Wednesday, March 2, 2016, 11:20

By Andrew Moody

Paul Mason's Postcapitalism , which has received high profile reviews across the world, is not a conventional journalist's book but more of a polemic. (Nick J.b. Moore / For China Daily)

Paul Mason believes that people innocently sharing free music on the Internet - as is particularly the case in China - could spell the end of capitalism.

The multi-award-winning broadcast journalist and author argues in his now already bestselling book Postcapitalism that the digital revolution could finally make Karl Marx's prophesy about the end of the economic system that has dominated since the mid-18th century British Industrial Revolution a reality.

"If you have got something - no matter what its production costs are - that can be reproduced infinitely, then sooner or later under free competition, its price is going to fall close to zero," he says.

"We can see this in digital music. When I first started writing this book, I had research that showed that Apple had 95 percent of digital music. Obviously, that was just the digital music market. It did tell you that a whole unmeasured chunk of digital music was being shared for free."

Mason, who made headlines at the weekend by quitting his high profile role as economics editor of Channel 4, was speaking in a cafe opposite the ITN studios in Gray's Inn Road in central London.

The book, which has received high profile reviews across the world and involved the author in an extensive speaking tour, is not a conventional journalist's book but more of a polemic.

"My previous four books, including a novel, are written from the experience of a journalist. This book is written from my lifetime engagement with two issues - social justice and technology. In my mind I believed that they were separate but that has all changed," he says.

That change has been the Internet and the availability of an almost infinite supply of information and the emergence of open-source operations such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where there is no profit motive.

"Capitalism cannot deal with abundance since like all previous economic systems it is a solution to scarcity. The capitalist solution is to distribute goods according to the market. The feudal solution was according to obligation. The Han Chinese solution was semi-slavery, peonage and obligation," he says.

Mason, a regular visitor to China during his broadcasting career, believes the Chinese government is more aware of the challenges posed by the digital revolution than many in the West.

"The upper reaches of the Chinese Communist Party do engage with all these things. They think very broadly and talk very aggressively about non-market technology. Certainly China's young people are engaging with technology."

Mason says far from all this being pie in the sky it could have v ery profound implications for the way people live and, more importantly, work in less than a generation.

He believes that the Internet of Things - machines speaking to machines - will destroy white-collar as well as blue-collar jobs.

Instead of mass unemployment he believes the solution is for everyone to have a basic income from the state so they could do other things like community work, study or look after an elderly relative.

He says that the cost of giving everyone in the UK, as one example, 6,000 pounds ($8,357) a year would double the current benefits bill but there would be ways of offsetting the cost.

There would still be incentive to work with the minimum wage being set at a high level.

"The basic income is coming and it is a near-term issue. I had a debate with a bunch of rightwing economists a couple of weeks ago and they said it wouldn't work because people are naturally acquisitive and competitive and want to be richer than their neighbors. I said that I knew that was not the case because I grew up in a community that had real social solidarity," he says.

Mason was the son of a lorry driver and teacher and grew up in the relatively working-class town of Leigh in Greater Manchester in northern England.

In an unconventional career, he was a music teacher before switching to be a journalist on trade publications in the 1990s.

He came to prominence as an expert interviewee on the Dot.com crash and then landed the plum job as business correspondent of the BBC flagship news and current affairs program Newsnight. He moved to Channel 4 in 2013.

Mason, who has been described recently as a Renaissance Man and has recently become a specialist on the Greek crisis, believes neoliberalism of the past 25 years has been a disaster, resulting in millions having to endure low-paid employment while only a few have gotten rich.

He believes there is evidence even in the Kondratieff wave theory named after the Russian economist Nicolai Kondratieff, who Stalin eventually had executed, that capitalism is now incapable of moving on from the 2008 crash.

He argues financialization is an existential threat to the global economic system with the value of financial derivates globally rising from just $50 billion in 1991 to $38 trillion now when the real economy is just $70 trillion.

"It is like building a nuclear power station with a terrible management next to a village," he says.

Postcapitalism by Paul Mason (Allen Lane) will be published in paperback in June.

andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn