After months of horrific scenes of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean where literally thousands of human beings were dying at sea, European public opinion was finally mobilized to respond to this movement of people. However, the anguished expressions of concern from the general public and government leaders in Europe was a far cry from the response that met the first wave of migrants that was largely African.

In response to that migration, European authorities openly talked of launching military attacks on the boats in Libya to stop the “flood” of these “illegal” immigrants into Europe, even after experts cautioned them that military attacks would result in even more deaths at sea. More

Just as race cuts across class, fostering divisions that prevent the working class majority from uniting against the capitalist 1 Percent, the more invisible division of class cuts across race to both temper and deepen the savagery of racial stigma and abuse. How is it that technically Black public personalities like Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama can win enthusiastic endorsement from millions of white Americans who couldn’t care less about the vast mass of Black Americans who live in abject poverty and under the heel of the deep institutional racism that permeates the nation’s educational, labor market, health-care, real estate, finance, and (of special recent attention) criminal justice systems? Part of the explanation for this seeming paradox is that Winfrey, Obama, and other white-pleasing Black elites have milked the timeworn role of the “good Negro.” They refuse to confront racism to any significant and substantive degree. They embody and advance the notion that Black Americans are disproportionately poor, jobless, unhealthy, incarcerated, and criminally marked largely because of poor and working class Blacks’ own “bad choices” and culture.
The Winfreys and Obamas are presented as examples of how Blacks can succeed in the “post-racial” U.S. by “dropping the angry [race] attitude” (throwing Jeremiah Wright under the bus) and casting down their buckets to move up in the American “opportunity” system. Their success is taken as proof that racism no longer poses serious obstacles to Black advancement and equality in a “color blind” nation that no longer requires protests against white privilege. And they are happy to explicitly reinforce the message. They blame “Cousin Pookie” (Obama’s darkly humorous term of derision for poor and allegedly lazy Black women on welfare) for her own poverty and diabetes and to refrain from noting that their own success might smack of tokenism and racial divide and rule. They know why Booker T. Washington got invited to the Theodore Roosevelt White House and W.E.B. Du Bois did not.
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Not least for it’s sheer optimism, I was happy to read Roger Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism. In it, Mason makes two broad and largely commonsensical observations regarding the rapid development of information technologies – first, that as our information technology is getting increasingly more sophisticated, it is possible to automate away more and more jobs; second, that as this happens, more and more people will spend their time producing information of different kind – suggesting that these two development will together force capitalism to evolve, largely without any violence or class struggle, into a “postcapitalist” world order.

Is he right? Probably not.

Mason’s main suggestion is that the more our economy is organized around the production of information and knowledge, the less will it make sense for this economy to take the form of capitalism. Why? Because, as Mason puts it himself, “markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant”. Imagine here the difference between sharing an apple and sharing an idea. If I have an apple and share it with you, I end up having only half an apple. If on the other hand I share an idea with you, I get to keep the whole idea only now you have it too. Thus, while ideas are inherently abundant, apples are inherently scarce – and capitalism, Mason points out, is really only equipped to deal with the production and circulation of the latter category of things. More