Where IS Paul Mason Going?
Marx, Marcuse and the Magic of Machines
In the wake of the 2017 election, Paul Mason, sitting on a panel at a conference organised by the Blairite Progress faction, told the audience:
‘Right now our leader is addressing a 200,000 strong crowd at Glastonbury who are singing his name… The question for people in this room is: it is now a left-wing Labour party… Do you want to be part of it or not? Because there is an alternative. There could be a British Macron [boos from the audience] Yeah, go on, keep going. There could be a British Macron, you could have a British end Brexit second referendum party – run with it. It could do much better than the Lib Dems did. Now’s the time.’
Although Mason stressed that Blairites were ‘all welcome’ to stay in the Labour Party, he added:
‘If you want a centrist party this is not going to be it for the next ten years. If it’s really important to you to have a pro-Remain party that’s in favour of illegal war, in favour of privatisation, form your own party and get on with it!’
After Labour under Ed Miliband was trashed in the 2015 General Election, Jeremy Corbyn had been elected Labour Party leader after hundreds of thousands of young people joined, hoping to swing the party to the left. In the 2017 General Election, Labour under Corbyn narrowly lost but reversed the party’s decline, getting 40 per cent of the vote, 30 extra MPs and 12,877,918 votes in all. The Mandelson-trained centrists, who had hoped for a total collapse of the Labour vote, allowing them to shout ‘we told you so’ and reclaim ‘their’ party, were disappointed. Not that it stopped them. (See The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy by Paul Holden.)
Today, despite the Mandelson-McSweeney-Epstein-Palantir scandal, Paul Mason is a loyal Starmerite.
What happened?
Back in 2020, Paul Mason contributed to the book Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism (editors: Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, Heather A Brown; published by Palgrave in 2020) alongside essays by a dozen writers, including myself. Mason’s two chapters were ‘Why Marx is More Relevant Than Ever in the Age of Automation’ (which first appeared in the New Statesman in 2018); and ‘Why Twenty-First Century Marxism Has to Be Humanist’.
Since the 1980s, Mason’s politics have gone from Trotskyism to Left Populism to Corbynist left social democracy to loyal Labourism, with a commitment to ‘growth’ and ‘green jobs’ stimulated by the arms economy and a revamped, fully tooled-up NATO.
Since the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, Mason has decided that ‘we’, i.e. democracies, are already fighting a hybrid-war with Russian imperialism: on the Dark Web, social media, cyberspace, etc; all to be fought under the popular front ideology of fighting ‘fascism’, as represented by the likes of Farage, Le Pen and Putin. Mason, like all antifascists, is no doubt a Trump-hater. Keir Starmer, Mason’s man of the hour, probably is too, but like most of the European centrists he is still playing the humiliating role of Trump-whisperer.
What follows is a shortened version of an article I wrote for International Marxist-Humanist in May, 2018. Mason gave it a nice recommendation on his Twitter page, although he never responded to the actual content.
Looking back, I would note, firstly, that his interpretation of Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ bestowed an apparent faith in technology which prefigured his current hostility to the Green Party. Secondly, in the closing section ‘Where is Mason Going?’, I wrote that his co-option of Marx’s Capital ‘raises as many questions as it answers, but that is precisely what makes it so interesting.’ I am not sure that that is the case now - either way. Mason’s next book is a 600-pager, entitled Reds: The History of Communism from the Neolithic to Xi’s China ( Head of Zeus, forthcoming, 2026). I still find his output ‘interesting’ enough to want to review it when it is published.
May 2018
Paul Mason’s essay, ‘Why Marx is more relevant than ever in the age of automation’, published in the New Statesman (7 May 2018), highlights Raya Dunayevskaya’s contribution to Marxism:
‘As Dunayevskaya understood, the impulse towards freedom is created by more than just exploitation: it is triggered by alienation, the suppression of desire, the humiliation experienced by people on the receiving end of systemic racism, sexism and homophobia. Everywhere capitalism follows anti-human priorities it stirs revolt – and it’s all around us. In the coming century, just as Marx predicted, it is likely that automation coupled with the socialisation of knowledge will present us with the opportunity to liberate ourselves from work. That, as he said, will blow capitalism “sky high”. The economic system that replaces it will have to be shaped around the goal he outlined in 1844: ending alienation and liberating the individual.’
Mason’s arguments for humanism are hardly likely to endear him to ‘traditional’ Leftist ‘materialists’, as when he argues, for example, that the first ‘reinterpretation’ which Marx’s ideas ‘suffered’ came from Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who ‘tried to systematise Marx’s ideas into a theory of everything in the universe, encompassing no longer just history but physics, astronomy and ethnography’. One common accusation coming from Left critics of Mason is that he is overly ‘subjective’ and ‘individualist’, and therefore, ‘liberal’. Mason, for his part, sees no future for ‘traditional’ leftist formulations on organisation and class-consciousness or for the faux collectivism of ‘democratic centralism’:
‘That impulse towards individual liberation? It’s already there in Marx, just waiting to be discovered. So paint what you want, love whom you want. Fuck the vanguard party. The revolutionary subject is the self.’
Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’
Mason has cleared the field for a timely debate on automation, which makes the correspondence in the early 1960s between Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse on this issue worth revisiting. In 1960, Dunayevskaya directed Marcuse’s attention to a debate within her organisation (News and Letters Committees) between two workers, Angela Terrano and Charles Denby.
Terrano, an electrical worker, rejected capitalist automation altogether, arguing that work in the new society would be ‘something completely new, not just to get money to buy food and things… it will have to be completely tied up with life’.
Denby, a Black auto-worker in Detroit, argued on the other hand (as summarised by Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell), ‘that workers control of production plus a shorter work-day, in the context of the abolition of capitalism, would be needed to realise the potentials of automation’. Marcuse, for his part, could see no theoretical or practical connection between the intense daily struggles in Denby’s auto-plant and the abolition of capitalism. As for Terrano’s position. Marcuse thought that anything ‘completely new’ would be underpinned by automation.
In the correspondence, Dunayevskaya reminds Marcuse of the argument in his preface to her book, Marxism and Freedom, that the the labouring classes had transformed’ from a force of negation of capitalism to one of acquiescence (if not actual affirmation). On this point she questions whether he ‘had not fallen into the trap of viewing Marxian socialism as if it were a distributive philosophy’. Marcuse, rising to the bait, takes his argument further, suggesting that only ‘genuine [ie universal] automation’ would ‘explode’ the capitalist system. Objectively, sections of both the capitalist class and the proletariat were united in resisting automation. Capitalists had cause to worry about the decline in the rate of profit; workers were worried about ‘technological unemployment’. As for Angela Terrano’s position, Marcuse writes:
‘Re Angela T: you should really tell her about all that humanization of labor, its connection with life, etc. – that this is possible only through complete automation, because such humanization is correctly relegated by Marx to the realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity, i.e. beyond the entire realm of socially necessary labor in the material production. Total dehumanization of the latter is the prerequisite.’
For Marcuse, the question is just how total does the dehumanization have to be as prerequisite to exploding the capitalist system. Capital has a ‘tendency’ to ever-increasingly replace living labour (workers) with dead labour (machines made by living labourers). This rise in the organic ‘composition of capital’ (the predominance of fixed capital over wage labour) depresses the only source of profits: living labour as transformed into its abstraction, labour power, which is sold to the capitalist. The value of the labour power is measured by the socially necessary labour time imposed by the market, or the state.
The ‘last piece of the puzzle?
Mason writes on Marx’s 1858 ‘Fragment of Machines’ in the Grundrisse:
‘When researchers eventually discovered and published Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” in the late 1960s, Dunayevskaya understood it was the last piece of the puzzle. This was not an account of capitalist economic breakdown due to the falling profit rate, it was a theory of technological liberation. Freed from work by the advance of automation, Marx had foreseen how humanity would use its leisure time: for the “free development of the individual”, not some collectivist utopia.’
The first half of the first sentence is factually wrong, unless Mason is referring only to English translations. The Grundrisse was first published in German in Moscow in 1939, and then in Berlin in 1953. That Dunayevskaya was familiar with it much earlier than the ‘late-1960s’ is evident from her dialogue with Herbert Marcuse in the years 1958-60.
To say, as Mason does, that Dunayevskaya understood the 1858 Fragment on Machines as ‘the last piece of the puzzle’ is contestable. Comparing what she sees as the shortcomings of the Grundrisse (in 1858) to more developed insights of Capital (in 1867), Dunayevskaya writes on the role of the ‘General Intellect’ of capitalist production in its totality:
‘Thus, as against the emphasis on machinery as a “monster” that the workers will overcome, there is too much emphasis in the Grundrisse on machinery as providing the material basis for the dissolution of capital as the workers standing alongside of production as their “regulator”.’ [Philosophy and Revolution]
Because the Grundrisse still stresses the material conditions for the struggle for socialism rather than class struggle itself, the general contradiction of value-production and the tendency of the falling rate of profit are not made as integral to the lot of the worker as they are in Capital.
The threat to present-day capitalism is social revolution by unemployed workers who are cast aside as capitalism becomes increasingly productive. However, as Peter Hudis argues, ‘capitalism responds to the risk that its actions will ‘produce a revolution’ by increasing the employment of nonproductive workers even as it reduces, absolutely as well as relatively, the number of value-creating productive workers at the point of production:
‘Yet, since capitalism is continuously driven to reduce the proportion of living labour to dead labour, over time even the relative over-employment of non-productive workers comes under attack by capital. This is the situation that the West faces at the start of the twenty-first century, as seen in the concerted effort to reduce the number as well as the wages and benefits of public-service workers through austerity-measures.’
The ‘unemployed workers’ therefore do not just include the youth of the ‘underclass’; we are also talking about skilled, ‘professional’ people whose skills are going to be made increasingly redundant by automation/AI/robotisation.
Where is Mason Going?
It would of course hardly be adequate to dismiss Mason’s position on automation as simply a (presumably) unconscious repetition of the techno-utopianism of Herbert Marcuse. When Mason writes, ‘Everywhere capitalism follows anti-human priorities it stirs revolt – and it’s all around us’, he sounds decidedly un-Marcusean. Mason’s vision of the socialist future isn’t some accelerationist dream of a life of ‘play’, all watched over by machines of loving grace. What he says is that automation might provide ‘the opportunity to liberate ourselves from work’. Also his view, ‘If we are to defend human rights against authoritarian populism we must have a concept of humanity to defend – as we must if we insist that human beings should have the power to limit and suppress the activities of thinking machines’, is explicitly based on Dunayevskaya’s ideas, not Marcuse’s.
Mason is not a theoretician; he is not interested in ideas that do not speak directly to modern times and struggles. As a journalist investigating globalised capitalism, Mason has poked his camera and microphone into numerous places and struggles around the world where lesser journalists wouldn’t fain to tread (the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, European Left-populism, the threat of fascism, the Gaza war, the Greek crisis, Corbyn’s Labour Party – you name it, he’s covered it). In his New Statesman essay, Mason has a story to tell based on his own experiences and readings of history: of how the 20th century Left disastrously lost the plot, and how the humanism of Marx and Dunayevskaya could point the way forward to redemption. It is certainly the case that his 3,000-word offering raises as many questions as it answers, but that is precisely what makes it so interesting.
Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: from 1776 until today. Preface by Herbert Marcuse (1958)/
The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm- Correspondence 1954-1978 (Eds. Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell.
Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, p132.
Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism (editors: Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin, Heather A Brown; published by Palgrave in 2020
Whatever Happened to Left Populism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’?