Thoughtland

The National column: Isn’t it time the BBC started taking Scotland seriously?

My Saturday column in The National, dated August 29th, 2015 (online version). All shares and comments welcomed. Note: ***response to social media criticism of the column, below fold at end of the piece. 

Isn’t it time the BBC started taking Scotland seriously?

Pat Kane for The National

THE First Minister took the stage at the Edinburgh Television Festival on Thursday, and sought to insert a new Scots cog in the grinding wheels of the BBC’s Charter Review.

Not easy. Between Alex Salmond and the BBC’s Nick Robinson bumping chests like silverbacks, and Armando Iannucci hymning the “British soft power” of public broadcasting in his Mactaggart lecture, there’s not much media-space left for calm, detailed reform proposals from Scotland.

Yet it’s worth putting Sturgeon’s plan – essentially one more public TV station, and one more public radio station in Scotland, with an implicit argument that the BBC as a whole should move to a federal structure – in an obvious European context.

 The best example is Germany’s system of federalised TV stations. Do a five-minute Wikipedia search on public broadcasters WDR (serving the state of North-Rhine Westphalia), BR (serving the state of Bavaria) and HR (serving Hesse) – then go to their programming pages.

With a population of six million, Hesse has six public radio stations (digital and analogue); the other two lander (between two to three times more populous than Scotland) have 10 each. Each has at least one public broadcast TV channel, and also contribute material to German national (and international) TV.

Whatever way you want to cut that proportionately – and even accepting Germany’s greater prosperity and taxes – there is clearly room, and precedent, for the very basic expansion of Scottish public media services proposed by the Scottish Government.

With BBC3 closing down, we have the broadcast spectrum available. Even accepting budget constraints, surely a merging of BBC Alba with a new Scottish channel is doable? *** And doesn’t it make blinding sense to separate out BBC Radio Scotland into two channels – one for music and sport, one for news, discussion and features – rather than the maddening tone-and-mood changes you hear in a day’s listening?

But here we come to the content question, so lyrically raised by two archetypal ScotLab representatives over the last 24 hours. On STV’s Scotland Tonight on Thursday, Ken Mackintosh MSP asked, with incredulity in his voice, what we would put on an all-Scottish channel – how would it be filled? Just with Scottish stuff?

And on the BBC, Iain Martin MP reminded us that, of course, Scots must have utterly unimpeded access to baking, dancing and time-travelling programmes from the BBC every Saturday night. Otherwise, naturally, a collective nervous breakdown.

We went round the houses on Martin’s point ad nauseaum during the indyref. One look at the average TV diet in Ireland, in a multi-channel and multi-platform age, should answer those anxieties. But Mackintosh’s mild derision over how a Scots TV channel could even be programmed – displaying all the sensitivity to Scottish national ambition so notable in recent ScotLab leadership – is worth a brief answer.

Only one short strapline would be required for a separate and new BBC Scotland TV channel: Taking Scotland Seriously. And that means, by implication, taking more time and going into more depth with Scottish affairs. Does anyone really believe that the 10-minute rammys and point-scoring of the items on the BBC’s Scotland 2015 (or for that matter, STV Scotland Tonight) cover more than a fraction of what each topic deserves?

It’s a paltry response to the active citizenry that has emerged over the last two plebiscites in Scotland. The citizens have responded themselves, of course. Their appetite for a more substantive discussion about Scotland’s past, present and future sustains – via both clicks and pounds – a growing range of alternative digital media (and of course, this paper).

But I don’t know any of the committed enthusiasts in the Scottish alternative sector who wouldn’t welcome a Scots channel that properly served the citizenry. Something that gave crucial areas (like health and medicine, business and the economy, sci-tech and innovation, energy and environment, education at all levels, our global impact on the world) the dedicated screen-time and journalistic/investigative brio they deserved.

Can we imagine some relationship between Scottish civic media and new Scottish public broadcasting channels? Could a percentage of its operations be more like the early years of Channel Four: a television publisher with an explicit remit for diversity of opinion, and a willingness to prototype new hybrid forms of broadcast and digital media? 

But before these cutting-edge matters, there is surely no end of Scottish needs that dedicated Scottish public channels could satisfy. Simply to cover what the French would call our “arts of living” is a task at hand – not just our vibrant art, not just food, drink and recreation, but our sense of history.

That’s not just about putting Tom Devine to service as our Simon Schama, but also televisual history – deploying the Scottish archive we have, using material from both commercial and public resources, to give perspective and context to our sense of ourselves. (BBC4's relationship with its archive is a brilliant template here). 

But, as we fondly plan and scheme, here comes the brick wall. The new Tory culture and media minister, John Whittingdale, made matters abundantly clear in Edinburgh the other day. He regarded a No vote in the referendum as a recommitment to British identity – and, by association, a recommitment to the BBC as the “[UK] national” broadcaster.

I enjoyed the brilliant, likeable – still evidently Glaswegian, but also pretty establishment – Armando Iannucci and his Mactaggart Television Lecture [full text here]. But as you listen, it’s easy to imagine the case for Scottish channels being drowned in the grander storm of liberal-left and conservative UK elites, battling mightily for the “soul of the Beeb”.

That’s what happens when you don’t vote to become a nation-state: all that’s left is supplication and reasoned argument to the centre, most likely resulting in a head-pat and a “terribly sorry”. And there you can bundle up BBC Scotland reform with lots of other devolutionary frustrations. But, of course, there’s more to Scottish media than pining after Pacific Quay with an SBC badge on it.

Isn’t it worth stating the obvious – that the resignation of Police Scotland’s Stephen House has come after many months of detailed, pertinacious reporting (and a few well-timed exposes of Holyrood’s back-stage process) by dogged members of Scotland’s press?

Or to remember the bravery of the young members of National Collective, successfully facing down being sued by Ian Taylor of the Vitol oil group, in response to their article raising questions about his funding of Better Together?

So we bide our time, waiting for the constitutional and structural stars to align, and produce a Scottish public broadcasting culture worthy of the name. But, meantime, let’s make sure we don’t forget to support those whose media activity “afflicts the comfortable, and comforts the afflicted”, as the American muckraker Finley Peter Dunne once put it.

“Team Scotland” does not necessarily equal “Democratic And Self-Aware Scotland”. Top-down institution-building and reform does not solve all problems in our good society. And even as we eat popcorn before the political spectacle of the long break-up of the Union, let us remember that the relationship of media to government should be, to some extent, that of dog to lamp-post. And that this is absolutely fine.

Thoughtland compendium, Jan-Aug 2015

Just did a ton of updates  from my various bits of Scots, UK, and blog journalism - op-ed, features, reviews, thinkpieces over the last 9 months. Here's a handy compendium post (most recent first, down to January 2015). As ever, comment and sharing most welcome. 

The National column: The Arts aren't about where you're from, but what you know

The National column: Is this a smartphone which I see before me? Why Shakespeare was a pioneer of social media

The National column: We save our souls, and recover our humanity, by opposing the renewal of Trident

Scottish Independence and “PostCapitalism”

Bella Caledonia column: Adventures in PostCapitalism

The National column: What next for capitalism as Apple keep the must-have gadgets coming?

The National column: A BBC worth defending?

The National column: Trouble at the heart of Eutopia

Scottish Socialist Voice column: A Red/Green bloc is needed at Holyrood

Scotsman column: Designs on humanity’s future

PK's "The National" column: Spornosexuality, Peak Beard and Narcissus 2.0

Scotsman column: The internet is not just for trolls

PK's "The National" column: As hip-hop once again becomes the voice of American protest where’s ours?

PK's "The National" column: What my father ‘s sacrifice of a historic football trip says about aspiration...and austerity

PK's "The National" column: PuNK’s NOt dEaD... even if its history has been hijacked by big business

"Tomorrowland" - SF gets optimistic again (my column for The National)

The National column: How can we find what we love? Step forward award ceremonies

The National column: The Politics of Ecstasy

Interview in Liberation: "Britain, je te kilt"

Prospect blog: The SNP has a hard road ahead

The National column: A dollop of Borgen, a pinch of House of Cards ... and a chance to mould a new model for society

The balance of power ... how we can create a more progressive society

Bella Caledonia: Some Notes Against Complacency

BBC Arts column: Imagining a new nation

The National column: The Arts aren't about where you're from, but what you know

My Saturday column in The National (online edition), August 22nd, 2015. This is a response to the debate around Liz Lochhead, Scottish national makar [poet], and her comments on the "lack of Scots" employed at the National Theatre of Scotland. All comments/shares welcome.

The Arts aren't about where you're from, but what you know

Pat Kane for The National

SHOULD Scots – however we choose to define that term – run Scottish cultural institutions? No, it’s not Alasdair Gray making his unhelpful “colonists and settlers” distinction again, but another Scots literary figure of high esteem – our national Makar, Liz Lochhead.

Quoted in an interview for the literary mag Gutter, Lochhead says it’s “a great pity” that “there’s a shortage of Scottish people working in the National Theatre of Scotland…I just wish there were more Scots, some more people with a Scottish theatrical culture”. That culture, Liz continues, is “gutsy, upfront, borderline” with a “rough and ready relationship with variety”.

As with the essay behind the Gray stushie of 2012-13, we would all do well to take time out to read the long, expansive text from which Lochhead’s points are lifted. Here, I want to both factually correct Liz, but also dig into the emotional and historical undergrowth of these kinds of statements. My own heart pulls in several directions here, and it may be a modest contribution just to chart those pulls.

A careful report by Phil Miller in our sister paper The Herald debunks nearly every one of Lochhead’s claims about the NTS. “They’ve got all the budget for theatre in Scotland, really.” Fact: NTS gets £4.3m direct from the Scottish Government, but the Creative Scotland theatre budget is actually £15m, distributed across many companies.

“And it’s in the hands of a very few people, few of them Scottish.” Fact: if you’re looking to tick the boxes of birth, upbringing, accent, education, and artistic record, the NTS’s associate directors, Graham McLaren, Cora Bissett and Simon Sharkey are undeniably Scottish, and powerfully talented.

It’s worth dwelling on these three, to see how their routes are as determining as their roots. Sharkey’s journey goes from Cumbernauld Theatre, to producing work in the USA, Singapore, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Ireland and Jamaica, and back to NTS, where he runs their participatory theatre projects.

Cora Bissett passed through the eye of the RSAMD in Glasgow, has notched up a barmaid’s role in Rab C. Nesbitt, and has become one of our most inventive actor-directors. 

Her three most recent productions are about Janis Joplin, female genital mutilation (Rites), and the late dance-folk fusioneer Martyn Bennett.

These are Scots in the world, and Scots with the world inside them.

But it’s Graham McLaren – as equally and recognisably Scots-seasoned as these colleagues (RSAMD, Theatre Babel, Perth Rep) – who really begins to trouble Lochhead’s complaint. McLaren and a fellow associate at NTS, Neil Murray, have been “poached” by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, to serve as joint directors from 2016, succeeding Fiach MacConghail.

The Irish Times politely notes that “it’s the first time the role has been filled by theatre professionals working outside Ireland”. The Irish Independent quotes actress Rosaleen Linehan: “I think a lot of our own boys will be surprised… But at least they are Celts” (“Celts”: can you imagine that passing by the Scottish commentariat?).

And as far as I can ascertain online, that’s yer furore. As in: none. The Abbey Theatre is the key institution of the Irish cultural revival, itself a deep driver of Irish independence. WB Yeats once leapt on its stage, to calm the rioting audience during Sean O’Casey’s The Plough And The Stars. This institution has decided that key personnel of an upstart national theatre should be given license to “challenge assumptions around the words ‘national’, ‘theatre’ and ‘Ireland’”, as the new appointees’ put it in their public statement.

Is this an example of Irish “cultural cringe”? I doubt it. But is it an example of observing the success of the NTS as a “theatre without walls”, internationalising its Scottish productions with remarkable success, and wanting a piece of that action? I’d say yes.

And just to remind ourselves that the NTS’s first director was the non-Scots Vicky Featherstone, who now shapes the radical Royal Court theatre in London, and is back in Edinburgh producing a stage adaption of Alan Warner’s The Sopranos (titled Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour). 

This playing at a Traverse theatre part founded by Louisiana-born Jim Haynes (alongside John Calder and Richard Demarco)…

FFROM all this, you get the point – or at least one point. Scottish culture and arts have always been wide open to the sensitive and enthusiastic outsider. There are many, many reasons for this, some of them with tortured histories.

We speak the global language, English – Scots and Gaelic having been historically marginalised, often by educational and social coercion. 

Also, Scotland missed that 19th century “culture and nationalism” moment, most notably forged by the Nordic and Scandinavian countries (we were doing duty as the “workshop of the empire” at the time).

So even as the main institutions of Scotland persisted after the Union, Scots maintained a degree of looseness about “who we were and are”. This can generate a spirit of openness, a capacity for absorption of influences – but also insecurity and lack of confidence about cultural traditions.

The artistic and creative part of the Yes campaign turned this “Caledonian antisygyzy” into an advantage. It harnessed as many of the overlapping, contradictory “cultures” of Scotland as possible, to a moment of sheer democratic principle. (And it nearly worked. Next time.)

Yet one phrase of Liz Lochhead’s statements intrigues me – her sense of Scottish theatre culture as “gutsy, upfront, borderline” with a “rough and ready relationship with variety”. I think she is right – the writer/director John McGrath (Birkenhead-born, Oxford-educated) and his career with 7:84 proves that.

But I also think it points to something that often lies behind the complaint about who is most appropriate to make decisions about sustaining Scottish culture – and that is class.

Comedy is the indicator here. As much as pointy-heids like myself might wish otherwise, the Scottish working-class doesn’t flock to Kelman readings, or NTS productions. 

It’s the 21 sell-out shows of Still Game at the Hydro, watched by 210,000 fans over its run in 2014. What goes viral (or amasses views) on social media isn’t some bravura soliloquy from the Traverse stage, but clips from tv shows like Limmy, Burnistoun, Chewin’ the Fat or Rab C, or comedians like Kevin Bridges or Frankie Boyle.

Yes, TV plays its part in supercharging their interest – and that’s a separate argument: we should be televising much more original Scots drama. But the question still arises: Where else can the Scots working-class hear their vocabulary and diction, and their “gutsy, upfront and borderline” concerns, properly expressed in the mainstream?

There is a flipside to this as well. If a fundamental anxiety about identity still pervades Scottish ordinary lives, then our scabrous, relentless comedy-sector plays a therapeutic role – turning angst and frustration about inequality into soul-saving laughter.

Does all this answer the opening question? Only at this angle. Whoever gets into a commissioning position in Scottish arts and media should at least appreciate the complexities and unevenness (which themselves are creative possibilities) of the culture they’re getting into.

Yes, it’s as likely a New Yorker, or a Varsovian, or a Carioca, could intuitively grasp these polarities as a native Scot – and of course, conversely, that a Scot could also grasp American, Polish or Brazilian cultural dynamics.

But in either situation, however you achieve the necessary mix –between the cosmopolitan realm of art and exchange, and the traditions and energies of the working-class of any nation – it has to be achieved. By personnel, by job specification, by affinity and relationships – I’m not sure of the exact procedure.

However, blithe ignorance of the kinds of plebeian traditions that writers like Gray and Lochhead draw on, develop and innovate with, simply wouldn’t do. Beyond that, the invitation is clear: come ‘a ye.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)

The National column: Is this a smartphone which I see before me? Why Shakespeare was a pioneer of social media

My Saturday column in The National (online edition), August 15th, 2015. All comments/shares welcome.

Is this a smartphone which I see before me? Why Shakespeare was a pioneer of social media

Pat Kane for The National

BENEDICT Cumberbatch – known around my house as “Darth RADA” – is having problems with his Hamlet run in London’s West End.

One obvious problem is that reviewers gave its very early preview performances only two stars out of five. This has generated a wider discussion (led by John Tiffany, formerly of the National Theatre of Scotland) about how negative hacks should give hard-working thesps a break, as they “develop” and “emerge” their productions over a run.

I expect “Shakespeare” – whatever individuals or historical processes stand behind that term – made exactly the same mud-spattered complaints about perfidious punditry backstage at the Globe, somewhere between 1599 and 1602 (the date-range of Hamlet’s origin).

But Cumberbatch’s other complaint is much more interesting and ironic. For myself, it also explains why I am increasingly (not decreasingly) fascinated by the works of Shakespeare, and in general Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and poetry, as I get older.

In short, if you are interested in how modern times came to be, and what it feels like to transition from one epoch to another, you have to stay in touch with Shakespeare – not respectfully, but dynamically, opening out its language and themes to the present (and future).

Darth’s second problem is both ultra-modern and perennial. Last week, after a lacklustre performance, the actor came out to meet the backstage crowds of “Cumberbitches” (their self-chosen name: he doesn’t like it). He then delivered a rather contradictory message about their use of social media and smartphones during the performance.

“Please tweet, blog and hashtag the shit out of this play”, Benedict asked the swooning crowds. However, the “red lights” of recording smartphones in the auditorium, glowing as they captured the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, had been so distracting to the actor that he had to stop and start again.

“It’s mortifying and there’s nothing less supportive … I can’t give you what I want to give you, which is a live performance that you will remember and hopefully in your minds and brains – whether it’s good, bad or indifferent – rather than on your phones. So, please don’t.” Or in subsequent performances, Cumberbatch warned, you will be evicted.

There are three issues here – historical, artistic and philosophical. Firstly, were the original conditions in which Hamlet was performed all that reverential? Not at all.

Audiences in the “penny-stinkers” ate and swilled, chatted up fanciable prospects, booed or threw objects at poor performers or infamous villains – and even answered back to soliloquies. By comparison, the potentially silent video-recording of a moby seems thoroughly respectful.

Secondly, most Shakespeare plays are artistically structured to cope with the diverse demands of their original audiences – both the nobles in the boxes and the artisans in the stalls. Hamlet himself calls the latter “groundlings” (typical of him). They are “capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise” – and you can nearly hear the cat-calls answering his princely, screwed-up contempt.

But even in the playtext of Hamlet there are insertions of raw entertainment into the overall court-angst. Songs, capering clowns, gravediggers as stand-up comics, lunging swordplay, Hamlet’s own relentless piss-taking.

Of course, the original audiences could be enraptured. “Sit in a full theatre”, wrote Shakespeare’s near-contemporary John Webster, “and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the actor is the centre.” Cumberbatch may be looking for exactly that raptness – and he may get it. But he should be more robust in the face of the evident pleasure and appreciation of audiences, as Shakespeare’s work intrinsically is.

But the third issue – sparked by the use of these “funny electronic things”, in Cumberbatch’s fogeyish words – begins to capture the profound relevancy of Shakespeare to the present. Is there a character more relevant to the age of screens and selfies, avatars and updates, subversive stunts and freak performances, than Hamlet?

Hamlet is out to confirm his ghostly late father’s claim – that he (the king) was murdered by his own brother. Hamlet’s stratagem is to put on a cheesy court-play that parallels the murderous act, which the prince sets running before the suspect brother on his throne. From the side, Hamlet keenly watches his stepfather’s reactions for signs of guilt.

David Tennant’s brilliant rendition, which the BBC filmed in a modern setting in 2009 (available online), actually has Hamlet using a small super-8 handheld camera to record Claudius’s face. When he wants to make sure he is alone to soliloquise, Hamlet rips the security camera from the wall of the central chamber, crunching it underfoot. The production highlights that much of Hamlet is about the surveillance of the state, closely observing the behaviour of those who might challenge its legitimacy and power.

Surely the challenge for any contemporary producer/director of Hamlet is to respond to our hyper-aware world of mass self-communication – a world where we shape our own image, and critique the shaping of others, at will. And surely that means not chasing mobys (and their users) out of the sacred, whispering space of establishment theatre. To bastardise the original line: the digital “play [or replay] is the thing, by which we catch the conscience” of the kingly elites of our current world. Let me mention Assange, or Snowden, or Manning, or Mitt Romney, or the Falstaffian Lord Sewel…

Yet it’s not just Shakespeare’s Hamlet that easily meshes with the concerns of early 21st-century modernity. As Paul Mason recently wrote in his book PostCapitalism, you go to The Complete Works to feel what it’s like to live between the fall of one old model of economy and society and the rise of an entirely new one.

In the history plays, old feudal loyalties are being dissolved by money concerns and mercenary ambitions. In the comedies and tragedies, Mason notes, there are as many “bankers, merchants, companies, mercenary soldiers, trading cities and republics”, as there are aristocrats, castles and monarchies.

And the heroes, whether noble or not, display all the self-fashioning skills of the coming merchant era. Othello is defined by his bravery, Hamlet and Prospero (from The Tempest) by their philosophical intensity, Portia (in The Merchant of Venice) by her mastery of the law.

I have seen two recent productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company of non-Shakespearean Jacobean plays – the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Both of them cranked up the appetite-driven, materially obsessed, ambiently violent tendencies of the original texts to an enjoyable modern extreme – somewhere between The Only Way Is Essex and Monty Python.

Some do have a grumble about all this. “Can’t they just do it straight, for once?” But this presumes the originals were ever “straight” themselves, rather than their words buckling, mutating – and sometimes flowering – under the pressure of their age.

So grapple with Shakespeare. It’s taken me a good 30-odd years to feel fully capable of it. My early educational experiences, like many, were not good. But now, freed from the exam and peer-group angst, I’m enjoying myself.

Look also for those who simply want to be inspired by him, to make new works. Close to home, David Greig’s Dunsinane – his sequel to Macbeth – wants audiences to think as much about self-government, Gaelic and Gulf imperialisms, as it does bloody daggers and malevolent women.

And perhaps most important of all: read Shakespeare out loud, and in your own accent, unencumbered by any anxiety about “speaking it right”. One of my favourite chapters in one of my all-time favourite books, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose, is called the “People’s Bard”. Rose recounts a huge, inspiring 19th-century workers’ culture of Shakespeare appreciation.

Perhaps the more social media Darth RADA gets from his CumberFans, the more Shakespeare can be replugged back into the vital currents of everyday culture. If I were him, thinking of the thespian long-term, I wouldn’t complain about those wee red lights.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)

The National column: We save our souls, and recover our humanity, by opposing the renewal of Trident

My Saturday column in The National (online edition), August 8th, 2015. All comments/shares welcome.

We save our souls, and recover our humanity, by opposing the renewal of Trident

Pat Kane for The National

THIS is a week where we are face to face with the horrors of nuclear war. Our mediascape offers little respite from images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and rightly so. But here we still are – with ten of thousands of nuclear warheads distributed across the world. With superpowers still brandishing (and even refurbishing) their arsenals. And with our own island about to sign off on a pumped-up version of its own flaccid nuclear phallus. It would be easy to run to the hills, waving hands in despair.

As I’ve been surfing the cultural archive of the bomb this week, I have some questions about how the threat of nuclear weapons freezes our minds, as well as rouses us to activism.

Go online, and you can easily find a copy of Peter Watkins’ The War Game [bit.ly/1TbT5fL]. This is the 1965 drama-documentary about the consequences of a nuclear attack on Britain, banned by the BBC. It’s a period piece, for sure. At times, it’s a dull conveyor-belt of Cholmondley-Warners giving expert testimony.

But it’s also obvious why nervous BBC managers kept it off the screen. Just like in his as-it-happened documentary on Culloden, Watkins had a brilliant eye for bringing extreme situations down to a raw human level.

He shows the family cowering under its table, tending to an already sickening child. The post-bomb firestorms that blacken and incinerate ordinary citizens. The food riots that lead to summary executions, commanded by a bespectacled man who clearly had an alternative career in meter-reading.

What also strikes the modern viewer is how many of The War Game’s scenes – where a previously orderly suburb is blasted to pieces, its inhabitants staggering around in bewilderment and rage – have become a staple of our 24-hour news media.

It could be the consequences of drone strikes in Gaza, Syria or Iraq, or the aftermath of a storm hitting New Orleans or a Thailand village, or the dusty city-dwellers moving through the debris of 9/11 or 7/7. But we are hardly shocked any more by the sight of modern life eviscerated, turned into tatters and ruins, at a stroke.

So to return to some of the post-explosion photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, horrific and heart-stopping as they are – the skinless bodies, the eyeless heads, the bodies turned to instant shadows on the pavement in the heat of the blast – is to raise a flutter of uneasy questions in the 2015 breast.

We may have been memorialising the Holocaust and the two atomic bombs for the last seven decades, but remembering hasn’t overtly humanised us. We are only a few clicks away from enough images of mass murder, dismemberment and injury to satisfy the most incurable psychopath.

Indeed, what Martin Amis calls “horrorism” is an available media tactic all round. I will never be able to watch a Daesh beheading clip – the very thought makes me reel. But I can also barely watch the Wikileaks video showing US guncopter pilots picking off civilians in the Iraqi streets.

The burned Iraqi on the road to Basra – who inspired Tony Harrison’s great poem A Cold Coming – is probably as close as contemporary imagery gets to the charred icons of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. But say we did produce a further avalanche of horror images, in an attempt to represent the hundred thousand civilian deaths generally agreed to be the consequence of the second (illegal) Iraq War.

Would that keep our outrage at a peak, ready to be deployed when the next intervention is called for? Or – a dark thought – might some part of our visual conscience now be as cauterised and nerveless as the face and limbs of any of these victims?

I think there is a deeper numbing that the era of the atom bomb has inflicted on our everyday moral responses. You’ll remember the joke that went around a few years ago, when our set-top boxes began to receive the History Channel: “They should call it the Hitler Channel, there’s so many documentaries about him on it.”

But the joke had an elemental truth buried within it. Fascism, Nazism and Hitlerism are endlessly fascinating for the historically minded, because the processes behind their rise and fall can be so clearly identified – whether in terms of economics, ideas of race and nation, the use of mass media, etc.

We nowadays see familiar economic resentments meet the enduring purisms of racial identity, and keep our warning lights on for “neo-Nazi” tendencies across Europe. Yet it at least feels as if errant hearts and minds can be grappled with, perhaps changed, with appeal and argument – daily, yearly, across an electoral cycle. Historical, in the best sense.

But the atomic bomb, the tens of thousands of warheads, and their Cold War justification of “mutually assured destruction”? All things are a product of history, of course – even startling scientific discoveries.

But nuclear weapons do seem more like the opening of Pandora’s Box, uncontrollable demons escaping, than the warrior’s arms chest. And at the back of our minds, no matter our busy plans and schemes for the present, we know we must manage what Amis calls “Einstein’s monsters” – lest they end human history altogether, in a series of planetary flashes.

I suggest this awareness has run like cold steel underneath our affairs for much of the last 70 years. We have sensed – but kept largely buried – the terminal consequences of a malevolent (or miscalculating) “finger on the trigger”. And though I couldn’t praise the generations of CNDers enough, I think this has also driven us culturally in often heedless, manic directions.

For example, we usually identify the rise of consumer hedonism in the West with a number of drivers. Say, the need to stimulate demand to cope with over-production. Or the increasing use of Freudian psychology in the Mad Men era of advertising, their pitches getting deeper under our skin.

But might not another factor be the implicit awareness, in the era of the Bomb, that the future could be blindingly cancelled at any time? And thus to focus intensely on the present – to live, love and furiously purchase and pleasure-seek like there’s no tomorrow – was an understandable response?

I’m beginning to think we have underestimated how much the hair-trigger possibility of nuclear conflagration has affected us, and in particular our civic willpower. By comparison, the environmental crisis does feel eminently historical. Our graphs of human-made global warming don’t just give us timelines into the past, but deadlines into the future too. 

Take action now, on whatever green guru’s script you choose, and you might be able to mitigate the worst of the changes we know are coming.

Yet when you watch the closing sequence of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, with that crazed cowboy bestriding his missile, hat-waving himself and our civilisation into oblivion, there is true madness in his laughter – and ours. The end of the world comes as a bad joke about our technological prowess, our ingenuity and potency. The human virus consumes itself – and good planetary riddance.

For me, this is why the anti-nuclear politics at the core of Scotland’s independence movement (and Corbyn willing, perhaps to return to the UK Labour Party) has always been so powerful – and so wonderful.

It is a demonstration that we choose not to be paralysed by the sheer scale of the nuclear system. That we can keep our minds unfrozen, our political will concentrated upon an act of nuclear non-proliferation. That we refuse to sink into the waters of cynical despair, and dare to make history.

I’m not a spiritual person, but it’s difficult to avoid the language: we save our souls, and recover our humanity, by opposing the renewal of Trident. 

The Bomb will not defeat us, one way or another.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today).

Scottish Independence and “PostCapitalism”

This is part 2 of my extended review of Paul Mason's PostCapitalism book, first published on Bella Caledonia, 5th August, 2015 (FYI, an excellent intro to his work/interview with Paul can be found here). Part 1 is here. 

Scottish Independence and “PostCapitalism”

By Pat Kane

As you’d expect from a professional reporter, working for a respected global news organisation, Paul Mason’s vision of a “PostCapitalism” – the title of his new book– doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable facts.

The penultimate chapter, which is entitled “The Case For Rational Panic”, is uncompromising and clear. Disruptive global warming, the demographic and pensions crisis, and the forces of migration responding to both of those, will deliver even more convulsive shocks and shudders to every country and region in the world – Scotland included.

As to the solution to these crisis, Mason is again refreshingly direct: a market-led approach to any of this – the default method recommended by the neo-liberal consensus for the last 30 years – is a busted flush. To a very large extent, his postcapitalist vision is an attempt to provide a comprehensive, structural solution to these deep challenges.

In this blog (a long one, but he’s full of ideas) I’m going to go through Paul’s strategies for dealing with these real-world challenges. And I hope to show how the pursuit (and realisation) of Scottish independence could be an ideal test-bed for his vision.

Yesterday I described how Mason is trying to make us all understand how transforming info-technology could be of our current socio-economic order. But it’s worth thumbnailing his basic challenge once more.

Code + Copy = Revolution

A purely digital good, once made, can be reproduced and shared forever, at no extra cost. This is a direct challenge to the classic capitalist idea that goods and services can only be accessed through money and prices.

The more that other goods are shaped by digital processes – designs for manufacture of transport or houses, bio-formulas for drugs or food, machines that are ever more adaptive and even self-directing – the more the price-system for those goods begins to dissolve.

The baroque, often ludicrous structures of copyright and control which snake through our info-lives – suppressing a genuine potential for abundant services and products – could be halted and reversed. That is, if the “left” exerted enough “willpower, confidence and design” (in Mason’s words) to create “projects” that proposed alternatives.

Who does Mason think could take these projects (of which more later) forward? In my previous blog, I charted Paul’s attempt to cast the “universal educated person”, or “networked individualist”, as part of a longer history of the culture of the working-class. A culture which always surpassed, in its dreams and aspirations, any degrading or exploitative relation it had with the managers and bosses of capitalism.

Surely it’s easy for Yessers to understand exactly what Mason is referring to, if they recall the everyday community flourishing unleashed by the Yes campaign during the indyref.

And in Scotland, that flourishing was amplified by the contagious, irrepressible use of network technologies – to organise and archive meetings, to distribute alternative news and counter-factual graphics, to raise cash for activist projects at cost price.

So Indy supporters should know, intuitively, what Mason means by the communicational and liberating power of digital computers and networks.

Networked activists used and built the web in order to prototype their future, “as if” it was already happening (or even “as if you were in the early days of a better nation”). But they aren’t the only agents of change, for Mason, that could bring about a post-capitalism.

Mason spends a lot of his book berating old-style lefties for their lazy, managerialist assumptions – that all you do is take control of the state, by elections or other means, and the socialist dream is achievable.

So it’s comforting to realise that, at the end, Paul does see the state – one with confidence in its regulatory and policy powers – as an essential player in the “transition phase” to post-capitalism. For Yessers, who directed their networked activism to the achievement of a Scottish nation-state, this part of Mason’s vision should be of great interest.

How could the policy programme of a future Scottish Parliament respond to the already “post-capitalist” dimensions of the indy movement? Using whatever powers it can muster, short of and including full nation-statehood?

Helpfully, Mason closes his book with prescriptions – which he will be happy to see “torn apart and revised by the wisdom of angry crowds” – under the title of “Project Zero”. This refers to three overall objectives:

• a zero-carbon energy system
• the production of machines, products and services with “zero marginal costs” (ie, too cheap and plentiful to price)
• and the reduction of necessary labour time as close as possible to zero

Mason then outlines eight tasks in a project plan that might get us to this postcapitalist state.

A “Project Zero” for Scotland

The most pertinent thing to do, for Scottish readers, may be to briefly introduce each one, and then see where that fits into the Scottish policy landscape, whether historic, actual, prospective or hoped-for.

“Model first, act later.” This is an intriguing suggestion from Mason, based on his investigation into how massively powerful computers can now model and simulate designs for reality.

His signature example is the aircraft jet engine, which in the old days was tested a couple of hundred times in real life, but has been tested a hundred million times by a computer simulation, before being actually constructed.

Simulations of climate change, or epidemics, or populations, or traffic flows take in thousands of different inputs, algorithmically calculated. But, Mason complains, when we model our economies, our inputs are pitiful: the European Central Bank uses only households, firms and the central bank.

Why can’t we establish “a global institute or network for simulating the long-term transition beyond capitalism” – starting with “attempting to construct an accurate simulation of economies as they exist today”?

All the “big data” that surrounds us could feed into such a simulation, and allow us to eventually test out our post-capitalist notions to see what ones worked, or didn’t, or needed tweaking.

There’s a few obvious resonances with Scottish policy here. We already have a “Scotland Performs” website, which has scores of “national performance indicators” with arrows pointing up, down or both ways – yet it’s hardly the Wikipedia-like interactive simulation that I think Mason anticipates.

We also have something of a legitimation-crisis when it comes to statistics that measure the performance of the Scottish economy, with claim and counter-claim coming from ScotGov, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Office of Budget Responsibility, and various other bodies.

Could a partnership of Scottish universities, government and the business sector take up Mason’s suggestion – not just to use petaflop computers to model in real-time the Scottish economy, but to begin this process with global partners, and with a view to exporting and benchmarking this process? Why not do it here – the land of Clerk-Maxwell, Adam Smith and Red Clydeside?

“The Wiki-State.” If a state is like Wikipedia, it doesn’t provide command-and-control from on high – but it does build a structure that enables much free and creative activity, often of great usefuless and relevance, and produced through diligent and respectful collaboration.

What stiffens Mason’s spine is that such a state should be proactive in extending the zone of postcapitalist collaboration and free services. Which means both “switching off the neoliberal privatisation machine” (ie, don’t cave in to the privatisation of public services (“the EU made me do it”)), and actively using the power of procurement to “favour sustainable, collaborative and socially just outcome”.

Do existing Scottish Governments accredit themselves well here? Not very – though there are enough flurries of protest (recently around the idea that the public service of CalMac Ferries could be passed over to Serco) to show that the Scottish public sphere understands how its state should act to benefit the commonweal.

But in recent legislation around community empowerment, and land reform, there is at least obesiance paid to the principle of pushing back against corporate imperatives in the name of the popular will.

However, it’s not quite “clearing a space in the capitalist jungle”, in Mason’s words, to allow the “fragile new plants… of peer-to-peer projects, collaborative business models and non-profit activities” to grow. A left-green electoral bloc in the May 2016 Holyrood elections seems like more and more a necessary component of a radical “independence” majority – at least to keep the possibilities open for something more than the SNP’s boilerplate “fairness-and-prosperity” approach.

And in terms of what’s coming, even a safety-first Scottish Parliament could be knocked off-course. Mason also ventures into how a “wiki-state” might stave off a deeper financial collapse, due to accumulating debts not just from botched austerity programmes, but also the looming pension payments crisis. At the very least, his projections should focus Yessers’ minds on what form of Scottish national economic sovereignty could navigate through what looks like some very stormy waters to come – no matter what we do.

"Expand collaborative work.” Again, here Mason takes a strong-minded view of the state’s responsibility to exercise “law and regulation”, in order to limit traditional enterprises’ ability to “contribute to social injustice”. These include start-ups incentivized by tax law to pay low-wages from the get-go, or large cheap-labour corporations that benefited from the space “ruthlessly carved out for them since the 90s” by the state.

What a state should also promote are businesses which produce free stuff in a collaborative way: he wants someone to set up an “Office of the Non-Market Economy” to nurture them all.

As I know from my board membership of the think-and-do-tank Common Weal, Scotland already has a deep historical tradition of co-ops, collectives, mutuals and credit unions. It’s now being added to by cafes and bars, creative spaces, and most vibrantly news-and-views media platforms.

The latter – this blog, Wings, CommonSpace, Newsnet, The Ferret, The National and several others – are probably the best example of the kind of spontaneous networked organisations that can be generated from the combination of info-tech and social movement.

Though interestingly, online subscription and net-based crowdfunding – the latter of which doesn’t even merit a mention in Mason’s book – has been a vital, and even reliable way of ensuring sustainability (sometimes even sanity) for those who run these platforms. Yet these are literally gifts to valued figures, granted money by the community in a similar way to the elite employees of high-performance info-capitalist enterprise – who as Mason says, “are basically paid to exist” (or more likely, for the cybernats, post more than a few times a day).

But the idea of an “Office of the Non-Market Economy” sounds like a slam-dunk offer, if the Scottish Government was vaguely interested in Mason’s analysis.

“Suppress or socialise monopolies.” Faced with the tendency to abundance and freedom of informational and information-shaped goods, info-capitalism’s primary response is to try and establish a monopoly (the posterboys being Google and Apple). Mason is bracingly militant about the state’s response: break ‘em up. And if you can’t break ‘em up, take them into public ownership.

Paul is also very clear about the impact of public provision of items like water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecom infrastructure and education. If they were delivered at close to cost price, the price of basic necessities would cheapen, labour time could be reduced, and the free production zone increase. It would be a “strategic act of redistribution, vastly more effective than raising real wages”.

In Scotland – and I would love to know how this phrase made it into the First Ministerial vocabulary – we actually have a policy beachhead for all this. The concept of the “social wage” has been part of SNP policy for several years now.

It is usually represented by the eight year freeze in council tax; free prescriptions; elderly personal care; free school meals; a commitment to the Living Wage for all public sector workers under Scottish Government pay policy; the roll out of 600 hours of free childcare for all 3, 4 and vulnerable two year olds; the Scots students saving up to £9,000 per year with fee-free tuition.

As Salmond wrote in the Guardian in 2012: “We have made a conscious decision to provide certain core universal services, rights and benefits, some of which are no longer prioritised by political leaders elsewhere in the UK… We do this because we believe such services benefit the common weal. They provide a sense of security, wellbeing and equity within communities. Such a sense of security is vital to a sense of confidence – and as we have seen over the last three years, confidence is essential to economic growth.”

The last line slides into orthodoxy. But the overall principle is clear – however tough it may prove to use Scottish sovereign power to defend its application (from EU regulators and the like). There is an overall Scots consensus for using public services to counter the atomizing and fear-inducing impact of neoliberal marketisation on everyday communities.

What Mason can add to this defensive argument is a positive opportunity. A “social wage” (along with a citizen’s basic income – see below) can support a steady growth of non-market mutual provision, driven by the sharing, copying and modelling digital technologies he champions.

Even short of full independence, wouldn’t it be possible for a Scottish government to open up and support these possibilities? Does this not go with the very grain of the “commonweal” so often invoked by ScotGov ministers?

“Let market forces disappear.” This is a slightly misleading header, as Mason concedes that “networked individuals” have a strong consumer identity, and that markets – as a way that producers and makers can respond to complex desires – should still have their place. But if the private sector seeks profit, it must do so from “entrepreneurship, rather than rent”.

What that means for information goods is that you don’t just keep extending copyright and controlled-usage for ever – which provides you with rent, forever – but you deliberately make those copyrights “taper away quickly”, after the short-term gains from innovation (new clothing style, hit record) fade away. The way to make more money is to then come up with something new again!

Thus a “commons” of intellectual property grows and grows, providing a necessary resource for non-profit/free labours and enterprises. This would be further enriched by ensuring that state-funded research results, generated by from universities and other institutions, were “free at the point of use”.

Again, in the context of the Yes campaign, Scots have recently had the experience of playing fast and loose with copyright – of people getting themselves together around projects and worrying (or forgetting) about who “owns” it afterwards.

I’ve often thought there could be a much bigger infrastructural responsibility invested in something like “Creative Scotland”. Because if creativity and innovation is “becoming exponential”, as Mason phrases it, shouldn’t the macro-institutions which sustain that be of an appropriate scale?

And again, what is to stop a Scottish Government experimenting with support systems for postcapitalist artists, creatives and enterpreneurs – involving not just open cultural rights, but different forms of communal living, different kinds of community contribution?

Interestingly (for so-called “statist” independistas like myself) Mason isn’t afraid to bat for the state interest when he perceives it to be urgent. Around energy, he’s forceful about the need to take the grid and its carbon-based suppliers into public ownership. (As they can’t burn their reserves without burning the planet, he quips, “these corporations are toast anyway”).

So far, each of Mason’s project goals has consequences for how Yessers think of Scottish sovereign state power – and this is just one of the more acute. If a future Scottish government were to conduct these nationalisations – and it’s certainly not on the SNP-majority ticket at the moment – could this happen within the framework of EU competition law, in its current, neo-liberally punitive form?

The more that Mason specifies the state policies that will help the transition to a postcapitalist society, the more militant it looks like the next Scottish assertion of sovereign independence will need to be, to get anywhere near this state of affairs. The SNP’s indy-lite policy prospectus for 2014 (“independence in the UK”, as Iain Macwhirter once waspishly called it) seems like a proper dead-end, as a model for the next heave (whenever it happens).

“Socialise the finance system.” This is a complex section, and it’s perhaps easier to begin by quoting Paul’s ambition:

“In the short-term, the intention is not to reduce complexity – as the money fundamentalists want – nor simply to stabilize banking, but to promote the most complex form of capitalist finance compatible with progressing the economy towards high automation, low work, and abundant cheap or free goods and services”.

His range of measures to ensure this are pretty familiar to those who have engaged deeply with the Scottish policy debate over the last ten years. Firstly, a nationalised central bank, targeted at sustainability (see notions like a Green or a People’s Quantitative Easing, flagged up in the Corbyn campaign in the last weeks).

Secondly, a much more regionalised and regulated banking sector, with credit unions, peer-to-peer lenders and the like given greater status. And thirdly, a re-regulation of complex global financial activities, emphasizing investment for production, and hunting down tax havens.

But let me keep coming back to the Scottish indy context. To take these measures forward would require a general popular confidence in the ability of one’s state to conduct sovereign reforms of its macro-financial systems.

We just didn’t have enough of that on September 18th, due in part to the terrifying psychological bombardments of the media-establishment complex (though it was touch and go for them). And the spectacle of the Greek Syriza government being pummelled this way and that by their Euro “partners” might have boosted the resolve of the already-engaged, but perhaps has worried even more those older, pensioned, tremulous Nos.

Yet again, Mason’s challenge to any potential postcapitalist state, and its confidence in its agency and sovereignty, is considerable. Are we up to it, and up for it?

“Pay everyone a basic income.” This relates to a pillar of Mason’s overall historic argument. The organised working classes and their militant demands for better terms and conditions, as a wave of capitalist expansion crests, actually helps the whole system thrive in the long run.

The new social measures they force (from public housing to universal education) improve the capabilities of the worker; and the expensiveness of the labour compel companies to develop more efficient and innovative production technologies.

But neo-liberalism smashed the power of labour over the last 30 years – which meant that, even as the startling powers of info-tech have bedded in, stagnation has been the result. This is because neo-liberalism’s control freakery is essentially happy with the majority of its populations working in low-skill, low-wage,“bullshit” jobs. A basic income is an attempt to kickstart the “workers” end of systemic development again – by removing the opportunity to make a business from bullshit jobs.

Basic income is also a future-oriented response to the prospect of postcapitalist enterprise being much more about non-market behaviours and relations. We will have to start valuing this kind of activity, because the necessary hours of labour in society are due to start rapidly declining, due to automation – which threatens to remove 40% of existing jobs by 2040.

In Mason’s vision, basic income (his levels are £6000 for the BI, with a minimum wage at £18,000) provides a basis on which the techno-mutual society can flourish. It gives people a high economic floor, from which they can strike a new mix – between their jobs (which are now tending towards high-wage, high-skill occupations, employers pushed their by the basic income), and their lives (and loves).

The Scottish pathway towards this is, actually, pretty clear. The late feminist economist Ailsa McKay is perhaps best known in the country for persuading Alex Salmond that a massive investment in childcare would serve a number of positive outcomes – both supporting women’s autonomy, and paying for itself by bringing more women into the labour market.

But it’s not as well known that Ailsa’s next policy horizon was the introduction of a “citizen’s basic income” (CBI) in Scotland (see her Royal Society of Edinburgh policy paper). She’s worth quoting in full:

“In contrast to current social security measures, a CBI does not explicitly link income provision with work. In this sense it can be regarded as an emancipatory measure in that it serves to free individuals from the economic necessity of toil and provides the basis to support a range of welfare enhancing activity undertaken outwith the confines of market based exchanges. A CBI is not merely an alternative to existing social security provision but rather a philosophy aimed at enhancing individual freedom and promoting social justice. In essence providing the basis for securing ‘real freedom for all’.”

Certainly, welfare powers are coming piecemeal to Scotland under devolution, and we can’t get the integrating powers required short of independence. But the Utrecht experiment in basic income seems to be happening at the level of a city or municipality. Are there “Yes” towns, with the required cohesion, patience and municipal vision, that would be willing to take on an experiment – Coatbridge? Dundee? Inverness?

“The network unleashed.” You gotta love Paul Mason for paragraphs like this:

“There is no reason other than exploitation why world-class techniques of automation cannot be applied, for example, to the labour of the sandwich factory or the meat-packing plant. In fact, it is only the availability of cheap, unorganised labour, supported by in-work benefits, that permits these business models to exist. In many industries old disciplines of work – time, obedience, attendance, hierarchy – are enforced only because neoliberalism is suppressing innovation. But they are technologically unnecessary”.

Mason performs a crucial service in the PostCapitalism book – in that he continually smacks you upside your head, and jolts you from the consensus view about how our modern, producing-and-consuming lives should be.

But as I wrote in my first piece on the book in The National a few weeks ago, I think Paul underestimates just how brilliantly seductive those info-capitalists are. The Zuckerberg’s, the Ive’s and Jobs’s, Larry and Sergey and Jeff Bezos and all devote billions designing ways to corral us back into a passive, orderly space with our daily techno-structures.

How we keep mentally and imaginatively escaping from those comfort zones into more dynamic, active visions of our coming society – think the closing credits of Wall-E, where the blobby humans work with their robots to rebuild their world – is a question perhaps for artists most of all. (Pause to mourn the passing of National Collective, now probably more needed than ever).

Luckily, Scotland is not short of what Disney called “imagineering” or “imagineers”. From conceptual artists to science-fiction writers, from games-makers to hard-core researchers, from SF blockbuster scripters to open-source coder communities, we have an embarassment of future-oriented riches.

I facilitated an encouraging conference on Scottish innovation a month ago in Edinburgh – and by far the most exciting contribution came from Glasgow School of Art’s head of design, Irene McAra-McWilliams.

Irene actually suggested a new verb to us all – “to studio”. Meaning that the vibrancy of creative practitioners in Scotland was suggesting new organisational forms that we could begin to scale up across Scotland. A studio (as opposed to a a lab) is about a collective display of work, a space of explicit mutual inspiration and soft prototyping.

From everything that Paul has suggested in his extraordinary, mobilising book, what would a “postcapitalist studio” scene look like in Scotland? Who can build them? From what elements? What would they do?

And BTW, dear Yesser: Do you remember what it felt like, to have the energy to ask all these questions, and find the people around you who might help you answer them – or ask better ones?

You do? OK. So there’s one idea – “modular, self-managed, granular”, as Paul might approvingly say – for the Scottish future. Get his book, read carefully (and with pleasure), and come with a fistful of your own.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer, and an innovation editor for Bella Caledonia (www.patkane.today)

Bella Caledonia column: Adventures in PostCapitalism

 

This is part 1 of an extended review of PostCapitalism, the magisterial new book from the writer and economics editor of Channel Four, Paul Mason, published in Bella Caledonia, 4th August, 2015. Part 2 of the review focusses on the book's direct relevance to the Scottish political agenda, devolved and independent. Here, I give a general overview and critique of the book. All comments/shares welcome.

Adventures in PostCapitalism

By Pat Kane

I can’t give a higher accolade to a book than to say it deserves reading three or four times – and that after that you should have it on hand for keyword reference, via whatever devices you possess.

Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism (buy here) connects our contemporary challenges – technological, socio-economic and planetary – to a very persuasive history, whose waves of change are explained by a powerful collection of theories. I expect that we’ll be coming back to drink from this river again and again on the Scottish indy-left.

Yet the reader would do well to pay close attention to the subtlety of Paul’s arguments about what might come after capitalism. He says explicitly that he is a “revolutionary reformist”, and delights that this self-description annoys both the boss-class and the Occupy protestor alike.

One of his most useful moves is to urge radical leftists to abandon the idea that capitalism can only be “overthrown” from the “outside” with an “entirely new plan” – and that instead, a postcapitalism can be “incubated” from within it. There’s a number of reasons Mason gives for this. One of which is that Marx and Engels, for all their analytic power, got the collective mentality and experience of the worker (as a “proletariat”) under capitalism quite wrong.

Marx pronounced that the proles were entirely alienated in their consciousness, brutalised cogs in the factory system – and thus would be desperate for enlightened vanguards to lead them to liberation.

However, over successive waves of capitalist development, the working-class found a way to “live alongside capitalism”, as Mason puts it, by generating their own positive culture of liberation. They didn’t just grimly press for better working conditions (which, by restoring demand to economies and improving workers’ capabilities, enabled capitalism to renew itself).

They also created clubs, recreations, libraries, self-educations, entertainments – often themselves infused with utopian, humanistic visions, reaching way beyond the achievement of decent working conditions. (I once bought a “Socialist Sunday School Song Book” from a shop in Glasgow’s Trongate: all those sentiments are in there, hymn by hymn).

The point Mason wants to make is that, historically, there has always been a zone of what you could call “complex liberty” in working-class lives. People have always had intense, lively reasons for wanting to push back the frontiers (and the hours) of societally-required labour, one way or another.

This was desired in order that rich and meaningful choices could be freely and consciously made – about the direction of one’s life, or the relations with one’s relatives, friends and neighbours, or one’s attitude towards knowledge or skill.

In short, left politics should not always be just about defending the right to “labour”, “jobs”, “employment”. It should also be about creating conditions where the maximum possible number of citizens can exert the greatest possible degree of autonomy and self-determination.

In short, left politics should not always be just about defending the right to “labour”, “jobs”, “employment”. It should also be about creating conditions where the maximum possible number of citizens can exert the greatest possible degree of autonomy and self-determination.

In pushing for as much free time as possible, as a benefit from increased productivity through technology, a modern left honours some of the best traditions of working-class life. The Multitude itself has always contained multitudes.

So when Paul comes to tell us that digitalisation, enabled by computers and communication networks, opens up a realm of free products and services that threaten the very property rights and social arrangements of capitalism itself, he wants to be seen as drenched in workers’ history, not some Wired-magazine neophile. (Though to be fair, the “New Digital Socialism” essay that founding Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote in 2009 is fascinating to compare with Mason’s work).

Friendly and mutual societies were the precursors of the achievements of the welfare state, public housing and mass education – all those wrested from the furious upheavals of capitalist development by the organised working-class.

In the same manner, suggests Mason, contemporary radicals and progressives should be even more ambitious for what current practices like open source software, digital sharing practices and computer simulations could become, at the level of an entire society. What would be the postcapitalist equivalents of those great collective achievements?

My sense is that Mason wants these ambitions to be guided by this irrepressible historical desire – that is, to seek the resources to shape your life according to your sensibilities, in cooperation with others who have a similar openness and ambition.

Paul doesn’t go exactly where I went in The Play Ethic in 2004, in trying to locate the source of this desire. I found it in the biological and evolved necessity of play and creativity to the development of the human animal.

The lives of most humans in history have been conducted under conditions of economic scarcity. Digitality and networks brought the spirit and practice of abundance into the socio-economic mainstream. For me, the digital revolution has felt like the platform that the creative principle in human beings has been long awaiting, over many millennia.

Ever since the first artwork on a cave wall, or the first consciously-formed social group, adult humans – themselves always forged through early childhood play – have sought to express their creative urges. Human imagination irrepressibly bubbles up through the cracks of brute survival. The current tumult of digital culture only hints at the kind of world we could forge if those exigencies of survival were radically reduced.

I know it’s fun to tear strips off the “hipsters” and the “creatives” – and it’s right to do so when they are just expressing their accumulated cultural capital, as a class privilege. But what is so valuable about Mason’s PostCapitalism is that he makes us realise how propitious the general conditions are, in which we can make very significant redefinitions of the priorities of our lives.

Paul asks us to build the confidence that we can answer our complex needs with free, open and information-driven systems and practices – and to experiment like crazy in doing so. If we can do this, we might well be able to displace “work” from the centre of our societies, and replace it with “meaning” or “culture” or “purpose” or “creativity” or “care”. Or any permutation of those.

Of course, who exactly the “we” is in those last few paragraphs – how big, how self-conscious, how clearly motivated to progress change – is the crucial question. In my Guardian Live discussion with Paul and others a fortnight ago, and in my recent column in The National, I flagged up a few potential problems.

Paul’s chosen agent of change is the “universal educated person” that’s coming to consciousness throughout the capitalist world system. These types are not just to be found in the developed world, but are also reacting to illiberalisms in China, the Middle-East, South America, the major African cities. All of them are empowered to dream bigger, and build or promote alternatives, by means of their networked devices.

Back in 2004, using an admittedly awkward neologism, I called them the “soulitariat” (the proletariat sold their physical power to the authorities; the soulitariat sell their mental and emotional power – but can never sell it entirely).

Back then, like Paul, I too hoped then that these digitally-empowered “players” would become a majority class. And not just (to use the old Marxist language) a class “in” themselves, but a class “for” themselves – acutely aware of their own interests and agenda. They’ve also been called “hackers”, and then “makers” and “creatives”, over these last ten or fifteen years.

But however many times we’ve described them, I’m not sure they’ve fully turned up yet – ready and willing to build the new society that their communication-driven lifestyles imply.

There may be deeper reasons why they haven’t arrived. Paul and I both have quite a faith in the intrinsic, evolutionarily-rooted capacity for human creativity. He talks of an “adaptive left”, ready to bring about “new kinds of human beings”, whose eventual character traits cannot be predicted. “How will humans have to change in order for postcapitalism to emerge?”

But I wonder how strong the counter-tendency is: a desire for less change, for the conservation of things, for stability and security first?

…I wonder how strong the counter-tendency is: a desire for less change, for the conservation of things, for stability and security first?

We’ve no shortage of science-fiction in popular culture, imagining “new kinds of human beings” every week. The problem is, when it does, it usually reveals deep and enduring fears, rather than thrilling new possibilities.

I’m thinking about Channel Four’s Humans, or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. The first is about humanoid robots, the second about bio-modification, both becoming an accepted fact of our coming lives. But both are predominantly cautionary – telling stories to prevent a future happening, rather than showing a pathway to it.

“What [we postcapitalists] are trying to build”, says Mason, “should be even more complex, more autonomous and more unstable” than the flexible organism (or “adaptive system”) that is capitalism. A capitalism whose ability to shift and mutate to changing conditions proved ultimately superior to the most meticulous Soviet planning.

But are there limits to how much “complexity, autonomy and instability” humans can cope with? For example, isn’t one of the biggest forces in the contemporary world the kickback against the kind of incessant, transformative modernity that Paul celebrates? Whether that be militant religious identities, or hard-core environmental resistance, or more locally the four million odd votes on this island for UKIP, asking to “stop the world and get off”?

Mason has a tin ear for this philosophically conservative tendency (with a small “c”). At one point he writes about the travails of labour organisers in the global South, and the “social and ideological cobwebs” in the minds of locals that “they fail to overcome”. Those cobwebs Mason defines as “ethnic rivalries, the village network, religious fundamentalism, organised crime”.

For Paul to call these “cobwebs”, presumably to be swept away by a confident ultramodern hand, isn’t reckoning seriously with their shaping power. Take a young African-Muslim man’s militant ethno-religious identity, fuelled by the meretricious quality (not to mention the lethal drone strikes) of Western civilisation. Would his head and heart be so easily “sublated” by the influence of his compatriots becoming “universal educated individuals” on their ever smarter phones?

Mason and I hugely admire the Catalan social thinker Manuel Castells, only glancingly referenced in this book. But I wonder whether a deeper engagement with his work might have helped here. In his trilogy on network society, Castells talked about the tension between “the Net” and “the Self” (I commissioned Castells on this topic for my E2 page in the Herald in 1997, and recently referenced this in an essay on Alasdair Gray’s “settlers and colonists” controversy in 2012).

On one side, Castells posits the fluid experience of network society – the world at your digital fingertips, and the “multiple identities” you need to function properly in it. And on the other side, Castells concedes an equally strong impulse to have your feet planted somewhere, to lay down a collective anchor of identity in the global storm.

So yes yes yes, Paul, let’s push forward new practices that both demand and forge “new humans”. But shouldn’t those interested in a good society also be trying to find a healthy balance between cosmopolitan complexity and traditional stability – or even more elemental, between risk and security?

One way to balance these poles is through a civic nationalism or constitutional patriotism – a vibrant national polity seeking to make its progressive, constructive mark on the affairs of the planet. This was summed up classically by the SNP pioneer Winnie Ewing’s old 60s phrase, “stop the world, we want to get on”.

Mason wrote a Guardian column recently which resisted mightily the idea of any kind of English identity, even while accepting that constitutional reform is coming to England. He wants Englishness itself to be like its language – a sprawling force for plurality, hybridity and worldliness. Something that could only be crudified by association with a flag or nation.

But couldn’t that be expressed as a unity-in-diversity, an e pluribus unum, a national home whose framing of diversity and difference you could be proud of? That “green and pleasant land” implied by the recent invocations of William Blake’s Jersusalem – whether they be Jez Butterworth’s, or Danny Boyle’s?

“Don’t try to burden me with yet another layer of bogus identity politics”, says Paul in the Guardian article – and it’s OK, Paul, I won’t! But the national dimension brings me to the question of how Paul’s PostCapitalism might inform the policy agenda of pro-independence parties and movements in Scotland – which I’ll explore in my next Bella blog.

Pat Kane is a writer and musician, and one of Bella Caledonia’s innovation editors (www.patkane.info).