This is staggeringly incoherent. Mason admits that capitalism now exerts unjust extraction as much through lending and information as though labour, but then argues that the end of labour, since for Marx its exploitation is the source of all value, means the end of capitalism! https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1388447837973790722

But it is clear by his own logic that what he really means is that we should accept a vast Chinese style state finance and information capitalism in the mystical believe that eventually the state will wither away as unneeded by a positivist scientific society.

Yet Cruddas in his book carefully shows that this post-work account of Marxism (rendering it more like Comte) rests on an overrating of a short passage in the Grundrisse.

Cruddas is deemed to be on ‘the old Labour Right’ but he is far more obviously a socialist than is Mason.

It’s true that many of the urban young are part of a new proletariat. Yet their ‘wokeness’ is a false-consciousness whereby they take on the values of the faulty well off on fringes of the finance/information economy and so blame their exclusion on prejudice vs ‘identities’ etc.

Whereas their exclusion and impoverishment is structural and economic, not cultural. They need to see they have become routinised drones like old factory workers but in a new way.

Their seduction by liberal politics is similar to the long-standing seduction of American workers away from socialism by the American myth of individual striving and the dream of solely individual triumph. Indeed the language of all this is downloaded from the States.

Finally there is no strong evidence that automation will abolish most jobs: only alter their character. Used the wrong way by capitalism automation will further routinise, trivialise and diminish the dignity of work. It is Cruddas who offers the socialist alternative to that.