资本主义的终结（上） | 好书摘录
The end of capitalism has begun
The red flags and marching songs of during the , plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above.
希腊债务危机时，红旗飘扬，人们高唱行军歌曲，期待着银行国有化，20世纪的梦想得以重温：自上而下地摧毁市场。
For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.
20世纪相当长时间内，这就是左翼眼中跨越资本主义经济的第一阶段。工人阶级是主力，他们不在投票箱旁，就在街垒之上。他们要撬动国家，周期出现的经济崩溃为之提供契机。
Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.
过去二十五年间，事实恰恰相反，崩溃的倒是左翼事业。市场摧毁了计划；个人主义取代了集体主义和团结；世界工人阶级大幅扩张，虽说前后看起来都算“无产者”，但思考和行事方式都与以往不同。
If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die.
如果你经历了这一切，并憎恶资本主义，这简直令人痛心疾首。可在这一过程中，技术开辟了一条新路径，老左派的残勇以及所有受其影响的其他力量，或者接受，或者消亡。
Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.
到头来，资本主义不会被任何急行军式的手段消灭，将之消灭的是某种更有活力的东西，它起初在旧体制内并不起眼，却冲破重重障碍，依照新的价值和行为重塑了经济——我将其成为后资本主义。
As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.
正如五百年前封建主义的终结一样，资本主义被后资本主义替代，随外部冲击而加速，新人类的出现塑造了它，这一进程已经开始。
Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
后资本主义成为可能，原因是过去二十五年中，信息技术发生了三次大变革。首先，信息技术降低了工作需求，模糊了工作与业余的界限，缓解了劳资关系。随之而来的自动化浪潮将大幅缩减工作量，不仅确保了人类生存，还会让所有人活得有尊严。目前，这一进程搁浅了，因为我们的社会结构还无法承担其后果。
Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last.
其二，信息损害了市场正确形成价格的能力。这是因为市场的基础是稀缺性，但信息却源源不断。作为一种自卫机制，体系造就了垄断企业，即庞大的技术公司，其规模堪称过去200年所未见，但这难以持续。
By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.
这些公司塑造商业模式，做高公司估值，全依赖于抓取一切社会信息并为之私有，因此构建了一栋脆弱的公司大厦，这与人类的基本需求，即自由运用思想，显得格格不入。
Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
其三，我们看到合作生产的自发兴起：新出现的商品、服务和机构不再听命于市场，不再受制于管理架构。
The biggest information product in the world – – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.
例如世界上最大的信息产品维基百科，它由志愿者免费生产，于是消灭了百科全书业，预计削减了每年30亿美元收入的广告生意。
Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.
几乎没人注意到，在市场体系的各个角落，全部经济生活都以不同的节奏运转。并行货币、时间银行、合作社和自我管理空间激增，经济学专家几乎没发现这些，而很多正是2008年危机摧毁了旧结构的直接结果。
You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from carpools to free kindergartens.
只有仔细找，才能发现这种新经济。在希腊，一家草根非政府组织调查了该国的食品合作、另类生产者、平行货币和当地汇率体系，发现70多家实体项目，数百家小型规划，从拼车到免费幼儿园。
To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.
对主流经济学界而言，这些看起来不过证明了经济尚有活力，可问题就出在这里。他们能够生存，原因是他们用后资本主义的货币进行贸易，尽管断断续续，效率不高，这些货币是自由时间、网络化行为和免费材料。从中创立一个对全球体系的完整替代品看起来还太过单薄，不够正式，甚至还挺危险。可别忘了，爱德华三世统治的时代，钱和信用的观感同样如此。
译注：爱德华三世是14世纪的英国国王，其统治期间，英国遭遇黑死病，人口锐减，英国走向资本密集型发展道路，因此被认为是英国历史上重大转折事件。
New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.
新的所有制形式、新的借贷形式和新的法律合同：一整套商业亚文化在过去十年间出现了，媒体冠名为“分享经济”。“大众”和“对等生产”等时髦词汇广为流行，可没人去想想，这一动向对资本主义自身意味着什么。
I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do.
我相信那是一条出路，但除非政府作出根本性变革，培育、促进并保护这些微观层面的项目。
And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”
首先必须是思想的变革，改变对技术、所有制和工作的看法。当我们创造新系统原件时，我们对自己说，也对别人说：“这不再是我的生存办法，不是逃离新自由主义世界的避难所；这是新的生活方式。”
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The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession.
2008年危机抹除了13%的全球产能和20%的全球贸易，给全球增长蒙上阴影，任何不足3%的增长规模都被视作衰退。
It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation.
在西方出现了比1929到1933年为期更久的萧条期；即便现在，复苏也了无生气，长期停滞的前景让主流经济学家胆寒。
The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart. The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold.
欧洲的余震将大陆撕裂，他们的解决办法是紧缩+货币超发。可那些都不奏效。在受创最严重的国家中，养老金体系遭到摧毁，退休年龄飙升到70岁；教育被私有化，毕业生正面临终生要担负的高昂债务。服务业正在解体，基础设施停滞。
Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up.
即便现在，许多人还是没明白“紧缩”的真义。紧缩并非在英国或社会大混乱的希腊推行为期八年的支出削减，紧缩意味着西方国家的薪酬、社会工资和生活标准延宕数十年的滑坡，直到与中国和印度上升的中产阶级水平一样。
Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer.
同时，由于缺少其他替代模式，另一场危机的条件正在集聚。在日本、南部欧元区、美国和英国，真实工资已经下降或停滞不前。影子银行系统得以重组，如今比2008年更为壮大。要求银行拥有更多准备金的新法令或遭注水，或被推迟。同时，货币汹涌中，金字塔尖的1%更肥富了。
Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.
于是，新自由主义化身成导致周期灾难性失灵的体系。更糟糕的是，它打破了200年来的工业资本主义模式，一场经济危机催生了新的技术创新，这种创新让所有人获益。
That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class.
这是因为新自由主义，过去是200年来的第一个经济模式，其兴起的前提是压低工资，摧毁工人阶级的社会权力和韧性。
If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism. The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption.
看看长周期理论学家们对经济腾飞期的研究，19世纪50年代的欧洲，20世纪前十年和50年代的全球，正是有组织劳动者的力量迫使企业家和公司不再通过削减工资这种旧商业模式寻求复兴，迫使他们进行创新，走新型资本主义道路。结果表明，每个上升期，我们都发现了自动化、高工资、高价值消费组合。
Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet.
今天，没有工人的压力，处于创新潮核心的技术不再要求高消费支出和再次雇佣旧工人。信息成为碾压价格和削减维持行星生活所需劳动时间的一台机器。
As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
结果，大部分商业阶级成为新勒德分子。当基因测序实验室指日可待，他们则开起咖啡馆、美甲店和上门保洁公司：银行体系、计划体制和已死的新自由主义文化奖赏的毕竟是低价值和长时间工作岗位的提供者。
译注：勒德分子，十九世纪初英国手工业工人中参加捣毁机器的人。
Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology.
创新正在发生，可迄今为止，它还未能引发长周期理论预计的第五次资本主义腾飞，原因就在存在于信息技术的特性之中。
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We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet.
我们周围不仅有智能机器，还有以信息为中心的一个新层级。想想一架航班：计算机在开飞机；飞机被设计、压力测试和“模拟生产”了数百万次；数据还实时回复给生产者。飞机上，人们盯着屏幕，在某些幸运的国家，还可以接入因特网。
Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.
从地面看，和詹姆斯·邦德的时代一样，都是一只白色的金属大鸟。可现在，那既是一台智能机器，也是一个网络节点。它拥有信息内容，向世界贡献了“信息价值”和物理价值。在满载乘客的一架商业航班上，每个人都盯着Excel表格和Powerpoint幻灯片，客舱堪称一家信息工厂。
But what is all this information worth? You won’t find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated.
可所有这些信息价值几何？你没法从账面上找到答案：现代记账标准中，知识产权的价值主要靠猜。2013年SAS机构研究显示，为数据估值，无论获取数据的成本，还是其市场价值或是未来收益，都难以充分核算。
Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world.
只有通过一种包括非经济利益和风险在内的记账法，公司才能向持股人解释清楚，他们的数据到底值多少钱。我们为现代世界最重要的事物估值的逻辑玩不转了。
The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
21世纪初伟大的技术进步不仅是新事物和新方法，还包括旧事物和旧方法的智能化。产品的知识内容比生产产品的硬件要有价值的多。
But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, “third” kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries.
可这被视作有用的价值，却无法交换，无法做资产估值。二十世纪90年代，经济学家和技术专家都深有同感：信息的新角色创造了一种全新的、“第三种”资本主义，它与工业资本主义全然不同，正如后者与十七、八世纪中的商业和奴隶资本主义不同一样。
But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist.
但他们却难以描述这种新的“认知“资本主义的运动方法，这是有原因的，其动力说到底是非资本主义的。
During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property.
二战中和二战刚结束时，经济学家仅把信息视作一种“公共品”。美国政府甚至命令不准因专利获利，只能通过生产线本身赚钱。后来我们才开始明白什么是知识产权。
In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: “precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information.”
1962年，主流经济学大咖肯尼斯·阿罗表示，在自由市场经济中，发明东西的目的是制造知识产权。他写道：“恰恰达及成功之时，信息未能充分利用”。
You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
在所有业已建立的电子商务模式中，你都能发现这一真理：垄断化和数据保护，抓取用户交流产生的自由社交数据，将商业力量注入以前非商业性的数据生产领域，挖掘现有数据用来预测未来——无论何时、何处都确保只有公司能够利用这些结果。
If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights.
反过来表述阿罗的原理，其革命性影响显而易见：如果自由市场经济+知识产权导致“信息未能充分利用”，基于信息充分利用的经济体就无法与自由市场或绝对知识产权兼容。
The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too.
我们所有现代数据巨头的商业模式都旨在于阻止信息充足。可信息是充足的，信息产品可以免费复制。一旦制造出某物来，就可以无限拷贝和粘贴。一首音乐和你用来制造航班的庞大数据库都有生产成本，但再造成本则趋近于零。因此，如果资本主义的一般价格机制得以发挥作用，其价格也会趋近于零。
For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”.
过去二十五年中，经济学一直与这一问题缠斗：所有主流经济学都从稀缺性出发，可当代世界中多数动力都是充沛的，正如天才史都华·布兰德曾言，“想要免费”。
There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced.
一方面是公司和政府的信息垄断和监视，另一方面是信息全然不同的发展：信息成为一种社会品，免费使用，不归任何人所有、利用或定价。
I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? .
我查阅了经济学家和商业大佬们试图建立一个框架的诸多努力，他们想理解以丰沛社会信息为基础的经济学如何运转。可将其想象出来的竟然是19世纪电报和蒸汽机时代的一位经济学家。他的名字？卡尔·马克思。
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The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”.
那是1858年2月，伦敦肯特镇，大概清晨四点左右。马克思在德国被通缉，可这会儿，他正拼命地勾勒着各种思想实验和写给自己的笔记。六十年代的左翼知识分子最终得以看到马克思当晚写的是什么时，他们会承认“那挑战了迄今为止对马克思的每一种严肃解释”。文章被称作《关于机器的片段》。
In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information.
在《片段》中，马克思设想了在一个经济体中，机器的主要作用是生产，人的主要作用是监督机器。他表明，在这样的经济体中，主要的生产力是信息。
The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines.
像自动纺纱机、电报和蒸汽火车头等机器的生产力并不依赖于制造它们所需的劳动力数量，而依赖于社会知识水平。换言之，组织和知识对生产力做出的贡献比制造和运转机器更大。
Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”.
考虑到马克思主义过去是一门有关窃取劳动时间的剥削理论，这堪称革命性论断。该理论指出，一旦知识成为自身的生产力，超越了生产机器所需的真实劳动，大问题就不再是“工资与利润之争”，而在于谁控制了马克思所谓“知识的权力”。
译评：可见熊彼特对马克思的批评并不全面。
In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing.
马克思说，在一个机器承担大多数工作的经济体中，机器中包含的知识从本质上说是“社会性的”。在凌晨最后的思想试验中，马克思想象了这一进程的终点：制造“理想机器”，永恒运行，没有成本。
A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched.
他说，没有成本的机器不会给生产过程增加价值，数个核算周期后，它会迅速降低价格、利润、劳动力成本以及其所接触到的一切。
Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.
你一旦意识到信息是物理性的，软件是一种机器，存储、带宽和处理能力的价格正以指数级速度坍塌，马克思思想的价值就显而易见。我们被没有成本的机器包围了，如果我们愿意，会一直如此。
In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”.
这些直到二十世纪中叶才发表的思考资料中，马克思把信息想象为一种“总体智能”来存储和分享，地球上所有人的思想都通过社会知识连接在一起，每一次升级都让所有人受益。简而言之，马克思近乎设想出了我们生活的信息经济体。而且他写道，这将“把资本主义炸上天”。
...
With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost.
地貌改变了，20世纪的左翼想象中超越资本主义的旧途径消失了。
But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system.
但是一条新路被开辟出来。合作生产定义了市场机制之外的路径，运用网络技术，人们生产出免费、可分享的商品和服务。
It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.
那需要国家创立一个框架，正如国家在十九世纪初创立了工厂劳工、稳健货币和自由贸易的框架。后资本主义的部门可能在几十年间与市场部分共存，但重大的变化已经出现。
The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured.
变革涉及到国家、市场和市场外的合作生产者。可要促成之，左翼的全部工程都要重塑，包括抗议组织和主流的社会民主及自由派政党。
In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.
事实上，一旦人们理解了后资本主义转型的逻辑，这些想法就不再是左翼的财产了，它们成为更广泛的运动，我们需要给之加上新的标签。
Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: “Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.”
谁能促成其发生呢？在旧左翼事业中，是工人阶级。二百多年前，激进的记者约翰·赛沃尔警告说，建造英国工厂的人创造了新的、危险的民主方式：“每个大车间和制造厂房都是某种政治社会，这里没有议案可以压制，没有治安官前来驱散。”
Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”.
今天，整个社会就是一个工厂。我们都参与品牌、标准和机构的创造和再造。同时，对每天工作和获利至关重要的交流网格中流动着共享的知识和共同的不满。今天，网络就像200年前的车间，他们“无法压制或驱散”。
True, states can shut down , , even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce.
没错，国家可以关闭脸谱、推特，甚至在危机时关闭整个因特网和移动网络，让发展中的经济瘫痪。他们也可以存储和监视我们生产的每一个比特的信息。
But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.
可国家无法再次推行五十年前那种等级化、依靠宣传和人民无知运行的社会，除非像朝鲜和伊朗那样，选择退出现代生活的重要组成部分。正如社会学家曼纽尔·卡斯特尔思所言，那就好像试图让一个国家停电。
By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
数以百万计的网络人口，尽管在经济上受人剥削，可划一划手指就具备了全部人类智能。信息资本主义创造了历史变革的新力量：受过教育、相互连接的人类。
Postcapitalism is published by Allen Lane on 30 July.
（未完待续）
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