资本主义自断生路？

    这几天好像所有人都在对资本主义品头论足。

    上周，法国经济学家托马斯•皮凯蒂赴纽约和华盛顿宣传自己的大部头新作《21世纪的资本主义》（Capital in the Twenty First Century）。这本书通过详细的分析证明，在资本主义社会，贫富差距以及财富集中在少数人手里是一种常态，而不是个别现象。

    政治顾问和社会理论学家杰里米•里夫金最近出版的作品《零边际成本社会》（The Zero Marginal Cost Society）探讨的也是类似问题，只是这本书不是那么冷静，有时甚至过于乐观。里夫金在书中强调，资本主义似乎正在断送自己的前程。

    里夫金指出，私营市场追逐效率和生产率，导致我们越发靠近这样一种态势，那就是几乎所有产品的边际成本都会一步步地接近于零。

    里夫金在书中做了这样的设想：工厂完全由机器人负责运营，使用风能或太阳能这样的可再生能源；制造出来的产品由无人车辆运送，这些车辆同样使用可再生能源。更有甚者，这些产品可能都不需要运输——借助3D打印机，人们在家里或者几个街区之外就能进行生产。

    说到我们的家，在里夫金的新世界里，人们用来修建住宅的很可能是3D打印机就地取材所制造的材料，而且修建时间之短前所未有，从而节省了大量的建材运输费用。里夫金提到，麻省理工（MIT）的一座实验室正在开发“不用人力”就能在一天内建起房屋构架的技术。他说，同样的构架“可能需要整整一支建筑队伍工作一个月。”

    大家应该已经想到，这样的住宅将越来越多地使用清洁的可再生能源，其中安装的传感器数量之多将超过大家的想象；所有数据都将汇集到智能电网中，这样住宅就能知道人们在什么时候需要多少电力，以及哪些东西需要维修。

    构建这样一个高科技乌托邦的途径就是把里夫金所说的通信互联网（怎样共享信息）、能源互联网（怎样共享能源需求信息以及怎样分配能源）和物流互联网（怎样制造并运送产品）融合起来，这些网络就是人们所说的物联网。

    的确，打造这样一个系统的初始成本可能会非常高。但里夫金认为，建成并投入运行后，这个系统所带来的益处将从根本上改变我们的经济秩序。他写道：“物联网已经让生产率达到了以接近于零的边际成本提供诸多产品和服务的水平，这些产品和服务实际上已经处于免费状态。由此产生的结果是，公司利润开始枯竭，产权开始弱化，富裕经济开始慢慢取代以稀有性为基础的经济。”

    但实际情况是，美国公司的利润正在上升，无论用绝对水平，还是用占国民收入的比例来衡量都是如此。当然，在科技的颠覆之下，有些行业正在苦苦挣扎（比如几乎整个媒体行业）。同时，埃克森（Exxon）和雪佛龙（Chevron）等大型能源企业在寻找和开发新化石燃料资源方面遇到的高成本阻力让人望而却步。但总的来说，企业都在赚钱，而且赚的相当多。

    资本主义和里夫金的世界有什么契合点呢？他的答案是：“在即将到来的时代，随着新生代越来越认同协作主义（Collaboratism），资本主义和社会主义都将失去主导社会的能力。”

    为了阐释我们怎样才能迈向这个经济新篇章，《零边际成本社会》带着读者在历史中畅游了一番，从欧洲的封建社会到亚当•斯密和卡尔•马克思，再到蒸汽、钢铁和铁路的兴起，然后是石油时代。里夫金指出，过去几百年中，建立工业秩序的成本如此之高，以至于我们需要通用电气（General Electric）、福特汽车（Ford）和美国电话电报公司（AT&T）这样的大型上市公司。实现社会电气化，用电话和铁路把人们联系在一起，以及让普通民众用上汽车，这些都是规模极为宏大的项目。过去，集权型企业可以胜任这项任务。但里夫金认为，今天，这些公司正在变得不那么举足轻重。

    对里夫金来说，我们正在进入社会要素的时代；就消费者而言，和只是获得物品相比，物品所有权已经不再处于那么核心的位置。他指出，汽车共享网站Zipcar、租房网站Airbnb和Courchsurfing.com以及儿童玩具交换网站Baby Plays和Spark Box Toys都是这方面的先驱。把这样的行为延伸到其他经济领域后，比如点对点的可再生能源共享以及通过众筹方式获得个人和企业贷款，所有公司的产品和服务销量可能很快就会大幅下降，而他们的客户甚至会减少得更厉害。衡量这样的经济是否成功也许不能再用GDP和利润这样的指标。

    Capitalism seems to be getting it from all sides these days.

    French economist Thomas Piketty made the rounds in New York and Washington, D.C. last week to promote his new, widely praised tome, Capital in the Twenty First Century, an exhaustive analysis that argues that inequality and the concentration of wealth among the few are the norm, rather than the exception, within capitalist societies.

    In a less sobering -- at times, overoptimistic -- side of a similar coin, political consultant and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin's recently published The Zero Marginal Cost Society highlights a capitalism that seems to be running itself out of business.

    Rifkin argues that the private market's drive for efficiency and productivity has brought us ever closer to a world in which the marginal cost to produce just about everything will inch closer and closer to zero.

    Picture factories run entirely by robots, powered by renewable energy sources like wind and the sun, creating products delivered by driverless vehicles, also run on renewable energy. Maybe these products won't even need to make any kind of journey at all. Perhaps they can simply be produced at your home or a few blocks away with the help of a 3-D printer.

    Speaking of your home, in Rifkin's new world, your next one may very well be built by locally generated, 3-D-printed materials, in record time, removing the considerable expense of transporting construction goods. Rifkin cites an MIT lab that is working to develop a house frame in a single day "with virtually no human labor." An equivalent frame, Rifkin says, "would take an entire construction crew a month to put up."

    That home will be powered by -- you guessed it -- increasingly cheap renewable energy, and it will be stocked with more sensors than you can imagine, all feeding data into a smart grid, so your house knows how much energy you need and when, and what needs to be repaired.

    This is a technological utopia brought to you by the convergence of what Rifkin calls the Communications Internet (how information is shared), the Energy Internet (how energy needs are shared and energy itself is distributed), and the Logistics Internet (how products are built and delivered), all equaling the so-called Internet of Things.

    Granted, the initial cost of building such a system will be substantial. But once it's up and running, Rifkin argues, the benefits will fundamentally reshape our economic order. "The Internet of Things is already boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them practically free," Rifkin writes. "The result is corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and an economy based on scarcity is slowly giving way to an economy of abundance."

    Actually, corporate profits in the U.S. are increasing, both in absolute terms and as a portion of national income. Sure, some industries are struggling against the waves of technological disruption (e.g. almost the entire media sector). And then there are energy giants like Exxon and Chevron, which are facing daunting, expensive headwinds in the search for and cultivation of additional sources of fossil fuel. But businesses overall are making money, and quite a bit of it.

    Where does capitalism fit into Rifkin's world? "In the coming era," he says, "both capitalism and socialism will lose their once-dominant hold over society, as a new generation increasingly identifies with Collaboratism."

    To explain how we reached this novel economic moment, The Zero Marginal Cost Society takes readers on a grand historical tour, from feudal Europe, to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, to the rise of steam, steel, and railroads, and the oil age. Rifkin argues that creating the industrial order of the past few centuries was so expensive that it required massive, publicly held companies like General Electric, Ford, and AT&T. Electrifying society, connecting them by phone and rail, and putting the masses behind the wheel of a car were wildly ambitious projects. Centralized corporations were up to this task. Today, Rifkin argues, those companies are becoming less relevant.

    To Rifkin, we are entering the age of the social commons, where ownership of goods is less essential to consumers than merely having access to them, pointing to car sharing services like Zipcar, apartment sharing sites like Airbnb and Courchsurfing.com, and children's toy exchanges like Baby Plays and Spark Box Toys as pioneers. Expand this kind of behavior to other parts of the economy -- peer-to-peer renewable energy sharing and crowdfunded personal and business loans, for example -- and all sorts of companies may soon end up selling far fewer goods and services to even fewer people. You would need to put aside measurements like GDP and profits to gauge the success of such an economy.