Paul Mason > Quotes

“I was never taught how to love, the meaning of love, the value of trust, friendships and relationships or family values. Instead, I was taught not to trust or confide in others, since they wouldn't believe anything I said, and that evverything in life came at a cost, even love and compassion.”
― Paul Mason, The Cupboard Under the Stairs: A Boy Trapped in Hell...

“I had no fight left in me. Mentally and physically, I was drained. So, for now, Jack had won. I was an empty shell. I avoided conflict or discussion.”
― Paul Mason, The Cupboard Under the Stairs: A Boy Trapped in Hell...

“Everything I did was fake, an act, not because I was naturally or deliberately deceitful, but as a result of the years of abuse and rape. I had not been able to form my own personality or identity, and, because my childhood had been cruelly taken from me, I didn't know how I should react to certain situations, especially those where someone was showing me genuine kindness. I always believed that there would be some price to pay or a sexual act to be commited.”
― Paul Mason, The Cupboard Under the Stairs: A Boy Trapped in Hell...

“Cockshott and Cottrell argue that improvements in computer power, together with the application of advanced maths and information theory removes, in principle, the Hayek/Robbins objection: that the planner can never have better realtime information than a market. What’s more, unlike the left in the calculation debate, they say the computer model we would need for planned production should use the labour theory of value, and not try to simulate the results of supply and demand.”
― Paul Mason

“6The report showed that while ‘intangible assets’ were growing on US and UK company balance sheets at nearly three times the rate of tangible assets, the actual size of the digital sector in the GDP figures had remained static. So something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern economy.
However, by any measure, it is clear that the mix of inputs has altered. An airliner looks like old technology. But from the atomic structure of the fan blades, to the compressed design cycle, to the stream of data it is firing back to its fleet HQ, it is ‘alive’ with information.”
― Paul Mason

“In 1993, the management guru Peter Drucker wrote: ‘That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society “post-capitalist”. It changes, and fundamentally, the structure of society. It creates new social dynamics. It creates new economic dynamics. It creates new politics.’ 7 At the age of ninety, the last surviving pupil of Josef Schumpeter had jumped the gun a little, but the insight was correct.”
― Paul Mason

“If you believe there is a better system than capitalism, then the last 25 years have felt like being, as Alexander Bogdanov put it in Red Star, a martian stranded on earth.”
― Paul Mason

“It's difficult to describe how terrible and disgusting being rasped can make you feel. The vulnerability, guilt, fear, lack of self-esteem and confidence are feelings that merge with the recollections of what happened. The shame I felt could never be recounted in words. It was absolute devastation, and no amount of talk, help or counselling will ever eradicate the feeling of self-disgust.”
― Paul Mason, The Cupboard Under the Stairs: A Boy Trapped in Hell...

“This is possibly the most revolutionary idea Marx ever had: that the reduction of labour to a minimum could produce a kind of human being able to deploy the entire, accumulated knowledge of society; a person transformed by vast quantities of socially produced knowledge and for the first time in history more free time than work time.”
― Paul Mason

“The great technological advance of the early twenty-first century consists not of new objects but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical elements used to produce them.
In the 1990s, as the impact of info-tech began to be understood, people from several disciplines had the same thought at once: capitalism is becoming qualitatively different.
Buzz phrases appeared: the knowledge economy, the information society, cognitive capitalism. The assumption was that info-capitalism and the free-market model worked in tandem; one produced and reinforced the other. To some the change looked big enough to conclude it was as important as the move from merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century. But just as economists got busy explaining how this ‘third kind of capitalism’ works, they ran into a problem: it doesn’t.”
― Paul Mason