Paul Mason > Quotes

“bargaining This stage is characterized by the non-BP making concessions in order to bring back the “normal” behavior of the person they love. The thinking goes, “If I do what this person wants, I will get what I need in this relationship.” We all make compromises in relationships. But the sacrifices that people make to satisfy the borderlines they care about can be very costly. And the concessions may never be enough. Before long, more proof of love is needed and another bargain must be struck. depression Depression sets in when non-BPs realize the true cost of the bargains they’ve made: loss of friends, family, self-respect, and hobbies. The person with BPD hasn’t changed. But the non-BP has.”
― Paul Mason, Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder

“With info-capitalism, a monopoly is not just some clever tactic to maximize profit. It is the only way an industry can run.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“JP Morgan spelled it out: for neoliberalism to survive, democracy must fade.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring – not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“loss of self-esteem Beverly Engel, in The Emotionally Abused Woman (1990), describes the effect of emotional abuse on self-esteem: Emotional abuse cuts to the very core of a person, creating scars that may be longer-lasting than physical ones. With emotional abuse, the insults, insinuations, criticism, and accusations slowly eat away at the victim’s self-esteem until she is incapable of judging the situation realistically. She has become so beaten down emotionally that she blames herself for the abuse. Emotional abuse victims can become so convinced that they are worthless that they believe that no one else could want them. They stay in abusive situations because they believe they have nowhere else to go. Their ultimate fear is being all alone.”
― Paul Mason, Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder

“When the people decide to live, Destiny will obey, Darkness will disappear And chains will be broken.”
― Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

“The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phony and fragile as East Germany did thirty years ago.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it?”
― Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed

“or we don’t – and disaster follows. It has become common to laugh at the absurdities of the climate-change deniers, but there is a rationality to their response. They know that climate science destroys their authority, their power and their economic world. In a way, they have grasped that if climate change is real, capitalism is finished.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“So I want to propose an alternative: first, we save globalization by ditching neoliberalism; then we save the planet – and rescue ourselves from turmoil and inequality – by moving beyond capitalism itself.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings.”
― Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

“But why, if the real weekly value of my labour is thirty hours of other people’s work, would I ever work sixty hours?”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“In Gaza, in August 2014, I spent ten days in a community being systematically destroyed by drone strikes, shelling and sniper fire. Fifteen hundred civilians were killed, one third of them children. In February 2015, I saw the US Congress give twenty-five standing ovations to the man who ordered the attacks.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“Who can forget the contract issued at Apple’s Foxconn plants in China, in 2010, forcing workers to sign a pledge not to commit suicide due to workplace stress?4”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“At the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, where they’ve knowingly mispriced risk, one guy messages another: ‘Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,’ adding the emoticon ‘:O)’.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“whenever I want to stop myself being too Marxist about the future, I think about Shakespeare.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“In Kondratieff’s theory, each long cycle has an upswing lasting about twenty-five years, fuelled by the deployment of new technologies and high capital investment; then a downswing of about the same length, usually ending with a depression. In the ‘up’ phase, recessions are rare; in the ‘down’ phase they are frequent. In the up phase, capital flows to productive industries; in the down phase it gets trapped in the finance system.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“It is as if, in response to the creation of digital networks, we are changing our behaviour to become not just networked individuals but ‘network animals’.”
― Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

“In continental Europe,’ wrote a distraught John Maynard Keynes, shortly after storming out of the British delegation at Versailles, ‘the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or “labour troubles”; but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.’24”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power’s own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia.”
― Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

“La historia de los ciclos largos demuestra que el Estado solo se siente forzado a actuar cuando el capital fracasa en su empeño por impulsar los salarios a la baja y cuando los nuevos modelos de negocio se ven anegados bajo una avalancha de condiciones negativas;”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalismo. Hacia un nuevo futuro

“By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy—the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an ‘alternative network of relations’.”
― Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

“Einstein wrote that the aim of science is to capture the connection between all experiential data ‘in their totality’ – and to do this ‘by use of a minimum of primary concepts and relations’.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“Con la infotecnología (o tecnología de la información), sin embargo, grandes tramos del proyecto socialista utópico han pasado a ser posibles:”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalismo. Hacia un nuevo futuro

“Einstein believed the truth of a theory is, for certain, borne out by whether it successfully predicts experience. But the relationship between the theory and the experience can only be grasped intuitively.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’, defined as the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.11”
― Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

“It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, these elements already exist”
― Paul Mason

“la tecnología de la información, lejos de crear una forma nueva y estable de capitalismo, está disolviendo el sistema capitalista en general, porque corroe los mecanismos de mercado, socava los derechos de propiedad y destruye la tradicional relación entre salarios, trabajo y ganancias.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalismo. Hacia un nuevo futuro

“A track on iTunes costs next to zero to store on Apple’s server, and next to zero to transmit to my computer. Whatever it cost the record company to produce (in terms of artist fees and marketing costs) it costs me 99p simply because it’s unlawful to copy it for free. The”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“Among skilled workers, much value is placed on the ability to reinvent yourself, to align yourself with short-term corporate objectives, to be good at forgetting old skills and learning new ones, to be a networker and above all to live the dream of the firm you work for. These qualities, which would have attracted the word ‘scab’ in a Toronto print shop in 1890, are since the 1990s obligatory – if you want to stay in the core. For”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future