Postcapitalism Quotes

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A decir verdad, la misión empresarial de Apple, en esencia, es impedir que la música sea un bien abundante.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalismo. Hacia un nuevo futuro

“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

“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

“El propio Kondratiev se mostró siempre exquisitamente cauto en cuanto a las implicaciones de su teoría. Jamás afirmó que sirviera para predecir acontecimientos, aunque, desde luego, predijo la Gran Depresión de la década de 1930 diez años antes de que esta se produjera.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalismo. Hacia un nuevo futuro

“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

“el capitalismo es un sistema complejo y adaptativo que ha alcanzado los límites de su capacidad para adaptarse.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalismo. Hacia un nuevo futuro

“Even in advanced countries the labour market is built overtly on coercion. Just listen to any politician make a speech about welfare: cutting unemployment and disability benefits is designed to force people to take jobs at wages they can’t live on. In no other aspect of the market does the government coerce us to take part; nobody says ‘You must go ice skating or society will collapse.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“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.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes 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 old structures after the 2008 crisis. New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past ten years, which the media has dubbed the ‘sharing economy’. Buzzterms such as the ‘commons’ and ‘peer-production’ are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this means for capitalism itself. I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a massive change in what governments do. This must in turn be driven by a change in our thinking about technology, ownership and work itself. When we create the elements of the new system we should be able to say to ourselves and others: this is no longer my survival mechanism, my bolt-hole from the neoliberal world, this is a new way of living in the process of formation. In the old socialist project, the state takes over the market, runs it in favour of the poor instead of the rich, then moves key areas of production out of the market and into a planned economy. The one time it was tried, in Russia after 1917, it didn’t work. Whether it could have worked is a good question, but a dead one. Today the terrain of capitalism has changed: it is global, fragmentary, geared to small-scale choices, temporary work and multiple skill-sets. Consumption has become a form of self-expression – and millions of people have a stake in the finance system that they did not have before. With the new terrain, the old path is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that work only when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework, and the postcapitalist sector might coexist with the market sector for decades. But it is happening." (from "PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future" by Paul Mason)”
― 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

“Now, here’s a more intriguing game: imagine if Amazon, Toyota or Boeing tried to create Wikipedia. Without”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“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

“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

“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

“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