Paul Mason left the BBC for pastures new…perhaps the BBC finally saw the light about his trotskyist tendencies or whatever they maybe…..this is amusing…Mason, and his utopian dream, is slam-dunked, very gently by BBC Trustee (and Migration Advisory Committee member…strangely the BBC’s Fraser Steel is on the board of Immigration Service UK Ltd….funny what these BBC types get into) Diane Coyle:
PostCapitalism dreams big – but its theories tend towards the vague
As a woolly centrist rather than a techno-Marxist, the future seems far more contingent than Paul Mason’s vision suggests.
Should the Syriza government in Greece ever throw off the shackles of Troika imperialism and achieve its anti-austerity revolution, Paul Mason will surely be one of the first supporters it will honour. One of the admirable characteristics of Channel 4’s economics editor is his passionate engagement with his subject. He seethes with indignation about the injustice he has seen.
His book is equally passionate, and meant as a manifesto for a new world of post-capitalism. It’s a mixture of interesting reflection on how digital technologies are creating the opportunity for various forms of economic organisation and extremely irritating rhetoric: irritating because, from the first page of the introduction, it divides the world into goodies and baddies – sorry, radicals and neoliberals.
After the rhetoric and grand theorising of the earlier parts of the book, you close it asking: is that it? Socially responsible solar panels will overturn neoliberalism? Still, those who think neoliberalism is a coherent concept, and believe history progresses in clear stages, will delight in the hope offered by PostCapitalism and its argument suggesting that there is something inexorable about progressing beyond market capitalism.
To me, as a woolly centrist rather than a techno-Marxist, the future seems far more contingent. The digital technologies will certainly bring about deep social and economic changes but I suspect we are far more likely to see capitalism reinvent itself in messy, incremental ways, as it has before.
Paul Mason has read all the books, learnt all the clever things to say about Marx and Capitalism, he can spin out an eye=catching theoretical narrative but when it comes to producing a coherent, structured and intelligent analysis for the real world he falls apart.
What did the BBC ever see in him? What was it that induced them to make him the economics editor on one of their supposedly prestigious programmes, Newsnight?
Perhaps they all think like Mason and believe it to be normal. Gawd help us.
Paul Mason has read all the books, learnt all the clever things to say about Marx and Capitalism, he can spin out an eye=catching theoretical narrative but when it comes to producing a coherent, structured and intelligent analysis for the real world he falls apart.
What did the BBC ever see in him? What was it that induced them to make him the economics editor on one of their supposedly prestigious programmes, Newsnight?
They probably hired him for these very reasons. I’d love to know how many bbc employees were card-carrying communists. I used to listen a lot to the (admittedly entertaining) film critic Mark Kermode. He made no bones about the fact that he used to be a trot and at least he was honest about it. Be interesting to see a list of ex-commies at the BBC all the same, it would be apparent all those trying to move us into a post-capitalist world.
(Techno Marxist? Wasn’t that like the KLF or something?)