Paul Mason

I think if...

Oh, shit, it does look like fucking Paul Mason.

Oh, that bird.

Oh, shit.

What an intimidating subject to take on.

Paul Mason, welcome.

Great to be here, Ian.

I mean, when you had the idea for this book, or did someone suggest it to you? I mean, it's such an intimidating subject to broach, isn't

So why don't I just write the chapter on the French Revolution, immerse myself in it, and then move on.

And that's the way I had to work on it.

Which implies a huge amount of intellectual curiosity because, I mean, I think if I said to people, oh, Paul Mason's written a book on communism, they would think, well, he knows a lot about the 20th century stuff because, I mean, that's kind of what we all grew up with, I suppose.

But the stuff going back from...

And then the last thing I would say briefly is I'm of an age, I'm in my early 60s now, but I'm of an age where the idea of automation from a left perspective was that it was going to bring us a utopia, a post-work utopia.

Paul Mason's book, Post-Capitalism, apart from that Paul Mason went off the deep end in terms of the military-industrial complex.

But Paul Mason, before that, wrote a book called Post-Capitalism, which laid out a prospectus that said the reason why we have labour-saving technology is to reduce the amount of work in our lives, to bring more time and background resource into our lives, partly so we can have more pleasant lives, but partly because so we can also have the resources as citizens to think through the challenges that we face, which are climate, which are technology, which are pandemic, which are crisis of meaning.

We need time and space to think through these questions and to deliberate amongst ourselves, to give ourselves more time as citizens to do this.

I want the data centres to be controlled in such a way that they give us more time and space in our lives as citizens to solve our big 21st century problems.

So there's a political, the old-fashioned phrase, a political economy question here.

We don't really, I've not really figured out a proper political economy of how we manage this level of productivity.

And again, Paul Mason makes this point really well.

That the question is open is conceded by the loudest of those sounding the alarm.

Paul Mason, whose book Fascismus sets out to found a new anti-fascist alliance, writes in its opening pages, "'No serious faction of high finance wants or needs fascism.

For Mason, this is a riddle.

The right is returning, although nobody ordered it.

I don't know.

Anyway, it's by Paul Mason, and he has written books on topics such as this.

He's speaking from the UK, of course.

But he says AI will transform capitalism.

Subscribe to The New World, thenewworld.co.uk forward slash twomats.

We've still got a few copies of Paul Mason's brilliant book Reds as intro subscription offers.

So if you're thinking about spending 30 quid on that, well, get yourself a New World subscription into the bargain.

Thank you to Matt Withers for producing the show.