Author: pmadmin

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Our broken economic model has triggered a crisis of the neoliberal self

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The antidote to the folk religion of fatalism is simple: find each other and act

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The rise of AI means business ethics are not enough. We’re going to need a whole new moral philosophy.

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#ThisIsACoup (Field of Vision, 2015)

Director Theopi Skarlatos. Narrator Paul Mason. Executive producer Karen O’Connor. In this four-part documentary series Paul Mason follows the Greek uprising against the Eurozone, from inception to defeat. With exclusive access to the corridors of power, and at the front line of social conflict.

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Astoria (Young Vic, 2016)

Written and directed by Paul Mason Budapest 2016: At the height of the refugee crisis, a Syrian woman searches for friends in the backstairs of a Budapest hotel. But the building has an unacknowledged past…

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K is for Karl (2018)

Written and narrated by Paul Mason, director Theopi Skarlatos No thinker has influenced the modern world more than Karl Marx. But what did he really think? In these five short animated documentaries, commissioned by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth Paul Mason explores the key concepts of Marxism. For screenwriting […]

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Divine Chaos of Starry Things (White Bear, 2017)

Paris 1871: A revolt takes control of a global city. In the final days, working class women – seamstresses, teachers and sex workers – take up arms, desperate to defend the freedoms they have won. Their attempt fails and they are exiled to remote New Caledonia. Based on the memoirs of 19th century feminist icon […]

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Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (Young Vic, 2017)

How did we get from Occupy and the Arab Spring to Donald Trump? Narrated by Paul Mason, script developed in collaboration with director David Lan, producer Ben Cooper and the cast: Khalid Abdallah, Lara Sawalha and Sirine Saba. Commissioned by BBC Performance Live. Performed at the Young Vic March 2017. Broadcast on BBC TWO 22 […]

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Party Animals (JB Shorts Manchester, 2016)

2015: A Labour special adviser goes comatose on the day Ed Miliband loses the election, and wakes up on the day his replacement is chosen…. A 15 minute play co-written with James Quinn for the JB Shorts festival, Manchester, 2016, starring Sally Carman. “The cherry on the cake … guaranteeing the audience leaves wiping away […]

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Clear Bright Future

Clear Bright Future: A radical defence of the human being, was published by Allen Lane in May 2019. In it I defend the idea of radical humanism in the face of algorithmic control, artificial intelligence and enforced, performative market behaviour. I argue that free-market economics were a gateway drug to a widespread anti-humanistic and fatalist […]

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Postcapitalism

June 2015: “The danger is that as the crisis drags on the elite’s commitment to liberalism evaporates. The successful crooks and dictators of the emerging world have already bought influence and respectability: you can feel their power as you walk through the door of certain law firms, PR consultancies and even corporations. How long will […]

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Rare Earth

Tiananmen Square, 2009: ​“Across the concrete, hundreds of metres wide, tens of thousands of unquiet spirits had begun to march … The dead, scraped up off the floors of unlit factories; the victims of firing squads; workers whose lives had been shortened by cancer and poisoning. A whole delegation of brick-kiln kids, their childhoods stolen by […]

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Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere

​Cairo, 2011: “The ground floor of Musa Zekry’s house is head-high with garbage and thick with flies. The floor above is home to the widow of his brother, shot dead during the revolution….A dead brother, several fear-filled days in Tahrir Square, weeks of danger and distrust: that’s the balance sheet of Musa Zekry’s revolution. All […]

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Meltdown

Lehman Brothers, 15 September 2008:  “I stumble aboard the train. As it speeds through Maryland, I try to follow the news via guerrilla log-ons to wi-fi as we pass through stations: Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark. The Susquehanna river flashes past, shimmering in the dawn. The herons, gliding low across the water, were here long before investment banks. What nobody […]

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Live Working or Die Fighting

Shenzhen, 2003: “When they came into the room the guys were sheepish and so was I; every one of them was missing a limb. I had dragged them across the city to meet me in this tatty rooming house because, for a Western journalist, going to Longgang – an industrial suburb of Shenzhen – is only […]

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Britain’s impossible futures

The UK parliament is at an impasse, the latest vote producing a majority for a renegotiation of its departure from Europe that the EU cannot grant. Both main parties risk fracture. So does the UK.

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Break up big tech

The great technologists believe that society exists outside of them. We must fragment technological monopolies until they behave

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Boris and the bananas

Johnson sold the dream of hard Brexit to the British people. Now the fantasies of the right-wing Conservatives have collided with reality

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