Reds tells the global history of communism, going beyond the turmoil of the 20th century, and exploring the origins of communist ideas, movements, and regimes. It tells the whole story – from the first barricade to the last chunk of the Berlin Wall. Not flinching from either the heroism or the horrors. It starts in […]
Read more →Allen Lane will publish my new book How to Stop Fascism, an original and challenging history of fascism and guide to resisting it. The bookwill explore the history of the original fascist movements in the 1920s and '30s, and the conditions that brought them to power. Mason aims to bring new insights about the similarities with the current political climate, and will argue that in order to resist the rise of violent, far-right mass movements, society must first understand fascism as a generalised and recurrent symptom of capitalist failure, not a finished historical fact.
Read more →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 […]
Read more →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 […]
Read more →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 […]
Read more →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 […]
Read more →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 […]
Read more →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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