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Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions QUOTES

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions QUOTES

1 " When the people decide to live, Destiny will obey, Darkness will disappear And chains will be broken. "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

2 " Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings. "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

3 " It is as if, in response to the creation of digital networks, we are changing our behaviour to become not just networked individuals but ‘network animals’. "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

4 " By this definition we are in the middle of a revolution: something wider than a pure political overthrow and narrower than the classic social revolutions of the twentieth century. Out of the very values and practices of free-market capitalism—individualism, choice, respect for human rights, the network, the flattened hierarchy—the masses have developed a new collective practice. They can bypass and supersede the machinery of power via, as Gorz predicted, an ‘alternative network of relations’. "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

5 " The root cause, simply put, is globalization, and the resulting monopolization of wealth by a global elite. "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

6 " depletion and climate change. For the older generation it’s easy to misunderstand the word ‘student’ or ‘graduate’: to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today’s undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year—excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book.2 "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

7 " He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’, defined as the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.11 "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

8 " And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power’s own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia. "

― Paul Mason , Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions