Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed
Paperback, 288 pages
ISBN: 9781844676538
November 2010
$14.95 / £8.99
Other Editions
Paperback, 198 pages
ISBN: 9781844673964
May 2009
$14.95 / £7.99
Reviews
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“A page-turning account … Mason is refreshingly clear-eyed—and angry.”
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“Excellent.”
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“What people need is a reliable guide to the financial crisis … Meltdown is the book they are looking for.”
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“A lucid and sharply polemical account.”
Blog
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Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere
Two days before International Workers Day and Paul Mason, BBC Journalist and author of Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere, asserts a global revoultion is taking place.
Read the article in full here."Two years on from the Arab Spring, I’m clearer about what it was that it inaugurated: it is a revolution. In some ways it parallels the revolutions of before – 1848, 1830, 1789 – and there are also echoes of the Prague spring, the US civil rights movement, the Russian ‘mad summer of 1874’ … but in other ways it is unique. Above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seems to be inverted. There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible, that a great change in the world’s priorities is within people’s grasp."
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The welfare state we’re in – A reading list for the present class war
In the UK this month austerity has revealed itself to be in the mode of naked class war. Monday began with welfare reforms, the introduction of the notorious bedroom tax and reductions in the access to Legal Aid. These attacks will be followed in the coming weeks by the replacing of disability living allowance with a personal independence payment policed by Atos, the reduction in the 50p tax rate (providing tax cuts to the rich) and the introduction of the controversial Universal Credit scheme. Combined with other aspects of late capitalism (from food prices to housing shortages) the reality of life in austerity Britain is uglier than it has been for some time.
With textbook ideological manoeuvring these assaults have been accompanied by a rhetoric designed to divide the working classes between “workers and shirkers.” To the chorus of the right wing press, statements, such as this one by Liam Fox or this from Iain Duncan Smith, ultimately aim to crush the possibility of an organized resistance. Most revealing this week has been efforts by the right wing to frame the horrific Philpott manslaughter as a result of ‘benefit dependency.’ Almost beyond belief, this story’s beginnings in the Daily Mail and right wing blogs were reinforced yesterday with this statement from the grubbiest man on earth: Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. -
The Essential Verso Undergraduate Reading List
If you think the latest tome of Giddens’ Sociology is the one textbook you need to get you through your undergraduate days, think again. Impress your tutor and learn something beyond the lecture theatre with these essential Verso titles.
Bolster any politics, philosophy, economics, literature, sociology or history essay with one of these books and not only score the grade, but begin your lifelong love affair with radical writers.
Discussions
Begin a discussion about this book-
In the new edition of his acclaimed account of the financial crisis, Paul Mason shows how, for the last fourteen months, the illusion has been sustained that no matter how badly the world economy slumps, there is always a pain-free way out of it. With the realisation slowly dawning that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is: who should feel it?
