"though Mason makes his case with passion — he does not hide his contempt for the global elite — the writing is sometimes infused with such anger that it feels irritatingly shrill. But even if you love the current capitalist system, it would be a mistake to ignore the book. For Mason weaves together varied intellectual threads to produce a fascinating set of ideas. At times, the text is unnervingly dense; Mason has done extensive research. But the thesis about 'postcapitalism' deserves a wide readership among right and left alike. [...] while Mason’s ideas might seem crazily idealistic, they are thought-provoking."

"it is not unreasonable to suppose that capitalism will finally disintegrate. No political or economic system lasts for ever. Nor is unreasonable that, in a world run by those with short-term agendas, someone is thinking about what is to be done in the long term. Where I part company with Mason is his prescriptions. They are remarkably thin, take no account of political realities and it takes an awful long time to get there. First, one has to plough through more than 200 pages of analysis in the course of which the author examines one by one the various economic theories advanced by 19th- and 20th-century political philosophers and various IT gurus. [...] We have to wait until page 263, a chapter headed “Project Zero”, to discover what the author has in store for us. [...] Scarcely a word about how we get from here to there. That, I suppose, will be left to the proposed thinktank to work out."

"It is an immensely ambitious book. In less than 300 pages, Paul Mason not only explains the past 300 years of capitalism and the efforts to replace it with another system (socialism), but shows how it would be eventually transformed and proposes a set of policies to help that transformation along. Moreover, it is not a superficial book as it might seem at first by contrasting the enormity of the material covered and the relatively slender size of the volume. One should not be misled either by the folksy style used by Mason. The style may be journalistic, but the questions asked, the quality of the discussion, and the objectives of the book are first-rate."