He added: “I went into journalism at the age of 30, confident that because I could write polemical propaganda leaflets, news wouldn’t be a problem.” Some might say that this is precisely the problem with Mason’s reporting; he remains a cheerleader and propagandist at heart. He can be a very good, if very partial and engaged, journalist. His reporting on the Greek crisis has offered greater insight into the thinking of Syriza — perhaps because he agrees with so much of it — than could be found almost anywhere else. He is now making a crowd-funded documentary, Greece: Dreams Take Revenge, about Syriza and “how a radical government takes on the world”.

But too often clear reporting is replaced by wishful thinking, such as the relish with which he reported on the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent upheavals,  or his 2012 book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. Its 2013 update is titled Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere. Presumably it will still be kicking off when the final whistle goes.

With Postcapitalism Mason has upgraded his publishers — from the niche, left-wing  Verso to Penguin — and gives his explanation as to why the much-heralded crisis of capitalism is finally upon us. In Mason’s view, “Capitalism is a complex, adaptive system which has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt.” He is a big fan of Nikolai Kondratieff, a Russian revisionist Marxist economist who was executed by Stalin. Kondratieff spent his time in the gulag working on his theory of long-run economic cycles or waves, lasting 50-60 years. In Mason’s view the fourth wave of capitalism came to an end with the 2008 financial crisis — and we have now entered the fifth and final wave. 

As many have argued before him, workers are being impoverished and the system cannot hold. What is new in Mason’s eyes is that technology means co-operation on an unprecedented level is now possible. He sees Wikipedia — which is provided free and makes no profit thanks to its 27,000 volunteers, who are gainfully employed elsewhere, thanks to capitalism — as the model for the “sharing economy” he envisages.

He believes that this time it will all be different. But as the historian of economic thought, the late Mark Blaug, put it, “What a wonderful story is the history of Marxism, refuted again and again, and revised again and again — not by its enemies but by its friends.”