We celebrate 500 episodes of Aufhebunga Bunga with a cold, hard look at the decay around us.
Alex and George plus contributing editors Lee Jones and Alex Gourevitch wrangle with four principal questions:
- What does it mean to say our era is one of decay or decline?
- How does this relate to the non-death of neoliberalism – its intellectual destitution, its practical weakening, but also its mutation and perpetuation?
- How does neoliberal decay relate to the decline of a unipolar world under total US hegemony, and the decline of the liberal globalist order?
- To what extent is the decay of representative democracy cause or consequence of the above?
And finally, as we have been asking since we started this podcast in 2017: what comes next?
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Readings:
- Geopolitics at the End of the End of History, Lee Jones, The Northern Star
- Technofeudalism vs Total Capitalism, Alex Hochuli, American Affairs
- Regime Change in the West, Perry Anderson, London Review of Books
- Changing the Regime, Building the Nation, Phil Cunliffe, The Northern Star
- An Audacious Book, Roberto Schwarz (review of Robert Kurz's 1991 Collapse of Modernisation), Meditations Journal
- The new historical simultaneity, Robert Kurz, Libcom
Past landmark episodes
- 100: What was the end of history?
- 200: Which country crystallises world-history from 1900-2020?
- 300: The threat of nuclear annihilation
- 400: The political oppositions of the next decade