/500/ Disrupt, Decline, Decay

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:

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  What does it mean to say our era is one of decay or decline?

  
  


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  How does this relate to the non-death of neoliberalism – its intellectual destitution, its practical weakening, but also its mutation and perpetuation?

  
  


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  How does neoliberal decay relate to the decline of a unipolar world under total US hegemony, and the decline of the liberal globalist order?

  
  


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  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:

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  Geopolitics at the End of the End of History, Lee Jones, The Northern Star

  
  


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  Technofeudalism vs Total Capitalism, Alex Hochuli, American Affairs 

  
  


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  Regime Change in the West, Perry Anderson, London Review of Books

  
  


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  Changing the Regime, Building the Nation, Phil Cunliffe, The Northern Star

  
  


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  An Audacious Book, Roberto Schwarz (review of Robert Kurz's 1991 Collapse of Modernisation), Meditations Journal

  
  


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  The new historical simultaneity, Robert Kurz, Libcom

  
  

Past landmark episodes

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  100: What was the end of history? 

  
  


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  200: Which country crystallises world-history from 1900-2020?

  
  


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  300: The threat of nuclear annihilation

  
  


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  400: The political oppositions of the next decade