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/186/ Aufhebonus Bonus ft. Lee Jones (Patreon)

Published:
2021-04-13 06:00:03
Imported:
2026-06
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  • 186-AufhebonusBonus-Covid.mp3

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Content

On Covid state failure + responses to listeners.

We start off by discussing listener points and criticisms – e.g. is PMC a useful category? Is a counterculture a terrible idea? Were we wrong on Deleuze? More on the lockdown debate... – before featuring the second part of our discussion with Lee Jones on the coronavirus and state failure (from 45:30)

We look in depth at what went wrong in Western state responses to the pandemic, why they didn't follow their own plans, and compare this to South Korea's relative success.

Readings:

How the pandemic has exposed Britain’s failed ‘regulatory state’, Lee Jones, Daily Telegraph

COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state, Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, Review of International Political Economy

Files

Comments

Marc Walles

Thank you for this episode and thank you for adressing my concerns. I now have plenty of things to meditate about. Lee Jones framework seems very fitting to analyse the current state of state failure. The reason I am pro lockdown or how what we in Germany would call a Zero Covid policy is because it seemed like the fastest way to deal with the crisis and the fastest way to get back to civil liberties and I don t want my region to breed its own mutation and make things worse for everyone. We can agree that the current state of halfhearted indefinite lockdown is pretty bad and symptomatic. I will take your advice and try to go beyond the lockdown question and focus on the state failure aspect of the crisis. Btw I like George so try not to edit out too much of his jokes ;) I would also like if you brought a Fisher/ Adorno nerd to maybe explore how they can help us find a political perspective. Maybe a certain digital media artist from Munich.

Elias B

It would be interesting to have an episode with a critic of the «PMC discourse» to try and hash out the concept in more detail. Seems to me that people who find it useful and those who don't tend to talk past each other repeating the same talking points while not really addressing each other's arguments (like the indirect debate btw Winant and Liu). Therborn's recent article in Jacobin (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/03/middle-class-decline-capitalism-1-percent) would be interesting to discuss in relation to this as well

Davka Smolah Collective

I think the vagueness of "PMC" comes from the differences in how states have constructed and reinforced their own PMCs, insulating them from proletarianization.

Bernhard Pirkl

Thanks for the answers guys. RE: the Deleuze stuff: Andrew Culp mentions the anti-idpol strain (for lack of a better word) in Deleuze in his Dark Deleuze. I'm pretty sure others have too, but that's what is on top of my head right now. Just in case you want to pursue that further.

dshamz_

The episodes where you guys answer listener questions are great, thanks for this! On the subject of the PMC - I do think it’s a useful concept, but I worry that the emphasis placed on it by Liu (whose writing and podcast appearances I really enjoy!) and others risks obscuring the fact that the real ruling class is still the bourgeoisie. A lot of the critiques that (correctly) emphasize the perniciousness and opportunism of the PMC seem to come from people like Liu, yourselves, and myself, that are fellow members of that class and so have experienced firsthand the distasteful and destructive way these people operate, both towards one another and particularly towards working class. But I’m not sure that’s the right angle from which the view the PMC - it might be much more fruitful to view them from the perspective of capital and to ask what material and ideological function they serve to the ruling class (e.g. disorganizing the working class, perhaps as a fraction of the petit bourgeoisie?), rather than presenting the issue in such a way that they, themselves, might be confused for the ruling class.

Shatner's Bassoon

Hmm, I really made a tit of myself with that irascible tit comment. It sounded horrible when you read it out, and I blushed to the roots of my bald-faced hair. On the PMC ... it's true, the class structure is more finely differentiated now than it was in Marx's day, with many more intermediary ... strata (stratum?). Maybe professionals and managers do constitute a class of their own, after all - my only issue really was the use of the term PMC to describe ALL non-manual workers. A university graduate in a dead-end office job on the minimum wage is not PMC, or even lower PMC, I would argue, but is actually a bona fide prole. (That's how I like to think of myself anyway.)

Gabo Goff

On pmc thing it seems a big divide is net wealth and college education. So sort of binary do you have college degree and do you have positive net wealth. For younger people this is do they have some retirement savings to greater level than student debt. Then older pmc have wealth in their homes with new Generations joining this distinct, at least in non rural areas, status Would say non college educated are not pmc and those with much more debt than savings may not be pmc. Jobs that allow you to save in us includes 401k accounts, a subsidy that benefits higher earners who can save more and creates a pro market sentiment which often correspond to their jobs anyway. What’s interesting to me is non pmc or downwardly mobile pmc a left wing force or will some hiccup in housing and financial markets create a future rupture in pmc politics. I believe in many Anglo countries the housing as an asset and general net wealth from work is common.

Gabo Goff

Another question i have is if we see wage growth in at least us but maybe England for low income people will pmc wage growth follow or will pmc wages stagnate, while their resentment against low income Americans grows. This would be Amazon warehouse workers all get raises but mid level managers don’t.

Ran Heilbrunn

Thanks for this. It was a great episode. I partly disagree with Phil about the text being a standalone piece – Deleuze calls it a postscript, which precisely means that it is not a standalone work, but a fragment of a broader discussion. Apart from that, I think that the most obvious tension between Deleuze and wokeness has to do with anti-essentialism. It's a major theme in Deleuze (and in poststructuralism more broadly), which is constantly being evoked today by the most ardent critics of identity politics – like Adolph Reed Jr. and the guy from Dead Pundits Society, for instance. But the purpose of comparing this tension to the relationship between Freud and modern therapeutic culture was actually to say something more general about the relationship between contemporary mass culture and the intellectual traditions of the past. These traditions are being bastardized and vulgarized by certain social and cultural dynamics that have little to do with their actual content. So, when trying to evaluate a thinker's work – whether it's Freud, Deleuze, or Fukuyama – one should avoid conflating it (or even uncritically associating it) with its representations in mass culture.