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/320/ Aufhebonus Bonus (Feb 2023) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-07 07:01:00
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

On your questions and criticisms.

[Patreon Exclusive]

A bumper episode as we respond to your points from December through to the end of January. We discuss 'political capitalism', where the left is today, atomisation, degrowth, disciplining the working class, critical cinema, and family abolition. 

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Comments

Elias B

Alex's point about rituals reminded me of an argument made by Yuri Slezkine about why Bolshevism didn't survive longer than a human generation. He points to the fact that it didn't establish any real private rituals: no changes to family life, marriage, funerals, or even reading habits (children grew up on the classics of world literature and not those od socialism), so the ideology wasn't able to reproduce itself past the first revolutionary generation (unlike Christianity and Islam).

Davka Smolah Collective

Hot take: science and technology in terms of humanity's capability as a whole have not slowed down very much. The ability of the capitalist mode of production to convert new scientific and engineering developments into standardized, rationally distributed "innovations" is what has stagnated, and even been locked down to a certain degree by rentiering on IP rights, privatization of state infrastructure, and expensive energy.

jkjkjkj

I don’t agree with Phil that there is a capitalist concensus on degrowth. Practically speaking it’s a fantasy, as growth and consumption around the world continues to grow. There are rare elites (many highly tied to the NGO/nonprofit sector) that espouse the ideas of degrowth publicly but don’t meaningfully follow it in practice and almost treat it rather as a technical solution or form of redistribution (IE: you in the developed world will eat less meat, but more meat will be produced as the global market expands due to growing wealth in the developing world). Frankly the degrowth discourse strikes me more as a clash pushed largely by competing interest groups in the energy sector. More big oil vs the green lobby (as you note, no mention of nuclear) than Davos vs the world. Davos wants more consumption and production in a capitalist economy

jkjkjkj

As a dedicated urbanist, I think the problem with Caspers argument regarding the value of degrowth is not about space, but it’s that the real median/mean standard of global living is probably best reflected by a working class person who is middle income by the standards of the developing worlds urban metropolis’s but lower middle class (or perhaps a touch lower) by the standards of the west. While it’s certainly commendable that much of the developing worlds urban populations have come so far over the past few decades, there is still an enormous amount of growth and development that has to occur to provide true prosperity to the vast majority of the non western world. The average urban citizen in the world is not somebody living in NYC or London, it’s somebody living in Jakarta or Manila or Cairo, where standards of development and infrastructure still require enormous work, to say nothing of areas such as rural Honduras or Tanzania. Redistribution is necessary for sure, but it’s simply not enough

Steve Bowbrick

I really liked George's point about degrowth (and green thinking in general) putting the outcome first - that we should put the democratic determination first and rely on the process to produce a good outcome. But what is remarkable about this moment is that the outcome is actually to some degree already prescribed. The giant objective discontinuity of climate collapse sets us this challenge: knowing the outcome of continued growth in production at the current rate (or at the increasing rate necessary to meet the needs of the developing world) as we do, come up with an authentic democratic response that doesn't impoverish workers, burn entire regions of the earth or crash civilisation all together… This is a situation where democrats and leftists have to respond to the objective, external reality. I don't want to sound like a stuck record but if insurance companies, bureaucrats, industry, Davos man, silicon valley and finance capital can all apparently plan a response why can't the left?