/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:

• 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?

For all Bungacast content, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast, and for our monthly newsletter, click here.

Readings:

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

• Technofeudalism vs Total Capitalism, Alex Hochuli, American Affairs (forthcoming, late August)

• 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