/333/ Aufhebonus Bonus (April 2023)
Added 2023-04-11 13:13:38 +0000 UTCOn your questions & criticisms.
[Patreon Exclusive]
Is the Left dead? Did the turn to culture really kill it? Or is the nostalgia for the post-war Left the real problem?
We also debate what the function of imperialism in Africa is; the 'pro-worker' conservatives in the US; surveillance of app workers; what economic growth is for; and whether to f**k models.
Comments
It was great to hear my comment about democracy and climate collapse read out on this ep. I am so cool. But you all basically dodged the question. I agree that production can and should continue - and increase! But production and emissions are still tightly coupled (one requires the other, one increases with the other). That's the objective reality you have to respond to, not the more general doom and collapse narrative. And this is actually a positive thing. We have learnt that capitalists can't decouple in any meaningful way - that even the commissioning of awesome quantities of green generation doesn't reduce emissions in any meaningful way. We have to assume that this is because this progress is made in a capitalist framework, where the hope is that green tech represents the next cool way to reverse the decline in returns on investment. My profound hope is that, once capitalism is out of the way *brushes hands* decoupling can accelerate because it will be liberated from the necessity of ever-increasing returns and of permanent transfers to owners. There's your objective challenge!
Steve Bowbrick
2023-04-18 14:25:52 +0000 UTCfire emoji
John O'Riordan
2023-04-18 12:36:53 +0000 UTCOk, call me a basic bitch demsoc, or even a liberal perhaps, but I think the Left has been dying since long before the End of History. IMHO the End of History was just when the cancer exhausted the host to death and there was no more denying anything was wrong. I think the Left has been dying since at least World War I from cancer of the vanguard. When the German Revolution failed, the entire turn on the Left was towards having a Properly Communist/Socialist intellectual vanguard who would go out into their own historical situation, find a suitable revolutionary subject or coalition thereof, radicalize that subject, and then lead them into a revolution. The job was no longer to represent the industrial working class and its interests, to serve the labor movement, but to instrumentalize them in the intellectuals' mission. I call this a "cancer" rather than just banging on about "authoritarianism" or "Stalinism" both because it extends far beyond Leninist sect-parties and because it killed the way a cancer kills: by overburdening the metabolism of the host, in this case the labor movement and the industrial proletariat. Imagine a warehouse and logistics worker in, say, the UK today. The program suggested to him by the Corbyn-era Left circa 2016-2017 (and sorry to pick on poor Corby but at least everyone agreed he was a "real Leftist", so he's my target) was to somehow simultaneously reindustrialize Great Britain, redistribute from the wealthy to the professional middle class, bring up his wages and working conditions, build vast new blocs of social housing, renationalize railways, repair and expand the NHS, pay reparations to the colonized Global South (especially the anti-imperialist Axis of Resistance), reject and oppose Amerikan imperialism and NATO, smash the oppressors of THAT WHICH WE DO NOT NAME, open the borders to solve the aging population problem and fully fund pensions, and also of course Remain in the ever-closer European Union. There was absolutely no way to pull all this off at once. Even assuming you considered every single element of it desirable, it was full of contradictions where doing one good thing (Remain) would strangle all opportunity to do other good things (reindustrialize, expansion of state services). If this poor warehouse worker was a donkey carrying the burden of making the Left's program real, he would have collapsed from the weight. No possible industrial action he could ever execute could accomplish all that! Why not just take off some of the heavier burdens, then? Because then the vanguard rebels and tries to split, accusing you of reaction, class treason, and red-brownism for daring to suggest that Doing Both might not actually work. Realistically, could a political bloc built on this principle of doing Everything Everywhere All At Once, all the time, at the orders of an intellectual vanguard who persist in MANGO jobs between waves of activist politicization but never have to do any heavy lifting for a wage, POSSIBLY have done ANYTHING but fail? Between failure and treason, the Left has broadly chosen failure. That's why it's dead. (The tone of the last part of this critique does come from being a What's Left listener back when they had Benjamin Studebaker.)
Eli S
2023-04-13 13:58:48 +0000 UTC
