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?

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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