A Shareable World

In this guest episode hosted by Greg and his daughter, Erica, they pick through the atheism of Richard Dawkins to find and better understand how modern atheism is a limiting worldview, the mechanisms that lead us to truth, and the uses of religion that go beyond it as a metaphysical description of the world.

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“I find Mexico to be incredibly interesting because we witness the disintegration of Western political institutions. The state is disintegrating in Mexico in front of our very eyes, and it's being replaced by the so-called cartels… We haven't seen that kind of thing in the world—because these cartels have no political depth. They don't have any ideology, right? They're strictly economic institutions. They do represent—and I think this is a very interesting point worth thinking about as we go on—the cartels represent the ultimate economization of politics.”-big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 What about the conditions of the USSR—so integral to the Allies’ victory in WWII—made its post-war behavior and prospects so different from the US? How did these challenges lead to the post-war solidification of its authoritarianism and its occupation of many countries in Eastern Europe?

19:30 How did ideology function in the process of the Soviets’ development of their state, and the US’ development of an image of that state? In what ways did the US, in antagonizing the Soviets so intensely, accidentally accept some of their ideological presuppositions? In what surprising ways did communist ideology spread, other than direct Soviet occupation?

25:02 What about the Middle West [big Mike’s term for Western Europe]—what challenges did they face post-WWII? How was its development influenced by the legacy of democratic socialism, much stronger there than in the US, and fascism, which was homegrown in many more European countries than we remember? How did their vulnerability allow the US to step into its position as world superpower, as we know it to be today?

37:55 What about the ‘third world’ or ‘developing world’—problematic categories that betray the influence of Marx? How did imperialism and its volatile endings lead to surprising consequences for both West and East, who both tried, often violently, to influence the way peoples across the world were trying to determine the course of their own lives? What value do the experiments of various ‘postcolonial’ countries have for us today?

“In the West … there was a very strong reassertion of capitalism. Now I say reassertion of capitalism. And the reason I say reassertion is because during the Second World War—US society for the few short years of the Second World War was radically changed.”—big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 Why have we already forgotten about such a recent world-historical event as the Cold War? In the post-WWII climate, what are the four world regions that are at odds with each other? What was the influence of communist ideas in each of these four regions? How did the Third World function as a battleground between West and East?

13:59 The Cold War was fundamentally a competition for power. How did this competition happen ideologically? How did this inform the military and economic competition?

20:04 How was the war fought culturally between East and West? How do different practices around the interaction between intellectual and political life allow us to see how important the cultural war was?

29:32 How did the cultural war in the US—which attempted at all costs to de-emphasize class—try to respond to state cultural messaging around WWII, which inadvertently helped spawn a homegrown anti-capitalist movement? How did the US state’s attempts to control culture and ideology influence those in the Middle West and Third World who were disillusioned by both capitalism and communism?

37:57 Rewinding a bit, in what ways was the US functioning as essentially a socialist state in WWII? How did its ideological promotion of military service during that war (accidentally or not) align with anti-capitalist ideas, particularly by emphasizing the value of democracy? Why did these material conditions make such a severe re-assertion of capitalism and capitalist values necessary? How did this bleed into the consumer capitalism we’re familiar with today, and the concurrent evisceration of labor’s power? What does this tell us about the power of ideology to change and even negate people’s experience of material conditions?

“…social democracy recognizes the need for the state to put some band-aids on some sores, right? Democratic socialism comes along and says, that doesn't work. That's not enough. That really, that we need to change society institutionally.”—big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 A brief recap of last episode: how can the uprising of communism and fascism in the 20th century be seen as responses to the crises of capitalism?

05:26 Why is it important for us to think about the history of the Cold War, and how we think about the history of the Cold War (and beforehand)? Why was the Russian Revolution such a massive, world-historical event?

12:50 How does the Western response to the Russian Revolution (and the ensuing civil war) shape the trajectory of Soviet communism towards state power? How does the need to accumulate capital lead to a communism that, when lived on the ground, is essentially like fascism?

26:14 How does the brief, tenuous alliance between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during World War II collapse into the Cold War? Post-WWII, how and why do perceptions form, at least in Northern and Western Europe, of communism as more viable and powerful than capitalism, a perception immensely foreign to us in the U.S.? How does this lead to the rise of social democracy, or at least social democratic party and policy, in Europe?

35:26 What’s social democracy, and how does it differ from ‘ameliorated capitalism’? How is the role of charities in ameliorated capitalism similar to the role of the state in social democracy?

39:29 What is the move that takes us from social democracy to democratic socialism? Why is a fundamental restructuring and redistribution of resources necessary to democratic socialism, and what are some historical examples of this?

46:31 If America is heading towards further and further privatization, how does that create problems over who has the power to make decisions over economic and political life? How do those tensions over equality of power also exist in a democratic socialist society in which the state has control over resources and distribution?

56:26 If we’re going to have the structural changes needed to face our crises and still respect everyone’s autonomy? How will this require changes in the way we live, and the way we think about how we live?

So from 1929 on through the end of the Second World War, we can see very clearly how seeds planted a little bit earlier blossomed into alternative ways of organizing society. And I want to briefly look at that ‘cause I think that's, we live the consequences of that to this day.-big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 A brief recap: we know by now why it’s important to study history. How did socialism arise concurrently with, ‘as the twin of’, capitalism? Why was the concurrent shift in material conditions—the discovery of electricity—and ideology—that nature could be extracted from—necessary for the birth of capitalism? What are the major successes of capitalism?

11:07 What are the major failures of capitalism? How are these failures exacerbated by other material conditions, such as urbanization? What do these failures have to do with capitalism’s fundamental instability? What does that instability have to do with our day-to-day experience of living in capitalism?

18:08 How do we deal with some of capitalism’s failures? Is it by limiting or stopping growth—if that’s impossible, what do we really have to accomplish?

22:11 If capitalism did cause many enormous improvements for human life, was it necessary as a stage of history preceding a better system, as Marx thought it was?

27:33 What were the attempts to make a better system than capitalism even at the beginning of capitalist history? What can we learn from the fact that even before capitalism was in full swing, people were worried about it?

31:31 Jumping forward, what can we learn from the Great Depression about the fundamental instability of capitalism in its full force? How did the Great Depression lead to the three very different responses—ameliorated capitalism, fascism, and communism—that defined world history in the 20th century?

34:09 What are the workings and ideology behind what Mike calls ‘ameliorated’ capitalism, exemplified by the New Deal in the U.S.? How does it function as a response to the issues of capitalism?

39:54 What about fascism—how can it be considered a response to the issues of capitalism, particularly as it manifested in Italy and Germany in the 20th century? What were the massive cultural shifts that ensued?

44:30 How was communism—which often went by the name socialism, but we’ll call communism to differentiate it more clearly from ‘democratic socialism’—a response to the issues of capitalism? What were the cultural changes necessary there?

48:35 How can we view the massive, world-historical events of the 20th century as a manifestation of the conflicts between these three responses to capitalism? Why did ameliorated capitalism and communism band together to defeat fascism in the Second World War?

52:12 Why, particularly, is 'ameliorated capitalism' not enough; why does it fail as a solution? What does this have to do with the cultural changes it does (or doesn’t) provoke?

57:22 Looking ahead: what makes a society like Scandinavia a democratic socialist one, as opposed to a social democracy? What are the cultural changes democratic socialism entails?

"I can prove to you historically that private property didn't always exist! And the fact that it didn't at a certain point exist means that it's also possible for it not to exist now. That's exactly the point." —big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 Recap: why is history important? What can historical failures teach us that historical successes can’t? How can an attention to that failure foster a feeling of solidarity, of humility? How, despite everything, can history be a source of hope?

09:27 How did history as a discipline form? What does this have to do with the division of the social sciences in the middle of the 19th century?

15:07 How does the figure of the statesman—as opposed to the politician—allow us to conceptualize a total vision for a new world, as opposed to individual solutions? How does the fragmentation of the disciplines prevent us from having vision in our day to day lives?

24:22 How did the current discipline of economics derive from the formerly integrated notion of political economy? What does that have to do with the concurrent rise of capitalism and nation-states, and the consolidation of state power? What does this teach us about how the production of knowledge is always shaped by power structures?

33:23 What are the historical conditions we’re in now, in terms of the relationship between wealth (economic) and state (political) power, versus the middle of the 19th century? How does this relationship illuminate for us a conflict between the market and democracy?

42:39 What might the discipline we need look like? Where might it lead us? How would it allow us to think about our fundamental problem, which is our relationship to nature?

“Capitalism was not written indelibly into the future of the middle ages. The decline of the middle ages takes place and there are many responses to it. One is the rise of capitalism and one is also the rise of socialism, if I understand socialism to be the search for reasonable alternatives to capitalism, and indeed that turns out to be the case.”—big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 What even is history, and how does history as we in the West think of it today arise alongside capitalism? If history as we think of it today arises alongside capitalism, what does it do for capitalism?

15:21 More broadly, what does history do in the world, who does history serve? How can history give legitimacy to different views of the present?

18:54 How do conceptual questions about how we study objects in history—such as, for example, questions about how we should define an ‘event’—allow us to use history for different purposes?

22:10 If history is always a construct, then how do we start to construct a democratic socialist view of history, as opposed to the commonplace (capitalist) histories we are commonly confronted with? How does allow us to rethink the relation between socialism and capitalism?

37:30 If history is constructed ideologically, how do we weigh the validity of one history as compared to another? How do we allow the ‘debris’ of history to surprise us despite our preconceptions?

39:51 Looking ahead, how can we use history as a set of tools for creating a new mental structure that takes us towards the world(s) we want?

...one needs to think about all the things a narrative does, all the ways it functions to create the world that we live. Notice I didn't say the world that we live in—the world that we live. —big mike

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In this episode:

01:19 What is a story, what is a narrative? What role does it play in everyday life?

06:08 How do narratives establish the concepts of what's normal, what's good and bad? Why do we need to change narrative to change the world?

12:35 What are the narratives at the heart of our economic and political systems?

19:52 How do stories acquire legitimacy? Do humans need stories to be legitimated from the outside?

30:21 What is the role of education in reshaping narrative?

35:09 What are the new stories we need?

40:42 How do we rewrite, rethink the story of the communist experiment?

“I want to redefine culture as that complex of thoughts, attitudes, emotions, the whole realm of the immaterial world, that helps me to define the material world.” —big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 A continued discussion of ‘culture’: why do we need to make a systemic cultural change? Why is it useful to think of culture as not just the concrete practices and materials of daily life, but also the way in which we think about those concrete things? What does it mean that our ‘culture’ is incredibly materialist, i.e. that we think about the world as if material exchange predominates over the immaterial?

17:26 How can we think more precisely about the distinction between the material (or infrastructure) and the immaterial (or superstructure) and how they interact, using Marx’s concepts? Where did the Marxists go wrong in prioritizing the material? What are some examples, historical and contemporary, of how impactful immaterial ideas are on how we think about material things?

30:00 Questions of practice: what happens when our ideas about how we want to live run up against the material limits of the world we live in now? How do we bring principles that are not of this world to bear on reality? Does it take a collective? Does it take an individual? A small group of heroes?

44:50 Turning towards the contemporary, how are public figures talking about change, if they’re talking about it at all? If they are, how are they (or are they not, to be specific) talking about changing our fundamental narratives?

…we don't live in a world in which issues can be individually separated, one from the other. That we actually live in a world which is very systemic in which everything is really connected to every everything else and everybody is connected to everybody else.—big mike

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In this episode:

00:00 Recap: why is it important for us, vital for us, to radically rethink everything?

02:03 How and why do we talk about individual ‘issues,’ and how do we need to start thinking about the problems we face? How are the problems we face connected? What is preventing us, institutionally and intellectually, from grasping the full extent of those connections?

14:44 How can we define culture (opposed to how it’s commonly defined, in terms of ethnicity) to start thinking holistically? Why is culture not just specific material practices and activities, but also a way of thinking about the world that emerges from and is reflected by those material things?

27:50 Conversely, what is the bearing of immaterial ideas on the material world, our material experience of daily life? Why do we have to pay just as much, if not more, attention to immaterial ideas as material conditions?

33:11 What glimpses do we have of a transformed way of thinking about the world, a transformed culture; how do we move from what is to what could be?