Episode 1411
The futilitarian condition / Neil Vallelly
Nov 30 2021
If you have kids, you love them. But it's not because they give you more money, more energy, more free time, more time with your friends. Quite the opposite. You have to make a sacrifice for your children. It's their neediness. It's the fact that they need something from you that elicits that love. And that's how social eros develops as well. When we start to open up to the need that other people have of us. So when people go out marching, for example, for free Palestine to stop the genocide in Gaza. They're not doing that because they're going to improve their wage packet. This old political consensus that people act on the basis of enlightened self-interest is nonsense. They're not doing it for an easier or more convenient life. They're risking arrest. The people in this country are being locked up. Even grannies for supporting called Palestine Action. So people take risks when they feel moved by that social eros that bond with other people who need something from them and they put themselves at risk. And that to me is a far more promising avenue for socialism and radicalization than ‘let's offer people some housing’, ‘let's offer people wage increases’. You know, that's a good start but there's nowhere near enough.
Richard Seymour returns to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book "Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization”, published by Verso Books. Seymour discusses the ideologies amplifying the contemporary right that is distorting modern politics into a nihilistic disaster nationalism.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell! from Patreon.
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Nov 23 2021
Nov 10 2021
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink. This is a pep talk for me, but I suspect others can use one, too.
I was reading an article about how entrepreneurs like the Fyre Fest guy and the fake blood machine woman have conned investment cash out of venture capitalists. One of the startup companies mentioned was WeWork, a real estate company, I guess, specializing in incubator- type spaces or something, where people working on a project together would live in the same space, maybe, or just inhabit the space somehow, but the space would be specifically curated to cater to a group who wanted to be, I don’t know, entrepreneurial or some shit, like maybe the type of people who would develop a company like WeWork, the company specializing in spaces for groups of people getting together to come up with companies like WeWork.
Companies that are con-jobs specifically structured to take investors’ money fascinate me, because they demonstrate how fucking brainless capitalists are, and how expecting vacuous greedy twatism as a philosophy to somehow improve society can lead to hilarious disasters. WeWork started out with a hefty valuation of $47 billion, one that dwindled to, I think, currently, do not quote me on this, five dollars and forty cents.
What caught my eye, though, was a phrase in their phishing literature that attracted investors: there was a “kibbutz-like” atmosphere at the company, or in its buildings, or some such garbage. Whatever you think about Israel, a kibbutz is a socialist socio-economic relationship between its members, often built around a few small industries, crops, and livestock. There’s a seniority system, but at every level the fruits of labor are shared out equally, and decisions about just about everything are made democratically. Children are all raised together, so they are like siblings. A lot of siblings.
The thing that surprised me is that anyone would consider a kibbutz or any socialist enterprise an attractive advertising analogy. But then I got to thinking how successful many left efforts have been in the marketplace.
Greenwashing is, of course, when a vile corporation, the sole purpose of which is to make as much profit as possible, pretends to the public that it cares about the environment. Greenwashing it a huge part of any polluting company’s PR budget.
Likewise, sensitivity across the gender, ethnicity, and racial spectrum.... read more