ACFM - ACFM Trip 54: The Future

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

What if we stopped treating the future like a speculative asset and started trying to actually build and prepare? The ACFM gang look to the horizon in this Trip episode. Did young people always worry so much about their futures? Has the currency of emergency been devalued? Does conservatism have an idea of the future? […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my friend Nadia Idol. Hello. My other good friend, Keir Milbin. Hello. And today we are talking about the future. Okay, so why are we talking about the future, Keir?

Well, I mean, the future, the absence of the future, the disappearance of the future, the short nature of the future, you know, that seems to be one of the conditions of the contemporary world, you know, and this struggle to refine some idea of the future which we could sort of, we could move towards. The part of that I think is this sense that we're living in the time of crisis and emergency, you know, if you look at something like Extinction Rebellion, for instance, you know, their statements were we're living in an emergency, therefore we need a completely new way of doing things, basically. That idea of the future, which is really foreshorten, is quite hard to resolve with a more strategic left politics in which, you know, you're trying to act in the present to move towards the future. You know, that's one way in which we Well, one reason we'd want to talk about the future. We also have done a couple of workshops recently, consciousness-raising sessions, live consciousness-raising sessions. On the theme of the future, we ask people to, you know, questions and they fed back, etc. It was pretty obvious from them that people have a very pessimistic view of the future at the moment. I think also, I guess I'm interested in, as you mentioned, Keir, in a sense,

the different conceptions of the future and what those timelines, are. So I'm interested in the fact of like the effect of capitalism on the way that we understand time, in the sense that capital is very interested in, you know, the measure of the quarter, i.e. three months and how much profit you can make in that timeline. That's a very short timeline. It's very, it's different even thinking about a year or five years in the classic, you know, socialist sense, the five year plan or even, you know, generational thinking. And I, and I'm interested in, you know, how that plays into our thinking psychologically, but of course, as a socialist, I'm interested in, you know, fighting for a different shared future, a different horizon,

for a different potential. And that kind of colours my politics in a certain way. And so an interaction with the future kind of conceptually, I think, is quite central to how I think about myself as an activist and a political thinker. I think on a personal level as well, I'm interested in the future because I've always struggled with it. And I'm not entirely sure if this is a function of the age that we live in, but I think maybe in my case, it's about my psychological disposition. Like I never had any dreams for the future when I was a child. I never wanted to be something. I didn't have an imaginary for what I wanted. And I don't look forward to things. interesting to, I think, observe in culture how people react to that. I tend to receive

quite negative reactions as if that's a bad thing. Oh, God, you can't look forward to things and you don't dream about the future. And I don't. I don't experience it as something negative, but it is definitely something that I've grappled with and also now politically under capitalism I'm finding, as you mentioned with the workshops here, that it's kind of difficult to believe in or dream for ourselves collectively what the future would look like. And at the same time, it's kind of like we have to, to be able to struggle and to be able to build alternatives. We have to operate as if another future is possible. It has to be kind of something that we hold, even though we also have perhaps that pessimism ingrained

within us because of our lived experience. So those are some of the things that I'd like us to touch on when we talk about the future. And what about yourself, Jeremy? Well, I'm interested in all that stuff. And I'm interested in the kind of changing relationships being individual and collective senses of the future, you know, there was this cliché which Keir has often brought up when we've been doing workshops that goes back sort of to the mid-90s, whereby people had become really pessimistic about the future of society, but really optimistic about their own individual futures. Like, everybody thought they were going to be all right about society was disintegrating. And that was basically true. That was probably true. If you're like, if you're like

a Gen X, that was probably was what, that is in fact probably what you experienced. You probably did all right. Lots of people didn't, but you probably did. And you're probably now looking in a situation where prospects for your kids are pretty dire and pretty worrying. So, and everyone else's kids, unless they've got a massive inheritance. But even then, you know, I think even for, I would say even for people, unlike my own kids, you've got a massive inheritance coming, it's still sort of scary to think, well, that's what they've got to rely on now because safety relations are falling apart. And it's interesting to think about whether that's changed. And it was interesting to me, because when we did Constance Raising Workshop at Circle Dance in South London a few months ago,

the thing that really came up for me personally was this realization that I'm actually very pessimistic about my own individual circumstances, but I'm less pessimistic about as of collective circumstances just because I have some faith in the ability of, you know, my communities and networks and my class to struggle. But before we get into all that, I am going to, to give some parish notices to the listeners. So please do you remember, we've got this newsletter that comes out every month. Our producer child is fantastic.

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by just going to navara.com newsletter. You can also subscribe on a quite different platform, on Spotify. You can subscribe to the ACFM music playlist. You can listen to all the music that has ever been played on ACFM. Just go to Spotify, search for ACFM. And that is, by this point, that is actually a really cool playlist. Do you remember on Spotify or on any other platform that you're listening to us on, it always helps the podcast if you give it a five,

star rating. Sometimes you have to put a little review. Sometimes you can just click the five stars, just do whatever helps. And if you want to help us even more than that, if you want to help build left and progressive and radical culture in the UK and the wider world, please do consider supporting our host, Novara Media, for as little as one pound a month. Just go to navara.media stroke support and help to secure a better future for all of us. We should play the song in the year 2525, which was a really huge hit in 1969, I think in the US and a UK for a duo called Zagher and Evans. It's like a one hit one, I don't think they ever got in the charts again, but they were like at number one both sides of Atlantic. It's a really odd song. It's sort of a song,

it starts in the year 25, 25, 25, you know, and then moves on to the year 3535, etc. And it charts like a future history of mankind over something like 10,000 years. I suppose it's It's a song about man's relationship to technology and automation and machines or machines overtaking human functions and in mankind becoming deteriorated as a result. So one of the lyrics is, in the year 6565, you won't need no husband, won't need no wife. You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a long glass tube. And then there's other ones about, you know, your arms and legs deteriorating because you won't be using them, etc.

What a strange thing to make a song about in 19. 69. In the year 55, 55, your arms are hanging limp at your side. Your legs got nothing to do, some machine doing that for you. In the year 65, 65, ain't going to need no husband, won't need no wife. You pick your son, pick your daughter too. from the bottom of a long glass to grow. Can we go back to this idea that we're living in a time of crisis and emergency,

and that produces a very close in for shortened conception of the future? I've been reading a book recently by a political theorist, Jonathan Whitehall. In the long run, the future is a political idea. It got quite a lot of attention last year and this year. actually. I think the spur for Jonathan White for writing that book is this sense of that we live in a time of emergencies. And I think it's stuff like, you know, the exor, the founding XR's Extinction Rebellion statement, you know, which is, you know, it's an emergency, you know, we have to act differently and all that sort of stuff. And for him, he sort of thing, his sort of like problem is he's

trying to resolve that with the practice of democracy as it's existed so far, you know, since it's reinvention in the 18th century, etc. No, he says that, like, democracy as we practice, it needs like an open conception of the future. And in fact, it needs some sort of far-sighted conception as well, to some degree, as in we need to be able to hold an election, etc. And if you lose the election, it doesn't seem as though everything is lost. Or if you're in a movement and you get a setback,

then it doesn't seem as though that setback can't be overturned. If you're in an emergency, that does seem that way. And so, like, you know, that we live in a type of sense, a period where there's a huge sense of emergency. Sometimes that is a sign to climate change, which is this really existing emergency. Emergency is probably not the best way to deal with it. But it is something in which really affects the timescale upon which you have to think about policy. But it also applies to things such as, you know, the far right, which are denying climate change. But, you know, if Donald Trump loses an election, it's like, well, we've got to storm, you know, the January 6th storming.

of Congress, etc. and Donald Trump in 2024. He says this is the last chance we have. This is the last election. It's the only election that counts. If we lose this, everything's lost. As you go through the book, he's not denying that this is a time of emergency. It's something that's very hard to deny. All right. Emergency is not the best way to look at it, but it's a time in which climate change faces us as this huge blockage on the horizon of the potential for an open future anyway. And his solution is that, you know, if we do have a foreshortened time scale for immediate action, and the way to address it is to intensify democracy, right? So at the moment, we, every defeat Brexit, for instance, you know, that seemed like this huge defeat that needed an

immediate rerunning, let's have a second referendum, etc, etc. But that part of the problem with that is that our agency, our ability to affect politics, you know, is very limited. you know, if you're voting once every four or five years, then, you know, losing the election is a big, big thing. If democracy is intensified, you have more ability to influence the direction of society, you know, throughout life. That intensifies politics or democracy and would help us deal with this sense of emergency, basically, or deal with the negative effects of a sense of emergency, something like that. It's a good idea, isn't it? It's a pity. It doesn't look like the political class have any interest in extending that particular measure

Well, I mean, the big disappointment in it is that he, you know, he runs through various things, but then he comes up with like, well, what we need to have is some sort of recallability of democratic representatives. It's like, well, fuck, that's not enough. It's the problem with the whole of political science as constituted in the English-speaking world, that it brackets off any kind of sociology. You can do a thing called political sociology, which you're usually only being allowed to do in a sociology department. But there just is no sociology a lot of the time. So there is no sense of or who are the actual social agents like engaged in politics or having values or having ideologies or doing things. And that is the way

the whole discipline is constituted quite explicitly to foreclose any thinking about the question, the sociological question. Or political economy as well, you know. Well, I would say political economy properly understood as an extension of political sociology. It shouldn't be treated as an autonomous field. I just agree. Political economy is that I was going to say the other way around, but I just can't be asked. Yeah, no, but anyway, the book is sort of interesting in that, I like the setup of the problem, basically.

I don't like the solution of the problem, but I quite like the setup of the problem because of that, because we do live in this time of a foreshorten future. And that links to all sorts of discussions about, you know, the disappearance of the future and all this sort of stuff that we've gone over and over and over again on this, on this podcast. I was just thinking, as Keir was speaking, I was wondering, like, have, like, has the, the currency of emergency been devalued in campaigning anyway? Like, forget about, like, big structures. Like, everyone's using, everyone on the kind of campaigning from liberal to, like,

far left is using emergency terminology. And I'm not sure that people are experiencing us as living through a time of multiple crises without an analysis. I'm not sure. I'm trying to think about how this interacts with conceptions of the future. I think if you're involved in activism and campaigning and have kind of consciousness about issues around climate change, and I think also let's be real, like war and genocide, et cetera, and the extermination of, you know, Palestinian people, for example. I think if you have an awareness of that, then the acuteness is perhaps something that, like, you experience in a kind of libidinal sense. It's part of your daily life, like, whether you decide to, like, ignore it or act on it or, you know, decide strategically

this isn't the time. But I'm trying, you know, think for people who are not involved in this stuff, like, is this a time of emergency? It's a time of a lot of, like, cascading of, like, bullshit, like, you know, I think something like the pollution that's been created by water companies, etc. Like, that's a tangible thing that people can see that is absolutely ridiculous and people understand that a crisis due to the way that companies operate. But I think on a, like, on a larger scale, like, does that, like, emergency type discourse, like, how does it affect people's understanding of the future? I'm not sure. I'm not sure it does, it does actually constrain time in that way for most people who are not involved in politics, actually.

Well, I think you're right. I think people, it's true that people don't buy into the narrative for the most part, according to which the ecological emergency has to become the top priority. If you look at research into the general public opinion, people do take it really seriously, but they're also they're more bothered about more immediate issues like cost of living issues etc

I mean my own view on that it is a real it is an issue and it is a problem I sort of think I've sort of come to the view that you really can't popularise like the ecological crisis

as an immediate issue that you're only going to be able to persuade people to take it seriously as it needs to be taken once they feel that certain other basic needs are being met

and I think probably realistically only once a broad set of social democratic demands are being met for things like public ownership and redistribution and full employment. I think that's the only historic circumstances under which we're going to see people really accepting it. Unless we're looking at a situation where there really are floods in London on a kind of monthly basis, at which point people are just going to look to wholly authoritarian solutions, I'm afraid, probably. So, I mean, that's part of the thinking behind the whole idea of the Green New Deal, there's the demand around which socialists, social democrats and ecologists should all converge.

But I think that's a useful way of kind of framing that strategy for people who were already committed to a certain kinds of eco-socialism. But I think broadly, you've really got to accept that I think it doesn't work as a framing, as a kind of popular framing, actually. And I think it really only mobilises people who are already committed. so I think that's right I think what you're saying is is right and I think it is really limited in that way partly because I do I do think people widely recognize how serious this situation is and it's making people it is making people very pessimistic about the future

but I think that you know the the kind of average view into far as there is such a thing like a British voter is well if they can't even sort out the water supply then how they're not going to do anything, then they're not going to actually implement a transition to a post-carbon economy. Of course, they're not going to be able to. If they can't make the NHS work, if they can't, like, get us back to sort of where we were in, like, in 1960s, like, in terms of people feeling like, we actually have a functioning state, then they're not going to be able to undertake a project of transition, which would be the biggest social project ever undertaken by a government, like in the history of the modern state. So I think it's something that people,

involved in green politics do you have to think about, I think, you know, right now at the time of recording, I guess by the time this goes out, we'll know whether Zach Polanski has succeeded in his attempt to become lead of the English and Welsh Green Party on the basis of his, you know, populist, social democratic, socialist platform. So I suppose it's too late to make any intervention on that. But I think it's definitely interesting. That's a debate going on within, like, the Green Party between people who basically take that view, then unless the Green Party is like obviously standing up for a very, a kind of immediately appealing social democratic program to people, then it just won't be able to win ground for a significant project of transition.

Yeah, I mean, we haven't thought, we haven't actually talked about hope here, and maybe that's something that we do want to talk about or not, but I was just thinking, if we're trying to bring this kind of discussion back to. to thinking about the future and how people imagine the future, then maybe it's the logical thing for people to kind of retreat as a form of defence mechanism if they don't believe that this kind of change, and I use the word change cautiously here because I think it's been so overused, but like for us to be able to affect change on something like climate change,

and if they can't deal, like you said, Jeremy, with the NHS or like water pollution or whatever, it makes sense for people to retreat and be like, well, I'm going to think about the future in terms of like my immediate family and maybe my children, if that. And then, you know, fuck it because I can't think about a horizon which involves a collectivity. And that, I suppose, also will change people's understanding and prioritisation of what the collective is. So there's an interesting interaction there with like the potential for socialist politics in the first place, I think. So I think questions of the future is actually really important here. I totally agree that like the way forward for green politics,

is to concentrate on a cost-of-living crisis, but also to point out that increasingly, like climate change is driving increases in things such as food costs, etc., certainly driving things such as increases in the cost of energy, et cetera. But those things are tied up to other dynamics involving capitalism and, you know, rentier, asset sweating business models that dominate an economy such as the UK.

I think, though, in terms of a sense of the future, I think what might be the dominant sort of, attitude to what's going on is that we're in a process of decline. It's like, especially in a country such as a UK, its decline is perhaps the key way in which people sort of understand the present, but of course, declining is a projection into the future, which is the opposite of the one that we would need for a sort of left progressive politics, basically. But I also think that, Mike, it's important to understand how contradictory,

the images of the future that we operate with are, me and my, and Bertie Russ And Russell and Kai Herr recently wrote an article for tribute, which would be coming out in the next issue, and the issue deals with this conception of decline. One of the arguments you put in there is that, like, one of the feelings or the sensations of living in contemporary Britain, especially when around politics such as climate change, is just a sense of unreality. We're caught between these contradictory futures. There's this huge weight of scientific knowledge around climate change, right, which makes huge predictions about what the future is going to look like and what we have to do. in the future in order to ameliorate the worst of that, right? And I think I sort of disagree with you, Nadia, that there isn't a sense of other people don't experience climate change

because there is an increasing sense that the climate is getting more chaotic, basically. You know, just sort of lived experience of that. On one hand, there's this weight of scientific knowledge which says this is what the future is going to be like. But on the other hand, if you look at how the political elite or the economic system works at functions, they function as though they don't believe in that, even though they may say they do believe that scientific knowledge.

That's not the way they function. They function in this insouciant way. So one way in which you can get at that is this idea that the valuation of fossil fuel companies are based on the idea that we're going to dig up all of the proven fossil fuel reserves that are in the earth that we've found and we can access.

We're going to dig all of that up and we're going to burn it. And so estimates of that, that would produce 4,77 gigatens of CO2 and put it into the atmosphere. And that on its own would lead to 4.3 degrees in increasing global average temperatures. A recent report out from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, right, they made this analysis that said

just three degrees of global warming would cause 4 billion deaths and wipe out more than 50% of world GDP by 2070. Those are almost unfathomable numbers like 4 billion deaths. Do you know what I mean? That's something, that's a future in which a cooking. financial system, it just doesn't seem viable that their coherent financial system could survive that sort of change. But yet, you know, so if that happens, if the future of which those fossil fuel companies are valued occurs, then nobody's going to be able to get the benefit of that

through a coherent financial system. But on the other hand, if that fossil fuel reserves are not burnt, they're kept in the ground and not burnt, then those companies are massively overvalued to huge degrees, There's such huge degrees that if stock markets and around the world corrected to get the true value of those fast fuel companies, the financial system would collapse again. Do you know what I mean? It's these two contradictory futures in which the future that we, the present that we exist in, which is based around all these economic structures and the logic with them that they run to, it just produced this sense of like we're basically caught between these like impossible contradictory. futures. Most people might not make that analysis and do that, but there is a sense of unreality between the scientific conception of the future, which most political leaders and until recently most financial actors say they believed it, and then their actions, their actions

say we don't believe in it. What's one of the contradictions about the future? I think we're caught him. They don't believe in it or they don't think it's their responsibility. Well, I mean, that's the other thing, right? There's this guy, Stuart Kirk, who was, I can't remember what he wasn't. He was HSBC sort of like very high up in HSBC anyway and he made this talk a couple of years ago, which he said, like, I don't worry about climate risk because I make my financial assessments based on seven years cycles. Anything that happens outside that seven years is irrelevant, basically. So I don't care about climate change because it's not going to be that bad in seven years time. That's somebody else's responsibility. Do you know what I mean? He actually got the

sack after making that speech. But like, actually, if you look at the actions of HSBC, very, very, They also agree with him, or they, you know, he was just a bit too honest. Yeah, okay, but how is it coherent for some people? How is the experience of climate change immediate for people in Britain today? I mean, through increasingly chaotic weather, basically. It's just a bit hot, isn't it? It's very hot, isn't it? Yes. You want some floods? Absolutely. The people who are experiencing flooding, absolutely. People who are growing things,

people who grow stuff know that there is a change. People who like pay attention to nature. which, you know, might be casually a lot of people. But, like, I would argue that, you know, like, this is not Bangladesh and at least down in the South, like, unless you're, I don't see that people are experiencing, it doesn't feel like the apocalypse is coming, to be honest. I don't think it does. The apocalypse is a bad way to conceptualize it, basically, because climate change does not affect you as one big disaster.

It's like a pulsing, a thing that comes and goes. accelerates as it bears so, you know, a series of like catastrophes and crises which are like and even the experienced, you know, you experience them more if you've got less money and less ability to escape or insure against them, you know. So in parts of the world, in parts of America, it is impossible to get insurance because of climate change. All of a sudden, you know, the way that they operate is completely changed. For the rest of us, it's stuff like, oh, well, everything costs a lot more these days, doesn't it? There's a variety of reasons for that, but one of them is the increasing impacts of climate change.

And then we, like, you know, I think everybody does experience that sense that, like, the weather has become a more chaotic. That doesn't mean you necessarily associate that with climate change. Big proportion of the US population. I've got conspiracy theories, but the Democrats having weather control mechanisms, you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. I mean, everything you're saying is correct. But if I'm trying to think about this within the prism of the future, Like, does my experience of the fact that it's a bit hot in London affect how I understand that reality of climate change or things being a bit more expensive, affect how I understand the future and the horizon because of those things?

I don't think it does for most people. I think there has to be like a cascade, more of a cascade of different experiences for it to be viewed within the prism of the climate crisis or disaster. It's actually easier to conceptualize it as like capitalism or the system in terms of the things that, you know, like Jeremy was pointing out, like the material realities that are affecting people are so stark at the moment that, you know, cost of living and like basically and the dissolution, sorry, the destruction of institutions is something that I think is more like that feels more catastrophic than climate change for most people in the UK is my argument. I might be wrong, but that's what I observe. When we held our Consonist Raising Workshop on the theme of the future, the first piece of music I played in our little musical bit was a bit from the album Cariobin by the spontaneous music ensemble, who were a British free improvisation group of the late 60s. And to me, this is really interesting,

because spontaneous music example are one of the sort of purest free improvisation groups ever and had this very utopian idea that they were playing a sort of music, that prefigured a completely free and democratic future. Whereas a lot of free improvisation is very deliberately sort of a cacophonous and very deliberately atonal. SMEs music is sometimes, but it's often quite delicate and quite pretty almost, and quite utopian in its aesthetic. So let's hear a bit of that.

It was a really great experience, actually, listening to that track at the circle dance. It was a really great experience, actually, listening to that track at the circle dance. It was in the nightclub. I don't know how many people there. There's probably like 100 people, all sat in the floor, stood up, etc. And then we just played this sort of like free jazz. And it was just a really interesting experience, listening to it together without dancing. People weren't dancing,

but then they did start to move in time. I thought it was an excellenter. A really, really interesting experience. One talking about the future we should play is Our Friends Electric by Tubeway Army. So basically Tubeway Army is Gary Newman. It's from 1979. it's a great song

where the lyrics are sort of about alienation, etc. I think Gary Newman is like autistic and I later admitted that and it's sort of drawn from that, but it's also drawn from, you know, J.G. Ballard's sort of idea of alienation and he's alienated

in the future when we have these electronic friends who come around. I think the actual lyrics of the song are like an electronic friend who's coming around as a prostitute basically. I think it's predicting that sort of future. That Jonathan White book that you were talking about here,

it's basically a history of the idea of the future. That's how it mainly frames itself. I mean, you could have published this book a few decades ago and just say it was a history of modernity, the idea of the modern, and you had mostly the same set of references, actually, to a large extent. And the idea of the future is kind of tied up with the idea of the modern and the idea that you're living in it you're living in a moment in history

which is distinctively different from the past and you're on some kind of trajectory of change which means that there's going to be something else coming which is different from the present in the same way that the present is different from the past the usual account within European and American history of ideas basically is to see all that as really starting in the 18th century I mean it's a content I mean that is that is that is a contentious account, you know, Renaissance scholars will protest that people are already talking about that way in the Renaissance in Italy and 17th century specialists will point out that actually maybe the big change is the scientific revolution, which happens like in England

in the early 17th century, but it's a fairly standard account that it's in the 18th century that people really start to think you can make society anew with the Enlightenment and the American revolution and the French Revolution and this idea of, and it's also the experience of the Industrial Revolution and global colonialism, like wreaking these incredible changes in people's lives produces this idea that there's a thing called the future that we might now look forward to or be afraid of. So one way to think about that though is, is to think about in terms of like politics and political movements. So one of the ways in which we can understand like pre-modern political movements or uprisings even or rebellions or something like that

and then the modern ones and movements for the modern era is that like pre-modern revolts were sort of more reactive and basically you know there was like there's a wrong that has been done and we want to go back to time before it was a wrong sometimes that can be a historical wrong you know the the whole idea of the norman yoke basically and that we need to get rid of the aristocracy in the UK because of the invasion, 1066, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it's like a return to something, basically. Perhaps you have like cyclical conceptions of time or a conception of time as decline, actually, like as the fall, you know, the fall from grace or whatever.

Once it was great, now it's shit sort of idea. So one of the other resources you can go to for that is the German theorist Reinhart-Coseleck, who when we did the workshop, as Jeremy pointed out, was a member of the National Socialist Party, but still, let's override that small concern. He's like a big German theorist of conceptions of history, basically. He's got these concepts, the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. And so his argument is something like, you know, during the Middle Ages, doing the pre-modern period, you know, change happens so slowly that there isn't a gap between your experiences and what you expect to happen in the future.

your experience of your life, perhaps even your parents' life, was a good kind of to what the future would look like, basics. And so that's one way of thinking about the idea that the future is something which is different and then something which is malleable, which we could act to shape, you know, it's less prevalent during that time. And it's only when the pace of change that starts to accelerate, you know, and you have the industrial revolution, etc. Then you have political revolutions.

That there's a gap opens up between, you know, the space of experience, and a horizon of expectations and your horizon about what the future might look like sort of lengthens and separates from your own personal experiences, basically. And there's something there about the invention of utopian fiction and that sort of idea in which people invent futures which are different to the present. Quite often, there's a set really, really far in the future, you know, so far that it doesn't imply actually in the present. That's all really important.

it's all really useful. I would also point out to anyone listening that the classic reference point, I think, on these debates within British left thoughts is still E.P. Thompson, the making of the English working class. Because it's E.P. Thompson, the great British socialist historian, in his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class, he points out that there's this big shift in the late 18th century

where people who are making radical claims for equal rights, for democratic rights, even for socially economic rights, stop doing that thing of saying we should have these rights because there's some point in the past when our ancestors had them and they were illegitimately taken from us and start saying, well, actually it doesn't really matter. You know, we can just figure out for ourselves what kind of rights we should have and build a society on that basis.

But the key figure he associates with that change in the English-speaking world is Thomas Payne, the great sort of political activist and theorist, active in Britain and the States and France in the late 18th century. Also trade unionist, actually. I was niggled by the fact that Jonathan Whitebook does not mention E.P. Thompson, I have to say. It's a classic claim, isn't it? But it's also, I know it's something that different historians like, well, want to argue over, and they'll say that, well, you know, utopian narratives, for example, before the 18th.

century often appeal to some imagined past, but they'll, they'll suggest people didn't really think that that stuff actually happened in the past, that it's actually a way of positing the idea that things could be different from how they are now. But still, I think it is really, it is really interesting to think about that the whole idea of a sort of a future, a something to think about, something to try to imagine, really emerges around that time. And that Jonathan White book does, it does do a really good job, I think, of framing that. And, explaining especially to a sort of general readership how that idea has a future because it's true

because it is true that you just don't really get people sort of imagining a future much in any meaningful terms like before the 18th century and then for the past 300 years people are sort of obsessed with it so it is that is really interesting but then the question then is what what is the political function of that what is the political function of thinking about the future, thinking about a future that's different from the past,

and having sort of visions of the future. Because obviously, this is one of the great contentious issues in left thought and radical thought from the mid-19th century, right up to the present. And I would say, just in my lifetime, actually, I think there's that you can really see a sort of back-and-forth pendulum. At one moment, people will say, like, we don't need any sort of blueprints for the future. We need to struggle, we need to have values, we need to have things that we're against, and we need to have immediate objectives we want to achieve. But if you have any sort of blueprint for the future, then you just end up sort of constraining yourself too much. And in fact, people come to associate

the idea of having blueprints for the future with kind of totalitarian or overly dogmatic politics. And everybody starts quoting that line from Marx, where Marx himself says he's not interested in writing recipes for the cookshops of the future, which we've referred to before. And then people do that for a few years. And then people start popping up and saying, well, you know, if we don't have, if we don't have any vision of the future, what are we, how are we even going to persuade people, that we have any idea at all, how we're going to change things. And then you get, for example, Nick Surnichick and Alex Williams' book, inventing the future, becoming a massive bestseller in 2016 or when it came out, which is basically

say, yes, we should, we should have a set of, a set of ways of imagining a possible. future and it should be one in which automated technologies reduce the workloads for everybody and we all have much better lives as a result of that. So that's kind of interesting for me to think about because you can sort of, you can see, I can always see both arguments. You can see the argument for saying, well, yeah, we just have to sort of be open to the possibilities of the future and not have a kind of set idea about what we want it to look like. And you can also have a, I can also see the value of saying, no, we know exactly what we want the future to look like. We want a 30-hour working week and nationalised public services. Well, I think what helps with that a little bit is kind

of grounding yourself in materialism and kind of checking in with yourself that you've not got some kind of like ultra post-Marxist position where it's like the possibility of multitudes, of like anything could happen in the future. Because the other thing that you didn't mention, Jeremy, that we saw happened, you know, with the Arab Spring is that when you don't have a program, then somebody else will fill that vacuum. And that's part of like the practical problem of like not having that kind of vision or program for the future. Like sure, it doesn't have to be something where you're wedded to the entire manifesto if the, if the conditions on the ground change. But I do think, I also think like there has to be some kind of like vision of how

things could work in a sense. And I was interested listening to you, Jeremy, because I think as socialists, I feel like even when we're talking about the future, we tend to fall into, and I think probably for a very good reason, like a wider sense of temporality where we're thinking, right, okay, if we are going to think about the future, if we are going to envisage the future,

then we actually have to understand history and we have to kind of like pull back in a way to go forward. And that seems to be something, you know, like the workshop that we did at the world transformed, you know, a few years ago, many years ago now, of like history will sustain us, this idea of like the importance of understanding our

own history to be able to understand the present and kind of pull forward into the future. But maybe one of the ways of solving this is to introduce different kind of frameworks of how we understand the future. And I was looking at like different female theorists, contemporary theorists, other than, you know, some of the people that you guys have already mentioned. And I was looking at, I won't be able to pronounce her name properly, like Rael Yagi, I think, or Yagi, who is a Swiss philosopher. And she has this really interesting concept. that kind of pulled at me, this idea of like forms of life, of thinking about capitalism, obviously, as we would agree,

not as, you know, just an economic system, but like trying to problematize the way that we live, work, and kind of relate and organize society, and try and make the argument and find frames of which to, you know, create those spaces where it's understood as, you know, historically contingent and always open to change. And part of her thing is this whole, you know, which is popular anyway in a lot of activist circles,

this idea of reclaiming the capacity to experiment with your alternative ways of doing things now that kind of start to build the collective imagination for the future. And of course, she does a lot of stuff as well on, you know, as Keir was mentioning in the beginning, like capitalism, like the essential part of capitalism as producing these systemic crises to obstruct, you know, the future or like future possibilities, etc. But also one thing that I'm trying to figure out, and maybe I will figure this out by the end of the episode, is why I hate world building so much.

So in a sense, I'm kind of contradicting myself because I'm not interested in world building, even though that I'm interested in a manifesto and I'm interested in a vision, I don't think world building as an exercise, a gamified exercise, like I'm quite repulsed by it. And I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it seems to be an arena of play that I think is non-productive, even though I'm very kind of pro play, but I'm, you know, I don't like sci-fi and I don't like reading. I don't like fiction that involves world building, etc. And yet, on the other hand, like politically, I'm kind of wedded to the fact that this is really important. So that's something that I'm grappling with. And maybe I'll come to an understanding of why by the end of this.

this episode. Well, let's part that a moment. There are a series of words that we could utter, which might trigger me and Jeremy to talk about tabletop role-playing games, and we must close that off immediately, or else we'll lose the topic. To come back to this, to where you're going before that, Nadia, and also to come back to what Jeremy was saying about this thing about, you know, is there some sort of happy medium between, you know,

producing the recipes for cookshops of the future, you know, and then just saying, well, the future will look after itself, basically. And there are elements of left theory, communization theory, for instance, in which, you know, the idea that there's a period of transition or that, you know, we have to have to move from one period to another. There's a whole series of ways in which you can think about things, the future in a slightly more open way.

One very popular way, it comes out of Rockstrom et al, from the Copenhagen, I think Copenhagen, from the Resilience Centre. I think it's in Copenhagen. So these are like, you know, basically Earth System scientists. And they make this analysis of like the nine Earth system processes upon which continued human and civilization depends. And they use that to map what they say is a safe operating space for humanity. So it's something like that.

You can have any form of social, economic and technical organization you want as long as it stays within this space. So as long as it doesn't produce so much CO2 that temperatures go above this level, or it doesn't produce so much pollution that this has interfered, there's so much nitrogen interferes with the nitrogen cycle, these sorts of things. So that's quite an open future. And then people like Kate Roweth, who wrote a book called Donut Economics, says, well, you could add something to that. You could add, like, the minimum requirements for people to live a dignified life.

And so you can have any form of the future, any form of technical and social and political organization you want, as long as it fits within that donut, as long as it gives people the basis for a dignified life, you know, and it doesn't exceed these sort of like Earth system, natural processes upon which we develop. You can do that. And from that, I think, that one of the things you can do, and one of the things we're doing that in the Radical Abundance book, published the 20th of September,

available for pre-order now from Pluto books. One of the things that we're doing in Radical Abundance is say that, like, you could use that sort of idea to sort of backcast, right? Or we know we have to get here within these sorts of boundaries. so we can back past, you can backcast, say, well, we need, yeah, okay, so we need to stop this sort of activity, etc. And then you can sort of forecast from the future, from the potentials of the future, basically, a sort of, almost like a conjuncture analysis saying, the current conjuncture says that these are the opportunities, these are the sort of strategic wages you

can make. There's probably a gap in your analysis of the future from like backcasting and forecasting, but then what you can then do is build institutions that seem to move us in a direction that that forecasting and backcasting implies, basically. All of that is a big way to say that left politics, unlike other forms of politics, I think, it needs to operate on like several timescales at the same time. You have to act within the possibilities of the present, but you cannot, if you focus too short on, if the future is a very narrow future, then a level of change just isn't very big. Do you know what I mean? And if you if you concentrate just on the far future, then where's the agency? Now, how are you going to get there? There's no possibility

of transition. It's just a nice picture, nice image. And I think there is a politics to be built of that, a sort of politics of like of transition, if you want, but a transition which isn't like a movement from here to like a predetermined place, but a movement from here to a place in which you can have any form of social and economic and technical organization you want within these sort of boundaries. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that obviously the problem is that most of our politics is actually caught between two very specific temporalities, is the temporality of electoral cycles, and it's the temporality of capitalism. As I think Nadia was alluding to earlier, the temporality of capitalism itself, arguably, underwent a pretty

significant shift, like in the second half of the 20th century, the complete abandonment of any kind of idea of capitalist management being about the sort of long-term cultivation of institutions or social relationships. So the idea that you really shouldn't care at all, at all, about the welfare of your workers or the communities they're embedded in or anything like that, that you shouldn't even really care, actually, about the actual institutional or organizational health of the company, but beyond a very short horizon, that the only thing you should care about is the share value at any one moment in time that you should do anything necessary to increase the share price within a time space sometimes a minute never mind months hours

etc and all that so and all that poses a real problem for us I mean I think we know I mean think no one listening to this is probably unaware that that we need institutions that can resist actively resist the capitalist demand that absolutely every policy decision by government, every management decision by corporations be subject to the iron law of the city, the share price and the bond markets. I think everybody knows that,

but it's worth really thinking about, thinking about what's at stake there, which is partly why, you know, the kind of democratic institutions that Jonathan White wants in his book, we would say are totally unattainable without building up the organized power of working people, basically, against those capitalist institutions.

But it's also we're thinking about the, I think, the problem of electoral cycles, I would say, in politics. I think it's always a really tense issue because, I mean, right now, we're recording in July 2025 and people are understandably very worried about the fact that right now it looks highly probable that we're going to get a far right. a true far-right government, a kind of formally, officially far-right government for the first time in British history

at the next election, which has to happen by sometime in 2029, and people are really exercised about that. Which we called, by the way, as soon as Labour got into power and we recorded, we had this discussion and we said it looks very likely. If they don't enact, to your point that you were just making, if they don't enact policies that are going to alleviate people's pain,

now, even for the optics, we are getting a far right government. We said it, you know, we said it some time ago. There's a reason why you can make that you shouldn't have the next election as your horizon, especially from a kind of broader, historically left perspective. And that has really debilitating effects on organisation and strategy. I mean, I'm not saying this is my, I mean, I am like most people listening probably, going to be doing whatever I can to forestall Nigel Farah's led government in some sort of coalition with the Tories

happening in 2029, but you know, I think you could, for example, make a really reasonable argument right now that that ship's already sailed. It's too late, basically. You know, a new left party should have been launched three years ago if you wanted that to have a significant impact on

the 20-29 election, that that ship has sailed, that we're going to get a Farage government. The Farage government is probably going to be really unstable and quite likely collapsed by 2013 and that's probably now the eventuality we should be building towards and planning for. So I'm not saying I'm making that argument because I don't think I can really bring myself to be that disciplined and or even complacent about the idea of Farage getting elected.

But I think if you look back to the history of the British left in my lifetime, I mean, it's something I've wrote about a bit in the early stages of the Corbyn leadership. I think if you look at the political tradition that Jeremy Corbyn came, from the Benite traditions have named after Tony Ben, the great British leftist parliamentarian. You know, the reason the Benites were completely unable to win over the majority of Labour Party members and the Labour movement and the public to their programme in the mid to late 80s, even though the programme in policy terms is relatively popular, I would say, was precisely because even then there was this sense of real emergency. There was this sense that we just have to win the next

election by any means necessary. You have to end the nightmare of factorism and that there are, you know, there are poor people on benefits. There are millions of unemployed people whose quality of life completely depends on us, you know, meeting that emergency. We have to try to win the next election. And of course, you know, through the 80s and right up until 1997, Labor didn't win the election. However far it moved to the right in its program, however centuist it became, didn't do that. I mean, there always was an alternative strategy, which is the strategy of the progressive alliance. You know, people like people are arguing for from like 1988 because of the emergency.

And maybe that should have been followed. But the Benites just had this view that, well, it was wrong for Labour to adopt this centrist strategy to try to win the next election. But they never had an answer to the question. Well, okay, all right, are you actually saying, like in the Britain of 1988, like if Labor adopts a radical socialist programme right now, given all the forces against it, you think it's then going to win the next election? Or are you saying, actually, we've got to stop worrying about the next election?

We've got to accept that the scale of the political defeats that we suffered in the 80s is such that it's going to take like at least 10 years to rebuild a socialist and neighbour movement and we should be building towards some point in like the late 90s where we could get a socialist government elected. And I'd say like in retrospect, you can say clearly that's what Ben should have been saying, that Ben should have been saying from 1983, probably from 1970s, certainly from the moment of the minor strike, that's it, we're fucked. we've got to stop even trying to win the next election for the next 10 years, instead build a mass movement that can eventually popularise a socialist program. And then in the late 90s, we might well have got a left-wing government instead of just the Blair government. So that's what, but even then, even, you know, the Benet, the Benites, like the radical left, even like the Trotskyist at that time, no one was saying that. No one was saying that.

They were just saying, we should adopt a socialist program because it's the right thing to do. And whenever faced with the question, well, doesn't that mean we're going to lose the next election? They just, they would just evade it. They didn't have an answer. And I think for me, I'm going on about all that, because I think it is symptomatic of the fact that, you know, even people who really should know better, you know, like me or like most of us, frankly, you know, we find it very difficult to kind of free ourselves from the sense of impending emergency, which the electoral crisis, the electoral cycle. I mean, always sort of imposes on us. And I'm not sure what we do about that. I mean, I sort of think that really in an ideal world,

we would have some completely different kinds of organisation that would be different from trade unions and different from political parties, whether like far left parties or like mainstream electoral parties, that would be trying to do that work of kind of long-term or medium-term, like strategy and culture building and movement building. I'm just raising plus canteens. Yeah, that's what's happening.

But I think that is, you know, how we get out of that logic of urgency. And while also acknowledging that it is urgent, like it is true, it's true that, like, people will die if Farad gets elected, who won't die even if, like, Starma gets reelected. And yet if Starma gets reelected, like, next time, it's probably the case that what follows on from that is, like, some even worse kind of fascism. So it's really hard to know, like, how to orient oneself to these different timescales. And I think it's partly because it is a problem we don't have the institution, which can really do that. And I think we need them.

That's part of what that Jonathan White book, he sort of, he makes this argument that we need a shared conception of the future, not shared across the whole of society, but like political parties were invented, basically by the left, you know, in the terms of the mass party, etc. based around the idea that we had a shared conception of the future and that the party would be the mechanism by which that shared conception of the future we would act to bring that about and that faith in that shared future would allow us to suffer the defeats and not lose hope or not get not lose direction or something like that I mean that's not really been the history of political parties and one of the things that Jonathan White doesn't deal with is the fact that well why is the age of the mass party gone you know and if you want it back well, what are you going to do to bring it about? It seems to be outside the scope of his thinking. You know, I actually think we need to, you know, start thinking about economic coordination, you know, on non-market levels, on not based on markets, basically,

form an economic logic upon which we start to start to instantiate in institutions that deal with, like, you know, social reproduction, even production, etc., etc. But before that, or at the same time as that, we need some way of getting a much more coherent vision of a shared future. Do you know what I mean? And then we need to build organisations which operate on the logic of like we're going to get there, we're going to move there, that's where we're going to go.

And that is a logic which has to stretch beyond electoral cycles. You know, it's a logic which is very hard to do in government where, you know, you get into government, you know, immediately you're faced with this prospect of you need to make capitalism function. And to some degree, that's just true. You know what I mean? We need a process of transition where we move, where we subordinate the parts of the economy that's run under the logic of capitalism and the market.

We need to subordinate those parts of the economy to the parts of the economy that run under a different logic, right, that we're going to build. But the point is, you know, we rely on, we're reliant for our everyday existence on all of these institutions, these, you know, our pension funds, etc. all running under an illusionary conception of the future, as we said earlier, about these stranded assets or potentially stranded assets of fossil fuel companies, etc., which makes the logic of which all of our institutions

run on basically false or illusory. But we need to address the fact that, you know, there needs to be a process of transition in which we keep continuing to live and exist and be able to produce medicines and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's the real, real difficult. That's the real problem, the problem of transition of our time, basically. We have to play something by the US band Man or Astraman, question mark.

They play for the 1990s, I think they start the early 1990s. They're a band with a schick. I always like a band with a schick. And their schick is that they are aliens and who have been sent to Earth to play surf rock for some reason. That's not explained. They've got this stick that they're these aliens. They're really into sort of science fiction, but it's like the conception of the future

that you get from like 1950s and 1960s films, basically. That sort of space age sort of feel. I saw them a couple of times live and they're great. They sort of come on in like, you know, astronaut gear, and they play 50s and 60s, sci-fi films. Apparently, they used to have one of those Tesla coils that they put on stage, which sends a huge sort of electrical arcs everywhere. Sounds very dangerous.

I think we'd call it atom punk these days. That's sort of like 1960s version of what the future would look like. We could play maximum radiation level from their 1996 EP Deluxe Men in Space. One of the other ways in which we could think about the future as well is not just how near and far we're thinking in terms of the future, but also how open and malleable is the future versus how closed down and predetermined is the future. that one of the ways we can think about that is sort of far right far right politics is sort of in some ways far right politics is sort of evacuating the present by making a claim on the deep past and the and the far future

and the deep past with that I'm thinking of you know oh we can't change the future because there are genetic causes for current inequalities so like the return of racism quotation marks around it scientific racism basically at odds with contemporary scientific genetics, but don't seem to stop them, et cetera. Or even just evo-psych, you know what I mean? Even evolutionary psychology, which the present is determined by the psychology

that we developed when we were running around the African savannah or something like that. That's a way in which we can sort of close off possible futures, basically. But the other way the writers has sort of evacuated the present to some degree. Is that evacuated the current crises of the present, I'm linking this to things such as the need to change society to deal with climate change and other ecological catastrophes.

The other way in which has done that is to focus the politics on the far future. So one way in which, or one trend that starts to do this is like what's called long-termism, which is closely linked to something called effective altruism. So effective altruism is that you should do the most you can to help the most amount of people, basically. whether they're currently alive or living in the future. Well, that's the important thing. You might think, well, that's a good thing. Yeah, let's try to help the maximum amount of people.

But, like, in this thinking, it's like you make an imaginary future in which there are trillions of people in the future and far future existing in computer simulations. And the most important thing to do, their interests outweigh actually existing people in the present, these imaginary people in the future. So the most important thing to do is not to deal with hunger, inequality, climate change, etc. All of the things that we know we need to deal with. Not to deal with those, but it is to enable oligarchs, such as Elon Musk, to create the conditions upon which, in the future,

these sort of artificial intelligences in which we will exist can come about, basically. It's obviously there's two things going on there. One is, if you want funding, go and suck some oligarch cock. Make your theories so amenable to the line up to the interests of people with wealth, basically. that's, you know, then the sort of long-term is an effect of altruist is a lot of good. That long-termist ideology, it's not dependent upon thinking you're going to create all these AI people. There's a simpler version of it, but they just say, the most social problems can be solved in the future by giving the cleverest people the most resources. And we, the tech class, are the cleverest people. So the more we can accumulate the most possible resources, the more problems we'll be able to solve in the future.

It's not much of a variation on the John Wesley, founder of Methodism, saying that Thatcher used to like to quote, earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can. And the idea is these effective altruists tell themselves that they're basically accumulating vast fortunes for the sake of some future point at which they're going to become these like mega philanthropists and solve all these problems that can't even currently be solved by current technology, like climate change and disease and human mortality and stuff. You don't have to have the positive artificial people. You can just claim, you can just believe that you and your class fraction

will obviously solve all social problems eventually as long as you get to accumulate all the capital. Yeah, but at your discretion, which is the point at what all of this obscure, to I think most people who don't necessarily have a political analysis. They think that at their discretion means the best possible outcomes, because as coders, they're the people who know how to solve all social problems, obviously. I don't think any of them code, actually. Sure, but my point is that this cycles back to democracy, whereas what these people hate the most is, like, rights and regulations,

and what they love is kind of like philanthropic discretion. like it's like I will accumulate all of this wealth and then when I feel like I want to bestow it upon the people who I decide are in need then I will do so that's definitely true I mean of course you're right

that's not how they can they conceptualize themselves more like sort of Plato's philosopher kings they think they are the only people who possibly could be like mean be entrusted with all this knowledge and power and to be able to deploy it for the benefit of

humanity because everyone else is too dumb. No, you're right. It's much more sinister. Yeah. Yeah, it's much more sinister. But it's partly because they are so stupid that they think that, you know, they think being really good at building, you know, tech startups and juicing the stock price with crypto scams means you are one of the cleverest people in the world. I mean, the other version of this is Elon Musk's stuff about going to Mars, etc. That we need to become multi-planetary civilization in case the Earth is destroyed. I mean, I would say the sort of, the

effective altruist and effective accelerationist and transhumanists, they're the kind of leading edge, the kind of cutting edge of this ideology. They're the real kind of leading edge. I think if you look at what the kind of the kind of second, third tier kind of billionaires and kind of multimillionaires,

what they actually believe. What they actually believe, believe is everything we say on this show, everyone on the left says, is true. That ultimately humanity is going to be faced with a choice between, you know, expropriating them, taking away all their wealth and power, or, you know, or inducing cataclysmic climate change with wipes out a large chunk of the Earth's population. And their, and their preference is option B. And that's what they're

getting ready for. So, they do have that vision of the future. And it is based, it, it is actually based on the scientific reality, actually. I mean, this is interesting because we sort of started off the show, and we started off preparing our notes with this idea that there's this mismatch. There's a scientific consensus as to what's going to happen if certain courses of action are or are not taken. And there's a political reality, according to which politicians behave as if that isn't true or as if they don't know it's true. But I don't even think that's actually accurate. I think Kier Starman knows perfectly well, this is what's coming. And he also, he makes a rational judgment that him and his family are probably going to be

better off-siding with the oligarchs. They'll be in the billion of people who's still survive, the cataclysm. So he's going to do it. I'm not saying I think this consciously goes on in his mind. I'm not saying that is actually that conscious rational, ideational process is what goes on in Kirstama's conscious mind. But I think on some level, I think I do think, I think that is what's driving him. And he's the entire kind of political class of which he is a member. So I think it's probably not true that they don't know that all this is happening. I think they've got no intention of trying to do anything about it because they do know that were they to try that if if it comes down to a massive global class struggle,

if it comes down to a confrontation between the representatives of the majority of people on planet earth and who want to survive and the minority who've got all this wealth and power and don't really care if those other people survive, then it's the people leading the political projects to kind of challenge the wealth and power of the people, you know, who've got it at the moment, who are very likely to be vulnerable. You know, they're going to be in real. It's going to be really tough job. It's going to be a very tough job to be like a prime minister trying to do like a socialist program in a world in which people like Elon Musk are willing to see, you know, the majority of the Earth's population die rather than give up any of their power. That's going to be a tough job. Loads of those people that are going to find themselves, you know, thrown in jail by reactionary government. Loads of those people that are probably going to find themselves, you know, their lives and their family's lives, you know, really made difficult. by media, which are all owned by their enemies. And so they don't want that, you know.

So I think they do have a, I think they do understand all that. And they understand that the potential risks and cost to them of sticking their necks out, of like being on the front line of some class struggle in order to save the future for the majority of humanity. They say no thank you to that, basically. The other way in which that sort of calculation is done in something like neoclassical economics or like the mainstream of economics is to say that, in the future we will have so much better technology that in fact we should you know it doesn't

matter if we don't deal with climate change now because they'll be able to deal with it we'll be much better able to deal with those costs in the future basically there's like a future offsetting sort of logic and in fact that's in the IPCC calculations at the moment is that like so there's that book overshoot by Andreas Marlman and Parton somebody else I haven't read but I have listened to a few interviews with them, which is this idea that the idea that we will offshoot our targets, our climate change temperature targets, but then we'll be able to use technologies that take carbon out of the atmosphere to pull ourselves back down. That's built into even IPCC calculations, you know, and that's the sort of the thing

that allows politicians to not face up to the consequences of their action. It's not a coherent argument, I don't think, though, because basically, you know, Once ice caps melt, they don't come back. And so the effects of those ice caps not being there is a massive feedback loop which you cannot get out of. It's an obvious exercise in special pleading driven by the ideological refusal to countenance any political program, which would shift classwork, which would alter existing classwork. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. That's my friends is the nature and function of ideology. You should have done that in a Zijek voice. on an episode about the future we have to play some music that is from the present and that feels like it's trying to sound futuristic I think and succeeding I think I think my favorite track of this year possibly that fulfills those criteria is this track drums of death from the FCA Twigs album you sexier and this she you sex you were rather she did this track with

the Welsh producer I think call us drums of death really interesting really nice piece of sort of glitchy post R&B or post post hyperpop maybe we could call it

I'm a girl dropping up to the floor and the car body told shut your skin and your shirt and flesh

and feel home Feel hard Feel heavy What we're talking about What we're talking about this kind of What we're talking about here is still this kind of large Ideas about the future isn't it? We also wanted to think about

or how do people personally or individually think about futures? And also, to what extent are ways of thinking about the future bound up with really kind of intimate and personal ways of conceptualizing ourselves? I guess I'm just interested. Like, when you guys were younger, did you think, right, in five years' time, I want to achieve this? In 10 years' time, I want this. Or, like, in my future, this is what I want my future to look like.

Like, was that part of, like, your brain space? Not me, no. Although, when I was a kid, I used to read a magazine called 2000 AD, which was far in the future, and I thought, God, I'd be 30 in 2008. That's incredible. And look what the world's going to be like. Actually, the world in 2008 is pretty dystopian. But, no, I've never had any five-year plans, etc.,

of that sort of way of conceptualizing the world or your own future. What about you, Jeremy? me. When I was in my late teens, I did think about what am I going to do with my life. And I came to the conclusion of the people I saw on telly, the people who seemed to, both seem to not really, who seem to talk shit the least often, and the people who seemed to have a good time when they were old. I was kind of preoccupied the idea that one day I'll be old. And I don't want to, I don't want to choose a lifestyle. That means I'm only having a good time in my 20s. They were academics. So I did decide, yeah, I'll become an academic, and I'll try to become an academic.

And then the future happened. The kind of person who had a specific plan, like, I'll be a professor at this age, and I'll go to a more elite institution at this age, like I've always sort of detested that, to be honest, which is really something I got from sort of counterculture and sort of punk culture, this critique of sort of careerism. So I was always very, I was really, really resistant to to that kind of, that kind of thinking. So I don't know if that answers are quick. Is that a yes or a no?

I don't know. Yeah, yeah. No, I do think it's interesting because I don't feel like I know the answer, like what the statistics are on like, and whether people actually answer this question in a faithful or honest way or whether they answer it retrospectively, you know, in a different way or they imagine their past selves differently. But, you know, we're sold this idea in culture that, you know,

We ask children when they're young, like, what do you want to be when you grow up or sold this idea that, you know, that young boys think about, you know, their careers or even young girls, but that, you know, that a lot of young girls think about, like, wanting babies and wanting a family or whatever. And I can't relate to any of that at all. And I guess I'm interested in how these things interact with, like, the 21st century, because that's quite a 20th century story, I think. I mean, we still have this idea. in culture. But, you know, I do speak to people. I remember distinctly being in my early 30s and first meeting people who would say things like, you know, in five years time, I want to be here, or like, this is the kind of job, this is what I want to achieve. And it's not always, you know, career related. It might be, you know, art related or it might be, you know, about personal project. It might be stuff around kids. It might be stuff around like space or I want to move to a different place. And I was interested in that and like on how and like on how that kind

personal level interacts with, you know, those political discourses and how, you know, and which, you know, whether how, how, how, how, how, how, how, where people are of those discourses influencing them effectively. And I don't know the answer. And I guess that got me interested in this idea of building something. Because I often hear people talk about this. Again, I'm very alienated from this. And, like, part of what I spoke about on the growing podcast about, like, my interaction in the personal development world was like to try and learn some strategies which have been life-changing to me, to be able to do some kind of planning, to feel like I've got some kind of agency on my life after having quite a hard time psychologically. But I still

struggle with how people talk about families and wanting to like make a family and like build a family and like build a future. And you know, one one term that I absolutely hate, which I think is about the commodification, which is really about like the commodification of experience, is making memories. Whenever I hear making memories, it makes me want to throw up. And I, but I'm interested in all of that because I'm like, is that critique coming because of my psychological disposition? Is it coming from my like left wing politics or is it becoming from, you know, like, what, like, why do I have that alienation? Like, are some of these things, do they not have that, you know, Basically, why am I attributing such, like, a value judgment to them?

You're sort of talking about this idea of the good life, aren't you? Of, like, you know, this is what the good life looks like, et cetera. And you could definitely, like, if we went back, I went back and I said, you know, like, yeah, basically political parties, as in the mass party, sort of invented on the left as this, you know, because we have the shared conception of the future. And the idea was to build a shared conception of the future and then act towards it, etc. and other political tendencies then copied all of that those forms, et cetera,

with different conceptions of the future and different attitudes towards the future. But you could definitely say across the 20th century and certainly in the post-war period when you have the era of mass consumption, you just have this like day-to-day logic of, and day-to-day logic

and a map of what the good life should look like, which is tied up in consumption, basically. And so that is a move from like a share-to-day logic. vision of the future to a personalized vision of the future. No longer will we collectively create a vision of the future move towards it. Instead, you know, we will consume our way to a better life. And of course, there's a definite constriction of agency there, right? Because the only agency you have in that is the ability to buy things from a range of products which you don't get to feed into what they look like, etc. You're, you know, you're basically consuming somebody

else's conception of what the future should be like and you have a little bit of agency in there sometimes you have a little bit more agency in there and you have the development of like subcultures through consumption and all that sort of stuff and which you know young working class and middle class kids try to seize control over the future etc etc the whole dynamic through mod and then hippie and punk etc etc something we all know know so well but there's it uh yeah i wanted to the point of that sort of idea of a shift from a shared conception of future to a more personalized experience of the of the future. The lack of agency that comes about with that and then this situation we're in now where we're faced with these huge problems which need a shared

both conception of the future and shared action to move towards the future and yet all the time going on in the background is these is this day-to-day interaction with consumption with you know with mortgages etc with pensions all of these these institutions upon which the future becomes constricted in some sort of way, debt, etc. is another way in which the future, your present self, makes this sort of bargain which constrains your future self. Your future self has to make the payments, etc., etc., etc. That's one of the problems. It's another way of restating this difficulty between or the lack of collective agency that lies behind a lot of the disillusionment or loss of faith in a malleable future.

I think it's interesting when we're thinking about like relationships because, you know, people do have milestones in their relationships. Again, I'm fascinated because I'm like, I really feel like I'm an outlier here, but like people have, you know, anniversaries, you know, people have anniversaries that's something that happens, like people have like get engaged, people get married, people have kids and these are all kind of like, they're marked, they're socially marked and a lot of them are to do with the future. And I think, Jeremy, you wanted to say something about children and hope and the future as well, which I think is really interesting here to think about that. How do we interact between our descendants? How do we think about

our descendants? Partly what we're talking about here is people having a kind of individualised sense of a future and their life having a particular life course. I mean, that's what the idea of career is a sort of professional class version of a broader concept of the life course, having a particular kind of path and having a path that you might sort of prepare for or plan for. And I guess, to some extent, that's really historically and culturally and socially specific.

I mean, to some extent, obviously, that, I mean, the idea, a lot of what we've been talking about really is an idea of career and an idea of family life, which is really specific to the period, really, you know, from, maybe from the 30s, but really after World War II, up until sometime in the present or sometime recently, and it's specific to the material conditions

that people are living under in places like Britain then. But there's a limit to how historically and culturally variable ideas like a personalised cent to the future are, partly because, well, that's an idea which is, it's always going to be there in any situation in which people are responsible for children, and people are thinking about the fact they've got children and their community has children,

and those children have to be sort of cared for. But I think, I mean, in really crude terms, in say, pre-industrial societies in which social relations seem to be very stable, in which in the terms we were talking about earlier, actually, there isn't really a sense that the future is going to be different from the past. There might be an expectation. There might be an assumption that what children are going to do is the same thing that their parents did. And even if the parents are not around or die, they'll be taken care of by the community. but what happens in a society in which on the one hand people are increasingly conscious that their own lives are different from those of their parents

and their children's lives are going to be different from those of their future and also social relations become much more atomized, much more fragmented, life becomes much more precarious. Then ineptively people become anxious about what the future is going to hold for their children and the sense of what one's own relationship might be to future generations, to generations to come, then becomes really, you know, it becomes fraught with certain kinds of anxiety,

it becomes a preoccupation. And I think it's important to acknowledge the extent to which a lot of those things that people are sort of encouraged to want in terms of an imagined future for themselves, things like having a mortgage, things like having a stable job, things like having career progression. I mean, a lot of that is a kind of inevitable response to the sense that, well, without all those things, if you go and have children, you might be, you might just be subjecting them to a life of poverty and insecurity. So partly a lot of that stuff is imposed by the sense of insecurity and the sense of uncertainty, which people experience in a really, in a rapidly and continually modernising society, which is defined by

the sort of insecurity of capitalism. Another way to think about that is, is in terms of like entering adulthood. And like there's a delayed entry into adulthood. So a lot of the markers of like, This is how you get into adulthood. I have things such as I've got a permanent job, et cetera. I'm going to have children. I've got a stable place to live. Perhaps I own my own home, you know, as we go through the 20th century, etc. Those markers of like the past from adolescence into adulthood.

And all of those things, if you can access all of those things, they generally come later in life, basically, than they're used to. So the average age of a first child in the UK, something like 10 years older than in, the late 1970, something like that. And the age upon which you can access home ownership, if you can access it at all, it's a lot, lot later. And so for a while there was this idea of like an extended adolescence linked to like consumption patterns.

I always think of like the sitcom spaced in terms of that, you know, where everyone's just sort of like sitting around and playing computer games. But I know, but that seems like a 1990s artifact now. People don't have that space to do. that. You know, it's a much more anxious experience of delayed adolescence or extended adolescence in some sort of way. I wanted to play a bit of music on this episode from perhaps the most explicitly and self-consciously future-facing genre ever to come out of the British music scene, drum and bass. This is a classic bit of futurist drum and bass. This is LTJ. Buchum

Horizons from 1996. You know, I'm going to be. Another thing I think, has happened over the course of the past few decades. I think this probably goes right back to the 50s and 60s really in the sort of invention of youth cultures. I think people have really been encouraged by various formations of consumer culture, like not to think about their, I think people have been encouraged not to think about their personal futures, as well as, as well

as there being this idea that there's a particular sort of career path you ought to have and people being encouraged to think about themselves as employees and as commodities on the labour market. I don't think it's as simple as people being encouraged always to think about even their own personal futures, because I think something that happened, again, that really happened in the 90s, is that people were not at all encouraged. Young people were not at all encouraged to think about their personal futures, except in very narrow terms or very simplistic terms. And that's partly why, for example, employers and government were able to get away with, the massive closure of defined benefit pension schemes.

Because I remember saying to my students sometime in the late 90s, saying to a room full of undergraduates in their early 20s, you've got to understand what's happening right now is, you know, you are being deprived of access to assets and resources that workers have had access to for the past few decades. And overall, this is going to affect your overall incomes and wealth over your life course more than anything else is going to happen to you. And they were, of course,

they're totally uninterested in it. Who wants to think about pensions when you're like a 22-year-old undergraduate? But that was my point to them. My point to them is if we had like a news media that was really concerned with telling you about stuff that's really going to affect you, you would all be being told about this every day and be up in arms about it. And there was this phenomenon that I remember Angela Marlotti writing about in the early 2000s, what she called the Global Girl, which was like the kind of ideal type of the graduate student

she was encountering at the time. And the thing about one of the things, the thing about the global girl, for example, is that she didn't think of herself as somebody who might in the future have children and therefore wasn't really concerned with kind of boring old traditional feminist political issues like access to child care and stuff. And that is all true. And that is something. And again, and that is, that was something I really experienced at the time. And I think it was, it was like politically really deleterious that people were encouraged into the, this very specific way of thinking about themselves and their futures, according to which, well, the way to secure for yourself a good future was to make yourself hyper-competitive in a labour market, but it was not to give any attention at all to questions like, what would your access be to facilities and services like childcare or like pensions when you're older? And that was really deleterious. Of course, that was all bound up with something that, for example, the sociologist Richard Senate was writing about, also in the late 90s.

the way in which the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism had really destroyed the basis upon which people, like in the baby boomer generation, and the generation before them, had been able to think about themselves and their own futures with reference to ideas like the idea of having a job for life, the idea of having a permanent welfare, state, safety net available to you. Because Senate's point was that that was something that had made people able to sort of plan their lives. and that this had been really enabling for people, that it wasn't something that we should just sort of hate and detest because we're good punks or past 60s Bohemians. Senate's argument was, well, this was something that was really being taken away from people and something that the people had fought for,

for like 150 years of industrial labor struggle, people had fought for the ability to find themselves in a situation at the age of 22 where they could say, right, I'm going to get a job in a factory or an office or a corporation or a university, I'm going to have that job for my whole life, I'll have a pension at the end of it. And I know that there's a welfare state as well,

that it's going to look after my kids as they're growing up, and they'll look after them if I die, and they'll look after them at school, they'll look after them at university. And Senate's argument was all that was being taken away from people, and what was being then taken away from people was the ability to plan their own futures. And also the sense that their futures would be shared

with a community of people in the same situation. So you couldn't any longer, you wouldn't form like strong bonds of solidarity with people in your workplace because you didn't think you were going to be working there for very long necessarily. And that was an argument the Senate made. And I think that was really profound. I think that was really true. So like the right to be able to plan your own future, to plan for your future.

I think that is an important right that people should want to claim. Now, in our utopian socialist vision of the future, your ability to plan for your own future would not be dependent on an employer, for one thing. It wouldn't be dependent on an employer, even under conditions of full employment where unions have a lot of power. There will be sufficient social provision, there'll be minimum, there'll be basic income, there'll be basic services, there'll be sufficient social provision that people could confidently sort of plan their future, basically irrespective of their position in the labour market. But of course, it's worth, I think this tells us something profound, actually. I think this is really important thing to think about, because

It's a point I've made loads of times, but if you really want to understand what governments like the new Labor government, and I'm sure to some extent the current government, and even Tory governments have really thought about themselves and their position in the world and their relationship to the future and the future of their countries since the onset of neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s, then a really consistent theme is really what governments have thought is we really don't have the capacity to control the future. or plan for the future like they had in the old days. They had back in the 20th century. And all we can really do is equip our citizens to compete in an increasingly competitive and increasingly globalised labour market. And in fact, that's why we have to, for example, force schools in universities to be nothing but sort of training people

for a labour market. Because actually, that's the only thing we can do. We can't do anything else for our citizens except train them and encourage them to train themselves to be hyper-competitive in this increasingly precarious and globalised international labour market. And so they have quite deliberately, you know, for decades now cultivated this idea and encouraged people to have this idea, the one I've been describing, whereby really the only way to think about your future is to be fearful about it

and to be convinced that the only thing you can really do to secure a future for yourself is make yourself hyper-competitive in the labour market. Of course, I would say that has probably now shifted. that started to shift in the past 10, 12 years as we've entered a situation where however good a degree you get from an elite university, for example, you still might well not get a really good job in this hyper-competitive and increasingly digitized and automated labour market. And therefore, actually, the only thing you can really do to secure your future is speculate on assets. And this is what, you know, this is again, this is why I think

people on the left really don't understand what a big deal like crypto is, especially in the States, like crypto currencies become a means by which all kind of layer of the population in the States have been encouraged into the idea that, well, actually, the way you prepare for the future is you buy a speculative asset, because nothing else is going to work. And of course, that takes us back into the very heart of capitalism itself, because, as I've said on the show before, a few times, you know, one of the great historians of capitalism, Fernand Brodell, he argued that going right back to the early days, pre-industrial capitalism, in the mercantile cities of medieval Italy,

yeah, capitalism has always been about this idea that really the way to get rich is to speculate on the future. The way to get rich is to, you gamble, basically, or you bet on the future value of what the profitable outcome might be of some trading voyage, or you bet on the future value of shares, you bet on the future value of currencies, you bet on the future value of completely made up assets

that only exist to have their future values bet upon. So in some sense, is about the sort of complete colonisation of the life world of everybody by pure capitalism. And it's, and pure capitalism's understanding of the future, which is that the future really is just a sort of, you know, it's just something that you, the future itself is something you treat as a speculative asset, rather than something you can, you can build or even really prepare for in any meaningful way. You're sort of setting up a sort of historical cycle between, you know, valorising predictability

then valorizing speculation, if you want. One of the ways in which capitalism deals with the future is by calculation, right, by sort of like by assessing risks, et cetera. And then hedging against those risks, that's what a lot of financial assets are meant to be. That sets up two different abilities to predict the future. Like, you know, close in you can predict how consumption patterns are going to go over the next six months, etc.

You can try to think about why they may change, but, you know, they can be fairly predictable. And then there's just stuff which is basically really unpredictable, such as, you know, these big, big systemic sort of shifts, such as the 2008 financial crisis, etc. You know, and of course, you know, there's lots of money to be made through those events as well, do you know what I mean? There's something there about, like, the level of predictability that capitalism creates and the sort of profitability you can get out of that in a way you can hedge against the, the future. But I like the way you were talking about the Richard Senate stuff in terms of predictability, the predictability of life.

And it's something about that, because that's the sort of classic way in which we think about the post-war, sort of perhaps even the Fordist era of like, you know, basically our lives are made more predictable by becoming more mass, basically, by having mass institutions, mass consumption amongst, you know, a variety of options, but a delimited variety of options, etc etc and then some sort of shift into you know sort of post for this sort of era perhaps where there you know there there's a different relationship between you know your past patterns and then your particular future behaviour and there's something there about algorithmic prediction

as well isn't there basically where there's a huge amount of data being collected on you and then your future paths being set out in a way that you can't see but like basically has a huge effect on your futures. On an episode about the future, we've got to hear some music from the great pioneering exponents of electronic music, Kraftwerk. And

I think this is my favourite song by a long way. This is from 1980, 81. This is Computer Dark. I mean, we're talking about, I mean, we're talking about sort of radical ideas and capitalist ideas of the future. But there's also, there's an interesting question then as to whether conservatism, like has any idea of the future or whether it can only ever think of preserving the present or looking back to the past.

And Nadi, you were talking about a book in which that question of, you know, conservatism or nostalgia or harking back to the past or thinking about the future or being open to the possibilities of the future is a essential theme. Why do you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, so I just happened to be reading Grayson Perry's The Descent of Man, which was published in 2016. So a few things have changed since this book came out. But I'm reading a lot of various different texts around masculinitys at the moment, which is a subject that I'm interested in as a feminist and kind of trying to think around some of those ideas. And, you know, this is like a really, like it's a short, really sympathetic and kind of. of tender book in a way where Grayson Perry is kind of trying to come up with this critique of traditional masculinity and like thinking about like what is like the future for men and what is

the future for like a different kind of masculinity and kind of trying to answer that question. And one of the interesting things that he brings up is this idea that, you know, feminism by default and, you know, campaigns for women's rights like is necessarily forward looking. And I think I would extend that to say, like, you know, left politics is necessarily forward-looking. Because if you're thinking about progressive forces and you're thinking about challenging, you know, the structures and you're embracing, like, new possibilities, like, on an even emotional level, like, that understands the future as, like, an important terrain. And he just proposes that with talking about, you know, problematic masculinity, which he says is backward-looking.

So he's talking about this form of masculinity, which is more traditional. And he, like, it talks about nostalgia a lot. And nostalgia is very interesting here and, like, what it does to, again, like, our sensations of the future, our ability to, like, organize. And he's talking about it specifically in terms of, like, men and masculinity is, you know, in the 21st century. And these ideas and ideals of, like, dominance, stoicism, control and, like, conceptions of what he calls the default. man and why that's problematic. And so then he starts talking about a bit about fear. And I think fear is really interesting when we're talking about futures and being able to imagine the future and basically how men are able or not able to respond to social shifts, like, you know, changes

in feminism or other politics. And he's saying like one of those ways that, you know, and maybe this kind of intersect, he doesn't talk about in cells specifically. Or maybe he does actually, but like not in a, in a huge way, is that part of the, a reaction kind of on a personal and a political level is one of kind of defensiveness and retreat and retreat and that kind of retreat into that nostalgia is a way that men and masculinities in that construction have, um, have related to, to those kind of social changes. And he's kind of trying to like build, it's kind of like a lighthearted kind of like this is a polemic piece in a way of rethinking masculinity as not something that is lost and therefore needs to be retrieved from the past,

but something to be remade in some form that is open to the future without kind of rejecting masculinity completely, which I think, you know, I think, you know, from a woman's perspective is really important. And I don't like the term toxic masculinity. I think there's been an impasse there. I think there's a, there's been a misunderstanding that has occurred. I think with a lot of young people, or at least the way the term has been used, has been, you know, to kind of imply that any kind of masculinity is kind of backward or problematic per se. And he's, and it was quite good, you know, nice to read a book that is written by a man and self-confessed tranny, as he calls himself, about these kind of issues. So it got me thinking a lot about, okay, are there sets of

politics or sets of identities that are necessarily kind of nostalgic and past looking, and there are others that are future looking. And so then I got thinking about, well, how does the interaction between like hypermasculinity and sci-fi sit? And then how does that link to, you know, the stuff that we were talking about, about Elon Musk, which is, you know, has got some kind of archaic kind of very sexist and kind of sexist and old school, nostalgic kind of traditional masculine ideas, but also has like a very, very future-looking masculinity. So I was kind of thinking about all of these things when I read

this book. Oh, that's really interesting. I mean, this idea of being open to the future is obviously a big theme for Jacques Derrida, especially in his classic book Spectres of Marx. The idea is that basically what it means to be kind of on the left politically is to be open to the possibilities of the future and the possibility of democracy. to come and that's one of those ideas i think i've talked about this on the show before that i often find myself thinking that that's just really banal what does that mean it just means you know keeping an open mind hoping stuff turns up maybe keeping the faith that one day things can be more democratic than they are now but i do feel like it is often quite a useful

idea it's quite useful because i do think i mean this comes this brings us to sort of ideas about you know hope and optimism and pessimism and thinking about the future and I know that it's a it's a sort of the general clichés that anyone on the left is relatively optimistic and of course the you know the the big cliche we've talked about on the show before and I think we might do a whole episode about one day or a microdose is the formula which is always credited to Gramshee but actually it's there was someone else who said it that he was creating you know that what a radical must have is the pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will and I think I don't really want

dwell on that now. I know people will be expecting us to. So I'm just saying, I'm not going to. But I do think in a funny way, I think a lot of the time, you know, people on the left don't really act as if they think, you know, well, we could win. We could win something. And I'm thinking like, what would that mean? Because I think, I think it makes you much more strategic a lot of the time to actually think, well, there's a possibility that the current situation could change and and think, well, what, okay, what would it actually mean to get from here to the, to an imaginable situation in which the situation has changed? And I think that's partly what's meant by this openness to the future. Being open to the possibility of the future, partly it means, like,

really thinking, okay, things really could be different than they are now and then thinking, well, what would, if things were to become different from how they are now, how would we get from there to hear. So I think that, I'm just saying, I think that notion of openness to the future is often quite productive, even though it can sound quite banal. And I think that, that Grayson Perry idea that you're explaining there is a good illustration of how it can be quite productive. I try to link that up with, with this idea that is conservatism always backward looking?

And is, is Elon Musk forward looking? Because he sort of is, isn't he's got some sort of like, you know, he does rockets, doesn't he's got some fucking line on we're all going to go tomorrow I don't think he really believes that but he's also got an attitude like a sort of like a fuck the future sort of attitude

which is this thing of like that whole creative destruction let's just mess things up and see what happens sort of attitude you know what I mean a sort of embrace of chaos well it's not cohesive I mean that's the thing isn't it it's both at the same time well it's sort of nihilistic isn't it

and it's sort of dystopian actually or it's a vision of the future Elon Musk and the billionaire class I think they do have this vision of the future which is literally dystopian to most people and they sort of know that their utopia will be most people's dystopia and they don't care.

They're happy with that and that does bring us on to an interesting question I did want to talk about it's normal for a podcast like this one to devote lots of time to thinking about utopia and utopianism. I can't even remember. Have we done an episode on Utah?

We have. Yeah, we've actually done it. Several years ago now. We've done it. We can do another one in the future. But I think I'm interested in the value of dystopianism or is dystopianism valuable. I think it's an interesting question because actually when we did our workshop, our constantist raising workshop on the theme of the future, one of the things I did for that was to get a bunch of clips from films about the future and look at different ways of envisaging the future. And I didn't even really occur to me until I'd done it. They were all dystopians.

in one way or another. There are very, very few movies that present a utopian vision of the future. There's lots of, lots of dystopianism. And it's an interesting question, like, what is the value of dystopianism? Because we normally associate leftism with optimism, with hope for the future, and with utopianism as a way of animating and inspiring visions of the future in people that will get them to think about radical possibilities. But I do wonder sometimes if dystopianism also has a certain value, in that it does, you know, there might be a certain value in saying to people, look, this is where we're going. Like, this is actually where we're heading.

Like, if you don't do something about it, if you don't change what you're doing. I'm not sure, because generally speaking, I'm generally skeptical about the idea that sort of negative affect in any way actually radicalizes people. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also, I would argue that it's partly to do with the art and aesthetic,

you know, like the idea, for a lot of people, like, that kind of, like, macabre darkness is a space, of which artistic production is much more fruitful. It definitely is for me. I don't like drawing or writing about nice things. I like painting and writing about difficult things. And I think that it's a subject of fascination.

And people are more likely, I think, to watch it or read it or be peaked by it, both peaked and peaked, both spellings of the world, in a sense, by that kind of film. People won't watch a movie about the world being amazing in the future. Like, nobody wants that. Yeah, it's that classic thing of like, well, where's the drama come from in a utopian future where everything's not really nice, et cetera, et cetera. Where the food is excellent in the canteen and everyone's having a nice time. Like, fucking no one's going to watch that.

Yeah, I'd like to watch a film about the future canteen. But like the other, and then the sort of value of dystopias is, you know, science fiction is always, in some ways, an extrapolation of current trends, which is like a way of critiquing the present. On an episode about the future, we haven't had a chance to talk much about Afro-Futurism, but I think nonetheless we should hear a bit of classic Afro-Futurist music. Let's hear a bit of the title track from Miles Davis's 1972 classic On the Corner. I mean, we've talked about this, this narrative of the way in the way in which, you know, perhaps under different regimes of accumulation,

the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, you know, people's relationship to the future changes or the idea of the personal future and the collective future. You can frame that in terms of this much longer history, according to which, if you go back to the writings of the great German sociologist Max Weber in his classic work, the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, he actually says, he says, look, capitalism

wouldn't have happened at all, were it not for Calvinism. And Calvinism is the weird, extreme. form of Protestantism, which says that, well, one of the features of our beliefs has to be that actually God knows in advance, everyone who's going to go to heaven and who isn't. And actually, he's already decided, and a tiny minority of humans are going to get to go to heaven. And there's absolutely nothing you can do in your life to change whether you're going to go to heaven or not. And you might ask, well, if that's the case, then shouldn't everybody just like not care about how they conduct themselves and will and have a good time? And a few people

did draw that conclusion in the 17th century and formed weird like free love sects and stuff or maybe not weird, maybe cool free love sects or what have you. But Weber says, well, actually it points out, well, it's true. The vast majority of Calvinists were also people who promoted like extreme Puritanism, living a very, very sober life, like not really having any fun, not enjoying music and culture, just sort of working very hard in your job and going to church a lot, especially on Sundays. And, and California, argument is that those people were trying, they were kind of tortured by this worldview, according to which there was no way of knowing if you were actually going to go to heaven

after your death. And there was nothing you could even do to affect that future. So therefore, what you had to do to stay saying was convince yourself that you must be one of the elect by living this incredibly pure life. And he said, it's only people living like that who would ever have started, started off really engaging in full stale capital accumulation. Because to engage in full-scale capital accumulation, what you've got to do is, like, work really hard to get loads of money, and then not spend any of it having a good time. Like not living like a merchant print in Italy in the 15th century. No, no, no, not living like that at all, because then you just spend all your money on art and palaces and parties. No, you've got to have this really weird worldview that encourages you just to keep saving it and just reinvesting in the business, reinvesting in the business, reinvesting in the business.

Because that's the only thing God has put you on this earth to do, supposedly. And that results in this situation with the whole notion of deferred gratification is kind of built into capitalist culture. And capitalists themselves, but also workers, and everyone in the population in the capitalist society has to believe in the sort of the value of hard work, thrift, saving, etc. And things sort of stay like that, sociologists will say, until maybe the 1920s with the emergence of consumer culture. And with the emergence of consumer culture, what happens is, well, actually, capitalists now, they need people also to want to, to have a good time in the present, and they want to spend loads of money and have fun. And then in the mid-20th century, you get this sort of trade-off between the long history of people having to defer their gratification and save for the future and build a life for them

and their legacies, and then the growth of a kind of culture of hedonism and living for the present and having a nice time and eating nice ice cream and going on holiday and having a fast car. And that becomes more and more a part of the culture as capitalism developed, as you move into post-Fordism, and as you move into the 21st century. And from that point of view, then, it becomes really confusing, like, well, okay, if you're a radical who understands all this stuff, like, what is the view you should take? This is one of the problems with Adam Curtis. I've been promising Matt, our producer, and other people for years, I'll do an episode

on my podcast, Culture of Our Politics, all about Adam Curtis. And I am going to do it finally, like, this month. But Adam Curtis is so confusing, because Adam Curtis himself seems incredibly confused. like, well, what is the radical take on this stuff? What is the radical take? Should you, like, just live in the present, like a sort of bohemian artist, like from the early 20th century, and, you know, cast aside the puritan demand that you plan for your future and have a career and have a pension plan? Should you do that in the way that's sort of bohemians in countercultural figures seem to think maybe in the 60s? Or in fact, is that just to completely buy into what

Christopher Nash called the culture of narcissism? Is that just to become an ultra-capitalist? Is it actually better to be really kind of sober now and not drink and not have drugs and not eat chocolate and actually try to sort of plan for the future? Or maybe you should be a kind of dedicated Maoist revolutionary who just doesn't think at all about themselves and just does everything they do for the sake of the struggle.

So the question is, well, how do you live that paradox? What do you be? And Nadia, I think you had some kind of interesting thoughts about Like, well, how do you live that paradox? Yeah, no, I'm just interested in this fact that, like, on one hand, it's a good thing to be present, whatever that means, you know, and to be, it's not so much being in the moment, but like not consciously anxious about the past, you know, anxious about the future or nostalgic about the past. Like, it's a good thing to be, you know, present in your relationships, like, present in your relationships, like, present in your, you know, you're in your in, you know, if you're in a, if you're in a meeting or if you're in a gathering and there are other people, you want to be present in that. You want to be present with your cultural or

like social expression. You want to be present with art. You want to be present in nature rather than be like recording it. You know, and also there's of course interfaces with, you know, the obsession with everything being recorded and not being about even like watching the recording afterwards, but you know, about how like social media and whatever has, has affected people. So in, so in a way, there's a presence. I know that kind of Buddhist idea that the only moment is now, which I would say is positive and like is really important. But at the same time, there's obviously like there's, you know, the capitalist discourse around this, which is that, you know, that nothing matters except like this kind of like, I don't know, it's a kind of, it's a co-option of the mindfulness, I guess, discourse in a sense, which is taking it away from a connectivity. Because I think what we're talking about here is like connectivity needs some kind of. kind of presence, but that is one of telling people effectively that there is no future and there is no past, which is I think this is where it becomes politically problematic because it's pulling away from that trajectory of, you know, another world as possible or that being

able to think about one's future is a possibility. So I think there is an importance of like presence and for one to cultivate some sort of presence in your, you know, ability to live your daily life, while also rejecting that kind of discourse which has that ideology, which is effectively just trying to make you into a precarious worker. And I think it's trying to cultivate and also be wary of those differences there. That is the challenge for anyone living today. Whoa, that's too far out.