TRASHFUTURE - UNLOCKED Riley's Commie Book Club: The Blurst Is Yet to Come

Episode Date: February 8, 2019

Riley's Commie Book Club is a bit different. This time, Riley speaks with scholar and author Peter Fleming — you might recognize the name from a previous episode discussing his book 'The Death of Homo Economicus' — and this time they cover the subject of Peter's new book, 'The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide.' Peter Fleming is a professor at the University of London and the University of Technology, Sydney. He is the author of several books, including The Mythology of Work (2015) and The Death of Homo Economicus (2017). His writing has appeared in the Guardian and Financial Times. Peter stayed up late in Australia in order to have a lively discussion with your delightful host, and we're greatly appreciative of him. You should buy Peter's book, and you can do so here: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-worst-is-yet-to-come-a-post-capitalist-survival-guide/ *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have an upcoming live show -- with comedian Josie Long -- in London on February 21st at the Star of Kings (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) starting at 7.30 pm. You can buy tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-ft-josie-long-tickets-54546538164 *COMEDY KLAXON* *COMEDY KLAXON* On 13th February at 8 pm, Josie Long and a number of other comics will perform at Smoke Comedy at the Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA). Tickets are £5, and you can get them here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-feat-josie-long-tickets-55036156626

Hello, and welcome to this month's edition of Riley's Kami Book Club, but we've taken it and we've twisted it because instead of just me figuring out frantically how to talk about one book for a whole hour by myself, which is really, really, really, really hard. Instead, I am here with the expert on this month's book, its author, Peter Fleming, who is a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and author of The Worst is Yet to Come, a post-capitalist survival guide. Peter, how are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me on your show, Riley. Oh, no, no worries. It is a genuine pleasure. Usually, a lot of the time, we're a bunch

of goofesses who talk to a bunch of other goofesses, and instead of talking about real stuff, we tend to go on extended riffs about like soup or how the first slaves were Irish or all that kind of nonsense. Today, we are talking about very serious stuff and to kick us off, I'm going to ask the question that's on all of our minds. Why is the popularity of the adult ball pit in London a sign of things to come? Well, I think it's a very, very symptomatic trend. Us wanting to return to being children, you know, we can't escape our jobs. We can't escape the city. I lived in London for many years, and the sense of universal immiseration is very, very difficult to escape. And so,

where do you escape to when you've got nowhere to run? Well, you begin to imitate patterns of life that were once deemed to be freer. And being a child, being a child is one such activity. So, I see it as a kind of mimesis, a repetition of, you know, a psychoanalyst would say that you're repeating. You're repeating something that was always initially a trauma, but it's been recast as a moment of freedom. Yeah, I mean, I think that's about right. And the more I think of sort of modern capitalist society as essentially infantilizing, it's like the more I start seeing it everywhere. So, one of the other places that I sort of see this is not just in how we engage in recreation, where we're just sort of want to not think about anything and feel

like a kid and play Disney movies and this bullshit, but that I feel like more and more, we're endlessly being graded and auditioning for things and being sort of evaluated. And all of a sudden, the entire world is like you're sitting in a classroom and your boss is your teacher. And the Department of Work and Pensions is your principal. And everybody is there sort of poking, prodding, measuring and evaluating you to see if you're worthy to progress through the next stage gate, essentially, like it's all just kindergarten and preschool. Well, that rationalization is pretty intense at the moment. And even children are kind of thrown into the examination process from a very, very early age. I'm in my 40s. And when I look back, and I don't think it's

necessarily with nostalgia, but I don't remember the staunch examination process being so intense. And you're right, it seamlessly moves into the workplace as well, that evaluation. So I think the phenomenon, the ball pits that you're talking about is this kind of moment in which we're trying to retrieve or revive, revive this moment of childhood that we never actually probably had, that we missed out on. And it's an escape in a system that has little escape routes available for us. So yeah, no, definitely, definitely. Wouldn't want to be a kid now. I mean, it's, this is actually something I was thinking of yesterday. And I love to really just kick a show off on a huge bummer. But I feel like,

isn't it so bizarre that we're in a point where I sort of woke up in this morning and I thought, I hope I don't live too long, because I hope I die of natural causes before it becomes impossible to live in a comfortable or dignified way. I think I'm the first generation maybe who's ever sincerely had that thought. Oh, wow. Yeah. No, well, that's a good thought. There are things worse than death. And that's kind of something that I think is on all of our minds. But then again, I guess, you know, if suddenly someone said to me, you know, if my doctor said, you know, you've got terminal cancer, you know, would I be saying, oh, well, you know, I had a good, good, I had a good, good go at it. And my, you know, I'm okay.

No, I'd be like, I'd be shitting myself, right? And I'd be like, oh, no, no. So I think it's, I think, I think it's important to keep these things kind of in a little bit of a perspective. Well, this is why one of the things you talk about in your book, like really, really spoke to me, which was like the idea, like you were talking about sort of this, this sort of almost constructive pessimism, where like it's on the one hand, you've got, you know, cheerful morons like Matt Hancock, who we can all profitably ignore because he thinks that apps will replace the NHS. But then on the other hand, you've got almost like the, the optimistic socialists like Naomi Klein, for example, who think that like,

there we, that there is sort of a better future out there that we can see from here. But it seems like what you're talking about is this, like, like we say that the worst is yet to come, and we should believe that it's going to get worse. So we can understand that like the revolutionary potential of me to get better. Yeah, no, definitely. I think that was the motivation of the book, you know, and that's a pretty bleep book, you know, it wasn't particularly pleasant to write, to be honest. Again, I'll say it was pretty bleep. I was reading it, just being like, just being like, damn. Yeah, yeah.

This is very upsetting. You know, I just thought, I just layer it on, you know, and usually you pull back, but I thought, you know, just when I thought I should pull back, I'll put another layer on just to see where it goes. And the result kind of is what you read. But I think that, you know, yeah, I kind of call it a double bind that, you know, on the one hand, a certain pessimism and negativity has been kind of co-opted by the system, that it's no longer kind of hoping that we happily identify with it. It wants us to see a pessimistic outlook, you know. And I think that's always been there in neoliberalism. There's been a skepticism about things like trust and, you know, community and so

forth. And that's become quite endemic. So that space has been colonised to a certain extent. And you see this in, you know, Trump's a great example, Brexit's a great example, you know, it's bleak. And then on the other hand, you have, particularly in the certain left-wing circles, but also in liberal circles, this kind of attempt to kind of say, well, we have to be optimistic, because otherwise, how are we going to even think about alternatives if we have no hope? And so we have these double binds. So in both situations, you know, by double bind, I mean that you have to go into either camp, there's no other route. And so I really just wanted to transcend those two, that dichotomy, that dualism, and look for a space in which, a conceptual space

in which radical pessimism could be turned into a progressive force. And I really think that that's quite useful to, you know, I do sincerely believe that it's going to get worse from here on and, and, you know, we haven't hit rock bottom. And, you know, it feels like it, it feels like the only way is up, you know, but, but I think that the proper mature attitude, the adult attitude, ironically enough, given our previous theme, is to brace for the worst and take to be politically, politically sensitized to that. So I'm put in mind of the episode of The Simpsons, because everything to me is The Simpsons, where they're digging for the Cat Burglars gold, and they've dug themselves so deep in the hole

that all they can think to do is quote, dig up, stupid. Yeah, that sums it up. Dig up, dig up. So what I'm, but we know this, this reminds me, I mean, I had a whole bunch of notes, but fuck it, we're just going off script at this point. That's all right. Well, what, but what it makes me think of is like that we're actually just are now seeing in the, in the UK and the US, we're in the midst of seeing it getting worse right now. I mean, because I think that anyone imagining that the US government shutdown where is going to end anytime soon is probably a fantasist because the whole ideology of the right now has been the

annihilation of society, right? So what better way to annihilate society than just to stop having national parks, right? Like those are just gone because Trump has decided he's not going to fund them. And why would he, why on earth would he fund them? He doesn't care about national parks. I mean, it's, it is the slow winding down now of American society is a going concern. The same thing with No Deal Brexit. I think Theresa May is going to sort of, is going to bend on the idea of No Deal Brexit. No, she's got her mandate, which has kicked out the foreigners, and she's willing to burn the country down to do it. Like in both of these cases, US and UK society are like, I wonder, I don't even, I don't even know what it is. Like,

do we just need to fight a war so that our sort of bored, horny old men felt like they did something worthwhile with their lives? I'm not really sure, but like ours put two of our societies have just decided that they're done and they're just sort of winding down. And however many resources you had at the moment of wind down, that's how likely you are to be the leader of your wasteland's motorcycle gang. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. It is quite phenomenal. You know, six months ago, I thought, and this is when I was writing the book, I thought, you know, reflected on it. And I thought, you know, Peter, you know, we probably have, they can't get any worse than this. You know, what are you envisaging here? You know, a complete, a complete mount

down. And, you know, six months later, you know, it has got worse that what's happening, transpiring in the US is just phenomenal. A level of self harm by the elite. That is, you know, I think I'm recorded and unprecedented in US history. And I'm amazed that something hasn't happened. I'm amazed that people haven't taken to the streets. I guess the teachers are doing that now to a certain extent. Massive strikes among the primary school teachers. But, you know, I guess what the problem is, is that if the elite goes down, it's also interconnected. And we see this with Brexit. If the elite go down, we go down with it. And that's a scary thing, because we really cannot, you know, we really cannot get off the boat if the power structure,

which has neoliberalism has moved so strenuously to gain complete control of society, and to put all of its energy into creating that totality. And now it's folding back on itself. And we're kind of going down with the ship along with it. And that's a really sad part. That's a part that makes me really kind of motivated me to write the book, you know, that we need to do something about it. And but, you know, I'm the same as everyone else. I'm just, it's a spectacle. I'm just watching it on the news going, I can't believe it, you know, and being astounded by the next newsflash day after day. So it's a very, very kind of difficult impasse that we're in at the moment. Well, I think one of the reasons it's sort of, it is so debilitating is, and like,

I think you and Mark Fisher were friends, right? Yeah, we were friends. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you speak of a couple of Mark sort of core concepts in your book, like you sort of build on them. I think one of the, one of the big, big sort of, sort of, I guess you'd say operating forces here is capitalist realism, which sort of in brief is the kind of deflationary perspective that makes it seem like the economic power, the economic power structures that were in place from what, 1972 are sort of natural and immutable and unchangeable, and we have to work sort of within them, because anything beyond them is not just impossible to do, but incoherent to imagine. I think the, and I think the other thing at play here that you sort of evoke is, is hauntedness,

where we sort of at the same time as we feel the capitalist realism constraining us in, sort of as we clock into another Amazon job, where, well, of course we have to wear monitors on our wrists that buzz if we move in the wrong direction, because that has to increase efficiency, because it has to increase returns, and if returns increase, then I keep my job, and I can keep my hab unit, whatever, whatever. But at the same time, the hauntedness of the things we could have done, the knowledge that a global distribution network like Amazon, where it in sort of popular control would bring us more towards utopia, and the only person standing in between us and that is Jeff Bezos, and every police officer.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, Mark Fisher's work, I think, was really important, and you can see the influence in the book I've written, but his concept of the haunt, of the hauntology, I think is really important, that idea that we are not at one with ourselves, we're haunted by these lost futures that could have been, particularly during the radical ruptures of the 1960s and 1970s, and I think that's a really useful idea, and it kind of chimes with his notion of acid communism. The book he is working on just before he died, and there's kind of notes that have just been published in a book called K-Punk, kind of notes on that notion of acid communism. And I think that's a really kind of interesting way

of rethinking, you know, he was always rethinking this notion of capitalist realism. How did capitalism transform into, from a prescription, what we ought to do, and what we ought to, how we, you know, during the Reagan and Thatcher years, you know, was always this kind of like normative stance, this is the way we should go to one in which it's really a description, this is what reality is, adapt to it, no matter what. Otherwise, you're going to be, you're going to be destitute, there are no alternatives. How did that transition occur, and how can it actually be, how can it be dissolved? How can that ontological realism be dissolved in a way that is meaningfully progressive? And I think that that's what we should be thinking about in terms of

breaking up the solidity of that, I call it a false totality, it's a totality that would like to pretend it's universal, and of course, no society is universal. It's certainly done a very good job in creating a pretense of being such. And I think when we talk about sort of trying to rebuild, or not rebuild, but at least regain some of those lost dreams, I think a lot of people sort of, because we think of the world just as divided into the private and public sectors, think of the public sector as conflated with the state as the only way that we can do that. I think that's why so many socialists, especially new socialists today, are sort of electoralists. They think democratic socialism

means just electing socialists and hoping they do socialism from the organs of the state. But one of the, and this sort of lets me, and I don't think we're going to be able to actually build the kind of transformative society we need to get beyond, you know, this sort of neoliberal hell with the organs of the state, because it's undergone a historical transformation that you chart from the state into what was often called the nanny state of the 1970s, to what you call the stepmom state of the 1990s, to the psycho nanny state of the sort of post-2001, post-2008 era. I don't know if you could describe that a little bit more. Yeah, sure. So, you know, well, I think at the present time, the state and the technocratic

infrastructure and machinery of the state, and the politicians and advisors of the state, and so forth, really is now kind of the big problem. And if it was once part of the solution to creating a socialist democracy, then, you know, it's as far away from that as we can think of, I think. And so what I tried to trace in the book, and I was basically trying to explain a couple of things mainly around immigration policy in the US and UK, which has become really, really nasty and, you know, tyrannical in some cases. And I was trying to figure out, you know, what's going on here when the state is no longer, and it probably never was completely, but no longer a vehicle for achieving certain progressive measures. I think of the NHS in the UK,

which is a wonderful thing, you know, these things don't, these things have been dismantled, and we have what we have a really nasty situation when it comes to statecraft and governmentality. And so what I do is I rather arbitrarily have to admit, but it was fun trying to construct a history of the state, according to Peter Fleming. But it was what I argued is that what I've argued in the book is that we've moved from that kind of nanny state, which we all know about the welfare state to the neoliberal age, the heyday of Thatcherism and Reaganism. And, you know, we had it in many other countries, what I call the stepmom state, where the nanny is thrown out. And instead, we have the stepmom who's, who's notoriously distant and clinical

towards her adopted children. And the adopted children were, of course, us. And, you know, tough love and all of that sort of stuff and very kind of clinical. Now we've moved to a phase, what I call a psycho nanny state. And basically, it's a return of the nanny, but she's gone crazy. And she wants to control every part of your life. She's still dressed as a stepmom as a HR manager, but she's crazy. And, and, and, you know, you just want to run when you see her. And I think that's quite a useful, useful metaphor to describe what's happening in a number of Western societies, the US and the UK and a whole host of other societies, countries and economies as well. But I do have that qualification at the end of that

chapter called the psycho nanny state saying, you know, you know, what we are dealing with is a very male kind of phenomenon as well. And so maybe the nanny metaphor is not quite accurate, because the nanny psycho nanny kind of points to a certain demented femininity. And I think that we're dealing with a masculinity here that's gone completely haywire. And so, so I do have a number of qualifications. But yeah, the psycho nanny state, I think, is, is, is scary, is kind of anathema to all of the things that we should be working towards and is going down the drain with, with, with the rest of this, with the rest of the system, I would say. Well, it's one of the things that I think I want to pull out here is that

is the fear you get when you are forced to interact with the psycho nanny state or the drill sergeant state or whoever it may be, where and this is almost something I want to sort of pull back to the death of homo economicus where you talk about sort of being trapped either being trapped in the unemployment industry or trapped in the prison system or anytime you come in contact with the state. It is, it is clearly designed to be a disciplinary instrument. You know, it's like, yes, well, it's like, it's a floor to catch you if you fall, but the floor is made of activated tasers, you know, so you don't die, but you are shocked into climbing up back up the ladder. And what's clear, what I always say, I think, I think of neoliberalism myself as a kind of,

I think of, if you think of the state as a set of institutions and these institutions are things that initially were, to some extent, say built, built that things that we built together things that the organized labor movement created, whether it was the NHS or as sort of pressure through like labor politics or through the week, the weekend, an institution we have through a militant labor in the 19th century, these things we have made together that neoliberalism takes and presents back to us as a sort of parody where the welfare state that we created as a working class in the 20th century has been transformed into this, into this perversion where the welfare state is turned from something to catch you into a floor made of tasers to make sure that

you get back up on the ladder. And its purpose is no longer to ensure a dignified life. It's because at some point somewhere, the designer of this demented machine realized that it was better if people who would otherwise die from falling onto a pit of spikes just fell onto a pit of tasers because then they could keep climbing the ladder, even if they kept slipping back onto the tasers. You know, it feels like it's become torturous. I think that metaphor is better than the psycho nanny state actually. The thing with the psycho nanny is that it's still personal. It's still a person. It still sort of recognizes you individually. Whereas I think the idea of a machine sort of captures some of the sense that this has been sort of built as this sort of

impersonal slow motion killing machine that we're all just sort of standing in. Yeah, the state, no, you're exactly right. The state has turned into this punitive kind of punitive machine and architecture that is certainly not dwindled or withdrawn, like all of the theorists of neoliberalism said, you know, the state must withdraw. We should have free markets and the state provides law and order, but that's all. That certainly hasn't happened. It's ballooned in many ways and it's become the protectorate of a class structure. And when I was at university, we used to hear about, you know, vulgar Marxism and the vulgar Marxist theory of the state was, this is in the economics classes in political science and all of that sort of stuff.

The vulgar Marxist theory of the state was that, you know, the state is merely an instrument to maintain a class structure. And we used it. We learned all of the critiques of that. It's so simplistic, you know, it's so functional. But now when I think about it, yeah, that's pretty much it, you know, it's not far off. It's not far off. And so in some ways, society has been kind of redrawn over the last, over the last 10 years, 15 years into this kind of vulgar Marxist version of how capitalism works, has been boiled down to its basic tenets. And it's, and all of the niceties and all of the sophistications, you know, the postmodern kind of sophistications of all, they've all evaporated. And we've really just seen the sheer brunt force of a economic system

that's holding on to a path that is clearly failing. And it's clearly kind of going to implode very soon. And the state cannot think of any way, any way out either. And it's kind of wedded to this path. And, and that wouldn't, you know, if the elite went down the drain, it wouldn't worry me too much. And it wouldn't worry a lot of us too much. But as I said before, you know, the totality is a web. And it's a web that we're all kind of connected into. And we'll go down with it, unfortunately. And so, you know, the book has a very bleak view of the state, you know, I think that, and I'm not necessarily an anarchist or, or, or, or, or a, you know, libertarian socialist in any, in any way. But, and I see many of the great achievements of the

state in the past. But at the present time, it's so obviously geared towards protecting a very small, rich minority who are, who are in their kind of, you know, gated communities. It's so clearly geared towards that there's no longer any ideology to hide it either. It's, it's, it's so visible. And it's so patent, you know, that it's very, very difficult to be positive and optimistic about how the state's going to unfold in the near future. Well, without, without sort of, there are a couple more things I want to, I want to talk about, about the state. And then I want to move on to sort of talking about sort of like robots and utopianism and stuff. But one of the things I think about with the state is, okay, well, two

things. Number one, this is a challenge to the listener. And to you, Peter, imagine any time you interact with the state or have in the last 10 years interacted with the state since the financial crisis that wasn't disciplinary, maybe the NHS. Yeah, I think, I think it would be, it would probably be the NHS. I'm just thinking what else, you know, immigrant, because I'm also an immigrant to the UK. So when I was dealing with, when I was dealing with immigration, immigration, I have friends who have kids in schools, and that's just basically teaching to, teaching to tests. I even used to back when I used to do that, I used to be a tutor. And I would like, I would talk to these sort of brilliant young

people who were curious and wanted to actually learn things and challenge things and learn ideas that were outside the curriculum. And so he's been half the lesson talking about that. And the other half being, okay, forget about that. Now we have to just learn the sort of motions you have to go through. Disciplinary. HMRC is disciplinary, pay your taxes, or you go to jail. Or don't not just that, but fill in the form right, or you go to jail. Even like getting your, getting your sort of job seekers allowance or universal credit, fill in the form right, go to everything, get evaluated, or you go to jail, or you get sanctioned, you starve to death. Everything is disciplinary, except but not for the rich. If you're wealthy, then you have,

then there is a special department at HMRC that fills in the form for you by liaising with your accountants. And that's how you get your government benefit, because quite often you just get paid back. If you send your child to a private school, then they get their education consultants. They get, the tests get tailored to them. If they're trying to find a house, there's sort of property concierges. Everything for them is sort of so wonderful and gentle. And literally everybody else is this brutal disciplinary institution that's there basically to make you terrified of interacting with it. Yeah, well, that's, I think that's the purpose, you know, and this stems from the ideology that we've been discussing over the course of our conversation, that the

ideology of neoliberalism is basically one that wants to create a certain subject that is amenable to free market capitalism. And to do that, ironically, you need a state that is A, very intrusive and always in your face and punitive, but B, that hates itself. The state, self-hating state, I think is very, very important characteristic, because how can you be a proto capitalist, identify with the ethos, but also have a strong state, but also be a state technocrat. You know, it's a paradox. So there has to be this kind of self-hatred. And that self-hatred comes through in various means as well. I think we see this in all sorts of forms, but the US governmental shutdown is a classic case of that, isn't it? You know, it's the state eating itself.

But you're right, you know, I think that, you know, future work, future research, future philosophy, social philosophy really needs to focus on the state. And it's probably happening, people are probably working on this. But I think that, you know, the state is such a powerful institution that it's been perverted in such an awful way that we really need to think of the state again as a public institution rather than as a punitive one. And a whole mindset, a whole shift in mindset has to occur for that to happen. Because at this stage, you know, the mindset of the of governmentality, this state, statecraft, as it's called in political science, is one that is really kind of very, very skeptical about the public sphere. It's very

skeptical about public involvement in running their own affairs and having some representation via the state. So I think we need a really, what we really need is just a very radically new philosophy of the state in which to breathe life back into it. So I'm not, I'm not, you know, and it's, I'm not necessarily an anarchist in that respect, you know, I still believe that there is, there is hope that the state can be kind of turned back to a progressive agenda. But critiquing the state from the point of view that we're doing it now, I think we've got to be very careful that, you know, because on the right, on the radical right, there is a very anti-state agenda as well. So I would not want to kind of feed that particular menacing machine

either when we're critiquing the state. So we've got to be very, very careful about how we word it and how we frame it. I think that's, that's where I really, I always sort of really liked what John, John McDonald's evocation of the sort of old mark, old sort of, I think it was an Italian communist phrase of, of in and against the state where that is, that is how a modern socialist party must work is to understand and grasp the power of the state. Well, at the same time, trying to dismantle its disciplinary tools or trying to dismantle the vast majority of its capacity to be disciplinary. But I think where like radical pessimism comes into this is like to imagine that this is going to be easy or is going to be the matter of just voting in Jeremy

Corbyn is fantasism. You know, this, this is, this is A, far from guaranteed to work and B, it's probably not going to be easy. Because this is, I can't remember if this is what I said when I was talking about your book or a different one, but that we always say, okay, yeah, well, we're going to go in and then we're going to make, you know, Jeff Bezos or whatever, pay his fair share of taxes without realizing that someone like Bezos, even if it's the law that he has to pay his taxes, every tax he pays is voluntary, you know, every law he chooses to follow is voluntary. And at some point we are going to have to accept that we are going to have to make people like Bezos do things involuntarily. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. And, and, you know, you're completely

right about Corbyn and the, and, you know, and this kind of fantasy that, that it will all be corrected and, and that a public sphere and a democratic vitalism would be vitality would be resurrected along if we just elect the right people, you know, the state's gone too far down this kind of awful path, and that the people, people in the state don't really matter that much anymore. And I think that, and that's important to keep in mind. I think it's also important to keep in mind that, you know, we don't want to be too romantic about what the state was in the past. It has, you know, always been a capitalist state. I think the neoliberal or the psycho and any state version of it as a particular extreme rendition of what the state has always been in, in, in, in

that regard. So it was never, the capitalist state was never, never a friend in the way that we're thinking about it. So I think that's, I think that's a critique of the state today shouldn't be one that sees the 1960s and 1970s as, as this kind of blissful utopia. There are many victims or in the many, there are many kind of travesties enacted by the colonial state as a good example that we need to keep in mind. But it has been a vehicle for important progressive trends with the healthcare system in the UK being a good example. Do we just want to walk away from that? And I'm not too sure I would. No. Well, I think this is, this is what I always sort of bang on about,

sort of, especially when I speak to my, my liberal friends from university, where I said, they say, well, what is democratic socialism? And I say, well, part of it, sure, is electing socialists and democratic elections, but that's like one part of it. Another part of it is, for example, creating bottom up institutions that are designed to serve the interests of the people creating them. And so like, for example, a local investment bank that funds sort of worker co-ops, but isn't concerned with profit making and isn't owned by like fucking Lloyds or whatever, that that is also a democratic socialist institution. They have conflated democracy with voting. And I think it actually takes a bit of radical

pessimism. It takes a bit of understanding that, you know what, in many ways, not in all ways, but in many ways, like fuck to the state, you need to understand that this is not going to be as easy as an election. It's not going to be as easy as waiting for something to get automated or whatever. It is going to take, it is going to take actual inventiveness and radical pessimism is what I think it takes to spur on some of that actual inventiveness. But you can see like, and the reason I think of a public bank, because I was just put in mind of Proposition 8 from one of the last elections in California, where they're trying to do exactly that, they're trying to create a local investment bank that isn't tied to Wells Fargo. And you

know, and it's looking at socialism, not just as a state activity or something you can do when you vote, but something you can do on a daily basis. Yeah, I think that's right. You know, you know, socialist democracy is certainly just not electing and socialist or semi socialist politicians, it's a way of life. And it's a particular stance towards what I would, what I suggest is public sphere being one that is one that is first and foremost before before the instruments of the bureaucratic state take take place. So I would totally agree with you that it is a particular attitude and it's a way of life. And it's a particular set of enabling institutions for self, for self governance. And that's, and that's, that's,

that's interesting what you're saying about what's happening in the US, you know, I think one of the most depressing, depressing histories, corporate histories that I can think of in the UK was the co-op, the co-op bank, how it began, it began, you know, as a workers cooperative. And it ended, it ended with it being this kind of almost garish, there were scandals with the CEO, you know, taking cocaine and all sorts of bizarre things, you know, living the corporate high life, how it went from that kind of workers cooperative that was genuinely set up for insurance and so forth, community run to this kind of stereotypical, reckless, high-risk taking corporate entity. And I think that's an interesting little historical microcosm of

what our society has kind of, the path our society has followed more generally. And so I think those grassroots activities, it's definitely, definitely very important. And, you know, so does that mean I'm going to tell everyone, don't vote, remember Russell Brand was saying that a few years ago, he was, he was saying, you know, don't vote, don't vote, I'm not too sure about that, I don't know. But I do believe in that phrase, and I cannot remember who the author was, but you know, if voting made a difference, they would have outlawed it years ago, right? But it's the, well, the whole thing, I think the thing to remember is like, especially in the States, and now with like voter ID laws and stuff,

they are trying to outlaw it. That's true. Like, that's the thing, it does, you can tell it does matter because they're very concerned of making the people they know will vote against them not do it. But one thing is that if you listen to sort of the sort of 40 some odd minutes of this, of this conversation so far, you'd think your whole book was about the state. In reality, I'm just very interested in the state. And I sort of, I really like what you have to say about it. But the worst is yet to come, it's about a lot more than the state. And one of your chapters in the book that I quite enjoyed is called Shitty Robots, which I think sort of goes and really sort of yanks the idea that sort of greater automation means a better life for everyone

and really sort of puts it under this sort of sickly white light of, well, just saying, well, no, actually it doesn't. And there is this incredible, there's this incredible juxtaposition I found, which was from a couple paragraphs from an article about Softbank, where they're talking about their investment in WeWork. So I'm going to read this now. WeWork's potential, you're familiar with WeWork, right? Okay, so it's for anyone who doesn't know, well, we've talked about it before in the show, but I guess if you don't know somehow, it is a shared office space that tries to be your whole life. So WeWork's potential lies in what might happen, rather, when you apply AI to the environment where most of us

spend the majority of our waking hours. I head down one floor to meet Mark Tanner, a WeWork product manager, who shows me a proprietary software system to monitor their buildings. He starts by pulling up an aerial view of the WeWork floor I had just visited. My movements from the moment I stepped off the elevator had been monitored and captured by a sophisticated system of sensors that live under tables, above couches, and so forth. Sensors installed near this office's main floor help WeWork do things that opt to maximize their people working there's experience. I did a bit of paraphrasing and helped WeWork discern that morning lines for coffee were long, so they added an extra barista.

WeWork executives, of course, assured me that the sensors do not capture any personally identifiable information. So there you go. You're being monitored all the time, 24-7, every movement you make, but hey, they're using it to tell that you want coffee in the morning. Thanks. Yeah. I think of that situation, I'd want a lot of coffee. I think I just want hemlock at that point. Brume up a nice little, brume the Socrates special. I'm going down. Yeah, that's great. I love it. That's the essence of the shitty robot, where you give up all of your sort of autonomy, any expectation of privacy you may have had ever, but this large collective is then able to use

all of that information in ways that benefit you, like telling you that you want a coffee in the morning. This is the essence, I think, of the shitty robots chapter, where it's like, yeah, the improvement. If you look at the quality of life that you get by having all of your movements and preferences and so on tracked and analyzed by large companies, really all they can do is tell you stuff that you and presumably they, if they have a modicum of sense, already knew, but what they get is something much more powerful. Yeah, no, definitely, definitely. Yeah, that chapter, that was really kind of, as you very nicely described it, is really trying to show how

sure there's been these major leaps in technological development, automation in the workplace, et cetera, et cetera, but it has an abolished work. It's just made it more miserable to do. And the human factor is still very, very much part of any social order that is governed by and controlled by these algorithms and the big data and the AI equipped automation, but it's just a lower level of life that's involved. And so I was really trying to also question this idea that's been quite popular, that we might be on the cusp of a post-worker society with the way in which AI is developing in the industrial sphere and in the workplace and so forth. But I was just looking around

and I was thinking, hold on, this doesn't make sense. Everyone seems to be as frenetic as ever. Unemployment are at record lows. The jobs are awful and low paid and low skilled. So I was trying to figure out how can we have a theory of computerization, cybernetics and so forth, but also see how it interlinks with the perpetuation and even the reinforcement of the ideology of work rather than dissolving the need for a job. It seems to be reinforcing the ideology of work. And basically, the shitty robot was all I could come up with. Well, I mean, I think it's sort of half true because the robot is terrible at giving most of anything of any benefit like, oh, great, I can like a page on Facebook and my ads will be slightly

more customized to my preferences. So the algorithmically generated t-shirts will get my birthday right when they say, yeah, it's a Gemini thing. But at the same time, now I can be micro-targeted with electoral message. I mean, I don't think the far right would micro-target me with electoral messages unless they really believe in horseshoe theory. But you know what I mean? Like it's all of these things are just it's they're they're not shitty for the people who built them. They're excellent for the people who built them. They do exactly what they want and they do it super, super well. You know, it's it's one of these things where it's like it's the way we talk about sort of the the rope, the golem turning the entire world into a hill of be one of that's the that's

the Hebrew myth where the golem turns the entire world into a row of beans because there's no one tells it to stop or then there's the paperclip monster where the turns the entire world into paperclips because the AI no one ever told the AI to stop. But the fact is it's that sort of infinite acquisitiveness that infinite ability to sort of transform control and dominate. That's what we're actually scared of all AI does is make it more. It just facilitates it all any technology. The word technology, it's just comes from the Greek Greek root tech name, meaning skill. It's just neutral facility. It's just facilitation. It itself is neutral, but a moment exists in the real world. Any actually existing technology is always part

of a power of a power relationship. And so it's there is never going to be an automated way for me, a consumer to monitor how much my phone bill say is overcharging me. And if they might actually owe me, you know, a 50 cents back on my bill, but they are always able to automatically clean out my bank account because there's a one penny I haven't paid interest on. Yeah, no, definitely. You know, that's that's different. So it's always an expression of very human relationships and very human power relationships. And if you inject AI and machine learning into the psycho nanny state going back to the state or the corporate, the corporate the corporate matrix, then you're going to get a very narrow, very ideologically biased

expression of technology. And I think that's what we're seeing, you know, and this is why I think that, you know, we've had computerization, for example, for the last 35 years, it's not new. And we've had sophisticated automation and industry for for many, many years. But we're still working ourselves into the ground, you know, it hasn't got rid of work, and it hasn't got rid of it hasn't created this kind of leisure society or, you know, this beautiful kind of society of play. It seems to have quite quite successfully articulated a particular view of how our society should look. And it's, and that is neoliberal capitalism, with a very brutal edge to it. And so I think we need to be very kind of careful about how we treat.

I think it's I always thought of it as a red herring, to be honest. Well, here's I would actually disagree with you on one point. I think it actually has created this post work society of play. It just hasn't created it for us. It's created it for Kylie Jenner, created it for Jeff Bezos' ex-wife and a live girl, whoever she is. It's created it for them. They have that. Good point. Good point. I'd agree with it, definitely. Yeah. So it's like this is like, sorry, go ahead. Oh, sorry, I post post workerism for the 1% or the 0.1%. Yeah. Well, and it's, you've read For Future's Life After Capitalism by Peter Fraze.

Yes, I have actually. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Yeah. So it's, it's so big. I think like, this is your book for me really tied in with that one, where it's like, at the end, he's like, look, it's not all these four futures, which are so whether on a two by two matrix of hierarchy and scarcity, you know, if we can get past scarcity, but we still have hierarchy, then we live in a rentier state where everything is controlled and copyrighted. But there doesn't need to be. If we have get past scarcity and have no hierarchy, then we have fully automated luxury, communism, post workerism, wonderful. If we still have scarcity, and then we have no hierarchy, we have sort of more

standard socialism, as you might see it, which is just worker, we still need to work to produce, but we're in control of what we're doing. And then if you have hierarchy and scarcity, you get exterminism, which is where the rich basically just kill everyone, which is sort of what we're in now. But that these things can all sort of exist together, where you have sort of utopian communism for the rich, because they're engaging in killing the rest of us, whether that's through commission and sort of America's increasing drone war, whether that's through the militarization of borders and the sort of systematic drowning of migrants, whether that is austerity, killing the poor by, by a mission and grinding more and

more of the former liminal classes into the poor who are fit to die because they've failed a were a fitness for work assessment or what have you. This is all basically so that the cast have made in Chelsea can continue fucking each other in the toilets of shortage clubs. Now that wasn't an image I wanted to see. And you forgot about the opioid crisis in the United States, you know, which is a purely... Oh, how could you forget about that? That's a great example of a depressing example of what you're talking about. It's been entirely manufactured by this ethos. And so like this is why I also then want to pull back to one of your... I love how I'm totally

going in order here. I want to pull back to this other chapter where is capitalism a cult? And I think the vast majority of the working class, or in the middle class, has basically just decided it's willing to die because of a cult that it's in. Yeah, yeah. That was basically trying to... Because there's been lots to talk about, you know, capitalism as a religion, as a belief structure. And it clearly is that going back to Walter Benjamin in particular, who kind of did some very interesting thinking around that. So I wanted to kind of extend that idea into a cult and use the metaphor. And maybe it's not even a metaphor. Maybe we are in this giant cult in which trying to get out of it is very, very difficult.

And that the leaders of the cult would rather perpetuate their own demise than see their cult dissolve and that the people interacting in the cult escape. And the reason why I was thinking about the cult is that I'm just amazed after the 2007, 2008 crisis that we didn't have some major rethinking about how economy and society should be organised. How, you know, the same old doctrines of neoliberalism were really kind of applied even more ardently than it was in the past. I was amazed, you know. And the only way you can really explain that is if you go to the social psychologists who look at cults, you know, when doomsday cults... I think I used the example in the book, you know, doomsday cults who believe that on, you know, February, January

2018, 2019, when the clock turns 12 at midnight, the world's going to end. And so social psychologists have been fascinated with this because those cults ardently believe fully, fully, you know, in this prophecy. So what happens when the prophecy invariably doesn't transpire when it fails, that the world is still there? Well, they change their mindset and they say, well, there's all sorts of things that happen. Maybe special forces stood, stepped in and, you know, UFOs and aliens, you know, stepped in to save us, you know, and the cult actually re... the failure of the prophecy actually reinforces the belief structure. And I thought this is exactly what's happened among the technocratic elite of neoliberalism after 2008. It did not really question

the veracity of its ideological thinking. It become even more stringent and even more faithful to the doctrine. And so therefore we can go to... I actually went to the website Colt Watch to look at tips on how to escape a cult. And they've actually got some very good tips, you know, don't tell them that you're leaving, you know, pretend and then kind of jump out the window, find a friend, you know. And when they... and when the cult kind of try and track you down at your parents' house, you know, don't answer the door and all of that sort of stuff and be prepared to go through a withdrawal period. And I thought this could be a useful way of escaping what we're facing today. Well, there's actually also... there's another... I read this article and

we know what I was actually put in mind of as well is another kind of cult that I think a lot of... you might say not the technocrats, but a lot of say people in the working classes especially, especially sort of extremely online Instagram people have, which is I think they're all... they're almost in a cargo cult where there is this whole cottage industry of talking about hustle and self-help and, you know, building your online business, one, you know, audiobook recommended by Bill Gates, listen to on double speed while jogging and taking a new tropic or whatever at a time, where it's just this... there are all these beliefs that if you imitate the behaviors of executives, you too can live an executive life, where it's just a cargo

cult, where all these people who believe that if they wake up at six and do all this, they're just going to be successful because they're working very hard. You ask them, well, what are you working hard at? They're like, success. And it's like, what? What do you mean? And I think it's what we have is... and if listeners aren't familiar, cargo cult sprung up throughout sort of Polynesia in the 20th century, after sort of like Native Islanders would see Americans come build sort of airstrips on their islands to supply them in the war in the Pacific Theater, and then it looked to the Native Islanders like, oh, well, these foreigners are teaching us how to summon gods, which are the planes, by doing these elaborate rituals. And so when the Americans left, they

were like, okay, well, now we want some of that cargo. So we're just going to build fake watch towers and put on coconut headphones, which they thought were religious gear, and then we can summon planes. And so what you're doing is you're imitating all the behaviors without sort of understanding the underlying networks that create it. And so I sort of see a lot of people in capitalism, whether that's Instagram, hustle people, or even just people who work hard at their jobs or whatever, like they're just in a cargo cult, where you're just imitating the behaviors that you think will bring all this success. But if you look behind every allegedly self-made millionaire, you'll find that actually their family had an emerald mind in South Africa,

or they inherited some sort of ungodly sum of money, or even the so-called influencers that they all love, like Caroline Calloway, who will be discussing on the episode tonight that I'm recording. But if you're a free listener, that'll be months ago, whatever. Not months, month, where all of this is really just ways to obfuscate the actual working of actual inequality, where none of this effort stuff matters. Yeah, I think that entrepreneurship in particular has been this kind of weird, this weird kind of phenomenon in which we think that we're going to all be, you know, these kind of wealthy Bill Gates-like people. I don't know if the ideology is as strong as it

used to be. It used to be very, that whole enterprise ideology was pushed in the United States, Europe, and the UK, New Zealand, and Australia very, very fervently in the 1990s. And I think people have probably cottoned on to the nature of that ideology, and then it's been a bit of a scam. But what you're talking about is really interesting, this kind of mimesis of mimicking of the CEO. There's a really interesting book called The CEO Society that was just published by a couple of people that I know, Carl Rhodes and Pete Bloom. And they're arguing, and they really have this interesting kind of idea of the ideology of the CEO permeating not only politics, but everyday life, to the point where, you know, they look at books like with titles,

What if Buddha was a CEO? You know, it's just really, really hard core. It's really hard core. But they love it. Yeah, no, it's as fascinating. They dug up some. What if Bismarck invented TikTok? My favorite, my absolute favorite book is What if Confucius was an influencer? Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Jeez. Jesus Christ, SoundCloud Rapper, burning up the charts now. And so I guess I want to sort of bring it, bring it home with sort of one last little section here, which is sort of coming back a little bit sort of party politics in the state, because I think we've talked about how things are getting worse and how we need to be like radically pessimistic to understand that the traditional valves of things getting better,

whether that's electoralism or technological development, or, you know, just general human, just trusting in human nature and hope and togetherness and stuff probably isn't going to work. But the last thing I want to get round to is almost is ending on like a little bit of sort of a kind of a weird high, which is to talk about my favorite British cabinet minister, Matt Hancock, MP, the minister for health and social care, and my precious angel, who is basically can be summed up as a cheerful idiot who shouldn't be given charge of a dull pencil. But he is, he's just so innocent and naive. It's too bad he has any power, because I think otherwise he would be like, you know, a really excellent sort of village idiot.

So this is sort of last thing is on. Don't sugarcoat it, tell me how you really feel. So this is on the fake utopianism of Matt Hancock. And so this is around how he's trying to sort of eradicate the NHS. So Nicola Blackwood, a former advisor to online private GP provider, push doctor, has been appointed as health minister for innovation. A title includes digital health by Matt Hancock. Blackwood will now work with Hancock, leading on many other things, industry engagement with NHS, innovation, digital and technology. Push doctor, chief executive, Weiss Scheifte said, Nicola resigned from our board on the 9th of January to pursue this fantastic opportunity in government, and she leaves with our thanks and best wishes.

The fact that she has been appointed as such a prestigious role shows the caliber of individual our board attracts and how strongly the government believes in the future of digital health. Of course, Mr Hancock has previously come under fire from GPs who accused him of promoting his friends companies like Babylon or push doctor, who said that they were brilliant at taking pressure off the NHS and expressed a desire for wider access so that loads of companies can do what Babylon is doing. Now, this is very bad. This is obviously someone trying to roll back the one good element of the state that isn't disciplinary and make it more sort of disciplinary and technologized, but the world is getting worse as deeply competent people squeezes harder,

but the last at the vestiges of the structures that were supposed to protect us from them, which now sort of mostly just depress us, are literally staffed by like the cast of the three stooges. They have left their worst and dumbest in government. I don't want to almost be too accelerationist about this, but it is very easy to radicalize people against someone like Matt Hancock. Yeah, no, definitely, definitely. And I think if there is a moment of optimism in our discussion, then I guess that, and we kind of touched on it earlier, I guess that it's that the veil has fallen. And power is so stupid. Power is intrinsically stupid. Hierarchies are intrinsically stupid. As the fabulous work of David Graber, the topiary of rules kind of points

out, power is generally right from the start, not really in touch with what's going on below in terms of the hierarchy. But now it's been boiled down to its essence. We really see incompetence, disarray, kind of gauntlessness in the corridors of power. Now, of course, does that translate into the radicalization of the public sphere? And does that trigger a grassroots democratic response? That translation is always the tricky part, isn't it? That seeing power as incompetent and unworthy of any position of governance, seeing that, and that's in that recognition translating into political activity and a radical kind of rejuvenation of the public sphere,

that's the big leap, I think, and it's never a mechanistic relationship between those two things. But, you know, I think that all of the ideologies and the frills of neoliberalism have really kind of been evaporated and burned away. And we're seeing the skeletal structure, if you like, of the power system. And that's what this book is really trying to kind of refer to in the sense that we can see the power structure. We can see how it's, how bent on maning society. And just because we can see that doesn't mean that it's not going to get worse. So therefore, what should our response be to that? And if that's optimism, that's my weird Fleming's weird bent on optimism. It's a pretty bleak optimism.

And I think that's as good a place as any to end, because otherwise we won't end on a high note. So I'm going to say, Peter, thank you very much for coming on. And we'll link your, the the Repeater Books link in the description. And that's, I think that's going to be it for us today. Fantastic. It's been lovely speaking with you, Riley. And thanks for the opportunity to chat about the book. Yeah, you as well, Peter. So buy the book early and buy it often.