Best of This is Hell! 2023

I’ve listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.

I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of the hellish topics that we have to address before we’re no longer in hell.

In no particular order, here are the ones I liked, with some citations to provide context and pique interest.

Best of 2023: The Long Land War / Jo Guldi

“I think it is so vital right now that we embrace the utopianism that was present in the 1940s and 1950s with land redistribution and use it as a way to guide us in this moment when we have a lot of grassroots voices saying we are in trouble. There is a gun to our head, and yet we seem to be in a moment of paralysis, institutional paralyzes where little seems to shift.”

Best of 2023: American Agriculture Is about Money, not Food / Alan Guebert

“This system will collapse under its own weight because it’s not now and never has, and therefore can’t supply what’s really required: healthy, vibrant, growing community. Agriculture should be about what it says it’s about. It’s a compound word: agri-culture. It should be about food communities. When we get away from that, we are slowly getting away from what’s sustainable or even regenerative. In the way of rural America, regenerative and sustainable used to be the way those communities grew and the way they supplied the world, especially your neighbors, your local communities with high quality, low cost food. And after, or maybe hopefully before the collapse is complete, we’ll get that message.”

Best of 2023: Secret Power: Wikileaks and its Enemies / Stefania Maurizi

“At the moment, I’m sure the moment he leaves the European soil, the moment he leaves London, he’s gone, Julian Assange is gone. I’m sure the moment he gets extradited to the U. S. is a dead man. Politically, professionally, he’s dead.”

Best of 2023: Big Pharma Rigs the Game / Julia Rock

“These are the companies that, that at the end of the day have, have provided us with lifesaving treatments like the government funded, government subsidized COVID vaccine. Companies like modern and Pfizer are jacking up prices on it. There’s lots of evil stuff happening…It’s difficult to hold those two things in our head at the same time.”

Best of 2023: “Luxury Emissions” Doom Us All / Christopher Ketcham

“Under Neoliberalism, the poor, the working class, the lower middle classes, THEY all have to practice personal responsibility, you see, but corporations, and the wealthy who are served by corporations, and the wealthy who are subsidized by government in collusion with corporations: not so much personal responsibility, right? So I think we’re just looking at the hypocrisy of the class system, right? So these social obligations apply, you know, to the lower classes, but not to the upper classes.”

At 32:20, he talks about technophilic solutions to climate change,

“Climate change is just one part, one part of the world problematique, which is overshoot, the global overshoot of population and the overshoot of human economies, right? Beyond the biological carrying capacity of Mother Earth.

“And so that overshoot, you know, it can be seen in multiple ways: ozone depletion, loss of tropical rain forest and woodlands, the massive and continuing expansion of domesticated land, the massive die-off of wildlife, the domination of the planet by homo sapiens and our domesticated animals, coastal nitrogen expansion, the fisheries fully exploited, biodiversity crash due to, again, the total domination by homo sapiens—the almost-total domination by homo sapiens—of the Earth, desertification, soil loss, chemical/nuclear waste, freshwater shortages, and on and on and on.

“But, mainstream environmentalists say ‘our only problem is climate change; everything else is fine.’ Nope, we’re not overpopulated, we’re not overconsuming, we’re not overshooting the limits to growth on planet Earth. No, that’s not an issue.

“So, instead, what is offered to the public is a bright, creamy, green dream that technology is going to save us. There’s literally goes to be a deus ex machina of solar and wind power and lithium-ion batteries that is going to somehow subsidize—or continue to subsidize—our profligate lifestyles and our deranged growth system—our economic and population growth system—at the same time that we can wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

“These are all lies. But, again, they are widespread lies. And they lies given the imprimatur of authority by major newspapers and major environmental groups.”

At 34:00 he says (about Extinction Rebellion’s announcement that they will no longer be doing as much their “annoying citizens” kind of protests),

“What they’re ceasing are the preeminently stupid tactics of laying down in highways, pissing off motorists, who are trapped in the techno-industrial system. This is the system we live in. We drive cars. There are motorways. Our public transit has been eviscerated by the trucking industry (at least in the U.S.) There are many communities that are dependent on cars. If you lay down in the street, all you’re doing is pissing off average citizens, who might be in your corner.”

At 1:00:00, he responds to Chuck’s question about how we don’t discuss climate change in terms of class,

“100%. That is the issue that we’re not talking about. Remember, there’s no classes in the United States, man. We’re all equal. It’s all equal opportunity. [chuckles] Lies, lies, lies. Yes, absolutely. If we don’t address class and the implications of class bifurcation and the extreme inequality and the rule by the wealthy and the oligarchy, we’re never going to get to a sustainable society.

“As I mentioned earlier, elites are buffered by their money from the negative consequences of environmental change. They will resist altering the system—the system of growth, the system of capital accumulation, the system of constantly expanding ecological footprint—they will resist altering that system that has benefitted them so greatly, right up to the very end.

“So that, effectively, to change such a society, you’ve got to rid of the elites. And then we’re talking about revolution.”

Best of 2023: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy / Claire Provost & Matt Kennard

“The corporation is a devilish economic instrument that has gone out of control. The problem is the instrument itself.”

This one was informative, but wasn’t as full of AHA! moments as the ones above.

Best of 2023: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care / M.E. O’Brien

I started off not really liking this interview, but warmed up completely when I realized that we’re on the same wavelength. They came out so strongly against traditional families that I reacted negatively, thinking “the families and couples I know aren’t dysfunctional, and they’re all pretty traditional.”

But, then, I slowly realized that they’re not pretty traditional. They live in very traditional communities, but several of the strongest families/couples I know are definitely not “male-dominated”. Each partner has their strengths, but only some chores/tasks are traditionally assigned. But that’s the point! The point is that my family is healthy and strong because it’s not aligned along traditional, capitalistic needs and lines. It’s already quite communal. The parts of it that are the least communal are the most dysfunctional, actually.

At 23:00, they say,

“Private households aren’t something we all choose because we’re all brainwashed or we can’t think of anything better. But we pursue private households—finding a partner to age with, raising children within a private household—because that is a necessary survival strategy [sic; should be “tactic”] in racial capitalism.

“That in the dynamics of labor markets, state policy, of what it takes to survive and reproduce in the world, we form private households that we’re then really dependent on. That the private household is a major dimension of reproduction.

“And that we, that in our efforts to form alternative families—better families, chosen families—they often end up reproducing many of the problems that we are trying to get away from.

“That the contradictions of trying to survive in a capitalist society put tremendous pressures on people, that end up fragmenting chosen relationships, and reproducing all sorts of gender inequality and class inequality within chose family structures, and end up putting a lot of pressure on people, reimposing, in some cases, traditional gender roles.”