Hi, y'all. Luke here with an interview. I'm very happy to share. The following is the audio version of my recent conversation, published in Jacobin, with the British writer, author, and activist, George Mombio. Now, for some of you, George might need no introduction. For those of you who don't know his work, he's one of the guardians most radically

inclined voices, someone who's thought a great deal about the climate crisis and who's also

written very perceptively on the subject of neoliberalism. Now, that's a subject we've spoken

about a lot on this show. And I want to quote something George wrote back in 2016. He writes,

so pervasive as neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognize it as an ideology. We appear to

accept the proposition that this utopian millennarian faith describes a neutral force, a kind of

biological law like Darwin's theory of evolution.

But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations.

It redefines citizens as consumers whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that the market delivers benefits that could never

be achieved by planning. Now, I suspect those of you who've listened to the show for a while

can see in those words why George's work has meant a lot to me. Now, in thinking about

neoliberalism, what it's done with our world and to the societies in which we live, an

urgent issue, at least for me, has always been the breakdown of community. As we've come to live

in societies dominated, increasingly dominated by commercial and transactional

relationships, by economic relationships, societies that are defined by the commodification of everyday life

and all the rest of it, the extent to which community, particularly in a political or a civic sense,

the extent to which that even exists anymore,

I think is very much open for debate.

Now, that's a problem for intrinsic human reasons.

I think as human beings, we have very much drawn on communities of one kind or another

for thousands of years as sources of belonging,

...