Re: <nettime> Fwd: Re: Forms of decisionism

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 07/26/2016 10:50 PM, Alex Foti wrote:

> the Schumpeterian state is already with us (e.g. The Entrepreneurial
> State by Mazzuccato). The crisis has brought industrial policy back
> into fashion, and today this means innovation policy, or rather
> incentives and subsidies for digital innovation. So in a sense, all
> states are Schumpeterian. However none of them, with the partial
> exception of the US, is Keynesian.

In The Future of the Capiitalist State, which is like, mid-nineties I 
think? Bob Jessop already identifies the then-current state form as a 
Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime (SWPR), succeeding and 
replacing the former Keynesian Welfare National State. This could be 
said because innovation policy had already become national dogma 
throughout the Western world in the 70s and early 80s, when state 
planners and corporados looked back on the technological and 
organizational transformations of the WWII era and asked, how can we do 
it again? Turned out that the old trick of military research investment 
(Star Wars) made the magic happen - at least, after the new trick of 
attracting global capital to US and UK financial markets had been 
accomplished by the Volcker Shock in 79-82, followed by the City's Big 
Bang a little later on.

The US never went formally postnational (though in important senses it 
functionally was due to neo-imperialism). The EU countries did make a 
formal supranational structure and the notion of "workfare" is due to 
the inimitable Tony Blair who incarnated the SWPR. Neoliberalism was 
borderless for capital and innovation-based to the core. We have lived 
the limits of the Schumpeterian dream, in that form at least. Still the 
process of restarting economic growth while reintegrating disgruntled 
voters and restabilizing a hostile international environment remains 
exactly the process of the capitalist state, whose intellectuals have 
long since learned to recognize long-swing crises - even if it is still 
very difficult for them to find the peculair and often horrifying magic 
that resolves them.

Could the left have a word to say about this? Can the very notion of 
innovation be renewed and transformed? Are there pathways of future 
development that do not lead to such brutal dead-ends as the SWPR?

Alex is right to say we should have a conference about it. In addition 
to the brilliant timetable and texts he already sent, there is the 
Technopolitics group in Vienna and my collected inquiries on the subject:

www.threecrises.org

It is interesting and kind of anguishing to have worked on this for a 
decade and now experience the tumultuous culmination of the long crisis 
- which in fact, just as the best theory predicts, leads to a situation 
where all bets are off, no one knows what will happen next, every sector 
of society and economy is in disarray, political, social, military and 
ecological threats abound, and of the many new possibles waiting in the 
wings and straining at the bit, no one knows which ones will combine to 
form the new thing - or if they even will.

May we live in less interesting times someday! But for now, it's time to 
cross the river.

thoughtfully, Brian

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