Re: <nettime> The Vision Thing (was: Managerial capitalism?)

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 09/21/2017 05:06 AM, Felix Stalder wrote:
> This vision, I'm convinced, can only come from transformed relations
> within the biosphere (be that sustainable socio-economies, perma
> cultures or geo-engineering) supported by advanced technologies.

That's what I think too, and it's what I spend most of my time on these 
days (though probably more with the soft culturalism than the advanced 
technologies). Interestingly it's also what Alex Foti thinks, when you 
jump to the end of his book and read the last chapter. Way to go Alex, 
you're up to the minute.

Trumpism is a military-police-extractive industry reaction, based on the 
decadent dregs of Fordism plus the threatening detumescence of the white 
Anglo-Saxon puritan cock in the face of multiracialism and 
multisexualism. It could become an authoritarian regime, for sure, but 
only in the total absence of any pushback from the left, because 
Trumpism is structurally weak: it is casting aside its libertarian wing 
in favor of rising demands for state spending (notably due to the 
hurricanes but also the war lobby, huge contracts in the atom bomb 
industry, for instance). So the question is, what does pushback from the 
left side of the political spectrum look like?

Interestingly this is where Orsan's contributions run parallel to 
Alex's. Orsan is looking at the historical arc of a major sociological 
formation that was initially called "the New Class" when it was analyzed 
in the 1950s by a guy named Djilas, in a place, remember, that was 
called Yugoslavia. He saw that not workers, but cadres produced by the 
brand-new state educational apparatus were taking effective power in 
society. That idea about the power of educated cadres was transferred to 
the US in the Sixties when the huge state expenditures of the 
Kennedy-Johnson era (guns *and* butter, remember?) were effectively 
producing a new form of social agency, the manager, the knowledge 
worker, the media technician, the so-called "value intellectual" (fancy 
term for a pundit) etc. Conservatives who were not yet neoliberals 
became horrified when these new figures began inventing 
environmentalism, practicing alliance strategies with oppressed 
minorities and standing against the military-police sectors. After 
Djilas's concept filtered through as a way of analyzing what was going 
on, the most interesting right-left debates of Seventies were all about 
the possible destinies of the New Class (full disclosure, I wrote about 
this somewhere, http://threecrises.org/1968-black-power-and-the-new-class).

We know what happened: the neoliberal turn absorbed and repurposed this 
proto-revolutionary sector, so you got Jerry Rubin, the golden boys, the 
cognitariat, the California Ideology, the Flexible Personality, the 
whole anarcho-libertarian dreamland of the Nineties. 'Nuff said. 
Fast-forward to the present.

Trumpism is older people, middle class, smaller towns, the countryside, 
the resource fringe, the South - but not Southern cities. Cities all 
across the US are filled with precarious *and* middle-class youth 
practicing coss-race, cross-class alliance strategies - and reawakening 
old memories about those kinds of things in the process. At the urban 
level, Democratic mayors have no choice but to support them, because 
otherwise you get riots, work stoppages, non-compliance of all kinds. 
Check out the new book by Juan Gonzalez, Reclaiming Gotham, which 
describes the radicalization of progressive mayors in an arc extending 
from Occupy to the present (or just check out the extended interview 
with Gonzalez on Democracy Now, it's worth it). If you keep in mind that 
urban centers are not just the sites of potential racial conflict, but 
also the places where extreme weather events cause disasters that 
require social spending, then you can see where the pushback from the 
left could come from.

The New Class is dangerous when it shakes off its privileges and tries 
really broad alliances with one foot in the state and the other outside 
it. Trumpism is the perfect spur for that. And so is the current 
bankruptcy of the mainstream Democratic Party, which has left all kinds 
of holes for new actors to get in.

Different neocapitalist formations could arise from this shakeup and 
they likely will, both as country-specific patterns and as a patchwork 
of social forces within any one country. As the natural disasters hit 
and AI clears out the old concept of a job, new versions of social 
spending by the state are almost inevitable, and they will obviously 
translate into growth sectors for new kinds of corporations, or old 
ones. Trump is going to send the cash to his people in Houston and most 
of Florida and don't forget about the wildfires in the Northwest and the 
droughts in Montana and the Dakotas and this is just his first year. The 
terrain of the big struggle is actually about social spending. So the 
current question of the New Class is, can we put a vision into this 
state spending? Can we make a major pushback against the proto-fascists 
and drown the libertarians in their own proverbial bathtub? Can we build 
from below in ways that shape the inevitable institutionalization from 
above? Can we make Green Capitalism a much better reality than either 
Tesla or Musk or Schmidt would ever have dreamed?

I have the intuition that Alex's book may be structured to give an 
insight into how current class dynamics are leading in the kind of 
direction I've sketched out. But to say they are leading does not mean 
they will get there. Especially not in the US where anything is 
possible. A big war, a new figure of terrorism, an untimely but 
ever-more possible collapse of the Mexican state, a tremendous upsurge 
of armed militias, the Tweet to end all Tweets, these and many other 
"events" could give unstoppable power to the rightward turn.

Everything you read in the daily paper today is some kind of take, 
half-unconscious or disguised or explicit, on the gigantic struggle that 
is now taking place over The Vision Thing.

let's do it for a change, Brian

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