Brian,
If I could pick a central aspect of future life we should be aiming for it would be this:
Information and resources (material and time) growing closer and closer together, while spreading more evenly across the globe.
The great irony of internet life, of course, is that while "know-how" has become greatly more accessible, the means of activating it remains walled off by private pay walls and state-enforced property rights. Without power, access to information becomes an overly abstracted noise (perhaps an instantaneously more "meaningful" distraction from chores than say social media, but a distraction no less). As I say to my dad while he watches NOVA, "what are you going to do with all this knowledge?"
The closeness of information and material goes a long way in explaining my fascination with "camps". I mean, what would it take to turn a public university or a corporate manufacturing plant into a camp? To me, the provisional connotation of encampment calls to mind the de-abstracting effect that claiming one's autonomy would have on the economy. The brutal stigma of camps points to the imperative we as "makers of a compelling alternative" have to address: If we have a less abstract (more direct) structure of economic relations two (potentially troubling) things happen--1) on the personal scale we take more responsibility for advantages and mistakes we get involved in, therefore the merit of our work is more stark--and 2) on the global scale, our relation to ecology strikes us with more instantaneous force, where day-to-day circumstances like weather conditions bear on our immediate quality of life (this is already the circumstance of the global poor). In the new order, how does this more direct kind of responsibility not crush us? Our grappling for alternatives should not shy away from countering the individual stakes (whoa, sacrifices!) involved in greater ecological responsibility.
Brian, I don't share your pessimism that responses to climate change will be inevitably stalled. The main barrier to action is not recognition and desire to change, but rather "the cost" as defined by the status quo powers. Felix, here I am collapsing your four groups into three, those that have a large stake in the current power structure, those who have the means to analyze power (for better or worse), and those who want to fit in somehow. The vast majority that make up the latter conformists are subject to a tipping point, wherein a cohesive mass of attention (≥30%) from trusted media channels motions in the direction of a new order and change follows. I agree with Brian that going for power through civic engagement makes a lot of since here, but to take it further (on the Gramsci tip?) I think our movement requires images of this updated "good life" as a necessary catalytic device. And rather than authoritarian or corporatist propaganda, these images must be held to a democratic process, which to me looks like a networked series of physical conventions. To fully answer your question of what this more pleasant future looks like, Brian, we must convene and draw up some pictures.
That brings me to Prem's emphasis on the physical spaces required for "emergence". His point that [democratic?] process itself creates alternatives couldn't be more true, but how do we claim these spaces? Brian, this goes back to your point a few months ago about Marx's formations, meeting with knowledgeable others in real space within that artisan guild fraternity. Where are the guild-halls for today's technologies? Private tradeshows? Aspen-esque festivals? Academic conferences? Specialty book publishers? Online forums such as ours?
To ask Felix's question another way, how do we defragment these stray channels of know-how? Is it a parasitic model like Chomsky advocates, cleverly stealing from the powerful to sustain the insurgency? Should we set a goal of commandeering the increasingly crowdfunded campaign funds of the Democratic Party? Should we be busy rebooting an "occupy" movement that goes beyond arresting our troubled institutions, but immediately repurposing them into meeting halls for both democracy and the logistics of info-material redistribution?
By invoking the meeting hall we take the leap of actually imaging people in a room. Here, Lucia's concerns about the unequal stresses put on certain individuals due to common personality dynamics come roaring to the fore. My wife is a mental health therapist (and also an introvert). Her work constantly makes me aware of the social strain that people with personality disorders and other mental health concerns put on those around them. These aggressions often flow from damaging experiences in childhood, creating cycles of abuse, social ignorance or neglect. Pathways to self-awareness and "treatment" are hardly straightforward. Nevertheless, I do believe there are structural solutions for what seem like individualized traumas. Indeed, a movement that doesn't respond to the most damning forces on the interpersonal level offer us little hope if we want a massive alternative, attracting the many who are presently sore from continued societal breakdown.
When I ask my wife why she dearly needs time at home to recharge, her most common response is that the demands put on her during working hours have already depleted the energies she might use for socializing once "free time" begins after 5:00 or at the start of the weekend. Holding up autonomy and minority rights above the policing of obligations at work would be helpful in mitigating the unequal costs required of different personalities, and also the democratic renovation of workplace hierarchies would obviously do some good to that end. But would that be enough? Haven't the trade unions already fallen prey to the group dynamics that introverts fear? All this is to say, provisions for interior labor and fortitude are essential aspects of a more just social formation. And an alternative system of justice has to respond even to interpersonal aggressions in a way that is reconciliatory especially to victims, but also perpetrators.
As Lucia also points out, no one should be expected to conform to the same demands (social or otherwise) all the time. Beyond taking greater responsibility for destructive personalities, I would propose that an attractive vision of the future must return to seasonal schedules of labor. How might a reprieve or change in work throughout the year satiate what isn't attended to by varieties in a daily or weekly routine? The heavy walls of industry have disastrously insulated society from responsibility to the seasons (and ecological responsibility in general) and bent us toward relentless spans of repetition, holed off from other disciplines and stations of work. Wouldn't variegating the calendar with different matter and locations for work (and rest!) have tremendous psychic and ecological benefits? An economic reordering on this magnitude has to describe this system in technical terms that convincingly counter the present myths of economic "reality", e.g. "there isn't enough money" to make our compelling dreams a reality.
Returning to Felix's assertion that the movements on the ground are missing points of connection and also related to Morlock's concerns about scale, how do we break out of the fragmented individualist (boycott, consumerist politics) and moderately size ("intentional communities" and alternative platforms) to something on a scale that can effectively counter global corporations and transnational agreements? Can this be accomplished beyond the power of the state but in such a way that doesn't fall into the trap of ethnocentric nationalism? Will there be a "green book" with a directory of meeting halls and work stations for the journeywoman worker and her family? What would happen to those who wish to obstruct the socialist network after the rank coercion of the punitive, carceral state is abolished?
We must contemplate the terms of familiarity will garnish this emergent, evolving, network of seasonal and ecologically responsible labors, because familiarity is a more resilient bond than trust. To this end, I think the dual traditions of modernism and vernacularism are excellent traditions to cross-pollinate. Much like the big boxes and retail chains have come to define suburban comforts, how do the physical and programatic architectures of the coming socialism face the public in ways that promote mobility and transmission of "credits" from one labor form/region/discipline/tradition/technology to another?
How do we not get lost across such vast geographical and disciplinary subsections? On the largest scale, what form of governance would we validate with our duty even if it leads us (occasionally? seasonally?) to stations outside of our own intentions? Here again, we on the left have to confront something head-on that has an enormous stigma. In the face of the dominate corporate structures that redirect us all the time, would ANY alternative movement, political process, or governance structure earn in us a similar right to conscription? If we aren't going to shrink from all institutional forms (anarchism), when does an organization or institution get to decide for us? I ask this because I am unable to imagine a massive organization of societal change built on a simple volunteer basis, mainly because I believe that if given a choice, most people would (and do!) simply walk away from the basic day-to-day demands of socialization (ask those who bear the brunt of social reproduction!). This is why capitalist notions of individualism are such a powerful tool for coercion--people would rather go with the flow so long as they get a pass to ignore their neighbors' interests. Even if advantages slow to a trickle, satisfaction in violence goes a long way in making up the wage.
The most radical claim of modernity is mass-socialization itself, which in it's day-to-day exercises, sustains as a non-superlative and largely thankless set of tasks. To avoid mass-aceticism which will never garner a popular base, I believe the institutions that promote cooperation must plan on the award of some "superstructural" status to those who "answer the call" of socialization, so to speak. Even in the absence of meaningful hierarchy, superlative status is a powerful motivator. Conservative institutions are masters at this, but to violent and disastrous ends. In our discipline to avoid injustice, the Left often shrinks from action on the massive scale (I agree with Morlock on this), ceding the reigns to corporate sharks, sellout legislators, and authoritarian hucksters.
With lots of work ahead,
see you at the next meeting,
Vince
Dear Felix,
>But to break out of the mold of neoliberal hyper-individuality and the
cult of "weak ties", to formulate something like a left perspective,
there needs to be a realization of a common fate, of a problem that
cannot be solved individually, but demands a collective response. From
this, a practice of solidarity can be built. <
I have learned a lot from living in Paris for over two decades, especially from the recent renaissance of economic sociology and institutional economics here. I have hung out with European and Latin American activists who drew me into the alter-globalization movement launched in Porto Alegre in 2001. I met you and likewise gained greatly from our civilized interaction and friendship, as I have from Brian, Alex and others on nettime and in person. But -- there has to be a but -- I believe that there is one crippling intellectual impediment above all others that undermines political initiatives generated in this network. It is the belief that more solidarity can fix excessive individualism.
When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive. We could not close our house doors since neighbors should be free to come and go as they please. When the men took their morning crap in the outside loos, they left the door open to converse across the low backyard walls. After sanitation was modernized, you could still accidentally run into a old lady in the bathroom who couldn't bring herself to close the door. All bedroom doors were left open. The corner pub was our living room. When the gas company started work with their machines outside too early, half a dozen women would assail them on behalf of "our street". They shut down the machines. When United scored a goal, the combined shouts of 50,000 men cowed the women and children left behind like a hundred bull roarers in a New Guinea village.
By the 90s, having lived mainly in Britain, North America, West Africa and the Caribbean, I was convinced that solidarity in that form of concrete class solidarity was now gone forever. To my joy, living in Paris proved that I was wrong. The republican tradition of manifestation, of street protests, was alive and well. It was not for nothing that France gave us society and solidarity, England economic individualism, Germany philosophy and history, and America democratic revolution. But scratch the surface and it gets more complicated -- the English are profoundly conformist, the Americans even more so and I have never come across a people as individualistic as the French. Look at their intersections jammed at rush hour, the way they bust into queues, their behavior at supermarket checkouts.
All this is preamble, a phantasmagoria in Benjamin's terms. To get serious, I have to go back to Durkheim and Mauss. French social thinkers around 1900 blamed it all on Herbert Spencer. Market economy was an English invention (with some help from Adam Smith) and incurably individualistic, a premise taken to evolutionist extremes by Spencer's social Darwinism. When Talcott Parsons wrote The structure of social action (1937), he began by asking who killed Herbert Spencer and how? His answer was Durkheim, Weber, Pareto and Alfred Marshall (yes, the synthesizer of marginalist economics and Keynes'teacher).
Emile Durkheim, in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and his nephew Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925) and extensive political writings insisted that markets were social (the non-contractual element in the individual contract) and that humanity is homo duplex --both individual and social (or democracy must reconcile freedom and equality according to Tocqueville). Bourgeois ideology everywhere contrasts individualism and society, as Spencer did. In this the left as usual reproduces the dogma of its capitalist opponents. Mauss was a cooperative socialist, active in the French Section of the International Workers party (SFIO) and a close friend of Sidney and Beatrice Webb who, with Marshall and others, led the Fabian wing of the Labour Party. They aimed for consumer democracy building on the solidarity and individualism of existing capitalist societies, through coops, unions and mutual insurance.
Fair trade isn't just helping poor foreign farmers. It offers feel good shopping for bobos. If neoliberalism promotes "hyper-individuality" and "weak ties", it does so by doping the masses with the academic social sciences as a smokescreen for its own strategy for carving up the world as a plutocracy. Ensuring that capital flows freely everywhere is a coordinated social strategy. Why else would the US have 25 % of the world's prisoners, most of the world's weapons and the internet corporations who sabotage our ability to make society? When the corporations claim to be people like you and me in order to benefit from human rights laws, while unlike us retaining limited liability for debt, they combine individualism and global power in ways that are hidden from most and hardly revealed by setting up little clubby institutions that deny the legitimacy of their members' individuality and desire for freedom as for belonging to others as equals.
Europe is politically a mess and Latin America no better. This strategy of fixing individualistic markets with social clubs is bad politics because it's bad anthropology. Trump and Brexit may be bringing the Anglos to their knees -- or not. But it is time for the Latin tendency to recognize that the British and American empires are no longer what they were and that opposing individuals to society was always self-defeating. The Cold War pitted free enterprise against communism and both were a trfavesty of the forces driving the American and Soviet empires. We need to bring social and liberal democracy together somehow. We need realism, courage and some heavy hitters along the way.
Keith
On 27.12.18 20:11, Brian Holmes wrote:
> So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the
> good life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or
> regional scale.
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G. Vincent GaulinPendleton, SC