Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

[Frank Rieger <frank@ccc.de>]

Dimitry, just for the record: I don´t speak for the CCC here. And the "both sides" strawman you are creating is just trying to obscure the problem that "the ends justify the means" is not a long-term viable concept for both ethical and practical reasons. Idolizing an imperialist and oppressive state like China just because it makes shiny socialist sounding propaganda is certainly not "left". I would not like to live in a world where millions of people suffer and die for either profit or ideology.


Going forward, I think any strategy needs to take into account that we are moving into a new phase that is characterized by some major trends (the list is not exhaustive):

1. A move towards open (not hidden as today) state oligopoly capitalism in the west where MegaCorps and the state form an open symbiosis made of regulatory capture and corporate support for imperialist aspirations.This will also seriously impact labour rights which will be the first to get chopped in the Corona aftermath in the name of "enhancing competitiveness".

2. The technological universe split between the large blocks (especially China and the West) looks unavoidable at this point in time. The western elites have recognized the technological and manufacturing dependency and will try to reduce it, through state-sponsored enterprises in strategic sectors. From an imperial point of view this is logical, as technology is the foundation of power (control over the movement of people, information/data, money and goods) and military might.

3. Given the tighter fusion of state and MegaCorps, the ruling elites in the West are already developing a clear understanding that under no circumstances this conglomerate can fall under the political control of people who might entertain the idea that expropriation or splitting up of the MegaCorps for the good of the people is an interesting option. Thus the efforts to distract from the core conflicts by directing the public focus to narrower issues like climate change, social justice, terrorism etc. pp. will get significantly stronger. And these will be used to build tighter systems of control, as of course totalitarian solutions for all these issues look obviously attractive.

4. Military escalation between nations / power blocs will become again more normal, with the corresponding "patriotic" fever and the good old "supporting our troops is our duty" themes being played. We are moving technologically to an omniviolence world (Armenia / Aserbaidjan was just the preview), where drone warfare / assassinations and infrastructure attacks (cyber and physical) are the new normal. The general public will become even more oblivious to wars far away (and atrocities committed against migrants at the borders towards poorer countries), as long as the number of own victims is low. (Private military contractor MegaCorps are already doing a lot of the murdering and they will get an even bigger share of the bloody pie.) This ignorance by the public will suddenly and nastily shift the very moment their normal life is impacted, but this will only lead to more internal oppresion.

5. The information landscape will become ever more confusing with the big platforms getting more heavily policed / censored, every actor running its own disinformation, distraction and discourse disruption ops and counter-ops, basically unrestricted. As Dimitri has so aptly demonstrated, even having a civilized debated on this venerable mailing list has become challenging. This is because the default mode of discourse is no longer to come to a mutual enhancing of understanding the world better by exchange of arguments and viewpoints – and changing its on opinion based on the better argument or missed facts. The goal instead now is to "win", "destroy" the opponent or just cause him to quit the discourse by annoying the shit out of them.

So how to get to a strategy out of this situation?

First, everyone needs to learn how to hold a proper discourse again where the goal is, in the best tradition of marxist dialectics, not to "win" an argument but to harness collective brainpower to come to better solutions. Interestingly, in most of the vaguely leftist movements in places like Kurdistan or Mexico, this works much better than in the West, because they face concrete problems that need to be tackled with meaningful actions and they don´t have brainpower to waste.

Second, we should recognize that there is no way around trying out concepts and ideas in practice on a small scale. Groups need to set up their own voluntary structures, analyze the failures, iterate until things work, analyse the boundary conditions, document well what they found out, share to convince people why their template for doing things is better than what someone else has tried out. This applies to economics, distribution and accountability of power, decision making etc. Lots of communities that find their own rules, distill them into templates and invite others to use the templates and iterate on them provides a resilient, adaptable and productive way to solve the problems of economic infeasibility, corruption, abuse of power, suffocating in bloated sets of rules and dynastic elite forming that have wrecked past attempts. Acceptance that different people have different needs, that different groups of people can do things differently and under different conditions while still following the same end goals is a key element of any larger strategy.

Third, the theoretical foundations of left theory are at the moment quite frankly not in a much better shape than those of the current capitalist economic theory, which has utterly failed. Acceleration of technology with the resulting huge advantage for oligopolies that can create the conditions for huge capital accumulation early on in a technology cycle is nothing new for any reader of Marx and Engels, it is just that the scale and speed have immensely progressed. The question how leftist experimental communities / networks can economically thrive under these conditions is one that is urgent and is so far not well addressed by most theorists, who rather focus on the grand schemes that ideally should be forced on the largest number of people possible. There are some notable exceptions though.

So in summary, my take is that the way forward is to try to tackle the three points above, focus on building alternatives outside the prevailing system, experimenting and documenting what works for others to replicate and grow into a movement and into a critical mass by offering obviously better and more attractive alternatives, instead of waiting for a world revolution that will never come.

Thanks & Greetings,

Frank

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