Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 2, Issue 7

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Rahul, thanks for writing, and yes, I am interested to talk about it.

  From whatever I read about goings-on in the USA (I am not American and do
> not live there) it looks to me like the Bidens Sr and Jr are being found to
> be corrupt to a degree perhaps never seen before in the USA, and that their
> party and their party's followers have nothing whatsoever to say about the
> misconduct of these people.
>

Well, you could look a little closer and the discussion would become more
interesting. Biden Jr has definitely abused his family name in what I would
call a corrupt or criminal way, but he isn't a politician himself, and so
far Biden Sr has not been found guilty of providing his son the influence
which the latter sought to sell. Nor has Biden Sr protected Jr
institutionally, as you can see from the ongoing trial. Your statement
about Sr is definitely a Republican talking point, but without any proof to
support a legal case, and to me it's quite important to stay within what's
called "the reality community." The populist political technique of making
outrageous and unfounded claims is an epistemological attack on democracy,
which needs the critical quest for the truth in order to come to an
operative consensus.

That said, I agree with the thrust of your remark because I'm continually
shocked by the lack of self-critique on the part of the Democratic Party
and its followers. Two things of particular concern: first, the
administration's foreign policy which is thoroughly warlike; and second,
its continuing support for the fossil-fuel industry. Sure, you can find
what's typically called corruption among Democrats (I mean, abuse of
elected position for personal gain), but it's far exceeded by political
corruption, which consists of politicians seeking budgets for their home
state in order to gain votes. That behavior is practically automatic, and,
among other things, it impedes urgently needed changes having to do with
CO2 emissions. It now appears as a serious weakness in the way democracy
works as a system. This is one of my main points: Because of economic
populism, democracy is failing to deliver on its core steering function
(which is guiding the polity through a crisis). The UK has provided many
examples of this recently, and I guess the list could go on if we looked
into other countries. Sure, they've always been corrupt as hell, but now
it's so glaring, and societies are so paralyzed, that it can be seen as an
emergency situation.


> You dislike Macron in France and Modi in India, both for the authoritarian
> manner (clearly unconstitutional) in which their administrations (mis)rule.
> Yet France has perhaps the oldest claim to be the intellectual fount of
> democracy and India since the early 1950s to be the world's largest
> democracy. What has gone wrong? Is it only the fault of capitalism and
> whatever it has mutated into?
>

That's the big question, and the points you make about France and India
definitely underscore how serious it is. Asking "What has gone wrong?" is
essential. Saying it's the fault of capitalism and leaving it at that would
be simply useless. Everywhere, societies are facing make or break issues.
How they react, on what basis, through what institutional mediations, with
what blockages or failures, those are the key questions. Everywhere there
are major interest groups built up around extractive, industrial and
financial markets, and these groups are defending dead-end positions in
toxic hierarchies. So far, the US-China conflict is an expression of the
struggle between roughly symmetrical interest groups, for control over
exactly the same positions. So yeah, it's about capitalism but also about
the absence of regulation. It's about the failures of democratic
capitalism.

Where's the democratic deliberation on the most urgent stakes of the
twenty-first century? Well, those stakes are largely off the table. That's
the shortest possible way of describing the current crisis of democracy.

>From the US perspective I still have some admiration for certain steps
being taken by the European Union, but EU politics are hard to follow in
detail and I would be glad to hear from people who do.



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> > Today's Topics:
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> >     1. The ends of democracy (Brian Holmes)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:59:35 -0300
> > From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
> > To: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> >       collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets"
> >       <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> > Subject: <nettime> The ends of democracy
> > Message-ID:
> >       <CANuiTgzxtSz26oKbfwr6pyc-RPVk1wm7cxMVC3W8inbD-U=
> AvQ@mail.gmail.com>
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> >
> > On my way to Argentina a couple weeks ago I started listening to the book
> > by Martin Wolff, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. I was drawn by the
> > use of the central concept, which has been deployed by Wolfgang Streek
> for
> > many years. The basic idea, as old as Marx, is that capitalism has been
> > historically associated with democracy, not by accident but because free
> > labor is much more productive (that's Marx) and because free
> entrepreneurs
> > can process information and invent new business combinations more
> > efficiently than any centralized government (that's Hayek and
> Schumpeter).
> > However, democratic government delivers not only a legitimation but also
> a
> > contradiction of capitalism, because it is not just about the individual
> > freedom to labor and invent. It's also about collective decisions
> > concerning resource use, the regulation of production and the
> distribution
> > of the results.
> >
> > I don't know if Wolff would agree to the above because I got sick of his
> > paternalism and hypocrisy, so I dropped the book. However it stimulated
> > some end-time thoughts I have been having over the last few years.
> >
> > Many people believe we are in a crisis of democracy (though few mention
> > capitalism). The case of Trump makes this obvious. If he is elected
> again,
> > democracy's days are likely numbered. The aspect of collective regulation
> > (rule by law) is obviously flouted by Trump and his followers, not to
> > mention the critical quest for truth that since the Enlightenment has
> been
> > a core technique for obtaining a workable social consensus. Unfortunately
> > this is not only a US issue.
> >
> > Take the case of an idiot like the Argentine politician Javier Millei,
> who
> > just came out of nowhere to receive a stunning 30% of the vote for
> > president in the first round of elections. He's a TV personality whose
> > campaigning style is a mashup of Trump and BoJo. A libertarian, he would
> > eliminate all redistribution, lift the currency controls that reduce
> > inequality between those earning dollars and those earning pesos, and
> > eliminate supposedly useless institutions like the national science
> > foundation (Conicet). A harsh conservative at the same time, he admires
> the
> > architects of Argentina's crash in 2001 (Menem, Cavallo), despises any
> sort
> > of women's liberation and openly favors figures associated with the
> > military dictatorship of 1976-85. The vote for him expresses widespread
> > rage against the status quo. His support comes from everywhere in the
> > country except the Buenos Aires metropolitan region - just like the
> > rural/urban divide in the US. His rallying cry was "Que se vayan todos!"
> > (kick the politicians out, every one of them - an anti-political populism
> > which, unfortunately, was also exactly the slogan of the anti-neoliberal
> > revolt in 2001). After that example, look into Nayib Bukele in El
> Salvador,
> > Narendra Modi in India, etc. A Trump victory would open the floodgates
> for
> > these kinds of figures, while at the same time provoking reactionary
> > parliamentary regimes tending toward authoritarian "democracy," like that
> > of Emmanuel Macron in France.
> >
> > At a higher level of abstraction, consider the widespread opinion that
> > among contemporary developed governments, only China can make effective
> > decisions. I agree with the observation and apparently, so does the Biden
> > administration in the US. It has responded to rising Chinese cultural,
> > economic and military power by printing money at will, taking major steps
> > toward direct management of the economy and engaging preparations for a
> war
> > (saber waving at China, expansion of NATO, remilitarization of Japan,
> > reconciliation of South Korea and Japan, etc). All of this reinforces the
> > same nationalism unleashed by Trump, albeit in a different rhetorical
> key.
> > These are profound changes which cannot be explained by the (nonetheless
> > undeniable) decay of the democratic public sphere brought about by the
> > likes of Facebook and Twitter. What you see in the global diplomatic
> arena
> > today is a desperate attempt by the US to recover control over a world
> > order whose peripheral components - in Central Asia, Africa and Latin
> > America - have been absorbed over the last ten years into the new trading
> > system constituted by the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. It is hard to
> > believe that democracy could survive a dramatic rise of militarized
> > nationalism provoked by a clash of rival imperialisms.
> >
> > A third and even greater threat to democracy stems from the same
> > observation about China. If anything is ever to be done about climate
> > change, it will require a major increase in the capacity to govern, and
> > specifically, to slow down runaway resource use. In a sense, we are
> > hopefully all China soon, and the point is to paint the red dragon green.
> > But this is exactly what voters are refusing. Currently, all democratic
> > capitalist countries require continuous economic growth to assure the
> > legitimacy of their governments. This is even true for China, which is
> not
> > democratic but has definitely unleashed individual and entrepreneurial
> > economic freedoms as a compensation for centralized control. Ever since
> the
> > end of the Second World War, and the simultaneous "Great Acceleration,"
> the
> > capacity to extract, to produce, and especially, to consume, has been the
> > centerpiece of capitalist democracies. How to produce new forms of
> desire,
> > new individual ethics and new collective values on the timeline of the
> > rapidly decaying biosphere? It would hardly be surprising if democracy
> did
> > not turn out to be the answer to that question.
> >
> > I love democracy, but democratic capitalism is a planetary bust. In my
> > short remaining life I will never give up on the expansion of human
> rights
> > under a framework attentive to inequalities of race, class and gender.
> > However, the drive to accumulate, and to attain what the Viennese
> political
> > ecologists Brand and Wissen call "the imperial mode of living," does not
> > seem to be tempered by the rights framework, either at the top or even in
> > the lower reaches of the income distribution. I share the aspiration
> toward
> > what Kohei Saito calls "degrowth communism," but I don't yet see how to
> get
> > there politically. I also share the desire, experienced by a relatively
> > small but growing number, for trans-species empathy and a profoundly
> > relational experience of what we now call "selfhood" - but I can hardly
> > imagine the cultural, political and economic conditions under which that
> > desire could be instilled and fulfilled among broad segments of
> > contemporary urban and rural populations. The slightest steps in those
> > directions, which always involve some limitation of desire and resource
> > use, immediately seem to dissolve the social contract, unleashing
> symbolic
> > and real violence.
> >
> > Democracy has ends, in the sense of transcendent orientations and goals,
> > that differ considerably from those of capitalism. This was a marriage of
> > convenience that's now ending very badly. I don't have the solution to
> the
> > riddle of the modern Sphinx. This post is an invitation to think about
> it,
> > and to talk about it.
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Subject: Digest Footer
> >
> --
> _________________________
> rahul.goswami@pobox.com
> +91 8600043381/9833471884
>
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