Re: <nettime> Ocular facts

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

Felix Stalder wrote:

"I think any alternative must turn the new conditions of "expensive nature"
and "end of fossil fuels" into a source of agency."

Felix, I totally agree. This is what democracy could do. Instead of
inciting rage and calling for violence against a scapegoat, a candidate
would have to stand up, name the unsolved challenges and propose the new
arenas in which citizens can have agency. These arenas would include, at
minimum, C02 reduction, cross-border solidarity instead of border policing,
and the renewal of public-benefit infrastructure. They would involve a
significant role for the military in terms of disaster relief and
pacification, and they would lead to the nationalization of at least some
aspects of energy production and distribution. There are heroic deeds to be
accomplished in these arenas. Democracy grows strong through the
multiplication of individual agency.

However, just getting started on that pathway requires a struggle between a
domestic democratic project and the corporate interest groups that sustain
the exploitation of cheap energy and cheap labor at the global level. And
in the developed countries, many many people are engaged, either
substantially or aspirationally, in the exploitation of cheap energy and
cheap labor.

Passions are easy to stoke, and conflicts are quick to explode, when
longstanding conditions of access to resources, income and social status
start suddenly to change. Creating the possibility of agency, however, is
very different from inflaming hatred. You have to give people a larger
vision within which their individual actions can stand out as
transformative. In the United States, after the first Trump presidency, the
Democrats designed legislation to do this, it was called Build Back Better.
The idea was to create arenas for socially transformative employment in
hi-tech industry, energy provision and urban retrofitting, with multiple
points of entry for different regions, races and classes. The problem is
that the Democrats failed to pass the legislation, while at the same time
getting embroiled in both cold and hot wars whose aim is to sustain the
corporate exploitation of cheap energy and cheap labor. So it's not that
they didn't try. It's that they failed.

This has been both painful and pitiful to watch, because Biden knew what
was needed and was initially able to explain why, raising a lot of
enthusiasm. He has simply been unable to deliver. His policies were ruined
in advance by the narrow demands of interest groups, and the energies of
his administration have subsequently been sapped by the maintenance of
empire. Biden can no longer explain anything, because he is now mainly
involved in defending the class structure that has caused all the problems.
Therefore he appears as a slack-jawed zombie in the face of Trump, who as a
fact-free nationalist does not struggle beneath the weight of
contradiction. Biden, on the other hand, has been destroyed by the
contradictions between his domestic welfare and global capitalist ambitions.

This is not over yet. Courage only appears in the face of fear. As the
situation becomes frightening, we as citizens, and particularly as
intellectuals, need to find the courage to state what we think is possible,
and to shoulder the sacrifices of getting there. We need to demand courage,
both from our leaders and from ourselves. Otherwise we'll be led by
domestic rage into civil strife and international warfare.

For years on this list I wrote about major political-economic crises that
lead to paradigm shifts. Now we are clearly at the turning point of a major
crisis. It's the point where centrist parties fail. At this terrifying
moment, only the courage to express a necessarily abstract but still widely
shareable vision can open up the arenas of transformative agency.

soberly, Brian



On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 5:16 AM Felix Stalder via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

>
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> On 6/30/24 23:09, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> > Why do the centrist parties fail?
>
> I think we all know the basic outlines of the answer, but at the risk of
> mansplaining, here is my version of it.
>
> Social Democracy, understood very broadly as centrism, was built on a
> compromise between labor and capital. Allowing for capital accumulation
> with some concessions for labor. This was based on three conditions: the
> Cold War which made capital inclined to accept such a compromise, "cheap
> nature" and abundant fossil fuels, both of which supported the fantasy
> of endless growth.
>
> All three are gone. The idea of the "peace dividend" that inspired
> Clinton/Blair/Schröder's "third way" obscured the consequences of the
> end of the Cold War for a decade or so, but not for much longer. The
> rise of the billionaire class and extreme social inequality is the
> direct effect that everyone can see.
>
> The end of cheap nature triggered a new geopolitical scramble for
> resources and rising costs of climate change, economically and
> politically. "Peak Oil" (not in the sense of peak availability, but peak
>   use) threatens to devalue trillions of dollars in assets
> (infrastructure and reserves) which is at odds with the demands of
> capital accumulation.
>
> The centrist parties, vetted to the modern notion of "realism" and
> "belief in science", do acknowledge all of this, but offer no solution.
> Their policies amount in the best case to crashing into the wall at
> 90km/h instead of 100km/h.
>
> The right's answer to all of this has been to deny the reality of the
> problems, yet indirectly offering ways to address them nevertheless:
> ethno-nationalism (and geopolitics as war-like competition) and
> eco-fascim (e.g. blaming population growth (aka non-whites) for the
> environmental problems and creating a kind of neo-Manthusianism).
>
> In my view, this will lead to even more misery, and while it doesn't
> offer optimism (Trump never smiles), it offers, what is more important,
> agency. The center offers only fake optimism (new technologies will
> solve climate change), but no agency.
>
> Stopping this, I fear, will be extremely hard because the center
> collapses under its contradiction (you can see this in US, as Brian
> described, but also  in Germany, where a social democrat-led government
> is highly unpopular and seems to open the door to the far right. Let's
> see what happens in the UK....).
>
> I think any alternative must turn the new conditions of "expensive
> nature" and "end of fossil fuels" into a source of agency. And there are
> plenty of examples, we all know that too. Do they form a coherent
> program? Not yet. Will they? It's hard to say. What we know from complex
> system science, in stable circumstances, change is either impossible,
> or, retrospectively, inevitable.
>
> And, if anything is clear, we are not in a very stable system-state.
> Thus, nothing is impossible or inevitable.
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