Re: <nettime> electro- vs petro-state

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

Wow, it's great to hear people talking about these things, thanks for this
Felix:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/brics-in-2025/

The Phenomenal World article is the story of hegemonic transition,
whose broad outlines were easy to predict by the late 2000s. However, the
phenomenon in question is so big, so complex, with so many private and
national interests involved in an ever-changing set of dynamic
relationships, that it's almost impossible to see it as it unfolds. That's
why this is such a good short piece.

In an interview between David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi that we discussed
on nettime back in the day ("The Winding Paths of Capital") Arrighi noted
that it would take cooperation between the major Western powers - what used
to be called inter-imperialist cooperation - to stave off a shift in world
hegemony from the US to China. "Inter-imperialist cooperation" is just a
highly ideological way of saying "the West vs the Rest" - but maybe there
is something worth keeping in that hoary old concept. When Russia invaded
Ukraine in 2022, the renewal of military collaboration among what are once
again described as the Western "great powers" became the new policy of the
United States, attempting to a reinforce the Nato alliance and enlarge it
for a confrontation with China - or at least, as a containment strategy
toward that incredibly dynamic rising power. You might remember that Nato
opened an office in Japan to that end, as Biden set about trying to realize
what Obama had earlier proclaimed, the famous "pivot to Asia." Although I
am completely pro-Ukrainian I still pointed this out at the time, and
everyone savaged me for that because it was a politically incorrect thing
to say. Supposedly the West was morally good in its stance toward Ukraine.
OK, believe what you like. What I saw at the time was a morally good stance
folded into an overarching imperialist logic of domination.

The interesting thing is that although the United States under Trump no
longer has those ambitions to reboot the post-World War II world order, and
is now trying to brute-force its way to a renewed dominance, the Russian
war has to the contrary played perfectly into China's hands and served the
aspirations of many developing countries very well, allowing them to take
their first steps toward an exit from the US-led trading and investment
regime. The trade in Russian oil not priced in dollars has been the crucial
vector of this shift; but it is underpinned, as the Phenomenal World
authors point out, by China's major efforts at setting up alternative
supply chains and technology transfer agreements throughout Asia, Africa
and Latin America, where governments and developmentalist intellectuals
have been trying to engineer such shifts since the New International
Economic Order projects of the 1970s. In Argentina toward the end of the
2010s I witnessed this first hand: the Confucius Institute began
distributing money to all the leftist intellectuals who, without abandoning
their critical faculties, set about generating a lot of enthusiasm for the
fulfillment of old "South-South" dreams of codevelopment serving human
ends. Chinese rhetoric directly fed those dreams and jump-started the new
phase of development on the back of suppressed ambitions dating back to the
aborted global revolution of the 1960s. This was a fascinating moment which
few people in the US or Western Europe even noticed.

Today, the ugly spectacle of Trump breaking all the conventions of liberal
multilateralism, and thereby apparently destroying the prospects of
"inter-imperialist cooperation," might make you believe that it's now a
done deal. No one can hold back the tide of history. The Western alliance
has broken down and substantial decolonization of the Global South has
begun. Hegemony has already shifted to the East.

It sounds rosy under those lights, but it's far from the case. This is a
major crisis, and like all such crises, it unfolds in the dark, between
players of highly questionable motivations, and largely by sheer accident,
under the pressures of passion and necessity. We are at the outset of a
protracted struggle in which anything can happen.

In Chicago at Watershed Art & Ecology we are currently organizing an
experimental conference in the Anthropocene Campus series, this one called
"Anthropocene Consequences" (Oct 22-26 - contact me if you want to come).
The reason for speaking about the present political disaster of the United
States under this heading of "Anthropocene Consequences" is spelled out
really well in the Phenomenal World article. In the face of a challenge,
not only from Russia and China, but also from ecological and human rights
defenders at home, the extractive fraction of capital in the US (20th
century style industrialism) has allied with the tech fraction (21st
century logistics, warfare and social control) in a bid to impose their
combined hegemonic power on the world. They are doing this via a direct
takeover of the American state, whose blueprint at the strictly capitalist
level is called Project 2025. They are putting everything into this effort
- it's a full-on national-fascist takeover, jackboots and all - and since
the extractive, industrial and managerial interests of large and
influential sectors in Europe and in the developing countries themselves
are threatened by the Chinese-led energy transition, it means that the
struggle is intense everywhere and at all scales. In Argentina over the
course of just a few years we witnessed a pivot from enthusiastic opening
to China back to complete strategic alignment with the US - accompanied by
the shift toward a fascist-type police state. At the same time, neighboring
economic powerhouse Brazil has taken exactly the opposite direction. You
can be sure that the climate crisis, which is setting the basic terms for
this confrontation, will become increasingly significant to the strategic
aims of all nation-states, and to the existential quandary of all global
populations.

To me the Phenomenal World article is just the obvious thumbnail sketch of
what's going on in reality. But I don't think that's so easy to see from a
tech outlook. If you think of tech as this unprecedented thing that emerged
from nowhere in the 1990s and created an entirely new world - well, then
history is bunk, right? But just think for a moment of Silicon Valley tech
as the latest expression of the US-led logistical, managerial and
consumerist world system developed in the second half of the twentieth
century. From that viewpoint, tech is perfectly integrated with
extractivism and with fossil fuels, which are now called upon to power AI
data centers, so that Elon Musk can implant chips in our heads and make us
into the interplanetary work force of his Blade Runner dreams.
Unfortunately, this new suicidal phase of capitalist development is what
the United States is gunning for when it sends its bombs to Ukraine and to
Israel, and prepares for its confrontation with China, as both recent
administrations have done. And OK, I know it's supposed to be morally wrong
to equate the Biden and Trump administrations, but on many levels I do.

The Anthropocene consequences are heavy, too heavy, because they are
systemic and also because they are mostly invisible to all those who want
to find the good guy (or the "indispensable nation") to follow through the
current world panorama. I think the absence of this shining moral and
intellectual light is a testimony to our really abject collective
failure to develop a vision of a viable future, outside the imperatives of
the capitalist state. If all this comes out badly we're going to have a
devastating world war - and that's a real possibility. But even if it
doesn't go that far (current levels of economic integration weigh against a
world war), what's decisively happening is the wholesale destruction of the
capacity for fully global, and not simply inter-imperialist, cooperation on
the level of planetary stewardship. As efficient and cheap as China's new
electric cars may be, they are not going to stop runaway global warming
without a genuinely integrated, rules-based global ecological order. So
will something new arise from the ashes?

Unfortunately I suspect we will see the ashes - and the floods - come first.

Which is no reason at all not to keep trying for a more just social order.
If only to preserve that moral thing called your own humanity, which
can't survive if it is not widely shared.

solidarity, Brian



On Mon, Sep 1, 2025 at 2:54 AM Felix Stalder via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

>
> This is one of the best articles on geopolitics that I've read in a long
> time, not the least because it puts BRICS at the center, rather than the
> US.
>
> https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/brics-in-2025/
>
> The basic argument is that the competition between China and the US is
> now also a competition between two techno-political paradigms, one based
> on (green) electricity and one based on fossil fuels, with China being
> the largest producer of green energy (by far), while the US as become
> the largest exporter of fossil fuels.
>
> And these are really two paradigms from which very different industrial
> policies, geopolitics, eco-politics, and even cultures (think
> petromasculinity) flow.
>
> There is now a fierce geopolitical competition between these two
> paradigms, and the US has relatively little to offer, so it has to
> revert to brute force to keep other countries in line. This works best
> with allies (think Europe promising to buy LNG and scrapping tariffs on
> US monster cars). Also domestically, the US uses brute-force to keep
> fossil fuels competitive, cancelling almost finished green energy
> installations and gutting the EPA to offload more of the costs to public.
>
> On the other hand, the China model (and cheap Chinese exports), allow
> countries like Pakistan to leap-frog in terms of energy production,
> installing 17GW of solar capacity in 2024 in a largely bottom-up process
> (as a comparison, Germany installed about 20GW).
>
> As they write:
>
> "China’s package of automation, digitalization, and electrification
> offers firms and nations not just carbon-reduction but also—more
> persuasively—productivity, efficiency, and energy sovereignty. The
> material basis of the global production, consumption and information
> systems are being remade. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to think that
> will imply a radical transformation in global politics."
>
> They summarize this shift as "Diversify, dedollarize, decarbonize".
>
> And, interestingly, AI plays an important, but somewhat subordinate
> role, as part of a new industrial infrastructure, which underpins the
> electrification and digitization in all its aspects. No AGI necessary.
>
> The article even contains an update of Carlotta Perez famous chart on
> techno-economic paradigms, with the IT/software paradigm in decline.
>
>
>
> I came across this article via Paris Marx's Tech Won't Save US podcasts,
> where the two authors. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay, were interviewed.
>
>
> https://techwontsave.us/episode/291_how_chinas_renewable_push_upends_geopolitics_w_kate_mackenzie__tim_sahay
>
> --
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