I have lived in Pars now for two decades and in that time I have been
sustained mainly by French economic sociologists and institutional
economists, as well as by networks taking in Latin America, Southern and
Northern Europe, Africa and South Asia. There is a dominant ideology in
these circles: the economy is dominated by capitalism, neoliberalism or
"markets" driven by English individualism, so that social or collective
considerations are marginalised, obscured or repressed. The policy
therefore is to restore society to its proper place. Sometimes this is
articulated through the idea of a commons.
C B Macpherson, in the introduction to his reader Property, reminds us that
there are only two kinds of property -- private, held exclusively against
the world, and common with inclusive access and use. The problem is that
private property is now overwhelmingly owned by public bodies, by
governments and corporations. The confusion is compounded in that private
property is still talked about as if it were individually owned objects
rather than ideas and business corporations won the human rights of
individual citizens while retaining their legal privileges.
Emile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss, in tracts ranging from The
Division of Labour in Society (1893) to The Gift (1925), attacked the
bourgeois ideology stemming from English writers like Herbert Spencer. The
industrial division of labour and the market contracts that sustain it are
not anti-social, but their social principles are usually hidden from view.
The task therefore is not to restore social interests that were previously
missing, but to build on what people already were doing along these lines
and to develop new more visible institutions and practices better able to
guarantee individual and social interests than what we have now.
Instead of tinkering with stand alone concepts like the commons or
counterculture, we have to have a comprehensive human philosophy. What does
it mean to be human? To be self-reliant and to belong to others. Both are
partial, difficult to attain and complementary. But holding two ideas in
ones head at once is apparently hard. So is the notion that self-interest
and mutuality must be combined pragmatically. Even harder is combining the
ideas that each human being is unique and part of humanity as a whole.
Kant, in Perpetual Peace, pointed out that we once roamed the earth without
restriction, but our movements are now controlled by territorial states
whose purposes include the use of armed force to maintain unequal relations
between the world's peoples. Earlier he insisted that the potential of
human reason will only be realized at the species, not the individual
level. He asked how societies were organized beyond he reach of states, at
a time when he knew that coalitions of states were gearing up for the
Napoleonic wars. The most difficult task for humanity and the last is
universal provision of social justice. The means to this end is conflict,
so that people will eventually choose law over suffering and loss.
We know that world society has degenerated since the settlement of the late
1940s, after thirty years of war and depression ended in a world revolution
linking western industrial societies, the Soviet bloc and newly independent
countries as developmental states. These gave priority to ordinary people's
purchasing power, public infrastructure and services, curbing capital flows
and economic inequality, while sustaining the biggest economic boom the
world has seen. The events of 1979-80 were a counter-revolution against
that revolution and we are still living with its priorities.
It is too late to revert to the Keynesian policies of the post-war era. The
money genie has been released from the bottle. Corporations now outnumber
governments by 2 to 1 in the top 100 economic entities of our world. They
are busy building a world society of which they will be the only effective
and responsible citizens. The American Empire still has a lot of hard
power, even if its soft power is diminished. Europeans' share of world
population in 2100 will be a sixth of what it was in 1900. Africa is the
only region whose population is growing now and its share will have
quintupled in the same period. Africa and Asia will account for around 82%
of living humanity in 2100. Is the West ("the whites") going to hand over
peacefully or go down with a fight?
And yes, we have stumbled into universal communications which may not
remain so for long. What difference does that make to our hopes for a
better future? But don't imagine that the parochial mutterings of a
self-selected group of western geeks who flourished in the 1990s will come
up with a discourse that grabs more than a tiny bit of the necessary
action. The net has to be cast much wider and what circumstances will
conspire to make that happen? Above all, if politics has to be reinvented
to meet current and future global needs, where will states be located and
is their reconfiguration possible without general war, as after 1945?
Keith
On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 11:47 PM, Felix Stalder <fe...@openflows.com> wrote:
> On 2017-07-08 10:53, Brian Holmes wrote:
>
> > These lines, while pitched at Milo and the young sexy neofascists,
> > describe a lot of the cultural pranks we used to celebrate in the
> > festival circuits emanating out from Amsterdam. The big difference
> > is that until very recently, the world was stable and the pranks
> > were inconsequential. Now the ways that such nihilism feeds monsters
> > have become all too obvious. The style of paranoid critique that many
> > of us in the theory-world practiced is complicit in these devastating
> > outcomes, because no matter how bad things may be, it is one's
> > responsibility to seek for possible ameliorations of the common lot
> > - by which I mean something much more widely shared than the rarified
> > concept of "the commons."
>
> Looking back, the shortcomings of the approaches "emanating out of
> Amsterdam", say tactical media in particular and, but the cultural/media
> left more generally, seem to be twofold, in my view.
>
>
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