Dear Brian,
As always your emails are illuminating.
I've one question: to you, what are the parties, social
formations, social forces that could enable " dispersed transformation
of the energy and agricultural systems accompanied but pervasive
reworking of the patterns of inhabitation and entirely new forms of
ecological stewardship, based on the logic of ecosystem services
(which needs to be amplified by a new concept of human services to
ecosystems)"?
And maybe a secondary concern about the term "service" that you use:
with a configuration of other managerial terms, it has replaced
-erased - first "source," then "ressource," I mean it's a term
completely integrated in the system that produced the environmental
disasters - I know I go quickly from service to disaster, but, to make
a long story short, it seems to me that the word service is a denial
of any eco-systemic reality (I try to explain that in La Part
inconstructible de la Terre, to be published in English as The
Unconstructable Earth at Fordham UP).
Best,
Frederic
On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 12:07 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:
Mason really captures the intensity of the breakdown, not only of
neoliberalism, but of the post-WWII interstate system. He also manages
to keep Asia in the picture, which is essential, because it is the
emergence of the China-centric economy that destabilized the former
Trilateral hierarchy of the US, Western Europe and Japan. However I
have always found Mason's prescriptions incoherent, and in this
case he goes off into some fantasy about Keynes that is totally
invisible on the actual political landscape. Except maybe in the UK
itself? If that's true, as David suggests, it would explain what I
don't get about the article. It would be really great to hear more
detail about the Corbynites' analysis of the international
situation and how they translate that into a domestic policy program
(Barbrook, where are you?).
In the US there is no broad discussion about the need for what Alex
calls a "new pact," and the reason for this is that, quite unlike the
situation in the 1930s, the economy is currently booming and there is
(as yet) no credible threat of authoritarian control over the
prosperous sectors. The professional-managerial types of the digital
economy, yesterday's "new class," have firmly hitched their
fortunes to the rising oligarchs, and there's far more interest in
the sales of Elon Musk's flamethrower than in any transformation
of the social order. We cannot currently produce anything on the order
of Keynes, much less Marx, because the macro-level breakdown of the
postwar system has really been caused at the micro level by the
ethical-political decay of the science-based professions that Felix
has analyzed. The emergence of the professionals as a force in their
own right, based on education and therefore distinct from the
capital-accumulating bourgeoisie, lent the consistency of a quest for
objective truth to all the properly political discussions about how to
organize a complex society. Neoliberalism dissolved that ethical
component of technocratic society by encouraging professionals to
abandon the state and any notion of public service, in favor of
entrepreneurship with its self-interested disruption of legitimate
rules and norms (something that Paolo Virno analyzed perfectly over 20
years ago in his text on Opportunism, Cynicism and Fear, which in
English is tepidly called The Ambivalence of Disenchantment).
Alex writes:
to stave off nationalism, racism, authoritarianism we need a new
social pact (similar to fordism in its macro elements) that
distributes the productivity of machine learning to all - a pact
between the forces representing the female and multiethnic precariat
and those of digital oligopoly
Alex, I totally agree about the new pact but I think the reason
it's not happening lies precisely in the description of its
potential partners. The precariat as theorized in the 1990s and 2000s
totally ignored the impoverished industrial workers outside major
metropolitan areas and the agricultural sector, paying only lip
service to migrant farm workers. It had nothing to say to the former
artisanal and commercial middle classes whose "included" status was
shattered by the opportunistic disruption of business models and the
retreat of the state from anything to do with social reproduction.
Unlike Fordism, it offered no productive pathway toward membership in
any kind of social pact, but only dangled the promise of a
redistribution of financial wealth whose spigot has now dried up. It
is true that machine learning will unleash a new flood of industrial
productivity comparable to that released by the cynical relocation of
Fordist industry to Asia during the neoliberal period. But without any
corresponding form of productive inclusion, that flood when it comes
will only drown people in more meaningless and abusive products,
exactly as the flood of cheap Asian "goods" - which should be called
"bads" - has destroyed the social fabric in the US and led to things
like the opioid crisis and the election of Trump. Let me be clear that
this was no fault of the Asians, but instead, it was down to the
owners of capital who sought a fast buck, and to the politicians who
enabled them. The evil twin of precariat theory in the US was nothing
other than Clintonian entrepreneurialism, which appealed to the vote
of women and minority sectors in order to increase the agency of
bankers and the emerging digital oligarchs.
Anywhere you go in the world, the contrast between the glittering
metropolis and the toxic countryside is now obvious. It is
underwritten everywhere by equally stark divides within the
metropolitan order, which remain invisible to people who move only
between their jobs, their entertainment palaces and whatever they call
home (from cheap flat to luxury penthouse). The thing that has now
started and happening and is about to intensify radically is not just
labor instability and household debt. Instead the cheap flats, decayed
middle class houses and rural shacks are going to start getting
massively destroyed by climate-change phenomena, as they already have
been in places like Puerto Rico or during the flooding in India. The
real opportunity for collective investment and a new form of
productive citizenship lies in eco-technics, by which I do not mean AI
or centralized geo-engineering but instead, dispersed transformation
of the energy and agricultural systems accompanied but pervasive
reworking of the patterns of inhabitation and entirely new forms of
ecological stewardship, based on the logic of ecosystem services
(which needs to be amplified by a new concept of human services to
ecosystems). Keynes has no blueprint for this situation. Neither do
any of the anarcho-libertarian theorists of more recent years,
including the Accelerationists with their absurd rallying cry of
luxury communism.
I actually think there's a theoretical/practical emergency
unfolding before our eyes, except it's still dinner hour below
decks on the Titanic, and most people are just anxiously wondering how
low they can go on the tip to the waiter. At least Paul Mason went up
for a look-see at the ocean.
Although we all surely disagree from the get-go, let's produce
some converging ideas on the scale of the current planetary weather.
Brian
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