Dear Felix, >But to break out of the mold of neoliberal hyper-individuality and the cult of "weak ties", to formulate something like a left perspective, there needs to be a realization of a common fate, of a problem that cannot be solved individually, but demands a collective response. From this, a practice of solidarity can be built. <
I have learned a lot from living in Paris for over two decades, especially from the recent renaissance of economic sociology and institutional economics here. I have hung out with European and Latin American activists who drew me into the alter-globalization movement launched in Porto Alegre in 2001. I met you and likewise gained greatly from our civilized interaction and friendship, as I have from Brian, Alex and others on nettime and in person. But -- there has to be a but -- I believe that there is one crippling intellectual impediment above all others that undermines political initiatives generated in this network. It is the belief that more solidarity can fix excessive individualism. When I grew up in Manchester after the war, solidarity was a powerful weapon against privacy, the cult of being exclusive. We could not close our house doors since neighbors should be free to come and go as they please. When the men took their morning crap in the outside loos, they left the door open to converse across the low backyard walls. After sanitation was modernized, you could still accidentally run into a old lady in the bathroom who couldn't bring herself to close the door. All bedroom doors were left open. The corner pub was our living room. When the gas company started work with their machines outside too early, half a dozen women would assail them on behalf of "our street". They shut down the machines. When United scored a goal, the combined shouts of 50,000 men cowed the women and children left behind like a hundred bull roarers in a New Guinea village. By the 90s, having lived mainly in Britain, North America, West Africa and the Caribbean, I was convinced that solidarity in that form of concrete class solidarity was now gone forever. To my joy, living in Paris proved that I was wrong. The republican tradition of manifestation, of street protests, was alive and well. It was not for nothing that France gave us society and solidarity, England economic individualism, Germany philosophy and history, and America democratic revolution. But scratch the surface and it gets more complicated -- the English are profoundly conformist, the Americans even more so and I have never come across a people as individualistic as the French. Look at their intersections jammed at rush hour, the way they bust into queues, their behavior at supermarket checkouts. All this is preamble, a phantasmagoria in Benjamin's terms. To get serious, I have to go back to Durkheim and Mauss. French social thinkers around 1900 blamed it all on Herbert Spencer. Market economy was an English invention (with some help from Adam Smith) and incurably individualistic, a premise taken to evolutionist extremes by Spencer's social Darwinism. When Talcott Parsons wrote The structure of social action (1937), he began by asking who killed Herbert Spencer and how? His answer was Durkheim, Weber, Pareto and Alfred Marshall (yes, the synthesizer of marginalist economics and Keynes'teacher). Emile Durkheim, in The Division of Labor in Society (1893) and his nephew Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925) and extensive political writings insisted that markets were social (the non-contractual element in the individual contract) and that humanity is homo duplex --both individual and social (or democracy must reconcile freedom and equality according to Tocqueville). Bourgeois ideology everywhere contrasts individualism and society, as Spencer did. In this the left as usual reproduces the dogma of its capitalist opponents. Mauss was a cooperative socialist, active in the French Section of the International Workers party (SFIO) and a close friend of Sidney and Beatrice Webb who, with Marshall and others, led the Fabian wing of the Labour Party. They aimed for consumer democracy building on the solidarity and individualism of existing capitalist societies, through coops, unions and mutual insurance. Fair trade isn't just helping poor foreign farmers. It offers feel good shopping for bobos. If neoliberalism promotes "hyper-individuality" and "weak ties", it does so by doping the masses with the academic social sciences as a smokescreen for its own strategy for carving up the world as a plutocracy. Ensuring that capital flows freely everywhere is a coordinated social strategy. Why else would the US have 25 % of the world's prisoners, most of the world's weapons and the internet corporations who sabotage our ability to make society? When the corporations claim to be people like you and me in order to benefit from human rights laws, while unlike us retaining limited liability for debt, they combine individualism and global power in ways that are hidden from most and hardly revealed by setting up little clubby institutions that deny the legitimacy of their members' individuality and desire for freedom as for belonging to others as equals. Europe is politically a mess and Latin America no better. This strategy of fixing individualistic markets with social clubs is bad politics because it's bad anthropology. Trump and Brexit may be bringing the Anglos to their knees -- or not. But it is time for the Latin tendency to recognize that the British and American empires are no longer what they were and that opposing individuals to society was always self-defeating. The Cold War pitted free enterprise against communism and both were a trfavesty of the forces driving the American and Soviet empires. We need to bring social and liberal democracy together somehow. We need realism, courage and some heavy hitters along the way. Keith On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:54 PM Felix Stalder <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 27.12.18 20:11, Brian Holmes wrote: > > So what's to be done is to generate new aspirations, new ideas of the > > good life, and initial models for putting them into practice at local or > > regional scale. > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
