Re: What does Trump get right?
Dear Michael, we fundamentally agree and yet it seems we also fundamentally disagree. Yes, I too think November is pivotal and the defeat of the Republican party and the disempowerment of its chief is essential. Like yourself, moreover, I think this way because of the reality of climate change. Trump has worked on nothing so hard as dismantling every piece of environmental legislation achieved over the past five decades. He has been effective at it, despite tremendous resistance. I think this is a crime against humanity. We really don't have to disagree on that, I can assure you. The question is how to win in November. This question is at the center of Democratic political strategy. Can the party win by throwing its support behind a surge of young candidacies responding to a massive conviction that the economic system has been rigged against the majority, that they have been denied a good life, duplicitously saddled with debt, relegated to precarious employment, swindled of their money by financial fraud, denied public services, shut out of health care, blocked because of the color of their skin, struck down by racist police? Or can the party win by going back to Clintonian triangulation and the soothing assurance that all is already for the better in the best of all possible worlds? Those who want to take Option 2 represent the deeply rooted inertial faction of the Democratic Party. Those who want Option 1 - whose most accurate name is social democracy, and whose most rhetorically powerful name is socialism - can recognize momentum when they see it. This is not about voting for a third party. This is about changing the only viable one we have. The Republicans in their twisted way recognized this, albeit reluctantly, in the wake of 2008. Their activist donor networks supported the grassroots upsurge of the Tea Party and turned it into an electoral surge that disempowered Obama in 2010 (Theda Skocpol's book is the best story about this, but Jane Meyer's Dark Money fills in the gaps about the donor network's role). A right-wing critique of neoliberal capitalism thereby made its way into the Republican Party. Don't waste time explaining that this was no real critique, they don't understand the modern economy, etc. What matters in politics is the effectiveness. This critique grew and it was not fully instrumentalized by the usual Republican power brokers. In 2016 it shattered the traditional structures of the Republican party and of its policy elites to smithereens, unleashing the irrational fury of the present regime. My claim is that this was achieved because Trump himself criticized the structure of the US political economy as it had evolved with effective bipartisan support over decades, calling out its injustices in a language that his constituency could understand and taking bold moves to change it. Nevermind that his moves are contradictory, incoherent, hypocritical, self-destructive. They continue to be far more effective politically than anything the Democrats have produced, including Obama, who despite his centrism was in many respects an outlier in his own party. The Democrats need to repopulate their party with representatives who do not look, talk, act or cash in like the Clintons. They need to critique the political economy for its flagrant injustices and, because their constituency is rational, they need to propose radical but effective solutions to those injustices while also moving decisively ahead on the biggest injustice of all, climate change. To do this requires a shakeup equivalent to the one performed by the Tea Party. It requires an upsurge by the base. The keyword of the upsurge is socialism. Now, as Gary Hall just said on this list the other day, politics is about hegemony. Hegemony is not total power, nor is it the reconciliation of all political contradictions. It is about the temporary unification or suturing of contradictions so as to produce an effective unity within a specific conjuncture. Time is short. The strategic question is what are the contradictions, and how can they be overcome in November? Those who are energized to win the November elections are divided into three camps. The first just viscerally hate Trump and think that the hatred of Trump is all that matters, don't worry, they will vote for any Democrat that makes it onto the ticket and no one will have to go knocking on their door and offering them a ride to the polls. The second camp wants a return to a version of common sense forged by Kennedy on the basis of FDR. They want a renewal of public institutions, an extension of public employment, economic planning to relieve hardship, the extension of civil rights, a return to ethical considerations in every profession and a renewed sense of community, social democracy in short. The third camp are the campers, the Occupiers, who gave up anarchy for electoral politics because of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They want the same things, but they see
Re: What does Trump get right?
On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 3:14 AM, Keith Hart wrote: > For some decades, usually behind closed doors, the corporations have been > designing a world society in which they would be the only effective > citizens. They disparage the old political model of nation-states > (corrupt), national laws (no reach) and citizenship (lazy and > irresponsible), evoking a weird version of Kantian moral law instead. The > two planks of their existence -- limited liability for debt conferred by > Elizabeth I and elision of the difference between real and artificial > persons in economic law (Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad > 1886) must occupy centre-ground in any mobilization against them. > Corporations ability to claim the human rights of individual citizens not > only guarantees them permanent legal immunity, but by collapsing the > distinction between persons, ideas and things, political responsibility and > action become unthinkable. > Keith, I agree with your global economic perspective, and would add that the remarkable capacity of the corporate order to deliver the goods to world populations (which you've always insisted on recognizing) is the social relation both hidden and expressed by the commodity fetish. It is a cult of power, offering a spectrum of personalized deities that far outstrips the multivariate gods of the late Roman Empire. While the cult is celebrated in the field of representation, aka "spectacle," the machinic power of capital (those non-financial corporations you mentioned) continues to rip materials from the ground in some places while covering the earth in steel and concrete elsewhere -- with Canada's Tar Sands and China's "One Belt, One Road" providing devastating examples. It was ever the job of intellectuals to identify these processes and analyze their structure, a role I have increasingly taken on in recent years as a cartographer. Agreed, too, that we in the old centers of capital accumulation cannot imagine the revolts of tomorrow. However, I think the decline of democracy in those old centers has a greater negative influence on the rest of the world than you suggest. This is directly connected to fintech (the fusion of finance capital and internet technology). My post was provoked by the news of Apple's $1 trillion valuation, but also by a remarkable interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy”: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how He points out that India, with 250 million users and growing, is the largest global market for Facebook, outstripping the US itself, and that Narendra Modi may be considered the best, or rather worst, exponent of government by social networks, effecting that marriage of the surveillance capitalism and the liberal state to which I referred in the post. Vaidhyanathan shows in detail that political polarization is the primary way social networks operate in democracies, but he also explores the development of WeChat in China, compares and contrasts it with Facebook, and thus establishes a non-parochial assessment of this mode of governance, which has brought us Trump, Brexit and, I suppose, the Five-Star/Lega government in Italy as well. You're right that the obsessive insularity of the US is both repulsive and intellectually crippling (I would even say spiritually or cosmologically cripppling). But the problem is, if you want to act politically you have to deal with the situation in which you are mired. In this regard, Alex Foti who wrote me on the backchannel has got it totally right: I want to stand with the youth of this country and throw every punch I can for socialism. This is a revolt I can imagine, it's the very one I and so many others have been pushing for over the last twenty years -- but the difference is, we were theory and the kids are fact. It's incredible: in the US (and seemingly also in Britain) very large numbers of people from liberal backgrounds are now calling for socialism, and getting candidates elected on that call, with the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) providing both the intellectual platform and the forms of solidarity that support the wider trend. What all these people are describing as a possible political outcome is in fact social democracy, but they use the word socialism to insist that we will not accept another hypocritical liberal compromise with the powers of debt and limited liability. It's an amazing phenomenon, though a fragile one for sure, not the be-all and end-all of a progressive response to the global crisis of capitalism, but still, a promising element of that response. What I mean to say is that this constructive push, and not the mindless reflexive polarization of obsessive anti-Trump movements on Facebook, is the kind of movement that we fading dinosaur intellectuals should support in the present. Because Heiko Recktenwald is right: AI is coming with unbelievable speed, and
Re: What does Trump get right?
Am 03/08/18 um 09:04 schrieb Brian Holmes: > But don't do it on Facebook, even if the actual human beings you love > are posting their children's pictures there. Because if you do, you > will contribute one more neuron to the marriage of the surveillance > state and monopoly capital. You can use if for whatever you want, the surveillance state aka "AI" is stupid and what matters is speed. Best, H. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: What does Trump get right?
Hi Brian, I never thought that your nettime posts were weird or worse-- which is why I always read them and sometimes reply, like now. The picture you draw from the NYT and your own posts of the last two decades is unassailable and it is a political crisis. The issue is to find out who the sides are and how we can do our best for our side, the rest of us, people in general. The concentration of capital and market share is most obvious in the US fintech firms ad that has to be recognized. But the larger question concerns the global corporate takeover: the top 150 global corporations are mostly financial, led by three Chinese banks. Of the top 100 non-financial corporations over half are European. The world's nationalist strong men are currently challenging neoliberal globalization, but they too are market fundamentalists with a more local agenda and perhaps different corporate support. Protectionism and the free market were always joined at the hip; the conflicts involved are becoming more explicit now that the global money circuit is unfettered and lawless. Clearly the changing nature of the American Empire deserves closer scrutiny that it usually gets from the left. For decades critics of our persuasion and especially European and Latin American intellectuals have tended to downplay its strengths and coercive potential. Trump, by attacking Europe and making unsavory friends elsewhere, is making that power more overt. Europeans can't reproduce or defend themselves and treat the migrants who work for their pensions with contempt, while disparaging the US as an inferior civilization. The Empire rests on militarism, mercantilism, the world currency, intellectual property and the internet economy. American intellectuals tend to be insular and parochial, so that their take on the Empire's potential is obsessively domestic -- not Trump's or Bolton's however. The struggle we all face is global, not just some US mega-corporations, even if the American Empire is a big part of it. For some decades, usually behind closed doors, the corporations have been designing a world society in which they would be the only effective citizens. They disparage the old political model of nation-states (corrupt), national laws (no reach) and citizenship (lazy and irresponsible), evoking a weird version of Kantian moral law instead. The two planks of their existence -- limited liability for debt conferred by Elizabeth I and elision of the difference between real and artificial persons in economic law (Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad 1886) must occupy centre-ground in any mobilization against them. Corporations ability to claim the human rights of individual citizens not only guarantees them permanent legal immunity, but by collapsing the distinction between persons, ideas and things, political responsibility and action become unthinkable. The world's population in 2100 is forecast to be 42% Asian (60% now) and 40% African (15% now). Half of Africa's population in under 20 years old. Compare that with the rest-- all the Americas, Europe, Russia and Oceania 18% in total and ageing fast. Trump is onto that one too, as is Macron. "The West" has the means of blowing the world up in some farewell armageddon. Short of that, progressive political\ movements and the young men who will die for them will come from where the people are (clue: not nettime readers). The basic question is what forms of political association could take on the corporations. As for ideology, we could start with the organization of debt and insist that we are human and Apple is not. Keith On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 9:04 AM, Brian Holmes wrote: > What does Trump get right? > > As a socialist, who votes Democratic but doesn't believe in it, I have > been able to tell you the answer to this question for the last 20 years. > Now that Apple is valued at $1 trillion, the New York Times finally agrees > with me: > > https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/business/apple-trillion.html > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #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: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > -- # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
What does Trump get right?
What does Trump get right? As a socialist, who votes Democratic but doesn't believe in it, I have been able to tell you the answer to this question for the last 20 years. Now that Apple is valued at $1 trillion, the New York Times finally agrees with me: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/business/apple-trillion.html The shorty: Trump gets it that a mere 30 banks and corporations take half the profits of the US economy. These companies have emerged from the tech boom, they are so-called knowledge-based industries, their HQs and design labs are staffed by the hippest university-educated urbanites in the world, and their vanishing labor force is either located offshore (like Apple's) or paid the most abysmal wages imaginable, for example to pick products in warehouses so hot that employees are routinely carried out on stretchers and revived with salts before being sent home, wherever that might be (tent, trailer, SRO, nearby freeway bridge, you name it). I say "vanishing labor force" because the same companies are currently automating the redistribution of the wealth out of existence, without any plan for how society will be able to reproduce itself even ten years into the future. Trump gets it that a massive pattern of social injustice has been engineered by global elites, including US liberals. That he is a rabid right-wing member is those selfsame elites, that he is supporting them with most of his policies, is obviously his own form of incoherency and self-delusion. But it doesn't take away from the raw truth that he has been the first President to baldly enunciate. Those who immediately want to write back in protest, But Trump this, or Trump that, remain blind. Trump and his racist thugs emerged from the self-interested vaccuum of the center-left, those who believed in the Democratic Party, voted for it, and did not even seek to change the world in their imagination, much less their own actions. You wanna fight Trump? Clean your own house at the same time. It's obvious to me that the Apple iPhone is the definition of the commodity fetish in our time. Do you love that thing? Ask yourself what you love. But don't do it on Facebook, even if the actual human beings you love are posting their children's pictures there. Because if you do, you will contribute one more neuron to the marriage of the surveillance state and monopoly capital. I believe that if the US Democratic Party does not realize that its historical mission is to dismantle the mega-mind-control corporations of the net economy that they empowered in the 1990s, they will lose to the party of rapacious fascist extractivism, which, given the parlous state of the other so-called democratic societies, will probably succeed in dragging the whole world down into an authoritarian hell made inexorably worse, every year, by the pressures of runaway climate change. I have said these kinds of things for the last twenty years, since my first nettime post in 1998 which was around the time that I started to have a global political consciousness. Over that time I have been keenly aware that so-called ordinary people (not you, dear reader) have considered me wierd, scary, extreme and frankly insane. Yet now, they might find themselves thinking, not more so than the scary social world surrounding all of us. A few years ago, some believed that this emerging nightmare of a political economy could be reversed by the self-organized uprising of critical collectivities able to pierce the ideological veil and offer new pathways of productive development. Instead the multitudes got fascinated with their iPhones. More recently there has been the hope that the most oppressed (ie anybody who's not straight and white) could transform the culture while the rest of us applauded and liked. Both those generous hopes are a naive evasion of responsibility. Today it's socialism or bust. Salvation, if such a thing is possible, springs from a disciplined, formal, electoral change in the hard-wired structures of social organization--a change underwritten but not opposed by a patient, sweeping transformation of the culture of domination that has brought us to this pass. Here's the most challenging thing: the only practicable instrument of the formal institutional change, in a rigid bipartite system like that of the United States, is a thing called the Democratic Party. Renew the center or go down in its flames. It's quite amazing to see the mainstream grappling, albeit timidly, with exactly these core issues. My advice: Don't just look. Don't just critique from the sidelines. Engage with the process, somehow, in many different ways. It will take a lot of people, not just in the US or in the so-called West, to learn how to run the world differently. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info:
