Re: <nettime> Paul Mason: Trump is a symptom of the new globaldisorder, not the cause

[Richard Barbrook <richard@imaginaryfutures.net>]

Hiya,

> 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?). 

We were visiting Berlin to tell the SPD about Labour's digital campaigning during the 2017
election campaign. I emphasised that our success was due to politics not technology.
If the SPD also wants to win 40% of the vote, it should move left and become a class party!
https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm

Richard

p.s. John McDonnell - Labour's finance spokesperson and Jeremy's Number 2 - is on the
executive of DiEM25.

=======================

Dr. Richard Barbrook
Dept of Politics and IR,
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street
LONDON W1T 3UW
England

+44 (0)7879 441873

Skype: richard.barbrook
Facebook: Richard Barbrook
Twitter: @richardbarbrook

https://www.digital-liberties.coop
http://www.cybersalon.org
http://www.classwargames.net
http://www.politicsandmediafreedom.net
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works

'Clause 5: That as the laws ought to be equal, so 
they must be good, and not evidently destructive 
to the safety and well-being of the people.' 

The Levellers, The 1647 Agreement of the People 
for a Firm and Present Peace Upon Grounds of 
Common Right.

On Thu 14/06/18 11:16 PM , "Frederic Neyrat" fneyrat@gmail.com sent:
> 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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