Re: <nettime> The Meaning of Boris Johnson

Concerning...

Le 12 févr. 2022 à 14:43, David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk> a écrit :

Actually Joseph I think quite a lot is new… going as far back as November 2020 I wrote post which pointed to the proposition that before the pandemic if anyone had suggested that under conditions, other than war, that wealthy technologically advanced states were capable of shutting down 80% of the global economy, furloughing large swathes of the workforce along with 1.4 billion students as well as bringing mass air transportation to a grinding halt, the proposition would not just have been dismissed.
As the usually sober and measured political economist Helen Thomas declared “We have to face up to the fact that we have been through something, as a world,.. that in some sense was beyond our imaginations in the west at the beginning of this year.” The appearance of this degree of agency led the other participant in the discussion, Adam Tooze to declare this to be -THE shock discovery of 2020- “hands down, flat out, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened in modern economic history.”
http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/blog/the-unthinkable-has-to-be-thought-sean-cubitt/ Re-reading this article reminds me that at the time Brian was already deploying the concept of an eco-state..

David, I see your point about the newness, but I must be cautious about both the altruism that "awareness of mutual dependency and the collective agency" seems to suggest (all working together to face a mortal threat), and the agency itself.

What happened in France (my example) was entirely top down, there was no collective agency. There was no sudden altruism on the part of political leadership. They reacted out of fear of the chaos that would be caused (1) when the hospitals could not cope with the tsunami of patients and (2) when people, who were confined in order to stop the tsunami, ran out of money.

Macron's releasing billions with his policy of "whatever it takes" was not altruistic at all - he was just stepping in to substitute for the economy until things could return to business as usual. Negative interest rates made this economically viable, and Macron knew full well that the alternative, austerity and poverty, would lash back at him and his government. Today, with the French economy flourishing and low unemployment, they are bragging about how what they did made brilliant economic sense, however "unorthodox" it might seem to neoliberal economic doctrine.

What is notable is that even though the first wave revealed in France (and elsewhere) how the hospitals had been whittled down in the interests of profitability and could not cope because of lack of beds, personnel and equipment, they've done nothing about it. Of course, at first, they said that they would revigorate the system, but they did not, once the pressure dropped. They negotiated raises and better working conditions as minimally as they could. The contrast between helping businesses and hospitals is in the fact that for a neoliberal like Macron, businesses represent value and hospitals represent a cost. Which justified pouring money into the former, and minimising resources given to the latter.

As for "collective agency", I am not sure how much of this there has been during the pandemic, more than simply being in the same boat together. Or more accurately, the Western boat was relatively well furnished, and did not come to the rescue of those from Africa or Latin America who were far less well equipped.

The only collective agency offered French citizens during the lockdown was to applaud healthcare staff from our balconies at 8 PM.

Joe Rabie.