I came late to Brown’s writing, and was deeply impressed: the diagnosis of individualism seems even more astute living for a few months in the States. I’d throw into the mix some thoughts from Laclau’s On Populist Reason: that the unit of social action is neithe rindividuals nor groups, and certainly not society: it is demands. Demand for somehting impossible in the current polity such as “Bring Down Washington” or “The EU is a machine for corporate capital: let’s get out”. Neither Washington nor Brussels can answer that demand: which is why it is truly political. The Left problem has been that it ends up defending the indefensible.
In the Brexit case, widespread disillusionment with a decreasingly democratic, increasingly neoliberal central pseudo-state only found voice from those who have other reasons to attack it: those who want to deregulate food, pharmceuticals, pollution etcetra, and those who want to increase their own power bases (though the jury is out on whether UKIP tok Russian money it was certianly invested in many other right-wing anti-EU populist movements). Both major parties were torn: a Tory party defending itself against the equivalent of Bannonism by assimilating UKIP policies, while the agriculture-and-business traditional Tories wanted to keep the financial benefits of the status quo; the right wing of Labour believing pretty much the same, and the Left only too aware that speaking out against the EU for Left reasons would lose them votes from well-intentioned greens, workers-rights activists and many more constituencies. As a result and not for the first time the Left missed the opportunity to give direction and political efficacy to the popular demands for a new Europe that is not entirely devoted to stripping the assets of Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. The Right has a hundred years of practice at doing exactly that. Vox populi vox dei: but the voice of the people is still not being heard. Rust belt America and the abandoned North of England will not get better because of new right policies. They will continue to believe that this is because their guys have been betrayed. Unless it becomes possible to re-articulate the popular voice. Taking back control is a pretty good slogan: its only problem is that “we” don’t take back control, “they” do. What happens if we present taking back control as a mission of the Left - if, instead of believing that it lacks reason or authenticity, we listen to and act on the popular voice? regards sean On 8 Nov 2017, at 19:47, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org<mailto:nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org> wrote:nd Message: 2 Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 19:47:15 -0500 From: Ian Alan Paul <ianalanp...@gmail.com<mailto:ianalanp...@gmail.com>> To: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com<mailto:bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>> Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org<mailto:nettime-l@mail.kein.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> Brexit democracy Message-ID: <CAM-xAVY9LZGtin=LyDkSpX=8hmldsdflwwjgxqi5+hnansk...@mail.gmail.com<mailto:CAM-xAVY9LZGtin=LyDkSpX=8hmldsdflwwjgxqi5+hnansk...@mail.gmail.com>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" ...in hopes of pushing the conversation a bit forward, we have this helpful passage from the end of Brown's most recent book "Undoing the Demos" which I think quite accurately and concisely sums up the present conjuncture we find ourselves within: "The Euro-Atlantic Left today is often depicted, from within and without, as beset by a predicament without precedent: we know what is wrong with this world, but cannot articulate a road out or a viable global alternative. Lacking a vision to replace those that foundered on the shoals of repression and corruption in the twentieth century, we are reduced to reform and resistance - the latter being a favored term today in part because it permits action as reaction, rather than as crafting an alternative. While the Left opposes an order animated by profit instead of the thriving of the earth and its inhabitants, it is not clear today how such thriving could be obtained and organized. Capitalist globalization, which Marx imagined would yield a class that would universalize itself by inverting its denigration into shared power and freedom, has yielded instead paralyzing conundrum: What alternative planetary economic and political order(s) could foster freedom, equality, community, and earthly sustainability and also avoid domination by massive administrative apparatuses, complex markets, and the historically powerful peoples and parts of the globe? What alternative global economic system and political arrangements would honor regional historical, cultural, and religious differences? With in such arrangements, what or who would make and enforce decisions about production, distribution, consumption, and resource utilization, about population thresholds, species coexistence, and earthly finitude? How to use the local knowledges and achieve the local control essential to human thriving and ecological stewardship in the context of any worldwide economic system? How to prevent rogue subversions without military repression or prevent corruption and graft without surveillance and policing? Whither the nation-state or international law? ..... The task of the Left today is compounded by this generalized collapse of faith in the powers of knowledge, reason, and will for the deliberate making and tending of our common existence. Insistence that 'another world is possible' runs opposite to this tide of general despair, this abandoned belief in human capacities to gestate and guide a decent and sustainable order, this capitulation to being playthings of powers that escaped from the bottle in which humans germinated them. The Left alone persists in a belief (or in a polemic, absent a belief) that all could live well, live free, and live together - a dream whose abandonment is expressed in the ascendency of neoliberal reason and is why this form of reason could so easily take hold. ..... Tasked with the already difficult project of puncturing common neoliberal sense and with developing a viable and compelling alternative to capitalist globalization, the Left must also counter this civilizational despair. Our work on all three fronts is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success. Yet what, apart from this work, could afford the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future?" (pp. 220-222) I would largely agree with the problems she articulates and the challenge she proposes here for anyone who still considers themselves part of "The Left." I've already articulated my thoughts on NetTime concerning where I believe this "other" world becomes possible: in powerful, diverse, contagious, collective refusals which create the conditions within which something otherwise can take hold. I'd be very interested to hear others' responses to Brown's prognoses! ~i
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