Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
Keith's Hart's answer to Ken Wark is brilliant writing, because it takes all the terms of the arguments seriously enough, and historically enough, that a next step can then be envisaged. Keith recounts the formation [in the 1860s-70s] of new industrial states by means of national revolutions from above, all in the name of democracy and science. I'd say the next step or the next scale of that kind of argument begins right here In 1973, an increase in oil prices plunged the world economy into a depression from which it has still not recovered. The 1973 depression was caused by the increased oil prices; but behind them was the larger issue of an inability of the capitalist states to go on extracting resources, under the conditions of their own choosing, from the formerly colonized countries. The increase in the raw materials bill coincided with a resurgence of class conflict in the core countries, with steep increases in the working hours lost to strikes (the highest levels were reached in Britain in the early 70s). Neoliberalism emerged, in Britain and the US, as what now appears an ultimately untenable solution to this double crisis, both of imperialism and of the capital-labor compromise. The solution was fiscal, geographic, and financial. Cut taxes on corporations; negotiate traties making it possible to produce wherever labor is cheapest, and to sell products wherever there is money to buy; and create a world financial market that could gather capital for the creation of productive plant and infrastructure. This was sold on the rhetorical level as being an extension of liberal thinking, i.e. free market plus democracy. What's neo about it is what really sold it: the impossibility for countries to compete if they don't join free-trade zones; the unrefusable offer of foreign investment capital once the free trade zone is installed. The positive effect was to reimpose an economic discipline both on the working class in the advanced countries (through fear of losing jobs to the south), and on the formerly colonized countries (through debt and dependency on investment). Call it globalization. I think that what we are seeing now is that the disciplinary mechanism of financially regulated globalization doesn't work. Subjugated economies collapse (Argentina); fractions of the world population revolt (terrorism); the US cannot maintain its lucrative position as the banker/coordinator of world industrial development (stock market crash). Under these conditions, the fragility of the nation-state as the political form of a compromise imposed by capital on populations becomes too great. The crisis of the 1970s returns. But the real solution being proposed is obvious, and has been under preparation all along. The nation state consolidated in the late nineteenth century will be abandoned for regional blocs: NAFTA/FTAA, the enlarged EU, and an enlarged ASEAN including and dominated by China (for which the treaties now exist). These blocs would allow direct administration of labor and markets over large and very unequally developed areas, without all the pseudo-liberal complexities of the financially governed borderless world. And the blocs would also fight to exploit what they don't directly control (Mideast oil, anyone?). But to achieve that solution means abandoning some of the post-89 rhetoric of liberalism and democracy - and for that, you'd need serious reasons. If we're unlucky, it may be that in retrospect a world civil war whose beginning is marked by September 11 will be seen to have played the same kind of role in cementing the unequal class relations of the new regional blocs as the conflicts of the 1860s and 70s did in establishing the capitalist-dominated democracies of the industrialized nation-states. Had Engels lived in the globalizing 1990s he would never have feared that society was being coordinated faster at the top than at the bottom: because it was painfully obvious. Only since 1994 and above all since 1999 have people even begun to imagine that alternative forms of coordination from the bottom up might be possible on the regional-bloc and world scales. One of the things that has pushed me to collaborate on the mapping work I've been doing with Bureau d'Etudes (more on that sometime later) is the desire to contribute to the very possibility of conceiving those scales in some kind of detail. As for the step after that, what I see, darkly, are efforts to make uuniversal rights substantial by constructing and defending commons where free access does not equal destruction of resources: this, from natural resources like water to social ones like housing, energy, mobility and communication. I think the coming battle with capital will have to take place in these areas, and not only over the terms of waged labor. Now, to get back to Keith Hart, I don't know if liberalism in the manner of John Locke can really help in this process
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
What is living and what is dead in liberalism? (Neo or otherwise). What is living and what is dead in leftism? (new or old style) These are good 'Hegelian' questions, and while as Brian says, they have been raised on nettime before, the discussion was far from comprehensive or conclusive. I don't much dissent from Keith Hart's excellent primer on the political economy of the 19th century. However, it seems to me to be the kind of explanation one might describe as late 20th century orthodoxy. I'm not sure we are still living in the world for which that was the relevant history. Everyone to his taste, however. It seems to me to under estimate the role of communication vectors and the abstraction of information, and to be far from precise and clear in following this aspect of the transformation of material reality. One has to rethink what is base and what is 'superstructure.' On information as property: Yes, obviously, patent and copyright exist since the 18th century. But they are *not* intellectual property -- a term not much used before the late 60s. They were the 'commons' on which the progressive privatisation of information in law and policy has been built. Copyright was not a form of property at all. The change in terminology is significant. Information itself arises at the nexus of technical, economic and legal determinants. Technically, its roots are in the telegraph, first technology to separate the speed of movement of information from the movement of people or goods. Thus making possible the coordination of the movement of people and goods by the movement of information. Marx was already onto this in the Grundrisse. There is no such thing as the 'world market' without a space of communication wherein values can be identified and transmitted. The great weakness of Marx's otherwise seminal discussions of exchange value is that when he compares, say, 5 coats to 4 bales of linen as euivalents, he speaks as if there were a purely ideal space where these exchange values met. He doesn't address the materiality of exchange value, which rests on the capacity to transmit information about use values -- prices -- across space and time independently of the ability to move the thing itself. Echange value only emerges in a space of communication. This space grows in radius as communication develops. First within the space of the nation, then without. But it is the same process. The interaction of the technical and legal creation of information as an autonomous, abstract value creates a whole new sphere of economic valuation and exploitation. As Keith suggests, it is always useful to look at scale. Look at the proportion of the assets that make up the market value of corporations. The intellectual property portfolio occupies an increasingly large proportion. What comes together to create the economic value of 'intellectual property' is firstly is much more rigid legal protection, and secondly the communication vectors that make it so much easier to store or to transmit. When Brian speaks of efforts to make universal rights substantial by constructing and defending 'commons' where free access does not equal destruction of resources... he is talking about what will in the first and last instance be a commons constructed out of communciation vectors and in which information circulates, where both are outside the logic of commodification. The establishment and management of any other kind of commons depends on this. One has to confront the vctoral with its own tools, as Critical Art Ensemble remind us. I've always found it more useful to speak of a vectoralisation rather than a globalisation. The latter term is a bit too freighted with ideological baggage. And it misses the extent to which the becoming-abstract of space (what Felix, quoting Castells, called a 'space of flows') is a vectoral phenomenon before it is anything else. Putting places in touch with each other, which proceeds in a much more haphazzard way than 'globalisation' would lead one to suspect, and which does not produce the liberal-enlightened result of transparency of communication and rational coordination of wants and resources, has proceeded apace for century and a half since the creation of telegraphy. The internet revolution, after all, is really just telegraphy, on a vastly expanded scale, with bells and whistles. This historical movement -- the becoming vectoral of space -- has been going on for a while. But it comes to interact with the transformation of information into property only quite recently. One only has to look at the flurry of legislation -- the Communications Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US. Or the remarkable amount of GATT and then WTO time taken up with issues of patent and copyright protection. These are relatively new developments, and their significance is not really plumbed by the tools of historical materialism as we have them to hand. While there are aspects of 'neo'-liberalism that seem
