Re: Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
Hello Miguel - Personally, I think this kind of reasoning can lead to very dangerous "dead-ends". Do you just need to speak of "colonialism" to take away all individual responsabilities of human beings in their actions towards others? Well, no. That's exactly why I wrote, in response to Allan Siegel, that the issue here is NOT just about history. Instead it's about what's happening now. The Middle East been the focus of war in the world since the mid-seventies (before it was Asia: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). The US is still fighting its illegitimate war in Iraq, which now threatens to spread much wider. And you might have noticed some recent events in Palestine? These are ongoing realities, very negative ones, whose consequences we ignore at our own peril. To that, one must add the anti-Muslim racism that has been rising in France and throughout Europe over the past twenty years. It's another present reality with serious effects on civil peace. As for individual responsabilities, I think the terrorists in France have committed heinous crimes, and there's no excuse for that. I also think there is a clear and present danger of more such crimes to come. That's the point. At a time when the world is closer to full-scale global war than it as been for many decades, I do not see the wisdom in throwing symbolic oil on real fire, which is what the authors of sacrilegious caricatures have been doing. I'm asking where does the clear and present danger come from, what supports it and how to diminish it? Since 2001, we have seen some very bad answers to this basic question. The psychology of superego guilt that Zizek describes does exist, for sure. But not in what I write. I don't like that way of thinking either. And at the same time, I don't believe all responsibilities are individual. We live in a world of singular persons, but also of nations and of blocs. Individuals who commit murder should be punished. Those who plot it should be stopped. But if you think only in terms of criminals and crimes - that is, if you think only in terms of individuals - then war falls entirely off the scales of justice, and words such as exploitation, oppression, domination and ecocide have no meaning. We need to deal with the consequences of collective acts. That's politics, not psychology. Anyway, this is a tremendously polemical subject and the details are worth arguing over, so I appreciate your remarks. best, Brian # 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
FairCoop as creative-construction of Commons Humanity as an antitode
By Pablo Prieto and Enric Duran Some revolutionary activists have an amazing ability to avoid the economy. We have been iron-branded with the idea that the economy is not only evil, but the cause of all evil; that we should stay away from it and feel guilty about being involved with it. Like don Quixote, we are sane and pure-hearted, but we refuse to see this one truth: we need a new economy. A new economy begins with a new kind of money. If youâve managed to live in something close to a gift economy: congratulations, youâve made it! This only works for some of us, though, living in relatively small communities, and not on a global scale. You have to realize that youâre not really changing your neighborsâ world by trading Ubuntu installs for massage; youâre not overthrowing the hyperarchist system of human domination by paying for your tofu in rainbowcoins, now, are you? While complementary currencies do a great job at local level, theyâre just that: they complement other parts which together make up a whole. And what we really need is to build up a whole new way to live in this world. Here we go! So, we need money, we need decentralized international markets, financial tools, solid trade networks⦠a financial system, after all. Money, or food for that matter, arenât harmful: bulimia or capitalism are. Money can and should be used for the common good â and by money we donât mean fiat currencies, of course. Fiat currencies are created and controlled by an evil structure, and used for tyranny and planetary destruction (also, we donât see a way we are ever getting any of that pie). We need to create our own monetary system â a better one, one that will suddenly make theirs obsolete and their banks worthless, just like the electric car would do with the gas distribution network. And we need the transition to be fast enough so they donât have time to react and use it for their benefit. What youâve just read is the definition of the term disruptive technology. In 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, he came up with two disruptive technologies at once: the blockchain, a public, universal, unalterable digital ledger, and the proof-of-work (POW), a new network p2p security system. Together, thanks to the power of cryptography and the Internet, they allow us to decentralize, and hence democratize three things: Economy. The blockchain allows us to securely store and move our own money with no need for intermediaries. This automatically renders the current financial system useless, and is only the beginning of a new way to organize the whole economy. Politics. If we use banks and pay our taxes, the government will do whatever they please with our money, or maybe what the banks please. If we instead use our money to support the projects we would like to see happen, they will eventually happen. What matters here is that with the blockchain we have the real freedom to choose between supporting central governments or supporting a new, distributed way to organize our lives. Culture. Decentralizing technologies empower the p2p network society as a new way of thinking and doing thatâs quickly replacing many old-regime institutions and central authorities. Anyway, individualistic approaches to this new technology â like bitcoin â are very interesting experiences, but frightening. We can even picture a gloomy future ruled by cold algorithms and controlled by relentless DACs (decentralized autonomous corporations). We probably wouldnât like that much. Maybe the solution to state hierarchy is not completely math-based individualism. Maybe a middle path (as David Harvey would put it) is needed, where the potential of decentralization and the capacities of cooperations could join together. A disruptive technology is not revolutionary in itself, unless it comes wrapped in a new system of governance, and also in a new ethical paradigm, one thatâs broadly and honestly accepted, never imposed. Revolution is not only a political change, but a cultural and individual mindshift. The perfect political system wonât work unless we first learn how to love each other. Any revolution prior to that will lead to disintegration of power only long enough for the next populist leader to figure out how to get hold of it. And well, we also need to go further than a new financial system⦠Productive businesses are usually forced to make a big profit to pay back their debts to financial institutions. The so-called real productive system needs to be freed from the parasite, and when that happens we will clearly see how the financial system has absolutely nothing to offer to society, how it was all a gigantic scam, and how most of it is simply disposable. We (including you) have a lot of work to do in build
Re: Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
2015-01-14 8:07 GMT+00:00 Brian Holmes : Hello, Brian. On an opposite end of the spectrum, I encourage you to read the interview with Luz, the cartoonist of Charlie Hebdo, which Patrice Riemens sent to this list. Some of the things this man says are just astonishing to me. He claims that the group of caricaturists at Charlie did not want to deal with grand symbolic figures but with very specific things, images that make sense and are funny in France. But on what planet does this guy live? How can he see caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as anything else but a symbol, a charged cliche, a hot-button item, a waving red cloak in a vast international bull ring? I am sorry to criticize someone whose loss has been so great, but it's pure narcissism, this idea of a cherished France that could be held in your hand and protected from the world into which it nonetheless sends its armies and its oil majors. The sacrosanct caricature of Charlie, brandished in the air as a fetish of liberty, is exactly the reification of the self that O'Connor describes. I don't know what will come of these events, and I don't want to prejudge what French society will make of them, but I can see the potential for the very facile patriotic and chauvinist defence of a supposedly secular freedom of expression which would justify the complete absence of any reflection on the griefs that push people to the insanity of terrorism. I have seen this worst case happen in the US, with the results that we have before our eyes. What we need is not just reflection but action to change the way that the world economy functions. Otherwise its necropolitical character will inevitably poison whatever fine lands we imagine ourselves to live in. Personally, I think this kind of reasoning can lead to very dangerous "dead-ends". Do you just need to speak of "colonialism" to take away all individual responsabilities of human beings in their actions towards others? In the politically correct/postmodern left, it just seems so. Moreover. it seems that this feeling of collective "guilt" automatically legitimizes any curtailment of freedom of speech... "You can't say or express what you think because of your government's actions" doesn't seem like my kind of politics... This seems to be the same think that Zizek tried to say in an article for New Statesman:Â "Such thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with the cheap relativisation of the crime (the mantra of "who are we in the West, perpetrators of terrible massacres in the Third World, to condemn such acts"). It has even less to do with the pathological fear of many Western liberal Leftists to be guilty of Islamophobia. For these false Leftists, any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia; Salman Rushdie was denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, etc. The result of such stance is what one can expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. This constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be . . ." http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/01/slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdo-massacre-are-worst-really-full-passionate-intensity Best regards from Portugal -- Miguel Caetano http://twitter.com/remixtures http://iscte-iul.academia.edu/MiguelCaetano/ # 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
Re: Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
On 01/13/2015 03:58 PM, allan siegel wrote: Yes, there is a crisis, that shouldn�t be a big surprise but what precisely is the crisis?A number of contemporary philosophers have been wading into this question for some time now; is it the crisis that marks a break with modernity? Quite possibly. Is it simply the economic crisis of 2008? No. After floating through years of fuelled by the illusions of the post-modern delirium we�'re finding that it is not easy to get very far if you�'re running on empty and the consequence finding ourselves stuck in something akin to an ideological vacuum. Hello Allan. In few words you say so much. The "post-modern delirium" you refer to is, by my reckoning, the product of the last half century. It condenses the various ways that capitalist societies found to bring back into their fold all those who revolted against them starting some five decades ago. "Post-modern delirium" is the attempted reification of a failed revolt. When the lingering dreams and feverish regrets are burnt away, what remains is the measured, objectified, manipulated, controllable residue of past generations' struggles for emancipation and justice. For anyone who might care about these things, there is a very penetrating author named James O'Connor who wrote books such as The Fiscal Crisis of the State, followed by Accumulation Crisis and then by The Meaning of Crisis. Three books that address your question. Generally people only read the first one, published in 1973, because they want to know why the Fordist boom fell apart. The idea that slowly emerges from his later work, however, is that in capitalist societies, personality crisis can be understood as the momentary breakdown of a social process that has led individuals to treat their own selves as objects: glittering, pricey, high-status things whose possession and ownership gives us power over others. A crisis of value (that is, not only a plunge in the cash value of asssets, but also a failure of the institutional circuit that sustains cash value) can therefore be a vital threat to psychic health and equilibrium. At the moment of the vaccuum - ie the empty bank account, the lost job or the failed business - your thing, your self, suddenly begins to appear worthless. By the same token, though, crisis can also be a chance to exit the strictly privatized coccoon of the reified self, and begin understanding and acting upon human interdependence. If one cannot simply buy and flaunt the simulacra of fulfillment, then some attention to the reciprocities whereby people sustain each other becomes not only a necessity, but even a new reason for living. Check out how O'Connor describes the conjoined process of social and psychic crisis, almost thirty years ago in The Meaning of Crisis: "We know that capital is racing madly through the present; it has raced headlong into a crisis. It attempts to reduce its turnover time compulsively and obsessively. Modernization of production, internationalization of production and a bloated debt structure are three sides of a single process. Whole cities and communities are thrown away in the race to defend and expand profits. "Growth coalitions" multiply like cancer cells, killing the normal cells of family, religion, tradition. The frenzy of accumulation; the fear that it will come to an end in a huge crash or an environmental or military catastrophe; the unbelievable excesses of late capitalism worldwide - these bear witness to the obsessive-compulsive qualitity of the inner soul of capital. If we could become its inner eye, if we could transport ourselves into its inner soul, if we could hear the relentless beat of accumulation, we could experience as well as know the madness of this obsessiveness – this world where capital and money are a religious and aesthetic experience, and where power is a moral category. When we examine ourselves, we find capital within our own souls. We too rush through the present; we race for some victory – or toward some unknown destination; we are governed by unlimited desire; we stumble and fall from identity into the abyss. We create our own personal crisis, as capital creates its own crisis." For me, that's an amazing paragraph: it's an economist putting the intimate self into the macro-economic picture. Whenever this kind of move is made, ethics and then politics surges to the fore. Amidst the general wreck and sadness of what happens in the world, the cultural question is not just how one suffers but rather how one struggles to create one's own crisis - and then hopefully to resolve it, in a social space beyond the fiction of a stable and valuable interiority which one could polish and improve and flaunt before the desiring gaze of others. In fact what is being called the ‘crisis�' is probably the result of the conflation of a host of historical factors: political, economic, etc… So, to view the crisis in the absenc
