Re: The Vision Thing (was: Managerial capitalism?)
On 09/21/2017 05:06 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: This vision, I'm convinced, can only come from transformed relations within the biosphere (be that sustainable socio-economies, perma cultures or geo-engineering) supported by advanced technologies. That's what I think too, and it's what I spend most of my time on these days (though probably more with the soft culturalism than the advanced technologies). Interestingly it's also what Alex Foti thinks, when you jump to the end of his book and read the last chapter. Way to go Alex, you're up to the minute. Trumpism is a military-police-extractive industry reaction, based on the decadent dregs of Fordism plus the threatening detumescence of the white Anglo-Saxon puritan cock in the face of multiracialism and multisexualism. It could become an authoritarian regime, for sure, but only in the total absence of any pushback from the left, because Trumpism is structurally weak: it is casting aside its libertarian wing in favor of rising demands for state spending (notably due to the hurricanes but also the war lobby, huge contracts in the atom bomb industry, for instance). So the question is, what does pushback from the left side of the political spectrum look like? Interestingly this is where Orsan's contributions run parallel to Alex's. Orsan is looking at the historical arc of a major sociological formation that was initially called "the New Class" when it was analyzed in the 1950s by a guy named Djilas, in a place, remember, that was called Yugoslavia. He saw that not workers, but cadres produced by the brand-new state educational apparatus were taking effective power in society. That idea about the power of educated cadres was transferred to the US in the Sixties when the huge state expenditures of the Kennedy-Johnson era (guns *and* butter, remember?) were effectively producing a new form of social agency, the manager, the knowledge worker, the media technician, the so-called "value intellectual" (fancy term for a pundit) etc. Conservatives who were not yet neoliberals became horrified when these new figures began inventing environmentalism, practicing alliance strategies with oppressed minorities and standing against the military-police sectors. After Djilas's concept filtered through as a way of analyzing what was going on, the most interesting right-left debates of Seventies were all about the possible destinies of the New Class (full disclosure, I wrote about this somewhere, http://threecrises.org/1968-black-power-and-the-new-class). We know what happened: the neoliberal turn absorbed and repurposed this proto-revolutionary sector, so you got Jerry Rubin, the golden boys, the cognitariat, the California Ideology, the Flexible Personality, the whole anarcho-libertarian dreamland of the Nineties. 'Nuff said. Fast-forward to the present. Trumpism is older people, middle class, smaller towns, the countryside, the resource fringe, the South - but not Southern cities. Cities all across the US are filled with precarious *and* middle-class youth practicing coss-race, cross-class alliance strategies - and reawakening old memories about those kinds of things in the process. At the urban level, Democratic mayors have no choice but to support them, because otherwise you get riots, work stoppages, non-compliance of all kinds. Check out the new book by Juan Gonzalez, Reclaiming Gotham, which describes the radicalization of progressive mayors in an arc extending from Occupy to the present (or just check out the extended interview with Gonzalez on Democracy Now, it's worth it). If you keep in mind that urban centers are not just the sites of potential racial conflict, but also the places where extreme weather events cause disasters that require social spending, then you can see where the pushback from the left could come from. The New Class is dangerous when it shakes off its privileges and tries really broad alliances with one foot in the state and the other outside it. Trumpism is the perfect spur for that. And so is the current bankruptcy of the mainstream Democratic Party, which has left all kinds of holes for new actors to get in. Different neocapitalist formations could arise from this shakeup and they likely will, both as country-specific patterns and as a patchwork of social forces within any one country. As the natural disasters hit and AI clears out the old concept of a job, new versions of social spending by the state are almost inevitable, and they will obviously translate into growth sectors for new kinds of corporations, or old ones. Trump is going to send the cash to his people in Houston and most of Florida and don't forget about the wildfires in the Northwest and the droughts in Montana and the Dakotas and this is just his first year. The terrain of the big struggle is actually about social spending. So the current question of the New Class is, can we put a vision into this state sp
general theory of the precariat: great recession, revolution, reaction - out now:)
cari amici e amiche precari/e i have finally managed to put out a coherent book on the precariat. i hope you dig it. here's the link, below the back cover. ciao and thanks to Geert and the INC! http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/general-theory-of-the-precariat/ >From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. This book describes how the precariat came into being under neoliberalism and how it has radicalized in response to crisis and austerity. It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti cover the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of 2016, to presents his class theory of the precariat and the ideologies of left-populist movements. Building a theory of capitalist crisis to understand the aftermath of the Great Recession, he outlines political scenarios where the precariat can successfully fight for emancipation, and reverse inequality and environmental destruction. Written by the activist who put precarity on the map of radical thinking, this is the first work proposing a complete theory of the precariat in its actuality and potentiality. ps the last sentence is presumptuous but i wanted to show guy standing's theory was off-target and also that paul mason's theory of capitalist development was incomplete without regulation theory (btw my model was arrived at independently) alex # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Managerial capitalism?
The point of all good debate is to thrash out understandings, misunderstandings and counter-understandings, until some sharable form of clarity emerges. Brian thanks for your thoughtful response. My previous email is not really based on a worked out but on informed intuitions. Informed by the new class theory in Bogdanov and Bukharin -I didn't read what Trotsky wrote on the topic but am sure Burnham had read it, then I read Gramsci and his reading of Machiavelli and modern Machiavellians, especially Mosca. The fact that since 19th cc. this class has been in formation. Revolutionary leaps in science and philosophy, was the accumulation of 'capital' of this class, called knowledge. I seriously think, managerial science (cybernetics+GST+operations research units [and Burnham's role in the re-organisation of OSS into modern CIA was not a coincidence] has emerged in the hands of conscious class agency of future 'managerialism', consisted of certain fractional divisions some were close to social-democratic ideas (in line with Dewey, Bertallanfy, Wiener, Von Neumann, Von Forester etc.), some to anarcho-capitalism (Misses, Hayek, Friedman, Rand etc.) and some others even envisaged a full-fledged alternative for the aftermath of capitalism. So, if in managerial capitalism managerials are subordinate to capitalists, this needs to be reversed. Fascism and Nazism may be the version of state-capitalism that came closest to managerialism as another (worse) system. After their defeat in 1945, but also subsuming many minds running away from fascism and Nazism (also ex-nazi and fascist scientists runaways) the really existing managerial revolution arrived in the 50s and 60s. In a sense, corporate-liberalism in the West, USSR and China, and NIEO were versions of 'managerial capitalisms' in variety and their competition dominated the world. In all these variations yet managerials subordinated to productive capital -filling key functions in line with Keynesian, socialist, and third worldists ideologies. With the emergence of mass media, computer systems, behaviourism, TNCs, etc. we had Peter Drucker's, Henry Kissengers, Alvin Toffler's, and those who manage and serve to IMF, WB, OECD sort of bodies, as well as states and corporations. These segments of managerials, top managerials, had a deal with Hayek-Friedman-Coase, who aligned with the vision and interest of the money-capital fraction which was hibernated between 1920s and 70s. Formulation made of neoliberalism did eliminated or undermined the broader class base of managerials, in favour of a fusion between top managers and top money capitalist. Years when Rockefellar studies at LSE, and forms Club of Rome -as monarchs willingly turned to bourgeoisie in 17th 18th century we have now capitalist dynasties being raised as managerial. Also as a counter strategy to not to lose whole control to professional cadre of CEOs and top managers. So, rise of global market, liberalisation, good governance, collapse of class compromise, flexibilisation, internationalisation of production, ICT revolution, post-modernism, so on so forth. The rise of 'Empire' was a thrust to unify economic, political and military power in the hands of this class fusion of capitalist managers and it was in expanse of subordination of entire global production -first to finance/money capital; then the production and finance got subordinated to algorithms and data. The control was taken over, by money-dealing a specific segment of the class agency of money capital, based in Wall Street and the City. Such class is tearing apart all consensus base and triggering reactionary regression, calling for corrective war that will finish all the wars. As you say, China being closest to managerial capitalism and being the new hegemoni is not a good sign. Since it pushes all system to that direction. Climate change and other earth-systemic problems strengthen the hand of complexity managers so on. Some segments of managerial feel ease in aligning with fascist option. Putin's Russia represents a similar form, as Tayyip's Turkey. The system dynamics pushes even EU, after UK to that direction. In all cases, economic political and military power is being totalled in limited class of people, and it looks like big data, silicon valley, IoT, is not there to reverse these tendencies but enforcing them. As I said, these can be illusionary since I did not work through all these, instead as I said it is an informed intuition. Getting feedback from and debating it Brian is one of the best opportunities one might have to think these stuff through. So thanks for that. Best, Orsan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # coll
Re: Managerial capitalism?
Brian &al: > Try the vision thing. Nobody has it, everybody needs it, it's the rarest thing > on earth. I don't think that the post-2008 crisis will ever be resolved > until some socio-political agency comes up with a vision of the future > that is inspiring, workable and translatable into mathematical-statistical > terms. And what if we never get one? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king -- Erasmus (from the Latin *_in regione caecorum rex est luscus_ (https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=in_regione_caecorum_rex_est_luscus&action=edit&redlink=1) *) In 1946, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), still a stanch Socialist, wrote an essay called "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," published in the journal Polemic (and reprinted in the "Orwell Reader" &c). Then he sat down and wrote "Nineteen Eighty-Four," which few have recognized as his continued polemic against the now evident *end* of "class warfare" (much as Aldous Huxley had written "A Brave New World" against H.G. Wells' "The Open Conspiracy"). Orwell refused to understand what had already happened. Burnham, in turn, like many other Socialists (but certainly not all) of those times -- including Daniel "Post-Industrial" Bell &c -- recognized that MASS MEDIA had ended the usefulness of "class" analysis, since the population had shifted under *radio* conditions (as understood by Marx &al) away from that sort of consciousness. "Mass" had replaced "class" in how people thought. As a result -- which Blair/Orwell fiercely resisted -- a completely *new* sort of "capitalism" had developed and, therefore, a *new* sort of opposition was required. This recognition (which some then-and-now refused to recognize) was a result of the Rockefeller Foundation's 1935-1940 "Radio Research Project" (RRP) -- which was the first time that anyone had organized a sweeping effort to try to understand the *effects* of new technology on the population. Without that understanding, "vision" is simply not possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Research_Project For those who are paying attention, T. Adorno was hired by the RRP to explain the effects of music in a radio environment. He never completed that assignment and his "exit memo" to Paul Lazarsfeld has never been published. The only public copy resides on microfilm at Columbia University Rare Books and I have a PDF of the photos I took off the reader, if anyone is interested. In 1953, the Ford Foundation (where its Program Area Five: Individual Behavior and Human Relations had replaced the earlier Rockefeller funding) granted $43,500 to Marshall McLuhan (an English professor) and Edmund "Ted" Carpenter (an anthropologist, likely working with the CIA in "Area Studies") for a project titled "Changing Patterns of Behavior and Language in the New Media of Communications." This grant (roughly $500.000 in today's money) produced a seminar and a journal. That journal, EXPLORATIONS: Studies in Culture and Communications, has recently been republished and is *required* reading for anyone today who is looking for "vision." http://wipfandstock.com/explorations-1-8.html McLuhan attempted to get the Ford Foundation, as well as Robert Hutchins (first at Univ of Chicago and later at his Ford-backed Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara), to fund his organizing of a research center to address these issues. When they declined, he eventually got the Univ of Toronto, IBM and others to back his Centre for Culture and Technology -- which, alas, never produced any useful research, since McLuhan largely abandoned the effort after clashing with psychologists about his "sensory balance" tests and, instead, opted to become a "media guru." Along the way, McLuhan and Bell were invited to the 1969 Bilderberg Conference, to explain May '68 in Paris. Apparently neither of them understood that a new "technology" was involved -- LSD. Later, Marshall became the "Patron Saint" of WIRED magazine -- which, in turn, was founded by Stewart Brand, the "patron saint" of LSD. Yes, Thomas Wolfe, who "discovered" McLuhan (ending his career as a researcher), was also responsible for documenting the *drug-based* origins of the "Californian Ideology." https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Kool-Aid-Acid-Test/dp/031242759X While the original Rockefeller project studied *radio*, McLuhan devoted his life to studying the *effects* of TELEVISION -- thus "changing patterns of behavior and language" in the *new* media of communications in the 1950s. But that is no longer the world in which we live. We are now DIGITAL. This means we don't *perceive* the world in same way anymore. As a result, the earlier details no longer matter -- at the same time that the "method" involved is more valuable than ever. The "steering function" collapse that you describe is simply the result of what ha
Re: Managerial capitalism?
The point of all good debate is to thrash out understandings, misunderstandings and counter-understandings, until some sharable form of clarity emerges. Brian thanks for your thoughtful response. My previous email is not really based on a worked out but on informed intuitions. Informed by the new class theory in Bogdanov and Bukharin -I didn't read what Trotsky wrote on the topic but am sure Burnham had read it, then I read Gramsci and his reading of Machiavelli and modern Machiavellians, especially Mosca. The fact that since 19th cc. this class has been in formation. Revolutionary leaps in science and philosophy, was the accumulation of 'capital' of this class, called knowledge. I seriously think, managerial science (cybernetics+GST+operations research units [and Burnham's role in the re-organisation of OSS into modern CIA was not a coincidence] has emerged in the hands of conscious class agency of future 'managerialism', consisted of certain fractional divisions some were close to social-democratic ideas (in line with Dewey, Bertallanfy, Wiener, Von Neumann, Von Forester etc.), some to anarcho-capitalism (Misses, Hayek, Friedman, Rand etc.) and some others even envisaged a full-fledged alternative for the aftermath of capitalism. So, if in managerial capitalism managerials are subordinate to capitalists, this needs to be reversed. Fascism and Nazism may be the version of state-capitalism that came closest to managerialism as another (worse) system. After their defeat in 1945, but also subsuming many minds running away from fascism and Nazism (also ex-nazi and fascist scientists runaways) the really existing managerial revolution arrived in the 50s and 60s. In a sense, corporate-liberalism in the West, USSR and China, and NIEO were versions of 'managerial capitalisms' in variety and their competition dominated the world. In all these variations yet managerials subordinated to productive capital -filling key functions in line with Keynesian, socialist, and third worldists ideologies. With the emergence of mass media, computer systems, behaviourism, TNCs, etc. we had Peter Drucker's, Henry Kissengers, Alvin Toffler's, and those who manage and serve to IMF, WB, OECD sort of bodies, as well as states and corporations. These segments of managerials, top managerials, had a deal with Hayek-Friedman-Coase, who aligned with the vision and interest of the money-capital fraction which was hibernated between 1920s and 70s. Formulation made of neoliberalism did eliminated or undermined the broader class base of managerials, in favour of a fusion between top managers and top money capitalist. Years when Rockefellar studies at LSE, and forms Club of Rome -as monarchs willingly turned to bourgeoisie in 17th 18th century we have now capitalist dynasties being raised as managerial. Also as a counter strategy to not to lose whole control to professional cadre of CEOs and top managers. So, rise of global market, liberalisation, good governance, collapse of class compromise, flexibilisation, internationalisation of production, ICT revolution, post-modernism, so on so forth. The rise of 'Empire' was a thrust to unify economic, political and military power in the hands of this class fusion of capitalist managers and it was in expanse of subordination of entire global production -first to finance/money capital; then the production and finance got subordinated to algorithms and data. The control was taken over, by money-dealing a specific segment of the class agency of money capital, based in Wall Street and the City. Such class is tearing apart all consensus base and triggering reactionary regression, calling for corrective war that will finish all the wars. As you say, China being closest to managerial capitalism and being the new hegemoni is not a good sign. Since it pushes all system to that direction. Climate change and other earth-systemic problems strengthen the hand of complexity managers so on. Some segments of managerial feel ease in aligning with fascist option. Putin's Russia represents a similar form, as Tayyip's Turkey. The system dynamics pushes even EU, after UK to that direction. In all cases, economic political and military power is being totalled in limited class of people, and it looks like big data, silicon valley, IoT, is not there to reverse these tendencies but enforcing them. As I said, these can be illusionary since I did not work through all these, instead as I said it is an informed intuition. Getting feedback from and debating it Brian is one of the best opportunities one might have to think these stuff through. So thanks for that. Best, Orsan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticis
Re: Managerial capitalism?
On 2017-09-21 06:27, Brian Holmes wrote:
>
> In my view, these radical splits have come about due to the excesses
> of the "fit" represented by neoliberalism, where the state, the
> military and the corporations worked together to produce tremendous
> market booms and savage inequality.
That fit stopped working around 2008 in a global scale, due to a triple
crisis: economic, geo-political and ecological.
Economically, quite obviously, due to the financial crisis and the
take-over of private debt by the public making a Keynesian answer to the
crisis economically impossible (expect in China).
Geo-politically, as the liberal, post-war global regime increasingly
challenged by the BRICS dominated by China (e.g. Shanghai Cooperation
Organization and its non-IMF/WB development bank), and ecologically, as
the impact on global warming was becoming increasingly felt as a
destabilizing force (e.g. the role of the heat wave in Russia 2010 in
driving up the prices for bread in Egypt).
The reaction in Europe was been, by and large, extend and pretend. Where
the welfare state exists, populations can be managed, in the former
east, the turn to a hard nationalism can be ignored and the places like
Greece can be suppressed sufficiently to not matter. In the mean time,
the Turks and now the Libyans can be paid to subdue the refugee crises
outside view of tender European publics.
In the US, despite all the rhetoric of economic nationalism, it was
basically, as Brian put it, a hostile take-over of the two most powerful
faction of the post-war economy -- finance and carbon -- which know that
their prime is over, want to wring out the lemon one last time, while
preparing escape the fall-out on their own private, heavily guarded
island. Musk and Schmidt probably represent the liberal version of this
take-over.
China's response towards managerial capitalism and a strong
state-corporate nexus with a geo-political vision has been described by
Brian.
All of this, however, leaves out the question of the impact of the
ecological crises. One thing is clear, global warming will be very
expensive, so the countries with the least money will be least able to
adapt. And in many ways, this includes China, if you break it down to
per capita numbers.
The Green Climate Found, established in 2010 was supposed to raise $200
billion by 2020 to help developing countries, but that seems unlikely to
be actually met. And the costs of the damage of just to storms,
Harvey and Irma, are estimated to run up to $150 - 200 billion in the US
alone.
> I think whatever ultimately happens in the West is going to matter.
> Probably we should do a straw poll on this. Do we go green? Do we go
> fascist? Do we go back to an improbable status quo ante? Or some
> other outcome? What do you think, nettimers?
If you factor in global warming, the relative position of the US and
Europe might actually decrease slower then pure demographics suggest,
simply because they have the means and the technology to deal with it
best. But in what kind of a world? Bifo is already speaking about
"Auschwitz on the Beach" in regard to the new border regimes of the EU
in Libya.
And while the "wall" at the border of Mexico might not be build, it's
telling that it was one of the main promises that got Trump elected and
only his incompetence prevents it from being built.
So,this leaves us with Musk & co as kind of avant-garde of a new green
authoritarianism, based on a renewed state-corporate fit centering
around a transformation towards carbon neutrality. Add automation to the
mix, and this will not even in the countries/regions that have this
option, include everyone.
And then we arrive at the question Morlock raised:
> What is the value of the attention when the purchasing power is
> zero? The most likely uplifting answer is, after the redundants are
> given some food and shelter ("basic income"), pacification. The
> dystopian prediction being kill them all.
To avoid this, Brian's question is of great urgency.
> I don't think that the post-2008 crisis will ever be resolved until
> some socio-political agency comes up with a vision of the future that
> is inspiring, workable and translatable into mathematical-statistical
> terms.
This vision, I'm convinced, can only come from transformed relations
within the biosphere (be that sustainable socio-economies, perma
cultures or geo-engineering) supported by advanced technologies. And
these visions better have to be more practical and applied than the
musings of our leading theoreticians in the field such as Haraway or Barad.
Felix
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Re: Return to feudalism
Very true. I recently witnessed something, and will try to explain in as non-technical terms as possible: the event was around distributed applications and in particular the presentation was about micropayments. The audience of 30-40 was rather tech-savvy - developers, entrepreneurs and assorted lurkers. A system was described that can pay for the video stream in real time, as the stream is being pulled, in units of about 5-10 seconds of video. The payment mechanism is embedded in the network delivery fabric. Nothing controversial so far. The main advantage was announced: the price depends on the video quality (essentially, a bitrate) of each segment, so that if you get a particular segment at lower quality (because of network congestion), you pay less for that particular 10-second segment. The question for the presenter came up, why would the content authors/owners agree to this, in other words why is the content value equated with the bitrate, why is the payload treated the same as the carrier? The reaction of the audience was pretty much unanimous: this is a non-issue - of course that the value of a movie is equal to the bitrate at which it is consumed. The speaker didn't even understand the question - the counterargument was that Amazon AWS also charges per gigabyte, so what is odd about charging for movies per, basically, weight? These are the people who are actively developing the systems which will deal with the content in the future. The state of mind is that the value created outside the tech domain - fiber, switches, routers, encoders, players - does not figure at all. The embedded payment systems may not even recognize a possibility of such value. This is not new. It started in 2000s when EFF argued that "bits want to be free", there is no "content", and DRM is evil. This attitude effectively squeezed out pretty much all small publishers from the market, as only few huge monopolies could afford to effectively charge for the content (through lawsuits and switching to the expensive real time you-pay-we-stream-to-you model.) The real question, after the long intro: was there ever a monetary value in the content beyond the cost of the physical carrier? Thick books are usually more expensive than thin ones. Paperback is cheaper than hardcover. Tickets for big theaters are more expensive than tickets for fringe rat-infested venues. What happens when the carrier becomes effectively free? As with the disappearance of the labor, problem-solving with the technology seems to point to the same conclusion: problem-free society is a nightmare. On 9/18/17, 17:06, John Hopkins wrote: > Whomever, whatever controls the protocols, controls the device and > reaps the rewards that the device brings. This is because the protocol > is a proxy for the actualized projection of energy or the pathway that > energy is mandated to follow # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
