Ash & Kirsty - the brilliant voices of contemporary Marxism

[Alexander Bard]

Dear All

Ash and Kirsty's conversation is flawless. A million thanks to Ari for
posting the link. These two young women do they exactly what I have been
asking for, they put class first and identities second and thereby arrive
at a Marxist analysis of contemporary society from which we can build a
proper left for the future.

I have said nothing else here, even if my tonality has been different than
Ash and Kirsty's stylish performance. So if we seriously discuss substance
and not just tonality, I frankly don't understand how you can celebrate
awesome Ash and Kirsty on the one hand, Brian, and then dismiss my
arguments as "reactionary" on the other. What exactly is the difference
between what we have argued? Ash and Kirsty are as beautifully Marxist as I
have asked for. So what's the deal here?

As for Nettime, this at least was an open and curious leftist forum on the
relationship between humans and technology.for years. Lovink and I first
met through a shared informationalist reading of Deleuze. Maybe that is no
longer the case. Maybe Marxist Libertarians like say myself, Brendan
O'Neill, Tom Slater and Joanna Williams from Spiked Online, Peggy Sastre
who started the French all-female opposition to the Hollywood-driven #metoo
campaign with Catherine Deneuve, et cetera, are no longer welcome. Maybe
Marxist thinkers who agree with me on every point I have written here, like
Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, are also no longer welcome. Maybe white men
in general are no longer welcome unless they shut up infinitely and admit
eternal guilt for their gender and skin color.

Maybe Nettime is and should be precisely the identitarianism-only forum
that some members apparently would like it to be when they scream for
"exclusion exclusion". We have seen this happen with many Rousseauian
political sects in the past. It could certainly happen here too. Maybe it
already did. And I have no problem with that. Like Angela, I would just
like the founders and moderators of Nettime let us know what their
intentions are going forward. Should I not fit in within these ambitions,
please note that I am more than happy to leave. And probably many other
Nettime members too who have been supportive of me lately but not even
bothered to post this to the list. The ceiling is apparently way lower now
here than it was a few years ago. But I'm fine with that if that is what is
desired. Viva "Nettime The Safe Zone" in that case!

Finally to Florian, I am anything but "querfront". I'm the exact opposite.
I take neither side at Charlottesville, I do not unite the two. It is
actually precisely the unification of a Hitler camp and a Stalin camp that
I would want to avoid at all costs. I'm a Marxist Libertarian of the French
bent like thousands and thousands of leftists since the 18th century. An
avid reader of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Kristeva, Paglia, Deleuze,
Foucault and Zizek. Meaning I'm also happy to collaborate with liberals and
conservatives but neither with the extreme right nor with the extreme
Rousseauian sects to the left.

If my ideological position is not welcome on Nettime, I'm happy to leave.
No hard feelings. The Intellectual Deep Web and other forums are full of
tech thinkers who share my convictions. I will probably meet and hang out
with people like Ash and Kirsty there too. But a policy decision of where
the limits lay when it comes to ideology and tonality on Nettime would be
most welcome. Fully agreed. And thank you for listening before I shut up
and leave in the case.

Best intentions indeed
Alexander

Den sön 4 nov. 2018 kl 22:03 skrev Brian Holmes <
bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>:

> Alexander's positions have been thoroughly critiqued from many quarters.
> After building on those critiques, Ian has just enumerated his many
> reactionary statements. I think it's definitive and I won't engage with him
> anymore.
>
> Ari just sent in a video where a brilliant young woman, Ash Sarkar, talks
> about the deliberate persecution of black radical socialists after the
> 1960s, and about the way that leftist social movements were weakened as a
> result. She goes on to develop a class analysis which doesn't diss off
> intersectionality (that's the main identity politics concept she discusses)
> but instead, fills the gaps she sees in present-day politics on the left.
> In the middle of it she invokes Angela Davis, a black Marxist feminist who
> was not killed in the 1970s and went on, among other things, to help start
> the movement against mass incarceration which has been one of the key
> forces of change in American life during these last years. The only point
> where I might disagree with her is that Angela Davis has certainly not been
> forgotten in the US, though maybe in the UK, so in that case, let's
> remember a little.
>
> The difference is: talking about specific people and events in the
> present, building constructive positions, and covering an amazing amount of
> ground in short words.
>
> Check it out if 

Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Dan

Your posting is so damn brilliant I hardly know where to start praising it.
Yes yes yes, this is the summary of the amazing achievements made by a
politics of identity. But is also came out of an ideological conviction
that there was class as superior category (including all people, globally)
under which we then find the sub-categories which this politics rightfully
built as proper subcultures that were encouraged to speak and be seen and
heard. And this was indeed a massive achievement that worked. Precisely
because of its firm roots in Marxism.

However there is always a point where those who are being seen and heard
must also be held responsible for what they say and give voice to. Is what
you're saying actually factually true? And is it relevant to the priorities
that we must make going forward in the class struggle proper? And also,
what in all this is "left" or "right"? Maybe what you say is relevant but
isn't necessarily a Marxist priority but rather a universal priority where
we can find liberal and even conservative allies (say principles like "rule
of law", "free speech", "gender, race and sexual orientation equality" or
say even "cannabis legalization"), then let's find those allies while we
still emphatically address the class issue which liberals and conservatives
will always ignore. Where we instead may even have to go to war for justice
to be made. Just like Lenin said.

Because that's how a society works. The politics of identity also did
succeed in this department. The end of apartheid in South Africa proved it.
Any damn pride parade proves it. However the question now is whether those
pride parades still address say gender, race and sexual orientation issues,
and attract allies, or have just become stations for what we should refer
to as a "politics of trauma" rather than as a "politics of identity".
Rousseauian cults and sects. An infantilized version of leftist discourse,
where a narcissistic call for "look at me, look at me, look at me" has
replaced the Marxist class struggle proper for equal opportunity for all in
any given society through empowerment and a demand for adulthood from all
involved. Where what is said is properly challenged and not just accounted
for depending on who speaks. As for Scandinavia, the LGBT people proper are
now leaving the pride parades as these have been taken over by heterosexual
gender scientists who merely use the parades for their own benefit as
professional state bureaucrats. Need I add that the latter all use
"identity politics" as their excuse for even being there in the first place?

And this is my possibly only disagreement with you, Dan. You say that the
previous generation should have taught the new generation on what it
achieved and how it got there. But has the new generation, fostered by
social media, the welfare state and consumer society to always seek The
Great Tit rather than empowering iitself toward adulthood, even bothered to
study history? Do they even know who Marx is? Do they even know who Hegel,
Nietzsche and Freud are? I believe the responsibility for this The Great
Generational Gap lies with both generations. And it is fundamentally
ideologically a huge step away from Marx into the arms of Rousseau.
Marxists can handle what triggers them, anything that does not kill them
makes them stronger and not weaker.

The college trigger warnings and safe zones today have absolutely nothing
to do with Marxism. But they have everything to do with a Rousseauian
middle class petit-bourgeois anti-ideology that is obsessed with tonality
and etiquette (of others, mind you, not their own venomous tonality, since
they always refer to the excuse of "suffering from trauma"), an attitude
toward political struggle that is obscenely infantile and ironically way
more Versailles than Paris. Watch out for anybody and everybody who
constantly "takes offense". You will see nothing but Rousseauian self-pity
behind such (a lack of proper) arguments. You simply can not mix Marx with
smelling salts with impunity. Instead the Rousseuians must be called out on
their game. Is this struggle about you being seen and heard only for the
reason that you want to be seen and heard (media-driven narcissism), or is
this struggle about the genuine unfairness of class divisions, the
genuinely unfair distribution of the resources that society has
accumulated, the genuinely unfair distribution of the costs for that
accumulation (ecology etc), the equal distribution of both rights and
duties among adults in a society of adults?

And do we then have the visionary and strategic tools for such a proper
Marxist class struggle? Because it is precisely when vision and strategy is
lacking, when the outer circuit is weak and the inner circuit expands at
the cost of the outer circuit, that Rousseau makes his ugly return in our
midst. We lost Marx, still benefited from the Marxist heritage for another
30-40 years. What we now see is the total disappeareance of Marx replaced

Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Alice

If you refer to what I wrote, then please let me correct you. I never said
that gender is a social ghost. I said that race is a social ghost. There is
no such thing as race outside of bigoted people's limited imagination. Skin
color makes us no different from one another than hair or eye color. Which
is why all forms of racism are invalid. Prejudices are best fought with
empowerment and facts, not with infinite (self)victimization. Call the
prejudiced out on their ignorance, not on some kind of banal moralism.
Gender exists ontically and not just ontologically. As does androgynity
between the genders. And all three categories serve excellent and equally
important roles in the community. I'm a radical egalitarian for good and
sold scientific reasons. Tribal mapping theory even includes a forth
category labeled "the shamanic caste" for added tribal queerness, the
go-betweens of all genders that walk between tribes. There you go, pretty
much all people included in that model, my favorite model for future
socialism.
However class beats everything else when it comes to political struggle. I
just read and found out both Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou agree strongly
with me on this note. Not that namedropping is an argument, just another
example of how there is a major backlash brewing against identitarianism's
claim toward becoming the core of the left. I firmly believe such a
Rousseauian turn would be a devastating mistake. Back to Marx, please!
Best to fight sexism and racism (of all kinds) through facts and
empowerment. Subordinated to that one factor that overdetermines the social
arena as a whole, the good old well-performed class analysis.
With violence too if needed. You're certainly not going to find people like
me among the passive-aggressive trolls in the pacifism camp.

Best intentions and I believe over and out for now
Alexander

Den fre 2 nov. 2018 kl 17:52 skrev Alice Yang :

> Trust me, race and gender are not social ghosts. They have extremely
> material consequences.
>
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 12:48 AM Alexander Bard 
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Justin
>>
>> Was Karl Marx an idealist or a materialist? I'm perfectly happy to leave
>> that for you and others to decide. Because I'm a pragmatist and my ideas
>> are pragmatist and the rest is just wordplay to me. I'm interested in
>> factual truth and in whether something works or does not work. I'm also
>> interested in opinion being challenged on its own merit. Therefore I
>> radically separate person and opinion. The whole idea that who speaks
>> affects the value of what is being said is just value relativism of the
>> worst kind. I know this is a popular kindergarden game among identitarians
>> of both the extreme right and the extreme left (as if "being seen and
>> heard" must be divided equally among some five-year-olds). Because I can
>> see no other value in this habit than infantile attention-seeking. Which
>> means it is in itself victim-seeking and therefore victimhood-encouraging
>> and certainly not heroic and empowering for anybody. And I can't think of
>> anything less Marxist than that. As I said, identitarianism is Rousseau
>> through and through. How it even sneaked into "The Left" beats me.
>>
>> Everybody should radically be allowed to speak and each argument should
>> be judged on its own merits, not according to who forwards it. That
>> strengthens the overall the debate the most. That is if you're interested
>> in debates having successful and productive outcomes. At least I am.
>> Anything else is just a waste of valuable time. So does race exist? Yes, it
>> does, undeniably, but only as a social ghost. My brother and I had no idea
>> one of us was black and of us was white until we where 14. We had no idea
>> we ought to have cared. Now we can spend our entire lives going on and on
>> about social ghosts and, like David pointed out, end up being the very
>> people who defend and keep the social ghosts the most and the longest.
>> However I find that tragic. I want to move on. And class being firmly tied
>> to capital and power is therefore the factual overarching category under
>> which we can then deal with minor issues like race and gender. Effectively.
>> Now if that is not a materialist argument as much as an activist one, then
>> I don't know what is. If anything is idealist and not materialist it must
>> certainly be the obsession with social ghosts. But sure, the I and the M
>> labels are yours to decide. I could not care less.
>>
>> Best intentions
>> Alexander
>>
>> Den fre 2 nov. 2018 kl 04:00 skrev Justin Charles <
>> justinrobertchar...@gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Coming in late to this thread but the anti

Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

[Alexander Bard]

Yes yes yes, dear Jan Hendrik, this is precisely the way to go! We need to
fundamentally reunderstand social relations to then make smithereens of
western individualism (Descartes and Kant) to then present the
relationalist or network-dynamical model for the 21st century society, for
man and machine, for economy and ecology, and the universal rather than the
particular condition for being human. This is where the call for a return
to the tribe comes in.

I haven't worked with Australian aboriginals but when Jan Söderqvist and I
researched for our book "Digital Libido" we traveled to Brazil, Peru,
Colombia, Botswana, New Guinea, northern Canada, to interview hundreds of
tribal elders and collect the data by which we could make data anthropology
out of tribal anthropology. And naturally universal patterns soon began to
emerge out of the data. A matriarchy (inner circuit) matching a patriarchy
(outer circuit) with clear male, female and androgynous contributive
archetypes (forget work, what is deeply human and social is contribution,
in whatever shape it comes) making it possible for us to guarantee that all
living human beings today have had contributive social archetypes (whether
they still will do so remains to be seen once robotization and
automatization have played their cards). And not a single trace of
individualism anywhere, but tons of personal responsibility (returned with
autonomy) following the always returning and all-important rite of passage.
Tundra or savannah had no effect, the tribe works the same everywhere we
looked. I believe this is a formidable foundation for a thriving
eco-socialism. And I certainly want to be part in building it in whatever
way I can.

Please note how the rite of passage and the journey from childhood to
adulthood is fundamental for any thriving and functioning culture. It is
consequently The Left that should embrace and cherish adulthood as ideal.
Why our western identitarianism has done so much damage is because like all
Rousseauian movements before it, it has celebrated childhood over
adulthood, infantilized western society on a massive scale both through
consumerism, welfare-state dependency, instagram narcissism, and pure
capitalist greed. And you can just check the data coming out of Google for
understanding the true tragedy of our times: Each generation only talks to
itself, the relationships between the elders and youth have broken down.
This is what is historically new and so utterly dangerous with the social
media revolution, we have never had a generationalist society before. And
besides the ecology this is the most dangerous thing we are playing with in
contemporary western society.

So I argue that an Australian aboriginal elderly matriarch really teaches
us what our own elders would have taught us, had they still been around or
listened to. However if we can manage to create a grand narrative based on
our fundamental tribalness, ecological sustainability, equality and respect
between tribal members (the only hierarchy we found within tribes is that
the older decide over the younger, strictly from a maximized wisdom ideal),
then we can focus on the two major challenges that await us: The move from
intratribalism to intertribalism (which is going to be incredibly hard, we
are essentially born programmed to kill strangers no matter what Derrida
and Levinas think) and the move from the human relationality to the
human-machine relationality. Tough stuff indeed. But without a new grand
narrative (a return to the real rather than the good tribe) we will utterly
fail. Postmodernism and identitarianism served their purposes but are of no
or little use in this struggle. Class analysis and sociobiology though mean
absolutely everything.

Best intentions
Alexander

Den fre 2 nov. 2018 kl 05:40 skrev jan hendrik brueggemeier :

> Dear nettime list -
>
> a little late to the party (and it seems the conversation has already
> moved on …) i do like to pose some observations/ questions that this
> thread has triggered for me — although i must admit that i have not read
> marx (nor rosseau) myself. that’s probably me just being lazy as i did
> inherit a copy of “grundrisse” from my dad and i was impressed that he
> had sat down and used a ruler to underline important parts throughout
> the whole book. Btw jean amery writes about going through the waves not
> having had read marx in 1930s and again in 1960s …
>
> a little while ago i helped facilitate a conversation about eco-feminism
> from an australian-aborignial and a western perspective between two
> philosophers: mary graham, a kombumerri elder from queensland and freya
> mathews from victoria. mary made a comment that for her western
> philosophy is pretty much the intellect of the arena (and this recent
> thread on nettime did bring her point home in a way).
>
> however, how i interpret her observation is that one difference of
> aboriginal intellectuality to a western (academic) one is that it stems
> from within 

Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Justin

Was Karl Marx an idealist or a materialist? I'm perfectly happy to leave
that for you and others to decide. Because I'm a pragmatist and my ideas
are pragmatist and the rest is just wordplay to me. I'm interested in
factual truth and in whether something works or does not work. I'm also
interested in opinion being challenged on its own merit. Therefore I
radically separate person and opinion. The whole idea that who speaks
affects the value of what is being said is just value relativism of the
worst kind. I know this is a popular kindergarden game among identitarians
of both the extreme right and the extreme left (as if "being seen and
heard" must be divided equally among some five-year-olds). Because I can
see no other value in this habit than infantile attention-seeking. Which
means it is in itself victim-seeking and therefore victimhood-encouraging
and certainly not heroic and empowering for anybody. And I can't think of
anything less Marxist than that. As I said, identitarianism is Rousseau
through and through. How it even sneaked into "The Left" beats me.

Everybody should radically be allowed to speak and each argument should be
judged on its own merits, not according to who forwards it. That
strengthens the overall the debate the most. That is if you're interested
in debates having successful and productive outcomes. At least I am.
Anything else is just a waste of valuable time. So does race exist? Yes, it
does, undeniably, but only as a social ghost. My brother and I had no idea
one of us was black and of us was white until we where 14. We had no idea
we ought to have cared. Now we can spend our entire lives going on and on
about social ghosts and, like David pointed out, end up being the very
people who defend and keep the social ghosts the most and the longest.
However I find that tragic. I want to move on. And class being firmly tied
to capital and power is therefore the factual overarching category under
which we can then deal with minor issues like race and gender. Effectively.
Now if that is not a materialist argument as much as an activist one, then
I don't know what is. If anything is idealist and not materialist it must
certainly be the obsession with social ghosts. But sure, the I and the M
labels are yours to decide. I could not care less.

Best intentions
Alexander

Den fre 2 nov. 2018 kl 04:00 skrev Justin Charles <
justinrobertchar...@gmail.com>:

> Coming in late to this thread but the anti-identity current that's growing
> more and more prevalent on the left lately seems to be somewhat in
> opposition to contrary to materialism. To say that "class is class and
> only class has universal validity" strikes me as pretty idealist, not
> materialist. OneWhile race may not exist to Alexander Bard and Candace
> Owens, I'd argue that maybe it doesn't exist for them because materially it
> need not. Alexander is a white man. Candace Owens, while a black woman, has
> a class position that allows her to skip some over much of what it looks
> like to be black for most black people, who aren't well-compensated
> conservative (or liberal) commentators. Most black people's class position
> is deeply intertwined with the color of their skin. I don't think I need to
> go into the historical reasons for this. I'd also say that Asad Haider's
> book was in no way championing victimhood. If that's what one takes away
> from it then they've read an entirely different book than I did.
>
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 12:05 PM tbyfield  wrote:
>
>> Ian, this idea of 'civility' should be unpacked a bit, because the ~word
>> lumps together a disparate range of concerns. At its worst, a lot of
>> babble about civility boils down to is tone-policing, which relies on
>> etiquette as an all-purpose tool for micromanaging rhetoric — and in
>> doing so, limiting and even delegitimizing positions of every type
>> (subjective, relational, political, whatever). In other contexts —
>> notably, in 'centrist' politics in the US — it serves as a rationale
>> for institutionalist pliability: 'bipartisan' cooperation, etc. But
>> those two uses are very different from its function as a foil for the
>> frightening prospect of outright political violence. These different
>> strands, or layers if you like, are hopelessly tangled, and that
>> confusion in itself has serious consequences — hence the culturalist
>> use of the word 'strategy,' which often is used to get at the nebulous
>> realm in which individual behavior aligns with (or 'is constitutive of')
>> abstract, impersonal forces. That's a very roundabout way to get at the
>> obvious problem, which is the direct way that increasingly uncivil
>> political discourse foments violence. And, in a way, that's the problem:
>> the left's path for translating ideals int

Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

[Alexander Bard]

t; If your class analysis can't account for the way labor/capital has been
> sexualized and racialized historically, via colonialism, the gendered
> division of labor, etc., then your analysis has nothing do with the
> actuality of the world and instead only obscures it.
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 07:23 Alexander Bard  wrote:
>
>> Dear Florian, Brian & Co
>>
>> Thanks for excellent postings on the future of the left. This is
>> precisely the discussion I was looking for. However I think identitarianism
>> is quite easy to define. It is simply a series of sub-categories that deny
>> any superior category that ties them together. Laclau and Mouffe defined it
>> quite clearly in the 1980s with their hegemony theory. What they heralded
>> though as the route out of the hellhole of the grand narrative(s) and
>> admitted would be a competition between subcultural sub-identities (the
>> identities that fight over who should be seen and heard in identity
>> politics, who is the biggest current victim) I believe was a terrible
>> mistake. Let's use some Freud, Kristeva and Girard here to understand why
>> I'm so strongly opposed to Laclau and Mouffe.
>>
>> A tribe or a nation is lead by a grand narrative of where it comes from
>> and where it is heading. This is the priestly or shamanic storytelling of
>> where and when the tribe has to move/adapt to change. The vague goal is
>> some kind of utopian vision (the journey being more important than the goal
>> etc), the past is retold as to cherish the wisdom of the elderly and the
>> energy of the young so as to keep the whole tribe/nation on the move and
>> adaptable to change without patricides or matricides (costly revolutions or
>> bloody coups) being necessary. Any other identities are then sub-identities
>> to this overarching collective superidentity (tribe, nation, religion,
>> party, state etc).
>>
>> The loyalty toward the superidentity is achieved either through what
>> Kristeva calls the authentic phallus (the fetish that lifts the collective
>> upward) or through the false phallus (the abject that unifies the
>> superidentity through hatred) to complement the mamilla that secures
>> everyday survival. Often cited examples are Moses and the Promised Land for
>> a fetish and Hitler and the Jew for an abject. With three main disastrous
>> fake-phallic projects to deal with in the west (Hitler, Stalin and
>> Colonialism) it is no wonder that The West had to go through an iron bath
>> of critical analysis to deal with all three simultaneously from the 1940s
>> forward.
>>
>> But in doing so, the baby (grand narratives) was thrown out with the
>> bathwater which made us all terribly sensitive toward a return to the very
>> roots of these three fake phalluses and then naively started building a
>> forth one. I'm not kidding, but Identitarianism is as Rousseuian as the
>> previous three (Steven Pinker describes the dilemma beautifully in "The
>> Blank Slate"). Postmodernism became its own grand narrative as an
>> anti-narrative and that is why Identitarianism is what it is and why it is
>> so dangerous. It does not even see its own blind spot (you need Hegel to do
>> that, we must stop bad-mouthing Hegel).
>>
>> The Identity Left denied the possibility of vision and its own capacity
>> for adulthood (the journey to The Promised Land is of course the journey
>> from childhood to adulthood), eternally infantilized itself, and did so by
>> sloppily adding an abject to unify all its various self-victimization
>> cults, namely around The White Heterosexual Male. It was consequently only
>> a matter of time before The White Heterosexual Male stood up and made
>> himself the victim and there you have the equally Rousseauian Extreme
>> Right, Trumpism etc. At least the Extreme Right in Europe, Florian, is
>> distinctly male and working class, in Sweden all Sweden Democrats are
>> former Social Democrats for example. And what are the middle classes if not
>> second generation working class anyway?
>>
>> Now we are stuck with the Charlottesvilles of the world and the only way
>> out is a new utopian vision. The Right has its own clumsy version of this
>> vision and it is its tech heroes Elon Musk and his vain trip to Mars,
>> biohacking, transhumanism and the lot. Libertarian tax-free utopias devoid
>> of nation-state attachments. And they can't even make Facebook a
>> customer-friendly experience. Enough said. Silicon Valley ideology is not
>> even individualistic, it is outright autistic. We can surely do better than
>> that. Now if the Left could recognize 

Re: Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

[Alexander Bard]

Actually, nope.
Rather the exact opposite: "The inability to think race and class
separately says everything you need to know about the poverty and
bankruptcy of Ian's position."
Unless you realize that a wealthy person, regardless of skin or hair color
for that matter, has more power and influence in any given society than a
poor person, you are in really dangerous and deceitful territory.
And as for "the richness of the complexity of your understanding", Ian,
bare me your enormous pretentiousness. People are simple. As is wealth and
income. Only a tired old capitalist would claim that anything is so complex
and sophisticated that it can not be understood. Pretentiousness is merely
hiding the reactionary attitude driving identitarianism.
It helps nobody. Least of all the poor South Africans first betrayed by
apartheid and now by the utterly corrupt and sickeningly identitarian and
privilege-driven ANC.
South Africa proves exactly what I'm saying. I repeat: A race war would be
disastrous, but a class war against the entire establishment is exactly
what the country needs. Never ever mix up the two.
Over and out
Alexander

Den tis 30 okt. 2018 kl 13:15 skrev Ian Alan Paul :

> "My native South Africa is heading toward a class war or a race war. A
> class war is exactly what South Africa needs, a race war would be
> disastrous."
>
> The inability to think race and class together in this case in particular
> says everything you need to know about the poverty and bankrupty of
> Alexander's position.
>
> If your class analysis can't account for the way labor/capital has been
> sexualized and racialized historically, via colonialism, the gendered
> division of labor, etc., then your analysis has nothing do with the
> actuality of the world and instead only obscures it.
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 07:23 Alexander Bard  wrote:
>
>> Dear Florian, Brian & Co
>>
>> Thanks for excellent postings on the future of the left. This is
>> precisely the discussion I was looking for. However I think identitarianism
>> is quite easy to define. It is simply a series of sub-categories that deny
>> any superior category that ties them together. Laclau and Mouffe defined it
>> quite clearly in the 1980s with their hegemony theory. What they heralded
>> though as the route out of the hellhole of the grand narrative(s) and
>> admitted would be a competition between subcultural sub-identities (the
>> identities that fight over who should be seen and heard in identity
>> politics, who is the biggest current victim) I believe was a terrible
>> mistake. Let's use some Freud, Kristeva and Girard here to understand why
>> I'm so strongly opposed to Laclau and Mouffe.
>>
>> A tribe or a nation is lead by a grand narrative of where it comes from
>> and where it is heading. This is the priestly or shamanic storytelling of
>> where and when the tribe has to move/adapt to change. The vague goal is
>> some kind of utopian vision (the journey being more important than the goal
>> etc), the past is retold as to cherish the wisdom of the elderly and the
>> energy of the young so as to keep the whole tribe/nation on the move and
>> adaptable to change without patricides or matricides (costly revolutions or
>> bloody coups) being necessary. Any other identities are then sub-identities
>> to this overarching collective superidentity (tribe, nation, religion,
>> party, state etc).
>>
>> The loyalty toward the superidentity is achieved either through what
>> Kristeva calls the authentic phallus (the fetish that lifts the collective
>> upward) or through the false phallus (the abject that unifies the
>> superidentity through hatred) to complement the mamilla that secures
>> everyday survival. Often cited examples are Moses and the Promised Land for
>> a fetish and Hitler and the Jew for an abject. With three main disastrous
>> fake-phallic projects to deal with in the west (Hitler, Stalin and
>> Colonialism) it is no wonder that The West had to go through an iron bath
>> of critical analysis to deal with all three simultaneously from the 1940s
>> forward.
>>
>> But in doing so, the baby (grand narratives) was thrown out with the
>> bathwater which made us all terribly sensitive toward a return to the very
>> roots of these three fake phalluses and then naively started building a
>> forth one. I'm not kidding, but Identitarianism is as Rousseuian as the
>> previous three (Steven Pinker describes the dilemma beautifully in "The
>> Blank Slate"). Postmodernism became its own grand narrative as an
>> anti-narrative and that is why Identitarianism is what it is and why it is
>> so dangerous. It does not even see 

Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

[Alexander Bard]

powerment are everything. And Marx beats Nietzsche
through a return to the tribe. Marx believed in the potential of the
proletariat. He was right. Who are the cultural engineers that based on
open source build our tomorrow today? They are the new proletariat. How do
we unleash their power?

Brian is of course absolutely right about ecology. But ecology is dystopian
in itself. So what is the Hegelian turn when ecology becomes utopian? Its
collectively technologically achieved reversal? Personally I'm investing in
a tech start-up that locks in carbon in smart and cheap new ways. With the
very same people that I build a tantric whorehouse with in Holland. That's
my activism. What is yours? Can we inspire each other? And a last word
concerning class versus sub-identity: My native South Africa is heading
toward a class war or a race war. A class war is exactly what South Africa
needs, a race war would be disastrous. Need I say more? You get the picture.

Best intentions
Alexander Bard

Den mån 29 okt. 2018 kl 23:10 skrev Florian Cramer :

> The problem with all debates of "identity politics" is that there is no
> clear definition of it, not even by Mark Lilla who popularized the term in
> 2016. (Lilla, by the way, doesn't even speak of or for the "left", but of
> two types of  "liberalism", one that he supports and one that he rejects.)
> "Identity politics" is a textbook strawman argument which any decent
> analytic philosopher should be able to tear into pieces with propositional
> logic. What's more, the term has become a reactionary meme now that
> political movements, such as "Aufstehen" in Germany, are being founded on
> the premise of reinvigorating the left by ridding it from "identity
> politics". This is where the strawman becomes a red herring.
>
> All this is mostly based on the fiction that the working class defected to
> the extreme right after established left-wing politics no longer
> represented it. It's a fiction because, at least in Europe, research has
> clearly shown that most voters for the extreme right come from the middle
> class and vote for these parties because of shared core values (in short,
> an understanding of the rule of law as law and order, and an understanding
> of democracy as the execution of the will of the people who represent the
> majority population), not policies.
>
> If Lilla and others were more consequential, they would have to
> historically denounce the political left as "identity politics" as such.
> One could call the French Revolution "identity politics" of the bourgeois
> (versus the aristocracy), the 19th century workers' movement "identity
> politics" of the working class (which an old-school Jacobin might have
> rejected precisely on the grounds that the republic had declared everyone
> to be equal), the feminist movement "identity politics" of women, the black
> civil rights movement "identity politics" of African Americans, the gay
> pride movement "identity politics" of queers etc.etc.. In the end, those
> who deplore "identity politics" express a nostalgia for a simple, binary
> past that never existed. Worse, they patronize groups of people to which
> they neither belong, nor are in touch with.
>
> Maybe there could be a more precise notion of "identity politics" in the
> sense of political choices purely made on the basis of one's group identity
> instead of one's political interests. Examples could include trade union
> members who voted for Clinton, Blair and Schröder in the 1990s out of token
> loyality to "their" party, or the blind support of openly destructive and
> malicious politics on the basis of ethnic loyality in areas with ethnic
> conflicts. In my hometown Rotterdam, for example, a right-wing populist
> party has been the strongest political force for one and a half decade
> simply on the basis of white ethnic voter loyalty (in a city whose majority
> population is now non-white), never mind the fact that this party is
> chasing its own voters out of the city by aggressively gentrifying
> traditional neighborhoods. Did Lilla and his epigones ever call this
> "identity politics"?
>
> -F
>
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Empowerment vs Entitlement - what direction will The Left choose?

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Ari & Co

I totally agree and this was precisely my point. And for all the good
intentions of keeping a civilized tone on this forum, we are civilized
enough not to have to deal with tone-policing either. Thanks to Ted for
pointing that out. Now, let's dare to think this issue though fully. Here
is a thought experiment. OK?

Can we agree that we want class to disappear or become irrelevant? Can we
agree that we want race to disappear or become irrelevant? Can we agree
that we want genders to be given equal opportunity and then empowered to
decide what to prioritize as respective outcomes of that equality? And that
we wish for genders to be equally strong and collaborate? So as to which
gender you are born into becomes, again, irrelevant?

This means we remove the narcissistic obsession with identities and
differences to be replaced by a class struggle proper. A struggle based on
empowerment and not on entitlement. A storytelling about the road upward to
the heroic and not downward into the abysmal. You see, I don't believe that
people are nearly as complex and/or sophisticated as they themselves think.
I believe people are rather simple and utterly predictable once you've
studied Freud. That's precisely why I like them. Without pretentions.

So maybe "labour" was too limited a term coming from Marx, well then
"contribution" is the term proper. Credit Marx for that. Because that was
what he meant. Not a single tribe ever fosters its children to be anything
other than contributing adults. What would the alternative be? Identity
politics' obsession with keeping victims passivized forever as cry-bullies
at The Great Tit of the state and the media? No way. Which is why Marxism
and identitarianism are incompatible. And which is why identitarianism is
just identitarianism. Without a class analysis overriding everything else,
why would there be any difference between the cuckoo's next called "The
Identity Left" and the cuckoo's nest called "The Identity Right"? They are
both each other's perfect abjects. Caharlottesville literally left no space
for any third alternative since Rousseau ruled both camps and class was
never part of the equation.

Other than that, I hope Ted Byfield writes his own books instead of poking
fun about other writers' calendarian priorities. Especially because he is
absolutely right. The postmodernist left has resigned into the falsehood of
matrichal pacifism. Its total and utter lack of phallic passion is exactly
why philosophers like Land and me have turned our backs on it with such a
vengeance. My question is then whether Byfield sees himself as first
executioner of people he merely dislikes in a Robespierrian vendetta
justified by a purification of the population toward a Rousseuian infantile
innocence (Pol Pot did that well and if anybody was a Rousseuian he was,
Pol Pot even did his PhD on Rousseau).

If so, Byfield will soon have thousands of Portland hipsters joining his
ranks when Charlottesville really magnifies in North America. I'm sure
Antifa makes sure his books become bestsellers in no time at all. Or else
Byfield is seriously interested in Marxist violence firmly focused on using
whatever means necessary to go after the class oppressors of our time,
because then that is a book I would be happy to publish myself. He should
then regard me as a loyal and listening ally and not as a foe.

Because I like Byfield's desire for phallus a lot, the question, as Freud
would say, is where he chooses to direct it. But contrary to Land, I still
count on diplomacy to work. I still want the priests to build religious
ritual places rather than design military drawing tables. Although time is
running short. But pacifism is dead and over and should never have been a
leftist axiom to start with. Here Byfield is thoroughly correct. Never
castrate a culture more than absolutely necessary. Once we deal with the
infantilization of the left we can also open a whole new tool box toward
proper empowerment.

So while Byfield has decided not be interested in my ideas based on his
dislike of my personality, I pay no attention to his personality but am
frankly and sincerely interested in his ideas. You say violence. Then I
must ask in return: The Rousseauian variety of ressentiment, or the Marxist
variety of empowerment? Or have I misunderstood that there ever was a
difference? Because to me it makes a hell of a difference. Like the
difference between planned violence or threats thereof and the blind
variety where today's social justice warriors are bound to end up soon.
It's about to become Paris vs Versailles 1789 all over again. Then because
of the printing press, this time because of the internet. My question to
Byfield is what we are going to do inside Paris once Versailles has burned
down?

Best intentions
Alexander Bard

Den fre 26 okt. 2018 kl 00:47 skrev ari :

>  The primacy of identity has transmorphed class struggle into
>  ressentiment 

Re: Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Hahahaha, and there comes the Rousseuian personal attack. Exactly my point.
There are apparently people so evil and dangerous that the mere mentioning
of their names disqualifies the mentioner from any further attachment. See
Ian's outburst below. Are the gallows what await me next?
While I thought Nettime was s forum for grown-ups - in which case
separating person and opinion (meaning Nelson Mandela may be wrong and
Adolf Hitler may be right on details) - is a fundamental requirement, Ian
wants this to be a kindergarden faux discussion forum for the good children
isolating themselves against the evil children on the outside. Superiority
versus inferiority in the moralist struggle. Sooo Rousseauian. And exactly
what is so fundamentally pathologiocal and infantile with identity
politics. What could possibly be a more Rousseuian attitude than that?
I happily dine with everybody and anybody without becoming them. As my
great dad taught me when I was five years old. And if The Left may not even
listen to and learn from Candace Owens, Nick Land and/or Adolf Hitler for
that matter, then whatever that Left is, deserves to die its current slow
death into total irrelevance. It is not a proletarian left at all, it's
just a church lady left.
But I'm all for The New Left. A return to Freud and Marx. And I'm happy my
message in a bottle in this forum worked big time considering how many
offlist new amazing contacts my postings created. Nettime is still very
much alive (thank the God who does not exist) even if not on the mailing
list itself.
And Ian, our dear historian of identitarianism Asad Haider will never
attract any masses. Because he again does not have a narrative to attract
anybody. Except possibly for the eternal self-victims that Marx so grandly
despised.
Thank you, everybody!
Alexander Bard

Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 23:46 skrev Ian Alan Paul :

> "Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News these days, race does not
> exist to her. Neither does it to me. And gender is merely a rough but not
> fixed orientation toward dividual archetypes of tribal contribution."
>
> What a strikingly ahistorical, antimaterialist, and ideological statement.
> Anyone who finds Candace Owens and Nick Land salvageable deserves no
> attention, and certainly no serious consideration or dialogue. Best of luck
> with your fantasy of a pure universal class which exists only for itself as
> an abstraction thoroughly divorced from reality.
>
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 5:34 PM Alexander Bard 
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Ian
>>
>> It's great that you bring up Asad Haider because he is a brilliant
>> historian of identity politics and I agree with him that the big shift
>> happened in 1977. But while for Haider 1977 meant a deepening of
>> emancipatory struggle to include feminist and anti-racist minoritarian
>> causes that he insists were ignored prior to then, I disagree and mean that
>> this shift was rather an ideological turn away from Marx straight into the
>> arms of Rousseau and no deepening at all but rather a massive loss. The
>> preoccupation became one of medial attention (the attentionalist call for
>> "has everybody been seen and heard" rather than the socialist call for "has
>> everybody been given the means and resources toward equal opportunity")
>> instead of class struggle proper and has remained so ever since.
>>
>> Once this dramatic shift of "leftist activism" met with postmodernism's
>> hatred of the grand narrative as idea (which I as a Hegelian insist is in
>> itself just another form of subconscious grand narrative) we ended up with
>> the mess we have today. Laclau's and Mouffe's hegemonic race to the bottom.
>> Specialized subcultural struggles "within" rather than "away from"
>> victimhood with no clear vision in sight. Meanwhile that clear goal will
>> always be lacking unless there is a grand heroic narrative that connects
>> the struggles and lifts up its participants to a tribal and today also
>> hopefully global whole.
>>
>> My work is therefore all about tribal anthropology instead (tribes in
>> Greenland, Botswana, New Guinea and China are all alike) now moving into
>> data anthropology about contemporary humans to build a universal story of
>> the tribe in all its variety and diversity. This is the return to Marx that
>> I insist on. Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News these days,
>> race does not exist to her. Neither does it to me. And gender is merely a
>> rough but not fixed orientation toward dividual archetypes of tribal
>> contribution. Without any Rousseuian fantasies allowed on any levels.
>>
>> Because only class is class and only class har universal validity.
>> Laclau's and Zizek

Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Ian

It's great that you bring up Asad Haider because he is a brilliant
historian of identity politics and I agree with him that the big shift
happened in 1977. But while for Haider 1977 meant a deepening of
emancipatory struggle to include feminist and anti-racist minoritarian
causes that he insists were ignored prior to then, I disagree and mean that
this shift was rather an ideological turn away from Marx straight into the
arms of Rousseau and no deepening at all but rather a massive loss. The
preoccupation became one of medial attention (the attentionalist call for
"has everybody been seen and heard" rather than the socialist call for "has
everybody been given the means and resources toward equal opportunity")
instead of class struggle proper and has remained so ever since.

Once this dramatic shift of "leftist activism" met with postmodernism's
hatred of the grand narrative as idea (which I as a Hegelian insist is in
itself just another form of subconscious grand narrative) we ended up with
the mess we have today. Laclau's and Mouffe's hegemonic race to the bottom.
Specialized subcultural struggles "within" rather than "away from"
victimhood with no clear vision in sight. Meanwhile that clear goal will
always be lacking unless there is a grand heroic narrative that connects
the struggles and lifts up its participants to a tribal and today also
hopefully global whole.

My work is therefore all about tribal anthropology instead (tribes in
Greenland, Botswana, New Guinea and China are all alike) now moving into
data anthropology about contemporary humans to build a universal story of
the tribe in all its variety and diversity. This is the return to Marx that
I insist on. Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News these days,
race does not exist to her. Neither does it to me. And gender is merely a
rough but not fixed orientation toward dividual archetypes of tribal
contribution. Without any Rousseuian fantasies allowed on any levels.

Because only class is class and only class har universal validity. Laclau's
and Zizek's dream of the particular personifying the universal was never
more than a wordgame anyway. It is through shared vision (a fetish as
opposed to an abject) that we can find a shared agenda. Not by distributing
medial attention according to ultimately infantile needs. Because that's no
better than Trump himself.

Best intentions
Alexander Bard

Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 21:27 skrev Ian Alan Paul :

> If you you think being of critical and suspicious of theological
> metanarratives is intellectually lazy, wait until you hear about
> faux-Marxist class reductionism!
>
>
> In all seriousness, for those of you looking for actually useful analyses
> of the complex relations between identity, class, and emancipation, you
> couldn't do much better than Asad Haider's recently published "Mistaken
> Identity" ( https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity ),
> which draws on the history of black radicalism to arrive at some truly
> exciting answers.
>
>
> ~i
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 12:06 PM Alexander Bard 
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Joseph
>>
>> While you resentfully remain obsessed with my tonality and my etiquette
>> (as if this was some smelling salt-driven cocktail party at a ship doomed
>> to sink) I do prefer to stay with the topic I brought up.
>> Forget about me. Ans forget about Joseph's preoccupation with my style
>> and whatever bitter personal vendettas he is projecting, I'm into the topic
>> of what the left might or could be. And with postmodernists ringing alarm
>> bells at any attempt at creating a grand narrative while the world is on
>> fire, may I ask, is this all you can achieve? What is that if not the most
>> mortidinal, death- and tit-worshipping pathetic anti-narrative there ever
>> was?
>> It's very comfortable to say "I don't know" but as far as I'm concerned
>> the answer - while pretending to be cautiously honest - reveals nothing but
>> ignorance and intellectual laziness.
>> However it is easy to see where it all comes from, this so called "left"
>> has returned to the comforts of Rousseau's kindergarden fantasies and is
>> more preoccupied with keeping academic tenure, posing with the correct
>> virtues, than with fostering and mentoring a new generation of leftist
>> radicals focused on the potential of open source platforms toward a
>> collaborative collective intelligence. The project that should be and still
>> could be the genuine leftism of the 21st century. The rest you can read in
>> my books "Syntheism" and "Digital Libido". Yes, the first one is about
>> Intelligence becoming God and the second one is on how we still underrate
>> Hegel and

Re: Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Joseph

While you resentfully remain obsessed with my tonality and my etiquette (as
if this was some smelling salt-driven cocktail party at a ship doomed to
sink) I do prefer to stay with the topic I brought up.
Forget about me. Ans forget about Joseph's preoccupation with my style and
whatever bitter personal vendettas he is projecting, I'm into the topic of
what the left might or could be. And with postmodernists ringing alarm
bells at any attempt at creating a grand narrative while the world is on
fire, may I ask, is this all you can achieve? What is that if not the most
mortidinal, death- and tit-worshipping pathetic anti-narrative there ever
was?
It's very comfortable to say "I don't know" but as far as I'm concerned the
answer - while pretending to be cautiously honest - reveals nothing but
ignorance and intellectual laziness.
However it is easy to see where it all comes from, this so called "left"
has returned to the comforts of Rousseau's kindergarden fantasies and is
more preoccupied with keeping academic tenure, posing with the correct
virtues, than with fostering and mentoring a new generation of leftist
radicals focused on the potential of open source platforms toward a
collaborative collective intelligence. The project that should be and still
could be the genuine leftism of the 21st century. The rest you can read in
my books "Syntheism" and "Digital Libido". Yes, the first one is about
Intelligence becoming God and the second one is on how we still underrate
Hegel and Freud when trying to understand our current predicament. But it's
all forward-looking and grand narrative-building. As this is what we need
today.
Oh, a great many thanks for the offlist endorsements I have received the
last three days from Nettime members. However if those endorsements end up
in my private mailbox rather than on Nettime itself, then perhaps this
mailing list is better suited for some kind of nostalgia for the pre-Trump
era or something? I have that still to figure out. I personally prefer to
looking forward and solving deadlocks. But no prestige.
Deleuze genuinely mixed Nietzsche and Marx, he was an absolutely heroic
philosopher. Totally opposed to Rousseau. So what do you think Deleuze
would have thought of today's social media-driven victimhood obsessions?
Yes, I miss Nick Land here. We are close these days.

Best intentions and utmost humility
Alexander

Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 14:24 skrev Joseph Rabie :

> Alexander addresses me with an injunction and second-guesses my answer:
> "What is your tactic? Further excuses for not dealing with the crisis of
> the left?"
>
> My answer is that I do not have the slightest idea, and that anyone who
> claims to have one is either a liar, fool, or utopian dictator. And insofar
> as utopian dictatorship is concerned, Alexander espouses a
> "politico-theological project", a title that has all my alarm bells going.
>
> Indeed, Alexander reduces the complexity of the world to a sterile,
> doctrinal dialectic that denies the sophistication of reality.
>
> I regret being so disobliging, but in my opinion Alexander's prose is
> intellectual, political and literary logorrhoea, in no way conducive to
> dealing constructively with the issues at hand.
>
> Joseph Rabie.
>
>
>
> Le 26 oct. 2018 à 20:33, Alexander Bard  a écrit :
>
> Dear Joseph
>
> Yes, I said I made a grotesque simplification. That was my point. What
> else is new? Have I claimed anything else?
> If we don't start to see the difference between a victimhood-driven and a
> hero-driven left, then how are we going to spot our own weaknesses? Where
> do you start yourself?
> Because I'm one of many many leftists who return to Marx these days since
> Identity Politics has become nothing but an endless tirade of complaints
> with no creative solutions or constructive routes up and out in sight. It
> really is Rousseau and his tabula rasa idea of humanity all over again.
> Moralism instead of pragmatism. And it has been growing since the 1970's
> and now dominates whatever leftist social media we still have.
> That's not Marxism. That's a parody of Marxism. Celebrating the lumpen
> proletariat instead of heading directly for what proletarian heroism could
> be in the 21st century. No wonder that 95% of social crowdfunding goes into
> the pockets of the libertarian right these days. Leftists do not even
> support each other any longer. At least not for more than three days.
> What is your own answer? What ties us together? Only banal hatred of
> Trump, or a true vision for the future, a genuine politico-theological
> project that get people going?
> Sometimes simplifications do the job. What is your tactic? Further excuses
> for not dealing with the crisis of the left?
>
> Best intentions
> Alexander Bard
>
>

Re: Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Sure thing, dear David!
And I do not for one second doubt the sincerity of the members of these
communities.
But where are they now? And if they are still around, what unites and
strengthens them? A shared vision forward for all? Or an external abject
that comfortably unites them as an excuse to not take the next step forward
but rather comfortably enjoy the nostalgia of past achievements?
I see a lot more power coming out of young men following Jordan Peterson
and young women following Camille Paglia these days. They just don't know
how Marxist they actually are when they side with and understand the masses
against the elites. That's where I'm heading. The Syntheist Node in
Stockholm has tons of that forward-thinking and awareness of the end for a
new grand narrative.
I spoke about Syntheism to a bunch of lovely ex-squatters in Holland three
years ago. They loved the conversation. Then they smoked tons of weed and
did nothing.
However the tantric people I build a new advanced whorehouse outside
Amsterdam with are real doers. To me they are also the new genuine left.
Talk is cheap, action is everything.
And a return to Marx is much much needed to get us out of the identitarian
deadlock.
Best intentions
Alexander Bard
PS: And no, Deluezianism is not an identity, it is an ideological set of
opinions which I'm happen to dump if somebody shows me something better;
being gay, woman, black, can not be dumped, so are identities, but
sub-categories to class and not first categories as Rousseauians would
claim...

Den fre 26 okt. 2018 kl 14:05 skrev David Garcia <
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk>:

> In his book the Digital Condition Felix Stalder introduces the term ‘*communal
> formation’* to describe a political subject that
> has emerged’is emerging from the collapse of the traditional frameworks
> (family-church-trade-union-political party-secure employment)
> that once served to provide ballast and orientation. They have (if I
> understand Felix correctly) have some relationship to ‘communities of
> practice’ which are formations fused in the pragmatic heat of ‘doing'..
> Amsterdam’s squatters of the 90s one of many examples .. I don’t think
> that these formations can be dismissed as narcisistic.. they are a
> distinctive political subject + many such as civil rights folks, feminists,
> stone-wallers,
> AIDS activists, pre-date the internet by decades..
>
> On 26 Oct 2018, at 12:34, Alexander Bard  wrote:
>
> Absolutely correct, dear David, I could not agree more. But there are tons
> of misplaced good intentions involved in this.
> Identity politics has exploded because of the internet's hidden deceitful
> promise that all children were finally going to get their spot in the
> limelight. Which of course never happened because we all have attention
> constraints. And being drowned in mediocre floods of cat and baby pictures
> (95% of Instagram postings are completely ignored, blogs peaked already in
> 2006), why is the audience to blame when the flood of junk was so mediocre
> to begin with? No wonder people turn to Netflix these days. It was all 99%
> fake news like media always produced tons of fake news. Better then to have
> quality amusement to death to make it more enjoyable.
> So it is wrong to call this a desire for recognition (what an infantile
> desire to begin with) but rather a desire for attention that became an
> obsession with the distorted supernova called the Cartesian Self. Just when
> individualism died and became an underclass phenomenon (the shift toward
> dividualism was the successful use of the Internet of course, the
> netocratic one).
> Class was lost in all this. And as a Deleuzian I then have to decide
> whether I go down the drain with Rosseauian identity politics or ally
> myself with the real Marxist class struggle. Deleuzians can not escape and
> stay in between any longer. Those are my ten cents. I see class as heroic
> tribe so I stay the course and work on developing stories about the Heroic
> Tribe, which today is to celebrate and lift people up toward the Cultural
> Engineer who is the true proletarian of the the 21st century. Which means I
> also ally with the masses against the (academic and financial) elites.
> Self-pity is a dead end. No wonder Jordan Peterson is huge these days.
> Postmodernism was meant as a CRITIQUE. That was the Frankfurt School's
> intentions all along. Not meant to kill modernism and replace it.
> When that shift happened, when postmodernism killed modernism and became
> the de facto ideology of Western Academia, we also lost Marx to Rousseau.
> It's the shift from Lenin to Stalin again for all I care.
> And here is the blind spot. Postmodernism essentially claims that "all
> grand narratives are dangerous narratives, therefore there must not be any
> grand narrative." Well, 

Re: Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

Absolutely correct, dear David, I could not agree more. But there are tons
of misplaced good intentions involved in this.
Identity politics has exploded because of the internet's hidden deceitful
promise that all children were finally going to get their spot in the
limelight. Which of course never happened because we all have attention
constraints. And being drowned in mediocre floods of cat and baby pictures
(95% of Instagram postings are completely ignored, blogs peaked already in
2006), why is the audience to blame when the flood of junk was so mediocre
to begin with? No wonder people turn to Netflix these days. It was all 99%
fake news like media always produced tons of fake news. Better then to have
quality amusement to death to make it more enjoyable.
So it is wrong to call this a desire for recognition (what an infantile
desire to begin with) but rather a desire for attention that became an
obsession with the distorted supernova called the Cartesian Self. Just when
individualism died and became an underclass phenomenon (the shift toward
dividualism was the successful use of the Internet of course, the
netocratic one).
Class was lost in all this. And as a Deleuzian I then have to decide
whether I go down the drain with Rosseauian identity politics or ally
myself with the real Marxist class struggle. Deleuzians can not escape and
stay in between any longer. Those are my ten cents. I see class as heroic
tribe so I stay the course and work on developing stories about the Heroic
Tribe, which today is to celebrate and lift people up toward the Cultural
Engineer who is the true proletarian of the the 21st century. Which means I
also ally with the masses against the (academic and financial) elites.
Self-pity is a dead end. No wonder Jordan Peterson is huge these days.
Postmodernism was meant as a CRITIQUE. That was the Frankfurt School's
intentions all along. Not meant to kill modernism and replace it.
When that shift happened, when postmodernism killed modernism and became
the de facto ideology of Western Academia, we also lost Marx to Rousseau.
It's the shift from Lenin to Stalin again for all I care.
And here is the blind spot. Postmodernism essentially claims that "all
grand narratives are dangerous narratives, therefore there must not be any
grand narrative." Well, stupid, you just created a rand narrative with that
statement and the most dangerous one of them all, the Rousseuian one.
Unless stopped, PoMo will undoubtedly lead to slaughter. It always did in
the past, so why not now?
Attention-seeking belongs to daycare centers and kindergardens. When
prevalent among grown-up people it should be called its proper name,
narcissism and/or infantilization.
Not that I don't desire variety and diversity like every other decent human
being. But I seek it and I don't need it thrown in my face from
pathological cry-bullies.
Back to Marx! Meanwhile, prepare for Trump round 2. "The Left" has learned
nothing but lost its roots. Next Bolsonaro in Brazil. I'm spending this
winter in Rio.
Best
Alexander Bard

Den fre 26 okt. 2018 kl 10:51 skrev David Garcia <
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk>:

> The emphasis on class and class struggle as the universal category often
> seems to
> operate differently to the cultural politics of an expanding, fluid
> multiplicity of struggles
> around identity and the demands to have specific identities recognised and
> respected.
> Sometimes called the politics of recognition.
>
> There has been a longstanding suspiscion in these identitarian movements
> of the so called 'grand narratives' based on -universal categories,
> principles or experiences.
> A suspicion based on a history which sees adoption of these universals as
> subsuming or
> marginalising the specifities of community and community solidarity on
> which these
> movements depend for their heft.
>
> This is a fault-line goes back to the enlightenment’s unquestioned belief
> in ‘reason’ as the universal
> solvent for all injustice. Whose limitations we might recognise in David
> Cameron’s infamous mode of
> address when chiding Angela Eagle in UK parliament in 2011 with the words
> “calm down dear”..
>
>
>
> On 26 Oct 2018, at 06:32, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
>
> > In a French philosophy class 50 yrs ago this thread would have provided
> a fantastic 'baccalaureat' exam subject, since it encapsulates the no 1
> issue of French philosphy, as expressed in the title Vincent Descombes'
> awesome overview of the same: Le Meme et l'Autre (The One and the Other)
> being the question whether there is an identity between identity and
> difference, or a ... difference.
> >
> > It also epitomize the emptinesss of discussions of identity, this time
> illustrated by a member of Bilwet's famous, but totally vacuous phrase
> "rather a complex identity than an identity complex",

Identity and difference

[Alexander Bard]

For the sake of simplification: Identity politics is Rousseau and class
struggle is Marx. All over again.
This explains why Rousseauians have detested Marxists and Marxists have
detested Rousseauians for the past 200 years and torn apart The Left again
and again in between them.
And the reason is simple: The two strategies are incompatible. because
Rousseau based his ideology on the celebration of the victim whereas Marx
based his ideology on the celebration of the hero (as heroic class, not as
an individual hero as in Nietzsche). Rousseau is destruction (for example
as in crush the patriarchy) where Marx is construction (build a matriarchy
to match the patriarchy etc).
#metoo is the perfect example of a Rousseauian media hoax where western
middle class women take offense in male etiquette in the salons (just check
how offended American upper class women turned out to be with Mexican guest
workers' glances and vocabularies, they took to the smelling salts like mad
at places like Hollywood and Harvard) while Marxists are preoccupied with
the continuous exploitation of working class women by middle class men (and
women). Today most clearly found in young Kurdish women's fight against
ISIS etc. Which is real struggle, as in the streets of Paris and not in the
salons of Versailles.
The problem with Rouessauianism being that it really isn't leftist at all
(Freud attacks both left and right, Hitler and Stalin, in "Civilization And
Its Discontents" for a good reason). The Extreme Right is merely the
response to the Rousseuian project of using the white heterosexual man
(increasingly the working class white heterosexual man) as the abject to
unify all the different identities of the Identity Left's myriad of
victimhood appointments. Once everybody else was appointed a victim blaming
the WHM it was only a matter of time before the WHM would stand up and turn
himself into the victim and voila we had the Extreme Right. Which is of
course where workers rightfully skipped The Left and are now lost for good.
It's the same old identitarian epidemic that we had in Europe in the 1930's
all over again. And before that in the 1840's. Cheap solution narcissistic
populism replacing class struggle proper.
The Left should never have abandoned Marx for Rousseau in the 1970's. But
that is what happens when academia takes over political struggle from the
working classes and academia is full of ambitious and narcissistic middle
class careerists. Camille Paglia is totally right on this point (and way
more Marxist than she realizes). This is the mess we live with today. An
empty pretentious left without a story.
I'm more a Marxist than ever. Class and class struggle are real. Global.
For Marxism to return it needs a new utopian and/or visionary heroic story
(the old one was kidnapped and domesticated by capitalism and called social
democracy). And tons of realism. We are not even close to build a global
society. We need borders that work first of all. I agree 100% with Brendan
ONeill here, another Marxist totally opposed to the disaster called
Identity Politics.
Because I firmly believe Identity Politics is one sick dead end. And soon a
bloody one too. It has infantilized society completely, while
identitarianism is also neither left nor right. Rather Identity Politics is
Charlottesville and Charlottesville is prophetic. We are bound to see many
more meaningless bloody Charlottesvilles soon. And none of them will deal
with the issue of class. None.
My hope is that we return to Marx. And cherish adulthood over childhood. My
liberal feminist mom is 83 years old, an avid reader of Simone de Beauvoir,
and she detests #metoo. I completely understand her (who came up with the
idea that women are weak hidden backstabbers rather than strong public
activists) and I also share her sentiment only adding Marx to what I
believe is the perspective of an important liberal ally. Those are my ten
cents.
Best intentions
Alexander Bard

Den fre 26 okt. 2018 kl 07:33 skrev Patrice Riemens :

> In a French philosophy class 50 yrs ago this thread would have provided
> a fantastic 'baccalaureat' exam subject, since it encapsulates the no 1
> issue of French philosphy, as expressed in the title Vincent Descombes'
> awesome overview of the same: Le Meme et l'Autre (The One and the Other)
> being the question whether there is an identity between identity and
> difference, or a ... difference.
>
> It also epitomize the emptinesss of discussions of identity, this time
> illustrated by a member of Bilwet's famous, but totally vacuous phrase
> "rather a complex identity than an identity complex", completely
> overlooking that the latter is a consequence of the former, not its
> opposite.
>
> Alterity is just as bad a carrier of progress as identity.
>
> This being said: The Winter Is Coming ...
>
> Cheers all the same, p+2D!
>
>
>
>
> On 2018-10-26 01:36, Johnatan Petterson 

Re: 1994, Visions Of Heaven and Hell

[Alexander Bard]

Correct!
Which is why you can't read Nietzsche without Marx and Marx is best read
with Nietzsche.
Or you can't read Deleuze  without ploughing through Freud and
Lacan first.
So we are now split between two extremes: ultraglobalism and ultralocalism.
Isn't Nick Land just the perfect example of the latter? In which a true
globalist must respond, what?
Best
Alexander

2018-03-02 16:03 GMT+01:00 Richard Barbrook :

> Hiya,
>
> > Where is Nick Land now? What is he up to? Can he be brought back to
> > philosophy and critical theory?
>
> Nick Land is now a booster for the racist alt-right:
> http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/
>
> We did warn you that Deleuze and Guattari were the class enemy!
>
> Richard
>
> ===
>
> Dr. Richard Barbrook
> Dept of Politics and IR,
> University of Westminster
> 32-38 Wells Street
> LONDON W1T 3UW
> England
>
> +44 (0)7879 441873
>
> Skype: richard.barbrook
> Facebook: Richard Barbrook
> Twitter: @richardbarbrook
>
> http://www.gamesforthemany.org
> http://www.cybersalon.org
> http://www.classwargames.net
> http://www.politicsandmediafreedom.net
> http://www.imaginaryfutures.net
> http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works
>
> 'Clause 5: That as the laws ought to be equal, so
> they must be good, and not evidently destructive
> to the safety and well-being of the people.'
>
> The Levellers, The 1647 Agreement of the People
> for a Firm and Present Peace Upon Grounds of
> Common Right.
>
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Re: 1994, Visions Of Heaven and Hell

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Callum & Co

Point taken and full understanding.
Personally though I happily lunch with people with or without embrace. The
former does not require the latter.
And when digging into the human mind, Nick Land sees further and deeper
than almost anybody. It is what he sees and not how he values it (if he
really does at all, accelerationism at least started as a truly ironic
politico-philocophical movement) that interests me. It is by reading your
opponent in detail, not by imitating your idols, that you become a better
thinker. And I am a Hegelian more than anything else.
Or your opponent convinces you that you're wrong, then so be it. That is of
course the whole point with discourse.
Again, thanks for the links and connections. I will be happy to update
myself, and whoever else here who is interested, on the status of
accelerationism into the 2020s.

Warmest greetings
Alexander Bard

2018-03-02 16:49 GMT+01:00 Callum Copley <callum.cop...@gmail.com>:

> Hi all, first replying via nettime, hope this works.
>
> I too have found some of his thinking very interesting at times but upon
> learning the extent of his political views I refuse to engage with his work
>
> See below:
>
> *"Nick Land advocates for racially based absolutist micro-states, where
> unregulated capitalism combines with genetic separation between global
> elites and the ‘refuse’ (his term) of the rest. It’s a eugenic philosophy
> of ‘hyper-racism’, as he describes it on the racist blog Alternative Right,
> or ‘Human Biodiversity’ (HBD). Here, class dominance and inequality are
> mapped onto, explained, and justified by tendencies for the elite to mate
> with each other and spawn a new species with an expanding IQ. Yes, this
> ‘hyper-racism’ is that daft – and would be laughed off as the fantasy of a
> neoliberal Dr Strangelove if it didn’t have leverage in this miserable
> climate of the ascendant far right. Regarding the other side, the domain of
> the ‘refuse’, Land uses euphemism to stand in for the white nationalist
> notion of a coming ‘white genocide’: ‘demographic engineering as an
> explicit policy objective’, ‘steady progress of population replacement’, is
> the racial threat he describes on the bleak webpages of The Daily Caller. "*
>
> https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/why-is-nick-land-still-em
> braced-by-segments-of-the-british-art-and-theory-scenes/6329
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 4:35 PM, Nina Temporär <nina-t...@gmx.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> > Am 02.03.2018 um 16:03 schrieb Richard Barbrook <
>> rich...@imaginaryfutures.net>:
>> >
>> >
>> > We did warn you that Deleuze and Guattari were the class enemy!
>> >
>> > Richard
>>
>> Hi Richard,
>>
>> Whoa, bold one-line-claims thrown into the silence of a snowy Friday
>> afternoon!  Nice attitude :) But….
>>
>> It’s no big deal to know how Foucault kickstarted postmodern
>> Left-Nietzscheanism, and that Gudrun Ensslin initially run a little Nazi
>> publishing house.
>>
>> But could you elaborate on this one please?
>> (And don’t tell me you believe in 'the other side of reason' =
>> anti-intellectualism = right-wing. That formula is so uninformed and
>> ableist…
>> I want to hear better arguments.)
>>
>> Cheers N
>>
>> >
>> > ===
>> >
>> > Dr. Richard Barbrook
>> > Dept of Politics and IR,
>> > University of Westminster
>> > 32-38 Wells Street
>> > LONDON W1T 3UW
>> > England
>> >
>> > +44 (0)7879 441873
>> >
>> > Skype: richard.barbrook
>> > Facebook: Richard Barbrook
>> > Twitter: @richardbarbrook
>> >
>> > http://www.gamesforthemany.org
>> > http://www.cybersalon.org
>> > http://www.classwargames.net
>> > http://www.politicsandmediafreedom.net
>> > http://www.imaginaryfutures.net
>> > http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works
>> >
>> > 'Clause 5: That as the laws ought to be equal, so
>> > they must be good, and not evidently destructive
>> > to the safety and well-being of the people.'
>> >
>> > The Levellers, The 1647 Agreement of the People
>> > for a Firm and Present Peace Upon Grounds of
>> > Common Right.
>> > #  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_

1994, Visions Of Heaven and Hell

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Carlo & Co

Where is Nick Land now? What is he up to? Can he be brought back to
philosophy and critical theory?
I read "Fanged Noumea" when it was released a couple of years ago (I guess
most Nettime members did) and remembered how inspired I was by Land's
perspective in the 1990s on "the flat chaos" that would become the
Internet. Although my take it would be more Deleuzian-nomadic than Land's
accelerationist take (you either base your ideology on that worked in The
Tribe or what worked during Feudalism), he is still a massive inspiration
and a truly creative thinker. So his mind would certainly be a welcome
prodigal return for current critical debate.
Last I heard, Land was in Shanghai and busy doing pop culture and writing
psychological fiction. If he is still around there, maybe I could find him
for an interview when I'm in Shanghai in April?

Best intentions
Alexander Bard

2018-03-02 13:24 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX <l...@time.to.get.psyced.org>:

> Bumped into an amazing documentary from 1994: depicting the future
> of society in the age of the Internet. Some statements are funny or
> sad for their naivity, some others are chilling as they predict the
> advent of the great Internet monopolies.
> "Visions Of Heaven and Hell" - https://www.youtu.be/GMdPLxbuc8Q
>
> "I think it could be a disaster scenario, as this new technology
>  comes to its fruition, with fewer people getting richer and more
>  people getting poorer. And I think it could mean the collapse of
>  society as indeed the collapse of the world civilisation and a
>  new dark age. And the only thing that I think in the end can save
>  that, is if the people who master this technology, the new rich,
>  the new intellighenzia, can actually think beyond themselves. If
>  they can realise, that the best form of selfishness is unselfish-
>  ness. That if they don't actually invest in people other than
>  themselves, beyond themselves, they will destroy themselves."
> Charles B. Handy, 1994.
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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Alexander Bard]

I hate to look like a self-promotor here - sorry - but Jan Söderqvist and I
analysed "attentionalism" as the deeper and even more complex continuation
of "capitalism" in our Marxist digital age manifesto "The Neotocrats"
already in 2000. The full scary pyramid of networks (class divisions are no
longer between individuals but in between the networks themselves), "you
are those you are allowed to communicate and exchange information with" in
Chapter 9. And as Slavoj Zizek among others have pointed out, the
resistance against the new unfairnesses and injustices of the
attentionalist system is laid out for "eternalist activists" in Chapters 4
and 5. Don't focus too much on the algorithms themselves but rather on who
has access to them and know how to exploit them (those with 400,000 rather
than 40 twitter followers and with higher positions in Facebook's dreaded
sociogram etc). A keyword here is "imploitation" and "imploitative power".
The pwer of information is namely one of exclusivity and timing. It is when
you access and can extract information, not if you do, that determines
power in an attentionalist world. Which we empirically showed had shifted
in 2012 (attention outscored any other forms of capital value precisely in
the search algorithms by then, even the ad had become a sign of
desperation. The benfit of our analysis is that you can establish three
rather than just one netocratic class category. Information owners (say
current Silicon Valley) after all only possess the means of (re)production
within the system. Like nobility and factory owners before them. But power
also needs a truth-producing vector (previously priests and academia, now
both powerless) and an imaginary power (previously kings and politicians,
now increasingly ironic and powerless, we predicted "a TV celebrity would
become U.S. President soon for ironic reasons",16 years before Trump
happened). It is where these two further netocratic elites pop up that we
are working to find out now. And it is dirty, we need not only Hegel and
Marx but increasingly Freud to understand how mortido and libido clash and
preversely interact in digital culture today. Think Frankfurt School
revival. Which is our next, fifth book.
All the best intentions
Alexander Bard

2018-01-16 13:46 GMT+01:00 Sean Cubitt <s.cub...@gold.ac.uk>:

> that should of course have read:
>
> the ruling algorithms are in every epoch the algorithms of the ruling class
>
> From The German Ideology to German Media Theory (and you’re right Patrice,
> via Therborn . .  and Lefebvre and Stuart hall)
>
> have algorithms taken over the role of ideology? Clearer if posed in
> Foucauldian power-knowledge-institution terms of discourse: has the
> construction of truth passed over to algorithms, whose operation favours a
> class that owns the means of their distribution?
>
> subordinate question: is this the work of a distinct class that owns the
> means of production, or is distribution now more significant in the age of
> financialisation? Or, have the algoithms extended the work of
> autonomisation Marx saw happening in the factory system,  from purely
> productive to reproductive sectors, no longer therefore under the control
> of capitalists but rewarding them with obscene bonuses as a form of benign
> parasite that helps them survive and grow - capitalists as symbionts, the
> gut flora of algorithmic capital.
>
> If any of these hypotheses are true, the forms of struggle against them
> take very different shapes.
>
> s
>
> > On 16 Jan 2018, at 12:20, Patrice Riemens <patr...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Sounds like "What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules"
> >
> > https://www.versobooks.com/books/292-what-does-the-
> ruling-class-do-when-it-rules
> >
> > Ciaoui, p+7D!
> >
> >
> > On 2018-01-16 12:27, Sean Cubitt wrote:
> >> The algorithms of the ruling class are in every epoch the algorithms
> >> of the ruling class
> >> --
> >>> Message: 1
> >>> Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 20:16:59 +0100
> >>> From: Florian Cramer <flrnc...@gmail.com>
> >>> Cc: Nettime <nettim...@kein.org>
> >>> Subject: Re:  social media critique: next steps?
> >>> Message-ID:
> >>> 

The alt-right and the death of counterculture

[Alexander Bard]

Excellent postings, Brian and Keith, as always!
Could a Freudian-Marxist approach a la The Frankfurt School be the way
forward for critical theory here?
I'm working with Jan Söderqvist on a re-reading of Freud's "Civilisation
and its Discontents" for the digital age for release in 2018 myself. And I
guess the approach then is a Marxist-Libertarian critique based on the
assumption that Keith's fundamental question "What does it mean to be
human?" could be replied in a Freudian and timeless manner as "The Journey
from Childhood to Adulthood". Where Adulthood includes the originally
tribal commitment to contribute (it is not about "having a job" as the
lowest common denominator for the social, "having a job" is merely the
capitalist imperative standing in for the proper "desire to contribute to
the tribe").
So a leftist critique would have to start with the assumption that
contemprary society in various ways denies its citizen the completion of
the journey from childhood to adulthood, it infantilises its citizens on a
massive scale by indirectly forstering them into the belief that "they have
nothing to contribute" besides possibly "the job they have been rewarded".
Even jobs are no longer contributions, "jobs are rewarded" these days to
the loyal voters of the extreme right, this is after all both Trump's and
Le Pen's most basic appeal, they claim to be "the job-rewarders".
Please note that this critique would involve the education system since the
education system is completely focused on "adaption to the job market" and
not on "citizens getting help to self-help towards adulthood, contribution
and autonomy". But it would also include a massive critique against the
consumption society (check hamburger obesity etc) and from a libertarian
angle an attack on the current structure of the welfare-state (anything
that infantilises people would be a deserving target for critique).
I believe any serious discussion on the introduction of Universal Basic
Income (the left's main topic these days besides the fundamental struggle
against climate change) would have to start by addressing this issue too.
If UBI infantilises large parts of the population, it would amount to an
anti-Freudian disaster (a dramatic surge in alcoholism, drug abuse, media
additiction etc) .But if it is designed to foster the contributive impulse
(way beyond any job market ideals) it would make perfect sense as the
leftist rallying call for the next few decades.
Could this then begin to answer the leftist utopian call of "what it could
mean to be human"?
Does this make sense? Or do you already include this Freudian critical
perspective in your analysis? We are after all fighting the alt-right's and
other extremism's  "fake phalluses" wherever we look these days. But what
kind of state power do we reply with? What would be the ultimate aim of our
state power? Just individual autonomy through financial redistribution?
Really? Or the support towards an adultisation of society, away from our
current mailaise, its mass infantilisation?
Best intentions
Alexander Bard

2017-07-10 8:27 GMT+02:00 Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>:

> Keith Hart wrote:
>
>
>> What does it mean to be human? To be self-reliant and to belong to others.
>>
>
> It sounds like such a simple statement. But it spans left and right,
> society and autonomy, the whole and radical difference. Having lived among
> the French intellectuals, I have enormous respect for the left-leaning
> approach to the social whole. Having lived in the US (but not so close to
> the US intellectuals, ha ha ha!) I have also developed quite a bit of
> respect for the governing philosophy that mediates the relations between
> individuals.
>
> In the past, the US won a war that allowed it to institute an
> individualist framework that came to permeate international law and
> diplomacy, decisively shaping the postwar world order up till now. The
> "golden age of the individual" (generally known as the age of human rights)
> was vitiated by the abuse of larger sovereignties, whether the
> corporations, the national states, or the regional blocs, all of which
> arrogated to themselves the rights that were supposedly those of flesh and
> blood humans. Sovereign power gave individualism a bad name, for sure:
> that's why those French intellectuals complain, and they are right to do
> so. Despite the abuses, the anthropologist Rene Dumont held that in the
> last instance the demands of holism had to be interpreted within the
> individualist framework. He believed that, because in his day (40s through
> 90s) individualism was undeniably the dominant form: the one that could
> resolve the most contradictions. Private ownership of currency, and the
> modicum o

Re: Can the Left Meme?

[Alexander Bard]

   On an added more speculative note to these excellent aesthetics
   excursions:
   It doesn't take much for Trump voters to discover that no new factories
   with any new jobs are being built in Michigan and Indiana.
   Consequently, American terrorism is hardly imported any longer but
   quickly escalates from the one factor that the American mainstream
   refuses to see: The alt-right going openly violent and the Oklahoma
   Bomber rather than 9/11 being the precedent of extreme right terror and
   violence in the 21st century.
   The likely response is a second American Civil War based not on
   Cascadia peacefully leaving the Union (why would it be allowed to) but
   on Antifa-inspired hipsters in say Portland, Oregon, picking up arms in
   reponse to alt-right terror cells. Castrated pacifism is after all only
   the trait of the current mid-life leftist generation, the ones who
   turned American leftism into "Occupy t-shirts" and Bernie Sanders
   campaign buttons. The next generation may very well regard all
   anti-capitalist struggle from a necessary pro-violence starting point.
   But is that through a return to blind and contingent 19th century urban
   anarchist struggle? Or with a proper vision for a just and fair America
   and The World in this century? But where is that Marxist vision in that
   case? Because if large-scale violence is back from the right, then why
   would it not sooner or later return from the left? How could it be
   otherwise? But with which direction?
   Maybe we even should look for the birth of this movement among "leftist
   fans" of Jordan Peterson and Pankaj Mishra in the You Tube
   Self-education Generation?
   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2017-06-18 21:43 GMT+02:00 t byfield <tbyfi...@panix.com>:

  On 16 Jun 2017, at 13:25, Gabriella "Biella" Coleman wrote:

Lots of bad bits too. No amount of theory can paper over 
basic flaws
in analysis.

   Thanks for your points below. But I am just not seeing the 
connection
   between your analysis of left vs right language politics and the
   basic flaws in the analysis. Could you elaborate?

 The analysis seems fine as far as it goes � the problem (IMO, natch)
 is that it doesn't go far. For example:
 <...>

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Neoliberalism & alt-rght trolls

[Alexander Bard]

Excellent summary, dear Felix!

However Ancilla van de Leest (not van der Leest) left the board of the
Dutch Pirate Party in April.

Probably to return to reality TV or something similar for a savvy media
narcissist like herself.

It is highly doubtful though that the former Pirates who joined Thierry
Baudet's party last year will be allowed to return to the Pirates even if
they would like too. van der Lesst probably the Pirates a great service by
exposing alt right elements within her party. And deserves credit for that.
The Pirates themselves are not a clear left or right or even
environmentalist movement. They do not fit any such traditional scale.
The Pirate Party is however mostly anarcholibertarian (Swedish founder and
chief ideologue Rick Falkvinge certainly is).

As in America, do expect liberatarians to join forces with social
conservatives over the next few years.

They happen to share a cherished enemy in the Identity Left (Camille Paglia
and Jordan Peterson are their You Tube superheroes).

Although the union of former Pirates and Baudet in the Netherlands is way
more extreme than any other such alliance. Probably Putin-sponsored too.
But get used to the libertarian/social-conservative axis as the main
intellectual enemy of both the Traditional and Identity Left the next two
decades or so.

Best
Alexander Bard

2017-05-28 10:05 GMT+02:00 Felix Stalder <fe...@openflows.com>:

>
> On 2017-05-26 20:15, Karin Spaink wrote:
>
> > Really? Top brass of the Piratenpartij moved on to Thierry Baudet?
> > That’s quite some news, actually! Is there any public information
> > available about that?
>
> I'm no connoisseur of Dutch politics, but this you can find online,
> from September last year and it's quite strange. As it turned out,
> the prediction Wilders would crush Baudet turned out to be incorrect.
> Don't know about the rest of the article. F.
>
> Dutch Pirates defect to intellectual right-wing party
>
> https://www.quirksmode.org/politics/blog/archives/2016/
> 09/dutch_pirates_d.html




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The meaning of Macron (short answer: Tocqueville in France)

[Alexander Bard]

   Dear Dante

   Yes, and I believe Emmanuel Macron himself would agree to "being a
   socioliberal" which in Nettime parlour would be "neoliberal" indeed.
   You don't need to wait for that. It will be his victory speech soon.
   But of devils presented to us, I prefer a liberal like Macron to a
   neo-fascist like Marine Le Pen (I'm not an accelerationist). Until the
   Left regroups into a responsible but straight-forward
   welfare-state-defending basic-income-promoting, budget-keeping
   democratic Marxism that is the best we can have (Trotskyist populists
   like Melenchon and Corbyn must therefore be strongly resisted; they are
   the least thing we need right now).

   And as for dear Sebastian's bitter but welcome comments on this thread:
   Yes, of course politics is political theatre. It always has been, as
   thinkers from Machiavelli to Guy Debord have always been quick to point
   out. Jan Söderqvist and I even predicted in "The Netocrats" in 2000
   that soon the U.S. would likely elect a game-show host as president as
   a result of politics going ironic and increasingly powerless (therefore
   tyurning into a "celebrity democracy"). In 2016 we were proven right.
   So you could easily regard our comments in this thread as "nothing more
   than football babble", if it was not for the fact that politics still
   controls, deals with and directs trillions of dollars worth in jobs and
   wealth between the world's nations and populations. Your nihilism
   consequently adds nothing to address these complex issues. So what do
   you want to say besides attacking fellow Nettime debaters for the
   apparent fun of it? Or was that all?

   For hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Somali migrants in Sweden and
   Germany at the moment, it makes a hell of a difference if these
   countries are run by social democrats or right-wing populists. And that
   is just the start.

   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2017-04-26 1:50 GMT+02:00 Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.mon...@gmail.com>:

 Emmanuel Macron can also be understood as a ( status-quo ? )
 Neo-Liberal public relations guy, ex-Rothschild investment banker,
 creating a new packaging for the same neo-liberal politicians.
 Let's see, if and when he gets elected, whom he brings into his
 government.
 <...>

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The meaning of Macron (short answer: Tocqueville in France)

[Alexander Bard]

   The Nordic countries' and Germany's social democratic parties have
   interestingly enough often been accused of "selling out to the
   neoliberal world order" but were the only ones in Europe to withhold
   the populist storm of the past 20 years while even often remaining or
   having gained in power and influence. I would rather acknowledged their
   success to an orderly pragmatism and a willingness to compromise with
   socialliberalism when needed during this period of strength for liberal
   capitalism due to ultra-fast globalisation and digitalisation. This is
   evident in their refusal to bow for extreme nationalism and other forms
   of really non-leftist populism. And in the utter lack of corruption
   scandals among these parties. Their main argument besides the socialist
   call for "justice" has been their excellent capacity to govern
   responsibly. Something I see utterly lacking both with France's
   Socialist Party and Britain's Labour after Blair and Brown. You don't
   win elections unless you come across as capable of governing. Which is
   why I regard any "leftist party" which can not balance the state check
   books as a fraud. Tax the rich if you like, and then spend more on the
   poorest and on infrastructure which all citizens gain from. But govern
   with responsibility. Politics is worthless unless it is sustainable.
   Especially for The Left.
   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2017-04-24 18:34 GMT+02:00 Alex Foti <alex.f...@gmail.com>:

   Dear Alexander and All,
   your spot-on remarks (!) make me wonder about the future of social
   democracy, something Castells pondered in a recent editorial:
 <...>

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Re: the meaning of Macron (short answer: Tocqueville in France)

[Alexander Bard]

Excellent analysis, Alex!

But Emmanuel Macron should best be compared with Canada's Justin
Trudeau rather than any current American politician (though as a
pragmatist liberal he is ideologically in line with the Obamas, both
previous president Barack and possible forthcoming Michelle).

Pete Buttigieg is a name I would look out for as a possible American
equivalent to Trudeau in Canada and Macron in France. Let's see if
Buttigieg stays with the Democrats or goes independent in the next
election= . This is my stance: The Left will not regain power and
win elections unless it gets rid of its populist trash with faces
like Corbyn in the UK, Sanders in the U.S. and Malenchon in France.
Charming and clever Malenchon did lose to both Le Pen and Macron in
the most leftist-friendly country in Europe. And I understand why.
His crazy and completely unrealistic economic model was just as silly
as Sanders's was in the US and Corbyn's is in the UK. It was pure
populist nonsense, not Marxism for sure, and not even decent Social
Democracy (which I happen to like a rather lot).

We need a pragmatist realist left. We have one in Sweden that does win
elections. Not any more of this populist non-Marxist nonsense thrown
at conservatives like Theresa May and Donald Trump which they can then
thrash to pieces.

Until that happens, liberals are very strong as the only reasonable
alternative to the populist right. The French Left will vote for
Macron too on May 7. Simply because they won the last election with a
deservedly deeply unpopular lying populist named Francoise Hollande.
In hindsight, people will regard Barack Obama as one of the greatest
president the U.S. ever had. And Theresa May will thrash Corbyn to
pieces in June in the UK. Not because she has a heart or people like
her. But for the simple reason that she knows how to run and keep a
damn budget.

Best intentions
Alexander Bard (a very non-Trotskyist Marxist, as you can probably tell)


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In Praise of Cash (or just another luddite nationalist death spell)

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Morlock & Co

Totally agreed.

Which explains Occupy's failure (yes, it was a failure). In the current
techno-ideological environment, Occupy was doomed to become nothing but a
cool t-shirt and a few Insta photos within days and then to be over within
weeks. The Wall Street guys had the last laugh (especially as they are
hardly not even located in Wall Street anymore). As if they didn't know
from the very beginning that this is where "the naive Occupy" would end up
anyway. After all, they live in the same techno-ideological world where
"stamina" is the quality in constant lack.

Furthermore, I'm not in any way denying that there have been many attempts
at globalising or at least internationalising The Left. Thanks M.P., for
providing links, but I already said that from Kant via Marx to Habermas
there has always been a Cosmopolitan Left. But it is laregly dead and gone
today. While Capital went global (and digital) over the last 30-40 years,
unions went asleep and nationalist, and if you haven't noticed The Left is
today the possibly worst enemy of open borders and free migration in Europe
and North America. The Left has become The Right simply by sticking to the
failing and doomed nation-state model, even to the point where we face
discussions on this forum taking the view of "perhaps there is something to
Donald Trump's message after all" as its starting point. So when did The
Left betray its cosmopolitan heritage and turn to the luddite model for
taking on the future? That is today's Left of closed borders and
protectionism.

The best such a Left can achieve is the occasional Syriza election victory
following a crisis where even the populist right has failed. But what does
such a Left become once in power? Nothing but another isolationist populist
nationalist failure. Is this all we can aim for? Corbynism? Seriously?
In a globalised and digitalised world, The Left has to become globalised
and digitalised, and certainly so if the enemy has bothered to change.
Because otherwise the Left will not and does not deserve to become that
Node in the dark chaos that constitutes that overwhelming principle of the
network age: nodalisation. For The Left to act as The Phallus in the
current and forthcoming chaos, it must provide a spiritual and cosmopolitan
answer to the questions of our time. And with crypto-cuurencies et al
killing nation-state high taxation as we know it, global redistribution
must become a pragmatic and not a moral issue.

Otherwise The Left is dead, leaving politics to a struggle between liberals
and conservatives. Perhaps we have already arrived there? Does anybody even
care about a "Left" today in say France? Or Germany? Or India?
I certainly doubt it.

Best intentions
Alexander Bard

2017-03-04 3:56 GMT+01:00 Morlock Elloi <morlockel...@gmail.com>:

> There are many different issues here, and I am not sure that it makes
> sense to conflate them into one or few trends.
>
> Bitcoin: Bitcoin, OK, *is* a testament of how much gold is missed, and
> government currencies are hated (Bit*coin* - in the US gold ceased to be
> legal tender in 1933), to the point where any exchange medium not obviously
> controlled by the government is elevated to the "cash" status. The basic
> premise of Bitcoin failed when fully distributed minting proved
> economically unfeasible. Very few noticed this failure. But the original
> battle lost was the removal of gold as practical exchange medium, and that
> is the battle that has to be re-fought, as Bitcoin is going to have exactly
> the same fate if it ever becomes anything close to untraceable practical
> exchange medium. Burning kilowatts into hashes instead of extracting gold
> from dirt makes no difference (product note to self: consumer electric
> heater that mints.)
>
>
> The sad Luddite fate of the left: agree.


<...>



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In Praise of Cash (or just another luddite nationalist deth spell for

[Alexander Bard]

Sure, Morlock, all brilliant points taken, and deepest respect, but
"Bitcoin was"? Really?

We have merely seen the beginning of value transfers through encrypted
block chain technology.

Bitcoin in all this is possibly at most "The Alta Vista of block chain
technology". Not nothing more than that. Whatever Chinese sepculators
may think.

The next generation of web browsers is far more likely to be tied to
say Z-Cash buttons or any other block chain technology that is a vast
improvement on the clumsiness and centralisation of Bitcoin. Big deal?
Not in itself. It can turn out to become quite interesting for The
Left to be honest. Since when did paper money in bank vaults help us?

Come on!

But from a leftist perspective this of coursea lso means a massive
loss of taxation coming to mind. In the future, mind you, not in the
past. Where we then see history repeat itself all over again: Capital
constantly beats The Left by in itself being a global phenomenon. So
when Capital went global and unions stayed local, the unions lost. If
unions has "internationalised" 50 years ago we would never have ended
up in "the neo-liberal paradigm" where we are today. You only win wars
if you develop the right weapons and the right resources.

The same thing goes for money today (which will of course all be
virtual real soon).

So we return to where we started: The problem with The Left is its
constant love affair with the 18th century nation-state and its
repeated LACK of utopian imagination. Every time globalisation beats
the shit out of nation-states we lose because the globe beats the
nation. And we stay tied to a nation-state model like brats to whom
the nation-state is the only tit they can find to suck. Repeat after
me: u-n-i-m-a-g-i-n-a-t-i-o-n. Kant, Marx and Habermas were all
globalists. They were right. But where then is the globalist left
today?

Or is all that is left of the left nothing but a pathetic luddite
provincialism?

Why not rather propose how value can be better distributed to the
masses beyond block chains? Since it is value redistribution and not
money models that are of real interest to The Left.

And unless you're willing to discuss that, you indeed are nothing but
a luddite nationalist. Honestly: Can't we do better than that today?
Is the capacity of this highly trained and well paid academic crowd
not better than that?

Personally, I'm going all in on mentoring at non-profit NGO-style tech
start-ups in Scandinavia. I intend to suck all the goodness out of
block chains I can get (massive chains of trust between strangers can
truly revolutionise the world). But then I'm convinced one can avoid
becoming a luddite without being naive. As a matter of fact, I believe
that is what a great leftism is all about.

Best intentions

Alexander Bard

2017-03-03 2:31 GMT+01:00 Morlock Elloi <morlockel...@gmail.com>:

> Bitcoin was never cash (that was the biggest lie about Bitcoin), so
> it could not possibly counter the war on cash. It was exactly the
> opposite - it was a competitor in the anti-cash surge. There is no
> end user independence, there are no traceless offline transactions,
> there is huge amount of strings attached to powerful players, and
> huge amount of complex technology required. The real understated
> promise of Bitcoin was avoidance of taxation, and even that is
> turning to be a pipe dream.

<...>



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Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

   Excellent points, dear Brian, and much agreed too.
   But is there somehow a widespread agreement that economic growth in
   China and India over the last 30 years has not benefitted the masses at
   all? That this is merely a "neo-liberal myth"? Sure we have seen enough
   Indian and Chinese billionaires on shopping sprees in Paris and New
   York to know how miserable the wealth vs poverty ratios are in these
   (as in most) countries, and we know how much of the profits from say
   the Pearl River delta sweatshops that have ended up in American,
   European and Japanese pockets (often not taxed as well). But to say
   that none of this was any good for the masses, who claims that? Any
   Indian or Chinese theorists? Or just the good old white male academic
   elite in Europe and North America? My not very liked Trumpist Left?
   India and China did live through decades of misrule under Indira Gandhi
   and Mao before getting caught in the globalisation maelstrom. But why
   not then in the good old Marxist tradition admit that capitalism is
   sometimes the least bad of all system? Definitely better than gandhiism
   or maoism for sure.
   While the solar panels now bringing the best hope of an end to the
   fossil fuel paradigm happen to be developed and manufactured in - China
   and India. Snow melting in China does scare the Chinese on all levels
   of society. For a variety of good reasons.
   Other than that, I could not agree more on the economic historical
   analysis. And indeed, let's move on.
   Best
   Alexander Bard

   2017-01-31 7:07 GMT+01:00 Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>:

 It's important for the political imagination to have these discussions
 about history.

 >   As for the examples from a British professor in Paris you mention
 >   they are all taken from a colonial past where the destructive
 >   colonialist effects of the measures involved were not taken into
 >   picture. Scottish trade barriers had a target and that target
 >   was hardly English or German producers but rather producers in
 >   colonised territories whose industralisation was delayed by some
 >   200 years due to racist trade barriers in colonial Europe in the
 >   18th and 19th centuries up to European trade barriers against
 >   African cotton and food products to this very day.

 <...>

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Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Carlo & Co

I love how Nettime easily explodes into a debate forum for hundreds
of issues simultaneously. The brainpower here is magnificent. However
there are just too many different threads here all at once for me to
be able to respond to decently.

Glad we agree though that crypto currencies are a major problem to
nation-state-based taxation. It is not now. But it certainly will
be. Cyberspace with encryption has plenty of room for new panamas.
Ethereum is soon to be found in every web browser. Just like Telegram
is killing text messaging as we speak. Especially among smartphone
users on boats crossing the Mediterranean "illegally".

Plus that there is a constant on-going political struggle between a
liberal cosmopolitanism and a socialist nationalism. Where my hopes
for a socialist cosmopolitanism either can not find support on this
forum, or is simply unrealistic to begin with. I guess I need to work
on that myself. However, birth rates are way higher in Sweden and
France these days than they are in Italy. So for the research you are
asking for in that department, Carlo, you had better ask women what
motivates them to give birth to kids in the first place. In Africa and
elsewhere.

In Sweden and France, women find plenty of affordable creches and can
therefore keep having careers and kids at the same time. In Korea
and Italy, it is either a career or housewifing next. You should not
be surprised that most women then opt for the first rather than the
latter. Consequently, Korean and Italian birth rates have imploded
(currently 1.2 kids per woman). While Sweden and France keep at least
replacement rates (2.1 kids per woman). So pensions issues alone
do not explain birth rates. Neither does blaming "neoliberalism"
for neither this nor that. Unless it is "neoliberal" to just ignore
women, in which case neoliberalism ironically seems to coincide with
the growth and success of feminism. ;-) However I would agree that
Goldman Sachs of course is "a neoliberal institution" that wields
enormous power. Ironically more so under Trump than under any previous
president. But I personally just refer to that as "capitalism" per
se. Since when there is nothing new about something, there is also
no need to attach a "neo" prefix. Or to invent a "protocolism" for
that matter, for our otherwise brilliant brother Felix, when there is
already something called the worship of "the rule of law". Which is in
turn where the socialist nationalism, which I have such problems with,
always seems to return. Is that really the only option? Then why not
China as our model for the future?


I guess I had better ask my therapeut if I'm a closet
anarcho-libertarian then. Does anybody here have access to Peter
Thiel's private drug binges? ;-)

Best intentions, from a sunny Cape Town
Alexander Bard

2017-01-31 2:09 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX <l...@time.to.get.psyced.org>:

> On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 01:01:09PM +0100, Alexander Bard wrote:
>
> > Thank you for an excellent expose of your position on world politics and
> > your defense of the term "neoliberalism".
>
> I was just exercising empathy towards people that use it more than me.  ;)

<...>


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Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

use this is really the new middle ages. The global
   empire. A plurarchic empire without a head. And if you don't want to
   read my books (es, I hate anything that smacks self-promotion too),
   then check out Critchley's "The Faith of The Faithless" for a start.
   Zizek's "Less Than Nothing" is brilliant too. The Frankfurt School 2.0
   - the digital version, anyone?
   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2017-01-29 23:50 GMT+01:00 Dan S. Wang <danw...@mindspring.com>:

 Alexander, a late reply to your original post and later:

 >>Can we please raise the quality of postings on this forum to at least
 >>slightly above the junior high school level?
 >>Best intentions from Cape Town

 I accept your best intentions. A provocation in a spirit of impatience and
 with a sense of urgency is just what I want now. Thank you. That said, you
 went to a different junior high than I did.
 <...>


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Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Carlo

Thank you for an excellent expose of your position on world politics and
your defense of the term "neoliberalism".

I would however like to offer strong but friendly disagreement.
To begin with, hardly any mainstream politicians today propose the
free-for-all hell that you paint in your presentation. The fact that they
in reality have to follow a pseudo-liberal market is simply a result of the
collapse of nation-state power to a global libertarian netocracy. Silicon
Valley et al is not elected by the people. But their basic ideology is no
different from yours. We can call it "balanceism" if you like. The
explosion of heavy and costly financial and market regulation following
2009 proves my point. Thatcher and Reagan did die in 2008. Didn't you
notice?

We are rather offered a variety of pragmatic either centre-right or
centre-left proposals fitting somewhere between traditional social
liberalism and social democracy.

Against this at least decent political middle (Angela Merkel, Barack Obama
et al) stands a populist extreme right promising ethnically cleansed
paradises that will never materialise (so once they start winning
elections, prepare yourselves for the births of the even worse thru voters'
disppointment, say Aryan State etc). And a populist left stuck with
identity issues and so far removed from proper Marxist class analysis and
economics that it is a best toothless and at worst just the Hegelian
negation of the extreme right (against this blue collar white male I offer
you this black lesbian anarchist, so who  is to be most pitied on Twitter
etc?) and therefore no better. Possibly even worse. Let's say I'm not
impressed with Podemos in Spain for example.

What scares me in all this is not environmental disaster (it is horrible
but the Chinese have woken up and invented cheap solar power as a result)
as much as the dissolution of the very fundament of a high-taxing
nation-state; Picketty's darling too and rightly so, Picketty is a Marxist
proper, albeit pragmatially speaking one in the wrong millennium. After
all, I live in Picketty's ideal state, Sweden.

No, the real scare should now be the collapse of taxation as such (where
trade barriers is one tax among many, and one of the least constructive).
The real enemy being bitcoin and other crypto currencies, undermining the
very possibility of taxation. How the hell do you tax a world of ultrafast
financial transactions on Tor browsers? Let's not be naive here: Tax
authorities are aware of the problem and have no clue have to solve it. Can
you help them with your anti-neoliberalism? If so, we are on the same side.
But moralising complaints will not suffice, solutions are needed.
The thing is that selfish libertarians can easily sacrifice the Virgin
Islands now for what awaits them next, the tax-free online paradises to
come.

Now this is where I would like to ground contemporary digital Marxism. Not
absurdly claiming that African population growth is a result of
neoliberalism. Since it is not. It is the result of decades of hard work to
stop African mothers from dying at childbirth. And if Europe as expected
will need their children, migration is not something a Marxist should
oppose (I expect that from Heideggerians but not from Marxists) but rather
support.

We must then arm these African workers with smartphones, credit cards,
online forums, and fresh copies of "Das Kapital". Or they will do it
themselves. That's where hope resides.

With open ears and all the best intentions
Alexander

2017-01-28 20:15 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX <l...@time.to.get.psyced.org>:

> On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 08:40:28AM +0100, Alexander Bard wrote:
>
> >Dear Carlo
> >My excuses for being rude in my response to you. And please understand
> >moderators took notice too.
>
> In retrospect I am unsure if replying publicly was actually useful
> from my side as I believe in patient but solemn moderation and do
> not believe in any attempts of public shaming: chances of injustice
> are too high. So my apologies for not choosing the path of private
> mails with the moderators and you.



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Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

   Dear Carlo
   My excuses for being rude in my response to you. And please understand
   moderators took notice too.
   That behaviour was completely unwarranted of me and I ask you to accept
   my full apologies.
   However, my asking all members of this list to not throw around the
   label "neoliberalism" lightly had nothing to do with you or your
   posting and neither did I claim that.
   What I did however respond to from your specific posting was the idea
   that international trade is some kind of an internal affair in between
   nation-states and little or nothing else. That might have been seen as
   a valid arguement 300 years ago, but its is hardly what international
   trade is today. The world is not a competition between national powers.
   Inter-state tade is rather less than 1% of overall global trade today.
   Trade has rather become a multitude of forces and interests of which
   nation-states play an incredibly small if any part.
   This is what I meant with opposing you taking a North Korean approach
   to trade. Or a Trumpist-populist approach to trade if you wish.
   From a Marxist internationalist perspective this makes little or no
   sense. Such a radical nationalist isolationist approach should frankly
   rather be described as the utter reactionism that it is.
   As for the examples from a British professor in Paris you mention they
   are all taken from a colonial past where the destructive colonialist
   effects of the measures involved were not taken into picture. Scottish
   trade barriers had a target and that target was hardly English or
   German producers but rather producers in colonised territories whose
   industralisation was delayed by some 200 years due to racist trade
   barriers in colonial Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries up to
   European trade barriers against African cotton and food products to
   this very day.
   Which reminds me of rule #1 in discussing international trade: it can
   not be taken seriously unless full global implications of trade rules
   are taken into perspective. Believe it or not, the economy has been
   globalised ever since The Silk Route's golden days. It is just the size
   of the trade whic has exploded in recen decades. To the benefit of
   hundreds of millions of Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and other people.
   So my mistake was to act out frustration in a completely unacceptable
   manner.
   But my main argument that we must not fall into Trumpist argumentation
   on trade without very good reasons is still adamant. Trump lied
   massively to his voters. The real danger now lies in where and when
   they will turn the disappointment this populism will create.
   Whatever happened to Marxism and its conditional internationalism and
   borderless solidarity here?
   Because if it can be saved we can discuss taxation rather than trade
   barriers. Distributed wealth is way way more benefitial for an
   egalitarian society than trade barriers ever could be. And I insist on
   that stance until I have seen proper arguments for the opposite.
   Funnily I have searched for those atguments through the last 300 years
   of economics literature and never found them. But I'm still all ears.
   Until then I belong to the vast majority of Socialists who are in
   principle pro free trade. Leftist Trumpism is just not my thing.
   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2017-01-27 17:40 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX <l...@time.to.get.psyced.org>:

 On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 03:34:05PM +0100, Alexander Bard wrote:

 >Excuse me, but what kind of world do you live in?
 >A world where all property is owned by nation-state governments as if
 >they were all North Korean dictatorships? And the globe is a
 >competetion for most evil between these states and nothing else? Have
 >you even heard of transnational movement?

 This has not been the topic of conversation in this thread, but you are 
free 
 to start it.
 <...>

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Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

   Excuse me, but what kind of world do you live in?
   A world where all property is owned by nation-state governments as if
   they were all North Korean dictatorships? And the globe is a
   competetion for most evil between these states and nothing else? Have
   you even heard of transnational movement?
   Can we please raise the quality of postings on this forum to at least
   slightly above the junior high school level?
   And while I'm at it, may I suggest a pause from the usage of the sloppy
   demonising term "neo-liberalism"?
   I can not in all honesty accept that we put a word on some kind of
   garbage waste bin into which we are all allowed to throw in anything we
   do not spontaneously like and then refer to it as "neo-liberalism". It
   is not just sloppy, it is outright idiotic, and it explains why The
   Left is losing everything as we speak. It has gone lazily bonkers.
   Unless you clearly do not define what you mean with "neo-liberalism",
   do not use the word. It has become absolutely meaningless.
   Instead, if this wants to be a forum for serious discussions on digital
   leftism, let's all go back to Marx and start by defining class and
   class struggle.
   It all begins and ends there anyway.
   And censoring the internet is not the slighest bit Marxist. Neither is
   racist localism, so stop defending that too. Don't be Trumpists!
   Instead look at the real issue at hand: What are we going to do with
   the masses of Trump and Le Pen and Brexit voters when their
   pseudophallic leaders do not give them what they want? How do we
   prevent an Aryan State in Europe or a new U.S. civil war from rising?
   Or do we go even more radical than Zizek and in an accelerationist
   manner accept and encourage such a development?
   Best intentions from Cape Town
   Alexander Bard

   2017-01-26 15:00 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX <l...@time.to.get.psyced.org>:

 On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 07:58:46AM +0100, Alex Foti wrote:

 > [Trump's] politics is neither neocon nor realist (certainly
 > not international kehoane-style) but isolationist.

 We have been sold the notion that Protectionism is very
 very bad and leads to "economic warfare".
 <...>

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Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[Alexander Bard]

Exactly, dear Morlock!

Which means we have to go "more Freudian than Freud himself" at this
junction, since even the old and cynical Freud was deep at heart a
Rousseauian who insisted that "truth will set us free". The Freud of
"Civilisation and Its Discontents" in the 1930s. And with him the entire
ultimately naive Frankfurt School. No, truth is never available to us. It
is the lower degree of lying that we must aim for since this is what is
indeed available to us. After a lot of hard work.

Lacan makes this break with Freud with his models of the conservatism of
all organisms, the defense of olf models at cognitive dissonance, and
ultimately the break into psychosis when old models break down, unless new
more functional models have arrived by then. Both dividually and socially.
We all keep whatever ideologies we seem to have - with their idiosyncrasies
- until we finally have new models (or ideologies if you will) available to
us that "seem" to work better.

Which is why the next revolution will not happen in the streets (we need to
get over Paris 1789 and even more so Paris 1968 as our model) both in our
minds and our digital environments once this new ideology of digital-global
solidarity has become available to us. And to get there we need both
technology, ideology and a good dose of destinal luck. A return to the
depth of our timeless psyches in the current chaos (humans do not change,
technology does, and ideology must change with it).
Meanwhile populism will rule The Old Left and cause one major hype after
another followed by increasingly worse disappointments. In this regard and
speaking Lacanese: "Bernie Sanders is not it". Sanders might speak warmly
about American industrial workers but he does so completely ignoring
Chinese or Mexican workers in the process. And his budget maths do not add
up. At all.

Sanders might have his heart in the right place (and doesnät Obama too with
his sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous pacifism?), but merely the
way an old preacher is still peaching in a rural church to the already
converted while the factory landscape in the cities is on fire but
completely out of his scope. Like populists always have.
Occupy is therefore a good t-shirt (bless them) which however never manages
to even conquer the t-shirt factory where it is branded.
So this is the time to subtract, reflect and produce brand new and way
deeper ideology than what we have done during the past 100 years. We need
to kill poststructuralist cynicism, create new ideology to understand
ourselves and our predicament better. We need new monasteries to do this.
And most of all, we need to get over Marx. I agree with Zizek, Hegel is the
way forwad to do this. As always at historical locks.
Then we can make real change. Change of heart and body. Until then,
fighting for encryption between us (think Telegram, the most impressive
Russian innovation since Sputnik) is where the current struggle is at.
Fight the FBI for Apple, then fight Apple, but not to set us free but to
create new societies based on masses of open source technologies.
Always remember this tiny strategical detail: Once college kids get laid
their political staying power is zilch. As St Paul and Lenin would both
happily tell us.

Which is why the barricaders of 1968 quickly became wealthy conservative
yuppies once the dust settled. No, a new class with a new ideology is the
only possibility of genuine revolution. And such ideologies are derived
from the potentialties of new technologies.
My hope resides with participatory culture. I'm personally already immensed
in it.

So may I then speak Lacanese once again and provoke her on the rather
unified Nettime list: What if your beloved Neoliberalism "does not exist"?
Best intentions
Alexander Bard (call me accelerationist if you will, but I'm all for
Hillary Clinton next November)

2016-04-17 4:47 GMT+02:00 <morlockel...@yahoo.com>:

> The widespread imposed or voluntarily adopted anonymous (or not so
> anonymous) ideologies, that facilitate the demise of their believers, are
> hardly a new phenomenon. Expecting that naming them is going to change
> anything is a fallacy.

<...>


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Return of the F-scale - and How to Respond

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Jan Hendrik & Co

What Söderqvist and I started with in the "Syntheism" book is the classic
case of looking for potential radicality in "the places where nobody is
looking". Definitely using tons of Hegel (here I agree with Zizek in "Less
Than Nothing", one of our major inspirations, that a "return to Hegel" is
what is most needed today for leftist discourse). We found this is in the
empirically validified differences in "priorities of worlds" between
today's 40-year-olds and 20-year-olds: To 40-year-olds the physical world
is still primary and the digital world is secondary and mostly an
"irritant" as a buzzing smartphone in their pockets, in this generation's
shallow search for "authenticity" as "lifestyle".

However to 20-year-olds the digital realm is the real world, period. And
will always be. So what do 20-year-olds make of the physical world?
Fascinatingly nobody seemed to have asked that question before Söderqvist
and I did (Critchley agrees this is where Bard & Söderqvist are pioneers,
if our book is correctly understood as a response to his "The Faith of The
Faithless"). So we arrived at Burning Man as this is what makes Silicon
Valley's culture distinctly original (the California hippie heritage rather
than the brash capitalist element of it).

Burning Man is now the fastest growing sociocultural movement on the planet
and despite being an easy target for classic leftist critical theory (a
sitting duck if you like) it has tons of stuff to teach "the left" on how
to go about things in the digitalised and globalised world (so of course I
started working from inside the burner movement which now even contains
"Syntheist congregations"; a theorist who does not practice what he/she
preaches is pretty useless, as far as I'm concerned).

So what do digital natives make out of a physical world they have made
secondary? Well, they turn it into a sacred playground of course (your
fellow American-born Australian theorist Mark Pesce wrote prophetically
about this 15 years ago). And what do people do when they end up in droves
to a sacred playground for real? They go tribal of course. And what do
people do when they arrive in a sacred playground? Well, interestingly they
stop using money as much as they possible can (there are no Coca Cola signs
at Burning Man and if there were they would be torn down and burned), make
connections that are concrete rather than abstract, they simply start
praticising a utopia; a temporary utopia for sure (we are not naive) but a
utopia nevertheless, the good old driving force of The Left which The Left
has lost track of (and consequently and deservedly has thereby lost its
drive too; a left without a utopia is as dead as a Christianity without a
Heaven).

Needless to say, the burner movement has already expanded globally, is now
decentralised (San Franscisco headquearters has long lost control of it),
has hundreds of spin-offs around the world, and now also has both urban and
permanent extensions (the Permaburners community). So we already have a
spiritual (as in "not new age") and proto-Marxist movement expanding
rapidly in full force, developing its spirituality in a Deleuzian
egalitarian fashion, and appealing tremendously to 23-year-old digitally
savvy art students with radical emancipatory and environmentalist values to
begin with (the movement now consists of millions). What is despertaley
needed now though is critical thiinking or else libertarian
"micro-capitalism" rather than The Left will conquer this generation and
another opportunity for The Left will have been lost.

Still this is still just one early example of "digitopia" in the physical
world. I firmly believe in focusing on digital integrity (supporting Apple
and Google when they fight the FBI but never going naive about the enormous
netocratic power concentrations they now constitute, meaning next fighting
for open source as a general principle rather than just a market platform
option etc). I'm not saying a general utopia is possible, but like
Meilassoux and Zizek, I firmly believe we need "a return to the possible
impossible" in all its assumed naivety, a faith in faith itself as
Critchley and Baiou would have it. Temporary utopias are after all the
playgrounds where permanent utopias can become feasible, and thereby the
local isolated possible is the correct response to the global impossible
(as I'm sure the formidable nettimer Ted Byfield would agree; at least I
always prefer anarchist experiments to Stalinist solutions).

The politico-theological monasteries are back and with more digital
cleverness and and embrace of criticial theory (think class instead of
subculural identities) the eco-villages could do real well to (and I want
people to follow up and our work as we do on Critchley and Badiou). That's
where I suggest we look and invest our lives and energies, rather than
money, next. But then we also have to kill academia (it's the next diigtal
upheaval anyway; leftist thinkers principally 

nettime Aprés Yanis Varoufakis: As it happend (on June 27th

[Alexander Bard]

   Well, we should really listen here to the likes of Stiglitz and
   Krugman. Leftist economist who have been proven repeatedly. Providing
   bad loans is actually not a crime and should not be a crime. It is just
   bad business. And doing bad business is not and should not be criminal.
   What is criminal however is the corruption between politicians and
   their banker friends who use taxpayers' money to prop up banks that
   really should default. So those who are criminally protected in all of
   this are utlimately not the bankers but the bank owners, those
   cornerstones of a capitalist system, the stock owners. Wealthy
   Europeans (many Greeks) with Swiss bank accounts who do not pay taxes
   but use our taxes to cover up their own losses. The guillotiines should
   be moved to Zurich and Geneva and nowhere else.
   A Grexit has at least scared the Eurozone for strictly psychological
   reasons. It is the psychological ripple effect which worries
   capitalists, when their mutual collective cynicism is exposed (learn
   from the Lehman Bros affair 2008-09). But the Greek economy is less
   than 2% of the entire EU economy and the Greek loans relatively modest.
   It is not the money but the psychology which scares capitalists. For
   all the right reasons.
   Which is why I from a strictly from a leftist perspective am all for
   the Grexit and the reintroduction of the drachma in Greece so that
   Greece can become independent (as is Joseph Stiglitz), run its own
   politics and economics, print its own money, recapitalise its own
   banks, and let wealthy German, French and British bank ownders take the
   hit they should taken years ago, for providing fake loans to
   meaningless Mediterranean property speculation in which Greek voters
   had nothing to gain anyway.
   I am actually aghast at supposedly leftist save the euro ideas. Why
   should bourgeoise Empire be saved at the cost of radical Independence
   and Democracy? Why???
   And I'm against Alex Tsipras lying and lying and lying. A no on Sunday
   is a definite Grexit. All other leftist parties around Europe are
   screaming this fact to Greek voter today. They ms listen and not buy
   into Tsipras' Putinist postmodern propaganda. The fact that Tsipras
   lies about this fact to his own electorate shows he is no more
   trustworthy than the German and French bankers whose asses DSK and
   Merkel have long tried to save.
   Between these two sides, I refuse to take sides. Loyalty should be with
   the Greek AND European people. Neither with politicians not bankers.
   Agreed?
   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2015-06-29 23:42 GMT+01:00 carl guderian ca...@vermilion-sands.com:

 On 28 jun 2015, at 19:53, Patrice Riemens wrote:

  Grüzi mittenand,
 
  I was just as surprised as everyone else to that the final nail on the
  coffin of the 'institutions' phoney line of reasoning was hammered in by
  none other than Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in what will probably go down as
  the best political 'Return of the Mommy' performance of the period.
 
  http://fr.slideshare.net/DominiqueStraussKahn/150627-tweet-greece
 
 Oh, this is good:

 [DSK]

 I believe that we need to think different, we need a change in the
 logic, we need a radically new direction to reframe the negotiations
 with Greece.
 ...


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nettime Europe: from bad to worse (should be Greece, from worse to good)

[Alexander Bard]

Sure, mainly agreed, but I'm all for holding greedy French and
German bankers (correctly pointed out by Seb here as DSK's darlings)
responsible for the massive fluffy loans they provided to greedy Greek
tax-exempt property developers, precisely through the default on Greek
debt which is now the more than likely outcome of this circus. Greece
will be left with its own currency (the new drachma) and then put
in the same position as many other non-euro EU countries. In which
case, Greece will finally have to learn to tax its wealthy and its
consumption to be able to pay the pensions, the government employee
salaries and the investments in edcuation and infrastructure necessary
to run a functioning Greek social democracy. In what way could there
be anything wrong with that from a socialist-democratic perspective
(as I assume most Nettimers should support)? So what I have defended
all along are all the EU taxpayers who have been unfairly forced to
pop up both EU banks and wealthy tax-exempt Greeks for years. Finally
we can see an end to that evil circus. With Greece as now seems most
likely leaving the euro and being forced to behave as responsibly and
democratically (and no longer populist) as Sweden, Britain, Poland
and even Switzerland while French and Gernan banks take the massive
hit on their bad stupid loans they should have taken all along. You
see, a proper Marxist analysis sides with the working class against
the wealthy, not with one small country (Greece) against a big one
(Germany). Which is why I regret to have to insist that Syriza is not
a Marxist party, but a nationalist-populist one, far more fascinated
with media narcissism and game theory (Yanis Varoufakis' real academic
discipline) than with fairness and justice. Unfortunately. At the end
of the day, why not just Freek voters going to the polls on Sunday?
Why not all EU voters? And how many of the 500 million non-Greek EU
voters do you honestly think would support Greece staying in the euro
without a default on debt at the cost of non-Greek EU taxpayers? Not
a single one. So where is their voice, according to Syriza? Oh, as
non-Greeks they apparently do not count. Which is just nationalist
populism at its worst. Greece deserves much better than Syriza.

Best intentions
Alexander Bard




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nettime Gentrification - or a focus on income and wealth?

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Friends

Concerning the recent discussions on the evilness of Google and/or
Facebook as corporations (one thing) and the evilness of Google and
Facebook employees for causing major gentrification to speed up in
the Bay Area (an entirely different issue to me), can soebody please
explain to me how gentrificaton became a major cause of concern to
leftists? It smacks of good old conservatism to me.

Should cities be stale, unchanged, fixed over time? Should people only
be allowed to move through government directives and/or death? If not,
then why is gentrification our concern? Is Niznij Novgorod suddenly
the ideal here?

Should we not be more concerned with the classic issues of wealth and
income distribution and Piketty's extremely vaiid point that Europe
and America have returned to a 19th century class society in terms of
precisely wealth and income (for which Reagan and Thatcher plus of
course Blair should correctly be blamed)? Because the problem with
gentrification is not that rich people buy poor people's property when
the poor can not afford to keep them (or as is of course mostly the
case, the poor never owned the property in the first place) but if and
when the wealthy have all the wealth in the first place (which is far
from always the case at gentrification).

Every time I see a political maneuver to save a city from
gentrification the biggest benefactor turns out to be a terribly
wealthy old ladiy who likes to keep an eight-room apartment for
herself and a cat. I just don't like the naivety of Soviet-style
economics precisely because it kills both creativity and equal
opportunity even with the best of intentions. So why can't we do
better than that and go straight to the core of what a class society
is: The struggle over financial means. Today increasingly also the
struggle over connections (lobbies killed democracy) and education and
job opportunities etc. But back to Marx! Would he have been concerned
with gentrificaton? Certainly not. It was a conservative concern then
and so it is today.

And if gentrification is a particularly bad problem in the Bay Area,
have you guys even heard of Mumbai, Shanghai or Istanbul? Doesn't seem
so, or have I missed something here at Nettime?

If you're particularly horrified at gentrification in the Bay Area,
perhaps it is just because it happens to be particulary fast and
therefore obvious there (for American standards, it is still nothing
compared to Asian and Latin American megacities) and perhaps because
you're docking the real issue here: lax Californian taxation. Nope?

Best intentions, but more long term I hope
Alexander




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nettime tensions within the bay area elites

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Geert  Co

Just to add to the complexity of the picture, Google is a rather
decentralized mess - every googler I meet works on his/her own separate pet
project - so far unable as a whole to take a stand with its billion of
users against govenrments and large corporations, or for that matter switch
to the other evil side either as Microsoft, Apple and other older actors
of the Bay Area have done before them.

Three points of hope though:

-The Snowden scandal was met not just with anger within Google but also
with steadfast pragmatism. The comments I heard frmo the inside all
concerned war is a matter of resources California/Confucian style,
exposing the fact that the only employer in the U.S. employing more
top-rate mathematicians than Google itself is - tada - the NSA! So Google
regard the war as a matter of who has the most resources will eventually
win. Here of course with Google being aware that we the people will
eventually opt out of Google if a more secure alternative far from the NSA
eventually pops up (I assume Darknet, Bitcoin, Silk Road style but for
communication and easy to use etc). Google does not have any enemy
businesswise now, the next decade likely to be their golden age (Android
and You Tube being enormous power generators). Their threat is definitely
from the future and they are aware of it.

- Eric Schmidt's book with Jared Cohen is a piece of horrible carp and so
far I have not met a single Google insider who did not agree. Schmidt seems
to be the borrowed stupidface to keep Washington happy about Google
whereabouts but carries none or little cred within the Google hydra itself.
He is an outsider and a pretentious and narcissitic one too. Judging from
the book he is also a complete idiot and a puppet for someone. The book is
that bad. Schmidt is definitely not Google.

- Brin and Page are still young enough to be driven by their personal
ambition to have fun and live the Californian dream (Burning Man every
year, etc). They do listen and are not so much evil as naive when leaving
their algorithm-driven comfort zone. But then again, Google is already what
Foucault would refer to as an institution driven by the credo of endless
self-expansion and of ciurse fed by senseless ad profits. And therefore a
lot more dangerous for its naivety than for its evil. Drones, batteries,
will they get involved with commercial cannabis next? The odds are really
low. Apple are after Tesla (for the battery technology more than the cars I
assume), Google will keep purchasing Star Trek dreamery.

Google or Facebook? Google anytime. But with Schmidt in the midst of a
bunch of fun-seeking hippies, the world desperately needs alternatives to a
company that controls 80% of search outside China and 90% of smartphone
data traffic (including China) worldwide. And has not been able to escape
the long arms of the NSA. Its their naivety towards all this concentrated
power which scares the shit out of me.

Brotherly love
Alexander Bard




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nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Alexander Bard]

...


???There are always exceptions to the rule... But there's hope. Brin and Page
had no money either when I met them 12 years ago.??? They ignored and still
ignore money and have billions. But they love power. And nurture their
networks.

Everybody's, sincerely
Alexander Bard

PS: Who loves James Barrett's comment on this thread but has no immediate
comment to make to James' brilliant posting


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Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Flick and James

No, money is not the end of all things. Unless you still wear the
most popular t-shirt from the 19th century: Whoever has the most
money when he dies wins. The end of all things is of course power
and not money (cue in a Zizekian manner of course taken from House
of Cards). So money will only be at the center of things when and
if money can buy you power (which it of course still can and likely
always will) but if anything else beats money to power, we would be
enormously naive if not taking this into account. Especially if we are
sincere about our Marxism as a pathos rather than a strict logos.

As for James' question of whether Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are the
most powerful people on the planet: Of course not. It is not quantity
but quality that counts even in a Google algorithm. It is who you
know and not how many you know which maximizes attention. Credbility
must always be multiplied with awareness as the basic equation of any
information-curating algoritm. And this is of course why we now move
into the golden age of the sociogram. Why else would there be free
gmail, free facebook and twotter accounts etc in the first place.
Come on? This is of course all properly calculated. Nothing is ever
for free unless you get a bubble gum from a stranger at Burning Man.

And please please please, I'm not saying money is not important. Not
in any way whatsoever. And I'm not saying an old power structure is
over and done with. We see traces even of the feudal system everyday
in our lives today (Islam and Catholicism to name but two of its
long-lasting bi-products), but here we are talking of of changes and
eventual revolutions in a Bergsonian long duree, but still correct,
manner. And attention is creeping in everywhere as a source of power.
And how do we study it? Well, just look at what the Silicon Valley
behemoths are going after and you will find where the power of
attention is heading next. Money is a means to power. And will be,
especially as attention can NOT be accumulated to then be traded. It's
just that attention is an incredibly complex beast possibly producing
a worse class division than anything we have previously seen. It must
therefore not be ignored just because models that are not complex
enoigh to understand the world today. For example: Was The French
Revolution really a revolution, or merely the symptom of the real one
(which of course happened in Germany in 1450)?

I'm not the slightest bit optimistic about the future. But I believe
our best shot as saving the planet, fighting class divisions and
alienation etc is a proper netocratic metaphysical system to be
developed. My shot is syntheism (what Simon Critchley calls mystical
anarchism and Alain Badiou heralds as truth as an act). That's
where I'm heading next in my research and literary work. Once that
is done, I agree with Zizek and Badiou that we can create another
proper symptom of a revolution, And in this activist work, keeping the
Internet free and open as much as possible is the truly revolutionary
activity of our time. I'm glad Slavoj Zizek finally sees the Pirates
as the forebearers of this major movement.

All the very best
Alexander




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Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Alexander Bard]

Dear Florian

I can sense that we disagree already - and probably have to agree to
disagree - but let me just state that netocracy is already well defined
in internt social theory and needs no confusing redefinition from you nor
anybody else. Netocrats are those who use The Internet to their own
advantage and who strengthen their power by successfully creating social
networks within which they pursue their social intelligence and tranied
social skills. As diferent form a bourgeoisie of stockholders and factory
owners. Society then increasingly becomes a power structure of networks
rather than individuals (and just look at Silicon Valey and then tell me in
what way I'm wrong here). Media industries have operated around and
concentrated on such power structures for decades and with all of society
becoming medialized, The Internet merely reflects the rest of society in
this department.

You can argue that capital is the only thing that counts at the end of the
day and that attention is a meningless term. Pre-Marxists argued the same
way promoting land ownership and against the importance of money prior to
Marx too. However the fact that 99% of Google searches pass through the
attentionalist left column and merely 1% of Google seraches pass through
the capitalist right column proves it is your analysis and not mine which
is simplistic and therefore ends up with a less correct analysis. if you're
interested, I wrote The Netocrats with Jan S??derqvist 14 years ago and it
is also available as one third of The Futurica Trilogy if you'd like a
copy. And don't worry about me self-promoting, all our books are
non-profit. We just like a good debate on what really counts in
contemporary society. And a radical thinking more inspired by Zizek,
Critchley and Meillassoux rather than Immanuel Kant.

Best regards
Alexander Bard


2014-04-16 19:57 GMT+02:00 Florian Cramer fcra...@pleintekst.nl:

 On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Alexander Bard bardiss...@gmail.comwrote:

 What it is not taking into perspective is the fact that the Internet itself
 fosters a new parallel class system of a netocracy versus a consumtariat.


 A netocracy would be the class that controls the infrastructure and
 policymaking of the Internet - and, by implication, the economic and
 political systems connected or depending on it.
 ...


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Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Alexander Bard]

And still, while this analysis is correct it is also merely half-right.
What it is not taking into perspective is the fact that the Internet itself
fosters a new parallel class system of a netocracy versus a consumtariat.
But that is of course because the members of Nettime themselves are all
netocrats and therefore rather blind to this digital division. Power always
blinds us, especially of course our very own power.
For example, you can no longer ignore the fact that there is an enormous
difference in power between somebody with 400,000 Twitter followers and
those with merely 10.
Not that the division between a bourgeosie (those with money) and workers
(those without) in a Marxist sense no longer exists, just that the new
division in attention arther than capital complicates things further.
Unless Nettime begins to dig into this complexity of power, the themes of
this forum will look rater banal in hindsight. Don't you agree? I'm sure
Karl Marx himself would have. Just take Google, who by focusing on
attention maximization (who is top if you google search engine if not
Google themselves?) and ignoring mioneymaking in strategy is the fastest
growing financial behemoth ever, merely as an ironic side-effect.
Power is no longer just Fortune 400. It is just as much a sociogram as an
income or wealth distribution. And will increasingly be so.
I'm glad people like Slavoj Zizek are finally understanding this too.
Best intentions
Alexander


2014-04-15 1:39 GMT+02:00 d...@geer.org:

  | As Enzensberger's Rules for the Digital World suggest - somewhat
  | unintentionally -, freedom of electronic devices will be a privilege
  | of the wealthy. In the near future, to be upper class will no longer
  | mean that you carry the latest electronic gadget, but that you can
  | afford the luxury surcharge for a life without tracking devices.

 Absolutely right.  When was the last time any member of the
 Fortune 400 list, or Obama for that matter, carried cash or keys?
 ...


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