Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Karin Spaink]

On Jan 31, 2017, at 14:18 , Alexander Bard  wrote:

>   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"? 

"Polls show that about 9 out of 10 Americans believe that global poverty
"has worsened or stayed the same. But in fact, [..] every day, an
"average of about a quarter-million people worldwide graduate from
"extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. [..]

When I began writing about global poverty in the early 1980s, more than
40 percent of all humans were living in extreme poverty. Now fewer than
10 percent are. By 2030 it looks as if just 3 or 4 percent will be.
(Extreme poverty is defined as less than $1.90 per person per day,
adjusted for inflation.) [..]

There will, of course, be continued poverty of a less extreme kind,
smaller numbers of children will continue to die unnecessarily, and
inequality remains immense. Oxfam calculated this month that just eight
rich men own as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity. Yet global
income inequality is actually declining. While income inequality has
increased within the U.S., it has declined on a global level because
China and India have lifted hundreds of millions from poverty. [..]

Remember: The most important thing happening is not a Trump tweet.
What’s infinitely more important is that today some 18,000 children who
in the past would have died of simple diseases will survive, about
300,000 people will gain electricity and a cool 250,000 will graduate
from extreme poverty.”

Nicholas Kristof, Why 2017 May Be the Best Year Ever
NY Times Jan 21, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/why-2017-may-be-the-best-year-ever.html


- K -

-- 
People get what they get. It has nothing to do with what they deserve.
  - House, in House s05e01

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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 :

 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 :

> 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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Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Flick Harrison]

> On Jan 28, 2017, at 14:29 , Morlock Elloi  > wrote:

> The 'left' discourse has been divorced from the reality for almost a decade, 
> since the mixed race president got into the office. This cognitive dissonance 
> was required to imagine the progress.

“I’m right, and you don’t seem to agree, therefore cognitive dissonance.”  Can 
we please bring this discussion to a level higher than Scott Adams? ;-)

Besides, the right seems to be taking cognitive dissonance all the way to the 
bank.  “I hereby declare this crowd larger.  Signed, President Donald Trump.”

> Everything became a meme, a notion, an idea, easy to contain, direct and 
> bend. Instead of propaganda being manufactured by the state, the whole swaths 
> of population willingly took part in it. Many of the loud ones got paid.

I played a multiplayer video game today and was surprised to find the chat 
console filled with racist crime “statistics” being spread that way, referring 
of course to “n***er crime.”  Talk about the whole population writing 
propaganda.

By calling Obama a mixed-race president you are meming with the white 
supremacists, though you probably think you aren’t.  Sidelining his blackness 
doesn’t work, that’s why people like him don’t bother trying.  He identifies as 
black, and it’s his blackness that energized the KKK and the far right into 
action.  Hillary’s womanness is the next thing that drove them bonkers.  If you 
think this is a side issue, I will hazard a guess you are a white male.  I also 
guess you think that #BlackLivesMatter is just a meme.  It isn’t.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/us/politics/03census.html 


Whiteness matters to Trump and his followers. What macro-economic explanation - 
other than the random alliance-chages a la 1984 - for Trump to swing against 
major-partner China and in favour of struggling Russia?  Does personal 
enrichment really cover it?  Well, why let Asians off the hook to colonize 
Africa and compete with the Panama Canal and spend all our energy containing 
our fellow whiteys in Eurasia?  Even Israel can still fit into the 
co-antisemites’ foreign policy because Russia considers Israel a 
“Russian-speaking country” and damn are they convenient for weeding out 
muslims.  This Great White Alliance is an angle no one seems to have explored 
yet, but it seems kinda obvious to me.  Then again, maybe people are afraid to 
give Trump ideas.
 
And to go a step further - why wouldn’t the alt-right forces ruling Russia be 
happier to deal with a racist, misogynist bully than a black man or a woman?  
Why not find a partner to declare all Muslims terrorist (except the 
bloodthirsty puppets in Chechnya, and the strictly-secular thugs running 
Turkey)?  Hey, those anarcho-feminists in Rojava are brown, they’re probably 
terrorists too!
 
> It's hard to wean off that. Just look at the panic when the reality refused 
> to follow the doctored polls.
 
In any case, this stuff about doctored polls is overblown.  The US election, 
for instance, closely resembled the polls in early November.  The problem was 
the quickly-changing terrain, and the slim margins of the swing-states, not 
inaccurate polling.  Same thing with the Canadian election - it looked close, 
but with the hijab issue blowing up, and then the NDP flip flop on balanced 
budgets, a major Tory corruption trial unfolding in real time, the Alan Kurdi 
image hitting the front pages, the public broke for the Liberals very late.  To 
this day the poorly educated wrongly use our election as another example of the 
wrong wrong polls.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/canadian-election-2015-poll-tracker
 


And:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ 


>  The real shock, and the end to the cargo cult politics will come when the 
> new masters start laying off the obsolete propaganda machine.


God help us when there’s not even an MSM to tell us whether Trump is even 
really still alive or not, and all there is left are competing propaganda blogs 
pulling alternative facts out of their buttholes all day.

> Twitter is cheaper.


Nobody cares how much it costs.  The National Post, our right-wing national 
paper, stayed afloat for years despite losing money.  It’s very useful to have 
a credible mouthpiece for corporate viewpoints.  Pushing the convo nets big.

-- 
* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison 
 

* FLICK's WEBSITE: 
http://www.flickharrison.com 
 
↑ Grab this Headline Animator 

Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Brian Holmes]

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.


Well, here is something to think about. After WWII the US, which
had outstripped in productivity practically all other nations in
practically all sectors, and had bombed most of those other nations
and sectors into the ground to boot, wanted to declare free trade
as Britain had done in the 19th century. That would have been a
"neo-liberal" order (liberal being more or less equivalent to free
trade in the context of the British-led world system). To achieve this
renewed free-trade order the US wanted to impose a thing called the
World Trade Organization as part of the Bretton-Woods treaties. But
other countries, including the Europeans above all, understood that
they would never be able to develop their economies again under such
conditions. Why? Because the products of the more sophisticated and
advanced country would always be cheaper and better, and therefore no
new local development would occur. So what emerged instead, not 200
but 70 years ago, was the Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade,
the GATT, which was a process of inter-national negotiation over
tariffs in order to reconcile the benefits of protectionism with the
benefits of free trade.

And the story didn't end there. In the 1970s, so-called developing
nations, whose resources and labor had basically been the prey of the
industrially developed ones up to that time, tried to extend such
principles into a New International Economic Order. Again the point
was to selectively negotiate tariff barriers in view of national
development. This, at the time, was considered proper Marxism,
by the way. And it briefly appeared practicable due to the high
resource prices that had been won through concerted resistance. Those
high prices gave the developing countries a bargaining chip in the
international arena for the first time. They could actually negotiate
over which of the benefits of free trade would be beneficial *to
them*, just as the Europeans had done a generation before. However,
all that fell apart in the 1980s, due to the rise of what untold
numbers of critical economists and social scientists have analyzed
"neoliberalism" (also known, insofar as free trade is concerned, as
"the Washington Consensus").

In the end, the US finally saw its 1944 Bretton-Woods plans
fulfilled in 1997 with the foundation of the WTO. So, free trade and
neo-liberalism have just about everything to do with each other, as
Milton Friedman would certainly have agreed.


>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.


iI think your mistake is rather to make false assertions that support
the status quo (or in this case, the status quo ante, since free
trade, and with it, the entire neoliberal order, is now on the edge
of collapsing). Nonetheless, you're right to say that the full global
implications of trade rules should be discussed. Had this been done
in 2000, when China was admitted to the WTO, we might have avoided
the spectacular shift of global manufacturing to a country that was
essentially free of all labor and environmental laws, leading to
form of uncontrolled export-oriented growth under the control of
expatriate corporations and so-called financial planning (ie, invest
massively in cheap industry for a quick buck). The consequences of
that quintessentially neoliberal phenomenon of export-led growth in
East Asia have been many, but as a proper Marxist ecologist (and
please consult John Bellamy Foster, editor of the Socialist Review,
before you deny the existence of such a proper being) I would point
to two consequences. The first is the alienation of people throughout
the formerly developed world from the labor process, and from the
democratization that goes with a practical grasp over what you make,
which is indispensable for collective control over production and
societal development. And the second is 

Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[carlo von lynX]

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.  ;)

> To begin with, hardly any mainstream politicians today propose the
> free-for-all hell that you paint in your presentation. The fact that they

Yes, most people have learnt to disagree with neoliberal ideology, but...

> 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

... exactly. In a globalized world we keep seeing the race to the bottom
of ethics. If the large majority of countries respects certain ethics
of, say, taxation, then some few countries will try to cut out a slice
of strategic advantage by offering a tax haven.. like the UK, traditionally.

> 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

You can't say I have an ideology and Silicon Valley is in any way
similar to it, without elaborating in any way how you got to such
a spectacular statement... Are strawman argumentations a habit of
yours?

> 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?

Then why is Goldman Sachs so adamant to have Trump remove Obama's
post-2008 regulation? Europe's inability to seriously counter the
bank lobbyists is depressing. The proposal I made does not consider
the inability of corrupt governance to enact it, that's a different
topic for which I have a different idea.

> 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).

Eh? Isn't the collapse of taxation *caused* by globalization?

> The real enemy being bitcoin and other crypto currencies, undermining the

Yes, bitcoin is a mid-term threat to democracy - but its current
volume is ridiculous compared to the dimensions of wealth that is
being accumulated using other tax haven methods by the top few.

> very possibility of taxation. How the hell do you tax a world of ultrafast

That's why some people have developed taler.net - a cryptographic
payment system that defends the anonymity of the customer but also
the transparency of the merchant. Therefore, hiding transactions
from the tax office doesn't work.

> financial transactions on Tor browsers? Let's not be naive here: Tax

Yes, we have for a long time criticized the lack of modeling of
ethical and social needs in financial blockchain technologies.
Glad, we are no longer alone. Blockchain-based redistribution
schemes do not work, because the rich simply do not participate.

> 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.

Exchanging Bitcoins into real-world valuta will have to become
illegal. It is factually like money laundering.

> 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.

Yes, we need to migrate the little volume of legal use of Bitcoin
from blockchain technology to an ethical crypto currency, then
start dismantling the Bitcoin infrastructure. Since sociology has
not found a "distributed" way of implementing social ethical goals,
we need to use the good-old state architecture with its corruptible
but better than nothing 'separation of powers'. Therefore, since
ethics cannot be decentralized, there is no need to decentralize
the transactions. Thus, the blockchain is a useless producer of
overhead, especially because of its climate-unfriendly proof-of-work
operations. As soon as proof-of-stake is implemented using state
authorities, the architecture is hardly different from regular
distributed technology.

> Now this is where I would like to ground contemporary digital Marxism. Not

That's fine. I think Bitcoin is not our biggest problem, but
if we just differ regarding priorities rather than positions,
that's pretty neat.

> absurdly claiming that African population growth is a result of

Wait wait, you could have at least had the decency to ask how I
could possibly deduce such a statement. Too simple to just call
things absurd that you haven't thought about yet.

> 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

That is a nice reason, but maybe not the only one. I have heard
several times, that for billions of poor, having children is
the only alternative to inexistant pensionate guarantees. Of
course children will be loved in any case, but even Italians
went from the most prolific country of Europe in the 60's to
one of the least 

Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Alexander Bard]

   Thanks a million for your lengthy and thoughtful response, dear Dan!
   Exactly what I was looking for. Cheers to lucky Madison for having you
   around.
   Well, I have been here at Nettime long enough to see people blame
   "neoliberalism" for the crisis in Greece when in reality those
   neo-liberal bastions the IMF and the World Bank largely sided with
   Greeks (due to Keynesian trends in economics after 2009; the IMF and
   the World Bank are after all only chasing the latest trends the way H
   and Zara do in fashion retail, they are not neo-liberal per se,
   bureaucrats have no predetermined ideology besides their own paychecks)
   while what crushed the Greek economy was the unwillingnes of German
   voters to bail out the Greeks (and consequently German and French
   banks).
   So are these German voters neo-liberals? Of course not. They are
   classical Lutheran social conservatives. Possibly even racist ones. But
   not neo-liberals or even any other sort of liberals. Neoliberalism is a
   comfortable demon. But it is to a large extent a non-existent one.
   Especially after 2008-09. I would prefer to see it gone in this forum
   (but that's just me).
   You see, there is a reason why I wrote "The Global Empire" with Jan
   Söderqvist in 2004 which was that "Empire" with all its naivities
   needed a proper both Marxist and Nietzschean response (Hardt and Negri
   wrote a pop book, not a work of philosophy). I still believe this to be
   the case and by now I also have the full support from say Simon
   Critchley and Slavoj Zizek. The Identity Left is dead (or at least
   should be). Jeremy Corbyn has been an even bigger disaster for British
   politics than Brexit ever could be (I personally don't mind a messy
   Brexit for people to realise what such a populist adventure costs). Et
   cetera, et cetera.
   So we need a drastic return to Marx. Blaiming "neoliberalism" again is
   no better than Christians blaming "The Devil" when they should blame
   atheism.
   And as for your excellent response, we also need a return to Freud.
   Because American voters already know all those dirty secrets about
   Trump that you list. And love him for them all. And will love him even
   more for the scandals that you and others try to provoke. Rather
   prepare yourself for a battle between Trump vs Madonna in the 2020
   election, because that is where the social media-heavy United States is
   heading next. To understand this scenario, you need Freud. Why do
   people love to lick the ass if power? Now, mix Freud with Marx and what
   do you get? The Frankfurt School. That is where at least I am today.
   Meanwhile, Picketty's mistake is to think that people (and even more so
   corporations) CAN be taxed in the future. We are all digital-savvy
   enough on this list to see what is really happening: Ethereum will
   release its next generation of memes and software this year, the
   z-cash-driven web browser is just around the corner. National
   currencies may very well be obsolete within a decade. And with it
   nation-state taxation. And with that the last remnants of the classic
   Picketty-driven Left is gone, the hope for a fairer heavy-taxed
   nation-state. Am I a neo-liberal saying this? Am I illusionary? No, of
   course not. I'm just trying to ground The Leftist discourse in reality.
   Any other option is just a Freudian pervserse enjoyrment of our own
   hopeless predicament. And THAT I do not buy. I am not a lazy leftist
   literature professor more concerned with keeping my paycheck than with
   a better fairer future for humanity.
   So where do we go then? My response is to reach for the utopian skies
   and go all the way for a global democracy. Through an enlightened and
   if you say so Maxist spirituality. Syntheism, Alter Ego in the UK, the
   Pirates, all these new phenomena point towards a plurarchic radicality
   that I'm all in favour of. I wish more of it on Nettime too.
   Because otherwise the world will be ruled for the next 100 years by The
   Libertarian Netocracy coming from out of Silicon Valley, the real
   Washington. And do they care about democracy? Of course not. Because
   here we actually have the first new elite in history for some 500 years
   that can afford to ignore democracy completely. Just google Peter Thiel
   and Palantir and there you go. The blue collars of Michigan do not see
   this yet, but we should.
   The Liberatarians do not even need an ideology such as neo-liberalism
   to gain power. They just use their technologies and not only capitalise
   on human relations, they tinderfy them. This is the world of pure
   attentionalism. Isolated human robot-like entities infantilised into a
   world of computer games and thousands of hours of internet porn. With
   bigger class divisions than ever.
   So what is our response? Do you have a heart? Well, then start building
   monasteries. Because this is really the new middle ages. The global
   

Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Heiko Recktenwald]

Am 28/01/17 um 08:40 schrieb Alexander Bard:
>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.
>   
Maybe http://www.volksbuehne-berlin.de/deutsch/denkzeichen/ is what you
are speaking of.


Trade barriers are a very effectiv tool to give protection to local
industries or to trash them as in Gaza. Equality as in "equal trade" aka
"fairness" is between nation states. Political diversity, how can this
be wrong?


Best, H.
i


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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 :

> 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?

[Morlock Elloi]

I wish.

The 'left' discourse has been divorced from the reality for almost a 
decade, since the mixed race president got into the office. This 
cognitive dissonance was required to imagine the progress.


Everything became a meme, a notion, an idea, easy to contain, direct and 
bend. Instead of propaganda being manufactured by the state, the whole 
swaths of population willingly took part in it. Many of the loud ones 
got paid.


It's hard to wean off that. Just look at the panic when the reality 
refused to follow the doctored polls. The real shock, and the end to the 
cargo cult politics will come when the new masters start laying off the 
obsolete propaganda machine.


Twitter is cheaper.


On 1/26/17, 6:34, Alexander Bard wrote:


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.


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Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[carlo von lynX]

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.

>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.

Allan gave us some eloquent definitions on the subject. I consider
the fallacious ideology of radical freedom of the markets rather
than that of the people the greatest threat to the survival of
humankind on the planet, so I find it more important than the
traditional distinction of "left" and "right" politics. While
neoconservative can be seen as a kind of "right", neoliberal
politics doesn't really qualify as either left or right, so I
find it quite adequate that it is to be used as frequently as
the other two terms, and therefore occasionally subject to
false use.

In fact I doubt there is much false use of the term "neoliberal".
People just frequently attribute all kinds of consequences of
neoliberal politics with the ideology itself. So when you observe
the consequences of a ruthless globalization that ideologically
refuses any kind of ecologic, ethical or social taxation, then
the resulting collapse of climate, labor markets and human
rights is correctly to be attributed to neoliberalism. A lot of
people thought free markets are a brilliant idea, but so do a
lot of people think scientology has a great belief system.
In either case it has nothing to do with facts and ethics.

So, is global warming neoliberal? of course!
Is the exponentially growing gap of inequality neoliberal? Yes.
Is desperate migration of entire populations neoliberal? Yip.
Is the growth of population in Africa neoliberal? Quite likely.
Is polluting the oceans with sulfur from HFO neoliberal? Sure!
What about iPhone slavery in Indonesia? No doubt!

Is it neoliberal, when people are desperate about what is being 
done to them, that they put their cross on the ballot in the 
place that their government expects the least? Sounds legit.

How much is left that isn't somehow correlated with this
madman ideology of unleashed "free" markets?

And now the country that originated some of the worst
ideologies on Earth is itself stepping back from neoliberalism.
Should we laugh or cry?

The nation that has been predicating free market to the world
while it was drowning Silicon Valley (Google and Facebook
specifically) in governmental subsidies to ensure they achieve
a lead over the rest of us, has chosen to undermine the work
of decades of Pentagon strategists.
Should we laugh or cry?

>Trade has rather become a multitude of forces and interests of which
>nation-states play an incredibly small if any part.

That is a large-scale claim here. Let's imagine Europe, Africa,
South America and several Asian countries agree on an "equal
trade agreement" rather than insisting on the race to the
bottom of free trade, how would that not have a certain impact?

And since we already understood that fiscal paradises can no
longer be tolerated, why not stop trade with countries that
disrespect equal trade requirements? If the UN is in crisis,
why not found a second UN of the willing and cut out the
unwilling?

>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.

I don't see an alliance of reasonable continents exactly as a
kind of North Korea.

>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.

Yes, that is why I am not proposing to resort to protectionism
or mercantilism. I am suggesting to take a reasonable middle
ground between the madman extremes.

>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.

That is a simplification I would not agree upon. If the immense
damages to the ecosystem had been factored into today's shipping,
then in no way on Earth would it economically make sense to buy
Chinese garlic in the U.S.A. Today's globalization is completely
over the top from what would actually make sense economically, if
we factor common sense, ethics and ecology into the economy.

Another aspect is the globalized jurisdiction. Back 

Digital leftism in a globalised world? (Trumpism vs. neoliberalism)

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Trying to catch up with all the various points of view being thrown
around here; but Alexander Bard makes an important point about the
“sloppy” use of terms and the inevitable consequences’, i.e. loss of
meaning and discursive traction… So, I hope this adds some clarity:

"Neoliberalism looks forward to a global order contoured by a
universalized market rationality in which cultural difference is at most
a commodity, and nation-state boundaries are but markers of culinary
differences and provincial legal arrangements, while American
neoconservatism looks backward to a national and nationalist order
contoured by a set of moral and political attachments inflected by the
contingent ambition of Empire. More generally, neoliberalism confidently
identifies itself with the future, and in producing itself as normal
rather than adversarial does not acknowledge any alternative futures.
Neoconservatism, on the other hand, identifies itself as the guardian
and advocate of a potentially vanishing past and present, and a
righteous bulwark against loss, and constitutes itself a warring against
serious contenders for an alternative futurity, those it identifies as
"liberalism" at home and "barbarism" abroad.” Wendy Brown

If the left, and/or other progressive social forces, cannot imagine,
define, articulate and build upon something other these two calamitous
polarities than the future, indeed. looks very bleak… rebel cities need
much more than alternative rhetoric to become the bulwark against
nationalist myopias...

allan

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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 :

 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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Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[carlo von lynX]

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.

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

My post just got an affermative feedback by a British professor
in Paris who has been evolving the concept of what I would call
"equal trade" agreements as opposed to "free trade" agreements
and bumped into the incapacity of people to even imagine such
a thing. I found it highly enlightening and motivating that
not being a part of the machinery of traditional thought can
lead to the ability to think out of the box and circumvent
cognitive barriers that have been erected by ideology and/or
special interest.

So what exactly is it, that you would like to criticize?
Could you please go into details rather than leave it at
some pointlessly insulting level?

>And while I'm at it, may I suggest a pause from the usage of the sloppy
>demonising term "neo-liberalism"?

Since you are replying to my post, and my post did not make
a single mention of "neo-liberalism" I deny you the right to
throw straw-man argumentation at me.

In this post you express an aggressive tone, miss out on
delivering actual argumentation and even pull a logical fallacy
on the interlocutor. If this is a slightly moderated list, then
this post should have hit the moderation wall for as long as
it takes until its author formulates a thought that brings the
discourse forward rather than getting tied up in the emotional
use of fallacies.

>And censoring the internet is not the slighest bit Marxist. Neither is
>racist localism, so stop defending that too. Don't be Trumpists!

Congratulations. You just pulled two further straw-man
argumentations at me. I neither advocated Internet censorship
nor racist localism.

>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?

Certainly not if you try to impede people from using certain
terminology and thinking certain necessary thoughts to recognize
fallacious thinking and transcend it. This mail has not provided
any contribution in that sense, but I suppose it is somewhere
stuck inside your head and needs more time to find a formulation
that anyone outside your head could possibly agree on.

My perception is that by continuing the discourse on "equal trade
agreements" we are a lot closer to a solution that could actually
remove the foundations of the unhappiness that motivates the
"masses of Trump and Le Pen and Brexit voters". So while your
post lists the symptoms without a suggestion for treatment,
we were discussing a medicine against the malady. Did you even
notice?

>Best intentions from Cape Town
>Alexander Bard

In endless patience, the author of the e-mail that got you so
angry and made you reply completely off-topic, for no discernible
reasons.

Dear moderators, please make sure the contributions are actually
constructive.


-- 
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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 :

 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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