<nettime> Alan's query - counter-powers

[Brian Holmes <106271.223@compuserve.com>]

Alan Sondheim wrote:

[snip]
I agree about the WTO protests, etc. - but like most of us, I fear the
onslaught of legislation Bush etc. has pushed through in the first couple
of months - it's overwhelming, its effects are global, and at least for the
next four years, it seems unstoppable...
[snip]

Yes, and as long as the only horizon of politics is the parliamentary
sytsem - electoral politics - there will be no-hope-for-4-years.

You prove the sad truth of exactly what I said: we're in a situation where
the whole system of democratic representation is so filled with pre-set
imperatives that no matter what the candidate promises - left or right - as
soon as they get into office the logic of the economy and its geopolitical
strategies takes over, and the electorate loses their freedom, even their
feeling of being free. Because an oligarchy's in power. Bush's
anti-abortion vote-pandering is significant because it's tied into his
corporate warmongering and environment-raping. But in 4 years you'll get a
kinder, gentler version of the same thing.

What I'm saying - and what Amy Alexander said in her way too - is that you
can do something entirely different, theatrical, funny, surprising, which
is also political to the extent that it challenges the inertia of the
current oligarchic-democratic system. That's what I liked in your trial
idea - that, and the fact that the case could be won too (Chirac here in
France is having a hard time fending off a corruption trial right now, you
know). But from my view, this kind of approach is also what the whole
so-called "antiglobalization movement" is all about. Everywhere (in Canada
this month) it means challenging the pre-set agenda for politics in your
home country, challenging the basic Thatcherite dictum that still holds in
all our governments, "There Is No Alternative." That's what's on trial.

Check out what Gustavo Esteva just said in an interview about the Zapatista
march:

[snip]
I think the most important impact of the march is that it was a perfect
illustration of a different political style for modern society. The
definition of politics in all the theories and practices around the world
can be summed up in the words of the Interior Minister after the march,
when he was asked why foreigners were being allowed to participate in it
and express opinions against the government. He replied saying that they
are not participating in political activities because politics is only
about getting votes and taking power to govern the country. That is the
classical conception of politics. And as we know, there is a radical
disenchantment with formal or representative democracy - people everywhere
are abandoning the ballot box. So I think what we are seeing is an
alternative notion of politics that we call radical democracy, the
possibility that people take their destinies into their own hands and have
a legitimate political activity. I think this was very well illustrated by
the march, particularly by the discourse in the Zocalo which said something
very important about the role of the Zapatistas: "we are not showing you
the way, we are not guiding the way."
[snip]

What's on the horizon are a thousand unguided inventions like the Zapatista
march, protest performances which are always mock trials:
extra-parliamentary fictions of law and legislation that are so strong,
gain so much attention, that the parliaments have to take them into account
and ultimately, the systems of decision-making and oversight have to
change. This is the moment to extend and deepen the crisis of
_representation_ in the political sense (and the internet culture we're a
part of here is part of that crisis). The social order has to be put up on
trial. The way things are going, the only other choice is a global police
state and the sham democracy that the US - the world leader - is living
under right now. I don't think people will choose that alternative. Not me
anyway.

Brian


PS: the Esteva interview, dated 07 April, is available in the archive at:
www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html

Also a text by Harry Cleaver on the "Electronic Fabric of Struggle":

[snip]
The theme of "governability" was widely discussed in the wake of the
Trilateral Commission Report on The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the
Governability of Democracies that was published in 1975. That controversial
report located the roots of the economic and political crises of the 1970s
in the ways grassroots movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s had
generated too much "democracy" and its authors called for a restoration of
the balance in favor of elite "governance"... While the specter of
"ungovernability" haunts capitalist policy makers, many of us are fighting
for just that: to make it impossible for those who would "govern" to do so,
and open space for a recasting of democracy in which there are not
governors and governed but rather self-determination.
[snip]

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