Patrice Riemens on Sun, 4 May 2008 22:28:37 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Making a Killing from Hunger |
Hi All, Despite the fact of having written in my thesis (1985) (*) that just like History according to Karl Marx is the history of class struggle, our economy is the economics of transfering incomes from household to firms, and that up to the point where all incomes are transfered and the the world stops (really the capitalists' least of worries), I still think that our friend Brian has fallen of the edge here. In what ressembles so much a conspiracy theory that it is one (**), he endorses the rickety combination of the latest version of the capitalists need ever fresh terrains of endocolonialst exploitation blame game to that very old cow (Roman history anyone?) 'the speculators did it' explanation. The whole thing has some traction, but it won't get us all the way over the hill. The current food squeeze looks like, and has indeed all the frightening potential to become, a remake of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. In this largely unknown biggest tragedy of WWII, where almost as many people perished as in the Nazi death camps, the shortfall of grain avaibility as opposed to demand was less than 1,5%, yet prices, fed by speculation and hoarding trebled, before spiralling out of control (and like one century earlier in Ireland, the British overlords did nothing to alleviate the situation, or rather the contrary. Blame my Gallic temper for seeing some kind of 'perfide Albion' consistent characteristic here - continued in our times, globaly ruled by a TINA Anglo-Saxon logic). And pace the incompressible intellectual avantgardists in our midst, the starving will _not_ revolt, simply because starving people are simply too weak to revolt (another lesson of the Great Bengal Famine and many other places). Neo-liberal capitalism's relentless, and hitherto remarkably succesful march to accumulate ever further, and boldly go where it never had gone before - or even held for possible, is a political fact, but not a political decision in the 'parliamentary' sence of the word, and thus can not and should not be countered as such. And unfortunately, the call for the alternative, regulation and intervention instead of (a remarkably selective form of) laissez-faire, is very unlikely to take flight, since 'the system' has been so resourceful in making us believe, in a myriad of ways, that it is both only a default mode ('the economy as a meteorological phenomenon' as I call it) - and the only one on offer. TINA again. In fact, every societal system does that, up to a certain point. Ours simply stretches it for much longer. And in the meanwhile of course, most of us, sorry, of 'them', will probably be dead. In the aftermath of the Great Bengal Famine, with so much of the, only temporarily inneffective, demand wiped of for good, a large number of speculators and hoarders did not make a killing at all (besides an all too real one) but went bust instead. "Meet the New World. Same as the Old World" - Pat Cadigan) (No) Cheers from patrizio and the Diiiinooos! ----- (*) http://preview.tinyurl.com/6lxuj4 ;-) (**) "If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck... it must be a duck! - supreme justice Rehnquist (OK it's originally from Richard C. Cushing...;-) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org