Re: <nettime> to the army of "love"

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 10/18/2011 03:47 PM, Moritz Geremus wrote (concerning the idea that 
FINAZISM will produce violence):

> First: The simplification of branding an enemy based solely on
> material wealth, is something I thought left over for populist
> right wing-parties (as in "artists swallow up all our tax-money for
> left hobbies"), and secondly, the radical Marxist materialism of
> submitting to money obsessively while describing the "greed" of the
> one's who comparatively have more than themselves as the opposite
> position of their own.

Moritz, your posting is heartfelt and I understand your frustration
with the concept of FINAZISM. Such a concept muddies the waters, for
sure.

However I think there is a truth underneath, which the authors are
trying to point to, and maybe not really reaching with their manifesto
form. That is that the global reign of money without any care for
the consequences of its sudden shifts and mathematical maelstroms
is now producing societal breakdowns, chaos and dislocation that
ultimately lead to violence. We know this from the world wars of the
mid twentieth century. It would be horrible to have to revist such a
sequence, in any way whatsoever. I do not think there is really any
chance of it happening in Europe or America, at least not in the old
form of nation-to-nation combat as in the previous world wars. But
the continued, and indeed, reinforced insistence on the unlimited
"freedom" of finance capital has created a de facto government of the
world which cares nothing about global inequality and climate change.
It is impoverishing people at a frightening rate, even in the most
developed countries, and it is unleashing social unrest everywhere.
It offers us the perspective of tremendous violence in the upcoming
decades, when people from the Southern countries begin leaving their
flooded-out and devastated capital cities and attempting to come to
the increasingly racist and fenced-off North. In fact that kind of
violence has already begun in both Europe and America. To say this has
been provoked by financialization implies that the reign of money has
also created an entire class - or that an entire class has created
it - and that the collective behavior of this financial class is
now impeding work on any solution to the problems that light-speed
economic development has created over the past 30 years. That class
is the 1% that's now being denounced by the protestors, not because
they too want to be rich, but instead, at least in most cases, because
they are rightfully concerned about the consequences to which this
concentration of economic power is giving rise. It's the most serious
situation I have seen in my lifetime and there's a reason to want to
do something about it.

I don't know where you are from or what you do, Moritz, but it sounds
like you are deeply suspicious of communism. One can guess why. The
tendency in the twentieth century toward the reduction of every
argument to a caricature FOR or AGAINST communism was an immense
dead-end. And it continues to be a dead end (check out Glenn Beck
and Ann Coulter, in the abysmal American media-sphere, if you want
confirmation of this). The same dead-end is found in the constant
accusations that this or that is Nazism. Finance is pretty far from
Nazism. But it exerts an increasingly totalitarian rule of its own,
and that is what Geert and Bifo are trying to get at.

> Macdonalds and Facebook have become cynically the probably most
> successful realization of every Marxist dream in that sense -
> never before in mankind's history where so many people so equally
> represented and egalitarian in their powers and means in the same
> place.

The power we are all equally granted by such a communism of capital
seems derisory. But interestingly enough, Facebook can be used for
political mobilizations that are not so ignorant or one-dimensionally
polemical as in the past. McDonalds, I am not so sure!

best, Brian Holmes





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