Re: <nettime> Brexit democracy

...in hopes of pushing the conversation a bit forward, we have this helpful passage from the end of Brown's most recent book "Undoing the Demos" which I think quite accurately and concisely sums up the present conjuncture we find ourselves within:

"The Euro-Atlantic Left today is often depicted, from within and without, as beset by a predicament without precedent: we know what is wrong with this world, but cannot articulate a road out or a viable global alternative. Lacking a vision to replace those that foundered on the shoals of repression and corruption in the twentieth century, we are reduced to reform and resistance - the latter being a favored term today in part because it permits action as reaction, rather than as crafting an alternative. While the Left opposes an order animated by profit instead of the thriving of the earth and its inhabitants, it is not clear today how such thriving could be obtained and organized. Capitalist globalization, which Marx imagined would yield a class that would universalize itself by inverting its denigration into shared power and freedom, has yielded instead paralyzing conundrum: What alternative planetary economic and political order(s) could foster freedom, equality, community, and earthly sustainability and also avoid domination by massive administrative apparatuses, complex markets, and the historically powerful peoples and parts of the globe? What alternative global economic system and political arrangements would honor regional historical, cultural, and religious differences? With in such arrangements, what or who would make and enforce decisions about production, distribution, consumption, and resource utilization, about population thresholds, species coexistence, and earthly finitude? How to use the local knowledges and achieve the local control essential to human thriving and ecological stewardship in the context of any worldwide economic system? How to prevent rogue subversions without military repression or prevent corruption and graft without surveillance and policing? Whither the nation-state or international law?
.....
The task of the Left today is compounded by this generalized collapse of faith in the powers of knowledge, reason, and will for the deliberate making and tending of our common existence. Insistence that 'another world is possible' runs opposite to this tide of general despair, this abandoned belief in human capacities to gestate and guide a decent and sustainable order, this capitulation to being playthings of powers that escaped from the bottle in which humans germinated them. The Left alone persists in a belief (or in a polemic, absent a belief) that all could live well, live free, and live together - a dream whose abandonment is expressed in the ascendency of neoliberal reason and is why this form of reason could so easily take hold.

.....

Tasked with the already difficult project of puncturing common neoliberal sense and with developing a viable and compelling alternative to capitalist globalization, the Left must also counter this civilizational despair. Our work on all three fronts is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success. Yet what, apart from this work, could afford the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future?" (pp. 220-222)

I would largely agree with the problems she articulates and the challenge she proposes here for anyone who still considers themselves part of "The Left." I've already articulated my thoughts on NetTime concerning where I believe this "other" world becomes possible: in powerful, diverse, contagious, collective refusals which create the conditions within which something otherwise can take hold.

I'd be very interested to hear others' responses to Brown's prognoses!

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 2:20 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

Wendy Brown was a crucial writer for all those who wanted to understand neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. I subsequently lost track of her, mainly because you can't follow everything but also because I began to perceive her work as an endless critique of the adversary, with no positive content beyond the appeal to an idealized social-democratic order. I hope to be wrong in that assessment, but there are some reasons for it.

For example, the fourth chapter of the "Walled States" book has a very penetrating read of material walls as supports for a fantasy of individual sovereignty, and I think the psychosocial analysis there is profound. But I do not detect either any treatment of the fundamental problem, which is how you build a social democracy that can protect people from the present dangers of economic and ecological existence, while at the same time maintaining the openness of liberal societies. I want to submit this is a real problem.

The Clintonian neoliberalism of the 1990s turned entirely away from the question, on the premise that the unleashing of technology, trade and global finance would supply enough wealth to make it irrelevant. This is still the implicit answer on the Democratic side, from Soros or Gates to Obama or Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, more radical discourses from the post-68 Far Left just call for open borders, but contribute no ideas about future economic and ecological development, except the pious wish that people left alone will do their own thing and be fine. I think that an open border requires a process of codevelopment, so that people do not flee from one country to the next, but instead interact as increasingly equal and mutually respecting neighbors. That's the opposite of the relation we now have with Mexico in particular, where from Nafta to the heroin trade, gigantic problems are largely (though not only, of course) created by the US. Then, just as Wendy Brown says, the illusion of a wall is invoked against the very clear and present danger of the collapse of the Mexican state, or at least, of that part of the state which was able to support elements of social democracy.

If you go to Mexico and talk to a relatively wide range of people there, then you will realize that the danger is no fantasy. The basic continuity of life for all social classes, from the rural peasants to the middle classes of Mexico City itself, is now threatened and has been so increasingly for at least the last decade. And it should be obvious that major upheavals in a neighboring land which contributes so much to the US population and economy will have major consequences on the US. People are going to flee, and some of those people really will be very dangerous. "Build that Wall" is a horrid and useless response to real problems of the neoliberal form of codevelopment, that the Left - and I mean, both the Center and the Far Left - do not even talk about.

I could go further into the question of how the inability to envisage the future contributes to another clear and present danger, namely the well-named opioid epidemic, which directly involves heroin from Mexico but is even more directly caused by the stupidity of our laws and the criminal avarice of our pharmaceutical industry. However, let that be enough said for now.

In the essay that Ian brings into the mix, Brown says this:

"A robust language of social power is all that can provide a deep account of the devastating inequalities and the unfreedom generated by capitalism along with the legacies of racial and gender subordination. In turn, a language of society is all that can make addressing these inequalities and unfreedoms into a demand on us all, rather than the plaint of interests."

I agree with that, and though it comes at the end of the essay (ie at the point where no further elaboration will occur) at least it's there in principle. Is it an appeal for a stronger state? I don't think so, at least, not so simply. Instead I'd read it as an appeal for a stronger relation between society and the state, whereby positive proposals, emanating from society in its many parts, are instantiated by administrative programs that are continually watched over and guided from the non-state public realm (which maybe should not be immediately compressed into the straightjacket of so-called "civil society"). There's the frame of the conversation that we need - at least in my view, which I'd love to discuss with you all. Otherwise the situation that currently prevails in Mexico will extend to the US, in a local variant to be sure. Instead of wondering when your city will be taken over by narcos and then "taken back" by military forces in collusion with one or another of the cartels, you will wonder when your town will be taken over by armed militias, before being taken "back" by something very new, ie an organized neofascist military state with the full force of the law. In my view, this not-so-rosy picture will become reality if we go on evading the basic questions of ecosocial codevelopment in the twenty-first century.

soberly yours, Brian

On 11/06/2017 11:17 AM, Ian Alan Paul wrote:

Wendy Brown is an indispensable thinker for these times. In addition to Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, her recent short text that explores the progression from neoliberalism to neofascism is a must-read: http://www.publicbooks.org/defending-society/ (and for more depth on this subject, see her latest book "Undoing Demos" from MIT)

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Ivan Knapp <knapp.ivan@gmail.com <mailto:knapp.ivan@gmail.com>> wrote:

Not new to anyone here i'm sure, but this thread can't help bringing
to mind Wendy Brown's ever more prescient work on this subject-
especially chapter IV

http://www.tepotech.com/chiapas2015/Brown_Walled_States.pdf
<http://www.tepotech.com/chiapas2015/Brown_Walled_States.pdf>

On 6 November 2017 at 15:44, Brian Holmes
<bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com <mailto:bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>>

wrote:

On 11/06/2017 05:13 AM, David Garcia wrote:

The success of the slogan ‘Take Back Control” is cruscial to
understand it speaks to the profound loss of agency that so
many of us feel and how for many the capacity to disrupt
politics as usual gave Brexit voters a sense of power.

This is spot on for the United States as well. Alas, in our
country the wording for a very similar sentiment was very
different: "Build That Wall." The many degrees of hatred
condensed in such a statement have made it almost impossible to
have any conversations with core Trump voters, who definitely
want to hang on to their sense of empowerment. However, you can
have conversations with centrist people who simply never would
have spoken to strangers about politics before. Not just the
Republicans, but also the plutocracy, the corrupt Democratic
establishment and sometimes even the police and the military are
critiqued in ways that were formerly taboo. Universal health
care and climate change mitigation are increasingly seen by the
Center Left as urgent needs. But it's tough to get to the three
key questions: How do we restore democratic equality? Who is the
'we'? And is 'restore' the right word?

The Right has presented us with the demand for system change. So
doing, they have responded to a deep and fully justified anxiety
which the Democrats - and to some extent, even the post-68 Left
- could not voice. But it's clear that Trump cannot produce the
change, only its media-driven, hate-drenched simulacrum. The
real thing is so much harder to achieve. It requires a
political, economic, philosophical and even spiritual shift in
each of the people who would be its agents. You cannot get that
from a single leader or a single doctrine, much less a slogan. I
can only speak from my own narrow position in society, among
academics, artists and activists in a Midwestern city. Before we
could successfully argue with Republicans on a train, we would
have to have much deeper conversations among ourselves, while at
the same time becoming much more sensitive to worlds beyond our
enclosing spheres.

Brian

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07984620700

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