Re: <nettime> Stormy weather?

[Pit Schultz <pit@klubradio.de>]

Black Soil


It is probably a matter of thinking the hows and whys synthetically,
along a "golden path", dependent on an unlikely but still highly
desirable outcome, not without invoking a disappearing horizon of
timeliness.


Rather than giving up in the face of apparent complexity, the
interconnectedness of the polycrisis would reveal a recurring culprit:
yet another manifestation of the plurality of capitalisms unable to
give up, to reveal its own next stage, which for some is already
glowing green from the future.


As another term for the process of global erosion of the legitimacy of
what we call "the West", as the world as we know it, it is impossible
to say "we" or "see the world" without partly emulating a specific
type of knowledge, and again the sense that there could and should be
a world after it will have ended, as the West as such. In the same
way, "the East" probably ceased to exist with the fall of the Berlin
Wall, opening up to the short summer of the end of the history of
(neoliberal) globalisation, mediated, of course, by the rise of the
Internet.


Unfortunately, precisely because it is so clear that the days of the
rules of the Pax Americana, the Washington Consensus, are numbered,
the defenders of the privileges of the status quo are fighting very
hard to maintain their field of reality distortion. On both sides,
many people are dying for the dialectical postmodern inversion of the
hegemonic dream, which aims to redraw borders and spheres of influence
on a chessboard of neo-imperial powers, so as not to have to deal with
the inherent contradictions of a system whose operational
functionality has come to a provisioned linear standstill, as
described by established meteorological science.


When it is said that the Ukrainians are defending the West and its
values, this is to be taken literally; it is also the values of the
rent of property, measured in terms of 100-year leases on valuable
black soil, in the hands of Western land-grabbing asset managers
speculating on scarce commodities in a bet against famine
catastrophes, just as German border colonisation functioned, as
exemplified by the family history of Leopold Georg (Jegorowitsch)
Koenig, the 'sugar tsar'.


The recourse to reactionary geographical determinism carries with it
the spatial essentialism of Carl Schmitt, both highly influential for
the neocons in 'realist' US doctrine, as well as the forerunner of
Putin's way of seizing the opportunity of the closing window of fossil
supremacy to reposition Eurasian geopolitics, for an imperial
recurrence to multipolar identitarianism. Such fundamentalist
geographical identitarianism could become today's scientific racism.


The only global player today that is strategically (philosophically,
systemically) fit and has the capabilities and capacities to execute
is China. That is why it is becoming the main global antagonist in a
very pitiful competition of a Spenglerian tendency to
self-destruction, which we have already glimpsed in the genocidal
determination of the pandemic deaths of the socially disenfranchised
in Bolzonaro's Brazil and Trump's USA.


The question of guilt, the focus on Putin's brain and the countless
sufferings of the people should not be sacrificed to a weak and flawed
thinking that essentially prioritises Eurocentric "universal values",
in whose name an imaginary world is being rebaptised into missionary
submission in order to transition to a Germanic green future, without
recalculating the checks and balances of who has benefited most from
the fossil-industrial regimes in recent decades in order to (not) pay
for the transition now.


The decisive factor in the outcome, to use the language of board game
thinkers, is Europe and the bridging role of Germany, so the Ukrainian
war (including the recent debates over tank exports) is mainly about
disciplining Europe to submit to the fading glory of Western world
domination, the result being high inflation, an increasing debt
spiral, tech stock bubbles and derivatives markets at an all time
high, business as usual for the 1% ready to sacrifice more surplus
population for financialised profit.


In terms of the green transition, this war is already a huge setback,
not only the CO2 footprint of the military apparatus itself, including
its active disposal, but also the harmful fracking methods, the
reactivation of coal energy and the prolongation of the nuclear dead
end are a massive distraction from climate goals. A simple explanation
could be the inability of market democracies to carry out deep
reforms, so they prefer war to transform the economy and discipline
governmentality with an external enemy. (as Athenian democracy did
before).


It is not so much an escapist desire to imagine a mindset of ethical
neutrality, but rather the vivid memory of "mailboming" during the
Jougoslavian war back on the nettime mailinglist, where the only
sensible outcome was to avoid being drafted to join one side or the
other, virtually.


[ thanks to deepl for the pimped polemics, take it with a grain of
salt, these are tumultous times, and it is easy to drift away into
scholastic pub talks as some of the utopian socialists did in 1840,
only now on machine learning steroids.. thinking of a renaissance
human, but more as a marvel version stuck in a death loop of a
remastered japanese soulslike in hard mode]
#  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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: