Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 2, Issue 7

[Rahul Goswami via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Brian,

As you end with "this post is an invitation..." I'd like to ask you 
about this point:

"The case of Trump makes this obvious. If he is elected again, democracy's days are likely numbered. The aspect of collective regulation (rule by law) is obviously flouted by Trump and his followers,"

From whatever I read about goings-on in the USA (I am not American and do not live there) it looks to me like the Bidens Sr and Jr are being found to be corrupt to a degree perhaps never seen before in the USA, and that their party and their party's followers have nothing whatsoever to say about the misconduct of these people.

You dislike Macron in France and Modi in India, both for the authoritarian manner (clearly unconstitutional) in which their administrations (mis)rule. Yet France has perhaps the oldest claim to be the intellectual fount of democracy and India since the early 1950s to be the world's largest democracy. What has gone wrong? Is it only the fault of capitalism and whatever it has mutated into?

Regards, Rahul

On 23/08/23 15:30, nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org wrote:
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>     1. The ends of democracy (Brian Holmes)
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> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:59:35 -0300
> From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
> To: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> 	collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets"
> 	<nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> Subject: <nettime> The ends of democracy
> Message-ID:
> 	<CANuiTgzxtSz26oKbfwr6pyc-RPVk1wm7cxMVC3W8inbD-U=AvQ@mail.gmail.com>
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>
> On my way to Argentina a couple weeks ago I started listening to the book
> by Martin Wolff, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. I was drawn by the
> use of the central concept, which has been deployed by Wolfgang Streek for
> many years. The basic idea, as old as Marx, is that capitalism has been
> historically associated with democracy, not by accident but because free
> labor is much more productive (that's Marx) and because free entrepreneurs
> can process information and invent new business combinations more
> efficiently than any centralized government (that's Hayek and Schumpeter).
> However, democratic government delivers not only a legitimation but also a
> contradiction of capitalism, because it is not just about the individual
> freedom to labor and invent. It's also about collective decisions
> concerning resource use, the regulation of production and the distribution
> of the results.
>
> I don't know if Wolff would agree to the above because I got sick of his
> paternalism and hypocrisy, so I dropped the book. However it stimulated
> some end-time thoughts I have been having over the last few years.
>
> Many people believe we are in a crisis of democracy (though few mention
> capitalism). The case of Trump makes this obvious. If he is elected again,
> democracy's days are likely numbered. The aspect of collective regulation
> (rule by law) is obviously flouted by Trump and his followers, not to
> mention the critical quest for truth that since the Enlightenment has been
> a core technique for obtaining a workable social consensus. Unfortunately
> this is not only a US issue.
>
> Take the case of an idiot like the Argentine politician Javier Millei, who
> just came out of nowhere to receive a stunning 30% of the vote for
> president in the first round of elections. He's a TV personality whose
> campaigning style is a mashup of Trump and BoJo. A libertarian, he would
> eliminate all redistribution, lift the currency controls that reduce
> inequality between those earning dollars and those earning pesos, and
> eliminate supposedly useless institutions like the national science
> foundation (Conicet). A harsh conservative at the same time, he admires the
> architects of Argentina's crash in 2001 (Menem, Cavallo), despises any sort
> of women's liberation and openly favors figures associated with the
> military dictatorship of 1976-85. The vote for him expresses widespread
> rage against the status quo. His support comes from everywhere in the
> country except the Buenos Aires metropolitan region - just like the
> rural/urban divide in the US. His rallying cry was "Que se vayan todos!"
> (kick the politicians out, every one of them - an anti-political populism
> which, unfortunately, was also exactly the slogan of the anti-neoliberal
> revolt in 2001). After that example, look into Nayib Bukele in El Salvador,
> Narendra Modi in India, etc. A Trump victory would open the floodgates for
> these kinds of figures, while at the same time provoking reactionary
> parliamentary regimes tending toward authoritarian "democracy," like that
> of Emmanuel Macron in France.
>
> At a higher level of abstraction, consider the widespread opinion that
> among contemporary developed governments, only China can make effective
> decisions. I agree with the observation and apparently, so does the Biden
> administration in the US. It has responded to rising Chinese cultural,
> economic and military power by printing money at will, taking major steps
> toward direct management of the economy and engaging preparations for a war
> (saber waving at China, expansion of NATO, remilitarization of Japan,
> reconciliation of South Korea and Japan, etc). All of this reinforces the
> same nationalism unleashed by Trump, albeit in a different rhetorical key.
> These are profound changes which cannot be explained by the (nonetheless
> undeniable) decay of the democratic public sphere brought about by the
> likes of Facebook and Twitter. What you see in the global diplomatic arena
> today is a desperate attempt by the US to recover control over a world
> order whose peripheral components - in Central Asia, Africa and Latin
> America - have been absorbed over the last ten years into the new trading
> system constituted by the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. It is hard to
> believe that democracy could survive a dramatic rise of militarized
> nationalism provoked by a clash of rival imperialisms.
>
> A third and even greater threat to democracy stems from the same
> observation about China. If anything is ever to be done about climate
> change, it will require a major increase in the capacity to govern, and
> specifically, to slow down runaway resource use. In a sense, we are
> hopefully all China soon, and the point is to paint the red dragon green.
> But this is exactly what voters are refusing. Currently, all democratic
> capitalist countries require continuous economic growth to assure the
> legitimacy of their governments. This is even true for China, which is not
> democratic but has definitely unleashed individual and entrepreneurial
> economic freedoms as a compensation for centralized control. Ever since the
> end of the Second World War, and the simultaneous "Great Acceleration," the
> capacity to extract, to produce, and especially, to consume, has been the
> centerpiece of capitalist democracies. How to produce new forms of desire,
> new individual ethics and new collective values on the timeline of the
> rapidly decaying biosphere? It would hardly be surprising if democracy did
> not turn out to be the answer to that question.
>
> I love democracy, but democratic capitalism is a planetary bust. In my
> short remaining life I will never give up on the expansion of human rights
> under a framework attentive to inequalities of race, class and gender.
> However, the drive to accumulate, and to attain what the Viennese political
> ecologists Brand and Wissen call "the imperial mode of living," does not
> seem to be tempered by the rights framework, either at the top or even in
> the lower reaches of the income distribution. I share the aspiration toward
> what Kohei Saito calls "degrowth communism," but I don't yet see how to get
> there politically. I also share the desire, experienced by a relatively
> small but growing number, for trans-species empathy and a profoundly
> relational experience of what we now call "selfhood" - but I can hardly
> imagine the cultural, political and economic conditions under which that
> desire could be instilled and fulfilled among broad segments of
> contemporary urban and rural populations. The slightest steps in those
> directions, which always involve some limitation of desire and resource
> use, immediately seem to dissolve the social contract, unleashing symbolic
> and real violence.
>
> Democracy has ends, in the sense of transcendent orientations and goals,
> that differ considerably from those of capitalism. This was a marriage of
> convenience that's now ending very badly. I don't have the solution to the
> riddle of the modern Sphinx. This post is an invitation to think about it,
> and to talk about it.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
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