Re: <nettime> Stealing the spotlight

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Felix wrote:

"The wheels fell off in 2008 and contradictions mounted. Geopolitically,
China and Russia became strong enough to push back against this
unilateral perspective, demanding a multipolar word. 2008 Russia invaded
Georgia, then also on its ways towards EU and possibly NATO. China and
Russia had, already in 2001, established the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, as the institutional basis for moving out of the
Washington Consensus of IMF and Worldbank."

This is the basic scenario for a shift in global hegemony, from the US to
China. That kind of shift was theorized very well by Giovanni Arrighi and
its possible contours have been debated here many times. The difference
today is that what was once mere possibility is now widely considered to be
both likely and imminent. The war in Ukraine, and crucially, the export and
currency controls placed on Russia, have given Russia and China the
opportunity to lay the foundations of a new trading and investment system
that bypasses the dollar, threatening the end of US empire.

Given that hegemonic transition is now an open and urgent debate, one can
wonder, how are both sides preparing for the inevitable clash?

Last night I watched the whole tape of the Zelensky-Trump-Vance shouting
match (which btw includes slapstick worthy of Saturday Night Live). My head
was spinning, as it has been for days now, trying to figure out what kind
of strategy is entailed when the US completely breaks with a key ally - and
indeed, with the entire NATO alliance - in favor of an historic enemy,
Russia. How could the US carry out this 180-degree shift in its alliance
system? How could I be seeing NATO thrown away in an unplanned fit of rage?

Suddenly it hit me: If it takes Russia and China acting together to push
the US out of its hegemonic position, then an alliance with Russia could be
conceived as a strategy for retaining global hegemony in the face of the
challenge from China.

Indeed, I think that is the current US strategy. Pry Russia away from
China, gain control over the recommercialization of its energy and mineral
resources, and use those resources to spark a global economic boom.

What's more, I also think that the attempted Elon Musk takeover of the US
administrative apparatus is part of a strategy conceived for the advent of
General Artificial Intelligence on the global stage. The belief in Silicon
Valley seems to be that an imminent qualitative leap in the capacity of AI
systems will make traditional bureaucracies obsolete, unable to respond at
the speed of AI-driven social change. That kind of change will no longer
just be in how you amuse yourself generating idiotic poetry or DALL-E
images. It will be a full-spectrum change in how societies are controlled
and how war is prosecuted. One could excuse strategists for thinking a
horrible thought: whoever's government is not entirely transformed to take
advantage of AGI will be crushed.

Is it possible that, not Trump, and not his racist-fascist psychology, but
instead, some dark collective force in the current US administration
actually has a grand strategy? That is, a comprehensive plan for facing a
full-on societal and military crisis of global governance?

Please don't get me wrong. The question does not imply endorsement. Even if
they have a strategy - which is by no means certain - it is likely a very
bad one, by which I mean a very stupid and incomplete one, and therefore it
would have a tremendous chance of failure. But I think it's important to
reality-check this hypothesis of a possible grand strategy over the coming
weeks and months. What's happening in the US seems completely insane, as
though driven by pure atavistic passion - the passion of resentment. Yet
the resentment may be fueling something much bigger. It may be fueling a
gambit for the renewal of US empire.

What do you all think about it?

curiously, Brian

On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 1:03 PM Felix Stalder via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 2/27/25 17:09, GM - tedbyfield via nettime-l wrote:
>  > The impulse to psychologize everyone and everything is baked *really*
>  > deeply into the liberal imagination. It’s a key part of how we got to
>  > where we are, and making it go away will be a key to how we untangle
>  > this mess.
>
>
>
> Yeah, let's return to a more material analysis.
>
> The regime whose ruins are now undeniable might well be called
> "unilateral neoliberalism". Unilateral in the sense that the US saw
> itself as having won the Cold War and facing no geopolitical
> competition. The order it tried to impose on the world was essentially
> neoliberal globalization: free trade, competition, capital mobility,
> sometimes advanced through a basically liberal framework (rule of law,
> private property and some level of human rights), sometimes through
> military means. If you remember the "humanitarian war" in Kosovo or NATO
> enlargement, these two things could be fused in strange ways.
>
> The wheels fell off in 2008 and contradictions mounted. Geopolitically,
> China and Russia became strong enough to push back against this
> unilateral perspective, demanding a multipolar word. 2008 Russia invaded
> Georgia, then also on its ways towards EU and possibly NATO. China and
> Russia had, already in 2001, established the Shanghai Cooperation
> Organization, as the institutional basis for moving out of the
> Washington Consensus of IMF and Worldbank.
>
> Internally, ramped up austerity undermined the legitimacy of public
> institutions, which has already been weakened by previous rounds of
> austerity and hollowing out of public-private relationships (ie.
> privatization and dependence on third-party funding). At the same time,
> quantitative easing created a new class of super-wealthy people who
> outgrew the liberal institutions which were supposed to regulate them
> (or the markets in which they operated).
>
> Increasing volatility due to climate breakdown supercharged this breakdown.
>
> None of this is new. We all know this, and how did we all laugh at
> Fukuyama's End of the History. Rightly so. But the liberal established
> really believed it, right to the end. And the left didn't really do its
> homework either, since its critique remained an essentially liberal.
> Think suing governments for their lack of climate action because how
> global heating does infringe on individual rights.
>
> And this is also where the need to psychologize comes in. If you already
> know the rational structure of the world, then any fundamental critique
> is essentially irrational. Large parts of the left bought into it,
> turning themselves into technocrats, tinkering within the system,
> constantly forced to make compromises that we both rational and
> contradictory at the same time. Think of the Greens in Germany. (Of,
> course, there is no lack of more radical thinking, it is largely
> academic / art-based. That it's not entirely ineffective shows the
> hatred the new right has against it.)
>
> So, what is happening now, is for all to see. In terms of geopolitics,
> it appears that the US is finally acknowledging the existence of a
> multipolar world. Weirdly enough by accepting, quite openly, the Russian
> version of it, centering around great power politics and zones of
> domination and exploitation. For Europe, this is a rude awakening from a
> self-induced intoxication of the self-serving platitudes governments
> have told themselves.
>
> Internally, I think we are seeing, at least in the US, the formation of
> a new model. Many call it fascist. I am not convinced that this is a
> useful analogy (at least for the US, Europe might be different), even if
> there are many actual fascists now rising to power. Rather, as Quinn
> Slobodian suggested, Dubai or Saudi Arabia (under MBS) might be a better
> camparison [1]. Authoritarian societies, where a small group of people
> enjoy enormous riches while the majority lives in a state of precarious
> dependence (lose your job in Dubai, and you lose your visa next day), or
> extreme exploitation, lacking even fundamental rights. Also, these are
> societies that are socially extremely conservative, read patriarchal and
> racists, while aspiring to a technological hypermodernity. They are not
> exactly isolationist, but also not open in a liberal sense. This mix of
> capitalism and feudalism also goes well with Varoufakis' analysis of
> Technofeudalism, which is one of the major social bases that drive this
> model.
>
> And they will succeed, no matter what the costs, if there is no
> alternative, and it's not the return to the liberal order.
>
>
>
> [1] I can only recommend this episode of Dough Henwood's podcast.
> February 20, 2025 Anatol Lieven looks at the global dimensions of
> Trumpism • Quinn Slobodian muses on whether Trump is a neoliberal, and
> examines the three major strands of DOGE-ism
>   https://leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S250220
>
>
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