Brian Holmes on Mon, 14 May 2001 00:40:28 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Re: Election day!!! |
Lorenzo Tauti writes: "But where are the new oppositions? To make new theories you have to deal with an emerging new reality." So why don't we deal with it? The new reality seems best characterized as "neoliberal media populism." It's a hegemony, meaning it knits together various forms of political will and desire, to create an effective social force. The neoliberal aspect - proposing business as the model for social management - obviously gains the allegiance of those who would directly profit from Berlusconi's election, in terms of money and immunity from legal pursuit. Tax cuts for the rich and entrepreneurs, relaxed legislation on business activities, cession of public services to the private sector. Forza Italia sells a policy mix familiar since Reagan and Thatcher. And for the small entrepreneur, who'll probably lose by it, it adds the poplist lure of the "self-made man." Reagan did that too. But populism is a lot more complex. The best thing I have read about it is in an early book of essays by Ernesto Laclau, from the late seventies. He points to a prepolitical stock of emotion-charged ideas and symbols, latent in a population and reaching back before the modern age, available as a motivating force to be shaped into very different kinds of social organizations. This is the stock-in-trade of Fini's Alleanza nazionale, and in a different way, of Bossi's Legha. In the case of the Legha in North Italy, the link between neoliberalism and populism is obvious: images of regional identity are mobilized in support of an exclusionary process, in the attempt to get rid of the tax burden imposed by redistribution toward the South, and to keep immigrant labor without rights, easily exploitable. Populism directly serves capitalist imperatives. But where is the link between neoliberalism and the populism of the post-fascist Alleanza nazionale? The center-right is concerned with morality, authority, social stability, clientelism. The identity it promotes is not regional but institutional. It deals more in integration than exclusion. Broadcast media spans the gap between neoliberalism and the center-right. Brodcast media are integrative. Everyone talks about the same thing: you can have the comedy of "national issues" (cf. the Americans). Broadcast media are the essential vehicle for the propagation of populism. But at the same time they are an important business sector. Private broadcast media have everything to gain from neoliberalism. In Italy they may now become the dominant force in the country - even worse than in America. I'm certain we'll see more and more neoliberal media populism, each time in specific forms, over the years to come. Its impact can already be described in America, in Austria. The question is what to do about it? That's where the networked media are important. In France and Canada, probably elsewhere too, you see a new, but still mostly national interest in critical left politics that develops through horizontal, associational forms, outside the broadcast media, and largely ignored by them. Internet is key to that, as it allows scattered people to find each other and to stay in touch in a sea of indifference. Internet has been the most important tool for a vast popular education process which has allowed people to revive a basically Marxist critique of the world-economy-in-their-backyard, a critique that goes beyond the academy and the small, die-hard groups. But it only works when it's connected to real social forces: constituted associations, professional sectors, and ultimately political parties. If you want to get rid of the Berlusconis, the Bossis, the Finis, the sheer aleatory freedom of worldwide, networked communications isn't enough. You have to invest your attention in constituted associations, professional sectors, and political parties. Just on the edges of the traditional left. Where people try to find something in common that isn't the TV. Anyway, let's hope the bastard loses after all? Somebody please correct me if I said anything stupid. I'm gonna go look at the tube myself.... BH # 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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net