Re: <nettime> The Precariat and Climate Justice

[Alex Foti <alex.foti@gmail.com>]

Dear Felix, i realize now you have theorized much more cogently
the relationship between informationalism and green capitalism
than I did. I totally agree Castells' structural interpretation of
fall of USSR is best yet offered. Since I don't have much to add
to your text on these aspects, I will concentrate on what you call
appropriately the competing political projects of informationalism,
one capitalist (murdoch etc) the other commonalist (btw did u see
spat b/w huffington and springer over paid online content? will
send next). Open source peer production is already an economic
reality but not yet a full-fledged political reality, altho pirate
parties clearly are getting most of their votes there. And Hardt and
Negri are portraying immaterial labor as the social constituency
of a cooperative revolutionary autonomous multitude (Commonwealth
is a great book, in my opinion) which mobilizes around a radical
politics of the common(s) to overthrow existing capitalism. Their
take is: if the poor, precarious, immigrants don't build the new
institutions of the common, they won't defeat the republic of property
to replace it with a wobbly commonwealth (may the authors forgive this
brutal synopsis). Their emphasis is on the foucaultian production of
alternative, radical subjectivity.

But a competing political project needs to also be grounded in
ideological and geopolitical realities and no p2p revolutionary
army or emerging power is posing as alternative to nato-defended
imf-governed informational capitalism. Maybe a more nuanced analysis
would counterpose authoritarian informational oligarchies like China,
Russia, Italy to liberal republics of copyright (US, UK). Definitely
there's internal opposition within the EU to copyright enforcement,
but it's not yet portraying a systemic alternative.

Maybe I'm too traditional on this, but to me it seems that in Europe
the major cleavage is not on property rights but on identity: what's
Europe? when did it start and where does it end? It's Western
and Christian, i.e. monoethnic, the Right says. Multiethnic and
Solidaristic, movements are saying (since the Left is basically dead
in the Old Continent). The other cleavage, which the EU has in common
with the US, is the absurdity of trillions to the bankers that caused
the crisis while people get fired by the millions. There's likely to
be a social explosion over this: will it go left, will it go right?

solidarity to the striking universities of Austria!

love and climate justice, lx






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