Brian Holmes on Wed, 9 Feb 2011 12:14:48 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The beginning of the end? |
On 02/05/2011 11:49 AM, Martha Rosler wrote: > hey, brian, > II'm not equipped to argue this global trend forecasting, but I do have > some quibbles about how you get there. Hello Martha, thanks for your curiosity and also for the encouragement of those who wrote me on the backchannel. I know the ideas in this "Beginning of the End" contribution might sound a bit wild-eyed, but they are just an off-the-cuff response based on the much more solid research program on "technopolitical paradigms" that Arnim Medosch and I are developing. This research looks into the periods of systemic order (or at least, dynamic equilibrium) that develop in the periods between the great economic downturns and period of political disorder that are well known from recent history: 1929 and its consequences; the 1973 oil-shock and the long recession of the 1970s; and now the meltdown of 2008, with whatever may follow. Of course, looking at those more-or-less coherent periods also means looking very closely at the crises from which they emerge. We want to create a better characterization of the periods loosely known as "Fordism" and "Informationalism"; but our real interest is to understand the present crisis and how to act within it. To the extent that this is a research program and not a dogma or a finished project, all questions and dialogues are very welcome. I'll try to answer your questions, not one by one but in groups. The idea here is not to defend the exact wording of my little text, but it is to respond to your specific questions and also to explain the general framework of interpretation that makes current events look very much like the beginning of an ending of the neoliberal or informationalist period. To start, this seems to be the most problematic of my assertions: "Beginning with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the focus of global warfare and the principle justification for the gigantic national arms-manufacturing complexes shifted from Asia (which had occupied that role during the Cold War) to the Middle East. US defeat in Vietnam officialized the shift." Of course you are right to point out later on that there never was an atomic war between the US and USSR, but there were many proxy wars supported by those two powers all over the formerly colonized "third world" (the number of those proxy wars actually peaked in the early 1980s, I believe). But if we try to characterize the geopolitics of the postwar period (say, 1945-75), there were two very big hot wars in Korea and Vietnam that oriented US military-industrial development within the larger, ultimately very stable context of the Cold War. These were big, long, deadly, full-on wars, absorbing huge amounts of military production and allowing for the pursuit of the continuous mobilization that, in the eyes of corporate and State Department planners, had been so "positive" for US economic growth and control of the international environment. In fact, the Korean War is what really solidified the Cold War, after its beginnings in 1947-48 with the Truman Doctrine and the formation of NATO. It's important to realize that NATO takes over for the Marshall Plan, which couldn't be renewed due to lack of Congressional support: NATO and the Cold War were the way to fulfill the corporate lobby's plan to circulate US capital through Western Europe and Japan in order to create markets for US industrial production (all that was planned during the war by the Council on Foreign Relations, see the great book Imperial Brain Trust which tells the story). There's a lot of research showing that these wars and the huge military deployments within the NATO framework were not only motors of economic growth, but also the justifying and legitimating factors for the US version of the planned economy in that period, where immense military budgets were both a way to maintain full employment and a driver of technological innovation. To claim that Asia had been the focus of US shooting wars in the postwar period is, I think, not only factually true, but if you add in the above considerations it also tells a lot about what gave structure to that whole period of post-WWII history. But this is all just background to get to your questions. Let's go further. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods currency agreement in 1971-73 and the oil shock of 73 are considered by all kinds of historians as the end of the postwar order and the beginning of something new -- just the beginning, because the new period (or "paradigm" as we would say) only takes on clear form with the ascent of Reagan and Thatcher and the emergence of neoliberalism in late seventies-early eighties. It's significant in my eyes that the OPEC oil embargo was a result of US support for Israel in the 1973 war launched by Egypt. You're right, it's not really a "victory," but they did invade the Sinai by using an amazing tactic of basically melting the hardened sand defensive wall installed on the banks of the Suez Canal, which really threw the Israelis off guard and destroyed the myth of thier invincibility; and so, taking the Egyptian viewpoint for once I consciously decided to call it a victory (it is very fascinating to visit the 1973 war memorial out in the Cairo suburbs just to see how the Egyptian state imagines that "victory"; also check the Amos Gitai film Kippur for some insight into how the Israelis felt about the whole thing as defeat or disaster). Out of the oil embargo came the new economic arrangement with OPEC and above all, Saudi Arabia, that Michael Hudson discusses very well in Super-Imperialism, and of which John Perkins gives such a graphic portrait in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. More broadly, from 1967 on the Middle East becomes the site of repeated shooting wars involving the US client Israel; and the 1973 war ultimately leads to the US support of Egypt with the 1979 treaty, to the tune of approx. $2 billion a year. At the same time, the figure of radical Islam as the great enemy takes form with the Iranian Revolution and then the assassination of Sadat in 1981. Now, of course you're right about the continuing importance of the USSR in the 70s and 80s. The role of the Middle East as the focus of US strategy and shooting wars and radical Islam as the ideological enemy clearly does not become central and structural until the end of the Soviet Union: but it undeniably has become so, with the Gulf War, 9-11 and then the ongoing Irak war. This pragmatic fact of the Middle East as the focus of war is overwritten by the emphasis on the Islamic terrorist enemy and it has led to all sorts of transformations in the US military deployment which are really very characteristic of the larger political-economic picture, namely the onset of informationalism. Under this political-economic regime the key weapons are the guided missile and the UAV, both depending on GPS technology and a whole lot of other components that are deeply bound up with informationalism (they go back to Reagan-era "star wars"). The other big thing is counter-terrorism surveillance, using information tech to pre-emptively identify very ordinary, unremarkable individuals moving through a more or less "open" system of communications and transport. Huge amounts of money go into this, it's a growth industry. What we are trying to catch in our study is this kind of relation between technology, economics, geopolitics, and many other things besides. You ask whether "neo-imperialism" isn't a better description of the US in the Middle East. Well, yes, but you have to pack a lot into the "neo." Since the early 20th century the US hegemony has not been about colonizing other countries, it has built the paradox of liberal empire, where wars are fought to impose "free" trade to the benefit of the hegemonic power. It looked to many as though this liberal empire was going to collapse after the defeat in Vietnam, and also with the rise of Japan as an industrial power: around this time Wallerstein began proclaiming America was in decline. But he was a bit too early off the starting block with that one, and what happened instead was the rise of a new financialized economy that was very big on computers and networks. We think there is a link between financially driven globalization, just-in-time production, smart-weapons warfare and the rise of the Internet: all of that begins in the early 70s, starts to develop seriously in the 80s and comes to a peak in the late 90s and early 00s; and it's all associated with changes in organizational forms, media, cultural values, even the very definition of money. In short, it's a different paradigm. Far more than neo-imperialism is at stake in these developments, and yet the US still strives to maintain its hegemony, often through very aggressive means (which is what Hardt and Negri refused to admit in Empire and that's the reason why that book, which has so many great insights, has ultimately been a kind of failure). If you can allow me to get all geeky on you, I think it's very revealing to look at the transition between what the sociologist Bob Jessop calls the Keynesian National Welfare State and the Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime. The second paradigm is transnational by essence, it's networked, it's fast and it's very crisis-prone. I tried to get at all these period differences way back in 2002 in my text on the "flexible personality." This time around it is getting much clearer and more precise, which is normal because we seem to be coming toward the end of the whole period of informationalism or flexible accumulation or whatever you want to call it. Finally, you are not convinced by the "causal link" between the financial meltdown and China's increasing assertion of its sovereignty. Well, this is in process and it's probably too early to tell (not the way Zhou Enlai famously said it's too early to tell about the success of the French Revolution - I mean, it's just a few years too early). There's a great article in a recent New Left Review called "America's Head Servant?" which reviews the way that China developed into a manufacturing base for the US, continually circulating the capital earned from its exports back into the US so that Joe and Jane Consumer could buy more at Wal-Mart and the Chinese could continue to develop industrially. The author thinks nothing has changed since the crash. I am not so sure, because China has done huge public-works projects to spend its way out of the crisis and in that way the state has begun to take over from foreign capital as the engine of development. In particular you can see them trying to corner the industrial market in green energy technologies, particularly wind power, and that shows a pretty clear understanding of the opportunities presented by a coming change in technopolitical paradigms. At the same time they have engaged an important internal debate about whether they should keep plowing their money back into US Treasury bonds. Meanwhile, everyone is waiting to see how low the dollar will slide and to what extent Asia will develop consumer markets and also bond markets that will reduce their dependence on the West. Of course the US and its allies could still pull the rabbit out of the hat and set up some new form of hegemony (and "hegemoney" as Arrighi says); but one way or the other, I think the present neoliberal pattern of development is one the way out, not in one blow but in the upcoming probably quite tumultuous decade, of which present newspaper headlines are a part. Anyway, I write all this because I hope some people might be interested in the project, and in fact we are interested not only in readers but in collaborators. No one knows what will happen in Tunisia and Egypt but it really seems to me that we have entered a period of relative chaos when seemingly small things like social movements and artistic inventions and philosophical breakthroughs can actually sway the course of events (only partially of course but that's much more than usual). The point is to be as alive as possible, to be as aware as possible and to try to understand what's happening while it's happening, rather than waiting for tomorrow to be sure about yesterday. Hope that's somehow enlightening and not too long or boring or obvious or whatever. For those who are interested here are some materials of the Technopolitics project, which also goes by the name of Four Pathways through Chaos: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ten-postulates-for-technopolitics http://occupyeverything.com/features/fault-lines-subduction-zones http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/workshop-at-mess-hall-chicago The real home of the project is the Technopolitics group at http://thenextlayer.org - the site is down right now, but check it out, it will be back up soon enough. best, Brian # 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://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org