Felix Stalder on Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:14:48 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Quick Review.. |
On 2018-09-11 18:15, podinski wrote: > For me, it was interesting to zoom in and examine this notion that the > alt.right might be seen as co-opting elements of the transgressive arts > of the last decades... to fuel their own political power / agendas... While this might be an adequate description on an esthetic level, what is lacking, and what has lacked for a long time on the left, is an analysis of power. The culturally inclined fraction of the far right saw the control over discourse, the ability of the (neo)liberal center to make it effectively impossible to utter opinions outside a very narrow band (free market in economy, "post-structuralism" in culture, numbers and experts in policy making) as a crucial element in their own marginalization and effectively preventing the building a new alliances. They wanted to break this control, hence their relentless attacks on "political correctness" (largely a made-up bogeyman, whose fabrication was made all the easier by the antics of self-absorbed "radical" academics), hence their constant trolling of any fora that seemed to be informed by such ideas, hence their undermining of rational discourse itself (a fixture of the anti-enlightenment wing of the right). But this was not an end in itself. This contributed to opening the space for the formation of a new power-block consisting of traditional conservatives (small government, tax cuts), segments of the economy that realized that China was beginning to dominate "free trade" and disaffected working and middle-classes who formulated their decline/frustration not in economic terms but in cultural ones (racist, misogynist, nativist, religious etc). This has been enabled and financed by those segments of the elite, who know that their game is ending (petrocapitalism and financialism) but want to continue the fracking of nature and society a little longer, privatizing more profits and socializing more costs. What the right managed to do is the give each of these groups something that they wanted, in return for accepting some things they don't like. Steve Kurz spoke of the "faustian bargain" of the religious right and the types of intention this introduces into the some of these groups. On the left there has been no analysis of power for a long time. Since the 1960s, their "transgressions" were done in the pursuit of some vague notion of "justice" or "personal freedom". Indeed, much of the left, at least in cultural terms, has been "against power" (a ridiculous notion in and off itself) with very little notion of what should replace the system of neoliberalism that is so clearly tottering. This lack of power analysis made it easier to accept the strange notions of "empowerment" and other ideas of social change developed within the circles of philantropy. See, for example, this interview with Anand Giridharadas: Calling Out Phony Philanthropists https://www.philanthropy.com/article/calling-out-phony/244373 Q: You write that the phoniness of social-change efforts led by elites contributed to Donald Trump’s election. Explain. A: You cannot understand the rise of Trump without understanding the elite conquest and privatization of social change-making. I think a lot of rich Democrats laid the groundwork for Donald Trump in a couple of ways. By promulgating pseudo-change, they created space for him. All the nonsolutions to real problems meant that those problems festered over 30 or 40 years. From what I know, there have been attempts to connect some segments of the religious block with environmentalism (responsibility to look after god's creation) but beyond the European movement against GMO (which connects people who are against meddling with NATURE, to people are concerned about the validity of the science, to people who are against private ownership of life-forms and the threat this poses to small farmers) it doesn't seem to have progressed a lot. Felix -- |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.key-server.io/search/0x0BBB5B950C9FF2AC
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