Brian Holmes on Mon, 1 Jun 2020 09:40:54 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking? |
On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 5:26 PM Kurtz, Steven <sjkurtz@buffalo.edu> wrote: > Is anything breaking? No, nothing is breaking. The structure is > safe in spite of this uprising being more multi-racial and class > diverse than any I have ever seen. The two systems of law will stay > in place. The law will be biased in favor of the rich and biased > against the poor and minorities. At best, what these uprisings > produce is reforms and campaign rhetoric. Of course, nothing has changed in America in our lifetimes, so it's reasonable to doubt that it will now. But doesn't that foreclose any chance of something new arising? How can it arise if even people like us don't push for it? All liberals see Trump as an existential threat. He clearly aims to remake this country into a distinctly non-liberal, nationalist kind of society. If reelected, he will durably transform the United States into an unalloyed version of its worst image. That means climate change will accelerate to become a near-term cascade of disasters with not even a hope of stopping it. Liberals cannot stand that perspective. And yet they see it clearly in the near future. To beat Trump, the Democratic party needs black, brown and progressive white votes. These now form a single bloc. For sure, getting those votes also means changing liberal America. It's gonna require massive redistribution as well as deep changes in the law and the concrete behavior of the police. Otherwise black, brown and progressive people won't go out to vote. This combination - an existential threat to liberalism and the need to capture a racially defined voting bloc - is new. Something like it did happen during the Great Depression. But at that time the electorate was not so deeply divided by racial issues. Biden's first reaction to the protest was a remarkable appeal to Blacks. OK, that's campaign rhetoric. But the Washington Post underlined the novelty: no appeal to white liberals fearing for their property. Instead, he asked them to imagine something they can't imagine: being at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. That's a strategy. And it is the right one. The question is whether he and the Dems can stick to it. Or maybe more accurately, whether we can force them to stick to it. Like every other country, the US is now facing economic dislocation on an unprecedented scale. To overcome it will require massive state investment. Trump will do it through the military, the national extractive industries and the border police. Again this is unbearable for liberals, because they know that such policies, which they could and did accept in the past, are now the guarantee that nothing will be done about climate change. What the black-brown-progressive bloc is demanding from liberals is for the newly created federal money to be invested in a job-creating Green New Deal based on criteria of racial justice, in order to create what is called a "just transition" away from fossil fuels. Without such a program, we will go on living in hell. And it will get much hotter, fast. With all hearfelt respect, Steve, this is not the time to say that things will never change. From my perspective, this is the last chance to create substantial change. We have to build what Gramsci calls a historic bloc. That means a social formation that is able to turn itself into a hegemonic force and shift the very basis of power in society. All the materials are there for this. But that's no guarantee it will happen. all the 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: