Re: <nettime> What does Trump get right?

On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 9:25 AM, JNMRom <jnm@rom.fr> wrote:

In many places of the worls, people invest in lot of micro-structures, citizen-sized cells, in all fields of daily life ( community supported agriculture, non-profit dispensary, wireless community networks, associative schools or universities, citizen energy smart grid and so on...). It's not a "potential", it's a reality. Add local currencies, and many other self-sustained citizen-oriented services, and you have more power than any global corporation. This movement has started, and has the biggest power ever to transform the thermo-industrial capitalist society into a better (climate-change resilient) world.
When the creation of specialized citizen micro-structures will be generalized, will be born a collective conscience, able to generate and extract revocable leaders for each speciliazed cell, and bigger scale actions could be taken to solve macro problems ( ressources and climate).

Thank you, this is very well said and adds a lot. I also read the "Response to Ambient Pessimism" that you linked to, and I wish you luck, not only with the event, but with all the processes that meet and entangle there and in the future.

It's not a potential, it's a reality, you write. Indeed, because the granular, multi-dimensional and multifarious set of activities you describe has gone beyond the fixation on resistance and revolt, and turned their enormous potential into realities. I love that kind of thing and it's basically what I work with, on and for. Surprisingly there are also many such initiatives in the United States, though you wouldn't know it from the newspapers.

Bigger-scale actions can be taken to solve macro-scale problems, and again I agree, the transformation of the power grid by distributed energy production is a fantastic example. But I am afraid those actions won't come to fruition as long as the formal structures of the state are left to concentrate the bad solutions of the twentieth century and reimpose them to the point of collective suicide. Case in point: the electricity provided by the solar panels on our roof at home is managed by a company that gets the majority of its power from coal plants and nuclear energy, which together supply about 80% of the power in the state of Illinois. I could get a battery, hook it to our panels and ease my conscience with the thought that w have become autonomous, but that would be a pathetic form of quasi-religious ideology. Because out micro-energy autonomy would just run parallel to macro-dependency on the energy corporations. Or I could do as the social movements I support have done, and force the state to provide at least the same subsidies to wind and solar power as they have to coal and nuclear. This type of policy put 5% wind power into the grid in the space of only three years, and it has been relaunched with more support for community solar in 2016. However, you will hardly be surprised to hear that the abysmal American president has taken steps to counter exactly this kind of initiative.

Democracy offers one big advantage over corporate and military bureaucracies, which is that the leaders are, in fact, revocable. So let's just revoke the present ones and get on with it! I don't believe that relative equality, or egaliberty as Etienne Balibar once said, can be furnished by any kind of bureaucratic structure, but the point is a proper balance where universal rules provide security and stability while enabling cooperative productivity and forms of innovation that are respectful of others and not predatory, as so many disruptive innovations are today.

Collaborative production is doing pretty well in some spheres. To complement it we need something like the partner state theorized by the Commons Transitions group:

http://commonstransition.org/blueprint-for-a-partner-state

To get there, however, requires a lot more collaborative experiments, a lot more debates in civil society (like the ones we're having now) and above all, a lot more involvement in politics, to show that a new common sense can be instituted in place of the old thermo-capitalist one.

Good luck everybody, keep the revolts and positive initiatives coming! And as Marcuse used to say, don't forget to vote either!

Brian