Re: <nettime> covid: neoliberalism superspreader, nationalpopulism superkiller

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Alex, greetings from Chicago. It has been really brilliant to hear
from you over the last week and I hope you can go on telling what it's
like as Italy opens for business again, and how things work out or
don't, at what costs in terms of solidarities and civil liberties.

No one could disagree with you that the Washington consensus is
dead, and that the AngloSaxons have managed to put the worst of
neoliberalism into an even worse but utterly incompetent national
populism (which often looks more nitwitpop than nazipop, though not to
deny the deadly consequences).

But don't you think Trumpism and BoJoism (if you can even characterize
the latter) are manifestations of the crisis and breakdown of the
former consensus, more than any kind of viable response?

For sure, some serious readjustment of the China-centered just-in-time
production system is coming, along with stiff domestic surveillance
and much more border-panic. Those would be perfect national-populist
moves. But they work dead against the weird merger of nationalists and
Wall-Street/City elites that has been the central unstated fact of the
new political regime (represented perfectly in the US by Mnuchin). And
in an earlier mail you mentioned UBI and MMT (that is, universal basic
income and modern monetary theory: printing press, industrial bailouts
and helicopter money directly to populations). Those are wildly
popular ideas and although they aren't necessarily antithetical to the
financial order at first blush, still they swing the natpop needle
towards the left. Along with the incompetence trap, they suggest that
some kind of new regime will emerge from all this, combining all the
features above but with some new perverse leftward twist. What do you
think? Could it happen? What would it look like? Obviously it's no
academic question because there's likely to be a new government in the
US very soon, and in the UK, I dunno - but Johnson now looks like a
knave and above all, a fool, and Trump, there are no words for it. So
the question is, What kinda change is gonna come?

good luck man,
take care of y'self, Brian

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 4:31 AM Alex Foti <alex.foti@gmail.com> wrote:

> as third instalment before replunging into isolation silence, i wanna
> briefly discuss the following: in 2016, national-populism succeeded
> neoliberalism in the nylon ganglion which had been at the heart
> of financial globalization since reagan and thatcher's concerted
> resurrection of international speculation (barred in the post-WWII
> era). as many predicted (including yours truly) the washington
> consensus went in tatters and took bretton woods institutions and
> military alliances down with them.

<...>



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