| Brian Holmes on Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:51:19 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> to the army of "love" |
On 10/18/2011 03:47 PM, Moritz Geremus wrote (concerning the idea that FINAZISM will produce violence):
First: The simplification of branding an enemy based solely on material wealth, is something I thought left over for populist right wing-parties (as in "artists swallow up all our tax-money for left hobbies"), and secondly, the radical Marxist materialism of submitting to money obsessively while describing the "greed" of the one's who comparatively have more than themselves as the opposite position of their own.
Moritz, your posting is heartfelt and I understand your frustration with the concept of FINAZISM. Such a concept muddies the waters, for sure. However I think there is a truth underneath, which the authors are trying to point to, and maybe not really reaching with their manifesto form. That is that the global reign of money without any care for the consequences of its sudden shifts and mathematical maelstroms is now producing societal breakdowns, chaos and dislocation that ultimately lead to violence. We know this from the world wars of the mid twentieth century. It would be horrible to have to revist such a sequence, in any way whatsoever. I do not think there is really any chance of it happening in Europe or America, at least not in the old form of nation-to-nation combat as in the previous world wars. But the continued, and indeed, reinforced insistence on the unlimited "freedom" of finance capital has created a de facto government of the world which cares nothing about global inequality and climate change. It is impoverishing people at a frightening rate, even in the most developed countries, and it is unleashing social unrest everywhere. It offers us the perspective of tremendous violence in the upcoming decades, when people from the Southern countries begin leaving their flooded-out and devastated capital cities and attempting to come to the increasingly racist and fenced-off North. In fact that kind of violence has already begun in both Europe and America. To say this has been provoked by financialization implies that the reign of money has also created an entire class - or that an entire class has created it - and that the collective behavior of this financial class is now impeding work on any solution to the problems that light-speed economic development has created over the past 30 years. That class is the 1% that's now being denounced by the protestors, not because they too want to be rich, but instead, at least in most cases, because they are rightfully concerned about the consequences to which this concentration of economic power is giving rise. It's the most serious situation I have seen in my lifetime and there's a reason to want to do something about it. I don't know where you are from or what you do, Moritz, but it sounds like you are deeply suspicious of communism. One can guess why. The tendency in the twentieth century toward the reduction of every argument to a caricature FOR or AGAINST communism was an immense dead-end. And it continues to be a dead end (check out Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter, in the abysmal American media-sphere, if you want confirmation of this). The same dead-end is found in the constant accusations that this or that is Nazism. Finance is pretty far from Nazism. But it exerts an increasingly totalitarian rule of its own, and that is what Geert and Bifo are trying to get at.
Macdonalds and Facebook have become cynically the probably most successful realization of every Marxist dream in that sense - never before in mankind's history where so many people so equally represented and egalitarian in their powers and means in the same place.
The power we are all equally granted by such a communism of capital seems derisory. But interestingly enough, Facebook can be used for political mobilizations that are not so ignorant or one-dimensionally polemical as in the past. McDonalds, I am not so sure! best, Brian Holmes # 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: [email protected]