Alexander Bard on Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:51:55 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Can the Left Meme?


   On an added more speculative note to these excellent aesthetics
   excursions:
   It doesn't take much for Trump voters to discover that no new factories
   with any new jobs are being built in Michigan and Indiana.
   Consequently, American terrorism is hardly imported any longer but
   quickly escalates from the one factor that the American mainstream
   refuses to see: The alt-right going openly violent and the Oklahoma
   Bomber rather than 9/11 being the precedent of extreme right terror and
   violence in the 21st century.
   The likely response is a second American Civil War based not on
   Cascadia peacefully leaving the Union (why would it be allowed to) but
   on Antifa-inspired hipsters in say Portland, Oregon, picking up arms in
   reponse to alt-right terror cells. Castrated pacifism is after all only
   the trait of the current mid-life leftist generation, the ones who
   turned American leftism into "Occupy t-shirts" and Bernie Sanders
   campaign buttons. The next generation may very well regard all
   anti-capitalist struggle from a necessary pro-violence starting point.
   But is that through a return to blind and contingent 19th century urban
   anarchist struggle? Or with a proper vision for a just and fair America
   and The World in this century? But where is that Marxist vision in that
   case? Because if large-scale violence is back from the right, then why
   would it not sooner or later return from the left? How could it be
   otherwise? But with which direction?
   Maybe we even should look for the birth of this movement among "leftist
   fans" of Jordan Peterson and Pankaj Mishra in the You Tube
   Self-education Generation?
   Best intentions
   Alexander Bard

   2017-06-18 21:43 GMT+02:00 t byfield <[email protected]>:

          On 16 Jun 2017, at 13:25, Gabriella "Biella" Coleman wrote:

                    Lots of bad bits too. No amount of theory can paper over basic flaws
                    in analysis.

               Thanks for your points below. But I am just not seeing the connection
               between your analysis of left vs right language politics and the
               basic flaws in the analysis. Could you elaborate?

     The analysis seems fine as far as it goes �he problem (IMO, natch)
     is that it doesn't go far. For example:
 <...>

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