Re: <nettime> When repression is cheaper than redistribution

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 09/04/2017 04:43 AM, walter palmetshofer wrote:

> The question is "Do you really want change or do you want just change 
> things a little bit?"
> 49:50 "you spot real change, when ..."

That's a great interview from Adam Curtis and t's worth listening to the 
whole thing. Just to be explicit, in the concusion he says:

"You spot real change happening when you see people from the liberal 
middle classes beginning to give themselves up to something, surrender 
themselves for something bigger than themselves. And at the moment, 
there is nothing like that in the liberal imagination."

Keith Hart is definitely right that the white middle-aged middle classes 
are not this force of change. It's not happening massively among 
them/us. Instead the most massive phenomenon is a reactionary attempt to 
hang on to past gains, that's Trump, that's Brexit, but that's also the 
US Democratic party whose mainstream constituency wants to keep on 
reaping gains from the finance-driven economy, without any greater 
redistribution. There is a powerful self-interest at work: no one in 
these classes is going to be as wealthy in the future as they are now, 
that's pretty clear, so practically everyone wants to hang on to what 
they've got and continue to enjoy whatever income stream is theirs. And 
that's exactly why so much surveillance and repression is currently 
tolerated. I would include myself in all the above diagnosis.

But it would be short sighted to see only this half of the situation. 
Keith also looks at it from Africa, where he has worked for decades, and 
I'll try a view, not from my personal perspective, but from where I 
live. I want to specifically address this question of the liberal middle 
classes.

Right now among precarious white middle class youth in the US, 
especially those who support Black Lives Matter and go out in the street 
against Trump, there seems to be an increasing disidentification from 
the avarice of the older generations. It's an awareness that they will 
not have access to such relative opulence, coupled with a consciousness 
of a general condition of injustice going far beyond themselves. I meet 
young people with a different look in their eyes, not such a 
self-interested one. Is this just a moral aspiration or will it 
translate into something concrete? I don't know. In any case, this 
change began to happen when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was 
expressed nationally in the Occupy movement, it was solidified with the 
grassroots response to Superstorm Sandy and it became effective and more 
or less undeniable as a grassroots political force with the fairly 
widespread support from white middle class youth for Black Lives Matter 
and the continuing anti-racist movements.

You get where I'm going. How much denial does it take for a young person 
not to see that the flooding of Houston, and the suffering of its poorer 
black and brown inhabitants, is an augury of their own future? I think 
the only force that could create and maintain that denial would be a new 
economic expansion that puts lots of money in young white people's 
pockets and makes them stupid again, as in the dot-com boom (sorry all 
you dot-commers, but that's how capitalism works). However I also think 
that the next expansion is going to be highly restrictive, it will 
happen but the surplus won't reach many people, it won't be like the 
90s, much less the 50s. So youth from the liberal middle classes could 
well begin giving themselves up to something bigger, as a fair number of 
them are already doing.

Keith is right to say that "we (the insular white critics) are not going 
to be where the action is," but anyway, giving yourself up to something 
bigger means precisely that you don't lead, you don't control, you don't 
have the first or the last word. Something bigger does, and the major 
question in society right now is to identify what that is, and to 
influence how it will develop, because socio-economic and climactic 
condtions are inevitably leading to new forms of collective 
identification and organization, beyond any mere redistribution of 
existing spoils, and with an urgency that can't be entirely repressed, 
no matter how much surveillance is put into it. The current struggles in 
the US over white supremacy are a prelude to struggles over the role of 
the state in the face of imperial decline, consequent economic 
stagnation, massive immigration and concurrent environmental breakdown. 
Will broad forces of civil society push the state toward egalitarian 
responses? Or will oligarchical forces push it instead toward 
ever-greater repression?

These questions become directly sensible in every new racialized 
confrontation and every new extreme weather event. Lived experience is 
what overcomes the limits of the liberal imagination.

Brian
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