Re: <nettime> Brexit democracy

Brian writes: "Supporting them remains essential, in the way that dreams and utopias are essential. But I think there's another responsibility, which is to imagine and get behind the factors of sweeping systemic change, which is what the times are callling for."

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, nor do I think they can be so neatly distinguished in practice.

If you're looking for people only doing the latter, you'll find no shortage of them (Syriza, Podemos, DiEM25, Attac, etc., etc.), all of which fail when they divorce themselves from refusal/revolt and choose to be "practical" and "participate." A popular slogan from the student revolts in California almost a decade ago captures the problem precisely: "Behind every budget cut, a line of riot police." The central contradictions we face have less to do with a lack of planning or strategy than they do with the violence of repressive forces, which are much better organized than us. I'm all for "imagining and getting behind factors of sweeping systemic change," but know that these will ultimately be tested in the streets. I would go further and even say that this imagination you write of only truly becomes possible from within the dynamics and contradictions of the struggles themselves, and certainly can't be grasped outside of those material conditions. We should look to revolts as the laboratories of imagination we require (This is a Spinozist point about what it requires to understand power). Everything else is idealist (and often reformist) fantasy.

Alex writes: "The problem of the revolutions of 2011 is that they failed to produce durable organization and to use their term institutions of the common, save for limited success on the municipalist front."

...and I think that this is hard to disagree with. That being said, it must be made clear that this failure was the result of repressive forces, not a lack of organization or imagination. The Egyptian revolution, with which I'm most familiar, only became possible after decades of concrete organization and struggle which were made invisible retroactively by western narratives about the revolution's supposed spontaneity.

It is revolt and refusal which must be prepared, imagined, encouraged, cultivated, supported, and organized for.

Best,

On Nov 13, 2017 7:03 AM, "David Garcia" <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote:

On 13 Nov 2017, at 09:21, Alex Foti <[email protected]> wrote

The problem of the revolutions of 2011 is that they failed to produce durable organization and to use their term institutions of the common, save for limited success on the municipalist front. Now that nazi-populism is successfully using movement tactics to growing popular consensus, the need for a new dual labor and political strategy and organization is more needed than ever.

While in the old anglo-saxon center of neoliberalism, socialism works as a political strategy and social unionism as a labor strategy (labor markets are tightening and wage increases and union wins are becoming more frequent), e.g. corbyn's new old labor and sanders' dsa, in continental europe the official left is disappearing and there is no ready alternative at hand against national populism ….

In Brighton (September 2017) The World Transformed- https://theworldtransformed.org/ is a kind of political fringe festival of art, media and activism that runs in parralel to the annual Labour party conference. It tookplace in multiple venues across the city. The point here is that it was organised by Momentum the pro-Corbyn pressure group. And the event was absolutely packed with radical ideas were being tested and protyped. It even included a session on how to deal with “capital flight” from the UK in the event of a Corbyn victory that was being trialed by none other than the shadow chancelor himself on the panel! This would have been inconceivable under the centrism of the past and it certainly made headlines. TWT was where the real action was happening not in the conf itself. Even though Momentum had a bespoke app to mobilise its Labour party members in an instant to shuttle to the main conf ensure the votes went Corbyn’s way. So here we see tactical media "folk politics” working hand in hand with institutional power.

Obviously it connects to Alex’s comments because if one dared to be optimistc the Momentum model suggests that something might have been learned since “the failure of the revolutions of 2011 to produce durable organisation..” (Alex). as Momentum is connected to the Labor Party but not PART OF the Labour party. Its a classic grass roots social movement (what Srnicek and Williams) call disparagingly “folk politics” whilst also being willing to engage with institutional power and so able to scale up and consolidate its acquired advantages. Of course this only works because Corbyn himself is someone who mirrors these developments as he is someone who has for decades been commited to protest based social movements as well as being a conscientious (and rebellious) MP. Its this genuine and rare hybridity that connects the movement to the individual and is one of the things we might mean by “authenticity”..

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- foot-note- The Labour/Momentum election campaign of 2017 learned a lot from the tactics of the Alt.righ/Bannon's tactics for Trump. In terms of connecting an on-line grass roots social movement to the aim of capturing of institutional power and creating ideological change in a political party. They both deploy hyper-partizan social media tactics to bypass what was seen as a mainstream media that would never give either Trump or Corbyn a hearing..(Let Corbyn be Corbyn worked as it did for "let Trump be Trump") Also both campaigns re-imagined the old fashioned political rally as a “media event” and far more…

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