Re: <nettime> Quick Review..

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 2018-09-11 18:15, podinski wrote:
> For me, it was interesting to zoom in and examine this notion that the
> alt.right might be seen as co-opting elements of the transgressive arts
> of the last decades... to fuel their own political power / agendas...

While this might be an adequate description on an esthetic level, what
is lacking, and what has lacked for a long time on the left, is an
analysis of power.

The culturally inclined fraction of the far right saw the control over
discourse, the ability of the (neo)liberal center to  make it
effectively impossible to utter opinions outside a very narrow band
(free market in economy, "post-structuralism" in culture, numbers and
experts in policy making) as a crucial element in their own
marginalization and effectively preventing the building a new alliances.
They wanted to break this control, hence their relentless attacks on
"political correctness" (largely a made-up bogeyman, whose fabrication
was made all the easier by the antics of self-absorbed "radical"
academics), hence their constant trolling of any fora that seemed to be
informed by such ideas, hence their undermining of rational discourse
itself (a fixture of the anti-enlightenment wing of the right).

But this was not an end in itself.

This contributed to opening the space for the formation of a new
power-block consisting of traditional conservatives (small government,
tax cuts), segments of the economy that realized that China was
beginning to dominate "free trade" and disaffected working and
middle-classes who formulated their decline/frustration not in economic
terms but in cultural ones (racist, misogynist, nativist, religious
etc). This has been enabled and financed by those segments of the elite,
who know that their game is ending (petrocapitalism and financialism)
but want to continue the fracking of nature and society a little longer,
privatizing more profits and socializing more costs.

What the right managed to do is the give each of these groups something
that they wanted, in return for accepting some things they don't like.
Steve Kurz spoke of the "faustian bargain" of the religious right and
the types of intention this introduces into the some of these groups.

On the left there has been no analysis of power for a long time. Since
the 1960s, their "transgressions" were done in the pursuit of some vague
notion of "justice" or "personal freedom". Indeed, much of the left, at
least in cultural terms, has been "against power" (a ridiculous notion
in and off itself) with very little notion of what should replace the
system of neoliberalism that is so clearly tottering. This lack of power
analysis made it easier to accept the strange notions of "empowerment"
and other ideas of social change developed within the circles of
philantropy.

See, for example, this interview with Anand Giridharadas: Calling Out
Phony Philanthropists

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/calling-out-phony/244373

Q: You write that the phoniness of social-change efforts led by elites
contributed to Donald Trump’s election. Explain.

A: You cannot understand the rise of Trump without understanding the
elite conquest and privatization of social change-making. I think a lot
of rich Democrats laid the groundwork for Donald Trump in a couple of
ways. By promulgating pseudo-change, they created space for him. All the
nonsolutions to real problems meant that those problems festered over 30
or 40 years.

From what I know, there have been attempts to connect some segments of
the religious block with environmentalism (responsibility to look after
god's creation) but beyond the European movement against GMO (which
connects people who are against meddling with NATURE, to people are
concerned about the validity of the science, to people who are against
private ownership of life-forms and the threat this poses to small
farmers) it doesn't seem to have progressed a lot.

Felix










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