Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Steve, fabulous to hear back from you and your last one clarifies your
viewpoints. Obviously I'm sort of a "professional optimist" to the
extent that I try to engage with what's going on, learn from it, add
to it if I can, and if it's positive, try to help it go somewhere.
Here's a point which isn't getting talked about enough:

> But here is what really gets me: The US is in the middle of a great
> depression and yet the stock market is fine and healthy. The Dow is
> up at 25,745 as I write this. Not record territory, but close. I
> think there are two reasons for this. The first is all the tax payer
> funded corporate bailout money coming their way which allows them to
> keep all the stock buy backs in place, thus raising dividends and/or
> share price. Or conversely, protecting them from having to reissue
> buy back shares to stay afloat while waiting out the pandemic. This
> kind of bail out makes corporate exchange a risk free affair. The
> second is they see all the independent businesses failing. This is
> going to open some new market share.
>

This is exactly true and it's the continuation of what happened after
2008. The bailout money injected into the stock market has not only
reinforced oligopolies (markets locked up by 3 or 4 players) and
swollen the ranks of the oligarchy, but it has also been fairly well
distributed to all the professionals who service the financial sector
and everything it drags along behind it (business services, urban
real-estate, luxury consumption). At the same time, with some recent
help from the coronavirus the bottom line has outright disappeared
for millions of households and basic trust in society is breaking
down. This kind of breakdown can elicit a right-wing reaction,
or maybe it could lead to something new. The gigantic political
question is whether the Democratic party will respond with a sweeping
jobs-and-infrastructure agenda (Green New Deal). I totally agree it's
something they would never do under normal circumstances, and they
definitely were not anywhere near doing it until the coronavirus hit.
Even under current circumstances, only a cross-race progressive push,
accompanied by the threat of withholding our votes, can make such an
agenda happen. And it still has to win at the polls.

Now a new threat has arisen from below. Looting is par for the course
in any big social disturbance, but the only time I have seen it on
this scale was the banlieue uprising in France in 2005. What people
are calling agents provocateurs (for instance, ambiguously dressed
white guys breaking windows with hammers) seems mainly to be hardcore
anarchists intent on knocking the system down with violence, but there
are probably also cops (after all, that's what "agents" means) and
above all, right-wing provocateurs out there breaking and burning
shit because they look forward to a big sweeping military reaction
with vigilantees and deputized civilians - not the Boogaloo, but a
more tightly conceived game plan that extremist libertarians talk
about (Hans Herman Hoppe and co). Even if there is nothing more in
the streets before November, these days of rage will loom large in
the elections. But I reckon there will be more, and that the extreme
right will soon engage in shooting provocations. All of this is highly
dangerous, but so is oligarchy, institutionalized racism and the
further militarization of society, so we have to deal with what we've
got right now.

The Covid threat, the unemployment threat and the anarchy threat
together indicate a turning point for this society, one that is far
more tangible and therefore more actionable than the next one on the
horizon (climate change). Frankly I think the hope that there will be
some kind of revolution coming out of all this is baloney - no one has
an organization, a plan or even a solid political philosophy, just a
lot of simplistic fantasies (I would be glad to be wrong, if anyone
can offer proof to the contrary!). We have to support the protests
and understand brutal domestic racism as the existential origin of
all the ills of empire, which is the strong progressive theory that
you can see expressed everywhere these days. We have to interpret
the looting as a symptom of hopelessness - and then bounce straight
back to the core issues. The thing is, the bailout bonanza and its
high-end beneficiaries aren't enough to carry the American economy.
The neoliberal pattern of development has done more than simply hollow
out the base it was built on, now it's actually destroying the low-end
consumer markets that the producer corporations still need, and so the
whole pattern of development is literally breaking down, coughing and
choking, shattering and burning. Only such direct threats can convince
the electorate of the wealthiest nation on earth to change course.
Middle-class liberals have to see that their wealth is insecure,
and that the abandonment of all aspirations to equality makes that
insecurity worse.

For all that, Bernie is still the transformative candidate, because
he continues to take the progressive agenda into the heart of the
Democratic party, while continuing to stress that voting, for a lot of
progressives, is not automatic - it's conditional on policy. If Biden
chooses a centrist liberal like Amy Klobuchar as his running mate, or
even a white progressive like Elizabeth Warren, then we will know he
has taken the traditional reformist path, nothing is going to happen
and he will probably lose. If he makes a risky bet on a strong and
combative black woman like Stacey Abrams, we will have the political
campaign of the century. After being left in the dirt by the Dems so
many times in the past, I will not try to predict what will happen on
that score. The thing to do right now is keep on pushing.

all the best, Brian



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