Re: <nettime> Thoughts on coups

Brian hits the nail on the head when he writes "paying out fiat money to smooth the
jagged edges of the business cycle and thereby making proletarian
consumption into the very engine of capitalist growth."

As Felix adds, capital absolutely requires externalised nature - a cost-free resource which can be mined and dumped into at no cost.

The model also applies now to the proletarian consumer: once merely formally subsumed under capital, the new form of consumption has been 'really' subsumed: the form of consumption is fully integrated - all consumption is also productive, generating data for further exploitation. The mass production of debt is a crucial part of the process: as is the mental health epidemic that it generates - this is one way capital dumps its unwanted product, just as it dumps unwanted heat into the atmosphere.

Waste is not marginal: it is integral to capital - and that includes wasting excess humans, ie those that are not in the inner circle of obscene wealth. The destruction of the state by capital under Brexit / Trumpism is one strategy for ensuring a) the proletarianization of the real subsumption of consumption under capital and b) the externalisation/environmentalisation of the bio-mass and - in a way that must terrify all post-autonomists - the general intellect.

Ex-communist polities (populist cronyism in its Putin/Xi variants) still seem to prefer state capture; neo-con/neo-libs go for state destruction: but the distinction is blurry (Georges Monbiot has a suggestion why:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/24/brexit-capitalism

More depressing is the failure of the Left - while half believed the EU was a flawed but viable system for controlling the worst excesses of capital (which is why Murdoch and other gang members wanted it wrecked), the other half, including Corbyn, saw it as a capitalist conspiracy. Given that nationalism is such a hallmark of the rhetoric of neo-populists, one obvious experiment to make is a post-nationalist left - which instantly implies not rebuilding globalisation as it existed prior to the GFC but one that builds on what now constitutes the material infrastructure: populations, networks and ecologies.

Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times, migration. Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy learn that removing the causes of migration - war, pandemic, climate change, colonialism - is the only way to survive (unless of course you're one of the billionaire class)

Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the excluded - human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a longer argument - technological

sean

Sean Cubitt | He/Him

Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA

[email protected]

New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:58:52 +0100
From: Felix Stalder <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: <nettime> Thoughts on coups
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
> down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
> money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it
> over the top into ecosocialism.

There are probably two distinct political strategies here. And it would
be interesting to work out their relation.

The first is move capitalism towards a different regime of accumulation,
one based less on extractivism and consumerism but rather more on
renewable energy and "eco-system services" for repairing some of the
damage already done (I know, this term is conventionally used in a
different sense). A little bit of this we are already seeing, with the
EU's project to become a first climate neutral continent by 2050, China
commitment by 2060 and new Biden admin making similar gestures. So far,
actual effects, in terms of reducing the output of CO2 and and
ending/slowing down the loss of biological diversity, have not been
achieved. The big question is: is that too little too late, unable to
overcome very real system barriers to substantial change? Or can this be
made into the beginning of a self-accelerating shift in the energy
regime of global civilization?

In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
capitalism without treating "nature" as an externality. So the question
then becomes, what are the condition under which a 'greener capitalism'
can be pushed into something else. In a way that is like an update of
the old Marxian idea that capitalism will produce productive forces on
which communism can be realized.

all the best. Felix

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