<nettime> The ends of democracy

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On my way to Argentina a couple weeks ago I started listening to the book
by Martin Wolff, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. I was drawn by the
use of the central concept, which has been deployed by Wolfgang Streek for
many years. The basic idea, as old as Marx, is that capitalism has been
historically associated with democracy, not by accident but because free
labor is much more productive (that's Marx) and because free entrepreneurs
can process information and invent new business combinations more
efficiently than any centralized government (that's Hayek and Schumpeter).
However, democratic government delivers not only a legitimation but also a
contradiction of capitalism, because it is not just about the individual
freedom to labor and invent. It's also about collective decisions
concerning resource use, the regulation of production and the distribution
of the results.

I don't know if Wolff would agree to the above because I got sick of his
paternalism and hypocrisy, so I dropped the book. However it stimulated
some end-time thoughts I have been having over the last few years.

Many people believe we are in a crisis of democracy (though few mention
capitalism). The case of Trump makes this obvious. If he is elected again,
democracy's days are likely numbered. The aspect of collective regulation
(rule by law) is obviously flouted by Trump and his followers, not to
mention the critical quest for truth that since the Enlightenment has been
a core technique for obtaining a workable social consensus. Unfortunately
this is not only a US issue.

Take the case of an idiot like the Argentine politician Javier Millei, who
just came out of nowhere to receive a stunning 30% of the vote for
president in the first round of elections. He's a TV personality whose
campaigning style is a mashup of Trump and BoJo. A libertarian, he would
eliminate all redistribution, lift the currency controls that reduce
inequality between those earning dollars and those earning pesos, and
eliminate supposedly useless institutions like the national science
foundation (Conicet). A harsh conservative at the same time, he admires the
architects of Argentina's crash in 2001 (Menem, Cavallo), despises any sort
of women's liberation and openly favors figures associated with the
military dictatorship of 1976-85. The vote for him expresses widespread
rage against the status quo. His support comes from everywhere in the
country except the Buenos Aires metropolitan region - just like the
rural/urban divide in the US. His rallying cry was "Que se vayan todos!"
(kick the politicians out, every one of them - an anti-political populism
which, unfortunately, was also exactly the slogan of the anti-neoliberal
revolt in 2001). After that example, look into Nayib Bukele in El Salvador,
Narendra Modi in India, etc. A Trump victory would open the floodgates for
these kinds of figures, while at the same time provoking reactionary
parliamentary regimes tending toward authoritarian "democracy," like that
of Emmanuel Macron in France.

At a higher level of abstraction, consider the widespread opinion that
among contemporary developed governments, only China can make effective
decisions. I agree with the observation and apparently, so does the Biden
administration in the US. It has responded to rising Chinese cultural,
economic and military power by printing money at will, taking major steps
toward direct management of the economy and engaging preparations for a war
(saber waving at China, expansion of NATO, remilitarization of Japan,
reconciliation of South Korea and Japan, etc). All of this reinforces the
same nationalism unleashed by Trump, albeit in a different rhetorical key.
These are profound changes which cannot be explained by the (nonetheless
undeniable) decay of the democratic public sphere brought about by the
likes of Facebook and Twitter. What you see in the global diplomatic arena
today is a desperate attempt by the US to recover control over a world
order whose peripheral components - in Central Asia, Africa and Latin
America - have been absorbed over the last ten years into the new trading
system constituted by the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. It is hard to
believe that democracy could survive a dramatic rise of militarized
nationalism provoked by a clash of rival imperialisms.

A third and even greater threat to democracy stems from the same
observation about China. If anything is ever to be done about climate
change, it will require a major increase in the capacity to govern, and
specifically, to slow down runaway resource use. In a sense, we are
hopefully all China soon, and the point is to paint the red dragon green.
But this is exactly what voters are refusing. Currently, all democratic
capitalist countries require continuous economic growth to assure the
legitimacy of their governments. This is even true for China, which is not
democratic but has definitely unleashed individual and entrepreneurial
economic freedoms as a compensation for centralized control. Ever since the
end of the Second World War, and the simultaneous "Great Acceleration," the
capacity to extract, to produce, and especially, to consume, has been the
centerpiece of capitalist democracies. How to produce new forms of desire,
new individual ethics and new collective values on the timeline of the
rapidly decaying biosphere? It would hardly be surprising if democracy did
not turn out to be the answer to that question.

I love democracy, but democratic capitalism is a planetary bust. In my
short remaining life I will never give up on the expansion of human rights
under a framework attentive to inequalities of race, class and gender.
However, the drive to accumulate, and to attain what the Viennese political
ecologists Brand and Wissen call "the imperial mode of living," does not
seem to be tempered by the rights framework, either at the top or even in
the lower reaches of the income distribution. I share the aspiration toward
what Kohei Saito calls "degrowth communism," but I don't yet see how to get
there politically. I also share the desire, experienced by a relatively
small but growing number, for trans-species empathy and a profoundly
relational experience of what we now call "selfhood" - but I can hardly
imagine the cultural, political and economic conditions under which that
desire could be instilled and fulfilled among broad segments of
contemporary urban and rural populations. The slightest steps in those
directions, which always involve some limitation of desire and resource
use, immediately seem to dissolve the social contract, unleashing symbolic
and real violence.

Democracy has ends, in the sense of transcendent orientations and goals,
that differ considerably from those of capitalism. This was a marriage of
convenience that's now ending very badly. I don't have the solution to the
riddle of the modern Sphinx. This post is an invitation to think about it,
and to talk about it.
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org