Re: <nettime> Ocular facts

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 6/30/24 23:09, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> Why do the centrist parties fail?

I think we all know the basic outlines of the answer, but at the risk of 
mansplaining, here is my version of it.

Social Democracy, understood very broadly as centrism, was built on a 
compromise between labor and capital. Allowing for capital accumulation 
with some concessions for labor. This was based on three conditions: the 
Cold War which made capital inclined to accept such a compromise, "cheap 
nature" and abundant fossil fuels, both of which supported the fantasy 
of endless growth.

All three are gone. The idea of the "peace dividend" that inspired 
Clinton/Blair/Schröder's "third way" obscured the consequences of the 
end of the Cold War for a decade or so, but not for much longer. The 
rise of the billionaire class and extreme social inequality is the 
direct effect that everyone can see.

The end of cheap nature triggered a new geopolitical scramble for 
resources and rising costs of climate change, economically and 
politically. "Peak Oil" (not in the sense of peak availability, but peak 
 use) threatens to devalue trillions of dollars in assets 
(infrastructure and reserves) which is at odds with the demands of 
capital accumulation.

The centrist parties, vetted to the modern notion of "realism" and 
"belief in science", do acknowledge all of this, but offer no solution. 
Their policies amount in the best case to crashing into the wall at 
90km/h instead of 100km/h.

The right's answer to all of this has been to deny the reality of the 
problems, yet indirectly offering ways to address them nevertheless: 
ethno-nationalism (and geopolitics as war-like competition) and 
eco-fascim (e.g. blaming population growth (aka non-whites) for the 
environmental problems and creating a kind of neo-Manthusianism).

In my view, this will lead to even more misery, and while it doesn't 
offer optimism (Trump never smiles), it offers, what is more important, 
agency. The center offers only fake optimism (new technologies will 
solve climate change), but no agency.

Stopping this, I fear, will be extremely hard because the center 
collapses under its contradiction (you can see this in US, as Brian 
described, but also  in Germany, where a social democrat-led government 
is highly unpopular and seems to open the door to the far right. Let's 
see what happens in the UK....).

I think any alternative must turn the new conditions of "expensive 
nature" and "end of fossil fuels" into a source of agency. And there are 
plenty of examples, we all know that too. Do they form a coherent 
program? Not yet. Will they? It's hard to say. What we know from complex 
system science, in stable circumstances, change is either impossible, 
or, retrospectively, inevitable.

And, if anything is clear, we are not in a very stable system-state. 
Thus, nothing is impossible or inevitable.





















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