Re: <nettime> The Arabs are democracy's new pioneers

["brian.holmes@aliceadsl.fr" <brian.holmes@aliceadsl.fr>]

Hardt and Negri wrote:

"given that these uprisings were sparked by not only unemployment
and poverty but also by frustrated productive and expressive
capacities, especially among young people, a radical constitutional
response must invent a common plan to manage natural resources and
social production. This is a threshold through which neo-liberalism
cannot pass and capitalism is put to question. And Islamic rule is
completely inadequate to meet these needs. Here insurrection touches
on not only the equilibriums of north Africa and the Middle East but
also the global system of economic governance."

The question of self-organization that I was earlier trying to raise on
this list reappears right here. How to bypass the authoritarian state and
achieve a management of common resources and potentials which is better
than the one effected by money and the price system? It is the heart of the
question. In another post I read somewhere, Toni Negri says that obviously
the first thing that has to be done is to take over the banks. However you
can be pretty sure that is the last thing that will be done. Rather the
questions of how to run a municipality, how to provide water, light and so
on, how to provide security in ways that do not involve hated secret police
forces, these and many other practical areas are immediately open to a
deeply transformed organization of social life. On the basis of such
experimentation, a new horizon could appear: wresting control of money
itself, or better, of the languages of exchange, away from the global
informational capital system - now that would be a new kind of revolution,
no longer liberal in the spirit of '89 (1789 I do mean).

best for tomorrow, Brian






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