Re: <nettime> What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

[Alex Foti <alex.foti@gmail.com>]

braudel once said that capitalism makes use of hierarchies but doesn't
create them - the slave trade was functional to the launch of global
capitalism by creating the atlantic economy, just as the genocide
of indios, native americans and native australians was product of
european colonization that generated primitive accumulation (although
one could argue that class struggle between lords and serfs was more
important - the brenner argument) - but as long as liberalism speaks
the language of rights, capitalism has room for inclusion into liberal
democracy of groups that weren't meant to be part of the people,
women, blacks, gays etc.

capitalism works on the divide-et-impera logic and has always put
immigrant unskilled labor against native skilled labor to pay both
less and thus increase exploitation by widening the reserve army
of labor. However, it's clear since Marx's times than Northern
industrialism was less racistic than Southern agrarianism. Racism in
the rust belt states is not as ingrained as in the South, so economic
populist reasons must be sought to understand the white working-class
and pauperized middle-class swing vote. During the Great Depression
the CIO was able to create a cross-racial industrial union that
redistributed productivity away from profits. SEIU has been trying to
do the same in the Great Recession, but with Trump the ethnic/gender
recomposition of labor has a formidable enemy.

more to the point, neoliberalism has been multicultultural and
individualistic since the late 80s, if not since its inception.
with neoconservatism its cosmopolitan allure started to wane, but
even bushism refrained from publicly hating women and blacks or
blacklisting latinos for deportation.

only fascist and nazi capitalist formations have used race/gender as
principles of political exclusion and labor discrimination (in normal,
meaning liberal or conservative, capitalism usually efficiency trumps
ideology, and in trumpism?)

misogyinia is the most rabid and shocking of trumpism and possibly its
biggest vulnerability. discriminating women is not only profoundly
unjust but also uneconomic, viz. the incredible potential squandered
in China and India by holding women back (to the point of demographic
imbalance due to selective abortions). hopefully it will be US women
that will save the world from trump's national populism.

anyway as Chantal Mouffe has been teaching us, race, gender and other
type of aconflicts are as important as class in defining contemporary
society and in building a leftpopulist alternative.

about Silicon Valley: Bezos, owner of the Washingtong Post, has saluted the
new president. Hey, for the amazonization, walmartization and uberization
of labor there's never been a better president (i don't see big problems
with apple sourcing out of china - xi jinping doesn't want them anymore
anyway).
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