| Sean Cubitt on Thu, 16 Apr 2020 08:56:05 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> covid: neoliberalism superspreader, nationalpopulism |
Brian, Alex, all there are also some intersting differences across the old, current and emerging hegemonies. Europe is heading towards making it difficult for bailed-out companies to use government cash to pay bonuses and dividends (this will apply to the UK if it comes into force before the end of december - when presumably BoJo's puppet masters will try to trash it), as this guardian headline reads, folks earning over a million will get the best of Covid tax breaks; while in the states https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/tax-change-coronavirus-stimulus-act-millionaires-billionaires [https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a66aeb33aac0cf6265e99caf1041032df407a182/0_133_4000_2400/master/4000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=6a99ce6349f3103af2976efa4840cbba]<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/tax-change-coronavirus-stimulus-act-millionaires-billionaires> Millionaires to reap 80% of benefit from tax change in US coronavirus stimulus | World news | The Guardian<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/tax-change-coronavirus-stimulus-act-millionaires-billionaires> Millionaires and billionaires are set to reap more than 80% of the benefits from a change to the tax law Republicans put in the coronavirus economic relief package, according to a non-partisan ... www.theguardian.com Whether Xi has lost enough kudos in the Party to lose power and see a new faction in - after the Hong Kong débacle and the Covid failures - who,outside the Forbidden City, has a clue. But my money is on the investment in belt and Road not being thrown away, a consequent and probably shift from the Atlantic and even the pacific as centres of the world with the centre of gravity moving towards the Indian Ocean (and the land routes) That neocon Republican success and the Little England conservative faction are responses to the crisis of 2007/8, a crisis which for much of the population of UK and US has never finished, seems a pretty strong analysis - and the echoes of Mussolini and electoral successes of the national Socialists in the 1930s would seem to suggest a parallel On the more optimistic side, the term 'unprecedented' is becoming so widespread it has to be ideological. Especially as everyone promptly points to the 1918 influenza as a precedent. The precedent worth considering is the cholera epidemic of the mid-19th century, the one that brought about the whole science of epidemiology and to a great extent the concept of public health (precursors were spiritual/religious). The specific issue was the discovery that not only the poor died. The proximity of rich and poor, in London which is the history I know best, was blamed - and resulted in the destruction of inner city slums (many nettimers will know Snow's famous map of the water pumps in Soho), and the first moves towards public housing. Corona is precedented: it gives an opportunity to name and shame the stupid idea of private health. It shows how self-destructive the privatisation of housing has been since post-1945 welfare state was rolled back in the name of libertarian competition. Not least it indicates the health costs born by everyone for the rich world's addiction to internal combustion (where do these auto-immune and respiratory conditions come from if not cars and shit housing) We can tell that corporations are not human (or indeed living) by the fact that they keep pursuing profit even if it means they kill not only humans but destroy their own conditions of existence. They are so wealthy they can corrupt pretty much any system. The logical possibilities are a) the current crisis, which is the direct descendant if not continuation of the 2007/8 GFC, is terminal. The fear would be that its fall would be fought at every stage, and that millions will continue to suffer and many to die in the fallout or b) reformist agendas manage to survive the corrupting influence (influenza?) of corporate power long enough to institute public health, public housing and the social wage, along with elements of planned economies in the most significant sectors. You have to wonder, if reformist, then with what compromises. The third option is restoration, which implies vast pools of untreated sickness in the Global South resulting in permanent health crises / economic crises, and an economic model designed - as in the case of the republican tax breaks - to use the crisis to syphon wealth from the state (ie the public purse) into the pockets of the plutocrat class - so a choice between apocalypse now, apocalypse postponed, and apocalypse forever. The difference between BoJo and Trump is that BoJo's handlers, notably D Cummings, are Nietzschean anarcho-capitalists who want apocalypse now in order to smash the existing (moral, political) sytem and create their own; while Trump is of the permanent apocalypse persuasion now back to managing the crisis . . . best to y'all sean Sean Cubitt School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne Grattan Street Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA scubitt@unimelb.edu.au New Book: Anecdotal Evidence https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au# # 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: