Re: <nettime> the great re-alignment

[Keith Sanborn via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

A cogent summary. Now the perennial question: What is to be done?

> On Nov 7, 2024, at 8:14 AM, Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
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> What a time to be alive!
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> In the US, Trump is re-elected and in Europe, the governments are collapsing (Germany), tethering at the edge of collapse (France), headed towards a last ditch centrist coalition that nobody believes in (Austria), or have already flipped to the far-right (Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Netherlands).
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> It's clear, the liberal world order has collapsed and will not recover. Not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and embroiled in wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney [1]), but also at the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the status of periphery had has become present in many forms in the center, few will shed tears, except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. The pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order cannot provide justification and soft-power, with the genocide in Gaza the final nail in the coffin.
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> At the center, the order collapsed because of its own contradictions. Since there are many, they manifest themselves in different ways, but I think they boil down to the neoliberal state being unable to manage the two really deep transformations.
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> One is digitization, where market forces created extreme concentration of wealth and power while threatening everyone else with redundancy (most recently even artists, long presented as neoliberal role models). It destroyed the public sphere (a problematic construct to begin with) replacing it with a system of chaotic volatility.
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> The other is climate change, where the weakened state has been unable to overcome the resistance of the fossil interests. Instead of strong policies, "market incentives" were used, which made life under stagnating wages even harder, while having no impact on the structural dependencies. Hence, the clean energy built-out did not reduce the amount of carbon emissions. That might change in the medium term, simply for economic efficiency reasons, but likely too little, too late. All of this made a mockery of expertise and rationality, which acknowledged the problem while coming up with a long list of reasons why not to act on it. Against this background, the argument that climate change is not a big deal because we can fix it later once AI has delivered a miracle solution, is that least internally consistent.
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> While Trump and the far right are, well, fascists in a political science sense, their support is not because people became fascists (well, some have always been, and it has become OK to say so openly). As Brian Holmes as argued for a long time now, the popularity of the far right is better seen a Polaynian double movement, people turning to fascism as a way of seeking protection against the ravages of unconstrained capitalism (trumps to main points, lower prices and closed borders). It's quite striking that in six out of seven out of ten states, abortion protection measures won with strong popular support. Even in Florida, 57% of voters backed the measure (but failed to reach the 60% threshold required for adaption). it's quite telling that even asked in isolation, the key point of Harris's campaign was widely supported, but the overall project of the continuation of the liberal project was rejected.
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> The left has been completely unprepared for this collapse. 50 years of neoliberalism has undermined ideas and practices of solidarity and replaced it with a cynical, game-theory view of social interaction of endless competition in zero-sum games. On what new basis solidarity could be rebuilt, is entirely unclear to me.
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> We are off the charts now and many vulnerable people will suffer. There is a tidal wave of ugliness coming. While liberal wars might be pursued less vigorously now that the Cheneys are in the wilderness for good, neocolonial exploitation will not, creating its own incentives for war. Musk made this very clear in relation to the need to have access to cheap lithium.
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> But, there is no reason to be nostalgic. It's precise the charts we had that created the mess we are will.
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> [1] For a fuller view of the background of this alignment, see the recent discussion of John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFtyDy_Bt0)
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