discipline posted:pm me with your email if you want to collaborate
No way. The last time I told you I was willing to be a collaborator you sent me a list of Canadians the CIA wanted dead. I will never kill someone, I am gentle. I could be your adviser though, because I think you have some great ideas.
And as i said,it is not unreasonable to hope that these forces of decompostion will provoke the creation of new state structures down the lines-perhaps even state structures that are larger than the nation state form. Local co-operation should bear this horizon in mind.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
-Romance of the Three Kingdoms
jools posted:the simultaneous dissolution and retrenchment of different arms and functions of the state is almost definitionally neoliberalism...
It depends on what social forces and purposes are driving the retrenchment.
Like fascism, i don't think neoliberalism has much useful meaning as a term outside of the context of the imperial metropole and the struggle of its bourgeoisie to exercise both domestic control of the core's popular classes and maintain its privileged place in the global hierarchy of nations. They don't weaken (some functions) of the state for its own sake, but as a tactic to advance a particular set of class interests at home and abroad. It is the interests that determine the meaning of the tactic, which by itself simply is what it is.
If it would be mistake to lump Deng Xiaoping in with Thatcher, it would be even more so to do the same to efforts at mutual aid by beleaguered communities.
shriekingviolet posted:.custom281748{color:#FFCC00 !important; background-color:#8F0000 !important; }drwhat posted:On the bright side, though, within the existing configurations there is more and more and more balkanization as the gaps widen and the wealth concentrates; people are of course blaming everything they can find that isn't class, but the end product seems to be the same, increased interest in smaller units of administration, and the pressure to unwind capitalist globalization projects even while they're still in progress. Multinational corporations and privatization just make large states seem less and less relevant.
There is more and more growing agreement across the spectrum of non-mainstream modern political thought - among the libertarians and the greens and the techno-fetishists etc etc - that there is a need for more and more locally (de-)concentrated power, and local power is only going to make it easier and easier to have local structures that actually are human/social rather than inhuman/capital.
I know there's a lot of resistance to the idea of incrementalism or intersectionalism, but I think it's happening regardless. I feel like the fight for the near future is going to be between local and personal vs a state seen as increasingly vestigial, with its bullshit neocolonial interests seen as wastes of money and time. I'm sure a lot of the local and personal will be framed as, and intended as, pure individualist-capitalist, like the extreme libertarians in america, but their effect could be very socialist in function, in the end. Which would really be helped along its way if the left decides to show up and participate without trying to break the whole thing up because it isn't revolutionary enough.
You've nearly identified a key problem here, as I see it, which leaves me curious why you're suggesting that we exacerbate it. An increase in preferences for local power at the community level combined with the gradual erosion of state faculties into privatized corporate interests won't undermine the crushing hold of capital, or even yield better services for communities because those things require large scale infrastructure. Health, education/research, communication, transport, all of these things are important and require dedicated maintenance, aren't nearly as supportable on a community basis, especially when they are being increasingly devoured and directly controlled by global corporate hegemony.
At the same time, while some structures of the state are becoming decentralized by this process, the ones central to maintaining power for the privileged class aren't going to just evaporate. Even if formal state structures as we know them now completely dissolve you can bet your ass there will still be cops murdering at home and soldiers murdering abroad to keep the gears of capital slick.
The temptations offered (independent energy production, efficient local food production, 3d printing our own consumer goods, community self-policing) to participate in this decentralization ignore the larger structural picture, that all these things are only of true value when they contribute to creation of a just and equitable infrastructure, and offer no defense against predatory corporate domination if they don't oppose it. If we don't agitate to consistently show that these things, while useful, aren't solutions on their own, we're going to wind up in a nightmare world of paying a new kind of company store lease for the IP rights to own and maintain our "independent" energy, paid licenses that periodically expire for the blueprints to 3d print goods, and our 'community police' inflicted on us by the wealthiest by their choice from a catalog of corporate protection rackets, in increasingly insular communities with even less possibilities for solidarity and mass action than we already have.
These things absolutely cannot be trusted to unfold in positive ways on their own, the dissolution of the state structures we're used to do not in any way guarantee the dissolution of the murderous power structures they were designed to maintain, and new innovations or projects that aren't focused on destroying that power aren't going to do it by accident.
yeah it's much more likely we end up in neofeudalism from this process than some anarchist federalist utopia of city-states.
NoFreeWill posted:shriekingviolet posted:.custom281748{color:#FFCC00 !important; background-color:#8F0000 !important; }drwhat posted:On the bright side, though, within the existing configurations there is more and more and more balkanization as the gaps widen and the wealth concentrates; people are of course blaming everything they can find that isn't class, but the end product seems to be the same, increased interest in smaller units of administration, and the pressure to unwind capitalist globalization projects even while they're still in progress. Multinational corporations and privatization just make large states seem less and less relevant.
There is more and more growing agreement across the spectrum of non-mainstream modern political thought - among the libertarians and the greens and the techno-fetishists etc etc - that there is a need for more and more locally (de-)concentrated power, and local power is only going to make it easier and easier to have local structures that actually are human/social rather than inhuman/capital.
I know there's a lot of resistance to the idea of incrementalism or intersectionalism, but I think it's happening regardless. I feel like the fight for the near future is going to be between local and personal vs a state seen as increasingly vestigial, with its bullshit neocolonial interests seen as wastes of money and time. I'm sure a lot of the local and personal will be framed as, and intended as, pure individualist-capitalist, like the extreme libertarians in america, but their effect could be very socialist in function, in the end. Which would really be helped along its way if the left decides to show up and participate without trying to break the whole thing up because it isn't revolutionary enough.
You've nearly identified a key problem here, as I see it, which leaves me curious why you're suggesting that we exacerbate it. An increase in preferences for local power at the community level combined with the gradual erosion of state faculties into privatized corporate interests won't undermine the crushing hold of capital, or even yield better services for communities because those things require large scale infrastructure. Health, education/research, communication, transport, all of these things are important and require dedicated maintenance, aren't nearly as supportable on a community basis, especially when they are being increasingly devoured and directly controlled by global corporate hegemony.
At the same time, while some structures of the state are becoming decentralized by this process, the ones central to maintaining power for the privileged class aren't going to just evaporate. Even if formal state structures as we know them now completely dissolve you can bet your ass there will still be cops murdering at home and soldiers murdering abroad to keep the gears of capital slick.
The temptations offered (independent energy production, efficient local food production, 3d printing our own consumer goods, community self-policing) to participate in this decentralization ignore the larger structural picture, that all these things are only of true value when they contribute to creation of a just and equitable infrastructure, and offer no defense against predatory corporate domination if they don't oppose it. If we don't agitate to consistently show that these things, while useful, aren't solutions on their own, we're going to wind up in a nightmare world of paying a new kind of company store lease for the IP rights to own and maintain our "independent" energy, paid licenses that periodically expire for the blueprints to 3d print goods, and our 'community police' inflicted on us by the wealthiest by their choice from a catalog of corporate protection rackets, in increasingly insular communities with even less possibilities for solidarity and mass action than we already have.
These things absolutely cannot be trusted to unfold in positive ways on their own, the dissolution of the state structures we're used to do not in any way guarantee the dissolution of the murderous power structures they were designed to maintain, and new innovations or projects that aren't focused on destroying that power aren't going to do it by accident.
yeah it's much more likely we end up in neofeudalism from this process than some anarchist federalist utopia of city-states.
could you expand on what you mean by 'neofeudalism'?
overall i would argue that sliding back on the scale of energy/technology due to peak everything will result in something that looks more and more like feudalism and less and less like capitalism. a sort of historical loop due to material conditions now that we are in the Age of Regress.
my theory is really sophisticated
The French case may be instructive: there, the monarchy (and the modern state that became the republic) was founded on the ruins of feudalism, both through the direct confrontation between the crown and the nobility and the transformation of the latter from independent warlords into courtiers, but also through the monarchy's encouragement of the rise of the urban communes (which it itself was not the cause) as a counterweight to the aristocracy. One element of the decentralized system of medieval feudalism helped bury the other elements and, and with them, the system itself.
Returning to the present day, the question then perhaps we should be asking ourselves is how to identify what local forms of self-organization will prove (or rather, are already proving) to be effective alternatives to neoliberal capitalist power and look to them to be the building blocks for the future overarching units of state organization.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
NoFreeWill posted:yeah it's much more likely we end up in neofeudalism from this process than some anarchist federalist utopia of city-states.
Yes, that's much more likely. Whatever barely-significant check on the power of capital that the current vestiges of state provide, at least it is something, and I expect a roller-coaster of fun and games (i.e., violence, suffering) as that unravels.
jools posted:the simultaneous dissolution and retrenchment of different arms and functions of the state is almost definitionally neoliberalism...
Endlessly swirling around the drain as everything is unmade and remade is the status quo and the problem, but I also think that resource exhaustion is real and like the pink ninja said, it does make the projection of state power more expensive, no matter how much it will try to pretend otherwise through propaganda.
Yes, "health, education/research, communication, transport", etc would all unravel and small communities would be worse off and more dependent on whatever they are dribbled out by the superstructure, violent military incursions into communities will happen, I'm not saying this is good. Like RM said though, to me it just seems inevitable. Sure, if people organized within the current national systems well, etc etc, but we aren't.
shriekingviolet posted:These things absolutely cannot be trusted to unfold in positive ways on their own, the dissolution of the state structures we're used to do not in any way guarantee the dissolution of the murderous power structures they were designed to maintain, and new innovations or projects that aren't focused on destroying that power aren't going to do it by accident.
I completely agree, and earlier when you say we must agitate to show that naive innovations are not going to improve material conditions by themselves, yes, exactly: I am saying it makes sense to aim to have an effect and an influence on new projects as they are in their moment of defining themselves. If we are entering a period where there is going to be a proliferation of new projects, potentially naive and unwittingly reproducing that which they mean to stop, that seems like the time to engage.
Moments of change are moments of weakness, moments of weakness are moments of change. There is the potential, there, for a feedback loop.
You have this patchwork of transportation ordinances across communities that, I imagine, came into place over decades to deal with what was happening there at the local level, and all of a sudden there's an opportunity for a killer mobile app to exploit the 'sharing economy' -- if only it weren't for these pesky outdated regulations. So they need that big lawn roller of state government or the public utilities commission to flatten out the terrain so that it's ready for easy capital investment and valorisation. At the highest level between countries, with all these free trade deals and stuff, you're seeing a push to make all capitalist countries have the same laws or regulations of natural resources or intellectual property, to basically look, run, act all the same. Even the electoral 'left' gets behind this, "we need to get with the times and adopt a national X program like they've done in Nordensweland, as it's shown to increase workforce participation and productivity by this and this amount!'
There's a case here for a kind of broad-based conservatism against capital: put the breaks on hasty deregulation/reregulation because the present institutions have a history and reasons why they exist, and it's unwise to wipe out everything old in a neoliberal great leap forward because someone pitched a slick crowdsourcing solution that *might* conrtravene child labour laws and the 13th amendment.
discipline posted:pm me with your email if you want to collaborate
I put the "borat" in "collaborate"
swirlsofhistory posted:There's a case here for a kind of broad-based conservatism against capital: put the breaks on hasty deregulation/reregulation because the present institutions have a history and reasons why they exist, and it's unwise to wipe out everything old in a neoliberal great leap forward because someone pitched a slick crowdsourcing solution that *might* conrtravene child labour laws and the 13th amendment.
the old order is already being trampled underfoot. we must accelerate capitalism's demise by heightening contradictions until we all go extinct.
swirlsofhistory posted:If you look at how Uber has been able to flaunt municipal and local government level regulations by selectively choosing to follow state level regulations, you can see how private capital prefers its neoliberalism from on high. http://host.madison.com/news/local/bill-would-regulate-lyft-uber-at-state-level-ban-local/article_aaa6bfdd-1dfd-5a7a-a02d-ba0b5376f841.html.
The state Department of Safety and Professional Services would oversee “transportation network companies” under the bill. The companies would be required to pay a licensing fee and carry insurance, but would not have to provide service around the clock, nor would the regulations limit how much companies could raise prices during peak demandtimes.
Both Soglin and Resnick have introduced ordinances that would regulate the services more stringently than the state proposal, with caps or bans on “surge pricing” and requirements officials say are meant to ensure equal access to transportation.
Madison officials have for months debated those issues and others as the city works on local rules for ride-hailing companies. The City Council will take up the issue at a meeting Tuesday.
If the state bill becomes law, however, all of that work at the local level could be rendered moot.
NoFreeWill posted:we must accelerate capitalism's demise by heightening
-Reza Negarestani