Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of counterculture

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 07/08/2017 07:39 AM, lincoln dahlberg wrote:
> what should critique consist of today? what of today's party 
> politics (Corbyn, Podemos, etc?), and what of today's social-political 
> movements? Are you suggesting a left populism (of, e.g., Laclau et al,) 
> in stating "The crucial thing now is not to claim any theoretical high 
> ground, but to try to understand and pragmatically embody what unites 
> those who resist..."?
I think populism today is being done very well by the people, by many 
grounded resistance movements. The heart of the left has always lain in 
solidarity with disenfranchised people's struggles, as well as respect 
for their autonomy, and on that I am in no way cynical: it's the 
fundamental thing that you learn by participating. However, the claim of 
theorists to find and formulate the secret principles that unify and 
guide those struggles (as the Autonomia thinkers often did), or the 
claim of would-be populists to find the rhetorical cues that can 
marshall them together into one inevitable overwhelming force, both seem 
dubious to me. I reckon what unites many many people on our side of the 
right/left divide is a repugnance at the idea that superior force 
carries rights of its own, that the outcomes of competition justify 
inequality, and that the consequences of industrial exploitation can 
just be ignored and forgotten while others clearly suffer them. Rather 
than making that awareness into a populism, I think people who are part 
of the formally educated, technocratic middle-management classes should 
act out of their own class position. That means finding ways to address 
the abusive power of the corporate state and its many institutions, in 
which we continue to participate even while we work in solidarity and 
seek our own necessary disalienation. From that angle, of course I 
support Corbyn's efforts as much as those of Spanish 
municipalismo,although these approaches have clear differences. What's 
needed to change society is really a combination of transformative local 
organizing and national electoral politics, which looked as though it 
was going to happen in Spain and then didn't, or not yet.
Ian, I get the impression you are putting a lot of effort into radical 
action over these recent years and I respect and admire that, but where 
I tend to disagree with you is that in my view, the arc of social 
movement experience shows that anarchist/autonomist exodus strategies 
have reached a dead end. Unfortunately, demos like those in Hamburg are 
just a detail for the state, they don't spill over to the general 
population and their main effect is to feed the militarization of the 
police. The lesson of the Occupy "no demands" approach was that yes, in 
that way you can swell a relatively autonomous movement and give it a 
big presence on the streets, but its very autonomy ends up as a kind of 
centripetal vortex, a trap in short, or at least a temporary impasse. 
There again I am not cynical: I think people learned that lesson and 
moved towards deeper and more consistent engagements in the wake of 
Occupy, which was a hugely positive movement despite the temporary 
impasse. In the US it was followed by the climate justice movement, 
Black Live Matter, No DAPL and the Bernie campaign among others - which 
are all cross-class, cross-race movements aiming at concrete 
institutional changes, while generating resistant community and psychic 
disalienation along the way. However I don't think those movements can 
be theorized with the post-68 anarcho-autonomist toolkit, or represented 
with displays of subversion that depend on the cultural/economic 
apparatus that is supposedly being subverted.
The big theoretical/practical problem is how to rework the legitimacy, 
and therefore the real effects, of state power. It's obvious there will 
be no sudden mass exodus from the corporate state (that's exactly what 
did not happen in the wake of 2008), but unless a way is found to 
reorient capitalist development, it will result in racialized class 
warfare and ultimately in civilizational suicide. In fact those things 
are happening, along with mass exinction of other species, as people are 
increasingly and painfully aware. The late twentieth-century "new left" 
taught alienated segments of the overdeveloped societies to seek 
solidarity with those on the edges of the industrial system, whether in 
other neighborhoods of the city or other countries of the world. But 
there is a difference between solidarity and facile identification, 
where you celebrate a demonstrative radicality and check out of the 
whole problem of changing a complex and highly entrenched 
technopolitical system, which is the question that Joseph Rabie just 
raised in his post. From my position (I mean, both my idiosyncratic 
subjectivity and my race-class position) the issue is using my little 
sliver of intellectual agency as a writer and media-maker along with the 
collaborations that agency can generate in order to help effect changes 
in the energy production technologies, which lie at the intersection of 
extraction and militarization, on the one hand, and alienated production 
and hyperconsumption, on the other. It takes on-the-ground resistance, 
it takes beltway politics, it takes new economic ideas, it takes 
spirituality and a carbon tax and a lot of other things, so I guess the 
relevant analytics is not anarchy but political ecology.
You know, in Spain at the end of the plaza occupations people went 
deliberately back to the neighborhoods, and they came up with new local 
practices and new kinds of political parties. The US is land-mined with 
reactionary forces rooted in settler colonialism and a half-century of 
full-on imperialism, and vaguely similar efforts to those in Spain have 
produced a gigantic depraved backlash that is really staggering. I grew 
up with the Seventies counterculture and went through its fresh 
transformations in the 90s and 2000s. The situation now demands, not a 
disavowal, but nonetheless a break and the invention of something new. 
That's what I take from this article we're all commenting on, and even 
more, from the times we live in.
best, Brian
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