Re: <nettime> England leaves Europe

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 06/23/2016 11:42 PM, Alex Foti wrote:

>   Either We Do Europe Now or We're Dead - meaning the chauvinists
> and the xenophobes will bring us back to the European nation-state
> that defends itself against migrants and any threat to its supposed
> cultural identity, unless we fight for a European Republic, by
> coagulating a transnational party for equality, ecology, gender,
> cyber, labor rights built on citizen participation and debate, that
> builds on the successes of Podemos and En Comù in Spain and
> Catalunya, and other instances of radical democracy across Europe, to
> dislodge the financial oligarchy and the European Commission which
> have brought us to disaster.

Yesterday's vote is a stunning development and it foreshadows the 
possible end of an era shaped, in many positive respects, by 1968 and 
the immense and diverse forces of liberation that flowered in its wake. 
As we contempolate what losing all that would look like, it is a sad 
moment. All that I am, the heart and soul of my political and cultural 
generation, was formed in the era of open borders.
"
Here's the rub, though: Martin Wolff of the Financial Times said exactly 
the same thing: "It is, for me, among the saddest of hours." Think about 
what that really means. Hackers, nettimers, No Border activists, 
brokers, bankers and cosmopolitan urbanites throughout the world 
recognize ourselves in the incredibly fluid network of prosperous 
European cities, with their openness and experimental culture (which the 
bankers call "innovation"). But what about the others? What about the 
people who voted leave?

The future platform of a Left powerful enough to reverse current trends 
has two main problems. The first is that its composition is deeply 
intermingled with the very forces of finance and the governing elites 
that have effectively bought us to disaster. The second is that it 
abhors the countryside and the small towns where large numbers of 
increasingly disconnected people live (and don't work). The wave of 
liberation has also been one of relative upward mobility and 
cosmopolitianization. By channeling that liberation toward the 
financially driven economy - with its institutions, circuits, devices, 
aspirations, status imperatives, etc - the neoliberal order, led in so 
many ways by the City of London, has alienated us from territorial 
realities. The future is now being decided by those left in the lurch.

We on the Left have our identity too - the multirace, multigender 
solidarity of experimentalists. Can we use it to create an ecological 
developmentalism for divided and desperately inegalitarian societies? We 
need to look outside the network of urban centralities and see how 
entire territories could be recreated in a new image. That image cannot 
simply be the old wild dream of the post-68 era, which was forged in 
universities and urban cores. Remain was lost by the City. Leaving the 
narrow pathways of financially directed development is what we must do.

It's about time, Brian

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