<nettime> the great re-alignment

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

What a time to be alive!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But, there is no reason to be nostalgic. It's precise the charts we had 
that created the mess we are will.

















[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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