Re: <nettime> England leaves Europe

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 06/25/2016 03:56 AM, Keith Hart wrote:

> For some time now Europe's political leaders and financial cities have
> threatened to abolish the City's immunity. That was the issue. The City
> wanted out, but didn't wish to make it obvious. See Nicholas Shaxson's
> Treausure Islands for the gruesome story of the offshore system and the
> City's part in it.

Keith, this is a strong and surprising interpretation, I am totally 
curious what you base it on. I have read Nicholas Shaxson and agree it 
is a great book. Indeed, the last thing the City wants is even the 
slightest regulation - and more broadly, the capitalist world economy 
has always thrived on cutthroat competition between national capitals, 
which is an inevitable outcome of any breakdown of the the EU and a 
relatively familiar position for the City, you're right about that. Yet 
the big money in the City bet on Remain, and all the figureheads 
campaigned for it! What's more, a lot of press claims that voters 
rejected the financial elites who did the continual campaigning (the 
famous "experts"). I am totally willing to revise my view, but I guess I 
would need some more convincing...

On 06/24/2016 08:43 PM, Michael H. Goldhaber wrote:

> But what about the fact that those under 50 voted to stay by sizable 
margins?

Well, it shows that a majority of those born since the Sixties are not 
dreadful nationalist bigots! Thank heavens!

But the danger and promise of democratic systems is that decisions are 
made by the numerical majority of those who vote in any given election. 
And when you lose, you lose. Right now the Left is losing, despite a few 
positive signs. I think a progressive egalitarian ecological politics is 
waiting to be invented. It's useless to grasp at this or that straw. 
There's a basic problem, we have to face it.

The proletarian Old Left is almost meaningless in the developed world, 
the minoritarian New Left is relatively vibrant but still a small 
minority, and the cyberlibertarian politics of the Nineties is just a 
delusion, since the "weary giants" of the old industrial nation-states 
still rule through the very networks that were supposed to displace 
them. The developed countries face yet another classic capitalist crisis 
of automation, deskilling and widespread redundancy, and the reactions 
of racist fear and nationalism are as crude as ever. But the traditional 
liberal cure - industrial expansion through increased global trade 
driven by volatile finance - now risks killing the patient. Ecology has 
become a matter of survival, but survival can only be won through a new 
political economy, with all the programmatic rationality, and also, all 
the rhetorical appeal that characterized the old one.

What's really crucial - and maybe this is what you're getting at, 
Michael - is how do younger people analyze this disastrous situation? Do 
they fall back on the capitalist reflex embodied by Hillary Clinton that 
says, push through the recession to another growth wave that will solve 
all the problems? Or do they create a genuine response to the current 
situation?

I'm over fifty, so I would rather put it this way: Can we cut across all 
the identity divides, interest groups and zip-code blocks to constitute 
a majority around a viable logic of development? The answer so far is 
clearly no. But it's really the only thing worth working on.

In response to the last poster, maybe I'll use my next art-funded junket 
to the UK for exactly those purposes!

best, Brian

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