Re: <nettime> Not One

[Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>]

Dear Ryan et al.

You needn’t apologize for anything.

In an sense I felt your post, Ryan, extended what I considered the proliferation of received and somewhat opaque terminology with which I felt Eric’s earlier post was riddled. I should have spoken to that. Now is not the time. Considering the history of the suppression of voting rights is indeed relevant as is settler colonialism. But those should not become meaningless mantras. Americans seem to forget their history more easily than most—given as so many of us are to millenialist illusionism—so it is important to remind them of it and of the need to change it. If those phrases get you into the street, they are working. If not…

My concern is that the proliferation of theoretical jargon does not advance us towards preserving the United States from the continuing slide towards, for lack of better words, “nationalist authoritarianism,” of the sort we have seen in Poland, Hungary, Russia, India and to a certain degree even in Britain. Italy has also shown that potential. The list is long, but the European examples seem more important, with their declining lip service to even bourgeois democratic values, let alone a shared historical project. With some exceptions, the virus has brought forward the tendency towards nationalist cocooning trending widely as well as violent reactions more in sympathy with it than against it. In Belarus and Kyrghyzstan, at least they are rebelling against it, even within a limited framework. We have even seen those actions in the street here, though more as provocation than as dissent. Mao, Lukashenko, Andrew Jackson, and Trump sent in the Army. Putin perfers poison. The point is: we, as citizens of the United States, have a responsibility to cut off the link between Trump and the Army and the Supreme Court as soon as possible and the most direct route at the moment is the election in a month. Maybe Covid will help in its own special way, if roid-rage doesn't buoy Trump up until the election.

We need vital action now, even if that means dirtying our hands with bourgeois democracy and voting, yes even in the face of historical voter suppression. We need to support those fighting against that and help where we can. We need a pragmatic, empirical approach rather than a strictly theoretical one. I refuse to give in to the “always already” endgaming of so much historical, social theorizing. Call it naive. I don’t care. I felt you were continuing the discussion in that direction.

I am not arguing against theory, but it should arise out of and be informed by practice—immediate experience—more than by other theory. Right now we are sorely in need of theory from praxis—or should I say immediate experience—and more praxis from that theory. And more praxis than theory.

As Brecht, no lover of bourgeois democracy, who faced historical Fascism, said: “Erst kommit das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” Very approximately, “First comes feeding, then comes morality.” No doubt I have decontextualized the original.

Keith



> On Oct 6, 2020, at 9:31 PM, Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Keith and all,
> I’m confused as to why you’d interpret my comment as an *appeal to the history of settler colonialism and the continued history of slavery* as *a reductio ad absurdum*. Just to be clear, this isn’t some kind of academic discussion to me.
> 
> I certainly never suggested that voting for Biden/Harris (or any number of other electoral decisions against the GOP and fascists) was somehow antithetical to long-term struggles for liberation. Nor did I minimize the enacted and potential violences of the Trump regime.
> (I mean, are any US voters on nettime *not* voting against Trump? Does that even need to be asked here?)
> 
> My specific reference to the election of 1920 in Florida, for example, is not one that easily lends itself to a falsely simplistic binary pitting revolution against a compromised bourgeois democracy. Nor is it some distant, irrelevant historical story in the current moment. The Proud Boys (and all their white nationalist friends) are not historical outliers, after all. You know, the “again” in MAGA and all.
> 
> If anything, I figured my comments would encourage situating electoral politics more completely into struggles for liberation. To do otherwise would be to completely disregard that history and those that fought (and died) to simply exercise the most basic rights that supposedly define democracy, in 1920 and before/after.
> 
> To try to restate the main reasons I responded in the first place: for many in this country, even the *semblance* of democracy has been a fraught (at best) lived experience and recognizing that is part of the struggle for those of us who have a normalized experience of bourgeois democracy (that’s why I responded to Frederic’s post). I guess what I’m saying is that this is not a new fight for many, and I think it’s important to keep that front-and-center. If that seems somehow reductive, well, I’m not sure what else to say.
> 
> Maybe I’d say to ask those leading the fight in the US right now, with BLM and the Poor People’s Campaign (for example), whether they think this is about *preserving* democracy or *creating* democracy for their constituencies. I think it’s possible to recognize the difference and it matters in understanding what you are fighting for and with whom.
> 
> Apologies for any crossed-wires, misunderstandings.
> 
> best,
> Ryan
> 
>> On Oct 6, 2020, at 6:00 PM, Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear Nettimers,
>> 
>> An appeal to the history of settler colonialism and the continued history of slavery is appropriate and accurate but at this moment used as a reductio ad absurdum is just dangerous. I am not a believer in justice through bourgeois democracy but the violence promoted and actualized under the Trump regime must be stopped. Think of Biden/Harris as a tourniquet applied to staunch fatal bleeding. 
>> 
>> Let me end with this: the day after Trump was elected, my students at the New School, most of them women, were in a state of shock and for good reason: one shared with the class that after Trump’s win had been announced she was walking down the street near the “campus” in New York City and a young guy walked up to her and said, “Now I can grab your pussy whenever I want.” And disease entity called Trump was not even inaugurated yet. The irresponsible minimization of covid which has lead directly to deaths and the work of the “Proud Boys” as agents provocateurs, which again lead to deaths. 
>> 
>> We are talking about the death of even the semblance of bourgeois democracy. And in its place not revolutionary socialism, or an anarchist utopia, but death-dealing fascism. Given the choice, I will vote for bourgeois democracy any time. 
>> 
>> Keith Sanborn
> 

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: