Below, find a brand new commentary from Notes From Disgracedland’s Bjarne Knausgaard who regular readers will recall pens some of the best political/economic color around.
The first link there is to his blog and the second is his Twitter, which you should follow.
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Four centuries after Galileo, our experience of space is undergoing the second revolution. With the help of information technology the space of trajectories has given way to the space of sites & networks. As time contracted and distances shrunk, different geographies became the nodes of the global Network. With delocalization and infinite connectivity the world has become smaller, but within that world things no longer have a fixed place; they are displaced and delocalized: Everything is now both everywhere and nowhere. All things are both equally important and irrelevant. Equivalence has become the source of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia.
Rule without a ruler
Through the erasure of borders and deterritorialization, The Network, the site of global flows, has become extraterritorial and, since laws are inherently local, by definition extrajudicial, and therefore, unregulated. There is no global law that governs the operation of the Network. It operates in politics-free space. This means removal of market frictions and optimal capital allocation which made the Network immediately irresistible for global capital. This changed everything.
As the Network carves its way into the system, it transforms all layers of the socio-economic landscape creating in the process (new sources of positive feedback and) additional instability of an already shaky system.
1st layer: Laws are local and so is politics – the Network is not governable and cannot be regulated
No one is watching the space in which global capital operates. No one even has capacity to do so or propose such an idea. Space of global capital flows, therefore, remains eminently extraterritorial and ex-judicial. The impossibility of Network regulation is a major novelty. It presents itself as an economic advantage and is embraced by the capital. This has created conditions for the removal of economic rigidities, erasure of borders, and delocalization of the labor force, guaranteeing optimal capital allocation, which has allowed for enhanced capital accumulation at a rate not seen before. However, the convenience introduced by deterritorialization creates new problems.
2nd layer (Problems): The Network is a politics-free space
Political Impotence: Economic interests are global while politics is local. Politics, the ability to decide, remains local and unable to operate effectively at the planetary level, while power to act is moving away to the politically uncontrollable global space[1]. There is no politics of the Network.
Rise of global capital: Global capital is gaining strength at the same time as political impotence becomes more acute. This defines the underlying power relations. Politics becomes the global oligarchy’s bitsch. Gradually, everything becomes subordinated to the interests of global oligarchy and their prosperity comes at social costs. The absence of Global law is transformed into A rule without a ruler and global oligarchy emerges as an anti-social class.
3rd layer (Consequences): Tyranny of the global
The global dominate the local: Local becomes either replication of the global (Glocal), or presents itself as Radical alterity which disrupts the system and becomes the object of an exercise of the right to interfere[2]. This means that the Network is all encompassing and cannot be avoided — everyone is on the grid.
4th layer (Mutation): State becomes eminently corruptible
As a result of creation of the Network, a new form of elite, global oligarchy, emerges which now makes all major economic decisions. The absence of global polity means that super-rich operate free.
Global oligarchies do what oligarchies normally do: They use their (substantial) wealth to protect their interests through whatever means are available, from lobbying activity, shaping of the public opinion, influence on the local legislative process and politics in general, to corruption, harassment, intimidation, or physical force. They are no longer interested only in profit but in every aspect of life. Their coercive power is transmitted through influence on legislation, art, media, culture, education etc. This is the rise to biopolitics and biopolitical economy.
The new global overclass is not governable: States are powerless to interfere and have to submit to the interests of global oligarchy and effectively become their extended arm. Politicians are vetted by oligarchies and only those who comply are admitted to the table. Institutional and social changes are aligned with interests of global capital. Society is treated as auxiliary. Welfare state is dismantled and its repressive apparatus strengthened.
Debt, fiscal policy, taxation and budget deficits are an important lever arm. They become the main instrument of biopolitics. For example, the US owes $16tr to global capital ($6tr to foreigners alone), about the entire GDP (other developed and undeveloped countries are not looking much better either). As a form of collateral/insurance creditors have been or will be granted access to domestic policy and guaranteed influence over decision making institutions in general. In this way, global oligarchy becomes a stake holder in the US government. This is where things become complicated further and problems deeper.
Rise of kakocracy
What most deeply holds a community together is not so much identification with the Rules that regulate its normal rhythms, but rather a specific form of transgression of the Rules. (S. Žižek)
“When the government becomes both referee and player, the game changes rather dramatically for every other participant. Rules that might be rigorously applied to private competitors will not necessarily be applied for the sovereign who makes the rules. Government should act as regulator but is increasingly an interested party”. [3]
If global oligarchy, or private sector in general, “owns” shares of the government — they have stakes in it and the ability to influence its decisions – then anyone who is not a “shareholder” in the government is at a huge disadvantage when it comes to competing with “insiders” – they are playing the game where referee is on the side of some players and, as such, is indirectly acting as interested party. In this setup, it is no longer competence, quality of products and services, but degree of influence one commends that plays a decisive role. Influence on public and government becomes the most valuable asset.
This is a source of a reinforcing (positive feedback) loop that destabilizes the system. Under the pressure of global capital and in the absence of political power to resist it, the functioning of the state reinforces both further removal of barriers to capital accumulation (economic rigidities) as well as political impotence through continued dismantling of the welfare state and general demand for smaller state, while at the same time conforming to demands of the Network to remain unregulated.
This reinforcing loop becomes the main driver of the rapid transformation of the state from the welfare to the penal modality of its functioning. Global capital demands a smaller state to ensure the status quo, i.e. that the state remains unable to interfere with the existing order of things and that the network stays unregulated. Its increasing wealth and influence accelerates the process. This is all happening between the 2nd and the 3rd layers. Politics and law adjust to accommodate global demands. Exclusions and surplus of population grow with more efficient production process and further access to cheap labor force. Because of that, demand for fiscally accommodative environment (primarily through lower taxes and shutdown of the state sponsored programs) exerts pressure on the state to transform further by shedding the vestiges of its welfare programs through relentless privatization, while at the same time strengthening its repressive apparatus in order to gain access to the play through its monopoly on violence. Carceral mode of the state is embraced and reinforced further by the global capital as a source of additional profit maximization, e.g. war on drugs, high incarceration rate, privatized prisons, and war on poverty in general. Rising inequality is but one of the consequences of this process. It correlates with (and exacerbates) other social maladies, but is not necessarily their only or even primary cause.
Corruption becomes an intrinsic part of how the system operates. The corrupt state becomes the source of dissemination of lawlessness. Through state’s repressive apparatus, violence propagates through all the pores of life. The end game? There is no global law to violate any more, no global law that could permit setting apart of criminal pursuits from “normal business activity”[4]. The gap between legal and criminal activities is closing rapidly as legal business converges to crime. This leads to gradual criminalization of the globe and globalization of crime. Crime is everywhere and nowhere.
Progressive criminalization of the globe and globalization of the crime is the most spectacular and potentially sinister consequence of the erratic globalization process. The mechanisms of democracy no longer function, they have been seized by corporate power. With time, corporations, which generally have no internal constraints, gradually lose external constraints as well. They exploit, because that is the only thing they know how to do, until exhaustion and collapse[5]. In Mao’s words. Everything under heaven is in utter chaos: the situation is excellent.
[1] Zygmund Bauman: Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Polity (2006)
[2] ibid.
[3] Cristopher Cox: Address to Joint Meeting of the Exchecquer Club and Women in Housing and Finance (Dec. 4, 2008)
[4] Franco Berardi, After the Future, AK Press (2011)
[5] ibid.
The modern anarchistic manifesto?
Bottom line!
The worker bee’s are going to kill the queen!
When you have industries writing their own legislation at the state and federal levels, we are on our way. Eventually, people will wise up and then… well, probably not, but revolutions are not a product of the majority but by a committed minority and an apathetic populace.
Has this been the case since shortly after WWI? The networks just have better and faster communications today.
It’s amazing that the oligarchs in the US have convinced the very people who would benefit most from the status quo to give it up and lie on their backs for the trucks to roll over them. In Russia Putin sleeps with a new oligarch every night. But China … not certain China wants to let the big boys clear into the holy of holies. That government still believes it can hold the reins and control the fast horses. Can’t wait to see what happens. The outcome could be that the global crooks gut all the societies on earth but one (China) only to see that one end up in charge with all the dirty work having been done by bosses they then turn into minions. Neal Stephenson saw the Chinese as taking over the world, which by then had turned into a Balkanized collection of city-states. He may not be far wrong.
Has anyone in the US wondered why Helmand province in Afghanistan remains a Taliban stronghold and well supplied with weapons . For those who have ever contemplated the question , loos at Helmand’s opium production and its links to the crime syndicates in Europe, and a link may be found.
Another reason the US should have never gone into that Mountainous rat hole. We’re slamming tens of thousands young chumps in this country into prison while..it’s clear…we look the other way at opium production in Afghanistan. Where does a large amount of this crap go?Russia! So…Hillary Clinton is whining about how foreign interference lost her an election..and in return the US assists in creating millions of hopeless addicts in Russia!
Globalization is an old story..and so is corporate influence. The notion that a self important technocratic
elite is above any law or beyond control and that we are all helpless pawns at their disposal need to be broken down.
Nation States are being hammered at across the globe…fragmentation of authority, not by global bogeymen, but by Ethnic and Religious subgroups will be the great story of the next 20 years.Small states mean less large scale control…by anyone. Global elites only appear to have some kind of unassailable position because Central Banks and trade patterns have fallen into place..they won’t in the future.
Never forget that policing powers only work and only have effectiveness when the overwhelming majority of people obey the ground rules..the day will come when they won’t. Small group resistance is tremendously disruptive..there are more police in Chicago and New York than ISIS puts on the ground in the Middle East…and look how they’ve occupied the 2 strongest military powers on Earth.
The internet and “connectivity..” only exists at the behest of power. The quote from Mao concerning Chaos is only a starting point..much more relevant is the one concerning Power coming from the barrel of a gun…
Global “elites” only look in control until they are not…an uber wealthy bitter grifter like Geo.Soros is really at the mercy of men like Xi Xingping and Vladimir Putin..at the end of the day those leaders are virulent Nationalists..not Internationalists..and will do anything to preserve the identity o their cultures and societies.
Double than in the US….people seem to have forgotten how protest brought down 2 Presidents in this Country..and forced the end of a war. It can and will happen gain when the tipping point of National self interest runs smack into manipulative self aggrandizement of the elite pimp class.