<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Frederic wrote:<br>"<font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6">I think that there is a
war at stake, because the problem is not any longer to produce the
rules thanks to which neoliberalism can work, but to create a space
without rules thanks to which a destruction can occur without any
limits, to enable a tiny group of persons to enjoy a huge amount of
money in the short term."<br><br></font></div><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><font face="verdana, sans-serif">Well, I agree. <font face="verdana, sans-serif">The techniques you described at work in the banlieue<font face="verdana, sans-serif"> in France, or that we could describe at Standing Rock, <font face="verdana, sans-serif">are the war machine unleashed and able to operate at full <font face="verdana, sans-serif">violence. I had a brush with it seventeen years a<font face="verdana, sans-serif">go in Prague, where the cops looked at my passport, saw that I was an American, radioed central command and then let me go - while capturing and later torturing other protest<font face="verdana, sans-serif">e</font>rs whose governments had a different place in their local balance of forces.</font> In my view, this force of unleashed violence is the "neo" of Imperial control and domination, without the "liberal" element of (of<font face="verdana, sans-serif">ten pseudo-) regulation and legitimacy </font>that was formerly mixed in</font></font></font></font></font> with it, all the way through the Obama era. The value of the postwar liberal <font face="verdana, sans-serif">system of rights</font>, and even more, of the attempts to extend it to a greater number of social subjects after 19<font face="verdana, sans-serif">6<font face="verdana, sans-serif">8, becomes more clear as it disappears.</font></font> We are really leaving that neo-liberal order behind now<font face="verdana, sans-serif">, and yet the new <font face="verdana, sans-serif">level of violence - visible, for example, in the violence of resource extraction that you can now see so clearly at work within the territory of the US itself -</font> that "new" level of <font face="verdana, sans-serif">devastation</font> was always there, it was always emerging as the radically violent potential of domination within the <font face="verdana, sans-serif">temporarily stabilized</font> neoliberal order.</font><br><br></font></div><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><font face="verdana, sans-serif">Marx believed that <font face="verdana, sans-serif">capitalism<font face="verdana, sans-serif"> was doomed to failure in its</font> attempt to</font></font></font><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><font face="verdana, sans-serif"><font face="verdana, sans-serif"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><font face="verdana, sans-serif"><font face="verdana, sans-serif"> us<font face="verdana, sans-serif">e</font> <font face="verdana, sans-serif">representat<font face="verdana, sans-serif">ional democracy to</font></font></font></font></font> regulate itself for its own smoother function<font face="verdana, sans-serif">ing<font face="verdana, sans-serif">. He was right, but despite all the grand claims in the early and middle twentieth century, no one developed a system of political oversight, regulation and steering that was as sophisticated and capable as the representational democracy that emerged from the American and French revolutions. Many of us on this list - well, you and me certainly, along with our c<font face="verdana, sans-serif">o</font>mrades at the journal Multitudes - made similar grand claims about two decades ago, essentially to the effect that new communications technology was unleashing a collective intelligence that could finally improve on representative democracy. We were not entirely wrong. What w<font face="verdana, sans-serif">e called "the multitudes" is known to contemporary political theory as "transnational civil society." It, and we <font face="verdana, sans-serif">as part of it, still has the key role to play in overcoming the blind <font face="verdana, sans-serif">violence</font> of war and extending the liberal system of regulation so far that the ecocidal violence of capitalism itself is throttled back along with all the drones and tanks and laser-bombs etc. If not, we shall die as a civilization. It's socialism or barbarism all over again, but we need a much less naive, much more s<font face="verdana, sans-serif">ophisticated political understanding of th<font face="verdana, sans-serif">e</font> potential that used to be called "socialism." We need an ecosocial democracy that can actually govern, with all the communicational <font face="verdana, sans-serif">finesse and technical detail that implies</font>. </font>This is how things stand in the early twenty-first century.</font></font></font></font></font></font> <br><br>Or at least, that's how this particular washed-up middle-aged not-so-middle-class old white fart sees it anyway!<br></font></div><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"></font></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:19 AM, Frederic Neyrat <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fneyrat@gmail.com" target="_blank">fneyrat@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">Dear Brian, </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">I completely agree with you, but let's take it on its reverse side: Trumpism might be a way for a certain number of persons to understand that what happens here - in the US territory or in the City - already happened there - "out there" or in the banlieue/suburbs." An awareness.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">I remember in 2010, in France, during a huge wave of manifestations against a project of reform concerning the retirement system, discovering a technique used by the police to control and scatter the manifestation (helicopters quasi-immobile just above the protesters + splitting of the demonstration in several lines + creation of a transient camp with "filter roadblocking" enabling the police to take a picture of every protester before they leave the camp (a racist practice that always kept the French-Arabic persons in the transient camp longer than other people), etc.) that was already used in the banlieues before being used in the City.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">I don't know whether or not it's possible to extend the concept of war and to use it to speak, à la Agamben, to the war of capitalism against humanity, or to speak of wars in plural (cf the last book of Lazzarato+Aliez that I did not read, but I heard of it).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">But when I read</div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/trump-begins-tearing-up-obamas-years-of-progress-on-tackling-climate-change" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/<wbr>us-news/2017/mar/28/trump-<wbr>begins-tearing-up-obamas-<wbr>years-of-progress-on-tackling-<wbr>climate-change</a></font><br></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6">I think that there is a war at stake, because the problem is not any longer to produce the rules thanks to which neoliberalism can work, but to create a space without rules thanks to which a destruction can occur without any limits, to enable a tiny group of persons to enjoy a huge amount of money in the short term. The walls that Trump wants to build are those that will enable his administration to destroy the US territory, preventing the US citizens to escape to Mexico......</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6">Best,</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="verdana, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6">Frederic</font></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2017-03-27 22:59 GMT-05:00 Brian Holmes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com" target="_blank">bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com</a>></span><wbr>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr"><div><div>While I am far from minimizing the harm that this administration can do (a form of harm which has many parallels around the world and whose interest is maybe not limited to the US), nonetheless the very CNN article being quoted in this thread shows how rhetorical these particular threats are:<br><br>"On Monday, Sessions reiterated that cities and states hoping to receive
federal funds or grants must comply with federal law requiring local
authorities to share citizenship or immigrant status of individuals to
the Immigration and Naturalization Service if requested. The attorney
general did not specify which cities or which funds the department may
claw back as it has threatened.... The government would likely be limited to pulling funds that it can
prove are related to the policy it is targeting, namely immigration
enforcement."<br><br></div>The nitty-gritty as I understand it is that they can pull funding related to... Homeland Security. Apparently that's the main destination of federal funding to cities these days! So to fight against the sanctuary cities, the Trump administration can only weaken what so far seems to be its strongest constituency, namely law enforcement.<br><br></div>That said, Frédéric's idea of focusing on war is timely. As the putative rhetorical powers of the administration are exhausted, it is obvious that they will attempt to use brute force. They won't do it - or at least they won't do it first - inside the borders of the US, because they do sort of have to obey the laws inside the country: meaning they can deport even more immigrants than the Obama administration's record deportations, yes, but they can't use unprecedented emergency powers unless they can manufacture an emergency. This points toward the impending invention of new definitions and practices of war, legitimating new states of emergency. I think a new definition and practice of war is a logical development of Trumpism. And I also think that rather than making up outlandish ideas of what those new definitions and practices will be, one might do better to look coolly at the record of the two previous administrations to see what they already are, and thereby, to identify where the qualitative thresholds can be crossed. Trumpism will stand or fall on the capacity of all levels of society - not just the top, the bottom, or the middle - to resist the escalation of foreign war and the generalization of its laws to the domestic sphere.<br><br>Here's the sad, but crucially important truth about the capitalist democracies: they call it fascism when the "just" laws of foreign wars are "unjustly" applied to the domestic sphere.<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:02 PM, Frederic Neyrat <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fneyrat@gmail.com" target="_blank">fneyrat@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">Concerning the occupation - "<span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)">many of us feel that this is no longer "our" country or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or doubling/doppelgange"r </span>- let's think about <i>The Man in the High Castle </i>(the TV show at least, for I did not read PKD's book). </div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">So, on the one side, the High Castle = the WH; on the other side, Sanctuary Cities that the WH tries to turn into Obituary Cities.</div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">I don't know what will be the result of this war. But it's a kind of war, right? Maybe Empyre forum could devote a month to that topic: Wars.</div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">My best,</div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)"><br></div><div style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(61,133,198)">Frédéric</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2017-03-27 20:48 GMT-05:00 Alan Sondheim <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sondheim@panix.com" target="_blank">sondheim@panix.com</a>></span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<br>
Sanctuary Cities (apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious)<br>
<br>
This may be of interest only to US residents, for which apologies.<br>
It does give some indication of the brutality of a regime which<br>
pays little attention to protest. The result for refugee and<br>
immigrant communities - even for families legally in the country -<br>
has been devastating.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/27/politics/jeff-sessions-trump-sanctuary-cities/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/27/<wbr>politics/jeff-sessions-trump-s<wbr>anctuary-cities/</a><br>
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/sanctuary-cities-explained/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/<wbr>politics/sanctuary-cities-expl<wbr>ained/</a><br>
<br>
(Sending it out because we're in a sanctuary city and state; both are poor, and, being pessimistic, I'm waiting for the resulting havoc. What's so strange, uncanny, for so many of us, is the speed with which the tenor of the US has changed; we've gone from more traditional protests (against police brutality, military engagement, women's rights, BLM) to protests based on a different atmosphere - that of overt racist acts, and potential or real federal attacks on the poor, Blacks, Latinos, the environment etc. - attacks from the very institutions that are "supposed" to protect us. So in a very real sense, many of us feel that this is no longer "our" country or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or doubling/doppelganger, and that's hard to come to grips with. I'm speaking of course from two positions - that of being white, middle-class, and "educated," and that of being Jewish and "senior," and witnessing, for the first time in years, acts of anti-semitism on the increase, even in Rhode Island (I won't even describe the destructive ageism I'm dealing with). So I'm privileged on the whole, not having to deal with what a friend here calls micro- aggressions against minorities - micro-aggressions that occur constantly, that have only increased as well. On a plane of sociality/communality, the US is a foreign country for many of us, located nowhere, going nowhere but towards a brutal and militarist future, at least for the time-being.)<br>
<br>
<br>
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