[p2p-research] what to think of p2p conservatism?

[Michel Bauwens]

Sorry for my late reply, it got bogged down in my backlog, I will publish
this on May 7,

Michel

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hiya,
>
> Blond poses as radical and 'outside', but basically he is an ideologue of
> the mainstream.  he has recognised a very real problem that the British
> state is separated from society, but he misdiagnoses the problem in the
> ideology of the party in power, when in fact it is a structural problem.
> The difficulty is that, if the neototalitarian substitution of state for
> society and the decomposition of everyday social relations through
> repressive forms of governmentality are not addressed, the three problems
> Blond identifies - a top-heavy state, a fragmented and atomised society, and
> a drastic split between the two - remain insoluble.
>
> Blond's doctrine is remarkably similar to the mainstream of Blairism: here,
> too, communities are to be put at the centre of politics, and the state is
> incited to re-moralise social life and rebuild shattered communities
> (witness ideas such as the 'Respect' initiative, the idea of opposing
> 'parallel lives' and breakaway communities, the 'inclusion' agenda, the
> promotion of 'citizenship' in schooos...).  Hence, the pattern is simply
> repeated.  The neototalitarian imaginary which has taken over the mainstream
> in Britain, and which permits little dissent within accepted frames, is
> based on the idea that something is fundamentally wrong with society and
> that the state needs to take action to solve it - restricted of course by
> the requirements that the state be neoliberal and repressive, hence that the
> means it uses are rather curtailed in variety but extremely intrusive.
>
> In fact, British political discourse is largely structured around a mixture
> of repression and trauma.  Britain went through an authoritarian moment in
> the mid-80s when political options were foreclosed, and political space has
> never been re-opened since this point.  Britain is thus in a similar
> position to post-authoritarian societies in which the past has not really
> been overcome, but has become unspeakable (e.g. Chile).  The state 'seceded'
> from society in this period by adopting authoritarian forms to smash social
> movements, and since this point, the drift in executive authority and
> state-society distance has worsened.  (This has been articulated in a frame
> limited to the Blair period by Oborne).  In some ways, it is a classic
> Bonapartist scenario - the Establishment let loose its reins on the state to
> allow the state to smash opponents it no longer had the power to defeat
> itself; in doing so, it also gave the state control over the Establishment
> itself, leading to a reconstellation of social forces with the 'political
> class' rendered autonomous and at the top.  This corresponds with a
> simultaneous restructuring of capital away from social insertion and towards
> externally-oriented finance and the 'global city' model.
>
> So, Britain is in effect 'occupied' by a political class and its
> apparatuses, in alliance with a transnational capitalist grouping with
> little connection to Britain.  This has led to the decomposition of old
> forms of social insertion, both sociological and imaginary.  The majority
> have experienced this trauma as loss (some in the first period - the death
> of Old Labour, some in the second - the loss of Establishment patronage and
> Old Britain), but the loss has not been recognised as such, since to do so
> would require challenging the very pervasive ideological presentation of the
> transition either as continuity (Britain is and always will be a liberal
> democracy) or progress (Britain moved out of the old era of destructive
> ideological conflict).
>
> This all makes sense when viewed in terms of Kropotkin's 'political' and
> 'social principles': the 'political principle' seizes increasing power at
> the expense of the 'social principle'; society is recomposed in
> authoritarian ways, and as a result, everyday horizontal connections are
> either decomposed or reclassified as anti-social/subversive.  The history of
> Britain since the mid-80s is a history of a series of further attacks on the
> 'social principle', from the Criminal Justice Act (partying and protesting
> is anti-social) to 'dispersal zones' (congregating with one or more other
> people is anti-social), 'New Public Management' (breaking the social
> principle within professions and public service bodies through surveillance
> and *gleichschaltung*) to rearrangements of public space (attempting to
> coopt spatial users into a regulation based on fear).  Notice also the
> decline in political engagement - falling party memberships, falling voting
> figures, reduced newspaper readerships and so on.
>
> Of course, this leads to a situation where people experience a lack of
> horizontal connections, permanent fear of arbitrary power and of horizontal
> but desituated Others, a lack of community, etc.
>
> The logical way of responding to such awareness is to bemoan the 80s
> counterrevolution and its subsequent continuation, to condemn the continued
> rule of the 'political class' and to demand a *reversal* of the
> transitions which have composed an increasingly authoritarian state.  Yet
> this would raise old traumas - one would effectively have to admit that *Thatcher
> needed to be beaten* in the mid-80s, that the foreclosed possibilities are
> markers of the necessities of political openness.  One would also have to
> reverse the dominant valorisations in public discourse today - for instance,
> to value freedom in public spaces (as a condition for horizontal
> composition) rather than regulation of public spaces for 'security'.
>
> Such a logical response is blocked by the dominant ideology and its effects
> - it has in effect been rendered unthinkable, and the trauma is 'repressed'
> (while remaining active as a Real).
>
> With the trauma unresolved, it has been refracted ideologically through the
> technique of identifying Others viewed as the barrier between an imagined
> harmonious past or pure essence and the actuality of 'broken Britain' -
> criminals, 'chavs', migrants, political dissidents, etc, and corresponding
> discourses on cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, human rights etc - creating
> a climate of fear where people dare not think outside dominant categories.
> (This was a discourse unleashed initially by the political class itself, as
> a way of legitimating authoritarianism - see Hall's 'Policing the Crisis' -
> but it has taken on a dynamic of its own through its connection to the
> news-value-seeking logic of the tabloids, and ultimately becomes
> disciplinary against individual politicians who are always under criticism
> for not being tough or effective enough, even while clearly reinforcing the
> total system).  The result is a 'choiceless democracy' (or polyarchy) -
> parties which are extensions of the deep state compete to appear as the best
> bearer or articulator of the homogeneous official ideology.  No movement
> from this ideology is possible without slipping precariously close to
> categories of exclusion.
>
> This means, among other things, that any effective response to social
> decomposition is foreclosed in advance or rendered as intolerable to the
> dominant discourse.
>
> Hence a situation when *everyone* - even the regime leaders - admit that
> something is wrong, that Britain is 'broken', that people are 'too atomised'
> and show too little respect for each other, that the revolution of the 60s
> and the counterrevolution of the 80s have 'gone too far', that certain
> virtues have been lost in the recent transitions...  yet at the same time,
> the persistent attempts to address these failings are 'utopian duplication',
> simply repeating the nexus of the problem.  The solution to the effects of
> the 'political principle' is taken to be... more of the 'political
> principle'.  The critique of the system as too atomised, too split between
> the state and society, too centralised, etc., becomes a *supplementary*critique - a necessary part of the dominant ideology, and not at all a
> bearer of critical force.
>
> (There is much more that could be said...  about the role in all this of
> militarised masculinities for instance, which provide a transmission belt
> from the 'mainstream' into the 'symptom' (of 'crime', violence, etc) which
> is permanently disavowed.  But I think this is enough to situate Blond in
> the conjuncture).
>
> In this context, we can situate Blond as someone who rehashes old themes in
> a slightly rearranged configuration.
>
> What Blond proposes are actually measures which retain or even strengthen
> the neototalitarian state.
>
> Take for instance the idea of loosening the reins still further on what he
> calls 'frontline civil servants', people such as police, community wardens
> and council officials, who already have draconian and vastly abused powers
> (the ability to issue ASBOs banning any act they happen to disapprove of,
> even if it is illegal; the ability to extort money under the pretext of
> summary on-the-spot fines for vaguely defined public order offences, etc).
> Of course the power of these petty incarnations of sovereignty will be
> directed mainly at the various Others.  Hence also, an ideal of greater
> community, but *enacted by the state*; furthermore, enacted by the state
> using neoliberal/neototalitarian means, which basically come down to
> attempts to coerce participation either directly or through economic
> bribery/punishment - people will be forced to behave more communally, or
> else their benefits will be cut off, they will be fined for being
> anti-social or given ASBOs, etc.  What could it mean to loosen their reins
> further?  I suspect it would mean eliminating the few remaining judicial
> constraints - things like the duty on police to record instances of stop and
> search, the prohibition on wardens using force/violence, and various
> proportionality and human rights limits imposed by the courts.
>
> At most it might mean loosening New Public Management to a sufficient
> degree to create a margin of 'discretion' - though this is unlikely to be
> implemented; if it were, it would generate at one degree remove a wave of
> tabloid outcry over why this man who had gone on to kill had not been
> charged for peeing in the street two years earlier, that suspected terrorist
> had not been raided because some civil servant had decided a phoned-in
> report was unreliable, or the other free party is left untouched because a
> local official deems it is not really much of a nuisance (we are seeing this
> already at an alarming tone of intensity with regard to social workers who
> 'should have caught' various well-publicised cases of abuse, and people who
> commit suicide after persistent bullying, where the media alleges police
> inaction).  In tabloid discourse, a single failure to act - however
> reasonable at the time - is always proof of a widespread and pervasive
> culture of impunity, a sign of a systematic liberal bias at all levels of
> the state (or inability to act due to human rights laws, etc) - however
> statistically unlikely the response in question - and hence, politicians
> complying with this discourse have to constantly build in surveillance
> mechanisms to make sure officials don't 'fail to act', that they always have
> the legal power to act, etc.  So Cameron will end up saying to Blond: nice
> idea, but unworkable.
>
> Notice also the centrality of the trope of overcoming left-right divisions:
> Blond's 'red Toryism' is here indistinguishable from (pre-election) Blair's
> 'Third Way' fusion of conservative and socialist values.  This is really a
> way of identifying with the 'post-ideological' coordinates of the
> 'post-politics' of political class rule - rejecting in practice both the
> deep insertedness of conservatism and the social justice of
> social-democracy, even while upholding them as ideals or goals.  (In a way,
> these people are all children of Eurocommunism or perhaps of Deng Xiaoping).
>
> Hence, also, the attempt to pass off (or more worryingly perhaps, to *really
> believe*) rather conventional, mainstream, unchallenging ideas lacking in
> reflexivity or critical sense as 'radical', 'new', transformative, etc.  (In
> African 'choiceless democracies', this takes a similar but simpler form:
> 'change', the 'new', 'hope' and the like as empty slogans in their own
> right).
>
> Ultimately, Blond's visibility is most likely a flash in the pan.  Cameron,
> like Blair, is a creature of the political class (not the Establishment, and
> certainly not 'society').  Image-conscious, and open to fusions with the
> deep state and the tabloids, his space within the system is rather limited,
> which will not stop him doing a lot of damage within the space it *does*give him.  Since members of the political class are driven by publicity and
> official ideology first and foremost, they are not really responsive to
> high-minded ideals.  Blond will likely vanish from the field just as quickly
> as Blair's early intellectual referents such as Etzioni, Hudson and Field,
> and his slogans vanish just as quickly as the 'Third Way', 'stakeholder
> society' and their ilk.  In the political class, seeking a 'radical'
> intellectual agenda is a political effect of seeking to mobilise discontent
> with an existing regime in hope for change.  Their function is as
> signifiers, not as guiding beacons.  And they lose their sign-value once a
> regime is in power, since to call for 'radical' change then becomes to
> question the continuities which have persisted.
>
> While Blond's motivations may well be more credibly academic, Cameron will
> have adopted him on the advice of spindoctors, for symbolic effect.  This
> whole 'red Tory' line - characteristically kept at one degree of remove, so
> Cameron can reap the benefits without the risks - is probably a rhetorical
> response to the sad attempts by Blairites to roll out class politics as a
> point-scorer against the Tories, attempts which the Tories have echoed (the
> 'Whelanism' anti-union demo for instance), and which are equally absurd on
> both sides.  Yet Cameron is vulnerable - he is from an extremely upper-class
> background, ex-private school and part of an elite Oxford University
> drinking club, and his Shadow Chancellor looks and sounds the archetypal
> 'toff', not to mention the ever-visible Boris Johnson (the three of them
> apparently drinking buddies at Oxford).  It is also possible that Cameron is
> gearing up to form a national government with the Blairites, in the event of
> a hung parliament (since the parties now have more in common with each other
> than with the distinctly off-message Liberal Democrats).  This would explain
> the 'Red Tory' stuff - emphasising similarities with Labour.
>
> Look on a policy level, and Cameron is 'more of the same' - and I expect
> worse around the corner.  Announced policies so far:  a massive attack on
> squatters and travellers, including criminalising squatting in Britain for
> the first time since the Norman Conquest; banning Hizb ut-Tahrir, despite
> its lack of any connection to political violence, for holding views anathema
> to the dominant ideology and the tabloids; and repealing the Human Rights
> Act, the last judicial barrier to neototalitarianism, a barrier effectively
> forced on Britain by the ECHR and the EU (and one which Cameron will have
> difficulty doing without, unless he wishes to secede from Europe).
>
> This could be the tip of the iceberg.  There are at least two other cases
> where a 'Third Way' ostensibly socialist government was replaced by a
> right-wing party after a long spell in government: Australia under
> Hawke/Howard, and Spain under Gonzalez/Aznar.  In neither of these cases did
> the rightists reverse any of the atrocities of the Third Way.  In both
> cases, they started new onslaughts of their own - in Spain, this included
> draconian attacks on opposition parties including the banning of Batasuna,
> and vicious 'anti-terror' laws; in Australia, it included the privatisation
> of universities, further attacks on union and protest rights, and finally
> the atrocity of the 'intervention' in which entire Aboriginal communities
> suffered colonial occupation and moral policing.  In neither case did the
> rightists have much of an electoral margin; in both cases they were replaced
> within a couple of elections, and in both cases there was a popular upsurge
> corresponding, I suspect, to the cutting loose of groups bought off through
> patronage under the 'Third Way'.  In both cases, the Labour equivalent moved
> back to the left in its rhetoric to gain re-election.  But in neither case
> did it do anything progressive in turn, once re-elected.  Aussie Labour's
> flagship policy at the moment is to impose a Chinese-style blanket firewall
> on the Australian section of the Internet.  The PSOE has yet again gone
> after squatters, seeking to clear all squats from Madrid (though after a few
> pitched battles I daresay it has backed off).  One could refer similarly in
> this context to the Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama series; and to the persistent
> rotation of two deep-state parties which lasted decades in Turkey.  In
> short, once a neototalitarian system is locked into a political system, it
> is not easy to break out of it; certainly the movements of mainstream
> parties do not cause such a shift.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> any commentary to add to blog excerpts would be very welcome
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: james burke <lifesized at gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 4:07 PM
>> Subject: link
>> To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html
>>
>>
>> Red Toryism as peer to peer conservatism<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=7876>
>> [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
>> Michel Bauwens
>> 20th March 2010
>>
>>  *David Brooks* explains<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html>the ideas of the Conservative British writer Phillip Blond:
>>
>> *“Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two
>> revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local
>> associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural
>> revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution
>> that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare
>> revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and
>> self-organized associations.*
>>
>> *Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of
>> deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global
>> financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a
>> town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away.
>> Unions withered.*
>>
>> *The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they
>> perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an
>> atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to
>> repair the damage.*
>>
>> *The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized
>> economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a
>> gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate
>> individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of
>> freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned
>> neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime,
>> and, as a result, four million security cameras.*
>>
>> *In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond
>> wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a
>> bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an
>> increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate
>> essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct
>> and mutually supporting failures.”*
>>
>> *The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector
>> that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical
>> transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and
>> creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people
>> who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”*
>>
>> *Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the
>> market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean
>> passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the
>> retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing
>> local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital
>> funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding
>> savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and
>> reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.*
>>
>> *To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior
>> government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants,
>> the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power,
>> giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would
>> funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in
>> infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would
>> rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined
>> with the towns around them.*
>>
>> *Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented
>> around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around
>> relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain
>> over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the
>> Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon.”*
>>
>
>


-- 
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