Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Know Your Enemy

[via LATimes]
Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said.

That's just the first graff.

Read the whole thing.

Know Your Enemy.

Peer-to-peer democratization of journalism, of commentary, of political organizing, of campaign fundraising, slowly but surely even its democratization of the structure and practices of Democratic Party itself are all breaking through the corporate media monopoly and its manufacture of disenfranchizing apathetic consent, breaking through the Village's gossipy trivialization of all questions of fact and substance that impact unconsulted majorities, breaking through the Village's corrupt cronyist inside-the-beltway networks of consultants and influence peddlers and revolving-door conflict-of-interest lobbyists and Machine politics patronage, breaking through the fraudulent spin-doctoring of parochial incumbent and business interests and socially reactionary subcultures. The "populist tone" (such as it is) that so alarms the Chamber is a direct consequence and expression of p2p democratization.

While the Villagers bemoan the incivility of the "angry bloggers" and flutter at the loss of "bipartisan" capitulation to their own paymasters and the lords of war, while the would be greenwashers propose "lifestyle environmentalism" (keeping consumerism intact and majorities docile) and promise fanciful technofixes like clean coal, and offsets, and new nukes (keeping Industrial Model centralization intact and elites in control), and while the libertopians and neoliberals and Randroids and Ron Paulites dredge up their old "beyond left and right" bullshit all the while endlessly spouting off the most tired facile rightwing reactionary crap imaginable, and while the left graciously indulges all this in the spirit of tolerance, judiciousness, collaboration, and all the rest (all the while being berated for our intolerance, anger, partisanship) you better believe Big Business knows exactly what it wants, knows exactly who its enemies are, and will cheerfully climb a pile of skulls to keep their position, their privileges, and their loot.

Big Business has no illusions whatsoever. They know that you are their enemy. They play dirty without hesitation. They will destroy the world to stay on top of their precious pile of gold plated poop (how they will do that if the world is destroyed seems not to have entered their calculations, maybe they plan to live under a bubble-dome in Dubai or in lifeboat palaces in the asteroid belt). They think they are better than you. They think they deserve to call the shots. They are bad people.

Hope without Fight won't cut it with these people. There's no time for handholding, no time for angels on a pinhead debates about Third Ways "beyond" Left and Right.

It's classic left against right politics we're engaged in here, people, it's p2p Dems and Greens against what FDR called the Economic Royalists, that is to say, against neoliberal free marketeers backed by neoconservatives with guns.

The p2p networking tools, the renewable energy technologies and permaculture techniques, the unprecedented genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medical therapies, the nanoscale biochemical manufacturing techniques and materials on the horizon -- none of this is politics, it's not a circumvention of politics, it's not substitute for politics, it's not a constitution of politics. These are technodevelopmental changes that constitute the stakes and tools taken up by stakeholder politics, shaped by stakeholder politics. Keep your eyes on the ball, technoprogressive people!

And dem-left progressive people in general:

Know Your Enemy. Act accordingly. You're part of the solution or part of the problem. Fight for secular democracy for all, fight for access to knowledge for all, fight for sustainable polyculture for all, fight for Choice and for consent for all, fight for basic income, universal healthcare, lifelong education for all. Educate, agitate, and organize -- peer-to-peer.

Things are getting exciting -- and things are getting ugly -- right about now.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can everyone be classified as left, right or center? Also, are libertarians left or right? You seem to be categorizing people based just on their economic views. Some Randroids might be left-libertarians; would they still be conservative?

I have a lot of (have mostly) progressive opinions and a few reactionary ones, so I don't know where I would fit.

Dale Carrico said...

Some Randroids might be left-libertarians

No. They're not. They're really not.

I have a lot of (have mostly) progressive opinions and a few reactionary ones, so I don't know where I would fit.

My point here obviously isn't to rewrite reality as a comic book, I fully realize of course that reality is complicated and people are complicated and blah blah blah blah blah...

But I call bullshit on a whole lot of reactionaries who want (in different ways depending on whether they are technocratic elitist readers who like Amor Mundi because they are technocentric in their focus like I am, DLC moderate but still corporatist readers who like Amor Mundi because they Democratic Partisans as I am, libertopian readers who like Amor Mundi because they oppose Bush as polemically as I do) to distract us with dime-thin differences from attending to the greater and more relevant difference between the left and the right.

Dale Carrico said...

Also, are libertarians left or right? You seem to be categorizing people based just on their economic views. Some Randroids might be left-libertarians; would they still be conservative?

Market libertarians are on the right. They deny this -- but that's either because they are evil or stupid. The declaration of market outcomes as noncoercive by fiat always benefits incumbent interests who can coercively control majorities and retroactively describe this control as liberty. The "irony" that marketeers end up hating government except for police and militaries keeping the workers in line which they always love only looks ironic to those who haven't looked or thought about their views very closely. Libertarian socialists are on the left.

The Political Compass is bullshit, btw, in my opinion. I sometimes think I am alone in the online world in this opinion.

The options are the social democracy and democratic socialism on the left and anti-democratic Royalism and elite incumbency on the right. The are a number of definitive antagonisms within both left and right in each historical epoch. But there are not in my view two separable axes, "economic organization" and "protection of individual liberties" (let alone three, for those who think fetal rights, environmental problems, or emerging technologies rewrite politics), and saying otherwise usually just expresses confusion or abets fraud in my view. Yeah, I really do honestly think that. Obviously, ymmv, and probably does.

Daniel Halsey said...

So how are you defining Polyculture.

It is the study and implementation of self sustaining plant and animal systems.

Dale Carrico said...

Syllabus for my course on green discourse, politics, and practices at Berkeley this fall. I think polyculture would be a better term for what David Holmgren means by permaculture, but I know that isn't the standard usage. And anyway using polyculture practices like the ones advocated by the Land Institute (companion planting, agroforestry, etc.) to replace industrial model agriculture while meeting its yields (this seems to me also to be Vandana Shiva's goal: a sustainable supplanting of the petro-chemical Green Revolution) does indeed seem to me to be exactly the right goal for technoprogressive Greens, local polycultures, renewable decentralizing energy provision, cradle-to-cradle manufacturing and design. The formal affinity of the word polyculture with the word multiculture (which I also champion over imperial nonconsensual monoculture and think is part of this same puzzle) is just a lovely terminological accident, a gift. But, again, this is just me playing around: I realize polyculture has a technical usage and that its nonstandard (however fruitful it may be) for me to connect it up to permaculture and multiculture the way I am tempted to do...