important dutch public debate after the slashing of cultural subsidies, Michel ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 3:52 PM Subject: Fwd: <nettime> Are we in 1935 Germany or 21st Century Netherlands? To: [email protected] Forwarded conversation Subject: <nettime> Are we in 1935 Germany or 21st Century Netherlands? ------------------------ From: *Ibrahim Quraishi* <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 5:28 PM To: [email protected] Dear Friend and Colleagues : How to stop the tidal wave of political extremism in the Netherlands today? The extreme right PVV and its leader Geert Wilders in particular have hijacked virtually all the debates on culture, education, minority rights and freedom of speech, but their neo-liberal agenda smacks of a particular brand of fascism of by gone days, as they have co-opted virtually the entire Dutch Political establishment into this horrific misadventure. What has become of the Dutch historical tolerance? What are we going to do to make sure that this country does not fall into the abyss of irrational right wing fanatics in the name of preserving their own brand of European-ness. The enemy is NOT Islam. It is NOT struggling artists, It is NOT the intellectuals, university students, hospital workers nor even ordinary citizen from all walks of life. The enemy is really the clique of neo-liberal capitalists who refuse to let go of their power and their jingoistic fear mongering in the name of national preservation, for their personal power aggrandizement and ultimate idealogical control. I urge you all to please take a moment and look for possibilities of finding a pro-active way to protest the proposed actions of the Dutch Government. We must stand against this tyranny of oppression of using public funding to silence the public itself!!! We cannot allow the fundamental destruction of our civil-society for political expediency that services the right wing agenda here in the Netherlands or anywhere else!!! This has happened before in the United States under consecutive presidencies, beginning with Ronald Regan (1980-1988) and the US have never recovered from its own national demise. As a matter of public record, education, culture, scientific research, social services, infrastructure, and all walk of life have been terribly effected by the American model : unbridled capitalism without responsibility! Do we really wish this neo-liberal nightmare to permanently destroy the foundations of our socio-political, cultural multiplicity? If all culture stopped for one day, all newspapers stop printing, all schools stop functioning, all hospitals closed their doors, all television stations and all other forms of digital media stopped broadcasting, what would happen??? This may be naive, but there must be a creative way to show resistance against political tyranny. If change is happening in the Middle East after 30 years of systematic oppression, we can also find ways to change our direction before its too late! Please join me and thousands of others to voice their dismay at the current demise of culture, civil society and ultimate diversity here. Monday 27 June 13.00-16.00 Plein & The Malieveld The Hague A Also please go to other websites like : http://www.schadekaart.nl and http://www.marsderbeschaving.nl/index_en.php to find out how you can contribute and get involved in this moment of extreme urgency. ibrahim quraishi www.ibrahimquraishi.org ps. as always to be removed from this mailing list, please click -->: [ [email protected]] # 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: [email protected] ---------- From: *Heiko Recktenwald* <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 5:20 AM To: [email protected] I am sorry, you are mixing two buzzwords, neoliberalism and fashism, that say more or less nothing. Please accept the fact that there are still differences to Berlin 1935. You will need better arguments to fill the vacuum in Dutch society that seems to play for Wilders. Maybe something like "an intolerant society is a dead society". What are the arguments of Wilders? Best, H. Am 26.06.2011 17:28, schrieb Ibrahim Quraishi: ---------- From: *Jernej Prodnik* <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 4:53 PM To: [email protected] Just because neoliberalism and fascism are perhaps buzzwords that doesn't mean they are irelevant, distinguishable and possibly very much correlated concepts, especially in case of Geert Wilders. Best, Jernej -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Heiko Recktenwald Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 5:21 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: <nettime> Are we in 1935 Germany or 21st Century Netherlands? ---------- From: *Florian Cramer* <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 5:57 PM To: [email protected] I would put it differently: It's a politics of conservative resentment mixed with politbureau capitalism. The conservative resentment of the Dutch government is rather old-fashioned. What is new is only its outspokenness: the break with a postwar consensus, or political correctness, of not attacking modern art for being modern art. For Zijlstra, the secretary of culture and education, the arts have been dominated by a small elite - read: art councils, critics, intellectuals - that superimposed its minority taste on society, making it the majority agenda. And indeed, it is difficult to argue with this unless one thinks that funding should just go to those kind of places and projects that wouldn't be able to sustain themselves on the free market. (Which _is_ an elitist stance.) Yes, one could consider it unfair that a ticket for an experimental music concert is subsidized while the musical isn't. However, the Dutch government's agenda is not at all consistent in this respect. It wants to keep the subsidies of operas and the big museums untouched because they represent "the cultural heritage of the Netherlands". Zijlstra even adds the flags of Dutch colonial ships to his heritage list (which strongly reminds of the uproar in Hamburg when the city subsidized the ship museum of a right-wing militaria collector with millions while cutting heavily into contemporary arts). Another problem for people in the arts is that they are now forced into the same boat as those contemporary art institutions whose funding should be scrutinized because their curators put the same artists on publicly subsidized shows whom they also recommend, in their second jobs as private consultants, to art collectors. Or you are in the same boat with people paid a top salary as directors of communal cinemas that run the same boring mainstream Hollywood 'arthouse' films as the other, non-subsidized movie theater in town. In other words, you're pressured to protest in the streets hand-in-hand with people you'd rather demonstrate against. The problem is not necessarily that the arts are cut. The problem is how they're being cut, with almost everything not fitting an utterly uneducated notion of "cultural heritage" and completely deluded perceptions of "top art institutes" being forced into the creative industries. Why is this not neoliberalism? If this were classical neoliberal politics, there would be just a general cut of public funding, leaving things to the free market and cutting taxes. But this is not what is happening. Instead, taxpayer's art subsidies are repurposed into taxpayer's business subsidies. The advice of the "Top Team Creative Industries" (lead by the business manager of Rem Koolhaas' bureau OMA) to the Dutch government boils down to subsidizing economically promising Dutch creative industries businesses, for example service design companies. Of course, this is just a small part of a larger development. The bigger picture is that Europe, and the Western World, is rapidly moving towards the model of Chinese politbureau capitalism where governments act as supreme CEO boards, and public budgets are business investment money. Only that for the Western economies, its not investment into growth, but into preventing the ship from sinking. What started with the bail-outs and nationalization of the financial sector is now growing like virus into the rest of the economy. Instead of mobilizing all production means for a military war, it's the total mobilization for the global economic war. It seems to be the perfect fulfillment of what Rudolf Hilferding described in his 1910 book "Das Finanzkapital" ("The Financial Capital") as "state monopoly capitalism". -F -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl ---------- From: *Dr. Peter Troxler* <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 7:29 PM To: Heiko Recktenwald <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] hm -- main difference to me seems to be today's focus on individualism while AH-193x was removing the individual for the sake of the party/nation/state any comments on that? / pt ---------- From: *Heiko Recktenwald* <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 8:15 PM To: [email protected] Well, the main difference seems to be that people were insulted etc less by a climate of hate or by opinions, but by the state and its law. You were not allowed to marry etc. And later people were actually killed. Again not by citizens, but by an industry run by the state. This is completely different, the Holocaust is different anyway..... In the Netherlands we have not more than a slight change in attitude, hardly noticable, more on a philosophical level, and IMHO that Wilders is not in prison now is a very good sign because such things must be discussed in a free athmosphere. A free society needs such discussions as well. The big example for the success of openness is England and the Dutch were very similar. The Romans come to mind as well. But I dont know the arguments of Wilders.. Best, H. Am 27.06.2011 19:29, schrieb Dr. Peter Troxler: ---------- From: ** <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 7:35 PM To: Florian Cramer <[email protected]>, [email protected] On Mon 27/06/11 16:57 , Florian Cramer wrote:: Ramsey Nasr put it actually quite nicely in his speech on Monday - loosely translated: "Combine the market with resentment and you get the recipe for the policy of the current Dutch government" Dutch text: http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2676/Cultuur/article/detail/2458831/201 1/06/28/Oproep-van-Ramsey-Nasr-aan-Mark-Rutte.dhtml<http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2676/Cultuur/article/detail/2458831/2011/06/28/Oproep-van-Ramsey-Nasr-aan-Mark-Rutte.dhtml> Except that this market is indeed far from a free market. Fernand Braudel's idea that the accumulation of capital inevitably distorts so-called free markets chimes nicely with the contemporary idea that certain - mostly financial - institutions are now "too big to fail", all in the name of "maintaining confidence" (of ratings agencies and other big financial institutions of course). I think what's happening in the Netherlands is that the language of resentment is deployed in the interest of indeed a kind of monopoly capitalism, but a monopoly capitalism in which the state plays only a subsidiary role: to extract value from the general population in order to keep those ships afloat that are "too big to fail". Everyone else can get eff'ed. Len ---------- From: *Brian Holmes* <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 8:16 PM To: [email protected] That's extremely well put, I agree. Neoliberalism is over, there is nothing "liberal" in Dutch policy anymore, neither the appeal to a free market nor the attempt to integrate a libertarian counterculture to the informational economy. We have a moved to a command phase in the relation between government and the economy, and China is setting the standard. By now everyone has probably read Wen Jiabao's recent declaration, "How China will reinforce the global recovery": http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/**e3fe038a-9dc9-11e0-b30c-**00144feabdc0.html<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e3fe038a-9dc9-11e0-b30c-00144feabdc0.html> However the point that Ibrahim makes is all the more serious. In the US, neoliberalism shifted to its command phase at the end of the dot-com bubble in 2001. Bush simultaneously militarized the budget and nationalized the discourse, while at the same time engineering a new bubble that lasted precisely the length of his mandate. The results are extremely negative across the board. There is no "recovery" in the US and more global financial chaos is on the horizon. Therefore Chinese methods become even more attractive. This is not 1935 Germany, it's the 21st century. But the fate of Weimar democracy has a lot to say to the 21st century. best, BH ---------- From: *Matze Schmidt* <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 9:28 AM To: [email protected] Hello, It is, but only in the heads of the dependent working population who regard themselves as independent. The term neoliberalism -- this old old hat -- matches, as you say, perfectly with the theories of

Rudolf Hilferding

who was in company with Otto Neurath (beloved by all stats-artists since Gerd Arntz) criticised by the dutch (!) international communists in the 1920s+ as the states-communist wo differentiates capital into "good capital" (subsidies, taxes, trade) and "bad capital" (fictitious capital, investment, banks). Matze Schmidt -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens