[P2P-F] Reflections on Trump, and the role of the commons as an alternative

Fri Feb 10 08:41:22 CET 2017

Dear Kevin,

Thank you so much for this perspective, I wholly agree and I want to
commend you especially for your efforts in knowing the dynamics of the
opposite camp, as I would not have the time to do this. I urge you to keep
on working on this track, and to become a real expert in this, god knows we
need people like you willing to do this. We would also welcome your
perspectives and writings on the p2p and CT blogs, and you will have seen
george por's proposal for a political and policy oriented commons
newsletter,

I want to make a little point of localism, and Occupy; obviously, at least
for me, it doesn't work to critique them from the outside as many
post-Marxists do, and seeing them as the enemy either. These are both great
and massive social mobilisations, moving into a necessary but not
sufficient direction. Localized initiatives are not bad, just insufficient,
swarm based mobilizations are not bad, just insufficient. At the same time,
for those who have a more integrative understanding and understand 'power'
and 'institutions' cannot be ignored, it's cleary not enough, and it is
important to also point that out.

One point here is that recently at the P2P Foundation I have been pointing
at the need for our language to reflect this. So I have been introducing,
in the context of our work on the cosmo-local DGML based forms of physical
production, to stress, not localism, but the 'subsidiarity of material
production' instead. I.e. we need a lot more local production, but always
also in a trans-national framework.

If ever you had some energy to maintain a newsletter of the kind george and
I are wishing for, that would cover political commons convergences like the
ECA, the assembly of the commons that are emerging, the policy work being
done in so many urban settings,

I would put a lot of my energy of assembling such info in a way that would
be accessible to the editor of such a newsletter,

we really need this, but at p2p-f, we are overwhelmed with our existing to
do lists,

Michel

Michel

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Cc: "staccotroncoso at p2pfoundation.net"
        <staccotroncoso at p2pfoundation.net>, Ann Marie Utratel
        <amu444 at gmail.com>, George Pór <george.por at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Reflections on Trump,      and the role of the commons
        as an alternative
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I completely agree Michel with your analysis of how the left have been
co-opted into supporting the neoliberal agenda. The other trend on the more
radical left over the last 30 years has been the rejection of parliamentary
politics in favour of localism. The risks of a puritan anti-state left
politics are that they have no organised opposition to challenge the
capture of the state by reactionary right wing forces. If the left is not
occupying those seat the right will.

Liberals have successfully co-opted aspects of the left into the
institutions of capitalism, with the collapse of the soviet union, the end
of history, the establishment left that includes academics without a
serious alternative assumed liberalism was a given and committed to working
for change from within a liberal framework.

No one expected a resurgence of fascism. Spend any time researching this
and you quickly realise it is huge. It is important to think about the
young people who are being recruited to extreme right, what paths have lead
them to participate in these communities.

The extreme right have not had the privilege of access to government,
academic institutions or mainstream media and so they waste no time trying
to get papers published or to lobby governments to support their policies,
no they are entirely focused on recruiting online not through reason but
through myth, tapping into young peoples anxieties and offering them
insurgent narratives, vision and mythology.

Where do young people go to learn about the world. Youtube. The extreme
right have made really effective use of this as a medium for recruitment.
Unlike academics, politicians so on who mostly talk to each other. The
right engage with these young people in 'debate'.

The problem is also the narrative. Liberals and the left offer complex
narratives. Liberal politics has become a bureaucratic and there are
establishment gatekeepers. The extreme right offer simple narratives with
naive hero myths which appeal to young people who the right claim are
raised being taught left politics of victimhood and blame in universities.

The promise of figures like Trump is that he does not care for checks and
balances, he is the image of the authoritarian who overcomes, the
complexities of politics, the cynical power plays of bureaucrats and
experts, he does this by sheer force of charismatic will, cheered on by his
followers who have simply lost patience with the status quo.

This is the modus operandi of fascism.

This has emboldened the far right, those who previously entertained these
ideas in private for fear of social censure are coming out and organising.

Berger is an expert on online extremism and has done significant work on
how Isis use social media to recruit and organise at scale. In this video
he explains how the far right are using the same tactics but do not face
the same kinds of limitations as Isis. He talks about the relative impact
of small groups on shaping public discourse. He is not at all convinced
that western governments have the capacity to effectively deal with this
turn.

We are looking at highly organised fascist recruitment and propaganda
machine. It cannot be tolerated and must face full resistance that means
alliances of everyone committed to democratic process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YJmfRbbPw

https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/
Nazis%20v.%20ISIS%20Final_0.pdf

Part of that is offering real alternative political imaginaries, and making
those imaginaries available and accessible to young people is essential.
What would a popular alternative movement look like? One that moves beyond
the horizontalism of Occupy and aims effectively to get hands dirty, to
take power and put it to work for the kind of world we want to live in.

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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