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[...] Exposed by the opening of its commercial frontiers to the competition of the lowest social and fiscal common denominators, and to systemic financial risks, it is seeing its resources crumble away at the same time as its burdens increase. Having become a universal debtor, it generates a population of creditors who no longer recognize their mutual solidarity yet expect it to remedy all their ills. [...]
This new international context is the most obvious cause of the destabilization of the social state, even if it is not the only one. The term ‘globalization’, however, promotes a confusion between two types of phenomena that are combined in practice but different in kind. On the one hand, there are structural phenomena, such as the abolition of physical distance through electronic communication, or common exposure to the health or environmental risks generated by technological development. These are irreversible and must be recognized as such in their impact on labour and the social bond. On the other, there are conjunctural phenomena, such as the deregulated circulation of capital and commodities, which proceeds from reversible political choices and goes hand in hand with the temporary over-exploitation of non-renewable physical resources. It is the confusion between these two phenomena that leads some people to see globalization as the expression of an immanent law not susceptible to any political or legal control.
Although Steyerl’s arguments in some cases unfold at a relatively abstract level, several of the essays address more directly the character of the art world itself, and its role in beautifying neoliberal capitalism. ‘Contemporary art feeds on the crumbs of a massive and widespread redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich’, Steyerl writes, adding that ‘it lends primordial accumulation a whiff of post-conceptual razzmatazz’. Art also mirrors the forms of present-day capitalism itself: on the one hand the figure of the artist offers a flattering model for autocrats and financier-patrons—‘unpredictable, unaccountable, brilliant, mercurial’—while on the other, the production of art depends on increasing amounts of precarious labour. In Steyerl’s view, unpaid interns and part-timers form a ‘reserve army of imagination’ that makes the mega-shows and Guggenheims of the world’s oligarchies possible. Exploitation within the art world tends to remain invisible in the art that is produced, however; even in ‘political art’, Steyerl observes, politics is ‘always happening elsewhere’.
[...] The thought that we might be the rubble implies that history will advance without us, protagonized by other subjects; we would be left in the position of Kafka, who maintained that there was ‘plenty of hope—but not for us’. Would this seeming abandonment of agency really be desirable? Steyerl might counter that the very phenomenon of subjective agency is beset with contradictions; the purpose of identifying with and ‘activating the thing’ was to skirt them. But the appeal to the object’s inert potential arguably relies on a reification of the subject–object split, whereas it would surely make more sense to retain a sense of the mutually interwoven, fundamentally mediated character of both; as Adorno put it in a late essay ‘On Subject and Object’, ‘the difference between subject and object slices through subject as well as through object’. The goal might then be not so much to identify with the object, to become the rubble of history, as to gain a demystified, non-alienated knowledge of its differentiation from the subject. Adorno again: ‘Knowledge of the object is brought closer by the act of the subject rending the veil it weaves about the object. It can do this only when, passive, without anxiety, it entrusts itself to its own experience.’
This is popular colonialism and it developed, he states, independently of the ‘organized enthusiasm of the upper classes’. It had to: a central claim of the book is that the official agencies of colonial knowledge and the organized colonial movement had no interest in including the lower classes in their discussions and gatherings. The regional colonial societies did not invite members of the working classes to participate in their meetings. Officers, government officials and businessmen formed the majority of attendees, with tiny numbers of petty civil servants, innkeepers or other small traders. The lower classes were addressed only as the objects of propaganda—or not addressed at all, for Empire was none of their business. In this regard, the plaintive letters requesting overseas deployment indicate some sort of autonomous thinking through of the self in relation to Empire. The letter-writers will not be admitted, of course, for they have no capital and their labour is superfluous. The colonies have labourers enough, African ones, overseen by the occasional European, who possesses them as he possesses capital. [...]
never really considered this angle before but of course it makes sense
[...] Once the PRC was established, the first generation of CCP leaders and cadres were always mindful of rural society, though this did not mean they were socially protective of it. The countryside was systematically exploited for industrial development, and little serious thought was given to the challenges of turning China’s vast peasant population into an urban working class. Neither economic analysis of modern capitalism and its internal contradictions, nor the inescapably long and winding path from immediate social mobilization to an ultimate future of equality and abundance, featured highly among Mao’s concerns after the CCP took power. [...]
On the other hand, the two World Wars pushed both parties to recognize the appeal of nationalism. For the CCP, that meant adaptation to the social realities of local society, and protection of its own national independence within an internationally bonded alliance. For the CPSU, fighting Hitler under Stalin, it was time to disband the Comintern and rally Russian patriotism. This had broader implications than winning the war. When the Red Army’s victory over the Third Reich brought most of Eastern Europe into a socialist camp, these countries did not join the USSR as additional soviet socialist republics, but instead formed their own respective national states.
[...] Since the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, we have not seen any comparable movements of working-class political militancy. Labour protests have not disappeared, but their aims are usually limited: defending wage levels or social benefits, without any horizon of political transformation. The threat of a ‘workers’ state’, of any kind, no longer exists.
We have seen that the primary force driving the changes after Mao’s death was a reaction against the Cultural Revolution. Yet this was never presented as a revolt against socialism. In both official discourse and popular understanding, the Cultural Revolution was treated as socialism gone wrong. Economically, the socialist revolution did not mean keeping people in poverty. Politically, it promised emancipation rather than the demagogic tyranny exercised by the ‘Gang of Four’. In a movement for the ‘liberation of thought’, calls for socialist democracy in the press both encouraged activists and benefited Deng in his struggles for power within the party. Since the international environment was no longer so hostile to China as in the fifties and sixties, while party cadres—not yet corrupted—were still capable of implementing directives, this should have been an ideal opportunity for the CCP to experiment with genuine socialism, with popular support and a whole generation of young people eager to participate in it.
unfortunately that didn't happen cus power corrupts etc
Under the new leadership and its bureaucratically minimalist conception of ‘political reform’, a fast track was given to a bankruptcy law and a series of regulations to reduce the economic burden on SOEs by changing life-time job security in a planned economy to contract employment in a labour market. The ensuing sense of insecurity in urban population centres was then intensified by the abolition of price controls on a range of goods which, in an economy already overheating, pushed the rate of inflation to nearly twenty per cent, causing widespread panic and withdrawals from state banks. Zhao’s government wanted to convince the party and the public that the price adjustment of 1988 was urgently needed. But in looking at the benefits the changes would bring, it paid little attention to their costs or to where the burden would fall. Urban residents who bore the immediate brunt had every reason to feel they had been denied any political say in the reform process. The economic crisis of 1988 would become a major factor in popular sympathy for the Tiananmen protests a year later.