[Reader-list] Guardian Unlimited: Daring to dream

[Vivek Narayanan]

Dear Keith,

I have enjoyed your past few posts to the list quite a bit and as (I 
suppose) a "young Indian intellectual" myself, I wonder if we on the 
list could push your argument a little further, and see where it leads.

I think you're right in your later mail that Rifkin's statements are 
strategic, if somewhat short-sighted and unreflective of larger 
historical shifts.  He is clearly writing out of leftish America's 
current "anybody but Bush" mentality, where, in the mainstream, slagging 
off the French and the Germans is a prime-time TV sport.  Thus Rifkin 
wants to preserve and somehow salvage liberal America's last links to 
sustainable sanity through Europe.  Rifkin has always dreamed of being a 
more populist speaker and writer, making crude arguments and hoping to 
sway policy and (having encountered him and his work some fourteen years 
ago in college in the US) I would assume he's slanting his usual shtick 
slightly to the right, hoping to make a difference.  The Guardian, of 
course, would be the wrong place to make that kind of difference.  Maybe 
he should have tried Fox News.

Further, R.'s root impulses have sprung from 80's environmentalism and 
from rather blunt anxieties about "science"; if I remember correctly, he 
has always been uncomfortable about a deregulated world, even a 
deregulated commons.  This also clearly informs his (and, for that 
matter, pop singer Madonna's) love of Europe as does -this is a palpable 
silence in his, and your, text, Keith- the challenge posed by burgeoning 
and ambiguous Islamist modernities.  (When the latter issue is taken 
into account, Europe becomes a  rather hostile place on the whole, and 
France, with its ridiculous and counterproductive headscarf law, becomes 
clearly regressive.)  So in the face of "the alternatives", Rifkin 
retreats to the liberal safe line and crosses his fingers in the hope 
that Europe, at least, will be the future of the world.

So I agree with you that old hegemonies need not be valorised, even if, 
in the battle between the euro standard and the dollar standard, I must 
confess a hope that Iraq will sometime lead the way, go back to trading 
its oil in Euros and let the US economy collapse into its own debt.

What I did find to be a rather surprising blind spot in your posting 
however, was a rather unproblematised paradigm of nation vs. nation.  
You speak of "billions of cheap, hardworking Asians" thankfully in the 
plural, but at the same time you still do sound surprisingly like our 
leaders and our upper classes dreaming of the rise of Eendia.  We're not 
talking of replacing one hegemony with another, are we?  This misses the 
point: for what is at stake is is the formation of a new global 
underclass, hard-working or not, and capital so fluent and mercurial 
it's hard to tell who exactly is in charge.   Nevertheless, whatever it 
is, whoever it consists of, there is obviously a NEW global aristocracy 
taking shape, and if it prefers to invest in or inhabit the East as 
opposed to the West (but never, alas, the strangled South) that's not 
necessarily a positive sign.

Transition from the nation?  Good thing, most probably.  But I'm not 
sure at all that the forces you speak of are "inherently progressive and 
revolutionary", not sure at all; isn't it up to us and our imagination 
to seize the moment and ride the forces into progress or liberation?  
Here at Sarai (where I am new) much research goes into illegal networks, 
and it's exciting, but one finds (not so?) that even within the 
subversive chaos there are shifts towards economies of scale, 
specialization, institutionalization of different kinds- and that may 
well, in some cases, mean new bossmen, henchmen, slaves, even at very 
local levels. (Perhaps someone more closely engaged in this research can 
correct me if I'm wrong.) I am concerned that we should not celebrate 
chaos without recognizing it as an ambiguous thing, a moment of 
transformation into a new order that may not be All Good.

So rather than imputing inherent qualities to complex processes that 
will continue to ricochet in several unpredictable directions, OR 
spending too much time praying that Europe recovers its liberal glory 
and saves us all from hellfire, I would rather we attend closely to the 
newly forming hegemonies and the possibilities for diverting, subverting 
and resisting them.  (You will notice I put resistance last; but perhaps 
it is not the least.)

While the iron is hot,
Vivek. 

Keith Hart wrote:

>
>> Sanjay Ghosh spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought 
>> you should see it.
>>
>> To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited 
>> site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk
>>
>> Daring to dream
>> Europe is no utopia but, using Britain as a bridge, it can share its 
>> global vision with the US
>> Jeremy Rifkin
>> Wednesday September 01 2004
>> The Guardian
>>  
>>
>
> I am mystified why an article like this should be posted to the list 
> without comment and apparently without expectation of discussion. More 
> to the point, I haven't a clue how readers might be expected to 
> respond to it. Let me briefly summarise what Rifkin has to say in this 
> puff his new book.
>
> There is a European dream to match the American dream, but it is about 
> transnational community rather than personal enrichment and is "bound 
> to the welfare of the planet". The EU economy is now bigger than that 
> of the US and in many indicators betters it. Europeans work to live 
> and Americans live to work. Britain (wait for this) can be a bridge 
> allowing the "two great superpowers of the 21st century" to synthesise 
> their differences for the benefit of the world as a whole. But the 
> British will have to decide where they think they belong.
>
> I can understand this being peddled in the Guardian to nourish the 
> faltering egos of its British readers. But what is it doing on 
> reader-list? Would most Indian readers easily see this for the 
> moonshine it is or are they expected to adjust their sights to this 
> eternal western hegemony? Dream on.
>
> What Rifkin's ecstatic list of economic indicators fails to point out 
> is that, thanks to the neo-liberal world economy they have jointly 
> sponsored in the last quarter-century, America and Europe have stolen 
> vast sums from the rest of the planet through rigged money markets, 
> debt interest, rents from 'intellectual property' in drugs, food, 
> culture and much else. They have erected a property regime that 
> rewards big money to the cost of everyone else. They police the 
> inequality they have generated with instruments of legal and military 
> coercion.
>
> But this attempt to establish a global command economy is doomed 
> because it depends on unleashing technological and social forces (of 
> which the internet is the most obvious manifestation) that are 
> inherently progressive and revolutionary. The result is the West is 
> becoming more rigid and dependent on high-cost infrastructure while 
> production is moving inexorably elsewhere. Manufactures have already 
> been relocated to Asia, especially China, and anglophone information 
> services are finding their way to India. It is inconceivable to me 
> that the billions of cheap, hardworking Asians will not put this 
> self-appointed global aristocracy out of business -- and long before 
> the 21st century is out. American and Europe economic power is already 
> collapsing under the weight of their attempt to con and bully the rest 
> of humanity into supporting them at a living standard they can't 
> afford. This shift is at one level between generations, since the rich 
> old West can no longer reproduce itself. But it will take some 
> intellectual and political leadership to give shape to this 
> materialist logic.
>
> As a counter-weight to Rifkin's self-serving twaddle, I would strongly 
> recommend a recent posting on the nettime list:
>
> THREE PROPOSALS FOR A REAL DEMOCRACY
> Information-Sharing to a Different Tune
> by Brian Holmes
>
> This can be found at:
>
> http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0408/msg00095.html
>
> But here we begin to tread on the turf of the commons-law list. And as 
> for a dithering Britain, whose creeping constitutional crisis is the 
> subject of an article I published in the Times Higher this week, I 
> will abstain from more comment until I can post a URL.
>
> Keith Hart
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Somehow I have to capture in this pamphlet the absurdity of allowing 
> these American and European banks, drugs companies etc to absorb the 
> wealth produced by the rest of the world including their own citizens. 
> Apart from turning the world's money markets into an unearned bonanza 
> for the US economy via Wall Street and the Fed's management of the 
> dollar, the rents extracted from commodities like drugs are amazing -- 
> the top ten drugs companies in the Fortune 500 made more profit last 
> year than the other 490 together. In the meantime US health costs 
> tripled in a decade and the job market is collapsing under the strain, 
> as it has in France.
>
> My friend Don Billingsley is touting Pat Buchanan's latest, Where the 
> right went wrong, for the clarity of its critique, if not for the 
> constructive policies. I have ordered it. The problem is that the 
> reputation of America and Europe in th erest of the world, like 
> Gilligan's Island post-fiat currency, is much higher than is warranted 
> by current economic realities. And, if Rifkin is anything to go by, 
> they will be able to sit on top of an unending stream of loot 
> indefinitely without even acknowledging where it came from. The 
> Hollywood film industry is a good example of the tendency, since the 
> Brits, having watched their own movie business being killed off by 
> American skulduggery in the 20th century, now insist on sheltering 
> behind this benign special relationship.
>
> i wonder what readers of the Sarai list make of postings like that.
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