• "Given the state of the planet," writes 350.org founder Bill McKibben in his new feature piece for In These Times, it would have been ideal for the world to have fully transitioned its energy systems away from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable sources "25 years ago." But we can still push for the "second best" option, McKibben concludes. To do so, we must move toward wind, solar, and water "as fast as humanly possible." (Common Dreams)

In less than 400 days the US could be relieved of perhaps the stupidest self-proclaimed “environmentalist” in US history. We will need to refocus the post-Trump environmental economy to sustainable goals that reposition the discourse about economic growth, particularly energy production, distribution, and consumption. The Green New Deal is only a start to discussing how labor and education must be central to new national industrial policies.

If the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world, we can see the divisions that are signified by the current nonsense in US politics against the Green New Deal (GND). Recalling the media framing that came with changing global warming to climate change, we need to refine our understanding of environmental messaging. It’s more than about cow farts or plastic straws, and always about the modern against the anti-modern.

This time it’s about the Green New Deal (GND), not simply as legislation but now as political meme. The “common clay” of Blazing Saddles did signify the same racial, class, and gender divisions that will be contested in 2020’s US elections, and the GND will be a battleground if used not as a weapon but as long-term messaging.

Neoliberalism "...is a regime of truth and value that construes all aspects of our world as business enterprises; even human beings are increasingly transformed into a kind of "human capital". In other words, under neoliberalism, we increasingly relate to ourselves as a resource in which we must invest in order to increase our value over time. In such a regime, only capital-enhancing subjects are worthy and only human capital that enhances the credit of the nation, now construed as a business enterprise, will thrive. This is precisely Trump's dream for America."

Trumpism is neoliberalism on steroids, and 2020 campaign financing to defeat it will be no different than previous elections, even if not expressed explicitly.

The financing of primary campaigns and the associated problem of media celebrity incumbency will remain a problem for 2020’s candidates. Even if “money is the mother’s milk of politics”, political engagement should not be seen as a function of small or large donations but a panoply of human participation like GOTV. In 2020 it will include voter suppression using geolocation. It’s always more than money.

...many veterans of Democratic fund-raising believe that the eventual nominee will have to marry a robust network of small-dollar online givers with a high-dollar fund-raising operation in order to both claim the nomination and defeat President Trump.

www.nytimes.com/...

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There are numerous descriptions of the history of industrial revolution and the claim that there is a fourth such revolution remains to be seen, much like the sobriquet of “2.0” to reflect versioned improvement. Technological determinism persists and insists on its inevitable progress, even as we experience the failures of post-Fordism.

The analog world remains, despite digital improvements, and we are pestered by commodity fetishism, the latest of which in telecommunications is “5G”. Most of us with smart phones now use a 4G device that provides an unprecedented amount of communication. More likely your next phone replaced by obsolescence will be more biometric in terms of user interface and access safeguards.

Our online sincerity is now tested by a variety of technologies, some biometric, others because there’s enough bandwidth to provide live, visual full-motion communication, but also there’s the processing speed to consult multiple large databases of personal information. “Googling someone” is changing.

Will your presence, your social being, be valued by some external system of credit much as your “credit rating” now measures your net worth and for some your social status.

Even more insidious will be social interactions valued instantaneously by technology comparing databases with few controls on privacy. “Background checks” will be more intrusive, as entire cottage industries will develop to “improve your social credit standing”.

AntiCapitalist MeetUp 27.I.2019 Draconian democracy and deconstructing the administrative state

Like Caliguila’s horse, Draco (not the Harry Potter one) ordered death penalties for cabbage theft, but had no cure for a leader who also had the mind of one. The Trump Cabinet continues to surprise us with its classist ignorance of worker misery, as the federal worker lock-out ended Friday, timed primarily to take attention from the #TrumpRussia arrest of Roger Stone.

Imagine this story…

"These bureaucrats only think of their political résumés as they destroy capitalism," she says. "They want students to focus on studying Christianity, not to practice it or fight for its cause. When we do that, it causes too many problems for them."

Christian youths are being targeted and blacklisted by local authorities at other schools, too. Earlier this month, plainclothes police assaulted and hauled away Christian students at X University, in the eastern US, after their school refused to recognize their on-campus Christian student society. Two weeks ago, a graduate of Y University was attacked and dragged into a car on campus by several people in black jackets.

[...]

"I think this shows the dominant political party can no longer justify itself," says historian Z. "While the party talks about serving the people, The US has actually been practicing socialism."

Historian Z says young Americans being arrested for practicing Christianity — the official belief system of the Republican Party — poses the latest conundrum for the country's leadership, whom he blames for feigning interest in Christianity in order to maintain a guiding principle.

"Since the current leader came to power, many colleges have established Christian study centers, and that leads to a conflict for the ruling party," says historian Z. "You're brainwashing the youth with Christian theory, but by doing so, you're giving them a tool to fight against the government."

It's also a tool young people can use to defend themselves when authorities arrest them, says historian Z. "It's like a child using his ancestor's tombstone to protect himself from an abusive parent."

A new Podcast series from Economic Update and Democracy at Work is worth your attention.

"The biggest capital power in London is of course the Bank of England, but its position as a semi-state institution makes it impossible for it to assert its domination in so brutal a fashion. Nonetheless, it too is sufficiently capable of looking after itself... Inasmuch as the Bank issues notes that are not backed by the metal reserve in its vaults, it creates tokens of value that are not only means of circulation, but also forms additional - even if fictitious - capital for it, to the nominal value of these fiduciary notes, and this extra capital yields it an extra profit." Marx, Karl. Capital, volume 3. Penguin. pp. 674–675.

Someone who had the time and wherewithal will probably have a first-hand report on this past weekend’s recent 2nd annual Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) conference in NYC.

Until that happens it seemed important to remind ourselves how important MMT is to progressive politics and how a radical political economy approach requires the continuing research work in this area, albeit largely academic. For a MMT primer go to this link.

It is one of the few contemporary movements that from a double-coding or even a dual coding perspective has the advantage of implying socialist solutions without ever having to mention socialism or Marx.

This is not a trivial matter, considering the ignorance of the US populace.

MMT is not necessarily a socialist stalking horse, but its adoption by folks like Bernie Sanders, provides one of many tools for how the current idiocy can be brought under control.

Agita and agitprop are the current features of what purports to be Trumpian US policy in numerous areas of contradiction, whether it’s international trade chaos or racist border policies.

Some writers would like to attribute child-like motives to current WH policies, considering the use of tweets as “official statements”, however false, infantile, and irrational. SAD! As if preying on mass anxiety was a useful policy.

The political economy of capitalism is also virtual because it is spatial and temporal.

As those who have followed stuff I’ve written here before, I have more than a passing interest in working-out a viable model of virtual capital. Such a model would allow a dimensional digital policy analysis of intangible assets, whether property rights, social networks, infrastucture networks, or financial capital.

So this is another peek at the literature review with the hope that you’ll find it interesting in terms of a capitalist critique. Apologies in advance for its ‘theoretical’ nature and its continuing visit to the work of David Harvey.

We argue here that the digital spaces formed by technologies such as the Internet are experimental spaces where capital seeks freedom from contemporary limits:

Old strategies of accumulation are re-attempted in new spaces and new strategies are crafted through trial and error in the never-ending quest to surpass or displace the internal contradictions which lead to crisis.

The concept we use to describe this is the digital spatial fix. We use this concept to find new sites of accumulation and crisis formation. This shows that while the fundamentals of the cycle of capital circulation have not varied from Marx’s original analysis, it has found novel methods, appropriate to the contemporary historical context, to attempt to escape its inherent limits.

In what follows we will briefly situate our description of digital spaces as fixes for overaccumulated capital within the literatures of the political economy of communication, geographies of economic crisis, and theorizations of the “network society”.

Then, mirroring Harvey’s description of three spatial fixes, we will describe three experimental digital spatial fixes we see operating in the current political economy:

• the primitive accumulation of time in social media,
• the annihilation of time by space via financial infrastructure, and
• the rise of affect rent in marketplaces for digital commodities.

We conclude by reflecting on the questions these conceptual foundations pose for further research, especially regarding the links between

• these digital spaces,
• the temporality of accumulation, and
• more traditional geographies of crisis.

The goal throughout is not to catalog the potential of digital spaces to act as spatial fixes, but to model a spatial approach to digital media

The Digital Spatial Fix Daniel Greene* and Daniel Joseph, tripleC 13(2): 223–247, 2015 http://www.triple-c.at CC: Creative Commons License, 2015.

www.microsoft.com/...

The problem remains in trying to disentagle the notion of digital spaces and the temporality of accumulation in the indeterminate and uncertain geographies of crisis in late capitalism. Harvey holds to a kind of “fixity” that for interpretation and explanation requires some dynamic simulation or representations for modeling.