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Yanis’ view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.
Looking beyond capitalism

Our global predicament changed radically after 2008, the year the western financial system imploded. Following twenty-five years of financialisation, under the ideological cloak of neoliberalism, global capitalism had a 1929-like spasm that nearly brought it to its knees. The immediate reaction was to use the central banks’ printing presses, but also to transfer bank losses to the working and middle classes (via bailout loans), so as to re-float financial institutions and markets. This combination of socialism for the financialised few and stringent austerity for the masses did two things.

First, it depressed real investment globally (as firms could see that the masses had little to spend on new goods and services), thus creating a gigantic gap between (a) real investment and (b) available cash and savings (boosted massively by government money printing). The result was discontent amongst the many and stupendous riches for the very few. Secondly, it gave rise initially to progressive uprisings (from the Indignados in Spain and the Aganaktismeni in Greece to the Occupy Wall Street movement and various left-wing forces in Latin America) who were, however, efficiently dealt with either by the Establishment directly (e.g. the crushing of the Greek Spring in 2015) or indirectly by the stagnation of global capitalism (e.g. the fading of leftist Latin American governments as Chinese demand for their exports collapsed due to the imbalance between global savings and global investment).

Yet that gift keeps on giving. Consider what happed on 12th August 2020, the day the news broke that the British economy had suffered its greatest slump ever. The London Stock Exchange jumped by more than 2%! Nothing comparable had ever occurred. Similar developments unfolded in Wall Street, in the United States. My interpretation is that, when Covid-19 met the gargantuan bubble with which governments and central banks have been zombifying corporations and financial institutions since 2008, financial markets finally decoupled from the underlying capitalist economy causing capitalism to evolve surreptitiously into a horrid postcapitalism – not, of course, the postcapitalism that convinced socialists once envisioned.

We need seriously to take into account the possibility that capitalism is not only worth terminating but, more pressingly, that capitalism has already undermined itself. Ιt is crucial to imagine what a postcapitalist world might be like.

To be desirable, it would feature markets for goods and services since the alternative –a Soviet-type rationing system that vests arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats – is too dreary for words. But to be crisis-proof, there is one market that market socialism cannot afford to feature: The labour market. Why? Because, once labour time has a rental price, the market mechanism inexorably pushes it down while commodifying every aspect of work (and, in the Age of Facebook, of our leisure even). The greater the system’s success in doing this, the less the exchange value of each unit of output it generates, the lower the average profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next systemic crisis.

Can an advanced economy function without labour markets? Of course it can. Consider the principle of one-employee-one-share-one-vote. Amending corporate law so as to turn every employee into an equal (though not equally remunerated) partner, via granting them a non-tradeable one-person-one-share-one-vote, is as unimaginably radical today as universal suffrage used to be in the 19th Century.

By granting employee-partners the right to vote in the corporation’s general assemblies, an idea proposed by the early anarcho-syndicalists, the distinction between wages and profits is terminated and democracy, at last, enters the workplace – with the new digital collaborative tools standing by to remove all inefficiencies that would otherwise hamper the prospects of a democratically-run corpo-syndicalist firm. Besides the democratisation of firms, it would bring the demise of share markets and terminate the need for gargantuan debt to fund mergers and acquisitions.

Already, some Central Banks are thinking of providing every adult with a free bank account. If this goes ahead in a society without share markets, why would you want an account with a private bank? Once debt leverage linked to share markets and personal banking disappear, so does commercial banking. Goldman Sachs and the like become extinct – without even the need to ban them.

What if we were to take this idea further, proposing that the Central Bank also credits each such account with a fixed monthly stipend (a universal basic dividend). As everyone would use their central bank account to make domestic payments, most of the money minted by the central bank will be transferred within its ledger. Additionally, the central bank can grant all new-borns a trust fund, to be used when they grow up.

Thus, persons would receive two types of income: The dividends credited into their central bank account. And earnings from working in a corpo-syndicalist company. Neither need be taxed – the end of income and sales taxes (VAT). Instead, three types of taxes fund this type of government: A 5% tax on the raw revenues of the corpo-syndicalist firms. A carbon tax. And proceeds from leasing land (which belongs in its entirety to the community) for private, time-limited, use.

Once this principle is embraced, a market-socialist blueprint almost writes itself. Freed from corporate power, unshackled from the indignity imposed upon the needy by the welfare state, and liberated from the tyranny of the profits-wages tug-of-war, persons and communities can begin to imagine new ways of deploying their talents and creativity.

As far as climate change is concerned, we know what we must do. Power generation must shift massively from fossil fuels to renewables, wind and solar primarily. Land transport must be electrified while air transport and shipping must turn to new zero-carbon fuels (e.g. hydrogen). Meat production needs to diminish substantially, with greater emphasis on organic plant crops. Strict limits on physical growth (from toxins to cement) are of the essence.

All these merely circumscribe some of the elements of a postcapitalism worth fighting, and living, for. And an escape from the dystopian postcapitalism that currently awaits us.

Professor Yanis Varoufakis is a member of the Hellenic Parliament, the Secretary-General of MeRA25, and a professor of economic theory at the University of Athens. He is the co-founder of DiEM25, member of the Progressive International’s Council, and the former finance minister of Greece. He is the author of several books, including the postcapitalist political sci-fi Another Now, as well as Adults in the Room and And The Weak Suffer What They Must?.

Paul’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.
Capitalism is no thing: we make it up

Capitalism, to use Aristotle’s terminology, is not a natural kind. That is, there is no thing in nature that is Capitalism. When we use this term we are speaking of a series of collectively believed and enacted human inventions that are continuously being reinvented, and that can be reinvented in very different ways to the prevailing norms under which we now live. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith describes how the utility companies of the 1880s invented mega-banks and mega-corporations which entirely changed what ‘capitalism’ before that time was. Equally, Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of 21st surveillance capitalism is an entirely new form of commercial power which has changed the way commercial and political realities now function. ‘Capitalism’ is an ever moving feast (or famine, depending on who you are).

There is, of course, a real world that cannot be simply constructed. This real world is occupied by real beings, and, at bottom, real wealth is the basis of any human commercial and economic structure; but real wealth and real beings do not have a dollar value other than as fabricated abstractions, for monetary value is a human construction premised on the prior existence of real beings and real wealth.

To explore ‘post-capitalist’ ways of thinking about wealth, natural and human flourishing, and political power, does not imply that ‘capitalism’ is a fixed and known reference point in reality that we are thinking ‘after’. There never was a natural reality called Capitalism.

The way financial, economic and political norms now work (call this Capitalism if you will) needs to change, radically. It is destroying the earth. It is destroying the ideological landscape that is presupposed for liberal democratic politics. It is astonishingly and unsustainably unfair. And, to the theologically inclined (such as Pope Francis) our present predatory and exploitative economic norms are an affront to divine reality, and all transcendent horizons.

Capitalism as we experience it today is astonishingly and unsustainably un-fair because this is a system of power that constructs two classes of people in the world – the superrich and the rest.

Deutsche Bank has loaned Donald Trump over $2 billion, but after Kristallnacht resonate riots in Washington in January 2021, Deutsche Bank decided to sever ties with Trump, even though he still owes them $300 million. It may well be too hard for them to get that money back, and they may well just forgive him that amount in order to be rid of him. To the super-rich, $300 million is petty cash that hardly needs to be accounted for. But for the rest of us, this is an unimaginably large amount of money. Merchant banks also live in another world to the rest of us. The volume of funds moved in currency and derivative trading is orders of magnitude larger than the globe’s actual economy; financial power and actual reality have no contact with each other, and yet power lies with finance rather than reality. This is not only morally and politically unsustainable, this is the means whereby the integrity of the globe’s biosphere itself is being ransacked.

One thing that the superrich understand is that money is not a natural kind. We make it up. They make it up to subjugate the rest of us, to live in exorbitant luxury, and to refuse to share with justice the resources of the earth for the flourishing of all. They make up money so that it is a tool of power that is much more significant than political power. This needs to change. We need to make things up differently.

Dr Paul Tyson is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland’s  Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Tyson is an integral thinker who works across philosophy, theology and sociology. Metaphysics and epistemology, understood not only philosophically and theoretically, but equally theologically and sociologically, are his areas of interest. At present he is a Principal Investigator and the Project Co-coordinator for the “After Science and Religion” project, run through IASH. This project stems from Professor Peter Harrison’s 2015 text, The Territories of Science and Religion, and seeks to re-think what both science and religion could look like as we move forward.

Nicholas‘ view on postcapitalism – a contribution to mέta:

Is post-capitalism a useful analytical construct? Well, maybe. There is no date on the birth certificate of capitalism, nor is it possible to put a date for its demise. Nevertheless, more than 17 decades ago, in a descriptive, analytical, revolutionary, and visionary manifesto, the young Marx and Engels had described the creative and destructive nature of capitalism. We live in a different world now, where the driving forces of capitalism, economic, social, political, and ecological have taken us.

Globalization, physical and virtual, is today much more complex and intensified. It changes the nature of economic competition and facilitates the concentration and centralization of capital and the real subsumption of labor to it. The increased mobility of capital and its migration to low-wage economies bereft of workers’ rights has put pressure on wages and workers’ rights in the industrialized economies of the West and increased the precariousness of employment for large parts of the working class, and throws working people into poverty. The fall of the Soviet countervailing power and the defeat of the Left has left capital – international and domestic – to enforce its terms on labour reversing the gains made by the latter after the Second World War. The winner-takes-all technology, the enhanced possibility of surveillance and control, the manufacturing of consent, and manipulation of information and opinion formation all had led to a society of increased inequality of wealth, income, access to education and health, and living conditions. Changes in the economy led to changes in politics.

Neoliberal policies require increasingly authoritarian solutions. The discontent of the people is not capitalized by the Left but by xenophobic and nationalistic politicians offering easy solutions and blaming immigrants for their country’s predicament. In Brussels, a wasteful and unaccountable bureaucracy selectively uses a discredited economic theory to create an economic universe of supposedly free-market, and hence ‘optimal’, arrangements. They impose an artificial non-market regime that serves the ends of the bureaucracy and the European capital and enforces austerity on the peoples of the EU. They use the repayment of an unpayable debt as one of its main instruments under the guise of EU solidarity while assuming the Calvinist moral high ground.

There are no obvious or easy ways out of this dystopia. The pandemic only exacerbated and made it clear for all to see the limits and contradictions of the capitalist order and its virulent mutations. There is no silver bullet to kill the vampire. We must fight from below on all fronts.

As an educator, let me offer a glimpse of a possible utopia or a facet of it. “For a world in which everyone can be a scholar”, a phrase suggested to me by a close friend and comrade. As it is today, education, especially tertiary education, is becoming increasingly inaccessible to the many, and the educational process itself follows a ‘business model’ that mimics the ‘efficiency experts’ practices on the shopfloor, streamlined and inimical to critical thinking. Imagine, instead of a market-oriented education commanded by bureaucrats, an education free for all at any level. Scholarships would be amply available even for those who cannot afford “free” education. Teaching should be done with a view to promoting critical thinking, and the assessment of teachers and institutions should be freed from inane and distorting metrics betraying their Taylorist origins. Research conducted in state-funded institutions should be published in open-access journals and books. Society would have changed the intellectual property laws and made it possible for anyone with internet access to enjoy the fruits of human genius. Public educational institutions should devote more time to allowing the diffusion of their research and ideas to the general public with an open-access model that would make it possible for everyone to be a scholar, even without a formal tie to the academic world. We would then have a more open, more democratic, more critical, more informed, more inclusive society, a society of dialogue, and ultimately a more productive society. In such a society, production will serve the needs of the many.

Professor Nicholas Theocarakis is a professor of economic theory and history of economic thought at the University of Athens. He studied Economics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at the Churchill College of Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1979 and would later receive his doctorate in economics. He has co-authored Modern Political Economics: Making sense of the post-2008 world with Yanis Varoufakis and Joseph Halevi. In March 2015, he was appointed General Secretary of Fiscal Policy, leading the technical negotiations of the Greek Ministry of Finance with the Eurogroup. 

Shyrin and Shoja’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
George Orwell

We have arrived at crossroads, facing the abyss on one side and the possibility of rebirth on the other. The future of capitalism is the abyss. It has already begun its plunge into mania, turbocharging at neck break speed, the destruction of the natural world, and fragmentation of the human spirit. At this juncture, alienation of our labor and our commodified living will feel nostalgic as we enter a simulated world, where we will be mere aliens in a world that belongs to the machines and their owners.  As we know it, the dominant art and culture are co-opted, lost their vanguard spirit, and have become means of production of illusion, worship of celebrity, greed, competition, and careerism. They will soon function as stimulants to some pleasure center buried in the depth of our alien souls. We’ll be slaves in the orgies of bread and circuses, worshiping the so-called rational Gods of science and technology and looking with awe at our superhuman masters’ biologically augmented Pharaohs. Never before the fall into the abyss has been so evident and tangible as capitalism enters its final race.

Yet, through its contradictions, historical capitalism has opened up another possibility, that of the birth of a new social order, perhaps a painful birth, but the real potentiality of new dawn nonetheless. Never before, the human material condition has been favorable to imagine and build a social and existential world where humans live in peace and harmony with each other and nature. Art and culture must be a vehicle of such imagination and possibility. It should inspire us with wonderment and awe at the very mystery of being and what really matters. We, humans, are storytellers and hence capable of writing a new tale for our destiny.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works with the mediums of photography, video and film. Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide, including the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Detroit Institute of the Arts; the Serpentine Gallery, London. A major retrospective of her work, “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again,” was recently held at The Broad Museum, Los Angeles and is currently on view at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Neshat has been the recipient of the Golden Lion Award – the First International Prize at the 48thVenice Biennial (1999), The Davos World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award (2014), and the Praemium Imperiale (2017). Neshat has directed two feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, and Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017). In 2017, Neshat also directed her first opera, AIDA at the Salzburg Music Festival, in Austria. Shirin Neshat is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels and Goodman Gallery, London, Johannesburg, and Cape Town.

Shoja Azari is an Iranian born filmmaker and visual artist who lives and works in New York. Azari’s feature films, “K,” “Windows,” “Women Without Men,” and “Simple Little Lives” have been screened widely at film festivals around the world. “Women Without Men” Co-Directed with the renowned, filmmaker, visual artist Shirin Neshat, brought the directors the highly prestigious award of the Silver lion (Best Director) at the 2009 Venice international film festival. Azari’s art works are in major collections, including (LACMA) La County Museum of art, (MOCA) Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (MUSAC) The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León among others. Shoja Azari and Shirin Neshat’s most recent feature film collaboration is “Land of Dreams” expected to be released late 2021 and “Looking For Oum Kulthum” which was widely released in 2017. “Badria”, Azari’s own latest feature film, was shot in Morocco in 2018 in collaboration with the young filmmaker Rodin Hamidi.

Anish’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

Rape terrifyingly but accurately describes our sad predicament.
The rape of our natural world and its resources.
Profit at any cost, human or environmental seems to be the ruling dictum.
Rape of our people forced into the drudgery of unfulfilling work for wages that can hardly sustain life with more than half our populations across the globe in abject poverty.
Rape of our culture as it is increasingly enslaved to the capitalist desire for commodity.
Rape of our psychic life as we are enticed into the barbaric fantasy of Nationalism

We are it seems at the edge of a precipice bereft of direction and helplessly expectant of renewal. Progressive politics has yet to articulate a way forward while divisive political realities the world over, ominously hold sway as we artists, poets and political thinkers seem out of touch with the mood of the people.

mέta proposes a coalition of poetic political and anthropological thinkers bringing together artists, politicians, psychoanalysts and philosophers to confront the violence that seems to shadow every human interaction.

Perhaps it is in this liminal space between poetry politics and the transcendent that a new psychic territory can be uncovered that might help lead us out of our stasis and into a different spirit that address with compassion the aspirations and hopes of us all.

This urgent work awaits us.

Anish Kapoor (British/Indian, b.1954) is regarded as one of the most prominent British-Indian sculptors of his generation. He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s; Kapoor is well known for his intense, almost spiritual, outdoor and indoor site-specific works in which he marries a Modernist sense of pure materiality with a fascination for the manipulation of form and the perception of space. Kapoor, who was born in Bombay and moved to London in the 1970s to study art, first worked on abstract and organic sculptures using fundamental natural materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment, and plaster. His sculptures extend formal minimalistic precepts through catching the viewer’s attention with rich colors, sensuously refined surfaces, and optical effects of depth and dimension. Since the mid-1990s, Kapoor has explored the notion of the void by creating works that seem to recede into the distance, disappear into walls or floors, or otherwise destabilize assumptions about the physical world. Through transforming properties of objects and materials, Kapoor’s recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture, design, and art. He received great critical attention in the United States for Cloud Gate, a permanent 110-ton sculpture of polished stainless steel created for Chicago’s Millennium Park in 2006, and for Sky Mirror, a 35-foot-diameter concave mirror shown in the same year at Rockefeller Center in New York. Kapoor has reached international status, with solo exhibitions at venues around the world, such as the Tate and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In 2015, a major exhibition of his work was presented in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and received the Turner Prize in the following year. Kapoor’s work can be found in collections worldwide, notably in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Prada Art Foundation in Milan, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He is represented by various galleries including Leslie Sacks Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA and Grosvenor Gallery in London.

James’ view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

At our first meeting in 1981, a distinguished Member of Congress – they did exist back then – Richard Bolling, Chair of the Rules Committee, remarked to me that “once in a generation we have to buy back the capital stock.”
 
As Bolling remembered, capitalism had failed in 1930.  After 1930 there was a contest of systems: communism, fascism, and the social democratic New Deal. In the aftermath of the Second World War, two remained; after 1991, only one.  Without the discipline of the Cold War, social democracy reverted to financial capitalism, and as predatory systems will do, financial capitalism ultimately collapsed a second time. The pandemic like all revolutions kicked in the rotten door.
 
The pandemic exposed the con at the heart of extreme capitalism. The banks and vast industries – such as airlines, hotels, spas, resorts and much of the fossil fuels sector – were kept afloat thanks only to aggressive support from the central banks.  But basic health supplies, such as masks, gowns, and sterilizing alcohol, ran short, as did food for food banks, while schools and millions of service businesses closed and tens of millions lost their jobs.
 
And yet, the pandemic also revealed possibilities for the post-capitalist world.  In large parts of Asia, social solidarity held, public health plans worked, and the virus was effectively suppressed, after which economic and social life returned and production to meet the world’s needs for essential supplies and eventually vaccines resumed. This was true in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and also in scattered places elsewhere, notably in New Zealand and in Cuba.  
 
Even in the West, governments in 2020 proved that they can write checks and maintain entire populations if they choose to do so, such are the fruits of agriculture and advanced production in the digital age.  Energy use declined, the air cleared and the water too, in some places. Networks of communication, mutual aid, political organization and protest against social injustice took hold.  In America in 2020, in huge numbers, people voted: twenty million more than only four years before.
 
So as the pandemic recedes, vistas appear that were not apparent before. If as Keynes wrote the Great War disclosed the possibilities of consumption and the folly of abstinence, the pandemic teaches new lessons.  With imagination and will, we now know, new and better ways to provide work, income, education, culture, old-age and health security and free time can be devised.  Resources can be mobilized for better living, sustainable within the global carbon budget as proposed by the authors of the Green New Deal.  And unpayable debts incurred before the world changed can (and must) be written down, equalizing at a stroke the distribution of wealth.
 
Against this prospect, oligarchs quiver, militarists mutter incantations and foster armed conflicts, the tech giants deepen surveillance, and economists, ever diligent servants of finance, offer optimistic forecasts as a substitute for social action.  They have often prevailed in the past, and may again.  Or perhaps they will not.  

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and a professorship in Government at The University of Texas at Austin. Galbraith holds degrees from Harvard University (AB) and in economics from Yale University (MA, M.Phil, PhD). He was Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress in the early 1980s. He chaired the board of Economists for Peace and Security from 1996 to 2016 and directs the University of Texas Inequality Project . He is a managing editor of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. From 1993 to 1997 Galbraith served as Chief Technical Adviser for Macroeconomic Reform to the State Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China, under a contract with the United Nations Development Program. In 2010, he was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 2014 he was co-winner with Angus Deaton of the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economics. In 2020 he received the Veblen-Commons Award of the Association for Evolutionary Economics. He holds academic honors from universities in Ecuador, France and the Russian Federation. Galbraith’s recent books include: Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (2016); Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016); The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014); Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (2012). The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008)

Brian’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

Post capitalism won’t suddenly appear with a big bang like the fall of the Berlin Wall. We’ll all be living it before we realise it has happened. In fact we have been living it, or at least the beginning of it. It’s already starting, beginning its slow and painful evolution with unexpected green shoots poking up above the surface. It isn’t really on the media radar because the radar is pointed in the wrong direction – towards governments and corporations and pundits, the old seats of power. All of those have an interest in maintaining the old story, which is why, even if they’ve noticed it, they aren’t going to tell us  the new one.

Those green shoots? People forming co-ops and mutual aid groups, refuting the ideology of individualism by their pragmatic cooperativism. Young people refusing to work for employers who don’t behave sustainably. More and more people signing more and more petitions demanding rights and accountability. A universal ‘pro-inclusion’ movement (unhelpfully labelled ‘anti-discrimination’). The increasingly conspicuous obscenity of extreme inequality. Mark Carney telling the world’s bankers that current forms of capitalism aren’t fit for purpose in any foreseeable future. The collapse of libertarian utopianism in the face of reality. The old political divisions no longer representative of anything that matters, and at the same time unexpected coalitions between previously hostile sectors. The lessons of Covid: that science works where ideology flounders; that macho leaders and magical thinking can’t fight viral reality; that the insane anti-mask individualism of the right is uncomfortably close to the victim-individualism of the left. 

It’s happening. We who for so long thought ourselves the exceptions, fighting a lonely battle, are now the rule. Nearly everybody is on our side, but we haven’t yet realised that we are a side. When we do, that’s when it really starts. 

Brian Eno is an English musician, record producer, visual artist, and theorist best known for his pioneering work in ambient music and contributions to rock, pop and electronica. A self-described “non-musician”, Eno has helped introduce unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music’s most influential and innovative figures. Born in Suffolk, Eno studied painting and experimental music at the art school of Ipswich Civic College in the mid1960s, and then at Winchester School of Art. He joined glam rock group Roxy Music as synthesizer player in 1971, recording two albums with the group but departing in 1973 amidst tensions with Roxy frontman Bryan Ferry. Eno went on to record a number of solo albums beginning with Here Come the Warm Jets (1974). In the mid-1970s, he began exploring a minimalist direction on releases such as Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), coining the term “ambient music” with the latter. Alongside his solo work, Eno collaborated frequently with other musicians in the 1970s, including Robert Fripp, Harmonia, Cluster, Harold Budd, David Bowie, and David Byrne. He also established himself as a sought-after producer, working on albums by John Cale, Jon Hassell, Laraaji, Talking Heads, Ultravox, and Devo, as well as the no wave compilation No New York (1978). In subsequent decades, Eno continued to record solo albums and produce for other artists, most prominently U2 and Coldplay, alongside work with artists such as Daniel Lanois, Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, Slowdive, Karl Hyde, James, Kevin Shields, and Damon Albarn. Dating back to his time as a student, Eno has also worked in other media, including sound installations, film, and writing. In the mid-1970s, he co-developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking. From the 1970s onwards, Eno’s installations have included the sails of the Sydney Opera House in 2009 and the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in 2016. An advocate of a range of humanitarian causes, Eno writes on a variety of subjects and is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation. In 2019, Eno was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Roxy Music.

Nick’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.
On Cosmopolitanism and its Discontent

Cosmopolitanism is neither the fictive invention of an individual mind, nor the unique fetish shared by a specific group.  Cosmopolitanism may never become a geo-political entity with an organizational structure and a leadership group. There has never been a cosmopolitan top-down agenda, but cosmopolitanism has perdured from the bottom – outwards. We should not wait for cosmo-liberators, but that does not mean we have no regard for material resources and external exigencies. To see how it transpires, in either the indignation against the constriction of the commons or the in the creation of other worlds, we will need a new approach for understanding companionship in the world. Cosmopolitanism is always there because it is in the air. It is never revealed or discovered as an entity, as it is only experienced and imagined as a process. It is neither the product of individual will, nor the found amidst historical ruins. It is not an object that can be measured, but it reveals itself in the constant trace of fellowship. Looking for cosmopolitanism in the map of empires or the building of state institutions is an exercise in disenchantment. The Ancients Greeks believed that love for the city was the best form of defense of the city. The love of cosmopolitanism is not a renunciation of the place you belong to and an abstract declaration of love for everything and anywhere. It is on the contrary a love for a place determined from the freedom to love all places. It is a love of here that is burnished through the exposure to everywhere. Cosmopolitanism is not just an escape from the self-imposed strictures of provincialism. It is the widest possible form of belonging and being. 

H. G. Wells captured the paradoxical status of cosmopolitanism. Despite its constant allure and perpetual speculations, at no stage has any city been built on the ideals of cosmopolitanism. It is always in the air. Yet, the idea never vanished like all impossible ideals should. On the contrary, even in the absence of any material manifestation, it keeps returning in mutant forms. This tension between the conceptual and the material may lead us to yearn for a coming cosmopolitanism. But this could miss the point that it also exists in every moment in time. It is formed through an appeal to the reality of the idea, and not in response to a reality in the world. In this singular, fleeting, bubbling action of relations a moment of time glistens into being and becomes something that is grasped as it disappears without a trace. It is there in the actuality of the moment, but nothing is left behind. No trace, no record, neither a concrete claim on history nor a direct political proposition. Like contemporary art, we can ask of cosmopolitanism, is that it? And, yet in its experience there is also an irrefutable presence, a reiteration of its actual existence. Cosmopolitanism is always there in history even if it leaves no trace of itself. It is there in the capacity to refer to something that is bigger than the ego and wider than the place in which our sense of the world is formed. This capacity to think and connect, to go beyond that which is at hand, opens up the constant but fleeting possibility and always unique experience of being cosmopolitan. Therefore the paradoxical expression that that the cosmos is coming is neither a nostalgic lament, nor a wallowing expectation, it is the constitutive tension that creates cosmopolitanism. There is no cosmopolitanism without the sudden, seemingly novel and unannounced, eruption of creation. 

Nikos Papastergiadis is Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures and Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Professor in the School of Art, Design and Media, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Chair of the International Advisory Board for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore. Co-chair of the Cultural Advisory Board for the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, Melbourne. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004) Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012), Ambient Perspectives (2014),  On Art and Friendship (2020), The Museums of the Commons (2020) as well as being the author of numerous essays which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwanju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13.

Preethi ‘s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

Collective action for our collective future

  1. Trying to recollect the turn of the last year of the last decade has felt like recounting the end of a noisy party.

Indeed 2019 was loud. It was the year of the “young protester,” with far reaching repercussions from Sudan to Lebanon, from Iraq to Chile. Young civilians mobilised on the streets and online, documenting ground realities, and de-escalating confrontations with remarkable poise. For those of us sitting on the sidelines, a new avatar of activism emerged and rapidly evolved. At unprecedented rates, activists plugged into social media networks, manifesting into national demonstrations on social justice issues that resonated across the world.

And then a screeching halt. The movement flatlined – physically and figuratively.

  1. One of the most debilitating health-crises known to several generations numbed the euphoria. The air, sound and optic waves became consumed by the fear of contagion. The streets went silent.
  2. The silence is stirring. Listen closely and you will hear the first murmurs of a collective movement towards post-capitalism.

The pandemic has not stifled the global-local impetus for change. The unsung heroines and heroes of 2019, some of whom are migrating against the tide or staying while others leave – they are still fighting. Many are carving out roles for themselves as agents of change amid national crises, while amplifying the voices of others without agency.

At a time when border restrictions between the global north and south are at their most restrictive, we are paradoxically drawn closer by our similar quests for equity. More than ever, political strife and disparities in the so-called developed north share the travails of the south. Intersectional interests are gaining new ground. Whether these voices of collective actions are reaching a “critical mass” in their own contexts has become less clear, since the pandemic took over global attention.

The pandemic period has forced a pause on most activity. This period has shown the worst consequences of governments and corporations being bedfellows and wielding draconian powers to preserve each other’s prosperity. As we continue to grapple over vaccine acquisitions, distributions and rollouts, labour markets and entire economies are teetering towards collapse.

Those of us featured in this Advisory Board have had the privilege of using this pause to ponder and posture. But this escalating crisis beckons action. How we can better capture the combined impact of collective actions across the globe? How can we stir the silence into renewed efforts? How can social justice movements across continents be linked to each other, in ways that erode the artificial boundaries between the global north and south? Amid a historic crisis that has left none of us unscathed, we have a unique opportunity. We can trigger new thinking and collective actions that pivot the world towards horizontal power structures.

This could be the beginning of dismantling the corporate capitalist architectures that have dominated our economies, societies and collective psyches. We simply cannot lose more time.

Writer, researcher and visual storyteller, Preethi Nallu reports on the topics of migration and freedom of expression for news media, UN agencies, think tanks and advocacy groups. Born in Iran, raised in India, Preethi has lived and worked in 15 countries across the globe. 

Preethi started covering migration in the Occupied Palestinian Territories during the 2008 Gaza War. She moved to the Thai-Myanmar border in 2010 to report about the lives of displaced ethnic minorities amid political reforms. As new waves of refugees arrived in Europe, following the ‘Arab Spring’ events, Preethi covered the Mediterranean and Balkan crossings as founding editor at Refugees Deeply. As borders to Europe closed in 2016, she started documenting the conditions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and deportations of Afghan refugees from Europe. She is now working in Central America, with a focus on Mexico as a “buffer zone” for asylum seekers arriving from the region.

Additionally, Preethi leads a global media collaborations program at Copenhagen based International Media Support. She carries out advocacy campaigns related to freedom of expression and safety of journalists and rights advocates in countries of the global south. 

Beral’s view on postcapitalism. – A contribution to mέta.

Modernist east-west intersections, ongoing dichotomy between visible and invisible partners; on the roots of today’s political, economic, cultural crisis.

As a curator and art critic from Turkey, I am observing and interpreting the socio-political and economic state of affairs in the region and its international relations from a position of being used to live continuously in dilemmas and crisis. Most of the time I deeply recognize the effects of the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, when the national borders were mapped regardless to the ethnic and traditional realities. The expired Modernist identicalness, identity and consciousness, similarities in Capitalism and its political, social and cultural infrastructures, conditions of Post-modernism could not erase the deep-rooted conflicts.

The East-West discourse, which is the victorious invention of 20th century capitalism, is still prevailing under other titles. Various classifications that survive despite the narratives of globalism has roots in differences between Greek and Chinese world views and philosophical origins and became popular during the Orientalism movement of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The concept often defines the West as an objective analytical society, usually in regards to technology and industrial advancement. In contrast, the East is viewed as a subjective intuitive-based society, usually emphasizing spirituality and mysticism.
Has this definition changed?

It is reflected in various forms and concepts in art, demography, education, history, ideology, linguistics, medicine, philosophy, politics, psychology, science-fiction, and sociology and gender roles. Throughout 20th century, up until the 80’s in the Western art historical discourse, the East was a resource for inspiration but not a partner for cultural dialogue. Dialogue, under the rather “behind schedule” influence of post-colonial, post-structural and post-modern discourse started in the 90’s and it is an ongoing process, which is for two decades is rather polluted by Neo-capitalism and religious narratives.

Who is influencing the global culture & art now? Considering the heterogeneous populations in the mega cities, with continuous flow of refugees and migrants, the control is not an easy task of official or private culture policies. The West has conquered the East politically and culturally in the past, but since 1990 that expansion is confronting a dramatic reversal. Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. Now, the scholars of the East are deconstructing this language under the conditions of Neo-capitalism and religious dogmas.

Turkey is one of the first countries which adopted itself into the 20. century conditions, in comparison to its neighbors; that is before 1990, when the Soviet countries still lived in socialism and communism. This could happen in spite of the anti-democratization process of the 1980’s military coup. Culture industry became independent and privatized; the last culture-scape is what one can see in Istanbul even if there is still a problematic gap of theoretical and practical infrastructures and analyses of artistic and creative productions.

The well programmed interest and projects of EU cultural policy to the art and culture scenes of South Caucasus, Middle East towards West-Asia from 1990 on revealed a remarkable counter-offensive (when not counter-attack) to the ongoing cold-war type political manipulations or unwarranted wars that is being staged on this geography. This counter-offensive, emanating from the intellectuals and cultural institutions in collaboration with the private sector initiatives, also indicated to a silent but strong resistance to war-making politics. The reverberations of this action have been observed in the increasing number of private and institutional collaborative projects. Here, I would like to point out that the artists and art experts of these countries are welcoming all kinds of collaborations from EU, but with the expectation of being reciprocal in every milieu. This attitude advocated the fact if there is some kind of understanding and learning, or going against the winds of war, it should be done together.

For this vast geography duality is still a problematic that should be questioned or tackled within the democratization processes. This momentum requires a progressive movement such as DiEM25, which is persistently dissecting the truths behind the ongoing global tragedies and Neo-Capitalist interests. Considering the ongoing clash, terror and crisis currently concentrated in the East-Mediterranean, Braudel’s romantically described “Cradle of Civilisation” seems to be Dante’s Hell. Islam is a religion incorporating the heritage of previous civilizations; however, Islamisation – even using all the tools of Neo-Capitalism- denying the beliefs and values in its source, going against the essential Islamic faith has failed to benefit from the enlightenment of Modernism. As Daryush Shayegan has disclosed, İslamic countries failing to adopt Modernism are living through it with a mutilated consciousness which is embellished with a hollow and perplexed Post-modernism. I believe DiEM25, empowered with meta ‘s mission is an opportunity to heal this mutilation. This international intellectual, artistic, scholarly and cultural hub for radical progressive movements across Europe should reach this part of the world as soon as possible.

Beral Madra, a critic and curator, founder and director Gallery BM and BM Contemporary Art Centre and the Archive (since 1980); Lives and works in Istanbul. She coordinated the 1st (1987) and the 2nd (1989) Istanbul Biennale, curated the Pavilion of Turkey in 43rd, 45th, 49th, 50th and 51st Venice Biennale, co-curated the exhibition Modernities and Memories- Recent Works from the Islamic World in 47th Venice Biennale. Curated Central Asia Pavilion in 53rd (2009) and the Pavilion of Azerbaijan at 54th (2011) Venice Biennale. Curated Alanica, South Ossetia (2013), Sinopale (2006, 2008, 2012) , Çanakkale Biennale (2012-2014), co-curated 8th Bucharest Biennale (2018). Since 1984 she has organized more than 250 local and international artists in her art centres and in other official art spaces in Turkey. She curated and co-curated over 50 group shows in international capitals. She mentored Istanbul Scholarship of Berlin Senate with 60 artists (1995-2013). She founded and lectured in the Art Management Department of Design of Yıldız Technical University (1998-2002). She is founding member of Diyarbakır Art Centre (2002-2010) ; Foundation of Future Culture and Art (since 1994); Founder and Honorary President of AICA, Turkey (established 2003); 2010 Istanbul Culture Capital Visual Arts direcor; artistic advisor of Gate27, Artist Residency (2019-2021). Publications: “Identity of Contemporary Art” (1987), “Post-peripheral Flux-A Decade of Contemporary Art in Istanbul” (1996); “İki Yılda Bir Sanat” (Essays on Biennale) (2003); “Neighbours in Dialogue” (2005 “Maidan” Essays on Contemporary Art in South Caucasus and Middle East, BM CAC Publications, 2007. “Home Affairs”, Essays on Contemporary Art in Turkey, BM CAC Publications, 2009.

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