(On the question, brought up on Nettime, whether the current cultural
politics of the Dutch government manifests "neoliberal fascism", the
following reply to the mailing list:)
I would put it differently: It's a politics of conservative resentment
mixed with politbureau capitalism.
The conservative resentment of the Dutch government is old-fashioned. It's
new only in its outspokenness, breaking with a postwar consensus and
political correctness of not attacking modern art for being modern
art. For Zijlstra, the secretary of culture and education, the arts
have been dominated by a small elite - read: art councils, critics,
intellectuals - that superimposed its minority taste on society, making
it a majority agenda. It is difficult to argue with this; unless one
finds that those kind of places and projects should be funded that
wouldn't be able to sustain themselves on the free market. Which is
an elitist stance. One might consider it unfair that a ticket for an
experimental music concert is subsidized while a musical isn't. However,
the Dutch government's agenda is far from consistent in this respect. It
wants to keep subsidies for operas and big museums untouched because
they represent the "cultural heritage of the Netherlands". Zijlstra
even mentions the flags of Dutch colonial ships in this context. (This
strongly reminds of the outrage in Hamburg when the city subsidized the
ship museum of a militaria collector with millions while heavily cutting
subsidies for independent art projects).
Another problem for people working, in one way or the other, in or for the
arts are the other people they are being forced into the same boat with:
curators of contemporary art institutes, for example, who put the very
same artists into their publicly subsidized shows whom they recommend,
in their second jobs as private consultants, to art collectors. Or
people paid a top salary for managing communal cinemas that run the same
mainstream 'arthouse' kitsch as the other, non-subsidized movie theater
in town. One is pressured to protest in the streets hand-in-hand with
those people one would rather demonstrate against. The problem by itself
is not that the arts are cut. The problem is how they are being cut,
with almost everything being forced into shutdown or becoming "creative
industries" that does not a highly illiterate, idiotic notion of "cultural
heritage" and a completely deluded perception of "top art institutes".
Why is this not neoliberalism?
To take the railways as an example for political economics: In communism,
the train system would be public property, there would be no 1st and
2nd class, and rides would be free. In socialism, the train system would
be a state non-profit, and tickets would be cheap. In social democracy,
the train system would be a state company, receive some public subsidy
and have some contractual obligations to social discount tickets, but
charge free market prices otherwise. In classical liberalism, the rails
would be public infrastructure but competing private companies would
run the trains. In neoliberalism, the rails, too, would be owned by by
private companies.
If the current Dutch government would exercise classical neoliberal
politics, it would cut the public funding of the arts, leave things to
the free market and cut taxes in compensation. But this is not what
is happening. Instead, taxpayer's art subsidies are repurposed into
taxpayer's business subsidies. The advice of the "Top Team Creative
Industries", lead by the business manager of Rem Koolhaas' bureau OMA,
to the Dutch government boils down to subsidizing, instead of the art
non-profits, economically promising Dutch creative industries businesses,
service design companies for example, in order to strengthen their
position on the global market.
This of course is just a small part of a bigger picture. Europe,
and the Western World, is rapidly moving towards the model of Chinese
politbureau capitalism. Governments now act as supreme CEO boards,
public budgets are used as direct investment into businesses. But for
the Western economies, this is not investment into macroeconomic growth,
but a measure for preventing the ship from sinking. What started with
bail-outs and nationalization of the financial sector has become a virus,
or to be precise: a reverse Ponzi scheme, growing into the rest of the
economy. Instead of mobilizing all production means for a military war,
total mobilization for the global economic war.
The 21st century is turning into the perfect fulfillment of a prophecy
written down one hundred years ago, state monopoly capitalism as
described in Rudolf Hilferding's 1910 book "Das Finanzkapital" ("The
Financial Capital").
