Month: February 2021

A Gorgeous Parade

Post author By Simon Hammond
Post date 11 February 2021

Film history is full of holes. Forget about the idea that ‘everything’ is available on the internet; everything isn’t available in the archives. The Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that eighty to ninety percent of silent films have been lost. Fire, censorship, neglect, the recycling of silver from the emulsion of nitrate stock: the reasons vary but the result is the same. Although the problem lessens dramatically beginning in the 1930s – a decade that saw the foundation of the world’s first film archives – it does not disappear. The farther away one gets from capital-intensive production, mainstream acclaim, or state-approved cultural patrimony, the more likely it is that a film will disappear or fall into material precarity, existing only as a bad VHS copy passed from hand to hand, and then as a worse digital file, uploaded and downloaded.

The reality of oblivion fuels fantasies of rediscovery. Rarely are these dreams as wholly fulfilled as in the case of About Some Meaningless Events (De quelques événements sans signification, 1974), directed, written, and edited by Mostafa Derkaoui. This debut feature, now streaming on MUBI, was shot in working-class areas of Casablanca by a group of young artists and intellectuals eager to ask what filmmaking could be in Morocco, a country where a national cinema had not yet truly been born. Their speculative, energetic answer was not to the liking of King Hassan II, a despot who was intent to clamp down on dissent and manage the national image following attempted coups d’état in 1971 and 1972. After a single screening in Paris in 1975, the regime suppressed the film and prohibited its export, consigning it to a clandestine existence. The ban was lifted in the 1990s, but when the Madrid lab holding the negative went bankrupt in 1999, the materials were seized as assets. They eventually wound up at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, where the film’s director and his brother, cinematographer Abdelkrim Derkaoui, supervised a stunning restoration. Now, nearly five decades after its first fleeting appearance, the film has finally entered widespread circulation, taking its rightful place as one of the great works of 1970s political modernism. Better late than never.

MUBI labels About Some Meaningless Events a documentary. Certainly, the film takes inspiration from the ethos of cinéma vérité, capturing life in a crowded neighbourhood bar and out in the street with a lightweight, sync-sound 16mm camera. Never do the filmmakers occupy a private interior; they remain at all times in public, subject to the vibrant reality that surrounds them. Like Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, who in Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1961) roam Paris, holding out a microphone to passers-by, asking if they are happy, Derkaoui’s crew seeks the vox populi. They conduct a series of interviews, posing questions that bear directly on the activity at hand: their topic is the cinema, and Moroccan cinema in particular.

According to Sandra Gayle Carter’s book What Moroccan Cinema?, at the time About Some Meaningless Events was made, the country had produced less than a dozen feature films. (Her volume’s ironic title telegraphs the enduringly fragile state of filmmaking in the nation.) Meanwhile, new waves were surging around the world and filmmakers from Buenos Aires to Havana to Oberhausen were composing manifestoes, setting out the way forward. It is against this double backdrop that Derkaoui, freshly home after completing a degree at the renowned Łódź Film School, hit the streets. Instead of proselytizing for a predetermined position, he canvases for opinion. What stories should a Moroccan national cinema tell? Should it aspire to the tremendous commercial popularity of the Egyptian cinema, or of karate films like The Big Boss (1971), starring Bruce Lee? Or should it follow the revolutionary example of Latin America and commit itself to formal radicalism and the project of cultural decolonization? Do Moroccans want to be entertained or to see the country’s social problems represented onscreen? The discussions are wide-ranging, broaching matters of genre, aesthetics, and audience. No consensus emerges, but one thing is certain: About Some Meaningless Events conforms to none of the examples mooted throughout its 78 minutes.

Crucially, the interviews are conducted not by Derkaoui himself, but by Abbas Fassi-Fihri, a journalist cast in the role of a director who is making a movie. Derkaoui orchestrates a mise-en-abyme: the inquiry on the future of Moroccan cinema is a film within a film, a documentary nestled within a fiction. The two layers are frequently indistinguishable, sharing a proclivity for handheld close-ups and a title – judging by the clapboard that appears onscreen, at least. When the production crew hangs out at the crowded bar, looking hip and flirting with women, it feels like a hundred stories are circulating through the smoky air, just out of reach. Every now and then a hint of one comes through in a line of dialogue without congealing into anything that lasts, as if the artifice of storytelling were trying and failing to break through the flow of life again and again. Why does one man wave around a crab and another, later, plop a fish in someone’s glass? What kind of appointment is the woman wearing the bright yellow faux fur coat in the midst of arranging? The bustle of the bar refuses to resolve into the tidiness of cause-and-effect narration, yet all of its unscripted vitality is the product of a staged conceit.

One plotline gradually does take root, rising above the collective din to tell the story of an individual. Early on, a young man appears alone on the street, smoking as he watches a bearded man get into a car and drive away. He hops on a scooter, possibly one that doesn’t belong to him, and departs, only to reappear in proximity to the filmmakers – suggesting that this character, whose name turns out to be Abdellatif, is more than just another member of the crowd. Later in the bar, he is there again, his gaze fastened on the same man from before, who now holds court at a table that reeks of corruption. When Abdellatif confronts the man and a brawl erupts, the direct sound usually present throughout the film disappears, leaving Włodzimierz Nahorny’s propulsive free jazz to fill the track, bursting with improvisational vim. Abdellatif fatally knifes the kingpin and the horns squeal. If the premeditated plotting did not make it evident already, the stabbing leaves no ambiguity as to the film’s fictional dimension. Little else can cleave documentation and fabulation like the difference between the obscenity of real death and the thrill of its dramatic contrivance.

The event transforms the nature of the film crew’s questioning. They turn away from the public and towards each other, gathering in the open air to debate how or if the stabbing should be incorporated into their film-in-progress. It transpires that the man was Abdellatif’s boss at the port. What motivated the violence? How does it relate to the broader context, to the exploitation of workers? What are the respective merits of fictionalizing the episode versus foregoing scripts and actors to shoot ‘sur le vif’? In a meandering and conflictual way, the conversation maps a series of issues leftist filmmakers were confronting internationally at the time: class privilege, the politics of form, and the ethics of packaging struggle and trauma for consumption. In what may well be a shot at Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), one man complains, ‘Even the student protests have been recuperated by Hollywood!’.

The murder is a high-stakes eruption of contingency that demands narrativization, whether through the personal history of its perpetrator, the grind of social forces in which he is caught, or some combination of the two. It is the stuff conventional films are made of, an event pregnant with the promise of meaning. As About Some Meaningless Events winds to a close, the crew takes the bait, doubling down on their vérité methods in an effort to make sense of what happened. They interview Abdellatif’s colleague and ask a friend about his family background. Finally, they visit him in police custody. Abdellatif tells them some of what they want to know: the difficulty of finding good employment, the bribes his boss demanded, what life is like in a neighbourhood he is sure the interviewer knows nothing about. Ultimately, though, he becomes frustrated and turns the tables on the filmmakers, challenging their desire for knowledge and the importance they assign to the cinema: ‘And you think you’re changing something with your camera?’ Returning the gaze of the apparatus, he puts an end to the encounter – and to the film we are watching. A distrust of the ideological betrayals of fiction and a hope that a commitment to reality might mitigate them are palpable throughout About Some Meaningless Events. At the same time, Derkaoui never lets documentary off the hook either, making full use of the powers of the false to query any claims it might make to social transformation or political righteousness.

Writing in Cahiers du cinéma in 1969, Jean-Louis Comolli remarked that a certain kind of fiction film was beginning to look a lot like documentary. It wasn’t a matter of simply poaching a visual style associated with authenticity, as happens often today; these were works that left behind the script and the studio, gave up on big budgets and 35mm, and embraced an understanding of cinema and reality as reciprocally produced in the act of filming. It was here, and not in the idea of making contact with a pre-existing reality, Comolli argued, that the radicalism of ‘direct cinema’ resided. Whether occurring in films deemed fiction or those called documentary, these changed working methods released filmmaking from the stranglehold of the commercial system and its conventions, revealing their repressive character and opening new, counter-hegemonic possibilities of expression.

Comolli’s unorthodox revision of direct cinema as a concept untethered from the distinction between documentary and fiction, defined instead as a mode of production and a way of making meaning, sheds light on the reflexive gambit of About Some Meaningless Events. Against the repressive weight of Morocco’s Years of Lead, the film dwells in a wealth of microevents occurring in an everyday world lacking any centre of coherence, a world the film produces as much as reproduces. Certain of little, it traffics in an abundance that refuses the fixity of categories, troubling not just the line between documentary and fiction but, perhaps more importantly, the distinction between significance and insignificance. Rather than focus on a single (anti-)hero or an exemplary incident poised to neatly tie everything together, Derkaoui offers something else: a relentless self-questioning that takes place in and through a sea of faces captured in close-up after close-up, pushing in and out of a frame that rarely relinquishes its tight hold. The result of this insistent proximity to the hum of life is nothing like claustrophobia; it is a gorgeous parade of ungovernable particularity, a portrait of national heterogeneity and dissensus. Could it be an anti-authoritarian aesthetics? No wonder the king was so against it.

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum on the ghostly realism of Pedro Costa.

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Swimming In It

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 10 February 2021

It’s more surprising that we so often fail to notice it. (Capitalism, I mean.) Eula Biss’s new book, Having and Being Had, chronicles the feelings she traced in herself once she and her husband bought a house, her uncomfort with a comfort that she knew in time would become neither comfortable nor uncomfortable – would simply become ordinary. She is enraged at having to own a gravy boat for Thanksgiving dinner, and at the impossibility of investing her pension in any equitable way; she’s bemused when she buys a $200 necklace and feels satisfied with the day, as if an act of consumption is work done; she is embarrassed when a Mexican woman with four children asks to rent the front room of her Chicago bungalow, because it lies empty three months after Biss’s family moved in. Our awareness of the untenableness of the system we’re living in rises and it falls; it goes undercover; we accommodate ourselves to it. But what, Biss’s book asks, if we didn’t get used to it?

The rules Biss set herself for the writing of Having and Being Had are one way she has of not getting used to it: she promises herself she’ll talk about money, exact amounts (in interviews accompanying the book’s release, she told interviewers she’d been paid $650,000 for this book and one to follow) and that she’ll start every section in the present tense, in a moment drawn from her life. The only books she’s allowed to read are ones a friend has recommended, so that she has to think about the ways her social capital and cultural capital intersect. (This rule has an odd consequence in the book, causing Biss to rely on canonical reading turned hazy since college, or to faux-innocently ask a parent in the bleachers, ‘What is capitalism?’ and hope they start talking about Galbraith.) Perhaps there must always be rules if you are to stay with the trouble – and Biss has form with trouble: her first book, Notes from No Man’s Land, was an exploration of race; her second, deeply prescient book, On Immunity, is about the fear, particularly the type that creeps over you when you have a child to protect.

The effect of the rules is to fill the book on the one hand with figures – a necklace is $200, a gallon of paint she can’t afford is $110 and the bungalow costs $500,000 – and on the other with conversations where she can never quite grasp this thing called capitalism. (As people say about love, you know it when you see it.) Here is a list of people she asks to help her define it: her friend Bill, an economist in a bar, a mother also waiting at a skating lesson, Scooby-Doo, her friend Dan, Thomas Piketty, Max Weber, Silvia Federici, her old student Eric, a father on the playground, David Graeber, her own father, Lewis Hyde, Beyoncé, Gerard Winstanley, a friend from work called Will. She is talking about it all the time, and in the talking, she realises she doesn’t know what it is. It takes a while for this pose to become refreshing rather than faux-naif – I kept imagining a Deliveroo rider or a worker in a Teesside vaccine factory or a care worker answering her question, with the hard-won knowledge that it was a system that made more money out of their work than they do – but it eventually has the alienating effect she’s going for, particularly when she begins to think about work.

One of the reasons she finds the acquisition of a mortgaged property so unsettling is that she used to live her life very differently: her aim was to earn enough money, at waitressing or at the Parks department or temping at a publisher or posing for life-drawing classes, to buy time to write, and when she’d accumulated enough money, she’d quit the job and write. She now has a steady job in the university and on the days when she’s not teaching, the work of writing – practicing piano, writing, eating lunch, gardening, writing again – feels to her like the life of an 18th-century aristocrat. Later in the book, a glass of wine in, she tells a friend that she’s afraid to admit that she doesn’t want to work: ‘I would still have plenty of work, I say, even without my job. I would have the work of writing, the work of research, housework and yard work, and the work of caring for a child. Work, in fact, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work.’ You could call capitalism the set of ideas that values some of these forms of work over others, but more than that, you could call it the thing that decouples work and dignity. ‘I don’t see much evidence’, Biss adds later to her husband, ‘that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.’

It is at this point in her investigation that Biss starts circling back to her own life. If she values most the work that is not her job – the practice of art, the cultivation of care – she must change her life. Can she? What would that look like? A friend commiserates when Biss admits she doesn’t know how to end her book: yes, she agrees, to end this book, you would have to burn down your house. She would also have to give back her Guggenheim money, because fortunes have never yet come from anything good. She turns back to her garden, when a friend who’s temperamentally a collector asks her what she collects, and she realises that her plant wishlist – cornelian cherry, red lake currant, scarlet prince peach – isn’t what it seems. ‘My garden isn’t a collection. It’s a place where I practice care, and where I take time. Time being, in the end, all I ever wanted.’ (This last sentence riffs on the line of Browning Emily Dickinson riffed on in reply to a neighbour’s observation that time must move slowly for the Amherst poet. ‘Time, why, Time was all I wanted!’ she said.) How should she value her time, particularly to those who want to buy it from her? Earlier she quoted Adam Smith on water. ‘Nothing is more useful,’ he said, ‘but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it.’ Diamonds, by contrast, aren’t useful, but can be exchanged for many things. ‘The things that meet our most urgent needs’, Biss writes, ‘are often worthless.’

It says something about capitalism that Biss comes closest when she speaks not just in metaphors, but in paradoxes. Just as we swim in it all day every day but rarely notice it. But when we do see it, it’s dizzying – and you can’t go back. I have felt this once, and not in any of the cooler places Biss sees it in operation, like the playground Pokémon card market, or the video for ‘Work’ by Rihanna. I was at the ballet, watching Giselle for the nth time. In the first half, a prince dresses as a pauper and falls in love with the village beauty, Giselle. She dies of madness when the king and queen turn up with the prince’s fiancée, and her rosy future crumbles. Giselle’s death is hard to believe, willed as it is by fairy-tale logic; I’d found that whether I could swallow it or not depended on who was dancing. But this time the melodramatic death spoke up: like the worker for the boss, the village girl was quite simply expendable to the royal court, and it is exactly her death that reveals this relation of power for what it is. (In Akram Khan’s modern version of the ballet, Giselle works in a factory, of course.) It’s not a broken heart – or not just a broken heart – but a broken system. Having and Being Had takes a feeling like this, the trouble of it, the exhilaration of it, and anatomises it. It is the sort of feeling that can be the beginning of something, if you let it.

Read on: Susan Watkins dissects Kate Manne’s feminism of the privileged.

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Putin’s Majority?

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 9 February 2021

On 2 February, Alexey Navalny was sent to prison for two years and eight months. Legally, the verdict makes no sense: the court replaced his suspended sentence with a real one for failing to check in with the authorities in Russia – while he was recovering from the novichok poisoning in Germany. Politically, Navalny’s imprisonment looks even worse: since it came right after the failed assassination attempt, how else to interpret it other than the ‘second best option’ for the regime? This disregard for optics suggests that the Kremlin is simply unwilling to tolerate Navalny’s activities any longer. He must either be imprisoned or assassinated, regardless of the backlash.

The authorities adopted the same stance of open confrontation towards the protests that followed Navalny’s arrest. Russian cities were instantly flooded with riot police, the National Guard, plainclothes ‘anti-extremist’ officers and countless other forces. Central Moscow and St Petersburg were completely shut down: armored vehicles blockaded the streets; metro stations were closed for ‘technical reasons’. The 23 January protests set a record, as at least 4,000 people were detained across the country. On 31 January that figure climbed to 5,700. With normal holding facilities chock-full of protesters, new detainees were brought to a migrant detention centre on the outskirts of Moscow. The lack of holding cells is so severe that hundreds of people spent days in police vehicles, prevented from eating or sleeping.

The latest wave of resistance is in many ways unprecedented. Navalny’s direct, populist style, his focus on elite corruption and his embrace of social demands (such as raising the minimum wage) have increasingly brought inhabitants of the Russian ‘heartland’ into the opposition orbit. In that respect, the protests of late January were something of a breakthrough. According to the sociologist Alexandra Arkhipova, who organized a quick survey of the protesters, 39% of 252 people surveyed in Moscow and 47% of 454 people surveyed in St Petersburg on 23 January responded that it was their first protest. In the regions, the number of new participants was likely even higher. Vladimir Zvonovskiy, another researcher who conducted 20 interviews with protesters in Samara, claimed that only a few of his respondents had ever attended such a gathering. Turnout at demonstrations reached its highest ever levels in many smaller cities.

While it was Navalny’s investigation and arrest that provoked the protests, only a minority of the protesters could be considered fully fledged ‘Navalnists’. According to Arkhipova, 33% in Moscow and 22% in St Petersburg ‘fully trusted’ Navalny, while the majority (57% in Moscow, 64% in St Petersburg) ‘somewhat trusted’ him. Zvonovskiy reported that some respondents did not want to replace Putin with Navalny, though they nonetheless craved social change. These findings confirm an obvious fact: despite Navalny’s charismatic media persona, the protests have never been solely about him. This cannot be considered ‘his’ movement. In its current form, the Russian opposition is comprised of disaffected youth, students, workers and white-collar professionals increasingly from outside Moscow.

The political credo that assembled these diverse layers can broadly be defined as ‘populist’. From the beginning of his career, when he joined the liberal Yabloko party in 2000, Navalny’s attitude toward policies and programmes has been instrumental. Whatever unites and expands the movement is good; whatever sows disagreement and alienates potential allies is bad. This was a stark contrast with Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder and eternal leader of Yabloko, who has always been dogmatic and intolerant, refusing any coalitions with the left (viewed as the heirs of Stalinism) and with other liberals (seen as responsible for the disastrous market reforms of the 1990s, which Yabloko opposed, favouring a more cautious, gradual approach). Navalny’s disenchantment with Yabloko – from which he was expelled in 2007 – did not evince a rejection of liberal ideas, but an antipathy toward old-style Russian liberals, who are famously disinclined to form a broad coalition.

It was in pursuit of such a coalition that Navalny began to align himself with the extreme right in the late 2000s, presenting a ‘civilized’ image of Russian nationalism open to alliances with the liberal opposition. But at the end of 2011, when a wave of mass demonstrations against parliamentary election fraud swept the country, Navalny came to recognize that nationalism – rejected by most of the protest movement – could not be a unifying platform. From that moment on he began to create his own ‘political machine’, a strongly personalized platform based on the rhetorical confrontation between ‘the people’ – lacking proper political representation – and the corrupt elite that had consolidated their power within Russia. Throughout the 2010s, this populist attitude informed Navalny’s anti-corruption investigations, whose targets were not only state officials, but oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska and Alisher Usmanov. Navalny railed against their acquisition of enormous wealth through the criminal privatization of former Soviet enterprises. Gradually, as Russia’s economic crisis deepened and poverty levels rose, Navalny’s focus on social inequality and the degradation of the public sector increased. One of his recent flagship projects was the Alliance of Doctors, an independent trade union that called for higher salaries in state health care and denounced the underfunding of hospitals during the pandemic.

None of this means that Navalny has turned left: his social-populist rhetoric, like his former nationalist line, reflects his pragmatic approach. Navalny’s personal views seem to be unchanged: he advocates ‘normal’ capitalism with functioning democracy, a large middle class, and a welfare state capable of smoothing out income inequality. He does not seem to dwell on the difficulty of attaining these goals in a poor, semi-peripheral country without implementing wider structural change. Yet his economic advisors are attuned to this contradiction – and propose to solve it through neoliberal, free-market policies that leave less room for social protection and inequality reduction than Navalny envisions.

Navalny’s populism has always been linked to activist politics: in every one of his videos he urges his audience not to remain passive spectators in anti-corruption investigations, but to take to the streets and struggle for change. Navalny himself has always been at the forefront of this struggle, which bears great personal risks in Russia’s authoritarian conditions. Navalny has been arrested and imprisoned for short periods after virtually every street protest (in total he has already spent around one year behind bars), and his younger brother Oleg has been sentenced to three years on trumped-up charges. Navalny’s decision to return to Russia and accept an indeterminate jail sentence is the latest example of his willingness to pay a personal price for his politics.

It is difficult to predict how the current street protests will develop. On the one hand, the January demonstrations saw the emergence of a new generation of activists ready to embark on a lengthy war of attrition. On the other hand, the furore surrounding Navalny’s arrest is bound to peter out, and many protesters will be mindful of losing their jobs or going to jail. Yet the authorities’ attempt to suppress the movement – through Navalny’s harsh sentence, the house arrest of his key associates and the systematic intimidation of his supporters – takes aim at a symptom, not a cause. These measures are based on the Kremlin’s theory that protest is merely a ‘technology’ imported from the West, which can itself be defeated by technical rather than political solutions. In reality, state repression will only defer a looming political crisis, which is likely to hit during the 2021–2024 election cycle.

This September’s Duma elections will be decisive for Putin’s re-election in 2024. The Kremlin strategy for both ballots is rooted in the concept of ‘Putin’s majority’: a silent mass of supporters who will ensure the absolute parliamentary dominance of United Russia, along with another triumphant victory for Putin himself. However, the January protests have cast doubt on this supposedly unbeatable voting bloc, which is threatened not only by those who took to the streets, but by all those who watched the Navalny investigation and expressed cautious sympathy for the protesters. The lack of social prospects, the pandemic-fuelled decline in living standards, and the frustration with an irremovable and unaccountable political regime will continue to dilute Putin’s support over the coming years. This will create a new political configuration in which the current system of ‘managed democracy’ may become untenable.

Besides street protests, Navalny and his team have developed their own electoral weapon – a highly advanced tactical voting scheme called ‘smart voting’. Though elections in Russia are tightly controlled through electoral fraud and the removal of independent candidates, the scale of malpractice varies across the regions. In many cases, it is possible to drive United Russia out of local parliaments by voting for the second most popular candidate in single-member districts. This is precisely the idea behind ‘smart voting’: votes mobilized by Navalny would be added to the second most popular candidate’s organic support, producing a narrow victory over the United Russia candidate. Of course, the problem is that the other Russian political parties are usually no less subservient to the Kremlin, so the benefits of electing them are slight. Nevertheless, Navalny’s support sows the seed of ambition among the existing parties’ mid-level operatives. Ironically, this most applies to the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF), as it is still the second most popular party nationwide and the chief beneficiary of ‘smart voting’. Gennady Zyuganov, the KPRF leader, demonstrated his cowardly subservience to the regime by denouncing Navalny and the protest movement in January; yet Valery Rashkin, the head of the Moscow KPRF, broke ranks and defended Navalny against the crackdown. Communist deputies of the Moscow city parliament even travelled to the airport to meet Navalny upon his return to Russia. The reason is simple: ‘smart voting’ has increased KPRF representation in the Duma from five to ten seats out of 45. Navalny and his team have already promised to unleash this scheme in the upcoming federal parliamentary elections, in a move which could exacerbate the current instability.

The Russian left – primarily its radical extra-parliamentary wing – is approaching the crisis in a state of organizational weakness and internal division. The protests that began in January once again revealed two opposing views on left strategy. According to the first, Navalny and Putin are simply the representatives of different ruling class factions, and the tens of thousands who came out to protest are therefore pawns in someone else’s game. They should either be radicalized (by urging them to abandon the protests for smaller Marxist grouplets), or simply ignored as irrelevant to a genuine (but currently absent) class struggle. The second position, which most left-wing activists have taken, stresses the need to participate in the democratic protest movement, bearing in mind that it transcends the figure of Navalny. The composition of the recent protests – which have drawn in a large number of new participants whose main demand is social justice – opens up a space for socialist ideas. This youth-driven movement, centred on a rejection of social inequality and elite privilege, is far more amenable to the left than, for example, the ‘fair elections’ rallies a decade ago. No one can guarantee its success; yet among the broad spectrum of protesters there is more demand than ever for democracy and socialism.

Read more: Tony Wood on the dynamics of the Putin era.

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Myanmar Days

Post author By Simon Hammond
Post date 8 February 2021

Demonstrators protest against the military coup and demand the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in Yangon, Myanmar, February 6, 2021. REUTERS/Stringer

In Myanmar, coups come rather more naturally to the military than electioneering. The re-house-arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi (ASSK) and the shutdown of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Myanmar last week mark a bitter juncture in the power-sharing arrangement between the Tatmadaw and the charismatic State Counsellor, whose international stock has now rallied to near pre-genocide heights. On the face of it, the dispute was over the election results of November last year, in which ASSK and the NLD triumphed at the polls. But to call what happened on 1 February a ‘coup’ is still a misnomer: the Myanmar military had never relinquished de facto power. It remained in a crouched position in its surreal fortress-country-club capital, Nay Pyi Taw, where it commanded 25 percent of the seats in parliament automatically, as well as control over the defence and interior ministries, and several other critical sectors of the state. On top of this, the openly Schmittian provisions of the 2008 Constitution – Article 417, in particular – grant the military the right to reassume power over the state in an emergency. There was never any question as to who decides what an emergency is.

Within hours of the Tatmadaw’s reassumption of control, solipsistic Western readings attached to events. Human-rights activists in and outside the country are by no means a monolithic group, but some argued that the Tatmadaw’s claim of an illegitimate 2020 election was inspired by Donald Trump. As if the Myanmar military needed tips from anyone on how to undo an election. The shutdown of the NLD was executed with such efficiency and speed that by the time it was being protested online and in Yangon, it was already a fait accompli. If Chinese state media were capable of tongue in cheek, its description of the events – ‘a major cabinet reshuffle’ – would be closer to the mark. The accompanying suggestion from some progressive outlets that Min Aung Hlaing, the chief of the Tatmadaw, and his cronies were driven by worries about being turned over to the International Criminal Court is likewise baseless. Part of the point of building the capital-compound of Nay Pyi Taw in the middle of the jungle was to banish any idea of an external intervention in Myanmar politics. Min Aung Hlaing is hardly the sort who spends his time shopping at Harrods or skiing in the Alps, where he could be picked up like an African general. When Min Aung Hlaing goes to Europe, he has been invited, typically by European military chiefs, and spends his days visiting the defence contractors who have armed his regime to the teeth.

Why then did Min Aung Hlaing and the Tatmadaw radically shift course? However much the NLD may intend to demilitarize the parliament, and however strong their performance at the polls, they did not – and cannot – reach the electoral threshold to do so. It seems that the generals had thought that the arrangement with ASSK would stabilize their preferred future for Myanmar and help naturalize their privileges. They wanted to make sure that their political party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), was on the way to being perceived as more than a front for the military, and rather as a legitimate, competitive political party. For their children, the point was for them to establish themselves in non-regime-friendly cities like Yangon as legitimate business-people. But these metamorphoses were becoming increasingly jeopardized. Ever since 2015, when ASSK’s NLD won 57 percent of the vote – a strong showing, though not the landslide Western media often made it out to be – the generals knew they had a problem. Instead of an adjustable power relationship, they came to see that they were at risk of becoming marginalized in an effective one-party state where the one-party was not their own. ASSK’s chutzpah in the face of the generals has been unyielding. For the past year, she has even apparently refused to meet with Min Aung Hlaing. She is now counting on people in the streets – not merely her own followers – to risk everything to reinstate her. It is not an unreasonable scenario. ASSK has deep sources of popular support. First, she is the daughter of the founder of the country – Aung San, ‘the General’ – who remains a kind of George Washington-JFK-Che Guevara wrapped into one (it helps that he was assassinated in 1947 and could remain a hazy martyr of independence; the very military that kept ASSK under house arrest for 15 years was founded and led by Aung San). The second is that the Bamar majority, the largest identitarian group in the country, see in ASSK all of the promise of globalization and prosperity. It is difficult to spend much time in Yangon or the smaller cities in the Bamar heartland without being overwhelmed by the iconography devoted to her. Yet no less significant has been her adamant embodiment and propagation of Myanmar nationalism, narrowly construed as Bamar interests. One of the few things that she and the military junta agreed on was the prosecution of a brutal campaign of massacres, rape, and forced exile of the Rohingya groups in Rakhine state. To her credit, ASSK has never much dissembled about being anything other than a blinkered Bamar chauvinist.

The trouble for the military is that, despite having fashioned the Constitution of 2008, they have lately been disserved by it. The Constitution, like its previous iterations, was designed with a first-past-the-post system that would keep ‘ethnic’ parties in the borderland states from having too many seats in the parliament. The chief minister of each state is still appointed by the President of the country, so that even an allegedly irredentist state like Rakhine, where NLD does not perform well, still has an NLD chief minister. The military made sure that the Constitution guarantees them 25 percent of the seats as a safety buffer. But the idea was that the military, and the constituents who work for industries associated with it – agriculture, mining, precious stones – would add to that vote share to make their party, the USDP, at least competitive with the NLD. Last year, Min Aung Hlaing even encouraged the military to campaign around the country and made some attempts to do so himself – a technically illegal activity since the USDP and the military are supposed to be separate – but in any case he was up against an NLD electoral machine that has been fine-tuning a get-out-the-vote campaign for a decade. Additionally, Myanmar’s first-past-the-post voting system, an enduring legacy of British colonialism, was not in Min Aung Hlaing’s favour. Successive Bamar-led governments have kept it in place since it helps suppress smaller ‘ethnic’ parties in the country. But now first-past-the-post is suppressing the actual – or now presumed – support of the USDP itself, which with just over 28 percent of the vote in 2015 would have won some 92 seats in a plurality voting system, as against the 30 it was actually awarded.

It is still too early to speculate whether 1 February marks the end of the military’s experiment with ASSK and the NLD. But there is little doubt that there is a constitutional problem in Myanmar that needs to be solved, both to make electoral politics more competitive, but also to deoxygenate the on-going civil wars in the border states, which would have more of a chance to de-escalate if Katchin and Shan and other borderland radical factions were less easily able to claim that they will never find justice or solace in the national parliament. The problem is that the NLD has little incentive to rearrange a system which puts such headwinds in its sails, while the junta do not think they are in an existential situation because Beijing is even more suspicious of the NLD and ASSK than they are. Viewed in a longer historical perspective, the events in Myanmar suggest that Samuel Huntington’s old vision of Third World authoritarian militaries midwifing – however more or less violently or against their will – bourgeois revolutions is a much trickier undertaking when the military itself wants to oversee every step of the procedure, and for its spawn to occupy the upper-echelon of the capitalist elite. Like Myanmar’s other hot conflicts, the inter-elite, inter-Bamar civil war is no longer behind closed doors.

Read on: Mary Callahan on the riddle of the Tatmadaw’s long reign.

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Writing Zimbabwe

Post author By Simon Hammond
Post date 5 February 2021

The Bildungsroman has been one of the more durable genres of prose fiction. Conventionally depicting the protagonist’s journey from youth to maturity – ‘Bildung’ could be rendered in English as formation, development, growth or education – the historical meaning of its emergence has been much parsed: analogue of a dawning modernity, the rise of the bourgeoisie, or the formation of the modern nation state? With its parameters set in the context of the German Enlightenment in the late 18th century, it soon spread across the continent, becoming – at least for a season – the paradigmatic kind of European novel.

With the flourishing of the novel in Africa in the 20th century however, the Bildungsroman was adapted to a dramatically different experience of social upheaval and transformation. Intermingling with traditions of autobiographical writing, here its existential framework was ineluctably the radical reordering of African life by colonialism, the battle for independence, the pathologies and struggles that remained after its formal achievement. Major works in this vein included Camara Laye’s The African Child (1953), E’skia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959), Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child (1964), Wole Soynika’s Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981) and Nafissatou Diallo’s A Dakar Childhood (1982). In more recent decades, works such as Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) have kept the genre centre-stage in university curricula.

This inheritance however has been a subject of intense critical dispute. To what extent is the genre bound to colonialist notions of personal formation? How far can the developmentalism of such works be seen to reproduce, challenge or dismantle that complex legacy? Thirty years ago, these were questions much asked of the debut novel of Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988). Written in the aftermath of Zimbabwe’s independence (it was the first novel to be published in the country by a black woman), it recounts the childhood and early adolescence of Tambudzai Sigauke, the daughter of a Shona family in rural Rhodesia in the 1960s, as she strives to break free of poverty and patriarchal village life. It is striking how differently the novel has been read: as a prime example of the Bildungsroman adapted to African realities, and as its undoing or refutation. Tambu’s evolution is profoundly Janus-faced. The price of gaining one of the few places for black students at a colonial mission school is an unyielding sense of anxiety and alienation. The novel’s title comes from a line in Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – ‘the condition of the native is a nervous condition’.

When a sequel, The Book of Not (2006), appeared eighteen years later, some of this ambiguity was resolved. Tambu’s continued education and first years of employment are portrayed in much starker tones, as she experiences continued injustice and cruelty amid the violence of Zimbabwe’s liberation war. Independence, when it arrives in the novel’s last section, is not matched by any parallel story of individual triumph over adversity; the novel seems instead to warn its reader against equating national independence with liberation of a more profound sort. It concludes on a note of uncertainty, with Tambu unemployed and adrift, unsure what her fate will be as a ‘new Zimbabwean’.

There is, then, a straightforward way to read This Mournable Body (2020), the final instalment of Dangarembga’s trilogy, which was published to much fanfare in the African literary world and shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. Not as ‘inspiring’ or a ‘story of triumph’, as it was wishfully characterised in The New York Times, but as the final blow to any hopes invested in Tambu or in her homeland. A shadow of her plucky girlhood self, our protagonist is now eking out a precarious existence in a brutal, unforgiving Harare. Independence has brought no improvement in her circumstances. Scraping by in a filthy boarding house, she is kept down by white colleagues, misjudged by her fellow Shonas, and subject to all manner of casual, gendered violence. Meanwhile, the Third Chimurenga, ZANU-PF’s controversial property-redistribution program, is heating up in the background, portending national crisis on a world stage. As Tambu’s fortunes have faded, her dreams have coarsened too. The quest for self, at once social and moral – the Bildungsroman’s North Star – has degenerated into a desperate grasping at upward mobility.

Dangarembga then, seems once and for all to have traded in the Bildungsroman for another prominent African genre, the novel of disillusionment. By the work’s mid-point, Tambu is admitted into a psychiatric ward. Far from fulfilling any path towards freedom as a corollary to the country’s liberation, Tambu’s options after her breakdown speak to the country’s cruel fate – working in private security, the product of a decayed social infrastructure, or else a demeaning white-led tourist venture. The novel ends where the trilogy began, at the homestead of Tambu’s family, where in hope of advancing her career she returns to commodify the circumstances of her upbringing for western eyes. For readers once enchanted by her rise in Nervous Conditions, this is perhaps the literary equivalent of the despair wrought by the regime of Emmerson Mnangagwa, which rapidly dashed the hopes raised when Mugabe was finally ousted in 2017 after 37 years in power.

It is, without doubt, a wrenching book. Dangarembga is no less unflinching in depicting the country’s economic woes. Any charge of so-called ‘poverty porn’ that might be levelled – against the ‘urchins’ roaming the streets of Harare sullied by ‘used condoms and cigarette butts’ that ‘build thick puddles of charcoal-coloured water’ – would be misplaced. Her work might be better understood as showing how real lives become the stuff of trope. Dangarembga is also distinguished by the sincerity of her local commitments. Unusually for a writer of her renown she continues to reside in Zimbabwe; she was detained in anti-corruption protests last year (and was recently awarded PEN’s International Award for Freedom of Expression). Her own description of her trilogy, as provided by a recent essay, is indeed in expressly political terms: ‘In the social, moral, economic and leadership decay that marks Zimbabwe today, I am hard put to find any personal trajectory that can be described as upward in any sense, other than that of accumulating material possessions.’ In her telling, Zimbabwe is suffering from a ‘crisis of personhood’ wrought by decades of despair and brutalisation, disaffection with the political class, and the abjections of ‘greed, lust, dishonesty, bloodthirstiness and corruption’ that have taken hold.

In such circumstances, a literary genre that depends on the development of the individual clearly cannot function as normal. But it may be a simplification to read the trilogy’s culmination as merely a brutal inversion. In Dangarembga’s conception, her work serves as an inquiry into ‘what is required to reanimate those who have suffered social death’ and calls for a ‘national transformation through engagement with the person’. A recent lecture, given in memory of the anti-apartheid revolutionary Oliver Tambo, spelled out her vision of a renewed moral focus on the individual that doesn’t lapse into an individualism of an anti-social, neoliberal sort. Her proposals are a necessarily back-to-basics approach to the democratic imagination, insistent on rights to life, human dignity, and freedom from cruel or degrading treatment and punishment. Among other things, the lecture served as an important reminder that ‘critiques’ of rights – one of the scholarly conversations in which her work has been implicated – can ring hollow when your friends and comrades are imprisoned or otherwise disappeared.

Returning then to her trilogy’s bruising conclusion, where might the seeds of this personal regeneration be sought? One answer may be found in the growing references to the Shona philosophy of hunhu, a communalist way of thinking that emphasises collective moral responsibility and the interconnectedness of human beings. This mode of thought, which Tambu wrestles with as her path falters, insists on a kind of moral growth that cuts against the liberal-individualist foundations of the Bildungsroman. At the same time, it insists on just and respectful individual behaviour. Dangarembga is ultimately interested in a more complex question than rise or fall, win or lose. Instead, she is asking how those crushed by social and economic forces beyond their control can retain a claim to moral growth – and what sort of fiction that demands. Conceived in these terms, the novel’s climax can perhaps be read in a more guardedly optimistic way. Without revealing every detail, it is sufficient to say that Tambu goes from marketing her mother to embracing her, from grasping for a promotion to giving up her job. Though Tambu’s dreams have been blighted, and so too the initial promise of national liberation, a new, more complex and less commercialized kind of self-formation may be in sight.

Were the work less attuned to the material realities of Zimbabwe’s place at the bottom of the world’s economic pecking order, or the links between ZANU-PF corruption and the avarice of global finance, such a conclusion might appear quietist. The course that Dangarembga has plotted for Tambu and Zimbabwe is a purposefully modest one, informed by an awareness of how grand political pronouncements have been put to the test in Zimbabwe and failed. The powers of hunhu in post-independence, post-democratic Harare to open up a space whose value is not fully beholden to a rampant neoliberalism – in which cultures and selves are bought and sold – are of course limited, but they are not meaningless. This Mournable Body is, then, a novel that mines what humanist possibility it can find in the Bildungsroman, while never mistaking it for nearly enough. After a trilogy which collides the genre against the realities of Zimbabwean life, Dangarambga seems to nevertheless insist that it will continue building in one form or another, trying, faltering, and then trying again in a different register. She has dismantled the genre to recombine its parts, producing a remarkable fiction in the process.

Read on: Lola Seaton on the Bildungskritiken of Raymond Williams and Mark Fisher.

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Militant Visions

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 4 February 2021

Cecilia Mangini, who died on 21 January this year, is widely credited as Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, though she was also a photographer, critic and activist. Her career, which spanned over six decades, followed a sinuous path. Born in the Southern region of Puglia in 1927, Mangini moved to Florence at the age of six after her father’s leather business collapsed. She studied political science at the University of Florence and upon graduating took up a secretarial role at the Italian Federation of Independent Cinema in Rome, where she began writing film reviews for Cinema Nuovo, Cinema ’60 and L’Eco del Cinema. From there she turned her hand to documentary filmmaking – an arena in which she was critically acclaimed, if never famed.

Living through the fascist era and the Years of Lead, Mangini’s turbulent historical context shaped the political impulses – primarily Marxist and feminist – which unite her eclectic body of work, pulsating through her studies of the Vietnam War, the life of Antonio Gramsci, the rise of the European far-right and the traditional shamanic practices in Apulia. Paradoxically, though not unusually, Mangini’s first forays into filmmaking were via the ‘Cineguf’ group: a fascist student film club attended by a number of leftist avant-garde directors – including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Antonio Ghirelli – in the early stages of their career. Like them, Mangini quickly shrugged off her reactionary affiliations, working with Pasolini and Lino Del Fra (the Roman director whom she would later marry) on several militant cinematic treatments of postbellum Italy. These included Ignoti Alla Città (Unknown to the City, 1958), a blistering commentary on the disenfranchisement of young working-class men, and All’Armi Siam Fascisti! (To Arms, We Are Fascists!) a 1962 archive compilation reflecting on the privations that led to Italian fascism, WWII and its aftermath.

These collaborations paved the way for Mangini’s work with the Italian Communist Party, under whose auspices she produced Essere Donne (Being Women), a 28-minute documentary commissioned by the Communist-aligned production company Unitelefilm as part of the 1965 election campaign. Essere Donne begins quite unlike any of Mangini’s previous work, with a hallucinatory montage sequence that unfurls at dizzying pace. A lurid pink elephant is flanked by a model clad in ostrich feathers and a Maidenform bra. The camera moves contemplatively over this image while cutting back and forth to clips of exploding atom bombs, which then give way to a series of disjointed close-ups. Magazine photos of lips, hands, feet, hair and eyes appear to fracture the female body into discrete, commodified parts. The unsettlingly hypnotic quality of the sequence is amplified by its accompanying score, the dissonant clanging of machines overlaid with an accelerated rendition of Brecht and Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’, whose lyrics desperately bewail: ‘If we don’t find the next whisky bar, I tell you we must die’. A male narrator, speaking in sparse, formal Italian, asks of the glossy advertisements:

Who can recognise herself in these images? Not the six million women who work in production in Italy. Not the millions of women who stay at home, bound by domestic labour. Not these 14- or 15-year-old girls who work in a pasta factory in Apulia.

With that, the prologue’s tension is undercut by a humdrum scene of Italian factory workers, edited so that a fragmentary shot of a male boss monitoring a female employee is continually replayed, as if to mimic the monotony of the assembly-line. Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism is thus translated into the visual language of the avant-garde, while the vivid colour of the opening is abandoned in favour of a saturated monochrome – draining the affect from the images. The camera pans down the leg of a young factory-worker, whose scarred calf forms a striking contrast with the airbrushed limbs of the previous scene. An elderly woman is shown stitching a bra not unlike that featured in the Maidenform advertisement. She speaks in regional dialect, telling us: ‘I make 100 lire from each of these bras; the store sells them for 1,500 lire each.’

Essere Donne is not Mangini’s best-known documentary, but it is among her most accomplished – its fusion of political propaganda, cinematic experimentation and juxtaposition of rural and urban cultures typifying her trademark style. Its power derives from her ability to weave different aesthetic practices and cinematic threads into a rich fabric that mimics her subject matter: the garment trade. Her thesis – that post-war capitalist expansion has crippled Italian workers – is not stated explicitly, but rather given striking visual form. The disruptive effects of rapid industrialization are highlighted through sensitive visions of the landscape which reflect Italy’s North–South divide. A looming shot of Milan’s Pirelli Tower, the administrative centre of the Pirelli tyre automobile corporation, is contrasted with the undulating Apulian hills. Machine noises are set against the plaintive lyricism of Southern folk song. While a woman works the fields of a Southern olive plantation, a factory tower rises ominously behind her, and the narrator informs us that ‘now industry has sprung up even in the olive groves of the South … every day that breaks over the skyscrapers, as over the houses of peasants and farmhands in the South, begins in the holy name of monopoly capital.’

Mangini had a lifelong interest in the effect of industrialization on Italy’s female population. Drawing on her childhood experience, as well as her conversations with other working-class women in Rome and Florence, she believed that rural women lured to the city by hopes of economic emancipation would find themselves ensnared in the strictures of urban capital. This bleak outlook finds its way into Essere Donne, which unflinchingly confronts the material impediments to women’s independence. Her portrayal of individual female subjects often overflows with humanity and empathy. ‘Still my husband cannot get a steady job’, laments an Italian mother, reflecting on her move from the countryside to Milan. ‘And to support the family, I have to go to the factory. So Rosetta, who is the eldest, must look after the little ones. She has to miss school.’ This testimony is accompanied by a sequence of the mother and daughter climbing the polluted stairwell that leads out from their basement. The mother, setting off for work, closes a fence on her daughter who, in the absence of her parent, clings to its metal wire. These tender moments recur throughout Essere Donne, showcasing Mangini’s ability to fuse polemical opposition to the Italian post-war settlement with a persistently humane and dignified portrayal of her interviewees.

The mainstay of Essere Donne is the contemporary economic situation in Italy, but there are also glancing allusions to world politics. These are mostly explored in its epilogue: a montage comprising press footage of anti-NATO protests and women’s marches, interspliced with moving images of nuclear weapons testing. The opening scene’s references to the atom bomb thereby come full circle, with Mangini implicitly suggesting that – despite the film’s lingering landscape shots, which appear to focus its critique on Italian class dynamics – the plight of female labourers cannot be reduced to a national issue. It is rather bound up with Cold War power relations. With this change in perspective, the situation of Italian women comes to metonymize a broader condition. Their mutilation by machine work stands for our collective precarity before NATO’s nuclear death machines. The expansion of capital into Italy’s semi-feudal pockets mirrors its forcible extension into Southeast Asia, Latin America and Indochina – accompanied by American warplanes.

Partly because of this closing sequence, Essere Donne was deemed too radical for Italian cinemas, which at the time were still regulated by the government’s ‘Obligatory Programming’ legislation. Its distribution was consequently limited: an issue only partially remedied by the Communist Party’s decision to take matters into its own hands by screening it in regional Communist Clubs. The suppression of Essere Donne was defended not on political but aesthetic grounds, with censors citing its failure to meet the minimum ‘technical, artistic and cultural requisites’ set by the ministerial committee. (The judges at the 1965 international film festival in Leipzig begged to differ, awarding Essere Donne the prestigious Special Jury Prize.)

Mangini’s mobilization of different aesthetic forms – semiotics, montage, stock footage and aural motifs – anticipated developments in British cinema that would not take hold until the 1970s. One can draw an easy comparison between Essere Donne and The Song of the Shirt, Sue Clayton’s and Jonathan Curling’s seminal 1979 documentary about female garment workers in London – which similarly interweaves disparate narratives, temporalities and screen effects. Perhaps the earliest and most influential text on film semiotics to be translated into English was Pasolini’s ‘Discourse on the Shot Sequence, or the Cinema as the Semiology of Reality’, which appeared in a 1969 edition of Cinim, and articulated many of the stylistic precepts which were forged in his collaborations with Mangini. As the British New Wave petered out amid the decline of 60s counterculture, this cinematic language – imported from the European left – became increasingly important for the avant-garde theorists and practitioners clustered around Screen magazine and the British Film Institute.

By contrast, Mangini’s domestic influence was somewhat limited. She was not just a woman in a man’s world, but the only woman in it. Twentieth-century Italian cinema was a firmly patriarchal industry, and though Mangini’s career was in a sense launched by Pasolini – whom she said provided a ‘springboard’ for her own productions – she was also eclipsed by his stardom. Pasolini’s cinematic theories acquired canonical status for later generations of filmmakers, while the audience for Mangini’s critical essays remained relatively small. Her documentaries also garnered little commercial success, relying instead on public subsidies and monetary awards. The funding to support such experimental ventures during the 1950s and 60s dried up in the 70s, an era that marked a qualitative decline in Italian cinema and a drop-off in Mangini’s previously prolific output. Already suffering under serious financial strain, she was dealt a further blow when Pasolini was murdered in 1975. Her career – still enmeshed with his – came to a temporary but significant halt, and she began to fade from public memory.

Although Mangini continued to produce powerful, socially conscious films, she did so at a reduced rate and in a comparatively conventional style. She became a sporadic screenwriter, working on more marketable projects such as La Villeggiatura (Black Holiday), a 1973 drama which explores the life of a conflicted history professor who, having been exiled to the provinces for refusing to pledge allegiance to Mussolini, begins to question his political commitments and the value of resistance. Developing on this theme, in 1974 Mangini directed La Briglia sul Collo (The Bridle on the Neck), which documents the attempts of the post-fascist Italian state to integrate perceived ‘misfits’ into mainstream society, focusing on the relationship between a seven-year-old village boy and the local school system. Towards the end of the decade Mangini co-wrote the script for Del Fra’s acclaimed biopic of Gramsci, set during the leader’s prison days, with flashbacks to the founding of the CPI and street-fights with the far-right. Whereas Pasolini’s later works retreated into fantasy and epic, Mangini’s marked something of a return to the neorealist tradition – yet with a strident political commitment that distinguished her from influences like Rossellini and De Sica.

Her final film was released in 2020, after she accidentally came across a series of pictures from her 1965 visit to Vietnam tucked away in two neglected shoeboxes. Mangini and Del Fra had travelled there with the hope of producing a documentary to aid the North Vietnamese cause, yet they were ordered to return home by the revolutionary forces and soon abandoned their project. Upon finding the images again, Mangini interwove them in her classic style to make Due Scatole Dimenticate (Two Forgotten Boxes), a reflective study not only of the Vietnam War, but also of her life in filmmaking, her innovative practice, and how the world had changed during the near century she spent on it.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton on the contours of new working-class cinema.

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Perceptions and Reality

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 3 February 2021

In part one of this essay, I examined the findings of the EHRC investigation into ‘Labour antisemitism’. Now it is necessary to turn to its aftermath – which has almost entirely eclipsed the content of the report itself. Within two days of Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party, Evo Morales had sent a message of solidarity all the way from Latin America, where he has many other things of pressing importance with which to concern himself. By contrast, the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) took a whole week to issue a statement that said the bare minimum, calling for Corbyn’s reinstatement without endorsing what he had said. The SCG could not even mobilize its full cohort of MPs to add their names to this tepid communiqué.

Some of the Labour left’s leading figures were unwilling to hold the line around the most elementary positions in defence of their own movement. The Momentum founder Jon Lansman claimed that ‘Jeremy’s words were not right’ while conceding that everything he had said was accurate, on the grounds that some people might find it upsetting to hear the facts stated plainly. John McDonnell elevated perceptions above reality in a similar fashion:

Numerically, the number of cases of antisemitism within the Labour Party might be small, but that’s not the issue. It’s the pain . . . you don’t calculate the numbers, you calculate the pain that’s inflicted.

By McDonnell’s benchmark, it would be impossible to say whether any claim about the prevalence of antisemitism in the Labour Party was exaggerated or not, however ludicrous it might be. Subjective feelings of distress may be very real indeed, but if those feelings are based on a false perception of reality, stoked up by grossly misleading news coverage, no party leadership can take responsibility for them.

A regular reader of Stephen Pollard’s Jewish Chronicle, for example, would no doubt find its contents deeply alarming. The Chronicle has published so many inaccurate stories about left-wing activists and Palestinian groups that it has provoked a whole series of regulatory rulings and libel settlements. These humiliating judgements have received little or no attention from the rest of the British media, unlike the ‘existential threat’ statement drafted by Pollard and his associates in the summer of 2018, or the front-page editorial during the 2019 election campaign that accused Corbyn of holding ‘racist views’. Despite – or more likely because of – this track record, a consortium fronted by Theresa May’s spin doctor Robbie Gibb rescued Pollard’s editorial tenure when his paper faced bankruptcy in April 2020.

Such editorial practices were by no means a peculiar habit of Pollard and his star reporter Lee Harpin, previously embroiled in the phone-hacking scandal. In November 2019, with the election campaign in full swing, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland casually defamed a Labour candidate as an antisemite, having confused him with another man who was also called Majid Mahmood. The New York Times has still not corrected Howard Jacobson’s demonstrably false claim that the 2017 Labour conference heard a motion in favour of Holocaust denial. Naturally, anyone who trusted the NYT’s fact-checkers would find that report most disturbing, when the real scandal is the total abdication of journalistic standards that attended this controversy.

With some of Corbyn’s most prominent allies adding to the pressure on him when they should have been supporting his stand, it was perhaps hardly surprising if the former Labour leader felt rather isolated. On November 17^th, he issued a second statement. Its key passage was as follows:

To be clear, concerns about antisemitism are neither ‘exaggerated’ nor ‘overstated’. The point I wished to make was that the vast majority of Labour Party members were and remain committed anti-racists deeply opposed to antisemitism.

At one level, Corbyn hadn’t rolled back on his previous argument – if the second sentence was accurate, as all the evidence suggests, then the media narrative certainly had exaggerated the objective scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party by an order of several magnitudes. Feelings of ‘concern’ can be real without having much or indeed any empirical basis.

However, the statement still conceded too much ground to the architects of this propaganda campaign. The people who dominated the public conversation certainly did exaggerate their own professions of ‘concern’ about the likely fate of Britain’s Jewish community under a Corbyn-led government, often in the most cynical and manipulative fashion. It’s impossible to draw a neat line between objective facts and subjective feelings when the media narrative leaned so heavily upon claims about the latter, in a bravura display of the rhetorical technique known as ‘cry-bullying’. In any case, if Corbyn’s second statement formed part of a behind-the-scenes agreement for his readmission to the party, Starmer had no hesitation in reneging on that deal when an NEC panel found that there was no basis for his predecessor to be suspended. His refusal to allow Corbyn back into the Parliamentary Labour Party has yet to be overturned.

None of this could deter some left-wing media commentators from triangulating between fact and fiction in a way that has become all too familiar. Owen Jones described Corbyn’s statement on the EHRC report as one of many ‘poor decisions’ he had made, without identifying a single problem with it. Instead, he delegated the task of evaluation to an opinion poll: ‘While a new Survation poll discloses that Labour members narrowly oppose Starmer’s decision to withhold the whip, it also reveals that most have strongly negative views towards Corbyn’s EHRC response.’ As it happens, the Guardian columnist had misrepresented the poll: 41 per cent said that they had a ‘strongly negative’ view of Corbyn’s statement, with another 17 per cent ‘somewhat negative’. More importantly, would-be thought leaders and opinion formers are supposed to offer a lead and express their opinions, based on evidence and logic, instead of ducking the question altogether.

It’s reasonable to ask if all those surveyed even knew what Corbyn had said, since Britain’s leading media outlets – including the BBC and the liberal broadsheets – were misinforming the public about the content of his statement almost as soon as he had issued it. The Survation questionnaire merely referred to ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s response’ without reproducing the text. A previous survey of the Labour membership from July 2019 had revealed overwhelming support for the views expressed by Corbyn: 49 per cent agreed with the statement that antisemitism in the Labour Party was ‘a genuine problem, but its extent is being deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Jeremy Corbyn’, while another 24 per cent preferred a more combative formulation: ‘It is not a serious problem at all, and is being hyped up to undermine Labour and Jeremy Corbyn.’

The aggregate figure (73 per cent) was significantly higher than the percentage of the membership who thought that Corbyn was doing a good job and wanted him to lead Labour into the next election (56 per cent for both), so it cannot simply have reflected feelings of loyalty to the party leader. There has been some membership churn since July 2019, with Corbyn supporters leaving to be replaced by Starmer enthusiasts, but not enough to account for the discrepancy. It’s more likely that large parts of the Labour membership have been demoralized by the relentless media campaign and just want the issue to go away.

The Guardian has a much wider reach among Labour members than any left-wing media outlet. Readers will have found its luminaries bloviating at every turn about the iniquities of Corbyn and clapping like seals at Starmer’s decision to suspend him. In response, the paper’s only columnist associated with the Labour left could not even bring himself to defend a statement that he knows full well to be true. It’s little wonder if some people who were enthused by Corbyn’s leadership now feel inclined to throw in the towel.

Writing for the Nation, another left-wing pundit, Rachel Shabi, at least tried to explain why she thought Corbyn’s statement was wrong, but the results were not impressive. Shabi had previously endorsed the claims of Panorama’s ‘whistleblowers’ without a hint of scepticism. Instead of pausing to reflect on her own credulity, she transferred it wholesale to a fresh object, accepting the EHRC report in toto, and asserting without evidence that it was just ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

For Shabi, any attempt to quantify the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party was a ‘numbers game’. Her grounds for objecting to Corbyn’s statement were just as murky:

When Corbyn, on the very day of the release of the EHRC report, commented that the issue had been overstated for political reasons, what does that say to the victims of antisemitism? And what about those leftists who dismissed the entire problem as a smear campaign? Wouldn’t Corbyn’s statement fuel such denialism and direct abuse yet again to those who dared to mention it?

To which the obvious retort is: ‘not if they read it’. Shabi herself acknowledged that Corbyn was merely ‘telling the truth’ when he said that the problem had been exaggerated, so we are left with a familiar bogeyman: ‘leftists who dismissed the entire problem as a smear campaign’. This rhetorical framing lumps together anyone who correctly identified the standard media narrative as a compilation of smears – major and minor, empirical and conceptual – with those people foolish enough to imagine that there wasn’t a single case of antisemitism in the Labour Party, under the misleading rubric of ‘denialism’.

Shabi could only muster a single sentence for the issue that is not merely the elephant in the room, but the furniture and fittings as well, when she noted that Israel’s British supporters ‘routinely conflate antisemitism with valid criticisms of Israel.’ The leading protagonists of the campaign to brand Corbyn’s movement as an antisemitic force have relied upon this conflation from the very start, with mounting shamelessness as that campaign gathered momentum. It is no minor addendum to be included at the end of an article that purports to be comprehensive.

Shortly before the EHRC report appeared, Starmer’s shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, administered a ‘dressing-down’ to the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock – a staunch opponent of Corbyn, it should be said – for daring to advocate a ban on the products of Israeli settlements. According to a Labour source who briefed the Mail on Sunday: ‘Lisa made no secret of the fact that she and the leader were angry with Kinnock – especially after all the work that has been done to try to restore Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community.’ Nandy’s interlocutors apparently raised no objections to her claim that Labour would have to grant impunity to West Bank settlements if it wanted to establish good relations with British Jews.

The groups with which Nandy was meeting – the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council – are indefatigable mudguards for Israel’s occupation regime and could never have been reconciled to Corbyn because of his support for Palestinian rights. Anyone who suggests otherwise is whistling in the dark. Despite the overwhelming evidence that attitudes towards Israel were inextricably linked to this controversy, the mainstream debate has systematically excluded Palestinian voices and perspectives.

Owen Jones concluded his Guardian op-ed by evading the central point: ‘If the left cannot untangle discussions of its progressive vision to end inequality from the evils of antisemitism, then it will permanently lose sympathy from the party membership and public alike.’ One might as well reproach the MAS in Bolivia for failing to ‘untangle discussions of its progressive vision to end inequality from the evils of electoral fraud’.

Evo Morales displayed a keener insight into what has been happening in British politics from the other side of the world than many people who have witnessed it at close hand, no doubt informed by his own experience of lawfare campaigns against left-wing movements. With such prominent figures as Jones and Shabi acting like negligent public defenders who want their client to accept a plea bargain despite being wholly innocent of the charges against them, it becomes easier to grasp how this frame-up was able to progress as far as it has.

The approach favoured by Jones and his co-thinkers – of trying to avoid a battle by declining to fight it – is the one that was actually followed by Corbyn’s leadership for the most part, with disastrous results. Corbyn and his allies repeatedly apologized for things that didn’t merit an apology or things that had never happened in the first place. Every unwarranted concession to a false narrative proved to be another brick in the wall. This failed strategy demoralized Corbyn’s supporters by denying them the satisfaction that was rightfully theirs, of seeing their leaders defend themselves and the wider movement against dishonest attacks.

The opponents of the British left are never going to set this weapon aside unless they face a concerted pushback. Corbyn’s would-be successor Rebecca Long-Bailey had none of his ‘baggage’ – which is to say, she didn’t have Corbyn’s long record of involvement in anti-war and anti-imperialist activism. Long-Bailey’s leadership campaign focused on domestic issues, and she went out of her way to avoid incurring the displeasure of groups like the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), to the point of implicitly condoning the Nakba at the JLM’s leadership hustings.

Yet Keir Starmer had no trouble fabricating an allegation of antisemitism against Long-Bailey when he wanted to sack her as shadow education secretary because she was too sympathetic to Britain’s teaching unions. Starmer and his outriders concocted this farrago in plain sight, claiming that it was an ‘antisemitic trope’ to highlight the training Israel gives to US police forces, as the actress Maxine Peake did in an interview shared by Long-Bailey. This threadbare calumny has now become part of the official record in British politics, while the prescience of Long-Bailey’s position on the reopening of schools goes unremarked. Her experience shows that the Labour right will use the Corbyn template to smear any left-wing MP who poses a challenge to Starmer’s leadership in the future.

This is no longer a question of defending Corbyn’s personal reputation – although Corbyn himself has every right to do so. For pundits who have spent the last decade promoting false equivalences between Syriza and Golden Dawn, Pablo Iglesias and Marine Le Pen, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, the story that has been laboriously constructed around Corbyn’s leadership is a godsend. The British commentariat will cling on for dear life to this malign fable, which depicts a left-led Labour Party as the mirror image of far-right movements in other European countries, posing an equivalent threat to the safety of ethnic minorities. It offers them a priceless alibi for their own complicity in the current state of British politics, and an excuse to shut down discussion of the problems and policies that Corbyn’s movement brought to public attention.

The Islington North MP appears to grasp this, even if some of his allies are unwilling to let the penny drop. The only problem with the content of his statement was that it didn’t go far enough; the only problem with its timing was that it came several years too late. He is entitled to receive the same wholehearted support from all sections of the British left that was immediately forthcoming from socialists in other countries with a keener sense of the importance of solidarity.

Read on: Daniel Finn on Labour’s Brexit crisis.

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Day Zero in Cuba

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 2 February 2021

The first of January 2021 was known as ‘Day Zero’ in Cuba. After almost three decades of operating with a dual currency, Cuba’s national peso (CUP) and its convertible peso (CUC) were unified as part of a broader process of ‘monetary ordering’ that also involves major price adjustments, the elimination of ‘excessive [state] subsidies and undue gratuities’ and significant changes in salaries, pensions, and social assistance benefits. The endeavour is without precedent, both because the US blockade restricts Cuba’s access to external finances and revenues, and because the process is underscored by the state’s commitment to cushion the population from the trauma of restructuring. It is also being carried out amid the global economic recession initiated by Covid-19.

In January 2021, Donald Trump became the 12th president of the United States to leave office without accomplishing regime change in Cuba, though it was not for want of trying. The Trump administration unleashed over 240 new measures to tighten the world’s longest and most punitive blockade, devised to cause misery and suffering among the Cuban people. Even in the context of the pandemic the pressure on Cuba intensified; Washington imposed suffocating sanctions while the Miami-based opposition promoted political instability and civil strife. In a final act of spite, on 12 January 2021, the Trump administration restored Cuba to the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move designed to obstruct any efforts by the new Biden administration to improve relations with the island.

Incrementally since 2019, Cuba’s access to food and fuel has once again been severely impeded, export earnings slashed and foreign investors scared off. Measures to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic have demanded additional resources, while the economy was shut down and tourism revenues plummeted as borders were closed. Even while thousands of Cuban medical specialists have treated Covid-19 patients in over 40 countries, goods shortages on the island have made long, exhausting queues part of life’s daily grind, with Cubans rising at 4am to get in line. Poor agricultural production and the pandemic have exacerbated scarcity.

Cuba’s GDP fell by 11 per cent in 2020 – nearly one-third of the total fall the island experienced during the ‘Special Period’ between 1990 and 1993, following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Hard currency receipts were just 55 per cent of planned receipts in 2020, while imports fell 30 per cent compared to 2019. Cuba needs hard currency to purchase on the international market; over half the food, fuel, medicines and other vital resources consumed on the island are imported, hence the unfilled shelves and long queues. This scenario both complicated and lent urgency to the process of monetary ordering.

Cuba’s dual currency dates back to 1993, the worst year of the Special Period, when the US dollar was reluctantly legalized to operate alongside the CUP. Possession of the dollar had been prohibited since 1979. Announcing the legislation in a speech on 26 July 1993, President Fidel Castro had made his distaste clear, warning of emerging inequalities as those in receipt of remittances would enjoy ‘privileges that the rest do not have’, something ‘we are not used to’. However, ‘black-market’ use of US dollars had become so widespread that prohibition was unworkable. Legalization transferred the benefits of using dollars from individuals to the state, so that everyone could benefit. It was also a necessary component of opening up the tourism industry, which operated in dollars. Furthermore, with so many Cubans having relatives in the United States, the inflow from remittances could bolster the ailing economy. However, remittances also exacerbated historically rooted racial and class inequalities, as most recipients were white and better off; their relatives who had left in earlier, politically motivated waves of emigration and were well established in the US or Europe, with adequate resources to send money back to Cuba.

US dollar transactions were permitted in the domestic economy and for personal use. Most basic necessities continued to be purchased in CUP, but luxury goods and supplementary basic goods available outside the ration-card allotment were sold at ‘hard-currency collection shops’, known as ‘dollar shops’, at prices that included steep taxes. For Cubans consumers, the value of the dollar quickly fell against the CUP (initially, from $1 = 150 CUP in 1994 to $1 = 18 in 1996) stabilising at $1 = 24 CUP. In state enterprises, however, accounting and exchange operations functioned with an official exchange rate of $1 = 1 CUP. This was problematic because it obscured losses and surpluses from their accounts, and removed incentives to increase exports. The enterprises’ economic results appeared the same whether their produce was sold internally for CUP, or exported for hard currency, even though the monetary value to the Cuban government was significantly different.

In 1994, the Cuban government introduced a new ‘convertible’ Cuban peso (CUC) to substitute the US dollar for use in Cuba at an exchange rate of one to one. The CUC was printed and controlled by the Cuban Central Bank. Gradually, use of CUCs outstripped US dollars; then in 2004 the US dollar was removed from legal tender. ‘De-dollarisation’ was a response to the Cuban Assets Targeting Group, set up by Bush to stop US dollar flows into and out of Cuba. The dual currency and dual exchange rates remained, however, with the CUC still pegged to the dollar, exchanged at 1 CUC to 24 CUP for Cuban consumers and 1 CUC to 1 CUP for state enterprises.

The dual currency divided the economy into two parts. Which branch any Cuban operated within depended on whether their income was exclusively from a state salary paid in CUP, or if they had access to dollars or CUC. Many Cubans had a foot in each sector. However, it also entrenched inequality and broke the link between work and remuneration. Incomes no longer reflected skill levels, nor the quantity or quality of formal work. Those with access to dollars could buy subsidized peso goods for a fraction of their market price and consume additional goods from dollar shops. Those dependent on peso incomes could not afford non-subsidized markets. State workers, including the most highly skilled, earned the lowest incomes. Many highly qualified Cubans left their professions for jobs with access to CUCs that provided them with a higher level of consumption, such as tourism, taxi driving or joint ventures.

Eliminating the dual currency was a priority for Cubans, according to the national consultations held during Raul Castro’s mandate as president. It was a key objective in the Guidelines for Updating the Economic and Social Model approved in 2011 and updated in 2016; and confirmed in the Sixth and Seventh Congresses of the Cuban Communist Party (2011 and 2016). In October 2013, the government announced that the process of reunifying the currencies was underway. The announcement was well received. Most Cubans had come to identify income inequality with the dual monetary system, and thus assumed that monetary unification would automatically see inequalities disappear.

The government’s statement, however, was clear: ‘monetary and currency exchange unification is not a measure which will, in itself, resolve all of the economy’s current problems, but its implementation is indispensable to re-establishing the value of the Cuban peso and its function as money; that is to say, as a unit of accounting, payment and savings.’ This was necessary, the official note said, for ‘developing the conditions which will lead to increased efficiency, more accurate measurement of economic activity and incentives for those sectors which produce goods and services for export and to replace imports.’ That statement was echoed in 2020 as ‘Day Zero’ approached.

Despite agreement about its urgency, unification was delayed while Cuba dealt with other pressing problems, but initial steps were taken. The one-to-one exchange rate in some Cuban enterprises was shifted to 1 CUC to 1 CUP, and later one to ten, massively devaluing the CUP, raising domestic production costs and requiring greater state subsidies to avoid passing on the higher costs to the Cuban population. The solution ultimately lay in increasing production and raising productivity. Essentially, ‘Day Zero’ is the culmination of years of preparation, the participation of hundreds of experts and, in the final months, the training of thousands of ‘cadre’, officials and specialists. It was also preceded by an intense public-information campaign with government ministers appearing on television daily to explain the measures and address Cubans concerns. This has continued into January 2021.

The minimum monthly wage for state employees (two-thirds of total employees) has increased by 525 per cent from 400 CUP ($17) to 2,100 CUP ($88); the new maximum, based on hours worked and excluding additional payments available, is 9,510 CUP ($396). Higher salaries will be linked to educational qualifications and other specialist criteria. The minimum age-related or disability pension was raised by 450 per cent to $1,528. These rises cushion Cubans from inevitable prices hikes, which were anticipated at an average 160 per cent for state-controlled prices and 300 per cent for private businesses. It follows that the greater proportion of income a Cuban spends in the non-state sector, the more they will be impacted by the soaring prices. However, the benefits of the salary rise to individuals will be eroded if goods scarcity leads to an inflationary spiral.

Higher salaries are structured to incentivise Cubans to improve their qualifications and skill sets. The adjustments will also push into work a large layer in society who get by without formal employment, benefiting from state provision and subsidized consumption. Already by December 2020, thousands of Cubans had applied for positions in the state sector. Yet scarcity remains high, and an inflationary spiral looms.

The ‘ration book’ will continue as a means for distributing highly subsidized food products, but subsidies for other goods in the family basket will be gradually removed as the emphasis shifts to ‘subsidizing people’, not products, so that state support is targeted to those in need.

Nothing dramatic happened on ‘Day Zero’ itself. Cubans have six months to spend or exchange their CUCs at the existing rate of one to 24 CUP. The CUP will not be the only legal tender in Cuba, however. In 2019 the government ‘temporarily’ opened stores in freely convertible currency (MLC), including the dollar. These stores were extended in July 2020. Though widely unpopular, they are a means to provide the state with urgently needed hard currencies. These MLC stores accept bank cards only, which depends on Cubans having cash deposits in Cuban banks. The success of these stores largely depends on remittances, but these have been obstructed by targeted US sanctions plus the global downturn.

All Cuban state enterprises now operate with an exchange rate of $1 = 24 CUP, a devaluation of 2,300 per cent from the one-to-one rate. This is supposed to force them to increase efficiency and productivity in order to adjust. The state has committed to protect enterprises by providing subsidies and credit for one year. However, the drive to raise productivity is bound to reduce job security and increase unemployment – difficult for a workforce accustomed to extensive protections irrespective of performance.

State enterprises have been granted greater control over management decisions: setting prices, raising salaries, distributing profits and securing foreign exchange. State or non-state entities that export can keep 80 per cent of revenues. Those supplying the MLC stores can keep 100 per cent. ‘Monetary ordering’ should benefit exporters, while importers will struggle. This should serve as an incentive to substitute imports for domestic products, fostering national production linkages, saving scarce hard currency and increasing foreign-exchange receipts. The measures are also intended to equalize conditions for state-owned companies and non-state forms of management (self-employed workers, cooperatives, and private businesses).

For foreign investors, the monetary and exchange unification will simplify the process of negotiating, evaluating and managing businesses in Cuba. The positive impact is blunted, however, as the US Treasury threatens to fine foreigners engaging with Cuba. Cuba is struggling to combat US measures to scare off foreign investors. In December 2020, it announced that restrictions on foreign business ownership would be lifted (except in extractive industries and public services), removing the obligation for foreign investors to enter joint ventures with the Cuban state in tourism, biotechnology and the wholesale trades. Cuba’s annual foreign investment portfolio included 503 projects for which the government seeks $12 billion as part of its national development strategy.

Speculation about monetary unification, along with goods scarcities, saw prices rise in late 2020. The government responded by raising state salaries (3 million beneficiaries), pensions (1.7 million beneficiaries) and social assistance (184,083 beneficiaries) in December 2020, earlier than planned. To counter inflation, prices on dozens of key products and services remain centrally set, but these limits have to be enforced. New, higher tariffs on electricity consumption intend to reduce state spending and promote energy saving. Some 95 per cent of the electricity Cubans consume is produced from fossil fuels; 48 per cent of that is imported at high prices, which include a premium charged by suppliers to compensate for the risk of being sanctioned under the US blockade. However, in response to complaints from the population about the hike in tariffs, the government reduced planned increases.

Although the ‘monetary ordering’ exposes Cubans to greater market mechanisms, it is not a break with Cuba’s present system. In the context of US aggression, trade dependence, economic crises and scarcity, the government aims to adopt greater material incentives in the long-standing battle to raise production and productivity within the socialist framework. Back in November 2005, Fidel Castro talked about ‘the dream of everyone being able to live on their salary or on their adequate pension’ without need of the ration book, which allows a ‘parasitic’ layer in Cuban society to refuse to work while benefiting from state subsidies. From 2007, Raul Castro constantly referred to the ‘socialist principle’ of ‘each according to their ability, to each according to their work’ as an aspiration in Cuba. He has repeated it in relation to the monetary ordering underway.

Cuba delayed ‘Day Zero’, hoping to create propitious conditions for its implementation. But with the pandemic raging and a global economic recession just beginning, nothing was to be gained from further delay. The process may alarm Cubans, but as the adjustment filters through the economy, and with the state’s promise that no-one will be left behind, it could prove to be a vital step for Cuban development. Even if the Biden administration lifts some sanctions, this year promises to be another tough one for Cuba.

Helen Yaffe’s We are Cuba! is out now with Yale.

Read on: Emily Morris on Cuba’s surprising trajectory since 1991.

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A Fabricated Crisis

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 1 February 2021

The dominant players in the British media have invested so much in the false narrative around ‘Labour antisemitism’ that they cannot afford to lose face now. The publication of the long-awaited Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report in October 2020 might have been an opportunity for Jeremy Corbyn’s detractors to quietly discard their more egregious fabrications. Instead, we have seen a concerted push to give those fabrications canonical status, so that the mere act of questioning them is sufficient to place one outside the moral community.

The Labour leader Keir Starmer cited his predecessor’s response to the EHRC report as a pretext to suspend Corbyn from the party. Although a panel from Labour’s national executive quickly overturned that decision, Starmer refused to restore the whip. Not for the first time, Corbyn’s supporters found themselves having to fight two battles at once: on the one hand showing that the EHRC report was badly flawed, on the other stressing that it offered no basis whatsoever for disciplinary action against him.

By the time the EHRC delivered its findings, there was ample evidence of its own crude partiality – perfectly encapsulated by its refusal to investigate racism in the Conservative Party despite multiple requests to do so. The Commission itself is a classic Blairite quango, set up in the last years of the New Labour government with a mandate to canalize anti-racism within limits determined by the state. Since the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, they have slashed the EHRC’s budget to less than a third of its previous level and stuffed its board with political appointees. In the process, the Commission has come to resemble a Matryoshka doll of bias: the former EHRC chair David Isaac, previously accused by his own chief executive of avoiding topics that might prove challenging for the Tories, has now levelled the same charge against its current leadership.

In the weeks following Corbyn’s suspension, there were multiple blows to the Commission’s credibility. On a single day in November, it published a report on gender discrimination at the BBC that was derided as a ‘whitewash’, then faced a stinging rebuke from a Westminster committee investigating racism against black people, which found the EHRC to have been ‘unable to adequately provide leadership and gain trust in tackling racial inequality.’ Within 24 hours of that double whammy, the Conservative government had appointed David Goodhart, a leading apologist for its ‘hostile environment’ policy, as an EHRC commissioner. To complete the debacle, the lawyer who led the Commission’s investigation of Labour, erstwhile Whig candidate Alasdair Henderson, was revealed to be a fan of race-baiting hard-right ideologues like Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray.

The report itself is underwhelming and comes nowhere close to substantiating the media hype. There is a striking discrepancy between the facts it presents and the way it interprets such evidence – a competent lawyer could drive a coach and horses through some of the conclusions that it reaches. Take, for example, its eye-catching claim to have found evidence of ‘unlawful harassment’ of Jewish people by the Labour Party. In support of this conclusion, the EHRC refers to a controversy that erupted during the 2016 local election campaign around social-media posts by the Labour MP Naz Shah, which predated her stint as an MP. According to the Commission, Shah’s posts ‘went beyond legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’ and were ‘not protected by Article 10’ of the European Convention on Human Rights.

What were these unacceptable comments by Shah? The EHRC refers to ‘a graphic suggesting that Israel should be relocated to the United States’ (a jokey meme, not a serious proposal) and ‘a post in which she appeared to liken Israeli policies to those of Hitler’. The report’s authors do not explain why the latter should be considered unlawful rather than in poor taste – if indeed Shah intended to make such a comparison when she ‘appeared’ to do so. (In Israel itself, the IDF’s deputy chief of staff Yair Golan went much further than Shah in a 2016 speech on Holocaust Memorial Day, telling his audience that he found it ‘scary to see horrifying developments that took place in Europe beginning to unfold here’.)

In her much-maligned and little-read 2016 report, Shami Chakrabarti quite sensibly urged Labour members in Britain to ‘resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine in particular’. However, this was a recommendation by a private citizen, not a legal ruling – Chakrabarti explicitly rejected the idea that ‘bad taste metaphors and comparisons should ever be a matter for the criminal law’ – and in any case could not be said to apply retrospectively.

The controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism lists ‘comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ among the things that ‘could, taking into account the overall context’ be deemed antisemitic. Labour adopted this definition under intense pressure in September 2018: like Chakrabarti’s recommendation, it has no retrospective force. The man who originally drafted the IHRA definition, the US lawyer and academic Kenneth Stern, has repeatedly spoken out against its use for legal or disciplinary purposes, warning that ‘right-wing Jewish groups’ are deploying it as a weapon to muzzle criticism of Israel. According to Stern, the definition should only ever have been a tool for data collection.

In any case, this bitterly contested text does not form part of the law of the land, even if it has become the law of the Labour Party, and the caveat about ‘overall context’ would vitiate its deployment by any judicial body (as opposed to private, sub-judicial organizations like political parties or universities). The EHRC’s assertions about legal constraints on speech about Israel have no basis whatsoever. The fact that Shah apologized for her posts, as the authors note, has no bearing on their legality: needless to say, many politicians have issued apologies for comments that broke no laws.

This should be enough to discredit the finding of ‘unlawful harassment’, but the problems don’t end there. The report claims that it was Ken Livingstone rather than Shah herself who perpetrated this act of ‘harassment’ when he ‘repeatedly denied that these posts were antisemitic and sought to minimize their offensive nature’. In a final twist, it asserts that Livingstone was acting on behalf of the Labour Party when he did so, although it had been several years at the time since he held any position for Labour in local or national government. These are the slender reeds upon which the EHRC rests its much-vaunted claim that Labour broke anti-discrimination laws under Corbyn’s leadership. The merest application of pressure to any of those reeds will cause them to snap.

If we were to apply the EHRC’s logic consistently, the Labour and Conservative Parties would have to be shut down immediately as criminal enterprises. Both are stuffed to the gills with senior figures who have denied that comments made by their colleagues should be considered racist – for example, the Labour MPs who rallied to the defence of Phil Woolas after the courts expelled him from the House of Commons for running an election campaign that was incomparably more offensive than anything Naz Shah can be accused of. Some of those MPs now form part of Keir Starmer’s front-bench team.

Of course, neither the EHRC nor anyone else in British public life have the slightest intention of extending the criteria used to indict Corbyn to the political class in general. The report’s authors clearly began with the assumption that Labour had to be found guilty of breaking the law in some fashion and worked backwards from that point, constructing a chain of argument that would appear to support their claim, so long as there was no proper scrutiny applied to it.

The report also muddles its discussion of the Labour disciplinary process in a way that can only have been deliberate. Most of the flaws and failings it identifies with that process were concentrated in the period when Iain McNicol and Sam Matthews had control of it. After Corbyn’s ally Jennie Formby replaced McNicol as Labour general secretary in 2018, the handling of antisemitism complaints by the party improved dramatically. McNicol and Matthews subsequently appeared as star witnesses in the BBC Panorama documentary ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’, where they presented themselves as heroic dissidents whose unflinching efforts to combat antisemitism had been obstructed by Corbyn’s office. The programme’s maker, John Ware, is an egregiously partisan and historically illiterate figure, who believes it should be compulsory to describe the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1947–48 as a legitimate act of self-defence. The EHRC tacitly dismisses the principal claims of Ware’s documentary – claims that had already been demolished at exhaustive length in a dossier compiled under Jennie Formby’s supervision.

Yet the authors of the report take care not to explicitly draw out the conclusions that are staring them in the face. Neither Iain McNicol nor Sam Matthews is named in the report, and the EHRC glosses over the significance of the factional divide between McNicol and his team on the one hand, Corbyn and his office on the other – something the authors cannot possibly have been unaware of, since it was one of the most prominent stories in British politics over the previous two years.

The authors scold Corbyn’s office for ‘interference’ with a small number of complaints, without acknowledging that the goal of such ‘interference’ was to accelerate the handling of those complaints and stiffen the penalties handed down—something Corbyn was repeatedly urged to do, not least by his deputy leader Tom Watson. As Richard Sanders and Peter Oborne have pointed out in their excellent critique of the report for Middle East Eye:

Corbyn is being held responsible for the failures of party officials who were not just his political opponents, but also among his principal accusers when it came to allegations of antisemitism. He is being simultaneously condemned for failing to show leadership, and for interfering in the complaints procedure – even when that interference was aimed at speeding up investigations.

The conventional wisdom of the British media holds John Ware’s Panorama documentary and the EHRC inquiry to have been the two most important planks in the case against Corbynism. In fact, it’s impossible to simultaneously accept the claims made in both. If the picture of Labour’s disciplinary process drawn up by the EHRC is accurate, then Keir Starmer’s high-profile legal settlement with Ware and his self-styled ‘whistleblowers’ must be considered a travesty.

For all its intellectual chicanery, the EHRC could never have delivered a report that backed up the standard media narrative about ‘Labour antisemitism’, as the empirical chasm was unbridgeable. And it was that narrative Corbyn had in mind when he included the following sentence in his response: ‘One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media.’

In a rational public culture, these words should have been as controversial as the observation that Glasgow lies north of Manchester. The main points of the media narrative from 2018 onwards were as follows: Corbyn himself was said to be personally antisemitic, with a deep, all-consuming hatred of Jewish people, while antisemitism was reported to be endemic within the Labour Party – aided and abetted by its leadership, which had ‘declared war on the Jews’ – to the point that it now constituted an ‘existential threat to Jewish life in Britain’ without precedent in any European country since 1945.

The people making such claims, from the Labour MP Margaret Hodge to the Board of Deputies president Marie van der Zyl and the Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard, were at the heart of public debate over this meta-controversy for several years, with regular access to newspaper frontpages and TV bulletins. They received access to this megaphone from much more powerful actors – the Conservative Party, Labour’s right-wing faction and their respective media allies – because they could supply invaluable assistance in a broader campaign against the British left.

One of the most unpleasant aspects of this campaign was the vilification of any Jews who stood against it. The right-wing Daily Mail championed Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s and is no less accommodating of racist politicians today. It published a hit-job denouncing David Rosenberg, a left-wing Jewish historian who organized the commemoration of London’s Cable Street rally, where Mosley met his Waterloo. The spectacle of Lord Rothermere’s xenophobic rag lecturing a Jewish socialist about the true character of antisemitism was a perfect synecdoche for the whole thrust of British media discourse, which combined incessant slander with the trivialization of real horrors. Guardian columnist Rafael Behr recently compared those who campaigned for Labour in 2019 to the accomplices of Nazism, and received clamorous applause from his colleagues for doing so.

For all their moralistic huffing and puffing, nobody in the British commentariat actually took these histrionic falsehoods seriously. The universal tendency for journalists to fall back on a minimalist line whenever they had to defend the narrative was proof enough of that. As a media talking point, ‘Labour antisemitism’ resembled an inverted pufferfish, which swelled up to the size of a basketball under normal circumstances but shrank to the size of a pea when under attack.

It should have been easy for left-wing MPs to poke holes in this outlandishly false narrative, repeating and expanding upon Corbyn’s statement without equivocation or apology. Doing so would have had two clear benefits, getting the facts across to the public while also putting Starmer on the spot. Instead, the Labour left – with a few honourable exceptions – mounted an ineffectual, half-hearted defence of Corbyn that must have encouraged his successor to think he could get away with an unprecedented factional manoeuvre.

Read part two, on the failure of the Labour left to mount an effective challenge to Corbyn’s suspension.

Tags Politics