Month: August 2021

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After the Blast

It has been just over a year since the devastating explosion at Beirut’s port on 4 August 2020, which destroyed several neighbourhoods and shattered the national psyche. The blast was all too predictable: the upshot of a 2013 decision by port authorities to confiscate a cargo ship carrying 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate and store it in a warehouse without proper safety provisions. Few believed that the political system would survive the fallout. Yet so far it has persisted, even in the absence of a stable government. Sporadic outbursts of public anger have not been enough to prompt a widespread change in political allegiances. For many, recent developments have paradoxically affirmed the need for institutionalized sectarianism and corruption. To uncover the reasons for this stasis, we must place the events of last summer in a broader historical perspective. 

The state of Lebanon was created following the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which France and Britain agreed to divide the Ottoman Empire between them. France acquired most of Syria, and in 1920 carved out Lebanon as a ‘safe haven’ for Christians in the region. The French decision to include Maronite villages to the north, south and east of historical Mount Lebanon led to the incorporation of major areas inhabited by Sunnis (especially in the north) and Shi‘is (especially in the south and north-east). The new borders shifted the demography away from Maronites, and Sunnis and Shi‘is came to form almost 50% of the population.

To correct the imbalance, France established a sectarian system that would guarantee Maronite hegemony. Almost all senior roles in government went to Maronites. They controlled the presidency, governorship of the central bank, and leadership of the army and security forces. Other religious communities – Sunnis, Shi‘is, Druzes, Orthodox Christians – became a supporting cast. Sunnis were awarded the posts of prime minister and police chief but given little actual power. Shi‘is received the ceremonial position of parliamentary speaker. Sectarianism was later enshrined in the National Pact, an oral accord that Lebanese politicians approved when France granted Lebanon independence (nominally in 1943, effectively in 1946).

This led to a political crisis in 1958, when Muslims, no longer willing to play second-fiddle to the Maronites, aligned themselves with the insurgent cause of Arab nationalism. US marines joined with Lebanese military intelligence to beat them back. The country’s unequal economic model – in which the dividends of rising growth rates flowed to the West’s favoured groups – was entrenched. This created the conditions for the civil war of 1975–1990, in which an estimated 120,000 died and over a million were displaced. During the conflict, Israel inflamed communal tensions by using Christian militias as a proxy force to fight the PLO. The civil war eventually yielded the Taif Accord, signed in Saudi Arabia in 1989, which dismantled Maronite supremacy and gave every religious group a real stake in government. Yet rather than weakening the grip of sectarianism, the agreement merely intensified it.

Under the new system, people born into a particular religious sect were compelled (by incentives or otherwise) to rally around certain political dynasties in order to maximize their social and economic leverage – embedding patronage and corruption in the country’s democratic processes. The so-called ‘confessional’ structure determines how many MPs can come from each sect, what ministerial posts they can fill, which areas they can represent, and how key positions in public bodies (and some private ones) are assigned. If disenfranchised Sunnis, Shi‘is and some Christians once hoped to topple sectarianism, years of civil war convinced most that this was impossible, not least because of external pressure from Israel, the West and Syria. Instead, they opted for greater influence within the sectarianized state as the second-best solution.

By stemming the conflict, the Taif Accord ushered in a period of tremendous optimism. But it did little to solve a series of underlying economic problems. With scant domestic resources, Lebanon has always depended on its role as a regional hub for travel and banking, shipping and commerce, education and healthcare services, publishing and performing arts – leaving it prone to the vagaries of international markets and regional politics. More recently, this has allowed successive US administrations to inflict maximal hardship on the country through blacklists and embargos, adopted at the behest of Israel to target the ‘infrastructure’ that supports Hezbollah. Such measures squeezed the public finances to their limit during the Obama and Trump years. In response, the Lebanese Central Bank resorted to a Ponzi scheme: raising interest rates to attract deposits from local banks in the knowledge that it would not be able to repay them. This triggered a severe financial crisis in autumn 2019. The country defaulted on its foreign debt payments for the first time. A wave of bankruptcies was narrowly avoided when the government allowed depositors to access a fraction of their money at an exchange rate far below that of the open market. Most depositors were effectively given a haircut, whether they liked it or not. Working-class Lebanese flooded the streets, demonstrating against the corruption of the political class.

Then came the explosion of 4 August. The currency went into freefall; today the US dollar fetches around 20,000 Lebanese pounds, compared to 6,750 before the blast (and 1,500 before the 2019 crisis). Public funds have dried up, and the lack of dollars has forced the rationing of many imports, especially fuel for cars and electricity. There have been extended blackouts and long queues at petrol stations. Since most workers are paid in Lebanese pounds, their purchasing power has fallen sharply. Many are forced to restrict themselves to essential shopping and minimize ‘luxury’ expenses such as meat or clothes. Medicine, though subsidized, is in short supply. Employment opportunities are dwindling: a large number of college graduates cannot find work to match their qualifications. This reinforces the sectarian system, as religious networks or political connections are often the only means to get a job. Those who cannot do so tend to migrate, their remittances extending a lifeline to the very system that ejected them.

By deepening the economic crisis, the explosion increased the population’s dependence on traditional sectarian leaders. Politicians turned to their international backers (the US, France, Saudi Arabia, Iran) to secure cash and supplies to distribute to their local supporters. Concurrently, the popular cross-religious demonstrations of 2019 petered out. Over the past year we have seen more sectarian gatherings tied to specific political outfits, whose primary aim is to score points against other groups. The explosion has also eroded the fragile relationships between these outfits – who, as in previous crises, are more concerned with blaming their rivals than finding the real culprits. When prime minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated in 2005, four pro-Syrian generals were jailed, then released a few years later when it became clear they had no role in the killing. Likewise, the judiciary is currently using its ‘investigation’ to target individuals whom it can scapegoat for institutional failures.

This has instilled an atmosphere of distrust which inhibits the formation of a government. Just days after the blast, the Lebanese PM Hassan Diab announced the resignation of his cabinet. Yet he has stayed on in a caretaker capacity amid faltering negotiations to assemble a new administration. Two attempts to establish a viable executive, under diplomat Mustapha Adib and former PM Saad Hariri, have failed. Another former PM, Najib Mikati, is now in talks with president Michel Aoun, but whether they can strike a deal before highly anticipated parliamentary elections in May remains uncertain. As the country’s resources contract at an unprecedented rate, its religious factions have become increasingly unwilling to risk their positions by compromising with their adversaries. Each of them fears that their constituents will view any concession as a betrayal. 

The arm-wrestling between politicians is not helped by redoubled foreign interference. Israel has been launching aerial attacks on Southern Lebanon: a stark warning that it will not tolerate a Hezbollah-dominated government. The Saudis have similar priorities, wary of the link between Lebanon’s Shi‘is and Iran. France and the EU have threatened to impose sanctions on Lebanese politicians if they cannot decide on the composition of a cabinet. Their tactics are deeply counterproductive, since by targeting specific groups they compound the impression that external actors are handing power to their proxies, in a direct replay of the colonial era. France has promised renewed economic assistance – but this is conditional on obtaining the contract to rebuild Beirut’s seaport, siphoning off billions provided by the IMF and other donors. Riad Salameh, the governor of the Central Bank, was installed by France and the US to do their bidding in the banking sector, attracting foreign investment and pleasing international creditors. He has remained in post throughout the crisis, despite coming under investigation for money laundering.

If the Taif Accords gave every religious sect a piece of the pie – large enough that they would not seek to challenge the system itself – now the pie is shrinking; disappearing, in fact. This leaves politicians reliant on foreign backers to sustain their patronage system: the only thing that can ensure the survival of Lebanon’s dysfunctional confessional democracy. Ordinary citizens who aren’t co-opted by the system tend to leave the country, weakening the social bloc best placed to change it. For those who stay behind, sectarianism is seen as the devil they know. A year after the explosion this arrangement shows little sign of changing. And yet, if increased foreign interference sparks a backlash from the Lebanese public, there remains a chance – distant, but not impossible – that a popular, cross-sectarian opposition to the political class may reemerge over the next decade.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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On the Run

In colonial India, news of the Russian Revolution was widely censored by British authorities. Newspaper reports were allowed to run for no more than two or three sentences. Yet these snippets drew the attention of Rahul Sankrityayan, a young Vaishnava sadhu who had become disenchanted with the cloistered world of Hindu asceticism. The 24-year-old Brahmin had already fled from two different Hindu monasteries and turned down an offer to become the future mahant (chief priest) at the famous Uttaradhi Math. By 1917, he was drifting closer to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that rejected the ritualistic trappings of the religion for a primordial Vedic identity. It was at one of Samaj’s newspaper offices that Sankrityayan began to pore over the scattered news fragments, piecing together a narrative of the events transpiring in distant Russia. Thus began a series of tumultuous changes in Sankrityayan’s own life, thrusting him into the nationalist fold of the Congress Party before remaking him as a Buddhist monk and communist peasant leader, whose intellectual and political activity took him as far as Tibet and Iran, the Soviet Union and Sri Lanka.

Rahul Sankrityayan (born Kedarnath Pandey) came from a family of farmers in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Rejecting both his child marriage and his family’s attempt to prime him for a career in colonial administration, he left home at an early age – motivated by a desire to study the Vedanta, one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy. He spent the next years wandering the subcontinent as an ascetic, adopting a number of different aliases. In 1919, when nationwide protests erupted against the Rowlatt Act – a piece of imperial legislation that allowed for non-jury trials – Sankrityayan was living in the Arya Samaj stronghold of Lahore. A general strike swept the city, and the young Hindu reformist was impressed by the strength of anticolonial resistance. Otherwise living in segregated quarters, Hindus and Muslims came together in the streets, chanting political slogans and drinking from the same glasses (a common taboo at the time). Although he was still entranced by the spectre of Bolshevism, the Communist Party of India had not yet been formed, and the non-cooperation movement was gaining ground. Sankrityayan chose to quit the Arya Samaj and join the Congress.

Over the following three years, his work as a grassroots political organizer saw him arrested and jailed twice. In prison he read Trotsky’s Bolshevism and World Peace, his first encounter with Marxism. Having come into contact with Buddhists in Bihar, he began studying The Majjhima Nikaya, a Theravada Buddhist scripture, as well as the Avesta. Sankrityayan taught himself French, and even wrote a utopian work of science fiction, Baisvi Sadi (Twenty-Second Century), an idiosyncratic blend of Gandhian nationalism, inchoate Buddhism and homespun communism. By the time he was released, the Congress Party was in turmoil. Gandhi’s decision to suspend the non-cooperation movement in response to protestors setting fire to a police station in Chauri Chaura had caused a series of defections. Although Sankrityayan did not join the breakaway Swaraj Party, he became increasingly disenchanted with Gandhian politics. In 1928, he retreated from activism and went to teach Sanskrit at Vidyalankar Parivena, one of the largest Buddhist monastic colleges in Sri Lanka, where he studied the Pali language, extended his engagement with epigraphy and archaeology, and became a dedicated reader of the Tripiṭaka. When Rudolf Otto, the German scholar of theology and comparative religion, met Sankrityayan at the Parivena, he was shocked to learn that the latter had never received a formal education.

After a year of teaching he undertook the first of four journeys to Tibet in hope of recovering a trove of ancient Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts inscribed in Sanskrit. Denied a travel visa, Sankrityayan disguised himself as a Tibetan monk and made his way to Kathmandu, where he befriended the Drukpa Lama and moved in with his disciples. Under tight colonial surveillance, Sankrityayan quietly set about learning the Tibetan language before striding across the Himalayas on foot and arriving safely in Lhasa. His visit coincided with an upsurge in tensions between Nepal and Tibet that spilled over into violent clashes. With war likely to break out at any moment, Sankrityayan searched for the ancient manuscripts and began to compile the first Tibetan–Sanskrit dictionary. On the verge of pennilessness, he was eventually forced to cut short his sojourn and walk back across the Himalayas along with twenty-two pack mules, each of them carrying manuscripts, paintings, and other ancient artefacts he had acquired during his short stay. On his return to Sri Lanka in 1930, he renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism – adopting, for the first time, the name Rahul Sankrityayan.

Sankrityayan deepened his political commitment on two short visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, first as a tourist and then as a professor of Sanskrit at Leningrad University. During his second visit, he married the Mongolian scholar Ellena Kozerovskaya. They worked together on Sankrityayan’s Tibetan–Sanskrit dictionary and had a son, Igor. Still captivated by the romance of the Russian Revolution, Sankrityayan did not realize he had arrived in a different Leningrad. He declared Stalin’s regime a utopian society and dismissed criticism of the purges as ‘anti-Soviet conspiracies’. Sankrityayan even remarked that his own presence in the country – as a foreigner and Buddhist – should have been legitimate cause for suspicion among the Soviet authorities (who were disappearing numerous Indologists and communists of Indian origin at the time). When the university refused to extend his teaching contract, he flirted with the idea of joining the armed communist movements in China or Spain. But instead he returned home and signed up with the outlawed Communist Party of India – traveling extensively in the Bihar countryside to organize peasant struggles and survey experiments in cooperative farming. After months of being tailed by secret police, Sankrityayan, now the president of All India Kisan Sabha (the CPI’s peasant front), was finally arrested in 1940, in a brutal nationwide crackdown on communists orchestrated in collusion with the Congress Party.

The Kashi Pandit Sabha, an organization of Brahmin scholars based in Banaras, gave Sankrityayan the famous title Mahapandit, ‘the great scholar’. Yet this was not entirely suited to his temperament. Sankrityayan was of course a polyglot and a polymath: during his lifetime he learned 33 languages – including Arabic, Russian, German, and Tamil – and wrote 140 books, including biographies, social histories, studies of Buddhist philosophy, travelogues, religious polemics, dictionaries, plays, novels, and an autobiography that spans six thick volumes. Yet little in this bustling oeuvre could be considered ‘scholarship’ in the strictest sense. Sankrityayan spurned specialization for the bricolage that he had honed at the Samaj newspaper office: improvising his texts out of heterogeneous sources and traditions. Drifting through monasteries, prisons and political parties, he thought and worked on the go (and often on the run). His various transitions – from Hindu to Buddhist to Communist – were not always clear-cut. While studying the Russian Revolution, Sankrityayan was simultaneously becoming a zealous Arya Samaji, planning to travel to China and Japan on proselytizing missions. Long after he abandoned Hinduism, he was still publicly wearing the garb of a sadhu (if only to avail of free food and lodging at religious institutions). In 1922 he struck an isolated figure at his first Congress meeting, arriving barefoot and shaven-headed, wearing the customary Vaishnava robes and holding a kamandal in his hand.

Earlier this year, the first complete English translation of Sankrityayan’s literary magnum opus, Volga se Ganga Tak (From Volga to Ganga) was published by LeftWord. Translations of the book are already available in Czech, Chinese, Russian, Polish, and numerous Indian languages. The new edition builds on a previous translation by the British Marxist historian V.G. Kiernan from 1946. Like many of Sankrityayan’s works, Volga – a fictional history of the migration of Aryans from the higher reaches of Volga to the Indo-Gangetic plans – was composed in jail. The epic spans 8,000 years of human history, beginning in 6000 BCE, the ancient age of matrilineal clans, and concluding in 1942 CE, the high noon of the Indian nationalist struggle. The subject matter is forbidding enough on its own terms. But Sankrityayan had the audacity to write it in the midst of a raging nationalist struggle while locked up for political sedition. He prepared for the project over the course of several months, during which time he delivered a daily lecture series on Indian philosophy for his fellow inmates and went on hunger strike to demand better provisions for reading and writing. Once he finally set to work, Sankrityayan completed the manuscript in just 20 days during the summer of 1942. The book was published the following year and was excoriated by the Hindu right, earning Sankrtiyayan the title of Nagnavadi Vedanindak (‘the nudist critic of Vedas’).  

Despite its millennia-spanning scope, Volga is not an intimidating read. Its longue durée narrative has the rhythm of an extended anecdote. It unfolds as a series of twenty interlinked vignettes and stories, each tracking the shifting fortunes of ordinary people at different historical junctures: the incestuous activities of ancient matriarchal clans; the fear of civilizational collapse prompted by agricultural progress; women’s everyday resistance to impositions on their sexual freedom; the fateful encounter between Aryans and Asurs amid the rise of the caste system. The many twists and transitions in Volga add up to an affective history of class struggle.

The novel’s everyday protagonists are interleaved with a panoply of Great Men: Ashvaghosha, the ancient Buddhist philosopher, poet and dramatist, is depicted dreaming of an anti-Brahmanical revolution in philosophy; Baba Nooruddin, the Sufi saint, repurposes a ruined Buddhist monastery into a khanqah, to the chagrin of orthodox Mullahs and Brahmins; and Mangal Singh, a fictitious Hindu king, befriends Marx and Engels in London. Although Sankrityayan’s text is deeply indebted to Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, it does not accept the theory of socialist ‘stages’. Its civilizational arc is flickering and non-linear, demonstrating how millennia-old contradictions have taken on new forms during the nationalist struggle.

In July 1942, communists were released en masse and the ban on CPI was repealed. This dramatic shift was prompted by the party’s unflinching support for British involvement in the ‘People’s War’ against Nazism. Following the party line, Sankrityayan, like other communists, paid little attention to the sudden militant turn in the Congress-led Quit India Movement. While millions laid siege to colonial police stations, public offices, telegraph networks and railway lines, the CPI remained focused on anti-fascism, even if it involved provisionally supporting British imperialism. Its consequent loss of popular support was compounded when the CPI failed to disentangle demands for self-determination from the ‘communal question’, endorsing the Muslim League’s resolution for a separate Islamic republic.

Although the CPI ultimately reversed these positions, a strain of reactionary Indian nationalism had gradually taken hold of Sankrityayan during the mid-40s. This was influenced by the CPI’s ‘Pakistan for Muslims’ line and by his ongoing communication with cultural organizations linked to Arya Samaj. Scandal erupted at the Akhil Bhartiya Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (All-India Hindi Literary Conference), held just months after partition. Having recently returned from his third visit to the Soviet Union, Sankrityayan declared that Hindi should be adopted as India’s ‘national language’ and that all religions, including Islam, should be ‘Indianized’. The audience were shocked that Sankrityayan’s anticolonial politics had curdled into popular Hindu nationalism. He was promptly expelled from the party. Back in the Soviet Union, Kozerovskaya was ordered to divorce Sankrityayan. When she refused, she was fired from Leningrad University, and the state put an end to the couple’s correspondence.

Three years later, the second part of Sankrityayan’s autobiography, Meri Jeevan Yatra, was published in Allahabad. Its epigraph, a paraphrase of Buddha, read: ‘I took thoughts as a raft to carry me across, not as a load to be carried on the head.’ Despite his political exile and marital breakdown, Sankrityayan’s proverbial raft had not yet foundered. After marrying Kamala Pariyar, his assistant at the time, he applied to join the CPI in 1955 and was readmitted. Repudiating his affinity with Hindu nationalism, he wrote a blistering polemic against Swami Karpatri Maharaj, a rightwing Hindu monk who was arrested for barring Dalits from the famous Kashi Vishwanath temple in Banaras. In a pamphlet titled Ramrajya aur Marxvad (Ramrajya and Marxism) – an inversion of Karpatri Maharaj’s 815-page tome, Marxvad aur Ramrajya – Sankrityayan attacked the symbiotic relationship between modern capitalism and hierarchies of caste and gender, as enshrined in the Brahmanical utopia of Ramrajya (the Kingdom of Rama). Holding out hope that Dalits and Bahujans might soon overthrow the Brahmanical supremacy in the Hindi heartland, Sankrityayan rejected the notion that religion was the opium of the masses. Instead, he suggested that in the subcontinent Buddhism was a historical forerunner of Marxism, and that Buddha should serve as our Hegel.

Throughout his meandering career, Sankrityayan’s instinct for improvisation was closely entwined with his impulse for ghummakari – ‘the practice of wandering’. With time, however, this impulse became difficult to sustain. In 1958, while traveling to Tibet, Sankrityayan – now burdened with diabetes and high blood pressure – suffered a debilitating stroke. Another followed in 1961, leaving him physically incapacitated. He was transported to the Soviet Union for medical treatment – but having lost most of his memory, he failed to communicate with Kozerovskaya and Igor. In 1963, Sankrityayan died shortly after receiving the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award.

It is tempting to suggest that the complete English translation of Volga will secure Sankrityayan’s place in the legacy of Indian communism. Yet the survival of this legacy is itself contested. The region where Sankrityayan spent long stretches of his life is now a wellspring of Hindutva. The ranks of far-right Hindu organizations have mushroomed. Hate speech, lynchings and pogroms suffuse everyday life in the region. Meanwhile, communists struggle to appear relevant. In this landscape, Sankrityayan has come to resemble one of the fabled relics he collected. His biography seems like a work of historical fiction – perhaps even the unwritten twenty-first story of his Volga – rather than a contemporary reality. And yet, this apparent distance between the author and his present-day readership could prove instructive. While studying his political trajectory, we are forced – like Sankrityayan in the newspaper offices – to reconstruct a revolutionary narrative which seems impossibly far away, but which may be closer than we think.

Read on: Francesca Orsini, ‘India in the Mirror of World Fiction’, NLR 13

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Remnants of Utopia

For some writers, not all, there comes a time when old stuff gets recycled. Earlier work is sent into another circuit of value-production – and even the pieces that were rejected become revalued. This applies to the collection Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances by the English writer Owen Hatherley, with its gathering of materials from various times and places: blogs now resting in ‘indefinite suspension’; salvos once composed for new net-based aesthetic-political fora; think-pieces punted to specialised building, design and architectural publications; and, as time goes by, columns, articles and longer essays for mainstream journalistic outlets. To reuse is to get a second chance to construct an argument – for sometimes commissions were muffled in the first instance, as attested by the inclusion of an essay on socialism and nationalism on the Danube (which previously appeared in truncated form), or an exposé of fascist influence in the design of Walter-Benjamin-Platz in Berlin (which was spiked by the London Review of Books). Such recycling is appropriate for someone whose thought developed in dialogue with the remnants of modernism, itself an aesthetics of scraps and quotation which queries what constitutes the truly new.

These off-cuts and online off-the-cuffs deserve to be read again, rescued from the ephemeral moment of their publication. Here they are reorganised thematically according to spatialised concepts. These range from ‘Spaces’, which explores the trajectory of post-war building practices, to ‘Screens’, which rewinds to Hatherley’s starting point in reviews of art cinema, and includes a poignant reflection on the work of onetime friend and blogger-in-arms Mark Fisher. This collating allows the reader to measure just how much foresight was at work in Hatherley’s writing. How sensitive was his radar? How many more libraries or public toilets have shut in the interim? How many more ‘golden turds’ erected? How much more idiosyncratic shop signage has been replaced by dull identikitism and how many more fascist architects have been rehabilitated? This retrospection could lead to despair – what effect does such caustic probing have, if it all keeps getting worse or not better? But the pleasure that comes from his prescient formulations carries its own reward, which may have something to do with solidarity.

Many of the fragments contained here initially appeared in altered form in Hatherley’s ten books, and some continue to float around forgotten corridors of the internet (the eight blogs he participated in can still be found, frozen in time). But their collection in a single volume allows for a re-evaluation of this scattered oeuvre. The driving purpose of the essays is clear: they argue with, bluster over and call to account the delusions and missteps of two decades of urban planning and design, predominantly in the UK, but also as far afield as Palestine. There are also some side glances to pop music. Hatherley began writing for a wider audience at a time when to write meaningfully – politically but also aesthetically – meant to write about music. Or that is what the people who influenced him had done: Simon Reynolds and Jon Savage, Ian Penman, Kodwo Eshun, and Fisher. From the 80s to the mid-90s music was the vector for political reflection and imagination, in its broadest sense.

By the time Hatherley moved to London to study English and History at Goldsmiths in 1999, it had become more enticing – and practicable – to write to one’s own deadlines, about whatever one wanted, without being edited. An army of online critics was assembling. Hatherley joined them, accessing the internet in a local library or cheap café. By then, music had moved to the margins. The NME was dying, criticism was deprofessionalising, and the medium was no longer capable of mingling trash, pulp and experiment. Hatherley’s primary concerns were the inaccessibility of social housing, the dismantling of the welfare state and the legacy of modernism – although he continued to write short-form music reviews for Wire magazine, and in 2011 he produced a monograph on Pulp, Uncommon, which is as much about Sheffield and council flats as about the band itself.  

Hatherley began to focus primarily on the political legibility of urban landscapes, and the depleted energies of modernism that they drew off. Disappointment is present in his earliest pieces. But this is not a loss-obsessed melancholia, because the author understands that modernism was always a warring realm between those who performed for the benefit of the rich and those who developed the capacity to politicise the aesthetic. Modernism is an unfinished project, not a dead one. La luta continua. And the scope or site of that struggle extends from local observations to international ones. For five years, Hatherley spent time in Poland and the former Eastern Bloc. In an echo of Walter Benjamin, drawn to Moscow in pursuit of Asja Lacis, Hatherley followed then-partner Agata Pyzik into the heart of Soviet Constructivism, deepening his understanding of the ‘failed experiments in non-capitalist systems’. Plenty of Western idealists have gone East chasing illusions. Hatherley punctures some and inflates others.

The subtitle of the book, ‘Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism’, relays the conundrum. There is no definitive end to modernism, even if at some operative level it is overwritten by an ideological epoch-cum-project called postmodernism. We have the ruins from which our new Jerusalem may be rebuilt. To find a home in ruins does not suggest that the ultimate ambition is to make oneself comfortable amidst the debris. Hatherley’s stance is not the one that Benjamin attributes to New Objectivist Erich Kästner and his ‘left-radical intelligentsia’. These ‘agents or hacks who make a great display of their poverty and turn the gaping void into a feast’ have made themselves ‘comfortable in an uncomfortable situation’. Know-all ironists, they turn political struggle into items of consumption, hawking their Kulturkritik to the highest bidder. Benjamin compares Kästner to a man who contorts himself according to the market’s whims, like someone suffering the spasms of poor digestion.

If Benjamin claims that constipation accompanies melancholy (an early twentieth-century idea recently reaffirmed by scientists exploring the interface of gut microbiome and emotions), Hatherley inverts this logic. The writer has Crohn’s Disease, diagnosed in 2005 after years of gut problems, which makes him dependent on the provision in public space of toilets for urgent access at any moment. ‘The Socialist Lavatory League’, a 2019 essay for the LRB, provides one possible meaning for the title Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances, as in how does one avoid soiling oneself when the progressive impulses that led St Pancras vestryman George Bernard Shaw to champion a public convenience in Camden Town seem like a pipedream in today’s privatised, austerity-saturated townscape? Hatherley offers a wide-ranging analysis of the significance and practicality of various prominent buildings, but his most trenchant – because most urgent – criticism can be found in the least expected of places (public toilets), figured as a prime site of collective struggle, embodying a civic ideal that recedes by the day.

Hatherley’s title also draws, more directly, on a 1978 interview with Who manager Peter Meaden in which he reflected on Modism and Mod living. ‘Clean living under difficult circumstances’ has something to do with keeping yourself and your cheap razors sharp – with remaining slick and neat amid the pressures of factory work and council-house existence. Hatherley stands up for the virtues of council housing and the expanded vistas of the modern tower block, even if his dress is not nattily Mod. Indeed, his floppy-haired, slouchy demeanour and crumpled suits lend him something of the air of his adversary, founding member of the Victorian Society John Betjeman. Hatherley’s defence of post-war council estates, the vision they expressed and the lives they made possible, is not done in the smarmy style of the New Brutalists who benefitted from right-to-buy: hoovering up capaciously dimensioned council flats in the Barbican and elsewhere, and overriding their modernism with Farrow-and-Ballification. It is undertaken from the perspective of someone who grew up in a well-designed Southampton estate and considered it a ‘sanctuary’ which provided stability for his single-parent mother.

Circumstances got more difficult during the period when Hatherley began to study part-time at Birkbeck for a doctorate on constructivism and architecture (I was his supervisor): a project which bloomed into his 2016 book The Chaplin Machine. The first essays in the volume were written at this time, when Blair was elected for a third term and Blairism had markedly changed the landscape, visual and ideological. These texts were conceived as acts of historical recovery, against New Labour’s repetition of stories about ‘old’ Labour, Red Robbo, British Leyland, union bullies and the rubbish piling high in the streets. The Blairist mythology of salvation from the recent excesses of both Old Labour and Thatcherism by blue-besuited Democrats is rebutted. In addition, a longer story is told about what modernism had made possible, in the name of true progress, at the precise historical moment when architecture merged with Private Finance Initiatives, speculation, and the windowless megaboxes of shopping centres and call centres. Blairism terminated in post-crash waves of Torydom, austerity and the manipulative kitsch of 1940s-derived Keep-Calmism, as the remaining scraps of the welfare state were sold off or choked of life. Sent out across the land, in emulation of Daniel Defoe, to report on the state of the nation, Hatherley chronicled the various shapes that ideology assumed in the built environment.

Clean living also suggests something ethical or pure. There is a sense in which Hatherley, as a jobbing writer, must have regarded himself as clean for being in nobody’s pocket (or for being in everybody’s – and so nobody’s in particular). He has no debts to pay off, or only real ones, which means he can say what he likes. He can call celebrated American architect Philip Johnson what he was: a Nazi activist. He does this not to puff and pant with moral outrage, but to diagnose the political aesthetic of this ‘talentless liar’ and its effect on contemporary architecture. Such refusal to compromise gives Hatherley’s work one of its most admirable and distinctive qualities: an unrelenting insistence on the connections between environment, economy, political decision-making and historical legacy, all comprehended in relation to street-level experience.

In 2018 Hatherley got a regular gig as culture editor for Tribune after its purchase by Jacobin (another instance of revamping an old piece of Labour Movement heritage). If Hatherley’s early writing had skewered the cheerlessness of urban development under smiley-snakey Blair, he has now taken the place of another Blair, ‘the forefather of all Progressive Patriots: the India-born, Eton-educated former Burmese policeman, Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell’, once literary editor of Tribune. Hatherley dealt with Orwell’s complicated profile as anti-imperialist and traditionalist in his Ministry of Nostalgia (2016), juxtaposing the era of post-war poverty with the ‘austerity nostalgia’ of the 2010s. The former may have been awful – but writers like Orwell witnessed the birth of the NHS first-hand, and retained some hope that similar modernist projects could change society for the better. Does Hatherley share their optimism? Despite its apparent objects – buildings, public squares, LPs, films – his criticism is motivated by a deep disenchantment with the present political moment, as the shenanigans of the Nasty Party clash with the pieties of Labour (before and after Corbyn). In Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances, he takes a moment to zoom out from this conjuncture and reflect on its more hopeful antecedents. We are invited to look back with him, in anger (of course), and in awe as well.

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘Comparing Capitals’, NLR 105.

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The Tributary

NGI 941

Trotskyism has always been a movement of the margins, and not just in the sense that its organizations have usually remained in the shadow of the labour movement’s big battalions. In the few cases where Trotskyist parties have come to play a significant role, it has often been at some remove from the regional power centres: Bolivia rather than Brazil, Sri Lanka rather than India. It is fitting, perhaps, that Ireland should be the last stronghold of European Trotskyism.

At the turn of the century, it seemed as if Trotskyist organizations might fill the political space vacated by the official, pro-Soviet communist parties. In France, the two main Trotskyist parties teamed up for the 1999 European election and sent five deputies to Strasbourg. They ran separately in the 2002 presidential contest for a combined vote share of 10% – more than the French Communist Party and the Greens put together. In Britain, Trotskyists were at the heart of every left-wing electoral initiative that sought to challenge New Labour, as well as the movement against the Iraq war.

Two decades on, those interventions are a fading memory. Radical-left parties made some notable advances after 2008, but groups of Trotskyist extraction only featured as part of wider formations like Syriza and Podemos, or in the leadership of parties whose public platform is well removed from that tradition, such as Portugal’s Left Bloc. In Ireland, however, the Trotskyist left has won at least five seats in the Dáil in three successive elections since 2011. To put that in context, Sinn Féin, which won the largest number of votes in last year’s general election, never had more than five TDs before the Great Recession.

Apart from a short-lived grouplet established during the Second World War, the history of Irish Trotskyism dates back to the late 1960s. A number of groups emerged from the left-wing student milieu of that time. People’s Democracy (PD), which became the official section of the Fourth International, had the highest profile, because of its role in the political crisis that engulfed the North of Ireland. PD activists were prominent in the civil rights movement whose protests destabilized the Stormont system. A decade later, they promoted the idea of a broad campaign in support of republican prisoners demanding political status. Sinn Féin belatedly took up this proposal during the hunger strikes of 1980–81, with consequences that are still being felt today.

PD was always a small organization, and by the late 1980s it had lost whatever influence it once possessed on the wider political scene. In recent decades, Irish Trotskyism has mainly consisted of two groups that, in contrast to PD, possessed a stronger base in the South than the North: the Socialist Party (SP) and the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP). PD had been strongly invested in the idea that the northern crisis would radicalize Irish society on both sides of the border. Neither the SP nor the SWP hewed to the same perspective, although their analyses of the northern conflict and the IRA diverged sharply in other respects. Until recently, the electoral impact of both groups has been an overwhelmingly southern phenomenon.

The SP and the SWP started as off-shoots of the British Trotskyist currents led by Peter Taaffe and Tony Cliff, respectively. This led some of their Irish rivals – republicans especially – to accuse them of following orders from London. If this was ever the case in the past, it’s certainly not true today: the Irish Trotskyists have been far more successful than their British counterparts in recent years, and the SP has formally severed its ties with Taaffe and his followers.

The SP used to operate as an entryist current inside the Irish Labour Party, much like its British sister group, before striking out on its own. Its best-known figure, Joe Higgins, first won a seat for the Dublin West constituency in 1997 and achieved a prominence out of all proportion to the SP’s size. This owed a great deal to his unique rhetorical style, which blended the personas of an Irish priest – Higgins had been training in a US Catholic seminary when he discovered Marxism – and a stand-up comedian. Higgins frequently had people who held no brief for his politics in stitches and commanded respect as the only opposition politician who could provoke the famously unflappable Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern to anger during the hey-day of the Celtic Tiger.

The success of Joe Higgins inspired his own party and the SWP to devote considerable energy to electoral politics, although it would be 2011 before they managed to win any additional Dáil seats. The Irish political system may be the most favourable for minor parties and independents anywhere in Europe: every constituency has multiple seats with preference voting, and there’s no minimum threshold of the national vote that a party has to clear. Higgins had initially built his profile in Dublin West by opposing water charges, and the next wave of protest in working-class communities was directed against bin charges in the early 2000s.

The socialist case against these service charges was twofold: they constituted a form of inegalitarian double taxation, and they would help fatten up the service for privatization. Several prominent left-wing activists, including Higgins, were jailed for taking part in protests against bin charges in 2003. Dublin’s local government officials went on to privatize refuse services, just as the campaigners had predicted. Bizarrely, it became an article of faith for Ireland’s centre-left parties that this only happened because of the protest campaign.

The real breakthrough came in 2011, when the first post-crash general election saw a huge increase in support for the left, broadly defined. Five TDs were elected under the banner of the United Left Alliance (ULA) – four in the capital and one in Tipperary. The ULA had several component parts, and while the finer details may seem obscure, teasing them out properly helps illuminate some wider points.

Three groups came together to form the ULA. The first was the Socialist Party, which added Clare Daly to its Dáil cohort that year alongside Joe Higgins, regaining the seat he had lost in 2007. The second was People Before Profit (PBP), a campaigning alliance set up by the SWP. One of the PBP TDs elected in 2011, Richard Boyd Barrett, was a long-standing SWP activist; the other, Joan Collins, had never belonged to the party. The ULA’s third component was the Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG). WUAG only had a profile in South Tipperary, where its leader, Séamus Healy, first won a Dáil seat in 2000 and reclaimed it in 2011.

The now-defunct constituency covered the southern part of the county, one of Ireland’s largest, although it contains no cities. The biggest town, Clonmel, has a population of 17,000, and a tradition of working-class organization that reaches back to the early twentieth century – James Connolly and Jim Larkin founded the Labour Party there in 1912. The ability of WUAG to secure a healthy vote in successive local and national elections suggests that the geographical concentration of the radical left in Dublin, Cork, and other cities is a function of supply rather than demand. In the bigger population centres, Marxist groups are more likely to have a critical mass of activists who can be mobilized for an election campaign.

The ULA’s initial success was followed by a period of fragmentation that would surely have proved fatal if the electoral system had not been so accommodating. Its three founder groups went their separate ways within a couple of years. The Socialist Party set up its own campaigning front, the Anti-Austerity Alliance (AAA), which changed its name to Solidarity in 2017. PBP carried on, while two ex-ULA TDs – Clare Daly and Joan Collins – created another organization called Independents 4 Change.

These comings and goings were grist to the mill for Ireland’s political correspondents, most of whom resent having to write about small Trotskyist parties and grasp eagerly for any excuse to cite Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Even less jaundiced observers must have found developments bewildering. But PBP and the AAA still managed to win six seats with 4% of the vote in 2016, a clear improvement on the ULA’s 2011 performance. The main factor behind that was an upsurge of popular mobilization between the two elections – above all the campaign against water charges, which became a genuine mass movement, on a much higher level than the protests of the 1990s and 2000s.

The Trotskyist left played an important role in that movement, supporting the call for non-payment of the charges at a time when Sinn Féin shied away from such tactics. In October 2014, the AAA candidate Paul Murphy won a high-profile by-election in Dublin South West that journalists considered a dead certainty for Sinn Féin, largely because his party pushed for a more combative line on water charges. The Irish establishment rounded on Murphy and his comrades after they joined a sit-down protest against a government minister visiting the constituency shortly after the by-election. The wildly inappropriate charges of false imprisonment brought against them ran into the brick wall of a jury trial in 2017, with the jurors clearly setting no store by police testimony that flew in the face of video evidence.

There is no way of measuring the opportunity cost of the divisions on Ireland’s radical left, but it must have been significant. The break-up of the old party system has produced a crowded political landscape where possession of a clear identity is a valuable asset. After the 2019 local and European elections, it seemed as if the tide was washing out for Sinn Féin and the radical left alike. Both Sinn Féin and the Solidarity–People Before Profit alliance lost more than half of their council seats. With a general election due within months, it seemed as if the Trotskyist parties would lose their parliamentary foothold altogether while their republican rivals were pushed back into a marginal space.

The February 2020 election, held just before Covid-19 struck, completely upended those expectations. Sinn Féin ended up topping the poll with 24.5% of the vote. In opinion surveys held since the election, the party has been vying with the conservative, strongly anti-republican Fine Gael for top spot. The average Sinn Féin vote share has been just over 29%. The next general election looks set to be one of the most bitterly contested in the history of the state, with a severe housing crisis and the pandemic’s economic fallout dominating the agenda.

The survival of the Marxist left was a subordinate theme in the election: Solidarity–People Before Profit held onto five of their six seats and survived to fight another day. However, in all but one of those constituencies, Sinn Féin could easily have taken another seat if they had run an additional candidate. The Sinn Féin surge happened so quickly and unexpectedly that the party’s conservative approach to candidate selection left it punching below its weight in terms of seat share.

Next time around, Sinn Féin won’t be making the same mistake. The party would be happy to take seats from any quarter, of course, but eliminating the Trotskyists would also have the advantage of removing a challenger on its left flank. For precisely that reason, it would be a great pity for the broader Irish left if the socialist groups faced electoral oblivion in the next national contest. Whatever shortcomings there might be in their approach to politics, they have made a real contribution since entering the stage. Notably, they were the only parties with national representation to align themselves wholeheartedly with the biggest social movements of the post-crash decade: the water charges campaign and the struggle for abortion rights.

On both of those issues, Sinn Féin lagged well behind the curve. There is certainly no question of the Trotskyist parties challenging Sinn Féin’s dominant position on the left of the spectrum in the foreseeable future. But the existence of a rival force, even a minor one, may serve as some deterrent against a rightwards lurch. There is now much less chance of Sinn Féin becoming a junior partner of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, as seemed probable just a few years ago: the party’s aim is to lead a government. But taking office from a position of strength is certainly no sure-fire guarantee against incorporation, as the example of Syriza showed us.

People Before Profit also now has the distinction of being the only party other than Sinn Féin with elected representatives on both sides of the Irish border. It has strongly supported the call for a referendum on Irish unity and intends to campaign for a Yes vote if that materializes. The dynamic of political competition in Northern Ireland differs sharply from that of the South and merits an article in its own right: for one thing, Sinn Féin features there as a party in government, albeit under very unusual circumstances, rather than the leading opposition force. But the existence of an all-Ireland socialist organization, even if it is a small one, is a factor of some importance when the coming years are likely to see the constitutional status quo under mounting pressure.

Does the Irish experience have any broader lessons? Perhaps it shows what future, if any, Trotskyism is likely to have: as one tributary of a recharged left-wing movement, rather than the mighty river that its founder expected it to become.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Ireland’s Water Wars’, NLR 95.