Month: November 2022

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Sex Pirate

That writing can be a space of freedom is a fraught concept. In its reactionary form, it produces writing that imagines it is free not just to express but identify with every little spurt of fascist emotional aggression that writers can stir from their bowels. There’s no shortage of writing as will-to-power tweeting. Midlist commercial authors pose as victims, looking for something, or someone, to blame other than their own mediocrity for the lack of literary fame – and market share – to which they have an overweening sense of entitlement.

Anglophone modernism often favoured this self-aggrandizing kind of freedom. Fascist, and also usually masculine: Mailer the wife-stabber; Burroughs the wife-shooter. For a writer who appears to the world nominally as a woman, and whose practice of writerly freedom is of a more self-dissolving kind, the problem of creating a public persona as a writer is as acute as that of writing oneself into the freedom of nonexistence.

Kathy Acker was a writer for whom writing enacted a kind of freedom, but of the far more interesting kind. A writing in which freedom did not inflate but rather undermined and dissolved the self. It is writing that is freed in Acker’s work, not the writer. The writing erases and effaces the writer, taking down in the process expected conventions of character, setting, narrative and authorship, tugging away also at the reader’s sense of their own integrity before the text.

To spotlight oneself takes ambition – it takes rather more to immolate one’s self. Thanks to Jason McBride’s definitive new biography, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, we now have in our hands an account of the genesis of Acker’s ambition and the work it sparked. Acker was born in 1947 to an assimilated New York German-Jewish family who appear and reappear as characters in her writing. Her stepfather comes across as at best useless. Her mother left Acker with an enduring impression of being unwanted. Acker escaped the family in ways both conventional and unconventional. She married Bob Acker, whom she met in college. She outgrew him as a writer, although Acker never became what anyone would imagine as emotionally mature and stable. While there were a handful of sustained, loving relationships in Acker’s life, there were also many brief, intense, fragile encounters (one of them with me).

Acker’s more sustained escape from the bourgeois family was through her uncanny ability to find communities of creative intensity: the New York Filmmaker’s Coop, the St Mark’s poetry scene, mail art, new music, language poetry on the west coast, the downtown art scene back in New York, or new narrative and the cyberpunk scene in the Bay Area in the nineties. Acker was never really of any such scene. She was not a joiner. She assimilated what there was to learn, about formal aesthetic tactics, about methods of being an artist, and moved on.

Her early published pieces were chapbooks circulated through the mail art network, using the address list of one of her mentors – Eleanor Antin. Some were signed with what I think of as a heteronym, a partial authorial persona, The Black Tarantula. The notoriety of these led to her break-out book, Blood and Guts in High School, published by Grove Press in 1984. Grove published most of her subsequent works, including Don Quixote (1986), Empire of the Senseless (1988) – from which McBride takes his title – and Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996).

The work can be read as a systematic destruction of the bourgeois novel, at (almost) all levels. At the level of prose, Acker eschews the ‘fine writing’ of literary fiction. The language is blunt, although Acker gave brilliant incantatory readings. She had learned from the New York poets how to write for the breath. Characters lack a consistent subjective interiority which might masquerade as a self’s private property. Characters become other characters, in other stories, other genres. Just as characters mutate, so too does the authorial voice, at one moment retelling a family story, at another retelling a story from Dickens or Hawthorne.

This freedom with writing rubbed up against the banality of literary ‘culture’, particularly in England, where Acker was embroiled in an absurd ‘plagiarism scandal’. In Acker, language is communism, the product of collective labour. To write is to rewrite. What’s interesting in Acker is always the combinations of material she works on and works over. The sudden jumps from one reworked text to the next, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, crack open the seam between reader and work, pushing against their assumptions of subjective coherence.

The tension in her work is between this depersonalization of the writing and the persona of the writer. Acker’s writing aimed to abolish private property in language, and yet the books still had to be sold on the literary market under her name and copyright. Given their challenging form, she had to make an image of herself to help sell them, a persona. A persona made necessary by the demands of media and marketing but also for navigating the perils of appearing in the world as a woman making serious claims as an artist. The result was a series of Acker avatars, which Jason McBride elegantly short hands as ‘a deranged kewpie doll, a pirate from the future, an alien courtesan’.

Acker was a mythmaker, fond of inventing fables about herself. While walking through Central Park, she told me her honeymoon was at the Plaza Hotel, adding that Jews had their honeymoons at the Plaza, and WASPs across the street at the Sherry-Netherland. There was no honeymoon. The story isn’t true, except as a way of explaining an internal divide in New York within the class into which she was born.

One of the dangers of biography as a genre is it can render its subject banal – it turns out Great Writers wipe their asses like everyone else. In puncturing the image Acker crafted for spectacular consumption, McBride gives us something more: a narrative account of the struggle of one woman to extend and inflect the trajectory of modernist writing in the late twentieth century. Her aim was to divert its course toward the self-dissolving kind of freedom, which among other things might be a freedom not so much against as beyond the reach of patriarchy.

McBride writes that Acker ‘wanted to live somehow outside of, or in-between, gender binaries’. I would give this more emphasis than McBride. I think this dissolution of the self into the space of writerly freedom was also and crucially a dissolution of gender, or rather of sex, as Acker was far more interested in flesh than social ‘constructs’. Much of her work is also a detailed investigation of the sensations of the body.

Acker never wanted labels, so I’m not going to claim that Acker was trans. As McBride notes, when asked for a sexual identity, Acker claimed it was ‘writer’ – although that takes on added meaning when one understands the kind of shape-shifting writing Acker practised. Rather, I think a dimension of the writing unfolds when one suspends the assumption that the writer is cis. In this case, the assumption that Acker was a cis woman. A dimension of writerly freedom is the freedom not so much from gender as within it.

The will toward freedom within gender is present in Acker’s life as well as in the work. The various, evolving Acker personas were improvised up against the constraints of image-making for the media. Working in the space of appearances is less free than working alone, writing in her endless journals, cross-legged on the floor, masturbating – a practice of Acker’s that I witnessed. Not freedom from gender, which inevitably ends up as some fascist, conformist demand, one particularly punishing toward femininity. Freedom within gender. Rather than being a unitary subject – ‘Kathy Acker’ – there were various Ackers, variously gendered. On the page, in public appearances – and in everyday life.

If one must think through identity labels, this is a way to square Acker’s affinities for queerness with the desire to be fucked, and by men. Sometimes Acker might be a girl, or a woman, being fucked, but sometimes Acker might be a man, or a boy, being fucked, or occasionally doing the fucking. It’s a quality she appreciated in others sometimes too. Among Acker’s lovers, I’m not the only one who was or is or could have been in some sense trans. Acker liked cis men, mostly, and sometimes cis women, but also had an affinity for gender pirates.

Among Acker’s most consistent personas was the pirate, imaginary avatar of worldly freedom, tacking away from state and capital. But it seemed like you had to be a man to be a pirate. So rather than sail the seas, Acker became a pirate of literature. In the open space of the old ocean of language, Acker could be free, and among other things, free within gender. Acker pirates are mythic rather than historical. They are amoral libertines. The free is not the good in Acker’s philosophy.

Piracy was an allegory for her own methods, and one of her myths. Acker liked the way myths began, as open-ended potential, not how they ended, when the hero slays the monster. The practice of writing is mythic in the sense that once a sentence begins it can go anywhere. In Acker-texts, beginnings never end.

McBride describes Great Expectations, one of Acker’s early books, as a ‘felicitous marriage of mutiny and momentum, rage and humour’. And so it is. Fiction is supposed to be free from mere facticity, but this is so rarely the case. Most fiction is just banal rearrangements of the obvious. Most sentences in fiction end pretty much where one expects. Stories might have ‘twists’, but they still have predictable arcs. Acker’s prose is not like that, and it’s a hard-won quality. McBride documents the various tactics deployed at different stages by different Ackers to undo the relentless obviousness of most writing, including much modernist writing. As he writes, ‘Literature was both her life and her adversary’.  

Literature whether high or low was treated not as ‘inspiration’, but as raw material. Acker’s was a materialist practice, a labour of making texts out of texts. Like all interesting writers, Acker was an interesting reader. Through voracious reading, Acker found blocks of text that could be altered, juxtaposed, undone, redone. One might say Acker read ‘sideways’ against the line of the text, unfolding the map of possibilities.

One of the texts from which Acker appropriates is memory. Shards of family life appear in multiple irreconcilable versions. Accidental births, unloving mothers, fathers who aren’t real fathers. For McBride, ‘the negative space of her past, with all its gaps and contradictions, remained a bottomless source of images and provided a kind of prefab pulp fiction’.

From literature, from life, from memory, from dreams, Acker drew the materials for writing as a mythic practice of absolute freedom. McBride: ‘She wanted to replace the old myths, the old superstructures – the double-bind patriarchal ones, the oedipal ones’. The moments of formless possibility in myth are what attract Acker, out of which other narrative practices and cultural forms could be drawn. That we can all make our own myths by cracking open the old ones is her gift to the reader.

It didn’t always work. McBride is one of the few who have noticed the influence of African writers on Acker, particularly Yambo Ouologuem and Ayi Kwei Armah, although I suspect there are others. There’s a book yet to be written on Acker’s complicated relation to race. Attempts at solidarity with anti-imperialist colonial movements tip into a kind of romanticism of the African or ‘Oriental’ other.

In many ways, Acker is still our contemporary. Most of her writing life was spent in New York, the Bay Area and London – three centres of what she sometimes called ‘postcapitalism’. Acker was an acute observer of the nexus of money, sex, art, tech and real estate in these metropolises, where the economy of things came increasingly under the command of an economy of information.

And then there’s Acker’s sexual politics, which owed less to second wave feminism than to sex workers. But for me, Acker is our contemporary mainly in opening up trans-ness as one of the axes of freedom within writing, and beyond. What we might become, on the page, is limitless. What we might become, in life, has to deal with the banalities and constraints of embodiment, on which Acker could write so well. Flesh too can be otherwise, if one reads and writes the languages of the body.

Read on: Julian Stallabrass, ‘In and Out of Love with Damien Hirst’, NLR I/26.

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Injured Egos

‘The case for national health care has never seemed stronger’, writes Judith Butler in What World is This: A Pandemic Phenomenology. So too the case for a universal guaranteed income. ‘Socialist ideals are renewed. And the movements to abolish prisons and defund the police are no longer “crazy” pipe dreams.’ How to explain these new possibilities for the left? Butler’s book never mentions Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. Instead, it focuses on how the experience of the pandemic has expanded our political imagination by upending the notion of ‘the bounded self’. Covid-19 may no longer be top of the headlines, but Butler argues that it has cast us as ‘relational, interactive’ beings, while ‘refuting the egological and self-interested bases of ethics itself’. This shift, she claims, will have political ramifications for years to come.

Not content with the pragmatic point that collective disasters require collective solutions, Butler proposes that we ground left politics in a phenomenology of intersubjective relations. This goes deeper than solidarity. In her view, it means learning ‘that we pass the air we breathe to one another, that we share the surfaces of the world, and that we cannot touch one another without also being touched.’ This offers a perfect antidote to the ego, which for Butler underpins competitiveness, conflict and ecological spoliation. Of course, as Butler acknowledges, our intersubjective world is made up of many overlapping worlds. Certain groups – those with inferior health care, those who could not work at home, those subject to environmental colonialism – were more vulnerable to the virus than others. But since the pandemic was a common enemy, it forced us to confront such inequalities head-on. Even nationalism, which for Butler is inextricably linked to the ‘bounded self’, will supposedly fall as we realize the epidemiological dangers of a global order in which so many countries cannot afford the vaccine.

A Pandemic Phenomenology forms part of an ethical or intersubjective turn in Butler’s evolving oeuvre. Born in 1956, and coming of age after the waning of the diverse left culture of the 1960s, Butler was disconnected from, and untouched by, the neo-Marxist upsurge of that era. She is best known for Gender Trouble (1990), her pioneering critique of feminism’s heterosexist bias. That text, along with her follow-up titles Bodies That Matter (1993) and Excitable Speech (1997), popularized a politics based on performative acts of insubordination directed against congealed or oppressive subject-positions. In Butler’s early work, the task was to undermine and scramble the codes that create and regulate subjectification. More recently, however, she has drawn on her long-standing interest in phenomenology – her Wikipedia page notes that she was punished in Hebrew School by being forced to study Martin Buber – to supplant the politics of insubordination with what might be called an ethics of reparation.

Butler was not alone in following this trajectory. Many of the figures who came to prominence as 60s radicalism was fading took a similar route. In Derrida’s later texts, the word ‘responsibility’ frequently looms, along with the slogan ‘Deconstruction is Justice’. Foucault’s writing on the ‘care of the self’ has likewise been described as ‘a way of examining and freeing oneself not by socially-constructed norms and standards, but according to one’s own ethical code.’ Both men were important influences on Butler. In some cases, this ethical approach may have reflected an accommodation with neoliberalism – supplanting the interrogation of power with a focus on the individual. But for Butler it has expressed the need for a more collectivist politics in the context of accumulation crises, climate change, the pandemic and the growth of right-wing populism.

Butler’s ethical turn began with her 2004 work, Precarious Life, a study of a prior disaster: 9/11. There Butler argued that the attack that brought down the twin towers, killing three thousand innocent people, breached the vulnerable narcissistic boundaries of Americans’ bounded or ‘ego-logical’ selves. The invasion of Iraq was a defensive reaction to that breach. It obscured an underlying ‘sociality of the self’: the fact that ‘we are not bounded beings . . . but also constituted in relation to others’. Butler reflected on why Americans were often only capable of mourning their own countrymen. In her view, global inequality had produced a ‘differential allocation of grievability’, an exclusionary conception of ‘what counts as a livable life and a grievable death.’ In striving to recover our lost sociality, she asked what radical politics would look like were it to take injurability or vulnerability rather than independence and self-mastery as the point of departure for political life.

A Pandemic Phenomenology aims to answer that question. Here Butler advocates a politics rooted in what she calls ‘critical phenomenology’, a body of thought she traces to Max Scheler, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, as well as contemporary philosophers like Lisa Guenther. Whereas mainstream phenomenology is concerned with the lived experience of the singular human subject, critical phenomenology is concerned with inter-subjective and collective experiences. Yet she also distinguishes critical phenomenology from the struggles over recognition or identity. ‘The collective constitution of the world is not the same’, she writes, ‘as a struggle for recognition within the existing social coordinates and categories.’ Instead, it entails a ‘fundamental transformation of the understanding of value’ based on a recognition of our shared vulnerability.

Bulter also stresses critical phenomenology’s active political dimension. From a phenomenological (essentially Heideggerian) point of view, she claims, we don’t just see the world, we grasp it, and thereby constitute it. What emerges is no longer the liberal world of self-interested individuals who decide on limited collective policies, but one in which the ‘embodied self is situated socially, already outside itself in the environment and others, affected and affecting.’ The upshot, in an age of globalization, is ‘the imperative to reconstruct the world in common.’ Reflecting on the work of Achille Mbembe, Butler writes that ‘we are not talking about resources and companies in which one could own a share of stock but a common world, a sense of belonging to a world, or a sense of the world as a site of belonging.’

What are the political implications of this perspective? The feeling Butler describes, of being part of a common world, is more or less compatible with every variety of politics, across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, populism, nationalism and fascism are precisely concerned with constructing this kind of collective subject. Part of Donald Trump’s genius lay in his rallies, which addressed his follower’s desire not just to identify with their leader but also with one another. At first glance, it might seem that liberalism, with its preference for arms-length relations, lacks the intersubjective dimension Butler describes, but this is hardly the case. Victorian liberals argued that it was impossible to build a society on the basis of self-interested egos, and relied on the private sphere, domesticity and the cult of women to transcend the bounded selves of the laissez faire economy. Butler’s suggestion that humanity is paying for its bounded, ‘ego-logical’ (let us say selfish) preferences would be recognizable to anyone familiar with the novels of Dickens and their critique of utilitarianism, or the progressivism of Jane Addams and its rejection of ‘lone horseman’ capitalism. What, then, would it take for the ethical turn to lead to a leftist politics? To answer this question we must address two prior ones. First, what does it mean to ‘constitute the world’; what does the world look like when we grasp it phenomenologically? And second, how should we conceptualize the collective subject that does the constituting; what kind of political world does Butler’s intersubjective subject inhabit?  

Butler gives the impression that because we constitute the world intersubjectively, we constitute it as intersubjective. But this neglects the role of reification: the sedimenting and routinizing processes that turn intersubjective practices into structural constraints. Capital is a perfect example. The process of valorization contains many intersubjective moments. In selling labour power, there is the relation of employer and employees; in the labour process, there are the group relations of the factory floor or office; in circulation consumers meet sales-people, and so forth. Yet, as Marx wrote, the end product confronts us as an alien being. Amid intersubjectivity, many processes occur behind our backs or, at least, outside our consciousness.

In addition, our intersubjective relations interact with the physical, biological and ecological world, giving them a materiality that the discourse of intersubjectivity cannot capture. Consider the pandemic. It was constituted in large part through the workings of capital. Global warming and tropical deforestation, the processes that led to the zoonotic leap, were non-accidental byproducts of a societal order based on extracting value wherever possible. Its effects were aggravated by the fact that states had spent decades slashing social spending to enrich investors. Meanwhile structural racism led to the unequal distribution of affordable medical care and the overrepresentation of the poor in frontline jobs. Every moment in this chain had intersubjective aspects to it, but the result, which combined physical with socioeconomic factors, has the automaticity of a well-oiled machine. To be sure, the recognition of the role of capital – of its reified character and its imbrication with natural processes – does not lead directly to an anti-capitalist politics. We need the mediation of an intersubjective world. But Butler doesn’t put these two worlds – capitalist objectivity and intersubjectivity – into a single framework. She lacks a political language that can simultaneously comprehend the real-world infrastructure constituted by capital and the phenomenological sphere out of which we constitute politics.

The second question concerns the collective subject that Butler evokes. In my view, this requires more than a mere appreciation of intersubjectivity. We need at least some account of human needs, motives and interests, especially insofar as they are relevant to politics. Butler’s suggestion that vulnerability or ‘injurability’ can serve as a standpoint for politics is intriguing on its own terms. But our fear of being infected is as likely to make us avoid one another as to act collectively.

Within the history of philosophy, phenomenology was a response to Kant’s positing of a transcendental ego. By way of contrast, Butler’s critique of the ego, and of ego-variants like the ‘bounded self’, could be read as a response to psychoanalysis, which is at root a theory of the consequences of our prolonged period of infant helplessness: that is, our vulnerability. Yet we must distinguish between two variants of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, Freud posited the ego as a seat of autonomy and moral responsibility. On the other, Klein stressed the ethical responsibility of the individual, rooted in their intersubjective origins. For Klein, there is no subject, only what we might call inter-subjects: individuals with ethical relations to one another, obligations based on the recognition of mutual vulnerability and possible harm. Is Klein’s account of intersubjectivity, ethical responsibility and reparation a sufficient basis for a more collectivist politics? Or do we also need Freud’s stress on autonomy?

Here it is essential to note the difference between the ego, which Butler invariably refers to negatively, and the self, as the term is used in phenomenology, therapy and politics. The ego is the seat of reason, whereas the self is a psychical representation, as in ‘self-image’. In The Wish to be Free (1968) Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt wrote, ‘From the standpoint of psychic structure . . . the important development historically has been the strengthening of the ego.’ Resulting from a radical ‘break with authority in religion, politics, economics and the family’, it was this egoic empowerment, not the ‘productive facilities’ nor ‘commitment to rationality as such’, that was the signal contribution of modern progressive movements. Since the 1970s, however, a change has set in: such movements have largely ignored or derogated the ego while attending to the intersubjective self. Yet intersubjectivity, whether in the phenomenological form advocated by Butler, or in the Hegelian form associated with identity politics, is a relation between selves, not egos. The Kleinian themes of recognition, intersubjectivity and reparation add something to the psychology of the ego, but they do not supplant it. A healthy, democratic group life relies on strong, bounded egos capable of resisting group pressure. Contra Butler, these are not contrasting options.

In general, then, if we want to develop a democratic, emancipatory or collectivist politics, intersubjectivity is not enough. A collective subject needs an account of the structure of the world, the causes of such crises as 9/11 and the pandemic, and reasonable proposals to resolve them. What is important is not how people are in the world (intersubjective ethics) but what they do in it (politics). This requires reason as well as experience. It requires journals, blogs, books, study groups and the like: the historic resources of the left. While intersubjectivity is a fundamental condition of social action, it is not enough. An emancipatory practice must marry the ideal of social justice to the ideal of individual freedom. The latter is worth emphasizing, since the failure of the historic left to realize its stake in individual freedom was one reason why figures like Foucault, Derrida and Butler sought a wholly new politics after the 1960s.

Whatever its limitations, A Pandemic Phenomenology represents an important attempt to forge a leftist politics appropriate to our times. At the very least, by emphasizing injurability and responsibility she encourages us to rethink the ethical basis of left politics, including that of the democratic socialism of the 1930s and 40s and the participatory democracy of the 60s. Butler’s enormously diverse and creative body of work has made her an important leader in that effort. Moreover, she has demonstrated great personal courage in withstanding the ferocious criticism elicited by her critique of Zionism, her support for Black Lives Matter and her rejection of trans-exclusionary feminism. As her example reminds us, everyone has a stake in the struggle to rebuild the left.

Read on: Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, NLR I/227.

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Brazil in Reverse

Over the last half-century, Brazil’s historical phases have spawned successive political generations. In the 1960s, a large cohort was radicalized by the struggle against the military dictatorship; in the 1990s, a younger stratum opposed Brazil’s entry to the neoliberal system; and in 2013, the outbreak of popular protests – which saw more than a million people gather in almost 400 cities across the country – marked the rise of a new social bloc, fighting back against increasing living costs, deteriorating public services and the centre-left’s accommodation with elites.

Yet the radicalization of June 2013 was different to that of the Diretas Já! and Fora Collor! movements of the eighties and nineties, both in its context and its outcomes. It did not fit into a broader pattern of revolutionary uprisings across Latin America, nor did it emerge in response to a neoliberal government. Instead, it followed a decade of rule by Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party (PT), which combined poverty alleviation with extensive financialization and corruption scandals. Moreover, this intense period of mass protests preceded a traumatic lurch to the right: first with the soft-coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016, then with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The process of generational formation thus took place in troubled waters. Unlike its antecedents, it was forced to contend with a confusing dynamic of ideological pivots and reversals, which almost ten years later have culminated in Lula’s return to the presidency – now in coalition with his onetime rival, Geraldo Alckmin.

How can we interpret the ambiguities of this period of radicalization? Why was a nationwide rebellion, driven mostly by young people and precarious popular sectors, and pitted against the political establishment, ultimately subsumed by forces of reaction? And what bearing does this have on the incoming PT administration? My view is that June 2013 represented an inflection point in Brazilian history, during which various political and ideological structures were exhausted, yet new ones failed to emerge.

Many on the left who participated in the 2013 protests were first politicized during the 2000s, when a number of radical initiatives – such as the alter-globo movement and World Social Forum – allowed a new layer of young people to agitate against neoliberalism outside the strictures of the PT. For them, the conciliatory approach of Lula’s administration and the Mensalão revelations confirmed the backward character of Lulismo compared to other Pink Tide experiments. They therefore poured their energies into aiding new social movements and building alternative left vehicles, such as the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), which was established in 2004 after several radical parliamentarians were expelled from the PT for voting against its social security reforms. The organization became a new home for political nonconformists: public sector workers, young people, intellectuals and social activists. Its foundational thesis declared the need to reconstitute the Brazilian left given the PT’s dogmatic gradualism and doomed attempts to curb inequalities without confronting capital.

When the social consensus built by PT administrations was destabilized by the delayed effects of the 2008 financial crisis, this new left was put to the test. The spark for the 2013 mobilizations was a seemingly modest campaign by the Free Fares Movement (MPL) to reverse a twenty-cent rise in bus fares which escalated into a full-scale uprising. Streets, squares, the National Congress and civic councils were occupied. Bus turnstiles were set on fire and bank windows smashed. Protesters scaled the Estaiada Bridge and saw themselves reflected in the postmodern skyscrapers of Faria Lima Avenue, the centre of high finance. Meanwhile, universities once again became sites of political-intellectual contestation. Marxist reading groups proliferated, along with podcasts, blogs, film clubs, rap battles. A new activist culture emerged, sensitive to issues such as police violence, the predations of the digital economy, social reproduction, structural racism, precaritized labour, decoloniality and environmental crises. And all this under a historically left-wing government which, as well as being buffeted by the upsurge of popular discontent, was also grappling with an economic slowdown caused by the fall in commodities prices, which threatened to derail its reformist and welfarist agenda.

This gave rise to an unsustainable situation. After the June mobilizations won their first concrete victory – the suspension of bus fare rises – their internal contradictions began to show. Now, the movement was no longer just about the extra twenty cents. A kaleidoscopic series of demands emanated from an increasingly heterogeneous coalition. There was no unified message, nor a clear strategic vision. Conservative forces emerged alongside the progressive activists who opposed the PT’s ‘rightward turn’. The former wanted to claim their place as the legitimate opposition to Rousseff’s administration, and in 2014 the neoliberal Free Brazil Movement (MBL) gained momentum by playing a leading role in her impeachment.

Brazil’s political life was thus uneasily poised between progressive and conservative ideologies. It became uncertain whether the demonstrations would deepen democracy or restore traditional values. The meaning of 2013 was disputed by these antithetical poles: MPL versus MBL; left-wing school occupations versus the right-wing School Without a Party project; trade union strikes versus the campaign for free-market labour reforms; the Feminist Spring versus the attacks on ‘gender ideology’; indigenous communities versus agribusiness. These variegated forces all emerged within the same conflictual sphere. Amid this flux, an unprecedented situation developed. The dispositions one would expect from certain societal groups and social classes were thrown into disarray. We witnessed the rise of paradoxical figures such as the worker-entrepreneur, the anti-fascist police officer, the far-right feminist, the football fans against the World Cup – who together formed the whirling ‘ideology comedy’ masterfully portrayed in Roberto Schwarz’s post-Brechtian play Rainha Lira.

In this landscape, ruling elites lost the ability to reflect the values and expectations of the public. The typical alternation between PT and Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) came to an end, yet attempts by newer parties such as PSOL and MBL to articulate a rival hegemonic project ran aground. Instead, the far right swooped in to fill the power vacuum, claiming that only an authoritarian figure could re-establish order and consensus by means of force. Bolsonarismo capitalized on the dynamic set in motion by 2013, presenting itself as the only genuinely new political phenomenon, while casting the left as nostalgic for an outdated ideal of progress.

Hence, one could claim that Bolsonaro’s regime was not merely regressive; it was rather a new variation on the dialectics of peripheral modernization in a post-colonial society. As Schwarz has long argued, a key feature of the Brazilian experience is the simultaneous presence of progressive and anachronistic tendencies. The country perpetually modernizes itself without ever overcoming archaism, which is always reinstated at a new level with updated forms of oppression and exploitation. Bolsonaro’s presidency expressed this developmental paradox: promising both unbridled capitalist accumulation to propel Brazil into the twenty-first century, and a reversion to the most antiquated racial, gender and regional hierarchies. In contemporary Brazil, the separation between old and new, regressive and progressive, backward and forward, has become hopelessly blurred.

Having spent years striving to become the ‘country of the future’, Brazil under Bolsonaro ended up as a vanguard of backwardness. Dark and previously dormant aspects of our social formation were brought to light. The military allied with religious groups and extractivists to drive a new phase of accumulation, combining environmental destruction with drastic cuts to public services. Bolsonaro reopened old social wounds and reinforced Brazil’s dependent and subordinate place in the global market, while revitalizing the Nation and Family. This progressive-regressive trend swallowed up the forces of the centre left. They could no longer present themselves as new, nor effectively challenge the president’s oligarchic-patriarchal settlement; so instead they clung to the achievements of the past, seeking merely to defend the minimal democratic milestones of the 1988 pact.

In this sense, the modernizing potential opened up by June 2013 was defanged and devoured by the reverse radicalism of Bolsonaro. Conservative elites came to be seen as anti-establishment figures – an image Lula legitimized by bringing various establishment parties into a broad alliance against the government. ‘Progressives’ now call for the reinstatement of the old, while the most reactionary parts of Brazilian society assume the guise of novelty. Lula’s return to office is a symptom of this conjuncture, in which large parts of the left have abandoned futurity for nostalgia.

Such realignments have been deeply disorientating for the generation forged in 2013. Since then, the process of organizing a left alternative to PTism has hit multiple roadblocks. PSOL has grown in terms of membership and parliamentary representation, but because Lulismo 2.0 appeared the only viable antidote to Bolsonarismo, virtually all opposition forces have now been sucked into its orbit. Yet one could argue that the legacy of 2013 lives on in three primary domains where the left remains active: the electoral sphere, civil society and the world of ideas. A large section of the new left has focused on bringing the combative culture of street protest into Brazil’s political institutions. Since 2016, an unprecedented number of young candidates – Marielle Franco, Sâmia Bonfim, Guilherme Boulos, Erika Hilton, Talíria Petrone – have won significant majorities in federal elections, running on platforms that emerged from the diverse initiatives of 2013 (such as #EleNão and Black Lives Matter). These new voices continue to make significant interventions in an ossified and ageing congress – although they have also to some extent demonstrated the ability of the Brazilian state to capture and assimilate spontaneous movements.

Other legatees of June 2013 have sought to remedy the weakness of the left in marginal and working-class communities, many of which are dominated by conservative institutions such as neo-Pentecostal churches. This cohort has pursued a movementist strategy based on grassroots organizing in peripheral areas. Groups such as MTST, Antifascist Deliverers and Rede Emancipa have enhanced the political agency of homeless people, gig economy workers and popular educators, while taking on powerful interests such as real estate speculators, drug cartels, tech companies and the private education industry. Yet whether they can gain enough support to dislodge the Bolsonarista bloc remains uncertain.

Although the practical energies unleashed by June 2013 were not complemented by comparable theoretical advances, there is also a promising intersection of militant and intellectual activity in contemporary Brazil. Its practitioners are not just ‘radicals of occasion’, as Antônio Candido would call them, but members of the subaltern classes as well. This layer reflects the gradual democratization of higher education – thanks to the implementation of racial and social quotas – yet it is hampered by the increasing pressures of the neoliberal academy. Its precarious conditions have made scholarship more specialized and market-oriented, diminishing the scope for radical critical thought.

The development of a new left political and intellectual culture will continue to be a slow and arduous process. Bolsonaro proved difficult to defeat in the recent election, and the country he presided over remains highly unequal and politically polarized. Lula has once again opted for the pragmatic path of moderation by forming alliances with the centre and right. Although this enabled him to win the presidency, it will leave him little room for manoeuvre once he takes office. In retrospect, June 2013 still provides a qualified lesson in the complexities of creating social change. But ten years later, it seems likely that a new generation – one that did not experience the earlier PT administrations nor the protests against them, but was politicized by the street-level anti-fascist response to Bolsonarismo – will become the driving force.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Neo-Backwardness In Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, NLR 123.

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Rearguard Battle

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Ben Bernanke last month unleashed a wave of indignation among those who view the former chair of the Federal Reserve as the epitome of unoriginal establishment thinking. Bernanke received the prize for work demonstrating that bank runs were possible and that they could impact real economic activity. Both of those things had been perfectly obvious since at least the 1930s. But the Keynesian models that the economics profession built during the post-war era were unable to account for such events, having no real explanation for the volatile dynamics of debt and finance.

This aporia became more obvious when the era of ‘fiscal dominance’ came to an end and financial instability made a comeback from the second half of the 1960s, challenging the Keynesian paradigm and lending credibility to rival strands of thought. Rational expectations theorists underscored the inherent futility of government attempts to interfere with the inner workings of the market, while Milton Friedman’s monetarism fostered the notion that Keynesian inflationism was responsible for the corruption of America’s monetary standard.

Bernanke and other New Keynesians didn’t buy the idea that the problems of the present could be solved by returning to a pure free market. Yet the shallowness of their take on the problem of capitalism’s instability was evident in the subsequent evolution of Bernanke’s work into a framework for inflation targeting and monetary fine-tuning that looked with suspicion on any attempts to manage stock markets or asset prices. In 2004, while serving on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, he brought the notion of ‘the Great Moderation’ into mainstream circulation, expressing his conviction that through rule-driven fine-tuning, the Federal Reserve would be able to ensure stable, non-inflationary growth. Above all, Bernanke maintained the illusion that, with the right minds at the helm of the economy, money could be the thing of neoclassical fantasy – neutral, stable, unobtrusive. As his memoir makes clear, this fully neoliberalized Keynesianism comfortably survived Bernanke’s own involvement in the enormous rescue operations that followed the near-collapse of the American financial system in 2007-08.

Alan Blinder’s A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021, was published in the US in the same week the Nobel Prize was announced. Following a doctorate at MIT with Robert Solow, Blinder has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in Princeton’s economics department, his alma mater. In the mid-1980s he was instrumental in recruiting Bernanke to Princeton based on the work that would eventually earn him the Nobel. But although Blinder and Bernanke share an intellectual agenda and are apparently good friends to this day, their political orientations are different. Bernanke is a Republican – or at least he was, until he realized how uncivil they can be – and he would not claim the Keynesian label as more than a purely technical description of his conceptual framework, which in any case he sees as largely compatible with the insights of New Classical and monetarist economics.

Blinder, by contrast, is a committed liberal (a self-proclaimed ‘centre-left Democrat’, as he says in the book’s introduction). During an extended hiatus from the academy in the nineties, he served as a member of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, followed by a stint as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, in which capacity he objected to Alan Greenspan’s eagerness to combat inflation by raising interest rates and inducing higher levels of unemployment. His oeuvre, which stretches from the 1970s to the present, is a sustained attempt to resist the neoliberal dilution of Keynesianism. It aims to preserve both the spirit of its original post-war iteration and its practical relevance as a policy manual, defending deficit spending and fiscal stimulus as means to stabilize the economy and bring it as close to full employment as possible.

Blinder’s new book offers a synthetic account of sixty years of economic policymaking in the US, spanning roughly the period of his own career, and picks up exactly where Friedman and Anna Schwartz left off in their influential 1963 work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Blinder maintains his text ‘is in no sense a sequel’ despite the ‘intentional homage’ of his title). It begins with ‘the New Economics’ enshrined in the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut passed in 1964, which he describes as ‘a watershed event’ – ‘the first deliberate and avowedly Keynesian fiscal policy action ever undertaken by the US government’ – and continues through the rise of monetarism, the Volcker disinflation of the 1980s, the rise of central bank independence during the booming 1990s (‘an important and almost worldwide revolution’ in monetary policy), responses to the 2007-08 financial crisis, and ‘Trumponomics’, before and after the pandemic.

Central to Blinder’s old-fashioned Keynesian project is the famous ‘Phillips curve’, which depicts an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. That curve occupied a pivotal but paradoxical place in post-war Keynesian thought. On the one hand, it formalized an unfortunate existential condition: the inevitable trade-off between the need to ensure stable money and the wish to make sure that everyone who wants a decent job has one. On the other hand, it was within this trade-off that Keynesians always identified a certain political agency: we may not like the fact that the trade-off exists, but we do have a choice about how to strike the balance – there is always something policymakers can do.

This was the prized possession of post-war Keynesianism that monetarists and rational expectations theorists sought to undermine. Friedman drew the Phillips curve as a straight vertical line, indicating that there is a non-negotiable, natural rate of unemployment and that attempts to interfere with it will inevitably backfire. Notwithstanding his attempts to ‘relegate my personal political views to second or third fiddle’, the clear purpose of Blinder’s book is to rescue the logic of the Phillips curve from the clutches of neoliberal reaction. For him, ‘being a Keynesian sometimes means worrying more about unemployment than about inflation’ – caring more about the welfare of those who need to sell their labour than the income streams of the rentier. That’s a nice sentiment, but what does it amount to?

Writing with such a defensive and pre-committed intellectual agenda can make it difficult to put one’s finger on the pulse of history. Yet some of Blinder’s previous writings have nonetheless been useful. His 2001 book The Fabulous Decade, co-written with Janet Yellen, presents a lucid though not particularly critical account of the 1990s boom. His study of the 2007-08 financial crisis, After the Music Stopped (2013), ranks among the more helpful mainstream perspectives. And compared to the opportunistic provocations of Larry Summers and other nominal Keynesians, Blinder’s op-ed interventions in the Wall Street Journal are always balanced and level-headed. But his new book makes clear how little intellectual substance there is to back up his normative investments.

*

Blinder’s most conspicuous lacuna is the same as Bernanke’s: an understanding of financial instability as an active force in the making of history. In their world, banks are institutions that take deposits and channel them into longer-term loans – neutral intermediators that work to even out financial flows that might otherwise not be well-matched, a prime example of the market solving its own problems. This ignores the possibility that the creation of money and credit might be tied up with uncertainty and volatility in a way that is systemic rather than accidental. It occludes the fact that financial institutions produce volatility in the course of their normal operations. Instability – loss of liquidity, non-payment, outright failure – is endemic, not exceptional.

Without an understanding of finance as a real force, the drama of the 1970s is impossible to comprehend. Until the early 1960s, financial institutions worked in ways that were still somewhat explicable from the view of banks as ‘channellers’. This reflected the relative stability of the post-war order and the low interest rates guaranteed by the Federal Reserve’s subordination to the Treasury’s debt-financing needs. But as the post-war economy matured and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations bet on maintaining economic growth through tax cuts, demand for credit grew. Banks were unable to take advantage of these lending opportunities because of the interest rate ceilings put in place during the New Deal. In this context, banks discovered that their business was not in fact dependent on receiving deposits. They could make loans first, and then go into the market and ‘buy money’ – that is, borrow the deposit liabilities they needed to satisfy regulatory requirements.

‘Liability management’ flipped the script, making it almost impossible for the Fed to control inflation. Every time the central bank tried to tighten, it provoked another wave of ‘disintermediation’ – banks repudiating the ‘channelling’ model and actively finding deposit liabilities. Policy responses to contain inflationary pressures slowed down growth and pushed up unemployment, particularly among people of colour and other minorities who were less likely to enjoy the protection of powerful unions. But these measures did little to check inflation, rendering Keynesian models increasingly useless.

None of these crucial developments is on Blinder’s radar. Instead, his aim is to prove that Keynesianism should have emerged from the 1970s intact. In its attempt to defend the validity of the Phillips curve, his account of the decade becomes a search for external events on which to pin the misery – escalating wars, oil shocks, and poorly timed or implemented policies. The reasoning seems to be that if only we could acknowledge the reality of supply shocks, the problem of unrelenting inflationary pressures would dissolve, and we would establish the needlessness of Volcker’s intervention.

But the Volcker shock did happen, and Blinder has only a tenuous grasp of how it worked. At one point, he recalls asking Volcker how he thought the Fed had conquered inflation: ‘by causing bankruptcies’. Some people might take that as a striking data point that you could do something with – but not Blinder. He is interested in it only insofar as it appears to refute monetarist claims about how inflation was defeated. Nor is Blinder convinced that monetary policy made a significant contribution to the Great Moderation, the prolonged period of steady growth and low inflation that the US experienced from the mid-1980s, which he instead considers ‘mainly a long streak of good luck’. Could all the bankruptcies have had something to do with it?

Beneath the superficial narrative of non-inflationary growth is a story of scarce liquidity here and abundant liquidity there, volatile asset prices, bankruptcies, bailouts for some and austerity for others. Yet, as A Monetary History of the United States shows, none of this is explicable from a New Keynesian perspective. When Volcker’s Federal Reserve abruptly stopped accommodating inflationary dynamics, the result was predictable: financial strain and failure. How this would play out was never going to be left to the impersonal judgement of ‘the market’. The savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 90s confirmed that systemically important financial institutions would not be allowed to go under, and demonstrated the extent to which the American public at large had become embroiled in the gyrations of high finance and dependent on bailouts.

*

When Blinder turns to the Clinton administration, he seems confused as to why an economic team that consisted predominantly of Keynesians was so reluctant to rehabilitate his preferred brand of Keynesianism by pushing for active fiscal policy and demand stimulus. No love seems to have been lost between Blinder and Robert Rubin (chair of Clinton’s National Economic Council and later Secretary of the Treasury), who is described as a former ‘prince of Wall Street’ and representative of ‘bond market vigilantes’. In Blinder’s telling, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen was schmoozing with Greenspan who was coordinating his policies with Clinton – and soon enough, the ‘profoundly anti-Keynesian’ idea that deficit reduction was the key to economic growth and job creation had gained a firm foothold in the administration. At this point, more traditional Keynesians like Blinder were pushed out of Clinton’s inner circle.

For someone who experienced the Democrats’ neoliberal groupthink up close during the Clinton administration, however, Blinder is remarkably credulous about Obama’s presidency. The latter is credited for attempting to restart Keynesian demand stimulus, before this project was supposedly railroaded by Republican sabotage and Tea Party populism. Of course, the reality is somewhat different. Clinton had at least been genuinely upset about the ways ‘a bunch of f-ing bond traders’ upended his plans for a Third Way alternative to supply-side economics. But it’s not clear that Obama’s mind was ever in a similar space. The economists he hired were both intuitively comfortable giving Wall Street what it wanted and instinctively opposed to alleviating financial pressures on ordinary people. Right from the start, their interventions were geared not to boosting demand or employment, but to pegging asset values and keeping financial firms afloat. In the administration’s view, the former was bound to be inflationary; the latter was pure, non-negotiable necessity.

Clinton was able to ride the roaring 90s, but no similar wave came to Obama’s rescue. Instead, the Obama administrations reinforced the Great Recession by combining the institutionalization of an elaborate bailout state with prolonged fiscal austerity. This is disappointing to Blinder, but he does not view it as the upshot of any conscious political programme. For him, ‘quantitative easing’ was simply the result of technocrats doing their jobs under trying circumstances. He laments the inability of the Obama government to understand that demand stimulus is the solution to economic stagnation. And he is even more regretful that Democrats are so often devoted to fiscal rectitude while Republicans have no compunction about cutting taxes for the wealthy. But his account of the failure of a more old-fashioned, social-democratic version of Keynesianism to carry the day is soaked in studied ignorance and wilful obfuscation. Ultimately, Blinder cannot accept the possibility that opposition to his favourite kind of Keynesianism was powered by a more or less coherent political agenda – that is, by neoliberal reason.

In recent months, Blinder has maintained a tortuously balanced perspective on the post-pandemic return of inflation: from ‘Don’t worry too much about the inflation surge’ to ‘The Fed should raise interest rates, but gently’ to ‘Inflation isn’t transitory, but it isn’t permanent either’ (all titles of his Wall Street Journal columns). Bernanke, meanwhile, felt that the Fed should have gone in sooner and harder – echoing the calls by Larry Summers and Jason Furman to increase unemployment and raise interest rates. Blinder’s reluctance to jump on the hawkish bandwagon is admirable. Yet, by the logic of his own beloved Phillips curve, what the Summers and Furmans of this world are advocating makes perfect sense: the way to reduce inflation is by increasing unemployment.

Bernanke’s trajectory suggests that when Keynesian concerns with economic instability are embraced by establishment interests and thinkers, they are likely to be used ‘to give life to rentiers rather than to abet their euthanasia’, as Hyman Minsky put it. That is the essence of the fully neoliberalized Keynesianism that Blinder fails to reckon with. It entails a commitment to stabilization as the overriding imperative of economic policymaking, which, rather than being constrained by traditional, social-democratic interpretations of Keynes, instead flexibly adapts his ideas to the requirements of an asset-driven economic system.

In the present context, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to divert people’s attention from the sprawling infrastructure of the bailout state, which provides the owners of capital with a wide range of subsidies just so they don’t get worried, start selling, provoke each other into panic and destabilize the system. As the US and other countries try to give this asset economy a new lease of life by escalating the repression of wages, political difficulties are bound to intensify, opening up prospects for progressive change. For all its wholesome intentions, Blinder’s narrative of the past few decades obscures the society-wide blackmail of the bailout state and legitimates the impoverished policymaking discourse that has allowed it to survive. Not quite the courageous rearguard battle he takes himself to be fighting.

Read on: Cédric Durand, ‘In the Crisis Cockpit’, NLR 116/117

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Post-Sturgeon

Increasingly, Scottish nationalists are peddling a dream they can’t deliver. Westminster won’t grant another politically binding vote on Scotland’s secession from the Union, Nicola Sturgeon has ruled out a unilateral declaration of independence, and the Supreme Court has just vetoed an advisory independence poll organized by Holyrood. With these pathways blocked, Sturgeon has pledged to turn the next UK general election into a de facto plebiscite on the break up of the British state. Yet the threshold she has set is improbably high: the SNP would have to win more than 50% of all votes cast in Scotland in order to secure a ‘mandate’ for separation – something the party didn’t achieve even in 2015, when the nationalists completed a near-perfect sweep of Scottish constituencies. Moreover, the unionist parties – Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats – won’t fight the next election on the SNP’s terms. They will emphasize more pedestrian concerns (inflation, healthcare, the economy) in an effort to drown out the surrounding constitutional cacophony. 

The narrowing of nationalism’s prospects casts doubt on Sturgeon’s future. Sturgeon was once seen as the great political saviour of the independence movement. If Alex Salmond, who led the SNP twice, from 1990 to 2000 and again from 2004 to 2014, couldn’t deliver the goods, his successor surely would. Where Salmond was impulsive and divisive, Sturgeon was cautious and unifying. Where he imposed his chaotic ego on issues foreign and domestic, the onetime Holyrood Health Secretary had more strategic nous, crystallizing the party’s Europhile credentials in the wake of Brexit and consolidating its standing among Scotland’s middle-class Remainer majority. For a while, her approach seemed to be paying off. Sturgeon engineered the destruction of Scottish Labour seven years ago, before lifting support for independence to record-breaking highs. (One poll, published in October 2020, put the Yes vote at 58%).

Recently, however, with the SNP fifteen years in office and independence no closer than it was in September 2014, the semi-biblical belief in Sturgeon’s power has started to fade. More and more, the feeling among Yes campaigners is that independence, if it ever arrives, won’t be delivered by the current First Minister. At the same time, Sturgeon has herself begun hinting at a life beyond the Scottish Parliament, telling an audience at the Edinburgh Festival in August that ‘I don’t want to be the kind of politician that clings to office’.

The hope in 2014, when Sturgeon first assumed control of the SNP, was that she would iron out the inconsistencies in Salmond’s neoliberal vision of independence – which drew heavily on the Irish and Icelandic models of market deregulation – and build a more progressive model, rooted in the populist energy of the Yes campaign. In the early years of her leadership, Sturgeon’s main asset was a sprawling base of freshly politicized activists who called for an accelerated Scottish exit from the Union. The conditions were ripe for her to place these activists at the core of a broader Scottish revolt against Westminster, centred on Scotland’s opposition to Conservative austerity and English Euroscepticism. But instead, Sturgeon – who in many ways inherited Salmond’s triangulating instincts – saw the 2016 Brexit referendum as an opportunity to de-risk, or de-radicalize, Scottish nationalism. From then on, the SNP moved to the centre in pursuit of liberal Remainers; the Yes campaign began to splinter and dissipate (thanks in part to a controversy over trans rights); and the prospect of a second independence vote receded.

Now, if and when Sturgeon goes – the 2021 Holyrood election may have been her last – she will leave behind a threadbare political legacy marked as much by what she didn’t do as what she did. Early SNP pledges to scrap Council Tax and abolish student loan debt were ditched. In their place came a botched green industrial strategy, record drugs deaths and, potentially, in line with the latest SNP spending review, tens of thousands of public sector job cuts. In 2015, Sturgeon ostentatiously invited the Scottish media to ‘judge’ her on her record of eliminating the class attainment gap in Scottish schools. Nearly a decade later, that gap remains as vast as ever. (Exam pass rates among the poorest students in Scotland fell by 13% during the pandemic; they fell by 6% among the richest students over the same period.) As First Minister, Sturgeon could have capped skyrocketing rents and moved fast against fossil fuels. Instead, at every opportunity, she opted for a strategy of obfuscation and delay.

Her contortions over North Sea oil are a case in point. In 2018, the SNP appeared to concede that the era of petro-nationalism was over was by removing North Sea revenues from its fiscal projections for an independent state. But in her speech to the SNP’s annual conference on 10 October, Sturgeon abruptly repositioned oil at the centre of her vision for Scottish self-government. Tax receipts from remaining North Sea fields would be paid into an investment fund, she said, which would help kickstart Scotland’s economy during the early years of independence. The announcement eradicated what was left of Sturgeon’s meagre environmental credibility and reflected a ‘business-as-usual’ vision for independence.  

Still, if Sturgeon failed to live up to her prophesied role, her successor is unlikely to fare much better. There is a striking paucity of talent on the nationalist benches at Holyrood. Critical voices have been muted by the stranglehold Sturgeon and her husband, the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, hold over the party. Of potential heirs, only the Constitution Secretary Angus Robertson enjoys any real prominence in Scottish public life, and he vigorously denies any interest in the leadership. The other fledgling contenders are Health Secretary Humza Yousaf and Finance Secretary Kate Forbes. But the former is chiefly distinguished by his dogged loyalty to Sturgeon, while the latter is a spreadsheet bureaucrat with antiquated views on abortion and trans rights linked to her extreme evangelical upbringing. Under Yousaf, the SNP would continue to tread the current Sturgeonite path of centrist mediocrity; under Forbes, it would become a conduit for devolutionary austerity and social illiberalism. Given their professional proximity to Sturgeon, neither candidate would deviate from the SNP’s gradualist orthodoxy on independence, leaving the party locked in a seemingly permanent pattern of electoral and constitutional inertia.

Today, the biggest risk for Sturgeon is that she is simply sidelined by events. The shambles of the Tory government means that Labour could win an outright majority at the next UK election, which would limit the SNP’s ability to wrench a referendum deal out of a hung parliament in Westminster – the last-ditch hope of the SNP leadership as its prospects for independence are progressively diminished. Keir Starmer has commissioned Gordon Brown to produce a blueprint for British constitutional reform, which may recommend the abolition of the House of Lords and the creation of an elected ‘Senate of the Nations and Regions’ in its place. As part of a broader push to check the appeal of independence, Brown could also offer Edinburgh (alongside Cardiff and Belfast) a fresh slate of powers over social security and economic policy. Starmer may adopt all or none of Brown’s proposals. (When the putative contents of the report were leaked in September, Labour staffers immediately sought to dampen expectations.) But the idea of an enhanced devolutionary settlement bolted onto a reworked British constitution has already attracted praise from some unexpected quarters. 

Writing in August, Stephen Noon – chief strategist for the Yes campaign during the first Scottish referendum in 2014 – argued that the SNP should temper its demand for secession in the event of an unfavourable Supreme Court ruling. The national question has become ‘too binary’, Noon said. Scotland needs a constitutional middle ground that grants Holyrood broader legislative freedom without inducing the pain of full-blown political divorce. ‘There is not as much of a gulf between independence and greater autonomy – what you might even call independence within the UK – as the polarized debate might lead us to believe’, he wrote. What emerges from Noon’s analysis is an alternative future for the SNP, in which the party embraces the ambiguity of Home Rule politics by bargaining for additional Scottish autonomy while simultaneously gesturing towards Scotland’s elusory national freedom – an ideal always just within reach but never materially realized.

Noon failed to explain how his confederal vision would resolve the embedded tensions – over Brexit and austerity, nuclear weapons, poverty and industrial decay – that drive demands for Scottish self-determination in the first place. Nonetheless, his call for compromise was revealing. The fact that a senior nationalist would publicly back ‘devo-max’ signals the impasse of the independentist movement. The SNP is making little effort to organize rank-and-file activists. Scottish civil society – one of the pivotal actors in the campaign for devolution thirty years ago – is stagnant. The only real sign of an offensive being mounted is a series of anaemic Scottish government discussion papers that raise more questions about the economics of independence than they answer. (The most recent of these – Building a New Scotland: A stronger economy with independence, published on 17 October – simply rehashed the corporate pabulum of Andrew Wilson’s discredited 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission report and committed the SNP to the temporary sterlingization of Scotland’s currency, until it becomes ‘practicable’ to establish a separate Scottish pound.)

Taken as a whole, Sturgeon’s political record is broad but shallow. Over the last ten years, support for Scottish independence has risen from 25% to around 50%. Scotland’s once immovable unionist majority has atrophied and is unlikely to recover. But Sturgeon’s decision to demobilize the Yes campaign after 2014 and channel its activist energies into her project of political management at Holyrood has left the SNP with minimal extra-parliamentary leverage. Following the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, each of the ‘legitimate’ routes to independence – an agreed referendum, an advisory referendum, a plebiscitary election – looks unrealistic. Sturgeon may or may not stick around much longer. But, for now, the country she runs is going nowhere.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Challenge from the Peripheries’, NLR 135.

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Where to Begin?

Even as a child, I was behind the curve. The toy store in the upscale shopping centre put my militia of Ninja Turtles, Jedi and Care Bears to shame. Unfamiliar brands glowered in judgment at my snot-nostrilled provincialism, the Play-Doh under my fingernails marking me as a suburbanite weaned on basic cable, a proper bourgeois childhood just out of reach. Instead of Barney, Babar. Instead of Barbie, American Girl. Most telling, on the shelves of these upper-class emporiums of Knoxville, Tennessee were the storybooks. No Goosebumps or Poky Little Puppy, here was another world: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, The Eleventh Hour and Roald Dahl, the appropriate companions of a growing mind that would soon expand to accommodate Robert Louis Stevenson, JRR Tolkien and The Secret Garden. How had I ever been content with Theodor Geisel and the Berenstain Bears?

This fall, New Directions – known as a pioneer of American modernism and foreign writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño and WG Sebald – published six ‘storybooks’ for adults, or perhaps especially precocious children. The stated aim of the series is ‘to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvellous book from cover to cover in an afternoon’. Curated by the Egyptian-born writer-translator Gini Alhadeff, each volume comes handsomely outfitted with a silvery spine and a design by book artist du jour Peter Mendelsund. Four of the books are brand-new works for English-language readers by contemporary New Directions authors – Helen DeWitt, Cesar Aira, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Yoko Tawada – while the other two, by Clarice Lispector and Osamu Dazai, are drawn from the stockpile of their late authors’ output. All but one is a translation: two from Japanese, one from Spanish, one Portuguese and one Hungarian.

What to make of this array, both as individual ‘storybooks’ and as a series? Only the fourth book to be published under DeWitt’s name (not including Your Name Here, co-written with Ilya Gridneff, which never saw publication but occasionally circulates as a PDF), The English Understand Wool has unsurprisingly garnered the most critical attention. The storybook format suits DeWitt’s text well. It is the story of well-spoken seventeen-year-old Marguerite, whisked away from her life in Marrakech by her maman to have a tweed suit made in London. Once there, Marguerite is abandoned and soon learns from a detective that her life has been a lie: she is in fact an orphan whose presumptive parents have fleeced her of her fortune and made a break for it. Now a cause célèbre, possessed of only her excellent taste and prim expectations, she undertakes to tell her story in a memoir, but each instalment of her manuscript is meddled with by her New York publishers. That DeWitt, a genius famously ill-served by the publishing industry, has written a novella about a genius ill-served by the carrion gatekeepers of literary culture has not been lost on critics. But Marguerite’s story, as she is quick to remind her editors at every impasse, belongs to her alone. She won’t be told that she is a victim, that she is too young to account for herself, or that she should substitute ‘suit’ for her preferred word tailleur. That a ghost writer should commute her story – that of a ‘missing child’ raised outside the culture she was born into by imposters – to the kind of neutered copy the masses expect is quite out of the question. I am who I tell you I am, DeWitt seems to be saying, and I will speak for myself in the language of my choosing.

A more unusual choice is Laszlo Krasznahorhai’s Spadework for a Palace, translated by John Batki. It’s the second novella to appear since the oracular Hungarian writer announced his retirement in 2019; a third, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, is due shortly – Krasznahorhai says this is because he doesn’t consider these to be ‘books’. Subtitled ‘Entering the Madness of Others’, Spadework’s narrator is herman melvill, one letter and two capitals short of literary immortality, a meek to the point of non-existent librarian who sees shadows of the great mystic and mariner not only in his own biography (he too lived on East 26th Street, he too apprenticed at a customs office), but in the alcoves and belvederes of Manhattan through which he roams in a mania of overidentification with his near-namesake. The circumstances of melvill’s own life – the wife who has deserted him, the tedium of his post at the NYPL, even his grand ambitions for a Permanently Closed Library housing every lost, secret, or unread volume ever authored and into which no man can enter – occur as afterthoughts. Nor is Melville the only spectre haunting melvill’s wanderings: there is also Malcolm Lowry, the patron saint of dipsomaniacs whose Under the Volcano is equally plagued by unhomeliness, and the American artist and architect Lebbeus Woods, whose impossible designs, which seem to be both ascending and in the midst of collapse, capture melvill’s crisis.

‘Manhattan’, melvill thinks, ‘is a nightmare come to life’, and dreams, whether good or bad, seem to displace its residents as surely as climbing rents. Hence, we have a book that is not a book, about a non-person in a kind of non-place. ‘People must be told the truth,’ agonizes melvill:

and, if you are truly an artist, this is the spirit in which you have to create architecture and poetry and music and science and philosophy, you have to look people in the eye as you tell them the truth about this universe in which we exist, that in fact this universe means danger, hazard, stress and destruction – nothing is whole and intact, the very notion of an intact whole is a lie – peace and tranquillity, permanence and rest are illusion far more dangerous than the truth . . .

But melvill is no artist and has no instrument with which to articulate his disquiet or vent his demons. His interior monologue, rendered in one long sentence, comes closer than Krasznahorhai ever has to Thomas Bernhard’s eloquent stutter. But while Bernhard’s fanatical monologues were calculated to insulate their speaker from other people, to insist on uncontaminated individuality, melvill is all influence and no inspiration. For a man always on the move, he is a true paralytic. If anything as commonplace as a climax can be said to occur in Spadework, it comes through the sentences of another, as melvill turns to the ‘Resistance Checklist’ Lebbeus Woods inscribed in his notebook: ‘Resist that feeling of utter exhaustion. Resist hoping that next year will be better. Resist accepting your fate. Resist people who tell you to resist. Resist the panicky feeling that you are alone.’ And if Spadework has a moral, as storybooks are supposed to, it is that ‘There is no duality in existence.’ We have one life to live, this storybook tell us, and it is not ours.

The Famous Magician by Cesar Aira, translated by Chris Andrews, is my favourite of the new books. Aira is the ludicrously prolific Argentinian author of over a hundred short books that invariably come apart while somehow keeping their shape. Rules are established before being merrily violated, ho-hum personal accounts become far-fetched zombie stories, serious literary rumination gives way to comic book pastiche. I’m a little baffled by the avant-garde bona fides of Aira’s practice, which he calls el continuo, in which he writes a page a day (so, like a writer?) and resists the urge to revise (so, he keeps going?). But the method appears to have been working: the results have been books that don’t read like the ones you encounter in life but the kind you might pick up in dreams.

Meeting the titular figure at an outdoor market in Buenos Aires, a sixty-something writer who resembles Aira is offered the power to transmute sugar into gold if he gives up literature (‘a waste of time and dangerous for the purity of the soul’). The Aira-narrator is intrigued – he has tired of life and craves renewal through the miraculous – and finds himself torn between the ‘sham magic’ of his novels and ‘the real magic’ opening up before him. The Aira-like writer quizzes his friends about the magician’s ultimatum, then journeys to Egypt to give an absurd talk about contemporary art that seems to be mostly about airports, and later winds up over the Nile at midnight, engaged in a magical duel with the warlock. Our hero is narrowly rescued by a deus ex machina which, as in most of Aira’s output, splits the difference between idiocy and inspiration. Aira’s story could never survive the oxidation of logic, but sealed in its hermetic repository of senselessness, it’s a magic trick of its own.

The other three storybooks are all grab-bags. 3 Streets by Yoko Tawada contains three ghost stories set in Berlin, where the Japanese writer has lived since 2006. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, and tends to be concerned with displacement, embodiment and the accidental epiphanies of exophony. Her books engage these themes by, for instance, telling the story of a kidnapped Vietnamese woman whose life begins to transform into the films of Catherine Deneuve, a circus polar bear who becomes a bestselling memoirist in the Soviet Union, or a closed-off island nation where children become frail and the elderly exuberant. Ghosts are a natural subject, as guests who nonetheless have an older claim on the land than the living. Each ‘street’ in the volume, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is both charming and unnerving. In ‘Kollwitzstrasse’, a shopper in a grocery store meets the ghost of a child whose narrow taste in foodstuffs, the narrator realizes, must date from when this neighbourhood of the city was part of East Germany. The story ends by imagining the grief of the artist Käthe Kollwitz after the death of her son in a war fought for the wrong ideals. The narrator of ‘Majakowkiring’ walks the city enmeshed in a mélange of histories, having been visited by the discontented ghost of Mayakovsky, who steps out of a photograph in a restaurant:

The city is an amusement park of the senses, a rehearsal for revolution, a restaurant where loneliness is devoured, a workshop for words. Surrounded by city scenes that look like the future, you believe you’ll soon be able to grasp the future itself. This is especially true when you’re intensely, violently waiting for someone. The fact that even if you meet the awaited person at the appointed time you still have the days after that to live through, slowly, stoically, moment after moment. You want everything all at once, right now.

In ‘Pushkin Allee’, the stone soldiers in a memorial to the Red Army come alive and, hearkening to the distant words of Stalin, prepare to fight the Nazis in Kreuzberg. This may well be Tawada’s finest work, partly because of how moving it is when someone capable of so much wit knows when to be reverent. A perfect story.

Early Light, a kind of chaser to Osamu Dazai’s classic novel of decadence and depersonalization during the demise of the Japanese Empire No Longer Human (1948), is ostensibly another unexpected inclusion. Yet it is here that themes explored throughout the series – identity’s abnegation under the weight of art and history, the attendant wish for an alternative that fails to arrive – appear in their most unvarnished form. During the war in Tokyo, Dazai was left half-buried by rubble after a bombing raid, leading him to join his family in Kofu, only for bombs to fall there too. This enigmatically informs the story, written in the immediate aftermath, of a drunkard who feels himself extraneous to his wife and children (one of whom, blinded by the attacks, may never see again) and struggles to find heroism rather than degeneracy in his character.

The destruction wrought by modern life pervades the second story, ‘One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji’. Unable to enjoy the view of what is after all a dormant volcano (‘Fuji from the window of an apartment in Tokyo is a painful sight’), a writer finds himself unable to reconcile representation with the real thing, or to connect with the people around him. He feels helpless to protect those for whom he feels responsible (‘Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall. It had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world was.’). It’s the definition of fatalism, but shorn of any nobility; he’s lived in indifference to himself for so long that there’s nothing left for other people. The end, in which the narrator, asked to take a picture for a pair of tourists posing in front of the mountain, cuts them out of the shot, could either cap the tragedy of a scoundrel who has decided to have done with humanity once and for all, or symbolize a more hopeful insistence that the only thing that endures be allowed its own frame at last. Or both. The title of the final story, ‘Villon’s Wife’ – an old translation by Donald Keene; the other two are by Ralph McCarthy – refers to Francois Villon, the medieval poet beloved by lowlifes. An indolent alcoholic who drinks what he earns for his stories remains swaddled in the life of the mind while his wife works off his debts and keeps secret her rape by a customer. In the last line, she reflects ‘There’s nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive.’ She, too, is no longer human.

Clarice Lispector’s The Woman Who Killed the Fish, first published in Portuguese in 1968 and translated by Benjamin Moser, is the only volume originally composed with children in mind. A writer of formidable modernist pedigree, it is something of a relief to find her working in a chatty, mischievous mode and concerned with that most storybook of subjects, the ‘intimate life’ of animals. First, let’s exonerate the murderess of the title story: she forgot to feed the fish. It could happen to anyone. Throughout, she maintains her love of all things small and clear in their desires (‘Animals speak without words.’). It is a life’s story in animals: we meet cockroaches, a little lizard, two dogs, a monkey baptized Lisete who dies wearing the narrator’s earrings and necklace, an enchanted island of parakeets, fish, and tapirs, and a quarrelsome dog named Bruno Barberini de Monteverdi. The same enchantment extends to the next story, ‘The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit’, which is flecked with lovely little asides like ‘as long as they’re loved, they don’t mind being a little dumb’, ‘every nature has its advantages’ and ‘a happy rabbit knows a bunch of things’.

The French writer and diarist Jules Renard also puzzled over the inner lives of animals and lamented that the weasels, dragonflies and ants he wrote about would never read his work. For his part, Ulisses, the dog-narrator of Lispector’s ‘Almost True’, has more on his mind than tummy-rubs and relates a kind of chivalric romance about a rooster, a witch and a fig tree. The last story, ‘Laura’s Intimate Life’, tells the life and times of a ‘quite advanced hen’. In the last episode in Laura’s eventful life as livestock, the question of interiority is turned on its head: she is visited by a diminutive being from outer space and together they wonder ‘what humans were like inside’. In these six books, we have six attempts at an answer, but each seems to say, ‘Well, where to begin?’ This one, at least, ends as all storybooks should, assuring us that all is well, at least for the birds, and with the words ‘the end’.

Read on: Ricardo Piglia ‘Theses on the Short Story’, NLR 70.

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Israel’s Straitjacket

First came the jokes. Black humour as a natural response to frustration and disappointment. ‘How was it yesterday?’ my Tel-Avivian neighbor, also a leftist, shouted from his balcony, wearing shorts and no shirt, sipping his morning coffee the day after the elections. ‘Not great’, I shouted back, continuing my brisk walk toward the kindergarten. ‘You should have had great fun voting’, he said, with a knowing emphasis on ‘great fun’. ‘Why is that?’, I asked. ‘Because’, he replied, delighted to have reached his punchline, ‘it was your last time!’ 

The Israeli elections of 1 November were indeed rather shocking. For the first time since its establishment in 1992, Meretz (the left-Zionist party) was ousted from parliament, as was Balad (an Arab-Palestinian party striving to make Israel ‘a state for all its citizens’). Simultaneously, we witnessed the spectacular rise of the national-religious list, composed of the Religious Zionism party led by Bezalel Smotrich (arrested in 2005 along with five other right-wing activists for plotting to ‘blow up cars on the Ayalon highway’, according to the Shin-Bet deputy chief) and the neo-fascist party Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Strength’) led by Itamar Ben-Gvir (convicted in 2007 of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization). Their joint platform was backed by almost 11% of Israeli voters and received 14 seats. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likkud party won 32 seats, while current PM Yair Lapid’s supposedly centrist outfit Yesh Atid picked up 24. The Labor Party – the leading political force during Israel’s first three decades, and a major player thereafter – came away with only 4.

Of course, Israeli democracy was nothing to brag about before the latest elections. The country’s so-called ‘change government’, which lasted from June 2021 to November 2022, was largely comprised of parties from the centre and centre right, who united in opposition to Netanyahu and viewed his ongoing corruption trial as a national disgrace. Their coalition also included the last remnants of the Israeli left and, controversially, the United Arab List. Its domestic agenda revolved around good governance, stabilization of the political system and passing a state budget for the first time in three years. But when it came to the occupation, the siege of Gaza and the refusal to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, it was not much different to the previous Netanyahu administration. Israel’s Zionist straitjacket may allow some room for debate on internal issues, but its confines are clear.

The most reactionary Knesset in history will now be sworn in on November 15. Yet this should not be read as a fundamental shift to the right. It is rather the outcome of various strategic manoeuvres on Netanyahu’s part as well as long-term processes within Israeli society. Such factors can be elaborated by analyzing the recent history of two political groupings: the Jewish religious parties on the one hand, and the Arab-Palestinian parties on the other.

Starting with the former: Netanyahu will most likely form his government out of the following components: Likkud (32 seats), Religious Zionism (14 seats), Shas (the Sephardic orthodox party, 11 seats) and Yahadut Hatorah (the Ashkenazi ultraorthodox party, 7 seats). The incoming PM can easily assemble this 64-seat bloc, in a parliament of 120 members, with the automatic support of all three Jewish religious parties (representing Mizrahi and Ashkenazi alike), which are now considered ‘natural allies’ of the Zionist right. Yet this is by no means a natural situation. It is the result of Netanyahu’s long-term plan to bring religious, orthodox and even ultraorthodox parties – which are in large part non-Zionist – into his political project, by framing it as quintessentially ‘Jewish’. The old saying goes that ‘the Torah has seventy faces’, but Netanyahu and the hard-right have given it only one. For religious parties, the latter is now a close collaborator while centrists and leftists have become the ultimate anti-Jewish Other – which, in the long run, leaves little hope for another changing of the guard.

Secondly, and no less cannily, was Netanyahu’s strategy vis-à-vis the Arab parties and Palestinian citizens of Israel. During his previous time in office, he both deepened Israel’s divide-and-rule approach to the Palestinians – precipitating the total disintegration of the Arab Joint List – and succeeded in cementing a fanciful association between the Arab parties and terrorism, thereby discrediting their criticism of the occupation. After United Arab List joined Lapid’s fragile coalition, Netanyahu (and the right in general) endlessly reiterated the claim that the new government was ‘reliant on supporters of terror’. The effectiveness of this smear showed how entrenched the discourse of ‘terrorization’ had become, thanks in part to other Zionist political actors from the putative centre and left (Lapid, for example, is currently refusing to meet with the leaders of the Arab parties Hadash and Ta‘al). Through such rhetoric, Netanyahu established a comprehensive formula which meant that every Arab-Palestinian would be required to prove that he or she is not a terrorist. Such delegitimization had a clear strategic aim, making it almost impossible for Arab-Palestinians to voice their opinions, and destroying the conditions for a stable centrist or centre-left coalition.

In other words, by coding the religious parties as right wing, and the Arab parties as terrorists, Netanyahu has rendered any joint coalition of Jews and Arabs unthinkable. What makes this strategy so successful, and so dangerous, is its apparent irreversibility. Over the next four years, the government will take extraordinary steps to lock in its hegemony. It plans to introduce an ‘overriding clause’ that will enable the parliament to overturn Supreme Court rulings, effectively abolishing the separation of powers and ensuring that Netanyahu’s trial will end without conviction. Netanyahu will also exploit the impotence of international law, along with Israel’s warm relations with the new authoritarian right in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, to realize the dream of a de facto annexation of Area C in the West Bank.

Despite what my neighbour said, it is most likely that we will meet again at the ballot box once the new government has completed its term. But the question is what options we – let alone the Palestinians – will have, after four more years of Netanyahu and Religious Zionism.  

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The House of Zion’, NLR 96.

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Circuits of War

A world war was declared on 7 October. No news station reported on it, even though we will all have to suffer its effects. That day, the Biden administration launched a technological offensive against China, placing stringent limits and extensive controls on the export not only of integrated circuits, but also their designs, the machines used to ‘write’ them on silicon and the tools these machines produce. Henceforth, if a Chinese factory requires any of these components to produce goods – like Apple’s mobile phones, or GM’s cars – other firms must request a special licence to export them.

Why has the US implemented these sanctions? And why are they so severe? Because, as Chris Miller writes in his recent book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022), ‘the semiconductor industry produces more transistors every day than there are cells in the human body’. Integrated circuits (‘chips’) are part of every product we consume – that is to say, everything China makes – from cars to phones, washing machines, toasters, televisions and microwaves. That’s why China uses more than 70% of the world’s semiconductor products, although contrary to common perception it only produces 15%. In fact, this latter figure is misleading, as China doesn’t produce any of the latest chips, those used in artificial intelligence or advanced weapons systems.

You can’t get anywhere without this technology. Russia found this out when, after it was placed under embargo by the West for its invasion of Ukraine, it was forced to close some of its major car factories. (The scarcity of chips also contributes to the relative inefficacy of Russian missiles – very few of them are the ‘intelligent’ kind, fitted with microprocessors that guide and correct their trajectory.) Today, the production of microchips is a globalized industrial process, with at least four important ‘chokepoints’, enumerated by Gregory Allen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies: ‘1) AI (Artificial Intelligence) chip designs, 2) electronic design automation software, 3) semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and 4) equipment components.’ As he explains,

The Biden administration’s latest actions simultaneously exploit US dominance across all four of these chokepoints. In doing so, these actions demonstrate an unprecedented degree of US government intervention to not only preserve chokepoint control but also begin a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry – strangling with an intent to kill.

Miller is somewhat more sober in his analysis: ‘The logic’, he writes, ‘is throwing sand in the gears’, though he also asserts that ‘the new export blockade is unlike anything seen since the Cold War’. Even a commentator as obsequious to the United States as the FT’s Martin Wolf couldn’t help but observe that ‘the recently announced controls on US exports of semiconductors and associated technologies to China’ are ‘far more threatening to Beijing than anything Donald Trump did. The aim is clearly to slow China’s economic development. That is an act of economic warfare. One might agree with it. But it will have huge geopolitical consequences.’

‘Strangling with an intent to kill’ is a decent characterisation of the objectives of an American empire that is seriously concerned by the technological sophistication of Chinese weapons systems, from hypersonic missiles to artificial intelligence. China has achieved such progress through the use of technology either owned or controlled by the US. For years, the Pentagon and White House have become increasingly irritated watching their ‘global competitor’ make giant leaps with tools that they themselves provided. Anxiety about China was not merely the transitory impulse of the Trump administration. Such preoccupations are shared by Biden’s government, which is now pursuing the same objectives as its much-maligned predecessor – but with even more vigour.

The timing of the US announcement came just days before the opening of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. In a certain sense, the export ban was the White House’s intervention in the proceedings, which were intended to cement Xi Jinping’s political supremacy. Unlike many of the sanctions imposed on Russia – which, apart from the blockade on microchips, have proven rather ineffective – these restrictions have a high likelihood of success, given the unique structure of the semiconductor market and the particularities of the production process.  

The microchip industry is distinguished by its geographical dispersal and financial concentration. This is owed to the fact that production is extremely capital-intensive. Moreover, its capital-intensity accelerates over time, as the industry’s dynamic is based on a continuous improvement of ‘performance’: i.e. of the capacity to process ever more complex algorithms whilst reducing electricity consumption. The first solid integrated circuits developed in the early 1960s had 130 transistors. The original Intel processor from 1971 had 2,300 transistors. In the 1990s, the number of transistors in a single chip surpassed 1 million. In 2010, a chip contained 560 million, and a 2022 Apple iPhone has 114 billion. Since transistors are always getting smaller, the techniques for fabricating them on a semiconductor have become increasingly sophisticated; the ray of light which tracks designs must be of a shorter and shorter wavelength. The first rays used were of visible light (from 700 to 400 billionths of a metre, nanometres, nm). Over the years this was reduced to 190nm, then 130nm, before reaching extreme ultraviolet: only 3nm. For scale, a Covid-19 virion is around ten times this size.

Highly complex and expensive technology is necessary to attain these microscopic dimensions: lasers and optical devices of incredible precision as well as the purest of diamonds. A laser capable of producing a sufficiently stable and focused light is composed of 457,329 parts, produced by tens of thousands of specialized companies scattered around the world (a single microchip ‘printer’ with these characteristics is worth $100 million, with the latest model projected to cost $300 million). This means that opening a chip factory requires an investment of around $20 billion, essentially the same amount you would need for an aircraft carrier. This investment must bear fruit in a very short amount of time, because in a few years the chips will have been surpassed by a more advanced, compact, miniaturized model, which will require completely new equipment, architecture and procedures. (There are physical limits to this process; by now we’ve reached layers just a few atoms thick, which is why there’s so much investment in quantum computing, in which the physical limit of quantum uncertainty below a certain threshold is no longer a limitation, but a feature to be exploited.) Nowadays, most semiconductor firms don’t produce semiconductors at all; they simply design and plan their architecture, hence the standard name used to refer to them: ‘fabless’ (‘without fabrication’, outsourcing production). But these businesses aren’t really artisanal firms either: to give but three examples, Qualcomm employs 45,000 workers and has a turnover of $35 billion, Nvidia employs 22,400 with revenues of $27 billion, and AMD 15,000 with $16 billion.

This speaks to the paradox at the heart of our technological modernity: increasingly infinitesimal miniaturization requires ever more macroscopic, titanic facilities, so much so that the Pentagon can’t even afford them, despite its annual budget of $700 billion. At the same time, it requires an unprecedented level of integration to put together hundreds of thousands of different components, produced by different technologies, each of which is hyperspecialized.

The push towards concentration is inexorable. The production of machines which ‘print’ state-of-the-art microchips is under the monopoly of a single Dutch firm, ASM International, while the production of the chips themselves is undertaken by a restricted number of companies (which specialize in a particular type of chip: logic, DRAM, flash memory or graphics processing). The American company Intel produces nearly all computer microprocessors, while the Japanese sector – which did extremely well in the 1980s before entering a crisis in the late 90s – has now been absorbed by the American company Micron, which maintains factories across Southeast Asia.

There are, however, only two real giants in material production: one is Samsung of South Korea, favoured by the US during the 1990s to counter the rise of Japan, whose precocity before the end of the Cold War had become threatening; the other is TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company; 51,000 employees with a turnover of $43 billion, and $16 billion in profits), which supplies all the American ‘fabless’ firms, producing 90% of the world’s advanced chips. 

Chris Miller, Chip War (2022), p. 197

The network of chip production is thus highly disparate, with factories scattered between the Netherlands, the US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia (though note the cluster of firms based in East Asia, as shown by the map above). It is also concentrated in a handful of quasi-monopolies (ASML for ultraviolet lithography, Intel for microprocessors, Nvidia for GPUs, TSMC and Samsung for actual production), with monumental levels of investment. This is the web which makes US sanctions so effective: an American monopoly on microchip designs, drawn up by its great ‘fabless’ firms, through which enormous leverage can be wielded against companies in vassal states which actually manufacture the materials. The US can effectively block Chinese technological progress because no country in the world has the competence or resources necessary to develop these sophisticated systems. The US itself must rely on technological infrastructure developed in Germany, Britain and elsewhere. Yet this is not merely a question of technology; trained engineers, researchers and technicians are also necessary. For China, then, the mountain to climb is steep, even vertiginous. If it manages to procure a component, it will find that another is missing, and so on. In this sector, technological autarky is impossible.

Beijing naturally sought to prepare itself for this eventuality, having foreseen the arrival of these restrictions for some time, by both accumulating chips and investing fantastical sums in the development of local chip-manufacturing technology. It has made some progress in production: the Chinese company Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SIMC) now produces chips, though its technology lags behind TSMC, Samsung and Intel by several generations. But, ultimately, it will be impossible for China to catch up with its competitors. It cannot access lithographic machines nor the extreme ultraviolets provided by ASML, which has blocked all exports. China’s impotence in the face of this attack is clear from the total lack of official response from Beijing officials, who have not announced any countermeasures or reprisals for American sanctions. The preferred strategy seems to be dissimulation: continuing to work under the radar (perhaps with a little espionage), rather than being thrown out to sea without a flotation device.   

The problem for the American blockade is that a large proportion of TSMC’s exports (plus those of Samsung, Intel and ASML) are bound for China, whose industry depends on the island it wants to annex. The Taiwanese are fully aware of the pivotal role of the semiconductor industry in their national security, so much so that they refer to it as their ‘silicon shield’. The US would do anything to avoid losing control over the industry, and China can’t afford the luxury of destroying its facilities with an invasion. But this line of reasoning was far more robust before the outbreak of the current Cold War between the US and China.

In fact, two months prior to the announcement of microchip sanctions on China, the Biden administration launched a Chip and Science Act which allocated $50 billion to the repatriation of at least part of the production process, practically forcing Samsung and TSMC to build new manufacturing sites (and upgrade old ones) on American soil. Samsung has since pledged $200 billion for eleven new facilities in Texas over the next decade – although the timeline is more likely to be decades, plural. All this goes to show that if the US is willing to ‘deglobalize’ some of its productive apparatus, it’s also extremely difficult to decouple the economies of China and the US after almost forty years of reciprocal engagement. And it will be even more complicated for the US to convince its other allies – Japan, South Korea, Europe – to disentangle their economies from China’s, not least because these states have historically used such trading ties to loosen the American yoke.

The textbook case is Germany: the biggest loser in the war in Ukraine, a conflict which has called into question every strategic decision pursued by German élites in the last fifty years. Since the turn of the millennium, Germany has grounded its economic – and therefore political – fortunes in its relationship with China, its principal commercial partner (with $264 billion worth of annual trade). Today, Germany continues to strengthen these bilateral ties, despite both the cooling of relations between Beijing and Washington and the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has disrupted Russian intermediation between the German bloc and China. In June, the German chemicals producer BASF announced an investment of $10 billion in a new plant in Zhangjiang in the south of China. Olaf Scholz even made a visit to Beijing earlier this month, heading a delegation of directors from Volkswagen and BASF. The Chancellor came bearing gifts, pledging to approve the Chinese company Cosco’s controversial investment in a terminal for container ships in the port of Hamburg. The Greens and Liberals objected to this move, but the Chancellor responded by pointing out that Cosco’s stake would be around 24.9%, with no veto rights, and would cover only one of Hamburg’s terminals – incomparable to the company’s outright acquisition of Piraeus in 2016. In the end, the more Atlanticist wing of the German coalition was forced to give way.

In the present conjuncture, even these minimal gestures – Scholz’s trip to Beijing, less than $50 million worth of Chinese investment in Hamburg – seem like major acts of insubordination, especially following the latest round of American sanctions. But Washington couldn’t have expected its Asian and European vassals to simply swallow deglobalization as if the neoliberal era had never happened: as if, during recent decades, they hadn’t been encouraged, pushed, almost forced to entwine their economies with one another, building a web of interdependence which is now exceedingly difficult to dismantle.

On the other hand, when war breaks out, vassals must decide which side they’re on. And this is shaping up to be a gigantic war, even if it’s fought over millionths of millimetres.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘America vs China’, NLR 115.

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Brazil Transformed

The closest election in Brazilian history came to an end on 30 October, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beating Jair Bolsonaro. Those who went to the polls knew that this was no ordinary ballot. Bolsonaro had pulled out all the stops to manipulate the democratic process and threatened to challenge any result that did not go his way. But Lula, the 77-year-old leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), drew on the enormous popularity he had amassed during his previous years in power, edging over the finish line with 50.9% to Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. In so doing, he recovered some of the terrain that the PT lost in the 2018 election and increased the left’s seat share in a parliament dominated by the right. The result was unprecedented: never before had a Brazilian president been elected for a third term, nor had the incumbent been defeated since the possibility of re-election was introduced.

Just three years ago, Lula was thought to be politically finished and possibly destined to spend the rest of his life behind bars, having been convicted on corruption charges. Now he is back; but the Brazil he will preside over is very different from the one he left to his successor Dilma Rousseff in 2010. The tight election race belied the conviction, held by many on the left, that this was still essentially the same country that had elected the PT four times. Once he enters the Palácio da Alvorada in January, Lula must deal with a sluggish economy at home and abroad, the legacy of six years of acute institutional dysfunction, a divided congress and a powerful far right. While his first government benefited from the commodity boom of the early millenium, no such windfall appears to be on the horizon; and even if it were, the prospect of rampant climate change limits the extent to which it could be exploited. Given such constraints, his room for manoeuvre – for increasing social spending or expanding the rights of marginalized groups – will be even narrower than it was in 2003.

To understand these changes, it is not enough to point to the extensive network of online influencers, YouTube channels, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, TV stations, radio broadcasters and evangelical churches that coalesced around Bolsonaro in 2018. It is also necessary to examine the longer-term dynamics that were set in motion by the PT administrations of the 2000s and 2010s, along with those which came to the fore in the years since. Such dynamics were at work in the four main stories of the recent campaign: Bolsonaro’s impressive show of strength, the degradation of Brazil’s democratic institutions, the rise of the extractive sector as a political and social force, and the broad coalition that the PT has assembled. This essay will look at each in turn.

I

In 2018, Bolsonaro could claim to be the candidate of hope and change. In 2022, he carried the weight of a disastrous presidential record: constant political turmoil, rising living costs, blatant corruption, the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. These issues were expected to alienate a sizeable chunk of the voters who had aided his victory four years ago. Indeed, as the results were announced, it became clear that Bolsonaro’s fate was sealed by the fraction of the electorate who switched their allegiances to Lula in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. But this trend was nowhere near as strong as the pollsters had predicted; instead of losing the majority of the wavering vote, Bolsonaro appeared to have brought much of it into his hardcore base, which emerged from the electoral cycle looking larger and more cohesive. This makes sense given that Bolsonaro, like Trump, was always more concerned with keeping his supporters engaged and mobilized than with the everyday business of governing. While this strategy lost him many middle-of-the-road supporters, it also consolidated the Bolsonarista bloc.

Bolsonaro’s coalition is largely held together by the far right’s impressive communicational infrastructure. Yet its origins can be traced back to the economic crisis that erupted towards the end of Rousseff’s first term and triggered the early termination of her second – as well as the various pension, labour and social spending reforms that followed. Among those who were lifted out of poverty during the boom years, attaining middle-class living standards (often financed by debt) became a major source of self-esteem. But the downturn which began in 2015 undermined the PT’s project of ‘inclusion through consumption’, prompting dissatisfaction with the party, which was compounded by successive corruption scandals. From then on, a long-established ‘neoliberalism from below’ combined with libertarian propaganda ‘from above’ to produce a new ideological landscape. As the number of people working for apps in Brazil exploded (a 979.8% increase since 2016), underemployment, deregulation and growing economic coercion were reframed as signs of personal freedom, entrepreneurship and healthy market competition, enabling sections of the electorate to partially regain the self-esteem that had been lost under the PT. Simultaneously, a renewed investment in gender, racial, religious and class prejudices – which the right presented as a defence of republican and Christian family values – provided psychological compensation for economic uncertainty and shrinking expectations. As an account of the crisis that blended ultraliberalism and anticommunist paranoia gained traction, many people who had benefited from the PT’s social policies came to see their social advancement as an individual achievement ­­– and to blame those very policies, as well as the groups and minorities that they aided, for their present tribulations.

This sense of resentment among the lower middle class converged with one that had been brewing since Lula’s first term among an upper middle class caught between the rich, who were becoming richer, and the poor, who were becoming less poor (thereby threatening their markers of class distinction). In Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign, these two strata joined forces with a capitalist class that saw in the PT’s fall an opportunity to push through a barrage of reforms (including a permanent cap on public spending) and in Bolsonaro a chance for at least four years of untrammelled predation.

After four years of exactly that, Brazil is now a more brutal and unequal country; but this has not necessarily damaged Bolsonaro’s political standing. On the contrary: for many of its adherents, Bolsonarismo’s appeal is what might be termed a differentially distributed state of nature: a situation in which the state no longer plays any role in mitigating existing power relations, and each person is free to exercise their authority in whatever sphere they might wield it, even if it is just over their wife and children or oppressed minority groups. Even for those in the peripheries, the idea that the state will stand back and refuse to intervene may sound more liberating than threatening. There is a perverse form of egalitarianism at work here: the feeling that, if one is subjected to ever more ruthless living and working conditions, these should at least be imposed upon everyone – except, of course, for the winners whose ranks one aspires to join, and in whose unfettered freedom one hopes to partake. Hence Bolsonaro’s paradoxical status as a symbol of both discipline and permissiveness: he represents a form of social Darwinism in which to compete is to operate at the limit of morality and law, and to win is to no longer be subjected to the same rules as everyone else.

II

Yet the results of 30 October were not merely a reflection of these political-historical trends. It would be giving Bolsonaro too much credit to ignore the effects of his extraordinary use of the state apparatus to support his election campaign. This is the second main story of the contest: even if the former army captain’s defeat saved Brazil from going down a path similar to that of Orbán’s Hungary, the electoral process made clear how much institutional erosion has taken place in recent years.

Although Bolsonaro promised a ‘new politics’, his tenure effectively radicalized some of the shadiest practices of Brazil’s notoriously self-serving political class. Threatened by criminal investigations surrounding him and his sons, and fearing an impeachment for his reckless pandemic response, the president curried favour with congress by instituting a ‘secret budget’ that, since 2020, has handed sympathetic legislators R$46.2 billion to be used with no democratic oversight. (By comparison, the Lava Jato investigation claimed to recover R$6.28 billion embezzled under the PT.) This system, which vastly increases opportunities for corruption, helped to secure the loyalty of the legislature, allowing Bolsonaro to pass a staggering number of patronage measures ahead of the presidential campaign. These included the expansion of cash transfer programmes, the opening of credit lines for recipients of those programmes, benefits for lorry and cab drivers (two bastions of Bolsonarismo) and tax cuts to reduce fuel prices. All this led to a temporary uptick in economic conditions, giving credence to Bolsonaro’s claims that Brazil was performing better than other countries in the aftermath of the pandemic. While Lula maintained his lead among the poorest section of the electorate, such reforms probably helped shore up some of the support which Bolsonaro would have otherwise lost as a result of rising living costs. More significantly, they created a fiscal shortfall estimated at at least R$150 billion, which is sure to constrain the programme of the incoming president.

Alongside this vote-buying operation, Bolsonaro repeatedly cast aspersions on the electoral process and suggested he would refuse to recognize a Lula victory. He openly courted the security apparatus, appointed over 6,000 members of the armed forces to government positions, and hinted at the prospect of a right-wing coup. Though this never materialized, the actions of the Federal Highway Police – disrupting traffic in Lula strongholds on election day – showed that it was not an entirely empty threat. In the midst of the campaign, even the fight against institutional dysfunction began to take on a dysfunctional form. When the Electoral Court intervened to control the spread of right-wing disinformation, it did so in ways that were legally questionable, fuelling Bolsonarista claims that they were being unjustly targeted by the state machinery.

All this raised the temperature of the elections and poisoned the political atmosphere. One in three voters, predominantly women and Lula supporters, cited political violence as a concern. Tensions came to a head in the week leading up to the second round, with two major incidents involving Bolsonaro allies. First, the disgraced former congressman Roberto Jefferson staged an armed confrontation with Federal Police, who tried to apprehend him after he broke the conditions of his house arrest by calling a Supreme Court judge ‘a used-up whore’. Soon after, the federal representative Carla Zambelli pulled a gun on a Black man with whom she had an altercation in the streets of São Paulo.

The incumbent clearly hoped that these shock-troops would protect his position. Following the election, he fell silent for 44 hours, consulting with various allies and waiting to see if the roadblocks that his supporters had erected would evolve into a large enough movement for him to contest the results. When this failed to transpire, he gave a reluctant two-minute speech in which he said nothing about his opponent, celebrated the ‘real emergence’ of the right under his administration, made some vague statements to keep hope alive among his base, and left it to his chief of staff to announce that the transition process had begun.  

III

The third major story of the election concerns the shape of the electoral map and the affirmation of the Brazilian countryside as a social and political force. Bolsonaro won, often by wide margins, in the South, Midwest and parts of the North: the heartlands of agribusiness where the extractive frontier is expanding. This tracks well with the spread of deforestation during his term. (In the Amazon alone, it was up by 73% in the last four years, whereas it had gone down by 67% under Lula.) Of course, PT administrations were far from enemies of the extraction industry; on the contrary, their wager on the commodities boom accelerated the reprimarization of the economy that had begun in the 1990s. Beyond talk of ‘shared values’, what explains the agribusiness sector’s preference for Bolsonaro was the prospect of accumulation unimpeded by any constraints or counteracting forces, be they the recognition of indigenous titles, environmental regulations or distributive policies. Even if most of the wealth recently produced in agribusiness strongholds has ended up in the pockets of a small number of families, Bolsonaro’s triumph in these regions shows that actions such as dismantling state agencies and cheerleading illegal mining and logging successfully conveyed an aspirational message: that his government had the back of the adventurous frontiersman and would defend free enterprise by any means necessary.

It was in Lula’s second term that China became Brazil’s main trading partner, firmly establishing the extractive sector on the world stage. But it was when the sector abandoned Rousseff in 2015 that it seemed to have come of age politically: no longer content to simply defend its immediate economic interests, it instead sought to impose its agenda on the country as a whole. With Bolsonaro, finally, it appeared to figure out that some form of overseer capitalism – a situation in which the interest of ensuring maximum predation leads capital to strike direct power sharing deals with security forces turned independent economic and political agents – would be the most compatible with its unrestrained flourishing.

The broader historical trend here may be the reversal of the political domination of the countryside by the bigger cities (and the industrial and service sectors) which began with Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s. This inversion is a direct consequence of the PT’s governing formula during its first stint in power: to reconcile economic growth with wealth distribution by taking the path of least resistance, using the bonanza afforded by the commodity boom to fight poverty without attempting structural reforms in areas like land ownership and taxation. The clout that this approach has gifted the extractive industries is such that, as one analyst recently remarked, it has become impossible to govern without the ‘Mega-Midwest’. While this is undoubtedly true in the short and medium term, the question for any political project concerned with economic and political equality is whether it is possible to govern with it in the long run, or if continuing to feed this sector will inevitably lead to something even worse than what has taken place since 2016.

IV

The fourth and final main story in these elections is that the broad democratic front which the PT had hoped to assemble in 2018 finally came through, with important figures in the right and centre right deciding they could no longer give Bolsonaro the benefit of the doubt. The composition of Lula’s cabinet will surely reflect this political heterogeneity, as well as the need to make alliances with a right-leaning but ideologically diverse parliament. Lula has already stated that this will not be a government of the PT alone. Yet the real issue is whether the PT will try to assert its leadership over the governing coalition, or whether it will merely seek to maintain an equilibrium that is bound to be highly unstable.

Over the next four years, the PT will once again face pressure to pursue poverty alleviation without structural reform – but this time without the revenue yielded by the commodity boom. As he joins the ranks of younger leaders touted as Latin America’s ‘new Pink Tide’, the challenge for Lula, as for them, will be to learn the lessons of the old one. Perhaps the most important is that, short of an improbable revolutionary situation, the question is never whether to make or not make concessions, but whether, even as one makes concessions, one is nonetheless working towards a long-term transformation of the balance of forces. If not, and there is no obvious direction of travel or strategic programme, then the line between concession and capitulation disappears, and it is likely that one will have to concede ever more. Given the twin threats of climate change and a burgeoning far right, the decision to work within existing constraints, without striving to change them, will only prove disastrous.

The conditions for a Lula presidency have never been as unfavourable as they are now, but the conjuncture also presents him with a great opportunity: to lead Brazil out of its self-imposed international isolation and position it as a world leader in the struggle for a just, ecologically realistic, socially transformative Green New Deal. If this strategy is successful, it could help to expand his room for manoeuvre domestically. To use a footballing metaphor of which the president-elect would no doubt approve, going on the offensive may be the best form of defence. It remains to be seen whether Lula, the most talented politician of his generation, will rise to that challenge.  

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Neo-Backwardness in Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, NLR 123.

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Assassination Time Again

A failed attempt in Wazirabad last Thursday to assassinate the former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has resulted in mass demonstrations throughout the country. Khan was aboard his campaign truck, on the long march of his supporters to Islamabad to demand immediate elections. Bullets hit him in the leg. Was it two or three? Such is the focus of debate on Pakistani television. A dozen others were injured, while a father trying to protect his three children was killed. The dialectic of illegally or constitutionally toppled leaders retaining their popularity makes the Army extremely nervous. Technically, the coup against Khan was legal: he lost a vote of no-confidence in April. The chicanery behind the scenes will come to light one of these days. Khan himself had few doubts that US pressure was behind his removal. The US State Department strongly denied any involvement, though did not hide its irritation at Khan’s criticism of the ‘mess’ created in Afghanistan, nor at Pakistan’s abstention on the UN vote for sanctions against Russia (the new government similarly abstained in the latest Ukraine vote).

A delegation of the ISI – Pakistan’s intelligence service – who were visiting the Pentagon at the time of Khan’s comments, reassured their friends that the country’s foreign and defence policies were decided by the Army, not the Prime Minister. This is, of course, true and has been the case since General Zia-ul-Haq declared martial law and removed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977. Zia promised elections within ninety days of the coup. In that case, suggested Bhutto, who had been placed under house arrest, all political leaders should be allowed to campaign publicly. The Army agreed and Bhutto went on a public tour, during which he was welcomed by huge crowds (a quarter of a million in Lahore alone). The general panicked. Were Bhutto to be re-elected, he would punish the coup-makers. A plot was therefore manufactured to charge him with murder and get rid of him. After a rigged trial, Bhutto was hanged in 1979.

A few months ago, I was reminded of these scenes from Pakistan’s past. Khan’s Party for Justice (PTI) is very different from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in social composition and political programme, but the dialectic is similar. Khan’s removal led to large-scale demonstrations – his supporters chanting Jo Amrika ka yar hai, Ghaddar hai, Ghaddar hai (‘Anyone a friend of America is a traitor, a traitor’) – and the PTI went on to win a string of by-elections against the new government, in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Karachi city. Khan’s popularity could not be doubted, but his demand for new national elections was refused. Ironically, the unelected new Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, was advised by his brother Nawaz Sharif (a former PM himself) not to form a new government, given the state of the country, and instead call an election. But the younger brother was desperate for power. The Army backed him, believing that they needed a new government in place for a year or so to destroy the PTI (who they had helped to power in the first place, in the hope that Khan would be a tame politician).

Khan and the PTI are now accusing Sharif, the interior minister and a senior general of being involved in the shooting. The would-be-assassin has claimed that he acted on his own because he was disappointed by politicians and their broken promises. He’s not alone in this regard, but shooting at them won’t change all that much. A corrupt and violent elite linked to all political parties and the Army will not disappear overnight. The ruling classes in the country have done virtually nothing to help the poor. Whether the man who fired the bullets is working for more sinister forces (something many in the country believe) we do not know. Was it a shot across the bows to frighten Khan away from politics? If so, it has had the opposite effect. The shooter claims he got the idea when he heard the call to prayer earlier that day.

Interestingly, the word assassin is of medieval Islamic origin. It derives from the hashashin, drugged-up killers belonging to a Shia sect created by Hassan-i-Sabbah in 1090. Peaceful hippies they were not. They were professionals hired out to anyone who needed them for financial or political purposes. Dissolved in the 13th century, their ghosts seemed to have entered Pakistan soon after the country was formed. The first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated at a political rally in 1951. The killer, Said Akbar, was shot dead immediately by veteran policeman Najaf Khan, who happened to be standing right behind him. A coincidence, the police said. The result of his death was a weakening of the refugee presence in the government and founding party, and the rise of the Punjabi landlords as the key players in the country. Bhutto was hanged; his daughter Benazir Bhutto was assassinated (also in Rawalpindi). Prior to that, her brother Murtaza Bhutto had been ambushed and killed outside his house in Karachi in extremely murky circumstances – some blamed Asif Zardari (Benazir’s husband and widower, later Prime Minister).

And now an attempt to kill Khan. Will it change anything? I fear not. The masses are cynical, the politicians and generals busy making money. There is no national alternative in sight. The Pashtun Protection Movement is the only serious group resisting the crushing hegemony of the ISI. Its MPs and activists are often arrested and tortured. The PTI’s collaboration on this front discredited it greatly. As did its total failure to deal with corruption outside and inside its own ranks. It would be good if some lessons were learned, and the next elections were more than two power-hungry blocs fighting to increase their bank-balances.

The whirligig continues.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘The Colour Khaki’, NLR 19.