Categories
Uncategorised

Middling Kingdom

‘A people with no trace of nationality and without political intelligence – in fact, the most insufferable creatures alive. Fortunately, a certain apathy prevents them from inflicting too much damage.’ Leopold I, airlifted out of the lower German nobility and onto the Belgian throne in 1831, when republicanism and democracy were still seen as dangerous synonyms, had mixed feelings about his move to Europe’s youngest state. His new kingdom was to serve as a Catholic buffer zone between post-Napoleonic France and Britain’s maritime hubs on the continent – a thankless position for a Protestant nobleman with global ambitions, who resented the constitutional strictures imposed on him by ‘those Belgians’. After Leopold’s death in 1865, the parish priest initially refused to bury his body.

In one sense, Leopold’s observation has clearly stood the test of time: Belgian political folly rarely registers beyond the country’s national borders. The accidental centre of Europe, home to some of the West’s most powerful institutions, including NATO and the EU, is remarkably unknown and unloved abroad. When the country features in foreign commentary, the same few motifs are repeatedly invoked: a kingdom at the crossroads of the Old World, a rough strip of motorway between Paris and Amsterdam, a modern office space for the lords of globalization. By and large, the nation is viewed as a historical curiosity, its contemporary realities overlooked.

According to the The Economist, Belgium is ‘the world’s most successful failed state’. Afflicted by a dysfunctional justice system, mountainous debt, a gridlocked party democracy and rising Islamist extremism, it nonetheless boasts one of the highest GDPs-per-capita in the developed world, one of the most unionized economies on the continent, a robust civil society, generous social security schemes, a large and prosperous middle class, and a Walloon Socialist Party (PS) that has ably resisted the worst effects of Pasokification. It is also home to the most successful far-left outfit in Western Europe, the PTB/PVDA: Belgium’s only genuinely national party, consisting of a core group of militants who have built an effective digital operation while retaining strong ties to what remains of the country’s labour movement.

Unlike the UK, Belgium’s post-industrial economy has ducked many neoliberal policy trends, and its regional minorities have been granted proper political autonomy. Unlike France, it has openly practiced a form of postcolonial amnesia, placing strict controls on migration from its former empire. Belgium is less financialized than the Netherlands, and its housing sector is less prone to asset inflation. Though it displays many of the usual symptoms of the twenty-first century – regional inequality, political polarization, bureaucratic inertia, multicultural friction – the country has managed to maintain a state of relative stability. In the Pax Americana and the age of value-added, export-oriented industry and specialized services, Belgium stumbled upon an inelegant yet durable method of managing decline.

Decline is still decline, however, and the coming year portends profound difficulties. In the run up to decisive elections in 2024, panic is gradually setting in. Ministers and party leaders are resigning; the Flemish far-right is plotting to break through its cordon sanitaire and ascend to government; Flemish nationalists are hoping for a ‘confederal’ breakthrough to push the two regions further apart; the far left continues to rise in Flanders and Wallonia; and Brussels is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Can the Belgian model survive such shocks?

The strangeness of the national mood was captured when Conner Rousseau, the telegenic leader of the Flemish Socialist Party – recently rebranded as Vooruit (‘Forward’) – was hit by a damaging series of scandals just as his party was surging in the polls. He reportedly exchanged ‘sexts’ with minors and misbehaved at an awards show where he dressed up as a giant rabbit and took to the stage to perform pop songs. Although the initial charges were dropped, it’s rumoured more will follow. In recent weeks, the right-wing blogosphere has been rife with speculation on Rousseau’s alleged misdeeds. In an apparent attempt at damage control, the party leader posted a choreographed video on social media, produced by former sports commentator Eric Goens, announcing that he was coming out as bisexual. It was sent to journalists with a large cheque enclosed. Soon after, the press began attaching disclaimers to its coverage of Rousseau’s reported indiscretions: none of the accusations had been proved, and there was probably nothing to see here.

The timing of the revelations was conspicuous. With the election looming, Rousseau’s swelling popularity threatened to alter the coalition prospects in Belgium’s notoriously complex democratic system. With a population of eleven million and a land mass the size of Wales or Maryland, Belgium has six official governments – one federal, five regional – and three linguistic communities. Regionally, the country is divided between Flemings, Walloons and Brusselians; linguistically, between Dutch-speakers, Francophones and German-speakers. The large northern region of Flanders is among the wealthiest in Europe, while the smaller southern region of Wallonia – once the site of smoke-stack steel mills, textile factories and mines – is comparatively poor. In Belgium’s 150-seat federal parliament, cobbling together a multi-party coalition is the sine qua non for any successful cabinet formation.

According to the most recent projections, the Flemish far-right party (Flemish Interest) will win 22 seats, up from 18, while right-wing Flemish nationalists (N-VA) will gain 20, down from 25. The Flemish liberals, known as Open VLD, are expected to fall from 12 to 6 seats; the Walloon Socialists will move from 19 to 20 and the Flemish Socialists from 9 to 16. On the far left, the forecast is even more impressive: the PTB/PVDA will supposedly leap from 3 to 8 in Flanders, 7 to 10 Wallonia and 2 to 3 in Brussels. That brings the party’s overall tally to 21, higher than that of the PS – a striking anomaly amid the waning of left-populist agitation elsewhere on the continent.

The success of the left at federal level, however, contrasts with an emergent right-wing bloc in Flanders – opening up the possibility of a coalition between Flemish Interest and the N-VA. Previously, the latter was able to win over much of the far-right electorate with its programme of tactical confederalization: a radical regionalization of power over taxes, economic policy, and social security – without a unilateral declaration of independence. Yet after almost twenty years in regional government, the N-VA’s promised confederal overhaul has not come to pass; and next year is seen as its political eleventh hour. Flemish Interest, for its part, has picked up N-VA voters through its fusion of welfare chauvinism and unapologetic separatism, proclaiming that Flanders must break out of its Belgian cage as soon as possible.

At present, though, the more likely outcome of the ballot is the so-called ‘Vivaldi option’: a continuation of the coalition that has reigned since 2019, whose party colours reflect the four seasons: Walloon and Flemish liberals, greens, Christian-democrats, and socialists – the Belgian equivalent of Germany’s GroKo. Yet the parliamentary arithmetic also allows for other combinations, such as an exclusively left-wing, or red-red-green coalition (one is tempted to call it the ‘Portuguese option’), comprising the PTB/PVDA, Vooruit, the PS, and the Flemish and Walloon greens. How plausible is such a Popular Front à la belge? The PTB/PVDA has already laid out its conditions for participation in government: a break with EU austerity, setting the retirement age back to 65, and a tax on millionaires – policies that the more conservative green parties are reluctant to adopt for fear of crossing their European partners. Yet the prospect of a progressive federal cabinet, however distant, has made the right uneasy.    

Belgium’s current political prospectus can be traced back to the uneven and combined development of its post-war economy. In the nineteenth century, Belgium was the original home of finance capital – a mighty merger between commercial and investment banking, the factory and the insurance fund, embodied by the powerful Socièté Générale bank. It was able to foster an industrial sector in Wallonia that surpassed countries with much larger landmasses. At its peak, the Socièté Générale Belgique was not just the country’s largest holding company, directly or indirectly controlling about 20% of Belgian industry; it also held interests in 1,261 concerns, including in steel, diamonds, insurance, chemicals and munitions.

None of this survived two German occupations. The Socièté never reinvested its profits in new, specialised industries, preferring European buy-outs, cartel arrangements or lazy price-fixing. In the 1950s, a section of the radical left trade union ABBV/FGTB proposed a package of ‘structural reforms’ to kill off the vieille dame and bring the economy up to speed with Sweden, Germany or France. This programme was never considered by the Belgian elite, who were able to cling to power partly with the help of uranium profits from Congo during the nuclear age. Meanwhile, a younger proletariat in Flanders entered the new industries – petrochemical engineering and oil – springing up around the river delta in Antwerp. By this time, the country’s economic coordinates were locked in place: regional conflict between Walloons and Flemings, competition from foreign producers and American hyperpower. After 1960, the Congolese colonies were officially lost, the industrial base was depleted, and Flanders received proper regional autonomy. Throughout the 1970s, Belgium’s antiquated institutions were steadily dismantled and its economy restructured for globalization. The old elite was ushered off stage, and the country’s economic axis rotated northwards, to the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam. Under American military supervision, Belgium prepared for incorporation into the deflationary EU.

The result was what the Italian buyer of the Socièté, Carlo de Benedetti, called ‘nightcap capitalism’: living off dividends of the previous century while stubbornly refusing to adapt to the present era. The competitive threat from US and German steel was never seriously met. Instead, Belgium’s industrial crown jewels were auctioned off in the 1970s, leaving Wallonia’s economic landscape barren and derelict. The region was never able to produce a Volvo or a Phillips; Wallonia continued to rely heavily on transfers or became a service provider to Brussels as it remade itself as a ‘Washington on the Senne’. Flanders, however, profited from its international ports and oil production. Servicing the new multinationals, its brand of capitalism resembled that of the export entrepreneurs in the Italian North; today, its elites are mainly concerned with labour supply and international competitiveness; they care relatively little for domestic demand or corporatist bargaining.

The Flemish employers’ organization VOKA has thus spent the last decade calling for limits on unemployment benefits. Flanders-based SMEs, in particular, are crying out for more labour and lower wages to keep the Northern export economy going. Since an open borders policy is politically impossible in a region increasingly rapt by visions of the Great Replacement, the only remaining option is to activate the large number of unemployed Walloons. VOKA capitalists believe that this stratum lacks basic discipline due to the ‘hammock’ of social security – something its counterparts in East Germany or northern France have learned to live without.

In west Flanders, French workers from Lille and Dunkerque are already called upon to fill labour shortages. On this basis, employer organizations are pushing for more commuter routes across the language border: just as the Flemings once went to work in the south, the Walloons must now come to Flanders (‘If the mountain won’t come to Moses, Moses must go to the mountain’, as one commentator recently reflected). The N-VA, vanguard party of Flemish capital, has vigorously promoted this agenda, pushing for so-called ‘degressivity’ (the reduction of unemployment benefits over time), an end to Belgium’s remaining wage indexation schemes, and the establishment of state control over benefit payments currently handled by union administrations. As Western Europe’s wealthiest party – supported by a real estate empire and swathes of state subsidies – the Flemish nationalists, even when on the electoral retreat, have the pockets to finance their neoliberal offensive.   

Attuned to such dynamics, the PS State Secretary and rising star Thomas Dermine has been making an indirect appeal to this rising bloc of Flemish investors. A novice in the party elite, who joined the Socialists after stints at McKinsey and Harvard, his aim is to effect a form of regional reconciliation. As he sees it, Belgium’s regions must learn to work together in a changing economic climate – which, in practice, means freeing up more Walloon resources for Flemish businesses. ‘The Flemish economy is facing a lack of space and personnel’, he claims, and ‘Wallonia has a large labour reserve, and fallow land by the dozen.’ Instead of Walloons commuting to West Flanders, Dermine wants the North’s SMEs to head south and establish enterprises there. By extension, the PS would be able to maintain its regional hegemony while heeding the demands of Flemish nationalists for further regionalization.

This, it seems, is the brutal alternative to a red-red-green ‘purchasing power coalition’. Belgium is facing the radical deconstruction of its social security system with Walloon Socialist assent, alongside a slow process of Flemish Orbanization. Whether this can be avoided is still uncertain. But it will likely require a degree of political intelligence that Belgium’s first king failed to detect in his subjects.

Read on: Anton Jäger, ‘Rebel Regions’, NLR 128.

Categories
Uncategorised

Body and Soul

Last month, in purple passages lauding ‘a master stylist, whose use of punctuation was an art form in itself’, whose literary career was powered by a ‘supercharged prose, all heft and twang’, the usually characterless British broadsheets succumbed to the charms of ‘style’. Journalistic prose gave way to overwriting, as if the subject – the death of Martin Amis – provided a pretext for some formal indulgence, the effusion of pent-up lyricism. If opinions differed as to the quality of his books or the value of his political interventions, all could agree that Amis’s sentences were ‘dazzling’. In these eulogies, style was invariably interpreted as a kind of personal touch, a reflection of the writer’s singular identity: ‘The style was the man’, Sebastian Faulks told The Times. Yet such unanimity created the impression that style was also more than this – something supra-personal, perhaps a class-bound argot, expressed in the shared valediction for Amis’s verbal gifts.

In his obituary for Sidecar, Thomas Meaney added a critical note to the chorus of praise. Amis ‘occasionally succumbed to the literary equivalent of quantitative easing – inflating his sentences with adjectives as if to ward off the collapse of the books that housed them’. The dichotomy, between Amis’s ‘high-flown English’ and its opposite, is a long-standing one. Here the image of inflationary adjectives presumes some ‘real economy’ of plain style, in which parts of speech can find their ‘natural rate’. Judgements about style are often structured around these two dependent poles: at one end, the flowery, the overwritten, the self-reflexive or even autotelic; and at the other, the plain, the clear, the concise and the communicative. Does this distinction, seemingly embedded in our common sense, withstand scrutiny?

The essayist Brian Dillon defines style as ‘verifiable presence on the page’, an authenticating imprint of the writer’s ‘body and soul’. This broad conception is shared with William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, authors of the influential writing manual The Elements of Style (1918). Yet they describe its realization in antithetical terms. While Dillon is a champion of deliberate stylization, Strunk and White prescribe a method that’s supposedly less self-conscious:

Write in a way that draws the reader’s attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author. If the writing is solid and good, the mood and temper of the writer will eventually be revealed and not at the expense of the work…to achieve style, begin by affecting none – that is, place yourself in the background. A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts – which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward.

Throughout The Elements of Style, plain, ‘honest’ language is juxtaposed to its reflexive counterpart. But the opposition is an ambiguous one. The authoritative, naturalizing prose of this passage enacts the conception of style as something that can simply ‘emerge’ in the act of expression, breaking through external ‘barriers’. Strunk and White’s syntax – the parallelism of ‘will emerge’ in successive clauses – conveys the ease and fluency of this process, by which the writer’s style, and inseparably, their ‘self’, shines through. Paradoxically, though, for one’s style to organically emerge, one must first ‘affect’ a neutral non-style.

In ‘Caedmon’s Dream: On the Politics of Style’, Richard Seymour argues that since total clarity is impossible, writing as if it were is ‘an affectation – just one literary style among others. It is a form of literary naturalism, which does as much to disguise its materials and artifice as possible’. The same goes for Strunk and White’s advice: if an unselfconscious style requires ‘affecting none’, it is as much a conscious effect as contrived stylization. The very presence of such advice – to ‘write in a way that comes naturally’ – in a style manual full of prescriptions and prohibitions embodies the contradiction. Like Dillon, Strunk and White are conscious of the literary effects they want to produce; they simply prefer different effects. The performative contradictions in The Elements of Style – including the ‘egregious flouting of its own rules’ noted by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum – are at the heart of a ‘plain style’ whose plainness contrives to obscure its own artifice.

In her examination of Dillon’s oeuvre, Lola Seaton identifies a taste for ‘artifice, obscurity, extravagance and oddity’ that contrasts with the staid precepts of Strunk and White. This leads her to reflect on a broader tension in critical writing, between ‘striking’ and ‘serviceable’ language: sentences that reflect the writer’s personality and those that faithfully represent the subject. Dillon tends to opt for the first, with a singular style marked by studied ‘gushes’ and ‘lyrical flights’. Yet this procedure can undermine itself by creating ‘a distance between the writer and their prose, showing the latter not to bear the imprint of their “body and soul”, but to be a sequence of choreographed gestures’. For that reason, Seaton suggests writers should be willing to ‘default to the good-enough word’ over the most imaginative one. The pole of plain style seems to exert a pull in her concluding sentences:

Accepting we don’t always know why some writing works on us and seems bound to last, nor why people like our own style (or why they don’t), means reconciling ourselves to the fact that even our best-laid sentences may well finish up like bus tickets, swallowed by time. That might limber us up to betray ourselves better, availing ourselves of language’s embarrassment of riches, including vanilla words, slack syntax and proper grammar – small tributes to the fact that style is not only a field of choice, but that the language is also using you.

Yet Seaton is not reading these generic linguistic features (‘vanilla words, slack syntax and proper grammar’) as signs of a style ‘that comes naturally’, in Strunk and White’s phrase. Instead, they are ‘small tributes’ to how language shapes us as much as we shape language: to the limits of authorial control and expressive autonomy. This notion points beyond the usual plain/florid dichotomy. What if style not only reveals ‘the self’, but circumscribes it?

Even as Strunk and White describe the writer’s self-emergence, they convey something significant about the social dimension of style, its strange impersonality or ‘way of running beyond intention’, as Seaton puts it. With their description of the almost automatic workings of style, prior to ‘the mood and temper of the author’, they register its supra-individual power, while simultaneously striving to contain it within tendentious rules. Dillon is similarly aware that his style depends on that of other authors, not least the ‘prose pyrotechnics’ of Barthes. A curator of ‘striking’ language, Dillon keeps a personal collection of ‘stylish passages, sentences and phrases’ to inform his own writing. Style thereby becomes a ‘repertoire’, a set of decontextualized aesthetic ‘choices’: the logic of postmodern pastiche described by Jameson. What critical framework can capture this dialectic, whereby literary language is inflected by both the personal and the social?

The limits of the personal in literature are elaborated in Eliot’s ‘impersonal theory of poetry’, often read as a reaction against the expressive subjects of Romanticism. For Eliot, writing ‘is not a turning loose of emotion’ but a process of ‘surrendering . . . to the work to be done’. Strunk and White would no doubt agree. But whereas for them, ‘the mood and temper of the writer will eventually be revealed’, for Eliot the poet’s ‘depersonalization’ is a form of ‘continual self-sacrifice’. Poets put themselves in the service of ‘a particular medium . . . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways’. These final adjectives point to the limits of authorial intention, limits Eliot ascribes not to the writer’s unconscious self-disclosure – even when the emotions in a poem derive from personal experience, Eliot argues, the ‘new combinations’ they form in the artwork exceed any individual consciousness – but to the alchemical properties of the medium itself.

For Eliot this medium is not only language, with its ‘peculiar and unexpected’ associations, but what he calls ‘tradition’ – ‘a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written’. Eliot is arguing against an atomizing view of art, the tendency to value only ‘what is individual’ in contemporary poetry, as if it will reveal ‘the peculiar essence of the man’. True artistic novelty, he claims, derives meaning from its dialectical relationship to the history of the form, which both gives rise to ‘the new work’ and is retroactively transformed by it. Tradition is at once ‘a field of choice’, to return to Seaton’s terms, and a force field in which writers must operate. Poetic language is not an individual’s voice, but a medium through which – as Eliot writes – ‘dead poets . . . assert their immortality’.

It is easy to argue that Eliot’s ‘impersonal theory’ is all too personal. Yet it can nonetheless serve as an antidote both to the bourgeois commonplace that ‘the style is the man’ and the atomizing, postmodern premises of much contemporary criticism. If style is to be more than a set of fetishized ‘quirks’ or a matter of personal taste, it must be understood in relation to a larger formal history of styles, conceived not as a discontinuous collection but ‘a living whole’. 

What does this mean for the practice of criticism? Though its conception of culture differs from Eliot’s, the tradition Jameson describes in Marxism and Form (1971) posits just such a ‘historical continuum’ of cultural forms. Style, on this reading, is not simply a ‘bunch of mannerisms’ (Seaton) nor a ‘war against cliché’ (Amis), but a diachronic process. Jameson begins by acknowledging that the prose of the theorists he discusses is generally thought to be ‘obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract . . . it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools’. He goes on to critique plain style and defend Adorno; but here the plain/florid dichotomy is posed not as a matter of taste but as a historical problem:

. . . what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence? In the language of Adorno – perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist, of them all – density is itself a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking.

Jameson’s own style of course must ‘be read in situation’. It strives to evoke the ‘formal pleasure’ of ‘dialectical sentences’, both as mimesis of Adorno’s style and an equivalent refusal of journalistic clarity. The periodizing clauses (‘in our present context’, ‘in this period’), although subordinate, are the pivots on which the first two sentences turn – from ‘our’ time to the time of Descartes and swiftly back, from the style to the ‘situation’ against which it must be read. The long second sentence ‘demands’ that the reader ‘consent’ to its duration, during which we become aware of the time of reading – of sentences themselves as units of time, and of reading itself as something that varies over (historical) time. The form of this sentence thus counteracts the situation it describes, as if to interpellate a slower, more engaged kind of reader.

The form of the final sentence, on the other hand, is at one with its content. Adorno’s style is abstracted into a vivid figure of a ‘bristling mass’ against a ground of glib text, a stylized impression of style as sheer differentiation. Something of Adorno himself, his supposed personality, is captured in Jameson’s reference to ‘the finest stylist’. Yet the individuality of Adorno’s style is not the expression of a discrete, autonomous subject, but the friction of a ‘situation’ that denies subjectivity. This situation is not an external historical fact, but a limit immanent to Adorno’s ‘particular medium’ at its particular historical moment. As in Eliot’s essay, the medium has ‘unexpected’ effects. The debased language that ‘surrounds’ Adorno’s, by pushing him towards obscurity and abstraction, leaves a negative impression on the style that attempts to negate it.

Of course, the ‘cheap facility’ of text has assumed new forms since Jameson’s book (let alone Adorno’s time), while the currency of modernist style may itself have been cheapened. Seymour suggests that ‘the digital reorganisation of capitalism may be the biggest transformation of writing in its history’. To pose the dichotomy as a historical problem, in our own period, would mean asking how the tradition of plain style might still be inscribed in ‘the new digital order’, and how it might be rewritten.

Read on: Francis Mulhern, ‘Caution, Metaphors At Work’, NLR 127.  

Categories
Uncategorised

Decapitalizing Culture

There are countless debates among sociologists and economists concerning the terms ‘human capital’ and ‘cultural capital’. The general view is that the former implies a rational instrumental attitude to the attainment of skills, whereas the latter suggests an investment in what Bourdieusians call illusio: the denial that the game of culture is in fact a game. Iván Szelényi once characterized the distinction slightly differently, writing that human capital denoted skills that are rewarded because of their contribution to productivity, while cultural capital was fundamentally a claim to rent. It seems to me, however, that we ought to be raising a different set of questions. In particular, it is important to ask: under what historical conditions does culture take the form of an ‘asset’ or ‘quasi-asset’?

The preconditions of this formation are a prior process of cultural expropriation, and a subsequent process that can reproduce this expropriation on an ongoing basis. Such ‘primitive accumulation’ of cultural or human capital can take place in a number of ways. It can involve the imposition of a single dialect on the national language which suddenly devalues pre-existing ones, as occurred inter alia with the Florentine dialect on the Italian peninsula. Or it can mean the devaluation of indigenous knowledge, such as managing commons and wastelands according to fertility cycles. Yet a more articulated analysis is needed here. For it is not true that the only options in the formation of cultural capital are complete equality or private possession. Swathes of human history have been marked by a sort of collective, class-wide possession of culture, such that it could not be seen as individually possessed ‘capital’. Consider the culturally omnivorous Renaissance men of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, or the debating publics that Habermas took as his model. Within these spaces of relative exclusivity, culture was a collective ‘possession’. It did not appear as an alien object to the members of the dominant class; it was not an individually appropriated ‘asset’.

This is significant for the politics of the university, and beyond that for the politics of culture in contemporary capitalism. Today, the academy is often defended on the basis of its contribution to ‘cultural’ or ‘human’ capital. But this approach is self-undermining. The claim to be providing ‘capital’ to some is premised on the exclusion of others. Cultural or human capital is only as valuable as it is scarce. Thus, as currently configured, it is not in the interests of the elite universities to provide degrees for all or even most of the people who would like to attend them. The relative value of the degree, like any other asset, declines with the expansion of access.

The response to this from the social-democratic left, ‘free higher education for all’, hardly touches the underlying issue. For the universalization of higher education would simply entail a reduction in its economic value unless the meaning of education were radically transformed. Culture must first be decapitalized; it must cease to be an asset. The humanized university, rather than being a place for the acquisition of human or cultural capital, would be an institution devoted to the construction of the personality. This should not be conceived as a return to the gentleman scholar, but as the formation of a new type of intellectual. The new intellectual would still possess an array of skills, yet the means by which those skills would be transmitted would likely differ from the current classroom. The craft of teaching itself would become increasingly the teaching of craft. Mutatis mutandis, the widespread availability of ‘information’ (rather a misnomer), via the internet and artificial intelligence, would support the project of academia as opposed to undermining it. Our aim should not be the universalization of access to cultural or human capital, but their abolition as social realities. Here, as elsewhere, the programme of the humanized society is not the redistribution of property but its overcoming as a real category.

Read on: Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Pierre Bordieu: Critical Sociology and Social History’, NLR 101.

Categories
Uncategorised

Role Play

Isn’t there something obscene about the photography of Walker Evans? For hours at a time, he would sit on the New York subway with his camera hidden beneath a heavy overcoat, taking candid pictures of the passengers who sat opposite him. Their effect is uncanny. One untitled image from 1938 shows a man and woman seated close together; nothing in what we see suggests intimacy or even familiarity between them. His face, turned leftwards, rests in an expression of contemplative disappointment, while hers is fixed on something near the viewer (the camera itself?). She looks as if she’s in the throes of a thought so arresting that, despite wearing gloves, she has brought her hands to her face to bite her nails. Evans’s posed pictures of gaunt pastoralists in his classic study of the Great Depression, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (1941), have this same air. His subjects do not – self-consciously, at least – indulge in the pornography of performing for the camera. The world onto which it opens is a mystery to them: MoMA might as well be Mars.

If there is a charm in this conceit, it is one that we are no longer naïve enough to appreciate. From the outset, the career of contemporary photographer Carrie Mae Weems has been marked by a productive discomfort with naturalism. Born in Portland in 1953, the daughter of sharecroppers from Tennessee and Mississippi, she studied photography and design at San Francisco City College before moving to New York in the late 1970s. There she spent the early part of her career reflecting on the effects of Southern migration and changing gender roles on black American life. Yet the political climate of the Reagan years made it difficult for Weems, at that time a Marxist and labour organizer, to think cogently about these issues.

The ideology of the Moynihan report – which claimed that a culture of poverty was responsible for the social rift between the black working class and respectable America – compelled Weems to offer an artistic counternarrative. The imperative to produce humanizing portraits of the oppressed hangs heavily over her youthful work. Family Pictures and Stories (1982), which focuses on an all-black cast of figures, is exemplary of this approach. In it we see smiling women in factories, a heterosexual couple embracing, two women linking arms and grinning. Whether or not these photographs succeeded in challenging racist narratives about the African-American working class, they ultimately represent a reactive project, in which art is seen as a kind of community service.

Throughout the decade, the emergence of what the French art historian Jean-Francois Chevrier called the ‘tableau form’ – the transformation of photographs into objects intended to be displayed on walls – inflicted a near-fatal blow to the idea of art photography as documentary. The need to consider multiple spectators made an unreflective approach to image-making seem inadequate. Suddenly, it was hard to look at works like Family Pictures and Stories without feeling like a voyeur. In a 2009 interview with Dawoud Bey, one of Weems’s teachers at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she explained how in the 1980s ‘traditional documentary was called into question’:

it was no longer the form; for my photographs to be credible, I needed to make a direct intervention, extend the form by playing with it, manipulating it, creating representations that appeared to be documents but were in fact staged.

Untitled (Woman Standing Alone) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

In 1984 Weems enrolled at Berkley after developing an interest in Zora Neale Hurston – a novelist and anthropologist who first came to her attention when a friend pointed out the striking resemblance between them. Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), an ethnographic collection of black Southern folklore which she produced after travelling around the black belt, had a significant influence on Weems. Both artists were concerned with understanding African-American culture as a distinctly modern phenomenon. Inspired by the folklorist Alan Dundes, who taught her in California, Weems would gradually develop a unique style based on fusing the roles of participant and observer, a hallmark of her work from the 1990s onwards.

The best curatorial decision made by the Barbican’s ‘Reflections For Now’ retrospective, which runs until autumn, is one of omission. The earlier documentary photographs – with knowing titles like ‘Black Man Holding Watermelon’ (1987-88) and ‘Black Woman with Chicken’ (1987) – are nowhere to be seen. Weems has described her celebrated Kitchen Table series as part of this documentary mode, but seeing all twenty-five images gives reason to doubt her interpretation. In fact, the photos seem more like a volta in her career. Their two main figures, Weems and a stranger whom she met just before embarking upon the project and hosted in her home while it took place, tell a relatively simple story – but in a way that engages directly with the spectator.

In the series’ most successful image, we see Weems and another man sitting across from one another playing cards. A bowl of what appear to be peanuts sit centrally in the composition, next to them lie shells discarded near a partially drained glass of whiskey. At the head of the table sits Weems, playing the character she describes as her ‘Muse’, wearing a coy expression. Something, not visible to the man, seems to have caught her attention, which is divided between her opponent and whatever it is that has drawn her away. This is the key move of the Kitchen Table series, the use of the spectator to break open what would otherwise be a naturalistic scene.

On the wall are several posters: we can make out Malcolm X, Gary Winograd’s satirical photo of an interracial couple holding chimpanzees dressed as children, and the album cover of John Coltrane’s Blue Train, on which the Muse’s pose is modelled. Combined with an accompanying text that describes a woman’s frustration at the incompatibility of motherhood and monogamy with the world of ideas, the lasting impression one gets from Kitchen Table is of the central character’s inability to sustain any stable notion of self. In every image there is something reticent, something questioning and uncertain about the Muse. Her glance is directed outwards rather than towards her lover, her untouched meal, the children whose movement is caught by the camera as they gather around the table. A contrast is drawn between these other figures, unreflectively absorbed in their activity, and the Muse who pulls away from immersion in any social role. It is to the camera that she turns, as if to ask, again and again, for a new role to play.

Philadelphia Museum of Art from Museums, 2006, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Over a decade and a half later, Weems reprised the character of the Muse in photographs taken outside famous art museums. (‘I use myself because I am available’, she remarked in a Q&A session ahead of the show’s opening.) Initially an outgrowth of Roaming (2006), a series of pictures of the Muse standing before the ruins of classical architecture as well as buildings of Italy’s fascist period, Museums (2006) again embraced the dual perspective of observer and participant. Yet the similarities with the Kitchen Table series merely underscore one of the central problematics of Weems’s work: the difficulty of treating history and culture as objects with which one can set up a real confrontation, rather than as merely abstract concepts.

On the last day of shooting Roaming, Weems was struck by the idea of standing before the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. She intended this as a form of institutional critique: the aim was to get museums to recognize their political responsibilities given what Weems has described as the ‘demographic shift’ towards a less white populace in the US. To my eye, though, these works have the opposite effect. The scale of the buildings and their aura is the first thing that strikes the viewer; second is the indifference of any passer-by to Weems’s antics. The presence of the Muse has the unintended effect of breaking the association between galleries and the idle hustle-and-bustle – bored children and couples on first dates – that takes place within them. The museumgoers in the images, in contrast with the theatrical performance of the artist, appear earnest and genuinely absorbed. Her attempt to repurpose the critical glance of the Muse in these more expressly political works reveals the impotence of such outbursts against the mute walls of history.

Painting the Town #3, 2021, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Of the recent works on show at the Barbican, Painting the Town (2021), a triptych of pictures of boarded-up buildings following the George Floyd riots, is the most interesting. Its first image shows several panels of plywood over which a roller of black paint has been applied, presumably with the aim of covering up graffiti. On the left, undeterred vandals have drawn over the black paint: its matt texture makes a better canvas than the rough wood. A quiet dialogue between authority and resistance, whose traces are clear for us to observe, has played out. The second panel appears more abstract; the different shades of black, signs that paint rollers have been applied at different times, convey the passage of time and the movement through it of different people with different, sometimes conflicting, intentions. In the final image, we see the building from its corner, closed not just to the inhabitants of the picture’s world but also to the viewer. From both perspectives, all that can be seen are the external signs of interaction: the plywood that protects storefronts from bricks thrown, the expletives drawn on walls, the hurried efforts to mask these outbursts. Cumulatively, the effect of the triptych is to vindicate an artistic vision that rides roughshod over that of the Kitchen Table and the Museum series. Here, a real confrontation with the world of politics and history can be gleaned, but in the afterglow of interactions with real people, who can only face one another by making themselves unavailable to the spectator.

Read on: Marcus Verhagen, ‘Viewing Velocities’, NLR 125.

Categories
Uncategorised

Congress Redux?

On 7 September last year, the senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi launched Bharat Jodo Yatra, a protest march to ‘unite India’ against the ‘divisive politics’ of the BJP-led government. Stretching from Kanyakumari, on the southern tip of India, to Jammu and Kashmir in the north, the yatra covered some 3,500 kilometers and twelve states. A number of celebrities made headlines by joining this five-month journey. As did Gandhi’s outfit (a single polo T-shirt throughout the winter), his scraggly beard and his fitness regime (‘fourteen pushups in ten seconds’). The right-wing backlash was predictable: some mocked Gandhi’s Burberry wardrobe, others likened his facial hair to Saddam Hussein’s. Yet, in every state he crossed, the 52-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty saw his approval ratings increase – most of all in Delhi, where they jumped from 32% to 55%. Riding a wave of mass popularity for the first time in his career, Gandhi provided this memorable summation: ‘In the bazaar of hate, I am opening shops of love’. And then, within a few weeks, his star plummeted. On 23 March, a lower Indian court convicted him of making defamatory comments about the surname of the Prime Minister. A day later, he was summarily ejected from parliament.  

While Gandhi’s political future is in jeopardy, his nemesis still appears to be untouchable, despite the volatility of his period in office. Over nine years, Narendra Modi has unleashed a devastating series of ‘shock and awe’ operations which have consistently failed to dent his popularity. In November 2016, he withdrew 86% of the circulating currency overnight, costing 10-12 million workers their jobs. In July 2017, he implemented a centralized Goods and Services Tax that further restricted the power of regional states. In August 2019, he abrogated the constitutional autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, allowing the influx of non-Kashmiris and private mining companies alike. Later that year he introduced the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act, sparking large protests that were eventually crushed by a right-wing pogrom against Muslims in New Delhi. From March 2020 onwards he catastrophically mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic, which claimed an estimated 4.7 million lives and saw the unemployment rate rise to 20.9%. Simultaneously, he passed three new laws to facilitate the corporate takeover of Indian agriculture, prompting a year-long struggle by the farmers’ unions that eventually forced their repeal. Now, Modi’s close relationship with the billionaire Gautam Adani – Asia’s second richest man – is in the global spotlight, after the tycoon was exposed for stock manipulation and accounting fraud.

But despite widespread accusations of cronyism, Modi’s reputation is intact. His approval ratings are consistently north of 75%: the highest of any serving prime minister. As the veteran Indian journalist M.K. Venu writes, he is a ‘Teflon leader’ to whom nothing seems to stick. Yet, despite this immovable hegemony, Indian politics is far from static. By pushing the Congress to the brink of electoral irrelevance, the BJP has, ironically, begun to elicit comparisons with the authoritarian reign of Congress in the early 1970s. Many commentators have noted the similarities: like Indira Gandhi, Modi is a charismatic figurehead who fronts what is essentially a single-party state; he uses government agencies to target opposition leaders at national and regional levels (the dismissal of Rahul Gandhi is only one of many instances); he has suppressed the principles of cooperative federalism, centralized all regional powers, fostered a new group of crony capitalists, and so on. Now, as the BJP begins to resemble the Congress of old, the Congress has been attempting to rebrand itself – taking tentative steps away from the elites and toward the popular classes.    

The Bharat Jodo Yatra was a prelude to this. In October 2022, the Congress held a rare presidential election: only the third event of its kind since Indira Gandhi called an internal ballot in 1972. For most of its history, heredity has taken precedence over democracy, to the benefit of the party’s right wing. Modi has often satirized the Congress fiefdom and portrayed Gandhi as a shehzada (or prince), while playing up his own plebian origins. Yet the newly elected Congress president is the 80-year-old Mallikarjun Kharge, a onetime union leader and minister in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, who is the second ever Dalit to hold this position. Under his leadership, the Congress’s electoral strategy has shifted. Ahead of the general election scheduled for 2024, and the nine state assembly elections later this year, its traditional preoccupations with ‘pluralism’ and ‘love’ are slowly giving way to a more concrete slate of welfare policies.

In the early months of 2023, the BJP further tightened its grip on the northeast. In February, it became a junior partner in coalitions with local parties in the Christian-majority states of Meghalaya and Nagaland. And in March, it came to power in the Hindu-majority state of Tripura, wiping out the Communists who had ruled almost uninterruptedly for four decades. In May, however, the Congress achieved a rare victory in Karnataka, long seen by the incumbent BJP as a strategic gateway for its ‘saffron revolution’ in southern India. The Congress won 135 of the 212 assembly seats, with nearly 43% of the total vote share. No party since 1989 had attained this kind of majority. Yet the most remarkable thing was its programme. As well as promising to ban Bajrang Dal, an extremist Hindutva organization, the Congress manifesto featured five significant welfare reforms: 200 units of free electricity to all households; 2,000 Rupees monthly assistance to every female family head and 3,000 for unemployed recent graduates; 10kg of free rice to every member of families living below the poverty line; and free travel for women on public buses. The local Congress leadership pitched these proposals explicitly to the Alpasankhyataru (minorities), the Hindulidavaru (backward classes) and the Dalitaru (Dalits), while reiterating their demand for a national caste census, so that historically disadvantaged groups would be better represented in public institutions. The BJP, meanwhile, deployed its usual tactics of religious polarization. Having recently banned hijabs in public schools, it ran a series of incendiary campaigns against azaans, halal meat shops and reservation quotas for Muslims. When the elections results were announced, Rahul Gandhi tweeted his verdict: ‘The strength of the poor has beaten BJP’s capitalism’.

The BJP still holds power in fourteen other states, while the Congress rules in just six. The next three assembly elections will take place in the Hindi belt – the central states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, as well as the northwestern state of Rajasthan, where the incumbent Congress is busy fighting off an internal rebellion. Here, policy pledges alone will not suffice to puncture Hindutva hegemony. In Madhya Pradesh, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organization of the BJP, has grown so powerful that it now runs its shakhas inside government offices. The Congress has no comparable network of cadres. Nor does it help that its state leader, Kamal Nath, is a dubious multimillionaire implicated in a slew of corruption schemes. In preparation for the upcoming elections, he has established a ‘temple priest cell’, which recently hosted a ‘religious dialogue’ with Brahmin priests who are demanding increased government allowances and transfer of temple lands to their families. If in Karnataka the party rallied the underclasses, in Madhya Pradesh it is wooing the Brahmin priesthood.

It would be convenient to explain such contradictions by blaming local leaders. But Kamal Nath is hardly an exception in the Congress ranks. The Gandhis, too, are notorious for their electoral opportunism. During previous election campaigns, Rahul has displayed his Brahmanical janeu in Hindu temples, while his sister Priyanka has endorsed the construction of the Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya, the nerve center of Hindutva politics (Kamal Nath even donated eleven silver bricks on behalf of his local party unit). Rahul has led a series of popular crusades against ‘BJP capitalism’, but he remains reluctant to discuss the sordid history of ‘Congress capitalism’: its turn to neoliberalism in 1991, to say nothing of its support for Adani in the decades prior. One must therefore ask whether the party’s self-reinvention is anything more than a cosmetic facelift. Is its movement toward the underclasses merely a cynical attempt to outflank the BJP?  

For some time now, the veteran journalist Harish Damodaran has been unravelling the historical knot between these two variants of Indian capitalism. In his analysis, the early years of Congress-led liberalization were marked by the twinned rise of regional entrepreneurs and regional parties. The former invested heavily in local political networks, which occupied key positions in coalition governments and leveraged their contacts in New Delhi to seize the newly liberalized sectors, including sugar, highways, press, liquor and real estate. The parties in turn used their funds to fortify their regional bases.

This dynamic changed dramatically when the BJP stormed to power in 2014 and inaugurated a new cycle of crony capitalism. Regional entrepreneurs have now been superseded by large conglomerates which are patronized directly by the central government. The BJP’s economic reforms, such as Special Economic Zone regulations and loan provisions, have enabled companies to monopolize entire sectors (Reliance controls petrochemicals and telecom; TATA controls steel and IT services; Adani controls ports and power). Inequality in India has followed suit, with the top 1% now owning more than 40% of India’s total wealth while the bottom 50% own just 3%. The BJP has benefitted from the enrichment of its corporate allies by opening new channels for cash to flow into its own coffers. In 2017, the party inaugurated an ‘electoral bond’ scheme that allows business groups to fund political parties anonymously. By 2022, the BJP had received 57% of all such donations (92 billion Rupees). The Congress received just 10%, while Trinamool Congress, now ruling in West Bengal, was the only regional party to receive significant funds (8%). The secret to the BJP’s centralization of political power lies in this centralization of political finance.

When the Hindutva brigade first came to prominence in the early 1990s, the critic Aijaz Ahmad spotted a rare chink in its armour. The BJP, he suggested, did not have a coherent economic programme to match the savagery of its paratroopers outside parliament. Because the Congress had already liberalized the Indian economy, the BJP could not make a ‘substantially more attractive’ offer to multinational corporations. Thirty years later, the situation has been reversed. The BJP has unleashed a second wave of liberalization, opening key public sectors – agriculture, healthcare, military and education – to unprecedented levels of private investment. Meanwhile, the Congress has tried to heighten its electoral appeal by making a ‘substantially more attractive’ offer to the Indian underclasses.

Congress’s welfarist turn, however, has little to no basis in mass politics. In several states – Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal – it has been demoted to the status of a small-time opposition party. As a result, cadre organizations are severely disjointed. Its senior leadership, still mired in dynastic intrigues, is cut off from the challenges of grassroots activism. As election fever grips the Hindi belt, this stratum is now handing out modest bundles of subsidies and stipends to the working poor. But it is unlikely that they will break the new alliance between political elites and big business by proposing more radical measures (wealth taxes, employment guarantees, minimum wages and so on). Their top-down push for piecemeal social reforms might win them some extra votes. But it cannot halt the march of Hindutva, much less resolve Congress’s own internal contradictions.  

When Rahul Gandhi was evicted from his official residence in April, Congress ran a social media campaign, #MeraGharAapkaGhar, which showed party members offering up their homes to him. Concurrently, the RSS and its affiliate organizations were coordinating synchronized attacks on Muslim neighbourhoods during the religious festival of Ram Navami. Across the Hindi belt, right-wing mobs burned down numerous Muslim homes, shops, libraries, graveyards and mosques. Such extrajudicial demolitions – which have become known as ‘bulldozer justice’ – are a new Hindutva ploy to collectively criminalize the minority population, who are often accused of instigating mob violence during Hindu religious processions. Through all this, the Congress has stood by, unwilling to stop the violence. While its leadership in New Delhi was occupied with the plight of Gandhi, its cadres in Madhya Pradesh were festooning the state headquarters with gleaming saffron flags, preparing for the arrival of sixteen hundred Brahmin priests.

Tariq Ali, ‘The Fall of Congress in India’, NLR I/103.

Categories
Uncategorised

No Man’s Land

On 28 May, elections were held in all Spanish municipalities and most autonomous communities. The results registered a turn to the right, with the Partido Popular (PP) picking up 7 million votes at local level and the Francoist Vox party more than doubling its share compared to 2019. The alliance between these two parties, already operating in Castilla-León, will now be extended to the Valencian Community and most likely to the Balearic Islands, Aragón and Cantabria. By contrast, the parties of the coalition government, the Socialist Party (PSOE) and Unidas Podemos, performed disastrously. The first lost six regions to the PP, while the second was ousted from all regional parliaments. Podemos’s local power was eradicated, with the loss of Barcelona, Cádiz and Valencia certifying the death of the ‘municipalist wave’ against austerity. Overall, left parties saw their vote share fall by 655,000: a 23% decline. The only ones that managed to increase their tallies were nationalist outfits: EH Bildu in the Basque Country and BNG in Galicia.

The governing coalition had several legislative victories since it was formed in 2020. It passed what it described as the ‘most progressive budget in Spanish history’; implemented a 20% increase in the minimum wage; imposed a cap on the price of gas that effectively contained inflation; and expanded waged employment, which surpassed 20 million workers for the first time since 2008. Yet its popularity has been steadily declining, partly because these measures have had little impact on Spain’s overall economic situation. The coalition continues to operate within the structural limits set by Brussels: keeping public investment to a minimum, while deploying Next Generation EU funds for flashy ‘modernization’ projects which do nothing to revive the country’s atrophied industrial base. With the PSOE and PP both adhering to this orthodox approach, the latter has sought to distinguish itself by launching a paranoid cultural offensive. Meanwhile, Unidas Podemos has seen its main policy ambitions frustrated by a watered-down housing law that skirts any confrontation with real estate capital. Politically, it finds itself in no man’s land, without coherent arguments to defend the administration in which it serves.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has now called for snap elections to be held on 23 July, in a last-ditch attempt to reverse the downward trajectory of his government. Currently topping the polls is the PP, fronted by the former Galician president Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whose four consecutive majorities in the regional assembly propelled him to national leadership in 2022. Feijóo is often described as a ‘safe pair of hands’, and the days when his party’s corruption scandals flooded the news cycle seem to be gone for good. Its recent election campaign presented Spain as an ungovernable country and Sánchez as complicit in the chaos – stoking public anger over squatters and the ET­­A, even though the latter was dissolved more than five years ago. This ploy was remarkably effective. In Andalusia, once the PSOE’s foremost stronghold, the PP and Vox increased their combined votes by an astonishing 43% in the local elections, and the PSOE lost in all but one of the major cities. In the Madrilenian regional elections, the PP won another absolute majority in the assembly and a 20% swing in the city council.

Some of the PP’s success is owed to the decline of Ciudadanos – the party often described as a ‘right-wing Podemos’ whose supporters have been switching to the PP in droves. But Feijóo also capitalized on popular opposition to what has become known as ‘Sanchismo’: a phenomenon confected by the right-wing press, which presents the Prime Minister as a capricious, proto-Bolivarian leader with a limitless thirst for power, eager to strike deals with Basque and Catalan separatists who want to ‘break up Spain’. Even more effective has been the right’s relentless culture war, taking aim at the legislation introduced by Irene Montero’s Equalities Ministry (including stricter laws around sexual consent and reforms that make it easier to change one’s gender without a medical diagnosis). Spain’s insurgent feminist movement, having gained ground in the 2010s, is now the object of a ferocious backlash – led by the PP and Vox, and amplified over the airwaves.

With its electoral relevance considerably diminished since 2019, and its internal culture beset by fierce political struggles, Podemos was desperate to retain its regional and local power bases. This was partly because it needed to be in a position of strength when negotiating with Sumar, the electoral platform led by Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz, which aims to supplant Unidas Podemos and bring together the entirety of the left. Yet the party suffered historic defeats in two key constituencies. In Madrid, the city where the indignados erupted and where Podemos itself was founded, it disappeared from the Assembly, picking up only 4.7% of the votes. In Barcelona, the incumbent mayor Ada Colau, who was elected in 2015 to challenge the city’s broken rentier model, was beaten by the reactionary nationalist Xabier Trias. In both cases, the elections were framed as a national referendum on Sánchez. The left’s only hope was to cut through that impression and shift the focus back onto local issues; yet it was hobbled by Podemos’s organizational incapacity and distance from community activism. It proved unable to stave off low participation rates and a prevailing sense of political disenchantment.

In the wake of these losses, the PSOE’s electoral war machine has gone into overdrive, while Podemos’s is showing signs of fatal exhaustion. The party’s radicalism appears to have abated. It is viewed with apathy and distrust by most of the left-leaning electorate. Four years in government, which largely involved the management of ‘pandemic Keynesianism’, have failed to consolidate its social bases. In fact, its single-minded electoralism has had the opposite effect. A minimal presence within civil society, not to speak of social movements, has turned the party into little more than a bureaucratic committee whose only power lies in its cabinet positions. The initial strategy of reconciling an exiguous grassroots membership with a broad appeal to depoliticized voters has run aground. A semblance of life is still maintained by Podemos’s residual media apparatus, comprised of social media networks and Pablo Iglesias’s new broadcasting channel, Canal Red, yet this has been insufficient to counter sustained attacks from mainstream outlets.

Most believe that it is now time for Díaz to take Podemos’s place and govern alongside the social democrats, insofar as the dream of securing a sorpasso – or ‘overtaking’ of the PSOE – is out of reach. In early June, Podemos was forced to strike a deal with Sumar, agreeing to fight the next elections under its umbrella rather than that of Unidas Podemos. This was a painful step, since it spells the end of the left-populist party as we know it. The leadership has realized that if it wants to preserve the electoral space it carved out in the 2010s, it must de facto dissolve itself within a new political structure populated by many of its factional opponents (most notably the Communist Party, and those who defected from Podemos to set up the rival electoral vehicle Más País).  

Sumar, however, has been unable to transcend the structural problems that afflicted its predecessor. The absence of a strong rank-and-file membership renders it reliant on media visibility, which means that Díaz’s personal appeal is one of its only electoral assets (her face will be printed on the upcoming general election ballots, just as Pablo Iglesias’s was). Still, there are a number of significant differences between the two organizations. While Iglesias’s rhetorical style was confrontational, Díaz’s is softer. Whereas he excoriated the Troika and Spanish business tycoons, her tone is openly conciliatory. He has struck a less conformist note on NATO, while she has followed Sánchez in pronouncing her unflinching commitment to the military alliance.

Although Podemos failed to preserve the mass politics of the indignados, this was always its explicit aim. Díaz, however, has a view of political representation that is overtly technocratic. She has touted the Next Generation EU scheme as a unique opportunity to extend state-led environmental planning. As Labour Minister, she engaged in extensive negotiations with trade unions and employer confederations to pass various pieces of progressive legislation, returning to the corporatist tradition that Mariano Rajoy all but dismantled a decade ago. Her project is a kind of labourism that strives to improve conditions through tripartite agreements rather than workplace struggles. Whether this will advance further than Podemos’s populist strategy remains to be seen. But it is clear that the extent of Sumar’s political ambition is to act as the PSOE’s junior partner. For the time being, transformative projects are off the cards.

Feijóo is expected to win the most votes in the upcoming elections, restoring the PP to a position it has not held since 2016. But his chances of forming a government are compromised by his belligerent nationalism, which makes it impossible for Basque and Catalan parties to support his administration. This holds out the possibility, however slight, that a variant of the current coalition could remain in power. Yet the outlook is not especially bright for whoever sits in the Moncloa Palace. Although Sánchez claims that the Spanish economy is ‘going like a motorcycle’, and GDP is expected to grow by 2% in 2023 and 2024, specialization in low-end services and tourism, plus declining industrial productivity and pressure for more military spending, places clear constraints on what the next government is likely to achieve. Brussels has demanded that Spain limits spending increases to 2.6% in 2024, in line with a Europe-wide return to austerity in the wake of the pandemic. This means that, even if the PSOE and the left somehow manage to stay in office, it will be an uphill battle to offset the effects of low wages and out-of-control rents. The Economy Minister, Nadia Calviño, has raised the possibility of partnering with other EU members to reform the fiscal rules of the Stability and Growth Pact; but gaining the assent of the Commission won’t be easy, and may be contingent upon further budget cuts. There is also considerable hostility to Sánchez within the PSOE, whose right-wing flank will attempt to block any deviation from neoliberal spending policies.

In the absence of meaningful social investment, Spain’s ‘entrepreneurial state’ has struggled to reconcile the imperatives of accumulation and legitimacy. This has opened the door to a hardline conservatism that abjures any progressive intervention in the economy and blames its ailments on external culprits: Russia, the ETA, criminals, separatists, etc. The infrastructure for an authoritarian turn under the PP and Vox is already in place. The police have mobilized against the current government, mounting a successful campaign in defence of the 2015 ‘Gag Law’, which drastically restricts freedom of speech and assembly. The judiciary have scuppered a PSOE initiative to make the courts more democratic, and continue to engage in lawfare against social movements. The media is already in league with the right, and promises to act as loyal retainer for a PP-led government.

The most prominent figures on the left, meanwhile, have failed to provide any self-critical account of how the cycle that began with the anti-austerity 15-M movement has concluded in this way. Instead, they are busy downgrading their political ambitions and completing the process of institutional rebranding after the defeat of Podemos. As it stands, Sumar’s ideological orientation and democratic structures are inhospitable to any kind of militancy. Its strategy is simply to keep the PP out of power and prop up the PSOE. If the Spanish left is to reject this defeatist approach and forge a new electoral project, it must find political avenues beyond the populism of Iglesias and the corporatism of Díaz. At present this seems like a doubtful prospect. But we can be certain that if radical politics is excluded from the institutional realm, it will take place outside it.  

Read on: Ekaitz Cancela & Pedro M. Rey-Araújo, ‘Lessons of the Podemos Experiment’, NLR 138.

Categories
Uncategorised

Thickened Lines

France is crying in Bruno Dumont’s latest feature. Incarnated by Léa Seydoux as the famed journalist France de Meurs, she is shot frequently in close-up, tears welling and streaming down her cheeks. Such images – glossy, melodramatic, showing one of France’s most internationally famous film stars – are hardly what we associate with Dumont. His ten features to date have been characterized by their naturalism and the unknown, imperfect faces of non-professional actors playing characters who, whether by social forces, madness or obsession, inhabit the social margins. France, released last year, offers an entirely different aesthetic and environment. France de Meurs is a celebrity news anchor and correspondent with a luxurious apartment in central Paris. And yet, by the film’s end, she has entered familiar Dumont territory in what is an unexpected turn, providing a rather brilliant final act that overshadows the first two.

In the opening scenes of France we are shown the catalyst for de Meurs’s tears: a car journey that knocked a motorcyclist to the ground, leaving him in a wheelchair and unable to continue working as a delivery driver. The accident generates a guilt that France cannot eradicate, whatever actions she takes to try to remedy her mistake. As she does so, she continues with her day job, heading off to various warzones and scenes of catastrophe to deliver her pieces to camera, microphone in hand, full of performed emotion. As a journalist it is difficult to watch these scenes. News correspondents in the field generally do not look as glamorous as a film star, and it is rare for reporters with a bulletproof vest emblazoned with PRESS and employed by a French broadcaster, or indeed any major news agency – much less their star anchor woman – to be authorized to enter war zones where there is a high risk of being caught in crossfire. Journalists do take such risks of course, but not always with the consent of their employer, and these are generally exceptions to the rule. (Marie Colvin, for example, famously lived on the edge during her missions for The Times. She died in the field in Syria in 2011.)

To be fair to Dumont, he did not intend France to be realistic: ‘the lines have been thickened… I’m showing the spectacle’. And he was not out to pierce illusions about the corporate media, doubting we harbour any. There are plenty of other films that have sought already to do just that: most famously, Sidney Lumet’s chilling and prescient Network (1976). Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022)and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022) are recent examples of the sub-genre. Dumont’s film possesses some familiar satirical elements, most notably thanks to France’s assistant Lou, played by stand-up comedian Blanche Gardin, who is just as disconcerting as an actress. ‘That’s television: the worst is the best’, she tells her boss when watching some harrowing footage aboard a migrant boat. ‘It’s a pity nobody fell in the water, that would’ve been even better.’

Although France is an outlier in Dumont’s oeuvre, his trajectory has been a series of zigzags. A set of gritty, violent early films have been followed by oddball comedies, historical dramas that incorporate musical elements and murder mysteries. Each has played with the codes of genre, such that our expectations are never met. The result is an unclassifiable body of work, one that ranges from his debut feature about a gang of motorcycle rebels set in Dumont’s hometown (La vie de Jésus), to a psychological drama about a girls’ obsessive love for Jesus (Hadewijch) and a rock musical based on Joan of Arc’s childhood and set to text by Charles Péguy (Jeannette).

One common property that draws these films together is an interest in the spiritual or sacred beyond the formal institutions of religion. This might take the form of a connection with nature, a passion that is treated by society as unsound or a higher form of consciousness attained through art. Religion was a feature of Dumont’s young life. He was born in 1958 into a Catholic family in Bailleul, just a few kilometres from the Belgian border. The third of four boys, he has described his upbringing as quiet and ordinary. His father was a doctor, and he would often accompany him on his rounds, sitting in the car in the courtyards of farmhouses observing the comings and goings. Such ostensibly banal spaces feature frequently in his films and can even act as the central location, as in his supremely weird television series P’tit Quinquin (2014).

Dumont discovered film as a young boy thanks to Saturday night visits to the cinema, quickly pledging to become a director. Failing the entrance exam for the IDHEC, France’s main film school at the time, he instead studied philosophy at Lille University, followed by the Sorbonne, learning how to make films on the side. After a stint as a lecturer, he worked from 1986 to 1993 making corporate publicity – filming sweets being manufactured, tractors assembled, lawyers at work, ham, bricks and coal in production. Dumont dismisses the artistic interest of these early films, but his later work is marked by an affinity with the industrial environments that he encountered. He is, he said in an interview, ‘very moved by the sound of machines…the vibration, the acceleration of an engine, there are connections with human life, we have these ups and downs too’.

Dumont’s interest in the sacred or spiritual has interesting echoes with the work of Robert Bresson, whom he cites as a central influence. To this end, like Bresson he has generally preferred non-actors who deliver their lines either without much emotion or in an unpolished way:

I got rid of the institution, but not the sacred. After my studies I was both happy and sad to abandon religion. But I soon felt that cinema had something religious about it. Art is the exact place, the perfect place, for spiritual life: it’s the most in-depth and the most accurate to represent it.

The sacred dimension comes late in France. We shift gear in the final act, when France visits a rural home to interview a woman whose husband has been revealed a serial killer. She is played by a non-professional actress and her closing dialogue with Séydoux as they sit at her dining table is a reminder of how original Dumont can be as a director, and the potential of this film to examine the changing nature of contemporary journalism. In these last scenes we see a real journalist at work: meeting people and hearing them out as they give their testimony, remaining receptive and mostly absent from the story. Closing as it does, France provides a note of hope that France de Meurs may become that reporter. But we leave her too soon to find out.

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum, ‘An Aphorist of the Cinema’, NLR 104.

Categories
Uncategorised

Subsuming Finance

According to Forbes Magazine’s Global 2000 ranking, the largest listed corporation by assets in the world today is the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a state-owned Chinese bank. ICBC is followed in the ranking by another state-owned Chinese bank (Agricultural Bank of China), then another one (China Construction Bank), and then another (Bank of China). Ranked fifth is Wall Street’s very own JPMorgan Chase. It is well-established that China’s economy is highly financialized, and that its banking sector – the largest in the world at this point – is mostly under government control. And yet, since Xi Jinping’s accession to the leadership in 2012, the CCP has acted as if its authority over high finance is still inadequate. Since 2017 in particular, a revolution from above has seized China’s financial sector, resulting in a number of purges, arrests, the odd death penalty, ruthless rectification of the most dubious segments of capital markets, and – most significantly – institutional reordering at the very top, shifting operational leadership over the financial landscape from government bodies to the CCP’s Central Committee.

The vigour with which Beijing has disciplined finance over the past six years was not foreordained. Ever since former premier Zhu Rongji overhauled China’s financial architecture in the 1990s, the major levers of the financial system were supposed to be firmly in the grip of central authorities. The largest financial institutions – whether commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies or asset managers – are state-controlled. This typically involves majority share ownership on the part of government-affiliated entities. Executive appointments in these financial corporations are made by various party committees; the Central Committee’s Central Organization Department (COD) is responsible for confirming the selection of the heads of the most significant institutions. The chairman of the board of ICBC, for example, is the equivalent of a vice minister in China’s system of political ranks – a respectable standing, but still one notch below the three hundred or so positions that claim full ministerial rank in the current cadre hierarchy. Chinese stock exchanges are not for-profit corporations as they are in Western countries, but subordinate bodies of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). The top issuers and acquirers of bonds happen to be the Ministry of Finance, state-owned banks, state enterprises and local authorities’ funding vehicles. Additionally, capital controls drastically curb the circulation of money flows across China’s borders – notwithstanding the ability of the privileged to circumvent them on occasion.

And yet, as is often the case in China, nominal concentration of power in a one-party system does not preclude organizational fragmentation, dispersal of authority and even, occasionally, outright disorder. All of this and more became apparent in the financial realm during Xi’s first term as party secretary, from 2012 to 2017. By that time, the financialization of the Chinese economy was accelerating. On the one hand, this was the result of bureaucratic decisions, in particular the establishment of a shareholding state framework in the pre-Xi years. This institutional setup involves a multiplicity of state-affiliated holding entities tasked with managing, allocating and ultimately growing the financial assets placed under their supervision by central and local governments.

On the other hand, repercussions of the 2008 global financial crisis unleashed dynamics of rapid financial expansion that surpassed the intentions of China’s central authorities. Stimulus by way of local investments in infrastructure and property, initially dictated by Beijing, led to the rapid buildup of debt in local government financing vehicles. These funding platforms raised capital not only through bank loans but also, increasingly, via ‘wealth management products’, ‘trust products’ and other high-return, high-risk shadow banking instruments.

This latter development came to a head in the mid-2010s, with the collapse of a number of investment instruments that left small-scale investors unable to redeem their savings. At the same time, a whole industry of internet-based ‘fintech’ platforms had grafted itself onto the Chinese shadow banking boom, the shadiest of which ran pyramid schemes under the guise of providing peer-to-peer (P2P) finance.

As the reliability of non-bank credit seemed to falter, vast amounts of funds were displaced, during the first half of 2015, into the stock markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen as an alternative money-making opportunity. Predictably enough, frothy valuations and a short-lived equity mania ensued, followed by an abrupt fall. Though government agencies ordered state-owned entities to buy stocks as a means to prop up the market, it emerged that the CSRC and the central bank had at one point been working at cross-purposes, implementing contradictory measures to address financial volatility. A botched yuan devaluation by the central bank in August 2015, enacted in the aftermath of the stock market rout, triggered significant capital flight that lasted well into 2016 – only partly stemmed by stricter enforcement of capital controls.

These financial travails of the 2010s allow us to make sense of the CCP recasting its relation to finance from 2017 onwards. This political shift was signalled by a Politburo study session on ‘safeguarding national financial security’ in April 2017, which anticipated a National Financial Work Conference convened in July of the same year. At both events, Xi Jinping stressed the imperative of addressing financial risk, declaring that ‘financial security is an important part of national security’. Regarding the CCP’s specific role in finance, he called for ‘strengthening party leadership over financial work’ and ‘upholding the centralized and unified leadership of the Central Committee’. These carefully calibrated dictums have since been pored over in cadre study groups and been reiterated countless times in the official media.

At the institutional level, the 2017 conference decided to set up a Financial Stability and Development Commission (FSDC) under the State Council (China’s central government). Housed in, but not subordinated to, the central bank, the FSDC was entrusted with ‘top-level design’ (dingceng sheji 顶层设计) – a phrase closely associated with the Xi era – in financial matters. Most of all, it aimed to more effectively orchestrate the work of the financial regulatory agencies and the central bank, whose uncoordinated action had reportedly aggravated the stock market crisis of 2015. Vice premier Liu He, Xi’s right-hand man on economic affairs at the time, ran the FSDC from 2018 to its dissolution in 2023.

As Xi embarked on his second term as general secretary after the CCP’s Nineteenth Congress in October 2017, Beijing’s dealings with the world of finance became less peaceable. On the anti-corruption front, CCP disciplinary organs intensified investigations and arrests in the sector. In 2018, a central bank party official went so far as to state that a ‘league of cats and rats’ was undermining the sector (the ‘cats’ referred to regulators, colluding with criminal financier ‘rats’). Among notable anti-corruption catches: the head of the insurance regulator, Xiang Junbo, arrested in 2017; the head of the securities regulator, Liu Shiyu, arrested in 2019; the chairman of Huarong, a state-controlled financial giant, Lai Xiaomin, arrested in 2018 and executed in 2021; two former chairmen of Hengfeng Bank, Jiang Xiyun and Cai Guohua, sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in 2019 and 2020 respectively; the president of China Merchants Bank, Tian Huiyu, and a central bank deputy governor, Fan Yifei, arrested in 2022; and most recently the former chairman of Bank of China, Liu Liange, arrested in 2023.

The most arduous financial battle of Xi’s second term, however, took place on a different front, in the forceful if selective campaign of debt reduction led by Guo Shuqing. From 2018 to 2023, Guo was simultaneously party secretary of the central bank and head of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) – by no means a typical double posting. At the CBIRC, he unleashed a ‘regulatory windstorm’ against the least favoured segments of shadow banking. His actions succeeded in bringing about a partial reversal of financialization in wealth management products and peer-to-peer lending platforms, the latter of which were declared defunct in late 2020. Later, Guo would play a central role in the humbling of Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s financial ambitions, with a cancelled stock market listing for Ma’s Ant Group in October 2020, followed by a partial state takeover of its lending business and, finally, the termination of Ma’s control over the group, announced earlier this year.

Yet despite the aims of the 2017 National Financial Work Conference, China’s financial landscape could hardly be described as stable by the start of Xi’s third term as general secretary in late 2022. The foregrounding of risk control and ‘national financial security’ did not succeed, any more than the creation of the FSDC, in preventing new heights of corporate debt from being reached in the troubled real estate sector – a fragility identified by Guo in a 2020 article as the greatest looming threat to the financial system. Three failing banks – Baoshang, Jinzhou and Hengfeng – also had to be rescued by the central state in 2019. This was followed by a regulatory takeover of one futures company, two trust companies, two securities brokers and four insurers in July 2020.

These persistent financial tremors may explain why, in a dramatic move in March 2023, the FSDC was abolished and its functions transferred to a newly created Central Financial Commission (CFC) located not in the State Council but in the CCP’s Central Committee. This typical instance of state-to-party substitution (yi dang dai zheng 以党代政) from the FSDC to the CFC looks like the logical upshot of Xi’s 2017 call to magnify party authority in the financial sector – the CFC’s existence serving explicitly to ‘strengthen the Central Committee’s centralized and unified leadership over financial work’ according to party documentation.

The CFC is to have its own office inside the Central Committee, which it will share with a companion Central Financial Work Commission (CFWC) – also announced in March. The CFWC is tasked with handling party matters (from cadre evaluation to ideological dissemination) while leaving operational leadership over the financial sector to the CFC. On the same occasion, on the government side, the CBIRC was transformed into an enlarged National Administration of Financial Regulation, which, according to the Chinese media, is planning 3,000 inspections of financial institutions this year.

Three main lessons can be drawn from the political vicissitudes of Chinese finance over the past decade. First, in contrast to the West, much of the stakes are located inside the public realm, that is inside the state writ large – encompassing party, government and state-owned corporations. While the taming of private capital-owner Jack Ma makes for good financial press headlines, this is a lopsided contest to begin with. For all the popularity of its Alipay app as a payments and lending platform, the assets of Ma’s Ant Group, on the eve of its cancelled listing, amounted to about 40 billion US dollars – less than 1% of ICBC’s 6 trillion. Greater rivalries are being played out across public bodies themselves, along horizontal lines (e.g., the central bank versus regulatory agencies) and vertical ones (e.g., State Council versus provincial governments). As a perceptive scholar of China’s political and economic hierarchies once put it: ‘China’s financial industry is a major battlefield for the most powerful political and economic actors who try to benefit from their control over state assets . . . The financial industry can therefore justifiably be treated as an integral part of the political system’.

A second lesson pertains to the evolving division of labour between party and government. The hierarchy of CCP committees parallels that of government offices without ever merging with it. Party channels – say, from the Central Committee to a provincial party committee, or from the central bank party committee to the ICBC party committee – maintain their own integrity beyond, or rather behind, administrative relationships embedded in the government machinery.

From this angle, a significant shift in the balance between government and party has taken place in the world of finance under Xi. This was announced at the National Financial Work Conference of 2017, eventually leading to the establishment of the party’s Central Financial Commission in March this year. This development represents a departure from the pre-existing framework in which ‘party affairs’ (dangwu 党务) in financial institutions – such as cadre selection and anti-corruption – were left to party organizations while the supervision of ‘professional business’ (yewu 业务) was reserved for government bodies. Now, by contrast, it is two new Central Committee commissions that will assume respective leadership over the two aspects.

By implication, this seems to confirm that in the present cycle of Chinese politics, the State Council is deemed unfit to take the lead on what is considered to be the nation’s highest-priority undertakings. This was further underlined this year when a new Central Science and Technology Commission was established in the Central Committee alongside the CFC and CFWC. Under Xi, ‘top-level design’ in key areas is best not left to the government. This might be cast in a negative light, suggesting that one of China’s two loci of power has become distrustful of the other. On the other hand, it could be pointed out that ‘partyfication’ of government missions and offices, if applied selectively, represents an effective way of upgrading the importance assigned to priority areas within the parameters of China’s political configuration. This latter reading is, unsurprisingly, the one favoured by the current leadership. In the words of Guo Shuqing: ‘In order to carry out financial work well, the most fundamental principle is to uphold the party’s centralized and unified leadership. This is the greatest strength of our system.’

The third and final lesson to be drawn is that ‘leading financial work’ in China, as the CCP likes to put it, is and will always be a Sisyphean task. Ever since the 1990s, once China’s current financial architecture had been moulded into shape by Zhu Rongji and his associates, Beijing has used its authority over financial institutions and financial circuitry as a means to influence developments in the wider political economy. The financial system was put at the service of broader ends – simultaneously economic and political. In the process, however, the character of the state itself was transformed, as both government and party embraced financial norms and logics and reconfigured themselves to keep up with the breathtaking material expansion of the sector.

The latest round of party-state reform, including but not limited to the creation of the CFC, reflects this process of restless organizational adaptation. For all the idiosyncrasies of each generation of political leadership, patterns of institutional reform echo each other from one cycle to the next. Centralization – shifting authority upwards from the cities and provinces to Beijing – and partyfication – transferring authority from the State Council to the Central Committee – may look like trademarks of the Xi era, yet Zhu Rongji himself resorted to both, especially as the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 raised the spectre of looming financial risk.

From one generation to the next, the runaway growth of financial capital has been met with successive rounds of institutional reordering. These constitute iterative measures, of a political and administrative character, called upon to master a continuous dynamic of capital accumulation. As financial expansion within the Chinese political economy reaches new heights, Beijing’s response is becoming ever more forceful – if never quite sufficient to keep pace.

Read on: Victor Shih, ‘China’s Credit Conundrum’, NLR 115.

Categories
Uncategorised

Strategies of Denial

There has been a lively debate on the American left about the Biden Administration’s industrial strategy. Discussion has focused on the prospects opened up by the massive stimulus – totalling some $4 trillion, if we factor in the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act alongside the Inflation Reduction Act – from training up ‘progressive technocrats’ to retrofit buildings to the feasibility of capitalist state-led ‘decarbonization’ under conditions of global overcapacity and falling economic growth.

So far, assessments have been mixed, differentiating ‘the good, the bad, the ugly’, albeit with the stress on the first. If the boost to employment and ‘green’ good works promised by the IRA cannot be dismissed, nor can its shortcomings: lack of funding for housing and public transport, neutered regulatory standards in the electricity sector, leasing agreements that give oil and gas producers access to public land. ‘The IRA’, a representative appraisal in Jacobin reckoned, ‘is at once a massive fossil fuel industry giveaway, a historic but inadequate investment in clean energy, and our best hope for staving off planetary catastrophe’.

In other words, the left critique has gone beyond ‘good, but not big enough’ – but perhaps not very far beyond. Almost entirely absent in these discussions is the geostrategic rationale that powers this national-investment drive, reshoring production on the US mainland, bagging lithium mines and sponsoring construction of microchip factories, in a militarized bid to outflank China.

Viewed from the halls of power, the anti-China orientation of US industrial policy is not an unfortunate by-product of the green ‘transition’, but its motivating purpose. For its conceptors, the logic governing the new era of infrastructure spending is fundamentally geopolitical; its precedent is to be sought not in the New Deal but in the military Keynesianism of the Cold War, seen by the ‘Wise Men’ who waged it as a condition for victory in America’s struggle against the Soviet Union.

Today, as after 1945, policymakers find themselves at an ‘inflexion point’. ‘History’, wrote future National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan during the 2020 presidential campaign, ‘is again knocking’:

The growing competition with China and shifts in the international political and economic order should provoke a similar instinct within the contemporary foreign-policy establishment. Today’s national security experts need to move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past forty years… The US national security community is rightly beginning to insist on the investments in infrastructure, technology, innovation, and education that will determine the United States’ long-term competitiveness vis-à-vis China.

Detailed at length in a report for the Carnegie Foundation, under the signature of Sullivan and a camarilla of other Biden advisers, ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ collapsed factitious distinctions between national security and economic planning. Hopes that globalized doux commerce might permanently induce other powers to accept US hegemony had been deceived. Another approach was in order. ‘There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy’, Biden declared in his inaugural foreign policy speech. ‘Every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind.’ Trump’s victory, forged in the deindustrialized heartlands of the opioid crisis and ‘American carnage’, had shaken the Democrat establishment. What’s good for Goldman Sachs was no longer, it seemed, necessarily good for America.

Scant mystery attached to the global motivation for this break with orthodoxy. China, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken hammered home in May 2022, ‘is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it’. Still worse, ‘Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past seventy-five years’. Happily, however, the guarantor of said values was primed to react. ‘The Biden Administration is making far-reaching investments in our core sources of national strength – starting with a modern industrial strategy to sustain and expand our economic and technological influence, make our economy and supply chains more resilient, sharpen our competitive edge.’ Competition, Blinken added, need not entail conflict. But the White House, having identified China as its ‘pacing challenge’, would not shrink from the possibility of war, beginning with ‘shifting our military investments away from platforms that were designed for the conflicts of the 20th century toward asymmetric systems that are longer-range, harder to find, easier to move’.

Three months later, passage of the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS Acts made tangible the ‘deep integration of domestic policy and foreign policy’. Restrictions on the export of crucial AI and semiconductor components to China, floated in September and certified the following month, confirmed the drive to monopolize ‘chokepoint’ or ‘stranglehold’ technologies, a veritable declaration of economic war. ‘These actions’, a CSIS analysis concluded, ‘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.’ Ominously, Sullivan invoked the Manhattan Project. For too long, he maintained, the US had sought only a ‘relative’ advantage in sensitive high-tech fields; it would henceforth ‘maintain as large a lead as possible’. Technology restrictions against Moscow imposed following the invasion of Ukraine were said to demonstrate that ‘export controls can be more than just a preventative tool’. Supply-chain interdiction, in defence jargon, is a key example of the fungibility of economic and strategic assets.

In Washington the music is military. Weeks before Congress voted on the IRA, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taipei aboard an Air Force jet, escorted by a dozen F-15s and the USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group (‘utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible’ in the words of Thomas Friedman; ‘a major political provocation’ per the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs). But the augmented US military threat had begun with the very start of the Biden Administration – which, far from dialling back Trump’s bluster, had built on it, only stopping to re-solder disgruntled NATO and SEATO allies to the project.

Since the revivification of the ‘Quad’ alliance at the beginning of 2021, soon bolstered by the AUKUS pact, America has enlarged its already vast archipelago of bases, invested with rapidly deployable mobile forces, deep-strike capabilities and unmanned systems. The aim, according to Ely Ratner, overseer of Asian affairs at the Department of Defense, is to establish ‘a more resilient, mobile and lethal presence in the Indo-Pacific region’. Stepped up US-Japanese joint naval exercises in autumn 2022 signalled a momentous shift in Tokyo, outlined in a new National Security Strategy oriented towards the ‘unprecedented’ menace posed by China; orders for hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles followed suit, along with the deployment of a newly constituted Marine Littoral Regiment to Okinawa.

At the start of 2023, panic over unidentified balloon sightings coincided with the leak of a memo by the head of US Air Mobility Command, whose ‘gut’ told him America would be at war with China by 2025. In February, the Pentagon announced plans to quadruple forces deployed to Taiwan, together with a surge in arms sales, and officials now publicly entertain the idea of blowing up the island’s semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the event of a Chinese invasion. Breaking openly with the longstanding diplomatic formula of ‘One China’ (claimed by both Beijing and the KMT’s Taipei, and formally acknowledged by Washington in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué), Biden has repeatedly affirmed his intention to use force in such an eventuality. The Administration’s ditching of ‘strategic ambiguity’ was confirmed by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in Senate testimony this March. Periodic talk of a ‘thaw’ only underscores the tendency to escalation.   

If the American left had any lingering uncertainty as to the international implications of Bidenomics it should have been dispelled by Sullivan at the end of April, in a speech on ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ delivered at the Brookings Institution. To those surprised the theme should be entrusted to the National Security Advisor, Sullivan again insisted on the priority of power-political concerns over Panglossian market fundamentalism. China’s rise was proof against nostalgia for globalist laissez-faire. Chinese ‘military ambitions’, ‘nonmarket economic practices’ and lack of Western ‘values’ – not to speak of Beijing’s grip on lithium, cobalt and other ‘critical minerals’ – demanded a firm response. Investment in electric vehicle and microchip production was a first instalment, along with the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, an anti-China trade cartel conceived as an answer to the Belt and Road Initiative. ‘We will unapologetically pursue our industrial strategy at home’, Sullivan intoned, ‘but we are unambiguously committed to not leaving our friends behind’. 

To gauge the extent of this ‘new Washington Consensus’, it sufficed to listen to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s address to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies the previous week. Yellen, reputedly the ‘dove’ to Sullivan’s ‘hawk’, opened her remarks with reference to ‘China’s decision to pivot away from market reforms toward a more state-driven approach that has undercut its neighbours and countries across the world’. ‘This has come’, she went on, ‘as China is striking a more confrontational posture toward the United States and our allies and partners – not only in the Indo-Pacific but also in Europe and other regions.’ Faced with a tense conjuncture, US economic policy would obey four objectives: first, guaranteeing the ‘national security interests’ of Washington and its allies; second, continuing ‘to use our tools to disrupt and deter human rights abuses wherever they occur around the globe’; third, ‘healthy competition’ with China, contingent on the reversal of its ‘unfair economic practices’ and compliance with the ‘rules-based global economic order’; fourth, ‘cooperation on issues like climate and debt distress’. National security, global policing, competition, cooperation: the hierarchy was clear.

Rhetorically, the White House has insisted that its aim is not economic ‘decoupling’ from China, but rather ‘de-risking’ – a trouvaille of Ursula von der Leyen, the so-called EU president, who musters Europeans to march to Washington’s tune. But Biden’s policies have left room for doubt concerning the fate reserved for ‘friends’ in this latest dispensation. Decades of US hedging on climate goals, accompanied by hosannahs to the sanctity of free trade, found Germany and France unprepared for the whiplash return of tariffs, capital controls and national subsidies for industry. ‘Next Generation EU’, core of the ‘Green Deal’ unveiled by von der Leyen in January 2023, offers some €720 billion in grants and loans to European governments, a sum comparable to the IRA; yet as Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay observe, EU countries have disbursed almost as much this past year alone in subsidies to offset the energy crisis resulting from proxy war in Ukraine. Visits to Beijing by Scholz and Macron aside, the Union shows little more appetite for defying its NATO protector in Asia than it does for independent action in Europe. Josep Borrell, von der Leyen’s sidekick in Brussels, was last seen calling on member states to send warships to patrol the South China Sea.

Technology embargoes, sanctions and alliance politics all have their place in a more expansive strategic outlook, classed by Pentagon war-planners under the watchword ‘denial’. Ostensibly, these measures aim to defend American forward emplacements on China’s borders, starting with the ‘military hedgehog’ of Taiwan. That the Administration should prepare to ‘deny’ Chinese ambitions in the region enjoys broad establishment consent, from the ‘restraint’-minded Quincy Institute to the Heritage Foundation and Center for a New American Security, notwithstanding disagreement over specifics. Like containment, its proximate predecessor, ‘denial’ is a labile concept. Whereas for some, emphasis falls on its counter-position to control, or primacy – the idea that American might should be sufficiently awesome as to dispel any thought of challenging it – others, inspired by deterrence theory, draw a distinction between ‘punishment’, or threats to inflict unacceptable harm on an adversary post facto, and an activist military posture, intended to make a territory unconquerable.

Either way, Washington must reconcile the imperative to prevent any state other than itself from dominating one of the great centres of world power (Asia, Europe, the Persian Gulf) with evidence of its citizens’ likely disinclination to back a major international war abroad, after twenty years of unending armed escapades. In the thinking of Elbridge Colby, its most influential theorist, a ‘strategy of denial’ answers to both criteria, husbanding resources while laying the groundwork to mobilize public opinion. In this context, the American left’s blinkered focus on the domestic impact of Bidenomics has echoes of the ‘social imperialism’ of the European belle époque, when the Webbs and Bernsteins celebrated an increased share of the cake for their native working class, as inter-imperial rivalries and colonial depredations accelerated towards catastrophe.

Ideally, of course, Washington would prefer that the sophistication of American hardware and the strength of its ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition in Asia dissuade Beijing from pursuing whatever designs it might have on Taiwan or the Philippines. However, as Rear Admiral Michael Studeman, director of Naval Intelligence, has warned, ‘we may be too late’. Should this be the case, the essential thing is that China be compelled to open hostilities. The relevant historical analogy is Imperial Japan in 1941, prompted by American oil embargo to launch its calamitous attack on Pearl Harbor, thereby rousing a hitherto reluctant population. ‘In circumstances where a focused denial defence would too likely fail’, Colby writes, ‘the United States’ strategic purpose should be to force China to have to do what Japan did voluntarily: to try to achieve its ambitions, China would have to behave in a way that will spur and harden the resolve of the peoples in the broader coalition to intervene and for those engaged to intensify and widen the war to a level at which they would win it.’ Plans were to be made accordingly. ‘We missed our chance to adopt a more nuanced defence strategy’, Colby has regretted, ‘and now we’re going to have to do things that appear very extreme.’  

To deny is to disallow, withhold or abjure. Verleugnung, in Freudian language, has a further sense, describing inability or unwillingness to acknowledge an unpleasant or traumatic reality. It is also connected to perversion – when the desired is absent, attention may fix on a present surrogate, or fetish. The 46th President can be no stranger to such feelings. But self-deception is everywhere. When Pelosi staged her jingoistic démarche to Taiwan, Democratic apparatchiks downplayed its consequence; for Matt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, and progressive activist Tobita Chow, the real danger was less Pelosi’s whistle-stop tour than those alarmed by it, their warnings an instance of ‘threat inflation’.

More often, denial takes the form of silence. Even thoughtful critiques – the recent Dissent symposium, ‘What’s Next for the Climate Left?’, includes a selection – barely consider the relational logic between expanded domestic spending and an increasingly aggressive Pacific policy, reiterated in speech after speech by Biden officials. That criticism also applies to the debate that NLR has been running on Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ (though the journal has attacked the social-imperial character of Bidenomics elsewhere). The point was registered in a contribution by economist J. W. Mason, who ventured a qualified endorsement of Biden’s spending programme that acknowledged ‘the frightening anti-China rhetoric that’s a ubiquitous part of the case for public investment’. ‘War is different from industrial policy’, Mason noted. Do America’s radicals get the distinction? 

Of late, the financial press has been ahead of the eco-socialist left in starting to voice unease with the hawkishness of Biden and Sullivan. The Economist and Financial Times have distanced themselves from the Administration’s more florid flights, indicating the need to cool down gung-ho rhetoric before it makes a new reality, as Rumsfeld might have said. The FT published a strong opinion piece by Adam Tooze calling for a strategy of accommodation to China’s rise – a proposal liable to be judged ‘either treasonous or non-planetary’ by the present White House.

When Chinese authorities announced a tit-for-tat ban on the use of microchips manufactured by Boise-based Micron Technology, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo declared that the US ‘won’t tolerate’ the decision. ‘We see it as, plain and simple, economic coercion’. Coercion or prudence, ‘preserving our edge in science and technology’ or ‘modernizing the kill chain’, ‘market-distorting practices’ or support for the ‘American worker’, ‘environmental justice’ or atomic showdown over the Taiwan Strait? Critical assessments of Bidenomics ought to be sure which is which. 

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘Paradigm Shifts?’, NLR 128.

Categories
Uncategorised

Stridulations

According to Confucius, silk was first reeled by Princess Xiling Shi in 2640 BCE. She was sitting under a mulberry tree in the Imperial Palace when a cocoon fell into her tea. The warm water caused its long filaments to loosen, and fishing it from her cup, she found the delicate thread to be endless. Enamoured by its beauty, she ordered her servants to spin the substance into yarn – and so began a sericulture monopoly that would last for the next three thousand years. The Silk Road opened during the Han dynasty, in 130 BCE; a few hundred years later, under the Tang dynasty silk became an important emblem of class; during the Qing dynasty, in the 1600s, the imperial silk factories were established, with funding from the treasury and oversight by the Imperial Industry Department. The ‘Four Silk Capitals’ were all located along China’s east coast, just inland from Shanghai: Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shengze Town and Huzhou.

Today, Huzhou produces the bulk of China’s children’s garments. In Zhili, some 18,000 privately owned factories are operated by 300,000 migrant workers from all over Anhui province. Production is seasonal: work is from February until June, then restarting in July for another four months. Most of the workers are in their early twenties. Between 2014 and 2019, the Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing filmed over 2,600 hours of footage in and around these factories, concentrating on the lives of the workers he encountered there. Youth (Spring) is the first instalment in a trilogy; the film, almost four hours long, screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year, along with Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters the first documentary to do so since 2008.

Followers of Bing’s work may find it curious that Youth inaugurates a new project, given that it returns to subject matter treated in Bitter Money (2017). The films are nevertheless quite distinct, despite both adhering to Wang’s typically intimate, unobtrusive style. Working with a small team – at most three camera operators in separate locations – and filmed using digital cameras, all modified with photographic, autofocusing lenses, Wang’s filmmaking follows a simple credo: ‘the film image is a recording of the reality of human existence in a given historical, socio-economic and political context, but at the same time it contains emotions, beauty, something more abstract that is perhaps Art’. His great talent is improvisation, the capacity to achieve this on the fly. Bitter Money documents the economic migration of its subjects, beginning in their home villages, following their journeys by bus and train to Huzhou, and then peering into the factories. It represented a kind of arrival or establishing shot. Youth, with its intense focus on life inside them, is more like a close-up.

Wang’s penchant for finding ‘beauty’ in human existence is tested by such surroundings. But in its stead, something else emerges, something more affective. He is forced to settle for flatter framing – typically, a worker at their station, shot medium-wide, cramped, colourless – and these images persist for much of the four hours. When – about halfway through – Wang cuts outside to a muddy puddle dimpled with light rain, I could hear the audience gasp: fresh air, at last. The film is broken into twenty-minute segments, each designated simply by cutting to a new often visually indistinguishable factory, with new characters introduced by subtitles providing their name, age and hometown. Wang had originally planned for forty-minute segments, but relented, feeling this would be too taxing on the viewer.

One marked difference from Wang’s debut nine-hour opus Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) is that here, as in Bitter Money, the workers we encounter are often women. Their suffering is revealed to be worse than that of their male counterparts. In Bitter Money, a young woman is physically and emotionally abused by her husband, who beats her and then kicks her out onto the street. ‘That bitch isn’t human’, he snarls. She had apparently neglected the housework, then dared to ask for money to visit their son. An early scene in Youth sees the parents of another young woman negotiating with her bosses. She needs an abortion but hasn’t yet finished her ‘pile’. The two parties come to the mutual understanding that her name will remain unsullied if she has the abortion quickly and returns to work the next day.

West of the Tracks followed the decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, once the booming heart of China’s planned economy. In the 1950s it became one of the USSR’s ‘156 Projects’ – industrial equipment acquired during the war was poured into China’s North-East. Before the Reform Era sealed its fate, Tiexi was home to nearly one million industrial workers. Wang’s film is emblematic of this old world even as it was passing into history: men and molten iron, monstrous machines, trains, cranes and hardhats. In the words of Lü Xunyu, its subject is ‘the dusk of an entire social world, together with all the hopes and ideals that created it’. Youth provides a view of what replaced it. Economic reforms meant that the state no longer had a monopoly on Huzhou’s labour. Zhili exploded under this new model: anyone with the money could rent a space, buy the tools and materials, hire workers and begin production – sometimes all in the same day. Without involvement from the state or banks, trading is based entirely on trust and reputation. An owner might pay suppliers for materials only once the garments are sold; workers are paid at the end of the season, on a per-garment basis, though the price of each is kept secret until the final few weeks.

This latter fact provides the film’s central tension. Once the price list is revealed, the workers in Youth come together in solidarity, organizing as best they can. Unable to strike or protest (new workers are waiting at the door), they appeal to what they perceive as shared interest with their bosses. This is due, in part, to the fact that many of these workers plan to open their own factories once they accumulate enough wealth. But when they ask for a ‘raise’, they are scolded; their only recourse is to try again, this time asking for much less. Yet Wang seemingly has faith in this new model. He has argued ‘this is a system where even the poorest can find a place. In a national economy completely controlled by the state and the banks, this type of experiment offers a glimmer of hope or, at the very least, an idea as to a possible way to move forward’.

One should note that the working conditions are horrendous, the pace of production unfathomable. Most workers can sew a pair of trousers in seconds; items like jackets take longer due to the inclusion of elastics or embroidery or patches (including Mickey Mouse). With a cigarette in their mouth and the radio blaring, workers appear to be practically throwing fabric through the machines – inseam, flip, inseam, flip, cuff, cuff, done. Onto the next pair. Repeat this from 8am to 11pm and you have one day’s work. Repeat this for 1.5 billion garments and you have Zhili’s yearly output.

Youth is scored by the sound of the machines, horrific and unrelenting. (I would estimate that their sewing machines are five times faster than my mother’s, the only one I’m familiar with, and about ten times louder.) The workers don’t seem to notice, but the audience certainly does – many viewers at Cannes found the film difficult to endure, and several walked out. One veteran critic called it a ‘durational punisher’ and the ‘toughest thing’ he’d ever seen at the festival. I managed to fall asleep at one point, which I felt put me in league with the workers, a capacity for environmental adaptation that apparently not all critics are attuned to. The elderly French woman sitting next to me managed the entire film – though, also like the workers, she required some nicotine to get through it, vaping into her armpit every few minutes. This is all to say: the film was a lot of work.

Writing of the factory-hands of England – those ‘eldest children of the industrial revolution’ – Engels wonderedhow the whole crazy fabric still hangs together’. ‘What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds’ – today Huzhou, Dhaka, Karachi: ‘Everywhere barbarous indifference’. Youth sees the factories and slums whose conditions Engels indicted become one: concrete beehives, maybe four-stories tall, devoid of natural light, tightly packed with bunkbeds and workstations, populated by young lovers, fighters, and pot noodles. This is the ‘dormitory labour regime’ in the words of Pun Ngai and Chris Smith, which allows for fuller control over workers’ lives, extending working hours to meet the demands of the global production cycle. Intercity mobility (as well as rural exodus) is denied by the household registration system; one means of escape is marriage, a central theme in both Youth and Bitter Money, in that it allows you to relocate to the province of your partner. Marriage therefore becomes another captive institution.

This labour force closely resembles that of England’s early industry – in its newness, alienation, poor conditions, and exclusion from social safeties. Wang, however, sees something more ancient: ‘There are forms of primitive organization there that are reminiscent of ancient tribes, with social and economic interactions that can seem quite archaic’. Curious to praise such a system while simultaneously identifying its crudeness, acknowledging the extent to which it diminishes its workers. Is this progress? This newer, young workforce is certainly estranged from history. The sociologist Ching Kwan Lee has contrasted the modes of resistance found in the rustbelt northeast – where workers tried to mobilize the remnants of the ‘socialist social contract’ – with those of the new generations of migrant labour who lack any experience of ‘socialist industrialism or Maoist class politics’, and among whom there is ‘a conspicuous absence of class identity claims’. Tellingly, Mao only appears once in Youth – we glimpse his face on the money come payday.

There are no silkworms in the film (Marx: ‘If the silk-worm’s object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage worker’), but there are crickets, which have their own mythology and lore. A symbol of wealth and prosperity, crickets have been kept as pets in China for at least a thousand years. During one scene, a worker makes mention of the ‘long bugs’ he can hear outside. ‘Crickets?’ ‘I call them long bugs.’ ‘I like their song.’ ‘Me too.’ The film – and its subjects – are buoyed by this youthful romanticism; its absence would make for something much more bitter. The capacity of the workers to endure the miseries of their condition, to find joy and love within the factory walls, is a testament to both their vigour and naiveté – what Wang calls the ‘delusions’ of youth. It may just be a fact of getting older, but I couldn’t hear the high-pitched croaking of the crickets in that scene. They were drowned out by the monstrous stridulations of the machines.

Read on: Wang Bing, ‘Filming a Land in Flux’, NLR 82.