Month: June 2023

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Longing for Crusades

If somebody, far in the future, decides to ‘look for the immediate cause which brought such a great war’, they will find that ‘the real reason, true but unacknowledged . . . was the growth of one side’s power and the other side’s fear of it’. The warring parties here are not the Americans and Russians, and the author is not an analyst of contemporary geopolitics. This is Thucydides, discussing the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BC. In explaining the outbreak of hostilities between Athens and Sparta, he does not mention any moral motive, nor any notion of defending values or principles. The conflict is described as non-ideological, born of a simple power imbalance.

Thucydides offered this lucid analysis despite the prevalence of ‘Athenian exceptionalism’ in mainland Greece. After the first year of the war, Pericles delivered his famous oration for fallen Athenians, which doubled as a eulogy for the city and its democracy. Kennedy and Obama’s invocations of a ‘city on a hill’ (not to mention Reagan and Trump’s ‘shining city on a hill’) pale in comparison to Pericles’s rhetoric:

We have a form of government which does not emulate the practice of our neighbours: we are more an example to others than an imitation of them. Our constitution is called a democracy because we govern in the interests of the majority, not just the few . . . In summary I declare that our city as a whole is an education to Greece.

Writing in 1792, Thomas Paine, would note, non-coincidentally, that ‘What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude’.

It may be appropriate to ask ourselves why nobody delivered the same warning to Washington in 2021 that the Corcyraeans gave to Athens in the fifth century BC: ‘If any among you do not think that war is coming, they are deceiving themselves. They do not see that fear of your power is fuelling Spartan’ – or Russian – ‘desire for war’. Indeed, the reluctance to assume a Thucydidean perspective on contemporary conflict signals a deeply ingrained political outlook: a conviction that today conflicts are driven by moral imperatives, and that wars cannot be declared unless they are considered ‘just’.

This seems a rather whimsical idea in light of the previous 4,000 years of human history. It wasn’t for the triumph of human rights that the Egyptian and Hittite armies clashed at the battle of Kadesh (1274 BC), nor were principles of humanity cited by Scipio Aemilianus when he razed Carthage (146 BC) and spread salt on the ground to prevent it from ever rising again. William the Conqueror did not need any ethical legitimation when he invaded England, and he did not feel the need to accuse Harold of war crimes and atrocities (1066).

The persistence of this moralizing discourse in the twenty-first century is partly because our mental categories haven’t yet recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall. So long as the Soviet Union was intact, the struggle for global dominion presented itself as an ideological contest. Rather than two empires, we had two irreconcilable conceptions of society: communism and capitalism. How gratifying it was to defend the forces of good from the Evil Empire! It seemed like a natural continuation of the previous philosophical struggle between liberalism and fascism.

This viewpoint has much to do with the particular course of US history. Let’s not forget that for over sixty years, the conquest of the American West was sold to the world as the defence of poor, vulnerable colonists and their unarmed offspring against savage, howling Indians thirsty for blond scalps. (An alternative narrative can be found in Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World, whose opening chapters describe, among other things, how native Californians would be bought by ‘peaceful’ colonists at less than $100 per head, while a black slave in the Atlantic could be sold for up to $1,000). In the American Weltanschauung, the entirety of human history is an endless Western movie: a teleology in which there’s always a sheriff to punish the bad guys, a guardian angel who restores law and order to the city on the hill.

According to this vision, every war triggered by Washington is a response to some greater crime perpetrated by their enemy. The invasion of Cuba was justified by the sinking of the USS Maine; US entry into the First World War by the attack on the Lusitania; the war on Japan by the attack on Pearl Harbour (it is rarely mentioned that in 1940 the US blocked the sale of planes, components, machines and aviation fuel to Japan, before embargoing the sale of oil in 1941). The war in Vietnam was likewise legitimized by aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin, which turned out to be as fictitious as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In each case it was a confrontation between Good and Evil, the pious and the ungodly.

Before the advent of the two great modern monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, the concept of ideological war was alien. The only stake was power, or rather dominion. There were no just causes – or, at least, any cause could justify itself. Religious expansion, armed proselytism, otherworldly salvation at the tip of a sword: these were the gifts bestowed by the new monotheistic faiths. Christians and Muslims annexed new territories in the name of God, eventually pitting one against the other in the Crusades. This inaugurated an age of Deus le volt – one that we are still struggling to exit.

Of course, even the Crusades degenerated into commercial wars: in the Fourth Crusade, defenders of the faith set out to liberate the Holy Land and ended up sacking Christian Constantinople. The successive, diuturnal conflicts between Europe and the Ottomans gradually lost their religious character, such that European states would often ally themselves with the Sublime Porte to weaken other Christian powers. But everything changed with the Reformation, which created an entirely new phenomenon in the West: the ideologization of war within Europe itself.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Cesare Borgia wasn’t waging wars for the predestination of grace, or to demonstrate the unity of divine nature, but simply to conquer the fortress of Fermo or the castle of Rimini. Forty years later, though, German lords would be pulverising their respective cities in the name of theology: in pursuit or defence of Thomas Münster’s Anabaptists. Two decades after that, the French fought a bitter civil war that saw the massacre of the Huguenots on the infamous night of St Bartholomew in 1572. The modern scientific revolution – Galileo’s breakthrough, the stirrings of industrial capitalism and the colonization of North America – was contemporaneous with the Thirty Years War, the most murderous religious conflict Europe had ever known.

This upheaval was so sanguineous that afterwards, for a century and a half, warfare reverted to the paradigm that had been in place during the Italian signorie: diplomacy by other means. The wars of succession – Spanish, Austrian, the Seven Years War – were unideological and secular. When ideological war eventually reappeared in the West, it was no longer motivated by traditional religion but by the religion of nationalism: an idolatry of the fatherland replete with its own apostles and martyrs (‘mort pour la France’). It’s easy to forget that over the last two centuries the creed of patriotism has killed more people than all previous religious wars. It was first seen in the War of Independence from British dominion by the thirteen North American colonies. From the beginning, one essential feature was its compatibility with republicanism, on display in revolutionary France, where the Girondin Jacques Brissot called on the nation to confront monarchic power in a ‘croisade de la liberté universelle’.

From then on, wars of national independence – from the Spanish guerrilla against Napoleon to Bolívar’s campaigns in South America, from the Italian Risorgimento to Irish and Algerian anticolonial movements – were distinctly ideological. It is notable, however, that they all involved a great (or waning) power facing off against an emerging populace. These struggles share characteristics with more recent asymmetrical wars. For one thing, the uneven distribution of power shaped the tactics deployed on the battlefield: weaker contenders – the OAS in Algeria, IRA in Ireland, the Israeli Irgun – often had to resort to guerrilla methods. The religion of nationalism also had its own foreign legion: Santorre di Santarosa and Lord Byron, an Italian and an Englishman respectively, laid down their lives for Greek national liberation; Garibaldi famously travelled to South America to fight for national independence – just as, in our century, a significant number of Europeans travelled to Syria to fight for Islamic State.

In the meantime, up until and including the First World War, symmetrical wars between great powers were fought largely on the basis of colonial ambition, for control over trade and territory. This remained the case even when rival states shared an ideology and culture (in the First World War, the monarchs of three fighting empires – Britain, Russia and Germany – were cousins). For much of this period there was no notion of ‘public opinion’, nor was there mass conscription. One could simply declare war without having to convince one’s people that it was worth fighting and dying for the cause. In the late nineteenth century, however, the emergence of public opinion inaugurated a ‘politics of atrocities’. It then became necessary to convince the population that the enemy had committed atrocities so intolerable that a military response was needed (I dealt with the politics of atrocities more extensively in Sidecar last year).

With the USSR, it was even easier to find a pretext for belligerence. Here was an empire of self-evident evil, and an atheist one at that. Its collapse created a gaping void for US grand strategists, who couldn’t help displaying a certain blasphemous nostalgia for their communist adversary. Just look at the names affixed to American military operations overseas. During the Cold War these were banal and arbitrary: the terrorist campaign against Castro’s Cuba was called Operation Mongoose; the mission to torture and assassinate members of the Vietcong was known as Program Phoenix; the bombardment of Cambodia, Operation Menu; Nickel Grass denoted the airborne delivery of arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War; Praying Mantis the attack on Iran in 1988. Yet the register changed after the fall of the Wall. The 1989 invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, marked a new grandiloquence. In 1991, as the USSR crumbled, the US embarked on mission Restore Hope in Somalia, while Haiti saw the pinnacle of this Orwellian newspeak with operation Uphold Democracy in 1994. There followed Joint Endeavour in Bosnia (1995), Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (2001), Iraqi Freedom (2003), and the classicizing Odyssey Dawn in Libya (2011).

If warfare in the communist era had a religious valence, in the post-communist world it became a question of morality – of humanity. We no longer speak of an Evil Empire but of ‘rogue states’. The enemy is to us what the criminal and gunslinger is to the sheriff. When we talk of ‘outlaw’ nations we embark, à la Carl Schmitt, on a ‘conceptual construction of penal-criminalistic nature proper to international law’: ‘the discriminatory concept of the enemy as a criminal and the attendant implication of justa causa run parallel to the intensification of the means of destruction and the disorientation of the theaters of war’.

Elsewhere, Schmitt notes that ‘to confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity’. As we edge, like sleepwalkers, closer to the abyss of nuclear war, one can’t help recalling the words of the Nazi jurist (who didn’t seem to realise he was also talking about his own regime): ‘weapons of absolute annihilation . . . require an absolute enemy, lest they should be absolutely inhuman’.

The contemporary period, then, is marked by a yearning for the Crusades. But in European public opinion one can sense a certain apathy, a lukewarm resignation if not thinly-veiled scepticism: the kind one feels when watching a film one’s seen too many times. The media still denounces Putin’s atrocities and makes obligatory comparisons with the Hitlers and Stalins of the past, yet it does so with the enthusiasm of a bored schoolchild, almost as if le coeur n’y était pas. How many times have we woken up to the news that our former allies have suddenly become reprobates and criminals? How can we forget that Saddam Hussein was furnished with chemical weapons to use against Iran before he was designated a war criminal himself? Or that Bashar al-Assad was deemed reliable enough to torture prisoners at the behest of the CIA before he became a so-called international pariah?

It also strains credulity that the US wants to see alleged war criminals tried in an international tribunal which it does not even recognise; that it supports Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime but refuses to tolerate Russia’s presence in Crimea and the Donbas; that it recognises the ethno-territorial grievances of Kosovar minorities in Serbia but not those of the Russophone minority in Ukraine, and so on. How can we take seriously the West’s invectives against authoritarian regimes, and calls to defend democracy, when our democratic leaders lay out the red carpet for a Saudi Prince who butchers critical journalists and an Egyptian General who executes political prisoners by the tens of thousands?

It may be time for our elites to put aside their hypocrisy for once and speak as frankly as the Athenians when they imposed their will on the inhabitants of the island of Melos:

We shall not bulk out our argument with lofty language, claiming that our defeat of the Persians gives us the right to rule or that we are now seeking retribution for some wrong done to us. That would not convince you. Similarly we do not expect you to think there is any persuasive power in protestations that . . . you have not done us any harm. So keep this discussion practical, within the limits of what we both really think. You know as well as we do that when we are talking on the human plane, questions of justice only arise when there is equal power to compel: in terms of practicality the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must.  

On the one hand, Thucydides seems to speak to the Russians of today, telling them to stop justifying every act of aggression by invoking the ‘Great War’ of seventy years ago and the need to save Europe from a Nazi menace (just as the Athenians safeguarded Greek freedom from Persian dominion). On the other, he seems to refer to the Americans, who impose penalties and sanctions simply because they have the power to do so, on states whose weakness often obliges them to comply.

Read on: Alberto Toscano, ‘The Spectre of Analogy’, NLR 66.

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The AMLO Project

The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender. This was by far the widest margin since the country’s ‘transition to democracy’ at the turn of the millennium. The parties that had dominated the political field throughout the neoliberal period were suddenly reduced to rubble. Today, the president’s approval ratings remain in the sixties, despite a relentlessly hostile press, a global pandemic, its accompanying economic crisis and inflationary pressures. Longstanding rivalries between the opposition parties have been shelved, with the PRI, PAN and PRD forced to come together or forfeit any possibility of succeeding at the ballot box.

The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the left learn from this endeavour?  

As a general rule, transitions from neoliberalism must take place in a structural setting shaped by neoliberalism itself: the erosion of the working class as a political agent and the dismantling of state capacity. It follows that the basic historical task of the contemporary left is the reignition of class politics and the relegitimation of the state as a social actor. We can therefore assess AMLO’s administration based on three fundamental criteria: the reinstatement of class cleavage as a primary organizer of the political field; the effort to reconcentrate the power of a state apparatus hollowed out by decades of neoliberal governance; and the break with an economic paradigm based on institutionalized corruption. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

1.

In May 2020, as the first right-wing protests erupted against AMLO’s government, a viral video made the rounds on social media. It shows throngs of upper-class demonstrators engaged in a march-by-car on a major avenue in Monterrey, Nuevo León. From the window of a public bus, an anonymous passenger begins to harangue the motorists: ‘This is what moves Mexico!’ he says. ‘The workers…the workers move Mexico!’ For many, the scene captured the return of class politics to public consciousness after a long absence.

Just a few months into his presidency, AMLO declared the death of Mexican neoliberalism. It was a bold statement, more of an aspiration than a fait accompli. The first signs of its realization were rhetorical. Previously, political discourse focused on the division between a vaguely defined ‘civil society’ and the state. Public officials increasingly conceded the necessity of increasing ‘citizen control’ over ‘governance’. Class antagonism had all but disappeared from mainstream commentary. Yet under AMLO it reemerged in Laclauian guise: as a confrontation between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ (fifis and machuchones as he mockingly calls them), the latter defined by their wealth, meritocratic self-delusion and disdain for working-class culture.

This verbal shift was matched by a stark process of party realignment. In the 2018 election, working-class votes were scattered across different parties, including the neoliberal bloc, while AMLO had an edge with middle-class professionals. At that time, 48% of voters with a college degree supported MORENA’s congressional candidates. In the 2021 mid-terms, by contrast, that figure fell to 33%. The inverse occurred at the bottom end of the educational attainment bracket: 42% of people with only elementary school education voted for MORENA in 2018, while 55% did so in 2021. Recent polling shows that those most supportive of AMLO are ordinary workers, the informal sector and peasants, while his most vociferous opponents are businesspeople and college-educated professionals. The ‘Brahmin Left’ phenomenon, which increasingly characterizes voting patterns in Europe and the US, has evidently been reversed in Mexico.

What explains this turnaround? The past four years have seen an avalanche of pro-worker reforms. The formal rights of domestic workers have been recognized for the first time, and precarious hiring practices have been eliminated. As a result, last year saw a 109% increase in reparto de utilidades: profit-sharing payments to which all workers are formally entitled, but which employers could previously circumvent by ‘outsourcing’ their hires. Under AMLO the process for forming new unions has been considerably simplified, statutory vacation days have doubled, and legislation is currently on the docket for a forty-hour work week (down from 48 hours). His administration has instituted the largest minimum-wage increase in more than forty years. Before the economic crisis that followed the Covid-19 shutdown, the poorest section of the population saw their income grow by 24%.

These shifting sands have resulted in the tentative re-emergence of the working class as a political actor. Perhaps the clearest evidence is the maquiladora workers’ uprising in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, where tens of thousands of employees launched the largest wild-cat strikes in the sector’s history. Energized by minimum-wage hikes, they demanded increases to other benefits, refusing to accept the employers’ attempts to stop bonuses from rising in line with salaries. The movement yielded new and successful unionizing efforts, and propelled one of its leaders, Susana Terrazas, to a congressional seat on MORENA’s ticket.

AMLO’s focus on social programmes has further strengthened this new class politics. Cash transfers now reach 65% more people than under previous governments. In 2021, despite the economic crisis, social spending as a percentage of total government expenditure reached its highest level in a decade. This welfare model operates under a wholly different logic to the previous neoliberal one, moving away from micro-targeting and means-testing towards a more universal approach. While cash transfers are still reserved for broad subgroups (people over 65, students, the disabled, and so on), conditions for accessing them are minimal. Welfare programmes have been enshrined in the Constitution, cementing their status as entitlements rather than ‘hand-outs’, rights rather than charity.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the parties displaced by MORENA have formed a coalition that openly proclaims its fealty to big business. Tycoons like Claudio X Gonzalez and Gustavo de Hoyos, former head of the employers’ confederation, have played a crucial role in financing the opposition and dictating its talking-points. As well as denouncing AMLO’s labour laws, the business sector has fiercely resisted his new approach to taxation. Although the government generally takes an orthodox line on macroeconomic issues, it has made a concerted effort to increase the state’s tax collection capacity, which has historically lagged behind OECD and LAC averages. Without altering the current tax structure, these enforcement measures have had a significant redistributive impact. According to official figures, the government increased tax collection from the richest in the country by more than 200%. (Hence the FT’s description of Raquel Buenrostro, AMLO’s former Secretary of Tax Administration and current Secretary of the Economy, as an ‘iron lady’ cracking the ‘whip on multinationals’ taxes’.)

At the same time, the loss of sections of the credentialled middle classes from AMLO’s support base reflects their symbolic demotion in the grand narrative of the nation, which the president has been constructing in his daily press conferences. Whereas under previous governments, a cabinet stocked with elite-university-trained figures signalled respectability and authority, appeals to ‘expertise’ are now seen as empty political marketing ploys. Ministers are praised for ‘being close to the people’, not for their titles and accolades.

AMLO has come in for criticism in socially liberal circles, predominantly composed of the credentialled classes, for his lack of interest in advancing the rights to gay marriage or abortion. He has refused to take a position on these issues, proposing instead that they be put to popular referendums; yet this is mostly a moot point now that there has been significant progress on such matters at the state level (interestingly, the most meaningful gains have been made in areas where MORENA controls the local legislature).

The president also stumbled in response to the combative feminist movement that emerged in 2019 to contest Mexico’s persistent femicides. From the outset, AMLO seemed more interested in ‘unmasking’ it as a campaign orchestrated by the right (which has indeed tried to highjack the uprising) than in listening to its demands. He has criticized the direct-action tactics of recent mobilizations and praised the work of female caregivers, in what many saw as an instance of male condescension. Although AMLO has stuck to a strict policy of gender parity in the selection of his cabinet, feminist detractors understandably see his presidency as insufficiently concerned with the country’s gendered hierarchies.

2. 

One of the main priorities of AMLO’s administration has been to reverse the hollowing out of the state. This process has taken various forms. First, there has been a push to recentralize government functions that had been outsourced to private and semi-private firms. The subcontracting of public services has been abolished, with the aim of reintegrating these into centralized state institutions. The government has also gotten rid of trusts that administered public monies in an opaque and highly discretionary manner, bringing such funds within the remit of government ministries.

This programme has been butressed by a series of state-led infrastructure ‘mega-projects’, the cancellation of private ones like the Texcoco airport, and the public expropriation of parts of the railways. AMLO’s flagship construction schemes include the Felipe Ángeles airport, the Maya Train around the Yucatán peninsula, a transportation corridor connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific Ocean, a rural road-building project and a major reforestation plan. Such undertakings are touted as means of creating employment through public works and rejecting the failed doctrine of laissez-faire.

Energy sovereignty has received special attention from AMLO’s government, which has tried to revamp the productive capacity of the state-owned petroleum company, PEMEX, and turn it into an engine of growth. It has also worked to curb, however modestly, the power of foreign mining companies. A new Hydrocarbons Law opens up the possibility of revoking permits to private firms that commit certain violations, while an Electricity Industry Law aims to increase the power generated by CFE, the state-owned electricity company, by limiting the requirement that it purchase electricity from the private sector. Both measures strive to enhance the relative position of the public sector and roll back the tide of neoliberal reform. The government recently reaffirmed this commitment with the purchase of thirteen power plants owned by energy company Iberdrola.

The prolonged period of state atrophy that preceded AMLO’s tenure has inevitably obstructed some of his most ambitious policies. The state has not yet shaken its dependency on private-public partnerships. It has been forced to use the administrative infrastructure of Banco Azteca, owned by the media mogul Ricardo Salinas Pliego, to implement its cash transfer programmes. While there is a plan for public banks to take over these responsibilities, the transition has been slow. AMLO’s signature infrastructure project, the Yucatán train, is owned by the state, but it will include public-private venture components. Previously outsourced government services like child care have been shut down with the intention of taking them in-house, but not all of them have been replaced, which means that people must use state vouchers to purchase essential services on the private market. Lacking real administrative capacity, AMLO has become increasingly reliant on the military to build and operate many of his infrastructure projects.

The need to recover the power of the state is also evident in the persistence of severe drug cartel-related violence – an issue that prompted AMLO to create a new National Guard, composed of members of the army (and additional new recruits), retrained to carry out police work. Critics claim this represents the militarization of public life. They also point to AMLO’s use of the repressive apparatus along the country’s southern border, where migrant caravans from Central America are often met with force. These actions are largely a capitulation to the US’s perennial demand (before and after Trump) for Mexico to stop the flow of asylum seekers. Like his predecessors, AMLO has accepted such constraints on national sovereignty, perhaps because it can be used as leverage in negotiations with his northern neighbour. He has devoted considerable energy to preventing caravans from reaching the US: offering Mexican work visas, calling for a ‘Marshall Plan for Central America’, and turning a blind eye as police engage in brutal pushbacks. His overall record in this area is dismal – although one important exception was his refusal to countenance Trump’s attempt to declare Mexico a ‘safe third country’, which would have prevented virtually all Central American refugees from seeking asylum in the US.

3.

In his inaugural speech as president in December 2018, AMLO asserted that ‘the distinctive feature of neoliberalism is corruption’. Neoliberalism, as he sees it, is not merely the contraction of the state but its instrumentalization in the service of the market. This process has transformed Mexico into a sort of reverse rentier economy, in which a network of private businesses siphoned money from public coffers through a series of legal and illegal mechanisms: privatization, outsourcing, the sale of overpriced services and the creation of ghost companies designed to take advantage of state contracts and tax evasion opportunities.

The notion of neoliberalism as a political economy of corruption has informed AMLO’s public spending objectives. The flagship concept of his government is a counterintuitive one: austeridad republicana, or ‘republican austerity’. In practice, this means the ongoing reorganization and recentralization of public spending with the aim of ‘cutting from the top’. Since Mexican neoliberalism forged extensive links between the state and private enterprise, austerity is seen as a means of breaking such connections – casting off parasitic companies whose profits rely on government largesse.

In the long term, strict adherence to austeridad republicana may make it difficult if not impossible to create a robust welfare system. Yet, for the moment, it has succeeded in relegitimizing the state after decades of cronyism and clientelism. Fears that it would result in mass layoffs have dissipated. In addition to large-scale spending on public works and cash transfers, sectors such as science, education and health have had their budgets increased, albeit minimally. The most urgent problem with AMLO’s fiscal restraint is that it undermines the case for far-reaching tax reform, as it implies that the left can realize its aims solely through more efficient spending: rebalancing the books rather than redistributing wealth. 

In theory, AMLO’s left critics could acknowledge his advances while mounting a sound critique of his gender politics, border policies and austerity programmes. Yet in practice, they have missed an opportunity to build a serious alternative to MORENA. So far, left-wing criticism of AMLO has been largely monopolized by the ‘progressive’ intelligentsia, which has in turn been absorbed by the elite-dominated opposition bloc. The autonomist movement, meanwhile, remains uninterested in capturing state power. It abandoned this terrain long ago and focused instead on opposing developmentalist projects, with little to show for it.  

Any assessment of AMLO and MORENA must recognize the difficulties of restarting a welfare state with a dilapidated administrative apparatus and reinvigorating a working class that has been all but defeated as a collective agent. The current administration is, of course, afflicted by many more uncertainties and contradictions beyond the scope of this brief survey. How viable is neo-developmentalism in the context of climate crisis? Can progressive taxation succeed in the midst of stagnant growth? How rapidly can a country wean itself off foreign investment? These are questions for the left worldwide. Whatever the shortcomings of AMLO’s answers, his attempt to break with neoliberalism cannot easily be dismissed.

Read on: Al Giordano, ‘Mexico’s Presidential Swindle’, NLR 41.

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At Cannes

The 21Th Cannes Film Festival 1968: The Cessation Of The Festival. Le 21ème Festival de CANNES 1968 s'arrête. De nombreux cinéastes décrètent l'interruption du festival et occupent la salle : parmi les nombreuses personnes assises, au premier rang en partant de la droite, François TRUFFAUT, Claude BERRI et derrière lui, une main devant la bouche, Claude LELOUCH. (Photo by Jack Garofalo/Paris Match via Getty Images)

For journalists, the process of accessing the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes begins months before the first film. The application, designed to weed out all but the most persistent, requires the submission of an extensive dossier (which must include: the circulation – print and digital – and schedule of your publication; a tally of its various social media followings; a signed letter from your editor attesting to your employment and describing the nature of your commission; examples of your latest film criticism – three pieces minimum; a long form of personal details; scans of photographic ID and any professional passes you might hold, and a passport-style headshot). Accreditation acquired (after several weeks’ wait) and badge collected (following a lengthy early-morning queue that winds around the yacht bays of the vieux port), there is still the hurdle of security. A snaking line of white barriers is guarded by bronzed contractors dressed in the kind of smart, pinching uniform usually worn by air hostesses who will, at gated intervals, demand to scan your badge’s QR code, inspect the PDF of a film ticket, check your bag, marshal you through a full-body scanner, pat you down and finally, wave you inside the Riviera’s ziggurat temple of cinema.

From here, make your way to the fourth floor; to the single elevator (located between the Salon des Ambassadeurs and the Terrasse des Journalistes) that links the upper levels to the basement, its doors half obscured by a wilting palm. Descend to level -2, then follow a pathway outlined in chipped green paint, past the stock rooms in which thousands of rolls of toilet paper are being unloaded from large trolleys onto smaller ones, through the vending machine hall which seems to have no onward exit but, beyond the battered armchairs in its far right-hand corner, opens onto a U-bend corridor that spits you into a fluorescent dining room ranged with Formica tables and chairs and a wall-length buffet counter of hot plates and salads. The workers’ canteen is the quietest room for miles. On the final day of the festival as banners are cut from the balconies and white sheets are thrown across the conference tables, only the low thrum of fridges and the occasional chatter between colleagues break the silence. Everyone is exhausted, visibly far too tired to disturb with requests for comment; it is time, you realise – at four o’clock in the afternoon on the last Saturday in May – to go home.

***

The seventy-sixth iteration of the event known simply as ‘Cannes’ was a twenty-million-euro festival of retirement, the long-rumoured death of cinema pre-empted by a fortnight of curtain calls for the biggest stars and directors of the last half century. Will Scorsese actually, as he has intimated, cease production after his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon? And Tarantino – a guest of honour this year – after his? At eighty-six, Ken Loach, most people agreed, has earned his pension. Unusually for the entertainment industry, at Cannes, which has long run on the fumes of cinematic heritage (the honorary president in 1939 was Louis Lumière), old age is something of an advantage. Crowds packed the Salle Buñuel to hear Jane Fonda, eighty-five, recount her memories of anti-Vietnam activism, the technical trials of shooting flight scenes in Barbarella, and details of co-starring with Robert Redford (‘not a kisser’) and Alain Delon (‘a kisser’). Her introduction to the final evening’s award ceremony was a brazen synopsis of the two major functions of the fortnight as a whole: insistence on the rude health of the seventh art as a major entertainment industry – ‘I’m sure that this festival has made you feel renewed hope for the future of cinema’ – and an opportunity nonpareil for the marketing of consumer brands – ‘I’m so proud of L’Oréal!’ Accepting the Palme d’Or for Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet ruffled feathers by ascribing a social purpose to filmmaking, while also indicating an ancillary function of the festival – as a demonstration of the singularity of French culture: ‘This year the country has experienced a historic contestation… and cinema is no exception. The marketisation of culture, defended by the neoliberal government, is destroying French cultural exceptionalism.’

Triet’s speech was a rare moment in which the reality of French social and political life threatened to puncture Cannes’ global bubble. The contestation Triet signalled? Ongoing protests against the retirement reforms forced into law by Macron and Borne earlier this spring and the brutal repression of protesters by the country’s police forces. On the central Sunday of the festival a crowd of around two hundred – mostly in their sixties – answered the call of the CGT to assemble beside a roundabout on the Boulevard Sadi Carnot to demand the repeal of the retirement reform, and to build enthusiasm for a national day of action on 6 June. Earlier in the week, the union had staged an illegal protest outside the Ritz Carlton highlighting the plummeting working conditions of the hotel staff. Three days later, CGT members cut the gas supply to the bustling restaurants along the seafront during the midday service, as part of an action whose aim was to target ‘symbols of capitalism’ such as ‘the hotels and restaurants of the Croisette’, ‘the Cannes police station’ and the ‘Palais des Festivals’.

Beyond the employment conditions in the service economy around the festival, did anything link Cannes to the demands of the demonstration, I asked a protester in her early sixties, a hospital worker three years retired, who wished to remain anonymous: ‘Down there,’ she pointed towards the Palais, ‘you see the power of the rich. They’re against the workers who demand good salaries, affordable food, the right to protest in the streets. The government does everything for the rich and nothing for the rest of us. We’re already cutting back on water, electricity, food – soon there’ll be nothing left to cut back on.’ Stéphane, a municipal worker in his late fifties, emphasised the role of the CGT in the creation of the festival. ‘There’s a rich history that links Cannes and the union’, he stressed. Animated by the desire to challenge the fascist film competition in Venice’s La Mostra, the efforts of CGT members were integral to the construction of the infrastructure in 1939 (the inaugural event was delayed to 1946 by the outbreak of war); the union remains part of the organising committee and runs its own parallel film screenings each year. Given the scale and force of the government’s reaction, what were the chances of success for the next wave of demonstrations, I asked a couple who were nearing retirement from the postal service: ‘I don’t think it will work, but we have to keep it up anyway. We want to try and show people elsewhere in the world that things don’t have to be like this.’

***

That Cannes has become a metonym for a bonanza of industry trading and red carpet photocalls only does so much to distract from the fact that it takes place in a city also called Cannes. This is a deeply strange place, devoid of the usual enjoyments associated with spending time in France – the restaurants are terrible and expensive, the beaches segmented into private strips, then paved over with temporary parquet bedimmed by canopies bearing the idents of food and drink companies: the Magnum Dipping Bar, the Campari Pier, the Nespresso Plage Californian Dream Pop-Up. Every night, these tents hold ‘parties’ that no one on the guestlist wants to attend (the dominant attitude among festival-goers is that there is always a better party than the one to which you’ve been invited, a sense that an imminent call or text will finally get you into the room that matters), while those without tickets stand outside peering past the bouncers at an empty strobe-lit dancefloor.

The coastline of Cannes is often compared to that of Southern California – an analogy no doubt prompted by the reference points of the Angeleno encampment that sets up for two weeks every May – but, demographically speaking, it is surely closer to Florida. On my first night, over dinner in a tourist-trap Italian restaurant with two critics, a raisin-faced Dutchman leaned over from his table to tell me he’d retired here after a career in ‘dance’ (later, a spot of light Googling revealed he had hosted a ballroom competition on Flemish TV before briefly taking over a three-star hotel on the edge of town – an acquisition his Wikipedia page described as ‘not without complications’). Keen to inform us that he had known Weinstein in his heyday, and once, at a festival soirée, seen Iman model entirely nude but for the ‘world’s largest diamond’, he was even keener to try and rent us his retirement yacht for next year – ‘why buy a house in Holland when you can have a boat on the Med?’ In the haunted atrium of the Gray D’Albion mall, a piece of prime real estate that links the beaches to the shopping hub of the rue d’Antibes, only a handful of businesses were occupied and open: a ‘luxury’ realtors whose windows were filled with English-language listings for bungalow villas in the adjoining commune of Mougins (in the interwar period a hub of poets and painters, now a sought-after third-age neighbourhood in the hills above Cannes); an interior design store selling fish mosaics and curlicued mirrors; and a weapon shop where a toy katana and a BB gun could be had for roughly the same price as a salade au chevre and half a dozen oysters at one of la Croisette’s extortionate seafront brasseries. All, in other words, that the adventurous but security-minded pensioner might need to set up and defend their last investment.

***

The purpose of Cannes – the festival – is not to watch films but to sell them. The organisation works on three levels: market, carpet and press. Arranged here in order of importance they also service one another’s needs: sales of films by agents to distributors are driven by the glamour of the associated premieres; the press, in the form of reviews, provides part of the marketing for the titles whose rights are mortgaged against anticipated ticket sales, while the chance to interview actors and directors – as well as to see advance screenings of the year’s upcoming titles – brings journalists to the Palais in person. The activities of the ‘marché’ dominate, the trade press covering breathlessly the price fetched by territory rights and distribution partnerships in their daily bulletins (large-print magazines with the glossed feel of travel brochures and for whose back pages underemployed critics moonlight). This year, an atmosphere of panic buying predominated, prompted by the Hollywood shutdown enforced by the Writers Guild of America strike and the threat of concurrent action over the summer by directors and other industry workers. ‘It’s not a question of money, since we don’t pay until the film delivers’, one distributor told the Hollywood Reporter, ‘but if everything shuts down, eventually we’re going to run out of movies.’

Common to virtually all cultural institutions, and no less true of Cannes, is the sentiment that it used to be better. Two peaks are evoked by seasoned regulars, one beyond most attendees’ memories – the 1960s, when it is said you could walk onto the beach and see Kirk Douglas braiding Brigitte Bardot’s hair – and the other squarely within it – the 1990s, when fortunes were made by film execs who flew in from LA, London and New York to cut deals and other substances. The long shadow of this latter decade still stretches over the industry side of the festival today. Cannes and the kind of cinema it typically represents – high-profile arthouse filmmaking by star directors with star actors vying for awards (though not as brazenly, most people seemed to believe, as in Venice) – have not recovered from the spectacular crash that ended the Weinstein era. If MeToo was once more in the spotlight thanks to the stunt selection of Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry as the festival’s opening film, it is rather the diminution of Miramax-style mega-company filmmaking that has most unsettled the business of cinema. Streaming service deals, not distribution sales, now account for the biggest payments of the fortnight – this year’s record was the purchase of North American rights to Todd Haynes’s May December by Netflix for $11 million. Killers of the Flower Moon offers an interesting example of the uneasy but occasionally reciprocal relation between the new titans of cinematic industry and the old distributor model: though it was made by and for AppleTV, by partnering with Paramount as a theatrical distributor, Apple gained access to Cannes as a marketing coup; in return, Cannes got the most famous director in the world premiering in the Salle Lumière. The streamers, it is clear, will inherit Le Palais – should they want it.

‘The film industry is not what it used to be’, Sam Brain, a freelance screenwriter and producer confirmed. ‘People don’t go to the cinema anymore, the cinema is really expensive – in part because people aren’t going – and so the glamour seems faded because the stakes aren’t as high. All the focus is on TV, because that’s where there’s more financial opportunity and creative space. The power in the industry is no longer in the international pre-sale market that Cannes functions to serve’. The amount of energy expended during the festival on denying and fighting this entropy is enormous and can even be detected in the form of the films themselves, as the critic Jonathan Romney, who has been attending since 1992, explained. ‘Cannes works under the assumption that everything is as it always has been: we must protect the sacred flame of cinema. The business rolls on, the stars turn up on the red carpet. But there’s a conservatism that’s emerged this year. Many of the films, even very good ones, in competition have been extremely classical. Kaurismäki for instance has made a wonderful film but it is the Kaurismäki film’. Such predictability, plausibly a sign of craft refinement among competition directors, can also be read as a further symptom of the festival’s endemic stagnation. ‘Cannes is like North Korea’, an editor and programmer for a section of this year’s festival told me over paper cups of wine at Le Petit Majestic, the bar descended on by critics after every evening’s final press screening. ‘Once hired, everyone stays in the same post for twenty years. They complain about it of course, but very quietly.’

What role, then, for the critic at this trade fair? For Yal Sadat, a writer at Cahiers du Cinéma, the end of cinema-going as a mass leisure activity, combined with the cultural shift to a preference for TikTok-length videos as entertainment, has produced a parallel death-spiral within film criticism. ‘The very idea of cinema has weakened, because of this economic problem caused by lack of desire for films, and for watching films in theatres. People are less interested in auteur cinema, and producers are no longer interested in criticism of their films.’ Numbers of tickets sold, scale of theatrical release, online views – these are what count now for producers, not critics’ reviews. At the same time, Sadat noted, there are still a few directors and producers for whom a good write-up in Cahiers is important. Even if the journal’s circulation is declining, its ‘seal of approval’ still counts. But auteur cinema, or an interest in cinema as an artform, is more and more a niche pursuit, the lifestyle choice of a select few, and further than ever from the cultural life of the many: ‘If cinema is dead, paradoxically, cinephilia is still alive and well.’

Viewing the films at Cannes, as a critic, is often surprisingly difficult. The ticketing system has its own hierarchy baked into it – a 7am online release slot is stratified by badge colour, with more tickets available to those at the top. The move to a booking website – as opposed to regular daily press shows for all competition films – is rumoured to have been triggered by a tantrum thrown by Sean Penn when (bad) reviews of one of his films were published after the afternoon press screening but before the glitzier evening slot. Critics were in two minds whether this year’s process was an improvement on the last, when the website would repeatedly fail but, if functional, tickets would at least be available to book. This year, waking up at 6:55am (CET) might only result in one ticket for four days’ hence – and rarely the one of your choice. If the marché du film is where the financial activity takes place, a smaller barter economy exists among the press, as those with higher-ranking badges trade tickets with the correspondents (yours truly) who lack film-world status.

And the movies themselves? Look beyond the death throes of criticism, the immiseration of industry workers, the jewel and ice cream experience pavilions that encircle the Palais, and it is still possible to spend days watching exceptional cinema at Cannes. Standouts of this year’s competition were Hung Tran Anh’s exquisite paean to gastronomic art and pleasure, The Pot-au-Feu, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s novelistic treatment of a school teacher’s midlife crisis, About Dry Grasses, while short films by Wang Bing and Pedro Costa played in a double bill before the lunch hour. (Stinkers included Loach’s trite post-Brexit parable, The Old Oak, Nani Moretti’s humourless self-tribute, A Brighter Tomorrow, Marco Bellochio’s hysterical melodrama, Rapito, and Karim Aïnouz’s embarrassing ‘lean-in’ treatment of the life of Catherine Parr, Firebrand.) An unexpected highlight, as part of this year’s superlative Quinzaine des Cinéastes programme, was the Georgian film Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, the second full-length feature by young director Elene Naveriani. It tells the story of Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), a single woman approaching menopause in a mountain village, stigmatised for her decision to live unmarried and alone. As other women boast of the feats of their children, a friend tries to warn Etero that the future of her shop is threatened by plans to construct a large shopping centre nearby. ‘Then I will retire’, she answers, a look of relief spreading across her face.

Read on: Julia Hertäg, ‘Germany’s Counter-Cinemas’, NLR 135.