Month: January 2024

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Marx or Jefferson?

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

In contrast to Du Bois, most European Marxists have been wary of calling for the redistribution of large landed estates, on account of the political and economic consequences of establishing a small holding peasantry. Dividing up land can be both politically liberatory and economically regressive, as the French Revolution demonstrated most clearly. Remember too that Gramsci’s The Southern Question (1926), a text which bears a resemblance to Black Reconstruction, was written partially as a defence against the accusation that the nascent Italian communist party demanded the breakup of the southern latifundia.

It may be, after all, that Du Bois is best understood neither as a theorist of intersectionality avant la lettre, nor as a Marxist, but rather as a radical and consistent democrat. His ideal political subject was the independent family farmer, able to withdraw from labour and commodity markets to some extent, or at least to engage with them on favourable and independent terms. In this Du Bois is a deeply American thinker whose critique of capitalism is more republican than socialist. For Du Bois’s concern was not really the failure of a socialist revolution, but rather the missed opportunity of a Jeffersonian Arcadia.

Read On: John-Baptiste Oduor, ‘Segregations Sequiturs’, NLR 136.

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Chaos in Ecuador

In recent years, the surging violence in Ecuador has made international headlines. Initially, coverage centred on frequent prison riots and massacres, which have claimed four hundred lives since 2021. Then, as the turmoil spread beyond the penitentiary system, the focus shifted to gang shootings and executions. Last April, video footage of an attack in the coastal city of Esmeraldas, showing a speed boat full of armed men shooting people on the docks, went viral. The following summer, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated and his alleged hitmen were murdered in custody. Now the country is reeling from a 24-hour rampage by drug gangs that culminated in a live, on-air hostage-taking on a TV news set. The incident prompted the newly inaugurated president Daniel Noboa to announce that the country was facing an ‘internal armed conflict’: constitutional parlance for a declaration of war, which essentially allows the military to take over from the police. Ecuador wasn’t always this cliche of a narco-state. It was once hailed as an ‘island of peace’, a security success story. What explains its spiral into chaos?

When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, the national murder rate was 15.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. When he left office office ten years later, it had fallen to 5.8, one of the lowest in Latin America. Several policies lay behind this success. There were, undoubtedly, some elements of a traditional law-and-order approach. The police force grew by 40% and many of its personnel were replaced, partly as a result of a 2010 police mutiny in which the president was held hostage for a day. There were significant wage hikes – the salary of rank-and-file officers was tripled – as well as investment in training and equipment that were often sorely lacking. The policing doctrine was also reformed, with the government driving decentralization and a smaller-scale, neighbourhood approach. Such initiatives played a major role in reducing crime rates.

This was accompanied by broader institutional change: most notably the creation of a Coordinating Security Ministry which oversaw security policy and enabled collaboration between different state agencies, in an attempt to diminish rivalries between branches of the military, police and intelligence services. Correa’s government also invested in a widely celebrated 911 emergency response system, which established call centres in seventeen locations by 2015. The state was, in short, making itself present on its territory: an exercise in Weberian sovereignty unlike anything that had come before. 

Perhaps more importantly, the Correa administration implemented a series of ambitious social policies – striving, for instance, to rehabilitate and reintegrate members of Ecuador’s prominent urban gangs. It approached the Latin Kings and Queens, Ñetas and Masters of the Street in an attempt to convince them to ditch crime and enrol in social and educational schemes. The government recognized that these organizations had not yet been inserted into the structures of the larger Mexican-run cartels, and that it could therefore stop the problem from festering. Correa also decriminalized the possession of small quantities of narcotics, as part of a general shift towards treating drug consumption as a public health issue. The aim was to prevent overcrowding in the prison system and allow the police to focus on criminal organizations.

Beyond that, the administration oversaw a marked improvement in living conditions. It doubled social spending, with significant increases for health and education, plus robust welfare programmes and a higher minimum wage. It audited the public finances to suspend or restructure illegitimate debts, renegotiated the country’s oil contracts, and improved tax collection from $5bn in 2007 to $13bn in 2017. By the end of Correa’s tenure, poverty had been reduced by 41.6% and inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, had fallen by 16.7%. Ecuador was making the kind of social progress that renders drug cartels obsolete. 

The concrete effects of Correa’s policies belie the narrative, pedalled by the Ecuadorean establishment, that his ‘soft-on-crime’ tactics are to blame for the current security collapse. Media pundits often suggest that if Ecuador was peaceful under Correa, this was because his government had made a secret pact with the narcos. But this argument is fanciful. The gangs would only have accepted such a deal were they able to increase their drug traffic. Yet even the US Drug Enforcement Agency celebrated ‘the excellent results obtained by the anti-narcotics police’ under Correa, which significantly disrupted the trade. Since he left office, by contrast, drug exports have risen to unprecedented levels.

It was in 2017, under the presidency of Lenín Moreno, that the situation began to unravel. Having styled himself as a continuity candidate, once in office Moreno reversed most of his predecessor’s policies. Under the supervision of the IMF – which extended Ecuador a credit line in 2019, on the condition of a so-called ‘reform program aimed at modernising the economy’ – the social state was rolled back, budgets were slashed and thousands were laid off. The security sector was not spared. The prison system saw its budget cut by 30%, and several ministries, including the Coordinating Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, were closed. The Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the police, was dissolved in a merger, while the main intelligence agency was shut down and its activities handed over to a new outfit run by retired military officers. The White House cheered from the sidelines, applauding Moreno’s ‘transition away from “21st century socialism” to a democratic society focused on the defense of basic rights and a free market economy’.

The outcome was catastrophic. Poverty increased almost 17% by 2019. Once the pandemic hit, there was an upsurge of unemployment and informal work, along with crime and drug trafficking. Gangs used the shutdown to consolidate their control over territory and cultivate ties with impoverished sectors of the population. These internal problems coincided with growing external ones. Following the 2016 Colombian peace process, Colombian drug traffickers began to move their product across the southern border and gained access to Ecuador’s Pacific ports, turning the country into a key transit point for drugs en route to the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Of course, we can only speculate as to how a different government would have dealt with these incursions. But it is clear that, rather than confronting a state with functional infrastructure and institutions, the cartels merely encountered Moreno’s neoliberal vacuum – and found it easy to fill. 

The government of Guillermo Lasso, which came to power in 2021, pushed ahead with the same IMF-supervised austerity and deregulation programme. His administration was weak – his party holding less than 10% of seats in the National Assembly – and marred by corruption. It did not take long for its approval ratings to reach a record low. This resulted in a deficit of leadership and legitimacy that constrained the state’s capacity to fight the crime syndicates, which began to flourish like never before. Still, the government retained the unflinching support of President Biden, who ignored frequent letters from Congressmen warning him about Lasso’s corruption and calling for a DOJ investigation into his hidden assets in the US. Allegations eventually surfaced that Danilo Carrera, Lasso’s brother-in-law and closest business collaborator, was linked to the ‘Albanian Mafia’ drug ring. Soon after, the key witness in the investigation was murdered, and Lasso’s scandal-ridden presidency began to fall apart. In May 2023, a few days before his likely impeachment by the National Assembly, he called new elections and relegated himself to the role of lame-duck president.

Violence meanwhile continued to mount. Prison massacres became commonplace and homicide rates climbed to an astonishing 45 per 100,000, an eight-fold increase since 2017. If Daniel Noboa, the centre-right businessman elected last October, is able to make even modest improvements in the security situation, he stands a chance of re-election when the country returns to the polls next year. His political prospects depend on convincing Ecuadorians that he is the man to defeat the cartels. So far he has tried to project toughness by reversing Correa’s decriminalization laws. He has also announced the construction of ‘maximum prisons’, contracted with an Israeli company, as well as ‘prison barges’ intended to conjure up images of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. But aside from this, little is known about the specifics of his security plan. His ‘war’ on the gangs will be extremely costly, and the current economic outlook is not favourable. Though the incumbent benefits from relatively high crude oil prices – Ecuador’s main export – he is desperate to secure other sources of funding for his offensive. Judging from the recent decision to increase VAT from 12% to 15%, this could mean further attempts to squeeze the public.

This precarious situation makes the Noboa government highly dependent on the US. Bilateral security ties had already been strengthened over the last five years, particularly under Lasso. In October 2023, a cooperation agreement opened the door for an American military presence in Ecuador, which would be forced to relinquish some of the basic tenets of its sovereignty and grant full immunity to US personnel. (Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that, since the deal only involves ‘cooperation’ as opposed to a formal ‘alliance’, it does not require legislative authorisation.) This fits into a wider trend. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has used the War on Drugs as a tool to maintain its foothold in the Western Hemisphere and exert its influence over the security apparatus of Latin American states. Having charted a nonconformist course under Correa, Ecuador is now eager to signal its compliance with the hegemon. Another sign of this reorientation is the growing security partnership with Israel, which has managed to coax Ecuador – along with a number of other states in the Global South – into complicity with its expansionist project. As Palestinians are slaughtered in their tens of thousands, Noboa bleats that ‘we’re not going to condemn Israel’s actions nor are we going to take the position Brazil and Colombia did’.

The risk is that the president will now try to assuage public anger over rising crime with a host of repressive and reactionary measures, whose primary casualties will be ordinary Ecuadorians – in particular the impoverished youth of the urban peripheries. We have already seen how, in Colombia, security forces who are under pressure to deliver can sometimes be more concerned with the headcount, or even the bodycount, than with the accuracy of the targets. A renewed crackdown on crime, absent any social programme, could lead to mass arrests, incarcerations and even killings based on little evidence. Another potential threat is the appearance, as in the 1980s, of death squads often acting in cahoots with security forces. Ecuador is swiftly becoming the new frontline of the failed US War on Drugs. It may take years or even decades for the country to rebuild a state that can guarantee peace and security for its people.

Read on: Rafael Correa, ‘Ecuador’s Path’, NLR 77.

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Vague Terrain

The Argentinian director Eduardo Williams’s first short, Tan Atentos (2011), appears in English filmographies as an alarming whisper, Beware. The Spanish title has its ambiguities: tan could mean ‘so’, acting as an intensifier (‘very attentive’), or ‘as’, indicating qualification or comparison (‘as attentive as that’, ‘attentive to this degree’). ‘Beware’ doesn’t resolve this ambiguity, and we should take the hint – the realm we’re entering will not provide clear answers – and maybe the warning, too. Many of Williams’s titles have this cryptic quality, as though missing a coordinate: Could See a Puma (Pude Ver Un Puma, 2011), That I’m Falling? (Que je tombe tout les temps?, 2013, I Forgot! (Tôi quên rồi!, 2014). Like their titles, much of these films’ dialogue sounds interrupted, fragmentary, half-sensical. Could See a Puma opens with a shot of a daytime crescent moon and a voiceover caught mid-sentence: ‘and believe it static and harmless as decoration’. Williams’s use of broken dialogue is destabilizing; his films can make you wonder if you’re paying enough attention, or the right kind.

The Human Surge 3 (2023) is Williams’s second feature, following 2016’s The Human Surge. The mischievous omission of volume two has the disconcerting effect of a missed stair. Like Williams’s shorts, they follow groups of young people as they hang out, work, chat and listlessly slink around disparate international locations which, like the scenes that play out in them, feel diffuse and unremarkable – under-tended public parks, train station waiting rooms, shared bedrooms, parking lots, deserted markets, drab beaches. ‘Following’ really is the operative word for what Williams’s camera does, sometimes keeping pace with his characters, sometimes falling behind, occasionally becoming distracted and wandering off.

The Human Surge begins by tracking a young Argentinian man called Exe around the suburbs of Buenos Aires as he visits friends and seeming strangers, works at a supermarket, and witnesses a group of men performing sex acts for a webcam. In a convenience store, the camera takes a languid interest in another shopper, slopes home after her, then follows her housemate into a dark room where a laptop is running a video chat with a group of men in Mozambique also trying to make money from half-hearted cybersex. Seeming to move through the laptop screen, the camera then follows these men out into Maputo, where they, too, wander around, seeing friends and looking for work. When one pisses on an anthill, the camera follows the stream, delving among the earth and insects before emerging in the Philippines, where a third set of characters walk through the jungle, swim and converse enigmatically: telling second-hand anecdotes about getting lost and being followed, or swapping arcane facts (such as the gigabyte weights of various animals’ genomes). Finally, we arrive at a factory that produces tablet computers, and the shots become long and static. It’s a film about young adults – underemployed, culturally peripheral – searching for connection and some kind of meaningful interface with the world, a theme the film puns on (the characters are always looking for signal, wifi, or somewhere to charge their phone).

Blending arthouse, documentary and slow cinema styles, Williams’s films are hybrid works that one could imagine being screened in a gallery as much as a cinema; like their characters, they seem resistant to settling. Born in 1987, Williams studied film proper rather than fine art – first at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, then under Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes in France – and there is a cinematic scale to his features, in tension with their lack of narrative. Watching his films you feel always on the cusp of perceiving some clearer shape, a story about to announce itself. Instead there are repeated motifs, images, phrases and scenarios: an accumulation of associations. The circumstances of the characters are never quite concretised. We gather that they struggle to make money – they live in shared, down-at-heel homes – but their situations do not seem desperate. They seem disaffected rather than alienated, rudderless not ground down. They exist in interstices – between major cities, jobs, stages of life, even between classes or social identities.

The Human Surge 3 is also set in three distant countries – Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Peru – and depicts groups of young friends walking, swimming, sleeping, sitting at empty cafés, and chatting disjointedly about their dreams and personal theories about life and the world. The conversations are not only hard to follow because they are fragmentary but because they take place in two or more languages. It’s not clear the characters can always understand one another. A viewer would need to speak Sinhala, Tamil, Mandarin, English and Spanish to do without the subtitles. Williams has spoken of his attraction to languages he can’t understand. Travelling abroad for the first time, he was entranced by the experience of hearing language as sound, and it is one he seeks to replicate in his films.

Rather than moving through settings consecutively as in the first film, The Human Surge 3 interweaves them. The locations are often hard to distinguish from each other: Williams continues to favour terrains vagues which might only be identified as Peru by a road sign, or as southeast Asia by a stall serving oyster soup. Augmenting this confusion, the protagonists begin to show up in other countries – inexplicably appearing on the other side of the world. This is one way that the film leans more towards science fiction, or even abstraction, than its predecessor. On several occasions, characters mention having dreamed of each other, and the film seems to partake of a dream’s hermetic, associative logic. In place of the previous film’s pricklier, restless energy is a sense of languorous contentment; in place of the machismo, a mixed, gender-fluid cast; in place of the bored, mercenary sex, tender, chaste flirtation. The restless search for connection has become a more melancholy search for home: a refrain of the film is ‘How do I go home?’, to which the enigmatic reply is a variation of ‘That’s complicated from here’. In the final scene at the summit of a Peruvian mountain, as one character looks at the view and wonders ‘Is that our home?’, another walks forward, picks up the camera, and rolls it back down the path, sending the image into a kaleidoscopic tailspin of figurative abstraction. Eventually the camera gets stuck in some undergrowth and the film ends.

Although his films have an otherworldly atmosphere, Williams uses non-professional actors and real settings. Fairly often, a passer-by will look right into the lens. There are hints that the latest film is set in sometime in the near-future; there are several references to a warmer climate – water being too hot to swim in, computers needing to be stored in the fridge. Many of Williams’s characters live in fragile, ephemeral dwellings – in thin-walled huts perched on the edge of water, or in shacks dotted around agricultural land, always overpopulated – and his films fluctuate between seeming like dreamy fairytales and frank portraits of precarity. There are allusions to Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force and the disappearances with which it is associated (a secondary character’s son is taken away). He could even be regarded as a practitioner of magical realism – of the kind Gabriel Garcia Marquez produced, with One Hundred Days of Solitude,in response to the massacre of striking banana plantation workers in Colombia and the terribly surreal way their deaths were institutionally forgotten.

As their drifting between countries emphasizes, Williams’s characters live in a globalised world where far-removed locations appear increasingly interconnected and homogenised, parts of a vast, elusive whole. The countries in The Human Surge are implicitly linked by the history of imperialism originating in the Iberian Peninsula. Distant as they are, there are echoes between the Argentinian Spanish, Mozambiquan Portuguese and Spanish-flecked Visayan. In the new film, the settings lack this shared historical thread but are relatively close latitudinally: their similar stormy equatorial weather and light makes it easier to confuse them. The anthropologist Anna Tsing has drawn attention to what she calls sites of ‘friction’ in the globalised world: the overlooked places where surreal, violent, often unconscionable activity takes place to facilitate the outwardly seamless flow of global capitalism. Williams is similarly concerned with the world’s less celebrated corners, away from capitals and trade centres. But the phenomenon he tracks is less friction than lassitude: places where the momentum of trade and empire has left absence and listlessness in its wake.

Though Williams’s is in this respect a global cinema, his filmmaking style is also appreciably Argentinian. His improvisatory, deadpan approach and unglamorous though occasionally beautiful suburban locations recall films like Martin Rejtman’s Rapado (1992),about a teenager wandering Buenos Aires in search of a stolen motorbike, or Alejo Moguillansky’s Castro (2009), whose protagonist is mysteriously chased through the city, mostly via its sprawling bus routes. Both films are about restless, uncertain men living in the prolonged aftermath of a military dictatorship, their country seeming alternately dismal, surreal, boring and full of dazzling possibility.

Williams’s interior scenes evoke another pivotal work of Argentinian cinema: Lucrecia Martel’s sultry debut La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), set in a holiday home in the north of the country belonging to an extended family whose relationships to one another – like those between Williams’s protagonists – are not entirely clear. Stunned by heat and alcohol, they spend much of the time lounging around. La Ciénaga memorably includes one of the least tempting swimming pools in cinema – opaque, still, fetid, green. ‘I ​think there are a lot of similarities in perception – between being in a pool and being in the world’, Martel has observed. ‘We usually forget that we are immersed in air.’ In The Human Surge, water tends to come up to about knee-height: Argentinian kids wade through flooded streets or the warm brown shallows of the Rio del Plata; Filipino families lie back in a pool below a waterfall in the jungle, talking about getting lost. In The Human Surge 3, characters are often up to their necks in water, but the film’s high-altitude climax on the mountain also heightens our awareness of air as a physical element. We can hear characters’ audibly laboured breathing in the thinner atmosphere, and at one point a character briefly takes flight, drawing our gaze up into the grey-blue expanse across the top of the frame.

As his films’ emphasis on water, air, the sound of language and digital technology suggests, Williams is concerned with how our experience of the world is mediated, and with our experience of that mediation. This is embodied in each film’s medium itself, or rather mediums. In The Human Surge Williams used a different camera for each country, with disorienting effects: Super 16mm film for Buenos Aires, which catches daylight in warm magenta tones but plunges interiors into fuzzy grey darkness; digital video shot on a tiny handheld camera in Maputo (then re-filmed on Super 16 from the laptop screen); and bright, brittle high-resolution digital video for the climactic Philippines section.

The medium of The Human Surge 3 is perhaps its most distinctive feature. Williams shot on a 360-degree camera whose footage he then edited into standard cinema frames by navigating it with a VR headset. The resulting image, stitched together digitally, is distended at its edges and in a few striking moments distorts the characters’ faces where they cross the image’s seams. The frame lilts right and left at its edges as the camera steps forward in pursuit of its subjects; whereas in the first film passers-by peered curiously into the camera, here they double-take, taking in a camera set-up that must have looked eccentrically elaborate, alien. At the heart of The Human Surge 3 is a long, enthralling sequence that moves between people swimming in murky water – an element, like the film itself, in which things are related, reciprocal, subject to pressures and freedoms, momentum and tension. Williams’s cinema makes us acutely aware (beware) of the presence of the filmmaker and of the fact we are watching a film: the looks into camera, the ungainly glitches, the 360-view and its occasional warping effect are like cold currents passing near the surface, or weeds brushing against your foot.

I first watched The Human Surge in 2017 on my wheezing old Macbook, the grime on its screen difficult to distinguish from the grain of the film stock, the intended quality of the sound hard to discern with the compression of the built-in speakers. I was nodding off by the anthill scene and woke up to the bright lights and repeating, computerised voices of the finale at the factory, over which the credits started rolling. Williams’s films encourage, if not sleep itself, then the ebbing and pooling of attention. While other films might seek to control our attention, Williams’s have a more insouciant grip on it, by turns looser and rougher. They catch it with a curious line or a vivid image, then invite it to drift with spells of inscrutable dialogue or shots that linger for twenty minutes. To recall one of his films is to remember a peculiarly porous attentive state – what you saw mingled with the circumstances of watching and the life around it. Trying to identify what exactly is compelling about The Human Surge or its wrong-footing sequel is like looking for the omitted pronoun in Could See a Puma. But something about the way the films cohere proves just as hard to forget.

Read on: Edgardo Cozarinsky, ‘Letter from Buenos Aires’, NLR 26.

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The Baluchistan Imbroglio

The level of ignorance in Western coverage of the border clashes between Iran and Pakistan should come as no surprise. Nor should the State Department declaration that Pakistan’s response was ‘proportionate’ – making for queasy comparisons with the ongoing mass slaughter being perpetrated by another US funded and armed entity not too far away. To get a clear picture of the latest strikes – Iran targeted the base of an armed-separatist group, the Jaish al-Adl, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan on Tuesday; two days later, Pakistan unleashed a drone attack against Baluchi-militant ‘terrorist hideouts’ on the Iranian side of the border – we need to sweep away their web of lies and mystifications.

Baluchistan is a mountainous region bifurcated by the Pakistan-Iran border, just as Pakhtun lands are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Baluch nationalists have long resented the often brutal control exercised by the Iranian and Pakistani governments. Historically, though, whereas the Baluch leaders in Iran were politically conservative, the main Baluch tribal leaders in Pakistan were all progressive, in some cases close to the traditional communist currents of the sub-continent. Before the Iranian clerical revolution of 1979 there was even talk of unifying the two provinces as a self-governing republic.

I was involved in many discussions with Baluch tribal leaders as well as radical activists at the time. There was an independent Marxist current that spanned the tribes, led by leftist Balauch intellectuals and their non-Baluch allies from the Panjab and Sindh provinces. Their magazine, Jabal (‘Mountain’) carried some of the most interesting debates on the national question, replete with reference to Lenin’s texts on national self-determination. The analogy of the Ethiopian-Eritrean divide was discussed non-stop. A leading figure, Murad Khan, argued that with the 1974 overthrow of the pro-imperialist Haile Selassie regime in Addis, the objective conditions of the Eritrean struggle had changed and the socio-economic situation in both regions could be developed in the direction of a class unity that transcended pure nationalism. Most Baluch also wanted some form of political autonomy, or failing that, independence.

Pakistan was under heavy pressure from the Shah of Iran to crush the Baluch insurgency. Tehran was worried that the radical currents might slip across the border. Bhutto, then Prime Minister, capitulated and the Pakistan Army went on to crush the rebels. From 1977, Pakistan was run by a vicious US-backed military dictatorship (as it is now, as far as Baluchistan is concerned, under the current ‘caretaker’ government). In 1979 the military would hang Bhutto, Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader, brutalizing the national political culture. In Iran meanwhile the new Islamic Republic excited popular hopes and Baluch nationalism was compelled, for some years, to take a back seat.

Geopolitics crushed all the utopian visions emanating from Baluchistan. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the implosion of the Baluch leftist groups in Pakistan. The Iranian mullahs asserted their authority on their side of the border. The repression in Pakistani Baluchistan was vicious and unrelenting. Bhutto’s execution unleashed turbulence throughout the country, and soon an entire Baluchi tribe, the Marris, led by Sardar Khair Baksh Marri (a semi-Maoist by inclination) escaped by crossing the border to Afghanistan where they set up camp and were given refuge, food and weapons by the pro-Soviet PDPA government. There were reports that Marri and key aides had flown to Havana via Moscow for advice from Fidel Castro, though this has never been confirmed by either side. This phase ended with the advent of civilian government in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Army continued to virtually rule the province.

The repression of the Baluch people has been appalling over the last decades. Temporary relief under some civilian governments never lasted long, and recently the crackdown has gathered pace. A few weeks ago I was asked to sign yet another Baluch solidarity appeal, after a totally peaceful and relatively small gathering of Baluch dissidents and their Pakhtun and Punjabi supporters in Islamabad was broken up by police, its leaders arrested and some of them beaten up. My first reaction was ‘why now?’ At the time such arbitrary brutality made little sense. Now it does. It’s obvious that the Pakistani military intelligence had orders to prevent any display of Baluch dissent in Pakistan. To choose to provoke Iran just now would only cause more headaches for Washington. At the same time, of course, it would further divide the Muslim world at a moment when Yemen – though not Egypt, Saudi Arabi or the stooges ruling the Gulf states – is offering a strikingly effective form of solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians.

I doubt that this exchange of fire between the two states will turn into a fully-fledged war. Pakistan, already an orphan-state of the IMF, would suffer more. And China has appealed to both countries to proceed to an immediate ceasefire. China has some clout. It has a large military-economic base in Gwadar on the Baluch coast in Pakistan and enjoys close economic ties with Iran. The Beijing cavalry will be working hard behind the scenes. But the political implications of this flare-up are worth noting.

The group that Tehran targeted, Jaish ul-Adl an offshoot of al-Qaida, has been operating from Pakistani Baluchistan for well over a decade. The group has close relations with Ansar al Furqan, its Sunni equivalent in Iran. Who funds such organizations? Why does Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, busy disappearing unarmed Baluch nationalists, not deal with these well-supplied Sunni fanatics? It is they who have targeted and killed Iranian security forces, including most recently an attack on police headquarters in Rask, an Iranian border town, in December. Iran has pleaded with Pakistan on many occasions to stop these outrages. No response except honeyed words. Is anyone else funding this terrorist group? Israel? The Saudis? Any takers? I don’t know, but nothing would surprise these days as Western double-standards on ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ are not taken too seriously, except by payroll buddies.

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

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Rhythms of History

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who died late last year, was among the great French historians of the twentieth century. A researcher of singular ability and imagination, he trained as a social historian in the Annales tradition, and came to prominence with the publication of Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966), which legitimized his succession to the editorship of the Annales journal, launched by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929. Whereas his predecessor, Fernand Braudel, had widened the geographical sweep of Annales history during his post-war tenure, pushing beyond France to encompass the economic and social activity of the greater Mediterranean world, Le Roy Ladurie returned the focus to rural France. He would go on to undertake a series of methodological experiments in fine-grained, micro-level analysis. At the same time, Le Roy Ladurie developed a form of climate history that sought to grasp the interrelationship between the environment and human society, virtually inventing the field in the process.

He was born in 1929 in Calvados, a sea-facing department of Normandy. His mother, Léontine Dauger, was the daughter of a viscount, his father, Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, was an independent farmer who later became Secretary-General of the Union Nationale des Syndicats Agricoles, a Catholic peasant union that supported agricultural protectionism and allied itself with the agrarian fascist Greenshirts. In 1942, he was appointed Vichy’s Minister of Agriculture and Food Supply, but opposed the regime’s forced conscription of French civilians for labour service in Germany and resigned his post after a few months. Toward the end of the war, he joined a right-wing Resistance group, but was nevertheless arrested as a collaborator during the purges. His son later observed that the French Revolution had never quite reached this part of Normandy, that in many ways its patterns of life were continuous with those of the Ancien Régime.

Le Roy Ladurie studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, then a bastion of communist organizing, and was soon radicalized. Mao’s peasant revolution inspired him to join the French Communist Party, in an experience he described as a ‘conversion, a metanoia’. For his master’s thesis, he chose a suitably ‘politically engaged’ topic, French colonial policy in late nineteenth-century Indochina. It was supervised by Charles-André Julien, a Trotskyist and one of France’s few specialists in colonial history. Another early mentor was Pierre Vilar, a socialist within the Annales fold, who, in his student’s estimation, represented the best in Marxian thought, namely a totalising analysis of social reality that employed both quantitative and qualitative methods.

It was customary at the time for doctoral students in history to be sent to the provinces to cut their teeth in the local archives. In 1953, Le Roy Ladurie was dispatched to Montpellier where he taught for ten years, first in a high school, and later as a junior professor at the University of Montpellier. Like Braudel – his future mentor and a fellow northerner – he was enchanted by the landscape, architecture and history of the Midi. Yet he found Party life more stultifying in the south. As a young militant eager to shake up the PCF’s internal culture, he and others like him were labelled ‘termites’. The Soviet invasion of Hungary soon prompted his exit from the party. With the war in Algeria unfolding, Le Roy Ladurie, wishing to remain politically engaged, founded a political action committee, gathering a contingent of local anti-war activists. The group was eventually absorbed into the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), a key organization of the French New Left composed of different factions of communist and socialist parties.

In 1963, Braudel offered him a position in the Centre de recherches historiques at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Unable to resist the ‘Braudelian sirens’, Le Roy Ladurie returned to Paris, quitting the PSU in the process. It was at this point, he later reflected, that he chose to put his ‘political conscience on the back burner for a bit’; moving to Paris ultimately provided an opportunity to ‘quietly slip out of my own skin’. A combination of careerism and disenchantment would see Le Roy Ladurie move steadily rightwards over the coming decades.

He arrived back in Paris with a thesis manuscript already exceeding a thousand pages. It would be published in two volumes as Les Paysans de Languedoc. A history of rural life in Languedoc from 1500 to 1800, it was a work of striking erudition and creativity, which stands alongside Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean and Bloch’s Les Rois thaumaturges as one of the most innovative texts produced by the Annales school. Its main sources were the compoix, property records that allowed Le Roy Ladurie to study ‘the extent, nature and value of landholdings’ over the longue durée. Beginning the work while still a member of the PCF, Le Roy Ladurie had intended to trace the origins of capitalism. But he was led in a different direction: the evidence ‘mastered me by imposing its own rhythms’. It is an apt metaphor, for the book provides a kind of symphonic history, attentive not just to the economic and demographic cycles, but also to culture, psychology and the biological dimensions of human existence.

The picture that emerged from this ‘total history’ was of a society locked into cycles of Malthusian pressures and unable to generate the conditions necessary for the development of capitalism. As the population began to multiply in the late fifteenth century, agricultural production remained sluggish, making growth all but impossible. Le Roy Ladurie discerns frustration at this impasse in the cultural and political spheres – in the preoccupation with heavenly salvation during the Reformation, a rise in anti-tax revolts, the frenzy over the witches’ Sabbaths. In the end, it was the expanding French state that acted to intensify social contradictions, its increasingly muscular tax policies aggravating the problems of underdevelopment, leading to a surge in rural protest in the seventeenth century. Like Tocqueville, Le Roy Ladurie saw the absolutist state as a major engine of social development in the Ancien Régime, though with the crucial difference that he regarded it as a force of instability rather than an instrument of order.

A year later, Le Roy Ladurie published his second thesis, the epic Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (1967). In many ways a drier exercise, the book sought to establish a rigorous methodology for studying climate history. This involved freeing it from anthropocentric prejudice and discovering data sets that could furnish clear patterns of change. In particular, Le Roy Ladurie hoped to confirm the existence of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe, a period of cooling that lasted from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. He relied on the evidence of wine harvests to trace the fluctuation of temperatures: late harvests showed a high correlation with rainy and cold weather. Though he abstained from passing final judgement, he noted that the process of working through the data would make climate history scientific much in the way ‘alchemy eventually turned into chemistry’. Once climate history established its scientific credentials, he argued, it could move into studying the natural environment’s impact on human civilization, in which case ‘climatic history would become ecological history’ and help shed light on wars, epidemics, migrations and political revolts. In this respect, Le Roy Ladurie’s first two books formed a complementary analytic: from different angles and with different temporal schemes, they surveyed a human world closely bound up with the dynamics of nature.

From these first histories, Le Roy Ladurie generated a complex research programme that branched off in different directions. One was the social history of rural areas in France, with a book produced on tithes in the Ancien Régime, multiple studies of the peasantry and an analysis of conscripts in the early nineteenth-century French army. This last work tabulated reports from medical examiners, which documented, among other things, rates of diseases, malnutrition, goitres, hernias and bad teeth in young draftees. For Le Roy Ladurie, this was a step toward building a bio-ecological history of France. It was in this social-historical mode that he participated in the ‘Brenner debate’ on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Robert Brenner had argued that the origins of capitalism lay in the social-property relations and dynamic class structures of seventeenth-century England, and that Malthusian accounts of the transition, focused on repetitive cycles, failed to capture such dynamism. In his response, Le Roy Ladurie defended his methodology, maintaining that its correlation of production, population, land rent and prices was highly compatible with Marxist analysis. He also challenged what he took to be Brenner’s narrow path to capitalism, one that required the destruction of the peasantry – what Le Roy Ladurie called teasingly an ‘Augustinian view of history’. This, he insisted, underestimated the resilience and ‘remarkable potential of the peasant family model’ as seen in Belgium, Holland, northern Italy and Catalonia during the early era of industrial capitalism.

A second line of research brought Le Roy Ladurie into the domain of popular culture. His initial foray, Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), was based on an archival trouvaille: Inquisition records documenting a bishop’s attempt to stamp out Cathar heresy in a remote southwestern enclave. From these, Le Roy Ladurie was able to reconstruct in ethnographic detail the mental and material world of these secluded peasants. The influence of the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss was evident, for in the absence of both the centralizing state and powerful aristocratic demesnes, the main organizing principle of village life was the local family unit, which dictated social alliances and conflicts. Wheras Le Roy Ladurie’s quantitative histories had tracked long-term shifts and fluctuations, Montaillou appears in a seemingly eternal state of patriarchal-economic relations.

Montaillou sold a quarter of a million copies and was translated into dozens of languages. Two years earlier, Le Roy Ladurie was elected to Braudel’s former chair at the Collège de France, his candidacy supported by Lévi-Strauss and Georges Duby. With a bestseller and a berth in France’s most prestigious academy, he had ascended to the very top of his profession and become the standard-bearer of the ‘third generation’ of Annales.

The next decade would see him widen his study of peripheral mentalités, often in unpredictable ways. In L’Argent, l’amour et la mort en pays d’oc (1980), he analysed a well-known eighteenth-century folktale, Jean-L’Ont-Pris, often taken to be a straightforward description of rural life in the pre-Revolutionary Midi. Le Roy Ladurie refused any realistic interpretation of the récit and offered instead a formidable reading that assembled more than sixty examples of vernacular literature to explore the deeper themes and structures of Languedocian consciousness.

Carnaval de Romans (1979), an account of a massacre of workers in the Dauphiné during the winter festival of 1580, was treated by many as a follow-up to Montaillou, due to the folkloric and symbolic dimensions of the protest. But in many ways, Le Roy Ladurie was investigating new terrain. It was the first time he had studied an urban setting, with its different orders of craftsmen and consular powers. What is unveiled is not a cultural or religious interpretation of the massacre, but – atypically for the Annales school – a political-economic history of class struggle. In Le Roy Ladurie’s telling, a group of local notables had seized control of municipal institutions, availing itself of fiscal privileges and suppressing the popular classes. When a threat arose from the lower orders, the oligarchs launched a pre-emptive attack and killed twenty of the movement’s leaders. Whereas Montaillou appeared frozen in time, Romans was at a critical point in the history of the Ancien Régime, poised between the folk traditions and popular assemblies of the past and the radicalization of oligarchies that would define the struggles of the future and lead to revolution.

The 1980s saw a further rightward drift in Le Roy Ladurie’s outlook, occasioned, at least in part, by the election of Mitterrand. What alarmed him, he wrote in the memoir Paris-Montpellier: P.C.-P.S.U., 1945-1963 (1983), was not so much Mitterrand himself, but rather the Faustian bargain he had struck with the PCF, a party still committed to the ‘totalitarian’ principles of Marxism-Leninism. With fascism defeated, he had come to believe that communism posed the greatest threat to that ‘island of liberty’ known as Western Europe. Le Roy Ladurie’s work underwent a parallel shift. In 1987 came L’État royal, 1460-1610, followed by its sequel, L’Ancien Régime, 1610-1770 (1991). Striking in both instances was the abandonment of the ‘from below’ perspective, which had previously been a unifying principle of his writings. Gone were the peasants, famines, Sabbaths and rural protests, as attention turned to courtly life and high politics. Surprising too was how he tended to identify with the absolutist state in his account (he remarks, for instance, that ‘the War of American Independence was intelligently pursued by the French, despite various reverses on the naval side’). Yet even if at stark variance with the Annales’ tradition, this work nevertheless showed traces of Le Roy Ladurie’s distinctive anthro-historical approach to the Ancien Régime, as when he proposed, in the second volume, to study the exercise of power along the lines of anthropologist Georges Dumézil’s ‘trifunctional hypothesis’, breaking down authority into sacred, economic and martial components.

In 1997, Le Roy Ladurie then published an ethnographic account of court society through the eyes of the Duc de Saint-Simon, whose Memoirs, a classic of Baroque literature, had been a livre de chevet of the historian’s since his teenage years. He argued that the petit duc was the most thoroughgoing proponent of hierarchy that court life had ever known. Historians had mistakenly enlisted Saint-Simon among the modernizers at Versailles, whereas in fact he was ‘an archaic specimen’, ‘a ruin ripe for excavation’. All Saint-Simon’s observations were subordinated to this axial belief: bastardy, which Louis XIV legalized for the purpose of legitimating an heir, could not be tolerated on the grounds that it resulted from a ‘perversion of procreation’; seating arrangements at court had to scrupulously follow the order of ranks.

Had it stopped here, Le Roy Ladurie’s career trajectory would have had a clean arc, moving from ‘low’ to ‘high’, social to political, radical to conservative. But after his retirement from the Collège in 1999, he returned to the climate history he had inaugurated in the 1960s, publishing the massive Histoire humaine et comparée du climat trilogy. In this forty-year interval, Le Roy Ladurie had never stopped collecting data on wine harvests and glaciers, and here he employs this mountain of evidence to produce a detailed and complex longue durée history of human beings’ relationship with the climate. This totalizing eco-history marks the culmination of a life’s work in the furrows of Annales history, and leaves no doubt as to the warming of the planet during the industrial era. As Mike Davis suggested in NLR, Le Roy Ladurie has left behind an intricate map for scholars to puzzle over as they tackle the climate emergency. This would require close collaboration between historians and scientists, and a continued focus on human history as eco-history; or, Annales at its very best.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Taking the Temperature of History’, NLR 110.

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Conditional Tense

The history of feminist filmmaking in Germany is multifaceted, even messy. The career of its eminence grise, Helke Sander, subject of a recent documentary, is a case in point. Cleaning House (Aufräumen) captures Sander in reflective spirit, endeavouring to ‘tidy up’ (aufräumen) both memories and possessions. Directed by a former student, Claudia Richarz, the film made its debut at the Internationales Frauenfilmfestival in Dortmund to an audience of grey heads; alumnae, one imagined, of the German women’s movement (younger viewers were notably absent). It was an appropriate venue: the festival originated as a counterpart to the journal Frauen und Film, which Sander founded in 1974. An interplay between criticism, feminist research, activism and filmmaking has characterised Sander’s career across the decades, though her avowed desire was always singular: to make films.

A member of the first cohort at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Sander’s classmates included future luminaries of the New German Cinema, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, alongside Holger Meins, later a member of the Red Army Faction. Her approach, mixing documentary and fiction, the personal and the sociological, was a product of this milieu. She was in her late twenties when she joined the academy in 1966, having already worked as a theatre director in Finland, where she had a child and married a Finnish writer. Her work would draw upon these experiences. In her best-known fiction, The All-Round Reduced Personality – Redupers (Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers, 1977), Sander herself plays Edda, a young mother and photographer. Short of time and sleep, having to juggle childcare, work and activism, Edda’s is a familiar struggle to balance domestic labour, financial stability and personal or creative fulfilment.

Edda’s romantic relationship unfolds in the gaps between these different kinds of work. In one scene she reads the newspaper in bed while sharing an orange with her lover. In her characteristically dry tone, Sander’s voiceover tells us that her attraction to him consists primarily in his being ‘so minimally exhausting that she can just barely tolerate him’. The gendered economics of art making are brought into focus. Edda’s photography collective at one point reflects on an assignment they have received from the city government. The politicians and bureaucrats want to demonstrate their openness to ‘women’s perspectives’, but the collective is aware that the commission is driven by another factor: the low cost of women’s labour. In Sander’s films, political reflection happens on many levels, often taking the form of meta-commentary; here, the precarious situation of female artists draws our attention to the limited resources available for the production of the film itself, on its director’s creative ambitions.

Political agitation within the film world came to seem a necessity during this period: the subjects and stories that interested Sander and her feminist co-thinkers did not appeal to the predominantly male committees that made funding decisions. Women simply did not have access to the same resources. In 1973, Sander and fellow director Claudia von Alemann organised the first edition of the Internationales Frauenfilmseminar in Berlin, which showed forty films on topics such as women’s struggles for workers’ rights, their representation in the media, abortion, sexuality and the dynamics of the feminist movement. The event not only inspired women all over Germany to organise screenings, but also helped to form new networks. Frauen und Film became a focal point for feminist discussion of film in Germany and beyond. To be a militant within film politics, however, had never been Sander’s ambition, as she makes clear in Fantasie und Arbeit (2009), a joint autobiography she co-wrote with East German director Iris Gusner. Becoming an activist was necessary in order to create the conditions in which she could become a filmmaker.

Sander’s organising within German film was, nevertheless, of a piece with her earlier participation in Berlin’s feminist and student movements. In January 1968, Sander, with a group including Marianne Herzog – also later a member of the Red Army Faction – established a network of Kinderläden. A hundred women turned up to the first meeting, and the first five childcare centres were set up across the city. ‘It was like a Big Bang’, Sander recalled, ‘the scales fell from our eyes. Nothing like this had ever happened before: women gathering to solve a problem without first seeking advice from a man.’ In an infamous episode that same year she confronted the men of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund: the lens of class struggle should be applied to relationships between men and women; action to redress this could not be put off until after the revolution. When the next speaker, a man, tried to proceed without responding to Sander’s point, a female member of the SDS threw ripe tomatoes at him (the incident became known as the Tomato Speech).

The dynamics of the student movement were at the centre of Sander’s second feature film, Der Subjektive Faktor (1980). Anni, the protagonist, moves into a commune with her child. The experience politicizes her, but she comes to realise that not only do women play a minor role in the movement, but their inequality is also considered merely an ‘additional contradiction’ (‘Nebenwiderspruch’), expected to resolve itself once the class struggle is won. Like most of Sander’s films, Der Subjektive Faktor presents one defined perspective – that of the protagonist – but many voices. These emerge primarily through dialogue and voiceover, but also through posters and flyers, diegetic video playing on a TV screen, and in documentary material woven into the film’s narration. In a long travelling shot, the film registers the various reactions – of women and men, ranging from disgust to disinhibited laughter – to the protagonist’s suggestion that women must be considered a ‘class’. A montage of documentary footage of men responding to the demands of the women’s movement follows. The combining of different materials and different aesthetic registers to present a set of political questions is characteristic. What does it mean to raise a young child in this politicised environment? What new forms of community are possible?

Though recognised as a pioneering filmmaker, today Sander is better known in Germany for her activism, in particular the Kinderläden project, which was foundational in the development of a nationwide network of childcare centres (the initiative was brought to completion by Ursula von der Leyen). The legal right to childcare – instituted in 2013 – is a great achievement, but it was only a part of what Sander and the West German women’s movement were fighting for. As a filmmaker, meanwhile, Sander remains little known outside of Germany. One factor may be her documentary Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children (1990) (Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder) detailing women’s experience of rape in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Sander was accused of historical revisionism, of wanting to weigh these rapes against Germany’s atrocities (an objection she anticipated). What drove her was the realisation that a huge number – an estimated 2 million, according to her research ­– of the generation of women before her had been raped after the war, but had remained silent.

What of the conditions for feminist filmmakers in Germany today? The network ProQuote Film, founded in 2014, demands gender parity in funding committees as well as in the distribution of funds, echoing the demands of Frauen und Film. Today ‘female stories’ and plots with ‘diverse casts’ have become marketable, and while the crisis of cinema is ongoing, streaming platforms overflow with content featuring ‘strong women’. Yet while women filmmakers in mainstream cultural production have been able to increase their share of a shrinking industry, for more experimental, political filmmakers, seeking to work with less commodified aesthetics, the situation has hardly changed. Activism to create the conditions to be a feminist filmmaker remains an urgent task. Sander’s work – both her political activism and her filmmaking – prompt us to continue this struggle.

Read on: Frigga Haug, ‘The Women’s Movement in West Germany’, NLR I/55.

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Democratic Pretence

Following Serbia’s elections on 17 December, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe held a press conference that felt like a funeral. A row of solemn bureaucrats read out a list of irregularities recorded during the contest, and they were legion. In recent years, Serbian national ballots have been somewhat Gogolian, with votes cast by long-deceased voters and other instances of fraud. But this time the scale was different. The OSCE concluded that the election had been carried out under a climate of intimidation, amid violence, vote-buying, dubious registers, ballot stuffing, pressure on public sector employees and ‘multiple allegations’ of mass bussing from neighboring Bosnia to vote for the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vučić.

Even taking into account the SNS’s underhanded tactics, the party still won a convincing victory at national level, netting about 47% of the vote, while the liberal opposition bloc Serbia Against Violence (SPN) came in distant second with just under 24%. SNS looks set to have an absolute majority in the 250-seat parliament: 147 seats to SPN’s 63. While the opposition maintains that the result would have been different in a media landscape less dominated by the government, Vučić still exceeded expectations. In most cases, it seemed that the rigging supplemented his mandate rather than dramatically altered the final outcome. One important exception, however, was Belgrade’s City Assembly elections, where irregularities were recorded at a full 14% of all polling stations. SPN are confident that they were the true victors in the capital.

The SPN coalition emerged out of the large-scale protests prompted by two back-to-back mass shootings in May 2023. Protesters blamed the killings on a culture of glorified violence and criminality, which they see as embodied in the imposing figure of Vučić. The President is believed to have extensive ties to organized crime, including some that stretch back to the underworld of the wartime 1990s, when he served as Milosević’s Minister of Information. In that role he was known for his ruthlessness in managing the media and government critics. It’s a reputation he has retained. Vučić dominates the country’s politics, presenting himself as a guarantor of stability and guardian of Serbian national interests in a hostile region. Since his party came to power in 2012, he has amassed total control over the country’s security services and overseen a lurid tabloidization of the press, which is used to savage his detractors. In the run up to the recent election, a member of SPN had a computer stolen from his home which contained a private sex tape; in the weeks ahead of the election, the graphic video was played on pro-government morning television.

The SPN coalition is comprised of several parties and political associations: the Green-Left Front, the nominally centre-left Party of Freedom and Justice, the liberal Movement of Free Citizens, and the conservative People’s Movement of Serbia, among others. Its campaign centred on corruption, political and media repression, and environmental issues. The liberal opposition has tried to draw a dividing line between its foreign policy and that of the government. Whereas Vučić’s orientation is deliberately ambiguous – pledging continued military neutrality and maintenance of ties with both Russia and the West – SPN has criticized the government for failing to join the EU in imposing sanctions on Moscow. Perhaps reflecting its primary support base among the educated, urban middle classes, SPN’s campaign did not foreground Serbia’s spiralling food price inflation, which is currently the second highest in Europe. Vučić’s supporters, meanwhile, tend to be rural, conservative and working class.

Protests against the election results began just hours after the polls closed, with SPN demanding that the electoral commission cancel the Belgrade results. A week later, clashes broke out with police after a window was smashed in the City Assembly building, and at least 38 demonstrators were arrested. Since then, students have blocked some of Belgrade’s main arteries and erected tents in the streets. On the afternoon of 30 December, tens of thousands of protesters congregated in the city centre to hear speeches from ProGlas (‘ProVote’), a group of artists and intellectuals calling for democratic reform. One of them held up a faded, threadbare EU flag which he had carried during the anti-Milosević marches of the 1990s. Also in attendance was a visibly weak Marinika Tepić, a leading figure in SPN who went on hunger strike after the election. While the bitterly contested Belgrade local election has been the foremost concern of the protests, SPN is now demanding an annulment of all elections at both the local and national level.

Both sides of the country’s political divide are drawing parallels with the ‘colour revolution’ that brought down Milosević. Serbian and Russian officials have accused the West of trying to enact a ‘Serbian Maidan’ – a slogan that a few protesters have since printed on their banners. The Russian ambassador, Alexandr Botsan-Kharchenko, told the press that Serbia was being targeted for refusing to impose sanctions on his country. Superficially, the contours of the unrest are reminiscent of colour revolutions past in pitting two elites against each other: an outwardly pro-Western faction and one more amenable to Russia (though not exclusively). But the missing element, notwithstanding Vučić’s official narrative, is firm Western political, financial, and logistical support for the opposition.

This is especially significant to many Serbs given the outsized role the United States played in turning the tide against the regime of Slobodan Milosević in 2000. In the months preceding his downfall, Washington contributed $80 million to so-called ‘democracy assistance initiatives’ and provided extensive logistical support to the opposition. Back then, the West promised Serbia a bright democratic future. Now, Vučić’s staying power reflects how much the world has changed since the turn of the millennium. Western governments may still help to fund election monitoring NGOs, but for the most part they have been reserved in criticizing the recent elections or the President himself. Across the region, US Ambassador Christopher Hill is widely regarded as excessively accommodating of the current Serbian regime. Shortly after the vote, he remarked that he was ‘really looking forward’ to continuing his work with the incumbent while criticizing protesters for supposedly resorting to violence. He has said that concerns about electoral irregularities should be dealt with by Serbia’s domestic institutions. This is no Maidan. No ‘democracy’ cavalry is riding to the rescue this time.

That is in part because Vučić has balanced his electoral chicanery and overtures to Moscow with actions designed to please the West. Here we can see a split between the spheres of political and media opinion. The editorial boards of both the Guardian and Washington Post have published scathing denunciations of Vučić, describing contemporary Serbia as a ‘textbook case of state capture’ and rejecting the recent election as a fraud. They have characterized the current US strategy as appeasement and called for a new approach, suggesting that Belgrade is edging closer to Moscow. Yet they are conspicuously silent about Vučić’s continuing cooperation with NATO, including a joint press conference he held with Jens Stoltenberg as recently as late November. Under Vučić, Serbia has participated in more military exercises with the Atlantic alliance than it has with Russia. Accusations of Western coup-plotting continue to be a staple of the country’s public discourse, amplified by its garish press; but in Vučić’s Serbia, populist pro-Russian rhetoric has always concealed quieter Western-friendly actions. 

Even as Vučić blamed Washington and Brussels for orchestrating mass protests against him, he also signalled that he would continue to play along. On 25 December, the day after dozens of demonstrators were arrested and outrage over the election reached its apex, his government announced that it would henceforth allow Kosovo licence plates to be used in Serbia: a controversial move for which the West has long applied pressure. The EU praised the decision as a sign of ‘progress’ – one that supposedly demonstrated Vučić’s willingness to resolve the issue of Kosovo, on which SPN is often notably silent and internally divided.

It is unlikely that a dramatic change in US approach is forthcoming. Electoral tricks in Serbia are a relatively minor issue, given the many wars and geopolitical crises in which Washington is now embroiled. Liberal interventionism and heavy-handed democracy promotion in the Balkans now seem like a luxury of the unipolar moment. Looking ahead to the upcoming American elections, it seems that a Trump victory would herald an even friendlier US–Serbia relationship. The Trump administration made no secret of its antipathy towards Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, and Vučić surely hopes that a Republican White House would give Serbia the upper hand in its tortuous negotiations with Prishtina.

It is also unlikely that the post-election crisis presages an imminent political shift in Serbia. The opposition will almost certainly fail to secure a rerun of the elections. SPN have said that regular protests will continue on a weekly basis, and disruptive street demonstrations are now starting to seem like a regular feature of Belgrade life. But absent any powerful Western patron, such activism has a largely therapeutic function. The recent holiday period has already reduced its scale. Even the opposition’s most achievable goal – new City Assembly elections – is looking less likely as the weeks go by. Yet, were it secured, this concession might well yield the best outcome for everyone: a victorious opposition could legitimize itself by governing at city level, while Vučić could continue to argue that Serbia is a democracy, and the West could continue to pretend that it supports one.

Read on: Lily Lynch, ‘A New Serbia?’, NLR 140/141.

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Denegation

For three months now, I have had my breakfast amid the rubble. I sip my coffee as the agony of the injured blares from the TV. At supper, I take a forkful of greens as the bombs rip children to pieces. I peel my apple to the sound of women’s desperate cries. Perhaps all these horrors will make us put on weight – for we are becoming, unawares, followers of Dolmancé, the master of ceremonies whom de Sade puts in charge of Eugénie’s immoral education, and who closes La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) with the immortal words: ‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’

We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. We, unbending guardians of Western values, implacable defenders of international law: we dine on mass murder bien chambré. We are deeply pained by the deaths of ‘innocent civilians’, of course, saddened by the hospitals razed to the ground. Our hearts go out to the ragamuffins with no future who assail the few aid trucks that reach the Strip. We are distressed by the number of journalists being slaughtered. But the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ in Gaza does not stop us sleeping at night, even as the situation worsens week by week.

The structure of this ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ recalls that of the climate emergency. The helplessness of the UN and NGO workers amid the ruins of Gaza bring to mind those environmental activists who try to clean up the oceans a teaspoon at a time – faced with the impossibility of alleviating what they should instead be preventing from taking place. Just as the will of governments to deal with the climate emergency is expressed by organising conclaves in the world’s biggest oil potentates, attended by 2,456 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, and presided over by presidents of its largest companies, so too it is the president of the state that organizes airlifts of weapons to Israel that urges ‘restraint’ and warns against ‘indiscriminate bombing’. According to CNN, at least 22,000 of the 29,000 bombs dropped on Gaza up to 13 December were supplied by the USA. This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing.

It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. This would be less apparent if the Israeli government and its supporters would simply state outright that Israel has the right to take revenge for the attack it suffered. Revenge has an ancient if inglorious tradition, enshrined in the Bible itself – ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – and, one might add in this case, ‘a child for a child’. And vengeance defines its own limits: by definition, it must be commensurate with the offence suffered. Instead, we are now reaching almost twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed. For proclaiming that the goal is not revenge but defence evades the problem of magnitude, of measure: one can continue to kill ad libitum because one is merely ‘defending’ oneself, with armoured vehicles and total air superiority against an enemy that has no heavy weaponry.

The truth is that is has become impossible to state publicly a desire for revenge. Revenge is the narrative engine of endless action films (the peaceful citizen who transforms himself into a ferocious executioner to avenge the massacre of his family and so on); but beyond the culture industry it has become taboo, unspeakable, excised from public discourse. This is key to what Bourdieu calls denegation. Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them. Denegation can be exercised in fields such as the art market: the artist can only obtain financial reward for their work if they convince themselves that they are motivated purely by artistic concerns. But in other areas it is far less innocent. The concentration camp guard cannot do his job properly if he thinks he is human scum. Even the SS officer must be able to look at himself in the mirror in the morning while shaving. In kinder terms: to be a good warden, you must have assimilated the Foucauldian critique of disciplinary systems.

My personal experience with political leaders – however sporadic and superficial – allows me to say that the cynicism hypothesis (that politicians are cynics who lie knowing they are lying) is often too laudatory, it gives them too much credit. Politicians almost always end up believing their own bullshit. In many situations, cheating oneself is the only option. There is a stage where the hypocrite lies to himself to such an extent that he is no longer aware of his own hypocrisy. He really thinks he possesses the virtues he affects, defending the values that he tramples. Hypocrisy allows us to reconcile ourselves to that part of ourselves that we do not like but which we cannot do without. And what is valid on a personal level is valid on the terrain of ideology – it pertains to what is socially sayable and what is not. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion, and has become an indispensable tool of politics.

Although La Rochefoucauld’s definition (‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue’) is more acute, let us proceed with the conventional one provided by Webster’s dictionary: ‘Hypocrisy. The pretence of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles etc, that one does not possess’. The hypocrite is thus not simply a liar. Con men lie but are not hypocrites. The Prince as Machiavelli describes him lies all the time but is not a hypocrite. The spy who pretends not to understand Chinese in order to gather information dissimulates but is not a hypocrite. The hypocrite is one who performs immoral acts while claiming to defend virtue: who unleashes war in the name of peace.

The canonical expression of this attitude is found in Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’. In it he presents a horizon of virtuous reforms intended to prevent the children of Irish paupers from being a burden on their parents or their country. His proposed solution is touted as ‘a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth’; it has the great advantage ‘that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes’. Swift goes on to list its other advantages: it would give ‘a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either encouraged by rewards, or enforced by laws and penalties’; it would increase the care and tenderness of mothers towards their children, as well as restore the national accounts and balance of trade. That the plan is to sell one-year-olds as piglets or lambs to be cooked (in various recipes) becomes only a technical detail.

Swift’s black humour is not an end in itself. He tells us that what we call hypocrisy should not be judged by moral criteria, which is how hypocrisy demands to be understood and judged. The modest proposal implies instead that hypocrisy should be judged by its success or failure. Recent studies devoted to the subject – for instance David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy (2008) and Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity (2010) ­– have taken a similar view. In what does the success of hypocritical behaviour consist? In not being revealed as such. A lie is effective if it is taken as true. Hypocrisy is useful as long as and only if it does not appear hypocritical. We are familiar with the usefulness of ‘good hypocrisy’ from everyday life, as in the relationship between two people who detest each other, but in public behave civilly. This fiction lightens the atmosphere and makes social interaction easier: better than a world where people start beating each other up as soon as they disagree on something. When a tyranny is fiercely despotic, it fools no one if it merely pronounces itself humane: the pretence of humanity must be accompanied by at least a sprinkling of it.

For Jay, hypocrisy is essential to political life. We see its application everywhere. The claim that a regime need only hold elections to be democratic, for example, is clearly false. As can be seen from James Madison’s account of the drafting of the constitution, the founding fathers of the United States did indeed want to establish a republic, but not a democracy (remember that for much of the 19th century the word ‘democracy’ had the same subversive and criminal connotations as the term ‘terrorism’ has today). This hypocrisy is plain for all to see: just consider the case of central banks, which are guaranteed the strictest autonomy and ‘independence’ from political power, i.e. from the popular vote. In such parliamentary (or presidential) republics, the people theoretically have power over everything except the most important economic decisions.

In reality, alternation in a liberal electoral regime simply constitutes a limit on political violence. It ensures that whoever loses the contest does not end up being thrown into the ocean from a plane (as the South American military did in the 1970s), that the opponent is not locked up in prison, his property confiscated, his family sold into slavery, as happened for millennia in countless societies. Hence the merit of representative republics: they bring us out of the Hobbesian state. The problem is that the limitation of force holds only as long as the political struggle is restricted to a clash between different factions of the dominant social bloc. Rather than establishing majority ruling, it ensures protection for the ruling minority. As soon as its power is challenged, this no longer applies. That is why opponents were locked up in stadiums in Chile or disappeared in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil. The hypocrisy of the ‘democratic’ set-up becomes plain when the myth of the ‘sovereign people’ is exposed. Indeed, those who do not countersign the treaty limiting political violence and ensuring the same ruling bloc stays in power are accused of ‘undermining democracy’.

Similar reasoning applies to today’s humanitarian imperialism. It must provide at least some semblance of benefit for the subaltern nations, just as the elective republic must grant the ‘people’ a sphere, however narrow, secondary and irrelevant, in which they are free to decide. But here there is an added complication. In the words of Erwin Goffmann, this play has to persuade two different audiences; one is the imperialists (persuading them that it is worth investing resources in this ‘imperial-humanitarian’ mission); the other is the subjects, to convince them that this is the best of all possible empires, the most humane, the one that most alleviates poverty and suffering. Sometimes these are simply incompatible. When Gladstone spoke of ‘liberal imperialism’ in the late 1800s, it sounded convincing to British ears, making them proud to shoulder the burden of civilising its ungrateful subjects. But it certainly did not convince the Indians and other colonised people, exterminated by the colonial famines famously recounted by Mike Davis.

The fiction that the empire rules for the benefit of its subaltern nations has proven more convincing at certain moments. After the Second World War and throughout the Cold War, to secure its loyalty and avoid defections the US ensured unprecedented prosperity for its vassals. It developed the strategy of ‘success stories at the borders’: the empire’s frontiers (South Korea, Germany, Japan, Italy) presented as veritable economic miracles. But once the Cold War ended, this narrative began to falter. It has been more than 30 years since the GDPs of Japan and Italy grew by a tenth of a point in real terms. The sullen face of empire has begun to show itself, through the blackmail of debt, the use of sanctions, and the increasingly frequent recourse to arms.

The narrative of the state of Israel is also addressed to distinctly different audiences (though never to the Palestinians who have, et pour cause, always rejected it, from the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 and 1973 wars, to Sabra and Shatila in 1982, to the Intifada, and on to today). One is the G7, which includes the countries involved, in one way or another, in the Shoah. The exemplary case is Germany, where as Moshe Zimmermann writes, the Holocaust has paradoxically become an effective public relations tool:

Germans discovered yet another surprising advantage of relating to the Holocaust as a part of their evolving present: the intensive work of memory and repentance, the ubiquitous presence of the memory of the Holocaust (for example, the Stolpersteine, or the commemoration of the Kristallnacht on 9th November every year) are interpreted by the observers of this society as clear signs of strength, respectability and honesty. Even in China there is widespread admiration for Germany thanks to its policy of “coping with the past” and reconciliation with the historical victims of the Germans, the Jews. Chinese thus wish that Japan would behave in the same way towards China, Korea or any other victim of Japanese belligerence in the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, as paradoxical as it may sound, the Holocaust is at the present an instrument of good public relations for the Germans.

The other audience is the Israelis themselves and the Jewish diaspora, particularly in the US. Here it has another objective. As Zimmermann writes: ‘Accepting the monocausal connection between antisemitism and the Holocaust not only supports the argument that criticism of Israeli policies must be automatically categorised as antisemitism, but that its predestined outcome will be yet another Holocaust’. The current crisis is exposing the hypocrisy underlying such narratives. In a sense, this hypocrisy is revealing itself because it has ceased to be sufficiently hypocritical, because behind the right to defence it has shown the ruthless right to endless revenge. Palestinians will never forget this ongoing attempt to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth. For diaspora Jews and Israelis alike, it will now be difficult to see themselves as the descendants of the ‘righteous’. I remember how moved I was by André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Righteous (1959), all the more so because my mother had been interned in Dachau. But today, the Israeli reaction has challenged the legitimacy of this kind of defence of Israel. Germans are forced to question whether the thesis, enunciated by Angela Merkel, that Israel’s existence constitutes the Staatraison of the German federal state still holds up under the bombs of Gaza. And perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, should start asking themselves why on earth, almost 80 years later, it is the Palestinians who have to pay for Hitler’s crimes.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Slow Motion Lulismo

One year after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to power, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of his governing strategy. After his election in October 2022, at the head of a heterogeneous coalition hoping to protect Brazilian democracy from Bolsonarismo, the president revived the classic Lulista approach: wholesale concessions to the bourgeoisie along with retail measures to benefit the masses. When he first assumed the presidency two decades ago, this combination of elite pacts and gradual reforms was both innovative and troubling. Lula refused to break with the neoliberal legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, yet he fought to raise living standards for the impoverished majority: expanding cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme, extending cheap credit and securing regular real-terms increases in the minimum wage. This social programme secured his 2007 reelection and took centre-stage in his 2022 campaign. Whether it can be sustained remains an open question.

From the outset, Lula’s ‘weak reformism’ was beset by a plethora of contradictions. To name just a few: gains in workers’ purchasing power were not accompanied by equivalent improvements in public healthcare, education, transport or security. Greater access to university degrees was not matched by decent employment opportunities. There was no coherent plan to stimulate domestic industry or shift away from raw material exports. Brazil’s decision to host the World Cup and the Olympics led to violent conflict and the displacement of communities. In the electoral sphere, however, weak reformism brought about a decisive realignment, with the poor supporting Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) en masse, while the middle classes coalesced around Cardoso’s centre-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). This model led to four consecutive presidential election victories for the PT. At its peak, a Rooseveltian dream of change without conflict won many hearts and minds.

Yet dissatisfaction, at both popular and elite levels, began to build in the 2010s. Mass protests erupted in 2013 after an increase in public transport fares. There followed a wave of judicial activism against the government, the illegitimate impeachment of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, and finally the imprisonment of Lula himself. Having ascended to the presidency through a congressional coup in 2016, Michel Temer launched his ultraliberal ‘Bridge to the Future’ plan, tearing up workers’ rights and pushing through austerity policies, including a constitutional cap on public spending. The next few years saw a return to the backwardness associated with the military dictatorship of the previous century. Temer and Bolsonaro buried the dream of social justice beneath the rubble of Lulismo. Poverty and homelessness soared. Societal regression was compounded by political atavism, with the army aspiring to run the state again. In the wake of this demolition, Lula was called back to rebuild from the ruins.

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After winning by a narrow margin, Lula took office on 1 January 2023, promising ‘unity and reconstruction’. He did not set any specific goals for his administration. His speeches emphasized the general aims of healing society, overcoming the climate of hatred, fighting inequality and pulling the country out of its international isolation. Throughout his campaign, the contrast between the good times of Lulismo and the subsequent period of crisis was evoked. Future prospects were relegated to the background.

Once in power, ‘unity’ was sought primarily through dealmaking with capital and Congress, which remained dominated by conservative forces. Left-of-centre lawmakers rarely comprise more than 30% of the Chamber, so Lula has always sought to form alliances with parties across the political spectrum. Since 2018, however, the far right has established a significant presence in the legislature. The Liberal Party (PL), which now hosts Bolsonaro, is the largest in the House, having won 99 out of 513 seats in the last elections. The rise of radical conservatism followed the decline of both the PSDB, which had 70 seats in 2003 and has since sunk to 13, as well as that of the PT, which shrank from 91 to 68 over the same period. These shifts have reduced Lulismo’s room for manoeuvre. But this does not necessarily imply greater parliamentary pressure for an austere fiscal policy. In fact, the entire right-wing camp maintains its ties with the bourgeoisie by offering privileged access to public funds and resisting tax increases. Its survival is closely linked to the use of budgetary resources.

For Brazilian capital, however, austerity remains the top priority. Over the past year Lula has given his Finance Minister, Fernando Haddad, the role of granting concessions to big business. These include the government’s new ‘fiscal framework’, which we will analyse below, as well as its modernizing tax reforms – which will consolidate a range of federal, state and municipal taxes into a single Value Added Tax. This bill, which followed three decades of debate on the tax system, was approved by Congress on 15 December with only the far right voting against. Four days later, Standard and Poor’s upgraded the country’s rating on the international markets.

Lula has meanwhile devoted the months since his election to finding loopholes through which the needs of the people can be met. In December 2022, after circumventing pressure for immediate austerity measures by skilfully appointing Vice President Geraldo Alckmin to chair the presidential transition team, Lula managed to approve a R$145 billion uplift in the 2023 budget with the so-called ‘Transition Constitutional Amendment’. He thereby avoided cutting welfare schemes such as cash transfers and subsidies for medicines.

The canniness of this move lay in establishing a dialogue with Arthur Lira, the powerful Speaker of the House, who had been in charge of its so-called ‘secret budget’. This mechanism, formalized under Bolsonaro, gave the Speaker approximately R$20 billion to distribute among deputies – generally used to fund works in their constituencies – without the need for transparency. The Federal Supreme Court had ruled the practice unconstitutional, but Lula agreed to retain it informally on a case-by-case basis (to be negotiated with the executive), and pledged his support for Lira’s reelection as Speaker, in exchange for the approval of the Transition Constitutional Amendment. As a result, on the day he took office Lula was able to extend the Brazil Aid programme, and in March he launched Bolsa Família 2.0, with a minimum of R$600 per eligible household, to which he added R$150 in welfare payments per child up to the age of seven. He thereby repaid the loyalty of his subproletarian base and shielded himself from the precipitous fall in approval ratings that has weakened other progressive leaders in Latin America.

Yet among the concessions granted to Lira, the percentage of net current revenues earmarked for parliamentarians has now been raised from 1.2% to 2%, partly to compensate for the weakening of the secret budget. This reinforces the power of Congress, which has been growing ever since Speaker Eduardo Cunha orchestrated Dilma’s overthrow in 2016. During the reign of Cunha’s successor, Rodrigo Maia, there was talk of ‘informal parliamentarism’, which persisted with Bolsonaro’s support up until Lira was elected. In light of this, some commentators claim that the Brazilian political system has moved from hyper-presidentialist to semi-presidentialist. This trend further constricts Lula’s power, as his fiscal policy now faces pressure on two fronts – from a capitalist class demanding more austerity, and from the steady advance of conservative congressional power over the budget.

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Lula’s fiscal framework, unveiled in March 2023, was the primary means of appeasing capital. Formulated by the Ministry of Finance, it was presented as a more flexible substitute for the spending ceiling that Temer had imposed seven years earlier. Given the absence of orthodox economists from Finance Minister Haddad’s team, the timidity of the plan probably stemmed not from any theoretical convictions, but from an agreement with the fractions of the capitalist class that reluctantly supported Lula in the 2022 run-off – the globalized financial sector in particular.

The overall effect of the framework is to put weak reformism into an even lower gear. Unlike the restrictions of the Temer era, which froze spending in real terms, it allows spending to grow as long as tax revenues expand as well. Yet the spending increase is limited to 70% of the gains in public revenue, and it must not exceed a maximum of 2.5% per year. By ensuring that spending grows at a slower pace than revenue, the rule enforces a gradual reduction in the size of the state, much like Temer’s infamous reform. As the economist Pedro Paulo Bastos has pointed out, the proposal is not even compatible with increasing the minimum wage to keep pace with GDP growth, or with maintaining the constitutional floors for education and health spending. The inherent contradictions of Lulismo were always destined to create problems in the long term, but now even the short term is under threat.

Lula’s attempts to mollify the investor class did not stop there. The executive also committed itself to the bold target of abolishing the primary deficit in 2024 and securing surpluses of 0.5% and 1% of GDP over the following two-year period. Given that the 2023 primary deficit is expected to exceed 1%, bringing it down to zero would require significant cuts – greater than those of Lula’s first term, which catalysed the establishment of PSOL as a left-wing challenger to the PT. The government claims that the plan is not to squeeze spending but rather to raise revenue, in part by taxing the rich. It has begun to take some positive steps in this direction: taxes on exclusive and offshore investment funds; reforms that give the executive more power in tax disputes with private companies; the Provisional Measure for Subsidies, which seeks to shore up the government’s tax collection capacity; and the review of so-called ‘tax expenditures’, mostly subsidies and tax benefits granted to specific sectors.

The passage of these measures has, however, meant granting further concessions to the conservative majority in the House, resulting in alliances with the Progressive Party (PP), a former bastion of the right that supported the military dictatorship, and the Republicans, an electoral vehicle created by the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which is linked to Bolsonaro. In September, these parties were given the ministries for Sports and Ports and Airports respectively, as well as other positions in the second tier of government. In theory, this means that Lula’s parliamentary bloc exceeds the quorum of three-fifths needed to pass constitutional amendments. Without that number, there is thought to be a constant risk of congressional mutiny against the president. But, in reality, thanks to the changeable and amorphous nature of the parties, the deal is no guarantee of stability. The relationship between the presidency and the House will still be characterized by tit-for-tat negotiations which could break down at any moment.

The parts of the fiscal framework that seek to change Brazil’s regressive tax system are welcome. And reducing the deficit by increasing taxes on the rich tends to be less harmful to growth than cutting spending. Yet the cap on spending increases means that this programme will at best reduce austerity without repealing it. The 2.5% limit represents a hard brake on progress that did not exist in previous Lula administrations. In the first and second Lula terms the federal spending growth rate was 7.2% per year. Between 2003 and 2010, primary spending as a proportion of GDP increased from around 15% to 18%, creating the conditions for dispensing the Bolsa Família and raising the real-terms minimum wage by 66%. Similarly, during both Cardoso’s second term and Dilma’s first, spending grew twice as fast as permitted by the framework. According to one counterfactual study, if the new rules had been adopted in 2003, government spending would not have increased, but fallen to 11% of GDP. The constraints are now so tight that the popular strata cannot move forward. This is Lulismo in slow motion.

One might argue that Brazil’s 3% GDP growth in 2023 contradicts the idea of a squeeze. But we are not yet living under the restrictive effects of the new fiscal framework. The recent economic acceleration was partly due to the spending from 2022 – the result of Bolsonaro’s use of the budget as an electoral tool – as well as the Transition Constitutional Amendment and the agrarian bonanza brought about by a record harvest in 2022-23. The proposed fiscal regime will bring this growth spurt to an end. Lula is well aware of this, which is why he has begun to speak of loosening the fiscal straitjacket. At the end of October he asserted that the deficit for the coming year ‘doesn’t have to be zero’. Almost immediately, the stock market fell and the dollar rose. Capital demanded a commitment to austerity and, for the time being, the government has given in, keeping the current target in place. Yet the dispute continues, with the PT recently ratcheting up its criticism of austerity. It remains possible that the stringent targets will be eased over the coming months. But will this be enough?

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To put Lula’s programme in perspective, it is worth comparing it to the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, who took office in late 2018. AMLO is generally associated with the centre-left, despite what is seen as his populist persona and his dubious approach to Covid-19. His agenda combines fiscal restraint with income redistribution, and has so far proved hugely popular with the working masses. Forecasts suggest that his successor is on track to win this year’s election comfortably. The president has pursued what he calls ‘republican austerity’, which seeks to restrict the private control of public resources while increasing taxation on the richest. There are obvious similarities with Haddad’s crusade against patrimonialism and his tax proposals. Yet AMLO governs with a flexibility that would be impossible under the Brazilian framework. The first year of his mandate was marked by expansionary fiscal policy, which intensified when the pandemic struck in 2020.

The next three years saw an overall contraction of public spending, yet this headline figure obscures important changes in the allocation of funds. Mexico’s traditional cash transfer programme, Progresa, was always viewed with suspicion by many on the country’s margins due to its strict conditions and eligibility criteria. Under AMLO, it has been replaced with universal transfer programmes increasing the number of beneficiaries. At the same time, his government has significantly raised the minimum wage and reinforced labour rights – financing these measures through cuts to the civil service. Whatever the shortcomings of AMLO’s programme, it has kept the Mexican economy growing at over 3% a year since 2021, which has contributed to his persistent popularity. His republican austerity is, from a macroeconomic point of view, far less austere than what is now being proposed for Brazil. It is more evocative of the original Lulism than of its pinched revival.

Lula may not enjoy AMLO’s approval ratings, which have stayed consistently above 60%, but he has still fared better than many of his other Latin American counterparts. Chile’s Gabriel Boric saw his ratings fall by 22% during his first year in office, while Colombia’s Gustavo Petro suffered a 23% drop over the same period. By contrast, Lula’s support has declined by just 11%: from 49% at the start of his term to 38% last month. Though he presides over a bitterly polarized nation, he has managed to retain a significant popular base, albeit one that is diminished compared to December 2003 and December 2007. Yet this relative stability will soon be threatened once, as is widely predicted, Brazil’s economy begins to falter under the new restrictions.

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The Planalto knows that the ‘feel good factor’ is crucial in election years. Ten months from now, the public mood will be reflected in municipal and mayoral elections across the country. Defeat in high-profile constituencies is sure to cast a pall over the beginning of the 2026 presidential election campaign. Hence the government’s recent steps towards altering the terms of the fiscal framework. Hence, too, the efforts of parliamentarians to secure their desired shares of the budget. In São Paulo, which often acts as an electoral barometer, the upcoming contest is on a knife-edge. The left-wing mayoral candidate, Guilherme Boulos, ran a strong campaign in 2020, and Lula won over the voters on the city limits in 2022. Yet the right may be effective in exploiting the conservative instincts of the metropolitan middle classes, usually decisive for the outcome of municipal elections. Here, as elsewhere, the fortunes of the economy will likely determine how they vote.

Global dynamics have introduced another note of uncertainty. Since the end of 2022, inflation in the US, the Eurozone and the UK has been falling – and interest rates should follow, reinforcing similar tendencies in Brazil. With any luck, this will allow global liquidity to recover and stimulate growth south of the equator. Yet rising geopolitical tension, volatile capital flows and extreme weather events will continue to disproportionately affect peripheral countries. Lula is attempting to reduce Brazil’s vulnerability to such external headwinds by finding new opportunities for development, especially those that don’t involve confrontation with the bourgeoisie. In the energy sector, for example, he has refused to block oil prospecting at the mouth of the Amazon River, even though this had officially been banned by the government’s own Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. (This has sparked fierce criticism from environmentalists, and even from Climate Minister Marina Silva, who oversaw a 22% drop in deforestation in the Amazon last year and proposed a ceiling on oil production.)

There are also those banking on the possibility of aid from China, amid growing Sino-American rivalry. Lula has generally displayed an audacity in global affairs that he has lacked on the domestic front. His emphasis on foreign policy has been so great that voters have criticized his international travel as excessive (in 2023 he visited 24 countries and spent 62 days abroad). Overseas, he has tried to mediate between the Venezuelan government and opposition, revitalize relations with Cuba, and carve out an independent position on the wars between Russia and Ukraine and Hamas and Israel. In September, Lula assumed the rotating presidency of the G20, using his platform to denounce ‘the structural mistakes of neoliberalism’. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to signal that Brazil will not be automatically aligned with any great power – that it expects concessions from both the American and Chinese blocs, particularly when it comes to the country’s long-term goal: reindustrialization. Yet, on this front, progress remains glacial. All we know so far is that the Chinese have agreed to build an electric vehicle factory in Bahia after Ford pulled out.

Of course, it is unlikely that any external strategy will have enough heft to move a continental nation like Brazil. This opens a window of opportunity for the far right, which could exploit conditions of stasis to cast itself as the only genuine force for change. If Lula’s first and second terms created the illusion of painless progress, his third has all but removed social justice from the picture. Some onlookers argue that, given the present circumstances, the priority should be to save democracy and leave the rest for later. But democracy cannot be stabilized without structural transformation – which, under the emerging regime of decelerated Lulismo, is proving increasingly difficult to imagine.

Read on: André Singer, ‘Lula’s Return’, NLR 139.

An earlier version of this article was published in A Terra é Redonda.