Month: July 2024

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Volume and Shape

On 28 February 1948 in Accra, the capital of the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), a group of former servicemen from the Royal African Frontier Force set out with a petition for the governor. They wanted payment of pensions promised them as part of Britain’s war effort. The march was peaceful – the demonstrators were unarmed – but as they approached the governor’s residence in the former Dano-Norwegian slave fort, Christiansborg Castle, they were blocked by colonial police who opened fire. Three demonstrators were killed; several more were wounded. The riots that broke out in response targeted symbols of colonial domination: government buildings were attacked, businesses were looted, and the headquarters of the United Africa Company (UAC, since merged into Unilever) were burnt down. In the aftermath the colonial apparatus – fatally undermined, but destined to stagger on for another nine years – embarked on a programme of reconstruction and repression. Political activists like Kwame Nkrumah were arrested and imprisoned, censorship was introduced. New infrastructure was built.

Chastened by the arson, the UAC commissioned a community centre in Accra from the recently incorporated architecture firm Fry, Drew and Partners, led by the modernist architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. A photograph of the building’s façade hangs in the first room of the V&A’s Tropical Modernism exhibition (until 22 September). It has many of the design features that characterize Fry and Drew’s work in Britain’s former colonies – what they called ‘tropical architecture’: wide, spreading eaves to create shade; cast concrete ­brises-soleils to break up sunlight and allow air circulation; pilotis – drawn from the architecture of the Swiss modernist Le Corbusier – for the porch. In the centre is a mural by the painter Kofi Antubam. It shows four geometric figures in traditional dress: three men and a woman. One holds a staff. The woman carries a basket on her head. The figures’ features are not differentiated. Nor are they set in illusionistic space. They are more like grand, generic archetypes than portraits of specific people. The inscription above and below them, written in the local language Ga, translates as ‘It is good that we live together as friends and one people’ – an apt sentiment after a riot.

Community Centre, Accra, 1953. Image courtesy RIBA.

Accra community centre sums up how ambiguous the links were between modernism and colonialism at this point in mid-century. The British were anxious to defuse ethnic and religious tensions. Antubam’s mural, with its depiction of similar figures standing around conversing, voices a call to peaceful unity regardless of tribal or religious affiliation. The centre was designed to produce such coexistence – within, shady communal areas and a cloistered courtyard allowed people to mingle. Fry and Drew were typical of modernist architects in their belief that intelligent designs, realized in the latest materials, could solve social or economic problems. Architecture, they wrote, ‘should aim at building up a new community life . . . by means of which self-respect and personal dignity may be restored’.

We could see the centre as an instrument of pacification, something brought in by the state-backed UAC to placate a desperate local population. Rather than alter their economic practices, which were a major source of local unrest in the months leading up to the riots (profit margins on company goods were fixed at 75%), the UAC brought in the modernists, to compensate the population with good design for the poverty and isolation that they – the company – had produced.

But we miss something about this building, and about modernism in general, if we associate it purely with colonial oppression. After all, the call to national unity, regardless of tribe or creed, articulated by Antubam in his mural wasn’t only useful for British governors worried about violence against Arab-owned shops. It was also crucial for Ghanaian politicians looking to throw off the colonial yoke – and, after independence in 1957, to hold together the polity’s formerly colonial boundaries. As the first president of independent Ghana, Nkrumah made Antubam an official state artist, commissioning him to design the presidential throne. Nkrumah invested in modernism itself – in the same secular, rationalist aesthetic that the British had employed – as a way to visualize the new state. Room 3 at the V&A provides a record of this investment: photographs of schools, government buildings, the modernist campus at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the great parade ground at Black Star Square, and the buildings for the Ghana Trade Fair which opened in 1967, the year after Nkrumah’s deposal in a CIA-planned coup.

Some of these buildings were designed by Fry and Drew, whose opportunities to create and refine their ‘tropical architecture’ hardly diminished as Britain’s empire broke up. Others were built by their students: in 1954, Fry was put in charge of the Architectural Association’s new Department of Tropical Architecture, where many of the great figures of post-independence Ghanaian and Indian architecture trained. Modernism adapted to decolonization, and vice versa. If Nkrumah’s anti-ethnocentric embrace of modernist design makes him one of the heroes of the show, Jawaharlal Nehru is another. Like Nkrumah, Nehru inherited a state with an ethnically and religiously diverse population, whose boundaries had been arbitrarily fixed by colonialism. Like Nkrumah, he pursued strategies to retain these boundaries that could tip into authoritarianism (India’s occupation of Kashmir is still the longest-running illegal occupation in the world). And like Nkrumah, Nehru recognized architecture’s potential to envision a secular, unified nation beyond divisions like religion and ethnicity – ‘unfettered by the past’, as he put it.

It was Nehru who gave Fry and Drew their most significant commission – the greatest ever imparted to a modernist architect – to build a new capital city for the Punjab, Chandigarh. They convinced Le Corbusier to join the project. He brought in his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret. Chandigarh is the axis round which the exhibition rotates: the ultimate example of tropical modernism in action, a utopic attempt at urban planning on a vast scale, raised against the spectre of violence. Lahore, the previous capital, had been incorporated into Pakistan with Partition. A wall text in Room 2 references the human cost – a million dead, 20 million more displaced – although the curators have decided not to show too much of this. There is nothing of Tyeb Mehta’s rent pictures of bodies twisted and cut in half as if by lightning; nor of Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of corpses piled in the street.

The closest we come to the horror is Satish Gujral’s anguished painting Mourning en Masse (1952) from his Partition series. This shows four women seated, veiled and moaning. Mouths gape. Eyes are covered. As with Antubam’s mural, they are hardly differentiated from one another, although here the effect of such de-individuation is not one of integrated dialogue, but of grief – of the abject misery that reduces people to wails and shrieks. Gujral’s figures grimace identically. The foremost woman’s left hand is raised, fingerless and cupped, like the blade of a shovel. I am not sure what this gesture was meant to imply – whether the hints I drew from it that the same people, reduced by loss to the condition of interchangeable units, might also make up the labour force to repair the destruction, are due to the picture’s content or to its placement in the exhibition. But this is the effect of Gujral’s painting here, since it hangs alongside so many objects and artefacts testifying to the vast collective effort that produced Chandigarh.

Le Corbusier in Chandigarh with the plan of the city and a model of the Modulor Man, his universal system of proportion, 1951 © FDL, ADAGP 2014.

In the middle of the room are two of the iconic, immensely collectible teak and cane chairs made for the different buildings – an Office Armchair designed by Jeanneret and a Library Chair designed by Eulie Chowdhury. Chowdhury was the only woman on the Chandigarh team, responsible for designing a number of buildings including the Government Polytechnic College for Women. The attribution of the chair to her rather than Jeanneret (as is usually the case) represents another small step in recognizing the centrality of Indian architects to the project. The chairs were made from local materials and techniques – a fact that is easy to miss if one dwells for too long on their formal elegance, which seems to speak a language of machines and mass production (this is especially true today, since they have now been copied and mass-produced for sale on the global market). The same holds for modernist architecture in general. The methods by which these buildings were realized, and the traditions to which they appealed, were often drawn from the premodern world, even if their aesthetics strained in the opposite direction. At Chandigarh, as Drew put it rather chillingly, ‘we found . . . that it was easier’ – i.e. cheaper – ‘to use 700 people to excavate than to employ an excavating machine’.

The regular concrete forms, perfect lines and massive, tessellating units of the finished buildings make this fact of their construction difficult to discern. This ultimate modernist project – embodiment of the doctrine of ‘truth to materials’ – belies its own process, the people who made it. One of the loveliest objects in the show is an architect’s model of the Palace of Assembly at the Capitol Complex, done in wood for Le Corbusier by the Sikh model maker Giani Rattan Singh in 1957. Photographs by Jeanneret show him carving the model on site, by hand. The iconic, typically Corbusian steamship-like funnel on the roof is carved from a single block of wood. The model gives us the complex as a geometrical essence – a pure language of volumes and shapes, solid and perfect, devoid of human figures.

The funnel of the Capitol Complex appears elsewhere in the same room, on a screen playing clips from Alain Tanner’s film Une Ville à Chandigarh (1966). The film, documenting the construction of the city, is a corrective to the superhuman purity of Singh’s model, and of the buildings themselves. Against a flat blue sky, labourers form human chains to pass bowls of cement. Women carry the same bowls on their heads. The work is fast and backbreaking. The men sweat through torn clothes. At times the camera pulls back to show the foothills of the Himalayas scattered with peasant dwellings. At others, it cuts to the interior of the new city, where Indian architects in immaculate shirts and ties make drawings. As the camera cuts back and forth – from interior to exterior, from city to outskirts, from half-built skeleton to completed edifice – it becomes possible to make out something of the class antagonisms that went into this ultimate symbol of secular national unity, of the labourers behind the monuments.

Chandigarh’s legacy is still contested. Arguments pointing to the city’s successes – to the high quality of life enjoyed by its residents, the excellent functionality of its public spaces, the generosity of its mass housing – are counterposed to the arrogance and imperiousness of its designers, Le Corbusier in particular. The curators point out his disdain for traditional Indian ways of life, extending to a ban on cows or markets in the city. The architect Aditya Prakash, who worked on the Chandigarh team, came to criticize the city for its commitment to totalizing design at the expense of ordinary human life: ‘it’s a place for gods to play, it’s not for humans’. In two of his own unrealized designs for expansions to the city, abstract people – Indian versions of Corbusier’s Modulor Man – tend market stalls and engage in traditional crafts.

Prakash wanted a modernism more in touch with the needs of ordinary people, more adapted to the Indian context. But the drift of architecture in the years since, towards ethnonationalist postmodern kitsch, would have horrified him as much as it would Le Corbusier. The time of secular modernism is over. India today is living in the age of the mega-temple. The last Indian object in the show is a model of Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations Complex (1970-74), an interconnected series of capped pyramids made from tessellating triangles of cast concrete. Rewal wanted the complex – which housed the Nehru Pavilion – to echo the achievements of Chandigarh. Its placement at the end of the section is symbolic. The complex was pulled down in 2017 as part of sweeping alterations to the architecture of Delhi carried out under Narendra Modhi’s BJP.

The demolished Hall of Nations Complex.

In both India and Ghana tropical modernism is on the defensive, its monuments threatened, their associations with socialism tarnished, their solutions to design problems – whether climactic or political – disregarded. This show tries to reverse the trend. Stress falls on the secularism of modernist architecture, as well as its nascent environmentalism. The application of intelligent design to questions like the creation of breeze and shade by non-mechanical means (Fry and Drew were gloriously scathing about the energy wastage brought about by air conditioning) holds lessons for a heating planet. The effort to produce dignified low-cost housing for all, and to free architecture from the constraints of tradition and religion, are projects for our current age of mass migration and resurgent ethnonationalism. These buildings have been neglected. Sympathetic reassessment should be a first step towards their protection.

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘A Mud-Brick Utopia’, NLR 120.

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Those Days

If you’re working from life, breakfast is a good place to start. Helen Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), opens: ‘In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives’. Informal, often unruly affairs, Garner’s breakfast scenes reveal the network of cares, desires, jealousies and dependencies binding her characters. In The Children’s Bach (1984), it is breakfast that marks Vicki’s entry into the beguiling Fox household; by the denouement – when the family has fallen to pieces around her – Vicki is making the breakfast. ‘I am necessary here. For breakfast I will cook tomatoes under the griller.’ In Garner’s most recent novel The Spare Room (2008), in which a woman named Helen cares for her dying friend Nicola, the mornings are less raucous, but still charged: Helen prepares a bowl of yoghurt and fruit for Nicola who quietly accepts the dependency she otherwise tries to deny, and they both put the horrors of the restless night behind them.

Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, a port city an hour’s drive from Melbourne. Long revered in her home country, she is belatedly finding a new readership elsewhere in the Anglosphere where her books are being issued after years of patchy availability; until recently the only one in print in the UK was The Spare Room, the dowdy illustration of wilting flowers on its cover belying the intense, savage narrative inside. Garner’s work is susceptible to such misrecognition. Her oeuvre is not straightforward, encompassing an uneven spread of fiction and non-fiction. In Australia, she is celebrated as a kind of grande dame of second-wave feminism and associated with the hippy aspirations and communal living experiments of the seventies. Yet her novels evoke a more complex, even critical relation to that era and its free-spirited ideals. She has written about her generation poignantly and mercilessly, from its sticky, stoned midst in Monkey Grip through to the hurt pride and residual solidarities of its aftermath in The Spare Room (a novel about ‘the generation that thought it would never get old’, as Hilary Mantel put it).

At the heart of Garner’s novels are homes, loosely inhabited by tangled groups of friends, relatives, lovers and children. Referred to by affectionate shorthands – Bunker Street, Sweetpea Mansions – they are part of a lineage of generously populated urban and surburban Australian houses, which includes Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, the houses on Elizabeth Jolley’s Claremont Street, and before them Christina Stead’s Tohoga House in The Man Who Loved Children. Behind this preoccupation with homemaking one can perhaps detect vestiges of Australia’s history of immigration – an anxiety about setting down new roots, a sense of being out-of-place and perhaps of the displacement that preceded it (the run-down house inhabitated by the Lamb and Pickle families in Winton’s Cloudstreet is visited by ghostly presences of Aboriginal Australians).

Garner’s shared homes are the soil of her thoroughly social worldview, which sees people as inescapably shaped by their relations with others – many others. Monkey Grip is the story of an intense love affair between Nora, the novel’s narrator, and occasional actor and heroin-addict Javo, but their romance is defined by an array of other connections: friends, other lovers, Nora’s young daughter, and, most notably, heroin. When Javo is introduced on the novel’s opening page, it is already, forebodingly, from within the context of Nora’s existing relationship: ‘It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love’.

Monkey Grip is sprawling, immersive and repetitive: how many times does Javo try to get off junk? How many times does Nora try to get off him? Countless days begin with bacon and play out on the hot concrete beside the Fitzroy Baths. Garner’s other novels are by contrast concise, even minimalist. Composed of brief scenes and clipped sentences, their crystalline forms echo the intricate configurations of her characters: amicably separated spouses, new partners, warring friends, children with loyalties to adults other than their parents.

In The Children’s Bach, Garner’s second and most distinguished novel, the scope is wider and the form more compressed. The book is about two orphaned sisters, Vicki and Elizabeth, and their encounter with the family of Dexter Fox, an old university friend of Elizabeth’s. While Vicki becomes infatuated with the Fox household – ‘the whole establishment of it’ – Dexter’s wife Athena is lured away into the ‘rough sexual world that lies outside families’ by Elizabeth’s rakish music producer boyfriend Philip. The repercussions involve countless different groupings of these characters and others: Philip’s precocious daughter, Dexter and Athena’s children, Dexter’s parents. New alliances form and re-form in each scene. A map of these relations in the manner of a family tree at the front of the novel would be uselessly overwrought.

With its precisely rendered tensions and its blunt vision of domestic life, The Children’s Bach shows some ambivalence about communal living: the Fox family initially seems appealingly solid, but is soon besieged by complications. By the time of Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), a more focussed study with a smaller cast, the dreams of the halcyon seventies have curdled. Sweetpea Mansions is ‘littered with the detritus of many a failed household’. Its latest residents are the tough, kind, Garner-like Janet, who owns the house, the recently born-again younger brother of her former lover, and a mystically inclined sculptor. Each harbours complicated, essentially selfish desires and fantasies about the others. The book contains some of Garner’s splashiest novelistic devices and motifs – a wad of stolen money, a longed-for baby, a Godot-like anticipated arrival. It also includes some of her most arresting reflections on her youth (and perhaps youth in general):

What were we thinking of, in those days . . . For all our righteous egalitarianism we were wild and cruel. We had no patience: our hearts were stony: our house meetings were courts of no appeal: people who displeased us we purged and sent packing. We hated our families and tried to hurt them: we despised our mothers for their sacrifice.

The fierce brevity of this passage, with its ruthless colons, is characteristic of Garner’s prose, whether she is describing a breakfast or a generation. ‘The best I can do is write books that are small but bleak enough to stick in people’s gullets’, she writes. In her diaries from the years following Monkey Grip’s release, it’s hard to miss her fondness for smallness: reading Peter Handke’s notebooks, she records ‘intense happiness at the tininess of his observations’; in Tolstoy she loves ‘the split seconds when a character gets everything wrong’; in Godard’s Bande à part ‘the tiny encounter with the nutcase’. Watching a film she wrote the screenplay for, she is frustrated to find ‘big, far-off images instead of the small intimate ones I had wanted.’ Small observations seed small scenes, which are ‘cobbled together’ into narratives. In The Children’s Bach, the eloping Athena and Philip sit together on a park bench and watch the world go by ‘as a series of small theatrical events’. Garner seems to see the world the same way.

In the 1980s, Garner moved away from fiction and turned to journalism, initially, by her own account, to make ends meet – ‘to feed myself and my daughter’ – though she has also suggested that she wanted to avoid competing with her then-husband, the novelist Murray Bail. But she relished the way assignments got her out into the world. In 1995, she published her first book-length work of non-fiction, The First Stone, a febrile, claustrophobic account of a sexual harassment scandal at Melbourne University. Her repeatedly stated intention to write a ‘quiet, thoughtful book’ comes to feel ironic: she grapples constantly with her own fraught reactions to the case, principally her bafflement at the accusers’ responses to what she considers a minor incident, expressed again and again in intransigent outbursts: ‘something here has gone terribly wrong’. She is rattled by the case and the book rattles with her.

An exhilaratingly self-exposing piece of writing, The First Stone is a reckoning with the passing of the values of Garner’s generation: ‘I was still skating along on ice that had frozen in the seventies’. The book drew a huge public outcry, as well as some rallying defences. Two other accounts of trials followed, Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). Both are more assured and ultimately more rewarding reflections on crime, animated by fascination with the ordinariness of the perpetrators – two young students who murdered one of their boyfriends, and a father who drove his children into a lake. But neither is as mesmerisingly unguarded as The First Stone (a conspicuous omission from the roster of planned reissues).

The book was reviewed by Janet Malcolm, author of her own celebrated and controversial books about court cases. While critical, Malcolm was compelled by Garner’s unremitting honesty: ‘The First Stone no more needs defending than our dreams do, with which there is no arguing, and which are always true’. Garner reveres Malcolm’s writing, especially her voice: ‘composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep learning yet plain in its address, and above all fearless’. But where Malcolm’s persona is highly controlled, Garner’s prose is agitated by her own uncertain presence. She admires Malcolm’s plain address and effortless demeanour, but she also values writing that allows its working and thinking to trouble the surface – she praises Elizabeth Jolley for the way her sentences show ‘the effort that has gone into their formulation’. Her description of Henry Green’s prose as ‘masterfully knobbly and casual’ captures the unpredictable shape and confident stride of her own.

Garner is celebrated as a forensically observant witness of everyday life but her disarming, precise prose means her presence as a witness is always felt. Her abridgements can plunge you into an image sooner than you expected, as in The Spare Room: ‘The morning was grey and gentle, with doves’. Or take this image from The Children’s Bach: ‘He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair.’ The shirt flung against a bookcase is hardly an ordinary sight, and takes some picturing (why would it be flung there, and how does it stay put?), while the glancing image that follows it is demandingly exact. Garner appreciates the way Malcolm ‘yolks the familiar with the strange in the way dreams do’, and here she takes quotidian objects – shirts, bookcases, kitchen chairs – and spins strange, even surreal imagery from them. We have to work to get to – or get back to – the everyday. And consider Garner’s habit of splitting lines of dialogue.‘“I love”, he said in a quiet voice, “the moistureless way in which we kiss”; ‘“Its insides”, she says, without apparent reproach, “were chewed out by rats.”’ In those unnatural, suspenseful pauses Garner is present, relishing the lines and the effect they have on her. The words feel salvaged from real life and yet at the same time emphatically crafted: Garner is right there in the middle of them.

Nowhere is Garner more present than in her diaries, published in three volumes so far, covering the late seventies up until the late nineties. They are pacy and unfailingly vivid, a rapid-fire procession of sparkling dialogue, frank admissions of plunging self-doubt and soaring desire, acutely rendered interpersonal dynamics (‘the humiliation of being clumsily lied to’), startlingly eloquent images (the moon ‘round as a drawing’), and joyfully bathetic reports of how art fits into life (after writing a successful scene for The Children’s Bach: ‘Delirious, I ran downstairs and bought myself a pasty’).

As a writer ‘actively nourished by everyday life’, she is open about drawing on these kinds of day-to-day trouvailles. Monkey Grip was based directly on her diaries: she carried them volume by volume to the Melbourne public library, transcribed them, cut out ‘the boring bits’, changed the names, and ‘sent it to a publisher’. The Children’s Bach, on the other hand, is a work of imagination incorporating smaller fragments of observed life. In her diaries from the time of writing that novel, Garner thrills at both the flow of invention and her use of small details stored elsewhere in the diary: ‘I cobble that scene together out of elements so disparate that only a compulsive notetaker like me could have had the raw material at her disposal.’

Yet more than displaying the ‘raw material’ Garner made her fiction from, or even taking us behind the scenes of her process, the diaries’ style and ethos illuminate those of Garner’s oeuvre as a whole. In one of many telegraphic reflections on her vocation, she notes her ‘determination to write only what is personally urgent to me’, and her wide-ranging body of work – from her rawest journals to her most accomplished fiction – glows with that urgency. It’s not simply that everyday life is Garner’s elected subject; her writing seems to spring authentically from it, as a direct response to living. ‘How sentences are made is of vital importance to me’, she has said, and yet ‘a person who can’t write but who has a story that’s burning to be told can sometimes have a gravitas that shames a critic.’ Garner at her best, which is almost all of the time, has it both ways: finely wrought, startling sentences that scorch with their unmistakable necessity.

Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘True Fictions’, NLR 122.

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Evil Empires?

China’s growing presence in Africa has captured global attention. As its trade deals and investments have eclipsed those of the West, politicians from the US and EU have raised the alarm: Beijing, they say, is exploiting the continent’s resources, threatening its jobs and buttressing its dictators, while casting political or environmental considerations to the side. African civil society organizations level many of the same criticisms, while also pointing out that Western countries have long engaged in similar practices. In the Anglophone media, most assessments of China’s outlook are clouded by the rhetoric of the New Cold War, which frames Xi Jinping as bent on world domination and calls on the forces of civilization to stop him. What would a more sober analysis look like? How should we understand Africa’s role in this hostile geopolitical matrix?  

Chinese interests in Africa – and Western concerns about Beijing’s influence – are nothing new. Understanding the current standoff requires us to trace its history. In April 1955, representatives of 29 Asian and African nations and territories gathered for a landmark conference in Bandung, Indonesia. They resolved to wrest autonomy from the capitalist core by promoting economic and cultural cooperation, as well as decolonization and national liberation, throughout the Global South. Thereafter, Chinese engagement with Africa was guided by this spirit of solidarity. From the early 1960s to the mid-70s, China offered grants and low interest loans for development projects in Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Tanzania and Zambia. It also sent tens of thousands of ‘barefoot doctors’, agricultural technicians and workers’ solidarity brigades to African countries that had rejected neocolonialism and been rebuffed by the West.

In Southern Africa, where white minority rule persisted in settler colonies and Portugal resisted demands for independence, Beijing provided the liberation movements in Mozambique and Rhodesia with military training, advisers and weapons. When Western countries ignored Zambian pleas to effectively isolate the renegade regimes, China established the Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority, which built a railroad that permitted Zambia to export its copper through Tanzania rather than white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. Throughout this period, Chinese policies were determined primarily by political imperatives, as the country sought allies in a global conjuncture shaped by the Cold War.

After the collapse of the USSR, though, its priorities changed. China responded to the advent of American unipolarity by embarking on a massive programme of industrialization and liberalization, hoping to avoid the fate of other Communist state projects. With this shift, Africa was no longer viewed as an ideological proving ground but as a source of raw materials and a market for Chinese goods, ranging from clothing to electronics. Political sympathy gave way to economic utility. African nations were valued according to their material and strategic significance for the CCP’s development plans.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, China had surpassed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner, and it has recently become the continent’s fourth largest source of foreign direct investment. In exchange for guaranteed access to energy resources, agricultural land and materials for electronic devices and electric vehicles, China has spent billions of dollars on African infrastructure: building and renovating roads, railroads, dams, bridges, ports, oil pipelines and refineries, power plants, water systems and telecommunications networks. Chinese enterprises have also constructed hospitals and schools, and invested in clothing and food processing industries, along with agriculture, fisheries, commercial real estate, retail and tourism. The latest investments have focused on communications technology and renewable energy.

Unlike Western powers and the international financial institutions they dominate, Beijing has not made political and economic restructuring a condition for its loans, investments, aid or trade. Nor are they conditional upon labour and environmental protections. While these policies are popular with African rulers, they are often challenged by civil society organizations, which note that Chinese firms have driven African-owned enterprises out of business and employed Chinese workers rather than local ones. When they do hire African labour, Chinese companies often force them to work in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. China’s infrastructure projects have also resulted in massive debts that have deepened African dependency, although African countries still owe far more to the West. Most damagingly, Beijing has secured its unfettered access to markets and resources by backing corrupt elites, strengthening regimes that have pilfered their countries’ wealth, repressed political dissent and waged wars against neighbouring states. African rulers have, in turn, given China much-needed diplomatic support in the United Nations and other international organizations.

For decades, China opposed political and military interference in the internal affairs of other nations. Yet as Beijing’s economic interests in Africa have grown, it has adopted a more interventionist approach, involving disaster relief, anti-piracy and counterterrorism operations. In the early 2000s, China joined UN peacekeeping programmes in countries and regions where it had economic interests. In 2006 China pressured Sudan, an important oil partner, to accept an African Union–UN presence in Darfur; in 2013 it joined the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, motivated by its interests in the oil and uranium of neighbouring countries; and in 2015 it worked with Western powers and East African subregional organizations to mediate peace talks in South Sudan.

During this period, China initially refrained from military involvement in strife-ridden areas, preferring to contribute medical workers and engineers. But this did not last long. There was a notable Chinese military presence in the UN peacekeeping missions to Burundi and the Central African Republic. The UN Mali mission marked the first time Chinese combat forces had joined such an operation, alongside some 400 engineers, medical personnel and police. Beijing also sent an infantry battalion composed of 700 armed peacekeepers to South Sudan in 2015. By the following year, it was contributing more military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council.

The trend toward heightened political and military engagement in Africa culminated in 2017, when China joined France, the US, Italy and Japan in establishing a military facility in Djibouti: the first permanent Chinese military base outside the country’s borders. Strategically located on the Gulf of Aden near the mouth of the Red Sea, the facility overlooks one of the world’s most lucrative shipping lanes. It has allowed Beijing to resupply Chinese vessels involved in UN anti-piracy operations and protect Chinese nationals living in the region. It has also enabled the monitoring of commercial traffic along China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which links countries from Oceania to the Mediterranean in a vast production and trading network. This will help China safeguard its supply of oil, half of which originates in the Middle East and transits through the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait to the Gulf of Aden. Most of China’s exports to Europe follow the same route.

Although Washington decries what it calls Chinese imperialism, its own military footprint in Africa is much larger, consisting of 29 bases in resource-rich areas. The US vows to fend off ‘evil empires’ while boasting more than 750 bases in at least 80 countries, compared to China’s 3. It has fought at least 15 foreign wars since 1980 – China has joined only one – and the fiscal regimes it has imposed on African nations, based on privatization, deregulation and spending constraints, have been ruinous. The US security establishment now aims to contain China’s rise by bolstering military alliances, especially with regimes that have received Chinese investment. Yet a growing number of African states, aware of this disastrous record, are refusing to take sides in the New Cold War, and are instead trying to play its combatants off against each other. The truth is, though, that as long as Africa is treated as a means for rival powers to expand their markets or influence, in collaboration with local elites, the people of the continent will not exercise true sovereignty. Today, legacies of the Bandung are in short supply.

Read on: Giovanni Arrighi, ‘The African Crisis’, NLR 15.

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Brecht’s Scissors

In December 2022, the International Brecht Society hosted its 17th conference – ‘Bertolt Brecht in Dark Times: Racism, Political Oppression and Dictatorship’ – at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Haifa University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Having spent a lifetime crafting scenes rife with contradiction, Brecht would have been struck by the irony. A dozen Palestinian performing arts organizations issued a statement urging the society to reconsider. Hosting such an event at institutions entangled in the occupation, they contended, was ‘an affront to Brecht’s memory’ and would undermine Palestine’s struggle ‘towards freedom, justice and equality’. The conference went ahead. When some attendees travelled to Ramallah to try to meet with Palestinian artists and intellectuals, they were rebuffed. A year later, amidst its ongoing scorched-earth campaign, the Israeli military destroyed Gaza’s last theatre. Dark times indeed.

Images from Gaza flashed across my mind as I visited brecht: fragments, the largest collection of visual material from Brecht’s archive ever to be displayed. Spread across four floors of London’s Raven Row are journals, sketches, newspaper clippings, plot outlines, albums, manuscripts and other ephemera assembled by Brecht over the course of three decades. Enlivening this ‘laboratory of miscellany’ – as Benjamin once described his friend’s workroom – is an ensemble performance that roams the galleries, adapted from four little-known theatrical fragments written during the twilight years of the Weimar Republic. It’s a lot to take in, but what’s there has been judiciously selected. The title underscores the intent of the curators – to highlight the collages, the snippets, the scraps, and all things fragmentary in Brecht’s oeuvre. Its mix of archive and repertoire offers an insight into the working methods of an artist who did so much to define the parameters of communist art.  

Framed and hung in the opening room are several manuscript pages from Brecht’s best-known visual work, War Primer (1955). Each page features a photograph from World War II, sharpened by a biting quatrain. Accompanying a portrait of Joseph Goebbels, for example, is the rhyming caption:

I am ‘the doctor’, I doctor what gets printed.

It may be your world, but I have my say.

So what? Its history gets reinvented.

Even my club foot seems a fake today.

Here, Brecht takes a potshot at the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, but the juxtaposition aims higher – skewering the truth pretensions of visual media. The family resemblance to the work of his Weimar comrades like George Grosz and John Heartfield is unmistakable.

Brecht, however, used collage and montage not just as artistic techniques; piecing together fragments was his method for researching, revising, and, crucially, reckoning with the shattered world around him. Most of the material included in brecht: fragments was not originally intended for public display. Enclosed in several glass cases a few feet away from War Primer are pages from albums Brecht compiled largely while exiled in America between 1941 and 1947. Shown here for the first time, these consist of large-format card sheets on which he pasted newspaper and magazine photographs in suggestive combinations. Among them are images of cities razed by airstrikes, bodies strewn among the rubble.

Many betray an interest in how social forms recur across different political contexts: an image of a Nazi frisking a Yugoslavian partisan is juxtaposed with one of Italian resistance fighters capturing a fascist; a frenzied crowd storming an American bank appears alongside a packed fascist rally; Bonnie and Clyde are paired with Hitler and Goebbels. Sprinkled throughout are scenes of collective struggle, from Calabrian peasants seizing farmlands to miners and women on strike. On one page, Hitler is seen furiously raising his fists just above a German schoolboy doing the same. The comparison infantilizes the Führer in the manner of a Heartfield collage. For Brecht, the assemblage was likely research into the gestural vocabulary of fascism that fed into his scripts and performances, such as the 1941 anti-Hitler play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. This stemmed from his broader concern with the theatricalization of politics – also evident in the clippings of Mussolini, Roosevelt and Stalin on view here.

Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Annotated scripts and plot outlines displayed throughout Raven Row show that Brecht was as keen to cut up his own manuscripts as he was newspapers and magazines. Just as his epic dramaturgy maintained that each scene of a play should stand on its own, a similar principle governed his composition of such works. Individual lines, snippets of dialogue, entire acts – nothing was safe from Brecht’s scissors. He and his collaborators rearranged plays, poems and novels, slicing out fragments and pasting them in new places or even into other manuscripts. This practice allowed Brecht to view his ideas, quite literally, from different perspectives, and to adjust previous writing to changed circumstances. Like history itself, Brecht’s work was never finished.

In brecht: fragments we witness history through Brecht’s eyes as he navigated a turbulent age – from Weimar Berlin to his flight from Hitler across Europe, his wartime refuge in Hollywood, and finally, his return to a divided Germany, where he was wooed to East Berlin with the promise of his own theatre. Collecting fragments was a means of grappling with the dark times he lived through, but the archive can also be made to speak to our own. Below one journal entry, dated 5 April 1942, Brecht affixed a news clipping: a bereft woman, collapsed on a war-torn street in Singapore, screams silently at the wreckage, a lifeless child within arm’s reach. Above this grim scene, Brecht ponders whether writing poetry in the face of such misery amounts to anything more than ‘retreating into an ivory tower’. His concern echoes a question recently posed by Sarah Aziza in Jewish Currents about the deluge of distressing images from Gaza: ‘What does all this looking do?’

To write this review, I revisited my copy of War Primer and was surprised to find the same photograph from Brecht’s journal, now accompanied by a poem. In this path from collecting to publishing, we witness Brecht at work, conjugating an answer to Aziza’s question. That the exhibition sparks flashes of recognition would not have displeased Brecht. Like Benjamin, he conceived of history as an unruly conjunction of past and present. For the livestream from Gaza to constellate with the records of barbarism Brecht amassed is entirely in keeping with the point of his collection. As Sarah James writes in her contribution to the exhibition catalogue, Brecht left behind his vast archive of fragments not for the purposes of ‘memorialisation, but as collective resources for future collaborators’.

The exhibition attests to this in remarkable ways, particularly through the roving 90-minute performance that fills every floor of Raven Row. The director Phoebe von Held has adapted four of Brecht’s unfinished dramatic works, staging them throughout the gallery to demonstrate how the repercussions of capitalist crises cascade onto the most vulnerable. On the top floor, a madcap scene from Fleischhacker (1924–1931) unfolds, about an unscrupulous speculator whose attempt to corner the wheat market triggers a global famine. We are then rushed down the stairs by a torrent of lines from The Flood (1926–1927), inspired by a 1926 hurricane that wiped out Miami. On the ground and lower ground floors, we meet those left to pick up the pieces: a family forced to abandon their farm due to Fleischhacker’s machinations, the shell-shocked tank crew of Fatzer (1926–1930), Mrs Queck, a single mother of five from The Breadshop (1929–1930), whose debts lead to her eviction and eventual death from despair. These fuming, quirky vignettes show Brecht at his most radical. He and his collaborators wrote them amidst the Wall Street Crash and Hitler’s rise, yet as we’re jolted from floor to floor, resonances with present realities hit home: engineered famine, forced migration, cities reduced to rubble.

brecht: fragments, performance view at Raven Row, 2024. Photo: Anne Tetzlaff

Von Held holds this sprawling world together with glue and tape. lambdog1066, one of London’s most inventive costume designers, has dressed the ensemble in maximalist attire collaged from rubbish. Nearly all props and set pieces are fashioned out of cardboard, including the large backroom where The Breadshop unfurls, which is covered in tiles made of shipping boxes, their address labels and Amazon logos still visible. Every directorial choice appears to have been made with fragmentation in mind; even the audience is split in half at the start and sent through the performance in opposite directions. The dozen actors constantly switch roles, flipping through characters like a stream of TikTok videos. One moment they’re with the Salvation Army, the next they’re playing in a bluegrass band. They portray cops, reporters, Deliveroo workers, biblical prophets, as well as less conventional dramatis personae like bull markets and cities on the brink of destruction.

After the performance, I returned upstairs to Brecht’s journals. An entry from October 1943 shows a photograph of a building in Aldgate – a stone’s throw from Raven Row – its façade blown apart by a German bomb. On the ground floor of the ruins, a vaudeville act is being performed to a small audience. It called to mind the destroyed theatres of Gaza and the West Bank. One such theatre, the Said al-Mishal Centre in Gaza City, was levelled on 9 August 2018 by an Israeli airstrike. Days later, Gazans set up white plastic chairs before the rubble, and performers climbed atop the jagged concrete and steel to stage a mournful remembrance. One young actress avowed: ‘We will rebuild it. They think they destroyed the building. Will they stop us? No. We will never stop. We can act in the street. We can act on the sand.’

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Brecht’s Relevance: Highs and Lows’, NLR 57.

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Remainders

The documentarian Thomas Heise, who died in May aged 68, was drawn to the marginalised and ostracised – the working class, the unemployed, the incarcerated, the politically extreme. Across his more than two dozen documentaries, individual lives open onto larger historical forces. Yet his work is always animated by a humanist intimacy, by Heise’s radically open-minded curiosity about the experiences and outlook of his subjects – how they think and feel, and why. He was interested in those who don’t have a voice; ‘Heise makes people talk who are not used to it’, as Mathias Dell observed in an obituary for Die Zeit. His films are at once indelible portraits and rich, ambivalent documents of modern German history.

Heise was born in East Berlin to an intellectual family – his father was a Marxist philosopher, his mother a literary scholar. After cutting his teeth as a director’s assistant at DEFA, the GDR’s state-owned film studio, he enrolled at film school in Babelsberg in the late 1970s, but left to avoid expulsion for political reasons. Two early documentaries about life in the GDR – including one, Volkspolizei, set during a night shift at a police station in central Berlin – did not accord with official visions of East German society and were banned from public viewing. He began making radio features in the 1980s, hoping the medium would offer more freedom, but this work ended up being censored too.

It wasn’t until the fall of the Berlin Wall that Heise could resume his documentary work. Eisenzeit (Iron Age), a film of painful beauty released in 1991, set the tone for what followed. A continuation of work begun at film school, it is a fragmentary account of the trajectories of four troubled boys in Eisenhüttenstadt, a town on the Polish border. Two of the four take their own lives; the other two emigrate to the West. Their stories are told largely through interviews with their friends and acquaintances. Carefully composed montages of mundane locations would become a trademark.

The fall-out from the unification of Germany – especially its disappointments and unsettling effects – became a major concern of his work. Perhaps his best-known and, at the time, most controversial, film is STAU – Jetzt Geht’s Los (1992), the first in a trilogy which chronicled the lives of a group of neo-Nazi youth and their families over a decade and a half. (The practice of long-term observation was something older DEFA filmmakers, including Volker Koepp, had specialised in.) Strongly criticized when it came out – the premiere in Berlin was cancelled due to protests – today the documentary seems an invaluable account of the rise of right-wing extremism in the early 1990s, a period that came to be known as the ‘Baseballschlägerjahre’ (‘baseball bat years’) due to the regularity of fascist riots and attacks on immigrants and leftists, especially in the freshly integrated Eastern Bundesländer.

The trilogy is set in Halle-Neustadt, a planned city built in the mid-60s to house workers employed in two nearby chemical plants. STAU opens with a shot of a burning car in an empty parking lot. Clouds of black smoke billow towards a busy street, but nobody seems to care; there is no fire truck or police car in sight and the traffic keeps flowing – a vivid metaphor for social conditions in Neustadt at the time. The film develops a divided relationship to its subjects, alternately remote and intimate. When the young neo-Nazis are together, the camera tends to keep its distance, capturing their aggressive, raucous energy from afar as they brawl drunkenly and shout fascist slogans. But much of the film is composed of one-on-one interviews: we see the young men in their homes, sitting more or less uncomfortably in front of the camera, talking about their frustrations and longings.

Early critics argued that the film gave its protagonists too much control over their self-presentation, disregarding their victims, and failing to condemn their behaviour. The documentary certainly displays a lot of patience with its characters. We learn about the boredom and listlessness that comes with unemployment, about absent fathers and overworked mothers. ‘We want to be noticed’, one youth says. But Heise does not provide clear-cut psychological explanations. He is interested in understanding the lives of these alienated young men without making excuses or inviting easy judgements.

In the austere living rooms of their working-class families, the young men are often polite and friendly, sometimes embarrassed, even shy. Of course, they do their best to present themselves well, often fishing for sympathy and downplaying the radicalism of their beliefs, claiming they only carry weapons for self-defence or that ‘Sieg Heil’ is an expression of protest without concrete political meaning. Heise listens and films. His interventions are subtle: ‘Do you know them?’, he asks one youth when he mentions his aversion to ‘the foreigners’. Juxtapositions reveal contradictions: one of the boys is shown talking about his resistance to ‘mixing different cultures’, and then in the next shot is seen enjoying a meal at an Asian restaurant.

The sequel, Neustadt. Stau – Der Stand der Dinge (2000), homes in on a couple of the young men and their families. After several court cases – two of them for violent assault – Ronny has turned away from the scene, although it’s clear that his worldview hasn’t changed. Konrad, on the other hand, who had dreamt of becoming a baker, has made politics his main purpose. No longer getting drunk and beating up leftists, he instead reads books by right-wing thinkers. Compared to the crude sloganeering we witness in the first part, Konrad is eloquent and seems politically sophisticated, confidently discussing the construction of a different system ‘with authoritarian elements’. With Jeannette, Ronny’s sister, a woman comes into focus for the first time. She is recovering from an abusive relationship that ended with her partner’s suicide. She was pregnant at 15 and the older of her two sons, Tommy, is now about 8 years old and already showing signs of rebellion. ‘Schade drum’ (‘too bad’), Jeanette says looking sadly at his photograph. By the time of the final film, Kinder. Wie die Zeit Vergeht (2007), Tommy has dropped out of school and spends his time with a much older neo-Nazi.

As in many of Heise’s documentaries, the landscape itself becomes a protagonist: Neustadt’s monumental, increasingly run-down housing blocks, the decaying facades of empty apartments, deserted streets and train stations. Like many parts of East Germany, Neustadt suffered heavily from the economic shock of reunification. The derelict buildings and drug trafficking cause many residents to feel unsafe; some blame the increased presence of immigrants. Kinder moves away from the housing estates to the industrial periphery. It opens with a tracking shot of the grounds of a huge refinery. Rendered with an abstract beauty, it appears inimical to human flourishing. Although shot in colour, Heise decided to make the film black and white in the edit. In an interview he explained that he had a hard time adapting to the garish colour schemes dominant in Western advertising, which by the 2000s had invaded East Germany too, even its most deprived neighbourhoods. The reduction to black and white helped him to concentrate on the essentials: on facial expressions and the texture of the landscapes (‘Black and white creates clarity in the images’).

Heise’s last and arguably most accomplished film, Heimat Ist ein Raum aus Zeit (Heimat Is a Space in Time, 2019) tells the history of his own family across the twentieth century. Running to nearly four hours, it combines materials from the family archive – letters, diary entries, school essays – read in voiceover by Heise himself, with footage of contemporary Germany: abandoned buildings and construction sites, woods and beaches, stations and schools, the crowded square behind the Brandenburg Gate. The effect is to transform biography into a kind of collective history. Heimat begins with love letters between Heise’s grandmother, a Jewish sculptor from Vienna, and his grandfather, a communist teacher from Berlin, where the two marry and settle down. We follow their correspondence with her family in Vienna until their deportation in 1942. A slow tracking shot over a historical document shows the names and addresses of the deported; the sequence ends with the words, ‘I am travelling today.’ The film continues with the next generation: Heise’s mother Rosemarie corresponds with a lover in West Germany, whose love letters are studded with cynicism about the political systems on each side of the divide. Ruptures in time and perspective are not acknowledged or glossed. Though the film is essayistic, the material is not coerced into an argument. It stands for itself, first and foremost.

‘There is always something left over, something that doesn’t add up’, Heise says at one point in the voiceover of Eisenzeit. His striking documentary Material (2009) is largely assembled from such remainders. A feature-length montage of miscellaneous footage collected over years, including much shot around the time of the fall of the Wall, it is perhaps the purest expression of Heise’s bricolage approach (history is not linear but ‘a heap’, he says in the film). The account it offers – fragmentary, variegated, contradictory – challenges the bullish official history propagated by West German media: it features recordings of GDR residents speaking about their hopes for the future of their East German state – hopes that dissipated when Germany was reunited on terms dictated by the West. Heise was interested in such untidy ambiguities, and was always willing to doubt preconceived opinions, including his own. Refusing to explain or cast judgement on what we are being shown, his films are deliberate without being imposing, leaving the complexities of history intact.

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

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Mutiny in Bolivia

During the two hundred years since it gained independence, Bolivia has experienced innumerable coups d’état. The presidential palace, flanked by the Cathedral of La Paz and the Legislative Assembly on the Plaza Murillo, has been the setting for many of these blunt bids for political power. It became known as the Palacio Quemado, or ‘Burnt Palace’, after it was set afire during a failed uprising in 1875. Yet despite this history, it came as a shock when fourteen armoured vehicles rumbled into the Plaza on 26 June and smashed open the palace’s gate. The leader of the incursion, General Juan José Zúñiga, entered the grounds accompanied by the heads of the navy and air force, and was met by President Luis Arce Catacora. Arce ordered him to withdraw his troops. Zúñiga refused. The face-off lasted several minutes before Zúñiga got back into his vehicle and retreated to the army headquarters in Miraflores.

Zúñiga later told journalists that his aim was to seize the government buildings and ‘reestablish democracy’ by military means. He denounced the Arce administration and called for the liberation of political prisoners, including the leaders of the 2019 right-wing revolt that overthrew Evo Morales. As Arce swore in new military commanders, Zúñiga was arrested and jailed. Yet by that time he had already contradicted his previous statements and declared that it was in fact the President himself who had directed him to stage the event in an attempt to prop up his faltering government.

In the wake of the stand-off, there was an outpouring of support for Arce in the largely indigenous city of El Alto and among sectors of the social movements. Yet many of the administration’s critics, on both the left and right, believed Zúñiga. Morales, who still leads the governing Movement for Socialism (MAS) party despite having been ousted from the presidency in 2019, and who is Arce’s main rival in the 2025 presidential elections, claimed that the government had orchestrated the incident to garner popular favour. The right-wing lowland opposition and urban middle classes agreed that it was all a political show.

As coup attempts go, it was certainly a strange one. There were no bullets fired, no occupations of government buildings. But if it were staged, why would Zúñiga and his accomplices have accepted the role of scapegoats? This murky episode, and the clashing responses to it, provide a window onto Bolivia’s current state of crisis. Two decades after the end of neoliberal governance, the country is experiencing a sort of structural decomposition. The economy is in steady decline, the leadership of the MAS is profoundly split, state institutions are eroding, and visions of national renewal are hard to find.

Arce served as Minister of the Economy in the Morales government for over a decade – a role in which he oversaw the greatest economic bonanza in republican history. Poverty and inequality declined, the middle class expanded, urban development accelerated and GDP grew at a healthy rate. Yet as with other Pink Tide projects, the MAS model depended on the commodities boom of the 2000s. It began to falter when prices took a downward turn in 2014, and further deteriorated when the pandemic triggered a global recession and soaring inflation in 2020. Since then, the state coffers have dried up due to decreasing fossil fuel production and exports. Bolivia collected $5.5 billion in natural gas rents and $6.6 billion in foreign sales in 2014, compared to $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion in 2023. Its mineral exports are still significant, but they bring in scant revenue because the tax structure favours cooperative mining producers. Despite the country’s hydrocarbon wealth, the government continues to import fuel for popular consumption, and it is yet to industrialize its potentially profitable lithium holdings.

Foreign exchange reserves have meanwhile fallen from $15.1 billion to $1.8 billion over the last decade. The government has borrowed to cover its losses, with foreign debt now at around 30% of GDP. It has retained many redistributive measures, including direct cash transfers to the poor and subsidized fuel prices, but this has cut further into the state budget. Partly as a result, public investment declined by half between 2016 and 2022. The currency is officially worth 6.97 Bolivianos to the dollar, but this can reach 9.20 on the black market. A scarcity of dollars and fuel has generated frustration across class lines. In late June, the government faced a strike from the heavy transport sector. These issues leant plausibility to the notion that the Plaza Murillo affair was confected as a distraction.

Bolivia’s economic crisis coincides with a political one. The gulf between President Arce and Morales, head of the MAS party, appears unbridgeable. Morales routinely attacks his former comrade, denouncing him as a traitor to the Proceso de Cambio (‘Process of Change’) who has reverted to the neoliberal status quo ante. Arce, in return, asserts that Morales’s public criticism amounts to collaboration with the right. The truth is that the two do not differ much in terms of policies or principles. Both seek to use the country’s natural resources to sustain a development model that mixes state and private enterprise, mitigates inequality through the redistribution of rents, incorporates indigenous and popular sectors politically, and preserves some autonomy from Washington. The differences between them are largely a matter of political style (Morales is combative, Arce mild-mannered) and the changed economic circumstances (initially favourable under Morales, much less so under Arce).

The main point of contention concerns who exercises greater power within the MAS. Morales’s frustration began in 2021 when the President ignored his advice to change the composition of the cabinet. The animosity has only escalated – partly on account of the caudillismo that is baked into MAS political culture. The cult of personality surrounding Morales can be traced back to his days as the leader of the coca-growers’ movement. It was inflated by MAS ideologue Alvaro García Linera, whose theory of Evismo framed Morales as an irreplaceable, once-in-a-century revolutionary hero. Since assuming office, though, Arce has developed his own personal ambitions and loyal following.

While Arce’s approval ratings have declined from around 50% to as low as 18%, Morales’s bid to replace him faces major legitimacy problems. Morales oversaw the passage of the 2009 Constitution, which allowed for only two consecutive presidential terms. Yet in 2013 the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal ruled that his first term should not count since it preceded the new constitutional framework, permitting him to stand for a third. In 2016, Morales held a plebiscite to modify the constitution to enable him to run again, but the initiative was narrowly voted down. The following year, a new ruling declared that term limits violated Morales’s human rights and allowed him to contest the 2019 elections. This knife-edge race concluded with Morales declaring victory and the opposition crying foul. Middle-class protests against ‘electoral fraud’ culminated in street violence and attacks on MAS officials. The Organization of American States, backed by the Trump White House, declared the victory illegitimate. Social movements and security forces both urged Morales to step down to prevent a wider conflict. Fearing for his life, the President fled the country, bringing an end to the longest civilian government in Bolivian history.

Military officials swore in Senator Jeanine Añez in November 2019 to head an unelected right-wing regime. Her government used heavy-handed tactics to silence its critics and carried out two massacres that left 21 protestors dead and hundreds injured. Deeply unpopular, Añez crashed to defeat in elections the following year, which Arce won with 55% of the vote. Morales then returned from exile and prepared for his next presidential campaign, on the grounds that the constitution does not rule out discontinuous terms in office. Yet his repeated attempts to cling to power and control the party apparatus have eroded his popular prestige. Arce has sought to use his institutional influence to block Morales’s return to the presidency. Morales has retaliated by expelling both Arce and Vice President David Choquehuanca from the party.

It remains unclear how this power struggle will play out. The MAS was founded in 1997 as a hybrid between a political party and a federation of social movements (its full name is Movement for Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the People). Although Morales is the leader, he does not have the power to nominate electoral candidates. They must be selected at party assemblies with the participation of the social movements, which are currently aligned with Arce’s faction. The polarization of the party renders it unable to nominate a contender. The two sides are too far apart to even engage in negotiations.

The confrontation in the Plaza Murillo bears the marks of this division. Three days earlier, Zúñiga, once a close ally of Arce, publicly denounced Morales and promised to block him from returning to office. This outburst violated a constitutional ban on military interference in political affairs and led Arce to dismiss him from his post. Soon thereafter, the general launched the mutiny. In their tête-a-tête outside the palace, Zúñiga accused Arce of betraying him. The episode could thus be seen as a spin-off from the Arce/Morales struggle, triggered by Zúñiga’s overzealous attempts to side with the former against the latter.

The acrimony between arcistas and evistas has also inflicted serious damage on both the legislature and judiciary. The 2023 judicial elections could not be held on time due to the factional deadlock in the legislative assembly. This caused the current Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal to extend its mandate, prompting the evistas – who already have reason to view the institution as biased in Arce’s favour – to denounce its rulings as illegitimate. At the same time, congressional infighting has frustrated important actions such as the approval of loans and lithium negotiations with potential foreign investors. Almost $1 billion worth of loans, earmarked for projects including infrastructure development, land titling and irrigation, have been secured by the executive but held up by the evista bloc, which insists that they should not be approved until the judicial elections have taken place.

As the MAS continues to tear itself apart, the Bolivian right is still struggling to assemble any meaningful opposition. It remains discredited after Añez’s disastrous stint in office. She and Luis Fernando Camacho, governor of the lowland department of Santa Cruz, are both serving time in prison for their roles in the overthrow of Morales. No candidate has emerged to replace them, and the conservative bloc is beset by deep divisions. Given the strength of popular opposition to neoliberalism, they cannot offer any alternative agenda to the left-nationalism of the MAS. Indeed, the right’s weakness helps to explain why personal and factional hostilities have freely proliferated within the ruling party.

The MAS has clearly lost a significant degree of control over the armed forces. Morales had quadrupled military spending in the hope of ensuring their loyalty. Unexpectedly, though, cadre at all levels turned against the President after the 2019 election and aided the right-wing power-grab. Until last month, Arce’s administration appeared to have the military in hand once again. Yet it is now apparent that the split within the MAS has destabilized the structures of command and facilitated armed intervention in the political process. Those who claim that Zúñiga’s mutiny was stage-managed neglect the extent to which the army can operate autonomously from the elected government.

Bolivia’s social movements have also regained significant autonomy from the state, and may be decisive in shaping the outcome of the ongoing political struggles. Between 2000 and 2005, they were by far the most powerful force in the country, bringing down the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, setting the agenda for economic and constitutional transformation, and elevating Morales and the MAS to high office. Yet after the right-wing opposition was defeated and the new constitution passed in 2009, political power was increasingly centralized, and the social movements came under MAS control. When the ruling party was unable to co-opt them, it resorted to strong-arm tactics to weaken the grassroots leadership and in some cases create parallel organizations.

Morales has always been able to control the syndicalist organizations of coca-growing peasants in the lowland Chapare region. But during his time in office, several other popular organizations – constituting the Pacto de Unidad coalition – were gradually brought into line, either voluntarily or under sustained pressure. When the Morales government fell, these organizations reclaimed much of their political independence. Though they never recovered the vanguard role that they had played in the early 2000s, they were effective in organizing against the Añez regime and securing the MAS’s return to power under Arce. As the antagonism within the MAS deepened, the Pacto de Unidad continued to support the Arce government, while the coca-growers stood by Morales. The social movements have increased their influence within the MAS and reasserted their capacity for large-scale mobilization. On 26 June, hundreds of people spontaneously surrounded the Plaza Murillo and confronted the troops in the street. This popular intervention was likely one of the factors that prevented an outbreak of violence and stopped the military from seizing power.

Despite the Añez interregnum, Bolivia has been one of the most resilient of the Pink Tide countries. Yet its economic and political problems are now being compounded by a challenging international conjuncture. The government must contend with the longstanding animosity of the United States as well as the reactionary turn in Europe and the stalemate in Latin America, where the left has come up against right-wing restorationist and populist projects. The stand-off in the Plaza Murillo demonstrates that the dissension within the MAS has created opportunities for reactionary forces, foreign and domestic, to wreak havoc on the country. Arce’s opponents may dismiss it as nothing more than a simulacrum of history, but it reflects a very real trend, whereby the stalling of the Proceso de Cambio has opened the door to would-be authoritarians.

There is nothing inevitable about this decomposition. What are the possible alternatives? The MAS has been gravitating towards China, the BRICs and de-dollarization to address the country’s structural economic obstacles. Lithium extraction remains the developmentalists’ dream, while environmentalists face an uphill struggle for a green transition. Popular forces are in a strong position to counter caudillismo, perhaps drawing inspiration from indigenous political cultures that favour decentralization and rotating authority. Yet these pathways are rarely the subject of open debate or contestation. On the eve of the bicentennial, it seems that the starting point for envisioning Bolivia’s renewal is recognizing the depth of its current crisis.

Read on: Álvaro Garcia Linera, ‘State Crisis and Popular Power’, NLR 37.

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Same Blade

A few weeks before Rishi Sunak called a snap general election, an anonymous Labour source, supportive of the party leadership, expressed surprise at the failure of the left to cause problems for Keir Starmer over his obsequious backing for Israel’s war on Gaza. ‘I’m surprised at how little they’ve taken advantage of it’, they said. ‘If you can’t build a mass movement inside the Labour Party about this, what can you build it about?’ Around the same time, an MP on the Labour left explained why they had not attempted to build such a movement: ‘We are frightened of being called antisemitic.’

Not everyone in British politics was paralyzed by such timidity. After nine months of sustained mobilization against the attack on Gaza by a solidarity movement that faced down splenetic charges of antisemitism from its opponents, Starmer’s party took a notable hit at the ballot box from candidates who declared their support for Palestine. Four independents won seats at Labour’s expense with platforms that highlighted Starmer’s public endorsement of war crimes, while several other Labour MPs, including the new Health Secretary Wes Streeting, came perilously close to being defeated. Starmer himself saw his constituency vote share fall by 17.4%, thanks to the insurgent left-wing candidacy of Andrew Feinstein. The Green Party, which also stressed its opposition to Labour’s line on Gaza, elected four MPs with its highest ever vote share. Most woundingly for Team Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn easily retained his seat in north London after being expelled from the Labour Party, despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of Labour bigwigs like Peter Mandelson and Tom Watson campaigning for his opponent Praful Nargund.

These results told a tale about the eclipse of the Labour left, less than five years after it held the leadership of the party, and the search for new openings outside the ambit of Labourism. In the wake of the 2019 election defeat, the general staff of the Labour left collectively decided that there was no point challenging allegations of antisemitism, whether or not they had any basis in reality. As Rebecca Long-Bailey, Starmer’s defeated opponent in the 2020 leadership contest, put it in an article for Jewish News: ‘My advice to Labour Party members is that it is never OK to respond to allegations of racism by being defensive . . . The only acceptable response to any accusation of racist prejudice is self-scrutiny, self-criticism and self-improvement.’

As they offered this advice, Long-Bailey and her team ignored the fact that Corbyn’s opponents routinely blurred the distinction between prejudice against Jews and the most elementary forms of solidarity with the Palestinian people. A few months later, Starmer ousted Long-Bailey herself from the Labour shadow cabinet, having cobbled together a charge of antisemitism that was insultingly threadbare, but there was no reassessment of the defeatist line. When Starmer had Corbyn suspended as a Labour MP for stating the obvious truth that the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents’, the parliamentarians of the Socialist Campaign Group barely lifted a finger in response. They appeared to believe that Corbyn’s removal had no wider implications for their political project, even as Starmer steadily expunged any trace of left-wing influence from the structures of the Labour Party in a way that put Tony Blair to shame.

By the time the general election was called this year, the LSE economist Faiza Shaheen was one of the few candidates on the Labour left standing for a winnable seat – Chingford and Woodford Green, in northeast London – who had not fallen foul of Starmer’s purge. In keeping with the general approach of the SCG, Shaheen pointedly refused to criticize Corbyn’s exclusion, telling the New Statesman that his statement was ‘really stupid’ and incompatible with Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on antisemitism. This did Shaheen no good when, in the run up to the vote, Labour apparatchiks decided they wanted to replace her with one of their factional allies.

The list of unforgivable offences for which Shaheen was arraigned included liking a tweet that referred to the existence of the Israel lobby. Extraordinarily, during a BBC interview, Shaheen conceded that it was unacceptable to talk about ‘professional organisations’ which direct hostile flak towards critics of Israel (this at a time when, across the Atlantic, AIPAC was investing unprecedented sums in a Democratic primary race to oust Jamaal Bowman). As with their response to Corbyn’s suspension, the most prominent leaders of the Labour left once again seemed incapable of planting their feet on the solid ground of empirical reality, deferring instead to feelings and perceptions, however absurd they might be. To her credit, Shaheen declined to bow down and ran as an independent, matching the vote for Labour’s hastily drafted candidate; Labour’s insistence on pushing her out allowed the Tory politician Iain Duncan Smith to retain the seat. Hopefully she now understands how easy it is to find yourself accused of antisemitism by cynical operators on precisely the same basis as the former Labour leader.

In that respect, the last nine months have been chock-full of what Barack Obama would call ‘teachable moments’. The same bloc of political forces that came together to vilify Corbyn has been campaigning tirelessly in support of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Earlier this year, two of Corbyn’s most indefatigable critics, Margaret Hodge and Ruth Anderson, posed for a photo alongside Israel’s president Isaac Herzog. This ‘solidarity mission’, as Labour Friends of Israel proudly called it, came shortly after the International Court of Justice had cited Herzog’s bloodcurdling remarks about Palestinian civilians when ordering the Israeli government to prevent incitement to genocide.

The leaders of this political bloc directed their fire against the Palestine solidarity movement that has organized so many big demonstrations in London and other British cities calling for an immediate ceasefire. To their immense frustration, they found that movement unwilling to capitulate or jump through hoops at the behest of its opponents. A figure like Mike Katz, the corporate lobbyist who chairs the Jewish Labour Movement, was left to engage in the usual vague innuendo, implying that Labour’s image was at risk of contamination from ‘the regular protests down the road in Parliament Square’ without being able to say what was wrong with those protests.

As the carnage in Gaza continued, Britain’s anti-Palestinian front began to lose its cohesion. The soi-disant Campaign Against Antisemitism overreached itself by picking a fight with the Metropolitan Police as part of its vendetta against the pro-ceasefire marches. The former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was bold enough to raise some questions about the ‘closely guarded secret’ of who owns the Jewish Chronicle and what influence they may have on the newspaper’s ‘pungent line’ over Gaza. After several years in which national media outlets, including the Guardian, were happy to present the Chronicle as the unmediated voice of Jewish opinion in Britain, this was quite a breakthrough. When Starmer made some ambiguous comments about recognizing a Palestinian state, the Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons accused him of ‘surrendering to jihad’ and ‘rewarding the worst pogroms since the Holocaust.’

If the Labour left had not internalized the notion that support for Palestinian rights was a liability, it might have taken the opportunity during these months to push back hard against the false narrative of pervasive, quasi-genocidal ‘Labour antisemitism’ under Corbyn and explain how that malign fable fed directly into Starmer’s endorsement of mass killing in Gaza. In practice, the SCG couldn’t even cause Starmer difficulty when he suspended their own members on absurd pretexts: Kate Osamor for listing Gaza as an example of genocide along with Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia (she immediately apologized for doing so, which wasn’t enough to satisfy the Labour leader); Andy McDonald for promising not to rest ‘until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty’. The obvious response to McDonald’s suspension would have been for other left-wing MPs to repeat his statement and challenge Starmer to explain why he objected so vigorously to the notion of Palestinians living in ‘peaceful liberty’, but they were unwilling to do so.

In the end, Osamor and McDonald both had the whip restored after Labour came under strong pressure from the outside. First the Scottish National Party brought forward a pro-ceasefire motion in the House of Commons; Starmer had to lean on the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Hoyle, to break the rules of parliamentary procedure so his MPs would not have to vote on the SNP motion (Hoyle was rewarded for his misbehaviour after the election with a fresh term as Speaker). Then George Galloway took a seat from Labour in a Rochdale by-election at the end of February by turning it into a referendum on Starmer’s Gaza policy. McDonald’s return to the Parliamentary Labour Party came within days of Galloway’s victory, while the leadership appeared to be saving up Osamor’s eventual readmission as a pacifying gesture, since it coincided with the defection of Natalie Elphicke, a Conservative MP whose record of bigotry was so extravagant that even a dedicated Blairite like the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley found her recruitment hard to swallow.

There were a few more teachable moments in the course of the election campaign. At the beginning of June, the Starmer leadership announced that it was dropping a vastly expensive legal action against five former party staffers whom it accused of leaking a report on Labour’s organizational culture under Corbyn. The main purpose of the action – apart from unadulterated spite, a motivation we should never discount when Labour’s right-wing faction is involved – was to discourage public discussion of the report by creating the impression that there was something illegitimate about its contents.

This effort was vital, since the evidence in the report discredited the lurid version of events peddled by Corbyn’s inner-party opponents in productions like the BBC documentary ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’ In another report, this time commissioned by Starmer himself, the lawyer Martin Forde deemed that version of events to be ‘wholly misleading’ and vouched for the accuracy of the leaked report. As election day approached, Forde revealed that he had also been threatened with legal action by lawyers acting on Labour’s behalf in an unsuccessful attempt to deter him from speaking about his findings. Forde may well regret having given the members of this clique the benefit of the doubt about their motivations at several points where there was no doubt available.

We will never know how the period since 2019 might have unfolded differently if the Labour left had displayed the same combativity as politicians like Rima Hassan and Rashida Tlaib when faced with deceitful attacks. Corbyn’s suspension was a turning point – the moment when some of his allies decided that telling the truth about their own record was simply too hard. Fortunately Corbyn himself decided not to go quietly. His successful campaign, along with those of the Green and anti-war candidates, delivered a blow to Starmer just as he seemed to be triumphant. From the outset of his leadership, Starmer and his team decided to conflate uncritical support for Israel with a righteous stand against antisemitism so they could use this conflation as a weapon with which to slay the left. Now they have ended up cutting themselves on the same blade.

In the short term, Labour’s position on Gaza is unlikely to shift in response to the election. Despite the Green and independent gains, the bloc of Westminster MPs challenging that position is actually much smaller than it was before polling day after the SNP lost most of its seats in Scotland because of factors that had nothing to do with international policy. Ousted Labour MPs like Thangam Debbonaire and Jonathan Ashworth have displayed all the humility we might expect since losing their seats, telling the broadcast media that they were the victims of dark, illegitimate forces. John McDonnell’s suggestion that Corbyn might be readmitted to the PLP is yet another example of wishful thinking about the nature of Starmer’s project and the place of the left within its confines. But the evidence that Labour can be punished at the ballot box in areas it took for granted, even at what is likely to be the high point of its fortunes under Starmer, has put down an important marker for the years to come, and should give more confidence to those organizing outside the party.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘False Compromise’, Sidecar.

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Victory Deferred

Minutes after the first exit polls in France last Sunday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon told a large crowd of supporters that the Nouveau Front populaire (NFP) had received a mandate to implement ‘its entire programme’. It was a stirring moment; the speech concluded with the opening bars of Jean Ferrat’s Ma France, one of the most beautiful left-wing songs in the national repertoire. Yet the spectacle risked raising hopes that will soon be dashed. For the left did not really win: the newly elected National Assembly numbers some 200 MPs affiliated with the NFP or likely to vote for the coalition – among them the Socialist François Hollande, whose disastrous presidency is still a fresh memory – against 350 right-wing MPs, from Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance to Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement national (RN). The left may have defied predictions of a victory for the far-right – no small achievement – but it did not triumph.

As for the ‘New Popular Front’, it is ‘new’ in the sense that isn’t as populaire as its predecessor of 1936. Among those who did not abstain, 57% of manual labourers and 44% of service-sector employees voted for the RN. It was in the big cities, where the population is disproportionately bourgeois and highly educated, that the NFP won the majority of its seats. This was especially true of the Socialist Party (PS) and the Greens. Mélenchon’s attempt to appeal to the popular sectors succeeded on one level: the mobilization of the banlieues, where large numbers of immigrants allowed La France insoumise (LFI) to achieve impressive results, often without going to ballotage. All the same, even a casual observer of French politics must have smiled on reading the headline in Libération, the daily newspaper of the progressive urban petty bourgeoisie, the day after the first round of the legislative elections: ‘Paris, capitale du Nouveau Front populaire’. Paris, the most expensive city in France, where apartments frequently go for over €10,000 per square metre, indeed elected twelve NFP MPs out of a total of eighteen, eight of them in the first round. By contrast, in working-class constituencies that for almost a century were citadels of the left, often of the Communist Party (PCF), the results were disastrous. Picardy returned thirteen far-right MPs out of seventeen; in the Pas-de-Calais, longtime fiefdom of Maurice Thorez – head of the PCF for more than thirty years – the RN claimed ten out of twelve seats, six in the first round. In the Gard, the party won every constituency.

One can therefore see why the Secretary General of the CGT, Sophie Binet, did not mince her words:

The arrival in power of the far-right has only been delayed . . . Working-class bastions in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the East, the North and the Seine-Maritime have fallen to the far-right. This is not merely a protest vote against Emmanuel Macron. A large number of working people voted for the far-right out of conviction. In duels with the left, wage-earners cast their ballots for the RN candidate. The casualization of employment and collapse of organized labour have accelerated the progression of the RN . . . The left that governed the country under François Hollande abdicated in the face of finance and oversaw increasing inequality within the workforce, pitting middle-managers against workers . . . Some formations abandoned the struggle for the collective improvement of working conditions in favour of welfare measures, while renouncing any confrontation with capital. The left must once more become the party of workers.

No doubt this problem is not confined to France. It suffices to replace ‘François Hollande’ with ‘Bill Clinton’, Paris with New York, ‘la France périphérique’ with ‘flyover country’ and Maastricht with NAFTA to paint a similar sociological and political portrait of the United States, and plenty of other countries as well. Even if the advent of LFI resuscitated the genuine left in France, many voters – in Picardy, in Lorraine, in the North, in the East – have not forgotten that on crucial political-economic questions, especially when it came to the EU, an entity responsible for destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, the Socialists linked arms with the liberal right; to the point that in 2005, Hollande and Sarkozy posed side-by-side on the cover of a celebrity magazine to call for a ‘yes’ vote in the European Constitutional Referendum and then, likewise united, ignored the opposition of 55% of the population to impose the treaty they had rejected. The two men then went head-to-head in the next presidential election, one ostensibly representing the left, the other the right, before succeeding one another at the Élysée, and adopting more or less the same supply-side economic policies, as stipulated by Brussels. In these conditions, it is hardly surprising that upwards of 10 million voters would henceforth seek a political alternative, looking to ‘those who have never governed’ – that is to say, the far-right.

But one can always hope that lessons are at last being learned. On the morrow of the elections, in the absence of a majority, all the parties of the NFP affirmed that they intend to govern together, and that they would not enter into a coalition with the centre or the right which would oblige them to renounce the better part of their economic and social commitments. They seem to understand that any new government which does not enact urgent social measures – annulment of Macron’s pensions reform, a minimum wage hike, increased taxes on the very rich – will almost inevitably hand the far-right an even higher score in the next election. Although the RN thrives on xenophobic fears and rancour, it also benefits from working-class people’s sense that nothing ever changes politically while their own lives get harder and harder, which makes them want to overturn the status quo, ‘just to give it a shot’. Like in the US, where Trump’s victory – that is to say, first and foremost, Clinton’s defeat – led the Democrats to propose Keynesian policies that broke (somewhat) with free-trade orthodoxy, the rapid advance of the RN plus pressure from LFI have at least had the advantage of preventing the French centre-left, in particular the Socialists, from continuing to defend neoliberal policies on the grounds that ‘there is no alternative’ to globalization and no salvation beyond the ‘cercle de la raison’.

In the wake of the ballot, the ascendancy of the far-right in France has only been postponed. The electoral ‘barrage’ meant that the RN came in third place, with around 140 seats in the National Assembly against some 160 for Macron’s Ensemble and 180 for the NFP (of which LFI took 74). But it won considerably more votes: 37% in the second round, as opposed to 26% for the NFP and just under 25% for Ensemble. What’s more, caught off-guard by Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament, the RN ran whatever candidates it had to hand, including dozens with no political experience, who were swiftly revealed by their social media profiles to be openly racist, antisemitic, homophobic or simply incompetent.

Bardella has already acknowledged these ‘mistakes’: ‘There is still work to be done in terms of the professionalization of our local representatives, and perhaps also the choice of a certain number of candidates. To be honest, in a few constituencies the choices we made were not good.’ The RN can henceforth count on considerably more public funds, allowing it to better prepare its cadres. And it will almost certainly claim additional mayoralties in the upcoming municipal elections (at the moment it has very few), which will enable it to further ‘professionalize’ its operation and expand its territorial grip. As if that weren’t enough, the RN will have another advantage over the coming months: while its rivals’ coalitions are fragile and have already begun to fray and vacillate, its own is solid. It isn’t an alliance of parties that detest each other, as with the PS and LFI. The RN already knows who its candidate will be in the next presidential election, which could be called at any moment: namely Marine Le Pen. Neither the left, with a host of contenders still in the ring, nor Renaissance can say the same. Macron cannot stand again, and four or five of his lieutenants are already vying to succeed him.

Nor can the President call new legislative elections for the next year. In the meantime, France is likely to be ungovernable. The RN will not join any coalition, as all of the other parties are in league against it. The NFP cannot command a majority unless it allies with Ensemble, but the presidential coalition is already in the process of disintegrating. One fraction would like to join forces with the NFP on the condition that it banish LFI (which, in turn, has warned that ‘no subterfuge, scheme or arrangement would be acceptable’, a position echoed by most of the Socialists). The other fraction would prefer to unite with forty or fifty right-wing MPs, but the feeling does not appear to be mutual. Were such an alliance forged, Ensemble itself would be shattered.

Having wrought the current chaos, the President departed for the Washington NATO summit, leaving behind a ‘Letter to the French’ in which he refused to acknowledge that they rejected him and demanded that the parties arrive at a solution that excludes both the RN and LFI. None has been found. By dissolving the National Assembly, the enfant roi at the Élysée has broken his toys and called on others to fix them. Over the coming months, his impulsiveness and egocentrism will make him more dangerous and unpredictable, to the point that even the once worshipful Economist has begun to worry: ‘Far from settling France’s political divisions, Emmanuel Macron’s surprise decision to call a snap election looks likely to usher in a period of deadlock, apprehension, and instability.’

Macron’s election in 2017 enabled the French bourgeoisie to bring together elements of both the left and right around a programme of neoliberal reform and ‘the construction of Europe’. Politically, this ‘bourgeois bloc’ has now imploded. Its left wing has turned its back on a largely discredited neoliberalism and a despised President who seems to have botched everything. Even so, enthusiasm for Europe continues to serve as ideological bedrock for this onetime alliance. To this one must add attachment to the Ukrainian cause and obsessive Russophobia, especially pronounced among the educated middle classes. Hammered home fanatically by the media, these Atlanticist passions are nonetheless insufficient to reconstitute the erstwhile bourgeois bloc, as Macron would like. Not in peacetime, at any rate.

Neither Europe nor Ukraine are sufficiently popular causes to cement a new coalition that would keep out LFI and the RN alike, on the model of the ‘Third Force’ that from 1947 to 1948 regrouped the pro-American parties in opposition to the Communists and the Gaullists. Yet François Bayrou, an intimate of Macron’s who was responsible for his victory in 2017, still hopes to accomplish something similar, leveraging the ultra-Atlanticist turn of French diplomacy following the President’s discussion of sending troops to Ukraine. Bayrou has set out the parameters of this potential alliance against ‘the extremes’: 

There are people who are all in agreement that we should pursue the construction of Europe. They all agree that we should continue supplying aid to Ukraine, at a moment when Putin has come out publicly in support of the Rassemblement national. So there are people who share what I consider to be the fundamental values. There you have an arc républicain, you have common values. I don’t exclude anyone. But I don’t think that LFI corresponds to those values.

It is doubtful whether anyone could form a government in France solely on the basis of such ‘common values’, especially given the composition of the current parliament. Paris is not Brussels, where socialists, conservatives and liberals get along well enough to govern. But nor is there any parliamentary majority to enact the programme of the left that came first in the legislative elections. This impasse, instigated by Macron, can only bolster the far-right, even after a plurality of French citizens rallied to prevent it from taking power. The President remains its best campaign official.

Translated by Grey Anderson.

Read on: Serge Halimi, ‘Condition of France’, NLR 144.

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Washingtonology

In 1952 and 1968, unpopular Democratic incumbents renounced their claims to reelection, in both cases against a backdrop of low unemployment and brutal, pointless wars. But despite such parallels, Joe Biden now reminds one more of Richard Nixon than of Truman or LBJ. In March 1968 – reeling from the Tet Offensive, a gold crisis, and Eugene McCarthy’s near-upset in New Hampshire, LBJ complained that ‘the establishment bastards have bailed out’. Yet he didn’t resist. Faced with a similar set of problems, Nixon ordered his men to break into the Brookings Institution (though not, as he briefly considered, to firebomb the think tank). Biden hasn’t bombed anyone in this country yet. But after his disastrous debate performance on 27 June, he has engaged in a level of intra-elite conflict – with certain donors, large sections of his own party, and above all, the media – which the country has not witnessed since 1974.

To a degree which is hard to exaggerate, the media reaction to the debate was swift and unanimous. Shock and panic were understandable, since the clearest implication of the debate was that Trump was now heavily favoured to win in November. Mixed with this were expressions of personal betrayal from people who, by their own account, had looked away from earlier signs of mental decline because they trusted the assurances issued privately by Biden’s camp. Ron Klain, one of Biden’s three or four closest non-family associates, reportedly told a New York Times journalist ‘a couple months ago’ to set aside ‘age concerns’ because ‘we haven’t had a campaign yet. Watch him campaign, watch the debates’. As Matthew Zeitlin predicted correctly the day after the debate, ‘A lot of reporters feel like they were gaslit, bullied, unfairly attacked for bringing up Biden’s age and will now feel absolutely emboldened to talk about it nonstop and won’t feel any need to respect the campaign and White House’s arguments for why they shouldn’t.’ 

As the tide went out, you could suddenly see which figures in the media were the most firmly anchored in defence of Biden, even the version of him on display at the debate. Chris Hayes of MSNBC offered a good example. On 6 July, Hayes interviewed Congressman Mike Quigley, one of the first to call for Biden to step down. In describing his own feelings to Quigley, Hayes identified himself frankly as a partisan: ‘I think I’ve been pretty honest about this – you talk about working your way through this. I feel somewhat similarly; differently because I’m a journalist, I’m not an elected member, but I have a deep stake in the prospering of American democracy and its future’. Casting about for defences of Biden, Hayes tried the following:  

There’s been a few moments [in earlier presidential races] where if you went up to anyone who’s a political practitioner they would be like he’s toast, he’s done, and then he wasn’t. So there’s some sense in which there’s some part of me sympathetic to the argument of like don’t get caught up in the moment, things can change, this like don’t, don’t get too, because you don’t – you never know what’s gonna happen.

This is a reasonable way to talk to yourself when your favourite team is losing a baseball game. As an argument about Biden’s fitness, it is stunningly vacant – and blithe, given that the future of American democracy is said to be at stake. Even Hayes had trouble believing it. When Quigley responded that ‘Four years ago you saw a different Joe Biden’, the host had to agree this was ‘incontrovertible’. By this week, Hayes had come around to Quigley’s view, though he made sure to say that ‘this is not a scandal’ and that Biden ‘is a decent man who has done nothing wrong’. Flattery has been a consistent feature of the appeals to Biden; despite its limited success so far, one can’t say for sure it won’t have any effect on a man with such a high view of himself.

Inevitably, journalists have described the succession drama as ‘Shakespearean’. If there’s a ghost haunting this feast of cliches, it is probably a starving Gazan. There has been strikingly little discussion of any connection between Biden’s reversal of political fortunes and his support for the ongoing Israeli assault on Palestine. But watching White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre get into a shouting match with journalists over Biden’s health, it is impossible not to think about the credibility gap that has grown wider with every press briefing about Gaza. 

On 8 July, the NYT reported, ‘The White House briefing room devolved into shouting on Monday as the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, repeatedly dodged and refused to answer questions about the president’s health, and whether visits to the White House by a Parkinson’s doctor were about the president.’ The next day, a journalist asked another Biden flack, Matthew Miller, about the death toll in Gaza. As Miller delivered a typical non-answer, the journalist interrupted. Here is the exchange that followed, as reported in the State Department’s transcript:  

QUESTION: You’re smirking. You’re smirking as you say that.

MR MILLER: No, excuse – go ahead with another question, Said.

QUESTION: You are smirking as you say –

MR MILLER: Absolutely not. I’m not going to – I’m not even going to entertain that.

QUESTION: Let me finish my – let me finish – let me finish my question, please.

MR MILLER: I’m not even going to entertain that.

Said, go ahead with another question.

QUESTION: Matt, you’re smirking.

MR MILLER: That’s ridiculous.

There was a reason the journalist was asking about the death toll. The Lancet had just published a letter estimating that the Israeli ‘war’ has killed at least one in twelve people in Gaza – close to a decimation in the strict sense. The estimate is necessarily crude given the destruction of medical and communications capacity in Gaza. We have a more precise measure of Washington’s support for an openly genocidal government since 7 October: $6.5 billion. 

It is a scandal, but at this point not a surprise, that large swathes of the US media and political elite have made their peace with both of these numbers. What is harder to understand is the media’s continued lack of interest in a related question: given the new consensus on the President’s inability to rule, who is making decisions about foreign policy? It is not as if such decisions have been suspended since the debate. On 10 July, the day after AOC burned the emperor’s incense – declaring that ‘He is in this race, and I support him’ – an ‘administration official’ told the Wall Street Journal that the US ‘will soon begin shipping to Israel the 500-pound bombs that the Biden administration had previously suspended, ending a two-month pause it had imposed in a bid to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza’. On the Ukraine front, the liberalization of the administration’s restrictions on the use of American weaponry is likely to continue. Since the Russian bombing of a hospital in Kyiv, one hears calls for the removal of all restrictions.  

Who has been making and will continue to make these decisions? As Bruce Cumings wrote at the dawn of the Second Cold War, there are certain questions which one can only study by squinting at ‘the fine print of our dominant newspapers, pursuing a Washingtonology that can reveal the hidden struggle’. Is it significant that three of the first legislators to come out against Biden were Quigley, who co-chairs the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, plus Adam Smith and Seth Moulton, both members of the House Armed Services Committee? It is well known there are sections of the national security establishment who have not forgiven Biden and Jake Sullivan for the Afghanistan withdrawal; even those who got over this may want a more legitimate figure in office to deal with NATO and – dare anyone hope? – prevent the reelection of Trump and the presumable consequences for Ukraine.     

What do we make of the timing when, on 9 July, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines put out a press release claiming that ‘Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza’? Just a week earlier, right after the debate, ex-Obama Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson said that ‘A presidency is more than just one man. I would take Joe Biden at his worst day at age 86 so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines’. Johnson earned his cabinet position in 2008, when he led Obama’s effort to compete with Hillary Clinton for money from New York financial circles; reportedly, Johnson and Obama sought specifically ‘to draw from pools that barely existed four years ago, particularly hedge fund and private-equity fund principals’. After leaving the Obama administration, Johnson became a proud recipient of the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Award. He is on the boards of Lockheed Martin and US Steel, a trustee of Columbia University, and a major figure within the network of corporate law firms, some of which are openly blacklisting anyone who has mouthed the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’.

Two statements, with opposing implications about the attitude of the national security apparatus toward the president. They may mean nothing, or they may represent the iceberg-tips of deep politics. How is anyone to know? Reportedly, Mao Zedong believed that Watergate was the result of ‘too much freedom of political expression in the United States’. For those of us living in the US, it is no small comfort that this freedom still exists, at least formally. It is good that we still have newspapers, and that they still report these details in the fine print. It would be better if they gave us more help in putting it all together. 

Read on: Richard Beck, ‘Bidenism Abroad’, NLR 146.

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Damage Control

Iran has a new president, its first avowed ‘reformist’ in almost two decades. Masoud Pezeshkian, a cardiac surgeon and former health minister who served in the Khatami administration of the early 2000s, clinched the election with 53.6% of the vote. Born to an Azeri father and Kurdish mother in the city of Mahabad, and raised in Urumia in Western Azerbaijan, Pezeshkian has a common touch, humble demeanour and fondness for Azeri proverbs which set him apart from his rivals. Just two months ago his ascent to the presidency was unforeseeable. Yet the sudden death of Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in mid-May prompted a political shift which commentators inside and outside the country are still struggling to comprehend.

To grasp how someone like Pezeshkian managed to pass through the filter of the Guardian Council, the clerical dominated body responsible for vetting the ‘suitability’ of electoral candidates, we must rewind to 2021. The election that year was perhaps the most carefully stage-managed in the Islamic Republic’s recent history. Raisi’s meteoric rise through several unelected power centres – his trusteeship of the powerful Astan-e Qods-e Razavi religious foundation, his tenure as Prosecutor General and then Chief Justice – led many to assume he was being positioned as the successor to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had entered his fourth decade of rule. It appeared that Khamenei and his allies had decided to sacrifice the already limited competitiveness of Iran’s presidential elections to guarantee conservative control of all three branches of government and ensure a smooth transition when he finally left the scene. Millions of Iranians, incensed by Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and the unfulfilled promises of the Rouhani administration, refused to go along with this electoral charade. Turnout hit a historic low of 48.8% and ballots were spoiled en masse. Raisi coasted to power regardless.

Yet his death in the forests of Eastern Azerbaijan put paid to this plan. In 2021, the presidential contest was inseparable from the question of leadership succession. Now these two processes of elite selection have been decoupled. In light of this, Khamenei’s inner circle have seemed willing to entertain the idea of reintegrating the more politically amenable section of the reformists – often called ‘state reformists’ by their critics – as a means of stabilizing the system. Unlike the presidential race of 1997, when the establishment was taken by surprise by the success of the so-called ‘left flank’ of the political class, this time they were prepared for a moderate candidate, even if he wasn’t their first choice. Khamenei and his closest allies may also have realized that when hardline Principalists (Osulgarayan) control every branch of the state, the supreme leader himself becomes a lightning rod for pent-up anger at the system, making it harder to deflect blame for corruption and mismanagement.

Yet the reasons for this reintegration go beyond intra-elite manoeuvrings. The nationwide women-led protests that erupted in 2022, as well as the ethno-national uprisings across Kurdistan and Sistan-Baluchistan provinces during the same period, saw the emergence of powerful anti-systemic forces that rejected the Islamic Republic and its political class tout court. No politician, except the most intransigent ones on the right, could fail to recognize their social and cultural reverberations. Pezeshkian was among a tiny handful of parliamentarians to publicly condemn the fate of Mahsa Jina Amini shortly after it became a national news story. He also mentioned her several times during his presidential campaign, signalling the enduring legacy of the movement and the widespread anger over its brutal suppression.  

This period of unrest coincided with an unprecedented wave of teachers’ strikes and labour militancy, as Iran’s downwardly mobile middle class, clobbered by double-digit inflation and radicalized by regular cycles of protest and repression, began to mobilize for change. Recent years have seen a pronounced deterioration in living standards, affecting millions of Iranians in the cities and provinces, from the salariat to the working poor. The country’s economic woes have been compounded by the marginalization of reformists, a clampdown on civil liberties, and the pursuit of a reactionary agenda around the politics of social reproduction and population control. US-led sanctions have accelerated the devaluation of the currency, causing many Iranians to channel their savings into the stock market or cryptocurrency.

The Iranian state is therefore facing a plethora of structural contradictions. The supreme leader’s office and highest echelons of the IRGC initially responded by doubling down on ‘national security’ and deterring outside incursions. Though this strategy could claim some success on its own terms, it was hardly a recipe for stability, let alone prosperity, and it failed to address the causes of spiralling domestic discontent. After Raisi’s death, it became clear that a significant part of the power elite and the wider political class did not believe that the radical Principalists – whose most extreme cadre is represented by the Endurance Front (Jebheh-ye paidari) – were capable of managing the crisis, or even understanding its stakes. Effective adaptation meant widening the sphere of political decision-making, albeit in a highly controlled fashion. 

Enter Pezeshkian. His presidential campaign had a slow start, and he did not perform well in the first televised debates. Despite his stint in the health ministry his national profile was meagre, and he was seen as lacking requisite experience. Endorsements from Khatami and other leading reformists, as well as former political prisoners and prominent intellectuals, failed to move the dial. The first round of voting saw the lowest ever turnout for a presidential election in the history of the Islamic Republic: a dismal 39.9%. Among the 60% that refused to vote, some were unwilling to confer legitimacy upon the system, while others were simply apathetic, no longer believing that the presidency could affect their daily lives, given the overarching authority of the supreme leader and other political, legal, religious and economic power centres. Yet Pezeshkian benefited from the shoddy performance of the system’s favoured candidate, the former mayor of Tehran and current Majles Speaker Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, who crashed to a humiliating 14% of the vote amid swirling accusations of corruption.

Almost every Iranian president to date has come to blows with the supreme leader when they have tried to pursue their own agendas. From Abolhassan Banisadr in 1981 to Mohammad Khatami in the 2000s, to the more recent administrations of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even Hassan Rouhani, relations have inevitably deteriorated, often leading to estrangement and finally the president’s expulsion from the real sites of power. In his campaign, Pezeshkian decided to address this issue by openly discussing the limitations of the president’s office. He told voters that he was not a miracle-worker, that his authority was constrained, and that he could only bring about change in areas under his immediate control. In those beyond his remit, he pledged to enter negotiations on behalf of the people. He would not confront the entrenched interests at the heart of the system but rather work with them constructively. This brand of centrism is a far cry from the Khatami years, where parliamentary democracy and neoliberal globalization were thought to represent the End of History, and from the more radical promises of ‘political development’ (towse’eh-ye siyasi): a common euphemism for democratization and constitutional reform. Yet it nonetheless represents a significant break with the past three years.

In the second-round runoff, Pezeshkian vied with the hard-right Principalist Said Jalili, a onetime nuclear negotiator and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Among Jalili’s key supporters were Covid-denialists, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, radical autarkists and absolutist theocrats. His programme combined an ultra-conservative cultural politics with a pseudo-populist economic offer which tapped into undercurrents of resentment. He promised to protect Iran’s most vulnerable citizens while tackling the corruption and rentierism of its crony-capitalist class. In response, reformists joined with the centre right, warning of the ‘Talibanization’ of Iran and its transformation into an Islamist North Korea should Jalili and his ‘shadow government’ take power. Fear of this prospect was enough to push voter participation to just under 50%. In the final tally, Jalili won 13.5 million votes to Pezeshkian’s 16.4 million, reflecting the growing polarization of the polity. The significant decline in the conservative vote share – Raisi received 18 million in the previous election – indicates that many moderates abandoned Jalili for Pezeshkian. Yet the dismal turnout rate, down from 73% in 2017, suggests that the politics of lesser evilism and damage control are now delivering diminishing returns.   

Pezeshkian’s campaign pledges were short on detail, but they aimed to address three main areas. The first was civil liberties. The candidate opposed the hard right’s clampdown on the public sphere – the ever-tightening regulation of women’s attire and gender relations, the increasingly stringent censorship laws, the looming threat of a restricted ‘national internet’ – and vowed to do everything he could to reverse these trends.

The second was foreign policy, widely seen as inseparable from Iran’s stagnant domestic economy. Pezeshkian promised he would try to salvage the nuclear deal, free Iran from the debilitating ‘cage of sanctions’ and de-escalate tensions with the US and Europe. This, he argued, would mean standing firm against radicals who seek to sabotage negotiations, choosing ‘expertise’ over ‘ideology’, improving ties with Iran’s regional neighbours and establishing more balanced relations between East and West.

Finally, Pezeshkian stressed the need to deal with soaring inflation, which was above 40% throughout 2023 and early 2024. His powerful coalition of political and economic interests advocated a series of measures to solve the crisis: market liberalization, deflation of the ‘bloated’ state sector, the stemming of middle-class capital flight, the empowerment of the private sector (as opposed to the crony-capitalist parastatal sector), and the courting of foreign investment. They believe this will fix the inefficient labour market and counterbalance the outsized influence of powerful religious foundations (bonyads) and assorted IRGC-linked firms and subcontractors.

In each of these areas, Pezeshkian’s policies could in theory be materially consequential for millions of Iranians. Internet access has been essential to the country’s democracy movement as well as individual freedom of expression. It has also been decisive for countless small traders and businesses in staving off bankruptcy. The Guidance Patrol’s heavy-handed policing of dress codes has violated the basic rights of millions of women, and their horrific actions, frequently caught on camera and broadcast across social media, have inflicted huge reputational damage on the system, provoking disgust even among many religious traditionalists. Reining them in would mark an advance for both the Iranian people and the regime.

In the realm of foreign policy, there is no evidence that the fundamental tenets of the Islamic Republic’s security doctrine are up for negotiation. Ayatollah Khamenei and leading figures in the IRGC have spent decades building up what is today known as the ‘Axis of Resistance’. They see it as an indispensable part of the Islamic Republic’s ability to protect the country from foreign threats and imperialist interference. While a turn towards proactive diplomacy may effect a degree of de-escalation, with potentially beneficial results, it will not change this essential part of the Islamic Republic’s defence doctrine. There is also a large question mark over whether any US president, Democrat or Republican, would be willing to spend a modicum of political capital breathing new life into a deal with the Iranian state.

As for the economy, the conviction that ‘expertise’ will save the day rings hollow, as does the idea that Pezeshkian will be able to pass his measures with a weak mandate and a parliament baying for his blood. Developing an effective technocracy would not be inconsequential, but nor would it circumvent the structural drivers of inflation and falling living standards. The incoming president seems to be aware that he must secure at least a modicum of popular consent for any reform programme. In late 2019, Rouhani applied a disastrous round of shock therapy by removing fuel subsidies, devastating working-class Iranians and sparking mass protests in which hundreds were killed. Reluctant to repeat this mistake, Pezeshkian insists he will only increase fuel prices with the hamrahi of the people – meaning their ‘participation’ or approval. Will it be forthcoming?

Pezeshkian has already made clear that his government will rely on a familiar cast of veteran politicians, technocrats and administrators. Two high-profile ministers in the Rouhani administration, Mohammad Javad Zarif and Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, were at the forefront of his campaign. His power bloc includes the neoliberals of the Executives of Construction of Iran Party, moderate senior clergymen, former and current elements of the Revolutionary Guard, and even some purged university professors. This fraction of the ruling class does not want to upset the apple cart. One of the main reasons they flocked to Pezeshkian was the hope that he could bring the economy under control, stabilize the domestic arena and calm international tensions in the shadow of the Gaza genocide.

Yet they also know that something needs to change. The status quo is becoming untenable and much of the population is at breaking point. Their solution is to mollify the urban middle classes and provide some concessions in the cultural and social spheres so as to prevent further brain drain and capital flight. They not only stand to profit personally from expanding the private sector and attracting foreign capital; this gambit will also allow them to check the parastatal sector and its undue political influence. To secure higher levels of foreign investment, they may have to improve relations with the West and secure the removal of US secondary sanctions. But they are aware that this agenda will be highly circumscribed by the supreme leader’s office and security-military establishment.

What this amounts to is a possible shift in tone, style, competency, policy priorities and ‘governance’ strategies, within clearly defined limits. This may well be registered in Iranians’ everyday lives, but it will have little bearing on the deep socio-economic problems by which the theocratic republic is afflicted. These will continue to cause disruption over the coming years, which will in turn elicit state repression in the name of ‘public order’. Once the next major crisis hits, the middle and working classes are unlikely to stay passive in the hope that the Pezeshkian government will finally deliver for them. They have been disappointed too many times to rest on such laurels.

Read on: Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, ‘Rules of the Game’, Sidecar.