Month: August 2024

To Be Continued

Post author By Lola Seaton
Post date 23 August 2024

Is there a ‘Seventh Generation’ of Chinese film-makers? It has not materialised in any formal sense, and the term is not in use. As a mode of classification, the idea of succession, one cohort following another – with no gaps in between – encompasses more than a century of cinema. But its ubiquity, at least among Western festival organisers and cinephiles, goes back forty years, to the emergence of the directors who were identified as the Fifth Generation though were, more significantly for descriptive purposes, the first to appear since the end of the Cultural Revolution and, with it, the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy. The graduating class of 1982 announced itself almost immediately, with Tian Zhuangzhuang’s September, Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight, and – above all – Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, about a soldier’s relationship with a teenage girl set on Loess Plateau in Shanxi Province and shot by Zhang Yimou, who emerged as a director with the Mo Yan adaptation Red Sorghum (1988), which won the Golden Bear at Berlin. During the next five years, Zhang received a Silver Lion at Venice for Raise the Red Lantern, then a Golden Lion for The Story of Qiu Ju, while Chen shared the Palme d’Or – with Campion’s The Piano – for Farewell, My Concubine.

These films, a rejection of the socialist-realist habits that had dominated earlier practice, were dramatic and pictorial, not dialogue-driven, and usually historical and rural in setting, literary in source. What came next, reflecting differences of social attitude as well as aesthetic inclination, was altogether harder-bitten, more self-conscious and self-consciously abrasive, carnal, lo-fi, ad hoc. Films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, Lou Ye’s Weekend Lover, and Guan Hu’s Dirty, set in the capital in the modern day or recent past, and typically concerned with members of the post-Tiananmen generation working as artists, musicians, or petty criminals, began to appear less than a decade after the first films of the Fifth Generation, and coincided with the height of its international renown. (Chen and Zhang even won BAFTAs.)

The relationship was initially one of gratitude. Wang has pointed to the ‘huge impact’ of Yellow Earth, which came out just before he entered the Beijing Film Academy; Jia Zhangke, who emerged slightly later but soon became the Sixth Generation’s leading figure, said that it was seeing Chen’s film as a 21-year-old art student, at the social club of the Department of Roads and Highway in Taiyun, in the Shaanxi Province, that inspired him to apply. (He was initially rejected twice.) He was a product of ‘yellow earth’ country, and he felt that the film, though set in the 1930s, was consistent at least in spirit with realistic portraiture of contemporary social problems, the approach he would adopt in his hour-long short Xiao Shan Going Home (1995), a sort of migrant-worker Waiting for Godot, and his early features Pickpocket (1997) and Unknown Pleasures (2000). In order to tell the story of modern China – and to preserve what was being eroded at such speed – the Sixth Generation drew on the early work of their predecessors and on kindred aesthetic movements like neorealism and the French New Wave, but perhaps especially on the example of the Guangdong-born, Taiwan-raised director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, work first introduced to the BFA students by the British Asian cinema scholar Tony Rayns. (Hou later donated a set of prints to the school.)

Hou’s trajectory goes some way to complicating the Mainland narrative of successive and seesawing philosophies. If his work displayed overlap with Fifth and Sixth Generation habits, it failed to do so chronologically. Though his early period films, notably A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and A City of Sadness (1989), could be seen as similar in theme and scope to what Chen and Zhang were making at the same time, Hou was all along engaged with stories about young people in the present day, the Sixth Generation reflex. For Jia, a largely unheralded Hou film like The Boys from Fengkui, made as early as 1983, could serve as a great liberator, his other Yellow Earth, when he saw it at the BFA, even though, looking back at Hou’s work – he announced his retirement last year – the more ragged and looser-gaited tale of ‘urban youth’, Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), stands out as his honorary contribution to Sixth Generation aesthetics. (Wang included A City of Sadness on his list of the ten greatest films, with the citation: ‘The light of Chinese cinema, directly facing the unbearable history’; Jia, on leaving BFA, sought out Hou’s producer Shôzô Ichiyama as a collaborator, and later wrote the introduction to Boiling the Sea, the 2014 book of interviews Hou did with the American scholar Michael Berry.)

It was as the Sixth Generation began to gain prominence, and by a similar route – though without the BAFTAs – that their predecessors turned their attention to preserving and burnishing what Chen himself called ‘legend’, essentially highlights of Chinese history, initially the medieval martial-arts tradition known as wuxia. Wang lamented that the Fifth Generation no longer presented ‘real human beings and true feelings’. In this context, in which fantasy and artifice of various kinds began to dominate, a redoubled devotion to realism and to representing dangxia xing (here and now), emerged as the dissident manoeuvre. Jia dismissed Chen’s later films as ‘childish fairy tales’, pointedly noting that he no longer suffered issues with the censor. In 2003, he lamented that Chen and Zhang had reneged on ‘the values they used to represent… I’m quite disappointed to see that Yellow Earth and The Story of Qiu Ju have been consigned to the dustbin so quickly.’ And in late 2006, Jia moved the release date of his latest film, Still Life, to coincide with Zhang’s latest wuxia epic Curse of the Golden Flower – at nearly $50m, the biggest-budgeted Chinese film, a record previously held by Chen’s The Promise, which had in turn superseded Zhang’s Hero – to emphasise, as he put it, how few cared for the inhabitants of the region affected by the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam in an age that worships gold. (Jia had by this point abandoned realism as a mode – Still Life, for example, contains elements of fantasy – but retained his interest in what might be considered realist subject matter.)

There are a handful of potential factors behind the reluctance to anoint a successor gang to Jia and co., a new class. Younger directors have not arrived en masse, with a succession of similar or similarly notable debuts. The Beijing Film Academy has lost its prestige, and role as mass incubator of new talent. And the Sixth Generation – or the prominence of its original members – has had a long tail. This is partly a product of cultural lethargy. Jia, more than a quarter century after Pickpocket, remains in international eyes the boy wonder of Chinese cinema. Guan Hu made his Cannes debut this year, with Black Dog, which won Un Certain Regard prize. (It comes out in the UK next week.) On the other hand, since the commercialisation of the Chinese film industry in the early years of the century, driven partly by the need to compete with imported products, it has ceased to be a director’s cinema even to the degree that it was. The film that Guan Hu made before Black Dog, The Five Hundred, a war film shot on IMAX cameras, was the second-highest grossing film at the global box office in 2020. (Hu has been unusual in his consistent willingness to cooperate with the film bureau, even paying to receive official sanction for Dirty.)

But while there has been no talk of a Seventh Generation, the culture of descent – of Chinese cinema as a site of baton-passing – has remained strong. Among directors born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many have shown their work at the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, which Jia founded in 2017, or allied themselves with a Sixth Generation figure. The late Hu Bo worked with Wang on An Elephant Sitting Still. Na Jiazuo made Streetwise in 2021 with the help of Guan Hu. Jia executive-produced Yuan Yuan’s Tomorrow Will Be Fine. Though certain members of the Sixth Generation have started to trade in fairy tales – or at least commercial frivolity – of their own kind, industrial conditions are not strong enough to support a movement born from the resulting disillusionment or contempt.

For now, the closest to an heir to this story of inheritance and rebellion, a frontrunner for the status of Jia’s dauphin, appears to be the thirty-three-year-old Wei Shujun, whose four films to date – a short and a trio of features – have all appeared at Cannes. Wei, who was born in Beijing, is eager to offer the pleasures of what might be broadly considered the Fifth and Sixth Generation approaches without subscribing wholesale to either. He has revealed that he fell out with his tutor on his directing Master’s, a BFA contemporary of Chen and Zhang, because he was constantly being urged to ‘adhere more to standards’ or ‘conform more to common practices’. He has also asserted – without naming names – that too many new directors ‘are just repeating the language of the Sixth Generation’.

If Wei’s work eludes the narrow debate about what constitutes the best – most responsible or rewarding – way to depict Chinese society, it draws on many of the sensibilities and techniques at stake. He is that by now familiar but not yet tiresome figure, the millennial magpie, and his new film, Only the River Flows, winner of Best Film at Pingyao and a hit on its release in China last year (it’s currently showing in the UK), is a mystery and a critique of the mystery form, by turns elegant, gritty, ethereal, sensual, playful, grounded in logistics and practicalities but also beholden – too beholden, it turns out – to the elusive and intangible. It begins in December 1995, and takes place in a small town. A murder has been committed in a nearby river-side community. The police chief (Tianlai Hou) has given his squad a vast new headquarters in a disused cinema and urges the lead detective, the Yunnan-born Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) to wrap things up ‘quickly’. It emerges that the first victim, known locally as Granny No. 4, adopted a ‘madman’ (Kang Chunlei) who is currently hard to track down, and therefore seems the likely culprit.

Like many films of the Fifth Generation, the film is a loose adaptation, in this case of a novella by Yua Hu, the author of the saga To Live, which Zhang filmed – with mixed results – in 1994. And there’s a lushness, a pleasure in colour and composition, that recalls Zhang and Chen in their pomp. Surfaces – leather jackets, cars, the river – shimmer and glow. Wei, working with the cinematographer Chengma, shot – in sequence order – on 16mm in the Zhejiang and Jiangxi Provinces, though the film stock had to be scanned and printed in Taiwan. (Even when Wang was making The Days thirty years earlier, he was forced to travel the one-hundred-and-fifty kilometres to Baoding where the only manufacturer was based.)

The period setting renders the film to some degree a social portrait. Wei decided to set the story in the mid-1990s – the source was published in 1988 – for roughly the same reasons that the Sixth Generation felt the urge to chronicle it first time around. Jia has ascribed his near-exclusive engagement with the new China not only to his disillusionment with Chen and Zhang but to his feeling of surprise, when returning to the Shaanxi Province, at the sudden availability of motorcycles and televisions and washing machines. Only the River Flows portrays a slightly earlier moment – or the same process at an earlier stage – serving up a landscape of boxy desktops, indoor smoking, cassette tapes, biros. During a recent conversation, Wei told me that he wanted – and perhaps, for practical reasons, needed – to evoke a period just before technology brought changes to forensic science, and ways of living and working. He explained that he was eager to get the tangible details right – the locations, textures, music – but also ‘the whole atmosphere. At that time people tended to congregate more. Nowadays we are islands. Each of us is an island. That was the main difference I wanted to recreate.’

Although the one-child policy looms and the presence of a disused cinema cannot help but allude to the state of the Chinese film industry – audience attendance was at an all-time low – Wei only flirts with the sort of historical analysis so pervasive at the time the story takes place. For the most part, the noir-ish plot and landscape are exploited for broader allegorical resonances. The epigraph is from Camus. The soundtrack borrows music by Howard Shore from Cronenberg’s unsettling adaptation of J G Ballard’s Crash. Wei seems to be drawing from less realist, more oneiric, predecessors – the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, whose ghost story Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes place in a cinema on the night of its closing, possibly Bong Jon-Hoo (Memories of Murder) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure).

In our conversation, Wei told me that he is also greatly indebted to Hou, a director resistant, he said, to established narrative formulas. Wei’s debut, Striding into the Wind (2020), about a sound recordist working on a student film project in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, recalls Goodbye South, Goodbye as it tracks its slightly feckless characters driving around, pursuing schemes that turn into scrapes. (Wei, before turning to directing, majored in sound recording at the Communication University in Beijing.) Like Good Men, Good Women, his superb follow-up, Ripples of Life (2022), follows the making of a film, is divided into three parts, largely concerns the lead actress, and ends, as A City of Sadness almost does, with the taking of a group photograph. Wei’s tendencies in the new film recall Hou’s own record as a director of off-kilter thrillers – not just Goodbye South, Goodbye but also Millennium Mambo – and his emphasis in Good Men, Good Women and The Puppetmaster on how stories get told and what may be lost in the telling.

Only the River Flows is aggressively thematic, insistently self-reflexive. The film opens with a sequence in which a boy carrying a toy gun chases his friends around an upper floor of a derelict building until he reaches a door which opens onto nothing. It has no relation to the story, and the boy is never seen again. (Ma Zhe is nearby on the ground, just about visible in a crane shot.) The river, the site of the killings, has a more symbolic function than in, say, a Sixth Generation thriller like Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, where it separates Shanghai from suburban Hong-Ku. (All his titles deploy spatial metaphors.) Only the River Flows doesn’t concern the making of a film, but as well as using a cinema as a central location, it is occupied by what is revealed or obscured by images and sounds, and contains details and lines of dialogue that allude to where people are within a story. There’s an emphasis on trajectories, on processes unfolding over time – in the pregnancy of Ma Zhe’s wife, and in the jigsaw puzzle at which she has been hard at work.

The final section of Ripples of Life, entitled ‘A Pluto moment’, takes the form of a thirty-five-minute debate between the director and the screenwriter (played by Wei’s co-writer Shunlei Kang). It turns on a clash of fundamental priorities, very roughly akin to the Sixth Generation’s polemic against the Fifth Generation. What vision of reality should their film promote? Their script concerns the awakening of a small-town girl’s consciousness. The writer views it as Chekhovian, but the director believes that even a portrayal of unrequited love ‘needs a bit of action’. The writer worries about being ‘cheesy’. The director reckons that the writer is just being ‘lazy’, and complains about the script’s seventy-two instances of silence. One of the writer’s potential solutions is, as he puts it, to take out ‘all of my concepts’.

A similar back-and-forth takes place – albeit in serial form – in the new film, with the unfolding case instead of a work-in-progress. The turning point arrives halfway through, following the arrest of the ‘madman’. ‘Why haven’t you wrapped up your report yet?’ Ma Zhe’s superior (Hou Tinlai) asks him. When he replies that he still needs to ‘sort things out’, he’s informed that the whole thing is ‘crystal clear’. As if to cap this assertion, the senior officer proposes a group photo with Ma Zhe and his colleague. But just as it is being taken, a box full of ping-pong balls is knocked to the floor. In a later instalment of this procedural-philosophical debate, it becomes clear that Ma Zhe’s position extends to a resistance to the explanatory force of the visual and audible field. He is keen to show fidelity to what lies beneath ‘evidences’, to reject ‘deductive reasoning’ as a route to understanding.

Wei doesn’t quite succeed in finding a structure and scenario for this mode of questing. The grounds for Ma Zhe’s discomfort are never plainly established. Wei’s work to date has been notably concerned with choosing one of two clearly defined alternatives – the allegiance to China or South Korea in On the Border, structure or flow in Ripples of Life. (His next film, Mostly Funny, which features Jia in a small role, portrays two brothers with divergent approaches to caring for their elderly mother.) The problem with establishing binary choices is that even taking the more nuanced route imposes a sense of resolution. Ripples of Life avoided this danger by ending the debate between the writer and the director in mid-flow, with the sudden revelation of the death of Diego Maradona, raising the question of whether an event of that nature belongs to the category of action or life-as-it-really-is.

Only the River Flows plumps more solidly for openness and chaos, the rejection of sense, or legibility. The story ends with a number of clinching gestures – a salute, a ceremony, a handshake – before a coda, set one year later, introduces a dissentient note. The classic instance of this sort of juxtaposition, between case-closed and a murkier, possibly infinite reality, comes at the end of Psycho when Hitchcock cuts from the psychiatrist’s pat account of deviant mother-love to a close-up of Norman’s near-grin and the contention, on voiceover, that he wouldn’t hurt a fly. The effect achieved here is not dissimilar, at least in the clarity of its intended meaning, and also has recourse to the reliably eerie power – in a hitherto fourth-wall-respecting context – of a gaze-cum-glare directed at the camera’s lens.

Wei has given himself the additional task – familiar to Hitchcock on other occasions – of needing to resolve by narrative means a central dilemma in aesthetics and epistemology. He is hardly the first director to overrate the conceptual possibilities of the mystery form, to mistake a refusal to deliver on expectations – almost to shirk his basic obligations under genre-cinema trading laws – for an act of tribute to the wonders of phenomenal reality. This implicit position is the corner into which Antonioni painted himself in Blow-Up, and was pretty much the starting-point for Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (though you might say that a starting-point is the best place to have it). If Only the River Flows is not ruined by its faith in the non-ending ending, it’s because by that point Wei has already set a contrary formal example, based in his virtuoso’s greed, the positive embrace of possibilities, a statement of intent that, in its implicit recognition of higher stakes and longer-term struggles, recalls the silly but none the less rousing toast raised by the director near the start of Ripples of Life: ‘It’s a long road ahead. We are in it together. To Chinese cinema!’

Read on: Zhang Xudong, ‘Poetics of Vanishing’, NLR 63.

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Counter-Music

Post author By Lola Seaton
Post date 23 August 2024

Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris in 1930 and died in Rome in 1996, leaping from the kitchen window of her apartment. She has long been recognised as one of the most formidable post-war Italian poets. In an early critical appreciation, Fausto Curi described her work as ‘ravenous, violent and dreamlike’. Pasolini admiringly compared her language to ‘the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumours, atomic blasts’. In a review from the 1970s, Andrea Zanzotto – also grasping for an image to describe her linguistic intensity – pictured her words as ‘clawed little monsters of light’.

Rosselli’s work is exciting and alien, a little frightening. For readers in English, her reputation has been secured by a number of excellent translations over the past twenty years. The most important of these are Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti’s War Variations (2003/2016), which presents her first published book, Variazioni Bellichi (1964), and Jennifer Scappettone’s Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (2012), an editorial triumph, bringing together extracts from interviews and correspondence, a selection of photographs and a comprehensive introductory essay. Thanks to these books, Rosselli found a ready audience among the leftist experimental poets of the 2010s, commanding respect and a certain awe. She was not the kind of poet whose work we knew by heart, but she was a poet we agreed on, a litmus test of difficulty and a watchword of invention.

The recently reissued Sleep is perhaps her most unusual book. Written in English, it consists of 126 short poems, mostly untitled. It was composed in what Barry Schwabsky calls, in his useful introduction, ‘three campaigns’, spanning 1953-55, 1960-61 and 1965-66. This means that it both is and isn’t early work, and it shadows and overlaps Rosselli’s first two books in Italian. It isn’t clear if the material was produced in an initial burst and subsequently revised, edited and shaped, or if Rosselli’s process was one of intermittent accumulation of fresh work. Each poem feels unfinished but perfect, or like a damaged fresco we can’t quite imagine was ever complete in the first place.

Though extracts from Sleep appeared in Locomotrix – and the sequence has been available with facing-page Italian translations since 1992 – Rosselli’s English poetry has not been widely known to anglophone readers. Rosselli spent a good deal of her childhood and adolescence in Britain and the United States. In 1937, her father – the antifascist activist Carlo Rosselli, who had recently returned to France after fighting in the Spanish Civil War – was murdered on Mussolini’s orders, along with her uncle Nello. When France fell to the Nazis, Rosselli and her brothers fled with their mother – the English suffragist Marion Cave Rosselli – first to London, then to New York and then back to London in 1946. Weakened by the hardship of years spent in exile, Marion died in 1949. Rosselli, still a teenager, moved to Rome, where she found work as a translator.

The poems in Sleep are, unsurprisingly, marked by these experiences. The beginning of the sequence simultaneously registers Carlo and Nello’s violent deaths and Rosselli’s own sense of displacement:

What woke those tender heavy fat hands

said the executioner as the hatchet fell

down upon their bodily stripped souls

fermenting in the dust. You are a stranger here

and have no place among us.

Rosselli’s accusatory register is much too volatile, too mobile, for speechifying or rousing oratory. She draws on parable and lullaby, writing from a position of vulnerability and exposure. A sense of mortal danger is fundamental to the work. There are police summons and brawls, the threat of a massacre at court and at least a dozen references to hell. ‘Tenderness itself is dangerous’, she writes at one point. But the poems are rarely harsh: they emerge from deep gloom, wisps of fog, before suddenly, catlike, darting away.

Amelia’s older brother John once wrote that Carlo and Nello came to be treated ‘as saints, or more prosaically as street names’ in post-war Italy. Sleep could be read as an ambivalent, at times even withering, analysis of martyrdom. Despite Rosselli’s secular Jewish background and Marion’s Quakerism, much of this is explicitly Christological:

Then you got reality: at the age of thirty-three

dying on the cross, at cross-country, murdering

your parents’ parents, saving that which was true

to your cumbersome nature. Then you got a sort

of freedom, by playing truant to all good causes,

then you fetched the seamstress, and she put things

straight.

Elsewhere there are crowns of thorns and time on the rack, and if I squint at a passage where someone tied to a chair shoots out arrows, I’m sure I can see a mirror-image Saint Sebastian.

In the 1950s Rosselli’s own politics began to depart from the ‘good cause’ of her parents, who were avowedly non-Marxist (and more importantly, non-Leninist) liberal socialists. In a letter to John in 1952 – a year before commencing Sleep – Rosselli discussed her growing frustrations with ‘democratic, gradual revolution’, given the fate of the post-war Labour government and the ‘floundering’ Italian socialists. In 1958 she would join the Communist Party (PCI).

Readers looking for didactic anthology pieces will be disappointed. Rosselli’s poems are assuredly not fit for placards; phrases can’t easily be plucked from their surrounding context, where it isn’t always clear who is speaking. She is guarded, suspicious and seems to have little interest in telling anyone what to do or how to feel. Nonetheless, some of the most moving moments in Sleep come in half-strangled declarations of political commitment, with glancing references to her ‘red roots’ and ‘revolutionary heart’. Emerging from historical and personal catastrophe ‘impertinent with grief’, Rosselli did not turn away from the practical tasks of socialist and communist organizing. But nor did she renounce her restlessness and uncertainty, the sometimes impractical feelings provoked by loss.

Rosselli’s decision to write in English – the language of her mother, but not her mother tongue – carries a certain pathos. Doing so while living in Italy implies a degree of withdrawal from public language, as if Rosselli writes towards an inward domain of familial intimacy. But if the configuration of that domain has been disturbed by the death of her parents, then writing in English is also a signal of estrangement, a turning inside-out, searching the language for what’s gone missing. These are porous and sometimes brittle poems, where the barriers between public and private, self and other, memory and expectation seem corroded. Because Rosselli did not, after all, become an English poet – her career really begins as an affiliate of the neoavangardia ‘Gruppo 63’ – it’s tempting to see Sleep as an act of exorcism or a settling of accounts. For her part, in an interview in the 1990s, Rosselli described English as ‘a very neutral language, barely emotional even in the vowels’.

The poems in Sleep are rarely funny exactly, but there’s a kind of gleeful pastiche as she tries on the metaphysical poets for size, adopts Shakespearian poses, demonstrates her flair and audacity. English was also the language of her schooling, and at one point she reduces Donne to a kind of haiku: ‘Ye who do Batter me with Wordes / be Still: my Soul does rise in Silence / up the Sordid Moon’. But nobody could mistake these poems for simple exercises. Another vignette, hushed and beautiful, runs:

o the trees are wild with winter tension

and the leaves rush upon the big mat

gallop-horsed

(and the leaves tumble like wild birds on the heath)

Here the act of shaking out a doormat is briefly imagined as the cracking of reins, spurring us on towards winter. The dead leaves have some life in them yet, held in fragile parenthesis. It reminds me of modernist imitations of classical Chinese poetry: Ezra Pound’s ‘L’iu Che’, where ‘a wet leaf clings to a threshold’, full of clarity and sadness.

Rosselli’s form in Sleep, while taut, is generally unobtrusive. Ten or so poems are only two lines long. A couple are even shorter. Her line breaks are often surprising, like a jutting-out paving slab or the jolt of a missed step. Her rhymes can be sardonic and cajoling, as in the final stanza of the final poem in the main body of the text (before the appendix of poems omitted by Rosselli from the Italian edition):

The stop: the glare the blare the hare

the hinges and the ruts all were there

singing or crying or fornicating or swinging

to a merry tune: your nostalgia, your

unhampered care: my business and your

solace.

Rosselli trained as a musicologist and attended the Darmstadt summer courses for New Music. In the letter to her brother where she declares her nascent communism, she discusses her attempts to develop a new notation system for transcribing the folk music of Lucania, in Southern Italy. She was not interested in merry tunes or nostalgia. The poems seem to demand to be sung, the words elongated and the pitches drawn out.

In an obituary for her friend Maximilian Voloshin, Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote of ‘putting out your ear like a shield’. It’s an appealing image, because it might be a defensive manoeuvre, like the brace we adopt for bad news, or a strategic parry, the way we listen while we plan our next move. Rosselli writes like a poet under constant threat of attack:

be kind be kind be kind I hear this phrase

screaming in my ear each day, be sweet

be sweet be sweet be sweet this is all

I can say (or seem to say).

Elsewhere she describes ‘singing rot / into the crashed ears’, which uncannily suggests ‘crashed cars’ without quite adding up to a pun. Rosselli’s poetry is a form of counter-music, a score for liberation, where struggle might involve something other than sweetness and kindness. The bitterness of this knowledge – ‘that shaft of marmalade lightning / that hiss in the prayer’ – demands that poetry resist and warp the language of business-as-usual.

In the final third of Sleep, Rosselli begins to square up to her theme, ‘staring in the face that / grey hound: death’. It’s as if we’ve had to earn each poem’s trust, and in return they can grow longer, more complicated and confrontational. What follows is a climactic series of violent, questioning lyrics, whose address seems both rhetorical – for the attention of the reader – and punishingly self-directed. The movement begins: ‘Who am I talking to? Who asks me / anything? What rebel use have you / for my jargon?’ and ends some twenty pages later with the mock-Jacobean ‘Would you have me fry in my soup? Or / be the everlasting damsel in her skirts?’ It is delirious and unnerving, almost operatic.

In one of the most intriguing and affecting moments she writes: ‘And are you crazy really? and are you your / friend’s friend?’. The lines brought to mind Muriel Rukeyser’s late 1930s elegy ‘Rotten Lake’: ‘are you your best friend’s / best friend?’ These are insecurities that anyone might identify with, but which take particular shape in periods of political defeat and disaster. It’s not impossible that Rosselli read Rukeyser; later she would translate Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Certainly they belong with one another as urgent poets of the mid-century left.

It seems to me that the difficult power of Sleep makes it hard to share: you want to be left alone with it, rather than to push it eagerly into the hands of friends, whether best ones or otherwise. If Shakespeare had his problem plays, these are problem poems, sitting uneasily in Rosselli’s own oeuvre and hard to assimilate to our nationally constrained notions of what constitutes English poetry. Maybe Sleep could provide a different starting point for thinking about the fate of late modernism in post-war Britain. We could construct a lineage of exiles, of migrant languages, a seam of experiment and survival.

The book is pocket-size; you can take it with you on the move and ‘hold it into the round world’s / marvellous substance’. Yet the ghostliness of Sleep can’t quite be shaken off, even with repeated readings. These are Rosselli’s first poems, and it’s not impossible to imagine a different ending, where she returned to English in her old age, completing the circuit. But such apparent consolation would be the work of some other poet, the result of another kind of life. What we’re left with is singular: a ferocious, perfect interim.

Read on: Rossana Rossanda, ‘The Comrade from Milan’, NLR 49.

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Fraud Foretold?

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 21 August 2024

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is no stranger to accusations of fraud. He has faced them for his entire presidency, starting with his April 2013 triumph in the contest to succeed Hugo Chávez. It therefore came as no surprise that the US-backed opposition refused to recognize his latest claim to victory in the presidential election on 28 July. Since then, Maduro and his supporters have sprung into action to denounce what they see as a coup attempt that threatens Venezuelan democracy. They have been backed by many leftists around the world, who echo their narrative of a revolutionary government confronting an imperialist and fascist threat. Such claims have a firm basis in recent Venezuelan history. Over the past quarter century, the opposition has repeatedly refused to concede its electoral losses (the 2004 recall referendum, the 2013 presidential election) and made violent attempts to topple democratically elected leaders (the 2002 coup, the 2014 and 2017 guarimbas). Washington has imposed brutal sanctions aimed at bringing down the government and supported Juan Guaidó’s corrupt and illegitimate ‘interim presidency’ of 2019-23, during which he attempted to incite a military coup and called for a US invasion.

Yet if false charges of fraud have become familiar, this should not blind leftists to the simple facts that make Maduro’s claim to victory ‘difficult to believe’, as Chilean president Gabriel Boric put it. First, and most importantly, in the three weeks since the election, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) has yet to publish any electoral results. The CNE has issued two televised bulletins, in which results were announced orally. The first bulletin came just after midnight on 29 July, approximately six hours after polls closed. The CNE announced that with 80% of the ballots counted, Maduro had won the election with 51.2% of the vote, while the leading opposition candidate Edmundo González received 44.2%. On 2 August, the CNE issued a second bulletin, announcing that it had confirmed Maduro’s victory based on 97% of ballots counted, with Maduro on 51.95% and González on 43.18%.

The CNE’s failure to publish detailed results, indeed any results at all, is in marked contrast to the past twenty years, in which results were published days and sometimes hours after polls closed. In the December 2015 parliamentary elections, which I observed, it took just over 48 hours to produce a clear breakdown. This year, the CNE says it suffered a massive hacking attack that prevented it from doing so, but it has not presented any evidence to back this up. The alleged hacking does not appear to have stopped the CNE from turning over tally sheets to Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal, which Maduro requested on July 31 as part of an official review of the results. Even those sympathetic to Maduro have wondered why the CNE has not found a way to publish this information publicly.

The opposition’s record on democracy is far from spotless. Its leader, María Corina Machado, has long been the head of an intransigent far-right faction which adamantly rejected elections. Machado was a signatory of the infamous Carmona Decree: the document that was intended to consummate the 2002 coup against Chávez. She spent years advocating violent regime change while cozying up to authoritarians like Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei. Throughout this period, she and her allies were supported by the US and other Western governments. Now that it has become politically expedient, however, Machado has had a Damascene conversion to electoralism. The popular sectors remain wary of her and of the opposition in general.

Yet in recent weeks the opposition has published its electoral tallies on a website that purports to show the results from 80% of voting centers. It claims González won with two-thirds of the vote while Maduro received only a third. To assess the validity of these figures it would be useful to compare them to those of the CNE, were the latter available. Another option would be for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to release the tallies that its electoral observers collected from every polling station nationwide. It did this following the 2013 election to counter the opposition’s false claim that Maduro’s victory was fraudulent. Yet, to date, the party has refused to release any results. Outside observers have not been able to confirm the opposition’s findings, but scholars who conducted statistical analyses of the data claim that they do not appear to show signs of tampering. They also found the CNE’s results to be dubious, noting, for example, that rounding the tallies to the first decimal, as the CNE did in its first bulletin, would have been ‘arithmetically impossible’. The first bulletin also claimed that the gap between Maduro and González was 704,000, with 2,300,000 votes yet to be counted, yet at the same time it asserted that the trend toward Maduro was irreversible: an obvious inconsistency.

A further piece of evidence that counts against Maduro is the explosion of protests across popular-sector barrios on 29 July, the day after the election. These were clearly spontaneous, as Machado had not called on supporters to take to the streets until the following day. Video evidence suggests that thousands, and likely tens of thousands, participated. This chimes with opposition tallies that ostensibly show massive rejection of Maduro in such areas. Equivalent protests have not occurred during any other recent instances of opposition mobilization, which have been dominated by the middle and upper classes.

A report by the Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social, titled Represión a los pobres en Venezuela, counts 192 protests in the Caracas region (specifically in the Capital District and state of Miranda, which includes much of greater Caracas), out of 915 total protests nationwide on 29 and 30 July. Of these 192 protests, the report finds that 80% occurred in barrios and popular zones, and that 75% of government repression against the protests took place in these same areas. This appears to support Yoletty Bracho’s assertion that the mobilizations ‘are not remotely guided by the Venezuelan right or by US imperialism.’

Maduro’s actions have been denounced by two international bodies that the state itself invited to observe the election. The Carter Center asserts that ‘Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.’ It indicts the administration and CNE on numerous fronts, including the failure to release disaggregated results; obstacles that prevented the vast majority of potential voters abroad (thought to number over four million) from voting; the disqualification of leading opposition candidates, who were ‘subject to arbitrary decisions of the CNE, without respecting basic legal principles’; unequal conditions for different candidates, with Maduro receiving significant positive media compared to González; and harassment of opposition campaign and staff.

On 13 August, a UN panel of experts, who observed the election at the invitation of the CNE, issued a sixteen-point preliminary report. Some of its findings are positive or neutral, such as the 59.97% participation rate, the peaceful environment on election day, the effective logistical coordination and the initially smooth electronic transmission of results. Yet, like the Carter Center, the UN report calls out the CNE for its failure to publish results – which, it says, ‘has no precedent in contemporary democratic elections’ – and concludes that those tallied by the opposition were trustworthy. It condemns government repression of protests from 29 July to 2 August, which it claims led to 20 deaths and 1,000 arrests. (The government itself has proudly declared that it has arrested more than 2,000 people for engaging in ‘terrorism’ following the vote.)

A careful consideration of the evidence, then, suggests that the election results are not just difficult but impossible to believe. Boric is not the only Latin American leader to have expressed major doubts. This has also come from three countries that have been close allies to Maduro’s Venezuela: Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. This bloc issued joint statements on 1 and 8 August asking the CNE to release the electoral returns and calling for restraint in the face of dissent. In recent days, Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro have gone further, with both leaders calling for new elections, with enhanced safeguards to ensure accountability and fairness. Petro has floated the idea of a transitional government bringing together officials from the Maduro administration and the opposition. On 16 August, Lula ratcheted up the pressure by publicly stating that Venezuela has ‘a very unpleasant regime’ with an ‘authoritarian slant’. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador has taken a softer stance, typical of his hands-off approach to foreign policy, yet even he has refused to recognize the incumbent.

The fact that Lula and Petro have become increasingly strident in their public statements may be welcome news for the opposition, but it does not bode well for a quick settlement to Venezuela’s political crisis. If Lula and Petro were engaged in serious negotiations with Maduro over an exit strategy, the public would be unlikely to hear much if anything until an agreement had been reached. At present, it is hard to imagine that Maduro and his supporters in the Venezuelan state will accept any overtures to step down. They are unlikely to agree to an amnesty deal in exchange for leaving office, aware that such agreements are all but impossible to enforce when political conditions change. And they appear to enjoy the full support of the Venezuelan armed forces, as well as China and Russia. The regime appears well-positioned to ride out the crisis for as long as it lasts and then get back to the business of governing Venezuela.

Maduro’s recent actions belie his claims to be continuing the revolutionary legacy of Chávez. The current president has implemented increasingly neoliberal, and even rightwing, policies in an attempt to jumpstart Venezuela’s economy after years of sanctions: eliminating tariffs on many imports, lifting price and currency exchange controls, and a embracing de facto dollarization. His regime has also engaged in massive repression, which has targeted not only the center and right, but also the left. As with the protests of 29 and 30 July, it is the poor – particularly poor men of colour – who have borne the brunt. This is one of the reasons that the Communist Party of Venezuela has stood against Maduro and now fervently rejects his claim of victory.

Publicly, the US has taken a surprisingly cautious approach, pledging to follow the lead of Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. The State Department issued a statement in the days after the election calling for transparency and the full release of the voting results. White House officials have been inconsistent: sometimes recognizing González as the rightful winner, sometimes refusing to take a clear stance. Biden at one point echoed calls for new elections before reversing this position. The current package of US and EU sanctions have already severely constrained Venezuela’s ability to raise funds or do business internationally. In October 2023, the Biden administration partially lifted Trump-era sanctions on the oil, gas, and gold industries as part of the Barbados accord negotiations, where the government and opposition agreed on a framework for the upcoming elections. Yet Biden subsequently reimposed oil sanctions in April this year after Machado was barred from running. These will continue for the foreseeable future, but to date there has been no serious talk of reimposing more debilitating measures.

The current US policy towards Maduro has two main causes. The first is the failure of the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy launched by Trump and continued in the early days of the Biden administration, characterized by crippling economic warfare coupled with full US support for Guaidó’s attempted coup. These actions failed to dislodge Maduro. Instead, they prompted the Venezuelan military and ruling class to close ranks to defend him, while causing massive outmigration which affected the US and many Latin American countries (none more than Colombia, hence Petro’s leadership on the Venezuela crisis). This brings us to the second determinant. With elections looming, and Republican hysteria about the so-called ‘border crisis’ at fever pitch, Washington is in no mood to see hundreds of thousands more Venezuelans coming to the US in the next few months.

What comes next? Proposals for new elections or power-sharing have fallen on deaf ears, rejected by both the government and opposition. ‘We go to a second election’, Machado remarked sardonically, ‘and if [Maduro] doesn’t like the results, do we go to a third, fourth, fifth until Maduro gets results he likes?’ The prospect of the US lifting sanctions appears remote, and it may even introduce new ones, especially if Trump wins in November. This suggests that the modest economic recovery Venezuela has experienced in the last few years will be stalled or reversed. In conjunction with continuing government repression, there will likely be continued outmigration on a significant scale. Venezuela is unlikely to return to any semblance of ‘normalcy’ in the near future.

This debacle plays into the hands of the regional and global right, which cites it as proof that social-democratic policies are untenable in the twenty-first century. Want to raise the minimum wage, reduce poverty and inequality, or stimulate popular participation in the democratic process? Don’t even think about it, lest you end up like Venezuela. If the left is to counter this narrative, and defend the real gains of Chavismo during the 2000s and 2010s, it must give up on consoling fantasies and take a clear-eyed look at the country’s degeneration. That means resisting apologism for Maduro. Socialists, of any stripe, should not provide cover for a government that fixes elections and then clings to power by brutally punishing its poorest citizens when they protest.

Read on: Julia Buxton, ‘Venezuela After Chavez’, NLR 99.

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Prospects

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 16 August 2024

How is the Starmer regime likely to govern? The election period yielded more questions than answers. As a succession of blunders by Sunak’s campaign – the PM’s early exit from a D-Day memorial assembly in Dunkirk, the revelation that several of his close confidants had placed suspiciously accurate bets on the date of the election before its public announcement – filled the rolling news chyrons, the opposition played dumb. Labour’s strategy was to do nothing and let the government fall, breaking its silence only occasionally with monosyllabic yelps of ‘growth’ and ‘change’. The Labour manifesto was light on detail – 136 pages of large-point font outlining amorphous commitments to focus-group-tested quangos in the energy and transport sectors – but heavy on photos of Starmer, Reeves and Lammy, their furrowed brows and rictus grins framed by turbines and terraced houses. Throughout May and June, the Labour leader appeared on the nightly news, tight-lipped, clutching unsipped mugs of tea as pensioners relayed the impossible costs of heating their homes; in interviews he claimed to have no favourite novel, to have suffered no childhood fears and never to dream.

If Starmer was reluctant to announce new policies, he was eager to rule them out: taxes on wealth, corporations, VAT or income; spending commitments that might contravene his ‘iron fiscal rules’. Now, after a month in office, neo-Labourism continues to assert itself through a series of negative propositions. ‘If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it’, Rachel Reeves told Parliament in a dour reversal of Keynes’s dictum, as she claimed to have discovered a £22bn ‘black hole’ left by her predecessor. That means no significant funding boost for the nation’s vitiated health service, no automatic winter fuel subsidies for retirees, no repeal of draconian restrictions on child benefits, a halt to infrastructure spending and further cuts to departmental budgets. It also means an end to some of the Tories’ most expensive culture-war gimmicks – among them the deployment of the Bibby Stockholm, an offshore barge to house 500 male asylum seekers, and the pledge to deport others to Rwanda – although Labour may yet substitute these with its own.

To forecast the likely trajectory of Starmerism, it is necessary to grasp the UK’s domestic tensions and global position – for these are the parameters within which the new government will have to operate. A victory by default is not necessarily pyrrhic. But given Labour’s deliberate lack of political vision, the party’s fortunes are uniquely dependent upon external events. Already, it has been forced to confront a series of far-right riots which spread from the deindustrialized north-west to impoverished coastal and semi-urban peripheries in late July. The signs of decline – economic, societal, geopolitical – are clear. If the election was marked by a shrugging acceptance of this, as the neutral background on which British politics plays out, then the next half-decade may thrust it to the fore.

‘Change’, the byword of Starmer’s campaign, has hardly been in short supply since the start of Tory rule in 2010. Britain has not only experienced the rapid dissipation of its internal civic structures thanks to austerity, but also a series of external economic and political shocks. Hollowed from within and buffeted from without, the country rattles as it falls. After leaving the EU, it proved incapable either of enacting nativist protectionist measures or of becoming a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ super-city-state (canard though the ambition may always have been). Instead, it has improvised its own inversion to Pyramus’s denouement: staggering across the world stage mortally injured while proclaiming its good health, inflicting further damage on itself as it tries to hide the wounds. In power, the Tory Party could no more ‘take back control’ than it could control its own frontbench. As a proxy for national self-determination, it pledged to safeguard England’s southern border from the perils of French supermarket dinghies bearing Syrian, Afghan and Eritrean teenagers. But even its immigration targets proved elusive, allowing Farage’s Reform UK to outflank it on the right.

While other parts of the world have begun to shift from ‘frictionless’ trade towards industrial policy and defence investment, the Ukanian economy has remained reliant on the mobile capital that flows through the City of London: a significant liability, as demonstrated by Truss’s ‘fiscal event’ and the subsequent bond market crash in autumn 2022. West London’s townhouses, along with rate-subsidised ghost developments elsewhere in the country, continue to act as brick-and-mortar piggybanks for international investors. Meanwhile, stagnant wages and high inflation have fuelled the decline of working-class living standards (with ‘cheapflation’ driving up everyday costs at an accelerated rate). The number of impoverished individuals is roughly the same as it was in 2010, but the severity and entrenchment of household poverty is much greater, with more children suffering from deprivation. NHS waiting lists have doubled from 2010 levels, and with them the need for life-saving interventions, as benign conditions are left to metastasize. Cases of type-two diabetes have risen to five million, an affliction indicative of a populace that struggles to feed itself healthily and relies on foodbanks in record numbers.

Economic ‘growth’ is presented as a panacea for the fractured kingdom. Yet the only hope for this is ambitious, targeted investment of the kind which is not forthcoming from Labour. The party is straitjacketed by its self-imposed fiscal rules: the current budget must ensure that day-to-day costs are met by revenues, and debt must be falling as a share of the economy by the fifth year of the forecast. Even the FT and IFS have scoffed at Reeves’s plan to dynamize British industry within this framework. Her formation as a Bank of England economist, which played an essential part in casting her as the most ‘qualified’ candidate for the role, now prevents her from taking any of the measures that might begin to fulfil her pledge to ‘restart’ the economy. Yet in contrasting such hallmarks of ‘discipline’ with the previous government’s ‘reckless’ approach, Labour has clearly made a political calculation. It reckons that a return to the austerian discourse of the Cameron–Osborne era is useful to lower expectations amid a set of structural economic problems which the government is unwilling to confront. If national rejuvenation is out of reach, middle-managerial competence is the best for which we can hope.

Much has been made (mostly by the government) of the government’s proposed changes to planning reforms, easing restrictions on new building sites to create more homes. But Britain does not suffer from a lack of houses, it suffers from an excess of landlords – even as buy-to-let mortgage holders have been selling up in response to rising rates that render small-time real estate investments unprofitable, increasing costs in an already over-inflated market that sees many tenants spend nearly 50% of their income on rent. The only real solutions, which Labour refuses to contemplate, are new social housing and rent controls. In their absence, attempts to stimulate a construction boom through deregulation will have little effect. At best, they might yield new opportunities to indebt oneself for flimsy newbuilds on so-called ‘grey belt’ sites: aptly named zonal designations for areas in which no one wants to live.

Behind this is a tale of diversification among the fractions of Britain’s capitalist class. While the City’s multinational finance firms are insulated from the most immediate shocks of interest rate rises, large and mid-size domestic retail and real estate firms have felt the brunt of monetary climate change. Starmer’s fiscal rules are intended to please the former, while his hazy promises of ‘growth’ and ‘stability’ are pitched at the latter. Rallying behind him early on were CEOs of companies such as Iceland, nationwide market-leaders in discount frozen foods, fed up with a Tory Party that presided over steep price rises for shipping, storing, selling and refrigerating consumer goods. Meanwhile, smaller businesses and the self-employed have a new electoral option in Reform, who took chunks out of Conservative majorities in its former heartlands across the commuter-belt south-east. The party is enmeshed in a web of petty commercial property holdings, guest houses, bust TV production companies, bed bug removal firms and, in one instance, a ‘social enterprise’ established to promote ‘White Rights’.

Historically, many have hoped to ‘solve’ the perennial problem of British decline by breaking up the polity itself. But today this prospect looks more distant than ever. It was neutralized by the electoral rout of the SNP last month: the culmination of a slow unravelling in which sapped enthusiasm for independence coincided with a series of damaging corruption scandals among the party leadership, with cause and effect impossible to parse. In Northern Ireland, the power-sharing impasse has ended and Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has become the first Republican to lead the assembly. But her appeals for a united Ireland remain rhetorical. The end of British occupation could only be brought about through a referendum triggered by Dáil Éireann and authorized by the British executive – something neither is likely to permit for the foreseeable future.

Labour has promised a change from Conservative government-in-absentia. But even if it is more proactive in managing the state, there is nothing to suggest that this will check the process of decline – which may, in turn, force the government to make some unappealing zero-sum decisions: fill in the potholes or stop the prisons overflowing, free up medical appointments or clear the asylum backlog. In foreign affairs, Labour remains committed to a series of hawkish propositions that are increasingly beyond its political-economic means. Arms will continue flow to Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ to reclaim every inch of territory from Russia. The UK will try to reclaim its role as America’s head-prefect in the New Cold War with China. A closer relationship with the EU will be sought, though the prospects for a more favourable post-Brexit trade deal remain uncertain. Continued support for Israel is essential to safeguard the ‘special relationship’, yet this has already begun to damage Labour at the polls, as young and Muslim voters seek a non-genocidal alternative.

Fealty to a standard notion of ‘electability’ – in which the least possible change is promised, for fear of disturbing the markets – has until now locked Labour and the Conservatives into a battle for the votes of a population that increasingly doesn’t. As Peter Mair foresaw, the parties have outlived what once passed for capitalist democracy; electoral choice now amounts to deciding between two cartels dominated by a clutch of ‘special advisors’ and their increasingly scandal-prone proxies on the frontbench. In 1997, when Labour won its last low-turnout ‘landslide’, the newly elected parliamentarians had a bright future, with better-remunerated positions in policy and finance lined up after they left office (note David Miliband’s smooth transition from baying for Iraqi blood to CEO of the ‘International Rescue Committee’). In 2024, by contrast, the Labour candidates seemed to have secured nomination only after exhausting all other opportunities for professional advancement.

Herein lies an important feature of Starmer’s neo-Labourism: an assertion of working-class identity without any commitment to working-class politics. The Starmerite formula demands having once been proximate to wage-labour, then using ‘public service’ as a means of social mobility. Of the new MPs that make up ‘Generation K’, more than two-thirds emphasized in their election literature some early personal or familial link to the constituency in which they were standing. But by drawing this connection, they also emphasized having left. Unlike former generations of working-class Labour politicians, the return of these middle-class small-town émigrés is packaged as a messianic managerialism. Prodigal pragmatists sent back to oversee decline. At least no one speaks of a classless society anymore.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Good Riddance to New Labour’, NLR 62.

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Into the Void

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 15 August 2024

Stuck in American exile in 1941, Karl Korsch surveyed the success of the Blitzkrieg on Greece and tried, heroically, to offer a socialist interpretation. The German offensive, he wrote in a letter to Bertolt Brecht, expressed ‘frustrated left-wing energy’ and a displaced desire for workers’ control. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt summarized Korsch’s position as follows:

. . . in their civilian life, the majority of the tank crews of the German divisions were car mechanics or engineers (that is, industrial workers with practical experience). Many of them came from the German provinces that had experienced bloody massacres at the hands of the authorities in the Peasant Wars (1524-1526). According to Korsch, they had good reason to avoid direct contact with their superiors. Almost all of them could also vividly remember the positional warfare of 1916, again a result of the actions of their superiors, in whom they had little faith thereafter . . . According to Korsch, it thereby became possible for the troops to invent for themselves the Blitzkrieg spontaneously, out of historical motives at hand.

It is tempting – and consoling – to view the recent riots in Britain through this lens. In regions that were once hotbeds of Luddite agitation and labourite self-organization, the old demand for workers’ control now seems to have been perverted into xenophobic violence, a longing to overthrow the bourgeois regime replaced by an attempt to smash its weakest subjects. One wants to believe, with Korsch, that behind the mask of reaction there is still some potentially emancipatory profile.

In his recent Sidecar article, Richard Seymour ably circumvents this economism. He insists that the unrest should not be understood in terms of wrongly sublimated left-wing libido, but as an expression of late-capitalist rot. Not an insurgency to be redirected, but an impulse to be quashed. The essentials of his diagnosis are inarguable: that the class composition of the rioters was not homogenously proletarian, that they were not responding to events representing any real ‘immigrant threat’, that their actions were incited by both the political class and digital ‘lumpencommentariat’, and that the concatenation owes more to feverish misinformation than to the authentic grievances of the dispossessed.

Seymour is also correct to note the contemporary character of the riots – flash mobs of a newly networked far right, rather than a return to Freikorps militancy. Hitler and Mussolini promised to forge colonial empires of the kind their French and British competitors had acquired long ago. Their ambition was to break down borders, not to reinforce them. Today’s far right, by contrast, seeks to shield the Old World from the rest of the globe, conceding that the continent will no longer be a protagonist in the twenty-first century, and that the best it can hope for is protection from the postcolonial hordes.

Seymour’s account is easier to fault for what it does not say than for what it does. Granted, the riots are no twisted expression of ‘material interests’. But this should not lead us into a form of superstructuralism that represses the economic roots of the current crisis. The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks, many of them counted among the poorest in Northen Europe. If a Korschian outlook can lapse into lazy apologism, there is also a species of anti-economism which risks obscuring the social terrain and thereby relinquishing the prospect of changing it. To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy.

In focussing on the ‘perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity’, for instance, Seymour neglects how economic factors underpin the peculiarly schizoid status of immigration in British public life. Powellism, as Tom Nairn once noted, was an elite reaction to an industrial strategy that relied on workers from the former empire. (The ‘rivers of blood’ speech was mainly a response to the Wilson government’s attempt to halt discrimination in public-service provision.) This supply of labour remained essential in the wake of deindustrialization, as demographic expansion became necessary to sustain the rising service sector. Despite all its rhetorical bombast, the Conservative Party has done nothing to change this fragile growth model. It did not reduce immigration figures over the last decade, nor articulate even the mildest English equivalent of Bidenist ‘reshoring’.

Popular dissatisfaction has meanwhile been rising since at least the late 2000s, with a creeping sense at the lower end of the labour market that although immigration does not cause low wages, it remains an indispensable part of the low-wage regime to which the policy elite is committed. What we have witnessed in recent weeks is the explosion of that discontent in the ‘hyperpolitical’ form that dominates the 2020s: agitation without durable organization, short-lived spontaneism without institutional fortress-building. That the UK’s majoritarian electoral system cannot process the rise of these far-right forces might be another subterranean driver of the street violence: if they cannot achieve stable parliamentary representation, as elsewhere in Europe, then extra-parliamentary activity becomes fatally attractive.

Today’s neo-Powellism is an attempt to rhetorically manage and contain this contradiction at the heart of British financialization: an economy dependent on cheap labour for its meagre growth rates, unable to deliver meaningful productivity, with a population that increasingly wants the state to mount some kind of systemic intervention. Added to that economic backdrop are other, more twenty-first-century factors: the falling price of cocaine, which is no longer merely consumed in law firms and nightclubs but also at sports matches and in pubs; the suppression of British football hooliganism, which has siloed more young men into the milieu of the far right – a world that mainly exists online, but in which nocturnal terror squads provide at least a fleeting sense of social collectivity.

There is also the international dimension. Is it surprising that a nation which styles itself as an attack dog for a declining imperial hegemon, and unconditionally supports genocide in the Middle East, would see such belligerence ricochet on the domestic front? The UK, having normalized the ongoing attempt to exterminate a surplus population in Israel and solve the Palästinenserfrage once and for all, has given a strong impetus to those wishing to enact anti-Muslim violence here at home.

Unlike the dominant varieties of antisemitism, anti-Islamic sentiment does not usually engage in projections of global omnipotence. Instead, it casts the Muslim as a dangerously ambiguous figure. In the zero-sum world of late capitalism, their ability to retain a minimum of communal cohesion is seen to have better equipped them for labour market competition. Rather than a fear of the other, anti-Muslim feeling is a fear of the same: someone in a position of equal dependence on the market, yet who is thought to be more effective in shielding themselves against its onslaught. Simultaneously, the Muslim is also seen as a subaltern agent of the abstraction which finance has inflicted on world of post-war stability: someone who is out of place, who is causing ‘borders and boundaries to erode’, as Seymour puts it.

In 1913, Lenin controversially claimed that behind the Black Hundreds – the reactionary monarchist force which gave the world the notion of ‘pogromism’ – one could detect an ‘ignorant peasant democracy, democracy of the crudest type but also extremely deep-seated’. In his view, Russian landowners had tried to ‘appeal to the most deep-rooted prejudices of the most backward peasant’ and ‘play on his ignorance’. Yet ‘such a game cannot be played without risk’, he qualified, and ‘now and again the voice of the real peasant life, peasant democracy, breaks through all the Black-Hundred mustiness and cliché’.

There is no repressed emancipatory core to the riots, no ‘energy’ which can be recuperated. In this sense, the kind of desperate hope that Korsch read into the Blitzkrieg must be abjured. But beneath British pogromism still lies a universe of misery which it is the left’s historic task to negate. Successful strategies for doing so are in short supply. A-to-B marches, of the type which now take place in London every month, can be a useful way to assert a political line. They remain a minimum requirement of socialist politics. But they are inadequate to occupy the void that is now being colonized by the neo-Powellite right. In Seymour’s depiction, this world often falls by the wayside. The left must make sure it stays in focus.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Enoch Powell: The New Right’, NLR I/61.

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Dreaming of Downfall

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 13 August 2024

What just happened? For almost a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland were in the grip of pogromist reaction. In Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster and Manchester, networked mobs of fascoid agitators and disorganized racists were thrilled by their own exuberant violence. In Rotherham, they set fire to a Holiday Inn hotel housing asylum seekers. In Middlesborough, they blocked roads and only let traffic through if drivers were verified as ‘white’ and ‘English’, momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official.

In Tamworth, where the recently elected Labour MP had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England’, ‘Fuck Pakis’ and ‘Get Out’. In Hull, as crowds dragged a man out of his car for a beating, participants shouted ‘kill them!’ In Belfast, where a hijabi was reportedly punched in the face while holding her baby, they destroyed Muslim shops and tried to march on the local mosque, chanting ‘get ’em out’. In Newtownards, a mosque was attacked with a petrol bomb. In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed.

Worryingly, while far-right activists played a role, it was probably secondary. The riots, rather than being caused by handfuls of organized fascists, provided them with their best recruiting grounds in years. Many people who had never been ‘political’ before, and perhaps never even voted, turned out to burn asylum seekers or assault Muslims.

The occasion for this carnival of racist inebriation was a terrifying mass stabbing in Southport on 29 July. The alleged attacker, for reasons not yet discernible, descended upon a Taylor Swift dance class, attacking eleven children and two adults. Three of the children were killed. Because the suspect was under eighteen, his identity was initially protected. It took only a few hours for the stabbings to become a rallying point for the far right, thanks initially to coalescing waves of online agitation. The suspect, according to rightist disinfotainment accounts, was a migrant on an ‘MI6 watch list’ who had arrived on a ‘small boat’: ‘Ali al-Shakati’. ‘Uncontrolled mass migration’ was to blame for the stabbings.

This fantasy, which came just days after a large rally in support of Tommy Robinson in Trafalgar Square, was signal-boosted by the usual reactionary grifters, Robinson and Andrew Tate among them. The rumour was further infused with vitality thanks to a swarm of reactionary social industry accounts based in the US. A Telegram account, set up either by fascists or the fash-curious, gained 14,000 members and played a direct role in incitement. Like sparks flying from a furnace, the agitation spread from social media into meatspace. On 30 July, a loose collection of racist vigilantes and neo-Nazis gathered on St Luke’s Road in Southport and attacked the mosque with bricks and bottles. Although residents participated in the clean-up and repairs the next day, the furies were only beginning. From the end of July, the cycle of riots swept the UK for over a week. They slowly petered out when, following the announcement of dozens of intended far-right protests across the UK on the evening of 7 August, tens of thousands of anti-racists turned out in London, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton, Hastings, Southend, Northampton, Southampton, Blackpool, Derby, Swindon and Sheffield. Most of the racist gatherings failed to materialize, and those that did were outnumbered.

Throughout, the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the marauders had been defended by a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, including Matthew Goodwin, Carole Malone, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. More insidious were the routine obfuscations of major broadcasters, such as the BBC insipidly referring to these Poujadist enragés as ‘protesters’, while the hosts on ITV’s Good Morning Britain scoffed and guffawed when the left-wing Muslim MP Zarah Sultana described the riots as racist. In Bolton, where local Muslims organized in their self-defence against a movement that had shown murderous intent, the BBC called the far-right rally a ‘pro-British march’, while ITV described how ‘anti-immigration protesters’ were met by ‘300 masked people shouting Allahu Akhbar’.

Still, on the morning after the anti-racist turnout on 7 August, all right-minded opinion-formers exhaled in relief. ‘Well done decency, well done the police’, sighed former BBC journalist Jon Sopel. Even the Daily Mail, a constant source of front-page panic about migration, saluted the ‘Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down the Thugs’. The Express, ever a redoubt of Robinsonades, cheered: ‘United Britain Stands Firm Against Thugs’. There was, of course, no genuine unity. Those who flooded the streets to stop the riots had recently been slandered as ‘hate marchers’ by politicians and pundits alike when they rallied in support of Palestine. And while the majority of Britons disapproved of ‘unrest’, a surprisingly large number of people, 34%, supported the ‘protests’. Almost 60% expressed ‘sympathy’ with the ‘protesters’. Unsurprisingly, among those who backed the ‘unrest’, supporters of Reform UK, the third largest party by vote share, were disproportionately represented. Still, what a comfort not to have to think.

There followed the inevitable search for foreign subversion. The BBC, the Mail and the Telegraph were joined by Paul Mason and the usual social-media liberals in blaming Russia. There’s scant evidence for this, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has pointed out. But the implication appears to be that nothing in Britain’s recent history, or in the behaviour of its dominant institutions, could possibly have led to the conflagration. The same mass media that has relentlessly drilled the public with moral panic about migration now denounces social media ‘disinformation’, stressing the importance of ‘facts’ and ‘objectivity’ in public life.

It is true that rumour played a critical role in congealing ad hoc alliances of engorged racists. As in the Knowsley riots in February 2023, inflammatory allegations spread on the social industry formed the inciting incident. But it’s telling that when courts revealed the identity of the suspect on 1 August, proving that he was neither a migrant nor on any ‘watch list’, the rioters didn’t break their stride: the worst attacks happened in the following days. People believed the rumours because it was expedient for them to do so, because it confirmed their prejudices and gave them the opportunity to act out long-brewing revenge fantasies.

This is how it has always worked. Rumours of a coming massacre of whites by black people sparked the pogrom in East St Louis, Illinois, in 1919. In Orléans in 1969, salacious stories about Jewish merchants drugging and selling women led to riots attacking Jewish shops. In 2002 in Gujarat, it was unsubstantiated claims that Muslims firebombed a train with Hindu pilgrims on board that became a pretext for gruesome ecstasies of Islamophobic murder and rape. And in the summer of 2020, the idea that ‘Antifa’ had started the Oregon wildfires to murder white, conservative Christians fuelled armed vigilantism. We can’t ‘fact-check’ the rumours into oblivion because, as Terry Ann Knopf documents in her history of rumours and race riots in the United States, the ‘facts’ are usually irrelevant. In moments of emergency, real or perceived, official sources are distrusted, while unofficial ‘witnesses’ are briefly sanctified to the extent that they fuel the fantasies bred by racial hierarchies and fears of revolt.

Recent moral panics, whether about race, nationality or gender, whether they are obsessed with asylum seekers in ‘five-star hotels’ or ‘bathroom predators’ or a supposed ‘man’ competing as a female boxer, share a sense of borders and boundaries eroding, of people being where they have no business being. Men becoming women, the rich becoming poor. The whites, as David Starkey once worried, becoming black. The majority becoming the minority. This is a surprisingly mobile fantasm, making it easy to switch rationalizations. When the identity of the Southport suspect was revealed, for instance, the subject was swiftly changed. It became about the fact that he was ‘the son of Rwandan migrants’, as Matthew Goodwin put it in a Substack post. Despite knowing nothing about the motive for the crime, it was suddenly a problem of ‘integration’ or as some of the online poetasters put it, ‘British values’.

This is an intriguing pivot: the actions of a white mass murderer (for example, incel killer Jake Davison) would not lend themselves to such pained interrogations. The fact that what is at stake is ‘ethnic’ belonging was clarified by Goodwin, when he was quizzed by Ash Sarkar on the BBC’s ‘Moral Maze’. Many people are English, he said, without being ‘ethnically’ so. Writing on Substack, he channelled the ‘fears’ of the ‘British and the English’ who, he informed us, are worried about ‘majority decline and demographic change’. Even cast in terms of ‘ethnicity’, not ‘race’, it is difficult not to see this as a soft version of what Chetan Bhatt described as the metaphysical obsession of today’s white far-right: the fear of white extinction. It is Britannia dreaming of its downfall.

This is a loose theodicy, which claims that whatever pain people are enduring in a country with stagnant living standards, crumbling infrastructure and an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian state, it must be the product of ‘broken borders’. Lacking the utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion, today’s far right has become obsessed with bordering. It has retreated to a defensive nation-statism, as the container for a series of traditional demarcations along gender and ethnic lines, obedience to which is invariably described as ‘integration’.

This parasitizes on official discourse. In the last few years, we have heard from senior politicians that ‘Islamists’ run the country, that peaceful Gaza protesters are a ‘thuggish mob’, that a parliamentary debate on a Gaza ceasefire had to be blocked to prevent the terrorist murder of MPs, that ‘Hamas’ was to blame for Labour’s poor showing in the West Midlands, that asylum seekers should be tagged, that too many migrants work in the NHS, that asylum seekers are expensive and dangerous, that Rishi Sunak is ‘the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration’, and that both Tories and Labour would ‘stop the small boats’ delivering refugees to British shores. And much as there has been a bipartisan consensus on leaning into the racist culture wars, both major parties are now affiliated with some variant of the transphobic panic.

Much as liberalism fails by blaming it all on ‘Brexit’ or Russia while ignoring the convection cells of the storm that have been gathering in plain sight, so the left often has its own comforting narrative in which plebeian racist violence is a distorted expression of ‘material interests’. This usually translates as a call to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ rather than ‘identity politics’: as though we could route around the perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity by offering jobs and wages. No doubt we need more bread and butter, but that is strictly orthogonal to what is taking place. Racism sometimes works as a form of displaced or distorted class politics, but not always. The ‘legitimate concerns’ of these rioters pertain to the idea of lost ethnic status. Where the ‘white working class’ is misleadingly invoked, ‘white’ is the operative term: the idea is that workers, far from being exploited, have been denied the appropriate moral recognition as white members of the nation by ‘elites’ too overzealous about extending recognition to minorities. It is about recouping the lost ‘wages of whiteness’.

Meanwhile those drawn to this ethnonationalist politics steadfastly refuse to be particularly poor or marginalized. They may have experienced relative class decline or inhabit declining regions, but they are as likely to be middle-class as workers. Racism does not so much express misplaced class grievance as organize the toxic emotions of failure, humiliation and decline. The terror of white extinction, to that extent, is the fear that without rigid boundaries and borders those who have hitherto been protected will plunge into the toiling mass of humanity. The hypertrophic excitement of the pogromists, and their manifest enthralment at the idea of annihilation, gives them something to do about it. It is their alternative to the pervasive affects of paralysis and depression, in a dying civilization.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Riot on the Hill’, Sidecar.

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Overwriting Palestine

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 6 August 2024

The most intense bombardment of a concentrated urban space in recent memory, the fastest deliberate starvation of any population in recorded history, the greatest number of journalists killed in any conflict worldwide, and the greatest number of United Nations staff slain in any period: Israel has set out to methodically obliterate every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, with the Lancet estimating that its war may have already left more than 186,000 dead. As part of this ten-month rampage, Israel has targeted schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural centres, heritage sites, mosques and churches. It has assassinated professors and massacred teachers, faculty and staff, along with their entire families. It has also caused irreparable harm to tens of thousands of students, in what UN officials have described as a ‘scholasticide’.

In the United States, the country most responsible for overseeing and abetting these horrors, university and college presidents have, at best, responded with stony silence. Many of them had rushed to denounce the violence perpetrated on October 7th, swept up in the panic over what Biden called the ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’ and the lurid fabrications about beheaded babies. Since then, they have expressed concern for the alleged safety of their Jewish students and introduced mandatory ‘antisemitism awareness’ training (along with an occasional nod to Islamophobia, but with scarcely a word about the anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism rampant on campuses).

It is extraordinary that to date not a single US university has officially condemned the genocide in Gaza – or, at the very least, the systematic Israeli destruction of universities there. On the contrary, they have insisted that they will maintain institutional ties with their Israeli counterparts, including those that are implicated in the war on Palestinian society and life, as well as their investments in the corporations gorging on the profits generated by Palestinian death. The fact that Palestinians, Christians and Muslim Arabs, as well as Jewish anti-Zionists, are now well-represented in many Western universities – mostly as students, and to a lesser extent as faculty and staff – means they have an intimate view of their own erasure.

For much of its history, the American academy was unapologetically Eurocentric, existing in what W.E.B. Dubois called a ‘white world’. This is no longer explicitly the case. Higher education is ostensibly more racially inclusive; curricula are ‘decolonized’. Yet unlike every other case of Western settler-colonization – from the enslavement of Black Africans to the genocide of Native Americans to the conquest of Algeria and South Africa – the oppression of Palestinians has outlasted the mainstreaming of concepts such as ‘human rights’ and ‘racial equality’. Apologists for apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South would not be tolerated in any major Western university today; yet Israel is openly embraced despite it being a state founded and sustained through the mass, and ongoing, dispossession of the native Palestinians, and despite being described by leading human rights organizations as an apartheid regime even before the Gaza genocide. Israel is also unique in having a large network of academic centres, visiting professor programmes and cultural and faith centres on American campuses, which are committed to defending and promoting an anachronistic and openly anti-Palestinian colonial ideology that seeks to fuse modern Jewish identity to an exclusivist ethno-nationalist state.

In recent years, some universities have removed monuments to slaveholders or renamed buildings to acknowledge their complicity in colonialism. Yet these same institutions, along with bodies like the American Historical Association (AHA), have refused to engage directly with the issue of Palestine. In May 2024, the AHA issued a statement criticizing police violence against campus protesters but managed to avoid using the word ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian’ even once. It seems that the only victims who can be mourned are those safely buried in the past. The ‘Palestine exception’ thus reflects the disjuncture between support for Israel and its ideology of colonial Zionism, on the one hand, and attempts to make amends for racist and colonial history, on the other. In this ideological landscape, Palestine is denied the status of a moral and political question, and Palestinians that of a people with significant history. Admitting the moral and political imperatives of Palestinian history and humanity contradicts the West’s highly selective self-image.

There are, of course, material and political costs to siding with the Palestinians. Zionist institutions and pro-Israel donors routinely smear Palestinian students and professors as ‘antisemitic’, while pressuring administrators to clamp down on anyone advocating for Palestinian rights, which is said to amount to ‘hate speech’. The Israel lobby has supported Congressional investigations into Palestinian activism on campuses. The pro-Israel Brandeis Center wages constant lawfare against universities and public-school districts to ensure they toe the line. One billionaire hedge fund manager has led a crusade against pro-Palestine student protesters, calling for some of them to be locked out of the job market. Most American politicians have stood with Israel since the onset of the genocide. They have not merely demanded that university presidents follow suit, but pressured them to do so through congressional hearings evocative of the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s. Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said that the Palestine solidarity protesters should be no more tolerated than KKK racists would be on campuses.

Yet the heart of the Palestine exception is not simply the crude denial of Palestinian history and humanity. More significant is the constant overwriting of this history by a different one: that of modern European antisemitism, with which the Western academy is deeply familiar (Jewish scholars were, of course, once barred from many of the same Ivy League institutions that now crack down on Palestine solidarity encampments). With this act of substitution, the ongoing reality of Palestinian slaughter is erased from ethical consideration. Palestinians and allied students, including Jewish anti-Zionists, protesting apartheid and genocide are presented as anachronistic ‘antisemites’ by a liberal (and, interestingly enough, by the increasingly ‘conservative’ and right-wing) West which has supposedly outgrown its historic Judeophobia. By the same token, supporters of the state that carries out genocide, or those who identify with its ideology, are cast as victims in need of institutional and police protection.

Beneath this distorted discourse is the West’s selective commitment to philosemitism: its professed love of Judaism and the Jewish people, which it views as necessary to atone for its record of racism and prejudice against them. Philosemitism has, in turn, been conflated with philozionism: support for Israel’s ethno-nationalist state ideology. As a result, contemporary Palestinian subjugation has been obscured by a narrative that presents historical Jewish victimhood as more consequential, and the state of Israel as a safeguard against it. By this means, ‘fighting antisemitism’ often implies erasing Palestine, not talking about Palestinians, not acknowledging that there can be no ethical consideration of contemporary Zionism without centring the Palestinian experience of subjugation at the hands of the self-proclaimed Jewish state of Israel. This is a disastrous outcome for anyone invested in the genuine and conjoined struggle against anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian racism.

The development of this outlook can, of course, be traced back to the Nazi Holocaust that decimated European Jewry. In its aftermath, the establishment of an Israeli state was presented in the West as a means to expiate the sin of Western antisemitism. In the debates leading up to the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948, the Palestinians were described by Western diplomats as impediments to this redemptive project. Palestinian life was not valued on its own terms, but simply in relation to a Western-identified ‘Jewish problem’. As Du Bois noted in his 1940 Dusk of Dawn and Aimé Cesaire argued in his 1955 Discourse on Colonialism, the victorious Allies had portrayed Hitler as a singularly German creation, rather than recognizing him as part of a pantheon of Western leaders who had long embraced virulent racism and carried out systematic genocides against non-Western peoples. Playing to this narrative, the newly established state of Israel launched a propaganda campaign which endures today, in which it presents itself as the victim of Arab ‘terrorism’ and a bulwark against a return to antisemitic barbarism.

The persistence of these tropes means that Palestine is rarely placed in its centuries-old Ottoman and Arab context or seen as an integral part of a multireligious Mashriqi region. In the Zionist imaginary, the only possible remedy to the historic plight of the Jews in Europe was to establish a uniquely modern, European-style Jewish state in Palestine. This state, so the story goes, has since its inception been besieged by hordes of Arabs who are afflicted by the kind of antisemitic hatred that European Christians are supposed to have abandoned. In The Jews of Islam (1984), orientalist Bernard Lewis writes that Arab opposition to Israel has little to do with colonialism or dispossession; he claims that its origins lie in a new ‘Arab antisemitism’ which was imported from Europe and brought an end to peaceful Judeo-Muslim coexistence. Palestinians have no place in this story, except as inheritors of Western anti-Jewish prejudice. ‘The Arab’, as Edward Said remarked in Orientalism (1978), ‘is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew’.

It is no wonder that the Western academic hierarchy, bound to these profoundly misleading narratives, and to the political, financial, and cultural investments that sustain them, has been silent in the face of Gaza’s immolation. To change course is no easy thing. The Western world’s last settler-colonial regime, committed to an ideology born in nineteenth-century Europe, remains remarkably adept at diffusing a story that erases Palestinian humanity, including in the realm of higher education. Most students, however, no longer buy this Eurocentric erasure – nor does most of the global population.

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

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Bloody July

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 1 August 2024

Speaking to journalists on 26 July, the Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina could not stop herself from weeping. She had spent fifteen years developing her nation, she said, and now the fruits of that development were being destroyed. Hasina was referring to a metro station in Mirpur – a shining symbol of the country’s plan to upgrade its infrastructure – which had been vandalized by student protesters. She alluded to a conspiracy involving the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, whom she accused of waging a campaign of violent sabotage. She said nothing, however, about the hundreds of demonstrators who had been shot dead by state forces over the previous week.

The trigger for the unrest was the decision to restore a quota that reserves 30% of government jobs for the extended families of veterans of the 1971 liberation war, which effectively means supporters of the regime. The so-called ‘freedom fighter quota’, along with corruption in the civil service exam, bars many of the brightest students from such professional opportunities. This is anathema to Bangladesh’s middle-class youth, who are both deeply aspirational and fiercely patriotic. Many of them have the skills to find work abroad, yet they are determined to stay and serve their country. Last month they took to the streets in their thousands to demand the reform of the system. Hasina’s ruling Awami League responded with a brutal crackdown, sending in its militia and security officials. Some protesters tried to fight back. Others, whom the government claims were infiltrators from opposition groups, attacked government buildings and public infrastructure. A nationwide curfew was imposed and the internet was shut down; arbitrary detentions and raids are ongoing. The court abolished the quota, but the movement is now demanding justice and accountability. As the death toll rose to 250, the government tried to coerce the detained student leaders into calling off the protests. It has so far been unsuccessful.

‘Bloody July’ has shocked the nation. Millions watched viral videos that showed the 22-year-old activist Abu Sayeed being shot by police at a protest in Rangpur and another young protester being tossed from the top of an armoured military vehicle and left for dead on the side of the road. Such images will not be forgotten. The Awami League appears to have squandered whatever legitimacy it may have had. This was not only its most significant political crisis to date; it was also a direct challenge to the party’s narrative of ‘development success’. The government had assumed that if it could deliver high growth rates and some public services, its one-party rule would be secure.

But while GDP has grown by 6% annually and infrastructure investment has been significant, prosperity has failed to trickle down to the middle and working classes. Development projects are marred by corruption and enrich those close to power. The broader macroeconomic situation is gloomy, with an IMF programme in place that demands spending restrictions and liberalizing reforms. The government has borrowed heavily from other Asian countries, leaving the economy vulnerable to currency and market volatility. When the protests erupted, Hasina had just returned from a trip to Beijing, where she was seeking $5 billion to shore up the country’s dwindling foreign-exchange reserves. Meanwhile, most Bangladeshis have suffered a punishing cost-of-living crisis, precipitated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, with the current rate of inflation close to 10%. Even the relatively privileged have felt the bite.

Since winning a landslide in the last free elections in late 2008, the Awami League has manipulated each subsequent ballot. It has done so with an increasingly heavy hand, seeking to marginalize or eradicate opposition parties. Thousands of BNP activists and leaders have been jailed. The former BNP Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia is under house arrest, while her son, Tarique Zia, is in exile. The party could not mount an effective opposition to the boycotted elections of 2024 nor the rigged ones of 2018. Jamaat-e-Islami has been banned, yet the government continues to invoke the threat of an Islamist takeover – alleging, without clear evidence, that Islamists were behind last month’s attack on the Narsingdi jail, which led to the release of 800 inmates including some convicted terrorists.

Public criticism of the government has also been criminalized over the last decade. Human rights advocates face harassment and arrest; journalists are hit with multiple lawsuits if they fail to toe the line; ‘disappearances’ are frequent. All this has been enabled by the Awami League’s unprecedented success in fusing with the state apparatus – the bureaucracy, security forces, judiciary – while also co-opting civil society and big business. While the spectre of a military takeover has haunted previous governments, Hasina has managed to satisfy the army via contracts, licences and strategic appointments, along with lucrative UN peace-keeping missions for the rank-and-file. Previously, Bangladesh’s state institutions have been known to break with the government and ‘align with the people’ – as in 1990, when military rule was overthrown by a mass popular movement, and 1996, when another uprising succeeded in establishing a caretaker government. But the current fusion of party and state has foreclosed this prospect. With Bangladesh turning to China and India for finance, it is no longer clear that Western countries have enough leverage to promote political alternatives, as they did during the 2006-08 transition.

With each new election over the past fifteen years, the political settlement comprising the ruling party, the state machinery and big capital has been further consolidated. Yet the general population has grown disenchanted as the promise of equitable development has been betrayed. Now, the strength of this elite power bloc seems less assured. Bangladeshi history has been punctuated by moments of mass mobilization which have often toppled unpopular incumbents. The current uprising is being likened to the 1952 Language Movement, when students in what was then East Pakistan protested against plans to make Urdu the official state language, which would have deprived Bengalis of jobs in the elite civil service corps. This was the opening salvo in the longer struggle that culminated in the 1971 war of independence. Will Bloody July light a similar fuse?

The young people who have been killed and brutalized over the past month have contributed much to Bangladesh: building its IT sector (with little government assistance), starting thousands of initiatives to support people during the pandemic, providing disaster relief and setting up non-profits to help the poor. This educated stratum is essential for a deprived nation trying to grow into a middle-income one and diversify its economy. Yet Hasina’s regime seems intent on alienating them. In doing so, many believe it has sown the seeds of its eventual downfall.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Bangladesh: Results and Prospects’, NLR I/68.

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