Month: September 2024

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The Gravedigger

When Michel Barnier’s appointment as Prime Minister was announced on 5 September, many French voters experienced two simultaneous sensations which say a lot about the country’s political direction. The first was, naturally, surprise – that a man who is no longer seen as a frontline politician, whose name was not even mentioned during the election campaign, should be given this post. The second was déjà vu. Over the course of the last half century, Barnier has held nearly every position in the cursus honorum of French politics: local elected official, MP, senator, minister, European commissioner. He is an exemplary figure of the vieux monde that Emmanuel Macron purported to oppose when he ran for President as a ‘modernizer’ and ‘disrupter’ back in 2017.

Who would have guessed that at the end of his career – at age 73 ­– Barnier would be moving into Matignon? Following his appointment, an archival clip from 1971 circulated on social networks, showing a young Barnier delivering a speech so vapid and anodyne that he already sounded like a seasoned politician. One gets the impression that he has never changed, that he was born, Athena-like, fully armed with political cant. A typical careerist of the conservative bourgeois political class, he has known no other profession: elected to public office in his home region of the Savoie at the age of 22, he was a member of parliament by the age of 27. The viral clip betrays his essence: an ambitious yet second-rate statesman, who has spent his life navigating the troubled waters of the French right without ever rising to the top – until now.

‘Michel Barnier, homme de consensus’, declared Le Monde on 5 September. Opportunist would be more accurate. Balladurian under Balladur, Juppéist under Juppé, Chiraquian under Chirac, Sarkozist under Sarkozy, Barnier succeeded in obtaining ministerial positions in most right-wing governments between 1993 and 2009 – a tour de force of politicking. His reputation as a competent technocrat eventually opened the doors of the European Commission. Defeated by Jean-Claude Juncker in his bid for the Presidency of the Commission in 2014, he rebounded when Juncker enlisted him as chief Brexit negotiator: a role in which, heedless of economic rationality or popular sovereignty, he sought to inflict maximal punishment on Britain for opting to leave the bloc.

Upon returning to France, now full of hubris, Barnier entered the Les Républicains primary contest, in hopes of standing as the centre-right party’s candidate in the 2022 presidential elections. In his efforts to seduce conservative voters, Barnier did not hesitate to deploy the arguments of the Brexiteers on immigration and the European Court of Justice, vowing to ‘put a stop to immigration’ and create ‘constitutional shield’ against laws that are ‘too favourable to foreigners’. The campaign was a flop. Yet it helped to reveal Barnier’s true colours. His reflexes on social issues have always been reactionary, and his long record of voting against abortion and gay rights put him at a distance from the early incarnation of Macronism; but as the latter shifted to the right – railing against ‘le wokisme’ – they were brought into perfect alignment.

Proud, opportunistic, conservative, but lacking any strong political vision, Barnier is perfect for the role that Macron now intends him to play: to transmute the electoral alliance known as the ‘republican front’, which prevented the Rassemblement National (RN) from obtaining a majority in the National Assembly, into a parliamentary alliance of the centre. This strategy has one goal: to maintain an economic policy favourable to capital. To understand Barnier’s appointment, along with the game that Macron has been playing since the legislative elections, one must recall the changing nature of Macronism, which has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive during its second term. This shift has not merely been a matter of political tactics, but a response to the present state of French capitalism.

Since 2017, the French economy has weakened, productivity has declined and growth has been minimal. To ensure profitability, some fractions of capital have become increasingly dependent on state support, with an estimated 130 to 200 billion euros distributed to private companies each year. The worsening public deficit reflects this: the state guarantees a rate of return higher than the rate of growth, and assumes responsibility for the shortfall. Yet one significant fraction of capital – finance – demands iron-clad guarantees on public debt. Macronism is thus forced to act as capital’s justice of the peace, trying to reconcile these conflicting interests.

It has done so by shifting the burden of adjustment onto labour – hence the fall in real wages, reduction in unemployment benefits and cuts to public services since 2021. The aim of Macron’s presidency is to maintain this asymmetry between workers and bosses. It is in this context that we must understand its growing authoritarianism, which reached new levels with last year’s pension reform. Rammed through parliament in the face of widespread popular opposition, and enforced at street level with the help of unchecked police brutality, the policy was denounced by both the left and the far right.

The RN, however, is now seeking to project an image of ‘respectability’ to the financial markets and traditional conservative electorate. During the June election campaign, it submitted its programme to an ‘audit of public finances’, effectively announcing that most of its ‘social’ measures would be annulled if it came to power. The left, meanwhile, agreed on a relatively moderate programme, yet – in a clear rupture with Macronism – aimed to reverse the President’s reforms and make capital pay. Macron’s difficulty is therefore this: in order to stay afloat politically, his camp must forge a new electoral alliance; but to maintain its pro-capital agenda, it cannot countenance any such agreement with the left. Thus, following the second round, the President sought to exclude the New Popular Front despite its winning the most seats, citing the ‘danger’ it would pose to the French economy. With the explicit support of Medef, the French employers’ union, he thus further restricted the scope of French democracy: effectively ruling any alternative economic policy out of bounds.

From the perspective of capital, this move makes perfect sense. But it presupposes the betrayal of the republican front and the establishment of an ‘entente cordiale’ with the RN. For the latter, this exclusion of the left is a blessing, making it the only ‘credible’ alternative to Macronism while granting it extraordinary power over the new government. In recent weeks, Macron submitted the names of prime ministerial candidates to Marine Le Pen, who was free to make her selection. Barnier owes his nomination to her goodwill, which he presumably earned with his virulently anti-migrant remarks during the 2021 primaries. His appointment represents an attempt to guarantee Macron’s anti-labour agenda under the watchful eye of the RN, on which the future of his premiership depends. He has become linchpin of a de facto alliance between Macronism and the far right.

The Barnier government is yet to be formed, but two of its political characteristics have already been made clear: a commitment to austerity and an obsession with immigration. In his first television interview, Barnier promised ‘not to increase the debt’ and to ‘control migratory flows’. Amid talk of reestablishing an ‘immigration ministry’, the new Prime Minister visited a Parisian hospital to affirm that major cutbacks will be necessary. The ‘retournement des alliances’ which he embodies can only accelerate the decline of French democracy. The republican front strategy has proved to be a trap, and the election has resulted in an outcome contrary to the logic of the vote. The public rejected Macronism in the first round and the RN in the second. Now they are getting both.

The French situation confirms that the far right can only come to power with the support of forces dedicated to defending the interests of capital. It also exposes the limitations of the left. By insisting that change must be pursued solely through the electoral realm, and by limiting that change to the regulation or amelioration of capitalism, it finds itself pushed to the margins of a democracy ever more tightly delimited by a capitalism in crisis. If the left is to renew itself, it must recognize that the crisis of the regime is only one facet of a broader one. But it may already be too late. The gravediggers of democracy, led by Michel Barnier, are hard at work.

Read on: Frédéric Lordon, ‘The French Uprising’, Sidecar.

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Ghost World

Soviet architecture generally only had ‘stars’ in its first and last years. At the start, the utopian generation of Melnikov, Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers, with their workers’ clubs and palaces of labour; at the end, the dystopian ‘paper architects’ like Brodsky and Utkin, who created Borgesian paradoxes about failure and confusion. Research in the last couple of decades has complicated this considerably, foregrounding major architects, especially in the non-Russian republics, working doggedly in the Brezhnev years, like Raine Karp in Estonia or George Chakhava in Georgia; but only the Ukrainian modernist Florian Yuriev has been the star of a film. In Oleksiy Radynski’s Infinity According to Florian (2022), the octogenarian Yuriev – who died the year before the documentary’s release – and a group of young supporters attempt to resist the diminution of his greatest building, the Institute of Information in Kyiv, into a bauble at the front of a shopping mall. In this struggle, elements of Yuriev’s life emerge obliquely – his time in the Gulag in his youth; his stint as a modernist painter during the ‘Thaw’; his brief success as an architect; and his long, obscure retirement as a nonconformist Marxist in post-Soviet Ukraine. Throughout, he’s a captivating presence, a modest, quiet but passionate utopian, a living embodiment of a future that never came to pass.

The film’s director has staked out a similarly nonconformist position. Infinity According to Florian is the only feature to date by the Ukrainian critic and filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski, who has been perhaps the most eloquent Anglophone exponent of what could be called a left-populist or left-patriotic politics in Ukraine. His writing and filmmaking refused to avoid the difficulties and complexities of Ukrainian politics – a country which has been a cold house for the left for many decades – while still coming down firmly in favour of, for instance, the insurrection against Viktor Yanukovych and against the ‘pro-Russian’ unrest that followed. In this, his work is in explicit dialogue with earlier examples of theoretical, politicised filmmaking from well-known directors like Dziga Vertov – as a student, Radynski wrote his thesis on Vertov’s early sound film Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas – to more obscure late Soviet figures such as the scientific documentarian Felix Sobolev. In terms of international affiliations, his films might be placed in the Western Marxist tradition of Kluge, Straub-Huillet and especially, Harun Farocki: deadpan, dialectical, sometimes slightly forbidding, with a grim sense of humour.

Before turning to directing, Radynski was a theorist and writer on film, politics and architecture; talking to me remotely at an event this spring at Factory International in Manchester, he reflected that ‘trying to put two images together’ was an experimental outgrowth of his criticism, which took on its own momentum. His first sketches were part of what was, in his words, ‘rather naively called “video activism” at the time’, when it was still widely believed on the left that ‘platforms like YouTube could be tools for progressive politics, rather than algorithmic behemoths eating away people’s attention and lives’. This early work emerged out of his involvement as an activist with Right to the City campaigns in Kyiv circa 2009-10, and as a writer and editor in the Ukrainian branch of the Polish left-liberal journal and publisher Krytyka Polityczna and a member of the Visual Culture Research Centre, a left-leaning collective-cum-think-tank in Kyiv.

It developed into more concerted, planned filmmaking during the events of 2013, with Radynski creating short online video reports ‘which me and my comrades at the time regarded as counter-information activism’. Radynski made agitational work on the protests – such as the pithy Kyiv: Why Violence? (2013) – and as a writer, published perhaps the most convincing Anglophone defence of them in his usual English-language outlet, e-flux, in a multi-part, labyrinthine essay, ‘Maidan and Beyond’. But the films that stood out were more about the other side. Incident at the Museum (2013) came out of a project on censorship in Ukraine, which brought Radynski and his colleagues to an art museum in the second city, Kharkiv. An interview with a ‘very conservative museum director’ is suddenly interrupted as the director has to meet and escort a luxuriantly bearded Russian priest, rumoured to be Putin’s confessor; for Radynski, the short stands today as a tale about ‘how the notion of “Russian culture” metastasises in politics’, with Orthodoxy and Russian patriotism married to artistic conservatism and institutional corruption. The People Who Came to Power (2015), made just after the overthrow of Yanukovych, was the result of spending several weeks in Donbas as local protests were fanned and militarised by Russian forces led by the far-right adventurer Igor Strelkov. The contrast between the small, paranoid, armed groups documented in this film and the street protests captured in the shorts from Maidan is hard to miss.

In the interregnum between the annexation of Crimea and the incursions into the Eastern Donbas and the invasion of 2022, Radynski’s lens began to settle on infrastructure, architecture, and on his native Kyiv and its highly publicised process of ‘decommunisation’. For Radynski, this ‘foolish and problematic’ state-mandated iconoclasm is fundamentally a ‘smokescreen’ for the neoliberal redevelopment of the city, with public spaces being eaten up by opaque private interests and infrastructure pushed to the point of collapse, all smoothed over by a consensus nationalism: processes ‘which were ongoing long before Maidan, but intensified by the governments who have misused it to their advantage’. Infinity was preceded by the multi-part The Film of Kyiv (2017), which counterposes the planned destruction of Yuriev’s building with the perpetually unfinished Podilsky Bridge in Kyiv, a metro and road bridge begun in 1993. In the process, Radynski had to come to some kind of terms with the Soviet legacy: though he firmly rejects any nostalgia, the USSR is ‘a constant presence’ in his work, having been, as he puts it, ‘brought up in the “ghost world” of post-socialism’ (he was born in Kyiv in 1984). Soviet history, for Radynski, was ‘anything but one monolithic thing’, with ‘every decade not only different from the previous decade, but also a rejection of the previous decade’.

The discovery of Yuriev, alive and still in Kyiv, during the 2010s, was thanks to Radynski’s fascination with his one realised major building, the Institute of Information. It stands at the point where the historic city gives way to a modernist zone of giant public buildings, wide roads and housing estates, next to a Metro station originally named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, and facing a square which, until recently, featured an exceptionally aggressive monument to the Cheka. Yuriev’s loose tongue and politically undesirable family connections saw him spend time in the Gulag, but upon release, he became one of several figures trying to revive the pre-Stalin avant-garde, working on synaesthetic abstract painting and devising his own colour theory. To his great surprise, his 1960s sketch of a building in the shape of a ‘flying saucer’ flanked by rectilinear volumes – a reach back to the Constructivist drama of 1920s paper architects like Ivan Leonidov – was discovered by a Kyiv bureaucrat and developed into a permanent building, which was eventually completed in 1971.

Meeting Yuriev, Radynski says, ‘helped me nuance and complicate my view of what Soviet culture was or could be’. In Infinity, Yuriev stands in the company of Ilya Budraitskis’s ‘Dissidents among Dissidents’, those unusual figures opposed to the Soviet system while retaining their socialist or communist commitments, in an anti-Soviet milieu that was generally liberal or conservative. Appalled by post-Soviet Kyiv and its embrace of capitalism – for Yuriev, an unaccountable historical ‘step backwards’ – the architect joins with youthful enthusiasts to try and preserve the building, if possible as something close to the function he envisaged in his original sketches: an auditorium and museum devoted to the ‘synthesis of the arts’. Radynski then juxtaposes this with the processes of capitalist development. After the building was listed in 2020, its Russian-Ukrainian developers could no longer, as planned, simply demolish it – instead, it is to be swamped in a galumphing glass structure housing a shopping mall, losing any coherence and all of its original clarity. Yuriev is evidently disgusted but unsurprised that the capitalist turn backwards would create something so grotesque.

By the time the film was released, Kyiv was under siege. Radynski has remained in the city during the war, and his activities since have, unsurprisingly, revolved around it. One example is the short Chornobyl 22, on the brief Russian occupation of the decommissioned nuclear power station and its poisoned Exclusion Zone; another is Intervention, made with the British artist-filmmaker Phil Collins, which responded to Tory politicians trying to use the war as a pretext for removing the Ukrainian statue of Engels in Manchester. In this collaboration, Ukrainian accounts of the war and Ukrainian texts on Russian imperialism – a subject upon which Engels’s opinions were forthright – are presented on LED panels. In e-flux, Radynski published an ambitious essay setting out ‘The Case Against the Russian Federation’, in which he attempted to make a more serious argument than most for the notion of the Ukrainian struggle as a ‘decolonial’ endeavour.

Ukrainian Anglophone writers and, especially, social media influencers, can tend to flit unblinking between evocations of anti-imperial, anti-colonial struggle and invocations of the defence of Western civilisation against Eastern barbarians. Radynski’s essay takes the claim seriously. It is dialectical and sometimes derisive, and often very funny, particularly in his account of how he, ‘ethnically’ half-Russian and half-Jewish, ‘became a Ukrainian’. The essay roots Russian hostility to Ukraine not in racial difference but as a response to Ukrainian traditions of anarchism and insurrection; that’s as may be. It is notable for, first, seeing Russia as a fundamentally ‘Western’ polity, and its expansion into Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus as a settler-colonial project with significant input from Germany, Scandinavia, France and Britain – and, more controversially, for conceding Ukraine’s complicity in this, with, as any historian knows, Ukrainians having been as implicated in the Russian push into Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries as Scots were in the British Empire. Russian historiography credits Kyiv with the creation of the Russian State, in the form of Kyivan Rus. Radynski, ever the dialectician, does not dispute this. The war, for him, gives Ukrainians the possibility of repentance for having helped create a monster.

His most recent short film, Where Russia Ends (2024), is a typically oblique attempt to make these arguments in cinematic form. Formally, it is a sharp departure from his long-take documentary style, an essay film based on found footage. It is, according to Radynski, partly a response to his disappointment with TraumaZone (2023), Adam Curtis’s montage of BBC archival footage on the collapse of the USSR, which presented the region as a monolithic ‘Russia’. Curtis’s film did, however, suggest to Radynski the possible use of vintage material he had himself been working with for over a decade: that of the ‘immense and abandoned archive’ of Kyivnaukfilm, an acronym for the Science Film Studio in Kyiv, which between the 1940s and 1990s made documentaries and animations on everything from the lives of animals to psychoanalysis, the roots of fascism to urbanism and environmentalism (these have seldom been seen in the West, except for a few documentaries by the studio’s artistic director, Felix Sobolev). Radynski has worked for years on digitising Kyivnaukfilm’s completed work, and on cataloguing its raw footage and rushes.

The material Radynski employs in Where Russia Ends focuses on Siberia and northeastern Asia – the Khanty, Nenets and Sakha autonomous republics and autonomous okrugs, all still within the Russian Federation – filmed during the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a Brezhnev-era grand project supplementing the Tsarist Trans-Siberian Railway, and the oil and gas pipelines that conveyed fossil capital from the ‘east’ to European Russia (and, as Radynski is keen to point out, to West Germany). Ukraine, he states, was ‘very much at the forefront of the industrial colonisation’ of northeastern Asia; ‘the filmmakers were essentially colonisers’ in the region, settling in the new industrial towns and cities and presenting the extraction of local resources as part of an uncritically depicted process of development. Industrial expansion is, in the original films, interspersed, as in the works of the British directors of the Empire Marketing Board, with images of untouched landscapes and picturesque natives.

For all his palpable love of this moment in Soviet Ukrainian filmmaking, Radynski sees it as another example of Ukrainian complicity with Russian imperialism. The fictional narrative he appends to this – stunningly beautiful – footage adds an anti-imperialist voice, one that imagines a solidarity between these Asian victims of Russian – European – imperialism and the Ukrainians whose own language and political rights have been periodically stamped upon by the Russian state with similar violence. Where Russia Ends concludes with a list of the republics of the Russian Federation that declared ‘sovereignty’ with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a sovereignty which would be brutally repressed in the Caucasus and gradually watered down into nothingness elsewhere. The film is a dream of a solidarity that was rare at the time, but which he argues can be revived in the present day. Like the work of Florian Yuriev, it is another of Radynski’s futures past that have not, yet, become a reality.

Read on: Volodymyr Ischchenko, ‘Ukrainian Voices?’, NLR 138.

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Soft Landing?

This August, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell delivered his annual address to top central bankers and economists, sparking what Bloomberg described as an ‘all-conquering Wall Street rally’. The reaction was in stark contrast to that which met his last two speeches at Jackson Hole. In 2022, a contrite Powell accepted he had been wrong about the recent bout of inflation being ‘transitory’ and committed to continued interest rate rises; in 2023, having raised rates to almost 5.5%, he announced they would have to stay ‘higher for longer’. On both occasions, markets plummeted.

This year’s rally appeared to rest on three claims: first, that inflation was ‘on a sustainable path back to 2%’, which meant it was ‘time for policy to adjust’; second, that while the labour market had ‘cooled considerably’, this was not because of ‘elevated layoffs’, as in a downturn, but rather ‘a substantial increase in the supply of workers and a slowdown from the previously frantic pace of hiring’. The Federal Reserve’s ‘dual mandate’ to keep inflation low and employment high therefore required it consider lowering rates in order to maintain a strong labour market. Of course, Powell cautioned that ‘the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks’, but the overtones of his speech were clear: that he had won the fight against the inflation and effected a near impossible ‘soft landing’, stopping the economy from overheating without causing a downturn. Should we believe him?

To answer, it is necessary to consider the recent history of the Federal Reserve. Throughout the neoliberal era, it has subscribed – in practice if not explicitly in theory – to the Friedmanite view that ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’, and that the cure is therefore a reduction in the money supply. Most progressive economists reject this approach, arguing that it tends to lead to recession and high unemployment. Some claim that the Federal Reserve should be more tolerant of inflation, yet this would never do for a central bank committed to protecting the wealth of the richest. Nor would it be good news for the working class: countervailing forces like rapid growth and low unemployment would be necessary to mitigate inflation’s impact on living standards and allow unions to push wages up – and these are largely absent, given the US’s weak productive economy and volatile labour market. Others advise tackling price-gouging by big corporations. But this is only one factor in the recent inflationary upsurge, and the institutional pathways for combating it are unclear. Kamala Harris has already ‘walked back’ her anti-price-gouging plan after a corporate backlash, and a more determined leader would inevitably see such legislation challenged by the right-wing judiciary.

Since inflation, symptomatically at least, is  ‘too much money chasing too few goods’, the least destructive way it can be addressed is by increasing the supply of goods and services whose prices are rising. Yet this would deprive the Federal Reserve of the near monopoly it has acquired over economic policy, and instead require a developmental state capable of pursuing an active industrial policy – not just directing credit, R&D,  trade and investment flows, but controlling capital, rather than being controlled by it. This is a tall order. Progressive economists who gesture towards industrial policy often imagine that ‘Bidenomics’ is ‘bringing it back’. Yet, in reality, Biden’s programme has amounted to little more than massive corporate subsidies, and its success in reshaping the investment landscape has been limited.

With these options off the table, US authorities are reliant on only one institution – the Federal Reserve – to control inflation, and it has only one instrument to do so: interest rates. While its decisions are always justified in terms of the dual mandate, nothing in its record shows that it is particularly concerned about increasing unemployment or inducing a recession. Paul Volcker’s notorious 1979 hike, which marked the apex of the central bank’s monetarist zeal, took the interest rate to nearly 20%, induced a double-dip recession and sent unemployment north of 10% according to the conservative official estimate. Four decades on, the Federal Reserve remains nonchalant about the employment part of its mandate. But there is another sense in which the institution has changed radically. Volcker was able to take such drastic steps because neoliberalism was still in its infancy, as were the processes of financialization that it was about to unleash. It therefore had no need to worry about bursting asset bubbles. Today, the situation is different. Much as he would like to, Powell cannot replicate the Volcker Shock, because monetary tightening has come to contradict the interests of the capitalist class.

Volcker’s successor Alan Greenspan inaugurated his tenure as the Federal Reserve Chairman by rescuing markets from the 1987 financial crash with generous amounts of liquidity. This was dubbed the ‘Greenspan put’: a ‘put’ in market jargon being a contractual offer to buy an asset at a certain price without regard to prevailing prices, essentially a hedge against falling prices. Greenspan coupled this with unabashed cruelty towards workers, as he tried to ‘stay ahead of the curve’ by raising rates well before signs of the labour-market tightening. Yet these complementary goals – propping up asset prices and raising rates to keep workers in check – were set on a collision course as financialization evolved. In the late 1990s, the Federal Reserve’s rate rises pricked the stock market bubble. As it burst, the Greenspan put dictated that he reduce interest rates to historic lows, not only bailing out financial institutions, but also keeping the housing bubble growing and creating a credit bubble alongside it.

Later, when the worldwide commodities boom generated inflation and downward pressure on the dollar, the Federal Reserve was once again forced to resort to rate hikes. The effect was to burst the housing and credit bubbles, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. In its wake, rates were taken even lower, to near zero, while Quantitative Easing and ‘forward guidance’ were used to revive asset markets. By then, such asset purchases became the means of sustaining the US’s heavily financialized growth model. Under Greenspan’s successors, the Federal Reserve put has facilitated private accumulation through speculative bubbles, while socializing the losses simply by creating more money.

Over the past decade and a half, for all the talk of financial reform, asset bubbles have grown to such an extent that they now constitute an ‘everything bubble’, which continues to expand while the real economy stagnates. Though the Federal Reserve took credit for keeping inflation low during this period, in fact it was suppressed by other factors. After the 1982 debt crisis, the US used its imperial power to force Structural Adjustment on much of the Third World while outsourcing production chiefly to China. It thereby kept the prices of key imports – primary commodities and outsourced manufactures – low, while imposing wage restraint on domestic workers. The 2020s brought this period of low prices to an end. The disruptions induced by the pandemic and compounded by trade tensions with China, plus the eruption of war in Ukraine, sent the costs of food and energy soaring. As inflation made a comeback, the Federal Reserve found itself in a fix. Because these asset bubbles rely on easy money, it cannot use the only means at its disposal to address rising prices.

The following two charts reflect this dilemma. One plots interest rates against the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index, the metric most widely used to measure inflation, and the next against the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Personal Consumption Expenditures, the metric preferred by the Federal Reserve when justifying the impact of its interest rate decisions on public consumption:

Three points are noteworthy. First, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure clearly understates inflation. It takes account of the ‘substitution’ that occurs when households shift to buying lower priced goods, effectively using households’ coping mechanisms as an excuse to artificially lower the inflation figures. It also gives a lower weighting to shelter costs, even though they have skyrocketed thanks to the housing bubble and the everything bubble. Second, since 2000, when the Federal Reserve accelerated its efforts to drive bubble-driven growth and changed its preferred inflation measure to PCE, the CPI has often been above the 2% target. No matter which inflation measure is used, inflation has generally been above interest rates during this period, making real interest rates negative. Finally, inflation today remains well above the 2% target, even if it has dipped below interest rates in recent months; yet the Federal Reserve flatly refuses to raise rates further, having brought them to 5.33% in July 2023. After all, this rise has already caused major ructions, from the failure of a string of banks beginning with Silicon Valley Bank to the instability in the commercial real estate, private equity and treasury markets and beyond.

Though the Federal Reserve claims that inflation is now down to 2.9% and predicts it will fall further, the Bureau of Labor Statistics disaggregation of the inflation numbers shows a rather different picture. While inflation has been dragged down by the lowering of food and energy prices, core inflation, a measure that excludes those prices because of their volatility, is still at 3.2%. With food and energy prices expected to increase in the coming months, not least thanks to continuing US and NATO warmongering, Powell’s declaration of victory may be premature.

What of his claim to have achieved a ‘soft landing’? There is equal reason to be sceptical. On the one hand, adverse jobs data suggest that a recession could still be looming. On the other, if interest rate cuts manage to prevent a recession, this leaves the door open to continuing inflation and ‘no landing’ at all. Raising the curtain on neoliberalism in 1979 with historically unprecedented rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has since, by nursing successive asset bubbles, deprived itself of the ability to use the only anti-inflationary weapon in its arsenal. Having arrogated to itself responsibility for managing the economy, it has now proven unable to do so.

Read on: Cédric Durand, ‘The End of Financial Hegemony?’, NLR 138.

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Regional Interests

Russian combatants in northern Mali faced a bloody confrontation earlier this summer. On 27 July, a Malian army patrol accompanied by Wagner Group auxiliaries was ambushed by Tuareg rebels near Tinzaouaten on the Algerian border. The Malian military acknowledged significant losses without providing specifics. Videos circulating on social media show destroyed vehicles and dozens of bodies strewn across the desert. Russian media reported around twenty Wagner deaths, while rebel sources claimed up to eighty mercenaries were killed. A sandstorm is said to have stalled the column, leaving it vulnerable to the attack. The spokesman for the rebel coalition accused government forces of retaliatory drone strikes, causing around ten civilian deaths in the area.

Following the attack, Ukraine’s director of military intelligence claimed that his agents had fought alongside the Tuareg rebels. This was corroborated by images showing black and white fighters holding the flags of Azawad and Ukraine side by side. It would not be the first instance of Ukrainian engagement in Africa. In November 2023, reports emerged of a hundred Ukrainian special forces taking part in operations against Wagner-backed militias in Sudan. In Mali, Ukrainian agents are said to be training Tuareg rebels to use the Mavic 3 Pro, dubbed the ‘AK-47 of the 21st century’ – a lightweight drone used for close reconnaissance and equipped with a drop grenade.

The ambush marks the first major defeat in Africa for the Wagner Group, which was formally placed under the control of the Russian Ministry of Defence after the failed coup of June 2023. First deployed in Crimea in 2014, the private military company has been active in Africa since 2017, with operatives reported in some eight countries, from Libya to Mozambique. Wagner functions as a series of semi-independent franchises, which employ Russian cadres alongside local fighters and veterans from neighbouring conflicts (primarily Libyans and Syrians). Of the 5,000 men it has in Africa, 1,500 are in Mali. This is half the number of soldiers who were stationed there as part of Operation Barkhane – France’s counterinsurgency mission in the Sahel – whose responsibilities Wagner has gradually assumed since Colonel Assimi Goïta took power in May 2021.

The government in Bamako is using Wagner to fight the separatists of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), an alliance of Tuareg militias active in the country’s north-west. The CMA is demanding the creation of an autonomous state, Azawad (‘Land of Transhumance’), an 800,000 km² expanse of rock and sand surrounding the cities of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. It commands a force of around 3,000 men, reportedly equipped with weapons and ammunition abandoned by Malian regular troops. Recent fighting appeared to favour the government forces. A Wagner-coordinated air campaign enabled them to recapture Kidal in November, more than ten years after a deal brokered by France and Algeria had handed it to the rebels. With the conclusion of Operation Barkhane, reclaiming the city became a priority for the junta as a symbol of restored Malian sovereignty.

Wagner purports to offer sub-Saharan states a comprehensive alternative to the French. Its mercenaries equip and train the armed forces and presidential guards, traditionally a key lever of power for Paris in ‘friendly’ regimes. But the group also provides non-military services, with a network of companies that compete with French economic interests: offering access to credit lines, management of mining and forestry activities, and even local vodka and beer production, to the detriment of French beverage company Castel. In classic neo-colonial fashion, Wagner offers its services in exchange for concessions. In Mali, it secured a revision of the mining code, granting more control to local political authorities at the expense of established foreign companies. Details of its fee structure remain opaque. Le Monde reported that €135 million of Mali’s 2022 defence budget was attributed to Wagner (well below the €600 million annual cost of Barkhane).

The Sahel – like the Horn, where the Gulf-led proxy war in Yemen is spilling over – is at the centre of what some are calling the ‘new scramble for Africa’. The recent wave of regime changes, some carried out by democratic means, others by force, has reshuffled the geopolitical deck. The withdrawal of French forces coincided with the rise of a new strategic bloc, formalised by the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States in September 2023. This confederation, comprising Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, was intended as a counterweight to ECOWAS and the G5 Sahel, both seen as pawns of the French. The demand for reliable military cadres in a region where national armies often drive political instability has created a favourable environment for private operators. Wagner’s arrival has thus allowed Moscow to gain a foothold in a region it had largely abandoned since the end of the Cold War (it has recently rebranded its operations there under the name Africa Corps).

If the Saharan-Sahelian belt is hotly contested, it is not least because of its resources. Local populations are on the frontline of mining conflicts, particularly in Niger, one of the world’s leading uranium producers. France has exploited several mines there since the 1960s, under the quasi-monopoly of Cogema – later Areva, now Orano – a linchpin of the country’s energy sovereignty, established during the oil shocks of the 1970s and still 50% state-owned. In 2023, Niger supplied about 15% of France’s uranium. Pending the development of so-called ‘fast neutron’ reactors, which are less fuel-intensive, Niger’s imports remain critical. Securing uranium sites in the ‘three borders’ area was allegedly one of the motivations behind Barkhane’s predecessor, Operation Serval – following a series of kidnappings at Areva’s mining complex in Arlit.

French involvement with the Tuareg long predates the discovery of uranium. The French conquest of the Sahara, begun under the Second Empire, expanded under the Third Republic when, to ratify the territorial partition agreed at the Berlin Conference, the signatory states had to effectively occupy the territories they had claimed. This need for control combined with a fascination with the way of life of the desert peoples. The exotic and archaic allure of these nomads captivated French high society: could these fair-skinned, light-eyed peoples be the descendants of Frankish crusaders, wondered deluded newspapers of the time. This fantasy was further fuelled by the idea that the supposedly moderate Islam practised by the Tuareg might be a veneer concealing an ancient Christianity.

The colonial administration regarded the Tuareg (a term of Arabic origin not used by the people it describes) as a constellation of chiefdoms, which it divided into four geographical confederations. It exploited internal conflicts: the strategy of ‘tribalization’, developed in the ‘Bureaux Arabes’ of colonial Algeria, fostered the proliferation of fronts, sub-fronts and decision-making centres, and continued into the post-independence era. This involved the appointment of leaders sympathetic to French interests, such as the charismatic Mano Dayak, allegedly installed by French intelligence in 1993 to fracture the separatist front in Niger. Infiltrating rebel movements provided security for local governments while allowing France to meddle in their internal politics. This has sometimes meant removing defiant factions. Hundreds of Tuareg repatriated from Algeria, where they had fled drought and repression, disappeared in Niger during the 1990s – largely uncommented upon by the French media.

The rise of national sentiment among the Tuareg owed much to the anti-Tuareg campaigns waged by the new regimes after independence. The romantic image of noble desert warriors that dominated colonial narratives was replaced by a view among the political elites of a plundering, slave-owning people. This narrative is particularly strong in Niger and Mali, where the CIA estimates that three-quarters of the three million Tuareg live. Cycles of severe drought and famine in the 1970s and 1980s drove nomadic youth into vagrancy. Fleeing northward, they were herded into camps in Algeria and Libya, where this mosaic of groups was seen as a homogeneous mass by the Arab authorities. Many ultimately joined Gaddafi’s Green Legion, serving as cannon fodder on the battlefields of Lebanon and Iraq, or in Libya’s war against Chad and its French ally in the Aouzou Strip. Some returned south to take part in the Tuareg uprisings of the 1990s and 2000s, their migrations facilitated by the arrival of ‘Japanese camels’ – diesel-powered Toyota Land Cruisers brought to the desert by humanitarian workers.

During this period, Gaddafi played the kind of disruptive role in the Sahel that Wagner does today. He challenged French economic interests by making Libya a hub for raw material trade independent of major Western companies – particularly in uranium, which he supplied to both Pakistan and India. Shortly before his regime collapsed under NATO bombs in 2011, the latest generation of Ishumars – a corruption of the French word chômeur (unemployed) – moved south with their weapons, allegedly encouraged by French intelligence. In Mali, the 2012 coup coincided with the resumption of hostilities between Bamako and the Azawad movement. The disorganised Malian army withdrew from the northern cities, retreating across the Niger River. But Tuareg control over Gao and Kidal was short-lived, as better-equipped jihadist groups – suspected of receiving covert support from Algeria – quickly gained ground. It was at this juncture that Paris sent in its troops.

Rather than cultivating relations with Tuareg communities, Algerian security services have focused on Islamist movements. Like Gaddafi, Algiers sought to challenge French hegemony in the Sahara. Salafists were a means of asserting itself as a new regional anchor. During the Algerian civil war, persistent rumours suggested links between Algerian intelligence and the Islamist groups Algiers claimed to be combating. When the Algerian army finally reclaimed territory from these groups in the late 1990s, some Islamists moved south. They mixed with local Berber tribes – of which the Tuareg were just one component – adopting their way of life in a classic Maoist ‘fish in water’ strategy. The Sahel provided fertile ground for racketeering and trafficking, originally in cigarettes and fuel, now also in arms and cocaine, with seizures of the latter in the region rising from 13 kg per year between 2015 and 2020 to 1,466 kg in 2022.

The first generation of Islamist leaders in the Sahel was predominantly Algerian. Among them was the enigmatic Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan who became a prominent figure in the Mzab valley during Algeria’s Black Decade. Francois Hollande’s high-profile campaign to eliminate jihadist leaders in the Sahel, including Belmokhtar – killed in a 2016 airstrike in southern Libya – paved the way for a new generation. Iyad Ag Ghali, a local noble and former leader of the Tuareg rebellion, broke away from the movement in 2012 to found the Salafist group Ansar Dine. He later took command of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM), an Al-Qaeda affiliate that, from 2017, unified the region’s katibas. GSIM has since expanded its operations beyond Mali, becoming increasingly active in other Sahelian border states, notably Burkina Faso, where the group claimed responsibility for an attack in the country’s north-central region last week that left over 300 civilians dead.

Despite tensions between the Tuaregs and the jihadists, these groups occasionally collaborate against their common enemy, the Malian government. Several sources reported that GSIM fighters were involved in the 27 July attack alongside the CMA. This information heightened enmity between Algiers and Bamako, the latter accusing the former of harbouring the attackers. But this non-aggression pact is far from a full-fledged alliance. According to Tuareg sources quoted by Le Monde, the GSIM was largely absent from the battle of Kidal last November. The CMA accuses the Islamists of letting them exhaust themselves against government forces in order to impose their own political programme and that of their supposed backers.

In the new conjuncture, France now finds itself isolated, a consequence of its long-standing habit of going it alone in sub-Saharan Africa. While the EU funded some infrastructure to support Barkhane, Paris bore the brunt of the operation alone. The Bundeswehr deployed up to a thousand soldiers in Mali but refrained from combat despite French requests. The approach has enabled Germany to maintain a presence in the Sahel after France’s official withdrawal. Resentment towards French influence in the region is also on the rise, aided by Russian propaganda. Wagner has been blamed for organising embassy protests and running online disinformation campaigns – here accusing a French company of orchestrating fuel shortages, there fabricating a mass grave at a former Barkhane base to cover up a massacre committed by its own mercenaries. In the CAR, authorities screened Tourist (2021) in Bangui’s main stadium – a crude propaganda piece that portrays Russian-speaking instructors leading Central African loyalist troops against a rebel faction propped up by a shadowy French figure. (The parallel with Hollywood is striking: much to the dismay of Macron’s Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the sci-fi blockbuster Wakanda Forever (2022) depicted soldiers in Barkhane-like uniforms looting Wakanda’s resources).

The United States has long tolerated the former coloniser’s hold on the Sahel. It supported Operation Barkhane, providing half of the supplies and offered intelligence and satellite capabilities, allowing Washington to keep a close eye. Recent developments may look like a setback for this strategy, as security deteriorates and Russian influence grows. Yet the US has also long sought to position itself in Africa as a Western partner distinct from France. The Eizenstadt project – named after a Clinton-era undersecretary of commerce – intended to establish a free-trade zone in the Maghreb to rival the Euro-Mediterranean market project championed by Paris. After 9/11, as Jeremy Keenan has shown, the Sahel and its ‘failed states’ were identified by the US security establishment as a key front in its global ‘War on Terror’. Beginning in 2002, Washington launched the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a series of military cooperation agreements with Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania, which involved deploying American trainers to build up local security forces. This initiative appears to have borne fruit, as Washington managed to avoid direct confrontation with the recent coup leaders in Niger and Mali, most of whom had undergone training programmes led by US Special Forces.

The signing of the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership in 2005, followed by the launch of AFRICOM in 2008, extended training missions to all countries bordering the Sahara. Algeria reportedly allowed Washington to establish a secret base in Tamanrasset, on the edge of the desert, in exchange for a substantial increase in US direct investment. Washington has also maintained a presence in Niger through drone bases in Niamey and Agadez. AFRICOM had been conducting surveillance flights there, tracking the movements of combatants to support Barkhane’s intelligence operations. US forces recently withdrew from the country after failing to reach an agreement with the ruling junta, effectively legitimising the coup. Despite its symbolic significance, this withdrawal is unlikely to have much operational impact, as surveillance activities were already being transferred to bases around the Gulf of Guinea.

AFRICOM’s relatively small footprint in the Pentagon’s budget should be seen in the context of a much higher proportion of contractors compared to other US military theatres. Current trends suggest that this reliance is set to increase. In January, the chairman of the Africa subcommittee urged competition with Wagner before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In particular, he stressed the need to expand the US toolkit for addressing security crises in Africa beyond traditional UN peacekeeping operations. Private military contractors are already eyeing the lucrative ‘regime security’ market. Since last year, DC-based firm Bancroft Global Development has been negotiating with the Central African government to replace Wagner in securing mining sites. ‘Private contractors have played, and continue to play, an important role in providing logistical support, training, equipment, and other capacity building’, an official from the State Department’s Africa Bureau said at the same hearing.

By sidelining Paris in the Sahel, Wagner appears poised to accomplish for security what Chinese construction and mining companies tentatively began on the economic front in the late 1990s. Through its example, states are rediscovering the classic model of the private militia – a model active in the Global South since at least the sovereign debt crises of the 1980s, as Joshua Craze has recently highlighted in his writing on Sudan. This approach is more flexible, cheaper, and less compromising of sovereignty for the host country. It is one that France itself has employed on several occasions, starting with its ‘Affreux’ in the former Belgian Congo. The recent events in Tinzaouaten suggest, however, that private military companies and militias are no panacea, and that after the failures of French stabilisation missions, they too will likely struggle to realise their interests in the region.

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.

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Darker Turn

There were few surprises in the German state of Thuringia’s regional elections last Sunday. Polling had long suggested that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which already scored 23.4% five years ago, was well-positioned to take first place, and that Die Linke, the party of Thuringia’s still highly popular Minister-President Bodo Ramelow and once the leading force in Thuringian politics, would not be able to replicate its previous success. Ultimately, the results proved to be just a bit worse than expected. The AfD performed slightly above expectations, taking 32.8% of the vote and thereby gaining a so-called blocking minority in the state parliament, which would allow it to hinder constitutional amendments. Die Linke, whose polling numbers had been declining slowly but surely since former parliamentary speaker Sahra Wagenknecht split off to for her eponymous Alliance (BSW) last October, came in fourth with 13.1%, less than half of its electorate from 2019, most of which seems to have decamped to Wagenknecht’s new formation, whose 15.6% put it in third place, between the CDU and Die Linke.

The outcome, as mainstream commentators announced with breathless unanimity on Sunday night, represents a political ‘caesura’: for the first time since the defeat of the Third Reich, a far-right party has won a state-wide election, indicating a profound level of alienation vis-à-vis the political establishment among a wide swathe of the electorate. On the parliamentary level, last week’s results will necessitate never-before-seen governing constellations, such as a potential alliance between the CDU and Ramelow’s humbled Linke, or perhaps even Wagenknecht’s BSW. This kind of triangulation, long the norm in many of Germany’s European neighbours, would prove a first for the Federal Republic, and is further evidence that even in the EU’s economic core, political business-as-usual is no longer tenable.

The surge for the AfD in Thuringia is particularly remarkable for the fact that its leader, Björn Höcke, is not your run-off-the-mill Muslim-baiting populist à la Matteo Salvini or Marine Le Pen, but, at least in the eyes of many observers, a dyed-in-the-wool fascist with a penchant for race science and Nazi-esque rhetoric. Yet that does not seem to have worried many voters, who flocked to the party across demographic groups. Although the AfD’s vote skewed male, winning 38% of men compared to 27% of women, in other respects the party seems to be breaking new electoral ground for the far right, significantly over-performing among young people and workers. Indeed, had it not been for Thuringia’s seemingly left-leaning pensioners, the AfD might have topped 40%.

It’s important to note that Thuringia is not particularly representative of the German electorate. With only 2 million residents, it contains a mere 2.5% of the country’s inhabitants, and its population is older than that of Germany as a whole. Although unemployment levels more or less align with the national average, structural inequalities – real or imagined – and feelings of having been colonized and infantilized by the West in the years after reunification, as documented in the work of sociologist Steffen Mau, have created a socio-political terrain that is evidently conducive to xenophobic ressentiments.

Of course, it would be reductive to blame the AfD’s growing mass appeal on the scars of reunification alone. After all, for decades, the losers of the transition were Die Linke’s core constituency, and many continue to vote for Wagenknecht’s new party in large numbers. Crucial to the far-right surge is the shift in the political atmosphere since the so-called ‘summer of migration’ in 2015, when over a million refugees, largely from war-torn Syria, arrived in Germany. Although initially received with open arms, their presence, alongside public sector austerity and infrastructure that – although it could be considered robust by American or British standards – is increasingly atrophied, has allowed social problems to be recast as a zero-sum competition between newcomers and natives. The AfD has effectively paired xenophobic calls for ‘remigration’ with easterners’ inherited distrust of elites in general and western elites in particular. The tone of its campaign – angry, provocative, but not without a hint of millennial post-irony – also gives it an oppositional flair that is particularly appealing to young voters, whom it reaches via social media platforms in numbers the mainstream parties can only dream of.

Having consolidated its strongholds in the East, and still polling at a comfortable 18% Germany-wide, it seems that the AfD is here to stay. The party narrowly missed first place in Saxony, which also went to the polls last Sunday, and is likely to do the same in the state elections in Brandenburg two weeks from now. Particularly noteworthy, however, was exit poll data on Sunday that shows voters increasingly turning to the AfD not as a protest vote, but because they regard the party as most capable of representing their interests on issues like (reducing) migration, fighting crime, and – crucially – keeping Germany out of the war in Ukraine, an issue that Die Linke, for whom opposition to NATO was long a key programme plank, has effectively ceded to the far right (Ramelow now repeatedly expresses his support for weapons shipments).

For now, the rest of the parties seem intent on maintaining the political ‘firewall’ around the AfD that has been in place since its founding in 2013. But beyond that (increasingly unsustainable) strategy, its opponents have made little headway in stopping its ascent. For months now, the parties of centre-right and centre-left, along with trade unions, churches, NGOs and the rest of civil society, have been organizing mass demonstrations across the country against the AfD’s growing influence. Sparked by revelations about a closed-door meeting between party functionaries and far-right activists to discuss mass deportation scenarios, the demonstrations, which social movements scholar Dieter Rucht described as the largest concentrated protest wave in the history of the Federal Republic, initially seemed to deal a blow to the AfD’s polling numbers, which have yet to return to their late-2023 highs. Yet the mobilizations had already been losing momentum for a number of months, long before failing to stop the AfD’s electoral triumph on Sunday. So far, the shock does not seem to have lent them a new lease on life.

Meanwhile, the BSW has made major concessions to the right on questions of migration and asylum entitlements under the pretext of winning back voters from the AfD and presenting a credible alternative to both the open racism of the far right and the left’s admittedly utopian promise of open borders, which few seem to want and even fewer seem to believe is possible. If this political pivot was intended to halt the growth of a grave threat, it increasingly feels like a darker turn, with Wagenknecht’s rhetoric escalating in recent weeks to denunciations of ‘uncontrolled violence’ committed by foreigners, and descriptions of Germany’s asylum seeker population as a ‘ticking time bomb’.

This kind of talk unsurprisingly makes many on the left bristle, but has it at least succeeded in taking some wind out of the AfD’s sails? Thus far, the answer seems to be no. The numbers of AfD voters defecting to the BSW camp are still vanishingly small. Non-voters, another group Wagenknecht hopes to mobilize, have proven somewhat more receptive, but its primary base continues to be former Linke supporters, while the overall vote for ostensibly ‘left-wing’ parties has continued to decline. BSW therefore finds itself in the awkward position of negotiating with the CDU, of all parties, over forming coalitions in Thuringia and Saxony, where the AfD’s strength and the collapse of the centre-left makes almost every other constellation impossible. This surely does not bode well for a project whose electoral fortunes have rested primarily on proclaiming its full-throated opposition to the entire political establishment. Nevertheless, the BSW was the other big winner of Sunday’s elections. Even if it has so far failed to eat into the AfD’s base, it looks set to become a significant force in the next federal parliament, due to be elected in autumn 2025. But given the volatility of the political landscape and the party’s own idiosyncrasies, what kind of force it will be remains an open question.

Read on: Joshua Rahtz and Oliver Nachtwey debate the BSW.

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Something Monstrous

In their recent exchange on Sidecar, Richard Seymour and Anton Jäger discussed how the left should understand the racist riots that erupted across the UK this summer. For Seymour, the spate of attacks on immigrants were not driven by the material deprivation of Britain’s ‘white working class’. They were, rather, symptoms of an insidious neo-nationalism that is increasingly obsessed with borders, boundaries and fortifications – seen as necessary safeguards against the erosion of traditional gender and ethnic divisions. Jäger agrees that it would be wrong to interpret the riots as ‘wrongly sublimated left-wing energy’ or read into them some emancipatory content. But he criticizes Seymour for elevating ‘mass psychology’ over ‘political economy’, arguing that the misery wrought by Britain’s uneven growth model – a low-wage service sector dependent upon migrant labour – is the ultimate cause of its social crisis.

Both writers adeptly capture the combustible atmosphere of contemporary Britain. Yet their debate risks lapsing into a zero-sum contest. Just as economic analysis can elide complex individual impulses, psychological analysis can erase their social context. What is needed instead is a concrete psychosocial assessment: one that adequately captures how the vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.

When images of the riots began to circulate, they looked all too familiar to those engaged in anti-racist activism. Many had seen them coming. On 23 May, a small group of protestors gathered outside the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley after it agreed to host an Israeli state-funded film festival. They were immediately surrounded by hundreds of far-right counter-protesters, who hurled glass bottles and chanted racial abuse. ‘They are going to kill us’, a friend texted me from the demonstration, before a handful of police officers escorted her and her comrades to the nearest underground station. That night, the extremists went home emboldened. The following weekend the pro-Palestine encampment at University College London was attacked. It was hardly surprising that as the Gaza genocide – backed and funded by Western governments – was broadcast by every major media outlet, some Britons should seek to emulate this anti-Muslim violence on a smaller scale. Echoing the bloodlust of the IDF, online platforms thrummed with calls to burn down mosques.

Meanwhile, the political establishment had turbocharged its racism in the runup to the general election. Rishi Sunak tirelessly reiterated his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘control our borders’ by imprisoning asylum seekers and banishing them to Rwanda. Keir Starmer tried to outdo him by demanding the accelerated deportation of Bangladeshis. One of Yvette Cooper’s first moves as Home Secretary was to draw a direct link between immigration and rising crime, launching a new Border Security Command and ramping up ‘illegal working raids’. When the rioters took to the streets, they were not merely repeating the slogans of these politicians. They were taking matters into their own hands, enacting the violent policies they had been promised. If creating a ‘robust deterrent’ means marking out migrants for persecution and death, it is only a small step to set fire to hotels where they are housed. Both Labour and the Tories described the riots as ‘thuggery’ and ‘mindless violence’, but neither was willing to discuss the establishment racism that galvanized them. Liberal democracies generally prefer to obscure such murderous impulses, dressing them up as ‘law-enforcement’ or cloaking them in national mythology.

Though Seymour and Jäger are right to argue that the riots lack a moral or emancipatory core, they nonetheless promote an avowed moral claim that warrants our attention. In both establishment and street discourse, what we see is the juxtaposition of the criminal outsider with some innocent or virtuous insider that requires protection. Sunak claimed that the ‘stop the boats’ policy was about saving lives at sea by breaking the model of people smugglers and punishing imaginary ‘queue jumpers’. Those that gathered outside mosques held signs that read ‘save our children’. It reflects the phantasy of ridding society of its rotten elements. When leaders fail to fulfil this desire, street violence is an alternative.

According to Klein, persecution and punishment are an infant’s psychic defence against ‘depressive’ realizations: the acknowledgement that a perceived aggressor is a complex and ambiguous whole, which in turn enables acceptance of the child’s own complexity and ambiguity. Infants experience their primary caregiver as split into two figures, one good (present and responsive) and one bad (absent and rejecting). Their rage at the latter distorts their sense of reality, which becomes populated by threatening figures who must be attacked and destroyed. Ideally, this condition is eventually supplanted by a more ambivalent outlook, in which the external object is seen as neither wholly one nor the other. But when the child fails to make that transition, it remains trapped in a cycle of fear and aggression.

In Britain, this process of ‘splitting’ serves to excise from national consciousness the role of colonial and neo-colonial violence in producing the ‘illegal migrant’. While Seymour writes that a ‘utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion’ has now given way to a far-right fixation on borders, it would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.

The 1981 British Nationality Act defined the concept of British citizenship via ‘patriality’, or blood ties. This legislation sought to erase Britain’s imperial history from memory and reestablish the country as a hermetically sealed white nation state. William Whitelaw, the then Conservative Home Secretary, remarked that ‘it is time to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we used to rule’. Today, those directly or indirectly affected by colonization are branded unlawful intruders with no claim to what was stolen from them. The racist violence of the 2020s is a means of repressing its historical antecedent. Splitting enables self-absolution and claims to moral righteousness in the face of this blood-stained lineage. And racialized people are emptied of their humanity. Palestinians are blown to pieces abroad; at home racist lynch mobs roam the streets. As James Baldwin wrote, ‘You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves’.

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