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In Defence of Ken Loach

So, it’s come to that: Ken Loach is now the target of a character assassination campaign waged by those who will stop at nothing to shield the apartheid policies of Israel. Their message to people of good conscience is simple: Unless you too want to be tainted as an antisemite, keep quiet about the crimes against humanity and the assault on human rights in the land of Palestine. They are putting the rest of us on notice: If we can do this to Ken Loach, a man who has spent his life championing the victims of oppression, racism and discrimination, imagine what we shall do to you. If you dare support the Palestinians’ human rights, we will claim that you hate the Jews.

The art of assassinating the character of a leftist has become better honed in recent times. When the Financial Times called me a Marxist biker, I confessed to the charge gladly. Calling me a Stalinist, as some unsophisticated rightists do, also fails to ignite an existentialist crisis in my soul because I know full well that I would be a prime candidate for the gulag under any Stalinist regime. But call me a misogynist or an antisemite and the pain is immediate. Why? Because, cognisant of how imbued we all are in Western societies with patriarchy, antisemitism and other forms of racism, these accusations hit a nerve.

It is, thus, a delicious irony that those of us who have tried the hardest to rid our souls of misogyny, antisemitism and other forms of racism are hurt the most when accused of these prejudices. We are fully aware of how easily antisemitism can infect people who are not racist in other respects. We understand well its cunning and potency, for instance the fact that the Jews are the only people to have been despised both for being capitalists and for being leftie revolutionaries. This is why the strategic charge of antisemitism, whose purpose is to silence and ostracise dissidents, causes us internal turmoil. This is what lies behind the runaway success of such vilification campaigns against my friends Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Brian Eno, Roger Waters and now Ken Loach. 

‘Is your exclusive criticism of Israel not symptomatic of antisemitism?’, we are often asked. Setting aside the farcicality of the claim that we have been criticising Israel exclusively, criticism of Israel is not and can never be criticism of the Jews, exactly as criticism of the Greek state or of American imperialism is not criticism of the Greeks or of the Americans. The same applies to interrogating the wisdom of having created an ethnically specific state. When remarkable people like my heroes Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein questioned the Zionist project of a Jewish state in Palestine, it is offensive to claim that to debate Israel’s existence is to be antisemitic. The question is not whether Arendt and Einstein were right or wrong. The question is whether their questioning of the wisdom of a Jewish state in the land of Palestine is antisemitic or not. Clearly, while antisemites opposed the foundation of the state of Israel, it does not follow that only antisemites opposed the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

On a personal note, back in 2015, while serving as Greece’s finance minister, a Greek pro-troika newspaper thought they could diminish me with a cartoon depicting me as a Shylock-like figure. What these idiots did not realise was that they made me very proud! Trying to tarnish my image by likening me to a Jew was, and remains, a badge of honour. Speaking also on behalf of aforementioned friends vilified as antisemites, we feel deeply flattered whenever an antisemite bundles us together with a people who have bravely endured racism for so long. As long as a single Jew feels threatened by antisemitism, we shall pin the Star of David on our chest, eager and ready to be counted as Jews in solidarity – even though we may not be Jewish. At the very same time, we wear the Palestinian flag as a symbol of solidarity with a people living in an apartheid state built by reactionary Israelis, damaging my Jewish and Arab brothers and sisters and stoking the fires of racism which, ironically, always forge a steelier variety of antisemitism.

Returning to Ken Loach, thankfully no smear campaign against him can succeed. Not only because Ken’s work and life are proof of the accusation’s absurdity, but also because of the courageous Israelis who take awful risks by defending the right of Jews and non-Jews alike to criticise Israel. For instance, the group of academics who have methodically deconstructed the IHRA’s indefensible definition of antisemitism, which conflates it with legitimate criticisms of Israel that many progressive Israelis share. Or the wonderful people working with the Israeli human rights organisation B’TSELEM to resist the apartheid policies of successive Israeli governments. I am just as grateful to them as I am to my friend and mentor Ken Loach.

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War by Other Means

One principle that gives relative coherence to the political rationality of the Trump faction is this: politics is merely the continuation of war by other means. That was on full display in the rhetoric of previous weeks, with Rudy Giuliani calling for ‘trial by combat’, or Trump exhorting his followers to show ‘strength’ at the US Capitol. This combative approach is not reserved for moments of crisis; it rather permeates the political reasoning of Trumpism, and identifies it as a direct outgrowth of a long line of reactionary thought.

Here I want to investigate not so much the ‘warlike’ logic of Trump’s politics but the other half of the equation, which is its grounding condition: the assumption that traditional logics of political mediation are vacuous and serve merely as a ruse. Here one can discern a rational kernel in the deeply mystified shell of Trumpian thought.

First, let me step back and explain briefly what it means to assert that politics is a continuation of war. In his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault invoked this transformed relation between politics and war, ‘the inversion of Clausewitz’s formula’, to grasp the functioning of power (admittedly, in a very different political context than our own). When Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th century Prussian military theorist, famously claimed that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, he intended to emphasize that diplomacy between states (this is primarily what he meant by ‘politics’) does not cease with the outbreak of war but continues in other forms. Or, to put this in different terms, military confrontation does not mark the end of political mediation but its persistence in a different mode.

Foucault, then, adopts Clausewitz’s logic in reverse: whereas for Clausewitz war is still ‘filled’ with political mediation, for Foucault politics are reduced to confrontation, ‘emptied’ of mechanisms of mediation. Foucault is experimenting with this formula, in my view, as a key to interpret the emerging neoliberal strategies to undermine the structures and mechanisms of political mediation, such as trade unions, welfare structures, the reformist Keynesian state, and so forth. (Although he poses this inverted formula as part of a general analysis of power, it is reasonable to speculate that it serves also as an indirect analysis of the political developments of the 1970s, especially since this argument appears primarily in his courses, which were much more tied to current events than his books.) The neoliberal vision of a politics without political mediation certainly persists in the Trump world, but it has become more extreme in many respects.

This frame helps cast a different light on the events of January 6. It is instructive that apologists for the descent on the US Capitol claim it was no different to BLM protests of the previous summer. That assertion betrays blindness to many essential distinctions, one of which is that, in contrast to BLM actions, the Capitol siege was not a protest. The logic of protest assumes a context of political mediation: a situation in which social and governmental structures at various levels will potentially respond with reforms. The demand to ‘defund the police’, as it is generally understood, for example, only makes sense in a context characterized by potential political mediation. Yet for Trump and his supporters, since the logic of and potential for political mediation is absent, protest makes no sense. They expected no mediation in response to their actions, only a political result: to remain in power. There was, then, no passage from politics to war on January 6. Trumpist political praxis was already animated by war logic, which is to say, devoid of mediation.

The lack of credence in political mediation also illuminates the Trump faction’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of election results since, at a deep level, claims of political representation are conceptually allied to those of political mediation. There is, of course, an overtly opportunistic element to Trump’s acceptance of some and rejection of other election results, as there is too with the longstanding Republican strategy to exclude voters (especially Black voters and other people of color). But these opportunistic tactics rest on the view, deeply embedded in reactionary thought, that claims to political representation are deceitful. For instance, in the early 20th century Robert Michels, wary of the rising electoral power of European socialist parties, sought to unmask what he considered their false assertion of representational legitimacy: all parties – even those purporting to express the popular will – are in the final analysis dominated by elites, and political representation is an elaborate deception wielded by those elites to gain and maintain power.

The same logic, at a much lower level of sophistication, underpins Trump’s view of representation, and that of the Republican Party more generally. Neither suppressing voter turnout through devious legislative fabrications (as Republicans have long done) nor discarding legitimate ballots (as the Trump faction recently attempted) appears scandalous or hypocritical, because claims of representation – like those of political mediation more generally – are seen as inherently bogus. From this perspective, liberal hand-wringing about democratic safeguards is simply disingenuous, since those who champion representation are not really handing power to ‘the people’, but rather using the ruse of representation to legitimize their side’s social, media, and political elites. Every election, by definition, is rigged.

This brief characterization therefore suggests that, beneath the cloud of lies and buffoonery, a relatively coherent rationality animates Trumpism: since effective political mediation is lacking and claims to representation spurious, the thinking goes, politics is merely the continuation of war by other means. Last week, Mike Davis and Thomas Meaney debated the meaning of the Capitol Hill riot for the future of the Republican Party. If we accept my hypothesis about the rationality of the Trump faction then we should also consider its consequences for the left in the US and elsewhere. What constitutes an adequate response to such agonistic logic? One might reasonably reply that we should contest its premise, championing the existing structures of political mediation and representation as effective and progressive. Alternatively, one could advocate that we inhabit the same plane of combat as our adversaries, treating political contestation as war. My view is that neither of these is adequate. Structures of political mediation have indeed largely been withdrawn and structures of representation are relatively ineffective, but the solution is precisely to invent new mediations, including novel mechanisms of democratic participation and collective decision-making. This is, in fact, what some of the most powerful social movements today are already doing. Articulating that next step, however, must wait for another occasion.

Read on: Hardt and Negri revisit the theses of Empire, twenty years after its release.

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Ins and Outs

For several years now, a serious effort has been under way in Brussels to learn nothing from Brexit, and the way things are it may well be successful. What could have been learned? Nothing less than how to shake off the late-twentieth century technocratic, anti-democratic, elitist chimera of a centralized European neoliberal empire and turn the European Union instead into a group of friendly sovereign neighbour states, connected through a web of non-hierarchical, voluntary, egalitarian relationships of mutual cooperation.

The internal life of the European Union is unendingly complicated and uniquely opaque, but one principle applies throughout. To understand it you must grasp the domestic politics of three key member states, Germany, France and Italy, and their complex trilateral relations. There is no supranationalism here at all, or only as a veil behind which the real action, national and international, takes place. France sees Europe as an extended playing field for its global ambitions; Germany needs the European Union to secure production sites for its industries, markets for its products, and low-wage workers for its domestic service sectors, as well as to balance its relations with France and the United States; and Italy needs ‘Europe’, in particular Germany, for its survival as a capitalist nation-state and economy.

The British never really understood this. Even the famously formidable British diplomatic service found the Brussels underbrush utterly impenetrable. While Thatcher hated the EU – too foreign for her taste – Blair believed that by turning it into a neoliberal restructuring machine, together with Chirac and Schröder, he could become its Napoleon: the Great Continental Unifier, this time from without. Little did he know. France and Germany let him walk into the Iraq war alone, as adjutant of his American friend, George W, and subsequently into his demise. And Cameron learned in 2015 that even Great Britain, used to ruling the waves, was unable to extract from Merkozy the tiny concessions on immigration that he thought he needed to win the referendum of 2016 – called after all to cast British membership in stone. There was no consideration in Germany of the effect on the British vote of Merkel’s open borders in the summer of 2015, letting in one million refugees, mostly from Syria, driven from their homes by a civil war deliberately left hanging by Germany’s American friend, Barack Obama. For Merkel, this was an ideal opportunity to correct her image as ‘ice queen’ acquired in the spring of the same year when she had let it be known that ‘we cannot take in everybody’.

Mystification was mutual. On the Continent nobody believed that the Cameron government could lose its referendum gamble. The only Brits to which the ‘European’ educated classes ever talk are from the British educated class, and these were for widely different, often incompatible reasons in unqualified love with the EU. For the Euro-idealists on the liberal left the EU was a preview of a political future without the blemishes of a political past, a constitutively virtuous state if only because it was not yet a state at all, uniquely desirable for people who saw their own post-imperial country in need of a moral refounding from above. Others who knew how Brussels works must have laughed up their sleeves – in particular a political class which had long cherished the possibility of moving difficult subjects directly into the bowels of that inscrutable Brussels Leviathan to be dismembered beyond recognition. This included the post-Blair Labour Blairists. Having lost power, and facing a working class that they in good British tradition found not quite up to snuff, they were happy to import a residual social and regional policy from Brussels – knowing full well that Brussels was unable to deliver anything of importance, not least because British governments, including New Labour, had pulled the teeth of the ‘social dimension’ of the ‘internal market’ by subjecting it to the sacred imperatives of economic ‘competitiveness’. Nobody realized that this was bound to backfire the moment people began to wonder why their national government had left them unprotected in the social desert of global markets, having turned over responsibility for its citizens to a foreign power and a foreign court.

When Cameron lost, left to his own devices by Merkel and Co., the shock was profound, but then EU politics resumed as usual. France saw an opportunity to unearth its original concept of integrated Europe as an extension of the French state, with the special purpose of locking Germany into a French-dominated alliance. In case Britain changed its mind and the Remainers got their way after all, the return to the flock had to be humiliating enough to rule out any possibility of future British EU leadership. Negotiations on a divorce settlement were to be led on the EU side by the French diplomat Michel Barnier, one of the outstanding technocrats of the Brussels scene. From the beginning he played hardball, doing little to help the referendum revisionists on the British side. But neither was Britain to be let go easily. Here Germany chimed in, keen to uphold discipline among EU member states. Macron and Merkel insisted that the divorce settlement had to be expensive for Britain, preferably including an obligation to accept Internal Market rules and the jurisdiction of the EU court forever, even outside the EU. For Germany this was to show other member states that any attempt at renegotiating their relationship with Brussels would be futile, and that special treatment either inside or outside the Union was entirely out of the question.

It will fall to historians to uncover what really happened between France and Germany during the negotiations between the EU and Britain. There is no democratic, or presumably democratic, political system on earth that operates as much behind closed doors as the European Union. The German national interest in maintaining international discipline notwithstanding, the German export industry must have been equally interested in an amicable economic relationship with post-Brexit Britain, and it must have informed the German government of this in no uncertain terms. No trace of this was visible, however: neither in the negotiating strategy of Barnier nor the public pronouncements of Merkel. Very likely, this was because Germany at the time was under pressure from Macron to use the British departure as an opportunity for more and stricter centralization, especially in fiscal matters – an issue where Germany’s reluctance to agree to arrangements that might in future cost it dear had met with the tacit support of the British, even though the UK was not a member of the Eurozone.

As the deal-or-no-deal day approached and the usual ritual of negotiation until the last minute unfolded, it appears that Merkel finally threw her weight behind the demands of Germany’s export sector. The United Kingdom had now been sufficiently humiliated. During the final negotiating sessions Barnier, while still present, no longer spoke for the EU; his place was taken by one of von der Leyen’s closest aides. Toward the end France used the new ‘British’ coronavirus strain to block traffic from Britain to the Continent for two days, but this could not prevent the deal being closed. Johnson’s brinkmanship was rewarded with a treaty that he could reasonably claim restored British sovereignty. He paid for it with a lot of fish, mercifully obscured by the further unfolding of the pandemic.

What are the consequences of all this? France hired 1,300 additional customs officials to be deployed to interrupt economic relations between Britain and the Continent, including Germany, any time the French government feels that the deal’s ‘level playing field’ is no longer being maintained. France and Germany succeeded in scaring other countries, especially in the East, out of claiming the settlement with the UK as a precedent for their aspirations for more national autonomy. Pressures inside the EU for a more cooperative and less hierarchical alliance didn’t even emerge. And Merkel’s successors will have to navigate an even more complex relationship with France than in the past, having to resist Macron’s embraces without British succour and in the face of the uncertainties of the Biden administration in the US.

As to the United Kingdom, for the Lexiters Parliament rules again, unconstrained by ‘the Treaties’ and the European Court, and British citizens finally have only their own government to blame if something goes wrong: no responsibility without responsiveness. Moreover, the Remainers – the euro-revisionists – seem to have given up, at least for the time being, although they may continue to look for other protections against strictly majoritarian parliamentary government. There is also the possibility of Scotland breaking away from the UK, as the Scottish National Party might mop up pro-European sentiment with a promise to apply for the empty British seat at what will by then be King Emmanuel’s Round Table of 27 knights. This would amount to turning Scottish national sovereignty over to Brussels immediately after having recovered it from London, forgetful of the mixed historical experience of Scotland with French allies and rulers. As long as there is in Brussels a reasonable prospect for Scottish entry, forget about Brussels learning from Brexit. On the other hand, unlikely as such learning is in any case, one might just as well leave the matter to the good sense of the Scots.

Read on: Christopher Bickerton’s analysis of European futures.

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War Zones

With Biden in the White House, do you foresee any major US policy changes towards West Asia?

Let us look at what we are changing from before we look at what we are changing to. This is difficult to do because Trump’s policies, assuming them to be coherent strategies, were chaotic in both conception and implementation. Trump did not start any new wars in West Asia, though he did green-light the Turkish invasion of northern Syria in 2019. He withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, but relied on economic sanctions, not military action, to exert pressure on Iran. In the three countries where America was already engaged in military action – Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria – surprisingly little has changed. Keep in mind that his foreign policy was heavily diluted by the more interventionist policies of the Pentagon and the US foreign-policy establishment in Washington. They successfully blocked or slowed down Trump’s attempted withdrawals from what he termed the ‘endless wars’ in West Asia. It is not clear, however, that they have a realistic alternative approach.

Biden will be subject to the same institutional pressures as Trump was and is unlikely to resist them. He may be less sympathetic to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu in Israel, but I doubt if the relationship between the US and either country will change very much. The next Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, approved the Iraq invasion of 2003, the regime change in Libya in 2011, and wanted a more aggressive policy in Syria under Obama. It does not sound as if he has learned much from the failure of past US actions in West Asia. This is not just a matter of personalities: the US establishment is genuinely divided about the merits and demerits of foreign intervention. It is also constrained by the fact that there is no public appetite in America for more foreign wars. For all his rhetorical bombast, Trump was careful not to get Americans killed in West Asia, and it would be damaging for Biden and the Democrats if they fail to do the same.

Will the Biden administration want to resuscitate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran?

Biden says he wants to resume negotiations, but there will be difficulties. One, security establishments in the West are against it. Two, Saudi Arabia and its allies are against it, and so, more significantly, is Israel. Three, the Iranians did not get the relief from sanctions they expected from the nuclear deal of 2015, so they have less incentive to re-engage.

A misunderstanding – perhaps an intentional one – on the side of Western states, Israelis and Saudis/Emiratis about the nature of the deal may prevent its resurrection. They claim that Iran used it as cover for political interference elsewhere in the region. But Iranian action, and its ability to project its influence abroad, is high in countries where there are powerful Shia communities such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan – and low elsewhere. Iran is never going to stop its intervention in these countries in which, in any case, the Iranians are on the winning side.

Gulf countries such as the UAE and Bahrain have recently established diplomatic relations with Israel. What effect will this have on Israel-Palestine relations?

This weakens the Palestinians, though they were very weak already. The UAE and Bahrain (the latter is significant only as a proxy of Saudi Arabia) did not do much for the Palestinians in any case. Yet, however weak the Palestinians become, they are not going to evaporate so, as before, Israel holds all the high cards but cannot win the game.

You’ve said that ‘great powers fight out their differences in West Asia’. Why is that?

West Asia has been unstable since the end of the Ottoman Empire. It has been an arena for international confrontation ever since. Reasons for this include, one, oil; two, Israel; three, states in West Asia look weak but societies are strong and very difficult to conquer – witness Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the even more self-destructive US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Invaders and occupiers in West Asia have great difficulty turning military superiority into political dominance.

What role did colonial rule play in the ethno-political conflicts of West Asia?

Foreign intervention usually exploits and exacerbates sectarian and ethnic divisions, though it seldom entirely creates them. Britain relied on the urban Sunnis to rule Iraq; the French looked to minorities such as Christians in Lebanon to rule there. More recently, foreign powers gave money, arms and political support to factions in Iraq to enhance their own influence but fuelling civil war. Opponents of Saddam Hussein genuinely believed that he had created religious divisions and these would disappear when he was overthrown. But, on the contrary, they got much deeper and more lethal. The same is true of Syria: the battle lines generally ran along sectarian and ethnic boundaries. Intervention in West Asia has traditionally ended badly for British and American leaders: three British Prime Ministers (David Lloyd George, Anthony Eden and Tony Blair) lost power or were badly damaged by the West Asian interventions they launched, as were three American presidents (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush).

You’ve said that the Iran–Iraq war was ‘the opening chapter’ of a series of conflicts in the region that have shaped the politics of the modern world. Why?

The Iran Revolution was a turning point, out of which came the Iran-Iraq war that in turn exacerbated Shia-Sunni hostility throughout the region. Saddam Hussein won a technical victory in the war but then overplayed his hand by invading Kuwait. Aside from Iraq, the sides confronting one another in West Asia are much the same now as they were 40 years ago. One big change is the recent emergence of Turkey as an important player, intervening militarily in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.

What role do proxy groups play in West Asia?

One has to be careful to distinguish between different ‘proxy groups’. The phrase is often used as a form of abuse to denigrate movements with strong indigenous support as mere pawns – and sometimes this is true. The Houthis in Yemen, for instance, have been fighting for years and receive little material help from Iran, but are almost always described in the Western media as ‘Iranian-backed Houthis’, implying that they are simply Iranian proxies, which they are not. In Iraq, some of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Shia paramilitaries) are under orders from Iran, but others are independent. The Kurds in Syria rely on the US militarily and politically because they fear Turkey, but they are certainly not American puppets.

What has been the outcome of ‘the War on Terror’?

It was America’s post-9/11 wars, supposedly against ‘terrorists’, that created or increased chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. These wars turned out to be endless, so populations had no choice but to flee. In Europe, the refugee exodus from Syria peaked in 2015–16 and was probably a decisive factor in the vote for Brexit in the UK referendum. All the anti-immigrant parties in Europe were boosted. The intervention by Britain and France in Libya (backed by the US) in 2011 destroyed the Libyan state and opened the door to a flood of refugees from further south seeking to cross the Mediterranean. The Europeans in particular remain in a state of denial about the role of their own foreign policy in sparking these population movements.

You were one of the first to warn about the emergence of ISIS. What led to its rise?

ISIS was born out of the chaos in the region. Before 9/11, Al Qaeda was a small organisation. Al Qaeda in Iraq, created by the US invasion, was far more powerful. Defeated by 2009, it was able to resurrect itself as ISIS after the start of the civil war in Syria. I am surprised now that more people did not understand how strong ISIS had become by 2014, the year they captured Mosul in northern Iraq. They had already taken Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad earlier in the year, and the Iraqi Army had failed to get them out. This should have been a sign that ISIS was stronger and the Iraqi government weaker than had been imagined.  ISIS was a monstrous organisation, but militarily it was very effective in using a mixture of snipers, suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and booby traps. Its weakness militarily was that it had no answer to air power.

Do you expect to see ISIS’s resurgence?

There is a resurgence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, not on the scale of 2012–14, but still significant. I am not convinced that clones of ISIS in other countries are as significant as is sometimes made out to be. ISIS lost its last territory with the fall of the Baghouz pocket in eastern Syria in March 2019. ISIS leader and caliph, Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi, killed himself during a raid by American Special Forces on a house in northwest Syria in October the same year. Since then events have favoured ISIS: the US-led coalition against it has fragmented and the defeat of ISIS no longer has the priority it once had; Sunni Arabs, the community from which ISIS springs in Iraq and Syria, remain impoverished and disaffected; ISIS has plenty of experience in guerilla war, to which it has reverted, because holding fixed positions led to it suffering heavy losses from artillery and airstrikes. The Syrian and Iraqi governments, as well as the Kurds, all have weaknesses like corruption that ISIS can exploit.

That said ISIS no longer has the advantage of surprise, the momentum that comes from victories, or the tolerance – and probably the covert support – of foreign countries (notably Turkey) that it had in 2014–16. The Sunni Arabs suffered hideously because of the last ISIS offensive with the part destruction of Mosul and Raqqa, their two biggest cities. Many will not want to repeat the experience. Local security forces are more effective than they were five years ago.

Was ISIS an anti-imperial force? Not primarily, since their main enemies were Shia and other non-Sunni minorities. Objectively, ISIS energised and legitimised foreign intervention wherever it had strength.

You’ve recently argued that ‘oil states are declining’. If so, what are the implications for the region and international politics at large?

Biden or no Biden, the nature of power in West Asia is changing. Oil states are no longer what they were because the price of oil is down and is likely to stay that way. This is profoundly destabilising: between 2012 and 2020, the oil revenue of Arab oil producers fell by two-thirds, from $1 trillion to $300 billion, in a single year. In other words, the ability of the rulers of a state like Saudi Arabia to project power abroad and retain power at home has significantly diminished. A country like Iraq has just half the income it needs from oil – and it has no other exports – to pay state employees and to prevent the bankruptcy of the Iraqi state. People forget what a peculiar situation we have had in West Asia over the last half century, with countries that would have had marginal or limited importance in the world – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Libya and Iran – becoming international political players thanks to their oil wealth. They could afford to buy off domestic dissent by creating vast patronage machines that provided well-paid jobs. But there is no longer the money to do this. The end of the oil-state era is not yet entirely with us, but it is approaching fast.

Is the US now trying to extricate itself from the region?

Obama and Trump both said they wanted to reduce on-the-ground commitments in West Asia, but somehow the US is still there. In reality, the Americans would like to enjoy the advantages of imperial control or influence but without the perils it involves. They would prefer to operate by employing other means such as economic sanctions or local proxies. The Obama foreign policy was meant to see ‘a switch to Asia’ but this never really happened, and it was the West Asian crises that continued to dominate the agenda in the White House. In other words, the US would like to withdraw from West Asia, but only on its own terms.

Across West Asia, left movements have increasingly been replaced by Islamist forces. How would you explain this change?

I am not sure that this is quite as true as it used to be because Islamist rule in its different varieties has turned out to be as corrupt and violent as secular rule. Both have been discredited by their years in power. Secularism was always strongest among the elite in countries like Iraq, Turkey, Egypt. It never offered much to the poor. To a substantial degree the same thing that happened to the Left is now happening to Islamist forces. Elites with a supposedly socialist ideology were as kleptocratic as everybody else. The same was often true of nationalism because religious identity often remained stronger than national identity.

How would you analyse the changing inter-state dynamics in West Asia?

States have gone up and down. The crucial change in the relative strength of states was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, so regional powers that it had protected became vulnerable to regime change. Russia’s military intervention in Syria since 2015 has somewhat reversed this – but not entirely. Iran became much more of a regional power thanks to the elimination of its two hostile neighbours – the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq – by the US post-9/11. It is under strong pressure from US sanctions, but these were never likely to bring about its effective surrender. Iraq and Syria are too divided for state power to be rebuilt. Saudi Arabia’s more aggressive foreign policy under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman produced few successes, aside from cultivating Trump and his entourage. Does the embrace of Israel by some of the Gulf rulers enhance their power or that of Israel? Probably less than they hope. Likewise, the Palestinians are weakened, but the ‘Palestinian Question’ has not gone away, will not do so, and will always return.

What of the ongoing civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Syria and Iraq?

The main sectarian and ethnic communities – Sunni, Shia, Kurd – will still be there in both countries, though there are winners and losers. The Sunni Arabs lost power in Iraq in 2003 and the Shia Arabs and Kurds have been dominant ever since. The Sunnis have failed to reverse this despite two rebellions, roughly 2003–07 and 2013–17 during which they suffered severe losses. The Kurds expanded their power (taking Kirkuk), but could not cling on to their gains. Nevertheless, they remain a powerful player.

In Syria, the Alawites (a variant of Shi’ism) hold power now as they did in 2011 at the start of the Arab Spring. The majority Sunni Arabs, under jihadi leadership, have suffered a catastrophic defeat with more than five million of them refugees. The Kurds expanded their power thanks to their military alliance with the US, but they are under serious threat from Turkey that has invaded two Kurdish enclaves and expelled the inhabitants.

The Kurds’ problem is that they are a powerful minority in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, but all these states oppose them becoming an independent nation state. They did achieve quasi-independence in Iraq and Syria thanks to central governments in Damascus and Baghdad being weakened by ISIS and thanks to American backing. Without these two factors the Kurdish communities will be squeezed. They will remain a power in Iraq, but in Syria their position is more fragile.

How do you look back at your four decades of reporting from the region?

I am still amazed by the regularity with which Western powers, notably the US, launch military and political ventures in West Asia without knowing the real risks. They do not seem to learn from their grim experience. Reporting this was always dangerous and is getting more so.

A longer version of this interview appears in the Indian fortnightly Frontline on 15 January 2021. The questions – some of which have been shortened – were asked by Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M.  

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Republican Futures

No one writes about the American berserk with the perception and ethnographic fluency of Mike Davis. In his account of the rampage on Capitol Hill, a tonic rebuttal of the present hysteria, he sees an already long-exposed faultline of the Republican Party becoming irrevocable. To one side, post-Trump Republicans for whom the mines of Trumpism have been exhausted: they’ve already extracted their justices, their tax cuts, and their anti-immigration credentials. On top of all this, Trump has now offered them the perfect excuse to spit him out as quickly as they popped him like a pill four years ago. It’s been ‘a helluva journey’, as Lindsey Graham said from the Senate floor, like a man back on dry land. Meanwhile, erstwhile Trump loyalists like Kelly Loeffler appeared like truants mouthing remorse in the principal’s office. To the other side of the divide, Davis points to the ‘True Trumpists’, led by the two Ivy League slicksters, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who hung on to the rocket too long, and now find themselves in Republican outer space – captains of a de facto third party that is mostly concentrated in the House of Representatives and state legislatures.

For all of its obvious power, one nevertheless wonders if Davis’s read on the events is perhaps too categorical. If anything, it may underestimate the sheer cynicism of many of the Trumpist representatives and, more importantly, the traditional, tactical amnesia of the Republican Party, although Davis is hardly unaware of this. If Tucker Carlson’s open-air therapeutic ward is anything to go by, the content of Republican grievances has already shifted away from election fraud – a one-time travesty anchored in delusion – and onward to the dark plots and complicity of Silicon Valley – an on-going travesty anchored in reality. Hawley and Cruz and their shock troops in the House have spent the past four years trying to assemble a permanent front against Big Brother Tech. To this end, they will reframe their own intransigence as just a more piquant version of Republicans blocking Merrick Garland from occupying his Supreme Court seat, and they will recast the rampage of the Capitol as the Alamo of free-speech.

There is much ground to be won by whichever Party can position itself as the long-term opposition to Silicon Valley. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brandishing a copy of Logic magazine will be no match for a party that dedicates itself to that mission. Structurally, the Republicans have the advantage. As Dylan Riley made clear in NLR 126, both Democrats and Republicans have no interest in attacking the components in each other’s coalitions that they share – finance, insurance, real estate – but each has something to gain in attacking the other side’s exclusive components: Silicon Valley, in the case of the Democrats, and extractive industries in the case of the Republicans. As the battle lines clarify, the Republicans have only been aided by the social media monopolies themselves, who appear to be working out deals with the incoming Biden administration and Democratic Party charismatics. Even if Biden’s call to repeal Section 230, as Trump desperately tried to do last month, is the opening salvo of a gruelling offensive on the Valley, as seems very unlikely, it does not necessarily bode well for public speech to have to answer to the pleasure of an implacably centrist regime.

Surely Davis is correct that the Trumpist faction of the party will never rally around another Romney type, but Romney was already a Jurassic figure in his own time. And I will eat my laptop if Chuck Grassley ever becomes president. The extreme stab-in-the-backers may make up a sizable fringe – around 20 percent of the party – and Mike Pence may look over his shoulder for the rest of his days. But it seems that the unstable Republican coalition has a chance not only to hold, but to bind itself anew if it can use Valley-hatred to suture its wounds. Will Trumpist electoral terror against traditional Republicans be any fiercer than the kind mounted by its Tea Party incarnation? However sharply or dubiously the two camps of the American Right define themselves – True Trumpists and Back-to-Businessers – the future leadership of the Party may belong to the most enterprising half-breed.

Read on: Mike Davis’s account of Republican realignments after the Capitol Hill riot.

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Riot on the Hill

Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’)

But something unexpectedly profound happened: a deus ex machina that lifted the curse of Trump from the careers of conservative war hawks and right-wing young lions, whose ambitions until yesterday had been fettered by the presidential cult. Today was the signal for a long-awaited prison break. The word ‘surreal’ has been thrown around a lot, but it accurately characterizes last night’s bipartisan orgy, with half of the Senate election-denialists channeling Biden’s call for a ‘return to decency’ and vomiting up vast amounts of noxious piety.

Let me be clear: the Republican Party has just undergone an irreparable split. By the White House’s Fuhrerprinzip standards, Pence, Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, Jim Lankford even Kelly Loeffler are now traitors beyond the pale. This ironically enables them to become viable presidential contenders in a still far-right but post-Trump party. Since the election and behind the scenes, big business and many mega-Republican donors have been burning their bridges to the White House, most sensationally in the case of that uber-Republican institution, the National Association of Manufacturers, which yesterday called for Pence to use the 25th Amendment to depose Trump. Of course, they were happy enough in the first three years of the regime with the colossal tax cuts, comprehensive rollbacks of environmental and labor regulation, and a meth-fed stock-market. But the last year has brought the unavoidable recognition that the White House was incapable of managing major national crises or ensuring basic economic and political stability.

The goal is a realignment of power within the Party with more traditional capitalist interest groups like NAM and the Business Roundtable as well as with the Koch family, long uncomfortable with Trump. There should be no illusion that ‘moderate Republicans’ have suddenly been raised from the grave; the emerging project will preserve the core alliance between Christian evangelicals and economic conservatives and presumably defend most of the Trump-era legislation. Institutionally, Senate Republicans, with a strong roster of young talents, will rule the post-Trump camp and, via vicious darwinian competition – above all, the battle to replace McConnell – bring about a generational succession, probably before the Democrats’ octogenarian oligarchy has left the scene. (The major internal battle on the post-Trump side in the next few years will probably center on foreign policy and the new cold war with China.)

That’s one side of the split. The other is more dramatic: the True Trumpists have become a de facto third party, bunkered down heavily in the House of Representatives. As Trump embalms himself in bitter revenge fantasies, reconciliation between the two camps will probably become impossible, although individual defections may occur. Mar-a-Lago will become base camp for the Trump death cult which will continue to mobilize his hardcore followers to terrorize Republican primaries and ensure the preservation of a large die-hard contingent in the House as well as in red-state legislatures. (Republicans in the Senate, accessing huge corporation donations, are far less vulnerable to such challenges.)

Tomorrow liberal pundits may reassure us that the Republicans have committed suicide, that the age of Trump is over, and that Democrats are on the verge of reclaiming hegemony. Similar declarations, of course, were made during vicious Republican primaries in 2015. They seemed very convincing at the time. But an open civil war amongst Republicans may only provide short-term advantages to Democrats, whose own divisions have been rubbed raw by Biden’s refusal to share power with progressives. Freed from Trump’s electronic fatwas, moreover, some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be much more formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote than centrist Democrats realize. In any event, the only future that we can reliably foresee – a continuation of extreme socio-economic turbulence – renders political crystal balls useless.

Read on: Mike Davis’s New Year’s blast to the American left. 

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The Trial of Julian Assange

The trial is over. Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the United States. If anyone who has been observing the trial says that they aren’t surprised, they’re fibbing.

Nobody who sat through the proceedings (as I did at an earlier stage) could have failed to detect the bias and, on occasion, outright hostility that Baraitser displayed towards the defence lawyers. The bulk of her judgement is in that vein. The defence put forward numerous arguments for why Assange should not be extradited to the US – above all, that the US was bringing political, not criminal, charges against Assange, prohibited by the UK–US extradition treaty – and she ruled against nearly all of them.

She ruled there were no grounds for thinking that Assange’s constitutional rights wouldn’t be upheld in the US or that he would not be subject to arbitrary punishment after extradition. She denied at length, in the final paragraphs of her verdict, that this was a politically motivated prosecution aimed at silencing a journalist – essentially providing a face-saver for the UK government.

Instead, she ruled against extradition on the grounds that it would be ‘oppressive by reason of mental harm’ – that under US pre-trial conditions, held in isolation in a maximum-security prison, Assange would not be prevented from committing suicide.

It seems that the spectre of ‘supermax’ – the brutal reality of the American carceral system – was placed in the dock and found guilty. Pure hypocrisy. Is London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, where Assange was held in isolation after being forcibly arrested in the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019, a humanitarian zone by comparison? In late 2019, doctors who inspected Assange wrote an open letter to the British government, stating that he ‘could die in prison without urgent medical attention’ due to the conditions in which he was kept. Nils Melzer, the UN Rapporteur on Torture, noted that ‘Assange showed all the signs typical for victims of psychological torture’, having been ‘in solitary confinement for all intents and purposes for more than a year now’. But Baraitser gave short shrift to this testimony.

Her ruling is only the first step. We do not know whether Assange will be granted bail pending the US appeal, or whether the judge will be vindictive. At his bail hearing tomorrow, the court will be more concerned about the risk of flight than the risk of assassination. And though Baraitser expressed her grave concern for his psychological wellbeing, she is unlikely to safeguard it by issuing an order of protection.

Questions also remain about the real reasons for this clemency. Did the incoming Biden administration let it be known they would rather avoid a US prosecution, in which the New York Times would be bound to defend Assange’s rights under the First Amendment, since it had also published Wikileaks materials? Did the British government want to link this to its own stalled extradition case against Anne Sacoolas, the US diplomat’s wife who fatally ran over a British teenager in August 2019? More details may yet emerge. But as they say in sport, a win is a win. The refusal to extradite should be celebrated, whatever its motives.  

As most people know, the case against Assange – an initiative of Eric Holder, the US Attorney General under Obama – is little more than an attempt to suppress freedom of expression. In a world where visual propaganda is central to war making, counter-images present a problem for the warmongers. When Al Jazeera broadcast footage of American troops targeting civilians during the War on Terror, a US army general – accompanied by a jeep full of armed soldiers – entered the news channel’s compound in Qatar to demand an explanation. The director of the station, a soft-spoken Palestinian, explained that they were simply reporting the news. A year later he was dismissed from his post.

Wikileaks likewise obtained footage of a 2007 US helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. The pilots were heard cheering, ‘Light ’em all up!’ and cracking jokes after firing on two young children: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.’ The ghoulish cynicism shocked many after the tape went viral. The crime it depicted wasn’t novel, nor was it comparable in scale to previous American atrocities (massacre of POWs in Korea, chemical warfare in Vietnam, carpet bombing in Cambodia and so on). Yet the Pentagon fulminated that the Wikileaks video would encourage terrorist reprisals. The problem was evidently not with committing war crimes, but with capturing them on film. Thus, Chelsea Manning, who leaked the material, and Assange, who published it, must be made to feel the consequences. 

Wikileaks cast light on the real reasons for the military interventions of the 2000s, which had nothing to do with freedom, democracy or human rights – except as codewords for capital accumulation. Using the internet to bypass legacy media, Assange published more than two million diplomatic cables and State Department records that exposed the machinery of American Empire. The reaction of the US state has often tipped into absurdity; a dog snapping mindlessly at everything ends up biting his own tail. Assange pointed out that ‘by March 2012, the Pentagon had gone so far as to create an automatic filter to block any emails, including inbound emails to the Pentagon, containing the word Wikileaks.’ As a result, Pentagon prosecutors preparing the case against Chelsea Manning found they were not receiving important emails from either the judge or the defence.

Revenge was the lesser motive. The primary aim was to deter other whistleblowers. Yet this was shortsighted and foolish. Those who expose war crimes, corruption or corporate malfeasance are usually courageous but ‘ordinary’ people, often quite conservative, working in establishment institutions: think of onetime CIA employee Edward Snowden or former marine Daniel Ellsberg. Would such a person – whose entire worldview has been shaken by some horror in their conscience – succumb so easily to a deterrent? The attempt to make an example out of Manning and Assange is at odds with the mentality of the whistleblower, whose sense of injustice drives them to accept the life-changing consequences of leaking.

Ellsberg, the State Department official who handed over secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, eventually became a liberal sweetheart, especially amongst Democrats, as he had exposed Nixon’s lies and misdemeanors during the war in Vietnam. I doubt whether Julian Assange will ever reach that exalted status on either side of the Atlantic. He has been slandered by media outlets across the political spectrum. Liberal newspapers have lined up to claim that he is ‘not a journalist’ but an ‘activist’ – or, as the Boston Herald had it, a ‘spy’. His trial never got the coverage it deserved in the NYT, Washington Post or the Guardian. The latter, despite publishing the Wikileaks material back in 2011, now appears to have given up on serious investigative journalism altogether. By contrast, El País and the Suddeutsche Zeitung were more objective.

Given what Assange has suffered, a few weeks of freedom in lockdown Britain will be a gift from heaven. No more cramped space and lack of sunlight; a chance to hug his partner and children, to use a computer, or pick up a random book. ‘I am unbroken, albeit literally surrounded by murderers’, he wrote to a friend from Belmarsh. ‘But the days when I could read and speak and organize to defend myself, my ideals and the people are over…’

Perhaps not.

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The German Söderweg

Like the biologist’s dye that stains bodily tissue and illuminates its cellular structure, the laboratory-grade opportunism of Markus Söder is a useful resource for understanding German politics. As the Minister President of Bavaria and leader of the Christian Social Union, Söder currently polls as the leading contender to replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor next year, despite not having declared his candidacy. The calculus is not strained: the CDU’s own three pretenders – Norbert Röttgen, Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz – could all cancel each other out. For all of northern Germany’s imputed reluctance to being ruled by a Bavarian, the closest election in postwar German history was between Söder’s political mentor, the Deutschmark fetishist CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, and Gerhard Schröder, who only narrowly won after he cannily channeled popular discontent about the US plan to invade Iraq. Most decisively, Söder is a Nürnberger from the relatively industrialized region of Franconia, not some primitive mountain yodeler of Berlin caricature.

From his earliest days, the German press identified Söder as a formidable political animal. After a minor deviation in childhood, when the five-year-old Söder brought home a ‘Vote for Willy’ sticker and his father enjoined him to pray for his sins, Söder slickly ascended the ranks of the Christian Social Union: president of the youth wing of the CSU at 28; CSU association leader for Nürnberg-West at 30; CSU media commissioner at 33; CSU general secretary at 36; CSU chairman for Nürnberg-Fürth-Schwabach at 41; Minister President of Bavaria at 52; and, as of last year, party chairman of the CSU at 53, with a standard CSU-majority of 87.4 percent of the party vote behind him. In what is essentially a Catholic political aristocracy – the CSU now has a room of its own in the Bavarian Historical Museum in Regensburg that follows the suites devoted to the reigns of Ludwig I and Ludwig II – Söder is perhaps only unusual in being a Protestant. Long known as the CSU’s attack dog – a reputation only aided by his beefy figure and faintly menacing, and quite possibly self-administered, haircut – Söder has been known to pick gratuitous fights with opponents. His ability to switch positions nimbly with plausible conviction, and his sheer enjoyment of political battle, has consistently earned him comparisons to Schröder. In their biography of the ‘Shadow Chancellor’, Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer note that Söder, who had a poster of Franz Josef Strauß, the Barry Goldwater of German politics, above his teenage bed, was also impressed by the pageantry of George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, which he witnessed at close range as a CSU emissary to the 2004 Republican Convention in New York (Curiously, Armin Laschet introduced this fairly critical biography of Söder at an online event in Berlin the other day, partly, it seems, as a gambit to narrow the race for the Chancellorship down to the two of them.)

How did this immaculate CSU stalwart become, over the past year and a half, an ardent progressive, posing as Merkelite Landesvater? It is one of the puzzles of contemporary German politics. The answer has roots deeper than simply the fact that Söder, with his eye on Merkel’s job, now has some appreciation for how she does it. To begin with, it’s worth recalling how drastically both he and the current Interior Minister (and preceding Minister President and CSU chair) Horst Seehofer misread the consequences of Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the German border open to asylum-seekers. In their interpretation of events, the political crisis over refugees was the uncorking of a bottle that would release all of the conservative spirits that Merkel had suppressed. As Merkel seemed to reveal her true colors – that of a delusional humanitarian – Söder and Seehofer finally thought they had her cornered. 2015–18 was the period in which they tried to finish her off by riding the wind of the right-wing backlash toward her and her policies (Needless to say, there was no principle in any of this: in his days as the Health Minister under Kohl, it was Seehofer who was regularly criticized within his own party for being ‘communist’ when it came to the destitute). Seeing no threat from the AfD, Seehofer and Söder decided to relax the CSU’s Strauß doctrine (‘Never allow a democratically legitimized party right of the CSU’) and appeared to think that the fledgling party’s promotion of more forthright Euroscepticism could be helpful. Then comes the CSU’s Austrian romance. Let us revisit those happy days:

  • Mid-December 2017: The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP, and his coalition partner, Heinz-Christian Strache of the hard-right FPÖ, presented their coalition agenda withdrawing protections for refugees at the Kahlenberg, site of a decisive 1683 battle against the Turks.
  • Early January 2018: Alexander Dobrindt, head of the CSU’s parliamentary group, published his call for a ‘Middle Class Conservative Turn’ in Die Welt (Springer’s ‘prestige’ paper). Portions of it read like a less erudite version of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.
  • Early January 2018: Viktor Orbán was the guest of honor at the CSU-Klausur, and gave an interview to Bild-Zeitung (that had been leading a pro-Kurz campaign for weeks by then): ‘We are not talking of immigrants or refugees, we are talking about an invasion’.

And so the CSU with Söder in the driver’s seat appeared prepared to go down the Austrian road: EU-critical, Putin-curious, agrarian-traditional, culture-war-trigger-happy, maximally Islamophobic neoliberal.

Then came the stunning upset. The CSU was humiliated in the 2018 October regional election. Söder lost 10 percent of the vote, much of which seemed to have been recouped by the Greens, who offer an ever more urban and online electorate the sought-after credentials of anti-racism and cosmopolitanism. With 16 seats lost in the parliament, Söder’s majority vanished. He had to build a humiliating, if not unprecedented coalition with the Free Voters of Bavaria, a hodge-podge ‘non-ideological’ party of the centre. It was now clear that the turn to the right had been a mistake. How did Söder respond? By conducting one of the most dramatic U-Turns in recent German history. Overnight he became a lover of bees and trees – calling for new regulations for their protection. He declared combustion engines would be banned by 2030. His progressivism even overshot what his party was prepared to stomach. At the CSU conference last year, Söder’s proposal for a quota of 40 percent women at all levels of the CSU was rejected by the party delegates. The CSU still has the best discipline of any party in the land, but there are audible grumblings from lower quarters. The CSU Landtag chair Thomas Kreuzer has been lately appending pointed reminders about ‘the farmers’ to Söder loyalty oaths.

What all of this reveals is not simply that Söder is now, belatedly, reforming the CSU in the same way that Merkel did the CDU. It shows that, with his eye on the Chancellorship, Söder knows that he has no choice but to forge a working alliance between main sections of export-oriented industry and the progressive middle classes. He grasps the objective pressure Merkel is under to balance the hegemonic alliance of big multinational corporations (as opposed to smaller, more conservative family businesses), moderate conservatives and urban liberals. Urbanization and export-orientation are two of the dominant forces shaping German social life: and they are moving the country in a progressive and liberalizing direction. (The AfD, caught in factional infighting, and experiencing diminishing returns on its novelty, has meanwhile become a party of last resort for disenchanted members of the state security apparatus and the Bundeswehr). Söder knows that he must divert some of the Green vote or at least make the prospect of ruling with them more plausible. The Austrian example was always an unworkable fantasy in Germany, even in Bavaria, where there are fewer traditional Catholics, the population is urbanizing, and there is a strong ‘progressive’ neoliberal ideology that emanates from BMW (Munich), Siemens (Munich), Adidas (Herzogenaurach), Audi (Ingolstadt), etc. Companies like this do not exist on the same scale in Austria; the country is 20 percent less urban than Germany; and Austrians never underwent any comparable ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, as they still prefer to think they were not responsible for crimes committed by Nazi-Germany. Despite Kurz’s relative popularity among the professional classes of Vienna, and his wing of ÖVP’s closer position to the Federation of Austrian Industries (Industriellenvereinigung), which represents big capital groups, Austrian conservatives can still cobble together a majority without the sort of urban progressives on whom Merkel has increasingly come to rely.

What are Söder’s chances for Chancellorship? It is still too early to say. He has acquired enemies all over the country, but also ardent supporters in unlikely places. As he approaches the seat of power in Berlin, he will come under much more scrutiny. It is practically a German political rite of passage at this point to plagiarize your doctoral dissertation, but if anything it’s a sign of Söder’s intelligence that he did not resort to the copy-paste method of his peers, but rather appears to have commissioned the thing wholesale, unless one is persuaded by the image of one of the busiest political operatives in the land pouring over hundreds of documents written in Kurrentschrift in a state archive to produce the 263-page thesis, ‘From old German legal traditions to a modern community edict: The development of municipal legislation in the Kingdom of Bavaria between 1802 and 1818’. That said, Söder has had a very good pandemic, which suited both his and the CSU’s authoritarian instincts. He locked Bavaria down faster, harder, and more coherently than any other state minister, and his resolute media performances played well in the liberal press. As he considers the dimensions of Merkel’s shoes, Söder is seeing like the German state: no longer the optics of the Mittelstand businessman or the farmer in the beer tent, but something more total and omniscient: Der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist.

Read on: Joachim Jachnow on the degeneration of the German Greens; Christine Buchholz’s wide-ranging survey of the political landscape under Merkel.

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Unabated

Heather Lewis’s Notice – recently republished after decades out of print – is a blistering and disturbing work. Rigorously deviant, technically merciless, to read it is almost an act of physical exertion, the effect viscerally stunning like a gut-punch. The resignation implied by its title – in the sense of ‘giving’ notice, abandoning a task – impels you to encounter it as an agonizingly extended suicide note. Lewis’s final novel was first published two years after she took her own life in 2002 at the age of forty, having relapsed following a long period of sobriety; she had also suffered an addiction to OxyContin, and ‘knew her way around heroin’ from her early years. Notice’s unanimous rejection – publishers recoiled from its relentless catalogue of cruelties, as well as an assumed proximity to its author’s life – coupled with the hostile reception that met The Second Suspect (1998), were widely perceived as precipitating Lewis’s decline. She had ‘gone too far’, though experimenting with limits – and with seeing how much both writer and reader could stomach – was also key to Lewis’s triumph.

The Second Suspect was an attempted compromise. A portrait of a female detective struggling to prove the guilt of a corporate male sadist who has raped and murdered legions of young women, this was Notice repackaged as a commercial thriller. Yet the novel still attracted epithets of rote ‘transgression’ and jejune ‘shock tactics’. Such criticism must have stung. Educated at Sarah Lawrence College and mentored by the writer-teacher Allan Gurganus, Lewis’s youth had been scarred by sexual abuse and parental neglect. House Rules (1994) was Lewis’s first – devastating, jarringly controlled – attempt to transmute her experience into a novel. In high school, she had made a foray into the world of show-horse jumping: the novel tells the story of a teenage runaway, victim of a sexually abusive father, who finds work as a trick rider. Existential squalor follows. Trick riding refers to the act of performing stunts on horseback. The sentence which begins Notice is ‘For the longest time I didn’t call it turning tricks.’

Notice follows a young woman, Nina, as she becomes ‘mixed up’ in brutalizing sex work, drugs, violence and prison. It begins with an ‘ordinary’ commute home, except home is an empty house from which the narrator’s parents have been absent for months. This isolation perhaps makes Nina more prone to the seductions of ‘Ingrid’s husband’ (also never given a full name) who picks her up by the side of the road: ‘Right there he’d flipped the game, right from the start’. Her subsequent account melds stark description with a cavernous lyricism:

I did wake up. Woke up sore and feeling drugged, and wishing I really was, but having no inclination to even find my liquor. I wanted to go back to that blackness where nothing had ever happened or ever had. Wanted this the way a child wants death, or the way I had as a child. A want simply to stop it.

In her former writing mentor’s words, Lewis’s ‘truest subject’ was ‘the void’ between the half-truths we tell ourselves, and the more complex, unflattering impulses behind what we do. Here the premise of turning tricks for money is punctured by the narrator – ‘because it just couldn’t be as simple as money’. Lewis instead sketches an alternative economy where the currency is suffering. As she puts it in House Rules, the narrator is interested in ‘the kind of pain that kills pain.’

The situation that unfolds could be portrayed as tragic, yet the novel resists any trace of pathos. Lewis’s tone has often been described as ‘chilling’, but a more diagnostic term would be dissociative. The writing is glazed and flattened by torment. Yet it carries the weight of something profoundly lived (if not fully resolved). Nina ultimately fluctuates between wanting to feel nothing – ‘it would make me feel something, which naturally is about the last thing you want’ – and wanting to feel everything. Between wanting to endure – ‘to prove I could take anything’ – and ‘a tremendous pull to give in, to give up.’ She knows she must escape Ingrid and her sadist husband, but also that – for ultimately enigmatic reasons – she cannot. The carnal scenes in Notice are frequently harrowing: those in which Nina is made to dress in the clothes of the couple’s deceased teenage daughter are particularly gruesome. Eventually she is committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she meets Beth, a therapist with whom she pursues a romantic relationship and who eventually ‘gets her out’, but not before Nina has to undergo nightly ‘visitations’ from the patrolling guards. It does not get any better. As the novel raced towards its climax, I waited, almost squinting through my fingers, for some pay-off catharsis, a release from the unabating build-up of traumatic incident, but one never came. 

It is hard to resist a ‘reverse-image-search’ kind of psychoanalysis, reading Notice as the culmination of a lifetime’s effort to deal with the trauma she suffered at the hands of her father (Lewis’s long-term partner, the writer Ann Rower, called Hobart Lewis ‘the grand villain’ of everything she wrote). It is also tempting to read the relationships that Nina has with women as possessing a more sustaining, nurturing dynamic. Yet these attachments sour and turn savage too. The French title of the novel – Attention, translated and published in 2007 – might better encompass the book’s ambivalence, the tightrope walked between vigilance and exhibitionism. Throughout, we are made aware of the narrator’s fear of ‘never holding anyone’s notice for very long’. Perhaps the nightmare Notice dramatizes is not that violence and abuse will lead to further escalation or even loss of life. The nightmare is that such violence will simply continue, without being registered at all. 

Read on: Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, ‘Notes for a Feminist Manifesto’, NLR 114.

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On the Threshold

The American language, like the American landscape, is a trash heap. On top of the hundreds of thousands of loan words from over three hundred languages handed down from its British forebear, American English is strewn with the numerous subcultural slangs and professional jargons of a diverse, technocratically administered society, as well as the acronyms and neologisms born to designate two industrial revolutions’ worth of concepts, companies and consumer products (the most phonetically bizarre are undoubtedly those coined by the brand consultants in today’s tech and pharmaceutical sectors). From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964), Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and A.R. Ammons’ Garbage (1993), the sheer ontological profusion of a nation born and raised in capitalist modernity has fascinated its poets, many of whom have taken up the task of sifting through this detritus in their work, navigating the strange coagulations and dialectical reversals of ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial’ that have ensued from the often violent, sometimes salutary contact between the cultures and economies of Europe and the dimensions of North American space.

Today, the American tradition of the literary gleaner is upheld by the poet, critic and visual artist Wayne Koestenbaum. Following in the footsteps of the New York School of poets and French transgressive writing, Kostenbaum, in his poetry and his critical prose, turns waste into a matter not just of aesthetic, but also ethical and political import. Like his father before him – a Berlin Jew who fled the Nazis as a youth, first for Caracas, then for northern California – Koestenbaum is a living representative of a lost culture: the gay scene that flourished in downtown Manhattan between the mid-60s and the late-80s, which produced a hyper-sophisticated connoisseurship for experiments in literature, dance, music and the visual arts before being decimated by AIDS. Koestenbaum left his home in suburban San Jose to go east for school, arriving in New York as a Princeton doctoral student in 1984, coming of age against the darkening horizon of the scene’s sunset years. The ensuing decades saw the razed terrain of downtown bohemia salted by conservative mayors, finance capital and real estate developers, who turned it into a space as culturally square as it is expensive. Now 65, Koestenbaum teaches Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and lives in his old apartment on West 23rd Street, on the same block as the luxury condominium that was once the Chelsea Hotel.

Stubble Archipelago, Koestenbaum’s new collection, discards the short, Creeleyesque stanzas of his 1200-page Trance Trilogy (The Pink Trance Notebooks, Camp Marmalade, Ultramarine) with their full-stop-free, left-justified lines, visually cordoned off from each other by horizontal bars floating in the stanza breaks, for ones that retain the norms of punctuation, but vary long lines with short, indented lines and has more frequent recourse to enjambment. (In an elegant variation on the sonnet, each poem has a total of fourteen of these longer lines, spread across four stanzas.) Along with the clipped, implied-subject sentences that appear to owe their provenance to the notebooks Koestenbaum has kept for four decades – in the solitude of a diary one can begin with the verb rather than the first-person pronoun – the poems of Stubble Archipelago have the taut, angular dynamism of a vehicle making hairpin turns at speed, rather than the stop-and-go-traffic-tempo of the earlier collections. Not surprisingly, they provide the scene for fascinating collisions between contemporary linguistic ephemera (‘STEM’, ‘bromace’, ‘community standards’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘sub bottom’), high theoretical jargon (‘Anthropocene’, ‘subject position’, ‘heterotopia’), and scraps of French, Italian and German. These are fused together under the heat of witty changes in parts of speech – such as the verbifications of the proper nouns in the line ‘Thousand sex partners giggle to Sontag it / Mercutio her’ – and outré personifications – as when Koestenbaum ‘woofed the zeitgeist’ but ‘Temps perdu didn’t woof back’. This is ‘diction as drag, diction as ecstasy-catalyst, diction / as hairpin, dic- / tion as transitional object’, whose irreverent juxtapositions of tonal register, speaking of Sontag, are one of the hallmarks of camp sensibility in literature.

The overall effect is reminiscent of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, where ‘this’ is often ‘cruising’, and ‘that’ is often ‘dreaming’. The thirty-six lyrics form a complex spiral of conceptual oppositions between erotic mobility and oneiric immobility, flow and friction, fantasy and materiality, announced in the striated and smooth textures of Koestenbaum’s cheeky title. ‘Desirability’, as he observes in www.mypornessay.com, ‘rearranges space’. Thus the ‘ferocious stubble’ of a passerby ‘undoes wan / pedestrian’s equanimity’ as does the ‘flat-assed beanie-and-wedding- / ring wearing man reading / Financial Times on C train’, who alas is ‘fruitlessly cruised’. Koestenbaum conceives of space – whether it is the physical space of downtown Manhattan or the virtual spaces of the unconscious mind, social media apps, or the page – as a kind of Platonic khora, a murky atmosphere or surreptitious aura he sometimes calls ‘nuance’ and other times ‘fag limbo’, the latter being a zone where ‘all territorial claims, all hygienes between philosophy and poetry’ are thrown into question. Apropos Hart Crane: ‘the point of queer poetry’ is to ‘make murky, to distort’ the reader’s experience through unusual syntactical choices and stylistic mannerisms. Elsewhere, in an essay on his friend, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, he expands the definition of queer-affirmative writing to include ‘any . . . project buoyed by excess’.

Excess, as Koestenbaum employs it, is a synonym of waste, a conceptual filiation which owes a great deal to the theory of expenditure advanced by Georges Bataille in such texts as ‘The Solar Anus’ and The Accursed Share. Bataille rejected the Malthusian assumption of resource scarcity that underpinned classical economic theory in favour of what he called économie générale; far from being subsistence economies, pre-capitalist societies in Europe and elsewhere were based on the assumption of abundance, symbolized in the unlimited thermodynamic productivity of the sun. These societies were organized not around utility and cost-benefit analysis, but around displays of luxury, which took the form of useless expenditures of wealth, that is, around the deliberate waste of surplus production in highly aestheticized rituals of gift-giving and sacrifice.

For Koestenbaum, waste has a somewhat more ambivalent significance, depending on what kind of entity is producing it. On the one hand, there is the equation of ‘Garbage / fecundity’ and ‘ecocide’, which proceeds not only from ‘Anthropocene / bad vibes’ and ‘capitalism’s thrum’ but also waste’s ‘embeddedness within linguistic inattentiveness’ of a rotting ‘cultural system’ that forbids ‘slow discernment’ in order to produce apps, etch-a-sketches, Benadryl, craft beer, Stevia, chewing gum, shower curtains, GI Joe denim and the other assorted junk that is sifted through in Stubble Archipelago. On the other hand, the excreta produced by the body – urine, shit, pre-cum, tears, sweat – as well as its unruly overgrowths – Whitmanesque armpit hair, ‘memento mori pubes’, ‘hennaed Frühlingsnacht hospice hair’, hairy shoulders, eyebrows, mustaches, and of course, stubble – are lovingly attended to, along with their atmospheric odours. (In a medium that has historically prioritized auditory and visual effects, Koestenbaum does not neglect olfactory and tactile sensory experiences.) Although writing – an at-present overproduced and undervalued consumer good – might seem to fall into the former category of waste, Koestenbaum reclaims it for the latter. Because interpretation focuses on signification, it tends to treat the concepts that result as immaterial, and thus we often forget that language is something that is produced and consumed by bodies. Sex and digestion provide more apt metaphors for communication than any vocabulary that relies on mental states: ‘writing / is a waste product / and therefore disgusts us, / and we choose, / as ethical and lunatic / stance, to form literature in waste’s image’. To what end, this ethical and lunatic stance? Koestenbaum’s answer: ‘to stretch threshold / experiences’.

‘We have grown poor in threshold experiences’, Bataille’s friend Walter Benjamin noted in the Konvolut on gambling and prostitution in The Arcades Project, referring to those moments of transition between states of being pre-capitalist societies marked with ceremonial rites. Koestenbaum uses this as the epigraph for his essay ‘Heidegger’s Mistress’, and Benjamin’s ghost – along with the ghosts of Brecht and Adorno – haunts Stubble Archipelago. Watching a film set in Berlin, for example, Koestenbaum imagines the ‘rickety red house facades / my father or Walter / Benjamin might once / have passed’; he discovers ‘messianic time’s momentary / emissary’ – a reference to Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history – in the ‘meat’ of a men’s room tryst. Thanks to the disenchantment and rationalization of everyday life in market societies, one of the few threshold experiences that remains to capitalist subjects, according to Benjamin, is dreaming. Less than a century later, even that, as Jonathan Crary argues in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, is under threat from developments in digital media, targeted advertising and the other insomniac technologies designed to ceaselessly extract profit from our attention, draining and impoverishing it. That is no doubt why such counter-strategies as unprofitable indolence and aimless wandering receive praise in Koestenbaum’s criticism, and why dreams appear so frequently in the Trance Trilogy and Stubble Archipelago. The twenty-nine dreams recorded in the latter – whose subjects range from visions of a ‘bombed, burning’ New York City to a performance of Montemezzi by his beloved soprano Anna Moffo – each constitute a small refutation of Henry James’s chestnut, ‘tell a dream, lose a reader’. No less than writing, dreams are the waste products of consciousness; to cross the threshold between waking and sleep is to enter a hazy land of excess experience; the experience of reading, whatever its subject, has much in common with hallucinatory and hypnogogic states.

Poetry has a distinctive formal tool at its disposal for simulating and stimulating threshold experience. Originally a layout convention for transcribing the metrical units of oral poetry onto parchment by scribes and later paper by typesetters, the line break is a visual demarcation of a boundary. Enjambment – from the French enjamber, ‘to stride over’ – is poetry’s means of allowing a reader to cross, after a momentary pause, the visual and sonic threshold of the line as she follows the semantic trail of the sentence; the commas, semi-colons, em-dashes, or ellipses that conclude lines are, on this analogy, not merely ways of organizing sentences, but are also like the stone horoi that were used as boundary markers in ancient Greece. For Koestenbaum, who describes his own poetic style in Whitmanian terms, as a ‘recklessly utopian vers libre approximating thought’s freedom’ and as a ‘democracy . . . of solitudes assembled in taboo congregation’, the ‘line-making impulse’ is a kind of ‘art activism’ and prefigurative politics, ‘a communitarian enthroning’ of a ‘heaven’ that can be ‘occupied today’, instead of deferred to the just political and economic order that may or may not lie in the future. And heaven, not unlike the dreams which are said to anticipate it, is a space of excess or surplus being usually only thought to lie beyond the ‘death-life interstice’, the ultimate threshold. If ‘fag limbo’ is a threshold space where the genres of poetry and philosophy meet, it is thanks to the ‘profound formalism’ of poetry’s ‘rear ends’ that it achieves philosophy’s stated goal: the preparation for death. Of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’, Koestenbaum writes: ‘he breaks the line because he wants to slay me, and I want to be slain: we participate together in this funerary rite’. It is a truth that holds for the writing and reading of all lineated verse, including his own.

This is no doubt why in his criticism – whether he is writing about Thoreau, Sontag, Schulyer or Bolaño – Koestenbaum takes such an interest in closural effects. (In By Night in Chile, for instance, he admires the way the ‘horror’ alluded to in the final sentence ‘remains offstage, as in a Greek tragedy’.) Stubble Archipelago concludes with a memory of himself as a fresh-cheeked, thirteen-year-old boy biking home, with his ‘Jacob’s- / ladder tail tongue hanging’ out of his mouth, open to a future where experiences will climb like angels into the heaven of what he characterizes in an essay on punctuation as his ‘suggestible’, ‘spellbindable’ brain. The image is an instance of the ‘stillness-in-motion’ Koestenbaum claims as the modernist ideal. It also recalls an observation he makes about Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel – another famous instance of the aestheticization of trash – in his commentary on Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Called Back’. ‘Even a spiral or wheel consists of lines’, he writes. ‘The line’s odd secrets involve circularity, cycling and recycling, an ecology of perpetual replenishment, perpetual relineation’. For those who know the odd secrets of the line, as Koestenbaum does, thresholds – and threshold experiences – are everywhere.

Read on: Walter Benjamin, ‘By the Fireside’, NLR 96.

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Without Heroes

Cinema arrives in Turkey by way of a French clown named Bertrand. In 1896, Bertrand is tasked with entertaining the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who is at this time carrying out a series of massacres against the Armenians that will later bear his name. In the memoirs of the Sultan’s daughter, we learn about the clown: how Bertrand hung a damp curtain from the wall of the Yıldız Palace in Istanbul and projected images upon it using a machine fuelled by gasoline. (No electricity yet in the Ottoman Empire.) It made an awful noise and stunk up the room, but the images produced a keen sense of hayret, or wonder – a term of high praise for poetry and shadow plays in Ottoman culture – and the night was deemed a success. Though we aren’t told which films the Sultan was shown, we know that the first public screening took place only a short while later at a beer hall in Galatasaray, with the now-famous L’Arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat and Cortège du Tsar Nicolas II à Paris on display. Audiences reportedly jumped from their seats when the train arrived; for the Tsar, they stood to applaud.

Cinema remained an itinerant European marvel for the next few years, with Pathé opening its first theatre in Istanbul in 1908. Turkey developed its own film industry thanks to the First World War: İsmail Enver Pasha founded the Military Office of Cinema in 1915 and began training soldiers to use filmmaking equipment, chiefly in service of propaganda, with the 1914 Censorship Act controlling what can be shown on Ottoman soil. (The earliest surviving Turkish film features a declaration of war against the Russian Empire; Enver Pasha was killed fighting the Red Army in 1922.) It was not until after the Second World War that cinema emerged as a form of popular entertainment. In the 1960s, ‘Yeşilçam’ films dominated – melodramas with mass appeal named after the location of their production companies (think Hollywood). By 1966, Turkey was the fourth largest film producer in the world, behind Egypt, India and the United States. A few people got rich, but the money was never invested in any coherent infrastructure, and with the various coups and constitutional crises over the next few decades, the industry soon collapsed – from producing two-hundred films per year to about ten by 1990.

You can trace the rise and fall of the Yeşilçam years through the career of Yılmaz Güney. Sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1958 for ‘Communist propaganda’, Güney appealed the case and, thanks to the disruption of the 1960 coup d’état, spent only a year in jail (using his time to write an explicitly communist novel). Soon after his release, Güney became a star in the Yeşilçam system, dubbed its ‘Ugly King’ (think Belmondo), and later moved to directing in 1965. His films are often compared to Italian neorealism for their simple moral narratives, on-location shooting, and non-professional actors. Though the Turkish state had no interest in funding filmmaking at the time, it maintained the Central Film Control Commission as an ideological censorship apparatus, and films like Güney’s Umut (1970) were banned for ‘subversive’ content, making him a cause célèbre on the left. He was arrested in 1972 for harbouring Mahir Çayan and other members of the People’s Liberation Party-Front, and again in 1974 for shooting a judge. (His family lawyers are currently trying to relitigate the latter case.) Imprisoned for much of the decade, Güney nevertheless managed to produce some of his finest work, with the films directed by proxy – shot lists and scripts smuggled out, rushes smuggled in. Güney was so well-regarded at this time that he was often allowed to edit from his cell, the films projected on prison walls.

‘Read and write without rest,’ urges Nâzım Hikmet in Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison. ‘I also advise weaving / and making mirrors.’ All that time behind bars inspired Güney’s next film, Yol (1980), set during the military putsch of 1980, which follows five prisoners on a week of home leave. The yolk: it’s all a prison, with walls ‘not made of stone, but paved with stuck traditions and hypocritical morality’. The iron bars are evenly weighted – economic, social, religious, political – though Güney pays particular attention to the Kurdish plight, daring to title one location ‘Kurdistan’. (This scene was cut from subsequent state-approved releases in 1993 and 2017.) Güney escaped from prison in 1981 and fled to Paris, editing Yol in exile and announcing his support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982, with some four-hundred demonstrators on the Croisette calling for a free Kurdistan; Turkey meanwhile stripped Güney of his citizenship and demanded his extradition. He was sentenced to twenty-two years imprisonment should he return – which he hoped to one day, we learn from interviews, but Güney died of cancer in 1984.

Only one other Turkish filmmaker has won the Palme d’Or: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. At a glance, his films appear less radical, and his personal life certainly so. Yet Güney said that revolutionary cinema should function not as a blueprint for action, but a ‘guide to thinking’. Ceylan’s winning film, Winter Sleep (2014) is all thinking, no action. A bourgeois hotelier and former actor, Aydın, lives an idyllic life in Cappadocia with his younger wife, Nihal. The plot is set in motion when İlyas, son of one of Aydın’s tenants, throws a rock through his car window. İlyas’s father, İsmail, had failed to pay rent, and Aydın inadvertently has him beaten by police. Nihal takes pity, stealing a large sum of money from Aydın – enough to buy a house – and offering it to İsmail. He throws it in the fire. Drawing inspiration and sometimes dialogue from Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Winter Sleep presents a simple enough parable. Güney would have told it from the son’s point of view, but the message remains the same. Yet the film is over three hours long. What else is there in the ether – in the dark hollows of those Cappadocian caves, in that seemingly infinite winter? Aydın is a would-be historian who keeps delaying his work. Might there be some kind of blockage?

Ceylan’s career began with the ‘Provincial’ trilogy: the 1997 debut feature Small Town, Clouds of May (1999), and Distant (2002). Each was made for less than $100,000, with Ceylan eschewing public funds. The director and his family act in the films, which take an autobiographical approach – all centre on the agony of abandoning home. Ceylan grew up in Yenice, a small town in Çanakkale Province just southeast of Gallipoli, where he would be labelled taşralı (think hick) by the bourgeoise metropolis. He studied engineering at Boğaziçi University, later moving to London to pursue filmmaking, and considers himself as something of a transfuge de classe. ‘His trajectory embodies the tradition of the Turkish intellectual with the contradictions and impasses in which he finds himself today’, writes Ferhat Kentel. ‘He belongs to a sort of middle-class in the process of gentrification, keen to “enlighten” society while remaining cut off from it.’

This also describes many of Ceylan’s protagonists: well-educated men who think to know better than everyone else, who are never necessarily wrong, never totally irredeemable, but who nevertheless remain outside of history. Given Ceylan’s love of Russian literature, you might call them superfluous men: bastard sons of East and West, intelligent yet politically impotent, bearing a false dignity undermined by contact with reality – which only leads to alienation, neuroticism and self-destruction. ‘That so many Russian literary heroes should be “superfluous men” seems almost inevitable’, argued Irving Howe. In nineteenth-century Russia, ‘no other kind of hero is possible’. Do Ceylan’s films make the same case for Turkey today? Lifted by the hopes of the large and militant Turkish left before it was vanquished, Güney’s films believed in revolution, and envisaged a heroism of the masses. Ceylan’s instead offer what Howe calls ‘heroes of estrangement’ – self-exiled individuals ‘unable to act heroically’.

In The Wild Pear Tree (2018), the protagonist is another would-be historian, who can only get public funding for his novel if he engages with local myth. Sinan refuses, preferring something more ‘meta’; should his career fail, he will simply join the riot police with his friend who brags about beating protesters. The film concludes what some have called Ceylan’s ‘Land of Ghosts’ trilogy, following Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). All are about the impossibility of a present that ignores the past. Set in Çanakkale, it avoids the tourist view of Gallipoli, which has become one of Turkey’s major marketing tools – a kind of founding myth for the modern state that allows secular and Islamic histories to live concomitantly.

The Turkish title, Ahlat Ağacı, bears a significance missed by the English translation, pointing to the Turkified name of the region in East Anatolia, Khlat, the pre-Manzikert Armenian homeland. The wild pear tree is endemic to the region – described by Ceylan as ‘quite ugly’ and bearing ‘very bitter fruit’. It seems to represent the twisted outgrowth of Turkey’s sullied soil. ‘When they find one near a village’, Ceylan said in an interview, ‘the locals will graft it to make it into a normal pear tree’. The mythmaking of state officials functions in the same way: on 25 April, 1915, the Allies made landfall in Gallipoli and Atatürk fought them off; the day prior, the Armenian Genocide began. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – a slow-burning crime drama set over the course of a single night in the desert – is a film that asks where the bodies are buried. Nobody seems to know.

Ceylan’s latest film, About Dry Grasses, centres on the superfluous Samet, a schoolteacher from Istanbul begrudgingly assigned to a small town in Eastern Anatolia. For much of the film his politics are difficult to ascertain: he plays FIFA with a friend in the army; he drinks with dissidents; he loathes the locals yet takes pity on stray dogs. At first, we think he might even be a paedophile – Samet pays too much attention to one of his students, a young girl named Sevim, who openly courts his affection. When Samet is reported for inappropriate behaviour, presumably by Sevim, he lashes out, publicly shaming her and the other (predominantly Kurdish) students. ‘None of you will become artists’, he tells the class. ‘You’ll plant potatoes and sugar beets so the rich can live comfortably’. From here, Samet sours on everything but fellow schoolteacher Nuray, a recently crippled Socialist. He competes for her affection with his roommate, Kenan, who has similarly been accused of inappropriate behaviour (though seems the nicer guy). The two are invited to Nuray’s house one evening, and Samet, conniving and self-centred, fails to pass this on, arriving alone with a bottle of wine. He does his best to seduce Nuray, but before she or Ceylan can gratify this seemingly irredeemable figure, he must first be unmasked.

‘I don’t feel the need to define myself as anything’, he says, responding to Nuray’s question of what ‘ism’ he belongs to. She calls him lumpen, a coward, says he talks ‘like a liberal’ and should get involved, take action. ‘Should I get beaten by the cops?’ Nuray rolls her eyes. They discuss order and chaos, the limits of collectivism; the conversation turns apocalyptic. ‘For me’, Samet says, ‘history recalls the weariness of hope’. Nuray begins to cry. ‘I’m weary, too’, she says. ‘Like I’ve lived a really long time’. He kisses her tears, and they head for the bedroom, with Samet making a quick exit – out onto a film set – to take Viagra, his impotence apparently extra-filmic.

‘Turgenev’s heroes define their humiliation as a function of their hope’, writes Howe. Is the same true of Ceylan? Later in the film, Samet confesses that what he saw in Sevim was a vision of the future – an energy or transcendence of which he was personally incapable. ‘I just wanted to make her a means for a dream world I had built beyond her’. One thinks of Marx writing to Arnold Ruge: ‘The world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality’. Or of Herzen on the superfluous man: that ‘Decembrist’ ‘trembling with indignation and visionary feeling’ who ‘strives to discern, at least on the horizon, the promised land he will never see’.

Ceylan said in a 2004 interview that ‘winning the Palme d’Or could be a tragedy for me’, and since accomplishing this feat his stand-ins have only become more self-effacing. There is a sense, in Samet’s relationships with Nuray and Sevim, of Ceylan confronting Güney’s ghost. He can only squirm and apologise. Güney’s Palme served to celebrate the revolutionary spirit. Does Ceylan’s effectively represent capitulation to the Bertrand school of cinema, where French aesthetics satiate genocidal sultans? Samet is an emblem of guilt, a mode of apology – his role in the effective colonization of the Kurdish southeast mimicking Ceylan’s identity as leading mythmaker of a would-be Westernized state. (One character in Anatolia asks: ‘Is this how we’ll get into the European Union?’)

Ceylan has downplayed his political responsibilities in the past, arguing that a filmmaker is not a journalist and ‘should be more interested in the soul of the spectator’ – yet Ceylan’s tortured bourgeois soul seems the lonely subject of these later films. (A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy, Tolstoy said. What of spiritual agony?) Samet ends the film with a kind of soliloquy, delivered from the historical ruins of Mount Nemrut, with some advice intended for Sevim: ‘Time will pass, and if you survive in this land of unending setbacks, you will still dry up and turn yellow in the end. You will find yourself at the midpoint of your life and see you’ve gained nothing but the desert inside of you’. One hopes she would reply: speak for yourself.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads’, NLR 127.

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Undoing Oslo

Five months into Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people – a compendium of colonial violence, from the bombing of maternity wards to what Raphael Lemkin once called ‘racial discrimination in feeding’ – there has been no shortage of critical commentary. Diaspora intellectuals have worked tirelessly to counter Zionist hasbara; yet when Palestinians are called upon, it is usually to bear witness to brutality and dispossession, not to give their political prescriptions. Haidar Eid’s Decolonising the Palestinian Mind, published late last year, is a vital intervention in this regard. The book sets out to revive the politics of Palestinian liberation by articulating a transformative anti-colonial praxis that would break with sundry ‘peace initiatives’ while redrawing ‘the (cognitive) political map of post-Oslo Palestine’. 

Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.

Though informed by Eid’s experience of living between bombing and blockade, the book is not a testimonial. It is an attempt to carry forward the intellectual project of the late Edward Said, taking cues from his intransigent criticisms of the Oslo ‘peace process’ along with his warnings about a statehood bereft of sovereignty and delinked from decolonization. Oslo, writes Eid, has become a seemingly untranscendable horizon for Palestinian politics, both in spite of and because of its manifest failure. Its framework has segmented the Palestinian population – the refugee diaspora, those living under distinct occupation regimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and the second-class Palestinian citizens of Israel – and created a fractured ‘Bantustan endorsed by the international community’. Gaza, Eid writes, is now ‘the mirror image of Oslo’: both the enabling condition of the current disaster and the true face of a peace process that promised coexistence but never countenanced justice or repair. As Eid reminds us, ‘75-80 percent of Gazans are refugees whose right to return is guaranteed under international law, a right that has been totally ignored by Oslo’. In his account, the ‘invasion and siege of Gaza was a product of Oslo. Before the Oslo Accords were signed, Israel never used its full arsenal of F-16s, phosphorous bombs, and DIME weapons to attack refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.’

‘Oslo’ names a form of false consciousness that afflicts Palestine’s ‘assimilated intelligentsia’ and political elites, who have been defanged, coopted, NGOised and corrupted by the apparatus bequeathed by the Accords. Neither the residual left nor the Islamist resistance has managed to break out of this iron cage. Even Hamas, with its proposal for a ‘long-term truce’ (hudna) based on 1967 borders, has succumbed to it. For Eid, this two-statism – ‘the opium of the Palestinian people’ – cannot challenge the logic of Israeli apartheid, since it implies the reduction of ‘Palestine’ to the current inhabitants of territories occupied and besieged by Israel. It effectively endorses ‘racist ideas about the separation of peoples’, when the sine qua non of liberation should be to reunify the Palestinian people that Zionism has divided by design.

Said’s legacy looms large in this effort to extricate Palestinian politics from the Oslo Accords. Eid reviews the great critic’s dissection of the so-called peace process, from 1993 until his death in 2003, and seconds his conclusion that ‘no negotiations are better than the endless concessions that simply prolong the Israeli occupation’. Looking back on the Accords, Eid asks whether

we have been forced to endure horrible massacres, a genocidal siege, the unstoppable annexation of our land, the building of an apartheid wall, detention of entire families and children, demolition of hundreds of homes, and many other abuses only because a comprador class saw ‘independence’ at the end of a closed tunnel!?

A return to the anti-colonial tradition of Said, Césaire, Fanon and Biko is necessary to counter a Palestinian ‘neo-nationalism’ which ‘beautifies occupation, endorses normalisation, and defends the racist two-state solution’, regardless of the fact that it ‘denies the rights of two-thirds of the Palestinian people, namely refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel’. By tacitly accepting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and coordinating with its repressive apparatuses, writes Eid, this neo-nationalist ideology has become a partner of the Zionist project. Its only ‘solution’ is to give a circumscribed political class the trappings of statehood (flag, anthem, police force) and delegated power over a fragmented population. This means denying the existence of the Palestinian people as a people, and reducing Palestine to the status of a governable or ungovernable enclave. Statehood, thus conceived, is tantamount to surrender. At most, such a state would grant the Palestinians notional ‘autonomy’ on 22% of their land, with no control over their borders or water reserves, no right of return, and no defence against Israel’s military juggernaut.

Eid also engages with Said to diagnose the impasse of the political class in the West Bank and Gaza. He denounces the decision to build a representative structure under Bantustan conditions in the 1996 Legislative Council elections, and describes the 2006 elections both as a repudiation of the political logic of Bantustanisation and an implantation of the ‘Oslo Virus’ – even among a victorious Hamas. After 2006, Eid claims, Hamas played the role of ‘prison sergeant’ in Gaza: applying illegitimate religious laws while appealing to the US on the basis of a sui generis two-statism. Eid does not address how this détente of sorts was destroyed on 7 October, nor the gestation of this operation during the years of apparent containment. Yet his assessment of Hamas’s government prior to that date is bleak:

Day by day, we have seen this authority shift from the stage of resistance to the siege, to coexisting with it and finally reaching a stage of taking advantage of it. It has created a new, unproductive, rentier class whose capital is based on trade in the tunnels (before their destruction by the Egyptian authorities), land trading, a monopoly on the marketing of building materials, etc. This went hand in hand with a monopoly on the definition of resistance, excluding the possibility of reconciliation with those who do not follow its ideology.

Eid dwells in particular on Hamas’s inability to capitalize on the Palestinian unity and international solidarity in the wake of the 2008-9 war (Operation Cast Lead for Israel; the Battle of al-Furqan for Hamas). Like its predecessors and sequels, the Israeli assault was intended to create a sense among Palestinians ‘that they are confronted with a metaphysical power that can never be defeated’. Yet Israel failed to break the spirit or the substance of resistance, declaring a unilateral ceasefire after killing 1,400 Palestinians and destroying swathes of Gaza. What followed was, in Eid’s view, an ‘abortion of victory’, marked by futile efforts to broker a national unity government between Hamas and Fatah and fruitless engagement with the US, fuelled by false hopes in the Obama administration. This demonstrated that Hamas had embraced the statehood fetish, reinventing the broken wheel of ‘independence’ rather than leading a popular emancipation struggle. 

Eid stresses the need for a different path to liberation – one ‘that makes the de-Osloization of Palestine its first priority’ and ‘divorces itself from the fiction of the two-state or two-prison solution’. His proposal is to disengage from the political structures of Palestinian governance, breaking with both the religious right (Hamas) and the secular right (Fatah), whose main priority, he argues, is their own political existence. Eid’s programme involves dismantling the PA along with the ‘classical national programme’ of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, and working towards the formation of ‘a United Front on a platform of resistance and reforms’ through the reconstitution of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). Eid draws on Paulo Freire’s concept of ‘untested feasibility’ (inédito viável), which claims that the oppressed can use ‘limit situations’ to develop critical practices with the potential to transform ‘hostile conditions into a space for creative experimentation of freedom, equality, and justice’. This may sound utopian given the intense hostility of conditions in Gaza today. But as imperial powers begin to rehearse ‘solutions’ for the day after the genocide, alternatives may amount to a permanent denial of Palestinian freedom.

What of the Palestinian left? Much of it is materially integrated into the subaltern economy of Palestinian political representation: ‘Most members of the political bureaus of the major left parties are either directly employed by the PA/PLO or get paid monthly salaries without being directly employed.’ Eid claims that the PFLP, DFLP and People’s Party have failed to mount an effective challenge to the authoritarian drift of the PLO and PA. He therefore argues that the left must be rebuilt outside the existing Palestinian political system, drawing on the grassroots mobilizations against the ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouin, the Unity Intifada and the resistance to the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. The principles of this movement must include a firm repudiation of two-statism; support for international solidarity and boycott campaigns; unity among Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora; a rejection of neoliberalism and revitalization of the PNC; and a willingness to learn lessons from both the Latin American left and the South African anti-apartheid struggle. All this would require not just a different politics, but a new cognitive mapping that ‘challenges the space newly drawn by the US, Israel, and their Arab allies – the so-called new Middle East’, and instead posits a ‘secular-democratic Palestine in the heart of a democratic Arab world’. In other words, it would require an abandonment of the fatal conceit that one can repair the legacy of partition by repeating its foundational premises.  

Eid’s intervention is valuable for its urgency of purpose and openness of outlook. Its proposals are especially resonant as the spectre of statehood hovers over the rubble of Gaza. Yet it is worth recalling that international law, invoked by Eid to underscore the injustice and criminality of apartheid, operates with statehood as its frame. A two-state vision sets the terms of juridical affirmations of Palestinian freedom, as seen in the ICJ cases challenging the legality of Israel’s occupation and seeking to apply the Genocide Convention to the current war. One of the key challenges for any alternative Palestinian political programme will be to navigate an international legal order which provides one of the only arenas for the legitimized assertion of rights while also leaving such claims prone to capture and domestication by hostile powers, above all the United States.  

As for Eid’s view of ‘one democratic state’ as the lodestar for Palestinian liberation, it goes without saying that this will come up against the imposing obstacles of the imperial system. It will also be confronted by the overwhelming commitment of Israeli Jews to the Zionist logic of elimination and domination, which has only been hardened by recent events. Eid echoes Césaire’s universalist refrain, ‘there’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory’; but what rendezvous, or even tolerable coexistence, can be imagined with those who have rallied en masse to a war promoted and prosecuted in explicitly exterminist terms? Even if we keep faith in the most utopian of visions, it is hard to avoid the sense that transitional arrangements will be required: perhaps some variant of the blueprint laid out by the Moroccan Jewish Marxist Abraham Serfaty in his prison writings on Palestine, where he argued for the establishment of two states, a ‘de-Zionised’ secular Israel under ‘one person one vote’ principles, and an ‘Arab’ Palestinian nation, as an interim solution.  

Who is capable of pursuing such a vision – one that, to quote Eid’s final line, could ‘turn the whole hegemonic picture upside down’? While Eid is forceful in criticizing the organized formations on both the left and right, and in centering grassroots cadres and the BDS movement, he is less clear on the role of armed resistance. There is little discussion of the armed wings of the various parties and factions (which have not always cleaved to the positions of their political leaderships), or of the popular resistance fronts that emerged in the First and Second Intifadas and which continue to operate in various defensive guises, most prominently in Jenin. Eid formulated his view of Hamas as ‘prison sergeant’ before 7 October, but it is not easy to square with Tufan Al-Aqsa – an attack which seemed like a deliberately irrevocable undoing of the status quo ante. It is also worth registering, contra Eid’s critique of left-wing collaboration with the PA, that the PFLP has recently joined forces with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian National Initiative to denounce Abbas’s appointment of a new ‘technocratic’ PM, Muhammad Mustafa. Still, it is to Eid’s credit that at perhaps the bleakest and certainly the most murderous moment in Palestinian history, he has had the intellectual courage not just to break with conceptions of peace pregnant with the disasters of war, but to affirm an expansive anti-colonial vision of liberation.

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

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Clandestinity

In December 1973, a version of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton secretly returned to his homeland. A member of the Salvadoran Communist Party since the 1950s, he had recently broken with it to join the guerrilla People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). He was well known to the country’s military dictatorship and had been jailed several times, so some subterfuge was needed to smuggle him back in. Before leaving Havana, where he had spent the previous six years, he adopted not only a new alias, but also a new face, getting his features altered (allegedly by the same surgeon who had worked on Che Guevara prior to his departure for Bolivia). The ruse worked well enough on the Salvadoran border guards, but within a little over a year Dalton had been betrayed by those who knew his true identity best: his own comrades in the ERP accused him of being a CIA agent and summarily executed him in May 1975.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, reissued last year by Seven Stories Press, are the only writings Dalton produced during this clandestine period, in which poetry and armed struggle converged. It occupies a curious place in his oeuvre, both a tragic coda and a new departure. In a formal sense, the poems are by versions of Dalton: whether due to the needs of clandestinity or as creative choice, he adopted five heteronyms, trying out different poetic personae complete with fictional biographies and contrasting worldviews. Thematically, while these poems have much in common with his previous work, they are more closely focused on Salvadoran politics and on questions of revolutionary commitment. They constitute a kind of oblique testament to Dalton’s own journey from CP orthodoxy to his embrace of guerrilla warfare. They also dramatize a critical juncture in the life of the Latin American left, when the triumphal upswing inspired by the Cuban Revolution had given way to the leaden years of dictatorship and repression, and when for many, optimistic visions of social transformation had been forced to yield to the harsh practicalities of resistance.

Born in 1935, Dalton came to prominence in El Salvador at the turn of the 1960s, as part of the generación comprometida – the ‘committed generation’ of writers born in and around the 1930s who took up social and political themes in their work. On a trip to Chile in 1953, he met Pablo Neruda, whose work powerfully influenced the earthy lyricism of Dalton’s earlier verse. He also met Diego Rivera, who helpfully informed the eighteen-year-old Dalton that he was ‘still an idiot’ because he had not yet encountered Marxism. It soon became central to Dalton’s politics and poetics, and four years later, after returning from a trip to the USSR for the World Festival of Youth, he joined the Salvadoran Communist Party.

Active in the Party and in San Salvador’s literary circles while studying to be a lawyer, Dalton was arrested in 1959 and again in 1960 amid government crackdowns on student protests. A police report from the time labelled him ‘an extremely dangerous element for national tranquility’. Dalton himself thought the description exaggerated, but it galvanized him into deeper political commitment; as he later put it, ‘from that moment on, I dedicated myself to providing the judges with evidence against me.’ In 1961, he abandoned his studies and left for Mexico and then Cuba. Though he returned clandestinely to El Salvador in 1963, he was soon imprisoned again. He escaped the following year and was able to flee into exile once more, but the murky circumstances of his jailbreak later struck his ERP comrades as suspicious. In a tragic twist, the good fortune that enabled him to reach safety – first in Prague, from 1965–67, and then in Cuba till 1973 – contributed to his downfall.

Almost all of Dalton’s literary output was first published in Cuba, starting with his 1962 debut poetry collection, La ventana en el rostro (The Window in the Face). Over the next decade, a stream of books followed in quick succession. These included further poetry collections in which Neruda’s influence was joined by that of César Vallejo, and where political and historical themes gradually became more prominent; Taberna y otros lugares (Tavern and Other Places) won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize in 1969. There were also two historical monographs on El Salvador and a book-length interview with veteran Salvadoran communist Miguel Mármol, whom Dalton had met in Prague. Titled after its eponymous subject, the book became one of the foundational works in the testimonio genre on its publication in 1972. It was also a pioneering attempt to recover the popular memory of the 1932 government massacre of peasants and leftists, a searing wound in Salvadoran history to this day known simply as La Matanza, ‘the Slaughter’. ‘All of us were born half dead in 1932’, Dalton later wrote in a poem titled ‘All of Us’, adding: that ‘To be Salvadoran is to be half dead / that thing that moves / is the half of life they left us with.’

Before departing from Cuba in 1973, Dalton put his literary affairs in order. Critic and novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya has meticulously analysed Dalton’s late correspondence and found him working hard to arrange the speedy publication of several more manuscripts, including an autobiographical novel, Pobrecito poeta que era yo (Poor Little Poet That I Was) and two works of poetry, Un libro levemente odioso (A Slightly Odious Book) and Un libro rojo para Lenin (A Red Book for Lenin). Though these only appeared posthumously – in some cases more than a decade after the author’s death – they are nonetheless works Dalton himself felt were complete, and consciously wanted to be part of his literary legacy.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle has a more ambivalent status. Written after the rest of his body of work, these poems feel like an experiment in process rather than a finished product. Mimeographed versions circulated in El Salvador at the time they were written, but the poems weren’t published until 1977, when comrades of Dalton’s who had left the ERP over his murder put them out under the title Poemas clandestinos (Clandestine Poems). In 1984, at the height of the US Central American solidarity movement, they were translated into English by the late California Beat poet and communist Jack Hirschman, and published alongside the Spanish originals. This dual edition is the text Seven Stories Press has reissued, with new prefaces by Salvadoran writers Jaime Barba, Tatiana Marroquín and Christopher Soto.

The heteronyms Dalton adopted in these fifty-seven poems certainly have different voices, but at the same time there are plenty of common themes and concerns. In that respect they are not like the famous heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa: rather than presenting parallel and distinct bodies of work, Dalton’s poetic personae converge around a shared political struggle, their different fictive backgrounds representing various sociological and ideological strands within El Salvador’s revolutionary movement. Two of the heteronyms supposedly studied law, like Dalton (Vilma Flores and Timoteo Lúe); two are sociologists by training (Juan Zapata and Luis Luna); and one is an activist in the Catholic worker movement (Jorge Cruz). All except Flores are men; all except Cruz are around ten years younger than Dalton – not so much alternate selves, perhaps, as personifications of younger comrades.

The Vilma Flores poems that open the collection in many ways set the tone, combining political militancy and a spare lyricism. ‘Don’t be mistaken’, a poem titled ‘On Our Poetic Moral’ begins: ‘we’re poets who write / from the clandestinity in which we live’, adding that ‘we confront the enemy directly’. The Flores poems also introduce a feminist perspective. ‘Towards a Better Love’ observes that, while ‘No one disputes that sex is a domestic condition’ or an economic one, ‘Where the hassles begin / is when a woman says / sex is a political condition’. (Kate Millet’s famous statement appears as the poem’s epigraph.) But this perspective remains at best underdeveloped, its implications rarely stretching beyond the recognition, for example, that the ‘the magic deodorant with a hint of lemon / and the soap that voluptuously caresses her skin / are made by the same manufacturer that makes napalm’.

Timoteo Lúe’s verses are more sentimental and sincere in their lyricism: ‘Like You’, for example, begins ‘Like you I / love love, life, the sweet smell / of things, the sky-blue / landscape of January days.’ Those by Jorge Cruz, meanwhile, are clearly intended to embody the strong Liberation Theology current within the Salvadoran revolutionary movement (though perhaps they also offer an implicit dialogue with Dalton’s younger Jesuit-educated self). In ‘Credo of Che’, Guevara merges with Christ in a confluence of religion and revolutionary politics: ‘they put a crown of thorns / and a madman’s smock on Christ Guevara / and amid jeers, hung a sign from his neck – / INRI: Instigator of the Natural Rebellion of the Impoverished.’

The poems by the last two heteronyms, Juan Zapata and Luis Luna, have much more of a satirical edge. The Zapata poems are mostly driven by a negative impulse to criticize the Salvadoran CP, and they come across as a barely veiled legitimation of Dalton’s break with the organization. But their mordancy makes for entertaining send-ups of the CP’s orthodox line. In ‘Parable Beginning with Revisionist Vulcanology’, Dalton’s heteronym in turn ventriloquizes a party apparatchik to declare that ‘The volcano of Izalco / as a volcano / was ultra-left’. Having previous spewed lava and ash, however, it had now learned its lesson and become ‘a fine civilized volcano’, a ‘volcano for executives’. Another poem titled ‘Ultraleftists’ similarly runs through El Salvador’s long insurgent tradition and sarcastically labels each instance a case of ‘ultra-leftism’, from the indigenous Pipiles resisting the Spanish conquest to communist leader Farabundo Martí, a victim of the 1932 Matanza. As an attack on the CP’s political timidity, it was rhetorically effective, but as a record of the serial outcomes of armed struggle, it hardly offered encouraging precedents for Dalton’s own embrace of armed struggle.

It’s in the Luis Luna poems that Dalton arrives at perhaps the most consistent voice. This is no accident, since Luna accounts for almost half the poems in total. These have a terse, Brechtian energy, combining the sardonic tone of Juan Zapata with Vilma Flores’s class-based militancy. A poem on ‘The Petite Bourgeoisie’ characterizes its subjects dismissively as ‘Those who / in the best of cases / want to make the Revolution / for History for Logic / for Science and nature’, rather than ‘to eliminate the hunger / of those who are hungry’. Often these poems rely on wordplay or extended metaphors. ‘Violence will not only be the midwife of History in El Salvador’, Luna observes in one poem, adding that it will also have to be ‘the laundress of History / the ironess of History / who goes looking for our bread every day / of History’. Elsewhere he argues that ‘private property, in effect, / more than private / is property that deprives.’ (The pun – propiedad privada vs propiedad privadora – admittedly works better in Spanish, but here as elsewhere, Hirschman’s translation hews quite closely to what Dalton intended.)

At times the Luna poems weave back and forth across the boundary between cautionary tale and bleak reality, between abstract parables and the horrors of the armed struggle. In one prose poem, two cops offer a prisoner a chance to escape torture if he can guess which of them has a glass eye. The prisoner guesses correctly, to the cops’ astonishment, by identifying ‘the only eye that looked at me without hatred’. ‘Of course,’ the narrator adds, ‘they continued torturing him’. Where others of the Luna poems offer encouragement in the struggle, moments like these cater to a different impulse, as if to record for posterity and thereby vindicate the guerrillas’ suffering.

There are some jarring moments when violence matter-of-factly intrudes into the Brechtian satire and play of ironies. In one of the Zapata poems, for example, the poet asserts that ‘everywhere the revolution needs people / not only willing to die / but also willing to kill for it.’ Across the collection, indeed, it’s the intrinsic connection to the armed struggle that separates the poems most from the contemporary context. Dalton’s heteronyms repeatedly and readily make the leap from politicized critique to direct military action, and this places them firmly in their historical moment, and by the same token distances them from our own.

In the intervening years, the vast majority of the Latin American left set aside the armed struggle, often in the wake of enormous losses. In El Salvador itself, the ERP eventually merged with other guerrilla groups to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which from 1979 to 1992 waged a bitter struggle against a string of US-backed authoritarian regimes. A peace settlement allowed the former guerrilla alliance to become a legal political party, and it even won the presidency in 2009, holding power for a decade before losing to Nayib Bukele. Recently re-elected to an unconstitutional second term amid widespread rigging, Bukele presents himself as a new kind of elected autocrat. But even though his brutal crackdown on so-called gang violence – in effect a vicious and indiscriminate assault against the popular classes – has been waged under the banner of the ‘New Ideas’ party, his methods would seem grimly familiar to anyone from Dalton’s time.

It’s the persistence of authoritarianism, in fact, that brings Dalton closer to us again – the vast and enduring edifice of repression confronting any attempts at progressive social change in El Salvador, and the repeated impotence of electoral means for implementing it. The final poem in the collection captures well the lethal impasse facing the Salvadoran left in the 1970s, and perhaps in the present, too. It opens by sunnily predicting that ‘El Salvador will be a pretty / and (without exaggeration) serious country / when working class and peasantry / . . . cure the historical hangover / clean it up reconstruct it / and get it going.’ The difficulty, however, is that the country is still beset by a range of problems, figured here as obstacles, ailments or disfigurements: ‘today El Salvador / has a thousand rough edges and a hundred thousand pitfalls / about five hundred thousand calluses and some blisters / cancers rashes dandruff filthiness / ulcers fractures fevers bad odors.’ The solution he proffers is an unstable combination of care and cleansing violence: ‘You have to round it off with a little machete / sandpaper lathe turpentine penicillin / sitz bath kisses and gunpowder.’ For Dalton’s heteronym, there was seemingly no contradiction between these remedies. The poet himself staked his life on the same powerful conviction, meeting his senseless end with an enviable certainty.

Read on: Régis Debray, ‘Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America’, NLR I/45.

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Political Instincts?

Two men flank each other in shabby paramilitary attire, their MAGA caps hovering above the swirling tide of flags and megaphones. ‘We can take that place!’, exclaims the first. ‘And then do what?’, his companion asks. ‘Heads on pikes!’ Three years later, these rocambolesque scenes from the Capitol riot on January 6th – now firmly encrusted on liberalism’s political unconscious – have become a revealing historical hieroglyph. Above all, they epitomize a culture in which politics has been decoupled from policy. The protest galvanized thousands of Americans to invade the headquarters of the world hegemon. Yet this action had no tangible institutional consequences. America’s Winter Palace was stormed, but the result was not a revolutionary coup or a dual power stand-off. Instead, most of the insurgents – infantrymen for the American lumpenbourgeoisie, from New York cosmetics salesmen to Floridian real estate agents – were swiftly arrested en route home, incriminated by their livestreams and social media posts. Today little remains of their Trumpian fronde, even as the mountain king prepares for his next crusade. A copycat putsch in Brazil also came to naught.

The same disarticulation afflicts campaigns across the political spectrum, from the BLM protests in summer 2020, which saw nearly twenty million Americans rail against police violence and racial inequity, to France’s gilets jaunes and the current Palestinian solidarity movement. Compared to the long period of relative demobilization and apathy during the 1990s and 2000s, in which citizens protested, petitioned and voted less, the events that followed the 2008 financial crash signalled a clear shift in Western political culture. The Economist informed its readers in the early summer of 2020 that ‘political protests have become more widespread and more frequent’, and that ‘the rising trend in global unrest is likely to continue.’ Yet these eruptions had little effect on the spectacularly skewed class structure of Western societies; BLM has failed to defund the police or curb their brutality; and the regular marches against Western sponsorship of Israel’s punishment campaign have not stopped the unrestrained bloodshed in Gaza. As James Butler recently remarked in the London Review of Books, ‘Protest, what is it good for?’ 

This is partly an effect of state repression. Yet we can further delineate the present situation by examining a different, downward rather than upward-sloping curve. Throughout the recent ‘decade of protest’, the secular decline in mass membership organizations, which began in the 1970s and was first anatomised by Peter Mair in the pages of this journal, only accelerated. Unions, political parties, and churches continued to bleed members, exacerbated by the rise of a new digital media circuit and tightening labour laws, and compounded by the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that metastasized out of the actual one of 2020. The result is a curiously K-shaped recovery: while the erosion of organized civic life proceeds apace, the Western public sphere is increasingly subject to spasmodic instances of agitation and controversy. Post-politics has ended, but what has taken its place is hardly recognizable from twentieth-century mass political templates.

Contemporary political philosophy seems ill-equipped to explain the situation. As Chantal Mouffe points out, we still live in an age of ‘apolitical’ philosophy, where academics are reduced to pondering why certain people decide to become activists or join political organizations given the prohibitive costs of ideological commitment. By contrast, Aristotle once dared to suggest that humans displayed an inborn instinct for socialisation: a feature shared with other herd animals, such as bees or ants, which also exhibit strong cooperative traits. As exceptionally gregarious creatures, he contended, men also had a spontaneous urge to unite within a πολις, a term only meagrely translated by the Germanic compound ‘city state’ – the highest form of community. Anyone surviving outside such a community was ‘either a beast or a god’.

The classical Aristotelian assumption of man as a zoön politikon was called into question by modern political philosophy, starting with Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume (the latter two idiosyncratic Hobbesians). It was fiercely contested in Leviathan, where man appears as an instinctively antisocial animal who must be coerced into association and commitment. Yet even Hobbes’s pessimistic anthropology hoped to re-establish political association on a higher plane. For him, man’s antisocial instincts opened a vista onto even sturdier collective structures. This was an implicit appeal to Europe’s republican nobility: they should no longer get involved in murderous civil wars and, out of self-interest, submit to a peace-abiding sovereign. Similarly for Rousseau, antisocial amour propre offered the prospect of a higher political association – this time in the democratic republic, where the lost freedom of the state of nature could be regained. For Kant, too, ‘unsociable sociability’ functioned as a dialectical harbinger of perpetual peace. In each case, the apolitical postulate implied a potentially political conclusion: a lack of strong sociability served to temper political passions, guaranteeing the stability of state and society.

The nineteenth century saw a more pressing need to assure generalized political passivity. As Moses Finley has noted, to be a citizen in Aristotle’s Athens was de facto to be active, with little distinction between civil and political rights, and with rigid lines between slaves and non-slaves. In the 1830s and 40s, the suffrage movement made such demarcations impossible. Proletarians sought to transform themselves into active citizens, threatening the propertied order built up after 1789. To neutralize this prospect, it was necessary to construct a new cité censitaire, in which the masses would be shut out of decision-making while elites could continue to enact the so-called democratic will. The plebiscitary regime of Louis Bonaparte III, famously characterized as ‘potato sack politics’ in The Eighteenth Brumaire, offered an exemplar. This ‘creative anti-revolution’, as Hans Rosenberg called it, was an attempt to redeem general suffrage by placing it within authoritarian constraints that would enable capitalist modernization.

Walter Bagehot – luminary of The Economist, central bank theorist and eulogist of the English Constitution – defended Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état as the only means to reconcile democratization with capital accumulation. ‘We have no slaves to keep down by special terrors and independent legislation’, he wrote. ‘But we have whole classes unable to comprehend the idea of a constitution, unable to feel the least attachment to impersonal laws.’ Bonapartism was a natural solution. ‘The issue was put to the French people . . . “Will you be governed by Louis Napoleon, or will you be governed by an assembly?” The French people said, “We will be governed by the one man we can imagine, and not by the many people we cannot imagine.”’

Bagehot asserted that socialists and liberals who complained about Bonaparte’s authoritarianism were themselves guilty of betraying democracy. Commenting on the result of an 1870 plebiscite which ratified some of Bonaparte’s reforms, he argued that such critics ‘ought to learn . . . that if they are true democrats, they should not again attempt to disturb the existing order at least during the Emperor’s Life’. To them, he wrote, ‘democracy seems to consist as often as not in the free use of the people’s name against the vast majority of the people’. Here was the proper capitalist response to mass politics: the forcible atomization of the people – nullifying organized labour to secure capital’s interests, with semi-sovereign support from a demobilized society.   

Richard Tuck has described the further modulations of this tradition in the twentieth century, visible in the work of Vilfredo Pareto, Kenneth Arrow and Mancur Olson among others. For these figures, collective action and interest-pooling were demanding and unattractive; voting in elections was usually carried out with reluctance rather than conviction; trade unions were equally beneficial to members and non-members; and the terms of the social contract often had to be forcibly imposed. In the 1950s, Arrow recycled an insight originally proffered by the Marquis de Condorcet, stating that it was theoretically impossible for three voters to ensure perfect harmony between their preferences (if voter one preferred A over B and C, voter two B over C and A, and three C over A and B, the formation of a majority preference was impossible without dictatorial intervention). Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ was seized upon as evidence that collective action itself was bursting with contradictions; Olson radicalized it to advance his claim that free riding was the rule rather than the exception in large organizations. The conclusion that man was not naturally inclined to politics thus came to dominate this field of sceptical post-war literature.  

Towards the end of the twentieth century, with the drastic decline in voter turnout, the plunge in strike days and the wider process of withdrawal from organized political life, human apoliticism seemed to mutate from an academic discourse into an empirical reality. Whereas Kant spoke of ‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’, one could now speak of ‘gesellige Ungeselligkeit’: a social unsociability which reinforces rather than sublates atomization.

As the decade of protests made clear, however, Bagehot’s formula no longer holds. Passive support for the ruling order cannot be assured; citizens are willing to revolt in significant numbers. Yet fledgling social movements remain crippled by the neoliberal offensive against civil society. How best to conceptualize this new conjuncture? Here the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’ – a form of politicization without clear political consequences – may be useful. Post-politics was finished off by the 2010s. The public sphere has been repoliticized and re-enchanted, but on terms which are more individualistic and short-termist, evoking the fluidity and ephemerality of the online world. This is an abidingly ‘low’ form of politics – low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value. It is distinct both from the post-politics of the 1990s, in which public and private were radically separated, and from the traditional mass politics of the twentieth century. What we are left with is a grin without a cat: a politics without policy influence or institutional ties.

If the hyperpolitical present appears to reflect the online world – with its curious mix of activism and atomization – it can also be compared to another amorphous entity: the market. As Hayek noted, the psychology of planning and mass politics were closely related: politicians would bide their time over decades; Soviet planners read human needs across five-years plans; Mao, keenly aware of the longue durée, hibernated in rural exile for more than twenty years; the Nazis measured their time in millennia. The horizon of the market, however, is much nearer: the oscillations of the business cycle offer instant rewards. Today, politicians wonder whether they can launch their campaigns in a matter of weeks, citizens turn out to demonstrate for a day, influencers petition or protest with a monosyllabic tweet.

The result is a preponderance of ‘wars of movement’ over ‘wars of position’, with the primary forms of political engagement as fleeting as market transactions. This is more a matter of necessity than of choice: the legislative environment for durable institution-building remains hostile, and activists must contend with a vitiated social landscape and an unprecedentedly expansive Kulturindustrie. Beneath such structural constraints lie questions of strategy. While the internet has radically lowered the costs of political expression, it has also pulverized the terrain of radical politics, blurring the borders between party and society and spawning a chaos of online actors. As Eric Hobsbawm observed, collective bargaining ‘by riot’ remains preferable to post-political apathy. The jacquerie of European farmers in the last months clearly indicates the (right-wing) potential of such wars of movement. Yet without formalized membership models, contemporary protest politics is unlikely to return us to the ‘superpolitical’ 1930s. Instead, it may usher in postmodern renditions of ancien régime peasant uprisings: an oscillation between passivity and activity, yet one that rarely reduces the overall power differential within society. Hence the K-shaped recovery of the 2020s: a trajectory that would please neither Bagehot nor Marx.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘After Populism?’, NLR 144.

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Bonapartist Solutions

There is a strong case to be made that the Eighteenth Brumaire still holds the key to understanding contemporary French politics. For Marx grasped that the secret of bourgeois power in France lay in the division between urban and rural popular forces; their mutual fear and loathing benefited a highly concentrated ruling class claiming a universal civilizational mission while establishing an impressively lavish welfare regime catering mostly to those who needed it the least. This model originated in the Directorate, was developed under the first Bonaparte and came to full fruition in 1848.

As Cagé and Piketty point out in Une histoire du conflit politique (2023), a book that sometimes reads like a rerelease of Marx’s classic bolstered by reams of quantitative data, the Bonapartist structure was only really challenged in the early twentieth century by a militant working class led by a Communist Party that forced the political system into a left/right alternation. Since the early 1990s, however, Bonapartism has reemerged stronger than before. In Macron it assumes a classic form. The right of the Rassemblement National and the left of La France insoumise (the ‘extremes’, in the parlance of the quality press) balance one another, while the radical centre – the bourgeois bloc anatomized by Serge Halimi – is free to pursue its own interests, while also claiming to protect the dignity of the nation, wider humanity and now the ecosphere itself. A remarkable political formula, as Mosca would have put it.

This raises an important question. Why can the American capitalist class, certainly the most powerful in history, not reproduce it? The paradox here is that this class has become hamstrung by a party structure that served it well for many decades. Historically, the two-party system split the working class between Democrats and Republicans, with the resulting vertical blocs cemented by a combination of promised concessions and personalist demagogy. Once in power, though, the parties would typically jettison their electoral programmes and tack toward the centre. But what has occurred in the most recent period – a phenomenon related to the rise of what I call political capitalism – are intra-party revolts on both the right and the left, the former significantly more powerful than the later. This turbulence within both parties reflects the wider problem of a capitalist system decreasingly able to deliver material gains to the working class.

This creates a dangerous situation for the rulers in which they cannot easily find a vehicle to re-establish equilibrium. Thus, a set of curious political symptoms have appeared: quixotic third party projects with no chance of success, former Republican operatives trying to recruit upscale conservatives for Biden, retreads from the Bush administration appearing on MSNBC and so on. These are all people who would like to establish an American version of Macronism, but cannot. Why? Because in a political system where the duopoly forces a choice, and where the parties seem paradoxically to be strengthening (one of the strange ways in which the US is Europeanizing just as Europe is Americanizing), it is difficult to reshuffle voter loyalites to allow for a Bonapartist solution. Deprived of this option, the American bourgeoisie is doomed to work within the confines of a party system that has now become a dysfunctional relic.  

Read on: Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, NLR 138.

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Intractable Crisis

As the world is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, the wars in the eastern DRC are entering their fourth and perhaps most dangerous decade, with a risk of major regional escalation. The conflict, which currently involves about a hundred different armed groups, has killed and displaced millions over the years. Since 2021 it has entered a new phase, marked by the reemergence of a rebel organization known as the March 23 movement. Private security companies and neighbouring states have joined the fray, and the diffuse range of belligerents has galvanized along two clear fronts: one aligned with the Congolese government, the other with the M23. The situation is now deteriorating by the day, and the prospects of peace are distant.

The violence began in earnest around 1993, when Zaire – the state that preceded the DRC – lost the capacity to contain the identity politics that it had cultivated over the previous three decades. Mobutu, a staunch ally of the West during his 32-year reign, had aimed to divide and rule by exploiting long-standing communal tensions. Forced migration, arbitrary border-lines and ethnic pogroms in the colonial era provided fertile ground for this strategy, which often targeted eastern DRC’s Kinyarwanda-speaking population. In 1994, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda caused millions of Hutu – both civilians and perpetrators – to cross into Zaire. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, the group that would soon capture the central government of Rwanda, pursued the genocidaires into DRC’s North Kivu province, and conflict spread rapidly across the country’s east.

Between 1996 and 2003, two devastating wars unfolded under the watch of an international community which had stood by during the Rwandan genocide and was now consumed by post-Cold War conflicts from Somalia to Yugoslavia. In the 1996-7 ‘Liberation War’, the veteran insurgent Laurent-Désiré Kabila toppled Mobutu and took power through a rebellion supported by Rwanda and Uganda. The ‘Second Congo War’ then erupted in 1998 after Kabila split with his Rwandan and Ugandan allies, who in turn supported another rebel campaign against his government. This time, the formerly genocidal Rwandan forces, which soon became known as the FDLR, lent armed support to Kabila. Numerous African countries threw their weight behind one or the other side.

Joseph Kabila became president after his father’s assassination in 2001, and three years later he officially ended the war, signing peace accords with domestic rebel forces and with the Rwandan government. Yet in 2005, the renegade army general Laurent Nkunda mounted a new rebellion against the Kinshasa administration. This concluded with another deal between DRC and Rwanda, who agreed to quash Nkunda and launch joint operations against the FDLR. The rebel leader was detained and his forces were integrated into the Congolese army along with various other armed groups. But the regional entente did not last long.

Following DRC’s 2011 elections, where the younger Kabila was re-elected in a contested poll, a group of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese officers and former partisans of the Rwanda-backed rebellion deserted the army and created the M23. Aided by Rwanda and Uganda, the group briefly conquered the city of Goma in late 2012. A year later, the Congolese army forced the M23 into exile with the help of the UN. But subsequent peace negotiations failed, and the remnants of the group returned to eastern DRC in early 2017, hiding out between volcanoes near the eastern border. During those years, other armed groups fragmented and multiplied. Though they proved deadly for the civilian population, they remained too scattered and peripheral to provoke much international concern.

Despite evidence of large-scale fraud, the December 2018 general elections effected the first peaceful transfer of power in Congolese post-independence history. Kabila, who was widely believed to be eyeing an unconstitutional third term before finally agreeing to hold the ballot, was succeeded by Felix Tshisekedi – the son of a historic opposition leader, and the first president since the 1960s without ties to the military or the rebellion. Diplomats and journalists predicted lasting political change. Yet over the past five years, most of the government’s democratic and economic reforms have stalled, and Tshisekedi’s pledge to ‘humanize’ the security forces remains unfulfilled, amid continuing abuses against human rights advocates and journalists.

Initially, Tshisekedi oversaw a period of détente with Rwanda, with highly symbolic moments such as a widely publicised handshake between Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame in December 2019, and a solemn meeting at the border after an eruption of Nyiragongo volcano in May 2021. Under Tshisekedi, the Congolese government began working on various political, economic and military deals with its eastern neighbours and joined the East African Community. The DRC established military deals with Bujumbura, formalising years of unofficial presence of Burundi’s army on its soil, and with Kampala, leading to the deployment of the Ugandan army in the Beni region – where the ADF, an ISIS-linked insurgent group of Ugandan origin, had been at the centre of large-scale violence since 2014.

The DRC also secured mutually promising agreements with Rwanda, but tense relations with Burundi and Uganda – whose military operations in DRC seemed to involve strategic and sensitive areas for Kigali – complicated the regional equation. An informal military alliance between Kigali and Kinshasa that had targeted FDLR hideouts between 2015 and 2020 was discontinued for reasons that remain opaque. At the same time, negotiations between Kinshasa and M23 broke down. The DRC established martial rule in North Kivu and Ituri, and announced a new demobilization programme targeting the rebels.

This, along with an abrupt end to the informal ties that had underpinned the brief honeymoon between Kigali and Kinshasa, helped patch up the relationship between Rwanda and the M23 (which had been uneasy since Nkunda’s arrest). In late 2021, Rwanda rebooted its support for the M23, which began attacking Congolese army positions. The DRC resorted to the tried-and-tested formula of sub-contracting other armed groups, notably the FDLR. Fighting escalated in early 2022 as the M23 landed a series of battlefield victories and expanded its territorial control in the areas north of the city of Goma.

Both the DRC and Rwanda decided to pursue military escalation rather than diplomacy. As Kigali sent troops to fight alongside the M23, Kinshasa rallied an array of armed groups known as wazalendo and contracted private military companies to fight the rebels. All sides of the conflict are now investing in sophisticated weaponry – including drones, Rwandan surface-to-air missiles fired from M23-controlled territory, and high-end assault rifles which the DRC delivers to its proxy forces. The Congolese army has begun to integrate Burundian soldiers into its ranks, while Uganda – despite conducting joint operations with the DRC against the ADF – has been accused of facilitating support for the M23 along the Congolese border.

For Kinshasa, the M23’s return was proof that Rwanda had never been serious about peace. The DRC frames the conflict as a result of Rwanda’s intervention, denouncing the M23 as a foreign puppet given its predominantly Kinyarwanda-speaking leadership. For Rwanda, however, the DRC’s renewed cooperation with the FDLR suggested that it was uninterested in improving regional security. Rwanda has denounced what it considers the ethnic cleansing of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, presenting the violence as a result of the government’s discrimination against its Banyamulenge, Tutsi and Hema populations. Both sides thus buy into different hierarchies of suffering, privileging either the victims of M23 violence or the Kinyarwanda-speaking population.

This political polarization has created an increasingly hostile discursive environment, reflected in the war of words conducted across both traditional and new media. During the first M23 war, it was possible for humanitarians, journalists and researchers to cross the frontlines and work on different sides of the conflict. Since the 1990s, there have always been moderate voices among the DRC population, who feel that they suffer from Kinshasa’s poor governance and divisive ethnic politics and from Rwanda’s ambitions to claim North Kivu as its backyard. They have consistently tried to resist the ethnic polarisation of conflict (with varying degrees of success). Today, though, online spin doctors, trolls and agitators on both ends of the spectrum smear their critics as either allies of the FDLR genocidaires or puppets of Rwanda, reducing the space for non-partisan discussion. Attempts to maintain a modicum of social cohesion are under serious threat.

Meanwhile, the conflict’s underlying structures – including the legacies of racist colonial rule, the divide-and-rule politics of the post-colonial era, and the wounds of the 1990s wars – remain intact. Local conflicts over access to land and resources, as well as political power, are being complicated by the activities of foreign mining companies lusting after export minerals. Over the decades, mass displacement has not only devastated eastern DRC’s agriculture; it has also created a growing workforce for informal mining and recruitment into armed groups, which has altered the social and economic fabric of the region. The conflict has now acquired its own self-perpetuating logic, as militarization and violence have become the dominant modes of socio-economic life. International intervention was complicit with this transformation. During the rebellion of 2005 to 2009, the phrase ‘no Nkunda, no job’ became commonplace, suggesting that UN workers and humanitarians were instrumentalizing the war to secure lucrative contracts and mineral rents rather than pushing for a peace settlement.

Time and again, external actors have failed to contain the escalation. The UN peacekeeping mission, deployed in 1999, has gradually been reduced to a politically marginal ally of the Congolese army. It has recently begun to retreat in the face of popular discontent and accusations of being in cahoots with the FDLR, to which it is indirectly linked because of its support to Kinshasa. The peacekeepers of the East African Community, on the other hand, spent nearly a year overseeing a shaky ceasefire in 2023 before being dismissed by Kinshasa for not fighting the M23. Now, an incoming regional force, under the auspices of the South African Development Community, is viewed as hostile and partisan by both the M23 and Rwanda. It is unlikely to fare better than its predecessors.

Two major African peace initiatives – the Nairobi peace process, which brought together the Congolese armed groups except the M23; and the African Union-sponsored Luanda roadmap, aimed at mediating between Kigali and Kinshasa – have so far had little impact. The Nairobi talks were little more than a pathway to reorganizing the armed groups as government proxies, while the Luanda roadmap became a forum for Rwanda and DRC to accuse each other of violating past commitments.

Although various countries have condemned Rwanda’s support for the M23 and its military deployments into the DRC, as well as Kinshasa’s use of armed proxies, international engagement with the crisis has been sparse and erratic. Global powers still see it as a marginal issue. This has fuelled accusations of partiality – whether it is pro-Rwanda voices emphasising Western complicity in the genocide, or pro-DRC ones stressing Anglo-Saxon support for Rwanda-backed rebellions. The result is a legitimate and deep-seated resentment towards the West, which has been exacerbated by constant diplomatic mishaps. In February 2024, the EU signed a memorandum of understanding on sustainable mineral trade with Rwanda, which has long been accused of benefitting from illegal mineral exports from eastern DRC. After vociferous protests, the Europeans backpaddled and issued a statement in which they tried to strike a balance between condemnation of Rwanda and the DRC.

Much ink has been spilled on identifying the prime mover of the conflict. Millions have been spent on ambitious peace programmes, often focusing on tropes about ‘ethnic violence’ or ‘greed for resources’, and assuming that that the various parties act according to what Westerners presume to be their ‘rational interests’. Across diplomacy, academia and activism, there are competing theories of where to place the blame: Rwandan interference, DRC’s governance problems, international intervention, transnational trade networks, the multiplicity of armed groups. Attempts to strike a balance in apportioning responsibility, meanwhile, are often met with accusations of moral equivalence. Supporters of Rwanda claim that, given its roots in the genocide, the FDLR cannot be equated with any of the conflict’s other actors; it is in a moral league of its own. Supporters of Kinshasa argue that singling out the FDLR is a veiled justification for Rwanda’s incursions into the eastern DRC.

This creates a cascade of moral problems. To survivors of the Rwandan genocide, the FDLR still has the same extremist anti-Tutsi ideology and therefore poses a continuing threat. Yet from a Congolese perspective, the FDLR is a shadow of its former self which no longer has the capacity for violence on the same scale, and its presence has now become a pretext for recurrent Rwandan aggression. Both these positions are understandable. The aim should be to create a dialogue between them, but in present conditions this seems almost impossible. It is difficult to find agreement on even the most basic facts of the conflict, since they are increasingly weaponized to suit the narratives of either side. The infamous UN mapping report – an inventory of crimes committed in eastern DRC between 1993 and 2003 – is a case in point. Over 500 pages, it compiles an extensive list of abuses committed by all warring parties; but is often selectively cited to assign sole responsibility to certain actors and exonerate others. This has compromised attempts to understand this intractable crisis along with efforts to resolve it.

The absence of honest peace efforts and the recent radicalisation of the conflict – both militarily and discursively – have damaged the social fabric of the eastern DRC. As many told me during a recent stay in North Kivu, the political polarisation has become so acute that any attempt to take an impartial stance is seen as giving ‘support to the enemy’. As of this month, Goma is now isolated from the rest of the country, with the M23 in control of large parts of North Kivu. The Congolese army is using its proxies to mount continual counter-offensives, resulting in additional displacement. Diplomatic efforts are stuck, as each side is entrenched in its maximalist positions. Kinshasa insists on an unconditional withdrawal of the M23 and Rwandan troops, while Kigali demands an immediate end to the collaboration with FDLR and warns against outside intervention. Against this backdrop, the current escalation seems increasingly reminiscent of the turmoil and regional conflagration of the 1990s.

Read on: Joe Trapido, ‘Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power’, NLR 98.

 

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L’Europe profonde

I realise that agricultural policy rarely sets hearts and minds racing. But the recent farmers’ protests in Europe provide fundamental lessons in contemporary political science. Their significance rests not only on the fact that they constitute one of the rare victorious protests of recent decades. Nor that the protesters represent one of the most protected classes on the planet (and perhaps the two are not unconnected). Nor because the victory consisted in reasserting their right to poison water, land and air (and perhaps the three are connected). Nor even because of the extraordinary submissiveness and munificence of both national governments and the European Union­ (and are these four things not connected?). The lessons go far beyond that. But let’s start with the facts.

The recent outbreak of farmers’ protests began in Germany on 18 December, when 8,000 to 10,000 demonstrators and at least 3,000 tractors descended on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Demonstrations continued in the capital and spread throughout the country in the weeks that followed, by which time French farmers were also in revolt, proclaiming a ‘siege of Paris’ on 29 January and blocking its motorways. Similar protests broke out across ten other EU countries, including Spain, Czechia, Romania, Italy and Greece. The initial unrest was triggered by Germany’s Constitutional Court, which had forbidden the governing ‘traffic light’ coalition from using unallocated Covid-19 funds to balance its budget. Forced to look elsewhere, the government curtailed subsidies and introduced new taxes affecting agricultural motor vehicles and diesel.

Hence the revolt of the farmers, who added further items to their cahier de doléances. This included the EU measure excluding those who do not set aside 4% of their land each year from subsidies. It should be noted that this is only a tentative first step towards allowing the land to recover and giving it some relief from nitrogenous fertilisers which, when released into the air, contribute 310 times more than carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect (4% of all soil does not seem like much of a sacrifice to prevent it from deteriorating completely). The farmers also joined with their Polish confrères who have been protesting for a year against the tax-free import of Ukrainian agricultural products (wheat, maize, rape, poultry, eggs), in a dispute that complicates official narratives of unshakeable European solidarity with the war effort.

The protests thereby took on an anti-EU character, which is rather surprising in light of the figures. For the EU allocates more than a third of its total budget (€58.3 billion out of a total €169.5 billion in 2022) to farmers, though they produce only 2.5% of the Union’s GDP and represent only 4% of European workers (and actually much less in the large producing countries – France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands – because a third reside in Romania alone). German farmers receive around €7 billion from the EU as well as €2.4 billion from the German federal state. The protests are all the more astonishing when one considers average net profits: €115,400 for the 2022/23 crop year, marking an 45% increase over the previous one. Producers of fodder for livestock farming did especially well, with more than €143,000, while arable farmers made an average of €120,000. The farmers are therefore protesting after a record year of profits.

European farmers have now been a protected class for more than sixty years, following the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 1962. Initially, this protection (import barriers, tax relief, subsidies, and guaranteed prices in the first decades) made electoral and political sense, as farmers still represented 29% of the population in Italy and 17% in France (to give two examples); but today, dedicating a third of EU resources to less than a twentieth of the population seems highly questionable. This is all the more true when one takes into account the evolution of the CAP. In the beginning it was based on centralised price support: products were bought by Brussels when their price fell below a threshold, and were then resold or simply destroyed. This method had several shortcomings: it stimulated overproduction, particularly of milk, fruit and cereals. In the 1980s, millions of tonnes of agricultural commodities were wasted. Moreover, because production was higher on large farms, agribusiness giants received the lion’s share of subsidies and relief.

With the neoliberal wave, however, centralised price intervention was reduced and management delegated largely to individual member states. The result is that subsidies, tax exemptions and incentives are fragmented into a jungle of local measures – a form of bureaucratic, computerised clientelism. The EU’s agricultural policy provoked criticism from non-EU countries which argued against the impenetrability of ‘fortress Europe’ for their agricultural industries, and also from Germany – a country dedicated to exports which found it an obstacle for trade agreements beyond Europe. It was also noted that even countries which benefit most from the policy, such as France (which receives €9.4 billion in contributions), pay more to the EU than they receive (the benefit lies elsewhere: in the free movement of goods and capital).

To grasp the dynamics of these protests, one must turn to their recent protype: the rebellion of the Dutch farmers over the past five years. Holland is the EU country with the most intensive agriculture industry. On an area of only 42,000 square kilometres (one sixth that of the United Kingdom), it raises 47 million chickens, 11.28 million pigs, 3.8 million cattle, as well as 660,00 sheep (the total human population is 17.5 million). France, on an area 15 times larger, raises the same number of pigs and only four times as many cattle. A country as small as the Netherlands is thus the second largest agricultural exporter in the world ($79 billion) behind the USA ($118 billion, over an area 250 times larger) and ahead of Germany ($79 billion, over an area nine times larger).

No wonder, then, that in 2019 the Dutch Institute of Public Health issued a warning about the ecological effects of livestock farming, showing that is responsible for 46% of nitrogen emissions (to feed livestock, the Netherlands has to import huge quantities of nitrogenous feed, on top of the nitrogenous compounds produced by the animals themselves), plus serious and irreversible damage to the soil. This can only be stopped by reducing the quantity of livestock reared; so, in response to these findings, the centre-right coalition government proposed a law to halve the overall number. The farmers’ reaction was swift: tractors advanced on The Hague, inaugurating almost four years of highly visible, sometimes violent protests, paralysing motorways and halting canal traffic. Soon, these protests were imitated in Berlin, Brussels and Milan. Farmers in the Netherlands make up only 1.5% of the population, but in March last year the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) won almost 20% of the vote and 15 out of 75 seats in the Senate, before collapsing in November’s early parliamentary elections to 4.65% and 7 seats in the House of Representatives.

Dutch governments (of whatever composition) are generally disliked by many EU countries for being the standard bearer of the ‘frugal states’, always ready to second the German Central Bank in its ordoliberal Strafexpeditionen. But it must be said that, although they eventually gave in, the governments showed much more backbone on the nitrogen issue than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe or even Brussels itself. This winter, faced with the threatening columns of tractors, the European Commission immediately folded on the fallow land ordinance. Instead of letting 4% of the land go unused, farmers will now be able to grow plants that ‘fix’ nitrogen in the soil such as ‘lentils or peas’. And national governments, starting with Germany, have withdrawn the tax on diesel fuel for agricultural use. There is now talk of new subsidies for the sector.

It is instructive to compare these reactions to those which met the gilets jaunes uprising in France. The trigger for the protests was similar: refusal to be burdened with the costs of ecological measures, in this case a rise in the price of road fuels. While the farmers’ demonstrations have never numbered more than ten thousand, and those involved has not exceeded a hundred thousand overall, the first gilets jaunes action on 17 November 2018 involved 287,710 protesters throughout France (this is according to the French Ministry of the Interior; there were likely many more). At least three million people took part in the movement over four months.

Police repression against the gilets jaunes was extremely violent; 2,500 protesters and 1,800 officers were injured in the clashes. An average of 1,800 people were detained every week; 8,645 were arrested and 2,000 sentenced, 40% of them to prison terms. By contrast, in the case of the recent French farmers protests I was able to find evidence of 91 detentions on 31 January and 6 at the Agricultural Fair on 24 February, where 8 policemen were slightly injured. During the ‘siege of Paris’ very few water cannons were used. The mildness of response was matched by other European police forces, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek and so on.

This leads to a second decisive difference between the two movements: the European dimension. It may come as a surprise that among the subaltern classes, the social group considered most archaic and most traditionalist is the first to develop a transnational character. Perhaps only the student movement of the 1960s managed to achieve something equivalent, with their actions spreading from capital to capital. It makes one reflect that the free movement of capital and labour did not produce a free movement of movements, with the exception of the farmers. After sixty years of the EU, the trade unions still stubbornly refuse to pursue actions on a continental level (it must be said that they feel absolutely no push from their bases in this direction). After decades of the Erasmus programme, we have yet to see a new student movement with a European dimension.

Even more striking is that this class is the only one capable of defending its interests effectively today. It has done so combatively throughout the last century. Take France: in 1907 in Languedoc and Roussillon farmers revolted against wine imports, and an entire department mutinied in solidarity, until they were eventually bloodily repressed by the army; in 1933 farmers invaded a prefecture for the first time; between 1957 and 1967 they fought the ‘artichoke war’; in 1961 the ‘potato war’ broke out, and in 1976 there were yet more gunfights and barricades. In 1972 flocks of sheep invaded the Champ de Mars in Paris and the cavalry officers’ ball was interrupted by a swarm of bees; in 1982 agriculture minister Edith Cresson was blockaded by farmers and had to flee by helicopter; in 1990 the Champs Elysées was covered in wheat grains; the minister’s office was ransacked in 1999; French president François Hollande was roughed up at the 2016 Agricultural Show.

In a paradox that would make Marx turn in his grave, it could be said that today the peasants, not the workers, are the only class that is internationalist in practice, precisely because they are chauvinist in ideology. As a social coalition, the gilets jaunes represented what Christophe Guilly called ‘La France périphérique’; the farmers by contrast could be said to represent ‘l’Europe profonde’. There is a world of difference between the two concepts: the former is marginal, outlying, the latter is fundamental, essential to the soul of the nation. Land is probably the most conservative concept ever developed. I remember once being in a vegetable shop in Greece and overhearing a customer ask the clerk for reassurance: ‘Are these potatoes Greek?’ There is the peculiar idea that if a fruit or plant comes from your land, then it is more genuine, less adulterated. It is no coincidence that the Italian premier Georgia Meloni is now weaponizing food in her nationalist identity offensive.

This helps to unravel at least some of the enigmas raised by the farmers’ protests of recent months. Instead of the classical alliance between workers and peasants proposed by Lenin, are we witnessing the formation of a new historic bloc? With tractors, combine harvesters and all the other machinery, the technological revolution wiped out the peasant masses Lenin was describing. Today’s peasants (at least those who have been protesting in Europe in recent months, and certainly not the labourers – often immigrants, even more often illegal ones – who work in their fields) are small landowners, similar to independent truck drivers, the small self-exploiting capitalists described by the Italian sociologist Sergio Bologna (one cannot help but remember the independent Chilean truck drivers who contributed so much to the fall of Salvador Allende).

Along with nutritional sustenance, peasants provide global capitalism with ideological support. This abstract financial system needs to anchor itself deep in our psyches in order to effectively govern at the level of the nation-state. Capital’s political representatives do not need farmers’ votes, nor their economic output, as much as they need the ‘imagined community’ that is created around the potato, the grape or the white asparagus. A representative of Dutch farmers remarked in 2019, ‘If there will soon be no more farmers, don’t say “wir haben es nicht gewusst”’. That he was unafraid of ridicule in making a comparison with the Holocaust is an indication of how far symbolic investment in the figure of the farmer can go.

What we are witnessing is therefore not a class alliance: the interests of small agrarian owners do not converge with those of financial capital. Quite the contrary, as the latter strangles them with debt. Finance capital shares interests instead with the large distribution networks and agribusiness corporations whose profits harm the vast majority of ‘tractor drivers’. To imagine that small farmers are allied with the big agribusiness conglomerates is like saying that small carpenters’ shops have the same interests as Ikea. This explains why, though the class of small farmer-owners is on average the most protected, and one of the most affluent, a part of it experiences hardship and has every reason to protest. The hardship of the Dutch peasantry – to give just one example – is due to the vertical integration between the oil industry, the chemical industry, the machine industry and large-scale distribution, which has made Holland the world’s second largest agricultural exporter.

But whatever their struggles, the fact is that today’s peasants are all smallholders. The ideology of ownership finds its purest manifestation in land ownership. The gilets jaunes did not protest as owners; the tractor drivers did. While sympathy from parts of the population is on grounds of identity, the indulgence of capital it is sympathy for a proprietary protest. Hence, a double attraction. The abandonment of environmentalist claims by governments (and also the idea of making consumers of fossil fuels pay for environmental conversion) reveals the ideological sway of ownership in contrast to that of the collective good.

In my book Masters, I posed a related problem: neoliberalism is an individualistic, atheistic, amoral ideology, based on the denial of any tradition, and on the idea of the human being as a behavioural tabula rasa. Yet why does neoliberalism constantly ally itself with religious fundamentalism, a communitarian, traditionalist, moralist ideology? The German neoliberals already provided the answer when they said that you cannot ask more from competition than what it is able to give. Competition is divisive, and therefore the system requires other components that can hold the social fabric together. For the neoliberal order, peasants are to society as religious fundamentalists are to ideology: remnants of the past, yet indispensable elements of identity cohesion. In the age of artificial intelligence, our rulers will make us fight for the European potato.

Read on: Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The French Insurgency’, NLR 116/117.

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In Cologne

That morning, on the weekend’s first flight from Heathrow the only other passengers are a dozen silent Rhineland businessmen, raising their coffee cups in greeting as they shuffle down the aisle. The transition from England to Germany is disturbingly seamless: at each end the same clean terminal corridors, the same overcast skies; only a shift in train moquette, Piccadilly blue to S-Bahn red, confirms arrival. Nine years ago, at the height of the refugee crisis, German stations were guarded by droves of heavily armed police. Now small khaki groups of soldiers mill around the ticket hall, chatting, scrolling, sipping Cokes. On exiting the Hauptbahnhof, the cathedral is too huge and too close to fit into one’s field of vision. It sits in the middle of the station forecourt, as if hastily dropped there. On its southern transept, the Gerhard Richter window, a derivation of his 4096 Farben painting: 11,500 coloured glass squares – ‘pixels’ – ordered by random number generator, then tweaked to avoid any suggestion of meaning.  

On the walk to Matthias Groebel’s studio, through the low-rise city centre, the sense of immanent Germanness deepens: long past their widespread disappearance in England, small independent shops of single purpose stagger on here under smart mid-century signs. The lettering of Elektronik van der Meyen is bright bee yellow; Top Service Reisebüro boasts a clean cobalt type; Boxspringbetten promises, in chirpy burgundy cursive, that you will ‘mehr als nur gut schlafen!’ From the direction of the river there’s the sound of a protest; I walk towards it and am, naively, astonished to see such numbers on German streets for Palestine. But it’s the red-white-green of Kurdish flags they’re waving, alongside banners bearing the face of Abdullah Öcalan – a proscribed image in a country where the PKK has long been banned. The crowd is mostly young men, escorted over the Rhine by black-clad members of the Bereitschaftspolizei.  

‘Wider brush, more colour’. I’m on my haunches by the tank, peering at the machine. ‘Narrower – less’. Matthias puckers, mimes a nozzle spitting out a delicate drop of paint. In the centre of the cool-lit studio is a small booth with a computer, walled in with piles of papers and books, an antique set of stereoscopic lenses; a few small bottles of acrylic ink indicate what is produced here, but there are neither brushes nor palettes, not a single mark or stain on the whitewashed concrete walls. We are looking through two panes of glass at a mechanical painting device. I am here to view the images this machine creates; something happens when you do, a friend has told me, that can’t be reproduced in photos.  

‘An artist has every right to turn around.’  

‘Something changes in the world, something changes in how we see.’  

‘Photos fade, a hard drive collapses, tapes rot, a WhatsApp message once took a fucking day to arrive – painting functions in different time.’

Matthias speaks in slogans, like he’s composing a manifesto on the spot. Offence as defence by a painter who trained and worked as a pharmacist – a painter who doesn’t paint. His practice is, has always been, unusual, taking images from analogue video stills, converting them via homemade software into digital information – pixels – that his painting machine then applies to canvas (an apparent automation which is, as Moritz Scheper has written, full ‘of artistic decisions’). The machine is a ship of Theseus, its parts continually replaced, removed and recalibrated over thirty-odd years. Today it is a contraption of chrome tubes, silver springs, slithers of wire and gaffa tape, bike chains and bolts soldered together and perched on rails, shoebox in size. Its first form comprised parts adapted from a Fishertechnik toy drawing set and electrical debris scavenged from Westphalian junk yards. Put together in the early 1980s, before any analogous commercial process had been developed, its assembly was a matter of skill, obstinacy and persuasion: You’ll never get an electrician to wire it up for you, warned one mechanic. Good luck finding a mechanic who can put that together, cautioned an electrician. ‘I left them to it’, Matthias says, shrugging, ‘and in the end it worked.’ 

The paintings I’m here to see are of a single building in Whitechapel, the Rowland Tower House. Made in 2006, they represent a shift in Matthias’s approach which he divides (slicing the air with his hands) into two rough periods: from 1989 – 2000 he used images taken from satellite TV, which arrived in Germany in 1984. At first there were only two stations: Programmgesellschaft für Kabel- und Satellitenrundfunk and Radio Télévision Luxembourg; PKS and RTL, the country’s first private TV channels, both specialising in endless repeats of American chat and game shows, padded out with ad hoc local programming to fill the yawning pit of 24/7 broadcasting. The need for footage of anyone doing anything fostered an anarchic attitude among producers; Matthias was drawn to anonymous faces caught off guard, at awkward angles and in lo-res close ups, which, paused, he used as the source material for early works. But TV got too predictable, or rather, ways of being on TV became too predictable. People stopped acting normally weird and started acting weirdly normal – like they were on screen. They pulled faces and posed. They anticipated the shot. The images Matthias was looking for vanished. So, from 2000 onwards, he started making his own tapes. ‘I always used cheap tech’. He picks up a Canon video camera onto which he’s grafted a two-mirrored lens as a viewfinder. ‘No need for grants that way – no need to explain yourself.’  

A lurch of nausea, a rush of adrenaline, a front of pressure in the brow. Something happening that your body can’t understand. Six paintings, each with its own internal duplication, of video stills of the shuttered and boarded Tower House. On the left, the building is in a dilapidated state but uncovered, on the third and lowest canvas two elderly men in kurtas and skull caps walk towards the image’s edge, then do so again. On the right, the same sections of building, now covered in tarpaulin, scaffolding, adverts for the property developers who are gutting and selling this former doss house, a model of Victorian industrial philanthropy, in which Stalin, Orwell and Jack London all stayed, as well as thousands of anonymous working men.  

The effect is astonishing. Somehow – Matthias himself cannot explain it – there is depth in the canvas, not the flatness of a Magic Eye nor the pointed jabbing of a 3D movie, but textural latent space. The tarp over the building flattens and bulges as if the windows have inhaled, the poles of the scaffolding protrude and hang, retreating into the walls, the cornicing of the gated entrance might crack and fall in front of you. In another painting, from the same series, a girl in a hijab and long skirt twirls in front of a young boy who is about to walk through a wall. Matthias’s paintings are often referred to as ‘ghosts’. Before visiting, I thought this was a description of the figures within them, but I was wrong  (‘your eyes adjust to the depth of the frame at the wrong speed’ I write down ‘not too fast, not too slow, but wrong.’) A few years ago, the poet Timothy Thornton, wrote that ‘ghosts are people who remind people of nobody.’ But these aren’t paintings of ghosts; better to call them ‘ghost paintings’. Something awry, misplaced, there where it isn’t, caught on canvas but missing, an absence without a gap.  

Over dinner with Matthias’s family that evening, in their warm kitchen (the windows steamed from cooking, a cage of chattering budgies by the door, books and clothes and cushions scattered in just-orderly piles) we all forget the word for the animal we’re eating. Sophia, his wife, mimes antlers, Matthias cries ‘Hirsche!’, I yell ‘deer!’ and the table bursts out laughing at this impromptu game of charades. We finish our venison stew and I’m handed a pair of silver goggles to try on, each lens a kaleidoscope. Everyone doubles, blushes eight different shades of pink. Now in the cage behind me there are hundreds and hundreds of birds. 

Cologne’s art scene has cycled through boom, bust and back to modest boom again, Matthias and Sophia explain. Site of Dada’s formation in 1919, home of the storied Kunstverein and the first art fair in 1967, at the end of the 1980s openings had crowds queuing down the street: women decked out in furs, limos crawling towards the galleries. When the wall fell, the artists decamped, as a flock, to Berlin; rising costs in the capital had lately brought some back but gone were the days of David Zwirner cycling around town waving hello to painters, collectors, friends.  

What is a ghost? I ask Matthias before I leave. He answers without missing a beat: ‘a ghost is information out of place’.  

Back in London, a few days later, a friend shows me around the theatre where he works. We sit in the stalls to catch up; I tell him about my trip and ask if he’s ever seen a ghost. Not personally, he says, but recounts a story about his colleague, B., who has been known to take naps in the flies. One day, B. woke up and knew, immediately and certainly, that there were people on stage. There was no one there, of course, but nevertheless there they were. Information where it isn’t; something stuck in transmission – there in that gap between pixels and paint. 

17 – 18 February, 2024 

Read on: Julian Stallabrass, ‘Radical Camouflage‘, NLR 77.