Author: Lola Seaton

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Speak, Geology

The world of the German author Esther Kinsky is the world after Babel. The Biblical story goes like this: once, the people of the world had a single language. They found an empty plain and, having worked out how to bake clay into bricks, decided to build a tower in order to reach the heavens – ‘otherwise’, they feared, ‘we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth’. When God comes to punish them, this is exactly what happens. The tower goes unbuilt, the universal language vanishes. Kinsky, who began her literary career as a translator of Polish, English and Russian, invokes Babel in her book-length essay Fremdsprechen (2013), a manifesto of sorts that sets out her conception of what it means to exist between languages. It begins with an extended riff on the thwarting of the tower of Babel as humanity’s third collective punishment (after the expulsion from Eden and the Flood), one that condemned it to ‘difficulties of comprehension’, to language as a site of otherness.

Yet for Kinksy, the chasm between languages is not a bleak place, but rather a field of resonances, a ‘transit space’, a creative sound-zone. Everyone must face the complex reality of life after Babel; everyone, too, is capable of excavating their personal relationship to language, formed through the accumulation of layers of association and memory, which can be unearthed and probed as Kinsky herself does in a series of autobiographical fragments that conclude the book. Kinsky employs such geological terminology throughout Fremdsprechen: language is likened to clay, loam, bricks.

Language and discontinuity, geological excavation and reconstruction: these are themes that run through the triptych of novels that has made Kinksy’s name in the anglosphere. River (2017), Grove (2018) and now Rombo (2022) – the first translated by Iain Galbraith, the latter two by Caroline Schmidt – have tended to be received as nature writing. Yet Kinsky has rejected this rubric, and for good reason. Not only is her vision of the natural world far less pristine than that found in many of that genre’s naiver examples, but nature in her work is ultimately more of a charged setting than Kinsky’s main subject – a device, or metaphorical resource. Her interest is not in geology itself, but in the geological workings of memory, while her central preoccupation is language – the ‘shapeable material’ of post-Babel Earth.

Kinsksy’s three Geländeromane (‘terrain-novels’) are formally experimental meditations on disturbance – at once geological, personal and linguistic. All are set in the aftermath of loss, and show their narrators trying to come to terms with change. In River, an unnamed narrator – about to leave town for good – wanders the ‘partly mutilated’ mudscapes of east London’s lower Lea Valley, recording what she sees with both photographs and words, journeying into the ‘lower reaches’ of memory:

Hidden in the middle of the large Hackney Marshes Playing Fields, as in the depths of the instant pictures I had taken with my bulky camera, were memories I was only gradually learning to read: the steady drone of an invisible plane above the white cloud cover, chirring pylons lisping messages from the air, the wispy rustling of pale winter grass in the wind, and between it all a stillness that masked the proximity of the city.

Grove, written in the wake of the death of Kinsky’s husband, the translator Martin Chalmers, sees a recently widowed woman move to a small Italian town southeast of Rome; her fragmented, memory-suffused relections on the land and her place in it produce a teetering superimposition of images. Kinsky’s investigation into what she calls ‘disturbed terrain’ finds perhaps its most literal expression in Rombo, about the series of earthquakes that rocked Friuli in northern Italy in 1976, killing around a thousand people, with countless more displaced.

The cataclysm is reconstructed through the fragmentary accounts of several fictional eyewitnesses; this collective narrative is interspersed with a narrator’s intricate descriptions of Friuli’s ecology and landscape, its local flora and fauna:

Up the Rio Nero, the terrain is always wild. The path is forever being shifted by fresh rock falls and descending scree – a terrain of interference in the tenor of events. The scent of resin sits above the sunny barren land, where dwarf pines brace themselves between chunks of rock – the trees so small one might be quicker to attribute to the stones their scent. Beside the pine saplings junipers take root, small bell flowers, heather on blown-in soil.

There are also detailed accounts of Friulian culture and folk customs, including a traditional song dedicated to the mermaid Riba Faronika – sung while undulating one’s hands in front of one’s chest – and the bile maškire performance, which takes pride of place in the region’s carnivals:

The men and women who masquerade in white all wear the same costume: a long white skirt adorned with colourful cording, a white shirt and a colourful belt. On their heads, a prodigious bonnet, bedecked with colourful paper flowers. Some bonnets dangle colourful ribbons that hide one’s face; all roaming strangers by no account recognizable, white as the limestone mountains and not-white as the flowers from the interglacial period that managed to salvage themselves, whiling in the cracks of the limestone peak that towered over the glacier.

As in the story of Babel, the disorienting fallout from the earthquake is social, cultural, linguistic. ‘An earthquake rattles everything and turns it upside down, even the thoughts in your head’, one local observes. ‘My life is this place’, says another. ‘Here I know everything. Every stick and every stone. The animals and the people.’ But then suddenly she doesn’t. Amid the rubble, it is not only the roads and pathways that are thrown into confusion; folktales and social bonds stop making sense too. ‘Work, the neighbourhood, the animals, music – all that was now divided into the before and after’, one resident says. Many families leave the region, never to return. The village cemetery has fallen into disarray. Displaced former locals who have decamped to nearby coastal towns look out towards the sea – the legendary home of the mermaid Riba Faronika: ‘But they said nothing about it, not even to one another, and they didn’t sing either, not even quietly, because it was too late for that – and even had they hummed, out of homesickness or simply from memory, never would they have moved their hands up and down before their breast, imitating a wave or a snake: not here, beneath this endless sky and in the presence of the horizon.’

While River had a looping, forking structure and Grove imitated its photographic leitmotif by layering – or superimposing – different exposures of its subject matter, Rombo’s snatches of memory and information overlap, diverge and rub against each other like tectonic plates. River and Grove were each narrated by a single coherent persona, whereas Rombo’s fractured chorus of voices dramatizes the ruptures created by the trauma of the earthquake. Together, the eyewitness accounts produce a kind of shifting mosaic – one might call it ‘rubble narration’ – which tries to convey the catastrophe, and the community it destroyed, while stranded irredeemably in the aftermath.

As an act of critical reconstruction, one might compare Kinksy’s approach to kitsugi pottery, or to the chunks of ruin and graffiti preserved in Berlin’s rebuilt Reichstag. The cracks are the highlight; the conspicuousness of the commemorative effort is the point. Kinsky’s descriptive exertion – although occasionally wearing in its attention to esoteric detail – is similarly paramount. It is a method for refusing oblivion. In each novel, dislocations of self and setting initiate a process of reorientation. ‘Memory’, one Friulian local says, ‘is something that is being forever woven.’ After the first earthquake, the residents find themselves arguing about what happened:

One argued over the form of the cliffs, the course of the brooks, the trees that avalanches rolled over. About the whereabouts of objects, the order of things in the house, the fate of animals. Each of these arguments was an attempt at orientation, at carving a path through the rubble of masonry, mortar, split beams and shattered dishes, to understand the world anew. To begin living in a place anew. With one’s memories.

In the New Testament, Jesus says that if people keep silent, the stones themselves will speak. Kinsky’s fiction is full of articulate, evocative stones: bits of brickwork in River; the Ravenna mosaics in Grove; Rombo’s twisted geological layers. But can stones be made to speak of absence, of loss? In Rombo, the loss in question is not just that of 1976. The novel, after all, is not titled Sisma – Italian for earthquake; Rombo is rather the local term for the subterranean growling that comes before seismic activity. ‘The earthquake is everywhere’, our narrator observes. ‘In the mountains’, says one local, ‘something is always shifting’. The narrator offers various theories about the kinds of tectonic activity that cause such disasters; they also note that Friuli is home to some of the deepest cavities on Earth:

What constitutes a cavity? Is it the absence of stone, soil, light – or the presence of walls enclosing it? The darkness within or the light without? When does can’t remember become forgotten, after all? In the early days of geology there was a science of abyssology. A theory of shafts, chasms, voids where forgotten things lie trapped, like tonsil stones. Things lost.

For Kinsky, nature ultimately provides no escape from loss, no solace or release from human tragedy (it is sometimes, as with the earthquake, the cause of it). What it may offer, however, is the possibility of coming to terms with this absence-filled world. Kinsky’s nature is never quite cruel, but it is utterly indifferent to humans’ emotional claims. As she once remarked in an interview: a landscape ‘touches our heart, but doesn’t itself have a heart’. Yet her strikingly unsentimental novels seem to suggest that to attend to the natural world, in all its icy, violent otherness, is to begin to find ourselves a place in it.

Read on: Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Rural Sensualist’, Sidecar.

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Blasted Sea

On 1 August in north-east Scotland, midway through the hottest summer yet, two sets of microphones were recording. One was trained on UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as he stood outside a Shell-owned gas processing terminal at Scotland’s easternmost tip, unveiling a plan to authorise 100 new licences to drill for fossil fuel in the North Sea. Some distance off the coast – and far from any media attention – a second set of microphones was being dragged through the water. Under the command of Texas-based geophysics company SAExploration, they were being used to survey the seafloor, searching for the fossil fuels that might lie beneath.

Such surveys are part of a booming industry. The latest IPCC report made it clear that no new fossil fuel projects can be initiated if we are to avoid catastrophic global heating. Yet according to Offshore Magazine, a trade publication for offshore fossil fuel exploration, ‘the future is looking bright’. The sector is expected to expand by 14% this year alone. Major offshore explorations are underway in the waters of Argentina, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Colombia, Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the United States. This expansion is driven in part by disruptions from the war in Ukraine, new technological developments and an industry buoyed by inflated profits and keen to defend and extend its position. The quest for offshore fuel is also propelled by growing scarcity. Much of the ‘conventional’ supply of oil and gas is already over-exploited, forcing mining companies to go to greater lengths.

Tapping ‘unconventional’ deposits requires advanced technology. Before an offshore oil or gas well can be sunk, the area needs to be mapped, and the most accurate way to do that is via a process called ‘seismic exploration’. This involves a ship slowly traversing the ‘acquisition area’ – industry jargon for the place being mapped – trailing pneumatic guns and microphones behind it, sometimes on 10km-long lines. The air-guns fire regular sound blasts into the water; the microphones record the echo bouncing back from the seafloor. To penetrate the sub-seafloor, where oil and gas may be found, the blasts have to be extremely loud. At an unimaginable 240 decibels, they are among the loudest sounds humans can produce. For comparison: these are louder than the sound produced by the explosion of an atomic bomb. To map the acquisition area, hundreds of thousands of such blasts are required. The guns fire every ten seconds, 24 hours a day, for months on end. At this rate the number of blasts adds up quickly. By the time of Sunak’s announcement, SAExploration’s vessel in the North Sea would have fired off almost one million blasts over the first 108 days of its mission.

One marine biologist-turned-whistleblower, disturbed by the possible ecological impacts of this practice, recently described her time aboard a seismic exploration ship that was working off the coast of Australia. She was given a pair of binoculars and tasked with keeping an eye out for whales; if the crew had visual confirmation of specific types of whales, they would temporarily pause the blasting. But this safeguard was limited, not only because the pneumatic guns were being dragged 10km behind the ship – near or beyond the horizon – but also because the blasts continue through the night when no observer is on duty.

The blasts are no doubt keenly heard by cetaceans – dolphins and whales – who experience sound in distinctive and complex ways (they are able to ‘see’ and feel with sound). Humans can hear frequencies between 20 and 20,000 hertz (Hz); Bottlenose dolphins can hear up to 160,000 Hz. They use their ultra-precise hearing to locate food, to navigate and to communicate. Hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb-volume blasts ripping through their habitat is likely to affect their senses in ways we cannot understand. It is an act of phenomenal violence. What of the other inhabitants of the overfished, acidifying ocean? What happens when microorganisms are hit with a 240-decibel sound wave? The short answer is nobody knows; it hasn’t been adequately studied.

This lack of ecological research contrasts sharply with the level of technoscientific knowledge needed to transform the audio recording of the blasts echoing back from the seafloor into maps for fossil fuel companies. Processing these recordings is highly complicated, often requiring super-computers to crunch the geophysical data. The US-based multinational oil company ConocoPhillips, for example, has one of the world’s top supercomputers, a purpose-built 1000m2 machine that sits in a data facility in Houston. Much of its processing power is given over to turning seismic exploration data into maps. Such processes are central to the extraction industry – a fact that complicates the call to ‘follow the science’ with respect to climate change. Oil and gas companies are following the science – indeed, they are using the most advanced science available, and they are using it to extract even more fossil fuel.

Marine seismic surveys, according to Australia’s regulatory agency, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) (which ‘recognises climate change’), are undertaken not only to identify ‘potential oil and gas reservoirs below the seafloor’ but also ‘reservoirs suitable for storing waste carbon dioxide to prevent it from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change’. A discerning reader will note that these two purposes exist in different universes. The first is real and dangerous, a practice that needs to be halted immediately if the planet is to remain liveable. The second is, at best, a science fiction concocted by the fossil industry.

Seismic exploration is a telling manifestation of the technoscientific reorganisation of global capital. It embodies the central contradiction that has been with us since the first nuclear explosions which opened a new epoch of cybernetic capitalism. At the cutting-edge of science and using some of the world’s most powerful calculation engines, the technique is as rationalised as it gets. Yet the blasting of an atomic bomb of sound every ten seconds is belligerent in the extreme toward the oceanic ecosystems, while the aim of expanding the frontier of fossil fuel extraction at a time of increasingly acute climate crisis is nothing short of demented.

Herein lies a deeper problem: a society dedicated to endless growth is necessarily pushed towards meeting expanding energy requirements. Governments of all stripes, from greenwashing ‘pragmatists’, like Labor in Australia, to anti-greens like Sunak’s Tories – also claiming to be ‘pragmatic’ – are forced to intensify the quest for more energy and thus the drive towards technoscientific instrumentalisation. Cybernetic capitalism, compelled to seek new ‘smart’ ways to achieve endless expansion, leaves behind a blasted sea and a boiling sky.

Read on: Timothy Erik Ström, ‘Capital and Cybernetics’, NLR 135.

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Living Together

In a 1977 lecture at the Collège de France, later published in How to Live Together, Roland Barthes explored a ‘fantasy of a life, a regime, a lifestyle’ that was neither reclusive nor communal: ‘Something like solitude with regular interruptions’. Inspired by the monks of Mount Athos, Barthes proposed to call this mode of living together idiorrhythmy, from the Greek idios (one’s own) and rythmos (rhythm). ‘Fantasmatically speaking’, he says, ‘there is nothing contradictory about wanting to live alone and wanting to live together’. In idiorrhythmic communities, ‘each subject lives according to his own rhythm’ while still being ‘in contact with one another within a particular type of structure’.

Although in Barthes’ view this unregimented lifestyle would be the exact opposite of ‘the fundamental inhumanity of Fourier’s Phalanstery with its timing of each and every quarter hour’, his vision is similarly utopian. But whereas Fourier proposed a plan for an organized, enclosed community, Barthes was not so much sketching a model as seeking to define a zone between two extreme forms of living: ‘an excessively negative form: solitude, eremitism’ and ‘an excessively assimilative form: the convent or monastery’. Idiorrhythmy is thus ‘a median, utopian, Edenic, idyllic form’: a ‘utopia of a socialism of distance’. In this middle way between living alone and with others, the interplay between individuals is so light and subtle that it allows each to escape the diktat of heterorhythmy, where one must submit to power and conform to an alien rhythm imposed from outside.

Barthes’ fantasy has considerable relevance for eco-socialist visions today. The aporia he identifies – between solitude and sociality, autonomy and coordination – has parallels in the conflicts animating the ongoing argument between degrowth and advocates of a Green New Deal or its equivalents. Impelled by the intensification of the ecological crisis, the disarray of mainstream thinking and the buoyancy of the climate movement, the debate has become one of the liveliest on the left intellectual scene.

A key area of disagreement concerns the problem of technology and scale. For ‘eco-modernists’ like Matthew Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War (2022), in order to green our societies and abolish global poverty, ‘a massive social effort of public investment and planning’ is required to accelerate technical progress: ‘solving climate change requires massive development of the productive forces’. As Huber wrote on Sidecar last year, ‘solving climate change requires new social relations of production that would develop the productive forces toward clean production’. In this traditional Marxist perspective, socialist planning – new social relations of production – would allow us to deploy technological solutions currently fettered by the capitalist hunt for profits.

The Japanese philosopher Kōhei Saitō, by contrast, takes a less sanguine view of the eco-socialist potential of technological advance. According to his reading of Marx, laid out in Marx in the Anthropocene (2023), the productive forces eco-socialists would inherit are the ‘productive forces of capital’: their technological content is indissociable from capitalist relations of production. More troubling, in Saitō’s interpretation, capital’s domination over labour is not just a matter of ownership, but results from the growing socialization of production: ‘capital organizes cooperation in the labour process in such a way that individual workers can no longer conduct their tasks alone and autonomously, but are subjugated to the command of capital.’ Saitō concludes that the ‘productive forces of capital cannot be properly transferred to post-capitalism because they are created in order to subjugate and control workers’. Capitalist technology ‘eliminates the possibilities of imagining a completely different lifestyle’. According to his degrowth vision, ‘the abolition of the despotic regime of capital may even require the downscaling of production.’

Both Huber and Saitō make important, perceptive arguments about the ecological transition toward socialism, though their positions in many respects mark opposite poles on the spectrum of left theorizing about the climate crisis. Each view has limitations. While the first involves a reckless act of faith in the wisdom and agility of a future socialist leadership to deal with capitalist’s technological legacy, the second overlooks the fact that the abandonment of ‘the productive forces of capital’ and the scaling down of production would result in a de-specialization of productive activity, leading to a dramatic reduction in the productivity of labour and, ultimately, a plunge in living standards. If the potential price of the eco-modernist embrace of technological development is human alienation and techno-capitalist reification, the likely cost of the degrowth rejection of it is austerity and impoverishment.

So, just as the problem of idiorrhythmy was for Barthes ‘the tension between power and marginality’ – between excessive regulation and excessive isolation – the strategic task for eco-socialists is to define a space equidistant from the promethean excesses of eco-modernism and the ascetic excesses of degrowth communism, even if the tension may not finally be resolvable. Fantasmatically speaking, as Barthes might say, there is nothing contradictory about wanting to enjoy the riches of a technologically advanced society and wanting to develop oneself in harmony with nature. Rather than choosing between acceleration and downscaling, ecosocialism should attempt to strike a balance between these alternatives. The reification of the productive forces inherited from capital and some degree of alienation in the labour process should be tolerated only to the extent that they are put to democratically legitimate ends through planning, in order to stabilize the climate and fulfil human needs.

Once this median course is accepted as a matter of principle, the truly hard work for eco-socialists begins. The degrowth scholar Jason Hickel recently proposed a broad definition of the goals of ecosocialist (and anti-imperialist) transformation:

We must achieve democratic control over finance, production and innovation, as well as organize it around both social and ecological objectives. This requires securing and improving socially and ecologically necessary forms of production while reducing destructive and less-necessary output.

Hickel’s wording seems uncontentious, but defining our social and ecological objectives, and deciding which forms of production are necessary and which destructive, entails revolutionary change. As ecological-economist pioneer Karl William Kapp observed back in 1974:

The formulation of environmental policies, the evaluation of environmental goals and the establishment of priorities require a substantive economic calculus in terms of social use values (politically evaluated) for which the formal calculus in monetary exchange values fails to provide a real measure – not only in socialist societies but also in capitalist economies. Hence the ‘revolutionary’ aspect of the environmental issue both as a theoretical and a practical problem.

Barthes did not fully elaborate on the political implications of his ideas, but they were in his view of great importance. As he explains at the beginning of the lecture, the force of desire – the figure of fantasy – is at the origin of culture. Yet in the quest for an emancipatory balance between cooperation and autonomy – developing productive forces and transforming social relations – abstract speculation will be less important than paying close attention to our historical situation and real-world institutions. The power of fantasy is only as strong as the concrete visions it produces.

Read on: André Gorz, ‘Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation’, NLR I/202.

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Forecasting China?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman does not mince his words:

the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be.

That was in the summer of 2013. China’s GDP grew by 7.8 per cent that year. In the decade since, its economy has expanded by 70 per cent in real terms, compared to 21 per cent for the United States. China has not had a recession this century – by convention, two consecutive quarters of negative growth – let alone a ‘crash’. Yet every few years, the Anglophone financial media and its trail of investors, analysts and think-tankers are gripped by the belief that the Chinese economy is about to crater.

The conviction reared its head in the early 2000s, when runaway investment was thought to be ‘overheating’ the economy; in the late 2000s, when exports contracted in the wake of the global financial crisis; and in the mid-2010s, when it was feared that a buildup of local government debt, under-regulated shadow banking and capital outflows threatened China’s entire economic edifice. Today, dire predictions are out in force again, this time triggered by underwhelming growth figures for the second quarter of 2023. Exports have declined from the heights they reached during the pandemic while consumer spending has softened. Corporate troubles in the property sector and high youth unemployment appear to add to China’s woes. Against this backdrop, Western commentators are casting doubt on the PRC’s ability to continue to churn out GDP units, or fretting in grander terms about the country’s economic future (‘whither China?’, asks Adam Tooze by way of Yang Xiguang). Adam Posen, president of the Washington-based Peterson Institute, has diagnosed a case of ‘economic long Covid’. Gloom about China’s economic prospects has once again taken hold.

That there are structural weaknesses in the Chinese economy is not in dispute. After two waves of dramatic institutional reform in the 1980s and 1990s respectively, China’s economic landscape has settled into a durable pattern of high savings and low consumption. With household spending subdued, GDP growth, slowing over the past decade, is sustained by driving up investment, enabled in turn by growing corporate indebtedness. But despite this slowdown, the current bout of doomsaying in the English-language business press, half investor Angst, half pro-Western Schadenfreude, is not an accurate reflection of the fortunes of China’s economy – plodding, but still expanding, with 3 points of GDP added over the first six months of 2023. It is rather an expression of an intellectual impasse, and of the flawed conditions in which knowledge about the Chinese economy is produced and circulated within the Western public sphere.

The essential thing to bear in mind about Western coverage of the Chinese economy is that the bulk of it responds to the needs of the ‘investor community’. For every intervention by a public-minded academic like Ho-fung Hung, there are dozens of specialist briefings, reports, news articles and social media posts whose target audience is individuals and firms with varying degrees of exposure to China’s market, as well as, increasingly, the foreign policy and security establishments of Western states. Most analysis of China strives to be of a directly useful and even ‘actionable’ kind. The stream of profit- and policy-oriented interventions, aimed at a small section of the population, shapes the ‘conversation’ on the Chinese economy more than anything else.

Two further features follow from this. First, the most salient preoccupations of Western commentators reflect the skewed distribution of foreign-owned capital within the Chinese economy. China’s economy is highly globalized in terms of trade in goods but not in terms of finance: Beijing’s capital controls to a large degree insulate the domestic financial sector from global financial markets. Overseas financial capital has only a handful of access points to China’s markets, meaning international exposure is uneven. China-based companies with foreign investors, offshore debt or listings on stock markets outside of the mainland (that is, free of China’s capital controls) generate attention precisely in proportion to their overseas entanglements. Thus countless news articles over the past two years have been devoted to the defaulting saga of real estate giant Evergrande – a Hong Kong-listed firm that has relied on dollar-denominated debt. Journalists and commentators may be gearing up to give the same high-visibility treatment to Country Garden, another troubled property developer with a Hong Kong listing and offshore debt. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal or New York Times subscriber will be forgiven for not remembering the last time they read an article about State Grid (the world’s largest electricity provider) or China State Construction Engineering (the world’s largest construction firm) – two companies less dependent on global finance and over which international investors are unlikely to lose any sleep.

The second feature relates to the financial industry’s reliance on the art of political-economic storytelling to sell investment options. Clients with money to invest want more than an analyst’s projection about the likely rate of return on a given investment product; they want a sense of how that product fits into the ‘bigger picture’ – into an overarching tale of opportunity, innovation or transition in one part of the market, in contrast to vulnerability, decline or closure elsewhere. Discussion of the Chinese economy is regularly inflected by narrative arcs of this marketable variety, whether ‘bullish’ or ‘bearish’. These have included, for instance: the theory of Xi Jinping ushering in a third wave of institutional reform – ‘Reform 3.0’ – at the Central Committee’s third plenum in November 2013 (nothing of the sort happened); fears of a ‘hard landing’ if not a ‘Lehman moment’ during China’s financial volatility of 2015 and 2016 (GDP growth remained close to 7 per cent); and belief in the inevitability of China ‘rebalancing’ from investment to consumption through the 2010s (the investment share of GDP has remained above 40 per cent since 2003). Such narratives, which seem to be crafted in response to the storytelling needs of Western investors and financial intermediaries, become magnets for public debate. The ‘rebalancing’ story, for example, served as a compelling inducement to invest in consumer-facing sectors of the Chinese economy – until it gradually lost credibility. Some money was made along the way, and some lost, and in that sense the story was partly successful on the industry’s own terms even though it was a poor reflection of economic fact.

That so much of the discourse on China’s economy takes shape in response to investor interests may also explain its susceptibility to short-term reversals of sentiment. As a rule, the performance of financial markets is more volatile than that of the real economy, and in China’s case it is mostly the former – to which overseas investors are most exposed, if unevenly – that drives perceptions of the latter. Hence the sharp mood swings from bullish to bearish and back, from one financial cycle to the next. In part fluctuating with the vagaries of market sentiment, Anglophone commentary also lacks consistent, credible criteria with which to assess China’s economic performance. How much growth is enough? What kind of economic expansion would it take for China not to be in a ‘crisis’? In 2009, as the Chinese government was unleashing a spectacular wave of bank lending to stimulate activity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it was widely believed that growing the economy by 8 per cent was necessary to avert mass unemployment and social instability. That benchmark has now conveniently vanished from view; nobody in the West today would dream of saying China should aim to grow by 8 per cent per year. And is GDP growth itself an adequate metric of economic strength? The significance that Chinese authorities attribute to GDP performance has declined. The official target for 2023 is an approximate one – ‘around 5 per cent’ – affording a measure of leeway, meanwhile the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) dispenses with an overall GDP target altogether.

In addition to protean standards for evaluating performance, there is also a degree of confusion about how to interpret major developments within the Chinese economy, especially in relation to the intentions of policymakers. The travails of the real estate sector are a case in point. The slow-motion collapse of over-indebted Evergrande has repeatedly been portrayed in the Western media as a calamity in waiting for the entire Chinese economy, in yet another iteration of the ‘Lehman moment’ trope. This elides the fact that the Chinese government deliberately prevented highly indebted property developers, including Evergrande, from accessing easy credit in the summer of 2020 – a measure since referred to as the ‘three red lines’ policy. Of course, no large-scale corporate default and restructuring is desirable per se. But it appears that failures like Evergrande’s have been treated by Chinese authorities as the price of disciplining the property sector as a whole and reducing its weight in the broader economy. Although the real estate downturn, with investment declining sharply in 2022, has weighed negatively on China’s overall growth performance, this seems to be the consequence of a concerted attempt to ‘rectify’ the sector – whose shrinking share of total economic output, even at the cost of GDP growth, might well be described as a positive development.

A starting-point for a more level-headed approach to the Chinese economy is to put the current moment in a longer-term perspective. China’s economy was comprehensively transformed in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result of the waves of reform that defined those decades, agricultural production passed from the collective to the household; state industries were converted into for-profit enterprises; the allocation of goods, services and labour was thoroughly marketized; and a powerful private sector was born, expanded rapidly and was consolidated. Since this era of intense institutional restructuring ended in the early 2000s, China’s GDP has more than quadrupled in real terms but the country’s fundamental economic structure has remained stable, in terms of both the balance between state-owned enterprises and private capital, and the precedence of investment over consumption. In this context, instances of significant change – technological upgrading, the expansion of capital markets – have been slow-moving. The decline of GDP growth is itself a protracted affair, and the essentials of the present configuration are likely to endure for some time. China’s economy is neither a ‘ticking time bomb’, as Joe Biden daringly opined last month, nor – an overused expression – ‘at a crossroads’. The China bulls of the West may well continue to morph into China bears and vice versa in the coming years, while the Chinese economy indifferently trudges on.

Read on: Ho-fung Hung, ‘Paper-Tiger Finance?’, NLR 72.

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Embracing Failure

Mario Tronti, who died earlier this month at the age of 92, was best-known as the author of Workers and Capital (1966). Consisting mostly of essays written in the first half of the sixties, his magnum opus was the most influential text of operaismo, the theoretical current that was then emerging in Italy amid a wave of labour militancy and factory occupations. ‘Workerism’, in the approximate translation, placed renewed emphasis on working-class struggle and consciousness. Foregrounding the primacy of labour in capitalist accumulation, the operaisti argued that the principal focus of Marxism should be not the abstract laws of capital, but workers themselves, without whom capitalism cannot function and who ‘push capitalist production forward from within’. In the bold vision of operaismo, workers act and capital adapts. ‘We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second’, Tronti wrote in ‘Lenin in England’, his editorial in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia, a journal he co-founded in 1963. ‘This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class.’

Born to a working-class family in Rome, Tronti studied philosophy at Sapienza under Della Volpe in the 1950s, when he became a partisan of the PCI. Led to question the orthodox Marxism he absorbed from the party after the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, and inspired by Della Volpe’s attack on positivism, Tronti began to criticize dialectical materialism as a form of naïve metaphysics. He took the view that classical Marxism was at once too historicist and evolutionary, and too oriented to a far-off future. What was needed was not a theory of history but a ‘science’ of present-day realities. ‘Marxism’, he would write in Workers and Capital, ‘has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.’

In the early sixties, he joined a group of sociologists who, profoundly influenced by Max Weber and led by the socialist Raniero Panzieri, founded Quaderni Rossi (1961–66). The first of several spirited, short-lived operaist publications, the journal was devoted to the study of postwar Italian capitalism and aimed to galvanize the rebellious workers in the country’s industrial north. Noting the close imbrication of capitalism and industrial progress – as Panzieri argued, ‘the two terms capitalism and development are the same thing’ – the aim of their research was to study workers’ efforts to become autonomous from and even halt that development. This critique of productivism became the premise of Classe Operaia (1963–67), which Tronti launched along with the historian Alberto Asor Rosa and the philosopher Antonio Negri.

Focusing on Fiat’s enormous plants in northern Italy – a cornerstone of the economy – the Quaderni Rossi circle argued that factory, society and state had become tightly interconnected; industry was fundamentally a political tool deployed to control labour and standardize society. As a result of the growing dominance of industry, society was becoming what Tronti called ‘an articulation of production’: ‘the whole society lives in function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domain over the whole society.’ Yet the tentacular reach of manufacturing and the importance of industrial workers also gave shop-floor struggle broader social significance and immediate political potential. The conflicts underway inside the factories were therefore not only between the needs of labour and the imperatives of the firms, but between workers and the state itself. At this pivotal conjuncture of Italian capitalism, Tronti contended, workers in key industries had the strategic power to reshape the state. A ‘vision of the part, to see the whole’, operaismo insisted that the refusal of productive labour – through absenteeism, strikes and other industrial actions of the period – was a threat to the system as such.

Above all, operaismo mounted a profound critique of work, one that questioned the place of labour in our lives. In a world in which the assembly line seemed to foreshadow the standardization of society, ‘the only plausible present-day minimum programme for the working class challenges for the first time the whole of productive activity that has hitherto existed. This challenge will abolish work. And in so doing it will abolish class domination.’ This was the basis of Workers and Capital’s admonishment of socialism, along with capitalism: both were systems that viewed ‘society as a means and production as an end’. In ‘all the upheavals of the past’, Tronti noted, ‘the type of productive activity was left intact. It has always exclusively been a question of the distribution of productive activity, redistributing labour to new groups of people’. To abolish work did not mean eradicating productive activity tout court, but it implied the difficult – perhaps impossible – task of dismantling an economy where the end of production was production itself. Only then would the ground be laid for a world with many ends.

The call for a ‘working-class struggle against work’ became a slogan, some would say a cliché, embraced by the new generations dreaming of a life free from drudgery, who often came into conflict with the PCI. But although it was among the emerging social movements that Workers and Capital found its most devoted readers, Tronti was not aiming to assemble a ‘new left’, nor did he endorse any of the myriad groupuscules operating outside the Communist Party. He was critical of the PCI’s ‘national-popular’ path and of the institutions of the classical workers’ movement (capitalism, he observed, ‘no longer manages its own ideology but has the workers’ movement manage it in its stead’). But he continued to believe in the need for a left government in the interest of workers, and for a mass politics anchored in parliament. Alluding to Machiavelli, Tronti insisted late in life that ‘the class remained the Prince, the primacy was still the struggle, but in order to try to give them a winning outcome, the instrument of the party was needed.’

In the 1990s, Tronti became a senator for the Partito Democratico, the successor to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra, which had evolved out of the dissolution of the PCI in 1991. His elevation to the commanding heights of the political apparatus was an emblem of what the workers’ movement had achieved during the economic boom of the postwar era. Yet by this time, deregulation and globalization had undermined the use of legislative power for progressive reforms, and many old comrades criticized Tronti for failing to appreciate that parliament was an ineffectual arena for social change. In another operaist journal, Contropiano (1968–71), Tronti had written that there is ‘capitalist economic development on the one hand and workers’ political power on the other – two forces . . . in a long war in which we can see neither the end nor who the victor will be.’ Ultimately, he seemed to accept that capitalist development had triumphed. In a late interview he came close to embracing failure: ‘I am defeated, not a victor. The victories are never final. But we have lost – not a battle – but the war of the twentieth century.’

*

Despite its lasting fame, Workers and Capital has often been interpreted as belonging to a distinct, operaist phase of Tronti’s work. His early interest in working-class subjectivity and his optimism about the industrial militancy of the sixties are sometimes contrasted with his later emphasis on what he termed ‘the autonomy of the political’: the need to consolidate the struggles in the factories through the power of the state, passing laws defending the interests of workers against the imperatives of the market – instituting worker self-management, shortening the working day, raising wages. Yet as students of Tronti’s work such as Franco Milanesi and Gigi Roggero remind us, this overlooks the essential unity of his oeuvre. As Tronti himself would later insist, it was operaismo that ‘discovered the autonomy of the political’. Meanwhile, the political realism, even pessimism, made explicit toward the end of his career, was firmly rooted in his early writings. One member of Classe Operaia, Rita di Leo, recalled Tronti remarking to her in 1966 that ‘We are left to explain, you why capitalism keeps winning, and I why socialism still cannot make it.’ In a 2001 preface to Workers and Capital, he insisted that ‘in spite of everything, in spite of the transition through the culture of crisis, of European nihilism, of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, there was still too much historicism, too much progressivism, too much faith in the final victory of good over evil’ in what he enigmatically called the domain of history.

Yet if his pessimism was latent from the outset, the utopian strain in Tronti’s thinking endured, even as he appeared to concede an utter defeat. Tronti postulated a ‘choice between history and politics: two legitimate horizons, but which each stand for a different class’. Capitalist history is nothing but the development of the global market; politics, on the other hand, is the attempt to arrest its course according to the needs and desires of the exploited. Tronti insisted that ‘politics stands against history’, and never stopped hoping for an organization that could subdue ‘the rhythm of the machine’. To stand with one’s back against the future, as Walter Benjamin had pictured it, facing what Tronti called the ‘body of history’ was for him ‘the soul of politics’. History has no soul, since souls – interior lives – belong to individuals, and in a world of dashed expectations and numbing alienation, our inner lives become political precisely because we are trapped in a history that promises no way out.

This anti-historicist line of thought had paved the way for Tronti’s studies of anthropology and theology beginning in the 1980s. His turn to theology may seem surprising given his rebuke of what he saw as the eschatological fantasies and millenarian expectations of the 1960s, though he was not alone among operaists in finding inspiration here. Negri lauded John Paul II and has often returned in his work to the Second Vatican Council and Francis of Assisi, while Sergio Bologna wrote a dissertation, recently reissued, on the antifascism of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a founder of the dissident Protestant movement Die Bekennende Kirche in 1930s Germany. In a discussion in 1980, Angelo Bolaffi noted that the weakness of the left consisted in the fact that it had produced a ‘theology of revolution’. To this Tronti responded without hesitation: ‘Precisely because there has been a failure of revolution in the West, revolution has become theology.’ For Tronti, theology was an attempt to rethink the possibility of politics in a period that offered no salvation, and to find meaning amid exploitation, suffering and the seemingly quixotic attempts to resist them.

Writing in Bailamme, a journal of spirituality and politics Tronti launched in 1987, he clarified the spirit of his anti-historicist politics by quoting the theologian Sergio Quinzio: ‘The meaning of this whole historical adventure is in its progress towards destruction so that the kingdom of God may be established’. This kingdom, which in the Gospel of Luke is said to be ‘within you’, was for Tronti a specific way to view and engage with the world. By this point, his perspective had also expanded beyond industrial capitalism to the longue durée of class oppression; he became increasingly interested in the category of the poor. Memory also became important for him: as a ‘weapon’, a means ‘to combat the present’, by linking us, not to history itself – the way things turned out – but to prior attempts to alter its course, inspiring us to change the present even if we cannot yet discern a better future.

Simone Weil once remarked that the Marxian notion that mass struggle was a ‘paradise-producing mechanism’ is ‘obviously childish’. In 2019 Tronti reflected that if the operaisti had initially been ‘outside and against’ the traditional workers’ movement, and then ‘inside and against it’, it was now time for a posture of ‘beyond and against’ – to transcend the conflicts between Western capitalism and Eastern socialism, something the PCI always refused to do. He wrote that ‘the working class was too much a product and part of industry, too much cause and negation of modernity, too much thesis and antithesis of a historical dialectic’ to resist capitalist development. The workers’ movement had never sought to alter ‘the type of productive activity’ that Tronti thought had rendered the socialism of the 20th century a terrible copy of capitalism. In an essay collected in Con la spalle al futuro (1992) he even suggested that ‘perhaps the working class couldn’t become a ruling class. And, consequently, perhaps the insurmountable limit of the experiment of socialism is not found in the backwardness of material conditions, in the isolation of the project, in the reality of war, internal and external, and much less in the iniquity or mediocrity of men’. The problem might be that it is impossible to rule over history.

Yet if, as Weil also suggested, ‘the idea of weakness as such can be a force’ – visible in the need of masses and minorities to struggle for their dignity – it might be possible to view victory and failure in a different way, one suggested by Tronti’s work taken as a whole. He was a speculative and in a sense even mystical thinker, who maintained that in a world where capitalism never seems to move beyond itself, an escape might nevertheless be found. The conflicts between ‘the body of history’ and ‘the soul of politics’ – over the meaning of our lives and the systems of production and reproduction that shape our existence – might not promise salvation. But they can, according to Tronti, produce a people who do not care for victory in this kingdom of history where only the rich and powerful count. The remnants of lost utopias can still confront the forces that reduce the end of productive activity to production itself. To embrace failure, then, is not to give up, but to reject the nihilistic idea that the good life is a victorious life, rather than one that begins to reshape our idea of happiness in the here and now.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.

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Costly Propositions

On 20 July, Fitch Ratings, the credit scoring agency, downgraded its measure of Kenya’s ability to repay long-term foreign debts from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’. The Kenyan state has been on a borrowing spree in recent years, and some of those bills are coming due, including a $2 billion bond in 2024. Fitch noted that the government needed to widen its ‘narrow revenue base’ to meet its many costs, but that it faced ‘execution risks’ due to ‘social unrest’ – a reference to the protests that have gripped Kenya in recent months, brewing since March and reaching their height in mid-July.

Although the demonstrations have subsided, dissatisfaction remains rife, and the conditions that brought people to the streets persist: a cost of living crisis triggered by soaring food and fuel prices and exacerbated by new taxes. In contrast to Fitch’s view, for many Kenyans the government’s revenue base feels anything but narrow. During the decade-long rule of President Uhuru Kenyatta, taxes were raised and their remit expanded – a process that continued apace after last year’s election of Kenyatta’s deputy, William Ruto. Now, new legislation promises to increase taxes even further, including doubling levies on petrol. The IMF, eager to lend more to Kenya, is pushing this reform as a precondition, justified in the name of reducing carbon emissions. It is a costly proposition for millions, at a time when mandatory contributions to the National Health Insurance Fund and a tax on telecoms are also squeezing incomes. The situation on the ground is worse than the official narrative suggests because most Kenyans not only pay legal taxes but are also forced to make private payments to police and other state officials.

Meanwhile, everyday expenses and prices for basic goods spiral. Some blame the war in Ukraine; others point to Covid-19. The reality, though, is that life has been getting more expensive since well before 2020. In Nairobi, the supply of affordable, decent housing is paltry. Huge numbers of modern apartment buildings have sprouted across the landscape, but very few are accessible to the majority. People remember a two-kilo bag of maize flour, a staple food, costing perhaps KSh.80 ten years ago. Today it goes for KSh.250. Declining public schools mean even working-class parents feel they must pay for private education. Underinvestment in public health services has likewise pushed many Kenyans into for-profit medical care. A recent Oxfam study documented dozens of cases of private hospitals imprisoning patients until they agreed to pay up. More and more Kenyans are taking on debt to afford treatment.

If taxes are not actually funding decent schools, hospitals and other public services, what are they being used for? Much of the country’s tax revenue goes towards repaying the expensive dollar-denominated debts incurred by the previous government. Kenyatta’s administration spent the years 2013 to 2022 cycling through loans from private markets, Chinese creditors and the Bretton Woods institutions. Under his watch, public debt more than quadrupled. Ostensibly, the increased borrowing was used for infrastructure projects that would enable capitalist development: roads, railway, dams and so on. The government argued that improved transport and electrification would attract foreign investment, creating the reliable income sources that so many citizens lack. Tax hikes were the price of maintaining credibility in the eyes of lenders.

Whether the original expenditures were wise remains contested. When Kenyatta approached the World Bank to finance a new railway line to supplant the colonial one, for instance, he was turned away. The Bank deemed it likely to be a financial mistake – with high costs and little economic benefit. Kenyatta pushed ahead anyway, securing funding from China. Another recent infrastructure project is the elevated expressway that now runs through Nairobi, dwarfing the parliament buildings and enveloping one of the city’s few public parks in exhaust fumes. When we drove along it in July, the monstrosity was largely empty because the toll price is out of reach for most.

Much government spending over the past ten years has also disappeared amid a series of massive corruption scandals. Some of it simply cannot be accounted for. Kenyan analysts speak of ‘state capture’ to describe the thoroughgoing appropriation of public monies by self-interested officeholders. The former Auditor-General, Edward Ouko, claimed such appropriation is so commonplace that official budgets are prospectively inflated, with a shadow system of allocations directed not only to the corrupt and their clients but also to those who might try to bring them to account.

Debt-fuelled infrastructure binges are as old as the Kenyan state (the settler-colony was founded to pay the cost of the railway to Uganda). State contracts and tenders have long been dependable mechanisms for the privatization of public wealth. Recent instances have been more egregious, though, in part thanks to the proliferation of foreign financial sources. The latest scandals include dams financed by Italian money, railways by Chinese, and roads funded by the African Development Bank. Countless examples circulate through Kenya’s public sphere, known by shorthands – SGR, NYS, Afya House, Eurobond – each indicative of profligate spending and unaccountable elites.

In the past three years, the Kenya shilling has lost around a third of its value against the dollar, making all these unproductive foreign-denominated debts harder to repay. Creditors have thus far been assuaged by boosted domestic financing, but as the large payments come due, even that tap is insufficient. Structural adjustment, international market strictures and the imperative to earn foreign exchange make the choices stark. Instead of attempting to claw back ill-gotten wealth or renegotiate with international lenders, the government has thus far decided that making ordinary people bear the cost is the best path.

Public disquiet about inflation and tax hikes has been growing. Since March, the opposition faction of Kenya’s elite has tried to capitalize by orchestrating a series of protests (known in Swahili as maandamano), led by the veteran politician Raila Odinga, who blames Kenyans’ economic travails on President Ruto. Odinga was an important advocate of multiparty democracy during the repressive rule of Daniel arap Moi. He has contested several presidential elections without success (including a number clouded by credible allegations of misconduct), sometimes on a redistributive platform and carrying the banner of the marginalized. Despite this, he is very much of the Kenyan ruling class, with substantial business interests, intermittent government posts and his own share of questionable dealings. As a result, some critics accuse Odinga and his allies in the Azimio la Umoja Coalition of manipulating supporters in order to relitigate the 2022 election he narrowly lost to Ruto.

Earlier this summer, maandamano gained momentum. Azimio la Umoja politicians held a large rally in Nairobi on 7 July, a symbolic date associated with the nationwide protests in 1990 that eventually led to multiparty elections. As in 1990, police violence followed, presaging a more elaborate government effort to isolate Odinga and his message. On 10 July, he surprised everyone by sneaking into downtown Nairobi on a public bus, attracting crowds and sending the state into a panic. Two days later, the police attacked another planned opposition rally. More protests coalesced, both in neighbourhoods typically associated with Odinga’s supporters and in more unexpected places, including along the new Nairobi highway. Pollsters reported a steady uptick in popular discontent with the government and its handling of the economy.

While it was predominantly young, urban men who participated in the always-risky street protests, their networks of support and shared feeling reach much further across society, and the extent of the demonstrations surprised many. The events the week prior could not be reduced to the will of politicians – they were only harnessing public anger arising from the generalized pressure on working-class Kenyans. Did the protests augur more widespread unrest, even a popular insurrection? When Odinga called for three more days of maandamano the following week, the tension was palpable in Nairobi. At least one large international organization cancelled trips to Kenya in fright.

When the three protest days arrived, some observers thought them muted; others labelled them a failure. It would be more accurate to say they were suppressed. Caught off guard by the upheavals the week before, this time the state’s repressive apparatus was ready. Opposition politicians and their bodyguards were arrested. Military-grade weapons and vehicles were deployed to poor neighbourhoods, urban centres and other strategic locations. Demonstrators were met with tear gas and live fire, especially in Odinga’s stronghold, the western city of Kisumu. Dozens were killed. Some of this made it into the press, more circulated on social media, but much went unreported, known only through the sound of gunfire at night or worried texts from friends. For its part, the government has been unrepentant.

Why have the protests petered out? It is not only state violence and informational vacuums that stymie popular movements. The country’s history of ethnic competition has long been inflamed by an elite strategy of divide and rule, with politicians instrumentalizing identity politics to curtail class-based alliances. Although Kenyans from across the country are critical of government policy – inflation and taxation cut across ethno-linguistic divides – longstanding accusations that Odinga principally represents people from the Luo ethnic group make it easy for some to reduce maandamano to an old narrative of ‘us versus them’.

If the message resonated less loudly in some corners due to the ethnic identity of the messenger, its traction was also limited by the deep-seated capitalist ethos that courses through the country, making it hard to sustain a solidaristic politics. Ruto’s presidential campaign promised to favour ‘hustlers’, a term he cribbed from the country’s youth culture to invoke an everyman entrepreneurialism – the striving not only of the working poor but also better-off Kenyans who supplement their main income with a side gig or two. For some, this amounted to economic populism, perhaps even class politics; yet ‘hustling’ is about self-advancement and independence, not redistribution and solidarity: a hustler is self-made, demanding neither social welfare nor revolution. A broad-based opposition to elite predation – whatever its ethnicity – would need a vision beyond the hustle.

Perhaps an even more important factor in weakening the protest movement was the precarious position of so many Kenyan workers. Unlike a waged working class that can count on a monthly salary – however small – most Kenyans live day-to-day: selling goods, driving taxis, earning tips in service work. Attending a march means they cannot make money that day, and without meaningful savings, they risk going hungry. Widespread insecurity is what summoned the maandamano crowd, but at least in this case, poverty also demobilizes. Even the threat of large protests and a police crackdown deprives many people of their daily income, as shops pre-emptively close, cab drivers keep off the roads and parents have to stay home to look after children whose schools are closed. In such conditions, with livelihoods at stake, potential support can easily slide into resentment.

For both the opposition and the government, such public nervousness makes for a delicate dance. By August, Ruto’s government was making confused gestures on economic policy – temporarily resinstating fuel subsidies while still increasing taxes. The opposition coalition and the government are scheduled to enter talks superintended by Nigeria’s former president, Olesegun Obasanjo. But economic fundamentals are being sidelined – they are just one among several items on an agenda, which gives the impression Kenya’s woes can be solved through simple bureaucratic reorganization. The talks present at most a chance for elite reconciliation.

Meanwhile, working people continue to struggle with rising costs. The international credit agencies are right: the outlook is negative. Improving it will require more than another loan or a broader ‘revenue base’. Yet for Kenya’s streets to erupt in sustained revolt, there would have to be a real rupture between the people and the ruling class. That would require a collective movement that bypasses politicians and challenges the state – not merely its leadership.

Read on: Paul Nugent, ‘States and Social Contracts in Africa’, NLR 63.

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Loose End

The writer Victor Heringer (1988–2018) did not consider himself properly Brazilian. Spending formative years in Chile and Argentina – after which he had to relearn Portuguese – he once explained that any affection for his country sprang from a kind of ‘uncomfortable amazement’. His claim to be apátrida, stateless, reflected a fundamental repudiation of tribalisms and ideologies of all kinds. Today there can be no vanguards, no faiths, or as he proclaimed in Pessoa magazine: ‘Down with Progress! Long live Walter Benjamin!’ His true homeland was irony, something he half-joked was unknown to his compatriots. In a 2014 article – all his contributions to Pessoa are collected in Vida desinteressante (2021) – he defined this not as the pointed drawl that indicates the opposite of the ostensible utterance, but as Scott Fitzgerald defined intelligence, ‘the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’. Its ruling instance was the compenetration of life and death: ‘Infinity is inscribed into our perishable flesh’.

Simultaneity is the theme of Misantropical, Heringer’s incantatory video made with the musician Dimitri BR for the 2012 São Paulo Biennale, and begets other reverberations in his video work, poetry, journalism and fiction, setting up frictions between melancholy and playfulness in inconsistent ways especially suited (he often said) to the restless attention-style of digital culture. Of course, the new and the old were for him entwined; he was at the same time updating his great hero Machado de Assis. And while he milked the irony of a Brazilian being the greatest ironist of all time, it’s surely because Machado, a mulatto as well as disabled and epileptic, was equally an outsider in his own culture. My failure to find anything online about how Heringer fits into the national literary scene could be simply because he doesn’t.

His debut novel, Gloria (2012), contrasted two phenomena, online life with its witty self-fakery and the growth of Pentecostalism, through two incurably depressed brothers; it was high on metafiction, using anachronistic language registers and pseudo-footnotes. The Love of Singular Men (2016), published this year in a remarkable translation by James Young, is more earnest, despite its slowly emerging snares, and therefore perhaps more daring. It is about first love and aloneness (‘singularity’). Partly set in the mid-seventies on the edge of Rio, in a poor district where the one big house belongs to the narrator Camilo’s family, it is dressed in his shifting subjectivity. We first meet him as a disabled, introverted thirteen-year-old with wildly dysfunctional parents who don’t allow him out except to school, on the day his father inexplicably brings home a ‘coffee-with-watered-down-milk colour’ boy named Cosme to live with them. Camilo instantly hates him, ‘who knows why. Hate has neither reason nor purpose.’

In a refreshingly anti-psychological novel, this is the condition of most emotions, offered as facts that observably succeed each other, typically in the form of physical sensation rather than as inner processes. Love is as arbitrary as hate: ‘After I walloped him with my staff, my hate no longer took Cosme’s name or shape. And so, with a single blow, I began to love him.’ Over the course of fragmentary encounters, love and lust become somehow requited. But what consciousness is remembering all this, yet never trying to make retrospective sense of it? Chapter five introduces a different time frame, that of fifty-something Camilo, still on crutches, in the present day. ‘After more than thirty years away, I came back to Queím. I want to die right where I was born. Everyone likes a little symmetry.’

A double narrative now unfolds. One, Camilo reliving his days as the overwhelmed naïf discovering the streets with Cosme, learning how to masturbate with the boys, the surprise first kiss, the terror of abandonment, Cosme’s homophobic murder. Two, Camilo today as the grumpy misanthrope, railing against the sameness of people or Rio’s cheap upgrades, lamenting the fading of memories that are nevertheless brutally vivid in the telling. Cosme’s death spelled the end of Camilo’s freedom as a teen. As a solitary adult, a period of dealing antiques provided some meagre human connection: ‘our bonds are cardboard boxes full of junk’.

When this sad man lures into his home an untethered boy rather like Cosme, the two strands begin to chime in unacknowledged, disturbing ways. Believing (on flimsy grounds) that Renato is Cosme’s killer’s grandson, yet developing a fondness for him, Camilo is batted between feelings that must be gleaned between the lines – quasi-affection, anger, arousal – given his petrification ever since the murder of his love. This pudeur is one of the most moving figurations of authorial compassion in the novel.

The narrator’s passivity demands active work from the reader. On top of the irregular alternation and overlap of the two timeframes, key information is not released chronologically. We know from the start that Cosme will be killed, steeping each moment of the pair’s two-week idyll in dread as we read. We learn much later of Camilo’s mother’s theory about Cosme’s origins, communicated in a posthumous letter. Cosme was possibly the child of a victim of his father under the dictatorship – suddenly revealed to his son as a torturer – but ‘I never tried to get to the bottom of it . . . It might have been an invention of her bitterness’. What if Renato’s identity is likewise an invention of Camilo’s bitterness? The hum of uncertainty and its implications are amplified by the novel’s literary and sonar patchwork: sharp sensual detail, foggy ambiguity, realism both social and magical, contradictory opinions, different orders of fantasy. The very concept of ‘first’ love is simultaneously upheld and subverted, as Camilo never loved a second time. The several pages dense with the names of real people’s first loves, which Heringer solicited from the internet, both embrace and exclude Camilo: ‘Like André loved Luca, like Tayana loved Nanda, I love my Cosme, my first and only.’

When it comes to fantasy, one scene stands out. The pair go to meet their usual gang of young toughs in the derelict slave house, and stage a kiss. The others freeze, while Camilo steels himself for extravagant violence; instead, a stylized brawl unfolds in slow motion and peters out. ‘Afterwards, for something to say, Knots commented that I was white and Cosme was brown, I was rich and he was poor . . . and then laughed . . . And that was that.’ Such easy acceptance of gayness from street kids in 1976 is surely wishful writing. It sends me to something that Heringer’s brother, in a recorded memorial, said about him: Victor often used the word ternura, tenderness; he did love the world, but really it was ‘more of an aspiration . . . He had an extraordinary capacity for both love and hate’.

In the slave house scene, then, love is wilfully made to prevail, as it also does – more pathetically – in the present, at the novel’s end. After a slapstick revenge fantasy, in which Camilo’s attempts to murder Renato are repeatedly thwarted by his disability, the tension lifts and the chapter numbers start going backwards. We move into the third person. Camilo has become a normal, fussy parent-figure to Renato; but he’s right back in the insecurity that tormented him with Cosme.

As if to adulterate a still too-pure form, various graphic elements appear. Here are Camilo’s childhood drawings, there, stills from a documentary Renato is watching, elsewhere the reproduction of a school attendance sheet. A kind of emoji, a circlet of commas, appears whenever the sun (which paleface Camilo hates) is mentioned, and is used to illustrate other violent evocations, such as scattered brains. The sign is complexly suggestive; the other visual extras – lacking, say, Sebald’s allusive distance in which meaning floats in the disjunction of text and image – provide little more than pleasing illustration. The book remains this side of putting language itself into question.

Was it all conscientiously planned? Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end. He killed himself aged twenty nine, when he was beginning to make his name. Perhaps the ‘who knows why’ that whispers through all his work applies also to this.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘Competing Readings’, NLR 48.