Author: Oliver Eagleton

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Gaining Ground

On 10 April, South Korea went to the polls to elect a new National Assembly. President Yoon Suk Yeol and his conservative People’s Power Party (PPP) suffered a surprise defeat at the hands of the progressive Lee Jae-myung and his Democratic Party (DP). With a turnout of 67%, the DP’s coalition captured 176 out of 300 possible seats, while the PPP took only 108. Yoon is now a lame duck, with little power to pass bills through the DP-controlled legislature. He is promising a complete cabinet reshuffle and a new political approach to restore credibility. Lee is basking in his victory, yet he is also under increasing pressure to live up to his campaign pledges.

Lee was born into a poverty-stricken family in Andong, eastern Korea, in 1964. At age thirteen his family moved to a planned industrial city outside Seoul and he worked as a child laborer in a rubber factory, where an industrial press crushed his wrist and left him permanently disabled. This incident, he says, inspired his decision to become a labour lawyer and engage in left-wing politics. Having worked as a DP spokesman after the 2008 election, he served as mayor of Seongnam from 2010 to 2018 and then as governor of Gyeonggi Province (the most populous region in the country). His election campaign touted the popular social-democratic reforms he implemented in both places, as well as his close relationship with the trade union movement. Lee foregrounded the cost-of-living crisis and workers’ rights, promising to reduce the working week by half a day while expanding welfare for women, children and the elderly. He argued in favour of geopolitical neutrality and diplomatic engagement with North Korea and China.

Yoon, a famed prosecutor who led the corruption investigation that toppled the former president Park Geun-hye in 2017, struck a different note. He described Korea as an underdog nation which has prospered through hard work, giving rise to world-class conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai. He stressed the importance of unfettering the private sector and accused his opponent of being a corrupt crypto-communist with sympathies for North Korea. While Lee called for state intervention to curb inflation, Yoon organized a council of businessmen and banking representatives to deal with rising prices. In the run up to the vote, Yoon made a televised trip to a grocery store where he let slip that he did not know the price of green onions – a staple of the Korean diet. After the clip went viral, Lee began to don a crown made of green onions at his campaign stops. In the end, both parties cruised to victory in their respective strongholds. The richest neighborhood in Korea, Gangnam district, remained dominated by the PPP, while the DP took left-wing constituencies like Gwangju, the birthplace of Korea’s Democratization Movement. Yet the opposition triumphed overall by winning the swing voters in key urban districts.

Lee’s candidacy was dogged by scandal, amid accusations that he had given favours to land developers in exchange for bribes during his mayoral tenure. To his supporters, this was a politically-motivated investigation driven by Yoon and his allies in the judiciary (at one point the president said that he would personally prosecute his opponent if he had the chance). Even so, the charges created an opportunity for Lee’s opponents on the right of the DP to try to oust him as leader, albeit unsuccessfully. They also prompted Lee’s former chief of staff to take his own life, citing the pressure of the case in his suicide note. As the controversy raged, Lee was subject to a lone-wolf assassination attempt, stabbed in the neck during a public meeting earlier this year.  

Lawfare has a long history in South Korea. Since 1987, when the dictatorship collapsed following a massive protest movement led by students and workers, the country’s democratic system has been volatile. Six former presidents and prime ministers have spent time in jail. Some of these arrests were widely supported by the public – as with President Park – while others, such as the impeachment of President Roh in 2004, caused widespread outrage. In many cases, litigation has been used to repress the left. Given the legacy of the Korean War and the effects of military conscription, it is difficult to declare oneself a socialist in South Korea without facing immense scrutiny and possible imprisonment. To give just one example, in 2014 a newly formed left-wing party, the Unified Progressives, performed surprisingly well in the Assembly elections, whereupon its leaders were immediately accused of helping North Korea to plan an invasion and jailed for treason. The party was subsequently banned.

A loophole for progressive politics, however, can be found in South Korea’s unusually militant trade unions, which have a high level of popular and institutional legitimacy. The largest union grouping, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), wields significant power. And the more radical Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) has become a model for labour organizing throughout Asia, drawing on its experience of the Democratization Movement and training its members in a variety of protest tactics. Throughout his presidency, Yoon has tried his best to crush this movement. He made international headlines in 2023 for his failed attempt to extend the working week from 52 hours to 69 hours, provoking a standoff with the FKTU and the KCTU, and he has taken a hard line on the ongoing doctor’s strike, threatening to fire those who walked out in protest against the government’s plan to expand medical school acceptance rates.

Yet the most decisive confrontation between Yoon and organized labour came at the end of 2022, when he broke a truckers strike led by the KCTU, sending 2,5000 of them back to work and prosecuting some of the organizers. Yoon, who likened the picket to a nuclear attack by North Korea, saw his approval ratings rise in the wake of the incident, as many people feared the economic damage that the strike would inflict. This emboldened him to launch another anti-union crusade the following spring, targeting the construction unions under the KCTU umbrella. Alleging that ‘illegal bribes’ and other forms of corruption were damaging productivity, Yoon proceeded to go after union members with legislation typically reserved for organized criminals. A total of 2,863 union members were labelled offenders; 102 were arrested and prosecuted.

The following May Day, Yang Hoe-dong, a KCTU member who was facing prosecution, set himself on fire outside the courthouse right before his trial. In a widely circulated letter written shortly before his death, Yang described the humiliation he felt at being compared to a criminal, and suggested that the Yoon government was no better than Korea’s past dictatorships. This sparked a summer of union activism and public demonstrations of a kind that had not been seen since the mobilizations against Park in 2016. The Yoon administration faced off against the KCTU and its allies in other social movements. Mass protests, walkouts and clashes with police were common.

Yang’s suicide evoked the memory of Jeon Tae-Il, the 22-year-old labourer who self-immolated in 1970 to protest the cruel working conditions imposed by the dictatorship. Although the government tried to cover up his death, Tae-Il became a martyr who inspired a wave of clandestine labour organizing led mostly by female garment workers. This episode is implicated in two competing narratives of Korea’s twentieth-century history. The first holds that Tae-Il’s protest was a wake-up call for activists across the country which eventually led to the collapse of the military regime, opening the way for social progress and democratization. The second claims that Korea’s economic success and global prestige were underpinned by the dictatorship’s industrialization policies, which the labour movement opposed on self-interested grounds. Today, Lee represents the former position, Yoon the latter.

The recent election results indicate that Lee’s narrative is in the ascent. The president’s strike-breaking has undermined his popular mandate, while his opponent has benefitted from partnering with the unions. Now, the question for the Korean left is how to consolidate the gains of the strike wave and use the DP’s control of the National Assembly to its advantage. Lee’s attitude towards the unions over the coming months will say much about his political outlook. Will he be receptive to the labour movement, or will he adopt a more top-down bureaucratic approach? So far, Lee has walked a tightrope between the populist rhetoric of a Sanders or a Corbyn and the liberalism of his DP predecessor Moon Jae-in. Which of these tendencies will win out remains to be seen. In recent years there has been a leftward turn in Korean culture, with directors from the generation of pro-democracy activists such as Bong Joon-Ho and Park Chan-Wook dramatizing issues like inequality, working conditions and state repression. Progressive currents are gaining ground. Might they soon find their way into the halls of power?

Read on: Kevin Gray, ‘Political Cultures of South Korea’, NLR 79.

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First Priorities

The French left is at a crossroads. Having failed to win the presidency or assemble a parliamentary majority in 2022, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is now attempting to chart a way forward for La France insoumise. The party faces a hostile media, voter apathy and an increasingly authoritarian government. NUPES, the electoral alliance over which it presides, has fractured. The only way for LFI to prevail in this unfavourable conjuncture and preserve its fragile hegemony over the other progressive parties is to expand its electoral base ahead of the 2027 presidential elections. But there are competing theories of how to achieve this, and deep uncertainties over the most viable strategic direction.

At present, LFI’s only strongholds are Paris, its surrounding banlieues, the peripheries of major cities such as Marseille, Toulouse and Lyon, and the French overseas territories. The party has struggled to attract support in the peri-urban areas that produced the gilets jaunes. For many activists, this signals a problem with its organizational culture. Since LFI was established in 2016, it has been dominated by a small group of parliamentarians and staffers close to Mélenchon. Stefano Palombarini has described it as a ‘pirate ship’ where all major decisions are taken by the captain. This nimble, centralized structure was partly what enabled its rapid ascent. Yet, today, some members have become convinced that the party will not break out of its Paris bubble unless it is thoroughly democratized. Clementine Autain, the deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis, argues that it is time to ‘throw open the doors’ and ‘become a mass movement’. The leadership and its supporters, however, believe that this cannot occur until robust internal mechanisms for mediating political disagreement have been developed. Since the membership has now expanded beyond the core of loyal Mélenchonistes, they warn, ‘throwing open the doors’ could mean abandoning political discipline and watering down their left-internationalist programme.

This dispute relates to the vexed question of who will lead LFI into the next election. One contender outside the circle of Mélenchonistes is the filmmaker-turned-parliamentarian Francois Ruffin. Born in Calais in 1975 and raised in Amiens, the constituency that he now represents, Ruffin is a self-described ‘petit-bourgeois intellectual’ – his father a manager at the Bonduelle vegetable company, his mother a housewife – who attended the same high school as Macron. In 1999 he founded Fakir, a left-wing satirical journal, and in 2003 published a searing critique of France’s media landscape, Les petits soldats du journalisme. Throughout the 2010s he directed documentaries on life in peripheral France, the dynamics of deindustrialization and the gilets jaunes. His 2016 film Merci patron!, a blistering takedown of France’s wealthiest citizen, the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, so enraged its subject that he bribed the French security apparatus to spy on the director. Ruffin was elected in 2017 as a candidate for the micro-party Picardie Debout, before joining the LFI parliamentary group later that year.

Ruffin is in favour of throwing open the doors of LFI. For him, the path to the Élysée runs through the rural areas and deindustrialized small towns once dominated by the Socialist and Communist parties, where much of the population are manual labourers, low-waged service workers or retirees. The only way to win back such voters from the RN, he argues, is to speak to their material concerns: ‘the discourse of real life’, as he calls it. In practice, this means promoting protectionist economic policies and a strong welfare state. He lambasts the government for unleashing an ‘epidemic of bad work’ and calls for limited forms of workplace democracy, with a third of the seats on company boards to be given to employees. This focus on employment conditions is an attempt to connect LFI’s current base to more peripheral constituencies. As Ruffin observes, there are clear commonalities in the working lives of urban racialized populations and those of white people in small towns. As part of this strategy, the politician typically avoids domestic issues deemed too sensitive, such as migration, and moderates his line on international ones. When he speaks at Palestine rallies, he demands an immediate ceasefire and denounces Israel’s war crimes, but he also insists, against LFI’s official position, that Hamas is a terrorist organization. When riots broke out over the death of Nahel Merzouk, a teenage boy shot by police in the Parisian suburbs, the Mélenchonistes denounced the killers as bloodthirsty racists, while Ruffin called for institutional reform.

Ruffin’s approach can be compared to that of Sumar in Spain. He argues that a populist strategy – maintaining a permanent war footing and provoking perpetual conflict with the establishment – will simply exhaust the party’s activist base and alienate large swathes of the electorate. He claims that LFI has already won the battle for hegemony on the left, and that it must now convince voters outside the fold. While many of his LFI colleagues have split with their erstwhile NUPES partners, Ruffin continues to collaborate with figures such as the Ecologists’ Marine Tondelier. Privately, those on the left of the Ecologists say that they would prefer to work with Ruffin than with a Mélenchoniste, and that a NUPES revival in 2027 would be more likely under his candidacy.

The Mélenchonistes have a different outlook. For them, the high rates of abstention in both the banlieues and peripheral France suggest that scores of voters remain disenchanted with the present political system. The party must therefore advocate a rupture with that system: its foreign policy, its economic orthodoxies, its security services and its social ethos. The aim should be to sharpen each political antagonism so as to achieve a state of what Mélenchon calls ‘permanent insubordination’. In a recent debate with Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé, Mélenchon accepted that the left needs to win back rural France – ‘who could argue otherwise?’ – but insisted that a focus on the urban quartiers populaire is even more essential. These areas tend to vote for LFI at a rate of 80%, but with a turnout of only 30%. The left should therefore strive to activate these abstentionist populations rather than gambling on the possibility of winning back Le Pen voters.

One Mélenchoniste who has been mooted as a future leader is Mathilde Panot. The 34-year-old deputy, who represents Val-de-Marne just south of Paris, is the daughter of a mathematician and an agricultural scientist. She studied international relations at Science Po and worked as a community organizer for a nonprofit operating in the banlieues before becoming an LFI staffer. Elected to the Assembly in 2017, she now serves as the party’s parliamentary leader. The optimum strategy, as she sees it, is to construct cleavages in which the left is polarized against the RN and Macronists – revealing the latter to be two sides of the same coin. She has been particularly vocal in her support for Palestine, aware that this issue plays well in banlieues.

Yet Panot is consistently upstaged by Mélenchon himself, who remains a major national presence despite claiming that he is willing to hand over to a new leader. Since October he has been more forceful in denouncing the siege of Gaza than any other national politician. He has attended the ICJ hearing and organized protests against France’s arms shipments to Israel while attacking Macron’s sabre-rattling on Ukraine. Mélenchon seems to be aware that Panot lacks the national profile to have a plausible shot at victory; and he is keen to kibosh the ascent of Raphaël Glucksmann, the ultra-hawkish PS candidate who is currently riding high in the European election polls. This, along with his desire to keep LFI aligned with his vision, may well motivate him to run again in 2027. Mélenchon’s supporters note that each of his previous campaigns has brought him closer to the second round (his longtime friend Lula, who was elected president of Brazil on his fourth attempt, is cited as proof that persistence can pay off). His detractors, meanwhile, claim that he is unable to unite the broad left and point to polling which shows that he would have been beaten had he made it to the run-offs in 2022.

There is plenty of common ground between Ruffin and Mélenchon, both of whom have indicated that their positions could be reconciled. The LFI leadership has established several working groups dedicated to winning over rural areas. They have also deployed a number of so-called ‘popular caravans’: cadres who are dispatched to strategic constituencies to engage with the population and then relay their views to the central party apparatus. For the Mélenchonistes, LFI could yet become a parti de masse by stepping up such campaigns and providing local services such as food distribution to deprived communities. Yet when it comes to the party’s overall priorities, the divergence remains stark. Ruffin emphasizes the need to alter the current distribution of voters, while Mélenchon aims to enlarge the total electorate. The first approach implies moving beyond populism, while the second means refining and intensifying it. The two sides disagree over the extent to which the official polling underestimates Mélenchon and whether there are enough potential voters in the banlieues to propel him to power.  

Whoever leads LFI into 2027 will have to appeal to the parts of French society which are disenchanted, but which currently have no affiliation with the left. This problem is exemplified by the ongoing farmers’ protests. As with previous bouts of unrest, the government is trying to halt the demonstrations while the parties to its left and right are competing to capitalize politically. Here, LFI should be in an advantageous position, since its manifesto calls for radical agricultural reform – repudiating the free-trade agreements passed in the European parliament – and one of its allies, the Confédération Paysanne, is among the organizers of the movement. Yet the party has struggled to gain a foothold, partly because of the media’s emphasis on the reactionary elements of the protests and their rejection of environmentalism.  In an attempt to shift the tide, Ruffin has been rubbing shoulders with farmers at the annual Salon International de l’Agriculture, which Mélenchon has boycotted for the last decade, hosting his own counter-salon that promotes peasant farming over agribusiness. Yet neither has managed to cast their party as a vehicle for farmers’ interests.

Over the coming years, the two factions will have to answer a number of difficult questions. Is it possible to shift the allegiances of Le Pen voters? Can this be achieved without alienating LFI’s current electoral base? And does the alliance with the centre-left risk corrupting the project? Conversely, is the strategy of constant conflict capable of reaching a broader constituency? Can the radical left win without the centre-left? Is there a sufficient number of abstentionists who could be activated? Whatever course the party takes, it will have to operate in a turbulent political climate which is increasingly hostile to the left. The institutions of the Fifth Republic – the state, the media, the mainstream parties, big business, the police – are determined to crush the rebellion that LFI represents. Reversing France’s reactionary drift will be a Herculean task.

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

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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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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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Against Solutionism

‘It’s coming ever more sharply into focus’, declared Anthony Blinken on a recent trip to Doha, speaking of a ‘practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel’. America’s Arab clients have also been invoking the two-state paradigm, with both the Saudis and Qataris stressing the need for such a ‘comprehensive settlement’. In the UK, David Cameron has declared his firm support for Palestinian statehood, while in Brussels Josep Borrell has insisted that this is ‘the only way to establish peace’. These statements can be seen as a frantic attempt at imperial containment. If the Palestinians cannot be ignored entirely, as in the Abraham Accords framework, better to push for a demilitarized, segmented Palestinian quasi-‘state’ so that Israeli normalization can proceed apace. Biden, personally and politically minutes to midnight, is desperate to put Jared Kushner’s agenda for the Middle East back on track after its derailing on 7 October.

How should we respond to the inglorious return and cadaverous persistence of two-statism? The most common reflex is to dismiss it as dangerous imperial ‘fantasy’, premised on the diplomatic formalization of the apartheid regime, and to advocate for one state as the only realistic alternative. This latter position was first formally put forward by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the aftermath of the Naksa. It was then adopted by Arafat and Abu Iyad as the official line of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Oslo’s wake, Palestinian intellectuals – Edward Said, Ghada Karmi, Lama Abu-Odeh, Joseph Massad, Ali Abunimah, George Bisharat and Yousef Munayyer, among others – returned to this framework. Writing in 2002, Karmi noted that although the demand for a secular democracy ‘might seem utopian’, it is no more so than ‘the Zionist enterprise of constructing a Jewish state in someone else’s country’. Last year, she published a book-length intervention on the ‘inevitability’ of a single, democratic state.

Recognition that the two-state solution is foreclosed is increasingly common across the political spectrum. An essay in the latest Foreign Affairs argues that ‘the effect of talking again about two states is to mask a one-state reality that will almost surely become even more entrenched in the war’s aftermath’. On the whole this is a welcome shift, reflecting the mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity and support for multi-ethnic democracy over Zionist supremacism. Yet there are good reasons for the Western left to tread carefully here. Given the current regional coordinates, is one-statism still the most principled and realistic option? The irremediable sickness of settler society, clearer and more horrifying than ever, may be just as much a barrier to one state as the entrenched colonial geography of the Occupied Territories is to two. If the uprooting of settlers from the West Bank is impossible to imagine, it is surely harder still foresee Israelis accepting the end of ethno-nationalism and peacefully cohabitating with Palestinians.

The Palestinian people – in Gaza, the West Bank, historic Palestine and al-Shatat – will inevitably determine the telos of their struggle. Solutionism risks abrogating this basic principle, and even making major strategic and ethical judgements on their behalf. While two-state models tend to deny Palestinians the right of return, one-state discourses might mean telling them to surrender the fight for decolonization, make friends with their oppressors and permit all settlers to stay. Such decisions could at some point be made by the Palestinians themselves – hence the importance of democratizing their national political structures to enable genuine popular deliberation – but they cannot be presupposed. In this sense, valorization of final-status political forms can involve losing sight of anti-colonial first principles. It can also neglect the objective conditions needed to establish lasting peace in the region. For no ‘solution’ that fails to command mass support from the Palestinians will endure, and only an endpoint that upholds their inalienable rights is likely to have such democratic standing.

It is on this basis that organizations like Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign have long refused to take a position within the strictures of solutionist debates: one state, two states, no state. For them, the primary aim is to build political pressure to redress the crimes on which Israel was founded: the denial of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and the return of refugees. The struggle against these brutalities must precede the development of political blueprints for the region; indeed, the course of the former will invariably determine the shape of the latter. As the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi puts it: ‘I’m very secular about what the solution should be. Some people are very keen on two states . . . There are those who argue for one, bi-national state. I would say, it’s much simpler than that. Allow the injustice to be rectified . . . Once people can return to their homes, let those people democratically decide, the people that live there, what kind of framework they want.’

This perspective has particular relevance to the post-7 October reality. Given both the historic strength and popular legitimacy of the Palestinian armed resistance, it cannot be assumed that the establishment of one democratic state in, say, the coming three decades is more plausible than the liberation of some Palestinian land from colonial occupation. In 1974, the PLO’s Political Programme stated that it would ‘employ all means . . . to liberate Palestinian territory and to establish the independent combatant national authority for the people over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated’. This vision, of asserting Palestinian rule over portions of liberated land, now seems remarkably contemporary. As Tareq Baconi has shown, the strategic conception of Hamas’s founders was not dissimilar, in aiming to secure a ‘complete withdrawal from the West Bank, the Strip and Jerusalem without giving up on 80% of Palestine’. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi looked to Hezbollah’s success in forcing the Israelis out of south Lebanon as a model for how this approach might work.

Such a trajectory, however unlikely, may now be more probable than the miraculous deradicalization of Israeli society. Of course, the odds remain daunting, not least because of the triumph of counter-revolutionary forces across the Arab world over the past decade. Perhaps the single most consequential and dispiriting factor here is the decimation of radical civil society in Egypt under the iron rule of El-Sisi – which, until it is overturned, could well preclude justice for the Palestinians. Yet the picture is complicated by the gradual waning of American dominance and the striking durability of the ‘resistance axis’. On such overdetermined terrain, there is no reason to think that the Palestinian struggle will conform to neat teleologies or ideal-types. Both imperial two-statism and more honourable visions of secular democracy long for quick-fixes: the former hoping to impose ‘order’, the latter to end the unbearable suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. But it is vital to note that most Palestinian conceptions of the struggle are temporally indeterminate. This is a national liberation project that has learned to distrust false promises of imminent salvation. We might therefore ask whether there is an element of projection in the search for rapid ‘solutions’ which are more easily assimilable and less discomforting for Westerners than a protracted, armed, anti-colonial struggle.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The House of Zion’, NLR 96.

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Reactionary Ecology

For many continental philosophers, the first two decades of the new millennium were a time of vibrant matter, hyperobjects, and a weird fixation with intestinal microbes. The late Bruno Latour saw this ‘new materialist’ doctrine – which decentred the human subject in favour of the world of ‘things’, believed to have agency of their own – as a useful resource in his career-long polemic against Marxism. Yet as Alyssa Battistoni has argued, Latour nonetheless ‘inched to the left’ during the latter half of the 2010s, focusing increasingly on the climate crisis and its imbrication with capitalist production. By way of Gaia theory, he became less concerned with micro-agency and began to develop a concept of the totality of interlocking organic and inorganic planetary forces. In Down to Earth (2019), he even introduced a form of overarching social antagonism by suggesting that the primary division of the twenty-first century was between the majority of the global population, who recognized the earth’s biophysical boundaries, and the elites who transgressed and disavowed them. 

This apparent radicalization culminated in Latour’s final published work, On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (2022), co-authored with the young Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz. Here, all prior reservations about terms like ‘class’, ‘society’ or ‘capitalism’ seem to have evaporated. No more sniffing the ground in search of lost microorganisms. Latour – true to his name – towers above the political landscape, scanning it in search of an ‘ecological class’ capable of salvaging the planet. Divided into 76 short entries, each of which takes up little more than a page, the Memo aims to develop a new ecologism capable of winning ‘the battle of ideas’ – just as ‘liberalism, followed by the various socialisms, then neoliberalism, and finally, more recently, the illiberal or neofascist parties’, have done. How should we assess this ambitious final project? To what extent can the late Latour be described as a figure of the left?

Latour and Schultz write that, in the present conjuncture, ecologism must cut across social categories to achieve hegemony. It must break the Marxist monopoly on class struggle and consolidate environmental activists of every variety into a single, universal subject. If this movement has not yet come to fruition, that is because of a ‘crisis in our mobilization capabilities’ caused by ‘anxiety, guilt and impotence’: ‘all these sad passions so characteristic of the times’. A ‘misalignment of affects’ at the level of our shared existence has left us ‘powerless to act collectively’. This, in turn, is described as the result of modernity’s ceaseless expansion of ‘production’, which has alienated and uprooted premodern community life. For Latour and Schultz, the fundamental problem isn’t property rights, capitalist social relations or wealth disparities; the world is simply out of joint. To realign it so that mass collective action is easier to imagine, the Memo urges us to recalibrate various political-ecological concepts: ‘soil, territory, land, nation, people, attachment, tradition, boundary, border.’ 

The authors are aware of the reactionary connotations of these terms. Still, they insist that rather than invoking them as abstract values, they are repopulating them ‘with a whole host of living things’: feminist movements, decolonial uprisings, indigenous struggles for land rights. Religion, too, can supposedly be reclaimed for progressive ecology. Latour – described by one obituarist as ‘the most important Catholic philosopher in the world’ – views the faithful as potential future allies, who have already been labouring, ‘over the course of centuries, to transform souls’. ‘So let’s add to our list all those who work, rite after rite, to make sure that the “cry of the Earth and the Poor” – to take up the beautiful expression (or, rather, cry!) of Pope Francis – is finally heard’.

Drawing on Christian theology, the authors’ ultimate ambition is to gather together the lost souls from across the world and give them a renewed sense of purpose and direction under the banner of ecology. The Memo directly addresses anyone who may be inclined to fight for climate justice, urging them to overcome the internal obstacles to political activity. In their conclusion, the authors draw a parallel between military mobilization for war and affective mobilization for ecologism, asserting that in the final analysis, ‘political ecology’ is ‘the name of a war zone’.

Full of literary flourishes, programmatic statements and bombastic assertions, The Emergence of an Ecological Class mimics the style of an avant-garde manifesto. The reader is warned at the outset that they ‘won’t find nuances or notes’. Yet the book also begins by quoting the dictionary definition of ‘mémorandum’: originally a term for an official document outlining the government’s views on a given issue. This curious combination of forms speaks to an underlying tension: between the elite sensibility of the authors and the popular cause they claim to advocate. Latour and Shultz write that ‘Marx remains an indispensable guide’ in their endeavour, and they recycle his image of a haunting spectre – substituting ecologism for communism. But when faced with the radical implications of a Marxian approach to climate crisis, they instinctively recoil, and the Memo’s bureaucratic temperament supplants the manifesto’s political urgency. 

This is most apparent in the authors’ discussion of their eponymous class subject. Membership of the ecological class is not reserved for the proletarianized, the propertyless, the underemployed, the precariat, or the racialized ‘surplus’ populations disproportionally affected by climate change (though they are, presumably, welcome to join its ranks). It is rather defined by the question, ‘When disputes involve ecology, who do you feel close to and who do you feel terribly far away from?’ Latour and Shultz deny any structural division between owners and producers, creditors and debtors, and replace an analysis of material fault lines with a faux solidarity based on gut instinct.

The effect is to flatten the social terrain by making ‘affects’ the primary determinant of one’s socio-political position. Rather than pitting the exploited working masses against their natural enemies – settler colonizers, landowners, industrialists and rentiers – Latour and Schulz juxtapose ‘living beings’ to ‘modernization’. This leaves them with a quasi-Heideggerian ecology, saturated with the jargon of dwelling places and authentic existence. ‘Primitive’ life is idealized as the antidote to ecocidal ‘development’. Attempting to outrun the long shadow cast by the tradition of class struggle, the authors embrace a reactionary obscurantism.

At the same time, the Memo evokes the blandest variety of French centrism, asserting that ecologism represents ‘the grain of truth in the cliché “neither right nor left”’, and framing politics as a ‘battle of ideas’ instead of as a struggle between classes. Ni droite ni gauche was once a mantra of the far right, as Zeev Sternhell demonstrated in his 1983 study of L’idéologie fasciste en France. Today, it has become associated with the post-political vision of Macron – who, shortly after the news of Latour’s death, lamented the loss of this great ‘thinker of ecology’. Formally at least, Latour’s ecologism resembles macronisme in holding that ideas and principles, through their persuasive power alone, can surmount political divisions and win support from across the social spectrum.

Latour and Schulz argue that before sad passions paralysed the world, ‘people’s energies used to flow from their ideals’ and ‘understanding a situation was enough to mobilize’ for social change. Their primary task, then, is not political – to assess the balance of societal forces and the strategies for overturning them – but pedagogical: to ensure that those who are choosing between the ideology of the ‘ruling class’ and that of the ‘ecological class’ know that truth and justice are on the side of the latter. There is no need to undertake a detailed analysis of contemporary radical politics and the conditions of emergence for a unified climate movement. Instead, the proper role of intellectuals is closer to that of neoliberal politicians: ‘selling’ the correct environmentalist doctrine to the people.

The book’s proximity to a sales pitch is clear from its overwrought prose (not to mention its frequent use of exclamation marks!). Yet in the final analysis, what is being sold to the reader is not a set of principles or policies, but rather a series of self-help precepts. As is typical of the genre, the Memo lays out its central purpose on its title page: ‘How to promote the emergence of an ecological class that’s self-aware and proud.’ For Latour and Schulz, pride is the foremost remedy for ‘misaligned affects’, the emotion that will embolden the ecologically-minded to take action. Their aim is to instil this feeling, not in any particular class subject, but in anyone who – thanks to the onslaught of undifferentiated ‘modernity’ – has become paralysed by loneliness, frustration, fear, shame or guilt. On the Emergence of an Ecological Class must be read in this light: as a ‘how to’ book for would-be climate activists who yearn to escape their existential inertia but are still too timid to blow up a pipeline.

Read on: Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Latour’s Metamorphosis’, NLR—Sidecar.

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Death of the Innovator?

One of the many contradictions within the ideological realm of Silicon Valley and its satellites is between a faith in decentralization and an infatuation with corporate ‘leadership’. Identifying companies by the surnames of their chief executives – Altman for OpenAI, Ellison for Oracle, Zuckerberg for Meta – has become industry parlance. In the trade press, there is a prevailing sense that these names serve as synonyms rather than metonyms, as if the individual atop the corporation is also the hinge upon which its success or failure turns. Yahoo’s botched acquisitions, security breaches and monetization challenges throughout the 2010s were indelibly associated with its CEO Marissa Mayer. The triumphant comeback of a near-bankrupt Apple in the late 1990s was attributed to Steve Jobs’s fabled boardroom coup.

CEOs did not always occupy such a privileged place in global business culture. Corporate leaders were once as anonymous to the public ‘as their secretaries, chauffeurs, and shoe-shiners’, according to the Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana. In his 2002 study Searching for a Corporate Saviour: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, Khurana describes the shifting practical and symbolic function of these figures since the late nineteenth century. The original titans of industry – the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, Charles Eastman et al. – gained public notoriety for their empire-building, technical and managerial innovations, philanthropic endeavours and anti-labour agitation. They embodied a distinctly bourgeois type of Weberian charismatic authority, wherein the accumulation of wealth was seen as a divinely ordained reward for their exceptional work ethic. By the mid-twentieth century, though, this image had been transformed, as the development of corporate routines, procedures, laws and norms led to a recognizably modern form of legal or rational authority.

At this point, the tycoon was reincarnated as a capable administrator. While Khurana attributes this to the rise of tyrants like Hitler and Mussolini, which burst the ‘myth of the self-made man’, a more comprehensive explanation might draw a connection between the midcentury CEO and the formal management principles of Taylorism. Appeals to rationality and efficiency impersonalized the subjugation of labour by capital. Exploitation could no longer be personified by the corporate baron, since workplace conditions were the result of an ethically neutral, law-like system of analysis, calculation and planning. Though organized labour continued to revolt against the ‘straw boss’ of the Fordized factory, by the 1950s the growing scale of corporate operations, as well as the supersession of entrepreneurs and their heirs by shareholders and then by boards of directors and managers, helped usher in a period during which the CEO delegated much of the firm’s visible daily operations.

By the 1980s, conditions were ripe for another transformation. The effect of the Dow Jones’s five-year bull market, followed by the much longer rally of the next decade, was reflected in the fortunes of the mutual fund. After the US Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1978 – which legalized and popularized tax-deferred, defined contribution plans, or 401(k)s – money poured into these pooled investment vehicles, which meant that the capital of non-professional or ‘everyday’ investors was funnelled into a diversified range of corporate shares. This had two significant implications. It supplied a broad baseline of demand for stocks, and it encouraged a widespread emotional commitment to the overall performance of the stock market. American news outlets still devote an overwhelming amount of airtime to stock price levels; Donald Trump often seemed to peg the success of his presidency to the performance of the S&P 500, and funds that replicate that index’s performance have surged in popularity in recent decades amongst the international investment community.

This enabled the rapid expansion of the business press – with outlets like CNBC, MSNBC and Bloomberg News founded during the 1980s and 1990s, alongside many more specialized finance reporting publications – as well as the coveted new job title of ‘stock market analyst’. Business journalism narrowed its focus, emphasizing the short-term performance of individual companies, for which the stock price was a clear and readily available barometer. Naturally, as Khurana notes, this coverage was always ‘tinged with the individualistic bias of American culture’, focussing on single personalities over complex strategies. Chief among them was the CEO, the most visible embodiment of a company’s fate.

At the same time, the duties of the CEO began to skew much more heavily toward media appearances, shareholder summits, industry conferences, earnings calls, one-on-one briefings and other responsibilities under the umbrella of ‘investor relations’. The ideal corporate leader was one who commanded the attention of, and inspired confidence in, a greatly expanded field of stakeholders. Those who could do so were remunerated with skyrocketing executive earnings. Khurana charts the rise of the ‘outsider CEO’, describing the process by which the scouting for a new chief executive evolved from a bland formality – merely the next promotion for a dutiful senior employee that had climbed the rungs of the corporate ladder – into a trumpeted media spectacle.

This period also saw the revival of the mythology of the founder-entrepreneur – which, not coincidentally, occurred in tandem with the tech boom, as well as a significant rise in both the popularity of venture capital funding models and the number of firms seeking access to capital. In this environment, technology moguls needed to proclaim paradigm-shifting ambitions for their work, and sought out creative ways of narrativizing those ambitions. This was reflected in the peculiar literary genre that emerged at this time and remains on the bestseller lists today: the evangelizing business biography or autobiography. A staple of this genre, as Khurana notes, is showing how the subject achieved success despite early-life misfortune: a stutter for Chrysler’s Jack Welch, dyslexia for Cisco’s John Chambers. More recent hagiographies have continued this trend: Walter Isaacson’s study of Steve Jobs dwells on his childhood adoption and pancreatic cancer diagnosis, while Ashlee Vance’s portrait of Elon Musk explains the effects of teenage bullying and marital breakdown on this ‘real-life Tony Stark’.

Can the cult of ‘the innovator’ sustain itself in the 2020s? Consider Jobs’s presentation at MacWorld 2007, a pomp-and-circumstance ceremony during which Apple announces its upcoming products. In his keynote, Jobs listed the three new devices to be released that year – ‘an iPod with touch controls, a phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device’ – before lifting the veil to reveal that these were, in fact, the functions of one single hybrid device, the iPhone. This has become the dominant template for technological innovation: what Jason E. Smith calls the ‘twenty-first-century Swiss army knife’, in which already-existing capabilities are mixed, assimilated, adapted and subsumed into multi-functional, composite tools. The consumer gadgets of recent decades are nifty chimeras that can recombine and superficially enhance familiar technological functions. This, Smith argues, signals the systemic absence of the kind of revolutionary innovation which once transformed daily life for the general population – automobiles, railroads, electrification, telecommunication, photography and cinematography – and made major productivity gains for the greater capitalist economy.

Today, we are witnessing this innovation-as-recombination reproduce itself at the level of the firm. The death of the internal research laboratory, once epitomized by institutions such as Bell Labs or the Manhattan Project, signals an organizational strategy that Nancy Ettlinger calls ‘the openness paradigm’, in which firms downsize or eliminate in-house R&D, opting for a coordinated practice of socialized innovation characterized by the external sourcing of research, technology and skills. Like the iPhone, the twenty-first-century technology firm becomes a composite tool, a heterogeneous collection of proprietary patents and licences, contracted vendors and suppliers, autonomous divisions and teams, open-source projects and frameworks, third-party integrations and cloud providers, browser-native applications and platforms, and transferrable educational competencies gathered across a transnational corporate reservoir. Amid this flux, the CEO must project an image of unity and integrity. Yet, when the market value of a company falls, the chief executive is revealed to be just another modular unit from the repository.

Read on: Sebastian Budgen, ‘A New “Spirit of Capitalism”’, NLR 1.

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Line of Succession

This year, elections across the world are offering a stark reminder that voters can expect very little from liberal democracy, even under conditions of ‘free and fair’ competition. It’s easy to bemoan the rigged results in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Russia, or the advantages of incumbency for the BJP in India and the ANC in South Africa. But the spectacle of a Biden-Trump rematch in the US, plus the dismal expectations for a Starmer government in the UK, suggest that problems with contemporary electoral systems are not confined to repressive or clientelist regimes. In Indonesia, the third most populous – and largest majority-Muslim – democracy in the world, a notoriously sinister and volatile figure is now set to take office. Prabowo Subianto, elected on 14 February, is an ex-son-in-law of the long-time military dictator Suharto, a former Army general dishonourably discharged after allegedly overseeing the kidnap and torture of dissidents, and a politician who has exploited ethnic and religious tensions and is now threatening to return the country to authoritarian rule.

Prabowo ran in the previous two elections and lost both times to Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’). Having been co-opted as Jokowi’s Defence Minister in 2019, he stood again in 2024 with the president’s son Gibran Rakabuming Raka as his running mate – a clear sign that his candidacy had been blessed by the incumbent. Jokowi’s tacit endorsement – as well as the bullying, bribery and bandwagoning of local officials to mobilize support – may help to explain why Prabowo’s 58% vote share on election day was nearly ten percentage points above pre-election polls. The scale of his victory obviated the need for a run-off against his two opponents, former Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, who picked up 24%, and Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo, who won only 17%. Yet to fully grasp why Indonesians have anointed this grotesque figure, we must take a closer look at the country’s political system.

Compared to earlier iterations of democracy, the parameters of Indonesian politics have been set very narrowly since the return to competitive elections in 1999. During the early post-war struggle for independence, the beleaguered Republik was led by a succession of fractious multi-party governments. Following emancipation from Dutch rule, it saw a short-lived parliamentarist experiment, with four parties dominating the 1955 elections: Partai Nasionalis Indonesia (22%), Masyumi (21%), Nahdlatul Ulama (18%), and Partai Komunis Indonesia (16%). Each was a mass organization with its own regional and sociological strengths and onderbouw of civil society groups. At this time the PKI was steadily building power among the electorate and within the state. Its labour federation, peasant union, women’s and youth groups – along with its cadre of artists and intellectuals and its numerous party publications – made it a formidable presence in public life and political discourse: probably the largest legal, above-ground Communist Party outside the Soviet Union and the PRC.

But this highly inclusive and participatory system could not survive the Cold War era. Amidst the CIA-backed regional rebellions of 1957-59, President Soekarno proclaimed martial law and dissolved parliament, banning Masyumi in 1960. Following a military coup in late 1965, led by Army general Suharto and supported by the US, the PKI was obliterated in an anti-communist pogrom, with hundreds of thousands of activists and affiliates murdered, and millions more subjected to intimidation and incarceration. Over the next three decades, the military regime retained a thin veneer of pseudo-democratic legitimacy, with carefully stage-managed elections producing both a pliant parliament and a largely appointed supra-parliamentary body, which reliably ‘re-elected’ Suharto and his chosen vice-president every five years. The PNI and the two small Catholic and Protestant parties were forced to merge into the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI), while NU and other Islamic parties were combined into the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP, or United Development Party). Meanwhile, the regime’s electoral machine, Golkar (an abbreviation of Golongan Karya or ‘Functionary Groups’), dominated the largely rubber-stamp parliament thanks to the guaranteed support of the military establishment, the bureaucracy and, with the rise of Indonesian capital over the 1980s and early-mid 1990s, the expanding business class.

It was only amidst the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, and Suharto’s stubborn prioritization of his children’s business empires and political fortunes, that open dissent and outright defections eventually destabilized the regime. In May 1998, Golkar leaders joined with cabinet ministers and senior Army figures to insist that Suharto give way to vice-president B.J. Habibie, the long-time Minister of Research and Technology and bitter rival of Suharto’s daughter Tutut. The diverse business interests represented within the regime – construction companies and customs brokerages, logging and mining concessions, agribusiness and real-estate firms – could not withstand the continuing depreciation of the rupiah and the deepening economic downturn. Suharto and his family had to go.

Habibie restored competitive elections in 1999 and Indonesia’s party system expanded, but within tightly circumscribed limits. Enduring anti-communism ruled out any resurrection of the PKI. Union organizers and student activists had little choice but to join the rebranded PDI-P (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), which was led by Soekarno’s daughter Megawati Soekarnoputri, and backed by enough retired Army officers and evangelical Protestant businessmen to offset any left-leaning tendencies. The 1999 election results set the tone for Indonesian democracy in the new millennium: 34% for the PDI-P, 22% for Golkar, and much of the remaining votes split among a welter of smaller parties representing various streams of Islamic education and associational life. This new system offered a highly conservative form of pluralism, with each party and its financiers enjoying state patronage and policy influence in a succession of broad-based coalition governments, which onlookers soon began to label ‘party cartels’.

Against this backdrop, prospects for meaningful political or economic reform were largely confined to the presidency. After Megawati’s brief and disappointing stint in office between 2001 and 2004, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired Army general with a marketable reputation as a ‘professional soldier’ and experienced cabinet minister, was elected, first in 2004 and again in 2009, promising to rise above the corruption and fractiousness of party politics. But his ten years in office proved to be a decade of missed opportunities for institutional reform and industrial deepening, amidst the bonanza of multiple commodity booms driven by rising demand from nearby China.

In 2014, Jokowi’s presidential candidacy offered what appeared to be a more promising vision of change from the top down. A small-time businessman with a furniture-exporting company, Jokowi was praised for his problem-solving and coalition-building skills as the PDI-P mayor of the Central Javanese city of Solo, and for his well-publicized impromptu chats with local residents as Governor of Jakarta. His supposedly ‘clean’ business background, his record of campaigning and cooperating with ethnic-Chinese Christian deputies, his engagement with local NGOs, community groups and labour leaders, and his distance from Megawati – now chairwoman of the PDI-P – raised hopes that he would be an incorruptible, independent, inclusive and progressive president.

Under Jokowi’s tenure, economic growth continued thanks to global demand for Indonesian minerals, palm oil and other exports, and the government engaged in a massive infrastructure spending spree that helped to boost the president’s popularity. Jokowi also impressed some Indonesians by taking up the mantle of economic nationalism. He imposed a ban on the export of unprocessed minerals such as nickel, in which Indonesia holds a commanding share of the global market, spurring a wave of investment – most of it Chinese – in new mineral processing plants. In response to rising concerns about low-lying, flood-prone and continuously sinking Jakarta, Jokowi rolled out plans to relocate the national capital to a new planned city in a remote rural patch of East Kalimantan, in Indonesian Borneo. Such measures helped to sustain his popularity ratings, which remained above 80% throughout his two terms in office.

Yet expectations of progressive reform were sadly mistaken, as seen in the introduction of new laws placing restrictions on union organizing, the media and sexual freedoms. By the end of his decade in power, the labour movement, civic activists and human rights groups felt bitterly betrayed. Critics charged Jokowi with an increasingly authoritarian disposition and an intolerance for dissent. He retained as close advisers a number of retired Army generals such as A.M. Hendropriyono, the former head of Indonesia’s National Intelligence Agency, who was implicated in a massacre of Islamist activists in 1989 and the assassination of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib in 2004.

But the biggest disappointment was yet to come. Following raucous street protests after his re-election in 2019, Jokowi brought his two-time opponent Prabowo into the Cabinet as Defence Minister, ignoring concerns about the latter’s incendiary rhetoric and human rights record. In late 2023, rather than accepting Megawati’s choice of former Central Java Governor as the PDI-P’s presidential candidate, Jokowi struck a backroom deal with Prabowo and spent the final months of his presidency ensuring the victory of his anointed heir. So much for the promise of change.

How to characterize Prabowo himself? In most Western media coverage, there is a near-pathological tendency to portray him as a marginalized figure whose political resurrection reflects the ‘populist’ appeal of his brash and personalist style. But Prabowo’s ascent to the presidency can only be understood through a properly historicized analysis. He was born in 1951 into the ranks of the priyayi, the Javanese aristocracy which staffed the Dutch colonial state and survived the transition to independence, as well as subsequent decades of economic, social, and political change, with many of its privileges intact. His grandfather was a Dutch-educated colonial civil servant who joined the Republican government during the Revolusi and founded the country’s central bank. Prabowo’s father, Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, received his PhD in Economics from the University of Rotterdam and went on to hold key economic portfolios in successive cabinets in the 1950s. But as a leading member of the conservative Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI), Sumitro played a role in the anti-Soekarno rebellions later that decade, whose defeat forced him and his family into exile for much of Prabowo’s adolescence.

With the establishment of a conservative military regime under Suharto in the mid-1960s, however, Sumitro returned to Indonesia to serve as Minister of Trade (1968-73), playing a key role in the reopening of the Indonesian economy to foreign loans, investment and trade. Prabowo entered the Indonesian Military Academy in 1970 and graduated four years later. His family background and formative years bear the traces of Dutch colonial rule, aristocratic privilege and the success of conservative anti-communism and economic liberalism in weathering both the transition to independence and the eventual lurch to military dictatorship.

Prabowo’s Army career spanned much of the Suharto era and the heyday of military rule, with his marriage to one of Suharto’s daughters in 1983 ensuring his rise to senior leadership roles. Much of his career was spent in Special Forces (Kopassus), with long stints in Indonesian-occupied East Timor and alleged involvement in large-scale violence against civilians, including the deployment of irregular militias to terrorize the local population. He faced similar allegations when he led Kopassus operations in West Papua, where local resistance to forced incorporation into Indonesia in the late 1960s was met with harsh military repression throughout the Suharto era and beyond.

The mid-1990s saw Prabowo promoted to key Army positions in Jakarta, first as Commander of Kopassus and then as Commander of Kostrad, the Army Strategic Reserve – the position held by Suharto when he seized power in late 1965. By the spring of 1998, when the ageing dictator was facing an unprecedented economic crisis and calls for his resignation, Prabowo controlled the single largest garrison in Jakarta, while close friends held the key Kopassus and Greater Jakarta Region commands. It was in this context that Prabowo arranged for the illegal detention of leading student activists and orchestrated large-scale rioting in Jakarta, evidently envisaging a martial law scenario in which he could consolidate power.

But with the accelerating flight of capital and ethnic-Chinese businessmen from the country and defections from within the regime, an alternative re-stabilization plan was put in place in late May 1998. Suharto resigned, Habibie assumed the presidency, and Armed Forces Commander Wiranto regained effective control over the military establishment. Prabowo and his allies were summarily removed from their commands, and within months he was discharged from the Armed Forces. It took him no less than twenty-five years to make a full comeback, using his sizeable fortune (acquired through interests in fossil fuels and palm oil), party machinery (including his own Greater Indonesia Movement, Gerakan Indonesia Raya or Gerindra), and social-media presence to mount a successful presidential campaign, which promised continuity with his predecessor on key policy fronts.

For many younger Indonesian voters, this backstory may have seemed utterly irrelevant in the run-up to the election, and Prabowo’s larger-than-life personality may have inspired confidence in his ability to exert presidential authority more effectively than his opponents. Over the years Prabowo has built a reputation as an effective political operator. He heads his own party, and he managed to win both a cabinet seat and a tacit endorsement from Jokowi while appropriating some of his popularity. In a depressingly stable system of oligarchical democracy, where the political field is narrowed by the requirement of nomination by one of the major parties, along with the practical necessities of campaign financing, Prabowo’s election is hardly a ‘populist’ aberration. It is, rather, an ugly reflection of what democracy has come to mean in Indonesia today. Prabowo and his family played a central role in the country’s post-independence history, and he is emblematic of the ultra-conservative forces which continue to haunt its present and its future.

Read on: Rohana Kuddus, ‘Explaining Jokowi’, NLR 130.

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Syncretic Past

During the Russian Revolution, few groups experienced wilder twists of fate than Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Born into the serenity of Habsburg rule and enlisted in an imperial army that erased national distinctions, they returned to a Europe of independent states and competing ideologies. Many were radicalized by the ordeal. One of them was the muckraking Transylvanian journalist Béla Kun. ‘Captured in 1916 and interned in the Urals’, Jacob Mikanowski recounts in his new book Goodbye Eastern Europe, ‘a passing acquaintance with Lenin vaulted Kun into the revolution and the leadership of the fledging Hungarian Communist Party’. The 1919 revolution in Budapest yielded an independent Hungarian Soviet Republic that lasted only 133 days. By the time it collapsed, Kun had taken flight. From the roof of the Soviet headquarters at the Hotel Hungaria he piloted a small airplane, ‘staying so close to the ground that his face could be clearly seen by those walking below’. He carried with him several stolen gold chains and church relics, some of which he dropped by accident, before vanishing into the USSR.

Life stories as tumultuous and unusual as Kun’s are difficult to reduce to history lessons. History, if it teaches anything, only does so obliquely, by way of paradoxes, contradictions and accidents – all of which feature heavily in Goodbye Eastern Europe: a sprawling account of Eastern Europe from the Medieval period to the present day. Mikanowski’s book sets out to tell the history of the region’s cohesion at the moment it has begun to disappear as a cohesive region. If this sounds paradoxical, then the book’s central conceit is no less so. ‘This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist’, it opens. ‘There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there’. What he means is that few people now ‘identify as Eastern European’: the Hungarians and the Polish think of themselves as Central European, while the Baltic states prefer to claim membership of the ‘Nordic’ zone’ to their north. The geographical rubric is an ‘outsider’s convenience’, often a ‘catch-all’ for stereotypes.

Has Eastern Europe ever been anything but a construction of the Western gaze? Most recently, the region’s various peoples were bound together by the shared experience of communism. Eastern Europe’s disappearance as ‘a tangible presence’ and ‘instantly recognizable reality’ coincides with the system’s demise, after which the region fractured into nation-states forging their own discrete identities. But Mikanowski argues that this cohesion, consolidated in the postwar period, reaches back further in time. Throughout the modern period, Eastern Europe was characterized by its distinctive and remarkable diversity: a ‘diversity of language, of ethnicity, and above all, of faith’.

This tension between diversity and cohesion finds expression in the region’s uniquely rich and heterogenous narrative traditions, especially its folklore and legends. ‘Hasidic Jews used to say that the best way to get to know their wonder-working rabbis was through the tales their disciples told about them’, Mikanowski writes. Similarly, ‘tales – stories, rumours, and folksongs . . . get to the heart of what it was like to experience the horrors of the fascist anti-utopia, the brief elation and prolonged terror of Stalinism, the stasis and scarcity of late socialism, and the sudden evaporation of solid values that accompanied the arrival of capitalism’.

Among the regional myths Mikanowski recounts is the story of a ‘great vampire plague that affected the Austrian military frontier in the 1720s and 30s’, during which Viennese officers, ‘their pockets bulging with treatises by Newton and Voltaire’, arrived in Balkan villages to find every grave exhumed and the freshest corpses ‘pierced through the heart with hawthorn stakes’. (The villagers told them matter-of-factly that this was how they dealt with the undead.) Mikanowski also mentions the Ottoman devşirme: the blood tax by which the Christian peoples of the empire were forced to give up their children ‘to be raised in the image of their conquerors’, converting to Islam and serving as soldiers and administrators. This, Mikanowski tells us, would later become the subject of various Serbian folk songs about Ottoman subjugation, sung by ‘wandering bards’ who carried with them ‘a stringed instrument called a gusle’.

In setting itself the task of describing and explaining this diversity, the book evokes another tension, one long prominent in Eastern Europe’s historiography: between the stories that populate it and the political or conceptual categories that try to tame them. Goodbye Eastern Europe is divided into three rather incommensurable parts: ‘Faiths’, ‘Empires and Peoples’ and ‘The Twentieth Century’. The first two interrogate categories of people – Pagans and Christians, Jews, Muslims, Wanderers, Empires, Nations, Heretics – while the last is a more conventional attempt at periodization. The narrative is chronological but rarely proceeds at the same pace. It skips around, dwells on exemplary episodes, shifts into the style of ethnography or into the personal one of family history.

A journalist and critic trained as an academic historian, Mikanowski has written for various American magazines about history, science, language and Eastern Europe. Raised in Pennsylvania, he spent much of his childhood in Poland with his half-Catholic and half-Jewish family. The book’s subtitle, ‘An Intimate History of a Divided Land’, yokes the historical to the personal, incorporating elements of memoir, travel writing and reportage. In the preface the author tells us that his ‘family’s history forms a braid running throughout’, and quotes Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm: ‘awareness of one’s origins is like an anchor line plunged into the deep’ without which ‘historical intuition is virtually impossible’.

Terms like ‘intimate history’ and ‘historical intuition’ suggest a style of historical writing most accurately termed Romantic. Emphasizing intuition over analysis, and the ability of history to move us over our attempts to understand its workings, Romantic history makes ample use of literary techniques, aiming to provide the reader with a close encounter with the past rather than a mere representation of it. ‘Intimate history’, however, doesn’t simply name a genre. It also suggests that Eastern European history is itself of a different order: more tangible, vibrant, deeply felt. Though whether this is indeed the case, or whether it’s a trick of the light, is not easy to discern.

Just as Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye, Lenin! turns out not be a paroxysm of Ostalgie but a meditation on how people confabulate the past to create a liveable present, Goodbye Eastern Europe’s nostalgic overtones conceal a sophisticated argument about the power of storytelling – a form of practical magic that can be put to various ends: to justify pogroms or devise syncretic rituals. Mikanowski’s historical snapshots range from eighteenth-century messianic movements and their charlatan techniques, to the attempts by contemporary nation-states like Hungary, Poland and Ukraine to form ‘usable pasts’ out of their heavily redacted histories. Above all, he suggests, storytelling and popular rituals have been means of regional self-fashioning.

Mikanowski at one point cites an episode from the memorial book of his great-great grandfather Meir. In 1893, the shtetl of Zambrów suffered an exceptionally terrible outbreak of cholera, which at that time was ravaging Russia and Poland. At a loss, the residents organized a Shvartze Khasene: a ‘black wedding’ for the man and woman deemed the most miserable in the town (‘a pauper girl named Chana-Yenta and the old bachelor Velvel’). Rolls were baked and meat and fish prepared by local housewives, while the wider community supplied the couple’s attire. They ‘set up the wedding canopy – in the cemetery, of course’, and on the wedding day, ‘a lively throng accompanied the bride and groom to their huppah’: the wedding canopy in Jewish marriage ceremonies. Soon afterward, the plague ceased, and Chana-Yenta ‘became known as the “City’s Daughter-in-Law”. She was given the job of municipal water carrier, and her husband was given an official beggar’s licence’. The Shvartze Khasene wove the tradition of Catholic exorcism into Jewish shtetl life. The villagers invented a ritual that mended the fabric of the community by translating the expulsion of malevolent forces into the partial upending of social hierarchy.

Elsewhere, Mikanowski invites readers to imagine what it would be like ‘to journey down the Istanbul-Belgrade highway in Ottoman times’, or to picture the American-born nature writer Eleanor Perényi, née Stone, accompanying her parents through Budapest in 1937 and falling in love with a Hungarian nobleman. Perhaps the most famous literary antecedent here is Claudio Magris, whose Danubio (1986), subtitled ‘A Sentimental Journey’ in the English translation, also used first-person anecdotes and diary entries to construct a heterodox history of the region. Just as Magris ferries his reader down the continent along the Danube’s riverbanks, Mikanowski flies low over the terrains that formed the Western flank of the Soviet empire.

Even minor narrative forms can have world-shaping power, Mikanowski suggests, and it is this argument that allows him to illuminate the connections between Eastern Europe’s twentieth century and its earlier history; in particular, between its eclectic stock of legends, folk tales and rabbinical parables and the twentieth century ideologies that took root in the region: fascism, communism and neoliberalism. At the book’s core is an examination of the interplay between the historical experience of communism and the deeper cultural traditions that gave that system its particular regional shape.

For Mikanowski, Eastern Europe’s superstitious and syncretic past holds the key to understanding communism’s industrial miracles, worker-heroes and paranoid surveillance apparatuses. The dogmatic and mystical character of the communist period is rooted, somewhat paradoxically, in the region’s deeper history of religious intermingling. In this part of the world, the resolutely atheist creed of Marxism was interpreted as yet another salvational doctrine, inspiring exceptionally zealous forms of devotion. Mikanowski tells the story of the Polish essayist Jerzy Stempowski, who, while walking with his father in Berdychiv in 1909, heard ‘a voice, intoning as in prayer’ and, after following it, arrived at a tailors’ guild hosting a live reading of Capital. The man reading Marx’s words had a ‘singsong voice, pausing after every sentence to answer questions. As the night wore on, the text – difficult to begin with – became even less clear, but that did not deter the tailors’.

Mikanowski also provides a striking account of the Holocaust, which dispenses with the high-altitude vantage of traditional histories in favour of an ‘up close, often face-to-face’ perspective on Nazi barbarism, as it was experienced among neighbours and within families, the author’s included. Instead of tracking large-scale trends or statistics, we are given vivid individual biographies that were deformed by the black hole of Nazism. Mikanowski tells the story of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, ‘the Proust of rubbish heaps’, who spent his whole life in Drohobycz, now in Ukraine, producing mesmerizing stories and illustrations as well as translating Kafka. While living under German occupation, he was protected by a Nazi officer who liked his drawings (in return, Schulz painted a mural for the officer’s children). But in 1942, another officer got into a personal feud with his protector, and both of them decided to shoot each other’s ‘pet Jews’. Schulz’s murder, Mikanowski suggests, doesn’t fit with the traditional image of the Nazis’ ‘mechanistic genocide’; ‘in most of Eastern Europe’, he writes, the Holocaust was experienced as ‘an intimate slaughter’. 

A history composed of extraordinary persons and remarkable events, emphasizing paradoxes and coincidences, sometimes threatens to dissolve broader ideas in the fizz of its colorful minutiae. At times the book’s argument, while impressive and complex, is in danger of getting lost among the curious anecdotes and vignettes about the author’s ancestors. Ironically, Goodbye Eastern Europe can sometimes feel like a series of scattered tales rather than a continuous history of a cohesive region. Still, for Mikanowski, the aim is not only to approximate the lived experience of the past, but to unlock insights that lie beyond the reach of conventional history – which fails to capture the kaleidoscopic complexity of the region’s competing narratives and belief systems. In this sense, perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is stylistic. It shows how the continuities in Eastern Europe’s longue durée can only be captured by a mode of writing that reflects its intimacy and heterogeneity.

Read on: Joachim Becker, ‘Europe’s Other Periphery’, NLR 99.

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False Alternative

In launching its assault on Gaza, the Israeli government had three primary aims: to exact revenge, to restore the prestige of the army – which had been severely damaged by the 7 October attack – and to guarantee Netanyahu’s political survival. So far it has proven relatively successful. The IDF has embarked on an effective public-relations campaign to rebuild its credibility as it lays waste to the Strip. And while Netanyahu’s popularity is at a nadir, calls for his resignation remain marginal; the public seem content to wait until the fighting is over to hold him accountable, which gives him an incentive to prolong it indefinitely.

Yet after four months, it is becoming harder to sustain the official narrative that the purpose of the war is to eliminate Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. It is increasingly clear that these goals are contradictory, since the greatest threat to the hostages’ lives is the continuation of the violence. With the number of IDF casualties rising, more than a hundred Israeli captives still being held in Gaza, and no significant gains in weakening Hamas’s operational capacities, public support for the war is declining. A significant majority – 58% – have expressed a lack of confidence in Netanyahu’s management of it. More Israelis now believe that returning the captives should take priority over the destruction of Hamas than vice versa.

Against this backdrop, a series of interconnected questions have come to dominate the Israeli political agenda: the future of Netanyahu, the future of the war, and the settlement that will be established in its wake. The most widely touted candidate to replace Netanyahu is the former army general and Defence Minister Benny Gantz, whose National Unity party is polling far ahead of Likud. Gantz’s political vision has never been particularly coherent. Over the years he has indicated support for some kind of diplomatic solution with the Palestinians, but he has also stressed that the present situation is ‘not ripe for a permanent agreement’. He opposed the Nation-State Law but abstained from voting when amendments were proposed in the Knesset. During the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms he avoided direct confrontation with the Prime Minister and stressed the need for a ‘mutual agreement’ between the two sides. Since October, Gantz has served in the war cabinet as a minister without portfolio. At times he has tried to distance himself from Netanyahu’s belligerent rhetoric, but in practice he has been just as active in prosecuting the military campaign. 

Among Israel’s Western backers, Gantz is seen as a welcome alternative who could save the country from the hard right and reestablish its identity as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. Washington, in particular, views him as someone who could be persuaded to accept a ‘constructive solution’ to the perennial problem of Palestine. The hope, among Biden and his team, is that once the war winds down Netanyahu will be ousted and replaced by this more reliable and less erratic partner. Yet both Gantz’s record and the current situation in Israel suggest that this is wishful thinking.

For one thing, there is a question mark over how much Gantz truly wants to lead the country. During his short political career, he has twice saved the political skin of the man he is supposedly trying to replace: first in April 2020, when he helped Netanyahu form an emergency government; then in October 2023, when he joined the war cabinet in the name of ‘national duty’. Having passed up these opportunities to topple his opponent, Gantz now finds himself without a clear pathway to power. As Israeli politics have moved rightward, his ‘centrist’ camp has lost the ability to assemble a Knesset majority on its own. It would need the support of Arab parties, which currently hold ten seats out of 120. But given Gantz’s attitude toward both Palestinians and Arab Israelis, winning their trust seems all but impossible. 

During the 2019 election campaign, Gantz boasted that he had ‘returned Gaza to the Stone Age’ during Operation Protective Edge, when he served as the IDF Chief of Staff. He also claimed to have ‘eliminated 1,364 terrorists’ – the total number of Palestinians killed in the assault, including hundreds of children. Now Gantz is replaying these apocalyptic fantasies on a much larger scale, waging a brutal war against an entrapped civilian population that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, he is overseeing the systematic persecution of Arabs in Israel, whose treatment is reminiscent of the military rule imposed on them in the early years of the state. The legal organization Adalah has documented an ongoing crackdown on any expression of solidarity with Palestine, which has so far led to hundreds of arrests, a wave of unfair dismissals, and the expulsion of hundreds of students from higher education institutions. Earlier this month, four leading Arab politicians, including Mohammad Barakeh – head of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab citizens of Israel – were detained by police for trying to participate in an anti-war protest.

The government has also pushed through extensive budget cuts for Arab local authorities, which are already suffering from persistent neglect, crumbling infrastructure and an upsurge in organized crime that the state refuses to address. In light of this, it is unlikely that the Arab population will support Gantz’s elevation to prime ministerial office, even if he is presented as the ‘lesser evil’. In recent years, mainstream Israeli political discourse has become highly personalized, centred on Netanyahu as an individual figure: ‘Should he stay or should he go?’ But for Arabs his removal would make little meaningful difference.

One need only recall the anti-Netanyahu ‘Government of Change’, elected in 2020 and led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, to underscore this point. The coalition, which represented almost every part of the Israeli political spectrum – and even won the reluctant backing of the Arab parties – had no plans to break with its predecessor’s so-called security policies. It had no interest in ending the conflict or the occupation. After only a year, it dissolved itself in order to save the regulations governing the dual legal system in the West Bank, which were placed in jeopardy when the right refused to vote for their renewal. In the end, the Bennett–Lapid government preferred to return Netanyahu to power than to see the apartheid regime threatened.

The unwillingness of the Israeli ‘opposition’ to mount a genuine challenge to the present order was reflected in the mass protests last year, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets following Netanyahu’s judicial coup. The movement, which was supported by senior figures in the political and military establishment, claimed to be ‘defending democracy’. But this did not mean full political and legal equality for all, since that would have to include Arabs. Its image of democracy was rather a technical-procedural one, based on the separation of the executive and judicial branches. The protesters’ primary demand was for the courts – those which had ratified the Nation-State Law, along with countless other racist and discriminatory measures – to retain their formal independence. Above all, the leaders stressed that an impartial national legal system was necessary to protect Israeli soldiers from facing international war crimes tribunals. Unsurprisingly, this was a ‘democratic celebration’ in which Arab citizens refused to take part.   

Even if Israel’s ‘centrist’ bloc were to somehow form a new government, with the aim of changing the status quo on Palestine, the obstacles to a Western-backed settlement would still be insurmountable. Among them is the strength of the Israeli far right, which would fight tooth-and-nail to block any diplomatic ‘solution’, as well as the drastic decrease in public support for Palestinian statehood after 7 October. There is also the dramatic demographic changes in the occupied territories, caused by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the constant growth in the number of settlers, whom the Israeli government would never agree to relocate. In Palestine, meanwhile, there is the issue of widespread distrust for the PA, which lacks the credibility to implement any such arrangement.  

Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise 20% of its total population, are now succumbing to despair as the state continues to slaughter their brethren in Gaza. Large numbers of Israeli Jews have given up on the prospect of a legal settlement: a development that the far right is exploiting by calling for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their historic homeland. A government of the ‘centre’ would not solve this structural crisis. It would only put a thin layer of makeup on the face of Israeli society.

Read on: Yonatan Mendel, ‘New Jerusalem’, NLR 81.