Author: Oliver Eagleton

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Rebel Maids

The Brazilian cartoon series Irmão do Jorel offers a cosy-satirical picture of family life, not unlike The Simpsons. Strikingly, however, there is a character with no homologue in the US series: the family’s maid, represented as a purple octopus – amorphous, voiceless, nameless, with eight arms ready to carry out any task requested of her (for a representative episode, see here). The Brazilian entertainment industry has many such images. From blackface turns on TV comedy shows to the maids who form a girl band in the hit telenovela Cheias de Charme, representations of domestic workers pervade the country’s cultural imagination.

Beyond the culture industry, paid domestic work is a daily reality for nearly 6 million Brazilian women, as well as for the millions of households that employ them. It is an occupation strongly marked by the sexual and racial division of labour: 92% of those employed in this category are female, and two-thirds of the latter are black. Restricted to the private sphere, the actual experience of this work has been atomized and largely invisible.

Despite the prevailing silence in Brazil’s public sphere about the realities of domestic work, domestics played a leading role in the 100,000-strong March of Black Women against racism and violence in November 2015. In 2016, a rapper and former maid, Preta-Rara, shared some memories of her time in domestic service on Facebook and was flooded with responses from other domestic workers. The page she set up for them soon garnered thousands of personal stories, from multiple viewpoints – giving voice to the experiences of Brazilian domestic workers in a way that cold official statistics could never do.

In 2019 Preta-Rara – real name, Joyce Fernandes; preta rara translates as rare or precious black girl – produced a compilation of these social media accounts in a book, Eu, Empregada Doméstica (I, Domestic Servant) with the subtitle: ‘The Maid’s Room is the Modern Slave Quarters’. It opens with the story of her grandmother, Noêmia, who began work as a maid at the age of fourteen. Preta-Rara’s mother, Maria Helena, followed the same path, and tells her daughter of the lasting trauma left by never having been taught to read or write. (Preta-Rara herself later made it to college and has taught high-school history, in addition to her music – her first album, Audácia, appeared in 2015 – and establishing a major social-media presence.)

Though some of the stories collected in Eu, Empregada Doméstica recall humane employers, the structural situation of the work means that exploitation is standard. Many depict psychological humiliations: accusations of theft, sexual harassment, moral harassment, effective imprisonment, occupational diseases and chronic exhaustion. Women recall being sent off in their early teens to work in strangers’ houses. Younger children, accompanying their mother to work when there is no one to watch them at home, get mistreated by employers or bullied by their children. Domestic workers often make huge sacrifices to help their children, especially their daughters, avoid going through the same experience. Access to education is frequently seen as the key to change – sometimes provoking mockery and disbelief from their employers. Escape from exploitation and subordination requires enormous individual effort and resources.

Preta-Rara herself recalls the indignity of being forced to use the ‘service’ lift in an apartment block, and to climb eight flights of stairs when it was out of order, because maids were not allowed to use the ‘social’ elevator. A common response emerges, when domestic workers are pushed to their limit: ‘Never going back to that place again.’ It is a phrase that occurs over and over in the contributions, a series of one-woman strikes against an intolerable situation, now brought together by Preta-Rara in collective form.

Nancy Fraser has analysed the heightened contradictions of ‘capital and care’ under today’s form of financialized capitalism, as neoliberal pressures put a squeeze on essential forms of material and affective reproductive labour – birthing and raising children, maintaining households, sustaining personal and community relationships. She argues that every form of capitalist society harbours a deep-seated crisis tendency, as capital’s drive to unlimited accumulation – free-riding on the life world, as she puts it – tends to destabilize the reproductive processes that are indispensable to the perpetuation of society itself, without which there can be ‘no culture, no economy, no political organization’.

For Fraser, these contradictions take different forms in the core and on the peripheries of world capitalism, as also across successive eras or ‘regimes of accumulation’: 19th-century liberal imperialism and colonial extraction; mid-20th century welfare-state Fordism and third-world developmentalism; 21st-century neoliberal globalization. Each, she has argued, produced its own asymmetrical fix for staving off the contradictions of capital and care: the ‘separate spheres’ gendering 19th-century bourgeois life, the expanded welfare provision and male breadwinner of Fordism, the two-earner families of neoliberal emancipation. Each fix in turn entered into crisis. The latest manifestation of this tendency in the US is the ‘crisis of care’ – time poverty, family-work balance – already attracting attention even before the reproductive catastrophe of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Yet the Brazilian experience – and perhaps, more broadly, that of Latin America – alters this picture. The stories collected by Preta-Rara speak not of epochal ruptures in forms of reproductive labour, but of intergenerational continuities. ‘Almost all women in my family started their lives as domestic servants’, one woman wrote. ‘My grandmother was enslaved – because that’s the right word – from childhood. My mother started to work as a family’s nanny when she was a teenager. My aunt has asthma attacks brought on by excessive work with chemical-cleaning products’.

‘Breaking the cycle of misery to which we were subjected is an arduous task’, wrote another. ‘It means fighting against everything and everyone. My grandmother worked all her lifetime in the fields, my mother was a maid, and I followed in her footsteps. Going against all of this leaves scars, physical and on the soul.’ At stake here are historical continuities traceable back to slavery – the connection Preta-Rara underscores with her subtitle, identifying the maid’s room as the slave quarters. Some of the social media narrators use the colonial term sinhá – ‘madam’ – to refer to their employers. Another makes the same link: ‘I’m always thinking that, if the memory [of paid domestic work] hurts me, I can imagine it must have hurt my mother and my grandmother much more, because, even allegorically, they had to bear the “lash” so that we could eat bread.’

As noted by the Brazilian social scientist and activist Lélia Gonzalez, to understand the place of black women in Brazilian society today, we need to examine their role under slavery. Gonzalez – herself the daughter of a black maid – summarized the historical role of the black mucama: ‘It was her task to keep the master’s house running at all levels: washing, ironing, cooking, spinning, weaving, sewing, and nursing the children born from the “free” wombs of the little senhoras… And after the heavy work at the master’s house, she was also responsible for taking care of her own children, as well as helping her friends who had come from the plantations, etc., who were starving and exhausted.’ The Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato has emphasised the longue durée nature of this ‘transferred motherhood’ in Latin America, dating from the onset of colonialism. It has been naturalized over the centuries by serial cultural forms, predecessors of the purple octopus in Irmão do Jorel.

The developmentalist era in Brazil brought many changes, but – pace Fraser – the underlying role of black women in social reproduction continued throughout. If anything, young girls were dispatched from the interior in greater numbers to work as maids in the booming cities. The social media stories illustrate this process well: ‘My mother comes from a tiny hinterland village and was sent to the capital to work at the age of thirteen’ is a typical beginning. This ‘national care chain’ – the internal migratory flow of girls and women from the Brazilian backlands to the cities, which peaked at the height of the ‘rural exodus’ of the 1960s-80s – has its equivalent in the ‘global care chain’ of which Fraser and others also write: the pull of globalized financialized capitalism inducing the emigration of racialized women from poor countries to undertake social-reproductive work in rich countries where, with the onset of the long downturn and collapse of the ‘male breadwinner model’,  women were heading into waged white-collar work.

Brazil is certainly part of the migratory flow of the global care chain, in keeping with its middle-ranking position in the world economy. Immigrant domestic workers are, for example, Bolivian, Haitian, Venezuelan and Filipina women, whose migratory condition intersects with racial, class and gender rankings. Brazilian women, on the other hand, mainly emigrate to the Global North, especially the United States and Western Europe.

How to explain the continuities in Brazil’s social-reproductive order, compared to the successive regimes that Fraser analyses? Here it may be helpful to draw upon the notion of colonialidad developed by the Peruvian world-systems theorist Aníbal Quijano, who pointed out that ruling classes in early 19th-century Latin America battled to prevent the decolonization of their societies even as they fought for independent states. Through this dynamic, the ‘coloniality of power’ was incorporated into the state-formation process itself. The sexual and racial division of paid domestic labour, and its historical continuity with practices dating from the colonial and slavery periods, underlines the relationship between social-reproductive relations in Latin America and this foundational hierarchy. In this context, the ‘care gap’ is not a recent process. It is a dynamic inscribed in the very ‘coloniality of power’.

Thus, paid domestic work is both an expression of the structural inequities within Brazilian society and the perpetuation of them. Its availability at a low cost for Brazilian middle and upper classes lessens the potential pressure for welfare-state measures aimed at supporting socio-reproduction activities – day-care centres, full-time education, community restaurants, community laundries and care centres for the elderly. As Rita Segato puts it in Crítica da Colonialidade em Oito Ensaios (2021), the continuity of women’s invisible low-paid work allows an ‘evasion of social-sector investment’.

It also dissipates tensions within middle and upper-class families, where women’s ‘double shift’ of domestic labour is alleviated, as well as the demand that their partners and other family members do their share. As the American sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argued in Black Feminist Thought (1990), historically many white families in the US similarly maintained their class position because they used black maids as cheap labour. At the same time, the delegation of domestic work tends to intensify racial and class inequities, accentuating the polarization between women, especially between domestic workers and their female employers.

Brazilian domestic workers have been particularly hard hit during the Covid pandemic, given their fragile or non-existent social protection. They were torn between continuing to work at high risk of infection or stopping work and losing their income. Nor were they given priority-worker status for the vaccine.

The aggravation of precarious social conditions suggests to some that we are moving forward towards the past. In Critique of Black Reason (2013), Achille Mbembe argued that the world is becoming nègre, as capitalism accentuates the exclusion, alienation and degradation of workers in general. From another perspective, the question of care provides a route to the future. For the Madrid collective Precarias a la Deriva, care should be a guiding principle in all political-economic considerations. Fraser argues that struggles over social-reproduction – encompassing housing, healthcare, food security, migrants’ and workers’ rights, day care, elder care, paid parental leave – are ‘tantamount to the demand for a massive reorganization of the relations between production and reproduction’.

Care and social reproduction are also central to movements such as Quilombismo and Bien Vivir, which focus on social practices based on cooperation, solidarity and equality. Production and reproduction go hand in hand in these radically democratic projects. Everyday resistance takes place in multiple ways, even if it is just to say, ‘Never going back to that place again.’ Certainly, Brazilian society will never be emancipated unless domestic workers are emancipated too.

Read on: Guilherme Boulos, ‘Struggles of the Roofless’, NLR 130.

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Zero-Sum Game

In my recent Sidecar piece, I developed the argument that economic disruptions unleashed by surging energy prices – especially in the gas market – can be connected to state climate policies. Adam Tooze, responding in his Chartbook #51, challenges this so-called ‘energy dilemma’ thesis. What Tooze rejects unambiguously is the theory that Western fossil fuel corporations have priced the prospect of climate related policy changes into their investment behaviour, and that this has contributed to the tensions on the supply-side that came to the fore this autumn. While I agree that stronger evidence is needed to reach a definitive conclusion, I nonetheless have several reservations about Tooze’s essay.

In the context of the current crisis, the term ‘energy dilemma’ was coined by Lara Dong, an analyst for the consulting firm IHS Markit, who explained how Chinese authorities have struggled to balance environmental concerns over coal with the need for energy security. Yet this is not a new idea. It can be traced back to the 1970s, when experts became increasingly aware of the tension between achieving affordable and reliable energy provision and limiting the detrimental impact of growing fossil fuel consumption. In 2010, the geographer Michael J. Bradshaw produced a systematic formulation of the dilemma in ‘Global Energy Dilemmas: A Geographical Perspective’, asking: ‘can we have the energy necessary for economic development and, at the same time, manage the transition to a low-carbon energy system necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change?’

Tooze, in his piece, presents the ‘energy dilemma’ thesis as follows:

The canard that continues to circulate is that the supply shortfall is directly connected to climate policy. Too much talk about net zero has discouraged fossil fuel investors, resulting in lower investment, restricted supply and vulnerability to demand shocks.

His creditable aim is to prevent this narrative being used to postpone the green transition. However, it is worth noting from the outset that the definition he presents is a narrow one, limited to the supply constraints that arise from waning private investment in fossil fuels precipitated by climate policies and related discourses. For Tooze, there is an energy dilemma only when climate policies exert an ‘indirect effect’ on private investment that results in limited supply and translates into systemic fragilities.

By contrast, building on Bradshaw’s perspective, ‘energy dilemma’ can be used to refer more broadly to the crisis tendency of capitalism driven by climate policymaking. That is, a dilemma occurs whenever climate policies hamper economic growth. This includes the direct effects of public regulation on economic actors’ operations (in particular, the impact of climate legislation on production, funding activities and consumption patterns) as well as the indirect effects of policy changes – or anticipated ones – on private investment. These elements are closely intertwined. Since both direct and indirect effects place constraints on the supply-side in terms of rising costs or reduced investment opportunities, their outcomes are similar: a cascading effect on volumes, prices and profitability that impacts growth patterns, either directly or via the financial system.

With this broader interpretation of the energy dilemma – in which both direct and indirect factors contribute to a crisis dynamic unleashed by climate policymaking – much of the evidence cited by Tooze does not contradict my thesis but rather confirms it. Take the case of China’s energy crisis. Tooze writes that ‘There is no doubt that deliberate decisions by Beijing to regulate coal-fired electricity generation played a key part.’ Although other details must also be considered, in the context of booming demand a straightforward energy dilemma causality is discernible: binding targets for energy consumption and coal use = energy shortages = manufacturing disruptions and blackouts. This process ‘plays out transnationally and by way of the spillover of Chinese supply constraints both from coal and low-carbon sources, to global LNG markets’ – an observation which appears to give the energy dilemma framework a global dimension, showing how tentative steps in the direction of carbon transition in China fuel tensions on international markets that reverberate in the rising cost of gas, particularly in Europe.

Tooze correctly points out that the attempt of EU authorities to limit their reliance on Russian gas has backfired. The building of oversized LNG storage capacities subsidized by public money in Europe was intended to set up a credible alternative to Russian supply in order to extract cheaper prices from Gazprom. But this integration into global LNG markets has ended up increasing the vulnerability of the region to gas price surges. The internal difficulty of the energy transition is thus compounded by direct exposure to the repercussions of China’s energy metamorphosis. Moreover, Tooze writes that in 2021 ‘the green factor finally does enter the European story’ since ‘a surge in the price of emissions permits in the EU-ETS’, in addition to rising coal prices, prevented European operators from switching back to generating electricity from coal. Here, climate policy directly restricts the possibilities to mobilize cheaper options which would defuse cost pressure – another iteration of the energy dilemma that Tooze purportedly rejects.

However, although many of Tooze’s examples fit within a more broadly conceived energy dilemma framework, the overall thrust of his argument is distinct. He asserts that the dramatic fall in fossil fuel investment since 2015 is not a consequence of climate policies and campaigns but of falling energy prices, themselves related to the American shale-gas revolution of the early 2010s. It is worth interrogating this point further. Focusing on the coal-gas-renewable conundrum in Western countries, we must understand the extent to which the current misalignment between supply and demand is due to decreasing investment in coal, insufficient increase of renewable supplies and/or insufficient investment in gas to bridge the gap – and how climate policies have influenced these interlocking issues.

On this very complex question, Tooze makes two claims. The first is that divestment from coal was mostly driven by a loss of competitiveness vis-à-vis alternative sources of power generation, especially gas. This was clearly a decisive factor in the short-term, but it would be reckless to dismiss the significance of longer-term financial assessments informed by government climate pledges and civil society pressure on investors. For instance, Magnus Hall, CEO of Vattenfal, explained that his company decided in 2016 to divest from coal-fired power generation in Germany for both short-term economic reasons and longer-term prospects related to climate policy:

society is becoming less and less accepting of coal-fired power generation. And there is an economic truth: it is becoming increasingly difficult to make money from coal in Europe. For our part, we sold our mines and power plants because we knew that these assets had become too risky financially.

Tooze’s second claim concerns the ambiguous position of gas supplies. While the use of gas has grown as a substitute for coal – in part because it is a more flexible complement to renewables – investment has increased in the development of LNG infrastructure for imports. However, production has also decreased in Europe and investment in US shale-gas has slackened. Tooze tries to explain the rationale for this slowdown:  

If there is a force holding back new investment in America’s shale industry today, it is not government climate policy, but the insistence by Wall Street that the shale industry actually pay out dividends rather than plowing back its earnings into new drilling.

There are good reasons to doubt this argument. In fact, from the point of view of capital, not investing – or divesting and distributing profits to shareholders – is a logical way to hollow-out a business without a future. In that sense, the financialization mantra, ‘downsize and distribute’, becomes one way to retreat from fossil fuels and reallocate capital to other sectors. Consistent with this, we observe a marked relative devaluation of the Oil & Gas firms’ market capitalization relative to other sectors in the course of the last decade (Figure 1), reflecting investors’ move away from carbon stranded assets and anticipation of deteriorating prospects. The Wall Street Journal likewise acknowledges that ‘Concerns about long-term demand are exacerbating the oversupply of fossil fuels, and companies say they have become more selective about where they invest’, contributing to one the worst-ever write-downs in 2020. All this can be read as evincing a clear – if dramatically insufficient and untimely – shift away from fossil fuel which, in specific segments of the market and amid booming demand, contributed to the recent shortages in coal, gas and electricity generation.


Figure 1. All-World index versus Dow Jones Global Oil & Gas index: last 10 years (FT.com market data)

Tooze states that ‘What 2021 exposes is that the green push since 2015 has been enacted against the backdrop of a regime of low energy prices set by the price collapse in 2014.’ By green push, he means the fact that the replacement of some coal supplies with relatively cleaner gas was supported by a favourable evolution of their relative prices. The big picture is that this is not a viable pathway for green energy, due to methane emissions and underreporting of leakages which suggest that natural gas could be more environmentally destructive that previously thought. However, as far as the energy dilemma debate is concerned, the dividends of a price environment favourable to a shift away from coal simply adds more weight to the idea that the costs of the adjustment are real. Although they were postponed for a couple of years, they are now abruptly manifest.

In this sense, it would be unreasonable to exclude the energy dilemma from our analysis of the present conjuncture. There are straightforward and precise connections between energy market turbulence and climate policies in China and in Europe. The temporary increase in coal supply in China to defuse economic tensions testifies to at least a short-term trade-off between emissions and economic growth. It may be difficult to disentangle the role of low prices from the longer-term decline in private fossil fuel investment since 2015; but we should not dismiss the idea that the latter was partly driven by gloomy forecasts for the sector based on anticipated climate policies. High payouts to shareholders and declining market capitalization can, indeed, be read as symptoms of such forecasts.

Tooze rightly suggests that energy companies are responsible for the myopia concerning the evolution of demand patterns that resulted in insufficient investment in energy. The fact that global investment in renewables and energy efficiency has actually declined since 2015 is indicative of the sector’s lacklustre engagement with decarbonation efforts. Yet although these companies bear collective responsibility, the issue is also systemic. It reveals a deeper coordination problem that enterprises cannot handle via market mechanisms alone. The energy dilemma thesis is in this sense consistent with the IEA’s repeated warnings about the coordination challenges related to the transition, and their exacerbation by slow and inconsistent policymaking:

As the world makes its much-needed way towards net zero emissions, there is an ever-present risk of mismatches between energy supply and demand as a result of a lack of appropriate investment signals, insufficient technological progress, poorly designed policies or bottlenecks arising from a lack of infrastructure.

At present, shortages of coal and gas coincide with booming demand, but if renewable production rapidly expands, electrification accelerates and/or energy consumption significantly slows, a collapse of fossil fuel prices is possible. In spring 2020, oversupply of oil resulting from the pandemic lockdown pushed US prices into negative territory. Further decreases may occur when fossil fuel producers compete to valorize the last sellable resources in a world shifting beyond carbon. However, even if such price slumps take place amid an energy transition, their wider context will be rising costs driven by expensive investment efforts and the deadweight of carbon-asset legacies.

Tooze and I agree on the limits of the price mechanism to guide the green transition and the necessity of macroeconomic planning. When it comes to the energy dilemma question, I sympathize with his reluctance to give fossil-interests any argument that could be used to postpone further greenhouse gas reduction. Yet we must also resist the delusion that crisis tendencies related to climate policy are not at stake. A smooth transition beyond carbon is no longer an option. There is no Pareto-efficient way of eradicating fossil fuel use in a timeframe compatible with the prevention of climate disorders. A zero-sum or even negative-sum game is in play, which means that some parts of the population will bear the cost of the adjustment more than others.

This looming distributive conflict puts drastic constraints on class compromises. At this stage, I do not see what should prevent a large progressive front from rallying in favour of restrictions on the avoidable emissions related to the consumption patterns of the ultra-rich. A class-biased punitive ecology could become an effective means to stop ecologically perverse expenditure from rebounding onto the poorest. It could also be a stepping-stone to broader social mobilizations. Crucially, the primary implication of the crisis tendency is not the impossibility of humanity to handle the challenges of the energy transition, but the additional barriers to collective agency erected by the imperative of capital valorization. Subordinating profit-making to rapid decarbonation is, in my view, a price worth paying for the cause of climate justice.

Read on: Cédric Durand, ‘In the Crisis Cockpit’, NLR 116/117.

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Ortega’s Synthesis

On 7 November, Nicaraguans went to the polls for the first time since the dramatic spring of 2018, when the country experienced a sustained insurrectionary challenge to president Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista administration. Ortega stood for a fourth consecutive term with no viable opposition: the only other candidates were from marginal government-aligned parties. The dearth of challengers was a result of the Sandinistas’ unrelenting campaign of repression, which intensified in recent months to include the jailing of nearly every announced or anticipated anti-Sandinista presidential candidate, as well as a slew of other political and civil society leaders. Voters sympathetic to the opposition abstained from the election, rallying around slogans like Mi candidato está preso (‘my candidate is in jail’). Predictably, Ortega’s ticket, which also includes his wife and incumbent vice president Rosario Murillo, won a clear majority of votes: about 75%, according to the Supreme Electoral Council.

The 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, which issued in the first Ortega-led government, still occupies a totemic position for many socialists around the world. Arriving in the twilight of the Cold War, the Sandinista triumph promised to revitalize the global left, still reeling from the disappointments of decolonization and the failure of the Soviet experiment. But as international interest in the country receded following the Sandinistas’ surprise electoral defeat in 1990, the chasm between Ortega’s heroic image and political realities in Nicaragua grew ever wider.

Now, with pro- and anti-Ortega factions presenting sharply divergent interpretations not only of the 2018 civic rebellion, but also of the political character of his administration, reasoned debate on Nicaragua has become increasingly elusive. Unless the contradictions of the Sandinistas’ programme can be resolved, another period of unrest is likely to erupt during Ortega’s next five-year term. In this context, it is vital for internationalists to clear the fog of the Cold War and look with fresh eyes on the political-economic coordinates of 21st-century sandinismo.

The neoliberal period (1990-2006) left 70% of Nicaraguan workers unabsorbed by the formal labour market, prompting waves of popular protest in which Ortega, as leader of the opposition, played a prominent role. At the same time, by the mid-2000s a new class fragment had taken shape. An ascendant business sector – including a number of millionaire investors with revolutionary pedigrees, like Ortega himself – now chafed against the thin layer of hyper-wealthy families that had controlled the country’s export economy since the dictatorship era (1936-1979).

Ortega’s return to office in 2007 was, in large part, the fruit of an opportunistic power-sharing agreement struck by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and its historic rival, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC). But it was also a rejection the Washington Consensus which coincided with the Pink Tide then cresting in Latin America. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, left-led governments were preceded by disruptive social movements that provoked crises in the national political system. Unlike Chávez, Morales and Correa, however, Ortega never promised to deliver transformative change by using the state to meet the demands of grassroots activists. Rather, Ortega pitched himself to both political elites and the wider public as the only figure capable of stabilizing the country’s political system by containing disruptive social conflicts within the state itself. (In this way, he bears a striking similarity to Lula in Brazil – another outsider among the Pink Tide cohort.) 

From the outset, the Ortega synthesis was an unstable class compromise in which the interests of private employers and un- and informally employed workers were sutured precariously together. This contradiction crystallized in the president’s vision of 21st-century Sandinista developmentalism. With one hand, the state extends generous social welfare programmes to unemployed and informal workers, whom it identifies as the protagonists of national development; with the other, it guarantees the acquiescence, and continued investment, of private employers by enhancing the conditions of exploitation in the wage-labour sector, for instance by restricting formally employed workers’ ability to organize.

The day after his inauguration in 2007, Ortega announced Nicaragua’s enrollment in the Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas (ALBA), an incipient economic bloc, led by Venezuela, which sought to resist US hegemony through regional economic cooperation. This new relationship pleased Nicaraguan producers by opening up the Venezuelan consumer market to their exports. For a time it also provided the Nicaraguan state with a reliable source of foreign aid; in 2014, Venezuelan assistance provided Nicaragua with almost a fifth of its annual budgeted income. The Ortega administration used that revenue to fund a range of means-tested welfare programmes, typically targeted at the jobless or informally employed, which provided direct grants of cash, construction materials and agricultural inputs to tens of thousands of poor households.

When Ortega first governed during the 1980s, the Sandinista revolution faced vehement opposition from Nicaraguan elites. When he returned to power in 2007, however, Ortega brought business associations – notably the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) – into government in official advisory roles, while also satisfying domestic investors’ demands for tax reductions. Exploiting the FSLN’s historically strong influence in the labour movement, the Ortega administration established tripartite agreements between the state, employers’ associations and Sandinista-aligned labour federations, minimizing conflict in nearly every industrial sector. The arrangement particularly benefited employers in the free trade sector, which during the 1990s and 2000s had been roiled by strikes and walkouts. New maquila factories proliferated during Ortega’s first term, and by 2012 the free trade sector employed one in six formal sector workers in Nicaragua.

The short-term economic effects of the Ortega synthesis raised eyebrows the world over. GDP expanded by 74% between 2006 and 2014, bringing Nicaragua into line with regional growth rates. Foreign direct investment, much of it aimed at free trade zones, grew at an annual rate of 22% during the same period. But the most impressive figures measured the country’s reduction in poverty. In 2005, the year before Ortega’s election, 48.2% of Nicaraguans subsisted on less than two US dollars per day; by 2017, that number had fallen to 20.1%.

Yet these achievements were never a pathway to socialism, nor even to sustainable developmentalism. Contemporary sandinismo triaged neoliberalism’s unruliest effects by maintaining, through targeted welfare grants, the livelihoods of workers excluded from the formal labour market; this, in turn, produced a steep drop in national poverty rates without disciplining the hyper-exploitative business class. Under this settlement, working-class organizations were co-opted by the state, and the Nicaraguan proletariat remained fragmented – partially enrolled in a constricted formal labour market; partially sustained by welfare programs that could only mitigate, but never transform, the conditions that suppressed wages in the formal sector. In the absence of external support – Venezuelan aid dropped dramatically in the years prior to 2018 – Ortega’s precarious compromise came apart.  

The immediate cause of the protests in 2018 was a proposed social security reform that would have increased personal and employer contributions while imposing a 5% reduction in benefits. Denouncing perceived corruption in the social security administration, university students in several cities organized demonstrations beginning in mid-April. Though they were violently disbanded by the national police and groups of Sandinista supporters, the unrest quickly spread, as urban youth and farmers joined the student uprisings. In May and June, protestors erected tranques – fortified roadblocks characteristic of militant protests in Central America – in neighborhoods and on highways throughout the country, paralyzing travel, limiting commerce, and sparking conflict with the national police.

In addition to organizing through student associations and formal opposition coalitions, militants established local groups (comités) and maintained informal communication through regional and national online networks. They referred to themselves as ‘los autoconvocados’, or ‘the self-organized’. As they mobilized, sections of the country became ungovernable, and stayed that way for months. Opinion polling conducted in the midst of the protests indicated that a majority of Nicaraguans in the most precarious employment situations supported Ortega’s immediate removal from office. Downward mobility, very often associated with ejection from formal employment in Nicaragua, was a significant predictor of dissatisfaction with Ortega. By contrast, those who felt their economic situation had improved or was unchanged since the previous year tended to back the president.

At first, the national business community, represented by COSEP and other chambers of commerce, maintained its support for the administration. Representatives from the free trade sector (including US- and Taiwan-based investors) even appeared onstage with the president when he announced the hasty withdrawal of his social security reform on 29 April. But COSEP soon responded to popular pressure by formally separating itself from the government. After over a decade as a stalwart Ortega ally, Nicaragua’s most powerful business association assumed a clear role in civil society-based opposition coalitions, where it was joined by other private sector groups. Together with associations of farmers and merchant vendors, business organizations staged periodic national work stoppages throughout 2018 that further weakened Ortega’s legitimacy.

The cross-class character of sandinismo was reflected in its opposition. A single narrow objective – Ortega’s removal from office – held together a broad but contradictory coalition, joining intersecting but uneven social sectors whose interests were mostly counterpoised. The demonstrators consistently rejected ideological labels, failing to formulate either a long-term vision or a concrete set of demands. This made the opposition movement especially vulnerable to state repression. For over a decade now, the Ortega government has unleashed the police on striking workers and underwritten settler violence in Nicaragua’s indigenous regions. But the behaviour of the national police force in 2018 was shocking even by those standards.

Groups of armed Sandinistas collaborated with national police to confront and detain protestors, especially during the ‘Clean Up Operation’ that razed tranques in June and July 2018. In a country only a generation removed from civil war, the emergence of these paramilitares had a chilling effect on protests, as did legislation ratified by the FSLN-controlled legislature that effectively criminalized public assembly. On Mother’s Day, hundreds of thousands marched to mourn the university students slain by state forces. Police responded by firing bullets into the crowd.

The rebellion sharply polarized opinion on the international left. Capitalizing on the mutually supportive dynamic between Nicaraguan state media and anti-imperialist observers abroad, the Ortega administration framed the protests as a CIA-orchestrated coup attempt – a narrative broadcast by sections of the Anglophone left with large online followings. Commentators sympathetic to Ortega continue to defend his government as a bulwark of ‘21st century socialism’ amid an ongoing crisis of the Latin American progressive politics. They correctly point out that a resurgent regional right, abetted at every step by international bodies such as the Organization of American States, is invested in the outcome of Nicaragua’s political crisis. The US, moreover, has imposed ‘targeted’ sanctions against Sandinista figures and passed the RENACER Act, a bundle of recommended sanctions which could result in Nicaragua’s expulsion from CAFTA. Ortega’s supporters are right that such mechanisms are intended to usher in a new regime that will neither be progressive nor democratic. But clear-headedness demands we acknowledge the barriers to socialist renewal that Ortega himself has erected. If the country soon takes a rightward turn, its roots will lie in the Sandinistas’ untenable programme, which ties the fortunes of workers to the profits of their exploiters. With the government’s reputation further damaged by the 7 November elections – which a significant portion of the public regards as illegitimate – it is now unclear how long these contradictions can be contained. Ortega has been re-elected, but he may not be president for long.

Read on: Dennis Rodgers, ‘A Symptom Called Managua’, NLR 49.

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Global Britain?

If the Conservatives’ 2021 Budget demonstrates the limits of their domestic ‘levelling up’ agenda – a modest rise in public spending that fails to repair ten years of austerity – what of the party’s foreign policy? Two years into his tenure, how does Boris Johnson’s promise of a ‘Global Britain’ align with the reality?

To answer, we should first recap the past decades of UK geopolitics. Britain’s international role has long been defined by subservience to Washington, acting as lead attack-dog where regime change has been decreed. This has always been a bipartisan project, but New Labour’s ‘hyper-subalternity’ towards America constituted an extreme, in contrast to the sovereigntist reflexes that sometimes animate the Tory benches. After the abortive militarism of the Blair years, Cameron’s overseas strategy involved a semi-coherent attempt to build a ‘smarter empire’. His government pledged to streamline and modernize the armed forces, with greater emphasis on soft power, trade policy and propaganda – treading a more cautious line than Blair had done in following US diktats. Spending cuts slashed thousands of defence jobs. Troop numbers were depleted and weapons purchases slimmed down – though work went ahead on the pocket-sized aircraft carrier beloved of Blair and Brown as a great-power status symbol.

Contra jingoistic criticisms from the Labour frontbench, this cost-cutting entailed no pull-back in Britain’s ‘global reach’. In 2011, with Obama famously ‘leading from behind’, Cameron joined Sarkozy in pushing for regime change in Libya, unleashing six months of NATO airstrikes that left an estimated 6,000 dead and catalysed a decade of factional violence. He intensified the civil war in Syria, working with Hollande to lift the EU embargo on arming anti-government forces, and established the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund to bankroll Assad’s opponents with at least £350 million, foregoing multiple opportunities to support a negotiated settlement that could have prevented the country’s interminable conflict.

Between 2010 and 2016, Cameron deployed troops to Somalia to support lethal US drone attacks; enabled the Saudi cluster bombing of Yemen; redoubled his commitment to the occupation of Afghanistan; launched a bloody ‘counterterrorism’ offensive against a scattered group of Malian dissidents; and applauded Israel’s strikes on Gazan civilians. Many of the UK’s interventions were joint enterprises with France, whose campaign for a more integrated European security policy was largely backed by Downing Street.

Cameron’s minimal display of independence in cutting the defence budget predictably angered the Obama White House, which continually reminded its Atlantic partner of NATO’s spending requirements. To save face, the PM switched tack shortly after the 2015 election and agreed to dedicate 2% of GDP to defence – though he instructed his advisers to find a way of meeting the target without actually burning through more money (for instance, by expanding the definition of security expenditure). Above all, Washington was incensed by Cameron’s refusal to toe the line on relations with the PRC. As the US geared up for a Great Power rivalry, the UK conversely signed onto Xi’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and expanded China’s access to British markets, with George Osborne declaring that ‘No economy in the west is as open to Chinese investment as the UK’. When it came to sabre-rattling against Russia, transatlantic unity seemed superficially to be restored: the US and UK both backed punitive sanctions in response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea. But the Obama Administration still had cause to distrust their ally’s resolve, given the Tories’ roster of Kremlin donors. 

After Brexit, the partnership with France unravelled, as Barnier and Macron pushed to inflict maximal damage on Britain to deter future experiments in popular sovereignty. That, along with the imperative to court a Trump-approved trade deal, helped to revitalize the special relationship. As Theresa May replaced Cameron in Downing Street, with Johnson her bumbling Foreign Minister, the UK doubled the size of its SAS force in Afghanistan and facilitated US drone strikes on Pakistan. But the two sides remained at odds over China. Trump’s tariff wall made a sharp contrast with May’s initial campaign to strengthen commercial ties and embrace the Belt and Road Initiative. While Washington pivoted from the Middle East toward Asia, London sharpened its focus on the Gulf monarchies, whose function in financing the UK’s deficit through weapons purchases would become increasingly vital to the post-Brexit economy – allowing Britain to ‘spread its wings across the world’, as Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told the DSEI arms fair in 2017. 

Enter Johnson as PM two years later, repurposing the ‘Global Britain’ bombast of the Brexit campaign as ultra-servility to Washington. Johnson and Cummings hired John Bew, a hard-core Labour-Atlanticist in the Bevin mould, to draft their ‘Integrated  Review’ of the UK’s international role. Bew is the author of an admiring account of Attlee’s Cold War record and fathering of the British Bomb, as well as a former holder of the Henry Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy at the Library of Congress, who has consistently praised the special relationship and attacked the notion that ‘non-interference in other nations would leave us secure.’ According to his Review, in the more ‘interconnected, multipolar and contested environment’ of the 2020s, Great Power competition will heighten the significance of ‘middle powers’ which stand between the American and Chinese blocs. In this context, Britain’s task is to foster ‘liberal democracy and free markets’, being ‘more active in shaping the open international order of the future’ – where necessary, by force. It must ‘create armed forces that are both prepared for warfighting and more persistently engaged worldwide’, aiming for an increasingly visible military presence on the international stage.

Hence provocations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, where Johnson sent an aircraft carrier strike group and the warship HMS Richmond in August and September 2021, eliciting a furious response from the Chinese Defence Ministry. Hence too the HMS Defender’s stage-managed confrontation with the Russian military in the Black Sea last June. Such actions are no less dangerous for being purely symbolic: a ‘theatrical exercise without serious British strategic purpose or rationale’, as Anatol Lieven has argued. The UK does not have enough aircraft or escort vessels to make the HMS Queen Elizabeth fully operational, and – as in Afghanistan – remains utterly reliant on the US for support. These deployments are PR stunts to boast of London’s unquestioning loyalty to the Anglo-American compact. Yet as Lieven stresses, the folly of strutting into a war with China would easily overshadow Britain’s disastrous collaboration in the invasion of Iraq. At the very least, these naval missions will further poison Anglo-Chinese relations, while the cause of those fighting for greater equality, freedom and democracy in China is only set back by ramped-up mutual chauvinisms.

If Johnson is susceptible to the charge – articulated by an Atlanticist stalwart in the FT – that performative gestures have become a stand-in for coherent foreign policy, much as culture-war posturing has become a substitute for ‘levelling-up’, he is nonetheless planning to put the taxpayer’s money where his mouth is. Inverting Cameron’s approach, Johnson has approved a £16.5bn rise in defence spending over four years. The RAF reports that this funding will be used for a ‘more regular drumbeat of deployments’ to the so-called Indo-Pacific, aiming to make Britain one of the most prominent actors in the region. The UK has also upgraded its cybersecurity capacities and passed a raft of legislation to facilitate its covert operations. Johnson’s Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act gives undercover British agents the ability to murder, rape and torture without fear of legal sanction; his Overseas Operations Bill grants British soldiers a free pass to commit war crimes; and his amendments to the Official Secrets Act recast critical journalists and whistleblowers as enemy spies. All this points to neo-imperial ambitions which, as under Blair, are more than merely gestural.

For Wolfgang Münchau, Britain’s manoeuvres against China signal a larger fracturing of ‘the West’. France and Germany are unlikely to pull their weight in any New Cold War, given their need to protect large export surpluses and push through the EU-China comprehensive agreement. The UK, by contrast, has remade itself as ‘the only European country the US can trust in the pursuit of its strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific’. With NATO too internally fragmented to confront America’s chief rival, the organization is likely to play ‘a more peripheral role in the future’, as the UK will ‘gradually cut off from European security policy’ and line up behind the White House.

The AUKUS nuclear pact, designed to escalate the arms race with China while casually marginalizing France, signals this intention. As does Britain’s ambition to expand the G7 into a new ‘D10’: a coalition of anti-China powers that would include India, Australia and South Korea. Johnson and Modi have agreed to work towards an India-UK Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with a provisional deadline set for 2030, which would strike economic deals and combat ‘shared security threats’. In the meantime, Britain has sided with Indian forces in their sporadic border clashes with the Chinese. Next year, the UK hopes to ratchet up its influence by joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade accord comprising eleven nations in the Pacific Rim. If its application is successful, London will attempt to block China’s parallel bid for entry.

While the UK’s liberal-democratic values are trumpeted in the Taiwan Strait, they take a back seat in other parts of the world. Johnson’s government enthusiastically supported the 2019 right-wing coup in Bolivia – using it as an opportunity to gain access to the country’s lithium deposits. It helped fund the campaign to oust Venezuela’s Maduro, and assisted the Columbian police as they led a lethal crackdown on anti-government protests earlier this year. At the same time, Britain continues to consolidate its friendships with despots in the Gulf. The RAF has established a second joint fighter squadron with Qatar as part of a £6bn arms deal, despite the regime’s support for UK-designated terror groups – including al-Qaeda’s outfit in Yemen. Johnson has provided the Omani security services with training and equipment, allowing them to violently disband large-scale protests. And British soldiers have been dispatched to Mahra province in Yemen, where they are assisting Saudi forces implicated in the torture and disappearance of detainees.

The UK sells billions worth of telecommunications interception equipment to each of these dictatorships, as well as aiding them through an opaque ‘Gulf Strategy Fund’ launched in April 2020. Such financial ties are set to deepen. Having spent months cosying up to the Bahraini Crown Prince – who oversees the systematic torture of pro-democracy activists in his country – Johnson is now on the cusp of signing a trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) which would grant City financiers and British pharmaceutical giants greater access to their markets. He has already secured an equivalent agreement with Sisi’s Egypt, giving tacit approval for the scores of extrajudicial killings carried out by its Interior Ministry. Israel – Britain’s other major trading partner – has also received unparalleled support from Johnson’s cabinet, which has helped security forces repress dissent in the West Bank and opposed an ICC investigation into war crimes in the occupied territories.

Reckless warmongering and arms for the worst Gulf dictators: surely Johnson’s record is an open goal for the Labour opposition? Not under Keir Starmer. If the Labour leader’s domestic goal is to pose – unavailingly – as a more competent Johnson, on China Starmer has positioned himself as more aggressive still. Calling for ‘an end to the naivety of the golden era’, Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy has urged the Tories to ban CCP officials from Britain, marginalise China at the UN, step up coordination with the US, and escalate the sanctions regime. Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s foreign policy spokesman on China, has asserted that ‘managing the rise of China is the number one geopolitical challenge the world is facing’, lambasting the Tories for their lack of success in ‘exerting or projecting our influence’ over the PRC. Nandy and Kinnock have also established close ties with the Tories’ foremost Sinophobe, the former Territorial Army officer Tom Tugendhat, who quipped that ‘Stephen Kinnock and I could give each other’s speeches on this subject’. Tugendhat’s ‘China Research Group’ – established to promote such policies as expelling Chinese students from British universities and sabotaging Belt and Road – was once seen as an association of hard-right Tory jingoists; but under Starmer, Labour MPs have been encouraged to join it.

The same pattern holds for other foreign policy decisions. Starmer claimed that the government had ‘badly underestimated the Russian threat and the response it required’; hinted at his support for an indefinite occupation of Afghanistan; and cheered the Tories’ attempt to immunize soldiers and spies from prosecution – while suggesting that the Overseas Operations Bill did not go far enough in this endeavour. The party welcomed Johnson’s historic expansion of the military budget and called for investment in extra nuclear submarines, expressing its ‘non-negotiable’ support for atomic weapons. 

Such reassurances to the security establishment have, of course, run alongside Labour’s dogged attempts to eradicate any trace of anti-Zionism from its ranks. So far, Starmer has launched a purge against even the most moderate critics of Israeli ethnic cleansing. He has given a green light to Labour Friends of Israel as it lobbies the government to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and implicitly blamed Hamas ‘rocket attacks’ for the Israeli government’s aerial onslaught against a trapped Palestinian population. The government Starmer hopes to lead would continue to supply Israel with the arms needed to maintain its illegal occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. Since Corbyn’s departure as leader and suspension from the PLP, both parliamentary blocs have reverted to the unabashed Altanticism of the new millennium. But whereas Blairism was met with a prominent anti-war movement, its latest variant – Global Britain – is yet to encounter such resistance.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘Toryism After Blair’, NLR 36.

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Energy Dilemma

The ecological bifurcation is not a gala dinner. After a summer of extreme climatic events and a new IPCC report confirming its most worrying forecasts, large parts of the world are now roiled by an energy crisis that prefigures further economic troubles down the road. This conjuncture has buried the dream of a harmonious transition to a post-carbon world, bringing the question of capitalism’s ecological crisis to the fore. At COP26, the dominant tone is one of powerlessness, where impending miseries have left humanity cornered between the immediate demands of systemic reproduction and the acceleration of climate disorders.  

Prima facie, one might think that steps are being taken to address this cataclysm. More than 50 countries – plus the entire European Union – have pledged to meet net zero emissions targets that would see global energy-related CO2 emissions fall by 40% between now and 2050. Yet a sober reading of the scientific data shows that the green transition is well off track. Falling short of global net zero means that temperatures will continue to rise, pushing the world well above 2°C by 2100. According to the UNEP, nationally determined contributions, which countries were requested to submit in advance of COP26, would reduce 2030 emissions by 7.5%. Yet a 30% drop is needed to limit warming to 2°C, while 55% would be required for 1.5°C.

As a recent Nature editorial warned, many of these countries have made net-zero pledges without a concrete plan to get there. Which gases will be targeted? To what extent does net-zero rely on effective reduction rather than offsetting schemes? The latter have become particularly attractive for rich countries and polluting corporations, since they do not directly diminish emissions and involve transferring the burden of carbon-cutting to low- and medium-income nations (which will be most severely affected by climate breakdown). On these crucial issues, reliable information and transparent commitments are nowhere to be found, jeopardizing the possibility of credible international scientific monitoring. The bottom line: based on the current global climate policies – those implemented and those proposed – the world is on track for a devastating increase in emissions during the next decade.

In spite of this, capitalism has already experienced the first major economic shock related to the transition beyond carbon. The surge in energy prices is due to several factors, including a disorderly rebound from the pandemic, poorly designed energy markets in the UK and EU which exacerbate price volatility, and Russia’s willingness to secure its long-term energy incomes. However, at a more structural level, the impact of first efforts made to restrict the use of fossil fuels cannot be overlooked. Due to government limits on coal burning, plus shareholders’ growing reluctance to commit to projects that could be largely obsolete in thirty years, investment in fossil fuel has been falling. Although this contraction of the supply is not enough to save the climate, it is still proving too much for capitalist growth.

Putting together several recent events gives a taste of things to come. In the Punjab region of India, severe shortages of coal have caused unscheduled power blackouts. In China, more than half the provincial jurisdictions have imposed strict power-rationing measures. Several companies, including key Apple suppliers, have recently been forced to halt or reduce operations at facilities in Jiangsu province, after local governments restricted the supply of electricity. Those restrictions were an attempt to comply with national emissions targets by restricting coal-fired power generation, which still accounts for about two thirds of China’s electricity. To contain the spillover of these disruptions, Chinese authorities have put a temporary brake on their climate ambitions, ordering 72 coal mines to increase their supply and relaunching imports of Australian coal that were halted for months in the midst of diplomatic tensions between the two countries.

In Europe, it was the surge in gas prices that triggered the current crisis. Haunted by the memory of the gilets jaunes uprising against Macron’s carbon tax, governments have intervened with energy subsidies for the popular classes. More unexpectedly, though, gas price increases have precipitated chain reactions in the manufacturing sector. The case of fertilizers is telling. A US group, CF Industries, decided to shut down production of its UK fertilizer plants, which had become unprofitable due to price increases. As a by-product of its operations, the firm previously supplied 45% of the UK’s food-grade CO2 – whose loss unleashed weeks of chaos for the industry, affecting various sectors from beer and soft drinks to food packaging and meat. Globally, the surge of gas prices is affecting the farming sector via the increase in fertilizer prices. In Thailand, the cost of fertilizers is on track to double from 2020, raising costs for many rice producers and putting the planting season at risk. If this continues, governments may have to step in to ensure essential food supplies.

The global and widespread repercussions of energy shortages and price increases underscores the complex fallout involved in the structural transformation necessary to eliminate carbon emissions. While a reduction is underway in the supply of hydrocarbon, increases in sustainable energy sources are not sufficient to meet growing demand. This leaves an energy mismatch that could derail the transition altogether. In this context, countries can either return to the most readily available energy source – coal – or cause an economic contraction driven by the surge in costs and their effects on profitability, consumption prices and the stability of the financial system. In the short term, then, there is a trade-off between ecological objectives and the requirement to foster growth. But does this energy dilemma hold in the medium and long term? Will we ultimately face a choice between climate and growth?

A successful carbon transition implies the harmonious unfolding of two processes complexly related at the material, economic and financial levels. First, a process of disbandment must take place. Sources of carbon must be drastically reduced: above all hydrocarbon extraction, electricity production by coal and gas, fuel-based transport systems, the construction sector (due to the high level of emissions involved in cement and steel production) and the meat industry. What is at stake here is degrowth in the most straightforward sense: equipment must be scrapped, fossil fuel reserves must stay in the soil, intensive cattle-breeding must be abandoned and an array of related professional skills must be made redundant.

All things being equal, the elimination of production capacities implies a contraction of supply which would lead to generalized inflationary pressure. This is even more likely because the sectors most affected are located at the commanding heights of modern economies. Cascading through the other sectors, pressure on costs will dent firms’ mark-up, global profits and/or consumer purchasing power, unleashing wild recessionary forces. In addition, degrowth of the carbon economy is a net loss from the point of view of the valorization of financial capital: huge amounts of stranded assets must be wiped out since underlying expected profits are foregone, paving the way for fire sales and ricocheting onto the mass of fictitious capital. These interrelated dynamics will fuel each other, as recessionary forces increase debt defaults while financial crisis freezes the access to credit.

The other side of the transition is a major investment push to accommodate the supply shock caused by the degrowth of the carbon sector. While changing consumption habits could play a role, especially in affluent countries, the creation of new carbon-free production capacities, improvements in efficiency, electrification of transport, industrial and heating systems (along with the deployment of carbon capture in some instances) are also necessary to compensate for the phasing out of greenhouse gas emissions. From a capitalist perspective, these could represent new profit opportunities, so long as the costs of production are not prohibitive relative to available demand. Attracted by this valorization, green finance could step in and accelerate the transition, propelling a new wave of accumulation capable of sustaining employment and living standards.

Yet it is important to bear in mind that timing is everything: making such adjustments in fifty years is completely different from having to disengage drastically in a decade. And from where we are now, the prospects for a smooth and adequate switch to green energy are slim, to say the least. The scaling back of the carbon sector remains uncertain due to the inherent contingency of political processes and the persistent lack of engagement from state authorities. It is illustrative that one single Senator, Joe Manchin III of west Virginia, can block the US Democrats’ programme to facilitate the replacement of coal- and gas-fired power plants.

As illustrated by the current disruptions, the lack of readily available alternatives could also hamper the phasing-out of fossil fuels. According to the IEA: ‘Transition-related spending […] remains far short of what is required to meet rising demand for energy services in a sustainable way. The deficit is visible across all sectors and regions.’ In its latest Energy Report, Bloomberg estimates that a growing global economy will require a level of investment in energy supply and infrastructure between $92 trillion and $173 trillion over the next thirty years. Annual investment will need to more than double, rising from around $1.7 trillion per year today, to somewhere between $3.1 trillion and $5.8 trillion per year on average. The magnitude of such a macroeconomic adjustment would be unprecedented.

From the perspective of mainstream economics, this adjustment is still a matter of getting the prices right. In a recent report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, two leading economists in the field, Christian Gollier and Mar Reguant, argue that ‘The value of carbon should be used as a yardstick for all dimensions of public policymaking.’ Although standards and regulations should not be ruled out, ‘well-designed carbon pricing’ via a carbon tax or cap-and trade mechanism must play the leading role. Market mechanisms are expected to internalize the negative externalities of greenhouse gas emissions, allowing for an orderly transition on both the supply and demand sides. ‘Carbon pricing has the advantage of focusing on efficiency in terms of cost per ton of CO2, without the need to identify in advance which measures will work.’ Reflecting the plasticity of market adjustment, a carbon price – ‘unlike more prescriptive measures’ – opens up a space for ‘innovative solutions’.

This free-market, techno-optimistic perspective ensures that capitalist growth and climate stabilization are reconciliable. However, it suffers from two main shortcomings. The first is the blindness of the carbon-pricing approach to the macroeconomic dynamics involved in the transition effort. A recent report by Jean Pisani Ferry, written for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, plays down the possibility of any smooth adjustment driven by market prices, while also dashing the hopes of a Green New Deal that could lift all boats.

Observing that ‘Procrastination has reduced the chances of engineering an orderly transition’, the report notes that there is ‘no guarantee that the transition to carbon neutrality will be good for growth.’ The process is quite simple: 1) since decarbonation implies an accelerated obsolescence of some part of existing capital stock, supply will be reduced; 2) in the meantime, more investment will be necessary. The burning question then becomes: are there sufficient resources in the economy to allow for more investment alongside weakened supply? The answer depends on the amount of slack in the economy – that is, idle productive capacity and unemployment. But considering the size of the adjustment and the compressed timeframe, this cannot be taken for granted. In Pisani Ferry’s view, ‘Impact on growth will be ambiguous, impact on consumption should be negative. Climate action is like a military build-up when facing a threat: good for welfare in the long run, but bad for consumer satisfaction’. Shifting the resources from consumption to investment means that consumers will inevitably bear the cost of the effort.

In spite of his neo-Keynesian perspective, Pisani-Ferry opens up an insightful discussion on the political conditions that would allow for a reduction in living standards and a green class-war fought along income lines. Yet, in its attachment to the price mechanism, his argument shares with the market-adjustment approach an irrational emphasis on the efficiency of CO2 emission reduction. The second shortcoming of Gollier and Reguant’s contribution becomes apparent when they call for ‘a combination of climate actions with the lowest possible cost per ton of CO2 equivalent not emitted’. Indeed, as the authors themselves recognize, the setting of carbon prices is highly uncertain. Evaluations can range from $45 to $14,300 per ton, depending on the time horizon and the reduction targeted. With such variability, there is no point in trying to optimize the cost of carbon reduction intertemporally. What is important is not the cost of the adjustment, but rather the certainty that the stabilization of the climate will occur.  

Delineating the specificities of the Japanese developmental state, the political scientist Chalmers Johnson made a distinction that could also be applied to the transition debate:

A regulatory, or market rational, state concerns itself with the form and procedures – the rules, if you will – of economic competition, but it doesn’t concern itself with substantive matters […] The developmental state, or plan-rational state, by contrast, has as its dominant feature precisely the setting of such substantive social and economic goals.

In other words, while the first aims at efficiency – by making the most economical uses of resources – the second is concerned with effectiveness: that is, by the ability to achieve a given goal, be it war or industrialization. Given the existential threat posed by climate change and the fact that there exists a simple and stable metric to limit our exposure, our concern should be with the effectiveness of reducing greenhouse gases rather the efficiency of the effort. Instead of using the price mechanism to let the market decide where the effort should lie, it is infinitely more straightforward to add up targets at the sectoral and geographical levels, and provide a consistent reduction plan to ensure that the overall goal will be achieved in time.

Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma, writing on this question in the FT, raises a point which indirectly makes the case for ecological planning. He notes that the investment push necessary to transition beyond carbon presents us with a trivially material problem: on the one hand, dirty activities – particularly in the sectors of mining or metal production – are rendered unprofitable due to increased regulation or higher carbon prices; on the other hand, investment for the greening of the infrastructure requires such resources to expand capacities. Decreasing supply plus rising demand is therefore a recipe for what he calls ‘greenflation’. Sharma therefore argues that ‘Blocking new mines and oil rigs will not always be the environmentally and socially responsible move.’

As the spokesperson of an institution with vested interest in polluting commodities, Sharma is hardly a neutral commentator. But the problem he articulates – how to supply enough dirty material to build a clean-energy economy – is a real one, and relates to another issue with the putative market-driven transition: carbon pricing does not allow society to discriminate between spurious uses of carbon – such as sending billionaires into space – and vital uses such as building the infrastructure for a non-carbon economy. In a successful transition, the first would be made impossible, the second as cheap as possible. As such, a unique carbon price becomes a clear pathway to failure.

This brings us back to an old but still decisive argument: rebuilding an economy – in this case one which phases out fossil fuels – requires restructuring the chain of relations between its diverse segments, which suggests that the fate of the economy as a whole depends on its point of least resistance. As Alexandr Bogdanov noted in the context of building the young Soviet state, ‘Because of these interdependent relationships, the process of enlargement of the economy is subject in its entirety to the law of the weakest point.’ This line of thought was later developed by Wassily Leontief in his contributions to input-output analysis. It holds that market adjustments are simply not up to structural transformation. In such situations, what’s required is a careful and adaptative planning mechanism able to identify and deal with a moving landscape of bottlenecks.

When one considers the economic challenges of restructuring economies to keep carbon emissions in line with the stabilization of the climate, this discussion acquires a new framing. Effectiveness must take precedence over efficiency in reducing emissions. That means abandoning the fetish of the price mechanism in order to plan how the remaining dirty resources will be used in the service of clean infrastructure. Such planning must have international reach, since the greatest opportunities for energy-supply decarbonation are located in the Global South. Moreover, as transformation on the supply side will not be enough, demand-side transformations will also be essential to stay within planetary boundaries. Energy requirements for providing decent living standards to the global population can be drastically reduced, but in addition to the use of the most efficient available technologies, this implies a radical transformation of consumption patterns, including political procedures to prioritize between competing consumption claims.

With its longstanding concern for planning and socialized consumption, international socialism is an obvious candidate to take on such a historic task. Though the poor state of socialist politics doesn’t conjure much optimism, the catastrophic conjuncture we are entering – along with price volatility and the ongoing spasms of capitalist crises – could increase the fluidity of the situation. In such circumstances, the left must be flexible enough to seize any political opportunity that will advance the cause of a democratic ecological transition.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’, NLR 61.

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Rusty Charley

Weird things are going on in Brussels, and they are getting weirder by the day. The European Union, an international would-be superstate running an impressive democratic deficit, is gearing up to punish two of its democratic member states and their elected governments, together with the citizens that have elected them, for what it considers a democratic deficit. Governing the EU is an unelected technocracy, a constitution without a people, consisting of unintelligible international treaties and the accumulated rulings of an international court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) – treaties that cannot in practice be revised, and rulings that only the court itself can revise – with a parliament that is not allowed to legislate and knows no opposition.

The current issue is an old one but was long avoided, EU-style, in order not to wake sleeping dogs. To what extent does ‘European’ law, made by the national executives assembled in the back rooms of the European Council and the secret chambers of the CJEU, supersede national law, made by the EU’s democratic member states? The answer seems simple enough, for EU-uneducated simple minds: where, and only where, in the Treaties (spelled in Brussels with a capital T, presumably to indicate their sublime nature) member states have bestowed on the Union the right to make law that is binding on all member states, so that on the issues they have delegated to the EU all would have the same law and would have to stick to it, in order to allow the Union to function smoothly.

Had it only ended there. Already in the early 1960s the Court discovered in the Treaties a general supremacy of EU law over national law. Note that to the naked eye, nothing like this is to be found in the Treaties; you need to be a member of the court to see it. At first, as long as the jurisdiction of the EU was still rather narrow, nobody bothered. Later, however, when the EU was increasingly used to open up national economies to the ‘four freedoms’ of the Single Market and then the common currency, the doctrine of the primacy of European law served as a convenient device to extend the Union’s authority without rewriting the Treaties, especially as this became ever more difficult with the rising number of member states, from six to, before Brexit, 28. What at first was to be no more than a highly selective upward transfer of national sovereignty, gradually became the principal institutional engine for what came to be called ‘integration by law’, operated by the Union’s central authorities and supported by varying coalitions of member states and governments – something considered by lawyers in particular to be normatively and technically superior to integration by politics.

While motives changed over time, integration by law always involved a deep reading of the Treaties to discover ever new reasons for subjecting democratic national polities to a post-democratic international technocracy. With Treaty revisions effectively blocked after the defeat in 2005 of a draft ‘Treaty for a European constitution’ in a French referendum (55.7% voting against it), the CJEU eventually became the EU’s single most important legislative and indeed constitution-writing body. (Ironically, one of the likely reasons why the constitutional treaty was rejected was that it explicitly stipulated the primacy of European law.)

Nobody knows for sure what is hidden in the depths of the European Treaties as they now stand, hundreds, even thousands of pages depending on the typeface. The only exception is the CJEU, and this is because what it says it finds in there is for all practical purposes what is in there, as the court always has the last word. So the CJEU, or in anticipation of it the European Central Bank or the European Commission, may read into the Treaties functional reasons for what the Germans call ‘more Europe’ – monetary policy must (!) today (!) encompass fiscal policy – or general intentions – hidden in the commitment of member states to an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’, reading people for peoples – or ‘values’ like ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ requiring, for example, more enlightened sex education in Hungarian state schools.

What precisely it will find in each case may be uncertain; what one can know for sure, however, is that the Court will never miss an opportunity to ‘build Europe’, meaning to confirm the supremacy of European over national law, as ultimately made by itself. Watching the CJEU go about its duties reminds one of a character in a Damon Runyon story called Rusty Charley, a small-time gangster working the 1940s Broadway who, when playing dice with his fellow-gangsters, rolls the dice inside his hat and then announces the result without letting the others take a look. Although he always won, nobody felt like asking inconvenient questions since Charley was ‘such a guy as is apt to hate being called a liar’.

That the supremacy of European over national law has presently become a matter of high political drama is to do with the EU’s politics of extension-turned-overextension. Facing conflicts and cleavages that they cannot politically contain, the ‘pro-Europeans’ are placing their hopes in the Court, to substitute the legitimacy of the law for the exhausted legitimacy of supranational politics. At the centre of the present controversy are Poland and Hungary with their ‘illiberal’ political regimes. Both countries insist on a strict interpretation of the Treaties, one that tightly limits the extent to which a member state’s politics and European policy can be a matter of concern for other member states or for EU institutions.

In the so-called ‘Treaty base’, a country’s legal system is subject to EU supervision to the extent that it may be needed to ensure the government’s proper, non-corrupt use of EU funds. While in a literal reading this is all that is meant by the so-called ‘rule of law’ requirement, ‘pro-Europeans’ claim it extends to the status and organization of a country’s highest court, in particular its independence from the executive. Member states are also expected by the treaties to conform to certain democratic and human rights standards; if they do not the Council can, by unanimous vote, take away their voting rights – not, however, expel them, which isn’t an option for an international organization that considers membership irreversible.

Normally, corruption and the politicization of a country’s highest court are not much of an issue in European politics. As to corruption, Poland is known to be largely clean (Hungary less so) while countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia and Malta are widely known as strongholds of cronyism and venality, not to mention, in some cases, the deeply entrenched abuse of minorities. Indeed, both Slovakia and Malta have recently witnessed the assassination, by criminal gangs connected to government circles, of independent journalists investigating corruption in high places. Still, nobody threatens to cut their European subsidies, and the liberal European press carefully abstains from comparing the Polish and Hungarian ‘rule of law’ to theirs.

There is reason to believe that this is because, unlike Poland and Hungary, they reciprocate for cash received by always voting with the Commission and otherwise keeping their mouths shut. Similarly, political influence on a country’s high courts is something that EU bodies have good reason not to make too much fuss about: where there are constitutional courts at all, all of them are, in one way or other, politicized; for Spain see the recent case of Podemos MP Alberto Rodriguez. (Sometimes politicization is considered outright desirable: Note that the EU commission and Parliament are taking Germany to the CJEU for its government not having prevented its Constitutional Court from forming an independent judgment, to the embarrassment not least of the German government itself, on the limits of European legal authority, in the case of the ECB’s debt purchasing programs.) What is special about Poland and Hungary is not that their highest judges are appointed ‘under the influence’, but that their governments, like increasingly the German constitutional court, openly insist on a narrow interpretation of the primacy of European law and a correspondingly extensive interpretation of – their – national sovereignty, in open defiance of ‘integration by law’, or by empire, as conducted by the CJEU.

The story that is presently unfolding here, then, is not a legal but a political one. Its most recent episode started with the Council passing the multi-billion NGEU Corona recovery fund, with considerable sums allocated to Hungary and, in particular, Poland, even though they were only marginally affected be the virus. For the European Parliament (EP), which has to approve the measure, this was an opportunity to extend its efforts to bring about regime change in the two countries, by making disbursement of their recovery money dependent on political and legal concessions to the EU. Elections are upcoming in both countries, and the hope was that a loss of European funds, allegedly destined to enable Poles and Hungarians to have a better life, more resilient to capitalist crises in general and coronavirus in particular, would undermine the present governments, as would getting the funds by caving in to ‘Europe’.

Hopefully this would, in the course of international elite management, put governments in place that are less responsive to their peoples and more to ‘Europe’, as constituted by the EU. It might also increase the number of liberal MEPs from the two countries, making the EP even more ‘pro-European’ than it already is. The problem for the Commission was that NGEU needed a unanimous vote in the Council, with Poland and Hungary set to vote against it if it came with any special clause directed against their governments. At the same time, the EP made its approval conditional on the Commission accepting what came to be called a ‘rule of law mechanism’, forcing the Commission to withhold funds to countries not respecting the primacy of European law, as discovered by the Court.

To get its way, the Commission went along with the EP while, apparently, promising Hungary and Poland that the ‘mechanism’ would never be activated. Officially, it was announced that it would be used only after its approval by the CJEU, where Poland and Hungary would challenge its legality. This was understood to take time, longer than the disbursement of the NGEU funds. Meanwhile on the Council, the ‘frugal’ Northern Europeans, led by the Netherlands, insisted that Poland and Hungary be treated harshly – probably to make their national publics believe that they could save precious North European money by having the EU cut the Polish and Hungarian allotment, in punishment for insufficient adherence to the rule of law. The result was an unprecedented public row, with pressure on the Commission mounting to be strict with the two ‘illiberal democracies’, inviting the Court to move faster than expected. In response the Polish Constitutional Court issued a ruling, long in the making but held back for political reasons, which, invoking the precedent set by the German Verfassungsgericht, declared the Polish constitution generally to be above European law. More turmoil can safely be predicted.

Non-German observers find it hard to avoid the impression that the worst rabble-rousers in the battle over Poland’s and Hungary’s liberal-democratic deficit are the Germans. A leading figure here is one Katarina Barley, Social Democrat and a former Minister of Justice in the Grand Coalition, until her party made her its top national candidate for the 2019 European election. This ended in a veritable disaster, at 15.8% after 27.3% five years earlier. Having moved willy-nilly to Brussels, Barley managed to secure for herself one of the fourteen (!) posts of Vice-President of the EP. In the autumn of 2020, Barley let it be known on German radio that the ‘rule of law mechanism’ had to be applied to ‘starve’ (aushungern) Viktor Orbán in Hungary as well as Poland generally. There are vivid memories in Poland, shared across generations, of the last German attempt to starve the country – memories apparently alien to ‘pro-European’ German politicians who, however, know for sure how neighbouring countries have to be governed: on the German model, as specified by the German government via Brussels.

Similarly Manfred Weber from the CSU, chief of the Christian Democrats in the EP and former candidate-in-vain for the presidency of the Commission, keeps threatening Poland and Hungary with ejection from the EU (which is not provided for in the Treaties). The German Foreign Minister, also a Social Democrat, welcomed the ‘rule of law’ statute for its capacity to ‘inflict pain’ on Hungary and Poland, and was applauded by a veritable army of German Greens in and out of the EP, cheered on by the German press, ‘quality’ or not, public broadcasting included. If you add von der Leyen, Polish citizens may be forgiven for believing that their country – whose government, like that of Hungary, has the support of more or less one half of its people – has again become an object of German aggression.

What is behind this, apart from the amazing historical amnesia, or sheer stupidity, of all-too-many German ‘pro-Europeans’? The money that goes to smaller EU member countries under NGEU must appear enormous to the average German taxpayer, especially as he or she begins to divine the huge costs of the impending ‘energy turn’, or of renovating the austerity-‘starved’ German infrastructure. The real object of the recovery fund – keeping national elites in Eastern Europe who are committed to the Internal Market and averse to alliances with Russia or China in power – is too delicate to talk about in public. So it needs to be demonstrated that the money buys something more uplifting than imperial stability: submission to Western European cultural leadership documented by the selection of leaders that suit Western European taste. One example would be the neoliberal Donald Tusk, a former Polish Prime Minister who was voted out of office after his government had ruined the national economy, only to be put in a holding pen in Brussels as one of the handful of European Presidents, where he was groomed for a victorious return after putting an end to Kaczyński and his ilk.

Will Poland and Hungary learn to be like Romania or Bulgaria, if not Malta and Slovakia, and thereby placate their Brussels foes? If they refuse and the CJEU gets the last word, another this time Eastern hour of truth may strike. How the court will rule is as certain as that the number of pips on Rusty Charley’s dice will be the number he needs to win. This may open the road to Polexit, just as Merkel’s denial of concessions to Cameron on immigration added momentum to Brexit. While von der Leyen has increasingly adopted the rhetoric of Barley, Weber and the Greens, Merkel, in her last hours as Chancellor, urged the EU to exercise moderation and seek a political rather than a juridical solution. (Merkel may have been notified by the United States that they would not be amused to see Poland, their strongest and safely anti-Russian ally in Eastern Europe, leave the EU, where it is fed by Western Europe so that it can be armed by the U.S.)

In this context, note that there now seems to be a slow awakening in other member countries over the sheer presumptuousness of the EU’s increasingly explicit insistence on the general primacy of its law over that of its member states, including their constitutional law. The battle of Poland and Hungary may put an end to the era when ‘integration by law’ could, thanks to its incrementalism, be treated by increasingly short-termist national governments with benevolent neglect. For example, French centrist politicians getting ready to run for the Presidency next year, like Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains), Arnaud Montebourg (a former Socialist) and even Michel Barnier, the EU’s militant Brexit negotiator, have begun to worry about what they now call French ‘legal sovereignty’ – some of them, including Barnier of all people, demanding a national referendum to establish once and for all the supremacy of French over European law.

While this is being written, out of the blue the CJEU sentenced Poland to a fine of one million euros per day for not having abolished a chamber of its Supreme Court set up by legislation to oversee the Polish judiciary with the intention, it appears, to subject it to greater political control. (Poland has already stated its readiness to abolish the chamber by the end of the year.) Together with another fine of 500,000 euros per day previously imposed for continuing to operate a particularly dirty soft coal mine, this amounts to roughly half a billion euros per year. As much as this may seem, it is miniscule in comparison to the 36 billion Poland is due to get out of the recovery fund. Apparently, these are currently being held back by the Commission under pressure from the EP, until now without formal explanation.

Whether this kind of political hardball will bring about the desired regime change is, however, far from assured. The first line of the Polish national anthem, Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, translates as ‘Poland is not yet lost’; it expresses a strong appetite for fighting a battle, even a losing one, to the end, against the odds, in defence of the national honour. In part because of this, a political deal still seems possible, and perhaps the one million fine is no more than the last hurrah of a court that expects to be sidelined by politicians able to think twice before they invite another national exit. (The German commentariat is certain that Poland will give in, being for sale like everybody else.) Rumour has it that Donald Tusk, who recently appointed himself Spitzenkandidat of the Polish opposition for the 2023 national election, has behind the scenes sought and received assurances from the Commission that the first instalment of the Polish share in the recovery fund will soon be disbursed, probably fearing that if it were not, this would not help him but the government of Kaczyński.

Read on: Gavin Rae, ‘In the Polish Mirror’, NLR 124.

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Bitar Investigates

On 14 October 2021, during a protest led by supporters of Hezbollah and the Shia Amal Movement, snipers allegedly affiliated with the ‘Lebanese Forces’ – a Maronite Christian militia – opened fire from the rooftops, killing seven unarmed demonstrators and wounding several others. The situation escalated, prompting an exchange of fire between residents of two nearby neighbourhoods. The embers of the civil war flared. At that moment its return seemed almost inevitable.

The Lebanese political climate is already saturated with the conditions for renewed inter-communal fighting, but so far no group has been willing to push the country into that abyss – partly because no other military outfit can rival the capacities of Hezbollah. Or so we thought. The Lebanese Forces and their leader – convicted murderer Samir Geagea – may now have achieved that status, thanks largely to the unprecedented support of the US and Saudi Arabia. Geagea and his fellow bandits have an extensive record of assassinations and genocidal activity during the civil war, including the infamous 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila, facilitated by the Israeli army.

The incident on 14 October has received tremendous attention in the world media, especially in Europe and the US. But what was stunning about the coverage in the New York Times, Times of London, Le Monde, BBC, CNN etc., was the uniform tendency to misrepresent what has unfolded in Lebanon over the last few years, and convince readers that the suffering of the Lebanese people will dissipate the moment the Hezbollah’s hegemony is curtailed.

There is no denying that Hezbollah has been a formidable political and military force in Lebanon since the early 1990s. But to present the group as having an iron grip on the country elides the complex dynamics that animate its sectarian politics. In fact, Lebanon’s army, banking system, commerce, courts and judiciary, service and tourism industry, educational systems, health services and government agencies are completely outside the reach of the Shia militia. In many of these sectors, the US continues to exert more influence than any actor in Lebanon itself.

The events leading up to the 14 October protest were a case in point. Popular anger has focused on the conduct of Tarek Bitar, the judge leading the investigation into the explosion at the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020. The current laws in Lebanon restrict the prosecution of senior statemen – especially presidents, prime ministers, ministers, and members of parliament – for misconduct while in office. Such offences must be referred to a special tribunal which has not yet been established (and maybe never will be). Bitar, however, has ignored these restrictions and insisted on questioning certain Hezbollah-aligned ministers.

This has created suspicions of chicanery on the part of the runaway judge. Many Lebanese are convinced that Bitar’s investigation is secretly executing a well-orchestrated plot against the broader political alliance around Hezbollah, which includes the likes of the Amal Movement (controlled by the Speaker of Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri), the Marada Party (led by the Maronite politician Suleiman Frangieh), and some senior Sunni politicians.

It is reasonable that eyebrows should be raised at Bitar’s pursuit of figures who are politically close to Hezbollah. Some have asked why the judge did not pursue other high-profile suspects who appeared to have a more of a direct role in the process by which 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate were improperly stored and detonated last year. It appears that in the early stages of the investigation Bitar did in fact pursue such potential culprits, until he was ordered not to touch them from on-high. Officials close to president Michel Aoun, the Lebanese army and the anti-Hezbollah camp have thereby gotten off the hook. In their place, it seems that Bitar has decided to go after those whom he believes to be the weakest link: Hezbollah. If this tells us anything about Lebanese society, it is that Hezbollah and its traditional allies have no control whatsoever over the judiciary, which remains in thrall to rival political forces.

Lebanese politicians tend to agree that investigating the explosion at the Beirut port should be a national priority. What they disagree on is the direction of the investigation. Each camp wants to move the spotlight off themselves and onto their opponents. Ordinary Lebanese, meanwhile, are suspicious about the politicization of the investigation: instead of finding and punishing those responsible, there is a widespread conviction that the US and its European, regional and local allies are exploiting the legal system in order to destroy Hezbollah’s political coalition and weaken the Shia militia. It is déjà vu all over again. We have seen such travesties before – when attempts by external powers to ‘safeguard Lebanese democracy’ turn out to be soft-power plots to undermine anti-US actors, such as the sham investigation and tribunal for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, used as a proxy battle for the Bush administration to weaken Shia influence.

The current US insistence on the ‘independence’ of the Lebanese judiciary can only be seen through this lens. Less than a year ago, the US pressured the Lebanese courts to free a war criminal by the name of Amer Fakhoury who, as an officer in the pro-Israel South Lebanon Army, was once the lead warden of the infamous Khiam jail, created by Israel and manned by SLA officers to torture and execute those who resisted the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. The US threatened Lebanese politicians and judges that they would be blacklisted and placed under economic sanction if they refused to release Fakhoury (himself a US citizen). Despite the enormous volume of evidence against him, including testimonies by former aides and prisoners, the Lebanese judge overseeing the case relented and released him, and Fakhoury was flown back to the US by private jet. The American hegemon’s project could not be clearer: to turn the Lebanese legal system into a tool in its war against Hezbollah and Iran, even at the risk of tearing the country apart.

Many questions about the port explosion remain unanswered, and it has become impossible for any investigation to acquire even a veneer of impartiality. The ammonium nitrate was, of course, stored at Beirut port following a court order to confiscate it from a ship whose owner had unpaid debts to a Lebanese merchant. So, naturally, the first person one would want to question is the judge who ordered the confiscation. But that judge has been shielded from the investigation by his superiors. In the absence of people to convict, the first culprit in this saga is the Lebanese legal system itself.

The second culprit, however, is the lineup of foreign powers with vested interests in Lebanon. To date, the US, France, UK and even Russia have refused to turn over satellite images documenting the explosion to the Lebanese authorities. They have provided the images from before and after the blast, but not the minutes when the event itself took place. Moreover, following the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war, a huge fleet of UN observers was stationed in and around the Beirut port at the request of Israel and the US, as part of an agreement between the Lebanese government and the UN. They are assisted by a large cadre of intelligence officers from the US, UK, France and other countries, who work to intercept arms shipments to Hezbollah. Which begs the question: if Hezbollah managed to bring in 2,700 tons of explosives, how did this fail to catch the eye of these officials?

The Lebanese army also faces questions, although Bitar has opted not to ask them. A directive had been issued by the armed forces that any weapon or material that could be used in making explosives must receive special approval before it can be unloaded, stored or transported anywhere in the country (be that via a seaport, airport or land point). How, then, was the ammonium nitrate unloaded and stored without the permission of the army, which has its own observers and base at the site of the explosion?

Whether or not Bitar is personally corrupt, it is clear that he is either politically motivated or has been manipulated by external actors looking to settle scores with Hezbollah. The violence on 14 October took place in exactly the same location where 46 years ago militants from the Maronite Kata’ib party (the mother organization of the Lebanese Forces) ambushed and killed 27 Palestinians riding a bus back from a soccer game. The refusal of the Lebanese judiciary to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators led to retaliations and counter-retaliations, and eventually to civil war. The Lebanese legal system today finds itself in a similar position. Rather than delivering justice, Bitar is contributing to the many mayhems that are ravaging the country. Whatever his intentions, the consequences could be horrific.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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Big Politics

‘Everything we do as citizens is determined by politics; and therefore everything unions do is determined by politics’, Len McCluskey wrote in his first book, a tract on trade unionism published shortly after the 2019 UK general election. Some eighteen months later, in her victorious election manifesto to succeed him as general secretary of Unite the Union, Sharon Graham declared that ‘the politics has failed.’ Her campaign insisted on the failure of Unite’s political project within the Labour Party. Any judgement of McCluskey’s record would seem to rest on what one makes of that indictment. As if to prove this point, McCluskey’s memoir, Always Red, released last month to coincide with the end of his decade-long tenure at the helm of Britain’s most formidable trade union, is dominated by a 180-page narration of his involvement in Westminster politics since 2011. The account of Corbynism therein is one of the most politically astute to date – no surprise given the editorial involvement of Alex Nunns, one of Corbyn’s most impressive former staffers and a historian of the project’s early stages.

When McCluskey began work as a planman on Liverpool’s docks in 1968, post-war trade union power was at its height. ‘You join the union here, son’ was the greeting at the dockland gate. McCluskey’s arrival as a 19-year-old member of the Transport and General Workers Union (T&G) came the same year as the election of International Brigadier Jack Jones as its general secretary, and through the early 1970s the union ‘reached the apogee of its influence on British life’, according to Andrew Murray, McCluskey’s chief of staff and official chronicler of the union’s history. By 1969, the T&G had 1.5 million members. It added 250,000 more in the following three years and hit the 2 million landmark in 1977. At this summit it was, in Murray’s telling, ‘the most powerful democratic working-class organisation in Britain’s history.’ Virtually all of McCluskey’s formative experiences, fondly recounted in the book, were in this ‘heroic period; a time when class solidarity…was something we lived and breathed.’

If McCluskey’s time as a lay member of the T&G happily coincided with the tenure of Jones, his industrial hero, then his move into the bureaucracy came at a less fortuitous moment. He became a full-time official for the T&G’s white-collar section in 1979, the same year Thatcher entered Downing Street. Neoliberal ascendancy devastated the industrial worlds of Merseyside with disorienting speed, with T&G membership in the region plummeting from 108,000 to 57,000 in the space of three years. Towards the end of the 1970s, in the twilight of Jones’s period as general secretary, simply keeping factories and other workplaces open became the major preoccupation. In McCluskey’s previous book, he traces the left turn in British trade unionism back to these origins: in Thatcher’s dislodging of unions from their ‘economic role in British capitalism’, and in Blair’s refusal to attempt a restoration.

In the early 1980s, McCluskey was central to organising the nascent left faction (National Broad Left) in the T&G, serving a political-secretarial function to its executive during time off from his duties in union officialdom. He was then ‘stood down from all industrial work’ to assist Liverpool City Council, led by the Militant Tendency, in their battle with Thatcher and Kinnock. This section of Always Red hints at McCluskey’s ecumenical formation. Tony Benn was his political hero, but much was learnt from Communist Party cadres in the T&G’s rank and file – although McCluskey never joined the CP given his discomfort with the Soviet regime. He had even less time for Britain’s Trotskyist outfits, describing them as ultra-leftists who put their ‘own short-term gains before the long-term interests of the working class.’ Militant, however, were the exception that proved the rule: ‘Here were people who lived in my community, worked in real jobs, and spoked a language that dealt with issues that mattered in a realistic and understandable way.’

McCluskey’s involvement in political organising, both inside the T&G and well beyond it, deepened as the industrial horizons of the previous decade rapidly receded. His national ascendancy originated in revulsion at the ‘accommodationist’ ethos of the early New Labour years. T&G general secretary Bill Morris had caught the Blairite bug, selling out the Liverpool dockers and antagonising the Broad Left. Yet the new millennium saw a historic left resurgence in the unions, with McCluskey at the forefront in the T&G: leading the radical opposition to Morris, managing the victorious campaign of Tony Woodley for general secretary in 2003, and subsequently becoming his assistant general secretary for strategy.

In Always Red, two noteworthy things about Woodley stand out: his deft navigation of the T&G’s merger with Amicus to form Unite in 2007, and his establishment of an organising department at McCluskey’s urging. McCluskey got the idea for the latter initiative, he says, from Andy Stern, former President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and arch-enemy of Jane McAlevey, deep organising’s high priest. McAlevey’s first book, Raising Expectations, is in large part ‘the case against Stern’, whom she describes as the leader of a ‘shallow mobilizing’ programme – aiming to grow union membership for the purposes of advocacy, absent any commitment to actually organising workplaces and readying them for strikes. McCluskey came across Stern in the early 1990s, long before the clashes McAlevey describes. But his commitment to Stern’s ‘ethos’ of organising, restated in the book, is intriguing – insofar as it indicates significant detachment from the McAlevey-esque methods to which Sharon Graham and many of Unite’s organisers are committed.

Among the great strengths of the T&G left tradition, as Andrew Murray points out, was its commitment to doing big politics. For McCluskey, the silver lining of a bipartisan neoliberal settlement which weakened unions in the industrial sphere was the freedom ‘to work in different ways’ politically, beyond the constraints of corporatism and the Labourist bureaucracy. In the days of Jack Jones and Frank Cousins, the political stature of the general secretary flowed from industrial strength. For McCluskey, it was something like the opposite: reviving the conditions of possibility for industrial might was the work of politics. A clear and concerted political strategy was adopted by Unite’s executive committee shortly after McCluskey’s election as general secretary in 2011. It aimed to win Labour for working people, win working people for Labour, and build a ‘broad alliance to defeat the Tories and their policies’, laying the foundations of ‘a socialism for the 21st century’.

Did ‘the politics’ fail? At the launch of Always Red in the upstairs of a Westminster pub last month, packed with Labour left luminaries and a handful of lobby journalists, the speeches of Corbyn and McCluskey both homed in on the most convincing case for the triumph of Unite’s political project: the 2017 general election. So too in the book, McCluskey extols Labour’s performance in 2017 as an object-lesson that ‘radical politics can succeed.’ Against the tide, he writes, ‘despite all the efforts of snide, treacherous snakes saying Labour would be obliterated, the country embraced the unashamedly radical prospectus put forward by Jeremy Corbyn’. There is little to dissent from here, and no doubt that Unite was indispensable in facilitating this remarkable – and likely singular – achievement. McCluskey reminds us that as cowards flinched (Owen Jones visited him just after the 2017 election had been called, insisting that ‘it wasn’t too late to change leader’), Unite remained steadfast in its support for Corbyn.

Had McCluskey not unexpectedly backed Ed Miliband’s introduction of one-member, one-vote for Labour leadership elections, Corbynism would never have come to pass. And had Unite not stuck by the project, it may have lasted no longer than a year. In that sense, judgement of McCluskey’s political strategy’s success and the Corbyn project’s value is one and the same. If the latter is correctly understood, despite its obvious failings, as a historic advance for the British left, then the former cannot be dismissed. Straightforwardly, McCluskey was committed first to pushing Labour to the left (2011-2015), and then to the success of a socialist electoral project – sustaining it financially and defending it against an unprecedented onslaught from the state and media (2015-2019). At neither stage was the political prize separable from urgent industrial priorities: namely, opposing austerity and working for the election of a government among whose earliest acts would have been the repeal of Europe’s most restrictive anti-trade union laws.

What of his shortcomings and misjudgements? It is clear from Always Red that, by and large, they were not due to an excess of the political at the expense of the industrial, but rather to deficiencies (or lapses) of socialist politics. This is most stark when it comes to climate breakdown. In its active support for a ‘just transition’, Unite’s public positioning on climate has in recent years been far superior to that of fellow energy unions. McCluskey himself helped persuade Unite’s delegation to Labour’s 2019 conference to support the Green New Deal motion with a 2030 net-zero target, and a ‘workers’ greenprint for a million jobs’ was central to the continuity campaign of general secretary candidate Steve Turner this summer. Yet beneath the surface there is an affinity between McCluskey’s stance on climate and that of the relatively right-wing GMB. In the book, McCluskey emphasises his support for a state-directed just transition, but explains that in its absence, he must defend the ‘good, skilled jobs’ Unite members have in the fossil fuel and aviation industries.

This is an increasingly untenable position. Not only is advocacy for the expansion of such carbon-heavy work a sectional interest antithetical to the general interest, it also expresses a profoundly conservative trade unionism, embodying  the institutionalisation of defeat (as Richard Seymour has argued). Indeed, Unite’s single most successful act of parliamentary lobbying in McCluskey’s time as general secretary was, in a joint effort with GMB, whipping 119 Labour MPs to vote in favour of a third runway at Heathrow in 2018. As the new GMB general secretary Gary Smith explained, ‘It’s jobs and work for us, we’re in the jobs and work business.’

Surveying McCluskey’s record during the Corbyn years more generally, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he often had a fiercer bark than bite, his rhetoric more combative than his political judgements. The mismatch is evident in Always Red. McCluskey gratifyingly denounces the PLP as ‘despicable, spineless people’ and excoriates the People’s Vote lobby, describing the likes of Paul Mason as ‘super-spreaders’ carrying the disease of ‘Remainitis’. On this level, the general secretary appears as the anti-McDonnell: uncompromising, unbowed, not giving an inch to the enemy. But the divergence between McCluskey and McDonnell over Brexit was down to honest tactical disagreements, about both the electoral calculus of Remain vs. Leave and the importance of Labour’s position reflecting that of its activist base. Beyond the European question, McCluskey was often guilty of the ‘knee-jerk conformism’ with which McDonnell has been charged.

During the 2017 election campaign McCluskey warned against Corbyn’s masterstroke speech in the wake of the Manchester terror attack, deeming it ‘too risky’. When it was forecast that Labour would be hammered in that election, Unite considered Emily Thornberry as a potential successor. The following year, McCluskey counselled Corbyn to adopt the full and unamended IHRA definition of antisemitism. He maintains that the leadership should have done so immediately – failing to see the dissonance with his diagnosis of the core of the ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ as the refusal of Corbyn’s detractors to ‘take yes for an answer’. In the round, McCluskey clearly recognises that such concessions gave the media license for further attacks; yet he puzzlingly seems to think that giving ground more quickly here could have helped clear the path to 10 Downing Street. Not to mention that the opening salvo of McCluskey’s counsel to Corbyn, just before his election as leader, was: ‘You can’t pick John as your shadow chancellor… we think John is too divisive and you’re going to have to think of someone else, maybe Angela Eagle.’ In this light, McCluskey might counterintuitively be seen as a precocious practitioner of ‘McDonnellism’. Such strategic parallels highlight the perils of political retrospectives grounded in narratives of individual betrayal and villainy.

Speaking at a Labour Representation Committee (LRC) meeting at the TUC Congress fringe in 2012, McCluskey sized up the political challenge facing Unite:

Yes, we can move Labour left, we have to move Labour left, but let’s be honest about the task that lies ahead of us. Because the truth of the matter is, there are thousands, tens of thousands, of our activists throughout the trade union movement who tell us that the Labour Party’s dead…When I was running for general secretary in Unite…there wasn’t a single meeting [where members] didn’t ask the question, why are we still paying this Labour Party so much money?

He continued to point out that, in an all-member vote in which the leadership took a neutral stance, Unite would likely opt to disaffiliate from Labour. Nine years later, these remarks convey both the success of McCluskey’s political strategy and the extent to which it was built on quicksand. As the triumph of Sharon Graham’s campaign demonstrated, Unite failed to galvanize enough union members behind its political operation in Labour, or to persuade them of its importance. To that extent, Westminster (and Unite’s ossified bureaucratic club) can be credibly accused of leaving the workplace behind.

Yet McCluskey’s judgement about the centrality of big politics still stands. No amount of workplace or community organising, irrespective of its depth or skill, can circumvent the state. Unite’s new leadership could easily become captive to the anti-politics that (exaggerated for electoral expedience) secured its ascendance, particularly given the fragmentation and decline of United Left – the once dominant faction that has long controlled the union’s executive and secured McCluskey’s election. In Always Red, he writes that at the union’s 2012 and 2014 policy conferences, Unite came ‘closer than most people realised’ to disaffiliating from Labour, and even discussed the idea of a ‘new Workers’ Party.’ Given Labour is now firmly in the hands of forces far to the right of those that drove Ed Miliband’s leadership, it doesn’t seem implausible that such a prospect could surface again. In the best-case scenario, measured by the dictates of the climate timeline, Graham’s agenda would feed into a renewal and radicalisation of Unite’s political strategy without its downscaling, leaving the union and the Labour left in a durably stronger position: deep organising plus big politics. As for McCluskey’s legacy, it remains too early to tell. For now, in the British left’s field of failing again and failing better, it can be said that his political failure was about as triumphant as they come.

Read on: Arthur Scargill, ‘The New Unionism’, NLR I/92.

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Rule by Target

Can a frugal state be totalitarian? Or, in other words, is an anti-statist totalitarianism possible? These questions have been asked countless times during the era of triumphant neoliberalism: beginning in 1973 when Pinochet implemented the economic dictates of the Chicago School, passing through the various military regimes responsible for carpet privatizations (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, etc.), up to the discussions – no matter how wrongheaded – of the ‘sanitary dictatorship’ of neoliberal governance during the pandemic.

Totalitarianism requires a strong, ‘totalizing’ state, at least according to the doctrine promoted by Hayek in his 1944 Road to Serfdom, which in its redacted form, published by Reader’s Digest, sold one million copies. According to Hayek, a society sinks into totalitarianism as soon as the state begins to worry about the economic security of its citizens. The trajectory is irreversible; we start with social security and end up in concentration camps (or gulags). The omnipresence of the state is thus integral to ‘totalitarianism’ in the Arendtian sense.

A recent book, however, has planted in me a seed of doubt. Johann Chapoutot’s Libres d’obéir. Le management du nazisme à aujourd’hui (Free to Obey: Management, from Nazism to the Present Day [2020]), translated this year into Italian and German but, as is often the case, not English. Its central figure is Reinhart Höhn (1904-2000): a jurist, academic and SS general, sentenced to death for war crimes but subsequently pardoned. Höhn was part of a group of intellectuals that provided the theoretical framework not so much for Nazism itself as for the Gestapo, the SS and the occupation of almost all of Europe. His partners in this project included Werner Best (1903-89): a jurist too, but first and foremost a senior police officer in Hessen, then head of the political police, and finally plenipotentiary of occupied Denmark; Wilhelm Stuckart (1902-53), lawyer, jurisconsult to the Nazi party, member of the SS and formulator and compiler of the Nuremberg Race Laws; Franz Alfred Six (1909-75), a doctor of political science and member of the SS; Otto Ohlendorf (1907-51), an economic consultant and SS colonel who studied economics, held a doctorate in jurisprudence and commanded a unit responsible for around 90,000 deaths in Ukraine, before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg and hanged.

The presence of this educated élite at the head of one of the fiercest apparatuses of repression ever conceived, is a marked contrast with the hysterical image of SS officers in many American Second World War films: an image whose coarseness borders on the comical, and banishes the idea that a phenomenon like Nazism could ever repeat itself. We are typically reassured that such ghouls could never again implement such dangerous ideas. Not so in Chapoutot’s portrait. The author explains how these SS intellectuals were called upon to provide a conceptual framework capable of overcoming the enormous logistical difficulties by the conquest of practically the entire continent. In a 1941 text entitled Fundamental Problems for a German Administration of the Great Space, Werner Best wrote that ‘the rapid and powerful expansion of the territories on which the German people directly or indirectly exercise their sovereignty obliges us to review all concepts, principles and procedures through which this sovereignty has hitherto been thought and constructed.’ However much the territory under German dominion might increase, ‘the German people will never be able to afford doubling the number of public servants.’ More would have to be done with fewer personnel, not least because a large part of the male population was conscripted. The procedures of the state needed to be honed, made more flexible. In fact, Best had (unsuccessfully) proposed to Himmler that the public sector adopt a model of relativ lockeren Besetzung (‘relatively “loose” occupation’). The SS intellectuals thus became advocates of flexible management and streamlined protocols, at odds with the caricatured image of the Nazi dictatorship.  

Chapoutot charts the social trajectory of these characters following the defeat of Nazism. After his commuted twenty-year sentence, Franz Six became an advertising consultant for Porsche; Best worked as a consultant for the company Stinnes AG, then became an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Federal Republic. The most interesting story was that of Reinhart Höhn, who, having escaped the death sentence and spent years practicing homeopathy under a pseudonym, went on to found the Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft (the Academy for Business Executives) at Bad Harzburg in Lower Saxony. By the time Höhn retired in 1972, around 200,000 German managers had passed through his institution; when he died, the number stood at 600,000. Professors at the school included other ex-SS officers, such as Six and Justus Beyer.

Bad Harzberg taught a style of management by target derived from Höhn’s reforms to the military chain of command. Under this system, the superior officer demands that his subordinates achieve their prescribed objectives, but leaves them free to decide exactly how, intervening only in exceptional cases (management by exception). Regrettably, Chapoutot does not investigate the relationship of the Bad Harzberg technique to the management styles now practiced in the United States. But his narrative shows how these hands-off methods were initially a product of German military expansion, which sought to reconcile a massive administrative operation with a reduced workforce.

The Nazi theorists were famously hostile to law and rights, viewed as creations of inferior Judaic and Latin cultures (Commandments of the Bible and Roman law codes respectively), and foreign to the proud German spirit which claims freedom from legal obligations. As such, they had a deep-rooted distrust of the state as a guarantor, responsible for the enforcement of law. The state was rather seen as a codified, ossified body which obstructs the flexibility and agility necessary for the expansion of Lebensraum. Nazis always talked of Reich (empire), never of Staat (state). Whereas Carl Schmitt saw states as bulwarks of political order, Best developed the idea of a Völkische Großraumordnung (popular order of the Great Space), in which the superior races would create zones of domination around themselves without fear of any normative restriction. Power was the only all-embracing source of political order. Aside from peoples (not, as per Schmitt, states), there existed no other normative points of reference that could be counterposed to the regime established by National Socialism.

For Höhn and his contemporaries, the state is unable to cope on its own when faced with the huge multiplication of tasks and responsibilities entailed by imperial expansion. It was precisely for this reason – to deal with re-armament, war preparations and the administrative challenges posed by the occupation of Europe – that para-state Nazi organizations began to surface, starting with the SS: a ‘private’ police force of 915,000 belonging to the party (even if Nazis always preferred to speak of a Bewegung – a movement – rather than a party). Likewise, Organisation Todt was born as a para-state company and ultimately employed 1.4 million foreign workers to meet civil and military engineering demands during the war. The state thus became one tool among many for achieving the Nazis’ domestic and overseas objectives.

Höhn believed that ‘legal theory has created an illusion, attributing to the state an “invisible personality”, transforming it in a perennial quest for sovereignty’, whereas in reality the state is nothing but an ‘“apparatus” at the service of power’, a tool which ‘the Nazi movement has captured, and to which it has ascribed other duties.’ In a chapter for the edited volume Grundfragen der Rechtsauffassung (Basic Questions for the Conception of Right), he elaborated on this argument: ‘The state is no longer the supreme political entity… It is rather an entity which limits itself to the execution of tasks assigned to it by the leadership (Führung), which operates in the service of the people. In this sense, the state is no more than a simple instrument . . . [to fulfill] the objectives it is assigned’.

It is this subordination of the state to externally-imposed targets and assignments that links Höhn’s theory to contemporary neoliberalism. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberals don’t seek to destroy the state; they know full well that without state there is no market. Rather, they want to invert the relationship of power between the market and the state. Not a market in the service of the state, but a state in the service of the market. Just as for Höhn the state is merely a mechanism equipped to achieve certain ends, so too for neoliberalism the state is a company that serves other companies – an entity that provides a service to be assessed in terms of the parameters of private enterprise (profitability, flexibility, best practices, benchmarking). None of this prevents a microscopic, pervasive control of citizenry, nor does it necessarily threaten the ability to stifle dissent. Just because war is outsourced to contractors (private mercenaries, that is to say) doesn’t mean it is less bloody, or lethal – or ‘total’.

The idea these Nazis passed down to us, then, is that of a heteronomous state, subordinated to external functions, designed to obey a logic which lies outside of it (and comes from a party or a company). This reverses the conventional wisdom. Totalitarianism doesn’t consist in enslavement by an omnipotent state; it rather wishes to impose a regime in which the state itself is enslaved as an instrument of an extrinsic omnipotence. A theory of management born to facilitate the advance of the Panzerdivisionen came to resemble the neoliberal project. We are thus able to resolve the Pinochet paradox, in which a brutal dictatorship violently imposes the free market. But if we were to think beyond 1973, it would be interesting to dwell for a moment on Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders, formulated in 2004 with the objective of instituting a neoliberal regime in Iraq, at the time occupied by the US Armed Forces. As Wendy Brown explains in Undoing the Demos (2015),

These mandated selling off several hundred state-run enterprises, permitting full ownership rights of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms and full repatriation of profits to foreign firms, opening Iraq’s banks to foreign ownership and control, and eliminating tariffs […] At the same time, the Bremer Orders restricted labor and throttled back public good and services. They outlawed strikes and eliminated the right to unionize in most sectors, mandated a regressive flat tax on income, lowered the corporate rate to a flat 15 percent, and eliminated taxes on profits repatriated to foreign-owned businesses.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: William Davies, ‘The New Neoliberalism?’, NLR 101.

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Lines of Succession

In Egypt, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War is a timeless event. But nearly fifty years later, the generation that fought on the banks of the Suez Canal and in the Sinai Peninsula is dying. The conflict will soon be resigned to historical memory, its battles memorialized in the media and official proclamations, but nowhere else. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was a teenager in the early 1970s, appeared to acknowledge as much during an educational symposium this week on the anniversary of the war, which came just after the death of one of its most famous veterans, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.

Tantawi, who was eighty-five years old, fought in both the Six-Day War in 1967 and the War of Attrition in 1967–70, but he distinguished himself as commander of the sixteenth infantry battalion in 1973. Among the first Egyptian detachments to cross the canal into the Sinai, the battalion is perhaps best known for its role in the Battle of the Chinese Farm, a brutal two-day confrontation with the Israeli military on the western edge of the Sinai. The Egyptians retreated from this fortification on 17 October, but not without inflicting significant damage on the enemy. Tantawi was awarded a medal for his courage.

Born in the Cairo neighborhood of ‘Abdeen in 1935, Tantawi graduated from the city’s Military Academy in April 1956, on the eve of the Suez Crisis, and fought alongside Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip soon after. He returned to the Military Academy to teach tactics and in the 1960s travelled to post-independence Algeria, where he established a similar institution. After the 1973 war, he rose through the ranks of the motorized infantry, eventually becoming commander of a division. Tantawi led the Second Field Army, the Republican Guard and finally the Operations Authority. From the mid- to late-70s, his role as Egypt’s military attaché in Pakistan and Afghanistan shielded him from civil-military tensions at home – as President Anwar Sadat repositioned Egypt geopolitically with the signing of the Camp David accords and fought to suppress the country’s opposition.

From top to bottom, the ranks of the military were displeased with Sadat’s unilateral realignment with the United States and rapprochement with Israel. So when a uniformed officer, Khaled Islambouli, opened fire on Sadat during a military parade, it was far from unexpected. A couple weeks earlier, the security forces had reportedly rounded up twenty people – some of them military officers – on suspicion of planning an attack. Aside from exposing the inability of the military to control its personnel, the assassination of Sadat precipitated intense internal surveillance and scrutiny. As Hosni Mubarak’s regime emerged in its wake, so too did a new order in the army, beginning, as it often does, with purges. Those who remained in uniform were sent a stark message: stay in line, and don’t fly too close to the sun. Mubarak found at least one senior-level officer who seemed willing to follow these injunctions: Hussein Tantawi.

During the US-led operation in Kuwait, Tantawi coordinated the deployment of Egyptian forces to the Gulf. He also became the primary liaison between the commander of the Arab forces, Saudi prince Khalid bin Sultan, and the Egyptian leadership. Tantawi was appointed defence minister shortly after the war in May 1991. After moving into the official residence off Ibn al-Hakam Square, his main priority was to oversee the transformation – or ‘modernization’, as the US government called it – of the military from Soviet to Western hardware, training and doctrine. Though Tantawi was receptive to Washington’s reforms, he was constrained early on by other senior officers who remained committed to the Soviet model. Whereas Tantawi had never attended a foreign military academy, his immediate predecessors all received training in the Soviet Union, while two of his successors spent time in the United States. His tenure, much like his background, represented an about-face for the military – and for Egypt more broadly.

When the military rules, soldiers are not just soldiers. Bureaucratic organization in an authoritarian state is often conflictual, so while war may have been the army’s vocation, politics became its specialty. They were forced to balance the competing priorities of loyalty and professionalism, reacting to the whims of the ruler (and sometimes the people). Of the twenty Egyptian defence ministers since the 1952 coup, Tantawi held the position the longest, weathering successive rounds of political violence, popular mobilization and economic liberalization. This was frequently interpreted by Egypt commentators as evidence of his complacency, lack of ambition and deference to Mubarak. Yet such characterizations overlooked an important fact: Tantawi beat the odds. In a country where top military officials are often jailed, exiled, muzzled, cashiered early – and have occasionally died in unusual circumstances – Tantawi’s longevity may have also been a sign of his political acuity.

Tantawi was, in fact, willing to push back against Mubarak at critical moments in his presidency, including the Egyptian revolution of 2011. From the first days of the protests Tantawi made his position clear: that the military would neither mount a coup d’état nor prop up the ailing regime. He believed that Mubarak had not grasped the severity of events on the ground, and doubted that he would cede control of the government even after he had agreed to a formal transfer of power. On 10 February Tantawi called a meeting of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces without its formal chairman, the president. The next day, Mubarak resigned and Tantawi took power. He oversaw a referendum on changes to the constitution – presidential term limits, a vice presidency, electoral reforms – and presided over the indictments of senior figures from the outgoing regime. Yet, as protesters continued to flood the streets calling for presidential elections to be brought forward, Tantawi’s forces killed dozens and arrested hundreds – at one point sending armoured vehicles to run over demonstrators staging a sit-in at the state television headquarters. Tantawi became a symbol of the ongoing state violence. His removal, or execution, was demanded by the crowds in Tahrir Square.

Two months after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi came to power, Tantawi was asked to step down from both his military and political positions. He remained an adviser to Morsi and received an honorary Order of the Nile, but otherwise retreated from public life. In his place, the ambitious and adroit Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ascended to the role of defence minister. Morsi had invited the coup-maker in – and before long the unstable civilian government had been toppled by a revitalized military high command.

Prior to the Arab Spring, Tantawi regularly stated that the military would not tolerate succession: a rebuke to Mubarak, who planned for his son Gamal to take the helm. Yet in Egypt, positions of power are often passed from important men to their understudies. One retired Egyptian general described to me the Sisi–Tantawi relationship as that of a mentor and protégé. Another speculated that Tantawi had marked Sisi out to become defence minister ever since he was a young major. While consolidating his iron-grip on the country, Sisi has canonized Tantawi, lauding his heroism and self-sacrifice, and frequently drafting him in for ceremonial duties. Sisi ordered a colossal mosque to be built in his honour, and the military produced a eulogizing film titled ‘A Tribute to Loyalty’. In it, we are presented with a striking succession of Egyptian leaders: Nasser, Sadat, Tantawi, Sisi.

Read on: Hazem Kandil, ‘Sisi’s Egypt’, NLR 102.