Author: Oliver Eagleton

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After Solidarity

Tori et Lokita (2022), the latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, opens with a shot that has become a signal part of their visual repertoire: a face in the centre of the screen, crumbling under the voice of an unseen speaker. We see Lokita as she is interrogated by an immigration officer. At first, she seems impassive, but eventually she hesitates, and then breaks down in tears, unable to answer the officer’s questions. We witness the consequences of power, inscribed on a face.

Lokita is a Cameroonian from Garoua who met Tori – a resourceful Bariba child from Benin – en route to Belgium. Back home, he was denounced as a sorcerer, a claim that makes for an easier path to asylum in a West eager to believe in tales of African irrationality. Lokita, meanwhile, is forced to try to claim refugee status by pretending to be his sister. Both immigrants are in desperate circumstances, and both must work delivering drugs to pay off the debts they incurred while being trafficked to Belgium. Given the similarity of their situations, one of the basic questions posed by Tori et Lokita is why Tori should be given papers while Lokita is disbelieved. They share one life, and amid indifferent drug dealers and cold bureaucrats, it is their fictional kinship that proves the only real relationship in the film. Church and family, by contrast, are merely vessels for the extraction of capital. A Sunday service turns out to be where the traffickers who brought Tori and Lokita to Belgium take payments for their services. Lokita’s mother is interested only in the next remittance.

Fictional kinship is a motif the Dardennes have previously deployed. In Le Silence de Lorna (2008), an Albanian migrant’s sham marriage to a Belgian junky, Fabio, leads to his murder. Lorna attempts to salvage a non-transactional form of affinity from Fabio’s death by insisting that she is pregnant with the dead addict’s child: a fake pregnancy that eventually unravels her dream of owning a snack bar. All too often in the Dardennes’ films, it is attempts to find forms of solidarity – real or imagined – that lead to their characters’ downfall.

Solidarity was the focus of the Dardennes’ first works. Raised in Seraing, the Belgian city in which all their films are set, the brothers spent the early years of their career (1978-1983) making documentaries, many of which looked back to the city’s labour movement and its struggles during the 1960s, in the factories that line the banks of the river Meuse. By the 1990s, however, they had switched their attention to fiction films that assess the state of post-industrial Belgium, and memories of labour militancy are notable by their absence. In the Dardennes’ films, the factories have closed, and shuttered with them are any hopes of collective solidarity and worthwhile work.

Their oeuvre depicts a world in which everyone is struggling to survive, the conditions for solidarity are absent, and there is no moral difference between legal and illegal forms of money-making. In Tori et Lokita, we watch Tori cycle between drug deliveries made at the behest of his Albanian boss, Betim, who conducts his business from the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, where he alternates doling out cocaine and preparing caprese salads. Such under-the-counter operations are a familiar scene in the cinema of the Dardennes. There is hardly a single business that isn’t also a swindle; the hidden abode of production proves to be merely the necessary camouflage for illegal accumulation. La Promesse (1996) opens in a garage, with a young man, Igor, fixing the car of an elderly woman, who opines that ‘all work deserves payment.’ The claim evokes a world in which labour is fairly rewarded, and a moral economy could be mapped onto capitalism. Igor listens to her voice as if it emanates from another era; he has already swiped her wallet.

Other values have also been emptied out. Family is no longer a respite. The Dardennes’ films are full of fake marriages and traded babies. Domesticity is either the site of a brutal initiation into illegal business, or else simply the scene for yet another scam – as in L’Enfant (2005), in which a young man decides to sell his child to make some quick cash. Whether the family was ever meaningful, work redemptive, or solidarity possible, is unclear. Such questions belong to the prehistory of the Dardennes’ fiction films, whose characters come in two strains: those who evince no interest in anything other than playing their part in a brutal transactional economy, and those who look in vain for normative attachments. This second group is driven by the desire for normalcy: a job, a family, and a sense of a whole, ordered life. The world in which these dreams made sense is long gone, if it ever existed, but the desires remain.

It is these drives that provide much of the narrative propulsion in the Dardennes’ films, whose cameras follow their young protagonists – tracking them from behind with over-the-shoulder shots – as they search for a place in the world. Rosetta (1999) opens with the film’s eponymous heroine cannoning through a packing plant from which she has just been let go, in search of an explanation for her sacking. Her unnamed boss, le patron, tells her that there was no particular reason – it was simply cheaper to hire another trainee. Don’t take it personally, he suggests; yet all Rosetta wants is for someone to take her personally, and see that she works hard. In other films we encounter other drives. In Tori et Lokita, Tori cycles through the city to make his drug drop-offs and secure a place in Belgium. In Le Gamin au Vélo (2011), we see another child, Cyril, pedalling furiously as he searches for his deadbeat dad, possessed by the idea that they might be reunited. (His father isn’t interested.)

Despite the world’s indifference to their desires, none of these characters can rid themselves of their unattainable dreams. Rosetta tells herself: ‘I want a normal life. I want a real job.’ She hopes to escape the abject trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother, but it is not affluence that she craves. Early on in the film, she throws away the salmon her mother scavenges from friends in favour of fishing in a lake. Later, she refuses a job on the black market and instead tips off a patron – rarely do figures of authority receive names in the Dardennes’ films – about a scam being run by one of his employees, Rosetta’s only friend, thereby allowing her to take his job. For a fleeting moment, Rosetta seems calm, almost pacified. Finally, she has a boss and a wage: a normal life. After the factory, the film suggests, there will be neither solidarity nor meaning in work. The best one can achieve is a stunted, precarious existence: in this world, waged labour is a prize for which one is willing to risk everything.

Lokita is also set on achieving a sense of normalcy, and uses the same techniques of auto-interpellation as Rosetta. She repeats to herself: I will get my papers, find work as a caregiver, and live with Tori. This vision sustains her as she delivers drugs for Betim, and during the mock immigration interviews that Tori stages so that she can credibly appear to be his sister. It might be the case that such a dream is achievable in contemporary Belgium, but we see no evidence of this in the Dardennes’ films, which take place solely in the half-light of illegal immigration and extra-legal exploitation. The real mystery is why dreams of normality have such a hold over these characters, despite all the evidence that such reveries cannot be realized.

In Deux Jours, Une Nuit (2014), Sandra has been let go from Solwal, a solar panel manufacturing company, after her colleagues were asked to choose between a €1,000 bonus and keeping her on as an employee. After pleading with management, she is granted another vote, and given the weekend to persuade her co-workers. Sandra is obsessed with getting her job back, though she gives no indication that she enjoyed her work or did it with any pride. What makes her obsession all the more remarkable is that her conversations with colleagues reveal that few of them rely solely on their jobs at Solwal. Willy also repairs garden tiles; Hamid does a night shift stacking shelves at a convenience store. A salaried position is no longer enough to survive. Work itself is unworkable, yet Sandra cannot escape the psychic hold it has over her. The redemptive power of labour in Deux Jours, Une Nuit, of family in Le Gamin au Vélo, and of legal residency in Tori et Lokita are fantasies – convincing only from the outside, to the unemployed, the orphaned, and the undocumented. The Dardennes’ narratives unfold in the ambiguous gap between dreams of a stable life and their foreclosure in the real world.

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In Robert Pippin’s treatment of the Dardennes’ films, he makes much of the fact that they all contain a crisis of responsibility. In La Promesse, a dying immigrant worker, Amidou, makes Igor promise to look after his wife, Assita; in Rosetta, the protagonist informs on her only friend in order to take his job, but abruptly renounces the position later in the film; and in L’Enfant, a young man sells his child and then subsequently tries to retrieve it. Some critics, such as Martin O’Shaughnessy, have claimed that the Dardenne brothers are trying to articulate an ethics after the demise of collective politics. It’s quite possible that the directors themselves would endorse such a reading. The series of journals that the Dardennes have published chronicling the making of their films, Au dos de nos images, are full of Levinas and short on Marx. (The same could be said of Sur L’Affaire Humaine, Luc Dardenne’s sole philosophical treatise).

But the films are not the filmmakers. What makes the best parts of the Dardennes’ oeuvre so compelling are the deeply uncertain ethical impulses of the characters. Igor, about to get away with covering up Amidou’s death, confesses what happened to Assita. His motivation is unclear, and seems as much to do with trying to escape his overbearing father, who is intent on initiating him into the family business of people trafficking, as it does with honouring his promise to Amidou. Ultimately, his revelation doesn’t improve Assita’s life, and destroys Igor’s world. Rosetta’s decision to give up her job is similarly complex, bound up with the return of her alcoholic mother and her own preparations for suicide. If this is what ethics looks likes after politics, it is not a redemptive story about new forms of care, but a bleak assessment of our capacity for solidarity under conditions of abjection.

Tori et Lokita is not one of the Dardennes’ finer films. Partly, this is because it functions as something of a greatest hits collection: auto-interpellation, tracking the backs of the characters, and even Tori’s manic pedalling around Seraing have all appeared in other films, to greater effect. More importantly, however, the film locates the crisis of responsibility that propels the narrative beyond the world of the characters: Lokita’s initial asylum claim is denied by the immigration officer. In desperation, she turns to Betim, who promises to supply her with false papers on the condition that she spend a month doing unspecified work for him in relative isolation. The audience fears prostitution, but instead she is taken to – of course – an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city, where she is expected to tend to Betim’s cannabis crop. Her attachment to Tori proves her undoing. He breaks into the factory and reunites with Lokita, but things quickly go awry when Betim’s associates discover them together.

The film’s final scene is an address given by Tori at Lokita’s funeral: ‘Lokita, if you had your papers, you’d have become a caregiver, and we would have lived together in Belgium. Now, you are dead, and I am alone.’ The speech closes the circle of the film, which began with Lokita’s face as seen by an immigration officer, and ends with the consequences of that officer’s decision. Never before have the Dardennes allowed themselves to be so clearly identified with a particular perspective in their films. Tori’s address to the funeral becomes a polemic delivered to the audience, denouncing the violence meted out to immigrants and demanding a humane alternative. After screening Tori et Lokita at the London Film Festival, Luc Dardenne remarked that ‘We were indeed angry, and this anger motivated us to make this film, particularly when we found out that there’s a huge number of unaccompanied minors who disappear. No one seems to worry about it. That absolutely has to change.’

It is incontestable that the immigration policies of Europe in general and Belgium in particular are violent and racist, and there are many crusading documentaries that can and should be made about them. But what the Dardennes’ oeuvre suggests is that the situation cannot be remedied by mere policy adjustments. It’s much worse than that. In their films, papers do not bring security; they are simply another commodity to be traded in a cut-throat marketplace. The problem, the Dardennes’ films suggest, is not simply a world that cannot offer us safety, but our irredeemable desire for it. In this sense, the presiding spirit of the Dardenne brothers’ work is Lauren Berlant, who has written on La Promesse and Rosetta. Their characters are caught in what Berlant would call a state of ‘cruel optimism’, wedded to hopes and desires that post-industrial capitalism cannot deliver. Yet such is the unremitting bleakness of the Dardennes’ oeuvre that what Berlant intended as a historical diagnosis threatens to become a metaphysics: a world denuded of the possibilities of solidarity. In this world, policy reform doesn’t constitute an exit plan.

The endings of the Dardennes’ most interesting films gesture beyond this bleak vision. In La Promesse, Assita and Igor walk through a train station, not quite together but not entirely apart. We cannot sense any solidarity between the immigrant and the people trafficker – yet they keep walking. Rosetta ends with an equally silent encounter between the protagonist and the friend she ratted out to secure a job. There is no coming community in these films, but the characters have, potentially, left behind their normative attachments to impossible fantasies of the good life. There aren’t any words yet for the forms of life that follow the deaths of these dreams.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘A New Proletkino?’, NLR 109.

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Hollow States

The return of industrial policy is unmissable, catalyzed by the cumulative shocks of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine as well as longer-term structural issues: the ecological crisis, faltering productivity and alarm at the dependence of Western states on China’s productive apparatus. Together, these factors have steadily undermined governments’ confidence in the ability of private enterprise to drive economic development.

Of course, the ‘entrepreneurial state’ never disappeared, especially in the US. The deep pockets of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health have been crucial in maintaining the country’s technological advantage – funding research and product development over the past few decades. Still, it is clear that a substantial shift is taking place. As a group of OECD economists noted, ‘So-called horizontal policies, i.e. interventions available to all firms and which include business framework conditions such as taxes, product or labour market regulations, are increasingly questioned’. Meanwhile, ‘the case for governments to more actively direct the structure of the business sector is gaining traction’. Hundreds of billions of targeted funding is now flooding businesses in the military, high-tech and green sectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

This pivot is part of a broader macro-institutional reconfiguration of capitalism, in which a high-pressure post-pandemic economy has tightened labour markets while the centrality of finance continues to wane. These phenomena are highly complementary: public funding stimulates the economy and may boost job creation, while the administrative allocation of credit serves as an admission that financial markets are unable to attract the investment necessary to meet major conjunctural challenges. At a very general level, this neo-industrial turn should be welcomed, since it implies that political deliberation may play a somewhat greater role in investment decisions. More concretely, though, there is much to worry about. At this stage, we can identify at least three problematic dimensions.

First is the extent of this turn itself. Though the sums are significant, they do not match the civilizational challenges we are facing – falling well short of the complete restructuring of the economy demanded by climate breakdown. This is particularly true in Europe, afflicted by chronic structural vulnerability due to self-inflicted austerity measures – currently rebranded ‘fiscal adjustment paths’ – and deepening divisions between core and periphery. The geopolitics of industrial policy are especially fraught within the context of the EU single market. Hayek was a strong supporter of federalism precisely because he knew that a union of this sort would create serious obstacles to state intervention. Reaching an agreement at the federal level to support a particular sector is exceptionally difficult due to diverging national interests, themselves a result of productive specialization and uneven development. At the national level, conversely, the relaxation of state aid provisions tends to elicit resistance from weaker member states, who fear that countries with larger fiscal space – Germany in particular – would be able to improve their competitive edge, further aggravating the Union’s productive polarization.

Because the entire European edifice was built on the premise that competition is sufficient to guarantee economic efficiency, there is close to zero technical-administrative capability to enforce industrial policy. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, austerity has had similarly damaging effects on state capacity. Asked about the viability of Biden’s programme, Brian Deese, the former director of the National Economic Council, sounded a cautious note: ‘A lot of that comes down to the professionalism of the civil service at the federal level and the state and local level – a lot of which has been hollowed out.’

Second, the substance of neo-industrialism is troubling. The choices currently being made about the direction of funding will shape the productive structure for decades to come. On the ecological front, the main issue is that they are almost exclusively conceived as subsidies for greening existing institutions and commodities, rather than reorienting the economy on the basis of sustainability. The car industry is a case in point. Ideally, green policies would develop multimodal transport solutions with a limited role for small, electrified vehicles. Yet this would imply a drastic downsizing of the car automotive sector – something unthinkable for profit-driven carmakers, who are instead pushing for fully electrified high-margin SUVs.

To reconcile increased productivity with environmental imperatives, industrial policy would need not only the resources to support structural change but also the means for state planners to discipline capitalists. The lessons of post WWII developmentalism drawn by Vivek Chibber remain valid: businesses understand industrial policy as ‘the socialization of risk, while leaving the private appropriation of profit intact’. They therefore strongly resist ‘measures which would give planners any real power over their investment decisions’.

Another qualitative issue is the global increase in military spending. In the absence of what Adam Tooze calls ‘a new security order based on the accommodation of China’s historic rise’, we have entered a New Cold War with the frightening potential to spread beyond the Ukrainian theatre. While some businesses have a lot to lose from a confrontation with China, others may stand to benefit. Along with the industrial-military complex, Silicon Valley corporations are deliberately fuelling fears about Chinese capabilities in AI, in the hope of securing public support for their activities and locking in access to foreign allied markets. This has created a mutually reinforcing relationship between private profit-seeking and state power, in traditional imperialist fashion.

The third problem involves the balance between classes. In her recently published book L’Etat droit dans le mur, Anne-Laure Delatte interrogates the economic roots of declining state legitimacy. She argues that, in France as elsewhere, rising taxes on households – most of them regressive – were accompanied by increased public spending for the benefit of corporations. This created a vitiated state, oriented largely towards the financial sector, and a general population increasingly distrustful of public policymaking. Today, it is easy to see how an ambitious industrial policy could aggravate such pro-corporate biases. Asset managers are especially eager to take advantage of the new rentier opportunities arising from state-backed infrastructure investment. Without increasing taxes on corporations and capital income, or taking industries into direct public ownership, state subsidies imply a transfer of resources from labour and the public sector to capital, exacerbating inequalities and resentments.

The West’s embrace of industrial policy is explicitly motivated by Chinese productive prowess. Yet one cannot overstate China’s singularity. There, state capital is dominant thanks to public ownership in strategic, upstream sectors of the economy – the ‘commanding heights’ in Leninist terms. As well as enjoying formal property rights to key assets, a highly specific form of state-class organization allows the CCP to exercise some control over the country’s general developmental path. Its culture of internal discipline is crucial in assigning politicians dual identities as masters of capital and servants of the party-state. This provides a firm foundation for public planning, allowing private accumulation to coexist with market-shaping forces such as credit and procurement policies. The CCP’s public-private network is also highly adaptable, enabling the government to implement major policy changes relatively quickly. Following the 2008 financial crisis, political instructions were immediately passed down to party members in anticipation of the huge state stimulus package, resulting in a much more rapid and effective fiscal response than in the US or EU.

In democratic societies, by contrast, effective discipline on corporations can only come from external popular pressure. Thus, for campaigning organizations and left parties, the neo-industrial turn is good news only to the extent that it gives new impetus to old concerns: Who decides where the money goes? What are its objectives? How is it used and misused? Perhaps, in helping us to formulate such questions, neo-industrialism will end up exposing the inadequacy of its own answers.

Read on: Aaron Benanav, ‘A Dissipating Glut?’, NLR 140/141.

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One Plus One

Mounted police charge striking workers, battering them as they try to flee. Children in threadbare coats watch the pandemonium, transfixed; women clutching swaddled babies look on. It’s as though a riot has broken out amidst the milling, workaday calm of Lowry’s Street Scene (Pendlebury). The American artist Alice Neel (1900-84) painted Uneeda Biscuit Strike (1936) at the peak of Depression-era labour militancy. The pictured strikers were employees of the National Biscuit Company, and the painting’s political message is, at first glance, clear-cut: support the workers. Its ostensibly polemical intent makes it easy to dismiss the work as a ‘bad’ painting – as unsophisticated and didactic. Yet its complex composition, on a closer look, is harder to grasp than its message.

Consider another painting from the same year, depicting a march in New York. It’s a dense dusk in May. The lights are on in the lofts and cold-water apartments on either side of the street. A column of rank-and-file Communist Party members and fellow travellers filter towards the vantage point that we, the viewer, now occupy. It’s as though we are among the crowd and have turned back to survey our fellow demonstrators, who carry luminescent hammer-and-sickle banners aloft like Chinese lanterns. In the foreground, we find ourselves face to face with four men, at the vanguard. One of them – the Welsh poet Sid Gottcliff – holds a white placard whose text gives the painting its title: ‘NAZIS MURDER JEWS.’ When Neel showed the work at the American Contemporary Art Gallery, one critic deemed it ‘an interesting picture, but the sign is too obvious.’ Neel’s response was characteristically curt: ‘But if they had noticed that sign, thousands of Jews might have been saved.’ The ACA’s director Herman Baron agreed, noting that ‘drawings and paintings can fight too.’

Uneeda Biscuit Strike, 1936. Oil on canvas. 91.4 x 109.5 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel and Victoria Miro. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.

Uneeda Biscuit Strike and Nazis Murder Jews are currently on show in ‘Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle’ at the Barbican (until 21 May). Visitors have likely been drawn by Neel’s celebrated later portraits of expectant mothers, feminist critics, inter-racial partnerships, drag queens, and poets and artists such as Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol. (‘I always loved the working class and the most wretched’, Neel reflected at the end of her career, ‘but then I also loved the most effete and the most elegant.’) But the tensions discernible in these two early paintings provide an instructive framework through which to see, or read, an Alice Neel painting, and perhaps also a framework through which to understand the evolution of her subject matter and style.

The Barbican retrospective makes clear that Neel’s was ‘a lifelong commitment’ (the phrase is the name of one of the exhibition’s final rooms). Yet her commitment took various, sometimes conflicting forms. She was steadfastly devoted to her project – unfashionable in the age of Abstract Expressionism – of representing people with her signature combination of uncanny vividness and freewheeling acuity. And she was also committed to social causes, from unemployment and union organization in the 1930s, to women’s liberation in the 1960s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. In exploring the interplay between Neel’s commitment to politics and to portraits, ‘Hot off the Griddle’ probes the limits of realism as a means of political expression.

Neel was born in 1900 (she was ‘three weeks younger than the century’ as she liked to say). Difficult years spent in and out of psychiatric hospital and the loss of two daughters by the age of thirty (one to death from diphtheria, the other to forced adoption by her husband’s disapproving upper-class family in Havana) were followed by years of increased stability, if never luxury or tranquillity, in which she balanced her career with raising two young sons as a single mother. In the 1970s, two sea-changes – second-wave feminism and the development of postmodern critiques of Abstract Expressionism – converged on the art world, creating a wave of interest in women artists and figurative painting. In 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York staged a major retrospective of Neel’s work – the only show of such scale held in the US in her lifetime. In 1981 Phillip Bonosky, along with the Artists’ Union, organized an exhibition in Moscow, the first solo show of an American artist held in the Soviet Union. (‘I always wanted to exhibit in the Soviet Union, because I believe utterly in détente’, Neel said. ‘I always thought it would be a great thing for the Soviet people to see the American people as I see them.’)

Two travelling retrospectives have brought Neel to audiences across the US and Europe in the last eighteen months. People Come First opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before moving to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, then the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Un Regard Engagé was on show at the Pompidou Centre – and was broadly similar in scope and works to the Barbican exhibition – and will travel to the Munchmuseet in Oslo later this year.  Though these exhibitions were organized in collaboration with each other, they have had different designers and architects, and the paintings have been accompanied by different texts: each city has received a different version of Neel. If the Met gave her something of a DNC makeover – portraits of cultured New York liberals, figured as a diverse set of individuals, unmoored from society at large – then the Pompidou dragged the artist back to the barricades: ‘Radicale! Politique! Humaniste! Féministe!’ read the online advertisement. It is this latter version of Neel that has travelled to the Barbican, under the curation of Eleanor Nairne.

Mike Gold, 1952. Oil on canvas. 81.3 x 63.5 cm. Estate of Alice Neel. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.

Most of the paintings in ‘Hot off the Griddle’ are portraits, though there is also a smattering of early interior and street scenes, as well as three accompanying films, of which Helen Levitt’s remarkable silent documentary In the Street (1948), depicting East Harlem in all its glimmering spit-and-sawdust, is a highlight. Nairne’s story-led solo exhibitions of New York artists at the Barbican – including Basquiat (2017) and Lee Krasner (2019) – tend to stage their early phases of tutelage and sacrifice in the eight small, dark rooms on the gallery’s upper floor, before leading the viewer downstairs into an expansive, light-flooded space of critical success. Nairne’s treatment of Neel conforms to this pattern; the upper gallery guides us through Neel’s early period of painting the poor on the streets of gilded-age Havana, Greenwich Village’s fabled inter-war bohemia and finally Spanish Harlem, where she set out to convey ‘the rich deep vein of human feeling buried under the fire engines.’ On display in the lower gallery are many of the works that made her name, including Marxist Girl (1972), in which a slouching Irene Peslikis, founder of the feminist NoHo Gallery in Manhattan, fixes the viewer with a confrontational stare. Also on show are several works depicting heavily pregnant women, including Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978) and Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967), in which an attractive young couple, she naked, he fully clothed, recline like dope-smoking odalisques on a wildly patterned bed.

By the time Neel moved to the Village in 1932, she was already volunteering with the Artists’ Union, producing illustrations for their pamphlet Art Journal. It was through this work that she met Communist intellectuals, writers and activists such as Bonosky, Horace Clayton, Art Shields, and Mike Gold, whose portraits hang in the two-room ‘Anarchic Humanism’ section of the exhibition. The portrait of Bonosky (painted in 1948), a sometime Moscow cultural correspondent for The Daily World, is particularly arresting: eyes fixed on us, his beloved Tolstoy’s War and Peace on a makeshift bookshelf behind. In the 2007 documentary about Neel made by her grandson, Bonosky appears as an avuncular figure and a compelling commentator on Neel’s work and its politics. Shields was once recognized as the greatest labour reporter in the United States, while Black Metropolis by Clayton wasrecently reappraised asa landmark study of race and urban life in Chicago, yet these men are largely forgotten figures today. Neel’s preternaturally vivid portraits of them seem to insist on their place in history.

Gold, the ageing firebrand, poses in a red tie and white shirt, staring prophetically into the middle distance. His right fist rests next to a newspaper, his folded glasses and an original copy of Masses, the American socialist magazine that was dissolved in 1917, and which Gold relaunched as New Masses in 1926. In compositional terms, Mike Gold (1952) recalls Neel’s 1935 portrait of Pat Whalen, a longshoreman who helped organize a Communist-led insurgency against the corrupt leadership of the International Longshoreman’s Association. Neel did several paintings of Whalen, including one in which he is depicted tearing down a swastika flag from the SS Bremen, which she later painted over. Made with oil, ink and newspaper on canvas, Pat Whalen portrays, in Neel’s words, ‘the ordinary Irishman’ who was ‘absolutely convinced of communism’ Like Gold’s, Whalen’s blue-bloodshot eyes are fixed in the area over the painter’s shoulder, while his fists – which would smash bar mirrors in the port of Baltimore to intimidate landlords into serving black patrons – are pressed firmly, like a fervent preacher gripping his scripture, on a copy of The Daily Worker, whose front page announces a further wave of trade union uprisings in the steel and coal industries. Pat Whalen is the one notable omission from Neel’s Great Depression works in the exhibition. The concentration of American socialist portraiture in the ‘Anarchic Humanism’ rooms cannot but bring to mind a comment of John Berger’s: ‘If an artist is painting a chair, then she or he does not automatically make it a Socialist painting by placing a copy of The Daily Worker upon it.’ The conspicuous paraphernalia in these portraits – the left newspapers, magazines and books advertising both the subject and artist’s political allegiances – gesture to the constraints of a realism that must ‘tell’, not show, the viewer what it wants to say.

Pregnant Julie and Algis, 1967. Oil on canvas. 106.7 x 162.6 cm. Estate of Alice Neel. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy the Estate of Alice Neel.

Neel’s devotion to portraiture – and faith in its political possibilities – not only put her at odds with Abstract Expressionism, but with dominant left-wing attitudes to art. Portraiture was widely seen as bourgeois, concerned with aristocratic deference, and, by mid-century, inferior to documentary photography. During the Federal Art Project period (1935-1943), which funded artists including Neel, the mural was more popular than the easel painting because it lent itself to narrative and public use (as decoration for infrastructure, for example). Neel, though, saw her portraits as displaying the dignity and humanity of those living under a system that degraded individuals in the name of individualism. When, in the 1930s, Philip Rahv criticized her for painting portraits, Neel retorted: ‘Well, one plus one plus one is a crowd.’ Like microhistorians who aim to understand an entire era by chronicling the life of a single person or community, Neel sought to evoke her subjects’ material world by studying how they sat within it.

The tension at work in Neel’s committed portraiture – between making paintings with political force and painting people as they are – is one that her best works reconcile, or rather don’t accept in the first place. As she moved from dramatic street scenes to quieter portraits of individuals, lovers and unconventional families in the second half of her career, Neel increasingly honed a kind of authentically political portraiture, matter-of-fact yet sympathetic, that refused the distinction between evoking social conditions ­– in her words, those of ‘the loser’ and ‘the underdog’ – and capturing her subjects accurately and vividly. Neel’s approach recalls Vivian Gornick’s statement on her parents’ Communist friends: ‘paradoxically, the more each one identified himself or herself with the working-class movement, the more each one came individually alive.’ Neel’s work undercut the belief, widespread among twentieth-century American artists and art critics, that realism was obsolete, with little chance of renewal in the name of either aesthetic or political progress. Through her frankly perceptive and defiantly démodé portraits, Neel showed realism to be a living method for indelibly representing ordinary people in a changing world. A radical vision ‘can be best transformed into living art by utilizing the living tradition of painting’, wrote Neel as a co-signatory to the ‘New York Group’ manifesto in 1937. ‘There must be no talking down to people; we number ourselves among them.’

Read on: Saul Nelson, ‘Opposed Realities’, NLR 137.

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Death Merchants?

On 24 September 1938, Benito Mussolini posed a question to a large crowd of his followers in Belluno: ‘Faced with the absolutely ridiculous alternative: butter or guns, what have we chosen?’ Their response was unequivocal: ‘Guns!’ Over the following years, Italians would suffer the consequences of this choice: massacres, destruction, economic ruin. Yet, nowadays, not even Vladimir Putin would dream of asking an audience of Russians whether they prefer butter or missiles, since he knows that – notwithstanding the rhetoric of Holy Mother Russia – they would vote unanimously for buttered toast. Nor would any Western leader run the risk of consulting their citizens on such a ‘ridiculous alternative’, aware that foreign policy decisions are best kept out of public hands.

Today, of course, the choice of missiles and drones is a given. It’s even considered morally indispensable – a ‘humanitarian necessity’. NATO has officially sent Ukraine more than a thousand tanks and over two million rounds of ammunition (but really it’s much more than this). And the Russian army, in turn, has mustered an equivalent level of armaments. Once the logic of rearmament is triggered, the Thatcherite maxim concerning finance capitalism rings just as true: ‘there is no alternative’.

Even a cursory analysis shows the profundity of the gap separating 1938 from the present period. In the interwar years, phrases like ‘mercanti di cannoni’, or ‘death merchants’, were used to describe those who reap the spoils of war. Now such terms are virtually banned from public discussion. The fact that there are people profiting from mass slaughter has been expunged from our political consciousness. Not even the most lucid and disenchanted commentator would dare affirm, as Anatole France did in 1922, that ‘We think we are dying for our country; we are dying for the industrialists’.

To be sure, the peace movement still denounces increased arms sales. In 2022, the world spent $2.24 trillion on arms, 39% of which was accounted for by the United States, 13% by China, 3.9% by Russia, 3.6% by India and 3.3% by Saudi Arabia. NATO members made up 55% of the global total. Peace activists have responded to such figures by pointing out that the total spent on arms could be used to solve more urgent problems: ‘With $25 billion we could resolve the most serious humanitarian crises around the world, with $100 billion we could mount an efficient offensive to the global climate crisis, and with $200 billion we could reach all of the UN’s Sustainable Development goals’.

Yet, although their arguments may be the same, the tone and rhetoric of the anti-war movement has shifted. Addressing International League of Peace Fighters in 1932, Anne Capy began by giving a much more concrete tabulation of war expenditure following WWI:

With the money the war cost, we could have provided a house worth 75,000 francs to every family in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium and Russia. We could even have fitted these houses with furniture worth up to 25,000 francs, and provided an advance of 100,000 francs to every family. There would still have been enough money to give each city of 200,000 inhabitants of the abovementioned countries 125 million for libraries, 125 million for hospitals and 125 million for universities. And there would still have remained a sum of capital which, placed at 5%, would have permitted to pay 125,000 schoolteachers and 125,000 nurses 25,000 francs per year.

She went on to denounce the ‘parasitic, international super-capitalism which dominates nations and has for years directed a great dance of speculation, governing behind governments reduced to the role of puppets’. It is hard to imagine such words being uttered today. Whereas Capy and her contemporaries had a clear critique of the ‘international profiteers of nationalism’ (a phrase used by Francis Delaisi in his 1913 pamphlet Le Patriotisme des plaques blindées), their inheritors typically use a more sanitized parlance – one that revolves around ‘human rights’, ‘diplomacy’ and the ‘rules-based order’.  

Indeed, who among us is capable of naming even a single Western capitalist or Russian oligarch profiting from the slaughter in Ukraine? Even if we were able to identify a few, it would be highly unusual to label them ‘geniuses of destruction’ (the appellation once given to Gustav Krupp), nor would we speak of the ‘Jackal International’, as Mil Zankin did in his 1933 pamphlet L’Internationale des charognards: Les marchands de canons veulent la guerre. Nowadays, it would be atypical to refer to an arms dealer in the following terms:

Sir Basil Zaharoff, the passion of whose declining years is orchid culture, would probably not be aghast at the suggestion that he was the greatest murderer the world has even known. He has heard it too often. And he may even enjoy the irony of his gifts (they took a few millions out of the hundreds of millions he made from the World War) for hospitalization of the ‘War wounded’.

This portrait of Zaharoff, then the world’s most powerful weapons magnate, wasn’t penned by an angry pacifist, but by an impeccably mainstream journalist for Fortune. The publication, founded in 1929 by Henry Luce, described itself as an ‘Ideal Super-Class Magazine’, a ‘luxury’ mouthpiece of American capitalism sold for a dollar a copy (equivalent to $16 today). In 1934 it published an unsigned dossier, ‘Arms and Men’, with the lengthy subtitle, ‘A primer on Europe’s armament makers; their mines, their smelters, their banks, their holding companies, their ability to supply everything you need for a war from cannons to the casus belli; their axioms, which are (a) prolong war, (b) disturb peace.’ Reproduced by Reader’s Digest, and later published as a pamphlet, the essay travelled widely. Its opening paragraph is striking, for it demonstrates how the capitalist class of the 1930s exhibited attitudes that have since become unthinkable. Imagine if the Wall Street Journal or Forbes began an article like this:

According to the best accountancy figures, it cost about $25,000 to kill a soldier during the World War. There is one class of Big Business Men in Europe that never rose up to denounce the extravagance of its governments in this regard – to point out that when death is left unhampered as an enterprise for the individual initiative of gangsters the cost of single killing seldom exceeds $100. The reason for the silence of these Big Business Men is quite simple: the killing is their business. Armaments are their stock in trade; governments are their customers; the ultimate consumers of their products are: historically, almost as often their compatriots as their enemies. That does not matter. The important point is that every time a burst shell fragment finds its way into the brain, the heart, or the intestines of a man in the front line, a great part of the $25,000 much of it profit, finds its way into the pocket of the armament maker.

It isn’t that this unofficial spokesman of American capital woke up one morning with the pressing urge to denounce the European war industry (its US counterpart only got a cursory mention). It was rather that a national campaign was already underway, culminating in a Senate Committee tasked with investigating the ‘manufacturing and sale of munitions and the economic circumstances of US entry into World War I’. The Democratic majority in the Senate elected Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota, as chairman – responsible for overseeing a total of 93 hearings. Predictably, although the investigation ‘produced a sordid report of intrigues and bribery; of collusion and excessive profits; of war scares artificially fostered’ and disarmament conferences ‘deliberately wrecked’, its ultimate impact was nil. It fulfilled the usual function of such inquiries: to brush the issue under the rug.

A few years later, it wasn’t just Mussolini and his supporters who chose guns over butter; the whole world followed suit. Thus, for all the sympathy and nostalgia that the anti-war movement of the 1930s may arouse today, there are two things worth noting about its trajectory: it was entirely inefficacious, and – as we shall see – most if not all of its arguments have been rendered outdated by our new political-economic conjuncture.

In the erstwhile discourse of pacifism, the ‘merchants of death’ were often presented as occult forces. As the Fortune piece asserted:

. . . without a shadow of doubt there is at the moment in Europe a huge and subversive force that lies behind the arming and counterarming of nations: there are mines, smelters, armament works, holding companies, and banks, entangled in an international embrace, yet working inevitably for the destruction of such little internationalism as the world has achieved so far. The control of these myriad companies vests, finally, in not more than a handful of men whose power, in some ways, reaches above the power of state itself.

This ‘handful of men’ whose power ‘reaches above the state’ were the same figures who, in Delaisi’s words, ‘specialise in manufacturing machines of war, concentrate on systematically corrupting the senior civil servants responsible for national defence, induce panic amongst an easily-excitable public opinion with loud press campaigns, exert pressure on legislatures to raise funds for lucrative orders and, by playing on patriotism as a dividend machine, entrench the odious regime of “armed peace” when not launching bloody conflicts directly.’ This image of puppet-masters pulling the strings of governments belonged to the era of magnate capitalism. But this regime was superseded by a distinct form of managerial capitalism at the turn of the Second World War. At that point, ‘death merchants’ were displaced by the ‘military-industrial complex’.

It was the American sociologist C. Wright Mills who, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, argued that a new oligarchy had consolidated itself, constituted by economic, political and military elites whose roles were increasingly integrated and intertwined. Politicians, Mills wrote, were no longer puppets controlled by industrialists and bankers, a ‘committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. They had been subsumed into the elite itself, and formed an essential element of its power structure – capable of shaping it and being shaped by it. The idea of a ‘military-industrial complex’, however, was most memorably conveyed by Dwight Eisenhower in his famous farewell message on 17 January 1961. ‘In the councils of government’, he declared, ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.’

From then on, talk of ‘death merchants’ was limited to shady figures who trafficked arms to Third World states and terrorist militias. World powers, on the other hand, could comfortably rely on their military-industrial complexes. Like snakes changing their skin, this moulting from death merchants to military-industrial functionaries had the effect of anonymizing the warmongers. Real-life people – who could in theory be named and shamed – were supplanted by an impersonal bureaucratic structure. The ‘complex’ saved them from accountability.

These days, if there’s a scarcity of munitions, arms producers will ask for assurances from governments before building new factories, as they don’t want to be stuck with idle factories once the war is over. The military-industrial complex therefore serves not only to produce armaments for the military, but also to guarantee that industrialists won’t find themselves with stranded assets. The constant interchange between the arms industry and the upper echelons of public life is best described through the metaphor of the ‘revolving door’; or, perhaps, the more expressive French term pantouflage: i.e., senior public officials (civil servants, cabinet ministers, generals) who become managers of private companies and vice versa. The current Italian Defence Minister, for instance, previously worked for the Leonardo group, a leader in the Italian armament sector, and served as president of the Federation of Italian Companies for Aerospace, Defence and Security.  

In the twenty-first-century imaginary, death merchants have been replaced with drug traffickers, as demonstrated by the endless Hollywood films in which the antagonist is a shady dealer in pills and powders. This represents an extraordinary act of misdirection, given that the global war industry employs more than 50 million workers and 500,000 scientists: a universe infinitely larger and more dangerous than that of drug pedalling. What’s more, the arms sector is now integrated into, and controlled by, the respected realm of finance. We now find great investment funds at the helm of arms companies. The same fund will invest in a chain of retirement homes in Germany, a lithium mine in Africa and a soy plantation in Brazil, as well as partnering with a multinational manufacturer of ‘suicide’ drones and buying equity in the US space industry. Everything is exchangeable, and therefore everything is permissible. For the investor, the anti-tank missile cannot be differentiated from the hospital bed, as both are bluntly characterised by their cost-benefit relationship, and hence subject to the same criterion of benchmarking.

Financialization of this sort has two primary effects. First, it stages the passage from the international to the global. A century ago, as Delaisi wrote, it was possible to identify a ‘Great International, long searched for by political idealists and working-class strategists, taking shape in the arms industry’. These were national figures operating according to an international logic; but now, in a striking inversion, we see transnational actors with global interests adapting themselves to national exigencies. Second, and perhaps even more insidiously, financialization has rendered all of us – the postman, the primary school teacher, the factory worker – shareholders (and thus, in a certain sense, both owners and profiteers) in the death industry. Since pensions have been privatized, our derisory retirement funds have to be invested, which means handing them over to corporations. Without knowing it, large swathes of the Western workforce have come to depend on the dividends of missiles launched in Ukraine. This may be an unconscious reason for the silence that surrounds the death merchants – a reticence that makes the indignation of the last century seem dated.  

Yet this doesn’t mean that, on at least a couple of points, we shouldn’t heed the old analysis of the arms industry. Fortune’s explanation of the ‘philosophy’ of the death merchants remains as relevant as ever: ‘Keep Europe in a constant state of nerves. Publish periodical war scares. Impress governmental officials with the vital necessity of maintaining armaments against the “aggressions” of neighbor states. Bribe as necessary. In every practical way create suspicion that security is threatened.’ In our current media landscape, these techniques still predominate – animating the nightly news coverage and shaping its parameters.

Moreover, the mutually reinforcing dynamic of arms sales is just as evident as it was in Delaisi’s time. ‘Under this strange system’, he wrote,

the war potential of a great country, or of a group of countries, is strengthened by the development of the adverse military power. The trade in arms is the only one in which the orders obtained by a competitor increase those of his rivals. The great armament firms of hostile powers oppose one another like pillars supporting the same arch. And the opposition of their governments makes their common prosperity.

This is why, as the Russian war machine experiences an unprecedented boom, its Western counterparts are also rejoicing. In the UK, BAE Systems has increased its revenues by 9% and seen its orders expand from £21,458 to £37,093 billion. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Germany’s principal defence provider, Rheinmetall, experienced a similar surge in orders, sending its revenue to €6.4 billion, inflating its profits by 61% and more than doubling the value of its stock. Even in a country like Italy, which has provided Ukraine with precious few weapons, the Leonardo group can boast of a 30% increase in orders, especially from allied states that need to replenish their arsenals.

As such, the idea that the great armament industries of hostile countries constitute pillars holding up the same arch – that the antagonism between their governments produces their common prosperity – is not so far-fetched. As ever, patriotism continues to function as a ‘dividend machine’.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Edward Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism’, NLR I/121.

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NATO’s Fabulators

‘That reptile’, Brecht once wrote in his journal, referring to Thomas Mann, ‘cannot imagine anyone doing anything for Germany (and against Hitler) without orders from anywhere’. The Manns had been spreading rumours around Los Angeles that Brecht was Moscow’s pawn: ‘slurs . . . they know full well can do a great deal of harm’. From the first prodromes of the ‘New Cold War’, a similar form of weaponized hearsay has been circulating in the US – with Trump accused of acting as a Kremlin stooge and winning the presidency through its patronage. What once seemed like merely an election-year contrivance of Clinton’s Democrats soon spread to Europe. There, without partisan inflection, it found expression in starker geopolitical terms when, in 2020, the European Parliament initiated an investigation into ‘Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union’.

The report of the INGE Special Committee depicted a pristine European Union threatened by Russian and Chinese designs. America’s extensive activity inside the EU was ignored – its European and African Command headquarters, 70,000 billeted troops, recent history of abduction and torture of EU citizens, use of European territory for CIA dungeons in the course of the War on Terror, industrial espionage and phone-tapping of heads of state, were all unmentionable. Instead, the Committee trained its attention exclusively on NATO’s eastern adversaries, decrying their attempts to ‘weaken and divide the EU’ through disinformation.

Such accusations are well-rehearsed. They are components of a hybrid war model the US has developed since the first decade of this century, in part through a network of NATO think tanks stationed across Europe devoted to the alliance’s expanded portfolio, which includes operations to manage public opinion – in effect the global Innenpolitik of US empire. As political parties have been transformed into administrative rather than mass-membership organizations, such centres of pseudo-expertise increasingly shape respectable politics. They provide readymade accounts of events and distinguish friends from enemies (however impoverished the evidence amassed or manufactured), marketing themselves as trustworthy by affecting an academic propriety. Europe is naturally a focus of such efforts given its geostrategic value for influence over Eurasia – the ‘chief geopolitical prize’ in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s judgment – at whose western extremity lies the ‘key and dynamic players’ of France and Germany. Integration of the greater ‘American-dominated West’ and the effective severing of relations between Berlin and Moscow is being undertaken in preparation for ultimate encirclement of the PRC.

NATO’s cyber warfare – namely digital and internet-based attacks including espionage, propaganda and sabotage of infrastructure – as well as other militarized interventions into civil society, are often presented as novel developments. But in fact they have much in common with US-NATO strategy in the early 2000s, when ‘competitive intelligence’ – the use of allied agencies to launder claims – was employed to heighten a sense of urgency and accelerate the move towards war. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, for instance, Italy’s SISMI played a key role in furnishing the Pentagon with counterfeit evidence, as shown by investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzo. Contemporary hybrid warfare also echoes its forerunners in focussing on domestic or allied populations. Snowden’s 2013 revelations documented GCHQ attempts – a parallel NSA programme must also be assumed – to manipulate the public by dissimulation and simulation.

Yet in spite of such continuities, NATO’s think tanks – comprised of twenty-eight so-called ‘Centres of Excellence’ as well as US State Department-funded outfits like the Bratislava-based GLOBSEC – have clearly stepped-up the modes of propaganda developed over the last quarter century of American warfare. To provide a snapshot of this change, it is worth surveying a few of these NATO-affiliated organizations and their attempts to shape public opinion in line with the alliance’s priorities on its eastern flank.

NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (StratCom), based in Riga and directed by Jānis Sārts of the Latvian Defence Ministry, was founded in 2014 to coordinate diplomatic and public relations as well as information and psychological operations. It was launched in part to repair NATO’s image after the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. A critical report by retired Canadian colonel Brett Boudreau, ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’, found that there was ‘no Allied joint doctrine manual on StratCom’ – only a ‘conflicting or confusing’ set of policies. Accordingly, the Riga centre, given an annual budget of just under €600,000 and sponsored by NATO states on an ad hoc basis, devoted itself to developing the ‘doctrine’ and ‘concept’ of NATO communications, along with education, training and operational support. In 2014 it ran a seminar on the ‘Weaponisation of Social Media’ for ‘Ukrainian and Georgian Government representatives’. It also publishes a biannual academic journal, Defence Strategic Communications, edited from King’s College London.

The basic orientation of the Centre is articulated in Boudreau’s foundational essay as well as various contributions to its journal. ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’ called for the elimination of certain ‘firewalls’ – or divisions between disciplines of military communications. Public affairs and psychological operations, foreign and domestic audiences, political and military domains: such previously distinct sub-fields of propaganda should be brought together under joint control. Distinctions between psychological operations designed to manipulate audiences and the ‘value neutral’ dissemination of information in the realm of public affairs, would thereby be formally abolished. ‘The foreign/domestic audience separation’, wrote Boudreau, ‘is a faulty foundation on which to base organisational structure.’ The report furthermore recommended eliminating the division between political and military public affairs offices, so as to liberate NATO military personnel from strictures over directly political interventions.

The pages of Defence Strategic Communications are no less audacious. Two characteristic articles from the 2016 inaugural issue reveal much about NATO’s new publicity strategy: ‘The Narrative and Social Media’ by US Army Psychological Operations Specialist Miranda Holmstrom, and ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’ by the Softbank-backed financier Jeff Giesea. The former gives an especially stark framing of the contemporary media environment and NATO’s activity within it; the latter demonstrates the extent to which StratCom has openly considered the use of disinformation. Holmstrom, for her part, aims at ‘winning hearts and minds’ via social media by employing ‘simple yet complete narratives that can easily be reproduced’. She asserts that ‘narrative’, as ‘a framework for the plot and setting of a story’, is fundamental to ‘propaganda’ because it is a form of sense-making through which information can be shaped and remembered, and may even foster an irrational response to events. Much like the structure of the fabula in a work of fiction, propaganda uses ‘set-up, conflict, resolution’ to guide the thought and action of a target. This principle can be applied to the ‘horizontal propaganda’ deployed through individual-to-individual contacts, as on Twitter or Facebook. The form solicits activity and participation, and ‘creates the illusion of choice, free will and personal decision-making’. Giesea, meanwhile, advises using pseudonyms to mislead social media users. He recommends ‘more aggressive communication tactics’ and enjoins NATO to boost its capacity for waging ‘memetic warfare’ – or operations tailored to the online universe, in which the stakes are ‘social control in a social-media battlefield’.

StratCom has also taken an interest in the software of private firms, where ‘application programming interfaces’ are recommended for tracking users through the tools developed at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. In a separate report on ‘Social Media Manipulation’, the think tank boasts of having ‘partnered with US Senators Chuck Grassley and Chris Murphy’ to buy interactions on each of their accounts so as to test the public’s responses. A 2020 contribution to DSC, ‘Deepfakes – Primer and Forecast’ by Tim Hwang, focussed on technical innovations of visual disinformation and the use of artificial intelligence in creating convincing false images and videos. Formerly of Google, the MIT Media Lab and RAND, Hwang, who is now at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, was a participant in a 2016 social media experiment funded by the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). His article recommends building up ‘connections with the technical media forensics community’ in support of ‘research on the psychological dimensions of deepfakes’.

Founded in Tallinn in 2008, the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre (CCD) is one of the oldest of NATO-accredited Centres of Excellence, funded and staffed by a roster of EU-NATO and non-EU countries. It deals with the technical aspects of cyber conflict, strategy and law. Since 2009 it has hosted annual international conferences on such topics – drawing hundreds of military, academic and government participants to Estonia – with sponsorship by US software, appliances and services firms including Microsoft.  

The CCD produces NATO’s guidelines for cyber warfare, compiled in the Tallinn Manual. In its first edition, the Manual presented 95 ‘rules’ to which states must refer in the event of cyber conflict. Aside from the usual rhetoric about the right to self-defence, the document is notable for its gloss on cyberattacks which cause ‘injury or death to persons or damage or destruction to objects’ – weapons like Israel’s Stuxnet, used against Iranian infrastructure, are brought to mind – and the exemptions it makes for war against civilians. ‘Certain operations directed against the civilian population are lawful’, reads rule 31, including ‘psychological operations such as . . . making propaganda broadcasts’ or analogous operations ‘in the context of cyber warfare’. Elsewhere, the Manual finds the use of ‘ruses’ and ‘false information’ to be permissible.

Central to the CCD’s activity is the organization of regular military exercises. ‘Crossed Swords’ was launched in 2016 as a so-called ‘red-teaming’ drill, in which participants simulate cyberattacks and test the ability of special forces to carry out an offensive ‘full-scale cyber operation’. Since 2018, it has expanded considerably, and now includes the ‘cyber-kinetic’ use of the military – a domain of cyber warfare that can inflict real damage on infrastructure or personnel. Such exercises clearly exceed the CCD’s purportedly defensive mission. ‘Locked Shields’, inaugurated in 2010, is now one of the world’s largest cyber-military drills, enlisting participants from groups in so-called Computer Emergency Response Teams to simulate ‘the entire complexity of a massive cyber incident’. As well as academics, delegates from militaries, defence ministries and police agencies – including the FBI – are party to the war game. Journalists are invited to impersonate themselves in order to lend authenticity to the role-play. Private commercial interests are also present: the CCD for example has formal contracts with Siemens, which allows for the use of its hardware and software, while the firm in turn uses the simulations to study its own weaknesses.

In recent years, the CCD has simulated attacks on a military airport, energy supply systems and central computer networks, along with the vandalism of websites, circulation of false reports, data theft, commandeering of military drones and hijacking of airplane refuelling systems. In 2019, its drill simulated the use of disinformation aimed at ‘sowing doubt’ among a domestic population, and dispatched defensive teams to counter the incursion through social and traditional media channels. As with StratCom, the CCD enjoys the benefits of connections with US think tanks and spy agencies: prominent among its ambassadors is Kenneth Geers, an Atlantic Council Fellow who has worked for years with the NSA and US Navy and served as a ‘global threat analyst’ at FireEye, a Californian private security firm.

Finally, the Bratislava-based GLOBSEC, established in 2005, is the successor to the Slovak Atlantic Commission, which was founded in 1993 to support Slovakia’s accession to NATO. Unlike the Centres of Excellence, it is not overtly geared towards training the military and national security apparatuses of NATO states, but rather addresses Central and Eastern European countries, where it aids NATO’s consolidation and expansion by integrating compradors into the circuits of transatlantic capital and officialdom. This is the purpose of its regular ‘forum’, which GLOBSEC describes as ‘the preeminent international strategic conference on the frontlines of a newly divided world’. (The 2021 gathering featured a discussion between Victoria Nuland and the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, as well as a session with Alexei Navalny’s Chief of Staff, entitled ‘Democratic Change in Russia: How to increase the Odds?’)

When NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced the ‘NATO 2030’ publicity campaign, GLOBSEC contributed a series on ‘geopolitical competition in the information landscape’. It called for increased public-private collaboration to combat Russia and China, asserting that NATO must accelerate the subvention of small and medium-sized enterprises and NGOs. For this purpose, Riga’s StratCom was proposed as a conduit; it could ‘engage in enhanced interaction with citizens, including addressing disinformation, and promoting media literacy, and more.’ The think tank also concluded that ‘NATO’s storytelling’ must be sharpened. As a complement to its regular output of non-fiction media, it should consider branching out into fiction – recruiting studios and publishers in the production of films, books and video games. NATO should appear in ‘popular Hollywood movies or online streaming franchises’ and enlist a greater number of ‘creative and unconventional surrogates’. No culture industry asset can be discounted. Academia is another area where GLOBSEC is active. Its Slovak Aid fellowship integrates Belarusian specialists into the ranks of capitalist management by assigning them Slovakian mentors – namely, the economists and industrialists who oversaw the shock liberalization of the 1990s. GLOBSEC’s outposts in the Western Balkans act as the publicity arm of NATO’s eastern enlargement, most recently helping to facilitate the absorption of North Macedonia in 2020.

For all of the talk of a New Cold War, the political, economic and diplomatic coordinates of contemporary militarism are distinct from those of the twentieth century. Neoliberalism remains a global pensée unique, however battered its reputation is by successive economic crises. And the largest powers in the current face-off – the US, Russia and China – have either become more unequally matched in military affairs (US-Russia), or they have become essentially interdependent amid a far more fragile regime of global capital accumulation (US-China).

States must also contend with a number of internal stresses. One is the growing inability of nearly all societies to reproduce adequate employment and living standards for large segments of their populations – as can be seen in the rustbelts of both China and the US, the hinterlands of Europe and the downward mobility of educated urban populations. The political consequences are that states face the erosion of legitimacy and the eruption of ‘populist’ or other discontents. Flagging economic performance has led capital’s dependence on the state to become increasingly direct: where profitable investment in production is difficult, upward redistribution through corruption has taken hold, in a process anatomized by Robert Brenner. Sectors of capital closest to the state – finance, plus those which orbit the military, police and intelligence services – stand to benefit economically, but they may also anticipate that society will become increasingly unmanageable without greater levels of repression. Efforts to secure rule by consent today encounter domestic as well as international opposition, as rival sectors within national economies find their interests as much in conflict with one another as with international competitors. The upshot is concentration for politically well-connected firms, and a move towards confrontation abroad.

In the US, atop this sits a layer of imperial strategists committed to the constraint and management of China along with the integration of Russia into the American sphere of influence. Until 2018, war between America and its designated Eurasian rivals was not so openly anticipated. Today, their independent and uncooperative paths of development – forced by the economic realities putting all societies under pressure – have become an ineluctable source of friction. A coordinated revaluation of the yuan, or a rise in Chinese wages, might boost US manufacturing competitiveness, but would undercut the PRC’s world-historic export-led growth model, dependent as it is on combining rock-bottom labour costs with high-tech assembly. At the same time, the tightened US noose around Russia – by depriving its industry of cheap energy – obstructs Germany’s profitable export to China of its machine tools and their services: a lifeline during the last decade’s eurocrisis.

As the relationship between the major zones of global capitalism has capsized into open and sustained antagonism, the shaping of European public opinion has acquired greater significance. Overdetermined by domestic and international pressures, issuing from a zero-sum contest between national manufacturers and across different sectors, Washington is above all concerned with the consolidation of Europe as an Atlanticist stronghold. Here, Ukraine acts as ‘a geopolitical pivot’, as Brzezinski put it. Without it, ‘Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire’.

For a few large European companies, this security programme has clear economic benefits. But for the majority of the European population – who are instructed to ‘freeze for peace’ – its costs will be significant. The destruction of vital domestic industries and inflation of military budgets will follow the decades of austerity inflicted on the social state. Injunctions to intensify ‘memetic’, psychological and information warfare must be understood in this context. The exercises in digital sabotage undertaken by the CCD and its affiliates indicate that NATO’s propaganda is ultimately designed to condition the populations of client states to accept their fate as decreed by Washington. Since the War on Terror, the alliance has shown itself capable of impressive adaptation, learning from its self-diagnosed errors in a mode of low cunning. Anti-war forces could do worse than recognize this last point and get habituated to cruder thinking.

This piece draws on the findings of a 2021 report commissioned by the Left in the European Parliament.

Read on: Ed McNally, ‘Humble Grand Strategy’, NLR 140/141.

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A Bipolar Order?

Italians, it is said, are given to a perspective on politics that they call dietrismo. Dietro means behind, and dietrismo means a habitualized conviction that what you see is designed to hide what you get, by powers operating behind a curtain that divides the world into a stage and a backstage, the latter being where the real action is, the former where it is purposely mispresented. You read something, or hear about it on the radio or on TV, and as a well-trained dietrista you wonder, not so much about what you are being told but why you are being told it, and why now.

These days, after three years of Covid and one year of the Ukrainian war, it seems we have all become Italians, dietrismo now being as universal as pasta. More and more of us read the ‘narratives’ produced for our benefit by governments and their client media, no longer for what they say but for what they may mean: as distorted images of reality that nonetheless seem to signify something, a little like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Take, for example, the semi-official ersatz account of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, published by the New York Times and handed to the German weekly, Die Zeit: the supposed culprits were six people, as yet unknown, on a Polish yacht rented somewhere in East Germany, who had conveniently left traces on the boat’s kitchen table of the powerful explosives they had taken along to the crime scene. Apart from the truest of the true believers and, of course, the loyal manufacturers of public consent, it didn’t require a lot of thinking to see that the story had been concocted to crowd out the account presented by Seymour Hersh, the immortal investigative reporter. What was exciting about it for the dietristic mind was that it was so obviously ridiculous that it seemed its ridiculousness could not be due to incompetence – not even the CIA could be as dumb as that – but was rather intentional, raising the question of what it might have been intended for. Perhaps, political cynics suggested, the purpose was to humiliate the German government and its federal prosecutor’s office, thereby breaking their will, by having them publicly declare this obvious nonsense to be a valuable lead to follow in their unrelenting effort to resolve the mystery of the Nord Stream bombing.

Another intriguing feature of the story was that the suspected boat renters were said to have some connection to ‘pro-Ukrainian groups’. While according to the report there were no indications that these were connections with the Ukrainian government or military, any Le Carré connoisseur knows that where the secret services are involved, any kind of evidence can easily be discovered if needed. Unsurprisingly, the report caused panic in Kiev, where it was read, probably rightly, as a signal from the United States that its patience with Ukraine and its present leadership was not unlimited. In fact, at about the same time there were mounting reports on corruption in Ukraine, emanating from the United States, coinciding with and reinforcing growing resistance among Republicans in Congress against ever more dollars being diverted into the Ukrainian defence budget – as though corruption in Ukraine had not always been notoriously rampant (viz. Hunter Biden’s stint as energy policy expert on the board of Burisma Holdings Ltd.). Beginning in January this year, the Washington Post and New York Times published a series of articles on Ukrainian outrages, including army commanders using American dollars to buy cheap Russian diesel for Ukrainian tanks and pocketing the difference. A shocked Zelensky immediately dismissed two or three high-ranking officials, promising to fire more in time.

Why was this now presented as news, even though it has long been common knowledge that Ukraine is amongst the world’s most corrupt countries? Further adding to what, seen from Kiev, must increasingly have appeared to be ominous writing on the wall, secret American documents leaked in the second half of April showed that the US military’s confidence in the ability of Ukraine to launch a successful spring counteroffensive, let alone win the war as its government had promised to its citizens and international sponsors, was at an all-time low. To American opponents of the war, Republicans as well as Democrats, the documents confirmed that keeping the Ukrainian army in action might turn out to be unacceptably expensive, all the more so since both political parties in the United States agreed that their country had to get ready sooner rather than later for a much bigger war, fighting the Chinese in the Pacific. (By the end of 2022, the United States was estimated to have spent something like $46.6 billion on military aid to Ukraine; much more is expected to be required as the conflict drags on.) For Ukrainians and their European supporters, it seemed hard to avoid the conclusion that the United States might soon take leave of the battlefield, turning its unfinished European business over to the locals.

Of course, compared to Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and similar places, what the Americans are likely to abandon is in not nearly as messy a condition. Working with the Baltic states and Poland, the United States has managed in recent months to push Germany into something like a position of European leadership, on the provision that it takes responsibility for organizing and, importantly, financing the European contribution to the war. Step by step over the past year, the EU was simultaneously turned into an auxiliary of NATO – in charge, among other things, of economic warfare – while NATO became more than ever an instrument of American policy flagged as ‘Western’.

When in mid-2023 NATO’s general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, is rewarded for his hard work with a well-deserved sinecure, the presidency of the Norwegian central bank, rumour has it that Ursula von der Leyen, currently president of the European Commission, will be promoted to succeed him. This would complete the EU’s subordination to NATO – that other, much more powerful international organization headquartered in Brussels which, unlike the EU, includes, and indeed is dominated by, the United States. In her earlier life, von der Leyen was, of course, German Defence Minister under Merkel, although according to general impression one of the more incompetent ones. While in this capacity she shared in the responsibility for the allegedly dismal condition of the German armed forces at the beginning of the Ukrainian war, she has now apparently been forgiven on account of her ardent Americanism-as-Europeanism or, as the case may be, Europeanism-as-Americanism. In any case, an agreement on closer cooperation was signed by the EU and NATO in January 2023, made possible not least by Finland and Sweden ending their neutrality and joining NATO. According to FAZ, the agreement establishes ‘in no uncertain terms the priority of the Alliance with respect to the collective defence of Europe’, thereby enshrining the leading role of the United States in European security policy, broadly defined.

The German government is now busy assembling battlefield-ready battalions of tanks of different European builds (the American M1 Abrams are said to arrive in a few months – how many months exactly is kept a secret – in Europe, where their Ukrainian crews will be trained on German military bases). It will also supply and keep in good repair the fighter planes that Germany, along with the United States, still refuses to deliver to Ukraine (though not for much longer if experience is to be a guide). Meanwhile Rheinmetall announced that it will build a tank factory in Ukraine with a capacity of 400 latest-model battle tanks per year. Also, on the eve of the 21 April meeting of the Ramstein support group, Germany signed an agreement with Poland and Ukraine on a repair shop, located in Poland, for Leopards damaged at the Ukrainian front, to go into operation already at the end of 2023 (obviously on the assumption that the war will not have ended by then). Add to this the promise, freely renewed by von der Leyen on behalf of the EU, that Ukraine will after the war be rebuilt at European, meaning German, expense – no mention, incidentally, of a contribution from the Ukrainian oligarchs, not many in number, but each of them all the richer for that. Indeed, an early April visit to Kiev by the German Economy Minister, Robert Habeck, together with a delegation of CEOs of large German firms, provided an opportunity to explore future business opportunities in the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over.

This may not happen anytime soon, however. The recently leaked American documents and the pronouncements of the semi-official commentariat indicate that a Ukrainian Endsieg is not expected imminently, if it is expected at all. Western delivery of military hardware seems to be fine-tuned to enable the Ukrainian army to hold its position; when the Russians gain territory, Ukraine will be given as much artillery, ammunition, tanks and fighter planes as it needs to push them back. A Ukrainian victory, however, declared essential for the survival of the Ukrainian people by its governing party, seems not to be on the American shopping list anymore. Looking at the delivery schedules for Abrams tanks and fighter bombers, to the extent that they can be gleaned from official announcements, the expectation is rather for something like drawn-out trench warfare with heavy bloodshed on both sides. It is interesting in this context that, in an apparently unguarded moment during one of his daily television addresses, Zelensky, demanding as always more Western military support, argued that Ukraine must win the war before the end of 2023 because the Ukrainian people may not be willing to bear its burden much longer.

As the United States proceeds towards Europeanizing the war, it will be up to Germany not just to organize Western support for Ukraine but also to impress upon the Ukrainian government that at the end of the day this support may not suffice for the kind of victory that Ukrainian nationalists claim the Ukrainian nation needs. As American franchisee for the war, Germany will be first in line to take the blame if its outcome falls short of public expectations in Eastern Europe, in the United States, among German pro-Ukrainian militants, and certainly in Ukraine itself. This prospect must be even more uncomfortable for the German government, since it appears increasingly unlikely that how the war ends will be decided in Europe. An important, possibly decisive player in the background will be China, with its longstanding policies of opposing any use of nuclear arms and abstaining from delivering arms to countries at war, including Russia. Following a short visit to Beijing, Scholz claimed that these were concessions to Germany, even though they date back much further. Indeed, the apparent American reluctance to enable Ukraine to go for an all-out victory, leaving post-operational rehabilitation to Germany, may be motivated by a desire to enable China to stick to its policy – which it might not be able to do if Russia and its regime were at some point pushed against the wall. If this was not merely a tacit understanding but rather some sort of negotiated agreement, it would certainly not be made public at a time when the Biden administration is making preparations to go to war with China.

The super-nationalists in Kiev may already smell a rat. Shortly after the latest meeting of the Ramstein group, Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Melnyk, representative of the classical-fascist Bandera element in the Ukrainian government, expressed his country’s gratitude for the promised arms deliveries. At the same time, he let it be known that they were pitifully insufficient to ensure a Ukrainian victory in 2023; for this, Melnyk insisted, no less than ten times as many tanks, planes, howitzers and the like would be required. Again applying dietristic hermeneutics, Melnyk, trained at Harvard University, must have known that this was bound to annoy his American patrons. That he doesn’t seem to care implies that he and his comrades-in-arms consider Washington’s ‘pivot to Asia’ already underway. It also signals both the despair of the governing Ukrainian clique regarding the prospects of the war, as well as its willingness to fight to the bitter end, driven by the radical-nationalist belief that real nations grow on the battlefield, watered with the blood of their best.

The approaching nadir of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism signals the emergence of a new global order, the contours of which, including the place of Europe and the European Union, can be discerned only by bringing China into the picture. As the United States turns its attention to the Pacific, its aim is to build a global alliance encircling China, to keep Beijing from contesting American control of the Pacific. This would replace the unipolar world of the failed neocon ‘Project for a New American Century’ with a bipolar one: globalization, and indeed hyperglobalization, now with two centres, much like the Cold War of old, with a remote prospect of a return, perhaps after another hot war, to only one centre, a New World Order Mark II. (Capitalism, we must remind ourselves, transformed and re-formed itself more fundamentally and effectively than ever in the wake of the two Great Wars of the twentieth century, in 1918 and in 1945, securing its survival by taking a new shape; surely there must be some memory in the centres of capitalist grand-strategy of the rejuvenating effects of war.)

China’s geostrategic project, by contrast, seems to be a multipolar world. For reasons of both geography and military capacity, the goal of Chinese foreign and security policy cannot really be a bipolar order with China battling the United States for global dominance, nor a unipolar world with itself at the centre. As a land power bordering on a large number of potentially hostile nations, it needs first and foremost something like a cordon sanitaire, whereby its neighbouring countries are bound together with China by shared physical infrastructure, freely awarded credit, and a commitment to stay out of alliances with potentially hostile external powers – as opposed to the American desire to subject the world as a whole to a globalized Monroe Doctrine. (The United States has only two neighbours, Canada and Mexico, which are quite unlikely to turn into Chinese allies.) In addition, China actively encourages the formation of something like a league of non-aligned regional powers, including Brazil, South Africa, India and others: a new Third World which would keep out of a Sino-American confrontation and, importantly, refuse to join American economic sanctions against China and its new client state, Russia.

In fact, indications are that China would prefer to be seen as a neutral power among others, rather than one of two combatants for world domination, at least as long as it cannot be sure it would not lose a war against the United States. A desire to avoid a new bipolarism along the lines of the first Cold War would account for China’s refusal to provide arms to Russia, even though Ukraine is being armed to the teeth by the United States. (China can afford this because Russia has no choice other than to fall in line with it, arms or not, no matter the price China might extract for its protection.) In this context, the one-hour telephone conversation between Xi and Zelensky on 26 April, mentioned only in passing by most of the European press, may have been something of a turning point. Apparently Xi offered himself as mediator in the Russian-Ukrainian war, on the basis of a Chinese twelve-point peace plan that had been talked down as trivial and useless by Western leaders, if they took notice at all. Remarkably, Zelensky called the conversation ‘meaningful’, elaborating that ‘particular attention was paid to the ways of possible cooperation to establish a just and sustainable peace for Ukraine.’ If successful, the Chinese intervention might be of formative significance for the emerging global order after the end of the end of history.

In recent months the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has been crisscrossing the world on a mission to whip as many countries as possible into the American camp of a renewed bipolarism, by appealing to liberal – ‘Western’ – values, offering diplomatic, economic and military support, and threatening economic sanctions. In her capacity as America’s roaming ambassador, Baerbock’s credibility requires that her own country strictly follow the American line, including cutting China out of the global economy. This, however, is in fundamental conflict with the interests of German industry, and by extension of Germany as a country, forcing Baerbock to tread an awkward, often outright contradictory line in relation to China. For example, while she framed her recent visit to Beijing in aggressive and even hostile rhetoric both before her arrival and after her departure – so much so that her Chinese counterpart felt it necessary to explain to her at a joint press conference that the last thing China needed was lectures from the West – she also apparently indicated that German sanctions might be selective rather than all-encompassing, with trade relations in several industrial sectors continuing more or less unabated.

With an eye to what might be going on backstage, one may speculate whether Scholz could have managed to get the United States to give Germany some rope in its relations with its most important export market, as a reward for running the European war effort in Ukraine in line with American requirements. On the other hand, German producers seem to have recently lost market share in China, dramatically so in cars, where Chinese customers are spurning new electric vehicles from Germany in favour of homegrown ones. While this may be because German models are considered less attractive, German anti-Chinese rhetoric may have played a role in a country with strong nationalist and anti-Western sentiment. If this is so, it suggests that the problem of German industry being too dependent on China may be about to resolve itself.

German China policy, following the US’s bipolar world political project, causes conflicts not only domestically but also internationally, most of all with France, where it threatens to tear the European Union even further apart. French aspirations to ‘strategic autonomy’ for ‘Europe’ (and ‘strategic sovereignty’ for France) stand a chance only in a multipolar world populated by a good number of politically significant non-aligned countries, quite similar to what the Chinese seem to want. To what extent this implies some kind of equidistance to the United States and China is a question left open, probably deliberately, by Emmanuel Macron. Sometimes he seems to want equidistance, sometimes he denies that he wants it. In any case, this prospect is anathematized by German pro-Western militants, above all by the Greens who now control German foreign policy. Among them, suspicions run deep of Macron’s occasional protestations that ‘strategic autonomy’ is compatible with transatlantic loyalty, at a time of growing confrontation between ‘the West’ and the new East Asian Evil Empire. As a result, France is more isolated than ever in the EU.

Macron, like previous French presidents, has always known that in order to dominate the European Union, France needs Germany on its side, or more precisely, in Brussels jargon: on the backseat of a French-German tandem. His problem is that Germany has now dismounted the bicycle, and for good. Under Green leadership it dreams, together with Poland and the Baltic states in particular, of delivering Putin to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which requires Ukrainian-German tanks to drive into Moscow, just as Soviet tanks once drove into Berlin. Macron, instead, wants to allow Putin to ‘save face’ and hopes to offer Russia a resumption of economic relations, after a ceasefire mediated, if not by France, then perhaps by a coalition of non-aligned countries from the ‘Global South’, or even by China.

The Götterdämmerung of Franco-German domination of the European Union, and the transformation of its ruins into an anti-Russian economic and military infrastructure run by Eastern European countries on behalf of American trans-Atlanticism, was never more visible than in Macron’s trip to China on 6 April, following Scholz (4 November) and preceding Baerbock (13 April). Strangely, Macron allowed von der Leyen to accompany him, according to some as a German gouvernante charged with preventing him from embracing Xi too passionately, according to others to demonstrate to the Chinese that the president of the EU was not a real president but a subordinate to the President of France, ruling not just his own country but all of the EU with it. The Chinese, who may or may not have understood Macron’s signals, treated him royally although they were undoubtedly aware of his domestic troubles; von der Leyen, known as the Atlanticist hardliner that she is, was given a special non-treatment. While flying back on his plane, von der Leyen no longer travelling with him, Macron explained to the press that American allies are not American vassals, a remark widely understood to imply, again, that Europe’s position should be one of equal distance from China and the United States. Germany, first and foremost its Foreign Minister, was appalled and let it be known, no holds barred, with the German media dutifully and unanimously following suit.

A few days later, on 11 April, Baerbock attended the meeting of the G7 foreign ministers in Japan. There she got her colleagues, including the one from France, to pledge as much allegiance as humanly possible to the American flag, standing as it does for one world indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. By this time Macron, noting that his rhetorical battle against French vassalage had gone unnoticed by the opponents of his pension reform, had already backpedalled and, again, professed everlasting loyalty to NATO and the United States. There is no reason, however, to believe that this will halt the Zeitenwende of the European Union underway with the Ukrainian war: the split between France and Germany and the ascent of the East European member states to European dominance following the return of the United States to Europe under Biden, in preparation for a global confrontation with the Land of Xi, in the untiring American effort to make the world safe for democracy.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management’, NLR 140/141.

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Counterpoises

‘Tulips’, borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s poem, is the title of a recent series of work by the British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. On view at Tate Britain until 7 May, the series consists of six, two-by-two-metre fresco paintings mounted on five-centimetre-thick wooden panels, accompanied by a graphite drawing on paper that bears the title of the series. Paying homage to Italian Renaissance masters such as Masaccio and Uccello, these works explore power dynamics and structures in modern societies.

Quinlan and Hastings began their artistic partnership around 2014, a year after they graduated from Goldsmiths College in London. Their first collaboration involved building gay bars in studios and holding live events to critique male-dominated sex culture. Using a Go-Pro camera, they spent nine months filming interior spaces of more than one hundred gay clubs across the UK, documenting their closures as a result of austerity, and at the same time recording a transition to hybrid forms of queer spaces. In 2016, the moving images they had assembled were condensed into a five-and-a-half-hour moving image archive titled UK Gay Bar Directory.

Quinlan and Hastings’s work combines contemporary practices such as filming, installation and performance with traditional techniques including wall rubbing, drawing, etching and egg tempera painting. Through drawing, they developed a passion for Italian Renaissance art. Their figures tend to be muscular and androgynous, offspring of those created by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Their strategy of deconstructing power by re-presenting it bore fruit in a series of twelve etchings, which became the centrepiece of a joint solo exhibition in 2021 titled Disgrace: Feminism and the Political Right. The prints, created with hard-ground etching and aquatint, map out a timeline of right-wing feminism, starting with Imperial Ladies Auxiliary, which depicts women’s complicity in the construction of Empire since the Edwardian era, and concluding with I’m Not a Woman I’m a Conservative and We Will Not Be Silenced, which challenge the ‘Women2Win’ rhetoric and trans-exclusionary views in today’s politics.

Their enthusiasm for Renaissance paintings and interest in critically examining public spaces led to their latest experiment: fresco painting. Fresco as an ancient technique developed in an intimate relationship to architecture. It usually involves painting with water-based pigments directly onto wet lime plaster spread over a wall surface. Because of the strict requirements of drying time – the painting must be completed while the plaster is wet – a fresco is painted section by section in what is called a giornata (a day’s work). Once dry, the pigment absorbed by the plaster, the painting becomes an intrinsic component of the walls of the building. With a monumental style, historical frescoes often carried the function of illustrating the moral codes of a society. The six paintings on show at the Tate derive inspiration from frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. The main portions of the chapel were painted by Masolino and Masaccio in the 1420s and the rest was completed by Filippino Lippi sixty years later. The narrative centres on Saint Peter, re-establishing the authority of the Church and the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, both of which had been under threat since the Great Occidental Schism of 1378. In these compositions, the physical appearance of the figures corresponds to their moral status. Saints are usually depicted as standing with both feet firmly positioned on the ground. Solidity of posture conveys spiritual gravity. Good and evil are discernible at a glance.

Depictions of postures are more complicated in Quinlan and Hastings’s adaptations of the quattrocento convention. In the Brancacci Chapel frescoes, clothing can function as a visual device carrying ethical implications, either exposing or disguising a figure’s stance. One example is Masaccio’s treatment of Peter and the tax collector in the central scene of Tribute Money. Although the saint’s pose mirrors that of the tax collector, the moral inferiority of the latter is revealed by his unstable stance, clearly visible because he has bare legs, whereas the saint’s rock-solid reputation appears intact as his legs are concealed by the garment he wears. In Quinlan and Hastings’s paintings, modern outfits such as trousers and miniskirts allow legs to become a more visible element in the composition.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Common Subjects, 2022, Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania).

In the painting titled Common Subjects, the six figures in the foreground are divided into two groups. The four on the left wear police uniforms, three men in trousers and a woman in a skirt. They are looking at two young women a few steps away, both dressed up and wearing high-heeled shoes. The police all stand firmly, their body weight evenly distributed between their slightly parted feet, a typical Renaissance manifestation of moral authority. The legs of the two women form a stark contrast: one stands with legs crossed, the other adopts a contrapposto, her weight shifted onto her left leg. The finger-pointing of the police at the two women seems to suggest some perceived immoral behaviour. A prison-like kiosk looms in the middle background, ominously suggesting how such encounters can end. However, any hasty conclusion about the gender and racial power dynamics is complicated by the dark skin colour of two of the police officers, and by a group of figures further back at the kiosk. Among them are two half-naked young men, one inside the kiosk, the other leaning cross-legged against it. The figures with upright postures are a woman and a girl, both wearing shorts and both turning away from the viewer.

The style of Quinlan and Hastings’s figures marks a significant divergence from their fifteenth-century inspiration. Masaccio was known for bringing a realistic vision into early Italian Renaissance art through making use of models and incorporating a sculptural approach into his painting. In the paintings of the two contemporary British artists, figures are collaged from street photographs in historical archives taken in Western metropolises such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their intention, as the artists described in an interview, was to create a ‘horizontal rather than hierarchical relationship to history’. Their colours are conceptual as well as perceptual. The sharp division between the pink pavement and the dark grey street in Disinherited looks more like the edge of Mantegna’s abyss. Yellow is sometimes used to navigate between foreground and background. Tonal gradation appears to have been achieved through a digital process of separating tones into different shapes. These metamorphoses of photographic reproductions play tricks on the viewer. Some figures appear to resemble certain public figures or celebrities at first glance, but just as one feels on the verge of identifying them, the figures become slippery and dissolve one’s sense of déjà vu. The suited man in A History of Morality looks as though he could have walked out of a noir film, but the more one studies him, the more he seems to belong in front of the tulip bushes in the painting.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, A History Of Morality, 2022, Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania).

Urban spaces in Quinlan and Hastings’s paintings are rendered in a muted palette and using large shapes, with details kept to a minimum. This creates a world that looks both familiar and strange. Buildings tend to be obliquely located so that vanishing points fall outside of the pictorial space rather than converging on a central figure. Conflicts, which are acted out on street corners, in parks, under the foliage of suburban trees or in public gardens, are open to interpretation. The semi-circle structure, which conveys a sense of camaraderie in the Renaissance frescoes, here signifies exclusion and banishment. In A History of Morality, a woman sitting on the ground apparently weeping is surrounded by a group of people formally dressed as though for church. The garden setting and the woman’s hand covering her face allude to Masaccio’s portrayal of Adam being expelled from Paradise. We don’t know what has happened, but the woman’s humiliation is clear; a woman in a yellow suit bends over and reprimands her, while a policewoman stands by, watching. In another painting titled Expulsion, figures are constructed from archival images of drag queens being arrested in New York night clubs in the 1950s. Superimposed onto a British suburban street, with handcuffs and police officers removed, the painting turns into a choreographed confrontation between two loosely assembled clans, half serious and half playful.

If the police have been deliberately expunged in Expulsion, they are physically present in all the other paintings. In the first three, if one follows the exhibition clockwise, the police occupy a prominent position in the foreground. Their involvement becomes more subdued, however, from one painting to the next. In the first piece, titled Disinherited, a constable raises his right arm with a gesture reminiscent of a Nazi salute to block a woman from walking off the pavement. In the next painting, the arms of the police officers are all bent, their gestures accusatory. The hands of the policewoman in the third painting are behind her back, though visible to the viewer (she is depicted from behind). In both Public Decency and Testimony, the police recede into the background, standing and chatting, as if leaving the disciplinary functions to the women in dress suits in the foreground: to remind the squatting girl of public decency, or to take the testimony of the brawler who stands beside a man collapsing on the lawn. The two passers-by in Public Decency are taken from Masolino’s Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha. While the gazes of Masolino’s onlookers direct the viewer’s attention to the two miracles performed by Peter, the two gazes here – one staring directly out at the viewer and the other a little off to the side – create the uneasy feeling that state surveillance is omnipresent even when it is invisible.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Tulips, 2022, Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania).

Once the viewer becomes aware of the symmetry in the installation of the six fresco paintings – three on the left with the police in the foreground, three on the right with the police withdrawn – the benches in the middle of the room, where one can sit down and examine the paintings at ease, are transformed into an axis pointing all the way to the drawing on the wall at the far end of the room. Made in 2022 in response to the adoption of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act in the UK, putting more restrictions on protests, the drawing is a pastiche of Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery, re-imagined with the British police in full riot gear mounted on horses. Medieval armour and spears are substituted for bulletproof vests, flanked by batons and pistols. The eyes looking through flame-proof balaclavas and shielded helmets are equally icy-cold, and the horses are as voluptuous as ever, with their tails carefully groomed. The spectacle of state power is on full display. In the background, haystacks are scattered across fields, where some people are dancing and some are marching, all bearing a resemblance to the figures from the etching series. Between the pastoral scenery in the background and the flamboyant menace in the foreground is a glossy foliage of trees and shrubs populated by pomegranates, roses and tulips.

All this is drawn with graphite, a dry medium that in the hands of Quinlan and Hastings produces a Florentine sharpness and detached clarity. Their communal way of working, unusual among contemporary artists, is another echo of bygone eras of art-making, when, as they observed in an interview, groups of artisans would collaborate in workshops headed by a master (‘We work like artisans, but we have no master’). In the same interview, the artists discuss their approach to drawing: ‘The hardest thing to get “right” is the psychological dimension of drawing; everything else can be achieved in a pragmatic and straightforward way, even talent. The right attitude to drawing is to understand the steps that the image requires you to complete and to follow these steps in an organized and fearless manner. The wrong approach to drawing is to become emotionally involved with the pencil, when this happens you lose perspective and it’s inevitable that you become completely hysterical and unable to perform basic tasks.’

Read on: Marcus Verhagen, ‘Making Time’, NLR 129.

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Đukanović’s Defeat

Montenegro's former prime minister and long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists leader Milo Djukanovic speaks during a celebration after presidential elections in Montenegro's capital, Podgorica, Sunday, April 15, 2018. The apparent winner of Montenegro's presidential election, Djukanovic says his triumph means Montenegro will stay on the path toward joining the European Union. (AP Photo/Risto Bozovic)

In Montenegro, they’re calling it ‘the twilight of the idols’. Milo Đukanović, the man who ruled for nearly 33 years, lost the presidential election in the second round on 2 April. The longest reigning European leader, christened ‘the smartest man in the Balkans’ by Radio Free Europe, now looks likely to fade from the political stage. What this means for the country, however, is the subject of intense dispute. For some, including Montenegro’s liberal Atlanticists and many among its minority groups, the defeat represents a victory for Vladimir Putin – one that might threaten the very existence of the independent state. For others, including the sizeable Serbian population and a diverse range of Montenegrins, the election marks the end of a dictatorship.

To his detractors, Đukanović was a strongman who turned Montenegro into an authoritarian mafia state. Crime and corruption were rampant, nepotism ruled, critical journalists were attacked and even killed, and ethnic and religious divisions were deliberately stoked. All this was tolerated by the West because Đukanović supposedly guaranteed ‘stability’ and proved willing to work with the US to achieve its foreign policy objectives in the region, most recently ushering Montenegro into NATO.

Đukanović, a former basketball player, rose to prominence during the late 1980s as a partisan of Slobodan Milošević’s ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’: an elite revolt that saw old political cadres swept away with the aim of centralizing power around those loyal to the leadership of the Socialist Republic of Serbia. With Milošević’s blessing, the young politician was appointed prime minister in 1991. Later that year, Montenegro drew international condemnation for shelling the UNESCO World Heritage City of Dubrovnik in Croatia, an operation launched ostensibly to safeguard the Serbian minority following the Croatian declaration of independence. In Montenegro, the Siege of Dubrovnik was justified as an attempt to protect Yugoslavia from Croatian fascism. Đukanović, referring to the chequered pattern on Croatia’s flag, declared that he ‘would never play chess again’.

Six years later, Đukanović performed a volte face, proclaiming his firm opposition to Milošević. This change of course came after Đukanović witnessed the large-scale Zajedno protest movement in 1996 and concluded that the Serbian leader had become ‘obsolete’. There were other factors at play in his pivot: a longstanding personal animosity toward Milošević’s powerful wife, Mira Marković, plus cajoling from Washington, which was keen to cultivate him as a potential counterweight to Milošević. Đukanović won the 1997 presidential election by a thin margin, amid allegations of irregularities and intimidation. The US immediately recognized his victory.

Incensed by Đukanović’s betrayal, Milošević reduced federal funding to the Montenegrin authorities. But the West would help fill in the gaps. Between 1999 and 2001, Montenegro received 765 million Deutschmarks from the US and EU. As the chief disseminators of foreign aid, Đukanović and his inner circle were able to create lasting patronage and clientelist networks. He also assumed control of the lucrative smuggling channels used to circumvent sanctions and thereby forged extensive links with organized crime. Đukanović oversaw a vast smuggling network that allowed cigarettes to be delivered via speedboat to the Italian port of Bari. The EU learned early on that this operation was costing it billions in tax revenue each year – and Italian prosecutors became increasingly eager to indict Đukanović for having ‘promoted, run, set up, and participated in a mafia-type association’. Yet he was protected by diplomatic immunity, and the US quietly advocated on his behalf before the government in Rome.

After Milošević was removed from power in 2000, Đukanović understood that he had lost much of his strategic value to the West. He set about remaking himself and his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) – now a liberal outfit with no left-wing credentials – as champions of the independent Montenegrin nation, at a time when Montenegro and Serbia were still conjoined in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A deeper identity conflict thereby emerged: ‘Montenegrin’ became associated with support for independence, while ‘Serb’ denoted support for the unitary state. Ahead of the 2006 referendum on independence, the DPS courted the Albanian, Bosniak and Croat minorities, adopting the rhetoric of multiculturalism less out of any meaningful conviction than out of political expedience. Most of them needed little arm twisting to get behind the idea of separating from Serbia, and on referendum day 55.5% of participants voted for independence, while 44.5% favoured preservation of the union. Tiny Montenegro – population 615,000 – was reborn as an independent country.

From that point on, Đukanović consolidated his rule by depicting opponents as a threat to Montenegro’s independence. He took particular aim at the Serbian population. In the Balkans, Serbian nationalism is often thought to entail Kremlin sympathies: an assumption that Đukanović exploited to depict Serbs as a threat to Montenegro’s modernizing, Euro-Atlantic orientation. The minority group was labelled a ‘fifth column’, an enemy of the state, a neo-fascist bloc – and thus significantly underrepresented in national and local government. Serbs frequently complained of voter disenfranchisement and other forms of political exclusion. The receipt of welfare benefits, too, was often contingent upon support for the DPS.

While Đukanović’s overreach was criticized by domestic opponents, his agenda was praised by allies abroad. Robert Gelbard, the former US Envoy to the Balkans, called him ‘a real hero’ for ‘building Montenegro as an independent, democratic state, a country that is founded on strong democratic and free market principles and one that has a clear vision of the future that accords with the way the US sees the world.’ John McCain described Đukanović’s push for Montenegrin independence as ‘the greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War’. Across the enlightened West, his austerity policies and privatization of public assets were applauded.

The irony is that, although Đukanović is now known as an ardent supporter of NATO, he spent his early political career cozying up to Russia. In the years after Milošević was overthrown, the West was initially reluctant to support an independent Montenegro, fearing it might undermine the fragile new democratic coalition in power in Belgrade. So Đukanović sought support elsewhere. Following the 2006 referendum, Russia was the first country to recognize Montenegro as a sovereign state. Putin valued Russian investments in Montenegro at $2 billion – roughly equivalent to the country’s entire economic output at the time. Russians also purchased the majority of shares in Montenegro’s industrial sector, along with vast swaths of its Adriatic coastline. Soon enough, every third yacht in Montenegro was owned by a Russian.

But with the annexation of Crimea, relations entered a new, icier phase. Montenegro joined the EU in imposing sanctions on Moscow. While Đukanović had long spoken of the prospect of NATO membership for Montenegro, the war in Ukraine made it a matter of greater urgency. The circumstances of the country’s accession were dramatic: Montenegrin authorities claimed that on election day in October 2016, Russia orchestrated an attempted coup d’état with the aim of assassinating Đukanović and preventing Montenegro from joining the Atlantic military alliance. The opposition expressed doubts about this narrative, which they described as a ‘cheap, staged vaudeville coup’, intended to preserve Đukanović’s power at a moment when he faced a formidable electoral challenge. But it was no matter. Đukanović was victorious once again, and Montenegro joined NATO in June 2017.

More recently, tensions between Serbs and Đukanović have centered around the powerful Serbian Orthodox Church, to which 70% of the country belongs. In December 2019, the government passed Đukanović’s controversial law on Freedom of Religion, allowing the state to appropriate property granted to the church after 1918. Protests, in the form of public liturgies and processions, were held throughout Montenegro. Such discontent dominated the 2020 parliamentary elections, as the church launched an ‘anyone but them’ campaign aimed at dethroning the DPS. The result was an unprecedented victory for the opposition, spanning both pro-Russia and pro-EU political blocs, which won 50.7% of the vote. Though Đukanović remained president, his challengers cobbled together a fragile new government that was instantly beset by crisis. It was felled by a no-confidence vote after just a few months in office. A subsequent opposition government met the same fate.

Yet, however crisis-addled the new opposition has been, the DPS remains in steep decline – having lost in 11 of 14 municipalities in local elections last year and anticipating a similarly poor result in upcoming parliamentary elections this June. In the recent presidential contest, Đukanović was defeated by Jakov Milatović, a 36-year-old Oxford-educated economist who ran as the candidate for ‘Europe Now!’, a new pro-EU centrist party. Milatović, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, served as economy minister since the opposition triumphed in 2020. During his tenure, the minimum wage more than doubled: the largest hike in Montenegrin history. But this reform, welcomed by citizens hurting from the Covid crisis, came with a price: gross salaries no longer include mandatory health insurance. In other words, the part of one’s salary that would have previously gone to the government for health care now goes directly into one’s pocket. Milatović’s economic programme retains universal healthcare as a basic right, funded by other means, but such means have yet to be clarified – and the increase in public spending is currently contributing to the country’s debt levels.

Đukanović derided his opponent’s policies as a dangerous form of ‘economic populism’ that would threaten the stability of the public finances and precipitate a so-called ‘Greek scenario’ (the charge of populism is dubious, given Milatović is a bland technocrat who spent years at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development). He also claimed that Milatović was an apologist for Serbian nationalism who had tricked the West into believing that he was a harmless liberal. This was a classic case of guilt-by-association: because many Serbs supported Milatović as a welcome alternative to Đukanović, this meant that Milatović himself must be an ultranationalist extremist. In this sense, Đukanović’s electoral campaign relied on collapsing the distinction between pro-Kremlin parties and Europeanist ones, portraying them all as crypto-Serbian nationalists intent on reabsorbing Montenegro into ‘Greater Serbia’.

In the end, Milatović’s victory was less a referendum on his policies than a decisive rejection of Đukanović’s narrative. Supporters of both the pro-Russian Democratic Front and smaller pro-EU parties ultimately banded together behind the opposition. This was evident in the pattern of votes between the two rounds. In the first, held on 19 March, Đukanović received 35% while Milatović won 29%, while in the second Đukanović received 41% and Milatović netted almost 60%. The ineluctable conclusion was that Đukanović’s polarizing strategy had foundered. Sixteen years after independence, his attempt to divide Montenegrin patriots from Serbs was no longer viable. Instead, a majority of voters from different ethnic and ideological backgrounds united to kick him out of office. Whether his replacement can deliver on his promises – to clean up Montenegro’s kleptocratic system and kickstart economic growth – is another matter.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘They, The People’, NLR 103.

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Capital’s Militant

He’s not as rich as Jeff Bezos, not a social media star like Elon Musk, nor an icon like Bill Gates. Yet he is the most interesting of the Silicon Valley tycoons, for more than any other he embodies the new breed of capitalist ideologue. Rather than using politics to make money, he uses his billions for politics, in the hope of emancipating the rich from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by the workers’. Peter Thiel (b. 1967): German by birth, American and South African by upbringing; according to Forbes, he is worth $4.2 billion. Equipped, in contrast to his peers, with a degree in philosophy and a doctorate in law, he likes to affect the posture of a philosopher king. In his most ambitious piece of writing, The Straussian Moment (2004), he sketches a kind of Geistes Weltgeschichte in light of 9/11, citing with carefully cultivated intellectual effrontery Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Pierre Manent, Roberto Calasso, and name-checking Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche and Kojève.

Ever since his university days, Thiel has been devoted to a kind of impudence of position, always embracing the most conservative one possible (he has been an admirer of Reagan since high school). According to his biographer Max Chafkin, Thiel felt that ‘mainstream liberals had accepted communists, but conservatives were unable to bring themselves to associate with members of the far-right…He really wished the right would become more like the left’. Enrolling at Stanford, the most reactionary of the top-tier universities, Thiel spent his time railing against what he saw as the institution’s endemic leftism, co-founding the Stanford Review with the blessing of conservative guru Irving Kristol and financial backing via the Olin Foundation (a key entity in funding and organizing the neoliberal counteroffensive, as documented in my forthcoming book, Masters: The Invisible War of the Powerful Against their Subjects). It campaigned against multiculturalism, political correctness and homosexuality. Its editorial board was composed exclusively of men.

On LGBT rights, the review claimed that ‘the real scourge was homophobia-phobia, that is, fear of being labelled a homophobe… anti-gay bias should be rebranded “miso-sodomy” – hatred of anal sex – to focus on “deviant sexual practices”’. According to The Economist, the article ‘even defended a fellow law student, Keith Rabois, who decided to test the limits of free speech on campus by standing outside a teacher’s residence and shouting “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!”’. (Rabois would later become one of Thiel’s closest business partners.) Thiel went on to co-author The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995), published by a right-wing think tank, the Independent Institute, thanks again to a grant from the Olin Foundation. Formidable chess player that he is (a ‘Life Master’), Thiel already understood that to fight the battle of ideas effectively, adequate funding was required. He complained that ‘only one in four Stanford alumni were millionaires’ – further proof, in his eyes, of the uselessness of the traditional academic curriculum.

Following brief stints as a lawyer and derivatives trader at Credit Suisse, Thiel returned to California in 1998 and established his own investment fund, Thiel Capital Management, with $1 million raised thanks to ‘friends and family’ (in all the biographies this episode is vague; as we know, the first million is always the hardest). The turning point came in 1999, when Thiel founded PayPal with a group of friends (thanks especially to Max Levchin, a Ukrainian-born cryptographer who thought up the basic algorithm for the system of online payments). This economic venture claimed an ideological motivation: ‘The driving ideal of PayPal’, he wrote, was to create ‘a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution – the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were’. The so-called PayPal mafia was formed: a famous photo depicts the audacious youths (all men) dressed as Italian-American mobsters of the prohibition era. Six would become billionaires. It’s notable that three had a past in apartheid South Africa: Thiel, Musk and Roelof Botha, PayPal’s CFO, later partner at the investment fund Sequoia. Thiel has a difficult relationship with Musk: amongst other things, he removed him as CEO of PayPal when the latter was on his honeymoon.

Thiel made $55 million from PayPal in 2002, launching him into the world of venture capital. The list of companies he has invested is extensive (Airbnb, Asana, LinkedIn, Lyft, Spotify, Twilio, Yelp, Zynga). His fame as a far-sighted capitalist was cemented in 2004 when, as the first external investor, he gave (a mere) $500,000 to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for 10.2% of Facebook’s shares, earning him over a billion dollars. If instead of realizing his stake, however, he had participated in Facebook’s recapitalization, he would now have around $60 billion. This hasn’t been his only mistake. In 2004 he refused to invest in Tesla and YouTube (both founded by ex-members of the PayPal mafia). In 2006, when Musk needed funds to develop Tesla’s electric cars, Thiel passed on the opportunity – a costly choice, given capitalization surpassed $2 billion in 2010 and peaked at $1,061 billion in 2021, a growth of 50,000% (by April 2023 this had dropped back to $584 billion, but still represents a rise of almost 30,000%). Musk put Thiel’s refusal down to ideological reasons: ‘he doesn’t quite fully buy into the climate change thing’.

What does Thiel buy into? Between 2004 and 2014 he busily expounded his world-view at conferences; in articles for the Wall Street Journal; in The Straussian Moment; essays such as ‘The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009) for the Cato Institute (a think tank financed by the Koch brothers) and ‘The End of the Future’ for the National Review; another book entitled Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) based on a course he taught at Stanford. (This was co-authored with one of his students, Blake Masters, later chief operating officer of Thiel’s investment firm, Thiel Capital, and president of the Thiel Foundation; in 2022 Thiel generously supported his failed campaign for the United States Senate).

In a typical move, Thiel often presents himself and his allies as victims. Just like the French who claim to be victims of North Africans, or Israelis who say the same of Palestinians, the rich are bullied by the poor. Like any reactionary, his is also a tale of decadence. For Thiel, we are in full-blown cultural decline, ‘ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment’. The cause is democracy, in particular its extension to women and the poor (note the association between the two): ‘The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.’

Enlarging the franchise is said to have hindered the technological and scientific progress which in the past permitted the generalization of a certain quality of life, even to those who didn’t deserve it. Since the 1970s – with the exception of the tech industry – this has stalled, with no great innovation registered in transport, energy or even medicine. Thiel concludes that progress is ‘rare’ in human history (perhaps not as rare as he thinks; the invention of the keel for watercraft seemed inconsequential in the medieval period, but it eventually made oceanic navigation possible). His solution: we must return to some kind of monarchical regime, because history’s great inventions have all been produced by companies (or startups) which function as absolute monarchies, or monopolies.

Thiel’s publicity efforts are often dedicated to extolling the parallel virtues of monarchy and monopoly: ‘Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today’s margins that it can’t possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits’. In a typical intervention for the Wall Street Journal, ‘Competition is for Losers’, he argues that competition produces copies or improvements of what already exists, but never true novelty – a fact that leads him to argue that ‘actually, capitalism and competition are opposites’.

It feels almost futile to note the logical inconsistencies of these arguments. Thiel maintains that progress is rare in human history, yet absolute monarchies have been the norm, from which one can only deduce that absolute monarchies have seldom generated progress. Monopolies don’t come from nowhere but arise precisely when a firm beats its competitors. One might in fact say that in an unregulated market monopoly is an inevitable result of competition: competing implies winners and losers, and as the winner is increasingly successful it becomes easier for them to dominate. This is why in the proto-history of capitalism of every country, we see the emergence of monopolies. To avoid their formation, it has always been necessary for states to implement anti-trust laws. Moreover, as soon as they’re established, monopolies cease to innovate and tend to live off rentierism. 

There is an even more fundamental contradiction here. How can someone declare themselves a libertarian yet support absolute monarchy? Whose freedom is he talking about? How many monopolies can the world accommodate? Freedom for the very few, slavery for the vast majority is the destination. Many have discussed the influence of Nietzsche on Thiel’s thinking, but perhaps the more precise reference is Max Stirner. Not for nothing, in Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) the ‘Unique’ or ‘Ego’ is defined by its ‘property’, and may use any means – fraud, deception – to realize its power. For Stirner also, free competition is a limitation on freedom, given that it can only be ensured by a state which begets servitude. How can one be against the tyranny of the state and in favour of absolute monarchy: the most despotic, intrusive and arbitrary kind of state? The answer is Stirner’s notion of the absolute instrumentality of every position. The Unique can say anything it likes if it is useful to him. Thiel has been accused of inconsistency and self-contradiction, but he is merely putting this Stirnean strategy into practice.

One example. Thiel spends his time denigrating Stanford and higher education in general (even financing, with much fanfare, a foundation for students who abandoned university to found their own startups – with extremely limited results). But he then paid money to teach a course at that very same university, which in turn allowed him to publish a best-selling book legitimated by the Stanford brand (the true number of copies sold remains uncertain: a million, a million and a half, even three million according to various claims, but the real number could be much lower). Another: Thiel spent his youth berating gay people only to come out in 2016, marrying a man and simultaneously admitting to a romantic relationship with a male model. If the ostentatious homophobia of his time as a student can be attributed in part to an anti-PC, anti-diversity crusade, it’s less clear why Thiel would bring a lawsuit against the website Gawker for outing him in 2011. The explanation offered by his biographer is that amongst the major investors in Theil’s capital venture are ‘Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime’.

This libertarian advocate for absolute monarchy also has no qualms about making money through mass surveillance. In 2003, he founded Palantir, which specializes in big data analysis and immediately received funding from the CIA’s investment fund, In-Q-Tel. Contradiction? In The Straussian Moment, just as he founded Palantir, Thiel wrote: ‘Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.’ Echelon is the most intrusive planetary surveillance mechanism yet devised in human history.

Palantir floundered until in 2011 a rumour began circulating that the company had ‘helped kill Osama’. From then on, contracts abounded, with the German police even seeking its services, which include not only software but also the manpower to use it (the Germans have now changed their minds and want to rescind on the deal). A paradox of capitalist profitability, Palantir is valued at $17.6 billion – without ever generating profits – and today forms the most substantial part of Thiel’s fortune. On the one hand, this libertarian makes his money helping the state spy on people; on the other, he promotes Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as instruments of emancipation from the tyranny of states (as I discussed in a previous article for Sidecar). This is not a question of incoherence or contradiction: it is pure and simple cynicism. Even his self-image as a ‘contrarian’ is part of the game, the goal being to present himself as an oppressed minority, an outsider, an underdog, an anticonformist. But what kind of anticonformism is it to wish to become rich and powerful? Even the defence of monopoly is perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist: think of the rehabilitation of monopoly by the neoliberals, the veritable ‘revolution in corporate law’ guided by Henry Manne. 

To be sure, this total lack of scruples recalls the attitude of the Nietzschean Übermensch, for whom everything is permissible – to be a libertarian and simultaneously flirt with Opus Dei, participate in the Bilderberg Group, fund Steve Bannon, become for a time Donald Trump’s sponsor in Silicon Valley then standard-bearer for a Trumpism without Trump and finally a promoter of the New Right. (Thiel’s jeremiad against political correctness echoes Nietzsche’s lament in On the Genealogy of Morality about the revolt of slave morality: ‘the higher man is liquidated, the morality of the common man emerges victorious’.) His desire is to oversee a permanent secession not of the plebs from the patriciate, as occurred in ancient Rome (as in the fable of Menenius Agrippa) but of the patriciate from the plebs. Hence the acquisition of a 477-acre estate in New Zealand, and his financing of Seasteading, a project for a self-sufficient community located far out in international waters, which after serious mishaps reduced its ambitions to operating 15 miles from the coast, only to then be shelved entirely. This separatist impulse is also present in his investment in Space-X with Elon Musk: Thiel is far less tepid about the idea of isolating himself in space than ‘the climate change thing’.

Yet the question arises: to what end? The price of nihilism is the meaninglessness of life itself, of one’s own troubles, of wanting to go to one’s grave loaded with gold. It’s no surprise that fear of death seems to be a dominant motivation. It reminds one of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), in which a knight plays his final game of chess against death. This consummate chess player believes death is ‘nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of’. This is why he throws bags of money at ventures such as Halcyon Molecular, Emerald Therapeutics, Unity Biotechnology, Methuselah Foundation, financing start-ups which promise to lengthen life to at least 120 years, the definitive cure for Alzheimer’s and so on. And if all this doesn’t work, he’s ready to have his brain frozen and wait for his reincarnation once technology makes it possible. (He’s not the only billionaire hoping to outsmart death; Jeff Bezos and Larry Page both fund the Alcor Life Extension Foundation ‘which has been freezing bodies and brains of the dead since 1970’.)

The contempt Thiel nurtures towards the rest of humanity must be almost equal to that which he appears to harbour towards the female gender, if he believes us slaves to be so masochistically inclined as to be ready to accept his morality. If he succeeds, he would be the first political activist to win over his audience not by promising anything in particular, but by guaranteeing hell as the only future we – the herd – deserve. The name that has been coined for this new manifestation of global capitalism is truly appropriate: the Dark Enlightenment. Switching off the lights is indeed the inevitable result.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Celebrity Thaumaturge’, NLR 74.

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Fantasies of Israel

Watching the news in Israel this month, you’d think the country was under attack from all sides. Three Anglo-Israeli settlers were killed by guerrillas in the West Bank; an Italian tourist was killed and seven others injured in Tel Aviv, in what may have been a car accident but was widely presented as a terrorist incident; and the IDF claimed to have intercepted the largest salvo of rockets fired from Lebanon since 2006. As is usually the case, these reports studiously ignored the killing fields of the occupied territories, where Israeli soldiers are murdering young Palestinians in ever growing numbers, either execution-style or by bombing their houses into the dust. Yet what was novel about the media coverage was its air of bewilderment: how could Israel’s hard-right government fail to provide security – or at least a sense of security – for its Jewish citizens? Who was to blame for this lapse?

For Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lay with the ongoing protest movement. Since early January, demonstrators have turned out in their hundreds of thousands to oppose his judicial reforms – which would enable the political takeover of the courts, allow the Prime Minister to escape conviction in his corruption trial, and increase the influence of Orthodox Judaism in both public life and the legal system. Netanyahu has accused his critics of dividing and weakening the nation, while lashing out at the reserve soldiers who threatened not to show up for duty were the measures passed. People close to him have also spread the rumour that the US was bankrolling the demonstrators (this was fake news, but it carried water given President Biden’s public condemnation of the reforms).

Judging by the recent polls, Netanyahu’s message has failed to cut through. For many Israelis, it was the PM himself who created such security risks. His popularity has reached a historic nadir, and he would likely lose elections were they held today. Having bungled his attempt to regain the trust of erstwhile supporters – bringing them into the warm embrace of the Zionist consensus under the threat of war supposedly emanating from Iran and its allies – he must now choose between two unappealing options: either jettison the reforms and quell the street-level resistance, or push ahead with them and deepen divisions among Jewish citizens. The prediction that these divisions could undermine the Israeli state from within seems premature at this stage. But there is no doubt that they have exposed serious cracks in the Zionist edifice – ones that may well widen over the coming years.

If social breakdown is not on the immediate horizon, that is largely because of the country’s mammoth security apparatus. Israel is still very much an army with a state rather than a state with an army. There can be no substantive changes to security policy without the assent of leading military figures – whose hand will not be forced, even by the new authoritarian government. This stratum has clearly signalled its investment in maintaining the current framework. In essence, that means continuing the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, the practice of home demolitions and the sanctioning of settler pogroms. It means enforcing institutionalized discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are denied the right to free speech and assembly. And it involves the regular bombardment and besiegement of Gaza, as well as almost weekly air raids on Syria.

The apparatchiks who design and execute these activities comprise the core group behind the recent demonstrations. Military officials who have committed countless war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and before that in the West Bank and Lebanon, are now playing a crucial role in the emerging opposition bloc. They form part of a wider Ashkenazi (European Jewish) elite, which views Netanyahu’s policy as an attack on their power bases within the state: not just the security apparatuses, but also the financial institutions, the judicial system and academia. They sense that the reforms would weaken their hold on these institutions, while empowering an insurgent coalition of orthodox Jews, settlers and Mizrahi (Eastern Jewish) Likud supporters who wish to make Israel more religious, more nationalist and more expansionist. As they see it, the triumph of this neo-Zionist coalition would threaten their secular lifestyle, compromise the state’s security and further tarnish its international image.

Hence, Western media’s depiction of the protests – as an attempt to save Israeli democracy from political overreach – is hopelessly distorted. The movement is not seeking to protect the rights of minorities (the first duty of any democracy) let alone the rights of the Palestinians on either side of the green line. During the first hundred days of the new administration, while secular Israeli Jews fought to preserve their hegemony, almost a hundred Palestinians – many of them children – were killed by Israeli forces. This killing spree did not feature in any of the demonstrations. Those who tried to raise Palestinian flags alongside the Israeli ones were forcibly ejected. Arabs evidently have no place in this feud between the Jewish families of Israel.

Instead, the protesters are motivated by what one might call the fantasy of Israel: that of a secular democratic state with enough moral capital to justify its occupation of Palestine at home and abroad. They are happy to be seen as exceptional nation – which must subjugate the Arabs to preserve the dream of a Jewish homeland – but they are also desperate to conform to the ‘civilized’ standards of the Global North. Their liberal Zionism is founded on a series of oxymorons: Israel as an enlightened occupier, a benevolent ethnic cleanser, a progressive apartheid state. Thanks to Netanyahu’s government, this image is now under threat; its contradictions are no longer containable. The state’s reputation is being damaged not only domestically, but also among the ‘international community’ that typically hails Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East and Tel Aviv as the LGBT capital of the world, while ignoring the besieged Gaza ghetto a few miles south.

This is why half a million Jews – mostly liberal, mostly secular, mostly of Western origins – have taken to the streets to defend the apartheid regime. Though they have forced Netanyahu to delay his proposed changes, their ultimate chances of success remain uncertain. Even if the reforms are scrapped, Israel will still be constitutively divided, with a secular Tel Aviv existing alongside a religious Jerusalem. How this tension might play out politically is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear: it will have little concrete effect on state policy towards the Palestinians. For all their differences, the two Israeli camps are united in their support for the settler-colonial project on which the nation was built. Settler colonialism invariably entails the dehumanization of colonized peoples, viewed as the principal obstacle to political harmony. It is based on the wish to eliminate the native population – either through genocide, ethnic cleansing, or the creation of enclaves and ghettos. In Israel, every Palestinian must be perceived as a savage or potential terrorist, every Palestinian territory as a theatre of war.

This underlying logic means that the Palestinians have nothing to gain from a return to the status quo ante. Indeed, the previous government, led by the ‘centrist’ Yair Lapid, was just as committed to maintaining the violent occupation. Its inclusion of an Arab party brought no tangible benefits for Israel’s Palestinian minority. They were still liable to be shot by the criminal gangs or trigger-happy police officers while the state turned a blind eye; still designated second-class citizens under the 2018 apartheid law; still subject to legal and financial discrimination; and still spatially strangled by the proliferation of Jewish towns and settlements. By extolling ‘democracy’ while ignoring such abuses, the current protest wave has highlighted Israel’s fundamental paradox: it cannot be both democratic and Jewish. It will either be a racist Jewish state, or a democratic one for all its citizens. There is no middle ground.

For precisely that reason, Israel is now viewed unfavourably by large sections of the global population. Although it has so far managed to maintain strategic alliances with governments in the West, the Arab World and occasionally the Global South, it risks becoming internationally isolated. The protesters rightly fear that if the country cannot sustain its fantasy image, it could suffer a fate similar to that of apartheid South Africa: a gradual decline in credibility, such that politics from below gains the ability to influence politics from above. In that case, Israel may still be viable on account of its military strength – but nothing more. This in turn could seriously jeopardize the Zionist project; yet, as with South Africa in the 1980s, it may also be the moment when the regime attempts to save itself by resorting to the worst forms of brutality.

One of the main differences between opponents and supporters of the current government is that the former care what global civil society thinks of Israel while the latter do not. The Ashkenazi elite are defending a form of ‘Zionism with a human face’ which the far-right administration is increasingly willing to abandon. The outcome of this conflict will partly determine whether Israel can preserve its aura of immunity and exceptionalism. During the recent history of Israel–Palestine, world opinion has often been diverted by other developments: first the Arab Spring, now the war in Ukraine. But the cause of the Palestinians has endured despite this wavering attention. Can it exploit the present moment to turn Israel into an international pariah?

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