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Undoing Oslo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Clandestinity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Political Instincts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bonapartist Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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Intractable Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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L’Europe profonde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Cologne

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

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

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

‘An artist has every right to turn around.’  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 – 18 February, 2024 

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

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Against Solutionism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reactionary Ecology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Death of the Innovator?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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