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Fossil Media

Few people outside France have heard of far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré’s takeover of the Journal du Dimanche. Yet it marks an important moment in the country’s political trajectory. The JDD is a weekly newspaper, founded in 1948, which acts as a sort of unofficial governmental gazette. It is carefully read by most journalists, politicians and CEOs. Despite its modest circulation – 135,000 per week, compared to Le Monde’s 500,000 daily sales – it is often used by senior politicians to announce new legislation and set out their agendas. Its bland centre-right orientation means it can align itself with both the Republicans and the right of the Parti Socialiste. More recently it has been described as ‘Macron’s Pravda’, and online memes have mocked its tendency to feature glorifying portraits of different cabinet ministers on its front page each week.

Yet earlier this summer, Bolloré launched a coup against this bastion of establishment politics. Having spent years patiently building a majority stake in Lagardère, the media group that owns the JDD, he announced the appointment of a new chief editor: the notoriously reactionary journalist Geoffroy Lejeune. Lejeune had previously worked at the magazine Valeurs actuelles, where he was involved in countless controversies: publishing a fictional piece that depicted the black MP Danielle Obono as a slave being sold in Africa, as well as an antisemitic cover story that described George Soros as a ‘global financier plotting against France’. His new role was anathema to the JDD’s staff, who responded by launching indefinite strike action – preventing the newspaper from being published for several weeks.

For Bolloré, this was nothing new. He had previously bought the TV broadcasting group Canal Plus and replaced its executives with his hand-picked stooges, triggering a lengthy strike which ended with the departure of most journalists at I-Télé – France’s equivalent of CNN. He then set about recruiting a new team and remaking the channel as CNews, modelled loosely on Fox. The mogul also purchased Hachette, the largest European publishing company, whose subsidiaries play a major role in producing educational textbooks. Bolloré is now the twelfth wealthiest individual in France with a net worth of €11.1bn. In the early days of his career he was lauded for importing cutting-edge financial techniques to France from the US. He adapted a variant of the 1980s leveraged buyout procedure and rebranded it poulies bretonnes after his home region – an innovation that helped to earn him the nicknames Petit Prince du cash flow and Mozart de la finance in the French business press.

Yet Bolloré was not above more traditional methods of accumulation. In fact, he has most consistently operated in old, declining sectors. The ailing business he inherited from his father specialized in cigarette paper. After selling it, he began to focus on postcolonial assets, particularly the port infrastructures and plantations that comprise the shadowy world of Françafrique. He owns approximately 500,000 acres of plantations across various countries including Cameroon, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. Until recently, Bolloré Africa Logistics presided over port infrastructures in most West African countries from Senegal to Congo. Its owner also acquired fossil assets, including oil depots in France and Switzerland, building a carbon empire through numerous acquisitions. All the while, Bolloré has crafted a public profile that personifies French family capitalism. To celebrate the bicentenary of his company, he donned some old-style Brittany velvet clothing and posed in front of his village church with his sons, whom he told to start planning for the next two hundred years. His political interventions typically promote right-wing Catholicism, unapologetic patriarchy and social hierarchy.

Bolloré’s acquisition of the Journal du Dimanche sparked indignation, with 400 prominent journalists, actors, trade unionists and former ministers publishing an op-ed opposing Lejeune’s appointment. Others denounced it as a bid for ‘almightiness’ and a ‘crusade for the Christian West’. The left and centre-right were united in their concern that French public discourse would be poisoned by this far-right insurgency. Yet such responses often misunderstood the significance of Bolloré’s actions, describing them as merely an exercise in narcissism by a vain, ageing billionaire.

Unfortunately, Bolloré is much more than that. He represents a powerful segment of the French business community, at the intersection of fossil industries, privatized utilities and postcolonial assets. The paranoid rhetoric of his outlets – on topics like the grand remplacement, ‘green dictatorship’ or ‘wokeism’ – is not incidental. It is an integral part of this business model. Racial domination is essential to the Bolloré Group’s operations in Africa. The suppression of environmental movements facilitates its dealings in the French oil sector. And patriarchy is ingrained in a firm that has been passed down from male owner to male heir over six generations.

Nor is Bolloré an isolated case. Other billionaires have gone on similar buying sprees over the past few years. In 2018, the Czech tycoon Daniel Kretinsky, who amassed his wealth in coal mining and power plants, purchased Le Monde – adding it to his portfolio of media assets including Elle, Marianne and Franc-Tireur. He is now expected to acquire the second-largest French publishing group, Editis, from Bolloré. CMA-CGM, a French maritime transportation giant and major player in logistics on the African continent, has recently taken over the business newspaper La Tribune, and plans to launch a competitor to JDD in the coming months. (The company is also currently in the process of acquiring some of Bolloré’s business ventures.) It thus appears that, while French news corporations have been historically controlled by entrepreneurs in the luxury, defence and telecommunications sectors, they are now being bought by fossil capitalists and Françafrique investors.

What explains this shift? For one thing, these sectors have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. The fact that the public considers them somewhat passé has not made them any less lucrative. In 2022, CMA-CGM achieved the all-time record for the highest profits ever made by a French company, with €23bn. Kretinsky’s fossil investments are also thriving. Thanks to the energy crisis, the profits of his firm skyrocketed from €1.2bn to €3.8bn in 2020-22, while the Bolloré Group made a record €3.4bn during the same period. This leaves such companies with ample funds left over to spend on shaping the ideological landscape to reflect their interests.

Capitalists like Bolloré have compelling motives to engage in this struggle over public opinion. France’s ability to project power in Africa has been diminished by the recent spate of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, threatening to undermine the very architecture of Françafrique. Macron’s African policy is also less interventionist than that of his predecessors – allowing friendly regimes to collapse while letting the French judiciary investigate corrupt business practices in former colonies. At the same time, France has nominally committed to the European Commission’s plan to ban most automotive combustion engines by 2035, reach net-zero targets and discourage investments in fossil energy. Given all this, Bolloré has reason to worry about who will defend his ports, plantations and oil deposits in the decades to come. He has wagered that it is better to get on the front foot than to leave his inheritors with stranded assets.

Macron’s response to the controversy at JDD has been muted. When the strike was announced, the government was careful not to criticize Bolloré. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne described it a ‘delicate’ issue, stressing that the state ‘should not interfere in the management of the media’. It was only the Education Minister, Pap Ndiaye, who stuck his head above the parapet, saying that he was ‘worried’ about the takeover given that Bolloré had turned his other media ventures into mouthpieces for the ‘radical far right’. In response, Bolloré’s news networks went into attack mode, denouncing Ndiaye as an enemy of free speech. At the next governmental reshuffle, Macron sacked him from his post and reassigned him to an obscure position in Brussels.

After forty days of striking, the journalists finally gave up, with many of them leaving the newspaper. The following Sunday the next edition appeared, having been written and edited in secret by another team of journalists recruited from CNews, Minute and Valeurs actuelles. Remarkably, it included an interview with one of Macron’s ministers: Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, the Secretary of State for City Planning. She later claimed that her decision to speak to the newly radicalized JDD was motivated by her support for ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and ‘free speech’ – implying that it was necessary to take a stand against the striking journalists were supposedly impeding press freedom.

Macron’s tacit endorsement of Bolloré’s growing influence may not be as surprising as it seems. After all, billionaire-owned media played a significant role in both his election campaigns, and it has been a major asset amid the recent unrest over pension reforms and racist policing. Since losing his parliamentary majority in 2022, the President has adopted an approach of strategic ambiguity towards the far right, alternately condemning and embracing its ideas. Could there be some eventual détente between the hardliners at the JDD and the centrists in the Élysée Palace? Will one tendency hegemonize the other? It remains too early to tell. What’s clear is that, together, these forces are pushing French politics in an increasingly reactionary direction. It may prove difficult to reverse course.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Grander Narratives’, NLR 142.

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A Message From the Emperor

Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.

Ezra Pound, A lume spento (1908).

The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death – all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire – before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fist on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more the stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate – but never, never can that happen – the imperial capital would lie before him, the centre of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.

Franz Kafka, ‘An Imperial Message’ (1919).

1883: Marx dies, Kafka is born. A metaphor that describes, explains, hints at, in its own way comprehends, indirectly expresses the following fact: it is only with the weapon of political irony that these days one can combat the tragic seriousness of history. The messenger, with his message, has not left the imperial palace; he has set off, but is still entangled in the long sequence of rooms, in the arrangement of successive courtyards, in the infinite outer houses, the inner staircases and then the other palaces, crowded with things, events, masses, institutions, guards, crowds and brawls. An impenetrable tangle. A space-time in continuous flux and change. It is this we call, this that is, modern capitalism.

The messenger has not escaped the palace, but, as he passes by, has created a disturbance within. Parts of the message have, in the meantime, been received, inspiring fear in the princes and hope in the people. It is already something, an occurrence that’s far from insignificant. All this demonstrates that the messenger had to leave, that his message was necessary. He has not completed the mission. And yet the fact that he attempted it has provoked an awareness of how things really stand: one that will be passed down to those who follow. This event is irreversible: you might argue that it was mistaken, you might forget it ever happened, but neither attitude can be sustained for long. The message was not delivered, nonetheless the message was not lost. This is what we are here to say. And were that the only thing left for us to do, it would be enough simply to know, and make known, that we have lived well.

The first letter of John the Evangelist: he whom we heard, he whom we beheld, he whom we contemplated and whom our hands touched, here, we declare unto you. And these things speak we unto you, that our joy may be complete. The start of the first century and the start of the twentieth to some extent resemble one another. The fulgurant beginning, the messianic message, the eschatological perspective that ‘shows unto you that eternal life’; against which a hard, tragic reaction – war, crisis, slaughter – returns us to the hundred-year peace: an operation of restorative innovation (a new name for the conservative revolution).

What is the workers’ movement missing? There were Desert Fathers. They were not listened to. But this is not their task, to be listened to in their own time. No, it is rather the seed cast into the field of the future. But in order that the plant comes forth, grows, bears fruit, and that the fruit not be lost, something else is needed. What is the message missing? I know it’s scandalous to even think it: what is missing is the Church form. That, it must be said, was attempted but did not succeed. The Revolution requires the Institution: to last not decades but centuries. This is the Church. To be conserved in time, for those to come, the liberatory event, always a momentary act – the taking of the Winter Palace – must be given a form. The transmutation of force into form is politics that persists, and then – only then – does it become history, comprehensive, complete and undiminished. And it is necessary to know, woe betide those who do not know it, that history, before the institution that contains it, is a permixta of good and bad.

It was Agamben who thought to go back to the young Ratzinger, reader of the Liber regularum, a work of the fourth-century Donatist heretic Ticonius. Ratzinger lingers on the Liber’s second rule, De Domini corpore bipartitio, ‘on the twofold body of the Lord’. I find this doctrine of the corpus bipartitum interesting for thinking the political. The body of the Church, insofar as it is the body of the Lord, has two sides, a ‘left’ and a ‘right’, guilty and blessed. Its two faces are found in the Scriptures: fusca sum et decora, says the bride of the Song of Songs, ‘I am black and comely’. The bride of Christ, the Church, has within itself as much sin as grace. Agamben writes:

Ratzinger emphasies the difference between this thesis and Augustine’s, who nonetheless has clearly drawn inspiration from it for his idea of a Church permixta of good and evil. ‘[In Ticonius] there is not that clear antithesis of Jerusalem and Babylon, which is so characteristic of Augustine. Jerusalem is at the same time Babylon, it includes it in itself. Both constitute one sole city, which has a “right” and a “left” side. Tyconius did not develop, like Augustine, a doctrine of the two cities, but that of one city with two sides’.

No one should think of relating these two sides to the left and the right that we nowadays discuss in the bar or between which we decide at the ballot box. This is a very serious matter. If even unto the Last Judgement there is a Church of Christ and a Church of the Antichrist, let alone in history a State of the righteous and a State of the wicked, then the good and the bad must exist not just in the same body politic, but in the very body of the Political. As Hegel said before Marx, whosoever wants die Weltändern, to transform life, must first of all come to terms with that ineliminable and irresolvable mysterium iniquitatis of the human condition and, with peace in their heart, struggle without hope of a definitive revelatio at the end of days. Kafka:

Great, tall commander-in-chief, leader of multitudes, lead the despairing through the mountain passes no one else can find beneath the snow. And who is it that gives you your strength? He who gives you your clear vision.

March–April 1917: as Kafka sent the message, Lenin wrote the April Theses. February had brought the bourgeois democratic revolution. ‘Dual power’ was in effect: the Provisional Government, which had overthrown the Romanov dynasty, coexisted with the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which harked back to the Petrograd Soviet of the 1905 revolution. Lenin had just completed and despatched from Dadaist Zurich his Letters from Afar. To Stockholm, then through Finland, in a sealed railway carriage, with the agreement of the German authorities – an ingenious tactical use of the enemy – he had arrived in Russia. At the Tauride Palace, where the Petrograd Soviet held their meetings, he speaks to a meeting of Social Democrats, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Independents. He reads them the April Theses:

The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. […]

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses. […]

Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy [for publication in Pravda Lenin notes ‘i.e., the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people’].

The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker. […]

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines, according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. […]

Our demand for a ‘commune state’ [note by Lenin: ‘i.e., a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype’]. […]

Change of the Party’s name [note by Lenin: ‘Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party].

Here is the message: ‘The tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’. And here is the messenger, who departs on his mission, with Marx’s whisper in his ears, repeated with exactitude. Carr retells the story of that meeting in which Lenin read the April Theses for the first time:

Bogdanov interrupted with cries of ‘Delirium, the delirium of a madman’; Goldenberg, another former Bolshevik, declared that ‘Lenin had proposed himself as candidate for a European throne vacant for 30 years, the throne of Bakunin’; and Steklov, the editor of Izvestiya and soon to join the Bolsheviks, added that Lenin’s speech consisted of ‘abstract constructions’ […]

Lenin’s speech was attacked from all sides, only Kollontai speaking in support of it; and he left the hall without exercising his right of reply. On the same evening he re-read the theses to a gathering of Bolshevik leaders, and once more found himself completely isolated.

Pravda published the theses on 7 April 1917, but the following day a statement by the leadership signed by Kamenev stressed that the theses constituted only ‘the personal opinion of Lenin’, and the same day the Petrograd party committee rejected them with 13 votes opposed, two in favour and one abstention.

These are the first signs of the difficulties that the political message will encounter in navigating the palaces of history. But this time – ‘November sixth is early, November eighth is too late’ – the message ultimately arrived at its destination. Miracles also exist in politics. And fortunately myth continues to transmit them. From that day, future humanity will conserve it in their memory. Therefore it’s possible! It is possible to reverse power, between the low and the high: those who are above, below; those who are below, above. Certainly, the messenger is ‘a vigorous, indefatigable man’, as Giulio Schiavoni puts it in his translation, ‘a robust, tireless man’ according to Rodolfo Paoli. ‘If he meets with resistance, he points to the symbol of the sun imprinted on his chest. He proceeds more quickly than anyone else’, we read in one version. And ‘if he is obstructed, he points to his chest on which is a symbol of the sun, and proceeds more easily than anyone else’, we read in the other.

Is that all? No, not for this alone was it a victory. For the bourgeoisie the revolution led to wars, those of Napoleon. For the proletariat war led to the revolution, that of Lenin. The dialectic of revolution and restoration functioned differently in the histories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the first, restoration came quickly, but the revolution won in the long run. The opposite occurred in the second: the revolution lasted, even if not sufficiently for its needs, but restoration was the definitive result; perhaps it could never have happened otherwise. So it was written.

‘The tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution’ was an eschatological message. It fits into the eternal history of salvation, sacred and not secular. It is the oppressed who rise up. Not homme, but humanité in revolt. With this message, and this messenger, it was translated into political action. For the first time. This is why its victory was irresistible.

If the message whispered in the ear does not find the messenger to bear it with power, making his way by force through the crowd, then it doesn’t arrive, doesn’t escape the tangle of palaces. The great, and for this reason tragic, event of the twentieth century, has taught us this. Instead, it is only the messenger who bears no message that arrives, because he is let through. We are being taught this lesson by the minor, comic event labelled the twenty-first century. Here, the prophecy has been fulfilled: the medium is the message. The messenger is the proclamation. Only nothing is allowed to come and go, democratically; never something. The catastrophe is that everything remains as it is. Nihilism amounts to everything being accepted as it is. Perhaps Russia was the only soil capable of welcoming that seed, the only space-time where the idea could have become history. Russian spirituality is what explains, deep down, that divine madness that was the proletarian October.

De Tocqueville caught some slight glimpse of the future. Communism in Russia and democracy in America are the two vast islands upon which the Modern, on its long journey, washed up. Provisionally, because other islands on other continents are still emerging. And today, one of these two great ships has arrived in port, while the other has foundered. Democracy has been realised and made a world of itself. Communism has been frustrated and turned itself into a dream. But the Russian revolutionary impetus and the practical American spirit remain two opposed choices in life, two alternative forms of existence. And I feel like saying something that is today scandalous: that freedom lies in the former, not the latter. I will add, repeating myself, a contentious assertion: naturally one can become free passing through many routes, but in the twentieth century I consider having been a communist the royal road. Speaking for myself, I know that I would never have the freedom that I feel, inside myself, without having passed through, in my thought and my life, the historic experience of communism.

Translated by Rees Nicolas.

This text originally appeared as ‘Un messaggio dell’imperatore’, in Dello Spirito Libero: Frammenti di vita e pensiero, Rome 2015.

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

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Darning the Planet

How had no one thought of it before? As millions sweltered in record-breaking temperatures across America and Southern Europe, a solution was hiding in plain sight. Simple, effective, and right under our noses – yet it took the perspicacity of the President of the French Republic to spot it. During Paris fashion week, Macron’s Secretary of State for Ecology, Bérangère Couillard, announced a groundbreaking new measure: from next autumn, subsidies ranging from €6 to €25 will be available to any French citizen who has an item of clothing repaired. The climate crisis will be averted by a trip to the tailor or the cobbler. Thanks to the meticulous bureaucracy of the French state, we already have the fine print of this bonus réparation textile:

For a pair of shoes:

€8 for an insole

€7 for the heel

€8 for stitching or gluing

€18 for a complete resoling (€25 if the shoes are leather)

€10 to replace a zipper

For a garment:

€7 to mend a hole, tear or rip

€10 for a lining (€25 if it’s complex)

€8 for a zipper

€6 for a seam (€8 if it’s double)

It could be argued that before it starts encouraging consumers to be less wasteful, the French government ought to encourage the textile and footwear industries to curb their practice of planned obsolescence, by imposing warranties that would oblige them to repair defective items free of charge for several years, or requiring the use of more durable materials. Educating citizens about environmentally friendly practices is certainly no bad thing. But given that – as Mies van der Rohe once said – ‘God is in the details’, it is worth taking a moment to consider the sums involved. The total amount allocated for this revolutionary measure was €154 million. Assuming that this figure doesn’t include the cost of employing bureaucrats to assess requests, disburse subsidies and supervise the quality of the repairs, this means a handsome €2.26 has been allocated for each of France’s 68 million people. Even if one were to only consider the 29.9 million ménages composed of an average of 2.2 members, each household would receive a grand total of €5.13 per year. To put this in context, recall that the French state spent some €7 billion on its pointless colonial mission in Africa, Operation Barkhane, which ended in ignominy last year; roughly €100,000 euros per year for every solider dispatched to the Sahel.

These numbers say a lot about the extent of the French government’s environmental commitments, and, more broadly, about the gigantic practical joke being played by world leaders in their ‘declaration of war’ on global warming. It is not just Macron. Look at how the rulers of countries hit by the record-breaking July heatwave behaved: as if global warming was some future menace, to be mended with the odd €6 for a jacket here and there (or €10 if it’s lined).

We’re not dealing with denialists here: they are comparatively unthreatening, for their bad faith is transparent, and they grow more pathetic by the hour despite their corporate bankrolling. Far more dangerous are those like Macron – that is, the overwhelming majority of the world’s political class, irrespective of ideological orientation – who feign concern from their air-conditioned offices and private planes, and then do nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact: for they make the public believe that the problem can be solved with half-measures and palliatives, promoting market solutions for a problem created by the market itself.  

The world is currently suffocating beneath a deluge of plastic, yet the plastic industry, which may well have the most effective lobby on the planet, is glaringly absent from environmental debates. The oil industry on which it depends meanwhile has discovered an irrepressible passion for the environment, according to its advertising campaigns; the term ‘greenwashing’ is appropriate precisely because it recalls money laundering by criminal organizations. They also propose utterly improbable solutions. Think of the electric car delusion – in order to pollute less we apparently need to build an electrical grid spanning the entire globe, replace every single car in the world (trucks and vans included) and furnish them with batteries whose production is one of the most polluting processes known to man.

Scientists contribute to these absurdities. A recent report in Nature described attempts to introduce crystals into the ocean in order to increase its alkalinity: a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions end up in the ocean, which acidifies the water, making it potentially inhospitable to life. What this plan amounts to is throwing lime (or some equivalent) into the sea. The problem is that humanity produces 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (in 1950 the figure was 6 billion). A quarter of this is over 9 billion tonnes, which could only be neutralized by a quantity of crystals of the same scale, which would presumably be dropped into the sea from the air. How much CO2 would be emitted by the production and global distribution of billions of tonnes of ocean antacid (without even discussing the immense pollution that this ‘solution’ would entail)?

Every year – as CO2 emissions and plastic production continue to climb – objectives that everyone knows to be unattainable are pompously announced. The 2015 Paris summit’s overarching goal was to hold ‘the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and pursue efforts ‘to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° above pre-industrial levels’, requiring greenhouse gas emissions to ‘peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030’. Such communiqués resemble a letter to Father Christmas; childish wishes for gifts to fall from the sky, or down the chimney. Only here governments around the world are writing Christmas letters to themselves. The World Meteorological Organization announced in May that there is a 66% chance that the 1.5° temperature rise will be reached before 2027. Yet the same organization maintains that already in 2022, the planet was 1.15 ± 0. 13° warmer than the pre-industrial average, making the last 8 years the warmest on record; that between 2020 and 2021 the increase in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was the highest since measurements have existed (methane is far more damaging than carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect); that the rate of ocean level rises doubled between the decade 1993-2002 and 2013-2022; that ocean acidification is accelerating. And so on.

Yet the environmental crisis is treated as a future threat, notwithstanding the warnings emanating from outlets as close to polluting corporations as the Financial Times, which sternly informs its readers that we are dealing with ‘a present reality’. The planet is becoming unliveable already. As an acquaintance recently joked to me, ‘you can’t live locked in a refrigerator’; yet the fastest growing city in the US is Phoenix, where this summer the temperature exceeded 40° for more than a month, forcing people to rely constantly on air conditioning (which further accelerates global warming).

Inspired, perhaps, by Ionesco and Beckett, today’s world leaders have invented a politics of the absurd. To get a measure of the situation, one need only compare the attention, ideological mobilization and resources devoted to the war in Ukraine with those devoted to the environmental crisis. The difference being that while the war endangers the lives of 43.8 million people and directly impacts 9 million more who live in the disputed territories, the environmental crisis endangers the lives of billions of people, condemns billions more to poverty and starvation, and has already forced 30 million people a year to migrate, with some forecasts predicting 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Meanwhile, Russia and NATO spend hundreds of billions on arms, while the war drives up commodity prices and government deficits. If just a tenth of these sums were devoted to the environmental crisis, the effect would be revolutionary.

This gives us a clear sense of how high the environment ranks in our ruler’s priorities. From a certain perspective, the masters of the earth behave towards nature as the US has towards Russia: waging a war against it without outright declaration. They treat the planet like marauders who plunder cities, burning everything to the ground. Why such obstinacy on behalf of our ‘cognitive aristocracy’? Why do they have it in for our planet? It’s not like they can emulate the marauders who, after sacking one city, could move on to the next. As much as they tout their mythical space industry, they will not be able to emigrate to a new planet after rendering this one uninhabitable. Pure recklessness, perhaps? A complete immersion in the present that effaces any thought of tomorrow? Boundless selfishness? The syndrome of the scorpion, for whom the earth plays the part of the frog? Or is it simple cowardice, a lack of courage to face the problem?

Perhaps a clue was recently provided by the ineffable Macron himself, when he spoke of the violence that broke out in late June among French youth – overwhelmingly children of immigrants living in the banlieues – triggered by the killing of a young man by the police. The solution, according to Macron, was simple: ‘order, order, order’. ‘Authority must be restored’ because the violence ultimately depends on a ‘parental deficit’. ‘An overwhelming majority’ of the protestors, he explained ‘have a fragile family framework, either because they come from a single-parent family or their family is on child support benefits’. In short, it’s the fault of single mothers (implied to have loose morals), who have failed to instil the values of civil etiquette in their turbulent offspring. In other words, the youth of the banlieues are violent because they’re sons of… To think we hadn’t realised! Maybe the elites exercise such violence on the planet because, without ever admitting it, they too are sons of…

Read on: Adam Hanieh, ‘Petrochemical Empire’, NLR 130.

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Rule by Junta

It’s typical of the West that it manages to make other people’s problems its own. In the Sahel, it may have some excuse. This highly peripheral region, which, until about a decade ago, was a concern only for humanitarians and the lesser departments of aid organizations, has quickly become central to Western preoccupations. First it was migration, then terrorism, now Russia; indeed, all three together at this point. In 1999, after a coup in Niger, I remember receiving a letter from a German aid worker including a tiny newspaper clipping with a single paragraph devoted to what it called the ‘Coup in die Wüste’, or ‘coup in the desert’ (the distinction between the Sahel and Sahara failed to register back then). By contrast, the Niger coup of 26 July – the latest in a series of West African overthrows that began in Mali in August 2020, continued in Guinea in September 2021 and reached Burkina Faso twice in 2022 – has provoked a global media frenzy. This time, I had to decline countless media requests simply for lack of time and headspace after granting countless others.

The coup took place in a fraught international context and sparked fears that it might herald a ‘Khaki Winter’ – that is, a string of copycat takeovers – in a region which, historically, has experienced the most coups on the most coup-prone continent in the world. Yet, even leaving all that aside, Niger’s putsch has some particularly dramatic features. It explodes the country’s status as the Sahel’s ‘last man standing’, a model of stability and democracy in the imagination of Western diplomats; the coup leaders have acted more recklessly than in the three other countries; and they are now being confronted more aggressively by both the West and the regional groupings of states, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WEAMU).

Exactly how and why the coup began, it is too early to tell. Western observers were almost unanimously stunned by the news. Because it did not follow the pattern of Mali and Burkina Faso, where military takeovers came about in the wake of large anti-government protests, it looked to them like a bolt from the blue. But save for the fact that a coup is necessarily surprising, being the result of stealth action, this one failed to astonish the people of Niger. It follows at least two other coup attempts since 2021, one of which occurred just two days before President Mohammed Bazoum’s inauguration. If Nigeriens did not express their discontent in the same way as the Malians and Burkinabes, this did not mean they were any more satisfied with their government; they were simply less organized. A protest coalition called M62, founded in August 2022 and named after the sixty-two years of independence from France, attempted to mobilize their resentments, but it was foiled by the regime. This unfolded in a political context where civil society activism had become a spent force and the independence of the media was considerably diminished. Over the years, both protest movements and critical journalists have been brought to heel through the Nigerien state’s liberal use of bribery and threats, including fiscal auditing and other administrative chicanery.

The previous coup attempts were merely the tip of the iceberg. In February, a military officer close to President Bazoum told me that coup-plotting had become routine, even banal, in high military circles. He added that in meetings between the president and the military command, the generals and colonels were frosty and sulking, while Bazoum was at a loss as to how to break through to them. He had to resort to continuous monitoring and engage in a game of re-appointments and disguised removals in what proved, ultimately, a futile attempt to outpace potential coup-makers. Given the degree of state surveillance, however, a coup could succeed only if it were perpetrated by the security body most trusted by Bazoum: the Presidential Guard. This body had thwarted coups not only under Bazoum but also under his predecessor, Mahamadou Issoufou. Having served under both administrations, the Guard’s commander, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, enjoyed the firm confidence of Bazoum. In an interview the detained president managed to give to Jeune Afrique from his place of custody, he denied the rumour that he was about to discharge Tchiani.

The bone of contention between these branches of the state was security policy. Under Issoufou, Niger opposed the 2011 NATO intervention to dislodge Khadafi, predicting it would destroy Libya and set off a security and migration crisis in the region. But when the prophesy came true, Issoufou decided to seek the help of the West to contain the fallout. There was a rational reason for this. Freshly into power, Issoufou and Bazoum’s party, the PNDS (or Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism) had plans for large-scale social spending in health and education. It also intended to replenish the civil service, which had not recruited in years. To carry through this programme, security expenditure had to be minimized, which was achievable only if someone else helped to shoulder the costs.  

On a broader level, relations between the newly elected government and military were rotten from the outset. In July 2011, after just four months in power, Issoufou foiled a coup attempt. One of the alleged plotters, Lt. Ousmane Awal Hambaly – a member of the Presidential Guard – saw his case dismissed and was released in 2012, but was subsequently involved in yet another coup attempt in 2015. At his second trial, he claimed that he had been ‘baited’ by Tchiani, who convinced him to plan the coup along with other military officers. Tchiani had by this time acquired a reputation for cooking up coup plots that he would then defuse, in order to make himself indispensable to his presidential patrons. Whatever the truth of the matter, such coup attempts served to make Issoufou paranoid about the military. According to hard-to-verify anecdotes – the non-existence of investigative journalism means that Niger’s public opinion relies mostly on gossip and rumours – such paranoia got in the way of beefing up the army for the fight against the Jihadists.

The reign of the PNDS began with good intentions, but was soon beset by serious flaws that made a viable security policy more difficult to achieve down the line. Two, in particular, turned the public against the ruling party. The first was endemic corruption, which had given democracy a bad name in Niger, and which the PNDS had promised to root out. In 2011, the government created a toll-free number to denounce acts of corruption, as well as a permanent body to combat it, raising hopes of reform that were later dashed. The second flaw was the recasting of the political system. Throughout the 2000s, Nigerien politics operated on the basis of opposing coalition blocs that jockeyed for position and forced each party to compromise with one another. This created a political balance that gave hope to opposition forces and reduced the public’s fear of being excluded from political rent-seeking or participation. It was this balance that the PNDS set out to destroy, in a bid to consolidate its permanent hold on power. Opposition parties were fragmented (Nigeriens use the energetic French term concassage, as in the crushing of a hard material), then absorbed through the lavish disbursement of treasures: plum jobs, contracts, tolerance for embezzlement and other improprieties. PNDS-led governments made room for dozens of ministers – always more than forty – along with hundreds of advisers and ‘high representatives’. Parties that refused this form of ‘inclusion’ were persecuted, notably by the above–mentioned anti-corruption body (the toll-free number was discontinued early on). The one organization that resisted assimilation throughout the PNDS’s tenure was the Moden (Nigerien Democratic Movement), better known as Lumana, which had a stranglehold on the country’s western region, including the capital, Niamey. Its candidate, Hama Amadou, spent the 2016 presidential campaign in jail.

The dominance of the PNDS had deleterious consequences for Niger’s democracy. It depoliticized the public sphere, which thereby increased the politicization of other areas of national life, including the civil service, where promotion came to depend on allegiance to the party and its coalition, and the army. De facto single-party rule was established. The cost was the deep unpopularity of the regime, the weakening of democratic institutions and the law – which were forced to serve partisan goals – and a declining sense of national unity, as people in the west of the country, and more generally in the south, felt they were second-class citizens compared to those in the Tahoua region (fief of the PNDS) and the north. Trust in elections was eroded. If the system of political balance was corrupting, the de facto single-party system was no less so, as well as being oppressive and non-inclusive. Nigeriens called it ‘the Gouri System’, from the Hausa word for ‘wish’, taken from one of President Issoufou’s slogans.

Thus, by the end of the 2010s, Niger had two pressing problems: unrelenting Jihadist violence, and a diseased democracy unable to deliver true legitimacy to the elected. In this context, the presence of the West looked like an added problem. It was more limited than in Mali, where the French counterterrorism Barkhane force and the UN’s peacekeeping MINUSMA mission operated. Before falling out with Mali’s junta and moving the remnants of Barkhane to Niger in late 2022, the French were active mostly in the north of the country, where they protected uranium mining sites. For their part, the Americans have two bases for the surveillance of the vast wastes of the central Sahara, while European forces offered training and technical assistance. This foreign presence was seen as intrusive, and the PNDS could not sell it to the public because of its own divisive style of rule. In the era of compromise politics, it could have made its case to opposition parties and genuinely independent civil society groupings, and a trusted, independent press could have been engaged. The public could have been swayed through debate. But the PNDS presented any criticism as a threat issuing from a radicalized opposition (PNDS activists called their Lumana counterparts ‘the delinquents’), rather than a legitimate grievance. In any case, the government seemed able simply to ignore popular discontent, since their police forces could deal with it easily enough. The only place where it erupted was Niamey, a city divided half-and-half between locals and migrants which, unlike the capitals of Burkina Faso and Mali, Ouagadougou and Bamako, lacks a unified identity base.

More grievously, the PNDS lost its bet that the West would help eradicate the Jihadist presence. Had this bet been won, the party would be in power today. But not only did the West fail to help on that front; it became an obstacle to collective security once the putsches in Mali and Burkina Faso brought to power juntas that chose not to rely on it. Prior to these developments, the three countries, together with Chad and Mauritania, were building momentum for the G5 Sahel: a collective security apparatus that would encompass the whole Sahel. Junta-led Mali and Burkina Faso crashed out of it in 2022 and made clear they would not work with Niger on collective security matters as long as Niger partnered with the French. From then on, Niger faced a dilemma, especially since the elite in the Sahel, and in Francophone West Africa more broadly, traditionally tends to scapegoat the French for their own failures, relying on the familiar yet elusive concept of Françafrique. In addition, a more recent ideological brew that combines decolonial radicalism, fringe ideologies like Kemetism (a religious belief that Black Africa is heir to Pharaonic Egypt), and the prickly sovereigntism of the weak, has seeped into the public via social media networks, sometimes from sources in France’s Black community. A Russophilia that was peculiar to Mali, going back to the reign of independence leader Modibo Keita, also percolated in this mixture. And France’s own mistakes, which stemmed from its highly inegalitarian relations with its African partners, poured fuel on the fire.

The PNDS’s Niger saw no reason to break its agreements with the West. But the military, who were influenced by the same ideological messaging, thought collective security with Mali and Burkina Faso was more important than partnership with these foreign powers. That’s why they sulked in meetings with the government. Bazoum, it seems, tried listening to them. Early this year, his chief of defence, Salifou Mody, was sent to Bamako to negotiate collective security measures. It is possible that Bazoum heard he did more than that, since he removed him in April and gave him the embassy in the Emirates, a potential source of rich pickings. But this manoeuvre failed to save the incumbent. Brought to power by the coup as second in line, Mody is now busy building ties with Bamako and Ouagadougou, and the Niamey junta has ‘denounced’ the partnership with France.

In theory, the coup could fix Niger’s two main problems. It could ‘reboot’ its democracy, which had been frozen by the Gouri System, and it could lead to the development of a better security policy. If the PNDS’s trajectory is any indication, the two outcomes are related. But does the junta care about democracy? And what about the West and Nigeria, both of which responded harshly to the putsch, the first suspending all aid, the second threatening war?

The process of restarting democracy by coup is no extraordinary occurrence in Niger. In fact, it has happened three times in the past, in 1996 (arguably), 1999 and 2010. But now the domestic and international climate is different. Niamey’s putschists are inspired by the examples of Bamako and Ouagadougou, whose juntas have weathered sanctions and stood up to the ‘international community’ and ECOWAS, while barely committing to a return to democratic governance. As in these other countries, the Nigerien junta is currently enjoying the adulation of the public, glad to see the fall of the Gouri System. They may interpret this as a form of legitimization that exempts them from having to return to the democratic process. Meanwhile, the ideological climate pushing toward a rupture with France and the West will also help to set the stage for authoritarianism – even though the West could be criticised for turning a blind eye to the PNDS’s own authoritarian tendencies and abetting them by default. The events in Burkina Faso and Mali indicate that, after a year or so, genuine support for juntas dwindles to the committed ideologues and those who have staked their future on their regime. Others tend to accept them because the material changes to their lives are minimal. If there is still a dearth of political participation, there is also a traditional Sahelian acceptance that this is what military rule looks like. The result is a form of political regression – although democracy as practised under Mali’s Ibrahim Boubakar Keita or Niger’s Gouri System hardly amounted to progress either.  

In all three countries, then, democratic restoration can come only from outside pressure – that of ECOWAS in particular. But in Niger, this pressure got off to a bad start. Because Nigeria was caught off-guard by the putsch, exasperated by the feeling of one coup too many, and under a leader – Bola Tinubu – who is determined to give ECOWAS a truly Nigerian stamp (even though Nigerians know and understand very little about their French-speaking neighbours), its response was severe. It included threats of military intervention along with sanctions such as cutting Niger’s electricity supply, over 70% of which comes from Nigeria. The Niamey putschists, naïve not to expect this backlash, have responded with outrage –  recalling ambassadors, breaking off agreements and refusing to receive emissaries.

If the putschists manage to entrench their rule and maintain their intransigence, declining to reach any compromise with the Nigerians and Westerners, which would inevitably involve a break with the methods of the Malian and Burkinabe juntas, the likely outcome will be the withdrawal of European security and development aid (if not humanitarian funding) and the continuation of ECOWAS sanctions, which are likely to be more damaging for Niger than they were for Mali. The Nigerien population will suffer, but they will take it as one more calamity among many, especially given their proverbial fear of ‘the soldier’. There will then be two unknowns: the attitude of the Americans, who will want to hold on to their desert bases, and that of the Russians, should the junta decide to invite them to Niger in the form of Wagner. Which, given its recent rhetoric, is not impossible.

Read on: Rahmane Idrissa, ‘Mapping the Sahel’, NLR 132.

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Structures of Feeling

The front cover of Lucy R. Lippard’s I See/You Mean, republished in 2021 by New Documents after decades out of print, is a pale shade of violet. On its lower left side, a map of what appear to be sea currents, signalled by a series of arrows; its upper right side may depict land, with rivers marked as lines. The first edition, published by the feminist press Chrysalis in 1979, carried a version of this same design, but in a deep blue. How might we interpret the change? Towards the end of Lippard’s book, we read that blue ‘is complete calm, depth of feelings, the medium of empathy’, while violet might express ‘emotional insecurity’ or a desire for approval. An additional change has been made to the back cover, which now features a black and white photograph of the author. Looking down at something out of frame, Lippard could be standing at a desk or table, perhaps reading something or examining images, writing or annotating (the question of whether she was an ‘artist’ rather than a ‘writer’ was raised around the time of the book’s writing). Barely visible in the background are the ordered panes of a glass door, a hint of a structure that permeates I See/You Mean: the grid.

I See/You Mean is an entropic novel, one constantly on the verge of disintegrating into fragments. Lippard is principally known as an art critic and curator, and her book derives from the North American art world of the late 1960s, a period in which Lippard was working as a researcher for art books to support her writing career, was a mother to a young son, and participated in activist groups like Art Workers’ Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution. The writing of the novel coincided with some of her most renowned artistic projects, and their concerns are legible within it. One was Six Years (1973), whose lengthy subtitle gives an account of Lippard’s ambitions for the work:

Six Years: The dematerialisation of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.

Another was a series of conceptual art exhibitions she organised between 1969 and 1974, often referred to as the ‘numbers’ shows because each was titled after the population of the city in which they were staged (the last of these, featuring only women artists, c. 7500, was held in Valencia, California). The third was the set of ‘feminist essays on women’s art’ collected in From the Center (1976). I See/You Mean, then, dates from a time when Lippard’s minimalist and conceptualist allegiances were being overwritten by feminism.

Lippard’s novel is on its surface an oblique portrait of New York’s avant-garde scene. One chapter, ‘Log V/Everybody’, for example, describes a party through a range of devices: unattributed snatches of speech, lists of conversation topics (‘Ad Reinhardt, money, day care, science fiction, Angela Davis’), movements (‘D to G to C and M and R’), data about guests (‘69 of the people at the party who live in New York City live below 14th Street; 18 live on the Upper East Side’) and their interactions (‘26% talked to people they had never met before; 17% of these because they felt physically attracted’). The quasi-systematic, quasi-rational cataloguing of information lies somewhere between Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist accounts of kinship systems and Dan Graham’s language piece March 31, 1966, with its list of measurements from the artist to the nearest subway station, to the paper in his typewriter, the ‘.00000098 miles’ between his cornea and retinal wall.

Most of I See/You Mean centres on four characters called A, B, D and E. Its most typical device is the description of imaginary photographs. Julia Bryan-Wilson has speculated that, used to writing about images as a critic, Lippard felt the need to invent some to hang her fiction on. Their effect is to conjure something of the solidity of the index, as well as distance. In photographs, unlike the movements of consciousness that have predominated in the modern novel, we see characters frozen and from outside. The additional representational form sets us at a remove from the characters, particularly as photographs are by their nature always in the past tense. The ekphrastic passages are interspersed with dated diary entries, lengthy quotations from other books, fragments of characters’ internal monologues, star sign information, I Ching readings (which might make us think of Lee Lozano’s 1969 I Ching Piece). Applied to the characters’ relationships, their jealousies, their pleasures, their arguments about feminism, writing and sex, these devices are ways of ‘managing experience’, to use Eve Meltzer’s phrase for the repressions and returns of affect in conceptual art.

I See/You Mean embodies a decentred, intimate positivism: the accumulation of documentation never amounts to a totality. If anything, it starts to break down. Diagrams such as the one carried on the book’s cover reduce their objects to a state of conceptual order, but in doing so reveal the way the objects they depict – the deep complexity of oceans, tides and shores for example – exceed their dimensions. The ocean is the book’s central metaphor for this dialectic between form and feeling. At one point, there is a description of a series of photographs demonstrating the effects of different wind-speeds on the sea surface; this is followed by a dated fragment saying ‘I need the sea to be the book’s armature; no – its medium’. Elsewhere, an account of sea currents might just as well denote the movements of emotion:

‘…there are deep flows, generally as slow drifts of immense masses of water, and these are of equal significance with the superficial currents in the whole system of mixing and interchanging of water masses … Ocean currents are caused by conditions existing in the water as well as by outside forces. Of the internal causes, most prominent are those due to differences in pressure; unequal pressure results when one part of the ocean is heated to a higher temperature than another … There may be internal waves at several different levels, and each series of waves may have some effect on those above and below’.

At another moment, two women discuss the orgasmic potential of the sea:

What turns you on?

Sexually?

Yes.

Well, if I think about the ocean – the idea or image of the ocean, something cool and clear and wet and all-enveloping. Sounds of waves breaking, the rhythms all the same but different, crossing each other, and endless. It rocks me out of my head and thoughts and inhibitions, I suppose.

I can see that. Oh yes. The sensual curve of a wave, like a body, the build-up. I’d never thought of it as directly erotic.

Anything moving or changing or heaving or curving. But slow.

The desire for the sea stems from the way it carries along, swallows up, obliterates the subject. The book begins and ends on the beach – the edge of the ocean, where human figures can still stand before being encompassed by its depths.

I See/You Mean’s dedication reads ‘For Susana, who always understands the sensuous grid’. In Rosalind Krauss’s account, the grid is the exemplary form in modernist art, symptomatic of visual art’s desire to emancipate itself from literature, narrative and discourse, and to declare its autonomy from nature, mimesis and the real world. What happens when the grid is brought back into literature – as in the book’s various devices of description, measurement and commentary – and applied to events and states of mind? In I See/You Mean, the absolutism of the grid is compromised. Its grids are all partial and incomplete – tentative frameworks drawn in coloured pencil, to test a logic of feeling. The novel is sensitive to the grid’s edges, the places where its claims to reason and totality are problematised. This is a social fact as much as a philosophical one. At the party, we are informed that the only two black people see each other across the room and ‘exchange ironic glances’. While the book’s initial grid of characters (two men, two women) might suggest a heterosexual logic, as it progresses A sleeps with B (a woman) and E (a man, who is gay), as well as D, her partner (and has an affair with Oliver, one of the two black guests at the party). To say the grid is sensuous, moreover, is not only to say that this abstract structure is brought into contact with bodies and all the psychological confusion they bring with them. It is to say – as Meltzer has – that grids are already sensuous. The clarity of grids is enticing. There is a beauty in their aesthetic. We can become deeply attached to them.

‘Feelings are facts’, says Yvonne Rainer. This is another statement of emotional positivism. Rainer’s films from the early 1970s share a great deal with I See/You Mean: the New York art scene, minimalism as it encounters the effects of the women’s movement, the cool presentation of emotionally charged material, taxonomic methods applied to the interpersonal. The final sequence of her Lives of Performers (1972) restages photographs from a book documenting G. W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929): representations of representations of a representation. About three-quarters of the way through, ‘No Expectations’ by the Rolling Stones starts to play, catching the spectator off guard. Pop music’s contrasting quality of allowing the listener to access and feel their emotions renders the moment, for me at least, almost unbearably moving. (‘Moving’ is a key word in the Rainer dictionary: ‘No to moving and being moved’ is the most over-quoted phrase in her writing.) Yet Rainer lets the Rolling Stones do this work for her. Everything on screen remains carefully controlled. I See/You Mean concludes differently. The structuring devices appear less and less frequently, while the distanced account of the various characters yields to a focus on A, speaking in the first person. Her narration resembles Lippard’s own life (she is in Spain, finishing a book, alone with her young child). This is close to – maybe is – ‘autobiography’. It is tempting to think that one of the determinants of this difference is feminism, a label that Rainer was still wary of embracing at the time, unlike Lippard, who said that writing the book made her into a feminist.

I see – the visual; you mean – language, literature. (Spoken aloud, ‘see’ and ‘you’ sound like ‘C’ and ‘U’, more letters.) We could interpret the book’s title in light of the feminist theories of the gaze elaborated shortly after, which posit women as the screen onto which the fantasies and fears of the male looker are projected, subjecting women to their meanings. Optics is one type of grid; language is another. Still, ‘I’ and ‘You’ are ambiguous here – could ‘I’ be the writer of the book? To ‘mean’, also, is not only to have meaning for another, against one’s will; it can also be to intend, which implies agency. And meaning is not only the bloodless work of signification, but the carrying of resonance, emotional weight. Seeing and meaning may sometimes be opposed, but they can also be connected (‘I see what you mean’). If Lippard’s title remains enigmatic, this may be because it is happy to slide between the analytical clarity of the grid and the mess of experience that eludes its grasp.

Read on: Caitlín Doherty, ‘Between Ego and Libido: On the Work of Carolee Schneemann’ , NLR 138.

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Zombie Economy

In the early 2010s, the economist Justin Lin Yifu, a former World Bank chief official with ties to the Chinese government, predicted that China’s economy would have at least two more decades of growth above 8%. He reckoned that since the country’s per capita income at that time was about the same level as Japan’s in the 1950s and South Korea’s and Taiwan’s in the 1970s, there was no reason China could not replicate the erstwhile successes of these other East Asian states. Lin’s optimism was echoed by the Western commentariat. The Economist projected that China would become the world’s biggest economy by 2018, surpassing the United States. Others fantasized that the Communist Party would embark on an ambitious programme of political liberalization. The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2013 that Xi would ‘spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well. Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison’. The political scientist Edward Steinfeld likewise argued in 2010 that China’s embrace of globalization would kickstart a process of ‘self-obsolescing authoritarianism’ resembling that of Taiwan in the 1980s and 90s. 　

Ten years later, the naivety of these forecasts is apparent. Even before the onset of Covid-19, the Chinese economy had slowed down and entered a domestic debt crisis, visible in the collapse of major real estate developers like Evergrande. After Beijing lifted all pandemic restrictions in late 2022, a widely anticipated economic rebound failed to materialize. Youth unemployment spiked at above 20%, surpassing that of every other G-7 nation (another estimate put it at above 45%). Data on trade, price, manufacturing and GDP growth all point to deteriorating conditions – a trend that fiscal and monetary stimulus has failed to reverse. The Economist now claims that China might never catch up with the US, and it is universally acknowledged that Xi is no liberal, having redoubled state intervention in the private sector and foreign enterprises while silencing dissenting voices (including those that had previously been tolerated by the Party).

It would be wrong to think that external factors have radically altered China’s prospects. Rather, the country’s gradual decline started more than a decade ago. Those who closely analysed the data, beyond the buzzing business districts and flashy building developments, detected this economic malaise as early as 2008. Back then, I wrote that China was entering a typical overaccumulation crisis. Its booming export sector had raked in a huge amount of foreign reserves since the mid-1990s. In its closed financial system, exporters must surrender their foreign earnings to the central bank, which creates equivalent RMB to mop up the foreign currencies. This led to the rapid expansion of RMB liquidity in the economy, mostly in the form of bank loans. Because the banking system is tightly controlled by the party-state – with state-owned or state-connected enterprises serving as the fiefdoms and cash cows of elite families – the state sector enjoyed privileged access to state bank loans, which were used to fuel an investment spree. The result was rising employment, a temporary and localized economic boom, and a windfall for the elite. But this dynamic also left behind redundant and unprofitable construction projects: empty apartments, underused airports, excessive coal plants and steel mills. That, in turn, resulted in falling profits, slowing growth and worsening indebtedness across the main sectors of the economy.

Throughout the 2010s, the party-state periodically undertook new lending in an attempt to arrest the slowdown. But many enterprises simply took advantage of easy bank loans to refinance their existing debt without adding new spending or investment to the economy. These companies eventually became loan addicts; and as with any addiction, increasing doses were needed to generate diminishing effects. Over time, the economy lost its dynamism as zombie enterprises were kept alive through debt alone: a classic case of the ‘balance-sheet recession’ that roiled Japan after its boom ended in the early 1990s. Yet just as these woes became increasingly clear to insiders in the early 2010s, they were censored in official media, which amplified Lin’s upbeat assessment. Meanwhile in the Western world, a web of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives had reason to suppress more sceptical analyses, as they continued to profit off luring investors into China. The illusion of limitless high-speed growth thus ruled the day at the very moment when the economy entered its most serious crisis since the outset of the market reform era.

Beijing has long known what must be done to alleviate this crisis. An obvious step would be to initiate redistributive reform to boost household income and hence household consumption – which, as a share of GDP, has been among the lowest in the world. Since the late 90s, there have been calls to rebalance the Chinese economy in favour of a more sustainable growth model, by reducing its reliance on exports and fixed asset investment like infrastructure construction. This led to some reformist, redistributive policies under the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao government of 2003–13, such as the New Labour Contract Law, the abolition of agriculture tax, and the redirection of government investment to inland rural regions. But the weight of vested interests (state enterprises, as well as local governments thriving on construction contracts and state bank loans fuelling those projects), and the powerlessness of social groups who stand to benefit from such rebalancing policy (workers, peasants and middle-class households), meant that reformism did not take root. The minimal gains in inequality reduction in the Hu–Wen period were duly reversed after the mid-2010s. More recently, Xi has made clear that his ‘common prosperity programme’ is not a return to the egalitarianism of the Mao era, nor even a restoration of welfarism. It is, rather, an assertion of the state’s paternalistic role vis-à-vis capital: increasing its presence in the tech and real estate sectors, and aligning private entrepreneurship with the broader interests of the nation.

The party-state has been bracing itself for the social and political repercussions of this dire situation. In official policy speeches, ‘security’ has become the most frequently uttered word, eclipsing ‘economy’. The current leadership believes that it can survive an economic downturn by tightening its control over society, eradicating autonomous elite factions, and adopting a more assertive posture on the international stage amid rising geopolitical tension – even if such measures serve to aggravate its developmental problems. This helps to explain the abolition of the presidential term limits in 2018, the centralization of power within Xi’s hands, the relentless campaign to root out Party factions in the name of anti-corruption, the construction of a growing surveillance state, and the shifting basis of state legitimation: away from the delivery of economic growth and towards nationalist fervour. The current weakening of the economy and hardening of authoritarianism are not easily reversible trends. They are, in fact, the logical outcome of China’s uneven development and capital accumulation over the last four decades. This means they are here to stay.

Read on: Nathan Sperber, ‘Party and State in China’, NLR 142.

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Imperfect Unity

With expectations set perilously high, last month’s NATO summit in Vilnius could not help but disappoint. Ukraine and some of its most ardent supporters believed that the glittering mirage of membership might materialize at last. The superlative language used to describe the event – ‘the most consequential gathering for the alliance in modern history’, ‘the most comprehensive defence plans since the end of the Cold War’ – suggested maximalist aspirations. Reflecting on the ongoing conflict in Europe, heads of state invoked the world wars of the twentieth century: a fight for the continent, for the West, for democracy itself. But behind the cheery technicolor photo-ops and self-congratulatory soundbites lurked an ineluctable fact: NATO is only prepared to engage in a limited, restrained war effort. This gap between rhetoric and reality has so far proved sustainable. But with Russian and Ukrainian forces locked in a bitter stalemate, and fractures opening up among the supposedly united West, will it remain so?

For supporters of NATO enlargement, the summit seemed to begin on a bright note. On its eve, it was announced that Turkey had finally agreed to back Swedish entry – which it had so far blocked over the country’s putative support for ‘Kurdish terror’. The news was met with the expected fanfare, and seemed to presage good things for Kyiv. Yet on 11 July Erdoğan appeared to change course, issuing a ‘clarification’ which stated that his government would need to examine the implementation of Sweden’s terrorism legislation before it could make a final decision, which may have to wait until the Turkish parliament next convenes in October. In the days leading up to the summit, Biden had tried to link Turkey’s receipt of much-coveted F-16s to an agreement that it would drop its objections to Swedish accession; but this too would require authorization from the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees, which may not be forthcoming. Erdoğan meanwhile began to talk up the prospect of reviving long-stalled plans for Turkey’s EU accession: ‘First, come and open the way for Turkey at the European Union and then we will open the way for Sweden, just as we did for Finland.’ Some are whispering that Turkey could get its candidate appointed to a key counterterrorism position in NATO, in a quid quo pro to signal that its concerns about ‘terrorism’ are being taken seriously.

Member states had already demonstrated their willingness to bend over backwards to please Erdoğan. On 6 July, a Swedish court made the unprecedented decision to convict a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. He will serve a four-and-a-half–year prison sentence in Sweden before being extradited to Turkey. Among the large Swedish-Kurdish diaspora, the case was widely viewed as a political stitch-up: another human sacrifice on NATO’s altar. The seemingly bottomless capacity to accommodate autocratic Turkey is, of course, difficult to reconcile with the framing of the current confrontation with Russia, as a civilizational struggle between an enlightened band of Western democracies and Putin’s Oriental despotism. NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, unveiled in Madrid, states that ‘authoritarian actors challenge our interests, values, and democratic way of life’ – but this refers solely to authoritarians outside NATO, not those within it. It remains to be seen whether the Atlantic alliance can maintain its current popularity while forfeiting any pretence to ‘shared values’. In 2014, a policy paper from the Norweigan Centre for Integrity in the Defence Sector warned that ‘unless NATO is seen as a community of values, public support and mutual solidarity may easily become undermined’.

The most dramatic disappointment of the Vilnius summit, however, was the news that Ukraine would not be granted a timeframe for eventual membership. The US and Germany were staunchly opposed to the idea, meaning that it was never a serious possibility. But it had been treated like one by the media, who ratcheted up expectations to an impossible pitch, echoed by Zelensky. Rather than a pathway to accession, the alliance approved a ‘three-part package to bring Ukraine closer to NATO’, including a ‘multi-year assistance programme to facilitate the transition of the Ukrainian armed forces from Soviet-era to NATO standards’, the establishment of a new NATO–Ukraine Council (where Ukraine and NATO will ‘meet as equals’), and reaffirmation that Ukraine would become a member someday, along with the waiving of the Membership Action Plan (MAP) requirement. NATO’s communiqué states that ‘We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when allies agree and conditions are met.’ Naturally, there is no explanation of what those conditions might be. What Ukraine has been granted is something akin to the so-called ‘Israel model’: a combination of ‘arms sales, security commitments, and military training’. For critics, this was merely a disingenuous attempt to spin the provision of arms as something more lofty. As the international relations theorist Patrick Porter put it: ‘What NATO is saying to Ukraine is “we think you’re worth fighting for at some point in the future, but we don’t think you’re worth fighting for now, when you’ve been invaded”’.

The provision of weapons and equipment has itself been incremental and limited. Ukraine has long sought F-16s from the US, but two months after Biden pledged support for training Ukrainian pilots to use the aircraft, he has yet to approve the delivery of manuals and flight simulators; nor have the Europeans produced a final training plan. This piecemeal approach, whereby Ukraine is furnished with a steady supply of arms which nonetheless falls short of what is needed to make a meaningful difference on the battlefield – while peace negotiations are categorically rejected – all but ensures that the war will be prolonged indefinitely. As it grinds on, without major breakthroughs on either side, the West will find it increasingly difficult to harmonize its bellicose rhetoric with its more tentative actions.

Vilnius was haunted by the spectre of summits past. Typically, the US informs its allies about its objectives about three or four months before the summit. But at the 2008 meeting in Bucharest, Bush made a surprise announcement that Ukraine and Georgia must be promised NATO membership at some unspecified future date, with the US pushing for the insertion of both countries into the MAP. Sceptical observers noted that this was the worst possible messaging: enough to provoke Russia, but not enough to prevent it from responding. This year, worries that Vilnius would amount to little more than ‘Bucharest 2.0’ seemed to be borne out: NATO effectively vowed to intensify the war without hastening its conclusion.

Venting his frustration via Twitter, Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that ‘It’s unprecedented and absurd when [a] time frame is not set, neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership.’ His remarks reflected a curious feature of the current Atlantic power bloc. American hegemony has in one sense been rejuvenated by the Russian invasion, with the Biden Administration corralling its European deputies into a drawn-out conflict. Yet the US’s hegemonic vision and geopolitical acumen still leave much to be desired. Declarations of ‘unprecedented Western unity’ may have seemed credible during the war’s first year, but the cracks are now proving difficult to ignore. Like Bush before him, Biden’s geostrategy is exposing latent divisions among the military alliance.

Of course, for many in the US security apparatus, developments in Ukraine are an unhelpful distraction from the more pressing issue of China’s rise. In 2022, the alliance published its strategic concept designating the PRC a ‘systemic challenge’. This year’s communiqué replicated that rhetoric: ‘The People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values’, it stated. The ‘A4’ nations – South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand – are a new fixture of the summit, and in June aircraft from the Japanese Air Force took part in ‘NATO’s largest air exercise since its inception’. The Vilnius meeting also produced the ‘Individually Tailored Partnership Programme between NATO and Japan for 2023–2026’, which envisions enhanced partnership between Japan and NATO on a number of ‘priority issues’ including cyber defence, emerging and disruptive technologies and space security. Nevertheless, plans to open a NATO liaison office in Japan were shelved earlier this summer after pushback from member states, with Emmanuel Macron describing it as ‘a big mistake’. Evidently, various countries that have lined up behind the US on Ukraine are reluctant to do the same when it comes to China. Central and Eastern Europe remain hawkish, yet much of Western Europe, fearing the economic fallout of ‘decoupling’ from the PRC, has instead pursued a softer policy of ‘derisking’.

If nothing else, then, Vilnius lifted the curtain on the Western unity invoked since February 2022. Such accord exists only at a basic level: the allies are united in their opposition to Russia’s invasion, but beyond that there are multiple areas of contention – though you wouldn’t know it from the breathless press coverage or self-satisfied rhetoric. In the Atlanticist information bubble, Ukraine is always on the verge of a breakthrough, Crimea’s recapture always imminent, and victory close at hand. The reality, though, is that NATO seems more interested in winning a PR war than a real one.

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

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Torture the Evidence

In his 1973 essay ‘The Coup in Chile,’ Ralph Miliband warned that left-wing movements which did not draw the right lessons from the overthrow of Salvador Allende ‘may well be preparing new Chiles for themselves’. The Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne was happy to recommend Chile as a positive model when he enjoyed Pinochet’s hospitality on a tour of the country the following year: if a British equivalent of the Allende government ever came to power, Worsthorne informed his readers, ‘I hope and pray our armed forces would intervene to prevent such a calamity as efficiently as the armed forces did in Chile’. The arch-conspirator in Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel A Very British Coup was called ‘Sir Peregrine’ in his honour.

During Jeremy Corbyn’s stint as leader of the Labour Party, there was some nervous speculation on the left about the possibility of military intervention if he became Britain’s prime minister. One could find enough raw material to inflame such anxieties, from public criticism of the Labour leader by senior military and intelligence officials to the notorious episode when members of the Parachute Regiment based in Kabul used Corbyn’s image for target practice on a shooting range. But talk of a latter-day coup ultimately served as a distraction from the more pressing danger: the deployment of a lawfare strategy against the left-wing upsurge of 2015–19.

Lawfare has been the main weapon utilized against the Latin American left in recent years. From the frame-up of Lula by Sergio Moro to the false charges of electoral fraud with which the violent overthrow of Evo Morales was justified, conservative forces in the region prefer to operate under a pseudo-legal banner instead of launching a frontal assault on democratic rule. They have received support in these efforts from bodies like the OAS that possess no legal authority as such but can bestow the appearance of moral legitimacy upon spurious claims that rules were broken or elections stolen.

Britain has ample experience of these methods, though they have more commonly been employed to defend those already in power from scrutiny than to remove left-wing challengers who pose a threat to the status quo. From John Widgery to Brian Hutton, there is a long list of senior judicial figures who refused to draw conclusions that the evidence obliged them to draw when vital interests of Britain’s power elite were at stake. After Hutton read out the findings of his 2004 report on the death of nuclear scientist David Kelly, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland noted the audible gasps of disbelief from Hutton’s audience and posed an obvious question:

If an argument rages on long enough, we soon call for a judge to investigate it for us in the form of a public inquiry. We see and hear the same evidence he does, but still we invest in him some mystical power to reach a conclusive truth we have not seen. And eventually he comes down from the mountain, like the high priest of yore, and delivers his judgment. Yesterday’s show shattered that illusion. Suddenly you found yourself seeing through the grandeur and mystique and wondering, who exactly is this man? Why was he chosen for this task?

Freedland’s brief dalliance with scepticism did not survive contact with the Great Recession. As one of the Guardian’s leading sharpshooters against the left over the past decade, he has leaned heavily upon the ‘grandeur and mystique’ of official bodies. However, his point here is obviously sound, whether or not he chooses to recall it. Widgery did not receive his judicial appointment on the understanding that he would whitewash a massacre of civilians by British soldiers in Derry. Nor did Hutton receive his on the understanding that he would wilfully obfuscate the decision-making process leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But neither man would have ascended the career ladder without a finely honed sense of what they would be expected to do in a situation like that, should it ever arise.

This historical context is helpful for understanding the highly successful campaign against the Labour left. Labour’s right-wing tendency took the lead in that campaign, but they received invaluable support from state and para-state institutions as they sought to delegitimize Corbyn’s leadership and present it as a moral abomination. The BBC and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) supplied the most important weapons in their arsenal, which are still being wielded today.

Although the British state broadcaster has no judicial powers, it enjoys a unique reputation as a trusted source of news reporting. As Britain experienced its deepest political crisis since the Second World War, the BBC put that reputation at the service of Corbyn’s opponents with its documentary ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’, which purported to show that Corbyn and his allies had done everything in their power to encourage and protect antisemitism in the Labour Party. The documentary set out a narrative of events that was ‘wholly misleading’, in the words of Martin Forde, a lawyer who was commissioned by Corbyn’s successor Keir Starmer to produce a report on the party’s organizational culture. Starmer accepted the conclusions of Forde’s report in full, passing up the opportunity to express any criticisms when it was published. In the annals of journalism, ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’ belongs in the same company as Judith Miller’s reporting for the New York Times on weapons of mass destruction.

While nobody who relied on the documentary as a cudgel against Corbyn has acknowledged Forde’s damning verdict, the Starmer leadership and its media outriders now tend to refer much more frequently to the EHRC’s report on antisemitism in the Labour Party – in particular its claim to have detected clear breaches of equality law under Corbyn. This would certainly be a powerful argument if the EHRC was a credible body that had produced a serious report. Alas, it was unable to satisfy either condition.

The Blair–Brown government established the EHRC in 2007, and obviously never intended it to be a fearless opponent of structural inequality. After all, the Commission’s first chair was Trevor Phillips, who has carved out a lucrative niche in the Tory press as an indefatigable apologist for political racism. On the off chance that the statutory body might nonetheless prove troublesome, the Conservative Party set about bending the EHRC to its will after returning to office in 2010. This strategy proceeded along two tracks: on the one hand, the Tories slashed the EHRC’s operating budget to less than a third of its previous level by 2020; on the other hand, they appointed ideological allies to serve as commissioners.

At this point, we might expect members of the British commentariat to harumph about ‘conspiracy theories’ – the standard retort to any form of structural analysis. If the term ‘conspiracy’ is to have any meaning, there must at the very least be an attempt by those involved to conceal what they are doing, even if they do not succeed. However, there was nothing remotely discreet about the Conservative plan to reshape the EHRC. One of those involved, Ian Acheson, boasted about it in an article for the Spectator.

The EHRC decided to investigate allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party for the same reason it categorically refused to investigate allegations of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, despite receiving multiple requests to do so with ample supporting documentation. It is a partisan body to its very marrow, and the report it produced on Labour under Corbyn reflected its institutional character.

The Commission clearly reached the same conclusion as Martin Forde about the credibility of ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’, but it chose to ignore the documentary altogether – one could read the report from cover to cover without even knowing it existed. This was the only way to avoid explicitly refuting the claims that the BBC had made without taking responsibility for those claims in a document that might be subject to legal challenge if it made specific, falsifiable assertions about named individuals. The EHRC found no evidence to support the standard media narrative about ‘Labour antisemitism,’ but strained mightily to produce something, anything, that might be used to denounce Corbyn.

Its finding of ‘unlawful harassment’ could serve as a case study of legal chicanery. The report’s authors simply invented a law governing the boundaries of legitimate speech about Israel – one that cannot be found anywhere in the statute books – and applied it retrospectively to comments that the Labour MP Naz Shah had made on social media before she was elected to Westminster. Having given itself the authority to deem certain forms of speech unlawful, the Commission went on to construct a tortuous chain of logic, whereby the former London mayor Ken Livingstone had also broken the law merely by defending Shah. It went on to conclude that the Labour Party itself was collectively responsible for Livingstone’s alleged transgression.

Anyone who has read Widgery’s report on Bloody Sunday or Hutton’s report on David Kelly will recognize the methodology at work. Instead of beginning with the evidence and proceeding step by step until you reach a set of conclusions, you begin with the conclusions you want to reach and torture the evidence until it signs a full confession. This methodology can be used to condemn the innocent just as easily as it can be used to absolve the guilty.

The EHRC has since moved on to fresh pastures, offering its services to the Conservatives in their battle against trans rights – most notably by providing Rishi Sunak’s government with valuable cover as it moved to veto a new gender recognition law that the Scottish Parliament had enacted. Tory ministers like Kemi Badenoch continue to appoint political bedfellows to the Commission, which now possesses the same claim to authority as the US Supreme Court and other sock-puppet institutions of that nature. The liberal press has belatedly discovered that there may be a problem of some kind with the EHRC, although its columnists still draw upon the half-baked indictment of Corbyn’s leadership as if it were holy writ.

If the British left is going to move on from the defeat of Corbynism, it needs to recognize how that defeat came about, and identify the vital role of state institutions which intervened directly in the affairs of the Labour Party. The Starmer leadership is a project of the British state, in a very tangible sense.

One should not see this in terms of Labour having been infiltrated and sabotaged from the outside. The party itself is an integral part of the state system – it was the leadership of Corbyn, a man who could not be trusted to cover up torture flights and war crimes, that was the exception to the rule. But Starmer himself is unusually attuned to the culture of the state, having served as public prosecutor before he became an MP. With every action he has taken since becoming Labour leader, he conveys the impression of a man who has the state deep in his bones. It suggests a damaging naivety on the part of Corbyn and his allies that they appointed such a figure to superintend Labour’s Brexit policy during the crisis of 2018–19.

The most plausible routes to a left-wing recovery in Britain all lie outside the Labour Party, and it is notable that one such opening, the Tower Hamlets administration of Lutfur Rahman, came after a previous exercise in lawfare that was used to remove Rahman from office in 2015. Richard Mawrey, the judge who ruled against Rahman, relied upon a piece of legislation originally designed to suppress the movement for Irish self-rule, washed down with a prejudicial view of the local community in Tower Hamlets that brought to mind an official of the Raj in nineteenth-century Bengal. Rahman did not bow his head in the face of this neo-colonial arrogance, and the refusal of his supporters to be intimidated has made it possible to carry out some modest but welcome reforms at municipal level. There are some obvious lessons here that can be applied outside east London, for those who are willing to draw them.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Crosscurrents’, NLR 118.

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An Activist Practice 

I admired Caitlín Doherty’s recent ‘A Feminist Style’, and I disagreed strenuously with almost every line of it. There is no conflict between these two sentiments, and one of the era’s most unfortunate tics is its insistence on interpreting every conflict as evidence of disrespect. There are certainly cases in which we politely praise a piece of writing solely as a way of genuflecting to the requisite social forms, but I want to emphasize that this is not such a case. Doherty’s argument is ambitious, her style (ironically) is exhilarating, and her willingness to question shibboleths – and hold the darlings of the literary world to account – is refreshing. Nonetheless, I remain unconvinced.

Her argument runs as follows. Contemporary feminist theory is boring, so boring that a generation of would-be feminist intellectuals has turned backwards, towards the iconic thinkers of the second wave. Hence the incessant cycle of revival and rediscovery, in which the celebrity intellectuals most active in the sixties and seventies are rehabilitated and effused over. The intellectuals in question, most recently Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag, tend to emphasize the centrality of female suffering – and, as a result, feminist politics has been reduced to a thin lamentation, divorced from any material programme.

My most trivial objection is that I am less cynical about the uses and abuses of Sontag and Dworkin. The recent publication of a collection of Sontag’s essays about women, in which she is openly ambivalent about the feminism of her era and hostile to movement poster-child Adrienne Rich, hardly amounts to an attempt to canonize Sontag as an emblem of the second wave. As for Dworkin, it may be that she is extolled as a stylist not because anyone wishes to reduce feminism to gesture, but simply because she is a great stylist. To commend Dworkin’s writing is not to imply that feminism is always and only a matter of a fancy prose (although as I have argued elsewhere, perhaps it sort of ought to be).

Broadly, however, I think Doherty is right that contemporary feminism is dull and unimaginative. We might assess the movement’s prospects either in terms of the activism it inspires or the theories it produces. I am most comfortably in agreement with ‘A Feminist Style’ when it comes to the philosophical poverty of contemporary feminism’s theories. Of course, there are still feminist intellectuals worth reading (Nancy Fraser comes to mind), but it is true that, on the whole, feminist thought is less invigorating than it once was, that there is little ‘engagement with the totality of the experiences of women, qua women, by a new generation of political philosophers’ as Doherty writes. It is also true that the female intellectuals we tend to canonize are too often flattened into symbols – although it is Joan Didion, not much of a feminist by any measure, who has been most thoroughly converted into a slogan on a tote bag. Alas, by far the most visible strain of feminism in the contemporary West is the gospel of girl bossery, evangelized by sleek entrepreneurs like Sheryl Sandberg.  

But I think feminism, as an activist practice, is more robust than Doherty gives it credit for. She makes barely any mention of the #MeToo movement and is unduly dismissive of recent organizing for reproductive freedoms. ‘The closest feminism has come in recent years to a mass mobilisation is in the domain of reproductive rights – no longer the terrain of one gender, but the grounds on which a person might be feminised, a verb which in contemporary usage means to exist at the sharp edge of precarity, removed from economic productivity, overwhelmed by the burdens of reproduction’. I’m not sure what else we should be mobilizing around at a moment when abortion rights, at least in America, are so imperilled. And make no mistake: feminist efforts to equalize abortion access in the wake of Dobbs – activists distributing contraceptive pills along underground networks, by securing funding for travel to states where there is still a right to choose, and more – have been nothing short of heroic.

Perhaps more centrally, though I agree with Doherty that much of today’s feminist thinking is uninspired, I do not accept her diagnosis of what ails it. She writes that ‘a focus on the negative experiences of womanhood – however broadly and ecumenically defined ­– will yield a negative feminism: participation credentialled on the basis of suffering’. But isn’t an articulation of collective suffering the basis for any successful mass movement? There is a reason that we have abandoned some of the more maudlin products of the 70s, namely the mushy hippies claiming that our wombs put us in touch with the earth, and retained the more pessimistic Dworkin. What is femininity, at its core, but institutionalized disadvantage? And what is feminism, at its core, but the attempt to expose gender as a nightmarish farce?

Read on: Nancy Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, NLR 56.

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Exit Rutte

With the fall of the Dutch government on 7 July, the reign of Mark Rutte, the longest serving prime minister in the country’s history, has come to an end. He was the managerial politician par excellence: a man who honed his skills in the Human Resources department of Unilever before serving a long stint in the engine room of the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). His premiership was characterized by major political and economic turbulence, yet for more than a decade he succeeded in weathering successive crises and securing a string of electoral victories for his party. By stepping down of his own volition he has deftly avoided being ousted by his rivals. His farewell session in parliament was warm and convivial; the mainstream opposition had only complimentary things to say. Rutte himself was overheard whispering to one of the centre-left opposition leaders that he ‘loved’ him.

Capitalizing on the eurozone crisis of 2010, Rutte ran for prime minister on a platform that self-consciously replicated David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’: Atlanticist, mercantilist, aimed at shrinking the public sector by devolving responsibility onto households, charities and community groups. Rutte called it the ‘Participation Society’, telling voters that ‘the state is no longer a happiness machine’. It was a message that resonated with the VVD base: big business, petit-bourgeois conservatives and pensioners. Once elected with 20% of the vote, the leader launched an unprecedented austerity drive, backed by the Social Democrats from 2012 onwards, which resulted in the longest recession and largest impoverishment in post-war Dutch history. The effects were increased public debt, rising suicide rates, declining wages and a severe care crisis. Yet none of this mattered as long as foreign investment continued to flow. Time and again, Rutte reminded voters that the wealth of the Dutch nation depended on its multinationals, and spoke of the country as a limited liability corporation: ‘BV Nederland’.

Having performed this economic realignment, Rutte shifted his focus to culture wars during his second and third terms: taking a tough line on the migration crisis and banning the burqa from various public spaces. (Overseas, meanwhile, the VVD provided aid to Syria’s Levant Front as it imposed Sharia Law and carried out summary executions in its territories.) Eventually, when the Dutch economy began to recover from its self-inflicted wounds and new budgetary space began to open up, the government’s hand was forced by the Covid-19 pandemic. Again, Rutte followed the lead of the British Conservatives. At first he gave the virus free-rein and relied on herd immunity, before making a sharp U-turn two weeks later, implementing harsh lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical measures’ to avoid overstretching the marketized Dutch healthcare system. The media framed his pandemic response as highly competent, allowing him to deflect the challenge from Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy – a far-right, Eurosceptic formation – and win reelection in 2021. (More damning reports on Rutte’s public health strategy have since come to light, but he can breathe easy thanks to the indefinite delay of the parliamentary inquiry that is due to start in 2025.)

Rutte’s third coalition fell apart when reports surfaced that the government had brutally cracked down on vulnerable parents over childcare allowances. An unprecedented 299 days of negotiations led to the formation of a new cabinet in 2022. Yet by that time the political situation had changed: Covid was gone and war was raging in Ukraine. The Dutch Supreme Court had also ruled that the government was in violation of its climate obligations, forcing it to announce that it would close farms and halve the number of livestock nationwide. This was a blunt solution to the problems caused by the country’s supersized livestock industry, which is responsible for 46% of its nitrogen emissions as well as the destruction of nature reserves and pollution of areas legally protected by the EU. Without downsizing this vast sector, the Netherlands could never hope to meet its environmental targets. Yet without anything resembling a ‘just transition’ – to compensate for job losses and reorient the economy away from agricultural exports – the decision to cull large numbers of animals caused understandable fear among the farmer population. With public money now reallocated to the defence and military aid budgets, along with schemes to offset the cost-of-living crisis sparked by Western sanctions on Russia, funds were in short supply for green social policies.

This set off a wave of aggressive farmer protests, with major motorways blocked by hundreds of tractors, and culminated in the establishment of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB): a right-populist party bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former meat industry journalist. In March this year, the BBB inflicted a painful electoral defeat on the VVD, picking up 1.4 million votes and capturing the greatest number of seats in each of the Dutch provinces. Large swathes of its supporters were disaffected ruralists – residents of the so-called ‘places that don’t matter’. Many of them had previously voted for the PVV, an anti-migrant offspring of the VVD, or for the VVD itself. They were not necessarily convinced by every element of the BBB programme, which includes a cap of refugees and stricter rules for integrating migrants, yet they were sufficiently repulsed by Rutte’s political machine and its apparent willingness to sacrifice their livelihoods. Some urban voters, too, gravitated towards the BBB after the government suspended large construction projects in an ostensible bid to lower emissions levels, forsaking any attempt to deal with the country’s housing crisis.

Rutte finalized his new cabinet just as the BBB’s popularity was growing. The Finance Minister, former McKinsey partner Wopke Hoekstra, switched roles with the Foreign Minister, former diplomat Sigrid Kaag, who leads the socially liberal D66 party. The VVD base took this as a sign that D66 was gaining increasing influence in the government, and that Rutte had perhaps been outmaneuvered by Kaag – who would use her new position to pursue an elite, ultra-woke agenda. Even worse, during the 2022 coalition negotiations Rutte had committed to ambitious environmental objectives which forced him to sign off on policies – flight-taxes, gasoline-taxes and potentially meat-taxes – that were viewed as onerous and authoritarian. Rutte himself seemed increasingly uncomfortable to be associated with the coalition, which was believed to have been hijacked by ‘climate believers’ who wanted to kill off the national food industry and ‘wokies’ who wanted to apologize for Dutch involvement in the slave trade and cancel the country’s infamous blackface tradition.

Accordingly, the government’s popularity began to plummet. In poll after poll, the ruling parties were projected to lose large numbers of seats in the next general election, while the BBB continued to surge. Parliamentary journalists expected that Rutte would do his utmost to keep his flock together and wait for a shift in the electoral tide. Surely a coalition that had been put together with so much effort wouldn’t be allowed to fall apart so easily? Not so. Under pressure from party elders and bureaucrats, Rutte was searching for an exit route that would minimize electoral damage to the VVD. A new influx of migrants in 2023 provided the perfect pretext.

The groundwork for this controversy had already been laid. Since the War on Terror, Dutch media has portrayed Islamism as a civilizational threat. Opposition to immigration in general and Muslim arrivals in particular has become the country’s main political litmus test, dividing its true-blooded conservative majority from its ‘out-of-touch’ progressive minority. Material issues – living costs, disposable income, taxation, quality and accessibility of public services – are meanwhile viewed as technocratic: the exclusive remit of economic experts. The main daily news programme on Dutch public television, Nieuwsuur, features a single neoclassical economist who informs the public about the causes of inflation, the need for interest rate hikes and the best means of sustaining profitability. Politicians have refused to speak about so-called ‘greedflation’ because they consider it a term of abuse to shareholders. Attempts to break through this cordon sanitaire by the leader of the Socialist Party, Lilian Marijnissen, and the leader of the largest trade union federation, Tuur Elzinga, have so far come to nothing.

In this conjuncture, Rutte found it easy to throw red meat to his base by confecting a dispute with his coalition partners. The disagreement centred on which categories of refugees should be granted the right to reunify with their children once they had been given formal refugee status. Two of the four governing parties, D66 and the Christian Union, wanted this to be available to both political refugees and those from war-torn countries. Rutte was willing to accept the first category but not the second. Turning this into a breaking issue allowed the VVD to demonstrate its toughness on migration to an increasingly discontented electorate and regain the momentum after its dip in the polls. The party showed that its commitment was strong enough to make the ultimate sacrifice: Rutte’s fourth government, and with it his political career.

Whether this political gamble will pay off is still uncertain. The next elections, scheduled for November, will be contested by as yet unknown party leaders, since Hoekstra and Kaag have stepped down. Frans Timmermans, the current Vice President of the European Commission, who has adopted almost every imaginable political position over the course of his political career, intends to lead the combined list of Social Democrats and Greens. Yet current polls suggest that right-wing voters appreciate Rutte’s decision to resign; some surveys even indicate that it has allowed the VVD to pull ahead of the BBB.

In many ways, Rutte’s move typified the politics he represents. The PM is famously averse to grand ideological projects (he once quoted the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s assertion that if one wanted vision one had better see an optometrist). Instead, he strives for mastery of the positional game that is contemporary politics, prioritizing tactics and optics over strategy and substance. His major concern was always how to survive the next election, how to use the next event to his electoral advantage, how to stage an exit before crisis hit and how to ensure that someone else took the blame. Facts, policies, democratic protocols: these were mere instruments for manipulating the perceptions of the public.

Rutte’s resignation may once again burnish the image of the VVD, but it may also prove to be the xenophobic flint that lights a combustible political tinder box. In its wake, the VVD may be unable to forge another coalition with more socially progressive parties; in which case a future alliance between the VVD and BBB cannot be ruled out. That, in turn, would mean the end of any serious Dutch contribution to the global effort to mitigate climate breakdown, along with increasing illiberalism and state-sanctioned racism.

Rutte’s international reputation has not suffered from his domestic troubles. His hawkishness on Ukraine – leading the charge for ever more deadly arms shipments – has endeared him to NATO, whose presidency may beckon. Or he may return to Unilever. During one of his last parliamentary debates, he reflected that his greatest political regret was the failure to repeal dividend taxes that were supposedly responsible for Shell and Unilever’s decision to move their holdings to the UK. Now, City shareholders are unhappy with Unilever’s performance and want to see the firm broken up. One idea that has been floated is to turn its food subsidiary into a separate legal entity and move its headquarters back to the Netherlands. Rutte would be the perfect man to run it. And a BBB-VVD coalition, eager to further poison the environment in the name of food industry profits, would provide the perfect political backdrop.

Read on: Harriet Friedmann, ‘Farming Futures’, NLR 138.