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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.

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A Photographic Negative

Deux pieds sur banquette (1981) © Christine Guibert/Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.

This summer, the upper galleries of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art are home to ‘This and More’, an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Hervé Guibert, curated by Anthony Huberman. Small-format prints depict domestic interiors haunted by absence. There are no faces and very few bodies, certainly none pictured whole. Instead: postcards arranged on bookshelves, an overcoat draped across a sofa, a work desk, a stuffed toy, collections of marbles and Christmas ornaments – so many objects pointing back to lives that have escaped the camera’s capture, the photographer’s own foremost among them. In Deux pieds sur banquette (Two Feet on Bench, 1981), the titular extremities only just jut into the frame. Two right feet, bare: Guibert and whom, positioned how? Impossible to know. In Autoportrait, porte vitrée (Self-Portrait, Glass Door, c. 1986), the material of glass turns against its promise of visibility twice over. On the right is a mottled pane set into a door, one seen also in Vertiges (Vertigo, n.d.), where it transforms a face into an inscrutable grey mass; on the left is Guibert, reduced to a dark silhouette reflected in a framed picture on the wall. The experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton once observed that, owing to their capacity to indiscriminately register detail, ‘photographs, to the joy or misery of all who make them, invariably tell us more than we want to know’. This selection of Guibert’s work evinces a countermovement: photographs can also extract, withhold, let so much fall through their net. Somewhere in between telling us too much and not enough, these images invite the beholder into the domain of fantasy and fabulation.

At first glance, some of them might seem to border on the banal. Shoes placed next to a daybed. And? The delicate force of ‘This and More’ is felt when its selection is considered in relation to Guibert’s broader practice across media. Guibert is best known as an author of queer autofiction, above all for To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, 1990), a novel chronicling his experience with HIV/AIDS, published two years after his diagnosis and one year before his death at age 36 from complications arising from a suicide attempt. In Modesty and Shame (La Pudeur ou l’impudeur, 1991) – the sole moving image work he completed – Guibert trains a camcorder on his emaciated body, videotaping his last months for posthumous broadcast on French television. On the toilet, on the telephone, in surgery, and on holiday on his beloved Elba, he is there in devastating beauty and peerless self-scrutiny. Whereas his friend Michel Foucault, who appears as the character Muzil in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, chose not to make his seropositive status public, Guibert laid bare his life and his death through the transfiguring lens of art. Given this affinity for disclosure, it is all the more striking that the photographs of ‘This and More’ have the quality of a purposely averted gaze. It is as if each exposure were the product of a determined decision not to expose those scenes which might most readily, most conventionally, attract attention or demand commemoration. The unabashed elaboration of illness, friendship and passion found in Guibert’s autobiographical writing is one way of challenging received notions of what deserves a place within representation and what does not. These photographs are another. In both cases, a question emerges: how does one’s private life find its way into a work of art?

La bibliothèque (1986) © Christine Guibert/Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.

Upon the English-language republication of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life in 2020, Parul Sehgal commented that Guibert’s work has been ‘strangely neglected in the Anglophone world, never mind its innovation and historical importance, its breathtaking indiscretion, tenderness and gore’. Thankfully, this has begun to change as of late, not least because of new editions of key writings that have appeared with Semiotext(e), a publisher long devoted to making the work of Francophone authors – particularly queer authors concerned with sex, art and the self – available in English. ‘This and More’, first shown at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute in 2022, is part of this revival. Still, Sehgal’s comment holds painfully true for the book of Guibert’s that is most germane to the exhibition: his extraordinary consideration of photography, Ghost Image (L’Image fantôme, 1981). Why is this slim volume not accorded the same attention as the book to which it directly responds, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire, 1980)? A simple answer can be found in Barthes’s towering stature relative to the much younger and less institutional Guibert. This, yes, but there is also more.

Guibert worked as a photography critic at Le Monde from 1977 to 1985, where he reviewed both Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) and Camera Lucida. Of Sontag, he notes that her book is most captivating when she writes of her own experience. In a similar vein, he gravitates to Barthes’s voice, which is erudite yet anything but stentorian: ‘It is not an arrogant voice seeking to affirm the truth of photography… If there is a truth here, it is in the sincerity of the subject’. Guibert, too, grounds his book in a personal register, but pushes this approach farther than either of his eminent predecessors. In lieu of teachable concepts like Camera Lucida’s studium and punctum, he spins tales of a queer life lived with and through photographs. Corporeality prevails. He treats the photograph as an unfailingly physical thing: handled, torn, creased, purchased, hidden, put on display, printed small, blown up large, retouched. There are photos so damp they stick to the glass of a train window; there is a photo stolen and pressed under an armpit, only to later decay such that the face it depicts appears ‘syphilitic’, ‘cancerous’. Guibert’s own body is ever present. He recounts placing a photograph of Hiram Keller from Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) over his erect penis as an adolescent; as an adult, he wonders about the existence of sexually explicit photographs of his parents. He likens working with a Hasselblad to cruising on public transit (both involve deflection through glass), muses on pornography (expedient yet unsatisfying), and returns repeatedly to his disgust with aging, which is to say, to his concern with physical beauty and with death.

Camera Lucida is the apex of Barthes’s autobiographical turn. Its exquisite prose is deeply moving, weighted with grief for the author’s recently deceased mother. But by comparison with Ghost Image, it is a work of distanced generality. It is remarkably chaste. In what is tempting to read as a criticism of Camera Lucida, Guibert asks, ‘How can you speak of photography without speaking of desire? If I mask my desire, if I deprive it of its gender, if I leave it vague, as others have done more or less cleverly, I would feel as if I were weakening my stories, or writing carelessly… The image is the essence of desire and if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory’. You reduce it to theory: Guibert conceives of this abstraction as a diminution, rather than an intellectual elevation. He has no aspiration to transcend particularity, to extricate his discourse on photography from his life. This is integral to the fascination and poignancy of Ghost Image and, given the contemporary proliferation of memoir/criticism hybrids, speaks to the volume’s enduring relevance. It also may also help explain why the book has yet to reach the audience it deserves. Its ideas are less transportable, less citable.

‘R.B. the writer’ makes a cameo late in Ghost Image, but an engagement with Barthes is there from the start, when Guibert discusses a missing image of his mother – a reply to the ‘Winter Garden’ photograph that sits unseen at the heart of Camera Lucida. That time-bending picture of Barthes’s mother as a child shocks her adult son with a premonition of his own death and thus becomes a guide in his attempt to discern the essence of photography. Barthes chooses not to reproduce the image, for its bruising, spectral power exists for him alone; others would not see what he sees. Guibert echoes this precursor while departing from it in important ways. Frustrated with his controlling father – with the images he took of his wife and how he policed her appearance – Guibert gets his mother to produce a different, truer, picture. He does her hair, chooses her clothing, adjusts the lighting. In this moment, to which he attributes ‘the secret power of incest’, she becomes more beautiful to him than she has ever been or will be. The processing of the film reveals that a catastrophe has occurred: nothing has been exposed. ‘For my mother and myself’, Guibert writes, ‘it was a moment of despondency and pain, a sensation of powerlessness, of fatality, of irremediable loss’. Like the Winter Garden photograph, this highly cathected image is unreproducible and entirely private. But unlike Barthes, Guibert infuses his story with illicit sensuality and rebellion; unlike Barthes, he approaches photography as a maker as much as a beholder. To ask whether the scene, with its perfect contrivance, ever really occurred is beside the point.

Message incomprensible (1990) © Christine Guibert/Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris.

If that ‘forbidden image’ had been realized, Guibert remarks, he would have had no need to write Ghost Image. But it was not. As the book progresses, this first missing picture is joined by others. Twice, Guibert writes of witnessing acts of friendship between boys that he wanted to photograph but could not because he had no camera with him. He calls these glimpses ‘the perfect image’ and ‘the beautiful image’, respectively, as if to suggest that the most prized pictures are those that do not come into being but remain etched in memory. As much as photography conditions experience, experience eludes photography. It drains away the affective thickness of life. Ghost Image is shot through with a love of the medium that is matched by a reckoning with its limits and failures. Guibert calls the book ‘a negative of photography’. The phrase might sound like a play on the notion of the photographic negative as an ‘original’, but his aim is not to isolate any essence, any noeme. Instead, the ‘negative of photography’ names something else: that his book ‘speaks of photography in negative terms, it speaks only of ghost images, images that have not yet issued, or rather, latent images, images that are so intimate that they become invisible’.

There is likely no better way to describe the photographs of ‘This and More’ than as a variation on this last kind of image: so intimate that they are barely visible. One can look at them, of course. But they refuse to yield fully to the gaze, to confess their secrets. They court insignificance yet hint at a potency of feeling that is accessible in its fullness to their maker alone. The obvious curatorial emphasis for an exhibition of Guibert’s photography would be to show the many gorgeous portraits he made of friends, lovers, and himself. ‘This and More’ takes a risk in leaving all that aside. In doing so, it stays true to the photographic autofictions of Ghost Image, following them to the threshold of incommunicability, where the opacity of private experience shows itself and the viewer’s imagination must take over. There, photography gives up the arrogant posture of revelation, delights in a modesty that verges on muteness, and allows itself it be haunted by all that it cannot make present.

Read on: Hito Steyerl, ‘Mean Images’, NLR 140/141.

 

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The Battle for Colombia

In Cali, memory lines the walls. Colombia’s third-largest city is adorned with murals depicting the estallido social: the immense protests that shook Colombia from April to June 2021, sparked by crushing social conditions and met with fierce state repression. Five-metre paintings of young people killed by police overlook congested highways, signalling residents’ refusal to forget the crimes committed under the authoritarian regime of Iván Duque. This year, on the second anniversary of the uprising, the city’s puntos de resistencia (or ‘resistance points’) were reimagined. New works of street art went up, while communal meals and musical performances brought together those affected by the events: the parents of activists killed in the crackdown, protesters left with life-changing injuries. ‘The police didn’t like us meeting like this before’, said one graffiti artist, spray can in hand. ‘But since the election, they tend to leave us alone.’

In June 2022, the revolt against Duque culminated in the election of Colombia’s first progressive government, headed by President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez. The last time a leftist made a serious bid for the presidency was in 1948, when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s likely victory was thwarted by his assassination. Since then, the country’s peasant and indigenous populations have been excluded from its political institutions – dominated by the interests of agribusiness and extractivism, propped up by Washington with the aid of right-wing paramilitary groups.

Colombian GDP is around the Latin American average, yet inequality levels are among the highest in the region. For decades, peasant, Indigenous and African-Colombian populations have been forcibly displaced to facilitate increased land concentration. As the extractive economy spread from the 1980s onward – along with ranching, intensive agriculture and cocaine production – paramilitaries cleared swathes of the countryside of their inhabitants. Under the right-wing presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002-10), the landowning oligarchy, accounting for only a tiny fraction of total landowners, increased its holdings from 47% of agricultural land to 68%, while 80% of peasant farmers lived in poverty. The urban working class suffered low wages and job instability, its capacity to organize for improved conditions fatally weakened by systematic violence against trade union leaders and community activists. During Duque’s tenure, 42% of the population were impoverished, thanks to a combination of hyper-neoliberal policies and mismanagement of the pandemic.

Such asymmetries are partly a result of Colombia’s rigged political system. In 1958, the two parties of the ruling elite, the Liberals and Conservatives, agreed that power would rotate between them as part of a National Front arrangement. This antidemocratic duopoly was contested by the guerrilla movements that emerged in the wake of the Cuban Revolution: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), which aimed to defend peasants against state violence and establish a new national settlement based on popular participation and anti-imperialism. The FARC, in particular, found support among the rural poor, as the guerrillas provided infrastructure, services and security in territories abandoned by the state. After half a century of fighting, in 2016 the group eventually signed a peace agreement with the government of Juan Manuel Santos. Yet a series of state failures meant that conflict persisted in regions formerly under FARC control. When Duque came to power two years later, he vowed to rip up the accords and take a hard line against guerrilla forces. His administration starved the agreement of funding and resources, refusing to implement its security mechanisms or rural development programmes. Killings of social activists and former guerrillas skyrocketed. Protesters calling for peace were massacred by the state.

Petro’s ‘government of change’ – comprising a broad spectrum of parties from the centre to the left, united in the so-called Historic Pact – was elected on a pledge to tackle these endemic social and political crises. Petro won 50% of the vote in 2022, securing unusually high turnout rates in the neglected Pacific, Caribbean and Amazonic regions, while his right-populist opponent Rodolfo Hernández came away with 47%. The new President vowed to meet the needs of those pushed to the margins: rural communities, ethnic minorities, young people, low-income workers. This would be achieved by reviving the peace process and stimulating economic development: implementing the 2016 agreement while simultaneously enacting a green transition. Legislatively, the government has so far targeted three key areas – the labour market, healthcare and pensions – while initiating dialogue with the country’s various armed groups.

There are clear limits to what Petro can achieve, given he is constitutionally limited to a single four-year term and facing bitter opposition from the establishment. Lack of a congressional majority has compromised his ability to pass meaningful reforms. An initial alliance between the government and the parties of the traditional elite – Liberals, Conservatives and Party of the U – has fractured, while the uribista Democratic Centre (CD) and Hernández’s Anti-Corruption League have tried their best to obstruct social policies. The administration is under constant attack from the corporate media, led by the neoconservative Semana magazine, owned by the Gilinski banking conglomerate. And Eduardo Zapateiro, formerly the top general of the Colombian army, has vigorously denounced Petro, going so far as to brand him a ‘criminal’ during the election campaign. Although Zapateiro resigned shortly after the 2022 election, and Petro swiftly removed fifteen generals linked to human rights violations, there is still uncertainty about the relationship between the army and the executive. Given such constraints, how should we assess Petro’s attempts to reshape Colombia, one year after his swearing in?

Colombian workers’ rights are among the weakest in the world, following years of anti-union legislation and the murders of thousands of labour organizers by state forces and their paramilitary proxies since the 1970s. Petro’s appointment of an experienced trade unionist, Gloria Ramírez, as Labour Minister was an important step in redressing this blood-stained record. The government’s flagship labour legislation, presented to Congress earlier this year, would increase wages for overtime and night work, clamp down on outsourcing and strengthen employment contracts. It would also impose a regulatory framework on the vast informal sector, which accounts for at least half the workforce and is uniquely vulnerable in times of crisis. On 20 June, these reforms were shelved on the basis that they lacked a quorum – a result celebrated by the CD and centre-right Radical Change party. While opponents have proclaimed the legislation dead in the water, the Labour Ministry insists it can be revived, although it has not yet managed to assemble the necessary votes.

Petro’s healthcare reform has fared slightly better. Restructuring of public health provision was urgently needed in the wake of the pandemic, as hospital staff died or resigned in droves over dangerous conditions. Chronic underinvestment means that children in peripheral regions such as La Guajira and Chocó still die of malnutrition and preventable diseases, while many poor Colombians, particularly in rural areas, struggle to access even rudimentary care. The government’s new bill enshrines healthcare as a universal right, asserting that class position should not determine chances of survival. As well as improving staff pay, it aims to reduce disparities in health access between urban and rural populations and increase pre-emptive testing for diseases. The establishment parties in Petro’s congressional alliance were unanimous in opposing this reform. In response, Petro broke up the compact and removed key ministers who objected to plans to eliminate the role of private providers. He thereby managed to push the legislation through phase one, where it now awaits further debate. But the breakdown of the congressional agreement has undermined his attempts to project an image of unity, and may make it harder to pass other laws further down the line.

Petro’s pension law passed its first congressional debate on 14 June, with two further ones scheduled amid unflinching opposition from the CD and Conservatives. Under the current system, informal employment and low incomes mean that only a quarter of Colombian workers qualify for pensions, with many forced into economic hardship or family dependence. The new proposals would guarantee a minimum pension to all retirees, reduce the gap between low and high earners, and see private pension funds transferred to the state-run Colpensiones system. Opponents claim that this would penalize higher-earning workers, while the administration projects that it will lift three million older people out of poverty.

So far, Petro’s attempt to end armed conflict and revive the agreement with the FARC – known as the strategy of ‘Total Peace’ – has returned mixed results. Conscious that the 2016 accords were previously undermined by right-wing hostility, he has tried to frame the peace process as a national project rather than a bilateral truce – appointing political opponents such as José Félix Lafaurie, president of the ultra-conservative FEDEGAN rancher association, to his negotiating teams. Yet because previous administrations failed to implement the peace deal, areas once controlled by guerillas have seen the proliferation of smaller armed groups competing to occupy the power vacuum. As a result, conflict remains rife in Cauca, Nariño and Putumayo in the southwest; Antioquia, Córdoba and Chocó in the northwest; and along the Venezuelan border in Arauca and Norte de Santander. Duque exacerbated such problems by ramping up militarization, launching bombing raids that killed civilians and giving soldiers a free pass to commit abuses, without seriously denting the capacities of the targeted groups. Petro, by contrast, has tried to roll out development programmes in these areas, but this long-term solution has not yet brought relief to their communities. A total of 82 social activists and 19 former FARC guerrillas have been killed in the first half of 2023 alone.

Negotiations with the ELN, Colombia’s largest remaining guerrilla organization, have picked up where they left off under Santos. But while Santos categorically refused to discuss macroeconomic issues, Petro has tried to stake out common ground. On 27 April, the government and ELN signed off on a negotiating agenda, christened the ‘Mexico Agreement’, which promised to examine ‘the economic model, political system and doctrines that hinder unity and national reconciliation’, and asserted that peacebuilding requires the ‘elimination of the current system of exploitation and depredation, and creation of the conditions for social and economic equity.’ The talks have not been plain sailing, but a resolution now appears to be achievable. The third round ended with a bilateral ceasefire announcement, due to begin in August and run for an initial period of six months. Discussions have also been held with two ‘dissident’ armed groups: the Segunda Marquetalia, which dropped out of the earlier peace process, and the Estado Mayor Central, which never subscribed to it in the first place. Here, a ceasefire has proved more elusive, and Petro has had to face down opposition from politicians urging him to abandon the effort.

Having campaigned on the need to phase out Colombia’s economic dependence on fossil fuels, which has driven deforestation and the contamination of natural resources, the government has pushed anti-fracking legislation while banning new oil and gas exploratory licenses. In March, it announced plans to transition towards a green economy by investing in renewable energy and modernizing its infrastructure. Vice President Márquez, a lifelong environmental campaigner, has been a powerful spokesperson for this programme. But as Colombia’s mineral wealth continues to flow out of the ground and into foreign coffers, it will not be easy to secure the level of international cooperation required for a major energy transition. And if revenues from fossil fuel exports start to shrink, the government will need alternative funding sources for redistributive and peacebuilding projects – which may be in short supply.

Petro’s project has been bolstered by the resurgence of progressive governments in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and elsewhere. Despite its internal divisions, this regional power bloc has caused American and European influence to wane. The rise of China has contributed to this rebalancing, as states increasingly look east for trade and investment. This contrasts with the 2015-19 period, when conservative governments in Latin America acted as willing relays for US foreign policy. Whereas Duque joined the US-backed coup attempt against the Maduro government, Petro swiftly reopened diplomatic relations with Venezuela, coordinating a joint response to mass migration and rising violence in border zones. The regional consensus has also turned sharply against the US-led ‘war on drugs’, which has devastated the continent for more than fifty years. Even if the anti-imperialism of the first Pink Tide has not manifested as strongly in the new wave, an increasingly multipolar world gives Petro and his allies greater room for manoeuvre. Concerns that the global hegemon would destabilize his administration have not yet come to pass.

Yet the government remains vulnerable on other fronts. Margarita Cabello, the right-wing Inspector General tasked with overseeing the conduct of elected officials, has targeted Historic Pact Congress members for removal, citing their opposition to police during the 2021 protests. And Francisco Barbosa, the Duque-appointed Attorney General, has impeded the peace processes by refusing to lift arrest warrants for leaders of armed groups and preventing their participation in talks. In early June, Petro’s Chief of Staff was accused of subjecting her household nanny to illegal surveillance. Shortly after, Petro himself was accused of benefitting from illegal campaign financing based on a leaked audio recording of his adviser Armando Benedetti. The president described these confected scandals as an attempted soft coup, or golpe blando, linking them to the long history of lawfare against social-democratic leaders in Latin America.  

The Historic Pact thus ends its first year in office attempting to balance the demands of the social movements that propelled it to power with those of a political class that retains legislative sway. Compromise will be essential, which could mean sacrificing some core elements of Petro’s agenda so that others can progress. A succession plan is also crucial for the ‘government of change’, as its gains could otherwise be rolled back by the next president. The 2022 election was won by a slim margin that could be wiped out by poor planning for the 2026 campaign. Perhaps inevitably, amid the constant stream of negative publicity and the seemingly intractable legislative quagmire, Petro’s approval ratings have recently begun to sag. Local elections scheduled for October will act as a referendum on his time in office. Can the opposition exploit them to further undermine his reformist ambitions, or will the spirit of the estallido social sustain the Colombian left?

Read on: Forrest Hylton & Aaron Tauss, ‘Colombia at the Crossroads’, NLR 137.

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Unrest and Repetition

When riots erupted in France at the end of June, it took police just under a week to make more than 3,000 arrests. Clashes on the streets of Paris and Marseille evoked other recent confrontations with the forces of state repression: think of the 22,000 arrests made by the Iranian police last autumn, or the 10,000 detained in America during the summer of Black Lives Matter. What do these three uprisings, across three different continents, have in common? To start with, the age and social class of the protesters. Those arrested were almost entirely under 30, and a disproportionate share were NEETs (those not in education, employment or training). In France and the US, this was linked to their status as racialized minorities: 26% of the youth population in zones urbaines sensibles are NEET, compared to the national average of 13%, and African Americans comprise almost 14% of the general population but 20.5% of NEETs. In Iran, meanwhile, the decisive factor was age: young people have lived their entire lives under US sanctions. Recent figures show that around 77% of Iranians between the ages of 15 to 24 fall into this category – up from around 31% in 2020.

The second common factor is even more striking. In all three cases, protests broke out following a murder committed by police: George Floyd, an African American, was killed in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020; the 22-year old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in Tehran on 16 September 2022; and the 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, of Algerian descent, in Nanterre on 27 June. In the aftermath of these killings, the media spotlight was placed on the ‘vandals’, ‘thugs’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘criminals’ who took to the streets, but rarely on law enforcement itself. In Iran, the identity of the policeman who caused Amini’s death isn’t even known. In France, Éric Zemmour’s spokesperson launched an online fundraiser to support the cop who killed Nahel, which collected more than €1.6 million before it was taken down.

A third feature connects such protests and their repression to unrest in other countries: monotonous repetition. There is always the same recurring scene: smashed shop windows, burnt-out cars, some looted supermarkets, tear gas and the occasional bullet from the police. In the West, the same formula has been operative for decades: the police kill a young person from a marginalized community; the youth of this community rise up; they destroy a few things and clash with the police; they are arrested. The atmosphere reverts to a kind of precarious tranquillity, until the police decide to murder someone again. (Iran’s protests last year were the first major uprising against police violence in the country – a sign that even the land of the ayatollahs is easing its way into ‘Western modernity’.)

France has a long history of such incidents. To give just a few indicative examples: in 1990, a young paralysed man named Thomas Claudio is killed in the suburbs of Lyon by a police car; in 1991, a policeman shoots and kills the 18-year-old Djamel Chettouh in a banlieue of Paris; in 1992, again in Lyon, the gendarmerie shoot and kill the 18-year-old Mohamed Bahri for attempting to evade a traffic stop; the same year, in the same city, twenty-year-old Mourad Tchier is killed by a brigadier-commander of the gendarmerie; in Toulon in 1994, Faouzi Benraïs goes out to buy a hamburger and is killed by police; in 1995, Djamel Benakka is beaten to death by a policeman in the police station of Laval. Fast-forward: the riots of 2005 were a response to the death of two teenagers, Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traoré (15); those of 2007 sought redress for the death of two more, Moushin Sehhouli (15) and Laramy Samoura (16), whose motorcycle collided with a police car. The litany is unbearable: it would be sufficient to remember the death of Aboubacar Fofana (22) in 2018, killed by police in Nantes during an identity check. Note how strikingly Gallic the names of victims are: Aboubakar, Bouna, Djamel, Fauzi, Larami, Mahaed, Mourad, Moushin, Zyed . . .

The exact same dynamic can be found across the Atlantic. Miami, 1980: four white police officers are charged with beating to death a black motorcyclist, Arthur McDuffie, after he ran a red light. They are acquitted, precipitating a wave of tumult that rocks Liberty City, resulting in 18 deaths and over 300 injuries. Los Angeles, 1991: four white police officers beat up another black motorcyclist, Rodney King. The subsequent unrest causes at least 59 fatalities and over 2,300 injuries. Rioting spreads to Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose. Cincinnati, 2001: a white policeman kills a black man, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, and 70 people are injured in the ensuing protests. Ferguson, 2014: a white police officer kills Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man; riots, 61 arrested, 14 injured. Baltimore, 2015: a 25-year-old black man dies of various injuries incurred while he is detained in a police van; clashes leave 113 police officers injured; two people are shot, 485 arrested, and a curfew is imposed with the National Guard ultimately intervening. Charlotte, 2016: police shoot 43-year-old African-American Keith Lamont Scott; riots, curfew, deployment of the National Guard. A protester is killed during demonstrations, 26-year-old Justin Carr; 31 are injured. We eventually arrive at George Floyd; the scenario repeats itself.

British police have no reason to feel inferior to their transatlantic counterparts, nor their neighbours across the Channel. Here a few examples among many: Brixton, 1981: constant police brutality and harassment issues in protests and riots among the black community; 279 police and 45 civilians are injured (protestors avoid hospitals out of fear), 82 arrests, over 100 burnt vehicles, 150 damaged buildings, a third of which are set on fire. The upheaval spreads to Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds. Brixton, 1985: police search a suspect’s house and shoot his mother, Cherry Groce. A photojournalist is killed, 43 civilians and 10 police officers are injured, 55 cars are set on fire and a building is completely destroyed after three days of rioting (Cherry Groce survives her wounds but remains paralysed). Tottenham, 1985: a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, dies of cardiac arrest during a house search carried out by police, and a policeman is killed by crowds in the resulting riots. Brixton, 1995: protests after a 26-year-old black man dies in custody; 22 arrests. Tottenham, 2011: police shoot and kill Mark Duggan; riots break out, extending to other areas of London and then to other cities. Over the next six days, five people are killed, 189 police officers are injured and 2,185 buildings are damaged. Beckton, 2017: a 25-year-old black Portuguese man, Edson Da Costa, dies of asphyxiation after being stopped by police. In subsequent protests in front of the police station, four are arrested and 14 police officers are injured.

I imagine this list was as exasperating to read as it was infuriating to write. At this point, police violence cannot be considered a bavure, as the French say, but a persistent and transnational feature of contemporary capitalism. (It brings to mind Bertolt Brecht, who, faced with the reaction of the East German government to popular protest in 1953, asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected a new one?’) What’s astonishing is that after every one of these upheavals, thousands of pitiful urbanists, sociologists, ‘youthologists’, criminologists, healthcare professionals, charities and NGOs turn, in their contrition, to the profound social, cultural and behavioural causes of such ‘violence’, ‘excesses’, ‘outbursts’ and ‘vandalism’. The police, however, are not deemed worthy of the same attention. Police violence is often described but seldom scrutinized. Not even Foucault sharpened our understanding of it, focussing instead on specific sites where law enforcement is organized and institutionalised.

Policing has clearly evolved over the centuries: it has been subdivided into specialised corps (traffic, city, border, military and international police) and its tools have been refined (wire-tapping, tracking, electronic surveillance). But it has remained identical in both its opacity and its unreformability. The states mentioned above have never put meaningful police reform on the agenda. None of their governments has ever pushed for an alternative – for why would a regime want to tamper with its most effective disciplinary mechanism? Nor have upheavals, riots and agitations managed to bring about change. It would seem, conversely, that popular rage is a stabilising factor, a safety valve for the social pressure cooker. Ultimately, it solidifies the image that the powerful have of the populace. In Herodotus’s Histories, written in the 5th century BC, the Persian nobleman Megabyzus states:

There is nothing so void of understanding, nothing so full of wantonness, as the unwieldy rabble. It were folly not to be borne, for men, while seeking to escape the wantonness of a tyrant, to give themselves up to the wanton­ness of a rude unbridled mob. The tyrant, in all his doings, at least knows what he is about, but a mob is altogether devoid of knowledge; for how should there be any knowledge in a rabble, untaught, and with no natural sense of what is right and fit? It rushes wildly into state affairs with all the fury of a stream swollen in the winter, and confuses everything.

From the point of view of the regime, it may well be that riots are welcome, for they guarantee renormalisation, they permit social ‘bantustans’ to remain such, and they deflate discontents that could otherwise be perilous. Naturally, for them to perform this stabilizing function they must be subject to outward condemnation: vandalism should be denounced, violence should spark indignation, looting should cause disgust. Such reactions justify the ruthlessness of the repression, which becomes the only means to beat back the tide of barbarism. It is under these conditions that riots serve to ossify social hierarchy.

We cannot but recall the popular revolts that periodically shook the ancien régime and were regularly and mercilessly repressed: the Grande Jacquerie of 1358 (which gave rise to the common name for all subsequent peasant uprisings), the Tuchin Revolt in Languedoc (1363-84), the Ciompi Revolt in Florence (1378), the Wat Tyler’s Rebellion (1381), the Peasant’s War in Germany (1524-6), the Carnival in Romans (1580) and Masianello’s Revolt in Naples (1647). The historian Samuel Cohn has counted more than 200 of these instances in France, Flanders and Italy from 1245 to 1424. But it was the great historian Marc Bloch who noted how the feudal system needed these revolts to sustain itself:

A social system is not only characterised by its internal structure, but also by the reactions it provokes: a system founded on commandments can, in certain moments, imply reciprocal duties of aid carried out honestly, as it can also lead to brutal outbursts of hostility. To the eyes of the historian, who must merely note and explain the relationships between phenomena, the agrarian revolt appears as inseparable to the seigneurial regime as, for instance, the strike is to the great capitalist enterprise.

Bloch’s reflection leads us to the following question: if the jacquerie is inseparable from feudalism, and the strike from Fordist capitalism, then to what command system does the tumult of the NEETs correspond? There is only one answer: a system – neoliberalism – in which the plebe has been reconstituted. Who are these new plebians? They are the NEETs of the US high-rise projects and the neighbourhoods of south Tehran, the subproletarians of the zones sensibles. They are the class that many of today’s so-called ‘progressives’ disdain, fear, or at the best of times ignore.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

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

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America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

                                    — Langston Hughes

July 4, 2023, in the US did not begin with a mass shooting. That happened the day before, in the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed. In the videos – and there is almost always video now of mass slaughter – a figure in black blasts away with an AR-15-type gun at no one in particular on a street in southwest Philadelphia.

The dead are always particular, in this case Dajuan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah, Jr., 31; Ralph Moralis, 59. Two unidentified children, aged 2 and 13, were seriously wounded. Police say the shooter wore body armour and also carried a 9mm handgun, magazines and a police scanner. A former roommate told reporters that the 40-year-old in custody for the shooting, who lives a few blocks from where the carnage unfolded, was ‘cool’ and ‘creative’; the kind of person who ‘helps out with everybody’, a neighbour said.

For the past decade, July 4 has been the Day of Death by firearm in America. Not that they all aren’t. Since January, there have been more deaths in mass shooting incidents than days, 356 according to the Gun Violence Archive. But July 4 tops all the other days in recent history, probably because something goes awry at a backyard barbecue or street party (as happened this year on July 2 in Baltimore, 2 dead, 28 injured) or family gathering (as happened late on July 4 in Shreveport, Louisiana, 3 dead, 10 wounded); someone was slighted, someone had a beef, someone fired in the air joyfully, someone planned a drive-by.

Last year Robert E. (‘Bobby’) Crimo III climbed on a roof in Highland Park, Illinois, and made the town’s July 4 parade a turkey shoot, killing 7, wounding 50. A police spokesman told the press that Bobby, then 21, ‘had some type of affinity towards the number 4 and 7’. The numbers were tattooed on his cheekbone and painted on the side of his car. A ‘quiet’ boy, according to an acquaintance. When asked the day before, after church services, what he had planned for 7/4, Bobby replied: ‘Not really anything’.

Court proceedings have been extended because it turns out the evidence of his alleged planning is as copious as his prior social media messages are alarming. One, reported in the press, said: ‘I just want to scream, sometimes it feels like I’m living a dream . . . Living the dream, nothing’s real, I just want to scream, fuck this world.’

He titled the post ‘Toy Soldier’. A cry for help? His only friend, a gentle boy it’s said, was already dead. OD’d. Bobby’s father helped him get a gun permit as a teenager, even though a family member had previously called the police claiming the youth had threatened to kill the family. His next court date is September 11.

*

I am writing on a train heading west from New York City to Buffalo. Independence Day, and the car is crowded with Bangladeshi families. Parents and children and old people speaking the old language. Most are making the full 400-mile trip to Buffalo. The children squirm through the eight hours of the trip but remain relatively quiet for all that. If the pattern I am familiar with from neighbours in Buffalo holds, the parents used to live in New York. The men might have driven taxis, as many did when the migration from Queens started about 10 years ago, or run small stores or managed pizza shops and so on. They moved to Buffalo, where they might still drive taxis but can also have a two-family house, a garden, a life at a fraction of the city’s cost. Some of the adult passengers of similar age may be brothers or sisters just making the move, judging by their bags – numerous and large and sometimes bound in duct tape. Some may have been accountants or college professors back home but were finally convinced to emigrate now that the rest of the family has resettled, and communities have strengthened; as, one by one, Catholic Churches have been deconsecrated and sanctified as mosques, and the cycle of birth and death has turned. The old women in flowing garments appear tense as their sons look after them, as they get situated. Calm now, they stroke the children, who lounge across their laps, dreamy.

We are all travelling on public-ish transportation, Amtrak being dependent on federal and state subsidies and regulations but operating as a for-profit corporation. We are all shades and ages and sexes. Multiple languages hum the length of the train. We are not exactly comfortable, but we accommodate one another as we can. It’s a holiday; we are spending it close, as strangers, eating kosher hotdogs or food from home, saying ‘excuse me’ and ‘please’, as people do who have a feeling for society.

On the strength of new immigrants and refugees, Buffalo’s population grew in the 2020 census – the first uptick it has seen in 70 years. As in a previous Great Migration, the train travellers are rescuing angels for the now-postindustrial North.

*

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! …

Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

. . . I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—

Most of the Bangladeshis have settled on the same side of town as those earlier internal migrants, the East Side, which once, long ago, before white flight, might have also meant the Polish side but which for decades has simply meant the black side. It is to this part of town that last year a 19-year-old white nationalist from rural New York State drove hours to slaughter black people at a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. Despite memorials, the grief of that May 14 feels remote now, even on the East Side, if you didn’t know the victims, or live in the postal code that the killer chose precisely for its African American density, or depend on its one supermarket. The way sickness felt remote in New York City at the height of Covid until someone you knew died. The way danger almost always does before it catches you.

And so, in another switchback, there is this: a fine and troubling book I carried on the train called The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. Its author, Jeff Sharlet, came through Buffalo toward the end of a cross-country trip in 2021 following the ghost of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old blonde Air Force veteran who was shot by an officer while climbing through a broken window inside the Capitol on January 6. We sat on the front porch on a soft, leafy summer night on the East Side, where I would bet almost nobody knows Ashli Babbitt’s name. Jeff is a witness to the country that knows.

Along his trip, he’d talked with white people who venerate Ashli as a martyr; with people who’ve revised her age downward, to where she’s just a girl, maybe only 16, curious – just wanting to see: hey, what’s going on? – innocent; with Christians who see her killing as the start of, or a battle in, a civil war; with preachers who have removed the cross from their churches because suffering Jesus is a sissy; with one who has fashioned an altar out of swords.

Jeff has reported on the Christian right for decades; this was the first time, he said, that he had been afraid. During a church service, the preacher had already denounced him as an enemy of the people. It was something Donald Trump had started calling the media at his rallies in 2016, while reporters were caged and the candidate’s worshipers were encouraged to take ecstatic pleasure in the abuse he heaped upon them. After the service, having been denied an interview with the preacher, Jeff was in the parking lot talking with two women when an usher and a heavily armed guard threatened him and ordered him to leave. ‘I have a notebook and a pencil, and you come with guns?’ he said, telling me the story, breathless, miming the pathetic way he’d held up his weapons.

I don’t doubt Jeff’s fear in the moment, but what rattles one reading his book is the dreadful accumulation. The cascade of his informants’ assertions which, for the reader’s sake, he must briskly, parenthetically refute. The giddy violence celebrated in some of those ‘facts’ (Trump still controls the nuclear codes; Hillary was secretly executed). The claims that storming the Capitol on January 6 was a ‘false flag’, made by people who were storming. The realization that facts, lies, refutations, none of it matters in the realm of myth and dream. The repeated offerings of ‘research’ he might want to follow to know the truth. The white women who’ve tumbled down the QAnon rabbit hole, gnashing and weeping over the fictional hundreds of thousands of children fictionally kidnapped, sexually molested and cannibalized by Democrats. The white men who see abortion as ‘a plot to replace American newborns with adopted foreign ones’. The men who see abortion as a simple problem of combat readiness. When war comes (be it civil or invasion by the Chinese), one told him, ‘you lose so many bodies that you need a level of fresh bodies you never dreamed you’d have to dig into’. The men ‘for whom women are a joke’. The people who fly black flags, punisher skull images, Trump ’24 flags, Confederate flags, black and grey American flags, gun flags.

*

The witness, Jeff in this case, does not argue with his interlocutors. The witness mainly shows: here is the shape of desire – guns, power, war, a strongman.

It is enough that he knocks on their doors. Sometimes he plays the fool, just an awkward white man (hence relatively safe), going around with a notebook, saying he’s curious too – about a flag, or a tattoo, or the cat who happens to be stepping carefully around a small but formidable portion of a family’s arsenal. ‘They call me a Nazi’, a young woman in Marinette, Wisconsin, complained, because of her shoulder tattoo; idiots can’t even distinguish a swastika from her Iron Cross and German flag. ‘“Honour and Glory for Germany”, she said, her voice a low drone.’

Here may also be the shape of heartbreak. We don’t know too much about the lives behind the symbols and the guns. It’s risky for the witness to hang around. We don’t know why that woman honours and glorifies the Reich, or why another woman laughed at QAnon but her friend became a devotee, or why Ashli Babbitt so #Love(d) Trump (in more than 8,000 tweets) that she laid down her life for him. Why so many speak of enthusiasm for civil war.

Maybe it’s an acquaintance with death. For Ashli, those eight deployments? For others, all the deaths of despair – from overdose, suicide, alcohol abuse – which occurred at higher rates in states and counties that went for Trump in 2016? For rural and middle America, all the battered vets from decades of what for most of the country has been let’s-just-forget-about-it legalized killing? For all of them, Covid? Beyond the conspiratorialist blather about a ‘Plandemic’ and the fury over one’s God-given right not to wear a mask or not to be vaccinated, there is the reality of grief: a million dead was made tolerable even as death from Covid was more than twice as high in pro-Trump states and counties as elsewhere.

Grief might be chorale. From Langston again:

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

But the embodiment of desire bid his people laugh in the face of grief and displace their rage on others. His enemies, now theirs. His hoped-for victories, theirs. His troubles with the law now borne by him alone, for their sake, with a smile and a smirk and a threat. The thing about Trump, people have long said, is he’s a showman, a comedian. ‘That’s a joke’, he’ll say at his rallies, often meaning the opposite, as Jeff describes, capturing the full manic fun among his followers, for whom he has made enjoyment in the suffering of others a carnival.

*

Langston Hughes was writing in a time of Depression, of European fascism; amidst sentiments of home-grown fascism and the organizing that came from it; amidst movements of socialist and communist internationalism, and the persistence of black people in the struggle for freedom throughout a history of murderous racism, the persistence of homosexuals like him to be ‘in the life’, in whatever way, despite the dangers. He ends his poem, famously, saying that there is no ‘used to be’, no Shangri-la, no greatness to be restored. Ancestry alone – his paternal great-grandmothers enslaved women, his paternal great-grandfathers Kentucky slaveowners – forbade that kind of nostalgia.

But probably every schoolkid in Buffalo back in my time, mid-Sixties, early Seventies, learned the poem, maybe heard it on the Fourth of July, because of its freedom dream: ‘The land that never has been yet—/And yet must be’, through the effort of ordinary people in ordinary and extraordinary times. We happened to learn it in an extraordinary time, an angry time, a dreamy time too.

Read on: JoAnn Wypijewski, ‘Politics of Insecurity’, NLR 103.

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A Feminist Style

What is the problem described today by feminism? A decade ago, a generation of women – now in our late twenties and early thirties – claimed it as a primary political identity, but no longer. Among young radicals in the Anglophone world, embarrassment at our proximity to something so easily co-opted by liberalism and neoliberalism alike issued in two concurrent desertions of the resurgent ‘women’s movement’ of the 2010s: one group jumped ship for an activist project motivated by the critique of capitalism, with which feminism quasi-geometrically ‘intersected’, the other went overboard for a distilled ironic nihilism. In both cases, podcasts ensued.

Where an identifiable form of feminism has clung on most tenaciously is in the commissioning and branding of cultural products. When it comes to the packaging of films and books by, about, or ‘for’ women, marketers’ lexicons have shrunk to two words: ‘timely’ and ‘urgent’. Feminism, in this register, designates any text or tale in which a woman might occupy a central position, or any project in which a role historically occupied by a man has been taken by a woman. Retellings of 1984 from Julia’s perspective, histories of art that apophatically emphasise the centrality of men in the field, films with titles that, taken together, sound like the garbled punchline of a mother-in-law joke: She Said, Don’t Worry Darling, Women Talking.

In such moribund conditions, it is unsurprising that Anglophone feminism’s last defenders have returned to the works of earlier icons as a way of reminding us that the term once evoked not just cultural form but political content. Behind this manoeuvre is a motivation that even its proponents find difficult to define: frustration at the lingering disadvantages of some aspects of the most ‘privileged’ versions of womanhood (white, wealthy, western); the dull compulsion of (often passive) misogyny that gives the second wave an aura of continued contemporary relevance. Absent any theoretical engagement with the totality of the experiences of women, qua women, by a new generation of political philosophers – feminist theory, where it is practised, tends today to tackle one aspect of women’s lives at a time (usually sex) – statements intended to demonstrate the vitality of feminism have increasingly relied for their evidence on the words of the dead. Sure she’s decayed, the exhumers confess, but in such style!

A few years ago, it was Catherine MacKinnon whose thought seemed to permeate contemporary glosses of women’s ‘situation’ – her established openness to trans identities made her seem au courant when compared to some of her contemporaries, and her legal scholarship suited the litigious aftermath of MeToo. But, being alive, MacKinnon proved hard to iconise – she has an unfortunate habit of continuing to speak and, inevitably, to say the wrong things (only to deny she said them…). What is more, legalism began to seem outmoded, as radical critiques of the form and function of the law and its agents entered wide circulation. The resurgent interest in legal activism of this period has since ebbed into a more literary form, the two modes united by their shared emphasis on testimony. As part of this shift, two figures have become the subject of notable renewed interest: Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag. MeToo’s impact is detectable not in any political transformation among the professional women who comprised its constituency, but rather in the desiccated dregs of a ‘feminist’ linguistic mode: a speaker who narrates in the first-person, invokes the literary and wants you to know of her pain.

The Dworkin revival began in earnest with the publication of a volume of her writing, Last Days at Hot Slit (2019) edited by Amy Scholder and Joanna Fateman, and continues via Pratiba Parmar’s documentary My Name is Andrea (2022), described, generously, by Amia Srinivasan as ‘almost schlocky’. The film is a travesty, objectionable even to those of us who disagree with Dworkin on most things, manipulative in the extreme in its use of its subject’s traumatic biography as a fast-track to her canonisation. But the simple fact of its existence, along with that of the edited collection, raises the coupled questions: why Dworkin, why now?

Andrea Dworkin, as Parmar’s film makes clear, suffered. While demonstrating at an anti-Vietnam protest in 1965 she was arrested and taken to the NYC Women’s House of Detention, where she was subjected to violent vaginal examinations that left her bruised and bleeding for weeks. In 1971, aged twenty-five, she fled her life in Amsterdam to escape relentless beatings by her then-husband, whom she had met through the city’s left-bohemian scene. These are the experiences that ground her work – her brutalisation by men in both the public and the private sphere. The central device of My Name is Andrea is to have Dworkin played by five different actors (to represent Dworkin at different ages), one of whom, early in the film, speaks Dworkin’s line: ‘I write my pain to symbolise all those other women’s’. This phrase captures the appeal of Dworkin’s work to the present iteration of Anglo-American feminism: the ability to verbalise individual suffering eloquently, and in so doing claim to speak and act on behalf of a collective – to make writing about oneself the central political act of one’s life. The film’s device neatly encapsulates the risk of turning to Dworkin for anything else: the flattening of all personal and historical particularity into a single narrative that naturalises pain as the universal birthright of all women. The five actors correspond only vaguely to Dworkin’s age through the film – symbolised mostly through changing hairstyles and bandanas. (The choice to have Amandla Stenberg, the only non-white cast member, portray a pre-adolescent Dworkin who is molested in the cinema is particularly dumbfounding, suggesting that experiences determined by race were movable trivialities when compared to the constancy of gendered oppression in 1950s America.)

A flood of critical reappraisals followed first the book’s publication and now the documentary’s release, unanimously expressing concern over Dworkin’s more extreme positions concerning penetrative sex, prostitution and porn, while singling out for praise a supposedly less contentious aspect of her work: its style. ‘What’s so exciting to watch, reading “Last Days”, is not her political trajectory but the way her style crystallized around her beliefs.’ (Lauren Oyler) ‘Her sensibility and her uncompromising analyses of intercourse and pornography are hard to prize apart.’ (Sam Huber) ‘The style is strident, enraged, and the conclusions are often stark, bluntly phrased, and difficult to read.’ (Moira Donegan) Dworkin’s books ‘contain certain truths’, writes Srinivasan: ‘she is one of the more under-appreciated prose stylists in postwar American writing.’ Of her own style, Dworkin said she aimed to write a ‘prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilising than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography’. This latter quote abounds in the reappraisals of Dworkin, a way of explaining the limits of her political conclusions, of re-interpreting her contextual and situated diagnoses of the condition of American women in the last decades of the twentieth century as ‘experimental literature, cultural criticism, a strategic provocation’ (Fateman). This move accomplishes two things: it rebrands Dworkin’s ideological excesses and missteps as aesthetic, while offering contemporary feminism a way out of the hard work of following Dworkin’s attentive analysis of her own era – by imitating her style.

This style reached its formal and affective apogee in one of only three books (of twelve) by Dworkin not to be included in the anthology: Scapegoat (1999), which replicates a graphical method of argument she first deployed in Intercourse (1987) – equivalence via virgule. A glance at the contents page is enough to convey the approach taken by Dworkin and to clarify her political message too: ‘Pogrom / Rape’, ‘Zionism / Women’s Liberation’, ‘Palestinians / Prostituted Women’; there is a trans-historical parity between the oppression of Jews and women, which at points in the book also extends to black people and, on occasion, poets too. A short quote suffices to give a flavour of her rhetoric:

Swimming in the blood of her own body, in labor and in pain, the woman is a half-human who achieves her half-human fate in pregnancy and childbearing. The canal through which the infant is extruded is the man’s place of sex; he enters, not wanting blood to drown him or contaminate him or pollute him; the blood makes her dirty and threatens his pristine penis; this makes her an abomination.

The shock value of such passages, intended to reverberate in an instant from the particular to the universal, facilitates quotation and recirculation. Justificatory citation is almost always drawn from a novel or poem (in the following passage Dworkin quotes Tsvetaeva and Cixous) and so literary criticism becomes the means through which the world is to be interpreted. Such methods place a question mark over Dworkin’s posterity. Even were it possible to write a prose ‘more terrifying than rape’, should the goal of feminism be to petrify its opponents into mute submission, its evidential base drawn from literature? Ought it not attempt to root its arguments more clearly in facts about the world? 

Susan Sontag maintained a mannered distance from second-wave feminism during its peak, as Merve Emre acknowledges in her introduction to the new collection On Women (Emre seems to miss the joke, though, when she cites as evidence of Sontag’s commitment to the cause her self-professed, lifelong interest in three subjects: women, China and ‘Freaks’). The introductory essay makes much of Sontag’s timeliness – ‘What a relief to revisit the essays and interviews … and to find them incapable of aging badly.’ It’s true that Sontag’s ability to conjure a bad infinity of nuance makes it harder to disagree with the immediate arguments of her texts ‘on women’ than in Dworkin’s case, but this has less to do with the transcendental genius on display in the essays and more with the bagginess of the collection itself. At its centre are Sontag’s written responses to a questionnaire issued to prominent women theorists and writers, including Simone de Beauvoir and Rossana Rossanda, by the left-wing Spanish-language journal Libre. While the other essays in the book certainly fulfil the requirement of being about women (general – ‘The Double Standard of Aging’ – and  specific – the subject of ‘Fascinating Fascism’ is Leni Riefenstahl), this is the only chapter in which Sontag addresses the problem of how to speak politically of women as a group, of their variable priority in the political struggle in an era of class antagonism and decolonisation.

Of more historical value than this emporium of Sontag’s musings would have been the republication in full of Libre no. 3 (October 1972), in which the interviews appeared, so that they could have been read in the context of other prominent views on the question, from writers outside the Anglophone world. But this would have been to miss a trick in both marketing and critical terms. Sontag’s value here doesn’t really have anything to do with her feminism – whatever this word meant for her at different points in her life – it’s in the new collection’s ability to naturalise the position of woman as writer, and thus to make writing itself seem the very act of womanhood. These revivals have reduced both writers to equivalent absurdities: they have tried to make a style of Dworkin’s politics and a politics of Sontag’s style.

The current second-wave revival will surely not halt with Sontag and Dworkin; other authors will be unearthed from the canon in an attempt to fill lacunae in modern Anglo-American feminist thought. We should, of course, continue to read these antecedents, whose work illuminates historic stages in feminism – let us not throw a nursery’s worth of texts by Firestone, Davis, Beauvoir, Mitchell and more out with Sontag and Dworkin’s bathwater. But in substituting fifty-year-old theses for an effort to analyse present conditions – or face honestly the present difficulty of defining womanhood so that it might be articulated in something approaching a totality – we make the error of claiming as ‘timely’ a rhetorical mode that made sense under conditions of legally enshrined patriarchy, even as that particular set of circumstances has, in the USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland and the majority of contemporary liberal democracies, ceased to exist. Rather than engage in the task of describing the world anew, a world equally if not more complex in its social arrangements than half a century ago, this revivalism lulls us into a depoliticising stasis. Both Sontag and Dworkin excelled at deploying a confident presentism, the power of which rested on its compression of history. Woman is because woman was. But the historical value of their texts aren’t undermined if we make the simple point that things have since changed. Perhaps not consistently improved, for the vast bulk of us, but by no means worsened on account of being women.

Sontag and Dworkin shared a rhetorical approach formed in response to the particular, concrete situations of women they lived among, whose lives, along with their own, they were trying to describe. Their naturalising presentisms were a part of their (shared) political belief in the distinct category of experience of womanhood – a belief confirmed by the laws and social structures of their time (Sontag herself warned against the misuse of ahistorical truisms, in her reply to Adrienne Rich, included in On Women, ‘Applied to a particular historical subject the feminist passion yields conclusions which, however true, are extremely general’). Absent this context, armed only with celebratory introductions by literary critics, we’re left with the impression that there is an essential connection between three poles embodied by these figures: womanhood – suffering – writing. Writing, conveniently, then becomes the answer to woman’s politicised suffering. But to identify oneself as a writer in the age of mass literacy provokes the same response as identifying as a feminist in an age of legal equality between the sexes: aren’t we all?

Dworkin and Sontag’s shared emphasis on suffering animates a residual concern about the diffuse but ongoing predicament of what it is to be a woman, awareness of which makes one into a feminist. But is this all that feminism is? And if it has become such a negative political project, might we not want to pause to consider the ramifications of defining womanhood through not just the experience of suffering but via the constant verbalisation of pain? What, exactly, is the political programme towards which pain, as a collectivising experience, might lead us? 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. 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.

It cannot be overstated how deeply boring all this is. How unthrilling, how inessential, to how few urgent questions this seems to contain the seeds of any possible answers. As Dworkin said of porn (after her friend said it of heroin): ‘The worst thing about it all is the endless repetition.’ We’ve been here before, of course, in the past few years’ debate over Afropessimism. Similar risks adhere to a negative feminism: if the aim is to move from a biological conception of gender, as of race, to one that is socially constructed but no less real for it in its consequences, might it not behoove us to arrive at a category definition that does not condemn all those who fall within it to limitless amounts of pain? Feminism has no absolute right to existence. It must describe something about the world accurately for it to make sense as a political-philosophical position. And that description must contain within it verifiable truths about the current situation of women, or else it will be – only – a style.

Read on: Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, NLR I/40.

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Beyond Labourism

In 1964, Tom Nairn issued a challenge to an isolated and listless British left. Faced with a Labour Party that dominates the political scene, ‘and has sunk such deep roots that any radical change in it seems unthinkable . . . what criticism could affect a leviathan like this?’ Nearly fifty years later, the Official Opposition has reverted to type following a brief, unrepeatable hiatus between 2015 and 2019. The party’s current platform combines hosannas to ‘iron fiscal rules’ and support for wage deflation with law-and-order rhetoric and a pledge to stop refugee boats from crossing La Manche. Its previous leader is subject to damnatio memoriae, unable to stand as a Labour candidate at next year’s general election. Dissenting members are being summarily expelled, with even the Guardian and Financial Times beginning to question the intensity of Keir Starmer’s crackdown on the left. This being the case, effective criticism of the leviathan is unlikely to occur inside its slimmed ranks for the foreseeable future.

But what about from outside? Last month, Tower Hamlets – London’s poorest borough, located in the east of the city with a population of 320,000 – signalled its refusal to conform to the country’s rightward trend. Its social-democratic council marked a year in office by expanding free school meals to all primary and secondary school students. This example, set by the area with the highest rate of child poverty nationwide, spurred others to act. The London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford announced similar, albeit more limited policies to address the ‘cost of living crisis’. At least some parts of Ukania, it seems, are resisting Labour’s direction of travel.  

The electorate of Tower Hamlets rejected Britain’s increasingly hard centrism in May 2022 and instead chose an ambitious programme of social democratic reform, effecting the biggest swing against Labour in living memory. The victorious mayor, Lutfur Rahman, picked up 11,000 votes more than the incumbent, John Biggs, who had imposed a series of austerity budgets and a variant of fire-and-rehire on 4,000 council workers. Rahman’s party, Aspire, secured an outright majority of council seats, while Labour lost 23.

A Bangladesh-born solicitor and former Labour politician, Rahman first won the mayoralty back in 2010. Though he was initially selected as the Labour candidate, he was forced to run as an independent after his political rivals accused him of ‘electoral corruption’ and ‘links to Islamist groups’. During his first term he passed a raft of policies to protect frontline services from spending cuts, as well as building thousands of new homes and significantly hiking council wages. He was re-elected with a landslide in 2014, but the result was challenged in the civil courts by Labour and UKIP, who doubled down on their allegations of clientelism. On the orders of a single judge, the vote was invalidated, and Rahman was banned from running for five years.

As a Muslim socialist with a committed base and a national profile, Rahman is one of the most distinctive figures in European urban politics. One in six of Britain’s Bengali community live in Tower Hamlets, and their votes were crucial to his political comeback last year. Since then, the media has continued to present him as a criminal, a demagogue or a dangerous populist. In the New Statesman, Paul Mason dismissed his supporters as ‘essentially a faction within local Muslim community politics’. Others attributed his success to the ‘unrepresentative’ demographics of the borough. The structural features that Tower Hamlets shares with other urban areas are less remarked upon. Deindustrialization of the docks, factories and warehouses; the increasing power of real estate developers in the Docklands redevelopment; the behemoth of deregulated finance capital in Canary Wharf; rising rents with the gentrification of Brick Lane, Bethnal Green and Bow – all this resonates with parallel developments in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and elsewhere.

Still, it is unsurprising that Tower Hamlets has become the springboard for the most serious challenge to the Westminster consensus. This small corner of East London has long incubated political dissent – a pattern that predates the arrival of the Bengali community. Its history of recalcitrance includes George Lansbury’s Poplarist welfare-rights rebellion in the 1920s, the momentous Cable Street anti-fascist demonstration in the 1930s, Phil Piratin’s victory as one of the handful of Communist MPs in Limehouse and Bow in the 1940s, the uprising sparked by the racist murder of textile worker Altab Ali and the squatters’ movement in the 1970s, and George Galloway’s victory on an anti-war ticket in Bethnal Green in the early 2000s. In Tower Hamlets, a combative working-class culture, invigorated by Irish, Jewish and Bengali-led movements throughout the twentieth century, has not been decisively broken as in other parts of the country. This peculiar micro-political climate – a historic tradition of worker militancy sustained by migratory waves – has created a hostile environment for the moderating tendencies of Labourism.

The programme of the current council is arguably the most radical in Britain. The borough’s 22,000 properties will be brought back in-house, as will various public facilities, and council workers will be entitled to a living wage. Aspire has rolled out bursaries for university students and an Education Maintenance Allowance for 16-18 year olds. A total of £12 million has been earmarked for youth services, along with £4.7 million for the voluntary and community sector. Free in-home elderly care will be made available, while charges for disabled care will be scrapped. A major expansion of social housing will coincide with a significant tax hike for unoccupied properties, and a ‘Masterplan’ for Spitalfields and Banglatown will aim to fight back against gentrification. Detractors accuse Rahman of depleting the council’s sizable reserves and risking default on its obligations. Supporters reply that a series of insolvent Conservative and Labour councils suggests that austerity does not guarantee financial stability.

The Aspire project demonstrates that building an active constituency of working people demands more than centralized coteries of technocrats and social-media influencers. As left-populists on both sides of the Atlantic confront the limits of Caesarist communication strategies, Rahman has taken a different approach – prioritizing gradual, face-to-face organizing and generally avoiding online campaigning. Nonetheless, the party still lacks a formal structure, membership and clear mechanisms for mobilization. Its all-male team of councillors poses problems for developing and diversifying its base. In the long term, a more effective synthesis of policy proposals and political mediation will be required to advance working-class interests in education, social care and housing. Historically, the most successful experiments in European municipal reform show that durable class coalitions rely on mass organizations capable of articulating and enacting popular demands. Without building this kind of institution, it is difficult to see how Aspire’s example could be replicated elsewhere. At present, the party’s political ambitions seem to stop at the borough’s boundaries, and its horizon of expectation remains focussed on the next local elections in 2026.

Such working-class alliances have typically relied upon the reconciliation of fractions with apparently divergent short-term interests. In Tower Hamlets, hostility to ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’ among Aspire’s base – many of whom rely on Uber or logistics companies for their livelihoods – will have to be harmonized with demands for traffic reduction and environmental regeneration. The council has so far tried to achieve this by opposing LTNs while installing electric vehicle charging points, new electric waste vans and green fuelling provision, as well as solar panels on council buildings. But it remains to be seen whether its environmental agenda will succeed in papering over these possible divisions. Perhaps more pressingly, any socialised house-building programme must resist the temptation to collaborate with corporate developers and housing associations – eschewing quick fixes in favour of genuinely decommodified accommodation. Public spaces will also have to be defended against astroturf campaigns that claim to represent local interests. The task of reconnecting political institutions to atomised twenty-first century urban workers takes more than a well-known leader or popular policies – whether in New York, Paris, Madrid, Berlin or London. A prerequisite for any sustainable movement for social transformation is the anticipation and sublimation of contradictions among subaltern layers.

Witnessing the delivery of Aspire’s programme, the Labour left must choose between three potential pathways: bide their time and hope for the best within the party while remaining hamstrung by its new internal culture; deprioritise party work for extra-parliamentary campaigns to shift the balance of power elsewhere; or break free of the Labourist straitjacket altogether and build an alternative formation. Whatever they decide, in East London there are signs that resignation to staid austerian politics does not have to be the order of the day. British socialists will determine their own fate, whether they submit to inglorious inertia or rediscover their capacity for critique.

Read on: Owen Hatherley, ‘The Government of London’, NLR 122.