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Jet-Setters

In the first two hundred days of 2022, Taylor Swift’s private jet made 170 flights, covering an average distance of 133 miles. It emitted 8,293 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the process. By way of comparison, the average annual carbon footprint for a US citizen is 14.2 tonnes. In Europe it is 6.8, in Africa 1.04. Swift’s jet, in other words, has a carbon footprint equal to 1,603 Americans, 2,225 Europeans and 14,552 Africans.

None of us would consider taking a plane to travel 133 miles. But evidently, we live in a world apart from the likes of Kylie Jenner – sister of Kim Kardashian – who is apparently partial to taking 12 minute flights. One wonders about the mental processes that govern such decisions, or those that led her to post on Instagram a black-and-white photograph of herself and her partner kissing in front of two private jets, captioned: ‘You wanna take mine or yours?’ It’s dispiriting to see that their uncertainty is seemingly no different from that of children deciding which scooter to ride. But the 7 million plus people who liked the post – evidently dreaming of owning a pair of jets themselves – inspire even more despair.

The dream of everyone having their own private aircraft – every man an Icarus – has been a figment of the Western imagination since before air travel even existed. See, for example, this French illustration from 1890 of a graceful lady with hat and parasol on her flying taxi-carriage: 

Albert Robida, Un quartier embrouillé, illustration for La Vie éléctrique, Paris 1890.

Just as the carriage, once the preserve of ‘gentlemen’, became available to all classes once it was mechanical and motor-powered, so too the aeroplane would one day become a personal form of travel, whizzing along the boulevards of the sky. An American illustration from 1931 already exhibited the idea of city parking for planes, even suggesting, perhaps in keeping with the ineffable Jenner, that a family may possess a number of them, just as they own multiple cars.

From Harry Golding, The Wonder Book of Aircraft, London 1931.

An unsustainable utopia: imagine a world with a few billion aircraft whirling around the sky. A few billion cars are already unbearable for the planet. But of course, it is the rarity of aircraft that makes them so desirable. There are 23,241 private jets in operation worldwide (as of August 2022), 63% of which are registered in North America. (The number of private aircraft as a whole is much greater; there are still 90,000 Pipers in operation, plus several other brands of private propeller planes).

Orders for new private jets are on the rise, even as calls to reduce CO2 emissions intensify. Beyond the opulent lifestyles of starlets and ephemeral idols, it is major corporations that are leading the charge. An Airbus Corporate Jet study found that 65% of the companies they interviewed now use private jets regularly for business. The pandemic caused this figure to skyrocket. Last year saw the highest jet sales on record. As one commentator noted: ‘According to the business aviation data firm WingX, the number of flights on business aircraft across the globe rose by 10% last year compared to 2021 – 14% higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The report lists more than 5.5 million business aircraft flights in 2022 – more than 50% higher than in 2020’.

While solemn international summits make plans for reducing emissions (along with the use of plastic, noxious chemicals and so on), elites are polluting away as if there were no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the poor fools down below busy themselves with sorting out their recycling. For our rulers, the question of whether it would be better to have an egg today or a chicken tomorrow is entirely rhetorical. Never in human history has a king, emperor, statesman or entrepreneur chosen the chicken: it is always and only the egg today, at the cost of exterminating the entire coop.

As Le Monde reports, the five largest oil companies posted ‘an unprecedented $153.5 billion (€143.1 billion) in net profits for 2022. The oil giants are approaching the total figure of $200 billion in adjusted net profit’ (i.e. excluding provisions and exceptional items), of which ‘$59.1 billion in adjusted earnings (+157%) for ExxonMobil (US); $36.5 billion (+134%) for Chevron (US); $27.7 billion (+116%) for BP (UK), despite a net loss of $2.5 billion linked to the Russian context; and $39.9 billion (+107%) for Shell (UK).’ Even the environmentally friendly Norwegian state pension fund, Equinor, will benefit from the bonanza: it posted ‘an adjusted net profit of $59.9 billion at the end of just the first nine months of 2022’.

The announcement of these record profits (which have not been taxed by any government) comes on the back of last year’s much-hyped COP27 conference in Sharm el Sheik, attended by as many as 70 executives from the fossil fuel industry. They will be gathering again for another no doubt portentous summit later this year, presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. (Naturally, a geopolitical emergency serves as a good excuse to delay the slightest environmental action: war in Ukraine has led even the ecologically-minded Germans to reopen their coal mines. Rather than prompting a shift away from natural gas, the war has sparked a frantic search for more of it. The pandemic likewise led to a vertiginous increase in plastic consumption, and if for a few months it helped reduce the emissions from road and air traffic, it dealt a far more serious blow to public transportation, now viewed with suspicion, as a site of infection and contagion.)

It is as if global elites weren’t just mocking the rest of humanity, but the planet itself – poisoning it with one hand while greenwashing with the other. The Italian oil company Eni has as its symbol a six-legged dog, formerly black, now green, thus assuring us of their environmental bonafides. ‘Investment firms have been capturing trillions of dollars from retail investors, pension funds, and others’, Bloomberg writes,

with promises that the stocks and bonds of big companies can yield tidy returns while also helping to save the planet or make life better for its people. The sale of these investments is now the fastest-growing segment of the global financial-services industry, thanks to marketing built on dire warnings about the climate crisis, wide-scale social unrest, and the pandemic.

Wall Street now rates the environmental and social responsibility of business governance, though Bloomberg rightly points out that ESG scores ‘don’t measure a company’s impact on the earth and society’, but rather ‘gauge the opposite: the potential impact of the world on the company and its shareholders’. That is to say, they are not intended to help protect the environment from the companies, but the companies from the environment. ‘McDonald’s Corp., one of the world’s largest beef purchasers, generated more greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 than Portugal or Hungary, because of the company’s supply chain. McDonald’s produced 54 million tons of emissions that year, an increase of about 7% in four years.’ Yet in 2021 McDonald’s saw its ESG score upgraded, thanks to the ‘company’s environmental practices’.

The elites are fond of dangling a grass-coloured future in front of us – deodorized, disinfected and depolluted thanks to biofuels and electric cars. But to produce sufficient biofuel we’d have to cover the earth with soy plantations, definitively deforesting the planet (not to mention the production of fertilisers, pesticides and agricultural machinery). As for the electric car, whilst it pollutes less than its petrol-powered equivalent when used, it actually creates far more pollution to produce one. According to one professor at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Energy Technology, manufacturing an electric car emits as much CO2 as driving 170,000km in a regular car. And this is before the electric car’s engine is even turned on. As one academic study concluded:

the electric cars appear to involve higher life cycle impacts for acidification, human toxicity, particulate matter, photochemical ozone formation and resource depletion. The main reason for this is the notable environmental burdens of the manufacturing phase, mainly due to toxicological impacts strictly connected with the extraction of precious metals as well as the production of chemicals for battery production.

This is without even counting the fact that the electricity used to drive the car will benefit the environment only if it’s produced by clean and renewable sources. At best, the electric car is a mere palliative: the problem is not so much having billions of non-polluting cars, but producing billions of cars in the first place (in addition to the necessary infrastructure).

The elites are fooling the world, but they’re also fooling themselves. They believe they can poison the planet with impunity but save themselves by escaping to recently-acquired estates in New Zealand, far from all the smog and radiation, or else to Mars or some other extra-terrestrial refuge. Infantile dreams, cartoon utopias. One wonders what right they have to proclaim themselves elites in the first place. In the original French, ‘troupe d’élite’ denoted a superior stratum. The term was popularized in postwar sociology by C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite (1956), essentially as a modern synonym for the classical ‘oligarchy’. After the sixties, it fell out of fashion, until reappearing again in the 1990s.

In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), Christopher Lasch wrote that what characterized the new elites was their hatred of the vulgar masses:

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.

(Note how the fortunes of the term ‘elite’ have gone hand-in-hand with those of ‘populism’, wielded as a pejorative).

Lasch defined the elite in intellectual terms, thereby opening the way for the problematic concept of the ‘cognitive elite’. The champion of the term was Charles Murray, who together with Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), a book whose essential claim is that black people are more stupid than white people. (In a subsequent conversation with the New York Times, aided by a significant amount of alcohol, Murray summarised his life’s work as ‘social pornography’.) Its introduction claims that ‘modern societies identify the brightest youths with ever increasing efficiency and then guide them into fairly narrow educational and occupational channels. These channels are increasingly lucrative and influential, leading to the development of a distinct band in the social hierarchy, dubbed the ‘cognitive elite’.

Those who govern today’s world consider themselves part of this enlightened set. The legitimacy of their power is based on their supposed intellectual superiority. This is meritocracy in reverse. Rather than ‘They govern (or dominate) because they are better’, we have ‘They are better because they govern (or dominate)’. Weber had already caught onto this inversion in the early twentieth century:

When a man who is happy compares his position with that of one who is unhappy, he is not content with the fact of his happiness, but desires something more, namely the right to this happiness, the consciousness that he has earned his good fortune, in contrast to the unfortunate One who must equally have earned his misfortune. Our everyday experience proves that there exists just such a need for psychic comfort about the legitimacy or deservedness of one’s happiness, whether this involves political success, superior economic status, bodily health, success in the game of love, or anything else.

Given the social, environmental and geopolitical disasters which we are heading towards at breakneck speed, it is easy to doubt the claims of the elite to cognitive superiority. Yet perhaps it is not so much that they are dim, but rather that they are asleep at the wheel – and accelerating towards the precipice.

P.S. I must confess that before researching this article I did not know of the existence of Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner: it must be me, rather than the elites, who lives in a world apart.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Jacob Emery, ‘Art of the Industrial Trace’, NLR 71.

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Je ne sais pas

When I was a child, my mother would read to us from an illustrated version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The content of each page – words in a large well-spaced font followed by a colourful picture – was bordered by bright patterns. Young children are often drawn more to the rhythms of speech than its meaning (their attention seems always to be directed to the conditions which make things possible rather than the things themselves). To the extent that I concentrated on the content of the story, I thought of – and can still partly remember – pictures surrounded by margins so decorative that they threatened to crowd out the main event. I imagined that the margin would grow with each turn of the page, surrounding, constricting and finally overwhelming text and image and, in so doing, bringing about an ending. I thought, or I imagine now that I thought, that perhaps this was the movement which guided the story.

The French filmmaker Alice Diop often refers to her work as an attempt to draw attention to the margins. Marginality does not, as her films make clear, suggest inferior status. It can exist on both vertical and horizontal axes. The closest analogy is psychological: what is marginal is what is not thought about, what is suppressed. The director of six documentaries and most recently Saint-Omer, for which she won the Golden Lion at Venice, Diop is the child of Senegalese immigrants who moved to France in the late 1960s. Born in 1979, she grew up in the Cité des 3000, a district of Aulnay-sous-Bois, a northeastern suburb of Paris built to house migrants working in the nearby Citroën car factory. She studied history, focusing on the legacy of colonialism, at the University of Evry, before training at the prestigious Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son (La Fémis). Like the writers Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux, she is a transfuge de classe who has dedicated the early part of her career to challenging polite society’s view of the dominated classes.

Conceived as a political project, Diop’s documentary work offered successive portraits of the banlieues that intend to dispel misconceptions and half-truths. Clichy For Example (2006) documents the aftermath of the riots that swept through France after two men died fleeing from the police; Danton’s Death (2011) follows an aspiring black actor, Steve, who dreams of being cast as the lead in the Büchner play after which the film is named, but encounters belittling acts of racially charged dismissal; On Call (2016) presents a series of vignettes set in a refugee medical centre which focus on the psychological and physical difficulties of its patients; Towards Tenderness (2017) examines race, love and masculinity via a set of interviews with young working class men. Most recently, We (2021) saw the director bring herself into the frame, reflecting on the death of her father and the co-existence of modernity and tradition in Paris’s suburbs. Taking inspiration from François Maspero’s Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, a book of photos and prose documenting a journey through the outskirts of Paris which Diop says taught her to love the banlieues, the filmtraverses the city’s periphery without stopping at its centre.

The film marked something of a departure for Diop. Made in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, We counterposes an image of a France divided between secularism and religious fanaticism with one whose fissures are too subtle to discern. Its scope – monarchists and car mechanics, nurses and game hunters – was wider than anything that Diop had previously attempted. In one scene we see a crowd, entirely white with the sole exception of a black priest, at a mass commemorating Louis XVI at the Basilica Cathedral in Saint-Denis. The camera scans the faces of the attendees. Some are moved, almost to tears, as they listen to the priest read Citizen Louis Capet’s final address. There is something pathetic about the scene, which is shot with an ambivalence that hesitates between disdain or pity. What we see are not those who would once have supported the Vichy regime, but a confused mass descending into the tomb of a dead king that is not kind enough to close behind them. Strange things live on in Paris’s margins.

In what follows, Diop recalls a dream in which she has mislaid the keys to her apartment. She recognizes the names of other residents on the intercom but cannot find her own. Eventually she is let in by a woman to whom she explains that she once lived in the building with her family. From deep in her pocket Diop retrieves a heavy bunch of rusty keys. With force the door yields; she enters, tentatively, and is greeted by a darkness which feels like a ‘tomb’. Unlike the monarchists of Saint-Denis, though, the director wakes up. Video footage of her father recalling his arrival from Senegal now plays. We see him move his face away from the camera and touch it as he speaks – through discomfort at being filmed or the effort of recalling the past? ‘I have always had work since I arrive in France.’ Should we share in his pride or find something melancholy in his assertion of it? Diop again lets the camera linger long enough for a shadow of doubt to be cast over first impressions. Her aim in such scenes is less to challenge a stereotype than, through the slow gaze of the camera, create a space in which the viewer can reflect on the varying meanings of the lives and words of her subjects.

Ambiguity is at the centre of Saint-Omer, Diop’s first feature film and her finest work alongside We. The film is inspired by the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegal-born French woman sentenced to twenty years in prison for the murder of her child. Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who confesses to the crime but pleads not guilty, confounds jurors and onlookers with her eloquence and psychological opacity. Asked by the judge why she killed her child, Laurence utters a line which will become a refrain: ‘Je ne sais pas’. At the film’s midpoint its other central character, Rama (Kayije Kagame), a black professor of literature who has travelled from Paris to the suburb of Saint-Omer with the aim of writing a book on the trial receives a call from her editor, who asks, ‘What is she like?’ A pause, slight but heavy follows. Whether this is out of exasperation or to collect her thoughts we do not find out, for Rama’s editor quickly supplies an answer: ‘She sounds fascinating’ (To whom?) ‘The press say she talks in very sophisticated French.’ Finally Rama speaks, her voice steady and dismissive: ‘She talks like an educated woman, that’s all.’

Diop’s animating theme is hereby complicated by the fact that Laurence, as with the real-life Fabienne, is in some respects the opposite of an outsider. She comes from a well-off Francophone Senegalese family; we are told that her father is a translator for the United Nations, that as a child she was forbidden from speaking Wolof. (Diop did not speak Wolof at home either and recalls her parents being warned off doing so by her teachers.) That Laurence’s background could count as marginal, that it could make her interest in European philosophy and literature inexplicable and fascinating, is a consequence of the provincialism that Diop sought to expose in We.

The existence of Rama, easily read as a fictionalized version of Diop but probably closer to her image of an ideal viewer, allows the drama of the trial to be seen from a sympathetic perspective. This is in stark contrast to the fetishistic response of the French press, who were quick to treat the real-life events as an expression of ungraspable cultural differences between Africans and Europeans. Rama however is also locked in her own, more familiar drama: a difficult relationship with her mother and her working-class upbringing and the anxiety – fuelled by her pregnancy – that she is at risk of becoming either too close to or too distant from them. In the first glimpse of her personal life, Rama, accompanied by her husband, visits her family. She hesitates when asked by her sister whether she can take her mother to the hospital, before insisting she cannot. At play is not just Rama’s refusal to allow her mother into her life, but the sense that her autonomy has been won by drawing a screen between her upbringing and the life she has made for herself. We are invited to compare the two women: how thin is the line which separates the successful professor and mother-to-be with the woman on trial?

Further details of Laurence’s life are soon revealed. An emotionally distant but disciplinarian mother whom she resents; a kind father that does not raise her but whom she admires; a wealthy family; a bookish, isolated childhood; and an elite class position which places her uncomfortably in French society. Added to this is a relationship with a much older man, Luc Dummontet, with whom she begins an affair not long after arriving in Paris. He is married with children and an irregular presence in her life. When Laurence tells him that she is pregnant with his child he keeps this news to himself, even after the child’s death. Dummontet is frail and pathetic; sheepishly, he complains of Laurence’s jealousy, her anger, her silent treatments, his fear that she will leave him because of his age and declining health.

Rama looks on with compassion, but through Laurence’s plight she is playing out her own fears and anxieties. One night, sitting alone in her hotel room she listens to recordings of the trial. As we hear Laurence speaking about her mother, Rama thinks back to her own childhood. A wordless scene around a kitchen table unfolds. Rama’s mother finishes a drink from a bowl after which she washes it and then retrieves a container of Nesquik from the cupboard, placing it on the table for her daughter who has entered and, without speaking, sits to drink some chocolate milk. The young Rama is wearing pyjamas and her mother is dressed for work; it is dark outside and unclear whether it is early morning or evening. When the camera returns to Rama as an adult her face is heavy with sadness. Is there something in Coly’s sad story that could have relevance to the life of Rama or any other observer?

The latter half of the film attempts, with varying degrees of success, to interrogate this question by treating Coly as a symbol of universal issues of femininity and agency. Laurence tells the court that she was a victim of sorcery, an excuse which the film gives us plenty of reasons to doubt without discounting it. In Saint-Omer’s most unpleasant scene, the police officer tasked with investigating the case explains that in an attempt to provide a cultural explanation for Laurence’s actions he suggested witchcraft. A back and forth ensues between the officer and prosecutor about the difference between infanticide and female genital mutilation, a practice the latter describes as having ‘cultural value’.

To read this scene purely as an instance of racist ignorance and dismissal would be to miss something. The police officer’s fantasies offer Laurence an opportunity to envelope herself in mystery, withdrawing into the symbolic world and becoming someone that cannot be reduced to received social categories. In her final monologue – repeating the words uttered by Fabienne – she explains how, standing on the shore with her child in her arms, the moon rose before her ‘lighting the path like a spotlight’. The judge attempts, unsuccessfully, to point to inconsistencies between this poetic narrative and Laurence’s initial testimony but to no avail – ‘Je ne me souviens pas’, she replies. Evidently, within the world of facts there is no possibility of making oneself intelligible, at least for someone like Laurence.

In her earlier films, Diop was often torn between a desire to depict working class life authentically and angst about the meaning of her images. In the case of Danton’s Death, for instance, she has said that she was careful with her footage lest it might inadvertently reinforce pre-established narratives about working-class men from the banlieues. Steve smoking weed with his friends was left on the cutting room floor: ‘We were not there to reinforce stereotypes but rather to dispel them!’ Rather than careful, sometimes excessive curation of the material, Diop’s solution in Saint-Omer – as in We – is to embrace ambiguity and complexity. But the solution comes at a cost: it runs up against the director’s commitment to a kind of universalism. Two provocative but ultimately contradictory statements made by Diop clarify this: following the release of We she declared in an interview that ‘Cinema makes it possible to test in an extremely sensitive way the existence of the other’; after the release of Saint-Omer, she claimed that ‘the black body carries something universal… I think that all men and women feel some kind of mirroring through this figure of a black woman… that is a political statement.’

The insistence that there are ways of being that cannot be reduced to pre-given frameworks and a desire to show that the particular is in fact universal pull in opposing directions. Saint-Omer responds to this contradiction with a forking path, following one before retracing its steps to follow the other. The first sees Diop granting Laurence the right of indeterminacy. Rama withdraws to her hotel room and watches a scene from Pasolini’s Medea. We watch Maria Callas tenderly dispatch her two children with a blade. They offer no resistance. She opens the window to a moon which lights a path across her face before the camera turns to Rama, stunned with recognition, her face lit by the same glow. A line from Pasolini to Laurence to Rama is drawn – its meaning unclear, its existence indisputable.

The second path is illuminated by a monologue from Laurence’s lawyer, who argues that her client is in need of psychological care. We hear of the chimeric nature of women who, like the mythical beast, are ‘hybrid creatures composed of different animal parts’. Women carry their mothers and their children with them; they live torn between different selves. The camera shifts to the women in the audience, moved almost to tears by this speech. Something like universalism emerges here but the cost of its appearance is never seriously interrogated by Diop. In Laurence’s story there is undeniably some analogy to the condition of women, to some universal – not to say mythic – experience of maternity. But in embracing it, are we not confining ourselves to a binary between ghettoization through racist narratives or universalism offered by empathetic members of the middle classes? Lost in this false choice is the incomprehensibility of Laurence’s actions beyond the poetic drama of her worldview.  

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘What’s Your Place?’, NLR 136.

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Sovereign Africa?

At the Munich Security Conference last month, Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila was asked about her country’s decision to abstain on a UN General Assembly resolution to condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine. Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, an economist who has been in post since 2018, did not flinch. ‘We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict’, she said, ‘so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world, instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’. The money being poured into arms, she continued, ‘could be better utilised to promote development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in other places, in Europe itself, where many people are experiencing hardships’.

This view commands a broad consensus across the African continent. In September Senegal’s President Macky Sall, the Chair of the African Union, echoed the call for a negotiated settlement, noting that Africa was suffering the effects of sanctions-induced food and fuel price inflation while simultaneously being dragged into the conflict that the United States has provoked with China. ‘Africa’, he said, ‘has suffered enough of the burden of history . . . it does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War, but rather a pole of stability and opportunity open to all its partners’.

The ‘burden of history’ and its emblems are well-known: they include the devastation wrought by the Atlantic slave trade, the horrors of colonialism, the atrocity of apartheid and the creation of a permanent debt crisis through neo-colonial financial structures. Whilst enriching European nations and spurring their industrial advancement, colonialism reduced the African continent to a provider of raw materials and consumer of finished products. The terms of trade sent its states into a spiral of indebtedness and dependency. Attempts to break out of this condition – by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso – resulted in Western-backed coups. Technological development in the name of social progress was rendered impossible. Hence, despite immense natural and mineral wealth and human capacity, more than a third of the African population now live below the poverty line: almost nine times the global average. By the end of 2022, the total external debt in Sub-Saharan Africa was a record $789 billion: double that of a decade ago, and 60% of the continent’s gross domestic product.

In the last century, the leading critics of these colonial dynamics were Nkrumah and Walter Rodney; yet there is little contemporary scholarship that carries forward their legacy. Without it, we often lack the conceptual clarity needed to parse the current phase of neo-colonialism, whose stock concepts – ‘structural adjustment’, ‘liberalisation’, ‘corruption’, ‘good governance’ – are imposed by Western institutions on African realities. Yet, as the statements of Sall and Kuugongelwa-Amadhila show, recent conjunctural crises – the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, rising tensions with China – have highlighted the growing political gulf between Western and African states. While the former rush headlong into a Great Power conflict with terrifying nuclear stakes, the latter fear that warmongering will further weaken their developmental prospects.

As African nations have diverged from the Atlantic powers, many have edged closer to China. By 2021, 53 countries on the continent had joined the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), designed to enhance trade and diplomatic relations. Every year for the past two decades, bilateral trade has risen – from $10 billion in 2000 to $254.3 billion in 2021 – such that the PRC has become the main trading partner for the majority of African states. At the eighth conference of the FOCAC, China announced it would import $300 billion worth of manufactured goods from African countries by 2025 and increase tariff-free trade, later waiving tariffs on 98% of taxable goods from the twelve least-developed African nations. The afterlife of colonialism means that Africa’s overseas trade is still heavily financed by debt; its exports are mostly unprocessed raw materials, while its imports are mostly finished products. For China, investment in Africa is motivated by the desire to strengthen its role in the global commodity chain, and by political imperatives such as the need to gain African support for Chinese foreign policy positions (on Taiwan, for example).

Chinese financial institutions have also disbursed significant loans for African infrastructure projects, which are grappling with an annual shortfall of over $100 billion. China’s advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, green technology, high-speed rail, quantum computing, robotics and telecommunications are attractive to African states, whose new industrial strategies – such as the development of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) – rely on technology transfers. As the former president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, wrote in 2008, ‘China’s approach to our needs is simply better adapted than the slow and sometimes patronising post-colonial approach of European investors, donor organisations, and non-governmental organisations’. This is a widely held view in countries still suffocated by IMF debt traps. It has become all the more prominent amid the recent decline of Western Foreign Direct Investment on the continent.

Closer ties between Africa and China have elicited a predictable backlash from Washington. Last year, the US published a strategy document outlining its approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast to what it describes as its own ‘high standards, values-driven, and transparent investment’, China’s investments are characterized as an attempt to ‘challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests, undermine transparency and openness, and weaken US relations with African peoples and governments’. To counter such ‘harmful activities’, the US hopes to shift the terrain of contest away from trade and development, where China has an advantage, towards militarism and information warfare, where America still reigns supreme.

The US established Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007, and over the next fifteen years constructed 29 military bases across the continent, as part of a network spanning at least 34 countries. AFRICOM’s stated objectives include ‘protecting US interests’ and ‘maintaining superiority over competitors’. It aims to enhance ‘interoperability’ between African militaries and US and NATO special operation forces. Building military bases and setting up liaison offices with African armies has been the primary mechanism for leveraging US authority against China. In 2021, AFRICOM General Stephen Townsend wrote that the United States ‘can no longer afford to underestimate the economic opportunity and strategic consequence Africa embodies, and which competitors like China and Russia recognise’.

At the same time, the US has ramped up its propaganda campaign on the continent. The COMPETES Act, passed by the Senate in March 2022, pledged $500 million for the US Agency for Global Media, as part of an attempt to combat PRC ‘disinformation’. A few months later, reports began to circulate in Zimbabwe that the US Embassy had funded educational workshops that encouraged journalists to target and criticise Chinese investments. The local organisation involved in the programmes is funded by the Information for Development Trust, which is in turn funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Development.

Needless to say, the West’s militarization of Africa over the past decade has done nothing for its people. First there was the disastrous 2011 war in Libya, where NATO led the push for regime change, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties and the destruction of key infrastructure (including the world’s largest irrigation project, which provided 70% of all the fresh water in Libya). In its wake, the Sahel region experienced an upsurge in conflicts, many of them driven by new forms of militia activity, piracy and smuggling. Soon after, France launched interventions in Burkina Faso and Mali, which – rather than clean up the mess of the Western war in Libya – served to further destabilize the Sahel, allowing jihadist groups to take over large tracts of land. French military involvement did nothing to alleviate conditions of insecurity. Indeed, Global Terrorism Index rankings worsened for both countries: from 2011 to 2021, Burkina Faso went 113th to 4th, while Mali moved from 41st to 7th. Meanwhile, the US continued its decades-long intervention in Somalia, internationalizing its local conflicts and strengthening its violent extremist factions.

The recent departure of French troops from parts of the Sahel has hardly reduced the scale of Western military operations in the region. The US retains its major bases in Niger; it has developed a new military footprint in Ghana; and it recently announced its intention to maintain a ‘persistent presence’ in Somalia. It is clear that the African Union’s plan for ‘Silencing the Guns’ – its campaign for a conflict-free Africa by 2030 – will never be fulfilled as long as Western states continue their pattern of bloody intervention and weapons companies reap massive profits from arms sales to state and non-state actors. As African military expenditures skyrocketed between 2010 and 2020 (by 339% in Mali, 288% in Niger and 238% in Burkina Faso), a vicious cycle of militarism and underdevelopment was gradually consolidated. The more money spent on arms, the less is available for infrastructure and development. The less spent on development, the more armed violence is likely to break out, prompting calls for further military spending.

This year, the African Union will mark 60 years since the foundation of its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity. During the 1963 inaugural conference of the OAU, Nkrumah warned leaders that in order to achieve economic integration and stability, the organization would have to be an explicitly political one – motivated by a clear and consistent anti-imperialism. ‘African unity’, he explained, ‘is, above all, a political kingdom which can only be gained by political means. The social and economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the other way round.’ Yet, despite the best efforts of decolonisation movements, economic interests – primarily those of Western multinational corporations and their state backers – ultimately usurped politics. In the process, African unity was hollowed out, and with it the sovereignty and dignity of the African people.

Nkrumah’s vision may be far from fulfilment in 2023. His contention that ‘no independent African state today by itself has a chance to follow an independent course of economic development’ still rings true. Despite some noble attempts, such as the 2016 resolution to ban foreign military bases, the African Union has so far been unable to free itself from neo-colonial constraints. Yet the continent’s refusal to toe the line on the New Cold War – its calls for peace negotiations in Ukraine, its reconfiguration of international partners – suggests that a different world order is possible: one in which Africa is no longer beholden to the ‘united West’.

Read on: Giovanni Arrighi, ‘The African Crisis’, NLR 15.

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Curious Stranger

July 1957. A 26-year-old Romila Thapar waits at Prague Airport. She is dressed in a sari. The pockets of her overcoat are bulging with yet more saris. ‘It is blasphemous’, she laments in her diary, to have crumpled ‘the garment of the exotic, the indolent, the unobvious, the newly awakening East’. But there is no more room in her suitcases. They are stuffed with photographic equipment (‘cameras, cameras, more cameras’) and saddled with ‘large bundles of books and papers, strapped together with bits of string’. Thapar – today the pre-eminent historian of ancient India – is on her way to China along with the Sri Lankan art historian Anil de Silva and the French photographer Dominique Darbois. Earlier in the year, the Chinese Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries had accepted de Silva’s proposal to study two ancient Buddhist cave sites in the northwestern Gansu province, Maijishan and Dunhuang. After some hesitation, Thapar, then a graduate student at SOAS in London, agreed to join de Silva as her assistant. She had been nervous about her limited expertise in Chinese Buddhist art, as well as the practical difficulties posed by the cave sites. And not without good reason. Just imagine crawling about in those rock-cut caverns ‘enveloped in billowing yards of silk’.

But China was still far away. The three women were waiting for their delayed connection to Moscow. The latest, much-publicized, Soviet plane had got stuck in the mud. Loitering in the terminal, Thapar observed the entourage of the Indian actors, Prithviraj Kapoor and his son Raj, a newly anointed superstar in the Socialist Bloc. As heavy rains poured outside, some members of the group began discussing the film Storm over Asia (‘Would they think it rude if I gently pointed out to them that the film was not by Sergei Eisenstein, but by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and that the two techniques are so different that one can’t confuse them’). Elsewhere, a French family tune into Radio Luxembourg; a young African man listens to the BBC on his radio; the terminal loudspeakers play the Voice of America (‘poor miserable propagandists’). Late into the night, Thapar leisurely smokes her black Sobranie. She thinks of herself ‘an overburdened mule wrapped in folds of cloth’.

This journey followed a new, but already well-worn, diplomatic trail. In 1950, India had become the first non-socialist country to recognize the People’s Republic of China. Two years later, a motley crew of Indian economists, writers and artists embarked on a self-styled Goodwill Mission. Their visit inaugurated a wave of political and cultural exchange that lasted for nearly a decade. In 1954, Nehru and Zhou Enlai signed the Panchsheel Agreement (‘five principles of peaceful co-existence’) in Beijing. Friendship societies bloomed on both sides of the MacMahon Line. And Indian trade unionists, state planners and litterateurs became eager pilgrims to Mao’s fabled cooperative farms. This growing decolonial intimacy was memorably captured in the breathless opening sentence of a 1956 dispatch, ‘Huai aur Cheen’ (‘Huai and China’), by the cultural critic Bhagwatsharan Upadhyay: ‘Abhi mazdoor-jagat Cheen se lauta hoon’ (‘I have just returned from the workers’ world of China’). The tone of the original Hindi conjures a neighbourhood gossip returning with the latest news from a corner teashop.

Thapar’s diary, recently published as Gazing Eastwards: Of Buddhist Monks and Revolutionaries in China, is a relic of this fraternal decade. But she was neither an emissary of the Indian state nor a member of any friendship societies. Unlike her fellow countrymen, Thapar’s travels were not fettered by the demands of cross-border diplomacy. Traversing the Chinese hinterland on trains and trucks by day and recording her experiences by night (often in the flickering light of a single candle), she travelled and wrote with greater freedom. The resulting travelogue is not only steadfastly historical, but also unexpectedly entertaining, a quality sorely missing from the reverential accounts of her compatriots. For instance, when the historian Mohammad Habib chanced upon a group of elderly war veterans during the Goodwill Mission, he sanctimoniously declared: ‘We are your sons from distant India’. Spreading her arms, a woman promptly responded: ‘If you are my sons, then let me press you to my heart’. When Thapar encounters a member of the youth team working on the Beijing-Lanzhou railway line, she cheerfully asks the young man if he stuck pictures of pin-up girls on the wall by his dormitory bed (he did).

Thapar’s political commentary is equally revelatory. Unlike other visitors who eulogized the popular emblems of Chinese development – factories, farms, oil refineries, dams – she highlights the uncanny persistence of ancient China in the Maoist era. As the workers laid the foundations for new construction sites, the remains of prehistoric societies were turning up with unprecedented frequency. After just a few years, hundreds of accidental archaeological digs spread out across the country. During stopovers at a neolithic excavation site near X’ian and a Ming-era Buddhist monastery in south Lanzhou, Thapar learned that groups of archaeologists and younger students were being attached to construction sites, where they mended, labelled and catalogued the discovered artefacts on the spot. The quantity of newfound prehistoric greyware was in fact so large that the country was facing a severe shortage of buildings to house them. During conversations with Thapar, the officials explained this popular enthusiasm by repeatedly quoting Mao’s directives to archaeologists – ‘discover the richness of China’s past’ and ‘correct historical mistakes’.

Faced with Thapar’s inquiries about the pitfalls of ‘salvage archaeology’, the provincial archaeologists and museum officials regurgitated statistics; politics was never mentioned, while the name of Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe drew blank faces. Her requests to meet the historians of ancient China, university students and young intellectuals meanwhile were brusquely ignored. This puzzled Thapar to no end, not least because their counterparts in India were working through similar problems. Back in Bombay, she had recently come into contact with the left-wing polymath D.D. Kosambi, whose work contained a blend of Marxist theory, numismatics, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and ethnographic fieldwork. In An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), Kosambi lyrically described India as ‘a country of long survivals’, where ‘people of the atomic age rub elbows with those of the chalcolithic’. China, Thapar slowly realized, was no different.

Recording her group’s trek towards Maijishan and Dunhuang, Thapar’s travelogue gracefully blends the world-historical with the everyday. Multiple timelines gather a heterogenous throng of characters onto the stage. At a monastery in Xi’an, we hear of the legendary seventh-century monk Xuan Zang lugging cartloads of Buddhist manuscripts, sculptures and relics collected during his sixteen-year sojourn across northern India. Back in the twentieth century, in nearby Lanzhou, Czech-made Škoda buses ferry Chinese workers to a power station. As Thapar proceeds across the hinterland, extended spells of isolation are broken only occasionally, as when a radio set catches the BBC News (‘the Russians had developed an intercontinental rocket that had alarmed the Western world’). On most days, Thapar’s battered copy of Ulysses serves as a marker of the passage of time (‘Ulysses is stuck at page 207 and at this rate will probably see me all through China’). Fittingly, this drama reaches its climax at the ancient cave sites, nested at the Chinese end of the Silk Routes which had once linked the region with Central Asia, India, and the eastern Mediterranean.

Thapar and her companions were the first group of foreign researchers to access the Maijishan site. Carved into sheer cliff faces, the caves contained hundreds of Buddhist murals and sculptures created over the course of a millennium. They were ‘like museums of Chinese paintings’: offering something like a historical timelapse of how the earliest Gandhara-era depictions of Buddha’s life were gradually adapted to the Chinese landscape. Every evening, the group descended from ‘heaven’ on rickety wooden ladders, sometimes nearly a hundred meters long. Back in the candlelit monastery, as wolves and bears roved outside, their experiences were equally startling: we hear of holidaying Chinese soldiers singing Cossack folk songs picked up from the touring Russian Red Army choir; a head monk toasting the end of the hydrogen bomb; a guard playing scratched folk records, featuring a Chinese cover of ‘Aawara Hoon’, the title song of Raj Kapoor’s latest hit. Meanwhile, at Dunhuang, the group discover that the Western explorers of the early twentieth century had vandalized and stolen numerous murals, paintings and manuscripts from the ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas’. In 1920, the White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks had found refuge in these same caves, and had spent their days gouging out gold from the artworks.

The thread of the present ties these proliferating timelines together. In 1957 the Chinese revolution started to unravel. Shortly before Thapar’s arrival, Mao had effectively ended the Hundred Flowers Campaign. His key distinction between ‘fragrant flowers’ and ‘poisonous weeds’ had instead impelled a brutal ‘anti-Rightist campaign’. Meanwhile, despite stiff resistance, the CCP was still pushing its ill-fated campaign for rural collectivization. Arriving in Beijing, Thapar fleetingly notes the ubiquitous ‘bright, bold cartoons and statements’, portraying the so-called ‘Rightists’ as venomous snakes. In the following weeks, her solidarity with the Maoists was severely tested by ongoing clampdowns on intellectual freedom (she was greatly disturbed by the case of the feminist novelist Ling Ding, who had been denounced and exiled). Despite warm encounters with the locals, she greeted village cooperatives with a mixture of guarded suspicion (‘Were we expected to believe that before 1951 production was low, in 1954 it rose by half and by 1956 it had doubled?’) and open cynicism (‘I asked somewhat diffidently if they had tried any experiments along the lines of Lysenko in Russia’). On returning to Beijing, she was told that Professor Xiang Da, an authority on Dunhuang, was too busy to meet her, only to discover from a newspaper report that he had already been charged as a Rightist last month. Soon China would be utterly transformed by the Great Leap Forward and the ill-fated Sino-Soviet split. The 1962 Sino-Indian War over their borderlands would close the curtain on a short-lived decolonial friendship.

In the six decades between Thapar’s journey and the diary’s publication, her scholarly studies have spanned the history of state formation in early India, the politics of the Aryan question, the conflicts between the Brahmanas and the Shramanas (the Ajivika, the Buddhist and Jaina lineages), the Itihasa-Purana traditions, and the Indian epics, among others. Along with Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Bipin Chandra, Thapar is widely credited for inaugurating a paradigm shift in the study of Indian history – a radical break with the British colonial periodization and research methods. Her honours include both the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences, and the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India (she has declined it twice). In the context of such an illustrious career, the diary is likely to be read as a relic of youthful indulgence. And yet, as Thapar has often argued, past events always accrue new, unexpected meanings in the present. It is hardly surprising, then, that the diary has significant affinities with her later work.

In the widely acclaimed Somnath (2004), Thapar describes how a single event – the destruction of a Hindu temple by Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turkic king, in 1025 – has been narrated across Turko-Persian and Arabic chronicles, Sanskrit temple inscriptions, biographies and courtly epics, popular oral traditions, British House of Commons proceedings and nationalist histories. Patiently decoding these dissonant voices, Thapar disproves the myth of Hindus and Muslims as eternally warring civilizations, established by British colonizers and popularized by their modern-day heirs, the Hindu nationalists. In doing so, Thapar reflexively shows that history is a process of ‘constant re-examination and reassessment of how we interpret the past’. Her pursuit however has never devolved into a postmodernist free-for-all. This is not just because of Thapar’s lifelong engagement with sociological theories, economic histories, archaeological methods and Marxist debates, but also because her scholarship has always been grounded in the public life of postcolonial India. Thapar has written school textbooks, given public lectures on All India Radio, and published extensive writings on the relationship between secularism, history and democracy in popular periodicals.

In recent decades, Thapar’s work has been systematically discredited by a Hindu right-wing smear campaign (popular slurs include ‘academic terrorist’ and ‘anti-national’). She has responded with characteristic aplomb, poking more historical holes in the fantasies of a ‘syndicated Hinduism’. Shortly before turning 90, she published Voices of Dissent (2020). Written during the upsurge of nationwide protests against the new citizenship laws (CAA and NRC), the book traces a genealogy of dissent in India – spanning the second millennia B.C. of the Vedic times, the emergence of the Sramanas, the medieval popularity of the Bhakti sants and Sufi pirs, and the Gandhian satyagraha of the twentieth century – that offer a vital corrective to the popular right-wing tendency to label ‘dissent’ as an ‘anti-national’ import from the West. Yet with the BJP pushing for the privatization of higher education, its affiliates infiltrating university administrations and its stormtroopers terrorizing college campuses, the struggle for decolonizing Indian history is no longer merely a matter of critique. There now exists a nationwide network of 57,000 shakhas operated by the RSS (the parent organization of the BJP), where the rank-and-file receive both ideological and weapons training, while the BJP’s IT Cell has infiltrated the social media feeds of millions of Hindu middle class homes, promoting its historical propaganda.

These changes have not only upended the paradigm shift in Indian history of which Thapar was a leading figure but have also illuminated its political limits. Historically anchored in the Nehruvian-era universities, the decolonial turn has struggled to significantly transform popular consciousness beyond the bourgeois public sphere. The Hindutva offensive has put liberal and left intellectuals in a difficult double bind. This contradiction was first captured by Aijaz Ahmad, shortly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, now widely recognized as the emblem of the ‘Hindu nation’. The Indian left, Ahmad had argued, cannot abandon ‘the terrain of nationalism’, but nor can it just occupy this terrain ‘empty-handed’, that is, ‘without a political project for re-making the nation’. In Ahmad’s words, to counter Hindutva with secularism is certainly ‘necessary’, but it remains ‘insufficient’. Likewise, countering the syndicated, market-friendly Hinduism by recovering a subversive genealogy of the Indian past is necessary but by itself, it too remains insufficient.

Thapar’s studies of ancient India naturally offer no ready-made cures for these modern maladies. One incident from Gazing Eastwards though reads like an allegory for future action. As Thapar declared in a lecture for All India Radio in 1972, ‘the image of the past is the historian’s contribution to the future’. In Lanzhou, Thapar and de Silva’s clothes drew considerable attention from the Chinese public. Trailed by curious strangers, they found it difficult to walk the streets. To blend in, they ditched their saris in favour of peasant jackets in the customary blue, made famous by Maoists at the time. As the universities continue to crumble, perhaps historians of the new generation should also discard their clothes of distinction, and blend as organizers, pedagogues and foot soldiers into the agrarian and citizen struggles erupting against the BJP-led right.

Read on: Pranab Bardhan, ‘The “New” India’, NLR 136.

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Victorious Defeat

I.

Historically speaking, political funerals have been associated with authoritarian rule. Surrounded with an aura of sanctity that even brutally oppressive regimes have been reluctant to suppress – with exceptions, of course, as the Israeli state demonstrated during Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral procession last May – political funerals have often acted as outlets of public dissent when other forms of protest are unavailable. The association, however, misses an important precondition: a conception of grief and mourning as a collective ritual. Such a perspective can help make sense of our contemporary predicament. The gradual eclipse of political funerals does not, of course, signal the eclipse of authoritarianism. It rather indicates another wind of change, one that has swept through authoritarian and liberal regimes alike: the transformation of mourning into a private affair. 

Against the spirt of his times, Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s funeral in Budapest in January 2023 was unequivocally political. It did not just bring together relatives and old friends. The overwhelming majority of those who made their way to Farkasrèti cemetery on that cold Tuesday afternoon did not know Gáspár personally. With the exception of a couple of supporters of Orbán’s government (some of whom came, perhaps, to see with their own eyes what a Hungarian newspaper announced after Gáspár’s death: the end of Hungarian Marxism), this wonderfully mixed crowd of young and old, local and visitors, was there because their grief for the loss of a public intellectual was not a private affair.

II.

Gáspár was born in 1948 in what was historically seen as the capital of Transylvania, a city Hungarians call Kolozsvár and Romanians Cluj. In 1974, in line with Ceaușescu’s attempts to embed his rule in nationalist mythologies, the pre-Roman Napoca was added, giving the city its contemporary name, Cluj-Napoca. Linguistic differences and national myths aside, these various appellations all describe a ‘castle within a closed space’. The ruins of castle Turnul Croitorilor remain on the outskirts of the old town, but the rest of the name has never rung true. The city’s permanently suspended sense of national belonging meant that it was more open than closed: Gáspár’s wide horizons, intellectually and geographically, can be seen as a testament to that.

With life stories forged in the turbulent years before, during and after the Second World War, his parents Gáspár Tamás (1914-1978) and Erzsébet Krausz (1907-1977), committed internationalist communists, were a strong influence in this same direction. While many Jewish relatives from Gáspár’s mother’s side were murdered in Auschwitz, she escaped deportation because she was already imprisoned as a ‘Bolshevik agitator’ by Antonescu’s Nazi-allied military dictatorship. His father, in prison since 1938 for communist activities, had his sentence abbreviated by forced conscription to the front, returning to Cluj in 1944 with an injury that forced him to walk on crutches for the rest of his life.

Their trajectories after the war reflected the fate of a large part of the revolutionary movement crushed by Stalinism and nationalism. Many of their comrades, who had survived torture at the hands of the Romanian and Hungarian secret services or the Gestapo, returned from Nazi concentration camps only to be re-arrested by the authorities. Contrary to Stalinist apologetics, it was steadfast allegiance to the emancipatory project that made such people dissidents against the new ‘socialist’ regimes. In his childhood and adolescence, Gáspár’s parents transmitted their knowledge and experiences to their son: alongside music, poetry and philosophy and the necessity of rigorous study to grasp each one, they taught him techniques for withstanding torture, in expectation of the arrival of the black car of ‘their’ Party.

Gáspár’s turn came in the early hours of a bitter February morning in 1974. The reason was not had he had done but what he refused to do, namely write an idiotic appraisal of Ceaușescu’s new ‘moral code’ for the Utunk literary magazine where he was employed. This cost him his job and, shortly after, the black car arrived, inaugurating a period of intense intimidation. When the regular ‘invitations’ of the Romanian secret police became unbearable and a prison sentence only a matter of time, his parents urged him to leave the country. In 1978 he did exactly that.

He could have settled in France: an uncle worked at the Renault factory in Paris. Instead, he opted for Hungary, inspired by the growing opposition movement there. His mauvaise reputation preceded him, however, and he was greeted by the secret police of a system just as ‘mendacious, stupid, brutal, repressive and treacherous’ as the one he had left behind. A job teaching philosophy at the University of Budapest would eventually also be cut short by his engagement with the dissident movement. When, after the Jaruzelski coup in Poland of 1981, he published his support for the Polish opposition under his own name, he was, once again, fired.

III.

It is often overlooked today, but the revolt of East German construction workers in June 1953, the workers’ councils of Hungary in 1956 or the 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia were made in the name of proletarian self-management, not that of market freedom. Gáspár’s dissident network similarly advanced a critique of the regime from the left. Yet, though inspired by the anti-Stalinist positions of Socialisme ou Barbarie or Karl Korsch, by the 1980s many dissidents, Gáspár among them, started feeling that ‘attempts to overcome the Soviet-style system from the left were doomed’ (see his ‘Where We Went Wrong’, 2009). Increasingly convinced that putting an end to dictatorship meant ‘paying the price of capitalism’, they began to seek theoretical justification for their change of position. The times found Gáspár taking various teaching posts in the West: his wide knowledge and his linguistic genius – he was more than fluent in many languages ­– allowed him to teach in universities including Columbia, Oxford, École des Hautes Études, Chicago, Yale and the New School. In these years, his deep disappointment and anger at the oppression of the ‘communist’ regimes melded with a (neo)conservative zeitgeist.

Their collapse was accompanied by an upsurge of collective hope and political imagination. Gáspár hastily returned to take part. But the dismantling of the Stalinist apparatus went hand in hand with ‘an economic black hole, galloping unemployment and Third World-type inequalities’ (see his ‘Words from Budapest’, 2013). Party chairman for the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) and elected to the opposition after the transition, Gáspár felt implicated in the historical disaster during which, in a country of 10 million, 2 million jobs evaporated while parliament spent months debating the republican coat of arms. ‘Our naïve liberalism’, he later reflected, ‘delivered a nascent democracy into the hands of irresponsible and hate-filled right-wing politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment of a provincial, deferential and resentful social world, harking back to before 1945’. What was intended as ‘liberation from centralized coercion’ ultimately resulted in nothing more than a ‘weakening of compound social power’.

In response, Gáspár ‘went back to school’ and re-emerged, once again, a dissident. In addition to Marx, Gáspár returned to the council communist and anarcho-syndicalist traditions that he believed had seen ‘much more clearly than famous and brilliant theorists that, however deserved the terminal defeat of the Soviet bloc. . . it was at the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise of working-class power, of adversary culture, the end of two centuries of beneficent fear for the ruling classes’. He became an avid reader of Italian operaismo and the German Wertkritik school as developed by authors like Moishe Postone and Robert Kurz, as well as the writings of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Guy Debord became one of his favourite thinkers. These resources, coupled with his observation of a transition that had unleashed the ‘most destructive power of capitalism’, set the stage for his most profound contributions to radical critical theory, re-conceptualizing communism as the emancipatory abolition of capital, state, nation and class. While most of his writings on these topics are in Hungarian, a significant number of essays and interviews were written, given and/or published in English, French and German. (And as his young comrades confirmed recently, a lot more will be published in English in the near future.)

IV.

Gáspár wrote and commented extensively on Central and Eastern European affairs. In numerous interviews (whose eloquence renders them of equal value to his writings), the dissident years before the collapse of the Soviet world and the transition to market capitalism were central topics, as were subsequent developments in the region. One of his most influential texts, On Post-Fascism (2000), is widely seen as a prophetic account of what has now become the all too familiar phenomenon of ‘authoritarian’ or ‘right-wing’ populism. For Gáspár the term ‘post-fascism’ was more appropriate.

Such interventions contributed to an image of Gáspár as an expert analyst of the region and a reliable forecaster of its authoritarian turn. Though flattering, this view is somewhat misleading. It was his analysis of the universal tendencies within capitalist social relations and its propensity towards (and compatibility with) authoritarianism that above all propelled his thinking, rather than any intimate knowledge of Romania or Hungary. On Post-Fascism begins, after all, by shredding any implication that what he is about to describe is regionally specific. Pointing to ‘a cluster of policies, practices, routines, and ideologies that can be observed everywhere in the contemporary world’, Gáspár’s primary concern was to spell-out what was post about contemporary fascist and authoritarian tendencies. Rather than relying on a violent mass movement, death squads and even the occasional suspension of the social function and political power of the bourgeoisie, contemporary authoritarianism in fact sits very comfortably within Western-style electoral democracies and a free market framework. In the absence of a radical, communist workers’ movement (the eradication of which was the historical task of Nazism), there was no longer any need to militarize the whole of society. Militarizing the police appeared to be sufficient.

It is for this reason that the frequent depiction of authoritarianism as a peculiarity of Central and Eastern Europe (and Gáspár as its local critic) is ultimately a mystification. The Polish and Hungarian governments do not hide their contempt for key aspects of EU law, or have any qualms about presenting their racist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-left positions as a defence of Western Christian civilization. But it was a French president who declared that the existence of a ‘rule of law’ renders any talk about repression or police violence ‘unacceptable’, while his militarized police maimed hundreds of gilets jaunes demonstrators with full impunity. It was in Greece that investigative journalists were wiretapped by the secret services and where the law-and-order dogma propounded by the government co-existed with extensive evidence of police collaboration with the mafia. Gáspár’s insistence that it was a mistake to approach contemporary authoritarianism through the lens of Central and Eastern Europe was not, unfortunately, given the attention it deserved. Even many on the left who otherwise refuse to normalize authoritarian tendencies in Western liberal democracies continue to describe their emergence as a process of ‘Orbánization’ .  

V.

Gáspár also pioneered the concept of ethnicism (‘an apolitical, destructive practice opposed to the idea of citizenship’), contrasting it with a civic-democratic nationalism that he went so far as to proclaim the only remaining ‘principle of cohesion in a traditionless capitalism’. In later years, however, he grew increasingly sceptical of the universalizing potential of national citizenship: buried under anti-Roma policies in Eastern Europe or the EU’s systematic anti-migrant violence, citizenship had become weaponized as a justification for exclusion. When parts of the left joined this chorus and condoned the exclusion of migrants as a prerequisite for re-establishing a national welfare state, Gáspár did not just see a form of ‘banal left nationalism’, inspired by bygone visions of social democracy. He also saw in such positions the shameful affirmation of a contemporary paradox in which equality, for the first time in history, is portrayed as ‘an elitist idea’.

Recognizing this regression did not mean, however, that Gáspár saw equality as the end goal of a radical transformation of society. In one of his most penetrating analyses, ‘Telling the Truth About Class’ from 2006, he explored the ways in which the historical trajectory of the left had been split between a demand for equality and recognition of the working class and a call for its abolition. On one side, Gáspár saw a ‘Rousseau-ian’ affirmation of class: against the bourgeois projection of the working class as barbaric and uneducated, a mob ‘tied to vice and corporeality’, Rousseau-inspired socialism counter-projected the working class’s cultural superiority and ‘angelic’ nature. On the other side was the lineage deriving from Marx, who had identified the historical potential of revolutionary transformation in the wretched and alienated existence of a proletariat that has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’. Calls for a more egalitarian and democratic inclusion of workers might be noble, but they ignored the constitution of the working class through the capitalist mode of production. Quoting from the Grundrisse, Gáspár reminded his readers that ‘labour itself has become a moment of capital’; for this reason, while calls for equality (rightly) attacked persistent systems of privilege and caste, they failed to identify the significance of capitalist social relations in the production and maintenance of class society. Communism should be the abolition of class society, not an equitable recognition of its constituent parts.

VI.

A few years ago, I was invited to Hamburg to join Gáspár on a panel discussion that sought to criticize left nationalism and notions of sovereignty through emphasis on the question of migration. As luck would have it, the organizers had us staying in the same house; it did not take long before we decided to extend our stay for a few days, which we spent taking long walks around this exceptionally hospitable German city, trying out sausages, drinking wine, and talking insatiably. In that time and place we became, I dare say, friends.

Ever since, we maintained regular contact, using emails for logistical arrangements (we brought him to Berlin for a public discussion on nationalism and migration, an event that took place under the heavy shadow of the Hanau massacre that had happened the day before) but hand-written letters for more engaged exchanges. The terrible news of his cancer intensified our correspondence. Among other things, I promised him that once he beat that awful disease, I would find a small datscha near Berlin for him and his daughter Hanna. He welcomed the idea as something that could ‘help our mood and give us a semblance of a putative future’.

The fluctuations of his illness and the state of the world at large did little to subdue his pessimism. ‘It is an uphill struggle’, he wrote to me two years ago, ‘to defend myself from feelings of disgust, contempt & hatred when I am looking at this world’. But expressions of despair were, despite everything, the exception. Short of breath but full of life, he wondered in his last letter if he could ‘venture forth on an eight-hour train journey to the town of my birth’. He was also excited about finishing a text on how ‘resistance to war had turned young Lukács, Bloch [and] Benjamin into revolutionaries’. Regretfully, I never responded. The fear of sending a letter that might never be received paralyzed me.  

VII.

When we first met in Hamburg, I gave Gáspár a copy of Paolo Virno’s ‘The Horror of Familiarity’, a text which he became very fond of. In it, Virno evokes the dialectic between Heimlich/Unheimlich (familiar/uncanny) prevalent in our times, drawing attention to the ominous, hyper-modern appeals to tradition and Heimat. ‘Anytime one tries to say: country, community or authentic life, penetrative and frightening screams come out’ Virno writes, suggesting instead that the search for familiarity is a ‘historical bet, not an already guaranteed property’. In a similar vein, Gáspár answered the accusation that communism is insensitive to the ‘Home’ by unequivocally declaring: ‘Yes, it is, as it is concerned about the homeless’. As it turned out, his last public intervention was a text defending the homeless against renewed attack in Hungary. ‘One should not live on the streets’, he wrote, ‘one should protest there’. There is, perhaps, no more fitting legacy than this.  

Read on: G.M. Tamás, ‘Words from Budapest’, NLR 80.

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New Stability?

On 1 November 2022, the night of the Danish general elections, a triumphant Lars Løkke Rasmussen – leader of the newly established Moderates party – told his followers, ‘This country is going to have a new government!’ Exit polls put the Red Bloc, the progressive coalition supporting the Social Democratic incumbent Mette Frederiksen, short of an outright majority. The right-wing Blue Bloc were also forecast to miss that threshold. Which meant that Løkke’s centrist platform, which elected 16 deputies out of 179, was set to play the role of kingmaker, potentially catapulting Løkke himself into high office.

He had been there before. From 2009 to 2011, and again from 2015 to 2019, Løkke served as Prime Minister and leader of the largest Blue Bloc party, Venstre. In this capacity he continued to hollow out the welfare state, strengthen punitive migration policies and ignore the climate crisis. He also sought to suppress the most right-wing elements in his Bloc by reaching across the aisle – running, in the 2019 election, on a pledge to unite the centre by working with Frederiksen’s Social Democrats and marginalizing the two ‘wings’, left and right. This would have marked a historic rupture in Danish politics, where parties outside the mainstream typically have to be considered, and thrown a bone or two, when building minority governments.

Although Løkke’s party increased its seat share in 2019, the overall performance of the Blue Bloc was dismal, and Frederiksen showed no interest in working with her rivals. Three years later, though, the situation had changed completely. This time it was Frederiksen herself who ran on the platform of creating a cross-party centrist government. Having spent the entirety of her administration resisting the demands of smaller red and green parties, she had now made it her mission to isolate the left and rule without it.

The final results confounded the early polls: the Red Bloc had, in fact, secured a majority with the slightest of margins. But Frederiksen was no longer interested in a leading a ‘progressive’ government. Instead, she formed a coalition with the Moderates and Venstre, now led by Jakob Ellemann-Jensen. While the Social Democrats secured almost 28% of the vote, its new partners came in second and third place: Venstre with 13% and the Moderates with 9%. That was enough to make Løkke Minister of Foreign Affairs, while Elleman was appointed Minister of Defence. The Social Democrats took the finance ministry as well as the office of Prime Minister. The left performed relatively poorly, with a combined vote of 17%, while the far right – reconfigured as three separate parties – collectively won 14%.

Løkke had broken with Venstre after the 2019 elections and named his new outfit after the governing party from the popular TV drama series Borgen. Life imitates art, as they say; but if Zelensky made the transition from fiction to reality, Løkke has done the opposite: modelling his persona and programme – and even his party’s brand colours – on this centrist fantasy-world. Such Netflixification reflects a wider shift in Danish political culture. Although the country has traditionally been governed by broad coalitions spanning multiple parties, the division between the Red and Blue Blocs was its major fault-line. In this electoral landscape, consensus was established on a range of issues, while specific policy areas were subject to relatively peaceable debate. This meant that a basic level of ideological contestation was preserved; real differences could be aired, albeit to a limited extent, and voters could easily categorize each party according to its Bloc. This system, though far from ideal, at least guaranteed a degree of public participation – which, in turn, ensured political stability and basic trust in the state. Such factors helped to slow the pace of neoliberalization and keep living standards relatively high. They also contributed to Denmark’s comparatively effective handling of the Covid pandemic.

Under this model, Danish businesses may have complained about higher taxes, but they profited from the country’s healthy, educated workforce. Politicians likewise resented the need to make deals with peripheral parties, but they were equally attached to the routine of stable governance. Now, though, the elite’s conception of stability has changed. The alternation of the Blocs has fallen out of favour, and the priority is to fight the wings – or yderfløjene – while consolidating the centre. Frederiksen has framed this about-turn as a response to the changing global conjuncture: war in Ukraine, the rise of China, inflationary pressures. Her election slogan, ‘Safety Through Uncertain Times’, captured this new disposition. 

Frederiksen has a strategic interest in forging this alliance. Leading the Social Democratic government since 2019 has made her an isolated political target. Since her election, the right has portrayed her as a would-be dictator, exploiting the Covid crisis to push through policy in a constant state of exception. She hopes that, by diminishing the intensity of these attacks, a broader centrist coalition will improve her long-term prospects. For Løkke, meanwhile, the new government provides an opportunity not only for a personal comeback but also for ruling without the racism of the far right, whose representatives – such as the Danish People’s Party – had previously undermined his ability to present himself as a sensible, pragmatic technocrat. For these leaders, the main inspiration is the Germanic model, which allowed Merkel to spend decades stifling dissent while maintaining a political status quo that benefited domestic business. Another parallel is Macron’s ‘revolution’ in France, where a dynamic centrism short-circuited the nominal contest between left and right.

Yet such analogies show how easily this model of stability can undermine itself. In France, election turnout is in freefall and the memory of the gilets jaunes still haunts the Élysée Palace. In Germany, the GroKo proved too unwieldy and uninspired to deal with the country’s most pressing issues, from public investment to climate breakdown. The Danish political system is already beginning to display some of the same symptoms. In 2022, voters were confused by the proliferation of new centrist parties, which emerged out of nowhere and were typically dominated by single politicians hoping to create a cult of personality around themselves: Løkke’s Moderates, Inger Støjberg’s Danish Democrats, Alex Vanopslagh’s Liberal Alliance. These faux-charismatic leaders stole one another’s policies, broadcast a similar range of vacuous soundbites and engaged in endless circular debate about, well, nothing really.

Vanopslagh courted younger male voters with a mixture of entrepreneurialism and Jordan Peterson-inspired self-help psychology – mounting an aggressive online advertising campaign that targeted TikTok and porn sites. Støjberg, a former Minister of Integration, leaned into xenophobia, capitalising on the fact that she had previously served a two-month prison sentence for illegally separating asylum-seeker couples. Løkke was hesitant to put forward any concrete policy ideas, aside from tax breaks for the rich and the gradual abolition of state pensions. What all three had in common was the lack of a traditional party apparatus: no large membership base, no conferences, no internal democratic culture. These were top-down PR operations. As they came to dominate the election campaign, public enthusiasm waned. Turnout sank to its lowest level since 1957 (excluding 1990, when voters had been worn down by a series of snap elections). The practice that Peter Mair described as ‘ruling the void’ was now fully operative in Denmark.

Three months into its tenure, what are we to make of Frederiksen’s ‘post-ideological’ government? One of her first acts was to renege on an agreement she had made with the left to increase investment in child care. At the same time, she introduced a raft of regressive tax cuts and – despite public pressure – refused to increase taxes on one of the country’s largest businesses, Mærsk, which posted record profits of over €25 billion for 2022 while paying an effective tax rate of less than 0.3%. Frederiksen recently announced her intention to scrap one of the country’s bank holidays while rapidly increasing military spending. She also unveiled plans to ‘reform’ higher education by cutting the majority of masters courses in the humanities and social sciences down to one year. The latter decision is particularly strange, since no one – not even Danish business – seems to support it. Yet the Social Democrats hope it will advance their political narrative, which positions them on the side of an ordinary, hard-working Denmark, against a parasitic stratum of educated cultural elites. Regrettably, this narrative – which has seen the Social Democrats adopt the anti-immigrant talking point of its erstwhile opponents – has so far enabled the party to appeal to a broad range of social groups.

Frederiksen’s removal of the bank holiday has, however, elicited more resistance than most of her previous policies. More than 400,000 people signed a petition against the bill, about 50,000 demonstrated in Copenhagen, and Social Democratic politicians were disinvited from May Day events across the country, signalling a growing rift between the party and the major trade unions. Although union leaders still maintain friendly relations with Frederiksen and her inner circle, rank-and-file discontent may make this increasingly difficult to sustain. Traditionally, the so-called ‘Danish Model’ demands that industrial disputes are settled by the stakeholders – workers and bosses – with politicians staying out of negotiations or at most playing a mediating role. Yet Social Democratic MPs have become more brazen in their willingness to interfere with this settlement. This has drawn criticism even from the notoriously timid grassroots members of their own party. Whether it leads to deeper divisions between the government and organized labour remains to be seen.

The latest opinion poll shows that support for the governing parties has fallen precipitously, by a combined 11.3%, while the wings have gained about 5% each since the elections. But these shifts in public mood do not mean that a counter-hegemonic project is on the horizon. The Social Democrats remain by far the largest party, with a solid support base comprising public-sector employees and working-class constituencies outside the largest cities. The party and its allies are intent on pushing through a centrist programme that seems as ineluctable as it is unpopular. But the new stability that they are establishing may rest upon a cracked foundation.

Read on: Niels Finn Christiansen, ‘Denmark: End of the Idyll’, NLR I/144.

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Turkey’s Statequake

HATAY, TURKEY - FEBRUARY 07: Smoke billows from Iskenderun Port fire as people walk past collapsed buildings on February 07, 2023 in Iskenderun, Turkey. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit near Gaziantep, Turkey, in the early hours of Monday, followed by another 7.5-magnitude tremor just after midday. The quakes caused widespread destruction in southern Turkey and northern Syria and were felt in nearby countries. (Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images)

On 6 February, southern Turkey and northern Syria were shaken by two massive earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.7 respectively. At the time of writing, the death toll has climbed to over 47,000, with more than 110,000 buildings either destroyed or damaged beyond repair. For Turkey, this represents the worst natural disaster in modern history. The scale of state failure, however, has been just as striking.

Erdoğan’s regime frequently boasts of having overseen a massive construction boom, in which airports, bridges, metros, highways and innumerable housing units were built – supposedly in accordance with new regulations drawn up after an earthquake shook the city of Izmit in 1999. But it is now clear that those building laws were paper tigers. Erdoğan has asserted that virtually all the buildings that collapsed this month were built before the millennium, but satellite images and first-hand reporting appear to belie this claim. In the city centre of Kahramanmaraş, the worst affected province in the country, almost 60% of the population live in buildings constructed after 2001. Luxury developments – which were supposed to be entirely earthquake-secure – have been reduced to rubble. Key infrastructure, such as the Hatay airport and highways crucial for disaster relief – as well as schools, hospitals and municipality buildings – have been destroyed or rendered temporarily unusable. Prosecutors are currently investigating more than 430 people, including developers and engineers, over their role in the disaster. Over 130 are already in prison. Some were taken into custody at airports as they tried to flee the country.

As with the price shocks Turkey has experienced in recent years, the government is trying to blame this disaster on ‘evil businessmen’. Yet the state itself is also culpable. Regulations were not sufficiently enforced, and many building projects were able to circumvent them through the AKP’s construction ‘amnesties’ – which allowed proprietors and developers to escape any possible charges by paying a small sum. The government’s own figures suggest that around 50% of Turkey’s building stock are non-compliant with contemporary regulations. Nobody knows what became of the taxes – totalling approximately $38 billion – intended to make buildings earthquake-resistant. When asked about the the money, Erdoğan refused to give any details and snapped that it was used ‘where it was needed’.

In short, the imbrication of the state with rentier capital was a major factor in the fallout of the earthquake. As scientists and architects have pointed out, it is perfectly possible to construct buildings that can withstand earthquakes of this magnitude. Yet there was apparently no will to do so, despite repeated warnings from the Chamber of Geology Engineers and other prominent researchers. Islamist-inflected hostility to science is an element here: the mayor of Kahramanmaraş reportedly told the head of the Chamber that he does not believe in the discipline of paleoseismology.

With earthquakes, the first 48 hours are crucial – survival rates drop rapidly thereafter. Yet the state failed spectacularly to organize emergency relief in the immediate aftermath. Independent reports note that, during the first day, there was almost a complete absence of official relief efforts on the ground. In cities such as Antakya, it took a full three days until disaster management was fully operational – and even then, it was limited to urban centres as opposed to the peripheries or villages. The reason for the incompetence is clear. It was not the cold weather, as Erdoğan claimed, but the fatal combination of neoliberal orthodoxy and the authoritarian degradation of public institutions.

In recent years, all aspects of disaster management in Turkey have been centralized within one body, AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency), which has been left with very limited resources after successive rounds of austerity. The organization was also restructured to promote AKP militants, chosen for their loyalty rather than their professional qualifications. When disaster struck, the person tasked with directly overseeing the intervention was a cleric, while the head of AFAD was a former governor. Neither had experience of disaster management. The incompetence was such that the government asked the previous, more experienced, chief of AFAD to take control in the Adana region. Anonymous sources from inside AFAD confirm that the first 24 hours in particular saw a complete lack of coordination, with senior AKP loyalists not wanting to go out into the streets for fear of a public backlash over their sluggish response. The AFAD is not only hamstrung by its lack of expertise, staff and equipment; its officials are also reluctant to take initiative due to their deference to Erdoğan. The decision was made, for example, to refrain from sufficiently mobilizing the armed forces, for fear that this would damage the government’s legitimacy.

The contrast with the response to the 1999 earthquake is stark. Back then, the scale of the devastation was likewise the product of state failure and the neoliberalized construction industry. Yet in its aftermath, civil society and state institutions – including the army – responded rapidly; the media was free enough to hold the government to account; and the actions of the executive were criticized by ministers as well as a parliamentary inquiry. Today, however, Turkey’s authoritarian settlement precludes even the slightest self-criticism. The iron fist of the state is being used to suppress independent reporting, with threats of retribution levelled at critical journalists. As with the Covid-19 pandemic, regime propaganda insists that the state response is beyond reproach. We are told that the destruction is ‘part of destiny’s plan’, and that no politician could prevent it.

Where the state has failed to intervene, however, ordinary people have done their best to fill the gaps. An astonishing wave of solidarity has swept across the country and the diaspora, with Turks volunteering in large numbers and sending money and equipment to the disaster area. Trucks loaded with desperately needed aid are constantly arriving in the province. Donations to independent bodies and political organizations have skyrocketed, reflecting the growing distrust in state institutions. For many, it feels like the spirit of the 2013 Gezi protests has been revived. The ‘other Turkey’, forever latent behind Erdoğan’s chaotic fiefdom, has become visible once again. While the government has made half-hearted efforts to restrict these grassroots relief efforts, it has refrained from stamping them out entirely.

Weakened by this calamity, the regime is trying to regain the initiative and reduce the political fallout through a theatrical display of national unity: ‘we’re all in this together’. So far, it is unclear whether his public-relations campaign will save Erdoğan’s regency, or whether, as Henri Barkey predicts, he will soon be submerged beneath a ‘tsunami of discontent’. In the end, only decisive political action can channel the current discontent to bring about his downfall.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads?’, NLR 127

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The Other Stuff

Dénouements characterized by misery and impotence seem predetermined in George Saunders’s early work, and tend to enhance the stories, liberating his satirical instincts. The hapless protagonists in Pastoralia (2000), still the finest of his short story collections, are locked into destructive narratives, played out in pasteurized corporate spaces, Gethsemanes and bleak visions of the future, yet the stories are ludic, full of slants and opposing charges, snapping turns and comedic innovations. By the time of In Persuasion Nation (2006), this brutality had acquired, in many places, an overtly political edge. In an interview from 2009, Saunders explained that he couldn’t help but write ‘what was really in my mind and heart’, and, after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, ‘what was in my mind and heart was, I guess, more linearly related to what was in the news.’ The strongest stories in In Persuasion Nation are narratives of paranoia. Saunders conceived ‘Adams’ as an allegory for the Iraq war (its title is an anagram), which then evolved into something more opaque and absurdist. ‘The Red Bow’ opens after a child has been killed by a rabid dog. The family want to alchemize their terrible grief into vengeance, so set about destroying any other infected dogs, then the ‘Suspected Infected’, and, finally, every animal in the neighbourhood. ‘Anyone objects,’ the bereaved mother orders, ‘kill them too.’

Obama’s election saw Saunders predicting a corresponding shift in his fiction. ‘Relieved’ that the levers of power were in safer hands, Saunders’s imagination could ‘shift back to being concerned with what I think of as general human foibles, instead of particular temporal human foibles’ (he confessed he was ‘kind of sick of politics’, ‘sick of all this right vs. left fighting’). This set the stage for the more sentimental mode of Tenth of December (2013), which won the Folio Prize, as well as his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which was awarded the Booker. Though still shot through with characters who experience terrible things, who frequently do terrible things, the grim trajectories of his early-career stories gave way, not to happy endings exactly, but more hopeful ones: finales in which feelings ‘expand’, ‘extend’, ‘encompass’, passing across the boundaries of flesh, evoking the possibility of togetherness. At the end of Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln’s personal sorrow at the death of his young son ‘extended to all in an instant’, for he saw ‘we were all suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering’.

Such sentimentalism is less in evidence in Saunders’s latest collection, Liberation Day (2022), his first in ten years. As a voice issuing from a beam of light has it: ‘You are trapped in you’. The words sound a bleak rebuke to the eponymous Mom in ‘A Mom of Bold Action’ when she tries, and fails, to imagine forging a connection with a man whom her husband recently beat up (they mistakenly believed he’d knocked over their child). It is a sad reminder of our ineluctable separateness from one another, containing no salve or analgesic in its assessment of the world’s current state, which Saunders has always thought fiction best placed to lay bare. Saunders is known for his interest in dystopias, nineteenth-century American history and the commodification of everyday life, and his taste for weird, inventive deployments of voice and quirky pyrotechnics (speaking beams of light, for example). But the concern that compels him, and makes his writing compelling, is the timeless quandary compacted in the beam’s utterance: the problem of what, if anything, we can really know of other people.

In the title essay of his first nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone (2007), Saunders suggested that the marathon process of revision to which he subjects his stories is designed both to increase their complexity and to hone their morally improving function: to ‘make us humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know’. A good story, he continues, allows us to ‘imagine them as being, essentially, like us’. By deepening and expanding the sympathetic imagination, stories can offer a kind of tutelage in the art of compassion. The fact we cannot read one anothers’ minds or live in one anothers’ bodies is a condition that storytellers of Saunders’s persuasion interpret as a summons or cue, deploying narrative to lessen our and others’ fundamental solitude, or at least to school us in living with it more humanely. Even though his oeuvre may be peopled with cruel and violent characters – rapists, child-beaters and modern-day slavers – often destined for failure or humiliation, we always feel, beneath the surface, the beat of a firmly ethical pulse, an underground stream of empathy, and we rarely doubt the essential niceness and kindly designs of their creator.

Indeed, these days Saunders may be nearly as well-known for his kindly designs as for his creations. An approachably eloquent spokesperson for fiction – he has taught on the creative writing MFA programme at Syracuse for over twenty years, and has written extensively about the art of short story writing in The Braindead Megaphone (2007), A Swim in a Pond in The Rain (2021), and latterly on his Substack ‘Story Club’ – Saunders has over the last decade achieved a degree of celebrity and influence that transcends literary culture. With his faultless public persona (avuncular, gracious, generous, Buddhist) and highly developed sense of the moral possibilities of storytelling, Saunders today verges on a kind of all-purpose sage (in 2013 he made TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, while his filmed commencement speech on kindness at Syracuse the same year has reached hundreds of thousands of viewers).

Yet the twin aims of Saunders’s tireless revising – to achieve complexity and promote sympathy – can seem, from a certain angle, if not incompatible then at least vying aspirations. Doesn’t coaxing us to ‘imagine them as being, essentially, like us’ risk dissolving complexity by implying we are all, at bottom, the same? (It is not, one might object, a requirement of empathy – the ability to understand and appreciate the feelings of another – that we assimilate our identities.) In the course of Saunders’s career, it has sometimes seemed that his most successful fictions are those that outrun any morally instructive designs, scotching our expectations. If Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo represent a period in which Saunders’ ethical intentions for fiction and the work itself were most closely aligned, their best moments nevertheless fight against simplification. (Saunders himself has expressed a preference for work that outstrips the author’s intentions. An allegorical story, for example, must exceed its initial premise, otherwise it’s just ‘a self-reifying scale model’: ‘snore’.)

*

In Liberation Day, one detects renewed scepticism about the possibility of bridging our apartness. Complexity for the most part trumps moral clarity, yielding some of the most interesting and probing stories Saunders has ever written, as well as a few of the least. The return to the mood of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000) is not difficult to parse; all but one story in Liberation Day were published after Trump’s election. Saunders found, once again, that he could no longer turn away from the ‘ugliness and sordidness’ of US politics. Surveying an acrimoniously polarized America, the stories in Liberation Day do not end with gushing passages where characters reflect on their shared suffering, but slink back in on themselves, back to the nuclear family, back to the prescribed societal order, without redemption or heroism.

Liberation Day’s title story is arguably the most layered that Saunders has written. As in ‘The Semplica-Girl Diaries’ from Tenth of December, in which wealthy suburbanites have immigrant women strung up as decorations in their front yards, individuals, driven ‘by hardship’, ‘consent’ (a term problematized at a critical juncture) to have their memories erased and become ‘Speakers’. ‘Pinioned’ to the walls of mansions, the Speakers entertain the owners and their guests with theatrical monologues and musical performances of historical battles. One is the Battle of Little Big Horn, when several thousand indigenous Plains Indians were ambushed by a cavalcade of the United States Army, and defeated them. The son of one rich family chastises his father for the Speakers’s production ‘badly neglecting the Indigenous perspective’ (the politically engaged, but often naïve, young person is a new character on the margins in Liberation Day). The Plains Indians’ ‘stunning victory is mere prelude; the colossus that is the white nation, galvanized by this humiliation, will soon enact a merciless revenge’. The story ends with a crackerjack set piece: the intrusion, during the play’s intermission, of young radicals arriving to liberate the Speakers. But while the Semplica-Girls made their getaway, this is not a collection in which power structures are overturned. The gear shift is more subtle, a liberation of mind rather than body. The Speakers, now cognizant of their captive state, are no longer able to perform with the innocence they had previously, but nor can they break out from their servitude.

The other story in Liberation Day that feels new is the strange, affecting ‘Sparrow’. It is delivered from a perspective Saunders has not attempted before: a first person that disperses into a chorus – residents of a small town who witness a quiet story of ordinary love from a sceptical distance. It stands out for its unusual stillness, its lack of gimmickry or violence. Rather, the tension that moves it onwards is drawn from the gap between the chorus’s cynical attitude to the couple and the genuine reciprocity in their developing romance, which we come to understand only by the lightest of authorial touches.

But despite the welcome return of the darkness of early collections, the overall quality of Liberation Day is more mixed, with the most overtly political narratives distinctly clunkier than previous ones. ‘Love Letter’, among the weaker stories, is an epistolary narrative in which a man responds to his grandson’s request for help after one of his friends has been arrested. The grandfather advises him to step back and ‘think as they do’ – ‘they’ being the authoritarian government run by the son of a ‘clownish figure’ – a realpolitik variation on what Saunders once described as the moral purpose of stories (to ‘imagine them as being, essentially, like us’). The grandfather would rather look back nostalgically to times like ‘that day when all of us hiked out at Point Lobos’, believing ‘the other stuff’ – politics – ‘is only real to the extent that it interferes with those moments.’ The reader of course is not expected to ally herself with the grandfather, but at such moments politics can seem like an interference in Saunders’s fiction, too.

A few stories are essentially bleaker revivals of conceits found in previous collections. In ‘Ghoul’, a dictatorial management team encourages those working at a Hieronymus Bosch-esque hallucination of a medieval theme park to inform on one another if they ever step out of character. But while the protagonist in Saunders’s early theme park re-enactment story, ‘Pastoralia’, repeatedly chooses not to inform on his cave-mate (it’s a Prehistoric Man re-enactment), in ‘Ghoul’, ratting colleagues out is already unquestioned practice. ‘We pass our days enacting insane rituals of denial!’ cries out one worker, and is immediately kicked to death by his colleagues. ‘Elliott Spencer’ recycles material, too. Homeless people are taken to a facility where their memories and faculties of speech are wiped in order that they might re-learn language, and a worldview with it, from scratch – according to a very specific agenda. Once they can speak again, the subjects are taken to protests and instructed to stand on one side of a divide manned by a sea of police so as to ‘bellow’ phrases like ‘Bastards, Turds, Creeps, Idiots’ at those on the other side (who are later revealed to be ‘union-organizer folks’ some weeks, other times ‘unarmed middle school teachers’). It is an undemanding allegory, which closely echoes a scene from Trump rallies Saunders described in a feature for the New Yorker in 2016: ‘Trump supporters flow out of the Convention Center like a red-white-and-blue river, along hostile riverbanks made of protesters, who have situated themselves so as to be maximally irritating.’

Since Pastoralia, Saunders has regularly dramatized his concern with the efficacy of empathy by way of dual perspective narratives, a close third that flips between two protagonists every few paragraphs. Like ‘Adams’ (In Persuasion Nation), ‘A Thing at Work’ is a study of escalation. Gen and Brenda are feuding colleagues; each has some leverage. Gen knows Brenda has been stealing coffee pods from the break room. Brenda knows Gen is using company money to finance an affair. Gen’s primary concern is that she will be perceived as ‘the snob who enjoyed good wines and custom mustards and kicking the white-trash lady when she was down’. As a low-paid employee on the brink of destitution, Brenda stands to lose everything if Gen reveals her secret. The overall effect is unsatisfying, the story’s form mapping too neatly onto its primary argument – that we fail to understand one another’s interior lives, especially across class lines.

*

The wish to circumvent the fact that ‘You are trapped in you’ perhaps explains why Saunders’s work features so many ghosts – discarnate forms that can traverse otherwise uncrossable boundaries. The ghosts in Lincoln in the Bardo enter into one another to discover unique but comparable and lovable souls. In ‘commcomm’ (In Persuasion Nation), as two characters progress towards an afterlife the narrator can only describe as ‘Nothing-Is-Excluded’, they ‘grow in size, in love’, the distinctions between them vanishing (a version of this sentiment ends up in Saunders’s 2013 commencement address: ‘my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE’).

David Foster Wallace ascribed to literature a similarly compassionate, connective function (around the time that Infinite Jest came out in 1996, Wallace reportedly pronounced Saunders, whose first collection had also just appeared, the most exciting writer in America). For Wallace great literature has the capacity to make one feel ‘unalone’. When I read that statement as an undergraduate, I copied it down as fact. Now I understand it as closer to a plea. In Wallace’s devastating short story ‘Good Old Neon’ (Oblivion, 2004), death is also imagined as a route out of our failures to understand one another. A man commits suicide and discovers life had been like trying to see one another through keyholes. After death, the doors are unlocked and ‘every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible’.

There are no more ghosts in Liberation Day, and the afterlife offers little salvation or release. In ‘Mother’s Day’, after a life spent being mistreated by an alcoholic, philandering husband, and neglecting her own children, Alma dies of a heart attack. She arrives in a bardo-like realm where she is allowed to choose who she wants to be now. Would she like to return to a younger version of herself? When she was a child? Even earlier: a foetal state? She declines each possibility – ‘As long as she was Alma, she’d be mad.’ The only way to free herself, Alma realizes, is by becoming nothing at all.

Read on: Anahid Nersessian, ‘For Love of Beauty?’, NLR 133/134.

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How to Blow Up a Pipeline

In the late 1960s, Seymour Hersh established himself as one of America’s most courageous investigative journalists, exposing covert US chemical and biological weapons programmes and uncovering the massacre of civilians in Mỹ Lai. He went on to work for the New Yorker and New York Times, breaking stories on the CIA’s domestic spying operations, the Watergate scandal, and the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. His 1991 book The Samson Option detailed the secret methods by which Israel acquired its nuclear arsenal. Over the past decade, essays for the London Review of Books have examined US involvement in the Middle East: challenging the official account of Bin Laden’s killing and highlighting fractures within the American security state over the Syrian war.

Hersh’s latest article ‘How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline’, was published on Substack last week. Citing a source with direct knowledge of the operation, it claims that US Navy divers – acting on orders from the Biden administration – used remotely triggered explosives to destroy the natural gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany. If this is true, the attack – targeting the crucial energy infrastructure of an ally – would constitute a major violation of sovereignty, if not an outright act of war. It would also mean that the US government is culpable for a major environmental catastrophe: the release of 300,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere – perhaps the largest leak in history.

The White House initially described the Nord Stream explosion as an ‘act of sabotage’, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggesting that Putin was responsible. Her claim was echoed by a chorus of European leaders, intensifying the demand for further escalation in Ukraine. Yet, by the end of 2022, Western officials conceded there was no evidence that Russia had detonated its own pipeline, nor was there any plausible motive for it to do so.

Since the appearance of Hersh’s story, the Kremlin has appealed for an international investigation into the attack, while Washington has dismissed his narrative as ‘utterly false and complete fiction’. Earlier this week, Hersh spoke to NLR editor Alexander Zevin about the possible rationale for the Nord Stream operation, the conflict within the Biden administration over the war in Ukraine, and the current state of the American media landscape.

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Alexander Zevin: Your most recent story describes the alleged US operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines last September. In the final line of the piece, you quote your source as saying that the only flaw in Biden’s plan was ‘the decision to do it’. Can you talk a bit about why you think this decision was ultimately made? Wouldn’t the risk of detection outweigh the potential benefits?

Seymour Hersh: The chronology here is quite simple. Before the Russian invasion, Jake Sullivan convened an interagency group with all the usual people: NSA, CIA, State Department, Justice, Treasury people, Joint Chiefs. And my perception is that they wanted to come up with options to forestall Putin and Russia. So this team was created and they asked themselves, Do we want to pursue a reversible or an irreversible course of action? Sanctions are reversible, whereas kinetic operations – attacks on infrastructure and the like – are not.

On January 26th 2022, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said in a press conference that, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 ‘will not move forward’ if Russia invades Ukraine. Which suggests that, by then, the administration was using the pipeline as a threat to make Putin think twice. Putin is, of course, picking up an incredible amount of money from the parent company Nord Stream AG, 51% of which is owned by his allies at Gazprom, with the remaining 49% shared between four different European companies which control downstream sales of the gas. So there’s a clear reason for targeting the pipeline.

The US then goes to the Norwegians, who end up playing a very important role in figuring out how to execute the plan. To plant the explosives, they needed to send Navy divers down 260 feet, with a complicated mixture of helium and nitrogen and oxygen, and bring them back up fast. This is a difficult manoeuvre, particularly when they’re releasing what’s probably the largest load of C4 ever dropped in the ocean: I mean, huge enough to take down a downtown building practically. And they had to do all this in two hours, taking care to avoid detection.

The Navy found the time to carry out the operation during an upcoming NATO Baltic exercise, and they were going to do it in early June, but instead they got waved off. The team is waved off, the sailors are waved off, and they’re told that the president wants the capability to do it at will. At that point, I have a feeling there was a lot of tension inside the interagency group – a sense of, what is this all about? Why destroy a pipeline that’s basically shut down anyway, after all the sanctions? Well, I think the Biden administration overruled these concerns for a couple of reasons. By September, even though the American press wasn’t telling you this, everybody I knew on the inside, and I know some people on the inside on this stuff, was saying the war is going to be a disaster. Of course, the Russians underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian resistance and their forces were pushed back, but the press greatly exaggerated the extent of their losses. The longer-term outlook for Ukraine was always bleak – partly because it’s still an extremely corrupt country where Western aid is often misused. So I think Biden had a tactical interest in destroying the pipeline, because this would prevent Germany from changing its mind when the going got tough and withdrawing its support for Ukraine. If there was a cold spell in November or December, that could’ve halted the Ukrainian counter-offensive and put pressure on Germany to lower gas prices by opening up the line. So that might have been one of the administration’s most immediate fears.

But there’s also a long history of American hostility towards this pipeline, stretching back to Bush and Cheney, who saw it as a strategic weapon that Russia could use to keep Germany and Western Europe from supporting NATO. Biden’s thinking was very much in line with this. Now, I don’t know if he wants a war with Russia. I don’t know if he wants a war with China. I don’t know what he wants. But it’s scary as hell, because maybe he doesn’t even know.

AZ: How do you square the overt statements or threats about Nord Stream – made by Biden, Nuland and Blinken – with the apparent need for utmost secrecy?   

SH: That would be a striking contrast if these American officials had a slightly higher IQ. But you know, Nuland is not a rocket scientist. She tends to blurt things out – like just a couple of weeks ago at the Senate hearing, where she commented to everyone’s favourite Senator from Texas that the administration was gratified that Nord Stream 2 was now ‘a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea’. And Biden of course does it too. On February 7th 2022 he met with Olaf Scholz at the White House, and at the press conference afterward he said ‘If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’ If I were in the German Bundestag, I would want to have a public hearing and ask the Scholz government what they knew about the American plan, given that these remarks were being made back in January and February.

AZ: In many of your stories, one of the reasons sources are willing to speak up is that there are conflicts and disputes within the state apparatus.  This was the case in some of your reporting on Syria from 2014, where military leaders clashed with the White House over its ‘red lines’ and the wisdom of bombing the country, given the risks this entailed of setting up a direct clash with the Russians. What is your sense of the potential internal sources of conflict over the Nord Stream operation – or the policy of military escalation in Ukraine generally?  

SH: There can’t have been much happiness about popping it off in late September. I mean, what’s the political goal? Was it strategic for negotiations or is it just to keep Germany and Western Europe in thrall to America? At some point, for economic reasons, Scholz may well have said: I’m out of the game – Ukraine can have a couple more German tanks, but I’m opening up the gas because I’ve got to keep my people warm and keep businesses going. But by putting an end to Nord Stream, Biden took that option off the table. And at that point, if you were a rational person working within the US state, you would say to yourself, this guy has made a choice that’s going to really hurt him in the long run. This kind of action might make it impossible for America to maintain its influence in Western Europe. Because with energy prices skyrocketing, and with little being done to ameliorate the decline in living standards, you’re going to see the far right gaining popularity across various countries.

The US is still sending liquefied natural gas to its European allies, but is charging three to four times more for it. So the president’s basically made a toss, you know, between severing the Germany–Russia link and losing political support for America and some of the states we most value. That would give any rational person in the intelligence community pause for thought. But, obviously, the story shows there were lots of people in that world who believed that developing the capability to destroy the pipelines would be useful to send a message to Putin. Certainly he knew that the US was discussing these options, and he probably knew about the training that was going on in the Baltic. We can’t be certain of this, but it’s hard to do something on that scale in the Baltic Sea without being noticed. Which also makes it unlikely that Sweden and Denmark were completely innocent.

AZ: Can I get your perspective on how the media landscape has changed since you broke a story like Mỹ Lai – or even since the 2000s, when you wrote several major investigative pieces about the War on Terror. Whether you published with a wire service as in Mỹ Lai, or in the Times, New Yorker or LRB, these stories were picked up, heaping pressure on the authorities to do more than issue a bland denial. But so far there has been a cordon sanitaire around this Nord Stream report, at least in the mainstream press. What’s changed?

SH: In 2007 I published a piece called ‘The Redirection’, about how the US had sided with the Sunnis against the Shias in the Middle East. That was very widely circulated. Reporters ambushed the White House spokesperson at the press briefing and asked ‘Is Hersh’s story true? Will you deny it?’ Years later people were still writing to me about it. A few of my New Yorker and New York Times articles had a similar reach – although of course I couldn’t get a paper to take the Mỹ Lai story, which is why I brought it to the Dispatch News Service.

But now you’re talking to a guy who recently learned second-hand about something called Substack and decided to publish there. I mean, we’re very adaptable in this industry. If the big boys want to cosy up to the state, if their idea of an ‘exclusive source’ is a presidential spokesman who whispers something to them after a press conference, then they can continue publishing in their outlets and real investigative journalism can happen elsewhere. These major outlets have run some of the dumbest stories I’ve ever seen in recent years. Back in 2021 there was one about Putin offering bounties to Afghan militants to kill US soldiers during the occupation. And more recently we’ve heard that he’s on steroids, that he has leprosy, that he has various kinds of cancer. You know, just crazy stuff.

So the only thing I can say about what’s changed is, this time I didn’t think of butting my head up against the system. I just went to this new platform and I’m told that the story has had over a million hits already: more than any other post – although the only mainstream media figure who’s called me up about it so far is Tucker Carlson. Self-publishing is terrifying for me, because I come from a very different world. In the old days of the New Yorker, the fact-checking was rigorous, really tough, and that was a great lesson for me. I was hired by the great New Yorker editor William Shawn five minutes after I walked into their offices off the street, and I worked there for two years before eventually leaving to go to the New York Times. Not many people would’ve made that change in the early seventies, since working at the New Yorker was supposed to be the best job in the world. But at the Times, there was a little period of heaven when Nixon was on the rocks, and I had the freedom to write stories that they would run. But by the time Ford got in it was back to the same old shit, so I had to get out of there.

Read on: Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is available from Verso.

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Selective History

Between the UK parliamentary elections of June 2017 and December 2019, the Labour Party’s position on Brexit faltered, leading to a catastrophic result at the polls. Having initially supported the outcome of the EU plebiscite, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership came under immense pressure from pro-Remain factions within the party to rally behind the call for a second referendum, a so-called People’s Vote, which, its proponents hoped, would reverse the 2016 result. Key to the disastrous volte face was a network of campaigners, activists and politicians, the left-wing flank of which was largely clustered around the group Another Europe Is Possible. AEIP’s national organizer, Michael Chessum, has now produced a personal account – titled This Is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left, From Anti-Austerity to The Fall of Corbyn – of these decisive years in the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party, placing them in a wider narrative of the development of the British left since 2010.

Born in 1989, Chessum has, over the past decade, established himself as one of Britain’s foremost professional activists. As a paid student union officer at University College London during the nationwide protests against the Cameron government’s plans to triple university fees and scrap education bursaries for teenagers, he played a leading role in the UCL student occupation and co-founded the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC). But while other figures in that occupation – Ash Sarkar, Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani among them – began to devote their energies to building left-wing media organizations, Chessum continued to concentrate his efforts on activism. Having joined Labour in 2012, he was elected to the first steering committee of Momentum. The following year he became a full-time organizer for AEIP. During his student years, Chessum developed a working relationship with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL), a tiny Trotskyist party best known for its defence of Israel against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, to whom he has remained close ever since. It is a revealing connection, but one he plays down the book, stressing that ‘of all the national-level spokespeople for the student movement of 2010’ he was ‘in a minority, and maybe a minority of one, in at no point joining a Trotskyist organization’.

In This Is Only the Beginning, Chessum recounts the changing orientation of left-wing youth politics in Britain, from horizontalist social movements organized to fight Cameron-era public sector cuts to the electoral machine of Momentum, a left-wing campaign group intended to bolster and organize Corbyn’s support base within and beyond the Labour Party. Chessum splits the previous decade into two dominant forms of political activity: 2010–15 was the heyday of the social movements, led mostly by student activists who later took up positions as journalists, paid university sabbatical officers and campaigners; during 2015–19, however, the youth wing of the autonomous British left joined the Labour Party and its affiliated institutions (notably, Young Labour) and began to professionalize.

While avowedly a partial account, the book relies heavily on interviews as well as personal recollection. These are most productive when Chessum has the courage to listen to those with different perspectives, such as Momentum founder Jon Lansman and former Unite chief of staff Andrew Murray. More often, though, he quotes personal friends who are often operators in the AWL and other sects – sometimes declaring their factional allegiance, sometimes not.

The book is premised on two interdependent theses: first, that ‘Corbynism’ was the product of social-movement politics outside the Labour Party; second, that its decline was set in motion by its drift away from those same social movements. It is this latter argument that its account of the 2015–19 period is principally constructed to support. ‘The new Labour left’, Chessum argues, ‘seemed curiously allergic to devolving power to their own activists and failed to democratize the party during their time in office.’ Through the centralization of Momentum and the control-freakery of a parliamentary office dominated by Corbyn’s key adviser Len McCluskey, Chessum argues that the party under Corbyn became ‘a left-wing version of New Labour.’

Chessum thus makes little attempt to tell the story of the significant events of the early years of Corbyn’s leadership – for instance, the discrediting of the anti-war movement as Britain prepared to bomb Syria in 2015, the ‘chicken coup’ and the retreat of party democracy just after the 2016 conference, and the anti-union laws and seminal trade disputes of the same year (which hampered the capacity of supportive unions, other than Unite, to engage with the project). The 2017 election is described as ‘a moment of intoxication from which the leadership never really came down’, but there is little attempt to analyse the lessons – good or bad – of that extraordinary result.

Instead, his is a tale focused solely on the organizational evolution of Momentum and the fallout of the Brexit referendum. On the former, Chessum offers a valid assessment of the leadership’s failure to support mandatory re-selection of MPs. On the latter, he clings to his interpretation of the People’s Vote campaign as an expression of the social-movement politics that brought Corbyn to power and were, in his view, subsequently undermined by the combined bureaucracies of the party and trade-union movement. After a detailed and rather self-pitying account of the Brexit motions at the 2018 Labour conference – which resulted in a position he accurately describes as a ‘fudge’ – Chessum’s only regret is that he compromised too much with the leadership. Ceding any terrain to elements of the party that advocated respecting the referendum result was, he says, ‘probably the greatest political mistake I have ever made’. Here, he fails to perceive even in hindsight what others saw clearly at the time: that opposition to Brexit had been hijacked by the Labour right, who were cynically using it claw their way back to power.

If Chessum’s strategic prescriptions facilitated the campaign against Corbynism, is his analytical account of the past decade any more convincing? He differentiates his book from other ‘court histories’ of the Corbyn project, stressing that ‘the new British left was not built by professionals, politicians and bureaucrats’. Yet his assessment – that it was built by mass social movements alone – is wildly off the mark. For Chessum, organized elements of the Labour left were completely irrelevant until Corbyn was catapulted to the leadership by extra-parliamentary forces. But Corbyn would never have reached the ballot were it not for organizations such as the Socialist Campaign Group, an assemblage of left-wing Labour MPs, who persistently put forward left leadership candidates in the face of certain defeat during the New Labour period. In fact, the ‘court histories’ Chessum dismisses – including personal memoirs such as Len McCluskey’s Always Red (2022) – demonstrate a far better understanding of the circumstances which allowed Corbyn to scale the heights of the party. Chessum is keen to emphasize the role that student-movement activists went on to play in the Labour left, but his own examples show that few of them were instrumental in Corbyn’s election, and mostly joined after the success of his leadership bid. The bureaucrats he castigates for seizing control of a people-powered movement were not singularly responsible for bringing Corbyn to the helm, but the leader would have failed at the first hurdle were it not for their work.

As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the author experienced the trajectory of the Corbyn project as a series of personal affronts and not simply political setbacks. When, in 2017, he lost a fight within Momentum, he did so having ‘built friendships with its staff and volunteers who had, apparently, engineered the abolition of my role and of the organization’s democracy behind my back’. By 2019, he had ‘stopped attending my local Labour left group because the atmosphere had become so toxic, and my position on Brexit made me a figure of genuine hate’.

Who can blame him? Yet, more than three years on, readers might reasonably expect a little more reflection from the author on his own part in the disaster. Chessum’s account of the 2015–2020 period is hopelessly distorted by both his vanity and his stubborn refusal to engage with the real reasons for the defeat: among them, the Labour leadership’s capitulation to a disingenuous lobby of Europhilic Blairites, who – abetted by Chessum himself – helped to anathematize the party in dozens of electorally crucial constituencies. His telling of the five years prior to Corbynism reads like a sentimental – if not uncritical – tribute to an era in which he was, briefly, the media spokesman for a radical yet unsuccessful extra-parliamentary left movement among British students. Conversely, the work of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and affiliated unions over the same period, which secured the selection of left MPs and rebuilt the left’s base in Young Labour, is airbrushed from history.

What, finally, are we to make of the claim lodged within the title? This is Only the Beginning has been marketed as a manifesto for the future as well as a reckoning with the past, but Chessum’s resentful tone and self-exculpatory motivations prevent it from being either. Chessum argues for a ‘regrouping of a left which is up to the task of transforming politics’, but his subsequent suggestions are as self-serving as his history is self-aggrandizing. ‘What is needed now is a campaign against amnesia, not just with an attempt to teach and share history – essential though this is – but by rebuilding a space for ideological traditions and collective memory in a practical sense’, he argues. Further still, Labour must split, with proportional representation providing the potential of left electoral success unhampered by establishment centrism. Yet, much as he repeatedly calls for movements to be ‘outward facing’, Chessum’s focus is fixed firmly to what existing activists must do: an insularity that is not altogether surprising, since Chessum’s broader political outlook has been shaped by navel-gazing grouplets with equally inflated perceptions of their own significance. There is precious little about building a programme that can resonate across the politically dispossessed working class, many of whom voted for Brexit and will now be failed once again by both its right-wing champions and a left that has branded them bigots.

Throughout This Is Only the Beginning, Chessum constructs a strange antimony between movement politics and bureaucratism. This dichotomy grossly disfigures the reality of the 2015–20 period, in which a core group of veteran socialist MPs and activists, accustomed to a position of toothless protest, was thrust suddenly into leadership of the national opposition and forced to harness what remained of a demoralized network of social movements to rapidly build an electoral base. This recasting of history, and his own role within it, allows the author to misrepresent his single-minded pursuit of an anti-Brexit Labour position as an assertion of movement-power against party-power.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this distortion is intended to burnish Chessum’s own image, especially given the self-regarding tone with which he describes key moments in the decade (in Spring of 2015, he watched Corbyn’s leadership take shape from Athens ‘in between covering the Greek left’s ill-fated confrontation with the Eurogroup for the New Statesman and being teargassed in Syntagma Square’; in September, despite only recently wondering whether ‘remaining in Labour is a good use of anyone’s time’, he returned to Britain graciously having decided he would ‘climb [Momentum’s] structures and build for it a democratic youth organization’). Selective deployment of the truth unfortunately colours Chessum’s general approach to his subject. The result is a book that at best reads as a litany of CV points from a mediocre career in politics, and at worst whitewashes its author’s full-throated participation in one of the most significant causes of the Corbyn movement’s downfall.

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