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Iron Musk

It is difficult to hide a certain satisfaction upon witnessing the collapse of bitcoin. Since I last dealt with the topic for Sidecar seven months ago, the total capitalization of cryptocurrencies has decreased from $2.6 trillion – equivalent to the total GDP of France – to only $901 billion (as of 15 June). One feels sorry, but only a little, for those gullible people who invested their modest savings in crypto currencies hoping for easy profits and got fleeced by another pyramid scheme – an updated version of the seventeenth-century tulip fever in the Netherlands, history’s first senseless financial bubble.

This schadenfreude is all the greater since the cryptocurrency crash particularly affects Elon Musk – in theory the world’s richest man, with assets valued at $268 billion. In the media, Musk is depicted as contemporary capitalism’s very own Tony Stark, alter ego of the Marvel superhero Iron Man: a business magnate, playboy, philanthropist, inventor and scientist. In 2019, Musk decided to accept cryptocurrencies as payment for the electric vehicles produced by his company Tesla. The following year, he invested $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Musk has relied on the fact that the cryptocurrency market is controlled by a small number of people who are able to manipulate its ebbs and flows (save any sudden waves of panic). For several years these capitalists propped up the value of their investments in bitcoin by continuing to accumulate cryptocurrencies, just as public companies do when they inflate their own shares through ‘buybacks’.

In the space of a year, however, Dogecoin has lost over 80% of its value, dropping from $40 billion to $6.9 billion. Undeterred, Musk has continued to assert his faith in the venture, relaunching it in May as a means to pay for the merchandising of his space corporation, SpaceX. Every announcement made by Musk is followed by a rise in the price of Dogecoin: a fact that illuminates the mechanism through which this new form of capitalism increases the fortunes of its standard-bearers. The capitalist announces on social media that they will buy a given share. Their followers (or, perhaps more aptly, believers) rush to buy the same shares, which experience a vertiginous surge, after which the capitalist cashes in by selling a part of the bloated stock, easily covering the cost of the initial purchase.

What’s producing revenue here is influence. In Musk’s case, influence is accrued through his own comic-book persona: he will continue to amass wealth so long as he is seen as a Stark-like figure. This is how his image as the Iron Capitalist remains credible. For this reason, Twitter is the most efficient financial tool at his disposal: his 91 million followers scattered around the world are his real capital. Hence why on 4 April the value of Twitter’s shares increased by 27% after Musk announced he had bought 9% of the company’s stock (Dogecoin also went up 20% as a result). It stands to reason that Iron Man would want to control the source of his revenue by investing in it.

Musk’s adherence to this superhero persona is therefore not only – or not even primarily – a vain ostentation, but quite literally a question of economic interest. Throughout his career as an entrepreneur he has carefully fashioned his image as an inventor or scientist (even if he dropped out of his graduate studies in material sciences at Stanford after only two days). As Forbes emphatically proclaims, ‘Elon Musk is working to revolutionize transportation both on Earth, through electric car maker Tesla – and in space, via rocket producer SpaceX’. Musk must constantly renew these superheroic credentials, investing in fanciful, futuristic projects reminiscent of science-fiction: electric cars, space exploration, artificial intelligence and neurotechnology. The key is to launch a new project before the previous one has been completed; new investments make earlier ones look profitable, thereby raising the value of their stock.

Exemplary in this regard is the story of Tesla, the electric vehicle company which, without having established a foothold in the industry (how many Teslas do you see driving around?), launched itself into the field of self-driving cars, with predictably disastrous results. As of 20 February, Tesla cars had caused 11 accidents, 17 casualties and one fatality. But, for Musk, the mere promise of automated cars served to obfuscate the broader failure of the electric vehicle. Tesla went public in 2010, after receiving $500 million worth of financing from the US government. From 2010 to 2019 its value increased, but at a fairly typical pace for an innovative tech company in a period of quantitative easing. (At this time, investment funds were able to take out billions in interest free-loans, and, without quite knowing where to channel it all, invested in companies that were seen as promising; it’s this that underpinned the enormous boom in stocks, despite the near-stagnant real economy). Over the following two years, the company truly went into orbit, peaking at $1.2 trillion in November 2021, before sinking to $662 billion as of 15 June.

This valuation does not correspond in any way to Tesla’s ‘real’ size, which remains modest both in terms of vehicles produced (305,000 the whole of last year) and sales ($54 billion). In comparison, the Volkswagen group had a revenue of $250 billion and produced 5.8 million cars, but its capitalization only amounted to $167 billion. The ascent of Tesla was also fuelled by the growth of bitcoin, the promise of space exploration and, in 2021, the long-publicised touristic rocket ‘excursion’, which helped SpaceX surpass the $100 billion valuation threshold. In this way, the SpaceX and bitcoin boom retroactively triggered the rise of Tesla.

As we’ve seen, the valuation of Musk’s enterprises, as well as the aleatory estimates of his wealth, have always been based on the promise of future expansion: achievements that are just out of reach, just over the next hill. His trust in bitcoin therefore indicates more than just a speculative opportunism; it embodies the business model that operates across his various industries. It also demonstrates that the influence exercised by Musk through Twitter doesn’t only affect small investors (those that Italian stock traders call parco buoi, ‘the flock’), but also ‘professionals’: stockbrokers, financial advisors, fund managers and so on.

Every epoch has an entrepreneur who symbolizes its particular style of capitalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the robber baron era, it was the evangelist of modern billionaire philanthropism, Andrew Carnegie and his Gospel of Wealth (1889). Then it was Henry Ford, the fascist-sympathizing industrialist behind the Model T, who shocked the world by paying his workers five dollars per day and was deemed ‘the one great orthodox Marxist of the twentieth century’ by Alexandre Kojève. The post-World War II period, with its social democratic compromise, lacked Promethean entrepreneurs of the kind envisaged by figures such as Werner Sombart and Joseph Schumpeter. Yet in the 1980s the mythos of the entrepreneur was revived with the rise of Reaganism. Richard Branson emerged as the fitting stepson of Thatcher, whose privatizations and deregulations paved the way for Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Healthcare. In 1986 the then Prime Minister appointed him ‘litter tsar’, tasked with ‘keeping Britain tidy’. Later, the Blair government entrusted him with managing part of the newly privatized British rail infrastructure.

Branson inaugurated the era of the performer-entrepreneur, a man of showbiz more than business, foreshadowing the new generation of moguls who operate on social media. Mark Zuckerberg, who deftly exploited Facebook to build his own personal brand, was the first. Then, in truly cinematic fashion, entered Iron Man Elon. Yet these symbolic figures aren’t necessarily the most significant ones. John Rockefeller or John Pierpont Morgan were far more important than Carnegie, even if they never embodied an epochal style. Bill Gates was just as important as Steve Jobs (himself a mythical character, though he died before the new wave of social media). In the same way, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos shapes our lives far more than Elon Musk, even though his presence on social media is close to nil, and he is markedly less representative of what might be called ‘comic book capitalism’.

The truth is that Musk’s significance is more political than economic. I know from personal experience that public figures – however cynical their stated positions may appear – end up identifying with the role they play and believing in the principles they thought they were exploiting. Tony Stark inevitably begins to see himself as Ulysses, ‘that man skilled in all ways’, whose ingenuity allows his people to fulfil their historic mission. Yet, unlike his former Paypal associate and fellow cryptocurrency enthusiast Peter Thiel, Musk has little use for political proclamations. His actions speak for themselves. They reveal an individual convinced of his right to shape the fate of the world – not primarily through his wealth, but through his membership of a ‘cognitive aristocracy’, an elect few more intelligent, more knowledgeable and more perceptive than the rest.

Here we enter the phantasmagorical world of the comic-book capitalists, who often use their vast wealth to realise their teenage fantasies. Relevant to this dreamland is the disproportionate influence, especially in the eighties, of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), in which the Russian exilée describes ‘a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations’, plus the resistance of some heroic capitalists who eventually migrate and establish a free society elsewhere (a notable super-fan of this extremely dull book was Alan Greenspan).

The 2008 crisis dealt a blow to the partisans of Rand’s rational egoism (Greenspan himself ultimately abjured it). But it was soon to be replaced by a new cult work entitled The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State (1997), co-written by James Dale Davidson, a financial consultant whose expertise lay in how to profit from catastrophes, and William Rees-Mogg (1928-2012), long-standing editor of The Times. A 2018 Guardian article summarized the book’s four main theses:

1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.

2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.

3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity.

4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a ‘cognitive elite’ will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals ‘commanding vastly greater resources’ who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.

Though written in 1997, the book is perfectly synchronized with the world of cryptocurrencies, created a decade later in the immediate aftermath of the financial crash. The Sovereign Individual found an early adherent in Thiel, a member of the so-called Paypal Mafia, the group of young entrepreneurs – including Musk – that launched Paypal in 1998 and subsequently spawned a whole host of companies; Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn, Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman founded Yelp; Keith Rabois was an early investor in YouTube; Max Levchin became the CEO of Slide, Roelof Botha a partner at Sequoia Capital. With the exception of Musk, they all appear together in a famous photo published by Fortune in 2007, sitting in a bar, dressed as Italian-American gangsters.  

Not all of this clique would become disciples of The Sovereign Individual: some continue to fund liberal causes and Democratic electoral candidates. Yet the real division within the group is between the paladins of crypto and the others. Remember, bitcoin presented itself as a tool that could render the state superfluous as a guarantor of currency – undermining one of its two remaining monopolies (the other being the monopoly on legitimate violence). bitcoin was a way of realizing Robert Nozick’s ultra-minimalist state in the economic and financial realm, well beyond even the most audacious Friedmannian vision, where the supply of money is entrusted to the market.

Even more radical in his political convictions is Thiel, who, as we learn in a recent article in the London Review of Books,

predicts the demise of the nation-state and the emergence of low or no tax libertarian communities in which the rich can finally emancipate themselves from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by workers’, has long argued that blockchain and encryption technology – including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin – has the potential to liberate citizens from the hold of the state by making it impossible for governments to expropriate wealth by means of inflation.

Thiel recently hired as Global Strategist for his investment fund the former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a conservative politician increasingly gravitating towards the extreme libertarian right. Thiel has also become a fervid exponent of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’, the new philosophy embraced by the alt-right and by some Trumpians (Thiel was one of Trump’s earliest financers), which proposes the creation of a neo-feudal system governed by a small set of cognitively superior elites.  

These patricians cloak themselves in the noblest of robes: those of meritocracy. After all, who would be against the idea that whoever deserves more should obtain more? The problem is that this reasoning is always performed backwards, moving from consequences to causes; so-called meritocracy, far from arguing that rewards should be commensurate to merit, actually maintains the opposite. Possessing wealth is already incontrovertible proof of the fact that it’s deserved. The rich are rich because they deserve to be, and everyone else is the undeserving poor. Musk is the living apologue of this principle, its celebrity incarnation. Yet, precisely for this reason, he doesn’t need to express radical positions like his ex-partner Thiel. The concept of cognitive feudalism is irrelevant for him, since he can simply exercise such tyranny over his employees. Rather than flaunting his radicalism, he puts it into practice. He doesn’t gloat about cryptocurrencies’ ideological virtues; he merely uses them to inflate the valuation of his companies. As Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote in his stinging critique of négritude: ‘a tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces’.

Yet the limits of this approach are plain to see. Tesla’s market performance mirrors that of cryptocurrencies with an astonishing similarity (Tesla’s collapse from $1 trillion to $662 billion since last November coincides with the recent crypto crash). The end of quantitative easing and the monetary tightening that central banks will implement to check inflation will precipitate the collapse of overvalued firms and Ponzi schemes of all types. At this point, capitalism will have to find itself some other heroes (or some other comics).

P.S. If the collapse of bitcoin was one good story this spring, there was also another. Last May, it was as if the Davos Economic Forum didn’t even take place; nobody paid it the slightest attention, and it hardly appeared in any news report. Before the pandemic, Davos seemed like the yearly reunion of the masters of the universe. Its sumptuous choreography suggested that movie stars and heads of state were visiting the Alpine ski resort, rather than capital’s bureaucrats and paper pushers. By contrast, this new sobriety is a breath of fresh air. Meagre consolation in the face of the war, perhaps, but still a small glimmer of hope.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: George Cataphores, ‘The Imperious Austrian’, NLR I/205.

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Nightmare’s End?

I am not in Sri Lanka, and I feel torn about what is happening there. Acute anxiety about how millions will survive the shortages of food, fuel and medicine jostles against a glimmer of hope that this crisis could be the beginning of the end of a decades-long nightmare. Since the country gained its Independence in 1948, various sections of the population have been targeted by its ruling bloc: threatened with losing their homes, livelihoods and often their lives. They have fought back, but each section has been isolated and crushed by an increasingly centralized and ruthless state. Now, for the first time, the vast majority of the population has risen in revolt. Criticism of the dictatorship is widespread, and divisions between working people may finally be healing.  

It is not easy to disentangle the different strands of Sri Lanka’s long-standing political crisis, but let me try. Equality before the law – a key component of any democratic republic – was never supported by the ruling class that took power in independent Ceylon. The two main parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), both endorsed ‘Sinhala-Buddhist’ supremacism. This meant persistent discrimination against ethno-religious minorities, which began right after Independence, when the UNP passed legislation disenfranchising around a million Tamils of recent Indian origin and stripping them of their citizenship. Most of those affected were plantation workers in the central hill country, who were already isolated from other sections of the working class by their confinement to the plantations.

The next major assault on equality occurred when the SLFP, led by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, came to power in 1956 and passed the Official Language Act, or ‘Sinhala Only Bill’. The Act discriminated against all Tamil-speakers, especially in public sector employment. It sparked major protests followed by the anti-Tamil riots of 1958, in which far-right Buddhist monks played a major part, assassinating Bandaranaike the following year for not going far enough in persecuting Tamils. The leadership of the SLFP was taken over by his widow Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Tamil was downgraded and English ceased to act as a link language, in a deliberate attempt to obstruct dialogue between communities.

Such measures were opposed by the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party of Ceylon (later the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, CPSL). Yet, once they failed to prevent the ratification of the anti-Tamil laws, the left parties did not continue the struggle against discrimination by building solidarity among working people from different linguistic and religious groups. Instead, they formed an alliance with the SLFP in 1964, and the parties jointly established the United Front (UF), which swept to power in 1970. At that point, principled members of the left parties split off, and Tamil socialists were left demoralized by the capitulation of their leaders. The only force that could have carried through the democratic revolution had splintered.

Once in power, the UF’s Land Reform Laws of 1972 and 1975 nationalized the plantations. Yet rather than distributing the land to Tamil workers – who were driven out and left to starve – it was handed to Sinhalese government supporters. In response, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) called for the creation of an independent Tamil Eelam. Militant groups, most notably the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), were established to fight for this goal. The LTTE initially attracted some Tamil socialists who believed it was waging a justified struggle for self-determination; but, in reality, the group was always committed to creating a Tamil-supremacist state by ethnically cleansing and killing Sinhalese. It even targeted Tamil-speaking Muslims in the Northern and Eastern Provinces which it claimed as its territory.

Despite all the privileges given to the Sinhalese majority by the UF, dissatisfaction with the regime remained widespread. Significant gains in healthcare and education were cancelled out in the public mind by inflation and food shortages. In 1971, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front), led by Rohana Wijeweera, launched an armed uprising to overthrow the government – backed overwhelmingly by Sinhalese young men for whom the problems of unemployment and poverty had not been solved by Sinhala Only.

Notwithstanding his self-description as a ‘modern Bolshevik’, Wijeweera’s revolutionary horizons were narrowed by a Sinhala-supremacist outlook which characterized Tamil plantation workers as mere tools of Indian expansionism. His uprising was powerless to reach across ethnic lines, and ultimately crushed by the UF government after a state of emergency was declared. Nonetheless, antipathy towards the ruling party lingered. When parliamentary elections were held in 1977, the UNP led by J.R. Jayawardene returned to power with 140 seats out of 168. He used this super-majority to enact a new constitution and anoint himself Executive President – with almost unlimited powers.

Sinhala dominance was entrenched under Jayawardene, with anti-Tamil pogroms sweeping the country just a month after his election. The 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act precipitated the torture, disappearance and extrajudicial killing of thousands of Tamils. In 1981, an orgy of state-sponsored arson, rape and looting in Jaffna included the burning of the public library, with around 95,000 books and ancient manuscripts inside. The violence then shifted to the east, south and hill-country, with thousands of Tamils evicted from their homes and robbed of their possessions. The even more gruesome massacres of 1983 initiated a civil war between the LTTE and government, which lasted some 26 years.

All this perpetuated the trend set by Jayawardene’s predecessors. But what distinguished his regime was its disastrous neoliberalization programme and unabashed authoritarianism. Production of consumer goods, both agricultural and industrial, was hit by cheaper imports in the 1980s, while the import of luxuries previously unavailable in Sri Lanka added to the drain on foreign exchange. Remittances from migrant workers, tea exports, tourism and new foreign investments failed to fill the gap, due to generous tax holidays and tariff-free imports of inputs. This led to increasing reliance on foreign debt, laying the basis for the current economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Jayawardene attempted to crush all dissent and extinguish democracy. His newly established Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS) was deployed in anti-Tamil pogroms, as well as killing opposition supporters, judges, trade unionists and striking workers, all with the collusion of the police. The second JVP insurrection, starting in mid-1987 and ending in late 1989, when Wijeweera was captured and executed, left an estimated 40,000-60,000 Sinhalese slaughtered in that period alone. Death squads targeted opponents of Jayawardene and his successor Ranasinghe Premadasa, frequently abducting and torturing them to death. Ranil Wickremesinghe, the current Sri Lankan Prime Minister, was a government minister throughout this period. The current president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, was an army commander. Both were implicated in the mass murder of Tamils and Sinhalese alike.

Since that period, the Executive Presidency has been subjected to an ongoing tug-of-war. Abolishing it has so far proved elusive, because the courts have ruled that this would require a two-thirds majority in parliament plus an absolute majority in a referendum. Yet more modest reforms have occasionally been passed to restrict the presidency’s power. Under the presidency of Chandrika Kumaratunga, from 1994 to 2005, attacks on democracy declined and the 17th Amendment was instituted, removing the president’s ability to unilaterally appoint people to institutions like the Election Commission and Supreme Court. This tentative progress was then reversed under Mahinda Rajapaksa, as state-backed death squads were revived to target dissidents. In 2009, the LTTE was finally defeated in the civil war’s horrific climax, in which an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed. In tandem, an 18th constitutional amendment reversed Kumaratunga’s reforms and abolished the presidency’s two-term limit.  

Rajapaksa rejected the UN’s demand for an independent investigation into reports of war crimes, framing this as an ‘anti-imperialist’ position. But though his rhetoric played well with some of the electorate, he lost credibility by contributing to the country’s mountain of foreign debt – with new creditors including the Chinese government and private buyers of sovereign bonds. With their popularity in decline, the president and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa – who, as Defence Secretary, controlled the intelligence agencies – tried to salvage their careers by scapegoating the Muslim population. They funded far-right groups of Buddhist monks, using them to violently attack Muslims while mounting an Islamophobic propaganda campaign through state-controlled media. Under the radar, the Rajapaksas also funded Islamist militants to fight against the LTTE – who remained on the government payroll as informants despite credible intelligence that they had been radicalized.   

Mahinda Rajapaksa was voted out of office in 2015, having alienated a large section of the Sinhalese population with the scandalous nepotism and corruption of his regime. In his place, ethnic minorities voted for a fragile Good Governance (Yahapalanaya) coalition between SLFP rebel Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe. The new coalition once again curtailed the powers of the president and reinstated the two-term limit with the 19th Amendment. But it, too, fell apart. The final blow to its credibility was the Easter Sunday terrorist attack in 2019, which killed 269 people in locations across the country. As it turned out, the bombings were perpetrated by the very same Islamists that the Rajapaksas had been bankrolling. Subsequent investigations revealed that during the Yahapalanaya regime, members of the terror group, including mastermind Zahran Hashim, continued to be paid and protected from prosecution by officials who remained loyal to Gotabaya. This was despite Hashim’s proclamation of allegiance to ISIS and ample evidence that his followers were accumulating arms and explosives.  

Yet, counterintuitively, it was the Rajapaksas who benefited from the Easter Sunday massacre. In the resulting panic, the government was weakened and Gotabaya was able to mount an effective presidential campaign, running as the ‘national security’ candidate. Later that year, he topped the poll with 52% of the vote. An alliance led by the Rajapaksas’ new party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, also won the parliamentary elections with a large enough majority to pass the 20th Amendment, reversing the 19th. Gotabaya proceeded to pack the cabinet with family members including Mahinda, who was appointed prime minister.  

By this time the economy was already sinking under $51 billion of foreign debt, much of it incurred by the family’s vanity projects and endless siphoning of money out of the country. The Gotabaya regime’s tax cuts made the debt unsustainable, and an overnight ban on imports of chemical fertiliser – implemented in the face of farmer protests – led to a colossal decline in crop yields. As foreign reserves ran out, domestic production of food and exports plummeted, leading to escalating unemployment, sky-rocketing inflation, power cuts and long queues to buy basic goods.

All but the very rich have been affected by this meltdown. Workers have lost jobs, farmers are in crisis and fishermen have no fuel to power their boats. Galloping inflation has eroded wages, and parents have gone hungry in order to feed their children. So, in early March 2022, people of all ages, from all ethnic communities, came out spontaneously with home-made placards bearing slogans such as ‘Go Home Rajapaksas’. They called for democratic reform, the immediate resignation of the president and his government, and an end to economic mismanagement.  

The government ignored these initial protests, but at the end of March a more militant demonstration near Gotabaya Rajapksa’s residence in Colombo was met with water cannons, tear gas and dozens of arrests. There followed a state of emergency, plus a nationwide curfew and social media ban. This heavy-handed response was expected to stamp out the unrest, but it only enabled it to spread. The president subsequently changed tack, trying to appease the demonstrators by reversing his authoritarian measures and forcing the entire cabinet (apart from Mahinda) to resign. But the protests kept up their momentum, and on 9 April activists occupied Galle Face Green: a park in Colombo facing the Presidential Secretariat. This now iconic site has been renamed ‘GotaGoGama’. The crowds were joined by a delegation from 1,000 different trade unions, who staged a general strike – the first in four decades – calling for the government to step down. 

A month later, pro-government thugs began to carry out violent attacks on the protests. Yet their resistance was so powerful that Mahinda was ultimately compelled to step down. He was evacuated from his home by security forces while the military was deployed with shoot-on-sight orders. With international criticism of the government growing, Gotabaya installed Ranil Wickremesinghe – the leader of the United National Party – as Prime Minister on 12 May. But although Wickremesinghe may be popular with the IMF, he is deeply disliked by the masses. His proposed 21st Amendment has been widely seen as a betrayal of the protesters’ demands, and his invitation to youth groups to sit on parliamentary committees has been met with the silence it deserves.

The numbers in favour of abolishing the Executive Presidency are currently smaller than those calling for Gotabaya’s resignation, but the demand is gaining traction. This creates an opening for activists, who can now push for a broader process of political restructuring which would devolve power to provincial and local governments. It also provides a space for progressive solutions to the country’s economic crisis. Socialist economists have long advocated a public audit that would repudiate Sri Lanka’s illegitimate debt, in defiance of the IMF. They have argued for importing only essential items like food and medicine and putting in place a public distribution system, while encouraging cooperative producers and defending public ownership of utilities, healthcare and education.

At GotaGoGama, Sinhalese and Tamils have reportedly celebrated New Year together, and various religious groups have shared in the breaking of the fast during Ramadan. Meanwhile, in the south, people have turned out for the very first time to mourn the Tamils killed in the civil war. Such developments suggest an easing of ethnic and religious tensions, despite the Rajapaksas attempts to stoke them. When I was conducting interviews for my 1993 book, Journey Without a Destination, the vast majority of Tamil and Muslim refugees and displaced people were admirably free of ethnic hatred, despite all they had suffered. I heard numerous stories of Sinhalese friends, neighbours, colleagues and even total strangers saving the lives of Tamils. I also encountered prejudice, especially among the Sinhalese, yet this flowed from the profound ignorance engendered by the Sinhala Only policy, as well as the suppression of dissident voices and relentless disinformation in the media. When experience contradicted propaganda, though, people were often willing to think anew. And this is precisely what is happening at present. Perhaps, if Sri Lanka’s fractured left can harness this sense of solidarity, the economic catastrophe may create the conditions for a democratic breakthrough.

Read on: A. Sivanandan, ‘An Island Tragedy’, NLR 60.

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Crowd Pleaser

TOPSHOT - Swedish film director Ruben Ostlund celebrates during a photocall after he won the Palme d'Or for the film "Triangle of Sadness" during the closing ceremony of the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 28, 2022. (Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP)

Ruben Östlund was awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s top honour this year, winning the Palme d’Or for Triangle of Sadness. He joins a rarefied group of directors – one that includes fellow Swede Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppolla, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, the Dardenne brothers and Ken Loach – to have won the award more than once; he now has as many as all female directors combined. Following Michael Haneke and Billie August, he is the third director to receive the award for back-to-back films, having also won in 2017 for his fifth film The Square. The two projects are not so differently shaped: while The Square looks at the art world and the wealthy idiots who inhabit it; Triangle of Sadness begins with the fashion world before moving on to wealthy idiots more generally.

It makes a funny kind of sense that these two films have been so well received at Cannes. The festival is one of hyper-opulence, with its red-carpet, black-tie premieres held in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, a two-thousand-seat palace wedged neatly between superyachts and luxury hotels. By awarding Östlund the Palme, the jury can position themselves as in on the joke: we know you’re mocking us, but we’re laughing, too. Wouldn’t he rather they boo? Östlund does not appear overly concerned with social change; his films are less satire than farce. He treads the careful line of the court jester – wanting to make the king wince while he giggles, just not enough to risk his own head. ‘I believe that rich people are nice,’ Östlund explained in one interview about Triangle of Sadness. ‘There’s an ongoing myth that successful and rich people are horrible, but it’s reductive. I wanted the sweet old English couple to be the most sympathetic characters in the film. They are nice and respectful to everyone – they just happen to have made their money on landmines and hand grenades.’ The film has rather too much sympathy for its wealthy subjects. Its underlying premise seems to be that whether rich or poor, we’re all the same – all driven by the same interest in self-preservation – which perhaps explains why Östlund never draws blood.

Told in three parts, Triangle of Sadness begins with a largely superfluous send-up of the fashion industry. Taking its cues from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno (2009), it doesn’t stray much further. An obnoxious television personality invades a casting call and has the male models smile or frown depending on what brand they represent. Expensive clothes require sorrow; cheap ones, joy. Among the models is Carl (Harris Dickenson), who, aged 25 in real life, may be aging out of the industry. The frown lines above his brow become the title of the film, after one casting director asks if they can do something about his ‘triangle of sadness’. Carl is dating Yaya (Charlbi Dean), an Instagram influencer who makes far more money than he does – modelling being the rare industry where women earn more than men. This is cause for conflict in their relationship, with Carl advocating a quasi-feminist equality to escape from paying the bill. Östlund’s intervention here is meant to be on the terrain of gender politics – wouldn’t it be crazy if men relied on their looks? – but this opening section has little payoff. Mostly, it begs the question of what constitutes a prostitute, with Carl and Yaya selling their bodies in different ways.

Following an excruciating argument about whether money-talk is ‘sexy’, we next encounter the pair on a luxury cruise, made possible by Yaya’s follower-count. On board are billionaires of differing detestability. The least offensive seems to be modelled on Markus Persson, also known as Notch, the Swedish game developer who sold Minecraft for $2.5B in 2014. He has plenty of money but lacks social skills, at one point offering to buy Yaya a Rolex for the meagre kindness of appearing in a photograph. Other billionaires include the aforementioned English couple, who thankfully meet a fitting end, and a charismatic Russian who, having made his fortune from a manure monopoly in Eastern Europe, calls himself the ‘king of shit’. Then there are the underlings, a crew with its own hierarchy: the non-white janitors, technicians, and cooks; the front-facing white women who pour champagne; an obsequious crew captain who tells her team to ‘think of the money’ when things get tough; and the ship’s captain (Woody Harrelson), who enjoys reading Marx and getting drunk.

The second act culminates with the Captain’s Dinner, where spoiled guests are served spoiled food during a spell of bad weather. They naturally end up quite sick. The sequence was the most uproarious I encountered at Cannes, prompting several minutes of laughter, as well as sending a few queasy press members running for the exit. But though a night of vomiting and diarrhoea, complete with exploding toilets and fecal floods, might seem appropriate punishment for arms dealers and other malefactors, Östlund does not intend for the sequence to be merely a moral comeuppance: ‘the audience should feel that they have suffered enough and want them to be saved’, he explains. More sympathy for the devil? Pirates then invade the floating microcosm and send it belly up. A select few from the ship survive and make it to a nearby island – Carl and Yaya, the crew captain, the tech nerd, the Russian oligarch, a janitor named Abigail, and a few others. Here, society is dramatically reordered. When it becomes clear that Abigail is the only one with any practical skills – a joke at the decoupling of wealth from genuine value – she eagerly takes on the role of a despot, offering each islander an extra portion of octopus if they agree to bend the knee. The Russian recites some wisdom from his school days in response: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’

Marx is rarely more than a punchline in Triangle of Sadness. This is in spite of Östlund being raised in a left-wing family and seeming to know the texts quite well. A retired schoolteacher in Sweden, Östlund’s mother remains an active member of her nation’s Communist party and sometimes strays into party-independent activism as well – such as when she asked her son to film an anti-NATO video in 2016. Östlund agreed, describing her commitment to this cause as ‘admirable and important’. He has not always felt so at ease with his mother’s politics: ‘Mum had books by both Marx and Lenin, and when friends came around, I’d turn the Lenin books around so that the spines were hidden. I understood that they were controversial in the eyes of others.’ That fear of offending the wrong people seems to have persisted. If his mother’s views had an uneven impact on Ruben, they made even less impact on his brother, who became a member of Sweden’s conservative-right. Östlund speaks of his time at the dinner table as one of being between two political extremes: ‘I am used to strong discussions about these two Western-Eastern ideologies’. A scene in Triangle of Sadness reverses this staging, pitting a Russian capitalist against an American communist: the king of shit against the ship’s captain. Drunk and locked in the captain’s quarters, the two take turns reading choice quotes from their phones – Thatcher versus Edward Abbey, Reagan versus Mao. It’s not a bad way of portraying most political debates today, but the effect is to position Östlund as the enlightened centrist, smarter than either side.

The Square provoked criticism from some left-wing critics, which Östlund felt was unfounded. ‘They want a sentimental portrait of poor people’, he claimed. ‘That’s bullshit! Poor people are living in tragedy. And their awful circumstances can create bad behaviours. I worry sometimes that some left-wing people misunderstand Marx.’ Östlund considers his approach a sociological one, which depicts individuals operating within a collective whose structures shape their behaviour. ‘If I look at what I learned from home, the one really useful thing was the analysis of Marx and his theories. That society comes from our position in an economical hierarchy. And that how we behave is determined by where we are according to the concept of production.’ For Östlund, ‘how we behave’ seems specifically linked to his preferred form for examining ‘society’, the comedy of manners, where in his most recent films, conflict arises from the incongruity of a class structure that forces upper and lower to mingle in the middle. His wealthy are well-mannered, his poor are often not, and this is meant as some ironic subversion of the cruelty inherent in the system.

Triangle of Sadness’s shipwreck might well undo all this, but instead what it presents is the persistence of ruthless social hierarchy – we may question whether here Östlund himself misunderstands Marx. In its progression from superyacht to survivor-island, the film suggests that we’re all foremost driven by greed and that capitalism, therefore, is merely an outgrowth, and natural conclusion to this uniquely human impulse. This is the West’s founding myth: that rationally self-interested individuals have been engaging in acts of truck, barter and exchange since the dawn of history, and that this process is inherently capitalistic. Despite appearances, therefore, Östlund films are ultimately less concerned with institutions or structures than the apparent verities of human nature. Barbarism is figured as a kind of blastema; manners, as dressing for the wound.

The Square and Triangle of Sadness both stage their best sequences during ritzy dinner parties. In the former, an artist enters the room acting as a gorilla, terrorizing the wealthy diners to the extent that they eventually pin him to the ground and beat him. Another descent into savagery. Is the artist here meant to represent Östlund? It’s hard to imagine his films provoking such animosity. They go too far to flatter their subjects; exploitation is figured as merely something awkward for all those involved. It may be incorrect to call the director a court jester – Lear’s fool, after all, spoke truth to power, acted as the king’s conscious, was the smartest in the room. Östlund, I fear, is more like a clown for hire, harmlessly squirting water in people’s faces, crafting intricate but hollow animals from balloons, smiling widely as he toots his horn. He’s just happy to be at the party.

Read on: Göran Therborn ‘Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy’, NLR 113.

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Persistent Presence

On 16 May, just months after the United States precipitously withdrew from Afghanistan, President Biden announced that US ground troops would return to Somalia and establish a ‘persistent presence’ – reversing the Trump-era withdrawal. His top general for Africa, Stephen Townsend, attested that since the US departure in January 2021, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the country had grown ‘bigger, stronger, and bolder’. After a decade and a half of US and African Union training, the Somali national army was still unable to defend its territory. In response, Biden’s team have defaulted to the classic US policy of endless war. Some 500 US troops will return to train and assist Somali forces in counterterrorism operations, with the aim of killing a dozen extremist leaders deemed a direct threat to the United States, its interests and its allies.  

US military intervention in Africa has consistently bolstered repressive regimes, enflamed local conflicts and undermined prospects for regional peace. Somalia is a prime example. During the Cold War, the United States helped to build the Somali army, despite the government’s brutal treatment of dissenters. President Siad Barre was seen as a useful ally against the Marxist government of Ethiopia, which Somalia challenged for regional dominance. By the early 1990s, however, the despot was no longer needed as a local policeman. Washington suspended military and economic aid, permitting warlords and their militias to overthrow his regime. Siad Barre fled to Nigeria and Somalia’s central government collapsed. State institutions and public services crumbled, the formal economy ceased to function, and southern Somalia fractured into fiefdoms ruled by rival warlords who clashed with a resurgent Islamist movement. War-induced famine, compounded by drought, threatened much of the population.

Concerned about regional instability on the strategic Gulf of Aden – through which Middle Eastern oil and natural gas reached the West – the US, backed by the United Nations, launched an intervention in 1992, with the Security Council authorizing the establishment of a multinational military task force under US leadership to ensure the delivery of humanitarian relief. The following year, another UN mission permitted US-led forces to disarm and arrest Somali warlords and militia members. The US began to take sides in what had become a bloody civil war – favouring some warlords over others. Civilians were predictably caught in the crossfire. Many were killed in US airstrikes, eliciting a furious backlash from the population. When two Black Hawk helicopters – deployed as part of a US Special Operations Forces mission – were shot down by Somali militias in October 1993, angry crowds attacked the surviving soldiers and their rescuers. Eighteen US troops and hundreds of Somali men, women and children were killed in the ensuing violence.

Having stirred up a hornets’ nest, the United States hastily withdrew from Somalia. Yet the emergence of al-Qaeda elsewhere in East Africa sparked new US concerns. The bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, followed by the 9/11 attacks in 2001, led to increased US collaboration with Ethiopia, Somalia’s regional nemesis. At the same time, Somali Islamist groups gained widespread support by providing essential social services, including schools, medical care and courts that brought some semblance of order to the war zone. Ignoring the reasons for Islamism’s popular appeal, Washington embarked on a violent and counterproductive campaign to stamp it out. The US banded together with Somali warlords and the Ethiopian government, helping to impose a corrupt government on the country in 2004. In 2006, Washington backed a subsequent warlord coalition to counter the Islamist threat, and supported an Ethiopian invasion and occupation that lasted until 2009. This precipitated a domestic insurgency led by al-Shabaab, originally a youth militia organized to defend the Islamic courts, which quickly transformed into a violent jihadist organization that gained the support of al-Qaeda.

By 2007, al-Shabaab had taken control of large swathes of central and southern Somalia – prompting the UN, African Union and neighbouring countries to intervene. The US worked in the shadows, launching a low-intensity war against al-Shabaab operatives, deploying both private contractors and Special Operations Forces to train and accompany Somali and African Union troops in combat operations. US drones and airstrikes killed key al-Shabaab leaders (to no avail, as they were rapidly replaced by others). As a result, al-Shabaab increasingly focused its attention on the West – targeting aid workers, journalists and Somalis who worked with them.

A decade and a half later, al-Shabaab maintains its powerful foothold in the absence of any functioning state apparatus. Although a new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, was elected in May 2022 after a protracted political crisis, the central government still cannot provide basic services in the territories it holds. There is no coherent national army, and the security forces, like the civilian government, are riven by clan-based factions who have used their US training to fight each other instead of al-Shabaab. The government caters to corrupt elites, ignoring the grievances that ignited the insurgency, while the US continues to wage its shadow war. The Obama administration dramatically escalated the use of drones and airstrikes to kill al-Shabaab insurgents, killing hundreds of innocent civilians in the process. In 2013, restrictions were introduced to diminish civilian casualties; yet their impact was minimized by a get-out clause for cases of ‘self-defense’. Upon taking office, the Trump administration reinstated more lenient policies on civilian deaths, intensifying its attacks before withdrawing most US forces in order to deploy them elsewhere. Now, Biden’s recent reversal has brought the policy full circle.

Various lessons can be learned from the US’s ill-fated military adventure in Somalia. One is that it internationalized what had been a local conflict, strengthening violent extremist factions and precipitating al-Qaeda involvement. Far from containing the bloodshed, external intervention increased it – expanding the war such that, by 2016, it included new players associated with the Islamic State. Likewise, peace initiatives brokered by outside actors have repeatedly foundered. Large segments of Somali civil society were not invited to the bargaining table, grassroots peace-building and nation-building efforts were ignored, and the interests of foreign governments and Somali elites prevailed over those of ordinary citizens. Consequently, no negotiated settlement has been able to garner popular support.

Advisors in consecutive Trump and Biden administrations have disagreed on how to manage the Somali debacle. The former concluded that US troops should leave, the latter that they must stay. Yet both Democrats and Republicans have consistently posed the wrong question. The issue is not how many troops, planes or drones the US should supply; rather, it is how to resolve the underlying political and economic grievances that generate instability. Accepting this fact would require a major shift in global outlook. Rather than understanding ‘national security’ as the imperative to protect US hegemony against perceived threats, it would demand that policymakers embrace a more exacting concept of ‘global human security’ – one that focuses on people rather than territory, and includes access to food, water, healthcare, education, employment and physical security, as well as respect for civil liberties and the environment. This multidimensional approach would recognize that the security of a state is premised on the protection of such needs, both inside and outside its borders. The Somali government’s failure to meet them allows movements like al-Shabaab to flourish. Without addressing these shortfalls, no amount of targeted killing or aerial bombardment will weaken the influence of these groups.

A more effective foreign policy would also acknowledge that grassroots organizations – agricultural cooperatives, trade unions, women’s and youth groups – are best placed to understand Somalia’s material problems and their solutions. If outside powers have any role in ending the conflict, it is to support local peace initiatives that include all affected parties: bringing such civil society groups into dialogue with other key actors, including Islamist and jihadist organizations. Yet this remains a distant prospect. Instead, Biden’s recent announcement has simply reaffirmed the standard playbook: propping up a repressive government, launching endless military strikes that kill civilians and engaging on an ad-hoc basis with enterprising warlords. The inevitable failure of this strategy will once again demonstrate that there are no easy fixes or short-term solutions to Somalia’s secular crises. Only a long-term process of structural reform can bring them to an end.

Read on: Alex de Waal, ‘US War Crimes in Somalia’, NLR I/230.

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Subterranea

‘Has anyone seen Rosemary Tonks?’ began an unusual announcement in London’s Evening Standard in November 1998. The request was on behalf of the publisher Bloodaxe Books, who were keen to reissue her poetry but explained that ‘we haven’t managed to speak to anyone who’s seen her since the seventies’. At the close of the decade Tonks had seemingly vanished, absconding from Hampstead and her career as a celebrated writer. No further poetry appeared, no new novels were added to the run of six that she’d published between 1963 and 1972, and it was widely believed she’d put a ban on anyone ever republishing them. The collected poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, finally appeared after her death in 2014. An introduction by the publisher Neil Astley revealed that Tonks had in fact been living in Bournemouth. ‘In illness you want to be alone’, she’d once said about her stint in Paris recovering from polio. In 1979, following a series of personal crises – the sudden death of her mother, the collapse of her marriage, burglaries, a lawsuit, an operation to correct detached retinas that left her partially blind for several years – she had retreated to the coast.

Perhaps Tonks had been threatening to do as much in her 1965 poem, ‘Ice Cream Boom Towns’: ‘Hurry: we must go south to escape / The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts’. An irresolvable restlessness, the sense of being out of joint with yourself and the world, goes back further than her difficulties of the seventies. ‘I was a guest at my own youth’, she writes in ‘Running Away’; ‘My private modern life has gone to waste’ in ‘Bedouin of the London Evening’. The feeling of finding yourself in the wrong life is also present in The Bloater (1968), which has been reissued this month. The most remarkable of Tonks’ novels, it had long been legendarily unavailable. It opens on Min, collapsed with world-weariness – ‘a form of tiredness which is like drunkenness… there are varied layers of brand-new tiredness inside the massive, overall exhaustion, so that you go on falling through one after another’. Later, Min tells Claudi that she’s ‘so miserable and frustrated’ she’d like to ‘lie down in some lousy stinking old Beckett play and just rot there’. Plagued by FOMO after gossiping with Jenny about their respective love lives, she phones up Billy to ask, ‘Am I being left out of things?’ But when Min does find herself properly in the world, she’s shattered by the recognition that her life isn’t her own.

Even prior to disowning her back catalogue, Tonks claimed not to think all that much of her novels. ‘It just proves the English like their porridge’, was her response to an editor’s congratulations on the success of her fifth novel, The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970). But although the remark’s flamboyant contempt and self-flagellating high-mindedness are classic Tonks, neither The Bloater, nor the rest of her novels, are that. The blurb on the new edition calls it a ‘sparkling’ comedy. ‘Exuberantly jaundiced’ or ‘blithely savage’ might be more accurate – and I’d argue that if the novel merits reappraisal, it’s precisely because of this awkward implacability. The novel appeared disguised as a gently racy social comedy, but Tonks – just like Min, her bristling, incorrigible bullshitter of a protagonist – cannot help but send up the conventions and proprieties of the form into which she’s plotted. It’s one way, short of disappearing, of tolerating not being how or where you ought to be.

The Bloater was originally published in 1968, though it’s not that sixties, but another one, a decade of relentless brown – brown ale, brown walls, brown corridors, brown light, brown days. Min works at the ‘electronic sound workshop’, a fictionalised BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with whom Tonks collaborated on a sound poetry broadcast, Sono-Montage, in 1966. There’s not much youth-quaking modernity here either. The staff are sexually frustrated bureaucrats bunkered ‘like a tinned shepherd’s pie’ down some endless corridor, where ‘the light is so bright you don’t even look ugly. You simply look like yourself’. The one spot of glamour is lovesick Jenny – surely a version of Tonks’ collaborator, Delia Derbyshire – with her bangles and glittered blue-black hair. But Tonks won’t have that either; Jenny’s face is only half made-up ‘until the evenings when she puts on the other half’.

The set-up is a marriage plot turned on its head. Min is married to George, and the novel follows her as she shuttles antically between two alternative suitors. There’s the eponymous Bloater, an exuberantly embodied, man-mountain of an opera singer, as gamey and oily as his cured herring namesake. Min finds him repulsive and cannot get enough of him. Then there’s Billy, who is ‘exact, contemporary, very masculine and controlled’; the way he talks to Min is like ‘a piece of fine dentistry… he stops up all aches and pains’. George meanwhile is hardly there at all. The ‘keeper of unprinted books at the British Museum’, we briefly glimpse the back of his pyjama jacket as he turns over in bed, emanating mute discontent. So vague a figure is George that one night Min switches off the lights in their home and locks up, leaving him eating dinner in the dark. Their house too seems strangely insubstantial, almost as if it doesn’t have any walls, and it’s unclear who lives there. A painting is cantilevered through a first-floor window. A slice of terrine is stored in the glove compartment of a car. Everything is ‘somehow running against the grain’, so that Min continually has to reapproximate the scenes of ordinary life.

But this isn’t really a book that cares about the breaking of marital vows. It is less concerned with bringing lovers together than with Min’s farcical efforts to escape from other people. The Bloater and Billy are two sides of the same coin, representing what Min is trying to avoid: having a body, having to contend with the bodies of others, being seen, being known. In the jacket note for her first poetry collection, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963), Tonks laid out her poetic ambitions: ‘I want to show human passions at work,’ she writes, ‘and give eternal forces their contemporary dimension in this landscape’. Here, however, she shows Min wriggling this way and that to avoid feeling at any cost. The risk of closeness is ‘all the suffering which is yet to come’.

Desire in the novel is constantly being cast out by disgust. The Bloater is an altogether disgusted book – excessively, theatrically so ­– and especially with the body: smarting gums, ‘pestilential’ armpits, bed sores, ‘cruel’ fingers, claggy over-powdered noses. Min has ‘the new welfare state disease’, gout, while the Bloater has catarrh. Their entanglement finally ends when she blurts out, ‘I don’t like your smell’. If Min’s not placing the world and the people in it at arm’s length by finding them repulsive, she’s trying to numb herself with what she calls ‘phony pleasures’, or else warding off intimacy with a clenched and calculating defendedness. Conversations are conducted like a game of Battleships. The point is to ‘win’, or, at least, not to surrender, lest your interlocutor colonises your mind or annihilates you. ‘She’s gone too far, and is forcing me to live her life’, Min says of a light chat in the pub with Jenny.

Tonks isn’t much interested in redeeming or absolving her protagonist, though it’s hinted that she shares a background a bit like her own. She does, however, get her happy ending with Billy. Finally, she coincides with herself: ‘I’m not the spectator I’m accustomed to being; I’m not in front of him, nor am I getting left behind.’ But it’s winkingly dashed off, as if to say, come on now, don’t be ridiculous. All kinds of things happen in The Bloater, but the real story is subterranean.

*

Tonks wouldn’t thank you for referring to her as an ‘English novelist’, profiles from the period comment, as if they’re indulging a daft pretension. But she rightfully claimed kinship with a nineteenth-century tradition of French writing, especially Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Her fiction writing, however, with its fascination for the secret chaos that exists between people, is more like her French contemporary, Nathalie Sarraute. Either way, you can understand why she was keen to disaffiliate herself from British literary culture. A 1970 Guardian profile includes the observation that ‘I have never met anyone who was so hurt by critics’. But, reading the reviews, I don’t think it was simply a case of Tonks being sensitive. Rather, perhaps her Francophilia was a response to the prevailing attitudes amongst critics of the time, who were tediously stuck on a nationalist, narrow and incurious idea of ‘the English novel’.

In any case, there’s more to the difficulty of placing Tonks’ writing, and the unhomeliness of The Bloater. In a 1963 interview she comments that ‘I could communicate if only the English weren’t quite so English’. And she wasn’t, exactly, but neither did she belong anywhere else. She was raised and lived mostly in Britain, but her life was profoundly altered by her family’s links to the colonies. Her father died in Nigeria before she was born, in Kent in 1928. She was brought up in boarding schools before joining her mother, who’d remarried, in Lagos, where her stepfather later died. Tonks married at 20 and went with her husband to India and Pakistan for his work, before returning, via a year in Paris, to London in 1953. She’d contracted paratyphoid fever in Calcutta and polio in Karachi, which left her with a withered right hand. Though not a colonial writer per se, she’s not quite an English writer, either. Tonks’ cosmopolitanism is a troubled thing – it’s that of someone who has left parts of herself behind elsewhere and carries elsewhere indelibly with her. In The Bloater, a shift in the light can render London more like Paris or St Petersburg. It’s a less pronounced version of an effect of her poetry, where a familiar London flickers in and out, becoming Egypt or the Baltic Sea. The equator might well run through Chelsea; Covent Garden is full of souks. But she’s not invoking other places as metaphors for some exotic, faraway imaginary. For Tonks, elsewhere is right here, bathed in the same brown light.

*

‘You can cure your reading with your life’, Tonks says, gnomically, during the same 1963 interview. It’s an offhand comment about the anxiety of influence, but the remark has a broader resonance with the way that, for her, living and writing sat uneasily with one another. Early on, her literary work seemed to provide a means to get to the real heart of things. ‘I know that to get through to you, my epoch,’ she writes in ‘Epoch of the Hotel Corridor’, ‘I must take a diamond and scratch / On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message’. But, over time, she came to see the literary world as the thing that had drawn her away from the proper stuff of life. ‘I think it diabolical,’ she comments, ‘this getting of a poet out of his or her back room and the making of them into public figures who have to give opinions every 20 seconds’. Later, this was to harden into violent disavowal.

Throughout the seventies, following the death of her mother, she’d drawn sustenance from various spiritual practices: Sufism, tarot, Taoist meditation, yoga. However, after a period of ill health followed by a series of bizarre supernatural experiences, she came to reject these as diabolical, and instead took up fundamentalist Christianity. She staged a double exorcism in her garden in Bournemouth, burning five suitcases’ worth of ancient Asian, African and Middle Eastern artefacts bequeathed by an aunt, along with the manuscript of a vast unpublished novel about the search for God, as two kinds of false idols. Perhaps, in some way, she was also attempting to vanquish those foreign, restless, unhomed bits of herself. In October 1981, she was baptised in Jerusalem. Born again, she became Rosemary Lightband, discarding the name that feels like an aptronym – at once fearsome and ridiculous, seeming to denote something of its owner’s skinless hauteur – for her married name, though she was already divorced.

I’d like to be able to tell it as a story of refusal, or of mystical transformation, against the typical accounts of people who, like Tonks, just get up and walk away from their lives – those narratives that prescribe the kind of existence it’s acceptable to have, hitting familiar marks: self-destructiveness and self-sabotage, reclusiveness, squandered potential, tragic decline. But it wasn’t. The diaries of her later years record a slow and torturous form of self-immolation. She devoted her attention to the bird song and ticking of clocks that she understood as messages from God. Mostly, she sounds terrified: of the incursions of Satan, the malign influence of other people, even more so of herself and her own mind. She was sometimes to be found commuting up to London to hand out copies of the Bible, the only book she now read, at Speaker’s Corner. In her house just behind the sea front, she worked at painfully winnowing herself away to make a vessel for God’s love.

Clearly, she was intent on making a complete break with her former self. But one can see in Rosemary Lightband a mutation of Tonks’s facilities as a writer into something else. Those same habits of mind – the form-seeking, the heightened awareness, the relentless self-interrogation – metastasized. In a letter to her great-niece from 1987, she writes that her former life was exactly ‘the preparation needed’ for studying the bible, ‘because your mind is alerted to unravelling mysteries hidden in words’. There’s an unassuming passage towards the end of The Bloater in which Min is rueing her domestic failures, but also seems to be reflecting on the source of her difficulties. ‘I know that one of my weaknesses is the fact that I can’t see dust’, she says. ‘I’ve been taught to see the fish lying in a stream, which means that I can penetrate through the glass clothes of a river and see its insides.’ This gift of obscene seeing was Tonks’ too. A writer like her, so vigilant about signs and symbols, so deep within her regime of self-punishment, must have read significance into her misfortune, especially the loss of her sight. Perhaps she decided that if you can’t cure your reading with your life, or your life with your reading, or your life with a different one, you must stop yourself from looking underneath the water.

Read on: Angus Wilson, ‘Condition of the Novel (Britain)’, NLR I/29

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What’s It For?

This year Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory turns fifty-two, and still that forbidding text, with its pages-long paragraphs and elusive, paradoxical argumentation, has not said everything it has to say. In a recent NLR article, Patricia McManus cited the book’s reflections on the relationship between artistic form and judgments of value in her response to Joseph North’s call for a ‘left literary criticism that would also be a radical aesthetic education, one which aimed to cultivate modes of sensibility and subjectivity that could contribute directly to the struggle for a better society’. That Adorno would have anything to contribute to this struggle is far from given. For many readers, with its conceptual vocabulary that is grounded in the German aesthetic tradition and its belief that philosophy should dictate the terms of art, the book may seem to belong far more to the past than the present. And yet it seems that Aesthetic Theory still has some light to shed on the question of what art can and – perhaps more saliently – cannot achieve in a world no less unfree than it was when Adorno left it.

A striking resonance with NLR’s present discussion of literary criticism can be found in Adorno’s call for ‘the study of those alien to art’. This is Aesthetic Theory’s equivalent of the figure of the ‘ordinary reader’, with whom the criticism of the past decade has, according to McManus, been increasingly preoccupied: the individual who, blissfully unaware of signifiers, discourses and the other paraphernalia of literary scholarship, simply reads what they like, and doesn’t read what they don’t. Is such a figure merely a projection, a symptom of the legitimacy crisis gripping the academy, as Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan argue? Or, as Rita Felski, Amanda Anderson and Toril Moi have it, could a better understanding of the ways in which readers actually read be the basis for a criticism more fully engaged with the wider world?

Adorno’s position on this question is typically dialectical. This figure is presented not without a tinge of elitist hauteur: ‘Those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its commodities were never familiar with art’. And yet, their lack of familiarity is said to afford them a clarity that the regular opera-goer, museum patron or literary critic lacks. They are ‘able to perceive art’s inadequacy to the present life process of society – though not society’s own untruth – more unobstructedly than do those who still remember what an artwork once was’. The person who squints at a work of modern art and demands, ‘What’s it for?’, has in this sense, a more lucid view of art’s standing today than the critic does – namely, that ‘nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore…not even its right to exist’.

Insofar as such passages meld a condescending lack of familiarity with those outside the academy to the deep self-loathing within it, they seem to bring together the weaknesses of both sides of the ‘ordinary reader’ debate. But Adorno isn’t out to idealize or to denigrate. His figure is, rather, a critical check on the ‘committed’ art and criticism of his time. Against Benjamin, virtually the only critic of Adorno’s lifetime considered worthy of sustained engagement in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno takes as axiomatic that the democratization of art was a failure. Rather than bringing art to the masses, in Adorno’s view the work of art’s mechanical reproduction simply produced a more refined form of mass culture – see the grumblings around the publishing world that ‘literary fiction’ is simply an elitist marketing designation – while the cultural homogenization of the classes destroyed the coherent and identifiable publics for whom the artwork was intended.

This historicization of the relationship between art’s producers and its ‘consumers’ is a minor component of Aesthetic Theory’s critique of a critique engagé. When seen from the perspective of the individual without artistic sensibility, he argues, it becomes clear that the categories of such criticism are fired from a pistol – launched, that is, without any rigorous conceptualization of what an artwork actually is. Brecht’s dictum that literature should be ‘no less intelligent than science’ and should therefore yield knowledge as true and as actionable as the social and even the natural sciences, appears rather more vulnerable when one imagines explaining it to the non-reader. ‘There is no answer that would convince someone who would ask such questions as “Why imitate something?” or “Why tell a story as if it were true when obviously the facts are otherwise and it just distorts reality?”’, Adorno writes. There is a ridiculousness even to the gravest artworks, he argues, the roots of which lie in the archaic character of ‘the mimetic impulse’. The concepts and categories of political criticism, which fold together the seriousness of the social sciences and the moral urgency of the struggle for justice are, therefore, attractive precisely because they place a fig leaf over the artwork – like the evening dress worn by Kafka’s ape in his address to the academy.

For Adorno, therefore, any attempt to derive moral and political education directly from works of literature is bound to stumble on literature’s ‘non-identity’. It is this claim for the autonomy of the work of art – usually paired with the anecdote of Adorno blanching when bare-breasted student demonstrators stormed his lecture hall – that has tended to furnish charges of political quietism, and, more outrageously, conservatism. But one need only set a few sentences of Aesthetic Theory alongside those of the ‘new aestheticism’ that – spearheaded by George Levine’s Aesthetics and Ideology (1994) – invoked Adorno to call for a return to the art object, against its ‘politicization’ by Foucault, Jameson and Said to see the difference. Certainly, insofar as he insists that the artwork, while obviously a fait social, cannot be deduced from its social circumstances, Adorno is at odds with other strains of Marxist criticism. He also resists, at least in my reading, the left-Nietzscheanism of Deleuze and Guattari, whose characterization of artworks as only one kind of ‘assemblage’ on the ‘plane of immanence’ suggests that artistic techniques and effects (no strong distinction is drawn here) are social practices simply because they take place within society.

According to Aesthetic Theory, what distinguishes the artwork from the rest of perceivable reality is that it orders its material according to its own logic. In the case of literature, this is most obvious in the transposition of non-linguistic experiences into language. But it is also manifest in the more granular business of style – something considered unworthy of critical attention in the current historicist paradigm. Adorno, however, asserts that art’s social function derives precisely from its distinction from other commodities, modes of production, services and forms of information. The self-imposed rationality according to which the artwork selects and arranges its constituent elements parodies the rationality of the social world. The artwork attains a critical function not in what it says, but in what it does: ‘It accuses the rationality of social praxis of having become an end in itself and as such the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends’. The horrors of technological rationality gone mad – above all, the Holocaust – are never far from Adorno’s analysis of Beckett and Kafka’s ‘negativity’. But even the lightest verse by Eduard Mörike, he argues, has a political character, simply because its elements appear to have come together of their own volition, free of the cruelty with which the social world makes everything within it identical with itself. A left criticism taking its cues from Aesthetic Theory would not, then, endeavour to bring the artwork closer to the social world. Instead, it would seek to move them farther apart.

Adorno is, to say the least, elusive about what this would entail. Aesthetic Theory is sparing with its oughts, shoulds and musts. One way to understand the book is as attempting to set limits on other conceptions of the work of art. Aesthetic Theory, indeed, often seems to be inveighing against the paradigms of the present. It is difficult not to read Adorno’s claim, for example, that the technologies, social processes and ideologies without which the artwork could not exist are crystallized within it as a defence of aesthetic experience against the Foucauldian episteme. Its resistance to the total politicization of art, meanwhile, could be addressed to the post-George Floyd American academy. It also voices no small ambivalence about the kind of materialism proposed by McManus, which is understandably gaining currency in a climate of widespread unionization drives by graduate student workers in American universities. In Adorno’s terms, a criticism that would take account of the actually existing material conditions – where there is ‘too much to read, too little time’, as McManus writes – would have to reckon with the displacement of these forces within the object of study for it to be something more than a ‘mere’ sociology of the university and publishing world. Such critical models ultimately retain the same obsession with the reality principle that dominates the administered world – with seeking to ‘punish’ art for claiming to be more than it is by making it less.

It would be no small betrayal of Aesthetic Theory’s unwavering negativity to close with an assessment of its ‘positive’ contributions. Nonetheless, in a certain respect it might be said to converge with North’s view in Literary Criticism (2017) that the coming criticism will place particular emphasis on a ‘therapeutic’ – a word I use advisedly in connection with Adorno – ‘rather than a merely diagnostic use of the literary’. Such an emphasis is, paradoxically enough, apparent in Adorno’s insistence on art’s ‘muteness’, that is, on the way that it transforms discursive ideas and concepts into appearances. Even the most discursive artworks have for Adorno more in common with nature, which simply is, than they do with philosophy or politics. ‘Nature’ refers here not just to natural objects, but to everything dominated, mutilated, and repressed by the civilizing process. The work of art becomes a preserve for those aspects of the world destroyed by instrumental reason, offering a negative image of what Jameson, in his own work on Adorno, referred to as ‘a powerful vision of a liberated collective culture’. Adorno therefore shows himself, in this respect, to have more in common with the emancipatory spirit of the sixties than he let on – though in his view, unlike ‘cuisine or pornography’, art achieves this precisely by suspending the immediate sensation of pleasure (‘Anyone who listens to music seeking out the beautiful passages is a dilettante’). A fully realized aesthetics would not, however, champion a regressive anti-rationalism – whose pitfalls fascism proved once and for all – or a sensory hedonism. In keeping with the Frankfurt School’s original programme, it would work in dynamic tandem with psychoanalysis and anthropology, illuminating all that lies in reason’s shadow, and that is needed to rescue reason in its fullest, most capacious sense from its most determined antagonist – itself.

Such a project is considerably more abstract than that sketched out in McManus’s essay, or, for that matter, than anything criticism has attempted since poststructuralism’s iconoclastic moment. But even Adorno’s most abstract considerations are undergirded by an anguished, ethical commitment. Perhaps Aesthetic Theory’s most significant contribution in the present moment is the centrality of suffering to its problems and its categories. For the rescue of aesthetics does not mean discarding criticism’s moral and political commitments. On the contrary, in an era when art has no clear social function, one justification for its continued existence is its ability to ameliorate suffering. Art is the proper vehicle for grasping and expressing suffering because it ‘eludes and rebuffs rational knowledge’. While today’s engaged criticism all too often elides the distinction between the depiction and reality of suffering – a category error Adorno would have blamed on mass culture – an Adornean aesthetics might situate itself among the ethical paradoxes of the therapeutic artwork. The artwork passes the ‘soothing hand of remembrance’ over human anguish, a relief that contains within it no small measure of betrayal. Criticism can give language to these paradoxes, can tease out and transmit consolation. It can tell us, as politics cannot, what can and cannot be said – what can be changed and what has left its scar once and for all.

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

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Pariah to President

In February 1986, the world was gripped by the ‘People Power’ revolt in the Philippines – the peaceful uprising that ended the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Earlier this month, many watched in disbelief as his son and namesake, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr., won the popular vote in the national elections, with the largest share since the end of his father’s rule. Some commentators have explained this stunning result as the product of massive fraud or material advantage – that Marcos Jr. and his camp hacked the country’s election system to rig the results or used their wealth – part of the estimated $10 billion stolen by the Marcos family – to fund a ‘disinformation’ campaign while buying off local politicians. The first allegation is certainly plausible, but so far it has not been supported by credible evidence. The second has been more extensively documented, but still leaves many questions unanswered. Why were millions receptive to Marcos Jr.’s narrative, and why did other candidates fail to counter it? By assessing the historical experience of the Filipino masses after the People Power revolt, perhaps we can shed some light on this political regression.

Marcos Jr. won because of two contiguous failures after 1986: that of liberals to force significant concessions from elites, and that of leftists to advance a compelling alternative to elite rule. Like their counterparts in other postcolonial countries, liberals in the Philippines have struggled to exert their influence on the ruling bloc. This problem persisted after 1986, when a big-tent coalition of centre-left and centre-right groupings led by President Cory Aquino took the reins of the state, restoring what Benedict Anderson called ‘cacique democracy’: the pre-Marcos oligarchic-liberal order in which the masses were allowed to vote, but powerful landed families with extensive patronage networks dominated the political system. Despite heading a self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary transition government’, Aquino failed to compel the country’s oligarchy to redistribute land, pay more taxes or raise workers’ wages.

This trend accelerated during the global economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, as Aquino and her anointed successor Fidel Ramos worked alongside a series of centre-right technocrats to institute increasingly regressive policies. They all but abandoned the project of establishing a developmental state, prioritizing the interests of investors over a domestic industrialization programme. In lieu of genuine land redistribution, post-1986 administrations promoted ‘market-assisted land reform’, enabling private developers and agribusiness corporations to accumulate more land and consolidate their holdings. Public infrastructure was privatized and fragmented; new consumption taxes targeted the poor; labour reforms drove down wages and conditions; while local producers were hit by an influx of cheap foreign goods. As a result, millions of working- and middle-class Filipinos suffered. Many became worse off than they were under the dictatorship, as land-grabbing dispossessed and displaced indigenous peoples, farmers and fishermen. Wages failed to keep up with inflation and jobs became more precarious, while the social ‘safety net’ was further weakened. Faced with these conditions, many became ambivalent about the post-Marcos era. Disappointment slowly morphed into indignation.

Had the Philippine left been stronger and more unified, this tide of frustration could have taken a progressive turn – allowing people to envision a society beyond both the dictatorship and its liberal-democratic replacement. But this was not the case. Once ascendant, progressives became increasingly disoriented and divided due to intensified state repression, sectarian violence and the dissolution of many workers’ organisations following the collapse of key industries. Their ranks diminished, many on the left argued for eschewing electoral politics altogether. Others supported limited participation: fielding candidates for lower offices or joining ‘tactical alliances’ with the traditional parties of the propertied classes.

Thus, in the decades that followed Marcos’s ouster, no socialist ran for president – and those that ran for party-list representative or senator did so as part of larger coalitions dominated by the liberal centre. Though many organised in rural areas and industrial belts, a radical opposition to the post-Marcos settlement was largely absent from the mainstream, which left the marginalized and dispossessed with no distinctive framework to anchor their resentment, no vocabulary to articulate their indignation. As a correlative, the governing liberals had little reason to adapt their programme in response to left-wing challenge.

This stasis among both liberals and leftists allowed the Marcoses to plot their return to power. Slowly but surely, they prepared the ground for Bongbong’s presidential campaign. Their homecoming from exile inaugurated a decades-long attempt to rehabilitate their legacy, by electing members of the family to local and national offices, forging civil society links, cultivating ties with the business sector and launching an extensive propaganda drive to whitewash the record of the dictatorship. In parallel, public opinion continued to turn against the Aquino-Ramos ascendancy. In one of the first outward signs of dissatisfaction with the post-1986 order, many from the lower classes spurned the liberals’ candidate and voted for the populist former movie star Joseph Estrada in the 1998 presidential elections.

At first, the middle classes continued to defend the liberal centre. In 2001, they mobilised in large numbers to oust Estrada from office and replace him with another Aquino-Ramos endorsee, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. They then stood by her as the urban poor poured out into the streets in an unsuccessful attempt to return Estrada to office. In 2010, it was the same bourgeois stratum that guaranteed the success of the establishment’s presidential candidate, Cory Aquino’s son, Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III.

But their patience began to wither during Noynoy’s tenure. His hardline neoliberal programme dented his popularity across all classes – as did his notorious failure to provide relief and expedite reconstruction in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. Though the economy expanded, inequality deepened and poverty remained widespread, with much of the new wealth syphoned off by an emerging layer of billionaires. It was for this reason that, in 2016, many of the middle class finally turned their back on the establishment and embraced Rodrigo Duterte, the foul-mouthed, tough-talking right-populist candidate who mocked the moribund politics of the ‘yellow’ liberals.

This abandonment of the centre was not total. A significant section of the bourgeoisie still voted for the establishment’s vice presidential candidate, Leni Robredo, giving her a narrow edge over Marcos Jr. However, while in office Duterte consolidated his popular support by condemning the ‘oligarchy’ (his preferred term) and cracking down on elite families that had fallen out of favour, while pursuing the same free-market programme promoted by the centre. He ridiculed liberal shibboleths like ‘human rights’ or ‘checks and balances’, waging a brutal war on drugs that left around 30,000 mostly poor people dead, as well as jailing an opposition senator, helping to oust a chief justice, punishing his media critics and escalating the military offensive against communist rebels. However, perhaps in recognition of continuing support for certain democratic institutions among the middle and lower classes, he refrained from abolishing congress and declaring martial law.

As the 2022 elections approached, two rebranding projects kicked into gear. The Marcoses accelerated their disinformation drive, while the liberals inched to the left: displaying an openness to moderate pro-worker reforms, yet still rejecting calls for a higher national minimum wage, wealth taxes and decriminalised abortion. They again selected Robredo – a middle-class public-interest lawyer with centre-left sympathies – to be their presidential candidate, and swapped their trademark yellow campaign colour for pink.  

At the same time, a split emerged in the left. Breaking with both the more dominant national-democratic and social-democratic blocs, which endorsed Robredo in the belief that a unity candidate was needed, a smaller coalition of activists presented the first openly socialist presidential ticket in Philippine history, headed by veteran labour leader Leody De Guzman and activist-academic Walden Bello. Convinced that the only way to appeal to lower-class Marcos supporters was to speak to their immediate material concerns, they championed the social policies that Robredo had dismissed. Their manifesto openly called for socialism – something previously unsayable in the public sphere.

Ultimately, though, both the liberals’ reputation-laundering and the socialists’ attempt to ‘stage a presence’ proved insufficient in the face of a well-orchestrated, decades-in-the-making shift to the right. Despite sparking some electrifying debates – which generated widespread curiosity about socialism – the De Guzman-Bello campaign failed to gain much traction beyond its core constituency. The absence of resources and supportive local officials constrained voter reach in an already uneven playing field. In the early days of the campaign they were largely ignored by corporate media, then later they were smeared as ‘communist terrorists’. Many expressed support for their programme, yet viewed their organizational weakness as a liability.

The contrast with Robredo was stark. Unlike De Guzman, she gained the support of certain anti-Marcos political dynasties and received significant amounts of campaign contributions from big donors. But she nonetheless failed to narrow the huge gap between her and the frontrunner. Her ‘inclusive politics’ and good-governance agenda – which failed to distinguish her from the traditional ‘yellows’ – proved incapable of regaining the trust of disenchanted voters. Though she performed well in some of the country’s poorest provinces, she won mostly elite enclaves, upper-middle-class districts and other upwardly mobile middle-class areas which constitute the liberals’ base.

Ultimately, it was Bongbong who secured the decisive votes targeted by both the centre and the left: slums, working-class urban districts, and many of the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois neighbourhoods across the Philippines. His high-tech propaganda blitz certainly helped to seduce such voters, but Bongbong’s success was mostly based on the recognition that rose-tinted accounts of the post-dictatorship years rang hollow. Political patronage networks likewise worked in Marcos Jr.’s favour; but local leaders would not have risked their own positions had they not sensed that the ground was already shifting beneath their feet and that Bongbong was on course for a landslide.

In the final analysis, what enabled Bongbong to win the presidency was not simply the machinations of his powerful family, but a strong current of resentment – directed at the liberals, unharnessed by the left – that the Marcoses could not have conjured on their own. Inside their trove of lies was a simple message which many believed to be true: that life did not improve after the People Power Revolution. Bongbong’s self-portrayal as a victim of the liberal establishment was effective precisely because many ordinary people see themselves in a similar light. The candidate fostered a strange kinship between himself and the masses, animated by the promise that they would collectively rise again – that a ‘beautiful morning’ awaited them after a long period of darkness, as one of their campaign anthems put it. Insisting on the need for ‘unity’, Bongbong largely refrained from spelling out his policy direction and merely presented different iterations of a single vow: that he would follow Duterte by keeping the yellows out of power. In a society where antipathy to oligarchic liberalism runs so wide and deep, this was enough to carry him to victory.

What the president-elect will do next remains to be seen. His promise to continue Duterte’s project suggests that he will further dismantle the country’s liberal-democratic institutions and implement draconian measures to displace the centre and crush the left – though without abolishing popular suffrage or parliamentarism. He is also likely to further liberalize and deregulate the economy while doling out perks to investors and cronies. The burden of taxation will be further shifted onto the poor, though they will be compensated with minimally increased social provisions (a roadmap followed by Duterte and the Aquinos before him). Bongbong has also announced that he will be re-appointing Aquino III’s secretary for economic development and planning – a former World Bank economist and dyed-in-the-wool free-marketeer – to the same post in his cabinet.

Yet, confronted with a vast and still restive working-class majority, a mercurial middle class and an increasingly assertive upstart section of the oligarchy – all struggling for a larger share of a small pie in a turbulent world economy – Marcos Jr. may be emboldened to exceed the ambitions of both his father and Duterte. Capitalizing on the unprecedented support he has amassed, and taking advantage of the inertia of the opposition, he may finally accomplish what the Philippine right have long been clamouring for: overhauling the post-Marcos constitution to remove restrictions on foreign ownership of infrastructure and environmental resources, limits to executive power and other progressive provisions.

Marcos Jr.’s ability to consolidate authoritarian neoliberalism is by no means assured. Much depends on the outcome of struggles that will ensue within the centre and the left following their defeat. Will progressive liberals reclaim their party from the conservative forces who have largely dominated the political establishment for the past three decades? If so, will they pivot away from neoliberalism towards a more redistributive model? Will the left continue to tail the liberals, or will they come together and build their own autonomous power base? Just as Marcos Jr.’s victory was enabled by forces beyond the Philippine right, the fortunes of his political project will likewise be determined by the choices of his opponents.

Joshua Makalintal contributed to this article.

Read on: Benedict Anderson, ‘Cacique Democracy and the Philippines’, NLR I/169.

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Two Populisms

Two governing parties of the nationalist right faced parliamentary elections in April 2022: Victor Orbán’s Fidesz and Janez Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS). But the results could hardly have been more different. Fidesz won 54% of the votes, five percentage points more than in 2018, while Hungary’s main opposition alliance – consisting of several liberal parties plus the right-wing Jobbik – garnered only 35%. By contrast, in neighbouring Slovenia, the SDS received a meagre 24% and was voted out of office, while the liberal Freedom Movement (GS) – a newly established outfit led by the former energy mogul Robert Golob – gained the largest vote share, with 35%. International media outlets lamented Orbán’s victory and celebrated Janša’s defeat, the latter supposedly proving that right-populism could yet be beaten by a reconsolidated political centre. 

In mainstream commentary, the SDS is often seen as a younger sibling of Fidesz. Both aim to build a right-wing party-state by gaining control over the press, education system and judiciary. Both use public money to develop vast clientelist networks. Yet, in spite of these common features, the SDS’s socio-economic policies have been closer to those of the liberal centre than to Fidesz’s nationalist programme. Moreover, the trajectories of Hungarian and Slovenian development since the early 1990s have diverged, with far-reaching implications for each country’s political landscape. The prospects for an incoming GS government can therefore be profitably assessed by differentiating the Slovenian experience from that of its eastern neighbour. How do the two compare?

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A major selling-point for Fidesz, in multiple election campaigns over the last decade, has been its rejection of the unfettered embrace of foreign capital that had hitherto been pursued by the Hungarian ruling classes. By the mid-2000s, the coalition government led by the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) was thoroughly discredited. The then Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted that he had persistently lied about the country’s economic situation and abandoned the social pledges on which he was elected. From 2006 his administration ramped up its austerity measures and sent its popularity ratings into freefall – trends that were further compounded by the global financial crisis. This allowed Fidesz to launch an effective electoral challenge in 2010, promising to fix the economic situation and replace the ideology of ‘international liberalism’ which it argued had constrained Hungary’s national potential. The party received 53% of the vote, giving it a two-thirds parliamentary majority that allowed it to redraft the constitution and entrench itself within the state apparatus.

In the wake of the 2008 crisis, Fidesz saw an opportunity to enhance the role of domestic capital. During its first period in government (1998-2002), the party had not challenged the primacy of foreign investment; yet throughout the 2000s, this imbalance generated increasing dissatisfaction among the homegrown capitalist class. At the same time, Gyurcsány’s austerity reforms, first drafted in 2006 and then radicalized with the IMF programme of 2008, immiserated large swathes of the working population. Sections of the middle class incurred massive foreign exchange debts. As the forint depreciated, they found themselves in a serious predicament, which foreign lenders did nothing to resolve.

Once in power, Fidesz set out to improve conditions for the middle class, which in turn became its primary electoral base. With its heterodox monetary policies and partial confrontation with overseas banks, the party brought relief to Hungary’s embattled debtors. Under Orbán, the national bank pursued proactive monetary policies that favoured the growth of domestic small and medium enterprises, while the government used public tenders, licensing arrangements, taxation and credit policies to favour domestic capitalists in areas such as banking, media, retail trade and utilities. These measures were crucial to building what the Hungarian sociologist Erzsébet Szalai calls a ‘client bourgeoisie’, loyal to the ruling party.  

Of course, Fidesz’s break with neoliberalism was far from total. In export manufacturing, the Hungarian economy continued to rely on foreign capital, providing multinationals with financial incentives and reduced corporate tax rates. Orbán combined generous family benefits for the middle classes with harsh neoliberal workfare schemes. He used public works projects to forge clientelist links with the poorest sections of the population, while simultaneously passing reforms that targeted labour rights and union organizing.

The overall result of Fidesz’s programme was a macroeconomic situation characterized by greater stability than during the first two decades of capitalist transformation. The party successfully decreased the country’s external financial dependency and the vulnerability that flows from it. This was the record on which it ran in 2022, putting ‘bread and butter’ issues like a 20% minimum wage rise, price controls and monthly pensions at the core of its election campaign. The liberal opposition was deeply uncomfortable with such topics. Its economic policies were a throwback to the 1990s and early 2000s – reviving free-market dogmas which had long been delegitimized. It consistently attacked the government’s authoritarianism but neglected the most basic social issues, and thereby failed to reach voters beyond its traditional base.

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Slovenia’s course in recent decades makes for a stark contrast. In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, the country’s ruling classes defended policies of selective economic nationalism. They tried to protect the hegemony of domestic capital in banking while opening the economy to foreign capital in export manufacturing. Trade unions were strong and combative enough to influence policymaking through tripartite institutions. This was a model that began to break down once Slovenia entered the EU in 2004 and Eurozone in 2007, before unravelling completely with the financial crash.

Under pressure from financial markets and the constraints of Eurozone membership, successive Slovenian governments – led by both the liberal parties and the SDS – adopted the European agenda wholesale, rolling out austerity, liberalization and privatization. When the SDS, which had led a coalition from 2004 to 2008 just before the financial crisis, returned to power in 2012, it did not question the accelerating denationalization of the economy. Its coalition even drafted the initial plans to sell off indebted banks and state enterprises, which were later implemented with some minor changes by the liberals. Pressure from the EU played an important role in this realignment. In 2013, the European Commission and European Central Bank directly intervened in the restructuring of the Slovenian banking sector, applying the same bitter medicine it had dispensed to other countries under Troika rule (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus). As a result, the government was obliged to recapitalize banks at a much higher price than initially calculated, and began to privatize them under the Commission’s supervision. This regressive macroeconomic restructuring severed the close links between the banking sector and domestic capital, while empowering its foreign counterpart. Fidesz’s economic-nationalist agenda was thus entirely foreign to the SDS.

In both countries, the bloc of liberal parties that spearheaded integration into the EU and Eurozone all but collapsed after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. Between 2009 and 2013, Slovenia witnessed mass demonstrations against the corruption of the political establishment, as well as rising labour militancy that rejected the suffocating structures of the traditional trade unions. But unlike in Hungary, this created a power vacuum that was filled by two distinct forces. On the one hand, the period of intense social struggles enabled the formation of a left party (initially called the United Left), which became a strident opponent of the neoliberal settlement and ultimately won nine seats in parliament. On the other hand, there was a proliferation of hastily established, highly personalized parties trading off the expertise of their leaders: the Alliance of Alenka Bratušek, the Party of Miro Cerar, the List of Marjan Šarec, and so on.

These new formations rapidly gained voters’ confidence and lost it just as quickly. Having cobbled together a rickety coalition government in 2013, they continued implementing neoliberal policies with an anti-democratic bent: the constitutionalization of fiscal limits set by the EU, plus the restriction of public referenda on issues related to the budget, international treaties or national security. As their popularity dipped, these technocratic parties made several abortive attempts to shore up a coalition. Their governments were highly unstable. Meanwhile the SDS stood by, ready to capitalize on their inevitable collapse. In contrast to the new parties – which promised to transcend the left-right division – the SDS stressed its hardline anti-communist stance and blamed the problems of the Slovenian economy on the ‘deep state’. It also harnessed social media to mobilize its base, inciting constant hysteria about Soros and refugees among a vocal section of the population.

The last SDS government, which returned to power in 2020, was the first since 2008 that stayed in office until the official end of its term. But whereas Fidesz could consolidate its ruling position, the SDS had been unable to develop an equivalent to Orbán’s client bourgeoisie. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the party managed to form a coalition when two smaller outfits agreed to join it – changing sides in a desperate attempt to prevent early elections in which they would have lost their seats. Yet, having benefited from these parliamentary contingencies, Janša failed to translate them into a lasting majority. Instead, his anti-Covid strategy was botched and haphazard. Charting a chaotic path between public health measures and economic stimulus, he alienated both trade unions and business organizations. Small pay rises, announced ahead of the elections, were insufficient to buy back public confidence. The SDS subsequently tried to borrow from Fidesz’s repressive playbook, using the pandemic as a pretext to extend its influence over the media, police and civil society. Yet in a country with a relatively solid anti-fascist tradition and a politicized layer of liberal civil society actors, that influence could only go so far. When the election campaign got underway in 2022, the opposition set the agenda: highlighting the authoritarian, xenophobic and nationalist aspects of SDS rule. Golob presented himself as a liberal-green, managerial alternative to the hard-right Janša, and was duly rewarded at the ballot box.

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Golob’s platform is neoliberalism with an ostensible social consciousness. It foregrounds the climate crisis, problems in the health sector and precaritized jobs. Yet his proposed solutions are uninspiring, consisting mostly of tax cuts, market-friendly green policies and a greater role for private capital in the pension system. In Slovenia, GS is sometimes seen as the heir to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDS) – the dominant centrist force during the transition period, which ruled from 1992 to 2004. LDS managed to accommodate the interests of both export capital and organized labour while forming broad coalitions with other parties. Its export-oriented policy was supported by fine-tuned regulations and a close nexus between state-owned banks and domestic capital. Yet, with EU accession, the institutional basis for this setup was eroded. Eighteen years later, the circumstances have changed significantly. There is no longer a strong domestic capitalist class nor robust trade unions; monetary policy is straitjacketed by the EU; and the extent to which GS can revive its predecessor’s programme remains uncertain.

What is clear is that the last elections significantly narrowed, if not temporarily closed, the possibilities for an alternative to the neoliberal project. In 2014, the United Left entered parliament with almost 6% of the vote. Four years later, that share rose to more than 9%. In the recent national ballot, however, the newly renamed Left barely exceeded the parliamentary threshold of 4%. Since the apex of its popularity, the party has increasingly focused on parliamentary manoeuvring, which has taken precedence over grassroots organizing and local branch activities. Its MPs have dissociated themselves from their initial campaign programme and edged closer to the liberal opposition, ultimately joining a formal anti-SDS alliance known as the Constitutional Arch Coalition. As a consequence, the Left has transformed into an outpost of the urban, educated middle classes: picking up votes from disenchanted former supporters of the liberal parties, while shedding the support of left-wing activists and social movements. Instead of advancing alternatives to SDS policies, it has often defaulted to a mechanical defence of the welfare state.

In sum, since the 2000s Slovenia moved from a selective nationalism with socially attenuating neo-corporatist features to the unbridled dominance of foreign capital. Hungary, meanwhile, opened itself to foreign capital during the transition period, then switched to the selective introduction of national-conservative reforms after the financial crisis. Fidesz’s partial break with neoliberalism has allowed it to cement its political position, while neoliberal continuity in Slovenia accounts for the relative unpopularity of the SDS. If either country is to move beyond its current polarization – between right-wing nationalism and liberal constitutionalism – a revitalized parliamentary left will be required.

Currently, though, socialist and environmentalist forces in the Hungarian opposition bloc are marginal. This is partly because the legislature as a whole has become even more politically heterogeneous since the April elections. The far-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland Movement) made it into parliament, which means that the liberal opposition (plus Jobbik) must share the opposition benches with a party that is in many ways ideologically close to Fidesz. This enlarges the government’s political options while putting the opposition under even more pressure to act in a unified manner, so as to avoid sidelining themselves under the present electoral system. That presents an extremely difficult situation for progressive forces, which will struggle to distinguish themselves from the rest of the Hungarian opposition. In Slovenia, by contrast, the Left has already acquired a distinct national profile, yet it has also diluted its platform through coalition-building with the liberals. As of 24 May, the party signed the coalition agreement for a GS-led government: winning real, but limited policy pledges in areas like health, wages and housing, but otherwise acceding to Golob’s neoliberal-oriented programme. Such concessions are only likely to exacerbate the Left’s detachment from its former working-class constituents, who will need a radically different political vehicle to challenge the status quo.  

Read on: Joachim Becker, ‘Europe’s Other Periphery’, NLR 99.

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Joining the West

A famous quote from Desmond Tutu – ‘if you are neutral in situations of injustice then you are choosing the side of the oppressor’ – has been widely used and abused since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In numerous fora, it has been deployed to harangue countries into abandoning their neutrality and lining up behind NATO. Never mind that the oppressor to which Tutu referred was apartheid South Africa, a regime actively supported by the Atlantic military alliance. In both Russia and the West, the current moment is characterized by a constantly replenished amnesia.

Earlier this week, Finland and Sweden opted to repeal their longstanding neutrality policies. Both countries submitted applications to join NATO, in a move that was rightly described as historic. Finland has been neutral since it was defeated by the Soviet Union during World War II – signing a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviets in 1948. Sweden, meanwhile, fought numerous wars with Russia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries but managed to stay out of any further conflict after 1814. Joining NATO discards a centuries-old tradition that has come to define the country’s national identity.

Press coverage of the push for NATO membership has been euphoric. While Sweden has witnessed a limited but still lively debate, in Finland there has been little space for public dissent. Earlier this week, the cover of Finland’s most-read newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, featured an illustration of two blue-and-white figures (the colours of the Finnish flag) rowing a Viking longship towards an illuminated horizon where the four-pointed NATO star is seen rising like the sun. The wooden ship is depicted leaving behind a dark, hulking structure decorated with a red star. The symbolism couldn’t be clearer. Or perhaps it could. Several weeks ago, the online version of Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter featured pop-up animation of the NATO emblem morphing into a peace sign.

In this media environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that support for NATO membership is high: about 60% in Sweden and 75% in Finland. But a closer look at the demographics reveals some cracks in the pro-NATO narrative. For the Atlanticist press, ‘the NATO question’ represents a generational shift, with young people supposedly eager to join against the wishes of their parents, who, we are told, are hopelessly wedded to an outmoded position of Cold War non-alignment. ‘Having been firmly opposed to any NATO move only weeks ago’, wrote former Swedish Prime Minister turned liberal thinktank groupie Carl Bildt, the political class ‘will now face a contest between an older generation and younger ones looking at the world with fresh eyes.’

In reality, though, the opposite is true: the demographic most opposed to NATO membership in Sweden is young men, aged 18-29. And little wonder. They are the segment of the population that would be called upon to join any future military excursion. Contrary to the assumption that Russian aggression has shocked Swedes into unanimous support for the alliance, opposition appears to be on the rise. On 23 March, 44% of young people surveyed were for NATO and 21% against. Last week, 43% of them were for NATO and 32% against: a double-digit leap. Support for membership rises with each age bracket, with the elderly most staunchly in favour. The latest polls from Finland tell a similar story. Polling by Helsingin Sanomat describes the typical NATO supporter as educated, middle-aged or older, male, working in a management-level position, earning at least €85,000 a year and politically on the right, while the typical NATO-sceptic is under the age of 30, a worker or a student, earning less than €20,000 a year and politically on the left.

Some of the most ardent supporters of NATO membership can be found among Sweden and Finland’s business leaders. Last month, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö hosted a ‘secret NATO meeting’ in Helsinki. Among those in attendance were Swedish Minister of Finance Mikael Damberg, top-ranking military officials and powerful figures in the Swedish and Finnish business communities. Chief among them was the billionaire Swedish industrialist Jacob Wallenberg, whose family holdings add up to one third of the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Wallenberg has been NATO’s most enthusiastic cheerleader among Swedish executives. He is a regular participant in the Bilderberg Meeting, an elite group dedicated to spreading the gospel of Atlanticism and free markets. In the weeks leading up to Sweden’s decision to apply for NATO membership, the Financial Times predicted that the Wallenberg dynasty’s stance on Swedish accession would ‘weigh heavily’ on the ruling Social Democrats, over whom he is thought to hold considerable sway.

At the Helsinki summit, Swedish government officials were warned that their country would become less attractive for foreign capital if it remained ‘the only state in Northern Europe outside of NATO’. This, along with significant cajoling from Finland, was one of the decisive factors that led Minister of Defense Peter Hultqvist to change tack and swing behind the alliance. Sweden’s Expressen reported that the meeting suggested the business community holds far greater power over foreign policy decisions than previously thought. It’s not hard to see why business are so invested. Swedish defense industry giant Saab is expecting major profits from NATO membership. The company, whose majority shareholder is the Wallenberg family, has seen its share price nearly double since the Russian invasion. Chief Executive Micael Johansson has said that Sweden’s NATO membership will open new possibilities for Saab in the areas of missile defense and surveillance. The company is expecting dramatic gains as European countries raise their defense spending, and first quarter reports reveal that operating profits have already risen 10% over last year, to $32 million.

The considerable influence of business leaders on the NATO question contrasts with that of the general public. Though Sweden has held referenda on every major decision in recent history – EU membership, the adoption of the euro – it will not consult its citizens on NATO. The most prominent politician to call for a vote is Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar, but her requests have been flatly rejected. The government, fearing that NATO membership could be voted down once wartime hysteria wears off, has instead taken a ‘shock doctrine’ approach, ramming the policy through while Ukraine is still in the headlines and the public is afraid. They have also said that a referendum would require extensive organization and could not be held for some months. This means the issue of NATO membership would feature in the September election campaign: a scenario the Social Democrats are determined to avoid.

In Finland, however, there is little mainstream opposition to NATO. The issue has been tinged by nationalist sentiment, and opponents of membership are accused of not caring about their country’s security. Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of membership this week, with 188 for and only eight against. Of those eight, one was from the right-populist Finns Party, another was a former member of the same outfit, and the remaining six were from the Left Alliance. The other ten Left Alliance MPs, though, voted in favour. One of the party’s representatives went so far as to propose new legislation that would criminalize attempts to influence public opinion on behalf of a foreign power: a precedent that could in theory leave NATO-critics exposed to prosecution.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has slowed some of this break-neck momentum. Calling Finland and Sweden ‘incubators’ for Kurdish terror, the Turkish president has vowed to block the two Nordic countries’ accession to NATO until they meet his demands. (The alliance requires unanimous approval from all member states for a new country to join). Erdoğan has blasted Finland and Sweden over their refusal to extradite 33 members of the PKK and Gülenist movement, blaming the latter for a bloody coup attempt in 2016. He has also demanded that Sweden lift an arms embargo that it imposed in response to Turkey’s incursions in Syria in 2019.

Kurdish issues have recently had an outsize presence in Swedish politics. When the Social Democrats lost their parliamentary majority last year, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson was forced to negotiate directly with a Kurdish MP and ex-peshmerga fighter named Amineh Kakabaveh, whose vote would decide the fortunes of the government. In exchange for keeping it afloat, Kakabaveh demanded that Sweden lend its support to the YPG in Syria, and the Social Democrats acceded. Now, as of this week, Kakabaveh has chided Andersson for ‘giving in’ to Erdoğan and threatened to withdraw her support for the government. The Social Democrats may have avoided making the autumn elections an unofficial referendum on NATO membership, but their government remains extremely weak, and will face intense scrutiny in the months ahead. Many fear that it will strike a private deal with Erdoğan to sacrifice Kurdish activists and Turkish dissidents if he agrees to wave through its NATO bid. Meanwhile, Croatia’s increasingly audacious president, Zoran Milanović, has erected another, smaller obstacle: promising to block Sweden and Finland’s membership unless Bosnia and Herzegovina’s election law is changed so that Bosnian Croats are better represented.

The media, both foreign and domestic, have frequently described Finland and Sweden’s accession as ‘joining the West’ – picking a side in the Huntington-esque civilizational struggle. This rhetoric is nothing new. Shortly before Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017, the country’s long-reigning premier Milo Đukanović said that the division was not ‘for NATO or against NATO’, it was ‘civilizational and cultural’. Yet it is especially odd, and revealing, to encounter this same auto-orientalism in Scandinavia. One right-wing commentator recently wrote that by joining NATO, Sweden was at last becoming a ‘normal Western country’. He then paused to consider whether the government would soon abolish the Systembolaget, or state liquor monopoly. Here we get a sense of what ‘joining the West’ really means: binding oneself to a US-led power bloc and simultaneously doing away with any nominally socialist institutions – a process that has already been underway for decades.

The abandonment of principled neutrality as a moral option follows the changing meaning of internationalism, especially for the left in the Nordic countries. During the Cold War, the Swedish Social Democrats expressed the principle of international solidarity through their support for national liberation movements in the so-called Global South. No figure better embodied this spirit than Olof Palme, who posed for photos smoking cigars with Fidel Castro and famously excoriated the US aerial bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong, comparing it to ‘Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville [and] Treblinka’. During the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, however, such ‘active internationalism’ was reconceptualized as ‘responsibility to protect’ certain non-Western victims of aggression. By the same logic, states are now expected to band together in an ‘alliance of democracies’ to confront tyranny and terrorism – through regime change where necessary.

But the decision to join NATO does not just rely on a hollowed-out discourse of solidarity; it is also presented as a vital act of self-interest – a defensive response to the ‘Russian threat’. In Sweden’s case, we are asked to believe that the country is currently facing greater security risks than during both World Wars, and that the only way to address them is to enter a beefed-up military alliance. Although Russia is supposedly struggling to make headway against a much weaker opponent in Ukraine – unable to hold the capital, hemorrhaging troops and supplies – we are told that it poses an imminent threat to Stockholm and Helsinki. Amid such confected panic, genuine threats to the Nordic way of life have gone ignored: the withering away of the welfare state, the privatization and marketization of education, rising inequality and the weakening of the universal healthcare system. While rushing to align with ‘the West’, the Swedish and Finnish governments have shown considerably less urgency in tackling these social crises.

Read on: Göran Therborn, ‘Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy’, NLR 113.

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Sculpting History

Images one after the other, combining clips from films and newsreels of the 1950s and 60s, including some we remember from the cinema, and then, in the next frame, an unknown shot of a woman wearing an apron sitting in her kitchen talking about her daily routine, or of children perched on the edge of a sandpit recounting their dreams from the night before. Here we are in a typical sequence from Retour à Reims (fragments), the fourth feature by Jean-Gabriel Périot, which employs the filmmaker’s signature method to survey its subject – in this case, the experiences of women and the working class in post-war France. Périot works by assembling a vast array of visual documents that he has collected, like a curator arranging a new hanging in a gallery to offer a fresh perspective on an artist’s oeuvre.

Since Périot’s early shorts of the 2000s, made when he worked in the multimedia department of the Pompidou, he has honed a distinctive approach that dispenses with many of the familiar attributes of the documentary form. Much of his work begins in the archives and ends in the editing studio. Périot spends years – seven in this case – researching and gathering material on a chosen subject without, he says, an end in mind, only questions that need answers, before intricately weaving them together. The results so far have been impressive, producing an original, eclectic oeuvre that includes his Une jeunesse allemande (2015), an important study of the far left in 1970s Germany and their relationship with the mass media. At the heart of his growing body of work is montage, which Périot compares in its procedures to that of sculpture, where one must

bring out a shape from a block of material while respecting certain details (the veins in the marble, internal movements in wood). You first roughen the material, try to understand it and feel the shape it hides, then you gradually get closer to this shape until you reach the details before polishing the whole thing. Montage is both a very technical job and a very sensitive and very sensory one.

In his latest film, however, Périot departs from his rulebook in one respect, by including a voiceover. To an extent this feature imposed itself as a necessity, given the film is an adaptation of the sociologist Didier Eribon’s memoir Retour à Reims (2009). In the book, Eribon examines his working-class upbringing in the titular city. Desperate to escape an environment that was made worse by his being gay, Eribon’s exit route was that of the classic transfuge de classe, going to university, getting an academic position and becoming a published author. Though born two decades after Eribon, the 48-year-old Périot says the book deeply resonated with his own experiences. But as its title suggests, Périot’s adaptation is far from faithful. Rather, he has selected fragments from the text, stripped it down to two essential themes while leaving out several others, notably that of homosexuality. It would have been too close to home, Périot has said about this omission. He did not want to make the film a personal reflection on his own life, both out of discretion and a fear of narrowing its focus.

The voiceover may be the biggest concession to the film’s source material, but in fact it works to distance us from Périot or Eribon, for it is read by a woman, and this voice most viewers in France will recognize as belonging to Adèle Haenel. As a result, her shadow is cast over the images we see, conjuring not only our knowledge of her fine work on screen with directors including the Dardenne brothers, Robert Campillo, Céline Sciamma, and the duo Gustave Kervern and Benoît Delépine, but also of the controversy she has courted in the last few years. Haenel played a key role in igniting the #MeToo movement in France through her public accusation against the director Christophe Ruggia. This was followed by her walk-out from the 2020 Césars ceremony when it was announced that Roman Polanski had been awarded best director, despite his outstanding charges for child sexual abuse. ‘C’est la honte’, she could be heard saying as she left the auditorium, in an act that inspired an article in Libération by Virginie Despentes that is now one of the movement’s founding texts: ‘On se lève et on se barre’. Most recently, Haenel has announced stepping back from acting to concentrate on her political activity, which has swung radically to the left.

Retour à Reims (fragments) is structured in three parts, though the first two make up most of the film’s one hour and 23 minutes running time, with the third a short epilogue in the form of an arresting fast-forward to contemporary France. Périot begins with Eribon’s grandmother, who was one of the tondues, the women who were paraded in the streets and had their heads shaved in an act of public humiliation for collaboration with the Vichy regime. In footage of these spectacles, we can make out the expressions of the accused, with their mixture of fear and contempt. It is a chilling starting point, not least because it is uncertain how many tondues really did collaborate, and how many were thrown in the same lot for shunning conventions of the time. This section then develops into a more general exploration of women’s lives across the period, knitting together testimony from housewives and young women with scenes from fiction films. The cumulative effect is touching and sad – this is ultimately a tale of limitation and unfulfilled dreams, of women whose lives could have been so much fuller had they been freed from their domestic roles. Among the few recognizable faces is Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, appearing in her kitchen, of course, chopping vegetables – seemingly more aware than most of the other women who appear in the film of the extent her life has not been fully lived. 

In the second part, Périot draws back further to explore the constricted experience of the working class as a whole. This analysis of domination was a key part of Eribon’s book, along with the shift he charts in his own family from leftists to National Front voters. Périot also includes the latter in his fragments. Alongside shots from factories and of workers describing their conditions, we witness the arrival of immigrants from newly independent Algeria and acts of racism. In one film clip, a young white woman enters a bar with a dark-skinned companion; not long after they order coffee an old wino at the end of the counter unleashes a bitter, racist tirade. Politicians also appear on several occasions and Périot pays particular attention to the 1981 election of François Mitterrand. We are left in no doubt that for all the jubilation this provoked on the left, and the nostalgia with which it is recalled by many in France today, Mitterrand was the president who did most to shift the Socialist Party to the right. In one particularly arresting sequence, we see Mitterrand on the day of his inauguration approaching us solemnly by foot along the Champs-Élysées, while behind him clashes take place between crowds and police. It is a nightmarish backdrop. Mitterrand is framed by violence, walking away as if oblivious to the disorder he has created.

The final section represents an unexpected finale. The quality of the images suddenly shifts from grainy and static to high definition, vividly colourful and dynamic. The footage here is not archival, but that of Périot and a few other filmmakers, shot during recent protests across France. After the sobriety of the first two sections, it makes for an invigorating jolt. We see the gilets jaunes protests and are reminded of the shocking police violence that took place in response, as well as other movements that have come out on the streets – environmentalists, feminists, the Nuit Debout protests. With this arrangement, set to rousing instrumental music, Périot makes what appears to be a distinct break from his source material, suggesting that the shift from left to right that Eribon chronicled may have been reversed. Given the stylistic austerity that he has previously adopted, it is surprising that Périot has taken this turn. And perhaps it is disappointing to see him use the powers of montage for a different end: to present an uplifting vision of France rather than depicting the one that currently exists. After all, while the epilogue forges a collective opposition through montage, the disparate protests that have erupted across the country remain just that, at least for now. But there is also something appealing about Périot’s note of optimism – it offers a snapshot of one possible future, as we embark on another five years with Emmanuel Macron as president.

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