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Leftovers

The 11 July snap election in Bulgaria may ultimately be remembered for its turnout rate, which fell to an all-time low of 42%. Much of the post-election debate revolved around the reasons for this figure. Some blamed the new electronic-voting machines, which supposedly scared off the elderly and less educated; others claimed that people were unwilling to vote during the summer vacation, especially since the outcome was entirely predictable. Only a few observers on the left suggested that the country’s consistently dwindling voter participation might have something to do with the lack of alternatives on the ballot.

The previous Bulgarian elections, held in April 2021, produced a short-lived hung parliament. President Rumen Radev, affiliated with the ‘conservative-left’ Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), facilitated a political reconciliation of sorts by appointing a caretaker government with members drawn from various political backgrounds. With that, the almost uninterrupted 12-year rule of the right-wing party GERB – under the leadership of strongman Prime Minister Boyko Borissov – came to an abrupt end.

Borissov founded GERB (literally ‘coat of arms’) in 2006 after a four-year stint as Chief Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior in the cabinet of Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the former Bulgarian tsar who was elected PM in 2001. Borissov’s popular appeal was based on his brash persona and tough stance on organised crime, along with his self-presentation as a political outsider. In 2005, he captured the mayoralty of Sofia with almost 70% of the vote. Four years later, he led GERB into government after almost winning an absolute majority in parliament. His party, modelled on Germany’s Christian Democrats, promised to eradicate criminal cartels, ensure the efficient disbursal of EU funds, limit government spending and taxation, and loosen employment laws: a programme that won support from the European political establishment.

Once in office, GERB relied on a revolving door of coalition partners to stabilize its rule: most recently, an alliance of far-right parties known as the United Patriots. Its tenure was characterized by growing social inequality, brutal austerity, and a steady decline in the quality of public services, healthcare in particular. With the government unable to sustain its momentum amid a series of corruption scandals and protests – which escalated throughout 2020 and 2021 – GERB’s former coalition partners eventually decided to draw a cordon sanitaire around the ruling party, joining the rest of Bulgaria’s political class in refusing to cooperate with Borissov. The Biden administration dealt the PM a further blow in June by sanctioning several Bulgarian politicians and businessmen under the Magnitsky Act. The list included the media mogul Delyan Peevski, an MP for the centrist Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) and allegedly a close associate of Borissov. The leader’s fall from grace was finalized by the election results this month. GERB dropped to 23%, down 1 million votes from its 2009 result. Parliament is now deadlocked, and negotiations between the parties are underway.

However, the real losers of the night were the BSP. Despite the popularity of President Radev and his brief caretaker administration, the party crashed to one of its worst ever results, taking in only 13%. Descended from the Bulgarian Communist Party, which ruled the country from 1944 to 1989, the BSP was one of the most popular national political organizations after the fall of the Eastern Bloc – a stark contrast with its sister parties in other former communist countries. It rebranded itself as ‘socialist’ in 1989, won the first democratic elections the following year, and adopted a new constitution. Along with its main rivals – the anti-communist Union of Democratic Forces (SDS), now allied with GERB – it supported a prompt transition towards liberal capitalism. But the general population had different priorities, expecting the elimination of old-regime privileges without sacrificing the robust welfare state built up over previous decades. This split between the parties and the electorate led to a series of unstable governments, which struggled to hold onto power throughout the 90s.

The skyrocketing unemployment and poverty of the transition period caused the BSP to pitch left in the 1994 elections, promising to temper neoliberal reforms with social protections. Elected on this platform, the BSP tried to retain price controls and protect the welfare state while privatizing the financial sector and deregulating international trade. Yet this attempt at class compromise resulted in a severe banking and social crisis three years later. Popular discontent with hyperinflation brought down the government in 1997, and the anti-communist parties managed to win a stable majority for the first (and only) time, offering radical neoliberal reform and the privatization of virtually all industry. The lesson for the BSP leadership was simple: that its left flank must not be allowed to govern. The BSP’s liberal faction soon took the helm, serving two more stints in government: from 2005 to 2009, and 2013 to 2014. 

Today, the nominally social-democratic BSP is facing a crisis similar to that of centre-left parties in the rest of Europe. Voters resent it for the right-wing measures enacted in the late 2000s, including the introduction of a 10% flat tax. They were also repelled by its decision to appoint the media tycoon Delyan Peevski as head of the National Security Agency in 2013. Since its return to opposition, the BSP has failed to highlight the contiguity between neoliberal reforms and rampant corruption. Instead, it has opted for handwringing over the loss of the ‘traditional Bulgarian family’, quixotic denunciations of ‘genderism’, and support for GERB’s nationalist campaign against Northern Macedonia. As a result, the BSP’s voter base has abandoned it in droves. Its working-class support fell to just 44% in the last election, compared to over 65% for all other parliamentary parties.

Amid the terminal decline of Bulgarian socialism, the country’s politics are now defined by the fault line between ‘protest parties’ and ‘the establishment’, pitting new and not-so-new smaller parties against the bloc composed of GERB, the BSP and the DPS (which claims to represent Bulgaria’s Muslim minority). Given Bulgaria’s status as the poorest, most unequal country in the EU – with swathes of its population lost to outward migration – one might assume that the field would be wide open for a left-leaning social-democratic opposition. But this prospect has largely been eclipsed by the dominance of ‘anti-corruption’ discourse, which overrides all other concerns. This idée fixe, which grew partly out of popular anger at socialist Bulgaria’s so-called ‘red bourgeoisie’, was compounded by the country’s accession to the EU in 2007, since fighting corruption formed a central pillar of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, introduced to monitor the integration of Eastern European nations to the bloc.

During the most recent election campaign, the self-styled ‘parties of change’ promised to break with the GERB model. One of their slogans talked about ‘scraping off’ the leftovers of the Borissov legacy. Yet when the votes were cast, none of them received a definite mandate. Izpravi se, Mutri Vun (‘Stand Up, Thugs Out!’), a centre-left grouping led by the charismatic former ombudswoman Maia Manolova, got just 5% of the vote, roughly the same as its share in April. Democratic Bulgaria (DB), the liberal–green coalition, won 13%: a slight increase  from the last election. The outlook was somewhat better for the populist Ima Takuv Narod (‘There Is Such a People’, ITN), led by the popular folk-rock singer and TV talk-show host Slavi Trifonov, which rose to 24%. All three organisations came to prominence last spring through an effective PR campaign that sought to expose GERB as morally and institutionally corrupt. They organised live-streamed hearings in parliamentary committees to investigate accusations of graft by Borissov’s top officials. These weeks-long sessions, presided over by Manolova, made for highly entertaining primetime television, featuring testimonies of shady businessmen who claimed to have been extorted by government ministers. Their findings validated the sentiments of the anti-Borissov protesters who had swarmed the streets of Sofia since July 2020, denouncing corruption and political repression.

Izpravi se is the only ‘party of change’ whose platform raises social justice issues and attempts to confront the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its membership includes former BSP activists and participants in the recent protests. Yet even Manolova tries to avoid the appearance of progressive politics, describing herself as ‘neither left nor right’. The DB’s Hristo Ivanov has also cultivated an apolitical vocabulary around state capture and judicial reform – issues thought to transcend traditional political divisions. He has recently reoriented DB along populist-nationalist lines in an attempt to move on from his embarrassing tenure as a reformist Minister of Justice under GERB and shake the coalition’s reputation as an exclusively middle-class outfit.

While Ivanov’s strategy has had some success, Bulgaria’s most important political actor following the July ballot – catapulted into the strongest position to form a government – is ITN. Though the party ran in parliamentary elections for the first time in 2021, Slavi Trifonov has arguably been building up its base since the 1990s. His music group, The Ku-Ku Band, has been one of the most popular acts for the past thirty years. Their patriotic songs were the soundtrack to the anti-communist movements of early 90s, and their current popularity can partly be attributed to nostalgia for the optimism of that period. The Bulgarian diaspora, many of whom tune into Trifonov’s talk show and turn out to see The Ku-Ku Band on tour, voted for ITN in large numbers. The party won 45% of the vote in Germany, and over 50% in the UK and Spain.

ITN representatives embrace the ‘populist’ label, comparing themselves to Italy’s Five Star Movement, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and even Trump. The leaders refuse to be referred to as ‘politicians’ and style themselves as ordinary workers employed by the people. Their party is not a ‘party’ but a ‘political project’. Like the Italian M5S, they promise to introduce direct democracy mechanisms including frequent referendums. They are heavily reliant on social media and private broadcasting channels, which allow them to skirt public scrutiny.

One of ITN’s few definitive political commitments is to reduce taxpayer subsidies for political parties: a reform which Trifonov tried to pass via a public referendum several years ago. Whether this would aid Bulgarian democracy is questionable, as subsidies are currently the only mechanism to transparently fund political activities given the parties’ low membership numbers. In general, ITN has maintained a remarkable silence on most major issues beyond electoral reform (again rejecting the left–right axis as outdated). It would not even offer an unqualified endorsement of the Covid-19 vaccine programme, asserting that the public should hear ‘all points of view’ on the question of vaccine safety. Despite its anti-elite posturing, the party is now proposing a government made up entirely of corporate-technocratic ‘experts’. The first nominee for Minister of Culture was Stanislava Artmutlieva, the owner of Bulgaria’s largest music distributor, famed for her passionate defence of copyright law. The Ministry of Energy is to be handed over to Krasimir Nenov, the director of a private coal thermal power plant. A Minister for the Environment has not yet been nominated.

Trifonov’s first choice for Prime Minister was Nikolay Vasilev, an investment banker who served in the former tsar’s cabinet and identifies as the country’s ‘top fiscal hawk’. Vasilev pushed through the radical deregulation policies of the 2000s, privatizing the state-owned telecommunications company and making almost 20,000 public employees redundant. Under his influence, ITN has forecast further public sector redundancies in the coming years under an obscure ‘digitalisation’ agenda. The party has also announced its intention to privatize major highways, along with the last publicly owned Bulgarian Development Bank (embroiled in controversy after huge loans were given to a group of politically connected businesses during GERB’s term). Although Trifonov has since withdrawn Vasilev’s nomination after a public backlash, the pair’s proximity underscores what many voters knew already: that the leftovers have merely been reheated, rather than scraped off the plate. 

The three protest parties agree on the need to pass judicial reforms and oust the current prosecutor general, who has served as GERB’s legal enforcer. They all subscribe to the magical powers of ‘e-governance’ in rooting out corruption and improving public services. In their campaign against graft, each is remarkably insensitive to social disparities: ITN has compared the corruption of the bus driver who steals petrol from his work vehicle with that of the politician embezzling funds from the public purse. Added to this, each party combines its emphasis on ‘the masses’ with a blind deference to experts. The deputy leader of ITN has remarked that he admires Margaret Thatcher for her resolve in doing what was ‘right for the people’, even if the people themselves did not realise it.

Such commonalities make it possible that Izpravi se and Democratic Bulgaria will choose to prop up an ITN minority administration. But this is far from certain. So far, only DB has expressed its willingness to enter negotiations with Trifonov, whereas the BSP and Izpravi se have been entertaining the possibility of giving the caretaker government a regular mandate. Borissov has ruled out supporting ITN, yet he may stand to benefit from an unpopular and ephemeral cabinet led by aloof technocrats. Many are speculating that GERB politicians will simply not show up in parliament and allow the other parties to vote in ITN. Then, when the new government falters, they will exploit the desire for ‘stability’ and storm to victory in the next election.  

Absent an explosion of social protest from below or a dramatic shift in the fortunes of the trade unions, Bulgaria’s chances of reversing this regressive trend are bleak. Given the continued dominance of the anti-corruption framework, the best shot for the country’s left is to shift the emphasis onto the structural reasons for widespread corruption – presenting itself as the solution to the causes rather than the symptoms. Otherwise, it risks disappearing off the radar of the popular classes, whose only options will be an ‘old politics’ or a ‘new populism’ with little to differentiate them.  

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Populism and the New Oligarchy’, NLR 82.

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Entrepreneurs in Uniform

It owns facilities that manufacture cement, steel, vehicles (passenger cars, subway cars, rail wagons and tractors), agrochemicals (especially fertilizers), and energy (petroleum retail). It has companies working in public construction (including desalination plants), mining, logistics, and retail. Its factories produce pharmaceuticals, processed foods, home appliances, kitchenware, computers and optical equipment. It reclaimed hundreds of thousands of acres of desert land and constructed bridges, hotels with lucrative special event venues, seaside resorts with luxury summerhouses, apartment complexes and lavish villas. It runs petrol stations, shipping firms, domestic-cleaning companies, and parking lots. It was allocated thousands of miles of land by the state to construct toll highways and collect usage fees.

To whom does this economic empire belong? The answer is the Egyptian army. This list of assets is taken from an interesting report published last year by the Carnegie Foundation. (The army’s ventures aren’t always prudent: in 2018, as the Financial Times reported, it opened a $1.18 billion cement factory that led to domestic overproduction, causing prices to collapse.)

Every country has an army, but in Egypt it is the army that has the country, as per Ayesha Siddiqa’s useful formula, elaborated in her pioneering study of Pakistan, Military Inc. (2007). By this, I’m not simply referring to a society controlled by its armed forces, which exists in various forms in countries from Nigeria to Brazil. Neither am I concerned at present with so-called ‘praetorian states’ – not to be confused with military regimes, for praetorianism can exist alongside an electoral system, its hallmark the number of ex-generals occupying public office as in Algeria and Israel, or in various African and Central American countries. Nor am I referring to the ‘military-industrial complex’ that exists in many Western states, from the USA and France to the UK, where the armed forces create substantial demand from buying weapons and technology, fulfilled by private industry, with connection between the two parties ensured by the ‘revolving door’, or in the more suggestive turn of phrase employed in France, through a pantouflage: the investiture of civilian ‘slippers’ to high-ranking officials who, once retired, enjoy the comforts of a boardroom seat.

Instead, I’m talking about those countries whose economy is dominated by the military, whose most powerful entrepreneurs are dressed in uniform. Where can these be found? The People’s Liberation Army played a significant role in the Chinese economy up until the 1990s, but after a series of anti-corruption trials, purges of high-ranking cadres and legal reforms the Chinese Communist Party regained control. In Russia, military influence is certainly expanding. According to a report by Transparency International, its army ‘is involved in many sectors of the economy, ranging from transportation to healthcare’ and has recently expanded into ‘the sale of surplus weapons, and insurance and marketing’. There however, the Soviet legacy of the Party’s supremacy over the armed forces – dating back to the Stalinist purges of Tukhachevsky’s Red Army in 1937 – remains significant.

With the notable exception of Thailand, the particular social arrangement where ‘Military, Inc.’ comes to dominate in fact tends to be found in Muslim countries: Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran (without considering Indonesia, which would require a historical digression). What is curious is that this military mercantilism has little to do with religious dispensation. In Egypt the army presents itself as a secular bulwark against Islamist militancy (recall Sisi’s massacre of Muslim Brotherhood members in 2013), whilst in Turkey it is indelibly marked by the laicist inheritance of Kemalism. In Iran the entrepreneurial army was a by-product of political Islam, whilst in Pakistan it was the military itself that oversaw an Islamist turn in the state under the dictatorship of Muhammad Zia ul-Haq (who ultimately executed the secularist Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1979).

The case of Pakistan is the best documented, thanks in large part to Siddiqa’s research. Its military possesses 12% of the country’s arable land, much of it in the most fertile and productive areas of Punjab and Sindh. Business operations are conducted through five ‘charitable’ foundations: the Fauji Foundation (run by the Ministry of Defence), Army Welfare Trust (Pakistan Army), Shaheen Foundation (Air Force), Bahria Foundation (Navy), and the Pakistan Ordnance Factories Foundation (also Ministry of Defence). Together Fauji, Shaheeh and Bahria control more than 100 separate commercial entities, from fertilizer factories to bakeries, petrol stations, banks, cement plants, hosiery factories, milk dairies, golf courses, and, in recent years, TV channels. A recent article by Eliot Wilson notes that

The Fauji foundation operates a security force (allowing serving army personnel to double in their spare time as private security agents), an oil terminal and a phosphate joint venture with the Moroccan government. Elsewhere, the Army Welfare Trust runs one of the country’s largest lenders, Askari Commercial Bank, along with an airline, a travel agency and even a stud farm. Then there is the National Logistic Cell, Pakistan’s largest shipper and freight transporter (and the country’s largest corporation), which builds roads, constructs bridges and stores vast quantities of the country’s wheat reserves … In short, the military’s presence is all-pervasive. Bread is supplied by military-owned bakeries, fronted by civilians. Army-controlled banks take deposits and disburse loans. Up to one third of all heavy manufacturing and 7 per cent of private assets are reckoned to be in army hands.

Foundations play an equally prominent role in Iran, where the Revolutionary Guards manage around a third of the economy, from energy to infrastructure, finance to the automotive industry. These include the Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution, jointly controlled with the government. Its largest subsidiary, the Agricultural and Food Industries Organization, owns more than 115 companies. The holding company Khatam al-Anbia (Seal of the Prophets), meanwhile, controls more than 812 registered companies, and has been responsible for a vast array of construction projects in the country, including, according to a recent RAND report, ‘dams; water diversion systems; highways; buildings; heavy-duty structures; offshore construction; water supply systems; and water, gas, and oil main pipelines.’ To this we should add university and military research centres, construction of a new line of Tehran’s metro system as well as a high-speed rail link between Tehran and Isfahan. Since 2009, Khatam al-Anbia has also controlled the leading shipbuilder in the country, the Marine Industrial Company (SADRA), and the shipyards at Bushehr, which specialise in the construction of freighters and oil tankers.

This is all without considering the black market. The Revolutionary Guards control a large part of the contraband that enters Iran, bypassing Western sanctions which, paradoxically, have actually increased their wealth, influence and popularity. The last presidential elections can be read as the revenge of the Guards against a wing of the clergy that had sought to reduce their influence. Not only were the charitable foundations asked to pay taxes during Rohani’s presidency, but the police conducted a series of high-profile arrests of prominent figures in the organisation, accused of corruption and unlawful enrichment. Woe betide any reformist clerics.

Perhaps the most interesting case of all is Turkey, where for two decades Erdoğan has sought to rein in the army. The positive consensus during the first years of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) time in government was in part due to the relief many felt at the thought of finally being rid of the yoke of the generals, who have been the principal tyrannical political actors since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. The violent repression that followed the opaque coup of 2016 provoked less hostility than was predicted precisely because those disproportionately targeted were army officials.

And yet the Turkish military’s economic empire remains intact. How so? The pillar of this empire is the army’s pension fund, OYAK, which, as Metin Gurcan writes in Al-Monitor:

all officers and non-commissioned officers of the Turkish military are obliged to join. About 10% of the monthly salaries of 250,000 OYAK members are automatically deducted as contributions to the fund, generating a monthly cash flow of around $35 million…OYAK is a major player with multibillion-dollar investments in sectors such as iron, steel and cement manufacturing, car making, construction, mining, energy, finance, chemicals, logistics services and seaport management. In some fields it has even grown into a dominant force. OYAK enterprises contribute 25% of Turkey’s industrial steel production and control 20% of the car-making industry in the country. Standing out among them are the iron and steel factories in Eregli and Iskenderun and the Renault OYAK plants in Bursa. The fund’s cement plants also make a significant contribution to the national economy. More than 32,000 people are employed in OYAK’s 60 companies, which operate in 21 countries.

A question arises: why hasn’t Erdoğan succeeded in dismantling this bastion of military hegemony in Turkey? Because being the able politician that he is, Erdoğan has proceeded obliquely, by encircling and infiltrating. He has bolstered the assets of the police, often at the expense of the army, and through various measures greatly weakened a pillar of the army’s economic power – its land holdings. The armed forces historically possessed large swathes of territory, often in areas primed for property speculation, such as military bases on the outskirts of the big cities. Construction and property speculation have been the two (now very much sputtering) motors of the ‘Turkish economic miracle’; it can’t have displeased the AKP that this growth occurred at the expense of the military estate. Following the attempted coup, Erdoğan then appointed himself a member and president of the board of TSKGV (Foundation for the Strengthening of the Turkish Armed Forces), which controls the production of armaments and military research.

But the truth is that given Erdoğan’s military adventures in Kurdistan, Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan, he needs the army more than ever, and so can’t risk undermining its loyalty. This is so even before acknowledging that in the current economic climate he cannot possibly afford to go after OYAK, which would be akin to killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

This brief survey of ‘Military, Inc.’ however leaves a basic issue unresolved in three of the four countries in question (Iran is a case apart). How does the entrepreneurial army coexist not only within the religious climate that characterises these states, but also with neoliberal orthodoxy? It was easier for the army to present itself as an engine of development when privatisation wasn’t in vogue. But now? Curiously, the three armies in question have in fact benefitted from the neoliberal wave, as they and their foundations have bought up industries abandoned by the state in the name of liberalisation. OYAK, for instance, acquired the steel-producing giant Erdemir for $2.77 billion in 2005.

What this demonstrates is that for neoliberalism, privatisation serves a purely rhetorical function, ready to be disavowed if no longer convenient. Neoliberalism and the military have a long and intimate history (think only of its origins on a national scale with Pinochet’s military coup and the regime he established as per instruction from Friedman and Hayek). The hand of the market is invisible but what Adam Smith failed to tell us – and the Chicago School revealed – is that it also comes armed with an assault rifle.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

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

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Private Transportations

Ghédalia Tazartès, collector of glass figurines, surrealist of sound and lifelong Parisian, sang in a private language and recorded his albums in a small atelier in the 11th Arrondissement, many in the company of domesticated pigeons. He often said that his life as a musician began at the age of twelve, when his grandmother died. The story goes that Tazartès went into the woods, dug a hole, and then sang so loudly that the ducks on the lake began to shake. He and his music continued in this vein until his death in February at the age of 73, after years of fighting both lung and liver cancer.

Depending on when you asked him, Tazartès said that his instrument was his voice, the tape deck, or a microphone. His first album, Diasporas, was released in 1979 on the Cobalt label founded by Philippe Conrath, a journalist with Libération. ‘My wife worked with him at Phydor, a biscuit factory’, Conrath told me. ‘He would sing while he was loading the cookies onto a truck. I knew he was singing something very, very, very, very strange’. As with everything he did for Cobalt, Tazartès recorded the music at home on a Revox reel-to-reel and delivered a complete album to Conrath. It begins in media res, Tazartès ululating in benevolent code, the tape collage making a dirty trampoline for his voice. The eleven tracks sound as if Tazartès had spent years watching cities from a train, landed in prison, and then decided to create a guidebook from memory, screaming about each city, one after the other, from his cell.

His second album, Tazartès Transports (1980), took this sound further. He collaborated with Jean-Pierre Lentin, editor of the counter-cultural magazine Actuel, who wrote a series of fake ethnographic texts describing the music of invented regions. ‘Each track had a particular function, to chase away birds for hunters, or something’, Tazartès explained. This gives the impression that the record might resemble something like CAN’s ‘Ethnological Forgery Series’, a collection of songs that does live up to that name. But, despite the origin story, Tazartès Transports does not sound like the music of another country. The album comes across as exactly what it is: a sui generis performer with no musical training, improvising on a Moog synthesizer and pushing the world in his head out through his mouth.

When Tazartès uses a language we recognise, it feels like a clue. On the first Tazartès Transports track (numbered but not named), he sings in French with his throat constricted. It is squeaky, as if the tape has been sped up slightly, his voice put over a timid synthetic rhythm. Translated into English, his plea ends like this: ‘It’s no small matter to give birth to lots of little cockroaches / Who will go about their business and won’t be cited in history / At least they won’t have fought any wars, it would be cruel to resent them for it’. This music seems like it might have fallen, after some half-hearted redacting, out of a bureaucratic satchel, a samizdat manifesto with an audience of zero.

Tazartès’s labels sometimes felt like this about his commercial potential. My favourite of his albums, une éclipse totale de soleil, came out in 1983 on Cobalt. It has not softened over time. Singing and tape edits create an immersive bad trip over the course of two very long tracks, birdsong and rhythmic pips jump cutting to fried pulses and vorpal growls. The topic and mood are so impossible to determine that one can only listen, obediently, hoping to answer the only real Tazartès question: What is this? Cobalt’s American distributor, Celluloid, did not care what it was, and refused to put out the record unless Tazartès waived his fee.

When I found une éclipse in 1987, I was entranced. I assumed ‘Ghédalia Tazartès’ must be the name of a collective. The only image on the sleeve was of a smiling toddler sitting next to a boat. (It’s a photo of Raphaël Glucksmann, now a member of the European Parliament.) My first thought was that the Tazartès Collective had kidnapped the baby as some kind of anti-imperialist gesture. That this is as far from Tazartès’s character as possible does not negate the fact that the music was intense enough to suggest a kidnapping was not out of the question.

On the basis of these first three albums alone, Tazartès deserves a comfortably elevated place among the sound artists of the 20th century. Like Meredith Monk and David Hammons, Tazartès was a hybrid artist living at the world. In the same way that Monk is a dancer equally skilled as a composer, and Hammons makes beautiful objects while questioning the need for objects, Tazartès was a spontaneous musician with a fine compositional sense, who made furious and compact recordings that give lie to the assumption that improvisers are experimenting rather than stating.

He was born in Paris in May of 1947 and got his first name from his grandfather, ‘born in the Ottoman Empire’, in Tazartès’s words. More specifically, he was from Salonika in Greece, a city which Tazartès said ‘was almost entirely Jewish, 80%, like Warsaw at one time’. After moving to Istanbul and having children, Tazartès’s grandfather relocated to Paris in the early Thirties, apparently for medical treatment. In 1933, at the age of fourteen, Tazartès’s father started working to help support the family. He was imprisoned at Auschwitz during the war but survived and returned to Paris where he worked in various shops. Using the stage name Betty Riche, Tazartès’s mother sang in clubs briefly, before leaving the stage to work with her husband in a clothing shop.

His family’s path has led to Tazartès being described as an inherently diasporic figure, a characterization that the music supports. But it isn’t quite accurate. ‘I am really French, despite my name as a Salonician Jew’, Tazartès said. ‘It bothers me a little when they say that I am something other than French because it is not true. I do not like lying very much, it is useless – it is not my style’.

Tazartès was not only a Parisian but someone whose life revolved mostly around three places: a bar called the Baron Rouge, a flea market called Marché d’Aligre where he found most of his clothes and glass gewgaws, and his beloved atelier, the loft on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine that he found in 1968.When the building started selling off apartments in the early Seventies, Tazartès was strapped, so his friend, André Glucksmann – philosopher and father of Raphaël – bought the atelier for him. He lived there, at least part of the time, for the last fifty years. ‘I have some kind of superstition about this place’, he told The Wire in 2008. ‘Without it, I don’t know if I am a musician’.

Tazartès fell in love with Beethoven and jazz as a teen but was unable to stick with either piano or saxophone. Though he never travelled in any specific musical cohort, his ex-wife, Nathalie Richard, recalled that he was a devoted fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane. Around the events of May 1968, Tazartès decided that he was a revolutionary and, in his words, ‘a bigmouth’. After working in the Phydor and General Motors plants, Tazartès started attending lectures at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. As his daughter, Elie, described him, Tazartès was very much ‘in the present’ and participated in May ‘68 largely because that was the most intense present available. In the early Seventies, he became, briefly, the singer of a rock band but the arrangement ended when he was asked to sing in English. Tazartès refused and walked away, permanently, from normative music, deciding to observe his own militancy of sound.

In l’atelier, as everyone called it, Tazartès began experimenting with a tape deck and a microphone, creating collages he called ‘impromuz’, sharing the results with a few close friends. One of these tapes reached Michel Chion, a composer of musique concrete – a style of composition that builds from recorded sounds rather than performances – with whom friends thought Tazartès shared some commonalities.

In 1976, Chion invited Tazartès to play a concert at the INA-GRM institute, musique concrete’s high church. The event, though, earned him an instant enemy in GRM chief François Bayle, who allegedly asked his colleagues during the show, ‘How can you all listen to this shit?’ This resentment aside, his entry into the public went well enough that Tazartès found the confidence to make a go of it with Conrath and Cobalt. Chion is actually part of Diasporas, heard on a fairly traditional track that isn’t representative of either artist’s general style. On ‘Casimodo Tango’, Chion plays both piano and toy piano while Tazartès croons the part of Quasimodo, singing in French about a leap from the top of Notre Dame and his love for Paris. According to Tazartès, he improvised the lyrics while riding his motorcycle around Notre Dame. According to Chion, it was played on the FIP radio station in Paris.

This was the closest Tazartès ever came to a hit. What little income he earned came not from records or live shows, but from the work he did with dancers and theatre directors. François Verret was one of the first dance artists Tazartès worked with, and their first collaboration in 1978 was an accompaniment for a routine which Verret performed with his ‘face plastered in clay, in a dress made of rags’. (Though they never discussed it, Verret said he made the piece while thinking of refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge by sea.) For the rest of his career, dance and theatre kept Tazartès afloat, including some fairly mainstream work with Philippe Adrien at the Comédie Française.

Richard gave birth to their daughter, Elie, in 1985, and Tazartès began splitting his time between the atelier and their nearby apartment. He slowed his recorded output and didn’t release anything for seven years after his 1990 album, Check Point Charlie. At home, with Elie, he created a language called ‘jhama’, a variation of the dialect he used for singing. ‘It’s a kind of emotional conversation’, Elie told me. ‘It relates to his family’, Richard said, ‘because the grandmother, she was talking Greek, and the parents were Ladino, and then they never talked in Ladino with Ghédalia, so he invented his own language.’

Tazartès had moved away from dance and was working more in theatre. ‘After 12 years working with modern dance, I felt there was nothing more to say with it’, he said. ‘I was interested in theatre, because there, you have text and you can discuss the subject with the director’. He came back to recordings in 1997 when a musician named David Fenech asked him to make an album for his new label, Demosaurus, created for the occasion. ‘He gave me three C90 tapes from which I picked a coherent set of tracks’, Fenech told me. These selections became the album Voyage à l’Ombre (1997).

As Fenech pointed out, the cassettes Tazartès gave him also contained tracks that showed up on later albums like Granny Awards (get it?) and Repas Froid (another joke). This cassette was drawn from the recordings Tazartès made over the years in his atelier, a collection only now being sifted through. In the last two decades of recordings, Tazartès was moving closer to a kind of universal melody, though without attempting to be more accessible. The jump cuts and dirty sounds had been abandoned and a new kind of approach was taking hold. Tazartès began sticking to a single mode for the length of the track without interruption, even if it was just an unidentified opera singer and Tazartès gargling above a rumbly synth pattern. Tazartès started playing bandoneon more and working with Tibetan bowls to create his drones. He began, essentially, trusting his own sound and interfering with it less.

In the 21st century, Tazartès returned to live performing, reaching New York once to play FUUB in 2016, Cafe Oto in London that same year. Though he never quite cottoned on to computers and went to an iPad only to return emails, Tazartès upgraded his equipment, moving to a sampler which he loaded with pre-recorded sound libraries. From here, he would burn CDRs of his creations. On the 2010 album, Ante-Mortem, Tazartès has become the ghost of his own machine, singing over stock string sounds, much clearer but also more uncanny than in his 1970s recordings. On ‘Seize’, he sounds as he often did, like a court jester larking about over some kind of cheap organ sound. On ‘Dix-Sept’, he seems to be chanting over a destroyed guitar drone, his two voices sounding like lost plainchant. How firmly he avoids anything identifiable begins to support his claim that he was a sound painter, and maybe not even a musician, a term he found pretentious.

Over his life, Tazartès created a small network that understood his thinking. At the Baron Rouge, he met an employee named Quentin Rollet who became a collaborator and ended up releasing some of his records. Together with Jerome Lorichon, Rollet and Tazartès played an improvised set at Église Saint-Merry in 2019, the recording of which has just now been released as La Chute de L’Ange. Tazartès played Tibetan bowl and small bells, Lorichon a Buchla synthesizer, electronic effects and a trumpet, Rollet alto and sopranino saxes. The concert proves that Tazartès was something he rarely described himself as – an improviser, though he often called his music ‘spontaneous’. The three musicians build a mesmerizing and dead serious meditation. For someone who always seemed to be playing a cosmic prank on the world, this recording demonstrates his sensitivity and how fully he could blend his work into that of others.

As his catalogue of unreleased recordings reaches the public in the coming years, comic and spiritual sides will hopefully receive equal attention. His tendencies towards the vulgar ensured that the musique concrète hardliners would never accept him. (For the 2015 album, La Bar Mitzvah du Chien, Tazartès demanded that Rollet appear naked, on all fours, for the album cover.) What remains is a lifeforce that shreds any container.

He was accompanied in his final days by his partner, Dominique Abensour, and his friend Goury Deco, a set designer. ‘The last music he made me listen to, a few days before he died, was a montage around a text by Artaud, pure Ghédalia, sensitive and angry’, Deco wrote to me. ‘Ten minutes non-stop of an acidic and guttural text, almost without taking a breath. I asked, “How did you do that, in multiple takes? We can’t hear you breathing!”’

‘“No,” he replied. “Just like that all at once, here, in one evening. Afterwards, I thought I had to do it again a few times, to get a handle on it, but no! The first take was the best.”’

Special thanks to Meerabelle Jesuthasan for the translations.

Read on: Eric Hazan, ‘Faces of Paris’, NLR 62.

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Continuity UK

As Britain attempts to normalise from the pandemic, the country’s politics is settling into familiar grooves. The hardline Home Secretary Priti Patel has announced measures to offshore the asylum system, while Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, a former Scots Guard and aerospace contractor, celebrated the first British and American sorties to launch from the decks of the nation’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, against scattered ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria – a return to maritime strike operations for the Royal Navy after a ten-year hiatus, Gaddafi’s Libya its last target.

The Labour leader Keir Starmer, who voted against RAF airstrikes in Syria in 2015 because he wanted a ground invasion to accompany them (‘I am not against airstrikes per se’), has been bolstered by a narrow byelection hold in Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire. ‘Labour is coming home’, he declared. The party appears to have benefited from a late shift in opinion in Conservative-leaning mill villages after news of a ministerial tryst at the Department of Health brought charges of Tory hypocrisy over social-distancing regulations.

Whether society is as pacified as the current Westminster scene would suggest, beyond party-political disagreements over the schedule for final lockdown easing, is another question. The Conservatives lost the safe Home Counties seat of Chesham and Amersham on 17 June on a huge swing to the Liberal Democrats, having earlier taken Hartlepool from Labour by a similar magnitude. But see-saw byelection results aren’t necessarily destabilising in the aggregate.

‘Are provincial gains for the long-term? Probably. Can the party hold on to at least most of the affluent South? Definitely’, argues James Frayne, an associate of the Prime Minister’s former advisor Dominic Cummings, writing in the Telegraph. He urges Johnson to hold his nerve and persist with the Vote Leave-derived electoral pivot to working-class voters in the Midlands and the North, although they should dial down the rhetoric – ‘provincial voters doubt “levelling up” could ever happen; affluent Southern voters think they will be fleeced to pay for revolution’.

In The Times, columnist Rachel Sylvester describes a Cabinet tussle between levellers-up and libertarians, the latter identified by their co-sponsorship of a Cameron-era neo-Thatcherite screed, Britannia Unchained (2012), which among other things had urged the Party to ‘stop indulging in irrelevant debates about sharing the pie between manufacturing and services, the North and the South, women and men’. Backbench MPs at the time, they have since risen through the ranks: Patel at the Home Office, Dominic Raab at the Foreign Office, Liz Truss at the Board of Trade, Kwasi Kwarteng at the Department for Business.

To complicate matters, Truss is singled out for criticism by Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times as one of the ministers seeking to wrest control of competition decisions and trade disputes from the arms-length regulators to which they were hitherto entrusted. Shrimsley decries ‘a new creed of unchained Tory interventionism’ spreading out from Number 10 and he urges more orthodox ministers – presumably, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and the new Health Secretary Sajid Javid, both former investment bankers – to reassert the importance of parameters and self-discipline.

How much Conservative dirigisme will outlast the pandemic emergency? It’s true that Brexit has given ministers a sense of greater latitude on regulation and policy. They have ‘lost the excuse that EU rules prevent action’, Shrimsley despairs. (Two of Thatcher’s chancellors, Nigel Lawson and John Major, had supported the idea of shadowing the deutschmark through the European Exchange Rate Mechanism precisely in search of what the Italians used to call a vincolo esterno). At the same time, however, with Cummings departed from Downing Street, Johnson is the only ‘leveller-up’ that Sylvester can locate on the premises, and it’s often overlooked how much ordinary Thatcherism there is in the Prime Minister’s belief system.

While trailing in the polls last autumn, Johnson generated headlines with a conference speech over Zoom conjuring a New Jerusalem on England’s Covid-splattered shores, invoking the spirit of Second World War state-welfare reformism. But as he made clear to the Party faithful, this time around it would be powered by free enterprise. A subsequent ‘Plan for Growth’ published with the March Budget was a damp squib, retailing discretionary competitive funding pots for infrastructure and skills projects to turn local areas into ‘hives of entrepreneurialism’. A £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund, already in operation, has been converted into a useful pork barrel to divert funds into Tory constituencies. Local authorities are left asking Whitehall for favours, a former official within the Northern Powerhouse unit complains to the FT.

Over at Business, Kwarteng, a former JP Morgan analyst, has scrapped Theresa May’s Industrial Strategy Council and published a Subsidy Control Bill expressly prohibiting subventions that require enterprises to relocate their activities from one part of the UK to another, as post-war regional policy used to do. The Economist observes that measures to boost advanced sectors such as life sciences are likelier to increase regional disparities than to ease them, since ‘turning Britain into a scientific superpower, for example, would be best done by focusing development on the already crowded and wealthy golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge’.

In the real economy, meanwhile – that is, the part of the economy that really matters – Sunak has published the outlines of a new rulebook for financial services, easing the Mifid II regulations inherited from Brussels in order to attract share trading and listings, and to retool the City’s competitive advantage after the loss of EU passporting rights. At the Bank of England, Governor Andrew Bailey tells a parliamentary committee that there are no ‘natural limits’ to a programme of quantitative easing now in its twelfth year and running close to £1 trillion. Indeed he is ‘not in a position at all to promise’ that it can be unwound to any degree.

According to the British Social Attitudes Survey two-thirds of people in both England and Scotland say that the current income distribution – further skewed by the QE stimulus to asset prices – is unfair, and that society needs to change. How to ease neoliberalism’s continued passage against this amount of passive resistance?

Well in advance of the pandemic, the National Health Service had become ideologically amplified in the national culture as a social-democratic companion to a revived monarchy and Army – fixtures of public life untainted by popular animus towards Westminster. Charities supporting veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq were doing a roaring trade until the pandemic disrupted the flow of street donations. Last week, the Palace awarded the NHS the George Cross, home-front counterpart to the Victoria Cross historically awarded to the gallants of colonial conquest. The NHS is the first collective subject to be so garlanded since the viciously sectarian Royal Ulster Constabulary for its service in the Troubles.

Clap for Carers, Help for Heroes, QE for asset holders. It didn’t need a football tournament to keep this long-running show on the road for a while yet.  

Read on: Anthony Barnett, ‘Iron Britannia’, NLR I/134.

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The War They Call Peace

As of 9 July 2021, ten years after independence, South Sudan lies in ruins. A civil war that began in 2013 has razed many of the country’s cities, displaced millions, and left entire regions at the edge of starvation. A peace deal, signed in September 2018, only succeeded in returning the main belligerent parties to Juba, the country’s capital. From their perches in a transitional government, the commanders who waged the last civil war continue to clash across the country. What a difference a name makes. Hostilities are now depoliticized as disarmament campaigns or else dismissed as ethnic violence by the billion-dollar UN mission. The UN is keen to cling onto a narrative that sees the peace agreement as a success, despite the fact that its own agencies have found that the level of violence in the country has increased since 2018. It insists that there has been a reduction in ‘political violence’, points to regrettable inter-ethnic conflicts, and suggests that it is the government’s responsibility to police them. Whenever researchers point out the involvement of national politicians in the supposedly local violence scarring South Sudan, the UN plays a credible Captain Renault at Rick’s, announces its shock, and redoubles its support for the government.

This was not the plan. A decade earlier, on 9 July 2011, dignitaries visited Juba to congratulate themselves on the creation of the world’s newest state. This despite the fact that South Sudan’s new ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), had fought a twenty-two-year-long civil war against the Sudanese government in Khartoum, and that it was the southern Sudanese who had voted to secede from their northern neighbour. For the Americans, British, and Norwegians involved in the peace agreement that ended the civil war, South Sudan was their baby. A World Bank report written shortly before independence brought these neonatal fantasies to their colonial apotheosis, hailing South Sudan as a tabula rasa. There are no roads, no markets, and no institutions, the report stated, and, as the consultants’ eyes gleamed, added: they will need to be created. For the internationals who thronged through Juba’s airport, eager to build a new nation, that South Sudan was terra nullius obviated any need to learn something about the country. Cookie-cutter approaches to statehood and simplistic tales about a victimized Christian south, now free of the yoke of the northern Islamic oppressor, were more functional than a real understanding of the region’s history. A state needed to be built, consequences be damned.

The SPLM’s leadership profited from international ignorance. An enduring aspect of the SPLM’s story is its ability to turn the – often simplistic, if not simply racist – tales outsiders tell about southern Sudan to its own ends. It is equally adept at manufacturing stories destined for external consumption. The SPLM’s first leader, John Garang, was a master in this regard. A charismatic politician with a PhD from Iowa State, Garang started the SPLM in 1983 with a plea for revolution in Khartoum. (Southern independence, diplomatically a lower-hanging fruit, emerged as a goal in part thanks to American pressure.) The incoherence of Garang’s later statements was not the result of insufficient hours in the library, but an appreciation of discordance as a diplomatic tool of the trade. Rebel movements in Sudan have always been reliant on manipulating external supporters. Garang could appear Marxist to the SPLM’s Ethiopian backers and then, following tectonic regional shifts and the collapse of the Derg regime in Addis Ababa, miraculously become the paragon of national self-determination that his American cheerleaders wished him to be. He died in a helicopter crash just after America forced Khartoum to sign a peace agreement in 2005. Amid the disasters of the Middle East, this was to be an easy American foreign policy win. The agreement guaranteed southern Sudan six years of self-rule and a referendum on secession in 2011. Salva Kiir, Garang’s successor, inherited none of his charisma, but all of his ability to manipulate self-regarding foreigners. From 2005–11, as oil revenues and donor funds flowed into the south, Kiir cultivated adoring foreign state-builders, eager to see their dreams of a new nation-state play out. He got into the act himself shortly after independence. South Sudan, he claimed: it’s a tabula rasa!

It wasn’t, of course. Britain took thirty years to pacify southern Sudan, principally via indirect rule, as it classified the region’s many groups according to ethnicity, while setting them against each other. At independence in 1956, northern Sudan, more urbanized, and putatively Arab, was ready to continue British policies, and use the south as a backyard from which resources and labour could be extracted. Sudan’s first civil war (1955–72) had begun the year before independence, pitting the northern elite against the marginalized peripheries of the country. The war ended with socialist dreams of development in the south, aspirations that died when the financial crises of the 1970s hit Sudan, and Khartoum collapsed under its debt burden. The second civil war (1983–2005) began soon after. According to the just-so stories pedalled at South Sudanese independence, the war pitted the northern Sudanese state against rebel groups in the south. In reality, the north borrowed a trick from the British, and set southern populations against each other in violent ethnicized conflicts. For Khartoum, this was war on the cheap. Oil had been discovered in southern Sudan in the late 70s, and the north sponsored militia forces under the command of Paulino Matip to fight the SPLM and clear populations from around the oil wells. Elsewhere, multiple militia groups emerged, frequently changing sides, as they manipulated the winds of regional favour. From the outside, this looked like an intense case of divide-and-rule, the north setting southern groups against each other. Inside southern Sudan, if it’s true that Khartoum manipulated southern commanders, those same commanders also used regional support to build up their own personal empires, transforming the social structure of the region.

Whether commanders were cadres from South Sudan’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka, loyal to the SPLA (the militarized wing of the SPLM), or members of Matip’s militias, largely drawn from the Nuer, the second largest ethnic group in the country, they used weapons from external backers to manipulate humanitarian aid, control cattle and grain markets, and position themselves atop a war economy. Endowed with weapons, they predated on local populations, enriching themselves at the cost of South Sudan’s farmers and pastoralists. Geopolitically dependent on external forces, fighting against each other, these commanders were nonetheless engaged in a process of class formation. It was this militarized class that took over the southern Sudanese state in 2005.

Once the second civil war came to an end, humanitarian supplies were supplemented by more lucrative sources of income. Oil revenues and donor funds went into the pockets of commanders who built a rentier economy predicated on the redistribution of external income to armed supporters. Superficially, a modern, liberal state was being created under the watchful eye of the Adam Smith Institute. Sub mensa, the project of class formation that had begun during the war continued apace. Commanders displaced hostile populations, rewarded loyal constituencies with NGO development projects, and attacked opponents under the guise of disarmament and demobilization campaigns. If in Juba the international community dined out on imported wine and mozzarella in restaurants next to the Nile, in the rest of the country, the civil war continued.

It wasn’t just that the UN and the diplomatic corps were wilfully blind to the travails of the country outside the capital; the very form of the peace deal signed in 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), encouraged this process of class formation. The CPA was a bilateral framework between two belligerent parties: the SPLM and the Sudanese government, and excluded all the militias who had fought against the southern rebel movement. It ignored the fact that for much of southern Sudan, the SPLM was an occupying army. The agreement left no space for political discussion and was designed to move along in a strictly technocratic fashion. This left the problem of all the militia groups around the country. Kiir took a leaf from Khartoum’s playbook and decided to buy them off.

In 2006, the Juba Declaration brought Matip’s militias – amongst many others – into the SPLA, rewarding ephemeral loyalty with petrodollars, and setting in motion a system in which commanders leveraged potential violence into lucrative payoffs. Commanders began to stage rebellions and demand better positions as the price for their reabsorption into the army. The SPLA’s ranks swelled with ghost soldiers, invented so commanders could augment their salaries. Soon, almost the entire state budget was directed to feeding the war machine. None of this was acknowledged by the intentional community. Formally, the South Sudanese state was being built and the army reformed. Millions were spent on fantastical security-sector reforms, dutifully superintended by international consultants, but meaningless outside the air-conditioned offices of the capital. If military reform was a charade, it was dreamt up in London and D.C., and made money for commanders and consultants alike.

Across the country, an increasingly zero-sum politics took hold. Commanders and politicians made ethnicized appeals to their constituencies, setting communities against each other. The state existed on paper, a thin veneer of legitimacy given by the international community to a predatory elite. Most commentators place the end of this bonanza in 2012, when in a stand-off over oil transit fees with Sudan (the only pipeline in the south runs north), the SPLM turned off the oil, activating what Alex de Waal called a ‘doomsday machine’. Without the money to grease the wheels of the commanders’ impressive 4x4s, de Waal held, civil war was imminent. The system would have imploded regardless. Kiir and his clique of largely Dinka politicians could not have indefinitely afforded to stave off war by continuously increasing rentier payments to commanders, especially given the collapse in global oil prices that would follow in 2014. Alarmed by the numerical dominance of Matip’s Nuer forces in the SPLA, Kiir’s clique had begun building up mono-ethnic militias from amongst their home constituencies, recruited outside the ambit of the army. The development of these private militias was simply a reflection of what the army had become: a collection of commanders bound together only by the common project of enrichment.

By June 2013, facing an increasingly austere financial situation, Kiir had dismissed both Riek Machar, his Nuer vice-president, and his cabinet, and it was clear to everyone except the diplomatic corps that war was on the horizon. Fighting within the presidential guard in December 2013 was the spark that set the country aflame. On one side: Kiir, his militias, and what remained of the oil revenue. On the other: Machar and virtually all of the Nuer commanders brought into the SPLA in 2006. It could have been the second civil war, redux, except a regional realignment had occurred. Museveni’s Uganda backed Kiir’s ruling clique and sent troops to stop the nascent rebel force, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Opposition (SPLA-IO), reaching Juba. Khartoum shifted sides. Kiir had pushed out most of the so-called ‘Garang boys’, loyal to the dream of a revolution in Khartoum, and replaced them with southern politicians who had served the northern enemy and more amenable to a settlement with Sudan based on shared economic interests in oil and mining. Without an external backer, the SPLA-IO was soon outgunned. One leading rebel general, Gathoth Gatkuoth, now comfortably ensconced in the government, told a UN investigator that he would happily convert to Islam, if only Khartoum would offer him resupply.

The SPLM was always going to win the war. For Kiir’s clique, the conflict was an opportunity to consolidate control of the country. The war continued the process of class formation, rather than interrupting it. Two modes, one substance. From 2005-13, the government had used county-border redistricting to force opponents from their land. When the war began, the government completed the process, carrying out the wholesale ethnic cleansing of opposition populations. The de facto displacements of the war would then be made the object of de jure legal judgments, following the latest peace agreement, sanctifying the land grabs. In some of the country, displaced populations would then be sent back to work the land they had once possessed, this time as wage labourers. To add insult to injury, the food so produced is sometimes purchased from the elite by donor governments, to be distributed to the displaced as food aid. The great untold story of the South Sudanese civil war is that it has been a massive wealth transfer from an immiserated population to a militarized elite, enabled by the international community.

The only people to not see these continuities are the UN and the diplomatic corps, for whom the civil war came as a shock. Seen dimly from behind the international veil of spreadsheets and guarded compounds, the war was not part of their implementation matrix. There was a timetable for state-building, and war rent it asunder. To repair this hole in the web of time, an army was dispatched from what Séverine Autesserre calls ‘Peaceland’. The courtiers of Peaceland are diplomatic corps, international experts in security-sector reform, and the UN. Soon there were innumerable meetings in expensive hotels in Addis Ababa, many a failed ceasefire, and two peace agreements. The formalized technocratic process of these agreements was as wilfully blind to the real political economy of South Sudan as the state-building process, and was instrumentalized just as easily.

By 2018, the SPLA had won a consummate military victory. The second peace agreement – the one apparently now holding – was effectively a negotiated surrender. Machar slunk back to the capital, dependent on crumbs from Kiir’s table. The security-sector reform process currently underway as part of the agreement is a giant pyramid scheme, in which commanders recruit troops with the promise of wages and ranks, just like it was in the good old days after 2005. No such bonanza is forthcoming. The government is keen not to repeat the Juba Declaration and bring Nuer troops back into the army. In any event, the major military power in the country is now a series of mono-ethnic security services directly controlled by Kiir’s clique. The largest of them, the National Security Service, modelled on Khartoum’s secret police, just had its salary paid via a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

In Juba, the elite has formed a transitional government. The class war continues, this time under conditions of austerity. South Sudan’s greatly reduced oil production has already been pre-sold to Emirati and Qatari banks, and in the place of petrodollars, Kiir’s regime dispenses licenses to commanders and politicians jockeying for position. Their income is derived from land, minerals, taxes, and manipulating humanitarian NGOs. One commander I know makes a good income creating prêt-a-porter compounds on land he has occupied and renting them out to NGOs who are supposed to assist the people the commander has displaced. The elite may be a fractious class, but it is very conscious of the fact that its position depends on the veneer of legitimacy given to it by the peace agreement. It’s a farce that suits everyone in Juba. In countless meetings this year, I have had to field questions from eager diplomats, wondering if the time is ripe to start reforming the army again.

The World Bank formally considers the war a disaster, but in many respects, the conflict has accomplished the goals of the organization. Vast tracts of the country are now uninhabited, as populations withdraw to relatively safer urban areas. South Sudan’s population of 12 million is now 20% urban. The empty land that results can be sold off to foreign companies and local barons. The South Sudanese population, displaced into cities, is increasingly reliant on markets for food and wages for income. Over the last few months, protests and riots have spread throughout the country. Youth groups have demanded that international NGOs employ local people or else leave. Warehouses have been burned. In Juba, internationals dismiss these demands as identarian ethnic claims, created by the manipulations of unscrupulous politicians. There is some truth to these statements, but it is none the less notable that even if youth demands are ethnically articulated, they are nationally identical, and a socio-economic mobilization that the international community would like to downplay. There is, after all, a state to support.

Read on: Alex de Waal, ‘Exploiting Slavery’, NLR I/227.

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Seismographs of Struggle

It was not easy finding the exhibition Sismographie des luttes at the Centre Pompidou. There were no posters to announce its presence outside or in the main hall. When I visited one Saturday morning recently, I even wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake, and the show was already over. Asking one attendant I was directed to the fifth floor but the staff up there at the turnstiles looked at me blankly when I mentioned it. So I wandered through the permanent collection and out into a long corridor where, at the end there was a window looking out across Paris and to the left, with no signage at all, a single room held the exhibition.

It was all a far cry from the previous outings this exhibition has had around the world: in Beirut, Cali, Dakar, Rabat, New York. What the Pompidou effort suggests is a discomfort, embarrassment even, at dealing with the subject of colonialism head-on. This is not something that Beaubourg has been known for engaging with since it opened in 1977.

Taken alone the exhibition reflects only a fraction of the extraordinary project it draws from. This began in 2015 under the direction of Zahia Rahmani, a writer and historian based at the Institut national d’histoire d’art in Paris. For several years she has led a small team of researchers dotted around the world who have been working to track down a thousand journals dating from the 19th Century up to 1989. The oldest on the list dates back to 1817 – the Haitian literary and political journal L’Abeille haytienne – and the subjects they cover range from politics and race to culture of all kinds. Every region is represented. The connecting thread between them is their existence within and in some way in opposition to a system of colonialism or oppression.

‘People are not passive, that’s what interested me’, Rahmani said when we met recently, describing her motivation for seeking out these journals. ‘We should give history another path than that which consists in thinking that everything emanates from the declaration of human rights.’

There are so many striking journals in the collection, and to see them revived in this way is moving and inspiring. Some existed for only a few issues, such as Zimbabwe’s Black and White that dealt with racial politics in 1966-67, while others such as the literary journal Sur from Buenos Aires – which treated social problems and was briefly banned under Peron – operated from 1931 until 1992. Others remain in circulation today. The geographical and topical range is remarkable. Indigenous populations from Australia to North America have their place, so too do an impressive selection of feminist publications from the Middle East and Asia, such as the striking Seito founded in Japan in 1911 which tackled homosexuality, drugs and abortion. To go through the list is to have so many new doors opened: one wants to walk through them all. There is the Turkish Šehbāl for example, active from 1909 to 1914, that covered music, philosophy and women’s rights and contained many stunning photographs and illustrations, or the satirical Phong Hóa whose pages were full of sharp-witted cartoons, appearing weekly out of Hanoi from 1932 until it was banned by the French authorities three years later.

To better grasp the scope of the project, and delve further into it, one must turn to the two catalogues published by Nouvelles Editions Place, and above all the online portal SISMO, an invaluable resource that continues to expand as the team’s research goes on. Free to access, anyone can explore the entire list, which leads to full digitalised contents for some, and at the very least a dedicated page containing information on origin, lifespan, language and cover image – so often a gem of graphic design, such as the art nouveau illustrations of Althaqafat alisuria, a journal of Syrian culture from 1934, or the bold covers of Mozambique Revolution that ran from 1963 to 1975, throughout the war of independence from Portugal. 

But the exhibition allows us to see the journals as material objects, complete with yellowing pages and dog-ears that evoke the many hands they once passed through. In the Pompidou’s room a few glass cases display editions of selected journals, highlighting the myriad formats used, from the broadsheet The Black Panther that the party put out, to a review such as Proa set up by Borges in 1922 that mixed sizes, with one issue on display around A5, another just under A2. Seeing all this gives a real and palpable quality to the radical contents of these journals: aesthetic objects that were also instruments of struggle. As Rahmani put it, all those involved in these journals over two centuries

participated in an aesthetic that is not violent. Of course there is violence in the sense that people are fighting, but they are struggling to be able to preserve a culture, or even their language, the possibility of living together, and of not living under coercion. They find release through the journal because it is not a weapon, it is a negotiation . . . and that’s what the installation showed me, that over two centuries there is a temptation to still nevertheless seduce the one who oppresses you, by reminding him who you are.

The contents of the exhibition has varied according to the location, with each space tending to showcase journals that relate to the local context and hold events to encourage people to delve into the issues they raised. None of this at Beaubourg. The selection here is both minimal and flat – the journals are presented as artefacts rather than alive and still the source of relevant debate. Also missing is a table with computers allowing visitors to explore the journals beyond those displayed in the room, something that was a feature at the other locations.

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the Pompidou and elsewhere is a film installation, which is made up of two sets of three still images projected against two walls showing around 450 journals and 900 documents. This runs on a loop to a soundtrack composed by Jean-Jacques Palix, a mixture of instrumental music with archive extracts from speeches made in defence of causes related to the journals. We see covers, inside pages, photographs of founding editors or other key figures. There is also a seventh image projected between the two sets of three with short paragraphs of text telling us about a particular journal, or related quotes. The semi-darkness of the Pompidou setting is another underwhelming choice on the part of the museum. Other venues provided the film installation with the cinematic setting it demands. At the Beirut Art Centre for example, the exhibition was held in such a dark space that it encouraged visitors to sit and watch the film all the way through. And indeed it is worth taking the time to experience the powerful, cumulative effect of viewing these hundreds of examples of printed resistance over more than a century, from all across the world.

The thousand journals are in around 70 different languages, including Creole variations, Mohawk, Tibetan, Zulu, Uyghur and Laotian, to cite only a few. But 222 of the journals are in French, 217 in English, and 199 in Spanish. This forces the question of intended audience ­– employing the language of the ruling power meant that many groups had no chance of reading the articles defending their cause. And it is here that the double function of the journals is evident: their memorial function for history, and their active function, ‘aimed at trying to develop within the colonial system a sensitivity towards them’, as Rahmani put it. ‘What is incredible is how these intellectuals manage this transition, they speak the language of empire, they master it, but they address empire in a critical fashion. It is very courageous’. Courageous is, indeed, the overriding impression one has when looking and exploring all these publications, now given a second life.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Planet Malaquais’, NLR 84.

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Back to the Present

In his 2011 essay ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, Perry Anderson writes that ‘in one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history’, the historical novel ‘has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than even at the height of its classical period during the early nineteenth century’. This, he observed, was somewhat paradoxical, for this renewed popularity coincided with postmodernism, the aesthetic regime, as Fredric Jameson put it, ‘of an age that has forgotten how to think historically’. Riding roughshod over the ‘classical form’, taxonomized by Georg Lukács in his canonical study of Walter Scott’s Waverly, postmodern- or meta-historical fiction had succeeded in reinvigorating a genre that, for thirty years after the Second World War, had contributed little more than a ‘few antique jewels on a huge mound of trash’. Linear historical necessity was jettisoned for ludic counterfactuals and chronological violations; romantic-nationalist aetiologies for imperial eschatologies; liberal faith that the clash of social forces would lead to progress with the suspicion that this was nothing more than a conspiracy of permanent catastrophe. Yet here was a case of a rising tide that lifted all boats: alongside these innovations in the genre, ‘more traditional forms have proliferated too’.

A decade later, the historical novel has cemented its status as a literary form. It is a matter of debate whether we have remembered how to think historically again, but owing to the contemporary political landscape, we have at least remembered that we ought to. That the genre, in both traditional and postmodern variants, continues to grow in popularity and respectability ­among Anglophone readers, writers, and awards-committees remains paradoxical, but perhaps no longer quite for the reason Anderson gives. Two defining features of today’s Anglophone literary culture are a moral imperative to enable historically marginalized voices to speak of, for, and by themselves, and an extreme scepticism about the ability of language to represent other minds, especially across the differences occasioned by marginalization. Whatever impact this moral-epistemic antinomy may have on narratives set in the present – where, perhaps not unrelatedly, memoir and autofiction increasingly hold sway – it is in principle fatal to the historical novel, a genre in which the possibility of representing ‘lived experience’ is by definition foreclosed. In her collection American Innovations (2014), the Canadian-American writer Rivka Galchen rewrote canonical short fictions as though they were narrated by women; the resulting pastiches provide a sharp commentary on the gendered assumptions baked in to putatively ‘universal’ works of literature written by men. But in her new novel Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Galchen attempts to transfer this approach to a real historical figure, only to get caught on the horns of this contemporary paradox.

Set largely in Leonberg, a small village in the Duchy of Württemberg, Everyone Knows tells the story of Katharina Kepler, mother of the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who, in 1615, was accused of poisoning the wife of a local glazer, Ursula Reinbold, and charged with sorcery. She was tried, arrested, had her property expropriated, and spent fourteen months in prison under the threat of torture before being acquitted in 1621. She died the following April, effectively ostracized from the community. Meanwhile, Johannes (defamiliarized as ‘Hans’ in the novel), who took an active role in his mother’s defence, completed his work on the laws of planetary motion, and three Catholic officials were thrown from the top window of Prague Castle, sparking what would become the Thirty Years War, by far the most destructive conflict, measured in terms of percentage of population loss, in European history.

We are reading about Katharina of course, rather than one of the tens of thousands of other women subject to witch trials in Early Modern Germany, because of her proximity to the world-historical figure of Johannes. In Galchen’s rendering, Katherina is a recognizable figure from small town life: a busybody and a know-it-all with a sharp tongue, a speciality in herbal remedies, and a worldview grounded in stolid, peasant wisdom. In another time and place, her combination of ordinary vices and virtues might have made her merely an endearing or irritating neighbour, but as an old woman in the Holy Roman Empire in the first quarter of the 17th century, it left her vulnerable to the kinds of opportunism, resentment, misunderstanding, and prejudice that led to the ordeal that marred her sunset years, and perhaps hastened her death. What makes her an ‘average hero’, in the sense Lukács extrapolated from Scott, is that by refusing to confess to the sorcery charge, she manages to retain her individual dignity in the face of enormous social pressure. What makes her a good candidate for a protagonist in our contemporary moment is that she is not just marginalized from history, but multiply marginalized: she is female, elderly, a widow, a peasant, and also – perhaps most importantly – illiterate.

Given this last fact, the most straightforward novelistic approach would be to employ third person point of view, which would allow Galchen the greatest purchase on her protagonist’s state of mind, as well as a stable chronological point beyond the action from which to telescope her story; in other words, to dispense with a realism of presentation for a realism of effects. This has been the procedure of a number of other recent historical fictions set in the period between the publication of the 95 Theses and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy (2009-2020), Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2019), Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor (2020), as well as John Banville’s earlier Kepler (1981), which treats some of the same events. But as this narrative mode would give peasant Katharina a proto-bourgeois (one is tempted to say proto-novelistic) consciousness, and as it would preclude her from ‘speaking in her own voice’, Galchen chooses, in a somewhat postmodern vein, to foreground the ways in which our access to history is always already mediated, and in doing so paints herself into a narrative corner.

Dramatizing a detail from the historical record, Galchen stages the main part of the novel as Katharina’s first person ‘truest testimony’ to her neighbour, Simon Satler, a reclusive widower who is pressed into service as Katharina’s legal guardian and stenographer. The testimony’s plausibility as legal document is blunted by Katharina’s persistent impolitic comments, but worse than that, in order to convey information to the reader, she must tell Simon many things he already knows. (The text is littered with variations on the qualifying phrase ‘as I don’t need to tell you, Simon.’) Then, in order to account for his presence in the text, Galchen introduces a section from his point of view (‘I thought it would be clarifying if I, Simon, explained myself here’, he says, inaccurately), which further exacerbates the narrative’s ungainliness. When, in another awkward concession to the historical record, Simon bows out from participating in Katharina’s legal defence three-quarters of the way through the book, the narrative falls into the lap of her daughter Greta. Interspersed between these sections is a cache of other fictionalized documents, including duelling petitions from Johannes and the Reinbolds, the prosecutor’s summation, and dozens of transcripts of witness testimony from the villagers of Leonberg.

If Galchen’s intention was to centre Katherina, this cacophony of textual mediation produces the opposite effect. Once the trial concludes, Katharina’s rationale for telling her story disappears, and she more-or-less disappears with it. In an epilogue, which takes place ‘twelve or so years’ after the conclusion of the trial, Katharina’s acquittal – which should be the novel’s climax – is treated as an afterthought. ‘What a fool I am’, Simon writes, ‘to forget that a reader might not know the fate of Katharina’. Being a matter of historical record, Katharina’s fate is never in doubt, nor are we likely to take the charge of witchcraft seriously, which means our sympathies are never in doubt either. Whether our preferred explanation is that the witch craze was a remnant of pagan folk rituals interpreted through the lens of Christian demonology (Ginzburg), a displacement of the scapegoat mechanism from other victims – Jews, heretics – onto older women (Cohn), a femicide motivated by primitive accumulation during the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Federici), or something else entirely, it is likely that nearly all readers will hold the view that there are no such thing as witches, that anyone accused of witchcraft is ipso facto innocent, and that, as a corollary, anyone who accuses someone of witchcraft is motivated by some combination of superstition, misogyny, or malice.

This view is shared by some of the characters in the novel – by Simon, for example – but not, for what it’s worth, by Katharina herself. (For Katharina, witches are indeed real – the titular accusation is first uttered not about her, as one might expect, but by her – only she is not one of them.) In an interview, Galchen also expressed ambivalence about it. In the early stages of writing she thought, ‘The only way for this to be interesting is for [Katharina] to be a witch’. In the end, however, she opted for a more contemporary understanding of the figure, according to which, in the words of the interviewer, those who were accused of witchcraft ‘were often just successful or unpredictable women’. This metonymic substitution of personal qualities for supernatural abilities betrays a longing to preserve something of the witch’s power at a symbolic level while retaining our sympathies for her as a real victim of persecution. But as gruesome as they were, the witch trials were ordinary atrocities during a period that saw war, starvation, cannibalism, the plague, pogroms, mass rape, and the wholesale destruction of cities, most famously, of Magdeburg, where, over four days in 1631, some twenty thousand people were put to the sword. Just as being unsuccessful and predictable was no guarantee of safety, being successful and unpredictable was a liability that was not just limited to women, as the cases of Bruno, Galileo, and Johannes himself would illustrate. The witch trial is what creates the witch; much as we might desire otherwise, we cannot have the latter, even symbolically, without the former.

A further consequence of Galchen’s narrative strategy is that the trial produces not only the pretext, but also the conditions of possibility for Katharina to tell her story at all. With one exception, the speech of all the characters is mediated, directly or indirectly, by the juridical apparatus of the nascent European state system. That exception is Simon, whose narrative, having displaced Katharina’s, is mediated instead by the market. The epilogue takes place at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Simon has come to hawk the ‘important manuscript’ we have been reading, or at least the bits of it he has access to. (In any event, this narrative device cannot account for even the existence of his sections, since Simon is ultimately unsuccessful in selling the manuscript, in part, because he has ‘not figured out how to describe it’ to potential publishers – a startling admission, coming so close to the end of Everyone Knows.) What the Frankfurt setting provides, however, is a direct, institutional connection from the early stages of capitalism to today’s literary marketplace. This, in turn, provides a glimpse of the moment at which enchanted ontology of the Middle Ages is swallowed whole by the commodity form, where it has been imprisoned ever since. Then as now, the battering ram of the new theological-economic order has been one commodity in particular: the printed book.

At the Fair, Simon runs into Johannes’ widow, Susanna, who has come to find a publisher for an unpublished manuscript from his Nachlaß. When Simon first sees her, she is standing between two stalls selling Luther’s pamphlets and Johannes von Tepl’s poem Death and the Ploughman. ‘So the stalls…sold books from a century ago’, he muses. ‘Why no interest in the awful and dramatic present?’ In the mind of one of the characters this thought is an anachronism, but the question of course is Galchen’s. Galchen has dusted Everyone Knows with allusions to our own ‘awful and dramatic present’ (largely to the pandemic) but these do not map neatly enough onto it to function as prefigurative allegory (the most obvious similarities – to #MeToo and to Donald Trump’s frequent references to investigations into his activities as a businessman, candidate and president as ‘witch hunts’ have the inverse moral valences). The part of the present that comes through instead is a comfortable nostalgia, a longing for what we have lost to progress, whose compensations are inevitably taken for granted and are thus – given the persistence in milder form of some of the real defects of the past (plagues, moral panics, gendered violence) – experienced as insufficient and disappointing.

The novel’s thematic contradictions are symptoms of this nostalgia, which emerges most powerfully in Simon’s final meeting with Susanna. The book she is selling is Somnium, an early work by Johannes which folds a treatise on lunar astronomy into a dream narrative. In the dream, a young astronomer, a student of Tycho Brahe, takes a voyage to the moon, with the help of his mother, a herbalist and healer with magical powers, that is, a witch. It is unclear when the details about Brahe and the mother-character were added to the original text, but in Everyone Knows, Susanna claims that they are ‘prophecy’ of the future rather than biographical details added after Johannes’ own work with Brahe and his involvement with Katharina’s trial. What is important here is the future orientation implied by the word ‘prophecy’, as well as the lunar voyage, which has led Somnium to be categorised as an early instance of science fiction. The presence of a real science fiction text in a contemporary historical novel should come as no surprise: Jameson has argued that historical fiction is really a species of science fiction, since the former is nothing more than the ‘time travel of historical tourism’. Of her rationale for writing Everyone Knows, Galchen has said: ‘I was desperate to escape…Even before the pandemic I was just like, I’ve got to get out of this moment. I’m leaving this year. I’m leaving the century. I’m leaving the US’. But as with spatial tourism, in temporal tourism, we always pack ourselves in our suitcase. Our contemporary science fictions are dominated by visions of apocalyptic catastrophe, whereas in choosing to time travel instead to early 17th century Germany, Galchen has allowed readers to escape to a world in which, despite all of its drawbacks, people could be said to hold out belief in and hope for the future. The catch, of course, is that what their future produces is us.

Read on: Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Witches and Shamans’, NLR I/200.

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Majidi in Context

Sun Children, the latest film of renowned Iranian director Majid Majidi, is easily his finest since Children of Heaven (1997). It is also his most radical work in years, taking aim at various aspects of contemporary Iranian society. It follows a group of underclass boys who enrol in school after Ali, the leader of the gang, is tipped off by a local crime boss that there is treasure buried beneath the school building. The children search for it while trying not to arouse the suspicions of the school authorities, yet the precarity of their home lives continually threatens to undermine their project. Drug rackets and addiction have torn their families apart. The parents are mostly absent; when they appear, it is to lambast the children for not working full-time. The school itself is the only institution in the area that caters to children from such backgrounds. Condemned to haggle for pennies from its small circle of donors, at one point the school is temporarily shut down for late rent payments. Like its students, it exists on society’s fringes.

The film’s depiction of Tehran’s poor however avoids didacticism. Instead, it provides an expansive portrait of the city that sheds light on its neglected corners. To find his protagonists, Majidi auditioned almost four thousand children from the city’s poor neighbourhoods – those selected give authentic, heart-rending performances. The narrative is fast-paced, aided by a stylistic trait of regular jump cuts, but the film widens its scope beyond the protagonists to broader political questions: society’s treatment of children, the effects of privatized education on the poor, the exclusion of migrants from the nation’s welfare system. One of Ali’s closest friends is an Afghan boy doubly oppressed by this configuration. Often employed as peddlers and hawkers, Afghan children receive low wages and face periodic police crackdowns in Iran. By attending school, the boy does not realize that he is committing an illegal act which may result in his family being deported.

This is one of several moments where Majidi contrasts the innocence of his child protagonists with the brutal world of politics, which is portrayed as corrupt and exploitative. When the school director signals his intention to run in the city council elections, his colleague tells him that he is bound to become ‘just like the rest of them’. The film is no less sparing in its depiction of the police: when a young girl is caught selling goods on the metro, they shave her head in an act of cruelty. But for Majidi this conflict between child and adult worlds runs both ways. In one of Sun Children’s most ecstatic scenes, the students climb the school gates to reclaim the building from the landlord who has locked them out. The children’s games, and the social ties which they engender, provide a bulwark against the practices of the adults around them.

Given Sun Children’s critical depiction of state authorities and rent-seekers, many western viewers will likely interpret it as a critique of the Iranian regime as such. Yet this is far from the director’s intention. Within Tehran’s predominantly secular and liberal film circles, Majidi is one of the few prominent figures with impeccable Islamic revolutionary credentials. He defends the Islamic Republic at every opportunity, describing the 1979 revolution as an attempt to realise spiritual ideals through political action. At the 2020 Venice Film Festival, he remarked that if the socio-economic situation in Iran compares unfavourably to that of other countries in the region, this was not because of the government, but rather the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States. Majidi is also one of the few directors who has made multiple high-profile visits to the Supreme Leader. It is believed that some of his productions have received financial and logistical support from the Revolutionary Guards.

How, then, should we locate his most recent film politically? It is not a straightforward question, for Majidi does not fit neatly into either reformist or conservative camps. In the 2009 presidential elections he voted for the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, yet he later cooperated closely with the conservative government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His films stand apart from the social realism of reformist directors like Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi or Mohammad Rasoulof, who are primarily interested in exploring gender roles and family dynamics among the middle classes. Yet they also diverge from conservative directors like Saeed Roustayi or Narges Abyar, who treat spiritual themes of sin and salvation through glorified depictions of the police, military and judiciary.

What most distinguishes Sun Children from both these traditions is its emphasis on issues of labour and working conditions. Child labour plays a pivotal role throughout the film, often in subtle and oblique ways. The protagonists make a living by recycling car parts and tires, while their friends sell cheap Chinese imports to commuters on public transport. Majidi foregrounds the arduous manual work of the treasure hunt, with Ali digging a long tunnel under the school over the course of several days. Work and play for the children often overlap, and although adults occasionally exploit this for their own benefit, they also allow the protagonists to forge bonds of solidarity which seem to bridge ethnic, national and gender differences.

Such themes align the film with the heterogenous ‘justice-seeking’ (edalatkhah) movement, which has become increasingly active in Iran in recent years. Like Majidi, this movement is religious and nostalgic. It campaigns for a return to the egalitarian values of 1979, demanding increased popular political participation and democratic accountability. Led by a cohort of young activists, many of them from poor backgrounds, the justice-seeking movement fills a void left by the defeat of earlier reformist tendencies. As Western sanctions have deepened inequality and intensified state repression, middle-class liberal activism has been beaten back. In its place, this more provincial, religious and working-class formation has emerged. Although the movement remains fragmented, localized and without strong national leadership, justice-seekers have won popularity in part thanks to their strong stance against economic sanctions and American imperialism.

Over the past decade, this coalition has developed through close interaction with Iran’s growing labour movement – itself an outcome of widespread discontent with economic liberalization and the sanctions regime. Students and even clerics have stood alongside a newly mobilized cadre of workers, occasionally joining them in demonstrations and sit-ins. Supportive activists frequently write for provincial and national news outlets, and, through their ties to local government institutions and police forces, are often able to negotiate the release of workers arrested during protests. In the disastrous final years of the Rouhani presidency, they often received the support of Ebrahim Raisi himself – at the time head of the judiciary and, with his eyes fixed on the elections, clearly intent on discrediting the government.

It is perhaps in this nexus between labour, religion and rights that Majidi’s latest work can be best understood. While justice-seeking activists typically marshal only limited support, and while their relation to the incoming Raisi government remains unclear, Sun Children has brought their concerns to the big screen. If Majidi has gained his respected status and political connections by defending the Islamic Republic against its foreign critics, he may now have become an important ally of those seeking to change it from within.

Zep Kalb & Masoumeh Hashemi, ‘Tehran’s Universal Studios’, NLR 121.

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Red Lines

On Monday 21 June the Swedish government fell. It was a strange coalition, voted down by another strange coalition. The administration was led by the Social Democrats (SAP), with the right-wing former trade union leader, Stefan Löfven, as Prime Minister. It included the smallest parliamentary party, the Environment Party, and relied on a confidence-and-supply arrangement with Sweden’s two most neoliberal groupings: the Centre Party and the Liberals. Its parliamentary majority was also contingent upon the votes of the Left Party, which last week withdrew its support, joining with the three conservative parties – the Moderates, the Sweden Democrats and the Christian Democrats – to pass a motion of no confidence. The Centre and the Liberals abstained.

Sweden has a parliamentary system based on proportional representation in multi-member constituencies, with the threshold for representation set at 4% of the national vote. Eight parties currently sit in parliament. The reason for the bizarre political games of recent weeks was a deadlock in which neither the left-of-centre – composed of the Social Democrats, the Left and the Environment Party – nor the traditional bourgeois bloc of Moderates, Centre, Christian Democrats and Liberals, could command a majority.

Until recently the third largest party – the xenophobic Sweden Democrats, with roots in the neo-Nazi and white power movements of the 1980s and 90s – was regarded as beyond the pale. In the other Nordic countries, xenophobic parties have formed governments or been invited into bourgeois coalitions. But Sweden remains more open and tolerant than its neighbours, with a significantly larger immigrant population. In 2018 the Social Democrats had their worst electoral result since the introduction of near-universal male suffrage in 1911, winning only 28.3%. Yet they remained the largest party, 8% ahead of the Moderates. After four months of negotiations a government accord was reached, keeping the Sweden Democrats out, and winning the support of the Centre and Liberals in exchange for 73 separate policy commitments.

These included: maintaining possibilities for profit maximation in social services; dismantling the public labour exchanges that were once the lynchpin of the social democratic full employment policy; changing labour legislation to make it easier to fire certain employees; and abolishing rent controls in new housing projects. The list also contained some modest climate policies, more resources for regions and municipalities, and one meagre social democratic proposal: a ‘family week’ which gives parents three days off to spend with their children during the school holidays.

The pact was a major achievement for the Centre and Liberals, who got the SAP to accept a number of policies which had been ruled out by the Moderate-led coalition of 2006-14. In exchange, the Social Democrats got the premiership and split the bourgeois bloc. The Left got nothing, apart from an insulting clause stating that they should have no influence on budgetary decisions. Yet its parliamentary support was necessary for the new government, and in the end it acquiesced to the SAP after intensive talks with Löfven.

The Swedish Left Party grew out of the Communist Party, which since 1964 was the pioneering ‘Eurocommunist’ formation avant la lettre: democratic, critical of the USSR, heterodox and intellectually engaged (it invited the editors of New Left Review to one of its seminars in the 1960s). A small party polling at 4–5%, it was quickly overwhelmed by international headwinds: the invasion of Czechoslovakia (which it condemned), the spread of Maoism, and post-1968 neocommunism. But it survived amid these difficulties, and from 1990 began the process of social democratization, completed after roughly two decades of internal conflict and external anti-communist bombardment. Today, the party sees itself as heir to an earlier form of social democracy, though it rejects the radical independent internationalism of Olof Palme, adhering to a conventional liberal worldview. Jonas Sjöstedt, its leader from 2012 to 2020, became one of the most popular politicians in the country, while his successor, Nooshi Dadgostar – a Sweden-born woman of Iranian descent – has earned respect from her confrontations with the SAP. With a vote of 8% in the 2018 election and a consistent programme of left social democratic, feminist and ecological reformism, the party has performed better than its Eurocommunist counterparts in Italy, France and Spain.

Upon signing the arrangement with Löfven, the Left issued a warning. If the government ever tried to change job security legislation or abolish rent controls, it would immediately call a no-confidence vote. The Social Democrats skilfully avoided the labour rights controversy, getting the two biggest unions to sign a new agreement with employers which relaxed job security in exchange for other provisions: the right to a permanent job after three years of temporary employment, and a publicly financed right to retraining and ‘competence development’. But last month the issue of rent controls appeared on the agenda, with a parliamentary committee proposing market rents in new housing developments. The SAP claimed it was in favour of continued rent controls in principle, but accepted the committee’s recommendation because of its 73-point agreement with the neoliberal parties. To Löfven’s surprise, the Left reminded him of its red line from 2019 and prepared a no-confidence motion. The conservative opposition parties – who are in favour of market rents – opportunistically joined the Left, and the political crisis was detonated. At this point, the Swedish constitution gave the Prime Minister two options. He could resign, prompting negotiations moderated by the Speaker to find a PM acceptable to parliament (which would give Löfven the chance to reassemble a majority); or he could call a snap election. Last Monday he announced his resignation.

Sweden’s parliamentary crisis raises various questions about the condition of centre-left politics, the fortunes of European social democracy and the weakness of the left, which may at least be outlined here. While social democracy has suffered a general breakdown rooted in the mutations of finance capitalism, today’s centre-left parties are facing highly differentiated problems and prospects. An understanding of this can be gained by locating the parties in their various democratic systems.

The smoothest terrain lies in front of the Anglo Labour parties of Australia, Britain and New Zealand, which inhabit one part of a (largely) two-party landscape, fortified by first-past-the-post electoral systems. Once a party has gained a seat at a two-party table, under these rules it is likely to win power sooner or later. It may lose its position, as the British Liberals did, but that requires the rise of a new, cohesive, self-conscious class (e.g. the industrial working class in the early 20th century), and the Anglo Labour parties have already taken out middle-class insurance against any repetition of this process. Last October, NZ Labour captured just over 50% of all votes, up 13% since 2017.

Another decent bet on the future of social democracy is the Iberian model, where the centre-left can claim to represent the nation’s democratic transition. In Spain and Portugal, the main right-wing opponents of the government are about the same size as the ruling party, operating in a system of proportional representation. In both cases they have recently overcome the liberal taboo against cooperating with the radical left, thereby gaining some autonomy from the centre-right.  

Meanwhile, the once powerful Nordic welfare state-builders have lost their parliamentary dominance, most likely for ever. They are now cut down to between 20% and 30% of the vote, with the Finnish falling even below that. But they are in competition with a disparate set of centre-right parties, which sometimes allows them to occupy a pivotal position despite their weak poll ratings – hence the social democratic-led coalitions of Denmark, Finland and (until recently) Sweden. More than their sister parties, these organizations have also retained something of their working-class and popular roots.

The mid-European coalition parties – in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland – are located in polycentric political systems of proportional representation, and are accustomed to serving in government. These parties have played a part in the development of national and local welfare states, though often a constricted and subordinate one. They will probably keep this modest role; although the Dutch Labour Party in particular has seen a drop-off in support, gaining only 5.7% of the vote in the two latest elections.

Two grand social democratic parties – in Austria and Germany – are in great trouble, facing unified bourgeois blocs of (mainly Catholic) Christian Democracy. Without the protection of a Westminster-style electoral system, they are in danger of being relegated to third-party status. German polls are currently showing the SPD placed well below the Greens. The historical core of European social democracy is unlikely to play any leading domestic political role in the near future.

Social democracy returned to Eastern Europe mainly thanks to converted communists, but their principal contribution to post-Soviet society has been liberal EU-philia and NATO-fication, rather than social democratic reforms. This imbalance between foreign policy and popular domestic concerns has cost the converts dearly. Social questions have become the preserve of hard-right conservatives, whose popular support has steadily risen. Almost all social democratic parties of Eastern Europe have also been involved in corruption scandals at the highest level. Only in the smallest and the poorest countries in the Balkan periphery – primarily Albania and North Macedonia – could social democracy conceivably retain substantial influence in the coming years.

Finally, we have the casualties: parties lethally wounded in Italy, France and Greece. In all three, but most of all in Italy, the whole party system has become unhinged and volatile. In Italy the PCI and the PSI both dissolved in the early 1990s. The socialists have virtually disappeared, while the prolonged dilution of Italian communism has all but severed its roots in the labour movement. Nonetheless, the Partito Democratico – with its changeable political colours – remains a significant player in the coalition games of this fractured party system.

In France, the Socialist party which carried Mitterand to power was formed only in 1971, and in the presidential election of 2017 its candidate was supported by 6.4% of voters. But it is likely that a new, potentially significant centre-left party of the highly educated middle-classes – Piketty’s ‘Brahmins’ – will soon be established. In Greece, PASOK is trying to regroup by gathering some other centre-left currents into the so-called Movement for Change. The standard-bearer for centre-left decline, PASOK is Europe’s only social democratic party clearly overtaken by a more progressive challenger – apart perhaps from Ireland’s Labour Party, now languishing behind Sinn Féin. Only in southern Europe have significant new left parties and movements emerged in this century: Syriza in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy, La France Insoumise, Podemos in Spain, the Left Bloc in Portugal. But for the time being, their way forward seems limited. With no majority in sight for any of these parties, parliamentary manoeuvring and extra-parliamentary politics are their only foreseeable future.

Sweden’s political turmoil is far from over. Löfven – more disposed to compromise than to fight – is hoping to return as premier after new rounds of horse-trading. His chances are slightly better than 50%. The parties which previously backed him as Prime Minister – the SAP, Centre, Left, Environment Party – have 175 seats against the conservative opposition’s 174. But given the Left’s withdrawal, there are MPs in the former bloc whose vote, or even presence, is uncertain. Löfven will be able to return to the role of PM unless there is a majority against him. But in order to get a budget passed he needs to have a majority himself – and the Centre has again refused to countenance any budget negotiations with the Left.

The government coming out of the new Speaker Rounds will probably be even more right-wing than the one which fell on 21 June – either because the conservatives will win the premier lottery, or because the neoliberal Centre will have extorted further concessions from the SAP. The Left, however, can be satisfied that it has stopped the abolition of rent controls for the time being, and improved its poll ratings by refusing to cross its red line. Commentators expect that if a new Löfven government is eventually established, it will have to give something meaningful to Dadgostar in order to get its budget passed.

The Swedish crisis therefore demonstrates the space that still exists for political manoeuvre among the representatives of Nordic social democracy, embedded in multi-party systems with divided right and centre-right parties. Yet the current parliamentary distribution of power in the European systems of proportional representation creates dilemmas for traditional social democrats, as well as newer left groupings: dilemmas between, on one hand, pragmatic negotiations, compromises and influence; and on the other, robust programmes, principles and isolation. Effective politics in these contexts requires a dose of both, but a stable equilibrium between them is elusive.

European social democracy got a second chance at power in the 1990s, after the first neoliberal shockwave in the East as well as in the West. After some initial success, it squandered this opportunity – possibly forever – through tone-deaf neoliberal adaptations. The Third Way produced xenophobic populism and a new hard right while also showing the weakness and narrowmindedness of the left. In Sweden, Dadgostar’s invocation of industrial-society social democracy may have some short-term tactical advantage but is hardly an adequate response to the complex 21st-century challenges facing any socialist project. If such parties are to overcome the dilemmas thrown up by divided parliaments, more creativity will be required.

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

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Crypto-Politics

Philosophy in the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition has a strange relationship with politics. Normally seen as originating with Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein in the early 20th century, analytic philosophy was originally concerned with using formal logic to clarify and resolve fundamental metaphysical questions. Politics was largely ignored, according to the Oxford analyst Anthony Quinton, before the late 1960s. Political philosophy, in fact, was routinely pronounced ‘dead’ at the hands of the analysts – so dead that the tepid output of John Rawls (whose A Theory of Justice was published in 1971) could appear as a revival.

At the same time, analytic philosophers were not uninterested in politics. Bertrand Russell is an especially well-known case, but other figures such as A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire – both supporters of the Labour Party (and in Ayer’s case, later the Social Democratic Party) and critics of the Vietnam War – were also politically involved. The reluctance to engage with politics in their professional capacities might seem thus to reflect not lack of political interest, but a view of philosophy as a largely separate sphere. Russell, for example, wrote that his ‘technical activities must be forgotten’ in order for his popular political writings to be properly understood, while Hampshire argued that although analytic philosophers ‘might happen to have political interests, […] their philosophical arguments were largely neutral politically.’

While at times insistent on the detachment of their philosophy from politics – stretching to a pride in the ‘conspicuous triviality’ of their own activity that the critic of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ Ernest Gellner saw as requiring the explanation of social historians – the analysts at other times floated some quite strong claims as to the political value and potential of their own ways of doing things. As Thomas Akehurst has shown, ‘many of the leading British analytic philosophers of the post-war period made it clear that they took analytic philosophy to be in alliance with liberalism’ and ventured that certain analytic ‘habits of mind’ – in particular those associated with the ‘empiricist’ school dominant at that time – might offer a crucial protective against various forms of ‘fanaticism’.

It was less clear how this was supposed to work. The analysts’ own pronouncements on the relationship between their philosophy and politics seem to amount to little more than a declaration of a monopoly on openness, a boast of humility, a set of dogmatic and opaque assertions about the inhospitability of the analytic method to dogma and opacity (‘no-bullshit bullshit’, to borrow the moniker later bestowed on the so-called ‘no bullshit’ school of ‘analytical Marxism’ by its critics). ‘Empiricism is hostile to humbug and obscurity, to the dogmatic authoritative mood, to every sort of ipse dixit’, the Oxford philosopher H. H. Price had written already in 1940: ‘The same live-and-let-live principles […] are characteristic of liberalism too.’ In a similar vein, in his 1950 essay ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Russell describes empiricism (‘the scientific outlook’) as ‘the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of liberalism’, and hailed Locke as the exemplification of the ‘order without authority’ allegedly central to both philosophies.

Between them, Russell and Price seem to be suggesting a series of links between 1. clarity, 2. the rejection of epistemic authority (amounting to a value of ‘thinking for yourself’); and 3. the rejection of political authoritarianism, a rejection which is assimilated to 4. liberalism, seemingly interchangeable with 5. democracy. Besides the looseness of the conceptual links in this chain, there are questions to be asked about its attachment to reality: about the relationship of these assertions by the analysts to actual analytic philosophy and philosophers, and to actual liberalism and liberals respectively. When Price lauds an intellectual culture ‘of free, co-operative inquiry, in which anyone may put forward any hypothesis he likes, […] provided it makes sense’ (which presumably means: makes sense to analytic philosophers), he evokes an image of a non-hierarchical, egalitarian discipline that is likely to strike those with experience of the culture of analytic philosophy as something of an idealization, to say the least. As for liberalism, Locke, and ‘order without authority’: what can you say, apart from maybe, ‘Don’t mention the slavery’?

Here we touch on another aspect of the analysts’ inchoate claim to offer a protective against political vice or misadventure. This is the wariness of ‘ideology’ and ‘theory’ (especially of the ‘grand’ variety). As Akehurst parses it, the idea is that a ‘focus on the concrete saves the empiricist from following grand theories, metaphysical chimeras and other strictly meaningless exhortations to devalue reality in favour of dangerous ideological fantasy.’ The thought here is intuitive enough, and liberals are not the only ones to feel its force – something like it is a theme of much anarchist writing, for instance. Yet whatever is to be said about it, it cannot be so simple as ‘Theory bad, Reality good.’ Rigid adherence to ideals, theories or principles can play its part in the commission of atrocities. But, first, what entitles liberals to the assumption that it is only other people who have ‘theories’? And second, can’t there be a converse and equal danger in the lack of fixed principles? Is ‘never torture’ a dangerous piece of dogma? Is it better to cast off such ideological baggage and keep all options on the table, doing as the facts of the situation (as we see them) demand? Liberalism’s history, in any case, boasts its fair share of terrible deeds committed both in the service of ‘grand ideals’ (for what else can we call ‘Liberty’?) as well as in response to the more ‘concrete’ considerations of expedience and profit.

If on the one hand analytic philosophy has presented itself as politically neutral, it has also regarded this very neutrality – this supposed freedom from dogma and ‘ideology’ – as the guarantor of liberal political conclusions. Analytic political philosophy, which has flourished and proliferated since the later part of the twentieth century, has preserved this basic posture. I wrote about this in my first book, The Political Is Political. What struck me about analytic political philosophy as a student (and what my tautological title was meant to capture) was that the subject was both paradoxically depoliticized and also political in covert ways. Under the influence of Rawls in particular, political philosophers have had remarkably little to say about actual politics or history. Armed with a sharp distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ (or ‘is’ versus ‘ought’), characteristic of the analytic approach, they have judged that such matters are the appropriate domain of social scientists. By contrast, the distinctive business of philosophers is to concentrate on the articulation of abstract ‘principles of justice’, often in the form of ‘ideal theory’. The contemporary political philosopher Charles Mills, while a self-identified adherent of the liberal-analytic approach, has criticized ideal theory as a form of ‘ideology’ in a loosely Marxist sense: a distortion of thought that reinforces an oppressive status quo by sanitizing and distracting from its ‘non-ideal’ features (Mills emphasises, in particular, the history and legacy of slavery in the United States).

Not only do philosophers in this tradition neglect real politics, I argued, but they also operate with a series of ostensibly neutral or ‘common sense’ methodological values  – ‘constructiveness’, ‘reasonableness’, ‘charity’ in argument – which invariably turn out, on closer inspection, to be interpreted in such a way as to favour liberal conclusions in advance, ‘begging the question’ against dissenting perspectives that might call for a more radical deviation from the political status quo. The injunction to ‘Be realistic!’, for example, commands virtually universal assent (who wants to be ‘unrealistic’?) but tells us nothing useful until filled out with some judgements as to what ‘reality’ is like and how it might be changed.

These, of course, are exactly the sorts of questions that are in dispute between people of different political outlooks. But what tends to happen in political philosophy, as in the wider world, is that taking account of reality is conflated with proposing less in the way of change, so that ‘realism’ and radicalism are assumed to be in inherent tension. Thus, while the ‘realist’ current in contemporary political philosophy is in one sense a challenge to the dominant approach (of ignoring real history and politics), it often ends up further entrenching a status quo bias, by equating ‘realism’ with small-c ‘conservatism’ and positioning ‘ideal theory’ as the peak of radical ambition.

Illusions of political neutrality, whether within the confines of academia or outside of it, are always deeply political, and usually conservative. (Think of the role that a faux-neutral, supposedly common-sense notion of ‘electability’ has played in British political discourse in recent years.) The answer, as I argued in the case of analytic political philosophy, is not to try to replace false neutrality with a ‘true’ one. The idea that this is possible, let alone desirable, is itself illusory. Judgements and assumptions about what is important, what kind of place the world is and what it could or should become – which is to say, political judgements and assumptions – are always and already embedded in the concepts and values we use to make and evaluate statements and arguments in philosophy and elsewhere. If there is an affinity between analytic philosophy and liberalism, it is perhaps in their mutual tendency to project this sort of illusion – to proceed as if their politics is no politics at all, just ‘realism’, or ‘common sense’. From this vantage point, the opponents of analytic philosophy and of liberalism can only appear respectively as obscurantists and fanatics. It’s no surprise, therefore, that some prominent analysts (Russell among them) became such ardent Cold Warriors.

The observation of G. J. Warnock, in 1958, that analytic philosophy was compatible with ‘a quite striking ideological range’ is clearly true, though Warnock also conceded that ‘there may be some deep-seated similarity of attitude and outlook’ not easily detectable to those who share in it. The political flavour of the school has been predominantly liberal, but it has not been exclusively so (think of analytic Marxists such as G. A. Cohen, or the radicals among the earlier ‘Vienna Circle’ of logical positivists). ‘Liberalism’, in any case, has meant (and continues to mean) different things to different people. Also like liberalism, ‘analytic philosophy’ is a slippery enough category to be resistant to any definitive characterization. It is not that analytic philosophy has any particular, fixed political content or valence. But its tendency toward ahistoricism and abstraction creates a vacuum at its heart, into which comes rushing, too often, too easily and too quietly, the dominant politics of the day. 

Read on: Lorna Finlayson, ‘Rules of the Game?’, NLR 123.