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Unlearning Machines

There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to its more sober initiates. On the left, the critical reflex to see this as yet another turn of the neoliberal screw, or to point out the labour and resource extraction that underpin it, falls somewhat flat in the face of a machine that can, at last, interpret natural-language instructions fairly accurately, and fluently turn out text and images in response. Not long ago, such things seemed impossible. The appropriate response to these wonders is not dismissal but dread, and it is perhaps there that we should start, for this magic is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few often idiosyncratic people at the social apex of an unstable world power. It would obviously be foolhardy to entrust such people with the reified intelligence of humanity at large, but that is where we are.

Here in the UK, tech-addled university managers are currently advocating for overstretched teaching staff to turn to generative AI for the production of teaching materials. More than half of undergraduates are already using the same technology to help them write essays, and various AI platforms are being trialled for the automation of marking. Followed through to their logical conclusion, these developments would amount to a repurposing of the education system as a training process for privately owned machine learning models: students, teachers, lecturers all converted into a kind of outsourced administrator or technician, tending to the learning of a black-boxed ‘intelligence’ that does not belong to them. Given that there is no known way of preventing Large Language Models from ‘hallucinating’ – weaving untruths and absurdities into their output, in ways that can be hard to spot unless one has already done the relevant work oneself – residual maintainers of intellectual standards would then be reduced to the role of providing corrective feedback to machinic drivel.

Where people don’t perform this function, the hallucinations will propagate unchecked. Already the web – which was once imagined, on the basis of CERN, as a sort of idealized scientific community – is being swamped by the pratings of statistical systems. Much as physical waste is shipped to the Global South for disposal, digital effluent is being dumped on the global poor: beyond the better-resourced languages, low-quality machine translations of low-quality English language content now dominate the web. This, of course, risks poisoning one of the major wells from which generative AI models have hitherto been drinking, raising the spectre of a degenerative loop analogous to the protein cycles of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease – machine learning turning into its opposite.

Humans, no doubt, will be called upon to correct such tendencies, filtering, correcting and structuring training data for the very processes that are leaving this trail of destruction. But the educator must of course be educated, and with even the book market being saturated with auto-generated rubbish, the culture in which future educators will learn cannot be taken for granted. In a famous passage, the young Marx argued that the process of self-transformation involved in real learning implied a radical transformation in the circumstances of learning. If learning now risks being reduced to a sanity check on the outputs of someone else’s machine, finessing relations of production that are structurally opposed to the learner, the first step towards self-education will have to involve a refusal to participate in this technological roll-out.

While the connectionist AI that underlies these developments has roots that predate even the electronic computer, its ascent is inextricable from the dynamics of a contemporary world raddled by serial crises. An education system that was already threatening to collapse provides fertile ground for the cultivation of a dangerous technology, whether this is driven by desperation, ingenuousness or cynicism on the part of individual actors. Healthcare, where the immediate risks may be even higher, is another domain which the boosters like to present as in-line for an AI-based shake-up. We might perceive in these developments a harbinger of future responses to the climate emergency. Forget about the standard apocalyptic scenarios peddled by the prophets of Artificial General Intelligence; they are a distraction from the disaster that is already upon us.

Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, is probably the most sophisticated attempt so far to construct a critical-theoretical response to these developments. Its title is somewhat inaccurate: there is not much social history here – not in the conventional sense. Indeed, as was the case with Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018), it would be hard to construct such a history for a technical realm that has long been largely tucked away in rarefied academic and research environments. The social enters here by way of a theoretical reinterpretation of capitalist history centred on Babbage’s and Marx’s analyses of the labour process, which identifies even in nineteenth century mechanization and division of labour a sort of estrangement of the human intellect. This then lays the basis for an account of the early history of connectionist AI. The ‘eye’ of the title links the automation of pattern recognition to the history of the supervision of work.

If barely a history, the book is structured around a few striking scholarly discoveries that merit serious attention. It is well known that Babbage’s early efforts to automate computation were intimately connected with a political-economic perspective on the division of labour. A more novel perspective here comes from Pasquinelli’s tracing of Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ to Ricardian socialist William Thompson’s 1824 book, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth. Thompson’s theory of labour highlighted the knowledge implied even in relatively lowly kinds of work – a knowledge that was appropriated by machines and set against the very people from whom it had been alienated. This set the stage for speculations about the possible economic fallout from this accumulation of technology, such as Marx’s famous ‘fragment on machines’.

But the separating out of a supposed ‘labour aristocracy’ within the workers’ movement made any emphasis on the more mental aspects of work hazardous for cohesion. As the project of Capital matured, Marx thus set aside the general intellect for the collective worker, de-emphasizing knowledge and intellect in favour of a focus on social coordination. In the process, an early theory of the role of knowledge and intellect in mechanization was obscured, and hence required reconstruction from the perspective of the age of the Large Language Model. The implication for us here is that capitalist production always involved an alienation of knowledge; and the mechanization of intelligence was always embedded in the division of labour.

If Pasquinelli stopped there, his book would amount to an interesting manoeuvre on the terrain of Marxology and the history of political economy. But this material provides the theoretical backdrop to a scholarly exploration of the origins of connectionist approaches to machine learning, first in the neuroscience and theories of self-organization of cybernetic thinkers like Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts and Ross Ashby that formed in the midst of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war, and then in the late-50s emergence, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, of Frank Rosenblatt’s ‘perceptron’ – the earliest direct ancestor of contemporary machine learning models. Among the intellectual resources feeding into the development of the perceptron were a controversy between the cyberneticians and Gestalt psychologists on the question of Gestalt perception or pattern recognition; Hayek’s connectionist theory of mind – which he had begun to develop in a little-reported stint as a lab assistant to neuropathologist Constantin Monakow, and which paralleled his economic beliefs; and vectorization methods that had emerged from statistics and psychometrics, with their deep historical links to the eugenics movement. The latter connection has striking resonances in the context of much-publicized concerns over racial and other biases in contemporary AI.

Pasquinelli’s unusual strength here lies in combining a capacity to elaborate the detail of technical and intellectual developments in the early history of AI with an aspiration towards the construction of a broader social theory. Less well-developed is his attempt to tie the perceptron and all that has followed from it to the division of labour, via an emphasis on the automation not of intelligence in general, but of perception – linking this to the work of supervising production. But he may still have a point at the most abstract level, in attempting to ground the alienated intelligence that is currently bulldozing its way through digital media, education systems, healthcare and so on, in a deeper history of the machinic expropriation of an intellectuality that was previously embedded in labour processes from which head-work was an inextricable aspect.

The major difference with the current wave, perhaps, is the social and cultural status of the objects of automation. Where once it was the mindedness of manual labour that found itself embodied in new devices, in a context of stratifications where the intellectuality of such realms was denied, in current machine learning models it is human discourse per se that is objectified in machinery. If the politics of machinery was never neutral, the level of generality that mechanization is now reaching should be ringing alarm bells everywhere: these things cannot safely be entrusted to a narrow group of corporations and technical elites. As long as they are, these tools – however magical they might seem – will be our enemies, and finding alternatives to the dominant paths of technical development will be a pressing matter.

Read on: Hito Steyerl, ‘Common Sensing?’, NLR 144.

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Wenders, Canonized

The acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders was born in Dusseldorf in August 1945. These two biographical facts set the trajectory of his career. Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, among others, Wenders became a key figure of the New German Cinema, a movement forged by that first postwar generation born into the ruins of the Third Reich. ‘I don’t think any country has had such a loss of faith in its own images, stories and myths as we have’, he reflected in 1977. ‘We, the directors of the New Cinema have felt this loss most keenly: in ourselves as the absence of a tradition of our own, as a generation without fathers; and in our audiences as confusion and apprehension.’ A society determined to forget its recent past and embarrassed by its cultural touchstones; with its own imagined community unavailable, another would have to do.

For Wenders, that would be America – or at least the version of America seen at the movies. This meant, especially, the endless highway, Coca-Cola, and rock music (starting with Little Richard and Chuck Berry, then continuing through the 1960s and long beyond). Like the woman in the Velvet Underground song whose ‘life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll’, Wenders observed ‘that was undoubtedly true in my case as well’. As well as, one imagines, the three years he spent at the University of Television and Film in Munich. Wenders had initially studied medicine, before switching to philosophy and then abandoning college and decamping to Paris to pursue a career in painting. But there, like the nouvelle vague directors before him he haunted the Cinémathèque Française – taking in as many as five films a day – and was nurtured by the influence of its legendary co-founder and director Henri Langlois, to whom he would later dedicate The American Friend (1977). Wenders too started out as a film critic, writing for the journal Filmkritik when he returned to Germany in 1967 (many of these essays are collected in Emotion Pictures: Reflections on Cinema) – and as a filmmaker, he was also eager to interrogate the form, reluctant to separate ‘the movies’ from ‘real life’, and saw a thin, nebulous line between documentary and drama.

Curzon Film (working with the Wim Wenders foundation which supervised meticulous restorations) has produced an impressive twenty-two-disc collection of his films. Each comes loaded with extras, including attendant interviews, featurettes and commentaries, with some supplemented by short films. Despite its imposing breadth, the set is, understandably, not ‘complete’ – but two early omissions are disappointing as each, notably, established many of the motifs that would characterize Wenders’s career. The short Alabama, 2000 Light Years (1969), was the first of his dozen collaborations with cinematographer Robby Müller. It’s not much, really, and the ‘plot’ needs to be intuited, but it’s all there: driving, smoking, jukeboxes, and, especially, music (including The Stones with ‘No Expectations’, Hendrix’s ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and Dylan from John Wesley Harding). Summer in the City (1970), Wenders’s debut feature, also shot by Müller and edited by Peter Przygodda (the first of twenty collaborations) has its limitations too, but it is surely better than The Scarlet Letter (1973), a dreary film included in the set that was such an unhappy shoot it nearly chased Wenders from the business.

Like Alabama, Summer in the City was probably excluded due to the impossibility of securing music rights that were originally disregarded. Dedicated to the Kinks (and featuring five songs by that band), the movie, which sports some eye-catching night-for-night shooting, can be described as a bizarre cross between Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957). But it anticipates what would follow, with its lament for the shuttering of old movie houses, a visit to a photo booth, a prominently placed jukebox, a screening of Godard’s Alphaville and endless driving. In short order Wenders would do all of this again, often spectacularly.

Wenders’s bid for the pantheon ultimately rests on a quartet of brilliant, diverse, signature films: Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). Alice in the Cities, one of the cinematic achievements of the 1970s, remains his most intimate and personal. Journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, who often served as Wenders’s alter-ego) has wandered across America in search of a story he fails to write. Limping home to Europe by way of New York, circumstances leave him briefly responsible for young Alice (Yella Rottländer); a missed flight complicates efforts to reunite Alice with her mother, and, stranded, a search begins for her grandmother, which takes this odd couple on a road trip through Holland and Germany. One suggestion of this textured, subtle film is that America is far more alluring as an idea than as an actual place. Inspired by Wenders’s first two trips there, he would later write that the American dream is ‘a dream OF a country, IN a different country, that is located where the dream takes place.’ Describing experiences that parallel the journey of Philip Winter, he recalls ‘My second visit to America I just didn’t dare to leave New York . . . west of the Hudson, I knew now, lay wilderness’. Wenders would, however, subsequently develop an appreciation for ‘Arizona, Utah or New Mexico’ – that is, the West as seen in the films of John Ford, a figure that looms large in Alice in the Cities – and in Wenders’s filmmaking more generally. Shot by Robby Müller in impeccable black and white, two scenes stand out beyond the special sequences documenting mid-seventies New York City: an interlude where Philip takes in a Chuck Berry concert (all the more meaningful in that the song, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, about a father attempting to reconnect with his young daughter, was an important inspiration for the film); and a poignant, pivotal confession in a café, a location that also features an unmotivated shot of a boy, leaning against a jukebox, sipping a coke, which is undoubtedly an evocation of the filmmaker himself.

The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, is Wenders’s most visually ambitious film, displaying an exquisite facility for shooting in colour, orchestrating a sophisticated palette that recalls Wenders’s one-time aspiration to be a painter. Music is, once again, an essential ingredient (and presumably the well-deployed songs by the Kinks and others were paid for this time around). The production also marked Wenders’s first collaboration with Bruno Ganz, an uncommonly gifted actor whose understated performance grounds the film, which is elliptical (especially on a first viewing) and distinguished by several bravura, suspenseful set pieces, many involving railways. Dennis Hopper fills the shoes of Tom Ripley, and though the performance is somewhat imbued with the actor’s own persona, it nevertheless works. American Friend is also distinguished by numerous cameo appearances, including nouvelle vague legend Jean Eustache and two directors from Wenders’s personal pantheon, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. Of Ray, Wenders wrote, ‘There’s one thing wrong with Godard’s famous line that if there hadn’t been cinema, Nicholas Ray would have invented it . . . Ray did invent cinema, not many do’. Fuller, who appeared in several of Wenders’s films, was an important mentor (he helped rework the screenplay for Alice in the Cities). In Wenders’s estimation, he was not only ‘the greatest storyteller I ever met’, but ‘one of the great directors of the twentieth century’.

Paris, Texas won the grand prize at Cannes, among other accolades, yet it endures principally as a cult favourite. This is perhaps not surprising – Dirk Bogarde, the jury president that year, recalls in his memoir some dismay from the festival overlords: ‘We were to choose films which would please a family audience, not ones which would appeal to “a few students and a handful of faux intellectuals”’. Starring Harry Dean Stanton as a drifter reconnecting with his former life, the film loses a bit of its magic as it becomes more literal in its final third, and there is a structural wobble with the discarding of two key characters. Nevertheless, as often, the artists were right and the suits obtuse – this is a special film. Every frame is filled with purpose, and the ‘through the looking glass’ scenes between Stanton and his estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski) achieve rare heights. Ry Cooder’s score, featuring Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues instrumental from 1927, ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’, is inseparable from the performances, especially in the first half of the picture, where dialogue is sparse. Paris, Texas was co-written by Sam Shepard, who also wrote (and starred in, opposite Jessica Lange) the very fine Don’t Come Knocking (2005), another regrettable omission from the Curzon collection. Both films are very Fordian in their locations, visual disposition and as character studies of men who withdraw from society to re-emerge years later in search of some form of salvation.

Wings of Desire, Wenders’s best-known film, has also been justly lauded. Jonathan Rosenbaum describes a film that presents ‘an astonishing poetic documentary’ of its host city. It features Bruno Ganz (Daniel) and Otto Sander (Cassiel) as angels who hover over a divided Berlin. As witnesses to and chroniclers of history as it unfolds, they are unable to participate in human affairs (or prevent its horrors, epic or intimate); they can only observe, and in some cases (but, tragically, not all) provide a comforting presence to those in distress. The narrative swivels as Daniel decides he’s had his fill of immortality – so curious about the human condition that he wishes to experience it. Crashing to earth, he courts a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encounters the music of Nick Cave. Peter Falk, whose affable celebrity has at times overshadowed his prodigious talent, excels playing a version of himself. His internal monologues feature some of the best writing (and line reads) to be found in Wenders’s oeuvre. The film was the third collaboration between Wenders and the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke. Handke co-wrote Wenders’s The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), an early landmark of the New German Cinema, based on his novel (Müller and Przygodda are also on hand, as are nods to Hitchcock, Americana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Long as I Can See the Light’). Handke also wrote Wrong Move (1975), a wistful road film in which Germany’s dark past weighs more oppressively than in any other Wenders film.

It is fair to say, however ­– and this is reflected in the Curzon collection – that Wenders’s oeuvre, especially following the glory days of the seventies and eighties, is uneven. In the late 1990s, Roger Ebert would astutely describe ‘a gifted and poetic’ filmmaker ‘whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp’. Faraway, So Close! (1993), a post-reunification follow up to Wings of Desire, has some things to say, but is inconsistent and never quite works; The End of Violence (1997), though beautifully shot and well-cast, is an unfulfilling, ultimately incoherent affair (and a welcome omission from the set); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), co-written by Bono, sees another fine cast wasted. These critiques can be taken too far, however, with commentators, perhaps understandably, grading on a curve – the way minor mid-career Dylan albums were often initially vilified, only to grow in esteem with the passage of time. In that spirit, Everything Will be Fine (2015), for example, widely dismissed upon release, is a welcome rediscovery. Had this small, thoughtful film been made by a young unknown, likely it would have been lauded as heralding the arrival of a promising new talent.     

Beyond Wenders’s four masterpieces, there is much to praise in the collection. Consider, most notably, two additional films that have the road as their theme (not surprisingly, Wenders’s production company is called ‘Road Movies’). Kings of the Road (1976), dedicated to Fritz Lang and running to three hours (plenty of time to touch base with the director’s familiar motifs, here adding an often-fraught homosocial relationship into the mix), follows its protagonists as they drive along the inter-German border, stopping at local, decaying cinema-houses. Until the End of the World (1991), at nearly five hours, is the ultimate expression of Wenders’s peripatetic urgency, traversing five continents and boasting an enormous, star-studded global cast (Max Von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau and Chishû Ryû among them). Perhaps less than the sum of its astonishing parts, the film nevertheless asks big questions, and presciently anticipated the worst aspects of twenty-first-century selfie culture. 

Arguably, all Wenders movies are in some sense road movies. Just as important as the road, however, is his fascination with the uneasy relationship between drama and documentary. Lightning over Water (1980), made with a dying Nicholas Ray, explores these themes most overtly. In the opening sequence, Wenders arrives at Ray’s SoHo apartment – in scenes handled so deftly the audience gets the impression that it is indeed privy to something very ‘real’ (though in retrospect there are multiple camera set ups). Soon enough, however, Wenders pulls back the curtain; the image shifts from pristine 35mm film to grainy video – and in the latter suddenly Ray’s lonely apartment is crowded with a film crew, harshly lit, and on a dime it’s that which seems real (though obviously, even that footage was shot and edited). But there are some inescapable realities here; Ray was indeed dying, and does not survive the shoot.

The State of Things (1982), which took home the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, is another meta-movie. Inspired by Wenders’s unhappy Hollywood interlude directing Hammett (1982), The State of Things, which opens with a movie-within-a-movie, follows a film crew stranded in Lisbon because the money has run dry while its director travels to Los Angeles to track down his furtive producer. Sam Fuller is a welcome presence, but the film really comes to life towards the end, when preternaturally intense seventies character actor Allen Garfield shows up as the missing money man on the run, monologuing in an R.V. A dozen years later, Lisbon Story (1994) explored similar themes in an informal sequel. An attractively shot trifle featuring Rüdiger Vogler, it is distinguished only by a pleasant musical interlude and welcome cameo from Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.   

Finally, and increasingly in late career, are excursions into straight non-fiction (as far as that goes), which showcase Wenders’s interests in and engagement with a panoply of the arts. These include cinema and music (of course), but also dance, architecture, fashion, and photography, a ubiquitous presence in Wenders’s life and in his films as well – photography plays an integral part not only in Alice in the Cities and The American Friend, but numerous later works, including, most explicitly, Palermo Shooting (2008). Of these productions, well represented in the set, two in particular stand out: Tokyo Ga (1985), Wenders’s moving homage to Japanese filmmaker Yasujirô Ozu (another important influence), and, irresistibly, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which follows Ry Cooder, who travelled to Havana to lure long-forgotten Cuban musicians out of retirement. Wenders, now approaching his eightieth year, released two well received films last year, Perfect Days, a rumination on the experiences of a janitor in Tokyo, and Anselm, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer. With Nick Ray and Sam Fuller present in the pantheon, as Curzon’s impressive box set makes clear, surely there is a seat at that table for Wim Wenders as well.

Read on: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, NLR I/91.

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Ukania and Palestine

The UK government has been among the most hawkishly pro-Israel states in the Western world, and the opposition Labour Party has done its best to purge critics of Israel from its ranks – yet the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain has been the largest in Europe. As one of the chief organizers of that movement, how would you account for its impressive scale?

In many Western countries, the pro-Palestine movement has different components that don’t always work together: leftist, Muslim, Arab nationalist. When we set up the Stop the War Coalition in 2001 we tried to take a different approach, and began collaborating with Muslim groups from early on – for instance after the massacre in Jenin in spring 2002. We decided that the February 2003 mass demonstration against the Iraq war would also be a march for Palestinian liberation: the two slogans for the event were ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’ and ‘Freedom for Palestine’. Then, during the protests against Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, we made an alliance with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al Aqsa and the Palestine Forum in Britain, which remains in place today. We’ve also worked a lot with British trade unions, whose stance on this issue has generally been quite robust. So I think the strong links between these institutions make the UK a distinctive case.  

There’s also a fairly widespread awareness of Britain’s imperial history, including its role in the Zionist project: Balfour, Sykes–Picot, and of course the League of Nations Mandate. If you mention these things at a rally in London, people of very different backgrounds and social classes know what you’re talking about – which is interesting, since we’re not taught about them in school. Now, with the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and violence spreading across the region, people are horrified by the UK’s support for the Israeli war machine. They recognize that this is a watershed moment. So for seventeen consecutive weeks there have been either major national demonstrations, which have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets, or significant numbers joining local actions. In response, the government has suggested banning Palestine flags, proscribing certain slogans and even outlawing the protests outright, as was done in France and Germany. But as yet they haven’t succeeded.  

Does that challenge the idea, which we heard throughout the Corbyn years, that anti-imperialism is a marginal, unpopular strain in British politics?

I think there’s a misconception that British workers have always been bought off by imperialism. But if you look at the history, there have been repeated mobilizations around international issues: from the Spanish Civil War to the Suez crisis to South African apartheid. William Morris bitterly opposed the Sudan war in 1884. The Lancashire working class supported the North during the US civil war even though they suffered hardship as a result. These were all popular causes. So there is a strong political current here – and I think it’s one of the main reasons why Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015. But of course, that current is anathema to the Labour establishment, whose foreign policy has been consistently reactionary, especially when it came to the independence and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. The right of the party couldn’t bear the idea that Corbyn would have changed Britain’s policy on the Middle East. And they couldn’t bear that a substantial segment of the population supported him on these questions. They could have tolerated him renationalizing the railways, but that was a bridge too far.

Does that also explain why the UK government has responded so aggressively to the recent protests?

I think the government was surprised by the response to October 7th. As the bombing of Gaza got underway, they decided to light up Downing Street in the colours of the Israeli flag. They thought this would be another Ukraine moment, with everyone rallying around Israel in a supposed clash between civilization and barbarism. They were gearing up for that kind of propaganda operation. But as early as October 9th, thousands of people gathered to protest outside the Israeli Embassy. As with 9/11, they saw that this attack would be used to justify killing on a much greater scale – and that the Israeli government would exploit this opportunity to try to expel the Arab population from historic Palestine. People didn’t trust the government, or the media coverage, or Keir Starmer. And this is a serious problem for the political class, because if the war continues to escalate they won’t have a mandate for intervention. They’ll struggle to gain consent for following the US into this military quagmire. And they won’t be believed when they tell us that Iran poses an existential threat, for example.

This is partly why we’ve seen the attempts to repress the movement. The government have branded the demos ‘hate marches’ and introduced legislation to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. They’ve also launched a crackdown on smaller fringe groups. The Muslim outfit Hizb ut-Tahrir has been labelled a terrorist organization – which obviously it isn’t, although we might disagree with it on most issues. Police have also arrested members of a small Maoist organization called the CPGB-ML, raided their houses and confiscated their literature. People in the Muslim community are being told that their children can’t talk about Palestine in school, otherwise they’ll be reported under the Prevent legislation. There is a real effort, from different sections of the establishment, to present pro-Palestine activists as Hamas supporters or antisemites. But despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail and the Metropolitan Police, they only ever manage to find about half a dozen people at each march who they can claim are carrying questionable placards.

More than 70% of the UK population now support a ceasefire, while the two main Westminster parties oppose it. What are the strategic implications of this situation for the left? Could it open up the space for an electoral challenge to Starmer’s Labour?

When the election is held later this year, Palestine will be on the ballot paper. Right now neither party is managing to satisfy its own supporters, let alone the wider public, so my guess is that there will be major abstention. It still looks like Labour will win a clear majority, but Starmer’s cheerleading for Netanyahu has prompted a mass exodus of members. Every week I hear about more local politicians who are leaving in disgust. In Liverpool, Hastings, Oxford and elsewhere, left-wing councillors have established independent groupings. Some of these people will probably run against Labour in the general election. It’s hard to predict how they’ll do, given the constraints of the first-past-the-post system, but they’ll certainly hurt the Labour vote share in various places – especially where there is strong support for a ceasefire. And this could, in theory, form the basis of a new organization: a new type of left party.

One of the big problems, though, is that the major trade unions remain tied to Labour. There are lots of general secretaries who come and speak at our Palestine demos, and several unions have backed our call for a ‘workplace day of action’ on February 7th, which is encouraging. But despite the strike wave that’s taken place over the last two years, the unions haven’t made significant gains in terms of their membership or influence. They are still relatively weak formations. So they’ll be keen to strike deals with Starmer once he gets into power, and reluctant to support autonomous political initiatives.

Might the unions begin to play a more militant role once a future Labour government starts imposing wage restraint on workers, as Starmer has indicated that it will?

Well I suppose we’ve been here before. Wilson launched a brutal attack on the Seamen’s Union in 1966, but the labour movement still refused to cut ties with his government. Since then, the unions have lost a great deal of their strength, which may put them in an even more precarious position; but then again so has Labour and Labourism, as a result of severing its organic connection with the working class. So I guess the answer is: some will wrest free of the party and some won’t. The Fire Brigades Union disaffiliated under Blair, and it’s conceivable that it and others like it might do so again. But my sense is that the larger unions will do everything they can to try to preserve a Labour government, even if its policies – on everything from austerity to the Middle East – are merely an echo of the Tories’.

Where next for the Palestine movement in the UK, especially given the tendency for regular A-to-B marches to lose momentum? How to preserve its energy?

The forms of action that can be taken are almost endless. Groups like Workers for a Free Palestine and Palestine Action have been shutting down weapons factories. Protesters have been staging sit-ins in railway stations. There was a day of action against Barclays Bank – which provides billions worth of investment to arms companies linked to Israel – and other types of BDS organizing are sure to continue. We’re preparing for limited walkouts across workplaces and campuses next week. But I don’t think we should see direct action and marches as somehow counterposed. To me, what the national demos do is bring very large numbers of people and groups together – which energizes them to go off and do different things. So that helps to keep the momentum going. If you don’t have the national demos, there’s a danger that the movement will fragment.

The other thing that will help to sustain the activism is a strong political core, which takes us back to the question of anti-imperialism. I think it’s important for people to see Gaza as integrally related to the wider setup in the Middle East – how it’s shaped by the United States, and to a lesser extent by Britain. So you need public meetings and discussions to develop that critique. And you also need writers and intellectuals to bring the issue into focus. Apparently Ghada Karmi’s 2023 book One State has sold out, and keeps selling out every time new copies are printed, which tells you that people are increasingly aware that the two-state ‘solution’ is a fantasy and are now thinking beyond it.

The thing is, even if there were a ceasefire tomorrow, this movement isn’t going away. The demos might get much smaller, and people might want to do more local actions, but the feeling among the organizers is that there has been a permanent sea-change in public attitudes towards Palestine. And this has already altered British politics. The establishment are still trying to weaponize accusations of antisemitism against anyone who criticizes Israel, but this has become much harder to pull off. The line that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ just doesn’t work anymore. Thanks to both the solidarity campaign and the ICJ ruling, Israel will now forever be associated with the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Marx or Jefferson?

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

In contrast to Du Bois, most European Marxists have been wary of calling for the redistribution of large landed estates, on account of the political and economic consequences of establishing a small holding peasantry. Dividing up land can be both politically liberatory and economically regressive, as the French Revolution demonstrated most clearly. Remember too that Gramsci’s The Southern Question (1926), a text which bears a resemblance to Black Reconstruction, was written partially as a defence against the accusation that the nascent Italian communist party demanded the breakup of the southern latifundia.

It may be, after all, that Du Bois is best understood neither as a theorist of intersectionality avant la lettre, nor as a Marxist, but rather as a radical and consistent democrat. His ideal political subject was the independent family farmer, able to withdraw from labour and commodity markets to some extent, or at least to engage with them on favourable and independent terms. In this Du Bois is a deeply American thinker whose critique of capitalism is more republican than socialist. For Du Bois’s concern was not really the failure of a socialist revolution, but rather the missed opportunity of a Jeffersonian Arcadia.

Read On: John-Baptiste Oduor, ‘Segregations Sequiturs’, NLR 136.

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Chaos in Ecuador

In recent years, the surging violence in Ecuador has made international headlines. Initially, coverage centred on frequent prison riots and massacres, which have claimed four hundred lives since 2021. Then, as the turmoil spread beyond the penitentiary system, the focus shifted to gang shootings and executions. Last April, video footage of an attack in the coastal city of Esmeraldas, showing a speed boat full of armed men shooting people on the docks, went viral. The following summer, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated and his alleged hitmen were murdered in custody. Now the country is reeling from a 24-hour rampage by drug gangs that culminated in a live, on-air hostage-taking on a TV news set. The incident prompted the newly inaugurated president Daniel Noboa to announce that the country was facing an ‘internal armed conflict’: constitutional parlance for a declaration of war, which essentially allows the military to take over from the police. Ecuador wasn’t always this cliche of a narco-state. It was once hailed as an ‘island of peace’, a security success story. What explains its spiral into chaos?

When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, the national murder rate was 15.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. When he left office office ten years later, it had fallen to 5.8, one of the lowest in Latin America. Several policies lay behind this success. There were, undoubtedly, some elements of a traditional law-and-order approach. The police force grew by 40% and many of its personnel were replaced, partly as a result of a 2010 police mutiny in which the president was held hostage for a day. There were significant wage hikes – the salary of rank-and-file officers was tripled – as well as investment in training and equipment that were often sorely lacking. The policing doctrine was also reformed, with the government driving decentralization and a smaller-scale, neighbourhood approach. Such initiatives played a major role in reducing crime rates.

This was accompanied by broader institutional change: most notably the creation of a Coordinating Security Ministry which oversaw security policy and enabled collaboration between different state agencies, in an attempt to diminish rivalries between branches of the military, police and intelligence services. Correa’s government also invested in a widely celebrated 911 emergency response system, which established call centres in seventeen locations by 2015. The state was, in short, making itself present on its territory: an exercise in Weberian sovereignty unlike anything that had come before. 

Perhaps more importantly, the Correa administration implemented a series of ambitious social policies – striving, for instance, to rehabilitate and reintegrate members of Ecuador’s prominent urban gangs. It approached the Latin Kings and Queens, Ñetas and Masters of the Street in an attempt to convince them to ditch crime and enrol in social and educational schemes. The government recognized that these organizations had not yet been inserted into the structures of the larger Mexican-run cartels, and that it could therefore stop the problem from festering. Correa also decriminalized the possession of small quantities of narcotics, as part of a general shift towards treating drug consumption as a public health issue. The aim was to prevent overcrowding in the prison system and allow the police to focus on criminal organizations.

Beyond that, the administration oversaw a marked improvement in living conditions. It doubled social spending, with significant increases for health and education, plus robust welfare programmes and a higher minimum wage. It audited the public finances to suspend or restructure illegitimate debts, renegotiated the country’s oil contracts, and improved tax collection from $5bn in 2007 to $13bn in 2017. By the end of Correa’s tenure, poverty had been reduced by 41.6% and inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, had fallen by 16.7%. Ecuador was making the kind of social progress that renders drug cartels obsolete. 

The concrete effects of Correa’s policies belie the narrative, pedalled by the Ecuadorean establishment, that his ‘soft-on-crime’ tactics are to blame for the current security collapse. Media pundits often suggest that if Ecuador was peaceful under Correa, this was because his government had made a secret pact with the narcos. But this argument is fanciful. The gangs would only have accepted such a deal were they able to increase their drug traffic. Yet even the US Drug Enforcement Agency celebrated ‘the excellent results obtained by the anti-narcotics police’ under Correa, which significantly disrupted the trade. Since he left office, by contrast, drug exports have risen to unprecedented levels.

It was in 2017, under the presidency of Lenín Moreno, that the situation began to unravel. Having styled himself as a continuity candidate, once in office Moreno reversed most of his predecessor’s policies. Under the supervision of the IMF – which extended Ecuador a credit line in 2019, on the condition of a so-called ‘reform program aimed at modernising the economy’ – the social state was rolled back, budgets were slashed and thousands were laid off. The security sector was not spared. The prison system saw its budget cut by 30%, and several ministries, including the Coordinating Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, were closed. The Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the police, was dissolved in a merger, while the main intelligence agency was shut down and its activities handed over to a new outfit run by retired military officers. The White House cheered from the sidelines, applauding Moreno’s ‘transition away from “21st century socialism” to a democratic society focused on the defense of basic rights and a free market economy’.

The outcome was catastrophic. Poverty increased almost 17% by 2019. Once the pandemic hit, there was an upsurge of unemployment and informal work, along with crime and drug trafficking. Gangs used the shutdown to consolidate their control over territory and cultivate ties with impoverished sectors of the population. These internal problems coincided with growing external ones. Following the 2016 Colombian peace process, Colombian drug traffickers began to move their product across the southern border and gained access to Ecuador’s Pacific ports, turning the country into a key transit point for drugs en route to the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Of course, we can only speculate as to how a different government would have dealt with these incursions. But it is clear that, rather than confronting a state with functional infrastructure and institutions, the cartels merely encountered Moreno’s neoliberal vacuum – and found it easy to fill. 

The government of Guillermo Lasso, which came to power in 2021, pushed ahead with the same IMF-supervised austerity and deregulation programme. His administration was weak – his party holding less than 10% of seats in the National Assembly – and marred by corruption. It did not take long for its approval ratings to reach a record low. This resulted in a deficit of leadership and legitimacy that constrained the state’s capacity to fight the crime syndicates, which began to flourish like never before. Still, the government retained the unflinching support of President Biden, who ignored frequent letters from Congressmen warning him about Lasso’s corruption and calling for a DOJ investigation into his hidden assets in the US. Allegations eventually surfaced that Danilo Carrera, Lasso’s brother-in-law and closest business collaborator, was linked to the ‘Albanian Mafia’ drug ring. Soon after, the key witness in the investigation was murdered, and Lasso’s scandal-ridden presidency began to fall apart. In May 2023, a few days before his likely impeachment by the National Assembly, he called new elections and relegated himself to the role of lame-duck president.

Violence meanwhile continued to mount. Prison massacres became commonplace and homicide rates climbed to an astonishing 45 per 100,000, an eight-fold increase since 2017. If Daniel Noboa, the centre-right businessman elected last October, is able to make even modest improvements in the security situation, he stands a chance of re-election when the country returns to the polls next year. His political prospects depend on convincing Ecuadorians that he is the man to defeat the cartels. So far he has tried to project toughness by reversing Correa’s decriminalization laws. He has also announced the construction of ‘maximum prisons’, contracted with an Israeli company, as well as ‘prison barges’ intended to conjure up images of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. But aside from this, little is known about the specifics of his security plan. His ‘war’ on the gangs will be extremely costly, and the current economic outlook is not favourable. Though the incumbent benefits from relatively high crude oil prices – Ecuador’s main export – he is desperate to secure other sources of funding for his offensive. Judging from the recent decision to increase VAT from 12% to 15%, this could mean further attempts to squeeze the public.

This precarious situation makes the Noboa government highly dependent on the US. Bilateral security ties had already been strengthened over the last five years, particularly under Lasso. In October 2023, a cooperation agreement opened the door for an American military presence in Ecuador, which would be forced to relinquish some of the basic tenets of its sovereignty and grant full immunity to US personnel. (Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that, since the deal only involves ‘cooperation’ as opposed to a formal ‘alliance’, it does not require legislative authorisation.) This fits into a wider trend. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has used the War on Drugs as a tool to maintain its foothold in the Western Hemisphere and exert its influence over the security apparatus of Latin American states. Having charted a nonconformist course under Correa, Ecuador is now eager to signal its compliance with the hegemon. Another sign of this reorientation is the growing security partnership with Israel, which has managed to coax Ecuador – along with a number of other states in the Global South – into complicity with its expansionist project. As Palestinians are slaughtered in their tens of thousands, Noboa bleats that ‘we’re not going to condemn Israel’s actions nor are we going to take the position Brazil and Colombia did’.

The risk is that the president will now try to assuage public anger over rising crime with a host of repressive and reactionary measures, whose primary casualties will be ordinary Ecuadorians – in particular the impoverished youth of the urban peripheries. We have already seen how, in Colombia, security forces who are under pressure to deliver can sometimes be more concerned with the headcount, or even the bodycount, than with the accuracy of the targets. A renewed crackdown on crime, absent any social programme, could lead to mass arrests, incarcerations and even killings based on little evidence. Another potential threat is the appearance, as in the 1980s, of death squads often acting in cahoots with security forces. Ecuador is swiftly becoming the new frontline of the failed US War on Drugs. It may take years or even decades for the country to rebuild a state that can guarantee peace and security for its people.

Read on: Rafael Correa, ‘Ecuador’s Path’, NLR 77.

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Vague Terrain

The Argentinian director Eduardo Williams’s first short, Tan Atentos (2011), appears in English filmographies as an alarming whisper, Beware. The Spanish title has its ambiguities: tan could mean ‘so’, acting as an intensifier (‘very attentive’), or ‘as’, indicating qualification or comparison (‘as attentive as that’, ‘attentive to this degree’). ‘Beware’ doesn’t resolve this ambiguity, and we should take the hint – the realm we’re entering will not provide clear answers – and maybe the warning, too. Many of Williams’s titles have this cryptic quality, as though missing a coordinate: Could See a Puma (Pude Ver Un Puma, 2011), That I’m Falling? (Que je tombe tout les temps?, 2013, I Forgot! (Tôi quên rồi!, 2014). Like their titles, much of these films’ dialogue sounds interrupted, fragmentary, half-sensical. Could See a Puma opens with a shot of a daytime crescent moon and a voiceover caught mid-sentence: ‘and believe it static and harmless as decoration’. Williams’s use of broken dialogue is destabilizing; his films can make you wonder if you’re paying enough attention, or the right kind.

The Human Surge 3 (2023) is Williams’s second feature, following 2016’s The Human Surge. The mischievous omission of volume two has the disconcerting effect of a missed stair. Like Williams’s shorts, they follow groups of young people as they hang out, work, chat and listlessly slink around disparate international locations which, like the scenes that play out in them, feel diffuse and unremarkable – under-tended public parks, train station waiting rooms, shared bedrooms, parking lots, deserted markets, drab beaches. ‘Following’ really is the operative word for what Williams’s camera does, sometimes keeping pace with his characters, sometimes falling behind, occasionally becoming distracted and wandering off.

The Human Surge begins by tracking a young Argentinian man called Exe around the suburbs of Buenos Aires as he visits friends and seeming strangers, works at a supermarket, and witnesses a group of men performing sex acts for a webcam. In a convenience store, the camera takes a languid interest in another shopper, slopes home after her, then follows her housemate into a dark room where a laptop is running a video chat with a group of men in Mozambique also trying to make money from half-hearted cybersex. Seeming to move through the laptop screen, the camera then follows these men out into Maputo, where they, too, wander around, seeing friends and looking for work. When one pisses on an anthill, the camera follows the stream, delving among the earth and insects before emerging in the Philippines, where a third set of characters walk through the jungle, swim and converse enigmatically: telling second-hand anecdotes about getting lost and being followed, or swapping arcane facts (such as the gigabyte weights of various animals’ genomes). Finally, we arrive at a factory that produces tablet computers, and the shots become long and static. It’s a film about young adults – underemployed, culturally peripheral – searching for connection and some kind of meaningful interface with the world, a theme the film puns on (the characters are always looking for signal, wifi, or somewhere to charge their phone).

Blending arthouse, documentary and slow cinema styles, Williams’s films are hybrid works that one could imagine being screened in a gallery as much as a cinema; like their characters, they seem resistant to settling. Born in 1987, Williams studied film proper rather than fine art – first at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, then under Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes in France – and there is a cinematic scale to his features, in tension with their lack of narrative. Watching his films you feel always on the cusp of perceiving some clearer shape, a story about to announce itself. Instead there are repeated motifs, images, phrases and scenarios: an accumulation of associations. The circumstances of the characters are never quite concretised. We gather that they struggle to make money – they live in shared, down-at-heel homes – but their situations do not seem desperate. They seem disaffected rather than alienated, rudderless not ground down. They exist in interstices – between major cities, jobs, stages of life, even between classes or social identities.

The Human Surge 3 is also set in three distant countries – Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Peru – and depicts groups of young friends walking, swimming, sleeping, sitting at empty cafés, and chatting disjointedly about their dreams and personal theories about life and the world. The conversations are not only hard to follow because they are fragmentary but because they take place in two or more languages. It’s not clear the characters can always understand one another. A viewer would need to speak Sinhala, Tamil, Mandarin, English and Spanish to do without the subtitles. Williams has spoken of his attraction to languages he can’t understand. Travelling abroad for the first time, he was entranced by the experience of hearing language as sound, and it is one he seeks to replicate in his films.

Rather than moving through settings consecutively as in the first film, The Human Surge 3 interweaves them. The locations are often hard to distinguish from each other: Williams continues to favour terrains vagues which might only be identified as Peru by a road sign, or as southeast Asia by a stall serving oyster soup. Augmenting this confusion, the protagonists begin to show up in other countries – inexplicably appearing on the other side of the world. This is one way that the film leans more towards science fiction, or even abstraction, than its predecessor. On several occasions, characters mention having dreamed of each other, and the film seems to partake of a dream’s hermetic, associative logic. In place of the previous film’s pricklier, restless energy is a sense of languorous contentment; in place of the machismo, a mixed, gender-fluid cast; in place of the bored, mercenary sex, tender, chaste flirtation. The restless search for connection has become a more melancholy search for home: a refrain of the film is ‘How do I go home?’, to which the enigmatic reply is a variation of ‘That’s complicated from here’. In the final scene at the summit of a Peruvian mountain, as one character looks at the view and wonders ‘Is that our home?’, another walks forward, picks up the camera, and rolls it back down the path, sending the image into a kaleidoscopic tailspin of figurative abstraction. Eventually the camera gets stuck in some undergrowth and the film ends.

Although his films have an otherworldly atmosphere, Williams uses non-professional actors and real settings. Fairly often, a passer-by will look right into the lens. There are hints that the latest film is set in sometime in the near-future; there are several references to a warmer climate – water being too hot to swim in, computers needing to be stored in the fridge. Many of Williams’s characters live in fragile, ephemeral dwellings – in thin-walled huts perched on the edge of water, or in shacks dotted around agricultural land, always overpopulated – and his films fluctuate between seeming like dreamy fairytales and frank portraits of precarity. There are allusions to Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force and the disappearances with which it is associated (a secondary character’s son is taken away). He could even be regarded as a practitioner of magical realism – of the kind Gabriel Garcia Marquez produced, with One Hundred Days of Solitude,in response to the massacre of striking banana plantation workers in Colombia and the terribly surreal way their deaths were institutionally forgotten.

As their drifting between countries emphasizes, Williams’s characters live in a globalised world where far-removed locations appear increasingly interconnected and homogenised, parts of a vast, elusive whole. The countries in The Human Surge are implicitly linked by the history of imperialism originating in the Iberian Peninsula. Distant as they are, there are echoes between the Argentinian Spanish, Mozambiquan Portuguese and Spanish-flecked Visayan. In the new film, the settings lack this shared historical thread but are relatively close latitudinally: their similar stormy equatorial weather and light makes it easier to confuse them. The anthropologist Anna Tsing has drawn attention to what she calls sites of ‘friction’ in the globalised world: the overlooked places where surreal, violent, often unconscionable activity takes place to facilitate the outwardly seamless flow of global capitalism. Williams is similarly concerned with the world’s less celebrated corners, away from capitals and trade centres. But the phenomenon he tracks is less friction than lassitude: places where the momentum of trade and empire has left absence and listlessness in its wake.

Though Williams’s is in this respect a global cinema, his filmmaking style is also appreciably Argentinian. His improvisatory, deadpan approach and unglamorous though occasionally beautiful suburban locations recall films like Martin Rejtman’s Rapado (1992),about a teenager wandering Buenos Aires in search of a stolen motorbike, or Alejo Moguillansky’s Castro (2009), whose protagonist is mysteriously chased through the city, mostly via its sprawling bus routes. Both films are about restless, uncertain men living in the prolonged aftermath of a military dictatorship, their country seeming alternately dismal, surreal, boring and full of dazzling possibility.

Williams’s interior scenes evoke another pivotal work of Argentinian cinema: Lucrecia Martel’s sultry debut La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), set in a holiday home in the north of the country belonging to an extended family whose relationships to one another – like those between Williams’s protagonists – are not entirely clear. Stunned by heat and alcohol, they spend much of the time lounging around. La Ciénaga memorably includes one of the least tempting swimming pools in cinema – opaque, still, fetid, green. ‘I ​think there are a lot of similarities in perception – between being in a pool and being in the world’, Martel has observed. ‘We usually forget that we are immersed in air.’ In The Human Surge, water tends to come up to about knee-height: Argentinian kids wade through flooded streets or the warm brown shallows of the Rio del Plata; Filipino families lie back in a pool below a waterfall in the jungle, talking about getting lost. In The Human Surge 3, characters are often up to their necks in water, but the film’s high-altitude climax on the mountain also heightens our awareness of air as a physical element. We can hear characters’ audibly laboured breathing in the thinner atmosphere, and at one point a character briefly takes flight, drawing our gaze up into the grey-blue expanse across the top of the frame.

As his films’ emphasis on water, air, the sound of language and digital technology suggests, Williams is concerned with how our experience of the world is mediated, and with our experience of that mediation. This is embodied in each film’s medium itself, or rather mediums. In The Human Surge Williams used a different camera for each country, with disorienting effects: Super 16mm film for Buenos Aires, which catches daylight in warm magenta tones but plunges interiors into fuzzy grey darkness; digital video shot on a tiny handheld camera in Maputo (then re-filmed on Super 16 from the laptop screen); and bright, brittle high-resolution digital video for the climactic Philippines section.

The medium of The Human Surge 3 is perhaps its most distinctive feature. Williams shot on a 360-degree camera whose footage he then edited into standard cinema frames by navigating it with a VR headset. The resulting image, stitched together digitally, is distended at its edges and in a few striking moments distorts the characters’ faces where they cross the image’s seams. The frame lilts right and left at its edges as the camera steps forward in pursuit of its subjects; whereas in the first film passers-by peered curiously into the camera, here they double-take, taking in a camera set-up that must have looked eccentrically elaborate, alien. At the heart of The Human Surge 3 is a long, enthralling sequence that moves between people swimming in murky water – an element, like the film itself, in which things are related, reciprocal, subject to pressures and freedoms, momentum and tension. Williams’s cinema makes us acutely aware (beware) of the presence of the filmmaker and of the fact we are watching a film: the looks into camera, the ungainly glitches, the 360-view and its occasional warping effect are like cold currents passing near the surface, or weeds brushing against your foot.

I first watched The Human Surge in 2017 on my wheezing old Macbook, the grime on its screen difficult to distinguish from the grain of the film stock, the intended quality of the sound hard to discern with the compression of the built-in speakers. I was nodding off by the anthill scene and woke up to the bright lights and repeating, computerised voices of the finale at the factory, over which the credits started rolling. Williams’s films encourage, if not sleep itself, then the ebbing and pooling of attention. While other films might seek to control our attention, Williams’s have a more insouciant grip on it, by turns looser and rougher. They catch it with a curious line or a vivid image, then invite it to drift with spells of inscrutable dialogue or shots that linger for twenty minutes. To recall one of his films is to remember a peculiarly porous attentive state – what you saw mingled with the circumstances of watching and the life around it. Trying to identify what exactly is compelling about The Human Surge or its wrong-footing sequel is like looking for the omitted pronoun in Could See a Puma. But something about the way the films cohere proves just as hard to forget.

Read on: Edgardo Cozarinsky, ‘Letter from Buenos Aires’, NLR 26.

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The Baluchistan Imbroglio

The level of ignorance in Western coverage of the border clashes between Iran and Pakistan should come as no surprise. Nor should the State Department declaration that Pakistan’s response was ‘proportionate’ – making for queasy comparisons with the ongoing mass slaughter being perpetrated by another US funded and armed entity not too far away. To get a clear picture of the latest strikes – Iran targeted the base of an armed-separatist group, the Jaish al-Adl, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan on Tuesday; two days later, Pakistan unleashed a drone attack against Baluchi-militant ‘terrorist hideouts’ on the Iranian side of the border – we need to sweep away their web of lies and mystifications.

Baluchistan is a mountainous region bifurcated by the Pakistan-Iran border, just as Pakhtun lands are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Baluch nationalists have long resented the often brutal control exercised by the Iranian and Pakistani governments. Historically, though, whereas the Baluch leaders in Iran were politically conservative, the main Baluch tribal leaders in Pakistan were all progressive, in some cases close to the traditional communist currents of the sub-continent. Before the Iranian clerical revolution of 1979 there was even talk of unifying the two provinces as a self-governing republic.

I was involved in many discussions with Baluch tribal leaders as well as radical activists at the time. There was an independent Marxist current that spanned the tribes, led by leftist Balauch intellectuals and their non-Baluch allies from the Panjab and Sindh provinces. Their magazine, Jabal (‘Mountain’) carried some of the most interesting debates on the national question, replete with reference to Lenin’s texts on national self-determination. The analogy of the Ethiopian-Eritrean divide was discussed non-stop. A leading figure, Murad Khan, argued that with the 1974 overthrow of the pro-imperialist Haile Selassie regime in Addis, the objective conditions of the Eritrean struggle had changed and the socio-economic situation in both regions could be developed in the direction of a class unity that transcended pure nationalism. Most Baluch also wanted some form of political autonomy, or failing that, independence.

Pakistan was under heavy pressure from the Shah of Iran to crush the Baluch insurgency. Tehran was worried that the radical currents might slip across the border. Bhutto, then Prime Minister, capitulated and the Pakistan Army went on to crush the rebels. From 1977, Pakistan was run by a vicious US-backed military dictatorship (as it is now, as far as Baluchistan is concerned, under the current ‘caretaker’ government). In 1979 the military would hang Bhutto, Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader, brutalizing the national political culture. In Iran meanwhile the new Islamic Republic excited popular hopes and Baluch nationalism was compelled, for some years, to take a back seat.

Geopolitics crushed all the utopian visions emanating from Baluchistan. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the implosion of the Baluch leftist groups in Pakistan. The Iranian mullahs asserted their authority on their side of the border. The repression in Pakistani Baluchistan was vicious and unrelenting. Bhutto’s execution unleashed turbulence throughout the country, and soon an entire Baluchi tribe, the Marris, led by Sardar Khair Baksh Marri (a semi-Maoist by inclination) escaped by crossing the border to Afghanistan where they set up camp and were given refuge, food and weapons by the pro-Soviet PDPA government. There were reports that Marri and key aides had flown to Havana via Moscow for advice from Fidel Castro, though this has never been confirmed by either side. This phase ended with the advent of civilian government in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Army continued to virtually rule the province.

The repression of the Baluch people has been appalling over the last decades. Temporary relief under some civilian governments never lasted long, and recently the crackdown has gathered pace. A few weeks ago I was asked to sign yet another Baluch solidarity appeal, after a totally peaceful and relatively small gathering of Baluch dissidents and their Pakhtun and Punjabi supporters in Islamabad was broken up by police, its leaders arrested and some of them beaten up. My first reaction was ‘why now?’ At the time such arbitrary brutality made little sense. Now it does. It’s obvious that the Pakistani military intelligence had orders to prevent any display of Baluch dissent in Pakistan. To choose to provoke Iran just now would only cause more headaches for Washington. At the same time, of course, it would further divide the Muslim world at a moment when Yemen – though not Egypt, Saudi Arabi or the stooges ruling the Gulf states – is offering a strikingly effective form of solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians.

I doubt that this exchange of fire between the two states will turn into a fully-fledged war. Pakistan, already an orphan-state of the IMF, would suffer more. And China has appealed to both countries to proceed to an immediate ceasefire. China has some clout. It has a large military-economic base in Gwadar on the Baluch coast in Pakistan and enjoys close economic ties with Iran. The Beijing cavalry will be working hard behind the scenes. But the political implications of this flare-up are worth noting.

The group that Tehran targeted, Jaish ul-Adl an offshoot of al-Qaida, has been operating from Pakistani Baluchistan for well over a decade. The group has close relations with Ansar al Furqan, its Sunni equivalent in Iran. Who funds such organizations? Why does Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, busy disappearing unarmed Baluch nationalists, not deal with these well-supplied Sunni fanatics? It is they who have targeted and killed Iranian security forces, including most recently an attack on police headquarters in Rask, an Iranian border town, in December. Iran has pleaded with Pakistan on many occasions to stop these outrages. No response except honeyed words. Is anyone else funding this terrorist group? Israel? The Saudis? Any takers? I don’t know, but nothing would surprise these days as Western double-standards on ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ are not taken too seriously, except by payroll buddies.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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Rhythms of History

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who died late last year, was among the great French historians of the twentieth century. A researcher of singular ability and imagination, he trained as a social historian in the Annales tradition, and came to prominence with the publication of Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966), which legitimized his succession to the editorship of the Annales journal, launched by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929. Whereas his predecessor, Fernand Braudel, had widened the geographical sweep of Annales history during his post-war tenure, pushing beyond France to encompass the economic and social activity of the greater Mediterranean world, Le Roy Ladurie returned the focus to rural France. He would go on to undertake a series of methodological experiments in fine-grained, micro-level analysis. At the same time, Le Roy Ladurie developed a form of climate history that sought to grasp the interrelationship between the environment and human society, virtually inventing the field in the process.

He was born in 1929 in Calvados, a sea-facing department of Normandy. His mother, Léontine Dauger, was the daughter of a viscount, his father, Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, was an independent farmer who later became Secretary-General of the Union Nationale des Syndicats Agricoles, a Catholic peasant union that supported agricultural protectionism and allied itself with the agrarian fascist Greenshirts. In 1942, he was appointed Vichy’s Minister of Agriculture and Food Supply, but opposed the regime’s forced conscription of French civilians for labour service in Germany and resigned his post after a few months. Toward the end of the war, he joined a right-wing Resistance group, but was nevertheless arrested as a collaborator during the purges. His son later observed that the French Revolution had never quite reached this part of Normandy, that in many ways its patterns of life were continuous with those of the Ancien Régime.

Le Roy Ladurie studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, then a bastion of communist organizing, and was soon radicalized. Mao’s peasant revolution inspired him to join the French Communist Party, in an experience he described as a ‘conversion, a metanoia’. For his master’s thesis, he chose a suitably ‘politically engaged’ topic, French colonial policy in late nineteenth-century Indochina. It was supervised by Charles-André Julien, a Trotskyist and one of France’s few specialists in colonial history. Another early mentor was Pierre Vilar, a socialist within the Annales fold, who, in his student’s estimation, represented the best in Marxian thought, namely a totalising analysis of social reality that employed both quantitative and qualitative methods.

It was customary at the time for doctoral students in history to be sent to the provinces to cut their teeth in the local archives. In 1953, Le Roy Ladurie was dispatched to Montpellier where he taught for ten years, first in a high school, and later as a junior professor at the University of Montpellier. Like Braudel – his future mentor and a fellow northerner – he was enchanted by the landscape, architecture and history of the Midi. Yet he found Party life more stultifying in the south. As a young militant eager to shake up the PCF’s internal culture, he and others like him were labelled ‘termites’. The Soviet invasion of Hungary soon prompted his exit from the party. With the war in Algeria unfolding, Le Roy Ladurie, wishing to remain politically engaged, founded a political action committee, gathering a contingent of local anti-war activists. The group was eventually absorbed into the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), a key organization of the French New Left composed of different factions of communist and socialist parties.

In 1963, Braudel offered him a position in the Centre de recherches historiques at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Unable to resist the ‘Braudelian sirens’, Le Roy Ladurie returned to Paris, quitting the PSU in the process. It was at this point, he later reflected, that he chose to put his ‘political conscience on the back burner for a bit’; moving to Paris ultimately provided an opportunity to ‘quietly slip out of my own skin’. A combination of careerism and disenchantment would see Le Roy Ladurie move steadily rightwards over the coming decades.

He arrived back in Paris with a thesis manuscript already exceeding a thousand pages. It would be published in two volumes as Les Paysans de Languedoc. A history of rural life in Languedoc from 1500 to 1800, it was a work of striking erudition and creativity, which stands alongside Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean and Bloch’s Les Rois thaumaturges as one of the most innovative texts produced by the Annales school. Its main sources were the compoix, property records that allowed Le Roy Ladurie to study ‘the extent, nature and value of landholdings’ over the longue durée. Beginning the work while still a member of the PCF, Le Roy Ladurie had intended to trace the origins of capitalism. But he was led in a different direction: the evidence ‘mastered me by imposing its own rhythms’. It is an apt metaphor, for the book provides a kind of symphonic history, attentive not just to the economic and demographic cycles, but also to culture, psychology and the biological dimensions of human existence.

The picture that emerged from this ‘total history’ was of a society locked into cycles of Malthusian pressures and unable to generate the conditions necessary for the development of capitalism. As the population began to multiply in the late fifteenth century, agricultural production remained sluggish, making growth all but impossible. Le Roy Ladurie discerns frustration at this impasse in the cultural and political spheres – in the preoccupation with heavenly salvation during the Reformation, a rise in anti-tax revolts, the frenzy over the witches’ Sabbaths. In the end, it was the expanding French state that acted to intensify social contradictions, its increasingly muscular tax policies aggravating the problems of underdevelopment, leading to a surge in rural protest in the seventeenth century. Like Tocqueville, Le Roy Ladurie saw the absolutist state as a major engine of social development in the Ancien Régime, though with the crucial difference that he regarded it as a force of instability rather than an instrument of order.

A year later, Le Roy Ladurie published his second thesis, the epic Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (1967). In many ways a drier exercise, the book sought to establish a rigorous methodology for studying climate history. This involved freeing it from anthropocentric prejudice and discovering data sets that could furnish clear patterns of change. In particular, Le Roy Ladurie hoped to confirm the existence of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe, a period of cooling that lasted from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. He relied on the evidence of wine harvests to trace the fluctuation of temperatures: late harvests showed a high correlation with rainy and cold weather. Though he abstained from passing final judgement, he noted that the process of working through the data would make climate history scientific much in the way ‘alchemy eventually turned into chemistry’. Once climate history established its scientific credentials, he argued, it could move into studying the natural environment’s impact on human civilization, in which case ‘climatic history would become ecological history’ and help shed light on wars, epidemics, migrations and political revolts. In this respect, Le Roy Ladurie’s first two books formed a complementary analytic: from different angles and with different temporal schemes, they surveyed a human world closely bound up with the dynamics of nature.

From these first histories, Le Roy Ladurie generated a complex research programme that branched off in different directions. One was the social history of rural areas in France, with a book produced on tithes in the Ancien Régime, multiple studies of the peasantry and an analysis of conscripts in the early nineteenth-century French army. This last work tabulated reports from medical examiners, which documented, among other things, rates of diseases, malnutrition, goitres, hernias and bad teeth in young draftees. For Le Roy Ladurie, this was a step toward building a bio-ecological history of France. It was in this social-historical mode that he participated in the ‘Brenner debate’ on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Robert Brenner had argued that the origins of capitalism lay in the social-property relations and dynamic class structures of seventeenth-century England, and that Malthusian accounts of the transition, focused on repetitive cycles, failed to capture such dynamism. In his response, Le Roy Ladurie defended his methodology, maintaining that its correlation of production, population, land rent and prices was highly compatible with Marxist analysis. He also challenged what he took to be Brenner’s narrow path to capitalism, one that required the destruction of the peasantry – what Le Roy Ladurie called teasingly an ‘Augustinian view of history’. This, he insisted, underestimated the resilience and ‘remarkable potential of the peasant family model’ as seen in Belgium, Holland, northern Italy and Catalonia during the early era of industrial capitalism.

A second line of research brought Le Roy Ladurie into the domain of popular culture. His initial foray, Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), was based on an archival trouvaille: Inquisition records documenting a bishop’s attempt to stamp out Cathar heresy in a remote southwestern enclave. From these, Le Roy Ladurie was able to reconstruct in ethnographic detail the mental and material world of these secluded peasants. The influence of the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss was evident, for in the absence of both the centralizing state and powerful aristocratic demesnes, the main organizing principle of village life was the local family unit, which dictated social alliances and conflicts. Wheras Le Roy Ladurie’s quantitative histories had tracked long-term shifts and fluctuations, Montaillou appears in a seemingly eternal state of patriarchal-economic relations.

Montaillou sold a quarter of a million copies and was translated into dozens of languages. Two years earlier, Le Roy Ladurie was elected to Braudel’s former chair at the Collège de France, his candidacy supported by Lévi-Strauss and Georges Duby. With a bestseller and a berth in France’s most prestigious academy, he had ascended to the very top of his profession and become the standard-bearer of the ‘third generation’ of Annales.

The next decade would see him widen his study of peripheral mentalités, often in unpredictable ways. In L’Argent, l’amour et la mort en pays d’oc (1980), he analysed a well-known eighteenth-century folktale, Jean-L’Ont-Pris, often taken to be a straightforward description of rural life in the pre-Revolutionary Midi. Le Roy Ladurie refused any realistic interpretation of the récit and offered instead a formidable reading that assembled more than sixty examples of vernacular literature to explore the deeper themes and structures of Languedocian consciousness.

Carnaval de Romans (1979), an account of a massacre of workers in the Dauphiné during the winter festival of 1580, was treated by many as a follow-up to Montaillou, due to the folkloric and symbolic dimensions of the protest. But in many ways, Le Roy Ladurie was investigating new terrain. It was the first time he had studied an urban setting, with its different orders of craftsmen and consular powers. What is unveiled is not a cultural or religious interpretation of the massacre, but – atypically for the Annales school – a political-economic history of class struggle. In Le Roy Ladurie’s telling, a group of local notables had seized control of municipal institutions, availing itself of fiscal privileges and suppressing the popular classes. When a threat arose from the lower orders, the oligarchs launched a pre-emptive attack and killed twenty of the movement’s leaders. Whereas Montaillou appeared frozen in time, Romans was at a critical point in the history of the Ancien Régime, poised between the folk traditions and popular assemblies of the past and the radicalization of oligarchies that would define the struggles of the future and lead to revolution.

The 1980s saw a further rightward drift in Le Roy Ladurie’s outlook, occasioned, at least in part, by the election of Mitterrand. What alarmed him, he wrote in the memoir Paris-Montpellier: P.C.-P.S.U., 1945-1963 (1983), was not so much Mitterrand himself, but rather the Faustian bargain he had struck with the PCF, a party still committed to the ‘totalitarian’ principles of Marxism-Leninism. With fascism defeated, he had come to believe that communism posed the greatest threat to that ‘island of liberty’ known as Western Europe. Le Roy Ladurie’s work underwent a parallel shift. In 1987 came L’État royal, 1460-1610, followed by its sequel, L’Ancien Régime, 1610-1770 (1991). Striking in both instances was the abandonment of the ‘from below’ perspective, which had previously been a unifying principle of his writings. Gone were the peasants, famines, Sabbaths and rural protests, as attention turned to courtly life and high politics. Surprising too was how he tended to identify with the absolutist state in his account (he remarks, for instance, that ‘the War of American Independence was intelligently pursued by the French, despite various reverses on the naval side’). Yet even if at stark variance with the Annales’ tradition, this work nevertheless showed traces of Le Roy Ladurie’s distinctive anthro-historical approach to the Ancien Régime, as when he proposed, in the second volume, to study the exercise of power along the lines of anthropologist Georges Dumézil’s ‘trifunctional hypothesis’, breaking down authority into sacred, economic and martial components.

In 1997, Le Roy Ladurie then published an ethnographic account of court society through the eyes of the Duc de Saint-Simon, whose Memoirs, a classic of Baroque literature, had been a livre de chevet of the historian’s since his teenage years. He argued that the petit duc was the most thoroughgoing proponent of hierarchy that court life had ever known. Historians had mistakenly enlisted Saint-Simon among the modernizers at Versailles, whereas in fact he was ‘an archaic specimen’, ‘a ruin ripe for excavation’. All Saint-Simon’s observations were subordinated to this axial belief: bastardy, which Louis XIV legalized for the purpose of legitimating an heir, could not be tolerated on the grounds that it resulted from a ‘perversion of procreation’; seating arrangements at court had to scrupulously follow the order of ranks.

Had it stopped here, Le Roy Ladurie’s career trajectory would have had a clean arc, moving from ‘low’ to ‘high’, social to political, radical to conservative. But after his retirement from the Collège in 1999, he returned to the climate history he had inaugurated in the 1960s, publishing the massive Histoire humaine et comparée du climat trilogy. In this forty-year interval, Le Roy Ladurie had never stopped collecting data on wine harvests and glaciers, and here he employs this mountain of evidence to produce a detailed and complex longue durée history of human beings’ relationship with the climate. This totalizing eco-history marks the culmination of a life’s work in the furrows of Annales history, and leaves no doubt as to the warming of the planet during the industrial era. As Mike Davis suggested in NLR, Le Roy Ladurie has left behind an intricate map for scholars to puzzle over as they tackle the climate emergency. This would require close collaboration between historians and scientists, and a continued focus on human history as eco-history; or, Annales at its very best.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Taking the Temperature of History’, NLR 110.

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Conditional Tense

The history of feminist filmmaking in Germany is multifaceted, even messy. The career of its eminence grise, Helke Sander, subject of a recent documentary, is a case in point. Cleaning House (Aufräumen) captures Sander in reflective spirit, endeavouring to ‘tidy up’ (aufräumen) both memories and possessions. Directed by a former student, Claudia Richarz, the film made its debut at the Internationales Frauenfilmfestival in Dortmund to an audience of grey heads; alumnae, one imagined, of the German women’s movement (younger viewers were notably absent). It was an appropriate venue: the festival originated as a counterpart to the journal Frauen und Film, which Sander founded in 1974. An interplay between criticism, feminist research, activism and filmmaking has characterised Sander’s career across the decades, though her avowed desire was always singular: to make films.

A member of the first cohort at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Sander’s classmates included future luminaries of the New German Cinema, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, alongside Holger Meins, later a member of the Red Army Faction. Her approach, mixing documentary and fiction, the personal and the sociological, was a product of this milieu. She was in her late twenties when she joined the academy in 1966, having already worked as a theatre director in Finland, where she had a child and married a Finnish writer. Her work would draw upon these experiences. In her best-known fiction, The All-Round Reduced Personality – Redupers (Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers, 1977), Sander herself plays Edda, a young mother and photographer. Short of time and sleep, having to juggle childcare, work and activism, Edda’s is a familiar struggle to balance domestic labour, financial stability and personal or creative fulfilment.

Edda’s romantic relationship unfolds in the gaps between these different kinds of work. In one scene she reads the newspaper in bed while sharing an orange with her lover. In her characteristically dry tone, Sander’s voiceover tells us that her attraction to him consists primarily in his being ‘so minimally exhausting that she can just barely tolerate him’. The gendered economics of art making are brought into focus. Edda’s photography collective at one point reflects on an assignment they have received from the city government. The politicians and bureaucrats want to demonstrate their openness to ‘women’s perspectives’, but the collective is aware that the commission is driven by another factor: the low cost of women’s labour. In Sander’s films, political reflection happens on many levels, often taking the form of meta-commentary; here, the precarious situation of female artists draws our attention to the limited resources available for the production of the film itself, on its director’s creative ambitions.

Political agitation within the film world came to seem a necessity during this period: the subjects and stories that interested Sander and her feminist co-thinkers did not appeal to the predominantly male committees that made funding decisions. Women simply did not have access to the same resources. In 1973, Sander and fellow director Claudia von Alemann organised the first edition of the Internationales Frauenfilmseminar in Berlin, which showed forty films on topics such as women’s struggles for workers’ rights, their representation in the media, abortion, sexuality and the dynamics of the feminist movement. The event not only inspired women all over Germany to organise screenings, but also helped to form new networks. Frauen und Film became a focal point for feminist discussion of film in Germany and beyond. To be a militant within film politics, however, had never been Sander’s ambition, as she makes clear in Fantasie und Arbeit (2009), a joint autobiography she co-wrote with East German director Iris Gusner. Becoming an activist was necessary in order to create the conditions in which she could become a filmmaker.

Sander’s organising within German film was, nevertheless, of a piece with her earlier participation in Berlin’s feminist and student movements. In January 1968, Sander, with a group including Marianne Herzog – also later a member of the Red Army Faction – established a network of Kinderläden. A hundred women turned up to the first meeting, and the first five childcare centres were set up across the city. ‘It was like a Big Bang’, Sander recalled, ‘the scales fell from our eyes. Nothing like this had ever happened before: women gathering to solve a problem without first seeking advice from a man.’ In an infamous episode that same year she confronted the men of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund: the lens of class struggle should be applied to relationships between men and women; action to redress this could not be put off until after the revolution. When the next speaker, a man, tried to proceed without responding to Sander’s point, a female member of the SDS threw ripe tomatoes at him (the incident became known as the Tomato Speech).

The dynamics of the student movement were at the centre of Sander’s second feature film, Der Subjektive Faktor (1980). Anni, the protagonist, moves into a commune with her child. The experience politicizes her, but she comes to realise that not only do women play a minor role in the movement, but their inequality is also considered merely an ‘additional contradiction’ (‘Nebenwiderspruch’), expected to resolve itself once the class struggle is won. Like most of Sander’s films, Der Subjektive Faktor presents one defined perspective – that of the protagonist – but many voices. These emerge primarily through dialogue and voiceover, but also through posters and flyers, diegetic video playing on a TV screen, and in documentary material woven into the film’s narration. In a long travelling shot, the film registers the various reactions – of women and men, ranging from disgust to disinhibited laughter – to the protagonist’s suggestion that women must be considered a ‘class’. A montage of documentary footage of men responding to the demands of the women’s movement follows. The combining of different materials and different aesthetic registers to present a set of political questions is characteristic. What does it mean to raise a young child in this politicised environment? What new forms of community are possible?

Though recognised as a pioneering filmmaker, today Sander is better known in Germany for her activism, in particular the Kinderläden project, which was foundational in the development of a nationwide network of childcare centres (the initiative was brought to completion by Ursula von der Leyen). The legal right to childcare – instituted in 2013 – is a great achievement, but it was only a part of what Sander and the West German women’s movement were fighting for. As a filmmaker, meanwhile, Sander remains little known outside of Germany. One factor may be her documentary Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children (1990) (Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder) detailing women’s experience of rape in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Sander was accused of historical revisionism, of wanting to weigh these rapes against Germany’s atrocities (an objection she anticipated). What drove her was the realisation that a huge number – an estimated 2 million, according to her research ­– of the generation of women before her had been raped after the war, but had remained silent.

What of the conditions for feminist filmmakers in Germany today? The network ProQuote Film, founded in 2014, demands gender parity in funding committees as well as in the distribution of funds, echoing the demands of Frauen und Film. Today ‘female stories’ and plots with ‘diverse casts’ have become marketable, and while the crisis of cinema is ongoing, streaming platforms overflow with content featuring ‘strong women’. Yet while women filmmakers in mainstream cultural production have been able to increase their share of a shrinking industry, for more experimental, political filmmakers, seeking to work with less commodified aesthetics, the situation has hardly changed. Activism to create the conditions to be a feminist filmmaker remains an urgent task. Sander’s work – both her political activism and her filmmaking – prompt us to continue this struggle.

Read on: Frigga Haug, ‘The Women’s Movement in West Germany’, NLR I/55.

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Democratic Pretence

Following Serbia’s elections on 17 December, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe held a press conference that felt like a funeral. A row of solemn bureaucrats read out a list of irregularities recorded during the contest, and they were legion. In recent years, Serbian national ballots have been somewhat Gogolian, with votes cast by long-deceased voters and other instances of fraud. But this time the scale was different. The OSCE concluded that the election had been carried out under a climate of intimidation, amid violence, vote-buying, dubious registers, ballot stuffing, pressure on public sector employees and ‘multiple allegations’ of mass bussing from neighboring Bosnia to vote for the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vučić.

Even taking into account the SNS’s underhanded tactics, the party still won a convincing victory at national level, netting about 47% of the vote, while the liberal opposition bloc Serbia Against Violence (SPN) came in distant second with just under 24%. SNS looks set to have an absolute majority in the 250-seat parliament: 147 seats to SPN’s 63. While the opposition maintains that the result would have been different in a media landscape less dominated by the government, Vučić still exceeded expectations. In most cases, it seemed that the rigging supplemented his mandate rather than dramatically altered the final outcome. One important exception, however, was Belgrade’s City Assembly elections, where irregularities were recorded at a full 14% of all polling stations. SPN are confident that they were the true victors in the capital.

The SPN coalition emerged out of the large-scale protests prompted by two back-to-back mass shootings in May 2023. Protesters blamed the killings on a culture of glorified violence and criminality, which they see as embodied in the imposing figure of Vučić. The President is believed to have extensive ties to organized crime, including some that stretch back to the underworld of the wartime 1990s, when he served as Milosević’s Minister of Information. In that role he was known for his ruthlessness in managing the media and government critics. It’s a reputation he has retained. Vučić dominates the country’s politics, presenting himself as a guarantor of stability and guardian of Serbian national interests in a hostile region. Since his party came to power in 2012, he has amassed total control over the country’s security services and overseen a lurid tabloidization of the press, which is used to savage his detractors. In the run up to the recent election, a member of SPN had a computer stolen from his home which contained a private sex tape; in the weeks ahead of the election, the graphic video was played on pro-government morning television.

The SPN coalition is comprised of several parties and political associations: the Green-Left Front, the nominally centre-left Party of Freedom and Justice, the liberal Movement of Free Citizens, and the conservative People’s Movement of Serbia, among others. Its campaign centred on corruption, political and media repression, and environmental issues. The liberal opposition has tried to draw a dividing line between its foreign policy and that of the government. Whereas Vučić’s orientation is deliberately ambiguous – pledging continued military neutrality and maintenance of ties with both Russia and the West – SPN has criticized the government for failing to join the EU in imposing sanctions on Moscow. Perhaps reflecting its primary support base among the educated, urban middle classes, SPN’s campaign did not foreground Serbia’s spiralling food price inflation, which is currently the second highest in Europe. Vučić’s supporters, meanwhile, tend to be rural, conservative and working class.

Protests against the election results began just hours after the polls closed, with SPN demanding that the electoral commission cancel the Belgrade results. A week later, clashes broke out with police after a window was smashed in the City Assembly building, and at least 38 demonstrators were arrested. Since then, students have blocked some of Belgrade’s main arteries and erected tents in the streets. On the afternoon of 30 December, tens of thousands of protesters congregated in the city centre to hear speeches from ProGlas (‘ProVote’), a group of artists and intellectuals calling for democratic reform. One of them held up a faded, threadbare EU flag which he had carried during the anti-Milosević marches of the 1990s. Also in attendance was a visibly weak Marinika Tepić, a leading figure in SPN who went on hunger strike after the election. While the bitterly contested Belgrade local election has been the foremost concern of the protests, SPN is now demanding an annulment of all elections at both the local and national level.

Both sides of the country’s political divide are drawing parallels with the ‘colour revolution’ that brought down Milosević. Serbian and Russian officials have accused the West of trying to enact a ‘Serbian Maidan’ – a slogan that a few protesters have since printed on their banners. The Russian ambassador, Alexandr Botsan-Kharchenko, told the press that Serbia was being targeted for refusing to impose sanctions on his country. Superficially, the contours of the unrest are reminiscent of colour revolutions past in pitting two elites against each other: an outwardly pro-Western faction and one more amenable to Russia (though not exclusively). But the missing element, notwithstanding Vučić’s official narrative, is firm Western political, financial, and logistical support for the opposition.

This is especially significant to many Serbs given the outsized role the United States played in turning the tide against the regime of Slobodan Milosević in 2000. In the months preceding his downfall, Washington contributed $80 million to so-called ‘democracy assistance initiatives’ and provided extensive logistical support to the opposition. Back then, the West promised Serbia a bright democratic future. Now, Vučić’s staying power reflects how much the world has changed since the turn of the millennium. Western governments may still help to fund election monitoring NGOs, but for the most part they have been reserved in criticizing the recent elections or the President himself. Across the region, US Ambassador Christopher Hill is widely regarded as excessively accommodating of the current Serbian regime. Shortly after the vote, he remarked that he was ‘really looking forward’ to continuing his work with the incumbent while criticizing protesters for supposedly resorting to violence. He has said that concerns about electoral irregularities should be dealt with by Serbia’s domestic institutions. This is no Maidan. No ‘democracy’ cavalry is riding to the rescue this time.

That is in part because Vučić has balanced his electoral chicanery and overtures to Moscow with actions designed to please the West. Here we can see a split between the spheres of political and media opinion. The editorial boards of both the Guardian and Washington Post have published scathing denunciations of Vučić, describing contemporary Serbia as a ‘textbook case of state capture’ and rejecting the recent election as a fraud. They have characterized the current US strategy as appeasement and called for a new approach, suggesting that Belgrade is edging closer to Moscow. Yet they are conspicuously silent about Vučić’s continuing cooperation with NATO, including a joint press conference he held with Jens Stoltenberg as recently as late November. Under Vučić, Serbia has participated in more military exercises with the Atlantic alliance than it has with Russia. Accusations of Western coup-plotting continue to be a staple of the country’s public discourse, amplified by its garish press; but in Vučić’s Serbia, populist pro-Russian rhetoric has always concealed quieter Western-friendly actions. 

Even as Vučić blamed Washington and Brussels for orchestrating mass protests against him, he also signalled that he would continue to play along. On 25 December, the day after dozens of demonstrators were arrested and outrage over the election reached its apex, his government announced that it would henceforth allow Kosovo licence plates to be used in Serbia: a controversial move for which the West has long applied pressure. The EU praised the decision as a sign of ‘progress’ – one that supposedly demonstrated Vučić’s willingness to resolve the issue of Kosovo, on which SPN is often notably silent and internally divided.

It is unlikely that a dramatic change in US approach is forthcoming. Electoral tricks in Serbia are a relatively minor issue, given the many wars and geopolitical crises in which Washington is now embroiled. Liberal interventionism and heavy-handed democracy promotion in the Balkans now seem like a luxury of the unipolar moment. Looking ahead to the upcoming American elections, it seems that a Trump victory would herald an even friendlier US–Serbia relationship. The Trump administration made no secret of its antipathy towards Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, and Vučić surely hopes that a Republican White House would give Serbia the upper hand in its tortuous negotiations with Prishtina.

It is also unlikely that the post-election crisis presages an imminent political shift in Serbia. The opposition will almost certainly fail to secure a rerun of the elections. SPN have said that regular protests will continue on a weekly basis, and disruptive street demonstrations are now starting to seem like a regular feature of Belgrade life. But absent any powerful Western patron, such activism has a largely therapeutic function. The recent holiday period has already reduced its scale. Even the opposition’s most achievable goal – new City Assembly elections – is looking less likely as the weeks go by. Yet, were it secured, this concession might well yield the best outcome for everyone: a victorious opposition could legitimize itself by governing at city level, while Vučić could continue to argue that Serbia is a democracy, and the West could continue to pretend that it supports one.

Read on: Lily Lynch, ‘A New Serbia?’, NLR 140/141.