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Wild City

Some years ago, a friend who lives in Camden Council housing within walking distance from St Paul’s Cathedral told me he’d seen a fox on his way home one evening. This, we agreed, was a landmark. Foxes were spotted in London suburbs for the first time in the 1930s. They made their way into the inner city during the sixties; living in green, hilly southeast London for 24 years, I see them nearly every day. But the dense streets of Central London were still fox-free. And then, they weren’t, and the beasts sadistically hunted by the English upper classes were wandering freely around the very centre of the capital, and can be found stalking the Royal Exchange on the average November night. Urban foxes are among the most conspicuous members of London’s sometimes strange wild animal population. In terms of public fascination, these indigenous beasts rank alongside a much more exotic species: bright lime-green parakeets, who have achieved a similar gradual takeover of the city, suburb by suburb, to the point that they are currently more common – at least in my corner of Camberwell – than sparrows or starlings, nearly as ordinary as pigeons and crows.

Rose-ringed parakeets flying over Hither Green Cemetery, London (2014). Photo by Sam Hobson.

Both creatures get their due in the geographer Matthew Gandy’s comprehensive, ambitious Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (2022). Gandy has spent the last two decades working on aspects of urbanism that are conventionally overlooked, such as recycling, waste, and most memorably plumbing, the subject of Concrete and Clay (2002), his eye-opening book on New York’s Robert Moses-era water system. He combines this with impatience with neoliberal boosterism (exhibited, for instance, in a ferocious attack on Rem Koolhaas’s praise of excitingly unplanned Lagos). But his most recent book is less a case study than a sweeping, compendious work, focused on the specifically urban nature of ‘urban nature’, and the ways in which accidental and unpredictable interactions of flora, fauna and human beings have taken place within large cities. It is also a timely book; the experience of being locked down in our homes, and finding relief in the exploration of the proximate environment, is still fresh (a phenomenon that has led to the popularisation of the ‘fifteen-minute city’ as both policy and conspiracy theory).

Many people have had unplanned Blakean experiences of finding universes in their local bit of neglected municipal open space – infinities in an allotment, a park, or a back garden. We were locked down as a consequence of the unexpected and ill-thought-out contact among humans, animals and cities; the Covid-19 virus leapt from bats, possibly via expensive, rare trophy animals in Wuhan’s wet markets, to us (another urban anecdote – a friend in the London Borough of Redbridge watching the construction of an impromptu morgue on Wanstead Flats at the height of the virus’s first wave). Both London’s foxes and its parakeets feature in Gandy’s book; he even recounts the delightful urban myth that the parakeets are descendants of birds once released into London’s sky by Jimi Hendrix, rather than, as the more mundane explanation has it, the result of a break-out from Kew Gardens. But much more unusual creatures are just as often the focus – a ‘strange-looking wasp’, for example, that Gandy discovers on his North London window and which turns out to be a member of a rare species (with ‘a liking for dunes, rough grassland and “brambly places”’).

Much of the attention paid to urban nature emphasises its usefulness – urban farms, tree-planting as climate-cooling mechanism and so on. Importantly, Gandy is most interested in an urban-natural landscape that doesn’t ‘do’ anything in particular. Though he concedes that ecology and aesthetics are by no means logically connected, the book is not a study of urban economics or politics (although they do feature) but an attempt to defend a certain kind of urban space created by those evanescent periods in a capitalist economy when one profitable use ends and another has not yet begun; it is essentially a treatise on the virtues of what city planners call ‘brownfield’ (left over by departed industry, property market failure or the effects of war) as opposed to ‘greenfield’ (agriculture, Green Belt, parkland). In trying to create a cosmopolitan, non-nativist ‘reenchantment’ based on the pleasures of ‘brownfield’, he takes issue with a certain urban pessimism that can be found on the left as much as the right; in passing, Gandy mentions his disappointment that the Scottish Marxist geographer Neil Smith’s personal love of ornithology never made it into his critical work on the bourgeois and neo-romantic nature of any project of ‘reenchanting’ space under capitalism.

Natura Urbana’s scope is international. There are detailed excursions to Chennai (home to a thriving community of urban ornithologists), Lisbon (where he finds poplar trees and pampas grass growing around an old gasworks), Yokohama (with its dragonfly-filled ponds), Los Angeles (with its suburban coyotes and parrots) and especially, pre-Wende Berlin, whose wastelands were the subject of a documentary film Gandy made in 2017. But the book is rooted in London, where Gandy grew up in the 1970s. He longingly recalls its bombsites and what used to be derisively called Space Left Over After Planning (SLOAP). In one beloved spot, in his native London Borough of Islington, he recalls a bombsite where ‘bright red cinnabar moths flitted across patches of ragwort, their yellow flowers contrasting with purple drifts of rosebay willowherb, a plant that had become a botanical leitmotif for London bombsites . . . to enter such a space conjured up images from children’s literature, of a magical transition into another world’. This passage recalls Humphrey Jennings’s wartime ponderings on the accidental beauty of bombsites, whose spaciousness and lushness he hoped could inform the practices of post-war planning. But for Gandy it is especially important that this was an ‘accidental garden’, with ‘no planting scheme or trace of human intentionality’ – in 1975, the ten-year-old future geographer wrote a letter to Islington Council protesting the site’s planned redevelopment. Accordingly, this is not a book about consciously ‘designed nature’, though Gandy has some smart and sometimes questionable things to say about it.

Botanists looking for wildflowers on a bombsite, Gresham Street, London
(1943). Source: Getty Images.

It isn’t all poetic encounters with municipal scrubland. Some of the urban-natural interactions Gandy catalogues are nightmarish. He describes the cockroach-induced allergies that beset many children in under-maintained American public housing projects, and the mosquitoes that evolved in interwar London to survive in the Underground, sucking on the blood of commuters. He also evokes the terrifying world of the Gilded Age Chicago stockyards, and the modernist slaughterhouses of Argentina (he could have included the Lyon Slaughterhouse designed in the early 20th century by the pioneering modern architect Tony Garnier, or, in Shanghai’s old International Settlement, the extraordinary, proto-Brutalist Municipal Abattoir). But generally the book is affirmative, if unsentimental.

Against the conventional perception of cities as inimical to plants and animals, Gandy insists, surely correctly, that urban areas are in fact very often highly ‘biodiverse’, especially when compared to ‘their monocultural hinterlands dominated by industrialised agriculture’. This is a consequence of the sheer diversity of spaces in cities, and to the sheer quantity, unusual in the more productive parts of the countryside, of places that are left alone. He is therefore enraged by the dismissive term ‘brownfield’. For one thing, these fields tend not to be brown. As an example, he discusses Hauts-de-Seine, the Paris banlieue borough that includes Nanterre and post-industrial Billancourt, whose ‘brownfield’ zones are far more biodiverse than the city’s manicured parks and gardens, comparable to the countryside around. He also finds instances of heavy industry accidentally fostering urban nature as well as destroying it; a vivid case here is the Sheffield-based biologist Oliver Gilbert’s study of the northern city’s wild fig trees, which flourished because the river Don, used for industrial cooling for the city’s steelworks, stayed at 20 degrees centigrade all year round. There’s also Jennifer Owen’s ‘thirty-year investigation of her back garden’ in Leicester, a particularly Blakean endeavour begun in the early 1970s, during which she found ‘over 2,200 species of insects, including 20 that had never been found in Britain and four that were new to science’. This, Gandy points out, is about the level of biodiversity found in Monks Wood in Huntingdonshire, one of Britain’s largest nature reserves; though over time – ironically, as the city has substantially deindustrialised – the diversity of insect life in Owen’s garden has declined.

Examples of lichens growing on an urban wall (2006). Photo by Margaret Sixsmith.

Gandy’s encomium to the unplanned and overgrown is also a defence of particular plants growing in places where they might be considered ‘foreign’; weeds, wherever they come from, are celebrated here. Much of Natura Urbana is devoted to the ‘non-native’. Examples include the Turkey oak in Britain, hated by conservationists as an aggressive, non-British oak, despite evidence that these oaks were here over 100,000 years ago, before receding and then returning as a consequence of global trade in the 18th century. Gandy speaks up for what are usually described as ‘invasive’, or more heatedly, ‘alien’ plants; most of all for buddleia, the ubiquitous ‘brownfield’ flowering shrub, which is of 19th-century Chinese origin. Just as Asian fauna travelled, usually as a result of imperialism, across Europe and the US, the same process also happened in reverse, like the growth across Chinese cities of sumac plants originally from North America, or the spurges that ‘escaped from the garden of Beijing’s Institute of Botany’ and now grow in the interstices of urban China. This sort of plant life tends to thrive most where systems of management and maintenance have collapsed, though Gandy does not always make the connection. Post-Soviet Kyiv, for instance, he finds to be an especially wild city: by the early 2000s, its 19th-century boulevards and overgrown Soviet ville radieuse housing estates hosted ‘over 500 non-native plant species’. This is undoubtedly true (a photographer and designer of my acquaintance once told me of his joy at coming back to Kyiv after a spell in Vienna – ‘it’s like a jungle!’), but it is a consequence of processes of state abandonment that in other respects have made many people’s lives miserable. Neglect is double-edged, and produces more than buddleia.

The political resonances of the ‘non-native’ species are brought out especially strongly in Gandy’s various tales of Berlin, a city which is returned to again and again in Natura Urbana. Because of the intensity of its wartime destruction and the reservation of an entire continuous stretch of the city as a deliberately fallow ‘death strip’ from 1961 to 1989, Berlin became something like the global capital of ‘brownfield’. It is also, ironically, a city from which Nazi-era botanists, such as Reinhold Tüxen, once attempted to control the vegetation of the Reich according to race science, mapping the vegetation of Germany and Poland according to its degree of Germannness and likening the spread of balsam in rural areas ‘to the threat of Bolshevism from the east’. Gandy devotes much space to scientific attempts to map the city’s post-war wild nature, including Herbert Sukopp’s studies of West Berlin as a place full of what in German is called Brache. Especially intriguingly, he describes Paul-Armand Gette’s 1980s photographs of Berlin streets and tenements overgrowing with shrubs from Peru and North Vietnam as a useful counterpoint to Joseph Beuys’s contemporary proposals for planting 7,000 German oaks in the German urban landscape. Bravely, given Beuys’s enduring (and rather spurious) status as secular saint, Gandy contrasts his nativism, ‘neo-romanticism’ and disinterest in complexity with the much more grounded and egalitarian work of Gette, who was interested in how urban plant life could be at once ‘exotic’ and ‘banal’.

Paul-Armand Gette, photograph of a Berlin street with Ailanthus altissima,
originally from China and North Vietnam, featured in the exhibition ‘Exotik als Banalität‘ (1980). Courtesy of the artist.

Much of this landscape no longer exists, stamped out by the banal stone facades foisted upon Berlin by the neo-Prussian planning regime of Hans Stimmann, but it does survive in pockets. Some of these are unplanned and wild, in the manner Gandy approves of, and are among the city’s most extraordinary spaces, like Teufelsberg, a mountain of rubble capped by the geodesic domes of a derelict CIA listening station, or the ultra-biodiverse wastes on what were once the runways and landing strips of Tempelhof Airport. A few, such as the recently opened Gleisdreieck Park, try to combine the planned and the unplanned. Gandy gives the Berlin examples a cautious welcome, but in general he reserves some of his harshest words for planned urban nature in this otherwise even-tempered book. New York’s High Line, for instance, a linear park on a disused freight line in western Manhattan, he denounces as an ‘ecological simulation’ of what was once a genuinely wild and enchanting landscape, its tastefully selected grasses and pines planted in the service of an extremely successful motor of property development. Gandy gives similarly short shrift to Instagram causes célèbres such as the densely planted ‘vertical forest’ residential towers of the Italian architect and PD politician Stefano Boeri, built in Milan among other cities. These worked well enough in northern Italy, but elsewhere, their spread has fallen foul of exactly the kind of ignorance of the very specific, local character of urban nature that Gandy is trying to outline here. When Boeri’s design was transferred to humid, subtropical Chengdu, the plants covering the skyscrapers quickly attracted dengue-carrying mosquitoes, making the ‘vertical forest’ deeply inhospitable for its human residents and radically reducing the towers’ property values.

The High Line, New York (2011): an ecological simulacrum of elements of
what once existed on the site. Photo by Matthew Gandy.

Like ‘brownfield’ (and for that matter, ‘anthropocene’, a word whose ‘messy omnipotence’ Gandy compares to that of ‘postmodernism’ in the 1980s), ‘Resilience’ is a term Gandy regards with great suspicion. ‘Resilient’ planting in cities tends to entail simple, robust flora, specifically able to weather global warming. This he sees as a new monoculture, in contrast to the constant flux of actually existing urban-natural landscape, the perpetual process of creation and destruction which throws up bizarre and unexpected freaks like the London parakeets. He makes a link between ‘Resilience’ and the mundane practices of neoliberal public management through the example of Sheffield, an especially green large English city, home to those steelwork-induced fig trees. Like ‘Resilience’ planners, the petty outsourcing companies the city charged with maintaining Sheffield’s trees in 2012 have been engaged in a project to replace what were, until recently, ‘fine avenues of elm, lime and cherry trees, some of which harbour rare insects’ with ‘simpler’ streets of little, homogenous, easily pruned varieties. This has led to bitter protests across the city, repeated in the south when a similar bulldozer approach was applied to the post-war boulevards of Plymouth. Disgust at the pruning of the trees helped the Conservatives lose control of that city last year. Gandy cautions that, however justified by the need to counteract global warming, ‘the neoliberal “urban forest” of the future is likely to consist of smaller and younger trees that support far less biodiversity’.

These examples, both glamorous (Boeri’s vertical forests) and shabby (British homogenised tree-lined streets), reveal some of the limitations of planning urban nature. But they are also illustrations of what neoliberalism does in cities. Gandy borrows the term ‘planification’ from Manfredo Tafuri to describe the forces ranged against the unplanned biodiverse urban wastes, but planning is essential to any kind of urban socialism. Given the suspicion of conscious planning that runs throughout the book, there is a question about whether it would be possible to actually create the sort of wild, complex, interstitial spaces that he favours, as opposed to simply waiting for them to emerge through accidents of creative destruction. Gandy surely knows this – his critique of Koolhaas’s dazzled but vacuous reaction to Lagos’s apparent ability to function without planning is among the most powerful attacks on Hayekian urbanism – but seems unable wholly to reconcile municipal socialism with a love of wastelands.

This matters, because conservation can make it perversely difficult to build green infrastructure. Some examples are rural: the construction of High-Speed Rail, for instance, has been made extraordinarily expensive in both Britain and Germany by measures to safeguard landscapes and biodiversity in protected areas – the astonishing cost and endless delays of the ‘Stuttgart 21’ railway project are in part due to the need to resettle thousands of rare lizards whose habitat lay in the path of the high-speed trains, while the preposterous expense of the HS2 disaster in Britain is largely down to ploughing railway tunnels under the Chilterns on routes that would more easily and cheaply run on the surface, so as to leave various southern landscapes untouched. Urban biodiversity is less frequently protected, of course. But a few years ago, campaigners protesting against a council housing development in the London Borough of Southwark, among the borough’s first since the 70s, rechristened the wasteland upon which it was to be built as ‘Peckham Green’. They even managed to get this designation, unheard-of until 2020, onto Google Maps. ‘The intrinsic worth of the ostensibly useless’, writes Gandy, ‘is as much a political question as an aesthetic or scientific one’. Natura Urbana is primarily about understanding and appreciating what already exists; hopefully its many insights will prove useful for understanding what sort of spaces we might want to bring into being. 

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

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Real Life

A pair of novels from Pier Paolo Pasolini, recently reissued by New York Review Books, display the aesthetic and intellectual range of the Italian writer and filmmaker. The first, his debut, Boys Alive, published in 1955, is a fizzing chemical reaction, its postwar hustler vignettes suffused with speed, lust and disaster. The second, his final work in prose, Theorem (1968), is a chilly, enigmatic parable about a visitor who seduces each member of a bourgeois family and thereby transforms or destroys them. (It began as a poem and was later made into a film of the same name.) Between these two approaches we find tradition distilled and then discarded, moving from gritty Italian neo-realism toward the abstraction of the then-ascendant nouveau roman. Pasolini built upon his literary inheritance before utterly razing it such that neither nostalgia nor mythology could gain a footing. Reading the novels back-to-back is like a cold plunge after a scalding bath.

Pasolini was an urban aesthete, conflicted Catholic Marxist, peasant mythologizer and inveterate lech. He was born in Bologna, in 1922, to a Fascist army officer and a schoolteacher. His father’s military postings and sometime imprisonment for gambling debts compelled the family to move frequently. He attended the University of Bologna, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century poet Giovanni Pascoli. It was there he began to speak openly about his homosexuality. (He was said to have fallen in love with one of the war-ravaged pupils he and his mother taught free of charge.) A series of disasters precipitated his fateful move to Rome. His brother, a partisan, was murdered by rivals in 1945. His father came home from the war in a state of alcoholic paranoia. Then, in 1949, Pasolini was caught with a group of underage boys performing an undisclosed sexual act. The local anti-Communist authorities put him on trial; narrowly avoiding indecency charges, he was nonetheless expelled from the Communist Party and fired from his teaching position. In January, 1950, he and his mother abandoned his father and set out for Rome.

The city was a sea change, a whirl of pleasure, squalor and art. Pasolini’s fall from respectability compelled a reckoning: ‘Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar Wilde.’ He sought the desperate freedom of disrepute and found it in Rome’s poverty-stricken underclass, particularly in the beautiful, violent young men who furnished him with the material for his early poems and fictions. He stayed afloat via odd jobs: teaching, literary journalism, bit parts in movies. He would later work as a screenwriter for Soldati and Fellini, and go on to direct a variety of disruptive, legacy-defining works including Accatone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962) and Medea (1969). He was murdered, in Ostia, in 1975, likely by a right-wing criminal organization.

Boys Alive remains his best-known novel. It is plotless, headlong, horny, vascular and often unbearably sad. It follows Riccetto and his friends – all the boys have diminutives or nicknames: Trouble, Cheese, Woodpecker and so on – over the course of five years as they pillage, cruise, fight, strut, gamble and narrowly avoid incarceration. Pasolini is unerring in his dramatic instincts. He seeks heat, battle, humiliation, thrilling reversals of fortune. The boys are either skint or flush with ill-gotten spoils. Money is forever being lost and found, then spent recklessly on indulgences. Financial windfalls – from lifting scrap metal, robbing friends and enemies, or sex work – are splurged on fashionable shoes or enormous bar tabs. Riccetto believes ‘cash is the source of all pleasure and all happiness in this filthy world’. It is above all a means of style, to be used solely in service of what the boys call ‘real life’.

What is this ‘real life’ they speak of? Everything pleasurable, everything wanton, everything unpredictable, incongruous and free. It is competition, fashion, swimming, sex, food, drink and indolence. ‘God, I like having fun!’ Cacciota says. The words constitute the group’s personal code, a philosophy with which they reimagine the meagreness of their circumstances. To experience boredom is to have failed ‘real life’. It is to be found wanting, to lose one’s nerve, or else to work a day job, to achieve a shabby respectability. To be short of cash is to lack the shrewdness necessary for living. It is a kind of total defeat. If the alternative to ennui is death, the boys will unfailingly choose the latter. (Many boys die in the novel: illnesses; drownings; car crashes; suicides.)

Weather and youth are the novel’s twin forces of aggression. There is no season but summer and one practically squints while reading, assaulted by page after page of heat and glinting metal. Asphalt yards ‘crackle with flame’, the Colosseum stands ‘burning like a furnace’; ‘rank heat’ rises from a river; bodies sweat under ‘the full blaze of the sun’. It’s nearly impossible to imagine Pasolini’s Rome in winter, so complete is his delirious, fiery dream. The sun is his engine. Its presence suffuses the novel, forever offering up a plausible, heat-addled motive for petty crime or a disorienting backdrop for flashy exhibitionism. It drives the boys, sweating, heedless, into their next misadventure.

The novel’s episodic structure – built loosely around criminal activity, family life, the procurement of prostitutes, group swims at the river, and plenty of shooting the shit – eludes a totalizing narrative. Scenes never outstay their welcome. A climax approaches, your heart lurches or breaks, and then you’re whisked to the next calamity a month or a year hence. It is in these pungent transitions that Pasolini betrays his obsession with cinema, in the way he weds his lyricism to setting, his prose like a camera eye, ever ready for the close up or tracking shot. Translator Tim Parks renders a lean, athletic prose that oscillates between beauty and brutality. Its wattage can’t be overstated. All is kinetic possibility, open-ended, chaotic, alive. No resolution, no hope, only action, action, action.

*

In 1968, Pasolini shot his film, Theorem, in Lombardy. Before it hit screens, he’d published a novel of the same name. Despite some equivocation by contemporary critics, he was quick to dispel any suggestion that the novel was mere film treatment. As translator Stuart Hood notes in his introduction, Pasolini said it was ‘as if the book had been painted with one hand while with the other he was working on a fresco – the film.’ The pleasures and challenges of each work are interrelated, a kind of correspondence. To set one against the other is to ignore this complementary formalism, the way each foregrounds the spiritual corruption and erotic ennui of the bourgeoise.

Theorem is a beguiling work of calculated estrangement. Pasolini forecloses any attempt to locate the narrative, geographically or historically. ‘As the reader will already have noticed,’ we are told, ‘this, rather than being a story, is what in the sciences is called “a report”: so it is full of information; therefore, technically, its shape rather being that of “a message”, is that of “a code”.’ Events unfold by way of meticulous description, a kind of poetic data that pins the novel’s subjects like insects beneath glass. What results is an allegory disguised as a memorandum.

The novel immediately establishes an aura of boredom, drift and atrophy. The family of a well-to-do Milanese businessman endures aimless walks, chaste kisses, drowsy reading, and the ringing of midday bells. This soporific mood is shattered when a beautiful, enigmatic young man invites himself to stay at their suburban mansion. Each member of the family – Paolo, the father; Lucia, the mother; Pietro, the son; Odetta, the daughter; Emilia, the maid – is gradually overcome by the youth. He beds them all, one by one, tenderly, as if the family ‘awoke in him merely a kind of loving compassion, precisely of delicate maternal caring’. His magnetism is effortless, his flesh somehow consoling. He remains an inscrutable presence throughout, a figure of almost biblical ambivalence.

His eventual withdrawal destroys the family: ‘The guest . . . seems to have divided them from each other, leaving each one alone with the pain of loss and a no less painful sense of waiting.’ Each fruitlessly seeks some purpose or diversion to staunch the wound of his abandonment: Emilia leaves her post to float surreally above her village; Odetta becomes catatonic and is admitted to a clinic; Lucia cruises for boys half her age; Pietro becomes an artist, pissing on his work in disgust; Paolo strips at a train station and walks the platforms as if in a dream. Between these descriptive chapters there are lengthy prose poems, ostensibly narrated by a member of the family. Their weighty musings (with titles like ‘Identification of Incest with Reality’ and ‘Loss of Existence’) offer bursts of transgressive interiority. These modal shifts continue through to the novel’s conclusion, ending with a reporter’s staccato questioning of the workers outside Paolo’s factory, a strangely detached examination deploying the ‘kind of language used in daily cultural commerce’. (‘Would the transformation of man into a petty-bourgeois be total?’) This alloy of myth, portent, social commentary and dream was as far as Pasolini could take the novel. From this point on, he would focus solely on filmmaking.

What proof the novel takes aim at – what theorem is being explored – tantalizes in its nearness. It remains an ambiguity swirling beneath the frozen crust of the novel’s surface, luring the reader into a strange, almost empirical participation in the presented facts. Everything trembles with restrained volatility as the family is awoken to itself, its hungers, its failings, the abysses of desire that suddenly open amidst so much ease and comfort. Pasolini is at his best here, a poet of ruinous Eros, of the calamities we welcome and fear, each of us ‘a famished animal writhing in silence’.

Read on: Jessica Boyall, ‘Militant Visions’, NLR–Sidecar.

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Smart People

‘I don’t think smart people should go to jail’, a young observer who works in crypto remarked outside one of the biggest fraud trials in US history. Samuel Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX and most famous advance man for the brave new ‘democratic’ alternative to the corrupt old world of cash and wing-tip finance, was the allegedly smart person in question. Three days later, on 2 November, a jury convicted him of wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. For his crimes, Bankman-Fried, 31, faces a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison.

The jury took just a few hours to conclude that he had siphoned off FTX customer funds to its sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, which spent, transferred or gambled that money away. For years he had assured customers that their funds were protected. Even when he knew $8 billion in customer money was gone, and no assets existed to repay it, he tweeted, ‘FTX is fine. Assets are fine’. It was necessary, he’d told his lieutenants, to send out ‘a confident tweet’ as customers frantically tried to withdraw their assets.

My young interlocutor hadn’t thought Bankman-Fried was innocent exactly, but fraud happens all the time, and Think how much good smart people can do in the world! The fallen tycoon’s smarts were much-invoked at trial, by both prosecution and defence. He graduated in physics from MIT. Trained at an elite Wall Street trading firm. Moved on to start Alameda, then FTX. A billionaire before he was thirty. He’d schmoozed with a passel of politicians including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair; a league of non-profiteers, Effective Altruists, vowing to serve mankind once they’d enriched themselves by any means necessary; and celebrities, who helped him market FTX as the safest, smartest place for anyone – the plumber, the barman, the most famous quarterback in American football history – to invest in cryptocurrencies. No one argued, not even his defence, that he’d done any good in the world.

I’d been watching his trial in federal court in New York, trying to put myself in the place of the only audience that mattered. I have to say the biggest revelation was that Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t too smart at all. Certainly not where it counted most – with his freedom in the hands of twelve ordinary New Yorkers: Female, 39, physician’s assistant. Female, 47, high school librarian, lives with cats, sister and sick mother. Female, 33, pediatric nurse. Female, 40, social worker, unemployed. Female, 65, corrections officer (retired), mother of three. Male, 61, postal worker, single. Female, 53, homemaker, divorced, onetime fundraising organizer for nonprofits. Male, 59, married, three children. Female, 50, Metro North train conductor, five children. Female, 43, Ukrainian immigrant, IT at Bloomberg, divorced. Male, 69, investment banker (retired), originally from Hong Kong. Female, 55, special ed teacher, originally from Bermuda.

These twelve were referred to only by numbers. Juror Number 4, a middle-aged white woman, handed the envelope to the judge and later pronounced, ‘Guilty’, seven times, to each of the counts. As she read out his fate, Bankman-Fried stood immobile. His parents, long-time law professors at Stanford – of ethics (Barbara Fried) and tax law (Joseph Bankman) – had walked into the courtroom clutching each other, small people looking smaller now, Barbara Fried gnawing uncontrollably behind drawn lips.

In sunnier days, both had played a role in their son’s business affairs. Bankman had been a paid adviser at $200,000, until he is said to have complained that wasn’t enough, and received a subvention from his son of $10 million. Fried counselled Sam on political donations. A political action committee she’d co-founded, Mind the Gap, received $1 million ostensibly from one of her son’s lieutenants, whose participation she had proposed (‘we don’t want to create the impression that funding MTG is a family affair . . . ’, she wrote in a cheeky email). While FTX customer funds were being raided, Bankman-Fried bought a $16 million house in the Bahamas, allegedly for his parents, who claim they didn’t know their names were on the deed. They are being sued by the post-bankruptcy custodianship of FTX, and call accusations of impropriety ‘completely false’. When Juror Number 4 pronounced ‘Guilty’ the third time, for ‘wire fraud (lenders of Alameda Research)’, Joe Bankman crumpled. For the rest of the proceedings, he remained like this, folded in half in his seat.

*

I was a latecomer to this event, which since 3 October had drawn a throng of youthful observers – reporters and bloggers, tech workers and traders, systems engineers, millennials dropping in for a glimpse of ‘our generation’s Bernie Madoff’. ‘This is the Super Bowl for nerds’, one attendee told me. Some said crypto’s a scam; others that Bankman-Fried’s a bad apple, ruining the party for revolutionaries fighting for ‘economic independence’, via pieces of code dependent on enormous amounts of real energy and real money to be anything more than figments in a computer game. For many this was their first trial, a kind of black-comic commons where everyone but the accused was making friends.

I arrived just before Bankman-Fried testified. It was a risky move, but Sam, as his attorney referred to him in court, is a gambling man, so he took the stand. Then he lied under oath. It’s arguable that he had nothing to lose (though the lying might cost him if Judge Lewis Kaplan decides that he perjured himself). The defence, having failed to undercut the government witnesses, had little else to offer. Maybe Sam could dazzle the jurors as he had so many journalists, celebrities and politicos; or charm them, as he had Michael Lewis, whose book on the man in the dock, Going Infinite, came out the day the trial began and quickly topped the lists. With a brazenness matching that of his subject, Lewis told the press his book was ‘a letter to the jury’.

This was not Bankman-Fried’s first wild gamble since FTX and Alameda went bankrupt last November and he came under federal investigation. The first was his decision to talk to the media: fifty or so interviews; days spent with Lewis after being arrested in December; hanging out with social media crypto influencer Tiffany Fong. The second was pleading ‘Not Guilty’. The government had millions of documents – myriad FTX financials; real and faked balance sheets of its biggest customer, Alameda; Slack chats; Signal chats; tweets; an executive’s contemporaneous journal; sworn Congressional testimony; records of expenditures by Bankman-Fried himself, on political donations, private jets (including for delivery of Amazon purchases), a $30 million penthouse in the Bahamas, where he’d headquartered the companies, etc.

It had the testimony of Bankman-Fried’s partners in crime, FTX and/or Alameda executives. Three of them had been the defendant’s close friends and associates (one a sometime girlfriend), who started talking soon after the enterprise imploded. Two pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy before Bankman-Fried was arraigned, and agreed to be witnesses for the prosecution. In court they would explain the details of the scam. The gist: there were one set of rules for ordinary FTX customers and effectively no rules for Alameda, which Bankman-Fried controlled by force of personality and 90% ownership. Alameda had unlimited ability to ‘borrow’ from FTX customer accounts, with no contract or written terms or posted collateral. That’s ‘stealing, plain and simple’, the government would argue.

Anyone else, aware of the awesome resources of the state and the cooperation of remorseful former associates, might have thrown himself on the mercy of the court. Bankman-Fried bet on himself. The jurors gave him the attention any defendant deserves. Then he spent hours kicking up dust in their face. The art of the con involves a number of skills. One is talking so much and so well that the mark has no room to think. Another is conjuring a personality that not only plays to larceny in the blood but also arouses in the mark an approving sentiment. The most skilled con artist is an extraordinary actor. The persona is seductive; it never slips, thus winning the mark’s confidence. A trial is not a confidence game; the jury has nothing to gain and much time to think. It is, however, a contest of stories. So, it is not impossible that a conniving storyteller might seduce one juror enough to believe him and then hold to that belief.

And here is where Sam Bankman-Fried’s bet on himself was bound to fail. For neither could he tell a compelling, exculpating, story of what had happened to other people’s money, nor could he make himself likeable. Questioned by his attorney Mark Cohen, he took roundabouts, spewing jargon as he went. I drew spirals in my notebook. With no coherent alternative to the government’s story, Cohen lingered on technicalities, fractured chronology, enabled his client’s discursive patter. One often couldn’t be sure what Bankman-Fried was saying, or why, or whether it was relevant or true. Fragments capture the substance of his testimony: I was busy. I didn’t know. I trusted others. Margin trading. Things happened. Yup.

This was the day of first impressions, and though some in the media would give his performance good reviews, it struck me as an exhibition of contempt – for the jurors’ time, their intelligence and something else: their likely relationship to money. For weeks they had heard about discrepancies of $2 billion, $8 billion, $14 billion; some of Bankman-Fried’s lieutenants had been anxious about multimillion-dollar expenditures. One had cried over what she had done. Here was the boss, speaking with nonchalance. Yup, he’d been ‘concerned’ when he learned of a multibillion-dollar ‘hole’ in his business.

‘Numbers like that just slide off our back’, one onlooker working in crypto told me later. No doubt they do, and jurors probably tried to see things from the perspective of someone who is young and has spent his adult life playing in the big casino. Bankman-Fried never returned the courtesy. In workaday America, a $400 unexpected expense can be calamitous for one out of three adults. Almost everyone knows someone for whom that is true. There’s a good chance that the librarian, the train conductor, the postal worker et al., did too. Most people are also likely to suspect that if a financial trading system is so complex that no one can keep track of the money, as Bankman-Fried had implied, something is wrong.

*

Overcoming doubt is the prosecution’s burden. ‘Beyond a reasonable doubt’ morphed into ‘no doubt at all’ the longer Bankman-Fried talked. Caroline Ellison, the former girlfriend and reluctant CEO of Alameda, had earlier testified that she had made seven alternate balance sheets when the legit one showed Alameda’s enormous liability from siphoning FTX accounts. She said that Bankman-Fried had requested the phony ledgers and picked the one that looked best, number seven, to show to potential investors. Bankman-Fried testified that he had just happened to look at only one tab of her attachment, which just happened to be number seven, which just happened to look the best. Who knows what Caroline was doing?

A skit from the Netflix show I Think You Should Leave became a meme among the young set, mocking Bankman-Fried’s performance. A car shaped like a hotdog drives into a shopfront window, shocking the people inside. A man wearing a hotdog suit pipes up, ‘Whoever did this, just confess; we promise we won’t be mad’. He directs suspicion at someone else and blathers about technology as he steals merchandise. ‘It says so much about what’s happening here!’, a tech designer told me during a break.

‘In what world is someone making eight balance sheets for themselves?’ the prosecution would later ask jurors in closing. Use ‘your own common sense and life experience’. Simplification had been the government’s strategy. It stripped down its list of witnesses and exhibits. It played to Judge Kaplan’s impatience with time-wasters. It explained FTX/Alameda’s secretive operations in plain language, and showed that whenever Bankman-Fried had faced a critical choice, he chose the crooked path. Contrary to defence histrionics, it did not make him out to be a ‘monster’; it likened him to an embezzler, a jewel thief, a banal criminal.

That Bankman-Fried could commit so major a crime and think he might beat the rap with so little effort spoke loudly of his character. Had anyone ever told him No? If not, the initial hour of cross-examination was a brutal first lesson. ‘A public flogging’, one observer called it. Bankman-Fried seemed to have internalized a single piece of legal advice – You can always say ‘I don’t recall’ – heedless of its corollary, that what the prosecution might present to ‘refresh your memory’ could spell trouble.

Assistant US Attorney Danielle Sassoon: Mr Bankman-Fried, isn’t it true that . . .

Bankman-Fried: I don’t recall.

Sassoon: Mr Bianco, please pull up Government Exhibit X . . .

By the government’s tally, under cross-examination Bankman-Fried said ‘I do not recall’ or some variant 140 times. I’d stopped counting at 76. He drew blanks on company policy that he had once touted, on contracts he had signed (some of them agreements with himself), on his sworn testimony to Congress (so many hands had written it), on what he’d told journalists a year ago, and what he’d told his attorney the day before. Relentlessly, Sassoon countered with documents attesting to something the defendant did, or knew, or should have known. Mr Bianco is now the most well-known courtroom tech assistant in history. A retired law professor watching the trial said the cross-examination should be studied by aspirants to the profession: no theatrics, just a clear story, a straightforward plan, and startling efficiency.

At one point some trial-watchers had wondered what Bankman-Fried’s strategy might be. A man so smart must surely have a plan. None ever revealed itself. Perhaps he thought he didn’t need one. He treated the courtroom like a betting parlour. To yes or no questions, he often paused for an uncomfortably long time, staring into a void as if calculating the odds of which response would get a better return. The case was lost. Anything he said might be honest, might be a lie, was likely a lie, because it’s hard to keep track of every previous lie, and Sam Bankman-Fried could not recall.

*

Now he’s going to prison. Twenty years, twenty-five, thirty? News reports have opted for ‘decades’. Sentencing will occur next March. Judge Kaplan has written of his disdain for the ‘studied calculation’ of white-collar criminals, whose offences he called ‘especially reprehensible’. At trial, he did not conceal his displeasure with Bankman-Fried’s circumlocutions. Mark Cohen has promised an appeal, something he was obviously preparing for throughout the trial.

What Cohen called Bankman-Fried’s ‘extraordinary journey’ is far from over. In March he is also scheduled to stand trial for bribery, conspiracy, bank and securities fraud in an alleged scheme to pay Chinese law enforcement officials $150 million to unfreeze $1 billion of Alameda’s trading funds when his companies were headquartered in Hong Kong. He may also face trial for federal election law violations related to at least $40 million spent on the 2022 US midterms. His lieutenant Nishad Singh pleaded guilty earlier this year in connection with the aforementioned $1 million donated to Barbara Fried’s political action committee.

This trial presented only one neat slice of an exceedingly messy story, both at FTX and in the larger ‘ecosystem’ that endures without it. Bankman-Fried had promoted FTX as the ethical operator in a murky world of a ‘currency’ especially well-suited to crime and crawling with grifters. His reference in court to people using crypto to ‘buy muffins’ or ‘pay rent’ – rather than, say, hire hitmen, fund private armies or steal from each other – was another, albeit minor, instance of giving a wholesome veneer to a fundamentally fraudy segment of an already deeply exploitative sector of the economy. US Attorney Damian Williams called the verdict ‘a warning to every fraudster who thinks they’re untouchable’.

If Bankman-Fried decides to plead guilty to the pending charges, he may have tradeable knowledge gained from his meteoric journey through the rot-riddled universe of finance, politics and crypto. In an excellent article in The Nation, Jacob Silverman reviews some ‘strange movements of cash and crypto’, involving everything from Hong Kong storefronts to US venture capital firms to crypto minters and others whose role remains largely shrouded:

Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t just control Alameda Research and FTX. He had some 140-plus registered companies – many of them shells used to direct billions of dollars in investments made with stolen funds. Some of these start-ups he controlled directly; others seemed to be covert parts of the Bankman-Fried empire . . . we still don’t know the full extent of this network of dirty and pilfered money . . . we do know that for a few years, Bankman-Fried controlled an incredibly valuable vehicle for laundering money.

While being led out of the courtroom, Bankman-Fried turned and gave a childlike smile to his stricken parents. Then he disappeared. Deputy US marshals escorted him to a vehicle waiting to return him to the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, where he has been locked up since August. Judge Kaplan had revoked his bail for attempts at witness tampering and other breaches of his conditions of release. (Among his offences: while lounging in his parents’ Palo Alto home, he gave Tiffany Fong pages of Caroline Ellison’s personal diary, which promptly became grist for The New York Times.)

Night had come. As observers gathered their things, Joe Bankman stood with Fried, looking up at Cohen imploringly for . . . what? Outside, jurors scattered into the subways. Lights bounced off the pale façade and blazing brass doors of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse. Thirteen Assistant US Attorneys lined up, unsmiling, to the left of a microphone. To the right, in shadow, stood at least a dozen of their aides. News photographers and spectators snapped pictures. None could fully capture the power that this disciplined formation projected.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Bitmagic’, NLR–Sidecar.

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Elective Affinities

It’s time to air an open secret. President Joe Biden is implementing the same policies that were inaugurated by the vilified, mocked and indicted Donald Trump, only with less fanfare and in a more decisive and brutal manner. In particular, Biden is resolutely pursuing the path of deglobalization that caused such a stir when the president in the orange wig embarked on it.

Biden has intensified the trade war with China unleashed by his predecessor. While Trump’s initiatives were sporadic and theatrical, such as the indictment of Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Biden’s more systematic policies – cracking down on advanced technology exports – have upped the ante. The war in Ukraine, which broke out a little over a year into Biden’s term, might seem to distinguish the two presidencies, but its repercussions in Europe reveal commonalities too: the dismantling of the German Ostpolitik (a policy pursued tenaciously by Germany since the chancellorship of Willy Brandt half a century ago), the decoupling of the German and Chinese economies and keeping Europe firmly under the aegis of NATO.

The Biden administration has followed the Republicans’ deglobalization playbook, even down to the details. Trump had weakened the World Trade Organization by refusing to ratify the appointment of judges to its top appeals court, which settles international trade disputes; the Democrats now continue to block those appointments. As a result, the WTO has been paralysed, its relevance diminished. The same continuity can be seen in relations with Saudi Arabia: despite promising in his election campaign to make the Saudis a ‘pariah’ after the barbaric murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Biden visited Riyadh in July 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine to persuade Mohammed bin Salman to increase oil production and to encourage closer ties with Israel. The following spring, Biden rolled out the red carpet to welcome the ‘pariah’ Crown Prince to Washington.

One could add other unkept promises, including ecological ones, notwithstanding the much-vaunted green subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. During his election campaign, Biden vowed to block new oil and gas drilling projects. Then war broke out in Ukraine, and in late April 2022 the White House announced it was opening up public land for drilling – nearly 144,000 acres – to new oil and gas leases, just months after suspending them. It did not end there: in March of this year the administration approved the Willow project, a decades-long oil drilling venture worth $8 billion in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which is owned by the federal government. According to the administration’s own estimates, the project would produce enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to adding 2 million petrol cars to the roads.

But there is another area in which Biden has furtively followed in Trump’s footsteps: the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. A signature policy of the Trump administration – though it only managed to build 80 miles of new wall (repairing or replacing another few hundred miles) – the Democrats had promised they wouldn’t add another centimetre. Now, Biden has authorized the construction of 20 miles (32 km) of new barrier in south Texas. With a year to go before the 2024 election, the intention of the initiative is clear.

And speaking of the pre-election climate: it is notable that during the recent United Auto Workers strike, both Biden and Trump went to Michigan, though they behaved quite differently when they got there (Biden expressed solidarity with picketing workers while Trump told employees at a non-union shop that picketing wouldn’t make ‘a damn bit of difference’). Yet both visits, blatantly instrumental, paid with one eye on the elections, are worth reflecting on. Let us recall that, as Branko Marcetic noted in 2018, Biden has spent much of his career ‘attacking progressive “special interests” while crossing the aisle to vote with Republicans in major instances that were decidedly unhelpful to the working class’ – voting in favour, for example, of the repeal of Glass–Steagall and Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. Bear in mind, too, that Biden has spent 36 years as a senator for Delaware, the internal tax haven of the United States. More than 1.4 million business entities – and among them more than 60% of the Fortune 500 – have made their legal home in Delaware because corporations registered in the state that do not do business there do not pay corporate income tax. Seeing Biden at a picket line is therefore a little strange. Such pro-labour posturing mirrors that of Trump himself, whose courting of manufacturing workers is similarly opportunistic and shallow.

The visits to Michigan bring to mind the expression ‘Reagan Democrats’, the unionized blue-collar workers whom Reagan won over so successfully on ideological issues in the 1980s. Part of this group defected to the Republicans in 2016, when Trump won several rustbelt states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (and for Obama in 2008 and 2012). In a way, the ‘Trump Democrats’ are the inverse of the Reagan Democrats: those who voted for Reagan went against their own economic interests in the name of ideology – partly the theme of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Trump’s supporters, by contrast, were pushed rightward in line with their economic interests – as a result of losing ‘good’ jobs (those with healthcare, pensions, paid holidays) or feeling that they were under threat. At an election rally in 2020, Trump said: ‘We want to ensure that more products are proudly stamped with the phrase – that beautiful phrase – made in the USA’. Under Biden, the Democrats, evidently alarmed by the 2016 election, have co-opted this refrain. Biden’s speeches emphasize bringing jobs back to America: ‘Where is it written that America can’t once again be the manufacturing capital of the world?’

This helps to illuminate the political resemblance between the two presidents, however much they present themselves as diametrically opposed. It is fair to assume that the different fractions of the ruling class in a country sometimes have diverging, even opposing interests. But if the country is the empire that dominates the world, on one point at least the ruling classes will agree: they do not want to see the basis of their power (i.e., the nation-empire) weakened. Those who have power intend, at a minimum, to maintain it, if not consolidate or expand it. So it is reasonable to infer that the conflicting interests between the various fractions manifest themselves in different strategies for ruling the world, in different conceptions of empire. In the United States, these different conceptions of empire are reduced to the clichés of either isolationism (or unilateralism) or interventionist multilateralism. Of course, this binary is too simple: in reality one can have unilateralist interventionism, among other combinations. But by the 1990s, these camps had crystallized into the party of globalization (governing the world by liberalizing trade and financial flows) and its opponents. Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, the globalization camp had the upper hand: the neoliberal version of globalization became known as the Washington consensus, which was forcibly asserted in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on.

But by Obama’s second term the cracks in this edifice were beginning to show. Think tanks (and not only conservative ones) were starting to worry about the rise of China and the centrifugal forces that globalization was nurturing within the empire, particularly in Europe. Critics of globalization began to point out that the US strategy, by turning China into ‘the factory of the universe’, was likely to undermine itself.

Such critics also began to point to the ways in which the rebounding effects of globalization were eroding the domestic consensus around the issue of empire. If in the 1950s a blue-collar worker in the US had a legitimate stake in empire (his salary and standard of living were the highest in the world), this was no longer true in the early years of the new millennium, when the vast majority of US factories had been relocated, first to Mexican maquiladoras and then to Asia. In a sense, globalization was weakening the home front of the empire.

This brings us to another aspect of the striking continuity between Trump’s and Biden’s policies. Bien-pensants around the world seriously underestimated Trump, deriding him for his histrionics and his lies. (It is worth remembering that when he was elected, Reagan was also mocked – as a B-movie actor, totally ignorant of foreign policy, a dupe who consulted fortune-tellers and was convinced of the imminent end of the world, destined to be impeached in a few months. We saw the sequel.) But of course, the Trump administration was not Trump alone. His cabinet included the CEO of Exxon, several members of the most powerful bank in the world (Goldman Sachs), a Midwestern billionaire (Betsy DeVos), several generals from the Pentagon, and as second secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, the Koch brothers’ man. Silicon Valley tycoons attended White House meetings. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation’s Annual Report, bidding ‘farewell to some great people in 2017’, boasted that the ‘Trump administration snapped up more than 70 of our staff and alumni’. The next year the think tank gloated about the Trump administration’s ‘embrace of 64% of Heritage policy prescriptions’. Beneath Trump’s bluster, in many respects his government was being teleguided by those think tanks funded by the fraction of the US ruling class that got him elected.

During the Cold War, a commonplace circulated: that the Republicans were conservative in domestic policy but less hawkish in foreign policy, while the Democrats were progressive at home but more warmongering abroad (the Vietnam War was fought under Kennedy and Johnson; Nixon negotiated peace). After the defeat of the USSR this notion lost its purchase: it was Republican presidents, Bush Sr and Bush Jr, who attacked Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again (although Clinton triggered the attack on Serbia and Obama continued his predecessor’s war). This brings us to the last, but no less significant area in which Biden has doubled down on Trump’s positions: in his vision for the Middle East as formalized in the 2020 Abraham Accords, seen most vividly in Biden’s total and unconditional endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu. With the Trump–Biden duo it feels like we are back in the Cold War: despite all his bombastic proclamations, Trump has not started any wars. Under Biden we are already on the second.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Strategies of Denial’, NLR–Sidecar.

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Hezbollah’s Next Move

Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, the Israeli retaliation has unleashed staggering levels of destruction – with the Palestinian death toll now exceeding 10,000. The US has hurried two airplane carriers and several destroyers to the region, along with special military personnel, to bolster its ally and ward off any possible intervention from Iran or Hezbollah. The latter has been engaged in tit-for-tat hostilities with Israel on its northern border, which runs for a hundred kilometers from the Naqoura in the west to the Shebaa farms in the east. This has forced the Israeli army to keep a high number of professional units stationed in the area, as well as maintaining air-force readiness and anti-missile defences. Whether this localized conflict will escalate is now one of the primary questions for the region and the wider world.

Far from being a puppet of Tehran, Hezbollah must be understood as a powerful political party with a strong militia and a significant influence in several countries beyond its native Lebanon – Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen. Its leadership and most of its rank-and-file consider themselves part of the transnational constellation that owes religious obedience to the Iranian Supreme Leader. But Hezbollah does not operate according to orders and fiats, and is itself a decision-maker in Iranian strategy in the Middle East. The final say on its policies comes from secretary general Hasan Nasrallah and his cadre. Their relation to Iran is that of partners, not auxiliaries.

Hamas, too, has a high degree of autonomy, and launched its attack based on its own political calculations rather those of Iran or Hezbollah. It decided that the policies pursued by the Israeli government and its settler population – indefinite occupation and gradual annexation – had reached a tipping point where inaction would prove fatal. This decision was rooted in a broader assessment of the geopolitical transformations taking place across the Middle East. Normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel was anticipated by the end of the year. A deal between Iran and the Americans was on the cards. The proposed India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, which promises to reinforce the centrality of Gulf states to the global economy, was rapidly becoming a reality. In light of all of this, the ‘international community’ was poised to further marginalize the Palestinian cause and revive the PA as a pliable alternative to Hamas. Internal and external dynamics convinced the organization that it had to either act or accept a slow death.

It is almost certain that Hezbollah had no prior knowledge of the consequent attack. The Lebanese party agrees with Hamas on many issues, and has spent years assisting it with money, arms and tactical advice, yet their geopolitical positions are not always aligned (they were on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, for example). It appears that Hamas’s act of desperation – to engineer a conflict with the aim of reactivating the Palestinian anticolonial struggle and maintaining their political relevance – will not have a straightforward domino effect on Hezbollah. At least not for the time being. By launching limited strikes across the border, Hezbollah is signalling its readiness to open a second front should the pulverization of Gaza reach a point that the party can no longer tolerate. Yet this restrained form of engagement also gives it the space to continually reassess the situation, consider its options and determine its next moves.

At present, the questions facing Nasrallah’s forces are these. Were they to enter a full-blown war with Israel (and possibly the US), would they be able to stop the Israeli invasion of Gaza and the massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians? Would they risk decimating Lebanon and inflicting tremendous damage on Hezbollah’s support base? Would they lose thousands of fighters and most of their weapons? Would they jeopardize the accomplishments of the resistance axis in Syria, Iraq and Yemen? What would they stand to gain from this hazardous course of action? The answers are liable to change at any moment. The optimum strategy today might be defunct tomorrow. But as yet, it seems that this is Hamas’s war, not Hezbollah’s.

Hezbollah’s options – whether to maintain hostilities with Israel at their current level, escalate them or reduce them – are governed by three important variables. The first is the situation in Gaza. Israel wants to obliterate Hamas in toto, and has been given the green-light to commit genocide in pursuit of this goal, even though its chances of fulfilment are highly uncertain. If Hamas is able to drag out the fighting, inflict significant harm on the enemy and thwart an all-out Israeli victory, then Hezbollah will score major political points with minimal sacrifices, simply by keeping Israel distracted on its northern front. The party could thereby avoid the dangers of escalation and live to fight another war at a more propitious moment.

The second variable is Hezbollah’s power base in Lebanon, which, along with the majority of the Lebanese society, is supportive of the Palestinians but hesitant about a war with Israel. They know very well that, on top of having lost their savings in the 2019-20 Lebanese banking crisis, an Israeli assault would threaten their homes and what remains of their vital national infrastructure. Hezbollah is, understandably, reluctant to endanger and alienate this constituency. The final variable is Iran and its interests, including the diplomatic rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the delicate negotiations with the Biden administration concerning its nuclear technology and the extent of US sanctions. The Iranian leadership knows that both of these would be upended by a major regional conflict – hence President Raisi’s cautious position and his continued lines of contact with the Saudi Crown Prince.

Yet as Israel’s killing machine mows down Palestinians by the thousands, each of these factors could change. If Hamas appears to be in existential danger, the calculus for Hezbollah may be different – since the loss of this ally could embolden Israel to target its Lebanese adversary next. As for the Lebanese people, it is unclear whether they will continue to prioritize their homes and assets amid the proliferating images of Palestinian body bags. Might they instead prove willing to suffer alongside the Palestinians? The Iranians, too, might have to look again at the balance between their immediate material interests and their nominal commitments to Palestinian liberation. Will they be able to sit face-to-face with US officials while the latter cheers on the immolation of Gaza? Wouldn’t this send the wrong signal to their other allies across the region – that Iranian support is fickle and unreliable?

If the situation in Gaza deteriorates to the point that Iran shelves its negotiations with the US, the Gulf states sour on Israel, and Hezbollah’s base becomes convinced that the party is not doing enough, then this could be a trigger for Hezbollah to escalate. Likewise, if Israel decides to target civilians in Lebanon and causes major casualties, Nasrallah cannot be expected to stand by. For Hezbollah, military intervention is always a political strategy rooted in the arithmetic of gains and losses and the complex field of allies and interests. Its next move will not be decided by Iranian influence or Islamist ideology, but by the demands of pragmatism.

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

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Course Correction?

The extreme centre in Germany is resented and outnumbered. In the Bavarian and Hessian state elections of early October, all three parties in the governing ‘traffic light coalition’ suffered a significant blow, with Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) plummeting to their worst ever result in both states. The much-diminished Die Linke performed poorly, too. Having failed to meet the 5% threshold for representation in parliament in 2021, surviving in the Bundestag only due to the technicality of retaining three independently elected constituencies, the party lost all its seats in Hesse. The rightist Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged as the unambiguous success story, securing nearly 20% of the vote in Hesse, where it came second – a first for the party in a western state. By the end of the month, the AfD was polling nationally at an unprecedented 23%, behind only the main opposition Union bloc.

Last week, however, a new challenge to Germany’s ailing political establishment emerged. At a press conference on 23 October, Die Linke’s Sahra Wagenknecht announced she was founding her own independent party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – for Reason and Justice (BSW). On the evening of the announcement, anticipated for some time, her new party, which includes nine other MdBs formerly of Die Linke, was already commanding the support of 12% of the electorate, poaching its largest share from the AfD (which fell by 5%) and small parties; the SPD, CDU, Greens and Die Linke also lost support. Expected to launch as a party next January, ahead of the European elections in June, polls suggest the BSW could win up to 20% of the national vote. Wagenknecht’s initiative has shifted the weight of national politics further away from the centre, and, for the first time in years, significantly to the left.

The basis for a broad opposition programme is clear. Germany is once again in a recession, less than a decade after its putative second economic miracle was to be the model for the rest of Europe, if not the world. The temporary conditions that enabled its relatively good economic performance from 2010 to 2019 – world-historic growth in the export markets of Brazil and China, above all – are now exhausted. Yet in today’s straitened circumstances, Berlin has not even gestured towards shoring up the well-being of its citizenry. Instead, it has obediently signed up to Washington’s project of relentless militarization and endless war to the east. This posture has not only undercut Germany’s access to the cost-effective energy essential to its industrial competitiveness, but has also detonated another historic refugee crisis which, for many in the deindustrializing areas, is seen as compounding the effects of the economic slowdown.

The political opening Wagenknecht is hoping to exploit is equally glaring. The public has good reason to regard the current government as continuing the ruling-class attack on its living standards, pioneered, in 2003, by Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 programme, and pursued since by centre-right and centre-left governments alike. Two decades of austerity have led to a rise in poverty, general insecurity and deteriorating public services. As a consequence, there is a wellspring of opposition to further retrenchment of the social state. The Greens’ efforts to shift the cost of environmental measures onto individuals – such as replacing domestic gas heaters – have also been broadly unpopular, stirring dissent from a consensus that is in reality supported mainly by the affluent and highly educated.

Wagenknecht addresses these concerns more directly than any other politician on the right or left. Yet despite her broad popularity, in the Berlin Republic she is often regarded as a controversial figure, notably within the shrunken ranks of her former party. For her critical interventions – on the war in Ukraine and NATO’s part in it, on the contradictions of the government’s Covid policy, and on immigration, as well as on the ‘left-liberal’ politics of a self-satisfied Bildungsbürgertum – she has been denounced as a Putin sympathizer, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-immigrant populist and a treacherous ‘diagonalist’ blending left and right. Her East German formation – she was brought up in Jena and Berlin – combined with her intransigent Communist politics lasting into the 1990s, has in the past even attracted the attention of the state’s internal security services.

Intellectually superior to most members of the Bundestag – she is the author of several books, including an economics dissertation on savings and a critical study of the young Marx – Wagenknecht delivers her arguments in a direct, sober communicative style that has earned her regular invitations to Germany’s television talk shows, despite their hosts’ hostility to her views. Presenting herself as a ‘left-conservative’, though her politics might better be characterized as ‘left-realism’, she has positioned her breakaway formation as a response to the Repräsentationslücke – representation gap – in contemporary Germany, where nearly half of the population does not see its perspective reflected in the party system. She has set out four domains encompassing the BSW’s proposed reforms. 1. ‘Economic rationality’ – ‘innovation, education and better infrastructure’; 2. ‘Social justice’ – ‘solidarity, equal opportunity and social security’; 3. ‘Peace’ – ‘a new self-image in foreign policy’; and 4. ‘Freedom’ – ‘defending personal freedom, strengthening democracy’, which includes widening the Meinungskorridor, or spectrum of opinion.

Nowhere has Wagenknecht’s departure from orthodoxy been more pronounced and consistent than in matters of war. For a time, the Ukrainian flag adorned every official building in Berlin, and any questioning of the conflict – even invoking the postwar taboo against exporting weapons to warzones, much less mention of the right-wing orientation of much of Ukrainian ‘orange’ nationalism, NATO’s eastward expansion or the danger of escalation – was essentially proscribed as partisan alignment with Moscow. Despite this prevailing Gleichschaltung, Wagenknecht’s dissenting line in near-weekly interventions appears to have enhanced rather than hurt her standing. She has also been forthright in attacking the government for its conspicuous incuriosity concerning the sabotage of the country’s energy infrastructure in the probable US attack on Nord Stream 2. She deftly connects foreign policy to domestic issues – linking, for example, the shortfall in Germany’s domestic capacity for producing medicines to the government’s commitment to manufacturing ammunition for Ukraine. More recently, she has criticized Tel Aviv’s offensive against Gaza, a rarity in a country which has banned peaceful demonstrations of sympathy for Palestinians.

The other stance that has attracted criticism, especially from the left, is Wagenknecht’s position on immigration. Yet its significance to her political outlook is often exaggerated. The issue is given minimal emphasis in her public addresses; her weekly bulletin and video lectures almost never mention it. Her position is also hardly an outlier on the German political scene. As she noted at the press conference last month, she supports the full right of asylum-seekers to live in Germany, as well as legal protections for immigrants; she is opposed to what she describes as immigration’s present unregulated form. This is also now Scholz’s revised position; it was the de facto position of Merkel, too, after she reversed twice on the question. Neither is Wagenknecht’s view particularly unusual historically within the trade union and socialist left of West Germany and elsewhere. It is in effect a guild perspective, favouring the regulation of the labour market.

Wagenknecht’s politics are not without theoretical limitations and inconsistencies, of course. As with most left-parliamentary oppositions of the last decade, the economic vision put forward by her Alliance – especially the enthusiasm for reviving industry – is implicitly predicated on an upturn in profitability in the national economy as the basis for a more egalitarian redistribution of wealth. Not only does this framework fail to register the persistent troubles facing the world economy, it also ignores the difficulties of attempting to increase German manufacturing competitiveness while at the same time improving working-class living standards (Germany’s expansion during the 2010s, after all, came at the expense of its working class, as well as the south of the Eurozone). In the context of a chronically weakened global economy, the shallow recoveries states have mustered have been reliant on neoliberal measures that precipitated the erosion of living standards abhorred by Wagenknecht and the majority. Still, whether or not her economic agenda will be able to arrest the deindustrialization of the country and reverse its worst effects, it cannot be denied that the current path of unending war is hastening it gratuitously, as Germany’s resource-poor and export-oriented economy is battered by higher energy costs.

The major weakness of Wagenknecht’s initiative at present is not primarily theoretical but practical: her Alliance lacks an active social movement. In place of cadres, there is an inchoate mass of opinion which remains to be organized through mobilization. Wagenknecht has in the past appeared somewhat reluctant to transform the enthusiasm for her politics into something more disciplined and embedded. She has avoided speaking at events of the university left, or at those which she herself has not convened. Aufstehen (Stand Up), the movement she launched in 2018, fizzled quickly. Loosely modelled on Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, it has now been reduced to an email newsletter. The February 2023 anti-war protest she organized, which drew tens of thousands to Brandenburg Gate, was never followed by further calls for public demonstrations. The party’s theoretical shortcomings and contradictions will likely only be transcended through increased political association outside of the videosphere. Parts of the new platform – especially its commitment to greater democratic participation – may indicate an awareness, post-Aufstehen, of the importance of an active membership. This will be especially critical given the probable fallout for Die Linke, which is likely to be gravely weakened by Wagenknecht’s departure; here the left risks losing significant institutional linkages to the past.

Some view Wagenknecht’s Alliance as a cynical and potentially damaging attempt to appeal to AfD voters. Oliver Nachtwey, for example, has argued that in ‘trying to conform and adapt to the New Right’, Wagenknecht risks ‘legitimizing’ its discourse, which could ‘further normalize and even strengthen the AfD’. But this concern gets the sequence of events the wrong way round. The rise of the AfD, and more broadly of the so-called ‘populist’ right, was itself largely a symptom of the failure of the left generally, and Die Linke in particular, to maintain a credible opposition to the governing coalitions (often because it held out hope of joining them), and so to sustain the confidence of broad layers of society. Only then did much of the polity become available to the right, which capitalized on justifiable indignation against the extant parties. Far from signalling a ‘normalization’ of the AfD, the BSW’s efforts to win over those who have drifted away from Die Linke and other parties potentially points the way back to a more formidable and dissident left, one which foregrounds its opposition to war, and ties this to domestic concerns.

Rather than representing a lurch to the right, then, Wagenknecht’s is a call for a return to popular sovereignty over foreign affairs, set against a political centre which courts nuclear conflagration from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Black Sea to the Taiwan Strait. The test for her Alliance is whether it can inspire the popular action needed to realize its platform, and overcome the many objective constraints faced by any government in contemporary Germany – let alone an opposition party – aiming to change the country’s course towards prosperity and peace.

Read on: Christine Buchholz, ‘Germany Re-Divided’, NLR 116/117.

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Imperial Designs

[title not known] 1967 Frank Stella born 1936 Purchased with assistance from an anonymous donor 2000 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78387

Since Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October and the ensuing assault on Gaza, the Biden administration has performed what is euphemistically described as a ‘balancing act’. On the one hand it praises the collective punishment of Palestinians; on the other it warns Israel against overreach. Its support for aerial bombardment and targeted raids is steadfast, but it has posed ‘tough questions’ about the ground invasion that started earlier this week: Is there an achievable military objective? A roadmap to release the hostages? A way to avoid untenable Israeli governance if Hamas is extirpated? Washington is pressing the Israelis on such issues – and sending its own advisers to help solve them – while also giving the green light for the ongoing massacre. Its response to the crisis has been driven by a confluence of factors, including the desire to outflank Republicans and the reactive instinct to ‘stand with Israel’. Yet it can also be placed in the context of its broader vision for the Middle East, which crystallized under Trump and was consolidated by Biden.

Aware of the chaos wrought by its regime change efforts, and eager to complete the ‘pivot to Asia’ initiated in the early 2010s, the US has sought to partially disentangle itself from the region. Its goal is to establish a model that would replace direct intervention with oversight from a distance. To contemplate any real reduction in its presence, though, it first needs a security settlement that would strengthen friendly regimes and constrain the influence of nonconforming ones. The 2020 Abraham Accords advanced this agenda, as Bahrain and the UAE, by agreeing to normalize relations with Israel, joined a wider ‘reactionary axis’ spanning the Saudi Kingdom and Egyptian autocracy. Trump expanded arms sales to these states and cultivated connections between them – military, commercial, diplomatic – with the aim of creating a reliable phalanx of allies who would tilt towards the US in the New Cold War while acting as a bulwark against Iran. Obama’s nuclear deal had failed to stop the Islamic Republic from projecting its influence. Only ‘maximum pressure’ could do so. 

Once in office, Biden adopted the same general coordinates: using the Negev Summit to deepen ties between the Abraham countries and suing for formal relations between the Saudis and Israelis. The JCPOA remained a dead letter and efforts to contain Tehran continued, through a combination of sanctions, diplomacy and military exercises. As Brett McGurk, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East, put it in a speech to the Atlantic Council, the premises of this policy are ‘integration’ and ‘deterrence’: building ‘political, economic, security connections between US partners’ which will repel ‘threats from Iran and its proxies’. Having developed this programme and presided over a trade boom between Israel and its Arab partners, Biden began to make good on the ‘drawdown’ promised by his predecessor – executing the pullout from Afghanistan while reducing troops and military assets in Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The incumbent also refined the US approach to Palestine. Whereas Trump had choked off aid to the occupied territories and tried to gain assent for his delusional ‘peace deal’, Biden simply accepted the imperfect reality – in which Israel, despite having no workable plan for the Palestinians, seemed to enjoy relative security thanks to the collaborationist authorities in the West Bank and the military stranglehold on Gaza. In the abstract, he may have wanted to revive the ‘two-state solution’, of a nuclear juggernaut flanking a defenceless and bantustanized Palestinian nation. But since that was a political impossibility, he learned to live with the situation that Tareq Baconi describes as ‘violent equilibrium’: an indefinite occupation, punctuated by periodic confrontations with Hamas which were small-scale enough to be ignored by the Israeli population.

This regional blueprint always suffered from serious problems. First, if its raison d’être was Great Power politics – stepping back from the Middle East to sharpen the focus on China – it proved partly counterproductive. For in signalling its diminished appetite for interference in the region, the US conveyed to its allies that they would not have to make a zero-sum choice between American and Chinese partnership; hence the PRC’s increasingly warm welcome in the Arab world: its construction of a military base in the UAE, its brokering of the Iran–Saudi rapprochement and its network of technology and infrastructure investments. Second, in pinning its imperial strategy on the Israeli normalization process, the US became especially reliant on this settler-colonial project just before it was captured by its most extreme and volatile elements: Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Galant. If American support for Israel has historically exceeded any reasonable political calculus, under Trump and Biden it acquired a coherent rationale: to place its ally at the centre of a stable Middle Eastern security framework. Yet the Israeli cabinet that came to power in 2022 – addled by eliminationist fantasies, and determined to draw the US into war with Iran – proved least able to play that role.

Now, in the wake of October 7, this equilibrium has been shattered and those fantasies activated. Hamas’s attack aimed to unravel a political conjuncture in which the apartheid regime had become convinced that it could repress any serious resistance to its rule, and in which Palestine was rapidly becoming a non-issue in Israel and beyond. That intolerable state of affairs was its primary target. The leadership in Gaza anticipated a ferocious response, including a ground incursion. It also expected that this would cause problems for the Abraham settlement by sparking regional opposition, at popular and elite levels, to Israeli atrocities. All this has so far been borne out: the Saudi–Israel deal is delayed, the next Negev Summit remains on hold, the Arab nations are roiled by protests and their rulers have been forced to denounce Netanyahu. What does this mean for Washington’s overarching policy ambitions? The final answer will depend on the trajectory of the conflict.

As many onlookers have noted, Israel’s stated aim of ‘destroying Hamas’ poses a risk of continual and protracted escalation. In planning an urban war against an embedded guerrilla army, the national unity government has contemplated various endgames, including the depopulation of the northern Strip and mass expulsions to the Sinai. Any such strategy is liable to cross the ambiguous thresholds that could trigger major reprisals from Hezbollah and – potentially – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (Yemen’s Houthis have already launched missiles and drones at Israel, and are primed to send more over the coming weeks.) Biden’s deployment of warships to the Mediterranean and Red Sea, plus Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy, are intended to avert this outcome. It is too early to assess the impact of their efforts, but failure would see the hegemon drawn deeper into this bloody quagmire. The effect would be to widen fissures in the Arab–Israeli axis and distract America from its priorities in the Far East.

In the event that the invading army manages to demolish Hamas politically and militarily, the US would also have to grapple with the problem of succession. At present it hopes to corral Arab states into providing a force to govern the territory so as to relieve Israel of the burden. US officials are reporting that American, French, British and German soldiers could be dispatched to defend this hypothetical dictatorship. But if regional powers refuse to cooperate, as seems likely, alternative proposals include a ‘peacekeeping’ coalition modelled on the Sinai’s Multinational Force and Observers – to which the Pentagon currently contributes almost 500 troops – or an administration under the auspices of the UN. Such schemes would effectively restore the US to the status of neo-colonial authority in the Middle East, despite its years-long attempts to fill the role with local subordinates. They would turn American forces into a visible target for the rage and resentment created by the Zionist war – an unenviable legacy for Biden to leave behind.     

But it may not come to that. There are other foreseeable scenarios that would be more favourable to the White House. Given Egypt’s refusal to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the banishment of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents seems unlikely in the short term. This, combined with American diplomatic pressure, has evidently caused Israel to modify the plan for its invasion, choosing an incremental approach over a rapid sweep. Whether this will reduce the chances of intervention by Hezbollah or Iran remains unclear. But the first is mindful of its precarious standing in Lebanon, which could be further harmed by a military conflagration, while the second is anxious to avoid the perils of direct involvement. The Saudis, though outwardly critical of the US position, are no less keen to prevent a conflict that would consume the entire Middle East and derail their ‘Vision 2030’. In each case, a number of domestic political imperatives are at odds with the regionalization of the war. A ray of hope for the declining empire?

Whether or not the violence is contained, however, Israeli success is hardly assured. Hamas’s 40,000 hardened fighters, adept at hybrid warfare and capable of ambushing the enemy via underground tunnels, are a stark contrast with the Israeli reservists who just received their refresher training. As the streetfighting begins, the numerical and technological asymmetries between the two may seem less decisive. One can therefore imagine a timeline in which the militants fight Netanyahu to a stalemate, the taboo on a ceasefire is lifted, and both sides eventually declare victory: Hamas because it repelled an existential threat from Israel; Israel because it can claim (however disingenuously) to have inflicted irreparable damage on Hamas and precluded any recurrence of its attack.  

Thereafter, Gaza would slowly emerge from the rubble and return to something resembling the status quo ante – yet with worse humanitarian conditions, as well as a wounded neighbour that is even more obsessed with its destruction. Although the US claims it wants Hamas to perish, it would stand to benefit from this situation in several important respects. It would save it from coordinating the post-war governance of the Strip; it would allow Israeli normalization to resume after a necessary hiatus; and, in the best-case scenario for Biden, it would place limits on further escalation while also undermining Russian and Chinese attempts to straddle both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The Abraham paradigm could thus be reinstated, at least until the next major flare-up. Rather than transforming the Middle East, then, the war may leave intact the ‘security architecture’ built by Trump and Biden. Yet the instability of this edifice has been proven. It would only be a matter of time before it buckles once again.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, NLR 48.

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Landscapes of Contestation

‘In the autumn of last year, there were four cases of homicide committed in four cities using the same handgun. This spring, a 19-year-old man was arrested. He became known as “the handgun serial killer”.’ So begins Adachi Masao’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), an experimental documentary that retraces the steps of Norio Nagayama, arrested in Tokyo on 7 April, 1969. Linguistic narration is otherwise scarce in the film, restricted to a handful of isolated statements supplying biographical details in a matter-of-fact voiceover. In place of conventional plot and character, the film offers a cascade of landscape images shown without commentary, accompanied by a careening free jazz soundtrack. Crisscrossing Japan, Adachi uses long takes to capture the locations of Nagayama’s life, from his childhood in Tōhoku’s Aomori Prefecture, a move to Tokyo as part of a mass-hiring initiative at age 15, and finally a disaffected drift across the country that culminated in murder. Trains, highways, ships, streets: whether desolate or crowded with people, these images are haunted by the troubled young man who perhaps once passed through them. What relation exists between Nagayama’s deeds and these impersonal spaces? Why tell his story in this way?

Adachi Masao / Iwabuchi Susumu / Nonomura Masayuki / Yamazaki Yutaka / Sasaki Mamoru / Matsuda Masao, ‘A.K.A. Serial Killer’, 1969, 4K Single-channel projection (original 35mm), Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A.K.A. Serial Killer is the central work in ‘After the Landscape Theory’, on view from 11 August to 5 November at Tokyo’s Photographic Art Museum. Curated by Tasaka Hiroko in collaboration with film scholar Hirasawa Go, this fascinating presentation of moving images, photographs and documents situates Adachi’s film as a key node within a diffuse, multi-faceted engagement with landscape in lens-based Japanese art from 1968 to the present. At the entrance of the exhibition is a copy of The Extinction of Landscape (1971), an essay collection by Matsuda Masao, a film critic who collaborated on the production of A.K.A. Serial Killer and was a central figure in the articulation of fûkeiron, or ‘landscape theory’. Resolutely rejecting the idea of landscape as a pictorial form devoted to the contemplation of natural beauty and severing any connection it might have to nationalist sentiment, this discourse posited that the power of the state and of capital can be rendered visible in commonplace images of the built environment. It recognized that power is everywhere: not only in spectacular moments of violence, as when police clash with protesters, but in everyday life. Forces of domination are present in transportation infrastructures and norms of bodily comportment, in the ways cities are constructed and local specificities effaced. So often this is overlooked, naturalized. But when caught on film, the petrified surfaces of the world can be defamiliarized and opened to scrutiny.

Matsuda Masao, ‘Fukei no Shimetsu’, Tabata Shoten, 1971, Private Collection

Matsuda’s thinking took shape during a period of tremendous economic growth and social tumult, in the twilight of the so-called ‘season of politics’ of the late 1960s. It was a time when anti-authoritarian sentiment ran high in Japan – whether in university struggles, protests against the renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), or the conflicts surrounding the construction of the Narita International Airport at Sanrizuka. It was also when, as Hirasawa puts it in the exhibition catalogue, ‘the entire Japanese archipelago was being transformed into one gigantic metropolis’, with intense development and new transport links eroding the distinction between city and countryside. The turn to landscape in A.K.A. Serial Killer was, then, a way of placing Nagayama’s killing spree within the larger frame of these social transformations rather than seeking individual, psychological explanations for the working-class teenager’s crimes. As Matsuda wrote of the film, ‘We became very conscious of that very landscape as hostile “authority” itself. It is very likely that Nagayama shot bullets to tear apart the landscape. State power recklessly cuts through the landscape to clear the way, for instance, for the Tomei Freeway. As we enjoy a pleasant drive on that highway, at that very moment the landscape possesses us, and “authority” entraps us.’ Looking at the built environment entailed turning one’s back on media spectacle to mount a critique of capitalist modernity through the typically spectacular and eminently modern art of the cinema. It meant producing a counter-image, a counter-cartography.

Following the initial display of Matsuda’s book, ‘After the Landscape Theory’ pivots to the present. This reverse-chronological organization has the felicitous effect of loosening the hold of historical material over the interpretation of the contemporary works. The notion of being ‘after’ the landscape theory has two possible implications: the simple fact of coming later, or a more direct relation, be it of homage, imitation or critique, as in the convention of titling a work as ‘after’ the style of a master. The curatorial decision of presenting more recent works first encourages the former approach, avoiding notions of origin and derivation, and circumventing claims to influence that may be tenuous. The presence of Sasaoka Keiko’s photographic series PARK CITY (2001–) in the exhibition’s first room is striking in this regard, as these images of Hiroshima challenge the conceptions of visibility and legibility upon which landscape theory as deployed in A.K.A. Serial Killer depends. The series title, which refers to the Peace Memorial Park, places Sasaoka’s images unmistakably in the shadow of nuclear aggression. Eight photographs of exterior spaces made between 2001 and 2009 are so dark that the distant bodies within them are scarcely discernible. Blackness floods these frames, with the white socks of uniformed schoolgirls in one picture dotting the obscurity like beacons. Elsewhere, Sasaoka shoots plain streetcorners and the interiors of the Peace Memorial Museum. Across these different approaches, she confronts the limits of what can be seen of history’s wreckage, as if to echo the famous line from Alain Resnais’s 1959 film: ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima’. Where A.K.A. Serial Killer considered how one might produce knowledge of a traumatic event, Sasaoka’s landscapes evoke muteness and unknowing. They hint at the possibility that images of the built environment might conceal as much as or more than they reveal. Theories, after all, are not facts; they are liable to fall short of their explanatory aims, and landscape theory is no exception.

Sasaoka Keiko, from the series ‛PARK CITY’, 2001-2009, Collection of the artist

Endo Maiko’s X (2022) and Takashi Toshiko’s 12-part Itami series (2005–10) are both serial moving-image works that approach landscape in a distinctly personal register. Made during the pandemic as an online project for the 14th Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, X was initially updated with new footage each day, producing an unfolding chronicle of the artist’s life. Itami similarly embeds the production of images in quotidian experience, such that the landscape is aligned with habit and intimacy, while the changing seasons provide a means of marking time. Such emphatically subjective approaches contrast sharply with not only Adachi’s film but also with the rule-based form of Imai Norio’s 8mm work Abenosuji (1977). An artist previously associated with the Gutai group, Imai filmed a series of traffic lights as they changed from red to green in a neighbourhood of Osaka. By allowing the presence of red lights to dictate where and when to make an image, he mitigates intentionality. This constraint intensifies the presence of contingency within the work, since all else that might appear in the frame besides the artist’s privileged motif is left to chance. Notably, traffic lights are responsible for regulating the movement of the masses at specified intervals; they tell Imai when to stop and film, just as they tell everyone when to stop and go. The concern with how social control manifests itself in urban space that so deeply marks A.K.A. Serial Killer resurfaces here in altered guise, as part of the relinquishing of authorial agency that is a hallmark of some strains of conceptual art.

Imai Norio, ‘Abenosuji’, 1977, Single-channel projection (original 8 mm), 22 min, Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

A pristine 4K projection of A.K.A. Serial Killer leads to the exhibition’s final room, which presents an array of documents, photographs and film clips from when landscape theory first took hold – including Nagayama’s handwritten journal and a copy of the book, Tears of Ignorance, that he published from prison in 1971. Rather than shore up Adachi’s film as an origin point, this room emphasizes that the discourse on landscape lacks a single authoritative formulation; it was a dispersed and contradictory debate occurring across diverse films and publications. On display are a trailer and stills from Oshima Nagisa’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), in which an activist filmmaker who is being chased by the police jumps to his death. The ‘will’ he leaves on film depicts the cityscapes of Tokyo; his friends wander the metropolis in search of those same locations, as if in search of their elusive meaning. Since A.K.A. Serial Killer was not released until 1975, it was Oshima’s film – originally titled ‘Tokyo Landscape War’ – that was initially taken to be exemplary of landscape theory; meanwhile, Matsuda first used the term in relation to the pink filmmaking of Wakamatsu Koji, also present here in the form of excerpts and stills. In 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut to make Red Army/P.F.L.P.: Declaration of World War, which marries the strategies of A.K.A. Serial Killer with the agitprop newsreel, depicting Palestinian fedayeen and members of the Japanese Red Army amidst landscape images. Three years later, Adachi would leave Japan to join the struggle in Palestine, abandoning filmmaking for nearly three decades.

Standing in this final room, it is possible to glimpse Sasaoka’s PARK CITY photographs back at the start: an architectural loop linking past to present. Why revisit all this material today? For a start because, as the exhibition demonstrates, the bond between landscape and power endures as a concern in artistic practice. In the catalogue, Hirasawa notes that, ‘Since the turn of the 21st century, a re-evaluation of landscape theory has taken place internationally, and it is likely not perceived as a specifically Japanese discourse.’ If it ever was: a programme of film screenings accompanying the exhibition gestures to the longstanding interest in landscape on the international left through the inclusion of works made between 1969 and 1981 by the Dziga Vertov Group, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville and Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub. Yet Hirasawa is correct in emphasizing contemporaneity. Today, landscape films comprise a vital current on the global circuit of festivals and biennials and, as a corollary, historical works of this kind have been the subject of renewed interest. Sometimes the connection to this past work is explicit: for instance, French-American artist Éric Baudelaire has produced a trilogy of films made with and ‘after’ Adachi, culminating in Also Known as Jihadi (2017). Meanwhile, the looser notion of coming after encompasses an avalanche of work. Whether in relation to concerns with climate, ecology and extractionism, out of a desire to move away from anthropocentrism, or as part of an effort to unearth traces of marginalized histories, landscape films have proliferated. As critic Leo Goldsmith has proposed, they ‘persist at a significant moment…in which the planet’s physical spaces are subject to increased quantification and abstraction on the one hand, and transformations to its geography accelerated by capitalism-driven human activity on the other’.

The present context is different to that which fuelled the debates in 1960s Japan, but there are affinities. Although, as works by Endo and Takashi show, landscape films can be tethered to first-person expression, their contemporary manifestations generally seek to transcend human perspectives and temporalities. The durational work of James Benning or Nikolaus Geyrhalter, for instance, is best understood as a response to crisis – to a ruined world in which ‘nature’ is a chimera. These are films for a time when anthropogenic changes to the environment are violent and ubiquitous, when rampant individualism must be refused, and when structural diagnoses are needed. Whether or not landscape theory produces the knowledge it promises remains an open question. What is certain is that it endures as a resource for filmmakers who seek to contest their present and, in turn, as a provocation for spectators for whom cinema is not only aesthetic but political and epistemological.

Read on: Jeremy Adelman, ‘The End of Landscape?’ NLR 126.

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Maspero’s Legacy

Late summer was marked by the loss of influential French publisher François Gèze. How should he be remembered? Born in Casablanca, trained as an industrial engineer, member of the Parti socialiste unifié and close to Parisian third-worldist circles, Gèze joined Éditions Maspero in 1977. Founded at the height of the Algerian War and linked to much of the then flourishing far left, the house was the principal Francophone publisher of Marxist theory and an emblem of anti-imperialist militancy. Six years later, amid straitened economic circumstances, François Maspero sold his stake for one nominal franc and transferred the directorship of what would henceforth be known as La Découverte to Gèze. At the time, the young publisher told anyone who would listen that ‘the Maspero catalogue was worthless’. Forty years later, we must assume the share of La Découverte in the €789 million annual sales of the Editis group is considerably larger than a symbolic euro.

In the world of books, where symbols are decisive, there is something more than a little disheartening about the Maspero list being in the hands of Vincent Bolloré, figurehead of a renascent, reactionary Catholic right. How did it come to this? La Découverte began publishing two years after Mitterrand’s election, as the government announced its U-turn on fiscal austerity and the official conversion of the PS to neoliberalism. Few doubted that the post-war epoch of political and social struggle – stretching from the great workers’ strikes through the campaigns against the war in Algeria, May 68 – had come to a definitive close. In Serge Halimi’s diagnostic, the left had stopped trying; in their stead the ‘intellectuals against the left’ of Michael Scott Christofferson’s description, spawned in the ideological slough of ‘anti-totalitarianism’, now took centre stage. France underwent a veritable ‘dégringolade’ in the words of Perry Anderson, an author who had been important for Maspero but who would not see a single book of his published by La Découverte.

The Mitterrand years: burial of egalitarian ideals and Marxist theories accompanied the terminal decline of the PCF as a mass party. ‘Worship of careerism, the Bomb, raison d’état, big business and the Mammon of cash-rackets-media-lies’, in Guy Hocquenghem’s summary. A terrible ordeal for a publishing house encumbered with the Maspero millstone. If the need to adjust the editorial line had already been on the agenda, Gèze made this the priority of La Découverte. Ever realistic in his approach to publishing, he refocussed the list on the humanities and social sciences (less politicized, more mass-market oriented) together with books by journalists dealing with hot-button cultural issues. To illustrate the evolution of the catalogue under his watch – an outpouring of more than 130 titles a year – it may suffice to consider two elements. First, the travesty of Maspero’s revolutionary anti-colonialism, dressed up in identitarian themes to please the taste of the cultivated petty bourgeoisie. The most emblematic example remains the metamorphosis of third-worldism into post-colonial hucksterism propagated by Pascal Blanchard and his co-thinkers, whose latest opus, Sexe, race et colonies (2018), packages the ‘domination of non-European bodies’ as coffee-table erotica. Second, the dumbing-down of social science, flagrant in the case of Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, authors of the crossover hit Le Président des ultra-riches (2011), whose most recent offerings are more or less unabashed exercises in tabloid voyeurism.

Gèze assumed the role of the rising entrepreneur, in tune with the social-liberal turn of a large portion of his readership. Symptomatically, he joined a host of other intellectuals associated with the ‘Second Left’ in signing the petition circulated by Esprit and the reformist CFDT trade union in support of the Juppé government’s plan to ‘modernize’ the French retirement and social security system. Algeria continued to occupy him: the 1990s were coloured by his campaign against the military regime in Algiers, accused of seeking to crush popular opposition by cultivating a climate of terror. Antipathy to Islamic radicalism caused many on the French left to hesitate in condemning the brutality of the Algerian government; Gèze’s engagement contrariwise led him to embrace an emergent form of cultural leftism, structured around faintly religious appeals to identity and denunciations of the ‘colonialist imaginary’.  

Perhaps no one attests more pungently than Hugues Jallon to the tragedy of the retreat of the publisher from post-68 idealism. Recruited by Gèze in 1997, Jallon referred to Malcolm X’s Le Pouvoir noir and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s Textes politiques, both published in French translation by Maspero, as ‘unreadable’ and ‘out-of-date’, belonging to ‘a past which is well and truly defunct’, literally: ‘Appalling!’ What of the bottom line? In 1995, La Découverte was bundled up with the Éditions ouvrières and Syros in a holding company capitalized by the CFDT. Three years later, following a bitter dispute from which it emerged victorious – with the dissolution of Syros and the departure of Éditions ouvrières – La Découverte was sold to the Havas group, itself on the cusp of being bought by the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, soon to become Vivendi and then Vivendi Universal. At last, Maspero featured on the Monopoly board of Parisian publishing, and Gèze’s career could truly begin. Three years after the spectacular collapse, in 2002, of Jean-Marie Messier’s megalomaniacal assemblage at Vivendi, La Découverte and three other Vivendi houses were snapped up by Hachette, which turned around and sold it off again the following year as part of a package deal, under the name Editis, to the Wendel investment company. Roller coasters and merry-go-rounds.

In 2005, now CEO of La Découverte in a group controlled by the boss of bosses, head of the Mouvement des entreprises de France ‘Baron’ Ernest-Antoine Seillière, Gèze not only affirmed that ‘I continue to publish exactly the same books as before, and no one has ever interfered with my editorial choices’, but concluded, ‘Now I have the peace of mind to edit, thanks to the economies of scale of a large group. Before, I spent more time working with my banker than with my authors’. When asked if he saw any contradiction between this cavalcade of owners from the ranks of France’s wealthiest men, and his loyalty to the ‘engagement’ of the Éditions Maspero, Geze replied: ‘Only the catalogue counts’.

Is this entirely true? It has often been reported that publishing attacks on the rich by José Bové, Michael Moore and their ilk greatly amused Seillière. A 2007 editorial innovation of Jallon’s also suggests that it’s not only the catalogue that counts: the creation of the ‘Zones’ imprint, intended to ‘renew the militant approach’ of La Découverte by ‘reconnecting with the third-worldist dimension of the Éditions Maspero’ through books that address the ‘problematics of the Global South’. Why pretend that a book series is published independently unless it is more politically coherent to construct ‘a site of editorial resistance’ – calling on partisans of ‘counterculture, activism and new forms of contestation’ to ‘whet their swords for new offensives and acts of resistance’ – independent of capitalist conglomerates?

As Jallon was promoted upwards, and learned the ropes as CEO, Gèze continued to exercise his talents in schemes concocted by the employers’ publishing union – in partnership with the French Ministry of Culture and the Centre national du livre – to shepherd the book business through its ‘digital transition’. When he retired in 2014, Jallon naturally was appointed his successor, with the agreement of the principal shareholder. Yet only four years later, the new CEO could not resist an offer from Vincent Montagne, recent owner of the Média-Participations cartel, to take the helm of Seuil and its subsidiaries. Jallon’s colleagues all congratulated him, if not so heartily as they congratulated his new boss – ‘representative of a moderate, even enlightened right’ in the words of one – for hiring this ‘authentic man of the left’. To replace Jallon, Gèze proposed Stéphanie Chevrier, who had started out as an editor in the Hachette and Flammarion groups before earning her spurs creating a bespoke ‘independent’ imprint, Don Quichote, at La Martinière. Once again, a left-wing publisher ensconced in a large corporate group striving to pass off the financier as a cobbler. The shareholders agreed. The mergers and acquisitions continued. A year after Chevrier’s arrival, Bolloré bought Editis from Planeta, which had purchased it from Wendel in 2008. In 2021, Chevrier’s boss was so pleased that he proposed she also take charge of the Éditions Julliard. At the time of writing – as part of his consolidation of the French media landscape – the sale of Editis to the tycoon owner of Le Monde, Daniel Kretsinky, is on the cards.

The conspicuous absence of Gèze, and any mention of La Découverte from the commemorative ceremony organized for Maspero after his death in October 2015, suggests that the handover thirty years earlier did not go altogether smoothly. By contrast, the tributes of Jallon and La Découverte to Gèze, ‘comrade, friend and fellow traveller’, leave no doubt as to the success of this latest bequest.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Paper Empires’, NLR 76.

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Argentina Realigned

My flight landed in Buenos Aires on Saturday 21 October, early in the morning. The atmosphere was so tense it felt like a place I’d never visited before. Presidential elections were being held the next day, and the candidacy of hard-right libertarian Javier Milei appeared to threaten the consensus that had been in place since the democratic transition of 1983. He was soaring in the polls – vowing to demolish the welfare state, dollarize the economy and launch an authoritarian crackdown on dissent. Everyone knew that the ballot would have implications far beyond the next four years. When the results came through, there was palpable sense of relief: Milei got 30% of the vote, while the Economy Minister Sergio Massa outshone expectations with 37%. Now the two contenders will face a tight runoff election in mid-November. Regardless of who wins, there will be no reversion to the status quo ante. Argentina’s political system has entered a new era.

Frustration with the Peronist establishment had been mounting for some time. During the period of kirchnerismo – the presidency of Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), followed by that of his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) – the country’s economic outlook oscillated. There was almost a decade of sound recovery, poverty reduction and improvements in every social indicator, thanks to strong welfare policies and the global commodities boom. Yet in 2011 a period of stagnation began. Slow economic growth, plus political corruption scandals and weariness with kirchernista personalism, created the perfect storm for the 2015 elections – when Kirchner’s anointed successor Daniel Scioli lost to the conservative free-marketeer Mauricio Macri.

Macri was hardly an outsider. He had been the mayor of Buenos Aires for the previous eight years, while his political coalition, Cambiemos, had a significant presence in Congress and governors in a few provinces. Its prominence increased with the 2015 elections and even more with the 2017 mid-terms. In office, he removed currency controls and established a floating exchange rate, as well as pushing deregulation to court international investors. A new IMF loan in 2018 paved the way for punishing austerity measures, which did nothing to curb Argentina’s persistently high inflation. When the country returned to the polls in 2019, it was beset by increasing poverty and crushing foreign debt. Macri was duly kicked out of office and replaced by the Peronist Alberto Fernández, with Cristina Fernández as his VP.

The kirchneristas – favouring greater income redistribution and less concerned with the fiscal deficit and balance of payments – were to the left of the new President, who styled himself as a capable technocrat. Yet the former could not muster the same popular support as the latter, and they had little means of implementing their reformist policies in the absence of economic growth. The question for the right-wing opposition, now rebranded as Juntos por el Cambio, was whether they could rehabilitate Macri’s legacy, present a united front and capitalize on splits within the ruling coalition. Fortune seemed to smile on them, if not on Argentina itself, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the worst drought in national history, which sent annual inflation north of 100%. Juntos por el Cambio thereby cemented its position as the leading challenger to Peronism and made a strong showing in the 2021 mid-terms. Its hopes for the 2023 elections were high.   

Few saw what lay in store. Milei, a self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist’, opponent of ‘gender ideology’ and apologist for the Argentine dictatorship, erupted onto the political scene. Having led his coalition La Libertad Avanza into Congress in 2021, he began to build support among legions of discontented young men and first-time voters, with a programme that included shutting down the Central Bank and privatizing the healthcare and education systems. His breakthrough in the primary elections of 2023, where he won 30% of the vote compared to 28% for Juntos por el Cambio and 27% for the Peronist Unión por la Patria, was a shock. Milei benefitted from anger at the government while also exploiting the vivid memories of Macri’s administration. He showed up the fact that neither of these electoral formations had a hegemonic vision for Argentina: the incumbent was unable to fulfil its social-reformist promises; the opposition had no distinctive identity beyond its hatred of Peronism. For many voters, a third option was appealing.

These shifting tides prompted the two other leading candidates, Patricia Bullrich of Juntos por el Cambio and Sergio Massa of Unión por la Patria, to act. For the government, there was an urgent need to stop Milei from undermining Argentina’s democratic settlement – hence its promise to convene a national unity administration, bringing together Peronists and non-Peronists, following the elections. The kirchnerista forces within its ranks were either marginalized or fell in line. Massa hardened his economic nationalist rhetoric, stressing the importance of defending labour and development from unchecked markets. For the macristas, meanwhile, the problem was mainly tactical, since a popular candidate of the extreme right made them look like a weak imitation. Bullrich, attempting to attract both Milei voters and the centrist electorate, ran one of the most inept political campaigns in Argentine history. Milei, for his part, made an effort to soften some of his most radical positions – pledging that he would implement transitional policies to compensate for cutting welfare. But affecting moderation was not always easy. His television appearances were punctuated by fits of manic rage, such as when he accused Bullrich of ‘planting bombs in kindergartens’ – a baseless accusation intended to evoke her membership of the Montoneros guerrilla movement in the 1970s (she responded by suing him for defamation).

On the day of the election, most forecasts predicted that neither Mieli nor Massa would receive enough votes to avoid a runoff, though the first was ahead of the second. In the end, Bullrich plunged to 24%; Juan Schiaretti, a Peronist dissident, picked up 7%; and Myriam Bregman of the Trotskyist left won only 3%. Yet the two frontrunners saw their polling positions suddenly reversed. How to explain Massa’s surge? Various factors were in play. For starters, there were the pro-cyclical measures he implemented as Economy Minister, which succeeded in raising consumption and demand. Some of them, like the elimination of income taxes for certain white-collar workers and executives, were not progressive, but nor were they unpopular with voters. Others, like freezing transport fares and devolving certain sales taxes, tried to compensate those most affected by inflation. As a whole, their impact was to shore up his support in the short term while increasing inflationary pressures further down the line.  

On top of this, it appears that the protest vote against the government, though powerful in August, plummeted once there was a real threat of an unstable outsider winning the election. A former tantric sex coach and singer in a Rolling Stones cover band, Milei is open about his ‘unorthodox’ lifestyle. He employs a psychic medium to speak with his dead dog, Conan – a creature whom he had cloned for $50,000, thereby producing four other mastiffs, each of them named after a different libertarian economist. His violent rhetoric, climate denialism and unabashed misogyny make Trump and Bolsonaro look fainthearted. His political apparatus is almost non-existent: he has hired various family members including his mother and his sister, whom he quipped would be his ‘First Lady’ were he elected. As he grew more familiar to the electorate, and as his novelty value faded, Massa’s relatively staid and conventional persona began to seem more attractive. (There were even rumours that Massa secretly supported Milei in the primary, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to beat – although nothing concrete has emerged to support this speculation.)

Now, in the period between election contests, a broader realignment is in motion. The expectation that Juntos por el Cambio would establish a stable two-party system, alternating in power with the Peronists, has been fatally undermined. Tensions between the main components of the alliance, Macri’s Propuesta Republicana and the historic party of the centre right, the Unión Cívica Radical, have reached boiling point. Bullrich and Macri have endorsed Milei in a bid to bury Peronism once and for all. Yet for many other coalition members, who retain some minimal commitment to democratic and republican precepts, this is a line they will not cross. A split looks possible in the coming weeks.

As for the Peronists, the divisions within the Fernández government have been smoothed over, at least for now, by the spectre of Milei. There is cautious optimism that Massa – having already increased his tally by almost 9% since the primary – will triumph in the ballot next month. He is on course to monopolize most of Bregman’s supporters and some of Schiaretti’s. Yet the decisive factor will be Bullrich’s voter base. Faced with the choice between a Peronist and a wild-eyed authoritarian, whom will they back? The outsider candidate, who made his name by railing against Bullrich’s ‘political caste’, will now have to seduce her followers. Whether he has the strategic nous for this is unclear.

What is clear is the reshaping of the Argentine political system. For almost fifteen years it was structured by the antagonism between kirchnerismo and anti-kirchnerismo. Now that is no longer the case. The former has seen its influence diminished under Massa’s premiership, which marks a reversion to classical Peronism. The latter, represented by Juntos por el Cambio, has lost popular support and fallen prey to its internal contradictions. Over the coming years, Argentina might find itself in a situation not dissimilar to that of the US or Brazil: on one side, a reactionary bloc drifting in an increasingly anti-democratic direction; on the other, a centre-left coalition which, partly because it encompass such diverse actors, struggles to formulate a coherent programme. Even if Massa wins the runoffs, there is no denying that Argentine politics has swung to the right since first decade of the new century. How he governs, and the popular pressures to which he is subjected, will determine whether it swings back.

Read on: Maristella Svampa, ‘The End of Kirchnerism’, NLR 53.