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Humans and Trees

In 1992, Hayao Miyazaki visited Hachiman Elementary School to speak to a group of students. This was seven years after Miyazaki had co-founded Studio Ghibli with his peers Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, four years after the release of My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, and the same year he would release Porco Rosso. He was a god. The children, all aged eleven or twelve, would have waited patiently for the magic man to appear – perhaps by cat-bus, or insectoid aeroplane, or flying broom. But in he walked with orthopaedic shoes, eyebrows overgrown and hair greying, and reeking, as some naughty adults do, of cigarettes. He briefly introduced himself and then began to talk of death.

In the Jōmon period – the Japanese Neolithic era, around 14,000 BC – people only lived to thirty, he told the class, intimating that he, their hero, would already be dead. In those days, he continued, people died before they became grandparents, and most would have children when they were just fifteen years old! He pointed at one of the students. This was before modern medicine, and so most of these babies would die, and these young mothers would need to have lots and lots of children just to ensure some survived. And even if you make it through all those painful childbirths – no doctors, remember – you don’t get to enjoy life for long, because when you turn thirty your children will be fifteen and it’s time for them to have babies and you to die.

‘Why am I telling you these things?’ he asked the children, presumably all in tears. ‘Well, in winter trees dry up and shed their leaves, but in spring they send forth new buds and shoots. And people are the same, for they have babies, the babies grow up, and then they have their own children. Of course, babies look like their parents, so even as people die they in a sense reappear. Both humans and trees, therefore, seem the same to me.’

Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, released without fanfare in Japan and currently touring the international festival circuit, is all about life, death, and rebirth. Like any good children’s film, it begins with the protagonist’s mother burning to death in hospital. Mahito Maki, a boy about the same age as those students at Hachiman Elementary, is awoken one night by a civil defence siren, and from his bedroom window sees the fire. He dresses in a hurry – Miyazaki carefully animating the awkwardness of buttoning one’s trousers in a panic, of attempting to speed down a staircase without falling – and then races toward the hospital, now alight with impasto pencil-scratchings in yellow, pink and red. As he runs, people enter the frame as already-charred corpses; they blur and flicker like flames. This horrific vision will recur throughout the film as a nightmare, as will fire – something violent, warm, divine, curative, illuminating, obliterating. (This year’s Oppenheimer, told from the other side of the war, opens with the myth of Prometheus.) In Miyazaki’s films, there is no good and evil, only the products of an oblivious natural world.

Mahito flees Tokyo for the countryside with his father, Shoichi, and his ‘new mother’, Natsuko, whose first interaction with Mahito includes placing his hand on her pregnant belly. He becomes quiet, avoidant, often looking to escape; he gets into a fight at school; he self-harms. All the while a grey heron seems to be mocking him – just circling and swooping at first, later crashing through his bedroom window and shitting all over the floor. ‘Your presence is requested’, the heron says through human teeth. Mahito isn’t sure what this means. He decides to kill the annoying bird by crafting a bow and arrow from bamboo, and in succumbing to malice he inevitably ends up in the underworld.

Here there is a milky-eyed wizard who builds the world each day from white marble tomb-stones, carved down to simple shapes, pyramids and columns and spheres, like toy blocks for children. There is an emerging empire of fat carnivorous parakeets who seek to overthrow him. There are little bulbous sperm-ghosts who represent unborn spirits (and will sell well as toys) and there are the vicious pelicans who gobble them up. There is a meteor that shines with the black rainbow of a polished pāua shell from which all the magic of this world is derived. And there is a Charon-like fisherwoman named Kiriko, who rescues Mahito, and who seems to be an age-inverted reincarnation – or parallel-carnation – of one of the goblin-like grannies who watch over him in the ‘real’ world. It’s all very strange.

But I am most taken by the island on which Mahito first arrives. It seems inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, and also Dante, featuring a golden gate with an ominous inscription, and Virgil and Ovid, and perhaps most importantly Paul Valéry, whose poem, ‘The Cemetery by the Sea’ where ‘Time glitters’ and ‘Dreams are knowledge’, inspired Miyazaki’s previous film, The Wind Rises (2013):

This peaceful roof of milling doves
Shimmers between the pines, between the tombs;
Judicious noon composes there, with fire,
The sea, the ever-recommencing sea . . .

Miyazaki adapts the poem more literally than before: those ‘milling doves’ are old ships on the horizon, circling the island in a silent, spectral orbit much like the aeroplane graveyard of Porco Rosso. The sun bounces on the ocean’s surface to resemble ‘fire’, a commingling of antithetical elements, which forms a ‘peaceful roof’ for the bodies below. Kiriko warns Mahito to tread softly, lest he wake the dead. (‘Their gift for life flowed out into the flowers! . . . Now larvae spin where tears once formed’ – isn’t this a philosophy of death so like the one Miyazaki recounted to his preteen audience?) The island is an unnerving place and thankfully we don’t stay long. The pair undo their trespassing by walking backwards through the gate. Mahito is told not to look back, like Orpheus, until they reach the shore. The wind is rising, Kiriko warns, and they must set sail at once.

Valéry’s poem ends: ‘The wind is rising . . . We must try to live!’ The recurrence of this phrase – in the title of The Wind Rises, but also within the film, again as a warning to the protagonist – is worth lingering on for the fact that The Boy and the Heron originally took the title of the 1937 novel by Genzaburō Yoshino, How Do You Live? The two films form an answer and a question. Mahito discovers the book by accident one day, a gift from his mother, with a dedication to her ‘grown-up’ boy. We see him abandon reading it to chase the heron. It’s a well-known text in Japanese culture, often read by children, which asks people to act selflessly, lessons of wisdom passed on by an uncle to his fifteen-year-old nephew, Koperu. Miyazaki, now eighty-two, had announced his retirement after completing The Wind Rises in 2013. He first did so in 1997, and has continued this tradition every few years. But after that last film, people believed him. It struck an elegiac tone. Many of its narrative elements were autobiographical, as they are again here: Miyazaki’s father was involved in the manufacturing of aeroplane parts for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which the protagonist of The Wind Rises, Jiro, helped design; in The Boy and the Heron, Mahito’s father is seen hoarding aeroplane parts in the countryside to preserve his factory. Miyazaki and his father did flee the war in Tokyo for the countryside (though we can’t be sure that a talking bird changed his life). His mother did get sick, suffering for a long time from spinal tuberculosis – a similar disease to the one suffered by Jiro’s wife – but she didn’t die in his childhood, and instead shocked the family by living well into old age. Mahito is often seen whittling, which is a skill Miyazaki passed on to his son Goro, having learned it from his own father. Jiro is an engineer who dedicates his life to a creative industry which nevertheless harms the world, something Miyazaki feels is true of animation; in The Boy and the Heron, this self-insert is bifurcated between the young Mahito and the old Wizard – the one who has to keep building new worlds else everything will end.

The remedial nature of the wizard’s building blocks gestures to an old-world modality. He draws his power from the meteor, which we learn fell to earth during the Meiji Restoration, an era that marked the end of Japanese feudalism and the beginning of rapid industrialisation. It was a time when samurai were retired and spirits disappeared, when the syncretic, pluralistic approach to spirituality, a mix of Shintoism and Buddhism then called shinbutsu-shūgō, was replaced by the worship of an emperor. Castles were destroyed, deep woods were plundered and railways grew like striped serpents across the countryside, fuelled by coal, whose production rose 3450%. For Miyazaki, as for Timothy Morton, this marked the end of the world. ‘It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust – namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale’, Morton writes in Hyperobjects. The mid-war setting of The Boy and the Heron is no accident, of course. ‘Since for something to happen it often needs to happen twice, the world also ended in 1945, in Trinity, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project tested the Gadget, the first of the atom bombs.’

Miyazaki is neither Karl Marx nor Ted Kaczynski. He has toyed with socialism and Maoism and now seems to have come around to an ecoterrorism led by nature itself. ‘I’d like to see Manhattan underwater’, he once told a writer for the New Yorker. ‘I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire – all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.’ Some of this thinking stems from reading Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World, which traces the various histories of civilizational collapse brought about by climate catastrophes. (When I saw the empire of parakeets, I thought of Ponting: an invasive species that has repopulated the underworld, risen to power, reached its apex, and in doing so, doomed itself.) It likely influenced Miyazaki’s understanding of societal decadence, his curmudgeonly view that things will inevitably collapse and that this can only mean good things. He even disavows environmentalism for this reason, claiming that his own ecological pursuits – using profits from toy sales to fund rewilding projects, for example – are foremost in the service of a personal nostalgia: ‘When I participated, I felt more pleased by seeing a real crayfish than by some grandiose feeling that I was preserving nature. We were able to become simply happy rather than thinking we were providing aid to protect this or that. We could see that the river was getting closer to what we remembered as children.’

Industrialisation is a childhood’s end, and in Miyazaki we so often see this Promethean moment rendered through a Freudian hermeneutics. (His new film features a primal scene between the father and ‘new mother’, observed by firelight; when Mahito reunites with his biological mother, she’s made much younger; his great transgression in the underworld, which leads to its destruction, is one of ‘taboo’; and so on…) Is Miyazaki a sleeper agent of the Freudo-Marxists, or is this just the nature of children’s films? His producer, Toshio Suzuki, would answer more simply that he’s a ‘mama’s boy’. For the Soviet cartoons that inspired Miyazaki, The Snow Queen chief among them, the child was a symbol that existed outside of capitalism, a pure potentiality or budding revolutionary. In Spirited Away (2001), the young girl Chihiro is the only one in her family capable of seeing spirits, while her parents obsess over consumption and turn into pigs – basically red cinema with a sprinkling of Shintoism.

Miyazaki believes that Mahito’s mid-teen moment is one much like the Meiji Restoration, a maturation that prefigures entry into the labour force and the total deadening of the creative mind (or the spiritual mind, the natural mind – all the same). This is marked most explicitly in Japan by university entrance exams – introduced, of course, during the Meiji period – a time often referred to as shiken jigoku, or ‘exam hell’. (Climb out of the underworld, young people!) This is also the time, Miyazaki claims, when they fall in love with anime. ‘To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own – a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they can incorporate into this private world . . . The word nostalgia comes to mind.’

Nostalgic for what? A time before adulthood, before industry, pollution, exams, emperors? In Marxism and Form, Fredric Jameson spends a long time teasing out a theory of Marxist literary criticism before arriving at his bravura example-analysis of Hemingway. He calls it ‘a mistake’ to think that Hemingway’s books deal ‘essentially with such things as courage, love and death; in reality, their deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style’. Hemingway, Jameson argues, is attempting to reconstruct some lost lived experience through his prose, where writing is as much a ‘skill’ as bullfighting or fishing. This spiritual pursuit, the nostalgic desire for an old world where the ‘true’ and ‘good’ were possible, is borne out in form, and each sentence points to its creator as an artisan, athlete, hero. Miyazaki’s animation functions similarly. At stake in his work is the anima of all things, the essential lifeforce of a world soon to ‘end in flames’ (so his latest film tells us), which perhaps explains his obsessions with animism, Shintoism and mechanisms of flight – all are a kind of quickening.

Porco Rosso, for example, the story of a porcine fighter-pilot and the closest thing Miyazaki has made to a Hemingway novel, again has little to do with its ostensible themes of ‘courage, love and death’. Few children understand what fascism is or what it means to fight against it, fewer comprehend the geopolitical complexities of aeronautical warfare in the Adriatic, and fewer still catch the reference to Jean-Baptiste Clément’s communard anthem Les Temps des Cerises. But what so enthrals Miyazaki’s audience – as with readers of Hemingway – is the animation itself, which we might liken here to the magic of flight. Consider the propellor, a symbol we find emblazoned on Mahito’s bedsheets: through strict adherence to the scientific properties of aerodynamics (Miyazaki’s insistence on instilling ‘fictional worlds’ with ‘a certain realism’) the propellor spins, blurs and disappears – and in doing so catapults us into the sky. Miyazaki’s unique talent for animating animation has a similarly uplifting effect.

In the 2013 documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, filmed during the making of The Wind Rises, you can see Miyazaki at work. His process is quite simple: he closes his eyes, envisions the scene, then puts hand to paper. Nobody knows what the film will look like until then. Key animation, script and storyboard all arrive at once, direct from Miyazaki’s mind. Here is that old-world modality yet again – the wizard and his building blocks. In his refusal to capitulate to modern technology and his insistence on personally drawing tens of thousands of frames for each film, Miyazaki is equally nostalgic for what Jameson calls ‘nonalienated work’ – but his nostalgia goes further. If previous films lamented the post-industrial use-value of human creativity – be that the ecologically destructive colony of ‘Irontown’ in Princess Mononoke (1997) or the Mitsubishi warplanes of The Wind Rises – then The Boy and the Heron takes a more apocalyptic view. Yes, after the great flood, grasses will inherit the earth, or parakeets, or whatever warriors nature thinks to send, but despite this, humanity will be lost, and human creativity with it. Elephants can paint, just not very well – like most animals they have no eye for colour. So what’s a man to do? In The Boy and the Heron, the wizard is seeking an heir. Will Mahito rise to the challenge? For Miyazaki, the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Read on: Fredric Jameson, ‘Gherman’s Anti-Aesthetic’,  NLR 97.

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That Which Haunts

Poetry, the American poet Louise Glück once told an audience, a member of whom had, preposterously, asked her to define it, ‘is that which haunts’. The response itself haunts, not least for being strikingly satisfactory. It ‘seems true and deep’, to borrow a phrase of Glück’s, from her essay ‘Death and Absence’. It begins in indeterminacy (‘that which’) and then tapers to a verb (‘haunts’) that is both distinctive and a little mysterious, achieving the air of the irrefutable while ‘loosing a flurry of questions’ (another of Glück’s phrases, this one from her essay ‘Ersatz Thought’). At once distilled and capacious, laconic and expansive, Glück’s definition of poetry shares many of the qualities of her poems.

Glück, who died aged 80 on 13 October, also talked about making poems ‘memorable’. She wrote thirteen collections in all, the first in 1968, the last in 2021, plus two slender books of essays, and a final short ‘fiction’ in prose published last year. She also taught poetry, from her late twenties onward, an experience she found she loved. Teaching was ‘the prescription for lassitude’; interludes of silence, some lasting years, were a feature of Glück’s writing life. Reflecting on working on her students’ poems in her essay ‘Education of a Poet’, she writes: ‘It mattered to get the poem right, to get it memorable, toward which end nothing was held back’. The repetition of ‘get’, producing that subtly odd, almost impatient phrase, ‘get it memorable’, enacts the kind of dogged focus it describes. (Occasionally lines would arrive like gifts, but making poems to house them was generally hard labour: Glück said her last book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, ‘came in the most tortured little drips – I thought of it as rusty water coming out of the tap’.)

The ‘right’ poem, the complete or perfected poem, is the ‘memorable’ one; its raison d’être, to ‘haunt’. Neither claim, similar but not identical, is necessarily obvious. Many poems lend themselves to learning by heart – this is one function, or effect, of rhythm and rhyme – but why would being memorable be the sine qua non? And do we want to be haunted? That which is memorable – one is tempted to say, ‘merely’ memorable – stays with you; that which haunts won’t leave you alone. That which haunts affects, consumes, disquiets, returns unbidden, perhaps unwelcome. And insofar as haunting is often recursive – that which haunts comes back – it isn’t exactly memorable: in fact, we may be haunted by what we would prefer to forget, or are in danger of forgetting (or fear we are: Hamlet’s father’s ghost commands him to ‘Remember me’).

Haunting, then, is not a steady, nor altogether pleasant, voluntary form of persistence. ‘The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last’, Glück once wrote. Her poems are sharp in several senses. They are not only distinguished by clarity, precision and keen intelligence, often delivering a penetrating, sometimes harrowing insight with aphoristic authority (most famously: ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.’ – ‘Nostos’). Her poetry is also unsparing, and can be mordant, cutting or frank to the point of callousness. The poems in perhaps her frankest, and most relentlessly morbid collection, Ararat (1990), a kind of family self-portrait written in the aftermath of her father’s death, are studded with barbs, lines of unexpected hostility:

My sister’s like a sun, like a yellow dahlia.
Daggers of gold hair around the face.

‘Yellow Dahlia’

My son’s very graceful; he has perfect balance.
He’s not competitive, like my sister’s daughter.

‘Cousins’

Or almost violent candour:

My mother’s an expert in one thing:
sending people she loves into the other world.

‘Lullaby’

In the same way as she’d prepare for the others
my mother prepared for the child that died.

‘A Precedent’

‘My son’ and ‘my father’ are the only male figures in a collection otherwise dominated by women, including a sister, a ‘girl child’ in Glück’s painful phrase (‘Mount Ararat’), who died before Glück was born. (‘Her death was not my experience, but her absence was’, she reflects in ‘Death and Absence’. It ‘produced in me a profound obligation toward my mother, and a frantic desire to remedy her every distress’ – ‘a haunted child’s compulsive compensation’.)

Ostensibly about death and grief, Ararat is shot through with envy, jealousy, fearfulness, resentment. Poems ‘will not survive on content but through voice. By voice I mean the style of thought’, Glück once wrote, and the ‘style of thought’ – the dominant logic – of the collection is comparison. The speaker often begins by contrasting, likening, ranking, summing up, categorizing. Yet there is usually something awry with these attempts at summary; they seem beside the point, the significance misplaced, a kind of category mistake:

When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.

‘Terminal Resemblance’

This is a bizarrely roundabout way to begin: that the speaker and her father do the ‘same thing’ is a rather abstract, shallow fact about their final parting (not least because the ‘same thing’ turns out to be waving, hardly an unusual gesture during farewells). By the last stanzas, the opening observation, although outwardly unimpeachable, seems an evasion, a way of not speaking directly of the pain of the memory, much as the speaker’s ‘wave’ is an effort to hide or expel her emotion:

When the taxi came, my parents watched from the front door,
arm in arm, my mother blowing kisses as she always does,
because it frightens her when a hand isn’t being used.
But for a change, my father didn’t just stand there.
This time, he waved.

That’s what I did, at the door to the taxi.
Like him, waved to disguise my hand’s trembling.

Several of the poems in Ararat progress from static abstraction to a painful particular, from some seemingly unflinching summary to a muted emotional climax. Many lead with conclusions: ‘My sister and I reached / the same conclusion: / the best way / to love us was to not / spend time with us.’ (‘Animals’). The second poem in the sequence, ‘A Fantasy’, begins:

I’ll tell you something: every day
people are dying. And that’s just the beginning.

Glück liked poems that dramatize a ‘question, a problem’ in which the ‘poet was not wed to any one outcome’. (In ‘Death and Absence’, she recalls cutting lines that ‘summarized what the poem had to suggest’.) In the light of such preferences, the second sentence in ‘A Fantasy’ sounds almost like a self-referential joke. Glück seems to have set herself the perverse challenge of beginning the poems in Ararat in the most inert way possible, with beginnings that sound like endings, dead-ends (fitting for lyrics that are, after all, about going on after death).

Yet ‘A Fantasy’ doesn’t begin with the pronouncement itself – ‘every day / people are dying’ – but that strangely unprovoked promise of disclosure: ‘I’ll tell you something’ is an odder phrase than its colloquial aspect suggests. The ‘something’ can sound either confiding or a little menacing, either arbitrary (you’ll tell us ‘something’, but will you tell us what we asked, will anything do?) or aggressively pointed. Does the speaker have something to say or is she talking for fear of silence the way her mother compulsively blows kisses? And who would need to be told, who could fail to know, that every day people are dying? Several of the book’s opening lines have this unstable, inscrutable tone: forthright and somehow exposed, knowing and a little childlike, as though the speaker doesn’t quite understand the import of what they’re saying.

‘A Fantasy’ goes on to describe a funeral, but superficially and from a distance, mostly without the specificity that would suggest true intimacy with death:

Then they’re in the cemetery, some of them
for the first time. They’re frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean
saying a few words, sometimes
throwing dirt in the open grave.

And after that, everyone goes back to the house,
which is suddenly full of visitors.
The widow sits on the couch, very stately,
so people line up to approach her,
sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.
She finds something to say to everybody,

Along with the accumulation of ‘some’ words (‘something’, ‘sometimes’, ‘someone’), the subtle lapses in logic (do people approach the widow because she is sitting ‘very stately’ as that ‘so’ suggests?) are little giveaways, indications that the speaker doesn’t fully comprehend the ‘something’ she set out to tell. It’s as though there is a child hiding within the world-weary manner, with its neat rhymes, or rather it’s the knowing posture that is part of what sounds like a child, a child’s botched precocity. The third and final stanza moves inward – ‘In her heart, she wants them to go away’ – and then ends on a note of unexpected ambivalence. The widow wants to be ‘back in the sickroom’: ‘it’s her only hope, / the wish to move backward. And just a little, / not as far as the marriage, the first kiss.’ She doesn’t want to revive her husband so much as relive his dying; to ‘move backward’ – not quite the same as ‘going back in time’, as though she wants to approach the past but doesn’t want to arrive.

Several of the poems in Ararat ‘move backward’, less advancing toward resolution than unravelling or backtracking from the certainties with which they begin:

Nothing’s sadder than my sister’s grave
unless it’s the grave of my cousin, next to her.
To this day, I can’t bring myself to watch
my aunt and my mother,
though the more I try to escape
seeing their suffering…

‘Mount Ararat’

Despite its sing-song matter-of-factness, the casual briskness of those two symmetrical apostrophes in the first line – among the formal signatures of the sequence – anticipates the speaker’s impulse to hasten past ‘suffering’. She can’t even bring herself to complete the sentence, to name what she can’t watch her aunt and mother do. Yet the second line of the couplet, which ends on that slightly hurried, forced rhyme with ‘sadder’ (‘next to her’), undermines or at least alters the first. The voice of a child is faintly audible, in the ‘unless’, which suggests the speaker searching for the right answer, as though there could be one. There’s the hint of a punchline, too, in the way the second line pulls the rug out from underneath the first by taking its proposition literally – as if it were a genuine invitation to comparison (and isn’t it her sister’s death that’s sadder than her grave?)

*

Escaping suffering – sometimes in the guise of confronting it – is among the major subjects of Ararat. Unlike her ‘brave’ friend ‘able to face unpleasantness’, the speaker is ‘quick to shut my eyes’ (‘Celestial Music’); she shows ‘contempt for emotion’ (‘Paradise’); she is a ‘living expert in silence’ (‘Children Coming Home From School’). The speaker in the sequence is in this sense an unreliable narrator (one poem is titled ‘The Untrustworthy Speaker’), and the drama of the poems arises from the way the language of neutrality, detachment or composure fails to convince. In ‘Cousins’, an amusingly nasty poem, the speaker compares her son to her ‘sister’s daughter’ who is ‘competitive’ (that she won’t say ‘niece’ is an early hint of the speaker’s hostility). But what the poem reveals far more vividly, because implicitly, is the speaker’s own competitiveness, formally disavowed by the even keel of the lines, which can’t quite disguise the tone of jealous vitriol:

Day and night, she’s always practising.
Today, it’s hitting softballs into the copper beech,
retrieving them, hitting them again.
After a while, no one even watches her.
If she were any stronger, the tree would be bald.

The measured pace of each line’s opening clause half-obscures the sound of bitter complaint, capped by that wonderful dry line ‘the tree would be bald’. The flat adjective exudes the venom behind the exaggeration. Next the speaker turns to boasting about her son, with a cloying internal rhyme followed by an almost preening dash: ‘I’ve watched him race: he’s natural, effortless—’. But her son always ‘stops’ – he ‘was born rejecting / the solitude of the victor’. Then follows the deliciously spiteful, socially unacceptable conclusion:

My sister’s daughter doesn’t have that problem.
She may as well be first; she’s already alone.

Reflecting on past efforts to write about her family in ‘Death and Absence’, Glück writes that ‘These poems, these many attempts, were frank but without mystery. The problem was tone… I kept taking appropriate attitudes, when what was wanted had to be, in some way unique’. As with the widow in ‘A Fantasy’, who only wants to go back in time as far as her late husband’s ‘sickroom’, the ending of ‘Cousins’ – feeling viciously competitive toward a child, and seeming to wish them ill – couldn’t be mistaken for an ‘appropriate attitude’. What makes Ararat’s remorselessly frank poems mysterious and unique is this disconcerting tension between sense and sound, between sentence and line, between implied emotion and composed appearance, which scrambles the voice of the speaker.

The speaker’s father is the absent centre of Ararat – ‘there was only one hero. / Now the hero’s dead…there’s no plot without a hero.’ (‘A Novel’). While alive, he appears remote, inexpressive, so much so that he seems to be waiting for death:

What he wanted
was to lie on the couch
with the Times
over his face,
so that death, when it came,
wouldn’t seem a significant change.

‘New World’

He is avoidant, perhaps depressed:

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn’t see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

‘Snow’

The sharp line, the one that punctures the line before – ‘to hold me / so he couldn’t see me’ – brings out the latent desolation in the image of discarded scraps of paper blowing over the railroad ties, two parallel lines that face in the same direction like the child and her father, but never touch, remain permanently separate. ‘So you couldn’t see me’ makes us reconsider the whole first stanza – its scarcely established sense of intimacy and anticipation (‘to New York, to the circus’) – as well as the first mention of holding: ‘He holds me / on his shoulders in the bitter wind’. That line break now seems to foreshadow the winding blow of the later line break – as though the holding is retracted by the fact she is on his shoulders (does being on someone’s shoulders count as being held, or is the child holding the parent – holding on?) And is being on her father’s shoulders the pleasure we assumed it to be or was she too exposed up there to the ‘bitter wind’?

Yet the final verb in the final line – ‘the heavy snow / not falling, whirling around us’ – like the snow itself, ‘looses a flurry of questions’. Glück uses the word ‘whirl’ twice in her essay ‘Ersatz Thought’ to describe the effect of the implicit or the incomplete in poetry: ‘the unspoken, becomes a focus; ideally, a whirling concentration of questions’; ‘the unsaid’ becomes ‘the centre around which the said whirls’. She also talks about the way the sentence ‘initiates and organizes fields of associations which (in the manner of the void) may continue to circulate indefinitely’. In ‘Snow’, even as it could suggest a kind of frightening chaos, ‘whirling’ also revives the air of magic and excitement that opened the poem, and the possibility of wresting poetry from desolation.

Whirling concentrations, flurries of questions, indefinite circulation: this is the sort of poetic permanence – alive, ongoing – Glück prefers to the more commonplace notion of poems as ‘words inscribed in rock or caught in amber’. What is left out of such ‘images of preservation and fixity’, she explains in ‘Death and Absence’,

is the idea of contact, and contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish. Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.

Though they contain their fair share of haunting lines, Glück’s poems are for the most part not, strictly speaking, memorable. They remain ‘strange, and will never become familiar’, as the American painter Philip Guston once said of the work of ‘marvellous artists’. But a poem that endures, this passage suggests, is not ‘memorable’ in the sense of being easy to remember; it is rather ‘worth remembering’. What is worth remembering? That which we are liable to forget, that which we need to continually discover – unsayable feelings and intolerable facts, the ‘unpleasantness’ we are perennially unable to ‘face’.

And that which disappears. ‘It seemed to Marigold that you remembered things because they changed. You didn’t need to remember what was right in front of you’, Glück writes in her final work, Marigold and Rose, a kind of adult-children’s book about the inner lives of infant twins. Marigold is writing a book even though she can’t talk, let alone read, and is given to astonishingly adult – existential, morbid – thoughts: ‘I will be grown up, she thought, and then I will be dead’; ‘the twins knew somehow they were getting older whether they wanted to or not. They would someday walk instead of crawl. They would have teeth…Everything will disappear, Marigold thought.’ Far from being a time of innocence, pre-verbal infancy in Marigold and Rose is a time of concentrated, radical losses of innocence. If ‘we look at the world once, in childhood’, it is then, Glück’s inexplicably convincing swansong suggests, that we absorb the unacceptable fundamentals – nothing lasts, including us and those we love – in elemental form. ‘Everything will disappear. Still, she thought. I know more words now…And both these things would continue happening: everything will disappear but I will know many words.’

What survives is voice, and what distinguishes a ‘specific, identifiable voice’, Glück insisted, is ‘volatility, which gives such voices their paradoxical durability’. It is this volatility which makes a voice seem to speak ‘not from the past but in the present’, which ensures a poem endures not as an ‘object’ but as a ‘presence’. One advantage presences have over objects is that they are not only there; you can be in them. If you read Glück’s poems, you can not only hear her durably volatile voice, you can feel you are in her presence.

Read on: Anahid Nersessian, ‘Notes on Tone’, NLR 142.

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The Polish Continuum

The Polish parliamentary elections on 15 October have created a period of political uncertainty. Although the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) won the largest share of the vote – just over 35% – it lost its parliamentary majority, and the poor showing of the far-right Konfederacja party deprived it of a potential coalition partner. Meanwhile, young people and women voted en masse against the incumbent, with an overall turnout rate of 74%. Should PiS fail to form a government, as looks likely, the task will fall to the Citizens’ Coalition (KO), which will try to assemble an alliance with the centre-right Third Way (TD) and the Left. PiS’s prospective removal has prompted sighs of relief from Brussels, legacy media outlets and international markets. The Guardian is triumphantly announcing that a KO-led government will ‘bring radical change to Poland’. Yet things may not be so simple.

Having come to power in 2015, PiS was able to increase its mandate in the 2019 elections thanks to a significant section of the electorate who felt that their living standards had improved under its tenure. It introduced universal child benefits and extra pension provisions, as well as raising the minimum wage. Yet while these measures have enabled it to retain a large voter bloc, its social spending waned during its second term. It did nothing to redistribute wealth nor challenge the power of international financial institutions and corporations, despite its nationalist rhetoric. Rising inflation, growing difficulties for young people to secure proper housing, a precaritized labour market and a crumbling health service – overburdened by the pandemic – contributed to popular frustration.

KO, led by the former Polish Prime Minister and President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, has led the opposition to PiS. A Christian-Democratic outfit tied to the European People’s Party, it has historically combined neoliberal economic policies with social conservatism. More recently, KO has attempted to court younger voters by tempering its free-market zeal and pledging to soften the government’s ban on abortion. Its electoral heartlands are situated mainly in urban regions, especially in the west of the country, and among highly educated and better-off voters. At this election it failed to make substantial inroads beyond such demographics, increasing its vote share from the previous parliamentary elections by only 3%. It now stands at 30.6%.

The Left gained a paltry 8.6% of the vote, a 4% drop since 2019. In recent decades, its strain of social democracy has struggled to gain a foothold in the Polish political scene. It was largely discredited in the mid-2000s when the governing Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) reneged on its electoral promises. The SLD continued the privatization and deregulation programme of the previous right-wing government. It did not reform abortion laws nor weaken the power of the Catholic Church in public life, and it actively supported the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This ceded ground to two political blocs from the right – the Law and Justice Party and the Citizens’ Platform (which later became the Citizens’ Coalition), with the left essentially becoming an appendage to the second. The 2023 election campaign exposed its signal failure to set out a coherent policy platform. Though it advocated more public housing and increased health spending, it also embraced the hawkish consensus on Ukraine and remained silent on whether a border wall should remain in place along the frontier with Belarus. Its support for higher military budgets made its social policies ring hollow. Having been fully assimilated into the KO agenda, it found itself without a distinctive pitch to make to the public.

The only real breakthrough was the newly formed TD, which brought together the Agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL) and a new political movement built around the media personality Szymon Hołownia. It won an impressive 14.4%, running on a neoliberal-conservative programme that drew some voters away from Konfederacja. TD promotes low taxes, market solutions to the housing crisis and an increased role for the private sector in public services. It supports reversing the complete abortion ban introduced by PiS but opposes legalizing abortion up to twelve weeks. The PSL leader Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has insisted that abortion and other social issues will not be part of any coalition agreement. Should the Left decide to join the incoming government, it will have no leverage to change this state of affairs. The dominant influence of KO and TD means that even if the administration passes some minor progressive reforms (such as restoring state funding for IVF), there will not be a real rupture with years of conservative rule.

The elections took place against a background of profound changes in Poland’s international relations. At the beginning of the Ukraine war, Poland was presented as a model for ‘the West’. It accepted large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, steadfastly supported Kyiv and supplied it with copious military equipment. PiS urged other nations to follow its lead, chastising Germany and France for their supposed heel-dragging. Commentators inside and outside the country began to hail Poland as a new European superpower that could shift the continental balance of power to the east. As part of this bombast, the government announced huge increases in military spending – around 4% of GDP this year – with the enthusiastic backing of the opposition. If all goes to plan, by 2035 Poland will have spent around €115 billion equipping its army and doubling its ranks.

Yet Poland’s status as NATO’s poster boy began to unravel last summer, as domestic farmers began to protest that a glut of Ukrainian grain was pushing down agricultural prices and threatening their livelihoods. With elections looming, PiS was forced to heed their demands, as agrarian workers constitute an important section of its voter base. Poland thus banded together with neighbouring states to place an embargo on grain imports from Ukraine. The EU followed suit – but when its temporary embargo expired last month, Poland reintroduced its own, along with Hungary and Slovakia. This led to a fierce diplomatic conflict between Warsaw and Kyiv, with the latter submitting a formal complaint to the WTO. In response, the Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki threatened to stop sending new arms to Ukraine and discontinue financial support for Ukrainian refugees. Some in the Polish government mooted the idea of extraditing Yaroslav Hunka, the Ukrainian Nazi who served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Over the coming months, a KO-led government will likely have to confront the contradiction of satisfying Polish farmers while also avoiding conflict with Ukraine and the EU. NATO leaders are hopeful that tensions can be calmed. But it remains to be seen how Tusk’s attempts to curry favour with the ‘international community’ will affect his domestic political fortunes.

Though it took some time for PiS to turn against Ukrainian refugees, it has always been fiercely hostile to those arriving from the Middle East and Africa. The Polish security forces have illegally pushed back migrants crossing the Belarusian border, where hundreds of soldiers have been deployed and a towering fence constructed. In August 2021, at the request of the government, President Andrzej Duda introduced a temporary state of emergency in the border region to inhibit the work of journalists and activists. All this was in line with the EU’s demands to keep refugees at bay: an edict that has created a humanitarian catastrophe in Europe, with asylum seekers freezing in Poland’s forests and drowning in the Mediterranean. Far from opposing this agenda, KO pledged to secure further EU funding to help fortify the Polish border. Tusk has, if anything, positioned himself to the right of PiS on migration, whipping up hysteria about arrivals from Islamic countries and urging the government to stop the influx.

Despite enforcing the policies of ‘Fortress Europe’, PiS has repeatedly clashed with Brussels over its judicial reforms. The government has sought to challenge the EU strategy of ‘integration through law’, as well as the general supremacy of European laws over domestic ones, via a ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that certain EU Treaty articles are incompatible with the national constitution. For these and other alleged violations of EU rules (regarding the appointment of judges, for instance), the Polish government pays a daily €1 million fine to the European Court of Justice, and the European Commission has refused to release €36 billion in loans and grants from the EU’s pandemic recovery funds. Yet the PiS, aware that its stage-managed confrontation with the Euro-bureaucracy bolsters its credentials as a defender of traditionalist values, is unwilling to back down. It rejects EU refugee quotas and LGBT rights directives, claiming that they represent attempts to impose multiculturalism on Poland and erode its family structure.

At the same time, the PiS government has claimed €1.3 trillion in reparations for damage caused in World War Two. During the election campaign, it accused Germany of supporting KO and presented Tusk as a servant of the Bundestag. One of its election broadcasts condemned Olaf Scholz for attempting to influence Polish politics and claimed that the only way to challenge German hegemony was to vote for PiS. Such rhetoric resonates with large swathes of the population, both due to legitimate long-term historical grievances and to more recent memories of Germany helping itself to Poland’s industrial and financial spoils during the chaotic years of capitalist transition.  

KO, by contrast, has styled itself as a modernizing Europeanist force – the voice of Polish liberal aspiration. Within days of the election result, Tusk announced he would travel to Brussels to reassure the EU that he would repeal PiS judicial reforms and, in return, gain assurances that frozen funds would be released. One of the primary aims of a Tusk-led government will be to return Poland to the European mainstream. Yet this hardly represents the triumph of liberal democracy over authoritarian populism, as some onlookers have claimed. For the EU is more than willing to embrace the latter when expedient: establishing a warm partnership with Georgia Meloni, tacitly approving Emmanuel Macron’s brutal crackdown on public protest, and turning a blind eye to rampant corruption – as well as the state-sanctioned abuse of minority populations – in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia and Malta. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party was once a member of the European People’s Party which Tusk used to lead. On a substantive level, the Euro-Atlanticist policies of PiS and KO are not much different: rapid militarization, the retention of ten thousand US troops on Polish soil, shutting out refugees and sabre-rattling against Russia. The current government fell afoul of the Commission and ECJ not because of its right-populist politics, but because it challenged the EU’s legal supremacy and weakened the power of its institutions in Poland. This is the sin for which KO, by reaffirming its fealty to the Treaties, must atone.

Whoever governs Poland over the coming years will face an international situation fraught with difficulty. The Ukraine conflict will continue to take a major economic toll thanks to ongoing supply chain disruption, reduced energy supplies and higher military spending. If the new government does not significantly invest in housing and public services, hostility towards the large Ukrainian minority in Poland – whom the far right is portraying as the source of the country’s problems – may grow. A PiS opposition could easily capitalize on the discontent. It remains the largest party in parliament, attracting support from some of the most socially excluded sections of society; and it retains the Presidency, which has the power to veto government policies and – for now at least – controls the Supreme Court and public TV networks. As the euphoria of election night subsides, opposition parties must bring diverse political forces into a government that is united primarily by antipathy to the PiS. The latter stands ready to use its substantial influence to undermine this coalition and expose its internal divisions. Tusk looks set to become Prime Minister – but the last laugh may not be his.

Read on: Gavin Rae, ‘In the Polish Mirror’, NLR 124.

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Speak, Geology

The world of the German author Esther Kinsky is the world after Babel. The Biblical story goes like this: once, the people of the world had a single language. They found an empty plain and, having worked out how to bake clay into bricks, decided to build a tower in order to reach the heavens – ‘otherwise’, they feared, ‘we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth’. When God comes to punish them, this is exactly what happens. The tower goes unbuilt, the universal language vanishes. Kinsky, who began her literary career as a translator of Polish, English and Russian, invokes Babel in her book-length essay Fremdsprechen (2013), a manifesto of sorts that sets out her conception of what it means to exist between languages. It begins with an extended riff on the thwarting of the tower of Babel as humanity’s third collective punishment (after the expulsion from Eden and the Flood), one that condemned it to ‘difficulties of comprehension’, to language as a site of otherness.

Yet for Kinksy, the chasm between languages is not a bleak place, but rather a field of resonances, a ‘transit space’, a creative sound-zone. Everyone must face the complex reality of life after Babel; everyone, too, is capable of excavating their personal relationship to language, formed through the accumulation of layers of association and memory, which can be unearthed and probed as Kinsky herself does in a series of autobiographical fragments that conclude the book. Kinsky employs such geological terminology throughout Fremdsprechen: language is likened to clay, loam, bricks.

Language and discontinuity, geological excavation and reconstruction: these are themes that run through the triptych of novels that has made Kinksy’s name in the anglosphere. River (2017), Grove (2018) and now Rombo (2022) – the first translated by Iain Galbraith, the latter two by Caroline Schmidt – have tended to be received as nature writing. Yet Kinsky has rejected this rubric, and for good reason. Not only is her vision of the natural world far less pristine than that found in many of that genre’s naiver examples, but nature in her work is ultimately more of a charged setting than Kinsky’s main subject – a device, or metaphorical resource. Her interest is not in geology itself, but in the geological workings of memory, while her central preoccupation is language – the ‘shapeable material’ of post-Babel Earth.

Kinsksy’s three Geländeromane (‘terrain-novels’) are formally experimental meditations on disturbance – at once geological, personal and linguistic. All are set in the aftermath of loss, and show their narrators trying to come to terms with change. In River, an unnamed narrator – about to leave town for good – wanders the ‘partly mutilated’ mudscapes of east London’s lower Lea Valley, recording what she sees with both photographs and words, journeying into the ‘lower reaches’ of memory:

Hidden in the middle of the large Hackney Marshes Playing Fields, as in the depths of the instant pictures I had taken with my bulky camera, were memories I was only gradually learning to read: the steady drone of an invisible plane above the white cloud cover, chirring pylons lisping messages from the air, the wispy rustling of pale winter grass in the wind, and between it all a stillness that masked the proximity of the city.

Grove, written in the wake of the death of Kinsky’s husband, the translator Martin Chalmers, sees a recently widowed woman move to a small Italian town southeast of Rome; her fragmented, memory-suffused relections on the land and her place in it produce a teetering superimposition of images. Kinsky’s investigation into what she calls ‘disturbed terrain’ finds perhaps its most literal expression in Rombo, about the series of earthquakes that rocked Friuli in northern Italy in 1976, killing around a thousand people, with countless more displaced.

The cataclysm is reconstructed through the fragmentary accounts of several fictional eyewitnesses; this collective narrative is interspersed with a narrator’s intricate descriptions of Friuli’s ecology and landscape, its local flora and fauna:

Up the Rio Nero, the terrain is always wild. The path is forever being shifted by fresh rock falls and descending scree – a terrain of interference in the tenor of events. The scent of resin sits above the sunny barren land, where dwarf pines brace themselves between chunks of rock – the trees so small one might be quicker to attribute to the stones their scent. Beside the pine saplings junipers take root, small bell flowers, heather on blown-in soil.

There are also detailed accounts of Friulian culture and folk customs, including a traditional song dedicated to the mermaid Riba Faronika – sung while undulating one’s hands in front of one’s chest – and the bile maškire performance, which takes pride of place in the region’s carnivals:

The men and women who masquerade in white all wear the same costume: a long white skirt adorned with colourful cording, a white shirt and a colourful belt. On their heads, a prodigious bonnet, bedecked with colourful paper flowers. Some bonnets dangle colourful ribbons that hide one’s face; all roaming strangers by no account recognizable, white as the limestone mountains and not-white as the flowers from the interglacial period that managed to salvage themselves, whiling in the cracks of the limestone peak that towered over the glacier.

As in the story of Babel, the disorienting fallout from the earthquake is social, cultural, linguistic. ‘An earthquake rattles everything and turns it upside down, even the thoughts in your head’, one local observes. ‘My life is this place’, says another. ‘Here I know everything. Every stick and every stone. The animals and the people.’ But then suddenly she doesn’t. Amid the rubble, it is not only the roads and pathways that are thrown into confusion; folktales and social bonds stop making sense too. ‘Work, the neighbourhood, the animals, music – all that was now divided into the before and after’, one resident says. Many families leave the region, never to return. The village cemetery has fallen into disarray. Displaced former locals who have decamped to nearby coastal towns look out towards the sea – the legendary home of the mermaid Riba Faronika: ‘But they said nothing about it, not even to one another, and they didn’t sing either, not even quietly, because it was too late for that – and even had they hummed, out of homesickness or simply from memory, never would they have moved their hands up and down before their breast, imitating a wave or a snake: not here, beneath this endless sky and in the presence of the horizon.’

While River had a looping, forking structure and Grove imitated its photographic leitmotif by layering – or superimposing – different exposures of its subject matter, Rombo’s snatches of memory and information overlap, diverge and rub against each other like tectonic plates. River and Grove were each narrated by a single coherent persona, whereas Rombo’s fractured chorus of voices dramatizes the ruptures created by the trauma of the earthquake. Together, the eyewitness accounts produce a kind of shifting mosaic – one might call it ‘rubble narration’ – which tries to convey the catastrophe, and the community it destroyed, while stranded irredeemably in the aftermath.

As an act of critical reconstruction, one might compare Kinksy’s approach to kitsugi pottery, or to the chunks of ruin and graffiti preserved in Berlin’s rebuilt Reichstag. The cracks are the highlight; the conspicuousness of the commemorative effort is the point. Kinsky’s descriptive exertion – although occasionally wearing in its attention to esoteric detail – is similarly paramount. It is a method for refusing oblivion. In each novel, dislocations of self and setting initiate a process of reorientation. ‘Memory’, one Friulian local says, ‘is something that is being forever woven.’ After the first earthquake, the residents find themselves arguing about what happened:

One argued over the form of the cliffs, the course of the brooks, the trees that avalanches rolled over. About the whereabouts of objects, the order of things in the house, the fate of animals. Each of these arguments was an attempt at orientation, at carving a path through the rubble of masonry, mortar, split beams and shattered dishes, to understand the world anew. To begin living in a place anew. With one’s memories.

In the New Testament, Jesus says that if people keep silent, the stones themselves will speak. Kinsky’s fiction is full of articulate, evocative stones: bits of brickwork in River; the Ravenna mosaics in Grove; Rombo’s twisted geological layers. But can stones be made to speak of absence, of loss? In Rombo, the loss in question is not just that of 1976. The novel, after all, is not titled Sisma – Italian for earthquake; Rombo is rather the local term for the subterranean growling that comes before seismic activity. ‘The earthquake is everywhere’, our narrator observes. ‘In the mountains’, says one local, ‘something is always shifting’. The narrator offers various theories about the kinds of tectonic activity that cause such disasters; they also note that Friuli is home to some of the deepest cavities on Earth:

What constitutes a cavity? Is it the absence of stone, soil, light – or the presence of walls enclosing it? The darkness within or the light without? When does can’t remember become forgotten, after all? In the early days of geology there was a science of abyssology. A theory of shafts, chasms, voids where forgotten things lie trapped, like tonsil stones. Things lost.

For Kinsky, nature ultimately provides no escape from loss, no solace or release from human tragedy (it is sometimes, as with the earthquake, the cause of it). What it may offer, however, is the possibility of coming to terms with this absence-filled world. Kinsky’s nature is never quite cruel, but it is utterly indifferent to humans’ emotional claims. As she once remarked in an interview: a landscape ‘touches our heart, but doesn’t itself have a heart’. Yet her strikingly unsentimental novels seem to suggest that to attend to the natural world, in all its icy, violent otherness, is to begin to find ourselves a place in it.

Read on: Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Rural Sensualist’, Sidecar.

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Impending Genocide

In Gaza, Israel is gearing up to commit genocide. It is not doing so quietly. It is repeating its intent every day, announcing it to the world in both its words and actions. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described those in Gaza as ‘human animals’ while declaring that Israel was cutting off water, fuel, electricity and food to the entire blockaded strip. Likud officials have called for nuclear strikes as well as a second Nakba. Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, has rejected the distinction between civilians and combatants, asserting that ‘it is an entire nation out there that is responsible’. Israeli military officials have made clear that their aim is ‘damage, not precision’. All the while, Israel has subjected the 365-square-kilometre area to relentless shelling, dropping the same number of bombs on its 2.3 million inhabitants as the United States unleashed on Afghanistan in an entire year at the height of its murderous invasion. Hospitals, mosques, schools and homes – all have been deemed adequate military targets. At least 2,750 people have died so far, over one million have been displaced, nearly ten thousand are wounded.

Half of Gaza’s inhabitants were told to relocate to the south of the strip via military-approved ‘safe routes’. Israel then bombed these routes while people were doing just that. Many other Palestinians refused to follow the order. They know better than anyone that this is a straightforward attempt at ethnic cleansing. Nearly 80% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, expelled from their lands in 1948 and refused their right to return by their colonial rulers. In the south, the situation is dire too, thanks to continual aerial bombardment, shortages of water, food and electricity, and the influx of new arrivals. Israel continues to block the entry of humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossing, which has been hit repeatedly by air raids. 

Israeli officials, including Netanyahu himself, have announced that this is ‘only the beginning’. More than three hundred thousand troops have been mobilized and are awaiting orders to launch a ground offensive which could, we are told, last months. The resultant death and destruction would be unimaginable. There is a high likelihood that the entire northern Gaza Strip would be razed to the ground, and that the inhabitants of the enclave would be corralled into an even smaller area – forcing them to choose between death, unbearable captivity, or exile. Israel justifies this indiscriminate bloodshed as a response to the killing of 1,300 Israelis in the days following the Palestinian break-out on 7 October, and the need to prevent Hamas from carrying out further operations. Its current assault must be understood, first and foremost, as a response to the political humiliation it suffered at the hands of the most isolated section of the Palestinian population.

After eighteen years of siege by land, air and water, during which Israel’s stated policy was to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger’ by severely restricting food access, while regularly ‘mowing the grass’ – i.e., carrying out campaigns of assassination and mass killing – Palestinians in Gaza finally managed to tear down the barbed wire that kept them captive. Through that act alone, they endangered the political future of Netanyahu and his coalition, along with the process of normalization between Israel and the region’s most autocratic and repressive regimes. In addition, they punctured Israel’s illusion of omnipotence, exposing its vulnerability for the whole world – and, more importantly, for all Palestinians – to see. Retribution will now be conducted by all available means – including forced displacement or outright annihilation.

The question facing all of us in the West is how to stop the impending genocide. Our rulers have made it clear that they will allow Israel to carry out its plans – invoking the country’s ‘right to defend itself’ by carpet bombing a civilian population. The US and the UK have sent battleships to demonstrate their unflinching support. Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Tel Aviv to give Netanyahu the EU’s backing. Keir Starmer insisted that Israel had a right to cut off vital supplies to the entire blockaded population. Simultaneously, our governments have tried their best to repress Palestine solidarity movements on the domestic front: France banned pro-Palestine demonstrations altogether, Berlin followed suit, and the UK considered joining in. Of course, this follows a years-long attempt to criminalize the Palestinian cause and stamp out the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, under the guise of ‘countering terrorism’ or ‘fighting antisemitism’. Why is our political class so invested in suppressing criticism of the apartheid regime? The answer is obvious. Western states support Israel in order to maintain their power at a crucial crossroads of world trade. Challenging that power is impermissible, because any attempt to hold Israel accountable for its crimes is – by definition – an attempt to hold our own states accountable for their involvement in them. Not only are our rulers prepared to let Israel level Gaza; they will even provide it with diplomatic cover and military supplies.

What is standing between Gaza and genocide, then, is political pressure – an internationalist movement whose aim is to force Western governments to backtrack and restrain the Israeli killing machine. Last weekend we saw the first stirrings of this movement in its current phase. Across the globe, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – turned out to march. Sana’a, Baghdad, Rabat, and Amman were filled with protesters as far as the eye could see, bringing cold sweats to the rulers of the region, who see the connection between their populations’ demands for Palestinian liberation and demands for their own. In London, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, in New York, Brussels and Rome, in Cape Town, Tunis, and Nairobi, in Sydney and Santiago, people took to the street to demand an end to the onslaught, an end to the siege, and a free Palestine.

These scenes were extraordinary – but they alone will not be enough. In the US, activists have targeted the offices of key policymakers, staging protests and sit-ins, demanding that they drop their support for Israel’s crimes and take action to end the assault. Shaming politicians in this way will be an important tactic in the days and weeks to come. The recent history of the solidarity movement offers other methods that may also prove effective. In the UK, Palestine Action has spent years targeting armaments factories and stopping the production of weapons intended for use against Palestinians. Dockers in Italy, South Africa and the US have refused to handle Israeli cargo during previous military assaults on Gaza, disrupting the flow of goods and weapons to the country. During the winter of 2008-9, as Israel launched its first massive assault on the strip following the imposition of the blockade three years earlier, students across the UK occupied their campuses, calling for their universities to show concrete solidarity with Palestinians and for their government to cut diplomatic ties. They used the occupied spaces to host lectures, discussions and debates. Amid growing repression against the Palestine solidarity movement, such spaces could once again play a crucial role in enabling street-level organization.

It is up to activists themselves to decide which methods are most suited to their local and national contexts. Yet, across the board, there can be no return to business as usual. We have a collective obligation to ratchet up the pressure on our governments, and on Israel itself, to stop the genocide and mass displacement. In the UK, several trade unions expressed support for the demonstration last weekend, as well as their concern about the situation in Gaza. Can such concern be translated into meaningful interventions? Can union militants move from making solidarity statements to taking solidarity industrial action? If lecturers and teachers, dockers and train drivers – to name but a few of those who turned out at the rally in London – could organize work stoppages, demanding that the government reverse its position and stop the ongoing mass murder, then Britain’s leaders would not have the political space to give Israel a carte blanche.

Today, Palestinian unions have called on trade unionists across the world to show their solidarity by refusing to continue with the provision of arms to Israel. They have asked that workers in relevant industries make the following commitments:

  1. To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
  2. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
  3. To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
  4. To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
  5. Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and, in the case of the US, funding to it.

These demands must now be brought to workplaces and unions across the West, where they will find important allies among existing campaigns against the arms trade. Points four and five are not industry-specific, and can have a much wider application across the labour movement.  

The task ahead of us is clear. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and a second Nakba are not acts of God. They can be prevented. Our governments have so far refused to raise objections. Let us remind them of the costs of their complicity.

Read on: Gabriel Pitterburg, ‘Converts to Colonizers?’, NLR 59.

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Border Lines

‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.’ With this celebrated incipit from his Discourse on Inequality (1755), Rousseau reminds us what lies behind the institution of the border, and just how vexed this concept is. There is, first of all, the introduction of a physical discontinuity in space: a line, a wire, a fence, a wall. Then there is a proclamation, an affirmation that what’s on one side of that line is mine. Finally there is society’s acceptance of this assertion: I become the rightful owner of the land when society believes me to be so.

Rousseau thereby captures what history has demonstrated countless times: that a border is not a physical entity but a social construction that divides an inside from an outside – a division that, precisely because it is constructed, is liable to alter, disappear and reappear. Indeed, there is nothing so changeable as the ‘sacred borders of the homeland’. One feels a certain tenderness leafing through the atlases of fifty years ago. Or one is struck by sorrow, as I do whenever I travel between Italy and Austria and think of the hundreds of thousands killed in WWI to move a border that no longer exists; or through Alsace and Lorraine, transferred from the Germanic Holy Roman Empire to France in the late 1600s, then from France to Germany with the War of 1870, and again from Germany to France with WWI. Of course, borders also spring up where there were none before, as in the former Soviet Union. The ongoing war in Ukraine is essentially a border dispute – over Ukraine’s borders and NATO’s borders. Its anachronistic, nineteenth-century flavour is due not only to its brutal pattern of trench warfare, but also to its character as a boundary struggle: one that has now brought the entire planet to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

As a social construction, the boundary is always the (temporary) outcome of power relations. There is a particular metric, almost inhuman in its abstraction, that can be used to measure the violence with which it is drawn. This is straightness. Where borders are sinuous and jagged, every indentation and protrusion tells a centuries- or millennia-old story of rivalry, conflict, compromise, agreement. Where borders are rectilinear, on the other hand, there has usually been no such negotiation between the two parties, but an autocratic diktat expressed in the exactitude of the geometry. An almost straight north–south border runs for thousands of miles between Canada and the US. Straight lines also separate various American states, especially west of the Appalachians, where the previous inhabitants were ignored, the land considered ‘virgin’ and the geographical lines drawn with rulers. Likewise with many African nations, with the division of Papua New Guinea, and with the borders between Syria and Iraq, and Iraq and Saudi Arabia, decided at a desk by two officials, Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot, tasked with dismembering the dying Ottoman Empire in 1916.

But as borders change, appear and disappear, the border as the founding institution of world geopolitics becomes more and more problematic. It seems paradoxical that in the age of globalization, when the earth appears to us as a small blue planet, when human agency extends under the seas, into space and on the waves of the ether, the problem of borders seems to be more urgent than ever. It was at the end of the 1990s – the ideological apogee of globalization – that the new discipline of Border Studies took shape, giving rise to academic journals, conferences, factions and subdisciplines. At the turn of the millenium, all the trendiest sociologists gravitated towards ‘the border’, whatever their political orientation: Étienne Balibar, Manuel Castells, Saskia Sassen, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of European integration, traditional borders seemed obsolete, yet new forms of delimitation emerged. Thus, Sassen:

One of the features of the current phase of globalization is the fact that a process happens within a territory of a sovereign state does not necessarily mean that it is a national process. Conversely, the national (such as firms, capital, culture) may increasingly be located outside the national territory, for instance, in a foreign country or in digital spaces. This localization of the global, or of the non-national, in national territories, and of the national outside national territories, undermines a key duality running through many of the methods and conceptual frameworks prevalent in the social sciences, that the national and the non-national are mutually exclusive.

This is what Beck calls ‘globalization from within’, whereby borders no longer follow the territorial limits of the nation, but multiply, diversify and become sectorialized. There is no reason why the boundaries of ethnicity, culture or religion should coincide with those of states themselves:

When cultural, political, economic and legal borders are no longer congruent, contradictions open up between the various principles of exclusion. Globalization, understood as pluralization of borders, produces, in other words a legitimation crisis of the national morality of exclusion . . . if the nation-state paradigm of societies is breaking up from the inside, then that leaves a space for the renaissance and renewal of all kinds of cultural, political and religious movements. What has to be understood, above all, is the ethnic globalization paradox. At a time when the world is growing closer together and becoming more cosmopolitan, in which, therefore, the borders and barriers between nations and ethnic groups are being lifted, ethnic identities and divisions are becoming stronger once again.

With the twentieth-century revolutions in transportation, new types of borders cropped up. Airports are an anomaly, since there the border is located not at the edge of the country but within it. One of the UK’s border posts is located in the centre of Paris, at the Gare du Nord from which the Eurostar departs; another can be found in the middle of Brussels. With Covid-19, we saw the creation of temporary borders, such as those that prevented people from entering or leaving China’s vast metropolises. Still, it is interesting to see how confidently the shrewdest social scientists of the time presented globalization as irreversible and, without openly admitting it, situated themselves within the conceptual horizon of the ‘end of history’ – a concept widely mocked but tacitly embraced. Just as they were tracking the rise of ‘globalization from within’, the ultimate cosmopolitanization of human society, deglobalization was already waiting in the wings – ready to erupt with the successive shocks of Brexit, Trump, Covid-19, war in Ukraine and decoupling from China. Meanwhile, the frontiers of yesteryear were getting ready to take their revenge, in the oldest and most mythical fom: that of the wall, like the Vallum Adrianum or the Great Wall of China.

Mind you, barriers had never ceased to be erected – in concrete, latticework, or barbed wire (the list is not exhaustive):

  • 1953: a 4 km wall between South and North Korea;
  • 1959: 4,057 km of the Line of Actual Control between India and China;
  • 1969: 13 km of peace lines in Ireland between Catholic Belfast and Protestant Belfast;
  • 1971: a 550 km line of control between India and Pakistan to divide Kashmir;
  • 1974: a 300 km green line between Greek and Turkish areas of Cyprus;
  • 1989: a 2,720 km Berm between Morocco and Western Sahara;
  • 1990: a 8.2 +11 km wall between the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and Morocco to block migration;
  • 1991: a 190 km barrier between Iraq and Kuwait;
  • 1994: a 1,000 km Tijuana wall between the US and Mexico.

But globalization has done nothing to curb the walling frenzy; quite the contrary:

  • 2003: 482 km between Zimbabwe and Botswana;
  • 2007: 700 km between Iran and Pakistan;
  • 2010: 230 km between Egypt and Israel;
  • 2014: 30 km between Bulgaria and Turkey;
  • 2013: 1,800 km between Saudi Arabia and Yemen;
  • 2015: 523 km between Hungary and Serbia;
  • 2022: 550 km between Lithuania and Belarus;
  • 2022: 183 km between Poland and Belarus.

Not to mention naval fortifications to prevent migrants from disembarking by sea. Still, perhaps the country that best exemplifies the level of sophistication – indeed, the level of perversion – that borders have reached, is Israel. This is how Eyel Weizman describes Clinton’s peace plan for the partition of Jerusalem:

64 km of walls would have fragmented the city into two archipelago systems along national lines. Forty bridges and tunnels would have accordingly woven together these isolated neighborhood-enclaves. Clinton’s principle also meant that some buildings in the Old City would be vertically partitioned between the two states, with the ground floor and the basement being entered from the Muslim Quarter and used by Palestinians shop-owners belonging to the Palestinian state, and the upper floors being entered from the direction of the Jewish Quarter, used by Jews belonging to the Jewish state.

In short, the proposed solution was to create a de facto airport, with the Arrivals and Departures located on two different floors that don’t communicate with one another, each with its own entrance and exit. So the border is not a line on a two-dimensional plane, as it appears on a map, but a dynamic partition in three-dimensional space – one whose complexity can be labyrinthine.

Where such ingenuity has been most striking, however, is in the construction of the 730 km wall separating Jewish settlements from Palestinian lands, which began to be constructed in 2002. Weizmann devotes a chapter of his magnificent Hollow Land (2007) to this wall and its consequences. Since those on each side of the partition must still be able to interact, the problem for Israeli planners is how to reconcile such interaction with isolation. For instance, when it comes to a highway that must serve Israelis and Palestinians,

The road is split down its centre by a high concrete wall, dividing it into separate Israeli and Palestinian lanes. It extends across three bridges and three tunnels before ending in a complex volumetric knot that untangles in mid-air, channelling Israelis and Palestinians separately along different spiralling flyovers that ultimately land them on their respective sides of the Wall. A new way of imagining space has emerged. After fragmenting the surface of the West Bank by walls and other barriers, Israeli planners started attempting to weave it together as two separate but overlapping national geographies – two territorial networks overlapping across the same area in three dimensions, without having to cross or come together.

In the face of such intellectual perversion, we must return to that fabled man who first fenced off a piece of land, and read Rousseau’s reaction to this founding act:

From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes, might not anyone have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes, filling in the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’

Read on: Chin-tao Wu, ‘Biennials without Borders’, NLR 57

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Kasselakis Ascendant

Few people would have imagined that, by autumn 2023, Greece’s Syriza would no longer be led by Alexis Tsipras, nor any other high-ranking party official, but by a centrist business magnate who has spent most of his adult life in the United States – a man who is not a member of the Hellenic Parliament, who has no history of progressive activism (unless we count volunteering for one of Joe Biden’s Senate campaigns), and who was not even involved with Syriza until the moment he decided to become its leader.

Yet this is the story of 35-year-old Stefanos Kasselakis, who was elected last month after a democratic process that included more than 140,000 party members and supporters. A graduate of UPenn’s Wharton School who worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before founding three successful shipping companies, Kasselakis was keen to stress his entrepreneurial experience during his campaign. He also emphasized that, in a country which has seen three prime ministers from the Papandreou family, two from the Karamanlis family and two from the Mitsotakis family, he does not come from a political dynasty. This combination of ‘expertise’ and ‘outsider status’ was enough to convince the Syriza faithful.

How did this happen? Why did a party supposedly rooted in the traditions of the left anoint someone to whom they are entirely alien? According to opinion polls, Syriza voters wanted a leader who could stand up to Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s New Democracy government, whose current popularity outstrips that of the opposition by more than twenty percentage points. They came to view Kasselakis – openly gay, photogenic and social-media savvy, adept at attacking the incumbent while avoiding the langue de bois of the traditional left – as the best option. Yet this was also thanks to the flat-footed performance of his rival, Efi Achtsiouglou, the former Minister of Labour who was widely believed to be Tsipras’s heir apparent. Though she made a last-minute attempt to frame the contest as a face-off between the centre and the left, she otherwise ran a moderate, timorous campaign – insisting that regaining power meant relinquishing any pretensions to radicalism. If Kasselakis’s politics are roughly equivalent to Biden’s, Achtsiouglou styled herself as something like the Greek Sana Marin.

Under Kasselakis’s leadership, Syriza will move even further to the right. He will be aided not only by the cadre that rallied around his candidacy from the beginning, who believe that Syriza needs to blend populist rhetoric with a centrist strategic orientation, but also by former allies of Tsipras, such as the former Media Minister Nikos Pappas, who have decided that the party must slowly rebuild its electoral credibility by presenting Kasselakis as the ‘anti-Mitsostakis’. Yet Syriza’s rupture with left-wing politics has a much longer lineage. Ever since 2015, when it capitulated to the demands of the Troika despite the tremendous popular defiance expressed in the bailout referendum, the party’s leftism has been exclusively cultural, rather than political or ideological.  

This disjuncture between ‘identity’ and praxis was the trademark of the Syriza government. Ministers and MPs would insist that they were ‘on the left’ while implementing aggressive neoliberal reforms. Euclid Tsakalotos, who served as Finance Minister from 2015 to 2019, embodied this contradiction most clearly. On the one hand, he ratified the infamous ‘Memoranda of Understanding’ imposed by the EU, IMF and ECB, meeting all of their punitive demands without exception. On the other, he remained the leader of the party’s putatively left faction, running as its standard-bearer in the recent leadership election. Many commentators have scolded Kasselakis for elevating image over ideology; yet it was Tsipras’s administration that emptied its ideological reference-points of their political content or practical consequence.

This was reflected in Syriza’s declining popularity and eventual defeat at the ballot box. In 2019, after four years of brutal austerity, it won 31.5% of the vote compared to New Democracy’s 40%, and was duly ejected from office. In 2023, the party’s fortunes sank further still, picking up only 20% in the 21 May election and 18% in the rerun on 25 June. Though it was initially unable to form a majority, New Democracy ultimately triumphed over Syriza with a margin of almost 23%, the largest gap between first and second party in recent history. The latter was hit especially hard in predominantly working-class constituencies.

These results are even more stark when we consider the many potential reasons for discontent with the Mitsotakis government. Because of its understaffed and underfunded public health system, which was bled dry during the Memoranda period, Greece had much higher Covid-related mortality rates than most European countries, including the UK, despite harsh lockdowns and restrictions. In March, a deadly train wreck – the result of a long delay in implementing adequate safety measures – led to a wave of protests across the country. Unrest was fuelled by authoritarian crackdowns, including the deployment of so-called ‘University Police’ to campuses. Meanwhile, a cost-of-living crisis erupted, with working-class households spending an unmanageable portion of their income at the supermarket. Following the 2023 election, the government’s failure to prepare for climate change became blindingly apparent amid the floods in Thessaly, prompting assessments of Greece as a failed state.

At each of these junctures, Syriza did nothing to capitalize on popular frustration. This was partly because it had not developed ‘organic’ connections with the majority of the subaltern classes, failing to establish a significant presence in the trade unions, play a leading role in the student movement, or embed itself in local democratic structures. The party had an electorate, but never a base. As a result, it did not exercise a hegemonic nor even a pedagogic function for the lower strata. This rendered its relations of representation weak, its voters liable to become fickle or disengaged. Unable to cohere anything like a left-wing ‘common sense’, Syriza remained a detached parliamentary vehicle, associated with the betrayal of 2015 and the austerity that followed. Its refusal to participate in any meaningful self-criticism made matters even worse.   

Consequently, large segments of the subaltern classes could be influenced by the rhetoric of the government, or, even worse, that of the far right (whose parties won 13% at the last election). Once in power, New Democracy positioned itself as the voice of ‘stability’ – putting things ‘back to normal’ after the trauma of the Memoranda period and the pandemic. It benefitted from the fact that some economic indicators had improved since Syriza was in office. The unemployment rate is now at 10.9%, whereas in the summer of 2019 it exceeded 17%, and wages have increased somewhat despite rising inflation.  

But New Democracy’s success was also the result of Syriza’s abandonment of any strategic orientation. Its ‘left identity’ never translated into a coherent plan for government – not even a reformist one. Towards the end of its tenure, it refused to chart a new course following the nominal conclusion of the Memoranda. It made general references to moving beyond austerity, maintaining some public control over certain utilities and reinstating parts of labour legislation that had hitherto been suspended – but none of this amounted to a forward-looking policy platform. The party’s ‘Green Transition’ rhetoric was easily appropriated by Mitsotakis. New Democracy could thereby present itself as the only credible party – while Syriza, having failed to present an alternative programme during its years in office, failed to convince the public that one was possible.

In a party which has created an audience rather than a base, which has repudiated organizing from below, and which lacks a clear legislative programme, the role of the leader is transformed: he is no longer the expression of a collective political will, but rather an image or an avatar. His primary purpose is to use his personality – or ‘brand’ – to halt the process of electoral decline. This is the shift that Kasselakis represents. He has already suggested moving away from key policies such as opposition to private universities: the issue that ignited the student movement in 2006 and allowed Syriza to make initial contact with a generation of young activists. Addressing the annual assembly of the Hellenic Association of Enterprises, Kasselakis thundered that ‘the word “capital” should not be demonized.’ His emphasis on social media rather than interviews or public speeches, as well as the fact that he is not an MP, enables him to mask his political inexperience. It also prevents him from being pinned down on specific policies, creating a deliberate ambiguity about Syriza’s platform which facilitates its rightward drift.

Could Kasselakis’s ascent cause a split in Syriza that might liberate its left-wing forces? It is indeed the case that many members suggested leaving the party after the leadership election. The former MP Nikos Filis, who once ran the party newspaper, has excoriated the new leader as a ‘post-political’ demagogue reminiscent of Beppe Grillo or Donald Trump. For the time being, Kasselakis’s opponents are hoping that the upcoming Party Congress will allow them to win the party back. But, failing that, one should not rule out the possibility of a new left formation emerging in the near future – hopefully in time to contest the June 2024 European Parliament elections.

With each day that passes, the Greek government sinks further into its morass of authoritarianism and incompetence. Across the aisle, what was once Europe’s most promising experiment in left-wing governance has become the testing ground for a vacuous ‘progressivism’ spearheaded by an ex-banker. Meanwhile, the subaltern classes remain fragmented and disaggregated, with strong pockets of resistance but also large segments that are aloof from collective politics. The cycle that opened with the Memoranda and the movement against them is now closed. It is unclear what forms of opposition will emerge in its wake. But one thing is certain: Syriza can no longer be their catalyst.

Read on: Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Syriza’s Rise and Fall’, NLR 97.

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Uprising in Palestine

In December 1987, a new intifada erupted in Palestine, shaking Israel as well as the elites of the Arab world. A few weeks later, the grand old Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani wrote ‘The Trilogy of the Children of Stones’, in which he denounced the older generation of Palestinian leaders – today represented by the corrupt, collaborationist Palestine (No-)Authority. It was sung and recited in many a Palestinian café:

The children of the stones

have scattered our papers

spilled ink on our clothes

mocked the banality of old texts…

O Children of Gaza

Don’t mind our broadcasts

Don’t listen to us

We are the people of cold calculation

Of addition, of subtraction

Wage your wars and leave us alone

We are dead and tombless

Orphans with no eyes.

Children of Gaza

Don’t refer to our writings

Don’t be like us.

We are your idols

Don’t worship us.

O mad people of Gaza,

A thousand greetings to the mad

The age of political reason has long departed

So teach us madness…

Since then, the Palestinian people have tried every method to achieve some form of meaningful self-determination. ‘Renounce violence’, they were told. They did, apart from the odd reprisal after an Israeli atrocity. Among Palestinians at home and in the diaspora, there was massive support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: a peaceful movement par excellence, which began to gain traction worldwide among artists, academics, trade unions and occasionally governments. The US and its NATO family responded by trying to criminalize BDS across Europe and North America – claiming, with the help of Zionist lobby groups, that boycotting Israel was ‘antisemitic’. This has proved largely effective. In Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has banned any mention of ‘Israeli apartheid’ at its upcoming national conference. The Labour left, scared of being expelled, has fallen silent on this issue. A sorry state of affairs. Meanwhile, most of the Arab states have joined Turkey and Egypt in capitulating to Washington. Saudi Arabia is currently in negotiations, mediated by the White House, to officially recognize Israel. The international isolation of the Palestinian people looks set to increase. Peaceful resistance has gone nowhere.  

All the while, the IDF has attacked and killed Palestinians at leisure, while successive Israeli governments have worked to sabotage any hope of statehood. Recently, a handful of former IDF generals and Mossad agents have admitted that what is being done in Palestine amounts to ‘war crimes’. But they only plucked up the courage to say this after they’d already retired. While still serving, they fully supported the fascist settlers in the occupied territories, standing by as they burned houses, destroyed olive plantations, poured cement in wells, attacked Palestinians and drove them from their homes while chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. So, too, did Western leaders – who let all this unfold without a murmur. The age of political reason had long departed, as Qabbani would say.

Then, one day, the elected leadership in Gaza begins to fight back. They break out of their open-air prison and cross Israel’s southern border, striking at military targets and settler populations. Palestinians are suddenly top of the international headlines. Western journalists are shocked and horrified that they are actually resisting. But why shouldn’t they? They know better than anyone that the far-right government in Israel will retaliate viciously, backed by the US and the mealy-mouthed EU. But even so, they are unwilling to sit by as Netanyahu and the criminals in his cabinet gradually expel or kill most of their people. They know that the fascist elements of the Israeli state would have no compunction about sanctioning the mass murder of Arabs. And they know this must be resisted by any means necessary. Earlier this year, Palestinians watched the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and understood that those marching to ‘defend civil rights’ did not care about the rights of their occupied neighbours. They decided to take matters into their own hands.  

Do the Palestinians have a right to resist the non-stop aggression to which they are subjected? Absolutely. There is no moral, political or military equivalence as far as the two sides are concerned. Israel is a nuclear state, armed to the teeth by the US. Its existence is not under threat. It’s the Palestinians, their lands, their lives, that are. Western civilization seems willing to stand by while they are exterminated. They, on the other hand, are rising up against the colonizers.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The House of Zion’, NLR 96.

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Mapping Turbulence

Robert Brenner’s histories of the ‘long downturn’, The Economics of Global Turbulence (1998/2006) and The Boom and the Bubble (2004), are among the most significant conceptualizations of the postwar global economy. A compressed and simplified version of their argument is as follows. Around the turn of the 1970s, downward pressure on prices resulting from new entrants into overburdened manufacturing lines caused falling profitability and investment, leaving the economy vulnerable to exogenous shocks such as the oil crisis of 1973. Keynesian demand-side stimulus was incapable of eradicating such overcapacity and even compounded it. Nor did the subsequent turn to neoliberalism effect a lasting recovery, instead delivering a period of austerity and financialization. This analysis, which anticipated the 2008 world economic crisis and its aftermath, has over the past decade gained increasing traction among both mainstream and heterodox economists. Yet two recent commentaries, by Seth Ackerman in Jacobin and Tim Barker in NLR, appear to challenge its underlying premises. They point to an elective affinity, if not a logical connection, between Brenner’s radical histories and his anti-reformist politics – rejecting the former based on the latter. How valid are their claims, and how compatible is their image of Brenner’s work with the texts in question?

Ackerman

One might expect a critique of Brenner to reconstruct the main arguments in his work and indicate their limitations. Ackerman’s article does not do this. It belongs more to the genre of polemic. The author begins with a primer on ‘crisis theory’, referencing some interesting material on the falling rate of profit from Nobuo Okishio, Paul Mattick and Anwar Shaikh, as well as Capital: Vol. III. He then turns to Brenner’s historical narrative of the post-1973 period, which he claims belongs to this broader Marxist tradition which stresses the centrality of crisis to socialist practice. Ackerman writes that Brenner’s historical approach is motivated by the need to identify unreformable tendencies in capitalism – such as tendentially falling profits – whose existence demands a ‘revolutionary supersession of the existing mode of production’. This position is then dismissed as dogmatic and unjustifiable, or even illogical at a theoretical level. To make this case, Ackerman adduces two major flaws in Brenner’s work.

First, Brenner is said to be reliant on different, mutually exclusive theories of falling profitability, which he deploys as a workaround for the earlier disproven crisis theories of Mattick et al.: a sectoral analysis of manufacturing competition, and a ‘wage-squeeze’ theory which he purports to reject but on which his thesis covertly depends. Second, Ackerman makes the case that the ‘long downturn’ is a myth: that the rate of profit worldwide only suffered a blow during the 1970s and fully recovered thereafter. To the extent that economic difficulties have arisen, he writes, they are simply due to coordination problems: ‘With a far-flung division of labour, the activities of millions or billions of people must be minutely coordinated and anything that disrupts this intricate coordination throws a wrench into the gears of production.’ Let’s consider these claims in turn.

Brenner, as Ackerman acknowledges, is not pursuing a line of argumentation about the tendential fall in the rate of profit. He is making claims about falling profit rates in specific sectors at specific times. For this reason, obviously, criticisms of Okishio, Mattick and Shaikh cannot logically implicate his work. Ackerman’s lengthy excursus on these thinkers, which takes up the bulk of his article, is therefore somewhat extraneous. Yet, more consequentially, Ackerman’s assertion that Brenner contradicts himself by leaning on the wage-squeeze theory is not supported by anything Brenner has written; nor does Ackerman attempt to back it up by way of a relevant citation, let alone quotation. Where might Ackerman have gotten this idea? It appears that it is derived from a misreading of a passage in Brenner’s lecture ‘The Problem of Reformism’ (1993). Here, Brenner states that after the onset of the crisis of profitability, ‘reformist parties in power not only failed to defend workers’ wages or living standards against employers’ attack, but unleashed powerful austerity drives designed to raise the rate of profit by cutting the welfare state and reducing the power of unions.’ It seems that Ackerman has mistaken this uncontroversial description of the class offensive of neoliberalism for an explanation of the ultimate cause of the downturn. That is, Ackerman reads Brenner’s description of employers’ attempts to restore profitability – through austerity and attacks on wages – as an argument about the fundamental reasons for the crisis. One need not agree with Brenner to see that these are distinct. Indeed, for Brenner, the employers’ offensive did not succeed in restoring profitability, partly because it did not get to the source of the problem.

What of Ackerman’s claims, also made by Barker, that the world economy is robust, that the rate of profit worldwide is comparable to that of the Belle Époque, and that therefore the entire basis of Brenner’s hypothesis is fatally flawed? To assess this criticism, it is necessary to begin with an accurate characterization of The Economics of Global Turbulence and The Boom and the Bubble. Both are works of history, not philosophy. The distinction is important, given the tendency of critics to select certain passages from the books and translate them into abstract principles which Brenner is said to hold. In fact, Brenner’s aim is to plot the development over time of the highly contradictory system of global capitalism. The result is not an idealist rendering of axiomatic laws, but the exact opposite: an account of large-scale changes in the postwar global economy, with its many reversals and transformations.

If this is the general method, what are the core historical arguments? Simply put, Brenner claims that Keynesian measures, intended to relieve the problems of overcapacity and overproduction that emerged from postwar industrial competition, ultimately exacerbated them. This failure, evident by 1979, provoked a dramatic macroeconomic reversal. By the turn of the 1980s, the US via the Federal Reserve was attempting to engineer a shakeout (sometimes referred to as ‘neoliberalism’) by raising interest rates to induce a recession. But this, too, failed to restore the world economy to its previous growth rates.

Facing reelection, Reagan resorted to massive spending with a programme of military Keynesianism, followed by an accord with the US’s main industrial competitors to coordinate a devaluation of the dollar to revive US manufacturing exports. But this in turn weakened the manufacturing profitability of the then second- and third-largest capitalist economies, Japan and West Germany. A decade later, in 1995, the advanced capitalist economies engineered a volte-face by way of a revaluation of the dollar. They oversaw the takeoff of finance and dollar-denominated financial assets, including in real estate and the stock market, enabled by ultra-low interest rates. For a period in the 1990s, a recovery appeared to be materializing, with profits in manufacturing rivalling those of the postwar boom. Yet by the turn of the century, first in the East Asian crisis of 1997-98, and finally with the implosion of the dot-com bubble, the so-called ‘new economy’ was shattered.

This is where The Boom and the Bubble and the second edition of The Economics of Global Turbulence leave off. In the long essay ‘What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America’ (2009), Brenner showed that the historic collapse of the world economy in 2008 was an extension of such highly contradictory attempts to resolve long-standing difficulties in the real economy, temporarily achieved through over-leveraged speculation in an inflated housing market. Though originating in the US, the crisis was so large as to be systemic, and required world-historic intervention by central banks globally, lasting a decade or more, arguably down to the present.

The main point is that after the early 1970s, at each of the turns discussed by Brenner, benefits accruing to manufacturing in one region came at the expense of that sector’s exports elsewhere, while finance tended to benefit from the revaluation of currencies in those same economies. Yet no sustained global recovery of manufacturing ever transpired, and the result was a qualitative transformation of the economy globally: towards financialization in certain zones, with manufacturing dynamism mostly confined to low-wage and high-tech latecomers like the Newly Industrialized Countries of East Asia: the ROK, Taiwan and above all the PRC.

In other words, to the extent that partial recoveries in profitability were achieved, they were limited to certain sectors like finance, at the expense of others like manufacturing. They were also localized, as well as highly dependent on the relative value of currencies. So, for example, finance in the US had a profitable run from 1995 onwards, but in conditions that undermined manufacturing, and by way of massive borrowing. For a time the opposite was true in Germany, but there, short-lived and fragile recoveries were only enabled by the devalued Deutschmark of the late 1990s, and, during the Merkel era, an undervalued euro, plus wage repression, nearshoring of production and the temporarily high growth in export markets like China and Brazil. China, meanwhile, has sustained its dependence on exports by underwriting credit-creation in the US to prop up consumption there. But, as Victor Shih and others have documented, it too has been beset by highly leveraged speculation in its domestic economy. Thus, the fall in manufacturing profit growth detonated a period of turbulence. Each attempt at a resolution – attacks on wages and austerity combined with high interest rates; massive military spending and then low interest rates to encourage successive financial bubbles; coordinated devaluations and revaluations of currencies – had only temporary effect, and set the stage for new rounds of instability.

Is turbulence in the world economy an esoteric diagnosis – one at odds with the scholarly consensus – as Ackerman and Barker appear to think? Hardly. Not just among libertarians, as Barker alleges, but also among his fellow neo-Keynesians, as well as radical historians and social scientists, the general chronology laid out by Brenner is accepted. In the latter category, its adherents range from Philip Armstrong to David Harvey to Eric Hobsbawm to Giovanni Arrighi (author of the most comprehensive critique of Brenner to date). Prominent mainstream economists – including Marcel Fratzscher in Germany, and Larry Summers and Barry Eichengreen in the US – have also developed theories of stagnation that accord with Brenner’s periodization, identifying structural problems in the economy even when it appeared to be firing on all cylinders.

Perhaps most important for the present discussion is Eichengreen’s history of the period, which divides it into two distinct phases: before and after 1973, the year that marked the end of the ‘golden age’ of postwar growth. Eichengreen attributes this to the exhaustion of what he calls the ‘catch-up’ of West Germany and Japan, which, by putting pressure on labour and capital, caused both to abandon their mutually beneficial agreements. What he suggests, and what Brenner plainly states, is that the lack of ‘coordination’ after 1973, which Ackerman argues is the ultimate cause of the slowdown, was in fact prompted by a deeper underlying force. But whereas Eichengreen does not develop his concept of ‘catch-up’ beyond some general remarks, Brenner traces its exhaustion back to the falling rate of profit in manufacturing among the largest capitalist economies.

The potentially most serious objection to Brenner is Ackerman’s calculation of the world profit rate, on which he hangs his principal argument. This metric, undifferentiated by sector and presumably including China, is termed the ‘profit-investment ratio’. By showing little drop-off in total profits, it leaves the coordination problem in the capitalist political economy as the sole cause of the severe crises of the last quarter century. It is an interesting statistical artefact. But because it does not distinguish between manufacturing and the overall rate in the countries on which Brenner focuses, it is not really germane to his argument. It may be that Ackerman’s preferred measure is superior for understanding the rate of profit worldwide in the abstract. But, by itself, it does not address the evidence amassed by Brenner, which documents the depletion of dynamism in productivity growth, output and so on, in specific regions at specific moments – caused by the underlying persistence of overproduction and overcapacity in manufacturing. Even if one concedes that profitability overall, measured however one likes, has indeed recovered, the transformations undertaken in order to accomplish this – financialization, rationalization of production, austerity, deindustrialization – must still be registered as historical developments, along with their political and social implications. This is precisely what Brenner’s work sets out to do.

It is conceivable that a critique of Brenner might begin with the abstract profit-investment ratio; but it could not subsequently dismiss all of Brenner’s work without first considering his detailed history of the period. Unfortunately, that is exactly Ackerman’s approach. For him, there is a more or less continuously high rate of profit throughout the postwar period and across the world economy, punctuated only by ‘coordination failures’ pertaining to the uneven division of labour. Unlike Eichengreen, Ackerman does not account for when or why such issues arise – nor does he explain why, if they are simply due to poor coordination, workers and capitalists haven’t yet brokered an enduring peace to share in the profits which are accruing relentlessly system-wide, and which, under a rationalized coordination of the division of labour, would set society on the path to a brighter future. Such a lasting resolution to class struggle was, in any case, the promise of the mixed economy in the advanced capitalist world around mid-century. Why did this ‘class compromise’ finally end? And why did it end when it did? These are the historical questions that Brenner addresses and Ackerman does not.  

Barker

For Barker, Brenner’s focus on manufacturing profitability represents a narrow and selective reading of history, which distorts the overall economic picture of the period. ‘It is not clear’, he writes, ‘why manufacturing profits should be especially important given that manufacturing currently accounts for only 11 per cent of value added in the US economy.’ Is this simply myopia on Brenner’s part? According to Brenner himself, the difficulties in manufacturing constitute the underlying cause which set off the concatenation schematically summarized above. Hence, his focus on the manufacturing profit rate is not due to an arbitrary prejudice, but to what he argues are the empirical and historical origins of the contradictory developments since the end of the 1960s. A critique of this focus on manufacturing, then, should challenge Brenner’s account of the recession of the early 1970s and the subsequent failure of Keynesianism at the end of the decade. But Barker does not attempt this. He simply takes the shrinking share of manufacturing in the overall economy as evidence that the sector, as such, no longer matters as much as it once did. As with Ackerman’s polemic, even if one were to agree with Barker empirically on this point, Brenner’s position cannot be so easily dismissed. For Brenner shows that the turn to finance is a response to difficulties in the real economy. As such, any serious engagement with his work must do more than assert that the real economy is no longer as vital a destination for investment; for this is one of the implications of Brenner’s argument.

Additionally, Barker objects to the concept of ‘political capitalism’ in Brenner’s more recent writing: the idea that, in conditions of stagnation, ‘raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return’ – and that the state has therefore become an indispensable instrument of surplus extraction. Barker argues that, since capitalism has always relied on state intervention, the novelty of this phenomenon is overstated. But Brenner can hardly be accused of neglecting the role of the state in capitalist development. In The Economics of Global Turbulence, the activities of the US, West German and Japanese states are addressed in nearly every section. What makes this previous period of accumulation distinct from the present one, he argues, is the state’s purpose and orientation. In the postwar period, state intervention organized itself around either increasing the competitiveness of manufacturing or, in the case of the hegemonic US, around encouraging manufacturing recovery in the FRG and Japan. Now, the political sphere is less concerned with ramping up accumulation or coordinating production in competing zones.

Instead, politics has become a process of direct (upward) redistribution of wealth. It is no longer the capitalist state organizing production; it is the ruling class engaging in an amphibious practice of corrupt internal self-dealing, in the context of a system-wide lack of dynamism and weakened ability to produce profits in the real economy. For this reason, it suggests a movement towards a novel mode of production, because it bypasses the specifically economic form of production for exchange that is characteristic of capitalism. Under this emerging regime, the separation of the economic from the social and political is no longer enforced.

Barker’s criticism therefore rests on a basic misunderstanding of the term ‘political capitalism’ in its context. Nothing in Brenner denies Barker’s point about the role of the state in creating conditions for accumulation. The historic shift Brenner identifies is, rather, about the aim of politics and its relation to economics. This is his subject, and although one may disagree with his analysis or terminology, a robust critique would have to confront his argument as it is laid out concretely.

Barker also asserts that Brenner’s analysis of the Fed’s role in the successive bubbles of the last decades is contradicted by the present process of monetary tightening. He claims that the latter is something Brenner theoretically ‘should’ support, given his objection to the cheap credit regime that had characterized the global economy since the 1990s. With this analysis, Barker presents Brenner’s argument as a one-sided criticism of ‘easy money’. But what has Brenner actually written about the use of restrictive versus ‘loose’ monetary policy? One exemplary passage on monetarism from The Economics of Global Turbulence reads as follows:

Ever more restrictive macroeconomic policy was supposed to restore profitability and thereby the economy’s dynamism by undoing the inertial effects of Keynesian debt creation by flushing from the system redundant, high-cost means of production, and by reducing direct and indirect wage costs via higher unemployment. Nevertheless, like Keynesianism, while accomplishing part of what it set out to do, monetarism ultimately proved inadequate, largely because it operated only through changing the level of aggregate demand, when the fundamental problem was over-capacity and over-production in a particular sector, manufacturing, resulting from the misallocation of means of production among economic lines. To the extent that major restrictions on the availability of credit were seriously undertaken, they tended to prove counterproductive, as the sudden, sharp reductions of aggregate demand that they provoked struck over-stocked and under-stocked lines indiscriminately and brought down both well-functioning and ill-functioning firms without distinction. The reduction of aggregate demand also caused problems by making the reallocation of means of production into new lines that much more difficult. In a sense, the problem with monetarism as a solution to the problem of international over-capacity and over-production in manufacturing was the opposite of that with Keynesianism. Keynesianism, by subsidizing aggregate demand, slowed exit from over-supplied lines, but it did create a more favourable environment for the necessarily risky and costly entry into new ones; monetarism, by cutting back aggregate demand, did force a more rapid exit from over-supplied lines, but it created a less favourable environment for entry into new ones.

It is clear from this passage that Brenner sees both ‘easy’ and ‘tight’ monetary policies as incapable of resolving the fundamental contradictions driving the downward pressure on profitability in manufacturing. Each remedy, by responding to only one side of the problem and exacerbating the other, set the stage for a future contraction. Low-interest rates were always destabilizing, politically and otherwise, given the historic level of financial speculation they encouraged. In their wake, the ongoing effort to destroy wealth – mainly that of smaller investors, those who aren’t politically well-connected, and so on – reinforces the ‘political’ nature of the present accumulation regime.

Brenner does not approve of either dynamic, nor should he. He does not argue for higher interest rates as a matter of principle, as Barker – mistaking historical analysis for moral philosophy – contends. He rather shows how in recent decades, low interest rates had been the basis for the wealthy to make money in an economy with little opportunity for profitable investment. The contradictions of that thirty-year regime, which was shaken by 2008 and experienced an afterlife from 2009-19, laid the foundations for the current coordinated class offensive, which Brenner terms ‘escalating plunder’.

The use of extra-economic means of expropriation – that is, coercion – and upward redistribution of wealth are effectively ignored by Barker. But the observable features of the contemporary world economy indicate that something like this is occurring, whether in the dispossession of small property owners or in the prospect of something like a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The latter suggests the direct administration of use values, along with the abolition not just of profit-making in production, but also of money itself as a universal means of exchange and store of value. As Eswar Prasad has written, such digital currencies would be expressly political, since they could be programmed to be conditional for particular uses, and employable only under certain social conditions. By replacing cash, CBDCs may furthermore eliminate the ‘zero lower bound’, and thereby facilitate deeply negative interest rates so as to enable the direct confiscation of deposits in periods of emergency, amounting to a ‘bail-in’ of banks as already assayed in Cyprus a decade ago.

Although these possibilities are not discussed by Brenner, they are now being openly aired by bankers and governments, and deserve serious consideration from the left. In my reading, they confirm his historical narrative, especially in his writings over the last decade and a half. They demonstrate that the primary contradiction today is political; and they account for why, given the weakness of capitalism economically, the ruling class has succeeded in consolidating its power. (Such developments, however, do not preclude a critique of the ‘political capitalism’ hypothesis or the more provocative concept of ‘techno-feudalism’. As Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck have argued, looking at these claims from a legal-historical perspective, the expansion of freedom of contract distinguishes the contemporary labour market from anything that could be understood as feudal or non-capitalist.)

Reformism versus Reforms

The question of politics is central to assessing the interventions of Ackerman and Barker in another important respect. Both appear to be motivated, more or less explicitly, by the desire to win reforms by appealing to politicians and policymakers, elected and unelected. Ackerman rejects the revolutionary politics that he imputes to Brenner, while Barker attempts to show that legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act in the US should be welcomed by the left. They both object to Brenner’s scepticism of such quasi-technocratic efforts. But Brenner’s historical account of US politics falls by the wayside in their commentaries, which focus instead on his provisional ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ (co-authored with Dylan Riley) and his lecture on the ‘Problem of Reformism’. Were we to take this longer-term analysis into consideration, how would we then characterize Brenner’s views on the connection between mass politics, political economy and reform in the US?

In his trenchant essay on the 2006 US midterms, ‘Structure vs Conjuncture’, Brenner argues that the most significant American reforms of the twentieth century – those enacted by Roosevelt and later Johnson – were won through militant social movements, each struggling under different political-economic backdrops. Contra the criticisms levelled by Ackerman (and to a lesser extent Barker), Brenner does not attribute these successes to any simple, automatic relation between such movements and the prevailing economic conditions. Rather, he sees their achievements as the outcome of contingent historical developments.

For Brenner, New Deal-era reforms were the result of an ‘explosion of mass direct action outside the electoral-legislative arena’; organizations like the United Auto Workers ‘initially refused to support the Democratic ticket and, at their founding convention in 1936, called for the formation of independent farmer–labour parties.’ Over the course of the ‘second depression’ and defeats in the latter half of the decade, however, ‘CIO officialdom reacted to the fall-off in mass struggles by turning to the institutionalization of union–employer relations, through state-sanctioned collective bargaining and regulation’, which entailed ‘a full commitment to the electoral road and to the Democratic Party’. From this point on, the Democrats and labour officialdom worked in tandem, and came to ‘count on labour’s support’ while delivering less and less in return.

The reforms of the mid-60s in the US – including the Voting and Civil Rights Acts, Medicaid and Medicare – were achieved under an entirely different political economy. The major unions had already been contained and domesticated by their middle-class leaders. Yet the militancy of the black liberation movement, principally in the north, along with the mounting pressure exerted by anti-war and Third World struggles, nonetheless managed to force a series of civil and legal concessions. (The popularity of such reforms quickly established them as hegemonic, and Nixon later sought his own version.)

It was only after the onset of the crisis of the 1970s that the employers’ counter-offensive began, under Carter initially, with deregulation followed by Democratic attempts to secure corporate backers. This went largely unchallenged by pacified trade unions, which had long abandoned any struggle for social reform. Here, Brenner is careful to contrast the trajectories of American and European history:

. . . adaptations to the downturn took place in the context of distinctive balances of class forces across the capitalist north, and this made for a significant variation in politico-economic outcomes. In contrast to the declining rate of unionization in the US private sector, most of the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe witnessed the opposite trend – an increase in union density not just during the 1950s and 1960s, but throughout the 1970s and, in places, the 1980s.

After 1995, with the appreciation of the dollar amid intensifying inter-capitalist competition, the US economy was largely defined by financialization and offshoring at the expense of manufacturing. US labour was in no position to resist this process, having forfeited its independent political organizations. By 2006, Brenner thought it ‘likely that the Democrats will only accelerate their electoral strategy of moving right to secure uncommitted votes and further corporate funding, while banking on their black, labour and anti-war base to support them at any cost against the Republicans.’ (Pelosi, in due course, funded the war on Iraq, and in the aftermath of 2008, Democrats distinguished themselves as the more enthusiastic partner overseeing the bipartisan bailouts of Wall Street.) Is this history, as Ackerman holds, fatally dependent on ‘crisis theory’, overly suspicious of union bureaucracy, and resistant to pursuing reforms from inside the state?

Ackerman’s assessment clearly fails to capture the detail of Brenner’s analysis, laid out in ‘Structure vs. Conjuncture’, which reveals that reforms can be won under dramatically different political-economic conditions. The comparison with Europe is offered as evidence that, even during periods of crisis, high trade union density could temporarily stave off the massive counter-offensive waged by capital during the 1970s and 80s. The main distinctions drawn by Brenner, then, are not only between different economic conjunctures (booms and downturns). They rather pertain to the history of the left in its concrete social setting – its tactics, class composition, and ability to maintain independence from parties like the Democrats – as it responds to such conjunctures. This is not by any means a historicist argument: it is clear that certain tactics are more useful than others, whatever the wider context; and it is also clear that during downturns and depressions, labour should be prepared for confrontation more than ever. But under any conditions, mobilization of an independent and active mass of the working class increases the likelihood of winning reforms.

In sum, the debate prompted by Brenner’s recent writings might benefit from sharper historical judgment. There is a superficial resemblance between the low-interest rate regime of the turn of the century and the golden age of Keynesian demand management. Likewise, the recent turn to high interest rates and extra-economic plunder may evoke the monetarism that accompanied the employers’ offensive at the end of the 1970s. But the diachronic relation of these episodes demonstrates their specificity. The Keynesian mixed economy dating from 1948 was reversed by the onset of neoliberalism in 1979, and overtaken by the era of ‘bubblenomics’ from 1995. The latter’s failure set in train the emergency neoliberalism of the Geithner-led bailouts after 2008, followed by a decade-long holding pattern. This was, in turn, succeeded by the current ‘political capitalist’ conjuncture: an assault on the population’s living standards combined with a hardening of the state’s repressive apparatuses. This perspective reveals certain causative and determinate links between events as they unfold over time. For that reason, it may be dispiriting to those who hope that the reforms of one era can be transplanted surgically onto another, by way of the correct policy choices. Ultimately, though, a politics rooted in a clear understanding of these distinct historical phases is a more useful guide to the present.

Read on: Robert Brenner, ‘Structure vs Conjuncture’, NLR 43.

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Milei’s Chainsaw

Javier Milei, presidential hopeful of the Liberty Advances coalition, speaks during a rally in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, Aug. 7, 2023. Primary elections set for all political parties for Aug. 13. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Having led his libertarian party alliance La Libertad Avanza into Congress in 2021, the far-right Argentine politician Javier Milei has once again outperformed expectations. In the August presidential primaries he received 30% of the vote – beating the two candidates from the centre-left Unión por la Patria, who won only 27% between them, and those from the centre-right Juntos por el Cambio, who came away with 28%. Now, in the run up to the general election of 22 October, Milei sits alone atop every poll. The only uncertainty is whether he can break the threshold to avoid a second round.

For many onlookers, Milei’s politics have been difficult to classify. He is a former semi-professional footballer, rock musician, comic-con cosplayer, tantric sex guru and professor of economics. He is also a red-faced television pundit and self-made internet meme. Caricature of this admittedly cartoonish figure is the crutch of countless op-eds, which reduce him to a Trump knock-off with an even more eccentric hairstyle (his nickname is ‘The Wig’). Others view Milei as another iteration of Latin America’s amorphous ‘populist’ phenomenon. As an article in Foreign Affairs put it, the region’s socioeconomic volatility has a tendency to produce ‘radical iconoclasts’: ‘Milei, Castillo, Bolsonaro, Chávez, and Bukele would probably not have risen in a more stable setting.’ In this binary frame – liberal stability versus populist demagoguery – all variants of ‘anti-establishment’ politics are lumped together, with little sense of their local particularities. 

Another line of commentary focuses, more accurately, on the spiralling economic crisis in Argentina. At around 120%, inflation is burning through the wallets of the entire population. The public debt-to-GDP ratio is about 80%, and there are no liquid reserves in the central bank. The IMF has made harsh austerity measures a condition of fresh loans every three months. The real estate market operates not in Argentine pesos but in US dollars, which are often difficult and expensive to acquire through the ‘dollar blue’ black market. The post-pandemic labour market is precarious and increasingly flexibilized, with a large informal sector characterized by over- rather than underemployment: for many workers, multiple jobs and gig work are a necessary means of survival. Meanwhile, private finance is ballooning household debts, pre-pandemic advances in gender equality are being reversed, and high prices are arresting the momentum of working-class and social-movement organization.

That a plurality of voters might rebel against a party establishment overseeing this kind of crisis is no surprise. (Public debt first exploded under Mauricio Macri’s conservative government in 2015, and has remained more or less stable under the Peronist administration of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.) Nor is it surprising that ‘populism’ should catch on in the country of its birth. But the question remains: why does Milei speak to this conjuncture, and what might his victory mean for the country’s future?

At electoral rallies that double as punk concerts, Milei pairs a hyper-individualist creed of ‘life, liberty, property’ with a populist denunciation of the ‘political caste’. He begins and ends most speeches with his catchphrase: ‘long live liberty, goddammit.’ His adoring audiences are mostly hyper-online men, many of them Bitcoin-enthusiasts and first-time voters. Milei promises them he will ‘burn down’ the central bank, dollarize the currency, eliminate most state agencies and privatize publicly owned firms. Just as he describes anthropogenic climate change as a ‘socialist lie’, he also denies the torture and disappearances that took place under the dictatorship, and plans to pardon the military officials jailed for such offences. Fuelled by a virulent sexism, he hopes to roll back the progress made by the country’s powerful feminist movement, particularly the legalization of abortion, and defeat the so-called ‘gender ideology’ of the LGBT community in education and culture writ large.

Milei’s outlook represents a reactionary mutation of neoliberalism in response to crisis conditions. It is the latest iteration of Latin America’s longstanding free-market authoritarian tradition – what Verónica Gago calls the ‘originary violence’ of its peripheral neoliberal model. At a time of desperation, as Pablo Stefanoni has observed, Milei has succeeded in building the only ‘truly ideological candidacy’ with both an electoral programme and a utopic image of the future. This goes some way to explain how he could win over so much of the male youth in the Buenos Aires villas (the country’s equivalent of Brazil’s favelas), while outperforming his rivals in regions that previously favoured the Peronist left.

More so than Jair Bolsonaro – whose candidacy was boosted by the young online activists of the Free Brazil Movement after he promised to appoint Chicago Boy Paulo Guedes as finance minister – Milei is a card-carrying neoliberal. When asked how he became one, he speaks of a near-religious conversion – from neoclassical Keynesianism to the Austrian School. (Milei is also planning to convert from Catholicism to Judaism, incidentally, although he worries that his presidential work-ethic might be incompatible with the observance of Shabbat.) In his victory speech after the primary elections, Milei thanked both his supporters and his pet English Mastiffs, who are named after Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas and Murray Rothbard. ‘What is the State anyway but organized banditry?’, wrote Rothbard in his Libertarian Manifesto (1973). ‘What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale? What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces?’ Fifty years later, these lines can be heard echoing across Argentine primetime television.

Following Friedman, Milei distinguishes between three types of liberalism: the classical doctrine of Smith and Hayek, which he holds in high esteem; the minarchism of Mises, with which he identifies on a practical level; and the anarcho-capitalism of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, to which he adheres philosophically. Milei has developed these views in a number of books: The Return to the Path of Argentine Decadence (2015), Freedom, Freedom, Freedom (2019), Pandenomics (2020), The Way of the Libertarian (2022) and The End of Inflation (2023). Many of his titles have been dogged by allegations of plagiarism. But this is not a concern for Milei, who prides himself on having imbibed his Austrian idols line by line. Unlike every other kind of property, their truths belong to everyone and no one.

Milei’s philosophy is not just on the page, however, but manifest in his concrete plans for dollarization – a project for which he has already begun to seek foreign financing. For many voters, incensed by inflation and accustomed to dealing in US currency, this policy seems intuitive, or at least worth the risk. For Milei, though, it is less about resolving the current crisis than upholding a timeless principle. In the Austrian School tradition, a return to the gold standard is the holy grail. Absent such a leap backwards in history, the next best thing is to tie the hands of central bankers, or cut them off altogether. The means for doing so are various. El Salvador’s aspiring dictator, Nayib Bukele, has adopted Bitcoin as the country’s second official currency, hoping to mimic the deflationary features of the gold standard. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has proposed using a basket of commodities, including gold, to back up the dollar. And Milei has touted the replacement of the peso with the greenback, alongside the abolition of the central bank – which he calls ‘the worst thing in the universe’.

In contrast to rudderless performers like Bolsonaro and Trump, then, Milei is zealously committed to a coherent ideology. (It was initially unclear whether he even wanted to be president, or whether his principal aim was to use his candidacy to weave his ideas into the cultural fabric.) It is partly for this reason that international financial markets are uneasy. Immediately after his victory in August, the peso and dollar bonds crashed in value, recalling the reaction to former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s radical neoliberal reforms in 2022. Of course, as a chief economist at one of Argentina’s largest firms and an adviser to numerous national and international public bodies, Milei is adept at reading market signals – as well as adjusting his levels of radicality to his audience. When speaking with Bloomberg, he reverts to abstract classroom lectures on macroeconomic theory. With the Economist, he emphasizes his establishment bonafides and rejects accurate characterizations of his programme as ‘hyperbole’.

In this more reassuring register, Milei explains that the welfare state should certainly be destroyed – but not all at once. ‘It is the enemy, so we are going to dismantle it. But with a transition . . . During the first years we would try to reconfigure [handouts] so that social policy would not be centred around welfare, but around human capital.’ To this end, he proposes cutting the number of government ministries from eighteen to eight: getting rid of the Ministries of Culture, Education, Transportation, Public Health, Environment and Sustainable Development, and Women, Gender and Diversity, among others. Some of their functions will be integrated into the Ministry of Human Capital, which will make welfare conditional on work. Social security reform, he adds, will follow the model instituted by Pinochet in Chile. A new era of shock therapy is on its way; but, as Milei assures the Economist, this won’t cause problems for international institutions or investors, since his own tax and spending cuts will be much harsher than the IMF’s proposals.

Nonetheless, in a report on Milei’s rising prospects, the Financial Times quotes an adviser at a London-based investment firm who questions his ability to execute such policies: ‘There’s concern about . . . governability – to what extent he would be able to control protests if he were able to implement his radical measures.’ Would the backlash against his agenda prove too serious for the state to repress? Again, Milei replies that he will wield his chainsaw – the tool he symbolically revs at his rallies – with care. He knows which arms of the state to cut off and which to use against his opponents. ‘We are working on a new internal security law, a new national defence law, a new intelligence law, on reforming the penal code, on reforming the criminal code and on reforming the prison system.’ Security will, moreover, be entrusted to his running mate Victoria Villarruel. Nicknamed ‘Villacruel’, she has spent her legal career to defending military officers convicted of crimes against humanity. She is a longstanding proponent of the so-called ‘two demons theory’ of Argentina’s dictatorship, placing equal blame on communist dissidents and on the state that systematically tried to eradicate them.  

Milei’s foreign policy evokes the same themes. Upon assuming power, he intends to initiate an ‘automatic alignment with the US and Israel’ while refusing to work with ‘socialist countries’ such as China, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. What this means in practice is the subject of debate. After all, Bolsonaro said the same thing about China during his election campaign before he embraced the country as president. Milei may perform a similar volte face. Yet his ideological commitment – along with his neocolonial fixation on ‘Western civilization’ – should not be underestimated. Nor should the unpredictability that comes with his particular brand of libertarianism. When asked about Argentina’s Mercosur deal with the EU, Milei inveighed against it, but he also voiced his opposition to the idea of tariffs tout court. His administration would surely extend the extractive frontier in the Lithium Triangle, which is already violently displacing indigenous communities, in line with the IMF’s requirement to pay back sovereign debts in US dollars.

Oriented toward Washington and Wall Street, Milei would be a lonely figure in the region; the Uruguayan president and the current frontrunner for president of Ecuador would be among his only allies. Yet, as he recently explained in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the effective transnational organizing of the far right means that such isolation may be short-lived. Milei has established ties with Spain’s far-right Vox party. He is allied with reactionary leaders across the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America through initiatives like the Madrid Forum, which aims to bring the moderate and extreme right together ‘to face the threat posed by the growth of communism on both sides of the Atlantic’. Milei sees himself as part of an insurgent Nueva Derecha that is laser-focused on the cultural front – fighting a long war of manoeuvre against gender equality and racial justice, with the help of online social networks. (The Milei–Carlson interview was viewed 420 million times after an endorsement from Elon Musk.)

Milei’s pledge to ‘Make Argentina Great Again’ is not just the latest Trumpian gimmick used by a far-right nationalist. It is also a genuine appeal for liberal palingenesis – a vision of national rebirth through a return to Smith, Hayek and their inheritors. When Milei uses this phrase, he is not just participating in the rehabilitation of the military dictatorship; he is also calling for a return to the golden years of Argentine history – the first decades of the twentieth century, when it was among the richest nations in the world. This prosperity, bestowed by ‘free-market classical liberalism’, was supposedly erased by the socialistic state-inventionism of Juan Perón, which has since mired the country in decadence and decline. To recapture such greatness, Milei advocates a ‘libertarian revolution that will make Argentina a world power again in thirty-five years’. Yet his anarcho-authoritarian programme would not look like dictatorships past. Its most destructive features are yet to be seen.

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