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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.

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Troubled Voices

Best-known in the English-speaking world for her 1992 debut The Governesses, a frenzied modern-day conte of female appetite translated in 2018, the French writer Anne Serre says she has little time for the vogue of fictionalised autobiography. ‘It’s not enough to write in your own voice, come to the page with what you have to say, and call it a novel’, she has argued. ‘The whole point of a novel should be that we don’t know who is speaking’. In a mannered, highly controlled style – her surname resembles the verb serrer, to ‘tighten, wrench or clamp’ – Serre has spent her career troubling the boundaries between author and narrator, fact and fiction, realism and fantasy.

In A Leopard Skin-Hat, published in France in 2008 and now the fourth of Serre’s fifteen works to appear in English, the question of who speaks is muddled by the presence of a character called ‘the Narrator’. Such metafictional ploys can be found throughout her oeuvre: a 2004 novel is titled Le Narrateur, as is a novella included in her 2021 collection A Fool and Other Moral Tales. In this case, ‘the Narrator’ is a middle-aged male writer, struggling to make sense of the abbreviated life of his childhood friend, Fanny, who dies by suicide after suffering from schizophrenia. An extended rumination on her life and death, the novel resembles a ballad, comprising a wistful effort to index everything remembered about a loved one and lamenting its failure to provide a cohesive portrait.

Raised in a ‘very decent’ and conventional bourgeois Catholic family, with literature-professor parents who ‘bathed’ their children in fiction from an early age, Serre insists that she began writing in order to charm her secondary school philosophy teacher (Anglophone critics have made much of her professed conviction that literature is invariably written to ‘seduce’ someone). She lost her mother when she was ten and her sister in 2007 from ‘probable suicide’ related to struggles with mental illness. Her sister was 43, the same age as Fanny when she dies; A Leopard-Skin Hat is arguably Serre’s most autobiographically inflected work to date. In an unusual disclosure of her intentions, Serre has said that she conceived the work as a tribute to a life which resisted interpretation.

Serre’s books unfold from striking, enigmatic images which ‘foist’ themselves upon her in dreams, or during walks in the countryside. This latest work is ignited from the ‘elegant leopard-skin hat’ that Fanny ‘pilfers’ during one of her more ‘light-hearted’ phases. As her illness worsens, the hat functions as a cruel measure of her decline. The novel opens with the Narrator’s fond, generic recollection of his friend in her youth: ‘Oh, how pretty she was, Fanny, back in the days of her childhood.’ The reader may suspect a Proustian set-up – a hapless, Marcel-like character mooning over his Albertine – but this is quickly disrupted. The portrait soon grows more complicated: ‘One summer, a child from next door asked her if he could use her piano and Fanny refused, saying quite simply, “No”. There was nothing gracious about it, no attempt to soften the blow. It was No. The child was taken aback and hurt, and went off looking distinctly sad.’

The Narrator’s fixation with Fanny is more intellectual than erotic; the bond they develop is not romantic but a ‘gruelling’ friendship. In contrast to the trademark eroticism of Serre’s other works, A Leopard-Skin Hat is a para-philosophical reflection on intimacy and the opacity of other people. Visiting Fanny’s bedroom after her body is taken away, the Narrator is confounded by its neatness, so at odds with Fanny’s public dishevelment: ‘he discovered, with a lump in his throat, all her papers carefully arranged and annotated and filed away like those of a fantastically tidy person, the official documents of her life meticulously ordered. You never know who your loved ones are or what they are capable of.’

The portrait represents something of a departure for Serre, whose characters have tended to resemble what she describes as ‘ghosts, masks, dolls, theatre figures and vignettes’ rather than full-dimensional people. Along with her next novel, The Beginners, published in France in 2011 and translated in 2021, A Leopard-Skin Hat was an experiment in applying her favoured modes – sly, oneiric, sometimes farcical – to a more realistic world. Serre did not judge either book successful, deeming them unsatisfying ‘one-offs’ that reaffirmed her antic taste for whimsy and surrealism, not the travails of everyday intimacy. Yet the works are among her most affecting. The Beginners, the story of an art critic, Anna, who, though in a contended long-term relationship, becomes infatuated with a researcher spending the summer in her countryside town, may be prosaic, but it is also tender and often riveting. Like A Leopard-Skin Hat, the novel chimes with elements of Serre’s own tragically inclined biography (Anna is also motherless, and has lost a sister to suicide). Its portrayal of how Anna ‘catches’ love for Thomas, like an illness, fatally contaminating her well-established partnership, vividly showcases the unsparing side of romantic life. For all the novel’s abstract talk of love and existential pondering, few others have registered the fraught experience of being in love with more than one person so well, nor articulated the dilemma as precisely.

It is a shame therefore that some of the sharpness of Serre’s prose is lost in translation. Her long-term translator Mark Hutchinson has rendered the crisp plainness of A Leopard-Skin Hat in an idiomatic English that is at times a little cloying and cumbersome. In a passage in which the Narrator questions whether Fanny ‘really wants to live’, for the expression ‘sortir de sa cachette’ (‘to come out of hiding’), Hutchinson has ‘to come out of her hidey-hole’. His rendering of Serre’s plain description of Fanny’s relationship to alcohol is similarly obtrusive. For ‘Lorsqu’elle a été ivre’, instead of ‘When she was drunk’, we have the old-fashioned ‘When she was in her cups’.

For a writer fond of ‘cruel irony’ (a term she has used to praise the work of Elfriede Jelinek), we should not exclude the possibility that Serre is sometimes poking fun at her Narrator. On occasion, a winking authorial voice intrudes: ‘Fanny’s actual life probably bears no resemblance to what the Narrator writes’. These metafictional flourishes would be more agreeable, and the sudden instalment of ironic distance more effective, if the reader were invited to care about the Narrator as a stand-alone creation. Yet he is pompous, inordinately occupied by his own genius, tediously adamant that the demands of long-term friendship are akin to those of writing books. Perhaps this estrangement is a further defence against the conflation of literature and reality, against approaching any settled sense – anathema to the novel, in Serre’s view – of who is speaking. But by leaning into the more parodic aspects of the Narrator, A Leopard-Skin Hat risks satirizing his struggle to say something fair and true about a loved one in distress, and rendering the central question ‘Who is speaking?’ a pantomime.

More than a meta-fictional hall of mirrors, however, A Leopard-Skin Hat is perhaps most potently about the limits of literature when confronted with something as obliterative as schizophrenia. Fanny’s life is portrayed as one of perpetual self-estrangement and fear. Calling herself ‘Felix’ as a child, she become a ‘social outcast’, unable to hold down a job. Her body is consistently ‘alien’ to her, an ‘enemy about to pounce’; she ‘scared of herself’ – ‘scared of hurting someone else.’ ‘The more she read’, we learn, ‘the more she seemed to fall apart’. As Serre has reflected elsewhere: ‘anything that’s unnameable is terrifying; and for a writer, perhaps even more so. Naming things is comforting. If you can’t name something (Is he a vagabond? A murderer? My loved one? Death? A ghost?), the world will disintegrate, and if the world disintegrates, you will too.’ The Narrator, for all his erudition, cannot ultimately find a way to define his relationship with Fanny: ‘Perhaps in the end it was more about love than friendship? What other name is there for this urgent, violent marriage of minds? Why did he accompany her?’

Serre, as we’d expect, leaves the question open. Definitively scotching this ‘one-off’ experiment in realism, she gives Fanny a celestial, surrealist send-off. ‘Over the rail she stepped, she who was such a powerful swimmer, and dropped into the sea’, from where she ascends to the heavens. ‘Truly, it’s a joy to have become a clock once more with a well-oiled, precision mechanism,’ she enthuses during her climb. From such heights, she can look down on the story of her life with, if not quite freedom, something like poise. She is still ascending in Serre’s final sentences. The Narrator is nowhere to be seen.

‘What distinguishes a novelist’, Serre has argued, ‘is having access to the imagination and knowing how to blend that in with their own experience. When the two currents merge (which is what being a novelist is all about), it reveals something, it tells you something about existence that is far more richly variegated, far more penetrating and arresting and impossible to pin down, than the story of a life’. In her latest novel published in France, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur (2022), she dispenses with her Narrator character and places the figure of a famous woman writer centre stage. The book unfolds around the latter’s death bed, thronged by journalists and critics who grill her about her latest text. ‘We are troubled by something,’ one reporter complains. ‘You are an old woman (our dear little old woman), but there is also an old woman in the story.’ They pause. ‘Is it not you?’ The question hovers unresolved. Serre’s preferred literary mode is enchantment. She does not break the spell. 

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum, ‘An Aphorist of the Cinema’, NLR 104.

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Blasted Sea

On 1 August in north-east Scotland, midway through the hottest summer yet, two sets of microphones were recording. One was trained on UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as he stood outside a Shell-owned gas processing terminal at Scotland’s easternmost tip, unveiling a plan to authorise 100 new licences to drill for fossil fuel in the North Sea. Some distance off the coast – and far from any media attention – a second set of microphones was being dragged through the water. Under the command of Texas-based geophysics company SAExploration, they were being used to survey the seafloor, searching for the fossil fuels that might lie beneath.

Such surveys are part of a booming industry. The latest IPCC report made it clear that no new fossil fuel projects can be initiated if we are to avoid catastrophic global heating. Yet according to Offshore Magazine, a trade publication for offshore fossil fuel exploration, ‘the future is looking bright’. The sector is expected to expand by 14% this year alone. Major offshore explorations are underway in the waters of Argentina, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Colombia, Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the United States. This expansion is driven in part by disruptions from the war in Ukraine, new technological developments and an industry buoyed by inflated profits and keen to defend and extend its position. The quest for offshore fuel is also propelled by growing scarcity. Much of the ‘conventional’ supply of oil and gas is already over-exploited, forcing mining companies to go to greater lengths.

Tapping ‘unconventional’ deposits requires advanced technology. Before an offshore oil or gas well can be sunk, the area needs to be mapped, and the most accurate way to do that is via a process called ‘seismic exploration’. This involves a ship slowly traversing the ‘acquisition area’ – industry jargon for the place being mapped – trailing pneumatic guns and microphones behind it, sometimes on 10km-long lines. The air-guns fire regular sound blasts into the water; the microphones record the echo bouncing back from the seafloor. To penetrate the sub-seafloor, where oil and gas may be found, the blasts have to be extremely loud. At an unimaginable 240 decibels, they are among the loudest sounds humans can produce. For comparison: these are louder than the sound produced by the explosion of an atomic bomb. To map the acquisition area, hundreds of thousands of such blasts are required. The guns fire every ten seconds, 24 hours a day, for months on end. At this rate the number of blasts adds up quickly. By the time of Sunak’s announcement, SAExploration’s vessel in the North Sea would have fired off almost one million blasts over the first 108 days of its mission.

One marine biologist-turned-whistleblower, disturbed by the possible ecological impacts of this practice, recently described her time aboard a seismic exploration ship that was working off the coast of Australia. She was given a pair of binoculars and tasked with keeping an eye out for whales; if the crew had visual confirmation of specific types of whales, they would temporarily pause the blasting. But this safeguard was limited, not only because the pneumatic guns were being dragged 10km behind the ship – near or beyond the horizon – but also because the blasts continue through the night when no observer is on duty.

The blasts are no doubt keenly heard by cetaceans – dolphins and whales – who experience sound in distinctive and complex ways (they are able to ‘see’ and feel with sound). Humans can hear frequencies between 20 and 20,000 hertz (Hz); Bottlenose dolphins can hear up to 160,000 Hz. They use their ultra-precise hearing to locate food, to navigate and to communicate. Hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb-volume blasts ripping through their habitat is likely to affect their senses in ways we cannot understand. It is an act of phenomenal violence. What of the other inhabitants of the overfished, acidifying ocean? What happens when microorganisms are hit with a 240-decibel sound wave? The short answer is nobody knows; it hasn’t been adequately studied.

This lack of ecological research contrasts sharply with the level of technoscientific knowledge needed to transform the audio recording of the blasts echoing back from the seafloor into maps for fossil fuel companies. Processing these recordings is highly complicated, often requiring super-computers to crunch the geophysical data. The US-based multinational oil company ConocoPhillips, for example, has one of the world’s top supercomputers, a purpose-built 1000m2 machine that sits in a data facility in Houston. Much of its processing power is given over to turning seismic exploration data into maps. Such processes are central to the extraction industry – a fact that complicates the call to ‘follow the science’ with respect to climate change. Oil and gas companies are following the science – indeed, they are using the most advanced science available, and they are using it to extract even more fossil fuel.

Marine seismic surveys, according to Australia’s regulatory agency, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) (which ‘recognises climate change’), are undertaken not only to identify ‘potential oil and gas reservoirs below the seafloor’ but also ‘reservoirs suitable for storing waste carbon dioxide to prevent it from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change’. A discerning reader will note that these two purposes exist in different universes. The first is real and dangerous, a practice that needs to be halted immediately if the planet is to remain liveable. The second is, at best, a science fiction concocted by the fossil industry.

Seismic exploration is a telling manifestation of the technoscientific reorganisation of global capital. It embodies the central contradiction that has been with us since the first nuclear explosions which opened a new epoch of cybernetic capitalism. At the cutting-edge of science and using some of the world’s most powerful calculation engines, the technique is as rationalised as it gets. Yet the blasting of an atomic bomb of sound every ten seconds is belligerent in the extreme toward the oceanic ecosystems, while the aim of expanding the frontier of fossil fuel extraction at a time of increasingly acute climate crisis is nothing short of demented.

Herein lies a deeper problem: a society dedicated to endless growth is necessarily pushed towards meeting expanding energy requirements. Governments of all stripes, from greenwashing ‘pragmatists’, like Labor in Australia, to anti-greens like Sunak’s Tories – also claiming to be ‘pragmatic’ – are forced to intensify the quest for more energy and thus the drive towards technoscientific instrumentalisation. Cybernetic capitalism, compelled to seek new ‘smart’ ways to achieve endless expansion, leaves behind a blasted sea and a boiling sky.

Read on: Timothy Erik Ström, ‘Capital and Cybernetics’, NLR 135.

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Psycho-Politics

As if demonstrating that the repressed does return, politics has erupted in the supposedly apolitical world of American psychoanalysis. An advocacy group, Black Psychoanalysts Speak, and a documentary film, Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, seek to redress the racial and class biases of analysis. Unbehagen, a psychoanalytic list-serve, features a roiling debate over whether it is necessary to match the analyst’s gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation with the patient’s. The American Psychoanalytic Association itself has been shaken by political recriminations, purges, resignations and denunciations. An article by Donald Moss, published in the association’s journal, provided the catalyst in this case. According to its abstract:

 Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has – a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable and perverse.

The reaction to the article was sharply divided. Some saw it as a valuable extension of psychoanalytic theory, while others believed it neglected vital determining factors of racialization, such as deindustrialization, union discrimination and the inequities of the real estate market. In response to the controversy, an internal body, the Holmes Commission, was entrusted to ‘investigate systemic racism and its underlying determinants embedded within APsaA, and to offer remedies for all aspects of identified racism’. Among the repercussions has been a debate over anti-Semitism precipitated by a speaking invitation to a controversial Lebanese psychoanalytic therapist, which led to the resignation of the President of the Association, Kerry Sulkowicz.

These developments are noteworthy in themselves, but they also raise wider questions about the relation between psychoanalysis and politics. What is striking about the politicization of contemporary psychoanalysis is the extent to which it conforms to the liberal identitarianism, sometimes termed ‘wokeness’, prevailing in the broader culture, which views systematic wrongs such as racism as emanating from individual psyches, along the model of sin. This marks a sad detour for a current of thought that provided a genuine alternative to moralism. Yet the stakes are greater than psychoanalysis per se. They concern the prospects for a twenty-first century Left that can encompass a non-reductionist conception of the relations between the social world and individual psychology. Recent years have also seen a certain resurgence of psychoanalytic thinking on the American Left. Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the podcast Know Your Enemy, traces this to the defeat of Bernie Sanders. ‘There’s an inward turn’, he speculates: ‘maybe this purely materialist analysis of people’s motivations doesn’t give us what we need to make sense of this moment’. A new journal, Parapraxis, describes itself as a ‘psychoanalytically oriented supplement to radical critique and historical materialism’, promising to uncover ‘the psychosocial dimension of our lives’.

To address this, we need to consider the intertwined histories of socialism, feminism and psychoanalysis. Socialism’s core contribution was the idea that democracy and individual freedom could not be achieved without countering capitalism in significant ways. By uprooting the peasantry and gathering workers together in cities, industrialization created the basis for a revolutionary movement. Less often remarked is that this same process transformed the family. Previously, the family had been the primary locus of production and reproduction, and hence the individual’s sense of identity was rooted in his or her place in both work and the family. Industrial capitalism separated paid work from the household. The consequences were twofold. First, the separation helped give rise to a new gender order among the emerging bourgeoisie based on the cult of true womanhood, which implied that women’s suffering endowed them with moral authority. Second, the separation contributed to loosening the bonds that tied individuals of both sexes to their place in the family, giving rise to the idea of a personal life – an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labour.

Understanding that modern capitalist society is based not simply on the rise of industry, but also on the withdrawal of production from the family, helps clarify the contributions and blind spots of these three emancipatory currents. Socialists tended to reduce culture and psychology to the economy. Focused on political economy they left the family and personal life to psychoanalysis and to feminism. Psychoanalysis and feminism in turn focused on the family, neglecting its relation to the capitalist economy. In the sixties, a predominant view on the left was that psychoanalysis was apolitical or ‘individualistic’. But in fact, it was political in a different way, focused not on capital vs labour, but rather on the freedom of the individual from internalized forms of authority, including those targeted by the democratic revolutions, such as tradition, lord/servant relationships and the church, all of which Freud loosely tied together as paternal law. Over time, especially by the sixties, those influenced by psychoanalysis turned their attention to other forms of internalized authority, particularly racism and sexism, as well as forms of shame and guilt specific to capitalism, deference to supposed scientific knowledge, doxa and, of course, deference to psychoanalysis itself.

In general, psychoanalysis did not directly confront institutions, but rather worked indirectly, through its effects on individuals. In this way it reflected the new experience of personal life, which was presupposed by Freud in the theory of the unconscious. According to that theory, the ideas or stimuli that came to the individual from society or culture were not directly registered but were dissolved and internally reconstituted in such a way as to give them personal, even idiosyncratic, meanings. As a result, the inner lives of modern men and women were organized through symbols and narratives that had become personal or idiosyncratic; psychical life could be interpreted but not reintegrated into a previously existing whole. In this view, a person’s race, gender or nationality doesn’t simply translate into their intrapsychic world, but rather is refracted through the contingencies of their personal life. This meant that politics entered the consulting room in terms of its meaning for the individual patient, rather than in the service of a political programme. Far from being defined by any given political ideas, psychoanalytic practice was open-ended, non-utilitarian and unpredictable.

For several decades, the potential contribution of psychoanalysis to radical politics was not widely appreciated. One reason is that psychoanalysis was not oriented to an identifiable sociological group, such as the working class, but rather to new, historically specific possibilities for personal emancipation, which capitalism promised but could not deliver. The limits of psychoanalytic politics also reflected the psychical or cultural reductionism built into the separation of the family from the economy. That separation gave rise to new ways of thinking about history and politics centred on the role of psychology in understanding both individuals and groups or masses, but these tended to be argued in themselves, rather than as part of a broader social theory. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the 1960s rebellions – in which women and issues of personal life were central – played a key role in redefining the politics of psychoanalysis.

This shift began with black intellectuals who drew on psychoanalysis to elucidate the inner costs of racism. Sociologist Horace Cayton, describing his own psychoanalysis, wrote that while he had begun with the idea that race was a ‘convenient catchall’, a rationalization for personal inadequacy, he ended up understanding that race ‘ran to the core of my personality’ and ‘formed the central focus for my insecurity’. ‘I must have drunk it in with my mother’s milk’, he added. Richard Wright, deeply shaped by psychoanalysis, claimed ‘that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure’. Fanon, a Freudian psychiatrist, wrote:

I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects…I took myself far off from my own presence…What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.

Such works were never intended to replace analyses of segregation and the plantation system, but rather to complement, deepen and complicate them. The result was Freudo-Marxism, in which individual psychology and social theory were each given their place. Other efforts to strike that balance included reinterpretation of the Reformation (Erik Erickson, Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm), and works on mass society and mass culture (Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Christopher Lasch, Richard Hofstadter, Herbert Marcuse).

The sixties efforts to produce a non-reductive understanding of the relations of the social and the psychical were short-circuited. Although the cult of true womanhood was long dead, many women remained suspended between two different approaches to the family: first, that the family, and personal relations more generally, were women’s special – moral – realm and, second, that sexual and personal emancipation required freedom from the family. The result was a deep ambivalence toward psychoanalysis, which was at least as consequential in shaping attitudes as the very real sexism of American psychoanalysts. What carried the day was feminists’ forthright expression of the extent of women’s suffering, and the profound sense of the injustice of a male-dominated society. The result was that the ambivalence was resolved negatively. This resolution informed two books that in 1970 announced the birth of second wave feminism: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. For Millett, Freud was the leader of a counter-revolution against feminism, waged under the banner of penis-envy. Firestone redefined penis-envy as power envy and replaced Marx and Engels’ idea of a dialectic of class with a dialectic of sex, according to which the rule of men over women and children was the driving force in history. Both books sought to replace psychoanalysis with feminism. Gayle Rubin famously called psychoanalysis ‘feminism manqué’.

Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) marked a new turn in the encounter between feminism and psychoanalysis. Mitchell was a socialist ­– and an editor of NLR – influenced by Fanon and by the existential psychoanalysis of David Cooper and RD Laing. The question that concerned her was how women live in their ‘heads and hearts a self-definition which is at core a definition of oppression’. In 2017 she recalled:

it was my fascination with the rabid anti-Freud stance of the first American feminists in the second half of the nineteen-sixties that made me go to the British Museum library to read Freud’s five articles on women. Instead, I read twenty-three volumes of his translated work non-stop. Psychoanalysis and Feminism was the result. I had found what I wanted – some way we could think about the question of the oppression of women.

Her book criticized second wave feminism for having gotten ‘rid of mental life’. For them, she lamented, ‘It all actually happens… there is no other sort of reality than social reality’.

In the late seventies and eighties, some feminists, gays and, to a lesser extent, people of colour became analysts, therapists or psychiatric social workers. They did not, however, for the most part join Mitchell in returning to Freud. Rather, they transformed psychoanalysis into the so-called relational paradigm, which focused not on the individual unconscious but on interpersonal relations. Based on Winnicott’s famous aperçu, ‘there is no such thing as a baby’ – i.e., the mother is always present – relational psychoanalysis was a compromise formation, combining a mother-centred paradigm, practical introspection and a new code of behaviour. Psychoanalytic feminists substituted ‘gender’ for ‘sex’, thus jettisoning the psychoanalytic theory of motivation, without putting another in its place. Melanie Klein’s theory of unconscious object relations, largely if not wholly consistent with Freud, was misrepresented as interpersonal or relational. Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin prioritized gender difference and idealized attunement and other female-associated, interpersonal skills. For others, the unconscious disappeared into a phenomenology of intimate relations, such as flirting, kissing, tickling and being bored or into a micro-sociology of insults and injuries.

The relational turn substituted an ethical theory of interpersonal relations for the unconscious. This contributed to what is today known as ‘wokeness’. What happens in the absence of a theory of the unconscious is projection. All evil and wrong is seen as coming from the outside. The theory of penis-envy was unpleasant, painful and even wrong, but its very structure included an effort to elucidate how women might have mobilized their aggression against themselves. When individuals lack even the concept of an intrapsychic life, much less access to it, they will project their aggression and other ‘bad’ feelings outward, generating the need for trigger warnings, moral judgements posted next to paintings, Deans and Provosts who play the role of police officers, for definitions of the university – and the New Left – as a rape culture. This idea that aggression comes from the outside works very well with the liberal/market paradigm, which is founded on an equilibrium model and denies that there is any aggression within the market system, and that any problems must be external – coming from the state, monopoly or China. The denial of aggression leads to moralism, based on the idea – which stems from the cult of true womanhood – that victimhood bestows moral authority. Here, the intrinsically duplicitous structure of capitalism shows itself in the realm of morality.

The demand for recognition may be read as the political counterpart to the relational turn. The overwhelmingly negative reaction of feminists to Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979) signalled the triumph of a newly minted Hegelian ‘recognition theory’ over Freudian self-reflection. In that book, Lasch viewed the demand for recognition as a symptom of an attention-based society, in which processes of mirroring and idealization prevailed. Yet to his feminist critics he was an advocate of a passé and ‘masculinist’ ideal of autonomy, and only that. Meanwhile, responding not to feminism but to Germany’s trauma of the Nazi years, Jürgen Habermas dismissed Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempts to combine Freud and Marx in favour of a paradigm based on intersubjectivity, democratic dialogue and communicative action, rooted in American pragmatism and social psychology. These currents were brought into relation with feminism by Axel Honneth, who argued that the demand for recognition, in the Hegelian sense of Anerkennung, is the master key of justice. The result was a new notion of ‘critical theory’, which replaced Freudo-Marxism: Winnicott stood in for Freud and Talcott Parsons stood in for Marx.

Let us now return to our nineteenth-century roots, when the withdrawal of production from the family created the modern demand for personal freedom, understood as something beyond the economy. Surely Marx, who read everything, and embraced the work of non-socialist thinkers like Charles Darwin and Lewis Henry Morgan, as well as that of monarchists like Honoré de Balzac, would have been fascinated by Freud, Fanon and Mitchell among others. As we learn from post-colonialism about the nation, we need to think about the family in terms of combined and uneven development. Bringing into one institution the most backward elements of society and the most visionary possibilities, the politics of the family is combustible. The forced separation between forms of personal emancipation, such as women’s liberation, antiracism and identity politics on the one hand, and socialism on the other, took place in the 1960s when the three emancipatory currents – socialism, feminism and psychoanalysis – were closest to being united.

The alternative to wokeness, finally, is not the abstract, liberal separation of the individual and the political, but rather the interdependence between the individual and the collective. All human beings have basic material and social needs that can only be met collectively. This is what socialists have historically understood. But the individual’s needs cannot be reduced to the collective; they are also internal, psychological and personal. Hence the logic of the idea of psychoanalysis complementing socialism. A revitalized psychoanalysis, galvanized by the rediscovery of the personal character of the unconscious, would greatly deepen our explorations of human freedom – in psychotherapy, in the arts and in public discourse ­– and would be a natural ally for a revitalized socialist politics. Meanwhile, there is always a place for moral reformation, even under socialism – just not within psychoanalysis.

Read on: Juliet Mitchell, ‘Psychoanalysis and Child Development’, NLR I/140.