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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.

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The Sycophant

Everybody has heard by now that British higher education is in a parlous state. Indebted students. Overworked staff on squeezed pay. Misery all round. The question is who is responsible. Some misdiagnose the condition, blaming overly inclusive admissions policies (‘Some people just aren’t university material’); others see an epidemic of wokery (‘Students nowadays aren’t willing to be challenged’). Far more sensible to point the finger at recent governments, and at the university bosses and managers their policies have empowered. The damage they have wrought is incalculable. Yet this too leaves out an important part of the picture. The uncomfortable truth is that academics have been complicit, and often instrumental, in bringing about the present predicament. It’s awkward to say it. For one thing, I am an academic myself. During strikes (which, to academics’ limited credit, have become more frequent – albeit belatedly – in recent years), solidarity seems to require the putting aside of internecine gripes. Victory to the UCU! And all that.

But the elephant can only be ignored for so long: we need to talk about academics. Rather like journalists, academics exhibit a profound mismatch between self-image and reality. They pride themselves on being independent thinkers and see themselves as possessing a somewhat irreverent or subversive orientation toward authority. But in fact, this self-conception masks its opposite. In a famous interview with Noam Chomsky in which he schools Andrew Marr on the ways in which the media selects for ideological positions, Chomsky draws a connection between this mechanism of ideological control and the education system:

There’s a filtering system, that starts in kindergarten, and goes all the way through, and it’s not going to work 100% but it’s pretty effective. It selects for obedience, and subordination… There’ll be behavioural problems. If you read applications to a graduate school you’ll see that people will tell you, he’s not, he doesn’t get along too well with his colleagues, you know how to interpret those things.

Academics are on the whole people who did very well in school. That is not to say that they all liked it, of course. But by and large, they would not be where they are if they had been utterly unable or unwilling to tolerate the kind of rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian structure that characterises school. Those who tend to fall foul of authority are usually weeded out well before the time of graduate study (‘behavioural problems’), with the result that academics as a group tend to be disproportionately deferential. It may not look that way to academics themselves, but this is hardly surprising: what counts as conformism (or rebelliousness) is relative.

This fundamental disposition toward conformity – detectable in the political alignment of the bulk of academic work – is on display in many a departmental or union branch meeting. It’s not that academics aren’t habitually disgruntled, or that they don’t complain constantly about the erosion of working conditions or the latest assault on educational standards. They are and they do. A typical academic gathering could easily be mistaken for a support group. But if after the rounds of Ain’t It Awful someone suggests doing something about it – such as simply not doing the latest thing that management has demanded we do (and which everyone has just agreed is pointless, harmful, or both) – those defiant voices melt away. ‘Oh no,’ they say, ‘that would probably upset management; we’re in a weak position as it is.’ And so they grumble and roll over, time and again.

If there’s one thing that infuriates academics more than university managers ever could, it’s other academics suggesting that they’re not being radical enough in standing up to management. I can well imagine that somewhere, an academic (perhaps one of my own colleagues) is reading this and already frothing at the mouth. Do I not understand the importance of maintaining good relations with management if we are to get anywhere at all? Would I have the department closed down in my quest for ideological purity?

For those of us who have recently emerged from a period of dutiful flirting with a briefly (if imperfectly) compos mentis Labour Party, this is all too familiar. The rage that those seen as overly radical or ‘hard left’ provoke in union and party ‘moderates’ alike. The unmistakable fact that they dislike us far more than the official opposition (management, the Conservatives). The lectures on the importance of being ‘strategic’ (and point-blank refusal to entertain the possibility of differing ideas as to what that means). The framing of opponents as idealists, irresponsible wreckers, out of touch, undemocratic or dictatorial, thuggish, or infantile (perhaps the ubiquitous idea of ‘grown up politics’ also belongs to the long shadow of childhood and school, in which a powerful con-trick equates maturity with acquiescence). And the sad reality that, in both cases, the supposedly outrageous radicals are really not very radical at all.

Negotiation and diplomacy are, of course, important, in university politics and beyond, as is ‘picking your battles’, and expending your ‘political capital’ wisely (though the people who most liberally employ these phrases often seem unwilling to pick any battle at all). The fear that resistance will be met with a punitive response, meanwhile, is not unfounded. It is hardly paranoid to worry that a department with a reputation for trouble-making might be ear-marked for closure. That concern cannot be taken lightly. Yet if resistance is often futile and sometimes counterproductive, that still leaves a question ordinarily beloved by political ‘sensibles’: what is the alternative? The answer of many academics, implicit or explicit, seems to be as follows: we cultivate good relations with management so that they see us as reasonable and trustworthy; we will then be in a better position to press our claims through reason and argument. What this approach presupposes is a basic commonality, or at least compatibility, of interests and objectives between the parties involved. Under such conditions, it makes sense to expect a certain reciprocity, whereby when we are nice to management, management will be nice back.

In many domains of life, that is how human relations work. But, clearly, there are also relationships and situations in which this fails to hold, or in which the dynamic is reversed: you give an inch, and the other person will take a mile. The relationship between labour and capital is one example. There is room for negotiation and compromise between the parties, certainly; but the way for workers to protect their interests is not to be as nice and obliging as possible toward their employers, but rather to flex their collective muscle by forming strong unions and strategically withdrawing their labour when the situation requires. This has nothing to do with how nasty or nice the employers or owners of capital are as individuals: workers and bosses have their parts to play, and they are going to play them more or less no matter what.

The relationship between university managers and academic staff is not precisely that of capital and labour, but it is much closer to this than to a relationship between neighbours or friends (this despite – and perhaps camouflaged by – the fact that there is a great deal of overlap between the populations: many managers are or used to be academics). Managers have their agenda, one fundamentally at odds with the interests and wishes of most academic staff: slashing ‘costs’ through cuts and casualisation, hiking student rents, increasing capital expenditure, inflating bosses’ salaries, expanding the role of private ‘providers’ in everything from cleaning to counselling and teaching. Ceding ground, acquiescing to their demands in the hope that this will be rewarded is a bit like throwing lumps of meat to a shark and hoping that it will not come back for more. ‘You’ve been very obliging, so we won’t push you any further,’ said no manager ever. Control is to the manager as profit is to the capitalist (and in the contemporary university, profit too is never far away). ‘We got away with that’, the real-life as opposed to the imaginary manager says: ‘What’s next?’

With departments closing all around us, and for reasons that often have nothing to do with their ‘performance’ or with anything their members have or haven’t done, the idea that we might save ourselves by keeping our heads down is, at best, a hope that they’ll come for someone else first. In reality, even this is so uncertain a strategy as to border on magical thinking. This is not to pretend that it is easy to stand up to the bosses, or that real improvement is possible without wider political change (scrapping fees, for a start). But it is possible, through strategic non-cooperation, to slow the decline, to make things sufficiently arduous and annoying for the enemy that they will think twice before making the next attack. From this perspective, the ‘strategic’ position of many academics and their union representatives looks a lot like Einstein’s definition of madness: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But it is not madness, exactly. It is teacher’s pet syndrome: an ingrained trust in authority – the conviction that those in power are basically reasonable people who have our interests at heart – and an equally ingrained fear of getting in trouble.

There is a tendency among the ‘Oh, the humanities’ crowd – those who defend, rightly if sometimes insufferably, the intrinsic social value of higher education – to tell a particular story about the decline of the British university. It all started to go wrong around 2010, the year when £9k fees were forced through (they were imposed on the first cohort of students in 2012). This story paints an overly rosy picture of what came before, and conveniently erases the role of the narrators in precipitating the Great Falling Off which so exercises them.

Many of the things that have ruined higher education can rather – like the things that have ruined our society more generally – be traced back to the 1980s. The first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which sought to evaluate and rank academic research (and to allocate funding accordingly), was held in 1986. Older and retired academics tell a familiar story about how this unfolded: much scoffing and derision at the philistinism of attempting to measure research ‘quality’, followed by total acquiescence. ‘I said, obviously we should refuse to participate in this’, one of my elder informants recalls. ‘They said: ah, but we can probably do quite well in it…’. It was in the Thatcherite 80s, too, that tenure was effectively abolished (since which even ‘permanent’ academics can in practice be got rid of with relative ease). That decade also saw the first big push to introduce the sharp differentials in pay that most academics now regard almost as a fact of nature (that at Cambridge University until the 1980s there was one basic lecturer’s salary is likely not only unknown but virtually unbelievable to many who work there today).

So, the rot did not begin in 2010 when the Tory–Lib-Dem coalition tripled tuition fees, nor in 2004 when the Blair government raised them to £3,000 a year, nor in 1998, when it introduced them. Fees are a disaster, but today’s marketised nightmare has deeper roots. And then as now, academics do not come out of the story looking good. At every step, they have not only failed to mount effective resistance to the forces that have mutilated the sector, but they have been actively complicit. And I do mean ‘active’. The RAE and its successor, the Research Excellence Framework (‘the REF’), are not done to academics but by them: senior academics form the panels and assess the ‘outputs’, even as they moan about the burdensomeness of the task and the overwhelmingly negative effects of the exercise on the life of the university. Again and again, they grumble and scoff (‘“Impact”? Ludicrous! “Prevent Duty”? Nobody could take it seriously…’), and again and again, they roll over.

Academics, it seems, are like the acquaintance who Dorothy Parker said ‘speaks 18 languages and can’t say “no” in any of them.’ The issue is not just servility, however, but a hubris that can superficially look like servility’s opposite, as when academics tell themselves that they are only humouring management while actually pursuing their own, subtly subversive agendas. But management, academics often forget, are generally indifferent to mockery or critique, however finely-crafted and devastating. They are happy enough to let us tire ourselves out. One of their favourite tactics, in fact, is to set academics onerous, pointless tasks to keep us busy. Could we gather some evidence to support our claims that the new policy is having a detrimental effect? Could we present the case for why we really need to have such things as offices? Could we fill in this consultation? Academics exhaust themselves writing meticulously argued treatises against the latest deleterious thing management wants to do, and then management do it anyway. Often, we even do it for them. Could we nominate some teaching rooms that we could stand to lose, in order to help management decide how to redistribute the ‘space envelope’? Would we mind drawing up a plan for whom to make redundant and in what order?

Yet the idea of academics as incapable of protecting their own interests captures only part of the truth. There is a clear sense in which the docile behaviour of academics is self-defeating. But equally clearly, academics are not all in the same boat: the well-paid professor has little in common with the lecturer on a fixed-term contract. If they lack class consciousness, it is partly because they do not constitute a class (and tend to have an uneasy relationship with that category even on the occasions they acknowledge it as something that might have relevance to them).

Another ingredient in the typical academic’s mental mix (also plausibly school-borne) is a deep-seated competitive individualism. It’s this which accounts for the ease with which academics are seduced into auditing and ranking exercises and jumping through the proliferating hoops that are the prerequisites for promotion. It’s this, too, which likely explains the generally low (though rising) rates of unionisation among academic staff. Even those who are union members often do not go on strike. They treat the union as a kind of insurance scheme (something that might be useful for them in a dispute over a promotion, for example). Some strike for part of the time, apparently seeing industrial action as a kind of ‘every little helps’ situation. Anecdotally, the willingness to forfeit pay seems to be inversely proportional to wealth and salary. The poorer and more precarious, the more willing to take risks and financial hits. The richer and more secure, the more liable to be heard complaining about not being able to afford to strike.

Individualism of this kind is the opposite of solidarity, which in academia is decidedly patchy. Nowhere was this more apparent than during the 2018 pensions strike and its aftermath. Graduate students and casualised academics, who can only dream of having retirement incomes to defend, turned out in droves to protect the pensions of their more secure colleagues; not long after, when the union balloted its members again over the issues of pay, workload, inequality and casualisation, few branches met the 50% turnout threshold. Permanent academics, false as their sense of security may be, are apparently more concerned with their next grant application than the fate of the temporary lecturer who will be brought in to cover their sabbatical. As a result, the unchecked march of casualisation is leading to a paradoxical proletarianisation, subjecting junior academics to a hazing ritual of insecurity and impoverishment only the independently wealthy can afford.

Who’s to blame for the plight of higher education? Time to consult the mirror. Looked at one way, academics are their own worst enemies. But viewed from another angle, their failure to defend their own collective interest makes more sense: the collective is not their concern. If the goal is to get ahead of the next guy, then a general deterioration of conditions is a cost that can be borne. For all the heart-rending laments from academics about the state of the universities, the reality may be still more depressing. Maybe they like what they see.

Read on: Francis Mulhern, ‘In the Academic Counting-House’, NLR 123.

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The Mexican Question

One indication of the plight of the left worldwide is the calibre of its contemporary lodestars. Just last century we were learning from and for revolutions. Today we are invited to take inspiration from the likes of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president now entering the final lap of his six-year term. In a recent Sidecar article, Edwin F. Ackerman described AMLO’s ‘overarching project’ as to ‘move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism’. Any such transition, Ackerman notes, ‘must take place in a structural setting shaped by neoliberalism itself: the erosion of the working class as a political agent and the dismantling of state capacity’. AMLO’s tenure ought therefore to be assessed according to progress in these areas. While Ackerman concedes other weaknesses – AMLO’s ‘dismal record’ on migration, his lukewarm response to Mexico’s feminist movement – his account is broadly positive. How accurate is this assessment?

In Ackerman’s description, the working class has re-emerged as a ‘political actor’, visible in workers’ uprisings and successful unionization drives, and reflected in the increasingly working-class composition of the president’s support base. Initial signs of a revival of class politics were rhetorical: AMLO adopted a populist idiom of confrontation between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. But this, Ackerman claims, was followed by substantive social policy, in particular expanding and universalizing cash transfers.

The truth however is that cash transfers are nothing new in Mexico, and nothing if not neoliberal. Pioneered by the government of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), Progresa epitomized the new state doctrine that displaced the more collectivist ideology of the Mexican Revolution. Rather than a universal entitlement, cash transfers were granted with conditions such as keeping children in school and attending regular health check-ups. The policy was conceived as enabling the individual to better navigate the uncertainties of the market as they pursued their personal betterment. More to the point, these schemes were akin to pre-emptive compensation while the Mexican state implemented a dramatic wave of privatization, liberalization and deregulation.

Ackerman argues that the removal of most conditions for welfare payments represents a break with this model. Having dispensed with ‘micro-targeting and means-testing’, cash transfers ‘now reach 65% more people than under previous governments’. This dramatically overstates the scale and significance of the change: the 65% figure is only true for three programmes – a pension for seniors, a stipend for primary and high school students, and another for farmers. The overall picture of social spending under AMLO is far less impressive. In 2018, the last year of the previous government, social programmes reached 28% of the population. By 2022, the figure was 35%, and total social expenditure was $1.3 trillion pesos – only 1.4% higher than what it was in 2014 when adjusted for inflation. This modest expansion of welfare support, moreover, obscures its regressive cast. The increased spending has not meant more protection for those most in need. The proportion of the poorest 5% of Mexicans benefitting from a social programme actually fell from 68% to 49% between 2016 and 2022, while the richest 5% saw their welfare coverage increase from 6% to 20%. Ackerman omits to mention AMLO’s dismal response to the pandemic, which followed a ‘path of minimal action’: Mexico’s excess death toll was the fifth-highest in the world.

Ackerman equally commends AMLO’s ‘concerted effort to increase the state’s tax collection capacity’, which he says has ‘had a significant redistributive impact’. A comparison with recent administrations in the region is instructive. Kirchnerism in Argentina increased tax revenue as a percentage of GDP from 21% to 28.9% during its first six years in government; Morales increased Bolivia’s tax revenue from 19.3% to 25.9% in his. By contrast, available data for AMLO’s first four years in power show a meagre increase from 16.1% to 16.7% (in 2022 tax revenues even declined in real terms). AMLO’s 0.6% increase is comparable to Lula’s first term in Brazil, but the figure obscures quite different tax structures. By 2009, Brazil’s tax revenue was 31.2% of GDP, almost double that of Mexico, which remains the lowest in the OECD and well below the average in Latin America.

Mexico’s underfunded public services, meanwhile, are being subjected to la austeridad republicana. Though Ackerman acknowledges this may undermine the effort to strengthen the country’s welfare system, he nevertheless argues that such austerity is part of an attempt to weed out neoliberal practices: ‘Since Mexican neoliberalism forged extensive links between the state and private enterprise, austerity is seen as a means of breaking such connections – casting off parasitic companies whose profits rely on government largesse.’ But such practices have not ended. The Mexican state now relies more on direct acquisitions than public competition, and friends of AMLO’s family have benefitted from this. In truth, it is difficult to regard ‘republican austerity’ as anything other than a leftist slogan for an old neoliberal tool.

Labour policy is the one area that has seen real progress under AMLO. Ackerman rightly points to the ‘pro-worker reforms’ – formalizing rights, simplifying unionization processes, improving conditions including increasing the statutory holiday allowance and raising the minimum wage, which this year reached 207.40 pesos ($12.30), 82% higher than it was in 2018. But again, nuance is called for. Ackerman says AMLO has overseen ‘the largest minimum-wage increase in more than forty years’. From the 1970s until the mid-1980s, the minimum wage remained above 300 pesos ($17.90), peaking at 396.40 pesos ($23.69) in 1977. Neoliberalization pushed down wages, and since 1996, until the recent hikes, the minimum wage hovered around 100 pesos ($6). The reforms therefore merely begin to reverse neoliberal excess.

Moreover, since not all workers earn the minimum wage, raising it has not resulted in a dramatic redistribution of income to labour as a whole. According to the latest data, between 2018 and 2020, when the minimum wage increased by 29%, Mexico’s labour income share as a percentage of GDP only rose from 33.4 to 35.2%. For comparison: between 2004 and 2010 in Argentina the labour income share grew from 38.7 to 49.3% of GDP. In the same time frame, during Lula’s first stint in power, Brazil’s labour income share rose from 56.1 to 57.9%, and would continue to grow – even under Bolsonaro – to 63.1% by 2019. (The minimum wage in each country increased by 147% and 50%, respectively, in the same six-year period.) As AMLO’s first Finance Minister candidly put it, his government would be ‘to the right of Lula’.

Many of the gains were also set in motion by previous administrations, and impelled by external factors. Mexico’s new labour policy was in part the result of Obama’s pressure to increase wages below the Rio Grande to deter America’s carmakers from further factory closures in the US. Accordingly, a constitutional reform that strengthened labour rights was approved in late 2016, two years before AMLO took office. In a peculiar combination of forces, US national interests, spurred by the country’s union movement, softened the excesses of the Mexican bourgeoisie. When AMLO was elected in 2018, the way had already been paved ‘from the outside’, as academics euphemistically call this episode of US intrusion into Mexican labour policy.

So far, so threadbare. A further priority of the AMLO administration, according to Ackerman, has been to roll back the neoliberal tide that had outsourced government functions to private companies, and he explains how this has been combined with a series of eye-catching construction schemes, including an airport in Mexico City, an oil refinery in AMLO’s home state Tabasco, and a train around the Yucatán peninsula. But lacking ‘real administrative capacity’ to oversee these megaprojects, Ackerman writes, AMLO has ‘become increasingly reliant on the military to build and operate’ them.

That is a serious understatement. The military has become a major contractor of the government, running and profiting from several airports including the new one it helped to build in the capital, a luxury hotel in Yucatán, and some sections of the new train; soon it will run its own commercial airline. The administration’s effort to bulk up the state apparatus has chiefly been accomplished through the comprehensive militarization of public life. Aside from the executive, the only part of the state whose power has grown under AMLO is the armed forces. By 2021, military spending was already 54% higher than at the start of his presidency. And that does not include the swelling budget of the National Guard, established in 2019 to replace the federal police which AMLO disbanded soon after taking office.

AMLO promised the National Guard would be a civilian-led force, but it is now under army command. Almost immediately, the National Guard started anti-immigration operations, deploying some 2,400 soldiers. Now there are 6,500 troops on the border with Guatemala and 7,400 on the border with the US – amounting to a full-blown ‘war against migrants’. AMLO’s government has effectively deputized the armed forces, in National Guard uniforms, as a Mexican branch of US border patrol. Under pressure from Trump and now Biden, the Mexican state no longer turns a blind eye to migration from Central America. The National Migration Institute has been militarized; its facilities function as detention centres. Last March, a rebellion by Central American migrants being held in Ciudad Juárez led to a fire that killed 39.

Ackerman contends that ‘AMLO’s use of the repressive apparatus’ to control the flow of asylum seekers is ‘largely a capitulation’ to US pressure, to which he says AMLO bows in order to gain ‘leverage in negotiations’. The fact is that AMLO did not dare to resist because Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican imports. AMLO could have responded with reciprocal tariffs, which might have ended free trade in North America. There was a time, in the 1990s, when he called for just that. To the extent that the Mexican government has used its role as anti-immigration lackey to the US to gain leverage, meanwhile, it hasn’t been exploited for ‘progressive’ negotiations, but to rescue General Salvador Cienfuegos from American justice after his capture on drug trafficking and corruption charges in 2020. Cienfuegos was the head of the armed forces from 2012 to 2018. The army pushed AMLO to lead a diplomatic operation that included direct talks with Trump to free the general. The charges were dropped; last year Cienfuegos was a guest of honour at the opening of the new Felipe Ángeles airport.

State propaganda has long portrayed the army as ‘the people in uniform’. But Mexico’s military is the same as it always was: soldiers still disappear or murder hundreds of innocent civilians. It is the same chain of command that was involved in the kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in 2014. A group of experts investigating the mass abduction ceased operations this year after reaching a dead end; in its final report, the panel noted the army was ‘hiding very relevant information for the clarification of the case.’ AMLO immediately defended the armed forces, saying ‘it’s not true the navy and the army aren’t helping.’

Whatever AMLO’s shortcomings, in Ackerman’s view the ‘attempt to break with neoliberalism cannot easily be dismissed’. But in reality, however much he has adorned his programme in the language of the populist tradition, his policies have amounted to little more than neoliberal fine-tuning, and in many areas he has actually deepened the worst excesses of the neoliberal state – more budget cuts, more fiscal discipline, more ‘free’ trade. On top of this he has pursued overtly right-wing measures, which Ackerman underplays, above all this unprecedented and dangerous expansion of the role of the military. Relations with the US, meanwhile, remain far from anti-imperialist and closer to client state dynamics.

The truth is that AMLO has become the latest case of left romanticization of a Latin American strongman. If there is a lesson from his tenure for the left worldwide, it is that AMLO’s populism is not the answer. The warning would be familiar to Mexican communists of the 20th century, whose hard-earned insights José Revueltas shared in his 1962 Essay on a Headless Proletariat:

The progressive politics of the government is a relative negation of the bourgeoisie as a class (since such politics seem to contradict their interests through concessions to the working class, nationalist measures, granting of democratic freedoms, etc.), but at the same time it affirms the national bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class, it affirms the apparent existence of a non-bourgeois government, ‘friend of the workers’ and enemy of a bourgeoisie that, apparently, is not in power either.

From this social diagnosis, Revueltas extracted a strategy for working-class independence, an old and seemingly forgotten theme of the Mexican left. Not all communists were as principled as Revueltas, who served time in prison. Others, like Vicente Lombardo, insisted on the need to stay loyal to populism, always supporting its candidates in elections. Even after the Mexican regime killed hundreds of students in 1968, Lombardo remained steadfast, even lamenting that the students went beyond ‘protest’ and ‘tried to become a revolt’. The populist rule that emerged from the Mexican Revolution was not to be contested, only cautiously criticized. In this strategy, the left must remain a junior, docile partner of the centre.

In the late 1980s, under the influence of Eurocommunism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Mexican communists followed Lombardo’s lead, becoming absorbed by populism. The result was a vacuum on the left, which still exists in Mexico today. The disease of Lombardismo has infected many parts of the left around the world, often in more virulent forms. At least Lombardo distinguished the left from populism. Now, the left is urged to become populist – a ‘left-populism’ in theory but just another centrism in practice. Yet the lesson the left should take from Mexico is to avoid it.

Read on: Jorge Castaneda, ‘Mexico: Permuting Power’, NLR 7.

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Western Pravdas

Mögen andere von ihrer Schande sprechen,

ich spreche von der meinen.

Let others speak of their shame,

I speak of my own.

Bertold Brecht, Deutschland, 1933

It’s the early 1970s. An American and a Soviet are debating which of their societies is freer. ‘At least we can criticize Nixon!’, the American blurts out. ‘So what?’, the Soviet replies. ‘We can criticize Nixon too.’ Nixon was, after all, more than worthy of critique: his administration was responsible for perpetuating the worst massacres in Indochina, the extermination of the Black Panthers at home, for backing Pinochet’s bloodstained coup in Chile; the list goes on. But today it appears that the roles have been reversed. When it comes to the war in Ukraine, Westerners find themselves in a situation not unlike that of the Brezhnev-era Soviet. ‘We are free to criticize Putin!’, they exclaim.

To be clear: Vladimir Putin is a true reactionary, with his nostalgia for the Tsars, his Orthodox Christian fervour and ironclad alliance with one of the world’s most objectionable religious hierarchies, his vision of a feudal state-capitalism, the rampant corruption he has enabled and encouraged, his butchery in Chechnya, his repression of dissent. And of course, his suicidal invasion of Ukraine, an anachronistic return to trench warfare in Europe that risks an atomic holocaust over territory – the Donbass – that a decade ago hardly anyone knew existed. To measure the extent of Putin’s folly beyond the horrors he has unleashed, one need only recall that in 2013, 80 per cent of Ukrainians had a positive opinion of Russia.

We would not have been awed by the bravery of Soviets who criticized Nixon’s barbarism – by a commentator in Leningrad describing him as the new Hitler. The same holds true today: unlike Russian citizens who risk their lives in doing so, we should hardly be celebrating the ‘courage’ of pundits in the West who deprecate the cruelty of this Eastern satrap (Oriental despotism: will this rhetorical topos, the coinage of Karl August Wittfogel, ever die?). Not to mention the unpleasant aftertaste of cowardice in the unremitting dictum of ‘we’ll arm you and you fight’ for which they have been a megaphone over the past year and a half. It’s all too easy to play tough with other people’s lives.

The phenomenon being outlined here echoes the past in some respects, while not abiding by it. The same division of the world into good and evil defined the McCarthyism of the 1950s. For readers who don’t remember, the term derived from American senator Joseph McCarthy, who together with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUCA), led a witch hunt targeting anyone (actors, directors, journalists, musicians, writers, diplomats, even members of the armed forces) suspected of being a communist. It’s no coincidence that Wittfogel himself participated in this witch hunt. In 1951, he accused the UN delegation chief and Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman of being a communist agent. Norman denied everything, but he was once again put under indictment. He committed suicide in Cairo.

There are, of course, significant differences. McCarthyism deprived its targets of their livelihoods in the name of a hunt for spies and traitors. Today’s campaign hasn’t gone as far. McCarthyism infected the American state and media, but since it also attacked them as either soft on communism or harbouring secret communists, an internal opposition grew, and it was ultimately ended by the establishment itself. Currently, what we might call Western Brezhnevism seems to be spreading unopposed. The result is a homogenization of perspective. Rather than la pensée unique, we have a récit unique. What is required of NATO members is unwavering adherence to an orthodoxy, demanding a level of self-censorship that recalls what the atomic physicist Leo Szilard said about Americans during the Cold War: ‘Even when things were at their worst, the majority of Americans were free to say what they thought for the simple reason that they never thought what they were not free to say’. 

Here I’m not referring merely to war propaganda, which is a given (and inevitable): our bombs only hit military targets, the enemy’s exclusively civilian ones; our soldiers are gentlemen, theirs are barbarians who commit atrocities; if we lose a city, it was of little strategic importance; if the enemy loses it, it was vital. I’m not even talking about lies, again a given in war; propagated not out of malice, but because you cannot give true information to the enemy. I’m describing something more subtle that permeates our thinking. The clearest signs, as always, come in lexical form. Why, for example, are Russian billionaires called oligarchs, but never Western ones? Billionaires in any nation form – by definition – a small group that exerts great power over the country. But the term oligarch implies something more: that the regime in which they operate is not a true democracy (read: like ours) but an oligarchy. The term is thus a building block for the construction of a non-democratic, authoritarian enemy.

The double standards are more telling in the use of the term ‘empire’. In Russia’s case – whether for Tsarism, the Soviet era, Putin’s revanchism – the term is used constantly, but in the mainstream press it is never applied to the United States, a peace-loving state concerned only with defending itself against ignoble aggressors. That the US has more than 750 military bases in 85 countries is an irrelevant detail (by way of comparison, the UK has 17 military bases abroad, France 12, Turkey 10, China 4, Russia 10, of which 9 are in countries within the borders of the former Soviet Union). Equally irrelevant is the fact that since the Second World War, it has triggered more wars than any other state on earth (in Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria…). And that’s not counting the coups d’état staged in Chile, Iran, Cuba…

Then there is the received vocabulary for hired soldiers, by now a resource used by almost all militaries (let’s not forget its august forefather, far less romantic than the stories we have been told, the French Foreign Legion established in 1831). On the American side they are demurely referred to as ‘contractors’, while their Russian counterparts are ‘mercenaries’ (an appropriate term in both cases). Meanwhile the former head of the Wagner Group, the recently deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin, was part of the ‘inner circle’ or ‘clique’ of the Kremlin Tsar, but the head of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is merely a ‘businessman’ who just happens to be the brother of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education minister. All such organizations recruit criminal offenders and all commit atrocities, though some are euphemized as ‘unintended casualties’ while others are signs of ‘barbarism’. We need a quantitative analysis of the Western media’s use of adjectives like those carried out by Franco Moretti on literary texts.

Perhaps the most telling indication of this new orthodoxy is the proliferation of the expression ‘Putin’s useful idiots’. A search on Google yields 321,000 results. The history of ‘useful idiots’ – implying as it does a cynical view of politics, in which good faith and naivety are exploited – is enlightening. As William Safire wrote in a New York Times Magazine article from 1987: ‘This seems to be Lenin’s phrase, once applied against liberals, that is being used by anti-Communists against the ideological grandchildren of those liberals, or against anybody insufficiently anti-Communist in the view of the phrase’s user.’ But Safire’s research failed to uncover the expression in any of Lenin’s writings and speeches. The cynicism of the term was thus used against its supposed first formulators.

Use of the expression faded with the end of the Cold War which had spawned it (‘Cold War’ itself a term coined by Walter Lippmann). But in 2008, it was reinvented as ‘Putin’s Useful Idiots’ in Foreign Policy. Paraphrasing Safire: to qualify one merely had to be insufficiently anti-Putin in the eyes of those using the phrase. One should, of course, remember the context. In the early 2000s Putin was asking to become a NATO member (as Foreign Policy reminded its readers last year in the article, ‘When Putin Loved NATO’). But by 2008, things had been turned on their head; the issue was no longer if Russia should be accepted, but how to grant Ukraine and Georgia access to NATO as a move against Russia (this was also the year of the war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia). ‘Putin’s useful idiots’ appeared again in a New York Times article in 2014, the year of Ukrainian President-elect Viktor Yanukovych’s dethroning. Usage has steadily intensified, the floodgates finally opening after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, it’s appeared in headlines (just to give an idea) in the Atlantic, the Spectator, Politico and the Economist.

An example of the term’s noxious application comes from Steve Forbes, editor of the eponymous magazine, who in June 2022 attached the epithet to French president Emmanuel Macron for having the temerity to propose a diplomatic solution to the conflict. The episode recalls when another French president insolently refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Such was George Bush’s anger at Jacques Chirac that his administration tried to convince Americans to change the name of ‘French fries’ to ‘freedom fries’. This was a repeat of the campaign undertaken during the First World War, in a climate of intense Germanophobia, when ‘frankfurters’ were renamed ‘hot dogs’ – considerably more successful than Bush’s feeble rebranding of fried potatoes.

On the long list of Putin’s useful idiots, one name that is conspicuous by its absence is Henry Kissinger, who wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post in 2014:

The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709, were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet – Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean – is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.

He concludes:

Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist – on the premises of Russian history. Understanding US values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of US policymakers.

Clearly, Kissinger has the qualifications necessary to be on the list of ‘Putin’s useful idiots’. Why has he not been branded as such? Because it’s hardly credible that the old fox of Realpolitik is an idiot, let alone at the expense of a comparative youngster like Putin. Perhaps he could have been termed a Putinversteher instead (Google yields 41,000 results for it), the German equivalent meaning ‘one who understands Putin’, which replaces the instrumental contempt of ‘useful idiots’ with innuendo: ‘understanding’ hinting at sympathy, support or complicity.

The sleight of hand is not an innocuous one. The war had barely broken out when Repubblica, one of the most important Italian newspapers, published a list of Putinverstehers, an exercise in public derision of prominent journalists and ambassadors for their adherence to the notion – verified a thousand times over throughout history – that the guilt of one party does not imply the innocence of the other. ‘But this is just pro-Putinism in disguise!’, retort commentators who until the day before yesterday hailed Putin as a political heir of Talleyrand and Metternich, ignoring his butchery in Chechnya, not to mention his ridiculous shirtless horseback rides, his photo-ops with tigers, his childish passion for martial arts, his boundless admiration for C-list actors like Jean-Claude Van Damme. How can you attribute intelligence to someone who idolizes Van Damme?

Swiftly, the discourse migrated from Putinversteher to all-out Russophobia. As Mikhail Shishkin argued in the Atlantic:

Culture, too, is a casualty of war. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian writers called for a boycott of Russian music, films and books. Others have all but accused Russian literature of complicity in the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. The entire culture, they say, is imperialist, and this military aggression reveals the moral bankruptcy of Russia’s so-called civilization.

That Ukrainians adopt this stance is understandable – à la guerre comme à la guerre – though they might have stopped short of closing the museum in Kiev dedicated to their compatriot Mikhail Bulgakov on account of his opposition to Ukrainian nationalism. Many great Russian authors were Ukrainian: Gogol, Chekhov (born near Mariupol), Akhmatova (born in Odessa)… But the fact they were born in Ukraine doesn’t mean they felt Ukrainian, just as writing in Russian doesn’t make you Russian, just as Austrian or Swiss authors would never feel German for writing in German, and Americans wouldn’t want to be called English just for writing in it. I have great admiration for the novel The Penguin, written by Andrei Kurkov, a Ukrainian author who writes in Russian but champions the Ukrainian cause. All this underlines the speciousness of Herder’s triad: ein Volk, eine Sprache, ein Land.

Denigration of all things Russian can be observed everywhere. Register the sudden absence of Russian films from our cinemas, even those of esteemed directors like Andrey Zvyagintsev, winner of several prizes at Cannes and a Golden Globe. The classics of world literature have not been spared either. See, inter alia, ‘From Pushkin to Putin: Russian Literature’s Imperial Ideology’, published in Foreign Policy, which characterized both Tolstoy and Pushkin as Russian imperialists (even if the latter’s reconstruction of the Pugachev Rebellion seemingly demonstrates his sympathies for the insurgency). Since the war began, several monuments to Pushkin in Ukraine have been demolished (and yet we express indignation when the Taliban destroys statues of Buddha?), and as the Financial Times reports, ‘some Ukrainians now refer on social media to “Pushkinists” launching missile attacks on their cities’.

No artist has suffered this vilification more than Dostoevsky. The equation is linear: Dostoevsky fashioned himself as the standard-bearer of the so-called ‘Russian soul’ (Russkaia Dusha) which ‘embodies the idea of pan-humanistic unity of brotherly love’. The Russian soul is at the heart of the idea that Russia must unify all of the Slavic people within and beyond its borders, and therefore the theoretical foundation for Russian imperialism of which Putin is an expression. Ergo, Dostoevsky is the inspiration for Putin, just as Nietzsche was for Hitler. For more than a century, Dostoevsky – along with Tolstoy – was considered a literary giant alongside Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe. Suddenly he’s a reprobate.

The analogy between Dostoevsky–Putin and Nietzsche–Hitler brings us to a final discursive aspect of this new orthodoxy: the constant comparison to Hitler and Stalin, which in modern secular theology means only one thing – identifying the person one speaks of as Satan. It is not the first time we have seen this film: figures whom only yesterday world powers had treated as trusted friends are suddenly declared monsters, madmen, criminals. An expedient amnesia is employed, alongside a moral rigour worthy of Cato the Younger. No need to go back to the praise that the Anglo-Saxon press bestowed on Mussolini (Hitler received the same treatment for a while too); one has merely to remember how Saddam Hussein was financed and armed to fight against Iran, only to become a criminal, and then a condemned man after an abominable farce of a trial. The same happened with Bashar al-Assad. In short, as soon as a crony ceases being a crony, he becomes a criminal (not that he wasn’t one before, but our eyes were closed then). Roosevelt’s immortal reply to those who pointed out that Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was a son of a bitch applies in every case: ‘Yes, but he’s our son of a bitch’.

Putin stopped being our son of a bitch some time ago now. But that doesn’t automatically make him a new Hitler. His was a violence of an almost metaphysical ferocity, so terrifying, so apocalyptic, that it doesn’t compare to that of the little despots who are often likened to him. To put Hitler side by side with any old murderer is akin to comparing every neighbourhood massacre to the Shoah. It ultimately diminishes the enormity of the Judeocide, a step towards absolving its perpetrators.

One last consideration: you know you’re in trouble when the political class starts to talk about the defence of values. As Carl Schmitt observed, values are an intrinsically polemogenous category, that is to say, one that generates conflict. In order to value, one must devalue other values – defeat them and subordinate them, thereby exercising tyrannical power. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, values are more like the first resort of tyrannical powers: it is no coincidence that fascism championed ‘the ethical state’. There is no possible compromise in the defence of values; only crusades can be fought in their name. This is especially true when we’re dealing with an idea as vague and ill-defined as ‘Western values’. What are these: slavery, practised for centuries? Wars to force a country to import opium? Concentration camps in which to cage asylum seekers, the billions handed to tyrants to keep them out, the patrolling of the seas to make them drown in the tens of thousands?

Western values seem to function intermittently, like a car’s indicator lights. For Kosovo, the idea that a linguistic and ethnic minority has the right to secession and independence holds. But not for the Donbass. For Ukraine, the right to resist invasion and occupation is sacrosanct. But not for the Palestinians. The truth is that in the game of the great powers, the issue is not really the territorial integrity of Ukraine. This is a mere pretext for the ‘defence of values’, for their export in fact. Better still if they’re exported by means of cluster bombs banned by a UN convention signed by 111 states (but not the US, Russia, Ukraine, China, India, Israel, Pakistan and Brazil). Cluster bombs render Western values all the more convincing.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Rise and Fall of the Daily Paper’, NLR 111.

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Living Together

In a 1977 lecture at the Collège de France, later published in How to Live Together, Roland Barthes explored a ‘fantasy of a life, a regime, a lifestyle’ that was neither reclusive nor communal: ‘Something like solitude with regular interruptions’. Inspired by the monks of Mount Athos, Barthes proposed to call this mode of living together idiorrhythmy, from the Greek idios (one’s own) and rythmos (rhythm). ‘Fantasmatically speaking’, he says, ‘there is nothing contradictory about wanting to live alone and wanting to live together’. In idiorrhythmic communities, ‘each subject lives according to his own rhythm’ while still being ‘in contact with one another within a particular type of structure’.

Although in Barthes’ view this unregimented lifestyle would be the exact opposite of ‘the fundamental inhumanity of Fourier’s Phalanstery with its timing of each and every quarter hour’, his vision is similarly utopian. But whereas Fourier proposed a plan for an organized, enclosed community, Barthes was not so much sketching a model as seeking to define a zone between two extreme forms of living: ‘an excessively negative form: solitude, eremitism’ and ‘an excessively assimilative form: the convent or monastery’. Idiorrhythmy is thus ‘a median, utopian, Edenic, idyllic form’: a ‘utopia of a socialism of distance’. In this middle way between living alone and with others, the interplay between individuals is so light and subtle that it allows each to escape the diktat of heterorhythmy, where one must submit to power and conform to an alien rhythm imposed from outside.

Barthes’ fantasy has considerable relevance for eco-socialist visions today. The aporia he identifies – between solitude and sociality, autonomy and coordination – has parallels in the conflicts animating the ongoing argument between degrowth and advocates of a Green New Deal or its equivalents. Impelled by the intensification of the ecological crisis, the disarray of mainstream thinking and the buoyancy of the climate movement, the debate has become one of the liveliest on the left intellectual scene.

A key area of disagreement concerns the problem of technology and scale. For ‘eco-modernists’ like Matthew Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War (2022), in order to green our societies and abolish global poverty, ‘a massive social effort of public investment and planning’ is required to accelerate technical progress: ‘solving climate change requires massive development of the productive forces’. As Huber wrote on Sidecar last year, ‘solving climate change requires new social relations of production that would develop the productive forces toward clean production’. In this traditional Marxist perspective, socialist planning – new social relations of production – would allow us to deploy technological solutions currently fettered by the capitalist hunt for profits.

The Japanese philosopher Kōhei Saitō, by contrast, takes a less sanguine view of the eco-socialist potential of technological advance. According to his reading of Marx, laid out in Marx in the Anthropocene (2023), the productive forces eco-socialists would inherit are the ‘productive forces of capital’: their technological content is indissociable from capitalist relations of production. More troubling, in Saitō’s interpretation, capital’s domination over labour is not just a matter of ownership, but results from the growing socialization of production: ‘capital organizes cooperation in the labour process in such a way that individual workers can no longer conduct their tasks alone and autonomously, but are subjugated to the command of capital.’ Saitō concludes that the ‘productive forces of capital cannot be properly transferred to post-capitalism because they are created in order to subjugate and control workers’. Capitalist technology ‘eliminates the possibilities of imagining a completely different lifestyle’. According to his degrowth vision, ‘the abolition of the despotic regime of capital may even require the downscaling of production.’

Both Huber and Saitō make important, perceptive arguments about the ecological transition toward socialism, though their positions in many respects mark opposite poles on the spectrum of left theorizing about the climate crisis. Each view has limitations. While the first involves a reckless act of faith in the wisdom and agility of a future socialist leadership to deal with capitalist’s technological legacy, the second overlooks the fact that the abandonment of ‘the productive forces of capital’ and the scaling down of production would result in a de-specialization of productive activity, leading to a dramatic reduction in the productivity of labour and, ultimately, a plunge in living standards. If the potential price of the eco-modernist embrace of technological development is human alienation and techno-capitalist reification, the likely cost of the degrowth rejection of it is austerity and impoverishment.

So, just as the problem of idiorrhythmy was for Barthes ‘the tension between power and marginality’ – between excessive regulation and excessive isolation – the strategic task for eco-socialists is to define a space equidistant from the promethean excesses of eco-modernism and the ascetic excesses of degrowth communism, even if the tension may not finally be resolvable. Fantasmatically speaking, as Barthes might say, there is nothing contradictory about wanting to enjoy the riches of a technologically advanced society and wanting to develop oneself in harmony with nature. Rather than choosing between acceleration and downscaling, ecosocialism should attempt to strike a balance between these alternatives. The reification of the productive forces inherited from capital and some degree of alienation in the labour process should be tolerated only to the extent that they are put to democratically legitimate ends through planning, in order to stabilize the climate and fulfil human needs.

Once this median course is accepted as a matter of principle, the truly hard work for eco-socialists begins. The degrowth scholar Jason Hickel recently proposed a broad definition of the goals of ecosocialist (and anti-imperialist) transformation:

We must achieve democratic control over finance, production and innovation, as well as organize it around both social and ecological objectives. This requires securing and improving socially and ecologically necessary forms of production while reducing destructive and less-necessary output.

Hickel’s wording seems uncontentious, but defining our social and ecological objectives, and deciding which forms of production are necessary and which destructive, entails revolutionary change. As ecological-economist pioneer Karl William Kapp observed back in 1974:

The formulation of environmental policies, the evaluation of environmental goals and the establishment of priorities require a substantive economic calculus in terms of social use values (politically evaluated) for which the formal calculus in monetary exchange values fails to provide a real measure – not only in socialist societies but also in capitalist economies. Hence the ‘revolutionary’ aspect of the environmental issue both as a theoretical and a practical problem.

Barthes did not fully elaborate on the political implications of his ideas, but they were in his view of great importance. As he explains at the beginning of the lecture, the force of desire – the figure of fantasy – is at the origin of culture. Yet in the quest for an emancipatory balance between cooperation and autonomy – developing productive forces and transforming social relations – abstract speculation will be less important than paying close attention to our historical situation and real-world institutions. The power of fantasy is only as strong as the concrete visions it produces.

Read on: André Gorz, ‘Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation’, NLR I/202.

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Forecasting China?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman does not mince his words:

the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be.

That was in the summer of 2013. China’s GDP grew by 7.8 per cent that year. In the decade since, its economy has expanded by 70 per cent in real terms, compared to 21 per cent for the United States. China has not had a recession this century – by convention, two consecutive quarters of negative growth – let alone a ‘crash’. Yet every few years, the Anglophone financial media and its trail of investors, analysts and think-tankers are gripped by the belief that the Chinese economy is about to crater.

The conviction reared its head in the early 2000s, when runaway investment was thought to be ‘overheating’ the economy; in the late 2000s, when exports contracted in the wake of the global financial crisis; and in the mid-2010s, when it was feared that a buildup of local government debt, under-regulated shadow banking and capital outflows threatened China’s entire economic edifice. Today, dire predictions are out in force again, this time triggered by underwhelming growth figures for the second quarter of 2023. Exports have declined from the heights they reached during the pandemic while consumer spending has softened. Corporate troubles in the property sector and high youth unemployment appear to add to China’s woes. Against this backdrop, Western commentators are casting doubt on the PRC’s ability to continue to churn out GDP units, or fretting in grander terms about the country’s economic future (‘whither China?’, asks Adam Tooze by way of Yang Xiguang). Adam Posen, president of the Washington-based Peterson Institute, has diagnosed a case of ‘economic long Covid’. Gloom about China’s economic prospects has once again taken hold.

That there are structural weaknesses in the Chinese economy is not in dispute. After two waves of dramatic institutional reform in the 1980s and 1990s respectively, China’s economic landscape has settled into a durable pattern of high savings and low consumption. With household spending subdued, GDP growth, slowing over the past decade, is sustained by driving up investment, enabled in turn by growing corporate indebtedness. But despite this slowdown, the current bout of doomsaying in the English-language business press, half investor Angst, half pro-Western Schadenfreude, is not an accurate reflection of the fortunes of China’s economy – plodding, but still expanding, with 3 points of GDP added over the first six months of 2023. It is rather an expression of an intellectual impasse, and of the flawed conditions in which knowledge about the Chinese economy is produced and circulated within the Western public sphere.

The essential thing to bear in mind about Western coverage of the Chinese economy is that the bulk of it responds to the needs of the ‘investor community’. For every intervention by a public-minded academic like Ho-fung Hung, there are dozens of specialist briefings, reports, news articles and social media posts whose target audience is individuals and firms with varying degrees of exposure to China’s market, as well as, increasingly, the foreign policy and security establishments of Western states. Most analysis of China strives to be of a directly useful and even ‘actionable’ kind. The stream of profit- and policy-oriented interventions, aimed at a small section of the population, shapes the ‘conversation’ on the Chinese economy more than anything else.

Two further features follow from this. First, the most salient preoccupations of Western commentators reflect the skewed distribution of foreign-owned capital within the Chinese economy. China’s economy is highly globalized in terms of trade in goods but not in terms of finance: Beijing’s capital controls to a large degree insulate the domestic financial sector from global financial markets. Overseas financial capital has only a handful of access points to China’s markets, meaning international exposure is uneven. China-based companies with foreign investors, offshore debt or listings on stock markets outside of the mainland (that is, free of China’s capital controls) generate attention precisely in proportion to their overseas entanglements. Thus countless news articles over the past two years have been devoted to the defaulting saga of real estate giant Evergrande – a Hong Kong-listed firm that has relied on dollar-denominated debt. Journalists and commentators may be gearing up to give the same high-visibility treatment to Country Garden, another troubled property developer with a Hong Kong listing and offshore debt. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal or New York Times subscriber will be forgiven for not remembering the last time they read an article about State Grid (the world’s largest electricity provider) or China State Construction Engineering (the world’s largest construction firm) – two companies less dependent on global finance and over which international investors are unlikely to lose any sleep.

The second feature relates to the financial industry’s reliance on the art of political-economic storytelling to sell investment options. Clients with money to invest want more than an analyst’s projection about the likely rate of return on a given investment product; they want a sense of how that product fits into the ‘bigger picture’ – into an overarching tale of opportunity, innovation or transition in one part of the market, in contrast to vulnerability, decline or closure elsewhere. Discussion of the Chinese economy is regularly inflected by narrative arcs of this marketable variety, whether ‘bullish’ or ‘bearish’. These have included, for instance: the theory of Xi Jinping ushering in a third wave of institutional reform – ‘Reform 3.0’ – at the Central Committee’s third plenum in November 2013 (nothing of the sort happened); fears of a ‘hard landing’ if not a ‘Lehman moment’ during China’s financial volatility of 2015 and 2016 (GDP growth remained close to 7 per cent); and belief in the inevitability of China ‘rebalancing’ from investment to consumption through the 2010s (the investment share of GDP has remained above 40 per cent since 2003). Such narratives, which seem to be crafted in response to the storytelling needs of Western investors and financial intermediaries, become magnets for public debate. The ‘rebalancing’ story, for example, served as a compelling inducement to invest in consumer-facing sectors of the Chinese economy – until it gradually lost credibility. Some money was made along the way, and some lost, and in that sense the story was partly successful on the industry’s own terms even though it was a poor reflection of economic fact.

That so much of the discourse on China’s economy takes shape in response to investor interests may also explain its susceptibility to short-term reversals of sentiment. As a rule, the performance of financial markets is more volatile than that of the real economy, and in China’s case it is mostly the former – to which overseas investors are most exposed, if unevenly – that drives perceptions of the latter. Hence the sharp mood swings from bullish to bearish and back, from one financial cycle to the next. In part fluctuating with the vagaries of market sentiment, Anglophone commentary also lacks consistent, credible criteria with which to assess China’s economic performance. How much growth is enough? What kind of economic expansion would it take for China not to be in a ‘crisis’? In 2009, as the Chinese government was unleashing a spectacular wave of bank lending to stimulate activity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, it was widely believed that growing the economy by 8 per cent was necessary to avert mass unemployment and social instability. That benchmark has now conveniently vanished from view; nobody in the West today would dream of saying China should aim to grow by 8 per cent per year. And is GDP growth itself an adequate metric of economic strength? The significance that Chinese authorities attribute to GDP performance has declined. The official target for 2023 is an approximate one – ‘around 5 per cent’ – affording a measure of leeway, meanwhile the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) dispenses with an overall GDP target altogether.

In addition to protean standards for evaluating performance, there is also a degree of confusion about how to interpret major developments within the Chinese economy, especially in relation to the intentions of policymakers. The travails of the real estate sector are a case in point. The slow-motion collapse of over-indebted Evergrande has repeatedly been portrayed in the Western media as a calamity in waiting for the entire Chinese economy, in yet another iteration of the ‘Lehman moment’ trope. This elides the fact that the Chinese government deliberately prevented highly indebted property developers, including Evergrande, from accessing easy credit in the summer of 2020 – a measure since referred to as the ‘three red lines’ policy. Of course, no large-scale corporate default and restructuring is desirable per se. But it appears that failures like Evergrande’s have been treated by Chinese authorities as the price of disciplining the property sector as a whole and reducing its weight in the broader economy. Although the real estate downturn, with investment declining sharply in 2022, has weighed negatively on China’s overall growth performance, this seems to be the consequence of a concerted attempt to ‘rectify’ the sector – whose shrinking share of total economic output, even at the cost of GDP growth, might well be described as a positive development.

A starting-point for a more level-headed approach to the Chinese economy is to put the current moment in a longer-term perspective. China’s economy was comprehensively transformed in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result of the waves of reform that defined those decades, agricultural production passed from the collective to the household; state industries were converted into for-profit enterprises; the allocation of goods, services and labour was thoroughly marketized; and a powerful private sector was born, expanded rapidly and was consolidated. Since this era of intense institutional restructuring ended in the early 2000s, China’s GDP has more than quadrupled in real terms but the country’s fundamental economic structure has remained stable, in terms of both the balance between state-owned enterprises and private capital, and the precedence of investment over consumption. In this context, instances of significant change – technological upgrading, the expansion of capital markets – have been slow-moving. The decline of GDP growth is itself a protracted affair, and the essentials of the present configuration are likely to endure for some time. China’s economy is neither a ‘ticking time bomb’, as Joe Biden daringly opined last month, nor – an overused expression – ‘at a crossroads’. The China bulls of the West may well continue to morph into China bears and vice versa in the coming years, while the Chinese economy indifferently trudges on.

Read on: Ho-fung Hung, ‘Paper-Tiger Finance?’, NLR 72.

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Indefinite Exception

When El Salvador celebrates its Independence Day in mid-September, it will be a year and a half into an indefinite State of Exception. Elected in June 2019, President Nayib Bukele, young millionaire and former public relations man, has remilitarized politics and criminalized dissent; his increasingly authoritarian regime has drawn comparisons with the country’s darkest decades of military rule and repression. The difference, for now, is Bukele’s enduring popularity. He is poised to secure an illegal second term in the upcoming 2024 elections.

Bukele’s propaganda machine has earned him both renown and notoriety worldwide. Through strategic use of paid influencers, trolls and aspirational ‘inspo’ content, he crafted a messianic image. His outlandish vision for the country – rebranding it as a tech investment hub, using cryptocurrency as legal tender, diverting geothermal energy resources to bitcoin mining – collapsed with the price of bitcoin last year. Yet he quickly moved to consolidate his rule and neutralize discontent over the faltering economy, adopting draconian security policies which have sustained his approval ratings and become a reference point for would-be autocrats across the hemisphere.

Bukele’s New Ideas (NI) party imposed the State of Exception on 27 March 2022, after the breakdown of secret negotiations between the government and the country’s criminal gangs resulted in a spate of mass murders that saw 74 people killed in a single weekend. Since then, the thirty-day order has been renewed seventeen times and counting. A de facto declaration of martial law, it suspends constitutional guarantees including the right to due process, freedom of association, the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel and protections from illegal searches and seizures.

In this constitutional vacuum, Bukele has waged his so-called ‘war on gangs’. More than 72,000 people have been arrested so far, with only 7,000 subsequently released for lack of evidence. The prison population has nearly tripled. With 2% of its people behind bars, El Salvador’s incarceration rate now surpasses even that of the United States. Inmates are denied contact with their families or legal representatives; survivors report conditions of overcrowding, disease, starvation and torture. In July, the legal aid group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario confirmed at least 170 deaths in custody, 84 of which appeared to be violent and another 52 the result of apparent medical neglect. By the beginning of September, the toll had surpassed 180. According to the non-profit Cristosal, not a single one had been convicted of a crime.

Analysing the data from March 2022 to January 2023, Cristosal found that more than 99% of arrestees faced charges limited to gang affiliation; fewer than 1% are accused of committing serious criminal acts like extortion, assault or homicide. Thanks to further penal reforms pushed through in recent weeks, suspects will be processed by the hundreds in mass trials. Legislators have also eliminated the two-year limit on pre-trial detention, while multiplying the length of prison sentences for gang members, including minors.

Despite such horrors, most Salvadorans continue to support the crackdown. Street-level gang activity has demonstrably lessened in the working-class communities that have suffered extortion and violence for decades. Whatever sinister bargains it may obscure, the temporary respite has renewed popular support for Bukele, just in time for the next elections.

The repression, however, has not gone uncontested. While legal aid and human rights groups scramble to provide services and document abuses, organizations like the Movement for Regime Victims (MOVIR, in Spanish) are mobilizing relatives of the incarcerated. Part of the leading opposition coalition, the Popular Rebellion and Resistance Bloc (BRP), MOVIR is fighting to destigmatize victims and provide support to families struggling to find lawyers, get news of their loved ones or make ends meet without them. Predictably, such groups are subject to harassment and persecution. The State of Exception has not only targeted alleged gang members and unfortunate bystanders; it is also being used to criminalize protest and prosecute dissidents, with public-sector union leaders and organized rural communities in the crosshairs.

Conditions for public-sector workers have deteriorated markedly under Bukele’s revenue-starved administration. Tens of thousands have been laid off since 2019; the Movement of Fired Workers (MDT) counted over 2,500 legislative employees, 3,800 city employees fired from NI-run municipalities and 14,000 from central government institutions. Those who have kept their jobs face state repression. According to the MDT, at least sixteen public-sector unionists have been arrested under the State of Exception, many of them during disputes over unpaid salaries.

In the countryside, Bukele’s security forces have used the pretext of fighting gangs to lay siege to historic bastions of popular militancy and resistance, including Liberation Theology-inspired Christian Base Communities and ‘repopulated’ towns that were resettled by organized refugees in liberated FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) territory during the civil war. In January, the ‘Santa Marta Five’ – a group of Cabañas activists who turned a local struggle against toxic gold extraction into a national campaign to ban metals mining – were imprisoned. Their treatment sparked international outrage. But campaigns of mass arrests, military harassment and occupation have taken place across the country, targeting organized peasants in the Bajo Lempa region and repopulated communities like Nuevo Gualcho in eastern Usulután. Residents, many of them survivors of a previous generation’s state terror, warn that militarization is a cover for land grabs for extractive industries and real estate development for coastal tourism.

The State of Exception has thus provided the president with a powerful weapon. But well before this, Bukele was using lawfare to disable and demoralize his opposition. He rose to power by leveraging prevailing anti-corruption discourses against his opponents on both the right and the left, drawing false equivalencies between the oligarchic ruling class and the ex-guerrillas in his own former party, the FMLN. Harassment of journalists and NGO workers has drawn widespread condemnation, but the prosecution, imprisonment and exile of left politicians have provoked less sympathy – a testament to the success of the efforts to discredit his progressive predecessors.

Some two-dozen former FMLN cabinet members, elected officials and party leaders have faced trumped-up corruption charges since Bukele’s election. These include the first FMLN president, Mauricio Funes, as well as former guerrilla commander and president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, both of whom were granted asylum in Nicaragua. These former politicians, many of them elderly ex-combatants, are confronting a range of flimsy to outright false accusations of embezzlement, money laundering and even gang involvement over the Funes administration’s efforts to support an ill-fated 2012 truce between the country’s warring criminal groups.

As well as undermining opposition leaders, these prosecutions have helped to erase the social gains of FMLN governance from popular memory, creating a depoliticizing tide of cynicism, as well as rancour toward the left. In electoral terms, the highly publicized prosecutions of party leaders, coupled with the sweeping repression of its historic bastions of support, has effectively neutralized the FMLN as a political force. For good measure, Bukele has also hobbled select adversaries from the notoriously crooked ARENA party, which implemented the neoliberal restructuring of the economy over four consecutive terms from 1989 to 2009. These include former president Alfredo Cristiani, enjoying exile in Europe, and the less fortunate former San Salvador mayor Ernesto Muyshondt, who has spent more than two years behind bars.  

As a result, no political actor poses a credible threat to Bukele and his party in the forthcoming elections, which will see legislative and presidential voting in February and municipal contests in March. Despite his robust popularity and the absence of viable challengers, Bukele is nevertheless going to great lengths to insulate his project from democracy. El Salvador’s constitution prohibits consecutive presidential terms, but in 2021, NI’s new legislative super-majority illegally ousted the Attorney General along with the entire constitutional court, and replaced them with loyalists who dutifully authorized Bukele’s candidacy.

In June this year, with the primary process already underway, Bukele’s party imposed a package of seismic electoral changes that quite literally redraw the map of Salvadoran democracy. Legislators voted to eliminate 83% of municipalities, slashing their number from 262 to 44, and to cut the number of legislative seats from 84 to 60. They also jettisoned the remainder method of apportioning the legislative seats, which had favoured smaller political parties. Under the new measures, the remaining municipalities will be converted into districts, which will be governed by unelected managers appointed by the president. As the BRP summarized in a communiqué, the reforms are designed to prevent opposition parties from regaining power in NI-run municipalities; to ensure NI’s overrepresentation in the legislature; to eliminate local autonomy; and to centralize power in the executive, ensuring one-party rule at every level of government.

Once a beacon for internationalist revolutionaries, then a posterchild for liberal-democratic transition, El Salvador’s autocratic spiral is tragic and alarming. In a regional context, however, the country’s path is hardly exceptional. Central America’s tenuous post-war bourgeois democracies, while governed by very different regimes, have all been roiled by crisis in recent years. This speaks to the profound exhaustion of a neoliberal political economy that has reproduced the subordinate role of the isthmus in the capitalist world system since the defeat of the insurgent movements of the 1980s. While the 1990s peace agreements dismantled military dictatorships and demobilized former insurgents, the region’s highly unequal economies continued to rely on vast reserves of low-wage labour and US-bound exports. In a deregulated landscape of scarce formal employment and woeful wages, millions were displaced to the United States. There, their labour fed the lowest segments of the deindustrializing economy’s growing service sector, while their remittances became an increasingly critical source of household income and foreign exchange back home.

The successive shocks of the global financial crisis and Covid-19 have laid bare these contradictions. This has produced divergent responses, including within El Salvador itself. The FMLN’s brief conquest of state power suggested, at its best, an emancipatory exit from the wreckage of neoliberalism, oligarchy and dependency – a promise that has propelled progressive popular forces into power in Honduras and, most recently, Guatemala. The FMLN’s trajectory, however, also offers a grim warning about the limits to transformation within the existing system. It is a lesson that Bukele has taken to heart.

Bukele offers no real solutions to El Salvador’s crisis. His cryptodreams dashed, he has embraced a familiar foreign investment-driven accumulation strategy centred on tourism and the export of low-wage migrants, maquiladora goods and call centre services to the US. This programme has failed to improve the country’s economic prospects, and while the anti-gang assault has buoyed Bukele’s approval ratings, economic concerns still top the list of perceived problems. As working-class youth swell a saturated prison system, the contradictions of poverty, inequality and dependency that produced El Salvador’s gangs are as glaring as ever.

The dozens of organizations that comprise the BRP are calling Salvadorans into the streets on Independence Day next week to march against the State of Exception, Bukele’s reelection bid and the latest slew of antidemocratic electoral reforms. These groups, most of them with origins in the FMLN, are working to rebuild the Salvadoran left in unenviable conditions. In the meantime, Bukele is remaking the country in his own image. It is an ugly sight.  

Read on: Hilary Goodfriend, ‘The Changemaker’, NLR-Sidecar, 12 August 2021.

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The Spanish Impasse

At the end of May, following a right-wing surge in the Spanish regional and municipal elections, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez – leader of the centre-left PSOE – announced that the country would soon return to the polls. A snap general election would decide whether Spain would be governed by a coalition of the Partido Popular and Vox: the reactionary alliance presiding over many of the country’s autonomous communities. It was widely anticipated that these parties would form a governing majority after the vote on 23 July. Yet the final results came as a surprise: an even split between the progressive and right-wing blocs. The PP picked up 137 seats while Vox won 33. The PSOE retained 121, and Sumar – the grouping of left-wing parties previously led by Podemos – came away with 31. Given the current parliamentary arithmetic, this leaves only two possible options: either a reinstatement of the current coalition of the PSOE and Sumar, backed by smaller nationalist parties, or another election. The right, which had made extensive preparations for government, was dismayed by the outcome. What were the dynamics behind it?  

A decade ago, Spanish parliamentary politics was based on a two-party system in which the electoral landscape was overwhelmingly dominated by the PP and PSOE. These sprawling apparatuses would sometimes rule with absolute majorities, sometimes with the biddable support of conservative Catalán and Basque nationalist parties. Today, that landscape has been reconfigured, with both the PP and PSOE consistently unable to govern without the support of parties that are situated to their right or left respectively. As a result, there are now two polarized political formations, each subject to various internal tensions.

The main problem for the PP, led by Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, is Vox – the party of the extreme right, which emerged out of a rupture within the PP itself. These outfits have a common genealogy and, up to a certain point, a shared social base. They are both descended from the cadre of Francoists that survived the transition to democracy and adapted without much effort to the new regime: ultra-monarchists, Spanish nationalists and cultural conservatives. Yet they represent distinct fractions of this sector. While the PP is an organic party of the bourgeoisie, Vox was always rooted in the old middle classes, infected by a nationalist-Catholic discourse that rails against modernity, denies the existence of sexism and climate change, and identifies itself with far-right forces elsewhere in Europe.

Vox articulates the grievances and moral panics of a stratum that has seen its privileges threatened by gradual changes in social life during the neoliberal era. Its unique combination of radicalism and conservatism is, at present, the main obstacle to the advance of the traditional right. On the one hand, the PP relies on this combative political formula to unite its base and mobilize it against progressivism. On the other, its use undermines the PP’s chances of reaching an accord with regionalist parties, whose support is essential to form a parliamentary majority. It is still too early to tell how the right intends to resolve this basic contradiction.

Moreover, by rallying the left-leaning electorate, Vox has been the decisive factor in creating the possibility of another progressive administration. Sumar, led by the Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz, lost more than 600,000 votes and seven deputies in the recent election; but given that its primary aim was to maintain a position that would allow it to play a role in cabinet formation, this result was not so bad. It was offset by the relatively strong performance of PSOE, which increased its constituency by more than a million votes.

At present, reviving the current coalition depends on the participation of Catalán nationalists, represented by the centre-left ERC and centre-right Junts. The present outlook for independentism is bleak, given the general exhaustion with the Catalán process. The ERC, ceding votes to the PSOE and to abstention, has fallen from 13 to 7 seats, while Junts has lost one deputy, bringing its total to 7 as well. Yet these weakened organizations now find themselves in the paradoxical role of kingmakers – able to make or break the governing alliance.

While the ERC’s support can be taken for granted, Junts is less predictable. Its demands – amnesty for more than 3,000 people charged with involvement in the unauthorized independence referendum of 2017 – are reasonable from a democratic perspective. But it is difficult for the PSOE and Sumar to accept them, for they are liable to alienate their supporters and spark conflict with the right-wing judiciary. As a result, everything depends on the calculation of the Junts leader and former Catalán president Charles Puigdemont. Will he capitulate, or will he hold the line? His party exemplifies the ‘autonomization of the political’ like few others. Though it started out as the vehicle of the Catalán business elite, today it answers only to itself, with a radicalized and committed base, but without a coherent programme or strategy for independence. This makes its next move all the more uncertain.  

If Puigdemont falls in line with Sánchez, the prospective coalition can only be understood as a transformist alliance of the forces that have dominated Spanish politics over the past decade: a PSOE that has reestablished itself at the centre of political life by winning enough passive support from the electorate, especially the youth; a Sumar that has banished and buried the radicalism of the early Podemos, remaking itself as a party with bland technocratic pretensions, akin to the German Greens; and a flaccid independentism that must choose between accepting Sánchez’s negotiating framework or remaining mired in perpetual crisis.

Behind the current parliamentary instability, then, lies a restoration of the status quo ante. If the 15M movement issued in a crisis of the two-party system, it has been revivified by these elections, with the PP and PSOE winning 65% of the vote between them – a significant increase on the previous four ballots. This surge in support by no means correlates to confidence in the PSOE’s programme, however. Its voters are no longer seduced by its siren songs of ‘change’ or ‘social transformation’. The only factor that allowed the centre left to avoid collapse was the emergence of Vox, and the fear it inspired among a large part of the public.

This being the case, how did the left move from a position of strength – aspiring to ‘overthrow the regime of 78’ – to one of weakness, if outright defeat, over the past ten years? The government formed by the PSOE and Unidas Podemos in 2019 was the first coalition since the start of the Republican period. Its rhetoric suggested a historic rupture. Yet, in practice, the administration made little progress on its social priorities, dedicating most of its efforts to stabilizing the constitutional order rather than pursuing any confrontation with the dominant classes. There were obvious reasons for this ‘reformism without reforms’. Unidas Podemos aimed to compensate for its lack of power in Sánchez’s cabinet by pursuing a limited legislative agenda which it hoped would lay the groundwork for future gains. Yet, as we know, it is much easier for a vitiated social democracy to pass superficial laws than to make deeper structural changes amid low growth and falling profitability.

For instance, although it passed some measures to increase the minimum wage, the PSOE-UP government failed to undertake any far-reaching action to reverse the secular decline in working-class purchasing power. Inflation peaked at 10% last year, while average wage growth stood at only 2%. Yolanda Díaz’s labour reforms may have expanded waged employment, but they left many injurious policies untouched – including the laws that make it easy for bosses to dismiss workers. EU ‘stimulus’ funds merely fattened the accounts of large energy companies, while the millions gifted to banks following the 2008 financial crisis were never repaid to the public. In foreign policy, Unidas Podemos aligned itself fully with NATO’s imperial project, augmenting the military budget by 25% at its behest. It was complicit in the state’s racist border policies, with shocking instances of fatal violence against African migrants on the Moroccan frontier. It could perhaps boast of streamlining the legal recognition of trans people and improving paternity leave – but such measures hardly validated its self-description as ‘the most progressive government in history’.

If this was the balance sheet of the last legislature, nobody expects its successor to be any better. In the progressive camp, debate is now focussed on how this precarious coalition might reproduce itself in power. This will involve some kind of political rebalancing among the different territories of the Spanish state, within the constitutional framework and without any federalist fervour. It will also mean maintaining social stability and avoiding labour unrest at all costs. Towards this end, the major trade unions, the CCOO and UGT, will assist the government in suppressing militancy and engaging in civil dialogue with employers’ organizations. With public expectations low, Sumar hopes that this will be enough to consolidate its support and see off challenges from the right. One factor that might threaten its agenda, however, is the EU’s return to fiscal discipline. Mechanisms to contain the previous social crisis through public spending – creating new civil service jobs, distributing meagre aid to the poorest sectors, managing the decline of public services – may no longer be possible in 2023, given the iron laws of the Commission.

This impasse – a PSOE-led government precariously in power, yet with no real programme for government – marks the termination of the previous Spanish political cycle, characterized by 15M, the Catalán independence process, the rise and fall of social movements and the eventual formation of the progressive coalition. Most of the forces that claimed to be anti-systemic during this period have now been reabsorbed into the dominant power structure. This reflects a deeper dialectic between the political sphere and civil society. It is at the level of politics that social mobilizations assume their ultimate form. The dynamics of the former determine the fortunes of the latter. In Spain, 15M found its final articulation in Podemos. The party’s rightward shift was then translated into widespread social passivity – marked by the integration of key activist layers into an ‘expanded state’. Thereafter, the public was further pacified and Spanish social contradictions were managed through the implementation of modest military-Keynesian policies.

Even so, the country remains riven with precarity and hardship, which poses a perennial threat to its political system. There is a growing proletarianized layer, comprising both migrant and native workers, excluded from official society and lacking electoral representation. Deindustrialisation and peripheralization has devastated swathes of Andalusia, Extremadura and the forgotten Spanish mezzogiorno. At the same time, sections of the working and lower-middle classes that once enjoyed relative stability are tending towards immiseration. A university degree no longer guarantees a stable job, nor does a job assure a decent salary. Rising inflation has created a gulf between a shrinking fraction of the middle classes capable of maintaining their living standards and ordinary workers – many of them in the manufacturing, logistics and service sectors – who are merging with the impoverished mass. This group is organizationally atomized. There is some trade union capacity in industry, but it remains negligible in services.

Spain’s peculiar class configuration is bound up with three major unresolved crises that will continue to shape its political landscape over the coming years. One is purely a domestic phenomenon, while the others are outgrowths of global capitalism. The first is independentism – most acute in Catalonia, Euskal Herria and Galicia. This forces the country’s progressive camp to make alliances with nationalist forces which it will struggle to hold together in the long term. It also serves to isolate the right, whose fanatical unionism allows it to collect votes in Spain while losing them in the stateless nations. Nationalist parties, meanwhile, have failed to move past the defeat of the Catalán process. Caught in a strategic crisis, they have sought their own transformist path via reintegration into the Spanish constitutional framework.

The second major crisis concerns Spain’s role in the world economy. As a minor post-imperial nation, its international position is that of foot-soldier to the US and the EU. Its link with these prosperous powers makes it ideologically invested in the fantasy of neoliberalism: the limitless possibilities opened up by free markets and unfettered enterprise. But, in reality, its relatively backward form of capitalism makes it dependent on the oscillations of European monetary policy. This is particularly damaging in the current global conjuncture, where the American Leviathan is stimulating ‘green growth’ while its European partners are forced to bear the brunt of the Ukraine war. The EU’s relegation to the role of second-tier power will have damaging effects on its weaker member states: deflationary contraction, further cuts to public spending, and attempts to shift the burden of a future recession onto the working class. These factors will further constrain the programme of any Spanish government.

Finally, the structure of the Spanish economy impedes its adoption of increasingly necessary environmental measures. It remains reliant on tourism, devoid of energy autonomy, and beholden to a parasitic business class that benefits from generous state subsidies. There is an urgent need to transform the country’s productive base to cope with the impact of climate change – already manifest in deadly heatwaves and droughts over the past season. Yet none of the mainstream parties is willing to contemplate this shift. Without it, the country’s crisis tendencies will only deepen.

In the near future, we will see whether Sánchez can assemble a parliamentary majority or whether he will have to call new elections. Alongside the process of transformismo, the influence of the radical left continues to wane, as demonstrated by the poor showing of the CUP in Catalonia and of Adelante Andalucía. To reverse this trend, socialists must refuse to be tied down by electoral cycles and abjure any association with state progressivism. Their first priority should be to develop a programme for this new conjuncture and radicalize what remains of the social and trade union movements. Given the limitations of the ruling parties, new outbursts of resistance are likely to occur over the coming years. But they will be futile in the absence of a new left project, actively supported by significant sectors of the working class and independent of the governing bloc. Only such a movement could reopen the political possibilities that parliamentarism has foreclosed.  

Read on: Pedro M. Rey-Araújo & Ekaitz Cancela, ‘Lessons of the Podemos Experiment’, NLR 138.

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Under Western Eyes

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer who died earlier this summer aged 94, represented a number of things, but they were all variations – to borrow one of his own favourite words – on the theme of freedom. To the Western readership which embraced his work perhaps as eagerly as that of any non-Anglophone writer during the final quarter of the twentieth century (Marquez was the obvious competitor) he seemed to offer a distinctive, unorthodox and unassailably authoritative approach to novelistic form, literary history and the sanctity of private life. But no less important to Kundera’s project and legacy were the liberties he took, the freedoms he granted himself – from responsibility and rigour, from his obligations to coherence and even reality.

He was born on April Fools’ Day 1929 in a small Moravian city, Brno, where his father, a pianist, served as the head of the state conservatory named after his mentor Leoš Janáček. Kundera initially studied music before turning to poetry, short stories and plays while lecturing in world literature at the FAMU film school in Prague. Though he had been temporarily expelled in 1950 from the Party, his early collection, Man, A Wide Garden (1954), was a classic of Czech communist verse and Kundera was, in the words of his contemporary Ivan Klíma, ‘an indulged and rewarded child’ of the regime. That changed in 1967, when he published a novel critical of political orthodoxies, The Joke, and delivered a speech at the annual writers’ congress celebrating the vitality of Czech culture and denouncing censorship, a contribution to the reformist movement that culminated in Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring. After the country’s invasion by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968, Kundera was fired from his teaching post, and his books – along with those of 400 colleagues – were removed from libraries and banned from shops.

His emergence as a figure of international prominence was extraordinarily swift. Until the late 1960s, Kundera’s only work to attract attention outside Czechoslovakia was a play, The Owner of the Keys (1962). Following publication of The Joke however, he received a visit from a delegation of Latin American writers (Marquez, Cortazar and Fuentes); introducing the French edition, Louis Aragon called it one of the great novels of the century; a film adaptation was shown in London and New York. In 1973, his second novel, Life Is Elsewhere, which had been smuggled out of Czechoslovakia by Claude Gallimard, was awarded the Prix Médicis, an award for under-appreciated writers, and Edgar Faure, the President of the French parliament, helped Kundera and his wife, Věra Hrabánková, to obtain a travel visa. They moved first to Rennes, then Paris, where he was made a professor at the L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. (He compared his move to a rebirth, something he had previously hoped for from Communism.) Briefly stateless after the revocation of his Czech citizenship, in 1981, he was granted a passport by Mitterrand.

By this point, he was arguably the country’s most famous émigré writer. A one-volume edition of Kundera’s story cycle Laughable Loves had appeared in Philip Roth’s Penguin series ‘Writers from the Other Europe’, and his stirring sequence of related narratives The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), the first book he wrote in exile, was serialized in the New Yorker. When it appeared in hardback, the New York Times ran both an interview with Roth and a review by John Updike under the shared headline ‘The Most Original Book of the Season’. Kundera was felt to be bringing news from behind the Iron Curtain, offering descriptions of Soviet oppression and hypocrisy – the most memorable being a passage about the Communist poet Paul Éluard participating in an anniversary dance while his friend Záviš Kalandra was being hanged. But in a development that Kundera welcomed, his intervention was taken as primarily formal, political to the degree that it challenged the primacy of politics – no ‘dissident’ intervention along the lines of Czesław Milosz’s The Captive Mind (1953) or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968). Kundera chose to write about the society he had left for the virtues it embodied, however residual or under siege. History in his telling was ‘an alien force’ which man ‘cannot control’, yet the novel was ‘born of man’s freedom’. His kind of ‘thinking novel’ – almost always divided into seven parts – was an assembly of narrated episodes, ‘reflective passages’, macro-structural dichotomies, adaptation of musical techniques (leitmotif, counterpoint, fugue, variation), anecdote, allegory, dream, fairytale and farce. There was consensus over the sort of unencumbered authorial figure he cut. John Bayley described him as ‘a man let loose among all the literary fashions of the West, grabbing this and that, intoxicated by the display patterns of freedom’, while Terry Eagleton, as different a critic as you could imagine (though unlikely successor to Bayley’s Oxford chair), remarked that he ‘treats the novel as a place where you can write anything you like’.

During the closing act of the Cold War, in a literary culture characterized by self-conscious cosmopolitanism and PEN galas, Kundera was the object of rhapsody, his work discussed – or name dropped – by a dizzying range of figures at or near their own height of prominence, from E.L. Doctorow to Tzvetan Todorov, Italo Calvino to Elizabeth Hardwick, David Lodge to Madonna. Raymond Carver, leading short story writer of the day, used the key passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being – about the ‘lightness’ imposed on human beings by having only one life – as the epigraph for his final collection Elephant (1988). Kundera provoked not just passionate advocacy but acts of devotion. Ian McEwan, a committed anti-Communist and notably reluctant literary journalist, reviewed both The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Kundera’s next novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), in addition to interviewing him for Granta; Edmund White, newly celebrated as the author of A Boy’s Own Story (1982), translated from French his lecture on the tragedy befalling ‘Central Europe’; Susan Sontag turned theatre director to stage his play Jacques and his Master, at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, in 1985.

Kundera’s aims and sensibility came into sharper focus with the appearance of his literary essays, collected in a series of books starting with The Art of the Novel in 1986. Reviewing Philip Kaufman’s film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Pauline Kael explained that Kundera set himself up as a ‘rational spokesman for playfulness’, mischievously adding (in parenthesis) that he ‘also sees it as a tradition’. That tradition originated in the early days of the novel – Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, de Laclos – and rallied again with Kafka, Musil and Broch. The tendencies of the nineteenth century, the novel’s putative peak, were at once too Romantic or subjectivist, too in thrall to plot at the expense of a confiding narrator. According to another conception of the thinking novel – Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism – Dostoevsky would belong in this company, as a practitioner of Menippean satire. But for Kundera, Dostoevsky was the bête noire, an example of a writer for whom feeling was elevated to the rank of truth – a lyrical attitude that the true novelist existed to expose.

In The Joke, he had offered something close to a paean to mid-life disappointment, the realization that one’s dreams were a lie. Life is Elsewhere (1973), about a poet and police informer who dies aged twenty, more directly revealed the enemy as youth and putatively youthful concepts – solipsism, revolutionary fervour, the poetic impulse. ‘A person becomes mature when he leaves his “lyrical age” behind’. At the end of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in a passage Kundera described as an ‘oneiric image of an infantocratic future’, Taomina moves to an island exclusively populated by children and is killed. In the same book, Kundera outlined two kinds of laughter, that of the devil, who exhibits lofty disdain for the idea of order, and that of angels, who laugh to restore or underscore a sense of divine harmonies. His concept of a ‘broadly developed and mature personality’ was one that recognised ‘illusions concerning progress’.

There’s an obvious precedent for an aesthetically inclined, would-be apolitical, anti-Soviet, Dostoevsky-bashing novelist with a wife named Vera, who dispensed churlish mots, set great store by a specialized category of bad taste, published in a second language, railed against sentiment and seriousness, and found fame in exile: Vladimir Nabokov. But Kundera exhibited a deeper kinship with another exile from the East, Joseph Conrad, whose work was underpinned by a similar conviction about the futility of human agency. (Conrad went so far as refusing to sign petitions, even one protesting the imminent execution of his old friend Roger Casement.) Defining irony in a glossary of words collected in The Art of the Novel, Kundera quotes a would-be revolutionary from Conrad’s Under Western Eyes – a riposte to Dostoevsky – to the effect that an ironic stance negates ‘all saving instincts . . . all faith . . . all devotion . . . all action’. The formulation finds an inverted echo in Kundera’s claim, in a well-known passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that ‘kitsch’, a term he associated with self-serving fantasies but applied to virtually anything he did not like, banishes ‘every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end up by doubting life itself)’ and ‘all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously)’.

The title of The Joke refers to a lampoon of Party optimism sent on a postcard by Ludvik, one of the narrators, to an earnest girlfriend, who reports him. But it also refers to the joke played on him by fate when decades later he tries to exact revenge. His ‘mission’ involves seducing the wife of the apparatchik who ruined his life only to discover that the man is a willing cuckold, glad to be shot of her. In the memorable final section of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas, a promiscuous former surgeon, and Tereza, the woman who has ended his regime of ‘erotic friendships’, are living deep in the Czech countryside, an internal exile resulting from a half-hearted but nonetheless ill-fated anti-Communist gesture on Tomas’s part. (The setting recalls Patusan, where ‘Lord’ Jim moves to leave behind what Marlow calls his ‘earthly failings’ and ‘reputation’.) In the final moments, Tereza apologises to Tomas. She had forced him to move back to Prague from Geneva on account of her homesickness. He is quick to reject the apology. When she says that surgery had been his mission, he insists that missions are ‘stupid’. He calls it ‘a terrific relief’ to recognize you’re ‘free, free of missions’ – a position no less applicable, it seems, to working as a surgeon than to taking a fruitless and costly stand against a repressive government.  

The central difference between Kundera and Conrad is how they conceive of the next step. Their attitude to radical programmes – to programmes of any kind – was similarly pitying and dismissive, but whereas Conrad deployed irony as something like a filter, a tool and marker of his detachment from terrestrial affairs, an aid in his search for transcendent meaning, Kundera was on constant guard against being gulled. To Conrad, a higher salvation was possible – if ‘saving instincts’ were to be rejected, it was in favour of a ‘saving truth’. Kundera receded into a pseudo-rationalist defeatism. 

Václav Havel, who had debated Kundera in the late 1960s on the question of whether Czechoslovakia was consigned to its fate, noted with admirable empathy that ‘total scepticism of Kundera’s kind’ was a ‘natural outcome of losing one’s enthusiastic illusions’. Kundera acknowledged that his own ‘lyric age’ had coincided with ‘the worst period of the Stalinist era’, yet this awareness failed to put a brake on his convictions. In his essay ‘Paris or Prague’, which appeared in English in Granta in 1984, he identified himself as an optimist of scepticism, a believer in scepticism’s force and power to prevail. He continued that what he shared with Central European novelists was ‘sorrow about the Western twilight. Not a sentimental sorrow. An ironic one.’ But it’s hard to construe what this distinction amounts to in the sphere of practice, how it differs from the fruitless despair that Sartre, discussing The Joke in his 1971 essay ‘The Socialism that Came in from the Cold’, was adamant that Kundera had stopped short of exhibiting.

Kundera’s positive vision was entirely retrospective. As he wrote of Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: ‘Only looking back could bring her consolation’. He defined a European as ‘one who is nostalgic for Europe’, and called ‘Czechoslovakia’, which originated in 1918, ‘too young’ a term to use. He was especially drawn to the idea of Central Europe, of which Bohemia formed a part, having been destroyed by Communism, an Eastern import – ‘raped by Asia’, in Havel’s paraphrase. He invoked a lost haven of pluralism and variety, a unity that ignored conventional topographic borders and markers, and was prone to saying things like ‘Do you know that in the seventeenth century Lithuania was a powerful European nation?’ It was exactly the sort of misty thinking that he professed to deride. Perry Anderson compared the notion that Kundera’s homeland was closer to ‘Western than Eastern patterns of historical experience’ to ‘the kind of redescription to be found in estate agents’ brochures’. Even Timothy Garton Ash, a fellow promoter of a Central European mirage, recognized that Kundera’s treatment of Russia was ‘absurd’.

The sternest rebuke came from Joseph Brodsky, writing in 1985, in response to an essay in which Kundera cleanly equated Communism, Dostoevky’s novels, and Eastern irrationality. Brodsky was no supporter of the Soviet Union – he moved to America after enduring a decade of persecution – but he lamented Kundera’s ‘lopsided’ historical vision. And though he said that he could readily understand why Kundera should wish to be more European than the Europeans, he argued that Kundera displayed a stubborn aversion to remembering the intellectual origins of Nazism and Marxism, and the emotional radicalism that was supposed to underpin them. ‘The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth – none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga’, he wrote. On seeing a Russian tank in the street, there was ‘every reason to think of Diderot’ – the writer Kundera had turned to when asked to adapt The Idiot for the stage. (‘I do not feel qualified to debate those who blame Voltaire for the gulag’, Kundera said a few months later, when receiving the Jerusalem Prize.) Dostoevsky’s novels in fact portrayed the Russian denouements to scenarios that developed in the West. The Possessed, for example, provided a reminder that Communism had encountered greater resistance in Russia than it later would in Kundera’s beloved and super-sensible Central Europe.

Brodsky, though focused on a local debate, had identified Kundera’s characteristic capacity for swatting aside any obstacle to what he wanted to say or do. He was not alone. Milan Jungmann claimed that in Kundera’s interviews his ‘true likeness is completely obliterated’. Like Tomas’s lover Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he began to insert ‘mystifications’ into his biography, describing himself in the period before the invasion as a ‘relatively unknown Czech intellectual’. The scholar J.P. Stern accused him of perpetuating ‘the myths on which he and I were brought up’. Todorov noted that Kundera’s belief that barbarity reigns was hardly compatible with the wide recognition of his work; Will Self that his reductive certitude was ‘poorly governed’ by its avowed belief in a pluralist mindset. Kundera’s fiction was by no means immune. Updike felt that elements of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were ‘rooted in the sky, in whims beyond accounting’, and later summarized its effect as ‘etherealized’. Klíma, notionally ventriloquizing the position of the Czech intelligentsia – though with notable gusto – said that ‘the hardness of life has a much more complicated shape’ than we find in Kundera’s novels, which instead resembled ‘the sort of picture you would see from a very capable foreign journalist who’d spent a few days in our country’.

Yet this cluster of vices – a vice-in-variations – is largely absent from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A star-crossed love story, it is, along with The Joke, his most solidly constructed book, far less capricious and conversational than its predecessor The Book of Laughter and Forgetting or successor Immortality (1988) or the four novellas he wrote in French, Slowness (1995), Identity (1998), Ignorance (2000) and The Festival of Insignificance (2014). It also offers the widest range of competing visions, and more than anything he wrote resists – though it did of course attract – the go-to Kundera adjective, ‘brilliant’. Janet Malcolm noted that the novel seemed to lead a ‘charmed life . . . Every door Kundera tries opens for him’. The claim is reminiscent of Updike calling The Great Gatsby ‘superbly fortunate’ and of James Wood’s reflection that certain novels – he named Dead Souls, Midnight’s Children, and Herzog – achieve something like ‘the inventor’s secret machine, elixir, or formula’.

In a sense, The Joke, with its devilish central conceit, more properly belongs in this company. But The Unbearable Lightness of Being offers portraits of characters who achieve dynamic life while illustrating the narrator’s stated theme – whether or not to live with ties, and the impossibility, within a single life, of evaluating the chosen course. The most palpable source of luck is that the seductive quiddity of narrative works not only to rein in Kundera’s discursive tics but also outwit his habitual certainties. The ‘lightness’ of a life without commitment is revealed as freighted with risk, as fraught with danger, as an existence weighed down by connection or conviction. The emphasis on the difficulty of having just one life, of not having the benefit of ‘eternal recurrence,’ forces a recognition in Kundera of the precarious truth-status of any position: engagement or apathy, feeling or detachment, Geneva or Prague. But, however at odds this was with how he talked about the world, it vindicates his idea of the novel – as a vehicle for uncertainty, a route to ‘suprapersonal wisdom’, much as Franz, an academic and devoted dissident with whom Tomas shares a lover, says that New York achieves a richness that far exceeds the conscious intentions of ‘human design’. Kundera frequently cut corners – Todorov used the word ‘oversimplification’, Klíma ‘simplified’ – but he also managed to write at least one book that tells the reader, as he said a novel should, that ‘things are not as simple as they seem’.

In 2002, Harold Bloom, in a nominal introduction to a collection of essays exploring Kundera’s work, cast doubt over the writer’s ‘lasting eminence’. He called The Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘formulaic, over-determined, and in places unbearably light’, and asserted – on what basis he does not specify – that ‘young people no longer go off to the Czech capital with his novels in their backpacks’. Kundera may have ceased to be a cult or sensation, the near-to-hand reference-point that he had been for the Gen X heroes of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995) and Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995).

Such gloating talk of Kundera’s eclipse is exaggerated. If he was no longer in backpacks, he was still on library desks and bedside tables. And his example has endured. Geoff Dyer, noting that readers had started to take their ‘amazement’ with Kundera for granted, argued that, far from being a mere ‘influence’ like, say, Martin Amis – stylistic, or tonal, or temperamental – he had developed a novelistic software that fellow practitioners could download. Writers who have directly cited his influence include Adam Thirlwell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Benjamin Markovits, Leïla Slimani, Taiye Selasi. Though The Unbearable Lightness of Being has claims to being a separate, extra-authorial phenomenon – it is at once his best-known and least typical book – the vision of the thinking novel as exemplified in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Immortality anticipated the essayism and autofiction now rather narrowly credited to W.G. Sebald. 

A greater challenge to Kundera’s legacy than the inevitable loss of modishness may be the charge most extensively levelled by Joan Smith in the ‘Czech mates’ chapter of her book Misogynies (1989). Even Jonathan Coe, having defended him against Smith’s claims, ended his 2015 essay ‘How Important Is Milan Kundera Today?’ with a reference to ‘the problematic sexual politics which send ripples of disquiet through even his finest books’. But this seems not to be the dominant position today. Gina Frangello, writing in the LARB in 2020, acknowledged Kundera’s misogyny only in the course of celebrating his work as a ‘definitive craft book’ on the uses of authorial omniscience. As recently as May – 37 years after the Madonna name-check – the English-Albanian pop star Dua Lipa praised The Unbearable Lightness of Being for its portrayal of sexual relationships.

It is easy to imagine Kundera’s novel enjoying an essentially charmed afterlife as well, proving sufficiently resilient or multivalent to withstand polemical blows, becoming a beneficiary as well a victim of the loss of its original context in Cold War jockeying and Anglo-American fetishism of Slavic sexual freedoms. John Banville expressed his astonishment, on returning to the book in the new millennium, at how little ‘a work so firmly rooted in its time’ had seemed to age. But then distance is often a boon to the longer-term reputation of writers apparently defined by a series of spot-lit moments, offering readers a reprieve from churlish sermonizing, misplaced stridency, or the spectacle of artistic decline, and bringing a sense of proportion and perspective, even a kind of serenity, a freedom from the fray, that provides more fertile ground for appreciation. As Tomas reflects, following a break-up with Tereza, ‘Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained’.

Read on: Jiří Hájek, ‘Condition of the Novel (Czechoslovakia)’, NLR I/29.

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Non-Events

Narrative painting in the European tradition tended to depict drama and action: scenes from biblical tales, classical mythology and historical events such as military confrontations and nuptial pagaentries. By contrast, the Chinese tradition of narrative painting was less overtly dramatic and more detached – ‘interstitial’ rather than ‘architectonic’, to borrow terms Andrew Plaks applied to classical Chinese fiction and historiography. Chinese literary narratives put equal, if not more, emphasis on ‘non-events’, or the interstitial spaces between events – purposeless gatherings and inconsequential conversations. Even battle scenes in Chinese historical fiction are often slowed down and their tension diffused using devices such as interspersed verse, discursive digression and frequent recapitulation, producing a ritualised ‘hiatus’ rather than a climactic action. Analagous effects can be seen in traditional Chinese narrative painting, always closely connected to history and literature, and where the ‘interstitial’ quality is if anything more pronounced since paintings convey narrative spatially rather than temporally.

The equivalent of ‘narrative painting’ in Chinese is xu shi hua (picture that tells a story) or gu shi hua (picture of an ancient event).The two concepts are intertwined. Sometimes a contemporary incident was indirectly depicted through the evocation of the past – especially common when the painting served a political purpose. Narrative painting flourished during the political turbulence of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), when North China was conquered by the Jurchens, ethnically the same group as the Manchu who would seize the whole of China in the seventeenth century, later adding what are today Tibet and Xinjiang to their conquests. The Jurchens defeated the Northern Song, pushing the Han rulers south of the Huai River, re-established as the Southern Song (1127–1279). In the south, the court painter Li Tang produced Duke Wen of Jin Recovering His State, using this ancient story of dynastic revival – from the seventh century BC – to express Emperor Gaozong’s ambition to reclaim the lost land. In the north, Yang Bangji, a Chinese literatus serving at the court of Sinicized Jurchen ruler Hailing (1149–61), depicted the Song’s humiliating tribute mission in A Diplomatic Mission to the Jin, in an effort to legitimize the Jurchens’ rule over North China.

Among the political paintings of the time, the theme of Mingfei chusai (Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier) stands out on account of its female protagonist. Consort Ming refers to Wang Zhaojun (54 BC–19BC), a lady-in-waiting. According to Han Shu (History of the Former Han), she was sent by Emperor Yuan to marry the ruler of the neighbouring Xiongnu empire – an early example of heqin, a diplomatic marriage alliance to ensure peace between China and surrounding states. This historical episode was fictionalised in a collection of short stories, Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital) some three centuries later. There, a corrupt court painter, whom Zhaojun is too proud to bribe, produces a deliberately flawed portrait of the royal consort – so flawed the emperor decides to send her away. Just as she leaves, the emperor appreciates her beauty for the first time, regrets his decision to exile her and has all his painters executed. The legend stirred the imaginations of Chinese literati and street performers alike. Generations of poets commemorated Zhaojun in their verses and made pilgrimages to her hometown. Demoted mandarins compared their own loyalty to Zhaojun’s patriotism, blaming their exiles on deceitful opponents like the villainous painter.

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Gong Suran (12th–13th century), Mingfei chusai tu (Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier), preserved at Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

The handscroll Consort Ming Departing for the Frontier is one of the earliest visual representations of the legend. The scroll, which many attribute to the Jin dynasty, is currently preserved in the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts in Japan. It measures 30.2 cm vertically and 160.2 cm horizontally when fully spread out. It shows Zhaojun being escorted into exile. The sand hills in the background are indicated with light-tone washes. Wind is suggested by the fluttering banner, waving ribbons and the sleeves half-covering the faces. The composition comprises four sections, arranged horizontally in a linear fashion. Those who came to look at the painting at the time would have unfolded the scroll from right to left. What they would see first would be the two Xiongnu men on horseback leading the procession, one carrying a flag, with a foal trotting alongside. Next would appear the lady-in-waiting herself and her maid, both riding a horse led by a servant. Wearing a fur hat with earmuffs and dressed like a warrior, Zhaojun grips the reins and looks ahead. The maid turns around as if trying to catch a last glimpse of her disappearing hometown. She carries a pipa, the four-stringed Chinese lute which, according to legend, Zhaojun played well. Following them is a group of seven men, among them a Han envoy holding a fan to shield his face from the wind. The last section depicts a Xiongnu man on horseback holding a falcon, and a hound loping along slightly ahead of the horse and its rider. The scene was painted with ink on paper, in delicate brushstrokes reminiscent of the baimiao style of the Northern Song master Li Gonglin (1049–1106). The narrative is minimal: instead of the drama of the send-off or arrival, the scene presented is, in essence, a ‘non-event’, its figures simply on their way. Yet the circumstantial details of this ‘interstitial’ space trigger the imagination, carrying a train of associations: their daily meals would come from hunting using the falcon, the sorrowful melody emitted out of the pipa would make wild geese linger, the foal trotting ahead of Zhaojun’s horse suggests the motherhood that would inevitably follow her marriage in a foreign land.  

Gong Suran, Mingfei chusai tu (detail), preserved at Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

Little is known about the identity of the painter, who signed the scroll ‘Zhenyang / Gong Suran hua’ (‘painted by Gong Suran of Zhenyang’. They were once assumed to be a Taoist woman artist because the signature was misread as ‘Zhenyang Gong / Suran’, ‘gong’ meaning temple. The current consensus is that Gong is the surname of the artist, and that Zhenyang was today’s Zhengding county in Hebei province, which fell under the Jurchen rule at the time. The stamp above the painter’s name reads ‘seal of zhao fu shi’, referring to a temporary post in charge of military affairs during wartime. Some speculate that the seal belonged to Wu Xian (?–1234), who was assigned the post in Zhenyang in 1217 and organized military resistance against Mongols, who frequently attacked the Jin state. In 1214, after Genghis Khan besieged Jin’s capital Zhongdu (the southwestern part of present-day Beijing), the Jurchens sent a diplomatic delegation to the Mongols, offering ‘gold and silks, five hundred boys and girls, three thousand horses’, as well as the Jurchen Princess Qiguo, daughter of Emperor Wanyan Yongji, to be married to Genghis Khan. It is possible that Gong’s painting of the legend of Zhaojun was commissioned to record the contemporary heqin event. The hypothesis is consistent with the scroll’s pictorial details: the black flag with a white sun in the middle is the symbol of the Jurchens; the clothes of the Xiongnu riders resemble those worn by the Jurchens and the Mongols; the hair style of two of the envoys was typical among the Mongols. One of the three colophons appended to the painting appears to confirm the theory. The poem ridicules heqin as desperate politics and sympathizes with the painter who, their intention delicately concealed, had succeeded in making the viewer feel sorrow about both the ancient story and contemporary matters.

Was Gong Suran a woman? If so, the painting would be a very rare representation of a woman protagonist by a woman painter concerning a political theme. It would certainly challenge the conventional conception of woman painters in dynastic times as courtesans who depicted willows on fans to reject clients’ advances, or as gentry who picked up their skills from brothers or fathers only to produce paintings as gifts in social exchanges. Museum labels tend to refer to Gong as a woman, but this is an assumption likely based on the name’s feminine intonation. There is no historical evidence available to confirm the painter’s gender or anything else about them. Perhaps the question should instead be: what was the general experience of women under Jurchen rule, especially if we see the image of Zhaojun as not only a historical icon but also a mirror of contemporary lives? Literary sources, such as Jinshi (History of Jin), praise women for their military skills – for leading troops and defending cities. Jin society appeared to be less hierarchical: one Song envoy visiting the Jin state was astonished by the sight of Emperor Aguda’s wife sitting next to him receiving guests and a second wife rolling up her sleeves to serve food. Acculturation went both ways. Elite Jurchen women started to wear silk and read Chinese classics; Han women, meanwhile, had more access to public venues under Jurchen rule than their counterparts in the Southern Song where foot-binding and Confucian ethics would confine them to interior spaces. In a large Jin mural (1167) at Yanshan temple in Shanxi province, women can be seen walking freely on the streets, mingling with men, shopping at the market, playing pipa in an open-air pavilion. This forms a stark contrast to the depiction of women in the Northern Song masterpiece Qingming shanghe tu (Along the River during the Qingming Festival), completed sixty years earlier: of the eight hundred figures featured in the scroll, only a dozen or so are women, many half hidden behind windows or peering from sedan chairs.

Zhang Yu (12th–13th century), Wenji guihan tu (Lady Wenji Returning to Han, detail), preserved at Jilin Museum, China.

The composition of the Gong scroll is almost identical to that of another Jin painting, now stored at the Jilin Museum. It was signed by a court painter named Zhang Yu serving at the Commission of Palace Services. The crucial difference in the Zhang scroll is the omission of the maid figure carrying the pipa. Later generations titled the painting Wenji guihan tu (Lady Wenji Returning to Han). Cai Wenji (177–239), of the Eastern Han dynasty, was abducted by Xiongnu invaders but eventually returned home after twelve years’ captivity. During the Song–Jin period, Wenji’s tale was frequently depicted in paintings, many in sequential scenes based on a verse epic called Hujia shiba pai (Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute), composed by the Tang poet Liu Shang (727–805). Like Zhaojun, Wenji also had a contemporary reincarnation. When the Jurchens captured the last two emperors of the Northern Song, they also took captive Empress Dowager Wei, who had to spend sixteen years in Manchuria until her son, by then Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song, signed a peace treaty with the Jurchens in exchange for her release. Questions remain as to whether the Gong scroll copied the Zhang scroll or whether both were based on an earlier painting. Whichever is the case, there is an undeniable relation between them: a poem on the Gong scroll juxtaposes Zhaojun’s pipa with Wenji’s flute; Emperor Qianlong’s inscription on the Zhang scroll contrasts Wenji’s rehabilitation with Zhaojun’s permanent expulsion. In this alternative tradition of visualizing human experience, the drama of departure or return is out of frame. Instead, a hiatus: an interstitial space that seems directionless and endless.

Read on: J. X. Zhang, ‘The Roar of the Elephant’, NLR 131.