New Left Review 120, November–December 2019

Citation preview

120 nov/dec 2019

NEW

LEFT REVIEW

Carlo Ginzburg Shame as Political Emotion Nicholas Mulder Homo Europus Juan Carlos Monedero State Powers in Latin America Rohana Kuddus September Surprise Oliver Eagleton The Bluebird’s Song Zion Lights Hot-Earth Rebellion Aaron Benanav The Realm of Necessity Emma Fajgenbaum Akerman’s Long Goodbye Owen Hatherley An Egyptian Niemeyer Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri Rethinking Empire in the Age of Trump

Editor Susan Watkins Associate Editor Francis Mulhern Editor at Large Tom Hazeldine

Editorial Committee Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson, Kheya Bag, Emilie Bickerton, Robin Blackburn, Robert Brenner, Malcolm Bull, Jacob Collins, Mike Davis, Daniel Finn, Tom Hazeldine, Rob Lucas, Tom Mertes, Francis Mulhern, Dylan Riley, Julian Stallabrass, Jacob Stevens, Tony Wood, JoAnn Wypijewski, Alexander Zevin

Publishing Director Digital Editor Assistant Editors Subscriptions Editorial Intern

Kheya Bag Rob Lucas Lola Seaton, Alice Bamford Midori Lake Oliver Eagleton

Address New Left Review 6 Meard Street London w1f 0eg United Kingdom

Tel Fax Email Website

+44 (0)20 7734 8830 +44 (0)20 7439 3869 [email protected] www.newleftreview.org

Designed by Peter Campbell

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ARTICLES

Juan Carlos Monedero

Snipers in the Kitchen

Carlo Ginzburg

The Bond of Shame

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Nicholas Mulder

Homo Europus

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Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Empire, Twenty Years On

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MOVEMENTS

Rohana Kuddus

September Surprise

Zion Lights

Hot-Earth Rebels



ARTICLE

Aaron Benanav

Automation—Part 2



REVIEWS

Owen Hatherley

A Mud-Brick Utopia

147

Emma Fajgenbaum

Akerman’s Farewell

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Oliver Eagleton

Mind-Forged Manacles?

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PROGRAMME NOTES Juan Carlos Monedero : Snipers in the Kitchen Amid ongoing political turbulence in Latin America, Juan Carlos Monedero mobilizes the resources of state theory, from Gramsci to Poulantzas, to provide a comparative critical analysis of the cycle of left governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil.

Carlo Ginzburg : The Bond of Shame Is shame for one’s country, not love of it, the truer mark of belonging? Lineaments of a political emotion, at the intersection of biology and history, from Nestor’s invocation on the battlefield of Troy to Primo Levi’s remembrance of the Red Army. How might we imagine the boundaries of a shame-based community?

Nicholas Mulder : Homo Europus As Jean-Claude Juncker steps down from the European Commission, reflections on his career as synecdoche for the political culture of the eu—and the passage of his homeland, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, from steel producer to financial lair.

Hardt & Negri : Empire, Twenty Years On If Empire was, for many, the signature text for the age of globalization, how do its theses fare now, in an era of rising nationalism and protracted crisis? In a landmark update, the authors examine how the twin spheres of power and (re)production have spun out of sync—symptoms of a system that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, works by breaking down.

Rohana Kuddus : Indonesia’s September Surprise What is the wider meaning of the recent mass youth protests across the Indonesian archipelago—Java, Sumatra, Papua, Sulawesi, Bali—and what do they portend for the second term of Jokowi, once the Obamastyle candidate of ‘hope and change’?

Zion Lights : Hot-Earth Rebels Interview with a leading activist from Extinction Rebellion. How the uk’s new climate militants adapted civil-disobedience theories and ‘flat management’ structures to shut down central London in the name of environmental emergency.

Aaron Benanav : Automation—2 Concluding his two-part analysis of technological development and global labour-market dysfunction, Aaron Benanav rebuts the automation theorists’ call for Universal Basic Income with a counterproposal. Can we invent the future by working backwards from the world we want to build?

book reviews

Owen Hatherley on Salma Samar Damluji and Viola Bertini, Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia. A full-scale study of the radical mud-brick designs of Egypt’s pre-eminent modernist architect.

Emma Fajgenbaum on Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs. Part memoir, part chronicle of a troubled-tender relationship, the filmmaker’s final book.

Oliver Eagleton on Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine. A Marxian-Freudian polemic against social media, seen as irredeemably hostile to progressive politics.

contributors

Aaron Benanav: teaches in social sciences at the University of Chicago; see also nlr 48, 61 and 119

Emma Fajgenbaum: associate editor at Jacobin; see also nlr 93, 100, 104 and 116/117

Carlo Ginzburg: emeritus at the Scuola Normale Superiore; Nondimanco: Machiavelli, Pascal (2018) will be published in English by Verso

Michael Hardt: at Duke; co-author of Empire (2000); see also nlr 14, 48 and 64

Owen Hatherley: books include A New Kind of Bleak (2013) and The Ministry of Nostalgia (2017); culture editor at Tribune; see also nlr 59 and 105

Rohana Kuddus: researches the histories and interconnexions of information, technology and society in Indonesia; see also nlr 104

Zion Lights: author of The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting (2015); in the media circle of Extinction Rebellion

Juan Carlos Monedero: at Universidad Complutense de Madrid; former member of the Podemos Citizens’ State Council

Nicholas Mulder: teaches political and economic history Antonio Negri: co-author of Empire (2000); Spinoza: Then and Now is forthcoming from Polity.

juan carlos monedero

SNIPERS IN THE KITCHEN State Theory and Latin America’s Left Cycle

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he question of state power is one of the most complex issues for emancipatory politics. Even when popular parties with redistributive agendas have won electoral majorities and gained, in principle, access to the governmental levers of power, they face a host of obstacles in implementing their campaign promises. They do not enter into full possession of the state, as if it were a new home: the rooms may be booby-trapped, the stairs barricaded; there may be snipers in the kitchen—shooters who are unseen because they are taken for granted, and all the more effective because unseen. As Lenin reminded Kautsky, even if they have been ejected from office, ‘the exploiters’ still retained many practical advantages: money, property, superior education, knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of rule, norms of organization, close connections with higher officialdom and so forth.1 In liberal democracies, enormous pressures can be brought to bear upon radical administrations, whether at municipal, state or federal level. The mainstream media, the judiciary, the intelligence services, opposition parties may all come into play, with scandals whipped up out of trifles, judicial harassment, dirty tricks or political manoeuvres—and this even before market pressures are taken into account. If we are not to become trapped in a permanent state of melancholy, we need a careful analysis of the state’s enormous capacity for reaction in defence of capital’s interests. These questions are central for an assessment of the cycle of left governments in Latin America that opened with Chávez’s victory in Venezuela in 1998—followed by the advent of Lula in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The end of the cycle might be dated to the 2015 victory new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, followed by the victories of Sebastián Piñera in Chile and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But at the time of writing this political landscape remains fiercely contested, with new rebellions against neoliberal orthodoxy in Chile and Colombia, counter-revolution in Bolivia, successive attempts to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela and new victories of the centre-left in Mexico and Argentina. A rich literature has analysed the roots of this experience in the crises of the neoliberal model that erupted across the continent in the late 1990s—foreshadowing those that would strike the advanced-capitalist heartlands from 2008—and its coincidence with the China-led commodity super-cycle. In one of the landmark texts of the upswing, the Brazilian strategist Emir Sader set Latin America’s markedly leftist political response to this conjuncture in the context of the continent’s long tradition of popular revolt.2 Since then, further work has focused chiefly on subjective issues: studies of social movements, protests and trade unions, both continent-wide and at country level. Of these, one of the most original contributions—from the Chilean scholar, René Rojas—set out to explain the limits of the ‘pink tide’ governments in terms of the structural weakness of the popular classes in Latin America, after decades of imf programmes, in contrast to the militant workers’ organizations of the 1960s, crushed by the full weight of the 1970s military dictatorships.3 So far, however, there has been little cross-country comparative analysis of the recent left governments’ experience with state power.

The problem of method What conceptual underpinnings would such a study require? Theorizations of state and inter-state orders have been a staple of political thought, often enough—in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel, Weber, Lenin, Gramsci, Mann, Tilly, Fukuyama—responding to the crises, wars and revolutions that have marked the emergence and life-span of the modern state. Collating half-a-dozen or more contemporary perspectives, V. I. Lenin, ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’ [1918], Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 28, Moscow 1974, pp. 104ff. 2 Emir Sader, ‘The Weakest Link: Neoliberalism in Latin America’, nlr 52, July– August 2008. 3 René Rojas, ‘The Latin American Left’s Shifting Sands’, Catalyst, vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 2018. See also the country-level studies collected in Eduardo Silva and Federico Rossi, eds, Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation, Pittsburgh 2018. 1

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Bob Jessop’s work offers a conceptual tool-box to help address the task. An English writer in the broader new-left tradition, Jessop’s early contributions focused on Marxian and Poulantzasian theories of the state; he has taught in the sociology department of the University of Lancaster since 1990, following a 15-year stint teaching government at Essex. His most recent book, The State: Past, Present, Future, summarizes nearly forty years of study.4 The approach Jessop proposes does not set out a general theory of ‘the state’—that is, an explanation that would comprehend its origins, laws of motion and course of development, without reference to other kinds of inquiry. He argues that the polymorphism of this mechanism of rule— instantiated in Mesopotamian palaces, scholar-bureaucracies, complex chiefdoms, city-states, early modern absolutist monarchies, colonial and post-colonial transplants, party-states, capitalist liberal-democracies— and its multiple, changing contexts suggest, rather, the need for a combined method of comparative-historical case studies and conjunctural analysis. The object, then, is not ‘the state’ but modern ‘states’, of which the primary determinants are, as Weber said, territory, population and apparatus of rule—to which Jessop would add the ‘state idea’. But these cannot be understood without reference to the broader system of competitive political forms—multi-national empires, militarized theocracies, feudal baronies, tribal confederations, lawless zones—within which modern states fought their way to dominance; to the discursive and coercive strategies through which they secure the population’s consent; and to the successive inter-state hierarchies in which they have combined.5 International structures of wealth and power have acquired a new salience for nation states in the age of globalization, Jessop notes, introducing non-accountable forms of control—multinational companies and banks, supra-national bodies—capable of penetrating their social structures. At the same time, economic might is more than ever linked to media power, with its capacity to promote and inform specific cultural values, and to surveillance technologies. There is no doubt that states are capable of exercising a greater degree of social control today than could have been imagined twenty years ago. See Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future, Cambridge 2016; previous works include State Power, Cambridge 2008, and The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge 2002. 5 Jessop, The State, pp. 5, 7ff. This essay will leave open the possibility of an intermediate order of analysis that would combine general considerations of a specific form of the state with a study of concrete local cases. 4

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Following Nicos Poulantzas in State, Power, Socialism (1978), Jessop argues that a state is not a neutral instrument or passive tool, offering equal constraints and opportunities to all social actors; nor should it be conceived, as in much mainstream political science, as disembodied from the broader society over which it rules. Instead, as the Greek political scientist suggested, the formal-institutional constitution of a state—its apparatus, modes of representation, governing ideas—reflects a historical crystallization of the balance of social forces in its home territory and beyond. For Jessop, adopting Gramsci’s terms, this material condensation represents the interests of the dominant bloc, the victors of past social struggles—of capital over labour, men over women, whites over blacks and indigenous peoples, the centre over the periphery. But the state compact is also marked by the compromises struck with broader class and regional forces, and the discursive forms or ‘hegemonic visions’ with which it wins the consent of the governed and projects its own goals as the national interest. It is in this sense that Poulantzas’s ‘admittedly enigmatic’ formulation, ‘the state is a social relation’, should be understood. Its mode of operation has built-in biases—Jessop calls this ‘strategic selectivity’—reflecting the interests of the dominant bloc; the liberal-democratic state is thus both representative and hierarchical. Yet the underlying balance of forces is subject to change, through shifts in the economy, social developments or the impact of external forces, potentially throwing the state into crisis and challenging its operatives to respond and adapt.6 In this view, it is not ‘the state’ that acts; rather, the powers of a state are activated by changing sets of leaders, officials and politicians located within different state institutions, often acting in response to external pressures, reflecting the domestic or international balance of forces. At the same time, the institutional matrix of the state apparatus itself— the core legal-political-coercive complex: executive, legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, intelligence services, armed forces and so forth—is a heterogeneous assortment, the distribution of powers varying within it. The relative weight of executive and legislative branches, the superordinate role of powerful ministries (Finance, Interior), the accountability (or corruption) of the bureaucracy, rivalries between intelligence services Jessop, The State, pp. 86, 53–6. By ‘social forces’ Jessop intends not only contending classes but also regional, racial, religious or ethnic groupings, all in turn cross-cut by gender.

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or security forces, are likely to reflect relations outside the state as well as narrow institutional outlooks and jealousies. To act coherently, the state apparatus as an ensemble needs to be unified by a guiding set of ideas—a state project, in Jessop’s terms—which provides it with an overall orientation and shapes the forms its ‘strategic selectivity’ will take. This project is distinct from, and narrower than, the hegemonic visions by which the dominant bloc aims to unify the broader social formation behind its rule and which serve to legitimate state power. Modes of representation—electoral systems and political parties, but also the ‘ideological apparatus’ of the media, education systems and established religions—are the crucial transmission belts for the reproduction and contestation of its rule.7 This perspective, which Jessop dubs the strategic-relational approach, suggests a dynamic, multi-faceted concept of state forms, whose operations need to be grasped in the context of the broader economic and social shifts within its core territory, and in the wider world-market and inter-state systems of which it is a part. It offers a rubric through which to examine state power in a more rigorous and comparative manner. Looking back at state theorizations produced over the last thirty years, our outlook today should be more radical and less optimistic. This approach may help to inoculate us against both optimism and pessimism, allowing us to operate instead on the basis of a hopeful realism. When they enter government, radical political forces that propose a new project for the country will inevitable come into conflict with established interests operating within the state apparatus. Lacking organic connections to the existing structures of economic, ideological and political power, they will have difficulty governing if they lack the necessary tools to counteract the ‘strategic selectivity’ of the state. They need to avoid the temptation to use the same channels that a conservative government might establish—for example, networks of corruption, or the criminalcoercive forces of the deep state—not only because this would morally discredit their project, but because the other necessary institutions that might tacitly support conservative corruption and coercion, such as the courts, the legislature and the media, will not be in place. Jessop, The State, pp. 66, 68–9, 56, 84–5, 86–9. One of the principles propounded by Samuel Huntington and his colleagues in their Trilateral Commission report, Crisis of Democracy (1975), was the need to reduce the ideological content of the main political parties. 7

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To analyse the practice and outcomes of Latin America’s left governments in relation to their states, we will need to sketch the historic processes of state constitution in each case, and then to examine the balance of forces that brought the new lefts and centre lefts to office, the hegemonic visions they proposed, their record in mobilizing state projects and the forms of resistance or in-built ‘strategic-selective’ bias they encountered during the changing conjunctures of their time in government. Needless to say, in the space of an essay such an investigation can only be schematic. Analyses of state power often run the risk of attempting total recall, but we should remember the lesson of Borges’s story, ‘Funes the Memorious’, in which the eponymous hero’s prodigious memory prevents him from thinking. An exhaustive examination may produce a clear starry night in which it’s impossible to discern the constellations. What follows, then, will be telegraphic in the extreme, focusing solely on the major cases of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil, set in comparative frame. Much of importance will inevitably be omitted. Nevertheless, since it seems that these questions have not yet been asked of the ‘pink tide’ experience, it may be useful to set down some provisional answers, in the hope that others will expand and correct them.

Processes of state formation Beyond their apparent similarities and the synchronous waves that have marked the continent’s history—wars of independence from the 1810s, oligarchic stabilization from the 1870s, crisis and populist insurgency from the 1930s, military dictatorship from the 1960s, conjoint democratization and neoliberalization from the 1980s, economic crises and left turns from the 1990s—the foundational compacts of Latin American states reveal as many contrasts as commonalities. Firstly, to use Jessop’s initial determinants of territory, population and governing apparatus, across the vast and varied topography of the continent, and the differentiated social structures of the pre-Columbian populations, centuries of Spanish and Portuguese imperial domination imposed contrasting models of rule. While this legacy divided the Hispanic Andean Highlands and the Southern Cone from Lusophone Brazil, the patterns of Argentina’s state formation also differed from the Andean-Caribbean countries considered here, even more than the state-development paths of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela have differed from each other. That said, an examination of South American states must start with the 19thcentury matrix from which they emerged.

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The terminal crisis of Spain’s Latin American empire was triggered by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquest of Madrid; the enlightenment ideals and liberal constitutions of Philadelphia and Cadíz provided models for the presidential republics that would emerge, but Bolívar and his comrades were operating in a different social landscape. In the high Andes, Spanish rule had been built upon the conquest of a complex urban civilization that had no parallel in New England; the operative principle was incorporation through subjugation, with intermarriage to further the work of the Church—as opposed to exclusion and genocide in the us. Military coercion was in constant use to subdue the large native populations and force them into the mines or onto the haciendas of the criollo elite, and mestizo sons could find a career path in the private militias of the great landowners. These layers played a central role in the prolonged wars of independence against residual Spanishroyalist forces and in the subsequent half-century of internecine warfare that demarcated the new nation-states’ territorial boundaries. At their foundation, then, the new states married the political forms of the liberal enlightenment to the authoritarian structures of Bourbon Spain’s imperial rule, excluding the indigenous populations. The constitutional model was the unitary presidential republic, comprising a strong executive with wide-ranging powers of veto and decree; a weak congress, institutionalizing oligarchic rule through restricted suffrage; a weaker judiciary, servant rather than overseer of the state, on the Roman model; constitutional privileges for the Church and Army; a disproportionate military budget, funded by taxes imposed on foreign trade or extorted from the indigenous populations. In Jessop’s formulation, the Andean states represented a crystallization of past struggles—the Spanish conquest, liberation wars—that offered no compromise to the indigenous masses, while opening the double-edged opportunity of a military career to the growing mestizo layers. With the exploited ground down by the whip and the sword, the main political divisions were between the exploiters themselves: regional caudillos attempting to seize the presidential palace; bitter strife between anti-clerical liberals and hard-line conservatives, reproducing the ideological rifts opened by the French Revolution. In Jessop’s terms, these divides also signalled the contradiction between the unitary command structures assumed by Bourbon Spain’s intendancy system and the localism imposed by the isolated haciendas, far-flung towns and impenetrable terrain, which made the journey between Potosí and La Paz, Guayaquil and Quito, or Valencia and Caracas a hazardous undertaking. The Church was the

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only ideological apparatus that aimed to reach the entire population; the output of liberal journalists and intellectuals in the cities was restricted to the Spanish-speaking elites. World-market forces abetted the consolidation of these rickety oligarchic states in the second half of the nineteenth century. As large landowners discovered a new role as exporters of primary products to the dynamic industrial-capitalist economies of the northern hemisphere, they found the means (foreign credit) and the motivation (usually under Liberal presidents: Guzmán Blanco and, initially, Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, Eloy Alfaro in Ecuador, Ismael Montes in Bolivia) to strengthen and modernize the national infrastructure—roads, ports, railroads, theatres, universities. The inter-state system they entered was still largely composed of imperial monarchies, including that of the British hegemon whose loans funded the Latin American countries’ insertion into the world market as specialist cash-crop and mineral exporters. State formation in Argentina involved yet another configuration of territory, population and institutional apparatus. Lacking precious metals and thinly populated, the Rio de la Plata region and the immensity of the Pampas were of secondary importance to the Spanish crown, which belatedly bestowed a vice-royalty on these southern zones (covering present-day southern Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina) in 1776. The imperial yoke weighed more lightly here and rural labour—landless mestizo horsemen and campesinos—enjoyed a degree more autonomy than the indigenous peons of the Andes. Buenos Aires had already developed an informal role as a contraband port, smuggling bullion, meat and hides and trading with the Dutch and British; vice-regal status allowed the city to collect customs dues, an enviable source of wealth. Buenos Aires was in the forefront of the War of Independence and saw a popular urban uprising against the Spanish authorities in May 1810; but there was scant cultural identity or material infrastructure to connect this future ‘Paris of the Americas’ to the faraway mission towns and estancieros of the northwest interior, where criollo notables looked rather to the imperial centre in Peru. Powerful provincial landowners refused to endorse the bonaerenses’ 1819 Constitution for a unitary, modernizing Argentine Republic, with a strong central executive and a congress selected in proportion to the provinces’ populations; they rallied their private gaucho armies to fight for regional autonomy from Buenos Aires, within an Argentine Confederation.

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The clash of these ‘hegemonic projects’, in Jessop’s terms, was fought out in on-off intra-elite civil wars that would run for forty years, with Britain arming the Buenos Aires liberals. Yet both the federalists—notably Juan Manuel Rosas, the immensely wealthy landowner-dictator who dominated the country from 1832–52—and the unitarians, Bartolomé Mitre (1862–68) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868–74), author of the immortal Facundo, a damning socio-literary portrait of the brutal, charismatic caudillo of Rosas’s ilk, concurred in building up the Army to pursue wars of extermination against the indigenous inhabitants and punitive border conflicts with Argentina’s neighbours. An oligarchic constitutional settlement took shape, step by step, on the basis of amendments to the 1853 Constitution, which stipulated a powerful president, chosen by a province-based electoral college, and a Congress also weighted towards provincial control through the indirectly elected Senate. By 1880, with Conservatives ensconced in power, the port-city had been detached, as federal capital, from the control of the powerful governor of Buenos Aires province, and port taxes flowed to the national Treasury. Yet by this stage, the shifting balance of social and economic forces—above all, the immigration of millions of workers from the Mediterranean countries—that would eventually challenge the Argentine oligarchy’s rule was already well underway. By contrast to these Hispanic republics, Brazil was launched as an imperial monarchy, its independence declared by the Bragança prince who would soon be crowned Emperor Pedro I. While Spain’s vast regional vice-royalties fractured into a dozen smaller states, the sprawling Lusophone possessions, some 3 million square miles, maintained a precarious unity. The relations of territory, population and state apparatus were also sui generis. At the start of the 19th century, Portuguese and Luso-Brazilians made up barely a sixth of the colony’s 3 million inhabitants, while the native Tupi had to a large extent been absorbed through coercive inter-marriage. The bulk of the population was of African descent: slaves, on whom the ports, plantations and domestic service depended, their numbers increased by tens of thousands of new arrivals every year, plus a substantial stratum of free black artisans and workers with their own Afro-Brazilian culture; for the elite, haitianismo would remain an ever-present fear. The 1808 flight of the Portuguese Court to the safety of Rio, as Napoleon’s Army closed in on Lisbon, brought with it the tattered

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trappings of absolutist rule. But this would not suffice to unify the disparate agricultural-export zones established under Portugal’s captaincy system—northeastern sugar mills, pasturelands in the far south, gold and diamonds in Minas Gerais, precious timber from the Amazon basin—nor to reconcile the powerful landowners and provincial elites (governors, notables, military officers) to loss of control over the forces of order and patronage networks in their home regions. The upshot created an instability at the heart of the state, as the balance of forces between centralists—the Palace, the Army, wealthy Rio merchants and state officials—and federalist oligarchs swayed this way or that. The 1824 Constitution, drafted by the Palace, delegated both executive and regulatory power to the Emperor, who named the Senate and could dissolve the Chamber of Deputies. A two-tiered electoral-college system for the Chamber allowed a relatively wide suffrage in the first round, extending to artisans and small traders—though the electors thus chosen, who in turn selected the deputies for the province, were restricted to the ranks of notables and officers. Successive provincial rebellions—some mutating into mass social uprisings—were put down by force of arms. By the 1880s, growing confidence in sectors outside the Emperor’s circle—politicized urban workers, whose campaigns helped push through the abolition of slavery in 1888; the Army, hardened by Pedro II’s serial wars against Uruguay and Paraguay; the booming coffee regions of the centre-south—generated new support for republicanism. Yet when the federalists gained the upper hand after Pedro was deposed by the military in 1889, they imposed an even more restricted franchise. Under the 1891 Constitution of the United States of Brazil, the federal government was controlled by the most powerful states, the presidency alternating between São Paulo and Minas Gerais. This was the oligarchic order that the Revolution of 1930 would overthrow, under the leadership of Getulio Vargas.

New forces, new forms External economic shocks—the 1929 Crash and Great Depression— would deliver the coup de grâce to most of these oligarchic state formations. The insertion of their economies into the world market as dependent agro-exporters to the us and Europe—coffee from Brazil, meat and wheat from Argentina, cocoa from Ecuador, tin from Bolivia—meant that the

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fall in commodity prices hit them hard. But other external and internal shifts had already sapped their foundations. The inter-state system had undergone a seismic shift with the rise of an anti-capitalist big power after the Bolshevik Revolution; the us would soon gear up for leadership of the Cold War. Domestically, new social forces had come of age with the economic development (immigration, foreign investment) overseen by oligarchic rule: nascent labour movements, politicized intermediary layers, the rise of socialist, communist, anarchist and radical-nationalist parties, dissident currents in the armed forces. In different forms and with varying tempos, radical regimes across the continent issued in a new state compact, partially side-lining the landowning classes held responsible for the country’s woes, and drawing in the new working classes to initiate import-substituting national development: Vargas in Brazil, Perón in Argentina, Bolivia’s ‘military socialists’ in the late 1930s and its mnr-led Revolution in 1952; in Ecuador, more patchily, the attempts by young officers and their allies to wrest fiscal control away from the Guayaquil plutocrats in the 1920s and 30s. The consequences—rising class struggle, the mobilization of agricultural workers—were unintended. The example of the Cuban Revolution showed where they might lead. The oligarchs’ response was implemented by Army commands, stiffened by us training. Military dictatorships seized power in Brazil (1964–85), Argentina (1976–83), Bolivia (1971–78) and Ecuador (1972–79). To a striking extent, the dictatorships’ cautious transitions to liberal democracy would replicate, if with a wider suffrage, the constitutional form of the oligarchic states: a presidentialist republic; a senate dominated by conservative landed interests; the armed forces never far from power. The external and internal contexts of Latin America’s new democracies had changed dramatically. Their debt-laden insertion into the world market was now governed by powerful institutional forces, monitoring the implementation of Washington Consensus policy—above all, privatization of state assets. Within the institutional complex of the state, the Central Bank and Ministry of Finance were given new heft. This reflected a global-domestic balance of forces that privileged the interests of free-flowing finance capital and discounted those of labour. But the upshot was to tar the governing liberal-democratic parties with the disastrous financial blow-outs, imf austerity programmes and dire social outcomes of the 1990s. This, then, was the overall context in

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which the new left governments came to power. It remains to examine their state strategies.

Venezuela: bolivarismo armed Venezuela’s precocious development as an oil state set it on a somewhat different path to the other Andean countries. By the 1920s, oil rents from the foreign companies pumping the Lake Maracaibo region overshadowed traditional agricultural exports and converted the landed oligarchy into a financial-rentier elite, with interests far beyond the country’s borders. Though briefly attempted, import-substituting industrialization was never a viable strategy for a petro-currency state. Instead, Venezuela was tightly integrated into the us market for oil, while its entrepreneurs became salesmen and franchise-holders for us companies, importing cars, clothes and culture for an urban middle class prospering on public-sector employment and whitened by post-war immigration from Italy and Spain. Darker-skinned labouring classes swelled the informal economies of the urban periphery. From 1958, the political system was run by a pair of parties, the centre-left Acción Democrática and centreright copei, who colluded to exclude the left while they alternated in the Presidential Palace and dominated Congress, showering oil rents on their supporters, supplemented by foreign loans when these declined. As the oil price bottomed out in the 1980s and 90s, this neo-oligarchic system entered a deep crisis, exacerbated by imf demands for state cutbacks and revelations of presidential corruption on a massive scale. By the late 90s, the general poverty rate was 86 per cent, and extreme poverty 65 per cent; under ad and copei administrations alike, riots and protests were met with police bullets. This was the context in which Hugo Chávez was swept into the Miraflores Palace with 56 per cent of the popular vote—a conjuncture that saw the elites weakened and discredited, but the mass of the population disorganized. The state machinery—Congress, the judiciary, state governors’ mansions, police and pdvsa, the semi-privatized oil conglomerate— was packed with supporters of the ad-copei system, while the armed forces were more fragmented, as the career of Col. Chávez showed. The international balance of forces was, of course, us-led; but for Venezuela this was mitigated to some extent by Cuban support and the possibility of loans from Russia and China, semi-detached from the Washington system. Rejecting imf orthodoxy, and vowing an immediate campaign

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against poverty, Chávez propounded the vision of a Bolivarian revolution that would replace the pale-skinned partidocracy with an inclusive polity, incorporating the mestizo majority. The invocation of Bolívar also indicated an international dimension of south-south solidarity, as a defence against the global predominance of Washington and the imf. Chávez took a root-and-branch approach to the political apparatus, signing the decree for a referendum on constitutional reform on the very day he took office, 2 February 1999. Drafted by an elected assembly, Venezuela’s 1999 Constitution was the first to be affirmed by a popular vote. It strengthened the executive and a new branch of ‘citizen’ power at the expense of the legislature, which was reduced to a unicameral assembly, elected on a modified first-past-the-post system, with its powers of impeachment transferred to the voters through the mechanism of a recall referendum; popular organizations were allotted a role in nominating Supreme Court judges and the National Electoral Commission. Yet in 2001, when Chávez and the new Assembly proposed a raft of laws on land reform, social security and allocating a proportion of oil revenue to social programmes, they ran into stubborn resistance from other parts of the state and its social allies: the armed forces, pdvsa management, the Employers’ Federation, tv channels, the old political elite, with tacit backing from the State Department and its sister organizations. In 2002 the chavistas defeated a military coup through mass mobilization and survived an oil shutdown and capital flight. The new state compact that emerged from these struggles was a curious hybrid. In intensive, behind-the-scenes dealings, Chávez and his comrades retired or paid off hardline military commanders. The rest of the Army was brought in, upgraded and won over to the Bolivarian project, the higher ranks acquiring a significant economic stake in the regime— not least, access to the currency-control and exchange-rate mechanisms originally introduced as temporary measures during the 2002–03 pdvsa lockdown. Second, as oil prices rose, and with Cuban help, Chávez bypassed the state to set up new projects in the poorer neighbourhoods: misiones offering food kitchens, healthcare, education and vocational skills and cut-price supermarkets, often with military assistance. After 2006, the government poured money into 20,000 community councils, neighbourhood assemblies charged with prioritizing new public works—with mixed results. These attempts were hampered by lack of skilled personnel and administrative expertise, worsened after 2007

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when Chávez fell out with former cadres of Causa R, Venezuela’s main left grouping, and switched to a policy of ‘21st-century socialism’—ad hoc nationalizations, in the absence of a coherent industrial strategy, worker-management or investment plan. Foreign policy, by contrast, proved relatively easy to re-gear. Caracas took the lead in regional integration, uniting Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras and half a dozen further Caribbean island states in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (alba). Projects for a regional currency, the sucre, a monetary fund, the Banco del Sur and a radical Latin American tv channel, Telesur, were set in motion. In sum: Chávez and his team succeeded in overcoming or bypassing the ‘strategic selectivities’ of the Venezuelan petro-state, in conditions that had seen the collapse of the old political elite. Resistance lay outside the state, in the student movement and us-backed opposition. The regime’s contradiction lay in Venezuela’s dependent relation to the world market, which it was unable to master. Once oil prices started to fall, the exchange-rate mechanism—already a sump of corruption—enforced grotesque distortions on the flow of imports, creating a criminalized black market and a price-controlled legal economy racked by shortages, beyond the wit of Chávez’s hapless successor to repair.8

Bolivia: decolonization? Less populous and much poorer than Venezuela, Bolivia’s ethnogeographic divides were starker and only partially ‘modernized’: a small group of wealthy, light-skinned agribusiness and banking families at the apex, their fortunes based in the eastern lowlands around Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the old colonial towns or the Zona Sur district of La Paz; intermediary layers of mestizo workers and a nascent indigenous petty bourgeoisie (truckers, traders, construction and real estate) in the informal economies of newly urbanized zones like El Alto; at the base, a bedrock of Andean subsistence farmers. Notwithstanding the popular upheaval of 1952, the state that emerged from the Banzer dictatorship in the 1980s reproduced the oligarchic features of the 19th century in liberal-democratic form. The powerful Senate gave a weight to the conservative eastern regions out of proportion to their populations. The For a more detailed account see Julia Buxton, ‘Venezuela After Chávez’, nlr 99, May–June 2016. 8

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Congress functioned as a de facto electoral college, with responsibility for picking the president if none of the multiple candidates achieved an overall majority. Party coalitions—mnr, adn, the formerly left mir— colluded to select wealthy scions of the agro-financial elite, typified by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. This layer closed the Andean tin mines, a historic centre of worker militancy, then proceeded to enrich itself by selling off state assets—gas, oil, telecoms, electricity, railways, water. The unintended upshot was to change the balance of social forces, as the imf-backed privatization programmes provoked the mass mobilizations of the gas and water wars, led by sections of Bolivia’s long-excluded indigenous majority, now uniting behind the Movimiento al Socialismo. Evo Morales’s 2005 presidential victory at the head of mas was thus backed by a stronger mass organization than Chávez had possessed, seasoned by years of militant protests and bloqueos that had dominated the tv news, driving out two presidents, and facing the bullets of Sánchez de Lozada.9 Externally, he could count on varying degrees of support from left governments in Caracas, Havana, Buenos Aires, Brasilia and Quito. At the same time, though morally and politically discredited, the Bolivian ruling caste had not undergone a debacle on the scale of Venezuela’s petro-elite. Secure in its regional strongholds, it still controlled the Senate and five of the nine regional prefectures after 2005, as well as the media and the banking system. Morales’s strategic vision was derived from the 2003 October Agenda of the mass movement. Describing Bolivia’s political edifice as a Spanish-colonial relic, comparable to apartheid, this called for an elected Constituent Assembly to design the state anew—as Morales put it in 2003: ‘We want to re-found the country, politics, democracy, with our own hands’—for the re-nationalization of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon wealth and for Sánchez de Lozada to be brought to trial for the massacre of protesters. In office, the Morales government swiftly negotiated more advantageous contracts with the foreign gas companies and awarded a large pay rise to the Army, offering officer training to broader indigenous layers and education programmes for new recruits. Its attempts to stamp out extortion and corruption in the national police force resulted in a mutiny; the government backed down, but the opposition seized the See Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, ‘The Chequered Rainbow’, nlr 35, Sept–Oct 2005. 9

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chance to forge tighter links with the police. State bias in the bureaucracy also operated against Morales’s newly appointed ministers, many from indigenous backgrounds, and a good proportion of them women. A new public water company was plagued by inefficiency. The most concerted resistance focused on the political system. In a twoyear struggle over the new constitution, the conservative opposition alternately besieged and boycotted the elected Constituent Assembly, insulted its indigenous female President, mobilized secessionist movements in the eastern regions, launched a vociferous, red-herring campaign to move the capital to Sucre and used its control of the Senate to impose a two-thirds majority vote on every article in the Constitution. The outcome was a compromise. Rhetorically, the Constitution proclaimed a plurinational republic based on social rights and respect for indigenous culture, with the chequered-rainbow wiphala to fly alongside the national flag. Substantively, land reform was neutered so that it didn’t apply to existing holdings. The disproportionate Senate was retained, with four senators for each of Bolivia’s nine departments, regardless of population. The electoral system favoured Morales in the short term, but—with a strong first-past-the-post component and congressional seats topped up according to the size of the President’s vote—it produced a lopsided representation of the vote that could equally benefit a right-winger. In concentrating powers around a charismatic president, it intensified mas’s dependence on Morales; a hostage to fortune, given that he was constitutionally limited to two terms. The resulting state compact was a temporary accommodation. With meaningful land reform blocked, agribusiness could focus on expanding soy production for the insatiable Chinese livestock market, while the traditional elite waited out Morales’s time in office, chafing at the self-confident presence of a new indigenous middle class in the city centres, as rising gas revenues fuelled a construction boom. Meanwhile the militant alliance behind mas fractured into sectoral interests, some incorporated into the increasingly complacent regime, others alienated from it as growth slowed down. Using the judicial machinery to override a 2016 plebiscite that opposed an extended term limit for Morales, the government revealed its weakness. Though Morales won the first round of the 2019 presidential election—the Organization of American States’ investigation found no problem with the official outcome, only

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with the unofficial ‘quick count’—the political balance had tipped against him.10 The opposition could rely on substantial institutional support within the state—police, prefectures, constitutional court, ultimately the military high command—and mass protests outside it, swiftly hegemonized by the far right, as well as backing from the oas and White House for Morales’s ouster. In brief: through its successive electoral majorities the Morales government achieved a partial reform of the state, channelling resources to the poor and transforming Bolivia’s official culture. But it met with significant institutional resistance, which—to some extent hamstrung by its own mistakes—it was unable to circumvent or conquer.

Ecuador: left-technocratic modernization For Ecuador, like Bolivia, the restoration of formal democracy after the corrupt military dictatorship of the 1970s went hand-in-hand with soaring interest rates and imf tutelage. Despite the ferocious infighting of the Ecuadorian political elite, riven by regionalist rivalries and personalized party machines, each successive government implemented the same policies as the last, culminating in the devastating economic crisis of 1999, after which the centre-left Mahuad administration adopted the us dollar as Ecuador’s national currency, tying the country’s fortunes to interest rates set in Washington dc. As in Bolivia, protests against this self-serving elite brought new forces into play: in the mid-90s, indigenous organizations from the Amazon, the central highlands and the Pacific coast forged a broad confederation, conaie. Between 1996 and 2005, mass protests and voter dissatisfaction saw the ejection of seven presidents, none finishing their term and four facing charges of corruption. Yet the anti-neoliberal forces—indigenous groups, transport workers, students, soldiers, neighbourhood networks—were also fragmented. conaie sponsored an electoral front, Pachakutik, which won eight seats in the 2003 election and entered the government of a supposedly radical colonel, Lucio Gutiérrez—who, once in office, turned coat and began applying the strictures of the imf, only to be ousted by a popular uprising in 2005, leaving the Pachakutik leadership split and demoralized. For details of the oas report, see Guillame Long, David Rosnick, Cavan Kharrazian and Kevin Cashman, ‘What Happened in Bolivia’s 2019 Vote Count? The Role of the oas Electoral Observation Mission’, cepr, Washington dc, November 2019. 10

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Rafael Correa would not succeed in uniting these forces—the proGutiérrez wing of Pachakutik opposed him from the start—but neither did he capitulate to neoliberal norms. Unlike Chávez or Morales, Correa was an intellectual with a University of Illinois PhD in economics. An outsider on the political scene, he had written papers for Gutiérrez’s short-lived successor and on that basis was invited to become Minister of Economics, where he made a mark with the public by standing up to the imf. The Alianza pais he founded with labour economist Ricardo Patiño to fight the 2006 presidential election was a loose coalition rather than a party, and its congressional deputies were prone to cross the floor. By comparison to Chávez or Morales, Correa governed as a technocrat. Yet his programme was drawn from the popular movements: an end to neoliberal policies; an elected Constituent Assembly drafted a new pluri-national constitution, enshrining indigenous rights and national sovereignty over natural resources, and rejecting foreign military bases. The electoral system for the new, unicameral National Assembly combined fpp and open-list pr districts; clashes between legislature and executive would be resolved by a ‘mutual death’ clause—that is, a general election. In contrast to the constitutional struggle in Bolivia, Correa’s administration ran into resistance after the new Constitution had been democratically affirmed, when it came to implementation. Attempts to restructure public administration fell prey to bureaucratic in-fighting. Re-nationalization of water works was blocked in Congress by indigenous demands that local communities alone should oversee them. In September 2010, an attempt to limit the medals and bonuses automatically handed out to police—originating from Congress, not the Carondelet Palace—was met by police and air-force mutiny, occupying the National Assembly and international airports at Quito and Guayaquil, and spreading to provincial cities. Correa was briefly held hostage when he went to address the rebel officers, then rescued by the military and his supporters. The following week, the government announced a police pay rise. More surprising was Correa and Patiño’s success in re-gearing the Ministry of Finance and Economics, which now brought the Central Bank under democratic control, deploying its reserves as a bulwark against the 2008 financial crisis, and instructed domestic banks to repatriate some 60 per cent of their assets. Patiño instituted an audit of the national debt, opening the books to uncover the lending terms international banks had

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extracted from the country’s leaders since 1976, unilaterally cancelling those deemed illegitimate and negotiating the rest down by two-thirds. Debt payments had consumed 40 per cent of Ecuador’s national budget, triple the sum spent on social welfare; that proportion was now reversed, and the imf sent packing. Public spending was channelled into roads, schools and hospitals, with the aim of realizing the constitutional rights to free universal healthcare and education; between 2005 and 2015, poverty levels fell from 42 to 25 per cent. A sovereign economic policy was matched by diplomatic independence, under Patiño’s stewardship from 2010. Ecuador was a front-rank member of alba and the other institutions of the Bolivarian alliance and offered refuge in its London embassy to Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks revelations included reports on the us Ambassador’s dealings with the Ecuadorian media.11 Ecuador did not revert to a sovereign national currency and was hit doubly hard by falling oil prices and a strengthening dollar in 2015–16, partially mitigated by loans from China. By that stage, Correa’s Vice President Lenin Moreno was running to succeed him. In office, Moreno lost little time in reverting to the status quo ante of privatizations, pps and public-sector cuts, welcoming the imf back to Quito—to be greeted by rioting protesters in September 2019. In sum: Correa’s government faced substantial political opposition, from both right and left—the banking-media magnates, who assailed him from the start, and sections of conaie. Some of this was reflected in institutional resistance. Yet Correa was able to mobilize a more capable economic team than Chávez had; for as long as they remained in office, they had some success in steering state policy in a more equitable direction. But again, electoral dependence on a solitary charismatic and committed figure ensured that this would be short-lived.

Argentina: left-peronism renewed In Argentina, a wealthier and more urbanized society than Bolivia or Ecuador underwent an economic collapse even more dramatic than Venezuela’s. As joblessness soared and groups of unemployed piqueteros threw up roadblocks to demand better government support, the Menem (1989–99) and de la Rúa (1999–2001) administrations stuck stubbornly to imf prescriptions, ultimately corralling voters’ savings accounts to 11

See the interview with Rafael Correa, ‘Ecuador’s Path’, nlr 77, Sept–Oct 2012.

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defend the peso-dollar peg. At the height of the crisis hungry families, the cartoneros, were scouring Buenos Aires suburbs for cardboard to sell. Popular mobilization here was as energized as in Bolivia, though at their peak Argentina’s barrio assemblies, communal kitchens, barter clubs, worker-run factories and counter-cultural interventions probably spanned a wider social range. Most alarming for the Argentinian elite, their target was the political leadership as a whole: the famous cry of the pan-banging crowds mobbing the Casa Rosada was ¡Que se vayan todos!—out with them all. The crisis of the two-party system brought into question the legitimacy of the presidentialist state that had emerged from the 1976–83 military dictatorship. As an electoral machine, the stronger of the two was the Justicialist Party, launched by Perón in 1945 with the backing of the cgt trade unions as a national-popular force that would divert agricultural profits to domestic industrial growth, in opposition to oligarchic liberalism. But the jp had undergone an opportunistic conversion: entering office at the height of the post-dictatorship hyperinflation, Peronist leader Carlos Menem had packed the Supreme Court with yes men and used emergency powers to push through a neoliberal agenda that temporarily swept all before it—embracing the programme of international capital that the jp was founded to oppose. Reversing the tentative steps taken to bring the Junta to justice, he released the torturers from jail. Ten years later, as the economy crashed, voters repudiated Peronism’s rotten remains and brought the liberal coalition headed by de la Rúa’s Radical Party to power—chasing him out, when he proved no better, in the general uprising of December 2001. It fell to the jp-controlled Congress to nominate an interim president to oversee the peso’s devaluation. Eduardo Duhalde was an old-school politician from Buenos Aires province, where in many districts the jp party machine was virtually amalgamated with the state, trading benefits for votes down to block level. But the Peronists were bitterly split, with three jp candidates running against each other in the 2003 election, including Menem himself. Néstor Kirchner, little-known governor of the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, had the dubious advantage of Duhalde’s support; far more than Correa—let alone Chávez or Morales— Kirchner was an insider, an adept of the party system. Once in the Casa Rosada, however, Kirchner broke decisively with what had gone before. He denounced Menem’s disastrous adoption

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of a programme that privileged giant conglomerates and international creditors—‘vulture capitalism’—over domestic needs. In a series of electrifying announcements, he sacked nearly half the military high command, implicated in the crimes of the Dirty War, and urged Congress to annul the laws that protected them from justice. Fifty-two federal police commissioners were dismissed and a campaign set in motion against criminality and corruption in the force. He channelled popular revulsion at Menem’s cash-for-votes Supreme Court with a call for impeachment and opened candidates to scrutiny from civil-rights bodies. He initiated a re-nationalization of the water companies, postal services and railways, extended subsidies for public transport, fuel and food, and expanded benefits for unemployed heads (jefas/jefes) of households, drawing piquetero leaders into the programme’s administration. Macro-economic policy would be based on the principle that interest payments to foreign creditors must not jeopardize domestic growth: ‘We will not pay down the debt at the cost of Argentines’ hunger and exclusion’, Kirchner told Congress in March 2004. He rejected the imf’s demand for a rise in utility rates and insisted on lower fiscal targets, balancing domestic growth rates. With foreign bond-holders Argentina stuck firmly to its offer of 30 cents to the dollar on outstanding debt, to which a majority grudgingly agreed. Kirchner’s strategy for overcoming institutional resistance was to take to tv to explain the obstacles confronting him, the pressures from special interests. In the moral and political vacuum left by Menemism’s collapse, he succeeded briefly in embodying the hopes of the popular mobilizations in the project of a sovereign and accountable state, based—to use Jessop’s Gramscian terms—on a new class bloc. Kirchner’s confidence and authority was grounded in part in his experience as governor of Santa Cruz, a sparsely populated province with a substantial public-sector workforce, funded largely by local taxes on hydrocarbon extraction. But it also drew on the resources of left Peronism—and in this sense, the bankruptcy of Argentina’s political class was not as complete as Venezuela’s. Kirchner’s was not a pioneer project, of the sort that Chávez, Morales and even, to some extent, Correa were attempting. Instead, he aimed to rebuild the domestic industrial base and public-sector services, drawing in the trade unions and the self-organized unemployed—a renewal of the classic Peronist strategy. Uniquely for an advanced-capitalist economy, the early years of Argentina’s post-crisis recovery saw a strengthening of the organized

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working class. Growth was led by labour-intensive sectors: metal manufacturing, construction, textiles; while a majority of new jobs were informal, nearly a third of them were in formal employment. Compared to the us, where the top 1 per cent monopolized all the gains of the recovery, in Argentina 60 per cent of new growth went to the richest 30 per cent, and 40 per cent to the rest. Unionization rates had plummeted under Menem, falling from 65 to 32 per cent between 1990 and 2000; they rose to 37 per cent by 2008, and were over 45 per cent in manufacturing, construction and transport. The outcome was a modest growth in pay and a rise in industrial disputes.12 Yet as the recovery strengthened and the popular mobilizations subsided, or were incorporated into the administration, the norms of Argentinian capitalist society reasserted themselves and the limits of Kirchner’s project came into view. Although he took a clean broom to the most compromised institutions, Kirchner attempted no root-and-branch renovation of Argentina’s traditional federalist state, on which the jp largely depended for its clientelist reach. This system gave a great deal of political power to elected provincial governors, who were responsible for drawing up the closed party lists for congressional elections organized on the basis of the D’Hondt proportional-representation model, which privileged the largest party blocs. At the same time, the federal centre was in charge of provincial funding, opening the way for quid pro quos. In the 2005 mid-term elections this provided a huge boost for Kirchner’s allies, but their support didn’t hold when the radical class alliance generated by the crisis began to come apart and the liberal opposition renewed its traditional denunciation of Peronism’s favouring a lumpen working class. Succeeding her husband at the end of 2007, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner aggravated the fracture—undoubtedly on Néstor’s advice—when she hiked agro-export taxes to 44 per cent. Cast as a radical-Peronist move against ‘the oligarchy’, this galvanized a new alliance between farmers and the wealthier sections of the urban middle class, while the left distanced itself from the machine politics of a resurgent Peronism, its ranks still replete with Menemites, and the growing wealth of the ruling couple. As a radical force, kirchnerismo had dissipated long before its namesake’s For the data, see Maristella Svampa, ‘The End of Kirchnerism’, nlr 53, Sept–Oct 2008; Cecilia Senén González, Bárbara Medwid and David Trajtemberg, ‘Union Membership in Argentina: A Theoretical and Methodological Debate’, mtess paper, Buenos Aires 2009. 12

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premature death in 2010 assured his place in Argentina’s pantheon. To summarize: in the crisis conditions of 1999–2003, Kirchner’s administration mobilized Argentina’s traditional reformist resources to re-cast the state project on anti-neoliberal—that is, national-sovereign developmentalist—lines. Its degree of success can be measured in part by the disasters that befell Mauricio Macri’s 2015–19 attempt to restore the status quo ante, resulting in the Peronists’ return.

Brazil: a pro-poor inflection Though harsh enough—high urban unemployment, wages decimated, soaring debt and interest payments, deep currency devaluation— Brazil’s neoliberal crisis in the late 1990s was not as dramatic as that of Argentina or Venezuela. There were no popular uprisings against privatizations or austerity, as in Bolivia and Ecuador, nor any regime crisis or collapse of the party system. The pt had been forged during an earlier period of industrial militancy and already governed a string of cities, including Porto Alegre, where it had introduced participatory budgeting; the 2002 election was Lula’s fourth attempt to win the presidency. The balance of forces was not propitious; though Lula defeated Cardoso’s successor by 61 to 39 per cent, the pt won less than a fifth of seats in Congress, dominated by deputies from the small-town interior and parties of the centre right. The state it presided over was in many respects a linear descendent of Pedro II’s, though transplanted to the light and air of Oscar Niemeyer’s Planalto. The 1988 Constitution tilted power towards Congress and the state governors, with their own military police. Large pr electoral districts and open-list voting favoured well-publicized (and well-funded) candidates over parties. In contrast to Argentina, no steps were taken after the dictatorship to bring the torturers to trial; the Supreme Court went as far as to call the amnesty law the foundation of Brazilian democracy. The pt had once fought to change the state, mobilizing alongside the broader opposition to the dictatorship for direct elections—‘Diretas Já’—but by 2002 it had adapted to Brazil’s political norms. As he entered office, Lula’s strategic vision was conciliatory: modifying his passionate appeals to the oppressed, he adopted the slogan ‘Peace and Love’ and signed a pro-market ‘Letter to Brazilians’. For two years his government stuck to the harsh imf programme bequeathed by Cardoso, as growth stuttered and unemployment rose. In the vain hope of securing Brazil a un Security Council seat by pleasing Bush and

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Chirac, the pt government re-equipped the Army and dispatched it to Haiti to crush shanty-town resistance after the us had removed the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. To pass legislation through Congress, Lula’s fixers resorted to paying the venal ‘interior’ deputies $7,000 a month for their votes. This was in line with the pt’s pragmatism. ‘To govern is to negotiate’, Lula explained in A Verdade vencerá (2018). ‘You make an agreement with who’s there in Congress, whether they’re robbers or not.’ In 2005 the monthly payments scandal was blazoned across the press, for the most part rabidly hostile to the pt. But Lula now took to the campaign trail and shifted left. The economy picked up, boosted by iron-ore and soybean exports to China, and the pt began a programme of raising living standards for the poor—Bolsa Família, household credit, minimum wage, old-age pensions—and expanding education. Encouraged by Kirchner’s success in Argentina, Lula’s speeches now contrasted the pro-poor pt approach to Cardoso’s unpopular privatizations, even though his own government focused more on increasing private income than improving public services. He swept the 2006 presidential election with 61 per cent; his ratings would be nearly 80 per cent when he passed the baton to Dilma in 2010. Without openly confronting Washington, he took a more independent line on regional integration, developing warm relations with the other left governments, and joined fellow bric leaders in calling for a non-dollar global reserve currency after the 2008 financial crisis. New oilfields off the coast opened the prospect of dazzling wealth for Brazilians, managed by the public-private energy giant Petrobras. From a position of apparent strength, the pt at last secured a Congress majority by sealing a coalition with the opposition pmdb, at the price of several ministries and congressional posts. Yet the pt’s strategy of peaceful and pragmatic adaptation left it with no defences when its political enemies took the opportunity to mobilize state institutions against it, as the economy worsened after 2013. The judiciary, investigating Petrobras corruption, concentrated—as Intercept’s revelations would show—on putting Lula in jail, even as judge Sergio Moro and prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol noted off the record that they lacked any incriminating evidence. In office the pt had never tried to organize its enormous voter base among the poor—the 40 million it helped escape from poverty; now it was outmatched on the streets by

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million-strong demonstrations captured by the far right. Led by Dilma’s pmdb Vice-President, Michel Temer, and with the backing of the Army chiefs, the Congressional majority turned against the executive and ousted Dilma in April 2016, pending the Senate’s impeachment trial of her. The Supreme Court overturned Lula’s constitutional right to habeas corpus and increased his pre-trial jail sentence on appeal from nine to twelve years, only reversing course when the evidence against Moro’s modus operandi became too blatant to ignore.13 In sum: with bitter irony, the pt’s conciliatory strategy towards the state had by 2019 contributed to the worst political outcome in Latin America, with Lula in prison and the hard-right Jair Bolsonaro in the Alvorada Palace. Bolsonaro’s background lies in the murky realm where coercion, law and money collude: the paramilitary police and sub-state militias of Rio de Janeiro province, the forces that have targeted and killed outstanding popular leaders like Marielle Franco.

Results and prospects Within the overall left cycle in Latin America, each of these five strategic practices has been distinct. In Venezuela, an attempted military coup was defeated by mass mobilization and government-army relations were reversed, to produce armed bolivarismo. In Bolivia, a mass anti-colonial movement in office. In Ecuador, a scientific left-modernization project. In Argentina, Peronist labourism re-energized. In Brazil, the attempt at a pro-poor accommodation with the system. In political terms, their outcomes can be assessed on the basis of sheer durability—a classic state criterion—and socio-economic effect. On the first count, the radicalism of Chávez’s project has paradoxically proved the most effective, outlasting all the rest. The latest oas attempt to buy off the military command and install the unelected opposition leader Juan Guaidó in the Miraflores fizzled out in May 2019. ‘Do they take us for mercenaries?’ one top officer asked. Yet the socio-economic outcomes have been dire. The regime’s determination to impose exchange-rate controls in conditions of oil-market and import dependency—and against the advice of all major left economists—proved disastrous. Venezuela’s rulers have See Pablo Gentili, ed., Golpe en Brasil: Genealogía de una farsa, Buenos Aires 2017; Carol Power et al., eds, Crónica de una sentencia anunciada, Buenos Aires 2018. 13

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allowed it to become the demonized reference point—the epitome of a counter-hegemonic vision—for the forces of conservatism. In terms of socio-economic progress, perhaps the greatest advances have been seen in Bolivia and Argentina; but in both countries, the lack of durability—due to personalism in La Paz, and to a fragile class coalition in Argentina—has put those gains in question. At the time of writing, a violent counter-revolution is being waged by the right in Bolivia, under the temporary stewardship of Jeanine Añez, whose virulently racist and reactionary gestures have alarmed even the oas. In Argentina, Macri’s attempt to re-impose full-bore neoliberalism has ended in electoral wipe-out, with cfk and her former chief of staff Alberto Fernández returning to power. In analytical terms, it may be useful to examine the left governments’ operations across the four dimensions of what Michael Mann has called ‘infrastructural power’: law, coercion, money, knowledge. Law here can be taken as referring to the legislature and the judicial system, mobilized against Dilma in Brazil, but also to the constituent process itself, which can serve—as in Venezuela in 1999—as a political education process. Coercion denotes the military and security forces and their intelligence wings, at national level; but the imperial power of the us has not been absent from this story: placated and promoted by Lula’s dispatch of the Brazilian Army to Haiti; intervening from above through the oas and other offices in Bolivia and Venezuela. Money here refers firstly to the world market and the international financial institutions, which always penalize social spending and so reinforce dominant-class bias. Knowledge in this context has two distinct though related meanings. The first involves administrative and political expertise, an area where Latin American states’ selective class biases are most apparent, shaped by a 200-year history of social hierarchies that endow a select few with access to education and prestige, powerful family networks, grasp of legislative processes, social access to the military high command and, not least, the symbolic capital of knowing how to speak, act and dress as the bearer of an elitist subjectivity. State functionaries may have both an esprit de corps and their own personal, party or regional agendas; they pass easily through the revolving doors between top ministerial positions and the penthouse suites of the private sector. Radical governments in Latin America have had serious difficulty in recruiting a new type of public servant, who grasps the novel role of a popular-democratic state.

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The second meaning of knowledge here refers to the ‘common sense’ of generally accepted ideologies; it involves the power to construct a narrative that makes the selective biases of law, coercion and money seem legitimate. In societies deeply saturated by the images and meanings of the audio-visual media, the latter controls enormous power in setting the agenda and selectively presenting information. Who controls the apex of these hierarchical media conglomerates—proprietors, directors, ceos—controls the message. The invisible hand here is not that of the market. A silent orchestra tunes its instruments, figuring out what melodies are required—though thinking too perhaps of who might hire or fire them, request a paid favour, invite them to lunch or for a vacation with sexual favours included at some glamorous beachside location. Democratic invention requires, as Gramsci knew, a different common sense, a new education and novel forms of leadership and popular identity. For this, radical governments require access to new media and autonomous critical thought. Law, coercion, money, knowledge: command of all four dimensions is the prerequisite for the effective use of the state’s ‘infrastructural power’. In Venezuela, chavismo has succeeded so far in maintaining the support of the Army and initially commanded the constituent and legislative processes—powers lost in the 2016 National Assembly election. But the expertise the state could muster was increasingly weak and it has signally failed to administer the realm of money. In Bolivia, the rightwing opposition fought the mas government to a halt in the constituent process, and retained the loyalty of the Fort Benning-trained high command—though it required the intervention of the oas to oust Morales. Yet mas did achieve some successes in the field of money—funnelling hydrocarbon taxes to the urban and rural poor—and that of culture, which will not be soon forgotten. In Ecuador, the Correa government rallied an impressive amount of expertise to audit the debt and so control the realm of money; an effective response to corporate media lay beyond its grasp, as did the armed forces. In Argentina, Kirchner succeeded up to a point in cleansing the judiciary of corruption and imposing the rule of law on amnestied military torturers. (The fate of Julio López, a worker due to give evidence against a notorious Buenos Aires police chief, head of a secret detention centre under the Junta, showed where these limits still lie.) If there was less advance in the realm of knowledge—the media dominance of the Clarín conglomerate remains inviolable— Kirchner also stood up to the imf, demonstrating some command over the realm of money.

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In Brazil, with the largest, oldest and most broadly dispersed ruling class on the continent, relying on habits of deference ingrained through centuries of slavery, the pt governments struggled to assert control in any of these four dimensions. Yet even in Brazil, where progressive advance has suffered the continent’s worst defeat under Bolsonaro, the legacies of the left cycle have not all been swept away. Attempts to restart the neoliberalization programme have generated rounds of protest from Argentina to Ecuador. As Nicos Poulantzas argued in State, Power, Socialism, the transition to socialism ‘cannot end with the taking of state power, but must extend to the transformation of the apparatus of the state’.14 To this we may add: with the permanent presence of the citizenry in the streets, so that the strategic leap of the elites (once they’ve lost the tip of the pyramid) from one sector of the state to another—from the judiciary to the church, the police to the military, the constitutional courts to the upper houses of parliament, the universities to the media—in order to block democratic change, can be foreseen and decisively defeated.

‘But it does require, always, taking state power’: Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, London 2000, p. 166. 14

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carlo ginzburg

THE BOND OF SHAME

A

long time ago i suddenly realized that the country one belongs to is not, as the usual rhetoric goes, the one you love but the one you are ashamed of. Shame can be a stronger bond than love. I repeatedly tested my discovery with friends from different countries: they all reacted the same way—with surprise immediately followed by full agreement, as if my suggestion was a selfevident truth. I am not claiming that the burden of shame is always the same; in fact, it varies immensely among countries. But the bond of shame—shame as a bond—invariably works, for a larger or smaller number of individuals. Aristotle listed ‘shame’ (aidos) among the passions, pointing out that ‘it is not a virtue’ (Nicomachaean Ethics 1108 a 30–1). This definition still makes sense. Shame is definitely not a matter of choice: it falls upon us, invading us—our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts—as a sudden illness. It is a passion placed at the intersection between biology and history: the domain which Sigrid Weigel made so distinctively her own.*

i But can a passion like shame be submitted to historical analysis? In his famous book The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) Eric R. Dodds argued, on the basis of literary sources—from the Iliad to tragedies—that in ancient Greece a guilt culture developed from an older shame culture.1 Dodds had taken this dichotomy from Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946): an influential, and much debated, anthropological analysis of Japan as a shame culture.2 The dichotomy has been described in the following terms: in shame cultures the individual is confronted with an external sanction, embodied by the community to which he or she belongs; in guilt cultures the sanction is introjected.3 new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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Both Dodds and, to some extent, Benedict refused to consider the two cultures as mutually incompatible, allowing for the existence of intermediate stages. Other studies, however, have reshaped the dichotomy in an evolutionist perspective, with potentially racist overtones. In an article which appeared in 1972 in The American Journal of Psychiatry, Harold W. Glidden posited an ‘Arab behaviour’ based on a shame culture focused on revenge.4 The implications were evident: the alternative to shame cultures, which are archaic and backward, was guilt cultures, whose distinctive features are interiority and a mature moral code—in a word, modernity. The possible misuse of the dichotomy is obvious, but its cognitive potential deserves a closer look. For my test I will start from two books, both published in 1993, whose contents overlap: Bernard Williams’s Sather lectures, entitled Shame and Necessity, and Douglas L. Cairns’s Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Their approaches are quite different from each other. Williams, the philosopher, offered a ‘philosophical description of an historical reality’, arguing that Greek ideas about action and responsibility were both close to and different from ours—but insisting that ‘the Greek past is the past of modernity’.5 Cairns, the classicist, carefully assembled and analysed a massive dossier in a quasi-ethnographic perspective, emphasizing the distance between Greek culture and ours.6 This essay was originally published in a volume in honour of Sigrid Weigel: Corina Caduff, Anne-Kathrin Reulecke and Ulrike Vedder, eds, Passionen. Objekte– Schauplätze–Denkstile, Munich 2010; reprinted by permission of Wilhelm Fink Verlag © 2006, an imprint of the Brill Group. Many thanks to Sam Gilbert for his linguistic advice and to Maria Luisa Catoni for her suggestions. 1 Eric R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley 1951. Italian translation, with an introduction by Arnaldo Momigliano: I Greci e l’irrazionale, Firenze 1959, p. 59 ff. 2 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, New York 1946. Italian translation, with an introduction by Paolo Beonio Brocchieri: Milano 1991, chapter X. On p. 244 Benedict writes that the dichotomy is often mentioned in cultural anthropological research. 3 A good discussion is provided by Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, Oxford 1993, pp. 27–47. 4 Harold W. Glidden, ‘The Arab World’, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 128, no. 8, February 1972, pp. 984–8. This article was brought to my attention by Edward Said’s harsh criticism of it: Orientalism, New York 1978, pp. 48–9. 5 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley 1993, pp. 16, 3. 6 See the conclusion: ‘These are the categories of our moral thinking, not those of the Greeks . . .’: Cairns, Aidos, p. 434. *

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‘The basic experience connected to shame’, Williams wrote, ‘is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition.’7 This initial hypothesis, born from the introspective efforts of a late-twentieth-century British philosopher, is consistent with a method which explains cultural phenomena by focusing on the individual. But to assume the very notion of individualism one sets out to demonstrate seems to imply a petitio principii: the danger of anachronism is evident. Williams claims to avoid it by relying on ‘bootstrapping’: a self-sustaining cognitive process that proceeds without external help (the metaphor is inspired by a famous story about Baron Münchhausen).8 The initial hypothesis is meant to serve as a starting point, which new data enrich and eventually reshape. To what extent did this research strategy work? A crucial test for Williams’s initial hypothesis is the frequent use of aidos in the Iliad to inspire courage on the battlefield. Aidos! (‘Shame!’) is a reproach addressed to warriors, sometimes followed by a compressed argument: ‘have shame each of the other in the fierce conflict. Of men that have shame more are saved than are slain.’ In other words, acting courageously is the best way to survive. This formula recurs twice in the poem (5, 529–32; 15, 561–4). But in a famous passage (15, 661–6) the face-to-face relation is expanded into something different: ‘Friends’, Nestor says, ‘be men, and set in your heart (thumos) shame (aidos) for other men, and remember, each of you, your children and wives and property and parents, both those of you whose parents are alive and those whose parents are dead: I beseech you here on their behalf, though they are absent, to stand bravely, and not to turn into flight.’9 Williams briefly quotes from this passage and then comments: ‘It is possible to see this kind of prospective shame as a form of fear.’10 But this suggestion leads to a further development, prompted by a word often paired with aidos in the Iliad: nemesis, evoking anger, indignation: Nemesis, and aidos itself, can appear on both sides of a social relation. People have at once a sense of their own honour and a respect for other people’s honour; they can feel indignation or other forms of anger when Williams, Shame and Necessity, pp. 78 ff, 219–23. Williams, Shame and Necessity, ‘Endnote 1’, pp. 219–23: ‘Mechanisms of Shame and Guilt’, pp. 219 ff. 9 I have used the translation by Cairns, Aidos, p. 69. 10 Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 79. 7

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honour is violated, in their own case or someone else’s. These are shared sentiments with similar objects, and they serve to bind people together in a community of feeling.11

‘People have at once a sense . . . they can feel indignation or other forms of anger . . . These are shared sentiments with similar objects’—on what grounds, we may ask, does Williams make assertions like these? Does he claim to have access to the inner feelings of ‘people’ on the basis of his own experience? Does the reference to ‘people’ imply that the connection between ‘shame’ and ‘anger’ is a transcultural phenomenon? The curious wording of the aforementioned passage is contradicted by Williams’s laconic reference to James M. Redfield’s Nature and Culture in the ‘Iliad’: The Tragedy of Hector (1975). In that work, the evidence for passions and feelings experienced by ancient Greeks is provided not by our own passions and feelings (they can only work as questions) but by linguistic evidence. In fact, the connection between aidos and nemesis had already been pointed out by a great linguist (and a great philosopher), Émile Benveniste, in his Noms d’agent et noms d’action en indo-européen (1948): From this point the evolution of the meaning [of nemesis] can be illuminated by that of a term with which it is associated in Homeric usage, aidos (cf. N 122 aidos kai nemesis); both refer to collective representations. Aidos stands for the collective sense of honour and the obligations it implies for the group. But this feeling is strengthened and these obligations are felt most keenly when collective honour is wounded. At that moment the abused ‘honour’ of all becomes the ‘shame’ of each.12

Benveniste translates the connection between aidos and nemesis into an argument accessible to us. We are far from the misleading transparency of psychological self-scrutiny. Let us listen once again to Williams: ‘These are shared sentiments with similar objects, and they serve to bind people together in a community of feeling.’ Does ‘they’ refer to the shared sentiments—or to words? To evade the question by answering ‘both’ would not help. The relationship between Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 80. Émile Benveniste, Noms d’agent et noms d’action en indo-européen, Paris 1948, p. 79. See also É. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, I: Economie, parenté, société, Paris 1969, pp. 340–1 (on philia and aidos). The latter work is mentioned by Cairns, Aidos. On nemesis and aidos see ibid., pp. 51–4. Neither Williams nor Cairns used Benveniste’s Noms d’agent.

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the continuous flow of sentiments and emotions and the discrete taxonomy created by words still baffles us. Will we ever be able to assess the impact of the word aidos, shouted on the battlefield, on the ‘bonding, interactive effect of shame’?13 What would have happened if that powerful performative word, aidos, had not existed? But aidos is, and is not, identical with ‘shame’.14 In Homeric language, as Cairns showed in his detailed inquiry, aidos and related words also meant ‘fear’, ‘respect’, ‘honour’, ‘veneration’, ‘modesty’, ‘sexual parts’. The Latin noun verecundia covers a similar ground: a range of meanings which include ‘religious fear’, ‘shame’, ‘veneration’, ‘sexual parts’ (verenda).15 When we look at other languages we immediately realize that nouns like fear, Furcht, crainte, timore overlap only partially with the range of meanings associated with aidos. Once again we are reminded of two simple truths: translations are always possible; translations are always inadequate. Simple, but also challenging truths. Nestor’s words addressed to soldiers confront us with the counterintuitive association between shame and honour.16 Aidos is a feeling (a passion) which involves a community, both visible and invisible, including the living and the dead: ‘Friends, be men, and set in your heart (thumos) shame (aidos) for other men, and remember, each of you, your children and wives and property and parents, both those of you whose parents are alive and those whose parents are dead.’ This passage from the Iliad explains why the bond elicited by shame may be extended not only to the act of being ashamed of oneself, but also to the act of being ashamed for the behaviour of somebody else, dead or alive. In a footnote Cairns explicitly addresses this extension of aidos, citing the example of Aeschines, the orator, who recalled that ‘rightminded men . . . covered their eyes, being ashamed for the city’, when they came upon the disgraceful aspect of Timarchus’s naked body.17 The Pathos- and Logosformel which Homer had referred either to face-to-face relations or to family connections involving living and dead, was later expanded to include the city. Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 83. Cairns, Aidos, p. 14 and passim. 15 Jean-François Thomas, Déshonneur et honte en latin: étude sémantique, Louvain 2007, pp. 401–39 (on verecundia). 16 Cairns, Aidos, pp. 12–13. 17 Cairns, Aidos, p. 294 n. 100. See Aeschines, Against Timarchus, I, 26. 13

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Shame embodies the relationship between the individual body and the political body. Man, as a political animal, cannot be identified exclusively with his physical body: this is why the boundaries of the ego are an issue. Echoing Ernst Kantorowicz, we might speak of everybody’s two bodies.

2 Ancient Greeks had no specific word for guilt.18 It would be tempting to assume that this absence encapsulates the difference between a shame culture like that of ancient Greece and a guilt culture like our own, shaped by the Judaic and Christian emphasis on original sin and the Fall. But this sort of clear-cut dichotomy would be deceptive. Ideas of original sin and primeval guilt were not unique to the Book of Genesis: they spread around the Mediterranean and were found in societies shaped by the ‘community of honour’.19 How did these very different sets of ideas interact? A case study may provide an answer. The obvious choice would be Augustine, the pagan professor of rhetoric who described in detail the long and painful trajectory which led him to Christianity. From its very title—Confessions—Augustine’s account is centred on guilt. But the language Augustine used in confessing to God is full of nuances. In speaking of his sins he insisted on distinguishing between facinora and flagitia. The same distinction is spelled out, more or less at the same time, in his De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine).20 Facinora are invariably a crime. In a famous passage Augustine recounted that, when he was sixteen, he and his friends stole innumerable pears from a tree in his village: ‘not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden [dum tamen fieret a nobis quod eo liberet, quo non liceret].’21 Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 88 and passim. Cairns, Aidos, p. 70. 20 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. J. F. Shaw, Chicago 1996, pp. 744–5 (De doctrina christiana, III.10.16). I analyse the distinction, from a different point of view, in a forthcoming essay: ‘The Letter Kills: On Some Implications of 2 Cor. 3, 6’. 21 Augustine, Confessions and Enchiridion, trans. Albert C. Outler, London 1955, II, IV, 9. 18

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Looking back in dismay, Augustine tries to understand what he did and why: What was it in you, O theft of mine, that I, poor wretch, doted on—you evil deed [facinus] of darkness—in that sixteenth year of my age? Beautiful [pulchrum] you were not, for you were a theft . . . Those fruits that we stole were fair to the sight [pulchra] because they were thy creation, O Beauty beyond compare, O Creator of all, O thou good God . . . And now, O Lord my God, I ask what it was in that theft of mine that caused me such delight [quid me in furto delectaverit] . . . (II, VI, 12)

Some modern readers ridiculed this passage: to make such a fuss over a few stolen pears! They missed the point. Augustine was suggesting to his readers that his boyish theft of pears re-enacted the scene of the original sin: ‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes [pulchrum oculis aspectuque delectabile] . . . she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.’ (Gen. 3, 6) Man’s propensity to evil comes through, Augustine suggests, even in a boyish theft. After the Fall, nobody is innocent—not even babies: ‘But if “I was conceived in iniquity, and in sin my mother nourished me in her womb” (Ps 51,5) where, I pray thee, O my God, where, O Lord, or when was I, thy servant, ever innocent?’ (Conf., I, VII, 12) But Augustine carefully traced a distinction between criminal facinus and shameful flagitium, the latter a sphere which, he insisted, had to be evaluated according to circumstances.22 In De doctrina christiana Augustine wrote: ‘Because it is shameful [flagitiose] to strip the body naked at a banquet among the drunken and licentious, it does not follow that it is shameful [flagitium] to be naked in the baths . . . We must, therefore, consider carefully what is suitable to times and places and persons, and not rashly charge men with sins [flagitia].’23 The former professor of rhetoric, used to the notion of decency or appropriateness (in Greek, to prepon), was implicitly rereading the Book of Genesis: ‘And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed [et non erubescebant].’ (2, 25) After the Fall, shame enters 22 23

Thomas, Déshonneur, pp. 179–213 (on flagitium). On Christian Doctrine, pp. 745–6 (De doctrina christiana, III. XII, 18–19).

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the world: ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked [cumque cognovissent se esse nudos]; and they sewed figleaves together, and made themselves aprons.’ (Gen. 3, 7) The meaning of nakedness had changed. Man and wife felt the need to cover their sexual parts, now turned into shameful parts (pudenda). Forever after, shame will be associated with the human condition, along with fear and guilt, inextricably intertwined in Adam’s answer to the call of God after the Fall: ‘I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he [i.e., God] said, Who told thee that thou was naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee, that thou shouldest not eat?’ (Gen. 3, 10–11) But notwithstanding his use of the Book of Genesis as a subtext, Augustine was eager to stress the social dimension of nakedness—as well as, more generally, of flagitium. Another passage from De doctrina chistiana refers to dresses instead of nakedness to point out that the perception of some behaviour as shameful or disgraceful may change with the times: ‘For while it was disgraceful [flagitium] among the ancient Romans to wear tunics reaching to the heels and furnished with sleeves, now it is disgraceful [flagitium] for men of honourable birth not to wear tunics of that description: we must take heed in regard to other things also, ensuring that lust does not mix with our use of them . . .’24 The context of the passage—a discussion of the polygamy of Biblical patriarchs—makes Augustine’s remark even more striking. Marriage customs change as dresses do; how they are perceived may vary from place to place and year to year; sometimes they may look shameful. Facinus is not subject to change; flagitium is. Shame is part of the history of mankind. Augustine’s Confessions presents itself as a soliloquy addressed to God. In his innermost being, through relentless self-scrutiny, Augustine discovered a God who was an eternal judge—but he was also aware of the approval and disapproval of different communities. In his experience guilt culture and shame culture were closely intertwined.

3 We started from a widespread experience: the country one belongs to is the country one is ashamed of. We may try to test the argument, either 24

On Christian Doctrine, p. 746 (De doctrina christiana III, 13, 20).

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narrowing the scale of reference (town, family) or enlarging it. Then a question arises: if shame implies closeness, what are the possible boundaries of a shame-based community? The beginning of Primo Levi’s La tregua (The Truce) may be recalled in this context. The war is over; Levi, with a group of survivors from Auschwitz, encounters the liberators, four Red Army soldiers on horseback: They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage; the shame that Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, the feeling of guilt that such crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.25

The victims and the liberators, Levi argued, were ashamed and felt guilty of having been unable to prevent injustice; the perpetrators and their accomplices were not ashamed. Those words, written in 1947, were published in 1963.26 In his last book, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), published in 1986, Levi returned to the same subject in a chapter entitled ‘Shame’. Once again he mixed shame and guilt: ‘shame, which is a feeling of guilt’; ‘a feeling of shame or guilt’. In pages of intolerable lucidity he explored his feelings of guilt and spoke of those who had survived the death camps only to kill themselves. Then he mentioned a ‘vaster shame, the shame of the world’: shame for the evil committed by somebody else, shame born from the sense of belonging, as the perpetrators and accomplices did, to humankind. ‘The sea of grief, past and present, surrounded us, and its level rose year after year nearly to the point of drowning us’.27 Levi committed suicide one year later. Only in extreme cases does the world experience this sort of shame. But its very possibility throws some light on the general issue I have 25 Primo Levi, La tregua (1963), in Opere, I, ed. by M. Belpoliti, introduction by D. Del Giudice, Torino 1997, p. 206 (If This is a Man, and The Truce, trans. S. Woolf, London 2001, p. 188). I am grateful to Pier Cesare Bori who brought this passage to my attention a long time ago. 26 Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (1986), in Opere, II, p. 1047. 27 ‘Il mare di dolore, passato e presente, ci circondava, ed il suo livello è salito di anno in anno fino quasi a sommergerci’: I sommersi e i salvati, p. 1057.

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mentioned: the boundaries of the ego. To speak of every human being having two bodies (the physical and the social, the visible and the invisible) is insufficient. It is more helpful to consider the individual as the point of convergence of multiple sets. We simultaneously belong to a species (Homo sapiens), a sex, a linguistic community, a political community, a professional community, and so on and so forth. Ultimately we come across a set, defined by ten fingerprints, which has just one member: ourselves. To define an individual on the basis of his or her fingerprints certainly makes sense in some contexts. But an individual cannot be identified with his or her unique features. To achieve a fuller understanding of an individual’s deeds and thoughts, present or past, we have to explore the interaction among the sets, specific and generic, to which he or she belongs. The emotion I started from—being ashamed for somebody different from us, for something we are not involved in— is a clue that helps us to rethink our multiple identities, their interaction and their unity, from an unexpected angle.

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HOMO EUROPUS

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o commemorate its most famous export, the German city of Trier made an unusual choice of speaker. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker delivered the speech honouring Karl Marx on his 200th birthday in May 2018. ‘What Marx analysed, what he suggested, what he has left us’, he said, ‘Capital, The Communist Manifesto, contributed to changing the world. It inspired many people of different provenances and fealties.’ Juncker was sanguine about how Marx the 19th-century theorist related to 20th-century political history. ‘One has to understand Marx in his time, and not express prejudices based on the certainties of hindsight’, he urged his audience. ‘Marx is not responsible for all the abominations for which his supposed heirs have to answer’. After this careful appropriation of the world’s premier revolutionary thinker, Juncker turned to the present. ‘The European Union is not a flawed construction, but an unstable one. Unstable because Europe’s social dimension remains the impoverished dimension of European integration’, he said. Channelling the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Juncker declared that ‘we must change this’. In his native Luxembourg, Juncker has always been on the left wing of his party, the Christian Social People’s Party (csv). But as his term at the head of the eu’s executive branch draws to a close, he has placed a renewed emphasis on the idea of a ‘social Europe’. Juncker’s late-career paean to Marx contrasts with his Commission predecessor José Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese ex-prime minister who began as a Maoist and retired to a board position at Goldman Sachs. The Luxembourger has been more constant in his trajectory over the course of a 40-year political career, of which he has spent an astounding 35 in cabinet-level positions: 20 years as Luxembourg’s finance minister, 18 as its prime minister, 8 as chairman of the Eurogroup of finance ministers and 5 as president of the Commission. Such longevity, not new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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uncommon among Central Asian despots, is remarkable at the head of multi-party coalition governments. Juncker’s political career is a metonym for the evolution of the European Union. At the same time, the peculiar history of the country that produced him illustrates how the continent’s leaders have reconciled their constituents to change in an era of neoliberal globalization. Interpreting Juncker’s politics is often a projection of one’s view of the eu. In the collective delirium of Brexit, British tabloids portray Juncker as a German-speaking autocrat, but he is a broker rather than a disciplinarian. The New York Times calls him ‘inscrutable’, but few European statesmen are so goofy and loose-mannered. To nationalists around Europe, his personal habitus reeks of the insider politics of the eu, in which smugness masks incompetence. A glad-hander who is fond of cigarettes and fine wines, Juncker represents the old boys’ instincts of a largely masculine political class. His cheerful play-acting demeanour simultaneously offends and disarms. Yet behind the occasionally drunk buffoonery hides a veteran political operator. The reasons to dislike Juncker are plain, but his strengths are more subtle and long-lasting. He possesses a charitable style and negotiating stamina that can only be acquired in countries with a compromiseoriented political culture. Nowhere in Europe has parliamentary politics been dominated by Christian Democrats for as long as in Luxembourg. The son of a steelworker, Juncker’s strategy to preserve national autonomy in the global economic arena emerged in the wake of the crises of the 1970s. He has perfected a flexible intergovernmental style of politics among European capitals while preserving Luxembourg’s welfare state by transforming its economy into a leading corporate tax haven and financial hub. In Europe, only Ireland is home to more tax-dodging multinationals, and only the City of London hosts more dark money; Luxembourg attracts both. This buccaneering business model was a symptom of the deregulated capitalism that produced the 2008 financial crisis, but it has survived even as the eu has undergone a period of great stress. A childless man with few passions beyond politics, Juncker continues to practise his craft. His jovial steadfastness in the corridors of global power has earned him respect even from Trump, who told him last summer at a G7 summit in Canada, ‘Jean-Claude—you are a brutal killer.’

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Between France and Germany Wedged between the Belgian Ardennes to the north, the German Eifel region to the east and the French department of Lorraine in the south, Luxembourg has been a crossroads for many centuries. Ösling, the northern part of the country, is covered in forested hills and river valleys; its flatter southern two-thirds, the so-called Gutland, holds the vast majority of the territory’s 600,000 inhabitants. Most natives speak Luxembourgish, a Germanic language with strong French influences. Juncker was born in 1954 in the village of Redange, 4 miles from the Belgian border. But ‘jcj’ spent much of his youth 20 miles further south in Belvaux, an industrial hamlet on the French border located at the heart of the iron ore-rich terres rouges. Just 10 miles northeast of this manufacturing concentration, on an elevated plateau, lies Luxembourg City. Being able to move from village life to a factory town to the capital city in the space of 30 miles gives an indication that Luxembourgish politics is provincial in a literal sense. Luxembourg City is the site of an impressive fortress founded in 963 by Sigfried of the Ardennes. Built into a promontory known as the Bock, the stronghold expanded over the centuries to include multiple hills and hundreds of towers, casemates, redoubts and tunnels. Sigfried’s descendants became powerful counts who held the title of Holy Roman Emperor during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Yet Luxembourg was too small to develop an autonomous base of political power. Ruled in succession by the Dukes of Burgundy, the Habsburgs and the French, Luxembourg was primarily the prized possession of others. The ‘Gibraltar of the North’ was considered the most impregnable fortress in northern Europe; even French fortress architect and master-besieger Vauban confessed to Louis xiv’s Minister of War in 1684 that ‘there are some events of which God alone knows the outcome and its time frame . . . the time when this place will be captured is not something that a man of good sense would dare to guess at’.1 After the fall of Napoleon, Luxembourg was re-established as an independent grand duchy. To quell French revanchism, the new state became Vauban to Louvois, 14 & 26 May 1684, in Albert de Rochas d’Aiglun, Vauban, sa famille et ses écrits, ses oisivetés et sa correspondance, Paris 1910, vol. 2, pp. 235, 239.

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part of the German Confederation, with Luxembourg City occupied by a Prussian garrison; but to appease the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Grand Duchy was put under the control of the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange-Nassau. This convoluted arrangement came under pressure from nationalist uprisings and the vicissitudes of inter-state politics. The ‘Luxembourg Question’ nearly provoked great-power wars in the 1830s and 1860s. In response to the Franco-German diplomatic crisis of 1867, Luxembourg was made neutral, forbidden from having a standing army and evacuated by Prussian troops, its majestic fortress dismantled. Foreign control loosened further when the Dutch king died without male heirs in 1890, putting the country under its own ducal family, the Nassau-Weilburgs. Despite growing political autonomy, Luxembourgers remained economically tied to their neighbours. Iron ore was first discovered in 1842. Together with the ore basins of Alsace and Lorraine, this made Luxembourg a natural complement to the coal fields of southeastern Belgium and the German Ruhr. As elsewhere, industrialization was a wrenching process. Recurring famines drove almost a third of the population to migrate to the us during the 19th century. Those who remained had little choice but to seek work on the estates of wealthy farmers or enter the iron mines and steel mills of the terres rouges. When the domestic labour supply began to run short, workers from Poland and Italy gravitated to the region. Vertical integration in the steel industry accelerated pan-European migration. The Grand Duchy was at the heart of a cross-border production complex that moved fuels, ores and workers across four countries.2 As a part of the German federal customs union, the Luxembourgish economy benefited from the rapid industrial growth of the Reich, but also suffered under its disciplinary practices. Workers’ living districts in the steel towns of Esch and Differdange were patrolled by the Hüttenpolizei, a locally recruited security force on horseback doubling as factory overseers and sheriffs. On the eve of the First World War, the steel sector provided 60 per cent of industrial employment in the country. Luxembourg’s politically astute Grand Duchess Marie-Adélaïde remained friendly with German authorities during the War, raising Allied Carl Strikwerda, ‘The Troubled Origins of European Economic Integration: International Iron and Steel and Labour Migration in the Era of World War I’, American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, 1993, pp. 1106–29.

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suspicions. After the Wilhelmine armies surrendered in November 1918, workers and farmers tried to establish a soviet in Luxembourg City, without success. Socialists and liberals attempted a republican coup two months later, but they too were stopped, this time by the intervention of French troops, called in by the new grand duchess, Marie-Adélaïde’s sister Charlotte. Quickly affirming her rule through a referendum, Charlotte introduced universal suffrage. She replaced the economic patronage of Berlin with that of Brussels, guiding Luxembourg into a monetary and customs union with Belgium. During her 45-year reign Luxembourg’s political balance was dominated by the Party of the Right (Rechtspartei), which represented rural notables and wine-growers in the Moselle valley in the east but also attracted steelworkers’ votes with Christian Socialist ideas.3 The Rechtspartei’s fusion of rural Catholic anti-communism and trade unionism pervaded the conservative working-class milieu in which Jean-Claude’s father Joseph was born in 1924. Despite the realignment with France and Belgium, Luxembourg’s main steel conglomerate, arbed, was economically dependent on German capital. Weimar industrialists parked large fortunes across the border to evade hyperinflation and labour unrest at home. Luxembourg’s history as a tax haven began under the premiership of Joseph Bech (1926–37).4 In 1929, Bech granted major tax advantages to holding companies, prompting international capitalists and wealth owners to relocate their assets to the Grand Duchy; within a decade more than 1,100 holdings had set up shop.5 Foreign capital was not the only thing to which 1930s Luxembourg opened itself up. Influenced by the ideas of Maurras in France, Degrelle in Belgium and Dollfuss in Austria, Catholic integralists were interested in establishing an authoritarian corporatist state.6 In 1937 they pushed Bech to outlaw the Communist Party, but this ‘muzzling law’ was narrowly rejected in a popular referendum, prompting Bech’s resignation. Lucien Blau, ‘Un tour de force réussi: du parti de la droite au Parti chrétien-social’, forum für Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur 203, October 2000, pp. 25–30. 4 Vanessa Ogle, ‘Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money and the State, 1950s–1970s’, American Historical Review, vol. 122, no. 5, 2017, p. 1437. 5 Luxembourg was a haven for the corsairs of Europe’s airwaves, too: the Englishlanguage Radio Luxembourg was founded in 1933 to circumvent the bbc’s radio monopoly in Great Britain; it used the world’s most powerful private transmitter to broadcast commercial radio from the continent over the British Isles. 6 Lucien Blau, ‘Histoire de l’extrême-droite au Grand-Duché de Luxembourg au XXe siècle’, PhD dissertation, Université de Metz 1995, pp. 53–75, 134–43. 3

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During the Second World War, Hitler went much further than the Hohenzollern emperors in incorporating Luxembourg into his realm. To the Nazis the Luxembourgers were a Germanic people led astray by the malign Latin influence of France; racial re-education would return them to their Aryan roots. In 1942 Luxembourg was annexed into the German Reich, put under the control of an nsdap Gauleiter, and had its male population conscripted into the Wehrmacht as ethnic German subjects of the Führer. Joseph Juncker was one of those drafted to fight the Red Army on the Eastern Front. After being taken prisoner, he ended up in a Soviet camp in Odessa. Luxembourgers in German uniform were lucky, since the Soviet authorities classified most of them as Frenchmen and repatriated them to the West. Northern Luxembourg became a battlefield in the final stages of the War, as American forces beat back the last Nazi offensive in the Ardennes (upon his death in 1945, General Patton was buried in Luxembourg City). The first post-war elections were so divided that a government of national union took office. Bech returned to power to control the premiership, finances and foreign affairs together with party colleague Pierre Dupong, leaving the other ministries to Social Democrats and Liberals. The unity cabinet of 1945–47 was the first and only time in Luxembourgish history that the Communist Party was in government: the gynaecologist and French resistance veteran Charles Marx served as Minister of Social Assistance and Public Health. Without significant parliamentary opposition, the Communists and Social Democrats were able to nationalize the railways and introduce protections for workers. The beginning of the Cold War ended this period of experimentation. Grand Duchess Charlotte moved Luxembourg resolutely into the American fold. Ending its historic posture of neutrality, Luxembourg became a founding member of nato. Seventy-eight Luxembourgers went to fight Communist forces in Korea. In the meantime, after returning from Soviet captivity, Joseph Juncker had married Marguerite Hecker. By the time their son Jean-Claude was born in 1954, a new European political order was coalescing around the burning of coal and the tempering of steel.

From steel to finance European integration has a powerful founding myth. Beginning with Robert Schuman’s famous May 1950 speech, France and West Germany

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chose to transcend longstanding rivalries to mend the damage and division of war. But in the heartland of the founding Six, economic integration was nothing new. For the inhabitants of Luxembourg’s steel country, the restoration of transnational production was a return to business as usual. After the War, Joseph Juncker worked at the arbed steel plant at Belval, where he served on the factory’s Christian trade union (though one rumour has it that he traded the labourers’ bleu de travail for the khakigreen uniform of a Hüttenpolizist).7 His son Jean-Claude attended middle school at a Belgian monastery and attained his high-school diploma in Luxembourg in 1974. He joined the csv that same year. As the successor to the interwar Rechtspartei, the csv was a natural home for people from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds like the Junckers. The party had rebranded itself in 1944; as its new name suggested, the csv was more directly concerned with the Luxembourgish working class, which it wanted to tie into a national compact with farmers, steel capitalists and wine-growers through generous social provisions. The csv’s Pierre Werner embodied this outlook, governing from 1959–74 and 1979–84 in coalitions with liberal and labour support. The Juncker family was deeply embedded in this web of party, church, work and welfare. Besides his father’s trade-union work, Jean-Claude’s uncle was the Christian Democratic mayor of the little town of Ettelbrück. In the year that he joined the party, the csv lost power for the first time. But in the long run, this brief interlude only served to accentuate its political hegemony: Luxembourg has had a csv prime minister for 63 of the 74 years since the Second World War.8 Manufacturing troubles were the root cause of the csv’s shock 1974 defeat. In that decade, the global steel industry was at the peak of its capacity. Luxembourg’s output had sextupled since the War, and steel-making employed more than 25,000 workers, some 16 per cent of the national labour force. In the early 1970s, a world glut combined with oil-price spikes sent the sector into a deep recession. The crisis refocused the attention of Luxembourg’s Christian Democratic elite, keen to play a leading role in Europe, on problems at home. From 1959, Werner had aimed to position himself as a power-broker mediating the demands of Gaullist France and a strengthening West ‘Mythes et légendes’, d’Lëtzebuerger Land, 23 September 2011. Since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1919, the Rechtspartei and csv have only been out of power in 1925–26, 1974–79 and since 2013—twelve years in a century.

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Germany. He was also an avid financial innovator. As a wartime banker and delegate at the Bretton Woods conference he had cultivated connections to us financial circles that would be crucial in the next phase of Luxembourg’s development. American banks and investment funds fleeing domestic regulations had opened branches in the Grand Duchy as early as 1959. Luxembourg’s lack of a central bank meant that they did not need to maintain legal minimum reserves and benefited from light oversight. In 1962, the National Bank of Belgium instated direct swap lines with the us Federal Reserve, allowing the Fed to stabilize the dollar exchange rate as American capital began to pour into the Grand Duchy.9 The Kennedy Administration imposed an Interest Equalization Tax to prevent the us balance-of-payments deficit growing too much, yet a group of European banks had already evaded these constraints by using Werner’s Luxembourg. In July 1963, they issued the first ‘Eurobond’—a privately created dollar loan of $15 million for Italy’s state road-building company—on the Luxembourg stock exchange.10 Werner did more than bring in foreign banks. Anticipating that Europe would eventually grow out of the bounds set by the Bretton Woods system, he also proposed a European monetary union as early as 1968. But the possibility of monetary harmony was destroyed by American departure from Bretton Woods in 1971 and the oil crisis two years later. By then the steel sector was struggling, and arbed’s output had fallen by half. Succeeding Werner in 1974, Liberal leader Gaston Thorn devised a rescue strategy, the Steel Plan, which involved the state, industrialists and trade unions in a corporatist fix. Converting the national economy from heavy industry to banking and services was a long-term effort. The government took over almost half of arbed’s shares, offered early retirement to workers and stopped indexing wages to inflation. Public spending rose to nearly half of gdp by the 1980s. Due to the csv presence in the unions, this transition went relatively smoothly. Luxembourg became one of the first countries to deindustrialize itself almost by consensus. In 1979, at the age of twenty-four, Juncker finished his degree in law at the University of Strasbourg, and became parliamentary secretary Under its Bretton Woods-era swap lines (1962–71), the volume of the Fed’s exchange of currency with Belgium and Luxembourg ($2.4bn) was larger than its swaps with West Germany ($1.4bn) or France ($1.2bn). 10 ‘$15m Autostrade Loan, Consortium Headed by Warburgs’, The Times, 19 June 1963. 9

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of the csv. Werner had returned to power, while Thorn had gone to Brussels to become the first Luxembourgish president of the European Commission. There were other promising young politicians on the scene; Viviane Reding, a Sorbonne-educated journalist, entered parliament as the third most popular candidate among csv voters in the south of Luxembourg, whereas Juncker ended in fifteenth place. Yet when the position of State Secretary for Labour and Social Security opened up in 1982, he was picked by the inner circle of Werner’s party-state. Juncker owed some of his power to his self-presentation as the leader of a group of ‘young wolves’ who wanted to modernize the csv in the wake of its 1974 defeat, emphasizing the importance of capturing the political centre. He rejected the conservative Catholic aura of the senior leadership in favour of appealing to new voter groups, including working women, in the name of a ‘pragmatic generation’. Juncker raised the solidarity tax to redistribute the costs of deindustrialization. Elected to parliament in 1984, he continued the reorientation of the economy towards services and banking. At the same time, Juncker paid fealty to the csv old guard: he always described himself as a spiritual child of Werner, and from 1984 followed in the footsteps of Werner’s protégé and successor, Jacques Santer.11 By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Juncker had climbed to the post of finance minister.

Birthing the euro Since Luxembourg has fewer inhabitants than many medium-sized European cities, Juncker’s eu colleagues have sometimes drawn into question his ability to govern large polities. But in seeing Juncker as a mere administrator, they discount his role as an ideological innovator. As the first csv leader to be born after the War, Juncker rejuvenated the party for the post-industrial age, extending its national dominance. At its 2002 congress, he rejected the designation of a ‘centre-right’ party, ensuring that the csv defined itself as a ‘popular party of the social centre’. Juncker’s soft neoliberalism appealed to steelworkers and bankers in equal measure.12 The same approach would be put to work on a wider stage. In the early 1990s, Europe faced the prospect of a British veto. In the preceding years a burst of continental integration had taken place under the forceful Commission president Jacques The best overview of Juncker’s persona and political career in Luxembourg is Laurent Schmit, Jürgen Stoldt and Bernard Thomas, ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’, forum für Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur 324, December 2012, pp. 4–11. 12 Charel Schmit et al., ‘C wie Centrum’, Luxemburger Wort, 27 January 2014. 11

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Delors. By the time leaders convened in the Dutch town of Maastricht to sign the treaty that created the European Union, British politicians were having second thoughts about the project. A reunified Germany seemed poised to dominate the new Union. The British elite was split over Delors’s plan to turn the existing Exchange Rate Mechanism (erm) into a common European currency; London’s global financial role, based on sterling, would be diminished. As Luxembourg’s finance minister, Juncker was responsible for chairing the meetings on the economic and monetary aspects of the eu. In the run-up to Maastricht he charmed and cajoled just as he had at home; but instead of Luxembourgish bosses and workers, he was now shepherding German conservatives and French socialists. Juncker kept the Brits in the Union by proposing that the pound could ‘opt out’ of the euro, enabling the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. Still, financial markets nearly destroyed the common currency before its birth. Having opened their own economies in the name of competitiveness by submitting to full capital mobility, European nationstates could only get to the euro by running the gauntlet of speculative attacks. On ‘Black Wednesday’, 16 September 1992, investors forced Britain to take the pound out of the erm. The shock of the British departure fed worries that the common currency and even the Union as a whole would collapse. Soon the strong export economies of Germany and the Netherlands were suggesting that they, too, might leave. But Juncker managed to keep all governments inside the new erm by widening the bandwidth within which national currencies could fluctuate, from 2.25 per cent to a super-elastic 15 per cent. Juncker said recently that the Maastricht period ‘is a time from which there are only two survivors: the euro and myself’.13 The commitment to a currency union, an idea that went against the grain of much expert opinion then and since, was a deeply political initiative disguised in the robes of economic necessity. Creating the euro demanded a willingness to grant concessions. British Conservatives were not prepared to offer much, but still got to join the Union. Juncker sees the erm crisis of 1992, not without reason, as the beginning of the road that led to Brexit. This frustration is perhaps born of an appreciation for how structurally similar Luxembourg’s economic posture is to that 13

Speech at the ecb Forum on Central Banking, 18 June 2019.

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of British neoliberals. During the years of Santer’s premiership, 1984– 95, the Grand Duchy was pursuing a policy of hyper-financialization. The continent’s favoured go-between nation was also where Saddam Hussein did his banking. Under Santer the number of banks flocking to Luxembourg grew rapidly;14 besides serving multinational corporations and tapping the thriving Eurodollar market, Luxembourg-based bankers specialized in catering to Europe’s quotidian bourgeois tax evaders, a customer type they labelled the ‘Belgian dentist’. Luxembourgers did not see much of a problem with this. Nor were other European countries very concerned with the issue of tax evasion in the 1990s. To the contrary, European leaders rewarded Santer by picking him to be Delors’s successor as European Commission president in 1995. This meant that Juncker became prime minister of the Grand Duchy. One year into his new job, Juncker took credit for crafting an important deal between Chirac and Kohl at an Irish summit of the European Council. France and Germany disagreed about the eu’s budgetary rules, and the deal that Juncker crafted in Dublin combined German demands for fiscal discipline with French desires for their flexible application.15 It earned Juncker lifelong support from German Christian Democrats, first Kohl and then his protégé Angela Merkel. Both Juncker and Merkel had manoeuvered into positions of influence in time to see their senior mentors’ political careers tarnished by corruption scandals. Kohl lost power in 1998. The next year a report exposing favouritism, fraud and abuse of power in the European Commission produced a no-confidence vote from the European Parliament; Santer’s entire Commission was forced to resign. It was the first time that the eu’s executive had been held to account for its behaviour; newspapers hailed ‘the passing of Europe’s ancien régime’ and predicted ‘the dawning of a genuine European democracy’.16 Yet while he was emerging as a paragon of European cooperation, Juncker continued Luxembourg’s competitive deregulation, helping to sap the Ogle, ‘Archipelago Capitalism’, p. 1450. The European deficit limits could be lifted if a country was in a severe recession, which Chirac and Kohl agreed was a contraction of more than 0.75 per cent of gdp. It was a solution that would become typical of Juncker’s intergovernmental style: an explicitly political compromise, bereft of any economic logic, but acceptable enough to keep everyone aboard. 16 ‘eu Chiefs Resign En Masse’, Guardian, 16 March 1999. 14 15

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very budget agreements he was brokering. The Grand Duchy’s tax-haven function undermined the fiscal power of other European states, while its pandering to banks and money-market funds contributed to building an unaccountable credit bubble that would burst in the next decade. In fact, Juncker was aware of this fragility; he secretly ordered the printing of 50 billion worth of a new, independent version of the Luxembourgish franc, to be kept in reserve in case the euro flopped. When the euro was successfully introduced on 1 January 1999, the Grand Duchy’s tiny army spent the entire day burning this pile of banknotes. As the Luxembourgish franc went up in flames, foreign money continued to stream into the country.

Eurozone crisis When your country is in the heart of Europe but less than a thousand square miles in surface area—roughly the size of Rhode Island—there are few areas of domestic life and politics that are not directly connected to the wider world. From the 1890s to the 1970s, the burgeoning steel sector attracted Italian and Portuguese workers. With the rise of finance and services, French, British and Belgian professionals have come to dominate the banks and law firms based in Luxembourg City. As a result, nearly two-thirds of the labour force and almost half of the Grand Duchy’s inhabitants are foreigners. Globally, only the Arab Gulf states have larger foreign workforces. In such circumstances, to defend openness is to defend Luxembourg’s national sovereignty. Immigration has been presented as a threat to the welfare state in many European countries. But Luxembourgish trade unions have upheld rather than restricted the entitlements of foreign workers. The steel mills have employed many Italian labourers since the beginning of the 20th century—Juncker says that growing up around Italians is why he hugs and kisses so freely in public—and the Common Market facilitated a new inflow of workers from Portugal. These Portuguese Luxembourgers constitute a sixth of the population and have been fully integrated into the social fabric. There is only a miniscule Luxembourgish far right and no strong antiimmigrant animus. The country is, in the words of one historian, ‘an immigration success story’.17 The key to maintaining this social compact was, ironically, taxes; as finance minister and prime minister, Juncker ensured the intensive redistribution of state revenues. Since the late Joel Fetzer, Luxembourg as an Immigration Success Story: The Grand Duchy in PanEuropean Perspective, Lanham md 2011. 17

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1980s the Luxembourgish economy has grown rapidly, but fiscal income has grown faster still, rising almost seven-fold from €3.4 billion in 1989 to €21.4 billion in 2017. Though globalization did not prevent effective redistribution, it did draw into question who controlled major parts of the economy. Luxembourg’s steel sector was a case in point. By the early 2000s, arbed merged with the Spanish firm Aceralia and the French steelmaker Usinor to form a new pan-European group, Arcelor. It had to avoid becoming, in Juncker’s words, ‘a simple prey’.18 Arcelor’s high-quality steel beams were used to build the Freedom Tower, the Bank of America Tower on Bryant Park and the New York Times building. But European consolidation was not enough in the face of rising Asian competition in the global steel market. In 2006 Arcelor faced a hostile takeover by the Indian Mittal Steel. Juncker and other European leaders resisted it for six months before a shareholder revolt forced them to capitulate to Mittal’s bid. The new company, ArcelorMittal, remained based in Luxembourg. Yet for Juncker, the takeover ended national control over the core industry that he had fought to protect since the 1980s. Despite these global limits to Juncker’s room for manoeuvre, he became an essential European politician by playing different levels of power off against each other. The ‘hero of Dublin’ narrative helped Juncker in European capitals, while his small-country background was an asset at eu summits. Leveraging his linguistic and cultural affinities, Juncker allowed both French and German elites to believe he was ‘their man’ in dealing with the other. In Luxembourg itself, his reputation as the ambitious son of a trade unionist who had made it in European politics solidified his domestic appeal. That the csv’s big-tent centrism continued to pay off was also proven at the polls. In 2005, French and Dutch voters rejected a draft European constitution in two referendums. Juncker gambled by offering to resign if the Luxembourgers did the same, and won when a majority approved it. Yet the negative results in France and the Netherlands forced government leaders to reconsider how to continue European integration. Importantly, the events of 2005 pushed eu institutions away from further supra-national federalism and towards a more intergovernmental approach, involving national leaders in regular summit diplomacy. This brokerage-heavy form of administration put a premium on pragmatism over vision. Unlike previous Luxembourgish 18

Speech to Luxembourg Parliament, 6 February 2006.

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prime ministers, Juncker did not just work in the shadows but took a self-consciously popular approach to European-level wheeling and dealing. Especially for French and German audiences, he cultivated a distinct media image as a political bridge-builder. Habermas saw in him a would-be mover of history, a man ‘of the calibre and will’ to launch Europe forward, but one whose country lacked the power to do so. Global banking credit was another channel of resources that Luxembourg could pander to but not control. Whereas financial-sector deposits were about 85 per cent of gdp in 1975, they had grown to 472 per cent by 2008.19 By then, Juncker had chaired the Eurogroup, composed of the euro area’s finance ministers, for three years. As a result, Luxembourg found itself at the core of the global financial crisis in a double sense. The money-market funds that had settled in the Grand Duchy came up short of dollars. Two major banks, Dexia and Fortis, had to be bailed out by the Benelux governments to the tune of $25 billion. Given Luxembourg’s dependence on its financial industry, Juncker saw no choice but to support the banks to the hilt. Yet the banking crisis exposed the flaws of short-term fixes by European leaders. ‘The method’, Juncker told reporters, ‘by which everyone comes up with ad hoc solutions in his corner the moment a crisis starts in a financial company isn’t a systematic enough method.’20 But given his political modus operandi, he was hardly the man to provide thoroughgoing changes. Though he had designed the Stability and Growth Pact rules of the Maastricht settlement, Juncker was by nature a rule-bender. Financial speculation had almost wrecked European monetary cooperation in 1992, and he favoured hashing out a backroom agreement before facing the press. In the discussions about bailouts for embattled Eurozone governments in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, Juncker often found himself in the minority of budgetary moderates. In 2011, he joked that he was ‘for secret, dark debates’ to avoid triggering a negative reaction from financial markets; southern European debtors were being unfairly depicted by northern Europeans as lazy and corrupt. But as an instinctive seeker of compromise, Juncker could soften but not transcend the divisions of the Eurozone crisis. Too undisciplined for the Dutch and Germans, too strict for the Greeks and Italians, there was a rather dark 19 20

imf Data, available on the Global Economy website. ‘The us Financial Crisis Is Spreading to Europe’, nyt, 30 September 2008.

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humour to his tendency to squeeze and fake-strangle colleagues during Eurogroup meetings.

Disgrace and promotion If any scandal should have ended Juncker’s political career, it was his enabling of Luxembourg’s colossal role in global tax evasion. But in a bizarre twist, his eighteen years as prime minister ended due to an unresolved episode of state terrorism from the Cold War. The socalled Bommeleeër affair concerned 24 bomb blasts in 1984–86. The unknown bombers mainly targeted electricity pylons but also set off explosives, stolen from stone quarries, at Luxembourg’s airport, police barracks, newspaper headquarters, gas plants and even at a European Council summit. The attacks appeared designed not to cause casualties. Although the perpetrators were never found, the bombings had the hallmarks of an Italian-style ‘strategy of tension’. Investigations into the bombings only began in 2004. Suspicion fell on two gendarmes, who were thought to have conducted the attacks to pressure the government into increasing funding for the police. Their defence claimed that they had been carrying out orders on behalf of a secret nato stay-behind network. The Luxembourg secret service, srel, received tips implicating far-right sympathizers. One witness claimed to have seen Grand Duke Henri’s brother, Prince Jean, in a car near the airport just before a bomb went off there. Although the much-delayed Bommeleeër trial is yet to commence, the affair has been a headache for Juncker for many years. There were rumours that the secret service had recorded a conversation between him and the Grand Duke about Jean’s involvement. In 2008, srel chief Marco Mille used a special wristwatch to record a conversation in which he tried to get the prime minister to confess he had withheld information about the bombings.

srel had reasons of its own to gather kompromat on Juncker. Over the course of the 2000s, the activities of the secret service had spiraled out of control. The decision to exploit Luxembourg’s position as a financial and fiscal paradise to gather corporate intelligence created dangerous opportunities for individual self-enrichment. srel agents extorted pay0ffs from Russian oligarchs, ran cigarette-smuggling rackets in the Middle East and were reported to have facilitated the transport of nuclear technology to Iran as us sanctions were beginning to kick in. There were

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also conflicts of interest between secret-service personnel and employees of CargoLux, the second-largest freight airline in Europe, with a fleet of over twenty Boeing 747s.21 Juncker ignored this shady business for too long. Since becoming Eurogroup chairman, he had spent more time networking in Brussels and courting German newspapers than running the affairs of the Grand Duchy. In July 2013, the spy scandal had grown so all-consuming that the Social Democrats withdrew from their coalition government with the csv. Even though Juncker’s party came in first in a snap election, parliamentary support for his continued reign was gone. The liberal Xavier Bettel became prime minister, and Juncker was out of political office for the first time since the end of the Cold War. During the two decades that he governed Luxembourg, Juncker profited from self-reinforcing policy choices and advantageous global trends. Substantial labour immigration, the crescendo of European integration and a rapid influx of corporate and financial capital boosted gdp. Fiscal largesse softened the effects of neoliberal reforms. A deliberate embrace of social centrism, appealing to women and professionals, made the csv a hegemonic party. Yet by the time he became president of the European Commission in 2014, most of these pillars were crumbling. The Union was mired in economic stagnation and unemployment. Far-right sovereigntist parties had emerged to challenge the euro. Immigrants were increasingly seen as a political problem rather than an economic godsend. Budget cuts rather than spending and tax increases dominated elite discourse. In any case, the eu’s budget was only 2 per cent of the continent’s public spending, and the Commission had no capacity to levy taxes. As a bureaucracy with a large public-facing component, the Commission was not the place where Juncker had planned to end his career. His bartering talents were better suited to the more reclusive European Council, a forum out of the limelight where heads of government meet to make and break eu policy. In 2009, Juncker had tried to get the Council’s inaugural presidency, but was passed over in favour of the Belgian exprime minister Herman van Rompuy. Five years later, the crisis had highlighted the eu’s democratic inadequacies, and the Europarliament elections became the focus of efforts to revive its popular appeal. This is why the European People’s Party (epp), the centre-right bloc in the eu See the investigative work of Véronique Poujol, ‘Vengeurs masqués’, d’Lëtzebuerger Land, 6 September 2013.

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Parliament, picked Juncker as its Spitzenkandidat. The 2014 campaign was the first time that Europarliamentary candidates ran actual campaigns to persuade voters across the continent. Juncker zipped around in private jets as well as in an epp campaign bus, both equipped with ashtrays to accommodate his smoking. While he displayed suppleness with French and German audiences, there was strong British opposition to his candidacy. Cameron, who had already conceded the promise of a Brexit referendum in a bid to shut down his party’s Eurosceptic wing once and for all, duly attacked Juncker as an eu super-stater. Given the common interests of London and Luxembourg as financial centres, he need not have worried so much. In the end, the irony of the 2014 European elections was that the first move towards picking heads of eu institutions democratically produced a Commission president who was a consummate insider. Given the manifest social costs of austerity policies, Europe’s conservatives were under pressure to address the unemployment crisis. The first big initiative of Juncker’s self-declared ‘political’ Commission was an investment scheme that would spend €315 billion ($390 billion) over three years—a number larger than anything ever produced by the eu. Yet the Juncker Plan was a neoliberal beast in Keynesian clothing, designed to cover up the lack of any European fiscal state. The core money spent was taken from other parts of the eu budget, which was then used as a guarantee to ‘catalyse’ private investment. Effectively, banks and investors were expected to sink money into Brussels-picked projects; no new net spending was being undertaken. Judging from pre-crisis levels of growth, by 2014 the investment gap of the European economy had grown to over €800 billion; in the face of this the Potemkin stimulus of the Juncker Plan was woefully inadequate.22 Political challenges rather than economic plans defined Juncker’s tenure at the Commission. In 2016, right-wing nationalists in Britain, Poland and Hungary rattled Brussels. Hoisted on the petard of Brexit, Cameron appeared to European officials as a flippant dissolver of union, a Gorbachev without historical necessity. Understanding that a country which does not wish to share any common institutions with the rest of the continent will have little urge to negotiate, Juncker took a strong line in the Brexit talks. His toughness on Brexit stands in contrast with his ‘Will Juncker’s €300 Billion Plan Close the Investment Gap?’, Wall Street Journal, 13 October 2014. 22

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measured response to the nationalist antics of the Polish and Hungarian governments; although provocative, they are in no way preparing to leave the Union (a striking 84 per cent of both Poles and Hungarians polled by Eurobarometer this year said that they feel they are citizens of the eu, a figure much closer to Luxembourg’s 93 than to the uk’s mere 58 per cent). Of course, there is little love lost between Juncker and Orbán, whom he called a ‘dictateur’ to his face­—Juncker exquisitely understands that being handsy is how you get away with slapping your political rivals. But despite calls to crack down on Hungary’s disparagement of liberal values, Juncker has avoided a direct confrontation. If a country shows its desire to be a member of the European club, he prefers to engage rather than penalize them. ‘I’m no great fan of sanctions, as they make the conversation more difficult’, he recently told the German tabloid Bild. ‘Countries are like wild horses, punishing them is not the way to tame them.’23 Yet since 2016 it has been hard to maintain a normal conversation with the American government. At first, Trump’s aggressive talk about American global power did not pose a direct threat to Europe. But when he pulled out of the Iran deal and re-imposed economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic and its trading partners, a more serious rift emerged. Juncker has called the us extra-territorial sanctions a ‘Nixon moment’ for the eu, akin to Washington’s 1971 departure from the Bretton Woods system. He has not been meek in organizing a response. The European Commission has countered Trump’s tariff hikes with import dues of its own, sued the us in the World Trade Organization and threatened asset seizures as retaliation for us action against European firms trading with Cuba. Answering to British delusion and American obstreperousness has provided a good outlet for Juncker’s desire to run a ‘political’ Commission. At the same time, the eu has adopted a critical but not uncooperative attitude towards China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is advancing further into southern and eastern Europe.24 Once again, there is a cast of outsiders against whom the meaning of the European project might ‘How Was That with the Greeks, Mister Juncker?’, Bild, 31 May 2019. While Juncker was still prime minister, Luxembourg had already moved into the domain of Asian offshore finance; in 2011 it became the first European country to issue renminbi-denominated assets outside the control of the Chinese government—so-called ‘Dim Sum Bonds’. 23

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credibly be defined. Whether these orientations will be continued by the new European Commission that takes office on 1 December 2019, led by German Christian Democrat Ursula von der Leyen, is an open question. But today the main cost of this growing political unification has been borne by those at Europe’s gates, especially African and Middle Eastern migrants clamouring to enter the continent with the highest living standards in the world. Juncker’s maintenance of internal openness and dialogue has gone hand in hand with his strengthening of European borders. Frontex, the eu’s border police, is undergoing a ten-fold personnel increase from 2016 to 2020. Meanwhile, as refugees cross the Sahara in search of capital and respite in Europe, Luxembourg has been rebranding itself as a leader in the commercial exploitation of space. Talks with Russia about an asteroid-mining agreement are in the works.

OUT NOW FROM VERSO ONE MAN’S TERRORIST A Political History of the IRA

Daniel Finn HARDBACK • £16.99/$26.95 • 978-1-7866-3688-1

‘One of the best analyses available of the politics that motivated and drove different currents within insurrectionary Irish republicanism over the past 60 years.’ —Tommy McKearney, author of The Provisional IRA

michael hardt & antonio negri

EMPIRE, TWENTY YEARS ON

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wenty years ago, when our book Empire first appeared, the economic and cultural processes of globalization occupied centre stage: all could see that some kind of new world order was emerging. Today globalization is once again a central issue, but now commentators across the political spectrum are conducting its post­mortem. Establishment political analysts, especially in Europe and North America, lament the decline of the liberal international order and the death of the Pax Americana. Newly dominant reactionary forces call for the return of national sovereignty, undermining trade pacts and presaging trade wars, denouncing supranational institutions and cosmopolitan elites, while stoking the flames of racism and violence against migrants. Even on the left, some herald a renewed national sovereignty to serve as a defensive weapon against the predations of neoliberalism, multinational corporations and global elites.

Despite such prognostications, both wishful and anguished, globalization is not dead or even in decline, but simply less easily legible. It is true that the global order and the accompanying structures of global command are everywhere in crisis, but today’s various crises do not, paradoxically, prevent the continuing rule of the global structures. The emerging world order, like capital itself, functions through crisis and even feeds on it. It works, in many respects, by breaking down.1 The fact that the processes of globalization are less legible today makes it all the more important to investigate the trends of the past twenty years in both the variegated constitution of global governance, which includes the powers of nation-states but extends well beyond them, and the global structures of capitalist production and reproduction. new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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Interpreting the primary structures of rule and exploitation in a global context is the key to recognizing and furthering the potential forces of revolt and liberation. The emerging global order and networks of capital undoubtedly constitute an offensive operation, against which we should support resistance efforts; but they should also be recognized as responses to the threats and demands forwarded by the long history of revolutionary internationalisms and liberation struggles. Just as today’s Empire was formed in response to the insurgencies of the multitudes from below, so too, potentially, it could fall to them, as long as those multitudes can compose their forces into effective counter-powers, and chart the path towards an alternative form of social organization. Today’s social and political movements are, in many respects, already pointing in this direction.

i. spheres out of sync Imagine the ongoing crises of Empire as taking place within two nested spheres—the planetary networks of social production and reproduction, and the constitution of global governance—that are increasingly out of sync. The inner sphere, the planetary domain of social production and reproduction, is constituted by ever-more complex and densely interconnected networks of communication, material and immaterial infrastructures, air, water and land transportation lines, transoceanic cables and satellite systems, social and financial networks, and multiple overlapping interactions among ecosystems, humans and other species. Traditional forms of localized economic production, such as agriculture and mining, persist within this planetary sphere; but they are progressively absorbed, dynamized and, in many cases, threatened by these intercontinental circuits. Labour, too, is drawn into and constrained by the planetary web of markets, infrastructures, laws and border regimes. The processes of valorization and exploitation are ruled by a highly variegated, but nonetheless integrated, global assembly line. Finally, institutions of social reproduction and circuits of ecological metabolism may remain local, but they too depend upon—and are often menaced by—increasingly large dynamic systems. For Deleuze and Guattari the schizophrenic nature of the capitalist machine is in part demonstrated by the fact that it ‘works by breaking down’. See Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane, Minneapolis 1983, p. 31.

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These planetary systems subsume, in both real and formal terms, diverse practices of social production and reproduction, across disparate spaces and temporalities. The fact that this sphere is so hetero­geneous, composed of proliferating borders and hierarchies at various scales—within each metropolis, nation-state, region, continent—should not prevent us from recognizing it as a coherent, albeit highly variegated, whole: a single, dense, planetary ensemble.2 This interconnectedness becomes clearest, perhaps, when we confront our shared vulnerability: in the face of nuclear devastation or catastrophic climate change, the entire web of living beings and technologies is threatened, leaving no one and nothing untouched. Surrounding this sphere of social production and reproduction, encircling it, is a second sphere, composed of intertwined political and legal systems at different levels: national governments, international legal agreements, supranational institutions, corporate networks, special economic zones and more. This is not a global state. As pretensions to national sovereignty fade away, what increasingly emerges instead are transnational regimes of governance. These overlapping structures compose a mixed constitution, which we will analyse in more detail below. Across the surface of this sphere, the reins of rule are held primarily by the owners of the world below—captains of industry, financial barons, political elites and media tycoons. As the neoliberal counterrevolution has advanced, the two spheres have come increasingly out of joint. They spin on separate axes and occasionally crash into one another. Whereas 20th-century reformist projects such as New Deal politics—or, at international level, the Bretton Woods system under us hegemony—sought an ‘embedded liberalism’ to stabilize relations between the two spheres, to foster capitalist development and maintain hierarchies at all levels of the global system, the neoliberal counter­revolution has created a governance sphere with no stable structural relation to the sphere of social production and reproduction.3 On the proliferations of divisions, hierarchies and boundaries throughout planetary space, see Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham nc 2013. 3 On ‘embedded liberalism’, see John Gerard Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization, vol. 36, no. 2, 1982; see also David Singh Grewal’s update, ‘Three Theses on the Current Crisis of International Liberalism’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2018. 2

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Neoliberal imperial governance seeks no such mediation and strives only to rule over and capture value from the inner sphere. The fact that the productive and reproductive circuits of the inner sphere are increasingly autonomous does not prevent the neoliberal governance sphere from exerting its command: it can measure the value produced there through monetary mechanisms and, by means of various instruments of finance and debt, extract from it the most value possible in the form of rent. Although this inevitably involves proliferating economic and financial crises, these are not signs of imminent collapse but, instead, mechanisms of rule.

The fortunes of us hegemony The fact that the two spheres are increasingly out of joint, however, is only part of the story. We need to look more closely at the composition of each sphere, to gauge its powers and estimate its prospects. We begin by taking a step back to register how the structures of global order have changed in the last twenty years, with an eye to how potential avenues have opened there today for the multitudes that resist and challenge them. At the beginning of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and as economic, political and cultural relations were extending in novel ways beyond the reach of national sovereign powers, the us President proclaimed the dawn of a new world order. At the time, most supporters and critics alike took for granted that the United States, having emerged ‘victorious’ from the Cold War as sole remaining superpower, would exert its unparalleled hard and soft power, shouldering ever-more responsibility while exercising increasingly unilateral control over global affairs. A decade later, as victorious us troops rolled into Baghdad, it appeared that the new world order announced by Bush Senior was being realized in concrete form by Bush Junior. American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan promised to ‘remake the Middle East’ while creating pure neoliberal economies from the ashes of invasion. As neoconservatives flexed their muscles, critics denounced a new us imperialism. From today’s vantage point, it is obvious that unilateralist us power was already limited, and Washington’s imperialist ambitions were in vain. us imperialism had been undermined not by the enlightened virtue of its leaders or the republican righteousness of its national spirit but simply by the insufficiencies of its economic, political and military strength.

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The United States could topple the Taliban and Baathist regimes (and, indeed, wreak tragic destruction), but it could not achieve the stable hegemony required of a true imperialist power. Now, after decades of failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, waging the ‘war on terror’, few can muster much faith in the benefits of a us-led global system or its ability to create a stable order.4 Since Trump’s election there has been considerable hand-wringing by commentators about whether the liberal international order can survive. In truth, the Pax Americana, and the moment when the us could unilaterally anchor a global institutional order, passed long before Trump crashed onto the scene.5 This new situation pertains not only to the United States: no nation-state today is able to organize and command the global order unilaterally. Those who diagnose the waning of us global hegemony—Giovanni Arrighi was one of the first and most insightful—generally project another state as successor in that hegemonic role: just as the mantle of the global hegemon passed in the early 20th century from Britain to the us, they reason, so too today, as the star of the us wanes, that of another state must rise, with China the prime candidate.6 In contrast, liberal institutional commentators cling to the belief that, despite the international disorder sown by Trump, the star of the United States still shines over the world, and talk of the relative decline of its military, economic and political powers is exaggerated. It remains, for them, the only contender for global hegemon.7 There is some truth in these arguments; but the more important point is that the role of the us, as well as that of rising powers like China, must be understood not in terms of Edward Luce expresses what has become the almost universal commonsense: ‘It is hard to overstate the damage the Iraq War did to America’s soft power—and to the credibility of the West’s democratic mission’. The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Boston 2017, p. 81. 5 The pages of Foreign Affairs provide ample demonstration of the angst suffered by leading advocates of the liberal international order in the age of Trump. See, for example, Joseph Nye, ‘Will the Liberal Order Survive? The History of an Idea’, and Robin Niblett, ‘Liberalism in Retreat: The Demise of a Dream’, both in Foreign Affairs, vol. 96, no. 1, 2017; and John Ikenberry, ‘The Plot Against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 96, no. 3, 2017. 6 On the prospect of a passage of hegemony from the us to China, see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, London and New York 2007. 7 Jake Sullivan can stand in for the chorus: ‘The United States is the only country with the sufficient reach and resolve, and something else as well: a historical willingness to trade short-term benefits for long-term influence.’ See ‘The World After Trump: How the System Can Endure’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 2, 2018, p. 19. 4

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unipolar hegemony but instead as part of the intense jockeying among nation-states on the rungs of Empire’s mixed constitution. The fact that no nation-state is able to fill the hegemonic role in the emerging global order is not a diagnosis of chaos and disorder, but rather reveals the emergence of a new global power structure—and, indeed, a new form of sovereignty.

2. empire’s mixed constitution When Polybius set sail from Greece in the 2nd century bc, he found in the heartland of the Roman empire a novel structure of power. Earlier thinkers—Herodotus and Plato, in particular—maintained that there were three basic forms of government, defined geometrically: the rule of one, monarchy; the rule of the few, aristocracy; and the rule of the many, democracy (each also corresponds to a negative form: tyranny, oligarchy and ochlocracy). They analysed the relative virtues of each constitution, and understood political history in terms of the passage from one to the other. The novelty of Rome, according to Polybius, was its mixed constitution: not an alternation among the forms of government but a composition of all three.8 Twenty years ago, we named today’s emerging order ‘Empire’ to indicate this mixed constitution of global governance. This Empire is not a global state, nor does it create a unified and centralized structure of rule.9 Although the conventional schemas previously used to grasp global divisions—First and Third Worlds, centre and periphery, East and West, North and South—have lost much of their explanatory power, today’s Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, London 1979, pp. 302–52. 9 Theorists have argued at different points over the past century that in order to guarantee the continued existence of capital and its global system, something like a global state is necessary. Karl Polanyi, for example, writing during the Second Word War, believed that the ‘only alternative to this disastrous condition of affairs [resulting from the punishment and exclusion of the defeated countries after World War I] was the establishment of an international order endowed with an organized power which would transcend national sovereignty. Such a course, however, was entirely beyond the horizon of the time’: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston 2001 [1944], p. 23. Polanyi and others making this argument are right that some global-governance structure is necessary, but they fail to recognize that new forms other than a state, such as Empire, can sustain the capitalist system. 8

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globalization is not a simple process of homogenization; it implies, in equal measure, processes of homogenization and heterogenization. Rather than creating one smooth space, the emergence of Empire involves the proliferation of borders and hierarchies at every geographical scale, from the space of the single metropolis to that of great continents. Here we can only sketch some of the most dramatic shifts in the imperial constitution over the past twenty years. On the monarchic level, the most striking development has been an emptying out of the centre. In the 1990s, although its star had waned, the United States still occupied central positions in key domains of power. The bomb, the dollar and the network—Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood/Silicon Valley—were able to wield monarchical force, and thus maintain in these domains something like the ‘rule of one’. us superiority in the realms of hard and soft power continues today, but on increasingly shaky foundations and with tighter limits. First, the formidable us military arsenal—its nuclear munitions, drones, surveillance systems and sophisticated technological apparatuses, along with its military bases and standing armies—remains significantly superior to (and more expensive than) those of other nations. But the defeat of us forces in Vietnam and their failures in Afghanistan and Iraq have made clear that, despite its constantly increasing capacity for destruction, the monarchical capacities of the us military machine are today more tenuous. Second, the monarchy of the dollar, the financial and monetary hegemony of the us, which appeared solid twenty years ago, has been progressively weakened. As with military power, in this domain too the throne was already on an unstable footing, dating back to at least the 1971 decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard. According to Timothy Geithner, since the 1990s, the us financial and monetary system has been ‘defying gravity’.10 These shaky foundations of us monetary and financial power were confirmed by the 2008 financial crisis, which again threw into question the ability of the us to fill a monarchical role.11 Finally, the Timothy Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, New York 2014, p. 105. ‘In the space of five years [ from 2003 to 2008], both the foreign-policy and economic-policy elite of the United States, the most powerful state on earth, had suffered humiliating failure’: Adam Tooze, Crashed, New York 2018, p. 3. Nonetheless, Tooze maintains it is too early to speak of a demise of the us world order because its two primary pillars, military might and financial control, still stand. What has ended is ‘any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model’: see ‘Is This the End of the American Century?’, lrb, 4 April 2019, p. 7. 10 11

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monarchical position of the us has diminished in the domain of the culture industry and digital technology. us corporations still predominate in world markets, but this functions ever less as soft power wielded by the us for global hegemony. Although based in the United States, these corporations increasingly operate on a planetary scale and contribute only ambiguously to the country’s global image. In all three domains, then, the United States still dominates with respect to other nationstates, and the pillars of its monarchical power still stand, but they are increasingly showing cracks. This is not to say that some pretender to the throne could claim its place; instead, a relative void is growing at the monarchical level. The aristocratic level of Empire, in contrast, is seeing tumultuous challenges mounted by rising and falling powers. The ‘rule of the few’ over the global system is exerted across three primary terrains, by major corporations, dominant nation-states and supranational institutions. Intense competition characterizes the relations among actors within each of these terrains, and between them: corporations versus nationstates, for instance, or nation-states versus supranational institutions. Relative positions within the global hierarchies in each terrain have shifted over the past twenty years. Whereas the fortunes of China have soared, those of the other brics which seemed poised to follow have faltered, at least for the moment. At the pinnacle of stock-market valuations, General Motors and General Electric have been supplanted by Apple and Alibaba. These competitive trends are extremely important and deserve detailed analysis, but our primary concern here is to recognize that, despite the cacophony arising from their conflicts, the various aristocratic forces are really playing from the same score. Or, to shift metaphors, they are like knights who, despite the pitched battles between them, all live to serve a shared chivalric code and the social order to which it corresponds. Most important at this aristocratic level of Empire is the extent to which, despite appearances, its general contours remain unchanged. From this perspective, the much-heralded return of the nation-state—along with nationalist rhetoric, threatened trade wars and protectionist policies— should be understood not as a fracturing of the global system, but rather as so many tactical manoeuvres in the competition among aristocratic powers. America first!, Prima l’Italia! and Brexit! are the plaintive cries of those who fear being displaced from their positions of privilege in the

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global system. Like the conservative French peasants whom Marx portrayed as being mobilized by memories of lost Napoleonic glory (and who yearned to make France great again), today’s reactionary nationalists aim not so much at separation from the global order as moving back up the rungs of the global hierarchy to their rightful position. In similar fashion, the conflicts between dominant nation-states and the supranational infrastructure—think of Trump railing against ‘globalism’ in his 2018 un General Assembly address—entail a ploy for a more dominant position within, rather than an attack upon, the global system. The elites leading the dominant nation-states and supranational institutions are all driven by the dictates of a neoliberal ideology irrevocably dedicated to constructing and maintaining the capitalist global order.12 Finally, the third and broadest level of the mixed constitution, ‘the rule of the many’, necessarily the most chaotic and least legible, is composed of a vast array of forces. It includes the entire panoply of subordinated nation-states and capitalist firms, along with their accompanying infrastructures; broadcast and social media; nongovernmental organizations that support the projects of states and corporations, often repairing the damage they have done; religious associations that are themselves a political force; even militias that combat states, or claim to have established states of their own. This level of the mixed constitution can be called ‘democratic’ only in the most degraded sense of that term, for it does not include anti-systemic movements or forces that could pose a serious threat to the continued functioning of Empire. Instead, the immense range of forces we locate here, even when they resist and challenge the monarchical and aristocratic powers, ultimately serve to support the imperial constitution as a whole. Foucault was a master at recognizing how seemingly resistant or oppositional figures could ultimately serve to reinforce the dominant power, just as the figure of the delinquent fortifies the disciplinary regime.13 We do not mean by this, of course, that all efforts at resistance are in vain and will inevitably be co-opted by Empire, leaving no hope for an alternative (Foucault meant nothing of the sort either), and we will soon turn our attention to the movements that verify this. Quinn Slobodian, focusing on what he calls the Geneva School and its role in the formation of the World Trade Organization, emphasizes that neoliberal ideology and globalism are completely intertwined: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge ma 2018. 13 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York 1977. 12

3. new internationalisms Focusing on globalization from above, however, provides a distorted view, because it is at core a response to—and an attempt to contain— the forces of globalization from below. Revolutionary internationalism has been throughout modernity the prime mover of the forms and processes of capitalist globalization. Every modern revolution—from Port-au-Prince to Shanghai, Paris to Havana—was in a profound sense internationalist, as are the most inspiring streams of proletarian politics, anticolonial and feminist movements and all forms of liberation struggle. Reading from below in this way allowed authors such as Giovanni Arrighi and Fredric Jameson to recognize that the development of neoliberal globalization from the 1970s was really a response to the 1960s confluence or accumulation of worker rebellions, liberation struggles and revolutionary movements throughout the world.14 Recognizing the structures of power as a response has not only an analytical function but also a political one. The most powerful forces to contest and move beyond the rule of Empire will necessarily take the form of further internationalisms. It is all the more important that we strive to identify and cultivate the new internationalisms emerging today. One means of recognizing internationalism in action is by tracing the development of international cycles of struggle: although each struggle may be focused intensely on local and national conditions, as the flame passes from one locale to another, the movement gains a global significance. The 2010–11 insurrections born in Tunisia and Egypt initiated such a cycle, as activists—first in other countries of North Africa and the Middle East, next in Spain, Greece and the United States, then in Turkey, Brazil and Hong Kong—erected encampments in urban squares and translated the demands for democracy into their own political idiom. In similar fashion, NiUnaMenos, the feminist struggle against sexual violence and patriarchy that began in Argentina, resonating with Polish struggles over women’s reproductive rights, was translated in innovative ways throughout the Americas and across the Atlantic to Italy and 14 ‘We can also see globalization’, writes Jameson, ‘or this third stage of capitalism, as the other side or face of that immense movement of decolonization and liberation which took place all over the world in the 1960s’: ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, nlr 92, March–April 2015, p. 129.

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Spain. A new feminist international is forming, based on novel forms of political strike.15 At a much vaster scale, but even less legible, migration constitutes a major force of internationalism and an ongoing insurrection against the border regimes of nation-states and the spatial hierarchies of the global system. The spectacular pilgrimages towards and across Europe in the summer of 2015, on foot, by train, by every means of transport possible, and now shifted to the treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean, have put the border regimes of Europe under threat. Similarly, the extraordinary caravans of Central American children and families passing through Mexico toward the us border in autumn 2018 served to publicize the ongoing crisis of the us border regime.16 But these highly mediatized events are only the peaks of a variegated range of global migrations, not only from South to North, but in every direction: from Nigeria to South Africa, Bolivia to Argentina, Myanmar to Bangladesh, and rural to urban China. This is an unusual kind of internationalist insurrection, of course— close up, it is hardly recognizable as political at all. The vast majority of migrants may not be able to articulate the political nature of their flight, let alone understand their actions as part of an internationalist struggle; indeed, their journeys are highly individualized. Explicitly organizational structures like the caravans are rare even within one stream of migration, let alone among the various global movements. There is no central committee, no platform, no statement of principles. And yet, the migrants’ lines of flight constitute an internationalist power. Whether driven by officially sanctioned motives, such as fleeing war or persecution, or for reasons delegitimated by the authorities, such We analysed the 2011 cycle of struggle in Declaration, New York 2012. On the partial revival of Tricontinentalism, see Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South, Durham nc 2018, p. 240. On NiUnaMenos initiating a new feminist internationalism, see Verónica Gago, ‘La internacional feminista’, Página12, 15 February 2019. 16 See Martina Tazzioli, Glenda Garelli and Nicholas De Genova, eds, ‘Rethinking Migration and Autonomy from Within the “Crises”’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 2, April 2018, pp. 239–65. On the caravans travelling through Mexico as a form of rebellion against the border regimes, see Amarela Varela, ‘No es una caravana de migrantes, sino un nuevo movimiento social qua camina por una vida vivible’, El Diario, 4 November 2018. 15

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as simply seeking adventure, migrants affirm the freedom of mobility, which can serve as the basis for all other freedoms.17 You have to step back to make out the design of the mosaic, to appreciate the political significance of global migrations as an ongoing insurgency. Rest assured that the ruling authorities recognize the menace: the power of the insurgency is confirmed by the cruel and costly counterinsurgency strategies launched against migrants, from the eu-backed concentration camps in Libya to the barbaric policies at the us border. The migrant insurgency, simply by traversing them, threatens to make the various walls that segment the global system crack and crumble.

4. global capital and the common Analysis of the mixed constitution of global governance needs to be complemented by investigation of the other sphere, that of production and reproduction—because, even when out of sync, each sphere requires the other’s support. Just as national capital needed the nation-state to guarantee its collective and long-term interests, so too global capital today requires a complex global-governance structure. The sphere of capitalist relations, like that of governance, is composed of an extraordinarily heterogeneous, conflictual and unstable set of elements which act on different scales: individual capitalist firms in competition with each other; national capitals, also often in conflict; various forms of waged, unwaged and precarious labour—as well as noncapitalist elements, which have always been part of capitalist societies. As with the other sphere, registering the heterogeneity of elements should not prevent us from recognizing the overall design.18 Here we briefly sketch some key directions in the development of capital by following some of the scholarly and militant critiques that have emerged in the last twenty years. (Indeed, the increasingly widespread See Sandro Mezzadra, ‘The Right to Escape’, Ephemera, vol. 4, no. 3, August 2004, pp. 267–75. 18 Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore emphasize the heterogeneities within the global capitalist system, highlighting ‘the necessarily variegated character of programmes and projects of neoliberalization, the uneven spatial development of which is constitutive and not a way station on a path to completeness’. ‘Still Neoliberalism?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 118, no. 2, April 2019, p. 246. See also Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, ‘Variegated Capitalism’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 31, no. 6, December 2007, pp. 731–72. 17

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questioning of capitalist rule has been accompanied by a flourishing of Marxist and anticapitalist analyses.) In addition to revealing the new and, in many cases, more severe forms of capitalist domination and exploitation, a prime mandate of the critique of political economy involves seeking seeds of resistance and freedom within the circuits of capitalist production and reproduction. To accomplish this, we focus first on the ways in which movements against capitalist society and its disciplinary regime have functioned as motors driving capitalist development. This is a story of co-optation and capture, but also, and more importantly, an index of the potency of revolt: where there is the power to impel capital forward there is also the potential to overthrow it. We then examine the ways in which capital, by pursuing its own development, creates weapons that can eventually be wielded against it.19 What strikes us most strongly in analyses of recent capitalist developments is the central role played by the common in its various guises, from natural resource to cultural product, biometric data to social cooperation. The common is ever more central to capitalist social production and reproduction—the value that capital accumulates resides, increasingly, in the common—and yet it also designates a potential for social autonomy from capital, a potential for revolt. Let us briefly describe three key terrains emerging within active analyses of capital, in which the common plays this central and paradoxical role: the extractive, the biopolitical and the eco-systemic. A wide range of recent analyses of capitalist production and reproduction cluster around the concept of extraction, understood in the broadest sense. They highlight not only the expansion of traditional extractivist practices—gas, oil, minerals, monocultural agriculture—in which value is in some sense pulled directly from the earth, but also modes Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello are often cited regarding the recuperation of 1960s revolts within the capitalist regime: The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York 2006. We are more indebted to Mario Tronti’s proposition that working-class revolts precede and prefigure the developments of capital: see Workers and Capital, trans. David Broder, London and New York 2019. Marx repeatedly emphasized that the most powerful weapons for rebellion are provided by capitalist development itself. Revolution will come about not through a return to past social forms, he wrote, but ‘on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely cooperation and the common possession of the earth and the means of production produced by labour itself’: Capital, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London 1976, p. 929; translation modified. 19

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of accumulation achieved by privatizing public wealth and infrastructures (transport and communications systems, cultural heritage) as well as new forms of extraction in which human and social values— including knowledge, data, care, the circuits of social cooperation—are appropriated and accumulated. ‘It is not only when the operations of capital plunder the materiality of the Earth and biosphere’, write Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘but also when they encounter and draw on forms and practices of human cooperation and sociality that are external to them, that we can say that extraction is at stake.’20 The metaphor of data-mining provides a helpful lens for seeing how traditional extractive operations have migrated to social domains. Accumulation by means of social-media platforms, for instance, can involve not only gathering and processing the data provided by users but creating algorithmic means to capitalize on the intelligence, knowledge and social relations they bring.21 Platforms like Uber and Airbnb have similarly transformed practices of ‘sharing’ from offering a good to others for common use into a means of extracting value. Finance, too, functions through its own mode of extraction. In part, of course, financial instruments are tools of speculation and create merely ‘fictional’ values, but primarily finance and debt relations are means to extract values that are produced socially, outside of finance capital’s direct management. Along with others, we identify this development within capitalist schemes of accumulation as the passage from profit to rent: whereas industrial capital creates profit largely by managing the production process and dictating forms of cooperation, finance extracts rents on wealth produced not under its direct management but through forms of productive cooperation external to it.22 These analyses of extraction resonate strongly with what David Harvey aptly calls accumulation by dispossession. Such processes operate chiefly Mezzadra and Neilson’s The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism, Durham nc 2019, is the most complete analysis we know of the expanded notion of extraction, especially in relation to logistics and finance. See in particular pp. 133–67; quote p. 138. 21 See, for example, Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect’, in Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, eds, Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google, New Jersey 2009, pp. 152–62. 22 See, among others, Carlo Vercellone, ‘Wages, Rent and Profit’, available online at generationonline.org; and Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge ma 2009. 20

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through new enclosures of the commons and the extraction of wealth, which may reside in the earth or in public infrastructures.23 Finally, while condemning the exploitation and social and ecological destruction which they wreak, we emphasize that every form of extraction draws upon values produced externally to its direct sphere of management. Extractivism preys on the various forms of the common—ecological, social and biopolitical.24 This process of predation points towards a potential that resides within the common, to which we will return.25 A second set of analyses highlights the role of the common in biopolitical relations, covering cognitive forms of production and the generation of affects and care, which spans the productive and reproductive realms. Studies of cognitive capitalism generally analyse the role of knowledge, intelligence and science in contemporary production, emphasizing the extent to which the ‘general intellect’—that is, the knowledges accumulated in society that have become in some sense common—has become directly productive of value.26 Others focus on digital labour and the production of value through digital networks and platforms, which in some cases rely on the value generated by the attention of users.27 Along with intelligence and attention, affects are also increasingly put to work in capitalist society, most often according to See Chapter 4 of David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003, pp. 137–82. Silvia Federici, stressing the ways in which the common is at stake in processes of primitive accumulation, makes the important point that the violence of primitive accumulation has always included violence against women. ‘Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus “liberated” from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labour. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women’s bodies than were ever erected by the fencing off of the commons’: Caliban and the Witch, New York 2004, p. 184. 25 These various extractivist relations might be conceived in terms of the formal subsumption of society under capital, in order to understand the extent to which society constitutes an ‘outside’ with respect to capital: the social relations and social cooperation that generate value are brought under the control of capitalist management but are nonetheless external to it, and thus subsumed only formally. 26 See Carlo Vercellone, ‘From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism’, Historical Materialism, vol. 15, no. 1, January 2007, pp. 13–36. 27 See Christian Fuchs, ‘Dallas Smythe Today—The Audience Commodity, the Digial Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory’, TripleC, vol. 10, no. 2, May 2012, pp. 692–740. 23

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established gender hierarchies. Jobs that involve a large portion of affect production—nurses, home-care workers, administrative-support staff, waged domestic workers, primary-school teachers, food servers—are low paid, highly precarious and, accordingly, predominantly filled by women. The production of affects is also central to the unpaid realm of social reproduction, including domestic labour, which continues to be defined by a gender division of labour.28 In these analyses, we recognize new and intensified forms of exploitation and domination, along with new forms of biopolitical control, and the colonization and commodification of further realms of human existence. Today, as the studies show, biopolitical productive forces are enclosed within private-property relations, labouring for a wage, or subordinated and discounted while the value they produce is still expropriated and accumulated. But here too we recognize the social nature of the common, since intelligence, knowledge, attention, affect and care are all immediately social capacities, defined by collective actions and interdependence. Great biopolitical reservoirs of the common are constructed in these resources of shared knowledge, collective intelligence, decommodified relations of affect and care, and, ultimately, the circuits of social cooperation; these have the potential to become autonomous from capitalist control. A third terrain of analysis addresses the common even more directly, by investigating the myriad ways in which the development of capital destroys the earth and its ecosystems. Analyses of climate change, in particular, demonstrate how intimately the history of capitalist development is tied to the extraction of fossil fuels. Many authors point out that saying human actions cause climate change or that we have entered an Anthropocene age, as if the species as a whole was equally responsible for the decisions that created our present predicament, masks the fact that a relatively small class of capitalists in the dominant countries are really responsible. As these studies make clear, a necessary precondition for any project to preserve the long-term health of the planet is challenging and overcoming the primacy of capitalist rule.29 That the common is On gender divisions within wage labour and on social reproduction, see Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work, Durham nc 2011. 29 See Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital, London and New York 2016; Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, London and New York 2015; Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, London 2014; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift, New York 2010. 28

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at stake in this domain is immediately recognizable, as vital realms of life that were once shared—the earth, the seas, the atmosphere—are closed off or degraded. The poor will suffer most and first from the effects of climate change, but eventually all will succumb. The common is central not only to what we have lost, however, but also to the alternatives we might construct. Indigenous protests against capitalist destruction pose most clearly the need for humans to establish a new relationship with the earth, characterized by relations of interdependence and care—to make the earth common.30 What stands out in all these analyses of contemporary capital is the power of the common in all its forms, from earth and water to the metropolitan circuits of social cooperation, from shared knowledges and intelligence to affective relations and social reproduction. Capital has increasingly become an apparatus of capture that preys on the common, extracting the values produced there, and creating myriad forms of suffering and destruction in the process. But all these realms of the common, especially when mobilized and brought together in relations of interdependence, have the potential for autonomy—the potential to create social relations beyond capitalist rule.

5. class–multitude–class prime Multiplicity is becoming the exclusive horizon of our political imagination. The most inspiring movements of the past decades, from Cochabamba to Standing Rock, Ferguson to Cape Town, Cairo to Madrid, have been animated by multitudes. Leaderlessness is the label often given to these uprisings, especially by the media: and indeed, they reject traditional forms of centralized leadership, attempting to create new democratic forms of expression. But rather than describing them as leaderless, it is more useful to understand them as multitude struggles—useful, in part, because it allows us to grasp both their virtues and the challenges they face. These movements have achieved important results; they have often alluded to an alternative, better world. But they have generally been short-lived and many have suffered defeat, with some witnessing their The ‘water protectors’ at the 2016 Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protests expressed the need for such relations of interdependence. See Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson, The Reconciliation Manifesto, North Carolina 2017; and Teresa Shewry, ed., ‘Environmental Activism Across the Pacific’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 116, no. 1, January 2017. 30

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gains brutally reversed. Something more is needed; and, as militants of various stripes will tell you, creative and original thinking about political organization is urgently required. We have no interest in lecturing these movements about the need to abandon their multiplicity and construct a unified political subject, be it a centralized leadership council, an electoral party or ‘a people’. A return to traditional forms of organization is not likely to result in more lasting or effective movements; in any case, they have been explicitly repudiated by the democratic sensibilities of the activists themselves. Furthermore, we do not believe, to put it in abstract terms, that only ‘the one’ can decide. The most important question for us is: how can a multiplicity act politically, with the sustained power to bring about real social transformation? It may be helpful here to step back twenty years and approach our contemporary situation from that vantage point. To explore the potential of today’s movements, we trace two historical and theoretical passages: from class to multitude and from multitude to class. This may at first appear as a pendulum action, a simple round trip; but we intend it to mark a theoretical and political advance, since the ‘class’ at the departure is not the same as that at arrival: the passage through multitude transforms its meaning. The general formula of organization we propose, then, is C–M–C', class–multitude–class prime.31 As in Marx’s formula, the importance rests on the transformation undergone at the centre of the process. Class prime must be a multitudinous class, an intersectional class.

From class to multitude The movement from class to multitude names, in part, the general recognition over the last several decades that the working class must be understood in terms of multiplicity, both within and outside its domain— a shift that corresponds to the emptying-out of claims to represent the working class by traditional parties and syndicalist institutions. As an empirical formation, of course, the working class has never ceased to exist. But since its internal composition has changed—with novel forms of work, new labouring conditions and wage relations—new investigations of class composition are required. In particular, these should explore the powers of social cooperation and the common. In addition, We are indebted to Joshua Clover’s analysis of the historical progression riot– strike–riot prime in Riot, Strike, Riot, London and New York 2016, and intend this discussion as part of an ongoing dialogue. 31

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the differences among labouring populations, which have always existed, now increasingly refuse unitary representation. Differences among sectors of labour—for instance, between waged and unwaged work, stable and precarious employment, documented and undocumented workers—along with differences of gender, race and nationality, which to some extent map on to those differences of work status, all demand expression. Any investigation of class composition at this point—and any proposition of class-political projects—has to be embedded in intersectional analysis. This is not a class, one might say, if by class one understands a subject that is internally unified, or can be represented as a unified whole; it is a multitude, an irreducible multiplicity. At the same time, the passage from class to multitude means that the struggles of the working class, and anticapitalist struggles in general, must be cast together and on an equal basis with struggles against other axes of domination: feminist, antiracist, decolonial, queer, anti-ablist and others (theorists of multiplicity are not troubled by open sets and unending lists). In this sense, the concept of the multitude is closely allied with—and, indeed, profoundly indebted to—intersectional analysis and practice, which emerges from the theoretical practice of us black feminism. Intersectionality, at the most basic level, is a political theory of multiplicity. It aims to counter traditional single-axis frameworks of political analysis by recognizing the interlocking nature of race, class, sex, gender and national hierarchies. This means, first, that no one structure of domination is primary to (or reducible to) the others. Instead, they are relatively autonomous, have equal significance and are mutually constitutive. Second, just as structures of domination are characterized by multiplicity, so too are the subjectivities that stand in relation to them. This does not imply either a rejection of identity or a cumulative, additive conception of many identities; rather, it requires a rethinking of subjectivity in the key of multiplicity.32 The call for intersectional multitudes is not merely an appeal for greater inclusion but rather, as Jennifer Nash says, ‘an antisubordination project’—that is, a combative, revolutionary strategy on multiple fronts simultaneously.33 32 An enormous literature has developed as intersectionality has become a key concept in a variety of academic fields as well as policy discussions. See Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational texts, ‘Mapping the Margins’, Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, and ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 140, 1989. On contemporary debates, see Jennifer Nash’s insightful Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Durham nc 2019. 33 Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, p. 24.

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It may be helpful at this point to consider the passage from class to multitude through the concept of precarity, in two senses. The first sense of precarity, mainly developed among European theorists and activists, is conceived primarily in terms of wage and labour relations.34 Precarity in this sense marks a contrast to the stable employment contracts that served as a regulative ideal in the Fordist economy of the mid-20th century—a regulative ideal that existed as a reality only for a limited number of (generally male) industrial workers in the dominant countries. Guaranteed labour contracts and laws that protect workers’ rights have been progressively eroded, and workers have been forced to accept informal, short-term labour contracts. These labour arrangements have always been raced and gendered, of course; but all sectors of the workforce are being affected by this trend, albeit in different ways and measures. This precaritization of labour is a powerful weapon in the grand arsenal of neoliberalism. Another sense of precarity, more developed by us writers, provides a useful complement, and again serves as part of an interpretation of— and challenge to—neoliberalism, but from a much broader perspective. Precarity, writes Judith Butler, ‘designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death.’35 Labour precarity is certainly part of the mix, but the notion of precarious life aims to grasp how legal, economic and governmental changes have increased the insecurity of a wide range of already subordinated populations—women, trans people, gay and lesbian populations, people of colour, migrants, the disabled and others. There is thus one notion of precarity that speaks the language of the working class and another that promotes an intersectional vision. Put them together and you have a good foundation for theorizing the multitude. We do not pose this movement from class to multitude (or from the people to the multitude) as a political mandate. That is not necessary, because it is already an accomplished fact that has manifested itself over the past twenty years in different countries and social contexts. We See, for example, Patrick Cingolani, Révolutions précaires, Paris 2014. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge ma 2015, p. 33.

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understand that many regard the historical shift from class to multitude as a decline and a loss, beginning with the diminished power and membership of institutional trade unions and working-class parties (and, indeed, not every multiplicity is politically progressive; crowds and mobs are just as likely to be reactionary). But we should also recognize all that has been gained in the process. At the level of analysis, it should be obvious that the multiplicity of mutually constituting structures of domination offers a superior lens for grasping our social reality, and this requires supplementing our brief investigation of capitalist rule with equal analyses of the institutional structures of race, gender and sexual hierarchies. But it is most crucial at the level of practice: there will be no successful and sustained project of class politics today that is not also feminist, antiracist and queer.

Rethinking class Yet to theorize multiplicity, or even to recognize existing multiplicities, is not enough—especially if by multiplicity one means simply fracturing and separation. To be politically effective, organization is required. And when dealing with multiplicities, that pressure is even more intense. To respond to our initial question—how can a multiplicity decide and act politically?—simply by saying that it needs to organize, is not yet very helpful. The next step, then, requires a return to the concept of class— but class conceived differently now—in order to explore more fully what a multitude can become and how it can act politically. One obvious objection to the proposal of this second movement, from multitude to class, is that it unravels all the advantages achieved in the previous movement, from a unified political conception based on a single axis of domination, that determined by capital, to a multiplicity, which also engages patriarchy, white supremacy and other axes. Our intention, however, is to develop a conception of class that refers not only to the working class­ but is itself a multiplicity, a political formation that makes good on the gains of the multitude. It may be helpful, first of all, simply to note authors who use the concept of class beyond reference to the working class, in order to address race, gender domination and struggle. Achille Mbembe, for instance, analyses the contemporary modes of control deployed against Africans migrating to Europe in terms of a ‘racial class’:

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Europe has decided not only to militarize its frontiers but to extend them into the far distance . . . [its borders] are now located all along the shifting routes and torturous paths trodden by the candidates for migration, relocating to keep on top of their trajectories . . . In reality, it is the body of the African, of every African taken individually, and of all Africans as a racial class that constitutes today the borders of Europe. This new type of human body is not only the skin-body and the abject body of epidermal racism, that of segregation. It is also the border-body, which traces the limit between those who are ‘us’ and those who are not, and whom one can maltreat with impunity.36

In the new global regime of mobility, Mbembe claims, Africans will be transformed into ‘a stigmatized racial class’. For him, the concept of class here is not, or not only, a socio-economic category. It serves instead as a means to think collective racial difference that is not merely based on skin colour; this racial class is born in the racist structures and institutions of Europe. Mbembe’s references here echo 1970s feminists like Christine Delphy, who employed the concept ‘sex class’ to understand patriarchal domination and to designate a basis of feminist struggle. To other feminists who challenged her usage, Delphy responded that the concept of class could grasp better than any other how subordinate social subjects are created by relations of domination. From this perspective, Delphy writes, ‘one cannot consider each group separate from the other because they are united by a relation of domination . . . The groups are not . . . constituted before they are put in relation. On the contrary, their relation is what constitutes them as such.’37 Here, then, relations of domination are prior to and constitutive of social subjects. In Delphy’s usage, again, class refers not exclusively to economic status, but instead involves an analytical procedure that can be deployed with respect to any axis of domination. 36 Achille Mbembe, ‘Vu d’Europe, l’Afrique n’est qu’un grand Bantoustan’, Jeune Afrique, no. 3024, December 2018, pp. 62–3 (translation ours). 37 Christine Delphy, L’ennemi principal, vol. 1, Paris 1998, p. 29 (translation ours). Shulamith Firestone similarly analyses the sex class system, considering sex class as parallel to economic class but embedded deeper in social relations: ‘just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in the temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction’: The Dialectic of Sex, New York 1970, p. 11.

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Our interest in these analyses of Mbembe and Delphy is, first, to highlight this point—that the concept of class can be used to grasp the effects of subjection created by relations of domination, not only with respect to capital but also with respect to white supremacy and patriarchy, in the interests of not only the working class but also the racial class, the sex class and others. Second, it is important to stress that the concept of class is employed here not only as a descriptive claim but as a political call to those subjected to patriarchal or racial hierarchies to struggle together, as a class.38 Finally, and this is the point most difficult to confront: to recognize a plurality of classes dominated and struggling in parallel fashion is a step forward, but is not enough. The notion of ‘multitudinous class’ or ‘intersectional class’ that we seek requires a further step: an internal articulation of these different subjectivities— working class, racial class, sex class—in struggle. Intersectional analyses commonly address the need for articulation between the subordinated subjectivities in terms of solidarity and coalition. Often this repeats an additive strategy: working-class plus feminist plus antiracist plus lgbtq struggle, plus . . . In other words, even when intersectional analysis refuses additive notions of identity, an additive logic can still govern activist imaginaries. One weakness of this approach is that the bonds of solidarity are external. What is needed are internal bonds of solidarity—that is, a different mode of articulation, going beyond standard conceptions of coalition. Let us illustrate this key condition—the internal relations of solidarity in this multitudinous class—with three theoretical examples. First, Rosa Luxemburg: after the failed 1905 insurrection in Russia, Luxemburg criticized the German proletariat and its party for their expressions of sympathy and support for their Russian cousins, whether tinged with condescension or admiration. Luxemburg was not, of course, advocating that German workers disengage from, or pay less attention to, the Russian struggles—exactly the opposite. The problem for her was that such expressions of ‘international class solidarity’ posed merely an 38 Lisa Disch interprets Delphy’s analysis of gender as a social class as not merely a description, but ‘an interpretation, a hail or call. Delphy solicits those subjected by patriarchy to identify as “women”, to take their oppression no less seriously than that of “workers”, and to participate in the struggle against oppression on their own terms’: ‘Christine Delphy’s Constructivist Materialism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 114, no. 4, October 2015, p. 834.

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external relation: German revolutionaries needed to recognize instead that the Russian events were their own affair and internal to their struggle, ‘a chapter of their own social and political history’.39 A second theoretical example: Iris Young in the early 1980s challenged male socialists who profess solidarity with the feminist movement. ‘By and large’, she writes, ‘socialists do not consider fighting women’s oppression as a central aspect of the struggle against capitalism itself.’40Note that Young is not addressing the misogynist and anti-feminist male socialists, of whom there were many, but instead the supportive male comrades who offer solidarity to feminists, or who see feminist struggle as allied with but separate from their own. Like Luxemburg, Young charges that such solidarity is not enough. She exhorts male socialists, in effect, to recognize feminist struggle against patriarchy as a chapter of their own social and political history. You cannot really be anticapitalist without also being feminist because, since they are mutually constitutive, capital cannot be defeated without also defeating patriarchy. A third example: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor makes a parallel argument addressing antiracist activists in the us who do not also focus on class domination. Too often, she maintains, there is a kind of segregation of struggles, such that anticapitalist struggles are assumed to be the task of white people, while people of colour must conduct antiracist struggles. ‘No serious socialist current in the last hundred years’, Taylor writes, ‘has ever demanded that Black or Latino/a workers put their struggles on the back burner while some other class struggle is waged first. This assumption rests on the mistaken idea that the working class is white and male, and therefore incapable of taking up issues of race, class and gender. In fact, the American working class is female, immigrant, Black, white, Latino/a and more. Immigrant issues, gender issues and anti­ racisms are working-class issues.’41 This is not a matter of accepting the participation of allies or expressing solidarity; the struggle against white supremacy and that against capital must be understood as internal to one another. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, New York 1971, p. 74 (translation modified). Iris Young, ‘Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory’, in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, Boston 1981, pp. 43–69. 41 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Chicago 2016, p. 216. 39

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The objection at this point might be: yes, they all need to struggle together because they are all precarious in the two senses discussed earlier; but such a projection of sameness is not helpful, because the modes of precarity and domination are different. We need to maintain the conception of multiplicity—capitalist domination is not the same as gender or race domination, and one cannot be subsumed under another. Instead of a reduction to sameness, this argument requires an articulation among the subjectivities in struggle. This is why class—a multitudinous class— rather than coalition seems to us the appropriate concept. But this is a notion of class that is not only composed of a multiplicity, and grounded in forms of social cooperation and the common, but also articulated by internal bonds of solidarity and intersection among struggles, each recognizing that the others are ‘a chapter of their own social and political history’. That is its mode of articulation, its mode of assembly. This is why we call this transformed notion ‘class prime’, so that instead of class–multitude–class, the entire movement we are trying to sketch is class–multitude–class prime: C–M–C'. This serves at least as an initial theoretical response to our earlier question: can a multiplicity act politically? Yes, it can do so as class prime, as an internally articulated multiplicity oriented equally in struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and other axes of domination. Granted, it is merely a formal, conceptual response, but perhaps it can offer a framework for thinking and pursuing that political project.

6. in praise of alterglobalization On 1 January 1994, the day that nafta went into effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation launched an insurrection in Chiapas, Mexico; on 30 November 1999, protesters in Seattle blocked the meetings of the World Trade Organization; on 25 January 2001, the World Social Forum was inaugurated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, counterposing itself to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; and on 21 July 2001, multitudes flooded the streets of Genoa to protest the G8 summit. The international cycle of alterglobalization struggles that developed in the Americas and Europe had numerous defects: their nomadic nature and the practices of ‘summit-hopping’ in many cases eclipsed engagement with local, sustained organizing; they were frequently criticized, most strongly by activists within the movements themselves, for failing to develop sufficiently the intersectional characteristics we have just

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outlined; and the season of struggles proved relatively short, due in part to their own organizational weaknesses. One should keep in mind, of course, that the movements were also closed down by the severe security regimes installed after September 11th; activists had to shift their focus from alterglobalization to anti-war movements. The extraordinary virtue of these protests was their theoretical practice. They constructed a global critical vision and were able, through their orchestrated events, to render legible the political significance of the relatively obscure realm of the global economic institutions. Rather than a movement, then, they might be better understood as a vast collective co-research investigation into the nature of the emerging global order. Activists knew that the major corporations and dominant nation-states, the United States first among them, had enormous power; but they also had the intuition that the global order was something more—and that it was here, at the global level, that the contemporary structures of domination must be understood. Each event illuminated another node of the emerging network of the global power structure: the wto, World Bank, imf, G8, trade agreements and so forth. The cycle of alterglobalization movements was thus a massive pedagogical project for those who participated in them—and for anyone else who was willing to learn. Since then, although the relative positions of the various powers within its mixed constitution have risen and fallen, the forces of domination and control of the global order have by no means lessened, despite the braying of the ideologues of national sovereignty. They have instead merely receded from view and become less legible, as if they had discovered an invisibility potion. We need today an international cycle of struggles with the intelligence to investigate the structures of the ruling global order. Sometimes, after all, the theoretical work done in social movements teaches us more than that written in libraries. Reversing their invisibility is the first step toward being able to challenge and eventually overthrow the structures of Empire.

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What's the Use? On the Uses of Use SARA AHMED

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New Masses, New Media—25

rohana kuddus

SEPTEMBER SURPRISE The Uprising in Indonesia

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n the last week of September this year, the complacency of the Indonesian establishment was shaken by a wave of mass protests breaking out across the country, in Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Bali, Papua and elsewhere. Under the banner of Reformasi Dikorupsi, or Corrupted Reform (referring to the Reformasi Movement that overthrew Suharto in 1998), university students, many in their college jackets, were joined by activists of all kinds, workers, trade-unionists, peasants, farmers, fishermen and high-school students—especially from vocational high schools (smk), generally from a lower-working-class background, stereotyped as rough troublemakers involved in gang fighting and given a hard time by the police. The protests began as peaceful rallies outside national and regional parliament buildings, with speeches and demands that mps come out to meet them. But once they were attacked by police using tear gas, water cannon and bludgeons, they often—though not invariably—turned violent in response, the smk students bringing collective strength and tactical experience in countering police assaults. By early October the movement had ebbed. At the cost—bracketing the toll in Papua—of five dead and 265 injured, it may not have been, as is commonly stated in the media, the biggest protest in Indonesia since the overthrow of Suharto in 1998; the demonstrations of 2016 against the Christian mayor of Jakarta, and the rallies against the result of the presidential election of May 2019, where reportedly eight were killed and 700 injured, may have been numerically larger. But these were highly new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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partisan, orchestrated mobilizations by forces of the religious and political right within the country’s collusive political establishment, rapidly absorbed and posing no significant threat to it. The explosions of popular anger across Indonesia in September 2019 cut across these lines. They were not the product of manoeuvres by any party or sectarian interest in the oligarchic constellation that has ruled the country since the fall of Suharto, and their demands were unambiguously progressive. The trigger for the movement was the package of blatantly regressive legislation rammed at high speed through the national parliament just before its term ended on 30 September, a no-holds-barred strategy typically adopted by an expiring legislature, ensuring limited time for deliberation or review of laws, and landing the next government with the consequences. The two most controversial measures in the package were a revision of the Criminal Code and an emasculation of the Corruption Eradication Commission (kpk). Legislation covering land, labour, mining, incarceration, cyber security and defence contained further affronts. Highlighting revisions to the Criminal Code and Corruption Commission in particular, a loose alliance of activists articulated a broader set of demands and, understanding the strategic role that students could play in mobilizing protest, projected these through them. The demands became: 1. Reject the revised Criminal Code, the Mineral Mining Bill, the Land Bill, the Correctional Procedure Bill, the Labour Bill. Revoke the kpk Law and the Natural Resources Law. Pass the Law on Sexual Violence Protection and the Law on Domestic Workers Protection 2. Cancel the appointments made by the parliament to neuter the kpk 3. Ban military and police officers from occupying civilian posts 4. Halt repression in Papua and elsewhere, and release Papuan political prisoners immediately 5. Stop the criminalization of activists 6. Stop corporate forest fires, and revoke their permits 7. Resolve human rights violations and prosecute human rights criminals

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As a comprehensively reactionary act of legislation, the revised Criminal Code has few equals in the world, outside perhaps Saudi Arabia. It punishes extra-marital sex with one year in prison, and cohabitation without marriage by six months in prison; denies women the right to abortion; bans any display of contraception by unauthorized persons, including parents; expands existing prohibitions of blasphemy, subject to five years in prison; criminalizes insults—loosely defined—to the government (including the president, vice-president, mps and regional authorities) and state symbols (flags, anthems, etc.); punishes any teaching of Marxism-Leninism with four years in prison, and any organization of Marxism-Leninism with ten years in prison. Even under Suharto there was no ban on extra-marital sex or cohabitation; ten people were prosecuted for blasphemy in 33 years, compared with over ten times that number in the two decades since; and the outlawing of Marxism-Leninism was not inscribed in the Criminal Code. To indignation at the obscurantist moral and political repression codified by the new provisions of the law, widespread among students and the young generally, was joined anger felt by all ages at the deliberate bid to cripple the Corruption Eradication Commission. Originally set up under Megawati as a way of thwarting investigation into the ill-gotten fortunes of her own family, the kpk in time escaped party control and—equipped with powers enabling it to prosecute even establishment figures as high as an ornament of the central bank and a police general, though presidential and kin malfeasance was naturally always off-limits— came to threaten elite interests. Attempts to clip its wings started under Megawati’s successor Yudhoyono as early as 2010, and have continued ever since. All of the political parties in the current swathe pushing for its neutralization have at least one cadre either on trial or convicted in a corruption case handled by the kpk. The Commission, however, continues to enjoy broad public esteem, especially after a hydrochloric acid attack on its senior investigator, Novel Baswedan, in 2017, whose perpetrator a joint fact-finding team set up by Jokowi’s National Police Chief Tito Karnavian pointedly failed to name. In mid-October leaked video footage showed pages of a red notebook belonging to a businessman charged with bribing law-makers being destroyed—pages suspected of containing Tito’s name when, as the head of the National Agency for Combating Terrorism and other posts, he was in control of funds

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amounting to $600 million. The prospect of a cover-up of theft of public monies, on a huge scale, aroused intense outrage.1 A further important strand in the protests was solidarity with the Papuan reaction to racist treatment in Indonesia. On the anniversary of the deal in New York at which the us pressured the Netherlands into handing over its colony in West New Guinea to Jakarta, for the same reasons it ensured Jakarta could seize East Timor with impunity thirteen years later—to fortify anti-communist nationalism in Indonesia— Papuans demonstrated peacefully in cities across Java. The following day, 16 August 2019, Papuan students in Surabaya were attacked by right-wing vigilantes alleging they had damaged an Indonesian flag on Independence Day, yelling ‘monkeys’, ‘dogs’ and ‘pigs’ at them, and their dorm was tear-gassed and stormed by police in riot gear; 43 were arrested. In response, thousands took to the streets in Papua, torching vehicles and buildings, including the local parliament. The government shut down the internet, closed schools, deployed thousands of security personnel and uncounted numbers of militia, while many fled the island. As of 1 November 2019, some 37 people have been killed, with possibly more unreported deaths.

Political context The wider background to the explosion this September lies in the drift of the Indonesian political system since the departure of Suharto, marked by the lack of any decisive ideological or institutional rupture with the New Order, and a closing of elite ranks in an oligarchic structure that retains its repressive machinery—army and police—but operates in a mediamanaged electoral system in which rival moneyed interests fight over the spoils of office rather than policy differences. In 2014 the election to the presidency of Jokowi Widodo, by origin an outsider to the oligarchy, promising not only economic development and environmental protection but clean government and a human rights agenda, raised hopes of change. These were soon dashed. By 2016 it was already clear Jokowi had no interest in addressing the slaughter on which Suharto had built his power, and was aiming to consolidate his rule by accommodating Even the Economist, a long-time apologist for Suharto’s regime, which never blinked at its exterminations, was moved to express dismay, asking plaintively, ‘Where did the reformist just re-elected as Indonesia’s president go?’ See ‘No Jokowi’, 28 September 2019.

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the country’s entrenched political and business elites.2 On securing reelection in 2019 his inauguration speech removed all mention of human rights, highlighting infrastructure development, investor incentives, bureaucratic improvement and welfare reforms. Under his trademark slogan of kerja, kerja, kerja (‘work, work, work’)—cultivating the image of an austere ruler quick to roll up his sleeves and get concrete things done, rather than being distracted by political fights—in practice he avoided the quick-sands of bureaucratic reform, while shifting the heavy lifting on infrastructure, healthcare and educational services to stateowned enterprises (soes) and corporate agencies. This narrowed focus on economic development has come at the expense of the environment (ambitious power-plant projects rely heavily on the coal industry) and of civil rights, with protest at forced land clearances for various infrastructural schemes repeatedly hitting the headlines (a major potential strike is looming over the New Yogyakarta International Airport). The results have been lack-lustre: growth anaemic, with most of its benefits going to the middle and upper classes; welfare programmes run by state-owned enterprises unevenly distributed and losing money; unemployment statistically falling but under-employment rising; corruption endemic. Institutionally, Jokowi started his presidency in 2014 with the backing of four parties that controlled 208 out of 560 seats in the parliament, though these were often more interested in beholding and extracting gains from him than supporting him. Within two years, to give himself more room to implement his priority programmes with less resistance from both the opposition and his own coalition, he co-opted Suharto’s prime creation, Golkar, plus two smaller parties, giving him a majority of 386 seats. Commonly, opposition parties are lured into government through lucrative offers of cabinet or soe posts, personal benefits and patronage opportunities. Novel in Jokowi’s regime, departing from traditional methods of ‘coalitional presidentialism’, has been his executive interference in the internal affairs of the parties so lured. Jokowi locked Golkar and others into his government not in the main by the usual offer of rewards and power-sharing, but by using his presidential authority to recognize or reject the legality of party leadership boards, withdrawing recognition from oppositional factions and transferring it to those willing to manoeuvre closer to him. 2 For the political landscape at the time and its historical backdrop, see my analysis in ‘The Ghosts of 1965: Politics and Memory in Indonesia’, nlr 104, March–April 2017, pp. 45–92.

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While consolidating his parliamentary base in the representative machinery of the state, far from curbing its repressive apparatuses, Jokowi built them into his formula for power, with a twist of his own. Where Suharto had ruled through his command of the Army and abri (covering the navy, marines and airforce too), Jokowi has relied to a much greater degree on the police, which has come to enjoy more and more power under him, occupying key positions in the intelligence apparatus, bureau of logistics and now even—highly contested by protesters—at the head of the kpk, with which the police has had a long history of conflict. The Army has not taken this rise of a long-standing rival lightly, which it regards as encroaching on its domestic turf and subtracting from its various opportunities for rent-seeking, and competition for spoils between the two forces remains intense, as within the gamut of parties, with an increasing number of ‘grey areas’ between them where they overlap and a less clear division of labour. In these conditions, political differences within the system, which looked for a moment in 2014 as if they might acquire somewhat more reality, have instead steadily declined. In the presidential election of 2019, that left religion as the only significant variable distinguishing Jokowi from his rival, the swaggering former army general Prabowo Subianto, a byword for military repression, son-in-law of Suharto and brother of a billionaire businessman. The major upset in Jokowi’s first term had come with the mass campaign by Islamist organizations for the ouster and imprisonment of Ahok, the Christian mayor of Jakarta, on confected charges of blasphemy against the Koran. Ahok was a protégé of Jokowi, but seeing the scale of the protest against him, Jokowi had no compunction in dumping him behind bars, while Prabowo, equally impressed by the success of the uproar, could hope to come to power if conservative Muslim sentiment, which had already favoured him in 2014, were to be galvanized more widely and fervently. To pre-empt this danger, Jokowi picked as a vice-presidential running partner Maruf Amin, one of the very clerics who had spearheaded the persecution of Ahok. This blatant piece of cynicism paid off. Jokowi increased his lead from 6 to 11 per cent, but it also exacerbated the religious, geocultural polarization. In 2014, there was already a divide between the Javanese Muslims and non-Muslim areas like Bali, on the one hand, where Jokowi was more popular, and Muslims in the Outer Islands and West Java, who supported Prabowo. In 2019, this split became even more pronounced, with a higher vote share for Jokowi in the Javanese Muslim and non-Muslim areas, and Prabowo performing better in the Outer Islands and West Java, as Jokowi lost South Sulawesi without former vice-president Jusuf

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Kalla as his running mate. Religion now seems to be the only significant political cleavage in the country, though more careful socio-economic analysis is needed, as the landless poor in Java may also have benefited more from Jokowi’s expanded education and health benefits than the poor outside Java, where the economy is more based on small-holder plantations and mining.3

Jokowi’s response Such was the landscape in the aftermath of the polls this April, into which the protests exploded. What was Jokowi’s reaction? While threatening to punish students who demonstrated, he asked parliament to postpone ratification of the Criminal Code, likewise the proposed Mineral and Mining, Correctional and Land Laws. But he refused to annul or modify the kpk Law, his Minister of Law and Human Rights, Yasonna Laoly, a champion of the current revision of the Criminal Code, telling students they should take it to the Constitutional Court for judicial review instead of protesting against it. As for Papua, Jokowi made the first visit of his second term to it, inviting assorted government clients, protesters excluded, to discuss reconciliation under the egregious rubric: ‘It’s okay to be emotional. But it’s better to forgive.’ Better still for the Indonesian state to strike with a hard fist. As of 14 November 2019, security personnel have not been withdrawn, with some 7,000 in mobile brigades still on stand-by in Papua, waiting for further instruction from the National Police Chief to put down any commemorations of the declaration of West Papuan Independence on 1 December, crushed by thugs in Surabaya last year. Accompanied by plans to slice and dice Papua into smaller units, ‘reconciliation’ is an offer at gun-point. Stalling, evading and repressing made up the typical set of responses to the crisis. Just how completely unmoved Jokowi has been by any sense that the parameters of politics as usual might have changed was made clear when he announced a new cabinet in October, appointing Prabowo, no less, as Minister of Defence, and bringing his party Gerindra with him into the ruling coalition. Alongside him, Tito Karnavian—former regional police chief in West Papau, then National Police Chief, a close ally of the president—became Minister of the Interior; Fachrul Razi, a former army general on the board of various companies and active For particulars, see Ulla Fionna and Francis Hutchinson, ‘Indonesia’s 2019 Elections: A Fractured Democracy?’, Asian Affairs, vol. 50, no. 4, 2019, pp. 502–19. 3

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in Jokowi’s campaign team, was made Minister of Religion; Nadiem Makarim, ceo of Go-jek (a motorcycle ride-sharing start-up that has rapidly expanded into food delivery, electronic payments, etc.—think Uber combined with AliPay—with a valuation of $10 billion), Minister of Education; Erick Thohir, a media mogul who headed Jokowi’s 2019 campaign team, and whose brother—a coal industry magnate—is frequently listed among the richest men in the country, Minister in charge of state-owned enterprises. A more incestuous conglomeration of the oligarchy, topped by the surreal clinch of Jokowi and Prabowo themselves, would be difficult to imagine. When Jokowi was first elected in 2014, there was a lot of hope—and promises—that his cabinet would be ‘clean’, that there would not be cattle-trading for posts within it, and that his coalition would be slim. His coalition has since ballooned from 208 to 427 seats, an almost 75 per cent majority in parliament, and seats on the cabinet have never been traded so promiscuously, with parties openly expressing discontent about the quota conceded them. Any pretence of avoiding traditional practices has been dropped. At her party’s congress Megawati issued an explicit command that ‘the pdip must enter the cabinet with the highest number of ministers’, while the Islamic movement Nahdlatul Ulama (nu), to which Maruf Amin belongs, complained that getting the vice-presidency was insufficient as a dividend, requiring a top-up of ministers. In parliament itself, Prabowo’s outfit Gerindra—previously the main opposition to the government—has now displaced Golkar as the second largest party in the coalition, its entry preceded by a highly publicized ‘safari’ to meet its future partners. For Jokowi, bringing Prabowo and Gerindra into his camp serves to reduce opposition to his regime by deflating the conservative Islamic forces that had rallied behind them. Many of these Islamists came from the 2016 mobilization against Ahok, distanced themselves from existing political parties, and had formed a coalition called 212 alumni (2 December 2016), consisting of the Islamic Defenders Front (fpi), Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (hti) and even plenty of nu, among others. After the co-option of Gerindra, the parliamentary opposition shrank to just two Islamist parties, pks and the Muhammadiyah-affiliated pan, plus Yudhoyono’s ‘non-aligned’ vehicle Demokrat, and is likely to dwindle further still. pan has crossed the floor multiple times, jumping to the ruling coalition in 2015, then supporting Prabowo in mid-2018, now rumoured—like Demokrat, a traditional fence-sitter hampered only by Megawati’s long-standing grudge against Yudhoyono—to be eying entry into the coalition once again.

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On the other hand, many of the more conservative Muslim voters who had hitherto backed Prabowo—coming mainly from the 212 mass movement that toppled Ahok, and the Islamic Defenders Front—have expressed their disillusion and withdrawn their support for him. Henceforward, opposition from Islamist parties and mass organizations that feel they have not been sufficiently accommodated by the current government, or subjected to increasing over-regulation and repression—Hizbut Tahrir was banned in 2017, and the fpi was recently denied an extension of its organizational permit—could well be radicalized. Some surveys indicate that around 13 per cent of Indonesian Muslims would vote for the fpi if it stood in an election, quite apart from the existing Islamic parties. In other words, the Islamist electorate is an appreciable force. What does this suggest about the course Jokowi and his coterie plan to follow in 2020 and beyond? Jokowi seems not to care much about his plummeting popularity—he’s been through worse during a kpk-police debacle in 2015—instead focusing on two main agendas: first, economic growth (giving an increasing priority to digital and service sectors) and infrastructure development, with the potentially vast boondoggle of a new capital to be built in Kalimantan in view; and second, doing battle with conservative Islam and terrorism by giving an ever freer hand to the police and armed forces. Growth will continue to be sluggish and unevenly distributed, as too will welfare programmes (the monthly fee for the state-owned health insurance, bpjs, which has been losing money for years, will be doubled next year). The security campaign not only signifies a departure from Yudhoyono, who had many conservative Muslims in his coalition, holding key positions in his cabinet. One of the strongest demands for reform after the fall of Suharto was an end to dwifungsi abri, the ‘dual functions’ assigned to the military under his rule, putting officers into civilian posts. In 2004 Law no. 34 forbade officers in active service from becoming involved in party politics or taking civilian positions, except in the ministries of political, legal and security affairs, defence, intelligence and narcotics—though of course it did not prevent retired generals from populating the political landscape. In June 2019, however, Jokowi issued a Presidential Regulation revising the Law, on the grounds that there were a growing number of surplus officers who could no longer be channelled into leadership positions in the civil service or state enterprises, and that the military were the most convenient go-to filler for development projects, from infrastructure to agriculture schemes—all prone to

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land grabbing. Last year, the National Police also signed an mou with the military allowing soldiers to be deployed during protests and strikes, mass riots, social conflicts, security duties and ‘situations requiring military assistance’. The risk of parallels developing with Suharto’s use of repressive apparatuses of the state to intervene in civilian life is plain. After six years in power, Jokowi—featured in 2014 as ‘The New Hope’ on the cover of Time magazine—might indeed be said to resemble a tropical version of Obama: both celebrity presidents relishing their personal poll-ratings with minimal carry-through to their parties and policies; surrounded by hold-overs of the previous regime; the same bland rhetoric of empty uplift; the same moral obtuseness; the same technocratic style, faith in markets and distrust of mobilization; the same connivance with big money and medical sops to the poor; the same combination of sanctimony and violence, drones in the Yemen and special forces in Papua. Only in their luck with legislatures have they really differed: Jokowi co-opting his opponents without difficulty to secure a huge majority, Obama failing to make any headway with a Republican opposition more principled, by its own lights, than Prabowo and the rest. It is small surprise that this is a record that has alienated many on the left—some of whom supported Jokowi in 2014, and a few more grudgingly in 2019—where anger at his indifference to human rights and damage to the environment is mounting. The main expression of this disaffection has been a movement for Golput (electoral boycott), but this has yet to achieve any significant access to the masses. In 2019 voter turnout was a record high of over 81 per cent, while spoilt or blank ballots amounted to a bare 2.38 per cent. Whether this will be altered by the grand coalition of Jokowi and Prabowo—mocked by many in Golput as ‘vote 1 get 2’ (as in ‘buy 1 get 2’) to drive home the futility of voting, since any candidate will bring together the worst of both camps—remains to be seen. The September protests took many by surprise, since they came from both sides of highly polarized regions and political divides, whereas recent mass protests—the post-election hubbub of May 2019, the 212 campaign of December 2016 against Ahok—have been sectarian and religious-conservative in nature. While there has been plenty of resistance to land clearance and abuses by farmers and others, this has tended to be small and localized in scale, without much presence of students—

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often scoffed at as apolitical millenials, the long history of Indonesian student movements dismissed as a nostalgic irrelevance in this century. A good many factors converged to provoke growing discontent, a strong, inchoate feeling that something was not right with the country. Parliament was pushing through a slew of controversial laws that would criminalize a wide range of ordinary actions and that could ensnare all and sundry: a popular slogan was semua bisa jadi korban (‘anyone can become a victim’). There is also increasing disdain for members of parliament themselves, as media frequently spotlight their glaring absence from—or their watching porn or falling asleep during—plenary sessions, not to speak of their rampant venality and greed in demanding still higher salaries. Then came the undermining of the kpk, the repression of Papuans, the spread of forest fires, and military-police brutalities, all within a couple of months before the outbreak of the protests. It should be said that despite the ecumenical atmosphere of the rising, not all those who protested agreed with all seven of its demands: criminalization of extra-marital and same-sex relations was supported by many of the more conservative Islamic participants. Polarization is growing along religious and geocultural divides, in ways reminiscent of some of pre-1960s Indonesia, while the current coupling of Jokowi and Probowo in the name of ‘deradicalization’ is likely to drive left and right in the opposite direction. Activists already joke that the term ‘radical’ (Islam) has become the new scaremongering catch-all, as over-use has banalized ‘communist’ and ‘anarchist’. What might the upshot of these developments be among the younger generation? The protests may not signal a decisive turn away from the amnesiac culture I described in these pages three years ago, but it does look as if the ‘undergrowth of consciousness’ I suggested back then has spurted upwards.4 The spectacle of university students joined by younger high-school comrades rising up all over Indonesia has been particularly heartening. What will become of it in the longer run remains uncertain, if only because Indonesian activists and students are caught in a tension between remaining ‘pure’ and trying to get a foothold in a political system increasingly barred to anyone without extreme wealth or the patronage of an impermeably corrupt oligarchy.

4

Kuddus, ‘The Ghosts of 1965’, pp. 91–2.

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New Masses, New Media—26

zion lights

H O T- E A R T H R E B E L S

Over the past year, Extinction Rebellion has drawn a new generation into mass civil disobedience over climate change—literally bringing the London traffic to a halt. Could you tell us about your background, and how you got involved in xr?

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was born in 1984 and grew up in an industrial suburb of Birmingham. My parents were from India—a little village in the Punjab—and came over to get factory jobs. I actually began thinking about environmental issues as a child—we learnt about the Amazon rainforest and global warming in school; this was around the time of the 90s Rio Earth Summit. There was a tv advertising campaign about taking care of the planet—turn the taps off, switch out the light when you leave the room—which had the tagline, ‘It’s not too late.’ I remember watching it with a horrible feeling: what if we are leaving it too late? I used to get my parents to collect all our glass bottles and take them down to the bottle bank for recycling when we went shopping on a Saturday. And I turned vegetarian too. At university I was part of a campaign to switch the campus to renewable energy, which we won. And later I was involved in the Climate Action Camp, which focused on corporations rather than public disruption. Then my children were born, which was a turning point. The stakes seemed higher: what situation were they going to inherit? I’d moved to Devon and was doing a lot of freelance writing about environmental politics and sustainable lifestyles, including a book called The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting, put out by New Internationalist—it’s a sciencebased approach to green birth, baby essentials, greening your home. So, new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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like a lot of people, I was chipping away on my own. When I first saw Extinction Rebellion come into being, I was excited, of course, and got in touch with my local group—but I thought it might be another movement that would just fizzle out, like the Climate Camps or Occupy. With the April Rebellion this spring, when we blocked five sites in London— Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Parliament Square, Piccadilly Circus, Waterloo Bridge—I realized this was different. I helped take Waterloo Bridge, which turned into a sort of festival, with huge numbers of people turning up after seeing us on television, many of whom had never been involved in protest before. We ended up staying there for two weeks. That’s when I thought, if anything works, it’s this. I gave up my other work and ended up switching over full-time to Extinction Rebellion. So how did Extinction Rebellion get started? What really galvanized xr was the 2018 ipcc Report, Global Warming of 1.5°C—just as it did Greta Thunburg and the school-students who protested in the Fridays for the Future campaign. The International Panel on Climate Change is very careful in its formulations to avoid anything scientifically contentious—it always seeks a broad consensus among the international climate scientists whose work it draws on. They agree that the global mean surface temperature now is around 0.87° higher than the 1850–1900 average, the proxy for the ‘pre-industrial level’. Over the last thirty years, as carbon emissions have soared, it’s been rising at roughly 0.2o per decade. This warming has already brought loss of ice, rainfall changes—increased droughts and floods—and ocean acidification, as the seawater absorbs carbon. The southern Arctic permafrost is already softening, the northern tundra and boreal forests are changing, sea levels are rising and marine ecosystems have already been affected—70 per cent of warm-water coral reefs are dying off and fish populations are migrating to cooler regions. At 1.5o hotter—and the greenhouse effects of past emissions guarantee we’ll reach it by 2040—these present problems will be intensified, with the Arctic ecosystems, high mountain ranges and coastal regions most affected. But the ipcc Report warned that simply limiting global warming to 1.5o will require ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’—and if we don’t make those changes now, cutting emissions by 40 per cent in the next twelve years, global temperatures will increase well above that, with terrifying effects.

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xr was launched in October 2018, the same month as the ipcc Report? Yes. Its precursor was a group called Rising Up, started eighteen months before by some long-standing direct-action campaigners. There was Gail Bradbrook, who’d been involved in environmental campaigns since she was a teenager and had led anti-fracking protests around Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was Simon Bramwell, a builder and bushcraft teacher, who founded the Stroud-based Compassionate Revolution group in 2015 with Gail and George Barda, an Occupy and Greenpeace activist. Roger Hallam was studying civil disobedience at King’s College, London; originally he’d been an organic farmer in Wales, but he could see the impact of climate change on his crops and began reading up about it. Clare Farrell was a fashion designer, she does a lot of xr’s art work—the block printing, for example. Robin Boardman was a student from Bristol, a bit younger than the rest. It’s striking that so many of the original Extinction Rebels seem to come from the West Country—the Cotswolds, mid-Wales, down to Somerset and Devon—a region of small towns, hills and moors, and mixed farming, compared to the flat fields of East Anglia. It used to be seen as majority-conservative, though since the seventies, counter-cultural networks have been flourishing there. Yes, it’s interesting—you get painted as middle class, yet Gail is a Yorkshire miner’s daughter, and I’m the child of immigrant factory workers. My parents certainly weren’t hippies—though some people think they must have been, to call me Zion. They’re very hard-working, very pro-capitalist, because that enabled them to get out of poverty— although I tell them, actually, capitalism is the reason you’re in poverty. But they do care about ecological issues, because they know what’s going on in India—the droughts, the terrible smog. So what motivated Rising Up? The starting point was the need to find a more effective form of protest than what we’d all been doing to date. Pretty much none of this came out of our own innovative thinking. It was about looking at the research, adding up the facts. Conventional A-to-B marches don’t work: millions of us demonstrated against the Iraq War and it didn’t make any difference.

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A key piece of research was Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works. They take data from hundreds of 20th-century social movements and analyse what they did right and what they did wrong. The most successful ones, those that had their demands met, used forms of decentralized, non-violent civil disobedience—large-scale direct action. The tipping-point, Chenoweth and Stephan found, was to get 3.5 per cent of the population involved. That’s not a huge number— it’s about two million in the uk. But it’s not just about getting them to demonstrate, because unfortunately that doesn’t make any difference. It’s about getting them involved at a higher level. If two million people bring the capital city to a stand-still, what can the government do? They can’t arrest that many people. We saw that in the April and October Rebellions this year: even when the number of people arrested was in the thousands, the police and the judicial system were overwhelmed. It’s interesting that Extinction Rebellion borrows from this us ‘colour revolutions’ tradition. Although Chenoweth herself started from a slightly different area of expertise, in counter-terrorism and advice to Homeland Security about us financial-sector vulnerabilities, her work on civil disobedience chimes broadly with the Albert Einstein Institute approach. Maria Stephan works for the us State Department at nato hq and in Afghanistan. But how did the Rising Up activists put this approach into practice? It’s not a blueprint, but the research is useful. So, in May 2018, about fifteen Rising Up people met in a cafe in Bristol and agreed on a strategy. They set themselves the target of addressing a hundred meetings of potential activists up and down the country, giving people the facts about the climate emergency, explaining that, in face of government inaction, they were going to declare a rebellion on 31 October 2018 in Parliament Square and asking people to ask themselves what role they would like to play. The Declaration of Rebellion was drafted by Simon Bramwell. It’s a really beautiful piece of prose, declaring that it’s our duty to rebel against our failing government—‘We act in peace, with a ferocious love of these lands in our hearts’. Some 1,500 people turned up for the declaration— far more than expected. That was followed by a spate of civil-disobedience actions in central London—sit-ins on bridges, planting trees outside Parliament, people super-gluing themselves to Buckingham Palace— which really caught the public’s attention. That was when Extinction

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Rebellion erupted into the headlines, in November 2018. The April 2019 Rebellion was much bigger, as I said, and the October 2019 Rebellion bigger still in terms of numbers, though the police prevented us from taking the bridges and kept us in Trafalgar Square. This mode of organizing suggests a radical break with Occupy’s approach to operating by consensus?

xr uses a self-organizing system based on features of the holacracy model. The idea is to be able to harness group wisdom while still being able to set clear targets and respond quickly in fluid situations. Local groups are the basic community-organizing structures, but we recommend that, as they grow, they should split into smaller working groups or circles, each focusing on its own specialist area. Each circle can choose its own coordinator; the coordinators then meet to decide key local issues. Local groups can connect with each other through regional and national coordination. Nationally, there are a whole series of different circles, each with its own mandate, and they work pretty much autonomously of each other. The Actions and Logistics circle decides on the dates and frames for actions. The Media and Messaging circle decides about organizing press conferences and press releases, covering relations with tv and the press; we’ve also set up our own paper, The Hourglass, which now has its own branch. There’s a Political circle that meets with politicians; a Finance circle which takes care of donations and fundraising, and checks everything with the Legal team; a Regenerative Culture circle, a Communities circle, a Tech circle and so on. Some of the circles are quite large and have lots of teams branching off, but each has its own clearly defined role. All the circles have at least two coordinators, one internal, the other external—feeding back information to the coordinators of other circles. The Anchor circle encompasses all the others. We organize discussions through WhatsApp and Zoom video-conferencing calls. Coordinators from different circles have to work together: for planning the big rebellions, the Action and Political circles formulate demands, the Arts circle needs to know what the Action circle needs, and the Action circle needs to know how much money there is from Finance.

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Media and Messaging is one of the bigger circles: we have between fifteen and twenty key coordinators, though that shifts around as different branches develop. The Social Media team decides on the hashtags, like #EverybodyNow before the rebellion and #WheresYourPlan. The idea for a funeral march, to stage the extinction of our future, came from brainstorming in the Arts circle. It was first performed in London with people solemnly burying a coffin marked ‘Nature’. But then the local and regional groups picked it up, and it very quickly caught on in other countries around the world. As we understand it, the holacracy model is a management structure derived from the ‘holarchies’—the natural hierarchies—in Arthur Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine? Well, again, we don’t practice that model, we just derive some features from it where they seem to be useful for building an inclusive, participatory movement. The important thing is that anyone can start a local group and take action in the name of Extinction Rebellion, as long as they adhere to xr’s principles and values, and work towards realizing its three demands. As you can see from the map on our website, over two hundred xr groups have been set up across the uk, so it seems to be working! Could you talk us through xr’s three demands? Number one is for the government to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency; we need the state to mobilize all-out, like in wartime, to halt the crisis. The second demand is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and to halt bio-diversity loss—the 2019 ibpes Report on bio-diversity says that one in seven species is now at risk of extinction. Third, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice, to decide which policies to push forward. This would be a jurylike structure, chosen by lot to get a cross-section of society. Parliament will remain, but it will play an advisory role to the Citizens’ Assembly. These are quite general demands. Might it not be more effective to call for three more concrete actions, like legislating and budgeting for a mandatory switch to renewable energy, or making public transport free and strictly limiting the use of private vehicles or air travel?

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I don’t think we should pretend to be experts on all the factors involved. Of course there are things that I would like to see, like blue-green infrastructure—using as many local spaces as possible to plant trees and capture carbon. The billions poured into fossil-fuel subsidies could be diverted into cleaner energy and technology. Maybe we need to transition away from air travel, or offer incentives to develop a more ecological way to fly. But I would be hesitant to say, let’s pick three solutions, because we definitely need more than that! The experts have a lot of solutions, but we need to forge a strategy from them in a democratic way, taking care of the needs of the most vulnerable. That’s where the Citizens’ Assembly comes in. Plus, our first demand—tell the truth—gives people a platform to take their own demands forward. For instance, it has taken a lot of work to ensure that our xr Farmers group and Animal Rebellion are cooperating and not antagonizing each other. Even in the energy sector, it’s quite a minefield. If you look at the ipcc report, its models for bringing down carbon emissions to a net total of zero by 2050 rely on the use of nuclear power and negative-emission technologies, many of which are untested: where will the captured carbon be stored, and what effect will it have on those habitats? The truth is simple: there’s an emergency, that’s just a fact. The solutions and social implications, they’re complex. People who’ve got involved in the Rebellions, often first-time young activists, speak very highly of the welcome and induction techniques that xr provides. Could you tell us about them? We call it the xr dna. It was developed by Robin Boardman and the Communities team, and it goes through the values and principles of xr, what got us here, how we operate, how to join in—the three dna building blocks are story, strategy, structure. We run it at festivals or you can do it online. You can just click on a Zoom call and have a welcome and an introduction. The idea is that the dna transmits the information that allows the movement to develop and lays a solid foundation for its culture. The training is also really good in helping people find where they can fit in. We have what we call xr butterflies who float around from team to team—I was a butterfly when I joined, because there’s always so much that needs doing in each team, and there’s no leader allocating people to different types of work. You have to find your own place individually and work out what you’re good at, which can take time.

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Your mode of drawing people into civil disobedience—the process of education, of people being able to take their own decisions about how they want to be involved—is a striking contrast to the vanguardist approach of a tradition like the Black Bloc. Could you talk us through a few concrete examples of how decisions are made? Generally our model is: if you want to take an action, and it’s non-violent, you can. You don’t have to get permission from anyone; you don’t have to go through some body that assesses it. But sometimes there are really strong disagreements. Before the 2019 October Rebellion, Roger Hallam and some others in the Action circle proposed using drones to disrupt Heathrow Airport. Quite a few of us saw the proposal coming up on WhatsApp groups and went, ‘Actually, maybe we’re not happy with that.’ There was a lot of discussion, with some arguing that it wasn’t non-violent—because drones are used as weapons—and that our priority should be mass civil disobedience in the capital, rather than a small-group action out at Heathrow. It went back and forth, but most people weren’t comfortable with the action, and eventually we said that it shouldn’t be an xr action. So they organized as a separate group, the Heathrow Pause, which had thirty or forty people in it, many of whom weren’t in xr anyway. So we decided that using a kind of consensus. It’s not a perfect system. It didn’t work in the case of the Canning Town Station action this October, when a small group of protesters climbed on the roof of a train, stopping it from moving, and angry passengers dragged them off. Someone set up a poll the night before which found that over 70 per cent of xr people didn’t want it to go ahead—and then it did. If we’d had more time, we could have followed the same process as with Heathrow. But that can be quite slow: you get the coordinators talking to their teams and then feeding back to the other coordinators, usually over Zoom or WhatsApp—there are too many WhatsApp chats. And most of us were on the ground in Trafalgar Square at the time, so there was no opportunity to discuss it. But so many people were upset by it that we’re now talking about streamlining the process, so that key people in each team can come together and take decisions quickly. Something like this will probably happen again, because we’re such a big movement, growing so quickly. The Action circle is always quite strategic and careful about ensuring that roadblocks don’t prevent people from getting to a hospital, for example.

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We chose those five bridges to block in November 2018 because they’re always shutdown for the London Marathon, so there’s obviously a plan in place to keep emergency services clear. There was total support for most of the actions this October: the mothers and babies’ nurse-in outside the Google office; the Youth group climbing up the YouTube building; the huge wooden pyramid at Oxford Circus; the National Portrait Gallery protest against bp sponsorship. Then there are always smaller ongoing actions carried out by local groups. ‘Clean up Barclays’ was taken up by lots of groups—activists with mops and buckets, swabbing down the bank branches, calling on them to disinvest from fossil fuels. The regional groups are completely autonomous. Have Extinction Rebellion groups been established in any other countries? Yes. After the November 2018 rebellion, xr groups were springing up everywhere—we counted 655 local groups in 56 countries. This October there was a major action in New York in Times Square, and another in Madrid. There were lots of small-scale actions, where the groups are smaller or where protest is more dangerous. In each country, members decide what is appropriate for them and adapt the model—and, of course, they work alongside existing environmental organizations, as we do. There’s an xr campaign to challenge Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil on state-sanctioned violence and ecocide by landowners and miners, in solidarity with indigenous groups. This August, Brazilian embassies in eleven countries were sprayed with blood-red paint and slogans like Sangue Indígena, Nenhuma Gota a Mais—indigenous blood, not one drop more. But there, for example, the xr coordinator couldn’t do a magazine interview because it would have put their life at risk—especially on issues around deforestation. The Brazilian group has added a new first demand, about ecology and justice for indigenous people’s rights. The situation is just as bad in Colombia, and much less reported. Five indigenous leaders were assassinated there recently, and 700 have been killed since 2016. Indigenous peoples are the best caretakers of their land, but instead of being given stewardship of it, they’re being murdered on a horrendous scale. How would you assess Extinction Rebellion’s achievements to date? Our first demand—for the government to tell the truth—hasn’t exactly been met. Corbyn moved for the British parliament to declare

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a climate emergency, which was passed, but the Johnson government didn’t budge. During the October Rebellion, Johnson himself called us ‘uncooperative crusties’, though a minion came to collect one of the trees xr was distributing in Parliament Square. They’re still subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry, still talking about expanding Heathrow Airport—so our second demand has not been met either. Strangely enough the call for a Citizens’ Assembly, which I always thought was our most radical demand, has been the most successful. Climate Assembly uk will take place at the start of 2020, over four weekends, with 110 members drawn from 30,000 households. The House of Commons set it up through several of its Select Committees. The Scottish government will also be creating an assembly to make recommendations on how to reach net zero emissions. A couple of smaller assemblies have already taken place in Camden and Oxford, and several other local councils—Devon, Leeds, Sheffield—are planning to follow suit. Even though Johnson has ignored our demands, over half the local governments in the uk have now got their own figures for reducing emissions between 2025 and 2050, and some of them are quite ambitious. Regional xr groups are lobbying their municipalities for measures like free public transport; they’re looking at issues like clean air around schools. There was even a police station in Surrey that declared a climate emergency. As it has been taken up more widely, our first demand has also been broadened out, from ‘Tell the truth’ to ‘What’s your truth?’—what should your community, your industry, be doing about the crisis? We now have a Media Tell the Truth team that focuses on trying to get the press to report on the climate. There’s Culture Declares, for artists to get involved, and also Writers Rebel. During the October Rebellion there was an action to shut down London Fashion Week, to get the fashion industry to tell the truth about their water wastage and emissions. And what will it take to make the aviation sector bring down emissions? What does society look like if we tell the truth about the emergency we’re in—and in which directions should it move?

aaron benanav

AU T O M AT I O N A N D THE FUTURE OF WORK—2

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e live in an era of dizzying technological change, with smartphones, self-driving cars and automated stocktrading desks apparently set to transform life across the globe. What will human beings do in an automated future? Will we be able to adapt our social and political institutions to realize the dream of human freedom presaged by a new age of machines? Or will it turn into a nightmare of mass joblessness? In Part One of this essay, I identified a new automation discourse, propounded by liberal, right-wing and left analysts alike.1 These automation theorists claim that mass technological unemployment will need to be managed by the provision of universal basic income (ubi), since large sections of the population will lose access to wage labour.2 I argued that the resurgence of this feverish discourse is a response to a real trend unfolding across the world: a chronic under-demand for labour. However, the explanation the automation theorists offer—runaway technological change destroying jobs—is false. The real cause of the persistently low demand for labour is the progressive slowdown of economic growth since the 1970s, as industrial overcapacity spread around the world, and no alternative growth engine materialized—a development originally analysed by Robert Brenner, and belatedly and obliquely recognized by mainstream economists under the name of ‘secular stagnation’ or ‘Japanification’.3 As economic growth decelerates, job creation slows, and it is this, not technology-induced job destruction, which is depressing the global demand for labour. In Part Two, I demonstrate that employment outcomes have differed in important respects from the automation theorists’ predictions. I analyse the contemporary dynamics of the global labour market and consider new left review 120 nov dec 2019

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the solutions automation theorists have proposed, notably ubi, before going on to consider, as a thought experiment, an alternative approach to achieving a post-scarcity future. First, however, I will argue that it is crucial that we reconceive of the present situation as marked not by the imminent arrival of mass unemployment, as automation theorists suggest, but by continuously rising under-employment. A survey of worldwide vistas of insecure work shows that this new reality has already been accepted by wealthy elites. Turning the tide towards a more humane future will therefore depend on masses of working people refusing to accept a persistent decline in the demand for their labour, and the rising economic inequality it entails. Struggles against these outcomes are already unfolding across the globe. If they fail, maybe the best we will get is a slightly higher social wage in the form of ubi. However, we should not be fighting for this goal, but rather to inaugurate a post-scarcity planet.

1. global labour-market dynamics What lessons can be gleaned from past experiences of job losses and profit-driven technological breakthroughs? On their own, these have Aaron Benanav, ‘Automation and the Future of Work–1’, nlr 119, Sept–Oct 2019. The automation theorists under discussion include Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, London 2014; Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, New York 2015; Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 114, January 2017; Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, New York 2018; Andy Stern, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, New York 2016; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London and New York 2015; Nick DyerWitheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, London 2015; Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, London and New York 2016; Manu Saadia, Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, San Francisco 2016; Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, London and New York 2019; see also Nick Dyer-Witheford et al., Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism, London 2019. 3 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006 [1998]. On secular stagnation, see Lawrence Summers, ‘Secular Stagnation and Macroeconomic Policy’, imf Economic Review, vol. 66, no. 2, 2018; on ‘Japanification’, see John Plender, ‘Why “Japanification” Looms for the Sluggish Eurozone’, Financial Times, 19 March 2009. 1

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never overcome human drudgery altogether. Nevertheless, they do periodically result in sweeping job destruction in certain industries, particularly when they allow firms to overcome a long-standing resistance to industrial development. Agriculture, for example, was one of the first sectors to be transformed by modern production methods: in the 15thand 16th-century English countryside, new forms of animal husbandry on enclosed farms were combined with crop rotation to raise yields. Yet farming remained difficult to mechanize, due to the uneven terrain of fields and seasonal cycles, and for centuries it continued to be a major source of employment.4 In the 1940s, however, advances in synthetic fertilizers, the hybridization of crops and the mechanization of farming implements made it possible to develop industrialized forms of agricultural production, and operative logics shifted dramatically.5 Labour productivity took off, as farms came to resemble open-air factories. Given the limits to the growth of the demand for agricultural outputs, the sector then shed workers at an incredible pace. As late as 1950, agriculture employed 24 per cent of the workforce in West Germany, 25 per cent in France, 42 in Japan, and 47 in Italy; by 2010, all of these shares were under 5 per cent. During the 1950s and 60s Green Revolution, methods of industrialized agriculture were adapted for tropical climates, with stunning consequences for global agricultural employment: in 1983, the majority of the world’s workers were still in agriculture; that figure has since fallen to 25 per cent.6 The major global job destroyer in the 20th century was not ‘silicon capitalism’ but nitrogen capitalism. No mechanism existed within the labour market to ensure that as many new jobs were created outside of agriculture as had been lost within it. Firms are still seeking ways to overcome obstacles to industrialization, but in the present era of slowing overall growth rates and generally slack labour markets, these innovations tend to leave working people without steady jobs. For example, on a global scale, the mechanization Strong tariff protections against imports from lower-wage countries were also key. See Niek Koning, The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the uk, Germany, the Netherlands and the usa, 1846–1919, London 2002. 5 See fao, State of Food and Agriculture 2000; and Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, London 2006, pp. 375–440. 6 Statistics drawn from the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, ‘10-Sector Database’, updated January 2015, and from fao, faostat and ilo, Key Indicators of the Labour Market, 9th edition, 2015. 4

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of electronics assembly and apparel and footwear industries would be devastating: these sectors employ large numbers of people worldwide and generate foreign exchange for otherwise cash-strapped economies. Sewing in particular has long been resistant to technological modernization: it involves detailed work with fabrics, which machines have trouble manipulating; the last major innovation in the field was the Singer sewing machine in the 1850s. Electronics assembly work, although of more recent vintage, has proven similarly resistant to labour-saving innovation, since it too requires the delicate manipulation of tiny parts. As technological laggards within larger, highly mechanized production processes, these jobs were some of the first to globalize in the 1960s. Retail, apparel and electronics firms contracted suppliers in low-wage countries to meet a growing demand.7 These industries remain significant as the first links of industrial supply chains, where they are subject to fierce competition among suppliers. Much of this kind of work has relocated to China since the 1990s. However, even as Chinese wages rise and other countries become more competitive, advances in robotics may finally be overcoming long-standing resistance to further mechanization within these fields. Foxconn is deploying ‘foxbots’ to stave off competition from electronics assemblers in lower-wage countries. In China and Bangladesh, apparel companies are using ‘sewbots’ and new knitting technologies, which may also be extended to the manufacture of footwear. These innovations are unlikely to lead to full automation in these sectors, but they could eliminate lots of jobs very quickly, and block access to the global economy for further low-wage countries, in Africa for example.8 It is unclear whether these technological developments are ten or twenty years away, and they may not occur on any scale at all. Yet even without major advances in See Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the us Apparel Industry, London 2002; and Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: rca’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labour, New York 1999. 8 Phil Neel, ‘Swoosh’, Ultra, 8 November 2015; Anna Nicolaou and Kiran Stacey, ‘Stitched Up By Robots’, ft, 19 July 2017; Jennifer Bissell-Linsk, ‘Robotics in the Running’, ft, 23 October 2017; Jon Emont, ‘The Robots Are Coming for Garment Workers. That’s Good for the us, Bad for Poor Countries’, wsj, 16 February 2018; Kevin Sneader and Jonathan Woetzel, ‘China’s Impending Robot Revolution’, wsj, 3 August 2016; Saheli Roy Choudhury, ‘China Wants to Build Robots to Overtake Its Rivals—But It’s Not There Yet’, cnbc, 16 August 2018; Brahima Coulibaly, ‘Africa’s Race Against the Machines’, Project Syndicate, 16 June 2017; afp, ‘Tech to Cost Southeast Asia Millions of Jobs, Doom “Factory Model”, Warns wef’, afp International Text Wire, 12 September 2018. 7

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automation, ‘Industry 4.0’ and ‘smart-factory’ technologies will increase the advantages of industrial clustering in the vicinity of related services, with the result that manufacturing jobs are more likely to be globally concentrated than dispersed.9 By overcoming impediments to mechanization in sectors that have hitherto acted as major labour-absorbers, new technologies may serve as a secondary cause of the under-demand for labour. However, the key to explaining this phenomenon is not the rapid pace of job destruction in specific branches, if it occurs, but the absence of a corresponding pace of job creation in the wider economy. As I argued in nlr 119, the main explanation for that is not rising productivity-growth rates, as the automation theorists claim, but inadequate output demand, due to the proliferation of industrial capacities across the world, an associated over-accumulation of capital, and a consequent downshift in rates of manufacturing expansion and economic growth overall. These remain the primary economic and social causes of the slack in the labour market that is wracking workers across the world.

Mass under-employment At the core of contemporary automation discourse is the concept of what the Harvard economist Wassily Leontief called ‘long-run technological unemployment’. Extrapolating from particular instances of automation and job loss, this is portrayed as an economy-wide phenomenon. Like ‘whale oil’ and ‘horse labour’, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain in The Second Machine Age, human exertion may soon find itself ‘no longer needed in today’s economy even at zero price’.10 Were full 9 Mary Hallward-Driemeier and Gaurav Nayyar, Trouble in the Making? The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development, Washington dc 2018, pp. 93–6. Global employment in the it and call-centre sectors also seems set to decline as cloud-based computing obviates the need for firms to develop and monitor their own websites and online databases; large Indian it firms are already shedding jobs. See Simon Mundy, ‘India’s Tech Workers Scramble for Jobs as Industry Automates’, ft, 27 May 2017. 10 Wassily Leontief, ‘Technological Advance, Economic Growth and the Distribution of Income’, Population and Development Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1983, p. 409; Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, p. 179. Dyer-Witheford speaks of a ‘deepening pool of unemployed populations, no longer required by digital capital’: Cyber-Proletariat, p. 3, while Yang refers to a ‘growing mass of the permanently displaced’: War on Normal People, p. xli.

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automation ever achieved, the resulting jobs apocalypse would quickly demonstrate that social life had to be reorganized so that waged work was no longer at its centre.11 But has the decline in the demand for labour actually been accompanied by rising unemployment rates, as the automation discourse suggests it should have? In the advanced capitalist countries, average unemployment rates rose in the 80s and 90s, and the 2008 crisis sent them back up. But over the past decade, they have generally dropped again, although at a slower pace than after past recessions (Figure 1). These data are sometimes taken as evidence that the demand for labour has not secularly declined. The point is rather that the forms in which that decline expresses itself have shifted from unemployment to various kinds of under-employment, which are more difficult to measure.12 As many commentators have Figure 1: Unemployment Rates in the us, Germany and Japan, 1960–2017 % 6 12 Germany

Unemployment Rate

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8 4 2

Japan

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1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

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Source: oecd Main Economic Indicators, Unemployment Rate, Ages 15 and over.

According to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, ‘the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play’: ‘Free Press Interview: A. C. Clarke’, Los Angeles Free Press, 25 April 1969. See also Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 180–1; and Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 194–6. 12 On the theory and history of jobless recoveries in the us, see Nir Jaimovich and Henry E. Siu, ‘Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries’, nber Working Paper no. 18334, August 2012, revised November 2018. On the limits of unemployment as a measure of labour-market health, see David Blanchflower, Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?, Princeton 2019. On the genesis of unemployment as an economic category, see Michael Piore, ‘Historical Perspectives and the Interpretation of Unemployment’, Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 25, no. 4, 1987. 11

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recognized, we are heading towards a ‘good job-less future’ rather than a ‘jobless’ one: ‘workers have to keep working in order to feed themselves, so they take any jobs in sight’, even those offering poor pay, limited hours or terrible working conditions.13 Automation theorists interpret this as a consequence of growing technological unemployment, occurring somewhere offstage. In reality, rapid automation of production is hardly taking place at all—offstage or anywhere else. In the decades since the early 1970s, as unemployment rates first rose and then stubbornly refused to fall, governments pushed for the weakening of labour-market protections and scaled back unemployment benefits.14 ‘Workfare’ policies, forcing the unemployed back to work, replaced passive income-support systems as the main institutional response to job loss. In countries such as the us, uk and Germany, few workers remain visibly and countably unemployed for long. Instead, they are typically obliged to join new labour-market entrants in jobs that are part-time, temporary or otherwise precarious, in economies that can no longer offer them anything better. The degree to which precarity then spreads across the aggregate workforce varies by country. Such shifts are easiest to document in the us, where non-unionized workers lack basic employment protections and, except in cases of outright discrimination, can be hired and fired at will. Here the unemployed were reabsorbed but at the cost of wage stagnation and worsening conditions.15 By contrast, in parts of Europe and wealthy East Asia, where employment protections are stronger, important sections of the labour force are insulated from the market pressures associated with periods of joblessness. Government strategy here has been to allow disadvantaged classes of workers to emerge. These ‘non-standard’ workers have no access to employment protections and are obliged to moderate their wage demands 13 Yang, War on Normal People, p. 80. Laura Tyson, ‘Labour Markets in the Age of Automation’, Project Syndicate, 7 June 2017. 14 For an account of how different welfare-state regimes adapted to the return of high unemployment, see Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford 1999; and Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity, Cambridge 2014. For a critical response to Thelen, see Lucio Baccaro and Chris Howell, Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial Relations since the 1970s, Cambridge 2017. 15 For the classic account, see Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, ‘The Great American Jobs Machine: The Proliferation of Low Wage Employment in the us Economy’, Study for the Joint Economic Committee, Washington dc 1986.

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to meet labour-market realities.16 Between 1985 and 2013, the share of ‘non-standard employment’ in total employment rose: from 21 per cent to 34 per cent in France; from 25 to 39 per cent in Germany; and from 29 to 40 per cent in Italy. In Japan, the share of ‘non-regular employment’ rose from 17 per cent in 1986 to 34 per cent in 2008, with similar trends unfolding in South Korea. These changes in the composition of employment are even more dramatic in new job offerings: 60 per cent of jobs created in oecd countries in the 1990s and 2000s were non-standard.17 Labour markets in these countries are becoming bifurcated between workers still in ‘standard’ employment, with relative job security, and a growing mass of typically younger outsiders who lack these benefits.18 In low- and middle-income countries, where the majority of the world’s workers live, ‘non-standard’ work has always been the norm; the ilo estimates that barely a fifth of unemployed workers receive benefits worldwide.19 The unemployed are therefore forced to find a source of income as quickly as possible, with the result that the measured unemployment rate is just 5.3 per cent in these regions, despite the dearth of job opportunities. Workers who lose their jobs mostly join young labour-market entrants in working informally—often in unincorporated micro-enterprises of five or fewer workers. Almost 70 per cent of employment in low- and middleincome regions was classed as informal in 2016.20

Post-industrial doldrums Instead of rapidly rising unemployment associated with a breakthrough to an automated future we are seeing rampant under-employment due See Patrick Emmenegger et al., eds, The Age of Dualization: The Changing Face of Inequality in Deindustrializing Societies, Oxford 2012, on the evolution of insider/ outsider distinctions within European welfare states. For an overview, see ilo, NonStandard Employment Around the World, Geneva 2016. 17 oecd, In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All, 2015, p. 144. See also Shiho Futagami, ‘Non-Standard Employment in Japan: Gender Dimensions’, International Institute for Labour Studies Discussion Paper dp/200/2010, Geneva 2010, p. 29. 18 See Bruno Palier and Kathleen Thelen, ‘Institutionalizing Dualism: Complementarities and Change in France and Germany’, Politics and Society, vol. 38, no. 1, 2010; David Rueda, ‘Dualization, Crisis and the Welfare State’, SocioEconomic Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 2014. 19 In sub-Saharan Africa, only 3 per cent of workers are covered by unemployment benefits—as compared to 76 per cent in high-income countries: ilo, World Employment Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs, Geneva 2015, p. 80. 20 See, respectively, the ilo’s Key Indicators of the Labour Market; and Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, 3rd edn, Geneva 2018, p. 23. 16

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to worsening economic stagnation.21 Rather than being put out of work by the low demand for their labour, people are forced to work for lower than normal wages, and in worse than normal working conditions. Those who can’t do so drop out of the labour force. Life in stagnant economies has thus come to be defined by intense employment insecurity, represented in a plethora of science-fiction dystopias populated by a redundant humanity.22 Under-employment is becoming a standard feature of labour markets, but one that lacks a standard form of expression. From the mid-60s onwards, as labour surpluses expanded globally, multinational firms began to engage in labour-market arbitrage, playing suppliers off against each other to obtain productive labour at low prices, which they then used to compete in oversupplied global markets. Industrial firms have taken advantage of employment insecurity not only in low-income countries, but also in the high-income world, moderating workers’ wage demands by creating multi-tiered contracts, or hiring workers outside the bounds of standard labour law. Yet only about 17 per cent of the global labour force works in manufacturing, with an additional 5 per cent in mining, transportation and utilities.23 The vast majority of the world’s under-employed workers therefore end up finding jobs in the highly heterogeneous service sector, which accounts for between 70 and 80 per cent of total employment in high-income countries, and the majority of workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa.24 The post-industrial economy we have inherited—now finally on a world scale—is, however, rather unlike the one whose emergence Daniel Bell first predicted in 1973: instead of an economy of researchers, tennis instructors and Michelin-rated chefs, ours is predominantly a world of side-street barbers, domestic servants, fruitcart vendors and Walmart shelf-stackers.25 Some automation theorists do identify under-employment as a common feature of contemporary economies, but they have trouble explaining it, focused as they are on the apparent dynamism of technological change. See, for example, Stern, Raising the Floor, p. 185; Yang, The War on Normal People, pp. 79–80. 22 Examples of such dystopian visions include Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) and Elysium (2013), as well as the Brazilian tv series 3% (2016), created by Pedro Aguilera. 23 ilo, Key Indicators of the Labour Market. Of that 17 per cent, a sizable fraction are informally employed, engaging in domestic industry: producing bricks, cigarettes, locks and shoes in tiny household or backyard shops and foundries. 24 According to the ilo, service workers came to represent the majority of the global labour force in 2015: Key Indicators of the Labour Market. 25 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York 1973. 21

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The basic pattern of employment growth in services, described by Princeton economist William Baumol in the early 1960s, helps explain why under-employment in the sector is such a major feature of today’s economy—and why the automation theorists’ account falls askew.26 Baumol explained rising service-sector employment by pointing out that service occupations see lower rates of mechanization and productivity growth than the industrial sector. If demand for services increases, employment does too, and by almost as much (Figures 2 and 3)—unlike in manufacturing, where most output growth is generated by rising productivity rather than expanding employment. Of course, some services, like wholesale trade, see spurts of rapid productivity growth, but these fail to coalesce in the sustained, sector-wide productivity growth of the sort that was endemic to manufacturing over the long history of its industrial development. Since services cannot rely on price effects for expanding demand—that is, rising productivity leading to falling prices and hence to increased demand—we should expect service-sector employment to grow slowly. As Baumol showed, service-sector prices suffer from a ‘cost-disease’: sluggish rates of productivity growth mean that services become ever more expensive relative to goods.27 Service-sector demand must thus rely on income effects for its expansion—the growth of demand for services depends on the growth of incomes across the wider economy. This means that as the rate of overall economic growth slows with the dilapidation of the industrial growth-engine, the pace of service-sector employment growth should slacken, too. But despite advanced economies growing more slowly, service-sector employment expanded quickly in certain low-wage, precarious occupations. It is at this point that logics of under-employment come into play. It turned out to be possible to lower the prices of these services—and so to expand demand for them—without raising levels of productivity, by See William Baumol, ‘Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis’, American Economic Review, vol. 57, no. 3, June 1967, pp. 415–26, as well as William Baumol et al., Productivity and American Leadership: The Long View, Cambridge ma 1989. 27 According to Baumol, it is actually the falling price of manufactures that makes services seem to be growing more expensive. The theory that changes in relative prices are determined by differential rates of labour-productivity growth was the original intuition behind the labour theory of value. See Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, New York 2000, pp. 73–4. 26

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Figure 2: Service Sectors in the us, France and Italy, 1980–2010 % 3 Output

Productivity

Employment

Average Annual Growth Rate

2

1

0

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France

Italy

Figure 3: Service Sectors in Thailand, Mexico and South Africa, 1980–2010 % 6 Output

Productivity

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Average Annual Growth Rate

4

2

0

-2

Thailand

South Africa

Mexico

Source: Groningen Growth and Development Centre, 10-Sector Database, January 2015 edition.

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paying workers less, or suppressing the growth of their wages relative to whatever meagre increases in their productivity were achieved over time.28 The same principle applies to self-employed workers, who, by offering to work for less, are able to create demand for their labour at the expense of their incomes. The service sector is the choice site for job creation through super-exploitation because the wages of service workers make up a relatively large share of their final price. Particularly in lowand medium-income countries, productivity growth in many services has been negative, as people contrive work for themselves via involutionary job-creation strategies. The extent to which firms are allowed to take advantage of such income-insecure workers depends on each country’s labour-protection laws. As under-employment rises, inequality must intensify. Masses of people can only work as long as the growth of their incomes is suppressed relative to the average rate.29 The consequence is an expanding gap between the growth of real wages and that of productivity levels, contributing to the 9 per cent shift from labour to capital incomes in the G20 countries over the past fifty years. Worldwide, the labour share of income fell by 5 per cent between 1980 and the mid-2000s, as a growing portion of income growth was captured by a tiny class of wealth-holders.30 In fact, increases in inequality are worse than these statistics suggest, since the distribution of labour income has itself become more unequal, with the largest pay rises going to managers. According to a recent study, between the late 1980s and the early 2010s, labour productivity grew faster than average wages, which in turn grew faster than median wages across the For a similar explanation, see Torben Iversen and Anne Wren, ‘Equality, Employment and Budgetary Restraint: The Trilemma of the Service Economy’, World Politics, vol. 50, no. 4, 1998. 29 As David Autor and Anna Salomons note in their criticism of the automation discourse, ‘labour displacement need not imply a decline in employment, hours or wages’, but can hide itself in the relative immiseration of the working class, as ‘the wage bill—that is, the product of hours of work and wages per hour—rises less rapidly than does value added’: ‘Is Automation Labour-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment and the Labour Share’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2018, pp. 2–3. 30 ilo and oecd, ‘The Labour Share in the G20 Economies’, Report prepared for the g20 Employment Working Group, February 2015, p. 3. imf, World Economic Outlook, 2017, Washington dc 2017, p. 3. See also Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, ‘The Global Decline of the Labour Share’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 129, no. 1, 2014. 28

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oecd.31 As inequality intensifies, opportunities for super-exploitation expand; it begins to make sense for richer households to hire the poor to perform tasks they would otherwise do for themselves—solely because of the extreme difference in the price of their respective labours. These trends suggest that the apocalyptic crisis of labour-market dysfunction that automation theorists anticipate will not take place. Instead, unemployment will continue to spike during downturns and then give way to under-employment and rising inequality. In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford’s worst nightmare would be if the ‘economic system eventually manages to adapt to the new reality’ of labour displacement, but in truth, it has. As Mike Davis put it, the ‘late-capitalist triage of humanity’ has ‘already taken place’.32 Unless halted by concerted political action, the coming decades are likely to see more of the same: overcapacity in international markets for agricultural and industrial products will continue to push workers out of those sectors and into services, which will see its share of global employment climb from 52 per cent today to 70 or 80 per cent by mid-century. Since overall rates of economic growth are set to remain low, the service sector will absorb job losers and new labour-market entrants only by increasing income inequality. This is not to say that the poor will get poorer, but that their share of income growth will remain much smaller than their share of the population. As Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have shown, incomes for the poorest half of the global population doubled between 1980 and 2016 (though rising by only a tiny amount in absolute terms), but that accounted for only 12 per cent of overall income growth; the richest one per cent captured more than twice that share—27 per cent—over the same period.33 Barring a shift in labour’s ability to press its interests, containing economic inequality will depend on the strength of welfare-state institutions. So far, these have tended to give way in the face of economic stagnation. In sluggish economies periodically wracked by austerity, it is Andrew Sharpe and James Uguccioni, ‘Decomposing the Productivity-Wage Nexus in Selected oecd Countries, 1986–2013’, in oecd, International Productivity Monitor, no. 32, 2017, p. 31. 32 Ford, Rise of the Robots, p. 219; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006, p. 199. 33 Facundo Alvaredo et al., eds, World Inequality Report 2018, Cambridge 2018, p. 52. Some portion of the income gains of the poorest 50 per cent was eaten up by higher living costs in cities, which are notoriously difficult to measure; urbanization increased from 39 to 54 per cent over the same period. 31

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easier to blame the resulting social deterioration on vulnerable sections of the workforce—immigrants, women, racial and religious minorities—than to unite around a new, emancipatory social project.

2. a silver bullet? The automation discourse has identified a set of troubling tendencies in the world economy associated with a persistently low demand for labour. The social crisis entailed by this long-unfolding trend is worse than the statistics indicate. Growing numbers find themselves excluded from meaningful participation in the economy and from the sense of power and purpose that it affords, even under the adverse conditions of capitalist societies. Atomization, amplified by job insecurity and inequality, renders people susceptible to the appeal of economic nationalism, which claims to solve globalization’s problems by putting ‘our country first’. Automation theorists are attentive to these dangers; the morbid symptoms of a decline in the demand for labour will not be alleviated by tariff barriers or job-training facilities.34 Measured against the slowburning catastrophe of the present era, such bromides offer little hope. The automation theorists therefore attempt a radical rethink. In this respect, automation is a lot like global warming: when people take it seriously, they find themselves willing to consider revisions to the basic structure of social life that they otherwise would have thought impossible. Naming the present world as obsolete, the automation theorists dream up radical ways to resolve the crisis of the world of work. Their solutions are worth considering, even if, as I have been arguing, they are wrong about its causes. The automation theorists’ principal proposal is a universal basic income: a no-strings-attached income paid to every citizen.35 Set at a high enough level, ubi would end poverty outright. A ubi would provide workers in See inter alia Darrell West, The Future of Work: Robots, ai and Automation, Washington dc 2018, p. 139; Yang, War on Normal People, pp. 150–61, 75–7; Eduardo Porter, ‘Is the Populist Revolt Over? Not If Robots Have Their Way’, nyt, 30 January 2018; Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 249–52. 35 See Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, London 2017, p. 8; Guy Standing, Basic Income: A Guide for the Open-Minded, London 2017. This proposal is discussed in Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 232–41; Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 257–9; Stern, Raising the Floor, pp. 171–222; Yang, War on Normal People, pp. 165–74. 34

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insecure employment with a measure of security, a crucial reform in an era of low labour demand and mass under-employment. On the basis of these arguments, automation theorists often present ubi as a neutral policy instrument—appealing to left and right—which solves the problem of global unemployment, just as the Green Revolution technologies were supposed to solve the problem of global hunger. Of course, such technocratic neutrality is a fantasy: depending on the manner in which it is implemented, ubi will lead in radically different directions, most of which will not bring us closer to a world of human flourishing.36

ubi proposals predate the advent of the automation discourse. Some trace their origin to Thomas Paine, who argued as early as 1797 that a lump-sum payment should be distributed to all individuals on reaching the age of majority.37 Paine justified this coming-of-age grant along classically Lockean lines: it would enable everyone to participate in market exchange, securing the moral foundations of a private-ownership society. Twentieth-century neoliberal economists supported a basic income for similar reasons. Milton Friedman argued for negative income taxes as a replacement for welfare-state programmes: instead of funding public projects aimed at reducing poverty, each person should be given enough to raise them above the poverty line.38 Today, the most fulsome neoliberal arguments for ubi are to be found in the writings of Charles Murray, who believes it will halt the decline of the West and restore its tired souls to Christian faith and monogamous marriage. The cash—$1,000 a month—will be freed up by liquidating most of the welfare state.39 Murray’s advocacy of ubi stems from his belief that welfare-state institutions are not only economically inefficient but This point is recognized in Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat, pp. 185–6; Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 127; Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How ubi Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work and Remake the World, New York 2018. p. 130. 37 On Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1796), see Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, pp. 70–2. 38 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, London 1962, pp. 191–5. See also Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, London 1979, pp. 54–5. 39 Charles Murray, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, Washington dc 2016, pp. 11–5; and Coming Apart, New York 2012. On Murray’s intellectual trajectory, see Quinn Slobodian and Stuart Schrader, ‘The White Man, Unburdened’, Baffler, no. 40, July 2018. It’s striking how many liberal and even left proponents of ubi have been influenced by Murray’s work. See Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 234–7; Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 262–3; West, Future of Work, pp. 99–100; Lowrey, Give People Money, pp. 128–30. Andy Stern even narrates a fictional conversation between Murray and Martin Luther King: Raising the Floor, pp. 202–3. 36

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soul-destroying—entailing the alienation of essential sources of individual meaning-making to the state. He argues that social problems like poverty and drug addiction should be handled directly by the communities in which they arise through ‘voluntary associations’, which ubi would support by providing a social wage sufficient to ensure that no one went hungry, and by dismantling the institutions that presently shoulder these burdens.40 In Murray’s vision, ubi would remain fixed at a low level. Further income redistribution would be blocked, so inequality would continue to soar. Murray’s proposal for a ubi is a disturbing vision of how an ever more unequal society, marked by a persistently low demand for labour, might render this situation palatable to the poorer among its members. His platform stands at the base of much of the right-wing automation discourse’s policy proposals.41 A danger is that, in its implementation, ubi may come to look more like this right-wing version than like left-wing alternatives. Left-wing ubi proposals would maintain or expand social provision, so their version would be far more expensive. From a centre-left egalitarian position, Philippe van Parijs, perhaps ubi’s most respectable advocate, wants to provide people with enough to meet their basic needs, without dismantling the welfare state. He and Yannick Vanderborght aim at 25 per cent of gdp per capita—roughly $15,500 per year for each person in the us in 2019. To make this more palatable, however, they recommend starting payments at a very ‘modest level’ and not on a universal basis: there would be a ‘participation condition’, such as a communityservice requirement, and eligibility restrictions, to prevent ‘selective immigration’ to ubi countries. The claim is that even small monthly payments will begin to revitalize communities, thereby becoming the basis of a powerful push for higher levels of ubi, or alternatively, for higher wages.42 Murray, In Our Hands, pp. 60–8, 81–90. See Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 234–7; Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 262–3; West, Future of Work, pp. 99–100; and Lowrey, Give People Money, pp. 128–30. 42 See Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, pp. 11–12, 214, 220–4, 127–8; see also Erik Olin Wright, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, London and New York 2019, pp. 74–5. For an earlier version of this argument, see Stanley Aronowitz et al., ‘The Post-Work Manifesto’, in Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, eds, Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation, London 1998. 40 41

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Meanwhile, for anti-capitalist automation theorists like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, ubi opens the more radical possibility of facilitating a painless shift towards full unemployment—to life beyond wage labour.43 As automation advances, the value of the ubi will rise until the power to purchase most goods and services is provided by this alternative distribution mechanism—a radical advance in equality. In Inventing the Future, ubi is held up as a way to accelerate the transition to a fully automated world, since a high minimum-income floor will empower workers to refuse work, which in turn incentivizes employers to make jobs enjoyable, or to automate them out of existence.44 ubi thus becomes a means not of stabilizing the late-capitalist economy, but of pushing towards a post-scarcity world, in which the ‘economic problem’ has been solved and people are free to pursue their passions. Past that point, the major questions concern humanity’s ultimate horizon. Does freedom from work mean indulging in hobbies, as Keynes imagined, or building spaceships and exploring the stars?45

Limitations In its egalitarian forms, ubi has many attractive aspects. Even a minimal net redistribution can be welcomed on its own terms, above all if it goes some way to alleviate the stress of poverty and its associated mental and physical ailments. Combined with a global carbon tax, ubi could play a role in mitigating climate change, providing a partial panacea for the job losses incurred through a transition to renewables.46 To evolve from a technocratic fix to an emancipatory project, however, ubi would have to do more: it would have to empower individuals to fight for dramatic social change. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, pp. 107–27. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, pp. 117–23. For the original version of this argument, see Robert J. van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, ‘A Capitalist Road to Communism’, Theory and Society, vol. 15, no. 5, 1986. See also Frase, Four Futures, pp. 54–8. 45 Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ (1930), in Essays in Persuasion, London 1963, pp. 366–7; West, The Future of Work, pp. 83–8. See also Saadia, Trekonomics, as well as Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series. The popularity of the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ meme speaks to this appealing vision. 46 Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Alive in the Sunshine’, Jacobin, 12 January 2014; Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, pp. 227–30. 43

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There are reasons to doubt that ubi will have that effect. To begin with the flourishing communities that ubi proponents invoke: in itself, giving people money will not revitalize communities. As Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, the expansion of the cash economy tends to melt ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relationships’ into air. This is because money allows people to meet their needs without relying on the communities of which they form a part; it therefore tends to erode their collective organizational capacities. Today, transportation, entertainment and nourishment have been entirely reshaped in line with this inner logic of market economies. People spend hours a day in traffic on their way to and from work—together but fundamentally alone—eating McDonalds and watching cat videos on their phones. Economies already designed to reduce everyone to an atomic existence could easily accommodate a ubi. What of the further claim that a ubi would empower workers in confrontations with their bosses? This is putting the cart before the horse: in order to win a ubi large enough to alter social relations, workers would first need to be empowered. A still deeper concern is that, even if ubi did give people a greater capacity to stand and fight, it is not clear that it presents a viable pathway toward broader emancipatory goals. For ubi to serve as the basis of a left-wing vision of exit from capitalism, the automation theorists’ analysis would need to be correct: today’s persistently low labour demand would have to originate in rapidly rising productivity levels, associated with a fast pace of economic change. Were that the case, the main issue society would confront would be rising economic inequality, which would be rectified by distributing more and more income as ubi payments, rather than as wages. If instead, as I have argued, contemporary under-demand for labour is the result of global overcapacity and depressed investment—driving down rates of overall economic growth—then waging such a distributional struggle would quickly become a zero-sum conflict between labour and capital, blocking or at least dramatically slowing progress towards a freer future. As such, we would need a plan for wresting control over the economy away from asset owners, yet ubi proposals say little about how to reduce capital’s sway over production. While a ubi has the laudable goal of separating the income people get from the amount of work they do, it would do nothing to alter the relation between income and assets, keeping us tethered to a system in which interest from extending credit, rent from leasing land or homes,

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and profit from running businesses constitute a sizeable fraction of total income. The profit motive would remain the driving force of the economy because capitalists would retain their power over investment decisions, which would continue to determine whether the economy grows or shrinks. Capital would thus continue to wield the weapon of the capital strike, i.e. the prerogative of owners of capital to throw society into chaos via disinvestment and capital flight.47 For forty years, in an environment of worsening overcapacity and slowing economic growth, capitalists have threatened the use of this weapon to force political parties to capitulate to their demands: for looser business regulations, laxer labour laws, and, in the midst of economic crises, for private bailouts and public austerity. A left that wants to use ubi to usher in a different sort of world would therefore need to present us with its Meidner Plan, bringing about the progressive socialization of the means of production via a planned transfer of asset ownership to society at large.48 The problem is that it was precisely the threat of capital disinvestment during the crisis of the 1970s that led to the original Meidner Plan in Sweden being cast aside. Such a plan would be even harder to realize today, when mass working-class organizations are much weaker and economic growth slower. Given this context, in which a capital strike would quickly push the economy deeply into crisis, we need to set our sights higher: on the conquest of production. Taking the power to control investment decisions away from capitalists and rendering the capital strike inoperative forms an essential precondition of our collective progress toward a post-scarcity future.

3. necessity and freedom Even if we doubt automation theorists’ account of technological progress—as I certainly do—the attempt to imagine and chart a path toward a post-scarcity future remains an attractive and valuable aspect See James Crotty, ‘Post-Keynesian Economic Theory: An Overview and Evaluation’, American Economic Review, vol. 70, no. 2, 1980, p. 25; Adam Przeworski, ‘Social Democracy as Historical Phenomenon’, nlr 1/122, July–August 1980, pp. 56–8; Jonathan Levy, ‘Capital as Process and the History of Capital’, Business History Review, vol. 91, no. 3, 2017. 48 See Bertram Silverman, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Model: Interview with Rudolf Meidner’, Challenge, vol. 41, no. 1, 1998. 47

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of the left-wing automation discourse, allowing us to pose the question of how the pieces of this defunct world can be reassembled to break through to a new mode of social existence. Harbouring a vision is crucial to reviving an emancipatory project today, not least because its future realization seems so far away. Nineteenth-century socialists knew they were far from achieving their goals, but they were nevertheless possessed by an idea of a freer future which animated their struggle. As late as 1939, Brecht could still write: ‘our goal lay far in the distance / it was clearly visible’.49 Few would say that today. Not only are we living in an era of stubbornly entrenched neoliberalism, provoking angry ethnonationalisms and climate-induced catastrophes of growing frequency and scale, we also lack a concrete idea of a real alternative. Centralized state planning turned out to be both economically irrational and ecologically destructive, filling warehouses with shoddy products and proving susceptible to autocratic bureaucratization. European welfare states and Keynesian full-employment policies proved unable to adapt to a context of slowing growth and ongoing deindustrialization.50 This is one reason why socialist reforms have given way to neoliberal ones, while emancipatory social movements have mainly been limited to rear-guard defences, which will merely slow our slide into the abyss. So, ‘demand the future’ indeed, but which one? It is striking that Star Trek: The Next Generation provides the go-to example of a freer future for so many automation theorists. In this series-reboot from the late 1980s, a technology called the ‘replicator’—essentially an amazingly advanced three-dimensional printer—brings about the end of economic scarcity, allowing people to live in a world without money or markets.51 Bertolt Brecht, ‘To Those Born After’, in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, London 2019, p. 736. 50 On the limits of actually existing welfare states, as explained by one of their great defenders, see Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton 1990, pp. 9–34. 51 See Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 246–8; Yang, War on Normal People, p. xvii; Frase, Four Futures, pp. 48–9. For an extended discussion, see Saadia, Trekonomics, pp. 65–86. This vision may have found its inspiration in the ussr. In 1961, Khrushchev called for communism in 20 years. Sci-fi duo the Strugatsky brothers penned a series of incredible short stories in response entitled Noon: 22nd Century (1961), describing space exploration in a communist future. Alongside their later novel, Hard to Be a God (1964), this vision of space-faring communists perhaps served as a model for Star Trek and for Bank’s Culture Series, both of which premiered in 1987. 49

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The question is: can we envisage a post-scarcity world without the replicators—that is, even if full automation turns out to be a dream? By side-lining the conquest of production as a goal, automation theorists have largely abandoned what has been seen as the basic precondition for generating a post-scarcity world, from Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia to present-day Trekonomics: not the free giving of money, as the automation theorists have it, but rather the abolition of private property and monetary exchange.52 One of the reasons for their relinquishing this key objective is that they tend to begin from the wrong transitional questions: starting from the assumption that full automation will be achieved, they go on to ask how we would need to transform society in order to save humanity from the mass joblessness it would cause and create a world of generalized human dignity. But it is possible to reverse this thought experiment, so that instead of presupposing a fully automated economy and imagining the possibilities for a better and freer world created out of it, we begin from a world of generalized human dignity and then consider the implications for technical change in working to realize that world. What if everyone in the world suddenly had access to enough healthcare, education and welfare to reach their full potential? A world of fully capacitated individuals would be one in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support. What would have to change in the present for this future scenario to materialize? In a fully capacitated world, everyone’s passions would be equally worthy of pursuit. Particular individuals would not be assigned to collect garbage, wash dishes, mind children, till the soil or assemble electronics for their entire lives, just so others could be free to do as they please. Instead of pushing some people down ‘under the mudsill’ in order to raise up the rest, as the South Carolina slave owner James Henry Hammond once put it, we would need to find another way to allocate the necessary labours that serve as the foundation for all our other activities.53 Thomas More, Utopia, 2nd edn, London 2014, pp. 47, 132. For Hammond’s 1858 mudsill theory, which claimed it was necessary to have slaves for drudgery, so the rest of society could be raised above the muck, see Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government, Oxford 2017, pp. 30–1. See also W. E. B. Du Bois’s evocative response to the mudsill theory in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Mineola 1999.

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Whereas automation theorists place their hopes in technology, many of the original theorists of post-scarcity—such as More, Cabet, Marx, Kropotkin—did not need to call on a deus ex machina to solve this riddle. They claimed that post-scarcity was possible without the full automation of production. Instead, we needed to conceive of social life as comprising a realm of necessity and a realm of freedom.54 In the former, we would share out the labours necessary for our collective reproduction, dividing up responsibilities while taking into account individual abilities and proclivities. Some tasks would need to be performed locally, but many could be planned on a regional or global scale. Of course, much necessary work is difficult to share out widely because it requires specialized skills: we would still need farmers, construction workers, surgeons, electricians and machinists—though in a fully capacitated world, these specialisms would themselves be more evenly distributed. Perhaps, alongside a common rotation, each individual would choose a vocation that would be added to their responsibilities. The result of such work-sharing would be that more people, including those currently cast aside as redundant workers, would participate in necessary work, and so the amount any one person had to do would be correspondingly reduced. In order to share these necessary labours at all, however, their character would need to be transformed. Social distinctions between waged and unwaged work, which have historically consigned women to the ‘hidden abode’ of household production, would have to be abandoned. Moreover, production and consumption would need to be conceived as a closed loop, rather than endpoints cut off from other social-ecological considerations.55 See More, Utopia, pp. 60–72; Etienne Cabet, Travels in Icaria, Syracuse 2003, pp. 80–9; Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, London 1993, pp. 707–12; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, London 1991, pp. 958–9; Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, London 2015, pp. 99–112. For a general discussion, which, however, excludes Cabet and Kropotkin, see Edward Granter, Critical Theory and the End of Work, Farnham 2009, especially pp. 31–67. Here I leave to one side thinkers like Charles Fourier, William Morris and Herbert Marcuse who essentially suggested that the collapse of spheres could be achieved by turning all work into play. Single-realm conceptions of a post-scarcity world are, in my view, both totalitarian and hopelessly utopian. 55 ‘Putting an end to garbage collection as a job some have to do for years, will be a lot more than job rotation: it will imply changes in the process and logic of garbage creation and disposal’: Gilles Dauvé, Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, Oakland 2015, p. 54. 54

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How a fully capacitated humanity would then set about further transforming their common labours becomes an open question. Here, it is important to recall that the technologies developed in capitalist societies are not neutral: they are designed to embody capitalist control, not to free humanity from drudgery; we probably have the technological capability to make many tasks more enjoyable than they currently are. Technical know-how might be applied to break down distinctions between skilled and unskilled labour, or to eliminate some kinds of labour altogether. Such questions would be settled by human beings freely and collectively figuring out what they wanted to do, rather than decided for us by supposedly unstoppable technological forces.56 Note that what I am here calling necessary or reproductive labour is not necessarily unsatisfying work, especially if it is apportioned in such a way that no one’s working life is entirely dominated by it. Minding children, for example, is not only good for children, but for adults too, opening them to the wonders of a child’s experience of the world; likewise, making dinner or washing dishes, when done collectively, can facilitate the forming or deepening of relationships. Whether a fully capacitated humanity would prefer such activities to be performed by food replicators and cleaning drones, so people can get on with their scientific research unimpeded, remains to be seen. In the post-scarcity tradition, the reorganization of necessary labours makes possible a world of free giving. Everyone can go to the social storehouses and service centres to get what they need, while—as More put it—‘giving absolutely nothing in exchange’.57 All are entitled to food, drink, clothes, housing, healthcare, education and to means of transportation and communication, irrespective of their contribution to the labour of necessity, ‘just as all men’ are ‘entitled to warm themselves in the heat of the sun’—although ecological sustainability would set constraints on their provision.58 Literal abundance is not required so long Instead of ending our social obligations to one another, as the automation theorists think possible, the point is to recognize and transform them—to dis-alienate communities rather than be done with them—as a way to ensure that individual freedom is shared equally and by all. This is not to champion drudgery and its associated work ethic, but to recognize that drudgery is unlikely to go away. 57 More, Utopia, pp. 67–8. See also Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp. 58–63. 58 James Boggs, ‘The American Revolution’ [1963], in Stephen Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, Detroit 2011, p. 110. 56

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as scarcity and its accompanying mentality are overcome, so that people can ‘live with a joyful and tranquil frame of mind, with no worry about making a living’.59 Indeed, according to this perspective, abundance is not a technological threshold but a social relationship, undergirded by the principle that one’s means of existence will not be at stake in any of one’s relationships. Likewise, in a post-scarcity world, there could still be sanctions to ensure the necessary work is actually undertaken. These would take the form not of threats of starvation and exclusion, but of invitations to cooperation.60 For theorists of post-scarcity, this reconstruction of the realm of necessity is not an end in itself; the solidarity it engenders also expands the realm of freedom, and ensures this too is shared by all.61 Under these conditions, once necessity is assured, everyone is free to develop their individuality, outside the bounds of any given community. The point is to enable by way of a collective social project what the automation theorists hope to achieve technologically. Of course, the realm of freedom is about time for both socializing and solitude, for both engaging in hobbies and doing nothing at all—‘rien faire comme une bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky’.62 Adorno’s phrase is suggestive of a world in which dispossession and the existential insecurity to which it gives rise have been universally abolished. None of this requires that we assume a spontaneous harmony of interests, or a benign human nature. On the contrary, ending economic compulsions implies that many people will be free to withdraw from oppressive personal relationships within households or workplaces, or to re-negotiate their terms. More, Utopia, p. 130. Economists have long recognized that hunger is not a good motivator: ‘the best situation for man is when he produces in freedom, has choice in his occupations, has no overseer to impede him, and when he sees his work bring a profit to himself and others like him’, with the result that ‘well-being has always been the most powerful stimulant to work’: Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp. 138–9. 61 In that sense, ‘equality enables—rather than detracts from—individualism’: Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London and New York 2015, p. 108. Ross’s text evokes a form of ‘luxury communism’ that need not be ‘fully automated’. See also More, Utopia, pp. 61–2; Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 711–2; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 532–3; and Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp. 99–112. 62 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London and New York 2005, p. 157. 59

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What will people do with their expanded free time? Post-scarcity has been called ‘post-work’, but such a perspective is inadequate.63 Reorganizing social life to reduce the role of necessary labour is not about overcoming work as such; it is about freeing people to pursue the sort of activities that cannot be described simply as either work or leisure. That might include painting murals, learning a language, building water slides—or discovering new ways to do common tasks to make them less timeconsuming. It could mean writing novels, or self-reinvention through education or exploration. As automation theorists of both right and left envisage, the end of scarcity would enable many to enter into voluntary agreements and associations with others from all over the globe: joining consortia of mathematical researchers, clubs for inventing new musical instruments, or federations for building spaceships. ‘Creative minds and scientific aptitudes’ would no longer be ‘wasted due to accidents of birthplace, the bad luck of challenging circumstances, or the necessity to survive’.64 Funding for research or art would also no longer be determined by the profit motive, or dictated by the interests of the wealthy. How would people gain access to the resources they need to pursue their passions in the realm of freedom? Presumably many of these could be developed within the realm of freedom itself, through voluntary associations, and federation among them.65 But these issues—as well as the related question of what counts as necessity and what as freedom— would be matters for a freed humanity to resolve for itself, politically. The world would be composed of overlapping partial plans, rather than a single central plan—a possibility within our grasp through the new digital means of communication.66 Within this framework, one could See Aronowitz et al., ‘Post-Work Manifesto’. Saadia, Trekonomics, p. 61. 65 One might imagine that the realm of necessity would in some respects continue to function like a capitalist economy, with its attendant pressures to raise productivity, reduce labour time and re-allocate resources. However, without labour or other factor markets, it is more likely that the realm of necessity would change slowly, absorbing innovations from the realm of freedom over time. The practical implementation of these innovations might take a long time, requiring coordination among various committees that would likely be more concerned with getting chores done, than doing them better. In that case, the realm of freedom would be the one giving rise to dynamic transformation. 66 See Evgeny Morozov’s discussion of Daniel Saros’s Information Technology and Socialist Construction (2014) in ‘Digital Socialism?’, nlr 116/117, March–June 2019. 63

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imagine fully capacitated individuals arranging themselves in all sorts of ways: people might live in large communities or small ones; they might do a lot of work or a little, choosing instead to explore nature, society, their minds, the oceans or the stars; they might be happy on a hot planet or a cool one; in a world of relative resource scarcity or abundance—as long as certain fundamental conditions of sustainable material security were met.67 The point of this exercise is to show that it is possible to design utopian thought experiments that revolve around and prioritize people, not technological progress. Recognizing the fundamental dignity of the seven billion-plus who make up humanity requires that we no longer agree to relegate some to a life of drudgery so that others may be free. It means sharing out the work that remains to be done in a technologically advanced society so that everyone has the right and the power to decide what to do with their time.

Agents of change This brief sketch of a post-scarcity world can perhaps serve as a benchmark to evaluate the various pathways that are supposed to get us to that place. From this standpoint, it is clear that nothing about the way our world is presently organized will automatically lead there. Life expectancies, education levels and degrees of urbanization have risen dramatically over time, yet they remain highly unequal. Meanwhile, even in the richest countries most people are so atomized, materially insecure and alienated from their collective capacities that their horizons are stunted. If full automation can appear as both a dream and a nightmare, that is because it has no innate association with human dignity, and will not generate a post-scarcity world by itself. Nor will ubi. Perhaps if access to education and healthcare were dramatically widened, communities revitalized by cooperatively sharing the work necessary to their reproduction, and industries partially socialized, then a basic income could form one part of a larger project aiming at human freedom.68 But the For an account of utopia amidst scarcity, see Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, New York 1994, as well as Fredric Jameson’s commentary on ‘world reduction’ in Le Guin’s novels in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York 2007, pp. 267–80. See also Frase, Four Futures, pp. 91–119. 68 Most ubi theorists end up admitting this point. See, for example, Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, p. 246. 67

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path to a post-scarcity world could also take some other form entirely. Without a vision of this world, it is easy to get lost along the way. If a post-scarcity world is not the inevitable product of technological advancement or technocratic reforms, then it can only come about under the pressure of social movements pushing for a radical restructuring of social life. One of the most disappointing aspects of the automation discourse is its tendency to underrate existing social struggles. In their 1985 article, ‘A Capitalist Road to Communism?’, Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs supposed that, as ‘rapid labour-saving technical change’ combined with ‘constraints on economic growth’, rational human action ‘can be relied upon to generate, sooner or later’ forces demanding and implementing social change. Writing thirty years later, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams despair of the forces that have been generated, which they describe as mere ‘folk politics’: people are reacting to the increasing complexity of the modern world, they say, by demanding a return to the simplicity of local communities engaging in face-to-face interactions.69 Despair of the emancipatory potential of today’s social struggles is not unreasonable. It would take a massive and persistent mobilization to turn the tide of a truculent neoliberalism, yet the only movement with the size and strength to undertake this task—the historic labour movement—has been thoroughly defeated. Strikes and labour demonstrations are mainly defensive: workers fight to slow the pace of capital’s juggernaut and its drive for more austerity, labour flexibility and privatization, in response to an economic slowdown that never ends. The labour movement has never figured out how to respond to technologically induced job loss under conditions of slowing economic growth. As Wolfgang Streeck put it, ‘disorganized capitalism is disorganizing not only itself but its opposition as well’.70 For this reason, the long descent into economic stagnation has not been accompanied by a renewal of mass working-class organizations. Nevertheless, over ten years on from the 2008 crisis, political stasis appears to be cracking. Social struggles have unfolded on a scale not seen for decades. There have been waves of strikes and social movements Van der Veen and Van Parijs, ‘A Capitalist Road to Communism?’, pp. 652–3; Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, pp. 9–13. 70 Wolfgang Streeck, ‘How Will Capitalism End?’, nlr 87, May–June 2014, p. 48. 69

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across five continents, from China to North Africa, Argentina to Greece, Indonesia to the us.71 Masses of people are once again joining work stoppages, occupations, blockades, riots and demonstrations, protesting against the morbid symptoms of a long-term decline in the demand for labour—inequality, employment insecurity, government corruption and austerity measures, as well as food, energy and transportation pricehikes. Protestors have come out en masse in response to police murders, which sparked the rage of those who would no longer stand for their lack of social recognition. To be sure, these explosive movements have so far lacked the staying power to force recalcitrant governments into retreat and have suffered reversals and defeats. But they have nevertheless broadened political horizons and radicalized a new generation of militants. Perhaps our era is like the mid-19th century—producing utopian visionaries, but also generating new constituencies for emancipatory social change. Objective features of the present period support this hypothesis: ours is the healthiest, most broadly educated, most urban and most connected population in world history. Literate and mobile people ‘will not accept a future of high inequality and stagnant growth’ on a planet with rising sea levels.72 Whether this will bring us closer to a freer future is an open question. What is certain is that if the social movements of the present period do take hold as more permanent formations, they are unlikely to look like the labour movements of the past. Vast discontinuities separate our era from that time. The labour movements arose during a long period of industrialization, whereas we live in the post-industrial doldrums: ours will be a struggle over the consequences of industrialization’s end. This is not to deny the global economy’s continuing dependence on industrial production, or the existence of factory workers. But the declining share of manufacturing in total employment means that these workers no longer have the capacity to cast themselves as representatives of a more just and rational future order. Even countries like South Africa, South Korea and Brazil, which industrialized only recently and where manufacturing 71 Among texts that attempt to take stock of these movements as a whole, see Paul Mason, Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, London and New York 2013; Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd edn, Cambridge 2015; Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, London 2017; Endnotes, ‘The Holding Pattern’, Endnotes 3, 2013; and Göran Therborn, ‘New Masses?’, nlr 85, Jan–Feb 2014. 72 Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London 2015, p. 29.

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workers were pivotal in the struggles for democracy in the 1970s and 80s, have long become majority service-sector economies.73 This change in the composition of the labour force will reshape social movements today in essential respects. Though automation discourse tends to over-emphasize this trend, it is true that direct human labour plays a much smaller role in the core industries than it did before; as Marx predicted, it has largely been displaced as the primary productive force by scientific and technical knowledge, embodied in vast infrastructures mobilizing both natural forces and machines. Many workers have been cast aside, forced to give up much of their waking lives to deadend service jobs in which labour productivity rises slowly. The dynamic struggles that animated earlier generations of workers over who should benefit from continual productivity growth therefore fail to take place. For most workers today, capital’s compulsion to drive down production costs means only labour intensification without corresponding increases in pay. Commentators have argued that however disaffected insecure workers become, they lack the power at the point of production necessary to press their demands.74 Yet, as it turns out, in a world of lean, justin-time production, organizing to blockade circulation in and around major cities can prove an effective tactic. An early example was given in the piquetero movement in Argentina: unemployed workers blockaded highways around Buenos Aires to demand better benefits.75 Since 2011, this tactic has been sporadically adopted by workers in the us, France, Egypt and elsewhere. In the autonomous spaces that can open up in the course of major struggles, questions of the nature and future of society are posed. Assemblies are generally open to all. Personal and intimate forms of coercion are not altogether absent, but there is a shared sense that everyone deserves a say in social affairs. Within occupations and on the frontlines of blockades, people do actually care for one another. They cook and clean and look after the children without expecting anything in return, although See Gay Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985, Berkeley 1994. 74 See, for example, Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War, Chicago 2017. 75 See Federico Rossi, The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina, Cambridge 2017. 73

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of course the materials they use to perform these tasks have generally been purchased within the normal course of the life they seek to disrupt by their actions. Such efforts do not merely indicate a cleaving towards a simpler life—whether in folk or völkish terms. Instead they point, however fitfully, towards a world of generalized human dignity, one with fewer borders and boundaries. No matter how large they become, these protests have so far been unable to escape the limits of all struggles over the collective reproduction of the working class, whose deterioration, under the pressures of stagnating wages, employment insecurity and welfare-state retreat, has been extreme. These movements fail to rise from the level of reproduction to that of production, even when they call forth and combine with strikes in what remains of the industrial core. However much hope they inspire amidst the catastrophe of the present, mass, disruptive protests in our era have so far lacked a vision of a wholly different world—one in which the infrastructures of capitalist societies are brought under collective control, work is reorganized and redistributed, scarcity overcome through the free-giving of goods and services, and our human capacities correspondingly enlarged as new vistas of existential security and freedom are opened up. Unless social struggles organize themselves around these historic tasks, they will not break through to a new synthesis of what it means to be a human being—in a world devoid of poverty and billionaires, of stateless refugees and detention camps, and of lives spent in drudgery that hardly offers a moment to rest, let alone dream. Movements without a vision are blind; but visionaries without movements are much more severely incapacitated. Without a massive social struggle to build a post-scarcity world, late-capitalist visionaries will remain mere techno-utopian mystics.

REVIEWS

Salma Samar Damluji and Viola Bertini, Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia Laurence King: London 2018, £65, hardback 368 pp, 978 1 786 27261 4

Owen Hatherley

A MUD-BRICK UTOPIA The Egyptian designer Hassan Fathy was one of those 20th-century architects who were never content with architecture as a straightforward technical discipline, but who used it as a speculative instrument, a means of shaping society towards the realization of a political and social ideal. He was also one of those whose reputation as a thinker and theorist vastly outweighs the number of buildings he actually managed to have constructed. But this is where similarities end to contemporaries such as, say, Buckminster Fuller or Berthold Lubetkin. Fathy’s great enthusiasm, upon which he staked his entire career, was the revival of mud-brick architecture in Africa and the Middle East, as a craft tradition that contained within it the potential to transform social relations in post-colonial countries—what he called a ‘mud-brick revolution’, a phrase he meant very seriously. Accordingly, Earth & Utopia, the first major study of Fathy’s work in some years, could easily have been called ‘Mud and Utopia’. Born in 1900 into an upper-class family in Alexandria—his father was a judge and rural landowner—Fathy studied at King Fouad University (now Cairo University) in the period following the 1919 Revolution against British rule, and spent a large part of his career teaching in its Faculty of Fine Arts. Late in life, well after the failure of his efforts in self-described ‘Architecture for the Poor’, Fathy was rediscovered as a talismanic figure of the reaction against post-war modern architecture. Aristocrats seemed particularly fond of his work, with the Aga Khan bestowing the first Aga Khan Award

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for Architecture on him in 1980, and Prince Charles devoting part of his bestselling anti-modernist Vision of Britain (1989) to Fathy, who ‘for forty years had to put up with persistent vitriolic criticism and denigration by the modernist architectural establishment because he continued to espouse the cause of traditional Islamic architecture’. This assessment was based upon Fathy’s 1969 book Gourna: A Tale of Two Villages, an account of an abandoned planned settlement near Luxor, in southern Egypt, which was widely read by radical architects in the 1970s when mit republished it under the title An Architecture for the Poor. Given that the architecture all this polemic was aimed against—the similarly ‘utopian’ but aggressively technocratic modernist architecture of post-war welfarism, which was embraced enthusiastically by most post-colonial non-aligned regimes—is now at a peak of fashionability, it is interesting to look at one of its more serious alternatives. Unlike the facile style-revivalists that the Prince of Wales praised, Fathy’s favouring of tradition was driven by his belief in a complete change in the relationship between architects and clients, peasantry and intelligentsia, in which the ‘traditional’ appearance was not the aim, but a partial side-effect of the building technologies used. Moreover, his interest in ‘self-building’ was not libertarian, but communitarian and anti-capitalist, a world away from the slum romanticism that has been so popular among architects and neoliberal economists since the 1990s. The authors of Earth & Utopia, Salma Samar Damluji, an architect who practiced with Fathy before his death in 1989, and Viola Bertini, an architectural historian who wrote her thesis on his work, portray him as a sort of post-colonial William Morris. The scope of his work as revealed in their book does in some ways resemble that of the great Victorian Marxist medievalist, who likewise sprang from a comfortable bourgeois background. The book contains essays on and interviews with Fathy, alongside various of his works across different media—his play The Story of al-Mashrabiyyah; the illustrated, calligraphic short story cycle The Land of Utopia; plans, drawings and paintings; a manifesto for an International Institute for Appropriate Technology; and a concise manual of mud-brick construction. The chronology of his work is lost in the density of material from different periods, and has to be reconstructed by the reader, which is a shame, as it’s a telling story. Fathy’s early work was typical of the time, with sketches of buildings in the French Beaux-Arts style; his Ruskinian-Morrisian revelation seems to have come after an encounter with the architecture of Nubia in the 1940s, where he purported to find the ‘living survivors’ of Arab structural design, ‘a vision of architecture before the Fall, before money, industry, greed and snobbery had severed architecture from its true roots in nature’. In one of Earth & Utopia’s four prefaces, Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil puts this discovery in the context of the regimes both of King Farouk and of Nasser, who

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promised in one of his propaganda speeches that ‘all fellaheen [would have] a house built from concrete’. He also notes, crucially, that while ‘it is usual for the working classes to emulate the upper echelons of society’, ‘the central obstacle for Hassan Fathy was that he tried to implement an architectural style from below’. This is one of the many possible explanations advanced across the book for the failure of Fathy’s projects; another, the authors point out, was the fact that ‘a local building system’ such as mud-brick ‘would eliminate commissions, brokerage fees, contracting and the legal and illegal gains that are accrued before, during and after the construction of any housing project’. As Salma Samar Damluji notes, this stepped on so many toes that it effectively ‘required revolutionary measures’, and a wholly ‘new programme for rural and city development’. What Fathy found in Nubian villages, where mud-brick was still being used without wooden supports to create sophisticated domes and vaults, was partly an architecture that was more suitable for the Egyptian climate than that being built by the developmentalist state. His play The Story of al-Mashrabiyyah defends the patterned wooden screens of traditional houses against feminist accusations that they were used to seclude women, by arguing that their use was climatic rather than misogynist. Fathy’s most convincing and prescient arguments were about energy-use and the climate—he would later make the seemingly incontrovertible point that ‘in America they have the concrete frame and glass wall buildings, and in Kuwait we have the same thing—forgetting that glass is transparent to the ultraviolet rays, and a glass wall of 3x3m in one room when exposed to the sun’s rays lets in 2000 kilocalories per hour, demanding two tonnes of refrigeration per hour’ (a point that is now even more relevant, with cities of computer-engineered glass shapes spreading across the Gulf). The shaded internal courtyards and pools of the traditional Arab village and city offered similar relief from heat and humidity, and through their intersection with surrounding public areas, Fathy found a ‘musicality’ of sequential spaces, a promenade architecturale that was one part medieval, one part Le Corbusier. This was combined with an insistence on people remaining in their place. ‘When the peasant modernizes and uses concrete in the village, or uses what he thinks is modern, it becomes worse than anything in the world’, he asserted in a 1984 interview with Damluji—you can expect him to play a tabur drum but shouldn’t put a piano in front of him. In 1983, Fathy claimed that ‘I am interested in the poor, in the 800 million poor people . . . Are the clients we want to serve the people with millions? We want to serve the people with milliemes (piastres), the poor, with an architecture for the poor. As for architecture for the rich, let them do what they want’. Yet just as with Morris, it would be largely the rich who would manage to actually live in Hassan Fathy houses.

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Fathy’s reputation rests on New Gourna, the venture which formed the subject matter of An Architecture for the Poor. Begun in 1945 in the vicinity of Luxor, it was a project to resettle a community of tomb robbers and antique dealers on a site near the Colossi of Memnon and the Ramesseum, moving them away from the tombs. In Fathy’s words, ‘a whole society had, as it were, to be dismantled and put together again in another setting’, something which he took as an opportunity to rethink how a village should function, from top to bottom, and how an architect should relate to the people they’re building for. In Bertini’s phrase, ‘the intention was to initiate a consultative mechanism as a sort of visionary experiment in participatory planning, involving the inhabitants in all decision-making processes’. The resultant village was to be in four parts, corresponding to the four different clans living in old Gourna; a system of private courtyards and public spaces was designed specifically with each family for each prospective house, which they were expected to help construct themselves—in the context of the European New Towns of the 1940s, where a choice between a house and a flat was usually the extent of public consultation, this was extraordinary. Fathy lived on site throughout the construction of New Gourna. But there was one significant flaw—the people of Gourna didn’t want to move in the first place. Fathy’s careful surveys to ascertain what each villager wanted in their house would be abortive, because as Bertini points out, ‘the people of Gourna . . . did not want to take part in such surveys, because they did not want to leave their old village . . . the attempts at direct consultation were thus largely unsuccessful, so about 20 houses were built as examples to facilitate direct consultation’. These were all that was built, along with a few public buildings, which formed an interesting selection: of the Mosque, school, bathhouse and theatre, only the Mosque was common in Egyptian villages at the time. The architecture, similarly, was hardly indigenous to Luxor specifically—Fathy’s abstracted version of Islamic architecture, with its organic, delicately curved mud-brick, its domes and vaults, its courtyards and decorative screens, had little to do, in Bertini’s account, with the brightly coloured, small, flat-roofed houses that the villagers had built for themselves in old Gourna. Moreover, while certain aspects of the poverty the villagers had moved away from were to be left unchanged—communal wells rather than running water, heating by a system of stoves Fathy had adapted from Tyrolese examples (of all places)—the village was expected, in Damluji’s words, to turn ‘the robbers into fellaheen’—grave robbers selling artefacts to international dealers into self-sufficient farmers. It’s perhaps unsurprising that opposition was fierce, culminating with villagers sabotaging a dam to flood the new village while it was under construction. Fathy blamed the richer villagers—those who really made money from the antique dealing— claiming they bullied the labourers and women into complying with the

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sabotage. Shunned by those it was designed for (and with), the unfinished shell of New Gourna would be occupied by families from outside the area, though in the 1980s, when Fathy was a famous architect, the theatre was renovated. The book’s pictures of isolated, dirty buildings lost in the desert seem very far from utopia. What happens next in Fathy’s career is rather surprising, particularly given the 1980s version of his trajectory as the lonely struggle of an antimodernist visionary. The story of New Gourna, publicized by contacts such as the British Architectural Review’s editor J. M. Richards, would interest Constantinos Doxiadis, one of the major global planners of the 20th century. Doxiadis planned dozens upon dozens of cities and new towns across the non-aligned world between the 1950s and 1970s, usually with Ford Foundation and occasionally cia support, in competition with the thenequally powerful town-planning bureaux of the ussr, socialist Poland and Yugoslavia. Doxiadis was no hack but a sophisticated architect and thinker, and even though his leading a multinational technocratic planning organization—Doxiadis Associates—made him a strange ally for someone who raged against ‘self-colonization’, his systematization of his ideas into the concept of Ekistics, as a ‘science of human settlements’ (from ‘oikos’), had enormous influence on Fathy’s later work. Doxiadis hired Fathy in 1957, and he worked at the main office in Athens for several years, before returning to Cairo in 1963. Much of his work at Doxiadis was for Iraq’s National Housing Programme, designing new districts for Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk, and for the new town of Greater Musayyib, which was substantially developed, in grid form, as ‘a point of balance between Fathy’s own specific way of making architecture and the requirements of the Modern Movement’, according to Bertini. The ideas, judging by the drawings included in the book—which, interestingly, given it is otherwise lavishly illustrated, doesn’t contain photographs of any of Fathy’s buildings with Doxiadis—are a fusion of modernist standardization and modern materials with traditional local methods of climate control such as loggias, screens and shading, and courtyards. That synthesis could be seen throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Soviet Central Asia in the 60s and 70s, and Fathy seems not to have brought much that was original to it; more distinctive, perhaps, was the traditional Greek house he designed for a site in suburban Athens. What this suggests is that excepting his ‘mud-brick revolution’, Fathy was very much an architect of his time. More important in terms of his revolution was his leading of the Doxiadis ‘City of the Future’ research project in Africa, where he travelled ‘from Senegal to Cameroon’ taking photographs, mainly of mud-brick architecture, in which he seems to have abundantly proven his point that ordinary people were able to create with mud an architecture of striking ingenuity and sensuality. (Damluji has continued this

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research in her own work, focussing particularly on the mud-brick ‘skyscrapers’ in Yemen, such as the ‘Yemeni Manhattan’ of Shibam Hadramawt, or the ornate Sanaa town houses, now blasted by Saudi bombing.) Increasingly, Fathy seems to have understood the failure in Gourna as a wider political one. In one of the texts of the African research project, Fathy builds on the Gourna experiment to, essentially, make a virtue of necessity—‘the Africans who want houses’, he argues, ‘should be encouraged to build houses for themselves.’ And so they were, but not in the (visual and material) way Fathy imagined, with industrial materials and discarded globalized waste products. That’s why Fathy combined his advocacy for self-building with a campaign for what he called ‘co-operative socialism’, where ‘co-operative building, in which all labour is free, is the only way of meeting the problems of the majority’. A family that has built its house ‘will feel a sense of achievement, a corporate pride, that a family who are simply given a house would not’. What marks this out from the later, neoliberal enthusiasm for favelas and suchlike is that Fathy did not think that this collaborative building made the families into entrepreneurs or property owners. Instead, he considered it a project of decolonization and decommodification—‘the currency must be sweat, not money’. Fathy’s second major project, and second major failure, was New Baris, a ‘desert city’ built from 1965 for the state’s Egyptian Desert Development Organization, and abandoned as a result of the Six Day War only two years later. Fathy may have been hired by the government on the basis of a letter he wrote to Nasser in 1963, drawing attention to his experience both with Doxiadis and at New Gourna, claiming that the combination of self-building, mud-brick and co-operative villages would help Egypt take the lead against Africa’s ‘self-colonization’, rehousing the world’s 800 million poor through their own efforts. There was some flattery here—‘experience has taught me that it is only through your policy of co-operative socialism—indeed, only through yourself personally—that these people have any hope of relief from the wretched conditions in which they live now’—and some suggestion that a mud-brick version of the Doxiadis organization could not only be a source of international prestige for Egypt, but also very lucrative (Doxiadis had become one of the most profitable companies in Greece). Apparently unperturbed by the failure of the villagers to agree in New Gourna, Fathy argued that ‘the more people are involved in development, the greater their social, psychological and economic stability: in building things, people build their sense of themselves’. His arguments, again, had much to commend them—the prefabricated parts for contemporary resettlement schemes in Egypt, he pointed out to Nasser, had to be imported from France; yet much better building materials, he claimed, were under the people’s feet. Fathy was aware that many peasants and working-class labourers did not necessarily agree—in 1969, he noted that ‘when concrete becomes accepted

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as a “superior” material by the natives, local materials are discredited and die out (in Ghana I was told that peasants now insist on cement block for their houses and refuse to use any bricks)’. Perhaps because of this, he seems to have factored into his utopian designs the possible effects of tourism. So the desert settlement at New Baris—whose buildings, monumental and beautifully modelled, appear from the book’s photographs to have survived much better than those at Gourna—was based around a Craft School that would also sell traditionally crafted objects, presumably in many cases to visiting urbanites. The architecture here is high as much as it is vernacular, a ‘geometric montage’ in Bertini’s words, with its domes and vaults ‘assembled like quoted references’ in an orthogonal grid, a pure invention of tradition. The craft centre was the first thing to be built. After New Baris too was abandoned—a failure which was, on this occasion, fairly unconnected to the architect’s utopian methods—Fathy’s last community, in the late 1970s, was almost wholly touristic, the Al-Mashrabiyyah Ekistic Village, near the Giza pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo. This was essentially Gourna or Baris without the politics, a project on the land of the architect Fayed Shukri, who lived next door to the theatre built as part of the project. Continuing the Morris comparison, this appears more as the Hampstead Garden Suburb to the ‘Nowhere’ of New Gourna. Fathy seems to have had no personal hypocrisy—Damluji recalls that the only effect of his winning the Aga Khan Award was that he went from owning two cats to owning 26. The success abroad of An Architecture for the Poor meant that he would be hired to design various private houses, such as the Sabah Palace in Kuwait—the rich, it would seem, have fewer problems with mud-brick than the poor. Certainly one result of the widespread circulation of that book was a Muslim community in New Mexico hiring Fathy and an entourage of Egyptian mud-brick builders to construct the Santa Fe Mosque—an ideal Nubian Mosque in a desert on another continent. In Egypt, Fathy lamented, ‘we’ve been fighting for forty years and haven’t achieved anything; in the usa they had a revolution in two weeks.’ One of Earth & Utopia’s more touching moments is an interview with one of the peasant mud-builders Fathy brought with him to New Mexico—unaware of where he actually was (‘above New York’) but scornful of the poor quality of American construction. Yet Fathy doesn’t seem to have taken the fact that Muslims in the us were much more enthusiastic for medieval construction methods than Egyptian fellaheen ever were as having any bearing on his wider project. The fact that Fathy’s greatest ‘success’, in terms of his works being inhabited—a bare minimum for any architect—was a Mosque in New Mexico, a tourist model village and houses for upper-class landowners should lead to some questioning of his credentials as an ‘architect for the poor’, though undoubtedly this was not for want of effort on his part. Writing

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on Gourna, Damluji contends that ‘it can be argued that Hassan Fathy and his intellectual school have, thus far, served wealthy Arabists who are fans or aficionados of Arab and Islamic art’, rather than the people for whom it was devised. It’s perhaps telling that one of the book’s four prefaces is by Salman Salem Binladen, who takes the liberty of dedicating the book to his financier father. Given the fact that the polemics to which Fathy was yoked— not always with his consent—were based upon the alleged uninhabitability and inauthenticity of modern cities and their alienation of ordinary folk, it is striking that neither of Fathy’s two utopian villages was ever properly lived in, although New Gourna was certainly squatted. From this distance, his failure mirrors that of developmentalism, and appears as another version of the same project of post-colonial socialist planning, rather than an alternative to it; perhaps one could see both as defeats rather than failures as such. More clearly now than in the 1960s, we can see that mud-brick has certain advantages over a material as carbon-intensive as concrete, though bridges, railways, solar panels and wind turbines will not be built from it. Fathy’s constant attention to temperature and local economies should also be an example to any architect trying to plan for climate change. Yet a more fundamental problem, one which advocates for self-building and face-to-face co-operative planning would do well to remember, may have been intrinsic to his utopian project. It is easier to tell the rich that mud is beautiful than to convince those who live in it.

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Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs Silver Press: London 2019, £13.99, paperback Trans. Daniella Shreir 205 pp, 978 0 99571 623 0 The Song Cave: New York 2019, $20, paperback Trans. Corina Copp 175 pp, 978 0 9988 29081

Emma Fajgenbaum

MEMOIRS OF AN UNDUTIFUL DAUGHTER Beautifully written itself, Chantal Akerman’s last book is difficult to write about. Ma mère rit was published in France in 2013, the year before Akerman’s mother died. It appears in English four years after she took her own life, on the completion of her final film, No Home Movie (2015). Within the wider ranks of francophone New Wave film-makers, Akerman has the distinction of being Belgian-Jewish, rather than French, and female—or, as she herself would put it, ‘a gender of my own’. A critical take on domesticity was the central theme of her extraordinary early work. Her first film, Saute Ma Ville (1968) was shot in the kitchen of her parents’ apartment; the 18-yearold Akerman gave a manic, slapstick performance of destroying the room before sealing the door, setting a newspaper on fire and turning on the gas. Her unforgettable Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) was set in the neat, bourgeois apartment of a forty-something widow; the film’s 200 minutes follow Jeanne as she performs her housewifely routines with perilous, metronomic precision, captured by Akerman’s collaborator Babette Mangolte in scrupulously framed compositions and unblinking long-duration shots. A silent indictment of the social order that imposes such life imprisonment, it required its audience to experience in real time just how long it took to make the bed, prepare a meatloaf, scrub the bath, grind the coffee. The glamorous Delphine Seyrig played the title role, an audacious piece of reverse casting which, according to Mangolte, evoked ‘a Brechtian aesthetic distance that raised the story above the anecdotal, to the archetypal—something more than realism.’ Realism is again at stake in My Mother Laughs. At one level, the book is a diary, and a sad one: notes written to keep the film-maker sane while she

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stays in the Brussels apartment of her elderly mother, the indomitable Nelly, who’s waiting for an operation (‘And me, will I manage to hold out for four weeks? Only if I write’). The narrative begins: ‘For now, my mother is alive and well. That’s what everyone says, and everyone also says that she is strong and nobody understands how she’s managed to survive’—survive a heart attack, a broken shoulder, crumbling bones, that is; but the verb, survivre, can’t not have another meaning. Nelly is a Jewish woman, born in Poland, who fled to Belgium as a teenager in the 1930s; under the Nazi Occupation she was deported to Auschwitz, returning to Brussels after the War. Chantal was born just five years later in the silent shadow of that experience; she has described her childhood as ‘full of holes’. Akerman’s anxiety about her mother’s health is mixed with a sort of bewilderment at her attachment to life: ‘She sleeps a lot, but she laughs. She enjoys herself. Then she sleeps.’ There’s a cinematic quality to Akerman’s writing, and she describes her mother with a camera-like gaze: ‘She waits for the housekeeper. She always waits in advance. Hours even. And she leaves in advance when she’s going anywhere and even nowhere, even if she knows she’s not going anywhere anymore.’ She duly records the daily details, the aches and pains, the shopping lists, the carers, Nelly’s nightly routine (‘she knows she has to tuck herself into the middle of the bed so she doesn’t fall out’). My Mother Laughs is interested both in showing, in unadorned light, this process of aging—another imprisonment, à la Jeanne Dielman, in the home—and in examining Chantal’s own response to it all, which includes her practice of documenting it as it unfolds. For if Akerman is known for capturing the multiple meanings of domestic banality, she is also a self-portraitist. The prose repeatedly comes back to the first-person perspective. ‘I’m preparing myself for her death’, she notes, in some variant, at several points. It’s a preparation that moves in circles, as the narrative flouts all linearity. In contrast to the slabs of real time that her films stitch together, in My Mother Laughs temporalities are fluid. The account reaches backwards and forwards to Chantal’s childhood, May 68, a wedding in Mexico—it is here that Nelly has her first heart attack—and Chantal’s attempts to escape from a claustrophobic relationship with an obsessively jealous younger woman, C, in New York. It ends, unexpectedly, with a new (or new-old) love, M, leaving the question of Nelly’s declining health in suspension as Akerman steers the reminiscence elsewhere. Most of Akerman’s films find some occasion to ask what daughters owe their mothers, and whether it’s a debt they are willing to pay; it’s a question posed with unflinching honesty in My Mother Laughs. Akerman’s taut prose—beautifully translated in both English editions—probes the push and pull between tenderness and frustration, between the will to forget and the need to know. An undertow of violence lurks in every scene, as Akerman

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I can’t stand to see you in that dirty shirt, that’s what she said, you deserve a smack. She brought her hand up to her face like she was really going to do it. I thought to myself, she must have been bottling up this hatred for years. That it was the reason for all the kisses she’d given and taken away . . . My old clothes and unbrushed hair had always bothered her, hurt her even. It was the opposite of reassurance. An unwrinkled world. A very peaceful life without unironed shirts and nasty surprises.

The abhorrence of uncleanliness, one presumes, has its origins in Nelly’s own past; the spectre of the camps haunts the book, and gets passed between mother and daughter—a state Akerman captures in the slide between pronouns, so that both women are by turns referred to in first and third person, and who is speaking is not always clear: There’s no such thing as an end. It could always begin again. Not in exactly the same way but restarting all the same, especially now when there are all these people sleeping on the street, I see more and more of them every time I go out and I always have to turn my head away because I can’t bear it . . . And it’s normal that they’re dirty but the dirtiness makes me shiver . . . I can’t look at that kind of dirtiness. I’ve known it once and I don’t want to hear any more about it . . . and when I see these dirty mattresses in the street my heart sinks and I ask my daughter how she can bear it. She says she can’t bear it either.

In her own telling, the bond between Akerman and her mother is excessive— ‘fatal for me’. Early in the book, she describes herself in the third person and captures this over-attachment: ‘The child was born an old child and as a result, the child never grew up. It moved in the world of adults like an old child, and didn’t manage well. The old child said if its mother passed away, it would have nowhere to come back to.’ This dynamic of coming and going—this persistent chord linking home and elsewhere—has played out in various ways in Akerman’s cinema. Saute ma ville was the destructive break that precipitated her departure to New

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tries to draw out the story of her mother’s wartime experience. But Nelly is adamant: ‘I know that if I do, I’ll be lost.’ She thinks of her favourite cousin ‘as seldom as possible’—‘otherwise, I’d start to think of everyone else.’ Besides, she counter-charges, Chantal barely speaks at all about her life in New York. Disappointment and pride run in both directions. Nelly’s love of life, her laughter, her feminine charm—‘I was so proud of her, of my mother, this beautiful woman’; ‘I loved her so much: her youth, her beauty, her dresses’—are contrasted with Chantal’s ‘oddness’, her scruffy hair, her disorderly appearance. Though Nelly has always doted on her daughter with the beautiful blue eyes, upon waking up in hospital after an operation, she meets Chantal’s gaze with an outburst of aggression:

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York, but in the films that followed, a melancholic sense of displacement settled. In News From Home (1976), Akerman returned to New York after the success of Jeanne Dielman, and over roaming footage of Manhattan’s streets and subways, softly recited her mother’s letters sent from Brussels. The film plays on the contrast between the intimacy of the maternal letters (a monologue, in so far as we never hear the replies) and the anonymity of a Travis Bickle-era Manhattan. Elsewhere, childlessness threatens to condemn Akerman’s characters to a perpetual wandering. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) followed a peripatetic Belgian-Jewish filmmaker in her late twenties who, we learn, twice broke off her engagement with the son of one of her parents’ friends. ‘When your parents are dead, and you have no kids, what’s left?’, chastises the man’s mother at a spot-lit German train station, one of the film’s many sites of transience. If the rising anxiety of loneliness finds expression in the diary-like form of My Mother Laughs, No Home Movie mingles this subjectivity with a more observational mode. A portrait of Nelly in her final months when mostly confined to her Brussels apartment, Akerman deploys a mix of aesthetic strategies, combining her signature framing shots of interior space with a looser, ‘home-movie’ style—even as the film’s tendency toward death overturns the genre’s more buoyant claims. The film is stitched together from some forty hours of footage in different formats: images on phones, video footage of Skype calls, a digital camera left running on a hall table, capturing Nelly as she potters about, discussing shopping lists and carers’ visits. In Dielman-esque fashion, Akerman maps the space of this bourgeois Brussels apartment, which is both sanctuary and prison, but these images are imbued with a tenderness unrivalled in her work hitherto. Looking through the doorway into her mother’s vast dining room, with its whiteclothed table and glass chandelier, Akerman’s camera can, from a respectful distance, capture her mother struggling with a meal, or linger on a coughing fit. As a cinematic portrait of late age, its mix of observation and compassion elevates it above a film like Haneke’s Amour (2012), which is overwrought by comparison to this shockingly real, yet contained—and never voyeuristic— picture of decline. But the family relation remains at the core of this last work, which was premiered at Locarno two months before its author’s suicide. Again, Akerman shows the rivalling love and frustration that vie for space between mother and daughter. The longest scenes are given over to conversations they share in Nelly’s tidy, mint-tiled kitchen, with Akerman’s camera propped up on a bench. The situation is allowed to unfold, and the women’s conversation ranges over the menopause, the nutritional value of potato skins and the family’s flight from Poland to Brussels in the decade before the war—‘for all the good it did!’ Elsewhere, when Akerman travels for work, she films her

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mother on the screen of a Skype call: ‘I want to show there is no longer any distance in the world’, Akerman says, and her mother marvels at the prospect. (Their most affectionate conversations are reserved for the mediated encounters over Skype.) Amidst this arresting proximity, Akerman interpolates shots of the windswept Israeli desert, filmed on a phone from a car window. They work to crack the surface of the tight cinematic space she has constructed, opening onto an emotional vastness underpinning the domestic confinement. There’s an Ozu-like effect in these interstitial outdoor shots that are counterposed to the hushed troubles of intergenerational family life. These passages add another layer of meaning to the question of ‘no home’, which takes in the matter of the two women’s Jewish identity and the possibility of a collective homeland, or a sense of arrival that could lessen the pain of displacement. At the same time, the unpeopled landscape obliquely raises the spectre of a new set of exiles, evicted from that space, which links back to Akerman’s career-long fascination with outcasts. No Home Movie glimpses a future in which, with her mother’s death, the idea of home will be gone forever. There’s a startling moment in the book when Akerman describes being told by someone that ‘it’s clear from your films that you put your whole self into them’. She reflects that, on the contrary, whenever she finished a film, she felt she’d left only a small trace. ‘And I didn’t want to contradict them’, she writes. ‘No, certainly not. I didn’t want to tell them that there were just traces, so I told them nothing at all.’ Yet the book, perhaps, contains a little more than that.

ŽIŽEK AT HIS

PHILOSOPHICAL BEST

Forging nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism, Slavoj Žižek takes on the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Quentin Meillassoux and everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Radical new readings of Kant and Hegel sit side by side with lively commentaries on film, politics and culture. This is Slavoj Žižek at his interrogative and energising best, and represents his most rigorous articulation to date of his philosophical system.

‘The Elvis of cultural theory’ New Statesman

‘Master of the counterintuitive observation’ New Yorker @BloomsburyPhilo / Bloomsury.com/philosophy

£22.99 Hardback / ISBN 9781350043787

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Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine The Indigo Press: London 2019, £12.99, paperback 250 pp, 978 1 99968 338 2

Oliver Eagleton

MIND-FORGED MANACLES? As the dot-com bubble expanded during the late 1990s, a cadre of cyberutopian theorists extolled the emancipatory potential of the internet. Digital technology would foster communication and collaboration: its decentralized networks would evade hierarchical authorities, unlock creative energies and spread radical ideas, rendering a vast field of information accessible and transparent. The more people became connected, the more freedom and democracy would flourish. Yet twenty years on, the Web has failed to deliver on these fantasies. Critics like Astra Taylor have shown how its ‘tendency towards monopoly’ allows corporations to circumscribe our online activity, undermining the McLuhanite ideal of free expression. In step with her analysis, a number of recent titles—Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things (2017), Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Anti-Social Media (2018), Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism (2019)—have railed against the growing power of the tech giants and its deleterious effect on democracy. The psychological impact of our collective screen-fixation has been studied by Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle and Jaron Lanier, whose joint verdict is damning: the internet does not build horizontal communities; it engenders addiction and distraction, destroys sociability, encourages narcissism and diminishes our capacity for rational thought. Our cognition will be stunted if we don’t learn to unplug. But if one writer is to put the final nail in the technophilic coffin, there is perhaps no better candidate than Richard Seymour. Raised in a dreary unionist stronghold on the outskirts of Belfast, Seymour moved to London in 1996, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on white supremacy in Cold War-era America. Since then he has pursued what he describes as

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his ‘dream of unemployment’. In the early 2000s he established a popular blog called Lenin’s Tomb—featuring sharp, often blisteringly polemical essays on a range of political issues—and became involved with the Socialist Workers Party, from which he eventually resigned in protest over its coverup of rape allegations against a leading member. His previous books include eloquent takedowns of David Cameron and Christopher Hitchens, as well as an extensive study of Corbynism that aimed to counter ‘wishful thinking’ about the movement’s long-term prospects. In 2015, Seymour’s disdain for false optimism and disillusionment with groupuscule politics moved him to co-found Salvage, a quarterly journal of socialist commentary whose distinctive aesthetic—based on edgy, self-aware cynicism—is summed up by its tagline: ‘bleak is the new red’. In his latest work, Seymour turns this disenchantment on the miasma of social media, excoriating the belief that Twitter—defined as ‘the world’s first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project’—will instigate positive political change or democratize the means of communication. Following Taylor and Taplin, The Twittering Machine argues that this digital platform is irredeemably reactionary—that the consciousness it ingrains is indicative of a political toxicity that should dissuade the left from overestimating its value as an organizing vehicle or propaganda tool. Seymour begins by asserting that the incredible popularity of the Twittering Machine (his shorthand for the online social industry) testifies to the degradation of social life under late capitalism. In his view, the basic function of Twitter and Facebook is remedial—to provide a stand-in for communities destroyed by decades of neoliberal rule—which means that digital platforms must be understood as a kind of dream-world: a site of instantaneous wish-fulfilment where we can retreat from the contemporary realities of hardship and isolation. Social media promises the limitless reign of the pleasure principle, and this fantasmal quality is what enchants techno-utopians. When they laud its capacity to connect people, this invariably attests to some failure of real interpersonal relationships; when they idealize its transcendence of the material world, this suggests an inability to tolerate that world, and a depletion of the will to change it. ‘Where society was missing’, writes Seymour, ‘the network would substitute’, constructing a shadowy ‘simulacrum’ populated by our innermost desires. These desires—which can be expressed by actions as involuntary as hovering over an advertisement—are subsequently translated into data, which is bought by companies seeking to control our consumer choices (or influence our voting habits, as with Cambridge Analytica). ‘We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience.’ The porous boundary between digital platforms and the unconscious allows

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capitalists to penetrate the psyche, turning its libidinous impulses into marketable products. Yet Seymour detects a contradiction in the Twittering Machine’s articulation of these subterranean energies. On the one hand, what we get out of social media reflects what we put in: the machine works like a mirror, or an echo chamber. But through this circular process our digital writing is simultaneously expropriated from us: when we post a tweet it ‘acquires a life of its own’, defying its author’s intentions, attaching itself to related text clusters, summoning responses and affecting the macrocalculations that data analysts use to measure and manipulate behaviour. In this sense, the online avatar—the body of writing which represents a person in cyberspace—is at once an intimate portrait (expressing desires so private that the user herself may be unaware of them) and an alienated one. Seymour claims that this dialectic of intimacy and alienation gives Twitter an ‘uncanny’ atmosphere. A social-media profile reflects the idiosyncrasies of its creator, while also leading a strange, autonomous existence in which it is the plaything of corporate interests. And it is this tension, between the avatar as personal profile and as depersonalized proxy, that explains the platform’s abhorrent political climate. As Seymour observes, the Twitter user is mostly cut off from society—solitary, hunched over her computer screen, tailoring her digital identity and honing her ‘personal brand’. But she is concurrently participating in a mass collectivization of sentiment, as her tweets join with others (through threads, hashtags and trending topics) to form an ‘omnidirectional wrecking ball’ for which no single tweeter need take responsibility. The result of these collective outpourings, in which chaotic groupthink overrides the user’s conscience, is widespread harassment and abuse; as one popular Twitter mantra has it, ‘None of us is as cruel as all of us’. Thus, the antinomies of isolated individualism—a Foucauldian ‘entrepreneurship of the self’—and an anonymous ‘lynch mob’ mentality coexist in the Twittersphere. Users move between narcissistic self-promotion and ‘ecstatic collective frenzy’, in an oscillation which confines political discourse to vain virtue-signalling and bullying moralism. Because it is a public platform, anyone on Twitter ‘can suddenly be selected for demonstrative punishment’ should they affront this labile mob. Seymour argues that the constant awareness of this possibility creates a ‘panopticon effect’ which enforces intellectual conformity, undercutting the claim that social media stimulates vibrant discussion. In place of solidarity amongst oppressed groups, the petty-bourgeois identity politics inculcated by Twitter’s individualizing technology boxes users into hermetic cultural categories in which they spend hours detecting and censuring political incorrectness. More importantly, however, it is this sense of being watched that makes Twitter so addictive. Every time a tweet is published, its reception— quantified in reshares and responses—either validates or reproaches its

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author. ‘In telling the machine something about ourselves, whatever else we’re trying to achieve, we are asking for judgement.’ For Seymour, tweeting is gambling: priming oneself for spectacular victory or crushing defeat. But, he reminds us, gambling addiction is not sustained by ‘positive reinforcement’: it is not a matter of ‘winning’ often enough to make the game worthwhile; rather, ‘everyone who places a bet expects to lose’. On Twitter we can never ‘beat the house’, never elicit an adequate number of likes to rescue our ailing self-esteem, and it is this pattern of perpetual, guaranteed failure that gets us desperately hooked. In the Twittering Machine’s ceaseless condemnation we find a ‘God’: a Big Other, an accusatory superego which highlights our inadequacy. And, to the delight of the data collectors, we cannot look away. Our compulsion to call forth this digitized judgement is, Seymour’s account, an expression of the death drive. The practice of online self-promotion exhibits a will to annihilation, evidenced by the tragic teenage suicides associated with social-media use. To explain this morbid phenomenon, Seymour cites Rana Dasgupta’s work on celebrity culture, which asserts that to be a celebrity is to be ‘always-about-to-die’. When the celebrity projects her glossy public image outward, she launches an unconscious attack on her inner life, which is gradually eroded and replaced with a mirage. Celebritization is a form of self-harm that atrophies one’s authentic identity to cultivate a hollow and commodified substitute. With the advent of social media, this condition has been diffused on a gigantic scale. Millions of people (especially school-age children) are now engaged in a frantic drive for followers and fans, inflating the online avatar at the expense of the everyday self. The narcissism promoted by the Twittering Machine is an exceedingly ‘fragile’ variety which, upon close scrutiny, looks indissociable from masochism. Seymour’s final chapters assess the extent to which social media can be harnessed for progressive ends, concluding that Twitter’s ‘incipiently fascist’ qualities make it an inhospitable environment for socialist struggle. Noting that it is the right, not the left, which has led the most successful online mobilizations, Seymour pins this disparity on an in-built political bias. He points to the role of affect in digital messages: when confined to 280 characters, shocking and emotive content trumps considered formulations, benefitting those who stir up hatred. On top of this, the platform’s competitive structure, pitting all against all in a ceaseless struggle for likes, creates a culture of social Darwinism in which the ‘strongest’ prevail; and its consequent promotion of hierarchies, or personality cults, inhibits egalitarian discourse while inciting would-be Führers. It is tempting to believe that we can turn the logic of Twitter against itself by exploiting the apparent tension between its free, all-inclusive networks and its regressive ideological function. But, for Seymour, any such attempt is doomed by these

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immutable features—affect, competition and hierarchy—which inform the platform’s algorithmic makeup. Remember, he writes, we are chained to the ‘protocols and controls’ that govern these websites, so even when we use them ‘to promote images and ideas that contest those that gained consent in legacy media’, we will ultimately ‘confirm, corroborate and consolidate the machine’s power over us’. If Twitter’s power resembles that of a fascist dictator, it cannot be appropriated by well-intentioned leftists: it must be overthrown. However, when it comes to practical proposals for enacting this digital revolution, Seymour is short on ideas. It is impossible to change the machine from within, he claims, but disconnecting completely would constitute a form of reactionary nostalgia. We could switch to non-profit online platforms, but their reluctance to turn users into addicts makes them boring and frustrating, which inevitably limits their reach. Elsewhere, Seymour has dismissed the idea of digital strike action—in which users would collectively log-off until companies check their corrosive data practices—deeming it too difficult to coordinate. With these options eliminated, Seymour leaves us with the assertion that ‘we need an escapology . . . a theory of how to get out before it’s too late’. Yet his final vision of this escape sounds more like a selfhelp plan than a theoretical proposition: ‘What if, in deliberate abdication of our smartphones, we strolled in the park with nothing but a notepad and a nice pen? What if we sat in a church and closed our eyes? What if we lay back on a lily pad, with nothing to do?’ Seymour’s incisive commentary on alienation, addiction and celebritization encapsulates the overall strengths of his book. The pathologies he outlines will be familiar to the average user, yet their reappraisal under this theoretically sophisticated lens distinguishes The Twittering Machine from previous critiques. Moreover, the author’s fluid prose weaves searing philippics against social media into an unwaveringly clear and perceptive argument, combining the spontaneous energy of a blog-post with a rigorous intellectual framework. In nlr 77, Rob Lucas argued that Net literature is often thin on ‘socio-historical explanations’. Writers like Carr and Turkle can sketch the formal features of digital technology, and provide a credible assessment of its cognitive effects, but they neglect the ‘social and cultural formations such as classes, genders, castes or religions’ which shape both the internet and its users. This blind-spot leads them to separate the interaction between mind and machine from its wider historical context, so that technical and psychological dynamics are detached from ‘relations of ownership and power’. We may be affected by the internet, writes Lucas, but the internet is in turn conditioned by cultural and material factors which a serious evaluation of the digital universe should confront. Unlike its techno-sceptic forerunners, The Twittering Machine does not shy away from this confrontation. It views

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the psychological and sociological valences of online platforms as contiguous, asserting that the mental damage inflicted by Facebook and Twitter is inseparable from their parasitic role in a capitalist economy. This psychosocial analysis rests on a careful intertwinement of Marxism and Freudianism. Seymour interrogates the drives, complexes and desires operative in our experience of social media, and explains how these internal forces are activated by the tech companies’ data-driven profit model. This injection of politics into the technology debate avoids the pitfalls of the Carr–Turkle approach. When they chart the rise of the internet, their silence on broader socio-economic issues imbues this narrative of technological development with a sense of inevitability. By ignoring the contingent historical structures that influenced the Net’s progress (neoliberalism, ‘homeland security’), they create the impression that there is no alternative to our current online reality. Their programme is thereby reduced to a mixture of personal guidelines (‘no screens at the dinner table’) and technocratic fixes to soften the least palatable features of the coming cyber-dystopia. Ironically, such determinism ends up replicating the internet-centric ideology that these writers intended to challenge, by viewing digital technology as an immutable, transhistorical deity to which humans must submit. The only disagreement between Carr and his utopian adversaries, on this front, is whether their god is cruel or benevolent. Seymour steadfastly refuses this theological perspective. He insists that the malady of digital technology is a societal one—the result of broken communities, a mass impulse to escape the material world, and the emergence of an authoritarian corporatism which mines our personal data. But, while locating social media squarely within these coordinates, he also remains sensitive to how the machine functions as an individual sickness: a set of physical and psychical symptoms that afflict the atomized user. Freudianism gives Seymour a language to describe these symptoms without lapsing into an apolitical, psychologizing register, because psychoanalysis is based on the conviction that—to borrow a phrase from Mark Fisher—‘the personal is impersonal’: subjective experience is determined by collective forces which take root in the unconscious (and which, in Seymour’s Marxian twist, are themselves contingent upon shared material conditions). Yet, at various points throughout the text, Seymour’s delicate balance of economic and psychoanalytic criticism is eclipsed by his relentless gloom about the prospective uses of social media. One of his recurrent arguments is that anything published on Twitter and Facebook will serve reactionary ends by empowering the tech giants. ‘Social-media platforms are fundamentally nihilistic’, he writes; no matter how much we ‘vary our tactics on the medium’, its algorithmic controls will drain our posts of their political content and repurpose them for profit. However, in a sudden shift of tone,

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Seymour’s conclusion acknowledges that Corbyn and Sanders have ‘used professional social-media campaigns to outflank and subvert the old media monopolies’, transmitting socialist ideas to millions. Since both these politicians have viable plans to dislodge the hegemony of the social industry (by closing its tax loopholes, clamping down on its labour practices and establishing publicly owned alternatives), surely their growing popularity, spurred by savvy Facebook and Twitter campaigns, has the potential to weaken—or even bankrupt—such platforms. This is a paradox which Seymour raises tentatively yet fails to elaborate—blinded, perhaps, by his unswerving commitment to ‘bleakness’. The more people respond to a Momentum tweet, the more lucrative data is generated for Twitter, strengthening its machinery of exploitation; but if this process creates widespread support for a redistributive programme, then the company’s short-term profit model may compromise its long-term interests. So, while Seymour provides an accurate diagnosis of the Twittering Machine’s structural position (as an instrument of capital), he understates our room for manoeuvre within this ideological matrix. His Marxist intervention in the tech debate stages the dialectical relation between psychology and sociology, or the individual and the collective, but it does not extend these dialectics into the realm of political action, from which Seymour—in his eagerness to dismantle internet-centric leftism—erases vital nuance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the discussion of Twitter’s reactionary affinities, attributed to its tripartite promotion of affect over reason, competition over cooperation, and hierarchy over horizontalism. Along with the dubious contention that competition and hierarchy are distinctly ‘fascist’ traits, rather than simply capitalist ones, this critique relies on a series of monolithic assumptions. The first is that affect is the exclusive property of the far-right—that the passion and concision which Twitter demands can only be weaponized by bigots. Here, Seymour’s position endorses the Enlightenment dogma that cultivated knowledge must quash ignorant emotion in the interest of societal advancement. His implicit equation of ‘feeling’ with ‘prejudice’ turns the left into a conduit for abstracted rationalism, elevating objective truth over subjective instinct. (In this vein, the book’s well-meaning critique of cyber-bullying—which Seymour ties to the reign of sentiment in the Twittersphere—sometimes sounds like a plea for more courteous political discourse: a liberal can’t-we-all-get-along-ism at odds with his typically acerbic style.) In Seymour’s reflexive rejection of affect, we therefore encounter the limits of the chic melancholia endorsed by Salvage. His uncritical rehearsal of this rationalist argument suggests that a suspicion of strong emotion—and resolve to remain desolate and disillusioned in the face of ‘wishful thinking’—may in fact narrow one’s analytical capacities.

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A similar one-sidedness is discernible in The Twittering Machine’s invective against competition and hierarchy. Seymour is correct that these discourses of power, ubiquitous on Twitter, emanate from an unequal society and replicate its governing logic. But he neglects to mention that on digital platforms there is often no distinction between ‘competition’ and ‘class conflict’, or ‘hierarchy’ and ‘leadership’. The same ‘protocols and controls’ which give rise to ruthless authoritarianism can produce inspiring left figureheads, because Twitter—stubbornly indifferent to the content that it publishes—will amplify whichever voice happens to be most resonant at a given moment. Seymour would have us believe that this is always the voice of Donald Trump, but sometimes it is that of Alexandria OcasioCortez. Likewise, the platform’s competitive dynamics, though born out of the pro-market doctrine that predominates in Silicon Valley, have been deftly exploited by outlets like Novara and Jacobin, whose ability to out-talk their Murdoch-owned rivals is enhanced by the decline of print. On this basis, the book’s blanket opposition to the Twittering Machine—its unwillingness to find anything salvageable in this ‘fascist’ technology—can at times seem overblown. We are left feeling that Seymour’s negativity is indicative of his trademark defeatism about the left’s prospects in general, rather than its Twitter performance in particular. Seymour’s portrayal of Twitter as a fascist instrument also suffers from his refusal to consider that the right’s online ascendance might best be explained by its offline reach. Although he elsewhere stresses the indivisibility of the virtual and material worlds, his final chapters tacitly separate them by attributing the left’s woes on social media to the internal components of the platform, as opposed to broader social and ideological effects. By contrast, a thoroughly historical approach would not ascribe the left’s deficit of powerful messaging and robust leadership to algorithmic bias, but to the culture of neoliberalism, whose elision of class struggle stripped socialist discourse of its affective force, creating a vacuum which the resurgent right has filled. This line of inquiry would allow more hope than Seymour’s book can countenance, since it would reject the schematic distinction between ‘hospitable’ and ‘inhospitable’ sites of struggle, insisting that such limits on political contestation are neither practically nor theoretically defensible. In the conjunctural crisis of late capitalism, socialist principles have reasserted their relevance. Our immediate task is to harness the affective energy of those principles and channel it through digital and non-digital mediums, instead of abandoning the former as a hopelessly corrupted domain. Seymour’s evaluation of the Twittering Machine is adept at exposing its power imbalances and structural limitations. But his refusal to work within these limitations—with an eye to overcoming them—evinces a political pessimism that needn’t flow from his critique.

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