A Review of Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex by Nick Dyer-Witheford, andMarx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco

Jamie Woodcock

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

jamie.woodcock@googlemail.com

Abstract

The two books, Cyber-Proletariat by Nick Dyer-Witheford andMarx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, both attempt to address the changes wrought by digital labour. Dyer-Witheford combines insights from the Marxist theories of autonomism and communisation in a rich, if somewhat dense, analysis. This is compared to Fuchs and Mosco’s book, focusing on Fuchs’s arguments and Brown and Quan-Hasse’s attempt at a social-media users’ inquiry. The problematic analysis of unpaid labour and the audience commodity is subjected to critique in the review. However, both are considered as making important contributions to ongoing debates in Marxism. In particular, the review argues that these debates are most useful when considered in relation to practice, whether organisational or empirical. These questions of worker resistance, the reorganisation of capital, and the implications for contemporary Marxism, can potentially be explored further through an updated method of the workers’ inquiry.

Keywords

Marxism – digital labour – Autonomism – social media

Nick Dyer-Witheford, (2015) Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, London: Pluto Press.

Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco (eds.), (2015) Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, Leiden: Brill.

The concept of digital labour presents three interrelated questions. The first is how workers are resisting and organising in new conditions, which also involves a debate about who now fits into this category. The second is the need to develop a new understanding of how capital is organised. The third is how critical theorists in general, and Marxists in particular, can apply and develop their analysis in relation to both of these changes. These two books, Cyber-Proletariat by Nick Dyer-Witheford andMarx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, both attempt to address the changes wrought by digital labour/capitalism. Nick Dyer-Witheford is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Christian Fuchs is a Professor of Social Media at the University of Westminster and also the editor oftripleC, an open-access journal, while Vincent Mosco is an Emeritus Professor at Queen’s University in Canada. Although they share common research interests in media, the focus of each book is different, and there are important arguments to draw out that have a significance for the project of revitalising a critical Marxism.

Cyber-Proletariat

Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Proletariat is a detailed and wide-ranging analysis. The book is focused on two concepts: cybernetics and the proletariat, the combination of which forms the title, similar to ‘cybertariat’, as used by Ursula Huws.[1] The choice of focusing on these two specific terms confers the book a distinctive analysis. Cybernetics is explained as having two meanings: the first is that rooted in military research that began during the Second World War, with the second relating to computer systems. These two definitions are considered together, ‘taking the ideas of cybernetic thinkers as a guide to how computers in general have altered the technological processes of capital’. This entails seeing machines ‘as entities governed by information control’.[2] The choice of the term ‘proletariat’ – as opposed to workers, working class, and so on – may initially bring to mind the rose-tinted nostalgia of productivist Marxism, yet Dyer-Witheford deploys it to much greater effect. By drawing on Marx’s notion of workers as ‘free in the double sense’,[3] and the etymological roots of the term in ancient Rome to describe the urban poor possessing nothing but the ability to reproduce themselves, the analytical scope is broadened. Building on Marcel van der Linden’s recent work,[4] there is a reminder that globally ‘a large proportion of the working class is workless’.[5] While the book covers electronics workers, call-centre operators, and peasants drawn into the factories, there is also a recognition that ‘now, as in Marx’s era, proletariat denotes the incessant phasing in and out of work and workless-ness, the inherent precarity, of the class that must live by labour, a condition raised to a new peak by global cybernetics.’

The argument unfolds through the meteorological metaphor of a vortex, emphasising the turbulence of changes taking place across the world. Marx and Engels’s evocation of ‘all that is solid melts into air’[6] is brought to life in a way that reflects the chaos that this involves. For Dyer-Witheford, this is comprised of three processes: ‘production, circulation and financialization’. The dynamics of these are explored through the composition of two factors: capital and the proletariat. This focus on composition signals the influence of autonomist Marxism on the book, with attention paid to ‘the relation between the technical conditions of the work (or worklessness) and the forms of political organization to which it gives rise’.[7] This composition is considered globally, taking in the ruins of Detroit, Silicon Valley, rare-mineral mines in the global South, and the high-tech factories of China, to name but a few. Yet what is notable is the focus on the financial crash of 2008 and the wave of uprisings dating from 2011, which takes the form of a ‘post-post-operaismo’ analysis.[8] This somewhat-awkward term signals a departure from Dyer-Witheford’s previous perspectives in Cyber-Marx[9] and Games of Empire,[10] entailing a more critical autonomist position. As he has argued recently, this is a result of involvement in the alter-globalisation movement and the post-2008 struggles. It therefore starts with ‘the “Facebook revolution” trope’ before moving on to the analysis of ‘the deeper effect of cybernetics on the restructuring of labor within advanced capitalism’.[11] The latest book also takes a less optimistic view of technology, involving a rejection of Hardt and Negri’s[12] later work by starting not with ‘multitude’ as before, but rather the ‘proletariat’.[13]

This ‘post-post-operaismo’ perspective found in Dyer-Witheford’s latest book involves a conversation between autonomism and communisation theory. While autonomism ‘emphasizes workers’ antagonism to capital’, communisation theory ‘insists that we must understand that workers are also part of capital’. The latter, for example, is found in the work of Cunningham[14] and Noys.[15] The combination of the two, Dyer-Witheford argues, stems from the ‘characteristic problems’ of each: autonomism ‘is chronically optimistic’, while communisation theory ‘has a very studied melancholia’.[16] This promises the possibility of finding a theoretically-productive meeting point. The question of linking this debate to some kind of practice is far from straightforward. Both in the book and elsewhere, he explains that he is ‘sympathetic’ to groups like Plan C in the UK, ‘who recognize that we do need to collectively as a movement think about issues of transition’.[17] This orientation towards practice comes first from the use of inquiries by Wildcat, Kolinko, and Asia Monitor Resource Centre.[18] It is then reinforced with the reminder that ‘Cybernetics was from its start the creation of war’ and ‘future proletarian struggles should adequate themselves to wartime’.[19]

The book is an exciting reapplication of Marxism to the pressing questions of digital labour. It is at its sharpest when these questions are considered in relation to concrete examples. Although these examples are not based on primary research, they often involve a new and nuanced take. At other points the dense nature of the text can become challenging, potentially limiting the readership to those engaged in academia. This would be a shame, as there is much that can be taken from the book. In particular, the discussion of workers’ inquiries[20] – a point that will be returned to later in the review – is important, but it also signals that many of these new attempts at analysing digital capitalism could benefit from pushing the questions into empirical or organisational projects.

Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

This book is the first of a two-part collection, which also includes Marx and the Political Economy of the Media.[21] As Fuchs and Mosco explain, the aim of both ‘is to contribute to overcoming’ what they see as a ‘lack of [a] systematic reading of Marx on communication and media’.[22] This is an admirable aim, although more limited in scope than Dyer-Witheford’s. The relevance of the topic is reiterated with a reminder of the importance of media for Marx, particularly given that ‘in addition to his work as a theorist and activist’ he ‘was a practicing journalist throughout his career’.[23] While there is not the space to discuss each of the chapters separately in the review, it is worth noting that Miriyam Aouragh’s chapter on ‘Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions’[24] is particularly useful, considering the discussion of the topic in Dyer-Witheford’s book. This section of the review will instead focus on the Introduction, Fuchs’s chapter,[25] and the study taking inspiration from this approach by Brown and Quan-Haase.[26]

The first chapter begins with the declaration from the head of a Berlin publishing house that ‘Marx is fashionable again’,[27] something echoed by the Labour shadow-chancellor.[28] Although moments like this are no doubt exciting for Marxists – particularly when thinking back to how unlikely it would have been to hear such things before the 2008 crisis – it is also necessary to be sober about how reflective they are of broader changes. The Introduction articulates how a Marxist theory of communication should, drawing on Mosco’s earlier work, ‘foreground the analysis of capitalism, including the development of the forces and relations of production, commodification and the production of surplus value, social class divisions and struggles, contradictions and oppositional movements’.[29] This is an exciting prospect, but one held back by their use of Dallas Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity.[30] Fuchs and Mosco describe this as the way in which ‘capital is accumulated by selling the audience, at a rate determined by its demographic characteristics, as a commodity to advertising clients’.[31]

The position on the audience commodity is restated and developed in Fuchs’s chapter, along with a survey of the literature in media studies.[32] This involves a schematic application of ‘Marxian categories’ that ‘Critical Internet Studies to a certain degree already makes use of … and should therefore acknowledge its own Marxian roots’.[33] While the eleven items listed are all things that Marxists should be concerned with, simply encountering the use of these concepts does not prove the utility of Marxism by default. Unfortunately there are no short-cuts for overcoming the theoretical, practical, and organisational challenges that face Marxists today. The chapter continues with Fuchs’s argument for a ‘digital labour theory of value’ that stems from ‘the value of a commodity measured as the average number of hours it takes to produce it’.[34] This update of the labour theory of value hinges on what Fuchs’s claims is a ‘crucial question’, whether ‘the users of commercial social media are generating value and are exploited’.[35]

This conceptual problem is also found in Fuchs’s earlier book Digital Labour and Karl Marx.[36] It is an argument that starts with the blurring of work and play in contemporary capitalism, but takes it to the extreme by arguing that users are actually working for companies like Google and Facebook. The first, and perhaps most obvious, critique of this position is that Facebook users are not ‘free in the double sense’ Marx described.[37] Fuchs’s response is that it involves ‘a social form of coercion that threatens the user with isolation and social disadvantages’.[38] The audience-commodity claim is justified by Fuchs’s position that ‘profit … is the outcome of unpaid labour time’,[39] whether from the part of the working day when the worker is producing a surplus above their wage, or outside of paid employment. This is justified with reference to the debates over unpaid domestic labour, for example in Dalla Costa and James.[40] However, As Chris Land has pointed out, ‘in one sense Fuchs is correct and provides quotes from Marx to back up his claims about unpaid labour being the source of value, but he also performs a theoretical sleight of hand.’ In doing so, Fuchs ‘misrepresents Marx’s main point about exploitation and waged labour’.[41] In Capital, Marx notes how the exchange of the commodity labour-power between the buyer (the capitalist) and the seller (the worker) appears straightforward. Yet, once this transaction is followed ‘into the hidden abode of production’, it is here that ‘the secret of profit-making’ can be found.[42] The transaction that has taken place is different to that of other commodities because the buyer purchases a potential that can only be realised once it is put to work. This indeterminacy of labour-power is crucial for understanding the workplace and value. Once a capitalist has ‘purchased a given quantity of labour power’, they ‘must now “stride ahead” and strive to extract actual labour from the labour power’ they ‘now legally own’.[43]

This indeterminacy of labour-power is the secret found in the ‘hidden abode of production’, in contrast to the claim that it is only unpaid labour that creates value. The argument that ‘there is not an equivalence between the value produced by labour and its remuneration is not the same as saying that unpaid labour is the source of all surplus value.’[44] This provides the basis for Fuchs’s argument regarding social-media users, leading to a calculation like the following:

What is the value of the single ad presented to a user? It is the average labour=usage time needed for the production of the ad presentation. Let’s assume these 27 172 420 million users are on average 60 minutes per day on Facebook and in these 60 minutes 60 ads are presented to them on average. All the time they spend online is used for generating targeted ads. It is labour time that generates targeted ad presentations. We can therefore say that the value of a single ad presented to a user is in the presented example 1 minute of labour/usage/prosumption time.[45]

On this basis, Fuchs declares Facebook usage to be labour, and even productive labour (so long as ad-blockers are not used, and presumably the user also watches or pays attention to the adverts). Thus users browsing on Facebook are the ‘21st century equivalents of what Marx considered as transport workers in classical industry’. The process of looking at funny pictures of cats, for example, becomes one of the activities ‘necessary for “transporting” use-value promises from companies to potential customers’.[46] As Michael A. Lebowitz has pointed out, ‘however much Marxian verbiage may subsequently enter into the discussion’ of the audience commodity, ‘it cannot alter the fact that what is produced is an entirely un-Marxian argument with un-Marxian conclusions which follow from the initial premise.’[47]

Fuchs’s theorisation entails the wholesale rejection of any alternative ways to understand this. It means failing to engage with the idea of rent: ‘if we want to understand the expropriation of value from forms of unpaid labour like Facebook, then an updated, but still Marxist, conception of rent seems to fit very well.’[48] Companies like Facebook could be understood as acting like a landlord, as the users’ ‘“labour” makes the site more productive, and they can charge advertisers a rent to access this digital territory.’[49] This would still involve the claim that users are exploited, but in a different way to that detailed by Marx. While the broadening out of the analysis from traditional wage-work is important – and indeed is dealt with by Dyer-Witheford, as discussed above – the consequences of not agreeing with Fuchs’s analysis do not necessarily mean ‘Facebook users are seen as unproductive and unexploited’, nor do they have ‘patriarchal and racist implications’.[50] If anything, the attempt to attribute equivalency between social-media users and other forms of unpaid work – housework or slavery, for example – is itself deeply problematic.

A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0?

The problematic analysis of the audience commodity overshadows what could have been an interesting chapter on an updated workers’ inquiry. Brown and Quan-Hasse[51] take Fuchs’s analysis and Bruns’s notion of ‘produsage’[52] to study the users of Flickr, an online picture gallery incorporating social networking. They argue that ‘users’ is, in fact, a ‘complete misnomer’, because these are ‘produsers … willing to produce content at no cost to the owners of these domains at the same time as these sites generate massive profits’.[53] The ‘Workers’ Inquiry 2.0’ is therefore positioned as a study of these ‘produsers’, ostensibly updating both Marx and the ‘methods of the Italian autonomists’.[54] This comes after a recent burst of interest in the workers’ inquiry as a method and practice, seen in the special issues of Ephemera andViewpoint,[55] neither of which are discussed in this chapter. There has also been a range of interesting attempts to update the workers’ inquiry method, seen, for example, with the Kolinko call-centre inquiry[56] discussed by Dyer-Witheford.

The analysis involves a comparison of industrial-factory labour to social-media ‘produsage’, and finds both similarities and differences. Drawing on Fuchs’s digital labour theory of value, Brown and Quan-Hasse argue that ‘the mode of produsage should be considered hyper-exploitative because it does not even offer its legions of workers a wage in exchange for their labour power and time’.[57] While it is true that no wage is offered to the ‘produser’, neither are they coerced into working on the platform, nor do they rely on the activity to reproduce their own labour-power. Despite this, the prospect of finding struggle on the Flickr platform is interesting, even if it is in user communities. In an optimistic part of the chapter, Brown and Quan-Hasse argue that there is ‘nascent evidence that this hyper-exploitative relationship is causing produsers to organize struggles against it’.[58] Unfortunately this is focused around what they call the ‘frequent uproars occurring on social networking sites regarding the violation of one’s privacy [which] have time and again resulted in controversy’. They continue to argue that ‘the near-exclusive focus on the violation of one’s privacy as the cause of these uproars is a mischaracterization and a mistake’, and quote Brown’s earlier research.[59] However, given the recent revelations about privacy and surveillance – particularly as related to WikiLeaks and discussed by Dyer-Witheford – it does seem to retain some importance.

There is a defence of the analysis of super-exploitation of ‘produsers’, taking a similar line to Fuchs, that again attempts to connect it with the struggle of domestic labour.[60] However, Dyer-Witheford addressed this in a much more nuanced way, rejecting

a direct equivalence between the experience of, say, the dagongmei and Facebook users. But vampire bites come in many ways. Facebook posting is a form of exploitation, which, without explicit violence, is nonetheless parasitic. It does not replace the ‘normal’ structures of daily class exploitation at work and home, but is added to and superimposed upon them, to constitute a regime in which the user is habituated, on pain of exclusion from social worlds, to surrendering the elements of their personality – identity, creativity, sociality – to enhance the circulation of capital. This submission is not the same as the brutal bodily discipline inflicted on thedagongmei, but it is a form of subjectification that is both infiltrative and extroversive in the abject submission to the commodity form it elicits.[61]

This analytical position does not require a rejection of all non-waged labour and it allows for an understanding of how these activities fit together with existing forms of paid and unpaid labour.

The idea of Web 2.0 entailed the rise of websites involving user-generated content. These questions have been complicated with the growth of crowdsourcing or so-called sharing-economy platforms, whether that be the astronomic valuations of Uber (a cab company that owns no cars) or Airbnb (an accommodation company that owns no beds). In the case of crowdsourcing in particular, the mixture of paid and unpaid labour is an interesting phenomenon. For example, the Zooniverse – a crowdsourcing platform for citizen science that has involved over 1.3 million users – allows individual users to contribute to the categorisation of large-scale scientific data. In this case the tensions between citizen scientists, professional scientists, and paid software developers highlight the complexity of understanding the processes involved.[62]

In the context of academic work, writing articles is a good example of the complexities involved. The wage paid to academics does not necessarily cover specific times, with many contracts now stipulating that the employment has no fixed hours and there is an expectation to work the hours necessary to complete the necessary duties. The journal articles that are the result of research (leaving aside the questions of teaching and marking) often end up behind paywalls, with publishers charging for individual or institutional access. Many academics now share articles on websites that are organised along the Web 2.0 model. Across these three cases there is a mixture of exploitative relationships taking place. To use Dyer-Witheford’s phrase, the ‘vampire bites come in many ways’,[63] but is the relationship more or less exploitative when it is not connected to the wage? This fixation draws a false separation between the overlapping processes taking place, the correction to focusing solely on waged-work resulting in the opposite, rather than engaging with the contradictions and complexities.

It is clear that in order to answer these questions – or indeed to ensure that the right questions are being posed – further empirical work should be undertaken both online and offline. As Trebor Scholz has argued, many of these platforms involve ‘digital black box labor’,[64] obfuscating the processes taking place behind the front page of the website. However, it is important to clarify what Marx originally intended with the workers’ inquiry and how this was elaborated in further attempts. Brown and Quan-Hasse argue that the ‘method was to provide workers with the intellectual and emotional tools required to struggle against their own exploitation’.[65] However, for Marx, the ‘practice of disseminating the inquiry also represented a step towards organizing this project, by establishing direct links with workers’.[66] In the context of online activity, Irani and Silberman’s ‘Turkopticon’ project points towards how this could be achieved. They launched an inquiry through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to reach people engaging on that paid micro-work platform. Following this, an activist system was created that combined a forum and a browser plug-in. This allowed workers to collect and share information on the requesters, something which is particularly important given that the ownership of completed tasks switches over immediately, while payment can be refused with no justification. This formed the beginning of an organisational project on a platform where workers are at a significant structural disadvantage.[67]

The Implications of the Arguments

Both of these books make important interventions in the debates on digital labour and capitalism. Dyer-Witheford’s book opens up a number of important questions and combines insights from two contemporary critical strains of Marxism. Fuchs and Mosco’s book is more limited in its focus on communication and media, although that would also likely make the book appealing to those studying or researching in that discipline. The topics involved have the potential to lead to a number of fruitful debates, many of which are crucial for updating and reinvigorating Marxism. Arguably, Dyer-Witheford’s contribution is more of a conversation with the left, while Fuchs and Mosco’s is broader – to the right of this, rather than with the right. The questions posed by both are best considered in relation to practice, both in terms of organising and empirical interventions. This is highlighted by Dyer-Witheford, who explains, as part of an argument against the accelerationists, that ‘there is a failure to acknowledge that the passage from the potential to the actualization of such communist possibilities involves crossing what William Morris describes as a “river of fire.”’[68] The debate about the audience commodity and the unpaid labour of social-media users would be much more interesting if the implications were considered in these terms. The key is to open up the three questions discussed at the beginning: how are workers (and who would this include?) resisting and organising, how has capital reorganised, and what does this mean for contemporary Marxism? The method of workers’ inquiry, which emerges in different forms across the two books, has the potential to be one important way to do this.

References

Aouragh, Miriyam 2015, ‘Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions’, in Fuchs and Mosco (eds.) 2015a, pp. 482–515.

Brown, Brian A. 2013, ‘Primitive Digital Accumulation: Privacy, Social Networks & Biopolitical Exploitation’, Rethinking Marxism, 25, 3: 385–403.

Brown, Brian A. and Anabel Quan-Haase 2015, ‘“A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0”: An Ethnographic Method for the Study of Produsage in Social Media Contexts’, in Fuchs and Mosco (eds.) 2015a, pp. 447–81.

Bruns, Axel 2008, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Cunningham, John 2009, ‘Invisible Politics – An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation’,          Mute, 14, available at: <http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/invisible-politics-introduction-to-contemporary-communisation>.

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James 1973, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

Dathan, Matt 2015, ‘Karl Marx Is “Back in Fashion,” Claims Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’, The Independent, 18 September, available at: <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-is-back-in-fashion-claims-labour-shadow-chancellor-john-mcdonnell-a6670211.html>.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick 1999, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick 2015a, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, London: Pluto Press.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick 2015b, ‘Cyber-Proletariat: An Interview with Nick Dyer-Witheford’, Viewpoint Magazine, 8 September, available at: <https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/09/08/cyber-proletariat-an-interview-with-nick-dyer-witheford/>.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick and Greig de Peuter 2009, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Videogames, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Edwards, Richard 1979, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century, New York, NY: Basic Books.

Fuchs, Christian 2014, Digital Labour and Karl Marx, New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, Christian 2015, ‘Towards Marxian Internet Studies’, in Fuchs and Mosco (eds.) 2015a, pp. 22–67.

Fuchs, Christian and Vincent Mosco 2015, ‘Introduction: Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today’, in Fuchs and Mosco (eds.) 2015a, pp. 1–21.

Fuchs, Christian and Vincent Mosco (eds.) 2015a, Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, Leiden: Brill.

Fuchs, Christian and Vincent Mosco (eds.) 2015b, Marx and the Political Economy of the Media, Leiden: Brill.

Haider, Asad and Salar Mohandesi 2013, ‘Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy’, Viewpoint Magazine, 27 September, available at: <https://www.viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy/>.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2001, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Huws, Ursula 2003, The Making of the Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World, London: Merlin Press.

Irani, Lilly C. and M. Six Silberman 2013, ‘Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk’, in CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 661–20, New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery.

Kolinko 2002, ‘Hotlines – call centre | inquiry | communism’, available at: <https://libcom.org/library/hotlines-call-centre-inquiry-communism>.

Land, Chris 2015, ‘From Mineral Mining to Data Mining: Understanding the Global Commodity Chain of Internet Communications. Review of Digital Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs’,Ephemera, 15, 4: 875–87.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 2009, Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis,Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Linden, Marcel van der 2008, Workers of the World: Essays towards a Global Labor History, Leiden: Brill.

Marx, Karl 1976 [1867], Capital:A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 2015 [1848], The Communist Manifesto, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mosco, Vincent 2009, The Political Economy of Communication, Second Edition, London: SAGE Publications.

Noys, Benjamin (ed.) 2011, Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, New York, NY: Autonomedia.

Scholz, Trebor 2015, ‘Think Outside the Boss’, Public Seminar, 5 April, available at: <http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/04/think-outside-the-boss/>.

Smythe, Dallas W. 1977, ‘Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1, 3: 1–27.

Woodcock, Jamie 2013, ‘Smile Down the Phone: An Attempt at a Workers’ Inquiry in a Call Center’, Viewpoint Magazine, 3, available at: <http://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/smile-down-the-phone-an-attempt-at-a-workers-inquiry-in-a-call-center/>.

Woodcock, Jamie 2014, ‘The Workers’ Inquiry from Trotskyism to Operaismo: A Political Methodology for Investigating the Workplace’, Ephemera, 14, 3: 493–513, available at: <http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/workers%E2%80%99-inquiry-trotskyism-operaismo-political-methodology-investigating-workplace>.

Woodcock, Jamie, Anita Greenhill, Kate Holmes, Gary Graham, Joe Cox, Eun Young Oh and Karen Masters 2017, ‘Crowdsourcing Citizen Science: Exploring the Tensions between Paid Professionals and Users’, Journal of Peer Production, 7 June, available at: <https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/files/8039057/COXj_2017_cright_JPP_Crowdsourcing_citizen_science_exploring_the_tensions_between_paid_professionals.pdf>.

[1] Huws 2003.

[2] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 42.

[3] Marx 1976, p. 272.

[4] Linden 2008.

[5] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 13.

[6] Marx and Engels 2015, p. 3.

[7] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 15.

[8] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 12.

[9] Dyer-Witheford 1999.

[10] Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009.

[11] Dyer-Witheford 2015b.

[12] Hardt and Negri 2001.

[13] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 12.

[14] Cunningham 2009.

[15] Noys (ed.) 2011.

[16] Dyer-Witheford 2015b.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 15.

[19] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 204.

[20] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 15.

[21] Fuchs and Mosco (eds.) 2015b.

[22] Fuchs and Mosco 2015, p. 5.

[23] Fuchs and Mosco 2015, p. 6.

[24] Aouragh 2015.

[25] Fuchs 2015.

[26] Brown and Quan-Haase 2015.

[27] Fuchs and Mosco 2015, p. 1.

[28] Dathan 2015.

[29] Mosco 2009, p. 94.

[30] Smythe 1977.

[31] Fuchs and Mosco 2015, p. 11.

[32] Fuchs 2015.

[33] Fuchs 2015, p. 36.

[34] Fuchs 2015, p. 44.

[35] Fuchs 2015, p. 45.

[36] Fuchs 2014.

[37] Marx 1976, p. 272.

[38] Fuchs 2014, p. 255.

[39] Fuchs 2014, p. 6.

[40] Dalla Costa and James 1973.

[41] Land 2015, p. 881.

[42] Marx 1976, pp. 279–80.

[43] Edwards 1979, p. 12.

[44] Land 2015, p. 881.

[45] Fuchs 2015, p. 53.

[46] Fuchs 2015, p. 54.

[47] Lebowitz 2009, p. 222.

[48] Land 2015, p. 882.

[49] Land 2015, p. 883.

[50] Fuchs 2015, p. 46.

[51] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015.

[52] Bruns 2008.

[53] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015, p. 447.

[54] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015, p. 449.

[55] See, for example, Woodcock 2013; 2014.

[56] Kolinko 2002.

[57] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015, p. 457.

[58] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015, p. 458.

[59] Brown 2013.

[60] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015, p. 459.

[61] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 93.

[62] Woodcock, Greenhill, Holmes, Graham, Cox, Oh and Masters 2017.

[63] Dyer-Witheford 2015a, p. 93.

[64] Scholz 2015.

[65] Brown and Quan-Hasse 2015, p. 475.

[66] Haider and Mohandesi 2013.

[67] Irani and Silberman 2013.

[68] Dyer-Witheford 2015b.

A Review of Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People, edited by Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis

Panagiotis Sotiris

Independent Researcher

panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com

Abstract

Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today, edited by Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis, is an important volume bringing together contributions that offer a variety of readings of contemporary social movements. The opposition between those writers who insist on the biopolitics of the Multitude and those who emphasise the hegemony of the people, and the debate between neo-anarchist and neo-populist positions, offer an insight not only into contemporary readings of mass politics but also into the very complex dynamics of contemporary movements and their radical democratic demands.

Keywords

Hegemony – Multitude – social movements – radical democracy – post-hegemony – Laclau – Mouffe – Negri

Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (eds.), (2014) Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

Introduction

Recent social and political developments and, in particular, the impressive global cycle of protest and contestation from the beginning of the 2010s onward, have brought the question of collective subjects and their politics to the forefront. In particular, we have seen massive movements claiming that they represent the ‘people’ in the sense of the vast majority of society (exemplified in the ‘we are the 99%’ slogan), in contrast to movements organised around specific social groups and their demands. These forms of mass politics along with their new practices of equal voicing, democratic decision-making and self-organisation pose a very important challenge for radical social theory and also for radical and socialist politics. In particular, they call on us to question the various attempts at theorising collective action and radical politics today, and especially the debate around the notions of the Multitude, suggested by writers in the post-workerist tradition and the various attempts to redefine the notion of thepeople as part of an attempt to rethink the material, practical, antagonistic and performative character of politics.

The Multitude versus the People

Regarding the theorisation of the Multitude we have the positions suggested by Hardt and Negri in a series of books and interventions since 2000 and the publication of Empire.[1] In Hardt and Negri’s reading, the modern biopolitical multitude is not just a political concept: it is based on the ontology of the post-industrial, ‘biopolitical’ labour process and the creativity of labour that the ‘Empire’ attempts to subsume. The Multitude must be theorised in terms of immanence, of an immanent social potentiality, since the dominant aspect of the capitalist productive process is the creativity and the productivity of labour upon which the power of capital is imposed as a parasite. However, the only available path for a politics of the Multitude is that of nomadic lines of flight, not of the construction of collective subjects and hegemonic projects. Only later in the ‘Empire’ project, and in particular the 2009 workCommonwealth, do Hardt and Negri choose to talk about the necessity of the ‘becoming-Prince of the Multitude’.[2]

On the other hand, we have those theorists that insist on the centrality of the concept of the people, in their attempt to theorise the political consequences of social antagonism and radical difference in contemporary class societies, either in the sense of a reclaiming of politics for those that remain unaccounted-for in the dominant political configuration, the choice made mainly by Jacques Rancière in his attempts to see how subalternity can be transformed into a radical democratic demand,[3] or in the sense of the possibility of an endless relational discursive reconstitution of the people as the moment of a singular universality, the choice mainly associated with the work of the late Ernesto Laclau,[4] but also with Chantal Mouffe’s proposal for an agonistic democracy.[5]

It is in particular the work of Laclau that plays an important role as a reference point (and as a point of debate) in this collection, especially since both editors of the volume, Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis, are associated with the Populismus research project at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki and are collaborating with Yannis Stavrakakis,[6] an academic well known for his attempt to use the conceptual framework of Laclau’s theory of populism and populist reason in the study of social and political movements today.

For Laclau, populism is not a particular political movement but a ‘political logic’.[7] According to Laclau, ‘the emergence of the “people” requires the passage – via equivalences – from isolated, heterogeneous demands to a “global” demand which involves the formation of political frontiers and the discursive construction of power as an antagonistic force.’[8] This is also related to Laclau’s well-known insistence on a particular relational conception of ‘discourse’ and on his idiosyncratic use of the notion of hegemony as precisely the moment and aspect that enables the emergence of political projects, along with his rejection of traditional class analysis as the basis of political practices and political blocs. However, it is interesting to note that while in the 1980s, especially after the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,[9] Laclau was accused of a post-Marxist and post-socialist political turn, in fact there have also been more radical uses of his conceptual framework, and this collective volume stands as such an example. Moreover, it is important to note that Laclau himself in a certain way initiated this debate via his critique of Hardt and Negri’s conception of immanence. For Laclau, the problem is precisely this conception of the Multitude in terms of a homogeneous collective entity which leads to the position that ‘full realization of the multitude’s immanence would be the elimination of all transcendence’.[10] Moreover, for Laclau, Hardt and Negri’s identification of any notion of sovereignty with repression and their nomadic conception of a plurality of struggles in fact leave no room for the conceptualisation of the political action that could turn political demands into reality.

It is obvious that what we are seeing here are two opposing logics of political action, one that attempts to ground it in the contemporary ontology of labour and capitalist production, and one that attempts to think it in terms of a certain reclaiming of political space but also of central political notions. The first one projects the dynamics of a certain image of production, the other the transformation of democratic vocabulary into a contested signifying terrain. In a certain manner, it also represents the very evolution of political contestation during recent years, from the nomadic and/or anti-political character of the first wave of anti-globalist/anti-capitalist protests to the reclaiming of politics by those movements aiming at ‘real democracy’.

A Presentation of the Volume

The introductory text by Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis places the book in the perspective of a conjuncture marked by major popular movements characterised by forms of collective self-organisation and self-mobilisation. They insist that ‘[t]he horizontal, non-representative networks of autonomous multiplicities on the one hand, the struggles of popular blocs that claim to represent universal interests and strive to impose their sovereign will, on the other hand, offer two alternative ways to make sense of democratic agency and the strategies of social transformation’ (p. 5). In this sense, the opposing definitions of democratic agency in contemporary movements represent the main question that this collective volume attempts to answer.

Benjamin Arditi’s contribution to the volume attempts to revisit the contribution of Laclau and Mouffe to a post-Marxist conception of politics centred on the notion of hegemony.[11] Although Arditi praises the overall theoretical importance of the work of Laclau and Mouffe, he is critical of certain tensions within it. In particular, he stresses the fact that Laclau and Mouffe present hegemony as the paradigmatic or ‘universal form of politics or at least of democratic politics’ (p. 21). This conception sees ‘all politics as hegemonic politics’ (p. 24) without any outside. In contrast to this conception, Arditi introduces the concept ofpost-hegemony. He employs the example of the broad spectrum of protest in Argentina in December 2001, which saw mobilisations that were political, but which, according to Arditi, could not easily fit into the conceptualisation of hegemony. Arditi suggests that the same goes for new internationalist networks of solidarity. In contrast, the politics associated with a potentialexodus of the Multitude, either in the form presented in Hardt and Negri’s theorisation or in the work of Virno, offer a way to think a politics that includes and does not cancel the singularity of each element. Arditi also refers positively to the Deleuzian themes of rhizomatic politics and the politics of becoming-minoritarian, and he discusses John Holloway’s conception of politics and Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones[12] as attempts to delineate a politics of defection. He also turns his attention to what he designates as ‘viral politics’ (p. 38) associated with internet-based initiatives and campaigns. His conclusion is that there are indeed ‘ways of doing politics that bypass the Neo-Gramscian logic of hegemony and counter-hegemony characteristic of most of what is usually inventoried under the name “politics” today’ (p. 41). Consequently ‘post-hegemony is a well-placed wager that validates a range of formats of collective action that were either ignored or dismissed by the advocates of the theory of hegemony’ (ibid.), ways to do politics that ‘certainly bypass the liberal democratic framework and that can function to trigger enthusiasm for politics among the disenfranchised and those who have become disenchanted by existing vehicles for participating in the process of shaping their lived world’ (p. 42). Overall, in Arditi’s case we are dealing with a post-hegemonic conception of politics, based upon an emphasis on singularity and a certain distrust of universalising discourses.

The second chapter of the volume is by Richard J.F. Day and Nick Montgomery, and represents a neo-anarchist position[13] according to which contemporary mass movements can be explained as ‘neither the People, nor the Multitude’ (p. 47). The authors accept some of the premises of Hardt and Negri’s conception of Empire, such as the decentralised character of Empire, the importance of enclosures and privatisation and the biopolitics of control over life. However, they think that the concept of the Multitude is an ‘abstract and universalizing’ one and that Hardt and Negri are themselves engaged in a ‘stagist narrative’ of ‘altermodernity’ (p. 56). Day and Montgomery reject both the notion of the Multitude and the notion of the People, since they both ‘remain excessively hegemonic in their orientation; that is, they seek to subsume disparate forces under a single banner, they seek to provide coherence and a centre, even while apparently insisting on decentralization and multiplicity’ (p. 59). Through their reading of Federici, they suggest that the very notion of the Common has to ‘beindigenized’ (p. 61) and that we must think the Exodus from the Empire in terms ofautonomies, deriving their inspiration from ‘non-sectarian, social anarchist traditions’ (p. 65), emphasising their plural character to avoid any conception of ‘transcendent totality’ (p. 69). What is interesting in Day and Montgomery’s contribution is precisely this combination of classical anarchist positions with a rejection of hegemony and any attempt towards universalising political interpretations, in contrast perhaps to the rather universalising conception of emancipation that historic anarchism shared with the socialist/communist tradition. By doing this, they also bring forward the limits of such anarchist positions, namely their inability to think of politics outside the terrain of movements and singular resistances.

Jodi Dean in her contribution[14] attempts to rethink the notion of the sovereignty of the people as part of her rethinking of communism. For Dean, the notion of the people is a ‘modulation of the idea of the proletariat as the subject of communism’ (p. 73). The sovereignty of the people refers to the dictatorship of the proletariat, ‘the direct and fearsome rule of the collective people over those who would oppress and exploit them’ (ibid.). Dean insists that the notion of the proletariat is relevant today, provided that we do not identify it with the traditional industrial working-class and take into account the shift toward the service economy. She supports her own conceptualisation of the people as ‘the rest of us’ by reference to Rancière’s notion of the ‘part-of-no-part’,[15] in order to think of the people as ‘a dividing and divisive force’, especially since, ‘[w]hile the people as the rest of us, as the part-of-no-part, is better than “proletariat” and “multitude” as a designator for the contemporary subject of communism, class struggle remains essential as the name for the fundamental antagonism through which society emerges – the division between the rich and the rest of us’ (p. 77). Consequently, the sovereignty of the people ‘points to a view of the state as what we use to govern forus as a collectivity. It is our collective steering of our common future for our common good’ (p. 79). Through a reading of Foucault’s theorisation of liberal governmentality, Dean suggests that ‘[l]iberal political economy is a limiting of the people as a collective force’ (p. 81).

However, there is the problem of the divisive character of the people in its ‘nonidentity with its sovereignty’ (p. 83). Through references to Susan Buck-Morris, Giorgio Agamben and psychoanalytic theory, Dean suggests that a way to think of this question would be to use the psychoanalytic distinction between desire (that which cannot be fulfilled) and drive as a repetitive process of not reaching jouissance.

The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, active and in common. Their sovereignty can be reduced neither to their majority nor to their procedures. Rather it names the cause and reason for government: the collective people in their desire for a common good. The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population. (p. 85.)

In order to theorise the conception of sovereignty as a ‘collective steering of our common resources and conditions’ (p. 87) Dean turns to Peter Hallward’s conception of popular will, which she defines as a dialectical ‘voluntarism’. According to Dean, ‘Hallward’s dialectical voluntarism suggests an understanding of the sovereignty of the people in terms of a collective egalitarian universalist desire’ (p. 89). This dialectical voluntarism can only be thought in terms of Marx’s ‘description of communism as the free development of each compatible with the free development of all’ (p. 90). In this sense, sovereignty is ‘unavoidably partial and incomplete’ (ibid.), but we must insist on this struggle as the condition of keeping the communist desire alive. In Dean’s case we are dealing with a very interesting attempt to combine the reference to the people and popular sovereignty with a class perspective and a communist orientation.

Saul Newman’s contribution attempts to theorise the new political terrain opened up by the politics of occupation of public space, a terrain of autonomous politics, that cannot be thought of in terms of the People or the Multitude, but rather ‘through the figures of exodus and insurrection as the reclamation of self’ (p. 94). Newman stresses the importance of the ‘deconstruction of the essentialism of traditional Marxist class identities’ (p. 95), which is necessary in order to theorise the plural character of contemporary mass movements, that are anticapitalist but at the same time against environmental destruction, state authoritarianism and enclosures. However, contemporary autonomous politics goes beyond the politics of hegemony, especially since hegemony ‘is a project of power, a project which aims to take over a position of power’ (p. 98). Contemporary movements do not ‘seek to participate in state power, or even to take it over in some revolutionary sense, but to foster autonomous relations and ways of being in the here and now’ (p. 99). Consequently, a politics of autonomy today can be better thought of in terms of ‘Miguel Abensour’s anarchic insurgent democracy’ (p. 100)[16] than in terms of the redefinition of populist politics suggested by Laclau and Mouffe. Regarding the conception of the Multitude offered by Negri and Hardt, Newman disagrees with what he defines as the ‘immanentist theory that underpins it’ and a ‘certain developmental logic […] in which the extension of global capitalism and its biopolitical processes and technological developments is welcomed as an inevitable stage before the coming of the multitude’ (p. 104). Instead, he suggests a politics around the concept of insurrection which ‘involves not so much the seizure of the apparatus of power, but rather a micro-political and ethical transformation of ourselves’ (p. 107), a politics of the transformation of the subject that is opposed to the notion of the revolution, which is associated with the imposition of a social and political order in contrast to autonomous self-arrangement. Again we have here the opposition between a politics of hegemony and an insurrectionary autonomous politics, a thread common to many interventions in this debate.

The contribution by Yannis Stavrakakis attempts to deal with criticisms against the positions of Laclau and Mouffe. He begins with Norman Geras’s critique of the supposedly idealist-relativist discursive conception of reality, as an archetype of this kind of criticism.[17] He also points to recent criticisms of the very notion of hegemony exemplified in positions such as Day’s. For Stavrakakis there are two variants to this argument. The first argument, which Stavrakakis attributes to Scott Lash,[18] is that hegemony was relevant within specific historical periods, but now we have entered an era of ‘post-hegemony’ (p. 116). The second argument rejects this temporal/historical aspect and instead considers hegemony as politically suspect, since it mimics ‘the power structures’ (p. 118). He attributes this line of criticism in particular to Jon Beasley-Murray,[19] and his insistence that it is not hegemony that secures social order but rather habit and affect. In contrast, Stavrakakis insists that ‘a multitude of autonomous struggles have become historically effective only when articulated within a common counter-hegemonic horizon of representation’ (p. 120), exemplified both in contemporary movements of indignation but also in the importance of populist (in Laclau’s sense of the term) parties such as ‘SYRIZA in the contemporary Greek situation [and] Kirchner’s Peronists in Argentina’ (p. 121). Stavrakakis rejects both the ‘quasi-eschatological structure’ (p. 122) of Lash’s passage to post-hegemony and the binary dichotomies associated with criticisms of hegemony – ‘inside/outside, before/after, hegemony/post-hegemony, representational/real, meaning/being, horizontality/verticality, discourse/affect’ – because they underestimate the extent to which these distinctions function ‘within a historical dialectics of mutual engagement and co-constitution’ (p. 122). Through references to Foucault, Elias, Bourdieu, Thrift and Lazzarato, Stavrakakis rejects this kind of exclusive binary oppositions.

Not only are Day, Lash and Beasley-Murray incapable of registering the constitutive interpenetration between representation and affect, the symbolic and the real, discursive hegemony and biopolitics – precisely what the work of Foucault, Elias, Bourdieu, Thrift and Lazzarato seems to allow and encourage. By sticking to a caricature of Laclau’s discursive theory of hegemony, they have also failed to take notice of developments within the terrain of discourse theory which have been following a similar direction. (p. 127.)

In particular, Stavrakakis refers to the evolution of Laclau’s thinking and his engagement with the ‘problematics of affectivity and jouissance […] [and] the more affirmative modalities of the Lacanian real’ (p. 127). Stavrakakis’s conclusion is that such criticisms of Laclau, in their ‘passion for the real’, in the end fail to stress contradictions which precisely have to do with the unavoidability of representation: ‘there is no repression without a return of the repressed; thus representation and discourse return to haunt post-hegemonic arguments. Leading them to one contradiction after the other’ (p. 130). In the case of Stavrakakis we are dealing with a defence of the relevance of Laclau for contemporary social and political developments, and in particular of the relevance not only of the notion of hegemony but also of Laclau’s conception of populism for the analysis of broad-left movements such as SYRIZA. In particular, it is important to highlight Stavrakakis’s insistence on the importance of representation as an unavoidable aspect of any attempt to articulate contemporary struggles into hegemonic projects.

The contribution of Paul Rekret returns to the debate between Laclau and Negri as a return to the question of an ontology of the political. He insists that ‘[i]f the broad claim articulated by post-foundational thinkers is that political philosophy and political science “displace” or disavow the political by seeking to eliminate dissonance, difference, conflict or struggle, then the widely shared aim of the ontological turn in post-foundational political thought might be defined as the attempt to think the being of the political in itself and not to confine politics to the juridical or regulative tasks to which it has traditionally been limited’ (p. 134). For Rekret the theoretical importance of Laclau lies in his ‘post-Marxist political logic of contingency’ (p. 135), and his reappropriation of the notion of hegemony from Gramsci along with his rejection of any ‘privileged agent of emancipation’ (p. 136). He also suggests that there are similarities with Hardt’s and Negri’s project which ‘can thus best be understood as an attempt to develop a post-Marxist political theory that would not reduce class struggle to the traditional notion of the working class but which engages with the variety of heterogenous actors engaged in political struggles in late capitalism’ (p. 137). At the same time he stresses their main difference, namely the fact that there is a distance between Laclau’s insistence on political contingency and Negri’s ‘focus upon the emancipatory potential contained in changes to the forces of production’ (p. 138).

One of the main points of Rekret’s contribution is that both Laclau and Negri display a certain ontological narcissism in the sense of an ‘understanding of the present as singular bearer of the ontological truths one holds’ (p. 139). In the case of Laclau this is evident in the centrality of the field of discursivity and its unavoidably antagonistic character, and in Negri in the centrality of the constituent power of the Multitude conceived as constant creativity and innovation. Consequently,

both thinkers shift the terrain of their arguments to the domain of ontological axioms. Thus, for Laclau class decomposition actualizes and confirms the possibility of antagonism in the abstractions of the absolute horizontality of the play of differences to which all phenomena are subsumed while for Negri the autonomy of the multitude against empire is grounded in the claim that the former is merely the embodiment of a generalized constituent power. Antagonism for both thinkers is thus premised upon the post-foundational move of locating the political in the ontological register. (p. 142.)

According to Rekret, in both cases, this kind of ontological grounding leaves no room for any other reference apart from the autonomy of the Multitude in the case of Negri and discourse in the case of Laclau. Thus there is no ‘criterion by which antagonisms can be evaluated and analyzed’ (p. 143). The result is that, although incommensurable, both ontologies lead to the same theoretical and political dead-end. In this sense, Rekret’s intervention is a useful reminder of both the persistence of ontological references to contemporary post-foundational political thinking but also of the limits of such an ontological approach.

This theoretical cul-de-sac of circular political debates is the direct result of the turn to the resources of post-foundational political ontology in the attempt to guarantee the possibility of political struggle in the absence or decline of a politicized working class. […] Sutured to ontology, political theory is caught in endless circles of self-reference. (p. 146.)

Alexandros Kioupkiolis sets out in his contribution to reject the commonly held assumption that contemporary movements ‘have ritually consigned hegemony to the dustbin of history’, suggesting instead that ‘hegemony should be radically recast beyond recognition, assuming a multitudinous form that can dismantle its hierarchical, homogenizing and ideological closures’ (p. 150). Kioupkiolis sets out to present both the main aspects of Hardt and Negri’s theorisation of the Multitude as an embodiment of contemporary capitalist biopolitics and of the emergence of new collective emancipatory collective practices. Then he presents the main criticisms against this conceptualization of the Multitude by Laclau and Rancière and their ‘charges of spontaneism, teleology and non-political nature’ (p. 155). However, he suggests that more recent interventions by Hardt and Negri, such as Commonwealth andDeclaration,[20] in fact answer some of these criticisms, by their references to constituent processes emerging in the democratic forms of contemporary movements of indignation and by referring to the Multitude as ‘a political project for the institution of an autonomous, egalitarian and common democracy, whose rudiments are furnished by the new forms of biopolitical labour and new social movements’ (p. 156). At the same time, he stresses the still ‘ontological and historical-material guarantees’ (p. 157) in Hardt’s and Negri’s theorisation. In light of these, Kioupkiolis attempts to offer a theoretical and political project that moves beyond the Multitude/hegemony dichotomy. In his own words:

autonomous multiplicities should actively pursue hegemonic forms of political intervention if they are to gain the power to change the world in their plural images of collective freedom, toppling the ruling forces of today. However, in their re-enactments of sovereign hegemony, such multitudes should effectively contest, twist, distort and reconfigure its prevailing structures if they aspire to enhanced freedom and equality. (p. 157.)

For Kioupkiolis, hegemony is still relevant for the analysis of contemporary movements. ‘Despite their explicit opposition to delegation, hierarchical organization, party partisanship and ideological unity, the core constituents of “hegemony” – representation, antagonism, uneven power and “chains of equivalence” which fashion collective identities around empty signifiers – stand out as building blocks of their political discourse and action’ (p. 159). Consequently, contemporary movements need first to ‘pursue hegemony as a struggle to reconfigure the existing composition of forces and replace it with a different power structure that will strain to minimize domination, hierarchies and exclusions’; secondly, ‘a variable degree of hegemony as collective unity-cohesion will be still needed to avoid mutually destructive collisions and incompatibilities’; and thirdly, ‘relations of representation and the dialectics of particularity/universality […] will be reproduced in any association in which the will of the many does not coincide with the will of all’ (p. 163). At the same time, contemporary mass movements as self-organised multiplicities of singularities will radically upset and reconfigure hegemonic politics through ‘variable hybridizations of verticality, concentration and horizontality’ (p. 164), the ‘affirmation of diversity and autonomous constituent practices’ (ibid.), a ‘composition of differences [that] will not be dictated by abstract, a priori laws’ (p. 165), and by making ‘representation accessible to the active engagement and the widening influence of the “represented”’ (ibid.). Consequently, this form of political association of the Multitude ‘could also fuel the relentless subversion of hierarchies, closures and new patterns of domination from within, holding out the prospect of a world beyond hegemony in a universe still bridled with it’ (p. 166). In the case of Kioupkiolis we are dealing with an interesting attempt towards a more transformative conception of hegemony, one that acknowledges its importance as part of the process of transforming movements into political forces of emancipation and, at the same time, stresses the need for collective political practices that subvert the reproduction of hierarchies and power relations.

Giorgos Katsambekis’s contribution attempts to think the Multitude/People cleavage in light of recent mass mobilisation in Greece, in order to go beyond this dichotomy. For Katsambekis it is possible to think of the politics of the Multitude and at the same time insist on the pertinence of the notion of the people as part of a ‘project of a radical and plural democracy’ (p. 171). For Katsambekis the best way to overcome this dichotomy is to think of a ‘multitudinous people’ that as a notion ‘can bring together in a single term at once the signification of the people’s constitutive internal divide and ambiguity, its irreducible heterogeneity and plurality, along with the multiplicity that characterizes collective action in the twenty-first century’ (p. 172). In this sense, ‘the “people” and the “multitude” mark certain potential crystallizations of collective/democratic agency and not empirical data’ (p. 177). The very emergence of a collective ‘we’ suggests precisely an act of representation and an assumption of universality that can be associated with the notion of the people. ‘The multitude can be seen, in these terms, as a state or metonymy of the people, or even as an internal moment/possibility’ (p. 179). Katsambekis uses the example of theaganaktismenoi movement in Greece, from May to July 2011, as an example of this collective performative production of the multitudinous people, emphasising its horizontal, democratic, participatory character and the emergence of a collective ‘we’. In this sense, Katsambekis insists ‘we can even go as far as to suggest that theaganaktismenoi constitute a form of progressive democraticpopulism in its purest form’ (pp. 183–4). Consequently, the notion of the multitudinous people expresses precisely this ‘inescapable slippage between people and multitude, already inherent in the conception of the “people”’. The people becomes less a reality and more a ‘constantpolitical project […] advancing […] an endless struggle for democracy’ (p. 187). This is indeed an interesting approach in order to combine the multitudinous character of contemporary mass mobilisation and the emergence of a certain notion of the people as a collective subject. However, especially regarding movements such as theaganaktismenoi in Greece, more attention is needed regarding the class composition of such movements and how they represent an alliancein actu of the working classes, with youths, with petit-bourgeois strata, in their common struggle against austerity.

The contribution by Andy Knott attempts a comparison of the positions of Laclau on the one hand, and Hardt and Negri on the other, regarding representation and political space using UK Uncut and Occupy as examples. Beginning with a reference to the relation between political space and representation, Knott stresses the persistence of spatial references in the work of Laclau leading to ‘both a pluralization and a complexification of political space’ (p. 193). However, ‘such spaces are never purely self-contained – they are never a pure particularity – but, rather, attempt to establish relations with other political spaces’ (p. 194). It is here that the possibility of representation emerges, despite Laclau and Mouffe’s initial rejection of representation in favour of articulation. However, since for Laclau the end of representation is full emancipation and a powerless society, and given the impossibility of this, relations of representation are inevitable, although we must ‘speak of representations in the plural’ (p. 197), whose expansion means that alternative political forms, apart from the political party, also emerge, as exemplified in movements such as Occupy and UK Uncut. Regarding the work of Antonio Negri, Knott stresses that, although there are not so many spatial references, in fact the transition from the mass worker to the social worker is also a change of topos in the sense of an exit from the factory. Spatial references are more prominent inEmpire, with its references to the deterritorialised space of the Empire and the metropolis as the site of bio-political production. In recent Hardt and Negri texts representation is linked only to a territorialising logic of sovereignty, meaning that in their work ‘[t]here are never representations in the plural […,] the concept of representation is necessarily associated with that of the transcendent One’ (p. 203). However, this means that ‘the application of a non-representational form of politics remains problematic’ (p. 204).

Knott then turns his attention to UK Uncut and Occupy as new forms of political space. He insists that ‘UK Uncut serves as yet another example of the expansion of the political space’ (p. 206) by subverting the role and function of retail outlets. In its turn, ‘Occupy sought to (re)appropriate public space, primarily through encampments which aimed to practice and promote open, participatory democratic forms and debate’ (p. 207). In contrast to the anti-representational positions of Hardt and Negri, and more in support of Laclau’s problematisation of representation, ‘these expanded political spaces, and their representative role, serve as an addendum to the traditional form of representation associated with liberal democracy’ (p. 209). What we have here is not only a defence of Laclau’s theorisation of representation, but also an important contribution to the importance of political space in the emergence of new collective movements.

The final contribution to the volume is by Marina Prentoulis and Lasse Thomassen, and attempts to consider the notions of autonomy and hegemony in regard to the 2011 protests in Greece and Spain. For Prentoulis and Thomassen the fact that the movements of indignation in Greece and Spain both rejected traditional party (and left-wing party) politics and sought new forms of representation implies that a ‘dialogue between hegemony and autonomy is necessary in order to grasp the movements of the squares’ (p. 214), overcoming the mutual suspicion of these two political logics, in both Marxism and anarchism. Beginning with the exemplification in post-Marxism of this opposition in the contrasting theorisations offered by Laclau and Hardt/Negri, they attempt to see the different interpretations of the movements of the squares either as emphasis on the need to transform themselves into a collective will, or as stressing their horizontal and leaderless character, or as bringing forward the fundamental antagonisms traversing contemporary societies. Consequently, the political challenge is ‘how these struggles can be connected or united, in a way that does not do violence to the singularity of the particular struggles, while also establishing some relation among the struggles’ (p. 218), something evident in the difficulties facing these movements regarding the creation of media forms that would not distort their voices or create centralised forms of communication. Regarding the movements in both Greece and Spain, they stress that in both cases ‘potentially universally inclusive signifiers’ (p. 224) emerged, enabled by the creation of an ‘antagonistic frontier vis-à-vis an “other”’ (p. 225), such as the Troika in Greece or national elites in Spain. However, in their organisational structure we can witness the ‘mutual contamination of horizontality and verticality, and of autonomy and hegemony’ (p. 226). Regarding the logic of hegemony, this emerges especially in the attempts to transform the social and political dynamics of the movements into electoral dynamics, exemplified in the metonymic displacements that led to the political and electoral prominence of SYRIZA, without reducing the reproduction of the tensions of the two logics. However, it is important to go beyond the simple opposition between autonomy and hegemony, since ‘in Laclau and Mouffe’s variant, the concept of hegemony can account for horizontal and autonomist struggles as the latter are always contaminated by vertical and representational relations’ (p. 231), while at the same time experiments in horizontality and autonomy also ‘influence the direction of democratic politics in a more radical direction’ (p. 232). Again, we have here a reference to the complexity of the collective politics of such movements that cannot be theorised by a simple dichotomy between autonomy and hegemony. However, again we face the question of the relation between the emergence of these movements and class relations, alliances and strategies.

An Assessment

It is obvious that we are dealing here with an important volume, not only because of the significance of the contemporary movements that form its reference point, but also because of the theoretical questions posed here. Of particular importance is this dialogue between, on the one hand, the problematic of hegemony, representation and populism in the work of Laclau and Mouffe, and on the other the new emphasis on autonomy in the work of Hardt and Negri but also in other recent neo-anarchist positions. The importance of this volume lies precisely in the fact that it does not only present the variations of a theoretical debate, but also engages in a dialogue with contemporary movements in their originality.

Moreover, the different positions presented here are not only expressions of different conceptual frameworks or theories but also of different directions within radical social theory when faced with the interpretation of such forms of mass-politics. On the one hand, we have all the emphasis on singular resistances and movements, in their insurrectionary potential that forms the basis of the interventions of Arditi, Day and Montgomery, and Newman; interventions that, at the same time, bring forward the limits of the negation of the hegemonic aspect of the politics of emancipation. On the other hand, the interventions that stress the importance of the hegemonic articulation of the notion of the people in contemporary movements, such as the ones by Stavrakakis, Prentoulis and Thomassen, tend to give less importance to the relation between hegemonic projects and class strategies. In his turn, Knott combines the reference to representation with the importance of the creation of political spaces, whereas Rekret’s intervention is interesting in this sense because it underlines the fact that a certain degree of ontological thinking is common to both approaches. Inside the dialogue between these different approaches, the interventions by Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis attempt a more complex approach that combines the emphasis on the singularity of resistances with the importance of the hegemonic instance and a certain notion of the people, whereas Dean attempts an interesting rereading of the notion of the people as part of a communist perspective.

If we try to reflect upon this debate we can see that there is a tension running through it. On the one hand, there is the need to ground the formation of social agents in the dynamics and antagonisms of capitalist production, both in the sense of the classical Marxist emphasis on class determination and of Negri’s conception of an immanent political potentiality of the forces of labour. On the other hand, there is the realisation that political mobilisation is never simply a reflection of the antagonisms at the level of production, but is always formed through forms of political metonymy and condensation, or what Althusser already in the 1960s defined as overdetermination.[21] It is here that the dialogue with the Gramscian conception of hegemony enters the stage.

At the same time, this volume brings forward the limits of remaining within the framework of this tension. I am not denying that in a certain sense this tension can be found even in classical Marxism exemplified, as Étienne Balibar has shown, in the discrepancy between the proletariat as potentially political collective force and labour as part of the constitutive antagonistic relation at the heart of capitalist production and reproduction.[22] However, to take this discrepancy as given and remain within its contours can only lead to dichotomies such as the one between the Multitude and the People. These dichotomies cannot be superseded by simply subsuming one term to the other, either by treating the People as a simple reflection of the forces of labour in contemporary capitalist production or by treating the Multitude as, basically, a politically performative concept. The reason is that such a dichotomy only reproduces the limitations of both perspectives. On the one hand, any attempt towards thinking in terms of an immanent grounding of collective subjects in the antagonisms of capitalist production runs the risk of essentialism and leaves no room for political practice other than simply helping the emergence of teleologically determined eventualities. From classical Hegelian-Marxist or Stalinist narratives of the primacy of the forces of production to Negri’s conception of biopolitical production, there is always the danger of a theorisation of a teleology inscribed in capitalist production as the constant production of its inescapable opposite, precisely something that represents historicism in the negative sense that had been the target of Althusser’s critique.

On the other hand, the complete delinking of politics from production-based social antagonisms, especially in the case of the work of Laclau, runs the risk, despite Laclau’s numerous warnings, of treating politics as a fully autonomous sphere, with no other determination than the constitutive lack and antagonism in social practices as discursive practices. It is true that Laclau tried at length to insist that his own notion of discourse refers mainly to the relational and articulated character of social practices, but still the problem of treating politics as a signifying process remains. Or to put it differently, the fact that politics includes signifying practices does not mean that politics is a signifying process. In this sense, Rancière’s conception of the People as the part of those that are not part has the theoretical advantage of including a reference not only to political non-representation, but also to class domination and exclusion. Moreover, the tendency to treat forms of collective mobilisation, such as the ones that we have experienced in the past few years, as mainly processes of political performativity and signification indeed runs the risk of obliterating the importance of class analysis and of class strategies in contemporary debates regarding the politics of both movements and left-wing fronts.

Moreover, this book brings forward some crucial theoretical and, in the last instance, political problems. One is the opposition between hegemony and post-hegemony. Here the very notion of hegemony in a large part of the debate misses all the complexity of the Gramscian notion of hegemony.[23] Instead, hegemony is either identified with the emphasis on consent alongside coercion, or with the relative autonomy of the political, or with its necessarily metonymical, symbolic and discursive character. Consequently, post-hegemony is identified in fact with anti-politics, with the return to the real of social antagonism and the potentiality of the Multitude. What is missing is precisely the relational and strategic character of the notion of hegemony as an attempt to think political power, class antagonism and transformation in class societies. In its original Gramscian formulation, hegemony cannot be reduced to the terrain of discourse, or ideology, or of politics as representation. Gramsci’s constant references to the grounding of hegemony in all aspects of social praxis, including the antagonisms within capitalist production, his attention to ‘molecular’ social and political practices, his interest in the hegemonic aspects of emerging capitalist regimes of accumulation as exemplified in his interest in ‘Americanism’ and ‘Fordism’, all these attest to the limits of treating hegemony in discursive or performative terms.

In this sense, it is still necessary to retrace what Balibar defined as Marx’s theoretical short-circuit between production and politics, which did not imply a simple grounding of politics in the economy or a conception of politics as the epiphenomenon of the economic essence but rather a different conception of both economy and politics. Within this context, the economy becomes a terrain of political struggles, the political a terrain of antagonisms that have to do with class strategies that in the last instance relate to antagonistic positions on the terrain of production. Moreover, a different conception of political practice emerges, a new practice of politics, a politics of labour, a politics that suggests: ‘(1) the political power of the workers (or better, of citizens in as much as they are workers); (2) the transformation of the forms of labour through political struggle; and (3) the transformation of forms of “government” by the recognition of labor-power’s capacities to expand (unlike productivism which represses such capacities)’.[24] This new practice of politics, based upon this ‘short-circuit’ between the economic and the political in capitalism, is – in a certain way – the answer to the dichotomy between stressing the political instance, as the terrain of the emergence of hegemony, and stressing social potentiality at the level of social production. What this conception of a new practice politics offers is, in a certain way, a combined socialisation of politics and politicisation of the social that enables us to think movements of emancipation as at the same time processes of political constitution and social transformation.

The other crucial problem is the danger of reducing the political alternatives to the opposition between a neo-anarchist emphasis on social movements, in their nomadic horizontality and refusal of political mediation, and a neo-populist conception of radical democratic politics aiming at the formation of broad political movements organised around the reappropriation of signifiers such as democracy, dignity and sovereignty. What is missing in this opposition is precisely the class-strategic character of (counter)hegemonic projects, its relation to the contradictions of capitalist accumulation and contemporary forms of imperialism, the necessity to rethink radical democracy in its relation to socialist transformation. And this can also have serious political consequences. The example of Greece and the experience of SYRIZA show that the simple translation of social dynamics into political representation by means of a broad anti-austerity front, based upon the new discursive constructions of the people emerging from the movement, does not of itself constitute a new hegemonic project. This would have required a more ‘organic relation’ to particular social movements and class practices and a programme that transforms the demand for democracy or dignity into a new narrative antagonistic to the dominant capitalist strategy and the embedded neoliberalism of the European integration process.

But what about the People, this ‘we’ that emerges in contemporary movements, if we avoid treating it as a simple metonym for the Multitude, or the Labour Force, or the Proletariat, and also refuse to treat it as the contingent outcome of the interplay in the chain of political signifiers? I think that it is here where the very notion of hegemony in its Gramscian sense arises. In contrast to the version of hegemony offered in the work of Laclau, which in a certain way presents hegemony as simply the political/discursive aspect of social relationality, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony refers to the complexity of political power and its strategic relational character while retaining the connection between hegemonic projects and class positions and antagonisms. In this sense, the People, at least as regards capitalist societies, is not just a metonym for the plebeian or excluded social strata, but instead refers to the potentially hegemonic role of the working classes and their ability to forge a broader alliance of the subaltern classes around a common project that attempts to undermine bourgeois hegemony and open up new possibilities of socialist transformation. To this we could also add another strategic concept: that of the historic bloc, that refers precisely to the combination between a social alliance, a hegemonic project and new forms of organisation, of doing politics.[25]

In light of this, the particularity and the importance of contemporary movements is that they are not simple expressions of social and political contestation. Nor can they be described in terms of simple nomadic practices and resistances. The references to social majority, not only the reclaiming of public space but also the demand for a central political role, the demand for radical solutions, the demand for dignity and democracy as active opposition to neoliberalism, the demand for popular sovereignty as a class project, all these attest to the emergence of potential new historical blocs. Rethinking hegemony requires us to think of the historical bloc as a strategic and not descriptive notion. It points to the need to rethink the political programme as radical alternative, to the importance of forms of collective organisation of the subaltern classes, to the necessity of political forms that can help the emergence of new forms of mass-political intellectuality.

Consequently, the challenge is not simply to oppose the horizontal to the vertical forms of organisation, or to think in terms of oppositions between the new forms of democracy of struggle and the potential political or even electoral translation of the new movements, or in terms of an opposition between politics and anti-politics. What is needed is to think in terms of a new practice of politics. One that could combine the challenge of political power with the emphasis on autonomous democratic forms of popular organisation which could offer the surplus of force ‘from below’ to counter the capitalist strategies that are inscribed in the very materiality of state institutions and practices, thus extending the potential of contemporary democratic practices in the movements. Moreover, this also requires strategic answers to the question of political strategy and programmes, in order to make sure that we are not dealing simply with a list of grievances but with elaborated alternative anticapitalist narratives for our societies. The contradictions and shortcomings of any attempt to simply translate movement dynamics and demands into electoral dynamics without autonomous forms of popular organisation and without elaboration of the conditions for an alternative programme were more than obvious in the Greek case. This also requires that we treat contemporary movements as learning practices, both in relation to the elaboration of alternative social configurations and in relation to the emergence of new democratic practices.

However, these points should not be read as an attempt to underestimate the scope of this collective volume. In contrast, they point to its importance and usefulness, as a contribution to an open debate that is not only theoretical but also political.

References

Abensour, Miguel 2011, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, translated by Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Althusser, Louis 1969, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Allen Lane.

Arditi, Benjamin 2007, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Balibar, Étienne 1994, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, London: Routledge.

Beasley-Murray, Jon 2010, Post-Hegemony: Political Theory and Latin America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bey, Hakim 1991, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchism, Poetic Terrorism, New York: Autonomedia.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980, Gramsci and the State, translated by David Fernbach, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Day, Richard F. 2005, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, London: Pluto Press.

Dean, Jodi 2012, The Communist Horizon, London: Verso.

Geras, Norman 1987, ‘Post-Marxism?’, New Left Review, I, 163: 40–82.

Geras, Norman 1988, ‘Ex-Marxism without Substance? Being a Real Reply to Laclau and Mouffe’, New Left Review, I, 169: 34–61.

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2004, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Books.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2009, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2012, Declaration, New York: Argo-Navis Author Services.

Howarth, David, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds.) 2000, Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto 2005, On Populist Reason, London: Verso.

Laclau, Ernesto 2015 [2003], ‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?’, in Post-Marxism, Populism and Critique, edited by David Howarth, Abingdon: Routledge.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, First Edition, London: Verso.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1987, ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’, New Left Review, I, 166: 79–106.

Lash, Scott 2007, ‘Power After Hegemony: Cultural Politics in Mutation?’, Theory, Culture and Society, 24, 3: 55–78.

Mouffe, Chantal 2013, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso.

Rancière, Jacques 1995, On the Shores of Politics, translated by Liz Heron, London: Verso.

Rancière, Jacques 1999, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julian Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rancière, Jacques 2001, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory and Event, 5, 3, <http://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028>.

Rancière, Jacques 2006, Hatred of Democracy, translated by Steve Corcoran, London: Verso.

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2014, ‘Gramsci et la stratégie de la gauche contemporaine: le « bloc historique » comme concept stratégique’, Période, available at: <http://revueperiode.net/gramsci-et-la-strategie-de-la-gauche-contemporaine-le-bloc-historique-comme-concept-strategique/>, accessed 20 August 2015.

Stavrakakis, Yannis 1999, Lacan and the Political, Abingdon: Routledge.

Stavrakakis, Yannis 2007, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Thomas, Peter D. 2009, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

[1] Hardt and Negri 2000; Hardt and Negri 2004; Hardt and Negri 2009.

[2] ‘Instead revolution must simultaneously be both insurrection and institution, structural and superstructural transformation. This is the path of the “becoming-Prince” of the multitude.’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 367.)

[3] Rancière 1995; Rancière 1999; Rancière 2001; Rancière 2006.

[4] In particular in Laclau 2005.

[5] Mouffe 2013.

[6] For Stavrakakis’s theoretical contributions, see Stavrakakis 1999; Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis (eds.) 2000; Stavrakakis 2007.

[7] Laclau 2005, p. 117.

[8] Laclau 2005, p. 110.

[9] Laclau and Mouffe 1985.

[10] Laclau 2015, p. 216.

[11] For Arditi’s positions, see also Arditi 2007.

[12] Bey 1991.

[13] For Day’s neo-anarchist positions, see Day 2005.

[14] Which is based upon a chapter of her Communist Horizon (Dean 2012).

[15] Rancière 2001.

[16] On the notion of insurgent democracy, see Abensour 2011.

[17] For the dialogue between Geras and Laclau & Mouffe, see Geras 1987, Geras 1988, and Laclau and Mouffe 1987.

[18] Lash 2007.

[19] Beasley-Murray 2010.

[20] Hardt and Negri 2012.

[21] Althusser 1969.

[22] Balibar 1994, pp. 125–49.

[23] Gramsci 1971; Buci-Glucksmann 1980; Thomas 2009.

[24] Balibar 1994, p. 141.

[25] On this reading of the historical bloc, see Sotiris 2014.

A Review of Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman

Eric Loefflad

Department of Law, University of Kent

edl4@kent.ac.uk

Abstract

While the Sino-Soviet spilt may have been one of the largest Left political schisms in history, comprehensive analysis of it is relatively rare. In this review-essay on Jeremy Friedman’s detailed historical account Shadow Cold War, the context and contemporary relevance of these events are thoroughly engaged. Towards this end, particular focus is placed upon Friedman’s depiction of a predominantly ‘anti-capitalist’ Soviet strategy and a predominantly ‘anti-imperialist’ Chinese strategy. Here an application of international legal theory as an analytical lens provides contextualisation of the historically contingent construction of ‘anti-capitalist’ versus ‘anti-imperialist’ strategies, as well as an explanation as to how the existing order’s rules and structures contributed to the contentious division between these two revolutionary movements.

Keywords

Cold War – international law – sovereignty – revolution – Soviet Union – People’s Republic of China – Third World – decolonisation

Jeremy Friedman, (2015) Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Introduction

In Shadow Cold War, historian Jeremy Friedman provides a rigorous and comprehensive account of the Sino-Soviet split in relation to Soviet and Chinese competition for influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with a core analytical focus on 1956–76. In framing this account, Friedman’s central point is that while both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’) were opposed to the Western capitalist order, their strategies differed in deeply consequential ways. This divergence is analysed under the banner of ‘Two Revolutions’, whereby the Soviet agenda was predominantly ‘anti-capitalist’ and the Chinese agenda was predominantly ‘anti-imperialist’. According to Friedman, when it came to building alliances with Third World states and national liberation movements in the era of decolonisation, these two revolutionary approaches addressed different issues, called for different tactics, and together form a vital, yet neglected, vantage point for understanding conflict and ideology during the Cold War.

          In terms of the substantive divergence that justifies this ‘Two Revolutions’ label, for Friedman the Soviet Union’s predominantly ‘anti-capitalist’ approach could be viewed as confronting the primary problem of inequality within nations (with the issue of Western dominance being a consequence of capitalism’s expansive logic). As such, the solution consisted in transforming global relations of production through proletariat self-organisation within the world’s most advanced economic sectors. This was to be achieved by the promotion of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’, whereby the possibility of armed confrontation amongst the ideologically divergent superpowers would be displaced into the realm of competing socioeconomic models. By contrast, the PRC’s predominantly ‘anti-imperialist’ approach could be viewed as confronting the primary problem of inequalitybetween nations (with the issue of capitalism’s dominance being a consequence of Western imperialism). Under this view, the solution was to establish the colonised/postcolonial world as a base of global power capable of actively confronting the West. The intended mode of achieving this being militant ‘anti-imperialism’, whereby foreign influence was to be expunged in order to create the conditions whereby the non-Western world could pursue its destiny unimpeded.

Shadow Cold War’s Account

As a preliminary matter, an overview of Friedman’s account is in order. In terms of structure Shadow Cold War is divided into seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. While the introduction and conclusion provide theoretical reflections on the respective origins and legacies of the ‘two revolutions’, the five substantive chapters detail the specific instances of interaction between Third World states/liberation movements and the Soviet and Chinese governments from 1956 to 1976. In capturing the uniqueness of this history, Friedman’s treatment of the United States, while acknowledging its importance, is minimal for two reasons: ‘The first is that far more scholarship is available on its role in the Third World than on the Soviets or Chinese, and this book seeks to help bridge that gap. On a deeper level, however, the attention given to the United States is limited because this book is about the policy and ideological debates on the left, among those who already took the role of Washington as the leader of the imperialist powers to be axiomatic.’ (p. 22.) In making his argument, Friedman draws upon an impressive array of archival materials from ten different nations. Thus,Shadow Cold War provides an invaluable resource for those undertaking detailed contextual study of Cold War political/diplomatic interaction.

According to Shadow Cold War’s historical narrative, the Russian Revolution occurred with the expectation that the revolutionary current would move westward through Europe. This is reflected in the fact that ‘[m]any of the key figures of the Bolshevik Revolution – Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and others – spent most of the decade before 1917 in European exile, in constant contact with their French and German comrades and viewing Russia from a distance.’ (p. 7.) Given its failure to spread in this capacity, it was only after the Second World War that the Soviet Union actively sought alliances with non-European revolutionary forces. In this context, early interactions between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’) were largely characterised by Soviet patron and Chinese client status. However, largely through the efforts of Mao, the PRC ultimately asserted an alternative revolutionary approach that drew upon its colonial experience and placed primacy on differences between European colonisers and the people they ruled.

This approach reflected two elements: a nationalist desire to incorporate as much of the nation as possible in the effort to build ‘New China’ and a consequent shift in the notion of class from one built strictly on one’s relations to the means of production to a more a more malleable one based on loyalty to the political system and its ideology. (p. 11.)

While largely concealed by the display of a united front against the capitalist powers, Shadow Cold War’s first chapter shows how these ideological tensions became increasingly unavoidable in the late 1950s. This was motivated immensely by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 statement calling for ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ between the Soviets and the West that ‘… dispensed with the traditional Leninist notion that war between capitalism and socialism was ultimately inevitable’ (p. 25). While the PRC’s initial internal instability and lack of broad international influence limited its immediate ability to contest this idea, it became increasingly clear that ‘China’s priority was to unite as much of the world as possible in a broad anti-imperialist coalition for the sake of confronting the West.’ (p. 40.) In this capacity it was ‘meticulously analyzing class origins of individual leaders, class compositions of movements and regimes in order to better understand which leaders, movements, and states could be expected to be reliably anti-imperialist …’ (p. 40.) From this basis, Friedman shows how this tense dynamic manifested in a wide array of Soviet and Chinese interactions with Third World actors whereby ‘Sino-Soviet divisions exploded into the open in the spring and summer of 1960’ (p. 51).

          From here, Chapter Two details how contentions were furthered when in 1961 the Soviet Union began to apply the originally Western-focused project of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ in the postcolonial world by promoting socialist socio-economic development projects. While the Soviets were able to take advantage of colonialism-based anti-capitalist sentiments, its own approach of ‘scientific socialism’ had to adapt to popular local projects ‘… ranging from Nasser’s “Arab Socialism” to Nkrumah’s “African Socialism”’ (p. 70). Moreover, in the process of doing so, the Soviets were competing with a West pursuing its own development agenda. It was thus hoped that ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ could be pursued through competing socio-economic models as opposed to armed confrontation. However, as Friedman shows, such a path alienated national liberation movements. This provided an audience for the PRC strategy of externally opposing the US and international organisations (especially the UN) ‘and internally in terms of expelling all Western influence at any cost’ (p. 86). Against this backdrop, much emphasis is given to the PRC’s propagandistic usage of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Here ‘[t]he image of the small, heroic island of Cuba facing the full might of the American imperial colossus, willing to risk annihilation in the cause of socialism, only to be betrayed by the cowards in the Kremlin, had captured the world’s attention and seemed to distil into its purest form everything the Chinese had been saying about the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence and its consequences for world revolution.’ (p. 96.) Thus the Soviet Union was forced to choose between furthering Peaceful Coexistence via development or world revolution via militant decolonisation.

          Following this, Chapter Three explains how by 1963 underlying tensions manifested in a highly visible Sino-Soviet split whereby ‘… Moscow and Beijing were left with no alternatives to a naked competition for influence’ (p. 102). Here, Friedman explains how the Soviets sought to limit Chinese-inspired diversion from their anti-capitalist agenda by replacing local nationalistic assertions with ‘revolutionary democracy’, whereby nationalist consolidation would go hand-in-hand with building transnational class solidarity. In addressing charges of ‘white interference’ in the non-European world, the Soviets sought to portray themselves as non- or quasi-Western and emphasised their Central Asian projects to show their model’s applicability to non-European societies. However, despite these efforts, Soviet success was limited by an influential Chinese diplomatic campaign that took advantage of Third World resentment at Soviet paternalism and concerns of future Soviet betrayal through an ultimate rapprochement with the colonial powers. These diplomatic endeavours were furthered by the articulation of a Chinese alternative to the Soviet development model that placed primacy on economic autonomy as opposed to building socialism, expanding production as opposed to equitable distribution of ownership over the means of production, and light industry and agriculture as opposed to heavy industry. Through these tactics, the PRC was able to compensate for a massive gap in military and economic aid compared to the Soviet Union. However, circumstances dramatically changed with the ousting of Khrushchev by Leonid Brezhnev, who was more concerned with establishing Soviet leadership over the world revolution than preserving the project of Peaceful Coexistence. This led to substantial Soviet engagement in numerous anti-imperialist activities in the mid-1960s, especially in the UAR (United Arab Republic), Algeria and Indonesia.

          While the Soviet Union had committed itself to militant anti-colonial struggle largely in response to pressure from the PRC, Chapter Four details this dynamic in light of the PRC’s Cultural Revolution. While this event led to a mass diplomatic recall and prolonged Chinese absence from world affairs, this did not allow the Soviets to institute an unadulterated return to their previous strategy. For, ‘[t]he newly militant Soviet anti-imperialist policy had created certain expectations among friends and foes alike and backtracking would be difficult, if not impossible.’ (p. 155.) As an expression of this new militancy, earlier policies of economic development were subordinated to political/ideological initiatives, largely centred around national Communist parties. Towards this end, Soviet scholars portrayed the Cultural Revolution as the logical result of an ‘ideological heresy’ within Marxism that posed ‘… a particular danger for countries that had only just recently liberated themselves on the back of nationalist movements’ (p. 162). However, asserting this disciplinary role also meant increased Soviet entanglement in complex situations, including the Arab–Israeli Conflict and the Vietnam War, where Chinese influence continued to resonate. Yet, while the Soviet embrace of anti-imperialism strengthened its claim to world-revolutionary leadership, it nonetheless detracted from the Soviets’ Western-oriented strategy and greatly entrenched their commitments in a Third World where their influence was limited.

          In Chapter Five, Shadow Cold War’s core account concludes with the early 1970s, when formal decolonisation had been largely accomplished. As a result of this change, the greater Third World project shifted from armed struggle to transforming the global mechanisms of resource production/distribution. Within this timeframe the Soviet Union’s Third World strategy was deeply influenced by the 1971 election of Salvador Allende in Chile, which led to the articulation of an ‘electoral path to socialism’. However, such endeavours that fixated on inequalities within nations had to contend with the rise of dependency-theory, which offered an account of inequalities between nations that, absent systemic re-ordering, could persist indefinitely after formal colonisation had ended.

For the Soviets dependency theory presented two major problems. First, it diminished the role of domestic political and economic transformations in favour of an analysis based on global mechanisms. Second, it divided the world not between East and West, socialism and capitalism, but between the ‘poor South’ and the ‘rich North,’ which once again separated the socialist and developing worlds and grouped the Soviets with the capitalist powers. (p. 193.)

Moreover, the PRC’s 1971 re-emergence onto the international stage and assumption of roles within international organisations (which included a seat on the UN Security Council) led many to believe it would assert itself as the leader of the new distribution-focused Third World agenda that was rallying around the New International Economic Order proposals. Furthermore, ambivalence concerning new Third World projects coupled with militant commitments led the Soviets to double-down on supporting the few remaining armed contestations linked to the original cause of world revolution, particularly in southern Africa and Palestine. While Chinese links with Israel and Apartheid South Africa fatally damaged claims to the mantle of revolutionary leadership, the PRC’s newfound coexistence with the West and international standing caused it to pursue its interests in a decidedly de-radicalised capacity. The Soviets, on the other hand, continued with militant anti-imperialism, yet dwindling resources and multiple tensions led it to draw clear distinctions in giving its support to Third World states firmly within the socialist camp – ‘Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Yemen, etc.’ (p. 214) – as opposed to those who were not. In this way, the Soviet endeavour of working towards a united revolutionary Second–Third World front broke down and the Third World was left divided.

          In concluding, Friedman explains how the Soviet continuation with militant struggle in the Third World fuelled its internal contradictions and hastened its decline. Thus, by the early 1990s when Soviet collapse drew near, ‘leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle, which Moscow fought so hard for, became not only unnecessary, but also a liability and a rueful memory.’ (p. 221.) As for the PRC, despite turning away from world revolution, it maintained an independent, anti-imperial stance and thus (in stark contrast to locations such as post-1989 Eastern Europe) was able to incorporate capitalist practices on its own terms. As a final note, Friedman views the lesson of Shadow Cold War as a confluence between the demand for dignified existence amongst those emerging from colonialism and the fact that both the Soviet Union and PRC could strategically promote methods of addressing these demands. Given that such demands still exist the world over, we can expect continued attempts to implement solutions.

‘Anti-Capitalism’ versus ‘Anti-Imperialism’ through an International Legal Lens

In assessing Shadow Cold War, a key point warranting careful attention is the book’s structuring dichotomy of ‘anti-capitalism’ versus ‘anti-imperialism’. As a preliminary matter, it must be noted that Friedman provides no indication he is writing as a Marxist and his method appears that of a conventional, context-focused political/diplomatic historian. Thus, he does not engage with the broad tradition of Marxian theories focused on the inter-relationships between capitalism and imperialism. Rather, for Friedman, questions of ‘anti-capitalism’ versus ‘anti-imperialism’ are depicted in a capacity that is relative and contextually-limited to the immediate actions/perceptions of stakeholders participating in the Sino-Soviet split. While Marxist debates on the relationship between capitalism and imperialism are mentioned for their contextual value, their broader implications are generally left unexplored. However, in his documentation of recurring arguments emanating from official channels in the Soviet Union, the PRC and various Third World states, Friedman does make a convincing case that many of the actors involved understood the Sino-Soviet split in such dichotomous terms.

          Yet, when it comes to critically theorising why this precise variation of ‘anti-capitalism’ versus ‘anti-imperialism’ came to define Sino-Soviet relations during this book’s prescribed timeframe, a key task is to account for contingency in light of the constraints of existing structures. After all, the Soviets and the Chinese where neither bound by their ideologies as matters of essential truth, nor were they radically free agents somehow existing outside the institutions of the global order they sought to transform. Thus, when accounting for why the Sino-Soviet spilt manifested itself along the precise lines in which it did, a theory of the larger global order’s inherited structures and their variable catalysing functions is in order. Such an account would certainly provide a resource for those seeking to apply the lessons of this era while avoiding the divisive pitfalls which helped to derail so many revolutionary aspirations. It is in this capacity that Marxist theories of (anti-)capitalist-(anti-)imperialist co-constitution largely absent from Shadow Cold War can be mobilised to interpret the events this book so rigorously depicts. Yet, given the numerous issues that can be analysed within the scope of this theoretical tradition, which precise structural constraints should provide an analytical entry-point?

          In light of this question, while in no way the only avenue, international legal theory provides a comprehensive lens for contextualising the distinct ideological formations presented in Shadow Cold War. While international law is certainly not Friedman’s explicit focus, engagement with it opens the door to a deep systematic analysis of his ‘Two Revolutions’ framework. For in considering the challenges presented to both the Soviet Union and the PRC, in the words of Barry Buzan and George Lawson: ‘… there is a great paradox at the heart of the relationship between revolutionary states and international society – revolutionary states must establish relations with other states and coexist with the system’s rules, laws and institutions even while professing to reject these practices.’^[1] This core premise is taken to an entirely new level of complexity when the transformative force of decolonisation becomes the object of focus. Here ‘revolution’ in the colonial world was experienced as both a multitude of localised assertions and a zeitgeist of universal upheaval that tasked its participants with the challenge of balancing the affirmation of unique identities with the embrace of all-pervasive transformation.^[2]

          Thus, in their respective leadership bids to gain influence in the decolonising/postcolonial states as a means of entrenching their preferred vision of ‘world revolution’, the Soviet Union and PRC could be viewed as the leading participants in a global ‘Inter-Revolutionary Rivalry’. Yet, when considering the operation of international law in light of this dynamic, a fundamental consideration is the emancipatory hope that many anti-colonial actors ascribed to it in support of various causes.^[3] While Third World opinions on this subject were in no way uniform, a highly influential idea was optimism that the inclusion of colonised peoples could force international law to transcend its imperial/Eurocentric bias and become truly universal.^[4] Thus, while extensive Marxist critiques of international law’s bourgeois nature were asserted by both Soviet and Chinese communist jurists,^[5] the hopes of a reformed international legal order amongst Third World actors, to whom both factions contentiously appealed, incentivised them to reinterpret/modify such positions.^[6]

          However, when appraising the logic of the international legal order in this context, a core feature to account for is its perpetual balancing of sovereign autonomy on the one hand and the facilitation of institutionalised international interaction on the other. This tension gives rise to structural indeterminacy where, in the absence of a centralised enforcement mechanism capable of resolution, international legal discourse perpetually oscillates between arguments for preserving the existing order and arguments for building a future ‘global community’.^[7] That said, by virtue of this indeterminacy, any attempts to use international legal argument to promote a radical agenda can be contested in a manner that is equally valid within the confines of international law’s internal logic.^[8] This ability of the existing order to constrain challenges through international legal counter-claims was a persistent presence in the decolonisation context.^[9] Against this backdrop, the ever-shifting multitude of revolutionary activity strengthened arguments that the system’s established rules needed to be fundamentally affirmed in order to provide stabilising coherence in the face of advancing chaos.^[10]

          Beyond this base-level indeterminacy, there is also the deeper issue of legal argument’s abstraction of actually-existing social relations through its production of fictitious ‘legal persons’ ideologically severed from their generative material conditions.^[11] Thus while materially-rooted interests produce the impetus for specifically characterising issues as ‘legal’, the determination of the precise material interests at stake in such contestations is actively obscured by this process of juridical abstraction.^[12] This is especially true of international law, where ‘legal persons’ are sovereign states whose lack of any overarching authority structure renders enforcement of obligations matters of ‘self-help’ that can only justified by affirming their sovereign status.^[13] While contradictions growing out of this concealment of materiality through international legalist abstraction have long been identified in the context of ‘Inter-Imperial Rivalry’,^[14] to what extent was a similar logic at play in the dynamics of ‘Inter-Revolutionary Rivalry’? Thus, the diverging trajectories of ‘anti-capitalist’ versus ‘anti-imperialist’ strategies can be vastly illuminated by analysing how the Sino-Soviet split’s key protagonists ended up unconsciously subjecting themselves to profound contradictions through their engagements with the structures of international legalism. This entails mapping the precise contradictions exposed by theorising Shadow Cold War’s foundational categories, the Soviet strategy of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ and the Chinese strategy of ‘Anti-Imperialism’, as distinctly international-legal phenomena.

The Law of Soviet ‘Peaceful Coexistence’: Between Abstracted Sovereignty and ‘Global Community’

In applying this analytical frame, an appropriate place to begin is with Friedman’s portrayal of the Soviet strategy of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’. According to his summation:

The Soviet Union’s basic focus was on lowering international tension and reducing the perceived threat of communism both in the West and in the newly emerging states…. This stance would not only raise the USSR’s international prestige, but it would also allow it to find more open doors and willing audiences for its economic advice and aid. The Soviets could then use such opportunities to promote their own political-economic approach: focus on state-controlled industrialization, long-term economic planning, construction of large enterprises of heavy industry, and nationalization of banks, transportation, and trade. According to Soviet thinking, this would inevitably lead to the growth of working class political power and organizations and ultimately produce governments more friendly to the Soviet Union, not to mention the ascendancy that such development would give the ideology of socialism around the world. (p. 39.)

While this depiction of peaceful coexistence reveals the Soviet objective of strengthening their system of political economy through a transformation of internal class structures, what must be accounted is the way in which this strategy was framed through international law,^[15] particularly its forcing of Western powers to account for their conduct in relation to their proclaimed ideals.^[16] This is certainly consistent with Shadow Cold War’s argument that the original Soviet strategy was directed to the West in the form of both mobilising its working classes and constraining its governments. That said, it is unsurprising that following Khrushchev’s announcement of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ at the 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party ‘more works on international law appeared after … than in the preceding forty years of Soviet legal history’.^[17]

          When observing international law as a channel for ‘Peaceful Coexistence’, it becomes clear that the international legal order’s core task of balancing institutionally-facilitated international cooperation with the affirmation of state sovereignty was at the heart of Soviet strategy. One the one hand, by actively engaging with postwar international institutions, the Soviets were provided with a platform for appealing to receptive audiences in the West.^[18] In this capacity, Friedman’s observation that the Soviets sought to shift revolutionary struggle from military confrontation to competing socioeconomic models must be considered in light of the newly-formed United Nations system’s unprecedented general ban on war as a matter of national policy. One the other hand, sovereignty was of paramount value given its purpose of safeguarding a state’s absolute discretion in adopting the political/economic system of its choice. Through this understanding, any state that frustrated another’s attempt to implement the type of reforms promoted by the Soviet development model could be condemned for interference in domestic affairs and violating the postwar international order’s axiomatic pronouncement of respect for sovereign autonomy. However, this specific approach to ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ presumed that actually-existing international law was ideologically neutral enough to support an effective project of radically transforming the global class/economic system. This was not the position of earlier Soviet jurists, whose interpretation of international law as a tool of capitalist expansion cast serious doubt on its compatibility with revolutionary change.^[19]

          Yet, explaining this divergence calls for analysis of a formative Soviet development that complicates Shadow Cold War’s portrayal of Soviet ‘anti-capitalism’. For it was through these events that an intensely ‘anti-capitalist’ strategy ultimately lost to one with deep nationalistic consequences. This was the infamous schism between Leon Trotsky’s ‘Permanent Revolution’ and Joseph Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’.^[20] Under Trotsky’s theoretical framing, the Soviets inherited a ‘backwards’ situation where external pressures merged with local practices to produce the unsustainable class-based contradictions that led to revolution.^[21] Yet, this context raised the key issue of whether the Soviet Union, as a solitary actor, could continue the process of world-revolutionary transformation given its inheriting a class dynamic whereby, according to Alexander Anievas, ‘… islands of the most advanced capitalist relations and productive techniques enmeshed within a sea of feudal relations’.^[22] For Trotsky, these contradictions rendered the Soviets unable to achieve their revolutionary objectives alone and, thus, he advocated for a German revolution to capture the most advanced means of production.^[23] This point forms a major consideration in Shadow Cold War’s framing of Soviet anti-capitalism where it is noted at the onset that ‘the leaders of the Bolshevik Party believed that the survival and success of the world’s first socialist revolution depended upon its being immediately followed by socialist revolutions in more developed capitalist countries, above all Germany.’ (p. 8.)

          Yet, what must be considered in light of this foundational premise is how the triumph of Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’ model trapped Soviet anti-capitalist strategy within the ideological confines of the nation-state (i.e. an entity presumed capable of standing on its own within the international order). In an intimately related capacity, international law, as an embodiment of the existing order’s systemic constraint on revolutionary anti-capitalist transformation, must be understood as actively enabling the victory of Stalin’s vision over Trotsky’s. After all, ‘Socialism in One Country’ as a statement of absolute sovereign discretion over internal affairs is deeply consistent with international law’s foundational premises of sovereign equality, nonintervention, and toleration of ideological pluralism. By contrast, Trotskyism’s active call for exporting revolution across borders as a matter of fundamental urgency is substantially more difficult to reconcile with these principles.

          Moreover, the early Soviet Union was plagued by denials of its international legal standing. For many prominent Western international lawyers this stance was problematic given that the international legal standing of governments, even revolutionary ones, traditionally focused on determining the presence of objective territorial authority via ‘facts on the ground’ in a manner divorced from the normative/ideological considerations of those tasked with making recognition judgements.^[24] Thus, the eventual universal recognition of Stalin’s ‘facts on the ground’ could be viewed as evidence of international law’s ideological neutrality in that it ultimately accommodated membership of a system deemed repugnant to the global ruling classes. However, a necessarily corollary to this development is the reality that, while accommodating of ‘Socialism in One Country’, international law’s foundational presumption of sovereign statehood rendered Trotsky’s more radically anti-capitalist objectives beyond the pale of possibility, thus exposing clear limits to this ‘ideological neutrality’ presumption.

          Thus, Shadow Cold War’s portrayal of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ as emblematic of the Soviets’ ‘anti-capitalist’ strategy must account for the reality that ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ emerged through the failures of more radical attempts to transcend the ideological constraints of the nation-state in their quest to transform global relations of production. As for how international law concealed the contradictory foundations of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’, one need only consider the foundational international legal tension between upholding sovereign autonomy and building ‘global community’. In the realm of sovereign autonomy, this question was settled through the acceptance of ‘Socialism in One Country’ within international law’s acceptable ambit of ideological pluralism. However, on the question of building ‘global community’ along distinctly Soviet lines, this could be viewed as a channel for the ambitions of trans-border solidarity expressed through Trotsky’s vision of ‘Permanent Revolution’. Yet, given that building ‘global community’ through international law is premised on the affirmation of a system of sovereign states, the very ability of ‘Permanent Revolution’ to expose state-centric constraints on radical transformation becomes fundamentally neutralised. Thus, attempts to further creative, materially-grounded solutions through international institutions would be constrained by the contradictory reality that such solutions ultimately depended on accepting legal forms whose existence was only possible by abstracting ‘juridical persons’ from material conditions.

The Law of Chinese ‘Anti-Imperialism’: Between Solidarity and Autarky

In turning to the Chinese rejection of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ as ‘revisionist’ betrayal of anti-imperial struggle through this international legal lens, as a preliminary matter what must be considered is the PRC’s exclusion from the UN. This by extension meant exclusion from the Security Council where China’s permanent seat/veto-power remained held by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China, despite this overthrown regime’s effective presence being limited to the island of Taiwan. Furthermore, this situation was maintained through arbitrary administrative procedures difficult to reconcile with international law’s ‘non-ideological’ focus on objective territorial authority.^[25] For the Chinese, this failure emanating from novel international legal mechanisms was reflective of their national experience of historical subordination to the West facilitated through juridical innovations.^[26] Moreover, the Soviets were hamstrung in offering solidarity, for their entire strategy of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ depended upon the success of the elaborate architecture of the UN system conforming with their interpretation of its stated ideals.^[27] Thus the Chinese strategy of ‘Anti-Imperialism’ presented itself as the necessary alternative to ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ by exposing its contradictions through charges of ‘revisionism’.

          Furthermore, for the PRC, Third World projects, including the Non-Aligned Movement, seeking to use Western-created international organisations for peaceful emancipatory purposes were dangerously delusional. Here, Friedman notes Chinese contentions with Nehru’s India and Nasser’s UAR, where ‘[b]oth countries were pushing African decolonization through nonviolent means through the United Nations, a stance China found doubly troubling, not only because it would reduce the possibility for a broad militant international front against imperialism, but because it asserted the validity of a world organization from which the PRC was excluded.’ (p. 41.) This being the case, unburdened by adherence to international institutionalism as an object of idealisation premised on abstracted legal forms, the Chinese could theorise state sovereignty as the condition of political independence in a substantive capacity. Thus, ‘Anti-Imperialism’ directly confronted the historical reality of sovereignty being premised on a ‘public’/‘private’ distinction where bounded-territorial authority was decoupled from transcendent economic interests and, as such, independence was never a guarantee of material self-sufficiency.^[28]

          Such a move was consistent with China’s history whereby the very reality of formal (semi-)sovereign status, demonstrated by lack of formal conquest, led it to identify with ‘myths’ of international inclusion that actively enabled Western domination.^[29] Moreover, this position directly addressed widespread fears of ‘neocolonialism’ amongst newly independent states whose challenging path to national consolidation left them open to external predation.^[30] In succinctly encapsulating the PRC’s position on the inadequacy of formal sovereignty, Shadow Cold War quotes a 1960 statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on the Congo crisis stating that:

The Congolese and Cameroonian peoples conducting armed struggle after achieving independence are struggling between real and fake independence…. African people cannot be limited to the independence that imperialism is ready to agree to …. they need to struggle to achieve the independence imperialism opposes …. they also cannot only be limited to political independence, they will endeavor to attain economic independence. (p. 56.)

The great contradiction of this situation begins with the premise that the ultimate goal of ‘Anti-Imperialism’ is to build enduring, trans-border solidarity amongst the non-European world rendering it capable of directly challenging Western dominance. However, by adhering to the sovereign nation-state form as a necessary, albeit insufficient, means of achieving this end, individual actors were fully empowered to retreat into an isolated state of autarky as a matter of sovereign prerogative regardless of how severely this may have damaged transnational solidarity efforts. This situation was especially precarious given the tension between affirming unique identities (typically grounded in the nation-state form) versus working towards global transformation that was prevalent in the postcolonial world.^[31] Thus, revolutionary actors experienced a variant of the frustration long highlighted by liberal theorists whereby a system of law premised on relations between sovereign states constructs a barrier to building a transformative system of law premised on closer interactions between peoples.^[32] Yet, in accounting for the material conditions that made autarkic withdrawals derail the promises of solidarity, what must be considered are the internal class dynamics that informed the reception of Sino-Soviet appeals by Third World actors in this context of decolonisation.

          As a fundamental matter of context, the reality was that postcolonial states inherited economies established to produce value for a distant metropole as opposed to building self-sustaining societies. As Shadow Cold War has shown, this resulted in the inheritance of agrarian, light industrial and extractive economies with primarily peasant-based, as opposed to industrial-proletariat based, labour forces. This exposed the limits of the heavy-industry promotion envisioned by Soviet ‘Peaceful Coexistence’. These realities forced the Soviets to modify their development models given that suppressing the peasantry in the name of bolstering the industrial proletariat, along the lines of Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’,^[33] was an unpopular option in the postcolonial world. However, a key factor highly relevant to this modification of Soviet strategy was the particular nature of elite-class formation/conflict common across a highly diverse array of postcolonial settings. Here the persistence of old elites empowered by colonial systems and the emergence of new elites empowered by independence created a volatile class situation where, across a diverse array of contexts, ‘determining … [class] composition has been the major political struggle of the revolutionary and immediate post-revolutionary periods.’^[34] Thus, while Soviet ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ sought accommodation, this unique class dynamic would prove highly consequential in light of the challenge of ‘Anti-Imperialism’ and its central contradiction of solidarity versus autarky produced by the attempt to radicalise state sovereignty.

          What the PRC faced was a dilemma regarding postcolonial actors, including many in the Non-Aligned Movement, where internal class struggles between old and new postcolonial elites resulted in internationalist ambitions that were decidedly more reformist and accommodating to Western influences/institutions than what ‘Anti-Imperialism’ mandated. How could Beijing pressure these actors into adopting a more radical approach without being seen as infringing upon the ‘true’ sovereign independence that formed the touchstone of its appeal to the Third World? While condemning revisionist, de-radicalised Soviet ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ as a new manifestation of white Western interference in the non-European world was certainly one strategy, a more fundamental move involved the PRC’s high-stakes attempt to lead the world revolution by example through invoking its sovereign prerogative to fundamentally re-order its own internal society along autarkic lines. Thus, under Mao’s leadership, the PRC embarked upon the Cultural Revolution, where, in the name of purifying itself of foreign influence, diplomatic staff were recalled. The result was a general withdrawal from international affairs that reduced the Chinese attempt to lead the world revolution to little more than a propaganda-dissemination campaign.

          While a few postcolonial leaders expressed some support, Friedman makes clear that ‘[o]verall, however, the Cultural Revolution was an unmitigated disaster for Chinese foreign policy. Most Afro-Asian observers were horrified by events in China as well as offended by crude Chinese attempts to spread the Cultural Revolution abroad, and little in terms of an economic, political, or ideological model seemed attractive to Afro-Asian elites trying to build their own countries.’ (p. 155.) This general response is unsurprising given the complex, ongoing issues of inter-ruling-class rivalry in postcolonial states. Thus, through the Cultural Revolution’s pursuit of internal transformation in a manner that led to external alienation, the PRC highlighted ‘Anti-Imperialism’s’ solidarity-versus-autarky contradiction that grew out of the foundational international legal principle of sovereignty whereby states are free to form and dissolve associations for any reason regardless of the impact this may have on collective endeavours.

International Legal Theory beyond Contradiction?

When confronted with international legal contradictions that were called-out in the presumptions of Soviet ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ only to manifest differently through Chinese ‘Anti-Imperialism’, questions are raised as to what theoretical tools are needed to confront such recurring contradictions. In addressing this question, a place to begin might be the work of Chinese Marxist legal theorists who sought to develop a class-based theory of international law more sophisticated than anything their Soviet contemporaries were doing at the time. Although subject to variation, for these theorists, ‘international law’ was not a single universal system, but existed in multiple forms corresponding to class categories where an entity’s legal obligations depended upon its position within the global class structure.^[35] Some of these approaches even scrutinised the very act of formulating legal theory as a direct indication of material, class interests. Here, the reality of multiple material interests explained the contradictory existence of multiple, ostensibly valid justifications for the supposedly ‘universal’ system of international law.^[36]

          Such approaches to law had the potential to directly confront the abstraction-generating quality of legal forms that constrained the Soviets through their embrace of ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ and persisted despite their heightened commitment to militant liberation struggles. Regarding Shadow Cold War’s observation that the Soviets responded to Chinese ‘Anti-Imperialism’ by beginning to ‘… increasingly … emphasize that peaceful coexistence did not exclude armed struggle in the developing world’ (p. 109), it must be noted that in doing so they remained bound by ‘Peaceful Coexistence’s’ international legal orthodoxy despite this strategic modification. Towards this end, Soviet efforts fixated heavily on developing expansive, periphery-friendly definitions of ‘aggression’ as a fundamental international legal breach, as well as the notion of ‘wars of national liberation’ whereby anti-colonial struggles would be elevated from internal affairs of colonial powers to international conflicts, thus bestowing an enhanced degree of legal protection and legitimacy upon national-liberation fighters.^[37]

          Yet, the great pitfall here was that Western powers could condemn these assertions as attempts to politicise international law’s ‘ideologically neutral’ principles. Here, claims abounded that such definitions of ‘aggression’ were cynical attempts to exclude non-Western coercive practices,^[38] and ‘wars of national liberation’ threatened to undo progressive legal developments within the law regulating armed conflict.^[39] Such focus on symbolically powerful, yet ultimately constraining, international legal issues provides context regarding the Soviets’ bind in producing creative juridical innovations when the greater Third World struggle shifted from armed struggle to productive/distributional mechanisms in the 1970s. Thus, in considering the radical nature of international legal theories that developed in the PRC, the question arises as to what alternative institutions could have been developed based on these theories had the project of ‘Anti-Imperialism’ not succumbed to deep division triggered in great part by the solidarity/autarky contradiction.

          While the PRC’s post-Cultural Revolution re-entry onto the international stage led to a de-radicalising of its approach to international law (amongst other things),^[40] we must remember Shadow Cold War’s point that Chinese anti-imperial leadership would have been a seemingly obvious choice for a refocused Third World ‘… attempt to overturn the existing international economic order’ via the New International Economic Order (‘NIEO’) (p. 206). While this type of revolutionary leadership did not occur due to rapid Chinese rapprochement with the West, these circumstances highlight the vast degree of contingency concerning the connections between law, class, and world revolution. After all, the failures of the NIEO have been assessed as a problem of emancipatory visions being constrained by the unforeseen structures of actually-existing international legality.^[41] To some extent, these systemic barriers were recognised by the Soviets who denounced these endeavours as ‘… not yet truly “anti-imperialist” … because they did not attack the very basis of the capitalist system itself’ (p. 208). However, given that the Soviets had committed themselves to constraining structures of international legalism, they were profoundly limited in their ability to offer alternatives.

          Yet, what if the PRC’s anticipated leadership did occur and the newfound distribution-focused Third World projects were guided by the radically class-conscious approach to international law formulated by the Chinese jurists? Could such a move have exposed the constraining contradictions of international law that fundamentally divided shared revolutionary ambitions? What new contradictions might have arisen and how might they have been confronted? The centring of such questions has much to offer contemporary theorists seeking to articulate radical, class-conflict based approaches to international law.^[42] Furthermore, if these pursuits are to be historicised within the broader scheme of struggle amongst diverse revolutionary actors on a global scale, Shadow Cold War offers a vast treasure trove from which materialist accounts can be constructed. That said, questions surrounding class and international legal contradictions form only one path of exploration amongst many that stand to be expanded by this book’s profound contribution regarding the critically important, yet long-neglected, dynamic of ‘Inter-Revolutionary Rivalry’.

Acknowledgments

This piece benefitted immensely from conversations with numerous friends and colleagues, with special thanks due to Luis Eslava, Ahmed Raza Memon, Rose Sydney Parfitt, Mia Tamarin and the participants in the 2016 ‘Legacies of the Tricontinental’ conference. All errors, oversights, omissions and mischaracterisations are mine and mine alone.   

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Roth, Brad 1999, Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roth, Brad 2012, ‘Sovereign Equality and Non-Liberal Regimes’, Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, 43, 1: 25–52.

Stone, Julius 1977, ‘Hopes and Loopholes in the 1974 Definition of Aggression’, American Journal of International Law, 71, 2: 224–46.

Trotsky, Leon 2017 [1932], The History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Vamvoukos, Athanassios 1979, ‘Chinese and Soviet Attitudes toward International Law: A Comparative Approach’, Review of Socialist Law, 5, 2: 131–56.

^[1] Buzan and Lawson 2015, p. 146.

^[2] Geertz 1973, p. 240.

^[3] See Eslava, Fakhri and Nesiah (eds.) 2017.

^[4] See, for example, Anand 1971.

^[5] See Hazard 1938; Chiu 1966.

^[6] One example being the Soviet embrace of ‘national self-determination’. See Bowring 2008.

^[7] Koskenniemi 2005.

^[8] See Knox 2010, pp. 197–9.

^[9] See Pahuja 2011.

^[10] In this capacity, the fundamental international legal norms of sovereign equality and non-intervention became entrenched as a means of managing the conflicting agendas of Cold War forces. See Roth 2012, pp. 32–3.

^[11] See Knox 2016, p. 89.

^[12] See Pashukanis 1987.

^[13] Miéville 2005, pp. 135–7.

^[14] Pashukanis 2005, p. 325.

^[15] See Raimundo 1967.

^[16] McWhinney 1962.

^[17] Vamvoukos 1979, p. 136.

^[18] See Quigley 2007.

^[19] See Pashukanis 2005.

^[20] For an overview, see Anderson 1983.

^[21] Trotsky 2017, pp. 3–12.

^[22] Anievas 2014, p. 96.

^[23] Rosenberg 1996, p. 10.

^[24] See Dickinson 1931, pp. 184–5, 193.

^[25] Roth 1999, pp. 261–3.

^[26] See Craven 2005.

^[27] On Soviet hopes for the UN system, see Korovin 1946.

^[28] Rosenberg 1994, pp. 129–31.

^[29] See Li 2011.

^[30] See Nkrumah 1976.

^[31] Geertz 1973, p. 240.

^[32] Neff 1990, p. 1.

^[33] Newton 2015, pp. 165–6.

^[34] Geertz 1973, p. 236.

^[35] See Chiu 1966, pp. 245–62.

^[36] See Chiu 1966, p. 262.

^[37] Ginsburgs 1964.

^[38] Stone 1977.

^[39] See Baxter 1975.

^[40] See Kim 1987.

^[41] See Ozsu 2017.

^[42] See Chimni 2004, Rasulov 2010.

A Review of Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

Massimiliano Tomba

Department of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

mtomba@ucsc.edu

Abstract

Kristin Ross’s book on the Paris Commune points simultaneously in two directions, one historical, the other political. It is a political intervention that goes back to the Commune in order to rethink and reopen emancipatory paths after 1989 and the collapse of the idea of state-communism. It is an intervention in the field of historiography because it challenges the idea of state-communism that played an important role in the communist historiography of the Commune. These two dimensions, politics and historiography, are strictly related to each other.

Keywords

Paris Commune

Kristin Ross, (2015) Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London: Verso.

The literature on the Paris Commune is vast. It is often repetitive. Certainly, as Trotsky wrote, one looks back to the Commune whenever the question of revolution has to be reconsidered in theory and practice: ‘Each time that we study the history of the Commune we see it from a new aspect, thanks to the experience acquired by the later revolutionary struggles and above all by the latest revolutions, not only the Russian but the German and Hungarian revolutions.’[1] For Trotsky, in comparing 1871 and 1917, the central issue was the party, or the lack of the centralisation of power in the Commune. And now? Why, how and to what end should we turn back to the Commune?

The virtue of Kristin Ross’s book is that it returns to the Commune from a very new perspective. Her temporal-historical register is that of everyday life and its legacy. This is the reason why Ross looks at the Commune though the lens of actors like Gustave Lefrançais and Elisée Reclus, among others, and the legacy taken up by thinkers like Morris and Kropotkin. Ross is not interested in the question of strategy, which is usually judged by the ex post wisdom of those who blame the Commune for having been defeated. As is well known, the Commune is often accused for not having an organised party or for not seizing the Bank of France. By contrast, Ross privileges the political and social change in the temporal dimension of the everyday. Her book points out the quality of the transformations in human relations, work and art, which the communards anticipated in the everyday.

Kristin Ross’s book points simultaneously in two directions: one historical, the other political. It is a political intervention that goes back to the Commune in order to rethink and reopen emancipatory paths after 1989 and the collapse of the idea of state-communism. It is an intervention in the field of historiography because it challenges the idea of state-communism that played an important role in the communist historiography of the Commune. These two dimensions, politics and historiography, are strictly related to each other.

Benedetto Croce once stated that history is always contemporary history. He was almost right. Indeed, Croce’s statement has to be amended with Antonio Gramsci’s correction that history is not just erudite or bookish, but requires the identification of history and politics.[2] From that standpoint, politicians are historians who, by operating in the present, interpret the past; and historians are politicians who dig into the past in order to reopen abandoned and repressed alternative pathways. The political criterion of a historiographical intervention is given by the standpoint of the historian, a standpoint that can never be neutral. According to Walter Benjamin, the supposed neutrality of the historicist’s perspective coincides with the point of view of the dominant classes. By contrast, the materialist historian, he states, develops the ability to look at the past not as an object to be investigated, but as something incomplete and open to possible futures, which are still encapsulated in ‘what-has-been’.[3] Ross is familiar with this way of looking at the past and her book is an extraordinary combination of historiography and politics.

William Morris is a constant presence in Ross’s reading of the Commune and allows her to place it in a temporal dimension that exceeds the historical existence of the Commune itself. In this way, the Commune does not coincide with the massacre of the Communards and the failure of that political experiment. Instead, it links up with temporalities that precede it and prolong its gesture. Morris once said that his tales of the past were parables of the days to come. A parable, comments Ross, is ‘not about going backwards or reversing time, but about opening it up – opening up the web of possibilities’ (p. 75). Kristin Ross’s book is fully entitled to be considered part of the tradition of political historiography that digs into the past in order to extract encapsulated futures.

Let us examine this issue more closely. Communal Luxury re-reads the political experiments of the Commune in the light of our present, namely the recent forms of protest on the world-political scene. It is not by chance that Occupy movements were looking for a tradition that originated in the Paris Commune. One could easily remark that such references to the Commune are rather common on the left. However, what is new is the entire post-1989 political context, which designates a political imaginary that is no longer organised around an end that must be realised. In other words, the collapse of a certain idea of socialism dragged with it an entire imaginary, but also the instrumental conception of praxis, according to which means were justified by the end – socialism – to be realised.

 How to provide a new imaginary? This is one of the questions that the book raises. ‘The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune’ – this is the subtitle of Ross’s book – is an alternative legacy that invites us to rethink political and social change in a new framework. Ross’s book looks back at the Commune without any nostalgia, but in order to grasp alternative trajectories of emancipation, i.e., trajectories that do not lead to the centralism of the socialist state. On the contrary, they express a new hope, which is no longer interested in taking power and the control of the state, but in practising politics beyond the state. Ross writes, ‘The end of state-communism freed the Commune from the role it had played in official communist history’ (p. 4). And it may well open new possibilities of liberation. In any case, one can say about 1989 what the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in his famously misinterpreted answer said when, in 1972, he was asked about the impact of the French Revolution: ‘too early to say’.

The end of Real Socialism becomes the condition of possibility for a different historiography that allows us to think politics differently. Ross states: ‘if we begin with the state, we end with the state. Let us begin instead with the popular reunions at the end of the Empire, the various associations and committees they spawned, and the “buzzing hives” that were the revolutionary clubs of the Siege. Then we see a different picture.’ (p. 14.) Communal Luxury aims to show us this different picture.

The title of the book – Communal Luxury, overlaid onto a blue painting by William Morris – is taken from the Manifesto of the Federation of the Parisian Artists written during the Commune. In the manifesto, ‘communal luxury’ expressed the demand for public beauty, i.e., a complete reconfiguration of everyday life according to which art and beauty must be integrated into life and work and not be confined in private spaces for the enjoyment of the privileged class. Communal luxury is, on the one side, the vantage point from which to observe the aesthetic reinvention of everyday life; on the other, it is a kind of prefiguration of William Morris’s idea of a new space/time, which is harmonised with the rhythm of nature. This is the space of experimental politics beyond the binary opposition of city and country, the space of the reinvention of the human within a plethora of human and non-human differences (p. 136). But not only that. It is also a trans-national space and the space of political and socio-economic experimentation. Indeed, ‘communal luxury’ reconfigures wealth into a new wealth that is no longer ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’[4] subjugated to the tyranny of exchange-value. Instead, it is a liberated wealth, which contributes to the regeneration of society through new values and solidarity. Not by chance, the last chapter of the book is titled ‘Solidarity’.

The book begins with the flag of the Universal Republic and concludes with the reinvention of wealth beyond exchange-value. But a new history of the Commune requires a new starting point and new references. In fact, the book observes the Commune through the viewpoint of William Morris, Elisée Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Napoléon Gaillard, among others. Lenin is mentioned solely for his ‘apocryphal dance in the snow in front of the Winter Palace on the seventy-third day of the Russian Revolution – the day, that is, that the Revolution had lasted one day longer than the Commune and in so doing turned the latter into the failed revolution of which the new one would be the corrective’ (p. 4). Ross does not develop an analysis of the Bolshevist’s claim of correcting the failed insurgency of the Commune. This is not the task of her book. Instead, the image of a dancing Lenin leaves the historical bifurcation open.[5] It is the same alternative that tormented the Commune’s existence: state-centralisation versus a universal federation of peoples or, to employ the terminology of Arthur Arnould, Unité versus Union.[6] In order to investigate this bifurcation in a non-dogmatic way, one has to pay attention not so much to military events before and after March 18, but, as Ross does, to popular reunions, clubs and various associations, which constituted the social and political fabric of the Commune. From this perspective Ross’s book is able to shed light on the often-forgotten ‘non-nationalist originality of the Commune’ (p. 12).

To the extent that the Paris Commune freed itself from the nation-state, it developed ‘a new vision of revolution based on communal autonomy’ (p. 111), which exceeds both the geographical-political provincialism of space – the nation – and the temporal provincialism of the unilinear conception of time: ‘The new, for Kropotkin as for Morris, could only be modelled on anachronisms land-locked in the present’ (p. 116). I want to give a couple of examples of the move that deprovincialises space and time, which this book helps us to think.

Let me begin with the international participation in the Commune and the diverse contributions to the ‘working laboratory of political inventions’ (p. 11). Ross tells us the story of Elisabeth Dmitrieff, the young member of the Russian section of the First International who joined the Commune and created the Women’s Union for the Defence of Paris and Aid to the Wounded. Dmitrieff was the theoretical mediator between Marx and Chernyshevsky who alerted Marx to the possibility of skipping capitalist accumulation. She was also the practical mediator between the French idea of the commune and the Russian collectivism of the obshina (p. 29). Ross suggests that when Marx looked to Russia, he saw its rural and non-capitalist communities ‘through the filter of the Parisian insurrection’ (p. 82). He could see in the Russian peasant commune and in the ‘archaic’ societies ‘the traces of the primary communism he had observed in the Paris Commune’ (p. 82). However, communism is not the consolation prize for the working class for suffering through primitive accumulation. After the Paris Commune and in dialogue with the Russian Populists, Marx abandoned the unilinear vision of historical time and began to consider history as ‘a series of layers from various ages, the one superimposed on the other’.[7] From this standpoint the ‘“archaic” type of communal property’ can prefigure different historical trajectories that lead to non-capitalist forms of society without undertaking primitive accumulation.[8] Marx’s recommendation (to himself and us) is therefore precious: ‘We should not, then, be too frightened by the word “archaic”.’[9]

From this angle we can see Dmitrieff and Chernyshevsky teaching Marx ‘the possible conjunctures between traditional and modern structures’ (p. 26). There are forms of the past that can be mobilised in the present and show trajectories, whose unexplored potentialities contain possible futures. The story of the Commune that Ross relates to us breaks with the history of the forms of transition and its stagist model. William Morris beautifully expressed the perspective of a different kind of historiography that is required today: the Federalist Administration of the Commune is, he wrote, politically ‘entirely opposed to French tradition since the time of Richelieu’, while socially it gives birth to the new world of ‘the workman organically associated for the first time since the Communes of the Middle Ages, and since 1793’.[10] There are two traditions: on the one hand, there is the tradition of the state and its centralisation of power; on the other, there are the traditions of insurgency, which does not create new political institutions ex nihilo. New institutions root their practices in the sunken legacy that links to the communes of the Middle Ages and the French Revolution.

Morris was an artist of the combination of modern and non-modern temporalities. The latter are not an expression of nostalgia, but rather visions of non-alienated labour. According to Ross, ‘Evoking communitarian or tribal societies of the past may provide clues to the free forms of a whole new economic life in the future’ (p. 75). The encounter of different temporalities generated a new field of possibilities in which the new life of the Commune was experimented with by putting together art, work and revolution.

Ross explores this field through ‘marginal’ actors and thinkers of the Commune. Gaillard is one of those actors. He was not only a revolutionary but also a shoemaker; an excellent one, it appears. During the period of the Commune, Gaillard the shoemaker built a massive barricade that barred access to the rue de Rivoli. He considered his barricades, no less than his shoes, works of art and luxury. Barricades became works of art of the revolution. And daily artisanal production became revolutionary. ‘“I believe myself to be a worker,” wrote Gaillard to Vermorel, “an ‘artist-shoemaker,’ and though making shoes, I have the right to as much respect from men as those who think themselves workers while wielding a pen”’ (p. 56). Claiming the same dignity of intellectual labour for manual labour, Gaillard does not trivially dispute the division of labour. He goes much further. The new revolutionary principle of the Commune digs like a mole in the ground of everyday life. As Ross emphasises, Gaillard was questioning the familiar distinction between the useful and the beautiful (p. 57). Indeed, Gaillard’s philosophy of the shoe claims to bring the work of the artist shoemaker ‘back to the anatomical principles of the foot’ (p. 57). Gaillard alleged that the modern shoe has imprisoned the foot in a narrow, deforming instrument of torture. Bringing back the work of the artisan to the ‘anatomical principles of the foot’ expressed an attempt to mobilise past temporalities in order to recombine in a new form production and art, two dimensions which, in ancient Greek, were merged in the same word: poiesis. Recalling the old principle of artistic production by the artisan, Gaillard challenged the series and mass production in which the product is no longer shaped according to human needs. Instead people have to adapt themselves to objects, and both producers and consumers have to adapt themselves to the tyranny of exchange-value. The Women’s Union made this point very clear in a document addressed to the Labour Commission: blaming the ‘disastrous implications of repetitive work on body and mind’, the Women’s Union claimed the ‘diversity of work in any profession’.[11]

In the revolutionary experience, art could no longer remain external to the everyday. Ross shows how the intermixture of art, revolution and work redefines the relationships between human beings and use-value, on the one hand, and working time and free time, on the other hand. In the interruption of the dominant temporality of the state, there emerges a different quality of time, which is both social and political. Reconfiguring the distinction of labour time and free time, social and political life, private and public life, the Commune was giving birth to a new humanity, which was not an abstract word, but a matter of education, art and works. ‘Everywhere the word “commune” was understood in the largest sense, as referring to a new humanity’, stated Elisée Reclus (p. 5). The ‘new humanity’ concerns a different configuration of social, economic and political life according to the principles of cooperation and association. However, as Ross reminds us by referring to Morris, this new life, the possibility to ‘live communistically’, cannot be achieved without the ‘abolition of private property’ (p. 118). This statement has not ceased to be disturbing in the eyes of the dominant class. Nevertheless, it remains the cornerstone of any real political and social change.

Ross redirects our attention to the fact that during the period of the Commune words such as citoyen and citoyenne ‘no longer indicate national belonging – they are addressed to people who have separated themselves from the national collectivity’ (p. 16). The story of this separation is the story told by Communal Luxury. It is in this separation that the flag of the Universal Republic appears. This flag merges dimensions that transcend the borders of nationality and its historical time. As Ross reminds us, the term ‘Universal Republic’ did not originate with the Commune, but with the Prussian-born Anacharsis Cloots, who was naturalised in 1792 and became a member of the National Convention in September of the same year. During the Revolution, the Universal Republic was not just an abstract ideal of sharing the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man with the whole world. Cloots himself acted as universal citizen beyond the nation and beyond his aristocratic status when he joined the Revolution. Many foreigners, like Cloots, took part in the Revolution, becoming political citizens in the everyday political practice of assemblies, sections and clubs. The 1793 Constitution ratified this political circumstance in article 4, which stated that ‘aliens whom the legislative body has declared as one well deserving of the human race, are admitted to exercise the rights of a French citizen.’ Reactivating an ancient conception of mediaeval rights, the same article extended the exercise of the rights of French citizens to ‘every alien, who has attained the age of twenty-one, and has been domiciled in France one year’. The Universal Republic in the French Revolution was more than a principle; it was a practice that the 1793 Constitution had to assimilate.[12]

Regarding the tradition of the Universal Republic, Ross states that, ‘far from implying a return to the principles of the bourgeois 1789 revolution, the slogan universal republic, when spoken by Communards, marks their break from the legacy of the French Revolutions in the direction of a real working-class internationalism’ (p. 23). However, if Ross had applied to the French Revolution the multitemporal framework through which she had analysed the Commune, she would have had a different view of the tradition of the Universal Republic. Indeed, the French Revolution was more than a bourgeois revolution. There were many revolutions within the Revolution, revolutions which exceeded the narrow political-temporal definition of a bourgeois revolution. For instance, the Women’s Union in 1871 ‘showed no trace of interest in parliamentary or rights-based demands’ (p. 28). Similarly, in 1792, Pauline Léon demanded not political rights but a revolutionary citizenship for women, which included the right to bear weapons. In both cases, women were already acting as political citizens despite the fact they did not have legal citizenship; in 1792 as in 1871 they were ‘indifferent to the vote and to traditional forms of republican politics in general’ (p. 28).

To conclude, I want to raise the question of universalism. It is true that the universality of the Universal Republic is not about scale. It expressed political inclusion beyond national identity. Being ‘French’ in Paris during March through May 1871 was not matter of national belonging but of a political and social practice. The adjective ‘universal’ may find an explanation in the Declaration to the French People of April 19, which states that Paris reserves the right ‘to universalise power and property’.[13] The universalisation of power through assemblies and the imperative mandate and the universalisation of property through a new regime of property relations were the two sides of the Universal Republic. These dimensions prefigured new institutions, which were not based on the logic of the modern national state. Ross’s book focuses brilliantly on the everyday life and various associations and committees of the Commune, but it does not address the new institutions in which the forms of a new political life were being worked out.

Édouard Vaillant, who oversaw work on education and culture during the Commune, offers us an insight into the correlation between the universalisation of power and that of property when he said: ‘we must apply to the theatres […] the regime of associations. […] The general management of theatres is charged with replacing the existing regime of proprietors and privilege with a system of association to be run entirely by the artists themselves.’[14] Private property was not in question merely abstractly, but rather in the everyday practices that sought to overcome the separation between the means of production and performers at any level. The communal practice, which simultaneously questioned state centralisation and property, induced the Federations of the artists to claim the abolition of subsidy as well: ‘In the place of state subsidies, the Federation looked to cooperation among the artists themselves as a way forward, rather like a trade union whereby each artist’s dignity was protected by all the others’ (p. 51). Indeed, the radical manifesto of the twentieth arrondissement demanded the abolition of all subsidies, not just those related to religion, but also to theatres and the press.[15] Decentralisation and distancing from the state were made possible through a new institutional articulation. Addressing the question of institutions would have been important in order to show how the collective creativity of the Commune, which was at the same time international and ecological, tried to reshape social life in a new political order and new property relations in the short time available to it.

References

Arnould, Arthur 1981, Histoire Populaire et Parlementaire de la Commune de Paris, Lyon: Éditions Jacques-Marie Laffont et associés.

Benjamin, Walter 1999, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blanqui, Louis-August 2013, Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis, translated by Frank Chouraqui, New York, NY: Contra Mundum Press.

Bourgin, Georges and Gabriel Henriot 1924–45, Procès-verbaux de la Commune de 1871, Volume II, Paris: E. Leroux-Lahure.

Edwards, Stewart (ed.) 1989, The Communards of Paris, 1871, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gluckstein, Donny 2006, The Paris Commune: A Revolution in Democracy, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Gramsci, Antonio 1977, Quaderni del carcere, four volumes, Turin: Einaudi.

Marx, Karl 1983, ‘Marx–Zasulich Correspondence’, in Shanin 1983, pp. 95–137.

Marx, Karl 1990, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Morris, William, Ernest Belfort Bax and Victor Dave 2013, ‘A Short Account of the Commune of Paris of 1871’, in The Commune: Paris, 1871, edited by Andrew Zonneveld, Atlanta, GA: On Our Own Authority! Publishing.

Ross, Kristin 2015, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London: Verso.

Rougerie, Jacques 1971, Paris libre 1871, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Shanin, Teodor 1983, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Tomba, Massimiliano 2015, ‘1793: The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality’, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, 5, 2: 109–36.

Trotsky, Leon 1921, Lessons of the Paris Commune, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1921/02/commune.htm>.

[1] Trotsky 1921.

[2] Gramsci 1977, p. 1242 (Q 10II §2).

[3] Benjamin 1999, pp. 463–4.

[4] Marx 1990, p. 125.

[5] Blanqui 2013.

[6] Arnould 1981, p. 275.

[7] Marx 1983, p. 103.

[8] Marx 1983, p. 107.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Morris, Bax and Dave 2013, p. 20.

[11] Rougerie 1971, p. 182.

[12] Tomba 2015.

[13] Edwards (ed.) 1989, p. 82.

[14] Vaillant, 19 May, in Bourgin and Henriot 1924–45, p. 427.

[15] Rougerie 1971, p. 138.

Jairus Banaji

Pedro Lemebel (1952–2015), Chilean performance artist, writer and queer activist who was twice fired from his job as a high-school art teacher for openly identifying as gay. In the eighties, Lemebel created a performance troupe that would disrupt public events to dramatise issues of oppression. One of the most notorious of these public interventions occurred in 1986 when Chile was in the last years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, but it was an intervention aimed at breaking the culture of homophobia on the Left. The image shows Lemebel as he appeared during this intervention, interrupting a meeting of left-wing opposition parties.

“In high heels and make up depicting a hammer and sickle emerging from his mouth and extending to his left eyebrow, Lemebel denounced the homophobia of the Left in his ‘Manifesto: I Speak for my Difference’ to a bewildered, even hostile, audience perplexed at the cross-dressing revolutionary they had difficulty recognising as a figure of left-wing militant politics. Also marking his literary debut, the intervention staked out the space of marginality and difference that Lemebel unapologetically inhabited and rendered visible through his actions: “No soy un marica disfrazado de poeta / No necesito disfraz / Aquí está mi cara / Hablo por mi diferencia / Defiendo lo que soy / Y no soy tan raro” (I’m not a fag disguised as a poet / I don’t need a disguise / Here’s my face / I speak for my difference / I defend what I am / And I’m not that unusual).”

Born in an impoverished suburb of Santiago, Lemebel always identified with the poor and the marginal in Chile’s society, describing himself repeatedly as “maricón, pobre, indio y viejo” (a poor, old, indigenous fag). “The dictatorship targeted not only left-wing ‘subversives’”, Kate Averis writes, “but homosexuals, the indigenous, the indigent, and other identities deemed non-assimilable to a model of national identity of which the white, heterosexual, ‘masculine’ military men most closely approximated the ideal”.

In the nineties Lemebel went on to publish three Chronicles that were essentially collections of short texts depicting lives at the “social, political, sexual and ethnic margins he himself occupied”. Here, “Much like the reappropriation of ‘queer’ by queer activists and theorists, Lemebel reappropriates the homophobic language used in Chile to divest it of its derogatory tone by using it in self-designation”. It was the crime fiction writer Roberto Bolaño who eventually brought his work to audiences abroad by arranging to have it published in Spain. Lemebel died of cancer in 2015.

https://minorliteratures.com/2015/02/09/pedro-lemebel-farewell-to-a-queer-icon/

A translation of Manifesto is available here:http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme4/manifesto-i-speak-for-my-difference/

By Jeffery R. Webber

Running on the ticket of the little-known Social Liberal Party (PSL) in Brazil’s general election last October, the virtually unknown Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain and marginal congressperson representing a Rio de Janeiro riding since the early 1990s, promised to be tough on crime and corruption.[1] Cultivating an outsider persona, he won the second round with 55 percent of the popular vote, while Fernando Haddad, a progressive political scientist, former mayor of São Paulo, and Lula’s hand-picked successor as leader the Workers’ Party (PT), captured 45 percent. Haddad’s showing in the second round nonetheless exceeded expectations, given the fact that he entered the race so late in the day. The PT took a very long time to come to grips with the fact that Lula would remain in prison and could not ultimately sustain his candidacy. Partially as a result of this overdue embarkation, Haddad secured only 29 percent of the vote in the first round.[2]

In an unexpected boon to Bolsonaro’s campaign, he was stabbed in early September at a campaign rally by a mentally disturbed man. The notably inarticulate candidate for the PSL was thereafter able to avoid all scheduled debates with opponents. Instead, he tweeted directly to his followers over an extended convalescence. Meanwhile, Haddad raced around the country, speaking at endless events, in an attempt to make up for lost time.[3] Following Bolsonaro’s late surge in the polls and surprisingly robust finish in the first round, the representative bodies of domestic and international capital, as well as their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, abandoned their traditional parties and rallied behind him to thwart any chance of the PT resuming office.

Bolsonaro, as Perry Anderson notes, ‘took every state outside the north-eastern redoubt of the PT; every major city in the country; every social class with the exception of the very worst off, living on incomes of less than two minimum wages; every age group; and both sexes – only among the cohort between 18 and 24 did he fail to win a majority of women’s votes.’ And yet, while the enthusiastic right-wing core of his support base celebrated with frenzy in the streets at the results, ‘there had been no great rush to the polls. Voting is compulsory in Brazil, but close to a third of the electorate – 42 million voters – opted out, the highest proportion in twenty years. The number of spoiled ballots was 60 percent higher than in 2014. A few days earlier, an opinion poll asked voters their state of mind: 72 percent replied “despondent,” 74 percent “sad,” 81 percent “insecure”.’[4] Boundless disillusion in the PT was one important factor in the forlorn societal condition which ultimately sanctioned the rise of a grotesque to the presidency.

Part of a wider implosion of the political centre in many of the world’s ailing liberal democracies since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the Brazilian elections witnessed the utter routing of capital’s preferred candidate, Geraldo Alckmin, who ran for the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), the traditional representative of international capital and the party most associated with neoliberal restructuring. Likewise, the other long-established party of the centre-right, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), under the leadership of Henrique Meirelles, was annihilated. On the centre-left, the PT accelerated its decline, which began as early as 2014, although it retained its position as biggest party in the lower house of congress, and won four state governorships. The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) didn’t even receive a sufficient number of votes to allow access to public resources and television air time, and the same was true of the campaign by environmentalist Marina Silva of the Sustainability Network (REDE).[5]

Brazil’s open-list proportional representation system has long been characterized by hyper-fragmentation in the two houses of congress, and a form of rule commonly known as ‘coalition-presidentialism’, whereby the centralized power of the executive must be coordinated with a decentralized and fragmented legislature. The consequent methods of rule typically involve the president gifting cabinet positions and other benefits to an array of small parties in congress in order to ensure a governable coalition.[6] The congressional results in the October 2018 contest, which ran parallel to the presidential ballot, heightened the traditional centrifugal scattering of micro-parties, and made visceral the collapse of the political centre. In the most splintered congress in Brazilian history, with over 30 parties finding representation, Bolsonaro’s PSL rose from 8 to 52 seats in the 513-seat chamber of deputies, while, as noted, the PT remained the biggest party in this domain, with 56, but was still down 13 from its previous position. As a whole, centre-right and right parties loosely aligned with Bolsonaro’s PSL dominate the lower house, and by one credible measure right-wing representatives in the lower house rose from 190 in 2010 to 301 in 2018. In another reflection of the pervasive sentiment of anti-politics in the country, voters rallied to perceived outsiders, with the traditional PSDB and PMDB’s congressional representation halved, and more than 53 percent of seats in the Chamber of Deputies seized by newcomers. Likewise, in the Senate, while 32 incumbents ran for re-election, only eight were successful.[7]

How to assess the new Brazilian regime? Early as it is in Bolsonaro’s rule, some broad stroke preliminaries are possible. In what follows I trace the political paralysis of the first five months, the popular social base of Bolsonarismo, its relationship to capital, and the role of evangelical Pentecostalism. I offer a biographical profile of Bolsonaro himself, map the three pivotal factions constituting the new government, and assess the economic outlook of the country. To anticipate the basic conclusions: the Bolsonaro regime is a weak and internally divided far-right regime, with declining popular support; capital backed Bolsonaro as a way out of crisis, but thus far the regime has not delivered, and the markets are losing faith.

Manic Stasis

Bolsonaro’s first five months in office have been characterized by misrule and pandemonium – endless Twitter wars; racist, sexist, and homophobic tirades; international diplomatic dramas; corruption scandals; cabinet instability; feuds with the legislature and judiciary; attempts to officially reimagine the 1964-1985 dictatorship as a golden period of democratic rule; and generalized policy paralysis.[8] But until mass mobilizations around education cuts in May, and a general strike in mid-June, this had decidedly not been a result of strong left-wing opposition, whether in congress or in the streets, but rather an outgrowth of internal wrangling between the constitutive factions of the tripartite coalition undergirding the regime –cultural authoritarians, militarists, and neoliberal technocrats.[9]

Each week there is further haemorrhaging of popular support for the president. According to a poll from April 7, conducted by the polling firm Datafolha, Bolsonaro registered the worst approval ratings after three months in office of any elected president in a first term since democracy was restored in 1985. Thirty percent of Brazilians considered his government to be bad or terrible, 32 percent optimal or good, and 33 percent average. [10] By contrast, for the equivalent period in office during their first terms the disapproval ratings for former presidents Fernando Collor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Dilma Rousseff were 19, 16, 19, and 7, respectively.[11] All the same, Collor was eventually impeached, Lula imprisoned, and Dilma thrown out of office by an institutional coup d’état.

Dangers lurk everywhere in the ensuing ataxia of the Brazilian body politic. ‘There is an atmosphere of pervasive violence in the country, which may be the way in which this administration tries to support itself, through a growth in organized and disorganized violence,’ the political economist Alfredo Saad-Filho suggested in a public conversation we held in early March at Goldsmiths, University of London. ‘But other than this, it is a circus of horrors, absolutely disorganized. Which may be a good thing for the left, in the long term. Because as they are fighting amongst themselves, they are not doing horrible things to everyone else. But I think this is a very small consolation. The political program of this government is intrinsically and heavily destructive of citizenship, of collectivity, of any form of social cohesion. There is absolutely nothing good associated with the social forces supporting Bolsonaro. It is an absolute political tragedy, and the left, still, is completely disorganized.’[12]

The Base

What do we know of the social composition of Bolsonaro’s mass base? What of his relations to capital? One pithy phrase, ‘the bull, bullet, and bible’ bloc, captures part of the picture, insofar as it highlights the centrality of agribusiness, the arms industry, and religious conservatism.[13] Agribusiness, ideologically attracted to Bolsonaro’s vision of freeing-up access to weapons and criminalizing rural workers’ movements, rallied particularly effectively to Bolsonaro in the south and central-west of the country.[14] Finance and large domestic industrial capital backed Bolsonaro only late in his campaign, after Alckmin failed to gain traction with the electorate, and other ‘outsider’ names were trialled without success. It was Bolsonaro’s move to bring on board neo-classical economist Paulo Guedes that eventually secured their backing. This was also true of Wall Street and international financial markets more generally, who were finally convinced that Guedes would ensure ‘the necessary reforms and privatization of the last state-owned companies, such as Petrobras.’[15] Ultimately overcoming their doubts in Bolsonaro, and fearing victory of the PT in the second round above all else, ‘every single business association, at every level, supported Bolsonaro. Every single business person who appeared on the media supported the right.’[16]

On a more general scale, the demographic with the most confidence in the present administration is evangelical and male, with above average educational attainment, earning more than five times the minimum wage, and living in the south of the country.[17] This is the voter profile most attracted to the ideological signifiers of lava jatismo (anti-corruption),antipetismo (antipathy toward the PT), anti-politics, ‘traditional’ moral values, and the promise of ‘law and order.’[18] The upper orders of Brazil’s urban metropoles have cultivated a particularly stark class resentment of the modest redistributive gains of the PT era – annual minimum wage increases, expansion of access to higher education, social and racial quotas, improvements in the labour code for domestic workers, the priming of cash transfer programs such as Bolsa Família, and increases in public resources for the impoverished strata of the poorest regions in the north and northeast. That these measures granted a novel quotidian presence of Afro-Brazilians and working class citizens in the heretofore exclusive spatial domains of the rich and the white – shopping malls, universities, and airplanes – was an affront to an elite way of life, a powerful psychosocial component of upper middle class support for Bolsonaro.[19]

Such ressentiment possibly runs even deeper among the lower middle classes, who enjoyed improved access to consumption, university, and formal employment in the high era of the PT (2003-2012), but who have since watched these material gains evaporate, along with their social privileges, as a consequence of economic meltdown.[20] Some have ended up as deeply precarious and indebted workers, the canonical Uber drivers and cosmetics saleswomen, among whom an anti-politics of bitterness is directed principally toward the PT, and increasingly finds combination with animus for feminists, LGBTQ+ people, and leftists.[21] Joining the downwardly mobile lower-middle-classes-turned-precarious-workers in their support for Bolsonaro are a petty bourgeois layer of commercial retailers and liberal professionals – doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the like – with a shared animosity for taxes and state provision of social rights.[22] Intermediate tiers of the social structure gravitated to Bolsonaro in large numbers, while capital cohered behind him as a last route out of crisis.

Evangelism

But there remains a missing element in this sociological audit. Indeed, one of the most critical combustible elements in Brazilian society, the political consequences of which are only understandable in relation to labour market transformations and capitalist crisis, has been the monumental rise of evangelical Pentacostalism.  Though raised a Catholic, Bolsonaro inaugurated his public dalliance with evangelism on May 12, 2016. Dressed in white, he was filmed being baptized in the River Jordan – where, according to the Bible, Jesus himself was baptized – by a Brazilian evangelical pastor of the Assembly of God.[23] Even so, the current president identified himself at the time as Catholic, and has never since renounced his faith.[24] His adult sons are evangelicals, as is his third and present wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, a sign-language interpreter who plies her trade in Pentacostal circles. The president’s last wedding was officiated by the influential pastor Silas Malafia, also of the Assembly of God. Travelling in these intimate cliques, Bolsonaro has managed to sustain a popular ambiguity as to his Catholic-evangelical identity, a not inconsequential political advantage.[25]

In his first public appearance following victory last October, Bolsonaro participated in a televised evangelical sermon, conducted by pastor and ex-senator Magno Malta; it was transmitted to millions of Brazilian television screens.[26] In Bolsonaro, evangelicals have found a spokesperson, even while he continues to enjoy the support of the most conservative wing of Catholic society, signalled, for example, by the devotion to the president of archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, Orani João Tempesta.[27] Similarly, while the current president is embraced as more or less evangelical by the evangelicals, his chameleon religiosity has allowed him to circumnavigate the ordinary disdain for evangelism found in the most privileged and well-educated strata of Brazilian society.[28]

The difference separating Bolsonaro and Haddad was 10.76 million votes.[29] Roughly 56 percent of the electorate is Catholic, 30 percent evangelical, seven percent non-religious, and one percent a composite of Afro-Brazilian religions. In the event, the Catholic vote was divided across the candidates, with a slight advantage going to Boslonaro. Haddad drew more concentrated support than Bolsonaro from the numerically insignificant affiliates of Afro-Brazilian religions, as well as the non-religious.[30] Crucially, the evangelicals acted as a bloc as never before, with their leaders harvesting years of dedicated political organizing. Although evangelicals represent less than a third of the electorate, they delivered 11 million votes to Bolsonaro, more than the difference separating him from Haddad.[31]

Despite a formal separation of church and state in the constitution of 1891 – further institutionalized in the declaration of the republic in 1899 – Catholicism has been the overwhelmingly dominant religion of Brazil, as well as being intricately bound up in the common sense notions of the Brazilian nation. Over the last few decades, however, this hegemony has suffered a relative decline, with a religious shift to evangelical Pentacostalism.[32] One authoritative account points to three dominant waves of Pentacostalism in the country. The first stretched from 1910 to 1950, during which time the Assembly of God, the Christian Congregation, and the International Church of the Four Square Gospel were established. These now constitute Brazil’s classic Pentacostal churches, and are distinguished by their emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the ritual of speaking in tongues.[33] A second wave, beginning in 1950 and closing in 1970, inducted a period of popular evangelism, with the first inroads into the communicative networks of radio and television. American televangelism was the model of this phase, with the Brazil for Christ Church and God is Love Church its quintessential institutional expressions.[34]

The last wave began when the second ended, and extends into the present. It is sometimes known as ‘neo-Pentacostalism.’ An early entrant was the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, established in 1977 by Edir Macedo, joined shortly thereafter by the International Grace of God Church, Reborn in Christ Church, Worldwide Church of God’s Power, and the evangelical community of Sara Nossa Terra. Driven by a new managerial ethos which structures religious institutions on the model of corporations, neo-Pentacostalism is doctrinally associated with the theologies of spiritual warfare and prosperity – intimately related to one another.[35]

Originating in American evangelical milieus during the late-period of Jimmy Carter and the new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, these two theologies found a syncretic synthesis in their new Brazilian home. The ‘theology of prosperity’ advances the view that God created his children to be prosperous and to obtain happiness in this earthly world. In other words, God wants to distribute wealth and good health to those who fear him in the here and now. To guarantee earthly prosperity one needs to demonstrate one’s faith, which entails financial offerings to the church. For adherents of the theology of prosperity there is a correspondence between the strength of faith and the size of these offerings.[36] Unsurprisingly, the most successful evangelical organizations in Brazil are quasi-financial, multi-million dollar enterprises as a result. Prosperity, in the sense of this religious creed, celebrates the pursuit of personal enrichment, and implicitly casts aspersions on the poor, whose poverty is traceable to personal failings. A stratagem of individual survival in the face of a protracted precariousness at the heart of the socio-economic order nicely complements a wider deterioration of collective subjectivity in Brazilian society, and the decades-long construction of neoliberal subjects, something that was never surpassed during PT interregnum.

The theology of spiritual warfare, meanwhile, involves a belief that the world is a staging ground for unadorned confrontation between forces of good and evil. According to its postulates, the forces of evil seize hold of the faithful and are the root cause of their problems and tragedies. Exorcism, therefore, to be carried out by religious leaders, is a necessary measure to expel the demons from the faithful and thus ensure their prosperity and health. Freedom from demons becomes a natural prerequisite for wealth and earthly happiness.[37]

Table I – National Census: Percentage of Catholics and Evangelicals, 1980-2010[38]

A national census is held every decade in Brazil, with the next one due in 2020.[39] Table I indicates patterns of religious self-identification, with a sharp decline of Catholics from 89.2 to 64.6 percent of the population from 1980 to 2010, and an attendant increase in evangelicals from 6.6 to 22.2 percent over the same period. If we parse the category of ‘evangelical’ further, it is possible to identify over half as neo-Pentacostals (13.3 percent of the total population), with the historical Pentacostals (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and so on) representing only 4 percent of the total, and seemingly in stagnation in demographic terms, and the remaining 4.8 percent a series of indeterminate evangelical sects (more independent, with less denominational fidelity).[40] The Assembly of God remains the biggest single institutional expression of evangelism in the country, with 12.3 million followers.[41]

While lacking the empirical depth and range of national censuses, individual studies by specialists in the area hypothesize that the rate of Catholic decline and evangelical uptick is increasing. Between 1990 and 2010, the Catholic population was losing adherents at the rate of 1 percent per year, while evangelicals were moving in the other direction at a rate of 0.7 percent. The latest specialist analyses suggest that the annual rate of diminution in Catholicism has accelerated to 1.2 percent since 2010, and the annual rate of gains for evangelism has moved in the opposite direction at 0.8 percent. If these numbers are roughly correct, Catholics will represent fewer than half of the population by 2022.[42]

As noted, there was a strong correlation between evangelical adherence and votes for Bolsonaro. In the states with the strongest evangelical presence – Rondônia, Roraima, Acre, and Rio de Janeiro – Bolsonaro was handed spectacular victories, and in the states of the northeast, where evangelicals have their weakest base, Haddad won handily. This is not to argue, of course, that religion was the only determining factor in far-right growth, but it is to point out its contingent decisiveness in the October electoral contest.[43]

Haddad made for a perfect scapegoat for organized evangelical reaction once he was finally declared the PT presidential candidate. When Haddad was minister of education during Rousseff’s first term in office, he attempted to introduce educational materials to combat homophobia in the public school system. Pastor Silas Malafia, in an exemplary response from the evangelical right, denounced the materials as a ‘gay kit,’ designed to convert children into homosexuals.[44] It was then-congressperson Jair Bolsonaro who took it upon himself to hold up the ‘gay kit’ as the empyrean of the PT’s moral depravity. Come the 2018 electoral season, Bolsonaro unleashed a tribe of social media combatants, generating a tidal wave of fake news memes, including images of babies being fed in public day care centres of the PT era with bottles shaped as penises.[45]

While Bolsonaro seemed, to many, to have simply materialized out of the ether when he assumed the presidency, in a certain sense the 2016 municipal elections in Rio were a premonition of things to come. While evangelicals had long had a presence in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, the state capital, and home of Carnival, had long been seen as hostile territory for traditional mores and conservative religious etiquette.  And yet, Marcelo Crivella, a bishop of the Universal Church and nephew of Edir Macedo, attracted voters behind a platform of antipetismo, a war on ‘gender ideology,’ and a conservatizing agenda for the public school system – depicted as a hotbed of cultural Marxism and social decadence. He successfully seized the mayoralty of Rio.[46] All of this a frightening intimation of just how quickly the extreme right can germinate when the soil shifts.

Ruy Braga, one of Brazil’s most innovative and perceptive sociologists of labour, has written the most penetrating early mapping of the complex relations between evangelism and alterations in the political subjectivity of specific subaltern layers, correspondent with the informalization of the world of work, contradictions within the PT’s development model, and the dynamics of economic crisis over the last several years.[47] The critical puzzle Braga poses is why ‘a substantial part of the working class chose a candidate clearly opposed to a redistribution agenda and who promised an attack on social security and labour rights?’[48] Conservative envagelism is definitely part of the story, but it needs to be linked, in Braga’s view, to the changing sociological conditions of a specific layer of the population – a working class layer accounting for more than a third of the electorate – which receives between two and five minimum wages; that is, impoverished workers, but not the poorest of the poor. This bracket of society used to vote consistently PT, but in 2018, 61 percent voted Bolsonaro, and only 39 percent for Haddad. The poorest, by contrast, persisted in their alignment with the PT. ‘We can infer, then,’ Braga suggests, ‘that the changing loyalties of those who receive between two and five minimum wages… is what explains the election of the PSL candidate.’[49]

There is some merit André Singer and Gustavo Venturi’s argument that low-income supporters of Bolsonaro were motivated by a concern for public safety, and were persuaded by his promise of a tough line on crime.[50] For Braga, this perspective is compelling insofar as it identifies ‘social violence as a trigger for Bolsonarism among people whose family incomes range from two to five minimum wages,’ but to stop here would be to remain on the surface of appearances, and to miss a much more thoroughgoing set of underlying structural variables.[51] If public safety was a proximate trigger, in other words, ‘the profound cause was the global tendency of frustration, particularly among precarious and informal workers living in large urban centers, with the limits (political, economic, and ethical) of the mode of development championed by former PT president Lula da Silva.’[52]

The PT development project at its peak (2003-2012) was a distributionist model rooted in an unstable class compromise, as capital continued to profit handsomely and social movement leaders were increasingly pacified through incorporation into the state.[53] Lula introduced distributive elements to the mode of rule, while maintaining a broad allegiance to the various sections of capital—agribusiness, finance, industrial, and the frequent symbiosis of the latter two. Honing a regime of multiclass conciliation, he conceded to the demands of capital while offering targeted welfare to pauperized strata dependent on the state for survival, most famously through the World Bank-lauded Bolsa Família—a conditional cash transfer program that reached millions.[54] Higher education was expanded and university quotas were introduced for Black students.[55] Millions of jobs were created, although these were mainly low-paid, unskilled, and precarious. The state invested in state-owned enterprises, particularly through the expansion of Petrobras activities in 2009, following the company’s discovery of deep-sea reserves in the Atlantic.[56] Expansionary policies were introduced in 2009–2010 in the wake of the global crisis, drawing on foreign reserves that had been accumulated at high rates during the commodities boom.

During the boom years, the PT was capable of lubricating its multiclass alliance, targeting modest social reforms at the poorest, providing employment, and raising the minimum wage and living standards, all the while allowing the rich to capture a disproportionate share of the wealth being accumulated. At the same time, under the second Lula administration there was no diversification of exports, the technological content of manufacturing production remained the same, and infrastructural investment, including basic urban services of transport and water—flashpoints in coming protests—was severely neglected.[57] Critical to the transformation in political subjectivity among those earning between two and five minimum wages was the combination of poor jobs, urban infrastructural decrepitude, and accelerating personal indebtedness. Between 2005 and 2015, ‘total debt owned by the private sector increased from 43 to 93 percent of GDP,’ Anderson points out, ‘with consumer loans running at double the level of neighbouring countries. By the time Dilma was re-elected in late 2014, interest payments on household credit were absorbing more than a fifth of average disposable income. Along with the exhaustion of the commodity boom, the consumer spree was no longer sustainable. The two motors of growth had stalled.’[58]

Braga’s ethnographic work among call centre workers in São Paulo reveals how the growing expectations of social mobility, fuelled in part by the PT’s ideological commitment to expanding a ‘new middle class,’ proved unsustainable. Consumption increased significantly, but it did so through the snowballing indebtedness of working class layers of the population. As workers became indebted they were more likely to see the short-lived improvements in livelihoods as a product of their own efforts, rather than as a consequence of PT social programs or economic policies.[59] When the economic crisis began to pinch in 2013, these livelihood gains for many informalized workers disappeared and they became embittered by targeted social programs like Bolsa Família and university racial quotas, from which they never directly benefited. Priced out of urban residential centres, they moved further and further into the distant suburbs, and their everyday experiences were mired in multi-hour commutes, a direct outgrowth of the neglect of public transport infrastructure under the PT.

Informal workers of this strata became ever more susceptible to right-wing formulations which identified such programs as responsible for reproducing the ostensible laziness of welfare recipients, on the one hand, and the corruption of the political clientelism of the PT’s rule, on the other. ‘The Brazilian far-right managed to instrumentalize this feeling through the rhetoric of “meritocracy”, appealing to popular resentment against the PT as the crisis deepened and decimated outskirts of cities, becoming increasingly dependent on notoriously inefficient public services.’[60] While social progress for subaltern layers was real under the PT, it was also always double-sided. Consumption was accompanied by indebtedness, housing ownership by longer commutes, and employment by precariousness.[61]

All the same, popular strata maintained their loyalty to the PT until Dilma’s second term, when Brazilian society’s shift to the right rapidly intensified in a distorted response to the hard neoliberal turn on the part of the government and the stark worsening of the recession in 2015 and 2016.[62] The decline of labour union density and militancy under the PT, and the rise of outsourcing, cooperative work and self-employment, helped to usher in a replacement of collective identities rooted in working class responses to shared interests with individualist identities and survival strategies. What sociologist Alan Sears has called the ‘infrastructure of dissent’ suffered protracted diminution, and in its place a neo-Pentacostal infrastructure flourished.[63] Health and other social assistance programs in the suburbs of São Paulo came to be administered by evangelical churches, even while being financed by the federal government. It was evangelism that came to be seen as serving the downwardly mobile informal working class layers, while the PT became associated with neglect and corruption.[64]

The ‘neo-Pentacostal movement today flourishes in a context of dismantling of labour protections, strengthening in low-income groups a subjectivity clearly aligned with the model of neoliberal self-management,’ Braga argues. ‘The mediation between the worker and the world of work ceases to be predominantly collective and begins to take refuge in the formulas of popular entrepreneurship.’[65] As we have seen, the ‘theology of prosperity’ neatly aligns with such individual survival strategies. With the exacerbation of informality, unemployment, and underemployment, it is unsurprising that small shop owners and more established street vendors now vie competitively with a burgeoning layer of newcomer street vendors in Brazil’s major urban centres. They grow to fundamentally resent each other, while uniting in their hatred of lumpen – the thieves and drug addicts. Meanwhile, all of the lower orders become more exposed to violent crime in a decaying social order.[66] In Brazil’s new world of work, ‘politicized collective relationships like those of the trade union movement are weakened in favour of competitive relations linked to the occupation of sales areas, as well as by the growing fear of urban violence…. If trade unionists have become distant from the everyday lives of subaltern classes, becoming less important to informal workers, it is relatively easy for a far-right candidate to associate them, for example, to the corrupt schemes of a political system in crisis, including them in the group of “good-for-nothings” who are “destroying the country”.’[67] For comparable processes to those at work in Brazil today, one need only look to the best ethnographies of working class decomposition and the rise of far-rights in Colombia and Guatemala in recent decades.[68]

In the 2018 elections, the vast, well-financed, and expanding reactionary fabric of evangelical Pentacostalism – temples, websites, television and radio stations – mobilized the novel political subjectivities of those earning two to five minimum wages, and helped transform them into Bolsonaro’s foot soldiers.[69]

Portrait of a Thug

Who is Jair Bolsonaro? With good reason, he is often set side by side with contemporaries like Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyńsk of Poland, Narendra Modi of India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, or Donald Trump of the United States. He is also occasionally discussed alongside an earlier generation of authoritarian Latin American leaders, such as Augusto Pinochet of Chile, or Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, alerting us to the potential menace of a return to a darker era – inconceivable until recently to many liberal social scientific analysts of Latin America, comforted in their echo chambers of assurance that the region’s democracies had been resolutely ‘consolidated.’

In some ways, though, the most analogous figure to Bolsonaro is the Guatemalan génocidaire Efraín Ríos Montt of the early 1980s, whose evangelical Pentacostalism ‘sustained a vision of a new Guatemala, formed from a potent mix of religion, racism, security, nationalism, and capitalism.’[70] ‘Brazil, in truth, elected a politician much more extreme than the other new authoritarian leaders,’ according to left-liberal Brazilian critic Celso Rocha de Barros. ‘Bolsonaro is the most radical subject to occupy the presidency of any democratic country in the contemporary world.’[71] Whether Bolsonaro is more extreme than Duterte, or Modi for that matter, is open to debate, but they are at least ultraists of a similar genre.

In a remarkable essay on the political culture of classical fascism, the historian Jairus Banaji explains that ‘fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own.’[72] In a comparable eclecticism, even if there has not been a fascist dictatorship installed in brazil, Bolsonaro’s weltanschauung revolves mainly around conspiracy, the political left, women, black and indigenous people, LGBTQ+, and environmentalists. He has famously explained that he would be incapable of loving a homosexual son, that he would rather such a son die in an accident than survive while gay.[73]

For Banaji, drawing on the work of Wilhelm Reich, patriarchal relations and the authoritarian family are the root of the state’s power in capitalist society. The authoritarian family, in this sense, ‘is a veritable “factory” of reactionary ideology,’ finding its fullest expression under fascism, ‘where this relationship between the two becomes overtly posited.’ There is a fundamental ‘resonance between the authoritarian character-structures that are moulded inside the patriarchal family and the Fuhrer ideology which is characteristic of all right-wing mass movements.’ [74] Bolsonaro’s unfettered attacks on ‘gender ideology’ recall Reich’s insight, having granted wholesale permission to unleash the worst strains of gendered violence already extant in the interstices of Brazilian society. ‘Rape is as common as murder in Brazil,’ Anderson reports, ‘more than sixty thousand a year, around 175 a day – the number reported has doubled in the last five years.’[75] Queer Brazilians have likewise been subject to unmitigated savagery. Already facing the highest level of lethal violence against queer people in the world, with 455 reported murders in 2017, the presidential election race of 2018 witnessed roughly 50 attacks ‘directly linked to Bolsonaro’s supporters; among them were at least two incidents in which trans women were killed by men who invoked his name.‘[76]

During his seven forgettable terms in the Chamber of Deputies, Bolsonaro’s main interventions turned on restoring the good memory of the military dictatorship. If anything, on this view, the dictatorship had not gone far enough in its notorious rounds of execution and torture of dissidents and activists. During the impeachment of Rousseff, Bolsonaro employed his speaking time to explain he was pledging his vote in the name of Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, head of the Doi-Codi unit responsible for the personal torture of the former PT president when she was captured during her period of guerrilla militancy against the dictatorship.

Bolsonaro has denounced fellow deputy Maria do Rosário, also of the PT, as ‘not worth raping.’ He has called immigrants ‘scum.’ The United Nations is for him a ‘bunch of Communists.’ A vociferous supporter of the military police and death squads, or militias, that specialize in the racist terrorization of the favelas in his beloved Rio, Bolsonaro has said that a ‘policeman who doesn’t kill, isn’t a policeman.’[77] His inaugural address as president pledged to ‘rescue the family, respect religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, combat gender ideology, conserving our values.’ Bolsonaro has referred to quilombolas, descendants of runaway slaves who have a distinct legal and cultural status in Brazil, as obese and lazy: ‘They don’t do anything. They don’t serve even to procreate anymore’.”[78]

It is worthwhile to recall here Alberto Toscano’s penetrating observations on ‘capitalist folklore,’ and specifically the notion that ‘fascistic, authoritarian and right populist solutions do not require a unified conception of the world and of life; or rather that, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, they can operate with the most degraded varieties of “cognitive mapping,” with the image of “totality as conspiracy.” If the illusion of the (left) intellectual is that [quoting Stuart Hall] “ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” this is an illusion that the right (especially once it leaves behind the rigor and asceticism of high bourgeois culture) need not entertain, happily flaunting its programmatic incoherence and rejection of the rationalist demand that politics have a logic, crafting its discourse to appeal in incommensurate ways to contradictory audiences.’[79]

Olavo de Carvalho is the quintessence of degraded cognition of this kind. He is to Bolsonaro what Steve Bannon was to Trump before their falling out. A Brazilian, but resident of Richmond, Virginia since 2005, Carvalho is a bizarre ‘autodidact, philosopher and former astrologer,’ with a social media audience of more than 570,000 and sufficient influence within the president’s most intimate coterie to determine cabinet selection and structure the ideological content of much of the president’s bountiful Twitter output.[80] Carvalho ‘has claimed that Pepsi is sweetened with the cells of aborted foetuses; that legalizing same-sex marriage leads to legalizing pedophilia; and that calamitous natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 earthquake in Haiti may be divine punishment for practicing African religions traditions.’[81] For Carvalho, ‘Brazil’s problem with violent crime might have been averted if the military regime had killed the right twenty thousand people.’[82] A recurring theme in the YouTube repertoire of the 72-year-old, pipe-smoking bear-hunter, ‘is a neo-Marxist insistence on the cultural hegemony that he claims has been imposed by globalists, the left, and the politically correct via schools, political parties, and the mainstream media and “fake news”.’[83] ‘Cultural Marxism’ has befouled the West, not least in the way it has concocted the elaborate ruse of climate change.

Channelling Carvalho’s worldview into the institution of the Brazilian presidency, Bolsonaro, ‘has been able to capitalize on the anti-political sentiments and deep conservatism prevalent among sections of Brazilian society,’ according to historian Benjamin Fogel. ‘His politics are premised on capital punishment for criminals, racism, sexism, homophobia, nostalgia for military dictatorship, gun ownership, pro-life views, and virulent anti-leftism, all combined with a dose of neoliberalism. Bolsonaro has been able to ride the anti-leftism wave unleashed by anti-corruption protests to pose as a political outsider capable of renewing the broken political system and a morally degenerate society.’[84]

As of June 2019, Bolsonaro had 9.5 million followers on Facebook, which was twice that of the country’s most important newspaper. By some estimates, he has 3.4 million Twitter subscribers.[85] Lacking a party structure from which to mobilize his core supporters and maintain their fervour, Bolsonaro depends on the extemporaneity of unmediated social media relations. As Toscano has stressed elsewhere, summoning Theodor Adorno, there is always ‘the problem of the libidinal bond that fascism requires, both vertically towards the leader (especially in the guise of a kind of play of narcissisms, the follower finding himself reflected in the leader’s own self-absorption) and horizontally, towards the racialized kin or comrade, identifying this as a technical, or psycho-technical, problem for fascism itself…. This libidinal energy is of necessitypersonalized as an ‘erotic tie’ (in Freud’s terms), and operates through the psychoanalytic mechanism ofidentification (again, both horizontally and vertically).’[86]

Prolonged degeneration of political representation in Brazil, a pronounced disintegration of political institutionality, has helped to fertilize Bolsonaro’s efflorescence. Outside of party structures, and drawing on the novel identifications allowed by social media interaction, Bolsonaro has harvested the libidinal bonds forged with his core supporters – roughly 30 percent of the Brazilian population. But only by constantly reproducing instantaneous and direct identification, stoking Twitter controversy, resurrecting the country’s institutional decay, and tilling the soils of moral panic, can Bolsonaro continue to titillate his hard core followers.[87]  The sensation of participating in a Bolsonarista WhatsApp group is one of popular power, however illusory in reality, of the capacity to support, sculpt, and scold the politics of one’s leader, while rallying to his defence against enemies, internal and external.  The sensation of immediacy, of ‘participatory ecstasy,’ is something many Bolsonaro supporters never experienced via the traditional political system.[88]

There may be an underlying rationale to the form of rule assumed by this inarticulate, undexterous clown, this interloper president, maligned by the mainstream media: ‘the factor that more often than not the fascist leader appears as a “ham actor” and “asocial psychopath” is a clue,’ Toscano reminds us, ‘to the fact that rather than sovereign sublimity, he has to convey some of the sense of inferiority of the follower, he has to be a “great little man”.’[89] Bolsonaro performs simultaneously as charismatic leader and man of ‘the people,’ someone sharing ‘their language, tastes, and culture.’[90] ‘Bolsonaro, the nobody – a citizen of failure – won the elections, embodying the worst features of Brazilian politics, and of Brazilian society, within himself’ – coursing through his blood, the ideological cocktail of anti-corruption, anti-crime, the hard state, and evangelical moralism. [91]

State Factions

Cultural Authoritarians

It is time now to interrogate the complex entanglements of cultural authoritarians, militarists, and neoliberal technocrats at the heart of the government in question. There are tensions and contradictions working between them, although there are also instances of overlap in specific personnel who bridge the divides, as well as moments of coincidence across currents in ideological and political purpose. Without forgetting the malleability of these lines of separation, then, let’s review each faction in turn.

Bolsonaro himself is the peak representative of the first group. The adhesive glues of this tendency involve a support base in evangelical Pentecostalism and right-wing Catholicism, an admiration for Donald Trump, antipathy toward China, aggressive hostility to Venezuela, a Zionist commitment to Israel, and such esoteric notions as Nazism being a leftist movement.[92] Joining the president in the innermost ring are three sons from his first marriage – Flávio, 38, a former lawyer, member of the legislative assembly of the state of Rio de Janeiro for the Progressive Party (PP) from 2003 to 2016, and the PSL from 2016 to 2018, and since 2019 a senator for PSL at the federal level; Carlos, 36, a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, for the Social Christian Party (PSC) since 2001; and Eduardo, 34, a former police officer and lawyer, and member of the chamber of deputies from São Paulo from 2014-2018 with the PSC, and from 2019 onwards with the PSL.[93]

Eduardo, the youngest of the brothers, is perhaps the most extreme sibling. He is the Latin American representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right international organization, the Movement. Eduardo, long an admirer of Bannon, took it upon himself to introduce Bannon to Carvalho during a visit to the United States. The two men hit it off. For Bannon, Carvalho incarnates a new source of vitality for what he sees as increasingly sterile traditional frames of reference within American conservatism.[94] In a 2018 video, Eduardo can be seen and heard contending that the recent spate of US school shootings are the consequence of schools being ‘gun-free’ zones. Legislators protecting that reality are ultimately culpable for the massacres.[95] He won a record 1.8 million votes in last year’s congressional elections, securing his membership in the chamber of deputies.[96]

Carlos, the middle son, is known as the ‘pit bull,’ both for outspoken loyalty to his father, as well as the role he played as coordinator of Bolsonaro senior’s social media campaign during the electoral race. Carlos has since emerged as the unofficial spokesperson of the presidency in the first months of the new regime, and the most vehement antagonist of Hamilton Mourão, vice president and chief representative of the militarist faction.[97]

If Carlos has attracted controversy in the press for his role as pit bull, Flávio has also drawn unwanted attention. He is under investigation for corruption concerning alleged payments to a former adviser and other suspect financial transactions, becoming a vulnerable flank for the Bolsonaro administration, given that a key part of its raison d’être has been a concerted war on corruption, which it treats as essentially a phenomenon exclusive to the PT.[98] Flávio also employed the mother and wife of an ex police officer in Rio who is the alleged leader of a violent urban militia.[99] Flávio, like his father and brothers, is a fierce advocate of gun ownership as an individualized means of responding to violent crime. In 2017, he shot a pistol through his own car windshield in the middle of a Rio traffic jam in an attempt to gun down a suspected thief.[100]

With this family dynasty at its core, the faction of extreme ideologues also encompasses the ministries of education and foreign affairs.[101] Bolsonaro’s first education minister was Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, an obscure, ultraconservative academic, whose main credential for the position was seemingly his tightknit association with Carvalho. Under his leadership, the ministry became a battlefield between cultural authoritarians and militarists. Vélez Rodríguez’s main efforts in the post were symbolic attempts to rewrite the portrayal of the military dictatorship in the public education curriculum and to introduce the national anthem into schools – the singing of which was to be followed by the children chanting the Bolsonaro rally cry, ‘Brazil Above Everything, God Above All!’[102]

Overstepping his authority one too many times, Vélez Rodríguez was forced from his position in early April, to be replaced by an ostensibly moderate technocrat, economist Abraham Weintraub. It is true that Weintraub has been more amenable to repairing bonds with the militarist faction, and yet his commitment to bringing the war on ‘cultural Marxism’ into the public education system rivals that of Carvalho. Like Vélez Rodríguez, Weintraub was unaccomplished as a scholar. A fierce adherent of austerity in the education sector, he is the author of the proposed reforms that catalyzed the mass mobilizations of May 15 and 30 this year.[103] Prior to taking up a position at the Univerisdade Federal de São Paulo, Weintraub had been director and chief economist at Votorantim Bank. Weintraub is a close friend of cultural extremist Eduardo Bolsonaro, but he is also a neoliberal dogmatist, suggesting elective affinities with the technocratic faction. His appointment is understood by many pundits to represent an attempt to repair some of the ill will between the main regime factions.[104]

In the realm of foreign affairs, Filipe Martins, a 31-year old advisor to the president, adherent of Carvalho, and former international affairs secretary of the PSL, has played an important role in setting the tone of this administration.[105] He is closely aligned with Ernesto Araújo, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and, with the customary ardour of youth, one of the more unrelenting reactionaries in the present government.

Araújo himself apparently owes his ministerial position to a direct endorsement from Carvalho. The West Virginia resident became aware of Araújo when the latter published a bewitched treatment of the US president and the new wave of far-right governments internationally in an article called ‘Trump and the West,’ appearing in a 2018 issue of the Cadernos de Política Exterior, the quarterly journal of the Brazilian Institute for Investigation of International Affairs, IPRI.[106] Araújo recognizes his debt to Carvalho and remains one of the guru’s most loyal disciples within government. This explains in part Araújo’s tense relations with career diplomats and civil servants in the ministry under his command, as well as conflicts with the militarist faction.[107]

Under Araújo’s command of the foreign affairs portfolio, Brazil has played a leading role in the dismantling of the South American Community of Nations (Unasur), which had sought some degree of regional autonomy for South America from US hegemony in recent years, and its replacement by the Forum for the Progress of South America (Prosur), which thus far coheres around the right-wing governments of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Ecuador.[108] Araújo is a hawk with regard to neighbouring Venezuela, and so it is no surprise that Brazil was one of the first countries to recognize the self-anointment as interim president of Brazil’s northern neighbour by conservative oppositionist Juan Guaidó.[109] The foreign affairs minister coordinated a meeting between Bolsonaro and the Venezuelan opposition in Brasília on January 17, just days before Guaidó’s declaration. According to Araújo at the time, the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro has only been capable of reproducing itself through ‘generalized corruption, narco-trafficking, people trafficking, money laundering, and terrorism.’[110]

Araújo is an open admirer of the far-right nationalist governments of Italy, Hungary, and Poland. He was personally behind the extradition of Cesare Battisti, a long-time political exile and novelist in Brazil who was wanted by the Italian state for his involvement in the 1970s far-left group, Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC).[111] Araújo’s brand of nationalism involves the notion that Brazil can play a bigger and bolder role on the world stage, but only if it subordinates itself in a tight alliance with the United States, under Trump’s leadership. He has said of the career civil servants in Itamaraty, the name of the palace which houses the ministry of foreign affairs, ‘They don’t think Brazil can be anything in the world and that we have to be content selling a few products and staying quiet, copying the agendas that come from abroad, such as the climate or human rights…. I believe that Brazil has to try to be big. This means precisely abandoning the anti-American worldview that has dominated Itamaraty.’[112]

Aligning with Israel in the Middle East is one way to strengthen allegiances with the United States. ‘When Americans see that we have positions close to theirs in discussions on the Middle East,’ Araújo stresses, ‘it makes it easier to reach out to them to discuss issues of wheat or ethanol.’ Because of Brazil’s renewed ties  to the United States, if a country is inclined to take an attitude hostile to Brazil’s interests, ‘it is going to think twice, because it will see that Brazil has this alliance.’[113] Araújo was warmly received by Trump in a recent trip to Washington, and returned to Brazil with a series of announcements concerning gains made on the trip – Washington signalled support for Brazil’s aim to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and affirmed its commitment to elevate the South American country to the status of a preferential ally of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). According to Araújo, these moves indicate Brazil’s enhanced ‘international profile and return to being an important actors across all spheres,’ situating Brazil decisively ‘within the geopolitical and economic space of the West.’[114]

China, meanwhile, represents a long-term existential threat in the worldview of the minister of foreign affairs, both in terms of commercial expansion throughout much of the world, as well as in terms of its geostrategic positioning vis-à-vis the United States. For Araújo, it is clear that China will become an ever bigger problem for the ‘West’ over time. As the line being drawn between the United States and China becomes sharper, bold alignment with the former must be the option pursued by Brazil. Still, Araújo has been unable simply to ignore the dependent ties of Brazilian exporters to the Chinese market. When he is pushed by journalists to clarify if his most hawkish statements vis-à-vis China mean that Brazil will reduce its commercial linkages with the Asian power, Araújo always returns to pragmatism, acknowledging that China will continue to be a major trading partner of Brazil.[115]

A final figure of note in the Bolsonaro regime’s cultural authoritarian contingent, is Damares Alves, a ferociously conservative evangelical pastor who was given the reigns of the ministry of family, women, and human rights.[116] In addition to playing a leading part in the government’s ceaseless propaganda war on ‘gender ideology,’ Alves’s ministerial remit has been extended to include Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency (FUNAI). In this domain, Alves draws on her experience evangelizing in indigenous areas of the country to execute Bolsonaro’s horrifying vision of the Amazon, environment, and indigenous territories. A key facet of the president’s perspective in this area is the ostensible alignment of indigenous interests with those of corporate mining and agricultural giants.[117]

Militarists

In contrast to the pomp and spectacle of the cultural authoritarians, the militarists, whose most visible representative is vice president Hamilton Mourão, project a comparatively quiet resolve. If the Brazilian populace has generally turned against most state institutions, polling suggests popular confidence in the armed forces remains high, indeed the highest of any state institutions.[118] Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, a former general who overseas security policy in the cabinet, says the military’s reputation for moderation is well-deserved: ‘Our style is to be conciliatory, not incendiary… That’s because we know full well the perils of extremism.’[119] Should Bolsonaro’s ineptitude in serving the interests of capital persist too much longer, the direct usurpation of power by Mourão is one plausible exit. ‘The bickering and resultant policy paralysis’ of Bolsonaro’s first months in office ‘has raised questions about Mr. Bolsonaro’s political skills and future,’ the Financial Times reports. ‘In a country with a history of vice-presidents rising to the highest office, analysts wonder if General Mourão is not already a president-in-waiting.’[120]

Lacking an institutional machinery comparable to the Republican Party in the United States, which remains capable of disciplining Trump in myriad ways, the Brazilian armed forces, and the army in particular, has provided a necessary infrastructural bedrock for the Bolsonaro administration. Reflecting Brazil’s well-established sub-imperial role in the region – as much under the PT as under the rule of traditional bourgeois parties – many of the key military figures staffing the state since January have been drawn from personnel whose formative experience was Brazil’s occupation of Haiti, part of a wider mission of the United Nations.[121] Labelled ‘the Haitian Generals,’ this group has overseen the insertion of 103 military figures into the various strata of state apparatuses under Bolsonaro – from the vice presidency, to ministries, to federal banks, to municipalities, and to strategic state enterprises, such as Petrobras. [122]

According to a poll in early April, 60 percent of Brazilians consider the participation of military representatives in the Bolsonaro government to be positive. Apart from the president (himself an ex-army captain) and the vice president, representatives of the armed forces occupy six of 22 ministries, including Fernando Azevedo as defence minister. Two other ministers have had military training. Members of the army, airforce, and marines occupy dozens of positions of note in the current government. Exemplary cases are the head of the National Department of Infrastructure and Transportation (DNIT) and key positions within FUNAI. If the president’s most prominent, informal Twitter spokesperson is Carlos the pit bull, the formal position of chief spokesperson is occupied by General Rêgo Barros .[123]

While the social media warriors of Bolsonaro’s inner circle play a critical role in securing the otherwise exhaustible zeal of the grassroots, ‘the military ensures that this reality show does not undermine the functioning of the machinery of the state, and, therefore, of the government.’[124] Mourão presents himself as the face of institutionality in a government which loathes institutions, of good sense in a government which lacks it entirely, of equilibrium, in a government which sews uncertainty as a matter of course. In so doing, he has earned the special and concentrated opprobrium of Bolsonaro’s sons and their sage in West Virginia. However, to date, the pageantry of these melees has not translated into genuinely irresolvable conflict between the militarists and the cultural authoritarians.

On a recent trip to Washington, Mourão held a series of public events as well as closed-door meetings with US senators and the American vice president Mike Pence. US business representatives who met with him praised the general’s calm and firm temperament. Citigroup’s CEO for Latin America, Jane Fraser, for example, suggested that Mourão’s tranquil and firm comportment is a necessary ingredient for investor confidence in the Brazilian government. In his speeches to US investors, Mourão, in accordance with neoliberal technocrats, consistently defended the necessity of implementing radical pension and tax reforms, as well as wide-scale privatizations.[125]

As late as last year, it would have been difficult to imagine Mourão’s self-reinvention as a voice of reason and moderation. Until recently, he was generally seen as one of the most aggressive proponents of a return to military dictatorship after decades of democratic rule. The five-star general was pressured to resign shortly before he was fingered as Bolsonaro’s vice presidential candidate. He managed to miscalculate acceptable limits to open adherence to authoritarian rule during the late period of Dilma’s rule – ‘he had openly attacked Dilma’s government; declared that if the judiciary failed to restore order in Brazil, the military should intervene to do so; and floated the idea of an “auto-coup” by an acting president, should that be necessary.’ [126] Mourão, who is of indigenous descent himself, has berated the ‘laziness’ of Brazil’s indigenous population, has lamented the ‘trickery’ of the country’s descendants of African slaves, and has explained that the only reason his grandson is handsome is a consequence of the ‘whitening’ of the population through European migration.[127]

It is undoubtedly true that military-civilian relations changed with the return of liberal democratic rule in 1985. And yet, certain dark legacies of the way the democratic transition unfolded remain at play to this day. Unlike neighbouring Argentina, where the military was vanquished by the Malvinas/Falklands War and a resurgent popular movement for democracy, the Brazilian dictatorship ultimately collapsed as a result of internal disputes within the armed forces. There was no comparable popular insurgent pressure from below. Coming ‘from-above’ in this way, the nature of the transition has to some extent insulated the Brazilian armed forces from democratic accountability.[128] One reflection of this is the total autonomy enjoyed by the military educational system, of which Bolsonaro is a product.[129] The core history texts taught in these schools present the military coup of 1964 as a democratic revolution, carried out by moderate groups respectful of law and order. They omit entirely the assassinations, repression of human rights, and torture committed during the dictatorship.[130]

In recent years, the reach of the armed forces into civilian affairs has been extended. Beginning in the first administration of Dilma (2011-2014), the armed forces were assigned a major role in domestic policing tasks in the name of restoring public security. Under Temer (2016-2018), military influence grew further, with the reinstatement of ministerial status for the Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI). The armed forces were also called upon to militarily intervene in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro between February and December 2018.[131] In the lead up to the October 2018 elections, various representatives of the armed forces let it be known, off record, that they would not accept another PT government.[132]

Although I have placed Bolsonaro firmly with the cultural authoritarians, he nonetheless shares many of the commitments of the militarists. For the first time since the end of the dictatorship, Brazil has a president who denies all evidence of the crimes committed by the military during the dictatorship, and who holds up one of the officials most associated with torture, Coronel Alberto Brilhante Ustra, as an exemplar for others. Bolsonaro is committed to a full alteration of the historical memory of the period, beginning with the idea that 1964 was not a coup, but rather a necessary initiative taken by the military in defence of democratic values.[133] Bolsonaro announced his intention to memorialize the fifty-fifth anniversary of the 1964 coup on March 25 early in his term, but was forced to back down in the face of public discontent.[134]  According to Datafolha, the majority of the population (57 percent) continue to think the day inaugurating 21 years of dictatorship should be condemned. Thirty six percent of Brazilians nonetheless support the president’s efforts to rewrite history.[135]

Neoliberal Technocrats

Next to the cultural authoritarians and militarists, a third current of neoliberal technocrats has been central both to Bolsonaro’s rise to office, as well to the design of the government’s political-economic and anti-corruptions programs. The latter task has fallen to Sergio Moro, the ex-federal judge responsible for heading up the Lava Jato “carwash” investigations into corruption, which ultimately underpinned the impeachment of Dilma and the imprisonment of Lula.[136] After the first round of the 2018 elections, Bolsonaro brought Moro under his wing, promising him the ministry of justice and public security should he become president. Moro quickly became the most popular minister in the cabinet, recognized by 93 percent of poll respondents, and with an unmatched approval rating of 74 percent. [137] Moro’s fame is the product of his leading role in a carefully manufactured politicization of corruption investigations dating back to 2006.  ‘Successive operations – raids, round-ups, hand-cuffs, confessions – were given maximum publicity,’ Anderson points out, ‘with tip-offs to the press and television, each carefully assigned a number (to date there have been 57, resulting in more than a thousand years of jail sentences) and typically a name chosen for operative effect from the cinematic, classical, or biblical imaginary.’[138]

While Moro’s public persona is one of dispassionate, judicious restraint, he happily assumed responsibility for one of the most reactionary pieces of legislation under Bolsonaro’s reign thus far. A package of anti-crime bills was passed into law under Moro’s watch with the ostensible aim of cracking down on endemic levels of violence. According to the new legislation, judges now possess the freedom to grant immunity to police officers who have killed civilians, provided the police officers can show that during the incidents in question they were subject to ‘violent emotion, excessive fear, or surprise.’ This is an extraordinary license to kill in a country where the number of annual police executions was already legendary.[139] According to the Brazilian Annual Public Security Report, in 2017, Brazilian police forces killed 14 people per day, 5,144 over the course of the year – a 20 percent increase relative to 2016. In 2017, 367 police officers were killed, an average of one per day. The uptick in police repression had no demonstrable effect on its purported aim, the reduction of homicides, of which there were 63,880 that year, 3 percent more than in 2016.[140] In 2018, with Rio de Janeiro’s favelas under military intervention at the behest of Temer, there were 1,532 officially registered killings by police. In 2019, the numbers have been equally impressive: 170 dead in January alone. After the apparent execution of 15 young men by police after they had been detained, Wilson Witze, the governor of Rio, immediately declared the police actions to have been legitimate.[141]

The anti-crime package overseen by Moro links back to an earlier presidential decree which freed up access to gun possession. In an intensely volatile combination, people have been granted even further access to guns while juridical freedom has been expanded such that vigilante assassinations can be framed as legitimate defence.[142] Despite everyday insecurity clearly having played a role in the election of Bolsonaro, recent polls indicate most Brazilians are unconvinced that the anti-crime package will actually improve their safety. For the majority of Brazilians, the possession of guns should be prohibited (64 percent), and society will not be more secure if people are better armed to protect themselves (72 percent). Police should not be free to shoot suspects because they might kill innocent bystanders (81 percent), and in instances where the police do kill, they should be investigated (79 percent). Pertinently, those police officers who shoot someone because they were in a heightened state of nervousness should be punished (82 percent).[143] Nonetheless, these polling figures have not translated into disapproval of Moro himself.

In a certain sense, Moro embodies the ideological conjoining of anti-corruption and state violence at the heart of Bolsonarismo. But he does so in a tempered voice, and with the measured, juridical rationality of the bourgeois state – a liberal cover for state murder. Moro is able to do so within Bolsonaro’s more general framework of rule. The president ‘consolidates in himself the program of the far-right, a program that focuses on corruption to give it legitimacy, and which focuses on a strong state, using the argument of violence,’ Saad-Filho explains. ‘But the idea is that if communities are insecure, more police and more violence will resolve this problem. A discourse that was connected to neoliberalism, again, because the state is intrinsically corrupt, so the way to resolve the problem of the state is to take it off the backs of the citizens through a neoliberal program. But you don’t talk about the program itself, you talk about liberating people from the yoke of a state which is intrinsically corrupt.’[144] Moro does the work of operationalizing this idea of a lean, hard, and clean state.

An agile operator, Moro is as comfortable in the sphere of social media, where he has plenty of followers, as he is in the more sedate corridors of power. He forges alliances with militarists in order to ensure the proper functioning of his ministry. At the same time, he obeys the diktats of Bolsonaro and his familial dynasty whenever necessary, and he avoids contradicting them publicly.[145] Should some kind of coup ever play out involving the removal of Bolsonaro and Mourão’s temporary seizure of the presidency, Moro would have been one logical candidate in the likely hasty search to follow, wherein an ex post facto civilian face would need to be found to legitimize the new regime.

But Moro’s luck recently ran dry. An anonymous source provided investigative journalists at The Intercept with a treasure trove of ‘private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation’ which reveal ‘highly controversial, politicized, and legally dubious internal discussions and secret actions by the Operation Car Wash anti-corruption task force of prosecutors, led by the chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, along with then-judge Sergio Moro.’[146]The Intercept unleashed its first flurry of reports in early June, with many more apparently in the pipeline based on an archive of materials now in their possession (and also safely secured outside Brazil, should the government intervene).

The investigative reports published thus far indicate unambiguously that the Car Wash prosecutors were fundamentally motivated by the desire to prevent a return of the PT to power, and that Moro secretly collaborated with them on various fronts to ensure this outcome, even while presenting himself as a neutral arbiter of justice. This was long suspected by PT supporters and critics of the Bolsonaro government, but hard proof had been lacking until now.[147] ‘Telegram messages between Sergio Moro and Deltan Dallagnol reveal that Moro repeatedly stepped far outside the permissible bounds of his position as a judge while working on Car Wash cases,’ one of the published reports indicates. ‘Over the course of more than two years, Moro suggested to the prosecutor that his team change the sequence of who they would investigate; insisted on less downtime between raids; gave strategic advice and informal tips; provided the prosecutors with advance knowledge of his decisions; offered constructive criticism of prosecutorial findings; and even scolded Dallagnol as if the prosecutor worked for the judge.’[148]

There is also clear documentation in the journalists’ archives that Dallagnol had serious doubts about the basic constitutive evidence in the case against Lula, in particular whether a beachfront triplex apartment that Lula was accused of receiving as payback for dolling out multimillion-dollar contracts with Petrobras was actually Lula’s, and whether it in fact had anything to do with Petrobras (the latter being especially important jurisdictionally, because without the involvement of Petrobras the case could not have been tried by Moro in Curitiba).[149]

The significance of The Intercept findings is already clear as day, even if there are still many more stories to be published. Moro convicted Lula after clandestinely and illegally collaborating with the prosecutorial team at a time when Lula was leading in the polls of the 2018 presidential race by a wide margin. Only after Lula’s conviction and the PT’s switch to Haddad as candidate did Bolsonaro’s numbers begin to rise.[150] Without Moro’s actions it is very far from obvious that Bolsonaro would ever have been elected. ‘That the same judge who found Lula guilty was then rewarded by Lula’s victorious opponent made even longtime supporters of the Car Wash corruption probe uncomfortable,’ The Intercept journalists go on to point out, ‘due to the obvious perception (real or not) of a quid pro quo, and by the transformation of Moro, who long insisted he was apolitical, into a political official working for the most far-right president ever elected in the history of Brazil’s democracy. Those concerns heightened when Bolsonaro recently admitted that he had also promised to appoint Moro to a lifelong seat on the Supreme Court as soon as there was a vacancy.’[151]

However important Moro has been to Bolsonaro’s calculus of power, it was economist and financier Paulo Guedes who eased into place the unlikely marriage between the nationalist ex-captain and capital. Bolsonaro had exhibited no earlier sympathies for neoliberal economics, favouring state subsidies and protections for his military voting base when, as a congressperson, he occasionally assumed substantive positions. ‘In the sequence of Bolsonaro’s rise,’ long-time Brazil observer Peter Evans notes, ‘the figure of Paulo Guedes rivals that of Judge Sérgio Moro. If Moro and his judicial allies did the negative work of removing Lula, Guedes did the positive work of building capital’s confidence that Bolsonaro’s economic agenda would serve their interests.’[152]

Guedes was a co-founder of the largest private investment bank in Brazil, BTG Pactual, and has amassed considerable wealth. An authentic Chicago Boy, having received his doctoral training in the department of economics at the University of Chicago, Guedes’s clearest expression of unrestrained commitment to Milton Friedman’s monetarism was perhaps his move to Pinochet’s Chile in the 1980s to take up an academic post. It was in part the promise of a comparable union between liberal economics and authoritarian rule that drew him into Bolsonaro’s quest for state control. ‘People asked me,’ he explained to the Financial Times, ‘how can a liberal join conservatives? They will only bring disorder. But disorder is already here…. The president will bring “order,” the liberals “progress”,’ Guedes said, with reference to Brazil’s national slogan, ‘order and progress.’[153]

A purer technocrat than Moro, Guedes does not understand the world of social media. Similarly, his attempts to navigate the labyrinthine politics of coalition-building in congress have not born fruit.  When he recognized Bolsonaro was not going to assist in the passage of his prized pension reform agenda, Guedes attempted to establish direct lines of communication with Rodrigo Maia, president of the lower house. However, Maia insisted on Bolsonaro’s direct involvement, inviting upon himself a barrage of insults from Bolsonaro loyalists, and the following statement towards the end of March, directly from the president: ‘I do not really want to carry out the pension reform.’[154] At one point, in apparent exasperation at his inability to move pension reform forward due to tensions between the president and congress, Guedes threatened to walk off the job and return to the lucrative life of investment banking.[155] He has never followed through on the threat, however, and remains at the time of writing committed to constructing the necessary alliances to pass his pension reform agenda.[156]

Accompanying Guedes in Bolsonaro’s neoliberal dream team until very recently, Joaquim Levy assumed the role of president of the massive Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). Here we see some of the continuities with the period of PT rule. Levy held several positions in the International Monetary Fund, and was President of a division of Bradesco, Brazil’s second largest private bank, before taking the reins as minister of finance at the beginning of Dilma’s second term in office in 2014 – a misjudgement on Dilma’s part, based on a wager that the PT might still project ‘credibility’ to finance capital through an orthodox finance minister. Following his brief stint in Dilma’s cabinet, Levy worked as the World Bank’s Chief Financial Officer, until he accepted the presidency of BNDES.[157] On June 16, Levy resigned from his position after being criticized by Bolsonaro. He was replaced by 36-year-old Gustavo Montezano, a long-serving drinking companion of Eduardo Bolsonaro.[158]

Meanwhile, in the ministry of agriculture, Tereza Cristina da Costa, a long-time congressperson for DEM, from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, is a direct representative of agribusiness interests.[159]  Onyx Lorenzoni, also linked to the agricultural lobby groups, and likewise a member of DEM, is Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, whose unenviable job it is to coordinate the disparate allied parties of the regime in congress, and mediate the conflicting agendas of the three principal factions within the governing apparatus.[160]

Thus far, as we have seen, the three factions have been unable to carry out even the minimum elements of Bolsonaro’s policy agenda. If capital is not to abandon ship, performance on the economic front in particular will have to change.

Rudderless Economics

Bolsonaro has been resolutely incapable of lifting the economy out of the impasse it entered as a result of the delayed reverberation of the global crisis, which finally reached the shores of Brazil in 2013.[161] Favourable external economic circumstances under Workers Party rule for both of Lula’s administrations, and part of Dilma’s first term, had allowed for ‘the virtuous dynamics of the labour market, including rising wages and employment, the formalisation of labour, higher transfers and improved social security provision while, at the same time, allowing the government to deliver low inflation and the fiscal surpluses demanded by the neoliberal elite.’[162]

All of this ended in 2013 as GDP growth entered freefall: 3.0 percent in 2013, 0.5 percent in 2014,     -3.6 percent in 2015, -3.3 percent in 2017, and 1.3 percent in 2018.[163] Defying the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC) projections of a Brazilian recovery in 2019, the country’s economy has contracted in the first quarter of this year. According to official statistics, 13 million people are unemployed, millions more underemployed, and 55 million people live below the obscenely low poverty line of five dollars and fifty cents a day, an additional 3 million since 2016.[164]

Of course, these aggregate figures mask the gendered, racialized, and generational characteristics of the labour market. By one estimate, of the nearly 30 million underemployed in Brazil, black women constitute 36 percent. Of the total unemployed in 2018, 54 percent were young people between the ages of 14 and 29.[165] The demographics for occupations of low productivity and low salaries (between one and two minimum salaries) are striking. Eighty two percent of economically active black women are employed in this strata, 63.4 percent of white women, 72.6 percent of black men, and 50.5 percent of white men. Informal labour - understood as jobs without contract, domestic work, own-account work, and employment within the family – constitute 50.4 percent of all jobs, an 8 percent climb from 2014 figures.[166]

‘What happens with Bolsonaro will tell us what is going to happen with the new right in Latin America,’ long time analyst of regional affairs Claudio Katz told me in an interview in Buenos Aires in early May. ‘And the problem is that the government of Bolsonaro, in the three months or so that he has been in power, is a joke, a laugh, a record of nonsense.’ For Katz, the new conservative wave in Latin America, of which Bolsonaro represents the leading edge, lacks direction, vision, and coherence. ‘The bases for the conservative restoration are fragile,’ he explains, ‘because the classical neoliberal economic project of the 1990s and 2000s in Latin America now runs up against a changed international scenario. As a result, the neo-liberals are bewildered, unsettled, do not know what to do. And that seriously erodes the political project of conservative restoration…. We are in the midst of a conservative restoration characterized by zombie neoliberalism, and therefore the prospects are wide open.’[167]

Compounding the domestic economic incompetency of the government, in its latest forecast, published in early April, the International Monetary Fund downgraded its expected rate of growth for the world economy (global GDP) to 3.3 percent for this year.[168] An intensifying trade war between Donal Trump and Xi Jinping is helping to improve the odds that global growth might worsen even further, to 2.5 percent, the ‘stall speed’ beneath which a recession is signalled.[169] There will be no outside saviours for the Brazilian economy, which has come to depend increasingly on primary exports of soya, oil, beef, and mining minerals. By April this year, Brazilian industry accounted for the smallest part of GDP in 70 years.[170] With good reason, the percentage of citizens who expect the Brazilian economic situation to improve fell from 65 percent in December to 50 percent in April, according to Datafolha.[171]

Initially, international markets and the leading financial press welcomed Bolsonaro’s presidency as a continuation and deepening of the aggressive neoliberal restructuring introduced under the short-lived, much-hated, and un-elected presidency of Michel Temer – Dilma Rousseff’s former vice-President, and an inveterate turncoat and swindler.[172] During his brief tenure, Temer was able to enact ‘what may be the most substantial regressive change in labour legislation in 75 years, forcing Brazilian workers back into precarious work.’[173] In 2018, on the back of Temer’s assault on popular livelihoods, reported profits of companies listed on São Paulo’s B3 stock exchange rose to R177 billion ($US 45 billion), which was an increase of 40 percent from R125 billion in 2017. If to this figure we add the profits of public-private state energy companies Petrobras and Electrobras, and Telecoms Oi, combined corporate profits reached R241 billion in 2018, a 100 percent rise on the previous year. Excited by the outlook of a further rightward turn, foreign direct investment in Brazil between February 2018 and February 2019 hit $US 89.5 billion, a significant increase on the $67 billion flowing inwards the previous year.[174]

It was hoped and expected that Bolsonaro would take a knife to what capital continued to see as Brazil’s bloated state – privatizing highways, ports, and airports, resanctifying the independence of the central bank, unrolling a series of fiscal reforms, and, above all, gutting the pension system.[175] The envisioned pension surgery would involve a radical reduction in public payments by R1 trillion, providing a sense of why ‘domestic and international companies have latched on to the passage of the bill as a test case of whether the new administration will be able to pass its broader reform agenda, including privatizations and deregulation.’[176]

Because it will necessitate a change to the social clauses of the 1988 Brazilian constitution, the pension reform requires three-fifths backing in the lower house of Congress – 308 of 513 members – and an equal proportion of the Senate, which has 81 seats.[177] Turmoil within the ruling coalition, however, has dampened capital’s expectations of the bill passing, and thus its confidence in Bolsonaro’s rule more generally.[178] In one signal of this shift in sentiment, the benchmark Bovespa stock market index had already begun to fall in late March, along with the Real currency, as it seemed increasingly probable that the pension reform efforts would be delayed, at least to the second half of the year, and diluted in content.[179]

The idea of pension reform is unpopular, with over half of the population expressly hostile, and Bolsonaro is keen to avoid the unfavourable political fallout it would bring in its wake.[180] Setting aside the intellectual dishonesty underpinning the claim that Brazil will collapse if it does not carry out pension restructuring, the genuine purpose of the changes is to undue once and for all the limited social compromise crystallized in the 1988 constitution. An enormous potential windfall to financial capital is being sold to the population as if it were in the nation’s interest as a whole.[181] Should a version of this bill pass eventually, it will precipitate new forms of social exclusion and inequality on top of already crippling disparities, with women and black workers hit hardest.[182] At the same time, should it fail to pass in the relatively near feature, capital is likely to take flight and Bolsonaro’s time in office could be short-lived.

Contradictions with specific sections of capital are also coming more strongly to the foreground. Agroindustry backed Bolsonaro decisively, but there are tensions between their interests and the early rhetorical moves of the government. For example, the anti-Chinese rhetoric of foreign affairs minister Araujó is a problem for obvious reasons. The Chinese absorb 33 percent of Brazil’s agribusiness exports. China accounted for 76 percent of Brazil’s soy exports and 20 percent of animal protein exports. In other less decisive sectors, China also plays an important role – 24 percent of Brazil’s cotton exports, and 39 percent of cellulose. Similarly, agribusiness lobbying was important in determining that Bolsonaro did not follow through with his promise to move the Brazilian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Arab Middle East spent $US 1.7 billion in Brazil’s agribusiness sector between January and March of this year, accounting for 26 percent of Brazilian meat exports, 16 percent of cereals, and 15 percent of sugar.[183]

‘The big problem that the United States has,’ Katz points out, ‘is that its natural allies in this would be the right-wing governments of Latin America; but they are governments whose dominant classes have very close relations with China, and the United States can offer them nothing in return. The dominant classes in Argentina and Brazil sell soy to China, and the United States is not going to buy that soy. The United States itself sells soy; in other words, it’s a competitor. So what can agribusiness in Argentina and Brazil gain by entering into an agreement with its competitor, the United States, rather than its client, China?’[184]

Forecasts

Bolsonaro’s astonishing ascent to the highest seat of authority in Latin America’s largest economy, in the fifth largest country in the world by area and population, was all the more discombobulating coming as it did in the wake of 13 years of rule by arguably the twenty-first century’s most stable and institutionalized social democratic party. Yet another instance of the unravelling of the political centre in the rolling tsunami of global capitalist crisis, and still, so many particularities.

The policy paralysis in the opening act of this government cannot endure if it is to sustain the backing of capital. Itself an expression of the difficulty in appeasing a heterogeneous social base in a context of enduring world market stagnation, the inertia of Bolsonaro’s politics is transforming the Brazilian president from an unlikely asset to a liability in the eye of capital. The question to which we cannot yet have an answer is whether the regime can continue to mobilize its hard nucleus of support through the libidinal bonds of the president’s Twitter account, while stabilizing a functioning coalition in congress capable of rolling out pension reform, as well as the attendant packages of privatization and deregulation. The unity across the cultural authoritarians, militarists, and neoliberal technocrats that such a practical coalition would require was struck a blow this June with The Intercept’s confirmation of long-held suspicions regarding Sérgio Moro’s secret dealings with state prosecutors – until then, Moro had been one of the likely candidates to bridge the regime’s internal divides, and shore up its anti-politics war on corruption. Still, Paulo Guedes is grinding away at discussions with key congressional actors, outside the limelight, and a pension reform of some kind is likely to pass eventually. How diluted it becomes in the process will be closely watched by international financial markets. Meanwhile, there are few visible signs that Mourão is pining for any immediate or direct usurpation of power. A great little man, Bolsonaro has cohered, for a time at least, the necessary ideological ‘pastiche of motifs’ to fill the vacuum blown open by the PT’s implosion.

And just how far has the PT degeneration progressed? It’s an ailing hegemon of the country’s left, but still the only operation of any size or weight, the institutional apparatus of which is likely to dominate all the more so a few years from now, as street mobilizations and strikes cede ground to the temporal pressures of approaching elections. The call to free Lula is a righteous one, and Moro’s crimes in all likelihood altered the results of the 2018 electoral contest, with nefarious consequences. Justice should be sought on all accounts.

And yet there is clearly a danger of nostalgia and personalism in the singularity of the campaign to free Lula. An aged man who reigned over the rightward drift of Brazilian social democracy is less than a beguiling future for the Brazilian left, and his revival would be no answer to the historical fact that the PT’s centrism played a critical role in ripening the conditions for the rise of a new far-right. Promise mainly lies elsewhere, even if establishing any left-party or movement independence from the petismo/anti-petismo binary would be a heroic task in the short and medium terms.

The labour movement was bureaucratized under PT rule, and is suffering under the structural informalization of the world of work and deindustrialization, as well as the legislative assaults on union rights begun under Temer and accelerated under Bolsonaro. But defensive strikes have been impressive in number, and the general strike of June is a basis from which to rebuild from the rank-and-file. The promise of left-social movement rebellion in June 2013 was eclipsed for a number of years, as the sociological make-up and ideological leadership of street protests changed in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Yet #EleNão, the women’s mobilizations of 8 March this year, the movements for justice for Marielle Franco, the movements against racism and for black and indigenous liberation, and the emerging struggles around education are potential grounds for rearticulation.

The necessary work of winning back the informal layers of the working class who have been realigned with evangelism and Bolsonarismo will not be easily accomplished in the immediate future, but is best seen as a medium term project, involving the slow, deliberate work of working class recomposition.

• 20 June, 2019

Jeffery R. Webber is a Senior Lecturer of International Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author most recently of The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. He is working on a new book for Verso,The Latin American Crucible: Politics and Power in the New Era.

[1] Thanks to Sean Purdy and Daniela Mussi for their assistance during fieldwork in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and for their comments on this piece. I also benefitted from conversations with Benjamin Fogel in São Paulo. Thanks also to Todd Gordon, Adam Hanieh, Joe Hayns and Forrest Hylton for reading an earlier draft.

[2] Daniela Mussi and Alvaro Bianchi, ‘Rise of the Radical Right’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 50.4 (2018), 351–55 (p. 351).

[3] Dom Phillips, ‘Jair Bolsonaro: Brazil Presidential Frontrunner Stabbed at Campaign Rally’, The Guardian, 7 September 2018, section World news <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/06/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-far…; [accessed 1 June 2019].

[4] Perry Anderson, ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, London Review of Books, 7 February 2019.

[5] Mussi and Bianchi; Ludmila Abilio and others, ‘The Long Brazilian Crisis: A Forum’, Historical Materialism <http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/long-brazilian-crisis-for…; [accessed 1 June 2019].

[6] Benjamin Fogel, ‘Brazil’s Never-Ending Crisis’, Catalyst, 2.2 (2018) <https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no2/brazils-never-ending-crisis&gt; [accessed 30 May 2019].

[7] Andres Schipani and Joe Leahy, ‘Brazil’s Bolsonaro Aims to Rule with “Bull, Bullet, and Bible” Bloc’, Financial Times, 9 October 2018; Mussi and Bianchi; Perry Anderson, ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’.

[8] Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado, ‘Bolsonaro’s Popularity Sinks After a Rocky 100 Days in Brazil’, New York Times, 14 April 2019; Gustavo Uribe and Talita Fernandes, ‘Após início com desgastes e isolamento, Bolsonaro revê estrutura de governo’,Folha de São Paulo, 10 April 2019; ​Benjamin Fogel, ‘Bolsonaro’s Three-Month Rule a Disaster’,The Mail and Guardian <https://mg.co.za/article/2019-04-12-00-bolsonaros-three-month-rule-a-di…; [accessed 31 May 2019].

[9] On the education demonstrations see Elizabeth Redden, ‘Brazil’s Bolsonaro Takes on Philosophy, Sociology’, Inside Higher Ed, 29 April 2019 <https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/04/29/brazils-bolsonaro-…; [accessed 30 May 2019]; Rodrigo Nunes, ‘Jair Bolsonaro Is Weaker Than He Looks’,Jacobin, 10 June 2019 <https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/bolsonaro-war-on-reality-education-prote…; [accessed 16 June 2019]; Herton Escobar, ‘In Brazil, “useful Idiots” Protest Cuts to Research and Education’,Science, 17 May 2019 <https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/brazil-useful-idiots-protest-cu…; [accessed 30 May 2019]; Tom Phillips, ‘Students Protest across Brazil over Jair Bolsonaro’s Sweeping Cuts to Education’,The Guardian, 30 May 2019, section World news <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/31/students-protest-across-b…; [accessed 31 May 2019]. On the general strike, see ‘Cidades pelo Brasil registram greve geral e protestos’,Jornal do Brasil, 14 June 2019 <http://www.jb.com.br/pais/2019/06/1004874-cidades-pelo-brasil-registram…; [accessed 19 June 2019].

[10] ‘“Não vou perder tempo para comentar pesquisa do Datafolha”, diz Bolsonaro’, Folha de São Paulo, 8 April 2019.

[11] Uribe and Fernandes.

[12] Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), Goldsmiths, University of London, Brazil under Bolsonaro: Alfredo Saad-Filho in Conversation with Jeffery R. Webber, March 14, 2019 <https://soundcloud.com/goldsmithsuol/brazil-under-bolsonaro&gt; [accessed 27 April 2019].

[13] Schipani and Leahy.

[14] Ana Garcia, ‘Brazil Under Bolsonaro: Social Base, Agenda, and Perspectives’, The Bullet, 15 April 2019.

[15] Garcia.

[16] Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), Goldsmiths, University of London.

[17] Marcos Nobre, ‘O caos como método: Manter o colapso institucional é o modo de Bolsonaro garantir a fidelidade de seus eleitores’, piauí, April 2019, 151 edition.

[18] Nobre.

[19] Garcia.

[20] Garcia.

[21] Garcia.

[22] Ruy Braga and Sean Purdy, ‘A Precarious Hegemony: Neo-Liberalism, Social Struggles, and the End of Lulismo in Brazil’, Globalizations, 16.2 (2019), 201–15 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2018.1479013&gt;.

[23] Lamia Oualalou, ‘Los evangélicos y el hermano Bolsonaro’, Nueva Sociedad, 2080, 2019, 68–77 (p. 68).

[24] Oualalou, p. 68.

[25] Oualalou, p. 69.

[26] Oualalou, p. 69.

[27] Oualalou, p. 72.

[28] Oualalou, p. 76.

[29] Oualalou, p. 69.

[30] Oualalou, p. 69.

[31] Oualalou, p. 70.

[32] Arí Pedro Oro and Marcelo Tadvald, ‘Consideraciones sobre el campo evangélico brasileño’, Nueva Sociedad, 280, 2019, 55–67 (p. 56).

[33] Oro and Tadvald, p. 57.

[34] Oro and Tadvald, p. 57.

[35] Oro and Tadvald, p. 57.

[36] Oro and Tadvald, p. 57.

[37] Oro and Tadvald, p. 57.

[38] Oro and Tadvald, p. 59.

[39] The government has warned that it will be scaling down the scope of the census, eliminating crucial questions such as those concerning unemployment. There have already been staff cuts at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, which is the entity responsible for carrying out the census. As a result, there have been protests by census employees. ‘Governo Bolsonaro promove ataques ao IBGE’, Esquerda Diário, 7 June 2019 <http://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/Governo-Bolsonaro-promove-ataques-ao-I…; [accessed 20 June 2019].

[40] Oro and Tadvald, p. 60.

[41] Oro and Tadvald, p. 60.

[42] Oualalou, p. 70.

[43] Oualalou, p. 71.

[44] Oualalou, p. 71.

[45] Oualalou, p. 71.

[46] Oualalou, p. 75.

[47] Ruy Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’, Jacobin, 7 April 2019 <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/bolsonaro-election-unions-labor-evan…; [accessed 15 May 2019]; See also Ruy Braga,A rebeldia do precariado: Trabalho e neoliberalismo no Sul global (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2017); Ruy Braga,A política do precariado: Do populismo à hegemonia lulista (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2012).

[48] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[49] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[50] André Singer and Gustavo Venturi, ‘Sismografia de um terremoto eleitoral’, in Democracia em risco? 22 ensaios sobre o Brasil Hoje (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019).

[51] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[52] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[53] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[54] Ricardo Antunes, ‘Brasil: El Colapso Del Gobierno Dilma Y El PT’, Herramienta, 2015 <http://www.herramienta.com.ar/revista-herramienta-n-57/brasil-el-colaps…; [accessed 8 March 2018].

[55] Alfredo Saad-Filho, ‘A Coup in Brazil?’, 2016 <http://jacobinmag.com/2016/03/dilma-rousseff-pt-coup-golpe-petrobras-la…; [accessed 8 March 2018].

[56] Alfredo Saad-Filho and Armando Boito, ‘Brazil: The Failure of the PT and the Rise of the “New Right”’, in Socialist Register 2016: The Politics of the Right, ed. by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), pp. 213–30 (pp. 217–218).

[57] Saad-Filho and Boito, p. 218.

[58] Perry Anderson, ‘Crisis in Brazil’, London Review of Books, 21 April 2016, pp. 15–22.

[59] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[60] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[61] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[62] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[63] Alan Sears, The Next New Left: A History of the Future (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd, 2014).

[64] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.

[65] Braga, ‘From the Union Hall to the Church’.