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.   

References

Anand, R.P. 1971, ‘The Development of a Universal International Law’, in The Search for World Order: Studies by Students and Colleagues of Quincy Wright, edited by Albert Lepawsky, Edward H. Buehrig and Harold Lasswell, New York: Appleton-Century-Croft.

Anderson, Perry 1983, ‘Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism’, New Left Review, I, 139: 49–58.

Anievas, Alexander 2014, Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914–1945, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Baxter, Richard 1975, ‘Humanitarian Law or Humanitarian Politics? The 1974 Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law’, Harvard International Law Journal, 16, 1: 1–26.

Bowring, Bill 2008, ‘Positivism versus Self-Determination: The Contradictions of Soviet International Law’, in International Law on the Left: Re-examining Marxist Legacies, edited by Susan Marks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Buzan, Barry and George Lawson 2015, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chimni, B.S. 2004, ‘Prolegomena to a Class Approach to International Law’, European Journal of International Law, 21, 1: 57–82.

Chiu, Hungdah 1966, ‘Communist China’s Attitude towards International Law’, American Journal of International Law, 60, 2: 245–67.

Craven, Matthew 2005, ‘What Happened to Unequal Treaties? The Continuities of Informal Empire’, Nordic Journal of International Law, 74, 3: 335–82.

Dickinson, Edwin 1931, ‘The Recognition of Russia’, Michigan Law Review, 30, 2: 181–96.

Eslava, Luis, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds.) 2017, Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Geertz, Clifford 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.

Ginsburgs, George 1964, ‘“Wars of National Liberation” and the Modern Law of Nations – The Soviet Thesis’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 29, 4: 910–42.

Hazard, John 1938, ‘Cleansing Soviet International Law of Anti-Marxist Theories’, American Journal of International Law, 32, 2: 244–52.

Kim, Samuel 1987, ‘The Development of International Law in Post-Mao China: Change and Continuity’, Journal of Chinese Law, 1, 2: 117–60.

Knox, Robert J. 2010, Review of The Degradation of the International Legal Order? The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics by Bill Bowring,Historical Materialism, 18, 1: 193–207.

Knox, Robert J., 2016, ‘Valuing Race? Stretched Marxism and the Logic of Imperialism’, London Review of International Law, 4, 1: 81–126.

Korovin, Eugene 1946, ‘The Second World War and International Law’, American Journal of International Law, 40, 3: 742–55.

Koskenniemi, Martti 2005, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Li Chen 2011, ‘Universalism and Equal Sovereignty as Contested Myths of International Law in the Sino-Western Encounter’, Journal of the History of International Law, 13, 1: 75–116.

McWhinney, Edward 1962, ‘“Peaceful Co-Existence” and Soviet-Western International Law’, American Journal of International Law, 56, 4: 951–70.

Miéville, China 2005, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Neff, Stephen G. 1990, Friends But No Allies: Economic Liberalism and the Law of Nations, New York: Columbia University Press.

Newton, Scott 2014, Law and the Making of the Soviet World: The Red Demiurge, London: Routledge.

Nkrumah, Kwame 1976, Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, London: Panaf Books Ltd.

Ozsu, Umut 2017, ‘Neoliberalism and the New International Economic Order: A History of “Contemporary Legal Thought”’, in Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought, edited by Christopher Tomlins and Justin Desautels-Stein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pahuja, Sundhya 2011, Decolonising International Law: Decolonisation, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pashukanis, Evgeny 1987, Law and Marxism: A General Theory, New Edition, London: Pluto Press.

Pashukanis, Evgeny 2005, ‘International Law’ (Appendix), in Miéville 2005.

Quigley, John 2007, Soviet Legal Innovation and the Law of the Western World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Raimundo, Bernard 1967, Peaceful Coexistence: International Law in the Building of Communism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rasulov, Akbar 2010, ‘“The Nameless Rapture of the Struggle”: Towards a Marxist Class-Theoretic Approach to International Law’, Finnish Yearbook of International Law, 19, 1: 243–95.

Rosenberg, Justin 1994, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations, London: Verso.

Rosenberg, Justin 1996, ‘Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations’, New Left Review, I, 215: 3–15.

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’.

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

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

[68] Lesley Gill, A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016); Deborah T. Levenson,Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

[69] Oualalou, p. 73.

[70] Enzo Traverso, ‘Interpretar la era de la violencia global’, Nueva Sociedad, 280, 2019, 163–79 (p. 171).

[71] Celso Rocha de Barros, ‘A queda: Hipóteses sobre o governo Bolsonaro’, piauí, March 2019, 150 edition.

[72] Jairus Banaji, ‘The Political Culture of Fascism’, Historical Materialism, 2017 <http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/political-culture-fascism&gt; [accessed 16 May 2019].

[73] John Lee Anderson, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy’, The New Yorker, 25 March 2019.

[74] Banaji.

[75] Perry Anderson, ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’.

[76] John Lee Anderson.

[77] John Lee Anderson.

[78] John Lee Anderson.

[79] Alberto Toscano, ‘Observations on Capitalist Folklore’, Viewpoint Magazine, 24 April 2019 <https://www.viewpointmag.com/2019/04/24/observations-on-capitalist-folk…; [accessed 17 May 2019].

[80] John Paul Rathbone, ‘The Mask of Bolsonaro’s Guru, Olavo de Carvalho, Slips’, Financial Times, 22 March 2019.

[81] Londoño and Casado.

[82] John Lee Anderson.

[83] John Lee Anderson.

[84] Benjamin Fogel, ‘Brazil’s Never-Ending Crisis’.

[85] ‘Brazil Leader Criticised over Obscene Video’, BBC, 6 March 2019, section Latin America & Caribbean <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47473582&gt; [accessed 3 June 2019]. There is some controversy over how many of his apparent Twitter followers are actually bots.

[86] Alberto Toscano, ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, Historical Materialism, 2017 <http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism&gt; [accessed 16 May 2019].

[87] Nobre.

[88] Nobre.

[89] Toscano, ‘Notes on Late Fascism’.

[90] Garcia.

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

[92] Andres Schipani and Bryan Harris, ‘Brazil’s Generals Viewed as Voice of Moderation in Populist Government’, Financial Times, 31 March 2019.

[93] Bolsonaro has another son, Renan, from his second marriage, and a young daughter – Laura – from his present marriage. He has famously said of his daughter that she reflected a moment of ‘weakness,’ on his part.

[94] Consuelo Dieguez, ‘O chanceler do regresso: Os planos de Ernesto Araújo para salvar o Brasil e o Occidente’, piauí, April 2019, 151 edition.

[95] Joe Leahy and Andres Schipani, ‘Brazil’s Gun-Loving Bolsonaro Clan Seeks to Build Political Dynasty’, Financial Times, 12 October 2018.

[96] Leahy and Schipani.

[97] Bryan Harris and Andres Schipani, ‘Brazil’s Bolsonaro Keeps It in the Family’, Financial Times, 6 May 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/2fad23d2-6cdf-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d&gt; [accessed 3 June 2019].

[98] Benjamin Fogel, ‘Brazil: Corruption as a Mode of Rule’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 51.2 (2019), 153–58 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1617476&gt;.

[99] Andres Schipani, ‘Will Jair Bolsonaro Be a Brazilian King Lear?’, Financial Times, 25 January 2019.

[100] Leahy and Schipani.

[101] Nobre.

[102] Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, ‘A farsa e a tragédia da educação’, Folha de São Paulo, 9 April 2019.

[103] Paulo Saldaña, Talita Fernandes, and Gustavo Uribe, ‘Missão é acalmar os ânimos no MEC, afirma Weintraub’, Folha de São Paulo, 10 April 2019; Bryan Harris and Andres Schipani, ‘Brazil Minister’s Dismissal Raises Doubts over Bolsonaro’,Financial Times, 8 April 2019.

[104] Paulo Saldaña and Gustavo Uribe, ‘Bolsonaro troca Vélez por economist inexperiente em educação no MEC’, Folha de São Paulo, 9 April 2019.

[105] Nobre.

[106] Dieguez.

[107] Ricardo Della Coletta, ‘Araújo chega aos 100 dias de governo questionado por diplomatas e militares’, Folha de São Paulo, 10 April 2019.

[108] Silvio Caccia Bava, ‘Adeus ao desenvolvimento’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, April 2019). Lenin Moreno, Ecuador’s president, was elected in 2017 on a platform of continuity with Rafael Correa’s administration, however, he made a sharp turn to the right almost immediately after he assumed office.

[109] Uribe and Fernandes.

[110] Dieguez.

[111] Caccia Bava. Shamefully, the Bolivian government of Evo Morales participated in the extradition after Battisti fled Brazil for Bolivia. Morales was also one of the only presidents not affiliated with the conservative right in the region to have attended Bolsonaro’s inauguration.

[112] Dieguez.

[113] Dieguez.

[114] Della Coletta.

[115] Dieguez.

[116] This new ministry replaced the old ministry of human rights.

[117] Dom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro to Abolish Human Rights Ministry in Favour of Family Values’, The Guardian, 10 December 2018, section World news <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/06/outcry-over-bolsonaros-pl…; [accessed 5 June 2019]; John Lee Anderson.

[118] Fabio Victor, ‘História, volver’, piauí, March 2019, 150 edition.

[119] Quoted in Londoño and Casado.

[120] Schipani and Harris.

[121] Raúl Zibechi, Brasil potencia : entre la integración regional y un nuevo imperialismo (Málaga: Zambra / Baladre, 2012).

[122] Nobre.

[123] ‘Maioria aprova a participação de militares no governo, diz Datafolha’, Folha de São Paulo, 8 April 2019.

[124] Nobre.

[125] Marina Dias and Patrícia Campos Mello, ‘Falo o que Bolsonaro não fala, afirma Mourão’, Folha de São Paulo, 10 April 2019.

[126] Perry Anderson, ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’.

[127] Schipani and Harris.

[128] Alexandre Fuccille, ‘Notas para entender os militares brasileiros na atualidade’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, March 2019).

[129] Ana Penido, ‘A educação nas Forças Armadas’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, March 2019).

[130] Victor.

[131] Fuccille.

[132] Fuccille.

[133] Victor.

[134] Uribe and Fernandes.

[135] José Marques, ‘Para maioria da população, golpe de 1964 deveria ser desprezado, diz Datafolha’, Folha de São Paulo, 6 April 2019.

[136] André Singer, O lulismo em crise: Um quebra-cabeça do período Dilma (2011-2016) (São Paulo: Commpanhia Das Letras, 2018); Armando Boito Jr.,Reforma e crise polícia no Brasil: Os conflitos de classe nos governos do PT (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2018).

[137] ‘Moro é aprovado por 59%, e ministro do Turismo, pivô dos laranjas, tem 11%’, Folha de São Paulo, 8 April 2019.

[138] Perry Anderson, ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’.

[139] Marcelo Freixo, ‘O pacote de Moro nasce velho’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, March 2019).

[140] Freixo.

[141] Adriana Vianna, ‘Políticas da morte e seus fantasmas’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, March 2019).

[142] Freixo.

[143] Fernanda Mena, ‘Maioria é contra pontos-clave de pacote anticrime de Moro’, Folha de São Paulo, 11 April 2019.

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

[145] Nobre.                                                                                                                             

[146] Glenn Greenwald, Leandro Demori, and Betsy Reed, ‘How and Why The Intercept Is Reporting on a Vast Trove of Materials About Brazil’s Operation Car Wash and Justice Minister Sergio Moro’, The Intercept, 9 June 2019 <https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-archive-operation-car-wash/&…;.

[147] Greenwald, Demori, and Reed.

[148] Andrew Fishman and others, ‘Breach of Ethics: Exclusive: Leaked Chats Between Brazilian Judge and Prosecutor Who Imprisoned Lula Reveal Prohibited Collaboration and Doubts Over Evidence’, The Intercept, 9 June 2019 <https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-lula-operation-car-wash-serg…;.

[149] Fishman and others.

[150] Moro initially sentenced Lula to nine years and six months in prison. As The Intercept journalists report, ‘the ruling was quickly upheld unanimously by an appeals court and the sentence was extended to 12 years and one month. In an interview, the president of the appeals court characterized Moro’s decision as “just and impartial” before later admitting that he had not yet obtained access to the underlying evidence in the case. One of the three judges on the panel was an old friend and classmate of Moro’s.’ Fishman and others.

[151] Glenn Greenwald and Victor Pougy, ‘Hidden Plot: Exclusive: Brazil’s Top Prosecutors Who Indicted Lula Schemed in Secret Messages to Prevent His Party From Winning 2018 Election’, The Intercept, 9 June 2019 <https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-car-wash-prosecutors-workers…;.

[152] Peter Evans, ‘Brazil: An Unfolding Tragedy’, The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Fall, 2018 <https://clas.berkeley.edu/research/brazil-unfolding-tragedy&gt; [accessed 30 May 2019].

[153] Andres Schipani and John Paul Rathbone, ‘Brazil Economy Minister Vows Return of “order” in Sweeping Reforms’, Financial Times, 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/c8925b18-2b25-11e9-a5ab-ff8ef2b976c7&gt; [accessed 6 June 2019].

[154] Nobre.

[155] Bryan Harris and Andres Schipani, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter Habit Endangers Brazil’s Reform Plans’, Financial Times, 29 March 2019.

[156] ‘Por reforma, governadores vão a Brasília e devem assinar manifesto conjunto’, Folha de S.Paulo, 6 June 2019 <https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2019/06/por-reforma-governadores-…; [accessed 6 June 2019].

[157] Andres Schipani, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Inner Circle: Who’s Who’, Financial Times, 22 November 2018 <https://www.ft.com/content/cc6331fc-ecde-11e8-8180-9cf212677a57&gt; [accessed 6 June 2019].

[158] ‘Saiba quem é Gustavo Montezano, novo presidente do BNDES’, O Globo, 17 June 2019 <https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/saiba-quem-gustavo-montezano-novo-pre…; [accessed 20 June 2019].

[159] Schipani, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Inner Circle’.

[160] Nobre.

[161] Jeffery R. Webber, The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), p. chapter 2.

[162] Alfredo Saad-Filho and Lecio Morais, Brazil: Neoliberalism versus Democracy (London: Pluto, 2018), pp. 80–81.

[163] CEPAL, Balance preliminar de las economías de América Latina y el Caribe (Santiago, Chile: CEPAL, 2019), p. 101.

[164] Bryan Harris and Andres Schipani, ‘Brazil’s Shrinking GDP Fuels Recession Fears’, Financial Times, 30 May 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/0ac1376e-8221-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b&gt; [accessed 31 May 2019]; Lena Levinas, ‘A ampliação de benefício é mais uma cortina de fumaça?’,Folha de São Paulo, 12 April 2019.

[165] Marilane Oliveira Teixeira, ‘A desestruturação do mercado de trabalho’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, April 2019).

[166] Oliveira Teixeira.

[167] Personal Interview with Claudio Katz, Buenos Aires, May 5, 2019.

[168] Anaïs Fernandes, ‘FMI reduz projeção para crescimento global em 2019’, Folha de São Paulo, 10 April 2019.

[169] Michael Roberts, ‘Global Slump: The Trade and Technology Trigger’, Michael Roberts Blog, 2019 <https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/05/26/global-slump-the-trad…; [accessed 31 May 2019].

[170] Bryan Harris and Carolina Unzelte, ‘Brazil’s Business Optimism Boounces Back under Bolsonaro’, Financial Times, 1 April 2019.

[171] ‘Otimismo com economia cai depois de Bolsonaro assumir a Presidência’, Folha de São Paulo, 8 April 2019.

[172] ‘Jair Bolsonaro Will Be Brazil’s next President’, The Economist, 29 October 2018 <https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2018/10/29/jair-bolsonaro-will-b…; [accessed 31 May 2019]; Samantha Pearson and Luciana Magalhaes, ‘Conservative’s Win Signals Sharp Rightward Turn in Brazil’,Wall Street Journal, 29 October 2018, section World <https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazilians-head-to-polls-in-divisive-presi…; [accessed 31 May 2019].

[173] Evans.

[174] Harris and Unzelte.

[175] Schipani and Leahy; Perry Anderson, ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’.

[176] Harris and Unzelte.

[177] Jonathan Wheatley, ‘Brazil Unveils Long-Awaited Pensions Reform Proposal’, Financial Times, 20 February 2019.

[178] Harris and Schipani, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter Habit Endangers Brazil’s Reform Plans’.

[179] Harris and Schipani, ‘Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter Habit Endangers Brazil’s Reform Plans’; ‘Reforma de Bolsonaro não é “de coração”, diz Guedes em Washington’, Folha de São Paulo, 12 April 2019.

[180] Ana Estela de Sousa Pinto, ‘51% são contra e 41% apoiam reforma de Previdência’, Folha de São Paulo, 10 April 2019.

[181] Eduardo Fagnani, ‘O propósito velado da “reforma” da Previdência’, Le Monde Diplomatique (Brasil, April 2019); Caccia Bava.

[182] Oliveira Teixeira.

[183] Mauro Zafalon, ‘Cem dias de Bolsonaro desafiam o agro a contornar vies ideológico’, Folha de São Paulo, 9 April 2019.

[184] Personal Interview, Claudio Katz, Buenos Aires, May 5, 2019.

Image derived from "_MG_0141" byalessandro dias is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

--translated by Joel Ruggi

Interview by Mariana Bayle and Nicolas Allen

A year after the historic election that brought Andrés Manuel López Obrador to power, the first tentative balance sheets of his Morena administration are starting to appear.

López Obrador’s approval ratings remain high, around 70% by recent reports. And the discontent that does exist – among the local oligarchy, disgruntled middle sectors and international capital– was to be expected. However, as reflected in a recent interview with the Mexican head-of-state, it is becoming clear that with the passage of time the veteran politician of the Mexican left will also have to square off with a challenge from his own base: the specter of disenchantment, lurking wherever the overwhelming desire for systemic change meets with the limitations of Morena’s own programme.

Some have argued that López Obrador needs to bring the country’s diverse social movements and leftist groups into the fold if he’s to accomplish the more radical elements of his programme. On that point, however, difficulties abound.

The permanent standoff between AMLO and the neo-Zapatistas has a long history and does not suggest any easy solution for the near future. But beyond that historical bad blood, a deeper fault-line exists where two important forces of the Mexican left tend to diverge: the national revolutionary tradition, embodied in AMLO and his historical predecessor Lázaro Cárdenas, and the diverse autonomous groups – indigenous, peasant, student, feminist, environmentalist – that often respond to different political coordinates.

Where AMLO is looking to advance a programme of “national regeneration” based on the defence of public interest and wage a top-down battle against corruption, there are many other currents of the Mexican Left that set their hopes on autonomous decision-making and more collective forms of managing the social commons. Although not always antithetical tendencies, their alliance is anything but a forgone conclusion.

Massimo Modonesi has been studying these tensions on the Mexican Left for the last two decades. He is the Chair of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the author of a near-dozen books, two of which are available in English: Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject (Pluto Press) andThe Antagonistic Principle. Marxism and Political Action (Brill-Historical Materialism).One of the leading Marxist scholars of Latin American social movements, his work brings a more complex class-analysis to bear on the region’s diverse forms of collective political action. In the following interview with Mariana Bayle and Nicolas Allen, Modonesi concentrates on the potential and limits of the current Mexican government as a vehicle for large-scale social transformation.

We’d like to begin by asking about your characterisation of López Obrador and Morena as a form of “delayed” or “belated progressivism”. Beyond its obvious chronological implications with respect to the Pink Tide, what do you mean by that?

The chronological question alone is worth taking note of, because that belatedness produces real effects.

Belatedness, as I use it, is in reference to both the domestic and the regional context. In the first sense, Morena’s arrival to power is late with respect to Mexico itself. The current progressive government should have been born in 2006, when there was electoral fraud.

It should have been born then because, at that point, it was the fruit of an extended process of anti-neoliberal struggle coinciding with the peak of the larger continent-wide anti-neoliberal cycle. At that stage, in 2006, the Mexican struggle was actively producing effects at the electoral level and shaking up the political and ruling classes.

So, we might say that the current progressive government is late with respect to itself – late in relation to its own foundational moment and its own progressive impulse, which contained a strong social movement component and a distinctly anti-institutional dynamism.

Clearly, it’s also late with respect to the Latin American progressive cycle, which was a phase characterised by struggles from below, but also by an opening for political opportunities encouraged by a favourable economic climate.

The current Mexican government is having to pay the price for these two time-lags: the first, its belatedness with respect to the initial propulsive momentum of social struggles, which could have pushed certain issues to the top of the agenda and altered “the relation of forces”. Currently, in Mexico, we don’t find the relation of forces altered in the same way as they were in other Latin American countries, or even as they were in other moments in Mexican history.

In other words, the current government can’t be viewed as the outcome of a struggle from below. And, obviously ,Morena is coming to power in a climate, both nationally and regionally, that is much more adverse to progressive projects than in the last decades. The current economic climate is clearly not favourable, and, on top of that, the issue of violent organised crime in Mexico tends to overshadow every other question.

In essence, the López Obrador government is swimming against the current. The present political situation, with its continent-wide rightward drift, is clearly different from before, and that is what I mean when I speak of a “late progressivism”: a progressive movement that by virtue of its lateness is less progressive.

And you don’t feel that there are any potential benefits to AMLO’s belatedness?

Being late doesn’t have many advantages, apart from allowing for a form of critical retrospection where the contradictions and shortcomings of other progressive governments could be better appreciated.

The problem in Mexico is that most people are not interested in thinking about those issues. There exists what we might call a “nationalist epistemology”: a line of thought according to which Mexico would be utterly unique and can only be thought on its own terms. Not everyone thinks this way, of course, but the government likes to think in these terms.

That kind of thinking has a certain political utility too: it shields the government from the inevitable accusation – mostly from the right wing – that AMLO is a “Chavista”. The government simply responds: “No, we are Mexicans.” As if that were the end of the discussion.

Regardless, that kind of thinking doesn’t help the government to critically analyse the contradictions of progressivism or move beyond the simple repetition of progressive gestures.

Speaking of limitations and possibilities: despite its evident limitations, AMLO’s government has inspired a wave of hope among popular sectors that could possibly be the spark that reignites new social struggles. How likely do you see this happening?

I’d like to emphasise that I see the potential, and not necessarily likelihood of it happening. There has definitely been an awakening of hope, especially in the more impoverished layers of society. It’s just as important though to recognise that this same sense of hope over time could turn into frustration, and the right wing will be waiting in the wings to make the most of that frustration.

But it is also possible that an eventual frustration could encourage more autonomous and independent mobilization, and increased politicisation. I don’t necessarily see this happening in the short term, but it’s on the horizon.

In terms of the relative success or failure of the government, there are, again, certain limits that will almost inevitably lead to frustration. The expectations for this government are incredibly high, precisely because of the long-term accumulation of discontent and the desire for something different. Once again, the government’s own “belatedness” is a key factor in this type of analysis.

In the current climate, where neoliberalism has reached such an advanced stage and the contradictions have accumulated to such a great extent, the government is playing a risky game by raising expectations, by making declarations like “neoliberalism has come to an end”. The entire talk of the Fourth Transformation, during and after the campaign, creates an incredible sense of expectancy.

The limits of López Obrador’s progressive politics could eventually give way to either right-wing or left-wing reactions, or both simultaneously, as was the case in other Latin American countries, where, in a political context dominated by the Left, the Right started to gather strength at the same time as mass mobilisation was at its peak. Ecuador and Argentina are perfect examples, where the hegemony of progressive movements began to collapse and break-off into tendencies on either side of the political spectrum. We’ll have to see in the case of Mexico which side will benefit the most from that eventuality.

What I don’t observe today is any type of independent Left capable of working from below to drag the entire process leftwards. Which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

I’ve recently published an article that deals with exactly this question, about what exists to the left of the “4T”. As for the Mexican Left, even while we are seeing a significant degree of fragmentation and dispersal, there remains intact a significant level of activity: youth movements, women’s movements, popular movements, non-governmental organisations, and so on.

This part of the Left is watching from the side-lines though, waiting to see what will happen next.I’m referring to those sectors of the Left that are beyond the hegemonic intentions of “Obradorismo”, beyond its plans for co-optation or assimilation. They clearly represent an insurmountable barrier for the current administration.

The fact that they didn’t join AMLO before means they won’t be joining him in the future. They might support certain measures when it suits them, but they won’t recognize themselves as belonging to Morena or respond to the leadership of López Obrador, which would mean acquiescing to a completely vertical structure that is foreign to them.

You spoke of raised expectations: it’s clear that by calling his government the “Fourth Transformation” López Obrador has set a high benchmark for himself. Surely there must be some grounds for comparison with the other historical transformations – Independence, Reform and Revolution?

There are grounds for comparison in the sense that the Fourth Transformation truly aspires to be as transformative as those other watershed moments. It is a question of historicity: neoliberalism has penetrated so deeply into Mexican society, configuring the entire social order along such oligarchic lines, that the present moment does indeed have an air of rupture about it. Where Independence broke with a principle of order and hierarchy, and the Reform and later the Revolution also broke with a certain type of capitalist class-hierarchy, in that same sense there is good reason to speak of a transformation.

But the problem is that neither the project nor the forces behind it are capable of carrying out the desired transformation.

I think the current government has a certain necessity to think of itself in those terms, as a rupture with neoliberalism and a recuperation of a certain national historical sensibility. And, here, it is important to stress that this is not just a question of propaganda; Lopez-Obrador truly believes in the project and that it is his historical duty set down by some national destiny.

But the project itself exists mostly at the discursive level. At the level of an actual programme, there is no suggestion of how López Obrador plans to achieve the objectives of the Fourth Transformation, no intention of breaking with the current order. It’s an extremely moderate programme designed to achieve a compromise with dominant sectors.

López Obrador proposes moderate reforms within a broadly neoliberal consensus, but those reforms are upheld as being radically transformative. So, again, there is a discrepancy between the transformation proposed and the transformation in practice, which, again, opens the door to frustration.

Compared with other recent Latin American experiences, nothing López Obrador is proposing  would go beyond what Lula did in Brazil or the Uruguayan Broad Front (Frente Amplio). It is the same progressive politics.

It will remain then for future historians to tell us if this “transformation” is on par with the Revolution and Independence; for the time being, it doesn’t seem to be a real possibility, all the more so because the transformation is not reflected in concrete practices.

What did take place with AMLO’s victory was a change in the general political mood, by which I mean not just a sense of hope, but also a shift in certain key areas. There have been real advances made in terms of combatting corruption and reasserting the idea of the general public interest.

But, again, this type of transformation doesn’t come anywhere near the deep change in power dynamics and processes of capital accumulation associated with the previous transformations. The Independence and the Revolution were decisive in altering the inner workings of Mexican society.

We can argue over whether the Mexican Revolution was or was not a true social revolution. But there was a constitution adopted there that modified the relation of forces, between those above and those below, between the popular classes and the dominant class.

This is all to say, the current government has re-established a new social pact of domination; a pact which, we might add, is more backwards than forwards looking.

Can we really speak of a “transformation” when the only project on the horizon is to return and restore the pre-neoliberal, post-revolutionary equilibrium? My sense is that a true transformative project would be more assertive of a new vision.

I think that we can expect a change in attitude: greater openness to political protest, a sincere attempt to tackle corruption, a new political class that begins to take shape around the defence of the general public interest and some type of national renewal. And there is absolutely something regenerative about the new government in that sense, but when we speak of “transformation” I would be more inclined to use a lower-case “T”.

Morena likes to call itself a “party-movement”. Do you see any evidence of this in terms of appeals to a more engaged citizenry, more “intense” forms of democracy, or other manifestations of a classic movement-based political platform?

Morena became an electoral apparatus shortly after it was born. Within its ranks one doesn’t find a diversity of leadership positions, a variety of different political currents or a great range of debates. However, many people have deposited a great sense of hope in Morena, becoming in the process strong sympathisers or even occasional participants.

The point is that Morena is an electoral apparatus and doesn’t have within its toolkit the capacity to play the role of an independent, autonomous political force. As an electoral platform it serves to distribute government posts, without any type of base to draw on.

There’s very little internal party life and, perhaps more to the point, Morena is manifestly the party of López Obrador. It’s not as if AMLO emerged from Morena. The party was fashioned from his rib.

It’s clear enough how this dynamic tends to work: it is one thing if a leader emerges from a relatively autonomous organisation, and another if that organisation is born from the leaders’ own initiative. AMLO is standing over the whole process in a relation of total verticality.

As for those who voted for López Obrador – the masses of supporters that basically appeared out of nowhere – I believe there is a chance we will see more dynamic developments among that base. But that dynamism, rather than being overtly politicising, I believe will be more disorganized, because the most politicised elements are those that have been sidelined during the current process.

I also do not think it’s really feasible to speak of a “left wing” of Morena, although there are several left-wing intellectuals and political leaders involved in the government. There are leftist voices among the party leadership coming from the Communist Party and other left groups of the 70s and 80s (that joined the PRD in the 1988-89). But the left-wing components are not reaching downwards towards the base; they’re oriented upwards and are interested in exerting influence over López Obrador.

Some left groups have joined Morena, while others – youth groups, feminist organizations, and other autonomous sectors – continue organising, agitating and struggling outside the party. I place my faith more in these groups, which are not yet organised mass movements. It remains to be seen how they will expand in the current climate.

Of course, everyone voted for AMLO – some with a more a critical distance than others–, and that, in a sense, is the more relevant question: how did trade unions, social movements, environmental movements and other organisations position themselves vis-à-vis the elections; who called for AMLO’s support, who voted in silence, who began to negotiate for positions, and so on?

Again, there’s a whole sector that opted out of forming part of the government. This side is biding its time, looking to intervene around particular issues like labour reform, human rights or gender issues. This type of opposition from the left is not a broad, general opposition, but rather one that is waiting to criticise the government around certain issues where the government is perceived as falling short. For example, the education reform has lodged a wedge between the government and the independent teachers’ movement, which, until that point, was in the process of negotiating certain candidates with the government. So, while not openly opposing the government, around the issue of education, for example, certain rifts have begun to open up.

The only group whose opposition to the government is completely unconditional is the Zapatistas, and perhaps some smaller Trotskyist groups. The type of antagonism represented by the Zapatistas is not limited to certain conflicts – the demand for an indigenous consultation around large-scale construction projects, for example. They maintain that the current government is just another kind of overlord, no different from previous governments.

Another possibility, looking more towards the long term, is that the critical wing of the Left, with its concerns over particular issues, could begin to form a more generalized opposition.

You mentioned the trade unions. Can you say something about the government’s connection with the labour movement and its relation to so-called “charrismo”, i.e. the bureaucratic tendencies within the labour movement?

It’s an ambiguous relation. The government is juggling between conflicting interests so as to not break relations with anyone.

In that spirit, the AMLO administration is pushing – peacefully, without causing waves – for a labour reform that in practice would mean a democratisation of the trade-union sector. But that same initiative also seeks to contain broader labour unrest.

At the same time, the government is trying to send a message to the business sector that the proposed measures will not upset the current balance of powers within the trade-union sector. The measure calls for greater pluralism within the trade unions, but only insofar as it doesn’t affect the interests of the larger trade unions. So the government is involved in this type of juggling act, trying to make everyone happy.

Once again, we find ourselves back with the issue of raised expectations: a great sense of hope has blossomed around the call for the democratisation of the trade unions.

But, on the other hand, the clout of the larger trade unions is what makes possible the kind of deal-making we’re seeing. And that type of negotiation is easier when the rank-and-file, in the public sector particularly, has been pacified by trade-union management.

In other words, it’s not as if Lopez Obrador’s labour reform is trying to take on the union bureaucracy that historically has played the role of domesticating and containing labour conflict in Mexico.

And what about in the cultural field? It seems like AMLO has been pursuing some important cultural initiatives – we’re thinking here about the designation of left-wing author Paco Ignacio Taibo II as the director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica (the Mexican state-funded, Latin American-wide publishing house). Taibo’s appointment was announced, provocatively, as the arrival to power of the “wise apaches”. What do you make of these overtly plebeian gestures that suggest a rupture with a certain intellectual elitism, of culture as a privileged consumer item, promoting instead a more radical understanding of national patrimony?

That change has been fantastic, and it is what I’m referring to when I speak of a shift in the political mood – which I don’t mean disparagingly at all! There are people like Taibo coming from a very serious political tradition who are onboard with AMLO and who are going to do important things in power, things that go against the existing bureaucratic structure of the state and appeal more directly to the popular layers.

So, I have tremendous respect for Paco (Taibo). But we should look more closely at the matter: Paco over time has positioned himself as the spokesperson for the left wing of Morena, even daring to question certain aspects of Morena, which is something that almost no other party member would have the nerve to do. What they’ve done now by giving Paco control of the Fondo is provide him with a space of his own, somewhere where he will be very successful, but also where he can work without upsetting the internal power balance within Morena.

Which is by no means to say that Paco was threatening to lead an insurgent opposition within Morena. There’s no such thing as an insurgent tendency, and, moreover, Taibo doesn’t have the kind of personality or influence to lead that type of movement. But Taibo represented a point from which to articulate a more critical viewpoint of Morena, where it seemed possible to question some of the party’s articles of faith.

Paco himself has a tendency to blur the lines between discipline and indiscipline, and what they’ve effectively done is given him a safe space to play with those boundaries. He’ll do very well there in the Fondo, and I’m just as certain of that as I am that he’ll quit if one day he feels that he can no longer do what he wants there. And if that moment should come to pass, I hope for Taibo, as well as other sectors that are accompanying Morena, that they will be able to recognise that they’ve done all they can and walk away.

This is basically what took place across the continent with the different progressive governments. Certain leftist forces eventually recognised that there was no more room for them to steer the process and they stepped down.

What I’m trying to say, with respect to Taibo and the Fondo de Cultura, is that we absolutely need to appreciate that the Mexican government is encouraging these types of dynamics. But, at the same time, we need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that these proposals are the outward sign of the project’s deeper radicalism, when in fact Morena itself, in its very programme, has no intention of pursuing such radicalism.

If we can change topics a bit, we’d like to ask about the tensions between AMLO and those parts of the left that are critical of his government. López Obrador sometimes accuses the critical Left of colluding with the Mexican right wing to undermine Morena. What is your response to such an accusation?

It’s a big problem, because with that type of discourse we see a certain polarity begin to set in: a rigid opposition between progressives vs. the right wing, which has really been the privileged polarity throughout all the different Latin American progressive governments.

Remember what Cristina Kirchner in Argentina used to say: “To my left, the wall”. The idea is that there is no possible contradiction or polarity with respect to an existing Left, or a potentially existing Left; where the left-wing groups are concerned – those protesting López Obrador’s large public works projects or fighting the education reform bill – AMLO simply writes them all off as “conservatives” and useful idiots for the Mexican right-wing “fifi”. So, from López Obrador’s perspective, the only relevant antagonism is between his own party and the right wing. There is no left wing beyond that polarity.

And he is right in a sense: the right wing is in fact the government’s enemy. There are obviously very powerful interests arrayed against him, but there are also plenty of other social layers, middle-class sectors, for example, who find his national-popular style of governance distasteful, if not outright horrifying. In his manner of speaking and behaving, AMLO represents a cultural clash that provokes a sense of unease among Mexican society’s middle sectors.

There is another sector – essentially that of the dominant economic interests – that is waiting to see how AMLO’s project will translate into state expenses; basically, whether AMLO will be pushing a model of governance reconcilable with the neoliberal model, or if he will be pushing for the type of big deficit spending that could pose limits to profits.

The same political and social interests that prevented López Obrador from winning in 2006 have essentially allowed him to win in 2018. And now they are testing the waters to see to what extent they can negotiate and interfere in his administration. Tomorrow or the day after, they may come to realise that they prefer their own direct class representatives in government and reconsider their available options.

With respect to these types of interclass relations, these negotiations and attempts to avoid conflict in the name of consensus, it remains to be seen how they will ultimately play out. While the Mexican right wing may not have made a demonstration of force, it is still very active, particularly in the press, and it is starting to identify certain areas of conflict that over time will become more open and direct.

In that sense, we are finding the same problems in Mexico as we saw in South America: the problem of how to insure that left-wing criticism doesn’t end up favouring the right wing. And there is a related challenge for the Left, which is to recognise that there is a real dispute taking place between the progressive forces and the right wing.

López Obrador’s progressivism – even where his own position bears traces of a deep-seated conservatism – is going to be defined in relation with Mexico’s conservative forces, in terms of which sectors are satisfied and which are dissatisfied with his administration. The resulting political fault lines will emerge from the particular balance that is struck there. It remains to be seen whether Morena’s government will be able to satisfy the conservatives, although simply displeasing Mexico’s right wing is not enough, in and of itself.

One thing Morena lacks though is the kind of long-term vision that other Latin American progressive governments had, where they managed to cover their bases by satisfying, in part, both the Left and the Right.

And what about AMLO’s relation to the United States? López Obrador has been criticised in recent days for his apparent willingness to follow Trump’s lead on migration policy. How do you view matters?

I have only one brief comment to make on the issue, because on the question of migration and the United States I know about as much as any other reader of the daily newspaper.

My overall impression is that the international arena is of secondary interest for the current government. AMLO is looking to create a climate for national renewal and is concerned with domestic affairs. He wants to avoid conflict on the international stage and is looking to keep a low profile.

In fact, that low profile was on display when AMLO refused to support US intervention in Venezuela. It may have seemed like a high stakes position, but it was actually the most obvious and natural position, completely in keeping with a longstanding Mexican tradition of non-intervention.

And that non-interventionism is in López Obrador’s nature: he is looking to avoid conflict. And, of course, any type of conflict with the US would imply, in addition to serious commercial problems, a level of geopolitical tension that Mexico is not equipped to handle. AMLO’s project is heavily dependent on a positive economic cycle to support all of his social policy, the strengthening of the state, the exploitation of oil and natural resources.

Of course, López Obrador comes from a political tradition that champions human rights and also believes in protecting the sovereignty of the Mexican territory, so certain matters are non-negotiable. But AMLO will never appeal to a version of Mexican nationalism as defined by its opposition to the United States. His idea of national renewal is completely divorced from any type of anti-imperialist imaginary, which is in strong contrast with what we saw in many other Latin American governments during the last two decades.

One of the more striking aspects of López Obrador’s first months in office has been his use of plebiscites and other “direct” forms of public consultation to test his most controversial, large-scale policy projects. What can we make of this style of governance?

AMLO is constantly appealing to these types of polls and consultations he’ll be conducting, whether it be about a particular construction project or even his own permanency in the executive office. This exercise is clearly guided by the logic of the plebiscite, what in more theoretical terms we might call AMLO’s Bonapartist tendencies. Some will view these measures and see a more or less covert attempt to practise a kind of direct democracy, but matters are more complicated.

First of all, who is going to stand up and say they reject direct democracy? As if direct democracy were limited exclusively to the specific format offered by the government. And this format does not include any prior process of the kind whereby people would be equipped to participate through political education and training, where they could be prepared to initiate political change from below.

The particular format of the plebiscite, where the leader summons the people to offer an opinion regarding issues that come framed in a certain way, this is clearly meant to obtain legitimacy for a measure that the government wants to pursue.

And I’m not against these instances of popular participation, but I don’t think they can be issued in a vacuum and serve as ad hoc legitimations for decisions already made regarding public policy. And that is the difference between the logic of the plebiscite and direct democracy, where the latter begins from below with autonomous forms of participation that do not restrict participation to questions formatted by the governing class.

And what about the question of organised crime and the so-called “narco-state”? Do you see the issue as being one where the government can make some progress, or, does it suggest a limit to the current administration’s possibilities for transformation?

I think the issue can only be tackled in a partial manner by a government such as AMLO’s. Paradoxically, the government’s ability to make progress on the issue is going to be a fundamental yardstick by which it is measured. Beyond whatever we could say about the relations between progressive and conservative forces, the particular types of class relations that might adhere in a given moment, my fear is that the real assessment of Morena will centre on its ability to combat the overwhelming violence that exists in Mexico.

That Morena can rise to the occasion, and do so with progressive policy, strikes me as a very tall order. Looking at what López Obrador has done up to this point, I think it was completely reasonable of him to refuse to totally demilitarise zones of conflict, because doing so would leave areas vulnerable to further violence.  What he has done is create a National Guard that is in fact military in nature, but that does not respond directly to the army, and will, hopefully, be able to replace the armed forces.

López Obrador also claims that violence can be combatted with social policy, but this will take time, and even then, the issue becomes one of what type of social policy is being implemented. And, here, I’m of the opinion that the type of social policy being offered cannot possibly make a significant impact on the existing levels of violence, because it’s too little money for too short a span of time.

There is a strong push to see this type of transformation take place through educational initiatives: the programme being offered calls for hired guns to become students with scholarships (“sicarios en becarios”).

Another project that attempts to tackle the issue of organised crime is being implemented through the creation of new state schools. Again, the problem with that initiative is that it ignores the work of public, autonomous educational institutions. In practice, this has meant imposing cutbacks on university spending (many of the country’s universities, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico, are governed autonomously) and redirecting funds to government educational plans. And this is a hotly debated issue: it’s, of course, a good thing to invest in education, but it is taking place through a heavily statist lens that ignores the importance of public autonomous education.

At the end of the day, this government has a profound distrust of any type of autonomous organisation. And I don’t mean autonomy necessarily in the sense of organisations from below, distant from the government; I’m referring to any general type of autonomous initiative. But this is no surprise: Morena’s ambition is to regain and reassert state control, and centralise all decision-making in the state.

Would you say that this type of state-centric model follows in the mould of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional)?

Not so much. What’s at stake with Morena is an attempt by the state to regain control, whereas the PRI was more interested in negotiating with every type of interest group imaginable: legitimate, illegitimate, legal and illegal. It has been decades since the PRI had any intention of governing from above; for decades now, it has been nothing more than a confederation of legal and illegal interest groups.

In that sense, López Obrador’s mission to reassert state control, to resume state oversight over the entire public apparatus, is in direct opposition with the existing form of governance inherited from the PRI, with its “caciques” and other forms of private accumulation.

López Obrador intends to revert what under the PRI had been a historical tendency towards the privatisation of the public sphere – the PRI managed the public sphere under a completely proprietary logic.

We might say that AMLO is following in the footsteps of Lázaro Cárdenas, in the positive sense of pursuing a popular project that involves expropriating and nationalising certain parts of the economy. But that same project can’t see beyond the expropriation of public goods, it can’t envision the autonomous sectors that play a vital role in Mexican social life: social movement, NGOs, university movements, all these types of autonomous movements that are being ignored rather than called upon to be leaders of the transformation.

The groups leading the current transformation are located elsewhere. They are the cadres working for the government in the public sector and, of course, the leader himself, since it is his movement.

To close with a more theoretically informed question, we were hoping you could explain your use of the Gramscian term “passive revolution” to understand the broad historical arc of the Latin American Pink Tide.

To be brief, I’ve tried to adopt a broadly Gramscian perspective in order to understand the last fifteen years in Latin America, and to see if that model can also apply to the current situation in Mexico.

The theoretical perspective is basically the following: Gramsci proposes that we consider the idea of a “passive revolution”, to which I would add the related concepts of “Caesarism”, “Bonapartism” and “transformism”, which help to flesh out the broader conceptual applications of passive revolution. The type of revolution in question is basically a transformation with a deeply conservative dimension: a non-revolutionary revolution, a revolution with a restoration, or a revolution that is also a conservation of old social forms.

As the name suggests, this revolution is fundamentally passive; it’s not just a transformation whose ultimate objectives are in some sense modest, but whose dynamics are fundamentally passive. These transformations, which call themselves revolutions and often intend to be authentically revolutionary, contain within their genesis a deeply conservative component.

Where things get interesting is around the question of popular mobilisation and participation, because everything I’m describing does not mean that there is no popular participation and activity. When Gramsci is characterising a revolution as “passive”, he means that it is a revolution led from above and not below, a revolution steered by the dominant and not the subaltern classes.

And this is the key concept: it is a revolution premised on the subaltern position of its participants, consisting in a process that either maintains or actively places its support in a subaltern position. This type of passive revolution, according to Gramsci, takes place when there is a challenge from below that produces a crisis within the hegemonic order; that order quickly mobilises to restore hegemony by conceding some terrain to the counterhegemonic challenge, in the name of demobilising the movement’s larger political potential.

So, the passive revolution is essentially describing a historical movement overseen by the dominant classes that also incorporates certain demands of the subalterns in order to demobilise their movement. And this is often also called “Bonapartist” or “transformist”, because the resulting situation is a historic stalemate, a political impasse with potentially catastrophic consequences, where it is only through the emergence of a charismatic figure standing outside the fray that a new social pact can be established and hegemony can be restored.

Transformism also suggests that the leadership of the social organisations, of the subalterns, ends up being siphoned off into a new administrative layer of the state apparatus, which is construed as being the satisfaction of demands but in actual fact is the process by which those demands are deactivated.

Obviously, the entire theoretical vision is more complex than I can possibly summarise here. For those interested in learning more, I’ve written a book called Revoluciones Pasivas en América (Passive Revolutions in America).

My point is that the Latin American Pink Tide can be broadly understood in these terms, while naturally respecting the specificities of each national situation. Some progressive governments were more revolutionary, others more conservative, but the idea is to use this type of analytic criteria in order to grasp what types of transformations have taken place, what has been conserved, what elements have been demobilised and what sectors remain active, how the subaltern leadership was assimilated into the state apparatus and what kinds of caudillismo – that is, what types of mediating forces – have emerged from that process.

This model allows me to appreciate both the specificities of particular processes as well as common elements across the Pink Tide. To put it differently: it allows the political analyst to read the dynamics of neoliberalism, post-neoliberalism and anti-neoliberalism within a framework that also ties back to struggles for democratisation and popular participation.

In the larger debate around the Latin American progressive cycle, those two questions – anti-neoliberal struggles and democracy – are too often treated as if they were separate issues. Questions about whether or not said government was neoliberal or post-neoliberal are rarely framed by questions about whether or not they were democratic, which is in essence a question about whether they exceeded the liberal, electoral framework. At its heart, this is a question about whether the political form itself was altered during the progressive cycle, or if there was simply a shift in the patters of accumulation and redistribution of the social surplus.

There are obviously specific cases in Latin America that fit the model better than others. With respect to Mexico, I think the model would apply fairly directly were it not for one significant discrepancy: the strength, or lack thereof, of the struggle from below. To be a passive revolution, there must exist some struggle from below that is subsequently pacified. In Mexico today, to state matters rather crudely, there is very little left to pacify. And this is different from 2006 in Mexico, when there were forces that could have produced such a passive revolution. What is missing in Mexico’s political climate today is the give and take between active and passive dynamics.

Image derived from https://massimomodonesi.net/video/

Panagiotis Sotiris

1. The general election of July 7 in Greece represents a major defeat for the subaltern classes in Greece, but also for the radical left. However, it would be wrong to assume that defeat was something that occurred on the day of the election. Rather, this is the result of a series of defeats, going back to the summer of 2015, and an expression of the strategic crisis of the Greek radical left and its inability to articulate a coherent strategy to take advantage of a unique conjuncture of hegemonic crisis in the 2010-2015 period. Moreover, the Greek election offers an opportunity to rethink the disastrous effects of the combination of ‘left Europeanism’ and of a reformist parliamentary approach to governance. As such, it offers important lessons for the radical left internationally.

2. After 4.5 years in government, during which it capitulated to the EU-IMF-ECB ‘Troika’, disregarded the tremendous popular determination in the 2015 referendum and implemented neoliberal policies, SYRIZA lost the election. The aggressive character of these policies, the failure to significantly improve living conditions and the increasing manifestations of political cynicism (exemplified in the handling of the 2018 deadly forest fires), all contributed to this defeat, despite the attempt of the SYRIZA leadership to invest electorally on the fear for a return of the Greek right, which can perhaps explain a last minute swing of voters that can explain why SYRIZA still managed to get 31.5%.

3. New Democracy returns to power, with an absolute majority of 158 members of Parliament, and a very aggressive program that combines neoliberalism with a strong authoritarian emphasis on ‘law and order’, calling for more authoritarian treatment of demonstrations and squats. One of the first measures it has announced is the revocation of the so called ‘university asylum’, namely the interdiction on police forces to enter university premises without prior permit from university authorities. The new government is dominated by figures well-known for their connection to big business and for the embracing of the Memoranda policies as strategically necessary. Moreover, New Democracy will benefit from its increased control over the State, since it also recently won 12 out the 13 regional elections.

4. With New Democracy at 39.8% and SYRIZA at 31.5% we enter again a period where two parties dominate the political scene around a centre-right/centre-left cleavage, with SYRIZA taking the place formerly occupied by PASOK. Moreover, SYRIZA who has moved significantly to the right, with Alexis Tsipras suggesting that it is an expression of a ‘Progressive Alliance’ and leaving aside the ‘radical left’ rhetoric, is consciously trying to play the part of social-democracy in Greece, taking advantage of the fact that KINAL (Movement of Change, the new name of PASOK) took only 8.1%. Tsipras has openly called for a ‘transformation’ of SYRIZA into a broad party in an attempt to even distance it from symbolic references to left wing radicalism.

5. At the same time abstention was still at very high level at 42%, an indication of a broader crisis of legitimization of the Greek political system, something that suggest that important segments of the electorate still feel alienated to the political scene. Although, this does not necessarily represent a ‘protest vote’, it still points towards a persisting political crisis.

6. Despite the right wing transformation of SYRIZA and the discontent expressed towards the neoliberal policies it promoted, there has not been a major swing of voters towards radical left formations. ANTARSYA, the coalition of the anticapitalist left, took only 0.41% of the vote and Popular Unity suffered another humiliating electoral defeat, taking only 0.28%. Even the Communist Party of Greece took only 5.3% despite running a very intense campaign. The only formation to benefit from a left-wing protest vote against SYRIZA has been ΜéRA25, the party led by Yanis Varoufakis, minister of Finance in the first Tsipras government. However, MéRA25 is not a radical left party and its political line is the fantasy of an ‘alternative europeanism’, that has been the trademark of Varoufakis who always talks about ‘saving Europe from itself’ and refuses to take a clear position against the Euro. It is impossible to think of this formation as a potential vehicle for the radical left.

7. The only positive development of the election was the electoral failure of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party, who obtained 2.93% of the vote and did not manage to elect anyone to parliament. This comes at a crucial point in the big trial of Golden Dawn where the leadership is accused of being a criminal organization responsible, among other crimes, for the murder of Pavlos Fyssas in 2013. However, another far right formation, the “Greek Solution”, that insists that it is not ‘fascist’, did manage to enter parliament after obtaining 3.7%.

8. Officially, the Greek bail-out program (the ‘Memoranda’) ended on August 2018, but Greece still under ‘enhanced surveillance’ by the European ‘institutions’. In reality, not much has changed in terms of reduced sovereignty, since Greece is obliged to have increased primary budget surpluses, to keep in place the neoliberal reforms introduced in the Memoranda period, and to still negotiate major policy directions with the representatives of the ‘institutions’. As a result of the commitment to austerity, Greece’s growth has been anemic and the decrease in unemployment (which still very high at almost 18%) was mainly due to an increase of part-time and precarious jobs. There has been a wave or privatizations (such as regional airports and the national railways), but as part of the agreement with the EU there are more underway, and the new government has pledged itself to promoting ‘investment’, accusing the legislation regarding protection of the environment and of cultural heritage as an obstacle to ‘growth’.

9. The election of 2019 marks the end of an historical cycle of intense economic but also political crisis. This cycle opened up with the combination of the global capitalist crisis with the crisis of the Greek ‘developmental paradigm’, which was based upon Greece’s participation in the Eurozone, increased public borrowing, overpriced public works and debt-fuelled consumption. It also opened up with the big rebellion of the Greek youth on December 2008, a social explosion without precedent that proved to be ‘a postcard from the future’. This was followed by the Greek sovereign debt crisis and the imposition of the Memoranda by the ‘EU-IMF-ECB’ Troika, which led to a social and political crisis that in the 2010-2012 period took the almost insurrectionary dimensions, with general strikes, the 2011 ‘Movement of the Squares’ and many forms of mass protest. This led to tectonic shifts in relations of political representation and the electoral rise of SYRIZA, which became the main party of opposition in the 2012 election and won the January 2015 election. However, SYRIZA had no real preparation for a confrontation with the EU and despite the expressed will of the popular majority to reject austerity in the 2015 referendum, accepted the third memorandum and fully implemented it. As a result, it was a party supposedly of the Left that accepted the neoliberal logic of ‘TINA’ [There Is No Alternative] and this had demoralizing effects upon social movements.

10. However, the forces to the left of SYRIZA failed to offer an alternative. The Communist Party (KKE) continued upon a political line that combined rhetorical anticapitalism with a sectarian tactic in social movements and a general line that insisted upon ‘the situation not being ripe enough for social change’. ANTARSYA failed at the peak of the crisis to contribute adequately to the formation of a political alternative strategy for the break with austerity and the exit from the Eurozone and the EU, leaving the terrain to SYRIZA and its reformist pro-EU line.  At the summer of 2015, after the capitulation of SYRIZA, the necessary cooperation between ANTARSYA and Popular Unity (who had just left SYRIZA) was not achieved, enabling SYRIZA to win the September 2015 elections.

11. The period after 2015 was also a period of strategic crisis of the Greek radical left. Popular Unity failed to become the necessary process of self-critique and recomposition of the radical left. In contrast, the leadership of Popular Unity opted for a traditional bureaucratic conception of running the front, combined with traditional reformist economism and a constant rhetorical denunciation of SYRIZA based on the mistaken assumption that the Tsipras would soon fall. Political energy was wasted in attempts to maintain a media presence and not on work on strategy or on building new movements. On top of this, the nationalist position regarding the Macedonia question from the majority of Popular Unity and Lafazanis’ open flirting with the idea of a ‘patriotic front’ just made things worse.

12. On the other hand ANTARSYA also opted for a sectarian tactic and a refusal to face the strategic challenges. The majority of ANTARSYA basically treated Popular Unity as the new SYRIZA and there a conscious attempt to undermine process of unity. At the same time, strategic thinking was replaced by an obsessive anticapitalist rhetoric which could not compensate for the lack of any confrontation with what constitutes revolutionary strategy today. Moreover, this sectarianism took various expressions also within social movements, contributing to the further fragmentation of the political landscape of the Greek radical left.

13. In contrast to an appearance of ‘relative stability’, which is mainly due to the absence of strong movements in the past years and the return of New Democracy to power, the situation in Greece is far from stable. The Greek economy has not recovered and with the European economy slowing down in could enter a new recession. The problem of debt has not been solved and social conditions have not improved significantly. Unemployment is high, wages are still very low, precariousness is on the rise, and public services are under attack. This is not due only to the inherent contradictions of Greek capitalism but also to the very functioning of the Eurozone and the European Union which has austerity and neoliberalism inscribed in its very institutional logic. In this sense, the dynamics of social and political crisis are still active, yet to see their full manifestation would require overcoming the disaggregating effects of the post-2015 conjuncture upon the subaltern classes and their determination to struggle.

14. Although the dominant forces insist that Greece’s relation to the EU has returned to a ‘new normality’ it is still impossible to have any kind of social transformation and emancipation, not even any kind of real ‘progressive reform’, within the political, economic and monetary architecture of the Eurozone and the EU, with its embedded neoliberalism and erosion of popular sovereignty. A rupture with the EU would not be a ‘nationalist’ option, but a class policy that represents the subaltern classes against the forces of capital that insist upon the ‘European Road’. It is by now evident that it is impossible to transform the European Union ‘from the inside’. In this sense, simply thinking of a return to ‘anti-austerity struggles’, however necessary and urgent these are, without any reference to the necessary rupture with the Eurozone and the EU, misses an crucial aspect of social and political antagonism in the current Greek conjuncture. 

15. Such a political orientation needs to be based upon a return of mass movements, starting with the effort to rebuild a labour movement in deep crisis, by means of grassroots initiatives to organize the majority of the employees of the private sector that have no trade union representation and by attempting, but also with working towards a new youth movement, with the attempt to mount resistances at the local level, and with the need for a broad movement against the persistent forms of sexism and patriarchy in Greek society.

16. To transform demands and struggles into a coherent hegemonic strategy requires the elaboration of a transition program, with both the technical but also the necessary social aspects of a ‘roadmap for the exit from the Eurozone and the EU’, as a struggle not only to regain monetary sovereignty and control over economic policy, but also to initiate processes of social transformation in a socialist horizon, processes which are the necessary conditions of any strategy to rupture to succeed.

17. It also requires rebuilding the radical left. With SYRIZA becoming a systemic political force and a ‘party of governance’ there is no point it treating it as a ‘force of the left’. Any process of recomposition of the radical left should be antagonistic to SYRIZA. What is required is reopening a political process for the recomposition of a new radical and anticapitalist left. In certain way, and despite the different histories (and problems), both ANTARSYA and Popular Unity seem to have reached a point that can only be described as ‘end of the road’, at least as political venues for the recomposition of a radical anticapitalist left that could stand up to the challenge. What is needed is a new thinking and a new practice in regards to radical left united front, not just as an agreement or cooperation between organizations, but as the formation of an open political process, a laboratory of strategy and new forms of political intellectuality, and a means to have not just a political program, but a project for hegemony and transformation.

18. This process would require not only self-criticism but also a profound rethinking of strategies, discourses and modes of organizing, along with extended experimentation and forms of bringing together militant theory and social movements. It is not going to be easy, and it might take time. In a certain way it is about actually learning from defeat.

"Parlamento" byRinzeWind is licensed underCC BY 2.0 

Pepijn Brandon

The sudden appearance of the land-question in the debates between the two contenders in the recent Indonesian presidential elections remind us that struggles over landownership run as a red thread through the history of capitalism.[1] Despite the enormous changes in the relationship between capital accumulation and peasant economies, there is an enduring aspect to this story. Regardless of the many different forms that the private property of land under capitalism takes, in Marx’s words in Capital, Volume III it always “presupposes that certain persons enjoy themonopoly of disposing of particular portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others.” And because this process of exclusion is historically connected to expropriation and displacement, colonialism and conquest, financial speculation and environmental degradation, dealing with land has never ceased to put dirt on the hands of all the members of the ruling class that get involved in it.

In this text, I want to focus on an elementary question: why does the ‘agrarian question’ have such longevity under capitalism? As with all elementary questions, providing an answer is not simple. The concrete processes by which peasant economies are integrated into the world market vary profoundly from epoch to epoch, between different regions of the world and ecological zones, and depending on the specific characteristics both of the agents of capital and of the pre-existing social relations on the land at the point of their encounter. Integration is never a straightforward process, and often includes compromises of dazzling complexity between old aristocracies, new rent-seekers and oligarchical capitalists, as well as between all the landholding classes, the state and small producers. The outcome, in many cases, diverges from a stereotypical pattern of capitalist agriculture envisioned by some socialist thinkers, in which capitalist development would lead to fully proletarianised farm-labourers working on factory-like, mechanised mega-farms – although there are, of course, plenty of instances in which agricultural capitalism takes this form.

These observations taken together have provided the starting point of a long debate among Marxist thinkers. It goes back to Marx himself. As is well known, working out the theory of ground rent, which explained how a class of landlords that was ostensibly outside of the core capitalist dichotomy of workers and industrial bourgeoisie laid claim on part of society’s surplus value in the form of rent without thereby negating the law of value, was a key problem that Marx had to solve in order to be able to write Capital. Even after he had worked out this problem theoretically, his desire to find historical explanations for the many variations in the concrete forms taken by landed property in Europe, the white settler colonies, India and Russia kept Marx from finishing his manuscripts for Volume III. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the agrarian question divided Russian Marxists and Populists and led to a famous polemic between Lenin and Kautsky. Throughout the twentieth century, developmentalist economists and dependency theorists assigned the question of the division of land an important role in attempts of the colonised, semi-colonised and former colonised nations to escape from poverty. These were never abstract debates. Communist movements in many parts of the world found themselves in the frontlines of revolts of the peasantry and the rural poor against the landowners. Paradoxically, and to the detriment of these often heroic movements, ‘state socialism’ also proved to be an aggressive dispossessor of the peasantry in its own right.

The continuing importance of the agrarian question throughout the history of capitalism directly links to the theme of ‘primitive accumulation’ discussed by me in the previous articles on this website. In Capital, Volume I, Marx deals at length with the commodification of land and the often violent destruction of rural communities as decisive ‘original’ preconditions for capitalist development. However, some of the complexities facing Marxist authors on this question arise from the very same source. If capitalist development is predicated on the destruction of pre-capitalist agrarian social relations, how then can these pre-capitalist relations continue to hunt the capitalist system as it matures? I believe one crucial element of the solution to this question is acknowledging that for Marx, the privatisation of land and dispossession of the direct producers on the one hand, and the introduction of the capitalist mode of production proper in agriculture are both moments of capitalist development, but not necessarily the same or consecutive moments. There is no doubt that Marx saw the first two as preconditions of capitalist development. But the latter, he treated only as its long-term result. This division is very clear in a passage inCapital, Volume III, which explicitly builds upon the discussion of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Volume I.

In the section on “primitive accumulation” we saw how this mode of production presupposes on the one hand that the direct producers are freed from the position of a mere appendage of the soil (in the form of bondsmen, serfs, slaves, etc.) and on the other hand the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land. To that extent, the monopoly of landed property is a historical precondition for the capitalist mode of production and remains its permanentfoundation, as with all previous modes of production based on the exploitation of the masses in one form or the other. But the form oflanded property which greets the capitalist mode of production at the start does not correspond to this mode. The form that does correspond to it is only created by the capitalist mode of production itself, through the subjection of agriculture to capital; and in this way feudal landed property, clan property or small peasant property is transformed into theeconomic form corresponding to this mode of production, however diverse the legal forms of this may be.[Italics by Marx, taken from the new translation based on Marx’s manuscript of 1864-1865. The passage itself was fully included in Engels’ edition of Volume III.]

The order outlined here is in accordance with Marx’s frequently stated conviction, that “capitalist production develops first of all in industry, not in agriculture, and only embraces the latter by degrees” (Theories of Surplus Value, Volume III, chapter 20.II.c).

The longevity of this ‘embracement by degrees’, in my view, poses less a theoretical problem and more a series of concrete historical problems, in the same way that the ultimate decision which parts of human life become commodified and which parts not depends on historical conditions and not on a theoretical limit to commodification under capitalism per se. Expanding onto the terrain of landed property, capitalist forms of exchange and production face at one and the same time a whole string of concrete limiting conditions. Land is the main source of wealth of all preceding ruling classes. It is the material foundation of subsistence economies and the communities on whose labour they are based. It is the first point at which nature itself intervenes in production and sets its ecological barriers on capitalism’s social metabolism, the socially mediated interaction between human beings and their environment. It is the territorial foundation on which state sovereignty is built, and a key source of state revenue. Sometimes, rapid expansion of the system pushes capitalists and the state to charge all of those barriers at once, even at the risk of social warfare. Sometimes, temporary moments of stagnation or contraction might transform the agricultural borderlands of capital accumulation into the ideal buffer zones in which to “lose” a superfluous part of the labour force (Marx’s reserve army of labour), or on which to dump part of the costs of social reproduction (to use the term popularised by socialist feminists such as Tithi Bhattacharya). The great variety of legal forms under which the economic encroachment by capital takes place, often allows an uneasy balance between advance and consolidation to appear as the pure preservation of tradition. However, as Jairus Banaji has shown extensively in his studies of the relationship between peasants in Southern India and the world market, what appears as tradition often consists of new creation of intermediary forms under the aegis of global capital.

Some of the most desperate political struggles in the last few years have been over the control of land, from the expropriation of native lands to allow for the building of oil pipelines in North America to the murderous attacks on the Movement of Landless Workers (MST) in Brazil. For greedy politicians and large landowners, however, this is a time of opportunities. The current phase of globalisation has ushered in new waves of agricultural reform. In this present conjuncture, global agrobusiness even more relentlessly than in the past subjects local production systems to the dictates of the world market, frequently while branding itself ‘socially responsible’ and ‘environmentally friendly’ for the sake of western middle class consumers. This process of subjection involves all sorts of backhand deals with large landholders and speculators at the expense of peasant small producers, who under neoliberalism lack even the minimal protection previously provided by developmentalist states. The voraciousness of this new wave is further deepened by the impact of climate change, that undermines the resources for resistance of poor communities against multinationals and local states.

However, even the latest phase of capitalist globalisation and land reform will not simply resolve the agrarian question for capitalism, by dissolving all traditional titles on land into a single category of commercial land-holding and by dividing the majority of the rural population into capitalist farmers and proletarians. As the Marxist agrarian historian Henry Bernstein noted in his seminal article from 2002,

just as agribusiness capital is increasingly consolidated through ‘globalization’ …, so is labour in the world of contemporary capitalism increasingly structurally fragmented, especially in the South. This fragmentation – manifested, inter alia, in the stagnant or declining opportunities of (relatively) stable wage employment, the vast extent of the urban ‘informal sector’, and the (re)structuring of labour markets, rural and urban – also connects with the class dynamic at work in agricultural petty commodity production.

The aim of landed property in this new phase remains, as Marx said, to carve out whole portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of the owners’ “private will to the exclusion of all others”. But this private will never goes unchallenged, however wealthy and powerful the individuals that wield it.

----------------------------

Sources:

Banaji, Jairus, Theory as History. Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden / Boston, 2010)

Bernstein, Henry, “Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View”, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2002), pp. 433-463

Bhattacharya, Tithi (ed), Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, 2017)

Marx, Karl, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III (London, 1991) Part Six

Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value,https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/

This piece was furst published at: https://indoprogress.com/2019/03/%EF%BB%BFpertarungan-demi-tanah-dan-eksploitasi-kapitalis/

[1]https://jakartaglobe.id/context/the-debate-that-showed-jokowi-and-prabowo-are-just-more-of-the-same

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Pepijn Brandon

The question of the role of violence in capitalist expansion, both historically and in the present, has engaged many of the system’s critics. Discussions on this topic have always revolved around the question how capital exploits, and subjects to its logic, elements that lie beyond the capitalist process of production and circulation as theorized in the three volumes Marx’s Capital. They have included such fundamental issues as the role of imperialism and colonial subjection, the violent struggles between and inside nation-states for the control of natural resources, the logic of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression, and the continuing existence of coerced and unpaid labor under capitalism. One of the first Marxist thinkers to deal with the relationship between expanding capitalism and its “outside” on a truly global scale was Rosa Luxemburg, who was brutally murdered one century ago this year. In her brilliant 1913 workThe Accumulation of Capital, subtitled “A Contribution to the Economic Interpretation of Imperialism”, she provided a daring and highly controversial reinterpretation of Marx, arguing that capital accumulation can only take place on a continuous basis as long as there are non-capitalist regions that can be forced to absorb the surplus production of the capitalist core. In the third and final part of the book, she included one of the most perceptive accounts of the historical preconditions of capitalist development. However, the almost complete rejection of Luxemburg’s theoretical argument in the first two parts of the book by fellow Marxists, has caused most later readers to overlook the immense value of this account.

            Immediately upon publication of her book, Luxemburg’s main theoretical argument came under sustained fire from representatives of all different wings of the socialist movement.[1] Luxemburg developed her notion that capitalism will enter terminal crisis without access to non-capitalist spheres out of a critique of Marx’s famous reproduction schemes in Capital, Volume II. Most Marxist thinkers at the time and later rejected her “under-consumptionist” interpretation. There are good grounds to do so, although the extraordinary vehemence with which many lesser minds attacked her suggests that other motives played a role. Political hostility against Luxemburg drove many attacks from the right. In addition, the diminutive tone of many of the responses has a definitive ring of sexism toit[PB1]. The content of these arguments has been described previously on this website. However, as the historian Marcel van der Linden has argued not so long ago, it is possible to reject the argument that the exhaustion of non-capitalist spheres forms the absolute barrier for capital accumulation, and still accept the observation of the historical importance of the violent integration of independent peasant production, the destruction of community-based economies, and the perpetual reproduction of all kind of middle strata between capitalists and wage workers in actual capitalist development.[2] Luxemburg saw the function of violence in the combination between the erratic, constantly growth-seeking, crisis-prone process of expansion of global capital on the one hand, and the substantial possibilities for the realization of surplus value outside capital’s immediate sphere on the other. She therefore analyzed this violence as “a continuous method of capital accumulation as a historical process, not just at its Genesis, but up to the present”.

            The historical section III of The Accumulation of Capital consists of eight chapters. After restating her theoretical position on the impossibility of capital’s expanded reproduction without the existence of “outside markets”, Luxemburg discusses the ways in which capital, with the help of the state, opens up, penetrates and subjects these regions. The economic aims behind this struggle between capitalism and societies with a “natural economy” were fourfold:

1. To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc.

2. To “liberate” labor power and to coerce it into service.

3. To introduce a commodity economy.

4. To separate trade and agriculture.

In the chapters that follow, Luxemburg describes how the murderous victories attained by capital in these four areas were accompanied by the introduction of a commodity-economy, the dissolution of small peasant economies, by the expansion of international loans, protectionism and militarism. The parallels with Marx’s treatment of “the so-called original accumulation” at the end of Capital, Volume I are obvious, and Luxemburg shares the same eye for the stream of human misery that the conquerors leave in their wake. “Since the primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organizations and for their material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development.” At the same time, Luxemburg insists that this violence not merely forms a preliminary to normal or real capital accumulation, explaining that “… we have passed beyond the stage of primitive accumulation; this process is still going on.”

The extraordinary sharpness with which Luxemburg dissected the realities of imperialist domination from the point of view of the countries subjected to it, arose from a dual source. On the one hand, she criticised a dogmatic understanding of capitalist development prevalent among many socialists, who showed an interest in historical processes only in as far as they neatly fit their abstract theoretical conceptions. Thus, for example, she rejected a linear and mechanic connection between capitalism and the expansion of free labor. After acknowledging that “the emancipation of labor power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism”, she continued to note the many contradictions which this process involved: “For the first genuinely capitalist branch of production, the English cotton industry, not only the cotton of the Southern states of the American Union was essential, but also the millions of African Negroes who were shipped to America to provide the labor power for the plantations … Obtaining the necessary labor-power from non-capitalist societies, the so-called “labor-problem”, is ever more important for capital in the colonies. All possible methods of “gentle compulsion” are applied to solving this problem, to transfer labor from former social systems to the command of capital.” Apart from this understanding of the complexities of historical development, the force of Luxemburg’s position also arose from her unequivocal opposition to imperialist expansion, at a time when more moderate Social-Democrats were willing to embrace colonialism and militarism as potentially progressive forces. Luxemburg’s historical analysis gave full importance to slavery, colonial exploitation, and the destruction of natural economies not by counterpoising them to “ordinary” capitalist development and the exploitation of the proletariat in the West, but by showing them to be a – in her view indispensable – complement to it. This is what made her, in the words of Marcel van der Linden, “the first Marxist who tried to develop a truly global concept of solidarity from below”.

The complete rejection of The Accumulation of Capital by the right and the left of the socialist movement buried her insights for several generations. But it is not so surprising that they are being rediscovered today. It is hard not to appreciate Luxemburg’s understanding of the links between imperialism and the continued swallowing by capital of everything that is beyond its borders, when seeing Bolsonaro’s agenda of privatising the rain forests, or when thinking of the havoc wrecked by multinationals in many parts of Indonesia on traditional communities and eco-systems. However, this rediscovery also poses difficult questions of analysis and definition, of the kind that Rosa Luxemburg herself was never afraid to confront. The Marxist geographer David Harvey contributed substantially to the reappraisal of Rosa Luxemburg by reformulating her theory of capitalist expansion as a theory of “accumulation of dispossession”. However, under this term, Harvey includes not only capital’s encroachment upon communities that previously at least in part had been able to keep the market at bay, but also the more traditional process in which successful capitalists swallow up the spoils of their defeated rivals inside the capitalist system through “normal” economic means, corruption and theft, or the use of the state. This equation of two very different historical phenomena led him to argue that under neoliberalism, “accumulation by dispossession” in fact has become the dominant form of accumulation. With this interpretative shift, however, Luxemburg’s stress on the fundamental connectedness of capital accumulation as Marx understood it, the ordinary process of centralisation and concentration of capital, and the integration of non-capitalist areas seems to be considerably weakened. Harvey’s reinterpretation, then, raises a difficult problem: in the 21^st century, what exactly constitute the “outsides” of global capital accumulation? Reading Rosa Luxemburg underlines the strategic importance of finding an answer. Because, however we judge the theoretical debates that it spawned, the supreme strength ofThe Accumulation of Capital is the way that it connected capital’s border struggles to the social conflicts at the system’s core.

This article was first published in Indonesian on the website Indoprogress.com https://indoprogress.com/2019/03/wawasan-sejarah-rosa-luxemburg/

[1] For an excellent summary of the content of these critiques, see Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga, ‘The early reception of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism’, Capital & Class, Vol. 37, Issue 3 (2013),https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816813505020, as well as the relevant documents gathered in Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, Discovering Imperialism. Social Democracy to World War I (Leiden / Boston, Brill: 2012; Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 33).

[2] Marcel van der Linden, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’s Global Class Analysis’, Historical Materialism, Vol. 24, Issue 1 (2016)https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341451.

[PB1]The removed sentence referred specifically to earlier contributions on Indoprogress.

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Pepijn Brandon

In the final part of Capital, Volume I on “the so-called original accumulation”, Marx gives a dazzling overview of the often violent historical phenomena that contributed to the birth of the capitalist system, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Particularly striking to a historian of Dutch capitalism and colonialism like myself, is the special attention that Marx gives to Dutch colonial violence in Indonesia as an illustration of this general process. This choice of material is of more than just parochial interest. It can help to highlight some important aspects of Marx’s approach to original accumulation that are easily lost when viewing this chapter through the lense of English exceptionalism, as many Marxists unfortunately still are prone to do.

Marx mentions Dutch colonialism in Indonesia several times in the first volume of Capital, and elsewhere in his work. But the most significant passage comes early in the chapter on the “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”. Its subject is colonial slavery, and the brutal depopulation of conquered areas that accompanied it. After citing the British colonial administrator Thomas Stamford Raffles’s judgement that the history of Dutch rule in Asia was “one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness”, Marx continues:

Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says:

“This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families.”

… Wherever [the Dutch] set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce!

The appearance of Marx’s scathing denunciation of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia in the chapter on the “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” is in itself of some theoretical interest. Although the title seems to announce that this text will focus on the early stages of the industrial revolution in Britain, the actual text covers a lot more ground. The most famous passage in this section illustrates the breadth of Marx’s global vision: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

But Marx’s discussion of violence did not stop with the predatory relationship between rising European powers and the rest of the world. In the chapter, Marx also discusses the ways in which increased global competition profoundly changed European societies and their states, highlighting the commercial wars between European powers, as well as the rise of public debt, the tax-state, and the international credit system. There is no single passage in which Marx explains how exactly these elements contributed to the rise of capitalist industry. Rather, the text suggests a variety of mechanisms. Perhaps the most obvious, is that foreign expansion helped Europeans to harvest the treasures of the world that were then turned into capital. Significantly, Marx points to the colonial system of Holland as the prime example for this. “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.” A second mechanism outlined by Marx, is that the state’s foreign and military adventures acted as levers for concentrating enormous funds in the hands of the rich, and allowing for their investment outside the usual constraints that still characterized more localized production systems. Thus, European states endowed “barren money with the power of breeding and thus turned it into capital”.

But the final, and most all-pervasive mechanism for Marx in this chapter is the way in which wars of expansion and colonialism provided powerful models, practical examples for the separation of the labourers from their means to gain an independent livelihood, and the sacrificing them to modern industry. “The colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modern Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.” This is a vision that is very different from the liberal notion, popular among Marx’s contemporaries and modern economic historians alike, of the rise of industry as the steady triumph of contractual, free labour. Marx expresses this thought most powerfully by repeatedly returning to the issue of “child-stealing and child-slavery” as a necessary component of “the transformation of manufacturing exploitation into factory exploitation, and the establishment of the ‘true relation’ between capital and labour-power.” For Marx, next to slavery in the Americas, Dutch colonial violence in Indonesia provided a prime example of how violence was used to create the preconditions for capitalist development. And in the light of what we have already discussed, it should come as no surprise that it is the “stealing of young people” through the East-Indian slave-trade became the centre of his critique.

There are many reasons why Marx turned to Dutch colonial history in Asia so prominently in this chapter. One was Marx’ belief, expressed already in his famous 1853 article “The British Rule in India”, that the earlier expansion of the Dutch in Asia had provided a model for the British conquest of India. The contemporary background against which Marx wrote could have been another factor. After all, the Dutch only formally abolished slavery in their East Indian colony in 1860, a mere seven years before Marx published the first volume of Capital. At the same time, forced labour as a key instrument of colonial exploitation was still in place in the form of the “cultivation system”, and the Dutch waged an endless string of military campaigns and full-scale wars to extend their hold over the whole of current Indonesia. Finally, the example of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia helped Marx to show that the kind of processes that he outlined as “original accumulation”, though playing out in a particular way in Britain, were fundamentally transnational. As the “model capitalist nation of the 17^th century”, the Dutch Republic and its cruel policies overseas provided a clear-cut case to look beyond the British Isles.

First published at: https://indoprogress.com/2019/01/marx-dan-kolonialisme-belanda-di-indonesia/  

Image derived from "Jakarta, Indonesia, October 2015" byhectorlo is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Michael Heinrich is the author of a major, multi-volume biography on Karl Marx. The first volume appeared 2018 – to coincide with the 200^th anniversary of Marx’s birth – and is being translated into English. Heinrich’s research on Marx has coincided with the project of collecting the known manuscripts of Marx and Engels into theMarx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. His PhD dissertation, published asThe Science of Value [Die Wissenschaft vom Wert - 1991], engaged with Marx’s critique of political economy, as well as the broader traditions of classical and neo-classical theories of political economy. Heinrich has also written commentaries and introductions on Capital and political economy as well as engaging in recent Anglophone debates over Marx’s theories inCapital.   

What are the theoretical reasons for a biography? For you, Biography plays a fundamental part in understanding Marx’s theoretical work. Throughout the twentieth century, it seems that a debate over Marxist theory was equally a debate over Marx’s biography and intellectual development as such. How has this translated into your account?

I have several reasons for doing so. The first reason comes from my prior theoretical work. When I wrote The Science of Value (1991), which will finally appear in English soon, I didn’t simply present Marx’s critique of political economy. I interrogated Marx’s intellectual development. What was it about Marx’s intellectual development that led to the critique of political economy? This taking into account of Marx’s development was always present in my work. And in this I had to answer to – up to a certain point - Marx’s biography. For example, I had to use Marx’s letters for theoretical questions. But a letter is something quite different compared to a published text. With a letter you always have to askto whom is this letter written? How free was Marx to tell the truth about his opinions? Did he merely seek to convince a publisher about a project or was he speaking to a comrade? You already need biographical context to answer these questions about the letters. The biographical context was therefore always present in my work, but I didn’t fully realise that at the time.

In the last few years especially, new biographical works on Marx have been written. They seem to present Marx in a neutral way. During the Cold War it was quite easy to see: there were anti-Marxist biographies that personally damned Marx, and hagiographic biographies that put him up on a pedestal. Since the 1990s biographies appeared that basically said: “well yes, Marx was an important person, we are trying to look at his life and maybe we could also learn something about his works”. They pretend to be neutral when they are not at all neutral. They are still biased, but they are presented in a much more sophisticated way.

Biographical writing has an even bigger political role today than it did during the Cold War. As I said, things were clear during the Cold War, but now they aren’t so visible. I’ll mention three recent biographies: Francis Wheen, Jonathan Sperber and Gareth Stedman Jones.[1]

Francis Wheen’s book is well written and tries to present Marx’s private life. However, he just invents large parts of it. He tells a lot of fairy tales and these fairy tales have great bias. As for Jonathan Sperber, judged by the extensive material he used, it seemed to be the most well founded biography when it appeared. Because he is a historian, he uses a lot of footnotes. You think every small detail is proven by the sources.[2] But when you check his sources, this isn’t always the case. They don’t always prove what he is saying. There is also a certain bias. Nevertheless, I think it is positive that Sperber says very clearly what he intends to do in his introduction. He explains his view that Marx was a person of the nineteenth century and has nothing to tell us today. Even though I disagree with this opinion, I esteem his clarity. Gareth Stedman Jones is not so open on this point, but I think he is doing something similar.[3] He also wants to put Marx back into the nineteenth century.

Biographies like these are far more effective than theoretical texts.

Theoretical texts are usually read by a small group of experts only. They discuss them in small circles. But biographies can reach a much larger audience and transport their messages far and wide. This was my other reason for writing a biography: it is important to settle accounts with all these fairy tales and to clear the space in order to discuss Marx’s texts politically. I mean by this not only the important texts we all know, but also the journalistic texts and his notebooks that are less known, as well as the his political actions.

Surely, the argument of biographers like Sperber, who claim Marx is a dinosaur of the nineteenth century, lack an understanding of the structural dynamics of capitalism. In a sense, they fall for the illustration rather than the structural dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. They see Marx’s work as relegated to nineteenth-century England, which only functioned as his illustration, as he writes in the Preface to the first German edition of Capital.

I wouldn’t be so quick! Using this preface, we can say that Marx claimed to do something other than simply analyse British capitalism. He wanted to present this as a theoretical development (as opposed to a presentation of capitalism’s historical development). I always like to quote what comes in the manuscript of Volume 3, where Marx wrote that he wanted ‘to present the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production in its ideal average’.[4] But this is only Marx’s claim. We can debate about whether he succeeded in carrying the claim through to fruition or not. Maybe he wanted this, but nevertheless was stuck in British capitalism. But if that were the case, we still have to discuss in detail what he was doing.

With Sperber as with Stedman Jones, I would say that they have a rather superficial treatment of Capital. Sperber’s attitude is: Marx’s theory is merely Ricardo’s theory plus Hegelian dialectics. This is an old prejudice. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century this argument could be heard. In the meantime, we have many more of Marx’s texts and many more discussions about Marx’s critique of political economy, where the meaning of critique is considered, as well as the meaning of value, etc. Sperber ignores nearly all of this, but Stedman Jones does too. 

Stedman Jones is very quick to say Marx failed in Capital. Why did he fail? Stedman Jones tries to show that withCapital Marx wanted to present a universal theory and he failed to do this. However, with this claim, Stedman Jones ascribes to Marx, he takes more fromGrundrisse than fromCapital.

We have to be cautious here. Was this really Marx’s aim? What changed in Marx’s development? According to Stedman Jones, the Grundrisse andCapital are essentially the same, so we can quote something from here and quote something from there. But I would say there is an epistemological difference between theGrundrisse andCapital. Already the point,what did Marx actually claim in his own terms, how universal or non-universal the theory should be, is a difficult question. It should be discussed and the answer shouldn’t be taken for granted so easily.

Let’s talk something about the MEGA. In the English-speaking world there is a divorce between the Marx and Engels Collected Works [MECW] – completed with a high degree of scientific precision which comprises of fifty volumes (unlike in France, where they don’t have such a collection), and what is now taking place within the German world with the publications of the MEGA. The further publication of the MEGA creates a new space for debate going into the future and I see your biography as a way of orienting to discussions that will come of these publications, or at least orienting to them in a pre-emptive way. Are we at the beginning of new debates around Marx? This prospect really goes against the grain of the common-sense idea that everything has been written about Marx already, that nothing is new under the sun.

This last idea is really sweet. You can find it time after time. Again and again examples where people – as far back as the 1920s! – wanted to do a thesis on Marx and the professor said, “Oh a thesis on Marx, but everything about Marx has already been written! Choose another theme”. But Marx’s own writings were not even completely known. In the twentieth century, every generation has known a different Marx, because the different manuscripts were published only as time went on.

When the writings of the young Marx were published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, people used to say, “now we know the whole Marx! The old Marx and the young Marx”. And then, during the Second World War the Grundrisse were published. A broader reception started only in the sixties and seventies and again people said “Ah now we have the connecting link between the young and the old Marx! So now, finally, withGrundrisse we have the complete Marx”.

But what followed with the MEGA? To briefly mention only the field of economics, in the late seventies came the complete manuscripts of 1861-63 (of which Theories of Surplus Value is only a part) and in the nineties, the original manuscript of volume three appeared and then, fifteen years later, the original manuscripts of volume two. And now, with the publication of more and moreNotebooks we will again enter new fields of Marx’s research process.

There is another important point. The MEGA publishes texts in their original form. This has basicallynever happened before. Think of theEconomic-Philosophical Manuscripts for example, and the famous chapter on the critique of Hegelian philosophy and dialectics.This chapter never existed in the original! It was a collection of paragraphs that dealt with Hegel. And it was put together by the editors as a chapter. Marx himself did not put it together.

When the MEGA is completed in full, which will take at least fifteen more years, then we can say, “Now we have for the first time a really complete Marx, in the sense of what he left behind”. It is not the complete Marx, as it is not everything he had ever written. There are great gaps. We lack many letters. We are missing a number of drafts. But nevertheless it will be as complete as is now possible. Then, regardingCapital, a new discussion will start especially because of theeconomic notebooks, in which Marx was preparing the rewriting ofCapital, which he planned in the 1870s.Capital - as we have read it for more than 100 years - does not give us the full picture of Marx’s thinking. Volume three for example rests on a manuscript written in 1864-65. But Marx continued to carry out his research on credit, crisis and the profit rate after 1865. This research is not included in the text we are reading.

In terms of representing Marx, there is conflict between the teleological view of his intellectual development and one that emphasises his theoretical discoveries along with the political combats he was engaged in. What is your attitude towards the teleological readings of Marx (which are still with us)?

Teleology in biographies is always a rather poor ex-post-construction, overlooking the moments of contingency, which exist in every individual’s life. My research program is different. First, we have to contextualise Marx’s theoretical achievements and writings. Capital is usually read as a contemporary book. Of course, it has relevance for the present age. But it is not a contemporary book. Many parts ofCapital have a political context, where Marx directed his fire at his contemporaries. For example, in his analysis of value-form and money, in the first three chapters inCapital volume one, Marx presents a strictly anti-Proudhonist theory. Marx did this already in 1859, in “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”.

However, during the early 1860s Marx recognised the weakness of his first approach through reading Bailey’s critique of Ricardo. Therefore, in the analysis of value form and money in Capital we have an intersection of three fronts: the critic of Ricardo, the defence against Bailey and the attack on Proudhon. Of course, Marx wants to analyse value and money in capitalism, but he did this in a specific framework founded in the specific scientific and political debates of his times, or more precisely: the debates, he considered to be the serious ones. My first point is to look at the context, in order to get a better understanding of Marx’s analysis.

Second, we have to see Marx as a person in a broader sense. When we read his texts, he is a theoretician for us. We usually focus on the logic of his theoretical arguments. But Marx also worked as a journalist for decades. He published hundreds of newspaper articles. And he was also a political activist, a militant in different degrees depending on the time. At certain times, he was very active, at others rather silent when there were limited possibilities for his activism. But the activism was still present for him. We have to bring together these three features: Marx the theorist, Marx the journalist, and Marx the militant. This was my main aim, namely, to contribute to a new view of Marx that brings these three parts together.

Tell us about what you bring that is new to an understanding of Marx. What did you discover for yourself, for instance of the relationship of Marx’s early development and Hegel’s philosophy? 

I think there are really interesting new aspects in Marx’s very early writings.

The new aspects I find question old judgments about the relation between Hegel and Marx. I think this relation is much more complicated than usually assumed, not only when we look at Marx but also when we look at Hegel. The picture of Hegel that many Marxists have long held is an extremely simplified one. But when you want to understand a certain relation and one pole of the relation is simplified to the extreme, you will never understand the whole relation. Therefore, I had to occupy myself very much with Hegel and other sources Marx drew upon.

Please go into a little more detail on that point. Could you specify with some examples?

The traditional view of Hegel is the following: Hegel is an idealist, one of the main representatives of so-called German Idealism. However, there is a nice article by Walter Jaeschke that appeared in 2000, where he asked about when the label “German Idealism” actually emerged. His answer: in the 1860s! It was a construction made in the German writing of the history of philosophy! For my biographical work, I used two encyclopaedias of the 1840s. Both argue that Kant and Fichte were idealists, but of course, Hegel and Schelling were not. We really must rethink this relation of materialism-idealism, which was so long taken for granted.

I deal with Marx’s Dissertation in my first volume. In the past there has been a lot of discussion about whether this dissertation is still idealistic or how much of it is materialistic. I would say that to pose the question in such a way presupposes an idea about the relation of materialism to idealism that rests upon a geographical metaphor. It is as if you have two cities, the city of idealism and the city of materialism, and you travel from one city to the other and ask, how far did you come? I would question the way the notions of materialism and idealism are habitually used.

What role did the relation of religion and philosophy play in Hegel’s works, the reception of the Young Hegelians and then Marx’s interventions, and his relationship to Bruno Bauer?

The relation of religion to philosophy was widely discussed in the 1830s. This was the milieu Marx grew up in as a student, in which he developed his own views. The debates over religion and philosophy were basically political. This is very important. Sometimes you read that the discussion of religion was only a disguise for the political discussion, insofar as one didn’t dare have a political critique, one started with the critique of religion.

But this view is totally wrong. The critique of religion itself was a political matter in a state that defined itself as a Christian state, not in a general cultural sense, but in the sense of Protestant Christianity, which was organised by the state: the priests were state servants. The political critique in the 1840s was a result of the failure of these debates.

Originally, the Young Hegelians thought they had to help the Prussian state, which they viewed as a progressive state. However, the Prussian state didn’t accept their help. Instead, the Prussian state became an ally of the reactionary religious factions. The Young Hegelians learned something about the character of the state through this fact. There is a very tight connection, therefore, between religion and politics, albeit at different levels. The discussions of religion are political in themselves. This was one level. The learning process that the Young Hegelians went through during the course of these discussions was another level.

Things are very interesting with regard to Hegel. What role did religion play in his philosophy? In his main philosophical works like the Logic, or thePhenomenology of Spirit, he argues that philosophy and religion have the same content and that there is only a difference in the form of presentation. One should already be suspicious of this argument because Hegel was such a theoretician ofform. Theform-differences are so crucial to Hegel, and yet now he says “Oh, it is only a difference of form”.

What does this mean?

Conservatives accused Hegel - in the 1830s - of being a secret enemy of religion, who didn’t dare to say this openly. According to them, he dissolved religion into philosophy. On the other hand, Hegel was accused of having made too many compromises with religion, transforming philosophy into religion. And then – this will be discussed in my second volume – comes Bruno Bauer who edited Hegel’s manuscripts on the philosophy of religion, and argued that Hegel’s move was a kind of double covering. Hegel first presents himself as a secret pantheist and this gives rise to different interpretations. But at his real core, according to Bauer, Hegel is an atheist. In some respect Bauer agreed with the conservatives, but what was for them a critic against Hegel, that was a merit of Hegel for Bauer.

What about Hegel’s criticism of the Romantic tradition, the beautiful soul as it appears in the Phenomenology, and Marx’s transition [Übergang] over to Hegel’s philosophy? Can you expand on this problem because I don’t think the connection has often been made about Hegel’s specific critique of the beautiful soul and Marx’s adoption of Hegel’s ideas?

Marx’s transition to Hegel’s philosophy is a difficult issue because there are nearly no documents testifying to it. We have Marx’s poems and his letter to his father, where he wrote that on the one hand he gave up his poetic attempts and on the other hand, he already moved towards Hegel. We have no other documents from Marx, no letters, no diaries, no documents from a third person, either. Therefore, one has to be very cautious.

My point is that the usual narration, starting with Franz Mehring (in his Marx-biography) that Marx gave up his poetic attempts and the idea of making a career as a poet because he realised that he wasn’t talented enough for it, is obviously wrong. Marx does not talk about talent at all, he spoke about his poems being idealistic in the sense that they confront a bad being [Sein] with a better ought [Sollen]. He didn’t want to continue with this. He formulated a philosophical critic of his poems.

At the same time – spring and summer 1837 – Marx read Hegel. At first he didn’t like Hegel, he wanted to reject Hegel with the help of ideas of Schelling and he tried to formulate an alternative. But finally, Marx couldn’t escape Hegel.

There is, above all, a coincidence of time between these two events. It can certainly be by accident. But there is also the other coincidence that Marx criticised, in his own poems, this very confrontation between bad being and the ought-to-be. This was an important part of Hegel’s critique of the Romantics. Again, this can be by accident. However, I suppose that Marx indeed read Hegel’s critique and that he referred this critique to his own poetic conceptions. I cite some passages, especially from the Phenomenology of Spirit, which I think fit perfectly with the young poetic Marx of this time. I cannot prove that he really read this, and that he really argued against himself as the poetic beautiful soul and so on, but it does sound plausible that he took this critique from Hegel. Giving up the poetic ideas and accepting the philosophy of Hegel seem to be two moments that belong to one process. I suggest how it could be. It cannot be more than a suggestion because we have no documents to prove it.

It is good grounds for an assumption.

Yes, it is an assumption and perhaps someone has good enough arguments to explain all of this in a different way. I don’t mind. I would be glad to have such a discussion. As Marx does at the end of his preface of Capital, I also say, every scientific critique is welcome.

On Bruno Bauer, the question of ‘self-consciousness’ seems quite interesting as to the role that it played in his work and Marx’s dissertation. But additionally, the role of Feuerbach, his critique of Christianity and the relation to Hegel. What did the picture look like between Marx and Feuerbach at this time?

I will cover the relation between Marx and Feuerbach in volume two of the biography. In volume one, I was much concerned with Marx and Bauer. However, in my presentation I did something quite different to what is usually done in Marx-biographies. The usual practice is to give, rather early on, an overview of Feuerbach or Bauer. They present nearly the whole intellectual development of the person, before they put the question of the relation of Marx to Bauer or to Feuerbach.

In such a way, very important details are lost. I focus on Marx and what he had at hand at a certain time. My first volume finishes with Marx’s Dissertation and I was very interested in what he could use for this work. In this first volume I didn’t analyse Feuerbach’sEssence of Christianity because it only appeared in the summer of 1841. Marx delivered his PhD thesis already in the spring of that year, so he couldn’t be influenced by this famous work. Only Feuerbach’s articles that appeared in Arnold Ruge’sYearbooks could have influenced Marx at that time. Therefore, I discuss them only. The same is the case with Bruno Bauer, his famousDie Posaune des Jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen was written in August 1841, after Marx’sDissertation.

In the second volume, I will treat Marx’s time in Bonne and his first steps towards the Rhenanian Newspaper. At this time, Feuerbach and Bauer made further important headway, and I discuss the influences. The connection between Marx and Bauer changes a lot. Before early 1842, Bauer and Marx were strongly connected and had common projects, but at the end of the year 1842, there was a split: a political split, a scientific split, and also a personal split. Marx moved much closer to Ruge and Feuerbach. Why did this happen? What was influential? This I will discuss in the second volume.

But what about ‘self-consciousness’ and Marx’s relation to Hegel’s History of Philosophy in the Dissertation, the reading of the Stoics and the late thinkers of Antiquity?

Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy were an important starting point for Marx’sDissertation, but the high estimation of Epicurus was already a clear critique of Hegel’s views.

The notion of self-consciousness [Selbstbewusstsein] is very important, but it means very different things - even for the same thinker - at different periods of time. You find it in Hegel, in thePhenomenology and inEncyclopaedia, where it is not such an important term. In Hegel’sLectures on the Philosophy of Religion it became much more important and because the discussion of this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy dominated debates during the 1830s, the notion became well known. Bauer and other Young Hegelians then used it. In Bauer, it developed in a specific manner and became a much bigger and comprehensive concept.

There is also a discussion about how Bauer influenced Marx. Did they use the same notion of self-consciousness? However, in Bauer it was not even the same notion over the course of time. In his Dissertation, Marx was rather cautious with the notion. This was contrary to Bauer, who filled out the concept more and more. But for Marx after theDissertation, it became less and less important, which could be one of the reasons for their split. But they had splits on several levels. There were various reasons for these splits.

And the criticism of Ruge in the Dissertation?

This was a critique that Marx made of the idea that Hegel accommodates his philosophy to some political pressure and political situations. It is a very superficial charge. For Marx the interesting point is what makes it possible that the philosophy can be accommodated? We have to go deeper in our insight. Insofar as this was the case, the very young Marx of the Dissertation shows that his analytical capabilities were in certain respects already better than those of Arnold Ruge who was much older and much more experienced. However, this was a theoretical difference and not a sharp difference at that. I suppose Ruge would have agreed if he had the chance to read the criticism, which he never could because it was never published during his lifetime. But politically Marx and Ruge became closer and founded theGerman-France Yearbooks together.

What about the political aspect of the Dissertation, for instance when Marx discusses the liberals, on the one side, and the positive philosophers, on the other. This is not a reference to the Young Hegelians and the splits that followed.

This is a very interesting point. Marx doesn’t distinguish between the Young Hegelians and the Old Hegelians – a difference, which I also interrogate, in the first volume. The real core of this difference is perhaps mainly a construction already made in Marx’s time with the terms that were used in his time. But things are not at all so clear. When Marx speaks of the liberals, I think the so-called Young Hegelians are included in this liberal party. The party itself is much greater than the Young Hegelians themselves. Some of the so-called Old Hegelians were also liberals in some sense. And the positive philosophy – the other pole Marx criticised – was a term used by Feuerbach in a well-known article, these were the philosophers who on the one hand tried to make use of certain Hegelian categories but also tried to combine this with a very traditional form of religious thinking. Marx saw both of these tendencies as the main opposing tendencies in the discussions of his times and against both he put his criticism. We can also read this as an indication that Marx didn’t define himself as a Young Hegelian. I think he tried to make clear that there was already some distance between the Young Hegelians and himself in these early years.

Does that run counter to many assumptions made by Marx biographers in the past?

Yes, this was a very dominant view and I must admit that I also shared this view in the past. The dominant assumption is that as a student in Berlin Marx became a Young Hegelian, then perhaps in 1843 under the influence of Feuerbach he developed a critique of the Young Hegelians. As in many other examples, when you look closer and in more detail, searching out the documents of the time, then you will learn that such a view is far too simplified. This is what I learned again and again during my work.

How Socratic! A lesson in knowing you didn’t know.

Many opinions are too simplified. You have to learn to question them.

In rejecting this narrative, what kind of political implications does this insight have with regards to Marx’s distancing from the Young Hegelians? How does it alter the understanding of Marx at this time?

I think the consequence is that Marx didn’t join the typical Young Hegelians. There were conflicts between the Berliner Freien and what Marx was doing in the Rhenanian newspaper. It is much easier to understand these conflicts when you have in mind that, even in 1841, Marx was not a full Young Hegelian but already had quite some distance, politically speaking, from them. It is then not so surprising that this distance becomes greater. If you say he was a Young Hegelian, then you are compelled to ask: “Okay, why in 1842 was his development already different to many other Young Hegelians?” The usual justifications are, “He was occupied with politics and he didn’t like these empty speculations”. This is however not a satisfying argument at all. But you can find it in many Marxist discourses! Something happens. But why does it happen? The usual response is: because Marx was occupied with politics and he saw that the concepts do not work! This is not an explanation but a problem. What did he see as not working? And why? Why couldn’t the others see this? They were also occupied with politics. I hope my presentation will clarify things a little bit more.

The picture one gets of Marx is that of a fiercely independent thinker. But why? Other aspects of his thought, like his legal training, seem to have been underestimated in the past.

Marx’s legal training is commonly underestimated. This is a result of his own self-portrait in the 1859 Preface when he gave his readers a very brief autobiographical sketch. He said that he had studied law but his real interest was in philosophy, so people may think that he hadn’t intensively studied law. When you look at the classes he attended, however, you see that he took law very seriously and you can see, especially in his articles for theRhenanian newspaper in 1842 but also later, that he was trained in law. His figures of argumentation show that he had good knowledge of law and he could put this knowledge to good use. In front of a court, Marx even twice argued in 1848 during the revolution. He was once personally accused, and theNew Rhenanian Newspaper was once accused, of undermining state authority. In a very clever way, Marx combined legal argumentation and political arguments to show that the accusation made by the state didn’t actually conform to the legal framework itself. Marx won both cases: as a lawyer, he had a one hundred percent success rate!

How important are the contingent beginnings, the world Marx was born into, post-French Revolution Rhineland, the social and economic context, to explain why Marx became Marx?

We have to admit that we effectively have no documents showing how Marx processed his early influences. We have many studies of the Rhineland, several documents about his father’s activities and about his teachers in school. But there are no diaries and no letters where Marx himself described what influenced him, what he saw and or what decisively shaped his early development. We need to be cautious.

Think about it: when we look at our own biography, to what influenced us, why we became what we became, why we became leftists, very often there are already events in childhood. When you were a youngster, perhaps there was a teacher, who influenced you or an early friend, who opened your eyes to this or that or a book, which inspired you. All this happened under certain social conditions and inside a certain discursive framework, which usually you recognize only much later. I assume that all this also was the case for Marx. What I tried to do was to collect all the information about the surroundings, especially the particular conditions of the Rhineland. The Rhineland was a new Prussian province after having been ruled by the French for twenty years. It was comparatively liberal, with legal equality for citizens. The rest of Prussia was very conservative, half feudalist even. If Marx had been born into the same family in Berlin, this would have been a decisive change.

Regarding Marx’s Jewish descent, in contrast to others, I would say that there was not really a Jewish influence on Marx. Already his father was quite removed from Judaism, he was a liberal and a supporter of the Enlightenment. He influenced the young Karl with these views. The majority of the teachers Marx had in school were also guided by Enlightenment ideals. Marx had already visited Ludwig von Westphalen (who later became his father in law) as a schoolboy because Ludwig’s son Edgar was Marx’s best friend at school. Ludwig von Westphalen was also part of this Enlightenment framework. We can recognize this influence for the first time in Marx’s high school essay.

Nevertheless, I also write about the situation of Jews because the baptising of the family is sometimes a focal point in the literature, but the social conditions that gave meaning to the baptism in Marx’s times are often neglected. I will continue the discussion about Jewish culture and anti-Semitism in the second volume, because of Marx’s article on the Jewish Question, which is often interpreted as an anti-Semitic text. In the first volume, I try to give the basics, by especially focusing on the distinction between anti-Judaism of the Middle Ages and the early modern times and anti-Semitism of 19^th century, as well as the distinction between ethnic [völkisch] anti-Semitism and racist anti-Semitism. I will try to show that we can find in Marx – in his letters, for example – anti-Judaistic remarks and stereotypes, but not in theJewish Question.

Working on his biography then, the man who said not to judge what people think of themselves but to judge what they are, are there any examples of this disjunct between what Marx says of himself and what he was?

This is difficult because what Marx said about himself is not always to be taken for granted. You must always have in mind to whom he is sayingwhat. To a publisher he says something different than to a comrade he trusts, or to someone who is an ally, but whom he doesn’t trust very much. What he says about himself depends on the situation. We must also keep in mind that Marx was a subject who learned intensively. He was learning all his life therefore he was also capable of throwing away former opinions he no longer held. When he learnt something new, he said “This is a new aspect, I didn’t know this, I didn’t have this in mind, so I cannot maintain what I wrote about this before”. He criticised himself. What he said about himself and his positions changed. We aren’t talking about one thing or one change. There are many changes. In the third volume for example, I will raise the problem of Marx’s Eurocentrism. In the 1850s Marx - in his writings and articles for theNew York Daily Tribune, on British policy in India - you can find a Eurocentric position quite clearly. However, this Eurocentric position slowly changed with new experiences and new writings. He didn’t define his position very often, but when you interpret what he says, and expresses, you have to acknowledge that it changes.

What about the political movements in Germany? I found the sections where you spoke about the Gesellschaft fur Menschenrecht and the kind of pre-Communist Manifesto writings of Georg Büchner fascinating.

Even though he died early, Georg Büchner is another person who will appear also later, when I will discuss the Communist Manifesto. I will compare theCommunist Manifesto with Büchner’sTheHessian Courier, written in 1834. It is only thirteen years older than theCommunist Manifesto and Marx probably never read it. I think it is useful to compare the texts in order to see what was already possible to say, so as to see the new thing Marx did in theCommunist Manifesto. This is a basic principle in my work. You cannot learn about such writings when you come to them with our present knowledge and consciousness alone. You have to look at the reference points of the time to understand what was typical of this time as well as what was new for this time. Georg Büchner, nowadays known as the famous poet who was ahead of his time, was also a very intelligent revolutionary (which cannot be said of all revolutionaries) and a very precise and illusion-free observer, what his letters especially show. He is indeed an excellent reference point.

The radical political movements in these times were rather isolated throughout Germany. Nevertheless, before the revolution 1848 there were constantly movements and conflicts that the German states suppressed severely. Having these movements and the growing dissatisfaction of the people in mind, it doesn’t look so surprising that 1848 the revolution spread so quickly. However, after the defeat of the revolution, the political as well as the discursive situation changed fundamentally. Prussia, with its militarism, became the hegemonic power and many former revolutionaries started to support the process of German unification under Prussian leadership. Other revolutionaries like Marx and Engels, who didn’t want to adjust to the reactionary German states, had to go into exile. The defeat of the revolution of 1848 was a decisive turning point for German history, as well as for the biography of Marx. However, I will be concerned with these stories in the third volume of the biography.

References:

Marx, Karl 1981, Capital. Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach, London: Penguin.

Sperber, Jonathan 2013, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, London: W. W. Norton & Company.

Stedman Jones, Gareth 2016, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, London: Allen Lane.

Wheen, Francis 1999, Karl Marx: A Life, London: Forth Estate.

Image derived from http://marx-biografie.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/MH_bea.jpg

[1] Wheen 1999.

[2] Sperber 2013.

[3] Stedman Jones 2016.

[4] Marx 1981, p. 970. Translation modified.

Edited for publication by Daniel Lopez

Frieder Otto Wolf taught political philosophy and the history of philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and is a fellow at the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation. He has for many years participated in the German debates over Marx’s theory. He is the author of Radikale Philosophie [Radical Philosophy] (2002) andRueckkehr in die Zukunft – Krisen und Alternativen [Back to the Future: Crises and Alternatives] (2011). He has co-editedDas Kapital neu lesen [Reading Capital Anew] 2006).

Wolf has also pioneered, initially with Peter Schöttler[i], the reception of Althusser’s works in Germany. He has translated, and commentated on Althusser’s Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1985), the writings on the history of political philosophyMachiavelli – Montesquieu – Rousseau (1987),For Marx (2011) andReading Capital (translated from the French first volume – 2015). Wolf also edited – with Ekrem Ekici and Jörg Nowak -Althusser: Die Reproduktion des Materialismus [Althusser: the Reproduction of Materialism] (2016).