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/  

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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).

Wolf has also co-edited the English-language edition of Rosa Luxemburg: A Permanent Challenge for Political Economy (2016) andThe Unfinished System of Karl Marx: Critically Reading Capital as a Challenge for Our Times (2018). 

Let’s begin with a simple question. Why West Berlin Marxism? Could you briefly explain the significance of this tradition?

West Berlin universities were central to the student revolt in the 1960s from the very beginning. Students read Marx, especially Capital, and encountered representatives of Western Marxism, both young and old. A non-orthodox style of Marxism developed in the departments of political science, economics and “philosophy and social sciences”. These new developments were autonomous from the Stalinised Marxism of the Eastern regime but also of the Frankfurt School (which was only one of the centres of Marxist renewal in Western Germany).[ii] The range of journals published in West Berlin illustrate this manifold engagement, being themselves the result of student-initiated Capital reading groups:Das Argument (The Argument) from the Institute of Philosophy (which under Wolfgang Fritz Haug later attempted to re-build a compromise with the official GDR and Soviet tradition) theBeiträge zum wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus (Contributions to Scientific Socialism), later titledSozialismus, from the Institute of Sociology (in which the young Joachim Bischoff was a leading member of a broader collective);Probleme des Klassenkampfs (Problems of Class Struggle) based at the Department of Political Science (in which a group of young researchers and activists managed to recruit people like Elmar Altvater to professorships); Mehrwert (Surplus Value) from the department of economics (building a special stronghold in international and dependency studies, only partly later giving in to the temptations of postmodernism). Other such developments have not produced journals, but important reference works (as e.g.Kapitalismus und Krise bei Marx [Capitalism and Crisis in Marx], 2 Vols.).[iii]

These attempts led to an autochthonous production of theory that lasted for a decade, even though there was little awareness of international Marxist debates, concentrating in these efforts especially on the fields of class analysis, “derivation of the state”, crisis theory, theory of revolution, theory of pre-capitalist modes of production, and, above all, the critical reconstruction of Marx’s theory of the domination of modern bourgeois societies by the capitalist mode of production as such. Yet rebellious students had pushed some younger academics towards critical inquiry and some of them became younger academics themselves, creating the conditions in which a layer could pursue further Marxist research inside and outside the institutions. 

After years of these efforts remaining more or less forgotten retrospective work (which correctly presents West Berlin Marxism as a part of the general renewal of Marxism in West Germany) has begun to develop anew which makes their insights available again.[iv]  

What made encounter with Althusserian Marxism possible within West Berlin Marxism?

Well, I think that the encounter between West Berlin Marxism and Althusserian Marxism centred on the problem of how to move from a general analysis of the capitalist mode of production, to the Umschlag and then, into method. These are necessary steps towards concrete analysis and practical deliberation. The turn to method was as a mere exercise in reflection, but was an imperative prerequisite for the “concrete analysis of the concrete” situation. This is an intellectual precondition for practical intervention; this was one of Althusser’s core concerns inReading Capital. It was also at the core of West Berlin Marxism, which combined a textual and philologically acute re-reading of Marx’sCapital (which followed its actual argument, cognizant of the limitations of Engels’s edition), with a keen sense of the systematicity of Marxian theory. At times this approach was not fully developed and is therefore in need of some critical reflection. For instance, in the process of readingCapital, these points help to distinguish between earlier versions where Marx was still grappling with the object of inquiry and later versions where he had made some progress in overcoming these difficulties. I think both West Berlin Marxism and Althusserianism have stressed the character of Marx’s theory of the domination of capital within bourgeois societies as a major breakthrough, creating the foundations for a science of history (Althusser) or a science of society (West Berlin Marxism).

Did Althusser’s proposal to view Capital itself as an intervention into philosophy win a hearing? What were the limitations and obstacles to a reception of Althusser’s work?

It must be said - with the exception of the Frankfurt School, which was outside of academia but, of course, in the business of philosophy – in Western Germany, philosophy was generally not open to Marxist approaches. The major developments in West Berlin Marxism occurred in sociology, political science and economics. With Wolfgang Fritz Haug there was an attempt made at philosophy. However, this was very much in the vein of trying to integrate the new analyses into traditional Marxism.

But in a context over-determined by a Lukácsian and Korschian variant of Marxism (Indeed, I’m reminded of Alfred Schmidt), one has the impression that Althusser’s arguments were doomed. What was the strategic theoretical-political axis around which the rejection of Althusser revolved?

I think the Frankfurt School tried to ridicule and exclude Althusserian problematics by, on the one hand, asserting that his work represented an old-school philosophical approach. This is a rather surprising claim and not an easy one to maintain, especially once you have acknowledged the French moment of philosophy in which Althusser was active. I tend to think that this criticism was rather more a projection of the difficulties the Frankfurt School encountered as result of their exclusion from academic philosophy.

On the other hand, they marginalized Althusser by arguing that his work remained within traditional Stalinism. Of course, there is a semblance of truth in this. Althusser was trying to intervene in the communist movement as it was. He used all kinds of subterfuges to intervene in this specific public. Althusser’s intervention was intended to topple and overturn theoretical Stalinism by attacking it on its own turf. This rendered a favourable reception more difficult in West Berlin and West Germany where the communist movement had ceased to play an important role, not least of all because the GDR had realised an unattractive model of socialism. The Prague events, during which Soviet troops put an end to the Marxist-oriented Prague Spring, confirmed this scepticism.

In that context, how did an engagement with Althusser materialise?

I can only speak for myself. I learned from George Lukács – who I read in a French edition in 1963 when a student of Lucien Goldmann – the need to organise within the communist-labour movement. However, the communist party no longer existed as a working-class current. In our context, the only remaining working class mass political current was Social Democracy.

I developed a different approach to Althusser. In fact, Althusser himself had recruited me to the discussions of the Althusserians, after discussing the politics of the Portuguese Revolution with him. My approach to Althusser is very much influenced by these political debates as well as interventions made by Althusser later in life who had – as is often overlooked – begun to distance himself from the really existing communist movement in 1975. For example, in the case of Portugal, he addressed his letters to a leading active member from the new Socialist Party, which had been founded under the tutelage of the German Social Democrats, instead of to members of the re-established and important Stalinist Communist Party. Nevertheless, in addressing himself to an intellectual of the Portuguese Social Democratic Party, Althusser raised the problem of “unity of the left”, which was needed in the moment of political transformation. This shows clearly that he was not dogmatically fixed on dialogues within the communist movement and was quite open to other political movements, the realities of revolutionary processes and the broad politics of the working class.

What impact did the Portuguese Revolution have on Althusser’s thinking? What did he think about the relation of the state and politics?

In the 1970s, Althusser made important developments. As you know, in ‘75/’76 there was an important turn in his reflections. This may have been inspired by the experience of the Portuguese Revolution. The revolution was lost on the level of the political forms of expression of the organisations and their capacities to find adequate compromise: The urgent unity of the left, to realise that which was becoming possible, wasn’t found – and maybe could not have been. In spite of the unitary impulse of the Movement of the Armed Forces, as well as of many popular initiatives from below. I am still convinced that a much more progressive “class-compromise” than the one that has then been imposed by German Social Democracy could have been found and implemented – with important consequences elsewhere! In the end this failure led to the reconstitution of Portugal as a normal Western European social democratic state, instead of initiating the beginnings of a genuine socialist transition. I think that this was not preordained; you can pinpoint certain strategic mistakes made by the communists and by the dissident communists within Maoism. I think these shortcomings should be criticised and overcome. The Trotskyists, on the other hand, didn’t play a relevant or instructive role. Still, the defeat of the Portuguese Revolution in 1975/76 should be studied thoroughly because of the strategic lessons it can provide.

Let’s move to the publication history of Althusser’s work in Germany.

There are two phases. One was when Peter Schöttler and his friends used Althusser to intervene into the Eurocommunist tendency, then developing at the margins of the German communist party as it had been reconstituted under the control of the DDR. Schöttler himself was a more or less orthodox Stalinist whose paradigm was toppled by Althusser’s writings; an instance of a successful intervention.

Interestingly enough, you find a number of things published in German which had not been published in French before or which were put into a new context by the intervention in Germany. These sometimes included forewords by Althusser, based on Peter Schöttler’s elaborations, which gave Althusser’s intervention a specific setting. This is how I define the first phase of Althusser’s publication in Germany. It was represented by the series of books published by Schöttler under the title “Positions” which was also the title of Althusser’s first book of collected works, published by the French Communist Party.

I came in during the second phase. This begun when Schöttler and I started a project of editing Althusser’s writings in German. I published two volumes; Schöttler was very busy trying to find his way into French-German academia at the time and was not able to produce the volumes he had planned. Althusser’s collected works, as they had been published by then, consisted in two volumes that I translated. These were, interestingly enough, lectures on epistemology and a collection of political writings, which were not so numerous at the time. Still, I thought they deserved an edition, from his book on Montesquieu onwards. This contained his critique of modern political philosophy, which as we know now was by then one of his central concerns and the object of a number of lectures which have since been published.

So, this was my contribution: I stressed Althusser’s more general epistemological commitment and his commitment to rediscovering modern political philosophy in a critical Marxist perspective.

What was the specificity of Althusser’s reading of modern political philosophy? Why was it important, apart from the simple appellation “Marxist”?

That’s an interesting point. I think the point was that politics has to be understood as an intervention into the concrete situation. The first conclusion to be drawn was that importing models doesn’t substitute for actually doing politics. This is a Stalinist idea of which the Trotskyists were not totally innocent. Similarly, the Eurocommunists tried to import models from Italy.

I think this also represented a possible meeting point with West Berlin Marxism, which started from the idea that you have to “dig where you are”, so to speak, for instance, by producing a class analysis of Western Germany. Of course, in a way this was undeniably theoreticist. But the general move was important. It was a breakthrough for us to say that “we have to do politics here” and, in the absence of other models, to commit to investigating how this might be possible. This was the mood underlying it. Althusser was a possible ally for this enterprise.

Though these texts were prior to the so-called crisis of Marxism and the June Theses, how did these earlier texts relate to the crisis of Marxism as it was experienced in West Germany?

They relate to it in an important way. They reaffirmed the need for scientificity. I don’t mean this in a theoreticist manner which suggests that provided you first do science, things will turn out fine. Rather, scientificity suggests that you have to respect the proper character of scientific discovery and disavow partisanship in science. Marx himself underlined this many times, as we frequently quoted him, all over the place in West Berlin. You have to be oriented towards finding out what is effectively the case. As Machiavelli said, “la verità effettuale della cosa” (the real truth of the matter at hand). I think this orientation was quite productive at the time; it was also an unblocking because it allowed us, for instance, to look towards the new social movements and not just those of the working class. Or, while looking at the working class and its own struggles, instead of trying to mobilise the organisations against the anarchist grass roots, we tried to find out ways to organise both in order to wage important struggles against capital. This was relevant even in the situation of blocked political perspectives we encountered in West Germany.

Let’s go further into the second wave of publication. The most significant event being the republication of Das Kapital Lesen and For Marx. Can you go into the importance of these editions for the debate over Marx in Germany?

You have to see that on a subterranean level a new reading of Althusser had already begun here. This is evident from the horrendous prices we paid for used copies of Althusser’s writing in German! And of course, we needed – and I’ve observed this in many discussions with students – to have German texts because French is still a foreign language here! English is more or less accepted as a world language, but French is not. So it was necessary to bring out a new translation. I think that the central prerequisite was to find a way of really translating Althusser into German and not into some intermediate language only comprehensible to people with some knowledge of French. This was the case with the earlier translations because the intermediate language – i.e. half way between contemporary German and French vocabulary – favoured by the Francophiles spontaneously came up, covering a lot of issues.

At the same time, I was earnestly trying to translate Althusser into German. I was more or less successful, although not without mistakes, which I have noted. We shall have a second edition ofDas Kapital Lesen where we can correct these. We also tried to contextualise the question of translation. So my postfaces and prefaces did not seek to build a German Althusserianism but to find a perspective on reading Althusser, which would be adequate to the different situation that the reader encounters here.

Explore that point about the situation encountered by a German reader of Althusser…

One of the major blocks to a reception of Althusser here was very simple: Althusser was ignorant of the Frankfurt School. He had some idea that it wasn’t his cup of tea, but that was about all he knew about it. There are some formulations of his in which he shows that he has not really studied Frankfurt School theorists and dismisses them in a more or less arbitrary way. This was not really justified - in fact I’ve just read a dissertation that argues Adorno, Otto Neurath[v] and Althusser are equally useful for the renewal of Marxism.

Otto Neurath? I wouldn’t agree with that…

Well, I found it curious. Maybe you would rather quote Korsch in this context. The author of the dissertation selected Neurath to show that these different, warring re-readings of Marx, are now history. We have to look back upon them and understand how they can help us read Marx on the level that is possible today. I say this not only with regard to the philological situation; we now have almost all the relevant Marx and Engels texts, which were not previously available – or were available in adulterated forms. In addition to this, there is a lot of theoretical debate. Many attempts at reformulating Marxism have taken place which have to be understood and from which we may no doubt learn important insights.

In this sense, I think it is a good symptom that we can now quote Adorno and Althusser together as classics without falling into the trap of trying to bicker about who was right in what detail.

But in the German context another limitation was the question of Marx’s French edition of Capital. Marx saw this as an independent text with scientific merit in its own right. But did the Germans really read it?

You remind me: yes, this is a scandal. Because the Germans are so Germanocentric, they overlooked that there are at least three versions of Capital: the last German edition (which Engels prepared based upon Marx’s notes without making use of all of them), the French edition, (which Marx thoroughly revised which is an important source on its own) and the notes from Marx that were overlooked or ignored by Engels.

These three texts are at the basis of a critical reading of Marx now, not to speak of the earlier editions, which also contain elements that can be helpful in understanding what Marx was trying to get at. 

 What about the New Marx Reading. Do they have impasses that Althusser’s work can address?

Yes I think so. Before going there, I have to address one simple but major problem on Althusser’s side: due to his intention of intervening into the communist movement, Althusser failed to overcome the idea of historical materialism as a science. According to his analysis, the science Marx produced consisted in the reconstruction of modern capitalist societies. It was not a general theory of history. Nor was it – as Balibar discovered very early – a general theory of socialist transition. This was a major point. If the issue of socialist transition exists on a different epistemological level than the general theory of capital, then the question of specific situations, constellations, and the critique of any unified model of socialist transition must gain in practical importance. In a way, these questions join with what we have already discussed; namely, the orientation to a specific situation was reinforced by the concrete form of Althusser’s intervention and not by adherence to the idea of historical materialism as a general theory.

I think Althusser was aware of this difficulty, which is partly why he formulated the very difficult metaphor that Marx opened the “continent of history.” This may be understood in the sense of a general theory. However, it could just as well be understood in the sense of a first point of contact that opens to further inquiries, different approaches and different modes, as the continent of history is explored. I tend to think that the latter reading is the more interesting interpretation of the metaphor.

And the latter reading of the metaphor seems to be more in line with the recent philological discoveries made possible by the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe…

Yes. In the transition from the Grundrisse, Marx was really elaborating the specificity of the capitalist mode of production. He was abandoning all kinds of general theories of history in favour of looking at specific constellations, even anticipating later discussions on the articulation of modes of production. Very specifically, he also addressed the complexity and multiplicity of the presuppositions of the breakthrough of primitive accumulation and the historical establishment of the capitalist mode of production.

But what of the epistemological breakthrough that Althusser sees in Marx? How does this argument relate to the recent publication of the German ideology manuscripts for the first time in full?

These are two questions. The first regards the epistemological break – the notion of the cut, which Althusser takes over from Bachelard – which is debatable as a concept. I think that it was important to even open these ideas to debate.  I refer to the idea that there is a profound difference between the philosophical and, to put it very harshly, ideological reflections of the Young Hegelians, the young Marx and the young Engels included, and Marx’s later breakthrough towards a scientific understanding of the capitalist mode of production. I think it is still very important to distinguish this and not to mix this up into a kind of “philosophising without criteria” which takes up bits and pieces of various writings of Marx to concoct a philosophy of one’s own. This does not help anybody; it blocks necessary debate and analysis. I think the idea that Marx – and I would add, very gradually – developed a new understanding of the problems of the critique of political economy and grappled with Ricardian ideas throughout his lifetime is essential. Equally essential is the idea that, despite employing simplifications of all kinds and possessing Hegelian preconceptions, Marx worked out of them in order to more clearly formulate his scientific argument. This is essential and should not be left out of any contemporary reading of Marx.

It is true: the breakthrough to which I just referred does not yet fully exist in the manuscripts of the German Ideology. The so-calledGerman Ideology was a planned periodical for which they collected materials, but which remained unrealised owing to their publisher’s fears. In it, Marx and Engels took the first steps towards their breakthrough. But they did not really achieve it. They progressed further in theGrundrisse and beyond although there was much movement back and forth as they sought a path towards solid scientific ground.

We can only understand what this means by looking backwards, from the breakthroughs that were made in Capital (or even those which should have been made there). This includes carefully rereadingCapital from the point of view of what the Third Volume wasmeant to be – not for what it is. This also entails reading the first and second volumes as a preparation for this final argument. We can only achieve a full understanding of Marx’s scientific breakthrough by reading the first volume as a kind of partial presentation of the entire theoretical articulation. This breakthrough created a new field of scientific inquiry – thecritique of political economy – which existed and developed further after Marx’s death. This means that we are not solely talking about Marx but also about Luxemburg, in some parts about Lenin and also people like Henryk Grossmann, Eugene Varga or Ernest Mandel.

Within Althusser’s own reading of the scientific breakthrough, above all represented by Capital, did his attitude towards the book shift after the first edition of Reading Capital and through the next decade,? How did his theoretical arguments develop?       

In Reading Capital, Althusser made a first attempt to philosophically articulate what is at stake inCapital. This is not often understood or taken seriously enough. Similarly, it is not well known that Althusser made further attempts towards this end. In his - I must say slightly ill-famed - edition of the French version of the first volume ofCapital he made that scandalous statement that a worker should start readingCapital from the second chapter leaving out the first chapter. This was of course revolting to all defenders of capital-logic. A further example of Althusser’s attentiveness to the philosophical significance ofCapital is his commentary on Gérard Duménil in which he proposes a very different reading to that favoured by the latter.

I think we have to stress that Althusser’s reading, with Balibar and others in ’65, was an initial attempt to open a field of debate by intervening into the emerging field of collective readings of Capital. Althusser did not see this as a closed system but saw the possibility of opening new perspectives and different approaches.

How do you periodise Althusser’s theoretical development in light of this?

As Goshgarian has shown, Althusser’s underlying theoretical orientation and philosophical approaches were not so deeply different. What was different was the way he tried to elaborate them and make them relevant to political intervention. We know that when he was writing his parts of Reading Capital or his pieces collected inFor Marx, he had already had a very complex idea of Marx’s theory, of what materialism is and what contradiction may be. This is visible in the margins at those texts. In the second part of his development, beginning in the mid-1970s, he made explicit what had been present in his earlier interventions, which were still interventions into “orthodox Marxism.” In his later interventions he tried to address this more radically and without the specific limiting prepositions.

It is also useful – as Goshgarian does it – to read the classical and better-known texts of his first phase in the light of what he tried to make explicit in the later texts. I think that the so-called late Althusser still continued this, although he restricted himself to a merely philosophical articulation. This was because he was cut off from all possibilities of co-operation or, more specifically, political intervention by his situation.

Let’s move to what it means to be a Marxist in philosophy.

This is one of Althusser’s great virtues. He threw into doubt the elementary questions that seem, at first, to be self-evident. By asking how to be a Marxist in philosophy, he put aside the idea that there already existed a Marxist philosophy. Of course, there are philosophical excursions in Marx’s work, although they aren’t very sustained and are very difficult to assemble into one whole. There are also philosophical elaborations by Engels – although Engels himself would not have characterised them as philosophical.

So, there is a problem there. Engels simply substituted the word Weltanschauung for philosophy and, in so doing, regarded it as more elementary. Everyone possesses and participates inWeltanschauung. However, philosophy is a specific way of dealing with these issues. For instance, you could argue – this is my view, not Engels’ – that theoretical works possess a different way of articulating and dealing with the problem ofWeltanschauung. I tend to think that Althusser’s term “ideology” (in the singular) is a good translation ofWeltanschauung and what this term had meant for Engels.

This is part of the problem. If you don’t think there exists something like a scientific worldview which does away with all philosophy and which is somehow the indirect offspring of a scientific discovery in the field of history, society and economy, then you have a problem. What does it mean to be a philosopher inside Marxism? It was important and pioneering of Althusser to have raised this question.

I distinguish between the way he raised these questions and the different answers he gave to them because he worked and re-worked this problem throughout his life. It was not easy for him. Although he gave some important and convincing partial answers, he never gave a conclusive answer. Indeed, I would add that there cannot be a concluding answer because the question has to be posed anew for each generation because (and here I am simplifying) each generation has to articulate what Marx’s theory and Marx’s revolutionary practice means for them in philosophical terms. This is a task that has to be addressed in specific historical conjunctures and is always undertaken provisionally.

You simply cannot conclude it.

We can’t even do away with serious research on this question because we are in a given situation – in the “conjuncture”, so to speak. You must react to it and you do so with the “moyens de bord,” as Balibar has called them, available to you. Namely, these consist of the intellectual tools already at your disposal in this very situation.

Althusser’s reliance on the French philosophy of science, which was a very specific brand, is a characteristic example of this. It has no equivalent in the German or the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It would be a mistake to assert that because Althusser made a productive use of this tradition proves that this is the one truth. It is no such thing. The French philosophy of science is one very interesting, albeit limited approach to the theory of science, epistemology, philosophy of science, or whatever you call it. It is certainly not the definitive one. It is a situated, conjunctural articulation of the problematic and is itself a philosophical effort.

This is what philosophy does. As philosophy, it never comes to an end. Hegel employed Penelope’s web as a very good metaphor for philosophy. Penelope, the wife of the absent Ulysses, weaved during the daytime and promised her suitors that she would marry one of them once she was finished. At night, she would undo the entire fabric and start it all over again the next morning. This is how philosophy proceeds. I think it is an apt metaphor; Hegel already saw that philosophy never comes to an end.

It never finishes what it began to weave. You could, if you look at the philosophers of the twentieth century, find a lot of examples of this.

Heidegger’s second volume of Being and Time was never written; Husserl wrote manuscripts elaborating his thought through the entirety of his life and never arrived at a definitive presentation of his philosophy. A similar thing could be said about Wittgenstein. The only ones who finish without descending into simple insignificance are people like Stalin, whose “philosophy” is entirely taken from others, or – ha! – manufactured for him by employees.

The recognition and articulation of this problem is also an example of Althusser’s intuitive depth, irrespective of the specific solutions he brought to bear.

So the philosophical moment within Marxism is nebulous, so to speak. In this sense Althusser’s philosophical probing runs counter to the “classics”. Franz Mehring is an example: he saw the birth of Marxian theory and its Weltanschauung as the end of the philosophical problematic. This seems to be a direct line to Engels.

Yes, but I would clarify Weltanschauung again: this term doesn’t solve the philosophical problem. It simply and vainly tries to do away with it. Philosophy is seen here as a mereHirngespinst, as something arbitrarily articulated by our brains without any correspondence in reality or in practice. Engels and Mehring really had no idea about what was happening in the philosophy of their own times. On the one hand, they saw academic neo-Kantian philosophy, which was both interesting and committed. Albert Lange, for instance, was a hard-headed socialist and a member of the First International. He was not aKatheder Socialist in the weak and pacifying sense. Others were also quite radical. Nevertheless, this tradition lacked something in comparison with classical German idealism, specifically, Kant. Engels was dimly aware of these academic philosophers. On the other hand, mainstream philosophy in Engels’ day defended so-called psychologism [Psychologismus]. The representatives of this idea were rather shallow. What Engels didn’t notice was that a process of radical philosophical renovation was simultaneously underway. Engels had no knowledge of these new developments, later most dramatically exemplified by American pragmatism.

He simply did not notice that philosophy was taking a new shape.

There is another example of this transformation of philosophy in the late 19^th century, albeit from another perspective. There were quite a number of early feminists who were fascinated by Nietzsche. This was not because they missed the explicitly male chauvinist theme in his philosophy, but because they saw that Nietzsche did not practice philosophy in the conventional sense. They saw – and I think this is similar to Engels’s and Mehring’s intuition aboutWeltanschauung – that the kind of systematic philosophy that Hegel represented was over, historically obsolete. New kinds of philosophy were emerging, but they weren’t regarded as a return to philosophy. Instead, Engels and Mehring saw the new kinds of philosophy as simply something else, as supplanting (traditional) philosophy. This was Engels’s and Mehring’s perspective. It was shared by the feminist readers of Nietzsche to whom I have referred. They were not fascinated by Nietzsche’s male chauvinism, but by the idea that it was possible to think on elementary and fundamental questions without retreating to the traditional model of modern systematic philosophy. They understood – along with an entire generation of intellectuals – that this traditional model had been defeated by the 1848 revolution. After all, all the Hegelians were part of the revolution: the moderate ones on the moderate side, the radical ones on the radical side. However, both camps took the side of the ’48 revolution.

The defeat of the ’48 revolution heralded the end of Hegelian hegemony in German universities.

Indeed, there is an interesting story about one of those Hegelians, Kuno Fischer. He was placed under a Berufsverbot in 1853: as a Privatdozent, he was forbidden to teach because of his Hegelianism. He was considered subversive – even though he later emerged as a very “tame” historian of philosophy.

This was the moment in which people like Nietzsche initiated a radically different approach to practicing philosophy. Marx and Engels, in a way, did this too. But they didn’t think of themselves as doing philosophy. In fact, neither did Nietzsche. It is an interesting point, however, that nowadays we don’t flinch when we talk about the philosophy of Nietzsche or the philosophy of Marx. I believe that we have to see this as a retrospective effect of the development of twentieth century philosophies. In the twentieth century, beginning with Husserl, new ways of practicing philosophy were developed. Well, you could say that these begun with Charles Sanders Peirce - but this was across the Atlantic.

On this side, the new practice of philosophy begun with Husserl, and later, by Heidegger, in parallel with the Vienna Circle and people like Moore and Russell in England. A number of new ways of doing philosophy sprung up which have, in fact, reinvigorated philosophy. What had seemed, in the age of positivism, to be over and done with assumed new shapes, without, however, reverting to the classical way of doing philosophy, still represented by Hegel. These philosophers created something quite different in the very fields of elementary refection and debate.

Back to Althusser, can we clarify how he thought the relation of these developments to Marxist theory?

He was quite clear on this question. A philosophy capable of articulating, understanding or interpreting Marx’s theory in contemporary terms has to rely on contemporary philosophy. So, there is no direct continuity there.

To take another example we can look at Lukács. I think in many ways he has been the starting point for modern Marxist philosophy. He clearly borrowed many ways of constructing philosophy from Simmel and others who had also began to renew philosophy. In my view, Simmel was not a very innovative philosopher. Still, although he descended from the line of psychologism, he tried to go beyond its limits. I should also mention Dilthey, who did not influence Lukács so directly, but who was also part of the renewal of academic German philosophy which took place from the ‘90s onwards, when academic philosophers began to read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. So, it was not only a matter of the process of creating new kinds of philosophy, but also of finding ways to integrate Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as alternatives to the classical approach to philosophising.

In the English-speaking world the dominant image of Althusser is of a thinker who prioritises substance over the subject, so to speak, one who disdained “praxis” as Marx had sketched out in the Theses on Feuerbach. How does Althusser understand praxis and the subject?

Well, Althusser’s materialism is certainly not about (Aristotelian) substance. His metaphor about philosophers who run to catch trains is relevant here. Materialists are those who enter the trains while they are running, then get off, when it is time for it, without respecting pre-ordained time-tables. The subject isn’t demolished in this concept of materialism. It is only put into its place/s.

In the Theses on Feuerbach (the real title is “1) ad Feuerbach”), Marx had not yet completed his breakthrough towards scientific research, as is indicated by his occasional notes. The title “Theses” was given by Engels in his additions. Apparently, although they were working together on publishing the periodical under the title of theGerman Ideology, Marx didn’t even show these notes to Engels. Engels found them in Marx’s papers after the latter’s death and then he edited them as part of his own settling accounts with Feuerbach. I think it should be clear that this is a text in which Marx was trying to find an orientation and not a text in which such an orientation has decisively been found. You can see this very simply by searching the text for the term class. It cannot be found; there is no mention of class, let alone class struggle. Another very simple point: the term Historical Materialism does not appear either.

What relationship do these so-called Theses on Feuerbach have to Marx’s reading of the Scottish thinkers and French materialists then?

Marx’s reading of the Scottish historical materialists and philosophers like Adam Ferguson who had taken a critical distance from all kinds of reductionist ‘mechanical-materialism’, may have inspired these notes. However, in them he was definitely distancing himself from Feuerbach and the French materialists. In the he criticised any kind of mechanical materialism, placing it on the same level as idealism. He even remarked that in some respects, idealism is superior because it at least has an inkling about the active side of thinking and activity. Accordingly, some people have read these so-called Theses not so much as founding a new kind of materialism, but as a dual critique of idealism and materialism, without however articulating a perspective on overcoming these poles.

 And Althusser’s response to this?

Althusser saw – I think correctly – that this was a transitional work.

Those who try to make these Theses into the first philosophical articulation of Marxism (as the late Engels had inclination to do, although I think he was of different minds about it) are simply not doing justice to the text. In the recent debates some have even argued that the text is not so much a critique of Feuerbach but an attempt, yes, to get a bit of distance from Feuerbach, while still seeing him as the highest and ultimate development of “philosophy”. I think this is linked to the question of the so-called Feuerbach chapter of the German Ideology, which Marx and Engels resolved to write only rather late. The process of preparing this chapter lingered on for about two years, in which they never actually started to write it. They produced some preparatory materials to write a chapter on Feuerbach. Most of it was taken out of what they – Marx especially – had written about Max Stirner. While they worked intensively on the critique of Stirner, the Feuerbach chapter remained at the preparatory stage. These materials are of course interesting. From them, e.g. one may learn a lot about the importance of Scottish materialism for Marx’s and Engels’s development. You can see moments where they take it up. However, it is certainly not elaborated into any kind of philosophical or theoretical coherence.

This gives credence to Althusser’s claim that there was no fully formed Marxist philosophy…

I think so, yes. There were, at various stages of Marx’s development (and less so in Engels, which is why I talk about Marx), efforts to find ways to philosophically articulate what he achieved politically and theoretically. But these were limited efforts and certainly were not an elaboration of his philosophy, which he promised to deliver, if only he could find the time… But he never sat down to deliver on this promise.

Lucky, he didn’t… Such a text would be monstrous in the hands of the dogmatists; and risk becoming the greatest dogma of the twentieth century.

Yes! It was good that his instinct forbade him from writing something that, as he saw it, would either block debate or produce a finished product quite inferior to his intentions. I think Marx was right to break his promise to formulate his dialectics.

Let’s move to another theme present in Marx’s notes “ad Feuerbach”, namely the notion of social relations. One of Althusser’s great achievements was to highlight the importance of this concept, against intersubjective thinkers and recognition theorists. What can be said of the link between these notes and Capital, from the standpoint of the critique of theoretical humanism, which the notion of social relations implies? I say theoretical humanism because you have been the president of the Humanistische Akademie Deutschland until last year!

This is complex. On the one hand I would stress that in elaborating a critique of political economy, what Marx was really doing was articulating capitalist class relations and their reproduction. Given this, even the general notion of social relations seems dubious. It is an abstraction. Do feudal relations, the relation of slave owner and slave or the relation between capitalist and wageworker have anything in common? This demands close scrutiny. An abstract idea of social relations is something I’d be very careful with.

And yet Marx’s breakthrough was that he realised that political economy was about class domination. In this sense the social relation of class domination is certainly central to his enterprise. His critique of political economy was meant to scientifically demonstrate – and this is interesting – that the science of political economy hides its foundations in class relations and class struggle. Although it is difficult to think about, this doesn’t detract from the scientific character of his inquiry. Marx was very explicit that there is no way to change the results of scientific inquiry for partisan reasons. And yet he was investigating a field which is constituted by the specific class struggles - not class struggle in general – but those between the capitalist class and the proletarian class, as they are constituted in the modern capitalist mode of production.

Okay so what about the formation of subjects – not the Subject – within Althusser’s work, in light of this?

The key issue here is the idea of the constitution of subjects within their class relations. Subjects do not exist before they are made into proletarians or capitalists. Rather, they are constituted as such, in and by the very class relations themselves. Here Althusser has found a way here of combining Marxism and psychoanalytic insights. In a way, this point can be generalised to the constitution of adult human subjects, who are constituted by interpellation. The question is: how does interpellation work? Althusser did not see this as an immediate class question. Proletarian subjects are not interpellated primarily as proletarian subjects. Of course the question then arises: where do these interpellations take place? Here, Althusser defended the idea that one’s immediate ideological interpellation takes place within ideological relations which are organised, in modern societies, by ideological state apparatuses.

Some people have objected to Althusser’s insistence that these were state apparatuses. The real question is what meaning he gave to this term. The definition of an ideological state apparatus does not demand that it is part of the bureaucratic organisation of government. The family is not part of the government, obviously. But it is still an organisation that institutionalises and reproduces domination. In this sense there are structures – apparatuses if you wish – which reproduce domination and which exist as a result of these processes, which, once established, reproduce themselves. This is a useful idea which prevents the dissolution of the concept into one of general social relations. In this sense, the notion of the state as the overall “machinery” of political domination is also applicable to the family. With regards to this, I would turn to Jacques Donzelot’s inquiry on the advent of the modern family[vi], which was organised politically to discipline male proletarians. So in this sense, the family in modern society is also part of the broader network of apparatuses which reproduce domination, and may be considered in this sense, state apparatuses.

Interesting. Okay so if we think about Lukács and Althusser – arguably the two most significant Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century – we have, on the one hand the problem of reification as the former understands it, influenced by Simmel and other neo-Kantians. Here the commodity is key. But then Althusser, in his writings on ISAs and reproduction, added another element to our view of the problem of the socialisation of individuals in bourgeois society.

There was a need to start from a different angle. Take for example the old infrastructure/superstructure debate. Yes, we have capitalist domination in the economic processes with exploitation and so forth, and we have political domination, as well as other ‘basic’ structures of domination, like some kind of ‘patriarchy’, international ‘dependency’ or ecological destructivity at the same time. And, still more blatantly, we have the lingering on of older modes of production under the domination of the capitalist mode of production in given concrete societies. This is how I’d explain Althusser’s turn. There is a problem when you just take capitalist exploitation and its forms as the “base”. You end up missing the real – or at least some of the real – determinants of the superstructure; of politics, of the ideological, and also the other elementary structures of domination like gender, international dependency and the relation of human beings to nature. These are not just epiphenomena of capitalist exploitation but are also determined by other elementary relations of domination. And in modern bourgeois civil society – or better, societies – these structures are co-present and, to employ an Althusserian term, “over-determine” each other. In this respect, you cannot say that one structure is more basic and elementary than the other; rather we ought to say, with the old Engels, that these different logics have a different weight.

Does this mean that capitalist exploitation is not always the most elementary and decisive element of domination, or do we have to inquire whether other structures of domination are the decisive element in certain situations, in certain ‘conjunctures’?

Yes, that is certainly true, but it is also very tricky because it depends on the particular problem you are treating. There are certain problems for which gender structures are immediately much more active and determinant than capitalist exploitation while there are others where capitalist exploitation is more immediately important. There are others still where international dependency or ecological aspects are of primary importance. I think this evokes the Althusserian argument that “the lonely hour of the last instance never comes”. In this sense, you can make a distinction between different primary relations which are plural and not reducible to just capitalism in a unitary sense.

This is the problem with Lukács’s approach. I think Lucien Goldmann also remained within this problem. At any rate, Lukács tried to approach philosophy, culture, politics, etc. from the angle of capitalist exploitation and its specific domination process only. This is insufficient. Althusser, in reacting to this problem, took a leap by regarding ideological subjection [assujettissement] as a reality of its own; as another field of reality and not just a superstructure of economic exploitation. I think this is the positive side of Althusser’s operation, which makes it possible to think that these processes of ideology reflect and process [verarbeiten] the different over-determining elementary forms of domination in concrete societies.

So in this sense I think Althusser’s move was productive because he overcame the element of class reductionism. You could also call it a reductionism to the process of capitalist exploitation. It is important to see the unavoidable overdetermination of real struggles which are very rarely fought over one kind of domination.

The other problem is Lukács’s assumption that the proletariat is a subject in-itself and through the process of consciousness it becomes a subject for-itself. Althusser’s class relationality – which we touched upon above – is of a very different kind that tries goes beyond the impasses of the Lukácsian subject.

The idea of class-consciousness, as it is present in Lukács, is undoubtedly fictitious. The notion of a “zugerechnet” (imputed) consciousness is central to History and Class Consciousness. There, we are talking about a fiction. The question is: is reality capable of realising this fiction? Lukács thought the answer was yes. But it was problematic, even in Lukács. The process by which the proletariat passes from a real and given consciousness to the fullness of imputed class consciousness, which has only existed as a fiction until now, is not articulated well enough in Lukács. And yet, he claimed to be able to measure the revolutionary consciousness of the proletarians with this fiction. That is what he claimed. But how to get from here to there? He had no idea. Well, admittedly, he had the idea that somehow class struggle produces this outcome.Somehow. That is, he doesn’t know how.

Let me interrupt you there. It seems we confront the ambiguities of interpretation regarding Marx’s notion of a political class subject. For instance, many Hegelian partisans of the passage from the in-itself to the for-itself – which you call a fiction – refer to the passage from the Poverty of Philosophy. Written in French, Marx’s actual phrase was ‘une classe vis-à-vis du capital, mais pas encore pour elle-même’ yet throughout the twentieth century this phrase was read in terms of the dialectic of the class in-itself and the class for-itself, even though Marx never used these terms. They are Hegelian concepts.

I would start from a different passage, namely the chapter on the struggle over the working-day in Capital. In this chapter Marx says – this has become a very important point for me – that ‘the workers have to put their heads together’ and somehow generate ideas about the way they are connected to each other and on the need for solidarity in facing common problems and building a capacity to act. However, this is all he says. The workers have to actively construct something like a common orientation. He is not talking about consciousness, he is talking about putting their heads together, i.e. about a real, material process of deliberation. This solution was not accidental; it was a much more realistic approach to the problem. Certainly, the proletarians will discover structural problems, structural orientations and common concerns. Insofar as they are objects of capitalist crisis, they may also discover the need for solidarity and organization. None of these are figments of the imagination. They are discoveries. This does not, however, refer to something pre-given or pre-ordained. You can clarify this by referring to the structure of the First International which tried to organize all kinds of workers’ organizations without possessing a clear idea of the party, the trade union, or other institutions. They were all present, insofar as they are political class organizations. Yet this ‘putting their heads together’, which was reflected in the forms of organisation of the First International, give us a much more realistic idea of what Marx thought about the real questions, as they have been articulated in the terminologies of consciousness or of ideology.

This perspective makes it possible to overcome a certain schematism which is present in Lukács and in Goldmann. We may ask, paradoxically quoting E.P. Thompson, about the real learning processes which lead to the constitution of the working class. From an Althusserian perspective, correctly understood, you can begin to understand what Thompson had been doing.

Elaborate on that! You know how scandalous such a statement is for those Anglophones reared on Thompson’s anti-Althusserianism! Thompson was chiefly responsible for creating a bulwark against old Louis.

I think it is only slightly paradoxical. Althusser’s intervention, focusing on ideological processes, is compatible with Thompson’s Marxian perspective. The objection would be that in Thompson, learning processes are still too psychological. So you have to transpose the analysis into an ideological process that is not psychological. I think an Althusserian perspective inspired by the Marxian approach reflected in Capital is capable of profitably reading Thompson’s historical studies. This said, the context of interpretation would change. Here we can takePeter Schöttler, who wrote a dissertation on La Bourse du Travail. This is an example of such a process in which the workers organised around immediate concerns – putting their heads together – and arrived at some kind of class organisation, with limitations but also with openings for class struggle.

Thompson’s concrete research exemplifies what an Althusserian perspective properly understood would bring about.

A genuine paradox… 

Schöttler’s work also shows that this is not a figment of my imagination!

To shift now, what is your positioning within the recent discussions of Capital?    

I have just read an interesting thesis by Stefano Breda, who argues – I think very convincingly – that you have to read Capital backwards. That is, beginning with its developed forms and their logic, you have to reread the first volume, noting its more elementary forms. In the 1970s we were trying to think about the next step, how to make use of the more developed forms of theoretical understanding as they are found inCapital as an the Ariadne’s thread for doing scientific research in other areas of building a materialist understanding of real historical processes.

First, with regards to the other forms of domination in modern societies it is important to underline that these are modern and not archaic forms that continue to subsist despite modernity. Today’s dominant patriarchal and gender structures are modern. They are not things (or rather, structures/relations) that survive unchanged; the same is true of international relations, maybe more evidently because international relations as such presuppose modern states, without which they wouldn’t make sense. This is also true of ecology. Of course, Stone Age hunters already drove mammoth to extinction. So yes, ecological damage caused by humans dates far back. Even in Australia, the first human inhabitants burnt native wood to the point of creating a new Australian ‘ecology.’ Humanity has modified environments since the early stages of the species. Nevertheless, there remains something fundamentally different about modern industry with its capacity to really transform the ecology of the planet. This is a destructive capacity that mammoth hunters and Aboriginal Australians did not possess.

This example makes clear two unavoidable elements of modernity: universalization and globalization.

Coming back to what I had started to say: in the 1970s, our project was to make the transition to the investigation of specific historical processes, especially those of the present, as well as of other fields of domination. Now I would propose that this transition to specific analysis or to that of other fields demands the construction of a theory of modern gender-ecological-international domination analogous to Marx’s theory of the capitalist domination of modern societies.

But there remains another very important step yet to be taken. With these theoretical tools it is necessary to analyze given conjunctures (as Althusser would say) in order to discover what is happening in the concrete society in which one lives and struggles.

The important point is that where political struggles are concerned, to know the general structures according to their “ideal average” is both instructive and totally insufficient. One has to analyze – Lenin and Althusser were correct in stressing this – the concrete ‘conjuncture’; the concrete situation within which you ‘find yourself’, in order to orient political action. This is itself a level of analysis. Modern societies all possess a body of people who try to figure what is happening in a particular country and in their own situation. For, they are concerned with describing how the family evolves, how families of new types arise, and which other factors must be concretely studied. These cannot be concretely studied in their own terms alone, but have to be understood within the specific interactions and concrete overdeterminations present in a given country. This demands a level of empirical analysis which should be urgently undertaken with reference to historical analysis, for example, to understand the tragedies of the 20th century. At least this is easier, because we now have more material and can verify which the better perspectives were and so on.

This is much more difficult to do for the present. I certainly don’t share Lenin’s optimism that scientific analysis will ever arrive at a concrete analysis of the concrete situation – simply because we don’t have sufficiently scientific and valid information about the present situation. Consequently, by way of scientific analysis alone, we never arrive at a valid conclusion upon which to act. We may only arrive there by a combination of scientific analysis and intelligent guesses – and this is best achieved not by isolated leaders presumed to be geniuses, but by a broad and self-critical process of deliberation mobilizing all available insights at hand (including, of course, the pertinent scientific findings). While these conclusions may well be very intelligent guesses, the fate of all guesswork is still risky. One may guess incorrectly, as Lenin did on certain occasions – and the collective process of deliberation may also lead to wrong conclusions which then have to be corrected.

The fact that Lenin guessed correctly on a number of occasions was impressive. And some historical organizations impress us by their capacity of guessing correctly. However, epistemologically speaking, we have to underline that these were guesses. Guesses are error prone even if they are prone to error in a different manner to scientific hypotheses. You can’t claim the same kind of scientific validity when judging the present situation in order to identify the starting point for a political proposal. There is still ample space for specific scientific analysis at this level of concrete analysis. This involves trying to understand what is happening in a country or group of countries, what factors underpin specific class struggles and what makes it possible to think about a revolutionary or a radical turn in politics. I would add that this capacity for analysis is not exclusive to radical politics. Indeed, it can exist alongside other competing analyses, including those produced by sociology, economics, history, political science, etc., all of which are highly ideological in that they try to formulate eternal laws of society and politics and so on. There has always existed specific fields of study: in America they call these “area studies” and in Germany it is unnamed, or in some cases referred to simply as ‘regional studies.’ Yet these approaches have existed in an institutionalized form wherever people try to find out and pin down what is actually happening in a specific country or in a group of countries. For example, in the United States or in Latin America, questions may be asked about the political, economic and social situations and their interactions. These kinds of studies, I would say, have been institutionalized and carried out by paid scientific workers since the end of the nineteenth century. These professionals are not just sociologists, economists or political scientists. Indeed, this is a messy affair. Some people, like Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons, propose to call it ‘mode 2 science’, as a field of studies which does not fulfil the rigid criteria of ‘mode 1 science’, but is still valid and needed, In any case, these area studies in the broad sense comprise an existing reality within which, I think, Marxist intervention will have to take place in order to generate context specific knowledge. Indeed, the more important question is how these areas and interventions may serve as guidelines for a truly radical and informed politics.

This is an important level that overly general theories do not really touch upon. General theories resemble constructed maps as they attempt to disentangle a fractured and chaotic reality. But they do not give us an analysis of the given situations in which we have to act. Although Lenin was wrong to say that you can actually make a complete analysis of the given situation – you can’t – the task of preparing an analysis and making an intelligent guess is a real one that has been institutionalized. The task is not an invention of epistemologists, looking for an object to analyze.

This is certainly the point where Marxist analysis becomes most political. If you manage to understand the inherent instability of the current conjuncture – or its stability, as the case may be – then you can orient radical political struggles. In this sense, Lenin was over-optimistic and effectively tried to close this type of debate with definite ‘scientific’ results. In addition to this, it is an urgent and quite real task to elaborate such intelligent guesses as I referred to before – this is something that must be worked upon today.

I’m not inventing anything new here. Most Marxist literature attempts something of the kind and tries to elucidate what is happening in specific situations. Yet many of these analyses possess the shortcoming of only or mainly focusing on economic analysis. To really grasp what is at hand you have to elucidate the economic, but also international dependency, gender and ecology. In this perspective, e.g. class reductionism is a powerful obstacle to the construction of real strategy.

So the concrete totality is more a methodological postulate rather than a finished and closed result that is achievable. This also points to a critique of the division of intellectual labour within capitalist society. There is a reality to the academic division of labour …

These ‘dirty’ types of intellectual labour that have existed in institutionalized forms all over the place, have always been more or less ‘hidden away’ in academia. I think you have to look at the different kinds of scientific systems in order to identify this. But the question of coming to grips with the task of finding realistic orientations for action in a given situation does exist. I think the critique of a false division of labour between the distinct ‘sciences’ of economics, philosophy, politics, sociology, on the one hand, and the ‘dirty’ area, of implementation or cultural studies, on the other, can and should be made among Marxist intellectuals. This is because we can confidently note that the other side, the enemy, is also undertaking specific research, which transcends disciplinary narrowness and becomes interdisciplinary. Their hands show traces of many disciplines.

It’s possible to argue two things: first, you have to undertake the specific analysis and secondly, you have to criticize false divisions of labour - between sociologists and economists, for instance. This opens a double attack upon institutionalized social, cultural or whatever other sciences.

Given that Marxist intellectuals working within the establishment constantly fight a kind of guerrilla war within its institutions, I am taken to think of the “crisis of Marxism”. What was Althusser’s response and what insights did he bring to the question? How do you see Marxist theoretical work going forward?

Althusser was pointing to a very elementary point that also implicates the Frankfurt School. Previously, Marxism had believed in the unity of critical theory and critical practice. The Frankfurt School somehow put this into brackets. After all, until Marcuse in the late 1940s, they never openly criticized Soviet Marxism and or even realized that there were other official or declared Marxisms. They didn’t even notice Trotskyism, or at least, they pretended not to notice it. Accordingly, the Frankfurt School avoided the problem and didn’t address it.

I tend to think Althusser’s declaration of this crisis was his most radical and important intervention into Marxist debates. Something was amiss with official Marxism since the middle of the 1920s and the rise of Stalinism. The Trotskyists failed to overcome this. They pinpointed a problem and started to have debates about how to overcome it, but they failed. That is my general reading, which doesn’t belittle them.

Althusser was, however, the first to say that this indicates a really basic problem. I would go as far as saying that in noticing this, he identified some shared basis between Stalinism and Engelsian Marxism: namely, a version of Marxism constructed in the late nineteenth century and which is in many ways distinct from Marx’s theory. This historical Marxism has been constituted as a political application and specific development of Marx’s theoretical achievements – and we should see that it was referring to a historical situation which has deeply changed since then: This comes out most simply by looking back at Stalin’s thesis of “the general crisis of capitalism”, which assumed that the capitalist mode of production had ceased to dominate historical development.

Althusser himself tried to overcome this problem by rethinking the role of ideology, which is the key in shaping politics. He went one step further in also defining Marx’s theory in light of the unfinished state of its elaboration.

Althusser only sometimes touched upon the problem to which I am referring. I think in a way it is possible to see that he was conscious of the fact that he only touches upon the problem, without elaborating it further, in his attempts - the varied and tentative character of which has often been neglected - to ‘philosophize’ Marx’s theory.

The most prominent such attempt was Reading Capital where Althusser tried to reconstruct Marx’s philosophy on the basis of the latter’s scientific breakthrough inCapital.

The second most important attempt to solve the problem of historical Marxism as a 19^th century and later Stalinist ideology is found in Althusser’s introduction to the Roy edition ofCapital. What he tried to do there was paradoxical and hasn’t been well understood. He did not go into the epistemology ofCapital but into its politics by almost fictionalizing the idea of a proletarian reader. To the disgust of most academic readers, he proposed that said proletarian begin with the second part ofCapital, skipping its theoretical beginning.

His advice was to return to the beginning only after having read the whole. This was scandalous to all those philosophically oriented, careful readers of Capital. I think that Althusser tried to devise a way of bringingCapital into the process of deliberation whereby proletarians were ‘putting their heads together’ and developing class consciousness. This advice was clumsy and quite brutal, but I think this is the way it should be understood. It is quite different from whatReading Capital proposes: in his edition ofCapital I, it is a different problematic that opens a perspective of deliberation, not the perspective of scientific discovery.

The third major intervention is his long preface to Duménil’s reconstruction of Marx’s theory. I have translated this and found it very interesting, because he takes up and discusses a perspective of reconstructing Marx’s theory, which is not his own. Duménil was in fact trying to reconfigure a completed and corrected version of Marx’s theory in Capital. Althusser reacted to this attempt with something which I find rather intriguing, given that it takes up a kind of constructivist perspective onCapital. I make a link here with my own earlier work, which was been carried out in the context of a German rationalist constructivism associated with Paul Lorenzen and his school. What I find problematic in Althusser is not his stress upon the constructive character of the concepts inCapital. I think this is important, elementary and should never be forgotten. Rather, he tends to argue that that construction means arbitrary construction. I don’t think this is true.

This relates to the sharp distinction, which I think Althusser overemphasizes, between research and presentation. The orders of research and presentation are, indeed, important distinctions to be made in Marx. I buy that. Yet, there is a kind of building of concepts which is part of the order of research and which bridges into the very construction of the theory. The concepts chosen are not merely arbitrary, but are conditioned and, to some degree, shaped by the findings of the on-going research process. Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ is indeed living on this basis. I think this link is was lost on Althusser. It could however be reintroduced.

The important thing is that he underlines the construction of concepts in Capital. While this is very important to understand the book – and this is a point made inReading Capital – the reader should also be aware of Marx’s remarks about the limits of the dialectical presentation. A constructivist conceptual presentation is itself limited; there are important points inCapital where the conceptual unfolding does not provide sufficient ground, or where it is simply not possible to take the next step ‘within theory’ alone.

Two simple examples illustrate the point. Firstly, that gold and silver are money is not something you can derive from the analysis of the commodity, nor, again, that labour power is capable of producing surplus value. These insights cannot be built or derived conceptually. There are other problems of a comparable nature which make it necessary for Marx to introduce historical analysis into Capital. So,Capital cannot be fully elaborated in abstract terms. Historical analysis does not just provide exemplifcation, but in fact grounds the conceptual structure ofCapital. I think this point provides a viable alternative to Althusser’s flirtation with arbitrariness inherent in conceptual construction.

What explains this “flirtation”?

This is an underlying thread stressed by Goshgarian. Since the 1960s, the idea of contingency has been central to his understanding of Marx. For a materialist this is a very important basic category. However, I would argue against Althusser on this very point: it entails an error of immediate application. Not everything is contingent. Some elementary things are indeed contingent. There is also always the possibility of contingent encounters. However, between these contingencies there are structured entities with tendencies and laws, which can be analyzed scientifically. This doesn’t detract from contingency. Rather, it means you cannot say that everything that happens is contingent. Doing so would simply destroy the possibility of scientific knowledge.

And the necessity itself for the concept itself for contingency… The Other of necessity…

I think Althusser is dimly aware of this point, but he glides towards the side of contingency.

This explodes the caricature of Althusser that you had his structuralist version in the 1960s – who only cared for structure – and then you have a flip in the 1980s towards contingency, the Other of his earlier errors.

Yes, as Goshgarian has shown, the concern with contingency was present in Althusser since the 1960s. On the other hand, I read the late Althusser as concentrating on certain philosophical aspects which were within his reach. While his attention shifted away from structures and laws and their development - part of the critique of political economy - I don’t read him as negating these analyses. For me it is a question of emphasis. Within philosophy, contingency was certainly more important. This may be observed in the metaphors he used: he speaks of the materialist philosopher who enters a train, not at the beginning, but en route. He also leaves it en route. Yet this doesn’t mean that the train doesn’t have tracks or timetables; rather, that it is not the task of the materialist philosopher to study the timetables, but the real movements of the train. Clearly, timetables are important - but the contingency of effective reality is also important, perhaps even more so.

What can be said about the relation of Althusser to his contemporaries?    

Two points occur to me. The first concerns Foucault. Foucault, at a certain point in his life, downplayed his encounter with Althusser. In my view, many insights for which Foucault is justly valued may be regarded as, in fact, Althusserian. There is far more continuity between Althusser and Foucault than Foucault himself was ready to admit. The plurality of determinations, for instance, is an idea already present in Althusser. This is a very general point, I admit; but there are more parallels. For example, the kind of historicity which is central to Foucault may be found in Althusser. Foucault’s notion of discourse wasn’t only taken over from Saussure and the structuralists, but also developed and was very much present in Althusser. You could also look at Michel Pêcheux who investigates the notion discourse from an Althusserian standpoint.

Secondly, I will mention Deleuze. Not to downplay the general importance of Derrida whom the late Althusser has been eager to refer to, but to bring out a specific point of analysis. I didn’t know Deleuze, but I knew Guattari through politics. I think that a commonality of concerns was shared between Deleuze and Althusser (and Guattari). This consisted in an attempt to identify the present nature of capitalist domination. In answering this, Althusser focused upon the ideological state apparatuses while Deleuze and Guattari on the ways of the subject-machines. Yet I think there are common problematics in the background: Their shared and real problematic was to identify the reproduction of subjectivities in completely capitalist dominated societies.

I think there is a lot of common ground between Ideology and the ideological state apparatuses andAnti-Oedipus, especially if you approach them through the perspective of making possible and orienting political practices of liberation.

[i]Peter Schöttler studied philosophy under Althusser.

[ii] This meant that the blockade on reading Althusser – emanating both from GDR Marxism as well as from the Frankfurt school - was far less effective in West Berlin than in other areas of the renewal of Marxism in the Western parts of Germany: The “Projekt Klassenanalyse” even made an important effort at “reading Althusser” (cf.  PKA, Althusser, VSA: Westberlin 1975, as well as the respective debate in the French journal “dialectiques”, No. 15/16, 1976).

[iii] A very special development in the Institute of Psychology – which split in two during this process – led to an autonomous attempt at formulating a critical, Marxist psychology (more or less around Klaus Holzkamp) – avoiding any real encounters with psychoanalysis - which has given rise to a Marxist inspired theory of subjectivity (cf. Morus Markard Einführung in die Kritische Psychologie: Grundlagen, Methoden und Problemfelder marxistischer Subjektwissenschaft, Argument: Hamburg 2009).

[iv]See their contextualization in the comprehensive works by Ingo Elbe, Marx im Westen. Die neue Marxlektüre in der Bundesrepublik, [Marx in the West: The new reading of Marx in the Federal Republic] Berlin: Akademie 2008; Jan Hoff,Marx global. Zur Entwickung des internationalen Marx-Diskurses seit 1965 [Marx Global: Concerning the evolution of the international discourse on Marx since 1965], Berlin: Akademie 2009; also relevant: Michael Heinrich,Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition. Überarbeitete und erweiterte Neuauflage [The Science of Value.  The Marxian critique of political economy between scientific revolution and classical tradition. Revised and enlarged edition], Münster: Dampfboot 2003; as well as Jan Hoff et al.,Das Kapitalneu lesen [ReadingCapital anew], Münster: Dampfboot 2006.

[v] Neurath was a leader of the Vienna Circle.

[vi] Donzelot, The Policing of Families (1997).

Image derived from http://www.friederottowolf.de/

by Mike Hill and Warren Montag

In ‘The Old Adam, After All: A Review of The Other Adam Smith by Mike Hill and Warren Montag’ https://brill.com/abstract/journals/hima/26/3/article-p243_12.xml,Christian Thorne is perplexed, even offended, that we would call our book The Other Adam Smith. For him, the other Adam Smith already exists: it is the humanist reaction to the ‘old’ Adam Smith of Greenspan, Friedman, Hayek and Von Mises, the heartless exponent of ‘laissez-faire.’ The new reading inverts the old: Smith becomes a thinker of sympathy and sensibility who values moral sentiments over self-interest (which presumes that self-interest, once known as greed, is not a moral sentiment) and who, even in theWealth of Nations, refuses to reduce society to the sum of the interactions between rational actors. More importantly, he advocates not simply high but ever-increasing wages for labourers and regards their poverty as a sign of economic weakness (as illustrated by his portraits of China and India). In sum, the scholarship of the past forty years shown that Smith, unlike his undeserving and, more importantly, illegitimate, heirs, was a man of sympathy and understanding who was acutely aware of the human costs of the free market. While Thorne identifies with the new, good, Smith, his insistence that Smith does not, and does not have to, depart from his commitment to market rationality to address problems such as famine caused by market failure, suggests that he shares more with the old view of Smith than he realises. In general, it is far easier to discern the many philosophical and theoretical orientations that Thorne rejects than those – within the last century, at least – to which he grants some validity.

Thorne, who describes The Other Adam Smith as ‘aswarm with detail’ that he has trouble following, nevertheless claims that we have constructed our Smith through a series of mutually exclusive and simplistic interpretations: good Smith, bad Smith, Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, and perhaps most bizarrely, the Scottish Enlightenment against ‘Spinozism.’ There is very little direct quotation from our book in his review – we hardly discuss Spinoza except in the shortest of the book’s five chapters – and he supplies even less textual evidence to support the existence of the modern liberal Adam Smith he wishes we had endorsed. For us, the term ‘other’ means (a) a Smith based on his totalcorpus, much of which has yet to be integrated into the prevailing picture of his philosophy; and (b) a Smith whose complexity cannot be reduced to the opposition between the old and the new. An indispensable part of our approach is precisely the identification of what previous readings must exclude to say what they want to say. If Thorne wishes to promote a social-democratic, or perhaps ordo-liberal Adam Smith, he must do by accounting for what Smith does and does not say, not by attributing to him ideas that are missing from his actual texts.

The lengthy introduction to our book outlines the plurality of Enlightenments (and the many Adam Smiths) that existed in his time and ours (see, for example, our account of the famous ‘Adam Smith Problem.’) It is for this reason that we included many other Enlightenment figures who cannot be reduced to an ally of either the good Smith Thorne likes, or the bad one he says we offer. Our book may be ‘aswarm with detail,’ but the swarm is where we find the most enigmatic and interesting aspects of the Enlightenment. This is not because we were engaged in a covert operation to apply some sort of French swarm-theory that we refused to name – those damned French, as Smith's cohort might say – but because Smith and the wide range of figures we discuss have a peculiar relationship to collectivity that is neither a mirror of economic individualism nor an organic whole. To say, as Thorne bizarrely does at the end of his review, that we rule out resistance of any kind, is at odds with both the historical reality of the eighteenth century and what we actually say in the book. How many partisans of the new Smith discuss the phenomenon of hunger riots in the eighteenth century or workers’ struggles against wage reductions?

For us, if we are permitted to cite French philosophy, the problem with what Foucault called the ‘simplistic and authoritarian alternative’ of being for or against the Enlightenment is that it requires a normative reading of the relevant texts. Such a reading tells us not what they actually say, but only whether they adhere to a set of prescribed values, just as official Communism once demanded that literary and philosophical texts be determined to be either reactionary or progressive. Thorne repeatedly expresses a particular animus toward Spinoza and, in a moment perhaps of over-exuberance, refers to the concept, taken by Spinoza from Roman historians and used widely in Eighteenth-century texts in English and French, of the multitude, as ‘a neo-vitalist philosopheme’ we have projected back into the late eighteenth century. Is it then an anachronism to speak about Spinoza even though he was a central point of contention in European thought throughout the eighteenth century and the prime mover of what Jonathan Israel has called the radical Enlightenment?

Thorne evokes contemporary French and Italian philosophy (for which Spinoza perhaps serves as a stand-in) in the way that other critics have evoked Marx in their critiques of The Other Adam Smith: as our hidden agenda. The mere mention of Marx for right-wing Smith scholars, and for many liberal readers of Smith, is sufficient to relieve them of the burden of reading our book and having to confront a level of historical detail that simply tries their patience. Thorne’s assertion of the influence of Foucault, let alone Agamben, on the book signals to readers why we have been so ‘unfair’ to Smith. He prefers to ferret out a few traces of contemporary continental thought rather than discuss the Enlightenment figures we analyse at great length. Spencer Pack, one of the proponents of the New Smith, complained that we were ‘uncharitable’ to Smith, as if it were necessary for Smith, like the beggar he describes in theTheory of Moral Sentiments, to ‘extort’ a theoretical alms from the reader. But Thorne’s review clarifies Pack’s complaint: our sin is to have taken Smith at his word, to refuse in as systematic a way as possible to bend or twist the actual words, sentences and texts into a false coherence or into the shape of something they are not and make them say more and other than what they do say. In this, we have followed not simply Spinoza’s protocol of reading as articulated in chapter seven of the TTP, but EP Thompson’s as well. It was Thompson (who cannot be suspected of any sympathy for French philosophy), in ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,’ who pointed out that the absence of any proposal for famine relief in a discussion of dearth and famine is the logical consequence of Smith’s insistence ‘that a famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconveniences of a dearth.’ To provide Smith’s text with what it lacks rather than explain the necessity of this lack is to distort its literal meaning and to impose on it meanings that not to be found within it.

Thorne grudgingly grants our chapter on (among other things) Smith's ‘Astronomy Essay,’ and what Thorne (a little misleadingly) calls Smith's ‘aesthetics’ a certain degree of validity. He concedes that there may be some good lessons there (for example, on wonder), and then proceeds to ignore them. The full phrase concerning wonder is Smith’s own: ‘the pleasing wonder of ignorance.’ We offer two ways to read this line, and admit that there may be others, but deriving from this line the idea that wonder is a ‘menace’ or that it ‘can easily kill us’ or ‘drive us mad,’ as Thorne does, is not one of them. Ignorance can be pleasurable insofar as it prompts us on to error correction, or it can be pleasurable because it allows us to remain in a state of ignorance without having to undertake the work of knowledge. In either case, for Smith, it is the ‘surprise’ that constitutes the ‘threat’ Thorne finds intriguing. The ‘wonder’ does the kind of philosophical bridging that ends up with ‘admiration.’ There emerges a three-part sequence, the end of which is to produce a sense of stability that both narrows and extends the way knowledge is produced. We called this narrowing and extending by its modern name of writing within the disciplines, and wanted to provide a history of disciplinary division that would also reveal how reading makes things absent. We did not provide an account of Smithian ‘aesthetics,’ because (to his credit) he did not obey the law of disciplines (which were then still in formation). When Thorne says ‘and yet’ there is some value in The Other Adam Smith, and when he applauds our ‘reading much else’ in addition to Smith's available work, he evokes the conundrum of interpretation that we wanted to elucidate by examining Smith’s account of the formation of disciplines, and his method of interpretation. This conundrum is the result of the interruption of habitual ideas, and the challenge the acquisition of knowledge poses to an orthodoxy that must recover from the shock of the unexpected. In both instances, a new ‘tallying of numbers’ should push us beyond the too simple divisions between old and new, good and bad. We do not ask readers to choose between ‘system or anti-system,’ as Thorne insists; such an alternative only masks the alternatives within the notion of system itself, the antagonistic versions of system that populated eighteenth-century philosophy, existing as much within as between philosophers and their oeuvres. There are no ‘Scottish Enlighteners … subjected to A-B coding’ inThe Other Adam Smith, as is alleged.

The definitive opposition of the old and new Smiths which, for Thorne, is unsurpassable, cannot make intelligible the irreducible contradictions and discontinuities within his texts: on the contrary, each side claims to present the real Smith, that is, a set of logically consistent postulates with which the texts must be reconciled. Some intractable passages, like the account of the invisible hand in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that has required what Spinoza called an act of textual extortion to be made compatible with the new Smith, must be shown to mean the opposite of what they say. Most, however, are simply overlooked and over time become invisible and unreadable. An interesting case in point involves chapter one of part I, ‘Of Sympathy.’ According to Google Scholar, approximately 40,000 books and articles in which this very brief chapter is discussed have appeared since 2000. Further, a cursory reading of a random sample taken from this number suggests that Smith’s opening sentence on sympathy is frequently cited in whole or in part: ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’ It is then all the more striking to note that the statement qualifying the notion of sympathy five sentences later has received little critical attention despite the fact that it cries out for interpretation: ‘Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.’ This strange sentence raises or should raise many questions. Why brother? Why a rack? How can we know that we do not know from sense experience what our brother suffers? This sentence, in contrast to that quoted above, is cited approximately 200 times and thus enters the discussion of sympathy in approximately 0.5 % of the scholarly publications of same period. Smith’s work is in fact filled with remarkable passages that remain un- or under-interrogated, while the same few passages continue to occupy the attention of commentators, distorting and simplifying the real complexity ofThe Theory of Moral Sentiments and theWealth of Nations.

Thorne himself, clearly bothered by our acknowledgement of Smith’s silence on the issue of what would today be called the endogenous failure of the grain market, failure that cannot be attributed to external government interference, attempts to paper over the gap in the text, by insisting that Smith’s unstated solution was or should have been a market solution. In fact, Smith has no practical solution, but instead uses theory to explain away famine as mere appearance, an illusion arising from fear and ignorance: the unerring immanent rationality of the market means that famine cannot be the result of the market’s autonomous and self-regulating operation. Dearth, a situation in which many people are weakened by hunger but where mortality rates have not risen significantly, becomes famine only when the state attempts through various means to increase the availability of food to the affected populations. This does not mean that Smith denied the economy’s moral mission: after all, if one wants to feed the hungry there is no more efficient means of distributing food to those who need it than the unregulated market (that is, there is no alternative). Thorne seems to think that this moral meaning separates Smith from the amoral, if not immoral, sentiments of those responsible for constructing the bad old Adam Smith. But this is not the case: Von Mises and Hayek repeatedly argued in their many and highly repetitive works that socialism (which they defined differently in response to the specific enemy they faced: pre-war social democracy, the post-war socialism of Red Vienna, or Bolshevism after the Russian revolution) was not simply wrong but could not work. They argued that capitalism, in the form of the private property of the means of production and the unfettered market, was the best of all possible economic worlds in moral terms: the market would supply the needs of the poor far more efficiently than any form of charity (not to mention the government handouts mass movements ‘extorted’ from cowardly leaders). More importantly, there was no alternative to the unhampered market but ruin, devastation and famine.

For Smith and his French predecessors, certain phenomena vulgarly understood as evils (Smith’s ‘inconveniencies’) had to be permitted, insofar as they played in an essential role in the system that would insure the best outcome in the production and distribution of necessities. To use the language of Leibniz’s Theodicy, they were evils required for the emergence of a perfection greater than what it would be without them. Those who, out of fear and ignorance (Smith) or envy (Von Mises and Hayek), would try to banish these evils before they have done their work could only make things worse precisely for those in need. It is this concern that led Von Mises to devote a section ofHuman Action to a refutation of Anton Menger’sThe Right to Whole Labor of Man, particularly Menger’s argument that there must be a legal and enforceable right to existence for civil and political rights to possess any other than a symbolic meaning. Such a right, to Von Mises, could only lead to an infringement of the immutable laws that make the market the providential design it is, disrupting its hidden order and inhibiting, if not destroying, its efficiency. He was horrified that states would allow ‘the mass’ emboldened by its numbers to demand that the state prevent their starvation by seizing the food that belongs to the merchant, by artificially undercutting market prices through subsidies, or by compelling merchants to sell at a rate below the market price. This what we might call the messianic supplement to what is typically the providential conception of market equilibrium: the appearance of disorder and dysfunction are in fact signs of the prosperity to come and whose coming (which cannot be hastened) is delayed by any attempt to circumvent the natural laws of the market. Let us recall that Smith argued that the mobs that plundered the storehouses of grain merchants seeking to relieve their hunger and malnutrition were not simply wrong for violating the property rights of the rightful owners of the grain. More importantly, their failure to observe the immutable laws of the market expressed their inability to identify and act upon their own self-interest, unlike even the most ignorant of the grain merchants.

Smith’s silence on famine relief is thus not simply the silence of an unstated assumption but is determined by two fundamental and entirely fictitious guarantees that allow him to dismiss the problem of starvation in those places, like France and England, in which only government interference could bring about mass hunger or famine. The first is his theory of the determination of wages. Wages rise and fall according to the law of supply and demand: is it not possible that they could fall so low that the labourer could no longer purchase what is necessary to his continued existence? Smith’s answer is no; wages can never fall below the level of what is necessary to secure the subsistence of the labourer, which forms an absolute floor of wages. Smith’s argument, vague and evasive as it is, is neither historical nor based on empirical evidence. It represents a providentialism that would today be called functionalist: for the market to deprive itself of the labour on which it thrives would amount to its self-destruction and it always acts to promote its own growth. The corollary of this argument is that for laborers to impose through the violence that commands Smith’s attention a rise in wages beyond the market price of labour would be to undermine the profit-driven expansion of the economy that will alone insure an ever-rising wage.

Smith’s second fictitious guarantee, articulated against the background of food riots, concerns the notoriously unstable price of food. If permitted to rise, prices preserve and increase the food supply: they are the most effective form of rationing. The ‘inconvenience’ of dearth is thus necessary to insure an adequate supply of food. His argument that famine is simply not possible under the regime of the unregulated market serves to deprive the food riots not only of any legitimacy, but even of rationality. The mob’s failure to understand the intricate workings of the market leads it to plunder storehouses or simply to impose price reductions by force, just as a century earlier mobs demanded the execution of witches. A market solution to the market crisis had been tried with disastrous results in pre-Revolutionary France (as Smith knew from Turgot). The idea that the market knows best how to ration food and does so through rising prices which must be allowed to rise as high as they need to go entailed considerable risk for the people and they knew it. Few accepted the assurance that constant hunger and growing weakness were not really signs of incipient famine, but a temporary shortage that the action of the market left to its own devices would address. They knew from experience that it might take a week, a month or more for supply to respond to demand and that the notion that people could survive through judicious rationing of what the market permitted them to buy was a myth. As Turgot, on the basis of his own observations, cautioned Hume: it is an absurdity to think that a day’s supply of food allotted by the market to a family of five can be stretched to feed six or more for more than a few days.

            It should be clear that denying the possibility of famine and defending the rational necessity of a rise in prices, no matter what the effect of that rise on significant part of the population, cannot be understood as a proposal for famine relief. The fact that Smith chose a rhetorical strategy different from that of the physiocrat Roubaud who explicitly demanded the immunisation of grain merchants and the protection of their lawful property in the face of the deadly hunger he had the honesty to admit was very real, does not change the fact that their positions were nearly identical in practice. Moreover, our discussion of the ‘unfortunate man’ who is abandoned by law and allowed to starve is not a reference to Agamben. It is a direct citation from Roubaud writing two centuries before Agamben. The new Adam Smith acknowledges the limits of the market, perhaps even the possibility of its failure. Here it is Thorne, not us, who has adopted the position of ‘the old Adam.’

Moreover, for Thorne, as well as for liberal historians such as Emma Rothschild, the conflict that defined the eighteenth century was that between the aristocratic defenders of feudal privileges, labour guilds and the wage and price controls imposed by an absolutist state, and a freedom loving bourgeoisie whose drive for the free movement of labour, wages and prices enlisted the support of the toiling classes. We should note, however, that this same historical moment was described in very different terms by Marx: for him it was the world of primitive accumulation in which tenants and laborers were indeed set free, but from their ties to the land (and thus subsistence). They were what Marx calls Vogelfrei, a medieval German penalty that placed the offender outside the protection of law, like a bird set free without protection or care to be devoured by whatever predator it encountered. The experience of the French revolution showed that the rural and urban masses rejected the freedoms demanded by the partisans of market rationality at least as much as the restrictions imposed by the old order: allowing the market to increase prices as much and for as long as it took for an adjustment of the ratio of supply to demand had been tried and proved in practice to be the road to hunger and destitution. In the eighteenth century, it was the people, ‘le petit peuple,’ who were the agents of anti-market price controls and grain distribution; the state acted, if and when it did, out of fear of their revolt. It was they who subordinated the property rights necessary to the market to the more elemental right to subsistence, as the draft constitution of 1793 showed. It offered a version of the enforceable right to subsistence that Von Mises would denounce as ruinous to the operation of the market:Les secours publics sont une dette sacrée. La société doit la subsistance aux citoyens malheureux, soit en leur procurant du travail, soit en assurant les moyens d'exister à ceux qui sont hors d'état de travailler (Article 21).

This is what is recognised in neither the old nor the new Smiths. Throughout his works, there appears at critical points another dynamic, irreducible to the opposition between the absolutist state and its feudal allies and an emergent bourgeois order, each with the values and norms proper to it: the dynamic set into motion by the independent mass struggles of rural and urban laborers. Surely it is obvious that their protests aimed to impose limits on increases in the price of food and other necessities, and not to free the market from its feudal or mercantilist chains to allow prices to rise as they will. Just as obviously, for Smith, these revolts were driven by fear and ignorance, that is, superstition, and remained a permanent threat to market rationality. Further, he described the resistance that exists even at the level of the individual labourer: the first chapter of the Wealth of Nations outlines the dystopian level of surveillance and control over the body of the worker made possible by new forms of production that assemble ever greater number of labourers into a single space and that through the management of time and motion restrict the worker’s physical actions to a degree never before seen. Here, Smith shows the way that resistance precedes and provokes the forms of subjection necessary to the free market. The fact that he conceives this resistance only negatively as an object of fear, does nothing to change the fact that he granted a place to themobile vulgus (or mob) on the stage of history. This is a point of convergence between Smith and Spinoza: both recognized and feared, if to different degrees, the power of the masses or multitude to preserve or destroy political and economic systems.

Smith allows us to see in the fear he expresses the power of what E.P. Thompson in his work on eighteenth-century food riots describes in rich detail: the knowledge and intelligence that accompanied the physical power of the labouring masses. In a different register, Hume identified the threat as ‘the many latent claims … of popular principles.’ We emphasise the word ‘many’ to point out that such ‘popular principles’ were neither unified nor without paradox and contradiction. This is why otherness as such is so hard to identify. For partisans of the old and new Smith alike, including Thorne, the depictions of resistance and revolt against the unhampered market in food or the physical demands of the division of labour as Smith imagines it, the ‘shocking violence’ of workers whose wages have been adjusted to market levels, placing an adequate supply of food beyond their reach, are invisible or, if noticed at all, declared the epiphenomena of Smith’s theory. For us, these movements, or the argument he carries on with them, are at the centre of Smith’s corpus, a centre that continues to be absent only to who refuse to see it.

Image derived from "AdamSmith" bybrochariot is licensed underCC BY 2.0 

As the Sudanese uprising enters its most critical conjuncture, with negotiations between the military council and the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom and Change collapsing, and the latter announcing a country-wide strike, Elia El Khazen interviews three Sudanese comrades in order to better situate the Sudanese uprising and understand future prospects. Originally posted in Al-Manshourhere.

Elia El Khazen is an active member of the Lebanon-based revolutionary socialist organization The Socialist Forum and an editorial member of its publication Al-Manshour. His writing has appeared in the organization’s publication, Jacobin Magazine and Salvage Quarterly.

Photos by Zaher Omareen.

Mohammed Elnaiem is the minister of Foreign and Domestic Affairs in 400+1, a black liberation organization based in the United States. He is also a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, where he studies the relationship between capitalism, slavery, and patriarchy.

Sara Abbas is a doctoral candidate in political science and a feminist who researches social movements in Sudan. She has written for Transition magazine, OpenDemocracy, and The Nation. The views expressed are her own and do not represent those of institutions she is affiliated with.

Raga Makawi is a Sudanese comrade who works for Zed Books and is based in London.

Elia El Khazen (EEK): Can you walk us through how the protests first started and what ignited them with a brief contextualization of the relevant socio-economic and political factors that might have driven them?

Mohammed Elnaiem (ME): The protests started in the peripheral city of Atbara on December 19th, and it was school students (middle, and high school students) who spearheaded the revolt. The story that is told often is that it only took one angry child who couldn’t afford a falafel sandwich --a staple food for students after they finish school -- to start a revolution. When the other students who shared his discontent joined him and marched towards the headquarters of the National Congress Party, Omar al-Bashir, the dictator of thirty years, had his fate sealed. This story, of course, can’t be confirmed, but the burned down headquarters of the NCP is a testament to the anger caused by hunger. Police were apparently beaten up, and when the Rapid Support Forces were dispatched to the city, lower-ranked soldiers (including one Colonel) eventually drove them off. Whether the story about the child is true or not isn’t important, for even as an allegory it is instructive. The people rose up because of the price of bread -- that was the initial trigger. Upon the recommendations of the IMF, the Sudanese government cut bread subsidies and was facing a foreign exchange crisis. ATM machines were empty, and the peripheries were facing the threat of famine. Sudan is a country which in some years has to spend 88% of the GDP on intelligence, and which has only descended further since the secession of the South, which the government is also to blame for.  The protests which started in Atbara quickly spread to dozens of cities, including the capital.

But as the bible tells us (wo)man does not live on bread alone. For the 30 years that Omar al-Bashir has been a dictator, not a day has passed where there wasn’t a form of resistance in the streets. Without a rich, underground political culture, able to nurture under such circumstances, it isn’t easy to conclude that anybody would have been able to seize the moment. The materialization of this political culture was the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) -- a network of banned unions --  taking the helm of the protests. That was the beginning of the end for the regime.

Sara Abbas (SA): I believe now that it was the town of Ad-Damazein that started the wave of protests, not on Dec. 19th. but on Dec. 13th. Ad-Damazin is the capital of Blue Nile State, an area that has suffered from war and poverty. But we know little about the circumstances of the protests there. Then on Dec.19th. Atbara started to protest, and so on. We have a problem in Sudan that those of us getting our news mainly from the capital often miss out on the details of acts of resistance from regions far away from the capital. This is in a way a reproduction within our own movements of the way the country is ruled- from Khartoum. We need to challenge this in our own movements, not reproduce it.

ME: Thank you so much for this correction Sara, I was unaware of this.

Raga Makawi (RM): The history of resistance in Sudan is accumulative, this makes me generally skeptical of the idea that a sweeping rupture of unfolding (small but connected) events could be traced to a city, a day, or a single act of resistance no matter how radical i.e setting something or someone ablaze. Still, every revolution needs a narrative and a conceptual framework to allow its deployment as an ideological tool whose rhetoric is meant to further fuel the resistance and rally up the popular masses. In this instance where could possibly be better than Atbara, the once upon a time center of Sudanese postcolonial revolutionary nationalism. I do agree with Sara regarding the risks of reproducing antique national narratives of a Sudan that have since changed drastically, these run parallel to attempts at mapping revolutionary developments in chronological order, with a single or unified demand, glossing over the many overlapping and intersecting variables.

The socio-political and economic realities that drive the ‘revolution’s’ agenda are much more intertwined and complex than the once-popular demand of ousting al- Bashir. With the 3 main objectives and subsequent demands of the Declaration of Freedom and Change (DFC) unfolding, the incohesive and inconclusive prospect of the negotiations, especially over what constitutes a priority for the subaltern many is overlooked, hardly a surprise if one examines with objectivity the class and ideological similarities between the liberal democracy leftist camp and its right-wing Islamist counterpart.

EEK: Where are the protests initiated and where are they coalescing, were they originally rural and provincial around areas Darfur or more central around areas like Khartoum? And what are the most relevant demands, chants, and revendications?

ME: Whereas the revolution started in an urban context --  in the city of Atbara, once a communist and trade union stronghold -- it would also be accurate to say that these protests began in the peripheries before reaching the capital. Protests also hit rural areas, insofar as they were towns that didn’t have populations scattered across vast spaces. But even in the peripheries, the protests were mainly centered in the cities, except for those organized by armed resistance groups (SPLM, SLA, etc.), which tended to be in rural strongholds.

That makes these protests unprecedented. The last wave of protests in 2012/13 was mainly focused on the capital, this time however a rural/urban divide was overcome.

In Sudan, urban resistance movements tend to be led by middle-class professionals/intellectuals -- although we can also say that these themselves tend to be living close to poverty, and/or are often unemployed. This is a middle class, that either graduated from college to find no job or remembers a time when they didn’t lead a precarious existence. Quite simply, it is culturally but not materially middle class. The Sudanese Professionals Association in fact, prior to organizing these protests, came into the public eye with a massive study on the minimum wage of Sudanese “professionals” (teachers, lawyers, doctors,) finding them all below the poverty line, in some cases making less than $50 a month. Withstanding all of this, however, I do not want to make the mistake of calling this a middle-class revolt that is being waged in the interests of the middle class. 

Those who take the most risks, just based on what I’ve seen on the ground, and those that run head-on towards tear gas canisters, chanting “I need my fix, bring on the tear gas.” These people tend to be misfits, the working class, the starving artists, the rastas with the dreadlocks, the countercultural youth. That’s the urban context.

When it comes to rural resistance movements, things tend to get a bit messy. The first reason is, of course, related to their very existence; a rural/central divide -- especially economic -- has categorized Sudan since independence and has as result spurred the existence of armed struggles. To those in the cities, the struggles of rural peoples tend to be distant, perhaps even abstract. There are many reasons for this, uneven development is one, but of course, racism that promotes the idea that some lives are more important than others is as widely practiced in Khartoum as it is denied. With no space upon which to use the means of resistance in the arsenal of activists in the cities, most activists in the peripheries, particularly in the peripheral towns and cities find themselves having no choice but to take up arms. It’s the only way that they will be heard. This is what happened in the Nuba mountains, and it’s what happened in Darfur. So the timeline itself for this revolution would be different whether you ask someone from SPLM or an urban professional in Khartoum.

What made this revolution work is how the two were able to coordinate. The alliance of the dispossessed middle-class revolt, with the working class and the misfits, put pressure on the National Intelligence Security Services (NISS) in the central cities, while the rural movements put down their arms and marched in the peripheries, taking the lead of students in those towns and cities who had for long preached that there was a non-violent solution to the Darfur question, just to take an example. With the armed movements choosing non-violence, and the central movements maintaining the momentum, the opposition began to unite just about the time when the government was starting to fall apart. The government couldn’t call the protesters terrorists, and as a result, couldn’t scare the middle-class. The government was also not able to divide the population through racism either.

One key moment was when the government, using old tactics, likely tortured and brought Darfuri students on TV to claim that Israel was funding the armed movements to divide the country through this revolution. In response, protesters in Khartoum chanted “You are racist and sly, We are all Darfur”.

SA: The most relevant demand in the first months of the protests was “tasgot bes” (fall, that’s all”. It was the bottom line that unified all the different components of the revolution including those in the diaspora as well as the majority of those that didn’t go out on the street but support the uprising. I found the slogan powerful yet ambiguous. Was it addressed to al-Bashir? Certainly. But as the revolution deepened, it became clear that it’s addressed to the regime, not just him. And later I realized that it goes even deeper- it’s addressed to the military state, which has ruled Sudan for all but 11 years since independence. It has not only ruled by physical violence, but also through structural violence- getting people, especially those in rural areas, so impoverished, and in some parts of the country so physically insecure, that their main concern is survival. This worked for a while, but it has also backfired. Because in the process, the state became seen as morally bankrupt, and as a dragon that must be slain. And for some, the feeling of having lost their honor in the struggle and indignities of everyday life, and of the country has lost its honor has led them to see honor in resistance.

 As Mohammed already said, another important slogan was “You are racist and arrogant [not sly], the whole country is Darfur!” This was a rejection of the divide and conquer of the Inqaz regime, its racial politics that tapped into ethnic hierarchies embedded in Sudanese society. I see this slogan as a significant turning point, but it’s not enough on its own to make for a social revolution. Same with women’s incredible leadership. All you have to do is look at the composition of the opposition’s negotiating team to see that it’s mostly male, “Arab”, urban, educated and Khartoum based. It’s an elite in opposition but an elite nonetheless. So the openings and challenges that the revolution has offered must be pushed and expanded through the organization and continued resistance.

One final thought: the rural/urban divide is a critical aspect of class in Sudan. It’s not just a postcolonial reality in Sudan, but also a colonial legacy. The British used the rural areas, for extraction (of cotton, etc) and those populations as the labor force, sometimes bringing in seasonal laborers from further afield. And in urban areas, especially Khartoum, colonialism cultivated an educated class (the “efendiya”) to fill in the lower ranks of the civil service and after the end of colonialism, to rule. The efendiya class may have been economically hit by successive military regimes but it still carries massive cultural and political capital.

RM: The question around the relationship between geographical locations and extent of demonstrations is one of inquiry into what kind of class politics are shaping the popular uprising and consequently it demands. In this instance, it is important to realize that one of the many legacies of the Salvation (Islamist) regime was that it managed to alter old power dynamics through the creation of a new middle-class mostly drawn from the peripheries. Hence, employing a class analysis around outdated modes/demarcations of center/periphery divide could be misleading.

Moreover, decades of repressive and irresponsible governance policies employed in the absence of any accountability have created peculiar realities for different regions, cities, areas especially when it comes to public work. Darfur, for example, has been under martial law since 2003, this has effectively meant that the entire region has been operating as per a highly securitized order, down to the last aspect of daily administrative affairs. In conditions like these, resistance takes on alternative forms, ones that might not fit neatly into the prescribed called for SPA forms of resistance but could be as effective if not more.

The SPA and DFC’s style of popular rallying is customized to fit a particular area and class, even within the center, they seem to draw on their ancestor's experience of the 60s and the 80s uprisings, but Sudan has drastically changed since. The classical rallying language employed isn't half as disappointing as the absence of a revolutionary message implicit or explicit to address the underlying class differences. Even within Khartoum’s many and divergent neighborhoods, commitment to the aims and message of the revolution wasn't easily attainable from day one, anecdotes from protestors reported that substantial neighborhoods like Ombada (a working-class neighborhood in the outskirts of Omdurman city) refused to participate for the first few months out of fear of excessive retaliation against them by the security apparatus. Failure to rally out the ‘city’ speaks yet to another form of cultural and racial divide within the class binary that the revolution’s leadership tends to ignore.

Massive alterations in the country’s economic structure have brought decisive changes to the class system as well. The dismantling of the agricultural industry and its replacement with a poorly managed/developed service sector has further accentuated labor precariousness facilitated by mass migration to the cities. On the other hand, the integration of the once-neglected peripheries into the war economy raises questions about new understandings around and of labor and capital in relation to who participates, with what demands.

A closer look at the ongoing conversations between the people that stack the rank and file of the revolution is a better informant of the mood, opinion, and position of the protestors five months into the uprising. In keeping with the latest developments on the political landscape, a different culture of sarcastic politicking has come to replace the once upbeat slogans unified by an anti-Bashir stance. I believe there are more truth and omen in the humorous memes that circulate in the aftermath of intermissions of the prolonged negotiations. The mockery spares no one, friend and foe and is, in my opinion, the most accurate measurement of the people’s voice.

EEK: Do you think this uprising can be characterized using Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of ‘revolutionary spontaneity’ i.e. mass protest driven without the aid and guidance of a revolutionary party? What then becomes the role of progressive, leftist and revolutionary organisations once the masses are more advanced than them?  

ME: It’s important to note that when Rosa Luxemburg provided her reflections on the mass strike in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution had not yet occurred. Nor had the split in the social democracy movement occurred yet. In fact, it was at a time when the European social democracy movement was ultimately convinced that it was the historical actor that would lead the proletariat to providence. There are parallels here with the Sudanese opposition parties. But more importantly, Rosa Luxemburg should be understood here as someone who was closer to the pulse of the 1905 revolutions of Russia than the social democracy movement, and her reflections then ought to be seen as early forms of dissent against European social democracy, who seemed to deny the significance of the self-organization of the working class.

Two reflections stand out that are helpful in understanding the revolution -- the first is about political education. To overthrow absolutism in Russia, Luxemburg says, “the proletariat requires a high degree of political education, of class-consciousness and organization. All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution.” Already it seems, we see Luxemburg suspicious about the idea that spontaneity contradicts organization, as well as an exposition of the idea that while important,  pamphlets, panel discussions, and so on are not enough for the success of the social-democratic movement. It is here where we find the biggest organizer of revolution, and so her appeal is to tell the social democracy movement not to think of spontaneity as political immaturity, but quite to the contrary, as you put it -- as the masses being more advanced than the party.

A second reflection, which in a sense can be seen as a reinforcement of the first point, is that “in the mass strikes in Russia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat is “uneducated”, but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them.”

This attempt to play schoolmaster, and this feeling of self-importance that many opposition parties, chief among them the Umma Party has, is what always keeps them a step behind the revolutionary masses. One finds himself feeling like they are looking at a living parody, when Sadiq al-Mahdi, head of the UMMA party, for example, tries to declare on live television that he is the legitimate leader of Sudan because he was the last democratically elected leader before Bashir’s coup thirty years ago!! Of course, he was ridiculed for that. The same can be said for the other opposition parties, which the vast majority of protesters are suspicious of, considering that in thirty years, most of them engaged in concession after concession to the ruling elite.

So why do people put trust in the SPA? Well, for one, they don’t claim to lead, they are offered the mantle of leadership. They are seen as learning about the struggle in the streets, and they are accountable to the streets. They engage in the battles on the street. When the leaders get arrested, they get arrested in protests. They aren’t trying to play the school teachers of the revolution, in fact, most don’t even know who they are. It’s a horizontal organization made up of illegal union members, your own English teacher could be SPA, or your doctor, or your neighbor, and they wouldn’t tell you. But that doesn’t at all mean that they aren’t members of political parties. It doesn’t at all mean they aren’t organizing with the parties. It’s an open secret that many of them are (the elected chairman, northerner Mohamed Yousef, was a member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, the southern armed struggle!). When the government says that a huge portion of them are communists, while this is propaganda, they aren’t lying. Most are likely politically independent, however.

But when one chooses to dedicate themselves to the SPA, instead of their own political parties if they are a member of one, this means they give up on the petty in-fights that are paralyzing the opposition, and means that they answer to the streets before anyone else.

The SPA of course, beyond being the interlocutor of the streets to power, also must engage with the very “world of politics” which most people in the streets are suspicious of. But people feel that the SPA is sort of an infiltrator in the sphere of political parties, shaking things up, acting on its behalf, standing up to the military and so on. The SPA set up the forces for freedom and change, of course, to unite the resistance. So officially, it is part of a body with the biggest opposition parties (The Umma Party, the Communist Party, the Sudan Congress Party, and so on) -- but at the same time, while perhaps providing these parties with a newfound popular legitimacy, it’s always seen as both the leader and the odd one out.

Does the SPA, therefore, not fulfill the criteria of a revolutionary party? Considering that our revolutionary parties, including the Communist Party (the oldest ones in the region), are not entirely trusted by the masses? I think it does.

SA: I* think* the protests when they started did fit Luxemburg’s idea of revolutionary spontaneity, but we need to really go to those towns and speak to those who participated to understand better. The SPA was able to channel the protests, imbue them with strategy, unity, and organization. I think the association has been accepted as a leader by the majority of protestors for two reasons that Mohammed pointed to. The first is that they are not a political party. This is important since the whole political class is distrusted, especially by the youth, who make up the majority of the population. But this reason alone doesn’t explain the SPA’s appeal. Why didn’t Girifna or the bigger Change Now coalition, for example, become the leader? (Girifna is a social movement style decentralized organization that emerged to my knowledge around the 2010 elections and confronted the regime, both it and Change Now (التغيير الآن) which is allied with at different points drew on youth and students, some of whom had party affiliations but chose to organize outside them and in a different way). I think the answer lies partly in the composition of the SPA. While its language builds on the language of other movements, esp. the youth and student movement (that came out on January 30, 2011, and attempted an uprising) with its emphasis on unity, rights, justice, peaceful resistance, anti-racism, and anti-sexism, there’s an element of it that is old, namely that relies on professional formations. The 1964 revolution and the 1985 intifada were organized in large part also by professional organizations. For example, the University of Khartoum Teachers’ Union played a critical role in organizing and mobilizing for the Intifada. Many of those who were very active in the union, like my father, did not become politicians afterward, rather handed the government over to politicians. Sudanese culture puts a very high degree of trust in education and educated people. And education is seen as one of the few vehicles that were available for social mobility, something that this regime is accused of destroying. Finally, the SPA has older faces, but some very young ones too as Mohamed said, some of whom were part of Girifina, Change now, and localized committees and groups. The reading of working-class youth (which in Sudan more or less means 40 and under) of the Inqaz regime is sharper than the older generation’s since they grew up under it and confronted it again and again. While they can use the older discourse when they deem it necessary, they also have access to different discourses, a more direct way of speaking, and at times use dialect and street language in a way that crosses over to young people and the street guys who didn’t necessarily have a chance to go to or finish school. This has been important as an element in their appeal.

I do think the SPA at the moment is the closest we have to a revolutionary party, but in the past month, it has been falling out of step with the masses. For example, its position is weaker (but still very strong) since it entered into an alliance with political parties and armed movements  (the alliance being the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom and Change, FDFC). The alliance makes sense strategically (not the least to unify the opposition and prevent spoilers). But it also means the SPA has to deal with a group much of which is out of step with the masses, esp. the youth. It is also unclear what the SPA’s position will be should a transition take place and lead to elections. At the moment, it positions itself as the voice of the masses, taking its cue from them. But it contains different political currents within it, various affiliations, and its decision to negotiate with Burhan’s military council is contested and thus has to be constantly negotiated with the masses on the street. The street is more militant in its distrust of the military establishment than the Forces of the Declaration for Freedom and Change, and in demanding retribution for the killing and torture and maiming of protestors.

RM: This question I believe has a large potential in unraveling the many concealed class disparities that the idea of a revolution with an overarching aim of achieving ‘Freedom, Peace and Justice’ means for the many as well as for a viable nation-building process that as Lenin said is not consumed with the architecture of development as much as a reworking of the country’s class trajectory.

There is no doubt that the one undisputed achievement reclaimed by the people in full over the past few months was the restoration of freedoms, a space to speak, act and behave with liberty not just from the repressive machinery of the state but also from the dominance of a conservative culture that is in essence racist, sexist and elitist. This break, through an act of spontaneous political thinking and action, can be seen mostly at the grassroots levels as evident in the organizational work of the many committees who have mustered a reputation of not only managing and safeguarding the sit-in areas but whose early activities saw the mobilization of various neighborhoods to match the rallying call from the SPA.

This isn't unexpected, neighborhood committees in Sudan, almost akin to what you would define as borough councils in the UK, have long been at the forefront of resistance, this is perhaps why the Islamist learned how to infiltrate them, and apply to them, as they did with the state machinery their infamous tamkeen (empowerment) policy, either by buying off their representatives or replacing them by those aligned with the regime’s ideology. Many of us who watch the SPA stumble on its road to securing the civilian ship, find solace in the nuclear level of organization as mustered by these youngsters, most identifiable by their slender bodies and undefiable attitudes, both a product of long-enduring hardships and courtesy of self-serving elite policies.

However, in between spontaneity and discipline of prescribed governance routes, those nuclear powerhouses, and their achievements are lost. A call for a technocratic government in line with the liberal democratic values of what the left perceives as civic builds on neoliberal values of apolitical meritocracies. This formula favors the already privileged as clear in the almost comical scramble for nominations. In this instance, the SPA provides the grounds for reproducing the old order, its reluctance to address the issue of privilege or class politics clearly throughout has facilitated the direction in which the negotiations are developing which is the refashioning of the new state in the image of a professionals class. Political parties, as flattering as their history might be, provide a more viable political space for different class members to negotiate agendas and secure wins should accountability be introduced.

EEK: The level of organization in the Sudanese uprising has been staggering, can you locate the historical linkages and lessons learned that the current Sudanese uprising has taken from previous uprisings and demonstrations in the country and the counter-revolutionary reversals across the region?

ME: While the SPA existed before the revolution, it also came into existence in anticipation of one. It draws its inspiration from Sudan’s rich revolutionary history. In October 1964, after the repression of students at the Khartoum University, and an event which led to the death of a student called Ahmad al-Qurashi, a revolutionary wave engulfed Sudan. The two key organizing bodies were the National Front of Professionals and the National Front of Political parties (including the Umma Party, the National Union Party, the Communist Party and to a lesser degree, the Muslim Brotherhood).

Characteristic of that revolution was some of the same issues we’ve seen in the ongoing revolution. General strikes, coordinated marches, divisions between the upper ranks of the Armed Forces and junior personnel, and most importantly, the enlistment of sympathetic officers to the revolution. In 1964, just as there is now, a coalition of political parties and professional associations came to the shore (The Forces for Freedom and Change), so too was there The United National Front which negotiated with the army for a democratic transition.

The same can be said about the 1985 revolution. It was led by a professionals association called the National Alliance for National Salvation, a joint movement between the trade union movement and professionals. It was characterized by general strikes, and the support of sympathetic members of the military, who refused to take orders to repress the revolutionaries. Once again, a Transitional Military Council was also formed to ensure a transition.

This is the third professionals association in Sudan’s revolutionary history to take the lead of an uprising and overthrow a military dictator and the parallels are too clear to be coincidental. The SPA formed The Forces for Freedom and Change, as a coalition between the armed/civilian opposition and the SPA, in a clear attempt to mirror the United Front of the 1964 revolution. The call to the occupation at the headquarters of the military was on April 6th, the day that Nimeri fell in 1985. The central role of junior officers meant that there were likely lines of communication open between revolutionaries and lower-ranked soldiers.

It’s not necessarily clear that these were lessons from the past. It’s more likely that these were just inherited strategies and tactics in an intergenerational political culture that never died. The revolution started months ago, but preparation started years ago.

The revolutionaries of course also learned important lessons from the regional revolts. In Egypt, there is the lesson of not trusting the military to bring democracy, and not giving into desperation and allowing for the revolutionary masses to give up the struggle for democracy in return for some faux guarantee of safety (you get neither). Tamarod in Egypt did not do this when it helped organize the revolution to overthrow Morsi. In Yemen there was the lesson of not trusting any Saudi/Emirati sponsored “transition”, and this definitely informs the suspicion that people have today of these regimes. In Syria and Libya, there is, of course, the weariness of armed struggle and, more importantly, armed external intervention. Overall, Sudanese and Algerian people today have enough of a critical distance (unlike many Egyptians unfortunately), to recognize how things went wrong in Egypt. They know, perhaps because of that distance, that nationalistic sentimentality towards the military should in no way translate into unconditional trust.

SA: I also don’t want to underestimate the years leading up to this uprising. In 2005, the “international community”- the US and some European countries, backed a regionally-mediated “comprehensive peace agreement” (CPA). To cut a long story short, after the end of that transitional period in 2011, when southern Sudan declared independence, Sudanese people saw the international community withdraw without regard to both the deep economic crisis the split caused, the return to highly repressive political culture, and the situation of being in limbo that southerners faced- stripped of Sudanese citizen and unable to live in South Sudan due to the emergence of conflict there or due to a feeling of not being at home. I saw a shift after 2011, Sudanese political forces of all stripes stopped looking to be saved or to reform the regime and began to unify around the idea of bringing forth its collapse. The 2013 uprising that was violently crushed is one testament to that. As were the protests last year. As well as the formation of political coalitions like The National Consensus Forces etc. But to me of vital importance is the strike actions. For example, the militancy and the radicalization of doctors during this particular uprising did not come in the void. They have been striking about their working conditions and the state of the public hospitals, as well as the privatization and corruption in the health sector, for some time now. They brought some of these organizational lessons to this uprising, as has the SPA (which was banned) with its work to campaign for raising the minimum wage. Members of other groups- Change Now, etc, neighborhood committees, women’s political party forums and movements like Girifna and Change Now have also gained knowledge in organizing. The latter two used social media and helped popularize the idea, already seen by the Sudanese from a distance in the 2010/2011 Arab uprisings, that social media can be a powerful documentation and communication tool. They also took an explicitly anti-racist stance, which grew also thanks to the work of Darfurian student groups and other political organizations from the so-called “margins”. And women’s groups such as the No to the Oppression of Women ( لا لقهر النساء) held street actions and some of their members were arrested. Political actors would meet on different platforms and cross paths and network and some activists are members of multiple groups simultaneously. I say this but I am also aware (and have a strong desire) to find out more about the organizing that was happening away from Khartoum. We still build narratives that are too much focused on Khartoum, or on the more formal political structures. This risks obscuring major contributions to the struggle. I’d like to know for example more about the history of the neighborhood committees, which are now playing a key role in the revolution.

RM: The level of politicization among the Sudanese youth is at an all-time high, this isn't strictly the product of the uprising but a result of a healthy and vibrant organizational and political culture that has defined the history of the country’s modern nation-building process. Samir Amin’s theorization around Sudan’s unique hybrid typology of the export economy and labor reserve puts in context the why and how of the country’s resistance legacy. However, the post-independence period has witnessed, as in the case of all other African postcolonial countries, a shift in the political narrative which reflected the contemporary emerging class dynamics, product of education, universities, political parties, civil society as they engaged and negotiated their space and identities with state institutions in a rapidly globalizing neoliberal order. These new spaces of emerging elite ideologies were not open to everyone.

What I mean to emphasis by this somewhat prolonged introduction is that historically, resistance developed along two parallel lines, one bonafide and central to the development of modernism in Sudan and to its middle-class sense of urban identity, those ‘effendia’, their struggle narratives lined the nationalist imagination and their cadres were rewarded with nothing short of state power. The other self-effaced at the sidelines, struggling with informality save for the few sectors whose blue-collar workers served the export-led/foreign exchange industry.

The class aspects of resistance manifest themselves clearly in and throughout the uprising and in the sit-in, the professionals at the table, the workers and the unemployed at the barracks. Complex gender and ethnic identities are interwoven in between, each draw on their own history of resistance in the process. The cohesion that the ‘revolution’ masks carry within it disparities over the right to agency and claims over political space and agenda. The recent disagreement around barrack zones revealed what’s at stake for each according to their priorities. The professionals vy for promised concessions in the grandmaster game of politicking, the rest a defense line in protection of their lives against a violent militia state operating in the absence of any rule of law,  the debate still rages on.

The stark difference in the composition and style of the resistance at each end reflects a crisis of a state-integrated in the global order through an enclave economy. The neighborhood committees, the local councils, and other grassroots organizations communicate the language and aspirations of the majority of the popular masses, not just in terms of demands and language but also in their style of delivery. Enclaves of globalization within the state and civil society speaks another set of priorities, where decades of neoliberal training on ‘inclusivity’ has identified the gender agenda as most pressing, the tool of delivering equality, the quota system, nevermind the absence of any institutional grounding that sees through the logical aftermath of these assignments.

EEK: Can you give us more insight into the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) that seems to be at the forefront of the Sudanese uprising?

ME: The Sudanese Professionals Association is a clandestine organization, with few key visible leaders and potentially hundreds of members. Membership is mostly secret, and for official faces, the most well known are Sara AbdelJalil, Mohammed Naji al-Asam, and Mohammed Yousef. There have been conflicting reports about the moment of its foundation, some say it was formed in 2012 by various professionals, while others insist that it was 2016 in a meeting between the doctor's syndicate and the university lecturers union at the University of Khartoum. The official website claims that it was formed in October 2016, after the Central Committee of Sudanese doctors, the Sudanese Journalists Network, and the Democratic Lawyers Association came together to forge a joint body.  It came to the fore, and became known to the intelligentsia, at least months before the revolution after publishing a study on the minimum wage.

The SPA was known for setting the schedules for protests. It would often coordinate with neighborhood committees of the youth, and its own members would show up to the places where protests would be scheduled, and risk arrest. The SPA, initially, was known as the organizer of the protests after December 25th. By January 1st, however, with the declaration of freedom and change, it had also shown its capacity to draw a roadmap for the future of the country. The first two clauses of the declaration are about solving wars, a goodwill gesture to those in the peripheries (civil society and armed organizations) that it could also try and bridge the central/peripheral divide.   

SA: The SPA did not, as far as I know, plan the early protests. Those were in AdDamazin, Atbara and Gadarif, etc, i.e. outside Khartoum. But when the protests came to Khartoum, they called for a march to the Palace. From there, its power grew, and it has spokespersons and branches in different cities inside and outside the country. What is stunning is that most of its members were unknown, with the exception of a few. Those who came out with their identity publically, like Al-Asam, knew they would be arrested. I think it’s a damning indictment of Sudan’s political class that people were willing to follow an unknown organization with mostly unknown members whom they saw as speaking truth, rather than well-known political figures.

RM: The Sudanese Professionals association is a ‘professionals’ body made up of the main unionized sectors who have since grown to encompass a plethora of bodies under its wing. At the helm are the doctor’s (represented in two factions and this has its own history as well), lawyers and engineers. These three perhaps make up the cadres of ‘effendi’ class proper and all have their political affiliations or at least inclinations, their voices are the most heard, positions emphasized, their actions define the political tone of revolution. The phenomena of a professional body occupying a prominent space in Sudan’s political history isn't new, their authority over the revolution, popularly bestowed, should be a topic of scientific inquiry in time, possibly a result of multi-party decay and the rise of the illusion of professionalization in the aftermath of the NCP’s higher education privatization policies.

Earlier debates in the first few months of the revolution had alluded to the crisis of a seemingly apolitical group leading a political revolution, this weakness can be clearly discerned in their struggle to communicate a popular position or agenda beyond organizing/leading demonstrations despite the massive popular support that has placed them in an advanced position at the negotiation table.

EEK: Teachers were at the forefront of the uprising against Omar al-Bashir last December, following a government decision to triple bread prices. What are the major unions and syndicates involved in the uprising?

ME: The major syndicates seem to be, the teacher's committee, the central committee of Sudanese doctors, the Democratic Lawyers Association, the Sudanese Journalists Network, the Association of Democratic Veterinarians, the University Professors Association, the Sudanese Doctors Syndicate, the Committee for the restoration of the Engineers Syndicate, and at least 9 others. The most important thing to mention though is that since the uprising, even those organizations which are not “officially” members have acted in unison with the SPA. There have been various “associations” formed, sometimes geographical, sometimes occupational, sometimes on a neighborhood to neighborhood basis. There is, for example, the “unemployed graduates” association. Students of universities have also organized themselves into associations. One of my favorite pictures to come out of the revolution is the “students of the Jinn al-Ahmar university” (hard to translate, but the best description would be is that it is a satirical take on university contingents by those who didn’t attend university, “bla bla bla” university essentially.”

SA: The unions representing blue-collar workers, which were destroyed by the regime, are also important to watch. Their previous members are also organizing, for example, the Railway workers who helped make it possible for the train to come from Atbara in support of the sit-in in Khartoum. And the dockworkers in Port Sudan, who began in the revolution to organize against the contracts by the port authorities and state with foreign companies, which are threatening their already highly precarious livelihoods. The port in Port Sudan is a perfect example of capitalist greed enforced by the state and its trajectory under the Inqaz (al-Bashir’s regime) reveals the contempt of the state for working-class lives and the deliberate impoverishing policies.

RM: It is important to note the modification in unionship as a form of resistance resultant of NCP ‘s repressive policies as well as the restructuring of the economy and the international capitalist developments in relation to labor. All three elements contributed to the ineffability of the union as a form of collective bargaining. While the SPA includes under its banner the most effective sectors from doctors to teachers, there is less acknowledgment and understanding of alternative modes of collective resistance as organized by those in the informal sector. However, the economic crisis, defined as the major drive behind the uprising should naturally avail more attention to informal/unemployed resistance methods, especially if they are to be constructively integrated into the proposed civilian government’s reformative plans.

Another issue one must pay attention to is the legal frameworks and practices that have come to govern even the most regulated of unions, the NCP had passed laws to restructure the organizational nature of unions, syndicates (نقابة المنشأ) replaced the old union structures weakening them from within by encouraging labor association within firms as opposed to across the sector. This practice has effectively undermined the worker’s positions by overlooking power dynamics and conflicting interests between blue and white-collar labor when lumping their grievances together.

EEK: What about leftist and communist organizations in the country, how involved are they in the uprising?

ME: Sudan, like many Muslim majority countries, has had to deal with the painful legacy of an influential, Islamist propagated, anti-communism. Once upon a time, most workers who were members of a union had sympathies with the Communist Party. The Sudanese Communist Party had the reputation of being the biggest in Arabic-speaking countries, and one of the largest in Africa. Until today, in comparison with other communist parties in the region, it is quite influential: it has consistently played a large role in the opposition and is especially strong in the universities.

But to the popular imagination, communist means atheist (even if, of course, this is a farce), and atheism is not yet tolerated.  This is the legacy of NCP rule. When the revolution began, senior figures in the NCP immediately blamed two culprits: they claimed that Israel, in coordination with the armed forces were conspiring to bring instability to Sudan and that the Sudanese Communist Party had received 250 million dollars to sow discord. Where the precise number came from, nobody knows. And while this might be partially comedic, it also comes with a tragedy: these kinds of associations in the popular imagination do work.

The Sudanese Communist Party has to be pitied somewhat. For decades, it has taken immense risks, its cadre members have been arrested and tortured, in the universities, it has played a large role in politicizing students within the “Democratic Front”, and it has played a role in protecting a vibrant intellectual culture. Am I a sympathizer? Of course. Withstanding this, however, it is also a party that often seems out of touch, unable to evolve beyond a Stalinist outlook (when this revolution started, they said it was the national-democratic revolution). While the youth are very active, and it can be said that they are often the ones taking most of the risks, and reaping the least praise -- the central committee is made up of an older out-of-touch generation. This is a problem that categorizes most opposition parties. In a young society, most of the leaders are older.

And then there is the problem of a political concession mentality for the sake of expediency. I still don’t understand how the Sudanese Communist Party could enter into an alliance with the Peoples Congress Party when the opposition coalition, the National Consensus Forces were formed. That party is run by Turabi, the architect of the regime, who only joined the opposition after a fall-out with the ruling elite.

Withstanding all of this, most negotiations with the military council (except for some here and there), have included the Communist Party. For the youth who have to deal with the stigma of the c-word, the ability to say that they are “members of the forces for freedom and change” has allowed them to propagate their ideas to thousands of workers, for the first time in over 30 years. They often do this in the occupation outside the military headquarters. 

The SPA, just as a coalition of banned unions, is obviously also under the sway of many leftists, but not exclusively so. Its official statements are more progressive and liberal in nature.  That this hasn’t turned off people lies in the power of its messaging: it talks to people about their most immediate material interests: rent, food, safety, transportation, etc. It doesn’t address the contentious topic of Sharia law. In Sudan, the left-wing includes everything from liberals, to leftists -- while the right often denotes Islamist leading parties. The SPA is not doctrinal, but its very nature probably deters Islamists from joining in.    

SA: Leftist organizations in Sudan mean basically the Communist Party but there are many leftists who are close in orientation to the party but not members of it. There is also the Democratic Front, university student groupings which are leftist in orientation to varying degrees in different periods. The SCP, as Mohammed said, is in bad shape in Sudan and has been for decades now, partly as a result of repression and the deliberate dismantling of the platforms through which it works (unions, etc) and partly due to its own policies and undemocratic practices. But, as Mohammed also said, while the party’s constituency is small, its impact on the political discourse and Sudanese intellectual life is huge. This revolution offers a chance for the party to rebuild itself. It will confront as it always has a very religious population that associates communism with being anti-Islam. And it will need to show its relevance to regular people as now it’s mostly a party of elites. But the rebuilding and reclaiming of the unions will be one arena that will help, as is the battle to make sure the economic justice doesn’t fall by the wayside in the transition and beyond. But it will be challenged by the fact that many if not most parties have adopted some of its core turf- bread, jobs, universal education, and health, etc. I’d be curious to see if other explicitly leftist parties emerge in the transition.

RM: To Sara and Mohammed's comprehensive comments on the state of the left in Sudan today I can only add that notions of popular engagement and association with the communist discourse and the party's agenda need to be re-examined in relation to the current developments. The liberal left’s tendency to dismiss class politics as an ineffectual variable in the democratic process by using international standards of income to what constitutes a classist society is problematic because it inadvertently undermines the socioeconomic resistance agenda. A recent survey conducted by revolutionaries at the sit-in received quite a bit of attention over the female representation in the polling process, lesser attention was given to the political affiliation of those polled with the larger share associated with members of the Communist Party. If accurate, these readings could hold promising indications for state reform under a civilian government.

EEK: After the fall of Omar al-Bashir and his successor Awad bin Auf, what strategy is the military council with Abdel Fattah Burhan at its helm employing in order to stay in power and delay the transition to a civilian rule?

ME: The Military Council seems to be trying, and failing to win popular support -- while at the same time doing everything it can to have revolutionaries turn on the FDFC. As it does so, it hopes to stall and ensure its place during the transition. Of course, Egypt, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have a role to play in this. The Rapid Support Forces, which is run by Hemedti, have been followed around by camera crew in stint’s that many suspects are manufactured: in one, they raided a house in the capital, and found explosive vests, guns, communication devices, and even medals! In another, they claimed to stop a helicopter that was smuggling out gold for the regime. This is a way to garner legitimacy and make people feel that they are the only guarantee of safety. These are all strategies to gain an upper hand in the ongoing negotiations. They don’t seem, however, to be working; the general attitude is one of contempt towards the military council.

SA: It’s buying time and stalling, holding the demand for a civilian government hostage to try and work out a favorable deal for itself so as remain in control. Early on, one way they tried to do that was by holding meetings with non-FDFC parties, which are dozens, to say they deserve to be in government too. But these parties are mostly discredited and are mockingly referred to in Sudan as أحزاب الفكة or “pocket-change parties” in reference to the strategy of the al-Bashir regime to foster division in the opposition by luring opportunists through money or governmental posts to break away and form their own parties. Negotiations have been taking place between the military council and the FDFC in May. It’s no surprise to me that they accept the FDFC’s suggested parliament (though one-third of it they will, unfortunately, have a say in) and also accept the idea of a technocratic government (ministers with professional profiles rather than political ones). In the military’s mind, those institutions don’t matter. They are most stubborn in regards to the Supreme Council. This is because the Supreme Council (المجلس السيادى) is equivalent to the presidency, which has always been the only branch of government that mattered under military regimes and where the control rests. They agreed now with the FDFC that this council will be an “honorary” one, with no powers, but I personally don’t buy it.

RM: I suspect that the Military Council is an acting agent of greater power dynamics that aren't apparent to the average revolutionary, here a more nuanced understanding of what the deep state constitutes as well as the particularities of the negotiations should be availed for open debate among the popular masses. The SPA has been forthcoming with this practice but selectively, the need to control the political discourse could be one caution against making every detail public which has it positive as well as negative aspects. In any case, it is wonderful to see such terms and discussions popular among the once layman/woman instead of them being confined to elite discourses.

I think it is important to realize that the current military state in Sudan has become somewhat of a skilled expert in the political marketplace to use Alex De Waal's concept where Sudan is now being auctioned off to the highest power block bidder. To realize the bid with minimum comprises a combination of leveraging and concessions are used to manage the negotiations, these practices should be understood and theorized in relation to the country’s history and its major political players, the DFC included.

The biggest fear is posed by transnational interests, snippets of daily updates that serve mostly as gossip now can help stitch together the story of how remnants of the old regime still operate behind the scene, their extended authority beyond regime and government is a testament of the hegemony of international capital no matter what conditions prevail. I was mesmerized by a story I read the other day on how the newly appointed General Prosecutor was deterred from entering Salah Gosh’s (‘disposed of’ head of the national intelligence) house to serve a summons warrant by security elements armed with grenade launcher pick-ups at his residence door. We need to question who those people are in relation to the social structure and how are they being financed and most importantly how did they come to defy the revolution in this sense?

EEK: Since December, repression has been fierce with hundreds of deaths confirmed and more injured. Do you fear that the current military regime could scale up repression in order to break the protests and sit-ins?

SA: The sit-ins and protests in some Darfuri towns, Nyala, Zalenji, Kutum were brutally attacked. And on May 13th, the sit-in in Khartoum was attacked, leading to many injuries and casualties. One problem we have now is to figure out who is orchestrating these attacks. In more than one case, eyewitnesses claimed that this was Hemedti’s militia, the Rapid Support Services. Speculation is rife- we know these attacks are by security and militias affiliated to the old regime. But the question is whether RSF is still loyal to that regime? Is it acting on its own behalf? Is it RSF at all (public opinion seems to believe so). And if so, the question is what the RSF’s relationship is to the military establishment. The RSF was a janjaweed militia created by al-Bashir’s security as an agile force unhampered by military rules to fight the rebel groups in the areas of Darfur, South Kordofan/Nuba Mountains, and Blue Nile State. It’s committed massive atrocities. After the EU began pumping millions into Sudan after 2014, with the prime purpose being to contain migration to Europe, the regime designated the RSF for that job and nominally integrated it into the army. But it remains above the law and not always aligned with the military’s interest. So I see Burhan and Hemedti, his deputy on the military transitional council, as having only one major common interest: the continuation of Sudan’s involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. This proximity to the UAE and Saudi Arabia is critical to both. They, especially Hemedti I imagine, fear a democratic, civilian government ending all his lucrative deals- on Yemen, in relation to the control (read: abuse) of migrants. And worse for him, though he probably currently feels too powerful and immune, a transitional justice process (as especially being called for by Darfuris and the families of the martyrs- those protestors who were killed), would possibly implicate him and perhaps Burhan as well. But though they have some agendas in common, it very much seems like the RSF is not really under military control. So that dynamic is volatile and alarming if you think of the potential for violence. The military itself turning to violence is less likely I think, though I may be just comforting myself with that thought. The lower-ranked soldiers have defended the revolution since April 6th and some have given their lives for it. I don’t think the military can make them shoot at protestors. I hope this is the same for both Khartoum and elsewhere. The military has always been ruthless in its killing fields in Darfur, Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains- those areas where they deem the inhabitants as a problem to be exterminated. But I don’t think the revolutionaries anywhere will settle for this anymore.

RM: Selective and targeted violence has always been the preferred methodology of the Sudanese military state, the proliferation of militias and the rise of Hemedity and the RSF is proof of that. Two points should be taken into account when conceptualizing the possibility of violence, first is that its administration in the center and the capital specifically is a new and unmastered phenomenon, as opposed to the violent application of legal frameworks that also act as tax systems, so they tread with caution. The second is that it seems like the state’s monopoly over violence has been broken or at least undermined, this is possibly a combination of internal mutiny within the ranks of the security and armed forces by the younger officers combined with their inability to procure the appropriate type of weaponry in light of depleting finances and the scrutiny of the international community which paradoxically usually provides them.

The peaceful nature of the protesting has also played a role in how the uprising is being perceived and defined in the global resistance landscape. The use of force requires a degree of legitimacy usually inferred through wobbly conceptualizations as a defense for reinstituting order, this proved difficult in the case of Sudan’s uprising despite the internal (Darfur cells spreading insecurity/ usual racist propaganda ) and external (Syria and Yemen fate) deterring rhetorics employed.

ME: At the current moment, the only card that the FDFC have in their hands is our occupation and our barricades. There have been multiple sly attempts to try to get rid of them, and this hasn’t worked. Lately, however, just before negotiations resumed with the military council and the FDFC, revolutionaries began building barricades across the Nile road, an important artery in Khartoum’s road system. It was apparently in response to a closure of a bridge that the Rapid Support Forces were in control of.  But by hours, these barricades took a life of their own, and eventually even moved even beyond the control of the FDFC. The message was clear if we don’t move towards a civilian government and the military council continues to stall, then regardless of the FDFC and even the Sudanese Professionals Association, we will up the ante until negotiations work in our favor.

In a press conference, Hemedti of the RSF declared that the revolutionaries were “bringing chaos”, and that the “chaos ends today.” The RSF was deployed, and on the 8th of Ramadan protesters behind the barricades were shot and killed. Despite video evidence, and perhaps because of being accustomed to a culture of impunity, the RSF tried to deny it and even pinned it on lower-ranked soldiers in the military. This only further had the general public turn on them.

All of this is to say that the RSF is quite unpredictable, at least in Khartoum. In Darfur and the peripheries, they show their true nature. But even here, just for the sake of demonstrating their power, they are willing to kill one or two revolutionaries.

The Red Sea coast and the Bab al-Mandeb strait are important geographical vantage points that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are keen on due to their position between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean through Egypt’s Suez Canal. This is why their preferred model for Sudan is the Egyptian model of military dictatorship. What is the role of Gulf capital in Sudan and

EEK: Are there other forms of regional and international counter-revolutionary forces exerting pressure on the military council?

SA: Yes though a lot of deals weren’t public, so I’m speculating in my answer below. Saudi and UAE and also Qatar have other commercial interests. Al-Bashir’s regime gave Gulf countries land leases for terms as long as 99 years, which they are using to grow various crops. They’re not even paying for irrigation, it is apparently provided free. These deals are threatened, as is Sudan’s participation in the barbaric war in Yemen. The Saudis and Emiratis are not willing to risk their own troops in ground warfare, so it's important for them to have the Sudanese “boots on the ground”. Many of these soldiers are reportedly children from poor families. They go to Yemen to kill and be killed. I worry about what sort of psyches are being created in that war, who will return carrying all that violence inside them. Same as what was happening in the war in South Sudan, the ugliness of it. This is scary to me in terms of the future.

But to go back to your question: Turkey also has commercial interests in Sudan that are threatened by the transition. For example, it apparently leased the Suakin port in the Red Sea state, down the coast from Port Sudan. Egypt has agricultural leases too, but also, is clearly threatened by a people’s revolution in its back yard (as it seems Sudan). Sisi has used his chairmanship of the African Union to buy the military time (Sudan should have been suspended until constitutional order is restored).

The Russians were accused of pressuring the military to repress the protests more violently. If true, I’m unclear what their interest is economical. It is believed though that al-Bashir was trying to woo them, and that’s the context of his visit to Bashar Al-Assad not long before the revolution started.

The UK and the US have backed the revolution in recent months, but less in policy (at least outwardly) and more in words and visits to the sit-in. I assume their economic agendas in the future will be the usual- securing favorable deals for their countries, promoting privatization, etc. For the US it’s almost certainly got its eye also on the oil (should South Sudan settle its conflict, it still relies on Sudan to get the oil to the ports on the sea). Not to mention that the US must be making some calculations in relation to its counterterrorism agenda. What is intriguing of course is that the US seems to be backing the revolution while its major ally, Saudi Arabia is working against it. But the latter’s to the TMC support is active while the former’s to the revolution is not.

Finally, neighboring Chad’s authoritarian leader, Idris Déby, can not possibly be happy with what is happening in Sudan, and in fact, the revolution has inspired some unrest in his own country. He has influence, especially over some groups in Darfur. And Salva Kiir, president of South Sudan, is also concerned regarding the changing order. He reportedly gave shelter to Bashir’s second wife, notoriously unpopular in Sudan for her corruption. Whether Déby or Kir is actively supporting the counter-revolution, I can’t say.

Otherwise- the EU is not supporting the counter-revolution per se, but its externalized borders policy since 2014 has helped make Hemedti the powerful and rogue player he is today. And while the EU has come around to supporting the demands for a civilian administration on paper, its response beyond that, concretely, is inadequate.

China was until the country’s partition, which resulted in 70% plus of the oil fields going to South Sudan, a major business partner of Bashir’s regime. I don’t know how much investment it still has in the country, and what its stance.

Finally, Sudan’s gold deposits, which are significant, are being smuggled out of the country for some time now. That’s big business, for which countries are involved.

ME: Sarah has pretty much covered all of the ground on the power players. To answer the inverse of the question, there seems to be a lack of political will to counteract the support that the military council has. The African Union demanded an immediate transition to a civilian government within 15 days, and when those 15 days passed (and because of the lobbying of Egypt), the African Union only expressed “regret”. The EU and western imperialist powers, in general, have written strongly worded letters, but that’s pretty what they do, right? Meanwhile, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have provided material support to the military council. The difference between the two, the FDFC and the military council is that the latter have billions of dollars behind them. That’s huge leverage in negotiations and just makes the transitional military council want to hold power for even longer.

EEK: After the Sudanese protesters publicly rejected the $3 billion dollars in aid from the UAE and Saudi Arabia and protesters continuing to refuse to leave the streets until a civilian government is formed, do you think Sudanese protesters have finally reached a level of consciousness that renders them immune to the counter-revolutionary wave or do you see a possibility of a counter-revolution forming in the near future? 

SA: I believe the 3 billion was given to the military in cash and materials, part of which they tried to “buy” protestors with, but as you said, protestors kicked those trucks out. I think the level of consciousness is high. But I don’t think anybody is immune to the counter-revolution. My main worries are (1) The military and/or RSF will agree to a deal only to buy time while it plots during the transition, with foreign backing, a re-take over and (2) populism. I worry that figures from the old regime will rehabilitate themselves and cast themselves in new garb. Even figures like Hemedti, unless he turns the full might of his violent machine on the protestors in the “center”. Darfurians know better, but those outside Darfur who identify as “Arab”,  well, some of them are susceptible to this type of populist discourse that is dangerous, flexible and regressive. The counterrevolution may also find a window in through the need to demobilize armed movements and integrate them into the political system. We’ve seen in one country after another than armed movements often have a rocky and incomplete transition to political parties, and that the mentality of “winner takes all” and “might is right” lingers.

Even in a best-case scenario where none of the above happens or we overcome it, the real challenge is how to make sure our democracy is a redistributive one, not a bourgeois one that feeds the masses elections while it secretly or openly concentrates wealth in the hands of a few. In Sudan, we idolize democracy partly because we’ve had so little of it. But the world is full of democracies where some people still starve while others throw away food at every meal.

ME: Excuse my pessimism, but despite the strides that the revolution in Sudan has made, revolutionary pessimism dictates that we have to even expect counter-revolution to happen. For one, I am quite enthusiastic about the SPA, but feel very pessimistic about the FDFC, particularly its more moderate wing: the Sudanese Congress Party and the Umma Party. I feel that it is likely Hemedti will have some kind of role to play in the transition, which means that the day we receive the civilian government is in fact the day that the counter-revolution begins. Whenever turns like these happen, there are usually celebrations, and within hours sober moments of silence and declarations by revolutionaries on the street that “the revolution has just started”. I like this attitude. We have a long way to go, and in my view, if done correctly then the next frontier is the struggle waged by the neighborhood councils. 

EEK: Do you think Abdel Fattah Burhan’s recent crackdown on many officials accused of fraud, including two brothers of Omar al-Bashir, will be enough to convince the protesters to leave the streets?

SA: Nothing will convince protestors to leave the streets while they still perceive the military to be in power. And they may well take to the streets again if some of the key demands are not met earlier rather than later in a transitional period, including transitional justice (esp. retribution for the killings and removal of regime loyalists from the civil service, an improvement in the economic conditions and an end to the wars.

ME: I agree with Sara here. The protestors have a slogan, “If it falls, or if it doesn’t, we’re staying.”, to which the chant continues, “even if it falls, we’re still staying.” It will take a lot to convince people to leave the occupation, and this is for one main reason: many other occupations understand themselves as congregations of people with a shared demand. This occupation understands itself as leverage for revolutionary leadership. It seems like a subtle difference, but this occupation understands that revolution isn’t an event but a process. As another chant puts it, “revolutionaries, freedom fighters, we’re finishing the journey”

EEK: There is talk of fractures within the opposition leaders that seem to be more preoccupied in distributing cabinet seats between themselves rather than ousting the military council. Is this the reason why the public announcement of civilian rule did not reveal cabinet members? Or is there another reason?

SA: Most definitely. Between the SPA and some of the more established parties in the coalition (e.g. Ummah, the Sudan Communist Party). In recent weeks they have been issuing confusing statements. This has been very bad for morale and made many protesters angry. The FDFC has just announced that they’ve resolved this issue and only the FDFC will release statements now, not individual parties. I do believe some parties are only grudgingly with the SPA in a coalition and don’t like having to follow it. And follow it they must because it has the legitimacy on the street they lack. For example, al-Sadig al-Mahdi of the Ummah Party, who was twice, briefly prime minister in the decades before Inqaz, clearly thinks he deserves to be the leader in the transition. He has his followers but I bet if he ran right now for president against Mohammed Nagi al-Asam, one of the SPA’s spokesmen who is a doctor in his 20s, al-Asam would win easily.

Also, some of the armed movements that are signatories to the Declaration for Freedom and Change, e.g. Sudan Liberation. Movement- Minawi, have tensions with the political parties. I believe these tensions are less about the vision of the transition and more about which positions they want to secure for themselves. Again, I worry because our organized political class in Sudan is, generally speaking, doesn’t inspire confidence (to put it mildly).  I hope we don’t end up with a government more invested in squabbling than in turning the country around. Because honestly, the Sudanese people have suffered enough and deserve better.

RM: Historically speaking, governing political collations in Sudan tend to fail, the 89 coup was led and rationalized in the aftermath of the 1985 elected government failed to agree on policies which in turn caused state collapse. This, like Sara, stated hardly inspires confidence given that those the same parties we inherit following every military-civilian cycle. Today, there is concern that the idea of a ‘technocratic government’ was concocted to stem and gloss over the internal rifts of the DFC. The transitional non-alliance myth we have been sold, should it materialize, is quite dangerous because it undermines the accountability of government to those governed supposedly through a political contract, reducing power relations to concepts of ‘management’ as per the neoliberal ideal.

EEK: There seems to be a general consensus in the Arab World that the hopes and dreams of the first wave of Arab uprisings are now being materialized by the Sudanese and Algerian protests. How important is solidarity with the Syrian, Moroccan, Egyptian and other uprisings around the region?

SA: It’s critical. We Sudanese have always been seen ambivalently by the Arab World. Many if not the majority perhaps of our population thinks of itself as Arab, yet the Arab world, due in part to racism, has often treated Sudan in a patronizing way. Perhaps this revolution has righted some of those perceptions and made it clear that we all have something to learn from one another. Leftist Arabs eventually began to pay attention and to support us and many are genuinely rooting for us. The first wave of uprisings was a turning point for us. It reminded us of our own history of revolt (which goes way back before 2010/2011). But it also expanded our imagination. The kind of organization on the ground in the Tahrir Square occupation you can see partly reflected in the sit-in/occupation now of the area outside the Military General Command in Khartoum. The Arab uprisings came at a devastating moment for us- the year in which our country was being partitioned. While some northerners like myself wholly stand by the right of the southern Sudanese for self-determination, especially given their criminal and racist relegation to second-class citizenship by “Arab” Sudanese society, in my heart I believe the answer is not more nations, but greater equality. Otherwise, we are just replacing one prison for another. We in the north also lost hope in change from inside the regime, or from the international community, after that. We went through increasing economic deterioration and seemingly never-ending wars. We became utterly depressed. And we saw the counter-revolutions win (for now) in most of the region. But we also know from our history that even failed uprisings change our subjectivities, and leave traces in the form of organizational knowledge, networks, symbolism, songs and stories, both oral and written, that we draw from. I actually think hunger is what started the revolution, but organizing is what turned that spark into a massive fire in which everyone threw their grievances as kindle: poverty, racism, lawlessness, dispossession, patriarchal oppression. The first wave of Arab uprisings taught us some cautionary lessons also, for example about how fast and deep the counter-revolutionary attacks come, and that we should not dismantle our street movements too soon because they are all we’ve got. Looking to the future now, on a very strategic level, we need to support each other (not just in the Arab world but in the Middle East and Africa more broadly) because every victory makes the ground beneath our own revolutionary currents more firm. And every dictator and repressive regime that remains standing works to undermine our movements across the region. Most importantly, we need to move from nationalism to internationalism. This is a tall order for this region, I know. But we must. It’s ok to have pride in your nation, I do, but nationalism is a two-edged sword. It simultaneously mobilizes and blinks. Part of moving to internationalism, as a first step, is stopping the competition on who is suffering the most. Our sufferings are not unique; our oppressions are shared and so must be our resistance if we are to prevail. This is not to stay we must resist exactly the same way. What Sudan and Algeria show us the power of drawing on our unique cultural and historical register to inform our resistance tactics. Without songs and poetry, our dialects, the Sudanese revolution may not have been able to sustain itself on the streets for close to half a year now.

RM: The internationalization of the struggle is important to identify and address the root cause of the crisis, historically the colonial structure and more recently a contemporary neoliberal order that has subdued the state to the whims of foreign capital. Whereas every struggle has its own history and particularities they all share the commonality of laboring under the specter of the industrial-military complex. Its soft arm, International Financial Institutions a fancy term for money lending sharks working under the guise of international relations and its globalized institutions, the World Bank and the IMF have prescribed a deep neoliberal path of privatization and labor peculiarity, these two policy formulas have altered the social contracts in a way that makes it impossible for states in the global south to stand accountable to its constituency. The more belligerent arm of the neoliberal order, military interventions and the armament of society to maintain enclaves of power and money have been the prescribed path for some of the aforementioned countries. Sudan’s long history of neoliberal soft policies has to lead it down the path of its belligerent strain. How else would it be possible in the aftermath of a revolution, for the center stage to be occupied by our constant violent periphery politics, while financially backed by the same powers that saw the destruction of the region?

Here, it is necessary to emphasize that constructive solidarity starts at home, the Sudanese middle-class has had a tendency to overlook the periphery. Globalization had made it possible for them, through identity politics, to associate with an international mobile middle-class that shares their values and aspirations. Debates around Afro-Arab recognition are highly exclusive and inbuilt into a geographically restricted configuration of Sudanese nationalism, designed to fit the international and regional narrative more than find solutions to questions on the relationship between citizenship and identity. In a recent piece, Magdi Elgizouli had correctly highlighted that al-Bashir was only being punished for failing to deliver the kind of lifestyle the urban middle-class was accustomed to, never mind these benefits were acquired through violent extraction in the periphery.

EEK: The Sudanese diaspora around the world has played an essential role in spreading the message of protesters back home and sustaining on Sudanese embassies and representatives around the world. How crucial was this participation and what would the role can the diaspora play in the future? 

SA: The diaspora’s role has been critical. To understand that, it’s important to understand that the millions of Sudanese abroad mostly fled or left the country due to political persecution, economic devastation, war-related physical insecurity or any combination of the above. Even those who are more privileged, i.e. who left by “choice” and who had “marketable skills”, hate al-Bashir’s regime for making the country a fixture at the bottom of so many tables of socio-economic indicators, and for making the Sudanese passport a liability. The Sudanese diaspora mobilized almost as fast as the protestors inside Sudan. Our role was especially to get the word out through social media, lobby journalists to cover it, politicians to support it, etc. But we also worked to first and foremost show the protestors inside that we are with them. We organized our own protests, info sessions, exposed ambassadors. We raised money for the injured to be treated, and for Ramadan to make sure protestors can stay on the street. Once the international media began to cover it, around the time al-Bashir fell, we had to correct a lot of misconceptions and misinformation. Many in the diaspora also wrote, made music or artistic interventions in support of the revolution. In terms of the diaspora’s desired role, it is to return and help rebuild the country. If a genuine transition occurs (not certain at all this will happen, since things are very precarious), my guess is some of the diasporas will return, others won’t. People have built lives and raised families elsewhere, so it's complicated. But what’s more complicated is that the educated diaspora is asked to contribute through technical knowledge. That makes sense and is fine. But this “technocratic” vision of the future is also a form of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism has created misery even in those countries in the “civilized world” that so many in Sudan aspire to emulate. So I see that some of our roles to share that too, and to help build a more powerful vision capable of delivering the revolution’s three demands: freedom, peace, and justice. That’s a battle whose outcome will be what makes the difference between an uprising that topples a regime, and a revolution that transforms society.

RM: The Sudanese diaspora played a tremendous role in terms of advocating for the success of the uprising, this work has had a large effect on the safeguarding as well as the continuity of internal mobilization. The financial campaigns provided a lifeline for the sit-in, now in its second month. Biweekly fundraisers collecting half a million dollars or more were used to supplement the basic needs of the protestors from food to life-saving health care, these initiatives served more than sustenance as they reactivated old bonds between those who have left and their institutions back home be them familial, professional, geographic or whatever cause the contributors chose to acknowledge with their aid. This gave agency to both parties, a sense of national responsibility towards one another that could easily serve in the future as a constructive framework to rift the ethnic, geographical and generational divide.

Another diaspora particularity that served the revolution is that in the aftermath of the NCP’s repressive policies, many politicians either fled or were exiled to western capitals, these became external political hubs for the largest political parties and movements now part of the DFC. Thanks to access they were able to advocate on behalf of their constituencies back home, providing much needed political advocacy which set the international narrative on Sudan in its right course. These actions were not only confined to high-level meetings and petitions but included some old fashioned protesting and public work across Europe and America. Sudanese professionals in the diaspora, with help from their colleagues, flooded the public media with accounts on Sudan, some media and academic accounts proved informative even for those in the country.

There is a risk however of this support turning into ‘intervention’ especially with the resistance narrative being deployed in terms of achieving liberal democracy as an end and not a means of achieving rights to equal socioeconomic access of the state’s resources. The diaspora comes with its own risk of neoliberal ideas about citizenship, consumption, and cosmopolitanism, already we are witnessing phenomenons where the diaspora is nominating their technocratic caders for the civilian transitional period, people they view as educated and capable but who are also of their class and social circles, their ideology of success is that of apolitical western acquired qualifications, commendable but not what Sudan needs right now. Some of the most worrying trends that I noted over the past few months engaging in public work abroad in support of Sudan is how the older generation, especially those who still possess political clout are trying to shape the outcomes of current political processes through referencing their pre 89 experiences.

It has proved a struggle to push against the ‘qualified technocrat’ logic despite the exclusive class dynamic it employs, the diaspora is at risk of acting as its main fodder if they are not careful.

EEK: How do you see the relation with South Sudan if a civilian government is formed?

SA: The South Sudanese regime is, like Bashir’s regime, a nightmare. So any civilian, democratic government worth its salt can not in good conscience have good relations with it. But there will be dialogue I imagine since reunification is a not so secret wish of the revolutionary masses. Either way, I hope the civilian administration cultivates care and protection for the South Sudanese, as opposed to their government. Northern Sudan helped create the nightmare they find themselves in and dispossessed them for generations. A public acknowledgment of that, restitution even, to me is key. But this is my own dream, I don’t see it reflected in the revolutionary discourses. The least a civilian administration can do though is restore citizenship to south Sudanese living in the north, and anyone who wants to return to Sudan. Right now those people are living in limbo, as strangers in their own land. And these are some of the most dispossessed and precarious communities in Sudan. They have not managed to make collective demands in the revolution even though many participate in it as individuals. And I don’t see what I suggest above in the Declaration for Freedom and Change or reflected in the proposed interim constitution. The focus is on removing obstacles to reunification, but for me, this is a critical first step, and the decision would have to rest with the South Sudanese.

RM: Both countries rely on each other for political stability, the formula upon with this dependency is built on is unfortunately corrupt. The elite of Sudan need the south’s oil revenue, the southern elite require the experience and resource of Sudan security state to keep their many fractionated militias in line and at bay as pronounced in the recent peacekeeping attempts brokered in the South. However, as Sara mentioned the politics of Sudan and South Sudan aren't exclusive to elite politicking, transnational kinship, internal migration, and displacement, peripheral relations of production all place the south Sudanese interests at the heart of Sudan’s struggle to achieve structural reform.

The reunification agenda is much more complex than reinstating a civilian government, it runs the risk of presenting the South Sudan crisis as one product of the Islamist security state whereas it is much older and reflective of Sudan’s postcolonial class hierarchy in which ethnicity is situated unfavorably.

EEK: Where do things stand?

SA: The FDFC has been pairing up negotiating with the military council with the strategy of “revolutionary escalation”, with the threat of a general strike if there is no rapid progress. On Monday, May 13, the negotiation teams made headway- agreeing on the structure of government and roles. That night, however, protestors on the edge of the sit-in were violently attacked, leading to mass injuries and some casualties. This has caused a political crisis and an atmosphere of anger, fear, and defiance. Negotiations continued the next day and made headway on some issues, notably the composition of the transitional parliament and the length of the transitional period (the compromise is three years). The FDFC also demanded the military investigate who killed the protestors. The FDFC was acting under pressure from the masses on this since many felt the negotiations should be suspended until the killers are brought to justice. The RSF is suspected of carrying out the attack, and as such, the military was asked to keep them away from the area of the sit-in. After making progress that day in the negotiations, the military all of the sudden suspended negotiations today. To me, it indicates an internal crisis. My guess is there is tension between the RSF and the military, but this is as of yet unsubstantiated.

Meanwhile, the FDFC, esp. the SPA, is spending a lot of energy urging people to keep the revolution peaceful. They have also decided on the borders of the sit-in/occupation, which has expanded over the last month to cover a massive area well beyond the military HQ. They are trying to reign it and concentrate it so its borders can be secured and better defended.

RM: An internal rift in how the revolutionary process towards a civilian ship is managed can be discerned if you look closely, this to me is perhaps the most accurate measurement of the competing and uneven power dynamics within the revolution’s camp as well as in relation to the TMC and other counter-revolutionary forces as well as their implications post-revolution. A preoccupation with the specter of political Islam as a tool of governance amongst the liberal left has suppressed alternative narratives on redistribution in relation to antique power relations.

For many at the sit-in at the barracks the outcomes and style in which the negotiations were conducted did not meet their revolutionary thresholds, early calls to boycott and scale up the peaceful resistance through a countrywide political strike that brings things to a halt was perceived to embolden the popular’s authority sending a message to counter-revolution camp that winning through concessions is impossible. The DFC was more reluctant to scale up things despite the public signals and opted to test the political grounds instead. Where it isn't lost on the public the unseriousness of the TMC in handing over power in good faith, its leaders should be able to recognize this more clearly. The absence of a formal narrative in response to these pertinent issues of what model to employ and what the limits of concessions should be as well as a channel to communicate the youth’s frustration is both problematic and opportune, mostly because it creates a space for the masses to question all elite politics left and right in relation to their aspirations and choices. After weeks of disgruntlement among the revolting masses, the SPA called for a mass strike after their latest negotiation round faltered. The response from almost all sectors overnight has been overwhelming, which speaks to a collective sense of responsibility and resistance amongst the Sudanese, a strong bargaining chip if used correctly. While the political strike no doubt will secure concessions on the part of the TMC the DFC must be strategic in terms of how they will use the last card under their belt. The strike has provided a renewed opportunity, especially the youth (40 and younger) to assert their contribution and voice in relation to the developments, whether to the DFC or Hemedity, their signed signs speak loud.

by David McNally

It has become clear that the Marxist critique of the state is once again in disfavour in many parts of the left. Sometimes this disfavour disguises wholesale political accommodation to the nation-state (e.g., with those on the left who oppose calls for open borders and smuggle in some kind of ostensibly "left" argument for "nicer" immigration controls). But, beyond this, there is a new "realism" on the left that accuses the Marxist critique of the state of being "utopian." This line of argument often attacks the metaphor of "smashing" the state for not understanding that some state services ought to be preserved in a post-capitalist society. In this case, we may be dealing with a genuine intellectual muddle about some fundamental concepts, rather than a bad faith attempt to discredit. In the spirit of engaging this debate in good faith, I begin today a series of reflections on the theme of Marxism and the state.

***

I

Marx’s approach to the problem of the state is immersed in radically democratic commitments. As early as 1843, in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the state, Marx informs us that authentic democracy (which is to say radical, direct, participatory democracy) “is the first true unity of the particular and the universal.” In contrast to authentic democracy, the state in modern society is an *abstracted* social force, a power outside the control of the people, one that stands over and against it (in an authoritarian and anti-democratic relationship to the demos). Anticipating his analysis of alienated labour (and of value in capitalist society), Marx focusses on how a human creation—the state—has come to dominate its creators. For this reason, he describes genuine democracy as the *disappearance* of the state. “In modern times,” he writes, “the French have understood this to mean that the political state disappears in a true democracy.”[1] Marx highlights the phrase “political state disappears” in his text. And that highlighting is at the heart of a genuinely revolutionary socialist approach to the state. The victory of the working class against capitalism means the dis-alienation of political power, its reconstitution as the power of the people. It means the end of the state as a power separate from, abstracted from, the people. In short, “the political state disappears.” All talk of breaking and superseding the state is based on this conception: that the victory of revolutionary socialist democracy constitutes the transcendence of the state. This victory over the state is the defeat of political alienation—its breaking by the power of the people, the demos. 

II: Preliminaries on Colonialism and War 

Marx’s theory of the modern state developed in its earliest stages by way of critical engagement with Hegel’s political philosophy. Of course, the young Marx already understood that the modern state expresses the dominance of a new form of private property (see his articles on the Wood Theft Debates[2]). But this insight did not yet constitute a theory of the modern state as such. 

The importance of Hegel’s doctrine of the state had much to do with its sustained engagement with classical political economy. Through the latter, Hegel arrived at the conclusions that the modern capitalist economy systematically generates over-production, poverty, and an expansionary drive toward colonization.[3] Colonialism is for Hegel a product of the inherent contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist economy. It is necessary to the modern state, rather than merely a particular policy choice. In the final section of his text, Hegel then examines the “individuality” of the modern state, arguing that it contains no inherent drive toward universal law and world peace. Instead, each state asserts its independence in opposition “to other states”—which leads to the inevitability of war.[4]

For Hegel, in other words, this is a constitutive feature of the state in a capitalist world system. It follows that the drives toward colonialism and war are inherent in the modern state as such (a recognition that is arguably fatal to all reformist approaches to the capitalist state).

In his existing commentary on Hegel’s theory of the state (1843), Marx does not deal with either of these sections of The Philosophy of Right. But he had certainly studied them, and there is little doubt that he was reflecting on them. However, in 1843 he had not embarked on his critical encounter with classical political economy and was not yet in a position to systematically address these issues. By the time ofThe German Ideology (1846) we find him taking them up.

As he develops the materialist conception of history in Part One of The German Ideology, Marx briefly turns to the question of the state. Here he rehearses his earlier argument that a distinctive feature of the modern state is the form in which it becomes “a separate entity” that stands over and against society (which is why he had argued that true democracy will require the “disappearance” of such a state).

He then adds that bourgeois political power must organize itself in this way “both for internal and external purposes.” We need to attend closely to what is being said here. The modern state, says Marx, organizes the social power of capitalist property against all subaltern classes within its territory *and* against all other states. The modern state expresses class domination and inter-state rivalry. As Hegel recognized, states exist in a system of many states, and the relations among these states are inherently conflictual. External force and violence are thus as much inherent features of modern state power as are internal force and violence against subaltern classes.

Along these lines, in an earlier passage in The German Ideology, Marx had written that the system of modern private property “must assert itself in its external relations as nationality and internally must organize itself as state.”[5] In short, the modern state is a nation-state. It is a state that projects sovereign power within its territorial bounds, and one that asserts itself as “nationality” in opposition to other nation-states. It follows, as it did for Hegel, that militarism and war are inherent elements of modern power.

To be sure, Marx’s thinking about colonialism and war was quite undeveloped at this point. He was still in the early stages of developing his theory of capital, primitive accumulation, and the world market. After Marx’s death, Engels would start to discern the drive toward war among the European powers of his day. And notwithstanding a number of shortcomings in their theorizations, it was the merit of the likes of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Lenin, and Bukharin to understand that drives to imperialism and war were fundamental to capitalism as a world system. I hope to return to these debates in a future post.

For the moment, let us note that the most sophisticated case for left-reformism in the early twentieth-century broke with both sides of Marx’s argument. In that, it at least displayed a certain (reformist) consistency.

In arguing for the use of the institutions of the capitalist state for “socialist” purposes, Karl Kautsky, leader of the “centre” current in German Social Democracy prior to World War One, proclaimed that his party would eliminate “none of the political ministries” of the existing state. Consistent with this, he developed his theory of “ultra-imperialism,” according to which a drive toward world peace, not war, was the inherent logic of international capitalism. Ironically, his celebrated example of this trend was the United States of America.

I plan to examine these issues at more length in subsequent reflections. For the moment, however, it is important to recognize that no adequate theory of the capitalist state can focus on the national level alone. “The” state must be analysed in terms of rivalry among many states. Precisely because it is organized “as nationality,” the capitalist nation-state expresses an antagonistic logic toward other states. Of course, this logic is a highly differentiated one, based on the systematic relations of dominance and subordination that define a world of imperialism and (post)colonialism. It follows that these relations are constitutive of the modern capitalist state, not accidental features that can be wished away on the road to a post-capitalist society.

III: The Bureaucratic-Military State vs. Radical Democracy and the Socialist Commons

So diminished have become the political horizons of much of the left in the neoliberal era that many have become captives of what Engels once called “a superstitious reverence for the state and everything connected with it.”[6] This is expressed in a knee-jerk defence of all that appears “public” in capitalist society as if it represents anti-capitalist beachheads.

Here, a watered-down “left” thinking unwittingly joins hands with the mainstream media in identifying state services with socialism. Just last week, for instance, a columnist in the Houston Chronicle intoned that “The United States has several socialist programs, including Social Security and Medicare.”[7] The absurdity of this statement ought to be apparent. It seems, however, that this absurdity can no longer be taken for granted on the left.

For instance, in light of my critique of the state, one critic opined that I should logically oppose partially-socialized medicine under capitalism. Since that is a nonsensical claim, let me state what should be self-evident. Every socialist worth their salt (critically) supports programmes that make life in capitalist society any bit easier for poor and working class people. But we are entirely capable of doing so without confusing such programs with socialist achievements. We steer clear of such confusion by insisting on the inherently anti-democratic form of the modern state. This allows us to sharply differentiate real public control from state ownership and direction.

Here, we are following in the tracks of Marx’s insights in his 1852 text, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. This is a critically important work on many levels. But I want to focus on just one aspect of it: Marx’s analysis of the stiflingly bureaucratic nature of the modern state. Indeed, it is in the course of this analysis that Marx introduces the idea of “smashing” the capitalist form of political power.

“THIS APPALLING PARASITIC BODY”

In the seventh chapter of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx turns his sights to the character of the capitalist state in France—a state that had recently crushed a workers’ uprising (1848) and consolidated itself in the 1851 coup led by Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon Bonaparte’s grand-nephew). Marx points out how this state massively concentrates power in the hands of the executive. Marx then denounces this “enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million.” These troops and bureaucrats, he observes, are subject to no authority other than that of the president and his executive officers.

Marx declares that this state suffocates the social life of the people. He describes it as an “appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores.” Noting that these structures emerged under the absolute monarchy of the 18^th century, he insists that the French bourgeoisie took over and “perfected” this bureaucratic-military form of state, adapting it to capitalist purposes.[8]

Ah, but what of all the public works undertaken by this state—from schools and universities to bridges and publicly-owned railways? Surely Marx saw these as progressive? On the contrary. He argues that all these were formed by severing them from the common interests of the people--*alienating* them from the people by ensconcing them in the hands of the state bureaucracy. As a result, “Every commoninterest was straightaway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher, generalinterest, snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of the village community to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France.”[9]

Rather than romanticize these “public” services and enterprises, Marx is scathing about their alienated form. These state operations have been “snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves.” Rather than communally-operated lands, schools, and universities—public services subject to democratic, community control—all these have been severed “from the common interests of the people.” Marx is here radically distinguishing between state ownership and communal ownership. The latter represents social property belonging to and regulated by the people. “Public” services and enterprises administered by the modern state, on the other hand, are merely controlled by a bureaucracy that chokes off the democratic life-blood of real communities of people.

“INSTEAD OF SMASHING IT”

It is in the context of analyzing the alienated character of the modern bureaucratic machinery of modern government that Marx introduces the idea of “smashing” the state. Since 1789, he claims, “all revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.” In the great uprisings of 1830 and 1848, all parties simply sought “possession of this huge state edifice.”

But because Marx’s conception of socialism was a radically democratic one, he knew that a workers’ revolution could not succeed if it simply sought “possession” of the bureaucratic state.[10] The anti-democratic structures of such a state would undermine all efforts to radically democratize social and political life—if its military structures did not do so first. This is why the bureaucratic and military structures of the modern state would need to be dismantled, superseded ... “smashed.”

Let me here add two quick points. First, as I shall explain in a forthcoming post, Marx’s metaphor of “smashing” must be read dialectically. There is nothing in it of a nihilist rage for destruction. Instead, what needs to be “smashed” are inherent obstacles to the construction of a democratic and communal form of social life. Marx imagines the dismantling of bureaucratic and military obstructions to a radical democratization which will bring about the withering away of the political state.

It is absolutely true, secondly, that Marx did not lay out any clear programme for such a smashing or dismantling in The Eighteenth Brumaire. It would only be in light of the uprising of French workers in 1871, and their creation of a new Paris Commune, that he would come to outline some basic principles of a workers’ state. But already, nearly twenty years prior to the Commune experience, he had identified the modern state as a suffocating, bureaucratic structure that undermines “the activity of society’s members themselves” and suppresses “the common interests of the people.” In so doing, he foregrounded the construction of thesocialist commons rooted in the democratic self-activity of the people as fundamental to the political project of revolutionary socialism.

[1]Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” in Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 88.

[2]Available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Rheinishe_Zeitung.pdf

[3]G.W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, Part 2, Section C.

[4]Ibid., Section 3, Part AII.

[5]Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, 3^rd. ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 99.

[6]Friedrich Engels, “Introduction” to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, ed. Hal Draper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 34.

[7]Chris Tomlinson, “Demanding a fairer form of capitalism is not the same as socialism,” Houston Chronicle, February 22, 2019.

[8]Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), pp.121-22.

[9]Ibid., p. 122. Because of the inanity of some responses I have received to this line of argument, let me state that it does not follow that Marx wants to “smash” railways and schools. But it does follow that dismantling the bureaucratic-military state involves *transforming* all state institutions into genuinely public ones.

[10] On the democratic character of Marxian socialism, see Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, volume one (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).