malcolm bull
LEVELLING OUT Equality currently functions as a shared ideal in both political rhetoric and philosophy. No politician calls for ‘a more unequal society’, and within political theory philosophers of almost every persuasion advocate some form of egalitarianism. The consensus is now so broad that many consider it the presupposition of meaningful political debate, and the universal basis on which governments are held to account by their citizens. Seen from what, following Dworkin, is often termed the ‘egalitarian plateau’, there is little indication that the period during which equality has functioned in this way is one in which global inequalities have
remained stubbornly unchanged. [1] In this respect, the image of an egalitarian plateau perhaps conveys rather more than is intended窶馬ot just the flatness of the surface, but also the way in which a plateau stands above the surrounding landscape. There is obviously a distinction to be made between the egalitarian plateau as a level playing field for theoretical discussion, and the egalitarian plateau on which people might seek to live their lives. However, theoretical equality is the basis on which actual inequalities are routinely justified, and the boundaries of the two overlap insofar as the greatest actual inequalities are to be found between those who are the subjects of theoretical concern and those who are not. [2] Around the edge of the
plateau is the precipice of relevant difference, into which fall all those to whom its egalitarianism is inapplicable. In recent years these boundaries have become the focus of lively philosophical debate, and, to a lesser degree, public contestation. Moving from the ablebodied human citizens of the nationstate who currently inhabit the plateau, these discussions have spiralled out to include the disabled, resident aliens, would-be migrants, the citizens of other countries, the members of other species and, hypothetically, the inhabitants of other planets. Supposing that we discovered the inhabitants of another planet to be living in circumstances less favourable than our own, would their small green heads or distant abode be relevant differences? Should not a
consistent egalitarian be committed to a redistribution of goods in favour of needy space aliens, and, if necessary, bring them back to share the dwindling resources of planet Earth? [3] These attempts to move beyond the egalitarian plateau do not necessarily have a common agenda. Not only does the currency of equality (legal status, opportunity, resources, capability, or welfare) differ from one case to another, but so too does the theoretical justification for extending it. The position of resident aliens is of more concern to communitarians, free migration to anarchists and libertarians; global equality is espoused, very cautiously, by some egalitarian liberals, while equality for animals appeals mostly to utilitarians and so on.
Although all of these philosophies find common ground on the plateau, their efforts to move beyond it have diverse motivations. Nevertheless, criticism of these moves is recognizably a variation on a single theme. The root objection to both egalitarianism itself and attempts to extend its range is that, taken too far, equality will result only in pointless levelling. All egalitarians view with equanimity the prospect of making the relatively well-off worse off, and levellers do so even if no one else will benefit. Luck egalitarians are committed to eliminating the benefits of sheer good luck, and if they are prepared to equalize rather than merely neutralize its effects, they are open to the accusation that they want to make us all equally
unlucky. What could be more pointless than that? In addition to objections to levelling down within a given population, there are objections to levelling out between populations, which argue that there has to come a limit beyond which a smaller population at a higher level has to be preferable to a larger one at a lower level of welfare. The two types of argument are rarely considered together in that the first functions primarily as an objection to egalitarianism and the second to utilitarianism. However, juxtaposing them may reveal something that is obscured when taken separately, namely the extent to which levelling down and levelling out may be linked.
In what follows, I will briefly discuss a series of debates for and against political revolution in which questions of levelling down and levelling out become entwined. They are all from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which egalitarian social change was largely brought about either as a result of revolution or in the attempt to pre-empt it. While the contemporary discourse of egalitarianism contains few echoes of this history, critiques of egalitarianism rehearse the accusation of destructive levelling that was long the critique of revolution itself. Might this discrepancy reveal something about the contours of the egalitarian plateau? And does the critique perhaps retain the negative impression of an egalitarianism more comprehensive and far-reaching than its contemporary variants?
A secret path Equality has had no fiercer critic than Nietzsche, whose ‘fundamental insight with respect to the genealogy of morals’ is that social inequality is the source of our value concepts, and the necessary condition of value itself. [4] His rejection of equality is unequivocal. He distinguishes himself absolutely from the ‘levellers’ and ‘preachers of equality’. [5] There is, he claims, ‘no more poisonous poison’: ‘it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice’, for ‘men are not equal’. [6] However, Nietzsche’s antiegalitarianism is not unnuanced. He does not reject equality based upon attributes that people actually share,
only the imputation of equality in the face of obvious differences of strength and weakness: ‘“Equality for equals, inequality for unequals”—that would be the true voice of justice’. [7] He therefore accepts equality up to a point; it is just that his understanding is restricted to the flat summit of ‘good men’ who, ‘inter pares’, [8] are constrained by ties of reciprocity. But whereas ‘the good are a caste, the bad [are] a mass like grains of sand’. [9] For Nietzsche, the problem with egalitarianism is not that it acknowledges equality within these two groups, but rather that it erodes the distinction between them by making equal what is unequal: ‘Are we not . . . well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand!’ [10]
The metaphor proved to be a significant one for Nietzsche, because it simultaneously suggests a result, ‘the desert’ of nihilism, [11] and the nature of the process through which it occurs. According to Nietzsche, nihilism means that values become devalued. [12] Because value is created by valuation, and valuation, as will to power, requires social difference, the way devaluation takes place is ultimately through social change. Making empty is the result of making small. A ‘law-like communism’ in which each must recognize every other as equal would therefore be ‘the destruction and dissolution of man, an attack on the future of man, a sign of exhaustion, a secret path towards nothingness’. [13]
The path originated, Nietzsche suggests, in the idea of equality before God. The human species endures only through sacrifice, for evolution requires that the weak perish. However, with Christianity, ‘all souls became equal before God’. This was ‘the most dangerous of all possible evaluations’, for by designating all individuals as equal, and valuing the sick as much as, or more than, the healthy, it undermined the justification for human sacrifice, and so ‘encourages a way of life that leads to the ruin of the species’. [14] For Nietzsche, there is a clear route that leads from the New Testament’s ‘war against the noble and powerful’ [15] to the atrocities of the French Revolution: The aristocratic outlook has been undermined most deeply by the lie of
equality of souls; and if the belief in the ‘prerogative of the majority’ makes revolutions and will continue to make them—it is Christianity, let there be no doubt about it, Christian value judgement which translates every revolution into mere blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated: the Gospel of the ‘lowly’ makes low. [16] The road that leads from ‘the lie of the equality of souls’ via the French Revolution to the ‘ruin of the species’ is the path of nihilism. But is it, as Nietzsche implies, also that of egalitarianism? Permanent revolution
What is the belief ‘that makes revolutions and will continue to make them’? Is it equality, as Nietzsche claims? This, at least, was the assumption of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. Even before Thermidor it had become a commonplace to say that the revolution was over. When, for example, Le Chapelier put forward his law limiting workers’ associations, he argued that they had been useful while the revolution lasted, but were superfluous now the revolution had finished. [17] To such suggestions the conspirators responded that the revolution was not over as long as there were more people who could be made equal: ‘one single man on earth richer, stronger than his like, than his equals, and the equilibrium is broken: crime and unhappiness are on earth’. Far from
being finished, the revolution was nothing but the precursor to a still greater one. [18] The revolution had to continue because there were more people to be included amongst the equals and, if necessary, it would continue even at the expense of that level of culture or equality that already existed. Maréchal may have gone beyond some of his comrades in proclaiming: ‘Let the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains’, [19] but Babeuf too was clearly a leveller. He suspected that the counterrevolutionaries in the Vendée had been decimated by Jacobin forces in order to facilitate the distribution of resources amongst a smaller population, and argued that a true egalitarianism required not a reduced population in
order to sustain a higher level of equality amongst those who remained, but rather shared deprivation for all. [20] Babeuf’s argument here is precisely that which Nietzsche attributes to egalitarians: equality precludes the possibility of sacrificing some people for the benefit of others. Yet the target of Babeuf’s remarks is not the ancien rÊgime, but rather the egalitarianism of the Jacobins themselves. The point of equality, he suggests, is not making some limited number of people more equal, even if they constitute a majority, but rather making as many people as possible equal, even if that means a lower level of equality for all. The revolution must continue not so much because equality is imperfect, but because its scope has been too limited.
Reflecting on Babeuf’s ill-fated project, Proudhon recognized the issue Babeuf was trying to address, but he did not see Babeuf’s programme as the solution, complaining that it ‘reduced all citizens to the lowest level’. [21] And as such, Proudhon argued, it was inegalitarian rather than egalitarian—though in the opposite sense to that in which the term is usually understood, for whereas ‘property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; community is the exploitation of the strong by the weak’. [22] Marx also criticized the primitive communism of Babeuf as motivated merely by the desire to level down, [23] but nevertheless identified strongly with the idea that revolution must continue; not perhaps, as Maréchal had argued, for as long as there was one man raised above his equals, but at least as long as
one class was raised above the rest. As he famously remarked after 1848: ‘it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, [and] the proletariat has conquered state power’. [24] Marx’s simultaneous rejection of Babeuf’s communism and acceptance of his motivation for continuing the revolution requires explanation. The ultimate basis of this move may perhaps be found in Pufendorf’s threefold distinction between private property, positive community and negative community. [25] This meant that there were potentially three ways for equality to be realized. If property is private, each individual will have whatever they
have in equal shares to the exclusion of every other proprietor. In positive community, where property is in common ownership, each individual will have exactly the same as all other proprietors, to the exclusion of nonproprietors. While in negative community each individual, without exclusion or exception, will have equal access to resources but no property rights, either individual or collective, because property, as such, will not exist. As Pufendorf pointed out, the key difference is the question of exclusivity: Both positive community as well as proprietorship imply an exclusion of others from the thing which is said to be common or proper . . . Therefore, just as things could not be said to be proper to a man, if he were the only being in the
world, so the things from the use of which no man is excluded, or which, in other words, belong to no man more than to another, should be called common in the former [negative] and not in the latter [positive] meaning of the term. [26] The unfolding narrative of revolution reflects these distinctions. To the Jacobin acceptance of private property, Babeuf has juxtaposed a form of positive community. Both Proudhon and Marx explicitly criticized him on this basis. [27] But whereas Proudhon favoured a synthesis of positive community and private property, Marx seems to have looked beyond positive community to a form of communism that was still more inclusive and utopian, a form of negative community governed
by the principle ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. [28] However, Marx postpones the realization of this community to the post-revolutionary transition from socialism to communism, and offers a conception of permanent revolution that itself potentially contains two limits, the proletariat and the state. The discrepancy did not go unnoticed. If the revolution was over when the proletariat controlled the state, what of those outside the proletariat and beyond the boundaries of the state? As Bakunin noted, Marx conspicuously excluded from the agents of revolution the Lumpenproletariat, ‘that great mass, those millions of the uncultivated, the disinherited, the miserable, the
illiterates . . . that great rabble of the people’, and by affirming the role of the state re-inscribed the chief limitation of the Jacobin republic itself, which ‘hardly knew man and recognized the citizen only’. [29] In contrast, Bakunin advocated ‘the emancipation and widest possible expansion of social life’ by which he meant ‘the natural mode of existence of the human collectivity, independent of any contract.’ Society therefore included not only those inhabitants of a state excluded from full citizenship, but also the rest of humankind, beyond the borders of the nation-state. [30] One of Bakunin’s followers drew the obvious conclusion: ‘The revolution cannot be confined to a single country: it is obliged under pain of annihilation to spread’. [31]
Trotsky’s reformulation of the idea of permanent revolution picks up both of Bakunin’s objections. Believing that ‘The proletariat, in order to consolidate its power, cannot but widen the base of the revolution’, [32] he argues that ‘permanent revolution . . . means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule . . . a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society’; and just as there can be no class limit, so there can be no national boundary: ‘the socialist revolution begins on national foundations—but it cannot be completed within these foundations’. Every limit must be sloughed off by society, ‘revolutions . . . do not allow
society to achieve equilibrium’; rather, ‘society keeps on changing its skin’. [33] Although one is concerned with economic and the other with political goods, there is a parallel between the argument made for an ongoing revolution in order to end exclusion from property, and the argument made for a form of permanent revolution that will prevent exclusion from revolution itself. In both cases, there is a potential limit—represented by positive community and socialism in one country—which is exceeded not on the basis that those outside the limit are necessarily the equals of those within, but rather that the existence of the limit perpetuates a form of inequality which otherwise might not exist. Rather than making access dependent on a certain
level of productivity or a certain level of development, negative community and permanent revolution offer to the unequal (unproductive individuals, undeveloped classes and peoples alike) access to that on which they might not otherwise have a claim. The parallel serves to highlight the changing relationship between inclusivity and equality in the earlier example. In the Conspiracy of Equals, equality demanded a greater inclusivity which potentially resulted in the loss of social goods or diminished access to finite resources. Marx’s alternative to the levelling down involved in positive community goes a stage further. Negative community may level out so completely that it dissolves everything it touches. For this reason, as Pufendorf
notes, critics argued that it was ‘opposed to human, that is, rational nature, appropriate only to animals, and unsocial’. [34] If anyone can just take what they need, the ideal of egalitarian inclusiveness is extended to the point where it dissolves the concept of property, and with it the possibility of equality, or any form of distributive justice. Eventually, of course, negative community undermines species-being itself. Down and out This genealogy reveals the steps through which the idea of permanent revolution might be articulated, and the potential objections to it. First, there is levelling down within a given population of the kind advocated by the
Conspiracy of Equals. This is simple egalitarianism, open to the criticism that if equality makes nobody any better off it is effectively pointless (indeed, that it becomes impossible to specify the sense in which equality really is better). Second, there is Babeuf’s point that a larger population at a lower level of well-being is preferable to a smaller one at a higher level. This is something other than simple egalitarianism: it assumes equality but also makes an implicit appeal to total utility, or at least to the happiness of the greater number. The potential objection to this type of argument is the implication that having an enormous number of people living lives barely worth living would be better than even a very large population with a very high quality of life, a possibility Parfit has called the repugnant
conclusion. Finally, there is Marx’s rejection of egalitarianism in favour of a version of negative community in which resources are available to all in proportion to need. Negative community does not presuppose equality at all, and so objections usually take a Malthusian form. If there are no boundaries and uncontrolled access to finite goods then a society is vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons, in which the resource in question diminishes and eventually disappears due to the absence of any restrictions on its use. [35] Although these arguments are philosophically distinct, a couple of simple thought experiments show how one might lead to the next. For example, in response to levelling down objections, Jonathan Wolff has offered a case in
which levelling down appears to be justified. [36] Suppose you are the mayor of a small town in a southern state in the United States. Your town has one swimming pool and no funds to build another one. The state legislature passes a law on the racial segregation of swimming pools. You are opposed to racial segregation, so you close the town pool. No one is any better off as a result and the white population is worse off, but it was nevertheless the right thing to do. Wolff argues that this is indeed an example of levelling down, and that levelling down may sometimes be reasonable on account of the symbolic importance of the issue. But is this, in fact, what makes the example plausible? Wolff assumes that his is a same number case and that we
are simply moving from inequality to equality within a fixed but racially mixed population. However, the argument is explicitly constructed in such a way that it is not sensitive to any actual inequality within a given population—it is not necessary that there should be any black swimmers who are prevented from using the pool (indeed he specifies that the black population may be indifferent to its closure) or indeed, that the small town in question should currently have a black population (though the location of the example in the southern us implies the possibility that it might have). The argument would be equally valid even if no black person had ever wanted to swim in the pool, i.e. even if there was currently no one to whose level the white swimmers were reduced.
The essential steps in the argument involve: 1. An original population enjoying some benefit: the white people who, under state law, are allowed to use the pool; 2. An additional population who do not enjoy it: the black people who, under state law, are not allowed to use the pool; 3. A combined population who do not enjoy it: a racially mixed population unable to use the pool because it is closed. The argument therefore appears to be sensitive not to inequality in the original population, but rather to the number of additional people involved, and the ease with which they might be included in a
combined population. Even if justifiable, the mayor’s decision would lose some of its plausibility if there were only one individual excluded from using the pool, however unjustly (e.g. because of the personal prejudices of the state legislators); or if the category of persons excluded, however numerous, were not remotely likely to use it (e.g. the native population of a remote Pacific island). In no case would anyone at all be gaining any benefit from the closure of the pool, but the mayor’s decision becomes easier to justify the larger the additional population of nonbeneficiaries and the greater the plausibility of uniting them with the original one. Rather than hinging on its symbolic import alone, Wolff’s example appears
to smuggle in an unspecified but significant number of extra people of sufficient proximity to appear relevant to our assessment of the argument. It is not so much a case of levelling down within a racially mixed population, as of levelling out between a small racially exclusive population and a larger racially mixed one. As such, it points to the possibility that what we might take to be examples of levelling down are often examples of levelling out, and that they owe at least something of whatever appeal they have to their ability to accommodate a larger population at the lower level. Cases of this kind are actually very common, and it is easy to see how they might eventually switch from levelling out to negative community. For example,
suppose that you are planning a large and expensive birthday lunch with some close friends. You then think of a couple more people you really want to invite, and so realize everyone will have to have smaller portions. The extra people all ask if they can bring a friend, and you decide you will have to change the menu. Then it dawns on you that with so many people coming, many others will be aware that you are having the party and may feel excluded. You decide to invite anyone who wants to come, and put up a notice: ‘It’s my birthday. Join the celebration.’ Realizing there might not be enough to go round, you add a ps: ‘please bring and share a bag lunch’. Repugnant conclusions
Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox provides a more formal account of this sort of progression, and of the potential problems with it. In its simplest form it starts with a population of equals at a high level, adds some extra people at a lower level outside the existing population (say, the inhabitants of a previously undiscovered continent or planet), equalizes the two groups separately (not necessarily levelling them down), and then unites them to form a single larger population at a lower level than the first equal population. If you are comfortable with each of these steps, and repeat them, you eventually end up with the repugnant conclusion. You will in effect have created a Utility Monster (a term Parfit borrows from Nozick) capable of devouring all the goods in the world in
order to distribute them ever more thinly—an outcome distinct from but similar in effect to a tragedy of the commons which assumes scarcity but not equality. [37] It is important to note, however, that we cannot arrive at this destination just by levelling down. In levelling down, just as much as with equality inter pares, there is a limit below which no one may fall, namely that of the worst off in the initial population. The repugnant conclusion can only be reached if the level to which a population has been levelled down is transformed into the level from which it levels out. Only in levelling out, where extra people are added at every step, is there no limit to how low you can go. But in order to level out, there has to be some
acceptance of extra people at a lower level. The cumulative dynamic is therefore not so much egalitarian as extra-egalitarian in that it explicitly favours a move from egalitarian to inegalitarian distributions. It both exceeds and stands outside egalitarianism, while always presupposing and returning to it. What would such an extraegalitarianism involve? One way to describe it would be as the conjunction of two principles: (1) individuals or groups within a collectivity should be as equal as possible, even if no one is any better off as a result; (2) there is nothing wrong with extra people, even if they are not equal to those included already. The first is an egalitarian principle open to a levelling down objection: how is it
better for people to be equal even if no one is any better off? The second, in its most obvious philosophical form, is a total utilitarian one open to an egalitarian objection: why allow inequality where none existed before? All extra-egalitarianism does is use one to justify the other: levelling down is justified by increased numbers; increased numbers by further equality. Levelling out furthers both equality and utility, but not at the same time. Given that the repugnant conclusion might be defended on some conjunction of egalitarianism and utilitarianism, what is repugnant about it? The most widely cited objection to both levelling down and levelling out is that they undermine value: levelling down removes the inequalities that are
necessary to generate particular things of value, while levelling out progressively removes all possibility of higher forms of value from the world. Maréchal’s ‘Let the arts perish . . . ’ acknowledges and accepts the consequences of the former argument, but most commentators have followed Nietzsche in considering it unacceptable. Even an egalitarian like Thomas Nagel admits to striking a mildly Nietzschean note when he argues that a society which supports creative achievement and encourages maximum levels of excellence will have to accept and exploit stratification and hierarchy, and that ‘no egalitarianism can be right which would permit haute cuisine, haute couture and exquisite houses to disappear’. [38]
Similarly, Parfit, though rejecting the Nietzschean view that it would justify great suffering, nevertheless argues that ‘even if some change brings a great net benefit to those who are affected, it is a change for the worse if it involves the loss of one of the best things in life’. [39] He therefore imagines the Mere Addition Paradox as a series of steps in which the best things in life disappear one by one. In common with most modern philosophers, he supposes the best things in life to be aesthetic. So at the first, Mozart’s music is lost, then Haydn’s; then Venice is destroyed, then Verona, until eventually all that is left is a life of muzak and potatoes. The sequence may be personal, but the nature of the examples is meant to be uncontroversial. Along the way, any of these irreplaceable things might be
taken as the unacceptable loss, the limit beyond which no more extra people could be added. Alternatively, each step could be taken as a means of dispensing with these valueless luxuries once and for all, just as the expanding guest list in the earlier example effectively disposed of plans for a grotesquely expensive lunch. Even Wolff’s case raised a question it did not appear to address: why does this small town need a swimming pool? This is why Nagel complains that ‘it is not always easy to prevent egalitarianism . . . from infecting other values’. [40] And it is for just this reason that Nietzsche identifies egalitarianism as nihilism’s secret ally. But as Nietzsche also points out, there is nothing nihilistic about equality itself; it only becomes so if the
less than equal are introduced into the equation and everyone is levelled out. Passive revolution Is this how revolution works? One way to answer the question is to look at another potential Utility Monster, Plato’s great beast. In the Republic he derides the Sophists for merely echoing the opinions of the multitude: It is as if a man were acquiring the knowledge of the humours and desires of a great strong beast he had in his keeping, how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several sounds it is wont to utter on the occasion of each, and again what sounds uttered by another make it tame
or fierce, and after mastering this knowledge by living with the creature and by lapse of time call it wisdom, and should construct thereof a system. [41] There is, Plato argues, no difference between this and the man who takes on board the political and aesthetic judgements of the crowd, and is then compelled ‘to give the public what it likes’. Thereafter, the great beast became the symbolic embodiment of levelling down in the interests of the multitude. Thomas Browne calls it the ‘great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion’, and Nietzsche himself refers to the promised socialist utopia as the time when ‘the day of the bestiatriumphans dawns in all its glory’. [42]
Could such a creature be transformed from reductio ad absurdum to revolutionary paradigm? At least one intellectual trajectory suggests that it might. For Vincenzo Cuoco, the Neapolitan political writer who was himself a protagonist in the short-lived Parthenopean Republic of 1799, Plato’s great beast may have offered an alternative model for revolution. Although the author of a philosophical novel titled Platone in Italia, Cuoco rejected ideal republics as too utopian, instead arguing that any successful revolution must gratify the wishes of the people: ‘This is the entire secret of revolutions: know what it is that all the people want, and do it’. [43] However, although Cuoco saw no other way of activating a revolution than that
of inducting the people, he acknowledged that there were two ways this could come about: if the revolution is active, the people unite themselves with the revolutionaries; if it is passive, ‘the revolutionaries unite themselves with the people’. [44] Of the two, Cuoco considered active revolutions the more effective because the people acts of its own accord and in its own interest, whereas in a passive revolution ‘the agent of government divines the spirit of the people and presents to them what they desire’. [45] To the objection that it is impossible to know what the people want, because a ‘people’ does not speak, he advocates precisely the technique that Plato mocked the Sophists for following when they made a system of the sounds uttered by the great beast— noting and interpreting other less
articulate expressions of the popular will and then acting accordingly. Although a people stays silent, ‘everything speaks for it: its ideas speak for it, its prejudices, its customs, its needs.’ [46] Taking on the opinions of the people is the way to expand the base of the revolution. Indeed, the two operations are potentially identical. The only way to co-opt the people is to allow yourself to be co-opted by them, even when, as Cuoco makes clear was the case in Naples, the people are the ‘lazy lazzaroni’, Marx’s Lumpenproletariat. [47] The Neapolitan revolution did not fail because it was a passive revolution; rather, it was a failed passive revolution, where the interests of the revolutionaries and the people were irreconcilable.
Gramsci claimed that Cuoco’s use of ‘passive revolution’ was no more than a cue for his own. [48] But read as a version of the great beast, the continuities between Cuoco and Gramsci emerge more clearly, and with them the possibility that passive revolution might be more than a type of failed revolution or prototype of counter-revolution. In order to explore this possibility, it is necessary to return to the beginning of the narrative, the point at which the history of revolution first appeared to have come to an end. Gramsci maintained that the French Revolution ‘found its widest class limits’ in the Jacobins’ maintenance of the Le Chapelier law. It was for this reason that the Jacobins ‘always remained on
bourgeois ground’. ‘Permanent revolution’, which the Jacobins appeared to be initiating, had reached its limit. Paradoxically, however, Gramsci argues that ‘the formula of Permanent Revolution put into practice in the active phase of the French Revolution’ later ‘found its “completion” in the parliamentary regime’, which ‘realized the permanent hegemony of the urban class over the entire population’. This was achieved through a combination of force and consent, widening the economic base, and absorbing successful members of the lower classes into the bourgeoisie. In this manner, ‘The “limit” which the Jacobins had come up against in the Le Chapelier law . . . was transcended and pushed progressively back’. [49]
According to Gramsci, something similar occurred in the Risorgimento, which was also characterized after 1848 by the formation of an ever more extensive ruling class. In this case, too, ‘the formation of this class involved the gradual but continuous absorption . . . of the active elements produced by allied groups—and even those which came from antagonistic groups and seemed irreconcilably hostile’. The result could be described as ‘“revolution” without a “revolution” or as “passive revolution”’. [50] For in a passive revolution ‘the thesis alone in fact develops to the full its potential for struggle, up to the point where it absorbs even the so-called representatives of the antithesis: it is precisely in this that the passive revolution or revolution/restoration consists’. [51]
Juxtaposed like this, Gramsci’s arguments carry the clear implication that permanent revolution is or can only be completed as ‘passive revolution’. It is an inference that he never explicitly makes, and it is one his commentators decline to draw as well, yet it is suggested not just by historical analyses, but by his own fragmentary attempts to reconcile his conceptual frameworks. His basic conceptual opposition is between the war of movement and the war of position, and he identifies the former with the concept of permanent revolution, and the latter with the concept of hegemony. [52] However, where ‘hegemony is rule by permanently organized consent’, [53] like that realized by the urban class over the entire French population under the parliamentary regime, it may function as
the completion of permanent revolution represented by the Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor. Hence, it is consistent for Gramsci to claim that ‘the 48ist formula of “Permanent Revolution” is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of “civil hegemony”’. [54] But Gramsci not only identifies the war of position with civil hegemony, he also identifies it with passive revolution. He asks himself whether Cuoco’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ can be related ‘to the concept of “war of position” in contrast to “war of manoeuvre”’, and whether there may be historical periods in which there exists ‘an absolute identity’ between them in which ‘the two concepts must be considered identical’. [55] Gramsci clearly thinks
so and identifies Europe post-1848 and 1871 as examples. So if the war of manoeuvre gives way to the war of position, in which permanent revolution is transcended by civil hegemony, does this not also imply that permanent revolution is transcended by passive revolution? Gramsci avoids this implication for a reason, namely that he wants to save the concept of passive revolution for specifically counter-revolutionary attempts to co-opt the forces of revolution to its own ends—the restoration, the state-led passive revolution of the Risorgimento, and fascism itself. But in fact there is no reason why the concept of passive revolution cannot be considered as politically neutral as that of the war of
position, or of hegemony itself. And this becomes clear in the threefold distinction Gramsci makes between (1) the ancien régime, whose ruling classes ‘did not construct an organic passage from other classes into their own, i.e. to enlarge their class sphere’; (2) the bourgeoisie, which ‘poses itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level’ but which has become ‘saturated’; (3) a class really able to assimilate the whole of society that would bring about ‘the end of the State and of law—rendered useless since they will have exhausted their function and will have been absorbed by civil society’. [56] Both the latter two are classic passive revolutions, absorbing their antitheses. The difference between
them is that the former, bourgeois revolution is a raising up which of its very nature must reach a limit or point of saturation, whereas the proletarian version of passive revolution, which culminates in the end of the state, has no lower limit. If these passive revolutions are differentiated only by being limited or limitless, then this carries the implication that if any passive revolution were to continue indefinitely, it would inevitably become permanent revolution. A class that absorbs its antithesis (passive revolution) will, unless it reaches saturation, become the class that absorbs the whole of society. (As the state is of its very nature a class state, the class that absorbs the whole of society will also reabsorb the state into
civil society.) According to Gramsci, the state in the West is ‘only an outer ditch’, behind which lie the robust institutions of civil society. [57] On this analysis, that outer ditch marks the class limit that restricts the scope of passive revolution; as the state is reabsorbed, the ditch becomes an open border, and Gramsci’s account of permanent revolution regains its nihilistic edge. Extra-egalitarian Do these fragments from the history of revolution provide glimpses of Nietzsche’s secret path? Nietzsche’s critique of egalitarianism highlights both its nihilistic potential and the role of inclusivity in realizing that potential. He identifies egalitarianism with nihilism on the basis that if value
presupposes inequality, equality must undermine value. But his argument suggests that even if equality is a form of nihilism, nihilism is not necessarily always egalitarian. To the question: what is egalitarianism and where are its limits?, Nietzsche answers that there are two types: the egalitarianism of mutual recognition between equals, and the egalitarianism of levelling down. Both have an internal limit, but in the latter case the limit may be used to pivot from levelling down to levelling out, opening up equality to those below the existing threshold. Egalitarianism in this sense is incompatible with equality as a state, in that it is constantly prompting revaluation in favour of the less than equal, and returning to equality only via inequality.
Each of the fragments above describes a moment of disequilibrium when the argument pivots from levelling down to levelling out. Such moments appear within the revolutionary tradition in the moves from equal property to negative community, from revolution to permanent revolution. Less obviously, they are reflected in the transformations of the great beast. In Plato, the great beast is merely an illustration of levelling down. In the aftermath of revolution, a further possibility emerges: the level to which society has been levelled down might be the level from which it levels out. Cuoco picks up the idea of an inarticulate people absorbing the elite, and turns it into the idea of passive revolution in which the revolutionary elite absorb the people, taking on their opinions in the process.
In Gramsci’s hands, this process of extending the class base of revolution is implicitly identified with permanent revolution, a revolution that ends by dissolving the state and with it the possibility of revolution itself. Although it might be assumed that egalitarianism lies at the heart of the revolutionary project, the dynamic described above is not so much egalitarian as extra-egalitarian in that it both exceeds and stands outside egalitarianism, even when presupposing it. Unlike telic egalitarianism, extraegalitarianism is not a one-shot political project. Indeed, it is not clear that equality is the point of extraegalitarianism at all. It is never satisfied with it, and it would be possible to devise a non-egalitarian form of
levelling out that did not require equality to be realized at any stage. If extra-egalitarianism has a point, it may be closer to what Nietzsche calls nihilism. There is, as its critics point out, something distinctly negative about any form of egalitarianism that goes beyond a concern to make the poor better off. But the type of negation involved in extra-egalitarianism is rather different. What makes it nihilistic is not just the loss of value (either in the form of particular goods or average utility) but the potential disappearance of what at the start of the process is the good being distributed. Yet to some extent, history suggests that the revolutionary tradition has actually been inspired by the idea of advancing to that point where the absence of limits negates the existence
of those things the limit seeks to preserve and distribute—property, class, law or the state—and which equality serves to maintain precisely because it presupposes them. There is indeed a sense in which, as Nietzsche said, this is the ‘secret path to nothingness’. But is this a destination to be avoided at all costs, or does it rather say something about the justification of extraegalitarianism itself? There obviously comes a point where we are all dead, but in cases where all involved still have a life worth living, it is possible to question the value of the things that we take to be social goods. In which case, equality represents not a utopian distribution, but a form of socially realized scepticism about value. Equality already functions like this in
the case of positional goods, where sharing in, and diminishing the value of, are effected simultaneously. Extraegalitarianism takes this further: it implicitly registers the ambiguity of all goods, and transforms questions about value into questions about need. Viewed in this light, the egalitarian plateau takes on a different significance. The various attempts to extend the plateau may together represent a larger political project than any embodies individually. If the plateau has the contours of a saturated passive revolution, attempts to go beyond it contain the promise of a permanent one, reaching out across the uneven terrain of the universe. If so, this would suggest that the egalitarian plateau is itself not just the ground of political debate, but,
as a community whose collective but exclusive possession is equality itself, that which stands to be demolished.
[1] Sudhir Anand and Paul Segal, ‘What Do We Know about Global Income Inequality?’, Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 46, no. 1, March 2008, pp. 57–94. [2] See Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, ma 2006. [3] Cécile Fabre, ‘Global Distributive Justice: An Egalitarian Perspective’, in Daniel Weinstock, ed., Global Justice, Global Institutions (Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary volume), Calgary 2005, pp. 139– 64.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Oxford 1996, 1.4; hereafter gm. [5] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, New York 1966, 44; Thus Spake Zarathustra (hereafter z), Harmondsworth 1969, p. 124. [6] Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (hereafter ti), Harmondsworth 1968, p. 102 (48); z, p. 124. [7] ti, p. 102 (48). [8] gm, 1.11 [9] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Cambridge 1986, 1.45. [10] Nietzsche, Daybreak (hereafter d), Cambridge 1982, 174; cf. z, p. 189. [11] Nietzsche, Will to Power (hereafter wp), New York 1967, 603. [12] wp, 2.
[13] gm, 2.11. [14] wp, 246. [15] wp, 208. [16] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Harmondsworth 1968, 43. [17] Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Les citoyennetés en révolution, Paris 1992, pp. 81–2. [18] Sylvain Maréchal, ‘Le Manifeste des Egaux’, in Philippe Buonarroti, La Conspiration pour l’égalité, dite de Babeuf, vol. 2, Paris 1957, pp. 94–8. [19] Maréchal, ‘Le Manifeste des Egaux’, pp. 94–8. [20] Gracchus Babeuf, La guerre de la Vendée, Paris 1987, pp. 90–6.
[21] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, Cambridge 1994, p. 100. [22] Proudhon, What is Property?, p. 197. [23] Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, Early Writings, London 1975, p. 346. [24] Marx, ‘Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League’, in Jon Elster, ed., Marx: A Reader, Cambridge 1986, p. 270. [25] See Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, London 2002, pp. 162–76; Stedman Jones draws on István Hont, ‘Negative Community: the Natural Law Heritage from Pufendorf to Marx’, unpublished paper, 1989. [26] Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo, vol. 2, Oxford 1934, p. 535. [27] Proudhon, What Is Property?, p. 196; Marx, Early Writings, p. 347.
[28] Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Elster, ed., Marx: A Reader, p. 166. [29] Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The International and Karl Marx’ [1872] and ‘Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism’ [1867], in Sam Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy, London 1973, pp. 249, 117. [30] Bakunin, ‘Statism and Anarchy’ [1873] and ‘Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism’, in Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy, pp. 327, 129, 136. [31] James Guillaume, ‘On Building a New Social Order’ [1876], in Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 378. [32] Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, London 2007, p. 166. [33] Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, pp. 117–20, 119. [34] Pufendorf, De jure naturae, p. 554.
[35] The classic statements of the ‘levelling down objection’, the ‘repugnant conclusion’ and the ‘tragedy of the commons’ are, respectively, Derek Parfit, ‘Equality and Priority’, in Andrew Mason, ed., Ideals of Equality, Oxford 1998, pp. 1–20; Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford 1984, pp. 381–90; and Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, vol. 162, no. 3859, December 1968, pp. 1243–8. [36] Jonathan Wolff, ‘Levelling Down’, in Keith Dowding, James Hughes and Helen Margetts, eds, Challenges to Democracy, Basingstoke 2001, pp. 18–32. [37] Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 419–41, and Parfit, ‘Overpopulation and the Quality of Life’, in Jesper Ryberg and Torbjörn Tännsjö, eds, The Repugnant Conclusion, Dordrecht 2004, pp. 7–22. [38] Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality, Oxford 1991, pp. 135, 132, and 138. [39] Parfit, ‘Overpopulation’, pp. 19–20.
[40] Nagel, Equality, p. 130. [41] Plato, Republic, 6.493. [42] Nietzsche, d, 206. [43] Vincenzo Cuoco, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione di Napoli, Milan 1820, p. 102. [44] Cuoco, Saggio storico, p. 171. [45] Cuoco, Saggio storico, p. 114. [46] Walter Carridi, ed., Il pensiero politico e pedagogico di Vincenzo Cuoco, Lecce 1981, p. 250. [47] Carridi, ed., Il pensiero politico e pedagogico di Vincenzo Cuoco, p. 253. [48] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London 1971, p. 108. [49] Gramsci, Selections, pp. 79–80n.
[50] Gramsci, Selections, p. 59. [51] Gramsci, Selections, p. 110. [52] Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 2, Turin 1975, p. 973. [53] Gramsci, Selections, p. 80n. [54] Gramsci, Selections, p. 243. See further, Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, nlri/100, November–December 1976, pp. 5–78. [55] Gramsci, Selections, p. 108. [56] Gramsci, Selections, p. 260. [57] Gramsci, Selections, p. 238.
kees van der pijl
ARAB REVOLTS AND NATION-STATE CRISIS The shockwaves of popular rebellion reverberating across the Arab world since the start of 2011 have put to the test the West’s dominion over the region; a rule that has long aimed at securing access to the Middle East’s oil and gas, while supporting Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine. The means by which imperial control is exercised were vividly exposed to public view, as Western officials scrambled to ‘stabilize’ the states that had long served as their clients in the region. In Egypt, a favoured destination for cia rendition flights, the annual subsidy of $1.3bn in us military aid since 1979 has famously
bought the Pentagon a direct line to the Army high command, giving Washington a control panel from which to manage the handling of the mass protests. The us Defense Secretary Robert Gates was on the phone to Cairo ‘every few hours’. Daily exhortations from the Obama Administration urged, first, ‘an orderly transition’ with Mubarak stepping down in September; then, as mass pressure grew, ‘an orderly transition now’, to the spymaster, Omar Suleiman; finally, a seizure of power by the Supreme Military Council (smc), an outcome announced to Congress by Leon Panetta, then head of the cia, on February 10, the day before it happened. All pointed to the urgency of American actions in stabilizing the 80-millionstrong centre of gravity of Arab
discontent, through the mechanisms of the post-colonial state. On March 19 the smc, under the leadership of Mubarak’s long-standing Defence Minister Tantawi, rushed through a referendum on constitutional amendments judged to favour the essentially conservative forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and the stillpowerful ndp in the parliamentary and presidential elections to be held later in the year. Further advances since Mubarak’s ouster—the sacking of his Cabinet and dissolution of the State Security Investigations Service, the political police, in March 2011; detention of Mubarak and other officials, and confiscation of the ndp’s assets, in April—have only been wrung from an unwilling smc by continued contestation
from below. Western stabilization has been equally apparent in Egypt’s postMubarak foreign policy. The first act of the smc was to pledge fealty to the 1979 Treaty with Israel, abrogating Egyptian sovereignty even within its own territory. Initial moves to open the border with Gaza were swiftly reversed. In Tunisia, responsibility for controlling the rebellion fell to the eu powers— above all the country’s former colonial master, France. Again, it was the levers of the post-colonial state that were put to use, even as this was contested from below. The first move of Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie was an offer to dispatch French riot police, battle-hardened in the banlieue, to aid their Tunisian counterparts in crushing the mass movement. As the regime
cracked, and former President Ben Ali and his family fled to Riyadh on January 14, the Army secured the streets and government buildings, but strove to keep the existing administration in place—with backing from British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who arrived with promises of aid. A stream of eu officials followed, bearing blueprints for acceptable reforms. It was left to the mass movement to maintain the momentum—fighting on to oust Ben Ali’s Cabinet, on March 4, and push through the dismantling of the State Security apparatus, the dissolution of the old-regime partocracy and expropriation of its assets. Constituent assembly elections are currently scheduled for October 2011.
Stabilization, then, entails keeping the pro-Western dictatorship’s state apparatus in place while removing the figurehead-turned-liability. A variant of the same policy can be seen in the bombing campaign against Gaddafi; British and American spokesmen have made clear that they are not aiming to destroy the Libyan state administration as such, ‘simply’—and illegally—to take out the Gaddafis. Urged on by France and Britain, instigators of the 1956 Suez intervention, and by the most bellicose advisors of the Obama Administration (Samantha Powers, Susan Rice), nato’s aerial onslaught was launched on March 19 and continues, with mounting civilian casualties, at the time of writing. One result has been to stop any independent protest movement in Tripoli in its tracks, while
subordinating the Benghazi leadership to Western diktat. The ultimate outcome remains uncertain, but the intent is obvious: by unleashing its firepower with apparent impunity, the West is out to demonstrate who holds the reins in the Middle East. Elsewhere—Bahrain, Syria, Jordan, Morocco—Washington and its allies have largely restricted themselves to pious calls for ‘dialogue’ with the protest movements. In Yemen, us attempts to shore up a dictator whom the Obama Administration has been arming to the teeth have brought the country to the brink of civil war. Other rulers on the Arab peninsula are judged ‘safe’, for the moment. Washington’s calculation seems to be that the kings and emirs may escape the fate of the
region’s untitled rulers and need only be encouraged to relax their hold. Cameron’s February 2011 trip to the Gulf with a delegation of uk arms manufacturers, hoping to upgrade the arsenals by which Arab monarchs ensure their longer-term survival, followed by a stop-off in Cairo for a photo-opportunity with demonstrators, gives the lie to any sincere concern for the wellbeing of the Arab peoples—a cynicism only underlined by his agitation for unleashing imperial air power against Libya. The ‘fight against the brutal dictator’, whose stubble recently rubbed the cheek of another British Prime Minister, gives the aesthetics of politics a new twist. Imperial gearbox
The post-colonial state itself thus provides a key ‘remote control’ mechanism by means of which the West can determine the direction of countries nominally emancipated from its tutelage. In general, American strategy has been to entrust a client governing class with the keys of the state, on condition that it leave the door open. Within this framework, the West will permit various gradations of popular political expression. The range runs from zero, under a dictatorship, through a middling set of pro-capital authoritarian regimes, to parliamentary representation, in which elections can replace one fraction of the governing class with another, but otherwise leave the social order unchanged. There the gradations stop. This is not to say that popular contestation plays no role: it is pressure
from below that usually necessitates the transition from one category to another. In a revolutionary situation, however, this controlled, step-by-step relaxation of repression becomes unstable; at that point, other forms of imperial intervention may be necessary to ensure that democratic aspirations do not exceed the bounds set by the ‘lock and key’ arrangement with the client governing class—by ‘military action when necessary’. [1] Schematically, we can represent the process by which the West has exercised its dominion over client nation-states as a ‘gearbox’ for managing popular demands. In conjunction with the appropriate fractions of the local governing classes, the gearbox is capable of shifting
between different gradations of coercion and consent. The ‘gearbox of imperial control’ allows the West to adjust the compromise with the client governing class in response to actual popular pressure, in the way the Obama Administration ‘switched gear’ from Mubarak’s autocracy to (the call for) ‘open and transparent elections’. Of course this presupposes that the transmission mechanism connecting the gearbox to the nation-state container remains intact; in the case of Libya today, an often-heard complaint in the West is that such a mechanism had never truly been in place, and that intervention is therefore required in order to create an ‘open door’ state in the first place—regardless of the disastrous results of similar attempts in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The post-colonial nation-states are themselves the products of complex sets of compromises between local (‘westernizing’) nationalists and forces adhering to non-Western forms of authority, as well as between the local governing class and the imperial power. Modern colonialism, it has been argued, won its victories ‘not so much through its military and technological prowess, as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order’. [2] The aspiration for national self-determination has a real popular basis, even if it constitutes only one political goal among others and is embodied in a form, the nation-state, imported from the West in the first place. Irrespective of how this compromise is shaped, however, local interests will find themselves party to a
broader deal that gives the imperial power an in-built advantage: the dominated society is usually kept captive within a post-colonial state structure that is foreign in origin, at best only partially adequate to local circumstances. In most cases an awkward and ill-fitting construct, the post-colonial state has had the task of domesticating and integrating preexisting political processes: regulating and pacifying tribal, nomadic, sedentary or religious forms of authority and community. In the process, it has helped to shape—even as it has itself been shaped by—a specific mode of foreign relations.
The dominion of the West today is often analysed in terms of transnational capital’s ability to entangle prior modes of production in its net; but it is equally urgent to analyse the structures of imperialism in terms of modes of foreign relations. Historically, the
foreign relations between tribes, or the relations between land empires and the nomads roaming their frontiers, were based on entirely different principles to those that have arisen over the past two hundred years under the dominion of the Atlantic powers. The notion of the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state, based on the idea that foreignness can be fully exteriorized from the social body, is incompatible with traditional tribal or nomadic forms of authority. In the contemporary mode of foreign relations, the state is the central mechanism by means of which the directive class can both demarcate a territory in which it is sovereign and control or mobilize the ‘productive power’ of the population within its jurisdiction, in dealing with foreign powers. Just as the West gained a
historical first-mover advantage as the original home of industrial capitalism, so it has retained the upper hand in the international state system, whereby post-colonial nation-state structures developed in the West have been fitted over societies for which that format was not necessarily suitable at all. This raises further questions about the attempts by the us and its allies to steer or stabilize post-colonial regimes in face of the Arab uprisings. For stabilization—keeping the state apparatus intact while removing a Mubarak or Ben Ali—can only be a halfway house. A revolution necessarily involves the seizure of power from a ruling class dislodged by popular revolt. The new power need not be the selfproclaimed vanguard of the next class in
Marxism’s historical progression— Jacobins for the bourgeoisie, Bolsheviks for the proletariat; the 1979 Iranian Revolution was a clear break with that model. [3] But if the existing apparatus is shaken or shattered by popular revolt, yet no group is ready to establish an alternative infrastructure of rule—a task historically undertaken by the political party—then what ensues is an interregnum. Western strategists are clearly determined to prevent this happening, if they can—here with soft prodding, there with air attacks. The attempt to wrest free from oppressive regimes must at some point broaden into a challenge to the entire edifice of Western imperial control. To investigate this vector of Western power in historical perspective may then cast light on the potential and the obstacles
with which the current revolt in the Middle East is confronted, and which it will have to recognize and overcome, if the popular mobilization that is currently unfolding is to evolve into a revolution. Imperial diplomacies The principle of national selfdetermination and the project of colonial imperialism developed in counterpoint to each other from the early 19th century. The Americas had seen the secession of the United States and the Haitian Revolution, following that of France. In Egypt, Muhammad Ali had challenged traditional Ottoman structures from 1805, adapting concepts of nationhood developed during the French Revolution. He dissolved the
artisan and commercial guilds, the Sufi orders and Bedouin tribal structures, as well as the minority religious millas inherited from the Ottomans, appropriating their social initiative on behalf of a dynamic, centralizing state. These events were still resonating in 1813–15, when Europe’s rulers met in Vienna to redraw the map of the Continent after Napoleon’s defeat. The national question emerged here for the first time as an issue to be settled by a conclave of the great powers. Most sensitive to it was Metternich, charged with running an Austrian empire composed of fourteen nationalities, and acutely aware of the destabilizing potential of the ideology of national sovereignty. He also put his finger on a contradiction in the Anglophone idea of individual freedom: ‘One of the
sentiments most natural to man, that of nationality, is itself erased from the liberal catechism.’ [4] From a conservative viewpoint, nationality offered a way to fulfil the requirement of ‘solid weight’, necessary for the Continental balance of power, while defusing the demand for popular sovereignty. The British, too, came to recognize that support for national independence might be a tool to employ as a lever in the inter-state competition against other European powers. Post-Napoleonic France and the united kingdom of the Netherlands and Belgium, both under informal British tutelage, were still attempts to restore the pre-1789 European order. When the monarchs of Europe had to concede a measure of
constitutionalism later in the century, the nation-state form worked to contain the ‘push from below’, as the 1830 Belgian secession would demonstrate. ‘The true function of constitutionalism was to protect the bourgeoisie from the princes, who rejected the revolutionary slogans, and from the masses, who accepted them.’ [5] British sponsorship of nationality, and of a measure of constitutionalism within national confines, drew on the liberal intuition that formal empire may ultimately constrain economic opportunity; Smith had already indicated, in the closing paragraphs of The Wealth of Nations, that losing the North American colonies could be a blessing in disguise. Burke made the case that Europe’s nations should be
judged on their ability to contain the precipitate extension of democracy, whilst safeguarding the hereditary right to property. [6] If class privilege was to be ensured, a balance of interests subject to flexible correction was the best way forward, in both domestic and foreign relations. With the dawn of the imperialist age, this insight began to evolve into an appreciation of how the nationality principle might be used as a tool for British interests. At the Congress of Vienna, Castlereagh made the protection of national minority rights an instrument of London’s foreign policy for the first time: while Poland was ruthlessly partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia, the British Foreign Secretary stipulated that the imperial monarchs recognize its identity by ‘treating as Poles’ the
‘portions of the nation that may be placed under their respective sovereignties’. As well as allowing for the recomposition of a buffer state, this signalled that, should popular pressure ever force the empires to concede democratic demands, a Polish nation would be there to contain them—in the way a compartment in a ship’s hull may contain a leak. France under Napoleon, however, had already indicated an alternative form of national mobilization that Britain would not tolerate: a contender state, driving forward its social and economic development by stimulus or direct control, ‘confiscating’ its civil society and mounting a challenge to the liberal West. Of the other European powers, only Prussia would be able to
domesticate its ascendant bourgeoisdemocratic forces in a comparable nationalist mobilization. Through a revolution from above and a set of brief victorious wars, Bismarck would weld together a united Germany that was truly sovereign, in the sense of not recognizing an authority superior to itself. But as the Napoleonic Wars had demonstrated, the British ruling class would accept the principle of national sovereignty only if actually premised on client status. Indeed, British support for national self-determination would be deployed as often to undercut the hold of modern contender states over fractious subject nations—from Napoleonic Europe to the ussr and today’s prc—as to prey on backward rivals like the Spanish or Ottoman empires.
The Ottoman Empire’s European possessions were particularly vulnerable to British designs, as also to those of Austria and Russia. The capitulations regime had been instituted in the early 16th century, when the Sublime Porte was prevailed upon to grant Francis I a protectorate over French travellers; Britain’s protectorate over the Sultan’s Protestant subjects dated from 1580 (since there were no Protestants, the Druze became the beneficiaries instead). In the 17th century Austria and Russia made similar stipulations, the latter assuming sovereign protection of Orthodox Christian Serbs and Greeks. The Ottoman system of millets had long granted ‘foreign’ communities a measure of local sovereignty within the empire; in the 19th century, however, competing imperialist powers began to
use the capitulations regime to transform the millets into client communities. Attempts by Serbian notables and Greek merchants to gain control over Black Sea tax revenues triggered Russian designs against the Ottomans; for its part, Britain began to shift from balance-of-power conservatism to using national aspirations as a stratagem for gaining access. Castlereagh’s initial reaction when the Greek independence movement erupted in 1821 was the same as Metternich’s: if Russia were to profit from the Greek revolt, the European balance would be thrown into disarray. But Canning, who succeeded him as British Foreign Secretary in 1822, broke with the Holy Alliance, offering tactical support to
national rebellions against the European empires, where it suited British interests. Having vanquished Napoleon, Britain could ‘once again lead the world along the middle path between despotism and revolution’. [7] Naturally, the newfound concern for the national rights of governing classes amenable to London’s imperial aims would not be extended to Britain’s own colonial subjects. A liberal New World? Paradoxically, it was in the Americas that the stabilization of the post-colonial nation-state under Western liberalimperial auspices obtained its modern form. In the vast, thinly populated expanses of the New World, it was not obvious that popular aspirations for sovereignty would be channelled into
nation-building, instead of creating, say, two or three large federations of ‘United States’. This, after all, had been the aim of Bolívar and San Martín, just as it was George Washington’s. Latin America therefore offers valuable insights into the shaping of client nation-states, in the context of the Anglo-American liberal world that was beginning to emerge. The British had been involved in Latin America since the early 18th century, both as commercial interlopers and as mediators. When the Portuguese monarchy relocated to Brazil in 1808, fleeing the Napoleonic threat, the uk secured a commercial treaty that gave British imports preference over those from Portugal. Gaining free access was a prime concern for both Britain and the us; London also floated the idea of an ‘Open Door’ declaration for the region,
although in the end it was left to President Monroe to make the formal declaration of 1823. Canning’s famous comment, the following year, that ‘Spanish America is free and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly she is English’, expressed Anglo-American alignment on a liberal grand design as much as it ruled out re-colonization of the Americas. [8] It was, of course, Napoleon’s conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 1808–10 that prompted cities in Spanish America to declare independence; but the construction of separate Latin American nation-states proceeded within a space already demarcated by British and us interests. The process built on urban nodes which, with their Spanish garrisons, had already acquired some
state-like characteristics. But the incomplete colonization of Latin America left large zones uncontrolled at independence. Here, mestizos, Amerindians, free blacks, runaway African slaves and others, excluded from the life of property and honour associated with urban residence and legitimate titles, were involved in cattleranching and illegal commerce. These activities in turn were protected by armed bands of smugglers, caudillos and other private ‘providers of violence’ who often made a crucial contribution in fighting the Spanish. The exigencies of frontier life produced shifting political loyalties, with the presence of large Amerindian populations often tipping the balance.
The new governing classes faced the task of completing the colonization process under their own steam and disciplining unruly frontier populations that did not fit easily into the nationstate format. Whether in the Americas or in the Eurasian land empires, the demarcation of frontiers typically cut across economic and cultural networks with people ‘on the other side’. As a result, loyalties could be split and populations might identify with either nation. Only when the struggle for independence spilled into fratricidal wars over state boundaries were territories demarcated along ‘national’ lines, as internal foreign relations blended into class compromises. Wars to settle matters that remained unsolved at independence were ferocious and
protracted in Latin America—just as the Civil War was in the United States. Britain’s informal empire in Latin America made it a silent partner in many of these conflicts; the us was also involved early on. That the new nationstates in the south were part of an informal hierarchy was never in doubt. As us Secretary of State John Quincy Adams made clear to Bolívar in 1824, the Monroe Doctrine ‘must not be interpreted as authorization for the weak to be insolent with the strong’. The us refused to attend the Pan-American conference convened by Bolívar in Panama two years later. Instead, there began a long line of interventions and actual annexations (Mexico, Puerto Rico), while Britain took the Falklands/Malvinas in 1833 and tripled
its Honduran territory at the expense of Guatemala in 1836. The us and Britain controlled not just the circulation of goods and capital, but also the bandwidth of popular sovereignty in each separate country. In most cases, this remained at the bottom end of the scale. Only since the 1980s, after the darkest night of state terror had passed, did the us switch to allowing ‘free and fair elections’—unless the expected results were deemed incompatible with Western interests. Flags and rights In the first half of the 19th century, British diplomacy’s use of the national question—adapting a conservative version of the French revolutionary or anti-colonial model to the requirements
of global dominion—was still essentially tactical and intuitive. Yet there were also acknowledged principles involved. The natural rights-based concept of civic nationality, within which ethnic associations become secondary, had a long pedigree. The idea of innate rights was formulated by landholders against the Norman kings, and projected across England and Wales in the centuries following the Conquest. Under the Tudors, state-building and overseas expansion became part of a single process. Thomas More and Erasmus reformulated the notions of civility and Christianity in universalistic terms; the Reformation added a popular, ‘national’ inflection, without removing the universalistic context. In a striking anticipation of the transnational society on which the Anglophone West was to
be erected, Francis Bacon compared the fate of Sparta, which had jealously guarded its ethnic purity, but whose proverbial valour had in the end been undermined by insufficient numbers, to that of the Roman empire, which welcomed foreigners and, indeed, entire nations as citizens: Their manner was to grant naturalization (which they called jus civitatis), and to grant it in the highest degree . . . Add to this their custom of plantation of colonies, whereby the Roman plant was removed into the soil of other nations . . . It was not the Romans that spread upon the world, but it was the world that spread upon the Romans; and that was the sure way of greatness. [9]
This was a powerful appreciation of the fact that, in projecting power over a larger, oceanic space, the ethnicities of those populating it were not necessarily of the first importance—as long as the claim to global dominion could be upheld. On the contrary, indifference to ethno-political or political-religious allegiances could lend a truly universal quality to the Anglophone liberal project. This perspective underlay the policy of creating nation-states as containers that would accommodate the demand for popular sovereignty while placing it under a specific control regime, with government devolved to friendly client elites. Inspired by the innate-rights doctrine actualized in the jus civitatis of the British Empire, the new nation is ideally a province of the Anglophone dominion first, and ‘ethnic’
or otherwise particular as a community only in the second instance. As the Latin American experience demonstrated, ‘responsible government’ could be exercised by non-Anglophone governing classes, respectful of British and us interests. More claimants to selfrule were bound to arise. The English geographer, Halford Mackinder, noted in 1904 that the projection of dominion would ultimately have to adjust to a world of separate states. Unlike the empire–nomad mode of foreign relations, under which ‘every explosion of social forces’ is ‘dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos’, the trend would henceforth be towards a filling up of all spaces under territorial sovereignties. Any social conflict will thus
be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence . . . Probably some halfconsciousness of this fact is at last diverting much of the attention of statesmen in all parts of the world from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency. [10] The us, as it assumed the mantle of liberal cosmopolitanism, replicated the interpretation of rights-based nationality in an even more radical version; the particular notion of the jus civitatis was here intensified by the anomie that accompanies migration, as successive cohorts of new arrivals were socialized into the settlers’ civic, pseudo-ethnic ‘Americanism’. No doubt each was
soon accumulating its own class and other experiences; yet they still shared the notion of a deterritorialized, rightsbased nationality, in combination with the specific constitutionality articulated by Locke. This larger politicaleconomic space can be understood, borrowing Mackinder’s terminology, as a ‘heartland’ from which liberalism— and, grafted on its particular constitutionality, capitalism—would begin their spread to the rest of the globe. In the process, however, the strategy of finding and grooming client governing classes ran into a movement coming from the opposite direction, articulating popular sovereignty from below. The nationalisms from below inevitably brought alternative interpretations of
community, loyalty and citizenship. This was most obviously the case with the contender states challenging the liberal order. In France, the Revolution had proclaimed a jus soli, birthright citizenship or law of the soil, prefiguring similar secular-republican structures elsewhere. This Enlightenment concept had influenced the notion of citizenship in the Americas, albeit that in the United States, the individual as a bearer of rights comes first, the citizen of the republic second. In the French conception, the law prevails over individual interests because it enshrines the general interest, whereas for liberalism, ‘there is a confrontation between particular interests (the dominant ones) and the collective interest’. [11] In the German lands that emerged from the Napoleonic
dominion, the jus soli in turn was challenged by the jus sanguinis, ancestral belonging or law of blood. This concept of nationality, with its roots in tribal foreign relations, in combination with the sacred qualities ascribed to territory, would legitimate some of the worst excesses of ‘exteriorizing the foreign’; it remains the nationality principle of Hungary, Japan and—until very recently— Germany. These different principles of nationality, as well as the uneven development generated by the spread of capital, have informed and complicated the struggle between the Atlantic ruling class and democratic forces seeking to emancipate themselves from its political-economic supremacy. Communist contenders
Foremost among these contenders were challengers from the Marxian left. The first articulation of the principle of national self-determination here dates from 1865, when the London Conference of the First International adopted a resolution to counter the ‘invading influence of Russia in Europe’ by ‘applying to Poland “the right of every people to dispose of itself”’, and to re-establish that country ‘on a social and democratic basis’. [12] Yet the national question always carried a certain ambivalence within Marxian theoretical analysis. Marx and Engels generally discussed the issue in terms of the broader political consequences of categorical positions. While the Communist Manifesto had famously proclaimed that ‘the workers have no fatherland’, Marx pointed out to Engels
in a letter of 1866 that this cosmopolitanism could easily turn into a silently assumed hegemony of a dominant nationality. [13] The theoretical terms for analysing such an inter-state hierarchy were not developed beyond sketches and fragments, however. The appeal of the International lay in its critique of capitalist exploitation, and when subsequent generations of Marxists aimed their arrows at imperialism and militarism, they generally did so by building on that critique. Debates focused on how national selfdetermination could be either neutralized or instrumentalized to facilitate a workers’ revolution—if it were not altogether rejected as an issue of concern to the labour movement, as
in the case of Luxemburg. The AustroMarxists—concerned to ‘solve’ the national question without breaking up the Dual Monarchy’s territorial integrity, so as to retain sufficient land mass for an advanced socialist economy— proposed to institute cultural autonomy, through a passport system that entitled bearers to the use of their national language and everything that flowed from that. Otto Bauer pointed out in 1907 that granting territorial selfdetermination to migrant workers’ communities would merely set off a chain reaction of endless national struggles, as capital recruits increasing numbers of workers to be employed away from home. [14] Against this, Lenin argued that socialists should advocate the right to territorial
secession and nothing less. The Bolsheviks rejected the Austrians’ assumption that national distinctions would endure. Lenin thought them a feature of the epoch of bourgeois revolution; once their demands were met, they would lose their political salience. In order not to be outflanked by nationalist demands from other parties in countries where this was still a key issue, the workers themselves should support the right to secession. Would it not be better for Ukrainian workers to conquer power on such a programme, secede from Russia, and return into a revolutionary federation of their own will, rather than keep them ‘inside’ and negotiate rights that would inevitably be limited? [15]
Such radical internationalism would obviously only work in the context of an advancing world revolution. Once the Bolsheviks were forced to retreat, the right to secession was compromised, too. As a contender state facing the liberal heartland, the ussr perforce adopted aspects of the Austro-Marxist programme; the resulting blend of a restricted territorial approach with a subordinate cultural autonomy would eventually contribute to the relatively smooth dissolution of the ussr into fifteen separate nation-states, each containing sizeable minorities, after 1991. With hindsight, this reveals the contradiction at the root of the Marxist strategy. The politics of foreign relations was approached tactically and polemically, while the transformation of the capitalist economy and the
transcendence of class society was theoretically elaborated in depth. The Russian Revolution occurred just as Washington was taking over the leadership of the Atlantic heartland from London. us strategy would be sustained by a formally anti-imperialist, profreedom ideology. From an early date, Woodrow Wilson advocated a policy of channelling democratic aspirations into arrangements compatible with Western interests: The East is to be opened and transformed whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which had stood still the centuries through are to be quickened, and made part of the universal world of commerce and of
ideas . . . It is our particular duty, as it is also England’s, to moderate the process in the interests of liberty; to impart to the peoples thus driven out upon the road of change . . . the habit of law . . . which we long ago got out of the strenuous processes of English history; secure for them, when we may, the free intercourse and the natural development which shall make them at last equal members of the family of nations. [16] In 1917, called upon to respond to the evolving political crisis in Europe after he had led the United States into the Great War, Wilson declared that national self-determination should be the guiding principle: ‘That no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine
its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.’ [17] Of course, as with the us warning to Bolívar ‘not to be insolent with the strong’, so here, too, ‘the little’ were not expected to challenge the overall order laid down by the great and powerful. The Bolshevik Revolution threatened to turn this upside down. The revolutionary government declared an end to hostilities on the Eastern front, instructing Russian soldiers to fraternize with their German opposite numbers, and published the Tsar’s secret treaties, exposing the machinations of the interstate system and thereby jeopardizing popular support for the Western Allies. Tens of thousands of German-language
newspapers were printed in Petrograd for distribution among the German soldiers, in the hope of kindling a revolution. As Trotsky arrived in BrestLitovsk to discuss the terms of a peace with Germany, Lenin and Stalin, the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, issued an appeal to the ‘labouring Muslims of Russia and the East’, annulling the Tsarist 1907 partition of Persia with Britain, the partition of Turkey and the seizure of Armenia. When the Brest conference opened, Trotsky issued an appeal, not only to the workers, but also to the ‘oppressed and bled peoples of Europe’. [18] Wilson’s crusade Yet if Marxist positions on national selfdetermination remained essentially
tactical, the Western perspective was strategic. Indeed it was at this point that the sponsorship of nation-building by the Atlantic powers mutated from an intuitive, eclectic approach to a scientific one. In the summer of 1917 Wilson had instructed his chief-of-staff ‘Colonel’ House to assemble the group of experts that would be known as ‘the Inquiry’, to help formulate us strategy for structuring the post-war world. The President himself proposed his young advisor, Walter Lippmann, as its secretary; Isaiah Bowman, Director of the American Geographical Society, and Columbia historian James Shotwell were influential members. Equipped with detailed maps, studies of Europe’s national movements and demographic and economic data, the team set about sketching frontiers that would grant
self-determination without creating new rivalries. The Inquiry produced its final draft on 22 December 1917, the day the Brest conference began. On 8 January 1918, Wilson gave his Fourteen Points speech, with Points 6 to 13, on national self-determination and territorial questions, adapted from the Inquiry report. [19] Wilson’s strategy put the resources of the United States behind a project of imperial global governance, in which nation-states carved from the defunct empires would operate as clients of the West against Bolshevism. This was the moment at which the us formally projected a rights-based jus civitatis as universal principle, laying the foundations for an ‘international community’, configured around the
Lockean heartland, that would uphold such rights against illegitimate authority. It was this system which was to prevail at Versailles. The Soviet leadership had no difficulty highlighting the selectivity with which the Americans applied this principle, with the obvious aim of creating a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe against revolutionary Russia. ‘You demand the independence of Poland, Serbia, Belgium, and freedom for the people of Austro-Hungary,’ Karl Radek wrote in an exchange of notes between the Bolsheviks and Wilson in September 1918. ‘But strangely we do not notice in your demands any mention of freedom for Ireland, Egypt, India, or even the Philippine Islands.’ [20] Of course, the Wilsonian vision was never meant to serve the cause of genuine sovereign equality; it was intended to
secure Western dominion, isolating and confronting any contenders, while opening up other societies to free access, not just economically but also politically. The us, followed by the major European powers, now also formally subscribed to the principle of electoral representation for the large mass of the population. This was a historical turning point; Wilson’s Crusade for Democracy effectively set in place the graded system of popular enfranchisement, at least in the advanced Western countries. If the actual implementation of electoral reform in Europe was soon derailed, as a result of the intensification of class struggles, this only confirmed that the world had not so much been ‘made safe for democracy’ as compartmentalized
into nation-states, ideally operating on lines compatible with general rulingclass interests. This was certainly the case in the Middle East, where France and Britain carved today’s nation-states from the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, recruiting new governing classes to offset the power of local Sunni notables. No concession was made to democratic aspirations, beyond playing off different elites against each other. In Central Europe, the unstable parliamentary systems created in the revolutionary aftermath of the Great War soon collapsed into dictatorship. The hand of the West was not entirely absent from these events, but the indigenous ruling classes did not need outside support to understand the nature
of the threat they faced. The prospect of socialists garnering majorities in elections inspired the organic intellectuals of the conservative ruling classes to develop ideas about restricting or manipulating democracy early on. In Italy, the neoMachiavellians led by Gaetano Mosca advocated mobilizing mass sentiment by a language of existential struggle, an aesthetics of politics invoking civilization, destiny and war. In Germany, Carl Schmitt elaborated on the need for a state of exception to prevent general suffrage being used for a socialist transformation. But it was Joseph Schumpeter, in his 1942 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, who formulated the notion of an electoral system restricted to a choice between trusted ‘democratic elites’ that
would become a key element of American strategy in the post-war period. Cold war projections After the Second World War, the Atlantic powers faced the problem of extending the concept of rights-based citizenship to a ‘global community of nation-states’. [21] The remaining European colonial empires had to be dismantled in face of the changing balance of forces, above all the potential for alternative national sponsorship by the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. Once again, the unspoken rule of the decolonization process was one of class compromise between neo-colonial overseers and aspirant national bourgeoisies, even when masked by
militant independence struggles. India offered the paradigmatic example for this process. The Congress-led agitation for independence was never intended to go beyond ‘generating pressures for better and better compromises with the foreign overlords’, leading to the ‘most advanced compromise’—the withdrawal of British political power. [22] The intellectual underpinning for American strategy in this period was provided by modernization theory—and, more broadly, by the mainstream disciplines of Political Science, Comparative Politics and International Relations. Before the War, Charles Merriam had engineered the marriage of American Political Science to the Rockefeller, Ford and other corporate foundations, through the structures of
large-scale research projects. Merriam’s work provided the blueprint for the blend of authoritarianism and minimal electoralism—without foregoing the option of outright coercion—that would guide American policy towards the newly emerging post-colonial world. In 1953 the Eisenhower Administration established the Committee on International Information Activities, bringing together the cia, Radio Free Europe, a Psychological Strategy Board and members of mit’s Center for International Studies, a dedicated thinktank set up by the cia and Ford Foundation, and headed by the economist Max Millikan. The Committee’s aim was to coordinate the intellectual and political campaign against the ussr. Millikan and fellow economist Walt Rostow, another father
of modernization theory, urged the need to ‘deny the dangerous mystique’ that ‘only Moscow and Peking’ could transform underdeveloped countries. [23] A countervailing programme was needed to help restructure them along liberal Anglophone lines, by identifying client rulers who could be trusted to ‘leave the door open’ and by setting the limits to legitimate political activity, outlawing or neutralizing any attempts at socialist organizing. A vast research project, ‘The InterUniversity Study of Labour Problems in Economic Development’, financed by the Ford Foundation, took on the task. Many of the big names in American post-war Political Science began their careers through this programme; the sheer scale of the operation was
sufficient to establish its intellectual hegemony, working from the assumption that ‘the ideal society was the “managed”, “open”, “affluent” capitalist society of the Western world which had reached its apogee in the United States.’ [24] Those who would be prepared to manage the ‘lock and key’ arrangement from this perspective, however, would in many instances be autocrats and dictators. ‘They are not the people, under normal circumstances, that we would want to support’, Secretary of State Dulles confided in camera to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1953. ‘We would be trying to get somebody else, but in times like these, in the unrest of the world today, and the divided spirit, we know that we cannot make a transition without
losing control of the whole situation.’ [25] How could elections be made ‘free and fair’, yet nevertheless deliver secure results? Robert Dahl’s 1956 Preface to Democratic Theory proposed the concept of polyarchy to describe a functional alternation of rule with majority voting. The parameters of a polyarchic democracy were explored in Political Man (1959) by Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the participants in the ‘Study of Labour Problems’ programme. Lipset argued that the premise for a stable democracy was a ‘common value system’, which would underpin the constitutionally secured alternation of legitimate elites. To qualify for electoral politics, a party must not act as the representative of any
clearly defined class, for if its support base reflects ‘basic social divisions’ too closely, no compromise can be achieved. A country would not qualify as a stable democracy if a ‘totalitarian’—i.e., Communist—party could succeed in winning 20 per cent of the vote, or had done so at any point in the past 25 years. In other words, the criterion for democracy becomes the outcome of the electoral process—a government responsive to us direction, presiding over a society compatible with Western capitalist interests—rather than popular sovereignty as such. Indeed, a stable democracy ‘may rest on the general belief that the outcome of an election will not make too great a difference in society’. [26] Democratization?
The 1960s and 70s, however, were characterized rather by a shift towards dictatorship. The Indonesian military coup of 1965 overthrew President Sukarno and brought General Suharto to power; the ensuing massacres of Indonesian Communist Party members literally eliminated the threat of the left, in the most populous country of Southeast Asia. The us had been closely involved in grooming an alternative client elite in Indonesia, from generals and administrators down to university professors, with the Ford Foundation playing a key role. The Suharto coup was a dramatic example of how to switch back from enlightened autocracy to dictatorship, when popular sovereignty threatened to become a real force. [27] The Indonesian bloodbath was famously applauded by Time
magazine as ‘the West’s best news in Asia’. The gearing back from democracy to dictatorship would continue, notably in Latin America. The Brazilian generals had already proclaimed martial law in 1964; in Chile, Allende’s government was overthrown in 1973; the Argentinian Junta seized power in 1976. This was the context addressed by William Douglas’s Developing Democracy in 1972. It was a mistake, Douglas argued, to think that only dictators could be entrusted with tutelage of their populations. A ‘regimented democracy’ might remove the need for coercion, provided it was bolstered by ‘transplanting mechanisms’, in the form of reliable mass organizations, and the population
exposed to daily information flows to shape their overall outlook. [28] The thinking of Lipset, Douglas and others contributed to the shift in policy advice that accompanied the Reagan Administration’s counter-revolutionary offensive in the 1980s. This involved a move from political developmentalism, central to the discipline of Comparative Politics, to a form of ‘democracy promotion’ in which the West would aim to exert its influence predominantly through ‘civil society’ and the economy. This of course presupposes open access and a liberalized economy, maintained both by the global institutions established by the Lockean West—imf, World Bank and so on—and by client finance ministers, usually now the product of elite American universities.
Yet the very success of the neoliberal project of the 1980s and 90s has also served to impoverish and de-legitimize the state as a structure of social protection. The unleashing of global capital, combined with post-Cold War pressure from the West to ‘open up’, has rendered sovereignty outside the Atlantic heartlands ever more commercialized and fractured, undermining the ‘national containers’ that the West once fostered. The upshot has been to create a generalized crisis of the nation-state on which Western dominion has rested for so long. This loss of underlying structure has been compared to the changes that ‘wracked Europe’ in the 16th and 17th centuries. [29] If this is so, then the transmission mechanism that links Western influence to the operations of a client governing
class risks becoming disconnected; jerking at a broken gearbox makes no sense. Arab challenge The Arab world, in revolt and once again under attack, finds itself in the midst of a triple crisis: the crisis of Western hegemony, the crisis of capital and the crisis of the nation-state. The Arab peoples have had to fend for themselves, in a Middle East dishevelled by creeping privatization, rampant corruption and mass unemployment, with hunger threatening if food prices increase at all. The very conditions of survival in the region are in jeopardy: the fresh water supply is being exhausted, harvest yields are falling, demographic pressures are on
the rise. States are failing even in their role as containers to hold a labour reserve or surplus population. At the same time, the mantras of Pan-Arabism and, more distant already, the Islamic Umma and Caliphate, cannot simply be invoked to right the wrongs of postcolonial state-building under Western auspices. The mid-20th-century advocates of Islamic unity such as Sayyid Qutb or Maulana Maududi, who denounced the nation-state as a blasphemous ‘idol’, underrated the extent to which each of the 57 countries with Muslim majorities had been following its own path already. The catalogue of victories and defeats that shaped a national framework within each jurisdiction cannot just be wished away; they have crystallized their own historical and cultural residues.
As to Arab unity, this is also something that is not simply waiting round the corner, if only Western influence could be rolled back. Throughout their history, the Arabs have been less in contact with each other than is often assumed. As the fighting in Libya at the time of writing highlights, their living spaces tend to be separated by tracts of desert. Hence, if anything like ‘Arab unity’ is to be achieved at some point, Nazih Ayubi has argued, ‘it is more likely to be through a strengthening, rather than a negation, of the territorial states in the Arab world.’ [30] Yet here precisely the current revolt intervenes by assaulting, necessarily, the state structures which have been frozen for decades into dictatorship and autocracy by a compromise between local rulers and their Western overseers. This is not,
then, a revolution in which the social forces associated with a new way of life press forward to take the place of defunct governing classes, no longer able to hold the line. Instead, it may well be that the current storms raging across the Middle East are part of a planetary depression, signalling a structural weakening of the postcolonial state form through which the West has long exercised its control. This is not to denigrate the dedication and courage of those stepping forward, often at the risk of their lives. But as with the leftward turn in Latin America or the democratization of countries like Indonesia, it is hard to overlook in the struggles taking place in the Arab Middle East, not just the loosening of Western supremacy, but also the element of disintegration of the nation-
state, which—once disconnected from the structures of Anglo-American and eu direction, and shorn of their client officials—would be necessary to settle in law, and defend in practice, the sovereign achievements of the popular movements themselves.
[1] In the words of President Clinton’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of Defence for Democracy and Peacekeeping, Morton Halperin; see his ‘Guaranteeing Democracy’, Foreign Policy, no. 91, Summer 1993, p. 106. [2] Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi 1988, p. ix. [3] Though the spectre of class succession was clearly haunting Washington at the time of the
1974 revolution in Portugal, when the Social Democratic leader Mario Soares famously assured Henry Kissinger that he ‘did not intend to become a Kerensky’, to which Kissinger replied, ‘Neither did Kerensky’. [4] Mémoires, documents et écrits divers laissés par le Prince de Metternich, Chancelier de Cour et d’Etat, vol. iii, Paris 1880, p. 431. [5] L. C. B. Seaman, From Vienna to Versailles [1955], London 1964, p. 39. [6] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], in Works, vol. iv, Oxford 1934, p. 67. [7] Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–22 [1946], New York 1961, p. 272. [8] Canning cited in John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ [1953], in E. C. Black, ed., European Political History, 1815–1870, New York 1967, p. 241.
[9] Francis Bacon, ‘The True Kingdom of Greatness and Estates’ [1624], Essays and New Atlantis, Roslyn, ny 1942, p. 127. [10] Halford Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal, vol. 23, no. 4, 1904, p. 422. [11] Jean Liberman, Démythifier l’universalité des valeurs américaines, Paris 2004, p. 21. [12] The General Council of the First International 1864–1866. The London Conference 1865. Minutes, Moscow [n.d.], p. 246. Support for the Polish cause against autocratic Russia, synonymous with the suppression of democracy, had been a central theme for the European left since 1848. [13] Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Engels’, 20 June 1866 in Collected Works, vol. 21, pp. 288–9. [14] Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, Vienna 1907, p. 340.
[15] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Ukraine’, 28 June 1917, in Collected Works, vol. 25, Moscow 1977, pp. 91–2. [16] Woodrow Wilson, ‘Democracy and Efficiency’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 87, no. 521, March 1901, pp. 289–99. [17] Wilson, address to the us Senate, 22 January 1917. [18] Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs, abridged ed., New York 1960, p. 15. [19] G. J. A. O’Toole, Honorable Treachery. A History of us Intelligence, Espionage and Covert Action, New York 1991, pp. 306–7. [20] Cited in Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs, p. 102. [21] Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence, Cambridge 1985, p. 259.
[22] Ajit Roy, Contemporary Perspective, Bombay 1986, p. 29.
India—A
[23] Cited in Irene Gendzier, Development Against Democracy: Manipulating Political Change in the Third World [1985], Hampton, ct 1995, p. 28. [24] Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan, Manchester 1987, p. 196. [25] Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), vol. 5, Washington, dc 1976, p. 387. [26] Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man, London 1969, pp. 32, 48. Small wonder that only the English-speaking West, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Switzerland were considered stable democracies by Lipset’s standards. [27] David Ransom, ‘Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia’, in Steve Weissman, ed.,
The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, San Francisco 1974. [28] William Douglas, Developing Democracy, Washington 1972. [29] Ronnie Lipschutz, The Constitution of Imperium, Boulder, co 2009, p. 8. [30] Nazih Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State, London 2009, p. 148.
INTRODUCTION TO ECHEVERRÍA Bolívar Echeverría (1941–2010) was one of the leading radical thinkers in Latin America, both an imaginative interpreter of Western Marxism and practitioner of its critical methods, which he applied to the continent’s realities. Born in the highlands of central Ecuador—at the foot of the Chimborazo volcano—he grew up in Quito, where he paired a philosophical education with a political one, reading Sartre, Marx and Heidegger while listening to broadcasts from revolutionary Havana. In 1961 he went to study in West Berlin, where he forged links with the student and Third World solidarity movements. In 1968, a few months before the crushing of student
protests at Tlatelolco, he moved to Mexico City, and began teaching philosophy at unam. He was to work there until his death, playing a significant role in intellectual life, notably as a founding editor of the Marxist journal Cuadernos políticos (1974–90). Echeverría also translated into Spanish key texts by Marx, Sartre, Brecht, Horkheimer and Benjamin— ‘The Author as Producer’ (2004), ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (2005). While much of his early work focused on Marx—a translation of the 1844 manuscripts (1974), El discurso crítico de Marx (1986)—Echeverría is best known for his engagement with the question of Latin American modernity. In a series of elegant essays—notably those in Las ilusiones de la modernidad (1995), La modernidad de lo barroco
(1998), Valor de uso y utopía (1998) and Vuelta de siglo (2006)—he argued that modernity in the Americas was characterized by a ‘baroque ethos’, distinct from the ‘realist’ one that marked the advanced capitalist world. It had emerged in the 17th century among the indigenous population, who after the destruction of their own civilizations had to adopt, or better imitate, the cultural forms of the colonizers; a practice of ‘cultural mestizaje’ in which ‘victorious forms are reconfigured through the incorporation of the defeated ones’. The essay translated here appeared in Spanish in the spring of 2010, to mark the bicentenary of Latin American independence. Published only a few weeks before Echeverría’s death, it similarly asks if the region’s nation-states—the hollow
forms of an oligarchic capitalism— might be remade from below, reclaimed through the dynamism of a protean popular identity. bolívar echeverría
POTEMKIN REPUBLICS Reflections on Latin America’s Bicentenary There is no little irony in the fact that the national republics established in Latin America in the 19th century ended up, despite themselves, behaving precisely in line with a model they claimed to detest: that of their own modernity—a baroque modernity that took shape in the Americas during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the hope of
‘modernizing themselves’, the continent’s powerful strata abandoned their own model for one that was more commercially successful—if not the Anglo-Saxon model, then the modernity that originated in France and was imposed on the Iberian Peninsula by Enlightened Absolutism. This compelled them to set up republics or nation-states that did not, could not, turn out as they wanted them to, as copies or imitations of European capitalist states. They had to be something else: representations, theatrical versions, mimetic repetitions of the latter; constructions in which, in unmistakably baroque fashion, the imaginary tends to take the place of the real. These attempts to imitate capitalist production were repeatedly blocked off
by rejection on the part of the ‘invisible hand of the market’, which seemed dedicated to finding a special, ancillary role for Latin America’s ‘state enterprises’ in global capitalist reproduction. [1] Within the contested composition of the capitalist rate of profit, the role of these states was to reduce systematically the proportion that necessarily corresponded to ground rent, thus recuperating for productive capital a part of the surplus value it had apparently generated but then ‘diverted’ to pay for the use of the natural environment forcibly occupied by the landlords (whether private, like the hacendados, or public, like the republics). Thanks to those ‘state enterprises’ and their ‘living forces’, the world-market prices of raw materials and energy—which, together with the
cheap labour at their disposal, formed the basis of their wealth—were notably reduced. In states such as those in Latin America, landowners were forced ‘by circumstances’ to trim their rent, and with it, indirectly, ground rent in the entire Western world-economy—to the benefit of productive capital concentrated in Europe and North America. In so doing, they condemned the mass of money-rent in their own republics to remain a form of mercantile capital, without ever reaching the critical threshold of money-capital required to make the leap into the category of productive capital. They themselves remained, despite the handful of examples of ‘great men of industry and progress’, simple rentiers disguised as merchants and usurers, condemning their republics to the
subordinate existence they have always had. However, even in this reduced form—a discreet ‘bite’ out of that devalued ground rent—the mass of money that the market placed at the disposal of Latin American enterprises and their states was sufficient to finance the vitality of those living forces and the ‘discreetly sinful’ wastefulness of the happy few [2] that gathered around them. The survival of the rest—the quasi‘natural’ populace, the non-full members of the state, semi-citizens of the republic—was left in the hands of wild nature and the magnanimity of ‘those above’; that is, left to a miserly divine will. But above all, the profits of these enterprises and their states were sufficient to lend verisimilitude to the
feeble imitation that allowed the latter to play at being what they were not, to behave as if they were states established by productive capital rather than gatherings of landowners and merchants at the service of the same. Deprived of that key moment or phase in which the capitalist reproduction of national wealth passes through the reproduction of the technical structure of its means of production—its expansion, reinforcement and renewal— the republics that were erected on the territories and populations of Latin America have always been forced to have an overly mediated or indirect relation to capital—the ‘real subject’ of modern history, product of the alienation of human subjectivity. Since the ‘independence revolutions’, these
republics have been dependent on other, larger states, closer to that determining subject; a situation which has meant a substantial reduction of their real power and, consequently, of their sovereignty. The political life that has unfolded in them has thus been more symbolic than actual; nothing that is contested on these stages has truly decisive consequences, or at least none that go beyond the cosmetic. In view of their economic dependency, the Latin American national republics have only been allowed to convey to the domestic political realm the decisions made by capital after these have been suitably filtered and interpreted in the states where capital has its preferred residence. They have been capitalist states adopted by capital only at arms’ length, fictitious entities separated from ‘reality’. [3]
Neo-classical bourgeoisies? In any event, the question remains: is there not cause for celebration in the outcomes today of the foundation two centuries ago of the nation-states in which Latin Americans now live, and which define what they are? Should Argentinians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, etc. not be proud of being what they are, or simply of being latinos? To be sure, even in the midst of the most calamitous loss of self-esteem it is impossible to live without a certain degree of self-affirmation, of selfsatisfaction, and thus of ‘pride’ in what one is, although that satisfaction and pride may need to be so hidden as to be imperceptible. Self-affirmation means reaffirmation of identity; and we may
well ask if the identity of which Latin Americans might be proud amidst their bicentenary celebrations is not precisely that trick identity, apparently capable of reconciling the insuperable contradictions between oppressors and oppressed, that was invented ad hoc by the creators of the ‘post-colonial’ republics after the collapse of the Spanish Empire and the ‘revolutions’ or ‘wars of independence’ that accompanied it. Moreover, this is an identity which, judging by the ostentatiously Bolivarian rhetoric of the mass media, seems to melt into another identity, which possesses the same essence but now with a continental reach: that of an all-embracing nation, the nación latina, which a Latin American capitalist mega-state still in the making would be able to set on its
feet. Examined more calmly, any pride in this identity would have to be of a faltering, broken kind; for we are dealing with an identity suffering from ailments that turn it into a source of shame, provoking a desire to distance oneself from it. The ‘revolution’ of independence, founding event for the Latin American republics that celebrated themselves in 2010, brought a ‘revised and expanded’ version of the abandonment by Enlightened Despotism of the practice of coexistence that had prevailed in American societies throughout the long ‘baroque century’—the practice of mestizaje. [4] Despite the strong hierarchizing effects of the monarchical institutions to which it was subordinated, this practice had tended towards a
relatively open form of integration of the entire social body of the inhabitants of the continent. But then Enlightened Despotism arrived, imported from France. Welcomed by the Hispanicized half of creoles and rejected by the other, ‘indianized’ half, it brought with it the distinction between metropole and colony, with the former consecrated as sole bearer of civilization to its overseas branches. If it was to be consistent, the metropole’s way of life had first to be distinguished and separated from those of the natural, colonized populations, in order for these latter modes of life to then be subjugated and annihilated. This abandonment of mestizaje in social practice—the introduction of a Latin apartheid which not only hierarchized the social body but split it into two parts, one invited to participate and the other
rejected—lies at the base of the creation and continued existence of Latin America’s republics. These are republics whose exclusionary or ‘oligarchic’ character, proper to any capitalist state, is exaggerated to the point of absurdity or even selfmutilation. The many who have remained outside them are nothing less than the great population of the indigenous that survived the ‘cosmicide’ of the Conquest, the blacks enslaved and brought from Africa, and mestizos and mulattos ‘of a low sort’. Almost a century later, having cut the umbilical cord binding them to the mother country and unencumbered by peninsular Spaniards, the same Franco-Iberianized creoles who since the first half of the 18th century had imposed themselves
on their ‘indianized’ counterparts— ‘neoclassicals’ winning out over the ‘baroques’—became the dominant class of the republics that are today delighting in their eternal youth. In the 19th century these national republics began to float like arrogant islands over the social body of the continent’s population. The implicit project behind their establishment included one essential task: to resume and conclude the process of conquest begun in the 1500s, which had become distorted during the long baroque century. It is this identity defined around exclusion, bequeathed by the enlightened creoles, that—lightly transformed by two hundred years of history and the conversion of European modernity into ‘American’—was being
celebrated in 2010 to the sound of drums and cymbals, albeit under ‘strict security measures’. This is an identity that could only be seen as a source of pride with the aid of a strong dose of cynicism. Unless, by dint of some powerful wishful thinking, [5] like that which is hanging in the air in South America at present—accompanied by a desperate will for confusion—one sees it as having already been replaced by another, future identity that has been totally transformed and democratized. One can only be surprised by the insistence with which those who today claim to be constructing the new Latin American republic continue to imagine, under the name of the fatherland, a supposed continuum between the marmoreal, neoclassical nation-state and
the ‘natural nation’ itself, with its dynamic, varied and evanescent identity; a continuum which, to put it sarcastically, has consisted in nothing other than the repression of the latter by the former. It is as if they wished to deny all knowledge of the unending, unremitting—though suppressed and unspoken—civil war that has been and still is taking place between the nationstate of the capitalist republics and the Latin American community as such, marginalized and oppressed by these states and thus opposed to them. This is a confusion that serves to obscure the revolutionary meaning of the social movements’ wishful thinking, and to dismiss the supersession of capitalism as the central element of the new republics; those embracing it must content themselves with removing the
destructive component supposedly confined within the ‘neo’ of economic ‘neoliberalism’, restoring economic liberalism ‘without adjectives’ and refurbishing it as ‘capitalism with a human face’. It is a quid pro quo which, assuming a transhistorical identity common to oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, those integrated and those expelled, asks us to judge it a historically ‘productive’ deception, useful for reproducing the unity and permanence that are indispensable to any community with a will to transcendence. A quid pro quo whose abolition would be a treasonous offence against the fatherland. Rituals of denial
From a certain point of view, the bicentenary celebrations are not so much festivals of commemoration as ones of self-defence against repentance. At their foundation, the new republics had a great opportunity: to break with the Enlightened Despotism of the past and recompose the social body that it had sundered in two. Instead, however, they preferred to exacerbate that division—‘last day of despotism and first day of the same’, read an inscription painted on a wall in Quito at the time—giving up the possible integration as citizens of those members of the community whom an enlightened productivism had rejected as ‘dysfunctional’. They decided, moreover, to add to the exclusion a parcellization of the organic totality of the population of the Americas, which
was an undeniable reality despite the geographical difficulties that are so often invoked. Faced today with the catastrophic results of their two-hundred-year history, the least that could be expected of these republics would be a spirit of contrition and remorse. But what they are engaged in is denial and the ‘transformation of vice into virtue’. This self-willed blindness before the unnecessary suffering they caused for so long leaves them far removed from any self-critical attitude, and compels them on the contrary to raise triumphal arches and encourage scholars and artists to compete in historical apologias. Yet amidst all the displays of selfsatisfaction, the celebrations of 2010 could not conceal a certain pathetic
quality; these were ceremonies that betrayed themselves, displaying at bottom the character of spells against a death foretold. Amid uncertainty over their future, Latin America’s oligarchic republics are now seeking a way to restore and repair themselves, even if it involves cynically doing more of the same, squandering the crumb of sovereignty that remains in their hands. They celebrate the bicentenary of their existence and at the same time, without admitting as much, they use the celebrations as amulets to ward off the threat of disappearance that hangs over them. The republican institutional apparatus was designed in the 19th century to organize the lives of the relatively few property-owners, the only true citizens
acknowledged as such by the republics. With the passage of time, however, this apparatus had to be put to political use to carry out another, dual task: it had, first, to deal with matters relating to a ‘social base’ that the republics themselves needed to broaden, which they did by opening themselves in small doses to the structurally marginalized population—but without affecting, much less shedding, their inherent oligarchic character. It was an apparatus condemned to live in permanent crisis. The determination of these suicidal, ‘anti-Lampedusan’ [6] republics to practise a form of ‘internal colonialism’—ignoring the general historical tendency towards the extension of demographic support for democracy—led them to allow their political life to wither until it reached
the bounds of illegitimacy, thus causing the collapse of that apparatus. Expanded and patched up without rhyme or reason, the institutional apparatus was bureaucratized and distorted by having to carry out such a contradictory task; its dysfunctional nature became increasingly acute, to the point where the ruling class itself began to lose interest in it. The elite abdicated the well-paid duties with which capital had entrusted it, and which had turned it into a structurally corrupt, in-bred stratum. It threw to the floor the political chessboard of representative democracy and returned to capital direct, ‘unprocessed’ control over public affairs. The ruling class even shrank itself, until it was no more than an inorganic conglomerate of de facto powers, dependent on other transnational powers
with their mafias of various sorts— whether legal or criminal—and their media manipulators. Practically dismantled and abandoned by its ‘real’ owners, the political superstructure with which these republics originally endowed themselves, and without which they said they could not exist, is today at the centre of a strange phenomenon: it is passing into the hands of anti-oligarchic and populist socio-political movements, which formerly repudiated it as much as or even more than it rejected them. Having ‘won the prize at the fair’, these movements are now looking to break out of their perplexity, hurrying to decide between the alternatives of refurbishing and revitalizing that institutional structure or rejecting it and
replacing it with another. These are dynamic social formations that have emerged within that ‘politicized’ mass of the marginalized and the poor that was generated as a by-product of the socalled ‘democratization’ of Latin America’s oligarchic republics; a mass which, while remaining excluded from republican life, has been semi-integrated into it as a ‘reserve electoral army’. The bicentenary celebrations, proclaimed in unison by all the governments of Latin America’s republics and organized separately in each of them, would appear to be events completely alien to ‘those below’— ‘ancestral’ republican spectacles, broadcast in all their splendour by the television monopolies, which the majority of the population would only
attend as spectators, whether openmouthed, enthused or bored. However, these majorities have made these celebrations their own, and not only to confirm the proclivity for partying for which they are known across the world, but rather to make apparent—often armed only with irony—the reality of exclusion that was being sidestepped by the fiction of the bicentennial republic. The oligarchic nations and their respective, artificially singular and unifying identities, to which different portions of that population only tangentially belong, have been unable to form themselves into totally convincing and agglutinating entities. Their weakness is that of the historic state enterprise that sustains them; a weakness which exacerbates the debility
that gave rise to it in the first place. Two hundred years of living under a state or national republic that systematically marginalizes them, but without letting them escape its gravitational field, have prompted the majority populations of Latin America to appropriate that imposed nationality, and to do so in a singular manner. The national identity of each oligarchic republic has been confected on the basis of the apparently ‘unique’ characteristics of the given state’s human patrimony, settled on that state’s territorial patrimony, with all its particular habits and customs. It is the product of a functionalization of the identities already existing within that human patrimony, adapting and popularizing said habits and customs to
meet the requirements of the state enterprise in its economic struggle with other states on the stage of the world market. The indisputable arbitrariness, the unnecessary character, of the national artifice is in evidence in Latin America with much greater frequency and much more starkly than in other historico-geographical situations within capitalist modernity. But it is an arbitrariness that, besides weakening the state, has effects of another order. It is the instrument of a modern civilizational project, repressed within existing modernity, concerning the identitarian self-affirmation of human beings. Not only was the Mexican or Brazilian ‘natural nation’ not replaced by the nation-state of these countries; rather, it was the former that overcame and gradually absorbed the latter.
For the Latin American nations, the very precariousness of the nation-state’s imposition made it stand as proof of the arbitrary, groundless nature of all selfaffirmations of identity. This was the ideal means to overcome the tendency towards regionalist substantialism that is proper to any modern, well-maintained nation. For example, in Ecuador—a republic designed on the lap of the Liberator—there are very few common traits among the population, whether derived from history or invented in the present, that would give cause to think the Ecuadorean nation-state solid and unshakeable. Nevertheless, one cannot deny the existence of an ‘Ecuadoreanness’—floating in the air, as it were, artificial, evanescent and with many faces—which Ecuadoreans recognize and claim as an important identitarian
feature of what they do and what they are; and which at the same time, above all through the hard school of migration, makes them open to cosmopolitan mestizaje. This disposition towards selftransformation, this dialogic acceptance—not just toleration—of the identities of others, stems precisely from the assumption that there is something contingent in every identity; that identities are founded on pure political will, and not on any mythic, ancestral bequest which, however much it is presented as being bound to the earth, always ends up taking on a supernatural and metaphysical character. It is this disposition that lends the identitarian affirmations of Latin America’s majority populations—concentrated in
something very subtle, almost an arbitrary fidelity to a ‘preference for forms’—the dynamism and capacity for metamorphosis which will be required by an imagined modernity, lying beyond capitalist stagnation.
[1] The term empresas estatales is used here to mean not state-owned firms, but states themselves; Echeverría elsewhere describes them as ‘private collective enterprises for the accumulation of capital’; see Vuelta de siglo, Mexico 2006, p. 147. [nlr] [2] In English in the original. [3] The illusory nature of actual political life in these republics is illustrated perfectly by the ease with which certain artists or politicians have shuttled between politics and art: there
have been novelists who were good rulers (Rómulo Gallegos), revolutionaries who were great poets (Pablo Neruda), while others were good politicians when painters, and good painters when politicians. [4] The term mestizaje (from the Spanish mestizo, a person of mixed race) here connotes the mixing of Iberian and indigenous peoples, cultures and practices. [nlr] [5] In English in the original. [6] In the original, ‘anti-gattopardiano’; referring to the famous line in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ [nlr]
ricardo piglia
Theses on the Short Story I In one of his notebooks, Chekhov recorded the following anecdote: ‘A man in Monte Carlo goes to the casino, wins a million, returns home, commits suicide.’ The classic form of the short story is condensed within the nucleus of that future, unwritten story. Contrary to the predictable and conventional (gamble–lose–commit suicide), the intrigue is presented as a paradox. The anecdote disconnects the story of the gambling and the story of the suicide. That rupture is the key to defining the double character of the story’s form.
First thesis: a short story always tells two stories.
II The classic short story—Poe, Quiroga [1]—narrates Story One (the tale of the gambling) in the foreground, and constructs Story Two (the tale of the suicide) in secret. The art of the short story writer consists in knowing how to encode Story Two in the interstices of Story One. A visible story hides a secret tale, narrated in an elliptical and fragmentary manner. The effect of surprise is produced when the end of the secret story appears on the surface.
III
Each of the two stories is told in a different manner. Working with two stories means working with two different systems of causality. The same events enter simultaneously into two antagonistic narrative logics. The essential elements of the story have a dual function, and are employed in different ways in each of the two stories. The points where they intersect are the foundations of the story’s construction.
IV Near the beginning of Borges’s ‘Death and the Compass’, a shopkeeper decides to publish a book. This book is there because it is indispensable to the framework of the secret story. How to arrange things so that a gangster like Red Scharlach is well informed about
complex Jewish traditions, and capable of laying a mystical and philosophical trap for Lönnrot? The author, Borges, gets hold of this book for him so that he can educate himself. At the same time he uses Story One in order to dissimulate that function: the book seems to be there in connection with the assassination of Yarmolinsky, the reflection of an ironic causality. ‘One of those shopkeepers who have found out that there are buyers for every book came out with a popular edition of the History of the Sect of the Hasidim.’ [2] What is superfluous in one story is fundamental in the other. The shopkeeper’s book is an example (like the volume of The 1001 Nights in ‘The South’, or the scar in ‘The Form of the Sword’) of the ambiguous substance
that makes the microscopic narrative machinery of the story work.
V The short story is a tale that encloses a secret tale. This is not a matter of a hidden meaning which depends on interpretation: the enigma is nothing other than a story which is told in an enigmatic way. The strategy of the tale is placed at the service of that coded narration. How to tell a story while another is being told? This question synthesizes the technical problems of the short story. Second thesis: the secret story is the key to the form of the short story.
VI
The modern version of the short story that descends from Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, the Joyce of Dubliners, abandons the surprise ending and the closed structure; it works the tension between the two stories without ever resolving it. The secret story is told in ever more elusive fashion. The classic short story à la Poe told a story while announcing that there was another; the modern short story tells two stories as if they were one. Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory’ is the first synthesis of that process of transformation: the most important thing is never recounted. The secret story is constructed out of what is not said, out of implication and allusion.
VII
‘Big Two-Hearted River’, one of Hemingway’s foundational tales, encodes Story Two (the effects of the war on Nick Adams) to such an extent that the short story seems to be a trivial description of a fishing trip. Hemingway puts all his skill into the hermetic narration of the secret story. He employs the art of ellipsis with such mastery that he succeeds in making us notice the absence of the other story. What would Hemingway have done with Chekhov’s anecdote? Recount with precise details the game and the atmosphere in which the gambling takes place, and the technique the gambler uses to place his bets, and the kind of drink he has. Never saying that the man is going to commit suicide, but writing the story as if the reader already knew this.
VIII Kafka tells the secret story clearly and simply, and narrates the visible story stealthily, to the point of turning it into something enigmatic and dark. This inversion is the basis of the ‘Kafkaesque’. Kafka would place the story of the suicide from Chekhov’s anecdote in the foreground, recounting it as if it were entirely natural. The terrible part of the story would be centred around the gambling, which would be narrated in an elliptical, menacing way.
IX For Borges, Story One is a genre and Story Two is always the same. In order to attenuate or conceal the monotony of
this secret story, Borges resorts to the narrative variants that genres offer him. All of Borges’s short stories are constructed through this procedure. Borges would tell the visible story, the short story, in Chekhov’s anecdote in accordance with the stereotypes (lightly parodied) of a tradition or a genre. A game of knucklebones between some gauchos on the run (say) at the back of a storeroom, in the prairies of Entre Ríos, told by an old cavalryman who served under Urquiza, a friend of Hilario Ascasubi. [3] The tale of the suicide would be a story constructed out of duplicity and the condensation of a man’s life into a single scene or act that would define his destiny.
X
The basic variation that Borges introduced into the history of the short story consisted in making the coded construction of Story Two the theme of the tale. Borges recounts the manoeuvres of someone who is perversely building a secret plot with the materials of a visible story. In ‘Death and the Compass’, Story Two is a deliberate construction of Scharlach’s. The same is true of Azevedo Bandeira in ‘The Dead Man’ and Nolan in ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’. Borges (like Poe, like Kafka) knew how to transform into an anecdote the problems of the form of narration.
XI The short story is constructed so as to make appear artificially something that
had been hidden. It reproduces the constantly renewed search for a unique experience that would allow us to see, beneath the opaque surface of life, a secret truth. ‘The instantaneous vision which makes us discover the unknown, not in a faraway terra incognita, but rather in the very heart of the immediate’, said Rimbaud. This profane illumination has become the form of the short story.
[1] Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937): Uruguayan short story writer, poet and playwright. [2] ‘Death and the Compass’ (1942) opens with the murder of a Talmudic scholar, Marcelo Yarmolinsky, in a hotel room. An enigmatic note left at the crime scene prompts detective Erik Lönnrot to suspect a connection with
Jewish mysticism. A second murder and a third take place, with similar notes left at the scene. Lönnrot deduces there will be a fourth—thus completing the four letters of the tetragrammaton, the name of Jehovah—and, connecting the previous crime scenes on a map, projects its location. But once there he discovers that he has been entrapped by the gangster Red Scharlach, who committed the murders and planted esoteric clues precisely to lure Lönnrot to his doom. [3] Justo José de Urquiza (1801–70): Argentine soldier and politician, leading figure in the opposition to the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas during the long Argentine Civil War; president of the country from 1854–60. Hilario Ascasubi (1807–75): Argentine poet, early exponent of ‘gaucho literature’.
kheya bag
RED BENGAL’S RISE AND FALL The ouster of West Bengal’s Communist government after 34 years in power is no less of a watershed for having been widely predicted. For more than a generation the Party had shaped the culture, economy and society of one of the most populous provinces in India—91 million strong—and won massive majorities in the state assembly in seven consecutive elections. West Bengal had also provided the bulk of the Communist Party of India–Marxist (cpm) deputies to India’s parliament, the Lok Sabha; in the mid-90s its Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, had been spoken of as the possible Prime Minister of a
centre-left coalition. The cpm’s fall from power also therefore suggests a change in the equation of Indian politics at the national level. But this cannot simply be read as a shift to the right. West Bengal has seen a high degree of popular mobilization against the cpm’s Beijing-style land grabs over the past decade. Though her origins lie in the state’s deeply conservative Congress Party, the challenger Mamata Banerjee based her campaign on an appeal to those dispossessed and alienated by the cpm’s breakneck capitalist-development policies, not least the party’s notoriously brutal treatment of poor peasants at Singur and Nandigram, and was herself accused by the Communists of being soft on the Maoists.
The changing of the guard at Writers’ Building, the seat of the state government in Calcutta, therefore raises a series of questions. First, why West Bengal? That is, how is it that the cpm succeeded in establishing such a broad and tenacious hold in this densely populated north-eastern state, when it failed to do so anywhere else in India, with the partial exception of Kerala? Second, what were the conditions in which the cpm first reached and then consolidated power in the province, in the 1970s and 80s? Third, how should their achievements in office be measured? Fourth, how to explain the party’s recklessly thuggish treatment of the oppressed layers that form its natural base? Finally, what were the factors that undermined its long electoral hold on the government of West Bengal? What
follows will attempt some provisional
replies.
Bengali specificities First, what accounted for the rise of the cpm in West Bengal, to a position of pre-eminence without parallel elsewhere in India? A large part of the answer must lie in the relative weakness of Congress in the province, and a distinctive social structure, especially on the land, after Independence. Historically, the Communist Party of India (cpi) that emerged from the anticolonial struggle, though it never achieved popular appeal on a national scale, secured a substantial base in a number of states—Andhra Pradesh, Bengal, Kerala, Punjab—outside the Hindi-speaking belt which formed the central bastion of Congress support. Of these, Bengal came to be the most important. The birthplace of anti-British
resistance in India in the first years of the twentieth century, and the principal centre of industry in the subcontinent, it offered a vortex of cultural renaissance, national awakening, peasant unrest and worker militancy, in which Communism took durable root. [1] Communists worked within the galaxy of revolutionary groups and underground cells active in the province. Promode Dasgupta, who would serve as West Bengal party secretary for nearly half a century, was formed in the Anushilan Samiti in the 1920s. Slightly younger, Jyoti Basu and Hare Krishna Konar worked as union and peasant organizers, often gaoled or beaten under the British. This was a more radical setting than elsewhere in India at the time, and even Congress was not immune to it. Under
the leadership of the Bose brothers— Sarat and Subhas—the provincial party tried to unite the majority Muslim and minority Hindu communities on a secular, socialist platform. This was anathema to the Marwari businessmen who bankrolled Gandhi. In 1937, at the urging of the millionaire magnate G. D. Birla, then based in Calcutta, the Congress High Command under Nehru, taking orders from Gandhi, forbade the provincial Congress to form a joint ministry with the pro-peasant, predominantly Muslim Krishak Praja Party in the Bengal Legislature. This sectarian decision, foreshadowing the Hindu chauvinism of its later years, sidelined Congress over the next decade, forcing the kpp into a coalition with the Muslim League, a landlord organization in Bengal, thereby helping to popularize
the League and turn the kpp from socioeconomic to communal issues. Any rapprochement between the Bengali Congress and the peasant movement was ruled out when Gandhi mounted a putsch against Subhas Bose, who had been democratically elected President of Congress in 1939, and had him expelled from the party in best authoritarian fashion. During the Second World War, British policies helped to create a famine that led to an estimated 2 million deaths in Bengal. When, after the War, the British realized they would have to withdraw from the subcontinent, Congress—a 97 per cent Hindu party—remained in a weak position in Bengal, where there was a Muslim majority and provincial ministry. With Partition looming, Sarat
Bose and Suhrawardy, heading the Muslim League in the province, came together on a platform for a united independent Bengal, against furious opposition from the Hindu Mahasabha, the ancestor of today’s bjp. The national Congress leadership—Nehru was particularly vehement—joined forces with the Mahasabha, whose leader was subsequently rewarded with a Cabinet post in Nehru’s government, to torpedo this prospect, instead forcing through a confessional division of Bengal between India and Pakistan, to ensure that the Hindu elite would retain at least control of its Western wing, around a third of the territory. Once India was independent, however, West Bengal was rapidly marginalized from the seats of power, its leverage drastically reduced in a political system whose centre of
gravity lay in the cow belt of North India. The local Congress clung to office, but it was an outlier in the structure of Nehru’s rule. Social conditions Partition reshaped Bengal’s economy and society, catastrophically severing the industrial West from the agricultural East. Prior to 1947, Bengal had been the world centre of a burgeoning jute industry, but factories around Calcutta were now cut off from crop supplies in East Pakistan; the conversion of paddy fields in West Bengal to jute cultivation contributed to an acute food shortage after Independence. The largest estates and most fertile land went to East Pakistan, while millions of refugees— first and foremost, the Hindu former
gentry, dispossessed and declassed by Partition—poured into West Bengal, to settle where they could. Those who managed to retain property there became burdened with down-and-out relatives (Bengali refugees were granted formal rights to claim back property under the 1950 Liaquat–Nehru Pact, so did not receive the state support granted to those in the Punjab). West Bengal’s caste structure was particularly localized and fragmented, therefore not as salient as that of the cow belt, but it still shaped the class hierarchy; if Brahmins were less entrenched, the educated castes predominated more than elsewhere, especially in politics, while rural capitalists relied on family trade and banking networks among Marwaris, believed to descend from Rajasthani merchant-caste migrants in the late 18th
century. The landless and poor were always low-caste, Muslim or both. West Bengal had one of the highest proportions of Dalits in India, at 23 per cent of the state population, while Muslims made up 25 per cent, largely concentrated in the south-eastern districts along the 1947 border. As far as land-holdings were concerned, the zamindari system, allowing titles to vast areas, had been nominally abolished by the Nehru government after 1947, but Partition made a reality of this in West Bengal. Though feudal landlords were no longer a force, however, the jotedars—traditional overseers with substantial medium-sized holdings, who formed the bedrock of Congress support in India—remained. But the majority of households had less
than an acre, barely sufficient for subsistence production. The land-tenure system was therefore highly fragmented. Casual, seasonal employment, sometimes as little as three months a year, was typical in the paddyproducing areas that occupied a substantial portion of the state. Rice was the staple crop and chief food supply, along with pulses, oilseeds and vegetables, though cash crops such as jute and, in the highlands, tea were also produced. Sharecroppers or bargadars, usually with tiny plots of their own, worked half the land, with scant security of tenure and often subject to debt bondage. Land scarcity led to subinfeudation and complex employment patterns: the better-off might rent from the poor, while farmers could rely on hired labour, family
efforts or waged work, depending on the season or circumstances. At Independence, agricultural production had been stagnant for nearly a century, despite this being one of India’s most fertile regions. Electrification was almost unknown outside the cities; roads and tracks were largely unpaved. In the aftermath of Independence, West Bengal’s Communists agitated with other militants for famine and refugee relief. In the 1950s the party began to grow after a successful campaign of squatting and picketing state land led to some redistribution around Calcutta. Trade-union membership rates were already higher in West Bengal than in the rest of India, and doubled between the mid 50s and mid 60s. Disillusioned middle-class migrants, living in
settlements on the outskirts of Calcutta, were forced into the labour market. Skilled workers in engineering, chemical industries and clerical jobs had to deal with high unemployment rates: this layer formed the cpi’s trade-union base. At the same time, the cpi’s principal orientation was electoral: in the West Bengal state elections, its share of the vote rose from 11 per cent, with 28 seats, in 1951 to 25 per cent, with 50 seats—nearly a fifth of the total—in 1962, when it became the official opposition to Congress in the state assembly. Enemies on the left The majority of West Bengal’s Communists, and nearly all its trade unionists and rank-and-file militants,
sided with the ‘left’ faction that would form the Communist Party of India– Marxist at its Calcutta conference when the cpi split in 1964. Amid heightened tensions at the time of the 1962 India– China border war, Dasgupta, Basu and others had campaigned against Nehru’s jingoism and been gaoled, while others on the Central Committee backed Congress’s ‘patriotic war’. The contrasting positions, which principally involved the party’s tactical orientation towards Congress, were framed as a strategy of a broad alliance against a ‘feudal’ Indian ruling class, on the one hand (cpi), or as working-class leadership against bourgeois rule, on the other (cpm). [2] At a time of rising class struggle and deepening economic crisis, both Communist parties continued to privilege the battle for office. In the
1967 West Bengal state-assembly elections the cpm won 18 per cent of the vote, with 43 seats, and entered a governing coalition—the United Front, led by the Bangla Congress, a shortlived breakaway from the national party—as a junior partner. The cpm’s Jyoti Basu became West Bengal’s Deputy Chief Minister, while Hare Krishna Konar was the Land Minister. That May a peasant rebellion erupted in the village of Naxalbari in Darjeeling district, led by the cpm’s peasant front. Konar attempted to mediate, trying to get the peasants to put down their arms, to no avail. West Bengal’s Chief Minister dispatched security forces to repress the uprising, which was crushed with extreme brutality over the succeeding months. The cpm
leadership’s continuing participation in the United Front government that was undertaking state reprisals against a section of its own base precipitated another split in the party, leading to the formation of the cpi (Marxist-Leninist), pledged to a guerrilla strategy in the countryside, along Maoist lines. Naxalbari was a watershed for the cpm: Promode led a virulent campaign against the ‘left-adventurists’, which at times degenerated into armed conflict. Meanwhile in the cities, a food crisis and deep recession, worsened by the devaluation of the rupee, led to riots and mass protests. Grain shops were ransacked and their supplies distributed—an activity that became known, after the Calcutta district, as dispensing Dum Dum dawai, or medicine. Left militants took the lead in
organizing general strikes, helping to popularize the gherao, or encirclement, as an effective tactic. The United Front coalition broke apart and the state’s Centrally appointed governor seized the opportunity to impose President’s Rule. Between 1969 and 1971, successive state-assembly elections—interspersed with bouts of President’s rule—saw the cpm expand its rural and urban base in Bardhaman, West Bengal’s coal-andsteel industrial belt as well as its biggest rice-producing area: mining and manufacturing districts stretch along the Damodar River between Asansol, Durgapur and the city of Bardhaman itself, making this one of the most populous regions outside the Ganges delta. In 1969, the party won 20 per cent of the vote, taking 80 state-assembly
seats; in 1971 it gained 33 per cent of the vote and 113 seats. Again in a United Front coalition headed by the Bangla Congress, and determined to avoid a second Naxalbari, the cpm pushed for a real degree of land reform. With population growth, West Bengal’s land-to-person ratio was now desperate: less than a third of an acre per head. Konar’s strategy was to combine mass mobilizations with land-redistribution measures already mandated by state law. [3] Agricultural workers, sharecroppers and small farmers were called upon to identify land belonging to absentee owners, or benami holdings—illegal excess—and became enthusiastic witnesses. This on-the-ground effort enabled the cpm cadre to build up bases in the countryside, dislodging the dominant Congress-supporting elite.
Poor and landless peasants were mobilized to seize the land, marching in processions armed with bamboo sticks, axes and spears. [4] At the same time, peasant insurrections were erupting in the countryside, led by the Maoist cpi–ml, while the imposition of martial law in East Pakistan, and subsequent Bangladesh liberation struggle, raised the question of a united—and red?—Bengal. The Congress government in New Delhi dispatched the Indian Army to forestall any such outcome—and to crush insurrectionary forces on both sides of the 1947 border in the process. The cpm was caught in the blowback of state repression, while at the same time mounting a further fratricidal assault on the Naxalites. Another bout of
Presidential Rule put Congress back in power in 1972, and Konar’s land reforms were swiftly reversed. Under Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a reign of terror was now unleashed against cpm and cpi–ml militants alike, along with trade unionists, peasant organizers and radical students. By 1973 there were nearly 18,000 political prisoners in West Bengal’s gaols. The repression was so heavy-handed that the bullets and batons of the Emergency period, imposed by Indira Gandhi from 1975–77, seemed merely the continuation of an ongoing, Congressled counter-insurgency campaign. [5] Into office When the long-overdue Lok Sabha elections were finally held in 1977,
Congress was defeated for the first time since Independence, ceding power to the Janata Party, an unstable coalition of socialists, big capitalists and the Hindu far-right. Indira’s party was evicted all across the country in the state-assembly elections held that summer: the Janata Party won over 46 per cent of the vote in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Orissa, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. In West Bengal the beneficiary of the nationwide anti-Indira swing was the cpm, whose cadre had behaved with great courage during the years of lead. The party campaigned on a minimal programme: release all political prisoners and provide basic relief to the poor. It won 35 per cent of the vote and a sweeping majority of 178 seats in the 294-seat West Bengal state assembly, by gaining ground in Howrah
and Hoogly, in the east, and Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia and Midnapore along the state’s western rim. The Janata Party took only 20 per cent of the vote in West Bengal, yielding 29 seats. Congress was reduced to 23 per cent of the vote, with a mere 20 seats. The cpm further strengthened its position in 1977 by building a Left Front coalition, based on electoral agreements that became known as the ‘Promode Formula’, after the cpm’s veteran State Secretary. Left Front parties would not run against each other; in each constituency, whichever party had garnered most votes in the prior election would stand unchallenged, on its own manifesto. The cpm’s most important allies in the Left Front would be the All India Forward Bloc and the
Revolutionary Socialist Party, both commanding significant support in the Siliguri Corridor and tribal-dominated, relatively undeveloped North. [6] In the 1977 state-assembly elections, the aifb won 5 per cent of the vote, garnering 25 seats, and the rsp 4 per cent of the vote, rewarded with 20 seats. The cpm’s allies were invited to join a Left Front government, with Basu as Chief Minister. Altogether, the Left Front commanded 230 seats, nearly four-fifths of the state assembly, and was backed by 45 per cent of the electorate. After the experience of the 1960s and 70s, however—repeated imposition of President’s Rule by Congress at the Centre; gaolings and beatings of party cadre—there was every reason to expect that, whatever its popular support, the
cpm-led government in West Bengal would be short-lived. Dasgupta, Basu and the others were determined to avoid a re-run of the United Front experience, when gains in the countryside had been rolled back by Congress’s reversal of land redistribution. Battered by repression, the cpm’s membership was barely 40,000 when it fought the 1977 election. The leadership resolved to implement landmark reforms that would buttress the party’s position among the peasantry, politically and electorally, against the anticipated storms ahead. [7] The Left Front government moved swiftly to set in place the three pillars of its agrarian programme: Operation Barga, registering sharecroppers’ rights; a land-redistribution programme; and the animation of panchayat—villagecouncil—democratic structures.
Tactically, the aim was to utilize existing progressive legislation—of course, unimplemented—to avoid delays and obstructions from the Centre, since Presidential ratification was necessary for laws passed at state level. Countryside consolidation Operation Barga once again used mass mobilization to make a reality of laws already on the statute books. Sharecroppers were legally entitled to permanent and heritable cultivation rights, and due 75 per cent of their produce, or 50 per cent if the landlord supplied seeds, et cetera. In reality, since most contracts were verbal, bargadars had little legal recourse against evictions and exploitation; their share of the crop they harvested was
rarely more than half and could be as little as a quarter. Even under British rule there had been campaigns to register sharecroppers, but the Left Front’s version involved mass participation, in an atmosphere of real euphoria. The cpm and its allies established some 8,000 reorientation camps across the countryside between 1978 and 1982, where public meetings were held to air grievances and educate tenant farmers about their rights. Villagers were enlisted to verify claims. Though Operation Barga was a drive for registration, rather than enforcement, the state government now put the onus on landlords to disprove occupants’ eligibility to bargadar rights. Some 1.2 million sharecroppers were registered in the first three years of the campaign, around two thirds of the total, and 30
per cent of all cultivators. They registered tenancy rights to an area of 1.1 million acres. The Left Front’s land-redistribution programme involved identifying plots above the legal ceilings and transferring them to the state, after compensation—a slow process. By law, appropriated lands were earmarked for either landless or marginal farmers, owning no more than an acre. The cpm’s priority was to consolidate holdings, starting with marginal and small farmers. Individuals had to apply to their panchayat, which would ascertain eligibility and grant pattas, or deeds, accordingly. By the end of its first term in 1982, the Left Front had handed over 800,000 acres to 1,572,531 heads of households—small
plots, not viable for market production, but enough for homestead allotments. [8] But it was panchayat reform that effected the most significant shift in the political culture of rural West Bengal. Village self-government had been a Gandhian vision, formalized after Independence, though regulations were rarely followed: in West Bengal panchayat elections had not been held for nearly two decades in many areas; the councils had traditionally been run by powerful local families, to arbitrate on village disputes. Left Front reforms now instituted direct elections to the panchayats, under universal suffrage and proportional representation, in which candidates from any political party could stand. The village assemblies, whose meetings would be
open to the public, were charged with drawing up development plans and distributing state and national funds. They were structured on three levels: gram (village), made up of representatives covering a population of about 12,000, from around 10 villages; block, for ten times that population; and state district, which was twenty times more again. In the 1978 panchayat elections, the Left Front won 69, 76 and 92 per cent of the seats for each respective tier, breaking—or at least, qualifying—the hold of rich peasants, rice-mill owners and moneylenders. The efficacy of Operation Barga is much disputed. Sharecropping was already being replaced by lease cultivation for cash payments when it was introduced—landlords do not have
to invest anything, can get a fixed payment or change tenants seasonally to increase rent. Registration in itself could not prevent evictions or low portions of the crop; the acreage affected was too low to make any great impact on overall productivity. The Left Front’s landredistribution programme was also small-scale, although it represented 20 per cent of all redistributed land in India. However, taken together with the Panchayati Raj and redistribution, Operation Barga helped shift social relations in the countryside by constraining the once unquestionable dominance of landlords in the battles that had rocked village life at harvesttime. Modest though the reforms were, the decentralized administration and enhanced social and economic stability encouraged investment, which had
previously been uneconomical in such a fragmented land-tenure system, and resulted in more work for agricultural labourers and the reduction of rural debt. Over their first decade, the Left Front reforms appear to have facilitated a more egalitarian Green Revolution than took place in most other Indian states. Faster-growing varieties of rice—for multiple cropping, extending the harvest season—require irrigation, not just rainfall. Panchayats played a key role by distributing Central government funds for building infrastructure such as roads and tube-well irrigation, which also provided off-season jobs. Subsequently, total working days for agricultural labourers in West Bengal rose to the highest in India. Within the cpm’s first two terms, increased
productivity and year-round employment led to a rise in real wages. Debt bondage, which had been rife in the state, had virtually been eliminated. Historically plagued by famine, West Bengal was transformed into the rice bowl of India. Mean per capita consumption doubled in ten years and the rural poverty head-count dropped from nearly 60 per cent to under 35 per cent in the late 80s. Party cadre were instrumental in settling payment disputes, a key site of local struggle. Typically, short ritual strikes preceded wage negotiations: landlords agreed to the rate that the party set, just below the official minimum; middle farmers least able to afford to pay the basic wage would not have to lose out to more prosperous landowners. The cpm was thus able to cement its electoral base by
mediating between different sectional interests. Its peasant front, the All India Kisan Sabha, grew from 1.2 million members in 1978 to over 7 million by 1987. The political payoff for the cpm was the creation of a highly effective rural apparatus, an electoral machine perhaps unmatched elsewhere in the world. Contesting three different sets of elections—local, provincial, national— each staggered a few years apart, fulltime cpm members were regularly engaged in brokering the needs of their electoral base in exchange for votes. Traditional factionalism and clientelism played a part in the panchayats, as branches of West Bengal’s vote-bank. Local leaders often disbursed land and aid amongst their own dol—their circle
of kin, caste and economic dependents—just as in other parts of India. On the other hand, the Panchayati Raj made local power-brokerage participatory: support had to be courted from those who had previously been excluded from any decision-making, while party membership became a relatively meritocratic sorting device for distributions among the poor. In conditions of scarce resources, the panchayats stood in the middle of a pyramidal system of patronage, with Alimuddin Street, the cpm’s hq, at the apex. [9] Urban outcomes In the cities, the advent of the Left Front put an end to the chaos and violence— verging on urban warfare—of the
Siddhartha Shankar Ray years. Although the traffic congestion and power shortages in Calcutta would continue, the cpm made a concerted effort to rebuild the public administration and to extend its hegemony in the process. Schoolteachers’ pay had nearly trebled by the mid 80s, to match that of centralgovernment employees. Police wages were also raised and a significant portion of the ranks was unionized; the police force as a whole became a bastion of support for the cpm. Publicsector workers, bank employees and airport staff were well served by cpmaffiliated trade unions. The party’s intellectuals were given a free hand to restore and administer the universities and cultural institutions; in a moment of euphoria, incoming Public Works
Minister Jatin Chakraborty had the top of the Shaheed Minar painted red. Salaries of civil servants took up some 80 per cent of the state budget; effectively, public-sector employees came to constitute an urban pillar of electoral support for the Left Front, to complement its strongholds in the panchayats. But whereas the latter were relatively cheap, civil-service emoluments were expensive to maintain, leaving little in reserve for upgrading social services for the rest of the population. In West Bengal’s industrial heartlands, the cpm faced an uphill struggle to reverse the decades of Congress neglect. Before Partition, the united province had accounted for 30 per cent of India’s manufacturing output. After 1947, West
Bengal could no longer rely on the proximity of raw materials, factories and ports for its competitive advantage: the Nehru government systematically downgraded the state, restricting licenses and investment and imposing a ‘freight equalization’ tariff that raised transport costs to those of the inland regions. From the 1960s, a chronic shortage of power contributed to disinvestment and falling profitability. Labour militancy—Bengal is the homeland of the bandh, a general strike that can last for days—no doubt contributed to capital flight, as always alleged, but by the late 70s had become mainly defensive. Here, however, the cpm vote was largely assured. Modest but measurable improvements in popular living standards;
consolidation of a well-organized rural vote block and public-sector support in the cities; a buttressing alliance with the smaller Left Front parties; popular memories of Congress authoritarianism—clearly these are important elements in any explanation of why the cpm’s 1977 victory in West Bengal, born out of the vote against the Emergency, did not dissipate at the next election, as happened in other states, but became anchored for the duration. Yet in themselves they were not sufficient to ensure the cpm’s continuing predominance after the Congress vote recovered, as it did in the 1980s. It is often assumed outside of India that the Left Front won two-thirds of the vote in West Bengal in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s, since it consistently won that proportion, or more, of the seats in the
state assembly. In fact, from 1982 onwards the Congress and, later, Trinamool Congress percentage of the vote was roughly equal to, or even higher than, the cpm’s (see Table 1). But, thanks to the vagaries of India’s British-built first-past-the-post electoral system, the Congress vote yielded between a half and a quarter of the seats the cpm obtained, and sometimes even less.
In other words—and astonishingly, considering its appalling record— Congress maintained a solid level of voter support in West Bengal. But its voters were generally either highly concentrated in a small number of constituencies, mostly in the city of Calcutta itself or holdouts in the North, or else dispersed through many constituencies but in slightly smaller numbers than cpm supporters, and so counted for nothing in the Indian ‘winner takes all’ electoral process. Under a more representative system the cpm would have faced the stimulus of serious political competition and perhaps potentially restorative terms out of office, as in Kerala; for there is no doubt that the absence of opposition had
a deleterious effect on the culture of Writers’ Building, the state’s central administration. And while the cpm sustained the 35 per cent of the vote it had won in 1977, the reforms it implemented over successive decades in office never increased this beyond a few percentage points. Limitations and stasis How should the Left Front’s first two decades be assessed? The cpm correctly points to severe structural limitations facing the party’s reform efforts in West Bengal—first and foremost, the vindictiveness of the Centre. As opponents of Congress, the cpm faced an uphill battle against Union discrimination and missed out on the patronage that other Congress-run states
enjoyed. Indira Gandhi’s government turned down an application to build an electronics complex in a satellite town of Calcutta, on grounds of ‘security’. The Bakreshwar Thermal Power project and Haldia petrochemicals development faced decade-long delays. The Centre imposed stiff restrictions on borrowing, followed by punitive austerity measures in the late 80s as the Rajiv Gandhi government started to put an end to Indian developmentalism. In addition, West Bengal was experiencing rapid population growth, in what was already the most densely inhabited state of the Union. Capital flight was a vital problem. As noted, however, labour militancy had become largely defensive: real wages in manufacturing have been on the decline since the mid 80s, as the sector’s share in gsdp dropped, and are
now lower than in Gujarat and Maharashtra, the most industrialized states. Under the Left Front, more workdays were lost due to lockouts than to strikes. Yet arguably, this arrested development had its counterpart in the internal culture of the cpm itself. Its unreconstructed Stalinism was reinforced by native customs of veneration and paternalism; adherence to rigid party norms effectively quashed all internal debate. Insiders were given priority for promotion in the civil service, universities, government hospitals, etc. Not that cronyism did not exist under Congress, of course; but the bar should be higher for a party of the left. Ultimately this tendency in the Left Front administration was demoralizing,
and it depleted standards. A sectarian attitude towards the non-party intelligentsia was part of this ‘politicization’ or tribalism: you were either for or against the cpm (this had homologues in the informal sector and in protection rackets on the street). Despite having some of India’s brightest thinkers and artists among their sympathizers, the cpm had left behind the cpi’s rich intellectual heritage. Calcutta is not the cultural hub it once was: political ossification, and the lure of better funding, has channelled a gradual brain drain of Bengali scholars and publishers to Delhi. [10] The West Bengal party’s main form of outreach is its daily Bengali newspaper, Ganashakti, which has a weekday circulation of 230,000 and can be read from billboards around Calcutta. Cocooned by an anti-
intellectualism and increasing parochialism, the Bengali cpm has maintained an ecumenical attitude to the various dogmas of its Left Front allies, on the one hand, and stony silence towards critical analyses of its development policies from outside its ranks, on the other. Its murderous hostility towards Naxalism has also had a deeply corrosive effect. The cpm’s lack of political will or imagination to tackle education and social services for the unprivileged has been attributed to the pervasive social conservatism and patriarchy of the party’s bhadralok—‘gentleman’— leadership. [11] The concerns of the Latin American left with popular literacy projects are alien to it. From the early 90s, West Bengal was counted an
educationally backward state at the primary level, with one of the worst enrolment rates; twenty years earlier it had been amongst the top few. Girls’ primary-school enrolment dropped from 43 per cent in 1986 to 40.5 per cent a decade later. To make matters worse, the Left Front removed English instruction from the state curriculum, supposedly in the name of encouraging basic Bengali literacy, creating an unbridgeable chasm between government and private schools. A generation became ill-equipped for training in science and technology, or the communications industry that swept Bangalore and Hyderabad, but bypassed Calcutta (itself now renamed Kolkata). In stark contrast, the cpm in Kerala mobilized volunteers in a highly successful mass-literacy campaign
during the same period; high female literacy in particular has enabled a decline in infant mortality and fertility rates. West Bengal’s health budget also fell below the Indian average, as a percentage of total expenditure, placing it near the bottom of the top ten large states. [12] With so much of the state budget given over to police and civil-service salaries, little remained for the improvement of public services. Road construction, water supply, social housing and electrification failed to keep up with the growing population’s needs. Diminishing living standards— overcrowding, poor sanitation—which were also the result of deindustrialization and migration, served to undermine Left Front support
in Calcutta and contributed to Congress’s share of disgruntled middleclass voters there. Petty extortion— ‘collecting for the party’—became common; larger-scale rackets run by cpm goons were assured impunity, thanks to police collusion. Resentments were exacerbated by the cpm policy of excluding non-party people from publicsector jobs, promotions, social services, etc, both in the cities, where Congress generally outpolled the cpm, and in the countryside, where it retained substantial support among the better-off farmers. [13] Rural gains also started to plateau— signs that the wider economic benefits of the Green Revolution and land reforms had been exhausted. By the start of the 1990s, landlessness had
begun to rise and poverty reduction to falter, although at 28 per cent the rural poverty head-count was a vast improvement on the all-India figure of 43 per cent in 1992. Per capita holdings had become smaller with population growth, but also more equalized, although this was mostly the result of market sales or household subdivisions, rather than the relatively smaller-scale land redistribution. [14] As production became increasingly commodified, cultivators were offered little protection from a commercial elite based around the rice mills, who lived off the wide margins between paddy and rice prices. With rising costs for fertilizers, pesticides and loans—thus diminishing returns—marginal and small farmers were left prone to debt and losing land. The large-scale mill owners and traders
had no particular interests in landlordism, so did not present an obstacle to redistribution. Their power was in fact strengthened under the cpm: in the 70s, electrical mills began to displace traditional wooden huskers, and the millions of women working them. With deregulation in the early 90s, the position of the rice mills was further assured, when they were allowed to cut out petty middlemen; this enabled the government to reduce the cost of procuring rice for India’s byzantine Public Distribution System. [15] The Left Front has done little specifically to address social inequalities based on caste, creed or ethnicity, beyond token quotas for government posts; although the majority of land-reform beneficiaries have been
the so-called Scheduled Castes and Tribes, as well as Muslims, offered more security here than in some parts of India. Yet their position remains precarious. [16] On the extreme margins of Bengali society with little upward mobility, adivasis fare the worst. A majority are under the age of fifteen and suffer from chronic malnutrition. The main concentration of the state’s tribal population lives in West Midnapore, on the edge of Orissa and Jharkhand; Santhals comprise the largest group. The effects of inadequate healthcare and education are acute for minoritized groups—who, categorized together, constitute the majority in West Bengal. Nearly two thirds of Muslims are illiterate; amongst Scheduled Tribes, female literacy is virtually nil, with knock-on effects for child health and
mortality. The Left Front organizes annual commemorations of the victims of Ayodhya on the Maidan in Calcutta, but it has never raised a campaign for desegregation in West Bengal, where Muslims are barely represented in cultural and civic life. The state’s socalled Scheduled and Backward groups do not have to contend with pogroms, as elsewhere in India, but the Left Front’s inertia on inequality and the lack of public services has left these populations particularly open to the appeal of Maoism or of militant Islamism. In turn the state started to escalate its violence, through routine police harassment, while retreating still further from the provision of social goods. A post-communist model?
At an impasse after their fourth successive victory in 1991, the ageing cpm leadership now had to contend with two traumatic outcomes: the end of Communism in the Soviet Union and of developmentalism in India, as Manmohan Singh’s Finance Ministry launched the country towards economic liberalization. The cpm was a vocal critic of Singh’s policies in the Lok Sabha; but within three years its leaders in West Bengal were following the same course. Basu announced the first publicprivate partnerships in 1994. The cpm switched to parroting the Central government, reinventing West Bengal as an investment-friendly gateway to Southeast Asia and advertising the state’s unorganized manufacturing sector as the largest—and one of the cheapest—in India. [17] The headline
figures were impressive: between 1996 and 2003, West Bengal attracted over $1.3 billion in foreign direct investment and the highest rate of domestic investment next to Gujarat. gsdp grew on average by 8 per cent a year, while over a tenth of total gsdp was comprised of exports, not least steel to China and the East Asian Tigers: $2.8 billion in 2001. But the take-off in manufacturing did nothing to regenerate West Bengal’s industrial heartlands, where layoffs and retrenchments only increased. The model the Left Front was pursuing was that of the ‘enclave economy’: a small high-productivity sector, with bespoke access to capital, transport, electricity and water, surrounded by the untouched mass of the agricultural workforce and
the traditional economy. [18] Rather than bring industry back to where it— and militancy—had been historically located, the cpm leadership aimed to build Special Economic Zones in greenfield locations. On the advice of American consultants, it has pursued agrarian restructuring in line with wto agreements, establishing Agri-Export Zones to process fruit and potatoes, with the big mills and contractors primed to service them. Prominent investors included snack-maker Frito-Lay. Along with bypassing trade-union rights, agrobusinesses enjoyed monopolies over selling inputs; contracts allowed them to predetermine the quantity and quality of the produce, and to ditch farmers with cash crops. Since aezs are classified as industrial sites, regular land ceilings did not apply. The price was increasing
hardship for the mass base that cpm leaders had long been able to take for granted: small farmers and manufacturing workers. The turn to Beijing-style market reforms overlapped with a generational transition in the cpm leadership. The 86year-old Jyoti Basu stepped down as Chief Minister to hand over the reins to his protÊgÊ Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in 2000, in preparation for the state election the following year. The passage of power had been in the making for almost a decade. There had long been rumours that Basu’s high-living businessman son, Chandan, was profiting from his family connections and from tax evasion. In 1993 Bhattacharjee had made the gesture of resigning from the state Cabinet in
protest against corruption in the administration and party, without incurring any censure; it seemed then that the leadership valued him for his clean public image as a crusader. The previous generation—Basu, Dasgupta, Konar—had been labour organizers, working underground, often enduring hardship and gaol. Bhattacharjee and Biman Bose, the new West Bengal party secretary and Left Front chair, both born in Calcutta in the early 1940s, had spent most of their adult lives in the corridors of Writers’ Building. Bhattacharjee also represented the ‘moderate’, ‘modernizing’ face of the cpm: cosmopolitan, third way. He had initially entered the state Cabinet as Culture Minister—he was a playwright and translator, on the side—but later added responsibility for the police to his
portfolio. The hope was that he would give the party a fresh look, to see off a dangerous new contender. Nemesis For just as the Left Front’s new course was gathering speed, seemingly with unbreakable electoral support, a nemesis emerged in the shape of the rogue Congress politician Mamata Banerjee. Born in 1955 in Calcutta to a modest middle-class Brahmin family, Mamata had accompanied her father to Congress rallies as a child. She rose through the ranks of the party’s student(-vigilante) wing, the Chhatra Parishad, during the Emergency—after gaining notoriety for blocking jp Narayan’s car in Calcutta and dancing on the bonnet. In 1984 she took one of the cpm’s safest Lok Sabha
seats in the Calcutta constituency of Jadavpur, and in 1991 entered Narasimha Rao’s cabinet. In terms of personality, she can run the gamut from agony aunt to firebrand. Though she leads a spartan life, Mamata’s performance in the political arena is nothing short of gladiatorial—theatrics include practically throttling another mp in front of the Lok Sabha and threatening to hang herself by a noose made from her shawl at a rally. Though her temperament is volatile, making her an unusual figure in latterday Congress politics, the basic reason for her split with Congress in the mid90s is that she has been staunchly antiCommunist throughout her career, since her days under Rajiv, and especially Sanjay, Gandhi. The battle against the
cpm had turned personal in 1990 when their cadre beat her so badly she was hospitalized for three months with a fractured skull. She was further galvanized against the Left Front in 1993, when police shot and killed 13 people at a demonstration she held in front of Writers’ Building. Mired in corruption scandals, Congress entered into talks with the cpm in 1996 about a federal coalition of smaller parties to keep out the bjp, which Congress would support from the outside—with Jyoti Basu’s name floated as a possible United Front government Prime Minister. Mamata rebelled, vehemently denouncing expedient national alliances that would effectively neuter Congress’s fight to unseat the cpm in West Bengal. Her criticism of Bengali Congress politicians whose national ambitions led
them to spurn the interests of the grassroots, or trinamool, precipitated the final split. Leading a revolt of disaffected Bengali Congress activists in late 1997, Mamata launched the Trinamool Congress as her own vehicle. Already in the mid 90s she had started to reach out beyond Congress’s traditional supporters, for example denouncing the cpm’s forcible clearances of street hawkers in Calcutta in the name of urban regeneration. Meanwhile sweatshops were proliferating alongside rising unemployment in the new liberalized era and the cpm-affiliated Centre of Indian Trade Unions was clamping down on independent actions in order to ‘protect industry’. For the 1998 Lok Sabha election in West Bengal, Mamata
entered into a seat-sharing arrangement with the bjp, who most likely provided seed money for her campaign. It was a compromising alliance: to keep some semblance of being a champion of the underdog she had to profess that she would not abide communalism. But the 1998 contest proved to be a shot across the cpm’s bow, indicating a rising tide of cynicism and anti-incumbent sentiment among the precarious urban sector. Although the cpm’s share of the state vote did not slip below 34 per cent, there was a strong swing in favour of the tmc and bjp in the industrial suburbs of Calcutta. In Dum Dum, which the cpm had only lost once since 1952, the party was served some bitter medicine: the vote fell by 10 per cent and the seat went to the bjp. The following year the tmc became a partner in the bjp-led
National Democratic Alliance government, launching Mamata onto the national scene. In West Bengal’s 2001 state-assembly election, the tmc took 31 per cent of the vote and 60 seats, nearly wiping out the official Congress party which was reduced to 8 per cent, even though— thanks once again to the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system—this cashed out as 26 seats. The cpm, with Bhattacharjee as the new Chief Minister, took 37 per cent of the vote and 143 seats. The electoral edifice constructed by Basu and Dasgupta—panchayat patronage in the countryside, bureaucratic prebends and union kickbacks in the cities, vote blocks of Left Front junior partners in the hill regions—was apparently still intact.
Alimuddin Street’s complacency about its ability to survive any eventuality was only strengthened in the 2006 state elections when the tmc, now in an alliance with Congress, saw its vote fall to 27 per cent while its seats were halved to 30. Mamata’s image was tarnished by having worked with the bjp after the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. She was attacked as politically erratic for having walked out of the nda Cabinet, then allied with Congress, only to fall out with it again. Complacency and crisis Seemingly invincible, Bhattacharjee and his Minister for Industry, Nirupam Sen, gave free rein to the party’s goonda element to speed their businessdevelopment plans through coercive
slum clearances and land acquisitions. Distress sales by small farmers in Calcutta’s neighbouring districts had facilitated the new it parks, shopping malls and real-estate developments. Grievances had little traction, since a viable opposition to the government had failed to materialize. Political parties in India have long had their own affiliated unions and social groups, but also their own armed elements. Violence and corruption is not more prevalent in West Bengal’s political culture than in the rest of the country, but it has some peculiar expressions. At the party’s apex elected politicians have engaged in very little graft: the Chief Minister lived in a government tenement while modest, backwater party leaders lived in plush villas. Local fiefdoms would increasingly become flashpoints as a
layer that had benefited commercially from political connections fought off those who got in the way of new opportunities. The auto giant, Tata Motors, had been lured to West Bengal with a sweetener of $200 million to build a plant for its new ‘affordable car’. In 2006, a barrier was erected around the proposed site— 997 acres of prime agricultural land at Singur, in Hooghly district—although there had been no consultation with the 20,000 people about to be displaced. The tmc turned local discontent in what happened to be one of their constituencies into a state-wide protest. That December Mamata went on hunger strike in Calcutta amidst a media circus. Tensions were heightened when Tapasi Malick, a prominent teenage protestor,
was murdered by a cpm party worker and the local cpm committee head, with construction interests in the project, and her burning remains were discovered in the cordoned-off area. On the heels of the protests at Singur in December 2006, the cpm’s Lakshman Seth [19] unveiled plans to survey Nandigram for a 14,500 acre sez to be developed jointly by the state and an Indonesian conglomerate near the port city of Haldia, the new principal hub of chemical and petrochemical industries. Distrustful of how they would be treated, villagers set upon the local panchayat office, where they clashed with police, then built a blockade. The proposed site was home to about 65,000 people, predominantly Muslim and low-caste agriculturalists and fishers. Maintaining
the siege, the tmc spearheaded a coalition. It was Left Front cadres rebelling now, a significant section leaving to join the rival party. Not even a week after the Tata contract was signed in March 2007, the state made a huge show of force by deploying 4,000 armed police, who were then met by a crowd of 20,000. Fourteen people were shot dead and over a hundred severely maimed, most likely by the 500 cpm cadre embedded in the operation. In contrast to Left Front intransigence on Singur, the government was forced to put Nandigram plans on hold after cpi, rsp and aifb leaders threatened to walk out of the Cabinet. By then the battle was no longer about industrial policy but territorial control. More lives were lost in partisan clashes and exchanges of
fire that erupted in the months following the massacre. All cpm offices in the area were destroyed; houses and shops of members and supporters were ransacked or torched. The local cpm planned an operation to recapture the area, allegedly with the consent of senior party leaders. Several hundred armed cadres stormed the area in November. Bhattacharjee publicly stated that the protesters had been ‘paid back in the same coin’. Though he was forced to retract the comment, he refused to offer an unequivocal apology. [20] The government’s new strategy was to move sez construction, like a hot potato, to less fertile regions such as West Midnapore and Purulia—far away from tmc bases near Calcutta.
In November 2008 a landmine blast hit the Chief Minister’s convoy in West Midnapore, as it was returning from the proposed site for a Jindal Steel plant in Salboni. Without evidence or warrant, the police launched reprisals against people in neighbouring Lalgarh. Villagers again barricaded themselves in. News spread from village to village by dhamsa madal, the traditional Santhal drum, and mobile phone. Solidarity from surrounding adivasi villages brought the movement to Bankura and Purulia districts. Afraid of a repeat of Nandigram, the government withdrew the police. As with Nandigram, a turf battle ensued over several months. Meanwhile the cpi (Maoist)—founded out of a convergence of modern-day Naxalite groupings, hitherto without a significant presence in the state—lent
their support and began to recruit in the region. Organizers from neighbouring Jharkand and Andhra Pradesh trained local youth to defend their own earlier attempts at self-government, which bypassed party and traditional hierarchies. Protestors destroyed the cpm’s office and the newly built villa of Anuj Pandey, the local party head, and his brother, a wealthy contractor and dealer in agricultural supplies. The Maoists proclaimed the area a ‘liberated zone’. Trying to supplant the state, they extorted ‘taxes’ from vestiges of government administration and fought off competitors. Bhattacharjee called in joint state and Central security forces, who cordoned off the region as thousands fled their homes. Subsequently the tmc, Maoists and other independent activists shared platforms
in Lalgarh repression.
against
government
Another left These movements of rural unrest can draw comparison to similar scenes in China, but in India the mix of extreme deprivation with political freedoms— however ensnared in electoral malpractice and an obstructive legal system—has more combustible results. Maoists have launched spectacular attacks on police installations in West Bengal and dominate the arid western plateau in the districts of Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapore, dubbed Jungle Mahal. [21] But the area is a small corner of the Tribal Belt of India where Maoism is spreading. The most affected states have isolated adivasi
populations in virgin forest, usually on top of mineral deposits lately eyed for extraction. What sets West Bengal apart is that an early state campaign—violent repression, followed by incentives of agrarian reform—had induced peasants to put down their weapons for decades. Latter-day Maoists there also have more contact with mainstream politics, in dialogue with other protestors and a major party. They even supported an independent candidate, jailed activist Chhatradhar Mahato, in the 2011 state election; whereas in the North—from where Naxalism takes its name— Gorkha and Rajbanshi separatists, with their own armed contingents, came to prominence in the 80s and 90s. Why did the cpm careen so recklessly into the disasters of Singur, Nandigram
and Lalgarh? After the 2006 state election, they took for granted a divided and weak opposition. Earlier drives to displace poor people from their homes, for the sake of ‘development’, had not received widespread attention; but in a new media environment, mobile or online images could send shockwaves. This obliviousness to public opinion is the outgrowth of a lack of political debate within the party. If the cpm had been more democratic at the grassroots, then the tmc could not have swollen up so rapidly with its defectors. Most Indian parties are run as family businesses, of course, so the cpm’s unanimism is not an anomaly overall, even if its specifically Stalinist discipline provides a harder shell and blinder self-assurance in pursuing policies that the State Committee has
decided. The party did eventually make concessions—they distributed 10,000 acres in regions neighbouring the unrest and pledged an end to forcible acquisitions—but the damage had been done. The other key factor is the cpm’s relation to mass movements outside its purview. The cpm’s original baptism of fire in office was its effort to crush Naxalism, under the 60s’ United Front. Thus its formative experience was not mobilization, but repression, of a rural movement; this generated a pride in its toughness against ‘ultra-left adventurism’ that became a part of its identity. But in contrast to forty years ago, the cpm cadre played a bigger role in recent clashes than state forces, which were almost auxiliary; in the absence of
any proper investigation, it is not clear what control the state leadership had over local members. At stake was not just the maintenance of ‘law and order’. As their commander Lakshman Seth put it to an interviewer in early 2008: the tmc’s political game plan is ‘to capture our ground. Our political field. Their intention is to oust our cpm party from Nandigram. If this model had succeeded they could have used this model elsewhere.’ [22] Presumably his concerns lay with the tmc union making inroads into the factories of Haldia. Beginning of the end The tmc went on to sweeping victories throughout the Singur and Nandigram districts in the panchayat elections in May 2008—with their new slogan ‘Ma,
Mati, Manush’: Mother, Land, Humanity. In the Lok Sabha elections of 2009 it extended its reach to the wider Ganges delta: the tmc won 19 of 42 seats, while the cpm was reduced to 9 and, for the first time in decades, failed to win a plurality of the vote. The writing was on the wall for the critical state-assembly election in May 2011. Astoundingly, in January 2011 cpm cadre were involved in killing several people in nearby Netai. The tmc set up relief camps, built support and won the seat. In the run-up to May 2011, Bhattacharjee was conspicuous by his absence on the campaign trail, while Mamata staged large rallies across the state on the platform of poriborton— change. The cpm pledged to preserve
the stability of the state, and improve its governance and efficiency. For the most part their election drive was practical: the cpm concentrated on canvassing swing-voters in the southeast, and fielded a slate that was a quarter Muslim and mostly young, first-time candidates. A ‘rectification drive’ had also been underway, announced at the same time as the rampage in West Midnapore: to root out corruption, 24,000 members had been removed over the last year. [23] One of the issues the cpm did raise was increasing quotas for Muslims and the so-called Other Backward Classes in government jobs. The other, in plain speech and circumlocutions, was that taking land from farmers was just the reality of any development in the state; in the future they would not be so ‘highhanded’. In short, the party offered
nothing to the voters they were trying to woo. Mamata was attacked by the cpm from the right, as a crypto-Maoist. Her rebuttal was that Maoism arises from poverty. Her Bengali manifesto pledged infrastructure and welfare to Jungle Mahal, as well as the Sundarbans and North. The English-language version proposed to bring about a second Green Revolution, industrial revival and tourism. She also had the backing of imams in her campaign against the state’s oppression and marginalization of Muslims. The result, when it came, was no surprise. The tmc received 39 per cent of the vote and 184 seats; its coalition with Congress raised this to 48 per cent of votes and 227 out of the state assembly’s 294 seats. The cpm took just
30 per cent of the vote and 40 seats; the Left Front as a whole got 41 per cent of the vote and 62 seats—half of them seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes and Castes. The aifb and rsp lost most of their existing seats except for a few in Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri respectively, where their main opponents were the tmc-backed Gorkha nationalists. Voter turnout across the state was 85 per cent—many going to the polls for the first time, having never known any other government nor the traumas of the past. Among voters under 25, the tmc led the cpm by 55 to 37 per cent. Of the outgoing Left Front cabinet, including the Chief Minister, 26 of 34 lost their constituencies, a clear dismissal of the cpm leadership. The majority of tmc votes were cast in the cities—Calcutta, Hoogly and Howrah—and in the largely
Muslim districts of North and South 24 Parganas. Rural, Bengali-speaking Muslims in general had been supporters of the Left Front, until the fight-back waged by people much like them in Singur and Nandigram. Congress took Murshidabad, [24] where the majority is Muslim and support for the party had traditionally come from Urdu-speaking elites. The cpm’s vote came largely from Bardhaman and North/South 24 Parganas. The party did not win any seats in the major cities—not Asansol nor Durgapur, let alone greater Calcutta, where it took only one seat out of 66. A few vestiges remain in the former stronghold districts of Bardhaman, Bankura and West Midnapore. The tmc’s success was not purely down to public engagements; in Bardhaman they
recruited ex-cpm muscle to attack party offices and supporters. [25] Balance sheet What have been the social and economic outcomes of the cpm’s 34 years in office? West Bengal’s ranking is around the Indian average on most indicators (see Table 2). The gap between rural and urban wealth has increased. Landlessness has been on the rise throughout the cpm’s tenure: just under 40 per cent of the rural population in 1987, rising to half in 2000, when it was 41 per cent for India as a whole. According to census data, cultivators have become a minority of the rural workforce. Some of this shift is due to rural diversification, while many trek to urban centres to find work, often on the
streets. Average economic growth has slowed compared to the 90s, when West Bengal was next only to Karnataka. But while its total gsdp is still one of the highest, on per capita gsdp it lies in around 6th place, between Punjab and Karnataka. West Bengal’s poverty rate has seen little improvement since the 90s, and its national hdi standing has basically remained static since the early years of the Left Front regime: from seventh place amongst major Indian states in 1981 to eighth. In health, new independent rural ambulances and clinics have brought some improvement. Infant mortality is one of the lowest in India, and the maternal mortality rate has fallen. On literacy West Bengal fares better than Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Punjab, though the dropout rate is still shocking.
Following the election results, Indian and Western media cast the cpm’s defeat in gleeful Cold War terms— voters had shed the yoke of Marxism and over three decades of decline. What Mamata’s programme is, not even her spokespeople can say. In her favour, one of the biggest state deficits in India has been resolved with an influx of Central funds, provided by the Finance Minister
Pranab Mukherjee—elder statesman and head of the Bengali Congress, once Indira Gandhi’s right-hand man. Mamata Banerjee’s self-propelled cult of personality—bringing to mind Uttar Pradesh’s Mayawati—has been the catalyst for harnessing rural voters in key districts, which Congress has not been able to do over three decades despite retaining a large portion of the electorate. The reality is that the cpm was voted out from the left, a historic reversal from their ascent to power in 1977. Bhattacharjee and Bose now represent the rearguard of the national party: the cpm’s opposition to the passage of the sez Act in 2005 and the Indo-us Nuclear Deal in 2008 was directly contradicted by the regional party’s practice in West Bengal. [26] At the same time, the Central Committee
has kept the Bengali leadership in place. They are making the best of a bad situation—the popular vote had not completely evaporated. They maintain that their record is unblemished: in Biman Bose’s wooden terms, their programme is to reconnect with the people and rectify the mistakes of their cadre. [27] Though cpm politicians have shown relative probity compared with the mephitic swamp of Congress, malversation and thuggery below cannot be tackled as a matter of etiquette. It is possible that time in opposition could rejuvenate the cpm; but it seems unlikely. The more probable scenario is that cpm patronage networks will dry up by the time of the next state election in 2016, and they will suffer further losses. The party is entering the political
wilderness divorced from internationalist and mass movements that could enable it to reorient its membership and replace its leadership. Amongst the base, sliding popularity has begun to have organizational repercussions: the Kisan Sabha lost nearly a million members in 2009 from 15,900,000 the year before. [28] Extraparliamentary groups are subordinated to electoralism: trade and peasant unions, student and women’s groups do not work across partisan lines to promote common interests. This leads to the absurdity of different unions in dispute with the same employer in pitched battles with one another. The cpm failed to innovate a relationship between social movements and political office. Instead, they rested on hollow victories that relied on gigantic
disproportions between their actual share of votes and number of seats in the state assembly. Winning constituencies—rather than building more support and fighting for advancements—became an end in itself. The other Left Front parties contributed to an optical illusion of mass support for the cpm, with coalition votes and seats often equated, though their role in government is subordinate. After years of electoral alliance, they have become more than ever restricted to their bailiwicks and no longer have a distinct political identity in the state as a whole. Yet in India’s vertically integrated society, small parties can often survive the usually lethal impact of first-pastthe-post politics. Post-election the aifb and rsp have admonished the cpm
leadership, but this raises the question of why they followed along. A longdiscussed reunification of the cpi and its erstwhile offshoot seems closer in sight, the former accustomed to mainly being Congress’s bolster in parliament, now the cpm’s fate. If nothing can be salvaged from the rest of the Left Front, then a new generation will have to forge its own alliances amongst independent left parties, the non-party radicals in social movements and the far left in the Tribal belt.
[1] For an overview of the history of Bengal, see Premen Addy and Ibne Azad, ‘Politics and Culture in Bengal’, nlr I/79, May–June 1973. I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara
Harriss-White and Achin Vanaik for their perceptive comments on this piece. [2] Nationally, the cpi claimed around 106,000 members after the 1964 split and the cpm around 119,000, although this was soon diminished by further splits. For a critical historical analysis, see K. Damodaran, ‘Memoir of an Indian Communist’, nlr I/93, Sept–Oct 1975. [3] According to the Constitution, the 17 state jurisdictions were entitled to set their own ceilings for land-holdings. In West Bengal, the 1953 Estate Acquisitions Act laid out the process for land appropriation (‘vesting’) and compensation; the 1955 Land Reforms Act stipulated ceilings of 5 to 7 hectares (roughly 12 to 17 acres) of irrigated land for families and 2.5 hectares (around 6 acres) for individuals. [4] Sumanta Banerjee, India’s Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising, London 1984, p. 137.
[5] Data from the state Home Minister; an Amnesty International report later put the figure at 20,000, mostly identified as Naxalites, but many cpm members as well: ‘Detention Conditions in West Bengal’, reprinted in Economic & Political Weekly, 21 September 1974. The cpi supported the Emergency as necessary against reactionary forces, bringing themselves into disrepute and terminal decline. [6] aifb: founded by Subhas Chandra Bose, now largely reduced to a cult of him; based only in West Bengal, mainly in Darjeeling and Cooch Behar in the Himalayan foothills. rsp: traces its origins to the Anushilan Samiti, like the cpm, but was never affiliated to the Comintern; a significant base among adivasi workers in the tea plantations of Jalpaiguri, but also elsewhere in India. [7] See Monobina Gupta, Left Politics in Bengal, Hyderabad 2010, esp. ch. 2. [8] See the recollection of then Land Reforms Commissioner D. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Land
Reform in West Bengal: Remembering Hare Krishna Konar and Benoy Chaudhury’, Economic & Political Weekly, 27 May 2000. [9] For a critical overview see Ross Mallick, Development policy of a Communist government: West Bengal since 1977, Cambridge 1993. [10] From Delhi, the national cpm runs an English-language publishing house, LeftWord Books, and a theoretical quarterly, The Marxist; but genuine debate, rather than a party line, is hard to find. [11] The high castes: Brahmins, Kayasthas and Vaidyas; ex-gentry who retain an aversion to manual labour, commerce and the poor. [12] For a systematic comparison of the cpm’s records in West Bengal and Kerala, see below: Achin Vanaik, ‘Left Strategy in India’, nlr 70, July–August 2011. [13] I am grateful for Pranab Bardhan’s insights on these points. See also Bardhan, ‘The
Avoidable Tragedy of the Left in India–II’, Economic & Political Weekly, 11 June 2011. [14] Households with between 0 and 2.5 acres rose from 28 per cent in 1980 to 43 per cent by 1995: West Bengal Agricultural Census. [15] Barbara Harriss-White, Rural Commercial Capital: Agricultural Markets in West Bengal, Delhi 2007. [16] In the late 1960s, vulnerable Scheduled Caste Hindus still in East Bengal sought asylum from communal violence: many communities were broken up by the Central government and sent to other states where they did not speak the language; they eventually tried to make their way back to West Bengal. A tragic instance occurred when one such group was driven out as intruders from their encampment in the Dandakaranya forest, in what is now Chhattisgarh, by the local adivasis. About 30,000 Scheduled Caste refugees journeyed to the mangrove forest of the Sundarbans in the late 70s. The Left Front government forbade the
settlement, on the grounds of preserving an ecological reserve, and launched a police offensive that culminated in the deaths of 236 people in the newly founded village of Marichjhapi. Mallick, ‘Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, Feb 1999. [17] West Bengal also has a higher percentage of people in lower—and higher—income brackets than the national average. [18] For the ‘enclave economy’, see Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy: 1947–2004, 2nd ed., Delhi 2005, ch. 14. [19] Then a cpm mp and Chair of the Haldia Development Authority, who had risen to prominence as a highly effective trade-union agitator. [20] He then further alienated intellectuals by allowing Islamist rioters to expel Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasrin from Calcutta, where she had been in exile after a fatwa against her.
Among the crowd were protestors for the Muslim victims in Nandigram. [21] The Bengali word jungle here means forest or bush, and invokes the uncivilized. [22] V. K. Shashikumar, ‘Operation Nandigram: The Inside Story’, Indian Defence Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008. [23] Barun Ghosh, ‘1000 Face cpm Axe’, Calcutta Telegraph, 16 January 2011. [24] Seat of the Nawabs who ruled Bengal during the Mughal period. [25] Smita Gupta, ‘Bardhaman: Left under siege’, The Hindu, 12 April 2011. [26] There had been plans to build a nuclear plant in Haripur, on one of the world’s most cyclone-prone coastlines, shelved after resistance from the local fishermen.
[27] See www.cpimwb.org.in. [28] ‘cpm Losing Base, Admits Kisan Sabha Leadership’, The Statesman, 30 December 2010.
Thomas Michl
FINANCE AS A CLASS? Amid the torrent of books on the 2008 financial meltdown and the North Atlantic ‘great recession’, this important new contribution from Paris stands out as an analytical beacon. A vast amount has been written on the mechanisms that allowed a giant securitization bubble to blow up within the hypertrophied financial system. But Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy are always mindful of a point that Marx or Keynes would have insisted upon: systemic crises are generated by the internal contradictions of the capitalist economy itself. The Crisis of Neoliberalism combines a long-run comparative view of capitalism’s crises—the 1890s, 1929,
the 1970s, 2008—and successive ‘exits from crisis’, with a detailed, data-rich anatomization of the developments of the past decade: the ‘new’ financial sector, growing global disequilibria, us housing bubble, the ‘seismic wave’ of the unfolding crisis and the rescue measures implemented by the us Treasury and Federal Reserve. [1] Duménil and Lévy conclude with a comparison of the aftermaths of 1929 and 2008, an assessment of the significance of the crisis for us hegemony and some sober prognoses on the social and economic order likely to emerge in its wake. The authors aspire to the kind of influence that Baran and Sweezy achieved with Monopoly Capital some forty years ago—and on this reading, they deserve it. Like Monopoly Capital, the analytical
framework of Crisis of Neoliberalism uses some Marxian categories and language, but leavened with (often implicit) elements of Veblen, Chandler, Galbraith, Keynes and Polanyi. The result is a highly distinctive—and compellingly radical—approach, which demands serious attention. The authors, senior scholars at the statefunded Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Paris, are best known in the English-speaking world for their 2004 Capital Resurgent—first published in France in 2001 as Crise et sortie de crise (reviewed by John Grahl in nlr 9). Here they laid out a threephase periodization of modern capitalism since its emergence from the crisis of the 1890s, together with an idiosyncratic theory of three-way class
struggle somewhat reminiscent of Veblen’s, involving capitalists (‘Finance’), a managerial class and ‘popular classes’, with the managers corresponding to Veblen’s engineers. In this earlier book, Duménil and Lévy argued that the capitalist ‘solution’ to the 1890s crisis involved the creation of a large-scale financial sector and of professionally managed corporations and cartels; in the process, capitalist ownership became separated from daily business management, and a large capitalist–rentier class, owning shares across multiple sectors, differentiated itself from a new class of professional managers and technocrats. The outcome, from 1900–29, was the ‘first phase of financial hegemony’, in the sense that Finance was in command:
there were no checks on the upper fractions of the capitalist class and the large-scale financial institutions, or their capacity to lead. Yet their leadership, and the hectic pursuit of financialization, speculation and self-enrichment that it involved, brought about the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The severity of the 1930s crisis offered opportunities for enhanced managerial autonomy, in alliance with the popular classes, manifested in the New Deal. This ushered in the period of post-war compromise, accompanied by strong workers’ movements, which lasted up to the 1970s, resulting in rising wages, full employment, the welfare state. But this settlement in turn entered into crisis in the 1970s, with falling profit rates and rising inflation. At this point, Finance seized the chance to inaugurate a second
phase of financial hegemony: neoliberalism, Duménil and Lévy argued in Capital Resurgent, was driven by the pursuit of income maximization by the upper capitalist layers, in alliance with the managerial class. The public and corporate policies they promoted accelerated the ascent of a finance-led economic model (financialization) and a regime of free trade and international capital movements (globalization), securing spectacular gains in wealth and income for the elites. In their latest work, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Duménil and Lévy reiterate and extend this historical model, focusing above all on the American economy and on ‘neoliberalism under us hegemony’. The crisis, they argue, is not merely a result of ill-managed
financial deregulation; it is the outcome of contradictions intrinsic to the trajectory of the us economy under this class leadership. ‘The boundless expansion of the demands of the upper classes’, Duménil and Lévy write, ‘pushed economic mechanisms to, and finally beyond, the frontier of sustainability.’ They contend that the top capitalists and their managerial allies have pursued an insatiable ‘quest for high income’ to underwrite their increasingly opulent lifestyles. On its own terms, this programme has to be judged a success. The top 1 per cent of us households, for example, now commands over 20 per cent of income, compared to a mere 9 per cent in the 1970s. Significantly, they have achieved this by increasing their own compensation levels—the rising salaries
and bonuses for top managers and corporate officials—rather than by expanding the share of profits in national income. Hence the flagging rate of investment: Duménil and Lévy calculate that, after 25 years of neoliberalism—and despite the ephemeral recovery during the second half of the 1990s—the stock of fixed capital in the us economy is 32 per cent lower than it would have been had previous investment rates been maintained. When non-financial corporations borrowed, it was increasingly not for investment but for share buybacks, aimed at benefiting their stock-market positions. The macro-economic outcome, then, has been a secularly declining rate of investment spending in the productive
core of the economy, together with an increase in consumption, driven by the luxury spending of the wealthiest but also by rising household debt, which Duménil and Lévy read as an extension of the original ‘neoliberal compromise’ between top capitalists and the managerial class to include ‘the upper fractions of wage earners’. The upshot was burgeoning us trade deficits, financed by foreign borrowing on a scale only possible for the world’s premier imperialist power, with the dollar as reserve currency. At the same time, the global ambitions of Finance, together with the ideology of neoliberalism espoused by the managerial class, dictated the deregulation of international trade and capital markets: funds flow abroad, rather than seeking productive domestic
investment. In the longer run, this trajectory involved both ‘a deterritorialization of commodity production’ and ‘a gradual penetration of foreign capital within national capital spheres’, raising questions about the future of us hegemony. In the shorter run, macro imbalances, above all household debt, threatened to destabilize the fragile financial structures that had multiplied under neoliberalism, above all after the dot.com crash in 2000, with the exponential growth of securitization and derivatives trading. The central sections of The Crisis of Neoliberalism track this post-2000 trajectory, from the housing boom to the financial crisis. Analysing the various components of final demand in the
fluctuating growth rates after the 2000– 01 recession, Duménil and Lévy confirm that the engine of recovery (such as it was) was a wave of residential investment, made possible by a surge in mortgage loans, which were in turn underwritten by securitization and default insurance, with the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates ‘feeding the wave’. From 2004, however, they suggest that the Fed was increasingly ‘losing control of the helm in times of storm’: when Greenspan attempted to reverse course in 2004, Fed officials discovered the failure of a formerly reliable mechanism, the link between the short-term money-market rate that it controls and the long-term capitalmarket rates that govern residential and business investment. Its ability to influence long-term interest rates, and
thus the efficacy of monetary policy as such, was impaired by the torrent of foreign investment pouring into the us from China and Japan—part and parcel, Duménil and Lévy argue, of the global financial restructuring effected by neoliberalism under us hegemony. The authors then demonstrate how the ebbing of the mortgage wave destabilized the fragile ‘financialglobal’ structure, dating the onset of the crisis from the end of the housing bubble in early 2006. The book offers a detailed analysis of the ‘seismic wave’, spreading through the financial sector, from the August 2007 liquidity crisis on the inter-bank market through to the onset of the global crisis in September 2008. Duménil and Lévy see no contradiction for neoliberalism in the
massive state intervention to support the stricken financial sector: Neoliberalism is not about principles or ideology but a social order aiming at the power and income of the upper classes . . . Considered from this angle, there was no change in objectives. In neoliberalism, the state (taken here in a broad sense to include the central bank) always worked in favour of the upper classes. The treatment of the crisis is no exception, only circumstances and, consequently, instruments differ. DumĂŠnil and LĂŠvy offer a detailed account of the steps taken by the Federal Reserve through to March 2010, followed by an analysis of the trends apparent in the main components of its balance sheet; this shows the massive
rise in the Fed’s holdings of us Treasury securities, even as its loans to us financial institutions decline. As they summarize: ‘crucial traditional segments of the functioning of the us financial system are still not ensured by the socalled markets’, but are dependent on state support. If there is a precedent to the current crisis, the authors argue, it is unquestionably that of 1929. The penultimate section of The Crisis of Neoliberalism offers a useful survey of the diverse interpretations of the Great Depression, together with an assessment of the policies—and politics—of the New Deal. Duménil and Lévy here reiterate their thesis of ‘the tendency toward increasing instability’ under financial hegemony, first developed in
their 1996 La dynamique du capital: Un siècle d’économie américaine, as an explanation of the Crash of 1929 and after with obvious resonance for their analysis today. It contains four propositions: (i) the advance of managerial and financial mechanisms gradually adds to the potential instability of the macro-economy; (ii) this tendency requires the gradual improvement of regulatory frameworks and macro policies; but (iii) there is always resistance to such corrective regulation; (iv) correction is, finally, performed, but only after the crisis, ‘the violence of the perturbation being the engine of the required adjustment’. What, then, is the outlook for today? Given the depth of neoliberalism’s crisis, and the prospect of America’s declining
world status if it continues, Duménil and Lévy think that a new configuration of power is likely to emerge within the next decade. Applying their three-class analysis, they suggest that the realignment will involve the managers asserting their authority to impose some kind of order on the neoliberal chaos (again, like Veblen’s engineers). This could occur in alliance with the popular classes, reconstituting the New Deal alliance; but that would depend on the strength and determination of the working class and its organizations. More likely, they think, would be an assertion of managerial hegemony within the existing capitalist–manager alliance—a technocratic solution without historical precedent, which they dub ‘neo-managerialism’. The programme for this new ruling-class
bloc would involve a ‘strengthening of the us economy on us territory’, restrictions on trade and capital movements and a financial sector at the service of the non-financial economy. Though this would involve ‘a degree of containment’ of capitalist interests, Duménil and Lévy warn, it would also mean the end of the welfare state and continued stagnation in the purchasing powers of the great mass of wage earners. But the exact content of the new power configuration will depend on social struggles still to come. By any measure, The Crisis of Neoliberalism is a landmark intervention in the post-crisis debates. How should its interpretation be assessed? First of all, Duménil and Lévy are surely right to stress the significance
of the massive reallocation of wealth that has taken place during the neoliberal period. This is a familiar story, of course, often served with a moralizing subtext. But the issue is not just unfairness; it is also dysfunction. This redistribution originates in the decoupling of real wages from productivity: in the us, real wages have stagnated or fallen outright for most workers since 1980 while their productivity continues to rise. We have returned to the world vividly portrayed in Marx’s accounts of the production of relative surplus value—productivity rising faster than wages—and absolute surplus value: more hours for the same wages. But the immature capitalism Marx studied would most likely have translated these upward redistributions into increased investment; an option
exemplified by China’s spectacular growth over the last decades. By contrast, neoliberal capitalism has effectively disincentivized investment in favour of shareholder value. Stock options, the shareholder revolution, and the growth of large pools of finance capital in pension, insurance, privateequity and hedge funds, have all conspired to force managers to distribute their firms’ profits to wealth holders through higher dividend payouts, interest on borrowings, and stock buybacks. Neoliberal ideologues promised a more efficient allocation of capital that would generate dynamic growth and prosperity. For a brief period in the 1990s, a temporary wave of investment in information technology appeared to
make this plausible; but that washed back out over a decade ago. Contemporary capitalism suffers from a chronic shortage of investment and misallocations of capital on a global scale. The financial system, far from facilitating real growth—a role that banks did play, in previous stages of capitalism—actually obstructs capital development and promotes the deindustrialization of the advancedcapitalist core. Nowhere was this more evident than in the run-up to the Great Recession. Along a key tectonic-plate boundary, the internal stresses presented themselves in the abysmally low business investment rate during the 2001–07 recovery. During this period, Greenspan and Bernanke were desperately trying to prevent the us from following Japan into a deflation trap.
But despite their near-zero real interest rates, an investment-led recovery eluded them, even though profits, relative to either income or capital, were strong. In manufacturing, the capital stock actually shrank for the first time since the Depression, stark evidence of deindustrialization. Instead, the Federal Reserve got an unsustainable construction-led expansion and a houseprice bubble fed by capital inflows from the Pacific rim, channelled through a shadow-banking system ensorcelled by structured finance and securitization. Apparently Federal Reserve officials— although not Bernanke himself—are now returning to Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis in their post-mortems of what went wrong. But Minsky’s picture of asset-market booms
and busts, driven by waves of exuberance or despair among bankers and borrowers, leaves out the functional role that asset-price bubbles played, while they lasted, in making good the shortfalls of the neoliberal model. For if the traditional restorative of capital accumulation fails, some alternative source of demand must be secured, or else the system will sink into stagnation. The serial bubbles in the stock and housing markets stoked consumer demand, first among those wealthy enough to own serious quantities of stock, and then among homeowners who were able to capitalize on realestate appreciation. It might have been possible for the Fed or other regulators to attenuate those bubbles. But as long as the underlying contradictions remained in place, they would have
expressed themselves in financial and economic turbulence of one form or another. That is what defines a crisis. But what kind of crisis? The divergence of interpretations on the left today about the current turmoil is almost as wide as that surrounding the Great Depression. Some, like Robert Brenner, would insist that profitability in conditions of overcapacity remains the issue. For structural Keynesians, the problem is demand and the solution lies in recoupling wages and productivity— wage-led growth. In Marxian terms, this is a realization crisis. Yet Duménil and Lévy resist this description, arguing that the crisis is ‘not the consequence of a lack of demand, the expression of the insufficient purchasing power of wages’. Instead, they insist, it is the outcome of
‘over-consumption, paralleling underaccumulation’; and chiefly, the overconsumption of the elites. This position depends on consumption spending by the elites materializing dependably. Yet the evidence that Duménil and Lévy cite—a study by Federal Reserve economists Maki and Palumbo— suggests that it took the stock bubble of the 1990s to drive up elite consumption; it seems reasonable to suggest that the housing bubble of the 2000s played a similar role. Without these sources of demand, the underlying realization problem would surely have surfaced. The absence of a V-shaped recovery in most of the advanced-capitalist core is further proof that this is a structural crisis. We do not have the ‘magneto trouble’ that Keynes believed could be
solved through an essentially technical fix, using monetary and fiscal policies to put the economy back on the road. At the same time, Duménil and Lévy are surely right to point out that neoliberal orthodoxies are still driving the ‘rescue’. In part, this is expressed in the premium put on restraining inflation, which would erode the returns of finance capital. Fed officials, ever the generals fighting the last war, are already whispering amongst themselves about the need to rein in some of the liquidity they have had to create. Meanwhile, the carping about the ‘burden of debt’ grows ever louder. There is an unsubtle parallel between the starvation of productive capital, enforced by the neoliberal capital market, and the starvation of the public sector— including education, health, basic
research and infrastructure—enforced by the bond market and its orthodoxies. The efforts of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have largely been directed towards rescuing the financial institutions that caused the crisis—a system the Chinese have taken to calling ‘socialism with American characteristics’. The Dodd–Frank bill was only a baby step towards what needs to be done to return banks— including the shadow-banking sector, which Dodd–Frank mostly ignores—to utility status, serving the real economy as faithfully as, say, an electrical power grid. Ironically, though, given the central role of asset-price bubbles in papering over its internal contradictions, in the short-to-medium term real financial reform would be likely to worsen American capitalism’s
performance. In the next decade, stagnation remains the most likely outcome. The comparative-historical framework that DumĂŠnil and LĂŠvy set out offers an invaluable starting-point for considering what comes next. The last two periods of crisis, the 1930s and the 1970s, were both incubators for new forms of capitalism; equally, they were very different sorts of crisis. The 1970s was, above all, a crisis of profitability, caused by a confluence of factors that included over-accumulation, a spike in commodity prices and the exhaustion of the prevailing technological paradigm. It caused the ruling classes to question the post-war consensus on full employment and managed capitalism and to rally round the policies and ideology that
blossomed into neoliberal capitalism. Hence, the defining moments of the new era’s birth—the Volcker interest-rate shock, which plunged the world economy into one of the deepest recessions since the Depression, and Reagan’s firing of patco strikers—were designed both to discipline workers and stabilize the profit rate. Herein lies a potential answer to the structural Keynesian analysis. Continuing the post-war model of capitalism was not an alternative because it could not, under the historical conditions prevailing circa 1980, address the underlying problem of profitability. But as we have seen, solving one kind of capitalist crisis— profitability—only created the conditions for another one to surface, whether we call it a crisis of ‘financial
hegemony’, as do Duménil and Lévy, or of ‘realization’. What of Duménil and Lévy’s predictions? Eventually, some new, post-neoliberal model is bound to emerge. Whether it will take the form of the neo-managerial alliance they depict is open to debate. One question—both for Duménil and Lévy and for Veblen, who had a similar idea—is what will motivate the managerial class to bite the hand that has been feeding it? Or, as The Crisis of Neoliberalism frames it: will managers balk at hurting the interests of their social ‘cousins’? Duménil and Lévy hint at patriotism as a possible motive—‘the desire to preserve the comparative power of the country’. But this seems unlikely to light a fire under our incipient
Veblenesque managers. The popular classes may be better advised to prepare to fight against a protracted period of stagnation and malaise, as American and European elites endeavour to keep the neoliberal project alive, at the price of a harshly reactionary political agenda. What of a new variant of the New Deal/welfare-state model? In Duménil and Lévy’s account, workers and managers would form an implicit compact to pursue objectives—growth, technical change, effective regulation— broader than the goal of maximizing shareholder value (here is where Chandler or Galbraith come in). The political problems facing such an alliance are obvious enough: in the 1930s, the international workers’ movement was strong enough to call capitalism itself into question; today’s
managerial authorities would sooner call out the riot police against the ‘popular classes’ than consider a joint programme with them. But, setting aside such practical political considerations, could such an economic strategy work today? The Keynesian view is that recoupling wages and productivity will overcome the chronic shortage of demand and that everything will then fall into place, through a sort of Say’s Law in reverse: demand creates its own supply. Yet even if aggregate demand problems are ameliorated, the favourable technological conditions of the post-war period are unlikely to reappear. As a result, profitability would become a more significant constraint on private investment. Managers and shareholders would have to be
convinced to lower their expectations, or perhaps recourse to some version of Keynes’s ‘socialization of investment’ would prove necessary. In this case, the state would have to become a significant source of public investment, R&D and demand; climate change and resource exhaustion make this more than an academic possibility. Without a level of political intensity comparable to the 1930s, it is hard to see options of this sort materializing. But then, looking forward from 1929, it may have seemed harder still. Young workers or students who have had the misfortune to enter the labour force during the Great Recession will require a far-reaching education in the history of capitalist crises if they are to begin to craft an alternative exit from the present one. This book should help.
[1] Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA 2011, $49.95, hardcover 391 pp, 978 0 674 04988 8
achin vanaik
SUBCONTINENTAL STRATEGIES Across most of the globe there has been a decline of left forces of all kinds over the past two decades. But there have been three or four countries in which political parties that trace their roots to the traditions of the Third International or to Maoism have remained stable or even grown: South Africa, Nepal, India and, arguably, the Philippines. South Africa has the sacp, while a Maoist party is the single largest political force in Nepal, and Maoism retains a national presence in the Philippines. The case of India is very interesting in that here there are representatives of both formations, which have—to an uneven extent—maintained or actually strengthened their reach over the past
twenty years. Both the Stalinized Communist Party of India–Marxist (cpm) and the once larger, but now smaller and shrinking, Communist Party of India (cpi) have remained forces of some political significance. The cpm, unseated in West Bengal after a record 34 continuous years in office, even in defeat obtained around 30 per cent of the vote, at the head of the Left Front which won 41 per cent. [1] Formations owing allegiance to the Maoist tradition, meanwhile, have actually increased their membership and extended their influence in recent years. Why has this been the case?
If only three or four countries have been bucking what is otherwise a global trend, the reasons must lie in the specificities of their respective socio-political formations. In India, the explanation for the persistence of Maoist and Communist forces is best sought in the country’s peculiar dualism, in which stable macro-structures of bourgeois liberal democracy co-exist with extremely undemocratic, violent sociopolitical realities at the meso- and micro-levels, especially, but not only, in the countryside. Secondly, steady capitalist development has brought dramatic polarizations between prosperity and extreme deprivation, overlaid onto the enduring pre-capitalist structure of the caste system, with great social deference at one end of the hierarchy and contemptuous exclusion
at the other. In this context, traditional Stalinized and Maoist notions of developmentalism in the name of socialism continue to exert a powerful appeal for large masses of people. The combination of sustained macrolevel democracy and capitalist advance with persistent underdevelopment and socio-economic exploitation has pushed the Indian left in two different directions. The legatees of the Communist tradition have essentially been co-opted into the liberal-democratic system of electoral and parliamentary politics. Even their stalwart defenders recognize that their many years in power in West Bengal as part of the Left Front—dominated by the cpm and its junior partner, the cpi— and their alternating terms of office in Kerala have corrupted them
programmatically, bureaucratically, socially and morally. The effects of their long involvement in ‘managing capitalist development’, even as this process has taken an increasingly neoliberal turn, were evident in the West Bengal Left Front’s behaviour over land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, though this did at least cause rumblings internally. However, political differences between the cpm and the cpi are not of serious consequence. In the wake of the recent state-assembly reverses in West Bengal and Kerala, talk of a possible near-term merger of the two parties has resurfaced. Were it to go ahead, which is by no means certain, it would be of much less moment than if it had taken place 15 to 20 years ago.
Even if the cpm and cpi were willing— which they are not—they are increasingly incapable of carrying out mass mobilizations among the poorest and most deprived, either to defend them or to help fulfil their basic needs and aspirations. Perhaps the most dramatic indication of this came in 1992, when the Hindu right organized the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya—the greatest mass mobilization in India since independence. But at this decisive moment in modern Indian history, the parliamentary left could not even carry out a counter-mobilization against the onslaught of communalism. Bringing out their captive trade-union wings in the standard form of one-day bandhs (strikes) and mass processions with economic demands is no substitute for a
sustained practice of extraparliamentary mass mobilizations that address a whole range of issues. The only relatively bright spot is the growth of the cpm’s and cpi’s women’s wings; but this too is taking place within a broader women’s movement in India that, compared to its past, is more sectoral in character, more fragmented, in which socialist- or Marxist-feminists exercise less influence than before. Red corridor Indian Maoism, by contrast, has moved in the opposite direction. With the exception of one strand—the cpi-ml (Liberation) group, which is itself stagnating—it has remained essentially immune to the lures of parliamentary and electoral politics, at least
concerning its own direct involvement. It has rooted itself among the poorest and most deprived sections of the population: Dalits and especially tribals in Central India. Its base area of Dandakaranya is a hilly, thickly forested region covering an area of 92,000 square kilometres, over twice the size of Kerala, cutting across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra and most of Chhattisgarh. [2] Naxalites also have a presence in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat and Uttarakhand. In July 2011, the government declared that 103 out of the country’s 602 administrative districts were affected by ‘left-wing extremism’. [3]
Maoism has survived and grown in India for one obvious reason which neither the state nor the mainstream parliamentary left are prepared fully to acknowledge: it has been the principal defender of the poorest and most deprived against their class oppressors and the politicians, bureaucrats, police and paramilitaries backing them at various levels. Like Marxist revolutionaries everywhere, India’s Maoists face the persistent riddle of how to bring about enduring radical transformation in a capitalist society with stable and entrenched structures of bourgeois democracy; as well as strong military and police apparatuses as a back-up for sustaining class rule. Yet Indian Maoists have simply failed to register the existence of this strategic dilemma, since their theoretical
understanding of the Indian social formation as semi-feudal and semicolonial effectively denies the existence of the country’s complex reality. Their strategy has essentially been one of armed overthrow of the state through a struggle in which the ‘countryside will surround the city’. They now give greater emphasis to lower- and workingclass urban mobilization, and also speak of building ‘mobile liberated zones’— from which revolutionaries move out when under pressure, to return later. But in the longer term, their strategy is simply a recipe for comprehensive failure, and in the short and medium term paves the way for many damaging and unacceptable practices. This is so for a number of reasons. Firstly, a military strategy cannot in the
long run succeed against the Indian state. Provincial governments and some opposition parties have sometimes found it useful to harp on the ‘Maoist threat’ and exaggerate its impact, as a way of obtaining more Central funds, which are then used for various other purposes; at other times, it has suited them to make a rapprochement with the Maoists. But much weaker national governments than that of India have been able to defeat very significant insurgencies which had mass support. The principal lesson the authorities have learned is that the more prolonged the stand-off between themselves and even popularly rooted armed insurgencies, the more wearied becomes the latter’s mass base, the more likely internal divisions are to emerge, and therefore the weaker the insurgency will become.
The lessons of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte) defeat in Sri Lanka are clear. Here was a non-state insurgency with unusually strong military capacities—it had its own air force and navy—confronting a state far weaker than India’s, with a mass base that was not just looking for life improvement but was even committed to the strategic goal of Tamil independence. Yet it still lost militarily to its opponent, which was of course helped out by the Indian state. It is not a coincidence that India, precisely after the Rajapaksa government’s victory over the ltte, escalated its coercive actions against ‘Naxalites’. Second, a militarized strategy demands a top-down command structure, which necessarily shapes the organization in an
authoritarian manner, minimizing the scope for internal democracy and putting a premium on secrecy and strict obedience. When things go wrong, as they inevitably will in one way or another, suspicions abound, and peremptory, ad hoc punishments tend to be imposed both on activist members and on sections of the wider social base. Fear becomes a means of cementing loyalty inside the organization and among its supporters. Alongside this, a militarized strategy creates a culture of hostility to those who do not share the same perspective; other progressive forces are seen as possible or actual competitors for support from the same social layers that armed Maoism is determined to monopolize. Such sectarianism tends to take extreme militarist forms. [4]
Thirdly, even though Maoist cadres are drawn from among tribals and Dalits, there remains a crucial disjuncture between the concerns of the leadership and those of the mass base. The former is ideologically committed to the longterm project of overthrowing the state; the villagers are looking for more concrete, near-term improvements in living conditions. To some degree, these immediate needs are held hostage to the more distant strategic aim. For example, the building of roads can lead to some life improvements in rural areas, but it can also facilitate government actions against the ‘liberated zones’; Maoist groups thus have an interest in preventing those forms of development they cannot control. Finally, the need for finances, in order to secure weaponry and to carry out positive
developmental activities among Dalits and tribals, means that armed Maoists cannot be consistent or wholehearted in their opposition to class enemies, but seek compromises with them that are financially favourable in the areas they control. These ‘liberated zones’ are therefore not liberated in the classical sense of, for example, China’s Yan’an in the late 1930s. There are thus serious limits to the Maoists’ ability to carry out socially transformative measures within these zones which could then create deeper and wider loyalties to their more abstract, longer-term goals. Questions of force Making these criticisms, of course, in no way implies endorsement of the Indian state’s repression and demonization of
the ‘Naxalites’. One can condemn unwarranted acts of violence by Maoists, but these cannot be equated with the brutalities committed by the Indian state. The government’s bid to crush Maoism has involved a frontal assault on sections of the latter’s social base, which remains the most oppressed in Indian society; the continuation of this policy will mean further violence of this kind, with profound implications for Indian democracy. The government’s stance is all the more dangerous because it receives legitimation from a whole array of intellectuals, academics and media figures, endorsing the idea that armed Maoism is ‘enemy number one’. This is plainly ludicrous. The principal danger to Indian democracy comes not from Naxalism but from the forces of Hindutva, which have carried out
violence and brutality on a scale that dwarfs anything armed Maoism has done. [5] The forces of the Hindu right have succeeded in institutionalizing themselves within Indian civil society in a way unmatched by the whole of the left, mainstream or Maoist; its political and cultural vehicles have been legitimized as an acceptable part of the mainstream. For example, the instigators and apologists for the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat— figures such as Chief Minister Narendra Modi—are not only unpunished, but lauded as statesmen. The state’s efforts to ‘eliminate Naxalism’ are also a cover for delegitimizing all forms of radical left politics. Thus when the mainstream parliamentary left effectively endorses
the Indian state’s policies towards the Maoists—or worse still, as in West Bengal, even orders armed actions against them—it is doing serious damage to its own cause. The state’s bid to shrink the public space for radical activity of even a non-violent kind is evident in the treatment of Maoist ‘sympathizers’: for example, the civil rights activists Arundhati Roy and Binayak Sen (also a dedicated medic for the poor) have been accused of sedition. No doubt the very high public, indeed international, profile of the two—Sen’s trial aroused protests from a host of Nobel Laureates—has stalled further action. [6] But the point has been made, and warning served to other civil-rights activists to think twice before attacking government policies vis-à-vis ‘Naxals’.
It is important to stress that in India, even struggles for elementary demands are met with violence at a very early stage. Time and again, repression has succeeded in preventing such movements from reaching a critical mass or in finishing them off altogether. Neither the mainstream left nor many progressive social movements have wanted to come to grips with this question of force, but it cannot be dodged. A posture of Gandhian nonviolence at all costs and in all circumstances often fatally disarms such struggles. Indian Maoists have at least addressed this reality, even if inadequately, and their very success in sustaining themselves among the poorest is testimony to the partial efficacy of taking up arms. However, what should be at best a defensive
posture, politically subordinated to a more sophisticated strategy for longterm transformation, has unfortunately become the main strategy itself. Ironically, it is the Indian far right— most notably the Sangh Parivar—that has been most able to control its use of force within an overarching strategic and political framework, to which its violent actions are firmly subordinated. Parliamentary Stalinism If Maoism is in a long strategic cul-desac, what of the Stalinized mainstream left parties? Over the last three decades, as in many other countries, the centre of gravity of Indian politics has shifted significantly to the right. The mainstream left has not been left untouched by this drift. Its trajectory
could be seen as broadly parallel to that of Europe’s former mass Communist parties, which went from Stalinism to Euro-communism to ultimate subordination to their Euro-socialist competitors; except that it is the cpm and cpi which have themselves become the main social-democratic force in Indian politics. Indeed, with the rightward drift of Congress, it is ironically the cpm and cpi that are today the principal legatees of the old Nehruvian consensus—the socialdemocratic vision of a strongly secular, welfarist and non-aligned, yet capitalist India. Formal commitment to a communist future leaves no imprint on these parties’ programmes or behaviour. Yet for all the manifest deficiencies of the cpm’s and cpi’s brand of democratic
centralism—far removed from best Bolshevik practice—there is still more internal discussion within them, and greater accountability of leaderships to members, than in any other party in India. Unlike most social-democratic parties of the later 20th century, they remain strongly opposed to Western imperialism. However, they have been consistently unprepared to offer a public repudiation of Stalinism, whatever some intellectuals and sympathizers inside or outside the two parties might say privately. There is likewise no public acknowledgement of China’s capitalist transformation. The consequence of such silence is that they are incapable of learning the lessons of the past or of strategically orienting their own cadres and activists. Ideological and programmatic mistakes are not directly
confronted; errors are sidestepped, not overcome. The parties cannot be genuinely self-critical of their past or present, and honest intellectual, political and moral rectification cannot take place. Most importantly, without an explicit, public and wholesale repudiation of Stalinism and its legacy, there is no way that a new, principled programmatic perspective—a ‘socialism for the 21st century’—can be built. What, then, are the prospects for the parliamentary left? Since the cpm is the hub of these forces, some reflections on its possible future trajectory may not be amiss. The party’s stunning defeat in the West Bengal state elections of 2011 is widely seen as a historic turning point. Given the scale of the rebuff from voters, this is understandable; but it is also
revealing that the cpm’s electoral fortunes, its eligibility to govern at provincial level, are considered the prime indicator of its political strength. This in itself illustrates the cpm’s degeneration since it first became a serious contender for government office in the late sixties. It has been a degeneration in two intimately related senses—political-organizational and structural. On the first count, the cpm was once a movement-based party, whose cadres were motivated by an ideological programme which, though Stalinized, nonetheless inspired involvement in mass struggles on behalf of various oppressed sectors— protecting Muslims from communal violence in the mid-sixties, or struggling for justice in rural areas. Four decades on, the transmogrification of the party is
complete—though not without lingering tensions between its theoretical commitment to anti-capitalist and antiimperialist perspectives and its focus in practice on the electoral route to power, above all in West Bengal and Kerala. Despite the shared ‘social democratization’ of the cpm’s wings in these two states, the deformities of the regional party in the richer and more powerful West Bengal have been much greater. Three important differences between the two states have affected the evolution of their respective cpm units. First, land reform in Kerala gave the great majority of the rural population ownership rights, to at least small household plots, thereby ensuring that basic food needs could be met, either directly through crops grown or through
sale of agricultural produce. In West Bengal, Operation Barga, which ended by 1981, gave sharecroppers security of tenure and rights to usufruct, but stopped there, never initiating the kind of redistribution of land ownership that would have greatly weakened the rich and middle peasantry, which continues to enjoy significant influence in the panchayat structure that was also set up and regularized by the Left Front in West Bengal. Here lies the second difference. In Kerala, the panchayat structure saw a genuine devolution of funds and decision-making powers that has enabled a range of local grievances to be addressed and needs fulfilled. Moreover, control of the state government has alternated between the cpm-led Left
Democratic Front coalition (ldf) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (udf); the Muslim and Christian communities, 23 and 19 per cent of Kerala’s population respectively, have broadly remained loyal to their respective parties, the Indian Union Muslim League and the Kerala Congress. This has meant that neither the cpm nor Congress could ever hope to establish the kind of top-down, centralized control over the Panchayati Raj that the cpm has in West Bengal. There the party succeeded in making it a mechanism for electoral-political dominance through the systematization of a structure of patronage and coercion, with its associated forms of blandishments and threats, rewards and punishments. In both West Bengal and Kerala it is proximity to power and its
benefits that mainly motivates the cpm’s cadres, rather than commitment to a Third International ideological legacy. But in West Bengal the organizational degeneration and lumpenization of its cadre base is much greater, because the continuity of its hold on power helped to create a much stronger meshing of party and administrative (civilian and police) bureaucracy—a ‘partocracy’ that lends itself to all kinds of abuses. This has resulted in a very effective form of patronage for those willing to pledge loyalty to the cpm; the party becomes a crucial avenue for resolving many everyday problems—access to health care, distress finances, employment for a family member, help with the bureaucracy, vengeance against an enemy, and so on.
The third key difference lies in the far superior levels of health and education in Kerala, which have enabled the state to compensate for the lack of industrialization, and therefore of adequate labour absorption, through the export of personnel of varying skill levels to other parts of India and abroad, thus creating a remittance economy; to this can be added a growing tourism sector. In West Bengal the Green Revolution, and agricultural growth rates more generally, ran out of steam by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Looking to the Chinese policy of inviting fdi to promote industrialization, the cpm’s state leadership took advantage of the 1991 reforms giving India’s states greater economic autonomy from the centre and pushed the party towards an increasingly
neoliberal line. By 2006, confident of its control over the rural hinterland— perhaps thinking to follow Beijing’s example in this regard too—the cpm pursued land acquisitions to fuel sez-led industrialization, to be realized by outside investors, Indian and foreign. This was the strategy that led to the Singur and Nandigram episodes of state-sponsored violence, which backfired dramatically in political-moral as well as electoral terms. Alongside this, the 2006 report by the Delhiappointed Sachar Committee showed how miserable the socio-economic situation was for Muslims in West Bengal—they make up nearly a quarter of the population—compared with most other Indian states with large Muslim communities. This created great disillusionment amongst an otherwise
loyal voter base. Protection of their lives from communal assault was no longer enough; they demanded improvement. Both of these conjunctural developments contributed to the shift in public perceptions against the cpm and Left Front in West Bengal. Where does the cpm go from here? In Kerala, the 2011 state assembly elections actually brought a reversal of the shift against the Left Democratic Front expressed in voting for the national Lok Sabha elections of 2009, and in the 2010 panchayat elections in the state. In the latest elections, the incumbent ldf coalition almost defied the longstanding trend of alternating stints in power, obtaining 68 seats out of the total 140 to the victorious udf’s 72. There is no reason to think the Kerala
party unit will alter its programme or strategy: it will continue along the established lines, expecting to return to power the next time around. What about the West Bengal unit and the central party leadership in Delhi? Until the end of the 1980s, nationallevel policy in the cpm was little more than the upshot of inner-party efforts at balancing the interests and concerns of the two main state-level units, with West Bengal dominant. The emergence of coalition politics at the Centre from 1989 onwards gave smaller parties such as the cpm unexpected leverage—even parties with 20–30 Lok Sabha seats could be considered useful partners— and opportunities to play a much bigger role at the national and international levels. It was here that a tension then
emerged between, on the one hand, sections of the Delhi-based leadership, and on the other, the West Bengal leadership and its supporters in Delhi. At one level this tension is rooted in a disjuncture between a theory and formal programme that is anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist, and a practice in West Bengal that became increasingly neoliberal in orientation, implemented by a state-level leadership seeking more stable relations with a Congress-led centre. At another level, the issue of whether the parliamentary left should join a Congress-led central government has frequently divided the party, as more generally it has the non-Maoist left outside the cpm and cpi. The seduction of gaining central power, to strengthen the cpm’s hold of its regional bastions as well as perhaps extending its
influence elsewhere, has been pitted against the very real fear, if not strong likelihood, that the left would end up sharing responsibility for a neoliberal drift internally and pro-American consolidation externally, without real power to change either course. For too many on the left, as well as some liberals, the issue of whether the cpm should have joined the 1996 United Front government, when its leader Jyoti Basu was offered the Prime Ministership, or the 2004 Congress-led United Progressive Alliance administration, has been seen as the crucial strategic question—the decisive test that would have determined its future fate—when it has not been anything of the kind. The real tragedy of the cpm is that either way—whether it
had joined a Congress-led government at the centre or not, and whether or not it joins one in future—its further deradicalization is assured. Of course, there is no question of the cpm somehow rejuvenating itself to become a much more radical anti-Stalinist force. The point is that it cannot even hope to again become the kind of movementbased party, with ideologically motivated and dedicated cadres, that it once was. The party’s major internal stocktaking will take place at its next congress, to be held in Kerala and scheduled for April 2012. The cpm will not disappear in the coming period. It will continue on well-worn paths, hoping—indeed expecting—that the mistakes of the new Trinamool Congress dispensation in Calcutta will once again hand it electoral victory. It
has no other vision. If the chance to join a central coalition government again arises, the cpm will this time most likely take it. But for the longer term project of building a more radical and principled Indian left, this will mean little or nothing. Radical perspectives One of the key arguments used to justify unwavering loyalty to India’s mainstream left parties is that this is a period in which progressive forces are on the defensive. The mainstream parties are held to be the principal mechanisms for preserving the remaining historic gains made by the socialist movement, and for preventing a further rightward drift towards communalist, anti-democratic forces.
This reasoning has been deployed to legitimize unprincipled alliances with non-bjp parties and the pursuit of a ‘Third Front’ politics. The very nomenclature—an unspecified entity that is neither bjp nor Congress—is an indication of how far the cpm and cpi have moved from earlier demands for a ‘left and democratic front’. But such compromises are based on a deeply flawed perspective: the idea that the transition to socialism will involve some kind of interregnum of social democracy or its equivalent in developing countries. This notion should be laid to rest. On this count, the right is correct: the present variety of neoliberalism, with a more or less human face, is the only kind of capitalism on offer.
What is required, then, is a much more radical and offensive perspective, guided by an explicitly anti-capitalist politics. While it can share much ground with existing social-democratic demands—for re-establishing the principles of universal and free healthcare, quality public education, guaranteed pensions, affordable public housing and transport—which have become all but impossible to fulfil in contemporary capitalism, this politics must also put forward what used to be called ‘anti-capitalist structural reforms’. Also required is the reassertion, in more creative contemporary forms, of classical transitional demands: transparency, opening management’s books, workers’ control, direct democracy and so on. There is much that can be learnt from the rich
international history of such efforts— Yugoslavia’s self-management workers’ councils; Cuba’s urban farming experiments; participatory budgeting in Brazil; communities of peace in Colombia; panchayat-based resource planning in Kerala; the tradition of democratic unionism forged in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. In more abstract terms, what is required is a politics that unites the particular with the universal. Historically, the two have most often been conjoined through the broader political projects of nationalism, socialism and democracy, whether separately or in combination. For the most part, where socialist revolutions have successfully transformed the state they have been connected to progressive nationalist
struggles. But that era is over, and it is now the project of a socialism connected to the struggle for deepening existing democracy that must inspire hopes for radical transformation. In the past, the principal organizational embodiment of such a combined politics has invariably been the political party, or the united front of such parties. We can be more flexible—perhaps we can create a new party, a new front, or some combination of radical parties and socialist-oriented movements. What does this imply for the pursuit of radical politics in India? No existing political force can be the nucleus around which a left alternative will be built. This can only come about through a recomposition and realignment of existing forces, which will inevitably
involve splits and fusions as well as accretions from unexpected sources. What this implies is that it is not loyalty to an organization but to a programme embodying principled radical positions that is important: the programme makes the organization, rather than the other way around. Second, there must be a combination of electoral and parliamentary activity with extraparliamentary mobilization. Indeed, for an effective left, it is success at the extra-parliamentary level which essentially determines success in electoral terms. Thus the left must have and constantly seek to expand an ideologically trained and committed cadre base; for this, it must practise a politics of passion, far removed from the mundane compromises of bourgeois forces. The organization that will
embody the programme of this new kind of left must itself practise the strongest forms of internal democracy: complete freedom of discussion and debate among members, the right to form tendencies and factions, and proportional representation of these groupings at all levels of leadership. Within the leadership there should also be representation, proportional to the membership, of women, tribals, Dalits and Most Backward Classes (the lowest non-Dalit castes). This would be a means of attracting such social groups, especially their most active and committed elements, away from existing, sectorally oriented organizations whose politics lack a clear anti-capitalist thrust.
Finally, the left cannot fall into the trap of a narrow bourgeois nationalism. In South Asia, the ‘socialism in one country’ perspective of both Stalinism and Maoism was and is a disaster. The Indian left that still speaks of semifeudalism and semi-colonialism or believes in a stage-ist approach—and hence rationalizes electoral–political alliances with non-Congress and nonbjp parties—is unprepared to recognize that India is a sub-imperialist, regional power. This is a crucial problem. It is not enough to attack American imperialism and oppose India’s strategic alliance with the us and Israel, important though these stances are. It is vital to acknowledge India’s own imperial role in South Asia: its oppressions in Kashmir and the Northeast; its overt and covert
interventions in support of reaction in Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and Sri Lanka; as well as the mutual hypocrisies of relations between the Pakistani and Indian ruling classes. Opposition to all this must begin here. Indian Stalinism often tails the Indian state in its nationalist posturing, while the Maoists will only recognize other Maoists as politically serious partners. Indian socialists seeking a wider and deeper radical internationalism must not only solidarize with anti-imperialists elsewhere; they must also prioritize the building of a more unified South Asian struggle. Edward Thompson once said very beautifully that throughout history, there have been struggles for decency, humanity and justice, and struggles for power. These are not parallel tracks;
they meander, and sometimes merge. When they do, power is being harnessed towards the important goals. When the tracks separate, some choose to go towards power while others continue on the path of principled politics. Our best hope is to continue on this latter path and seek to merge it with the path of power, so that we can then move forward on both fronts.
[1] The cpm now remains in power only in the small northeastern state of Tripura, but still has a strong presence in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, as well as Kerala and West Bengal. The cpi, though it has long had much less depth than the cpm, has always had a wider spread; besides a presence in the above named states, it has a cadre base in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
[2] According to state publicity materials, Chhattisgarh has huge deposits of coal, iron, manganese, bauxite, limestone, dolomite and quartz; diamonds, gold and uranium have also been discovered. See Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, Delhi 2008, p. 226. [3] ‘Over 100 districts will be declared Maoisthit’, The Asian Age, 5 July 2011. [4] See Nicolas Jaoul, ‘Naxalism in Bihar: From Bullet to Ballot’, in Lauren Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot, eds, Armed Militias of South Asia: Fundamentalists, Maoists and Separatists, New Delhi 2009. [5] The Sangh Parivar is especially hostile to Maoism because it sees it as the major barrier to ‘Hinduizing’ and communalizing the tribals of Central India, which it has partially succeeded in doing in Gujarat. [6] Arrested in Chhattisgarh in 2007, Sen was given a life sentence in December 2010; this
was suspended in April 2011 by order of the Supreme Court.
Tony Wood
SILVER AND LEAD On 11 December 2006, barely a week after his inauguration as Mexican President, Felipe Calderón sent 7,000 troops and police to the western state of Michoacán to destroy marijuana plantations and search out traffickers. [1] This was the first deployment of a ‘war on drugs’ that soon escalated dramatically: within two months, a total of 30,000 security personnel had been sent into 8 of the country’s 32 states, mostly in the north of the country. Four years later, Calderón’s war can only be classed as a murderous catastrophe: a staggering 40,000 people have died, over 6,000 of them in the first half of 2011 alone—equivalent to a casualty
rate of more than 30 a day—and yet the flow of drugs and weapons continues unabated, and the tide of killings, kidnappings and extortion has spread still further. While the overall statistics are shocking enough, it is perhaps the relentless succession of one horror after another that has the most numbing effect. How to make sense of such incidents as the discovery this spring of as many as 360 bodies in mass graves in Tamaulipas and Durango, or the mutilated corpses that have on several occasions been left hanging from bridges or dumped by roadsides, accompanied by banners bearing messages from the killers to the authorities? Narco-violence has long been present in Mexico, but only began to reach its present pathological levels
in 2008, a year after Calderón’s offensive, when the number of drugrelated homicides suddenly doubled. Since then, it has often seemed to defy analysis because it has become so much a part of Mexican reality, pervading the language and the culture. From newsstands to detective novels, from the airwaves to the internet, it is a source of fear and anger, or even in some cases of celebration: there are numerous songs— dubbed narcocorridos—narrating the deeds of capos and assassins as if they were folk heroes on a par with Villa or Zapata. The Mexican drug war has also spawned a growing literature attempting to describe the ongoing disaster. Both within the country and outside it, journalistic accounts tend to dominate.
These vary in quality: some are superficial and sensationalist—Malcolm Beith’s The Last Narco (2010) is perhaps the leading offender—while others are infused with a self-regarding lyricism, as with Charles Bowden’s numerous books on Ciudad Juárez (‘fear has been my pale rider’, he writes in Murder City, 2010). There is also some decent reportage. In English, Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica (2010) focuses principally on the border zone. In Spanish, reporters such as Héctor de Mauleón (Marca de sangre, 2010), Julio Scherer García (Historias de muerte y corrupción, 2011) and others have investigated closely key figures and developments of the last decade or so; while El México narco (2009), collecting articles by the staff of Proceso magazine, gives a state-by-state
portrait of the disorders currently gripping the country. But most of these writers have tended to hew close to the surface of events, the better to outline the complex web of alliances and betrayals between the various cartels. Circumstantial description has generally stood in for analysis of the deeper structures that gave birth to the drug trade in Mexico and made possible its expansion. Above all, though the existing narco-literature occasionally mentions corruption, it mostly appears as a secondary detail rather than a systemic, enabling factor. Many of the books currently available on the subject shy away from scrutinizing, let alone attacking, the politicians, policemen, bankers and ‘legitimate’ businessmen who made the rise of the narcos possible.
Anabel Hernández’s Los señores del narco is all the more striking against this backdrop. Its author is one of Mexico’s best-known investigative journalists. Born in 1972 in Mexico City, Hernández began her career as a reporter in 1993 for the recently established liberal paper La Reforma. Since the mid-90s she has written for two other mainstream dailies—Milenio and El Universal—before switching, in 2006, to the new online outlet Reporte Índigo. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of pharaonic spending on housekeeping at the presidential palace, Los Pinos; the scandal was dubbed ‘Towelgate’, and brought the downfall of several presidential staff. Her three previous books to date—La familia presidencial (2005), Fin de fiesta en Los Pinos (2006)
and Los cómplices del presidente (2008)—have also focused on corruption at the summit of power, under both Fox and Calderón. The product of five years of investigative work, Los señores del narco has a much broader focus, covering not just Calderón’s war but its long pre-history. Throughout, Hernández stresses the complicity of the authorities and the country’s business elite. Her title sums up her key argument: Mexico’s drug lords ‘would not have got very far without the connivance of businessmen, politicians and policemen, those people who every day exercise power from within a false halo of legality . . . They are all the lords of the narco.’ At every turn, Hernández names names—not just the
narcos and their immediate accomplices, but also the politicians, policemen, functionaries, judges and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them. The book is copiously documented and carefully sourced; the text includes reproductions of pages from official files of both the Mexican and us authorities, along with witness statements of many key informants. The sheer accumulation of detail, combined with a switch-back chronology, can at times be bewildering; scandalously, the publishers, an imprint of Random House Mondadori, have not seen fit to equip the book with an index, even after seven printings. Los se単ores del narco has certainly made an impression in Mexico, selling over 50,000 copies. More ominously, its
author has apparently received death threats—issued, she claims, by Genaro García Luna, Calderón’s Secretary of Public Security and leading official in the drug war. Now in his mid-40s, he has spent most of his career within the country’s intelligence service, cisen; in the book he is described as deeply complicit with the Sinaloa cartel. According to Hernández, the entire drug war is a sham, a militarized smokescreen behind which the government is steadily advancing the interests of one cartel at the expense of the others. The picture the book presents, then, is still bleaker than that suggested by the raw statistics: the drug war is not simply a futile bloodbath, it is a colossally cynical deception.
Over a century ago, the dictator Porfirio Díaz famously exclaimed: ‘Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States.’ The phrase is especially apt in the realm of drugs, since it is massive us consumption that has made Mexico such important and valuable territory— above all the region near its 2000-milelong northern frontier. Border cities such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, symbiotically linked to their counterparts on the American side—San Diego, El Paso, Laredo, Brownsville—have long been the conduits for contraband of various kinds. These crossing-points are the most crucial plazas, or territories, of the drug trade. But in many ways the matrix of the narcos lies a little further south, in a sparsely populated, mountainous zone spanning the three states of
Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa known as the ‘Golden Triangle’. It was here that, in the 19th century, Mexican farmers began to cultivate opium poppies brought in from China; by the mid-20th, much of the local peasantry had begun to farm the poppies and marijuana alongside the meagre crops from which they just about fed themselves. In Mexico as elsewhere in the world, drug production and rural poverty are deeply intertwined. It is from this harsh rural milieu that most of today’s drug lords emerged: first working in the fields as children—there were no schools for miles around—then accompanying their fathers to market, before eventually joining the trade higher up the value chain. Hernández notes that in the western Sierra Madre,
the situation has changed little since the youth of the present-day narcos. Hernández summarizes the different phases through which Mexican drugtrafficking has moved since the mid20th century. In the 1960s and 70s, an unofficial system was in place in which drug-runners—there were no cartels as such—worked specific plazas that had been agreed with the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri), in exchange for a levy on the profits. According to Hernández’s sources, suitcases full of dollar bills would make their journey up the government hierarchy, to the Interior and Defence Ministries and the Office of the General Prosecutor. The trade was limited to heroin and marijuana; none of the product was supposed to remain in the
country. However, the system that obtained under Presidents Díaz Ordaz (1964–70), Echeverría (1970–76) and López Portillo (1976–82) was to undergo serious mutation in the 1980s. The main cause was geopolitical: as part of the us attempt to overturn the Nicaraguan Revolution, the cia used drug sales to fund and arm the Contras. Following in the footsteps of us-based writers such as Gary Webb, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, Hernández relates how the Agency joined Mexican drug runners with Colombian suppliers to fly guns south and cocaine north. (Many shipments were then dropped off at Mena airbase in Arkansas; at the time, the state governor was William J. Clinton.) Thus, writes Hernández, ‘two groups of drug traffickers separated by geography and
history joined together, thanks to the cia, in an alliance that lasts to this day.’ While the cia covertly sponsored the drug trade in Mexico, other us agencies played a more disciplinary role. The Drug Enforcement Administration (dea), established by Nixon in 1973, has been the main force pushing for particular traffickers to be extradited—a careerending event for any narco. Hence the proverbial wisdom among them, cited by Hernández: ‘the gringos make you and the gringos unmake you.’ In the mid-70s, the dea instigated chemical fumigation campaigns in northern Mexico; these unfolded alongside Echeverría’s ‘Operation Condor’, which targeted not drug kingpins but peasant cultivators—hundreds were arrested and tortured, and entire villages emptied.
Apart from contaminating the soil, fumigation pushed marijuana and opium cultivation southwards, rather than reducing it; since then, the poor, predominantly indigenous peasants of the southwestern states of Michoacán and Guerrero have formed a key part of the drug trade’s agrarian base. Mexico’s main traffickers—nearly all from Sinaloa—also moved south, to the state of Jalisco. In the 1980s, meanwhile, the us Coast Guard stepped up interdiction efforts in the Caribbean, squeezing the supply lines of the Colombian cartels— and thus adding to the appeal of the land route through Mexico. Colombian cocaine dramatically increased the level of profits available to the Mexican narcos. The ‘tax’ payments handed over to government officials
also rose and the system became more sophisticated, suborning specific politicians and functionaries; corruption of law-enforcement was aided by its fragmentation, since there are police forces for each of the country’s 32 states and 2,400 municipalities, as well as a national corps. The spread of narcoinfluence somewhat undermined President De la Madrid’s announcement, on taking office in 1982, of a ‘moral renewal’. By this time the country’s first cartel had formed, based in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city. Most of the main cartels active today are descended from this one; the Sinaloa cartel is its successor, and others are the products either of territorial concessions it awarded in the late 1980s—as with the Juárez, Tijuana and Gulf cartels—or of more recent internecine warfare: the
Beltrán Leyva cartel, for example, split from the Sinaloa cartel in 2008. Until the early 1990s, a peace of sorts held between these various groups, all sheltered by officialdom. Institutional corruption had reached new heights under Salinas, who as president from 1988–94 pushed through one of the most rapid and extensive of Latin America’s neoliberal privatization programmes. This was a period when the Mexican elite amassed ever greater private fortunes, with ever less regard for the concept of legality. Amid this orgy of enrichment, it was even harder than normal to measure the exact contribution of the drug trade. The felonies of the president and his entourage were so excessive that they had to be revealed soon after he left
office, obliging him to flee the country for exile in Ireland. In 1995 Salinas’s brother Raúl was imprisoned on murder charges; he had salted away at least $100m in Swiss bank accounts— allegedly payments from the Gulf cartel—with the help of Citibank. There are strong suggestions that drug lords, and possibly the Salinas brothers themselves, may have been behind the assassination of pri presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana in 1994, after he had vowed to root out corruption. Salinas’s best-known legacy, however, was the free-trade agreement with the us and Canada. nafta, which came into force at the beginning of 1994, ushered in another distinct phase in the Mexican drug-trade. Firstly, the agreement meant
vastly increased vehicle traffic across the border—for example, 65,000 cars now cross at Tijuana every day— multiplying the opportunities for smuggling. The value to the cartels of the frontier plazas rose correspondingly, creating a powerful motivation for the turf wars of the future. Secondly, the establishment of scores of maquiladoras, assembly plants for the re-export of goods to the us market, brought with it population growth in Mexico’s border states, creating a large pool of cheap labour that, in the event of any downturn or market tightening, would be thrown onto the streets in search of survival; this has meant a generous supply of foot-soldiers for the cartels. A third development from the mid-1990s was to have important consequences further down the line: the head of the
Juárez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, began to demand the Colombians pay him in product as well as in cash. Up to this point, Mexican narcos had merely transported cocaine to the us. Now they began to deal themselves, using their proximity to the us markets to secure a much larger share of the profits. It was at this time too that the Mexican government began to adopt a militarized approach to the drug trade: Salinas’s successor Zedillo stepped up the army’s budget and responsibilities in this realm, putting General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo in charge of anti-drugs policy. Not that this signified an end to official connivance: in January 1997, Gutiérrez Rebollo went to Washington where the us drug policy chief praised him as ‘an honest man and no-nonsense field commander’; less than a week later he
was arrested for taking over a million dollars in bribes from the Juárez cartel. The year 2000 brought the end of seven decades of rule by the pri: the authoritarian corporatist system assembled in the wake of the Revolution, after passing through a developmentalist phase in the post-war period, followed by spiralling debt crises and then neoliberal restructuring, had become thoroughly delegitimized at the national level. But the party retained clientelist bases and governorships in several states, and many of the crooked mechanisms of the ancien régime continued to function even where opposition parties—the Catholic centreright pan and the centre-left prd—held state office. As far as the drug trade was concerned, the advent of multi-party
politics meant a change of labels and allegiances, but not a threat to its functioning. According to Hernández, the Fox presidency marked the start of the Sinaloa cartel’s ascendancy. Hernández asserts that connections between the cartel and the president date back to the early 1990s, when Fox was governor of the state of Guanajuato. She reports allegations that in 2001 Fox received a bribe of $40m from associates of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ (Shorty) Guzmán Loera, designed to smooth the way for Guzmán’s escape from high-security prison at Puente Grande, Jalisco that year. (According to the legend repeated by most journalists, Guzmán escaped hidden in a laundry cart; Hernández reconstructs the incident thoroughly,
concluding that he walked out in plain view wearing a police uniform.) Government officials made much public fuss about pursuing Guzmán, but kept conveniently losing his trail; he remains at large ten years later. In the meantime, Guzmán’s fortunes advanced at the expense of his rivals: in 2002, the Tijuana cartel all but dissolved after the death or arrest of its heads, the Arellano Félix brothers; in 2003, the leader of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, was captured. The dea, meanwhile, had opened an investigation against the President and his family. The Fox sexenio also saw the emergence of two new players within the Mexican drug scene, whose methods brought a shift in the nature as well as the quantity of violence. ‘La Familia’,
based in the prd stronghold of Michoacán, combines hair-raising butchery—its members announced their presence in 2006 by rolling five severed heads across the dance-floor of a disco in Uruapán—with a moralizing agenda: its killings are often accompanied by banners preaching the virtues of family and social cohesion, couched in quasireligious language. Still more dangerous are the Zetas, whose original core consists of former Mexican specialforces soldiers—many of them trained in counter-insurgency in the us in the 1990s, as part of a new paratroop formation designed to suppress the Zapatistas. Initially hired to be the security arm of the Gulf cartel at the turn of the 21st century, the Zetas have since evolved into a powerful trafficking organization in their own right,
operating principally in the states along the country’s eastern coast (nearly all run continuously by the pri since the end of one-party rule in 2000). But they have a presence in the majority of Mexico’s states and bases in Guatemala, where they have recruited from among that country’s Kaibiles, commando heirs to the Cold War death squads. In a sense, the Zetas could be seen as a Mesoamerican equivalent to the imperial blowback in the Hindu Kush, where Islamists funded by the us during the Cold War have turned on their former paymasters; the difference being that in Mexico, it is not us troops that are being targeted, but the soldiers and civilians of the empire’s local subcontractor.
Calderón secured the presidency in 2006 with the help of large-scale fraud: many of his votes were counted twice, ballots for his opponent were thrown in the dump, precinct tallies tampered with, until the Federal Electoral Institute produced the right result—a victory for Calderón by a margin of 0.58 per cent. The swindle provoked huge street protests from the supporters of his opponent Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who to this day styles himself the ‘legitimate president’. Though Calderón was thus lacking in legitimacy from the start, he swiftly put paid to any idea that he might shore up his position by seeking consensus. Instead, he rushed to militarize the situation, deploying thousands of troops to wage his ‘war on drugs’. Hernández describes Calderón’s crusade as ‘a theatre where
nothing is what it seems’. Across the north of the country, the army has moved into successive cities to ‘re-take’ them from the narcos. The epicentre of the fighting has seemingly shifted from one city to another—Tijuana to Ciudad Juárez to Monterrey—but homicide rates in each remain astonishingly high; Juárez alone accounts for almost 20 per cent of the national total over the last four years. Deaths are particularly concentrated in the north and in Guerrero and Michoacán on the Pacific coast, but other parts of the country have begun to increase their contributions to the grisly total; though the capital, notorious outside Mexico for its high rates of crime and kidnapping, is relatively calm—in part because the Federal District, unlike the rest of the country, has a single, well-funded police
force, making law enforcement less fragmented, better paid and more visible on the streets than elsewhere. Despite its terrible toll, however, the drug war has inflicted little damage on the Sinaloa cartel; Hernández notes that out of 53,174 arrests up to February 2010, only 941 involved its members. Calderón’s war is, according to her, aimed ‘not against “drug-traffickers” in general, but against those “drug-traffickers” who are enemies of El Chapo.’ In 2008, a split took place within the Sinaloa cartel when one of its leading figures, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, was arrested; he had seemingly been betrayed to the authorities by Guzmán. This caused violent convulsions in the narco landscape, as alliances were redrawn and one act of retaliation
unleashed another. ‘The rupture within the group that had for the last seven years been protected by the main federal institutions of security and justice’, writes Hernández, ‘provoked another equally violent rupture within those bodies themselves.’ Public servants at all levels—federal, state, municipal— had to negotiate with one of the two sides that had now formed. Meanwhile the country as a whole suffered the consequences: an upsurge of violence that dwarfed what had come before, as the struggle for control of the plazas intensified still further. Official connivance is the dominant theme of Hernández’s book: the structural corruption that makes the narcos’ existence possible. She gives several indications of how and through
whom the Sinaloa cartel has secured the state’s assistance. She focuses in particular on Genaro García Luna, Calderón’s key security official, and his long career of complicity with corrupt and criminal elements within the police force; one group sheltered by him, for example, ran a lucrative kidnapping ring in the Mexico City delegación of Iztapalapa in the 1990s. García Luna has also become inexplicably wealthy in his march up the official ladder, with a portfolio of properties and restaurants in the capital and Morelos state that he could not have acquired with his salary. The participation of the authorities in the drug trade is apparent, too, in the use of Mexico City’s international airport as a transshipment point by the Sinaloans, which Hernández investigates in convincing detail.
By the end of the book, it seems scarcely an exaggeration for Hernández to describe Mexico as a ‘narcocracy’, such is the degree to which state power is penetrated by narco interests. Yet it remains something of a puzzle that the drug trade has become so central to a political class which already had so many opportunities for illegally enriching itself. Part of the explanation is sheer quantity: the escalating amounts of money sluicing through the narco world made the latter increasingly a magnet for elite appetites. This may especially have been the case in the wake of Salinas’s privatization drive, which brought a relative contraction of the corporatist state, and so demanded diversification in the forms of patronage and kickbacks. A further consideration is the scalar nature of corruption itself.
Payments to those on the narco payroll vary according to the recipients’ usefulness and rank (according to evidence reproduced by Hernåndez, there is even a hierarchy of currencies: some are paid in dollars, others in pesos). Anyone participating in the system would know how much those above and below him would receive, and therefore how much he was due; and he would know that taking the money was no obstacle to career advancement—if anything the reverse. There are sadly few who have proved unwilling to leave such a source of revenue untapped. Corruption is so widespread, moreover, that politicians, police and state functionaries can go onto the narco payroll with impunity, since there is virtually no one in a position to denounce them.
Alongside official collusion, a second prominent motif in Los señores del narco is the interweaving of narcobusiness with the rest of the economy. For the narcos possess assets and investments in everything from banking to grocery stores, restaurants to real estate, which serve not only to launder drug money but also as the means through which they can gradually legalize their patrimony. Several observers have noted the impulse towards legitimization—perhaps most evident in the fact that secondgeneration narcos, unlike their fathers, are educated at Mexico’s elite universities; they look and dress like any other member of the wealthy few. If the narcos’ aim is eventually to be indistinguishable from the rest of the elite, in the realm of finances the merger
has already taken place. In Hernández’s view, ‘the steel armour that shields drug-traffickers’ businesses is made up precisely of networks woven with businessmen—and not with small businessmen, but with those who have developed large consortia.’ It is this financial camouflage that ultimately makes the cartels’ continued existence possible. Hernández writes of the need to reject the choice the narcos offer the country between money or the bullet— their ‘unliveable law of silver or lead’— yet her book itself is evidence that plata and plomo are not alternatives but constant, mutually dependent companions. At present the situation in Mexico seems desperate. The northern industrial city of Monterrey, for example, is under
virtual military occupation, with curfews, checkpoints and a steady flow of casualties. Residents reportedly cower in their houses amid large-scale gun battles between the army and paramilitarized narco-forces; businesses systematically pay protection money to one cartel or another, as the narcos expand their range of activities. Consumption of drugs in Mexico has also increased significantly in recent years—for example, according to official figures, the number of cocaine users doubled between 2002 and 2008. This is partly due to stagnation in us demand for cocaine—displaced somewhat by methamphetamine and other laboratory-produced drugs—and partly because the cartels have actively sought to develop domestic sales. The more these grow, the more the Mexican
drug market itself, as opposed to routes for accessing the us, will become the object of struggle between the cartels. Meanwhile the narcos’ reach is extending ever further into Central America, both recruitment pool and new battleground of the drug war. Countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, far poorer than Mexico, are in a still weaker position relative to the military and financial muscle of the narcos. In 2009, the American authorities estimated that Mexican and Colombian traffickers between them gained somewhere between $18bn and $39bn from drug sales in the us; these figures are, respectively, only slightly less than the entire gdp of El Salvador and Guatemala.
Mexico’s political class remains at best inert before the country’s continuing tragedy—and at worst deeply complicit in it. But in recent months a mass movement of citizens has arisen to protest the situation, under the slogan ‘Estamos hasta la madre’ (literally ‘we’re up to our mothers’, meaning ‘we’ve had it up to here’). Huge demonstrations have been held around the country—the one in Mexico City’s Zócalo in May 2010 drew an estimated 200,000 people—calling for a change of policy. In early June 2011 the movement formed a ‘Caravan for Peace’ thousands strong that wound its way from Cuernavaca to Ciudad Juárez and other cities in the north; later that month it secured a public meeting with the President, where he was urged to find a way out of the drug war. Calderón
listened, then calmly insisted he would stick to the present course—seemingly unconcerned at the flood of further deaths this would inevitably entail. Hernández’s verdict on his presidency is succinct but emotive: ‘his mandate will be engraved in the collective memory and the archives as the sexenio of death and corruption.’ Yet the very fact that Calderón is limited by the constitution to one sixyear term makes his intransigence all the more puzzling. Why continue with such a ruinous policy, with its attendant costs to his popularity, when he does not face re-election? What Hernández describes as his de facto backing for the Sinaloa cartel may be the product of a convergence between corruption and mistaken strategy, rather than of
corruption alone. Government statements speak of a policy of ‘disarticulating’ the cartels, fragmenting them so that they no longer pose such a threat to law and order (sc. the state’s monopoly of violence). But given the pattern of arrests and army deployments, the policy seems to be one of breaking up all the other cartels in order to leave the Sinaloans in command of the field. This is perhaps based on the notion that in the days of the pri, when there was only one cartel, the system was manageable and the violence contained; so, what Mexico needs today is to return to that state of affairs. This seemingly rational approach entirely misses the point, however: the rise of the narcos is both product and cause of structural alterations that make any return to the previous system impossible (leaving
aside the question of whether it would even be desirable). In the meantime, of course, the current policy is also very lucrative to those on the Sinaloa cartel’s books. Many in Mexico are now looking anxiously at the experience of Colombia, wondering what stage of that country’s trajectory Mexico has now reached, and what can be learned from it. The comparison is certainly a sobering one: at one stage the national murder rate in Colombia reached 60 per 100,000, rising to 500 in some municipalities; Mexico’s currently stands at 18 per 100,000. But the comparison rests on perilously false premises. The first is the notion that the two countries suffer from a similar, generic problem of ‘insecurity’. This is to occlude the
specific histories and conflicts particular to each. The rise of Colombia’s drug lords took place within a longer-running de facto civil war that pitted the state and right-wing paramilitaries against a range of leftist guerrillas; at stake were questions of property and landlord-class power, unresolved amid the fragmentation of state authority that has marked the country for much of its history. Mexico’s crisis is the outcome of a different kind of trajectory, in which the political system has corroded itself from within, while at the same time implementing a neoliberal turn that transferred effective power to the highest bidder. In Colombia, state authority has been almost permanently contested; in Mexico, like much else in the country, it has been gradually privatized.
The second dangerous assumption behind comparisons with Colombia is the mainstream idea that, though the situation there was certainly bad in the 1980s and 90s, the country has since ‘dealt with’ its problems thanks to the firm hand of Álvaro Uribe—and so that Colombia is in some sense a model for Mexico to emulate. The us obviously thinks so: after supplying close to $7bn in military aid to Colombia over the last decade, Washington is now upping its contributions to Mexico; disbursements under the Mérida Initiative rose almost tenfold from 2007 to 2008, from $56m to $437m, though the sums have decreased slightly with the recession. But the flood of armaments and assistance to the Colombian army and police produced by Plan Colombia had little noticeable effect on coca
production; the Plan’s main goal, rather, was the elimination of leftist insurgencies, which have lost ground while their paramilitary adversaries have been ‘amnestied’ by the establishment that had all along sponsored them. The cartels of Medellín and Cali, once so powerful, have indeed been smashed; but others, tied to the paramilitary auc, have taken their place within Colombia. Any diminution of the power of Colombian drug lords, moreover, has surely been counterbalanced, if not caused, by the rise of their Mexican equivalents: in 1990, according to us figures, Mexico accounted for around half the cocaine brought into the us; the figure currently stands at close to 90 per cent.
Washington has by now recognized that American demand is the unchanging factor behind the power of the drug lords, in Mexico as in Colombia before it. As well as being the principal drug market, America remains a bounteous source of weaponry for all players in the Mexican drug war—according to a recent report by three us senators, 70 per cent of the weapons seized in Mexico over the past two years can be traced directly back to the us; many of these would have been purchased perfectly legally in the thousands of shops just north of the border. But there seems little likelihood of a shift in drug policy, public attitudes or gun laws north of the border significant enough to curb the narcos’ revenues and resources, and with it their grip on the Mexican political and business elite. A far greater
upheaval, of the kind that shook off the oligarchic old regime after 1910, may be required to alter the parameters of power—of who controls the state and economy, for whose benefit. Until then, a benumbed country will be forced to continue, day after day, counting its dead.
[1] Anabel Hernández, Los señores del narco, Grijalbo: Mexico 2010, $279 (mxn), paperback 588 pp, 978 607 310 104 2
Alexander Zevin
CRITIQUE OF NEOCOLONIAL REASON There is no shortage of either scholarly or popular works on Jean-Paul Sartre, or on the intellectuals with whom he sparred in post-war France. [1] Yet if the number of studies continues to expand, the themes they treat tend, at the same time, to narrow: friendships, paramours and quarrels are laced into larger, moralizing narratives of alleged Sartrean backsliding on camps in the Soviet Union and show trials under its client regimes in Eastern Europe. This tradition found its own shrill champion in Tony Judt, whose Past Imperfect (1992) dwelt on the silence or complicity of intellectuals in and
outside the pcf who, ‘in the name of the proletarian and the class struggle made a daily contribution to the legitimation of the enslavement of the satellite states.’ A methodological consensus has meanwhile congealed around the work of Anna Boschetti, itself heavily indebted to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which interprets Sartre’s long career through the lens of self-promotion and the accumulation of—and competition for—intellectual capital. These approaches, dominant since at least the mid-1980s, are in need of revision. It is not just that they have aged poorly since the polemics attendant upon the end of the Cold War, but that they depend on the most pious and rudimentary of mises-en-scène. Sartre is given the role of villain in an
anti-totalitarian passion play in which his anti-colonialism is all but ignored: essays, newspaper articles, speeches, interviews, correspondence and wellpublicized speaking tours and voyages that extended from the immediate postwar period up through the 1970s. A portion of Europe over which Frenchmen exerted no control has obscured debates about the vast empire whose destiny France never willingly ceased to direct. Sartre pronounced the necessity of colonial independence well in advance of his apparent moral betters, and did more than most to secure it as a matter of fact. Such a reassessment is necessary not only for making sense of Sartre’s diverse theoretical insights into racism and anti-Semitism, the extent and shape
of human freedom, or the meaning of literary engagement, but just as much for appraising the intellectual constellation within which Sartre was enmeshed. Les Temps Modernes, the journal Sartre founded in 1944 with Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Ollivier and Jean Paulhan, adopted an intransigently internationalist outlook from the start. Sartre and Beauvoir also travelled widely on intensive fact-finding missions. The information they gathered on race relations in the us during trips in 1945 and 1947, respectively, made its way into novels, memoirs, reportages and plays. Their journey to Cuba in 1960 was the occasion for interviews, speeches and articles aimed at
publicizing the revolution for a global audience. Sartre’s own evolving critique of racism, colonialism and neo-colonialism was extensive and varied. The racial problem in the us was the focus of a number of post-war works, including the 1946 play La Putain respectueuse, unfolding the prostitute Lizzie’s dubious struggle to protect a black man accused of her rape in the South. Sartre’s contribution to the inaugural issue of Présence Africaine (1947) and his introduction to a selection of Francophone poets in 1948 marked his early appreciation for the négritude movement and the way in which, by refashioning the French language for their own ends, its poets might play an important role in the process of colonial
emancipation. As early as 1956 Sartre argued against the idea that economic reforms could ever seriously attenuate the basic political demand for Algerian independence in ‘Colonialism is a System’ (Les Temps Modernes did so a year earlier in ‘L’Algérie n’est pas la France’). His 1962 preface to the political writings of Patrice Lumumba analysed the challenges confronting newly independent states in a world in which different forms of domination had emerged even as formal colonization ended. In 1967 Sartre agreed to chair the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, and his activism continued through the 1970s even as his health began to deteriorate. Despite the chronological and thematic breath of these writings—and the trade
winds blowing scholars in the direction of global histories of empire—little systematic attention has been devoted to them in either French or English. Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre by Paige Arthur, and the translation of some of Sartre’s anti-colonial writings by Routledge in 2001 (first published by Gallimard in 1964 in Situations V), suggest renewed interest among Anglophone scholars in this aspect of Sartre’s oeuvre. Arthur’s study draws needed attention to the early Sartre, attempting to place his most famous and controversial preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) in the context of a continuous and less hortatory engagement with the Third World. Her contribution to the most recent sedimentation of scholarship on
Sartre is twofold. On the one hand, Arthur fills a void in the biographical feuilletons assembled by Annie CohenSolal and Bernard-Henri Lévy, both of whom omit any mention of their subject’s anti-colonialism before 1961. On the other hand, by reading the Fanon preface alongside his other writings on colonialism and neo-colonialism, she suggests that Sartre’s attitude towards violence was neither adulatory nor ‘curiously ambivalent’, but historically situated, intriguingly consistent. Arthur’s simultaneous focus on Sartre’s philosophical writings, and the way they respond to, modify or create theoretical frames in which to understand his anticolonialism, draws her attention to four discrete moments: an early set of works, from the publication of Being and
Nothingness in 1943 to Notebooks for an Ethics in 1949; the period between 1957 and 1960, in which Critique of Dialectical Reason is written and published, in part in response to the events in Algeria; and a moment of Third Worldism characterized by certain texts on the Congo, Vietnam and Bolivia from 1962 to 1968. The final chapters contain an appraisal of Sartre’s interventions on behalf of immigrant workers and regionalist movements in France and Spain in the early 1970s. These gauche prolÊtarienne years offer lessons for France today, where republican lip service to the rights of man belies the failure of policies aimed at integration and assimilation. What Arthur ends up producing is less a genealogy than a kind of cross-
pollination between Sartre’s philosophical ideas and his anticolonialism. His introduction to Francophone poets chosen by Senghor in 1948, ‘Black Orpheus’, presents the poetry of négritude as the quintessence of engaged literature, the concept elaborated earlier by Sartre’s presentation to Les Temps Modernes in 1945, and published in instalments as What is Literature? during 1947. The section of Notebooks for an Ethics published in Combat in 1949 describes the bad faith of the Southern slaveowner, who must first acknowledge the humanity of his slave (if only by taking precautions against the possibility of his escape or in preventing him from learning the scriptures), before reducing him to the status of subhuman—a category to which Sartre would return
repeatedly to describe the racism of colons in Algeria. Sartre’s engagement with American blacks in the immediate post-war period was especially significant, Arthur argues, because it led him to understand European colonialism as under-girded by a form of structural racism. He devoted special numbers of Les Temps Modernes to the us in 1946, with Richard Wright contributing stories and helping secure Horace Cayton Jr and St Clair Drake’s Black Metropolis. Sartre described each article as a face, ‘un visage inquiet, d’une émouvante liberté.’ In his contribution to Alioune Diop’s new review Présence Africaine, though, he cautioned against complacent French indignation at segregation in America. The few blacks from Senegal, Martinique or the Congo allowed to filter into France were
‘hostages and symbols’, whose equality—at Parisian universities, concerts, these ‘handsome courteous strangers who dance with our women’—depended for its charm on their strict exclusion from white society in the colonies. It is perhaps worth emphasizing the extraordinary internationalism of Les Temps Modernes. Seventeen articles on Indochina appeared in its pages between 1945 and 1951 alone, with thirty-one on colonial struggles in Madagascar, the Ivory Coast, Martinique, Guadeloupe, South Africa and Algeria. In the 1960s its coverage extended to the Congo, Guinea Bissau, Rwanda, Angola, China, India, Laos, Vietnam, Egypt, Brazil, Cuba, Tahiti and to the civil rights and black power movements in the us.
‘Black Orpheus’ is the centrepiece of Arthur’s excavation. Sartre’s address to white readers began with an inflection of the duelling gazes in Being and Nothingness: ‘Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground?’ ‘Here are black men standing, looking at us’, he announced, ‘and I hope that you—like me—will feel the shock of being seen.’ The poetry of négritude was the only revolutionary verse being written in French, and Césaire’s calamitous lyricism had nothing to learn from the surrealist leftovers of Eluard or Aragon. Yet négritude and the notion of a black soul, Sartre insisted, were transitory revindications. Blacks were unlike other victims of capitalism: they
could not choose to deny their difference, as some Jews might, and unlike his white counterpart, a black peasant or worker, ‘oppressed in his race and because of it, had first to become conscious of his race.’ The identitarian reflex was the precondition for a much broader solidarity with the toiling classes in Europe. ‘And because he is the most oppressed’, Sartre writes, in a reformulation of Marx to which he would return with insistence in the 1960s, ‘in working for his own deliverance, it is the liberation of all he necessarily pursues.’ These late-40s writings presage concerns about alterity and the formation of revolutionary groups out of serialized collectivities in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the next stop on
Arthur’s survey of Sartre’s philosophical prospectus. If she is less concerned about the intervening years, even the Critique is primarily background for a discussion of the ethics of violence in its wake. The analysis of Algeria in the Critique revolves around two conceptual axes: the practico-inert structures erected by colonizer and colonized, and the praxes, or bonds of alterity and reciprocity, between individuals and groups. In the first case, Sartre unfolds the history of the French colonization of North Africa since Charles X and the pacifications of Bugeaud, focusing on the role of low wages in driving expansion in the nineteenth century, and the need to keep them low if colonizer and colonized were to retain their roles in the twentieth. By the 1950s the only possible response
to a history of expropriation and exploitation, conquest and occupation, was a decision to return to sender and therefore a choice of particular praxes— the fln, for example. For Arthur the affirmation of the fln’s revolutionary violence in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, the following year, must be read in the context of the Critique, for two reasons. Sartre’s voluble rejection of political compromise takes on explanatory clarity in light of his account of petrified violence: the policies of Jules Ferry, the creation of the first colonial banks and maritime transports, the army as both an institution and a war machine, and colonial administrators—these had made violence the original situation, the fundamental relation, of daily life in French Algeria. On the other hand, his
earlier pessimism of the intellect serves to temper the somewhat sanguine portrait of the fln and its political prospects in the preface. In the Critique Sartre was mindful of the tendency of groups-in-fusion to relapse into serial collectivities, or to turn inwards, resulting in fraternal bloodshed. The criticism of an ‘embrace of violence’ levelled by Raymond Aron and somewhat clumsily reprised by Judt becomes difficult to sustain. For Sartre armed struggle was not a requisite form of negation on the road to freedom nor an end in itself, but a tool of counterviolence to which workers, peasants, the colonized, had recourse in given historical situations. The 1960s entailed a seemingly contradictory turn of events for Sartre—
both the erosion of his position in France, due to the challenge posed by structuralism, and the opening of a new phase of intellectual and political relevance announced by the Critique. Its appearance, notes Fredric Jameson, coincided with the Cuban revolution, the radicalization of the civil rights movement in the us, the intensification of the war in Vietnam, and the worldwide development of the student movement. In the Third World, Sartre’s earlier stress upon the revolutionary capacities of the colonized in essays such as ‘Black Orpheus’ had returned as movement and conjuncture. Sartre was deeply imbricated in both: a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121 in 1960; prefaces for Fanon in 1961 and Lumumba in 1963; interventions on behalf of Régis Debray, the Russell War
Crimes Tribunal and visits to Egypt and Israel, all in 1967. Arthur might also have included his and Beauvoir’s trip to Cuba in 1960, a personal and political escape ‘to keep from shrivelling up in the French misery’. Meetings with Che Guevara and university students in Havana, trips to the countryside in the company of Fidel Castro, attendance at the funeral for victims of the La Coubre explosion made a profound impact on Sartre. He promoted the young revolution, in need of friends abroad, as a popular model only partially foreseen by the Critique. A reportage entitled ‘Storm over Sugar’ appeared in sixteen instalments in France Soir in the summer of 1960, while in forums, interviews and essays he argued that Cubans were forging their ideology out of praxis, radicalizing in response to
offshore pressures from the us and to the objective need to alter the production processes in their single-crop economy. In 1968, too ill to travel to an international conference on culture in Havana, he still told the newspaper Granma, ‘I think that at the present time, it is in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America that a European’s own fate is at stake.’ Arthur understands this and similar expressions of support for the Third World by Western intellectuals to represent ‘a new ethics of personal responsibility, based on an idea that, in an increasingly interconnected world, people’s actions can have distant consequences.’ With the intention of explicating this ethical turn she focuses on three discrete moments of Sartre’s involvement: his preface to the collected writings and speeches of Patrice
Lumumba, assassinated in 1961 by us and Belgian-backed forces within the Congo, his Rome Lectures in 1964, and his chairmanship of the Russell Tribunal. Sartre’s preface is a subtle portrait of Lumumba and the forces which conspired, both in his own social makeup as a colonial ÊvoluÊ and in the tutelary form decolonization took under Belgium, to defeat his drive for real independence for Congo. Yet ethics are arguably a more prominent feature in both the Rome Lectures and the declarations of the Russell Tribunal. In the first instance, Arthur argues, Sartre attempted to determine an ethical basis for resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism, both of which made individuals into subhumans whose passage to humanity was conceived in
strictly passive terms. For the colonized, real freedom meant risking one’s life to obtain it. In an essay Sartre produced in connection with the Russell Tribunal, ‘Genocide’ (published in these pages), Arthur finds another example of his ethics of the least favoured. The asymmetry of power between the us and its peasant opponent meant that any war was bound to be genocidal. The guerrilla tactics employed by the Vietnamese, the only ones which stood any chance of success, made the entire population suspect. ‘Since civilians were the only visible enemies, their extermination became a criterion for victory.’ The moral imperative to resist worked in both directions. Americans and Europeans had a responsibility to support the Vietnamese who, by resisting the hegemonic designs of the
us, were quite literally ‘fighting for all of us’. Though blindness and other accumulated ailments slowed his pace for much of the following decade, Sartre nevertheless contributed several short speeches and texts on the subject of immigration and immigrant workers, in ‘The Third World Begins in the Banlieue’ and ‘The New Racism’, and on regional rights for Basques, Bretons and others, in Le Procès de Burgos. These applied theories of colonialism developed earlier to new contexts within Europe. Just as the metropole had once imported raw materials from its colonies, explained Sartre in ‘The Third World Begins in the Banlieue’, today it extracted human labour: unskilled workers whose low wages allowed
France to remain competitive in Europe and who, as in the Congo, were denied professional advancement because of their race. The process of ‘reconstituting within itself the colonies it had lost’ took physical form in the bidonvilles rising on the outskirts of Paris, and in the ‘farce of clandestinity, the very kind of immigration favoured by the bosses’. This was an ideal labour regime in which workers were under the permanent apprehension not merely of dismissal but of expulsion. The following year the civil-rights lawyer Gisèle Halimi went to observe the trial of sixteen eta members in the Spanish town of Burgos and edited a volume, to which Sartre contributed the preface. Sartre argued that the success of national liberation struggles—in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam—had spurred
regional movements in Europe where geopolitical divisions began to seem as arbitrary as the departments imposed by force in Algeria. Militants, awakened by the Third World, had, moreover, every right to assert their linguistic and cultural singularity, against an ‘abstract universalism’ imposed by the centralizing state. Despite their prescience these late interventions were pushed aside by the French Socialist Party, as Arthur notes, in favour of ‘a new form of universalism’ which ‘valued human rights over the protection of particular identities.’ Arthur’s Unfinished Projects carries the distinct trace of the conditions under which it was produced. Its interest in questions of human rights and global responsibility, the ethics of violence,
international justice and cultural identity, responds both to trends in intellectual history in academia and to Arthur’s occupational hazards since leaving it. Since 2006 she has occupied posts at the International Center for Transitional Justice, an ngo funded by the Ford Foundation, whose timely presence in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone or—in places where the dust from intervention has yet to settle—Iraq, encourages decision makers to prosecute the human-rights abuses of past regimes. Arthur’s focus on Sartrean ethics is inflected by her work at a centre that bills itself as ‘offering guidance on the great moral issues of war, peace and social justice’. If the influence of the pro-interventionist journal Arthur edited until 2006, Ethics and International Affairs, is evident in
the sorts of questions she poses, Unfinished Projects is nevertheless to some extent critical of the turn to human rights and identity politics. Yet her positive and, at first, agreeably imprecise suggestion—that Sartre’s current use-value may lie in helping us to think through new relationships between identity and democracy in the age of globalization—may be less openended than it sounds. It is remarkable that in a study ostensibly devoted to bringing the history of decolonization and Sartre’s philosophical oeuvre into closer correspondence, the colonial wars themselves—the major insurrections, battles and defeats; the parliamentary schisms, inquests and scandals they provoked; and the seemingly permanent
menace of De Gaulle waiting in the wings—are rarely mentioned. Arthur leads one to suppose that Sartre entered the anti-colonial struggle gradually but ahead of time, his post-war literary engagement overlaying empirical encounters with race and racism in America and France. Humanism remains on the philosophical horizon for the next thirty years. Readers who wish to enter the history of Sartrean anticolonialism in their turn are, however, entitled to ask through which door Arthur proposes to invite them. The upshot of her initial formulation—that Sartre’s theory of colonialism relied on both ‘an analysis of the material (i.e. economic) forces at work in the development of structures of exploitation and an analysis of the phenomenological conditions of
oppression that set individuals in asymmetrical relations of recognition’—is the disappearance of the first variable and the analytical dominance of the second. Intellectual chronology gives way to imagistic homology and the treatment of individual texts jumps skittishly between articles and interviews from different decades (a comment made by Sartre in 1967 that he now believed ‘only an historical approach can explain man’ serves to introduce the challenge posed by Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology in the 1950s), or else returns repeatedly to issues treated fragmentarily elsewhere. In contrast to Noureddine Lamouchi’s otherwise excellent Jean-Paul Sartre et Le Tiers Monde (1996), Arthur rightly
refuses to divide Sartre’s work between an early abstract and humanistic anticolonialism and a post-1956 ‘total radicalization’. But beyond the roughand-ready chronological divisions noted earlier, no alternative periodization is given theoretical grounding. How then to explain the change that occurs between Sartre’s writings on black literature in the American South, Caribbean or Africa, and his discussion of torture by the French army in Algeria? Arthur’s ethicization of Sartrean anticolonialism is distortive in a double sense. It not only passes over his important economic analyses of exploitation in Algeria, Congo or Vietnam, it also ignores his intellectual and political modulations over time. Sartre’s methodological commitment to Marxism after 1952 implied
decolonization as its praxis. When he wrote about responsibility or rebellion Sartre was generally not speaking in an ethical but in a political register, and it is the force of post-war circumstances which is too often missing from Unfinished Projects. Simone de Beauvoir writes of first becoming aware of the ‘disgrace and shame of colonialism’ at the same time as she was ‘converted to internationalism and anti-militarism’, at the Sorbonne, even if active politicization awaited the post-war. Literature may have been one of the ways Sartre became aware of the struggle for colonial emancipation, but it was not the only one. The lendemains de guerre were not the same thing as peace, he insisted; the Cold War was on
its way, and in October of 1945 in ‘La fin de la guerre’, Sartre recounted the story of a young woman, born in Russia but a French citizen, who on the day of victory cried, ‘I’m from a tiny country! I would like to be from a great country, a truly victorious power!’ Then in 1946 the war began in Indochina and Les Temps Modernes argued that for France to remain, ‘because we have finally found, in our dilapidation, a country weaker than us, would be the worst of all mockeries’. When François Mauriac objected to this editorial—‘Et Bourreaux et Victimes’—on the grounds that one could not compare the beneficial French presence in the Far East with the Nazi occupation of France, Les Temps Modernes responded by giving over much of the March 1947 issue to coverage of Indochina. If the
Germans had stayed three quarters of a century in France, they too would have built some factories and roads. Since military re-conquest would prove disastrous, leaving, it argued, was the only option. Even ‘Black Orpheus’ explains the power of négritude not merely as the inversion of an impersonal gaze, but in terms of the altered balance of power in Europe, and between France and its colonies: Once Europeans by divine right, we were already feeling our dignity crumbling beneath American or Soviet looks; already Europe wasn’t anything but a geographical accident, the peninsula that Asia shoves into the Atlantic. We were at least hoping to find a little of our lost splendour reflected in the domesticated eyes of the Africans.
But there are no more domesticated eyes; there are wild and free looks which judge our world. The political demand for decolonization had not waited for the Algerian War to be invented. In 1950 the intensification of the Cold War made colonialism more, not less, central to intellectual debates in France. The editorial in Les Temps Modernes on the Soviet gulag (written by MerleauPonty and signed by him and Sartre) took the position that, while offering no indulgence to Communist crimes, ‘neither must we make pacts with its enemies’. To attack only the Soviet Union was to absolve the West and its own dismal record. ‘The colonies are— mutatis mutandis—our slave labour
camps.’ ‘Perfectly indifferent to the 40,000 people killed at Sétif, the 80,000 murdered Malgaches, the famine and poverty in Algeria, the burned out villages of Indochina, the Greeks dying in their camps and the Spanish shot by Franco’, recalls Beauvoir of the climate at the time of Merleau-Ponty’s editorial, ‘Les Jours de Notre Vie’, ‘the hearts of the bourgeoisie suddenly burst when confronted by the misfortunes of the people imprisoned by the Russians.’ The breaking point Sartre reached in 1952 receives scant attention from Arthur. She does note that Sartre’s initial turn towards the pcf in 1952 was due to the Henri Martin Affair. But it is only ‘interesting’ that Martin, a communist sailor serving at Toulon at the time of his arrest, was accused of writing tracts against the war in
Indochina, while Sartre’s involvement is portrayed as a matter of personal inclination, a passion he had for defending the wrongly accused. Sartre’s falling out with Camus in the same year had similar colonial roots, originating in the latter’s condemnation of violence in the pages of Combat in 1946—made without reference to the fact that, at the time, France was engaged in putting down the Annamites in Indochina. During their public split in 1952 Sartre replied to the accusation that he had been silent on the Soviet camps by linking the Cold War and colonialism. ‘Yes, Camus’, he wrote, ‘like you, I find these camps inadmissible, but equally inadmissible is the use which the socalled bourgeois press makes of them every day. I am not saying, “The Malagasy before the Turkestani.” I am
saying that you cannot utilize the sufferings inflicted upon the Turkestani to justify those to which we subject the Malagasy.’ It is not a question of substituting the narrative of decolonization and the Third World for that of the Cold War, as Arthur sometimes suggests, but of discerning the intricate ways in which they were interconnected. If the lack of historical contextualization tends to rob Sartre’s anti-colonialism of much of its early political piquancy, it also leads to an extended explanatory faux piste, reinforcing the misguided treatment of his Third Worldist turn as primarily an ethical engagement. Les Temps Modernes was wary of discussing the ethical behaviour of the main actors in the Algerian War,
whether colonizer or colonized. Nor was it especially concerned with debates about cultural identity, otherness or republican universalism, subjects to which Arthur (along with many other contemporary historians) is devoted. In October 1955, five months after the war began, an article titled ‘Refusal to Obey’ described Algeria pointedly as a ‘colony . . . subject to the most obvious exploitation.’ Across November’s cover ran the headline: ‘Algeria is Not France’. In 1956’s ‘Colonialism is a System’ Sartre rejected all proposals for reform—that economic improvements could or should precede political ones, that educating the native population was even possible while ensuring Algeria’s profitability—as either neo-colonialist mystification or cynical stalling. ‘People who talk about the abandonment of
Algeria are imbeciles’, he wrote, ‘there is no abandoning what we have never owned.’ In the preface to Henri Alleg’s The Question—published in L’Express in 1958 after the French state confiscated the entire print run of the book—Sartre wrote that, in 1943, under the German occupation, ‘only one thing seemed impossible to us: that one day, in our name, people would be made to scream.’ He continued: ‘If 15 years are enough to change the victims into torturers it is because circumstances alone dictate. Depending on the circumstances, anyone at any time will become a victim or a perpetrator.’ One struggles in vain to discern the code of ethical conduct hidden within this landscape of colonial determinacy.
The philosophical and political importance of armed struggle— essentialized as ‘violence’—is another issue that is abstracted from its historical moorings in particular Third World conflicts and given the ethical treatment. Though she urges the contextualization of the Fanon preface within the totality of Sartre’s work, Arthur’s mind is not untroubled. After defending Sartre’s understanding of violence as contingent and relational she ends up agreeing with Aron on normative grounds, ‘since Sartre never really described what imperative or norm (if any at all) violence ought to be called upon to defend’. Perhaps she finds it difficult wholeheartedly to endorse this preface which coolly observes of the colonial révolté, ‘to shoot down a European is to kill two
birds with one stone, doing away with oppressor and oppressed at the same time; what remains is a dead man and a free man.’ Shocking rhetorical flourish, but Sartre was only reiterating the same position which fifteen years earlier had caused the editorial team to criticize Camus’s ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’. ‘We must face up to that unexpected spectacle: the striptease of our humanism’, Sartre wrote in the seventh year of the war in Algeria, ‘it was nothing but an illusory ideology, a justification for pillage. The non-violent are looking pleased with themselves: neither victims nor executioners! Come on!’ Far from returning to a practice of ethicization—dismissed by Beauvoir as an illusion common to bourgeois intellectuals, and for which Camus had particular difficulty in finding a cure—
Sartre’s writings, beginning in the 1950s, are characterized by an analysis of one form of imperialism as it transformed into another: neo-colonialism. Patrice Lumumba was the victim of a metamorphosis from which it was still necessary to draw conclusions in 1963. Lumumba realized, as Sartre had been arguing since at least 1956 with respect to Algeria, that political independence needed to come first, and that economic reforms were simply not possible within the framework of colonialism. Lumumba’s mistake had been twofold, Sartre explained in his preface in PrÊsence Africaine. On the one hand, he had misjudged his enemy, no longer a moribund, direct colonialism composed of small settlers and administrators, but an invidious and deft neo-colonialism.
Faced with the prospect of crises on the scale of Algeria, imperialist governments and large companies had decided to entrust nominal powers to natives—in this case the petty bourgeoisie of Belgian-trained employees and office holders—who would govern, more or less consciously, according to colonial interests. In the future, independence would no longer be sufficient, ‘without agrarian reform and without the nationalization of colonial businesses.’ The case of Lumumba held out another lesson. Independence in the Congo had not been won. It had been granted by the former colonial master, and this was not only an existential problem—‘liberty is not given, it is taken’—but a political one. In Vietnam and Algeria, Sartre explained, ‘whatever their present
difficulties, unity and centralization preceded independence and were its guarantee.’ Their leaders, Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella, had taken power despite the metropolitan countries, borne along by armed movements which not only ensured their personal legitimacy but national sovereignty as well. In the aftermath of Lumumba’s betrayal, and the division of the spoils by the us and Belgians under cover of a un mandate, Sartre looked to the eventual emergence of a ‘Congolese Castro’ who might redeem Lumumba in the same way Castro had Martí. The texts written in connection with the Russell Tribunal, collected in Situations viii, burn with impatience at American policies but are far too acute to settle for moral indictments. When Sartre
cancelled his trip to Cornell University in 1965 it was not because he felt every American was equally responsible for the war. Up until 1965 it was possible for a European to go to the United States because, with the Viet Cong in the process of winning in the South, ‘one had the impression that a period of imperial reflux had set in, and the Americans had begun to realize the absurdity of their policies.’ The decision to bombard the North had changed the war qualitatively. To give a seminar in Ithaca would only prove that calm discussion was still possible with an enemy engaged not only in a war of imperialist aggression in Vietnam, ‘but in South America, Korea, throughout the Third World’. The best chance to sensitize American opinion, he estimated, was from without—‘to
manifest a brutal and total condemnation’ and ‘to provoke, where it is possible—that is to say in Europe— protests.’ As for the moral stakes of his cancelled visit, or the capacities of a still embryonic American left to change us foreign policy, Sartre was unambiguous: ‘The United States will surely evolve, slowly, very slowly, but more so if we resist them than if we preach moral sermons.’ The final decade of Sartre’s life is treated by Arthur as a period of intellectual reaction against Third Worldism, and by extension against Sartre himself. She takes the debate organized by Le Nouvel Observateur in 1978, ‘The Third World and the Left’, in which Jacques Julliard claimed ‘there will be no African socialism that is not
totalitarian’, as emblematic. But since Sartre’s name is absent from this debate Arthur must resort to a sleight of hand. She instead moves four years ahead to Pascal Bruckner’s Le Sanglot de l’homme blanc: Tiers-Monde, culpabilité, haine de soi published in 1983—a piece of hysteria so unhinged as to be scarcely worth discussion. If Sartre is innocent of national masochism, Arthur hastens to add, neither does he have much in common with a form of identity politics, or a contemporary discourse on ‘the right to difference’, still fashionable in France. But aside from a few introductory references to one or two feminists who have suggested using Sartre for these purposes, it is not clear with whom Arthur is arguing. The turn towards human rights, the influence of
Levinasian ethics, the rise of the nouveaux philosophes and their critique of totalitarianism—all are mentioned, but since these all more or less explicitly rejected Sartre’s Third Worldism, how might they also represent his contemporary misuse? In fact, the silence around Sartre’s anticolonialism has been more significant, and more enduring, than its caricature. Arthur herself suggests as much, though her way of doing so ends in the bathos of a complaint that he is not to be found in the pantheon of postcolonial thinkers and the syllabi of departments devoted to this vital branch of scholarship. This obscure historiographical denouement is augured by one of several baffling mission statements, in which Arthur proposes that ‘an
interpretation that takes Sartre strictly as an “anti”-colonialist would view his thinking and his politics concerning colonialism and its legacy as oppositional, and thus in some sense unable to escape old, colonialist categories.’ Perhaps this accounts for her own scholarly pacifism—a citational diplomacy which aims so squarely at recovering what is acceptable about Sartre that it often leaves whole chunks of him scattered behind enemy lines. Arthur argues against sociologist Anna Boschetti’s portrayal of Sartre’s intervention in the Jeanson Trial in 1960 as a cynical ploy to prop up his flagging intellectual position. Yet Boschetti’s argument is simply recapitulated when Arthur wants to link Sartre’s activism in the 1950s and early 1960s to the political and intellectual movements
which followed. ‘Sartre’s position with respect to Third World liberation movements’, she writes, ‘helped him maintain an avant-gardism necessary to his continued relevance’, from the protests of May 68 to the post-68 interest in racism and immigration. Instead of recording just how unpopular his interventions on behalf of the fln were, she simply mentions in passing that Sartre’s anti-colonialism sat uneasily with the sensibilities of the general public, as well as many intellectuals on both left and right. Bernard-Henri Lévy is an even more frequent and problematic presence in the book. He is generally cited, along with biographer Cohen-Solal, as a sympathetic yet critical voice whose Siècle de Sartre (2000) sought to restore him to intellectual prominence—
censured and scrubbed, of course, of his period of cooperation with the pcf between 1952–56 and his Marxism. Arthur’s reliance on Lévy and Boschetti reveals a much more significant problem for this and any work which aims to situate Sartre within the postwar struggle over decolonization. To accept Lévy’s disjunction between Sartre’s ‘wrong choices’ in favour of communism and his ‘right’ ones in favour of decolonization is obviously false, since the Henri Martin Affair led Sartre to embrace both ever more tightly. Saying that Sartre’s Third Worldism was related to his engagement with communism without being reducible to it, ‘particularly since this support often set him at odds with the Communist Party’, is a meaningless variation of the
same distinction. Sartre spent far more time being called a hyena by the Party than working harmoniously at its flank. From 1952 to 1956 he regularly aimed barbs at L’Humanité, and admonished the party, in ‘Le Réformisme et les Fétiches’, to abandon idle polemicizing for the work of creating, in France, a living, breathing Marxism. In 1956 he condemned the Soviet repression in Hungary while assessing its meaning for the left in France: the pcf’s response to Budapest, and the sfio’s decision to launch France into an invasion of Suez at the same moment, revealed their institutional senility. Democratization, destalinization, ‘the resumption of contact with the masses and their mobilization, first against the war in Algeria’—these, he concluded, in ‘Le Fantôme de Staline’, were the
preconditions for a resurrected union of the left. That this entire phase—in fact all of the 50s and 60s—is consigned en bloc by the pathologically careless nouveau philosophe to the second, ‘totalitarian Sartre’, is hardly surprising. But that it should constitute an important frame of reference for Arthur is indeed remarkable. Lévy does not merely neglect Sartre’s anti-colonialism. He actively impugns it as an evil emanation of the second Sartre, those ‘familiar and terrible images of Sartre and Beauvoir in the ussr or Cuba’, their visits to China, their liaison with the French Maoists. Sartre’s stated admiration for Castro in 1960 was simply ‘crazy’. Worse: it was naïve since, notes Lévy, incorrectly, the Cubans ‘threw themselves into the arms of the Soviets and the so-called missile
crisis blew up a few months later.’ Lévy describes the substance of Sartre’s antiracism—‘Black Orpheus’, The Wretched of the Earth and the sections of the Critique devoted to colonization—as a betrayal. It was, finally, wrong to have called the Vietnam War, in which more bombs were dropped than in all of World War Two, a genocide. For the second worst crime, after complicity with tyranny, is anti-Americanism. Protests against French actions in Algeria were admissible, up to a point, but any wider anti-imperialism is ludricrously disqualified as an emanation of the extreme right. By the same token, Sartre’s exultation of the crowd in the Critique is a reversal that elevates the lynch mob of The Anti-Semite and the Jew, while his statement, in 1961, that
an ‘anti-communist is a dog’ ultimately recalls for Lévy Darquier de Pellepoix’s 1978 declaration that at Auschwitz they only ‘gassed lice’! Lévy’s indictment of his support for popular struggles in and outside the Third World is so complete that, by an ultimate inversion, it is the Sartre of Nausea who becomes ‘absolutely rebellious’. For the most part Arthur does not repeat these perverse formulations. In reproducing the phony division between two Sartres, however, if only by ignoring one of them, she perpetuates what can only amount to her subject’s partial demolition. Her emollience towards Boschetti is another missed opportunity to inject clarity into a historical field weighed down by its reliance on Bourdieusian
categories. In light of Sartre’s early and enduring commitment to decolonization it seems unlikely that he was a figure to whom, as another student of Bourdieu, James Le Sueur, implies in Uncivil War (2001), ‘it soon became clear that intellectual legitimacy was going to become more allied with anticolonialism’, and who ‘consciously or unconsciously’ linked his career to the anti-colonialist movement. Many, including Sartre, risked a great deal in speaking out against France’s colonial wars. Even with some form of negotiated settlement in Algeria on the horizon in 1960, the statement made in Sartre’s name in support of the porteurs de valises was widely condemned as a form of national betrayal, endorsing acts of metropolitan treason and violence against soldiers in Algeria. Contributors
to Les Temps Modernes did not write as though they knew the outcome in advance. In fact, they failed accurately to predict what happened in crucial ways. As late as 1961 Sartre still thought it impossible for De Gaulle to solve the crisis, and considered his ouster by generals a possibility should he propose negotiations or accept the resulting resolutions. The two bombs set for Sartre by the oas in 1961 and 1962 are only the most spectacular evidence of the consequences of his kind of engagement. The fact that expressions of support for decolonization have become banalized as morally or historically inevitable is in part a result of positions taken by publications like Les Temps Modernes; it was not a transparent truth from which it has always been possible to gain intellectual
purchasing power. More importantly, if the whole period of decolonization becomes a factor in political choices made about the us and ussr, the pcf, Gaullism, the legacy of the resistance and the memory of Vichy, then the very pantheon of exemplary intellectuals, and thus the field of ideas itself, will need to be re-examined. It is surely significant that the heroic figures of Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (1998) had either ambiguous or tortured relationships to decolonization in Algeria, or in Blum’s case, ended up prosecuting a war in Indochina while in office. ‘The Sleepwalkers’, an essay about the behaviour of Parisians the very day the Algerian ceasefire was signed, is an
expression of disgust which makes clear that, for Sartre, the successful resolution of the war had depended on mass mobilization and the reorganization and coming to power of the left. The fact that ‘a coup-d’état government is forced to give us what we timidly asked for seven years ago’, he wrote, was not a compromise without ‘victory or vanquished’, but a victory for the Algerians alone, which only their tenacity had secured. The Third World interested Sartre not solely, or even primarily, because in it he saw the local victory of the least favoured, but because its struggle for independence seemed to provide both the example and the spark for a much broader revolutionary solidarity. The ability of Cuba and Vietnam to resist the crushing blows of us military and economic
might appeared to offer a similar opening to those in the West who would know how to seize the initiative. Instead of searching to exculpate him from the charges of eurocentrism, revolutionary naïveté or violence, we ought to accept that Sartre’s anti-colonialism retains all its topical force. Renewed imperial adventures in North Africa invite comparisons. Forced to explain why Sartre was released from custody in 1968 De Gaulle replied, ‘One does not arrest Voltaire.’ Today the task is simplified. France’s philosophes call for the jets which strafe Libya, and hold joint press conferences with the President of the Republic. Petitions carrying the signatures of dissipated belles âmes are drawn up by unpaid interns and digitally dispatched: Cohn-
Bendit, Lévy.
Glucksmann,
Bernard-Henri
In the vicinity of these fine proclamations which purport to explain to us the true meaning of justice, it is worth recalling Sartre who, in 1961, had no advice left to give. He nevertheless saw young people struggling to emerge from beneath the rotting corpse of the Left in that ‘backwards province’, France. ‘Shall we say to them, “Be Cubans, be Russians, be Chinese, or, if you prefer, be Africans?” They will reply that it is a little late to change one’s birth.’ His old friend Nizan, he thought, killed in 1940, would have something to say to them—his naked revolt, his refusals, his class hatred, his furious confidence, his unmasking of intellectual imposture, all preserved by
his sudden death. Today it is the voice of Sartre that provides an antidote to easy-listening manifestos in favour of neo-colonial wars, and its irreducible acuity is the best argument against the intellectual surgeons whose unsteady hands wish to cut him in two.
[1] Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Verso: London and New York 2010, ÂŁ14.99, paperback 233 pp, 978 1 84467 9