Del Cap wrote:e da, nisam ni ugnelju odgovorio... pa zapravo prvo pitanje je ko su ovde bili kold vor liberals tokom, je li, kold vora. to da bismo znali koju su oni tradiciju napravili i na šta se danas (post-kold vor) neko nadovezuje. verovatno bi refleksni izbor bio upravo drugosrbijanci ali mnijem da postoji tu više kolopleta da bi se izvukla jasna linija.
4 November 2023
The talons of empire
Why the world can’t escape from American hegemony.
By Quinn Slobodian
Conflict in Israel-Palestine throws American relations with its Middle Eastern partners into chaos. Oil price rises strengthen the hand of petroleum-producing states, and offer the prospect of a realignment away from the central powers of the United States, Europe and Russia. The West is in retreat, trying to manage a situation in which they are suddenly no longer in control of world events. The year is not 2023 but 50 years ago, 1973, at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, which leads Arab oil-producing states to embargo shipments to the US and other supporters of Israel. The anniversary is likely no coincidence and must have been part of Hamas’s plans for its attack on 7 October, but it is worth asking what the difference was between now and then. How have conditions changed? Do the poor have more or less leverage than they did then?
A new book by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy, helps answer this question. The weaponisation of oil in 1973 was possible because of the existence of choke points in the production system. While the US was still a significant producer, western Europe in particular was dependent on shipments from the Middle East. There was a spigot that could be turned on and off to potentially devastating effect. What Underground Empire shows is that directly – and more often indirectly – the US learned its lesson from this moment of exposure. Farrell and Newman describe the rise over the past 50 years of what they call America’s “network imperialism”. In an era where markets were supposedly becoming ever-more disembedded from states, the authors show that the opposite was the case. The US, in particular – with China as an adept late innovator – was, in fact, cleverly devising ways to turn the apparently disordered globe-spanning infrastructures of finance, information, intellectual property and production supply chains into nooses to be held in its hand, controlling and potentially choking out any challenges to American power.
The Opec embargo and the Yom Kippur War were both 1973, but it was also the year of the founding of the Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) financial transactions system in the Netherlands by the Dutch banker Jan Kraa. This allowed banks to “talk to each other across borders” replacing the previous system in which operators had to “perform logarithmic calculations using shared code books” to ensure security. By 1975, 270 banks were signed up. Today, more than 11,000 banking institutions send on average of 42 million messages per day. By the late 1990s, Swift was the clearinghouse for most transactions. It also served as an all-important means of what the authors call “warfare without gunsmoke” for the US government against its geopolitical opponents. The first trial run was against a founding member of Opec, Iran, which had wielded the oil weapon itself after the revolution in 1979. By cutting out from Swift those who did business with Iran in the 2010s, the country was effectively quarantined from the global financial system.
The second tool that was used was the so-called Entity List, which prohibited countries from selling US-made technology or products to businesses considered national security risks without a licence. Even though the US had outsourced most of its own manufacturing, it often continued to produce small key components or, more importantly, held the patent on key parts. Since the Trump administration’s declaration of a trade war with Beijing, China has been the primary target for this form of export control, restricting the freedom of manoeuvre of third parties by way of globally enforceable intellectual property law.
A half-century ago, the coalition of developing countries in the United Nations, called the G77, viewed cutting off oil supply as a way to pressure if not blackmail the richer countries into a broader transformation of international relations that was referred to as the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Even though poorer nations themselves suffered from higher oil prices, the idea was to use the threat of future blockades on other key commodities to compel the Global North into expanding development aid, accept commodity price stabilisation agreements, and perhaps even offer reparations for colonialism. A lesser-known part of the NIEO was the demand for a New International Information Order. Because the capacity to report on global events was highly concentrated in the richer countries, new nations were too frequently dependent on the wire services centred in the old colonial powers for their day-to-day news. The New International Information Order proposed the decentralisation of journalism and communication infrastructure.
Although those demands had little traction in the 1970s, for a moment in the 1990s and early 2000s, some felt that such a democratisation of news creation had emerged with the rise of so-called citizen journalists, and a faith in the open platforms of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and video platforms like YouTube. Underground Empire shows how misguided such optimism was. The apparently open networks of the internet were always running through fibre-optic cables with choke points as easily identifiable and observable as oil pipelines. While there was a brief idea that fibre-optic technology was harder to spy on because it did not leak audibly in the way that traditional wires did, it soon became clear that it was actually even easier to get complete access with the complicity of the private service providers that operated the internet.
In one of their many evocative passages that makes visible the hidden infrastructure of everyday life, Farrell and Newman describe how “the cables terminated in Folsom Street [in San Francisco], allowing the NSA [the US’s National Security Agency] to use a prism to split the beams of light carrying information along fiber-optic cables into two separate and identical signals. One conveyed people’s emails, Web requests, and data to their expected destinations, while the other was diverted to room 641A. There, it was parsed and analyzed by a Narus STA 6400 machine, built by an Israeli company with deep intelligence community connections.” Private communication became the property of US intelligence. Companies were richly compensated for opening these back doors, they write, and those who baulked were threatened with crippling fines.
Globalisation in the story that Farrell and Newman tell was always quietly reinforcing the unipolar power of the United States. Given their portrait of the world economy in the 2020s, it would seem that any effort in realignment along the lines of the 1970s is doomed to be caught in the networks of the US’s underground empire. Certainly, this is what American policymakers hope. Startling to the authors themselves, parts of the US government picked up on an earlier version of their argument that introduced the term “weaponised interdependence”. Describing the use of choke points in the trade war with China, an official in the Trump administration reportedly remarked “weaponised interdependence. It’s a beautiful thing.” Late last year, the European Commission vice-president Margrethe Vestager used the term too, somewhat fatalistically saying that the EU had “had a hard awakening into the era of weaponised interdependence” after realising the “stark limits of a production model brd on cheap Russian energy and cheap Chinese labour”. Is this form of empire one that will be eternal?
Perhaps. But there might be another way to read their evidence. The outcome of the sanctions regime against Russia suggested that being excluded from the global financial system by the US was perhaps not the immediate death blow that many people expected it to be. While trade denominated in non-dollar terms remains a small (if growing) part of the world economy, there are nascent and halfway plausible efforts at building other empires. Farrell and Newman make clear that for this to have a chance, however, they need a combination of two things: a large domestic market, access to the extractive resources necessary as inputs into a modern digital and still carbon-driven economy, and the means of self-defence against a potential US-backed opponent.
The authors are fans of science fiction and the book is peppered with illuminating references to novels throughout. One comes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a 1992 novel that is a vision of the near future of commercialised sovereignty. It bears dim resemblance to the techno utopias of the 1990s – it offered Mark Zuckerberg the possibly Pyrrhic concept of the “metaverse” – but with a much grimmer undertone. Stephenson reminds the reader that Louis XIV’s cannons were inscribed with the slogan ultima ratio regum, or the last argument of kings. None of the would-be decentralisers in Underground Empire, from the Citibank head Walter Wriston who dreamed of an offshore world free of state control to the Ethereum head Vitalik Buterin’s fantasy of decentralised autonomous organisations, are ever able to escape the gravitational pull of state power backed up by the monopoly of violence. It is only the gargantuan “civilisation-states” of Russia and China that have a chance.
Given the story of Underground Empire, we can see that, as was the case 50 years ago, the Palestinian people themselves have no means of fighting a war on their own based on weaponry, finance, information or capital-intensive manufacturing. Then, as now, their putative allies in the region have only limited interest in creating a genuine New International Economic Order that would turn the world economy on its head. Why would they? The current one is serving them too well. The resolution of the first oil crisis was the quadrupling of the world oil price, thus quadrupling the receipts for the Gulf oil-producing states and creating the ocean of liquidity that sloshed into the London property market, private equity and now into futuristic projects of urbanism in the desert and (potentially) green breakthrough technologies. The current conflict in Gaza may have disrupted the détente between Israel and Arab countries but it will not change the bleak fact that in the medium term, the plight of the Palestinian people is no more than a footnote in the region’s power play.
Rhetorically, the dream of realignment is alive. A renewed Declaration of a New International Economic Order passed the UN General Assembly last year. A gathering of the Brics nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in South Africa promised expanded horizons for so-called South-South collaboration. But what Farrell and Newman’s book helps us to see is how sluggish any potential realignment might be. Fibre-optic cables travel across oceans and cannot be doubled overnight, nor can semiconductor foundries which require investment in the tens of billions and time scales near decades. The vision one leaves their book with is one of great-power conflict where, as usual, those at the bottom of the world’s hierarchy of wealth continue to suffer the most, with no refuge in sight. “What we will not do, because we cannot,” they warn, “is map plausible escape routes from the underground empire. It’s easy to descend into it but not so easy to get out.” In the 1970s, the G77 said what it was calling for was economic decolonisation as a complement to political independence. The underground empire suggests that is further away than ever.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-project-state-rethinking-the-twentieth-century/
American Affairs Journal
Fall 2023 / Volume VII, Number 3
The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century
by Anton Jäger
REVIEW ESSAY
The Project State and Its Rivals:
A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
by Charles S. Maier
Harvard University Press, 2023, 528 pages
“We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century,” Charles Maier notes in an announcement for his new book The Project State and Its Rivals. Both haunting and tantalizing, the sentence’s past tense speaks to a profoundly contemporary mood. As the twenty-first century progresses, confident visions about the previous century conceived from the vantage point of the 1990s—the “age of extremes” resolved by a set of liberal settlements—no longer seem safe and secure. In 2023, the European extreme Right is establishing itself as a force of government, populism is going global, and inter-imperial tensions have ushered in a new arms race. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland is currently polling above 20 percent, while Modi is set to win another term in India with an approval rating near 80 percent. To the desperation of liberals nostalgic for the 1990s, the “end of the end of history” has arrived.
- Spoiler:
As Maier surmises, there might be a connection between this sense of surprise and the comfortable judgments we tend to make about humani¬ty’s last hundred years. “If the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism,” he asks, “why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?” The question provides the working hypothesis for Maier’s new monograph, a self-described “rethinking of the long twentieth century,” which aims to “explain the fraying of our own civic culture” while also “allowing hope for its recovery.” Provocatively, Maier’s focus is on “both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies,” next to “new forms of imperial domination,” “global networks of finance,” and “international associations” that both challenged and shaped the state. The ambition is nothing less than a new general theory of the twentieth century, one that would allow us to deal with an unmastered past, but also to gain proper self-understanding in a new and confusing century.
Readers would be hard-pressed to find a more suitable candidate for the task than Charles S. Maier. At eighty-four, Maier—still teaching European and international history at Harvard—remains a scholar with panoramic disciplinary reach. His 1975 debut, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I, swiftly established itself a masterpiece of comparative political history. Based on a prior Harvard dissertation complemented with a decade of additional archival research, it examined the fraught resolution of the crises of liberalism after 1918, and what factors determined the potential emergence and stymieing of authoritarian regimes. After works on Germany’s collective memory of the Holocaust and an elite-driven account of the fall of East Germany, he waded into historical political science with Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood in 2014, followed by Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 in 2016. Clearly a product of a buoyant Cold War academe, Maier has always been locked in an uneasy pas-à-deux with Marxism: attentive to the class content of political life, but never taken to monolithic views of business interests and overly abstract notions of capital. His work on political economy looked closely at the class coalitions that gave way to divergent corporatist settlements in the 1920s and ’30s, and how these national blocs interlocked with differing international arrangements—a Marxist historiography despite itself. He also took the force of ideas seriously, weaving a tapestry of conceptual, political, and economic history, which explains the unique force of his writing. Yet unlike cultural historians, Maier has retained an interest in causality through the construction of comparative counterfactuals—what Britain and Germany shared in 1918, for instance, or why English Tories did not need a Duce and why the American South was different from the Mezzogiorno—a sensibility that also informed his consistently transnational approach to the twentieth century.
The Project State and Its Rivals exudes a similarly boundless ambition. As the book’s announcements make clear, Maier is on the lookout for a unifying category to cohere our historical experience of the twentieth century—or, more specifically, the forms of statehood that emerged in the interwar period, and that still present such vexing challenges to our intellectual imagination.
Maier’s project states moved within a triad of forces: the so-called web of capital, the network of governance, and the state as an institution. On this canvas, the long arc of his twentieth century becomes visible: the birth of the project state in the wake of the military confrontations of the 1910s, its sudden maturation and ascendance after the 1929 stock market crash, a period of aggressive rivalry in the 1930s and ’40s, followed up by its domestication under American supervision after 1947, its relative globalization in the 1950s and ’60s as postcolonial nations joined the ranks of contending project managers, and finally, a period of crisis in the 1970s followed up by a haphazard dissolution in the 1980s and ’90s.
In Maier’s view, the project state was set up to subordinate the web of capital and existing networks of governance, modernize resource empires, and embed financial institutions in national communities. In the 1970s, the contradictions of its model were becoming plain to see: both citizens and capital were unwilling to tolerate the inflationary imbalances which it was imposing. Internationally, these moods of discontent compounded with the monetary limbo of previously national economies at the end of the Bretton Woods system, now responsive to bondholders rather than voters. Consequently, new actors within the web of capital and networks of governance crafted coalitions that would liberate themselves from its stranglehold. On its ruins, institutions such as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were to sculpt new, more market-friendly states. These would forgo the stringent demands of their predecessors and restore capital’s hold over the investment function.
For Maier, ambivalence is a scholarly virtue when approaching the period: “there are other ways to think about the history of the last hundred years than as a contest between democracies and dictatorships, emancipation and oppression, fascists and communists, or even just between liberals and conservatives, left and right, or moderates and the ideologically obsessed.” Like the Thirty Years’ War which gave birth to Westphalian absolutism, the period from 1914 to 1945 produced a distinctly new state-form that differed from its nineteenth-century predecessors and still casts an intimidating shadow in our own era of state incapacity.
Defining the Project State
How should the period in question be typified? Here, Maier ably ventures into a crowded field. Since the 1940s, terms such as “totalitarianism,” “developmentalism,” “state capitalism,” or “managerial revolution” were devised to explain the types of collective power that arose in the twentieth century. Some of the century’s most able social scientists cut their teeth on the categorization. Yet all their solutions steadily revealed their hard limits. The “totalitarian” label always seemed overly normative and proved unable to explain internal differences in each camp; ostensibly anti-totalitarian leaders such as Roosevelt and Attlee also presided over an unprecedented suspension of civil liberties, while state control over the economy was hardly unique to the Soviets.
Yet the notion of “state capitalism” proposed by Frankfurt School theorists such as Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer also did not capture the strange hybrid of public and private which the interwar states were expressions of. In Pollock’s view, the bourgeois capitalism of the nineteenth century had died out somewhere in the 1930s: the free market was abolished by decree, prices were administered, and economic power had been replaced by political caste categories. Looking at cases such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Rooseveltian United States, Pollock claimed that state capitalism was the only viable successor to the age of laissez-faire. The cardinal question was now whether it would come in democratic or totalitarian forms—or whether the Office of Price Administration or Gosplan was in charge.
Already in the 1940s, however, critics pointed out the severe deficiencies of this frame. A mere five years after Pollock proposed his “state capitalism” thesis, the American Office of Price Administration was dissolved on the initiative of a Republican Congress, and American employers pushed through their Taft-Hartley Act. The resulting Cold War empire—driven by a coalition of capital-intensive export industries and investment banks that crystallized in the later New Deal—was to deconstruct the old European dominions, reindustrialize the continent, and replace Lenin’s imperialism with a less coercive model of global management. Borrowing a phrase from Tim Barker, Maier claims that the State Department thereby became the American equivalent to the French Commissariat général du Plan, even if it was never interested in the social housing projects and universal welfare provisions Parisian planners presided over.
Even in France, however, the predicted state takeover never happened. Rather, communists were pushed out of government under American pressure and planning remained indicative rather than direct. Similarly, the National Health Service proved an exception to the failed nationalizations introduced by the postwar Labour government; the Tennessee Valley Authority was an outlier compared to most public-private partnerships financed by the Roosevelt administration; in the meantime, the Nazis privatized large parts of the German economy.
The idea of a “managerial revolution,” in turn, underestimated the persistent power of a shareholder bloc, while the notion of a “developmental state” focused too heavily on economic policy. All missed the deeper transformation in state structures and political mobilization that marked the interbellum.
Project Leadership
Maier’s book offers a new solution to this enigma. In his view, all the classical categories used to describe the twentieth-century state miss its central feature: its orientation around the notion of a project, which could weld business interests, the general population, and state bureaucrats under a single, long-term time horizon. What united Roosevelt’s America, Stalin’s Russia, Attlee’s Britain, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, and Nkrumah’s Ghana, then, was not a diffuse totalitarianism or developmental ideology. Rather, it was their status as project states, which all “had a transformative agenda . . . based on authoritarian and even totalitarian as well as liberal and democratic coalitions seeking to reform sclerotic institutions or societies that seemed unacceptably unequal.” Project states thereby tended to “see society as a plasmic whole, sometimes in terms of elites and masses, knowable and controllable through statistical science, biological and legal interventions.” The specimen did not come without ancestors, of course—in Maier’s view, Napoleonic France and the wartime organization of the U.S. federal government in 1861 already exhibited embryonic signs of a later project state—yet “as a continuing and nonexceptional form of polity,” the new creature only “came into its own in the twentieth century.”
Maier’s category thereby demarcates and unifies. The notion of a “project state” allows us to understand what Mao, Hitler, De Gaulle, Attlee, and Nkrumah had in common. Yet it also clearly separates the twentieth-century state from its pre-1914 antecedents. Although Maier’s state never fully abolished capital, it did have a productively agonistic relationship with it: it was able to both discipline and repel those that controlled investment and to direct or claim those resources for itself. It was a state made for and by warfare, yet not exclusively so. To the disgust of neoliberals and New Leftists, it had an eternally uneasy relationship with the public-private divide, both on the social and on the economic front, encouraging higher birth rates while compiling calorific tables.
Above all, it was pitted against the nineteenth-century nightwatchman state, both as a reality and as a metaphor; public authority was to turn itself from a mere facilitator of economic commerce into an active choreographer of social movements. As Maier notes, the hustle and bustle of the traffic jam was replaced by the “ordered direction of the Riefenstahlian march”; under its baldaquin, masses would gather for coordination and instruction, in a rage for order that ran across the whole interwar period. Maier’s concept does not rule out internal differentiation, of course: “creating the fascist man who would live as a lion and not as a jackal was a different project than raising out of poverty ‘one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,’” and Stalin was surprised to see Churchill switch office with Attlee when negotiating the postwar order.
Still, all its forms took an energetic, even invasive interest in the populations that fell under their control: the project state built the National Health Service, transported prisoners to Kolyma, incinerated Dresden and Nagasaki, birthed cybernetics and nuclear power, reduced infant mortality, and cartelized the coal industries. Here was an entity “addicted to transformative agendas,” with a lifespan as short as it was eventful: born somewhere between 1914 and 1929, gone between 1973 and 1991. By the close of the 1980s, Maier admits, the project state had given up on its project and was no longer capable of controlling the forces of private capital. It slowly gave up the role of sculpting society, instead leaving the field open to self-experimentation and the emerging entrepreneurs of the self. In the historian’s view, its “audacity repelled many at the time and certainly social historians in the century since, but the ambitions constituted a major historical force and deserve empathetic understanding.”
Above all, Maier shows, project states met a crisis of leadership. Max Weber, himself an uneasy prophet for the rising project state, already discerned this feature in the late 1910s, when he called on a newly republican Germany to face a “night of icy darkness” with heroism and the “slow boring of hard boards.” He was hardly a lonely prophet. On a globe in which the oscillations of the market rather than the turning of the seasons governed an ever-larger portion of human life, “drift” inevitably gave way to “mastery,” as Walter Lippmann noted at the dawn of the new age in 1914. Internally, project leadership sought to organize and stratify the suffrage expansion which capitalism had always contained as a promise, yet which made cohabitation between labor and capital difficult. Externally, project states were to guarantee commodity frontiers or what Maier terms “resource empires” that could support increasingly market-dependent metropoles.
Project states, Maier thereby argues, were a product of the First World War, turbocharged by the Second, only faintly surviving into the age of American world-hegemony, finally to teeter in the inflationary 1970s, and fully die out in the unipolar 1990s. Already in the late 1950s, “the poet Stephen Vincent Benet was no longer around to ask us, as he had queried the dead in the 1930s, why we were marching,” Maier recollects. “We were being marched for the sake of a concept of citizenship that would largely dissolve by the 1960s. . . . [T]he project-state still imposed memories and set a cadence, but the urgency of its causes was weakening.” While Maier’s students marched against Vietnam, Milton Friedman proposed a marketization of the draft and a replacement of existing social security with a minimal cash grant. From the inside, plans for the silent execution of the project state were being composed.
The Century of the Project State
Taken on this timeline, Maier’s heuristic thereby acquires a sharper outline: project states were a product of a world war which was itself the expression of challenges to what John Darwin has called the “British world system.” This was a system based on free trade, the gold standard, and asymmetrical naval power. In this board game, countries that wanted to achieve military parity had to industrialize; to industrialize, they needed access to “resource empires” which would assure food and energy supplies in a world supposedly beset by existential scarcity. Naturally, challengers to this system were also under threat of being reduced to primary commodity suppliers to the British hegemon, stuck in unequal trading relationships and the ensuing comparative disadvantage. Internal British developments only created more reasons to break out. As more European nations began to acquire manufacturing sectors in the late nineteenth century, the British Empire began to tie its existing colonial territories to the home country by what was called “nontariff barriers”: “regulatory measures of one sort and another,” as Mike Macnair notes, “which pushed the colonial territories into trade with the metropolis.” As Branko Milanović has shown, the savings glut of capitalism’s nouveaux riches incentivized investment in colonial holdings rather than domestic economies. Coming up to 1914, this surplus was rushed to locations outside of Europe, where the new debt obligations were to be surveilled with navies financed through increased military spending.
The creation of these nontariff barriers led to what Germans termed Torschlusspanik (“closing door panic”): a sense that new capitalist economies with energy and food dependencies would be shut out of imperialist resource networks and face geo-economic extinction. Here was the driving force of the New Imperialism from the 1870s onwards, which accelerated the scramble for Africa and the increasing build-up of naval power. These factors also proved crucial in the German bid for continental hegemony in 1914—itself an attempt to secure a resource empire which could guarantee the population’s food and oil supply.
After 1918, this problem was only moderately resolved by the American supervisory system over Europe. The Versailles order left British and French imperial dominance intact and reduced Germany, unable to build its Eastern empire, to a state of semi-suzerainty. Coupled with the increasingly ambitious demands of domestic working classes, governmental minimalism was becoming a liability. Later, as these formal empires were rendered informal in the 1950s and ’60s, many former colonial territories began constructing their own project states to escape from their status as commodity frontiers: Mao, Castro, and Nkrumah as project leaders.
A general pattern becomes visible here. The rise of the project state can be conceptualized as a series of attempts to break the grip of dependency in an age in which the British world system was already fraying. This escape plan now presupposed a level of mobilization and coordination in a fully capitalist economy absent in the nineteenth century. Even in the case of the Soviet Union, the quest to catch up with Western competitors drew the contours of the Russian project state. For countries that had no internal frontier to recycle their settlers, like Germany and Italy, these attempts took on particularly brutal forms; all in all, however, the attempts saw an enormous expansion of state power, with catch-up projects which could take on both less democratic and more democratic forms—fascist, liberal, clerical-authoritarian, socialist, communist, or nationalist.
After the war, the project states and their resource empires were slowly decoupled, as Maier notes in the book’s middle chapters. This was followed by the construction of a new commercial empire, exemplified by the Pax Americana and Bretton Woods, which encouraged European nations to acquire new manufacturing sectors without threatening class stability. These were no longer the unruly project states that had threatened international disorder in the 1930s and 1940s; “economic growth allowed a policy of allocative neutrality,” while “the European project helped to replace the colonial tribute.” As Maier notes, “formal empire might have ended,” yet the Third World continued to serve its sorry function as a commodity frontier, even as many postcolonial leaders sought to emulate the jailbreak economics which project states had first practiced in the 1920s and ’30s.
An Unfinished Fresco
There are many virtues to this narrative. Maier’s book offers a powerful corrective to many one-sided accounts of twentieth-century history—particularly self-satisfied liberal narratives which still see the age as a confrontation between tyranny and freedom. Following in the tracks of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, Adam Tooze’s The Deluge, and his own oeuvre, The Project State and Its Rivals kicks over idols that still stalk our historical imagination in the twenty-first century.
As the historian Clinton Rossiter already noted in the late 1940s, many Western nations had embarked on a period of “constitutional dictatorship” to stabilize their political institutions throughout the middle of the twentieth century, blurring the very lines between authoritarian or nonauthoritarian regimes. In the latter sense, Maier offers us a twenty first-century variant of the 1338 fresco by the Italian painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, which offered a morphology of state forms through the ages. Most importantly, by drawing attention to the common experience of the project state across continents, Maier also offers helpful tools for understanding the synchronicity of the populist revolts after 2008, from Delhi to Budapest, held hostage by the same phantom memory of a now absent project state.
This limitless ambition also comes with potential risks, however. Throughout the book, Maier does an impressive job tracking continuities and discontinuities between a wide variety of case studies. Yet readers receive relatively little on the exact etiology of the project state. Where did it come from? Maier’s intuition seems to be that the project state came about through inter-imperialist catch up. Internally, capitalist economies generated a power vacuum in which capital and labor were pitted against each other, unprofitable assets were left unused, and populations were condemned to mass unemployment. Externally, an increasingly market-dependent society necessitated the creation of imperial reservoirs which could supply primary resources while being force-fed with the center’s industrial produce.
At the same time, however, Maier also posits interstate competition as a consequence without a cause. Project states are called into existence to modernize resource empires and battle geopolitical rivals—but why were these imperatives in the first place?
As mentioned, Maier seems to indicate that increasing market integration at the start of the twentieth century created a set of dependencies which exposed humanity to a new vulnerability. Capital’s invasion into the social fabric, so it seems, called forth a Polanyian counter-reaction. At the same time, Maier also claims that the “term capital is an abstraction, a shorthand for business leaders who represented finance and industry in the public eye and asset-owners and managers who directed privately owned firms”—a more sociological notion which gives us a matrix of choices for different social groups. Yet it tells us very little about the overall environment and structures in which project states were born, nurtured, and died—and why they have proven so difficult to resuscitate and maintain in the new century.
After the Project State
These ambiguities are on awkward display in the book’s closing chapters. By the early 1970s, Maier argues, the project state’s energy was spent: it “had mobilized public energy to wage war, overcome the interwar depression, attempt to retain empire, and construct social insurance schemes for old age, unemployment, and varying degrees of medical coverage.” Yet “governmental activism seemed to run into pervasive difficulties by the 1970s,” felled by overheating economies mired in stagnation and energy insecurity. The web of capital now sought to liberate itself from the strictures which the project state had once imposed upon it, including the large share of public property it had gained. The result was a momentous transition: the largest privatization of collective property since the secularizations of Catholic Church lands throughout western Europe and Latin America from the sixteenth century to the 1860s—“neoliberalism’s greatest wager.” The resulting transnational employer offensive saw capital hollow out the project state from the inside and rearrange it for its convenience. The result was a debilitating victory for capital in the social question—indeed, the effacing of the social question—and a dramatic crisis of interest-based politics. As Maier notes, “night was falling in the gardens of the global north.”
The resultant creature is never given a name in the book. Yet it is clear how frail the successors of the project state look in comparison to their centauric predecessors. The new state forms are “lamentably feeble when it comes to collecting taxes, winning wars or forging a really ‘hegemonic’ power bloc or an ideology that can carry the state beyond the coercive and ‘corporative’ level and into the moral and intellectual sphere.” As the Covid and Ukraine crises have shown, post-project states find it amazingly difficult to vaccinate and produce weapons—two of the “plasmic” interventions which were once celebrated as the key attributes of twentieth-century statecraft—and are ever-more helpless when buying consent from their populations.
Maier tells us much about the “how” of this story. Yet we receive comparatively little about the “why.” These problems compound in the book’s concluding chapter on the 2010s. Closing his arc, Maier zooms in on the explanandum of his overall project: a proper understanding of the populist decade after 2008. In his view, existing interpretations of the populist moment are too lopsided, choosing a cut-off point that hampers our understanding of them. Populists “may have believed” they were reviving the project state, he argues, “but the project was reduced to protection of the ethnic community,” with the more plausible result a mere “mafia state.” Maier’s overview of the current literature on populism is cursory, only faintly fleshed out by the references to political economy which run throughout the rest of the book, and replete with liberal pieties. He offers some hazy references to populism as an illiberal ideology with leadership at its center, linked to the charismatic authority endemic to the interwar period, yet never clearly settles on a definition. He rarely relates populism to structural factors that give plausibility to these new movements.
There are undeniable similarities with twentieth-century authoritarians, of course. Like twentieth-century fascists, today’s populists glorify leaders and seek to restrict universal citizenship to national borders; like ultra-nationalists, their primary locus for political decision-making lies in the executive. At the same time, the new populists hardly have ambitions to break the American world system, to rebuild a racial welfare state, or to discipline capital into the productive investment required to meet the century’s new challenges. With comparatively weak and top-heavy parties at their disposal, populists also find it hard to colonize and wield the state, often acting as rent-seeking coalitions that simply adapt to stagnation. Compared to the dynamic states headed by Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mao, today’s populists are cursed by a “cruelly absent grandeur,” in the words of Pierre Rosanvallon.
Maier notes these differences, yet his state-centric apparatus seems particularly ill-equipped to explain them. Both for Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and Mussolini, the relationship between leader and people that crystallized in the project state had its roots in history: a sense of directionality and dynamism, a telos to which humanity was to move. A “people” was to be mobilized for a project, itself indicating a close link between past, present, and future.
Few traces of such a philosophy of history can be found in contemporary populism. In that sense, it is indeed properly post-historical: unable to relate itself to historical dynamics that would determine where the Italian, Dutch, French, or British people are headed. Rather, populism instead relies on a constant short-circuiting between people and leader.
If we see Hitler, Attlee, and Eisenhower as products of the NSDAP, the Labour Party, or the GOP, what different history emerges? And what if we were to query the very idea of the mid-century era as that of the “project state”? As the German émigré Franz Neumann famously claimed, the Nazi state could easily count as a non-state, since “under national socialism . . . there is no need for a state standing above all groups; the state may even be a hindrance to the compromise and to domination over the ruled classes.” Partly motivated by his defense of the Sozialstaat which he saw dormant in the Weimar Rechtsstaat, Neumann saw Nazi Germany as little more than a temporary cartel between social groups.
The project state, in the latter sense, was mainly a project society, in which a specific mode of human action made possible durable forms of political engagement. Focusing so closely on the web of capital and the networks of governance, the mass parties and organizations which assured access to the state throughout the century only appear en passant in Maier’s analysis—a choir serenading in the dark.
One need not accept Neumann’s anti-statist readings of the Nazi project state. Yet real questions remain for Maier: if the project states which once forced a jailbreak out of the British world system were above all project societies, what are we to make of the possibility of their return? And if the project state’s revival requires a restarting of the fraught dialectic between society and state which ran across the twentieth century, how does it change our evaluation of populism as a failed attempt to do so?
A Society of Rackets
The mid-century moment which Maier so skillfully dissects offers potential clues here. Before Horkheimer borrowed Pollock’s notion of state capitalism, he offered a far more plausible analogy for the social formation which united all capitalist societies across the Atlantic in the 1920s and ’30s: “the society of rackets.” Horkheimer agreed with Schumpeter that the era of the heroic entrepreneur had come to an end, just as the authority of the bourgeois father had broken down. Yet what replaced it was not necessarily an all-powerful caste of planners. Rather, the bourgeois capitalism of the nineteenth century, overtaken by both employee and employer cartels, was increasingly sorting itself into “rackets”—the less idyllic iteration of the Burkean platoons which conservatives celebrated.
Horkheimer’s theory was tainted by an overall disdain for labor unions and their tendency toward corporatism. This was itself a relic of the left-communism he had adhered to in the early 1920s. As he noted in the late 1930s, “procurers, condottieri, manorial lords and guilds have always protected and at the same time exploited their clients. Protection is the archetype of domination.” In the twentieth century, this tendency to rackets now took on a specific form. “The racket pattern,” he claimed, “is now representative of all human relationships, even those within the working class. The difference between rackets within capital and the racket within labor lies in the fact that in the capitalist racket the whole class profits, whereas the racket of labor functions as a monopoly only for its leaders and for the worker-aristocracy.”
Around these rackets, so it seems, several projects could then coagulate, tying together the coalitions which captured the state machines of the mid-twentieth century. With the decline of familial authority, one part was transferred to the state—the “society without fathers,” which sociologists still analyzed in the 1950s and 1960s. More importantly, however, Horkheimer’s racket society relied on the transfer of parental authority to the level of the brotherhood—the substitute association. As men left the families that had nurtured them, they found their first refuge in the trenches, the Freikorps, and the party or the association—first in arms, then in street battles fought in the 1920s and ’30s. Financed by an aristocracy hostile to modernization, their ranks swelled further and were able to invade the state. It was their project, overall, that turned the interwar state into a project state; as Horkheimer noted, “the gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a symptom of the vanishing influence of anything outside the decisive groups.”
Today, Horkheimer’s rackets are no longer with us. The demise of Maier’s project state has, above all, seen a world-historic decline in associational life. This includes the “labor rackets” and parties which Horkheimer exhibited such ambiguity toward. Membership in these civil society associations—and not only on the left, the ostensible targets of the controlled deconstruction of the project state which Maier discusses—has declined dramatically in the last forty years. This controlled demolition of the public sphere has greatly reduced the administrative capacity of many states. Moreover, the Volcker shock and the ensuing era of central bank activism also emptied out the remaining associations not premised on consumption. The resulting void between citizens and states has also made it more difficult for states to construe projects per se. Instead, the repertoires of contestation and protest in the new century are distinctly fleeting and short-term, crippled by the neoliberal offensive on society, only faintly similar to the fraternities that the previous century built.
The neoliberal turn required a deep reordering of civil society. Reagan’s attack on the airliner unions and Volcker’s hawkish monetary policy could join hands. What followed was a slow squeezing of the organizations that supposedly drove the state to spend and increase inflation, to restore capitalist stability. The sovereign consumer was to replace the social citizen of yesteryear, assured by central bank action. This was a “politics to negate politics,” as Marcel Gauchet put it. Refiguring global institutions to suit the requirements of capital mobility internationally thus required national exercises of discipline which sidelined unions and decreased wage pressures, but which also pulverized established civil society institutions on both left and right.
Thus, the last thirty years have not only seen the demise and failed resurrection of the project state. At the same time, they have also witnessed the transition from what can be termed a “fraternal” to a “neo patrimonial” racket society. The new populist rackets are not the outgrowth of strong civic institutions. Rather, they are emanations of families and informal groupings—evidenced by the Trumps and the Berlusconis, or the cronies which the Polish PiS politicians have gathered around them, in a country where fewer than 3 percent of the population has a party membership card.
These are far removed from the fraternal rackets which Horkheimer discerned in the middle of the century. Their main set-up is not meritocratic or egalitarian, like the SS or the SPD, but rather based on reputation and spin. Their members’ value is not measured in medallions or other social capital, but rather in networks and followers. Unexpectedly for Horkheimer, the family has made a comeback in the age of neoliberalism, yet not in its traditional form, but as a refurbished insurance firm, with the Trumps, Berlusconis, and Kaczyńskis as the clearest examples.
As Maier admits, the viability of the project state’s successors is inherently limited. To make real incursions into capital’s prerogative over investment, a social threat that could alter the balance of class power is required. Few of the kind have been forthcoming in the age of populism. Rather, left-populism is best conceived as an attempt to construct a project state without a muscular civil society or labor movement, thereby greatly complicating the tasks of institutionalization which seemed so pressing in the twentieth century. So far, the only real threat has come from the life-threatening externality of climate change and the last project state in existence, Xi Jinping’s China. Yet these problems cannot solely be conceptualized on a governmental level. Today’s states are uniquely weak in the face of capital, which renders any transformative project difficult to implement. To restore the project state’s discipline over capital, however, would require disciplining the state into acquiring a project per se. Given that today’s populism has no durable project coalitions at its disposal, it can hardly restore this discipline; consequently, populists usually opt for easy rentier coalitions which trickle down wealth from specific sectors but hardly challenge the overall patterns of investment.
Maier ends his book on a conciliatory note. “Today,” he says, “many political groups are implying ‘Dare less democracy,’” which is also “a project and one that requires denying access to the polls and distorting public information.” Yet “after the totalitarian experiences of the mid-century and the personalized authoritarian ones popular today, dare one write, ‘Dare more state?’” On this point, Maier is at risk of putting the cart before the horse: a revival of the project state would require a due reckoning with the project coalitions which grouped around it in the twentieth century. Precisely this piece of the puzzle is missing from the dazzling fresco which Maier has offered us.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 3 (Fall 2023): 119–33.
About the Author
Anton Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His history of basic income, coauthored with Daniel Zamora, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, is now out with University of Chicago Press.
The resultant creature is never given a name in the book
- By the early 1970s, Maier argues, the project state’s energy was spent: it “had mobilized public energy to wage war, overcome the interwar depression, attempt to retain empire, and construct social insurance schemes for old age, unemployment, and varying degrees of medical coverage.” Yet “governmental activism seemed to run into pervasive difficulties by the 1970s,” felled by overheating economies mired in stagnation and energy insecurity.
- Populists “may have believed” they were reviving the project state, he argues, “but the project was reduced to protection of the ethnic community,” with the more plausible result a mere “mafia state.”
- At the same time, the new populists hardly have ambitions to break the American world system, to rebuild a racial welfare state, or to discipline capital into the productive investment required to meet the century’s new challenges. With comparatively weak and top-heavy parties at their disposal, populists also find it hard to colonize and wield the state, often acting as rent-seeking coalitions that simply adapt to stagnation.
- the relationship between leader and people that crystallized in the project state had its roots in history: a sense of directionality and dynamism, a telos to which humanity was to move. A “people” was to be mobilized for a project, itself indicating a close link between past, present, and future.
Few traces of such a philosophy of history can be found in contemporary populism. In that sense, it is indeed properly post-historical: unable to relate itself to historical dynamics that would determine where the Italian, Dutch, French, or British people are headed. Rather, populism instead relies on a constant short-circuiting between people and leader.
- Thus, the last thirty years have not only seen the demise and failed resurrection of the project state. At the same time, they have also witnessed the transition from what can be termed a “fraternal” to a “neo patrimonial” racket society. The new populist rackets are not the outgrowth of strong civic institutions. Rather, they are emanations of families and informal groupings
- Their main set-up is not meritocratic or egalitarian, like the SS or the SPD, but rather based on reputation and spin. Their members’ value is not measured in medallions or other social capital, but rather in networks and followers.
- Today’s states are uniquely weak in the face of capital, which renders any transformative project difficult to implement. To restore the project state’s discipline over capital, however, would require disciplining the state into acquiring a project per se. Given that today’s populism has no durable project coalitions at its disposal, it can hardly restore this discipline; consequently, populists usually opt for easy rentier coalitions which trickle down wealth from specific sectors but hardly challenge the overall patterns of investment.
I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk; I was asked to review his biography because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk. Because of his terrible politics, or his hideous wealth. Or simply as a matter of taste. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy; it all feels too much like a sideshow. Elon Musk barely exists. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson.
Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left
By Alex Hochuli
REVIEW ESSAY
The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006–2022
by Chris Cutrone
Sublation, 2023, 293 pages
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
by Vincent Bevins
PublicAffairs, 2023, 352 pages
The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession
by Arthur Boriello and Anton Jäger
Verso, 2023, 224 pages
- Spoiler:
We failed. We millennials missed a historic political opportunity in the long decade following the 2008 crash. “At least we tried,” we could say with some justice. After all, the generation that came of age in the 1990s didn’t even do that. But raised as we were on reality TV tropes about participants rising from obscurity and taking their dramatic shot at success—a generation whose older cohorts could certainly recite by heart Eminem’s lyrics about only getting one shot—one would have expected better. Then again, we are also the generation of participation trophies.
The 2010s was the protest decade, the populist decade, when the “end of history” of the long 1990s came to end. It was a proto-revolutionary moment, as discomfiting or “cringe” as it may be to think in such terms.
Self-conscious, willed political change doesn’t come out of the blue, but neither is it solely the product of incremental building. It is the product of both organization and spontaneity. Marxists have long known this, motivated by the notion of preparing, waiting for the next crisis. So did the original neoliberals, whose Mont Pelerin Society laid the intellectual groundwork for a new political-economic order decades in advance of the crisis of Fordist-Keynesianism in the 1970s. Indeed, in a notable salvo by two millennial leftists, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the authors urged the Left to imitate the Mont Pelerin Society—tool up and await an opportunity. Published in 2015, Inventing the Future was already too late for the immediate post-2008 period and the wave of protests it generated. The moment was already upon us: that year Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the UK Labour Party and Bernie Sanders began his first campaign for president. In the country where the crisis was most acute, where political contestation reached its loudest crescendo, left-wing populism flunked its big test: syriza capitulated in Greece that same year.
For this generation, it seemed as if the crisis was always arriving too early—we were always unprepared, both in ideas and organization. We didn’t know what hit us; no one told us politics was like this. Generation X was the generation that imbibed the failures of the boomers and the New Left; it was the generation of the end of history. And so millennials took a world without politics as a given—until this was suddenly thrown into question in the 2010s. In terms of the transmission of ideas derived from experience, a gulf separates us from previous generational waves of activism, from the New Left of the 1960s, and before that, the Old Left of the 1920s and ’30s. No one was there to hold our hand. And yet, our failure might turn out to be a consequence of the fact that we were too beholden to the past, without even knowing it.
The millennial Left can be periodized into three phases. Its prehistory concerns the antiwar movement of the 2000s. The election of Obama and the 2008 crash terminated what was by then already lacking in energy and focus. The second phase was marked by mass street protests and occupations; opposition to “capitalism” as such returned to the fore. I recall thinking at the time that Occupy Wall Street’s appeal to the 99 percent seemed to herald a turn—an opening to the majority of citizens, the people—after decades in which to be left-wing was to belong to a minority subculture, standing away from and opposed to mainstream society. Protest grew more frequent, though it was also disorganized and leaderless—and so demonstrations and occupations tended to run out of steam, or else be co-opted or outflanked. The latter half of the decade represents the third phase, in which millennials began to reckon with power. On both sides of the Atlantic, millennial leftists like Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara or Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani began to talk about winning. It seems so obvious now, but the very notion of victory was a novel idea to a generation for whom power was almost a dirty word. John Holloway (not a millennial) even wrote a book popular with young Gen Xers and older Millennials called Change the World without Taking Power.
What does the balance sheet of the 2010s show? The global protest wave that followed the financial crisis, from the nerve centers of global capitalism to languishing peripheries, was mostly “nonideological,” the divorce from previous traditions evidenced by its principal proposition: the rejection of old, corrupt elites, the political class, the establishment, la casta. The millennial Right did likewise, of course, and with greater success. In protests that were amorphous, leaderless, open to all comers, the Right mobilized an anti-politics more effectively. It is worth recalling that Leszek Kołakowski defined the Right by its lack of utopianism—the feature that marked the Left—and thus identified ‘Right’ essentially with opportunism. Hence, the sword of judgement necessarily falls heavier on the left.
The result of this anti-political muddle was countries left worse off than when they started. Some resulted in bloody civil war (Syria, Ukraine), others in a terrible restoration (Egypt, Brazil). Even in the best-case scenarios, change was halting and fragile (Tunisia, South Korea).
For others, the denouement would be more protracted, and thus more tragic. In Greece, Spain, and Chile, the activists drove straight from the streets to the halls of power, seeking to institutionalize their demands. In the latter of the three, the grand promise that neoliberalism would die in the very country in which it was first implemented was not delivered upon. A gleeful Left overloaded a proposed constitution with pet concerns, and the Chilean masses rejected it. In Spain, the inchoate Indignados that occupied the squares birthed an actual party, Podemos. It ended up as a junior coalition partner to the very party, PSOE, it held culpable for the neoliberal turn and which it aimed to displace. Alexis Tsipras’s betrayal provided a defining moment—a “bigger blow to the Left than Thatcher”—in the assessment of former syriza finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who saw it all from the inside.
Greece is only an extreme case of what went on across and beyond the West: a populace exhausted by neoliberal austerity and angry at the lack of democratic accountability and meaningful participation was ready, finally, to ditch the old and make a play for the new. The moment had arrived. And the millennial Left could not lead. In a first instance, it rejected the very idea of leadership. Then, in a second, it refused the sort of rupture necessary for serious reform. Its unpreparedness—some would say opportunism—has now led the Left back to the marginal, subcultural position it had sought to escape.
Greece again provides a crystalline example. In syriza’s second mandate, after it had swallowed whole the Troika’s deadly memorandum, thereby turning its back on the majority of citizens who had rejected austerity and diktat from the Eurogroup and international financial institutions, the party turned to easy fights like the “moral war” against corruption and postmaterial reforms around sexuality, gender, and so on. It became concerned with implementing austerity in a “sensitive” manner. Rejecting Old Left sectarianism, the party wished to be pragmatic. But remarkably quickly, “let’s dare to govern” became “let’s govern at any cost.” This could serve as left-populism’s epitaph, well beyond Greece.
In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? Too many of its practices reflected back some of the worst features of the current order: short-termism; a bias against political programs, mass organization and institution-building; and reliance on media and charismatic leaders. This is why the 2010s are a historic missed opportunity: when amid signs of mass revolt for the first time in decades, the ostensible forces of utopianism sought to change the content of politics without challenging the neoliberal shell that contained it—to make an omelet without breaking any eggs.
In 2023, three books emerged that attempt a reckoning with this history. Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality. Cutrone sets out to demonstrate how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized. Journalist Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn reconstructs the narrative of global street protest, taking aim at the movements’ “horizontalism,” which he holds responsible for the “missing revolution” of the book’s subtitle. Political scientists Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello’s The Populist Moment deals with the third phase, in which the Left turned to electoral politics. The book drives at the contradictions of the “populist gamble,” of trying to win without the social infrastructure that previous generations of the Left had at their disposal.
Taken together, the three works illustrate not just how protest and populism were characterized by their own internal cycles of growth and decay, but how the historical moment just passed represented a genuine opening, through which we failed to step. For those of us who grew up in the deep freeze of the end of history, wondering whether there might ever be politics again, whether human beings might ever group together and rebel and try to change things, to reflect on the 2010s invites a certain bitterness. We should be angry. The 2010s gave us masses in the streets and revolts at the ballot box, and we ended up quite possibly worse than where we started. But as always, the real catastrophe would be not to learn any lessons—or to learn the wrong ones.
Millennial Elegies
In If We Burn, Vincent Bevins, a former correspondent in Brazil and then in Southeast Asia for leading U.S. newspapers, weaves a narrative from January 2010 to January 2020 that ties together mass protest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Chile. Through interviews with those who were there, on the streets of São Paulo or in Tahrir Square or Maidan, Bevins tells the story of the decade that “surpassed any other in the history of human civilization in its number of mass street demonstrations.”1 Bevins’s method is “judging the movements by their own goals.” So we learn that seven of these cases experienced a fate worse than failure. More than just a scorecard, the author also, in initial and final chapters, traces the ways that intellectual history shaped protest, through the tension between verticalism and horizontalism, hierarchy versus spontaneous self-organization, and on questions of representation, meaning, and technological mediation.
Appropriate to what the mainstream media treated as social media-driven protest, Bevins satirizes the imagined life course of 2010s-style protests in the style of a tweet2:
(1) Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage
(2) Media coverage leads more people to protest
(3) Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting
(4) ???
(5) A better society
This naïveté runs right through protests in places as different as Chile and Turkey and Hong Kong—perhaps a product of a post-historical generation who really did think that if you got enough people and shouted loud enough, good things would happen. Or as the popular Egyptian blogger “Sandmonkey” explained, via a Lord of the Rings reference, he and those he fought alongside in Tahrir Square believed that when Sauron was defeated, all evil would simply disappear from the land. Get rid of Mubarak—good things ensue. In the most tragic of circumstances (Libya, Syria, Ukraine), a protest became a kind of revolution, which became a civil war, which became a bloody international quagmire: “we were very far from the digital world that Western leaders had envisaged. Bad things were happening all around, and raising awareness was very far from sufficient to stop them,” Bevins poignantly puts it.3
Politics abhors a vacuum. Those more organized or more powerful than you will fill the gap. If you don’t speak for yourself, to say what you are for, someone else will. All the protests Bevins reconstructs “start over something very specific; then they explode to include all kinds of people, accommodating numerous competing or even contradictory visions; finally, the resolution imposes very specific meaning once more. In the middle, infinite possibilities present themselves.”4
Anton Jäger and Arthur Boriello—millennials, like Bevins—pick up the thread at the point that protesters decide to pursue electoral means. Focused on Western Europe and North America (Bevins is more concerned with the world beyond the core), the authors depict what seems to be an abrupt about-face: from unorganized, free-for-all demonstrations featuring every demand under the sun and none at all, to formal political parties vying for government through elections. “They developed an earnest interest in power, for they did not believe one could ‘change the world’ without taking it.” They were serious about organizing themselves into parties, but, as we discover, they were held back by a world in which the power of parties as such was weakened.
Some created a new party out of nothing, like the academics at Madrid Complutense University who birthed Podemos; others transformed existing parties, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, who took parts of the Front de Gauche to generate La France insoumise (LFI; “France Unbowed” in English). In countries without proportional electoral systems, left-populists availed themselves of the insider route: attempting to take over existing, mainstream parties like the Democrats or Labour. All, though, shared the same “political grammar”: to orient themselves around “the people,” discarding an older Left focus on “the working class.”
This abandonment of traditional leftist symbolism was an attempt to respond to two crises, “a short history of content and a long history of form,” as Jäger and Borriello put it: the economic crisis and austerity, and the longer-term crisis of politics, of representation and organization—in a word, the “void” between state and citizens that the late political scientist Peter Mair revealed.5 What becomes clear is that the “populism” in question refers to a strategy pursued within the Left as a response to this crisis of politics: “All hoped to rethink and revive the Left by adopting a populist identity—either through the installation of new, dynamic party machines or by the capture of existing sclerotic parties.”6 We should, therefore, speak of a populist Left, rather than left-populism.
All of Jäger and Borriello’s cases passed through the same process of constructing the people as a political subject and then finding a charismatic leader to embody their hopes, dreams, and demands. All of them sought mass participation across classes, but with a particular emphasis on the following: the lost generation (young, educated, “connected outsiders”); the squeezed middle class that had voted for Third Way progressive neoliberals in previous decades, but who now feared joining the “new poor” of the long-term unemployed; and the surviving industrial working class. It was the latter’s relative absence which would prove the most damaging to the left-populist gamble.
Indeed, the book’s strongest contribution is in making clear this tension between a populism of the Left and social democracy: populism arises at times when the organization necessary for social democracy is not present. Absent today are the trade unions, party branches, civic associations, athletic clubs, and the like that formed a thick network of associations providing the ballast for social-democratic politics. Notably, the book does not feature sustained discussion of program—a reflection, surely, of platforms that, though they promised many decent policies, had little of the coherence needed to unify vision and policy in one.
So, though they eschewed the horizontalism of the early 2010s protests, left-populist electoral strategies were still confounded by very contemporary problems. Between the leadership at the top and the masses of potential voters, there was nothing, a great big void. For all the novelty of left-populism, what emerges is a picture where nothing really is all that new—rather like the two elderly representatives that Anglo-American leftists adopted as their respective standard-bearers.
The intellectual inspiration came from Latin America. Argentinian theorist Ernesto Laclau was the thinker who urged leftists to drop the rhetoric and symbolism of the proletariat in favor of a “people” that would be constructed discursively, in opposition to and in contestation with the elite. This was an adaptation to a South American context in which the formal working class was a small minority among the laboring masses, and thus in which industrial trade unions could not serve as the building blocks of party organization. The influence was most self-conscious in Spain, where “Latin Americanization” was an explicit goal of Podemos, and ganar (to win) became a key word of a “populism without apology.”
But they did not win. They all went through the same cycle of an early electoral breakthrough, which generated high expectations, followed by a period of institutionalization marked by scandals or internal tensions. The cycle then comes to a close as relative failure leads to a downscaling of ambitions. Left-populist campaigns, much like the mass protests that gave birth to them, were confounded by a void, where mediating organizations, and the organized working class that could give them weight and strength, should have been. They tried to do “socialism without the masses,” and failed.
Of the three books, it is in Chris Cutrone’s contribution that this point is most underscored. Cutrone is the “original lead organizer” of the Platypus Affiliated Society, a group whose name reflects its central idea: that if an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable. This is so because, in Cutrone’s account, the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions. Not surprisingly for a group which declares that “the Left is dead,” it is mostly despised by fellow leftists (the back cover endorsements are—hilariously—all condemnatory).
Cutrone’s book is distinctive in this trio in that it is not a retrospective account but “a running chronicle of [the millennial Left’s] key moments,” composed of contemporaneous polemical essays originally published between 2006 and 2022, and now pulled together by Sublation publisher Doug Lain. It forms an “inadvertent history of the Millennial Left.”
In a 2009 essay, Cutrone remarks upon the absence of a Left that could be meaningfully critiqued and pushed forward. Nevertheless, the global crisis provided “better ground for the Left than the US wars of the 2000s had been. The issue of capitalism has re-emerged.”7 But the Left thought that the neoliberal era could simply be reversed with progressive policies, reflecting the fact it had never properly understood the crisis of the Keynesian-Fordist state, and so the reasons why neoliberalism provided a solution of sorts. Moreover, the status quo ante to which the millennial Left appealed—the social democratic settlement—had not been progressive but rather regressive in terms of social emancipation. Reading history forwards, the Grand Compromise of the postwar era—workers get higher wages and welfare in exchange for not rocking the boat—was a defeat from the perspective of the dreams of interwar, let alone nineteenth-century, socialism.
Remarking on the first Sanders campaign, Cutrone asks whether it represents a potential political turn or instead the “last gasp of Occupy activism” before growing up and joining the fold of the Democrats. Similarly, observing the Arab Spring in an essay entitled “A Cry of Protest before Accommodation?,” Cutrone compares the 1960s and 2010s protests and warns that revolution might not be the one the protesters want but “rather one that used their discontents for other purposes.” Both proved correct—even if the costs of being proved wrong when pessimistic are much lower than when being optimistic.
For all of Cutrone’s searching and deep historical critique of a millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures, one is left with a sense of something strangely apolitical, or what Marx called “political indifferentism.”8 If every struggle is corrupted by its limited, complicit nature, then what would Cutrone have millennial leftists do—other than read the classics? Yes, the millennial Left played its cards badly, but at least it sat down at the table and played online poker—and not quadrille or speculation or whatever it was that was popular in the nineteenth century.
Now we face the pendulum of capitalist politics swinging away from a “free market” period and toward a “state-centric” one—back to “government regulation after neoliberalism, but under worsened conditions.” Cutrone is glum, seeing liberal, cosmopolitan moments as more propitious. This is surely wrong: periods of more “public” capitalism allow for contestation over what the state promises but doesn’t deliver.9 The past forty years have seen the absence of promises in which responsibility for outcomes has been outsourced to individual citizens. This cynical privatism is an abdication of authority on the part of political elites. The result has been a citizenry operating under extremely reduced expectations. The millennial Left at least sought to raise them, in however limited and backward-looking a fashion.
Four problematics thus suggest themselves for a new generation on the left seeking to respond to mass protest and ballot-box revolts: organization, media, rupture, and tradition.
The Problem of Organization
Cutrone notes that the protests of the 2010s, like the 1990s-era Left, understood themselves as doing “resistance,” rather than trying to get reforms passed, let alone make revolution. This defensive stance in part explains the organizational form that the protest wave took: horizontal, leaderless, pluralistic, spontaneous, and organized via social media. This was so irrespective of internal tensions that Bevins discovers in participant interviews. Anarchists saw their occupation of the streets and squares as creating a prefigurative space and self-governing community (one in which ultimately only students or the unemployed could participate in the long term), while others felt it was a mere temporary rallying point. Regardless, the unifying factor was rejection; the protests were anti-political. In Brazil, party emblems were banned; in Hong Kong, the key word was “no stage”—no leaders, no representation.
The rejection of formality ran deep. Some mass protests were originally organized by a small nucleus with clear goals. Such was the case in Brazil, which serves as the central case study in If We Burn. The Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), or free fare movement, was a group of anarchists agitating around the question of public transport. The MPL was organized on the basis that “everyone does everything”—this resistance against a division of labor works when you are a small, tight-knit group. But as the protests developed and became the largest in Brazil’s history, the group found no way of integrating new members. Following a script that would play out in many other cases, a small protest came to face heavy repression, widely circulated images of police violence (against the “wrong” sort of victim—in this case, a white, middle-class, female journalist) triggered something in the populace, and protest exploded, drawing in a huge mass of citizens. Yet the fiercely anti-hierarchical group ended up relying on the informal hierarchy of the original friendship group: effectively, a decision-making clique with no accountability to anyone.
Jäger and Borriello relate the same ironic process years later in France’s LFI. The absence of the usual party structures running from grassroots to leadership—obviated through digital consultancy and plebiscitary tools—led to “super-volunteers” becoming a new sort of internal oligarchy, making decisions behind the backs of the mass of online supporters who, in digital terms, would constitute “lurkers.” It is one of the many ironic reversals that we encounter throughout this history, where overcorrection ends up reproducing the original problem in a different form.
The prejudice against formality even appears in dress. Gabriel Boric, now president of Chile, made his name in the student demonstrations of 2011, and then surfed the 2019 uprising all the way to the top job. When entering parliament in 2015, Boric “turned heads” when he “showed up with messy emo-rock hair, a trench coat, and no tie.” Boric was an “autonomist,” and like the MPL in Brazil, sought to distinguish himself from the Old Left and “Leninist” practices. In this sense, his style was in keeping with the New Left that emerged in the 1960s—that is, one that was already fifty-plus years old—which sought to reject anything that reeked of Stalinism. And so it opposed everything that was big, inflexible, centralized, organized, bureaucratic, and formal.
Bevins maintains a journalistic detachment throughout, but we can glimpse who his true enemy is: “anti-Soviet and neo-anarchist thinking” which, he argues, found elective affinity with technological and corporate developments in the 2000s.10 The revolution would not be televised, but it would be Facebooked. For all their “resistance,” the young protesters bore striking similarities to the disposition of contemporary capitalism. “Smash things up, something better will emerge from the wreckage” sounds awfully like Silicon Valley–style “disruption.” Or, in a nice touch that Bevins reserves for a footnote, it sounds like Obama, who claimed his biggest mistake was failing to plan for “the day after” in Libya. Twenty-first-century capitalism continues to be anti-institutional, non-normative, anti-planning, short-termist, and rests on controlling flows more than building. What, then, is the point of a Left that only reflects these dominant characteristics of contemporary society back at it?
That so many bought into these ideas is tragic. “We thought representation was elitism, but actually it is the essence of democracy,” remarks activist Hossam Bahgat in Bevins’s book, reflecting on the failure of the Egyptian Revolution.11 Knowing the shape the counterrevolution took—General Sisi’s even more authoritarian dictatorship—one can only be left sad, bitter, angry.
Did the third coming of the millennial Left, the formation of parties, resolve these deficiencies? Street protests were open to all comers, and so the costs of exit were just as low. Yet, despite the turn to the party form, left-populism suffered the same problem. For instance, Jeremy Corbyn was only elected leader of the Labour Party because, in an effort to dilute the influence of trade unions, previous leader Ed Miliband had made membership available to the general public at the cost of only £3. Left-populist party campaigns were built on the internet model: anyone is one click away from registering, starting an action group, and campaigning for party candidates. You are also only one click from dropping out.
This has its benefits. In an ecosystem of “unmediated democracy,” malleability allowed left-populists to attract voters beyond traditional class-based alignments. A charismatic leader (or one onto which devotees project values) unifies the movement; such a personalization of politics has been the political norm for at least thirty years. New communications tools and techniques attract the youth. An antiestablishment attitude captures the prevailing sentiment. “With no powerful institutions like the labor movement to call upon, leftists were forced to take the battle to the electoral arena, thereby launching the true left populist gamble,” as Jäger and Borriello put it.12
This “attack” on the very idea of mediation presupposes a rapid assault on power—“as if by surprise,” Jäger and Borriello remark. Bernie Sanders hoped to go from being a forgotten, fusty old leftie senator to leader of the free world in the space of eighteen months. That may not have played out, but syriza really did transform from a new, small, radical Left coalition to unifying and representing all segments of society frustrated by austerity. Originally identified with “the protesters,” in a short space of time it became the recognized representative of a social majority. And it took office. But we know what happened next.
Jäger and Borriello argue that the “left-populist gamble” is premised on a wholly different understanding of the (bourgeois-democratic) political party: its goal is no longer about entrenching voting blocs over the long run, but about serving as the best disposable tool for each electoral contest. Again, the speculative, flexible, opportunistic nature of left-populism eerily reflects the functioning of capitalism today. This should alert us to the fact that the questions that vexed left-populism—To ally or not with the institutional center-left? Digital pop-up blitzkrieg or build party structures? Place yourself on the left-right axis or try to be indeterminate?—are not merely organizational.
Cutrone is in agreement. Within the Marxist tradition, revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin stand, in part, for spontaneity versus organization, respectively. Citing J. P. Nettl, Luxemburg’s biographer, Cutrone notes that both German and Russian revolutionary leaders addressed complementary questions, which can’t be reduced to that simple dichotomy: “How does political action enable transformative organization; and how does political organization enable transformative, emancipatory and not foreclosing action?” These are the questions that must be addressed to the millennial Left, because organizational problems are more than just impediments, they are symptoms that need to be worked through. “Perhaps we need to be ‘conservative’ in our ‘revolutionary’ politics in order to be actually radical in the present,” Cutrone concludes.13 Indeed.
This might well apply to another postmodern innovation: leaderism. Examined by sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo a few years earlier,14 the Left electoral movements of the 2010s relied on hyperleaders who draw legitimacy from emotional recognition and the acclaim of the base, rather than legal investiture by the party. The personalization of politics around the leader serves to compensate for the absence of mediating structures between base and leader. There are no local branches, no cadres, and indeed, no real party loyalty. We talk of Corbynism, mélenchonisme, pablismo instead. This is different from Leninism, Maoism, or Trotskyism, terms which represent variations of a common body of thought—socialism—and are thus total philosophies. As the authors rightly insist, leaderism is not really the overcoming of leaderlessness: it is not a cure, but a symptom of the same problem. The anti-Stalinism of the horizontal occupations transformed into something more personalistic than Stalinism itself!
The Problem of Media
Leaderism also generates new problems. The populist hyperleader is meant to be down-to-earth and morally irreproachable. It is a political truism that he who rides the highest horse falls hardest. So it proved with Corbyn, destroyed by accusations of anti-Semitism, or Mélenchon, undermined by media attention on his short temper, or Iglesias, who was found to have bought a €600,000 house with his political and life partner, Irene Montero. The hyperleader carries so many hopes and expectations that when he falls, so does the whole project. As Jäger and Borriello note in reference to Jeremy Corbyn, that project relied on new media to communicate with enthusiastic millennial voters, circumventing the mainstream media. But this underscored how much of a mediatic affair it was. A “media party will always be vulnerable to media attacks.”
The mediatic nature of so much of millennial Left politics comes through loud and clear in Bevins’s study of the protest decade. Already in the introduction he notes how the experience of May 1968 came to be traduced by those who were selected to appear on TV to talk about it in the aftermath (naturally, the more trained and educated). With the 2010s mass protests being even more inchoate than the 1960s, the space for imposing an ex post facto meaning on them was even greater.
Over the course of the book we find that fights over who controlled the social media accounts were a feature of both New York’s Occupy and Spain’s Indignados. And that Brazil’s MPL would share media responsibilities but “they would certainly make sure to offer the media the sort of content they loved to run.”
As Bevins remarks about Egypt in the critical moment of late January 2011: “the revolutionaries could have taken anything. They chose to stay in Tahrir Square, the default destination for many in the crowd; it was an empty piece of land, and its conquest offered no strategic value, except for its visibility.”15 The absence of clear political and class identities and meanings meant that symbols were sought elsewhere. One leading participant in Brazil’s June Days tells Bevins that the activist group’s main influence was Mexico’s Zapatistas, whose struggle had been introduced to them via the ’90s band Rage Against the Machine. In Hong Kong, a three-finger salute, taken from The Hunger Games films, became a common marker. “I think it is also a little sad, and definitely very unfortunate, that we got so many of our ideas from pop culture,” one Hong Konger concluded.16 The ersatz character of politics at the end of the end of history was on full display in these demonstrations. In Ukraine’s EuroMaidan, after Viktor Yanukovych announced he was not taking the EU’s deal, one group of leftists took a red flag embroidered with EU stars on it. “Europe” here represented not austerity and anti-democracy but “social democracy and human progress, prosperity and rights.”
Reflecting on the “missing revolution,” Bevins asks himself whether the mass insurrections were genuine moments, glimpses into “the way that life is really supposed to be,” and “the most real thing that one can ever feel,” or if, on the contrary, they were empty expressions of mass ecstasy, having more in common with Woodstock and Coachella than the storming of the Bastille. He concludes that “people went back and forth” on this—though one suspects this is the author’s view, too.
In lieu of a definitive conclusion, Bevins’s direct political object is the condemnation of Western journalists and their synergistic relationship with educated professionals, often from nonprofits, whom they selected as mouthpieces for the uprisings. “The Western media gave special attention to the euphoric, prefigurative, and ultra-democratic elements within the revolt,” he notes with regard to Egypt.17 In Ukraine, the liberal wing of EuroMaidan included workers in the tech sector who were mostly pro-Brussels, spoke the language of democratic ideals, in competent English, and were associated with NGOs who had full-time employees “trained and paid to interact with people like me [Bevins].” It is this prejudicial dynamic that complicates an already difficult task: finding the “truth” of the movements. There is an evident manipulability here. In Brazil, a right-wing pro-business group was able to seize leadership over the left-leaning social democratic protests by astroturfing themselves. Their name? MBL (Free Brazil Movement)—almost indistinguishable, especially in spoken Portuguese, from the autonomist initiators of the June 2013 protests, MPL. In Ukraine, Far Right nationalists became the predominant force in Maidan, punching above their weight. As one of Bevins’s interviewees explains, “they did not pull this off because regular Ukrainians supported them—they fought for it, and they won.”18
The Problem of Rupture
The left-populist gamble may have represented an attempt to seize power, but it also evinced a radical underestimation of power. In the best of cases, left-populists took office, yes, but never power. In another ironic reversal, the millennial Left dropped the notion of being self-consciously marginal and began addressing, and seeking to represent, basically everyone. But this meant avoiding hard ideological choices. You can’t be friends with the Eurogroup and the 61 percent of Greek voters who rejected the Memorandum. You can’t lead middle-class metropolitan Remainers and Northern working-class Leavers in the UK. You can’t unify a coalition of college-educated woke culturalists and working-class provincial materialists simply through the lure of executive power. There remains a potentially hostile legislature, a certainly hostile judiciary, a diabolical deep state, and even supranational institutions that will scupper the best laid plans. The long-term crisis of politics cannot be ignored in a rapid quest for executive power, under the illusion that neoliberalism will be swept away with the stroke of a pen.
Other ironies abound. Jäger and Borriello note how technocratic left-populism actually was. Because they lacked a mass membership capable of shaping policy, and their voters came from different groups in society with conflicting preferences, left-populist parties relied on technocratic policy fixes to resolve deep contradictions. But there is a limit to this—how, for example, would one reconcile urban middle-class and industrial working-class attitudes to climate change? Investment in the person of Jeremy Corbyn—or more credibly, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for he is a much better orator and tribune—can only go so far. But step back a second: personalism and technocracy? Is that not essentially Blairism? And so left-populism remained, in essence, an urban middle-class professional affair. In France, Mélenchon spoke about conquering the fachés mais pas fachôs (the angry but not fascist—the workers who had not turned irrevocably to Le Pen’s Rassemblement National). But “that coalition never materialized.” It continued to rely on urban, highly educated youth and the suburban proletariat in the service sector. As such, left-populism failed to deliver on its populist, unifying promise.
Jäger and Borriello locate the ultimate problem in the fact that the left‑populists were never able to transform their army of election campaigners into something more durable: “without waging a war of position to consolidate the gains of the digital vanguard, left populism will be remembered as little more than a wasted opportunity.” Had this succeeded, the left-populists may not have taken power, not in the short‑term anyway, but could have constituted themselves as something of a post-neoliberal force, exerting pressure to change economic policy, as well as going a little way toward mending the secular crisis of politics. Ultimately, the authors conclude, the experience was very short-lived—fitting for an ecosystem that is increasingly short-termist and “awash with exit options.”
A grander play for social transformation is barely hinted at as a possibility. Yet Jäger and Borriello note that the UK lacked the sort of constitutional barriers that would have held back a Corbynist program elsewhere, and are aware that Labour suffered a heavy defeat in 2019 after it failed to honor the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Where is the full-throated denunciation? The authors simply explain that the mostly Remainer activist base “mainly knew British politics as a torture chamber for fiscal discipline, not as a site for sovereignty.” True though this is, the authors end up somewhat recapitulating the low expectations of the age.
The popular appetite for change was there though (even if fear of the future always lurks round the corner). When people are given the opportunity to reject the status quo, they do, rightly insists Cutrone. The status quo’s response is always that they should not have been given the opportunity. Hence the importance of striking when the iron is hot. Organization, yes, but also some spontaneity.
Similarly, Jäger and Borriello observe that the Sanders campaign ended up as “another quixotic attempt from within a party of capital.” If the failure to break through in Britain concerned the question of the EU, in the United States, it was about the Democratic Party. “To succeed,” insists Cutrone, “Sanders would have needed to run against the Democrats the way Trump has run against the Republicans. This would have meant challenging the ruling Democratic neoliberal combination of capitalist austerity with New Left identity politics of ‘race, gender and sexuality’ that is the corporate status quo.” This, though, would have been a more thoroughgoing “populism” than what the actually existing left-populists ever countenanced—or if they did consider it, they were dissuaded by the bulk of activists wedded to a self-defeating leftism.
Cutrone concludes that whatever expectations the millennial Left “once fostered were dashed over the course of a decade of stunning reversals.” This rather overstates how much the millennial Left had to lose. Yes, it missed a historic opportunity, but this is more like missing the last bus out of town than getting your car stolen. In an interview with me, Cutrone conceded that the millennial Left “did the best they could,” but, crucially, that this is also what the New Left of the 1960s and the Old Left of the 1930s told themselves.19
Once again, Greece provides the clearest picture of the stakes involved. There were many on the international left20 who, though lamenting Tsipras’s white flag, explained in “realist” terms that taking Greece out of the eurozone and the EU would have meant utter chaos, the poorest would have suffered hardest, syriza would be blamed, the Far Right might benefit, and so on. But this is exactly what Greece has suffered anyway, even if in a more drawn-out fashion. To crash out would at least have offered Greece a horizon, a possibility to build itself up once again as an independent nation. And, crucially for internationalists, it had the potential to set off a chain reaction. Nothing of this is certain, but it would have been a play for greater possibility. Cutrone rightly cites Leon Trotsky in saying “those who demand guarantees in advance should in general renounce revolutionary politics.” The problem is that most of the millennial Left have. And this makes reform even less likely.
The Problem of Tradition
Cutrone, like Jäger and Borriello, makes use of the gambling metaphor. Cutrone, however, argues that the millennial Left chose not to play the hand it was dealt. It shied away in fear from the gamble itself, falling back instead on replaying the cards dealt to previous generations. What does this mean? This is best explored through reference to left-wing political traditions.
The thrust of Bevins’s analysis of the protests is that they were expressive of the legacies of the anti-Stalinist New Left, which, cut off from the Old Left through world war and McCarthyism, acted on the basis of half-absorbed, half-forgotten lessons. The result was a rejection of structure and preference for prefigurative rather than instrumental politics. Outside North America, though, the Old Left was very much alive, Bevins reminds us, citing Marxist-Leninist parties as well as national developmentalists who often repressed communists, even while they allied with the USSR (Egypt’s Nasser is a case in point).
This is a false dichotomy. The legacy of the 1960s runs through both sides: it’s there in “Stalinophobic” anti-communism (of both Cold War liberalism and social democracy—including in today’s “populist” attempts to refound social democracy without working-class organization) and in Stalinophilic “militancy” (Maoism, Guevarism). Setting up quasi-Stalinist or quasi-Maoist politics as “leftism that works” against the self-evident failures of anarchist horizontalism is a mistake. It merely results in a sterile and undesirable opposition between two leftist dead-ends: Stalinist “seriousness” and “organization,” and anarcho-liberal “narcissism” and “prefiguration.”
Indeed, for Cutrone, what is taken to be “left-wing” or “socialism” today is nothing more than the “naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication.” The Left takes the product of earlier failures and holds them up as objects of desire. Elements of this are visible in Bevins’s commentary on protest. He suggests that the collapse of governments is unlikely in the West, and that the armed forces in NATO countries “were certainly not going to abandon the state,” nor was NATO “going to bomb itself.” Is Bevins saying that the criterion of success is the establishment of separate, militarized blocs of nation-states, making political contestation over the future a geopolitical matter? That would be to rerun the Cold War! The Cold War was in fact testament to the failure of global revolution, to the ossification of the struggle for socialism into a mere “alternative” to capitalism, rather than a more advanced form of civilization. Nevertheless, Bevins indicates radical change is not really possible in the most advanced states, and only possible in peripheral “weak links.” This would seem to recapitulate a Third Worldism that is surely as exhausted as revolutionary politics in core countries. There is a certain conservatism in this. Is this also why Bevins does not deal with the Yellow Vests in France, who stood out for being the most sustained and proletarian of such protests, while also taking place in a core capitalist country? It would have been interesting to see this explored.
Meanwhile, though Cutrone underplays the specific problems of organization of our age—specifically the decline of associationism—his essays are useful for urging historical thinking. Millennials “blew their chance to relate to history in new ways that challenged and tasked them beyond post-60s doxa.” Instead, the millennial Left, in both protest and populist phases, evince a nostalgic quality, whether in pushing for a new New Deal or (much worse) replaying 1960s hippie protests or 1980s “resistance” to neoliberalism. These practices and beliefs “do not augur new possibilities but hold to old memories from a time when many if not most were not yet even alive. Its spectral—unreal—quality is evident.”
We should be alert to a troubling fact: over the past one hundred years, the left has mostly arrived post-festum, certainly in the West. It plays a role in ushering in a new era, then attacks the new era, and finally finds itself nostalgic for it. So the Left attacked the stultifying welfare-warfare state in the 1960s in the name of individualism, actions which, despite their intentions, laid the ground for neoliberalism once the postwar order fell into crisis. The Left then set up its stall as the resistance against the reorganization of capitalism along neoliberal lines, accompanied by the most forceful, moralized rhetoric in defense of society against individualism. Finally, the Left finds itself neoliberalism’s last defenders in the face of so-called right-populism in the form of Trump, Le Pen, Brexit, Vox, Fratelli d’Italia, or what have you. The Left may not defend neoliberal policies, but it holds to neoliberal or neoliberalized organizations and institutions, be it the Democratic Party or the EU or the university or the NGO.
Commonsense Communism
In 2011, Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism was published. That its central question could still be asked today is damning of both our complacent, gerontocratic elites as well as the forces of contestation that should push things forward. Indeed, it is the absence of a credible, popular Left that solidifies elite complacency. For all the critiques presented here, this should concern those observers who, unlike the present author, have no investment in the Left.
Why was the Left unable to achieve even its reformist goals, let alone any revolutionary dreams it may have had? A central question raises itself across the three eulogies of the millennial Left: when politics itself is in crisis, is the necessary first step to reconstruct civic association as a building block of a credible, mass left-wing political party? Or must the Left be prepared to act quickly, to seize authority, and to lead at moments when the masses’ conservatism rapidly evaporates and the status quo is rejected—as happens with some frequency, albeit unpredictably?
We should answer these questions with another question, already asked earlier: “how does political organization enable transformative, emancipatory, and not foreclosing action?” The answer, to take our two alternatives above, is surely “both.” The millennial Left’s failure was to do neither. It neither was able to bind the masses, to whom it briefly appealed, in new political organizations, nor was it able to act and lead in moments of crisis when the destruction of the old order (however conceived) was in shooting distance.
Jäger and Borriello write that the left-populist experience failed for being “too left, too populist”—it failed to break free from its minoritarian left concerns and symbolism, while failing to build a genuine party along the old lines, preferring instead the populist gamble. Perhaps another way to frame this is that the millennial Left would have benefited from a more “populist” ideology—that is, not beholden to the failed modes of Left activism of the late twentieth century—while also being more organizationally “conservative.” This would seem to tally with Cutrone’s call that a “Marxian approach should seek to occupy the vital, radical center of political life.”
In the U.S. context, this would mean “completing the American Revolution”—not MAGA but “Make America Revolutionary Again.” The sign of the times, of the 2010s, has been an expressed desire to break with the old—a sign the Left has too often ignored. Yes, Sanders called for a “political revolution” in the name of “democratic socialism.” What that meant was “an electoral shift to support new policies.” But reckoning with the crisis of the postwar order, and the current crisis of neoliberalism, means taking seriously the notion that there is no going back, that the end of history is over—and so is the twentieth century.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 1 (Spring 2024): 85–104.
Notes
1 Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023), 235.
2 Bevins, If We Burn, 258.
3 Bevins, If We Burn, 169.
4 Bevins, If We Burn, 167.
5 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013).
6 Arthur Boriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession (London: Verso, 2023), 3.
7 Chris Cutrone, The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006–2022 (Portland, Ore.: Sublation, 2023) 75.
8 Karl Marx, “Political Indifferentism [1873],” Marxists.org, accessed January 9, 2024.
9 See my review of Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises: Alex Hochuli, “Democracy and Discipline,” American Affairs 6, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 125–41.
10 Bevins, If We Burn, 268.
11 Bevins, If We Burn, 265.
12 Boriello and Jäger, The Populist Moment, 45.
13 Cutrone, The Death of the Millennial Left, 11.
14 Paulo Gerbaudo, The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2019).
15 Bevins, If We Burn, 67, emphasis added.
16 Bevins, If We Burn, 269.
17 Bevins, If We Burn, 69.
18 Bevins, If We Burn, 162.
19 “Death of the Millennial Left ft. Chris Cutrone,” Bungacast, podcast audio, January 9, 2024.
20 See for instance veteran boomer socialists Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch in Jacobin, who argued that more preparation would be necessary for Greece to ever leave: Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, “The Syriza Dilemma,” Jacobin, July 27, 2015.
After all, the generation that came of age in the 1990s didn’t even do that.
The Crisis of Culture by Olivier Roy — a remarkable achievement
A singular book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces it but brings order to a world not at ease with itself
In Ferenc Karinthy’s 1970 dystopian novel Metropole, a Hungarian linguist arrives at Budapest airport, whereupon everything goes awry. He goes through the wrong gate, gets on the wrong plane, and lands in an unknown city where, despite his professional skills, he cannot crack the code of the local language. He sees no way back.
Reading The Crisis of Culture, Olivier Roy’s illuminating and highly original interpretation of today’s world, I was reminded of the despairing experience of the Hungarian linguist. If home is a place that you understand and where you feel understood, we are today living in a homeless world. The cosmopolitan’s utopia in which one feels at home everywhere has been supplanted by a fear that nobody is actually at home or native to their own land.
Roy’s core argument is that what we are now witnessing is not the replacement of one dominant culture with another — as, say, during the expansion of Christianity or Islam, or during the Renaissance or Enlightenment — but a progressive erosion of culture both as an anthropological reality and as a national canon.
In Roy’s telling, this new reality is the result of a complex cocktail of events and factors. These include the “individualist and hedonist” 1968 revolution; neoliberal financial globalisation; the internet; and the melting away of physical borders after the cold war that has spurred the movement of peoples and “deterritorialisation”.
For him, national culture is like native language: you speak it before you learn the grammar. It is those “self-evident” truths which we share without knowing it. This shared culture is vanishing while artistic “high culture” is “either a waste of time or one hobby among many”. Not so long ago, to be French meant that you have read Hugo. Not any more. “At stake are the very codes and ties that comprise social ties, and which are encapsulated in discussions about identity,” writes Roy, a French-born sociologist who now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence.
The current conflict over values — the “culture wars” — is not really a battle between cultures, he argues, “but an attempt to conceptualise values above and beyond culture”. The result has been an “aggressive normativity”: everybody should explicitly know what is the proper behaviour in any given situation. Deviation is not tolerated.
While globalisation is often interpreted as “westernisation”, Roy sees it as “de-westernisation of the world”. The west has rented its culture for global use, and it cannot live in it any more. The spread of English, for example, has resulted in the rise of “Globish”, a language that is at times incomprehensible to people in Britain.
Roy is a man of the left. Yet unlike leftist critics of the “cancel culture” like Susan Neiman, author of Left Is Not Woke, or Yascha Mounk, who wrote The Identity Trap, he does not criticise identity politics for betraying universalism, but for trading complexity for fluidity, for replacing existing and very complex cultural identities with “box identities” and a world where freedom is the right to change the boxes.
An intellectual nonconformist, Roy has achieved something remarkable: he has written a book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces it, but is instead a nuanced cultural dissection of its origins and its contradictions. His tone, conveyed into English by translators Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, is melancholic, but never angry. He offers explanations, not polemics.
The resulting book is in a sense a 21st-century remake of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Roy agrees that history had “ended”, but not with the triumph of democratic capitalism. History’s “end” means that the past is no longer interpreted in its historical context. We are no longer interested in making sense of Thomas Jefferson or Robespierre in the context of their own times. We do not believe that the past is historically a different time. The dead have been liberated from their historical moment. You can no longer be progressive in the context of your time; you are now either progressive or reactionary for all times. Everyone is conceived as a contemporary, and is treated by the standards of today. Mozart’s Don Giovanni is as appalling in his sexual adventures as Harvey Weinstein. “The register of emotions is thus reduced to a collection of tokens,” writes Roy. The young act like the last generation, judges on the secularised version of The Judgment Day.
The Crisis of Culture is proof that truly singular books do not scream their originality; they hide it because originality no longer shocks. It brings order to a world that is not at ease with itself. Culture was once our traditional weapon against human mortality and we have every reason to fear that, as Roy asserts, “deculturation thus ends with dehumanisation”.
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms by Olivier Roy, translated Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, Hurst £20, 232 pages
Ivan Krastev is an FT contributing editor, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and fellow at IWM Vienna
https://newrepublic.com/article/179786/reading-imagined-communities-amid-resurgence-nationalism
Samuel Clowes Huneke/
April 10, 2024
Does It Hold Up?
Reading Imagined Communities Amid a Resurgence of Nationalism
What Benedict Anderson’s classic account of nationalism’s origins misses about today’s world.
Whenever I land back in the United States after a trip abroad, I feel a warm rush of familiarity, a penetrating relief at having made it home to native soil. It’s a curious sensation for someone like me, an academic who has lived abroad numerous times and certainly does not subscribe to the “America First” nationalism of the contemporary right. Nonetheless, it’s real, that comforting feeling of being once more surrounded by the strangers who make up my “imagined community.”
There was a period in the late 1990s when nations seemed to be fading away, nothing more than a warm glow on the horizon of the twentieth century, a tingling sensation that sentimental scholars indulged in after foreign travel. Globalization, it was thought, would wipe away the nation-state, replacing it with a neoliberal paradise of nongovernmental organizations and corporations and universal human rights. “The very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism,” the great historian Eric Hobsbawm opined in 1992, “suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak.”
Thirty years later, nationalism is back with a vengeance. From Giorgia Meloni’s government of “God, homeland, family” to Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist movement to Vladimir Putin’s efforts to rebuild old imperial Russia, nationalism has been intensifying around the globe for quite some time now.
Curiously, though, the most highly regarded study of nationalism remains Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book in which he coined the famous term. Nearly half a century old and cited over 140,000 times, it is undoubtedly one of the most influential scholarly works of the late twentieth century, responsible for cementing the idea that nations—far from ancient communities stretching back to the dawn of history—are, in fact, social and cultural constructs of recent vintage.
Returning to the text after well over a decade, however, I had completely forgotten that it was a work of Marxist scholarship. For Anderson, it began as an effort to explain what he considered a profound problem for the socialist left: namely, that wars broke out between socialist states, specifically Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia as well as the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. For socialists, who so frequently insisted that “Marxists as such are not nationalists,” these skirmishes posed a grave problem. How could a movement that sought to unite the oppressed proletariat of the earth succumb to petty nationalist grievances?
Anderson’s goal, then, was to explain nationhood from a Marxist perspective, to understand how the same economic forces that inform socialist thought could also be leveraged to explain nationalism. The result is a dazzling interpretation of the last 500 years of history, displaying a mastery of the material uncommon among writers today.
The ancient realms, in Anderson’s telling, were defined by three common characteristics. Each was organized around a particular “script-language,” which held out the hope of divine truth—Latin, in the case of Christian Europe. Each rested on a belief in concentric hierarchy, usually manifested as a feudal society orbiting a monarch. And—most importantly—each relied on a sense of temporality, an understanding of time, that did not meaningfully distinguish between past, present, and future. But in the late medieval and early modern eras, societies slowly began to shed these characteristics, opening up space for new manners of thought and new forms of belonging.
In Anderson’s account, the force of modern capitalism shoveled aside the ancient ways of being and thereby made room for the emergence of nations. These new “imagined communities” were based on vernacular, rather than divine, languages. They were conceived as leveled societies of coequal citizens. And they were attached to a profoundly historical sense of time: The nation became a protagonist of history; what the Germans call a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a community of fate, “moving steadily down (or up) history.”
Capitalism enters Anderson’s account in the disguise of the printed word. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz first set moveable type to paper in the middle of the fifteenth century. His original Bible was printed in 1455, and “print-capitalism,” as Anderson christens it, was born. By 1500, some 20 million books had been printed. A century later, that figure was 200 million. These texts spread and standardized vernacular languages and challenged the sacred centrality of Latin—and through it of Christianity. They also made intellectual communion possible between people who had never met and would never meet. In the profits of print-capitalism lay the seeds of the imagined community.
Of course, one might justifiably ask: If nationalism arose in large part because of printed language, disseminated through newspapers and books, what might become of it in a world where fewer and fewer people have the attention span to read a newspaper article, let alone a novel? Can the nation survive TikTok? But Anderson’s goal was to explain not the enduring conditions for nationalism to flourish but, rather, the circumstances of its birth.
The first nations sprouted in the Americas, the offspring of the earliest European colonies—the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, Portuguese Brazil, and the 13 colonies. Modern states required functionaries, bureaucrats, and intellectuals and merchants scurrying about to do their bidding. But the careers of these functionaries were geographically limited. Whereas an aspiring diplomat from peninsular Spain might circulate through Mexico on his way to higher office back home in Madrid, those born in the colonies could expect never to leave the administrative unit of their birth. And it was unlikely, no matter how talented they were, that the sovereign would ever appoint them to the highest offices, even there. As their number grew, they slowly began to form a class who began to think of the administrative unit of their birth as something slightly different and slightly more meaningful: a nation. By the early nineteenth century, most of the Americas were organized into independent nation-states, almost all of them republics.
At this point, Anderson argues, nationalism became an intellectual product available for export—or, as he puts it, “piracy.” As nationalist movements sprang up on the European continent, its monarchs grew increasingly concerned (with good reason) that nationalist fervor might sweep them off their thrones. After all, most royal families were foreign imports: England, for instance, has not been ruled by an English family since 1066. It has not been ruled by a British family since 1688. What claim could they possibly possess to rule a nation-state of Britons?
Europe’s sovereigns thus reimagined themselves as primi inter pares, first citizens of prehistoric nations. Their governments generated “official nationalisms” which could then be exported to their African and Asian colonies, where local (nonwhite) subjects were taught to be good Englishmen and Frenchmen and Dutchmen—and to be good colonial administrators. But, once again, their careers were halted at the colony’s edge. No matter how well educated, no matter how well they spoke English or French, no matter how competent they were, the color of their skin meant that they would never move beyond the roles prescribed them within the colonial hierarchy. And so, they too began to imagine themselves as members of a cohesive, ancient community, a nation that deserved statehood no less than Czechoslovakia or Poland or Switzerland.
And thus, we arrive at the end of the twentieth century, a world divided into nations and nation-states. Anderson’s account is a compelling one, for it explains the economic and geopolitical circumstances that attended the birth of nations and their perpetuation into the contemporary world. But what it cannot explain, and what Anderson himself remains seemingly mystified by, is “the attachment that people feel for the inventions of their imaginations.” Why, that is, “people are ready to die for these inventions.” No matter how many fine poems of the love of the fatherland or motherland (or whatever) he cites, Anderson’s Marxist framework cannot explain the devotion that nations have and continue to inspire.
The oversight is a result, perhaps, of Anderson’s strange, tenacious attachment to the idea of the nation. Waving aside “progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals,” who point out the violence and racism of nationalism, Anderson instead focuses on how “nations inspire love.” The “cultural products” of nationalism, he tells us, “show this love very clearly,” whereas it is exceedingly rare to find “nationalist products expressing fear and loathing.” It’s an assertion that beggars belief. Perhaps the most famous nationalist epics and novels are, indeed, works of love, but it requires little effort to find the extraordinary bodies of nationalist literature riven with hatred for the other; determined to protect the purity of the nation from contamination. The Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, for instance, penned Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in the heat of World War I, a 600-page screed directed against French civilization. Richard Wagner’s operas—nationalist art if ever it existed—are laboriously racist and antisemitic. No one would seriously think to claim that organized religions are essentially peaceful because they inspire “love,” yet this is precisely what Anderson suggests of nationalism.
Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that Imagined Communities remains strangely blind to the violence of nationalism and, especially, to the ideological interlocking of nationalism and racism. Indeed, in the roughly 10 pages that address racism, Anderson argues, “The dreams of racism actually have their origin in the ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation.” While “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies,” he contends in a slipshod sleight of hand, “racism dreams of eternal contaminations.” He suggests that racism developed only in the nineteenth century out of aristocratic pretensions and the “official nationalism” sponsored by Europe’s monarchs.
These are passages no serious historian would write today, and they’re indicative of just how little mainstream scholars thought about race and racism a half-century ago. We know now (if we didn’t then) that modern racism was already present in the earliest European colonization and offered grounds for the multitude of crimes committed against Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Anderson even cites examples of such racist thought early in the text! We know that the specific forms of anti-Black racism that have flourished in Western countries—especially in the United States—are a direct product of the system of chattel slavery (which Anderson leaves virtually unmentioned). And slavery provided, of course, the economic foundation of early European colonialism. The notion that the conjoined spread of capitalism and nationalism—both of which were amply wrapped up in colonialism—had nothing to do with racism is risible. The fact of the matter is, nationalism and racism are twinned forms of meaning-making characteristic of the modern world, and it is no accident that they both came of age in the twentieth century.
While Anderson’s text offers a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, then, it speaks little to the guises in which nationalism has reappeared in the twenty-first century. Even if nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not fundamentally racist (it was), there could be no doubt that the far-right nationalism on offer today is. Moreover, the left’s rejection of racism (such as it is) remains largely consonant with its skepticism toward nationalism. For all the economic accounts one might offer to explain nations and nationalism, there remains at the end of the day something profoundly ineffable about it, a deep desire for community defined not only by who belongs but also by who does not. As Anderson writes, national belonging satisfies not a political need but rather a baser human one, a need for meaning and belonging. If that is indeed the case, we are likely living not through the twilight of nationalism but rather its violent rebirth.
Samuel Clowes Huneke @schuneke
Samuel Clowes Huneke is an assistant professor of modern German history at George Mason University. He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/stephen-holmes/radical-mismatchSamuel Moyn didn’t begin his career as a crusading left-wing critic of liberalism. His earliest writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at Clinton’s National Security Council, beguiled by the ‘romance’ of human rights-driven foreign policy. As the US military pursued its mission in Kosovo, seen by many at the time as a model of beneficent liberal interventionism, Moyn helped to write an op-ed in the New York Times – under Clinton’s byline – headed ‘A Just and Necessary War’. It argued for the necessity of action, in whatever part of the world, against such crimes as ethnic cleansing.
In the years following 2001, however, his views changed. Looking back at the Yugoslav wars, he declared that the military involvement he had once supported had been ‘an assertion of American hegemony’. His subsequent atonement for his early lapse has led to such books as Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), which argues that human rights advocacy has done nothing to rid the world of material inequality, and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021), which aims to show that liberal attempts to make war less beastly have only resulted in wars becoming more common and lasting longer.
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