New Left Review 129, May-June 2021

129 may/june 2021
NEW LEFT REVIEW

Göran Therborn Brahmins vs Merchants?
Nick Burns Political Pessoa
Javier Zacarés The Noon of the Rentier
Marcus Verhagen Art and Time
Saskia Schäfer Ferments in Southeast Asia
Michael Denning Everyone a Legislator
Erika Balsom A Heterodox Film Critic
Tony Wood At Odds in Ecuador
Joy Neumeyer Burying Homo Sovieticus
Perry Anderson
Timpanaro among the Anglo-Saxons
Editor Susan Watkins
Associate Editor Francis Mulhern
Editors at Large Tom Hazeldine, Simon Hammond
Editorial Committee Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson,

Kheya Bag, Emilie Bickerton,
Robin Blackburn, Robert Brenner,
Malcolm Bull, Jacob Collins,
Mike Davis, Oliver Eagleton,
Daniel Finn, Nancy Fraser,
Simon Hammond, Tom Hazeldine,
Benjamin Kunkel, Rob Lucas,
Thomas Meaney, Tom Mertes,
Francis Mulhern, Dylan Riley,
Lola Seaton, Julian Stallabrass,
Jacob Stevens, Tony Wood,
JoAnn Wypijewski, Alexander Zevin
Publishing Director Kheya Bag

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new L eft review 129
second series
may june 2021
ARTICLES
Göran Therborn Inequality and Democracy 5
Michael Denning Everyone a Legislator 29
Javier Zacarés Euphoria of the Rentier? 47
Nick Burns The Politics of Pessoa 69
Marcus Verhagen Art and Time 97
Perry Anderson Timpanaro in the Anglosphere 109
REVIEWS
Saskia Schäfer Contrasted Revolutions 125
Erika Balsom Radical Visions of Film 135
Tony Wood At Odds in Ecuador 143
Joy Neumeyer Burying Homo Sovieticus 153

PROGRAMME NOTES
Göran Therborn: Inequality and Democracy

Critical assessment of a landmark international survey of electoral
demographics, mapping the social fractures blunting opposition to
inegalitarian politics. The weight in these of income and education, class
and identity, and the longer historical arc of national political orders.
What is the outlook for neoliberal economics after the pandemic, not
least in the country where they were first violently imposed?
Michael Denning : Everyone a Legislator

What is the principal legacy today of Gramsci’s writing on politics?
Often taken to be a theory of the party as a ‘modern prince’ derived from
Machiavelli, can this still be so in an epoch when political parties are
everywhere in decline? Michael Denning argues that what now matters
in Gramsci’s work is his theory of organizing as a premonitory form of
democratic legislation.
Javier Moreno Zacarés : Euphoria of the Rentier?

Are bloated finance and the information economy signs of something
other—and possibly worse—than capitalism? If the latter’s defining
characteristic is growth, might an era typified by stagnation signal
its supersession? An attempt to bring into dialogue the work of Brett
Christophers, McKenzie Wark and Aaron Benanav.
Nick Burns : The Politics of Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa was one of the greatest and strangest poets of the 20th century,
famous for the elusive profusion of his ‘heteronyms’. Yet in light of the
first biography worthy of him, and recent Portuguese studies of his work,
he emerges as perhaps the most passionate—and productive—political
writer of all the original modernists, as Portugal lurched from the noisy
overthrow of its monarchy to the quiet tyranny of Salazar.
Marcus Verhagen : Making Time
From recent reflections by Jacques Rancière on how capital partitions
the time of those it controls, to a stoppage by Maria Eichhorn of her
exhibition to allow workers at the gallery to articulate their own experi-
ence of labouring in it—lines of insurgent art that expose and challenge
segmentations of time, even as, perforce, they illustrate them.
Perry Anderson : Timpanaro among the Anglo-Saxons

Advocate of philosophical materialism; incisive critic of Freud and of
post-Saussurean linguistics; noted philologist: considerations on the
reception of Sebastiano Timpanaro in the Anglophone world, and his
relations with New Left Review in particular.
book reviews
Saskia Schäfer on John Sidel, Republicanism, Communism, Islam:

Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia. The different paths
and outcomes of anti-colonial revolution in Southeast Asia.
Erika Balsom on Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis:

Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema and On the Eve of the Future: Selected
Writings on Film. Variant impulses in the writing of a pioneer theorist of
avant-garde cinema.
Tony Wood on Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-

Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Indigenous resistance to
statist development as background to an electoral defeat of the left in
the Andes.
Joy Neumeyer on Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s

Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity. Sociological inquiry into the
bases of Putin’s support, beyond hoary anti-Soviet stereotypes.
contributors
Erika Balsom: author of TEN SKIES (2021) and An Oceanic Feeling

(2018); teaches film studies at King’s College London
Nick Burns: contributing writer at the New Statesman
Michael Denning: teaches at Yale; most recent book,

Noise Uprising (2015); see also nlr 66, 90, 122
Joy Neumeyer: research fellow at the European University Institute

in Florence, working on the cultural history
of Russia and Eastern Europe
Saskia Schäfer: teaches and researches Southeast Asia at the

Humboldt University in Berlin
Göran Therborn: emeritus at Cambridge, author of Inequality and

the Labyrinths of Democracy (2020); see nlr 78, 85, 99, 103, 113, 124
Marcus Verhagen: lectures at Sotheby’s Institute of Art;

author of Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in
Contemporary Art (2017); see also nlr 46, 85, 125
Javier Moreno Zacarés: research fellow

in political economy at Warwick
göran therborn
INEQUALITY AND
WORLD-POLITICAL LANDSCAPES
W
hy has there been so little political response or
popular resistance to the abrupt turn toward increasing
inequality since 1980, particularly in the core capitalist
countries? Does the sudden abandonment of neoliberal
austerity for unprecedented economic stimulus to counter the effects of
the coronavirus herald a belated era of reform?1 Will the end of covid-
19 resemble 1945 in the West, when not even a victorious war record
could defend societies of privilege from social anger? There are hopeful
signs in unexpected places, like the editorial boardroom of the Financial
Times and the Alpine resort of Davos. On 3 April last year the ft sol-
emnly declared: ‘Radical reforms are required to forge a society that will
work for all’—‘Redistribution will again be on the agenda.’ Meanwhile
the founder-director of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, has
let it be known that he expects ‘a period of massive redistribution from
the rich to the poor and from capital to labour’ after the ‘massive social
turmoil’ brought by the pandemic.2
The recent book Clivages politiques et inégalités sociales, edited by Amory

Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty, seems well placed
to address these concerns.3 In the introductory chapter the authors explic-
itly raise the first question indicated above, and while their research
predates covid-19, we should expect it to make a fundamental contri-
bution to grasping post-pandemic prospects. What for brevity’s sake
may be called the Piketty team4 is moving the goalposts in social science
and opening up new vistas on the world, in a manner comparable in
recent times only to the late Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system anal-
ysis. Piketty and Wallerstein are both intellectual spearheads of broader
new left review 129 may june 2021 5

6 nlr 129
movements—anticolonial revolution and egalitarian enlightenment,

respectively—and skilful academic entrepreneurs.5 Both are primarily
empirical scholars of great theoretical ambition, but they represent dif-
ferent styles of work. Wallerstein was one of the last real craftsmen of the
social sciences, an erudite, boundlessly curious individual artisan in the
tradition of the major historians, and for whom Fernand Braudel was
an adopted master. Piketty, on the other hand, belongs to a new era of
industrial research and Big Data, directing an army of trans-disciplinary
collaborators and assistants—not so much a manager as a trail-blazing
team leader of a bio-medical science lab.
Like the team’s work on economic inequality, Clivages alights on a

hitherto little-used data source, in this case electoral surveys in fifty
‘elective democracies’ over the post-World War Two period. The
uncertainty of such data is managed by averaging several surveys, if
available, and weighing each non-electoral survey variable by its vot-
ing concordance with the official electoral results. The different income
1
For a brief moment in 2020, the one-off cheques paid out to the bulk of the popu-
lation reduced poverty rates in Trump’s America and Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
2
Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, covid-19: The Great Reset, Geneva 2020,
pp. 78, 83.
3
Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty, Clivages politiques et
inégalités sociales: Une étude de 50 démocraties (1948–2020), Paris 2021. Henceforward
cpis.
4
Not counting their innumerable research articles and papers, the team’s most
important outputs include Thomas Piketty, Capital au xxie siècle, Paris 2013, and
Capital et idéologie, Paris 2019; Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations,
Chicago 2015; Lucas Chancel, Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the
Environment, Cambridge ma 2017; Facundo Alvaredo et al., ‘World Inequality
Report 2018’, World Inequality Lab, December 2017; Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them
Pay, New York 2019.
5
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis there emerged a significant intellectual
current worried about economic inequality, which had accelerated in the runup to
the crash. Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century was crucial to the
movement’s lift-off. It may be called an Egalitarian Enlightenment, as its interna-
tional, intellectual and politically non-aligned character bears some resemblance
to the Enlightenment under the ancien régimes of the 18th century. The movement
has made inroads into the historically ‘dismal science’ of economics, attracting
the support of several recent Nobel Laureates—Sen, Stiglitz, Deaton, Banerjee,
Duflo—and spawned transdisciplinary institutes of inequality studies in a number
of universities. It has gained some listeners among the bourgeois elite, including
in Davos and at the ft, but had little resonance with leading politicians. Of famous
living economists, so far only Piketty has come out as a socialist.
therborn: Electorates 7
and education categories of the surveys are transformed into compara-

ble decile scales. The outcome of the team’s analyses—graphed, tabled
and succinctly narrated—is a fascinating, empirically rich global land-
scape of the sociology of electoral politics. Politically and in a broad
sense intellectually, however, the book is a disappointment. The main
reason is that the authors do not systematically focus on the relation-
ship between politics and the (re)production of and variation in levels
of inequality. They know a lot about the individual dynamics of each,
and show us so—Clivages includes some gems of intercontinental com-
parison, for example the relative economic disadvantage of the lowest
castes of India and the Black population of the us6—but they largely
abstain from pursuing their connections. They do not attempt to iden-
tify which political cleavages have facilitated the current extremes of
inequality in the world, nor those that might provide a platform for
social transformation. No proper answer is given to the background
master question of the whole project, ‘Why have so many democracies
allowed socio-economic inequalities to deepen and oriented them-
selves to discussions of immigration, national identity or integration?’
The main political conclusions to almost 600 pages of tightly packed
information fall pretty flat. First, that ‘nostalgia for the class structure
of Western electoral competition during the trente glorieuses is a poor
guide’. Second, that ‘the post-Communist and post-colonial world . . .
bring other cleavages into play and require the construction of new plat-
forms of social and economic transformation’.7
Education and voting
The main searchlight of Clivages is trained on the social differentiation,

by income and by education, of political sympathies and voting behav-
iour. This is what its conceptualization of a political cleavage amounts
to—a much looser sense than is usual in the best political science, the
implications of which will be discussed below. Most of the empha-
sis falls on a reversal of the political articulation of (relatively) high
6
cpis, p. 301. The comparison is taken from Piketty’s Capital et idéologie, p. 417.
In 1950 and 1960 the relative economic disadvantage of former ‘untouchables’
and Black Americans was almost the same, both possessing an income of half that
of the rest of the respective populations. By the 2010s, African Americans, having
risen to a peak of 60 per cent of average us income in 1980, were back at their 1950
level, while the ‘Scheduled Castes and Tribes’ had risen to about 75 per cent of the
income of the rest of India.
7
cpis, pp. 17 and 587–8.
8 nlr 129
education within Western democracies. From party systems in which

high-income and highly educated people historically voted right while
low-income and less well educated citizens voted left, a different pattern
is developing in which the right is instead supported by high-income
voters with low education, and the left sustained by those with low
incomes and high education. The new system, for opaque mathemati-
cal reasons classified as one of ‘multiple elites’, therefore harbours two
distinct elites: a high-education, low-income ‘Brahmin Left’ and a high-
income, low-education ‘Merchant Right’. The notion of a ‘multiple elite
system’ is invoked several times, always as an ongoing tendency of great
significance. But none of its components—multipleness, elite character,
systematicity—is clarified. The only thing we learn is that it is an effect
or expression of the new tendency for the more highly educated to vote
left. The abrupt hailing of multiplicity fits uneasily with the basically
binary analytical framework of the book’s analysis of parties and party
systems. It is often formulated by the authors as left–right, but is not
defined in ideological terms. The parties in focus, in comparison with
others, are parties which (historically) have (had) more of their support
among the poorer half of the population than among the richer. This for-
mat, however, more or less precludes the possibility of studying political
elite structures and their evolution.
The change in the political colouration of educational background has

been a long time coming, beginning in at least the second half of the
1960s and reaching its global-average tipping-point in the 1990s. The
preference of lower-income voters for left-of-centre parties, on the other
hand, they find to be relatively stable, save in the us and the uk. In the us
presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, the Democratic candidate won
among both the bottom half and the top ten per cent of the income earn-
ers. In 2016 Trump won the middle 40 per cent, who in 2020 divided
their support equally.8 In the 2019 British election, low-income voters
preferred the Conservatives to Labour, 45 to 30 per cent. The Tories got
slightly more support from low than from high income voters—45 to
40 per cent—while Labour support was equally modest among the two
income categories. In France, Germany and Italy, on the other hand, low-
income alignment with the left is stronger now than in the 1950s.9
8
cpis, figure 1.1, and online annexe at wpid.world.
9
Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath, ‘Low-Income Voters, the 2019 General
Election and the Future of British Politics’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 23 June
2020; cpis, figure 1.3b.
How significant are the new political orientations of different levels of

education? Clivages defines ‘high’ and ‘low’ education in a particular way.
‘High’ means the most educated 10 per cent of the population, ‘low’ the
remaining 90 per cent. The ‘low’ education of Merchant Right voters in
rich countries simply means that there are fewer PhDs, completed mas-
ter degrees, graduate students, and in some countries, shorter academic
degrees among their number than among left-of-centre voters. The new
political meaning of higher education is an important historical change
which the Piketty team has brought into focus, but the finding is deval-
ued by its not seldom frivolous deployment. The mocking designation
‘Brahmin Left’ actually largely refers to distinctly non-elite university
lecturers, post-docs, graduate students, high-school teachers, social-work
professionals and librarians. Their electoral realignment derives from
the expansion of higher education and the social professions, and from
the long 1968—the political upheavals of university systems in the late
1960s and early 70s, which left an enduring cultural legacy, including a
number of new or re-founded left parties. The ‘Brahmin’ label on the left
is exaggerated by the inclusion of new Green parties, whose electoral base
is very much academically educated, but which represent a novel ideo-
logical current, and are in some cases—for example the current German
Greens—increasingly distancing themselves from the left.
Electoral bases
There is a noteworthy difference among centre-left parties with respect

to the educational backgrounds of their supporters. Those parties
nowadays receiving their strongest support from people with a tertiary
education are the us Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian
Liberals and ndp, the New Zealand Labour Party, French and Swiss
Socialists, and Italian Democrats. Those most strongly supported by
people without tertiary education are the social democracies of Austria,
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,
Spain and Sweden. Support for the Australian Labor Party is not
differentiated at all by level of education. The classical European social
democracies—to which Labour, the ps and the pd do not really belong—
have so far retained the popular character, in education and income, of
their (shrinking) base although they no longer dominate working-class
politics. In the 2018 elections the Swedish Social Democrats gained the
support of no more than a third of the working class, and together with
the Left Party garnered only 40 per cent. Nevertheless, this was enough
10 nlr 129
to make them the main current, with the rest divided between old bour-
geois parties and a new xenophobic party. On the other hand, by the
1950s and 60s, the French, Italian and Swiss left already received the
majority of their support from non-workers.10 The British Labour Party
was once the party of the working class, but in the general elections of
2017 and 2019 it was surpassed by the Conservatives by 9 and 21 per-
centage points, respectively.11
What is the political meaning and importance of the ‘Brahmin Left’?

Piketty elaborates the notion a little more in Capital et idéologie than
in the brief emphatic invocations in Clivages. It is characterized, in
his assessment, by ‘a certain conservatism in front of the inegalitar-
ian regime in place’, and shares with the Merchant Right ‘a strong
attachment to the current economic system’.12 This is a narrow concep-
tion. It fits the mainstream French ps, the British Blairites and the us
Clintonites and their ilk. But it misses at least two currents. The highly
educated contemporary left also includes the new radical left parties
of Europe, from the Left Bloc in Portugal and Podemos in Spain, via
France Insoumise to the Nordic Left Party of Sweden and Left League
of Finland.13 Secondly, it comprises many of the followers of Jeremy
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. One could also add the Greens, who may
be indifferent to inequality but who are hardly strongly attached to
the current global-warming form of capitalism and its globalization.
Politically and ideologically, the so-called Brahmin Left is ambiguous.
In contemporary European history its most significant instantiation was
arguably the post-World War Two Italian Communist Party, mainly led,
down to regional level at least, by highly educated intellectuals who even
headed party-dominated trade unions.
However, both wings are socially distanced from the working class and
the socially disadvantaged. To the right, the latter are a hopeless ‘basket
of deplorables’; to the left they are supposedly a central concern, though
in practice their views are not always heeded. The alienation of the right-
wing of the ‘Brahmin Left’ from ordinary people generated Le Pen and
10
Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1960–1980: The
Class Cleavage, Cambridge 2000, p. 497.
11
Geoffrey Evans and Jonathan Mellon, ‘The Re-Shaping of Class Voting’, British
Election Study, 6 March 2020.
12
Piketty, Capital et idéologie, p. 896.
13
There is one exception, the Dutch ex-Maoist Socialist Party, which does not have
its main support among the university educated: cpis, p. 261.
Trump. An even larger tragedy occurred in East-Central Europe, where

the ex-Communist Social Democrats, elected into power from Hungary
to Lithuania soon after 1989, adopted Brussels-mandated neoliberal
policies that pushed workers and ordinary people in general into more
socially attentive, hard-conservative parties which have governed these
countries ever since.14 The disastrous British general election in 2019
appears to have been due essentially to both wings of the Labour Party
thinking that what the majority of the working class had voted for, over-
coming years of electoral abstention,15 namely Brexit, was not to be taken
seriously. It seems that the fateful point here is not the mounting left
vote among the educated electorate, but the socio-cultural alienation
from the popular classes of left-of-centre politicians and their entourages
of spin doctors, advisers and assistants.
The wider mosaic
Among non-European electorates, Clivages finds no equivalent strong,

general voting tendency. Instead, its transcontinental survey of electoral
sociology yields four patterns. First, in some Latin American countries,
particularly Argentina, there is clear socio-economic differentiation, as
in the Western democracies. Also included in this group are countries
where this differentiation is intertwined with ethnic or regional divides,
such as Ghana, Nigeria, Malaysia and Thailand. Secondly, the Piketty
team identifies countries where socioeconomic differentiations seem
to be either ‘completely insignificant’—religiously divided Iraq—fairly
marginal—Taiwan and South Korea—or overtaken by ethnic or religious
differentiations—Pakistan and India respectively. Thirdly, the ‘majority
of democracies’ are said to be approaching, to different degrees, ‘multi-
conflictual’ patterns of political differentiation. Finally, in some countries,
for example Japan, Peru and the Philippines, socio-political identities are
only ‘weakly anchored in the socio-economic structure’.16
The logic of this typology is hardly overwhelming, reflecting the team’s

abstention from any serious thought about the notion of cleavage. And
as a summary of their own empirical work it is not quite adequate. In
their chapters on national political differentiation, on several occasions
14
Göran Therborn, ‘Crisis and Future of Social Democracy’, in Marcel van der
Linden, ed., The Cambridge History of Socialism, vol. 2, forthcoming.
15
See further Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley, The New Politics of Class: The Political
Exclusion of the British Working Class, Oxford 2017.
16
cpis, p. 87ff.
12 nlr 129
the authors take notice of ongoing tendencies toward greater ‘classiste’

differentiation, manifested most clearly and importantly by the Brazilian
electorate. The team’s data show that, surprisingly, the Workers’ Party
began by attracting more support from higher- than lower-income groups,
continued for a decade without there being significant income differen-
tiation in its base, and then became, from 2006 onwards—that is, after
the first Lula Presidency—representative of the poorer half of the popu-
lation. They find similar tendencies of class differentiation, of variable
strength and imbrication, in Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Mexico and
South Africa, and in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. The three
countries singled out for weak ‘social anchorage’ of their socio-political
identities suffer from the under-elaborated analytical framework in dif-
ferent ways. The narrative on Japan gives a clear outline of the social bloc
sustaining Liberal-Democratic power. So does the Peruvian summary, but
its typological placement veils the fact that Peru’s volatile politics includes
recent periods of both class and non-class voting, and that elections are
swinging in the direction of a clearer class divide.17 The section on the
Philippines fails to grasp the deep power of the landed oligarchy, but does
point to ‘persistent and particularly marked class cleavages’.18
Another differentiating variable which, along with education, has

reversed its ideological direction, is gender. Almost the only important
political ally of the historic women’s movements was the Marxist labour
movement. August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism (1883) was the second
most-read Marxist text after the Communist Manifesto in the 19th cen-
tury, running to 34 editions by 1903. However, when and where women
got the right to vote, patriarchy and religion—particularly in Catholic
countries—kept the majority of women on the right. This started to
change in the post-war period, when feminist dismantling of patriarchy,
the increasing economic independence of women, secularization and
women’s free rational choice produced a persistent if modest advantage
for the left-of-centre. The gender difference in voting disappeared in the
us in the 1960s before tipping to the left-of-centre in the following dec-
ade, joined by Sweden and other Nordic countries in the 1980s. By 2020
gender differentiation was zero in Italy, and in a small backlash since the
17
The second round of the Peruvian presidential election in June 2021 pitted a
teachers’ union leader from the Interior put up by an explicitly Marxist political
party, Pedro Castillo, against the daughter of a right-wing former president, Keiko
Fujimori. By 9 June Castillo had 50.2 per cent of the vote with 99.8 per cent of bal-
lots counted, virtually assuring his victory.
18
cpis, p. 370.
2000s women still give some advantage to the right in Portugal, but in
all other Western democracies, women now lean to the left politically. In
2014 the process reached Colombia.
Class, existential inequality and identity
The root of the disappointing political weakness of this grand empirical

exercise is a theoretical laxity which leads to a bypassing of empirical
questions, despite occasional aperçus. Two conceptual complexes are at
the centre of these problems. One concerns ‘identity politics’ and the
unclarified interrelations of class, inequality and identity. The other is
the concept of political cleavage, which is flattened out and deprived of
most of its analytical potential.
A running theme of the book is a distinction, independent of any

theorizing, between class (classistes) and identity (identitaires) cleav-
ages, with the authors expressing a ‘certain preference’ for the former
because they imply more ‘potentially solvable problems in redistribu-
tion and economic and social transformation’.19 This dichotomy of class
and identity is misleading. Class politics is also a form of identity poli-
tics, and the ‘identity politics’ of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and
so on, is, above all, a politics against denial, discrimination, inequality
and exploitation—just as class politics is. Claims for ‘the recognition of
difference’ in the intellectual debates of the 1980s and 90s never got
much political traction compared to struggles against patriarchy and
misogyny, sexual discrimination and persecution, and racist inequity,
exclusion and violence.20 Black Lives Matter is not a movement claim-
ing that African Americans should be recognized as different. Inequality
and identity should not be seen as separate or opposing concepts, nor
understood as calling for different strategies of political change, such
as redistribution and recognition. The two are importantly and variably
interrelated, and so are their remedies. In Arbetets söner (Sons of Labour),
the most popular song of the Swedish working-class movement along
with the International, it is said,
we demand back our dignity as humans

and fight for justice, liberty and bread.21
19
cpis, p. 588.
20
Cf. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking Recognition’, nlr 3, May–June 2000.
21
Here in the prosaic official translation of the Swedish Marxism and Music Archive.
14 nlr 129
This was a demand for existential equality against objectification, con-

tempt and humiliation. The profound personal wounds and bitterness
invoked here are not properly captured by the Weberian terms, once so
dear to sociologists, of status or prestige.
Starting out from Amartya Sen’s discussion of human capability,22 we

may distinguish three fundamental dimensions of human inequality:
vital inequality, referring to health and socially constructed life-chances;
existential inequality, the uneven allocation of personhood, autonomy,
dignity and respect, and the capacity for self-development; and resource
inequality. For understanding identities and the politics of inequal-
ity, existential inequality is at least as important as resource inequality,
whereas vital inequality becomes a collective experience less frequently,
and then often as an episodic experience, for example of an environ-
mental disaster or an unhealthy work milieu. The three dimensions of
inequality interact, reinforcing or mitigating each other, while keeping
their own irreducible Eigendynamik.
The weak popular response to accelerating economic inequality in the

capitalist core may be partly explained by the fact that for the majority of
workers, it did not imply an equally blatant attack on their human dignity
or on their real wages, which kept pace in most countries, greater female
employment boosting household incomes in some cases. What was felt
to be outrageous, as an existential threat, was a perception among parts
of the peripheral popular classes that they had been abandoned by the
ruling elites in favour of immigrants and foreign powers.
Class is defined by relations of property, work and employment. As an

analytical concept it is indispensable to an understanding of capitalism
as a socio-economic system and not a pure market structure consisting
only of sellers and buyers. As a social and political phenomenon it is (an
effect of) a collective experience, the awareness of inequality—existential
as well as economic—deriving from positions within the socio-economic
system. On this basis class is an identity, individual as well as collec-
tive: class consciousness. Through collective action, from organization
to voting, it becomes a political force. The salience of class inequality,
identity and power are contingent, but not random. Counterposing
22
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, London 2009. See further Göran Therborn, The
Killing Fields of Inequality, Cambridge 2013, ch. 4.
class and identity politics leads us astray from the proper study of the
interactions between them.
Political cleavages
The concept of a political cleavage was developed by Norwegian politi-

cal scientist Stein Rokkan (1921–79) as a means to understand the
historic foundations of political conflict and party systems.23 A man of
his time, Rokkan was essentially interested in Europe only. Globalizing
his approach holds great promise, and it is an indication of the trans-
disciplinary curiosity of the Piketty team, that they have placed the
concept of political cleavage at the centre of their global survey. However,
they leave its potential largely untapped by reducing it to the social dif-
ferentiation of voting by income, education, religion, ethnicity, gender
and so on. This is certainly interesting, and a legitimate self-limitation
for a huge research enterprise. But in view of the team’s explicit commit-
ment to egalitarian politics, it leaves a set of important questions never
asked and answers never attempted.
The explanatory power of the cleavage concept developed by Rokkan,

and put to great use by Stefano Bartolini in his monumental history of
the European socialist left as a series of mobilizations of class cleavages,
derives from two features.24 Firstly from its grounding in analyses of
the constituent historical formation of modern states and nations.
Secondly, and above all, from its focus on how structural conflicts in
a political system are translated into political divides—cleavages—
through processes of identification and mobilization. One can only
agree with the Piketty team when they say, ‘The cleavage concept
appears fundamental for understanding the democratic representation
of social inequalities’.25
Seemingly driven by their choice of data, surveys of voting, the

authors then scale down the problematic of how social inequalities
are translated—or not—into political cleavages. Clivages sets out to
23
Rokkan’s sprawling oeuvre of papers, articles and chapters has been organized
into a totality through a painstaking, conscientious and empathetic edit by the soci-
ologist Peter Flora: State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe:
The Theory of Stein Rokkan, Oxford 1999.
24
Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left.
25
cpis, p. 27.
16 nlr 129
‘document, as precisely as possible, the interaction between inequalities

and political cleavages in a comparative and historical perspective’. This
boils down to ‘studying how economic, social and cultural resources
influence voting behaviour’. A further reduction then leads to a concen-
tration on two measures, ‘the position of voters in the social hierarchy of
income and education (diplôme)’, occasionally supplemented by wealth
and ‘self-positioning . . . on the social scale’.26 Class cleavages become
the party-political sympathies of the top ten per cent of income-earners
or the ten per cent with the highest education, compared to the sym-
pathies of the bottom ninety (sometimes fifty) per cent. This does give
a new, comparative picture of the electoral choices of different social
categories in the world, including the large world beyond the West, but
it also leads to the bland conclusions cited above.
Historical pathways to nation-state formation
To apply cleavage theory to world inequality we had better start with

the formation of nation-states and what they entailed in terms of social
structuration. On a global scale there have been four major pathways
to the modern nation-state.27 Nations and peoples created states of
national, popular sovereignty by asserting themselves against different
kinds of previous rulers.
1. Against a Prince and his customary bulwarks, the aristocracy and high
clergy. Europe was the only continent where nation-state formation
was primarily an internal affair of existing polities, albeit affected by
external processes—for example, imperial wars overseas. European
nation-states were born cloven along class lines: the Third Estate—
the people—against the Prince, the aristocracy and its followers. The
transnational Catholic Church’s alignment with ruling princes made
religion versus secularism a major divide in Catholic Europe. The class
divide was then enormously reinforced by the industrial revolution
and the unique extent of its moulding of European society, indicated
by shares of industrial employment never reached in the us or Japan.
The constituent and industrially reinforced class cleavage of European
states gave rise to strong working-class movements and, over time, to
26
cpis, pp. 32–3.
27
Göran Therborn, Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy, London and New
York 2020, ch. 3.
limits on the economic inequality generated by capitalism. It inspired

class-conscious politics around the world, most successfully in China,
through a mutation into the decisive form of a combined peasant and
anti-imperialist revolution.
2. Against the Motherland, perceived as corrupt, intrusive, incompetent,

or simply too distant. This was the settler route in the Americas, Oceania
and South Africa. Here the master cleavage was ‘race’ and ethnicity,
dividing the settlers from the natives of the land they had conquered and
from the slaves imported to work it. Relations with the native peoples,
mestizos, slaves and ex-slaves, and the various origins of the immigrants
who came to populate the appropriated lands, were constituent divisions.
Class cleavages among the settlers who made up the new nations were
secondary. Into the 1970s, ‘Keep Australia White’ was the first principle
of the nation as well as of its Labor Party.
There were two types of European settler nations, however: one in

which settler livelihoods and wealth depended on indigenous labour
and/or imported slaves, and another in which indigenous inhabitants
were deported if not killed off, and where slave imports were deemed
uneconomic if not unethical, and the settlers instead worked the land
themselves. The latter type of society settled what became the northern
and western us, Canada, Boer South Africa, Australia and New Zealand,
and became pioneers of modern relative equality. The former character-
ized the rest of the Americas south of the Mason-Dixon line—including
the Caribbean, the world centre of capital accumulation by plantation
slavery—more or less down to the Rio de la Plata, as well as the Anglo-
Dutch Union of South Africa, and created the hard core of modern
inequality, structured by racial divides and hierarchies.28
3. Against an alien colonial power, the path of the peoples of the vast colo-
nial zone of Africa and Asia. Anti-colonial nationalism was inspired
28
In the Rio de la Plata region, the early-19th century monopolization of enormous
areas of highly productive land by the tiny new national elite laid the foundation
for the enduring, somewhat lesser inequality of contemporary Argentina, Uruguay
and southern Brazil. See further the illuminating works of Stanley Engerman
and Kenneth Sokoloff, for example ‘Factor Endowments, Inequality and Paths
of Development Among New World Economies’, nber working paper no. 9259,
October 2002; ‘The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World’, Journal
of Economic History, vol. 65, no. 4, 2005.
18 nlr 129
by the national and popular rhetoric of the colonial powers, but the
ex-colonial nations usually lacked the characteristics of the typical
European and settler nations, namely commonalities of language, reli-
gion and cultural history. The main thing connecting the peoples of the
ex-colonial nations was their experience of colonial territorial division
and administration. High inequality was a general inheritance from
colonialism, mainly determined by the value of extractable resources.
The ex-colonial nations were overburdened with non-class cleavages, and
nation-building to overcome them became a central task of the new rul-
ers. A quite specific cleavage within ex-colonial nations was the cultural
one between a ‘Westernized’, colonial language-speaking and colonially
educated ruling elite and the bulk of the population with its vernacular
culture. Classes and class conflict did develop in the ex-colonial zone,
but remained underdeveloped—as did capitalism itself, economically
enclaved and intertwined with and divided by persistent pre-national
fault-lines between tribes, languages, religions, areas and castes.
For the nations rising out of colonial capitalist underdevelopment,

socialism was a developmental option lying near at hand in the flourish-
ing period of the Soviet Union and the Chinese revolution. Mostly it did
not go very well in African, Arab and South-East Asian societies, neither
in terms of economic development nor in terms of distribution or dem-
ocratic participation, in large part due to the hubris of the radicalized
ex-colonial elite with their limited understanding of the complexities and
scarcities of their new nations. However, Piketty, in collaboration with
Lucas Chancel, has shown the potential of post-colonial development
in the case of India—by far the largest, and arguably the best prepared
intellectually and administratively for independence, but also one of the
more complex ex-colonial nations.29 Already in 1931 the Indian National
Congress had set a ‘socialist pattern of development’ as its goal, reaf-
firmed by a party resolution in 1955 and endorsed by the Parliament of
India in 1956. After a century of decline and stagnation, India started
growing, and growing much less unequal. By 1982 the top 1 per cent’s
share of national income had dropped from a peak of 21 per cent in 1940
to a north European level of 6 per cent, while the pre-tax Gini coefficient
had fallen from 46 in 1951 to 40. (The continental European coeffi-
cient was below 30 at the time.) Then Congress, like European social
29
Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, ‘Indian Inequality, 1922–2015: From British
Raj to Billionaire Raj?’, Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 65, no. 1, 2019, appendi-
ces 10 and 11.
democracy, turned to a neoliberal agenda, on which they were soon over-

taken by the right. In terms of overall economic growth, the neoliberal
turn has been successful, but the data compiled by Chancel and Piketty
show that the annual income growth of the bottom half of the popula-
tion was higher in 1951–80 than in 1981–2015.
4. The fourth major process of nation-state formation occurred through

rebellion against the predominant section of the elite by another sec-
tion of that elite, on the grounds of inability to protect the realm against
foreign imperialist threats. The Meiji Restoration in Japan was the trail-
blazer of reactive modernization from above. Through the legal fiction of
Imperial rule the Restoration did not explicitly create a nation-state, but
in its actual break with traditional precepts of rule and its imports of mod-
ern foreign ones, it was a de facto national revolution. Most attempts of
this kind failed—in China, Korea, Afghanistan, the Ottoman Empire—
due to strong traditionalist resistance. But when fully successful, as in
Japan, where it was helped by ethnic homogeneity and the absence of a
transcendent religion, it could create a nation without any deep intrinsic
cleavages.30 Sustained by geopolitical and economic success, the state
could transplant deferential feudal hierarchies into modern society.
Deference gives license to inequality, which soared in Japan until World
War Two. But military defeat wiped out the wealth of the country’s rich,
and concern with national cohesion—made more urgent by fear of ris-
ing Asian communism—was expressed in low-inequality developmental
policies, as in the former Japanese colonies of Taiwan and South Korea,
until the advent of the neoliberal tide.
Mutations
While leaving enduring legacies, the constituent cleavages and other

social configurations of these different processes of nation-state forma-
tion of course mutated in the course of their historical development.
Among the myriad of mutations, a few new key turns may be discerned.
Deindustrialization of the capitalist centre, and signs of persistent
enclavement of industrial capitalism and its dialectical class cleavage
in emerging new centres of capitalism—through declining or stalled
industrial employment shares in Asia and Latin America, and only slow
growth from low levels in Africa—open up a novel horizon for capitalism.
30
It is also significant that industrial work in Japan was originally largely done by
young women under patriarchal control.
20 nlr 129
The authors of Clivages recognize it by advising against classiste nostal-

gia, without explication or even a hint of the new capitalist dynamic.
From around 1980, neoliberalism became the predominant model of

economic development around the world, overtaking various socialist
and social-democratic conceptions. It was carried by powerful economic
forces: deindustrialization and a weakening of the working class in the
capitalist core; and a technological revolution generating capital accumu-
lation through the outsourcing of production, locally and globally, and
new forms of financial trading and profit-making. Neoliberalism could
shine in a context in which alternatives were in a state of exhaustion
(social democracy), failure (most Third World socialism) and implosion
(Soviet communism). The ideological and political driver of inequality
over the last four decades, its fate will shape our post-pandemic future.
As editors at the Economist proclaimed some years ago, ‘God is back’,

largely due to the perceived failure of secular policies of development.31
The return of religion started with the rise of Islamism in the wake
of the 1967 war, in which Israel roundly defeated the secular Arab
regimes. Islamism then got a major boost from its recruitment by a
Pakistani-Saudi-us coalition to wage a successful jihad against commu-
nism in Afghanistan, which ignited an international militant Islamism
of boundless ambition. The implosion of Soviet communism led to
a revival, and state endorsement, of all the main religions of the for-
mer bloc. The degeneration of the secular Indian Congress spawned a
Hindutva surge. The spread of us-exported evangelism and a ‘theology
of prosperity’ among the poor of Africa and Latin America should prob-
ably be seen against the background of disappointment with the more
collectivist Catholic ‘theology of liberation’ and the persistent poverty
bequeathed by secular politics. Secularism has not been rolled back in
Western Europe, whereas the bulk of Americans have always been told
and believed that they are God’s own people.
Tabulating inequality
The global political landscape painted by the Clivages team would have
benefited from a systematic framework of historical state formation and
its constituent social structuration, the developmental trajectories of
the latter, and the meeting of national social structures with changes in
31
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Rise of
Faith is Changing the World, London 2009.
world-historical time. However, it would not be fair to end this review

on a sour note. Let us instead conclude by taking in the picture of global
inequality which the Piketty team has painstakingly produced.32 In 1980,
at the end-point of industrial capitalism and industrial socialism, and
atop the historical ridge separating post-World War Two equalization
from the descent into massive inequality, the main features of the global
pattern of income inequality looked like Table 1, below.
What we see here is the relatively low inequality coming out of European
class cleavages and the Russian and Chinese revolutions they inspired.
The two different types of settler nations with their different levels of
Table 1: Income Inequality in 1980: Percentage of National Income

Taken by Top 10 per cent of the Population
Russia 22
Eastern Europe 26
China 28
Western Europe 30
Oceania 30
India 32
us 34
Japan 35
Indonesia 40
Southeast Asia 55
Latin America 55
Sub-Saharan Africa 58
South Africa 47
Middle East and 69
North Africa
The world 52
Source: World Inequality Database
32
Merely one of several possible summarizing measures, this is not the definitive
outline. It is based on complex calculations and estimates, each of which have their
margins of error. But it is a picture of frontline research, and its overall contours are
similar to those generated by other research and other metrics.
22 nlr 129
inequality—Oceania and the us on one side, South Africa and Latin

America on the other—stand out sharply, likewise the equalizing post-
colonial development of India under Congress rule and the persistently
high though differentiated inequality of the rest of the ex-Colonial Zone:
Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa. The modest income
inequality of post-imperialist Japan represents the north-east Asian
model of cohesive national development. The highest inequality is
located in the Middle East, including its dynastic, pre-national states and
statelets, inflated by the spike in the oil rent.
The new global pattern of inequality which has developed since the
watershed of the 1980s requires separate analysis, but we may get some
points of orientation from Table 2 below. Inequality has increased within
Table 2: Income Inequality in 2019: Percentage of National Income

Taken by Top 10 per cent of the Population
% change
since 1980
Russia 46 +25
Eastern Europe 37 +11
China 42 +14
Western Europe 35 +5
Oceania 40 +10
India 57 +25
us 44 +10
Japan 43 +8
Indonesia 41 +1
Southeast Asia 50 -5
Latin America 56 +0.5
Sub-Saharan Africa 56 -2
South Africa 65 +18
Middle East and 56 -13
North Africa
The world 52 0
Source: World Inequality Database

countries and regions but not, by this measure, in the world as a whole:
the trend between 1980 and 2019 describes a parabola, with a peak in
the early years of this century. Neoliberalism in India and the restora-
tion of capitalism in Russia have produced the most dramatic increases
of inequality, even after a certain moderation from a top-ten share of
around 50 per cent in the 2000s. By the late 1990s, after a decade of
Western economic and political overlordship, Russian per-capita income
relative to that of Western Europe had fallen back to its level before the
October Revolution—40 per cent, down from almost 70 per cent in
the mid-1970s, and well below its level of 60 per cent at the point of
implosion in 1990.33 To the west of Russia, on the other hand, restored
capitalism has remained within the stretched bounds of Europe, and
three post-communist countries—Czechia, Slovakia, and Slovenia— are
still among the least economically unequal countries of the world.
The Anglo-Saxon settler countries and Japan—no longer worried about

national cohesion despite its prolonged stagnation—have substantially
increased their inequality. High-inequality Southeast Asia has lowered
its level, while the modest Latin American equalization in the first
decade of this century has faded away,34 and sub-Saharan Africa also
remains very unequal. The former settler zone of southern Africa, with
its rents of extraction from mining, oil and gas, is the most unequal part
of the continent, and post-apartheid South Africa—converted from set-
tler to post-colonial nation—is the most unequal country in the world,
although the dramatic increase in inequality there since the early 1990s
may be exaggerated, taking the whole distribution into account.35 The
persistence of pyramidal inequality shows the deeply ingrained inequal-
ity of racist settler colonialism, and how the re-insertion of South Africa
into the circuits of global capitalism has blocked or truncated a quarter
33
‘World Inequality Report 2018’, fig. 2.8.2.
34
Piketty and his team have argued that the little equalization there was in Brazil
did not touch the rich but stayed within the bottom 90 per cent: ‘World Inequality
Report 2018’, ch. 2.11.
35
In both Eastern and Western Africa inequality has fallen since 1980 while still
remaining high. The top ten per cent national income shares are estimated at
47 and 54 per cent respectively: World Inequality Database. One of the principal
South African researchers of income inequality, Murray Leibbrandt, has found
more high-level stability, but including a sharp increase in labour-market earnings
in 2001–14. Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón, Murray Leibbrandt, Vimal Ranchhod and
Michael Savage, ‘Piketty comes to South Africa’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 72,
no. 1, 2021.
24 nlr 129
century of attempts at inequality decrease and poverty relief without

opening any path toward substantial economic growth.
Prospects
Neoliberalism is ebbing away. The state is returning to the centre of the

economy, as demonstrated by the unprecedented size of recent counter-
crisis interventions by the core liberal governments of the us, uk and eu.
Free trade is no longer a supreme economic value, and untrammelled
globalization is off the agenda of the powers-that-be. Geopolitical power
or ‘security’ has been enthroned as the primary goal in Washington,
Brussels and London. The surveillance culture exemplified by the
Amazon warehouses is accompanied by increasingly paranoid and
resourceful surveillance states.
In the North Atlantic region, particularly on its eastern wing, there is

hardly any reformist mood in political circles, unlike in 1945. Before
there is more ‘massive social turmoil’, the Egalitarian Enlightenment is
unlikely to get any hearing among the politicians of Natoland. The one
area where transformative action has been launched concerns a demand
that the us police and judicial system should finally respect the ‘life,
liberty and pursuit of happiness’—the elementary vital and existential
equality—of African Americans. The sadistic public police murder of
George Floyd did shake the us polity, and the long line of racist police
killings in America should be remembered by the rest of the world, when-
ever a us official starts hectoring other countries about human rights.
The emerging post-pandemic scene is taking on features of the world

on the eve of 1914. At stake is us supremacy and half a millennium of
Western domination. The configuration of world capitalism is changing,
with Asia rising, the emergent demographic giant of Africa becoming
more significant, and Europe sliding downwards. Latin America is with
Europe the loser of the pandemic, in mortality as well as in economic
terms, but so far in this century it has been a world centre of inven-
tive, though less often successfully practiced, progressive politics. Above
everything hangs the dark cloud of climate change, which is linked to
issues of inequality, since the consumption of the richest ten per cent
of the world population accounts for nearly half of all carbon dioxide
emissions.36 Every progressive movement will have to learn how to
36
Chancel, Unsustainable Inequalities, ch. 5.
navigate the complicated geo-economics and geopolitics of the envi-

ronmental breakdown—much more complicated than the previous
fateful issue of nuclear war, around which the superpowers played war
games in the 1960s and 70s, and against which peace movements of
disarmament mobilized.
Through financial and real-estate speculation, e-commerce and techni-

cal innovation, post-industrial capitalism is thriving, vividly illustrated
by the spectacular fortunes of the world’s 2,755 dollar-billionaires, 660
of whom qualified during the covid-19 crisis. The club has increased its
wealth by 62 per cent to $13.1 trillion, the equivalent of the annual gdp
of Japan, Germany, India, and Italy combined.37 Unlike its predecessor,
post-industrial capitalism has no master cleavage and no dialectic of
inherent contradiction. This makes it neither invulnerable nor unchange-
able, but more unpredictable. One implication is that electoral surveys
will have decreasing significance from one election to another. Another
is that an immersion in local studies of electoral behaviour in combina-
tion with local socio-economic data, which is the step forward suggested
in the final pages of Clivages, will have less generalizable value than in
the industrial and early post-colonial era.
So what might be said about the prospects for challenges to inequality

and injustice? At least two ways of searching for clues may be suggested.
One is to look for fault-lines, of probable social rifts rather than con-
stituent cleavages. Intra-national inequality remains a central one. After
some stabilization or moderation since the financial crash, it has been
accentuated by the pandemic, and is likely to come into international
focus in the looming battles around global heating. But inequality is
a condition rather than a hot conflict issue. To become one, a trigger
is required, which may be anything, from membership in the eu to a
tax on petrol.
The other things to look for are spaces and channels of mobiliza-
tion, which have widened enormously with social media and a
broadened popular public sphere in the wake of the weakening of
particularistic organizational or clientelistic loyalties. The Indonesian
protests last autumn against a new, more business-friendly investor
37
Kerry Dolan, ‘35th Annual World’s Billionaires List: Facts And Figures 2021’,
Forbes, 6 April 2021; Ruchir Sharma, ‘The Billionaire Boom: How the Super-Rich
Soaked up Covid Cash’, Financial Times, 14 May 2021.
26 nlr 129
code and labour law rallied not only the whole array of trade unions
but also students, professionals and Islamic religious organizations.
The Colombian movement, ongoing as I write, includes the trade-union
confederation, student movements, the political left and indigenous
organizations. In order to produce some social change and not just stop
at a certain triggering measure, these mobilizations will need creative
leadership, which is more likely to emerge out of the new movements
than from previous positions.
More than ever, political analysis will need the modesty of volcanology.
It may, then, be proper to end these reflections with an unfinished story.
Neoliberalism as a system of power was born in Chile under the military
dictatorship, elaborated by Chicago-trained and imported economists,
and it has more or less remained in power ever since, albeit not in mili-
tary uniform. On 9 October 2019 the President of the country, a true
neoliberal, declared proudly: ‘Chile is a real oasis in a Latin America in
convulsion’. Nine days later, on 18 October, a wave of protests erupted,
triggered by a rise in the metro-ticket price, which soon escalated—since
‘it is not thirty pesos, it is thirty years [of post-military neoliberalism]’.38
Despite violent repression, the movement obtained and won a ref-
erendum for a Constitutional Convention. In May 2021, members to
the Convention were elected, and the right-wing parties got less than a
quarter of the vote, thus losing any veto power. A progressive outcome
from the Convention can be expected. Later this year, there will also be
presidential elections which the left, headed by the Communist Party
in alliance with the Broad Front coming out of the student movement,
stands a good chance of winning, if the currently rather acrimonious
relations with the Socialist Party can be overcome.39 Neoliberalism may
be buried where it was born.
38
Francisco Herreros, ‘Chile despertó y abriró las grandes alamedas’, America
Latina en movimiento, 21 May 2021.
39
Active Socialist and centre-left support in the second round of the election will be
needed to get a left candidate over the line. The Socialist Party was invited to par-
ticipate in a joint presidential primary with the cp and the Broad Front but at the
last moment refused, due to its remaining ties to the post-dictatorial cartel of centre
and centre-left parties, a cartel now out of step with the post-2019 Chilean political
landscape. Currently the ps candidate trails in the polls.
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michael denning
EVERYONE A LEGISLATOR
M
y introduction to Gramsci, decades ago, was when
Stuart Hall returned to him to help us understand the
‘great moving right show’ of Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan.1 Considering the experience of the past
decade, we might begin a reflection on Gramsci with those same sec-
tions from Notebook 13: one on the Boulanger movement, the other on
crises of representation that generate Caesarist responses.2 Both pas-
sages drew on Marx’s own reflections on the sequence of election and
emergency, plebiscite and coup, that brought Louis Bonaparte to power.
Both passages warned us against a simple economism that reduced
the emergence of counter-movements on the right to narrow economic
motives. But perhaps we have learnt that lesson well enough; indeed,
Giuseppe Cospito has argued that, as the Notebooks developed, Gramsci
himself came to find Caesarism a concept of limited value, noting that
it ‘was introduced into the political language by Napoleon iii, who cer-
tainly was not a great political historian or philosopher.’3 Here, I want to
ask whether Gramsci’s conception of politics is useful for the resistance
to these regimes and movements of the right, for our precarious work
and life. After all, it has long been assumed that, as Eric Hobsbawm
put it, Gramsci’s ‘major contribution’ is ‘to have pioneered a Marxist
theory of politics’.4
An initial glance might prompt a no. There have been two major forms
of Gramscian politics and both seem exhausted. The first was the poli-
tics of those who re-imagined the communist party as the modern
Prince; this generated, through Togliatti’s pci, a new kind of commu-
nist party that not only left an imprint on post-war Italy but decisively
influenced the remakings of communist, socialist and workers parties
across Europe and Latin America. I won’t try to assess the balance sheet
of Gramscian communism, but it must be admitted that most of those

30 nlr 129
new parties are dead or dying. The second form was the politics that took
seriously Gramsci’s call for a war of position across the cultural organi-
zations of state and civil society, elaborating a new national-popular
collective will in education, journalism, popular culture and philosophy.
As the social movements of the New Left invented new forms of ‘cul-
tural politics’, his ideas were never far away, the ‘subaltern’ rather than
the ‘party’ seeming the crucial concept. Again, I won’t try to assess the
balance sheet of Gramscian culturalism, but it must be admitted that
most of the forms of that cultural politics are also dead or dying. Perhaps
this is not bad. We should remember Gramsci’s own warning about the
habit of misreading Machiavelli as ‘the man of politics in general, as the
“scientist of politics”, relevant in every period’. Rather, he maintained,
‘Machiavelli should be considered more as a necessary expression of his
time’. ‘Machiavelli is a man wholly of his period; his political science
represents the philosophy of the time, which tended to the organization
of absolute national monarchies.’5
Perhaps Gramsci’s ‘political science’ is likewise a ‘necessary expression’

of his time, the short twentieth century, an era now ended, the age of three
worlds, divided between Fordist capitalism, bureaucratized communism
and the postcolonial settlements of decolonization. If this is true, is there
a future for Gramsci’s legacy? However, we should also recall the mean-
ing of Gramsci’s ‘political’ turn. The radicals of 1848—including the
young Marx and Engels—had intentionally turned away from political
1
This essay was originally written as a keynote lecture for a conference, ‘Antonio
Gramsci: A Legacy For The Future?’, held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
Thanks to Luca Peretti; many of these ideas were worked out in a seminar on
Gramsci we co-taught.
2
Gramsci divided his 33 prison notebooks into individual notes preceded with a
hand-written symbol §; following him, critical editions of his work number pas-
sages by notebook and note: 1, §1 is Notebook 1, Note 1. Numbered citations below
will be followed by the source of the English translation, where one exists: Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell
Smith, ed. and trans., London 1971 (henceforth spn), and/or Prison Notebooks, 3
vols., Joseph A. Buttigieg, ed., New York 1992 (henceforth pn1/2/3)—as in this
case, 13, §18; spn, pp. 158–67, and 13, §23; spn, pp. 210–8.
3
17, §21, cit. Giuseppe Cospito, The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci, Chicago 2017,
p. 216. On Hall, see his The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the
Left, London 1988.
4
‘Gramsci and Political Theory’, Marxism Today, 1977, p. 207.
5
13, §13; spn, p. 140.
denning: Gramsci 31
explanations of society and revolution, seeking the anatomy of civil soci-

ety in political economy, taking us beyond the noisy spheres of markets
and legislatures to the hidden abodes of production, transcending the
limits of political emancipation in a quest for human emancipation: in a
word, the generation of 1848 emphasized the economic as an emergent
level of understanding, irreducible to states and sovereigns and consti-
tutions. In contrast, it is said, Gramsci’s generation—the generation of
1917—mounted a critique of their inheritance, what they named ‘econo-
mism’, hailed a revolution against Capital, reasserting the specificity of
the political, rethinking ‘state and revolution’, proliferating theories of
the political party, developing a new art and science of politics, a new
‘political science’. If Marx founded a Marxist economics, we are told,
Gramsci founded a Marxist politics.
In this essay, I want to challenge this sense of Gramsci the political sci-
entist by making three arguments. First, I want to borrow and develop
a proposal made by the Brazilian Gramscian Carlos Nelson Coutinho
that, just as Marx began not from political economy but from a critique
of political economy, so Gramsci begins not from political science but
from a critique of it.6 Second, I want to emphasize that Gramsci’s way
of theorizing political activity—the political life of the popular, subaltern
classes, the classes that ‘must work regular hours every day’7—does not
begin from the classic concepts of political science: state, party, sover-
eign. Rather, his critique of political science begins from a simple but
profound idea: that everyone is a legislator.
What does it mean to say this? I will suggest—as my final point—that

Gramsci’s insistence on this, an idea as fundamental to his work as the
parallel assertion that everyone is an intellectual, allows us to elaborate
an alternative way of understanding Gramsci’s legacy to politics: nei-
ther a specific model of a political party nor simply an understanding of
the centrality of culture to politics, but rather a conception of politics as
organizing. This may have particular resonance in North America where
the ideology of organizing and the ‘organizer’ has a long history from
the legendary Swedish migrant, Joe Hill of the Industrial Workers of the
World, to the present.
6
Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Gramsci’s Political Thought, Pedro Sette-Camara, trans.,
Leiden 2013, p. 58.
7
1, §113; pn1, p. 218.
The critique of political science
In considering Gramsci’s relation to political science, it is worth recall-

ing the ambiguity of Marxism’s relation to economic thought. From the
work of the Ricardian socialists like William Thompson who influenced
Marx to that of David Harvey, Moishe Postone and Anwar Shaikh in the
present, critical political economy has veered between, on the one hand,
demystifying the forms of reductionism and ahistoricism in economic
thought and, on the other hand, appropriating the knowledge embodied
in the economic analysis of capital and labour. Marxism has been at once
the rejection of an economic view of life, a rejection of homo oeconomicus,
and an alternative or heterodox economics: sometimes the critique of
political economy and other times ‘the political economy of the working
class’, a ‘Marxist economics’. There is a similar ambiguity in the critique
of political science that Gramsci inaugurated. Just as Marx saw political
economy as the leading new science of capitalism, so Gramsci, writing
in the midst of the formation of what we think of as the modern ‘social
sciences’, saw political science as a central form of knowledge: ‘politi-
cal science means science of the State’, he wrote in Notebook 15, ‘and
the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with
which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance,
but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’. As
a consequence, despite the ‘rise of sociology’ with the ‘success of evolu-
tionary and positivist theories’, he insists that ‘everything that is of real
importance in sociology is nothing other than political science.’8 One
can see why Gramsci often appears to be a political scientist developing
a new science of the State.
However, Gramsci was exceptionally conscious of the distinction

between classical economics and Marx’s critique—‘Classical econom-
ics has given rise’, he wrote, ‘to a “critique of political economy”.’ ‘The
“critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical
character’ of the ‘market’, ‘whereas pure economists conceive of these
elements as “eternal” and “natural”’; the critique ‘puts forward the “tran-
sitory” and “replaceable” nature of the science being criticized.’9 It is
clear, then, that he understood his work as an analogous ‘critique of
political science’. Indeed, he suggests, ‘the basic innovation introduced
by the philosophy of praxis into the science of politics and of history
8
15, §10; spn, pp. 244, 243. 9
11, §52; spn, p. 411.
denning: Gramsci 33
is the demonstration that there is no abstract “human nature”, “fixed

and immutable”.’10 As Coutinho has persuasively argued, ‘if Marx did
not believe’ in ‘homo oeconomicus, whose actions would be guided by a
“calculating” cost-benefit logic, neither did Gramsci believe in the “natu-
ral” existence of a homo politicus, whose main characteristic—according
to bourgeois “political science”, from Hobbes to Weber—would be
an innate “will to power” or to “prestige”.’11 Nonetheless, just as Marx
never completely escaped the world of classical economics, so Gramsci
never fully escaped the new political science. ‘The question of politics
as an autonomous science, of the place that political science occupies
or should occupy in a systematic (coherent and logical) conception of
the world, in a philosophy of praxis’ is, he wrote, ‘the first question that
must be raised and resolved in a study of Machiavelli.’12 Similarly, in
his critique of Bukharin’s popular manual of historical materialism,
Gramsci wonders ‘what status could be accorded to political science in
relation to the philosophy of praxis: whether the two’—political science
and Marxist critical theory—‘are identical’. He immediately insists that
this is ‘something impossible to maintain, except from the most crudely
positivist viewpoint’.13
Moreover, if Marx developed his critique of political economy through an

extended engagement with the works of Smith, Ricardo and Mill, as well
as with the left-wing Ricardians and Proudhonians, so Gramsci devel-
oped his critique of political science through an engagement with three
instances of ‘political science’. The first was the new pessimistic ‘political
science’ that had emerged in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, an
extraordinarily influential analysis of the formation of political elites that
remains the foundation of modern political science: the work of Gaetano
Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. The second was the legacy
of Machiavelli, who became increasingly important as Gramsci tried to
understand the trajectory of Italian, and indeed, European history since
the Renaissance, and whose Prince would serve as an exemplar for his
own Modern Prince: from imagining a ‘translation’ of Machiavelli in
Notebook 5—‘if one had to translate the notion “Prince”, as it is used in
Machiavelli’s work, into modern political language, one would have to
make a series of distinctions’14—to projecting ‘The Modern Prince’ in
10
13, §20; spn, p. 133.
11
Coutinho, Gramsci’s Political Thought, p. 60.
12
13, §10; spn, p. 136. 13
15, §10; spn, p. 244. 14
5, §127; spn, p. 252.
34 nlr 129
Notebook 8, as ‘the general title for the collection of ideas on political

science that may be assembled into a work of political science that would
be conceived and organized along the lines of Machiavelli’s Prince.’15 A
final form of ‘political science’ was the socialist, anarchist and syndical-
ist debate over working-class politics that dominated the first quarter of
the twentieth century, including Rosa Luxemburg and the syndicalist
Alfred Rosmer on the mass strike and Lenin and Trotsky on the revolu-
tions of 1905 and 1917.16 The prison notebooks begin from the same
imperative: Gramsci’s desire to theorize more than a decade of political
struggle, and particularly the Turin factory occupations of 1919–20 and
the subsequent rise of Mussolini.
Leaders and led, rulers and ruled
Where then does the critique of political science begin? Not with a new
theory of the state, but, as Coutinho argues, with a simple form, a fun-
damental relation. ‘The first element’ of politics, Gramsci maintains, ‘is
that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. The entire sci-
ence and art of politics are based on this primordial, and (given certain
general conditions) irreducible fact.’ Gramsci brackets the origins of this
divide—‘a problem apart, which will have to be studied separately’17—
just as Marx famously bracketed the origins of wage labour and capital.
He is not writing a history of rulers and ruled, but analysing the sim-
ple form of political domination. The couplet of leaders and led has the
same ‘methodological function’ as that of the commodity in Capital,
Coutinho argues: ‘it is an “abstract” figure (a “cell”, in Marx’s words),
which potentially contains all the more concrete determinations of total-
ity.’18 The point is not to naturalize or reify the couplet but to explore the
dialectic of leading, directing, conducting, representing: ‘is it the inten-
tion’, Gramsci asks, ‘that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is
the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer
necessary? In other words, is the initial premise the perpetual division of
the human race, or the belief that this division is only an historical fact,
corresponding to certain conditions.’19
15
8, §21; pn3: p. 246.
16
7, §16; spn, pp. 236–8. (‘Rosa—a little hastily, and rather superficially too—
theorized the historical experiences of 1905’ in The Mass Strike, which was
nevertheless ‘one of the most significant documents theorizing the war of manoeu-
vre in relation to political science.’ 13, §24; spn, p. 233).
17
15, §4; spn, p. 144.
18
Coutinho, Gramsci’s Political Thought, p. 48. 19
15, §4; spn, p. 144.
denning: Gramsci 35
Coutinho’s analogy with the commodity is helpful, but one might also
think of these ‘relations of leadership’ as serving a methodological role
analogous to Marx’s ‘relations of production’. The task of a theory of
hegemony is thus, one might say, analogous to the theory of value in
Marx. It emerges out of the discourse of political science in order to
develop an immanent critique of that discourse. In addition, Gramsci’s
key concept of ‘historical bloc’ is also in part founded on unfolding this
‘first element’ of leaders and led. For if this is on the one hand his term
for the social totality, the ‘unity’ between ‘structure and superstructure’,
it is also the name for the social forces that elaborate that unity, the
historical bloc between leaders and led made possible by an organic
attachment.20 If one accepts the argument that Gramsci’s work is best
understood not as ‘a Marxist theory of politics’ prescribing a specific
form of party or state, but as a ‘critique of political science’, in which
the theory of hegemony dissolves the reifications of leaders and led, rul-
ers and ruled, any ‘science’ of elites and subalterns, what then are the
grounds of his critique?
Let us recall for a moment the passage in Notebook 8 where Gramsci

first outlines the two projects of the Modern Prince, the two halves
of his critique of political science. ‘The modern Prince should focus
entirely on these two basic points: the formation of a national popular
collective will, of which the modern Prince is the active and operative
expression’, and ‘the question of moral and intellectual reform, that
is, the question of religion and world-view’.21 The latter project—‘the
question of moral and intellectual reform’—marked ‘any cultural move-
ment which aimed to replace common sense and old conceptions of the
world in general’. Here Gramsci develops a rich and influential theory
of ‘conceptions of the world’, and the way they emerge and are changed,
through a reinterpretation not only of ‘religion and world-view’, but of
common sense and good sense, philosophy and ideology, language and
folklore; and through a detailed exploration of what he calls ‘the forms
of cultural organization which keep the ideological world in movement
within a given country’.22 And at the heart of this theory of ‘conceptions
of the world’ lies his rejection of the social autonomy of intellectual and
cultural matters, his insistence that everyone is an intellectual, even if
only some of us have the function of intellectuals in the social division
of labour.23
20
4, §33; spn, p. 137. 21
8, §21; pn3, pp. 249, 248.
22
11, §12; spn, pp. 340–2. 23
12, §1; spn, p. 9.
36 nlr 129
This ‘second’ half of the project of the Modern Prince is well known and
continues to influence critical theory. I would suggest that its first half—
dealing with the issues raised by the question, ‘Do the basic conditions
exist for the awakening of a national-popular collective will?’24—is built
not from an a priori notion of the State or the political party but on a par-
allel rejection of the autonomy of the political and a parallel insistence
that ‘everyone is a legislator’, even if not all of us have the function of
legislators—or politicians—in the social division of labour.25 It is a curi-
ous phrase—one critic refers to it as a ‘bizarre utterance’26—and, to my
knowledge, few commentators have discussed it. Does it simply mean
that we are all citizens in a democratic republic, voters who legislate by
delegating our authority to elected representatives and political parties?
Or is it a call for some kind of direct form of legislation, ‘ballot initiatives’
whereby citizens initiate and vote on specific acts of legislation?
The question ‘Who is a legislator?’ first arises in the winter of 1932–33 in

the ‘miscellaneous’ Notebook 14, a place where Gramsci was developing
new formulations at the same time as he was recopying ideas already
developed into the thematically specific notebooks.27 Gramsci begins his
answer by noting that ‘the word “legislator” can in fact be interpreted
in a very broad sense’, that a legislator must be understood ‘not only in
the restricted sense of parliamentary-state activity, but also in any other
“individual” activity which seeks, in more or less broad spheres of social
life, to change reality according to certain guidelines.’28 ‘Since all men
are “political beings”, all are also “legislators”’, he argues. Though in
its official meaning, legislators are ‘those persons who are empowered
by the law to enact laws’, ‘everyone is a legislator in the broadest sense
of the concept’ because everyone ‘contributes to modifying the social
24
8, §21; pn3, p. 248.
25
14, §3; spn, pp. 265–6.
26
Peter Ghosh, ‘Gramscian Hegemony: An Absolutely Historicist Approach’,
History of European Ideas, vol. 27, no. 1, 2001, p. 5.
27
The new ‘philological’ reading of the development of Gramsci’s thought over the
course of the notebooks has asserted the importance of these late miscellaneous
notebooks: ‘it should be remembered’, Cospito argues (pp. 35–6), ‘that Notebooks
14 and 15 in particular—unlike many contemporaneous “specials”, often inter-
rupted after only a few pages—were used fully by Gramsci, even at times going
into both margins of every page, as if he realized that the space (and time) available
was by now insufficient for putting down all he had to say.’
28
14, §9; Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Valentine Gerratana, ed., Turin 1975,
pp. 1,662–3.
denning: Gramsci 37
environment in which he develops (to modifying certain of its charac-

teristics or to preserving others); in other words, he tends to establish
“norms”, rules of living and of behaviour.’ ‘One’s circle of activity may
be greater or smaller,’ he notes, and ‘the representative power may be
greater or smaller.’ But that only means that one’s legislation ‘will be
put into practice to a greater or lesser extent in its normative, systematic
expression by the “represented”. A father is a legislator for his children,
but the paternal authority will be more or less conscious, more or less
obeyed and so forth.’29
Gramsci does recognize the different degrees of power legislators have:

‘the distinction between ordinary men and others who are more specifi-
cally legislators is provided by the fact that this second group not only
formulates directives which will become a norm of conduct for the oth-
ers, but at the same time creates the instruments by means of which
the directives will themselves be “imposed”.’ ‘Of this second group, the
greatest legislative power belongs to the State personnel (elected and
career officials), who have at their disposal the legal coercive powers of
the State. But this does not mean’, he adds, ‘that the leaders of “private”
organisms and organizations do not have coercive sanctions at their
disposal.’30 The key point is to understand the common practice of leg-
islating in daily life. ‘If everyone is a legislator in the broadest sense of
the concept, he continues to be a legislator even if he accepts directives
from others—if, as he carries them out, he makes certain that others
are carrying them out too; if, having understood their spirit, he propa-
gates them as though making them into rules specifically applicable to
limited and definite zones of living.’31 Everyone is a conductor of others,
whether leading and directing—like orchestra conductors—or following
and relaying—like conductors in electrical systems.
The structure of Gramsci’s argument here obviously mirrors his ear-

lier thesis concerning intellectual activity, and the concept of ‘norms of
conduct’ is analogous to ‘conceptions of the world’. In an earlier note-
book, he had already developed this idea of norms of conduct: on the
one hand, ‘the law as expressive of the ruling class . . . “imposes” on the
whole of society those norms of conduct that are most tightly connected
to its own raison d’être and expansion’;32 on the other hand, the ‘group
29
14, §13; spn, pp. 265–6. 30
14, §13; spn, p. 266.
31
14, §13; spn, p. 266. 32
6, §98; pn3, pp. 83–4.
38 nlr 129
ethic’ of a political association that ‘aims to extend itself to a whole

social grouping . . . must be considered capable of becoming a norm
of conduct for humanity as a whole.’33 But now Gramsci extends the
idea. In our daily life, in greater or smaller circles, each of us establishes
norms of conduct, rules of living, in large part by accepting them, car-
rying them out, and making sure that those around us carry them out.
If ‘norms of conduct’ are analogous to ‘conceptions of the world’, the
forms of political organization—what Gramsci comes to refer to as ‘col-
lective organisms’—are as central to ‘the formation of a national-popular
collective will’ as the ‘forms of cultural organization’ are to moral and
intellectual reformation. Just as everyone is a legislator, so too everyone
is organized: ‘in any given society, nobody is unorganized and without a
party, provided that organization and party are understood broadly, in a
non-formal sense.’34
A theorist of organizing
In most readings of Gramsci, it is the ‘party’ that is accented in this

passage—nobody is without a party. I want to accent the other term—
nobody is ‘unorganized’—in order to suggest that Gramsci’s account of
the party must be seen as an instance of his wider theory of organizing
and organization. His legacy for contemporary political thought lies less
in the specific forms he inhabited than in the questions of organization
he raised. This may seem unpersuasive, for surely the term ‘party’ is more
central to the prison notebooks than ‘organization’ or ‘organizer’: after
all, he writes, in one of the most famous passages, the Modern Prince
‘cannot be a real person, a concrete individual’; ‘it can only be an organ-
ism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which had
already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action,
begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism
and it is the political party—the first cell in which there come together
germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.’35
But what if the political party was simply the organism that he knew,
and a theory of organisms and organization is his real legacy? I want to
suggest that the apparently marginal place of the concept of organiza-
tion in Gramsci is a mark of the fact that ‘organizing’ was an emergent
phenomenon at the time, and he can be seen as one of its first great
theorists. ‘Don’t mourn—organize’, Joe Hill (Gramsci’s contemporary)
33
6, §79; pn3, p. 63. 34
6, §136; pn3, p. 107. 35
13, §1; spn, p. 129.
denning: Gramsci 39
is supposed to have telegraphed just before his execution in 1915, and

today the slogan seems a quintessential expression of North American
radicalism. If the United States has never had a successful labour or
socialist party, its powerful traditions of community and labour organ-
izing, from the Montgomery bus boycott and Cesar Chavez’s farm
workers to the service-sector social movement unionism of unite
here, embody a distinctive ideology famously summarized in the writ-
ings and training of Saul Alinsky.36 ‘Organizing’ has a history: in fact, as
noted in the oed, the first English uses of ‘organizer’ as ‘a person whose
job it is to organize the activities of a union, political party, or similar
body’ are in the United States in the 1870s, where the Knights of Labor
and the Miners’ National Association formally commissioned ‘organiz-
ers’. By the 1880s and 1890s, trade unions were coming to be referred to
as ‘labour organizations’, a phrase with connotations very different from
the Saint-Simonian and Fourierist ideas of the ‘organization of labour’
in the 1840s.
By 1911, Robert Michels, a former member of the German and Italian

socialist parties, had placed the issue of organization at the centre of
political thought in his path-breaking study of parties—a work of the
new ‘political science’ to which Gramsci returned throughout the prison
notebooks. ‘Organization appears the only means for the creation of a
collective will’, he wrote in his opening, a line that would have resonated
with Gramsci. ‘Organization, based as it is upon the principle of least
effort, that is to say, upon the greatest possible economy of energy, is
the weapon of the weak in their struggle with the strong.’ Michels goes
on to note that ‘the socialists’ are ‘the most fanatical of all the partisans
of the idea of organization.’ ‘Organization has become a vital principle
in the working class.’37 Nevertheless, in the 1920s there was as yet little
developed socialist theory of organization: so judged J. B. S. Hardman, a
Yiddish Marxist activist who had migrated to the us after the 1905 revo-
lution in Russia and became the education director for the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers of America. Noting the lack of any attempt ‘to out-
line a technique of trade-union organization’, in 1928 Hardman called
for a training school for organizers, ‘to methodize the problem of
labour organization’.38 With the receding of the revolutionary hopes of
36
Notably, his Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, New York
1971.
37
Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies
of Modern Democracy, Eden and Cedar Paul, trans., New York 1915, pp. 21, 22.
38
Hardman, ed., American Labor Dynamics, New York 1928, p. 97.
40 nlr 129
the early 1920s, the Communist movement had also turned to issues
of organizing, trying to remake parties around factory ‘nuclei’ (rather
than the traditional territorial units) and ‘fractions’ in trade unions and
cooperatives. One sees this articulated in the 1924 collection, Lenin on
Organization; the introduction by the Lithuanian Comintern militant
Vincas Kapsukas accented the recently deceased Lenin as a theorist of
organization.39 By 1927, the us Communists had launched an internal
magazine, Party Organizer. Organizing was in the air, and the question
of developing and educating young militants in this spirit was a central
concern of the prison notebooks.
Gramsci’s insistence on understanding organization ‘broadly, in a non-

formal sense’, allows him to resist the ideological divide between the
‘public’ realm of politics and the ‘private’ sphere of production and
reproduction; he sees not only the legislators of the parliamentary-
administrative state but also the legislators of the factory and the
household. I have argued elsewhere that Gramsci’s ‘notion of the
“organization of work” unites his early account of the Turin factory
councils with his reflections in prison on the “American” methods of
Ford and Taylor.’40 Here I simply want to suggest that, for Gramsci, the
organization of work means not just the labour process—how work is
organized by the employer, the issues raised by Taylorism and scientific
management (the real subsumption of labour, in Marx’s sense)—but
also the politics at work (how work is conducted, the norms that legislate
work); how hegemony (workers’ leadership as well as capital’s dominion
over them) is ‘born in the factory’.41
Against political fetishism
Gramsci’s theory of organizing is thus a critique of both the ‘pessimistic’

political science of Pareto and Michels and the ‘optimistic’ management
science of Frederick Taylor and the Hawthorne studies. Indeed, one
might see ‘scientific organization’ as a working-class response to
39
The English translation, Lenin on Organization, Chicago 1926, was volume I of
the Lenin Library in the us; the volume was first published in German in 1924, and
a French edition appeared in 1928.
40
Michael Denning, ‘“Once again on the organic capacities of the working class”:
Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labour’, in Joseph Francese, ed., Perspectives on
Gramsci, London 2009, p. 72.
41
A phrase first used in 1, §61; pn1, p. 169.
denning: Gramsci 41
‘scientific management’; and just as management theory moves from

Taylor’s technical and disciplinary model to Mayo’s ‘human relations’,
so Gramsci’s marks a move from a technical model—with its rhetoric of
‘transmission belts’ and shop ‘cells’ and ‘nuclei’—to organizing as an act
of hegemony, of leading and winning consent. At the heart of Gramsci’s
reflections on organization is a distinctive theory of what we might
call political fetishism. Marx’s account of the ‘religion of everyday life’
included several forms of fetishism: that of commodities but also the
fetishism of the wage, interest and capital. In Notebook 15, Gramsci devel-
ops an account of political or organizational fetishism, as what is at work
when a ‘collective organism’ is imagined, by its own members, as acting
on its own. It appears as ‘an entity estranged from itself’, a ‘phantom of
the intellect, a fetish’. ‘The individual expects the organism to operate,
even if he does not.’ It comes to appear as a ‘phantasmagorical entity, the
abstraction of the collective organism, a sort of autonomous divinity, that
does not reason with any concrete mind, but reasons nonetheless, that
does not move with the resolute legs of men, but moves nevertheless.’ It
is, Gramsci writes, ‘a widespread way of thinking’—perhaps a remnant
of Catholic transcendence and paternalistic regimes—that is ‘common
for a number of organisms, from the state, to the nation’; ‘what is mar-
vellous, and characteristic, is that the fetishism of this kind reproduces
itself for “voluntary” organisms, of a non-public or state type, such as the
parties and the trade unions.’42
To combat this kind of political fetishism, Gramsci insists on histori-

cizing the forms of political organization. If organization and party in
the broadest sense are indeed fundamental, one shouldn’t reify spe-
cific forms of organization, whether trade unions, factory councils, or
political parties, which are in all cases shaped by specific historical situ-
ations. Consider what Gramsci writes about Hegel and Marx: Hegel, he
notes, ‘already goes beyond pure constitutionalism and theorizes the
parliamentary state with its regime of parties.’ However, ‘his concep-
tion of association cannot but be still vague and primitive’, ‘in keeping
with the historical experience of the times’ which ‘offered only one
accomplished example of organization, the “corporative” one (politics
embedded in the economy).’ Though Marx, on the other hand ‘could
not have historical experiences superior (or, at least, greatly superior)
to Hegel’s’, ‘he had a sense of the masses through his activity as a
42
15, §13, Quaderni del carcere, p. 1,770.
42 nlr 129
journalist and agitator.’ Nonetheless, Gramsci concludes, ‘Marx’s con-

cept of organization still remains entangled within these elements:
trade organization, Jacobin clubs, secret conspiracies of small groups,
journalistic organization.’43 For Gramsci, it is a profound mistake to
take the forms of workers’ organization as permanent or natural.44 A
Gramscian analysis of Gramsci’s concept of organization would have to
conclude that he himself remained entangled within the forms of his
own time: urban working-class cultural and educational circles, parlia-
mentary socialist parties, Fordist factory councils, and an embryonic
communist party.
Moreover, Gramsci argues that there is a vital relation between class and
forms of political organization. Just as different classes have different
relations to cultural conceptions of the world, so different classes have
different relations to legislating norms of conduct. ‘In political struggle
one should not ape the methods of the ruling classes, or one will fall into
easy ambushes’, he insists. ‘Class characteristics lead to a fundamental
difference: a class which must work regular hours every day cannot have
permanent and specialized assault organizations, unlike a class with
abundant financial resources whose members are not at all constrained
by regular jobs’. ‘Commando tactics cannot therefore have the same
importance for some classes as for others’: ‘to fix one’s mind on the mili-
tary model is the mark of a fool.’45 Indeed, because of the reality of work,
the dialectic of leaders and led in the working class, the issue of working-
class hegemony has a distinctive character. This will lead him to point
out the limits of strikes—to this day taken to be one of the highest forms
of organization—because they simply call on ordinary people to show the
‘qualities [of] solidarity, obedience to the mass organization, faith in their
leaders, a spirit of resistance and sacrifice’—in contrast to the potential
in ‘the occupation of the factories’, which ‘required an unprecedented
multiplicity of active, leading elements’.46 In the factory occupations, one
might say, ordinary workers emerged as ‘organic legislators’, creating
new norms of conduct, new ways of conducting work.
43
1, §47; pn1, pp. 153–4.
44
Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920, Quintin Hoare, ed., London
1977, pp. 74–6; see Denning, ‘Antonio Gramsci as a theorist of labour’, p. 74.
45
1, §133; pn1, pp. 217–8.
46
Selections from Political Writings: 1921–1926, Quintin Hoare, ed., London 1978,
pp. 418–9.
denning: Gramsci 43
Orchestras
In his reflections on the dialectic of leading and conducting in working-

class daily life, Gramsci returns several times to the image of an
orchestra (which had already appeared in Capital). It first appears in
the long note in Notebook 2 that summarizes and criticizes Michels’s
account of political parties, an opening move in Gramsci’s critique of
political science. Gramsci criticizes Michels’s inattention to issues of
class in forms of political leadership, and writes that ‘if there is no class
difference, the question becomes a purely technical one—the orchestra
does not believe that the conductor is an oligarchic boss—concerning
the division of labour and education.’47 Here the orchestra and its con-
ductor become a model for a technical relation of leadership. The second
instance recasts the orchestra as a political relation of consensus. In a
short note on ‘obeying and commanding’ in Notebook 8, the orchestra
and its conductor become an example of ‘agreement reached in advance,
collaboration; command is a distinct function, not imposed hierarchi-
cally’.48 The third instance comes in the important late note on political
fetishism already discussed. Here the orchestra becomes a figure for
a collective organism that is not estranged to a phantasmagoric entity,
but embodies an achieved unity: ‘a collective consciousness, that is a liv-
ing organism, is not formed until after the multiplicity has been united
through the friction of individuals: nor can it be said that “silence” is not
multiplicity. An orchestra that rehearses, each instrument on its own,
gives the impression of the most horrible cacophony; yet these tests are
the condition for the orchestra to live as one “instrument”.’49
None of the political antinomies faced by Gramsci in the age of the

socialist labour party—a century that stretched from the German Social
Democrats to the Brazilian Workers Party—has been overcome. Like
Gramsci, we live in a confused time. On the one hand, the recent
memory of riveting occupations has generated new political forces—
our Turin was Zuccotti Park and Standing Rock, and our Gramscis are
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad. (aoc has said, ‘The way that
I think of myself is as an organizer’. ‘From the beginning, I was always
47
2, §75; pn1, p. 323.
48
8, §45; pn3, p. 263.
49
15, §13, Quaderni del carcere, p. 1,771.
44 nlr 129
focused on organizing people, building a coalition, and deepening that

coalition with other organizers.’50) On the other hand, the spectre of
police and fascist violence lies across the continent, as chants of ‘I can’t
breathe’ and ‘say their names’ reverberate in the wake of the killings of
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others. The orchestra of the
left still seems to be rehearsing, each instrument on its own, giving the
impression of the most horrible cacophony, with versions of militant
spontaneism—the occupation of the squares, the mushrooming hashtag
activism of #blacklivesmatter and #MeToo—vying with insurgencies in
parliamentary parties. Moreover, we face ever new Boulangers, trumped-
up demagogues mobilizing fear in the face of crisis. Yet these tests are
the condition for the orchestra to live as one instrument.
Let me underline what is at stake in arguing for Gramsci as a theorist

of organizing. The age of the party is over: this seems true not just in
the us, but in the us-ification of other parliamentary election regimes.
As a result, young activists think of themselves as organizers (of a vari-
ety of stripes) not as partisans (party members). If so, Gramsci’s theory
of the party is a less vital legacy than his theory of organizing; more
over, his account is richer than the received us ideology of organizing,
which tends to bracket ‘ideological’ issues from ‘pragmatic’ concerns.51
Gramsci didn’t leave a handbook of political solutions; if anything, he
insistently reminds us that the forms of political organization are contin-
ually transformed, that we hold on to exhausted forms at our peril. But
his notebooks, composed in defeat, in prison, under fascism, offer a way
of rethinking popular politics—the reformation of the national-popular
collective will—in the workplace, the neighbourhood, the household, the
police precinct, the schools, even the legislature: that is, in all the places
where norms of conduct are lived and must be transformed, where
everyone is a legislator.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ‘In Her Own Words’, Jacobin, 11 July 2018.

50
51
For a powerful account and critique of this tradition, see the work of Jane
McAlevey: Raising Expectations and Raising Hell: My Decade Fighting for the Labour
Movement, London 2012, and No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded
Age, New York 2016.
Neither Vertical nor Horizontal
A Theory of Political Organization
Rodrigo Nunes
PB • £19.99/$29.95 • 978-1-7887-3383-0
‘Nunes systematically assesses the prob-

lems the left has faced since the Occupy
movement and its failure. A must-read for
the activists of our time.’
—Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
Prophets of Deceit
A Study of the Techniques of the
American Agitator
Norbert Guterman and Leo Löwenthal
PB • £16.99/$24.95 • 978-1-7866-3696-1
Classic analysis of proto-fascist tendencies

in 1940s America.
‘A most illuminating study.’
—New York Times
The Great Adaptation
Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe
Romain Felli
HB • £20/$24.95 • 978-1-7887-3414-1
How neoliberal ideas infuse contemporary

responses to the environmental breakdown.
‘A trenchant essay’—Libération
‘Excellent and very important.’

—Geoff Mann, Antipode
The Invention of Terrorism

in Europe, Russia and the
United States
Carola Dietze
HB • £30/$49.95 • 978-1-7866-3719-2
Terrorism is not, as is often claimed, the

product of Tsarist despotism or Islamic
sects in medieval Persia. Twinned at birth
with modernity, in fact, it has changed
remarkably little since.
javier moreno zacarés
EUPHORIA OF THE RENTIER?
N
otwithstanding the cyclical downturns and occa-
sional depressions, it is customary to speak of capitalist
development as a dynamic of self-expanding growth. Since
the 1970s, however, stagnation has set in on a global scale
amid falling profitability in the sphere of commodity production. The
relocation of the world’s manufacturing base to low-wage economies has
failed to offset this process—on the contrary, late industrializers have
compressed the productivity gains of their predecessors into ever-shorter
growth cycles, recreating their problems in an accelerated fashion. In
the meantime, capital has turned to speculative ventures, promising
better returns. The result has been a pattern of weak growth sustained
by financial bubbles, leaving a trail of destructive crashes and jobless
recoveries in the build-up to the Great Recession. In the decade since
2009, the central banks of the rich world have blanketed their anaemic
economies with money, but to no avail. As growth fails to pick up, the
wealthy are abdicating their investment duties, parking their capital in
government bonds regardless of negative interest rates—the owners of
capital are now literally paying states to take their money.
Though the story of secular stagnation is by now familiar, considera-

ble debates continue to surround it. First, there are competing ways of
conceptualizing the present stage of capitalist development. Conceptual
trends have varied over the decades: late capitalism, post-Fordism, cog-
nitive capitalism. However, the term that has risen to dominance over
the last fifteen years or so is ‘financialization’—a concept that highlights
the growing salience of finance, insurance and real estate in the world
economy at the expense of manufacturing.1 Second, the underlying
causes of the rise of ‘financialized capitalism’ are a matter of dispute.
Some see stagnation as a consequence of neoliberal restructuring in
the wake of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. According to this view,

48 nlr 129
neoliberalism empowered short-sighted financiers with their specula-

tive interests, stunting capitalism’s productive dynamism in the process.
Others argue that capitalism peaked with the ‘golden age’ of the postwar
boom, as intense international competition gave way to thinning profit-
ability and secular stagnation, leading to an outgrowth of excess capital
in the form of finance.
There is a third debate lurking beneath the surface, one that has not yet
begun in earnest but that is drawing increasing attention: the question
of whether we are witnessing a transition out of capitalism. Immanuel
Wallerstein saw financialization as the twilight of the capitalist world-
system, with the Great Recession signalling its irreversible demise. At
the time, he prophesied that ‘we can be certain that we will not be living
in the capitalist world-system in 30 years’—‘the new social system that
will come out of this crisis will be substantially different’. What it might
be, however, was ‘a political question and thus open-ended’.2 Most theo-
rists are, for good reason, less confident in making predictions with such
astronomical precision, but this has not prevented a growing number of
voices from raising the possibility that capitalism as we know it may be
warping into something else.
For classical political economists, capitalism was defined by a pattern

of self-sustaining growth driven by market competition. Competition
compels producers to maximise the cost-efficiency of their operations,
typically with labour-saving means, resulting in a systematic expansion
of output that cheapens the price of commodities—this is what Marxists
have long called ‘the law of value’. If such a dynamic is what distin-
guishes capitalism from other modes of production, then we need to
confront the fact that the capitalist world economy appears to be trans-
forming into the mirror image of this. With growth slowing down to
a trickle and productivity stagnating, it appears that accumulation is
now less about making anything and more about simply owning some-
thing. Profit-making is increasingly about cornering scarce assets in
1
Greta Krippner, ‘The Financialization of the American Economy’, Socio-Economic
Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 2005. Özgür Orhangazi, Financialization and the us Economy,
Cheltenham 2008. Thanks go to Elisabeth Wallmann, Callum Ward and Ilias
Alami for commenting on earlier drafts. This essay was written with the financial
support of the Leverhulme Trust.
2
Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘El sistema que salga de la crisis será muy diferente’,
Periódico Diagonal, 19 February 2009.
moreno zacarés: Late Capitalism 49
order to drive up their price—a practice that the classics called ‘rent’
and which they identified not with capitalists, but with landlords. As
rentierism takes over, it appears that capitalism’s distinct forms of sur-
plus extraction, organized around the impersonal pressures of the world
market, are giving way to juridico-political forms of exploitation—fees,
leases, politically-sustained capital gains. From the late David Graeber
to Robert Brenner, authoritative theorists of capitalism with opposing
ideas of its origins and development are now converging on the view
that contemporary patterns of class domination look, increasingly, non-
capitalist.3 For McKenzie Wark, this warrants the provocative question:
is it something worse?4
Redefining rent
In a masterful study, Brett Christophers casts light on contempo-

rary capitalist dynamics by reformulating the concept of ‘rentierism’.
Rentier Capitalism defines rent as ‘payment to an economic actor (the
rentier) . . . purely by virtue of controlling something valuable’. Rent-
bearing assets can be physical, like enclosed natural resources or a
piece of the built environment, or they can be purely legal entities, like
intellectual property. The point is to secure ‘income derived from the
ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions
of limited or no competition’.5 Christophers describes this as a syn-
thesis of the views of classical political economists, who saw rent as
monopoly profits derived from the objective scarcity of an asset, with
those of orthodox economists, who describe as ‘rent’ all excess profits
made from stunted competition, such as through regulatory capture.
This contradistinction is somewhat of a caricature: was Marx, for exam-
ple, truly unaware that ground-rent arises out of enclosure, and not
just out of the sheer scarcity of land? Yet, Christophers’s redefinition
of rent injects a remarkable dose of clarity into an otherwise obscure
and intricate topic, one until recently confined to critical geography, the
author’s disciplinary home.
3
David Graeber, ‘Imagining a World with no Bullshit Jobs’, Dissent, 16 August
2018. Robert Brenner has made this observation in a series of recent interviews on
Jacobin Radio.
4
McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, London and New York
2019.
5
Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for
It?, London and New York 2020, pp. xvi, xxiv.
50 nlr 129
For Christophers, capitalism in its current stage is not just dominated

by rent and rentiers; it is also, ‘in a much more profound sense, sub-
stantially scaffolded by and organized around the assets that generate
those rents and sustain those rentiers’. In other words, we are living in
a fully-fledged rentier capitalism: ‘a mode of economic organization in
which success is based principally on what you control, not what you
do—the balance sheet is the be-all and the end-all’. The days of crea-
tive destruction are long gone. This variant of capitalism is structured
around ‘having’ rather than ‘making’; it is ‘pervaded by a proprieto-
rial rather than entrepreneurial ethos’, in which the pace of societal
reproduction is no longer set by fierce competition in the sphere of
commodity production, but by ‘securing, protecting and sweating scarce
assets’. This carries inherently monopolistic tendencies which are ‘gen-
erally inimical to dynamism and innovation’, as the safety of rentierism
disincentivizes productivity-enhancing investments. For Christophers,
the term ‘rentierization’ captures better the stagnant state of contempo-
rary capitalism than ‘financialization’, which focuses on the redirection
of economic activities towards financial channels. The latter ‘privileges
one strand of a broader structural transformation and ignores all of the
others—several of which, data suggest, have been just as materially sig-
nificant as the expansion of finance, if not more so’.6 As Christophers
taxonomizes in the book, contemporary rentierism is a highly complex
and multi-faceted phenomenon. If the rentier of the nineteenth century
was predominantly a financier or a landlord, the rentiers of today also
derive income streams from digital platforms, natural-resource reserves,
intellectual property, service contracts or infrastructure.
Rentierism in one country
The empirical focus of the book is on neoliberal Britain—the rentier econ-

omy par excellence. Across seven chapters brimming with useful data,
Christophers explores the role of different types of rentier that have flour-
ished since the 1970s, charting their weight in the economy as well as the
institutional transformations underpinning their activities. Thatcher’s
massive privatization of public assets—state-owned companies, build-
ings, land—birthed infrastructure rentiers and swelled the ranks of land
rentiers, while the spread of public contracts due to outsourcing gave
rise to service-contract rentiers. The liberalization of finance and falling
interest rates enabled a surge in interest-bearing household, corporate
6
Rentier Capitalism, pp. xviii, 40, 31, 5.
and sovereign debt that boosted the power of financial rentiers. The
exploitation of oil reserves in the North Sea and the invention of digital-
platform technologies expanded the pool of natural-resource and digital
rents. In turn, the fortification of property rights buttressed rentierism
as a whole, as did the long-term neutralization of competition law and
a growing leniency towards monopoly practices. Fiscal policy was also
key, particularly the weakening of capital-gains tax, which released fiscal
pressure on the gains occurring upon asset disposal, allowing asset-price
increases to grow unchecked. As such, neoliberalism did not just support
the incomes of rentiers, but also the value of rentier assets themselves.
The exorbitant monopoly profits afforded by rentierism redirected capital
towards low-productivity sectors, resulting in a stagnant economy that,
due to the disarticulation of working-class organizations, is also marked
by growing inequality. Underpinning this social formation is a tacit class
alliance between large corporations and petty rentiers: homeowners
anxious about house-price increases and comfortable Telegraph-reading
retirees relying on pension-fund income.
For all its conceptual and empirical strengths, Rentier Capitalism suffers
from a number of lacunae. Despite aiming to tell a broader story about
the neoliberal age, the book’s approach displays a considerable ‘meth-
odological nationalism’. Besides an opening recognition that British
capitalism now lacks geo-economic integrity (‘London is a place where
world capitalism does business—no longer one where British capitalism
does the world’s business’), the book does not engage much with the
position of rentier Britain in the global political economy, nor with how
this might be shaped by a legacy of global imperialism and neo-colonial
power.7 Moreover, though the book opens with an excellent theoretical
exploration of rentierism, it neglects the other term that appears in the
book’s title: capitalism. What capitalism itself is, is effectively taken for
granted throughout the study. This omission is particularly important
for our purposes, as it prevents Christophers from fully grasping what
the ongoing process of rentierization, captured so well by his findings,
indicates about the past, present and future of capitalism.
The closest thing to a definition of capitalism in Christophers’s study is a

passing identification of its ‘essence’ with commodity exchange.8 This is
tantamount to falling back on a notion of ‘commercial society’, according
7
Rentier Capitalism, p. 6.
8
Rentier Capitalism, p.29.
52 nlr 129
to which capitalism is essentially a mode of economic organization in

which profits are made through trade. The problem with this view is that
it assumes precisely what needs explaining. Commodity exchange has
existed since time immemorial without setting in motion the dynamics
of modern economic development. This became clear to Marx in his
efforts to historicize the origins of capitalism. For him, the simple out-
growth of ‘antediluvian’ forms of capital (‘interest-bearing capital . . .
together with its twin brother, merchant’s capital’) was insufficient to
explain the rise of the capitalist mode of production. On the contrary,
Marx noted, whenever capital achieved a certain social supremacy before
capitalism, it tended to do so at the expense of production: it ‘clings to
it like a parasite’—‘it cripples productive forces instead of developing
them, and simultaneously perpetuates these lamentable conditions in
which the social productivity of labour is not developed’.9
Two logics
These pre-capitalist capitals operated according to what Christophers

would describe as a rentier logic. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown,
the commercial activities of pre-capitalist merchants relied not so much
on competitive production as on their capacity to arbitrage the supply of
goods across disjointed markets—to buy cheap and sell dear.10 In this
context, superior shipping capacities, monopolistic privileges or political
connections acted as rent-bearing assets that allowed pre-capitalist mer-
cantile actors to exploit the socially determined scarcity of commodities. Marx
agreed that rentier capital had a tendency to smother productive capital
in pre-capitalist societies. This, however, was no longer the norm ‘in the
context of the capitalist mode of production’, where ‘commercial capital
becomes demoted from its earlier preponderant existence’.11 Capitalism,
in short, is the first historical society where productive capital is capable
of offsetting the smothering effects of commercial capital, allowing both
to develop in a symbiotic rather than contradictory manner.
Marx’s point can be illustrated by the role of ground-rent in capital-

ist agriculture. In pre-capitalist societies, peasant producers organized
their subsistence around ‘safety-first’ strategies reliant on unpaid fam-
ily labour. This discouraged risky productive innovations, which meant
9
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, London 1981, pp. 728–32.
10
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London 2002.
11
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London 1981, pp. 505–7.
that, whenever output needed to be expanded, peasant households

tended to respond by deploying as much family labour as was needed,
irrespective of falling output per additional hour worked. As such, the
tendency was for agriculture to become more labour-intensive over time,
leading to stagnating or even declining levels of productivity and eventu-
ally subsistence crises. In the context of a stagnant social surplus, the
rent hikes of landlords claimed larger shares of a shrinking pie. This, in
turn, aggravated the problem of subsistence for the peasantry and accel-
erated the decline of their productivity. Capitalist agriculture, however, is
premised on constant productivity growth. Fierce competition puts capi-
talist farmers under relentless pressure to introduce capital-using and
labour-saving technologies just to stay in business. In this context, the
rent extracted by landlords merely eats into an already expanding social sur-
plus, which means that rentierism need not neutralize productivity gains.
In fact, land rent and capitalist production can even develop a symbiotic
relationship, with capitalists developing the productive forces even faster
just to offset the cost of rent hikes. For Robert Brenner, this self-rein-
forcing spiral of rent and productivity increases is precisely what birthed
capitalist agriculture in the first place.12 In early modern England, lords
forced peasants into short-term leases, locking them into a competitive
land market that raised rent prices as population growth pressed against
the supply of land. In this context, raising output became the condition to
renew a tenant’s access to the land, driving the spread techniques of crop
rotation and new forms of animal husbandry. Over time, the pressure
of ground-rent rewarded the most productive tenants, who consolidated
leases into large capitalist farms employing waged labour.
To be sure, capitalist production and rent extraction operate accord-

ing to diametrically opposite logics. Capitalist production involves the
continuous expansion of output with productivity increases. Impelled
by competition, the capitalist improves the cost-efficiency of the com-
modities he sells, driving down prices despite falling rates of profit. Rent
extraction, by contrast, relies on the reproduction of scarcity. The rentier
is a hoarder by definition, a commercial actor exploiting the capacity to
corner markets in order to raise prices as much as possible. Perhaps for
this reason, Christophers argues that ‘derentierization’ would result in
a ‘purer’ form of capitalism, one that is ‘fairer and more competitive’.13
12
Robert Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, Past and Present,
no. 97, November 1982.
13
54 nlr 129
Echoing the works of Thomas Piketty and Mariana Mazzucato, he invar-

iably sees rent as a hindrance to the capitalist mode of production, as
the inflated profits of rent-bearing assets distract capital away from its
duties in productivity and innovation. But the relationship need not to
be a contradictory one. Though rent extraction is always a nuisance for
the individual capitalist—as it syphons away excess profits—it does not
need to undermine capitalist dynamism per se, for capitalism is the first
mode of production in which the growth of productive capital can out-
pace the stifling effects of rentier capital.
This problematizes Christophers’s historical account of the ongoing

process of rentierization. Christophers describes the United Kingdom as
a rentier nation ‘by historical disposition’, noting that rentiers have had
a dominant role in British society ‘from the earliest days of its capitalist
odyssey’, particularly landlords and financiers. He argues that the rentier
was temporarily displaced from dominance in the early to mid-twentieth
century, when vast amounts of land were taken into public ownership
and finance was subdued by government regulation, paving the way for
the manufacturing boom of the postwar years. When this boom reached
a point of exhaustion in the 1970s—described as a ‘secular decline’
without additional explanation—neoliberal restructuring brought the
revenge of the rentier. With rentierism running rampant, the return to
the norm has taken a toll on the dynamism of British capitalism ever
since.14 The problem with this narrative is that it fails an elementary
test of historical comparison. Considering that Britain pioneered the
agrarian and industrial revolutions, why did the country’s historical dis-
position towards rentierism not stifle the development of the productive
forces back then? This unanswered question raises additional ones. If
rentierism did not strangle capitalist dynamism in the nineteenth cen-
tury, then what is to say that it is doing so now? And, by extension: what
if the ongoing process of rentierization is not the source of capitalism’s
slowdown at all, but only the symptom of a deeper malaise?
Industrial overcapacity
Perhaps it is capitalism itself that is in retreat, with rentierism merely

colonizing its ruins. This is the central premise of Aaron Benanav’s
Automation and the Future of Work: that the engine of capitalist growth—
productive capital—is winding down of its own accord. The book is
14
Rentier Capitalism, pp. 1–5, 19.
written in critical dialogue with the ‘automation discourse’, the now

widespread view that runaway technological change is rendering waged
labour increasingly redundant. Embraced by a broad spectrum of com-
mentators—from ultraconservative neoliberals and tech gurus to far-left
accelerationists—the automation discourse locates the source of rising
job insecurity and stagnant wages in a new generation of labour-saving
technologies. Benanav refutes this thesis. If labour-saving technology
were responsible for a long-term pattern of job destruction, then rates
of labour productivity growth (output per worker) should be speed-
ing up, when in fact they are slowing down. Unlike Christophers,
however, Benanav does not ascribe the slowdown to the outgrowth
of rentierism, but to ‘a worsening overcapacity in world markets for
manufactured goods’.15
In barely one hundred pages, Benanav combines technical precision

with an admirable degree of argumentative clarity to rearrange the
puzzle of global stagnation. Building on the ‘long downturn’ thesis of
Robert Brenner, Benanav argues that this historic saturation of global
capitalism traces its origins to the post-World War II era. Underpinned
by American technology transfers and geopolitical interests, the recon-
struction of Europe and Japan brought their manufacturing bases up
to speed with American producers and intensified international com-
petition for manufacturing exports. This, however, did not dissuade
other regions of the globe from building up their manufacturing capac-
ities as well and adopting export-led growth strategies. The spread of
industrialization crowded international markets and depressed prices
for manufactured goods, making rapid rates of industrial expansion
more difficult to achieve. From the late 1960s, high-income countries
began to shed industrial employment amid falling profit rates, with later
industrializers following apace as they reached the technical frontier.
Deindustrialization reached Southern Europe in the late 1970s, with
Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa follow-
ing in the 1980s and 90s. In many poorer countries, industrialization
peaked at such low levels ‘that it may be more accurate to say that they
never industrialized in the first place’.16
Benanav’s account leaves capitalism’s historic drive to maximize produc-

tivity in an awkward position, one that could use greater qualification.
15
Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work, London and New York 2020, p. 24.
16
Automation and the Future of Work, p. 21.
56 nlr 129
He stresses that the immediate cause of stagnation is not productivity

growth per se, but a glut in the world market caused by the replication of
technical capacities. Yet, it is evident that the underlying cause of over-
capacity is an imperative to increase productivity by capital-intensive
means, otherwise there would have been no need to replicate techni-
cal capacities in the first place. Benanav, however, seems fully aware of
this. As he points out, the economies that have managed to retain the
greatest shares of manufacturing employment are precisely those that
have robotized the most in response to fierce industrial competition.17 In
other words, the apparent demotion of productivity from his narrative
needs to be read alongside his critique of the automation discourse.
The mistake of the automation theorists lies in ascribing global dein-

dustrialization to productivity growth directly, prompting them to miss
a number of intermediate linkages in the causal chain. This grows out
of a statistical deception. Automation theorists wrongly assume that
industrial-productivity rates are accelerating because they have remained
high relative to output growth. Yet, this only appears as such ‘because the
yardstick of output growth, against which [productivity] is measured, has
been shrinking’. In reality, industrial-productivity rates are slowing down
and output is slowing down even faster. The story is really one of ‘output-
led’ deindustrialization. Overcrowded global markets for manufactured
goods have translated into thinning rates of profit and declining rates of
investment in fixed capital, with a corresponding economic slowdown.
This, in turn, comes with slowing productivity, as low growth rates mean
that firms ‘forgo major investments in expanding their productive capaci-
ties; many new gadgets on display in trade shows thus fail to find their way
onto shop floors’.18 In other words, capitalism’s drive to intensify produc-
tivity remains at the source of the problem, but the story is more complex
than the automation theorists’ fixation with technology would suggest.
A general downturn
This exhaustion of global industrialization casts a dark prospect over the

future of capitalism, as there are no viable alternative engines of growth.
Overcapacity is even more extreme in agriculture, and the service
sector—which by now amounts to a majority of the global workforce—
17
18
Automation and the Future of Work, pp. 23, 21, 42.
is not particularly amenable to leaps in productivity. Historically,

impediments to raising the productivity of services have been overcome
‘precisely by industrializing them’, that is, by replacing service workers
with manufactured goods, just as laundresses’ labour was replaced by
the washing machine. Echoing the work of William Baumol, Benanav
argues that services suffer from an inherent ‘cost disease’. Sluggish rates
of productivity growth mean that ‘services become ever more expensive
relative to goods’, which in turn means that the ‘growth of demand for
services depends on the growth of incomes across the wider economy’.
This poses a serious problem in a context of stagnating wages and wide-
spread precarity: ‘as the rate of overall economic growth slows with the
dilapidation of the industrial growth engine, the pace of service-sector
employment growth should slacken, too—and it generally has, across
the advanced-capitalist countries’.19
So where does capital go in a stagnant world economy? ‘As countries

have deindustrialized, they have also seen a massive build-up of finan-
cialized capital, chasing returns to the ownership of relatively liquid
assets rather than investing long-term in new fixed capital’. The process
is one of constant disinvestment away from productive capital ‘and fall-
ing long-term interest rates, as the supply of loanable funds far outstrips
demand’. The outgrowth of finance capital has in turn fed asset-price
bubbles, delivering a periodical mirage of wealth effects to richer house-
holds, enabling them to boost their consumption. When bubbles burst,
these same households tend to ‘withdraw from consumption to pay
down their debts, generating long periods of economic malaise’.20 This
dynamic of stagnation-financialization is what underlies the rentieriza-
tion of capitalism, and not the other way around, as Christophers claims.
In the face of stagnant growth rates, capital accumulation becomes a
largely zero-sum redistributive conflict in which investment flees to the
safety of rentierism. Neoliberal reforms did not originate this process,
though they certainly magnified it by removing restrictions to monopoly
profits and facilitating bubble-induced capital gains. As in pre-capitalist
societies, the rhythms of productive growth are now increasingly subor-
dinate to the rentier dynamics of finance and mercantile activity, though
this time the underlying cause is not the smothering grip of the rentier,
but capitalism’s own productive exhaustion.
19
Automation and the Future of Work, pp. 57–60.
20
58 nlr 129
The problem is that, as rentierism takes over, capitalism looks less and
less like itself. Are we caught in a transition out of capitalism? The mere
question may elicit incredulous responses. Of course, we still live in a soci-
ety mediated by money and markets, but so did the humans of antiquity.
One could point out that the productive stagnation of the kind Benanav
identifies is itself a function of capitalist competition—that the capitalist
‘law of value’ is still at play. But then again, historical transitions are often
drawn-out, messy processes, where old modes of production tend to lin-
ger and coexist with new ones. ‘There are no cut-and-dried distinctions’,
writes Christophers about rentiers; ‘it is unlikely to be the case that all
of the rentier’s income takes the form of rent’—‘income derives simul-
taneously both from control of an asset and from the work involved in
delivery of the product or service underwritten by it’.21 The same could be
said about entire social formations, with capitalist production persisting
but becoming demoted from its preponderant role in the new society. To
determine whether a society merits the label ‘capitalist’ or not, the crucial
question is what sets the pace of societal reproduction. If, as Christophers
claims, rentierism has indeed become the dominant logic, displacing
productivity growth and creative destruction as the central principle of
social organization, then the capitalist mode of production has become
subservient to something else. In which case, to speak of ‘rentier capital-
ism’ would be a misnomer—we would need a new term for it.
Burying capital
‘Of course, there’s plenty of evidence for this still being capitalism or
mostly capitalism’, writes McKenzie Wark in Capital is Dead. The ques-
tion, rather, is ‘whether an additional mode of production is emerging
and whether it is qualitatively different enough to call it something else’.
This is the starting premise of Wark’s provocative book, which takes aim
at the lack of historical imagination of contemporary Marxism, accused
of contenting itself with the thought that ‘since communism has not
prevailed, this must still be capitalism’. For Wark, after decades of crush-
ing defeat, the ‘genteel Marxists’ of academia have ceased to examine
capitalism as a historical, evolving phenomenon, because they have tac-
itly made peace with the idea that it cannot be overcome. The task, then,
is to shock us out of what Wendy Brown once called ‘left melancholy’.22
21
Rentier Capitalism, p. xxv.
22
Capital Is Dead, pp. 81, 12, passim; Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’,
boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3, 1999.
Wark reminds us that once upon a time there was ‘a language about
transitions between modes of production’, one in which capitalism was
a process with a clear historical origin, and, potentially, an end.23 The
book aims to recover this form of historical reasoning through a creative
thought experiment, with bittersweet conclusions. ‘So the bad news is:
this is not capitalism anymore, it’s something worse. And the good news
is: capital is not eternal, and even if this mode of production is worse, it
is not forever. There could be others.’24
So what is the latest monster that class society has engendered? Wark
baptises it the vectoralist mode of production. Recent technologi-
cal advances have made information extremely cheap and abundant,
raising the problem of ‘how to maintain forms of class inequality,
oppression, domination and exploitation, based on something that in
principle is now ridiculously abundant’. To resolve this contradiction, a
new mode of production has morphed out of capitalism, one based on
the control of what she calls ‘vectors of information’, an abstraction that
designates the ‘infrastructure on which information is routed, whether
through time or space’. If the ownership and control of the means of
production confer upon the capitalist the power to organize labour,
then ownership and control of the vector gives the vectoralist the power
to organize the means of production themselves, through ‘patents,
copyrights, brands, trademarks, proprietary logistical processes and the
like’. For Wark, much of the power and property of the world’s larg-
est corporations is now in vectoral form. Like Christophers, she notes
that many of them ‘don’t actually make the things they sell’, and even
when they do, ‘a quite remarkable amount of the valuation of the com-
pany comes from portfolios of intellectual property, or proprietary data
about their customers’.25
Importantly, the vectoralist class is a ‘new kind of ruling class’, that

does not appropriate a quantity of surplus value so much as ‘exploit an
asymmetry of information’. This dynamic has called into existence a
new subordinate class of relatively privileged ‘hackers’.26 Like Berardi’s
23
Capital Is Dead, pp. 22–3. This language remains alive and well. The Transition
Debate rages on, if not with the intensity of the 1970s. For a recent collection on
the topic, see Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post, eds, Case Studies in the Origins of
Capitalism, London 2019.
24
Capital Is Dead, p. 29.
25
Capital Is Dead, pp. 5, 55, 45, 115.
26
Capital Is Dead, p. 54, 13, passim.
60 nlr 129
‘cognitariat’,27 the hacker class is described as that which produces new

hacks of information, whether of a technical or a cultural kind. Hacker
labour is ‘not like the seasonal repetitions of farming or the clocking-on
of the worker’, it has a distinct rhythm of its own that resists old forms
of workplace discipline. Importantly, it also lacks a ‘relation between
the units of labour time and the units of value produced’; ‘Something
cooked up on the spur of the moment might have enormous value. Long
hours of slog might end up being for nothing.’ The qualitative work of
producing new information is then appropriated by the vectoralist, who
commodifies it by turning it into a commodity that can be rendered
equivalent in the market. Pre-vectoralist class antagonisms, such as the
landlord-tenant or capital-labour relation, coexist and interact with the
new vectoralist-hacker dynamic. Vectoralism still sits atop a pyramid of
exploited labour: when corporations like Apple or Google appropriate
information produced by their armies of hackers, they then incorporate
it into ‘products whose manufacture can be tendered out to a subor-
dinate class of capitalists’. Likewise, landlords benefit from the rise of
the vector in ways that capital does not. The influx of ‘creatives’ and
‘techies’ gentrifies neighbourhoods and drives out working-class ten-
ants. Simultaneously, it adds ‘layers of information to the place that can
be recuperated as value to sell it to bankers and lawyers and drive out
mere hacker-class tenants in turn’.28
In this complex modal formation, Wark argues, the vectoralist mode of

production has become dominant, relegating capitalist production to
a subordinate element. The emergence of vectoralism is described as
an unintended outcome of the secular stagnation of capitalist produc-
tion. The forces of production piled up against their limits in the 1970s,
unable to yield much by way of productivity increases or attend to the
demands of labour. The capitalist class found a way out of the impasse
‘by replacing labour with the vector and escaping along it’, using informa-
tion technology to unlock more abstract and flexible ways of organizing
production (globalization, outsourcing) and consumption (financializa-
tion). However, ‘what at first appeared to assist capital to defeat labour in
the overdeveloped world was also a defeat for capital.’ The capitalist class
found itself struggling against a new class that provided the very means
27
Franco Berardi, ‘What does Cognitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression’,
Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11 no. 2, 2005.
28
Capital Is Dead, pp. 43–46, 92.
of that victory—the vectoralists: ‘like the sorcerer’s apprentice, Capital

summoned up forces it could not restrain or control’. The result is ‘not
just a rentier bubble of speculation spooling out of the “real economy”’,
but something worse, because information has ontological properties
that change the commodity form in qualitative ways. Once created,
information ‘is infinitely replicable, cheap to store, cheap to transmit’,
which means that its commodification needs artificial means of enclo-
sure, like intellectual property. As the commodity escapes its material
limits and private property moves into such a high level of abstraction,
everything becomes up for grabs, even privacy: ‘we have run out of world
to commodify. And now commodification can only cannibalize its own
means of existence, both natural and social.’29
In short, capitalism is dead and vectoralism is feasting on its corpse.

The argument synthesized above runs through Wark’s book like a loose
thread. As the writing progresses, interesting remarks about the post-
capitalist transition become increasingly interspaced with expeditions
into all sorts of topics, including: left-wing scientists of the twentieth
century; the changing outlook of the Chinese Communist Party; the con-
ceptual genealogy of ‘vulgar Marxism’; or a commentary on Raoul Peck’s
film The Young Karl Marx. To a reader not accustomed to the logic of
cultural studies (like myself), the structure of the book may seem eclec-
tic and disorienting at times. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Wark’s
blend of philosophical inquiry and literary creativity makes for a remark-
ably thought-provoking work. Out of the three books examined in this
essay, Capital is Dead raises by far the most interesting and provoca-
tive questions, even if they are best answered when Christophers’s and
Benanav’s books are read alongside it.
Varieties of rentier
Wark’s argument has more convincing to do on at least two fronts. First,

it remains unclear why the control of information is the dominant fea-
ture of the nascent mode of production. There is nothing peculiar to
the vector about profiting from ‘owning’ rather than ‘making’. A similar
logic applies to a myriad of other rent-bearing sectors, like built infra-
structure, landownership, natural-resource reserves. Indeed, from the
perspective of Christophers’s taxonomy, the vectoralist is simply one
29
Capital Is Dead, pp. 57, 79, 95, 42, 48.
62 nlr 129
kind of rentier amongst many. Or rather, a combination of two types

of rentiers—those who derive income streams from digital platforms
and from intellectual-property rights. If Christophers disputes the term
‘financialization’ for privileging only one aspect of a broader process,
one could say the same about Wark’s account of vectoralization. Where
Wark and Christophers converge is in the thesis that a new rentier/
vectoral logic has displaced productive capital from dominance. This is
the second area that needs more reflection. Benanav’s book describes
how the capitalist mode of production has reached a point of exhaus-
tion, but his findings suggest that it continues to set the pace of societal
reproduction. In spite of rentierization, Benanav shows how the for-
tunes of wealthier economies have remained ‘strongly tied to the fate
of their manufacturing sectors’. In the absence of an alternative engine
of growth, fierce industrial competition remains the driving force of the
global economy, which explains why firms ‘have reacted to overaccu-
mulation by trying to make their existing manufacturing capacity more
flexible and efficient, rather than ceding ground to lower-cost firms from
other countries’.30 Capitalism may well be in a moribund state, but it
seems too early to pronounce it dead.
While Wark’s book shakes the historical consciousness of the reader

by presenting the world in a state of flux, it does less to identify paths
forward. Capital is Dead builds on the thesis of one of Wark’s earlier
books, A Hacker Manifesto (2004), written at a time when it seemed ‘as
though the one thing that really could form the basis of the commons
was information’. At the time, peer-to-peer file sharing was blowing
apart the culture industry and the producers of information were start-
ing ‘to think not just about their craft or trade interests but about a
class interest’. Fifteen years on, she now seems much less optimistic
about the prospects for resistance. New techniques for ‘the capture of
creation’ have been invented, to the point where production of informa-
tion can now be outsourced to ‘free labour’. ‘Even when you just stroll
down the street, the phone in your purse or pocket is reporting data
back to some vectoralist entity’. Hacker politics now appear much more
ambiguous as well. Though there have been remarkable instances of
self-organization, like the Google walkouts of 2018, the hacker class
seems to have ‘a very hard time thinking about its common interests,
because the kinds of new information its various subfractions produce
are all so different.’ Silicon Valley start-up types are also highly prone to
30
getting caught in aspirational dreams of corporate advance, even though

these are rarely fulfilled.31
Towards the end of the book, Wark calls for a politics of ‘acommunism’
(a play on atheism): ‘We’re free to desire another project for what might
come after capitalism. It won’t be Communism; as it turns out, the exit
from Capital through external revolution was an off-ramp not taken’. In
the absence of the hacker class assuming a new revolutionary subject-
hood, it remains unclear what Wark thinks the possibilities are. Perhaps
defeated by her own thought experiment, the concluding chapters
relapse into a strong sense of left melancholy: ‘Let us admit, comrades,
that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us’. We
are left with little to look forward to: capitalism is dead, communism has
missed the boat, and we are now stuck with something worse.32
A mixed economy
By contrast, Rentier Capitalism outlines a battery of policy proposals for

de-rentierization. In a thoughtful and clear exposition, Christophers calls,
among other things, for a more stringent competition policy, increased
taxation on capital gains, and a nationalization of certain sections of the
economy. Socialized sectors would then be managed by either differ-
ent scales of the state or by communal bodies. In this vision, a dirigiste
industrial policy would be pursued with the support of public-investment
banks. One of the most pressing tasks of this invigorated public sector
would be to enforce an urgent process of decarbonization. To be sure,
‘a non-rentier or minimally rentierist’ private economy would remain in
place. A considerable number of assets would still be privately owned
and marketed for profit, including: some financial assets, intellectual
property and, importantly, housing. But the chief point, we are reas-
sured, is that the owners of capital will not ‘be encouraged and enabled
to be rentiers’. Laying his cards on the table, Christophers argues that ‘a
mixed, plural ecology of ownerships is probably the best objective—and
is certainly the most politically and economically viable outcome’.33
In this society, he points out, ‘economic resources would be subject to

much more dispersed and democratic control’, which already makes this
31
Capital is Dead, pp. 54, 115, 48.
32
Capital is Dead, pp. 142, 169.
33
Rentier Capitalism, pp. 393, 407.
64 nlr 129
agenda worth pursuing. However, he overplays his hand when describ-

ing the radicalism of this vision. Perhaps pre-empting accusations of
reformism, Christophers claims that it would be impossible to call what
he proposes ‘simply “capitalism” in any of the various senses in which
we have come to use the word’—‘it is not capitalism, therefore, that one
would be saving’.34 As indicated earlier, it is not clear what Christophers
understands by capitalism, and hence what ‘various senses’ of the word
he is working with, but what if we were to simply call this vision: social-
democratic capitalism?
To be sure, the agenda that Christophers is proposing is urgent, at the

very least due to the looming environmental catastrophe. From the
perspective of anticapitalist resistance, it may even be desirable as a tran-
sitional programme towards something else, just as the more radical
advocates of the Green New Deal have argued.35 But to represent this
as a transcendence of capitalism seems somewhat unimaginative and
rather self-limiting, especially considering that what Christophers is
proposing looks a lot like a recharged version of the social-democratic
regimes of the so-called Fordist era, only with more environmental
considerations and less public housing—and the mixed economies of
this period were certainly within the bounds of a range of definitions
of capitalism. This brings us to a different but related problem. The
redistributive regimes of the postwar period were premised on highly
profitable manufacturing sectors. Today, however, we live in a world of
overdevelopment and saturated markets. From Christophers’s analysis,
one might deduce that lifting the dead hand of the rentier would be suffi-
cient to unlock a renewed cycle of industrial productivity. The crucial yet
unaddressed question is whether the ‘golden age’ of social-democratic
capitalism can be recreated in an era of secular stagnation, when there
are no opportunities for growth like those afforded by reconstruction or
catch-up industrialization.
Full socialization
In the final chapters of Automation and the Future of Work, Benanav argues
that mixed-economy solutions, like those advanced by Christophers or
by the left-wing proponents of Universal Basic Income, are not only
34
35
Thea Riofrancos, ‘Plan, Mood, Battlefield: Reflections on the Green New Deal’,
Viewpoint, 16 May 2019.
unrealistic in a context of secular stagnation, but they are also not going
to cut it in the arena of class conflict. These options obviate how, in
a world economy in which there is little growth to redistribute, ‘distri-
butional struggle would quickly become a zero-sum conflict between
labour and capital’. As in the postwar period, capital would resort to ‘the
heavy artillery of the class conflict: the capital strike’, only the stakes
would be even higher today, as depressed levels of investment and soar-
ing underemployment make disinvestment a stronger weapon. (How
this escalating dynamic might play out in a world of negative interest
rates is not considered.) To fend off the insubordination of business
elites, reformist state managers will need to ‘threaten firms with full
socialization’ and to follow through on those threats by ‘disseminating
a clear plan for doing away with private enterprise’ with the backing of
mass social movements. Even then, ‘facing such a salto mortale, reform
parties typically have blinked’. The example is the Meidner Plan, which
culminated in the capitulation to capital of the Swedish social-democrats
in the 1970s. Rather than seeing this as an impediment, Benanav leans
into the option of full socialization and charts a non-market alternative
out of the current impasse. To be sure, he does not seek answers in cen-
tral planning, which turned out to be ‘both economically irrational and
ecologically destructive, filling warehouses with shoddy products and
proving susceptible to autocratic bureaucratization’.36 Instead, he draws
inspiration from the post-scarcity tradition, sketching out the contours
of an alternative mode of existence based on the Aristotelian division
between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom.
The realm of necessity is to be managed by a logic of cooperative jus-

tice, one that ensures the provision of all goods and services outside of
the market. For Benanav, these needs will include ‘housing, food, cloth-
ing, common intermediate and final goods, sanitation, water, electricity,
healthcare, education, child and elder care, means of both communica-
tion and transportation, and so on’, to be allocated through institutions
such as social storehouses. Importantly, he points out that such needs
would not be determined a priori, but decided on a democratic basis.
These labours could take anywhere between three to five hours a day,
though this working time could be concentrated in different portions
of the year or of a worker’s life, making allowances ‘for rest, for travel,
for grief, or for cultural immersion’. There would be no central plan
but a series of overlapping partial plans, with some aspects managed at
36
Automation and the Future of Work, pp. 78, 70–1, 79, 81.
66 nlr 129
a local level and others coordinated with advanced computer technolo-

gies on a global scale. Existing distinctions between waged and unwaged
labour, which have traditionally confined women to the realm of house-
hold labour, would need to be dissolved. There would also predictably
have to be some kind of sanction system ‘to hold producers accountable
were they to fail to meet democratically determined social standards’,
though these sanctions would not deprive producers from their portion
of the social surplus.37
The administration of societal needs and the reduction of the working

day would be ‘the condition of possibility of everything else we want to
do’—the realm of freedom. In a beautiful passage, Benanav imagines the
thriving of ‘activities that cannot be described simply as either work or
leisure’: ‘painting murals, learning languages, building waterslides—or
discovering new ways to do common tasks to make them less time-
consuming . . . writing novels, or self-reinvention through education or
exploration’. The end of socially-determined scarcity ‘would enable peo-
ple to enter voluntary associations with others from all over the globe:
to join consortia of mathematical researchers, clubs for inventing new
musical instruments, or federations for building spaceships’. For most,
‘this would be the first time in their lives that they could enter truly
voluntary agreements—without the gun to their heads of a pervasive
material insecurity’. In the absence of market competition, there would
be ‘no built-in growth trajectory’ and the implementation of productivity
improvements will likely take longer than it does now. But there would
also be no need for growth at the current pace, since ‘most labours of
necessity would be services whose productivity is difficult to raise with-
out sacrificing quality’. In a statement reminiscent of Moishe Postone’s
concept of ‘historical labour-time’, Benanav stresses that in this soci-
ety, what today we call ‘capital’ would be ‘recognized for what it is: our
common social inheritance. Built up over generations, belonging to no
one and to everyone, it is that without which no one could achieve their
larger goals, or even imagine them’.38
Of course, many thorny issues remain neglected in this picture, such

as the role of specialization and expertise, the difficulties posed by
37
38
Automation and the Future of Work, pp. 91–2; Moishe Postone, ‘Necessity, Labour
and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism’, Social Research,
vol. 45, no. 4, 1978.
population movement, or the political dilemmas that might arise in the

likely event that transition does not happen at once and on a global scale.
If historical precedent serves as a guide, this new world would likely be
born under siege, much like the Paris Commune or the Soviet Union.
Ultimately, Benanav’s utopian vision avoids the defeatism of Wark
but also the concreteness of Christophers’s programmatic proposals.
Nevertheless, it is a bold and necessary look beyond capitalism’s rentier
morbidity—one that makes the dream of a democratic and decentralized
communism an almost tangible possibility.
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nick burns
THE POLITICS
OF FERNANDO PESSOA
‘I
n how many of the garrets and non-garrets of this world / Are
there self-styled geniuses dreaming this very moment?’ By his
death in 1935, the genius of Fernando Pessoa was in danger of
emerging from anonymity. For decades, remaining unknown
outside a small circle of literary friends had been a source of inspira-
tion and a rampart from which to engage in period polemics. Pessoa
drifted between cafés, rented rooms and tobacconists, quays and com-
mercial offices in Portugal’s backwater metropolis, imagining one day
his fame would surpass that of Camões. He had doubts: ‘At this moment
/ A hundred thousand brains dream themselves geniuses like me!’1 But
in his last years there were promising signs. He had acquired readers:
a younger generation of modernist poets, clustered around the maga-
zine Presença, would succeed in conveying his work to a broader national
audience after the Second World War.
Internationally, talk of Pessoa spread in the 1960s, with a sweeping criti-

cal treatment from Octavio Paz at the start of the decade and another,
narrowly formal, from linguist Roman Jakobson at its close.2 In the New
York Review of Books the critic Michael Wood soon seconded Jakobson’s
assessment of Pessoa as a great undiscovered figure of the generation
of Joyce and Picasso.3 But the breakthrough came after the publication
in Portugal of his incomparable collocation of prose fragments, O Livro
do Desassossego, in 1982. Four different English translations of it as The
Book of Disquiet appeared in 1991 alone, and three years later Harold
Bloom saw fit to include Pessoa in the elite group of writers of his Western
Canon (1994), on the merits of his visionary reading of Whitman. Today
a cottage industry of Pessoa scholarship rivals the Joyce machine. Every

70 nlr 129
several years since the 1970s has seen the publication of fresh poems
and prose from the massive trunk the author left behind at his death, a
treasure trove still unexhausted.
Now Richard Zenith, Pessoa’s leading English translator, has delivered a

comprehensive biography of the poet, the first of its kind in any language.
Previous treatments of the poet’s life have been idiosyncratic, one recent
effort the fanciful product of the retirement project of a former Minister
of Justice in Brazil.4 The very first biography, written by his contem-
porary João Gaspar Simões before Pessoa’s subsequent canonization,
is in its fashion markedly Freudian in outlook.5 The task Simões took
on was and remains extremely difficult, due to the obscurity in which
Pessoa operated throughout much of his life, the tumultuous political
conditions of early twentieth-century Portugal and the poet’s own radi-
cal literary dispersion. Zenith has acquitted his huge undertaking—over
nine hundred meticulously sourced pages—splendidly, the fruit of a
dozen years of scrupulous research overturning many a legend accumu-
lated in the previous literature (not a few deriving from Pessoa’s own
canards or those of contemporaries), and dispelling the confusions that
have surrounded even some of the most prominent episodes in Pessoa’s
life. The portrait of the poet that emerges from his book is a work of
striking sobriety and delicacy.
1
Álvaro de Campos, ‘Tabacaria’, Presença 39, July 1933. Translation mine. Pessoa
may have signed ‘Tabacaria’ as Campos, one of his alternate identities, but the senti-
ment has little of Campos’s energy, its sense of lonely defeat more reminiscent of
Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet—or of Fernando Pessoa himself.
2
Octavio Paz’s essay is the introduction to his anthology of Pessoa’s poetry (Mexico
City 1962), later featuring as one-fourth of his Cuadrivio (Mexico City 1965); Roman
Jakobson’s text first appeared as ‘Les oxymores dialectiques de Fernando Pessoa’,
Langages 12, 1968, pp. 9–27.
3
Pessoa on Joyce: ‘oneiric delirium . . . presented as an end in itself’. Richard
Zenith, Pessoa, A Biography [henceforward pb], London and New York 2021, p. 831.
4
José Paulo Cavalcanti Filho, Fernando Pessoa: A Quasi-Memoir, Milan 2019;
the Brazilian original appeared in 2011. Cavalcanti Filho’s bizarre, disjointed
compendium—often credulous, as Zenith illustrates (note 17, p. 991, e.g.)—is part
of a long tradition of retirement hobby-projects among the Brazilian elite, which
can be traced back at least to the ‘history of the suburbs’ which the narrator of
Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899) repeatedly threatens to write.
5
João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa: história duma geração, Lisbon
1950.
burns: Pessoa 71
Typical of this combination is Zenith’s calm treatment of the sensitive

subject of Pessoa’s sexuality. Conscious of the limitations of Gaspar
Simões’s handling of this issue, he nevertheless takes it seriously and,
without accepting the assessment of Pessoa as psychosexually infantile,
devotes much space to charting the cursus of the poet’s eros, and the
complexity of his competing desires. Through his poems, prose, let-
ters and innumerable fragmentary notes, we see Pessoa navigating his
homosexual impulses, slowly shedding an early resentment of women,
embarking on an amitié amoureuse with a young woman who longed
to marry him, acutely aware of the strange shapes of desire in human
life, yet in all probability dying a virgin. Searching for the best descrip-
tion of the contradictions of this temperament, Zenith finally terms
it ‘monosexual’, the pattern of an existence of what the poet himself
called ‘self-fecundation’.6 Such self-fecundity was, of course, directly
related to Pessoa’s extraordinary literary originality: the invention of his
famous ‘heteronyms’, dissimilar figures endowed with distinctive styles,
backgrounds, and philosophical views to whom he attributed much
of his poetry. As the monarchist Ricardo Reis, Pessoa composed care-
fully balanced neoclassical odes until he dispatched Reis into exile in
Brazil after the failure of a royalist rising. Whereas Alberto Caeiro’s forte
was nature poetry of an anti-philosophical cast, while the futurist naval
engineer Álvaro de Campos staged bravura performances in wild free
verse like a ‘Salutation to Walt Whitman’.7 Besides this major triad there
were dozens more, including the ‘semi-heteronyms’ Vicente Guedes
and Bernardo Soares, two obscure assistant bookkeepers—‘sleepy’ ver-
sions of Pessoa who authored in successive stages the fragments that
compose the Book of Disquiet. How appropriate that Pessoa, meaning
‘person’ in Portuguese, comes from the Latin persona, or mask. Many
of these masks seem more approachable than Pessoa himself, whose
‘orthonymic’ poetry, signed with his own name, is uneven: capable but
stilted English poems after Shakespeare, ‘swampist’ verses and ‘static
6
pb, p. 871.
7
Extending a notion of Eduardo Lourenço, Zenith has suggested that Pessoa’s read-
ing of Whitman caused him to ‘give birth’ to Caeiro and Campos, but that these
aesthetic children could not but attempt, Oedipally, to kill their father. See Lourenço,
Fernando Pessoa Revisitado: Leitura Estruturante do Drama em Gente, Lisbon 1973,
p. 86, cited in Zenith, ‘Pessoa and Walt Whitman Revisited’, in Mariana Gray de
Castro, ed., Fernando Pessoa’s Modernity Without Frontiers, Woodbridge 2013, p. 40.
72 nlr 129
dramas’ in Portuguese, a handful of poems in French: only the heraldic

cycle Mensagem stands out as an indisputably major work.8
Zenith’s biography is predominantly concerned, as it should be, with the

nature and scale of Pessoa’s achievement as a divided, self-multiplied
poet, in keeping with his reception around the world as a literary master.
At the same time, his reconstruction of Pessoa’s life situates him not
only in the aesthetic debates but the ideological conflicts that marked
the cross-currents of Portuguese public life of the period. His report
of Pessoa’s political interventions in these is attentive and respect-
ful, if occasionally unsparing—holding that Pessoa, in seeing politics
chiefly ‘through a poetic lens’, was often too sweeping in his assess-
ment of actors on the public stage.9 But though Zenith’s judgements
of this record are nearly always balanced and fair, they lack the depth
and detail of the rest of his book. For his biographer politics is not a
passion, whereas for Pessoa it unpredictably was. Nothing is stranger
than this side of his life. For if he was seldom assured writing poetry in
his own voice, Pessoa displayed surprising fluency and self-confidence
in his writing on politics. This neglected portion of his corpus is enor-
mously varied, encompassing contributions to some fifty publications,
drafts of articles intended for English or French newspapers, innumer-
able unpublished notes of varying tone and level of completion. In sheer
quantity and diversity, it is doubtful if there is a poet of his age who could
match Pessoa’s political output, which comes to us as a sprawling mine
of insights on a disordered time by one of its most remarkable minds,
as capable of unsettling analytic capacity as of polemical excess. A full
appreciation of Pessoa’s gifts cannot escape taking the measure of this
unexpected dimension of them.
Keeping his distance equally from ‘demo-liberal’ bourgeois opinion,

from fascism and from traditionalist monarchism, Pessoa presented
himself idiosyncratically as a nationalist averse to Catholicism, a
severe critic of democracy yet a proud liberal. That pose attracted little
8
‘Swampism’ (paulismo) was a languorous, decadent ultra-Symbolism conceived
under the influence of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the static drama a technique bor-
rowed from Maeterlinck. Pessoa’s self-published English poems received a warm
review in the Times Literary Supplement of 19 September 1918, though Zenith con-
siders the Glasgow Herald’s notice published the same day, criticizing Pessoa’s
‘foreigner’s English’, a more perceptive judgement. pb, pp. 346, 360, 559.
9
pb, p. 177.
burns: Pessoa 73
contemporary attention. As Paz puts it, though the ‘harsh light of scan-
dal’ momentarily fell on his name on several occasions, each time it
faded always into the darkness of obscurity.10 His political writing, often
incisive, sometimes infuriating, always unusual, has never attracted a
posthumous readership on a par with his poetry, and what scant atten-
tion it has drawn from scholars has for the most part been highly critical.
The leading exception is José Barreto, editor of an impressive collection
of Pessoa’s texts on themes of fascism and dictatorship in Portugal and
abroad, handsomely produced by Tinta da China, featuring many docu-
ments appearing in print for the first time, an extensive introduction by
Barreto, careful explanatory notes to the texts and painstaking descrip-
tions of their provenance and publication history.11 Photos of newspaper
articles offer a glimpse into the literary culture of the period, while scans
of Pessoa’s handwritten notes show the author’s infamously indecipher-
able penmanship and rejection of modernizing orthographic reforms
introduced by the republican government of his early adult years. The
sheer volume of political material composed by Pessoa—the trunk in
which he left his unpublished writings numbered some 28,000 items—
has nevertheless forced Barreto to be selective chronologically as well as
thematically. Concentrating on the period from 1923 to Pessoa’s death
in 1935, the collection omits the highly productive phase of his life from
1914 to 1922, without which no overview of Pessoa’s political writing
can be complete.
The Early Republic
Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. Descended on his mother’s side

from the minor nobility of the Azores and on his father’s from a general
who fought on the liberal side in the civil wars of the nineteenth century,
like many Portuguese he was also in part a descendant of Jewish conver-
sos. On his fifth birthday his father, a civil servant and music critic for a
Lisbon newspaper, died of tuberculosis, leaving the family in a precari-
ous financial situation—promptly remedied by his mother’s remarriage
to a naval officer appointed Portuguese consul in South Africa, which
10
Octavio Paz, Cuadrivio, p. 136.
11
Sobre o fascismo, a ditadura militar e Salazar [henceforward sf], Lisbon 2015,
431 pp. Barreto’s introduction to the book stands alongside his earlier essay
in English, ‘Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa’,
Portuguese Studies, 2008, no. 2, pp. 168–214, in some respects a more detailed and
substantial survey.
74 nlr 129
brought the child to Durban. There he proved an excellent student at

the English colonial school in which he was enrolled, absorbing Poe,
Keats and Tennyson, and contributing to its student magazine a sug-
gestive, precocious essay championing Carlyle over Macaulay. Yet as a
Portuguese national his prospects within the British Empire were dim,
and in 1905 the seventeen-year old returned alone to Lisbon, while his
mother and stepfather remained in Africa.
Pessoa arrived in Portugal at a time of considerable upheaval, the coun-

try’s constitutional monarchy hamstrung by rapid-fire rotation between
political parties and an insurgent republican left. Soon bored with his
classmates, he lasted barely a year at a course that was disrupted by a
student strike. In 1908, the Portuguese king and his heir were shot dead
by two republicans. Public indifference to the assassinations scandalized
Europe. By 1910, the monarchy was no more. Pessoa’s material situation
changed in 1909, when he inherited the equivalent of some $140,000
in today’s money from a grandmother who before her death had long
been mentally ill—fear of himself inheriting madness too would trou-
ble Pessoa for many years. But in a trice he blew the entire sum—and
more—on an ill-fated, short-lived publishing venture he named after the
ancient Egyptian bird Ibis. To cope with the debts in which he was hence-
forth entangled, Pessoa began doing irregular freelance translations
for commercial houses in Lisbon, and by borrowing incorrigibly from
family and friends, financed a long succession of further unsuccessful
literary enterprises, and the few luxuries of an impoverished existence—
daily coffees at his favourite cafés A Brasileira and O Martinho da Arcada;
wine, brandy and cigarettes; the worn but elegant suits in which he can
be seen strolling in photographs of the time, which he bought on credit
and sometimes failed to repay.12
Portugal, an agrarian country with a literacy rate of a mere quarter of

the population, had become only the second declared republic on the
European continent. But the liberal politicians who took over, unable
to resolve the paradox of political advance and socio-economic back-
wardness, recycled the failings of the monarchy, achieving only one of
their aims, permanent destruction of the temporal power of the Church.
Against this background Pessoa published his first major essay in 1912:
a comparative study in the literary sociology of England, France and
12
pb, pp. 246, 281–6, 304.
burns: Pessoa 75
Portugal in the mystical-nationalist review A Águia (‘The Eagle’). In

England, Pessoa wrote, literary production had reached its peak, both
in ‘national’ content and aesthetic quality, between 1580 and 1610, pre-
ceding a period of great political and civilizational achievement. During
Cromwell’s Commonwealth, ‘England gave the modern world one of
the great civilizational principles that are peculiar to it—that of popular
government, which after the French Revolution, scantily creative, became
simply republican democracy’. Yet this was followed by a steep literary
and civilizational drop-off. In the eighteenth century England merely
‘realized, apathetically and weakly, the principle she had created’, achiev-
ing ‘her own greatness and nothing else’. English literature during this
period, based on French models, was ‘absolutely null and sterile’, devoid
of national character. Only since the nineteenth century, with the advent
of a partially national, partially international (i.e. German) Romanticism,
had English literature revived its fortunes. France’s trajectory was almost
the opposite. Its literature was denationalized by classicism under the
ancien régime, and the ‘premature’ French Revolution of 1789 realized
its promise only later, between 1848 and 1870, with a maturing of the
idea of a democratic republic and the work of Victor Hugo. Since then,
however, French civilizational force had completely dissipated, the coun-
try subsisting on principles created in earlier periods (this despite the
strong influence on Pessoa of Symbolism and the décadents).
That by contrast Portugal was experiencing simultaneously ‘poor,

depressed’ social conditions, a ‘pitiable’ political situation, and a
promising, distinctively ‘national’ literary climate—here he referred def-
erentially to Águia editor Teixeira de Pascoaes—was a sign that it would
soon follow the English model of development. The impending arrival of
a ‘Great Poet’ or ‘supra-Camões’ would be followed by a general political
and civilizational renaissance.13 Pessoa’s ambition to become this figure
himself is clear (and today could be said to be nearing fruition, though
his nebulous hopes for a Portuguese renaissance—in which the country
gave its own new ‘principles’ to the world—remain as distant as ever).
Teixeira de Pascoaes’s vision of such a renaissance, centring on

saudade—nostalgia—as a source of renewed civilizational energy for
newly republican Portugal, clearly appealed to Pessoa, but differences
13
‘A nova poesia portuguesa sociologicamente considerada’, A Águia 2, no. 4,
Oporto 1912.
76 nlr 129
soon emerged. Pascoaes’s vision of the national spirit was parochial and
pastoral, Pessoa’s highly abstract and universalizing. Others in the Águia
circle found Pessoa ‘too cerebral’,14 and Pessoa drifted into another cur-
rent: a small circle of young writers, more pessimistic than the Águia
set, more mischievous, more inclined to look to Europe for inspiration.
Among them, in 1914—Pessoa would say—came ‘the appearance of
someone in me’: Alberto Caeiro, and in his train, Campos and Reis.
A year later Pessoa and his new friends started a modernist review,
Orpheu, scandalizing Portugal’s staid parnassian literary establish-
ment, which labelled them ‘madmen’.15 (Their riposte was to publish
poems by an inmate of Lisbon’s Rilhafoles asylum in the second issue
of the journal.)
A convinced enemy of the Church, excited by the prospect of a repub-

lic after his return to Lisbon, Pessoa was never a radical republican.
Disgusted at the celebrations that met the regicides, he decided that
the anti-clerical measures of a self-appointed provisional government
went too far,16 and the outbreak of war in Europe prompted a shift to
the right in his thinking. Painfully aware the British press disapproved
of Portugal’s republican turn, Pessoa’s own (moderate) republicanism
may in part have been a rebellion against his acquired identity in South
Africa. Certainly, though he never visited Britain, England always occu-
pied a conspicuous place in Pessoa’s thought, often appearing in the
guise of a cultural father figure which he alternately resented and was
eager to impress. Portugal’s traditional confederate and source of his
own education, the country had provoked a wave of indignation in 1890,
when an ultimatum from London vetoed Portuguese claims to the land
between Angola and Mozambique. Pessoa was only two at the time, but
the national memory lingered: Álvaro de Campos would in due course
revenge himself on the British with an ‘Ultimatum’ of his own, denounc-
ing all the participants in the Great War as plunging Europe back into
barbarism. When hostilities broke out in 1914, Portugal was naturally,
as England’s ‘oldest ally’, in official sympathy with the Entente, though
it had to be strong-armed by Britain into entering the war in 1916 and
14
pb, p. 324. This sentiment derived from Mário Beirão, who apparently nurtured
it long enough to torpedo Pessoa’s hope of a first prize for his collection of poems
Mensagem (a book whose highly abstract nationalism was likely to confirm Beirão
in his earlier judgement), for which he was a juror: pb, p. 861.
15
From the front-page review in A Capital, 30 March 1915. Mentioned in pb, p. 447.
16
pb, pp. 259, 293.
burns: Pessoa 77
sending troops to France, a third of them to die there. A year earlier, as

the republic suffered its first authoritarian interruption—a few months’
rule without parliament by Pimenta de Castro, military officer and uni-
versity professor at Coimbra (two significant professions for Portuguese
politics, as it turned out)—Pessoa found himself toying with the idea
of supporting Germany. In this mood he penned several notes—some
signed as the neopagan asylum resident ‘António Mora’—in favour of
German arms, including one that argued ‘if man, in the depths of his
humanity, can be horrified by the cruelties perpetrated by Germany in
Belgium’, these had nonetheless to be understood as an attack ‘on the
principle of small states’. Sympathy for the country as a state (rather
than Belgians as people) was invalid: ‘for the sociologist, Belgium has
no right to exist’.17 Pessoa’s defence of Germany was related to his theo-
ries about the rise and fall of national ‘civilizational’ energy in Águia: he
seems to have believed that of the nations fighting each other in Europe,
only Germany now possessed a compelling and novel set of principles
(including, he was convinced, paganism).18
This foreign policy turn had been preceded by a fateful campaign against
leading figures of the republic. On 3 July 1915, the strongman of the
dominant Portuguese Republican Party (prp), war hawk Afonso Costa,
leapt off a tram after mistaking a short-circuit on it for an assassination
attempt and was hospitalized, though not seriously injured. Whereupon
Pessoa wrote a letter to a newspaper as Álvaro de Campos dwelling on
the ‘deliciously mechanical’ way that divine providence appeared to work
by way of an electrified tram. An outcry in the republican press over
this applause for violence ensued. That in turn split Orpheu, which was
politically diverse—Raul Leal, a monarchist member of the circle, took
Pessoa’s side, but managing editor António Ferro was an avowed parti-
san of Costa and the prp.19 Pessoa’s friends Mário de Sá-Carneiro and
José de Almada Negreiros disavowed the comment, identifying Campos
as Pessoa, and helpfully explaining their friend had composed the letter
when inebriated. Members of a paramilitary group associated with the
prp went looking for Pessoa in the restaurant where the Orpheu set met:
only after receiving a tip in time did he escape harm. An unpublished
letter reveals that Pessoa wanted to repeat his insult and was presumably
17
Fernando Pessoa, Ultimatum e Páginas de Sociologia Política, Lisbon 1980, p. 38.
18
pb, p. 454.
19
pb, p. 475.
78 nlr 129
stopped from doing so only by the pleas of friends, fearing for the effects
on their magazine. It was too late. Plans for a third issue fell through,
and the group drifted apart, Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa’s best friend, decamp-
ing for Paris, where he would swallow strychnine the following year.
Orpheu never published another number.20
War and the aftermath
Meanwhile, monarchist uprisings and splits from the prp were accompa-
nied by endemic corruption and rapid-fire cycling through governments
(the final tally was 46 over 15 years, only a slight improvement on the
last decades of the monarchy). A growing sense of absurdity character-
ized the efforts of Portugal’s self-consciously modern and cosmopolitan
elite to preside over a country that had not rid itself of medieval condi-
tions. Disillusionment with the promise of parliamentary government
was nearly universal among the educated young. By 1914 many of the
country’s few thousand university students, sons of landowners and
industrialists alike, had exchanged the liberalism of their fathers for the
die-hard traditionalism of Integralismo Lusitano—a Catholic monarchist
movement inspired by (though less militant than) Action Française—
which enjoyed a talented exponent in António Sardinha (1887–1925) and
a brief entrée into politics courtesy of Major Sidónio Pais, charismatic
dictator for several months after a military coup in 1917.21
Pessoa had developed an appetite for political polemic, and the desertion
by his friends over the Costa episode did not discourage him. Earlier in
1915 he had been hired as a columnist for the newspaper O Jornal then
quickly fired for making fun of monarchists.22 In 1918, after Sidónio
Pais was assassinated, Pessoa fell in with a group of former supporters
of the brief ‘president-king’ (his term) around the magazine Acção, as
the republic returned for a doomed reprise lasting till its definitive over-
throw by the military in 1926. In Acção he discharged repeated fusillades
against democracy, and the notion of public opinion, on the grounds that
20
See Antonio Almeida, ‘“Brandindo o cutelo da Maldição”: Em torno do manifesto
O Bando Sinistro de Raul Leal’, Pessoa Plural 8, 2015, pp. 564–601. Zenith, describ-
ing the incident, regards the danger of lynching as exaggerated and argues that
Sá-Carneiro’s departure had nothing to do with the episode: pb, pp. 473–4.
21
See Herminio Martins, ‘Portugal’, in S. J. Woolf, ed., European Fascism, New York
1969, pp. 308–13.
22
pb, p. 456.
burns: Pessoa 79
modern science had proved that most are unable to think for themselves
(the influence of Gustave Le Bon’s psychologie des foules is likely). The
eighteenth century had considered man a rational animal; the twentieth
century knew he was irrational. Lamenting the loss of Pais as ‘another
Alcácer-Quibir’—the battle against the Moors in 1578 at which Portugal
lost its king Sebastian, inspiring a durable folk belief (in Brazil as well
as Portugal) that he would one day return to restore the glory of the
empire—Pessoa treated the secular millenarianism of Sebastianismo as
a kind of ideological rootstock on which to graft a nationalist saviour for
modern times. Responsible for this turn was a neo-Sebastianist tract by
a Portuguese writer of the previous generation who, like Pessoa, had
found himself drawn to the occult: Sampaio Bruno’s 1904 O encoberto
(‘the hidden one’).23 Zenith wonders how Pessoa could spend so much
time writing for Acção, playing the unconvincing part of a reactionary
(he proposes a crush on a fellow editor).24 In fact Pessoa’s praise for
Pais was chiefly posthumous: once the major was dead, he was safely
abstract, and the chief way in which Pessoa found it possible to love,
politically as well as personally, was in the abstract.
Yet Pessoa always took his distance from the integralistas and often posi-
tioned himself to their left. These efforts included a symptomatic clash
with a group of Catholic monarchist students at the University of Lisbon
over Pessoa’s decision to publish homoerotic poems by António Botto,
in 1922, and Raul Leal’s provocative hymn to homosexuality, Sodoma
divinizada the following year.25 After students attacked these writings
as ‘filth’, Pessoa wrote two pamphlets defending his friends, one signed
as Álvaro de Campos and another under his own name, to no avail: the
authorities confiscated every copy of the offending texts they could find
and burnt them. In later unpublished notes, Pessoa repeatedly described
Integralismo Lusitano as inappropriately French in origin, at variance with
Portuguese needs, and turned Maurras on his head to argue that ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ individualism was not a threat to European civilization, rather
its greatest virtue. ‘Maurras, poor fellow, in repudiating Kant repudiates
the best opponent of low rationalism.’26 Criticizing the integralistas in
Nietzschean-Thrasymachean style, he contended that only the weak and
23
pb, p. 424.
24
pb, p. 578.
25
See pb, pp. 624–6; José Barreto, ‘Fernando Pessoa e Raul Leal contra a campanha
moralizadora dos estudantes em 1923’, Pessoa Plural 2, 2012, pp. 240–70.
26
sf, p. 55.
80 nlr 129
ignorant, unable to compete under capitalism, fell back on imaginary

ideals of an obsolete societal form, the medieval corporation.27
Another indication of Pessoa’s hyper-individualist liberalism in this

period came with a short story of 1922 somewhat like the product of
a subtler Ayn Rand, entitled ‘The Anarchist Banker’. In it, a wealthy
financier explains that his rapacity, far from betraying his early anar-
chist convictions, is entirely consistent with them, for his own rise from
humble birth to great wealth has released him from the distorting grip
of the ‘social fiction’ of money, thereby decreasing the total power of
the artificial institutions that limit man’s natural freedom. Ascribing the
continued existence of poverty to want of ingenuity and talent among
the poor—that is, ‘natural inequalities’ which anarchism cannot and
does not seek to address—he ends by hailing Aristotle’s most notorious
dictum: ‘If a man was born to be a slave, liberty, being contrary to his
nature, would be for him a tyranny.’
Reactions to fascism
With this we arrive at 1923 and the stretch of Pessoa’s political writing
covered by Barreto’s collection, spanning a period marked in Europe by
the rise of fascism, and in Portugal by the decline of the republic and
the establishment of the Estado Novo. The scholar António Costa Pinto
has argued that but for the pronounced Catholic and traditionalist ten-
dencies in Salazar’s regime—that is, if Salazar had been a more typical
fascist—Pessoa would probably have supported him.28 Barreto, by con-
trast, contends that Pessoa’s hostility to corporatism set him apart not
only from the integralistas but fascist economic theories more generally,
and presents good evidence that Pessoa was a consistent critic of fas-
cism as the term was understood at the time, in the shape of Mussolini’s
regime in Italy. If he acknowledged the personal charisma (‘prestige’
was the term he preferred) of the Duce, and appeared to suggest that
Southern Europe was doomed to dictatorship or absolute monarchy, it
was more in a spirit of fatalism than apologia. Italian fascism itself he
repeatedly described as a tyranny.29 In a telling note that Barreto dates to
27
sf, p. 79.
28
António Costa Pinto, ‘Modernity versus Democracy? The Mystical Nationalism
of Fernando Pessoa’, in Zeev Sternhell, ed., The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal
Democracy, Jerusalem 1996, p. 354.
29
Introduction to sf, p. 20.
burns: Pessoa 81
1923–25, he wrote of the regime: ‘The fascists kill your grandfather, but
you can be sure the train will arrive in time for his burial.’30
In 1926 Pessoa published, anonymously in a republican newspaper,

a bizarre interview he fabricated with a fictitious Italian antifascist
who pronounces Mussolini a madman, and then goes on to declare
that fascism is only a ruse. The world is ‘directed by special forces’,
whose nature he declines to elaborate. The document is a mishmash
of genuine antifascist sentiments held by Pessoa and an irrepressibly
crankish streak of his own. When the Italian embassy wrote to com-
plain that Angioletti did not exist, Pessoa happily forged another letter
as Angioletti maintaining that he did.31 A month before his death in
1935 he was more straightforward, composing a blistering denunciation
of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia that was suppressed by the cen-
sors.32 On the Third Reich he had less to say, though his contempt for
Hitler was plain: ‘even his moustache is pathological’. For authoritarian
governments in Southern Europe that were not themselves fascist he
had greater sympathy, comparing in a prescient touch the situation in
Spain in 1930—the fate of the monarchy in the balance—with that of
Portugal in 1910, and warning of the potential consequences of Primo
de Rivera’s lack of personal ‘prestige’.33 Eight months after his death,
civil war erupted across the frontier.
Notwithstanding a few outbursts as Álvaro de Campos, never fully con-

vincing, Pessoa did not have much of a stomach for political violence.
But that he was attracted for much of his life to authoritarian rule of a
particular kind is clear. What was it then that prevented Pessoa from
succumbing to the temptations of fascism? Barreto ascribes it to an
Anglophilia that was philosophical as well as aesthetic, citing Pessoa’s
description of himself in 1935: ‘A conservative in the English style, that
is to say, a liberal within conservatism, and absolutely anti-reactionary.’34
Besides the youthful influence of Carlyle, he was prompted by his read-
ing of Herbert Spencer towards positions that Barreto does not baulk
at terming ‘proto-Hayekian’: defence of a limited or minimal state,
hatred of corporatism, insistence on the total freedom of the individual,
belief in an essential similarity between fascism and communism. This
side of Pessoa’s thought, along with his respect for human dignity and
30
sf, p. 57. 31
sf, pp. 82–9. 32
sf, pp. 341–7.
33
sf, p. 213, pp. 151–4. 34
sf, p. 291.
82 nlr 129
insistence on the independence of intellectuals, offered in Barreto’s

judgement an ‘antidote’ to the temptations of fascism.
Democracy and dictatorship
There is, at the same time, no doubting that Pessoa was a critic of
democracy. His dismissal of democratic systems was directed, however,
at least some of the time at their failure to live up to the ideals they
proclaimed, rather than the ideals themselves. The Portuguese First
Republic was a façade for the rule of a corrupt oligarchy; more generally,
the notion of ‘public opinion’, as commonly understood and identi-
fied with democracy, failed to capture the mental and political outlook
of most people. Pessoa’s gathering hatred for the First Republic caused
him twice to support dictatorship, once in 1918 and again in 1926. But
Barreto contends that a careful look at his major essay O Interregno of
1928, a ‘defence and justification’ of the military regime that had staged
a coup in 1926—commonly cited as evidence of his authoritarian bent—
reveals he defended it only as a necessary ‘state of transition’ to a future
government ‘based on opinion’. Considered in context, as the dictator-
ship pondered whether to return the country to parliamentary rule or
to consolidate itself on a permanent basis, he judges Pessoa’s essay to
advocate implicitly the former path.35
Yet the dictatorship was consolidated. Under the guiding influence of

Coimbra economics professor and Catholic politician António de Oliveira
Salazar, who outmanoeuvred the generals at the helm after 1926 with
his technocratic balanced budgets, military rule in Portugal evolved into
a novel corporatist-authoritarian regime from 1930 onwards. Thereafter
Pessoa’s changing attitude towards Salazar and his Estado Novo tells its
own story. At first there was reserved praise for Salazar’s talent as finance
minister, mingled with expressions of trust in his style of management,
though ‘unfortunately what he is most of all is a Catholic’.36 In an espe-
cially characteristic note Barreto dates to 1932 or 1933, Pessoa wrote:
Professor Salazar possesses in the highest degree the secondary qualities of

intelligence and will. He is a perfect executor of orders from those who pos-
sess the primary qualities. [He] has a lucid and precise intelligence; he does
not have a creative or dominating one. He has a firm and concentrated will;
35
José Barreto, introduction to sf, pp. 21–5.
36
sf, p. 178.
burns: Pessoa 83
he does not have a radiant and secure one. He is timid when he dares, uncer-
tain when he affirms. Not a statesman, he is an usher . . . A country must
be governed with book-keeping; it cannot be governed by book-keeping. We
are witnessing the Caesarization of an accountant.37
Yet Pessoa tried to keep an open mind. In 1934 he entered his book
of ‘heraldic’ nationalist poems, Mensagem, in a literary contest staged
by António Ferro, a former left-wing republican and collaborator with
Pessoa on the masthead of Orpheu, who had now become Salazar’s
chief propagandist, and was aiming to boost his regime with a cultural
offensive modelled on the successful mobilization of literary and visual
avant-gardes in Italy under Mussolini. Mensagem, described by Pessoa
as the subtraction of all the elements of his make-up save his mystic
nationalism, was a baffling cipher. For the jury assembled by Ferro, the
promising propaganda value of Mensagem’s nationalist subject matter
(kings and heroes of the Age of Discoveries) and rousing closing clarion
call (‘Now is the hour!’) must have seemed all but nullified by its cryp-
tic style and intricate oxymoronic elaborations. They awarded the prize
instead to the crudely cloying verses of a Franciscan friar in praise of
popular worship.38 Embarrassed at this outcome, Ferro scrambled to
increase the value of a second prize and get it awarded to Pessoa, while
arranging for a laudatory review of Mensagem to be published in a major
newspaper. Convinced that his talents were not properly recognized,
and unmoved by this manoeuvre, Pessoa resolved to give up the entice-
ments of official literature. The dictator’s speech at the award ceremony
for Mensagem, in which he demanded that Portuguese intellectuals fol-
low the ‘directives’ of his own ‘politics of the spirit’ shocked and enraged
Pessoa, who had boycotted the event.39 He paid off his debts with the
prize money, and proceeded to launch an open attack on the regime’s
37
sf, p. 179. Translation mine.
38
Mentioned in Orlando Raimundo’s António Ferro: O inventor do Salazarismo,
Lisbon 2015, is João Gaspar Simões’ memorable description of the winning entry:
‘as poor in literary quality as the founder of the Franciscan order was in material
goods’.
39
The notion of a ‘politics of the spirit’ was, as it turned out, borrowed from the
work of another poet writing politically. Ferro had enticed Paul Valéry to write an
introduction to a collection of Salazar’s speeches, and had cribbed the idea from
it: see Raimundo, António Ferro, p. 154; pb, p. 822. An extended discussion of the
Valéry essay in question can be found in Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, ‘Paul Valéry
and the Mechanisms of Modern Tyranny’, Hedgehog Review 23, no. 1, 2021.
84 nlr 129
introduction of a ban on Freemasonry, which it associated with the

republican political class, in an article entitled ‘Secret Societies’. A tor-
rent of angry rebuttals in the official press ensued, and Salazar ordered
the censors to prevent Pessoa from responding to them.
The publication of ‘Secret Societies’ in February 1935 marked an open

rupture between Pessoa and Salazar’s regime, and from this point until
his death in November the tone of his writing about it became uni-
formly hostile.40 A number of biting satirical poems portrayed Salazar
as a ‘poor little tyrant’ who ‘drinks freedom and liberty’. His name was
dissected into sal, salt, and azar, chance, Pessoa imagining the arrival
of a rainstorm to dissolve the salt—mistaking Salazar, who would prove
durable, for a transitory strongman like Pais or Pimenta de Castro.
Pessoa’s new politics made for strange bedfellows: he went so far as
to send an anti-Salazarist poem, ‘Liberdade’, to Seara Nova, a repub-
lican magazine that represented a faction Pessoa otherwise strongly
disliked.41 Most effective among these late political poems was perhaps
‘Estado Novo Love Poem’, a pastiche of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18’ using
the catchphrases of Ferro’s propaganda network touting Salazar’s finan-
cial acumen. Gesturing at the absurdity of placing political demands
on literature, Pessoa has his speaker compare the object of his love to
the national budget: ‘On your favour I’m depending / Won’t you stay
another moment / O my lovely cut in spending?’42
At the very time Pessoa was making his break with Salazar in Lisbon,
in London T. S. Eliot was negotiating the English-language rights of
Ferro’s sycophantic interviews with the dictator for Faber & Faber, pack-
aged as a book for translation in various European countries, under the
title Salazar: Portugal and her Leader. Curiously, Pessoa seems never to
have registered Eliot’s stature as a poet, his contributions to Wyndham
Lewis’s Blast, of which Pessoa read both numbers, apparently leaving
him cold. Had he done so, and lived longer, he would have been dis-
mayed to witness Eliot’s arrival in Portugal as a guest of the regime in
1938, and what he had to say about his experience, writing to Ferro of its
‘enlightened and far-seeing government’, and his ‘respect and admira-
tion for Dr Salazar, formed by reading’ and confirmed by ‘having the
40
41
The poem would not be published until two years after Pessoa’s death, and with
the final stanza cut by the censors: see Seara Nova 526, 11 Sep 1937.
42
sf, p. 377. Original in Portuguese, translation mine.
burns: Pessoa 85
pleasure of meeting him’.43 No sentiments could have been more distant

from Pessoa’s.
In an unusually precise and measured article written during the same

period, which he hoped to publish in the Paris weekly Les nouvelles lit-
téraires, Pessoa recounted Salazar’s patient manoeuvres within the
dictatorship to consolidate his power and his acute sense of the lev-
erage afforded him by his expertise in finance. As for the dictator’s
temperament, he was ‘intelligent without flexibility, religious without
spiritualism’, a species of Catholic materialist who was a born athe-
ist, who merely happened to worship the Virgin. Under way was a
change in the nature of the Portuguese dictatorship, from the ‘simple’
military type, along the lines of Primo de Rivera’s Spain, to something
more on the order of Mussolini’s Italy.44 Apparently seeking a return
to the ‘simple’ form, Pessoa drafted a letter to the Portuguese presi-
dent, General Carmona, begging him to check Salazar’s influence. The
Estado Novo was not what the ‘state of transition’ in O Interregno—a
text which, he now wrote in a note of March 1935, ‘should be considered
non-existent’—was supposed to be.45 Pessoa intended to reconcile his
defence of Freemasonry with his pride in the Portuguese past with a
new theory of ‘liberal nationalism’, to be propounded in an article for
which he left a dozen notes, dying before he could complete a draft.
For Barreto, this final phase reflects the enduring contradiction between
Pessoa’s liberal principles and his support for a ‘transitory’ dictatorship.
Nor would he have necessarily achieved greater clarity had he lived: the
Spanish Civil War might only have confirmed his sense of the necessity
of a ‘liberal dictatorship’.46
Verdicts on Pessoa
Barreto, a researcher at the prestigious Instituto de Ciências Sociais of

the University of Lisbon, belongs to the generation that came of age
in the last years of the Estado Novo. Prior to his work on Pessoa, he
produced studies on Portuguese labour history (emphasizing the defor-
mations of corporatism persistent in contemporary unionism) and the
Catholic Church (emphasizing Catholic resistance to the Estado Novo).
A major motive of his writing on Pessoa has evidently been to defend
the poet from accusations that he lent support to Salazar’s regime or
43
pb, pp. 900–1. 44
sf, p. 320.
45
sf, p. 289. 46
86 nlr 129
harboured sympathies for fascism, levelled not only by António Costa

Pinto, but Alfredo Margarido and Manuel Villaverde Cabral (a colleague
of Barreto’s at ics-ul), both political exiles before 1974—Margarido for
activity in Angola during the colonial war, Cabral for his membership of
the banned Portuguese Communist Party.
How does Barreto’s defence of Pessoa hold up? As to fascism in Italy and
Germany, Barreto clearly has the better of Pessoa’s critics, with the writ-
er’s opposition to Mussolini’s regime well documented. Given Pessoa’s
bent for the outrageous, one would expect accusations of other forms of
prejudice as well—racism or antisemitism. We learn from Barreto that
Pessoa, who always had a penchant for the esoteric, wrote a number of
fevered fragments on the ‘conspiracy of the 300’—an occult ring suppos-
edly ruling the world—in which he deprecates ‘sub-Judaism’, apparently
a synonym for vulgar materialism. We do not, however, learn that he
entertained plans to publish an edition of the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion at his publishing house, Olisipo (the plans were abandoned).47
Barreto has maintained in the Portuguese press that Pessoa was not a
racist.48 Such a claim fails the test of his comment, in an unsent open
letter to Woodrow Wilson that Zenith publishes in his biography for the
first time: blacks ‘are not human beings, sociologically speaking. The
greatest crime against humanity was the abolition of slavery’.49 To offset
this outburst, Zenith musters Pessoa’s criticism of the Italian invasion
of Abyssinia as evidence of a later change of heart. Actually, Pessoa’s
letter to Wilson, extending Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse’ to its logical
conclusion, is an extreme example of frequent outbursts in his private
writing and perhaps not something he would ever have published or
stood by, as Zenith suggests. On the other hand, nor is it sure that his
text on Abyssinia indicated a general change to Pessoa’s outlook. His
kind of humanism had always been at odds with a firm belief in natural
hierarchies—Aristotle by way of Herbert Spencer.
Would then the appropriate epithet be, not an incipient fascist but
a poet of neoliberalism ante diem? Certainly Hayek, to whom Barreto
compares Pessoa, was another Anglophile interested in the possibility
of liberal dictatorship, and one who sent a copy of his Constitution of
47
sf, p. 55; pb, p. 609.
48
‘Historiador José Barreto afasta acusações de racismo na obra de Fernando
Pessoa’, O Observador, 15 February 2019.
49
pb, p. 534.
burns: Pessoa 87
Liberty to Salazar. Curiously, Barreto’s arch-opponent Margarido also

spoke of Pessoa’s ‘most orthodox liberalism’ in an early essay on his
political thought.50 In this sense the intense debate among Portuguese
scholars on Pessoa’s relationship to Salazar itself risks a Pessoan-style
critique—that of being parochial and outdated (related, or unrelated, to
the way Portugal itself seems today in some ways a throw-back to a pre-
vious political age in Western Europe, with a still-going socialist party
in power, a communist party with ten times the number of deputies on
the far right, and a broad front against the austerity practised elsewhere
in the eu?)
Is it fair, though, to read Pessoa as a neoliberal? The ‘Anarchist Banker’

was meant as a satire of Proudhon, as Zenith reminds us, though other
writings suggest its sardonic reconciliation of liberty and social hier-
archy was sincere.51 But Pessoa was something of an anti-materialist,
too, and a counterbalance to his ‘orthodox liberalism’ lay in his aesthetic
commitments. Consider the ambivalent sentiment he expressed towards
American capitalism in his articles in his step-brother’s Commercial
Review: American pragmatism might be productive, the accomplish-
ments of Henry Ford no doubt ‘in their way, admirable’—but this was
a culture that produced rich men who did not know how to be rich,
one that could be taunted with questions like ‘How many of you have a
harem, a real harem?’52 American civilization had ‘the maximum of the
minimum’; there, people ‘don’t create, they only arrange’.53
Overall it could be said that Barreto blurs the contours of Pessoa’s con-
ception of democracy, at times frankly labelling him an antidemocrat,
at others presenting him as just a pointed critic of the failures of exist-
ing democracies to live up their professed ideals. His association of
Pessoa’s O Interregno with the latter rather than the former strain in his
thought seems especially a stretch. As its title suggests, Pessoa defended
military dictatorship as necessary to establish a sense of national unity,
currently lacking in the Portuguese but essential for the establishment—
at some point in the perhaps distant future—of a government ‘based
50
‘La pensée politique de Fernando Pessoa’, Bulletin des études portugaises 32, 1971,
p. 152.
51
pb, pp. 533, 619.
52
Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade 4, June 1926; quoted in pb, p. 668.
53
sf, p. 52. The verb arranjar is one Pessoa used closer to home, calling Salazar on
several occasions a mere ‘arranger’. American evaluations could be very different,
in ways Pessoa would have regarded as a vindication: see Dean Acheson’s widely
repeated description of Salazar as a ‘philosopher-king’.
88 nlr 129
on public opinion’. For Pessoa, however, government based on public

opinion was compatible not only with democracy but with regimes of
many different kinds.
Barreto is right that O Interregno is not a pro-fascist tract. The forces

behind the bloodless coup of 1926 were in the first instance neither
fascist nor even far-right. With the failure of Sidónio Pais’s integralista-
backed dictatorship fresh in the generals’ minds, their watchword was
rather all-purpose opposition to parliamentarism under the prp, Salazar
brought in as a technocrat rather than (initially) a Catholic conservative.54
O Interregno allowed Pessoa to revisit the theories of public opinion he
had advanced in his Acção essays. He now held public opinion a partially
rational phenomenon, rather than completely irrational (as previously).
It encompassed a dialectical dance between progressive instinct and
conservative habit, with the occasional ‘abusive intrusion’ of the active
intellect. Of the three possible bases for government—brute force, tradi-
tional authority and opinion—only the last was viable for modern states,
as the Enlightenment had irreversibly discredited traditional authority.
But public opinion was organic and could not be imposed on a peo-
ple. The mistake of the French Revolution had been to assume that the
English constitution was a ‘metaphysical truth’ or a ‘formula’ that could
be imposed as such, rather than the idiosyncratic result of a series of
accidents.55 The Portuguese First Republic was born without the exist-
ence of the strong public opinion that could have sustained it, so it
had failed, as would all future attempts of the same kind. Even where
a public opinion had taken shape, a regime that answered to it would
not necessarily be parliamentary or democratic. In Portugal these were
considerations that could only obtain at a later stage: required now
was a kind of non-regime, a sort of night-watchman state avant la lettre
enforcing only order, stimulating the growth of a national ‘idea’. The
only group in a position to deliver this were the Armed Forces. Military
dictatorship, whether the current regime or another, was the sole way
forward for the country.
54
A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, vol. 2, New York 1972, p. 179.
55
sf, p. 114.
burns: Pessoa 89
Much of the naivety of O Interregno is corrected in Pessoa’s later writ-

ings on Salazar. After endorsing military dictatorship as a solution to
national division in 1928, by 1934 he could see that Salazar’s deprecation
of the ‘party spirit’ was mere rhetoric, his official National Union not the
antithesis of a party—the official line—rather a mere ‘party with a minus
sign attached’.56 Pessoa came to reject the Estado Novo as embodying
ideological tendencies like Maurrassianism he thought foreign to the
national spirit, being a French import. In the terms of O Interregno, it
was neither a mere state of transition nor a true government of opinion
resulting from one.
It bears asking what exactly Pessoa believed was inherent in the

Portuguese national spirit. It could not be throne and altar, nor—Teixeira
de Pascoaes’s answer—saudade. Perhaps it was merely linguistic: ‘My
nation is the Portuguese language’, he wrote in 1931.57 The best answer
Pessoa could give in O Interregno was a non-answer, to the effect that
the Portuguese were paralysed by a lack of a national will and needed to
acquire one as soon as possible. Mensagem was his final and most mys-
terious answer: Portugal lay buried somewhere in a heap of symbolic
puzzles left over from the Age of Discoveries, in the mystical promise of
King Sebastian’s return.
Censorship, Freemasonry
In truth the trajectory of the Estado Novo bore more than a passing resem-
blance to the future government Pessoa had predicted in O Interregno.
The Estado Novo was in a sense only an outgrowth of the military dic-
tatorship that preceded it: Salazar was shoe-horned into power by the
military and it was a military rising that brought down his successor,
Marcello Caetano, in 1974. Claiming to represent the Portuguese nation,
after the death of the exiled Manuel II in 1932, the Estado Novo quietly
resolved what Pessoa considered the principal obstacle to Portuguese
unity, the quarrel between royalists and republicans. Ironically too, in
waging the brutal colonial wars that finally undid it, the Estado Novo
gave the Portuguese what for Ernest Renan was a crucial ingredient of
national identity: something jointly to forget.
56
sf, pp. 230–7.
57
Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, London 2001, p. 225.
90 nlr 129
Barreto’s case for Pessoa’s late turn against the Estado Novo finds
impressive illustration in unpublished material. Ultimately, it is not so
surprising that Salazar—pious, withdrawn, technocratic—was finally
a distasteful and anti-national figure for Pessoa. Weaker, in Barreto’s
portrait of Pessoa’s politics, is his neglect—tactful bracketing?—of the
lack of foresight which characterized its oscillations. For example, after
previously dismissing complaints about censorship, Pessoa justified his
late opposition to the regime by distinguishing between merely ‘nega-
tive’ censorship (preventing writers from publishing certain opinions or
addressing certain subjects) and a more oppressive ‘positive’ censorship
which instructed the writing of certain opinions. Casuistry dissembling
tergiversation? In an English fragment on the newly inaugurated Estado
Novo which Barreto dates to 1933, Pessoa could write: ‘Now the present
Dictatorship may frankly be described as liberal. Apart from the censor-
ship of the press, which is not very harsh and is chiefly mutilatory [sic] of
the products of worthless political fanaticism . . . there is in Portugal no
oppression’. Only two years later he would find himself angrily protest-
ing the mutilation of his own work.
In ‘Secret Societies’, the centrepiece in Barreto’s account of his turn

against Salazar, Pessoa makes a narrow defence of Freemasonry on its
own terms without appealing to liberal principles, and while issuing
several insults to the intelligence of the author of the anti-masonic law,
proceeds to no broad criticism of the regime. When his article came
under fire, Pessoa drafted a response—unpublished, with Salazar’s ban
in effect—insisting he remained a situacionista (supporter of the estab-
lishment) and absurdly claiming that he had the right to maintain his
liberal principles while still supporting the now explicitly anti-liberal
Estado Novo.
What might have happened had Pessoa not died at the end of 1935?
Would he have maintained his opposition to the Estado Novo, accepting
exile, imprisonment or enforced silence, or might he have found a way
to adhere to the new regime? Pessoa prized his independence so highly
that the last is hard to imagine, but so is his departure from Lisbon, or
his survival in general into the era of the Estado Novo, which began in
earnest the year after his death. Pessoa’s highly plural literary production
seems possible only in the world of the doomed Portuguese Republic,
full of colliding forces and avant-garde excitements.
burns: Pessoa 91
The poet seemed to realize this himself. Absurdity turns to tragedy in

the last notes in Barreto’s collection, showing Pessoa’s escalating panic
and despair at the political situation. ‘The New State has aged me’, he
complained in an unsent letter to a friend. It had dawned on him that
censorship meant that most of what he wanted to write was now unpub-
lishable in Portugal, and he abandoned plans to publish abroad. And he
was suddenly lonely: almost his entire group of friends, as well as the
secretary with whom he had once stepped out, would earn a living work-
ing for Ferro’s propaganda network or in related pro-regime activities.58
Zenith points out that even his heteronyms seemed exhausted. An ode
written in November 1935 and signed by Ricardo Reis no longer reflects
Reis’s classical repose, rather an existential scission that is all Pessoa’s:
‘I don’t know, when I think or feel / Who is thinking or feeling. / I am
merely the place / Where things are thought and felt.’59 By the end of the
month he was dead.60
Contradictions of the poet
Barreto’s compendium, including texts ranging in complexity from

scribbled sentences to fully developed essays, supplies a fascinating
storehouse of Pessoa’s rhetorical arsenal. Successive drafts of the same
essay reveal him trying out arguments, refining them, organizing abrupt
assertions into a more systematic order. Pessoa often claimed he was a
dramatist above all else—the influence of Shakespeare extending past
the sonnet form, the heteronyms dramatis personae in the supra-drama of
Pessoa’s oeuvre—and a dramatic flair is noticeable in his political prose
as well.61 An admirer of the debating societies of Oxford and Cambridge,
about which he is likely to have heard or read reports as a schoolboy in
Durban, Pessoa seems to be performing in much of his political writing.
58
pb, pp. 928, 937.
59
Quoted in pb, p. 921.
60
Pessoa’s last published article, introducing a November issue of Sudoeste reunit-
ing survivors from the old Orpheu scene, indicates his despair was not total. In
contrast to the resignation of his poem of 1933 ‘Tabacaria’—in which a defeated,
peculiarly Bernardo Soares-like Álvaro de Campos despaired of his lonely aspira-
tions coming to anything—in this piece he declared the immortality of his ‘extinct
and inextinguishable’ set of hopes. ‘We will always be around. Orpheu ended.
Orpheu continues.’
61
Octavio Paz reminds us that Pessoa was not exactly a dramatist: he invented not
characters but rather the works of characters (Cuadrivio, p. 144).
92 nlr 129
The prose itself is direct and fresh, free of the pompous circumlocutions
of Portuguese writing of the era. Pessoa’s English education lent him an
immediacy in his native language, though it also gave his Portuguese
an unusual cast. Detectable too are a certain number of translated
Victorianisms, and Pessoa can be dry or risible when, playing the part of
the theorist, he tries to imitate the syllogistic style of Aristotle.
Certainly no one could tax him with an excess of maturity in this portion
of his work. Yet from the vantage of the twenty-first century, the wild-
ness of Pessoa’s sorties is not without appeal. Protected by his obscurity
and his ability to write for different audiences in different ephemeral
magazines, he was always willing to try out a surprising or outlandish
argument. Prizing his independence above all else, he had little fear of
expressing unacceptable views or of contradicting himself. The darting
shafts of his intelligence make much of the political writing by headline
literati in this century seem packaged and predictable by comparison. In
an age when all vantage-points in the world of letters seem to reveal ever
more conformism and homogeneity, careful curation of indistinguish-
able personal ‘brands’ determined by hegemonic market and cultural
forces, Pessoa’s idiosyncratic heterogeneity appears positively revo-
lutionary. What prospects would confront a talent like his today? The
proliferation of journalistic fact-checking certainly militates against imi-
tation of his delightful Borgesian forgeries. But the contemporary scene,
with its combination of easily outraged moral sentiments and online
ecosystems bristling with pseudonymous political commentary, cries
out for the advent of some polemicist-cum-dramaturge, an infra-Pessoa
capable of wreaking scandal by means of a dozen fake accounts.
If the fruits of Pessoa’s boldness were mixed, his belated defence of

intellectual freedom was well warranted and genuine, his mockery of
Salazar vicious and acute. It can also be said (a low bar?) that his politi-
cal judgement compares favourably with that of some of his old Orpheu
comrades. Ferro was no doubt a born mercenary, but the story of Almada
Negreiros is perhaps sadder: author of an epoch-making attack on the
literary establishment in 1915—the Manifesto Anti-Dantas—he went on
to paint murals for the Estado Novo.62 Given its cold reception, his quick
62
Almada’s cannonade was directed at Júlio Dantas (1876–1962), surgeon, author
of popular dramas and veteran of the old guard of Portuguese literature; a peren-
nial Nobel contender who had been among the establishment voices to criticize the
Orpheu circle in print. Full of lurid objurgations—‘Dantas looks horrible naked!’;
burns: Pessoa 93
change of heart and the nugatory propaganda value of his impenetra-

ble Mensagem, the epithet Alfredo Margarido saw fit to apply to Pessoa’s
entry into the propaganda contest of 1934 (‘official poet’) seems exces-
sive. Zenith suggests that Pessoa’s friend Augusto Ferreira Gomes—a
genuine fascist who wrote for the magazine of Rolão Preto’s National
Syndicalist movement—was the force behind his entry, assuring him
there were no conditions attached to the prize.63 Then there are the liter-
ary considerations: the contest provided the inducement for a dissipated,
deteriorating Pessoa to assemble the only book of poems in Portuguese
published in his lifetime. Falling short of communicating the full range
of his genius, Mensagem stands nonetheless as the most complete of all
his works, and its publication must have offered a poet often tortured by
his own fragmentary condition some small measure of relief.
Barreto’s emphasis on the contradiction within Pessoa between an

English-style conservatism and a Portuguese-style mystic nationalism,
the former serving as an antidote to temptations latent in the latter, is
not unreasonable: in the last months of his life Pessoa himself articu-
lated the tension in his thought in these terms. In his most extreme late
attempt to square the circle, he declared that only the individual and the
nation were real, while all other sociological categories—including class
and even the family—were fictions.64 What to make of this claim? In
politics as in his poetry, Pessoa sought in his fashion to extract a single
absolute out of an apparently meaningless flux of multiplicity. In their
plurality and their otherness his heteronyms, each positing a unified
and coherent self that was different, exacerbated rather than resolved
his dilemma. Álvaro de Campos’s 1928 poem ‘Lisbon Revisited’ offers
the metaphor of a broken mirror: ‘In every fateful fragment I see only a
piece of myself / A piece of me and of you!’
Similar forces were at work in his political writing. Consistently refus-

ing to accept the division of society into social classes, Pessoa considered
materialism a vulgar reflex of spiritual slaves and their Marxist tribunes.
Human emancipation—Pessoa cited Hegel—was before all else a lib-
eration of the spirit. But where, politically speaking, lay the instrument
‘Dantas is a big gypsy!’; ‘If Dantas is Portuguese, I want to be Spanish!’ etc.—of the
many displays of impudence by the members of the ‘first’ Portuguese modernism,
Almada’s manifesto stands out as the most spectacular.
63
pb, pp. 823, 851.
64
sf, p. 360.
94 nlr 129
of this liberation? Searching for a unifying force, Pessoa found two:

the individual, who also represented humanity, and the nation, which
formed a supernatural mystery. Which was the true absolute? Unable to
give up either, he remained existentially torn between them.
Nor was it possible to stop theorizing. Octavio Paz was the first to rec-
ognize that Pessoa’s pastoral heteronym Alberto Caeiro represented the
‘myth of the innocent poet’.65 His serene opposition to all theories and
philosophies (‘Metaphysics? What metaphysics are in these trees!’) offers
a seductive retreat for souls worn out by the onslaught of modern ideol-
ogy.66 But the most cursory analysis reveals Caeiro’s rustic physicalism
as itself a particularly narrow metaphysics, and this tension—longing
for the peace that Caeiro promises, yet knowing the promise is false—is
at the core of his role in the Pessoan corpus.67 There could be no such
easy escape from the philosophical life.
Pursuing both the nation and the individual gave Pessoa at least one
point of contact with all his contemporaries, but also some disagreement
with each of them. A negative Everyman, Pessoa approached everyone
but reached no one—not even himself. ‘The individual has something
of the foreigner in him’, he admitted, a general statement but also a self-
epitome.68 Who could be a less convincing figure to insist on the absolute
unity of nation and individual than this Portuguese with his English edu-
cation and his split personalities? Pessoa’s political writing often took the
form of a fugitive species of polemic, an attack on everything from a van-
tage point of nowhere, capable of arousing excitement and recognition,
disappointment and revulsion, in equal measure. It is as hard to agree
with as it is hard to dismiss. In that, it may frame a paradox of much
modern political writing: the impossibility of identifying the self with
any single existent theory, yet the irresistible temptation to try.
65
Cuadrivio, p. 149.
66
Fernando Pessoa, Antologia poética, Lisbon 2013, p. 199. Translation mine.
67
Borrowing Tocqueville’s framing in Democracy in America II, part 1, chs. 3–4,
to the effect that English culture is fixated on details and Latin culture on general
ideas, Caeiro also appears as an emanation of Pessoa’s English-Portuguese double
identity: he tries to dismiss the role of abstract considerations in favour of details,
but does so in a manner which ends in abstraction.
68
sf, p. 371.
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Chile Confounds Kuban Stanitsa Super-Gaffes

CAMILA VERGARA GEORGI DERLUGIAN M I C H E L E M A RT E L L I
A plebeian electoral Reflections on a return The subtext of Mario

breakthrough. to southern Russia. Draghi’s blunders.
new l ef t r eview.or g/s i d e c a r

The End of Déby Hungary’s Liquor Killer Prince
RAHMANE IDRISSA YA N A S KO R O B O G AT O V TA R I Q A L I
Fall of Chad’s warrior- Reading post-Soviet Six years of Saudi war on

president. cinema. Yemen.
Eco-Investing? Abandon Ship Signs Everywhere

ADRIENNE BULLER TOM HAZELDINE LORNA SCOTT FOX
The illusions of ‘green Labourism’s decline The fiction of a physicist.

finance’. continues apace.
Erdoğan’s Zigzags Rebellion USA The Parasite

ÜMI T A KC AY NANCY FRASER RYA N R U BY
Turkey in cyclical crisis. Care and popular revolt. Literary gentrification.
Politics of Noir Correa’s Legacy How Does it Feel

E M I L I E B I C K E RT O N ÉRIC TOUSSAINT SASHA FRERE-JONES
Dominique Manotti’s Understanding the right- Farewell to Daft Punk.

masterworks. wing victory in Ecuador.
new l ef t r eview.or g/s i d e c a r

marcus verhagen
MAKING TIME
I
n modern times, Jacques Rancière addresses the organization
of temporalities that underlies the present order of society. He
suggests that some socio-economic roles have their own temporal
profiles, with distinctive schedules and cadences, their own pat-
terns of stress and release—this is what he calls the ‘partition of times’.
Modern Times emphasizes both the naturalized character of this organi-
zation of time and its stratification by class and occupation, determining
who can do what and when.1 But Rancière is primarily concerned with
efforts to resist the reigning partition and bring about a ‘redistribu-
tion of times’, by instituting other rhythms or re-assigning intervals to
other activities. Here he is characteristically ecumenical, touching on
both practical and literary resistances, and forms of redistribution both
personal and collective. Cultural products are read as potentially signifi-
cant interventions in the politics of time. So, for instance, Rancière sees
Virginia Woolf’s critique of the plot-driven novel in her essay ‘Modern
Fiction’ as a revolt against the subordination of narrative to an inevita-
ble climax or dénouement—and so, by extension, a rebellion against
instrumentalization as a principle of cultural and economic life.2 Protest
movements offer another example of temporal subversion: protesters
occupy time as well as space, subtracting it from work and producing
time spent together.
Today’s precarious labour has its own highly fragmented temporality:

periods of inactivity, retraining, part-time and multiple employment.
When precarious workers take to the streets, they turn this discontinu-
ous time into an interval of assembly, recasting the struggle over time in
new terms. Rancière focuses on the revolt of the intermittents du spectacle,
cultural workers, many of them in the performing arts, who protested in
2003 and again in 2014 against proposed cuts to the benefits supposed
to compensate for the sporadic nature of their work. The intermittents

98 nlr 129
plainly identified their problems with those of precarious workers every-

where and saw their protests as the construction of ‘a common time’,
within a new war on temporal partition. In presenting time as a crucial
site of conflict, Rancière is of course building on a long tradition rooted
in disputes over the length of the working day. This line of thought
received a powerful impetus in the late sixties from the work of histori-
ans such as Edward Thompson, who saw the rise of ‘clock time’ and the
imposition of ‘time-discipline’ as pillars of industrial capitalism, alienat-
ing workers from their own labour.3 Rancière adapts this argument to
current conditions and gives it a dynamic inflection, repositioning cul-
tural production and cultural labour at the centre of the debate.
Artists on strike
The questions that animate Rancière’s text are of course live ones in
the art world. They have been addressed by organizations such as New
York-based wage (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), which
has sought to highlight and counter the reliance of art-world institutions
on unpaid labour. They have also been tackled in artworks such as Maria
Eichhorn’s Spring 2016 project for the Chisenhale Gallery in London,
5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours. As a placard fixed to the gallery’s locked
front gate announced at the time, the gallery staff stayed away from work
for the duration of the show. On the day of the opening the gallery held
a symposium at which Eichhorn’s gambit was discussed by the artist,
Chisenhale Gallery staff, commentators and members of the public,
and the catalogue included an earlier conversation in which gallery staff
spoke to the artist about their work—about the pace of it, the time spent
fundraising, the pressure to respond to emails and maintain the insti-
tution’s social-media presence, and so on.4 Over the following weeks,
as the gallery remained closed, emails and calls met with automated
responses and social-media feeds were frozen. Eichhorn’s gesture was
configured in the catalogue as a gift. She was, she said in an interview
1
Jacques Rancière, Modern Times: Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics, Zagreb
2017, pp. 12–43.
2
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), Selected Essays, David Bradshaw, ed.,
Oxford 2008.
3
Edward Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and
Present, vol. 38, no. 1, December 1967, pp. 56–97. See also Guy Debord, The Society
of the Spectacle, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans., (1967) New York 1994, pp. 109–17.
4
Audio files of the symposium are accessible at chisenhale.org.uk. For a tran-
scription of the artist’s conversation with gallery staff, see ‘Working at Chisenhale
Gallery’, Maria Eichhorn: 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours, London 2016, pp. 15–41.
verhagen: Art Work 99
with the Chisenhale curator Katie Guggenheim, ‘giving time’, but in its
orientation to the public the show was also, as Guggenheim pointed out
in the same conversation, a denial of service and hence an action akin to
a strike.5 In Eichhorn’s project, as in Rancière’s essay, protest and labour
were viewed together through the prism of time.
Eichhorn’s intervention is one of a number of artworks in recent years

that have examined labour in the art world. Another is Intern vip Lounge
created by Ahmet Öğüt at Art Dubai in 2013. Accessible only to interns, it
was a well-appointed space where they could go to chat, play ping-pong,
help themselves to refreshments and attend a dedicated programme of
talks and screenings. The installation parodied devices used to flatter
and entice sponsors and collectors at art fairs—exclusive pre-openings,
invitation-only events and spaces, including vip lounges—while draw-
ing attention to the use of unpaid labour and alluding, more obliquely, to
the appalling conditions of migrant labour in the Gulf States. Though it
was on the face of it a less austere project than Eichhorn’s, it anticipated
certain features of 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours. Like the later work, it took
the form of a gesture of assistance to art workers while denying access to
the art-viewing public.
In one sense, though, Eichhorn’s project for Chisenhale Gallery was

unlike Öğüt’s Intern vip Lounge, for it drew heavily on earlier art projects
and art-world initiatives. Artists have long resorted to acts of withdrawal:
Marcel Duchamp claimed (misleadingly) to have given up art-making
for chess in 1923, the Dutch conceptualist Stanley Brouwn consist-
ently turned interviewers away and withheld biographical information,
the American artist Laurie Parsons turned her back on the art world in
1994 to become a social worker.6 Eichhorn’s work in London loosely
recalled these gestures and others like them, but it referred more point-
edly to various projects undertaken in the aftermath of the 1968 revolts,
a period she had already mined in an earlier work.7 It is in the work’s
backward glance, the way it made the interval between that time and its
5
Katie Guggenheim, ‘Interview with Maria Eichhorn’, Maria Eichhorn, p. 68.
6
The practices of Parsons and Brouwn are among those discussed in Martin
Herbert’s account of withdrawal as a strategy in contemporary art: Tell Them I Said
No, Berlin 2016.
7
One of her installations, ‘The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement’
von Seth Siegelaub und Bob Projansky (1997), is an investigation into the contract
that the dealer and early defender of conceptual art Seth Siegelaub drew up in 1971
with a lawyer to define and defend the rights of artists, particularly in the event of
the resale of their work.
100 nlr 129
own resonate in its imagery and organization, that its significance as a

reflection on contemporary labour can most clearly be seen.
One vital precedent is Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece (1969), for
which the artist issued invitations to galleries in Amsterdam, Turin and
Los Angeles, each invitation indicating that the gallery would be closed
for a period of time. Barry stayed away from the galleries involved, later
stating, ‘the people were so nice, but partially I would say that [my moti-
vation] was a kind of independent anti-establishment streak.’8 The same
sentiment, nourished by the 1968 protests and the antiwar movement,
powered a number of other projects of the time. During a 1969 residency
at the rand Corporation in Los Angeles, John Chamberlain proposed
various actions, one of which was to cut off all their phones for a day.9
Here was another artist who, like Eichhorn in 2016, offered an impedi-
ment to work as his contribution to the functioning of an enterprise.
Also in 1969, Takis took down one of his own works at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, where it had been included in a show without
his consent, and distributed a flyer in which he stated that his gesture
was ‘the first in a series of acts against the stagnant policies of art muse-
ums all over the world.’10
So it turned out. Takis’s intervention was one of the triggers for the
formation of the Art Workers’ Coalition, a group of artists, filmmakers
and curators who together lobbied museums to bring in free admis-
sion, show the work of black artists, involve artists in the curating of
shows, and introduce other democratizing measures. The group, which
included figures such as Carl Andre and Hans Haacke, wanted to
develop new forms of protest, not only against exclusionary art-world
practices but also against the Vietnam War. In April 1969, the awc held
an open hearing at which participants discussed a range of issues, from
artistic labour to sexism in American society. There the artist Lee Lozano
declared, ‘For me there can be no art revolution that is separate from a
science revolution, a political revolution, an education revolution, a drug
8
Robert Barry, ‘Closed Gallery Piece’, in John Armleder et al., eds, Voids: A
Retrospective, Paris 2009, p. 88.
9
Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge ma 2004,
p. 17.
10
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, Berkeley
2009, p. 13.
revolution, a sex revolution or a personal revolution’—‘I will participate

only in a total revolution simultaneously personal and public.’11 This
statement anticipated her General Strike Piece (1969), which announced
that she was quitting the art world and documented her final visits to
various institutions.12
The notion of the work stoppage was marshalled again in the 1970 Art
Strike, when an offshoot of the awc called for the closing of museums
in New York on May 22nd in protest against the Vietnam War and the
killing of demonstrators at Kent State University on May 4th.13 Many
museums and galleries did close for the day, including moma and the
Whitney, but the Metropolitan Museum stayed open and was picketed
by hundreds of artists, prominently including Robert Morris. Just a few
days earlier Morris had called on the Whitney to close his solo exhibition
there: he was, he said, ‘on strike’.14 It was on the back of this earlier act
of stoppage that he took up a leading role in the Art Strike.
When these artists and art workers closed galleries and launched strike
actions, they were using the withdrawal of labour not as a means to force
employers to negotiate over pay or working conditions but as a way of
highlighting inequities in the institutional workings of the art world.
More broadly, they were connecting their struggles with what Herbert
Marcuse called ‘the Great Refusal’. For Marcuse this encompassed not
just the rebellions of 1968 and the Black Power movement, but also a
range of day-to-day gestures of withdrawal and obstruction.15 Though
other art strikes have been organized since—including one protesting
Trump’s accession to the presidency—it is primarily to these moments
in 1969–70 and to this nexus of ideas that Eichhorn was referring in her
2016 project, half a year before Trump’s electoral victory. In their cata-
logue introduction, the Chisenhale Gallery’s then-director Polly Staple
and curator Katie Guggenheim recalled Barry’s 1969 Closed Gallery
Piece, pointing out that the artist’s Amsterdam gallery posted a sign on
the door stating, ‘For the exhibition the gallery will be closed’—the sign
11
Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, p. 17.
12
For a compelling analysis of Lozano’s refusals and withdrawals, see Jo Applin,
‘Hard Work: Lee Lozano’s Dropouts’, October 156, Spring 2016, pp. 75–99.
13
Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, pp. 112–21.
14
Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, p. 113.
15
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, Boston 1969.
102 nlr 129
on the Chisenhale’s gate in 2016 was a clear echo of this.16 They also
touched on the awc and the 1970 Art Strike. They might have added
that the symposium marking the opening of Eichhorn’s show recalled
the awc’s open hearing of 10 April 1969.
In evoking events and works of 1969–70, Eichhorn’s project asked to be

read as a gesture that was congruent with them. According to this read-
ing, 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours recuperated the stoppage as a sign of
protest, adapting it to the present configurations of work time. The pro-
ject thereby served as a refusal of the sleepless ‘24/7’ regime, described
by Jonathan Crary as a ‘non-social model of machinic performance’
which ‘conceals the human cost required to sustain it’.17 Crary’s 24/7
examines the rise of a professional culture of permanent availability,
detailing the ways in which work time has expanded to colonize other
areas of existence. In an era in which speed confers competitive advan-
tage, employees come under growing pressure to live by the cadences of
the market, increasingly disconnected from circadian rhythms.
This, perhaps, was the temporal regime that Eichhorn was suspend-
ing by ‘giving time’, with no strings attached, to Chisenhale staff. The
show stood as an exceptional interval in which work pressure was eased
by artistic fiat—an interval that stood apart from the ordinary flow of
productive time. It might be said that Eichhorn gave Chisenhale staff a
time resembling romantic conceptions of the artist’s temporal regime,
unstructured by schedules or deadlines—as referenced, for instance,
in Mladen Stilinović’s photographic series Artist at Work (1978),
which is composed of images of Stilinović lying on a bed, apparently
going to sleep.
Two readings
So one reading would hold that 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours carried out
a temporal redistribution, as Rancière would have it—that it, briefly but
suggestively, upended the current ‘partition’ by turning the time of hard-
pressed labour into an interval that was the worker’s to spend as he or she
pleased. In calling attention to artworks and events of the late sixties and
early seventies, Eichhorn’s project neither romanticized them nor turned
16
Katie Guggenheim and Polly Staple, ‘Introduction’, Maria Eichhorn, p. 13.
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London and New York
17
2013, p. 9.
away from the present: rather, the work suggested that confronting the
two historical moments might be an effective first step in sketching a
redistribution of times. She recovered the motifs of the stoppage and
empty gallery to reapportion periods of work and leisure, and so begin
to denaturalize the principles governing the contemporary economy of
time. But the project was open to another, bleaker interpretation.
This second reading is grounded not in the grand gesture of the stoppage
but in its discursive shadows, the symposium and catalogue. During the
symposium Eichhorn specified that she saw her conversation with the
gallery staff as part of the artwork. In this conversation, which is recorded
in the catalogue, what emerges is that gallery work epitomizes what writ-
ers in the Italian post-autonomist tradition, Paolo Virno and Maurizio
Lazzarato among them, call ‘immaterial labour’, which trades princi-
pally on communication skills, and on affective, expressive and creative
capacities. This kind of labour is predicated on flexibility and tends to be
highly precarious. It also erodes the distinction between work and free
time, since it involves the whole person, not just the worker’s technical
skills but their personality and social relations, which are shaped and
expressed in leisure and instrumentalized in the workplace.18
When gallery staff spoke with Eichhorn, they talked of building rela-
tionships with funding bodies and artists and, through social media,
with the public; they touched on the need to adapt to the demands of
the gallery as they routinely performed tasks other than those for which
they were trained; they spoke of representing the gallery in their spare
time, at other art world events; and so on. They clearly laboured under
the conditions outlined by Virno and Lazzarato—and the temporal pres-
sures detailed by Crary. They mentioned the want of time to reflect on
their work, the need to organize their time efficiently, the strain of trying
to attend to long-term projects while keeping abreast of more immedi-
ate tasks. Both the discussion in the catalogue and the later symposium
were coloured by the constant scrabbling for funds, at Chisenhale
Gallery and other institutions facing a decline in public support. An
analysis of small not-for-profit art organizations, taking Chisenhale as
one of its case studies, stresses the mismatch between the importance of
18
See for instance Paolo Virno, ‘Labour, Action, Intellect’, A Grammar of the
Multitude, Isabella Bertoletti et al., trans., Los Angeles 2004, pp. 47–71; and
Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds.,
Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis 1996, pp. 133–46.
104 nlr 129
these institutions to the larger art-world ecology (for instance as feeders

for museums) and their ability to find sponsorship and raise revenue
through commercial side-lines.19
Eichhorn’s project drew attention to these difficulties and to the pre-

carity of art-world labour, a recurrent theme in the catalogue and one
brought up in sharp and angry terms by several of those present at the
symposium. Like Rancière in his discussion of the intermittents du spec-
tacle, Virno and Lazzarato see cultural work not as an anomalous form
of labour but an emblematic one—and so it appeared in Eichhorn’s
work in London, which shone a light on the temporal and other stresses
that weigh on immaterial labour, in and by implication beyond the art
world. In their compelling account of the emergence of flexible post-
Fordist employment practices, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello trace
this development as a response to the protests of 1968 demanding
greater autonomy and scope for creativity at work. It is tempting to see
Eichhorn’s references to the art and political turmoil of the late sixties
as obliquely alluding to the historical beginnings of the labour system
anatomized in her conversation with the art workers at the gallery.20
Where does this second reading leave the artist? To the extent that the
project was a gift, she was the subject of that gesture, the giver who
initiated a redistribution of times. But inasmuch as she raised the vis-
ibility of backstage work in the art world, she played a more complex
and ambiguous part. In her conversation with gallery staff, she acted
as a facilitator, drawing each speaker out and occasionally offering
advice, but remaining mostly a discreet enabling presence. She was an
outsider; as she pointed out in the symposium, she was the one par-
ticipant whose labour was not withdrawn. It has been said of certain
strains in conceptual art, those in which the manual realization of the
artwork is delegated to collaborators, that they implicitly cast the artist
in a managerial position, but that characterization does not quite apply
here.21 Eichhorn was an external agent brought in to examine schedules
and structures, logjams and stresses. In this capacity, she did not pro-
vide solutions—rather, she created a context in which art workers could
assess the gallery’s institutional culture and air their concerns. In a role
19
Sarah Thelwall, Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value,
Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organisations, London 2011.
20
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Gregory Elliott,
trans., London and New York 2005.
21
Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic, Baltimore 2003, pp. 24–51.
more closely resembling that of a management consultant, she presided

over an exercise comparable to a workplace satisfaction survey.
If we accept this other reading, which focuses on what the show revealed
about the gallery as a workplace, the artwork was not transformative,
it did not invert the ordinary functioning of the gallery—on the con-
trary, it affirmed it. The conversation with gallery staff pointed to the
consonance of their work with the more precarious forms of immaterial
labour and hence re-established a temporal partition. That very conver-
sation and the gift of time itself may have served as a cathartic release:
the period of freedom from work granted by the artist can be seen as
holding to the same logic as a swim at the Googleplex or an office yoga
session. It mimicked the privilege designed to compensate workers for
the temporal and other stresses of work, temporarily defusing rather
than directly addressing those stresses. The same was more obviously
true of Öğüt’s Intern vip Lounge, which proposed a simulation of privi-
lege as a compensation for nakedly exploitative employment but left the
symbolism of exclusivity intact and, inasmuch as interns were corralled
in a separate space, held fair-goers to their allotted places.
According to the first reading outlined here, Eichhorn’s project harnessed

the notion of stoppage to stage a redistribution of times. According to
the second, it was an investigation of immaterial labour in which the
partition of times was reinscribed in the division of roles and the cathar-
tic description and release of temporal pressures. The question is not
whether one is more convincing than the other. They form a necessary
dyad, the one hinging on an exceptional interval of invisible leisure,
the other on labour conditions before and after: the one a wish-image,
the other a stock-taking. It is the tension between them that turned the
opening-day symposium into the tense and revealing event that it was
and the same tension that makes the project worth revisiting today.
For Rancière, ‘the most radical injustice suffered by those who are sub
mitted to the injustice of exploitation is the injustice of not having time,
the injustice of the partition of temporalities. For this partition does not
only entrap them in the material constraint of work. It also gives them
a soul and a body, a way of occupying space, of seeing, speaking, and
thinking adapted to that constraint.’22 Eichhorn’s project is premised
on the same understanding: this partition is more than just a symptom
22
Rancière, Modern Times, pp. 30–1.
106 nlr 129
of inequality and dysfunction. It is inequality and dysfunction. It is the

form they take as they materialize on the axis of time. Schedules and
deadlines, specific configurations of work and leisure, the cadences that
govern given tasks: these lock workers into roles, organizing time and
consciousness hierarchically, in accordance with larger economic struc-
tures and interests. Crary powerfully captures the present culture of
speed and its toxic effects but tends to treat it as monolithic. Rancière’s
crucial insight is that those effects are not uniform—they weigh in
different ways on different classes and communities. It is because sub-
jection to a temporal regime is also, unavoidably, subjection to division
and inequality that the disruption of imposed temporalities is vital to
any effort to rethink social relations. In ‘Theses on the Philosophy of
History’, Walter Benjamin recalls the insurgents who apparently shot at
clock towers in Paris during the revolution of 1830. Rancière invokes this
passage to suggest that radical social change requires—may be inaugu-
rated by—a fundamental rupture with the existing partition of times.23
Such a rupture can only take place, however, when the temporal order
of the present has been denaturalized. Harsh though it is to most, this
is not a structure that is immediately and plainly apparent but one that
flickers in and out of visibility, appearing most clearly when it is put
under stress, as it is by writers—so Rancière maintains—when they
disregard the temporal conventions of fiction writing, and by protesters
when they interrupt their work in the ‘formation of a common time’.
One virtue of Eichhorn’s project is that in the process of halting gal-
lery work she brings it out into the open and demonstrates its affinities
with other forms of immaterial labour. If, as Rancière contends, cultural
projects have a significant part to play in the wider effort to implement
a redistribution of times, then Eichhorn’s work is exemplary in fore-
grounding both the oppressive force of the current temporal regime and
the promise of another way of being in time.
23
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Thesis xv, in
Illuminations, Harry Zorn, trans., London 1999, pp. 253. See Rancière, Modern
Times, pp. 34–5.
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TIMPANARO
AMONG THE ANGLO-SAXONS
T
he reception of a thinker outside his own culture
is always unpredictable, often paradoxical.1 The case of
Sebastiano Timpanaro is not untypical. In his own writings,
there are plainly two principal cultures of reference outside
Italy—German and French. Germany: homeland of classical philology,
of historical materialism, and of psychoanalysis—that is, of the objects
of his great books on Lachmann, Marx-Engels and Freud. France: home-
land of Enlightenment materialism, and (antithetically) of 20th century
structuralism. So: Diderot and Holbach—object of some of his deepest
allegiances; Saussure-Lévi-Strauss-Lacan-Althusser—of his most dev-
astating attacks. Beyond such landmarks, Timpanaro had a fairly wide
knowledge of both intellectual landscapes. Many other figures from each
country populate his writings: from Schlegel, Bopp, Gödel, Meringer,
Korsch, Brecht on one side, to Laplace, Boutroux, Zola, Martinet, Sève
on the other.
By comparison, Timpanaro had scarcely any points of direct contact

with English culture. The only real exceptions lay in the technical field
of philology itself: Housman, Dodds, Lloyd-Jones, Kenney. Beyond this
specialized area, he had little traffic with English culture as such. The
situation was not quite the same with Anglophone culture in a wider
sense, since there were a number of American scholars of linguistics—
Bloomfield, Sapir and Chomsky—with whose writing he was acquainted.
But overall, there is no question about the distribution of his external
attention. The Franco-German axis dominates massively.

110 nlr 129
But if this was the pattern of Timpanaro’s interests, the pattern of inter-
ests in Timpanaro—his reception abroad—was the inverse. In Germany,
his book on Lachmann was translated; but nether Sul materialismo nor
Il lapsus freudiano ever saw a German-language edition, nor—to the best
of my knowledge—were ever seriously discussed in either Germany
or Austria. In France, this indifference was still more marked. Till
quite recently, none of his books ever appeared there.2 His magisterial
polemic against the misuses of Saussure, mystifications of Lévi-Strauss
or Althusser, met with complete silence. For Parisian intellectual life,
Sebastiano Timpanaro might as well not have existed. On the other
hand, in England, to whose culture he was far less attuned, not only
did his philological work achieve an earlier and more notable influ-
ence, but both his most widely accessible books were not just translated,
but aroused lively discussions. What explains this striking asymmetry
between orientation and reception?
One tempting answer would be that England lacked any powerful inher-
itance of modern philosophical idealism, comparable to the Hegelian,
Neo-Kantian or Crocean traditions against which Timpanaro pitted him-
self. Hence the local intellectual setting would have been more hospitable
to his ideas. There must be some element of validity in this hypothesis,
but it cannot be decisive. For England also lacked any strong tradition
of philosophical materialism either, at any rate after Hobbes. Rather, its
principal tradition was empiricist, with much more of a (sceptically) ide-
alist than a materialist accent, descending from Berkeley and Hume. We
can take it as symptomatic that in England there was no major recep-
tion of Leopardi comparable to what we find in Sainte-Beuve, Herzen
or Gide, nor any writer comparable to him like Georg Büchner. So the
philosophical setting was not that propitious.
More telling, no doubt, was another national peculiarity. England had a

very weak tradition of theoretical Marxism, as opposed to an (extremely
strong) current of empirical historiography inspired by Marxism, but
1
Edited version of a talk at the Scuola Normale in Pisa in 2001.
2
Eventually his philological work on Lachmann was translated into French. The
original Italian edition of La genesi del metodo del Lachmann was published in Pisa
in 1963. Its German translation appeared in Hamburg in 1971. Its rendition into
English was published in Chicago in 2005. In France, La genèse de la méthode de
Lachmann surfaced in Paris in 2016, half a century after its publication in Italy.
anderson: Timpanaro 111
without much systematic conceptual reflection. We had no Frankfurt

School, no Sartre or Lefebvre—nor any Gramsci or Della Volpe, of course.
What this meant, by the late sixties, was that England became an inten-
sive import-culture, so far as Marxism was concerned, with a very high
general level of translation of works from Germany, France and Italy.
This is the typical situation of a marginal or underdeveloped culture—an
eagerness to follow and learn from what goes on in the advanced centres
of intellectual production. Moreover, there was no strong local resistance
to any variety of ‘imported’ Marxist thought, because there was no prior
investment in—say—the Frankfurt School, Budapest School, Parisian
or Gramscian schools such as often blocked a free circulation of foreign
ideas elsewhere. Instead, in the England of that period there was a curios-
ity, among a newer generation, about each of these. From the mid-sixties
onwards, the journal that acted as the main conduit for them all was New
Left Review, which undertook translations, without bias, of every major
current of Western Marxism—so quite logically, of Timpanaro too. There
was no entrenched barrier to his ideas on the Left.
What, then, was the history of Timpanaro’s reception in England? In the

spring of 1974, the opening essay of Sul materialismo was translated in
nlr—a text that had given rise to some six replies in Quaderni Piacentini,
where it was originally published in 1966, to which Timpanaro had
rejoined in the second essay of the book. The editorial presentation of
Timpanaro in the ‘Themes’ of nlr welcomed his intervention, with one
qualification. In the Anglo-Saxon world, we wrote, Timpanaro’s argu-
ments were subject to a local modification.
Unlike Italy or France, in England and the usa vulgar materialism is not a
negligible presence within contemporary bourgeois ideology: it is a power-
ful current within certain disciplines, with a wide popular diffusion, and
a recrudescent influence in recent years—particularly active in studies
of race and related problems. Psychology and anthropology (Eysenck or
Baker) are obvious examples, together with the growth of so-called ethology.
The polemical fronts for Marxist intervention are thus more diverse than
on the European continent, and correspond more closely to the original
situation of Marx and Engels themselves, in their combat against the reac-
tionary character of both traditionally entrenched idealism and genuinely
vulgar materialism.3
3
nlr i/85, Nov–Dec 1974.
112 nlr 129
When, a year later, an English edition of Sul materialismo was being pre-
pared by the publishing house linked to nlr, Timpanaro was sent a set
of books from England to consider, as evidence that aggressive forms
of what Marx or Engels would have called vulgar materialism did exist
in our part of our world—not only Baker or Eysenck, but Skinner and
the newer ethology. Timpanaro’s response is to be found in the intro-
duction to the second edition of Sul materialismo, which first appeared
in English and then in Italian. In it, he conceded that he had underes-
timated the racist potential of contemporary forms of biologism, and
himself distinguished between philosophical materialism and any kind
of behaviourism; but warned that it was a mistake to dismiss ethology
as a field of research, whatever the misuses to which it might be put.
He concluded that to fight the new varieties of biologism it was useless
to appeal to any form of voluntarist spiritualism—only a consistent and
lucid materialism, that knew its own limits, could do so.
This first exchange between Timpanaro and his English interlocutors

was followed by a second, when nlr published in the winter of 1976
two chapters from Il lapsus freudiano—his discussion of the famous
omission of aliquis from Dido’s dying speech in Virgil. On this occa-
sion, some six contributors to the journal, including two of its then
editors, responded with counter-argumentation.4 Timpanaro’s young
critics included future leading figures in British intellectual life: two
of our most prominent feminist theorists and our leading film critic
among them. The debate revolved around two main issues. Firstly, was
Timpanaro right to assimilate Freudian slips to textual banalizations,
since—his critics argued—the former are cases where the subject typi-
cally knows he or she has mislaid the correct wording, while in the latter,
there is no such awareness? Secondly, had Timpanaro not overlooked
the Freudian theory of Begünstigungen, which could explain why uncon-
scious repression would fasten upon the ‘weak link’, aliquis in the case at
issue, of a textual chain—that is: one inherently liable to banalization—
to break into expression. In short, had he not neglected Freud’s notion of
4
Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell and Lucien Rey (Peter Wollen), Alan Beckett and
John Howe, David Rumney: ‘Comments on The Freudian Slip’, nlr i/94, Nov–Dec
1975, pp. 74–84.
over-determination? Was not his attack on Freud, taxing psychoanalysis

with unfalsifiability, dangerously populist?
It was typical of that time that the provocative theses of Sul material-
ismo, attacking virtually the whole corpus of Western Marxism as
idealist, should have aroused less strong reactions on the English Left
than Timpanaro’s criticisms of Freud. Timpanaro had no difficulty
replying, equably but firmly, to his critics. He opened his rejoinder with
the ironic observation:
If I had to give as concise and accurate a definition as possible of the typical

‘Western Marxist’, I would say: ‘Someone who is firmly convinced that Freud
is always right’. No, ‘Freud’ is not a slip of the pen for ‘Marx’. I really mean
Freud. Where Marx, and even more where Engels or Lenin, is concerned,
the typical Western Marxist has a host of reservations. Some of these are
correct (since, obviously, the founders of historical materialism were not
infallible, they were keenly aware they had left many problems unresolved,
and they were not in a position to foresee many new phenomena which
only appeared after they were dead); others are due to ‘revisionism’, in the
negative sense of the term, in other words to the influence of bourgeois ide-
ology. Where Freud is concerned, however, there are far fewer reservations,
indeed often none at all.
After noting this anomaly, he went on to write: ‘So I am not surprised

that the publication in nlr 91 of two chapters from my Il lapsus freud-
iano has provoked a veritable hail of rejoinders (see nlr 94), expressing
not merely disagreement but indignation at the appearance in a serious
Marxist journal of such an illogical, ill-informed and reactionary text.
At all events, I far prefer the lively polemical frankness of these English
comrades to the ‘diplomatic’ silence with which, barring a few excep-
tions, the Italian left press has greeted my work’.5
In a letter to nlr at that time, Timpanaro remarked that his critics knew
Freud’s work well and—as was their right—believed passionately in the
truth of his doctrine, but had been somewhat hasty in judging Il lap-
sus freudiano on the basis of only the excerpt published in our journal.
He ended by saying that he looked forward to an ampler debate when
5
‘Freudian Slips and Slips of the Freudians’, pp. 45–6.
114 nlr 129
the book itself appeared in English. As it happened, the most substan-

tial consideration of Il lapsus freudiano as a whole came in nlr as well,
when the journal asked Charles Rycroft to review the book. Rycroft was
then perhaps Britain’s best-known practising psychoanalyst, a leading
pupil of Winnicott and formerly a prominent member of the British
Psychoanalytical Society. During the sixties, however, he had come to
feel that the Society was too inbred and undemanding a milieu, and the
Freudian tradition as a whole insufficiently sensitive to the findings of
experimental psychology, as well as the insights of poetic intelligence.
A figure of wide culture, he seemed to us an ideal judge of Timpanaro’s
account of Freud.
Strikingly, Rycroft’s reaction was much more favourable than that of the
young left-wing writers who had first responded to Il lapsus freudiano.
Writing as a professional analyst, he declared: ‘I have in the main been
convinced by Timpanaro’s demonstration that Freud’s theory of slips
does not hold water and reveals more about his social milieu than it does
about psychological verities’.6 Rycroft approved four of Timpanaro’s
principal arguments against Freud’s account of verbal parapraxes. In
fact, he added yet another, from his own clinical experience, and from
an admission by Freud himself, not noticed by Timpanaro—‘that it is
as easy (or difficult) to obtain associative chains leading to significant
unconscious or concealed preoccupations by presenting words, pictures
or numbers to someone as by asking him to associate to a slip he has
made or to a number he has himself chosen’.
Rycroft went further, endorsing Timpanaro’s criticisms of Freud’s notion

of the unconscious as reified, and of Freud’s omission of biological
anxieties—above all, fear of death, one’s own or of others—as a central
motivation of involuntary slips, dreams or symptoms. He commented:
‘If Timpanaro and I are right about this, Freud’s exclusion of biological
frailty from his scheme of things must have been a defence, perhaps
against the very admission of frailty itself. I find it tempting to surmise
that the Freudian “system”, in which everything is referred back to one’s
own wishes and one’s own personal biography, contains an elaborate
but concealed defence of an illusion of the total autonomy of the self—a
typically bourgeois illusion, Timpanaro might say—and a denial of the
extent to which we are the creatures of biological and historical destiny.
6
‘Freud and Timpanaro’, nlr i/118, Nov–Dec 1979, p. 81.
When Freud, in the aftermath of the First World War, also had to recog-
nize that he was becoming elderly, he produced his theory of the death
instinct, according to which destructiveness, decay and death are still
our own wishes, not the effect of social and biological processes we are
powerless to resist’.7
On the other hand, Rycroft was more sceptical of Timpanaro’s insistence

that Freud had also unwarrantably suppressed social anxieties—
bourgeois fears of proletarian rebellion or popular upheaval—from his
account of parapraxes. ‘All children and indeed most grown-ups fail to
distinguish between social reality and the reality of the natural world,
and the possibility of radical changes in the structure of society seems
as unreal to them as does the possibility of an earthquake in a country
in which they do not occur. As a result, evidence of the possibility of
violent social change tends to evoke incredulity not anxiety. Hence such
facts as that refugees and exiles usually flee long after the writing has
clearly been written on the wall and that those who enjoyed high social
status in the country of origin often seem not really to believe that they
have lost it’.8
Rycroft’s vindication of Timpanaro was not unqualified. While he agreed

with virtually all of Timpanaro’s strictures on Freud himself, even add-
ing others of his own, he insisted that psychoanalysis as it had developed
since Freud did not correspond any longer to Timpanaro’s image of it.
Here, of course, he was speaking as a leading product of the ‘British
School’ descending from the work of Melanie Klein, on behalf of which
he defended the central importance of transference—a mechanism
altogether neglected by Timpanaro—and of the infant’s relation to the
mother, rather than the father. Rycroft ended on an amicably ironic
note, rejoining to Timpanaro’s Marxism. ‘Lastly, it must be true that psy-
choanalysis arose and took the form it did in response to specific social
tensions and would cease to be of anything other than historical inter-
est if ever those tensions were eliminated; a psychology that assumes
the universality of neurosis would cease to make any sense in a world
in which the only source of anxiety was man’s mortality and biologi-
cal frailty. But as, owing to unforeseen circumstances, the revolution
seems to have been postponed indefinitely, contemporary analysts and
7
‘Freud and Timpanaro’, p. 85.
8
‘Freud and Timpanaro’, pp. 84–5.
116 nlr 129
psychotherapists can, I think, work on without being unduly disturbed’.

A Leopardian Marxism of the kind he took Timpanaro to be advocat-
ing had undeniable attractions, but ‘like the best Italian wines’ might
not travel well. ‘Perhaps in England we should cultivate a Blakean or
Coleridgean Marxism, but dovetailing of the two components would
require the cutting away of a lot of dead wood—as, has, I imagine
Timpanaro’s grafting of Leopardi onto Marx’.9
In commissioning Rycroft to review Il lapsus freudiano, nlr had con-

ceived the idea of a reciprocal review by Timpanaro of Rycroft’s book The
Innocence of Dreams, which had argued that dreams should be regarded
not as neurotic symptoms born of repression (as Freud had maintained),
but as nocturnal expressions of the involuntary imagination once cel-
ebrated by Jean Paul or Coleridge. Timpanaro, however, though he told
us that Rycroft’s article was ‘intelligent and acute—nothing like it has
appeared on my little book in Italy’, firmly declined to review Rycroft in
exchange.10 ‘I cannot write what I do not know how to write. It’s not a
matter of being lazy or ill-will, but of inability’.11 The reason he gave for
this incapacity sheds a revealing light on the sense of responsibility he
brought to his critique of Freud. ‘There is also something else: the inter-
est of my work on the lapsus lay in the fact that I counterposed alternative
interpretations to Freudian interpretations of them. I would not know
how to do that with dreams: I would have to limit myself to showing that
Freudian explanations of them are in large part arbitrary, without having
explanations of my own to offer for them’.12
Five years later, Timpanaro sent nlr his essay on ‘Freud’s “Roman
Phobia”’—famously, a defence of Freud against his interpreters,
9
‘Freud and Timpanaro’, pp. 88, 86.
10
‘intelligente e acuto—in Italia non è uscito niente di simile sul mio volumetto’;
letter of 14 September 1979.
11
‘Non posso scrivere cio che non so scrivere. Non si tratta di pigrizia né di cattiva
volontà, ma di incapacità’; letter of 14 September 1979.
12
‘C’è ancora una cosa: l’interesse del mio lavoro sul lapsus consisteva nel fatto
che contrapponevo alle interpretazioni freudiane interpretazioni alternative. Per il
sogno no saprei fare ciò: dovrei limitarmi a dimostrare che le spiegazioni freudiane
sono in gran parte arbitrarie, ma non avrei mie interpretazioni da dare’; letter of 20
July 1979.
vindicating a social rather than oedipal reading of Freud’s reluctance

to travel to the Eternal City. Was this Timpanaro’s only text to be pub-
lished in another language before it appeared in Italian? I am not
sure. At all events, when he republished it some years later in Italy, as
he explained, he not only corrected various errors of translation but
expanded the essay, and added a pregnant political postscript to it on
the Middle East, more actual today than ever. In his preface to the vol-
ume in which it appeared, Timpanaro noted with regret that Il lapsus
freudiano had suffered a strange fate in Italy, selling very well initially,
then more slowly, but always amid a total silence on the part of Italian
psychoanalysts, including even personal friends of his. In the Anglo-
Saxon world, as we have seen, this was not the case. Not only did Rycroft
approvingly discuss his book at length, but in the same year that ‘Freud’s
“Roman Phobia”’ appeared in nlr—1984—two leading philosophers
paid handsome tribute to it: Adolf Grünbaum in The Foundations of
Psychoanalysis, and David Archard, in his important work Consciousness
and the Unconscious, which—after looking at Freud’s theory, Sartre’s cri-
tique of it, and Lacan’s and Laplanche’s extensions of Freud—ends with
a chapter on Timpanaro, whom Archard judged the most persuasive and
powerful of all Freud’s critics.
I have not so far touched on Timpanaro’s reception in the Anglo-

Saxon world as a classicist or historical linguist, for which I lack the
necessary competence. But even as a lay reader, I wonder—subject to
correction—if here too Timpanaro’s principal audience abroad was not
in England. He noted towards the end of his life, commenting on the
career of his friend Franco Munari in Berlin, that after the war Germany
had become—philologically speaking—somewhat provincial. England,
of course, had benefited from what Germany had lost, with the arrival of
Fraenkel, Maas and Pfeiffer. At all events, already by the late sixties—well
before his work on materialism or psychoanalysis reached our shores—
E. J. Kenney had dedicated his Sather lectures at Berkeley to Timpanaro,
without whose example, he wrote, ‘this book would not have been writ-
ten’.13 Building essentially on Timpanaro’s research into Lachmann’s
13
Kenney was Sather Professor at Berkeley 1967–68, when he gave these lectures,
subsequently published as The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the
Printed Book, Berkeley 1974.
118 nlr 129
precursors and coevals, Kenney reached an even more severe judgement

of Lachmann himself.
Three years later, it was Konrad Koerner who found it appropriate to pref-
ace his re-edition of Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit
der Indier with an English translation of Timpanaro’s fundamental first
essay on Schlegel and the origins of Indo-European linguistics.14 In 1979,
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, devoted an
essay to Timpanaro’s Filologia di Giacomo Leopardi that offered a lauda-
tory general profile of the figure whom he described as ‘at once the most
distinguished classical scholar now working in Italy, a leading authority
on Leopardi, and a Marxist theorist of striking originality who can be read
and admired even by enemies of Marxism’, among whom Lloyd-Jones
certainly counted himself.15 It was thanks to Lloyd-Jones that Timpanaro
was made a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
Outside the classical field, a still more significant tribute came from
England’s leading cultural thinker, Raymond Williams, then Professor
of Drama at Cambridge. His essay on Timpanaro, which appeared in
New Left Review in 1978, remains—at any rate in the English-speaking
world—the most considerable attempt to come to terms with the range of
Timpanaro’s fundamental ideas. No two temperaments could have been
more contrasted. Williams, who throughout his career never willingly
engaged in hostile exchanges with others, saluted Timpanaro’s ‘mode of
writing’ as ‘in the best sense polemical’. Williams added that he found
‘so close a convergence of interests and sympathies that it is not only
an exceptional pleasure to read his books’, and essential to engage with
them.16 His essay offers an assessment of Timpanaro’s arguments simul-
taneously in the fields of linguistics, psychoanalysis and materialism.
Timpanaro’s treatment of Freud, Williams wrote, could well have been

expected to arouse negative reactions. ‘The ideological roots and the
14
Amsterdam, 1977.
15
Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the 19th and 20th Centuries, London
1982, p. 105.
16
‘Problems of Materialism’, nlr i/109, May–June 1978, pp. 3–17; reprinted in
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, London 1980, pp. 103–22.
Henceforward pmc.
vocabulary of psychoanalysis are now very deep in Western culture. The

arrival of Timpanaro’s kind of sceptic, deploying analytical skills very
similar to those of the “higher criticism” of religion, seems likely to repeat
a moment of cultural history’.17 For his part, Williams welcomed Il lapsus
freudiano unreservedly, remarking only that criticism of psychoanalysis
needed in future to reflect much more than in the past on findings of
the experimental psychology it had disdained. Similarly, responding to
Timpanaro’s critique of post-Saussurian linguistics—the famous essay
on ‘Structuralism and its Successors’ in Sul materialismo—Williams sin-
gled out its ‘masterly summary of the crisis in historical linguistics that
preceded Saussure’, and ‘vigorous and convincing’ assault on the exten-
sion of linguistic models beyond language itself, in later structuralism.
Timpanaro’s criticisms of Chomsky, too, were telling, but here it was
necessary to move beyond critique to alternative scientific hypotheses, in
the spirit of Vygotsky and early Soviet linguistics, with whom—Williams
suggested—Timpanaro had not adequately reckoned.
But it was on Timpanaro’s materialism that Williams principally focussed.

Here, he wrote, Timpanaro’s fundamental emphasis—expressed in his
definition of materialism as ‘acknowledgment of the priority of nature
over “mind”, or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level,
and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level: both
in the sense of chronological priority (the very long time which super-
vened before life appeared on earth, and between the origin of life and
the origin of man), and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still
exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable
future’18—was indispensable. But Timpanaro’s formulation of it was
open to significant objections. It was wrong, Williams argued, to coun-
terpose ‘nature’ to ‘man’—‘a separation and contrast largely developed
in periods of the dominance of idealist and humanist thought’19—since
we remain natural beings ourselves. Nor was Timpanaro’s insistence on
the ineliminable element of passivity in the experience of our natural
condition altogether appropriate, since this condition constitutes us as
much as we merely endure it.
What Timpanaro’s reinstatement of materialism really did was to pose

three basic questions. ‘First, what is the effect of scientific evidence
17
‘Problems of Materialism’, p. 13; pmc, p. 116.
18
Sul materialismo, Pisa 1970, p. 7.
19
‘Problems of Materialism’, p.6; pmc, p. 107.
120 nlr 129
of a physical kind, notably that of the solar system and of our planet
and its atmosphere, on the proposition (ideology?) of the “conquest of
nature” which has often been associated with Marxism? Second, what
factors, if any, in our evolutionary inheritance qualify the project (ide-
ology?) of absolute human liberation? Third, what is the real relation
between projects of human liberation cast in collective and epochal
terms and the physical conditions which determine or affect individual
human lives?’20
Williams’s answers to these questions marked the degree of his con-

vergence and divergence from Timpanaro. On the first issue, he
rejected—along with Timpanaro—any triumphalist vision of the ‘con-
quest of nature’, proper to capitalism but mistakenly reproduced in
socialism, but added that to speak of our ‘oppression by nature’, as
Timpanaro, following Leopardi, had done was only to invert an initially
distorting vocabulary. On the second issue, while like Timpanaro repu-
diating latter-day forms of social darwinism derived from evolutionary
biology, Williams argued that, genetically speaking, ‘the deepest signifi-
cance of a relatively unchanging biological human condition is probably
to be found in some of the basic material processes of the making
of art: in the significance of rhythms in music and dance and lan-
guage, or of shapes and colours in sculpture and painting’,21 anchored
in our corporeality.
It was on the third question that Williams expressed most distance from
Timpanaro. Here, he contended, Timpanaro too unilaterally empha-
sised the negative dimensions of our physical existence—old age,
illness, death—at the expense of the equally undeniable dimensions of
youth, health, activity. This condition offers us ‘abundant possibilities
of physical fulfilment, which—though of course related to the character
of our special social order—are hardly ever wholly determined by it’.
He went on:
Thus in one equally relevant definition of our basic physical condition we

have many, and at times more immediately accessible, opportunities of
happiness in the exercise of our physical resources than in the project of
social liberation. In the advanced capitalist countries, in our own day, a
deduction of priorities from this version of the basic relations has been very
widely made. It is not just when staring death or disability in the face that
20
21
‘Problems of Materialism’, p.10; pmc, p. 113.
we can question or draw back from the revolutionary effort. It is also when
sexual love, the love of children, the pleasures of the physical world are
immediately and very powerfully present.22
There was thus, in Williams’s judgement, what he saw as an emotional

imbalance in Timpanaro’s Leopardian pessimism. ‘The profound sad-
ness of our epoch is fully expressed in the necessary reminders of our
continuing physical limits. Yet the true sources of this depth of sadness
are surely predominantly historical’. At a physical level, the possibili-
ties of happiness were objectively widening, as ‘more people are living
longer, are healthier and better fed, than at any time in human history’.
On the other hand, there was indeed—he wrote—‘ground for a sense
of tragedy in the long and bloody crisis of the ending of an imperialist
and capitalist order’.23 Williams’s suggestion was thus that Timpanaro’s
materialist pessimism was less a fully balanced response to our physical
lot than a displaced expression of foreboding at our political lot. If that
were truly the argument between them, it would have to be said that
Williams’s assumption—that the ‘imperialist and capitalist order’ was
indeed ending: thereby, presumably, allowing some ultimately less som-
bre conclusions—itself looks, in retrospect, desperate enough.
Let me conclude by stressing again the element of strangeness in the

degree of attention—still relative, of course—that Timpanaro received
in England. The culture of the two countries, where he was formed
and where he found a foreign readership, remained in many ways
quite distant from each other. When I once remarked to him that his
beautiful book on Edmondo De Amicis’s novel Primo Maggio could not
but remind an English reader of De Amicis’s contemporary William
Morris and his News from Nowhere, Sebastiano replied that he had never
read any Morris, a central figure in our Anglo-Saxon 19th century.24
Vice-versa, when nlr tried—repeatedly—to incite him to confront
the figure and use of Nietzsche, in a spirit similar to his treatment of
Freud, he declined.
22
23
24
Il socialismo di Edmondo de Amicis. Lettura del ‘Primo Maggio’, Verona 1983; letter
of 5 April 1984.
122 nlr 129
I have read much (not all) of Nietzsche, but too little on Nietzsche; and I
lack, in this period, the energy and wish to devote myself to such a vast
literature. The problem of Nietzsche needs to be handled with a lot of care.
There is no question that today’s Nietzscheans—who, for the moment, are
not as numerous or as noisy as Freudians in Italy, but could become so
in a near future—must be combatted; though on the other hand without
adopting as schematic and totally negative a view of him as Lukács in The
Destruction of Reason. One needs to see in Nietzsche also an acute critic of
certain aspects of bourgeois morality . . . Between a satisfied and ‘rational’
reactionary like Benedetto Croce and Nietzsche, I prefer Nietzsche, though
keeping a great distance from him.25
How should that ‘great distance’ best be defined? I would like to end
with a memorable sentence of E. J. Kenney, writing of Hertz’s biography
of Lachmann. ‘Fervently and often he reiterates that the ruling passion
of Lachmann’s life was truth. It is doubtful where there has ever been
a human being of whom this could be said without qualification’.26
Sebastiano Timpanaro would have enjoyed this dry Anglo-Saxon version
of a Nietzschean proviso. But more than for most human beings, truth
in its classical acceptation mattered to him.
25
‘Ho letto molto (non tutto) di Nietzsche, ma troppo poco su Nietzsche; e non ho,
in questo periodo, l’energia e la voglia di dedicarmi a tali vaste letture. Il problema
di Nietzsche deve essere affrontato con molta attenzione. Senza dubbio gli odierni
nietzschiani—i quali, in Italia, non sono, per ora, più numerosi e rumorosi dei
freudiani, ma potrebbero diventarlo in un prossimo futuro—devono essere com-
battuti; ma, d’altra parte, non si può assumere rispetto a Nietzsche una posizione
così schematica e totalmente negativa come quella di Lukács nella Zerstörung der
Vernunft. Bisogna vedere in Nietzsche anche un critico acuto di certi aspetti della
morale Borghese . . . Tra un reazionario soddisfatto e “razionale” come Benedetto
Croce e Nietzsche, io preferisco Nietzsche, pur mantenendomi a grande distanza
di lui’; letter, 30 January 1979.
26
The Classical Text, p. 107.
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REVIEWS
John Sidel, Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of

Revolution in Southeast Asia
Cornell University Press: Ithaca ny 2021, $39.95, hardback
324 pp, 978 1501755613
Saskia Schäfer
CONTRASTED REVOLUTIONS
The standardized designation ‘Southeast Asia’—two words, un-hyphenated,

capitalized—originated in the Pacific War. The Allies divided the world into
warzones. Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command (seac) comprised most
of what was to be wrested from Japan that was not already in the China thea-
tre or a former us possession (and included some territory no longer typically
placed in Southeast Asia: Sri Lanka; the Andaman, Nicobar and Laccadive
Islands; Christmas Island; the Maldives). In 1945, Washington established
the Department of Southeast Asia Affairs. The following year a depart-
ment of ‘Southeast Asian Affairs’ sprouted up at soas, joined by another
at Yale in 1947. Diffusion of the term was rapid and far-reaching. Before
the Second World War, Chinese-speakers had referred to the region with a
variety of terms and epithets, if mostly as Nanyang—‘South Sea’—but today
they more commonly use 东南亚—‘Eastsouth Asia’ (whereas, in compound
designations of a region, European languages put the vertical north–south
axis before the horizontal east–west, in Chinese the horizontal east–west
axis comes first). One place where the term has not acquired purchase is the
region itself, whose inhabitants rarely identify as ‘Southeast Asians’.
If the exact contours of Southeast Asia were not determined until after
the war, however, the region as a whole had long shared certain broad
features. It is the part of the globe where several of the major religious tra-
ditions intersect or overlap: Catholicism abutting Islam in the Philippines;
the Sanskrit-sphere underlying the more recent arrival of Islam in the

126 nlr 129
Malay-speaking world; Buddhism surrounding islands of Protestant

Christianity in Myanmar. Likewise, almost all of the major Western colonial
reviews
empires made a bid there, whether in the form of missionaries, joint-stock

companies or national militaries: the Portuguese conquered Malacca in
1511, and quit Macao in 1999; the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in
1599, and left in 1897; the first Dutch ships arrived in Java in 1595 and
the Dutch Army left in 1949; the French acquired their first enclaves in
Cochinchina in 1862 and departed from Indochina in 1954; the English
started commercial operations on Java in 1602, and left Hong Kong in
1997; the us military arrived in the Philippines in 1898, and closed the
Subic Bay base in 1991.
Southeast Asia is also home to among the most divergent pair of political
fates in the Cold War: in Indonesia, the us-supported massacre and uproot-
ing of the Left, which is now a minuscule formation struggling to rebuild
itself; in Vietnam, a Communist organization that dispatched two colonial
powers successively, and that still rules today. How are we to understand the
background behind these two outcomes? What accounts more broadly for
the revolutionary trajectories in Southeast Asia? Why were some nations
imagined before others? Why did the Philippine Revolution materialize so
early? Why was the Vietnamese Revolution so robust? These are among
the questions that animate John Sidel’s Republicanism, Communism, Islam.
Western comparison-making among nationalisms in Southeast Asia
began in earnest in the 1960s. In 1966, George Kennan could declare the
American Vietnam War unnecessary after a considered comparison with the
anti-communist insurance that issued from Suharto’s Indonesia. On a more
scholarly plane, Clifford Geertz contended in the early 60s that Southeast
Asia was divided into two kinds of countries. Many of the mainland states,
such as Burma, Vietnam and Thailand which based their nationalist creeds
on a strictly identitarian legacy of purported ancient vintage—‘Bamar-ness’,
‘Vietnamese-ness’, ‘Thai-ness’—were ‘essentialist’ nations. By contrast,
many of the states of insular Southeast Asia were more prone to ‘epochal’
constructions, treating their nations as self-conscious constructions whose
outcome would be subject to political or national struggles: Indonesia,
the Philippines, Singapore.
Some forty years later, Sidel dismantled Geertz’s dichotomy in a path-
breaking essay, ‘The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’, published in
Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2012, arguing that it was not
their dilemmas of ethnic composition but the nature and degree of their
integration with global capital that was the driving variable in how the new
states operated. Ideologically, mainland Southeast Asian states might be
classified as subscribers to Anthony Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of Nations,
the island nations of the region as implicit partisans of Benedict Anderson’s
schäfer: Southeast Asia 127
Imagined Communities, but it was the politico-economic dimension that

determined the kind of revolutionary tinder present in Southeast Asia,
reviews
rather than the doctrinal preferences of their elites. One of Sidel’s best exam-
ples was that of Burma/Myanmar and Indonesia. After independence, both
were ruled by men who had availed themselves of the political opportunities
under Japanese rule in the wake of the Second World War; both conducted
internal colonization and violent pacification campaigns in their outer-lying
regions; both underwent coups in the 1960s that resulted in more complete
military rule. Geertz was correct that a narrow commitment to Bamar iden-
tity hampered the Myanmar junta’s nation-building efforts, but the more
significant divergence, Sidel argued, came in Rangoon’s unswerving pur-
suit of economic autarchy, which set it apart from Suharto’s opening of the
economy to foreign capital. By training his sights on this sort of difference,
Sidel presented a much fuller picture of the constellation of Southeast Asian
nationalisms, not as wayward particles with any path possible, but rather
interlaced contexts, highly conditioned by both global capital and the exigen-
cies of the Cold War.
Sidel, the author of authoritative studies on bossism in the Philippines
and religiously framed violence in Indonesia, is a former student of Anderson,
to whom he has dedicated his new book. Republicanism, Communism, Islam
now offers an account of revolutionary mobilization in Southeast Asia that
aims to extend, and in some degree correct, not Geertz but Anderson him-
self. In it, he contends that Anderson, along with Southeast Asianists of an
older generation, such as Alexander Woodside, developed too top-heavy or
bottom-heavy a picture of anti-colonial nationalism. For between Anderson’s
anti-colonial elites and urban youth, and Woodside’s peasant nationalists
endowed with a surfeit of ‘acute historical consciousness’ and ‘cultural
pride’, lay a common problem: how was mass mobilization even possible
when, at first, nationalism only attracted a small sliver of the colonial popu-
lation? How was a classically elite figure like Sukarno—the product of a
Dutch education and the smattering of modernist ideologies on offer in the
late colonial state—able to bring his imagined Indonesia to fruition when
very few shared his vision in the 1930s, a good portion of which he and his
political associates spent in exile? How were the elite-educated ilustrados of
the Philippines able to fire up peasants in Luzon and Mindanao who did not
read their newspapers, much less their novels?
To answer these questions, Sidel turns not just to the revolutionary, but
also internationalist—‘cosmopolitan’ is a term he often uses—resources
and infrastructures of the time, and developments of the longue durée
which prepared the ground for ordinary participation or sympathy with
national projects. Unlike Mahmood Mamdani’s work on Africa, he avoids
foregrounding the path-dependencies bequeathed by the type of late colonial
128 nlr 129
rule (direct/centralized vs indirect/decentralized) of the region. Instead,

deeper historical formations (Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism) and wider
reviews
international movements (Communism, Pan-Islamism) are the main his-

torical determinants. In similar style Sidel seeks to advance beyond what
he terms the ‘Cambridge School’ of Southeast Asian studies, which has
stressed technological connectivity, port cities and commerce, sometimes at
the expense of more intentional revolutionary activity, in the generation of
nationalisms in the region. In this he furthers, in effect, the agenda at work
already in Anderson’s Java in a Time of Revolution (1972), where compari-
sons between Indonesian and Vietnamese revolutions are a running theme
in the book’s footnotes—just as, of course, concern with the longue durée is
central to Imagined Communities (1983), which dwelt at length on the con-
ditioning effects in Europe of Latin as a universalizing language that both
facilitated and fostered rebellions against its predominance. In Under Three
Flags (2005), Anderson would go on to stress the imaginative reach of an
elite stratum of educated anti-colonialists like Rizal and Martí at the turn of
the century, who dreamt of as-yet-nonexistent political formations. In this
sense, Sidel revisits the historical terrain of Early Anderson with the equip-
ment of Later Anderson.
Proceeding mostly in chronological sequence, Republicanism,
Communism, Islam moves from the Philippines to Indonesia to Vietnam.
While the Spanish conquest of the archipelago they named after their
king was not the first point of entry for European colonialism in Southeast
Asia—the Portuguese had already taken over the booming trading port of
Malacca when Magellan claimed Cebu for the Spanish crown in 1521—the
Philippines was the site of one of the most ambitious and thoroughgoing
of all Western projects in the region. Sidel points out two critical features
that distinguished early Spanish rule from other colonial incursions. First,
the islands were conquered at the relative apex of Spanish imperial power,
in a period that was simultaneously a high point of Catholic orthodoxy and
universalizing confidence, generating a vigorous and often violent effort to
convert the entire population to Christianity. Already in the 16th century,
schools and churches were being erected deep in the countryside, along
with a comprehensive, if often unavailing attempt to uproot indigenous reli-
gions and cults. By contrast, the Dutch empire never harboured ambitions
to convert the population of the East Indies to Protestantism. In Indochina,
Catholicism made significant inroads with French penetration—by the mid-
18th century there were 300,000 Catholics in the Red River Valley—but
Christianity was not embraced by the Nguyễn court, whereas Filipino elites
would become at any rate nominally Catholic. The consolidated form of colo-
nial rule in the Philippines has often been described as a Frailocracia—rule
by friars. In the 19th century cofradías and other Catholic associations would
later be put to revolutionary use by rebels, like a hijacked electrical grid.
reviews
The second element Sidel identifies as distinctive of Spanish rule in the
Philippines is that it was not yet as racially preoccupied as other European
systems would be. Chinese-speaking traders were not only allowed to set
up coastal operations, but encouraged to marry local women, the ensuing
offspring even assigned a special ‘mestizo’ status. The result was a ‘com-
prador’ class in the colony ‘virtually unique in Southeast Asia in terms of
its legal status and political potential’. Rather than Chinese being rigorously
separated from the general population, as the Dutch would try to do in the
East Indies, the Sino-mestizo class of the Philippines would form a signifi-
cant component of a 19th century bourgeoisie that produced a number of
revolutionary radicals. From the 1560s onward, through the thriving indus-
try of galleon repair at Manila as well as its Chinese-speaking traders, the
Philippines, though still perhaps not as globally connected as Malacca, was
linked to the far reaches of the Spanish empire. Eventually Cuban sugar,
Chinese silk, Mexican silver, Indian textiles all passed through the port of
Manila and beyond. So too the education available to the local population
was well beyond anything on offer elsewhere in the region. As early as 1611
the Dominicans founded the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. A den
of scholastic quackery perhaps, but it preceded medical schools founded by
the French and Dutch by more than two centuries. By the late 19th cen-
tury, Sidel cites a figure of more than 400,000 children in the Philippines
attending primary school, whereas in the 1920s fewer than 70,000 were in
primary schools in the Dutch East Indies. By that time, however, the Spanish
empire was a battered military power and a cultural backwater. When the
great Filipino novelist José Rizal left Manila to study in Europe, he made a
point of going to Germany and England, and made no attempt to hide his
feelings of superiority to writers of the metropole.
The revolutionary upsurge of the mid-19th century built off the network
of Masonic and Catholic associations easily taken over by those who saw
an opportunity in forcing an end to Spanish rule. As in Latin America,
the political fissures of the quarrels between liberals and clericals in Spain
played out in the periphery. The arrival in 1869 of a liberal Spanish gov-
ernor, Carlos María de la Torre y Navacerrada, to institute reforms in the
Philippines acted as the trip-wire for a series of events in Filipino soci-
ety that Rizal would dramatize in Noli Me Tángere (1887), with its cast
of scheming evil friars, well-meaning naive liberals, and downtrodden
indigenous rebels. For Sidel the problem for the Filipino revolutionar-
ies of the 1890s was not so much their small numbers as their schisms
and lack of cohesion. The masonic gobernadorcillo Emilio Aguinaldo was,
130 nlr 129
like Rizal, an ilustrado—an educated member of the mestizo class—who

wanted to accelerate liberal reform in the face of the Bourbon restora-
reviews
tion in Madrid in 1874. But another group of rebels who were gathered
around Andrés Bonifacio—an early comet leading a ‘revolution inside the
revolution’—favoured a more violent campaign to eject the newly hardened
Spanish. It was the failure of these two forces to coalesce that limited the
impact of the Filipino Revolution. The ‘early victory for liberalism in the
Philippines not only came at the expense of the more egalitarian republi-
can ideals of the Philippine revolution, but worked to create forms of social
inequality and injustice unparalleled elsewhere in Southeast Asia.’ The
top-down reformists of the liberal Propaganda Movement wanted to oust
the Spanish, but flinched at the prospect of a full-scale popular insurrec-
tion against them. Rizal, the ‘First Filipino’, foresaw what might be the
outcome of the split. In Noli Me Tángere, the young, revolutionary Emilio
appeals to the ilustrado protagonist of the novel, Crisóstomo Ibarra, whose
biography closely resembles Rizal’s own, in ways that uncannily anticipated
reality. When Bonifacio sent an emissary to Rizal in the remote town in
Mindanao where he had been deported after his return from Spain, Rizal
tried to convince Bonifacio and the rebels that their actions were prema-
ture. The young revolutionary rebuffed the message, and an insurrection
was launched in 1896, for which—though he had no hand in it—Rizal was
executed. The following year us colonialism, not Filipino nationalism, put
an end to Spanish rule, and waged a merciless war of extermination against
those who were still fighting for independence.
Dutch colonization of the East Indies was by contrast relatively superfi-
cial. Originally undertaken by a chartered commercial company, the voc,
eager to tap into one of the largest global trading networks, it made no
use of a local comprador class. Hokkien-speaking merchants in its islands
were discouraged from assimilating into the general population, and Dutch
educational and religious resources never came close to matching Spanish
labours in the Philippines. In consequence, Islamic education and associa-
tions had more room to manoeuvre and modernized themselves on their
own terms. Earlier Left accounts of the Indonesian Revolution located its
origins in the labour and communist movements founded by workers in
Java, whereas Anderson focussed rather on the revolutionary energies of the
Pemuda—urban youth who contributed overwhelmingly to revolutionary
activity between the 1920s and 1940s. Without discounting either of these
forces, Sidel emphasizes the ‘dense infrastructure of Islamic education and
associational life’ centred around organizations such as Sarekat Islam which
by 1916 numbered some 350,000 members, concentrated among labourers
in newly industrial cities like Semarang and Surabaya in East Java. Sarekat
Islam and related associations, Sidel argues, were the network through
which anti-colonial organizing on a mass scale became possible.
reviews
The railway strike of 1923, a huge coordinated effort between labour and
Islamic organizations, was a highpoint of this anti-colonial synthesis. But
the Comintern was slow to grasp the need for Communists to work with
Muslim organizations. ‘So, you do not see the revolutionary significance of
Pan-Islamism?’, Stalin teased M. N. Roy when they first met in Moscow. By
contrast, the Sumatran revolutionary Tan Malaka made an explicit case for
embracing Pan-Islamism as a tactic at the fourth Comintern Congress in
1922. He impressed on his hosts that the Dutch colonies did not conform to
any familiar pattern of historical development: sultans lived next to industrial
labourers in parts of Java, inhabiting wildly divergent historical time-scales.
It would be foolish to forego alliances with Muslim organizations that were
already, in their general orientation, anti-colonial. As in the Philippines,
Sidel notes the failure of a joint anti-colonial movement to emerge for the
ejection of the Dutch. Local communists, against the advice of Tan Malaka,
pressed forward with an uprising in West Sumatra in 1927 that was brutally
crushed by the Dutch. In Sidel’s account Tan Malaka features as a tragic,
unheeded figure, Sukarno as a wily survivor advancing a please-all-parties
programme for anti-colonial unity in his tract of 1926, ‘Nationalism, Islam
and Marxism’. The departure of the Dutch can be attributed, Sidel argues, to
multiple forces. Locally, in many places, pressure was exerted by the Muslim
paramilitaries formerly cultivated by the Japanese, which had now collected
under the umbrella of the Islamic party Masyumi, itself an outgrowth of
the Sarekat Islam. At another level, Washington, satisfied that the fledgling
republic of Sjahrir and Sukarno was sufficiently anti-communist, saw no
reason for the Dutch to mire themselves in a costly insurgency, and threat-
ened to withhold Marshall aid in order to ensure their exit. When Sukarno
in turn became unacceptable to the us by flirting with the Communist Party
(pki) in the next decade, Eisenhower tried to remove him in a coup orches-
trated by the cia, which failed. It would take another, better prepared move
in 1965 to oust him from power and kill off the pki.
What, then, set Vietnam apart? For Sidel, the most fundamental answer
is: proximity to China. For centuries part of the Sinosphere, the fate of the
former kingdoms and dynasties of what became Indochina were bound to
be closely tied to events in their larger neighbour. There were certain longue
durée features that also came to set it apart from the Dutch and Spanish
colonies: the high concentration of capital among French entrepreneurs and
Chinese-speaking traders limited the development of a local-Vietnamese
capitalist bourgeoisie comparable to the mestizo class of the Philippines, the
traders of Java and entrenched indigenous merchants of Aceh, Sulawesi and
132 nlr 129
Sumatra. In the 20th century, there were nationalist Vietnamese parties and
groups, but with nothing like the power or magnetism of the Kuomintang.
reviews
Another difference was the speed with which a radical trajectory was set off
in what would later comprise Vietnam, after an alphabetic reform in 1910
severed the new Vietnamese intelligentsia from their Confucian forebears,
as they read different scripts and different books. Suddenly a great writer like
Vũ Trọng Phu.ng—educated at a colonial primary school and by the streets
of Hanoi, who made passing allusion to Vietnamese epics, but whose closer
field of reference was French fiction: Maupassant or Hugo, not to speak of
Freud, Charlie Chaplin, even modernists like Proust—could become a true
artist of scabrous reportage and the absurd (his work would be banned for
more than a quarter century in the drv).
Like the abortive Cavite rebellion of 1872 in the Philippines, the Cần
Vương insurgency of 1885–89 in Indochina was an early rising among anti-
colonial elites that was easily repulsed by the French authorities. But by the
1920s and 1930s, a series of newer communist formations could emerge
in the shadow of Chinese communism over the northern border—their
rise enabled, however, by the support not just of the Chinese Communist
Party, but also the Kuomintang which distrusted the Vietnamese nation-
alists for currying support from the Japanese in their attempts to subvert
the Vichy French. So Ho Chi Minh benefitted from extra backing as well as
fewer obstacles, compared with his peers in the Philippines or the Dutch
East Indies. Nor was there a large moderate body of workers like the Sarekat
Islam requiring appeasement. American assistance was naturally lacking—
Truman never answered Ho’s plea for support—but a nation was easier to
imagine in Vietnam, which had been a unified polity less than a century
earlier, though many groups that had been inside of it hardly wanted to
resume position in any future Vietnam. Not entirely content to dismiss tra-
ditional Vietnamese authority, moreover, Ho—temporarily in control of the
north of the country after the 1945 collapse of Japan, which had taken over
from the French during the Second World War—had Bao Dai deliver the
Great Imperial Seal to him at Huế. Yet as the geographer Christian Lentz
has shown, this hardly meant that the Communists were met with a nation-
in-waiting. The Tai, Hmong, Khmu, and Dao forces that combined to defeat
the French at Ðiện Biên Phủ in the main did not even speak Vietnamese;
most of them did not think they were fighting for incorporation in a com-
munist state, but rather a better system of economic exchange and regional
self-determination, a belief which the Communists officially promoted and
sanctioned in their 1953 Ethnic Policy.
How persuasive is Sidel’s overall picture of the divergent revolutionary
fates of Southeast Asia? In comparative ambition and explanatory power,
Republicanism, Communism, Islam is a major achievement. This is a work

that is not simply a masterful synthesis of post-Andersonian scholarship,
reviews
but a bridge between the subtlety of Anderson’s style of analysis—even if
it doesn’t plunge as deeply into national imaginaries expressed in literature
and art—and something like the perspective of world-systems theory on the
paths of integration into networks of global capital. For Sidel, however, the
prospects of a revolution were not just a function of the particular way in
which countries in the region were drawn into the arteries of world capi-
talism, but of the differing types of pre-capitalist networks enmeshed in
contact with it. The revolutionary energies that ensued in Southeast Asia
were, it follows, deeply uneven: an early run in the Philippines, an explosive
finale in Vietnam.
In his final chapter, Sidel expands his field of comparison with succinct
overviews of two other cases, Burma and Malaya. In the latter, communists
were too concentrated in what the British had rigorously categorized as the
Chinese minority population, making it much harder to radicalize the rest
of the population; when Muslim communists from the Dutch East Indies
travelled to Malaya in the interwar period they tended to meet with fellow
Muslims rather than comrades of Chinese origin. The British authori-
ties were also skilled at dealing with the Communist threat, not merely by
repression in a pitiless counterinsurgency, but defanging the movement
in a parliamentary mechanism in which Kuomintang-related parties, like
the Malayan Chinese Association, were inscribed in the state, and anti-
communist operators like Tan Cheng Lock and later Lee Kuan Yew could
be cultivated to great effect. In Burma, it was manipulation of Christian
hill tribes against the majority-Buddhist Bamar population that allowed
the colonial authorities to forestall anti-colonial state-making, still unre-
solved today—though after 1945 the fact that the country had been ruled so
long by the Raj (it was only separated from Delhi in 1937, five years before
Japan conquered it) also left it inside an Indian orbit less favourable for
revolution than the Sinosphere from which Vietnam benefitted. Today, of
course, Myanmar has a much closer—if tenser—relationship with China
than with India.
What, finally, of the distinction to be made between cosmopolitanism
and nationalism in Southeast Asia? What Sidel’s study shows is that nation-
alism in the region typically possessed a cosmopolitan dimension, in the
sense that even the most hidebound nationalists were not pursuing their
national project in a vacuum: they knew they were entering into a world
order of states, and that success depended on some form of international
cooperation with more powerful global forces. In a recent lecture Sidel
has suggested that Anderson was less likely to stress the cosmopolitan
134 nlr 129
dimension of the Indonesian revolution because he was writing during

Reagan’s reheated Cold War, and was wary of providing ammunition for
reviews
neoconservatives attacking the nationalisms of Southeast Asia as offering

cover for communist infiltration. Yet Sidel’s own work shows that the same
‘cosmopolitan’ infrastructures that made revolutions in the region possible
could also become obstacles to them. Witness the role of the prc, after its
pact with the us, in Indochina: in the end, Vietnamese Communism may
have benefitted from having fewer rather than more opportunities to com-
promise. Between Anderson’s networks of ‘anarchist’ solidarity in the time
of Rizal and Martí, and Sidel’s of ‘cosmopolitan’ solidarity in the time of Ho
and Tan Malaka, there are still fresh comparisons to be made.
reviews
Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on
Soviet Cinema, Rachel Churner, ed.
mit Press: Cambridge ma 2020, $29.95, hardback
232 pp, 978 0 2620 4449 3
Annette Michelson, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film

mit Press: Cambridge ma 2017, $40, hardback
325 pp, 978 0 02620 3550 7
Erika Balsom
CAMERA LUCIDA
No less than three times across the texts assembled in On the Eve of the
Future: Selected Writings on Film, Annette Michelson quotes a statement
attributed to Theodor Adorno: ‘I love to go to the movies; the only thing
that bothers me is the image on the screen.’ The phrase has the zing of
a punchline, eliciting an immediate smirk. At the same time, it possesses
an aphoristic density, compelling the reader to tarry, to tug at the threads
of its taut weave. Adorno’s distaste for film is well known; he excluded it
from the field of art, decrying its representational illusionism, deeming it
exemplary of the manipulative mass narcosis of the culture industry. But
what was the pull of this ambivalent aspersion for Michelson, someone
who, after an early career as an art critic in the 1950s and 1960s, devoted
decades to the study and advocacy of cinema, according it a place in her
cross-disciplinary thinking unrivalled by any other medium? She too found
fault in mimesis and commercialism but was convinced that things could
be otherwise. If only ‘the image on the screen’ were different . . . What then?
From Adorno’s objection—from the deep frustration that it registers—she
wrings out a drop of utopia. Disappointment with cinema’s mainstream
iterations fuels a passion for recalling what it once was, what it might have
been, what it could still be. In short, it opens the door to an assessment
of modernist alternatives.

136 nlr 129
Michelson, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, devoted herself to this
project with erudition and fervour. Through her activities as a writer, curator,
reviews
translator, professor, and editor (first at Artforum and subsequently as co-

founder of October, a journal that borrowed its name from Sergei Eisenstein’s
1927 film), she championed those moments when a glimpse of a different
cinema flashed into view. The two volumes of essays she compiled in the
final years of her life, comprising texts written between 1971 and 2001, cor-
respond to the two clusters of activity that most seized her attention on this
front: On the Eve of the Future examines postwar American experimental
cinema and its precursors, such as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell,
while the posthumously published On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected
Writings on Soviet Cinema, edited by Rachel Churner, concentrates on Sergei
Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.
The division between the books is logical yet risks implying a bifurca-
tion in Michelson’s thinking that is hardly there. Her intellectual project is
unified, with each context figuring prominently in the collection ostensibly
dedicated to the other. Together, these twenty-one essays advance a powerful
argument, one as grounded in historical fact as it is poised to spur future
endeavours: if released from commercial imperatives and untethered from
the demand to reproduce ‘reality’, film could take its deserved place amongst
the modernist arts, becoming an epistemological machine, a philosophical
device capable of inducing sophisticated reflections on the nature of percep-
tion and cognition. Her texts prolong and enlarge those rare instances when
this potentiality has come to fruition, folding them into a rich genealogy,
putting them in conversation with advanced thought across disciplines. The
behemoth of Hollywood classicism becomes a mere footnote, as Michelson
boldly argues for the persistence of a filmic modernism grounded not in any
single aesthetics but in the problematization of mimetic referentiality, the
intimate braid of theory and practice, the contestation of industrial norms,
and, above all, the conviction that cinema is capable of producing knowledge.
Her account of Eisenstein’s dream of an intellectual cinema—a cinema of
concepts and ideas—neatly encapsulates her own position: ‘Film will indeed
be philosophical or it will not, in any but a trivial sense, be.’
It is a conception of the medium that sits at a vast distance from more
familiar notions: film as entertainment, storyteller, vehicle of personal
expression, window on the world. At a time when the field of cinema stud-
ies was gaining ground in the us academy, principally as an offshoot of
language and literature departments, Michelson played a pivotal role in
establishing what would become one of the discipline’s leading programmes.
At New York University, where she taught from 1967 to 2004, she asserted
a vision of film as an art, in dialogue with painting and sculpture. She
positioned herself against Bazinian realism and against the recuperation
balsom: Cinema 137
of Hollywood commercialism that characterized the politique des auteurs

and its us iteration, promulgated by Andrew Sarris in his polemic ‘Notes
reviews
on the Auteur Theory in 1962’.
The title of her first major text on cinema, ‘Film and the Radical
Aspiration’, initially delivered as an address at the New York Film Festival in
1966 (and notably absent from On the Eve of the Future), names the vein she
would mine. The essay straddles decades, setting forth a lapsarian narrative
of failure and renewal that its author would never abandon: ‘The history
of Cinema is, like that of Revolution in our time, a chronicle of hopes and
expectations, aroused and suspended, tested and deceived.’ Michelson pos-
its that the ‘Fall from Grace’ occurs circa 1929, a date that roughly aligns
with the advent of synchronized sound and the rise of socialist realism in the
Soviet Union, which together put an untimely end to a rich period of experi-
mentation with the plasticity of montage. Eisenstein, with his unfinished
projects—the unrealized adaptation of Capital foremost among them—is as
exemplary in ‘his defeat as in his achievement’. All was not lost, though: in
the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, on the one hand, and the
fledgling experimental cinema of the United States, on the other, Michelson
identifies two sites at which the embers of cinematic potentiality were being
rekindled in her time.
If, in this first essay, Michelson establishes a transatlantic fight on two
fronts for the renewal of the radical aspiration—one with significant paral-
lels to the ‘two avant-gardes’ Peter Wollen would delineate nine years later
in the pages of Studio International—she soon changed course. Her return
from Paris to the United States in 1965 coincided with a striking efflores-
cence of adventurous independent filmmaking, particularly in New York City,
where she took up residence after a brief stay in Los Angeles. Figures such as
Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow were at the centre of a multifaceted rein-
vention of the cinema in total defiance of its representational and industrial
conventions, working artisanally in the nonprofessional gauge of 16mm, pro-
ducing formally daring films that tested the parameters of their medium.
Michelson’s critical interest in the narrative cinema of her day diminished in
the face of this valiant undertaking. The broad scope of the exhibition reviews
she had written in Paris and initially upon her return to the us contracted into
a narrower emphasis with an underdog twinge, even if occasional forays into
other domains persisted. In a 2002 October roundtable on American avant-
garde film, she remarks that her early encounters with this milieu led her ‘to
think of filmmaking as the last of the heroic occupations’, naming this as one
of the reasons behind her shift away from painting and sculpture. Alongside
Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, she became one of the most tireless and
gifted advocates of the us manifestation of what Wollen called the ‘Co-op
movement’, publishing articles that assessed its present and gave it a past.
138 nlr 129
‘Toward Snow’, the earliest effort included in the recently published

volumes, is emblematic of Michelson’s excitement at this ‘movement’ and
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her conception of experimental cinema’s epistemological capacities. This

classic study propelled the Canadian artist, and particularly his 1967 film
Wavelength, onto the cover of the summer 1971 issue of Artforum, a maga-
zine that had never devoted much attention to cinema prior to Michelson’s
involvement. The article is symptomatic of a shift in the discursive location
of experimental film, out of the countercultural underground and into insti-
tutional legitimacy—a realignment that would find further consolidation in
the special film issue of the publication that appeared under Michelson’s
direction in September of the same year. Wavelength is what Sitney called
a ‘structural’ film: Snow orchestrates a relentless 45-minute zoom across
a Soho loft, complicating this ostensibly minimal shape with colour filters,
superimpositions, and a sine-wave soundtrack. As the artist explains, ‘The
film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the
gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have to
offer.’ ‘Toward Snow’ picks up on this invocation of ‘prophecy and mem-
ory’, extending into a time-based arena an insight Michelson had already
developed in relation to the minimalist sculpture of Robert Morris: ‘Our
perception of the work of art informs us of the nature of consciousness. This
is what we mean when we say—as I do say—that, although art no longer
means or refers, it does have a deeply cognitive function.’ In Wavelength,
she discerns an act of phenomenological reduction, a reflection on transcen-
dental subjectivity. For her, this paradigmatic film is nothing less than an
analogue of consciousness in which ‘epistemological inquiry and cinematic
experience converge, as it were, in reciprocal mimesis.’
Wavelength is a canonical work of anti-illusionism, easily amenable to a
discourse of medium specificity grounded in the autotelic purging of any
element non-essential to the material support. Ontology is not, however,
Michelson’s primary concern. Inasmuch as it figures in her discourse, it
is as means rather than end. The refusal of medial transparency is impor-
tant to her first and foremost for its capacity to activate the spectator’s
cognitive faculties—a goal that may be pursued through Snow’s rigorously
materialist strategies, but equally through other techniques. Her determina-
tion to approach the postwar avant-garde through the lens of epistemology
allowed her to find merit in filmmakers working in diverse, even antithetical,
aesthetic modalities. She lionizes the reductionist, rule-based approaches of
Snow and Hollis Frampton, but also the lyrical expressionism of Brakhage,
who very differently assaults the perspectival space of representation.
Seeking to liberate perception from the grid of language, he fashioned what
she calls a ‘cinema of hypnagogic consciousness’, one which replaced ‘the
filmic scene of action by the screen of eidetic imagery, projecting the nature
balsom: Cinema 139
of sight itself as the subject of cinema’. Maya Deren, meanwhile, gains

recognition as a theorist and practitioner of filmic metaphor, ‘reopening,
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within the context of postwar America, questions posed by the direction,
shape, and scale of Eisenstein’s project’.
Michelson is fond of such knight’s moves, often making surprising con-
nections across epochs and received categories. Nowhere does this occur as
impressively as in her comparative assessment of Brakhage and Eisenstein,
who together comprise the subject of ‘Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura’, the
lead article of a 1973 special issue of Artforum she devoted to the unlikely
pair. Through her adroit analysis, these two filmmakers—seemingly
so distant from one another in so many ways, not least in their attitudes
towards language—become kin. The genealogy she sketches in this essay,
as throughout her oeuvre, is dialectical in nature. The American avant-garde
gains legitimacy by claiming the canonical Eisenstein as a forebear and,
in turn, the interventions at mid-century allow the Soviet to appear as he
never could in his own time: not as one who staked out a direction without
a future, who was silenced by Stalinism and Sound, but as he who, ‘in a
dazzling leap of the imagination, invented on paper the essential tenor, the
form, the thrust, and the strategies of the American Independent Cinema’.
The idea of a paradise lost haunts serious commitments to the cinema.
Many filmmakers and scholars, such as Michelson’s long-time friend Noël
Burch, find their Eden in the pre-1907 ‘cinema of attractions’, taking it as
an unsullied site of inchoate potential. Michelson’s privileged moment is
slightly later, in the 1920s, reiterating an established historical narrative that
André Bazin had rejected, namely, that the scourge of synchronized sound
causes a violent rupture, curtailing the medium’s progress just as it was
coming into maturity. Unlike those who fixated on the turn of the century,
unearthing paths not taken so as to unsettle the inevitability of classicism,
Michelson articulated a prescriptive notion of what cinema should be by
exhuming a path once taken but blocked, making a concerted return to the
1920s that begins in 1972 with ‘From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s
The Man with the Movie Camera’.
She was not alone in circling back to the Soviets at this time. Some film
scholars peered across the decades out of nostalgia for revolution or com-
mitment to its present possibility; others attempted to identify precedents
for the theorization of cinema as a signifying system akin to language, a
methodological approach on the ascent in the wake of the structuralist
turn in the human sciences. Michelson was driven by something else: a
fascination with the ‘epistemological euphoria’ that once surrounded the
medium and which she saw as enjoying a contemporary resurgence. With
a contagious enthusiasm, she finds it in 1920s France, in Jean Epstein’s
breathless conviction that slow motion contains ‘the possibility of disclosure
140 nlr 129
that might regain for us a degree of certitude’ and in René Clair’s delightful
Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray, 1924), which concocts a reflexive inquiry into
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film’s ‘analytic propensities’ out of a simple science-fiction scenario. Her

highest admiration, however, is reserved for Eisenstein and Vertov, for they
surpassed their French counterparts by yoking meta-cinema to the revolu-
tionary project of remaking consciousness, proclaiming montage thinking
and dialectical thinking to be one. ‘The general aim’, Michelson writes, ‘was
no less than the transformation of the human condition through a cinematic
intensification of cognitive accuracy, analytic precision, and epistemologi-
cal certitude. Such were the promise and the burden of what came to be
termed, in Eisenstein’s phrase, “intellectual cinema”, and its affective agent
was montage.’
Through the creation and theorization of filmic constructions unteth-
ered from the demands of verisimilitude and chronology—such as the
renowned ‘For God and Country’ sequence of October—Eisenstein elabo-
rated a cinema of thought grounded in operations of fragmentation,
juxtaposition, and synthesis. Just as Wavelength invites its viewer to reckon
with anticipation and intentionality, so does October usher the spectator into
a process of filmic reasoning, in line with a conviction its director shared
with Marx: ‘Not only the result, but the road to it also is part of the truth.’
Vertov, for his part, marshalled all those ‘cinematic anomalies’ sidelined in
the name of realism—reverse motion, slow motion, the freeze frame—to
lay bare the workings of the apparatus, interrogate causality, and advance
filmmaking as a revelatory means by which the ‘Communist decoding
of the world’ might occur. For so many, cinema was a cult of distraction
and had always been so. Michelson devotes herself to bringing an alter-
nate vocation of the medium into view, insisting that in special instances it
could be transformed, as the title of her essay on Vertov would have it, from
‘Magician to Epistemologist’.
The proposal that cinema has the power to augment certitude entails a
conception of the apparatus and its spectator that sets Michelson apart from
the mainstream thrust of Anglo-American film theory in the 1970s—and
perhaps explains why her name seldom appears on syllabi devoted to that
history, despite the signal importance and conceptual richness of her writing.
In a 1990 text on Vertov, she voices with triumphant clarity an affirmation
found throughout her work: ‘the euphoria one feels at the editing table is
that of a sharpening cognitive focus and of a ludic sovereignty, grounded in
that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence open to those
who, since 1896, have played, as never before in the world’s history, with the
continuum of temporality and the logic of causality.’ In the act of beholding,
the spectator of epistemological cinema experiences the same demiurgic
pleasure. As Malcolm Turvey—Michelson’s former student and author of
balsom: Cinema 141
the foreword to On the Wings of Hypothesis—admits, this ‘confidence in the

individual spectator’s capacity for reflection . . . seems to come straight out
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of the Enlightenment’. It is a far cry from theorizing cinema’s function as
an ideological apparatus with concepts borrowed from Althusser and Lacan,
a topos that arguably constitutes the central research question of 1970s film
studies. The aspects of cinema that Michelson praises—the recapturing
of lost surety, the feeling of mastering the world—were central to that dis-
course, too, but were there identified as ideological mystifications to assail,
not attributes to celebrate. Unperturbed by the vicissitudes of poststructural-
ism, unconcerned with how subjectivity is produced in capitalist modernity,
and uninterested in cinema’s role in this process, Michelson posits the
subject as a pure rationality. Identical to itself, this subject is unfettered by
a body, free from encroachment, untouched by anything that would mark
it with difference.
Michelson’s avoidance of ideology critique can be explained at least par-
tially by her object choice. The experience of watching Wavelength has little
in common with the circuits of identification and objectification that course
through a Hitchcock film, after all. Instead of clawing at the regressive
pleasures of dominant cinema, she nurtures oppositional practices appar-
ently undeserving of suspicion. Her aversion to diagnosing the workings
of power is, however, part of a more generalized retreat from the social.
Michelson attends principally to formal innovations, for it is there, and not
in any representational capacity, that she locates the medium’s cognitive
potential. This attitude shapes her selection of favoured filmmakers and the
readings of them she offers. The socio-political dimensions of experimental
cinema, which have been of crucial salience to a more recent generation of
scholars, are scarcely confronted. In large measure, rationality prevails over
corporeality and sensation; form prevails over content and context. When, in
her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, Carolee Schneemann stood naked and
pulled a rolled paper from her vagina, reading aloud from it of ‘a happy man,
a structuralist filmmaker’ who cannot bear to watch her films owing to their
‘personal clutter, the persistence of feelings, the hand-touch sensibility,
the diaristic indulgence’, many assumed the target to be her then-partner,
Anthony McCall. Schneemann revealed later that the imagined addressee
was in fact neither a man nor a filmmaker: it was Michelson.
‘The cinema of the American avant-garde has been frequently accused of
apoliticism’, Michelson relays, deeming such an accusation ‘totally unjust’.
And so it is, but if one encountered this cinema through her writing alone,
coming away with such an impression would be forgivable. Her philosophi-
cal concern with the workings of consciousness results in an unrelenting
turn inwards, at the risk of forgetting something that Eisenstein and Vertov
knew well: cinema’s epistemological capacities do not just produce
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knowledge about human cognition; they can be exercised to grapple with

the struggle and joy of being in the world, in all its particularity. Despite
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her anti-illusionist convictions, Michelson has no allegiance to what Sylvia

Harvey called ‘political modernism’, a post-1968 discourse which also took
inspiration from the Soviets, calling for the marriage of formal reflexivity
and radical subject matter. Nearly fifty years old at the time of les événements,
she is a modernist tout court—a position that, by the 1970s, necessarily car-
ries with it a hint of conservativism. Other critics devoted to the ‘radical
aspiration’ sought to strengthen the bond between cinema and emancipa-
tory social movements; Michelson put the medium in the company of Eliot
and Joyce, as if proximity to such prestige might help to pull it up out of the
masscult gutter and ensconce it in the artistic pantheon once and for all.
Criticism has many functions, among them promotion and legitima-
tion. These were central to Michelson, who explained in a 1986 interview,
‘I always, in a sense, conceive my task to be doing something useful, some-
thing that wasn’t being done elsewhere. That’s why I’ve never taught a
seminar on Psycho.’ Experimental film, that poor stepchild of both cinema
and art, needed her. She skilfully demonstrated its seriousness and complex-
ity, shepherding it to greater recognition and shaping a canon. It needed
her, but she also needed it. By 1970, a dyed-in-the-wool modernist would
find little to rave about on the fine art beat. That sun was setting. For film,
meanwhile, it was high noon. The historical unfurling of modernism within
this ‘last of the heroic occupations’ abides by a different temporality—one
made visible in Michelson’s work—such that ideas of mastery, medium, and
the suffering genius remained central to it, even as they were under grow-
ing attack elsewhere. Attitudes that might otherwise smack of old-fashioned
orthodoxy take on a sense of vanguard urgency when brought to bear on a
reproducible medium widely considered to be synonymous with popular
entertainment. Despite the comparison of cinema to revolution that appears
in ‘Film and the Radical Aspiration’, Michelson is ultimately a reformist:
she did not seek to overthrow established aesthetic categories as much as
to secure a place for film within them. If the thrill of her prose were not
enough, the changed status the moving image enjoys today, at the centre of
contemporary art and as the subject of rigorous academic study, is a testa-
ment to the success of her endeavour.
reviews
Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to
Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
Duke University Press: Durham nc, 2020, $26.95, paperback
252 pp, 978 1 4780 0848 4
Tony Wood
RETROCESSION IN ECUADOR
The results of Ecuador’s presidential elections this year represented an

unmistakable setback for the Latin American left. After years of reverses for
the Pink Tide, a few recent developments—notably the election of Alberto
Fernández in Argentina in 2019, the Chilean upsurge of 2019–20 and the
return of the mas to power in Bolivia in 2020—suggested that the region’s
rightward momentum could be stalled. On 7 February 2021, Ecuador seemed
poised to confirm this trend, as Andrés Arauz, a 36-year-old economist and
former minister in Rafael Correa’s government, finished comfortably ahead
in the first round of voting. Yet when the second round was held on 11 April,
it was Arauz’s opponent, the centre-right banker Guillermo Lasso, who
emerged victorious with 52 per cent of the vote to Arauz’s 48. After four
years during which Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, steadily dismantled
the social gains made under his predecessor, the chance to shift the country
leftward once more was lost.
A full reckoning of the reasons for this defeat would have to take
account of many factors. But central to any discussion must be the role
played by years of increasingly bitter contention between two components
of the Ecuadorean left: on the one hand, the correísta currents seeking to
advance the redistributive priorities of the ‘Citizen’s Revolution’, set in
motion after Correa came to power in 2006; on the other, a coalition of
predominantly indigenous movements, grouped around the Confederación
de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (conaie) and the political party
Pachakutik, calling for a shift away from an economic model that remained
overly dependent on the extraction of natural resources.

144 nlr 129
The two positions were represented in the 2021 presidential contest by

the candidacies of Arauz and Yaku Pérez of Pachakutik, and there can be no
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doubt that their rivalry shaped the final outcome. In February, Pérez trailed
Lasso by a mere 32,000 votes, and may have played kingmaker by recom-
mending his supporters spoil their ballots in the April run-off. In a contest
Lasso won by 4 per cent, the voto nulo amounted to 18 per cent—a historic
high for Ecuador, where it has not been above 11 per cent since the 1980s.
The geography of the vote would seem to confirm that many Pachakutik sup-
porters either spoiled their ballots or directly backed Lasso: the banker carried
12 of the 13 provinces Pérez had won in the first round, including many of
the poorer and predominantly indigenous highland areas. He often did so
by crushing margins, aided by the fact that in several highland provinces,
Arauz’s totals were smaller than the voto nulo. It is hardly a stretch to say that
the rift within Ecuador’s left cleared Lasso’s way to the presidency.
How and why did this rift develop? Thea Riofrancos’s Resource Radicals
offers a thoughtful analysis of the origins and ground-level dynamics of the
divergence within the Ecuadorean left. Focusing mainly on the years 2006–
2016, it provides a political ethnography of key clashes over the extraction
of natural resources, seeing these episodes as central to the consolidation
of two broad camps, which Riofrancos terms ‘radical resource nationalism’
and ‘anti-extractivism’. The former ‘demands collective ownership of oil and
minerals’ and sees Ecuador’s natural resources as a vital means for carrying
out progressive social policies—poverty reduction in particular. The latter
camp, by contrast, ‘rejects extraction entirely and envisions a post-extractive
society’, and opposed the Correa government’s plans for large-scale,
open-pit mining of gold and copper as both ecologically disastrous and anti-
democratic, accusing Correa of riding roughshod over the 2008 Ecuadorean
Constitution’s commitment to prior consultation of affected populations.
For Riofrancos, beyond the immediate debate over policy priorities, this
contention over resources also raises more profound questions about the
purposes of progressive politics and the location of popular sovereignty: not
just who controls the subsoil, but, ultimately, who rules?
Resource Radicals emerged out of the author’s experiences living in
Ecuador in 2007–08 and out of fieldwork conducted between 2010 and
2016. Based in Providence, Rhode Island since 2015, Riofrancos is a politi-
cal scientist and an active member of the us radical left, writing regularly
for outlets such as n+1, Dissent and Jacobin. In her work to date, critical
analysis of the Pink Tide has overlapped with eco-socialist advocacy: she
is also the co-author of A Planet to Win, a 2019 manifesto for a Green New
Deal. Resource Radicals is written in more academic vein (it is based on her
2014 doctoral thesis), and joins an expanding body of scholarship on the
wood: Ecuador 145
politics of natural resource extraction. Her approach differs, however, from

historical or political-economic studies and from the ‘resource curse’ litera-
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ture in its strong emphasis on the discursive realm, as the place where rival
political visions are constructed and clash with one another. Yet her main
concern is to show how ‘popular mobilization shaped the political and eco-
nomic consequences of resource extraction’, and she is always careful to link
figurative battles to material facts and to their historical context. The result
is a level-headed and perceptive national case study that sheds light on the
broader dilemmas of the Pink Tide.
Natural resources have, of course, been central to Latin America’s for-
tunes for centuries—from the colonial exactions of the Iberian powers
through to the late 19th-century export boom that drew much of the region
more closely into the global economy, on deeply unequal terms. While
Ecuador’s economy was dominated for most of the 20th century by agri-
cultural exports, discoveries of oil in the Amazon in the 1960s and then
gas on the coast in the 1970s made the country a hydrocarbon exporter.
For a time, under the military dictatorship of Guillermo Rodríguez Lara,
revenues from the state oil company were used to fund national develop-
mental goals. But in the 1980s, in Ecuador as elsewhere in Latin America,
amid escalating debt crises and global economic turbulence, this state-led
model yielded to neoliberal recipes, combining deregulation and fiscal
retrenchment. Developmental goals were side-lined, while export depend-
ency only increased.
Yet it was not neoliberal governments that reaped the benefits of the
commodity super-cycle after 2000. Instead, high world prices for oil, gas,
metals, minerals, soya and other primary export goods swelled the coffers
of one progressive government after another—from Chávez’s Venezuela
to Morales’s Bolivia, and from Lula’s Brazil to Correa’s Ecuador—making
possible significant expansions of social and welfare spending that slashed
poverty across much of the region. As Riofrancos notes, however, the
peak of the Pink Tide also coincided with the emergence of the concept of
‘extractivismo’, which has been mobilized by critics of these governments to
assail their continued dependence on natural resources.
The term seems to have begun circulating more widely in the wake of
the 2008 financial crisis, and has acquired a variety of meanings. In its most
basic sense, it simply denotes the excessive weight of commodity exports
in a given economy. The Uruguayan scholar Eduardo Gudynas, who along
with Maristella Svampa is among the most prominent figures associated
with this line of analysis, defined it in 2015 as ‘a kind of extraction of natural
resources, in great volume or high intensity, which are essentially destined
for export as raw materials, either unprocessed or minimally processed.’
146 nlr 129
By this measure, most Latin American countries would certainly qualify

as ‘extractivist’, and many extremely so: primary resources account for
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more than 85 per cent of exports in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru,
Suriname and Venezuela, for example.
But as the -ismo suffix suggests, the concept is also supposed to have a
systemic dimension, referring both to a model of development and to the
broader effects of resource extraction; to a historical affliction and its present-
day symptoms. Hugely imprecise as an analytical category—in different
hands it can describe anything from the Manila galleons to the 19th-century
guano boom to globalized agribusiness to deep-sea oil drilling—extractivismo
blurs together centuries and social formations. This has often been part of a
broader move to collapse capitalism, socialism and, crucially, the Pink Tide
variants of developmentalism into a single destructive project, coterminous
with ‘modernity’ itself.
Despite or perhaps because of its capaciousness, the concept of ‘extrac-
tivism’ has become a kind of political floating signifier in Latin America.
This, indeed, was one of the distinctive features of the resource politics of
the 2010s: contention was increasingly framed not as being over oil rents
or ‘development’, say, but over the idea of resource extraction tout court.
The emergence and centrality of what Riofrancos terms ‘extractivismo
discourse’ in Ecuador is all the more striking because it quickly came to
divide political forces that had previously been united around a common
anti-neoliberal agenda.
In order to chart that divergence, Riofrancos begins by carefully trac-
ing the longer-run story of Ecuador’s varying forms of popular mobilization.
In socio-geographic and ethnolinguistic terms, the country is extremely
diverse. Some 72 per cent of the population self-identified as mestizo at the
last census, a large proportion of them retaining some link to their indig-
enous heritage. Around 7 per cent of the population classed themselves
as fully indigenous, belonging to one of more than 30 ethnic groups that
are distributed mainly between Andean highlands and Amazonian low-
lands; Afro-Ecuadoreans accounted for another 8 per cent, whites for 6 per
cent, and Montubians—a coastal mestizo group categorized as a distinct
ethnicity—another 7 per cent.
Schematically, there have been important political disparities between
highland communities and Amazonian groups, both in terms of timing and
in terms of motivating ideas. (The country’s coastal strip has historically
been a stronghold of the right—especially Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil—
and consequently features much less in Riofrancos’s account.) Highland
communities have recurrently fought ‘against unequal land tenure and
super-exploitative labour relations’, and their struggles gained particular force
in successive waves of mobilization from the 1930s onwards—culminating
wood: Ecuador 147
in an agrarian reform in 1964 that finally ended the huasipungo system of

semi-feudal tenancy. Amazonian movements, by contrast, tended to take
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the form of ‘ethnic organization to defend communal territory against state-
led land colonization, and oil exploration and extraction’, and gathered pace
starting in the 1960s—after the agrarian reform, which triggered a push for
colonization. These two ‘trajectories’, as Riofrancos terms them, only began
to converge in the 1970s, as a result of which a national-level confederation,
conaie, was formed in 1986.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the different currents of indigenous
mobilization merged with a broader stream of anti-neoliberal sentiment,
and it was their combined forces that repeatedly brought the country to a
standstill, and that ultimately helped bring Correa to power in 2006. Within
this anti-neoliberal consensus, the predominant view on natural resources
was a demand for ‘the expulsion of foreign oil companies, the nationaliza-
tion of oil, and the channelling of oil revenues to meet social needs.’ As well
as appealing to progressive urban middle- and working-class constituencies,
such demands mapped onto the highland communities’ calls for redistri-
bution, and were fully compatible with their conception of sovereignty:
conaie’s 1994 programme, as Riofrancos observes, proclaimed that natu-
ral resources should be ‘exclusive property of the Plurinational state.’ Yet
already there was another strand of thinking about resources that opposed
extraction itself—Amazonian communities in particular seeing it as a threat
to their livelihoods and ecosystems.
Both currents, Riofrancos argues, were voicing their demands in the
name of sovereignty—but they meant different things by it. One ‘invoked
popular national sovereignty against foreign capital’ while the other ‘asserted
indigenous territorial sovereignty against extraction.’ As long as they were
in opposition to the existing neoliberal paradigm, the two conceptions and
their accompanying demands could be conjoined. Yet ‘retrospectively, their
distinct logics are apparent’. One made its claims on behalf of a nationwide
demos and on the scale of the nation-state; the other was grounded in local-
ized claims to sovereignty that in their view took precedence over those of
the nation-state. Once the anti-neoliberal movement had opened the way
for the ‘Citizen’s Revolution’, the disparity between them would move into
the political foreground.
The 2008 Constitution was an important early milestone in the Correa
administration, enshrining the country’s ‘plurinational’ character. But as
Riofrancos notes, it also crystallized—without resolving—the tensions
between opposed views of resource extraction, which had featured promi-
nently in Constituent Assembly debates in 2007–08. She describes the two
rival projects for Article 57, which established the rights of communities
affected by extractive projects. The minority proposal, supported by many
148 nlr 129
indigenous groups, was to bring Ecuador into line with ilo Convention
169, which calls for ‘free, prior and informed consent’. The majority view,
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however, instead accords indigenous communities the right to ‘free prior

informed consultation’—a notably weaker standard. As Riofrancos observes,
moreover, the final text of the constitution was laced with further ambiguities
that proved consequential: it ‘empowers communities affected by extraction,
and it grants rights to nature’, yet at the same time it ‘also asserts the state’s
exclusive control over subsoil resources and biodiversity itself.’
Struggles over consulta previa, as it became known, then move to the cen-
tre of Riofrancos’s account. What made them especially intense was the fact
that they mainly revolved not around existing extractive projects but around
new ones—and in particular around mining, previously little developed in
Ecuador, but which the Correa government sought to encourage as a new
source of revenue. It did so in partnership with foreign-owned (principally
Canadian) mining concerns, which supplied much of the ‘information’ the
government provided to communities as part of the consultation process.
It seems to a large extent to have been this ramping up of mining, which
would principally affect highland communities, that precipitated a shift on
the part of conaie to a fully anti-extractive position. In other words, the
two historical trajectories described above were now conjoined in opposi-
tion both to extraction and to the Correa government. Protests against the
2009 Mining Law regulating the new sector brought a swath of arrests, and
signalled the repressive tack that the Correa government would thenceforth
often take in response to anti-extractivist dissent.
Riofrancos provides evocative portraits of particularly significant events
such as the 2012 ‘March for Water, Life and the Dignity of Peoples’, a
fortnight-long procession from the southern Amazonian town of Pangui
to Quito’s Parque El Arbolito. Accompanying the march, she noticed how
participants articulated a range of discontents with reference to the 2008
Constitution, making the document itself less a static settlement than a
tool of struggle: ‘the Constitution lived among us’, she observes. Riofrancos
also describes attempts by indigenous communities and environmental
advocates to enforce the higher standard of consent, and to organize their
own democratic consultas—local ballots that she calls acts of ‘vernacular
statecraft’. She gives a detailed account of a 2011 consulta on gold mining
organized by two community water management systems in Azuay prov-
ince, which opened with an ancestral ceremony—‘the musky sweetness of
burning palo santo infused the air around the concentric circles of fruit, veg-
etables, grain and flowers arranged on an electric pink and blue cloth’—and
ended with a resounding 93 per cent vote against the mine. One of the key
organizers of this referendum, which the Correa government refused to rec-
ognize as legitimate, was the indigenous activist Carlos Pérez, who in 2017
would change his name to Yaku Sacha (‘water of the mountain’ in Kichwa)
wood: Ecuador 149
Pérez—a move that Riofrancos diplomatically describes as testifying to ‘the

evolving cultural and political salience of indigeneity’.
reviews
Addressing the other side of Ecuador’s resource politics divide,
Riofrancos draws on extensive interviews with state functionaries. What
the latter shared, according to Riofrancos, was ‘a narrative that defined neo-
liberalism as state absence’ and an aspiration to ‘build a state that could
expertly regulate economic activity.’ While she is attentive to disagreements
within the correísta state, Riofrancos argues that on the whole, state func-
tionaries sought to frame resource politics as a technical issue that hinged
on the provision of information—in which case opposition was a matter
of misinformation or wilful obstruction; a minority veto of majority needs.
Ironically, this technocratic attempt to depoliticize resource politics only
helped to solidify the battle-lines between the government and mounting
opposition.
Riofrancos concludes with a fair-minded attempt to synthesize both the
achievements and the limitations of Ecuador’s two lefts, which she terms the
‘Left-in-power’ and the ‘Left-in-resistance’, and to draw lessons from them
for the Pink Tide as a whole. She records the Correa government’s concrete
achievements—sustained economic growth, a doubling of social spending
as a share of gdp, poverty dropping from 38 to 22 per cent—as well as a
‘substantive, grassroots empowerment’ that took place. At the same time,
however, Ecuador became more rather than less reliant on resource rents,
deepening the dominance of the extractive model, as well as racking up sig-
nificant debts to China and to regional development banks. For their part
the anti-extractive movements succeeded in making the question of extrac-
tion itself a central stake in Ecuadorean politics, and they ‘demonstrated the
capacity to stall or disrupt both oil and mining projects at the local level’. Yet
as Riofrancos puts it, they ‘had difficulty assembling a popular sector coali-
tion at the national scale with the power to articulate and enact an alternative
to the extractive model.’
In Riofrancos’s view, the sundering of these two left currents has been
both tragic and unnecessary. The dispute between them ‘became so polar-
ized that each saw in the other a political enemy more dangerous than
neoliberalism.’ She continues:
Lost in this internecine dispute was the radical promise of ‘twenty-first-

century socialism’: collective, democratic control over the conditions of
socio-natural existence. Such a program could have coherently demanded
both the redistribution of oil and mining revenues and a transition away from
the extractive model of accumulation that generates those revenues. Just
such a vision inflected conaie’s 1994 political program, published amidst
massive mobilizations against neoliberal land reforms . . . Yet two decades
later, ‘socialism’ and ‘anti-extractivism’ had come to name two counterposed
political projects.
150 nlr 129
For Riofrancos, however, both of these projects contain elements that are
fundamentally necessary—and not just in Ecuador. A redistributive soci-
reviews
oeconomic agenda is urgently needed to address gaping inequalities and

injustices; opposition to extraction must form part of any strategy to avert
or even slow down a cascading ecological disaster. There is an obvious reso-
nance between her insistence here that the two can and should be combined
and the case she has helped make elsewhere for a Green New Deal.
Resource Radicals offers a highly articulate and balanced analysis of the
intra-left contention that has done so much to shape Ecuador’s recent politi-
cal trajectory. Written at the end of the Correa administration and in the
early stages of Lenín Moreno’s government, it says relatively little about the
latter’s assiduous efforts to undo his predecessor’s legacy—a puzzle that
becomes more comprehensible if one sees correísmo itself as a provisional
coalition, which all along contained elements frankly opposed to much of
Correa’s agenda. The swift unravelling of the ‘Citizen’s Revolution’ should
perhaps have featured more prominently in Riofrancos’s account, since it
underlines the internal fragility of the ‘Left-in-power’ during the period she
covers. Nevertheless, Resource Radicals provides a detailed picture of how
the Pink Tide’s broader limitations played out in concrete political terms.
Absent a more thoroughgoing transformation of the country’s social struc-
tures, Ecuador’s progressive forces were only able to advance their social
programmes on the basis of deepening commodity extraction. High resource
rents enabled this to work for a time, but this strategy was always destined
to hit a wall when the resource bonanza ran dry, as it began to do after
2014. At that point, contradictions that had long been apparent between a
redistributive ‘radical resource nationalism’ and ‘anti-extractivism’ became
increasingly destructive.
Yet this in turn raises some troubling questions for Riofrancos’s anal-
ysis, and in particular for her hopes for a synthesis of the two projects.
Laudable though the latter might be in principle, her book itself provides a
test case of their painful incompatibility in practice, and her account of the
rival conceptions of sovereignty in play—grounded as they are in alternative
conceptions of the very nation-state—only shows how deep the rift goes.
She rightly points out the tendency of the broader anti-extractive critique to
posit a ‘total, ideologically closed system’ and hence to ‘foreclose the pos-
sibility of transformation, short of an exogenous shock.’ This then brings
up a profound problem: ‘who is the imagined collective subject’ that might
propel a shift to a post-extractive world? We might also add: through what
kind of political struggles—in opposition to what—is that collective subject
going to be forged?
While Riofrancos sees the 2019 protests against the Moreno government
as a hopeful sign, potentially pointing to a renewed convergence between
wood: Ecuador 151
Ecuador’s different popular sectors, the evidence of the 2021 election is con-
siderably more sombre. It highlights, moreover, an aspect that receives much
reviews
less attention in Riofrancos’s account than it perhaps should. In dealing so
extensively with intra-left contention, Resource Radicals tends to understate
the degree to which Ecuador’s Left-in-power, like all other Pink Tide govern-
ments, was besieged by an untransformed and still extremely powerful elite,
which retained both its economic power and its grip on the media as well
as its sway over key institutions, including the police. Not just well placed to
take advantage of the rift within the left, Ecuador’s elite worked assiduously
to amplify it. One obvious result was a startling inversion of the country’s
electoral map, with Arauz’s victories coming in the coastal strip and Lasso
carrying the highlands. It remains to be seen how durable that shake-up
will be. The prospect of working with Lasso has already caused turmoil in
Pachakutik, with Yaku Pérez abruptly resigning from the party on 20 May in
protest (though he had also opposed any alliances with Arauz’s party). Much
hinges on whether the rift within the left remains unbridged, or whether
the two lefts can converge once more in opposition to a refurbished and
rearmed neoliberalism. Riofrancos gives us grounds for pessimism while
making a more hopeful case.
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reviews
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s
Insecure Identity
Oxford University Press: Oxford 2020, £64, hardback
248 pp, 978 0 1975 0294 5
Joy Neumeyer
BURYING HOMO SOVIETICUS
Imagine a creature left behind by evolution. It is obedient, passive, and

dependent on others for its care. Devoid of morals, it lies in order to sur-
vive. Such is the fate of Homo Sovieticus, the personality type identified by
Yuri Levada’s sociological surveys on the ‘simple Soviet man’ of the late 80s.
Homo Sovieticus was expected to go extinct with Russia’s post-Soviet transi-
tion, only to receive an alarming new lease of life. Scholars and journalists
such as Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa have invoked the concept to attrib-
ute the country’s current brand of authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin to
the subservient mindset of its citizens.
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a political scientist at King’s College London,
rejects the ‘hopelessness’ and ‘Russophobia’ of such interpretations. She
calls for ‘an emotionally intelligent’ approach that is focused on ‘empathizing
with the Russian population, rather than pointing to where it went wrong’.
In The Red Mirror, she attempts to diagnose the Russian condition without
relying on Homo Sovieticus or assuming the superiority of its imagined
foil, the liberal Western subject. She proposes that polling data like Levada’s
can be stripped of its Cold War-era ideological foundations and retrofitted to
produce a more convincing assessment of the collective psyche. ‘You can’t
step twice into the same river—a classic saying’, she writes. ‘Or can you? . . .
How can we use the insights in social psychology to arrive at a less biased
understanding and give credit and the blame where they are due?’
Sharafutdinova grew up in the republic of Tatarstan, an oil-rich region
with a majority Tatar population, and received her PhD from George
Washington University. Her first book, Political Consequences of Crony
Capitalism inside Russia (2010), examined the rise of corruption in the

154 nlr 129
provinces. As privatization and free elections were introduced simultane-

ously in the early 90s, access to power meant access to property, and vice
reviews
versa. Sharafutdinova identifies two political models that emerged: ‘cen-

tralized and noncompetitive’, the system favoured by the tight-knit Tatar
elite, and ‘fragmented and competitive’, which characterized the Nizhnii
Novgorod region under Yeltsin ally Boris Nemtsov. In the latter, politicians
aired corruption scandals over the course of nasty campaigns, leading many
voters to see elections as elite infighting and to respond with apathy and
protest voting. As competitive democracy delegitimized itself, the Tatar
model looked increasingly appealing. Popular disillusionment with demo-
cratic institutions united the self-interest of Putin’s circle with the desires
of an alienated public. This, Sharafutdinova argues, is why most Russians
didn’t mind when Putin abolished regional gubernatorial elections in
2004 (according to polls) and why his popularity remained high even as
oil prices dropped.
By March 2014, when ‘little green men’ wearing unmarked uniforms
appeared on the island of Crimea, apathy had given way to euphoria. The Red
Mirror is focused on ‘high Putinism’—the enormous esteem the president
enjoyed in the wake of the annexation, when his approval rating regularly
exceeded 80 per cent. It fell to pre-Crimea levels of 65–70 per cent after the
announcement of the highly unpopular pension reform in June 2018, which
raised the retirement age by five years for men and eight for women, but has
held relatively steady ever since. Like some liberal American writers who
have made forays into Trump country, Sharafutdinova says that her study
is motivated by a ‘personal urge’ to understand why many of her friends
and family in Russia take a positive view of Putin. She does not accept
that their perceptions stem from ‘brainwashing and propaganda’, ‘cultural
preferences for a strong hand’, or ‘moral bankruptcy and the inability of
Russian people to distinguish right from wrong’, as the Homo Sovieticus
paradigm would suggest.
‘Homo Sovieticus’ inverted the Bolshevik concept of the New Man,
which promised to reform human beings into a perfected, generalizable
type. According to later observers, the revolutionary social experiment had
gone horribly awry. Émigré sociologist Alexander Zinoviev created the first
popular formulation of Homo Sovieticus in his novelistic depictions of
Soviet life from the early 80s. Zinoviev’s interest in taxonomizing socialist
man was expressed in a different key by Eastern Bloc dissidents who spoke
out against what they saw as their peers’ passivity and conformity, captured
by Vaclav Havel’s famous example of a greengrocer who puts a ‘Workers of
the World, Unite!’ sign in his window. As Sharafutdinova explores here and
in a 2019 article for Slavic Review (‘Was There a “Simple Soviet” Person?
neumeyer: Russia 155
Debating the Politics and Sociology of “Homo Sovieticus”’), these ideas

dovetailed with the model of totalitarianism inspired by Hannah Arendt.
reviews
Scholars of the totalitarian school, backed by generous funding from the
us government, shared an assumption that the collective nature of state
socialism destroyed the individual autonomy essential for democracy and
free markets.
Levada put notions about the ‘simple Soviet man’ on an empirical foun-
dation when he took over the All-Union Center for Public Opinion Research
in the late 80s, as part of Gorbachev’s effort to enlist the social sciences
in reforming the Soviet system. At the time, many members of the intel-
ligentsia were decrying Russians’ degradation as a means of calling for
change. Levada’s research combined concerns about the Soviet Union’s
debased inhabitants (referred to in ironic domestic parlance as the ‘sovok’)
with approaches derived from Talcott Parsons’ social systems theory. Levada
discovered the cowering practitioner of doublethink that he had set out to
find, while expressing confidence that this figure would die out along with
the Soviet state.
While Western Sovietology faded away, criticism of the backward masses
persisted among Russian intellectuals who sought a scapegoat for the coun-
try’s apparent failure to adapt to capitalist modernity. Levada’s successor
Lev Gudkov, who has headed the independent Levada Center since 2006,
announced that Soviet man was mutating and taking on increasingly cynical
and aggressive forms. According to Gudkov’s Abortive Modernization (2011),
‘the main obstacle for Russia’s modernization . . . is the type of the Soviet
or post-Soviet man (homo sovieticus), his basic social distrust, his experience
of adaptation to violence, that makes him incapable of receiving the more
complex moral/ethical views and relationships, which, in turn, makes the
institutionalization of new social forms of interaction impossible’. Gudkov’s
argument became the go-to framing for Anglophone journalists in search of
a hot (if reheated) take: ‘The Long Life of Homo Sovieticus’, a 2011 headline
in The Economist proclaimed. Its usage intensified after Donald Trump’s
election, when the increasingly ambiguous status of the liberal Western sub-
ject rekindled longings for its constituent other and the associated Cold War
verities. The persistence of Soviet man is the central conceit of Gessen’s The
Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017) and Yaffa’s
Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia (2020).
Both authors are staff writers for The New Yorker.
Sharafutdinova argues that Soviet man and his reincarnation are based
on a dated and ‘mechanical’ view of human personality as an output of the
political system. Rather than focusing on individual personality, understood
as ‘enduring, fixed and unchanging’, she favours social identity theory,
156 nlr 129
which highlights how identity is ‘socially and politically constructed, flexible

and context-dependent’. She argues that two features of collective identity
reviews
found by Levada’s studies—Soviet exceptionalism and an ‘us vs them’

mentality—left emotional ‘soft spots’ in the population that were highly
vulnerable to manipulation after the Soviet collapse. While other countries
in the former Soviet bloc celebrated their national liberation and ‘return to
Europe’, Russia experienced a period of ‘self-negation’. As the country went
from being a global giver of aid to a recipient, the people who had been told
they belonged to the most advanced civilization on earth were fed leftover
us military rations. During ‘shock therapy’, when salaries stopped being
paid and savings vanished overnight, there was little time or will to generate
a new self-concept. In June 1996, the Yeltsin administration announced a
contest to come up with a ‘national idea’. It never chose a winner.
In his first two terms, Sharafutdinova writes, Putin practiced a ‘hybrid
politics’ of centralized authority and liberal economics that ‘did not evoke
intense emotion’. The 2011–12 protests over corruption and electoral fraud,
however, revealed the limits of Kremlin control and the need for a fresh
strategy. The upshot was an activation of identity politics among aggrieved
Russians who saw themselves as the losers of the 90s. This ‘collective frame
of belonging’ transmuted shame over the country’s loss in stature into a
renewed sense of self: ‘The shattered Soviet identity went flying around—as
fragments of a broken mirror—resonating especially strongly in the eyes
of those hurt by the transition, distorting their view and making them fall
under the spell of the Kremlin-orchestrated messages tailored to capture
those lost souls.’ With Russia’s post-Crimea ‘collective effervescence’, the
transformation was complete.
Sharafutdinova riffs on Soviet pop star Iosif Kobzon’s declaration that
‘Putin is married to Russia’ to suggest that the country is ‘blinded by love’
for an abusive husband. To identify the psychological ‘glue’ that holds them
together, she draws on four focus-group interviews she led in Kazan and
Samara, as well as the results of a nationwide survey conducted with the
Levada Center. These are supplemented with additional polls by Levada, as
well as research by the state-run Russia Public Opinion Research Center
and Public Opinion Foundation. Her findings suggest that the image of
Putin constructed by state media has been highly successful. Focus group
participants praised Putin for his outstanding personal qualities, as well as
for raising Russia’s international status and bringing stability. She finds
that Putin fulfils the four principles of successful leadership defined by the
social psychologist Alexander Haslam: he is perceived as ‘one of us’, a sim-
ple lad who lost his job with the collapse; ‘doing it for us’, paying off Russia’s
debts to the imf while raising pensions and salaries in his first two terms;
‘crafting a sense of us’ by projecting resurgent patriotism; and ‘making us

matter’ by framing Russia as the defender of Christian civilization against a
reviews
decadent and arrogant West. All of these rest on Putin’s projected opposition
to the ‘trauma’ of the 90s.
Discussions of trauma are usually tied to the Freudian framework of his-
torian Alexander Etkind, which sees Russians as haunted by the repressed
memory of Stalinist crimes and is often used to explain why they are
doomed to repeat the past (as in Sergei Medvedev’s 2019 book The Return
of the Russian Leviathan). Sharafutdinova questions the relevance of psycho-
analytic principles developed to treat individual patients for entire societies,
and sees intellectuals’ focus on Stalinism as a distraction from the much
greater role played by recent history. On a social level, she argues, trauma
is ‘chosen’, collectively constructed in dialogue with leaders. The chosen
trauma of ‘collective victimhood’ in the 90s has it that Russian society was
ravaged by Western capitalists, out-of-control oligarchs, and Chechen ter-
rorists until Putin took over and ‘gathered the Russian lands’. Based on a
loose comparison to the ‘time of troubles’ when Poles occupied the Kremlin,
which was brought to an end by the crowning of Tsar Mikhail Romanov in
1613, this narrative is frequently repeated by the state media and Putin him-
self. Though less lurid recollections continue to circulate, Sharafutdinova’s
research finds that the Putin-approved version is hegemonic. Even those too
young to remember the decade can parrot its tropes to the point of irony: in
a hit song, Generation Z pop idol Monetochka sings that ‘in the 90s people
turned up dead and ran the streets buck naked’.
Later chapters survey how collective identity is created on state tel-
evision, with a particular focus on talk shows. Vladimir Solovyev, the top
headliner on the Rossiya channel, presides over debates in which straw men
voicing ‘Western’ views of Russian society and foreign policy are humiliated
by their stern-faced host. In a typical episode, he orders a Ukrainian guest
who insults the memory of a Russian pilot killed in Syria to leave the studio.
Sharafutdinova determines that ‘the neural connections created in the brain’
by such displays create an emotional ‘firewall’ among viewers in support of
Kremlin messaging. The book ends with a series of vignettes showing the
challenges that daily life in Russia poses for ‘human dignity’. These include
the saga of rap star Husky, who was arrested and jailed for twelve days after
his concert was cancelled by local authorities for ‘extremism’ and he tried
to perform on the street. Sharafutdinova concludes that the ‘revanchist,
victimization-driven consolidation’ which Putin and his image-makers have
created is hollow and can lead only to ‘dangerous political confrontation and
economic stagnation’. In order to move forward, she writes, Russians must
abandon their attachment to victimhood and reconsider the ‘moral void’ of
158 nlr 129
the 90s and Stalinism together as historical lessons that can serve as the
basis for a more ‘proactive’ political position.
reviews
The Red Mirror is a much-needed improvement on Homo Sovieticus,

with its reductive view of the relationship between politics and personal-
ity and its damning of Russians to reenact the past. Yet for all the book’s
calls for empathy, dissection of stereotypes, and emphasis on context rather
than inherent traits, the portrait of the collective psyche that emerges doesn’t
look that different from those fuelled by disdain. Post-imperial resentment,
lingering Soviet worldviews, and a charismatic leader who transfixes the
people—this is the syndrome identified by any number of other political
scientists and journalists. The book’s potential for innovation is undercut
by a tendency to use the same metaphors it is analysing. People under the
‘spell’ of Putin’s enchanted ‘mirror’ (stock images in the Russia-analysis
trade) are locked by writerly sleight-of-hand into a mystical communion that
is not always grounded in evidence. Sharafutdinova rejects the application
of psychoanalysis to entire societies, but is it methodologically any sounder
to portray Russians as trapped in a codependent relationship? Do citizens
marry their leaders?
As Sharafutdinova notes, while the majority of Russians continue to get
their news from television—around 64 per cent according to an August
2019 Public Opinion Foundation (fom) survey, or 72 per cent according
to contemporaneous Levada polls—the same fom survey showed that only
35 per cent of them trust it, down from 63 per cent in 2015. Such num-
bers cast doubt on whether theatrical outbursts on the nightly news have
formed an emotional ‘firewall’ around Putin—a deterministic narrative of
its own, based on neurobiology rather than personality. However effective
they may be in marketing research, focus groups are of more limited util-
ity in assessing political opinions in what is effectively a one-party state, as
they tend to produce the anticipated normative responses. Sharafutdinova
observes that those who spoke most in her groups in reference to the 90s
tended to repeat the narrative broadcast on tv, while those who seemed to
have dissenting views held back. Other indicators suggest that the symbio-
sis between ruler and ruled is more tenuous than it appears. After Russia
rolled out the world’s first covid-19 vaccine, Levada polls show that 60 to
70 per cent of its citizens don’t want to receive it, which many public health
experts attribute to a lack of trust in authority (arguably a Soviet legacy of a
different kind). By the beginning of May, only 10 per cent of the population
had received a dose.
Would abandoning victimization and reassessing the past make Russia’s
politics more democratic or improve its economy, with its declining real
wages and dependence on energy exports? The correlation is unclear. In
post-socialist Poland, martyrology has proven perfectly compatible with free

elections and economic growth. Jarosław Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice
reviews
Party has combined victim-based memory politics and obsession with the
90s (framed as a dirty plot between post-Communists and liberals) with
popular social payouts, low unemployment and a rising gdp. Conversely,
in post-apartheid South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
offered transparent exploration of past wrongs but did nothing to stop the
country’s spiralling inequality (leading to widespread criticism).
While the collective identity that Putin offers is hard to measure and its
connection to policy tenuous, the structural corruption and individual pre-
carity highlighted at the end of The Red Mirror continue to shape Russians’
memories and limit their prospects. Whether or not the dispossession expe-
rienced in the 90s counts as trauma, for many it was far from chosen, as
Sharafutdinova conveys when sharing stories from focus groups and her
own family about people who lost everything and never recovered. Tony
Wood’s 2018 book Russia without Putin, which dispenses with the machina-
tions of the leader and collective psychology in favour of material legacies,
shows how Putin’s rule has preserved and deepened the neoliberal trans-
formations of the Yeltsin era. The pension-reform protests suggest how
continued destruction of the social safety net has fuelled rising discontent.
The manipulation of emotional wounds can only do so much to mask
the country’s problems, which are not only blamed on the West. Andrei
Gryazev’s recent documentary The Foundation Pit is composed of YouTube
messages to Putin uploaded by residents of Russia’s regions—the people
most targeted by ‘the red mirror’—who are fed up with meagre incomes
and poor infrastructure. The film’s title is taken from Andrei Platonov’s
1930 novel of the same name, centred on a construction site symbolizing
the utopian future that is never built. The people of the Putin era show their
frustrations to their phone cameras: apartment buildings left without gas
or electricity when the money was stolen or dried up; rotten teeth that have
never seen a dentist; a village flooded with stagnant water that is traversable
only by raft. While some of them plead for help, many others bombard the
president with profanity. An aging veteran tells Putin that he plans to outlive
him and pour piss on his grave. ‘There is ruin and poverty everywhere in my
country, and I have one question’, a woman says. ‘Will you resign?’
The results of popular anger remain to be seen. Timothy Frye, a political
scientist who has also worked extensively with the Levada Center, describes
in Weak Strongman (2021) how Putin faces the same challenges as fellow
autocrats like Viktor Orbán, including ‘blunt management tools’ and tricky
policy trade-offs to counter the dual threat of elite coups and mass revolt.
While Putin has attempted to secure his legitimacy through a combination
160 nlr 129
of repression and patriotic rhetoric, Frye notes that the constitutional

amendments passed last year that allow him to stay in office for two more
reviews
terms were met with ‘indifference at best’. A Levada survey conducted in

January 2020 found that around one-third of Russians wanted Putin to stay
on as president after 2024, one-third wanted him to remain in government
in a different role, and one-third wanted him to step down—not an outright
rejection, but hardly an overwhelming show of support. Last summer, as
Russia experienced a sharp economic downturn due to low oil prices and
the covid-19 pandemic, Putin’s approval rating fell to its lowest level yet
(59 per cent). While such numbers may not pose an immediate threat to
Putin’s rule, they suggest that the ‘spell’—to whatever extent it existed out-
side observers’ minds—has broken.
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New Left Review 129, May-June 2021

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New Left Review 129, May-June 2021

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129 may/june 2021

NEW LEFT REVIEW

Editorial Committee Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson,

Publishing Director Kheya Bag

Address New Left Review

General Tel +44 (0)20 7734 8830

Designed by Peter Campbell

may june 2021

Göran Therborn Inequality and Democracy 5

Michael Denning Everyone a Legislator 29

Javier Zacarés Euphoria of the Rentier? 47

Nick Burns The Politics of Pessoa 69

Marcus Verhagen Art and Time 97

Perry Anderson Timpanaro in the Anglosphere 109

Saskia Schäfer Contrasted Revolutions 125

Erika Balsom Radical Visions of Film 135

Tony Wood At Odds in Ecuador 143

Joy Neumeyer Burying Homo Sovieticus 153

Göran Therborn: Inequality and Democracy

Michael Denning : Everyone a Legislator

Javier Moreno Zacarés : Euphoria of the Rentier?

Nick Burns : The Politics of Fernando Pessoa

Perry Anderson : Timpanaro among the Anglo-Saxons

Saskia Schäfer on John Sidel, Republicanism, Communism, Islam:

Erika Balsom on Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis:

Tony Wood on Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-

Joy Neumeyer on Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s

Erika Balsom: author of TEN SKIES (2021) and An Oceanic Feeling

Nick Burns: contributing writer at the New Statesman

Michael Denning: teaches at Yale; most recent book,

Joy Neumeyer: research fellow at the European University Institute

Saskia Schäfer: teaches and researches Southeast Asia at the

Göran Therborn: emeritus at Cambridge, author of Inequality and

Marcus Verhagen: lectures at Sotheby’s Institute of Art;

Javier Moreno Zacarés: research fellow

The recent book Clivages politiques et inégalités sociales, edited by Amory

new left review 129 may june 2021 5

movements—anticolonial revolution and egalitarian enlightenment,

Like the team’s work on economic inequality, Clivages alights on a

and education categories of the surveys are transformed into compara-

Education and voting

The main searchlight of Clivages is trained on the social differentiation,

education within Western democracies. From party systems in which

The change in the political colouration of educational background has

How significant are the new political orientations of different levels of

There is a noteworthy difference among centre-left parties with respect

What is the political meaning and importance of the ‘Brahmin Left’?

Trump. An even larger tragedy occurred in East-Central Europe, where

The wider mosaic

Among non-European electorates, Clivages finds no equivalent strong,

The logic of this typology is hardly overwhelming, reflecting the team’s

the authors take notice of ongoing tendencies toward greater ‘classiste’

Another differentiating variable which, along with education, has

Class, existential inequality and identity

The root of the disappointing political weakness of this grand empirical

A running theme of the book is a distinction, independent of any

we demand back our dignity as humans

This was a demand for existential equality against objectification, con-

Starting out from Amartya Sen’s discussion of human capability,22 we