Far-right political leader Geert Wilders was convicted of inciting hatred against Moroccans when he called them “scum” at an election rally in 2016. [GETTY]
Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his Islamophobia, and demands for, among other thing, the closing of all mosques in The Netherlands.
Crucial to his victory is the radicalisation of former supporters of the mainstream conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. As Dutch news satire website De Speld explained, VVD’s new leader Dilan Yesilgöz had run an excellent campaign…for Wilders.
Rutte had triggered the fall of his own coalition-government by demanding further restrictions on refugee rights that were unacceptable for part of his coalition. The VVD hoped the elections would be dominated by migration, and not other urgent issues such as the country’s housing crisis and the rising cost of living.
During the campaign, Yesilgöz exaggerated the supposed ease with which refugees enter the Netherlands. The main beneficiary of this tactic ended up being the PVV, the political force that for a decade-and-half built its political profile on hostility towards migrants.
The VVD lost 10 seats, leaving them with 24. Of the new PVV voters, one out of four previously voted for VVD.
Like many of his voters, Wilders is a product of the right-wing establishment. In the early nineties he worked for the VVD and in 1998 he represented the party in parliament. He also wrote speeches for the future European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, a pioneer in the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric regarding the West and Muslim societies in Dutch politics.
Wilders eventually left the VVD in 2004, partly because they would not categorically oppose Turkey joining the European Union.
Since founding the PVV in 2006, Wilders gathered a loyal base; almost 80% of those who voted for him in the previous national elections, did so again last month. Whilst the PVV largely rallied support as an opposition to Rutte, it is important to highlight that Wilders is not a political newcomer. Voters showed up for a seasoned politician who for years has remained consistent in his main policies. His popularity therefore shows how mainstream Islamophobia has become in The Netherlands.
Indeed, the PVV’s manifesto presented the racist and authoritarian positions that characterise the party. Pledges ranged from the petty revoking of the government’s apologies for the role played by the Dutch state in slavery, to the deportation of criminals with double nationality, to the deployment of the army against ‘street scum’, and the closing of borders for refugees and preventive arrests of ‘jihadist sympathisers’. Particularly drastic was Wilders’ long-standing insistence on ‘no Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques’.
However, it is not only racist and xenophobic politics that has attracted voters to the PVV. Wilders was originally an explicit supporter of neoliberal economic policies but for the past decade, his party increasingly posed as defenders of the welfare state. The PVV programme contained seemingly progressive positions, such as raising the minimum wage, lowering healthcare costs, and returning the retirement age from 67 to 65.
Though such rhetoric is contradicted by the party’s actions.
In his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), Wilders described the role of the PVV as supporting the austerity plans of Rutte’s first cabinet in return for measures to ‘restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and insist on the integration of immigrants’. In parliament, the PVV introduced a proposal to make collective bargaining agreements no longer binding, and supported further restrictions to access to social security.
Not to mention, today the PVV seeks to form a government with the VVD – the party that for the last decade headed the government’s implementation of neoliberal measures that they claim to oppose.
Whilst a substantial number of Wilders’ voters are certainly committed to far-right politics, part of his appeal is that he has been able to pose as an opposition force to an establishment that included the left-wing parties like the Labour Party.
In an attempt to present itself as a legitimate party that could govern, Labour entered a coalition headed by Rutte back in 2012 after they had won close to 25% of votes. They remained despite the deeply unpopular harsh austerity measures that were implemented, and even ran a former minister in the government as the candidate on a joint Labour/Greens ticket.
The result was a modest advance mostly through votes coming from the centre and other left-wing parties, but it hardly attracted new voters. In the elections last month Labour/Greens won 25 seats, and became the second largest party, but finished far behind Wilders.
Another error made by parts of the Dutch left is that anti-racism and migrants rights are considered secondary to social-economic issues. However, as the recent election dramatically showed, these are incredibly decisive issues in Dutch politics.
When Wilders’ electoral victory was announced, hastily organised protests took place in some cities. A coalition of progressive groups called a national demonstration in defence of civil liberties, freedom of religion and human rights. Such protests are of course not only important, but urgent because they make visible the opposition to Wilders’ agenda and show solidarity with groups that are threatened, especially Muslims.
After all, the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy shows what can happen when the far-right is in power; it may moderate some of its rhetoric, but it will not abandon its authoritarian and nativist project.
But protests alone are not enough. For years, Wilders pushed the mainstream to the right, pulling voters to his side. The Dutch left can learn something from this; instead of pandering the right, it needs to pressure them. As for rebuilding a left that can effectively pressure the centre and win new supporters, this will need to be a long term project.
What is needed now more than ever is a left that sees itself not as a government-in-waiting but as an opposition force.
Originally published in The New Arab. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/geert-wilders-left-needs-be-real-opposition
Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam, Netherlands and editor of the Dutch socialist website Grenzeloos.org.
Cite as: de Jong, Alex 2023 “Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition” Focaalblog 18 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/18/alex-de-jong-geert-wilders-election-victory-the-left-must-concern-itself-with-being-a-real-opposition/
How does Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do it? In Spring 2023, the economy is in a mess, inflation accelerating, and corruption rife. Government aid in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Southeastern Anatolia on 6th February was badly mismanaged. The natural disaster revealed the structural shortcomings of poorly regulated construction and real-estate markets, symptomatic of a political economy given over to short-term profit maximization. In the elections just a few months later, the opposition came together behind an attractive and eloquent candidate, the economist Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Yet in the second round of voting on 28th May the incumbent triumphed by over two million votes.
Image 1: Electoral poster for Erdoğan and his AKP party in central Rize, photo by author
If the polls ahead of the election were close enough to rattle Erdoğan, he betrayed no outward sign of discomfort. His imperturbable authority is one of his principal strengths. Critics highlight his control over swathes of the media and the mechanisms through which his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is able influence the votes of state employees. They point to illiberal policies on gender issues (particularly toward the LGTBQ community), arbitrary incarcerations such as that of philanthropist Osman Kavala, and more generally, the repression of a civil society. In his successful mobilization of Islamic sentiment against a secular “deep state” since the closing years of the last century, Erdoğan is categorized by many as a crude populist. In the centenary year of the republic established by Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk), some critics allege that in his two decades of power Erdoğan has fatally undermined the fundamental principles of the secular state. With his AKP party dominating the newly elected National Assembly, the prospect of a more liberal form of democracy emerging in the next five years is tantamount to zero.
Yet within a week of victory, before formally embarking on his new five-year term, Erdoğan made a well-publicized visit to the Atatürk Mausoleum in Ankara. He lauded the transformations of the inter-war decades, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The extraordinarily high turnout at the May elections, he declared, had once again demonstrated the vitality of the country’s democracy. This ritual occasion was reported in the official media as a ziyaret, a word that has religious connotations in Islam. Has Turkish nationalism been grafted onto Islam such that the mausoleum of Atatürk is now analogous to a religious shrine?
Islamic Capitalism
Erdoğan made his name as a Mayor of Istanbul, but nowadays he regularly loses the biggest cities. He owes his re-election primarily to constituencies in inner Anatolia – including even voters directly affected by the February quake. By unleashing market forces, Erdoğan has continued policies that date back to the very beginning of electoral politics in the wake of the Second World War. Market capitalism struggled to displace a “Jacobin” (Duzgun 2022) variant of modernity which emerged in the late Ottoman era and in secular form continued to dominate in the Kemalist republic. In the changing international climate of the 1980s, Turgut Özal abandoned protectionism and embarked on neoliberal privatizations of state industries. Özal’s Motherland Party demonstrated that capitalism could thrive in an Islamic ideological frame. There were further hiccups and another military intervention in 1997, the Motherland Party faded along with earlier “religious” parties, but in the new century the AKP has sealed the victory of Islamic capitalism: albeit in a political framework that has become ever more authoritarian in the last decade.
Image 2: “Thanks Türkiye” electoral poster for Erdoğan in Rize, photo by author
What does this mean in practice? It means first of all that the middle classes enjoy greater opportunities outside the public sector and that an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged in town and countryside alike (For discussion and an anthropological analysis of how small businesses operate in a provincial city, see Deniz 2021). But incentives to invest and consume privately have been accompanied by huge public investments, both in material infrastructure (above all roads) and in social security. Public health provision has improved immeasurably and this contributes significantly to the electoral appeal of the AKP. These welfare accomplishments are seldom acknowledged by the regime’s liberal critics. But critics are right to insist that, far from stepping aside to allow private property and market forces to determine outcomes within an impartial legal framework, the AKP intervenes at every level to enable the proliferation of cronyism and rent-taking (Karadag 2013). Following the bloody attempt by sections of the armed forces and others to depose Erdoğan in 2016 and the transition thereafter from a parliamentary to a presidential system, the patron-client networks of the AKP have become a stranglehold across most of the country – even where a semblance of negotiating “agency” to citizens is allowed (see Evren 2022 for an analysis of how AKP-dominated networks shape the transformation of nature as well as property and power relations locally in a valley of northeast Anatolia).
Nationalism and Ethnicity
Both presidential candidates played the national card. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu proved savvy in his use of social media, whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment on Youtube in a vain effort to make good his deficit after the first round of elections on May 14th. He had little choice. The party he has led since 2010 is the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which dates back to the era of Atatürk. Traditionally a statist party (“Jacobin” in the political Marxist analysis of Duzgun 2022), the CHP has a much smaller membership than the AKP and cannot generate the donations that might enable it to compete more effectively. In the present conjuncture of Islamic crony capitalism, why would any Turkish businessman be inclined to support the opposition? In the run-up to the elections, the public sphere was awash with posters of President Erdoğan.
Fuller explanations of the outcome of the elections require closer engagement with the decline in ethnic diversity since the emergence of the republic. The Ottomans ruled over an extraordinarily multicultural empire, but nationalist modernization has forged Türkiye (as the country now likes to be known in English) gradually into a more homogenous society. However, some forms of diversity have proved resilient. A common religion and similar experiences of socio-economic transformation have not been enough to endear Kurds to the Kemalist Turkish nation-state. Türkiye’s largest ethnic minority comprises roughly fifteen million members. Although significant internal differentiation persists, generations of conflict have consolidated national consciousness. Kurds outnumber ethnic Turks across most of southeast Anatolia. Many have migrated to the big cities of the west and to Europe in order to improve their economic situation (but not all mobility has been voluntary). Even if they lose their language in the second or third generation, most diaspora Kurds will vote for their own political party whenever they have an opportunity to do so, and seldom for the AKP.
Image 3: Electoral poster for Erdoğan in central Rize, photo by author
The East Black Sea Coast
These variables play out differently in other regions with smaller minorities and quite different economic conditions. In accordance with the Lausanne agreements, the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea coast were deported in 1923 (an instance of ethnic cleansing avant la lettre). Their material traces have receded steadily ever since. The splendid Hagia Sophia in Trebizond (today’s Trabzon) functioned for centuries as a mosque before being carefully restored by the Kemalists and opened as a museum in 1964. It was converted back into a mosque in 2013.
The family of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan comes from Rize, which is the last major city on Türkiye’s Black Sea coast, roughly half way between Trebizond and the Georgian border. Its population has doubled to over 100,000 in recent decades and it now boasts a university named after President Erdoğan. In this province, he won over 75% of the vote on 28th May. Most of the east Black Sea coast region is historically conservative and pious. Its subsistence-oriented rural economy was radically altered by changed by the expansion of tea as a cash crop from the 1950s (see Bellér-Hann and Hann 2000). The tea industry was an example of top-down Kemalist modernization, but peasant beneficiaries showed little gratitude and did not change their world view. The CHP has never done well here; in some towns and villages, the principal opposition to AKP comes not from CHP but from extreme nationalists.
But the province of Rize is not homogenous. An hour to the east in the direction of the border crossing to Georgia at Sarp, languages related to Georgian and Armenian are still spoken in the villages. The number of speakers is small and declining (probably below 100,000). In the absence of state support, the prospects for the survival of Lazi and Hemşinli cultural distinctiveness are poor. Unlike the case of the Kurds, ethnicity here does not appear to have an impact on party affiliation and voting behaviour.
However, some minority citizens distance themselves from the Turks of Rize through their pride in being progressive in the Kemalist republican sense. They attach high value to a secular education and social mobility, which almost always implies geographical mobility. A few committed individuals hang posters of Atatürk on their balconies to proclaim their abiding loyalty to the revolutionary secular traditions of the Kemalists. In this way, the man who dominated the public sphere in the last century maintains a presence; but in this election period, it is a modest one in comparison with the Erdoğan images.
This progressive element is strong in the town of Fındıklı, with a population of barely 10,000, which is still run by the CHP. Erdoğan posters are less conspicuous here. In the first round, Fındıklı was the only district of Rize province in which the incumbent President failed to receive 50% of the votes cast. Recently, a new recreational zone including a Lazi cultural centre was created between the sea and the motorway that has transformed the ecology of the littoral (see Genç and Şendeniz 2022). In other towns of Rize and Trebizond, such an initiative would likely have been named after Erdoğan. That was out of the question here. There was pressure from above to bestow the name National Park, but it was finally named Atatürk Park.
Image 4: (Left) Poster of Atatürk in rural Çamlıhemşin and (Right) electoral poster for Erdoğan in a country lane in Fındıklı, photos by author
But though it is possible to fight the occasional rearguard action successfully, enlightened Lazi landowners nostalgic for Kemalism are not sufficiently numerous to generate an electoral majority against Erdoğan. The success of the tea industry has promoted mobility: the children of the well-educated migrate to the big cities and cast their votes there. Arduous harvesting labour in their native villages is largely undertaken by immigrants, most of whom come from poorer western regions of the Black Sea coast. Some have settled permanently, giving rise to a significant population replacement and hastening the demise of the Lazi language (even activists concede that it would make little sense to teach Lazuri to primary school children who are not of Lazi ethnicity). These sharecroppers retain their conservative worldview. Kemalism has not been as kind to them as it has been to their landlords and the appeal of Erdoğan is strong – sometimes strong enough for them to display posters on quiet country roads. Both owners and sharecroppers approve of the fact that the AKP has refrained from a full-scale privatization of the state enterprise that has set the standard and dominated this sector since the 1950s.
In the second round, after picking up the votes of a candidate further to the right, even in Fındıklı Erdoğan obtained a majority.
Conclusions
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a gifted politician whose calm autocratic persona goes down well with large sections of the population. He has consolidated his stature as a statesman who stands up for an independent Türkiye on the world stage, whereas his rival Kılıçdaroğlu did little to dispel the view that he would be a puppet of the West, in particular of the USA. Rather like the situation in Hungary in 2022, a fragmented opposition driven to uniting behind a single candidate succeeded only in enhancing the standing and aura of the incumbent.
President Erdoğan is especially popular among citizens with low education and few qualifications. This includes much of the European diaspora as well as post-peasants in Anatolia who continue to the cities but are also prepared to relocate to meet labour needs within the countryside. The evidence from the east Black Sea cost shows that multiple factors interact to shape voting patterns. Uneven development in the Kemalist era has led to new class divisions, while fostering socio-cultural homogenization through new processes of internal migration. The persistence of the state corporation regulating the tea industry symbolizes continuity with statist traditions.
Image 5: “Thanks Istanbul” (some citizens of Istanbul were scornful of post-election posters expressing the President’s thanks to a metropolis that actually gave a majority to his opponent), photo by author
In the centenary year of the republic, Erdoğan is frequently mocked by liberal critics at home and abroad as a throwback to the days of Ottoman Sultans. Comparisons with Mustafa Kemal are perhaps more appropriate. Like his illustrious military forerunner, Erdoğan has transformed his country. The two will blend seamlessly as centenary festivities build up in the second half of this year. Erdoğan’s version of the authoritarian state resonates better with both local religious heritage and global capitalism. He has mastered ways of communicating with the masses that work for this country in this century. Within days of his re-election, the AKP machine was putting up new posters all over the country: in trademark pose, the supreme leader has his right hand on his breast, his lips form a faint smug smile, and the text proclaims “Thanks, Türkiye.”
Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
References
Bellér-Hann, Ildikó and Chris Hann 2000. Turkish Region. State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast. Oxford: James Currey.
Deniz, Ceren 2021. The Formation of Peripheral Capital. Value Regimes and the Politics of Labour in Anatolia. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Duzgun, Eren 2022. Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evren, Erdem 2022. Bulldozer Capitalism. Accumulation, Ruination, and Dispossession in Northeastern Turkey. New York: Berghahn Books.
Genç Fatma and Özlem Şendeniz (eds) 2022. Beyond the Land. Looking at the Black Sea as a Marine Environment. Fındıklı: Gola Yayınları. Bilingual publication (Turkish title is Karadan Öte: Deniz Olarak Karadeniz’e Bakmak); pdf available at https://golader.org/projeDetay/36
Karadag, Roy 2013. “Where Does Turkey’s New Capitalism Come From? Comment on Eren Duzgun” European Journal of Sociology 54 (1): 147-152.
Cite as: Hann, Chris 2023 “Thanks, Türkiye” Focaalblog 16 June. Thanks, Türkiye https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/16/chris-hann-thanks-turkiye/
On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken political pundits by surprise?
Since 2015, I have been conducting ethnographic research on progressive social transformation in Paris and, in fact, documenting the emergence of the counter-hegemonic bloc represented in this alliance. I have focused on what has been called “commoning” (Nonini 2007; Stavrides 2015; Susser 2016, 2017, 2018; Dardot and Laval 2019), the process of creating commons, to consider the ways in which this form of popular contestation is transforming political subjects, generating collective ethics, and reconfiguring democracy.
Image 1: Jean-Luc Melenchon delivering a speech at the NUPES convention on 7 May 2022, photo by Hugo Rota
Two aspects of commoning help to illuminate the current elections. The first is the creation of a new political subject and a political vision through a process of sharing and community activities. The second is the process of thresholding or crossing of transitional space that led to alliances among groups who had not previously recognized common interests. I argue that both aspects contributed to the creation of a public oriented in the direction of social justice, inclusivity and a collaborative left leaning political bloc.
To illustrate these processes, I focus on the Gilets Jaunes, a movement which emerged in November 2018. From the start there was much debate in France and internationally about whether to characterize the Gilets Jaunes as right or left in the context of Brexit, Trump, and most significantly, Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme right party in France (Rogozinski 2019, Balibar 2019 and many others). It is this dilemma that made these protests particularly important from an analytic and practical political perspective.
Historical Conjuncture and Crisis
In 2016, the Socialist government of Francois Hollande, with Emmanuel Macron as economy minister, initiated legislation to change the labor laws. Although policies to reduce public spending and increase the flexibility of employment had been gradually implemented for some time, this major effort by a Socialist government to change the labor laws set off a political crisis.
Because of this crisis, a new era of street protest emerged in Paris. The first of the protests was Nuit Debout, which began on March 31, 2016. This movement echoed the historic squares occupations of Southern Europe in 2011, although it took place five years later. As previously, in Spain, the call to action was initially to join the unions in support of the traditional labor laws that a socialist government proposed to relax.
The attempt to change the labor laws, and the protests in response, dramatically undermined the legitimacy of the Socialist Party. The political conjuncture of this event with allegations of fraud on the traditional right opened the way for a new political configuration in France. In this vacuum, the newly created party led by Macron, the left party created by Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2012, and the marginal far right, reincarnated by Marine Le Pen, re-oriented the national arena.
Taking advantage of the wide-open field, in May 2017, Macron, without a traditional party but strongly supported by corporate funding, was elected President for the first time. He rapidly began to implement far-reaching changes. In the interests of workforce flexibility, he weakened employment security and later tried to alter the calculation of union pensions as well as increase the age for pension entitlements. Student admissions to public universities were re-organized and health workers and teachers faced layoffs. The threat of worker disciplining in the interests of capital became widely feared. Each change was accompanied by massive social movements and street uprisings.
Over the years of the first Macron presidency, many different groups under different kinds of pressures opposed the new changes. Resistance took the form of both organized strikes and wildcat worker strikes, the occupation of squares, student sit ins and street rebellions. In November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes uprising began. Finally in 2019, a mass movement was organized by unions to oppose the dismantling of the national pension plans. I analyze the Gilets Jaunes within this broader historical arena as well as in contrast or comparison with the protest movements I have been observing in the United States.
The Gilets Jaunes and Commoning
The Gilets Jaunes began as a one issue protest, against the gas tax. The message was spread through Facebook, and other platforms. Still organizing around one issue, the protesters began to meet in real time, at roundabouts, crossroads and along highways in many parts of France. Next, Gilets Jaunes took to the streets of Paris in enormous and unprecedented marches on successive Saturdays for over eighteen months.
As people who lived near one another but had not necessarily met before began to meet regularly, they began to build a shared sense of community. Starting out as a mixture of pensioners, and many poor and disabled people from the provinces, including disengaged socialists and Le Pen supporters, the Gilets Jaunes can be seen as negotiating positions over time. Negotiations took place within the space of the commoning experience during the occupations, the general assemblies, the assemblies of assemblies and the massive Saturday demonstrations.
Image 2: Gilets Jaunes – Acte IX at Place de l’Etoile in Paris on 12 January 2019, photo by Olivier Ortelpa
The community was built in multiple ways: by barbecues and picnics, by bringing children to play in the environment, by building cabins, sometimes making them comfortable for wintry stays. Saturday afternoons were spent grouping close together in the cold to keep warm in wind, rain and snow, and some Saturday evenings around fires and in cabins. Gilets Jaunes wrote personal statements and commentaries on the backs of their vests. They spray painted slogans and arrayed tags, posters, and banners as well as other forms of graffiti (Le Comité de soutien 31 2019) along the routes of the demonstrations. The yellow vests and the songs such as the ever-present “On est la” generated a sense of belonging and became a signal that Gilets Jaunes were present in whatever guise they happened to be. Over time, singing the song simply indicated that people emulated and echoed the Gilets Jaunes in other demonstrations. Experiences such as this can be seen as the commoning process of the Gilet Jaunes.
Through meeting several times, a week, sharing narratives, singing Gilets Jaunes songs and, dressing in the familiar yellow vests, group members built a, possibly fragile, sense of solidarity in ways that crisscrossed over divisions of family, income, color, and age, and maintained a strong belief that the disabled were part of the community. Negotiations involved a recognition that poverty and distress need not be shameful but were a product of changing circumstances and uncaring or destructive government policies. As a result, in difficult, often physically uncomfortable, conditions, principles of cooperation were established along with a belief in horizontalism and an aversion to political leaders.
Où sont les neiges d’antan? (Where are the snows of yesteryear?)
Analysts have discussed the solidarity of factory floors or assembly lines and even nostalgia with respect to that solidarity (Muehlenbach 2017). Following Lefebvre there has also been a recognition of the solidarity of the streets and public spaces (Lefebvre 1971, Harvey 2012, Susser and Tonnelat 2013). The experience of the Gilets Jaunes points to the creation of a critical public at the roundabouts which generated or echoed the affect of the lost village community.
Such nostalgia has historically generated conservatism as well as revolutionary ideas (Susser 2008, Williams 1983). The question became, in what ways would this community be invested with emotions? It could generate an exclusive nationalism (as today in Hungary, Romania, or Poland) or a wider sharing sense of the needs of the poor and disabled.
In an ever-evolving process, people came to the roundabouts and talked among one another of their economic challenges and domestic hardship. They managed to escape the individual humiliations of poverty and household desperation, of their unrelenting work for not enough pay, their exhaustion and lack of belief in their own or their children’s future. Instead, they talked collectively about the degradation of everyday life – the loss of a village center, a post office, a bakery, and a public square; the loss of local schools; the need to drive long distances for employment and childcare; and the endless drudgery of work which did not allow sufficient time or provide the means to help their children, their elderly or disabled neighbors and relatives or meet their friends (Susser 2020). Their nostalgia recalled the loss of a social existence centered around local services and a secure welfare state and became the basis of their rage against Macron’s neoliberal policies.
Thresholding
The second aspect of commoning which contributed to a progressive or left positioning on the spectrum was what has been called thresholding (Stavrides 2015). Analysts (Stavrides 2015) have talked of “thresholds” to distinguish commoning from more right wing or nationalist movements claiming territory. The idea was that open doors or thresholds connected different groups which allowed for inclusivity while at the same time recognizing ethnic and other identities upon which the different groups were based. If commoning creates groups which are built on experiences of sharing in new ways, thresholds are a basis for sharing across groups. Thresholding be understood in much the same way as rites of passage which Arnold Van Gennep (1960) saw as taking place in three stages, separation, transition, and incorporation (see also Turner 1958).
We might consider moments of liminality, such as occupations, freezing afternoons at roundabouts or possibly the common experience of violence in the streets as the moments of separation and transition. These represent challenging and bonding processes taking place in liminal or temporarily undefined space. In sharing such trying circumstances, people cross thresholds of trust and build bridges across unusual groups, in processes of incorporation. Thus, what might be understood as prefigurative politics which emerged in the practice of street protests included both commoning and the recognition of many autonomous groups working together: In other words, inclusivity, and thresholds to new populations.
Environment, convergence, and thresholding
Thresholding among the Gilets Jaunes occurred with respect to the environmental movement. Emmanuel Macron had announced the gas tax as an effort to curb the use of this gas for environmental reasons. Consequently, the Gilets Jaunes protest against the gas tax was interpreted by the government and the media as a protest against ecology. Over the next two years, much time and effort were put into convergence. Environmentalists who were also Gilets Jaunes and others who organized joint marches, teach ins and conferences worked to counteract stereotypes and to build thresholds between the two movements.
In February 2019, the environmental movement staged a demonstration on a Saturday afternoon in Paris which the Gilets Jaunes joined. They started together. However, after the first few blocks the Gilets Jaunes parted ways from the permitted route of the ecological demonstration and made their way on a “wild” protest (undeclared) towards the Champs Élysées. Later all the groups met again listening to passionate speeches at La Place de la République. Some youthful Gilets Jaunes were sitting in the square wearing flowers in their hair reminiscent of green protests over many decades. After about 6pm, as dusk settled, violence suddenly erupted, traffic was stopped, and the square was closed off by police. From the point of view of the Gilets Jaunes, the violence was in response to police arrests in the square.
In spite, or possibly because, of the evening clashes, this demonstration clearly opened portals between the Gilets Jaunes and the environmentalists. From early 2019, “The end of the month and the end of the world” became a characteristic slogan of the Gilets Jaunes. Climate activists continued their efforts towards convergence. The Gilets Jaunes never became a climate movement, but the polarization claimed by the government was not supported by later events. Rites of passage in shared marches and other experiences had opened thresholds for collaboration.
Police brutality and thresholds of race
As I described in a previous post in FocaalBlog (Susser 2020), the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the US were followed by massive demonstrations against police brutality in France. Although police brutality was a long-time theme of the Gilets Jaunes, this time the Paris protests, while including the Gilets Jaunes, focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. This recognition of common problems represented newly possible thresholding between the Gilets Jaunes and people of color from the banlieues.
Here, thresholds were opened between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship, and other forms of historical subordinations.
Joint marches between Gilets Jaunes and people of color most subject to police brutality were not an ongoing phenomenon but again this demonstrated the opening of a portal for common understandings.
Image 3: “Who protects us from the police?” Gilets Jaunes protest in Tours on 12 January 2019, photo by Guillame70
Unions and strikes: thresholding on the left
Many Gilets Jaunes were suspicious of unions and many unions refused to officially march with Gilets Jaunes. However, despite this contentious relationship, there were collaborative efforts on May Day marches and elsewhere. Gilets Jaunes picketed many early mornings with bus drivers when they were out on strike. After the strike, the bus drivers organized a barbecue in front of a bus headquarters for Gilets Jaunes who had come out on those cold winter mornings: one of many thresholding events among strikers and Gilets Jaunes.
The silence of others: a more controversial example of thresholding
While there was openness among the Gilets Jaunes about not having enough to live on and many domestic challenges, Gilets Jaunes avoided talking about the politics of left and right. Their reticence over political persuasions was not surprising in the polarized political situation of France. In 2017, Macron had successfully used the fear of fascism and the history of the Vichy government to mobilize voters in opposition to Marine Le Pen in the second-round elections.
In 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Gilets Jaunes poured into Paris from the provinces, both Le Pen, on the extreme right, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the left, pledged support. Reporters and participants claimed that in ACTE 3, Le Pen nationalists led the assault on the Arc de Triomphe. The international leftist Black Bloc may have led the attack on the elite restaurant Le Fouquet a few months later. The participation of many on the left in the protests, and the roundabouts over time led to a movement that called for a diverse democratic voice and the extreme right became marginalized.
While the Gilets Jaunes expressed their rage in breaking windows and other property and participated in attacks on the Arc de Triomphe and Le Fouquet, they did not accept political leadership from either the far right or the left. Silence with respect to political affiliation and the rejection of an official leadership remained a determined response.
Although disagreeing in fundamental ways, Gilets Jaunes were more or less uniform in their hatred of Macron. They believed that he was “stealing the state” with his privatization policies and cutbacks in funding for services and public employment. They blamed the government for the destruction of a middle-class lifestyle either for themselves or for their children.
Collaboration for a political bloc was not based on a romantic image of common identity. Rather it was built on a restrained acceptance of political difference in a common rage about the loss of accustomed living conditions. This contrasts sharply with the US where polarization between left and right has become more extreme.
Trump, class, and thresholds in the United States
Although the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders certainly raised the possibility (Susser 2018), no political bloc has yet emerged to work across the vicious polarization in the United States. Trump demonstrators also come from the shrinking middle class and displaced affluent working class partially represented in the Gilets Jaunes. However, they have moved to the right and responded to the Trumpian rhetoric of anti-immigrants, whispered racism, antisemitism and now even the adoption of theories of the Great Replacement. What can explain these different reactions to some similar circumstances?
Analysts have been concerned that Gilets Jaunes, like Trump supporters, were opening an avenue for the antisemitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric expressed by the growing far right. Indeed, in recognition of the popularity of Le Pen, Macron adopted some rightwing exclusive rhetoric. A popular surge to the right was a frightening possibility. However, the Gilets Jaunes did not evolve into a movement fundamentally based on hatred of the other. Instead, as a movement they focused their desperation and rage against Macron’s shredding of the welfare state and reduction in investment in areas outside gentrified Paris (Hazard 2020). They demanded a more receptive democracy and not an authoritarian state.
Conclusions
As political pundits have finally noticed, a new political bloc or a working class with consciousness or agency is emerging. Commoning and the generation of shared values as well as thresholding across autonomous groups were particularly significant in the long-term building of this oppositional left bloc. An important part of this thresholding was the ability to by-pass the polarization of the extreme right and the extreme left. This unusual collaboration, rarely the product of any explicit negotiations, allowed the extraordinary and inspirational mass movement of the Gilets Jaunes to avoid the exclusive and racist nationalism evident in the US.
In the presidential elections of 2022, Le Pen, as in 2017, made it through to the second round. However, Melenchon came in a close third. Macron, lacking the broad support evident in 2017, relied on the anti-fascism of the left to pull him through the second round. The power of the left to support Macron against Le Pen was finally negotiated into NUPES, a united left front for the deputy elections for the National Assembly in June 2022.
In the June elections, NUPES won enough seats to become an official opposition and deny Macron his majority in the National Assembly. Some of Macron’s nominated ministers did not even make it into the Assembly. Macron was no longer able to pass the much-hated changes in pensions or his other policies. Marine Le Pen also won more seats than previously. Nevertheless, the success of NUPES clearly represents an unheard-of situation in the fifth French Republic where the President is generally rubber stamped by a weak National Assembly. This new powerful counter-hegemonic political bloc should come as no surprise. It has been formed over five years of extraordinary protest including the collaborative politics of commoning, thresholding and silence in the Gilets Jaunes collective efforts. The forthcoming regime will have to take these progressive voices into account.
Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.
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Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2022. “Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc.” Focaalblog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/21/ida-susser-melenchon-the-creation-of-a-left-political-bloc/
Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022). On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.
Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).
It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.
A story of many missed deadlines
Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.
This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.
However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.
Elections in a long-term battlefield
Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed. This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).
Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).
Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)
From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).
No one is legitimate
While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.
Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.
Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.
One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.
Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.
Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).
Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.
Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.
Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and
“Islamic Law”. Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.
The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections
Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon
as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s
accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They
form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of
the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation
and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the
complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or
turning-point of crisis, as
Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).
This involves a re-consideration of what is
fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological
implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past
rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian
totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows
concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in
mind.
Our guess (a risky gamble in these times
when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are
doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his
place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around
him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of
diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more
moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet
a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of
most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of
opposition headed by Trump.
This is not to gainsay the shock of the
storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of
Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in
the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a
relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency
is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of
political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those
who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality
at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully
restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his
uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup.
Named as “God’s
chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted,
even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense
for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew
out of control.
Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol
In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented
visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other
commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse
along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when
forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The
representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while
those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put
their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and
spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down
the corridors of power.
Shades of the past paraded in the present,
foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi
Germany. What Sinclair Lewis had warned
in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of
the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s
apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the
excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie
Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when
researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American
Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right
and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump
heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames
of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane,
“Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it
descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of
the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that
they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American
Dream.
But here is the point: The immediate
reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real
and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class
war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the
Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s
attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of
moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his
condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic
policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American
working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global
corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of
minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)
It might be remembered at this point that
the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military
veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that
shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on
violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US
Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of
democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the
Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the
very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was
shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent
paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox
slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.
The transitional figure of Trump feeds on
the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already
ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the
well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false
consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive
but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of
impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj
Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s
GREATEST TREASON”.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’
was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three
Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian
performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great
Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat
Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make
America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native
Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his
success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht.
Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration
to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with
characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic
class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides)
that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early
been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011;
Kalb, forthcoming).
But the point must be taken further. New
class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the
explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith
2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he
wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This
is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the
continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform
capitalism.
Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation
The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the
possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of
the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between
two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump
is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure
in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror
Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the
hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump
brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous
oppressive indications of its own.
The Trump events have all the hallmarks of
the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The
millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the
capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious
fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that
American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned
actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.
Such millenarian explosions, distinct in
their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It
was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis
and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of
the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the
western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn
1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling
2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).
The rupture of transmutation in capital,
the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx
and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital;
whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions
and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as
well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and
transformation.
The circumstances underpinning the current
transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those
associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology).
The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if
declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and
technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What
became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured
capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary
to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in
capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s
growth.
The new technological revolutions are a
response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes.
Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating
new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and
the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up
novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially
among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties
reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the
precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work,
of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching
manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.
The current technological revolution is a key
factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations
such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the
flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational
effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas
once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the
current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively
invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer
2010; Kapferer
and Gold 2018).
This is most noteworthy in those state
orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and
Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public
interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of
government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much
so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their
activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial
styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization
of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests
in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of
state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which
became an impediment to capitalist expansion.
These changes have wrought socio-economic
and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the
Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in
science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and
political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital.
It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first
century.
This is particularly so in the United States
whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which
accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal
in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress
that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of
the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses
such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump
phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic
of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)
One common feature of this is the rejection
of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked
extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control
and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe
notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from
interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further
hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by
corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his
presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of
the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the
spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an
already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist
interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this
respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech
billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early
Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero
to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a
corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel
2014).
From Panopticon to Coronopticon
COVID-19 has highlighted the social
devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see
also Kalb
2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been
shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if
not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them
it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like
Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).
Under the shadow of the virus, labour
demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits
legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that
protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational
opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously
discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a
transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering
consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting
poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the
revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the
competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for
the latter sector’s power.
There is a strange synchronicity linking
the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization
of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic.
Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the
acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s
transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of
the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one
manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory,
the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale
of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space
contraction and intensity
of the networked interconnections of globalization.
State surveillance has intensified as a
by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization
as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook
and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma),
is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing
individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’
(the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s
entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).
The management of Covid-19, demanding
social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased
the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding
force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social
particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the
social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social,
a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically
preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show,
radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the
same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.
This manifests in the deep ambivalence many
feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized
social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive
ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The
internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new
potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually
emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for
many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy
imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections
featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook
threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic
fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’
The hegemonic and totalizing potential for
the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as
never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but
in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the
social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with
dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their
order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and
self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s
actual Trump ban.
Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World
Trump and Trumpism are moments in the
transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the
formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its
transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism
manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the
transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in
train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some
aspects, is already being lived.
Trump himself can be described as an
“in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their
realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred
amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an
earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance
by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse
redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working
classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.
However, his authoritarian business manner,
of The Apprentice’s“you’re
fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an
exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from
non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate,
property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling
industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in
capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.
Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism
and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but
is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic
realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it
was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy,
especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the
current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of
innovatory knowledge.
Trump anticipated the risk to his
presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His
inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big
Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon
conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and
modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current
transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.
Trump’s cry that the election was being
stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes
related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto
unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the
millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by
fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting
from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.
Trump has always taken advantage of the
digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of
rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever
increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the
events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his
fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been
cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably
benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic
conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he
was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity.
(Kapferer
R, 2016)
The overriding image of the Capitol
invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the
heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have
concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American
far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear
references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There
were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class
fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear
of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of
extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to
unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what
happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of
George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in
their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the
nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular
historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social
and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen
again.
What we are saying is this: a different
authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the
fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but
which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary,
in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more
akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations
of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological
revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation
of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation
state.
Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production
and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect
rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone
accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the
foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is
a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed,
the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and
space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and
‘personalised.’
Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some
intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints
of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus
and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may
be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into
being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and
thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”
The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was
virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important
celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where
the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags
and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan.
Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant
savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media
image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.
We claim that something like Trump and the
events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena
we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most
intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the
socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The
apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven
in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale.
What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different
shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of
totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for
an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very
much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may
too easily obscure.
Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.
Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.
Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/
María de Jesús Patricio, known as Marichuy, is an indigenous Nahuatl woman born on 23 December 1963 in Tuxpan (“land of rabbits”), a small town located in the south of the state of Jalisco, where she grew up in a condition of extreme poverty. She is mother of three. As a child, she spent time observing older women from her family practicing traditional medicine. They were performing rituals and preparing oils and medicaments to heal people in their community. Over the years, she became a practitioner. In an interview of some years ago, (Tukari 2010: 12) she recalls that a mentor once warned her not to profit from her ancestral knowledge, because “the light protecting you would extinguish,” he argued, and she would no longer be effective as a healer. Her wisdom increased significantly as she started giving workshops around the region. Since 1995, María directs a health center in the Calli neighborhood of Tuxpam, where indigenous medicine is practiced and researched. Since then, she has received several public recognitions for her work, which focuses, she argues, in healing the community rather than just individual diseases. “Through the health center we defend traditional medicine, indigenous territories, and the mother earth based on an anti-capitalist approach and the libertarian struggle of the indigenous people” (University of Guadalajara 2015).
This post is part of a feature on the2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (SOAS, University of London).
As I left Bournemouth train station this afternoon, a homeless man approached me and asked for some change. Shelters in Bournemouth and elsewhere in the United Kingdom charge money to rough sleepers on a per night basis. The going rate is currently four British pounds in Bournemouth, and it is certainly a common experience for commuters returning from Southampton and London to this southwestern English seaside town to be asked to for a contribution to those fees at the train station. In fact, the local council adds further pressure to an anyhow pressurized population of homeless in Bournemouth. As the current Tory government has cut several welfare packages, the number of homeless has risen dramatically across the United Kingdom in recent years.
This post is part of a feature on the2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (SOAS, University of London).
With the election coming up today, I thought it would be interesting to look at the commitments to international development in the manifestos of the Labour Party, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats.
The day-to-day realities of election campaigns tend to soon undermine the carefully calibrated and plotted plans of campaign managers. So this election that was intended (by the Conservatives) to be the Brexit election has moved in new directions as the policies put forward in the manifestos came under scrutiny and attack.
This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (SOAS, University of London).
In his very carefully argued speech of 26 May 2017 on the relationship between contemporary terrorism and foreign policy, Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn observed: “Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians immediately accused him of bad timing and muddled and dangerous thinking. Some critics, exemplified by Conservative Security Minister Ben Wallace, argued that Corbyn needed a history lesson, since it was obvious that the roots of “Islamic” terrorism predated 9/11 and then US President George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan. “These people hate our values, not our foreign policy,” Wallace insisted in a radio interview that I listened to this morning.
