Socialist Register 2016: The Politics of the Right 9780850367133, 9780850367126, 9781583675748, 9781552667934

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THE POLITICS OF THE RIGHT Edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo

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THE SOCIALIST REGISTER Founded in 1964 EDITORS LEO PANITCH GREG ALBO FOUNDING EDITORS RALPH MILIBAND (1924-1994) JOHN SAVILLE (1916-2009) ASSOCIATE EDITORS COLIN LEYS ALFREDO SAAD-FILHO ASSISTANT EDITOR ALAN ZUEGE EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS ADAM HILTON STEPHEN MAHER CONTRIBUTING EDITORS BASHIR ABU-MANNEH GILBERT ACHCAR AIJAZ AHMAD ELMAR ALTVATER HENRY BERNSTEIN PATRICK BOND ATILIO BORON JOHANNA BRENNER PAUL CAMMACK VIVEK CHIBBER GEORGE COMNINEL MADELEINE DAVIS BARBARA EPSTEIN BILL FLETCHER JR SAM GINDIN BARBARA HARRISS-WHITE DAVID HARVEY JUDITH ADLER HELLMAN CHRISTOPH HERMANN NANCY HOLMSTROM URSULA HUWS RAY KIELY MARTIJN KONINGS HANNES LACHER LIN CHUN MICHAEL LOWY §EBNEM OGUZ CHARLES POST ADOLPH REED JR STEPHANIE ROSS SHEILA ROWBOTHAM JOHN S. SAUL MICHALIS SPOURDALAKIS HILARY WAINWRIGHT To get online access to all Register volumes visit our website http://www.socialistregister.com

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2 0 16 THE POLITICS OF THE RIGHT Edited by LEO PANITCH and GREG ALBO

THE MERLIN PRESS MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS FERNWOOD PUBLISHING

First published in 2015 by The Merlin Press Ltd. 9913 Wallis Road London E9 5LN www.merlinpress.co.uk © The Merlin Press, 2015 British Library' Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISSN. 0081-0606

Published in the UK by The Merlin Press ISBN. 978-0-85036-713-3 Paperback ISBN. 978-0-85036-712-6 Hardback Published in the USA by Monthly Review Press ISBN. 978-1-58367-574-8 Paperback Published in Canada by Fernwood Publishing ISBN. 978-1-55266-793-4 Paperback

Printed in the EU on behalf of LPPS Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants

CONTENTS

Leo Panitch

Preface

ix

Greg Albo Liz Fekete

Neoliberalism and popular racism: the shifting shape of the European right

Richard Seymour

Ukip and the crisis of Britain

Michael Lowy

The far right in France:

Francis Sitel

the Front National in European perspective

Walter Baier

Europe at the crossroads:

1 24

51

right populism and reactionary rebellion

68

GeofFEley

Fascism then and now

91

G.M. Tamas

Ethnicism after nationalism: the roots of the new European right

118

Richard Saull

Capitalism and the politics ot the far right

136

Alexander Buzgalin

Russia and Ukraine: oligarchic capitalism,

Audrey Kolganov

conservative statism and right nationalism

Aijaz Ahmad

India: liberal democracy and the extreme right

David Moore

154

170

An arc of authoritarianism in Africa: toward the end of a liberal democratic dream?

193

Alfredo Saad-Filho

Brazil: the failure of the PT

Armando Boito

and the rise of the new right

Gavan McCormack

Chauvinist nationalism in Japan’s

213

schizophrenic state

231

Avishai Ehrlich

Israel’s hegemonic right

250

Doug Henwood

The American right: from ntargins to mainstream

Bill Fletcher Jr

272

‘Stars and Bars’: understanding right-wing populism in the USA

296

Stefan Kipfer

The times and spaces of right populism:

Parastou Saberi

from Paris to Toronto

312

Lesley Wood

Policing with impunity

333

Reg Whitaker

The surveillance state

347

Andreas Karitzis

The dilemmas and potentials of the left: learning from Syriza

374

CONTRIBUTORS Aijaz Ahmad is distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine.

Walter Baier is a Vienna-based economist and coordinator of the network tratisfortii! eiirope.

Armando Boito is professor in the Department of Political Science, State University ot Campinas, Brazil.

Alexander Buzgalin is professor of political economy at Moscow State University and editor of the magazine Alternatives.

Avishai Ehrlich is a political sociologist and member of Hadash — The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality in Israel.

GeofTEley is professor of history and German studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Liz Fekete is the executive director of the Institute for Race Relations in London and advisory editor for the journal Race & Class.

Bill Fletcher, Jr is a racial justice, labour and global justice writer and activist.

Doug Henwood is based m Brooklyn, where he edits Left Business Observer 2Lnd hosts a weekly radio show called Behind the News. Andreas Karitzis is a member of the Central Committee of Syriza and serves on the board of the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens.

Stefan Kipfer is associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto.

Andrey Kolganov is professor of political science at Moscow State University and organizer with Alternatives Russia.

Michael Lowy is a Franco-Brazilian Marxist social scientist, presently ementus research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.

Gavan McCormack is professor emeritus of Australian National University and coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal.

David Moore is professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg.

Alfredo Saad-Filho is professor of political economy in the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Parastou Saberi is completing her PhD in environmental studies at York University, Toronto, and is an instructor at Trent University.

Richard Saull is senior lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London.

Richard Seymour is a writer, broadcaster and activist, and runs the blog Lenin’s Tomb.

Francis Sitel is a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist League in France, responsible for its journal Critique Communiste. He is also the co-editor of the review. Contretemps.

G.M. Tamas is a former member of Hungary’s parliament and deputy chair of ATTAC Hungary, and has taught philosophy at Yale University and the New School.

Reg Whitaker is distinguished research professor ementus at York University, Toronto, and adjunct professor of political science at University of Victoria.

Lesley Wood is associate professor in the Sociology Department at York University, Toronto.

PREFACE

I

t is becoming increasingly clear that we are at one of those historical moments that compel socialists to undertake a serious calibration of the

political forces amassing on the right. This stems partly from the electoral breakthrough far-right parties have made in Europe as the global financial crisis and unrelenting austerity continue to take their toll. But not only in Europe. Across the globe the far right is on the move: the great strength of right-wing populism in the US Republican Party and Conservative Party in Canada; the increasing range of state surveillance and intolerance of dissent, features of what some have called ‘post democracy’; the success of the BJP in India and the return of right-wing militarism to the political scene in East Asia; the strength of Putin’s populist authoritarianism in Russia; the continued spread of religious fundamentalisms to almost all quarters of the Middle East and many countries in Africa, and the response to this in the form of a new military dictatorship in Egypt; and the ever-increasing strength of the Zionist and religious right in Israel. It is particularly important in this context to take account of the particularities of the new right today in comparison with fascist political movements and states in the 1920s and 1930s, and also in contrast to various types of military and authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. The classical fascist movements embraced nationalist and protectionist economic policies; it is not at all clear that this is the case today where the radical right targets labour migration while tolerating the internationalization of capital. The same openness to the free movement of capital and the liberalization of domestic markets applies to authoritarian and military regimes today. It is too easy to draw a direct lineage from earlier European fascisms into timeless typologies, rather than attempt to uncover the discrete structural determinations of the radical right today. The careful political mapping of the new right, undertaken by the 52nd volume of the Socialist Register, addresses pivotal questions in the reordering of the balance of political forces today. What is the far right’s social base? What is its organizational strength and range? To what extent does it

X

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016

influence mainstream parties and opinion? How far has it penetrated state institutions? Even while the far right today is fluid and constantly mutating, as Liz Fekete has put it, the nature of its populist appeals and the foundations of their success require careful probing, amidst the rise in racialized violence and the ethnicist — let alone nationalist — hostility that has arisen in the face of the flows of human migration set loose by neoliberal capitalism. The very broad geographic as well as thematic range of the essays in this volume speaks to the global challenges the new right poses for the left. There is a great strategic importance in a sober analysis of the strength of new right today, and the impasse of the left emerges here as a central concern. In confronting almost everywhere different permutations of rightwing populism gaining further ground in this phase of neoliberalism, and the creeping state authoritarianism taking form in new modes of surveillance and policing, we need to recognize the complicity of liberal and social democratic political agents in these developments. The limited political capacities of the radical left have also played a part, providing space for the rise of the right and the new authoritarianism in the current conjuncture. As a good many of the essays here show, the severe contradictions in which the far right finds itself enmeshed often make its project quite fragile. We should therefore be wary of alarmism, while nevertheless carefully monitoring the radical right’s forms, practices and mobilizing capacities. If the far right were on the verge of closing the space that liberal democracy allows for freedom of association and free speech, then socialists would be obliged to engage in popular-front style cross-class alliances to defend that space. This would severely restrain radical socialist mobilization and programme until the threat was defeated. Indeed, whether such space exists for this is being tested in Europe today by the maniacal entorcement (in which social democratic governments are as fully complicit as mainstream conservative ones) of austerity memorandums on the new Syriza government in Greece. This is, in turn, testing Syriza’s own capacity for animating the radical socialist mobilization and fostering the creative talent needed for developing alternative ways of producing and living. As the concluding contribution to this volume by one of Synza’s leading party cadres puts it: ‘Without Syriza being the hope for a substantial change. Golden Dawn - or something similar - will definitely rise as the dominant political power. Needless to say that this would be the successful outcome of the memorandum period: transforming a developed society (with many many problems of mentality and orientation) into a social desert m which barbarism and fascism will prevail’. We are grateful to all our contributors for their essays, many of which were

PREFACE

XI

first presented in draft form at a stimulating Rejiiistcr workshop m Toronto m February 2015. We are also grateful to our old friend and contributor to the Register Eric Canepa for his translation of the essay by Walter Baier. This volume benefited greatly from the analytical and political insight of Alan Zuege, Adam Hilton and Steve Maher as well as their editorial skills in working with Adrian Howe to prepare it for publication. Louis Mackay outdid himself again with the word cloud cover design for this volume, the first mock-up of which inspired our contributors at the February workshop. And we more than ever consider ourselves especially fortunate to have as engaged a publisher as Tony Zurbrugg has been at every stage of conceiving and producing this volume. LP GA July 2015

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castes, or without waging highly publicized campaigns on the question of untouchability, to appeal to the oppressed menial castes. That necessanly earned him the ire of the more orthodox among the upper castes even though Gandhi never rejected the basic four-fold division (the vamaashram) of the Brahminical caste system. And one forgets now that Muslims counted for a quarter of the Indian population before the Partition, before two-thirds of them got regrouped in what we now know as Bangladesh and Pakistan. No leader or organization that sought to represent the whole of British colonial India could afford to ignore this demographic fact or to define India as a purely Hindu nation. So leaders of the Congress declared themselves secular with varying degrees of commitment or conviction. By the same token, the hostility of Hindu nationalism to this ‘secular’ nationalism was boundless. Savarkar, the chief ideologue in the whole spectrum of Hindu

INDIA; LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE EXTREME RICHT

1S3

nationalism, drew a sharp and enduring distinction: Gandhi’s was a ‘territorial nationalism’ which debased the idea of the nation by associating it with mere terntory, whereas his own was a ‘cultural nationalism’ of the ‘Hindu Race’ for which culture was synonymous with the whole way of Hindu life, including politics, society, civihzational heritage, family structures, form of government, etc. — a primordial, all-encompassing

of the ‘Race’, as it

were. Some aspects ot this cultural conservatism resonated with sections of Hindu society but, beyond a closed circuit of its adherents, this extreme definition ot the Hindu nation had few takers as the anti-colonial movement kept gaming more and more demographic weight and diversity across the land, and it had tew takers even after Independence as the Republic was sought to be organized on the basis of universal suffrage and what Nehru quaintly called a ‘socialistic pattern’. The RSS remained a relatively marginal force until after the dust of Gandhi’s assassination had settled in the 1950s, even though sensibilities amenable to ideas of Hindu nationalism were far more widespread than the ideologues of Indian liberalism concede. IV For the first quarter century of its existence the RSS displayed no tendency toward innovation and concentrated on self-preservation and expansion, with the distinct novelty that it concentrated on recruiting as many young boys into its local branches (shakhas) as possible, in keeping with the view that cultural transfonnation can be deep-rooted only if a corps of cadres are indoctrinated into its protocols from an early age. Strikingly, it stipulates that any boy who comes to its shaklia must do so with the prior consent and daily knowledge of elders in his family, assuming that there are countless families in the country who would welcome such an opportunity for their son and who will then get directly involved in the social life of the organization. During this first phase the RSS seems to have wanted to shelter itselt under state patronage while it carried out its more or less clandestine work under the banner of ‘culture’. It repeatedly proposed mutual cooperation with the British colonial authorities in opposition to the Congress and the communists. Soon after Independence, and even after it was briefly banned following Gandhi’s assassination, it proposed cooperation with the Congress against the communists who had emerged ffeetingly as the main opposition in parliament. It floated its first front organization under duress - for women, in 1936 — to protect its own all-male character and to ward off pressure from some particularly enthusiastic and vocal women who wanted membership to be

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otFered to women as well.^ No membership m the masculinist fraternity, the RSS declared, but you can have an organization (a Samiti) for yourself under our guidance.^ Then a lukewarm attempt was made in 1948-49 to float a students’ front during the period when the RSS itself had been banned, but that attempt went nowhere and the students’ front got going seriously only a decade later. Today, that front plausibly claims to be the largest students’ organization in the country. The real turning point came m 1951, on the eve of the first general elections, when a political front was floated in the shape of a brand new political party to participate in the polls, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), which was then dissolved in 1977 to be immediately reincarnated as the BJP. The BJS won three seats in 1951 but as many as 35 seats in 1967, with 9.41 per cent of the vote, having united much of the Hindu right under its umbrella by then. But the majority of the Indian bourgeoisie continued to support the Congress, at times grumbling and sullen, and the minonty of investors and traders who did not support it worked through other parties such as the short-lived Swatantra Party. The RSS itself did not grow much between Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 and Nehru’s death m 1962; the aura of the Congress as the unrivalled leading light of the anti-colonial movement still held. After that the RSS grew steadily and at times rapidly, even though some of that aura lasted for the Congress through the Indira Gandhi years and collapsed only after she had abrogated civil nghts and declared a State of Emergency m the country in 1975. Other fronts followed thereafter. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) for the working class, floated in 1955, has by now become the single largest central tiade union organization in India, claiming a membership of over ten million workers and afl'iliation of over four thousand trade unions.*^ The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) came in 1964, with the purported aim of propagating Hindu culture abroad, and remained m the shadows for two decades when, in 1984, this particular front was selected to spearhead the vast machinery of violence and rabid ideological hysteria that rolled across the coLintiy over the next decade and which brought the B}P to power in Delhi, for 13 days in 1996 and then, at the head of a broad-based coalition of political parties, for six consecutive years from 1998 to 2004. BJP leaders have asserted time and again that its ability to rise from an isolated minority fringe m 1984 to secure governmental power by 1998 was owed very significantly to the mass mobilizations and the periodic pogroms that reached a particular intensity between 1989 and 1992, culminating in the spectacular destruction of the Babri Masjid, that the Supreme Court had sought to protect through agencies of the Indian government. However, Indian liberalism itself has

INDIA: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE EXTREME RIGHT

185

never acknowledged that the reaping of snch rich electoral dividends from years ot violence by the RSS and its affiliates — and the fact that so many large and influential political parties have joined the coalition led by the BJP - means that something very fundamental has changed in the very fabric of the Republic. It was during those two years that Modi, the current prime minister, saw what was there tor all to see: that communal killings, images of Hindus killing members ot Christian and Muslim minorities, are good for winning elections. Since staging his own ethnic cleansing in 2()()2 he has not looked back. He increased his majority m the state assembly by a solid 10 per cent 111

the aftennath ot those killings, won two more state assembly elections and

then led his party to spectacular victory in the recent national elections. The RSS plays its fronts like pawns on the chessboard of Indian politics, mixing legalirv' and illegality, electoral politics and machineries of violence, in full view’ of agencies of law and organs of civil society. This is rather a sinister variant on the famous formula: ‘hegemony = consent + coercion’. And coercion has had — and will continue to have - a specific form: small doses, steadily dispensed; no gas ovens, just a handful of stonn troopers, here and there, appearing and disappearing; and a permanent fear that corrodes the souls of the w’retched of the land, while the liberal democratic machinery rolls on - no formal suspension of civil liberties! That, then, is the first innovation; a large inventory of very different kinds of fronts, to perform very different kinds of functions, at different times and in different spheres of society, to see if violence that is required for a revolution (from the extreme right) can be practiced alongside the pursuit of legitimacy through parliamentary elections as bourgeois legality and subjectivity require. Second is the issue of the relationship between political parties and affiliated organizations (fronts, in conmion parlance). It is normal m India for large political parties to have fronts for different sections of society: women, students, workers, peasants and so on. The Congress has them, as do the parliamentary communists. By contrast, the innovation here is that the RSS, which floats and controls the fronts, is not a political party but intervenes comprehensively in all aspects ol political and social life without taking any responsibility for what it does through its fronts; that the political party, the BJP, is not, strictly speaking, a political party but only a front m which virtually all the key leaders and organizers are drawn from the RSS. Moreover, all the other fronts are also fronts of the RSS, an extra-parliamentary entity; the BJP, being a front itself, has no control over those fronts. Fourth innovation: none of it is secret, as all is public and comprehensively documented, time and again — just a normal pait of libeial

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SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016

democratic freedom. Fifth, intricacies of law and constitution are carefully sifted through to detemiine exactly to what extent the RSS itself can function m the public domain as a legally constituted entity without having to reveal much of what it is and what it does. As a self-styled ‘cultural’ organization it IS exempt from the kind of accountability that is required of political parties. Liberal protections are thus utilized for secretive authoritarian purpose. In all this there are two distinct claims which the RSS throws around as if they were identical. It emphatically claims to be a purely ‘cultural’ organization, unmvolved in politics and, therefore, exempt from requirements imposed on political parties, such as revealing its membership or keeping accounts for public scrutiny. Simultaneously, it claims that it has a right to guide in all aspects of politics because, far from being an autonomous sphere, politics in Hindu society is one area of ‘culture’ just as ‘culture’ itself is an allencompassmg expression of the religion of the Race. The two claims are of course incompatible. Not for nothing did Mussolini declare that ‘we fascists are super-relativists’. And the final, most far-reaching innovation: the sheer number of fronts, running surely into the hundreds, possibly thousands - no one knows. The Anthropological Survey of India holds that the Indian population is comprised of thousands of distinct communities, sociologically so defined by custom,

speech,

location,

cuisine,

spiritual belief,

caste,

sub-caste,

occupation, what have you. The RSS is the only organization m India which has the ambition to have fronts for as many of these diversities as possible and does indeed go on creating more and more of them. In this sense, it is a spectacular missionary organization, and the mission is religious, cultural, social, economic, educational — and of course political. The heart of this problem for the RSS is that even though the word ‘Hindu’ is used by all as if the word referred to some homogeneous religious community' or a unified social category, the reality is that all these diversities - even immense differences of custom and religious belief — exist among precisely the 80 per cent of the Indians who are considered ‘Hindu’. Contrary to this realitv, the RSS has fairly precise ideas of what it means to be a Hindu, based on its own doctrine that being a Hindu is not merely a religious category, divorced from other kinds of subjectivity or conduct, but an entire way of life, from cradle to grave.*^ It wants to make sure that the ideal type it has invented becomes the normative standard among that 80 per cent. Its commitment to creating a cultural homogeneity out of this ocean of diversities, and to translate that cultural homogeneity into a unified political will, means that it wishes to become both church and state simultaneously. That ambition is at the heart of its fight against secular civility and the specific content of

INDIA: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE EXTREME RIGHT

187

its authoritarianism."’ That so comprehensive a civilizational project would wholly succeed appears implausible. The undertaking is audacious, however, and the success so tar, although partial, is also undeniably impressive. V India s post-Independence histoiy can be broadly conceptualized in terms ot three phases. The tirst lasted from 1947 to 1975. It was premised on tour values ot the Nehruvian paradigm: secularism, democracy, socialism, non-alignment. The practice did not always correspond to precepts, and the paradigm kept fraying, especially after the India-China War of 1962, and Nehru’s death soon thereafter. Even so, a certain degree of liberalleft hegemony did survive and got eroded only gradually. Eventually, the accumulating crises came to a head with the outbreak of massive, rightwing, populist agitation in the mid-197()s and, in response, Indira Gandhi’s suspension ot civil liberties and Declaration of Emergency." The end ot the first phase and the beginning of the second coincide in the massive ambiguities of that movement famously led by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), an aging Congressman and once a friend of Nehru, who now forged a tar-reaching alliance with the RSS and gathered a whole range of rightist forces as well as youth groups under the slogan of‘Total Revolution’, calling upon state apparatuses, including the security agencies, to mutiny. The RSS, with its thousands of cadres, provided the backbone of the anti-Emergency movement and then of the Janata Party government that arose out of the end of the Emergency, when Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s share of parliamentary seats rose from 35 in 1967 to 94 in 1977, with Vajpayee and Advani, veterans of the RSS, rising to occupy key cabinet posts. That outcome - the antiEmergency agitation leading to the first non-Congress government in the country - is still celebrated in the (non-Congress) liberal circles as a moment when the sturdiness of Indian democracy prevailed over Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial tendencies.’^ Yet that was precisely the process that served to legitimize the RSS as a respectable force in Indian politics and to confer on its political front a significant place in government for the first time in Indian history. I might add that the RSS made exponential strides between 1977 and 1982, for five years after the Emergency was lifted, owing to its newfound reputation as a defender of democracy against dictatorship. On the whole, though, that force also got splintered owing to its own contradictions and the phase of relative political crisis of the bourgeois state m India continued, in which the older power bloc, led by the Congress, was no longer capable of stable rule but none other had emerged to replace it either. That crisis lasted for over two decades, ending fully only with the advent of the second BJP-led government in 1998 (the first had fallen

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SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016

after thirteen days in 1996). The neoliberal policies that the Congress had inaugurated almost ten years earlier had by then taken root, inaugurating a new phase in which a drastically reorganized power bloc, consisting of all the non-left parties and ranging from the Congress to the BJP, gave a new stability to bourgeois rule in India regardless of which coalition of those parties wins the elections at one point or another. The decisive turning points had, of course, come earlier, nationally and internationally, during those momentous three years from 1989 to 1992. Internationally, those years witnessed the historic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in southeastern Europe more

generally,

with the

US becoming an unrivalled global hegemon. The whole of the Indian ruling class and its state structures could now openly unite behind this ‘lone superpower’ with no internal friction at all. Inside the country, those same years witnessed the onset of the neoliberal regime with the so-called RaoManmohan reforms, and that decisive turn m the institutionalization of communalism in structures of the Indian state, which began with the tacit agreement between the Congress and the VHP at the time of Shila Nyas m 1989 and even more dramatically during the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1982.'^ Conditions remained highly unstable for a few years, however. By 1998 neoliberalism had become a consensual position among the propertied classes and their representatives in various spheres of the national life. At the same time, the far right had made rapid gams and began concentrating on consolidation ot its newfound power. Extreme violence of the early 1990s was no longer required. It was much more important now to give the BJP a mildly liberal face so that it could be accepted as a party of bourgeois rule and an alternative to the Congress. The coalition government It formed in 1998 lasted for six years, leading then to ten years of a Congressled government that only ended with the return of the BJP in 2014 with a firm majority in parliament. Remarkably, these changes in government have witnessed no appreciable changes in policy. In this sense India has become a mature liberal democracy m the neoliberal age, like the US and UK, where

the two main competing parties - or coalitions of parties - function as mere factions m a managing committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the heart of this new consensus in the Indian ruling class is close alliance with imperialism externally and the imposition of neoliberal order domestically. In

hindsight

one

could

even

propose

that

the

promulgation

of

neohberalism was the necessary moment for the vanous factions of the ruling class, hence the various parties that represent capitalist interest at the federal and regional levels, to obtain a firm base of unity and a new type of alliance with US capital in the altered national and international conditions.

INDIA: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE EXTREME R1GF^T

189

All these parties compete with each other now for the spoils of office, not on matters ot policy or even ideology. This neoliberal order is what I call extreme capitalism and it has so tar had broadly analogous consequences in the India ot high growth rates and in the EU of low growth rates. The Congress serves as the tormally secular face of this class consensus while the BJP serc’es as its communal tace, even though the Congress is quite capable ot its own pragmatic uses ot communalism as much as the BJP is often quite willing to have the more provocative aspects of its programme suspended so that it may remain at the apex ot power m a broad coalition. Accordingly, Modi based his prime ministerial bid not on the Hmdutva plank of blood¬ curdling rhetonc, which had propelled him into halls of power in the first place, but on exactly that rhetoric of ‘growth’ and ‘development’ that the BJP shares with the Congress. Indeed, the Congress has always said, with much justice, that its own policies are what the BJP then implements. Modi IS not uniquely a candidate of all corporate capital; it is just the case that he has united many more of the top CEOs behind him, much more openly, than his counterparts in the Congress ever could even when they tried. Not that the punctual uses of violence as a strategic imperative have declined. Killing of some members of the religious minorities is a common affair, a couple of Chnstians here, five or ten Muslim there; nothing spectacular, just low-intensity and routinized, nothing to disturb the image of a liberal, secular, deeply democratic India. There is no longer a significant political party' in the country, with the exception of the communist left, that has not colluded with the BJP at one point or another since 1996 and especially so since 1998. At the time of the ethnic cleansing of Gujarat in 2002 numerous political parties united to prevent even a discussion of it on the floor of the House. Even the Congress colludes when necessary but rather quietly, not overtly because it is, after all, the main electoral adversary. Increasing communalization of popular consciousness can now proceed from two sides. There is of course the mass work by the RSS and its affiliates which have gained more and more adherents over some eighty years, m what Gramsci called the quotidian, molecular movements m the quality of mass perceptions at the very base of society - the creation of a ‘new common sense’. A majority of the liberals no longer know how much they themselves have moved toward the communal, neoliberal right. And now, for many years, these same shifts can also come from the side of the state, its political parties, educational enterprises, repressive apparatuses, often even the judicial branch. As India increasingly becomes a national security state, the bases for an aggressive, masculinist right-wing nationalism are bound to go deeper into society at large.

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VI Where, then, does the question of fascism fit into all this? I must confess that, in the wake of the spectacular events of 1992, this author was the first to raise this question comprehensively, first in a lengthy lecture delivered in Calcutta and then in another equally lengthy lecture delivered in Hyderabad^'’ Several other prominent scholars, Sumit Sarkar and Prabhat Patnaik in particular, had expressed similar misgivings. There emerged on the left a broadly shared thinking that the RSS, its affiliates and allies had been distinctly influenced by the Nazi/fascist combine at the very moment of their origin, that they had carried many of those sympathies and principles into their own organizations and modes of conduct, and that many of their more recent strategies and practices were distinctly fascistic. The CPI(M), a political party caught up in debates ranging all around it, even adopted the term ‘communal fascism’ to stress a certain degree of fascist content as well as to specify the uniquely Indian twist to that content. I had further argued that the type of politics that we broadly (and sometimes imprecisely) call ‘fascism’ is a feature of the whole of the imperialist epoch. Not for nothing did French ‘Integral Nationalism’, sometimes credited as being the original form of fascism, arise in precisely those closing decades of the nineteenth century, which were, in Lenin’s typology, the original moment for the rise of what he called ‘imperialism’. In short, so long as one was not suggesting that the replication of the German and Italian experiences was at hand, it was perfectly legitimate to place the RSS into a certain typology of political forces that are fairly widespread even inside contemporary Europe itself, from Greece to France and from Austria to Ukraine. I had also argued, tongue in cheek, that ‘every' country gets the fascism it deserves’ in accordance with the ‘physiognomy’ (a favourite metaphor of Gramsci) of its history, society and politics; and, I would now add, the historical phase that the country is going through. In other words, what we have to grasp about every successful movement of the fascist type is not its replication of something else in the past, but Its originality in response to the conditions in which it arises. There is no getting away from the materiality of the ‘here and now’. All revivalism is a contemporary' rewriting of the past, a radically modern neo-traditionalism. All the contemporary parties of the fascist type respond to their own national milieux and to the broader fact that, with few and only relative exceptions, the working classes are supine globally, beaten back by neoliberal successes in the reorganization of capital, and that political liberalism has itself made its peace with this extreme capitalism. In this situation the proper stance is not: watch out, Nazis are coming.

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The real question is the one that Kalecki posed at the time of Goldwater’s bid tor the US presidency in the 1960s: what would fascism look like if it came to a democratic industrial counti'y that had no powerful working-class movement to oppose it?'^ That is the ^eticral question,'^ and I think it applies with particular force to the India of today; the far right need not abolish the outer shell of the liberal democratic institutions because these institutions can he taken over by its own personnel altogether peacefully and because most others are quite willing to go along with it so long as acts of large-scale violence remain only sporadic and the more frequent low-intensity violence can be kept out of general view, by media monopoly combined with mutual agreement between liberalism and the far nght. Meanwhile, the communists are now too small a force to be considered even for a ban. Of course, the question of fascism of the classical type may well resurface if a powerful socialist movement were to be re-founded, on whatever new premises and strategic perspectives that may now be necessary for that act of re-founding and reconstruction. NOTES

1

The term ‘Hindutva' was coined by V. D. Savarkar, the founding ideologue of the politically extreme Hindu right, to distinguish his own doctrine from the religious structure of Hinduism. He translated ‘Hindutave’ into English alternately as ‘Hinduness' or ‘Hindu nationalism’. Thus, the terms ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hindu nationalism’ shall be used in this text specifically to the political ideology descended from Savarkar, his successors and followers.

2

Also see the account by Achin Vaniak, ‘India’s Landmark Election’, in Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, eds.. Socialist Register 2015: Transforming Classes, London: Merlin Press, 2014.

3

The historian Bipan Chandra once defined communalism as an ideology which proposes that members of a religious community also thereby constitute a distinct national community, which logically leads to the assertion that this communal nation must also have a state of its own - one in which others may live, but only as guests, foreigners or second-cla.ss citizens. This is an apt description of the ideology of the RSS and its affiliates.

4

The indispensible essay on the rise of Modi and his acquisition of such massive corporate backing is Vinod K. Jo.se, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’,

Caravan Magazine, 1 March 2612. 5

I have dealt with these matters at greater length, theoretically and descnptively, in several other publications, such as ‘On the Rums of Ayodhya: Communalist Offensive and Recovery of the Secular’, Social Scientist, 21(7/8), 1993; ‘In the Eye of the Storm: The Left Chooses’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31(22), 1 June 1996; and “‘Tryst with Destiny”: Free and Divided’, The Hindu, August 1997 - all three collected with some modifications in my Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary

South Asia, London: Verso, 2004. Related publications include ‘Fascism and National Culture: Reading Gramsci in the Days of Hindutva’, Social Scientist, 21(3/4), 1993; ‘Indian Politics at the Crossroads: Toward Elections 2004’, m Mushir ul Hasan, ed,,

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6

There is a delicious irony in the fact that the RSS, which zealously asserts that only men may be accepted as members, is called Mata (Mother) by all its fronts which coexist as siblings, born of this Mother, in what is called the Sanj^h parivar (the Sangh family).

7

This pattern of masculinist organizational privilege was repeated much later by one of its major fronts, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), which the RSS utilizes from time to time for unleashing communal violence. The VHP established a separate women’s organization under its own tutelage in 1991, Durga Vahini, which often recruits young girls from impoverished households, indoctrinates them and trains them in fighting techniques. Such women are known to have participated actively in violence against the minorities in pogrom-like events that go on in India under the relatively neutral heading of‘riots’.

8

It needs to be stressed here that the RSS front has achieved this not by suppressing communist tracie unions but by coexisting with them inside the liberal democratic framework, and that trade unions ot the communists and the RSS typically cooperate in workers’ protests organized at the national level. No fascist model here.

9

Not just from the cradle, actually, but from the womb. As M. S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsaiighchalak (Supreme Guide) of the RSS, puts it in his Bimcli of Thoughts (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, 1996): ‘Some wise men of today tell us that no man is born a Hindu or Muslim or Christian but as a simple human being. In fact, we are Hindus even before we emerge from the womb of our mother. We are therefore bom as Hindus. About the others, they are born to this world as simple unnamed human beings and later on, circumcised or baptized, they become Muslims or Christians.’

10

The great impediment in the realization of this homogeneity even among those who are fomially called ‘Hindu’ is of course the matter of caste. A uniform Hinduism that applied equally to all would have to be necessarily caste-less, but that is a structural impossibility. As Suvira Jaiswal, the eminent historian of early India, argues: Hinduism is doctrinally so flexible and decentred precisely because its rigidity exists not in the rigidity of belief system, an orthodoxty, but in the centrality of caste in Hindu society, i.e. an orthopraxy. The RSS can be iconoclastic on the issue but cannot commit itself to abolish caste as such.

11

Liberal-left dominance m the early years of the Republic can be witnessed in the fact that not only was Nehru’s own government dominated by the Congress left, but that the CPI was for many years the most prominent opposition force in parliament.

12

The confrontation between the JP-RSS-led right-wing populism and Indira Gandhi’s egregiously authoritarian rule dunng the short-lived Emergency was also reflected in contrasting positions of the two main communist parties, with the CPI supporting the Emergency and the CPI(M) joining the anti-Emergency agitation of the populist right (for its own reasons of course).

13

For detailed analysis of those events see my ‘On the Ruins of Ayodhya’.

14

Published later as, respectively, ‘Fascism and National Culture’ and ‘On the Ruins of Ayodhya’.

15

Michal Kalecki raised this point in his 1964 essay, ‘The Fascism of C)ur Time', repnnted in his The hist Phase hi the Transformation of Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Pre.ss, 1972.

16

In specific cases, notably that of Greece today, a fascist movement of the original type is on the move precisely because a leftist possibility is at hand.

AN ARC OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN AFRICA: TOWARD THE END OF A LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC DREAM? DAVID MOORE

A

bout a quarter of a century ago the end of the Cold War promised ideology’s demise and an eternity of liberal democratic peace across

the globe. Negotiations in South Africa between the apartheid regime in decline and the new aspirants to state power foretold farewell to the last outpost of colonial-style rule on the continent and indeed the world. The ‘dark continent’ was about to be enlightened. The ‘rainbow nation’s’ glow illuminated a global democratic consciousness that in the absence of the Soviet/Stalinist alternative could reign freely. Nelson Mandela’s idyllic iconography signaled the triumph; his smile as hejettisoned the nationalization clauses in the Freedom Charter symbolized the happy marriage of neoliberal economic discourse with promises of political equality.' Even many Marxists,

usually hesitant to swallow such superstructural epiphenomena, could not restrain their hopes - and not all of these were of the ‘national democratic revolution’ type.“ As civil wars and dictators across the continent lost their superpower sponsorships, those who held that African states were singularly sycophantic puppets thought a liberal peace dividend would ensue. Aid money and advisors for ‘democracy’ poured m. Political parties mushroomed. Yet while elections multiplied (to be manipulated when indicating uncomfortable results for the incumbents), state elites scrambled to the troughs of an increasingly globalized and accelerated dialectic of accumulation/dispossession. Their states became empty, shell-hke, but strictly guarded entry-points to financial flows and worldwide networks. When contested, wars often ensued: state rulers and challengers alike took on the appearance of warlords. The intelligentsia that structural adjustment policies separated from state apparatuses established a plethora of non-governmental organisations to perform the welfare, human nghts and even infrastructural functions cast aside by governments.

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That ‘civil society’ could be little more than chimerical, with neither an independent bourgeoisie nor a well-developed working class to challenge party-state networks, was lost upon enthusiastic participants. Foreign donors tilled the gap and created a new form of dependency. Inequalities between the new plutocrats and the ever-increasing reserve armies ot the unemployed and informal workers widened, even in the few countries where economic growth was respectable. Thus, 25 years later Fukuyama’s dream has dissipated. Authoritarianism from below and above, and much of it at violent extremes, is filling the vacuums left by liberal democracy’s unfulfilled expectations. This essay will attempt to trace its arc, from Africa’s southernmost tip in South Africa, up the western coast to Nigeria, across the north and centre to the east in Kenya, and down again to Zimbabwe just across the Limpopo from South Africa. Ot course, these social formations vary greatly: as the cliche goes, Africa is not a country. But as the universalists proclaim, excessive emphasis on the contingencies of difference and identities hide commonalities, promote relativism and discourage collective struggles.^ A wide theoretical angle attempting to merge the processes of primitive accumulation, nation-state fomiation and hegemonic construction, and democratic deepening can offer a way, broad though it may be, to view Africa’s new arc of authoritarianism.'* Other African social formations’ variations can be inserted within this arc without too much distortion or ffattenmg, as long as careful calibrations of historically grounded moyennes durees and ies evenements - the conjunctures and the moments - are carried out. The thread that could weave the Central African Republic, Somalia and South Africa into the same cloth would feel too rough. Yet in each case, distinctively capitalist relations of production are emerging fitfully from many non-capitalist forms, both internally and externally derived, in the context of a very long-running relationship with a global political economy wherein one must look very hard to find the ‘creative’ side ofits destruction. Simultaneously, but not always synergistically, has been the emergence of state structures barely congruent with ‘nations’. One can easily place blame on the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 for creating far too many colonies that would become far too many states,-^ ripe for the picking of generally rapacious new ruling classes;*’ yet this is hardly enough to explain the increasing paranoia of these classes as challenges emerge from below and above. Additionally, it should not be assumed that opening up to ‘voices’ from below is ‘progressive’. As new constituents m democratizing dispensations emerge, fundamentalist religious and other beliefs arise from what can delicately be labelled a ‘lumpen proletariat’ looking for all sorts of opiates to ease a misery that sees no mortal end: authoritarian strains can

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grow out of the demos as well as the elite.' It is perhaps serendipitous that as these words were typed in their pen¬ ultimate form a cnsis ot international relations and diplomacy hit the African ‘state-societs' complex’^ where the continent’s vortex of authoritarianism and liberty is centreei. Whilst attending a mid-Iune 2015 African Union summit in Sandton, South Africa, the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide for his role in killing and displacing thousands ot Dart'urians, left surreptitiously — with much help from his hosts — before the session’s end.'^ A legal NGO persuaded a high court to rule that he should stay until it detemiined if the ICC’s reach extended to South Africa; the guardians of South Africa’s state decided to support his choice to fly back to Khartoum instead of facing the test.'® The resulting debates in South Africa and the continent reflected a wide gap bettveen those for whom ‘freedom’ meant the sovereign right for African leaders to do what they want, mostly phrased within predictable patterns of anti-imperiahst posturing, and cosmopolitan versions of liberalism aspiring to restrict that liberty to those who do not kill their subjects wantonly.” In the midst of such positioning it should not be forgotten that the South Afncan state is itself not above doing this to its citizens, as its murder of thirpy'-four striking mine workers m August 2012 attests. Meanwhile those who contend that customary ‘ubuntu’ is the communal predecessor of peace and harmony in South Africa should note one of its ‘traditional’ leader’s instigation of the xenophobic attacks of May 2015 on migrants -‘foreigners’ — in Durban and elsewhere.’Gramsci’s note on the contradictions of international relations m the impenal age is especially relevant here, where many complex articulations of modes of production, politics and ideology are at their breaking point.”’ His pithy comments cast much light on the mini-crisis at the AU’s meeting m South Afnea’s financial centre. When examining relations between what later theorists would call centres and peripheries of the global political economy, we must: take into account the fact that international relations intertwine with those internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique, and histoncally concrete combinations.... A particular ideology, for instance, born in a highly developed country, is disseminated in less developed countries, impinging upon the local interplay of combinations.''’ When one adds Gramsci’s warnings about the differences between advanced capitalist — and presumably democratic — social formations and

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what he called the ‘East’ or Tsarist Russia, but could include the ‘third world’, the complications become more entrenched (and the shades of Eurocentrism would make post-colonial theorists livid): In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The State was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.'^ To be sure, as Gillian Hart remonstrates, Gramsci’s East and West should not be seen as absolutely separated binaries.Moreover, on the periphery of capital’s core, where social formations are characterized by the articulation — indeed hybridization — of economic, ideological, and political modes, liberalism (not to mention socialism) may fall under the rubric of Gramsci’s warnings about ‘ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed”’.'^ Nonetheless, they are part of the warp and weft of political and ideological life. Ideologies and praxes that may be ‘invalid’ for some classes are structurally and organically rooted for others: the interlocutors of donor driven democracy may be as embedded in a transnational class formation as a local one, or an admittedly fragile blend of both."' However, their ties with their global classmates can be severed more easily than with their local peers. One of the most energetic of the US’s democracy proselytizers has noted that democracy aid, now at less than $2 billion per year, has shrunk by 28 per cent under Obama’s oversight. The number of countries with American democratic tutoring has fallen from 91 to 63.This would appear to verify Samuel Huntington’s prediction that the ‘third wave’ of democratization has crashed on the shores of security concerns and the dashed dreams that have contnbuted to them. As the Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens has put it: Maybe the West mistook the collapse of communism -just one variation of dictatorship - as a vindication of liberal democracy. Maybe the West forgot that it needed to justify its legitimacy not only m the language of higher democratic morality. It needed to show that the morality yields benefits: higher growth, lower unemployment, better living.^"

Of course Stephens thinks that the latter trinity will come about through neoliberal means, but current trends indicate higher and non-productive inequality'' amidst more fmancialization, footloose capital, and an ever

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increasing global reserve army ot cheap labour.” In spite of what some call the Beijing Consensus coming to Africa in the guise of a ‘developnrental state that bears only rhetorical resemblance to the East Asian ‘miracles’, there is little evidence ot even a mild Keynesian riposte to the rapaciousness ot the current phase ot accelerated primitive accumulation - the public goods trom which amass much more slowly than the offshore accounts of Its beneficiaries."’ Could it be .said that tor the last quarter of a century the hte ot liberal democracy in Africa has been arbitrary and ‘willed’? In the inten'egnum before the errors are realized, it seems brutal forms of authoritarianism will fill the gap, as the following brief analysis of the four countries in Africa’s arc ot authoritarianism indicated above will show. SOUTH AFRICA South Africa is at the maelstrom of Afnca’s authoritarian/liberal contest. Tfie pivotal state m western aspirations for the ‘dark continent’, its rainbow tinted expenment with liberal democracy holds the rest of the world in thrall.-'* Its ruling African National Congress is tied to a 73-year-old leader whose alleged spending of around $2.5 million of public funds on his retirement estate symbolizes the worst fears of ‘good governance’ adherents. But his constant harassment by a parliamentary opposition of‘red-overall’ populists led by a young man (34 years old) expelled trom the ‘mother party’, and a once whites-only liberal party now headed by a young black man (35 years old) who does an excellent imitation of Barack Obama, suggests that the parliamentary cornerstone of liberal democracy is robust, in spite of some of its louder adherents being ushered out by police when at the 12 February 2015 State of the Nation address they persisted in demanding that President Zuma ‘pay back the money’ for his future home."® Yet, while the executive wheels appointees in and out of the security agencies as their allegiance to him is exposed - by media as ‘free’ as any in the liberal world^^ - and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (in a ‘tripartite alliance’ with the ANC and the South African Communist Party) is rent asunder as its largest union hovers on the edge of leaving and leading a leftist party,"^ what was once the centre of a political and social liberation movement is very close to losing Its hold. As that is happening the securocrats are, as Jane Duncan puts It, rising.^** With that, politicians, public prosecutors, civil society activists, refugees, and judges are subjected to accusations of everything from being CIA affiliates to rapists of minors - or rendered ‘home’ to be killed."'^ At society’s grassroots, the world’s highest number of protests per capita (save China) range from complaints about poor ‘service delivery’ to jostling for local government positions and, more negatively, xenophobia.

In

response, after inflating the numbers of protests and being too generous

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with labelling them as ‘violent’, the police have asked the state to provide an increase ot ZAR 3.3 billion (over US$ 250 million). According to the University of Johannesburg’s South Africa Research Chair in Social Change, this ‘will fund an almost doubling of the number of Public Order Police and additional water cannon and pyrotechnics’, but if dispersed otherwise could ‘build more than 200,000 RDP houses, roughly tripling the number completed in recent years’.-’" There might be an a.ssumption here that it the houses were built, people’s protests would subside. But with an unemployment rate ot over 25 per cent — perhaps twice that for youth — and one ot the world’s worst inequality indexes, even lots of very basic homes in which people can wait tor jobs are no guarantee of an end to the seething violence taken out in rape, murder, and drug related gang crimes.^’ It popular attitudes — especially among youth — toward foreigners are a manifestation of support for authoritarianism, there is little in the way of hope for liberal notions of tolerance among South Africa’s subaltern: just less than a third of David Everatt’s interviewees in the Gauteng area thought all foreigners — not just illegal ones, of which there are plenty given the

leaky borders — should be ‘sent home’.-’” Belinda Bozzoli’s interpretation of South Africa s rape culture — ‘domestic’ despotism as violent as any — offers an explanation of all forms of repressive brutality harking back to this essay’s second component of the primitive accumulation, nation-state / hegemonic formation, and democratization triad. She invokes the reverie of South Africa’s liberation struggle and liberal constitution, which awakened to a world of waning patriarchy and a nearly failed, or still-born, state. In the context of unevenly articulated ideological interpellations, ‘the constitution embodies all the classic enlightenment ideals of freedom and human rights, with a nod to the surviving pseudo-traditional forms of chieftainship and customary law , and along with it came all the ‘national myths ... of nation¬ building, “transformation” and progress’.” But this liberal and liberatory edifice has neither ‘brought the society to a new stability [norj weakened masculine violence’. The constitution ‘has not been “socialized”’ and the image of the ‘heroic men of the struggle’ has faded. But ‘rural men are increasingly supported in their endeavours to reconstruct rural patriarchy by a recidivist government’ seeking to bring back traditional authorities in order to build a rural support base ‘to replace its weakening urban one’. All this is combined with a ‘tragic battle between a relatively assertive femininity and a buttle masculinity to create an ongoing and violent war against women’. Karl von Holdt sees the ‘symbolic and institutional rupture presented by the transition to democracy’ producing a highly unstable social order that blends new with old forms of violence. ’^ New and unequal forms of power

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are generated with democratization, and, in a perspective more instrumental than Bozzoli s, von Ht;)ldt sees violence ‘deployed to defend this distribution and to challenge or reconfigure it’. In this process of maintenance and reconfiguration, 'existing fault lines or fractures — such as those of ethnicity, insider/outsider status, nationality and gender — are activated and expanded’. Thus South Africa experiences ‘multiple forms of violence — including subaltern forms such as protest violence, vigilantisni and xenophobic attacks’. ‘Intra-elite violence’, or what one might prefer to call the battle of classes and their fractions in fonnation, and how this brings in the subaltern through modes of ‘clientelism and populism’, is most important for von Holdt.-^^ It is here that democratization merges with primitive accumulation: a new, racially defined class is being formed in a way no kinder than any of its predecessors in world history. This grasping class has a tightly imbricated relationship to the state. It blends old apartheid and Cold War authoritarian forms with those of a nervously aspiring and sometimes paranoid ruling party torn betwixt patterns of the liberation struggle, neoliberal and managerial injunctions, patronage pressures from all sides, and popular demands on a fiscus with little reach. As Susan Booysen puts it, tiuring the last two decades the ANC has strengthened ‘its hold over state power, albeit at the exact time when serious flaws arise in the state’s ability to assert itself over society’.^*" Booysen refers specifically to ‘persistently ineffectual local government in many localities, the lack of credibility of policing and security, and serious lapses in the legal system’, yet much of her book examines how this contradictory moment of dominance and decline focuses on the desperate attempt of the president to avoid criminal charges until his temi ends in 2019.^^ The ruling party’s inability to control society whilst trying to create and maintain hegemony — Gramsci’s delicate blend of coercion and consent — leads to a Bonapartist focus on a gi'eat leader and tendencies to dispense with the niceties of democracy.^*^ When that leader fails to meet society’s expectations, as is the case with the waning hopes that a post-Mbeki regime would be a vast improvement over the post-Mandela Thermidor, he becomes more paranoid. As popular protests mount they are labelled as party to a pernicious foreign presence, and thus treasonous.The vicious cycle is hard to stop, especially given that such a situation generates policy paralysis.-*" South Africa is not ‘exceptional’, except that it accounts on its own for about one-quarter of Africa’s GDP, and with its ‘identity’ issues emanating from centuries of white domination it raises the question of race and class more immediately than the African social formations that were not colonies of a ‘special type’. It is a potent brew. In spite of it all. South Africa remains

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the best medium-temi hope for a politics that is liberal — and promises something further along an emancipatory teleology than that/' NIGERIA AND KENYA: THE APEX OF THE ARC Nigeria and Kenya represent the western and eastern anchors of a geo¬ political (and religious) arc sweeping north over the plains. Images of nomadic fundamentalists burnishing a form of religious authoritarianism have replaced the Communist menace in the minds and foreign policies of liberal democracy’s guardians.'*- In refugee circles around the world tales are tolci of a Boko Haram to A1 Shabaab arc directed by Saudi Arabia. This mythical conspiracy’s target is the fertile but conflict-torn eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,to take advantage of the storms created there since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide spilled across the border, in order to feed the hungry bodies housing the parched souls of the harsh Wahhabi strand of the Islamic tapestry.'*'* With Nigeria and Kenya now ranking first and fourth in Africa’s GDP stakes, these two vibrant candidates for the ‘African rising’ narrative - a hopeful but perhaps too panglossian apologue'*** - face a debilitating dialectic of authoritanan forms from below and above, in which religion is involved intricately.'**’ Both have moved from military or one-party states to modicums of electoral transfers of power. But Kenya’s incumbent Kibaki’s refusal of the 2007 elections results (leading to the extreme inter-party and ethnic violence which ensued in 2008, killing nearly 2,000 people) was symptomatic. And although Nigena’s retired generals-m-charge seem to find little difficulty dealing with elections, the 2015 election was postponed for six weeks due ostensibly to Boko Haram’s havoc.'*'' Boko Haram began its campaign to re-establish the early nineteenth century Sokoto caliphate - itself initiated as a holy war to oust the ‘hopelessly coirupt and apostate Hausa ruling elite of the time’ and destroyed by the British m 1903 - m 2002. But various localities in Nigeria’s north have hosted efforts to establish a religiously based autonomy since the 1960s.'*** The violence inherent to these efforts included eleven days of conflict between the Islamist sect Maitatsine and the Nigerian Police Force in December 1980 in Kano when 11,177 people - excluding police - were killed. Two years later, Muslims burnt down eight prominent Christian churches, fanning a religious war. Since then, inspired partly by Iran’s 1979 revolution and Wahhabi missionaries from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, and Syria, sharia has been implemented by twelve northern Nigerian states. The bloodshed has continued: at the turn of the millennium 2,000 Christians were murdered because some of them did not want Islamic rule.

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Boko Haram s campaign to recreate the caliphate began in earnest in 2009, after its once pacific leader Mohammed Yusuf was killed by the Nigerian state during sectarian violence that took at least seven hundred lives — and perhaps twice as manyd'^ The death toll since has ratcheted up to nearly 14,000, with a massive increase in 2014 when more than 10,000 people were killed.'"’ The phenomenon became well-known globally when nearly 300 schoolgirls trom the village ot Chibok were kidnapped.^' Michael Watts’ interpretation ot Boko Haram’s progression from ‘small prayer groups in the 1990s and established utopian neo-Salatist communities’ that were ‘hounded by corrupt and often violent local security forces, later being ‘drawn into gubernatorial politics in 2003 as thugs by politicians promising “a new Islam”has some validity, but downplays Boko Haram’s own agency. The Nigerian state has vacillated between — and combined — sticks (nvalling Boko Haram’s brutality) and carrots (reflecting the many state employees who are sympathizers and indeed members of Boko Haram’s ‘social movement’).The issues involved combine religious, political and accumulation factors, and are rooted in the socio-economic and psychic alienation entailed by a moment in Nigeria’s history when nothing (not even corruption) gains material resources more quickly than kidnapping and bank robbenes. What started as a puritanical ideological-religious campaign was soon compromised by political alliances. As faction begat factions warlord characteristics took hold; as violence locked in, the politics of revenge and ‘security’ gained precedence. In this respect - and it is here that the ‘north-south’ division breaks down along with perspectives pnoritismg religion — Boko Haram resembles the case of the Niger River delta environmental activists. They turned into something approaching warlords once they started kidnapping oil workers, and now - after the state’s concerted militaiy campaign against them collect millions from the state as ‘amnesty’.^'’ And it cannot be forgotten that separatist issues in Nigeria are not new nor restricted to the north: the Biafra war, instigated by the massacre of approximately seven thousand Igbos in Lagos and the north only six years after Nigeria’s independence, leaving a million dead, was at the opposite end of the country.'’^ It IS hard to be as sanguine as Karen Armstrong, though she rightly denies the solely religious foundation of violence such as that in northern Nigeria. Moreover, her liberal perspective may take her too far in global and historical comparisons. For her, so-called religious violence goes hand in hand with secular state-buildmg. The wars of the Reformation that may have killed 35 per cent of central Europe’s population were not really about Frotestantism versus its main Christian counterpart. While

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the participants certainly experienced these wars as a life-and-death religious struggle, this was also a conflict between two sets of statebuilders: the princes of Germany and the other kings of Europe were battling against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his ambition to establish a trans-European hegemony modelled after the Ottoman empire.^'’

Her version of history has it that ‘where secular governments have been established with a goal of separating religion and politics, a counter-cultural movement has developed in response, determined to bring religion back into public life’ and thus what ‘we call “fundamentalism” has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with an [aggressive] secularisation ... experienced as cruel, violent and invasive ... determined to destroy their way of life’, yet she suggests simultaneously that the liberal separation of church and state may be unique to western history.” This ‘war’ in Nigeria has lasted far longer than three decades, but so too did Europe’s ‘thirty years’ war’, in context: these are long longue dtirees-, the teleology never seems to arrive. In the short term, well-deserved celebrations in 2015 marked the relatively easy presidential transition from Goodluck Jonathan to the newly elected Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general (the inauguration of whom saw gutsy journalists confront the never-retiring Robert Mugabe, asking him when he would let democracy come to his own country).But those who claim that Buhari ‘will bring a new dimension to the issue’just because ‘he’s a Muslim, he knows the source of the problem’, are being naive in the extreme.” The global dimension — the world-wide terror/fundamentalist Islam network - is downplayed m studies of Boko Haram, but in Kenya it is upfront. A1 Shabaab’s home, Somalia, is a clear example of what even the most ardent critic of the shop-worn ‘failed state’ discourse would admit leaves much to be desired in terms of the adequacy of state capacities - and it is dangerous for its neighbours and allies. As Bill Freund puts it, Kenya has taken on some of the neighbourhood’s risks for itself

The stability of Kenya is important to the West where it is clearly seen as a kind of frontier against an uncertain Muslim world. If Islam is very much a minority faith m Kenya of no great consequence for its Establishment, Kenya has been inveigled into militaiy intervention in its neighbour Somalia. The Kenyan army and police, whatever mayhem they have caused to democratic protestors, have shown limited capacity to stop murderous incursions - and indeed Kenya has itself a significant Somali ethnic minority and considerable economic ties that cross the borders.

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Such is Kenya’s reputation that when A1 Shabaab attacked Nairobi’s elite Westgate shopping mall in September 2013, killing 67, security force corruption was immediately said to have opened the way for it and stymied Its response. The accusations continued when less than two years later 147 students were killed at Garrissa University College in northeastern Kenya 111

A1 Shabaab’s fifth attack.'’' Kenya’s journalists’ cynicism is so high that

hints were widespread that Kenya’s role in the ‘war against terror’ freed Its president from International Criminal Court charges (implicating both Kenyatta and Ruto’s parties) related to the post-2007 election violence.“ When parliament drafted amendments to Kenya’s security bills expanding their range exponentially, the fanuliar refrain was repeated.“ Kenya’s illtreatment of retugees is also folded into the discourse about its poorly executed involvement in the war against terror.'’^' Kenya’s response to A1 Shabaab has deep roots. The ‘religious’ violence emphasised by western media and foreign policy exists within an array of examples of politics by other means. Some are rooted in Nairobi’s urban gang structures, similar to Lagos’ replication of predatory patronage politics.“ Furthemiore, Kenya’s political elite has a long and well recorded history of legal and illegal excessive rent-seeking: its members of parliament were the highest paid in the world until a 40 per cent pay cut in 2013 (however, pension benefits and an annual car allowance of nearly $60,000 made up for It). Now they are second only to Nigeria’s.In other words, Michela Wrong’s journalistic characterisation of politics m Kenya being about ‘our turn to eat’ may be correct, although her focus on corruption alone does not heed the violence imbricated therein.'’^ Susanne Mueller traces this violent pedigree from the first elections in the 1990s, raising far-ranging questions about the relationship of the state to violence and ‘private’ accumulation. Then, the incumbent Daniel Arap Moi’s use of extra-state militia to eliminate his electoral opposition had the unintended side effect of chipping away at the state’s monopoly of legitimate force. Violence is [now] diffused and out of the state s control. Pandora’s Box is open. A collective action question arises here: under what circumstances do political elites, who themselves theoretically need peace and order to further many of their own political and economic interests, not have the incentives, power, or ability to take back the state’s monopoly, instead of participating in destroying it, and why?'’'' Mueller brings the Kenyan bourgeoisie (once considered by some Marxist theorists to be heading down a classically defined road) into the picture too.

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... why the increasingly prominent private sector has not acted as a bulwark against institutional decay and rising violence rather than being a part of It ... is another important question. What factors prevent it from assuming its historic role, why is it still so wrapped up with the state rather than autonomous from it, and what are the implications of this situation tor the transition to democracy, if any?'’'^

In other words: what happened to the separation of state and class that the dowering of liberalism was supposed to bring along with all its other accoutrements after the Cold War? ZIMBABWE: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION WITH A RACIAL TWIST? Mueller’s are almost universally African questions. Zimbabwe, where the authoritarian arc nearly forms a circle just to the north of South Africa, may go some way towards an answer. What the public health practitioner and activist David Sanders said about Zimbabwe and South Africa could be applied across the continent: the fomier is the trailer and the latter is the movie. As Mamdani might have put it, Zimbabwe and South Africa’s obsession with race only makes them seem different from the rest of Africa.™ Zimbabwe illustrates the dynamic between party-states in crisis and longsimmering or stalemated primitive accumulation processes. When in 1997 President Robert Mugabe could no longer control the political crisis created in part by structural adjustment and the nse of rnulti-partyism, he allied with the ‘war vets’ from the liberation struggle of the seventies. They wanted land and pensions — and had enough allies in the military echelons of the state to back them up. In 2000, the ruling party-state and what some call a ‘social movement

coalition took most of the mostly white-owned large-scale

commercial farms. A working class/hberal combination of opposition forces mounted an electoral challenge to such policy and practice, but by 2013 It was exhausted and split asunder after fifteen years of hooks and crooks applied to it by Zimbabwe’s African National Union-Patriotic Front.'' In spite of internal faction-fighting over a post-Mugabe future, ZANU-PF will probably continue to rule. Meanwhile, the ‘disappearance’ of an activist and journalist since March 2015 serves as a reminder of the ruling party’s paranoid propensities.™ In the longer tenn, around 150,000 new small commodity producers might go on their path to a form of agrarian capitalism that could create a well-differentiated yeomanry - perhaps centred in what Ian Scoones calls (rather precarious) ‘middle farmers’ - eventually splitting off from a proletarian mass amid a commercially successful form of plantocracy.™

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Yet it one follows Colin Leys’ seminal 1994 Ncii> Left Review article Contronting the African Tragedy’, even Zimbabwe has not gone tar enough down the route towards addressing the root of Africa’s problems. For Leys, neither colonial nor post-colonial regimes have had the courage or crudeness to ‘pay the military, financial and diplomatic price of superintending the mass dislocation and conflict’ that would convert Africa’s ‘land and labour into commodities’.^'^ In other words, the creation of private property — one of the steps towards primitive accumulation — has not been accomplished. In Zimbabwe the state has only made ‘offer letters’ to the new farmers, and communal fonns of tenure have not been changed in the former ‘reserves’ at all. ^ In lieu of this step, ‘vernacular’ articulations evolve, but the great experiment with capitalism might be forestalled.^*’ This is what Zimbabwe teaches us: even with the violence ofland invasions and stolen elections, the Gordian knot remains tied up and no one mode of production or political identity rules — least of aU the ‘people’s’, despite the creativity of the small peasants and bustling infonnals in the cities, and new ruling-class struggles to establish a viable structure of accumulation and legitimacy. The current round of creative destruction and (re)constructive formation may cut the cables of the past and forge a new future, but a slow fraying is more likely. CONCLUSION While

the

ropes

unravel

one

of South Africa’s

more

misanthropic

thinkers may have the last word for the present on what must be, for all its complications even in Africa, freedom /rom structural constraint and to fashion new opportunities within those spaces. As Coetzee puts it; If, despite the evidence of our senses, we accept the premise that we or our forefathers created the state, then we must also accept its entailment: that we or our forefathers could have created the state in some other form, if we had chosen; perhaps, too, that we could change it if we collectively so decided. But the fact is that, even collectively, those who are ‘under’ the state, who ‘belong to’ the state, will find it very hard indeed to change Its form; they — we — are certainly powerless to abolish it. What is certainly true is that a very difficult and probably wrong path for changing the African state form has been travelled for the past quarter of a century. Yet we can return to Gramsci’s cautiously optimistic considerations on ideologies’ global travels. Even if 25 years of ‘arbitrary’ and ‘willed’ liberal

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intei-ventions and enthusiasms in Africa have only resulted in ‘individual movements, polemics and so on’ they can ‘function like an error which by contrasting with the truth, demonstrates it’/^ What can be learned in their wake? If we go further into history, we know that the Cold War’s emphasis on security and order was overblown; now the pitfalls of combining economic neo-liberalism and political democracy are evident. Prospects of the pendulum swinging back to the poles of ‘security’ and ‘order’ cloud the prognosis for the next 25 years. This would confirm a sober pe.ssimism regarding hopes for a propitious blend of democracy and (human) security. But even so such hopes may not be ‘completely useless’: we can learn from ‘an error’. The search for ‘historically necessary’ configurations can continue. NOTES 1 The first book to challenge the myths of the liberal democratic state in Africa was Rita Abrahamsen’s Discipliiihig Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa, London: Zed Books, 2000, and it remains a classic. More broadly, see Leo Panitch, ‘Liberal Democracy and Socialist Democracy: the Antinomies of CB Maepherson’, Socialist Register 1981, London: Merlin Press, 1980; Jules Townshend, C. B. Maepherson and the Problem of Liberal Democracy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 2

John S. Saul, ‘South Africa: Between “Barbarism” and “Structural Reform’”, Neiv Left Review, 188(|uly/August), 1991. In spite of his many critiques of South African ‘elite parting’, Patrick Bond maintains a soft spot for the welfanst hopes of 1994’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, which he helped draft (see for e.xample ‘Minister Gordhan, Please Splash Water and Financial Relief on Fast-Burning SA’, Daily Maverick, 25 February 2015, available at http://www.dailymaverick.co.za).

3

Vivek Chibber, ‘Capitalism, Class and Universalism: Escaping the Cul-De-Sac of Postcolonial Theory’, Socialist Register 2014, Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2013.

4

David Moore, ‘Conflict and After: Primitive Accumulation, Hegemonic Fonnation and Democratic Deepening’, Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 4(1), 2015.

5 6

Adekeye Adebajo, The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War, London: Hurst, 2010. The jury is out on the nature of these ruling classes and indeed the social forces that shape and are shaped by them, as well as the theory that will decide this question. Marxian primitive accumulation perspectives unfortunately run a poor second in this race to semi-Weberian neo-patrimonial ones, even though they are deeper historically and less pessimistic - if one subscribes to the School of Oriental and African Studies Development Studies department’s mode of‘melancholic optimism’. See Christopher Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: LJnderstanding Violence in Developing Countries, London: Hurst, 2006; David Moore, ‘The Second Age of the Third World: From Pnmitive Accumulation to Global Public Goods?’ Third World Quarterly, 25(1), 2004; and ‘Bloody African Development: War and Accumulation on the Dark Continent’, New Political Economy, 16(1), 2011; cf Alexander Beresford, ‘Power, Patronage, and Gatekeeper Politics in South Africa’, African Affairs, (114)455, 2015.

7

David Moore,

‘South

Africa’s Xenophobia

of a

Special

Type:

Historical

and

Global Perspectives’, The Bullet, No. 1116, 15 May 2015, available at http://www. socialistproject.ca.

AN ARC OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN AFRICA 8

207

The phrase is Robert Cox’s. See his Production, Power and IVorld Order: Social Forces in the \Iakinci

History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987; .

9

Qaanitah Hunter, Mmanaledi Mataboge and Philip de Wet, ‘Al-Bashir Can Thank No.

U)

Simon Tisdal, ‘Omar .il-Baslnr Case Suggests South African Foreign Policy is Going

r. Mail and Guardian, 19-26 )une 2015, pp. 2-4. Rogue , Guardian, 15June 2015, available at http://www.theguardian.com. Fora view on the contradictions ot ANC toreign policy proposals, see David Moore, ‘Confused Policy Picture is Not One of a Confident Rising Power’, Mail and Guardian ,\5-22 ]une 2012, available at htrp://mg.co.za. 1 1

Which have more than an element ot truth behind them, thus hesitation at condemning the articulators of ‘ Atrican solutions for African problems’ as being just as hypocritical as the liberal internationalists and interventionists is understandable. One solution to the hypocritical exchanges around such issues would be for the current president of the USA to end his tenure by convincing Congress to sign the Treaty of Rome.

12

Thaddeus Metz, ‘Toward an African Moral Theory', Journal of Political Philosophy, 15(3), 2007. How the discourse of sovereignty became hitched to post-colonial promises of autonomous choice for state elites instead ot ‘the people’ is an open question, although a good starting point is the discussion ot ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ in Amy Bartholomew and Jenniter Breakspear, ‘Human Rights as Swords of Empire’, Socialist Register 2004: The Sew Imperialism, London: Merhn Press, 2004, pp. 134-40, taken up in David Moore, ‘Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe's Left? A Comment’, Historical Materialism, 12(4), 2004. For an influential conservative perspective worth consideration see Robert Jackson, QuasiStates: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambndge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

13

See Stephen Fnedman, Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid, Scottsville: University ot KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2015, for an acute and critical appreciation of Harold Wolpe’s work, which brought the ideas of articulation ot modes of pjoduction to South Africa’s ‘colonialism of a special type’ discourse.

14

Antomo Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 182. Gillian Hart cites the first phrase in her Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony, Scottsville: University ot KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013, p. 220, but emphasises space and forces instead of what Althusser might have called the intersection of differing histoncal times m one place.

15

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, translated by J.A. Buttigieg, New York:

16

Hart, Rethinking, p. 191, citing Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy.

Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 169. Hegemony and Marxism, Leiden: Bnll, 2009, p. 220. 17

Gramsci, Selections, pp. 367-8.

18

L7avid Moore, ‘The World Bank and the Gramsci Effect: Towards a Transnational State and Global Hegemony?’, in D. Moore, ed.. The World Bank: Development, Poverty, Hegemony, Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.

19

Thomas Carothers, ‘The Dangerous Cost of US Scrimping on Democracy Aid’, Cape Argus, 2 January 2015, available at iol.co.za. Much of this talk may be simply ideological froth: William Easterly, albeit perhaps with statistics before those of Obama’s reign were in, states that in spite of all the rhetonc about democracy vs. dictator aid, the proportion of aid to third world dictators - about a third - from 1972 to 2010 remained the same, as did the fifth for democracies (see ‘Foreign Aid for Scoundrels’, New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010). For example, the president of Cameroon has ruled since 1982, and as of 2010 had received about $35 billion: only those who make the Anglo-

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SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016 American nredia, such as Robert Mugabe, get cut off. On Canada’s engagement with this doublespeak see Doug Saunders, ‘Canada Sells “Rule of Law” to Countries Like Egypt. But Whose Rule? What Law?’, Globe and Mail, 21 March 2015.

20

Brett Stephens, ‘What Sam Huntington Knew’, Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2014.

21

For a liberal effort, see Crystia Freeland, The Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-

22

Susan Ferguson and David McNally, ‘Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social

Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, London: Penguin, 2013. Reproduction of a Global Working Class’, Socialist Rej^ister 2015, Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2014. 23

See: Moore, ‘The Second’, for consideration of state responses to the travails of primitive accumulation; and see S. Ibi Ajayi and Leonce Ndikumana, Capital Flight from Africa: Causes, Effects, and Policy Issues, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 for a big reason why they do not eventuate.

24

Using pre-2015 means of statistical measurements (see note 45 for comparisons with Kenya and Nigeria, which have changed their methodology thus adding nearly 90 per cent to their economies) the South African GDP at around $390 billon represented approximately one quarter of Africa’s. South African males can expect to live to nearly 60 years of age while women approach 63 (up significantly from men’s 52 in 2005, largely due to the roll-out of antiretroviral therapy that took place after AIDS-denialist Thabo Mbeki left the presidency and a vigorous campaign by the Treatment Action Group), and aspire to an average income of roughly $7,000 - with a purchasing power parity of over $12,000, or 68 per cent of the world’s average. These figures are however marred by one of the world’s highest rates of inequality, with a GINI co-efficient of 0.69, and a growth rate ofjust le.ss than 2 per cent projected for 2015. Mia Malan, ‘After Drastic Drop SA Life Expectancy Rises’, Mail and Guardian, 19 Dec 2014; Trading Economics, South Africa GDP per capita PPP’, available at http://www.tradingeconomics.com; see also the World Bank data on South Africa available at http://data.worldbank.org; for a liberal view of inequality see Gavin Keeton, ‘Inequality in South Africa’, Focus: Journal of the Helen Suzman Foundatio}i, 74(November), 2014; tor one more compatible with SR readers, emphasising the decreasing share of wages in the economy, see Nicolas Pons-Vignon and Aurelia Segatti, “‘The Art of Neoliberalism”: Accumulation, Institutional Change and Social Order since the End of Apartheid’, Review of A frican Political Economy, 40(138), 2013.

25

SAPA, ‘EFF thrown out for disrupting SONA, DA walks out’. Mail and Guardian, 12

26

Stephen Grootes, ‘The Fnghtenmg Implications of a Web of Spies, Lies and Politics’,

February 2015, available at http://mg.co.za.

Daily Maverick, 11 August 2014, available at http://wtvw.dailymaverick.co.za. 27

Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon, ‘Nuinsa, the Working Class and Socialist

28

Jane Duncan, The Rise of the Securocrats: The Case of South Africa, Johannesburg: Jacana 2014.

29

SAPA, ‘Report: Zimbabweans “Sent To Die’”, Mail and Guardian, 23 October 2011,

Politics in South Africa’, Socialist Register 2015, London: Merlin Press, 2014.

available at http://mg.co.za; ‘Source Report’, Mail and Guardian, 16 August 2013, available at http://cdn.mg.co.za; Craig Dodds, ‘CIA Spy Claims Rubbish: Protector’, The Independent on Saturday, 7 March 2015, available at http://www.iol.co.za; Angela Quintal, ‘Chiefjustice Speaks Out About Sex Smear’, Mail and Guardian, 12 Itine 2015, available at http://mg.co.za. 30

Peter Alexander and Carin Runciman, ‘Media Release: Researchers from UJ’s Social Change Research Unit Challenge Allegations Made by the SAPS About the Credibility of Their Recent Research Report’, 30 May 2015; Peter Alexander, Carin Runciman and Boitumelo Maruping, South African Police Service (Saps) Data On Crowd Incidents: A

AN ARC OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN AFRICA

209

Preliminary Analysis, }ohc\nneshuT^: South African Research Chair in Social Change, 25 May 2015, available at bit.ly/l|VgQri. 31

John Kane-Berman,

There s No Disguising SA’s Youtli Unemployment Problem’,

Business Day Lwe, 26Januai'y 2015, available at http://www.bdlive.co.za; Lise Vitten, Rape and Other Forms ot Sexual Violence in South Africa’, Institute of Security Studies Policy Brief. 72(Noveniber), 2014, available at http://www.issafrica.org. 32

David Everatt, The Politics ot Non-Belonging in the Developing World’, in J. Wyn and H. Cahill, eds. Handbook of Children and \'outh Studies, Singapore: Springer, 2015, p. 70; and his ‘Xenophobia, State and Society in South Africa’, PoUtikon, 38(2), 2011, based on research carried out before the mid-2008 outbreak of xenophobic violence that took 62 lives, including 21 South Africans who were often members of relatively small ethnic groups.

33

Belinda Bozzoli, ‘The Webenan State, Civility and Explanations of Rape’, seminar paper presented to IVits Institute of Social and Economic Research Seminar, University of the Wiuvatersrand, 25 May 2015, p. 16, available at http://wiser.wits.ac.za. Althusser’s and Laclau's notion of interpellation is reworked by Hart in Rethinking, pp. 194-6, 216 n.7 — not Bozzoh. BozzoH’s first work, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class: Capital and Ideology in South Africa 1890-1933, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, is a Gramscian interpretation of South Africa’s ruling class under apartheid. Perhaps this essay indicates the complementarity of Weber and Gramsci, be that a positive or negative reality. After a university career ending as the deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Professor Bozzoli is currently the Democratic AJliance’s shadow cabinet minister for Higher Education and Training, momtonng the Secretary General of the SACP and Minister for said department. Blade Nzimande. This may also say something about Gramscian Marxism versus rather crude versions of the National Democratic Revolution. South Africa is now, according to this exegesis, m the second phase of the transition to a national democratic society. David Moore, ‘Two Perspectives on the National Democratic Revolution in Zimbabwe: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred MhundT, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 30(4), 2012. The DA IS undoubtedly eating into the ANC’s urban support, especially in Gauteng, but strict liberals foresee their party developing similar patron-client relations as the ANC.

34

Karl von Holdt, ‘South Africa: the Transition to Violent Democracy’. Review of African

35

Of note here are tw'o essential sources brought to mind by von Holdt’s use of the notion

Political Economy, 40(138), 2013, pp. 590-1. of elite instead of class. Southall is closer to the ‘elite/patron-client’ mode of semiWeberian analysis that sees only a teleology beginning and ending in corruption and cronyism. Marais’ is akin to the classical Marxist genre. Both of these works are full of essential detail. Roger Southall, Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa, Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013; Hem Marais, South A frica Pushed to the Limit: the Political Economy of Change, Gape Town: University of Gape 36

Town Press, 2011. Susan Booysen, The ANC’s Double Act: Decline & Dominance in the Time of Zurna, Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, forthcoming. To be sure, some of this control over the state comes through patronage appointments to it - called ‘deployment’ - the results of which are often incompetence, hampering the party-state’s relation to a society with great expectations.

37

Raymond Suttner, ‘Protecting Jacob Ziiina Gonsiimes the ANG’, Mail and Guardian,

38

16 January 2015. David Moore, ‘Coercion, Consent, and the Construction of Capitalism in Africa: Development Studies,

Political

Economy,

Politics and the

L)ark

Continent

,

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210

Transformation, 84, 2014. 39

Sipho Khumalo, ‘Ziiina Warns Against Foreign Control ot SA’, lOL News, 12 December 2012, available at http://www.iol.co.za.

40

Richard Calland, ‘Seven Steps to Get SA Out of Its Economic Rut’, Mail and Guardian,

41

CL Lawrence Hamilton, Are South Africans Frce.^ Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2014.

19-25 June 2015, p. 21. 42

(hf course, these mirages take on real shape when one walks into them. Robert Fowler, A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with al Qaeda, Toronto: HarperCollins,

2011. 43

Assuredly, the Congolese tragedy did not begin with Rwanda’s ^enocidaires and its post-1994 state’s interventions: see Emery Kalema, ‘Death, Torture and Suffering: The Mulele Rebellion in Post-Colonial DR Congo’, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1 June, 2015, available at http://wiser,wits.ac.za; David Moore, ‘Lumumba: History or Hagiography?’ in V. Bickford-Smith and R. Mendelsohn, eds., Black and White in Colour: The African Past on Screen, Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006.

44

Karen Armstrong, ‘Wahhabism to ISIS: How Saudi Arabia Exported the Mam Source of Global Terrorism’, New Statesman, 18 November 2014.

45

Layla Al-Zubaidi and Jochen Luckscheiter, eds. Africa Rising: Hdw Benefits from the Continent’s Economic Growth?, Cape Town: Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2014 and Horman Chitonge, Economic Growth and Development in Africa: Understanding trends and prospects, London: Routledge, 2014. Recent alterations in the method by which GDP is measured have increased Nigeria’s and Kenya’s GDPs by nearly 90 per cent. See the World Bank’s country data for Nigeria and Kenya, available at http://www.data. worldbank.org, and the Worldonieters data available at http://www.worldometers. info.

46

Ct. Tadzio Muller, ‘Beyond the Criticism of Religion’, The Bullet, no. 1132, 22 June 2015. Essential work: Karen Armstrong, ‘The Myth of Religious Violence’, Guardian, 25 September 2014, and Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, London: Bodley Head, 2013. Regarding religion and violence in Nigeria one cannot forget the structural violence inherent in the corrupt management of building codes m Lagos that allowed the Christian evangelist T.B. Joshua to build an apartment hotel for his panshioners visiting from across the continent, which collapsed and killed 67 people. He blamed the tragedy on an airplane crash. What would Max Weber say about this version of Protestant Capitalism? Sapa, ‘Zunia: 67 South Africans Dead m Nigeria Church Collapse’, Mail and Guardian, 14 September 2014.

47

Geoffrey York, ‘After the Nigerian Election, What Will - and Won’t - Change’, Globe and Mail, 3 April 2015; Peter Kagwanja and Roger Southall, ‘Introduction: Kenya — A Democracy m Retreat?’Jourmi/ of Contemporary A frican Studies, 27(3), 2009, p. 259.

48

Daniel Agbiboa, ‘The Ongoing Campaigr of Terror in Nigeria: Boko Harani Versus the State’, Stability: International Journal of Security & Development 2(3), 2013, p. 2. The role of the British brings back the vexed issue of colonialism. Why the north and south of Nigeria mysteiy.

49

and Sudan, and Chad and many more colonies — were ever conjoined is a

Stuart Elden, ‘The Geopolitics of Boko Harani and Nigeria’s “War on TeiTor’’’, The Geographical Journal, 180(4), 2014, p. 416. The claim Yusuf started his career peacefully IS

111

International Crisis Group (ICG), Curbing Violence in Nigeria (II): The Boko Haram

Insurgency, Africa Report N°216, 3 April 2014, p. i. 50

Monica Mark, ‘Boko Haram’s “Deadliest Massacre”: 2,000 feared dead in Nigeria’, Guardian, 10 January 2015; BBC, ‘Nigeria Says It Has Ousted Boko Haram From Town of Bama’, 17 March 2015, available at http://www.bbc.com. The intensity of

AN arc: C')F AUTHC')RITAR1ANISM in AFRIC'.A

211

the increase in violence is indicated by Agbiboa’s tally ot'3,50() deaths at the time of his writing (probably niid-2012), and tallies of 14,000 by mid-2015. 51

The tendency toi Boko Fdarani s males to 'marry’ the young women tliey capture IS particularly appalling: Adam Nossiter, 'Boko Haram Militants Raped Hundreds of Female Captives m Nigeria’, New York Times, 19 May 2015.

52

Stuart Elden,

Interview with

Mich,iel Watts — on

Nigeria,

Political Ecology,

Geographies of Violence, and the Histoi^ of the Discipline’, Society and Space, available at www.societyandspace.coni. 53

Agbiboa, 'The C’lngoing’, pp. 8-11.

54

Drew Hinshaw, 'Nigeria’s Former C^il Bandits Now Collect Government Cash’, Wall StreetJounhil, 22 August 2012.

55

One of Nigena’s most respected intellectuals conies out rather ethno-centric, to put it mildly, ni his recounting of the events; Chinua Achebe, There PVas a Country: A Personal Histor}’ of Btafra, London: Allen Lane, 2012, and Chiniamanda Adichie’s review, 'Things Left Unsaid’, London Review of Books, 34(19), 11 October 2012.

56

Annstrong, 'The Myth’.

57

Annstrong, 'The Myth’.

58

Mariann Thanim, 'Nigeria’s Favourite Satinst Goes Global After Ambushing Robert

59

Martin Ewi, SAFM Morning Live, 29 May 2015, available at http://www.sabc.co.za;

Mugabe’, Guardian, 5 June 2015. cL Geoffrey York, 'How Not to Fight Islamist Extremism’. Globe and Mail, 27 February 2015. 60

Bin Freund,

The Making oj Contemporary Africa, 3'"'' Edition, London:

Palgrave,

forthcoming. 61

Rasna Warah, 'Corruption is Costing Kenyans Their Lives — No One is Safe’, Guardian, 9 December 2014, available at http://www.theguardian.com; Joseph Burite and Ilya Gridneff, 'Corruption, Lack of Political Will for Reform Weaken Kenya’s Ability to Fight Terrorists’, Mail and Guardian, 07 Apr 2015, available at http://mgafrica.com.

62

Owen Bovycott, 'ICC Drops Murder and Rape Charges Against Kenyan President’, Guardian, 5 December 2014; Sarah Nalukenge, ‘Idid al-Shabaab let Kenyatta Off ICC Hook?’, The Insider, 20 December 2014, available at theinsider.ug. Witnesses tended to disappear before reaching The Hague: BBC, ‘Kenya: “ICC Defence Witness” in Ruto’s Trial Killed’, 6 January 2015, available at http://www.bbc.com.

63

Human Rights Watch, 'Kenya: Security Bill Tramples Basic Rights’, 13 December 2014; Sapa-AFP, 'President Kenyatta Signs Controversial Anti-Terror Bill Amid Criticism’, Mail and Guardian, 19 December 2014.

64

Human Rights Watch, “You Are All Terrorists’’: Kenyan Police Abuse of Refugees in

65

Adnenne LeBas, 'Violence and Urban Order in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria’,

Nairobi, New York: Human Flights Watch, 2013. Studies in Comparative International Development, 48(3), 2013. Surjirisingly however, LeBas seems hesitant to claim gangs’ direct involvement in the post-2007 election violence. Cf. Stefan Dercon and Roxana Gutierrez Romero, ‘Triggers and Characteristics of the 2007 Kenyan Electoral Violence’, UK Department for International Development Improving Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth Research Consortium, CSAE WPS/2010, available at http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk. University of Johannesburg Ph.D candidate Tamuka Chinmambowa’s work on Zimbabwean urban gangs linked to the ruling party suggests comparable conclusions. Also see Jan Rielander and Henn-Bernard SolignacLecomte, ‘An Economist’s Answer to the Youth Employment Crisis in Africa’, Guardian, 21 March 2014. 66

Owen Bowcott, ‘ICC I9rops Murder and Rape Charges Against Kenyan President’, Guardian, 5 December 2014; Gerald Herbling, ‘Kenyan Legislators Emerge Second

212

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016 in Global Pay Ranking’, Business Daily (Kenya), 23 July 2013; ‘Kenyan MPs Settle for Lower Pay Rise’, AlJazeera, 12 June 2013.

67

Michela Wrong, It’s Our Timt to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan HTistle-Blower, London:

68

Susan Mueller, ‘Dying to Win: Elections, Political Violence, and Institutional Decay in

69

Mueller, ‘Dying’, p. 113.

70

Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late

71

David Moore, ‘Death or Dearth ot Democracy in Zimbabwe?’, Africa Spectrum,

Fourth Estate, 2009. KenyT, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 29(1), 201 1, p. 113.

Colonialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 49(1), 2014; Phillan Zamchiya, ‘The MDC-T’s (Un)Seeing Eye in Zimbabwe’s 2013 Harmonised Elections: A Technical Knockout’,Jowma/ of Southern African Studies, 39(4), 2013; Brian Raftopoulos, ‘Zimbabwe’s Politics of Despair’, Solidarity Peace Trust, April 2015, available at http://www.solidaritypeacetrust.org. 72

LDavid Smith, ‘Zimbabwe Activist Still Missing as State Officials Deny Abducting Him’,

73

Ian Scoones, ‘Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: New Political Dynamics in the Countryside’,

Guardian, 13 March 2015. Reinew of African Political Economy, 42(144), 2015, p. 194. Scoones decnes (on p. 192) the ‘ideological grandstanding’ of the ‘two lefts’ in the Zimbabwe debate, but devotes more words to those who are unenthusiastic about the land refonn process, and the party behind it, than to those he calls ‘populists’. For him, the fonner have fallen prey to western myths. 74

Cohn Leys, ‘Confronting the African Tragedy’, New Left Review, 204(March/April), 1994, p. 45.

75

Scoones, ‘Zimbabwe’s Land’, p. 191.

76

Philip Woodhouse and Admos Chimhowu, ‘Customary vs Private Property Rights? Dynamics and Trajectories of Vernacular Land Markets in Sub-Saharan AfncT, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6(3), 2006.

77

J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, London: Harvil Seeker, 2007, p. 3.

78

Gramsci, Selections, pp. 367-8.

BRAZIL: THE FAILURE OF THE PT AND THE RISE OF THE ‘NEW RIGHT’ ALFREDO SAAD-FILHO AND ARMANDO BOITO undreds ot thousands of chiefly white upper middle-class protesters X Xtook to the streets in Brazil in 2015 in an organized upsurge of hatred against the federal administration led by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party* {Partido dos Trahalhadores, PT).’ These demonstrations were organized through, and backed up by, a brutally hostile campaign against her administration in the mainstream newspapers and TV stations and on social media.- The 2015 protests were very different from the previous wave ot demonstrations in mid-2013. The latter were ignited by radical left workers and students contesting a public transport fare increase, although the movement was soon captured by an odd amalgam of the middle class, anarchist ‘black blocks’ and the far right.^ The 2015 protests were far more cohesive and better organized. Their demands, moreover, unambiguously aligned with the political right, and pnmarily included the country’s upper middle class and the bourgeoisie. The protest wave expressed, in our view, the disintegration of the political hegemony of the PT and the emergence of a ‘new right’ in Brazil. The 2015 demonstrations erupted in the political vacuum created by the paralysis of Dilma’s administration because of its own failings and Brazil’s worsening economy. Those difficulties were compounded by aggressive media reporting of the LMva Jato corruption scandal. That scandal focused on a network of firms channelling vast sums to assorted individuals and political parties through the state-owned oil company Petrobras. Yet, at a deeper level, the economic and political crises in Brazil are due to the achievements and limitations of the administrations led by Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (20032006 and 2007-2010) and Dilma Roussefl'(2011-2014 and 2015-present). They led a partial economic and social break with neoliberalism that delivered significant gains in employment and distribution, but also entrenched poor economic pertormance and left Brazil vulnerable to the continuing global

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downturn. In the political domain, the PT transformed the social policies of the Brazilian state, while .simultaneously accepting a fragile hold on power as a condition of power itself The PT governments have almost invariably followed the path of least resistance: there was no meaninglul attempt to reform the constitution, the state or the political system, challenge the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, reform the mainstream media or transform the country’s economic structure or its international integration. The PT also maintained (with limited and temporary flexibility in implementation) the neoliberal macroeconomic policy imposed by the preceding administration. This ‘policy tripod’ included inflation targeting and central bank independence, free capital movements and floating exchange rates, and tight fiscal policies. The PT administrations limited their aspirations to the ‘reformism lite’ permitted by their unwieldy political alliances at the top. This strategy alienated the party’s base and provoked the opposition into an escalating attack that came to the boil in March 2015. LULA I Lula, the founder and uncontested leader of the PT, was elected president on his fourth attempt, in 2002. His bid was supported by a ‘neo-developmentalist front’: a coalition of disparate forces that had m common the expenence of losses under neoliberalism and hazy expectations of a neo-developmentalist alternative.'* These groups included the internal (‘productive’ as opposed to ‘financial’ and ‘internationalized’) bourgeoisie (see below for further details), the organized (formal) working class, the lower middle class, some informal workers and assorted political chieftains from marginalized regions.^ This supporting coalition won against the ‘neoliberal alliance’, including the international fraction of the bourgeoisie, the upper middle class, that was ideologically committed to neoliberalism, and most informal workers that, m Brazil, traditionally voted with the right.^ The PT had been building this neo-developmentalist front for several years through the dilution ot its own left-wing aspirations, disorganization of its militant supporters, exclusion of far left groups, containment of the trade unions, NGOs, community and other associations and movements previously linked to the Party, increasingly close dialogue with business organizations m particular the Industrial Federation of the State ofSao Paulo {Federai;ao das Indiistrias do Estado de Sdo Paulo, FIESP), the most powerful manufacturing

sector organization in Brazil - and the construction of coalitions to win local elections and govern eflectively. As this process unfolded, the PT became defined more by its ‘competence’, ‘incorruptibility’ and commitment to

BRAZIL’S NEW RKiHT

215

economic growth based on production rather than speculation’ rather than by radical goals. The aspirations ot the neo-developmentalist trout remained unfocused in Lula s early years, but they centred on more expansionary and minimally distributive economic policies. These hopes were limited not only by the imperative ot managing an unwieldy coalition, but also by Lula’s ‘Letter to the Brazilian People , issued weeks betore the election in order to commit his government to the neoliberal policy tripod. With this reassurance in place, Lula sailed to victory largely untroubled. For the hrst time Brazil was led by a genuine worker-leader. Lula’s election was followed by a striking change in the social composition of the state. The Brazilian president appoints hundreds of cadres who, in turn, choose thousands of subordinates: in rough tenns, every election potentially decapitates the federal administration and hundreds of nominally autonomous federal trusts and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Within the limits of the coalition, Lula appointed dozens of progressive political, trade union and NGO cadres to prominent positions.' Whilst this efiectively captured or ‘nationalized’ many left organizations — with the notable exception of the landless peasants’ movement {Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) — it simultaneously changed social composition of the state

institutions: for the first time, workers and left-wing militants occupied important positions at the top of the federal administration. This does not imply that the-class character of the state had changed, or that public policies would necessarily shift to the left, but it changed the appearance of the state: millions of workers could recognize themselves in the bureaucracy, which increased hugely the legitimacy of the state among the poor and spread further a feeling of shared citizenship in Brazil. Lula’s power was limited by the appointment of a similarly large number of bourgeois cadres by his coalition partners, and by a powerful Congress that was, and remains, fragmented across two dozen or more raucous and unreliable parties. The PT has never elected even 20 per cent of Deputies and Senators, and the ‘reliable’ left (including the PT itself) rarely exceeded onethird of seats. Consequently, Lula (and later Dilma) had to cobble together fissiparous coalitions that were intrinsically prone to corruption - both from government, through pork-barrel politics or worse, or from capitalist interests buying votes and funding rival parties fighting expensive elections every other year. The PT had to manage this ungainly Congress under the gaze of an unfriendly judiciary, a hostile media, an autonomous Federal Prosecution and a corporatist Federal Police often working in cahoots. This unholy coalition - what Pierre Bourdieu called the ‘right hand of the

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State’ — may be explained, in part, by the social background of many civil servants employed at these levels (primarily the upper middle class, which opposes the FT with increasing ferocity) and their own functional position as enforcers ol public orcler. The FT has become, in contrast, associated with ‘social disorder’.^ The first Lula administration introduced moderate distributional policies, including the formalization of labour contracts, rising minimum wages and new transfer programmes; they also expanded the role of development finance through the Brazilian Development Bank (Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econonnco e Social, BNDES) and shifted the country’s foreign policy in a progressive direction. These changes were significant, but deeper social and economic gains were limited by the government’s detemiination to buy ‘market credibility’ through the dogged implementation of the neoliberal policy tripod. The ensuing economic fragilities were disguised by the global commodity boom gaining speed in the background. At a later stage, the boom would raise export revenues, taxes and aggregate demand, and allow the government to channel the proceeds of growth toward a broad range of gams. They included social transfers and rising minimum wages, the marginal expansion of infrastructure and the promotion of selected industries, especially those where competitive advantages could be easily achieved: large-scale agriculture, mining, oil, food processing and construction, and the expansion of low wage-low productivity employment in services.’ In the meantime, however, low GDF growth rates in the first Lula years frustrated everyone, especially the FT’s traditional supporters. They felt that their concerns were being ignored and their support was taken for granted, while

government

officials

schmoozed with bankers

and

industrialists

and parroted their discourse. Even this apparent sell-out was insufficient to remove the political resistance against Lula, and his administration was cnticized both tor what it did (‘packing up the state with acolytes’ and ‘taxing producers to frind sloth ) and for what it did not do (deliver rapid growth). The government’s growing political isolation created vulnerabilities that exploded in 2005, through the grotesque Mensaldo scandal."’ Without clear evidence, the government was accused of paying a monthly stipend to Deputies and Senators in order to secure their support. The media and the opposition pressed those claims relentlessly, with destructive implications for the FT. The Mensaldo led to the resignation of Jose Dirceu, Lula’s Chief of Staff and FT strategist, the Fresident of the FT, and several high-ranking cadres of the administration. Years later, leading Farty members were imprisoned after a contested trial at the Supreme Court. Those pressures fatally destabilized the alliance supporting Lula. The

BRAZIL’S NEW RIGHT

217

government lost its residual support among the middle class, and the internal bourgeoisie gained an uncontested hegemony: they led Lula’s defence in the Alctisalao and prevented the scandal from leading to his impeachment." The industrial working class remained supportive but passive, while the informal workers flocked to Lula because ol his working-class image and the distributive programmes introduced in his first administration: Boha Fannlia, universit\' admissions quotas, the formalization of the labour market, mass connections to the electricity grid and a rapidly rising minimum wage, which tnggered automatic increases to most pensions and benefits.'^ For the first time support for the PT became inversely correlated with income: the party was strongly rejected by upper middle-class voters and widely supported by poorer strata of the population.'^ LULA II The resources made available by the commodity boom and the transformations m Lula’s base of support catalyzed the emergence of a ‘winners’ alliance’, that is, a strongly bound and relatively coherent neo-developmentalist front which included the internal bourgeoisie and most of the formal and informal working class.''' They supported an economic policy inflection that diluted the Policy Tnpod through the accretion of selected aspects of neodevelopmentalism, especially bolder industrial and fiscal policies and higher public sector and SOE investment, and stronger distributive programmes. Importantly, the government approved in 2009 new regulations for the oil industry, following the discovery of vast deep-sea reserves in the Atlantic Ocean. The earlier regime of concessions to the oil majors was abandoned, and Petrobras would henceforth dominate oil exploration. This led to the restructuring and rapid expansion of the oil chain, across components, refineries and shipbuilding. This macroeconomic policy shift was triggered by the replacement of Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, who was heavily involved m the Mensalao, by the neo-developmentalist Guido Mantega, who was strongly supported by FIESP - that is, exactly the opposite of what the neoliberal alliance was aiming for when it unleashed the Mensalao scandal. Accelerating economic growth helped to consolidate the new front, and Lula’s political talent supported his elevation to spectacular heights. He balanced the demands of prima facie rival groups through his legendary shrewdness and the judicious distribution of public resources through state investment, development funds, wages, benefits and labour law. The economy picked up speed, and taxation, investment, employment and incomes increased in a virtuous circle. The dynamics were sufficiently strong to support bold expansionary policies m the wake of the global crisis, and

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Brazil recovered strongly in 2009-10. The country was anointed as one of the BRIGS, and Lula became a global statesman. By the end of his second administration, Lula’s approval rates touched on 90 per cent. The fraction of the bourgeoisie that supported orthodox neoliberalism remained intransigent in opposition, but it became isolated politically. The political divide in the country deepened. The opposition crystallized around a renewed ‘neoliberal alliance’ led by the financial and international bourgeoisie (suffering economic losses and dwindling control of state policy and resource allocation), and populated by the upper middle class (tormented by job losses and its dislocation from the outer circle of power, and jealous ot the — partly subsidized — economic and social rise of the broad working class), and scattered segments of the informal workers (notably fast-growing right-wing evangelical Christians).'^ This alliance was cemented and driven ideologically by an aggressive mainstream media."’ The ‘Lula Moment’ was limited by this constant process of political erosion, its faltering external driver and the restrictions imposed by the policy tripod. Even though the neoliberal policy framework had been diluted, the government remained only weakly committed to the rearticulation ot the systems of provision hollowed out by the neoliberal transition, and It was unable to diversify exports and raise the technological content of manufacturing production. Brazil created millions of jobs but they were mostly precarious, poorly paid and unskilled; urban services were neglected, manufacturing shrank and there was alarming underinvestment in economic infrastructure. DILMA I Dilma Rousseff was a revolutionary activist in her youth, and she rose in the PT as a manager and fixer. She had never been elected to public office until she was handpicked by Lula to be his successor for the 2010 election."' By then, she had already established an impressive reputation as Minister of Mines and Energy and, later, Lula’s Chief of Staff. There is no doubt that Dilma is the most left-wing President of Brazil since Joao Goulart was deposed m 1964. However, Dilma had no personal base of support. Having been anointed by Lula, she inherited both his voters and his detractors and, unsurprisingly, the voting pattern m 2010 closely mirrored that of the 2006 elections: Dilma won m the poorer states and, m each state, her vote was concentrated in the poorer areas and among the least educated voters. Her mam rival, from the nominally social democratic and strongly neoliberal PSDB (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira), won in the richer states and among higher income voters and

BRAZIL’S NEW RIGHT

219

those with more years of formal education. Dilma s first administration maintained Lula’s core economic team, but she replaced the President ot the Central Bank, Henrique Meirelles, a commercial banker afliliated to the PSDB, with Alexandre Tombini, a civil serv'ant more closely aligned with Dilma’s own priorities. The government expanded its social programmes and tilted economic policy further towards neo-developmentalism, but did not abandon the neoliberal tripod. The strategic goal was to shiit the engine of growth away from a taltering external sector and towards domestic investment and consumption. Real interest rates tell to their lowest levels in 20 years, fiscal policy became more e.xpansionary% new public investment programmes were introduced, several SOEs were restructured and strengthened, limited capital controls sought to moderate the overvaluation of the real, and the government introduced protection measures against 112 imported goods as part of a minimum national content policy in purchases made by the public sector and the SOEs. The administration intervened in an increasing array of sectors to reduce costs and expand infrastructure, strong-armed the private operators into reducing the price of electricity, held back the price ot petrol, and BNDES financed an expanding portfolio of loans. Additionally, the government sought to attract private investment into infrastructure and transport through concessions, public-private partnerships and regulatory changes in order to bypass budgetary constraints and legal limitations to state fundings and to commit the internal bourgeoisie to the government’s investment programme. This strategy failed. The continuation of the global economic crisis further tightened Brazil’s fiscal and balance of payments constraints; quantitative easing m the USA and UK destabilized the real and other developing country currencies, and global uncertainty and strident domestic critiques of‘interventionism’ limited private investment.'*^ The government raised its bets, intervening in additional sectors, building infrastructure and reducing taxes and energy prices - to no avail. Private investment tapered off, public finances deteriorated, inflation crept up and

CjE)P

growth sagged. Brazil s

prospects worsened further as China’s economy cooled and commodity prices fell. Stagnant exports and growing imports raised the current account deficit, and tax revenues faltered. Even the weather turned against the government, with a severe drought enveloping the southeast. As the drivers of economic growth successively failed, the administration lost the ability to reconcile interests within and beyond the neo-developmentahst front. International capital and the internationalized bourgeoisie used these economic difficulties to justify an attack against the Dilma

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administration, demanding the restoration of the orthodox neoliberal policies implemented m the 199()s. The ensuing siege by the mainstream media and the PSli)B pushed the government towards a policy shift. Dilma’s economic team increasingly deferred their neo-developmentalist ambitions and leaned back towards the neoliberal policy tripod. Fiscal austerity returned gradually, and the inflation target became increasingly important. Yet this policy shift did not reduce the intensity of the neoliberal attack. Instead, it increased the confidence of the opposition, which doubled its efforts to win the 2014 elections. Dilma’s administration had to confront not only a worsening economy but also mounting political turmoil. Since Lula stepped down, the political hegemony of the PT depended on perceptions of‘managerial competence’, the absence ot corruption scandals, continuing growth and distribution, and stable political alliances. None was easily achievable under adverse economic circumstances; worse still, Dilma never had Lula’s talent to bridge differences and bring together disparate interests. She was allegedly impatient with her political allies, intolerant with self-interested entrepreneurs, uninterested in the social movements, and she intimidated her own staff A vacuum formed around the president just as the economy tanked. The neoliberal alliance smelled blood. The media ratcheted up the pressure and started scaremongering about an impending ‘economic disaster’; the government’s base of support buckled and it became increasingly difficult to pass new legislation. The judiciary tightened the screws around the PT. Successive corruption scandals came to light. The neo-developmental front began to crumble and, with it, the political hegemony of the PT. In early 2013, the opinion polls suggested that support for the government was falling, and in June vast demonstrations erupted around the country. They encompassed a melange of themes loosely centred on

competent

government

and

corruption’.

Those

demonstrations

exposed the tensions due to the economic slowdown, the government’s isolation and its failure to improve public service provision in line with rising incomes and expectations. The middle classes also vented their fury against the widening of social citizenship, including changes in the state, transfer programmes, university quotas for blacks and state school pupils, labour rights for domestic servants and so on. In response, the government proposed a revision of the constitution m order to reform the political system. But the idea was shot down by most other parties, including the administration’s key centrist ally, Vice-President Michel Temer’s PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democratico Brasileiro, Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement). The government also introduced a

BRAZIL’S NEW RIGHT

221

programme bringing mainly Cuban doctors to municipalities with no health tacilities. Despite this proviso and the immediate impact and popularity of the programme, it was bitterly resisted by several Medical Associations, the media and most commentators. Their rejection was transparently informed by elitism, racism and rejection of the Cuban regime. As the economy ground to a halt the government reverted more fully to the policy tnpod m order to buy time and ‘credibility’: once pinned in the comer, the PT abandoned their own social and political base in order to tiy and please domestic, international, industrial, financial and agrarian capital. This was still msutficient. The government never had the support of the international and tinancial bourgeoisie, and was not about to gain it now. It lost most ot the middle class after the Mensaldo and because of its distributional and citizenship initiatives. It alienated the organized workers because of the worsening economic situation, corruption scandals, the policy turnaround and the persistent failure to address their key demands: the liinitation of the working week to 40 hours, the reduction of subcontracting and the improvement of pensions. It distanced some informal workers for those same reasons, although in this segment support for Dilma has mostly held up. And It lost the internal bourgeoisie because of the economic slowdown, lack of influence over the president and changing public policies. These disparate groups were bestowed a semblance of coherence by an antagonistic media claiming that the government was incompetent and the state was out of control. The administration also further earned the hostility of a highly conservative Congress because of its inability to negotiate. And, to cap it all, Dilma’s own relationship with Lula deteriorated badly. DILMA II Dilma was re-elected in 2014 by the narrowest margin in recent Brazilian history. Her victory was achieved through a last-minute mass mobilization triggered by left perceptions that the opposition candidate, former governor Aecio Neves, would impose harsh neoliberal economic policies and reverse the social and economic achievements ot the PT. In the first weeks of her second administration, Dilma faced converging cnses leading to the collapse of the two axes of PT rule: the economic model and the political alliances supporting the administration. The government’s earlier unwillingness to remove the policy tripod, the long global crisis and the insufficiency of the country s industrial policies fed the overvaluation of the currency, deindustrialization and a rising current account deficit. Balance of payments and fiscal constraints weakened the labour markets and induced inflation, and this vicious circle eliminated the scope for distribution and

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growth. Rising incomes in the previous period and insufFicient investment in urban infrastructure led to an intolerable deterioration in service provision, symbolized by transport in 2013 and water scarcity in 2014-15. In both cases, the fulcrum was in Sao Paulo, the country’s largest metropolitan area, its economic powerhouse and — crucially — the bedrock of the political right as well as the birthplace of the PT. Dilma’s desperate response to these crises was to invite the banker Joaquim Levy, a representative of international capital based in Bradesco, one of Brazil’s largest private banks, to the Ministry of Finance, and charge him with the implementation of a ‘credible’ adjustment programme that inevitably alienated the government’s social base. The government’s weakness and its adoption ot a large part ot the macroeconomic programme of the opposition - while maintaining its own social policies that grated the upper middle class — triggered an escalation of the political crisis. Another massive corruption scandal, long lurking in the background, captured the headlines. The LavaJato operation led by the Federal Police unveiled a large corruption network centred on Petrobras and including cartels, fraud and illegal funding for several political parties, among them the PT.'*^ Blanket media coverage focusing on the PT alone led to the further erosion of the government’s credibility in Brazil and its demoralization abroad. This scandal also catalyzed the emergence of a new right mass opposition movement demanding the ‘end of corruption’ and ‘Dilma’s impeachment’, even though there is no Icir d. Examination of the opposition’s grievances instantly leads to a laundry list ot deeply felt, unfocused and conflicting dissatisfactions that tend to be articulated by expletives rather than logic, let alone law.-^' THE BRAZILIAN ‘NEW RIGHT’ AND ITS LIMITATIONS The ‘new right’ describes a large and heterogeneous field of social groups, interests and values that have converged around an unremitting rejection of the PT and selected aspects of its rule. These groups include (mainly, though not exclusively, US-based) imperialist interests, large domestic capital integrated with the empire (the international Brazilian bourgeoisie dominated by finance but including segments of manufacturing and agribusiness), the upper middle class and sections of the broad working class that, for religious or ideological reasons, oppose the expansion of civic rights and progressive values, with current flashpoints centred around abortion and homosexuality (a generation ago divorce fulfilled a similar role). Politically, the new right encompasses an authoritarian fringe campaigning for the return of military rule, a larger moderate grouping demanding ‘only’ the impeachment of President Rousseff, and a jumble of participants

BRAZIL’S NEW RIGHT

223

protesting against more or less clearly defined policies but not necessarily supporting the removal ot the government by militai'y, parliamentary or judicial force. Despite their significant differences, these groups converge around the fight against corruption, which they associate directly with the PT as if It were previously absent. This selective

anti-corruption discourse replicates older right-wing

movements in Brazil, especially the campaign against President Getulio Vargas in 1954, and President Joao Goulart m 1964. The movement against Vargas collapsed when the president committed suicide on the verge of being overthrown; the movement against Goulart culminated in a military coup. Further right-wing entanglements with anti-corruption campaigns include the presidential election of Janio Quadros m 1961, who promised to clean up the country and resigned after only seven months, having failed to extract emergency powers from Congress; and the short-lived triumph ot Fernando Collor, ‘the hunter of Maharajahs’ (i.e., overly paid or corrupt civil serv'ants), in 1990, who became tangled up in an extraordinary tale of robberv' and multiple additional crimes and was impeached after two years. These events suggest that anti-corruption campaigns can have mass appeal, but corruption itself is resilient and movements against it have been used regularly to throttle the left. Despite

this

common

trait

with

earlier

right-wing mobilizations,

the emerging new right in Brazil does not appeal to the traditional anti¬ communist discourse grounded on Cold War imperatives, and it is not inspired by traditional Catholic values. Instead, the new right proclaims the (ill-defined) dangers of Bolivarianism and the closely related (but wholly chimerical) threat of‘left-wing authoritarianism’ in Brazil. Beyond empty calls for ‘the end of corruption’, which implicitly means ‘the end of the PT’, the central objective is the elimination of the neodevelopmentahst elements in PT government policy, if necessary through a rupture with democracy. These policy changes would impose a rigid neoliberal policy tripod and a sharp ‘fiscal adjustment’, and reverse the independent turn of Brazilian foreign policy. In addition, Petrobras would be ‘reformed’, with a new extraction policy offering significant concessions to the oil majors, the local content rules for government and SOE purchases would be eliminated, and BNDES loans would be cut drastically. The PSDB expresses the interests of segments of the bourgeoisie that would benefit from this, and the Party strongly advocates strictly neoliberal policies in

the name of ‘economic efficiency’ and

‘competitiveness’.

However, those policies lack mass appeal because they offend the widely shared notion of a national economy in Brazil; they also threaten many

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thousands of jobs. In order to bypass these difficulties, the PSDB too has placed corruption at the centre of its discourse. Unsurprisingly, the Party only points to instances or allegations of corruption involving the PT and the RoussetT administration, while avoiding entirely scandals involving the PSDB itself and other right-wing parties. This political acrobatics is facilitated by the collusion of the media and the connivance of the judiciary; scandals involving the mainstream parties seldom make headlines and rarely reach the courts; m contrast, those involving the PT are investigated noisily and even hysterically, leading to (frequent but rarely reported) complaints of abuse because of the overzealous diligence of the Federal Police and the judicial system. It is also noticeable that the institutions where corruption has been most often investigated are precisely those with key roles in the PT economic strategy: Petrobras and, more recently, BNDES. In contrast, there has never been interest in corruption m the central bank or other institutions of strategic interest to the bourgeoisie. In sum, while the 2015 demonstrations were ostensibly against corruption and for Dilma’s impeachment, they were actually about party political jockeying, shifting alliances between influential groups and disputes about political funding. More generally, corruption cannot be extricated from Brazilian political life by chasing up one criminal, firm or Swiss bank account at a time. While punishment must be part of the package, meaningful change must be based on constitutional and political reforms addressing the functioning and funding of the political parties and the structures of representation m Brazilian democracy. This is as yet not being contemplated. The PSDB has been split over the campaign to impeach President Rousseff. While the destruction of the PT administration would bring obvious advantages to the PSDB, this could also have destabilising consequences. The relatively more cautious strategy of keeping Rousseff under siege m order to extract from her a steaciy flow of concessions is currently more appealing to the leadership of the PSDB. If the Party eventually decides to support the impeachment campaign, with or without mihtar^^ intervention, the PSDB will have forfeited its claim to be a democratic organization. It would have, instead, completed its drift to the extreme right, following Its earlier reluctance to accept defeat m the 2014 presidential elections. In the following weeks the PSDB appealed to the courts on spurious grounds and objected to Dilma s sweaimg m, deploying implausible legal arguments. Currently, part of its national leadership advocates impeachment with the flimsiest of arguments: since Dilma is the countiy’s president she must have been aware of several instances of corruption; ergo, she is complicit and must be removed from power - no specific proof is required.

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The 2015 wave ot demonstrations was called by social meciia, backed up by the mainstream media, the PSDB anci other mainstream parties, but the latter are careful to blenci into the background so the protests appear spontaneous. While this helps to keep the focus on the government instead ot the political system as a whole, it also serves to disguise the rejection ot most it not all political parties within the new right, ranging from the disillusioned (‘all politicians are corrupt’) to the fascist (‘my Party is my counm^’). Unsurprisingly, members of the PT and other left organizations are routinely harassed in most demonstrations but, on occasion, even representatives ot the bourgeois opposition have been prevented from speaking. It is apparent that, just as there are conflicts between classes and fractions within the neo-developmentalist front, there are also significant tensions within the new right. The upper middle class provides the mass base of the new right, for example, through the Free Brazil Movement {Movimento Brasil Livre, MBL), one of the groups leading the demonstrations. Together with imperialism and the international bourgeoisie, several upper middle-class groups also argue rhetorically for a ‘minimum state’, but they do not generally defend a fiscal retrenchment that would cause economic losses to the middle class, and they eschew debates about the structure of the oil industry, BNDES loan policies or domestic content requirements. Instead, their rabid discourse and defence of‘liberalism’ and ‘meritocracy’ targets the social policies of the PT administrations. Their objections are due to the perception that these policies harm the economic interests and social privileges of the upper middle class. Economically, transfers to the poor allegedly misuse the taxes paid by the middle class in order to benefit the undeserving poor and the workshy. The upper middle class also abhors the racial and social quotas introduced in the universities and the civil service during the last decade, and they complain bitterly about the extension of labour rights to domestic servants: upper middle-class families have traditionally had at least one (generally female) servant, who is normally treated with a mixture of paternalism and authoritarianism, if not outright abuse, and these social relations are threatened by the regulation of domestic work. There is also abundant evidence that the upper middle class believes that distributive policies threaten its social privileges, for example, because environments that were traditionally reserved for white and relatively wellofl'patrons have recently been ‘invaded’ by black and brown working-class users. They include airports, sports clubs, private clinics and even roads, where automobile use has expanded rapidly fuelled by easy credit. Finally,

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quotas promoting the access of black students and those from state schools to university and the civil service have been subjected to successive legal and political challenges, since they break the near-monopoly of higher education by the upper middle class.In sum, although the opposition against the PT by the upper middle class converges with the interests of the international bourgeoisie, the underlying drivers are distinct and they may come into conflict. There is also evidence that the new right discourse has been spreading among the wider working population, partly through the fast-growing protestant (especially Pentecostal) churches. These churches draw upon highly conservative values and rally overtly against the rights of women and homosexuals, and even distil a disguised racism through their prejudice against the Afro-Brazilian religions. For example, the (Pentecostal) Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies has declared that he refuses to submit to a vote proposals to decriminalize abortion or to criminalize homophobia. Interminable mainstream media aggression against the government in general and corruption specifically has fed popular dissatisfaction with their own economic and social circumstances. In turn, the concessions offered by Rousseft to the neoliberal opposition have alienated the organized workers that might still be expected to defend the government. The resulting widespread malaise suggests that the new nght can gain ground among social sectors traditionally committed to the left and to the PT. CONCLUSION The protest movement against Dilma Rousseft overtly focuses on government corruption, but this is a diversion. The mainstream media and the opposition stress the financial flows involving the PT and downplay the involvement of the other parties, but a disconcertingly large number of politicians of every stripe is tangled up m Lam Jato and other investigations running concurrently. They include the Speakers of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, governors, the opposition presidential candidate Aecio Neves, and many more. However, for the media only the PT mattered for two reasons: because scandals can be used to cut off the sources of finance to the Party, throttling it, and they can be used to detach the PT from the internal bourgeoisie that has supported and funded the Party since Lula’s election. The detention of prominent executives and the CEOs of some of Brazil’s largest construction and oil companies and the threat of bankruptcy against large oil, shipbuilding and construction firms because of the paralysis of Petrobras and public investment sends a clear message that the PT is not to be supported - or else. The consequence of this aggressive approach is the destabilization

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ot the entire oil chain and the construction industry that, together with BNDES, have played key roles in the PT’s neo-developinentalist policies. The ciistance between iirst impressions and the grand strategy led by the international bourgeoisie and populated by the upper middle class ensured that the mobilization could not be controlled easily or precisely, and it could just as plausibly have grown as tapered oft. In either case, it would leave behind a residue ot disgust that can tuel a political spiral ot unintended consequences.’" Beyond this irreducible uncertainty, the fate of the four federal administrations led by the PT suggests a number of lessons. Firstly, under favourable circumstances, greater state legitimacy and hybrid economic policies disarmed the political right and disconnected the radical left from the working class. However, when the economic tide turned the fundamental incompatibility between neoliberal and neo-developmental policies fostered policy confusion and political crisis, and contributed to a conftuence ot dissatisfactions that can overwhelm the administration. Unmet aspirations and the convergence of grievances, even if they are mutually incompatible, can trigger political isolation and volatility that can become hard to contain. Secondly, while PT administrations managed to reduce the income gap between the middle class and the working class, a second lesson is that the political and ideological distance between them increased. This chasm creates political instability in the short-term and obstacles for democratic social and political reforms in Brazil in the medium- and long-temi. Economic growth, social inclusion, the distribution of income and wealth, employment creation and the expansion of infrastructure remain relevant goals in Brazil, but the PT has become increasingly unable to build the political conditions to achieve them. Thirdly, despite its volcanic energy and strident support for the imposition of an orthodox neoliberal programme in contrast with the presumably obvious shortcomings of the neo-developmentalist alternative, the new right opposition remains deprived of wide popularity. The PT has been implementing many of the opposition’s neoliberal macroeconomic policies while It seeks to preserve, in part, its own social policies. The PSDB does not seek to overthrow the government (although Dihna may have to step down if the situation spirals out of control); the upsurge against Dilma and the PT did not raise the popularity of the opposition (‘they are all thieves’), and no one aims to ‘end corruption’. This is not, then, a crisis of the state, the political system or bourgeois class rule. But it is a crisis of government and the hegemony of the PT, and it cannot be addre.ssed constructively in the absence of economic growth.

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The experience of the PT suggests, fourthly, that ambitious policy changes are needed in order to break with neoliberalism and secure continuing gains in distribution and poverty reduction. They include changes in the country’s economic base, international integration, employment patterns, public service provision, structures of political representation and the media. However, these were never contemplated by the PT, and those limitations have now returned to destroy the Party and its leaders. In Brazilian politics, selt-imposed weakness is rarely rewarded; instead, it elicits escalating attacks targeting the jugular. A further lesson is that the Brazilian opposition has become increasingly aggressive. Inspired by the mass movement leading to the resignation of President Fernando Collor in 1992, the media and the political right tried to bring people to the streets against Lula in 2005 because of the Mensalao. They failed miserably. In 2013, they attempted to capture an existing movement, but failed again as the demonstrations tapered off In 2015, the opposition built up the protest movement from scratch and brought it to the streets. This movement is large, cohesive and it belongs entirely to the nght. In the meantime, the left both inside and outside the PT remains disorganized and bereft of aspirations and leadership for the first time since the mid-1970s. Despite these successes, the organized nght has not gained popularity, despite the degnngolade of the PT. The combination of strengths and weaknesses on the sides of the government and the opposition suggests that Brazil is entenng a long period of instability. The emergence of a new political hegemony may take several years - and it is unlikely to be led by the left. As the ‘Pink Wave’ crashes on Brazilian shores, the Kirchner administration reaches the end of the road in Argentina and CliciiHsino disintegrates in Venezuela. These outcomes suggest that transformative projects in Latin America, however radical (or not), are bound to lace escalating resistance. Its form, content and intensity, and impact upon the social and political alliances supporting the government, will tend to fluctuate with the alobal environment, making it difficult to plan reformist strategies. It follows that broader alliances are not always or necessarily better, because they are prone to instability, and that the social, political and institutional sources of power must be targeted as soon as possible. There can be no guarantee that the task will become easier tomorrow, and no certainty that the future will be better than the present. The future does not belong to the left: it must be seized.

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NOTES

I

We are gratetui to Alison Ayers, Ana Saggioro Garcia, Antonio Carlos Macedo e Silva, Ben Fine, Lecio Morais, Lucas Bertholdi-Saad, Maria de Lourdes Mollo, Neil Coleman, Pedro Loureiro, R,iy Kiely, Sadi dal Rosso, Sam Gindin and Sandra Teresinha da Silva tor their generous comments to previous versions ot this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

2

For an extreme example, see the video ‘Por tavor, chaniem o alto comando!’, available on Trip TV’s youtube channel, posted 16 March 201,5.

3

See, tor exampile, Altredo Saad-Filho, ‘Mass Protests under “Left Neoliberalism’’: Brazil, June-July 2013’, Critical Sociolci^y, 39(,S), 2013; Alfredo Saad-Filho, ‘Brazil: Development Strategies and Social Change from Import-Substitution to the “Events of June’”, Studies in Political Economy, 94, 2014; and Alfredo Saad-Filho and Lecio Morais, ‘Mass Protests: Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Malaise?’, in L. Panitch, G. Albo and V. Chibber, eds.. Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class, London: Merlin Press, 2015.

4

See Alfredo Saad-Filho and Lecio Morais ‘Lula and the Continuity of Neoliberalisin in Brazil: Strategic Choice, Economic Imperative or Political Schizophrenia?’, Historical Materialism, 13(1), 2005.

5

The class composition of this alliance is examined in Altredo Saad-Filho, ‘Brazil: Development Strategies and Social Change’. For a broader study, see Amiando Boito, ‘Govemos Lula: a Nova Burguesia National no Poder’, in Annando Boito e Andreia Galvao, eds., PoHtica e Classes Socials no Brasil dos Anos 2000, Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2012.

6

Andre Singer, ‘A Segunda Alma do Partido dos Trabalhadores’, Nouos Estudos Cebrap,

7

See Annando Boito, ‘A Hegemonia Neoliberal no Governo Lula’, Critica Marxista, 17,

8

See Pierre Botirdieti, Contre-Feux - Propos pour Sert’ir d la Resistance Contre L'invasion

9

See Vanessa Correa, ed., Padrao de Acumula(ao e Desenvoivimento Brasileiro, Sao Paulo:

10

See Andre Singer, ‘Raizes Sociais e Ideologicas do Lulismo’, Novos Estudos Cebrap, 85,

88, 2010, p. 109. 2003, p. 6; and A. Singer, ‘A Segunda Alma’. Xeo-Lihhale, Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 1998. Fundayao Perseu Abramo, 2013. 2009. II

For a detailed analysis, see Boito, ‘Governos Lula’.

12

Singer ‘Raizes Sociais’.

13

See Saad-Filho and Morais, ‘Mass Protests’.

14

This is similar in composition to the popular and national fronts proposed by Communist Parties in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1950s-60s. See Armando Boito, ‘O Lulismo e um Tipo de Bonapartismo?’, Critica Marxista, 37, 2013.

15

Marcio Pochmann, Nova Classe Media?, Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2012.

16

The Brazilian mainstream media is highly homogeneous in its opposition to the PT. It is as if, in the UK, the BBC, Sky TV and all major newspapers copied the Daily Mail, or, m the US, if the entire mainstream media was regimented by the Fox Broadcasting

17

Company. Brazilian presidents can be re-elected only once, but they are allowed to run again for the same position after a tenn’s interruption.

18

Yilmaz Akyiiz, Waving or Drowning: Developing Comitries after the Financial Crisis, South

19

See the graphic sumnianes available at http://mfograficos.estadao.com.br; http://www.

20

See, for example, the online petition for impeachment on http://www.peticaopublica.

Centre Research Paper 48, Geneva, 2013. estadao.com.br; and http://estadaodados.com. com.br, or the Facebook impeachment page, available at https://pt-br.facebook.com.

230 21

SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016 The seriously rich are not too troubled, since their children can always study abroad; in contrast, the upper middle class must rely on the state-funded universities which, now, are no longer exclusive.

22

This scenario can be compared to the aftermath of the vast mobilizations associated with the Matii Pitlite investigations in Italy. The overthrow of the First Republic did not foster a renewed democracy; it led, instead, to a political life dominated by Silvio Berlusconi, biif[qa-bni{^a and Beppe Grillo’s whimsical Movimento 5 Stelle.

CHAUVINIST NATIONALISM IN JAPAN’S SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE GAVAN MCCORMACK early sev^enty years after the San Francisco peace treaty of 1951, which X ^ cemented in place Japan’s incorporation in the postwar US-centred strategic and political order, Japan remains subject to heavy US control, and the country' still faces eastwards towards its patron even though to its west China is now its key economic partner.' The economic superpower Japan remains semi-occupied: Okinawa is still essentially a US military colony where the Marine Corps and Air Force are deeply entrenched, while elsewhere Japan is dotted with housing, hotels, schools, golf courses and other US military facilities. The Japan-based US forces enjoy a measure of semi-colonial extraterritorial privilege, scarcely revised under the Status of Forces Agreement in place since San Francisco. As the process of postCold War reorganization of US forces proceeds, that base system is being consolidated and reinforced. It IS ironic that the Japan that resisted becoming a subordinate part of the China-centred world system to its west for over a millennium should have chosen - within the space of just over half a century - to become precisely that in relation to the great power to its east. China, for its part, multiplied Its per capita GDP by twenty times between the early 1990s and 2014, by which time it was the world’s largest economy (on a purchasing power parity basis), with a GDP of $10.3 trillion, roughly double Japan’s.^ As a proportion of global GldP, China rose steadily, from 2 per cent m 1990 to a predicted 25 per cent m 2030 and 27.8 per cent in 2060, while Japan has correspondingly declined, from 15 per cent in 1990, to below 10 per cent in 2008, expected to reach 6 per cent in 2030 and 3.2 per cent in 2060.’ It IS that shift in relative weight perhaps more than anything (national debt, aging, shrinking population) that disturbs Japan. Even if the world no longer spins on a US axis, the Japanese state is built on the assumption that it does, and that the system created at San Francisco continues. Japan and China

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today present contrasting visions of a future East Asian order of security and cooperation — a Pax Asia — but for either to yield is almost unimaginable, while for both to cooperate on a basis of mutual respect and equality is unlikely, because of the past record/ By clinging to the Pax Americana, the Japanese government, especially under Abe Shinzo (prime minister 2()()6-20()7 and 2012-present), sometimes referred to as ‘nationalist’, is better considered a ‘client state’. Seventy years after defeat in war, Japan is led by a politician who (in)famously looks with pride on Japan’s feudal and fascist past, but who, Janus-like, is at once deeply hostile towards the United States and utterly servile to it, being perhaps the most enthusiastically pro-American of contemporary world leaders. The type of chauvinist nationalism he displays is really what political scientist Nakano Koichi calls ‘air nationalism’.^ Yet Abe Shinzo, despite - or even perhaps because of - being the very epitome of‘slavish mentality’, looks assured of a rosy political future.^ Virtually unopposed in the Diet, he seems set to become the longest lasting and most ‘successful’ of all modern Japan’s prime ministers. FROM GRANDFATHER KISHI TO GRANDSON ABE Haifa century ago, Kishi Nobusuke (prime minister 1957-60) played a key role in bridging the contradictions of the formula and fusing prewar and wartime thinking in the American-designed state. Kishi, grandfather and political role model to current Prime Minister Abe, was first a key figure m the design of the institutions of militarist Japan in the 1930s and 1940s - its ‘Albert Speer’. As such, he was a prominent member of the government that declared war on the United States in 1941. Later, however, he ser\'ed as architect of postwar democratic Japan in the 1950s and 1960s and became one of the two ‘most influential agents the United States ever recruited [and who] helped carry out the CIA’s mission to control the government’.' Meeting regularly with his CIA case officer, he received direction in basic political tactics and access to a flow of secret funds in an arrangement that then continued under his successors for ‘at least fifteen years, under four American presidents ... into the 1970s’.*^ The two items that, under US guidance, became central to Kishi, rearmament and constitutional revision, were adopted a half century later by his grancison, Abe. As the Japanese experiment seemed to be brilliantly successful, setting the country on an apparently ever victorious march towards global supremacy in tbe 198()s — the Japan as Number One’ era — the US government stepped up pressure to seek a greater contribution in militaiy and strategic terms and neutralize and incorporate its economic thrust under US control. On

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the tornier, Japan was subjected tc^ a series of political anci strategic policy desiderata statements from the mid-90s on, first by the US government and then by nominally private think tanks.These prescriptions may be seen in sum as a statement ot the principles that have guided US policy on japan for the past two decades. These political and strategic pressures to conform to Washington’s direction were paralleled by the assertion of US economic control and pressure to neoliberalize, anci to open key sectors of its ecc:)nomy, finance, insurance, health sercuces and pharmaceuticals. A Statement of Reform Desiderata, demaiiciing comprehensive institutional change by way of deregulation, pnvatization and structural reform, was issued by the government of the United States to the government of Japan each year ciuring the two decades since 1989. The point, as Murata Ryohei, Japanese ambassador to the United States (1989-92), later wrote, was to press Japan for ‘system change’ on behalt ot US banks and insurance businesses and to facilitate merger and acquisition access to Japan’s finance sector."’ The high water mark ot that phase of the relationship came under Prime Minister Koizumi (20012006), coinciding with much of the presidency of George W. Bush (20012009). In these so-called ‘golden years’, as Vice Minister for Defense Moriya Takemasa later remarked, ‘it is called an alliance, but in practice the US side just decides things unilaterally’.” This control mechanism was suspended under Prime Minister Hatoyama in 2009, resumed under a slightly different name in 2011, and then from 2013 incorporated within the comprehensive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. Showing just how seriously he took the encomiums issuing from Washington, in February 2013, when Abe made his first visit to the United States since resuming the office of prune minister, he responded to the Center for Strategic and International Studies agenda by addressing his mentors individually by their first names and assuring them that their instructions of the previous year would be faithfully implemented.'" Despite the regional and global transformations, twenty-first century Japanese governments, never with greater determination than under Abe, have concentrated on committingjapan absolutely to the US, in other words to reinforcing the San Francisco system, significantly stepping up Japan’s commitment under it and giving it a specifically anti-China direction. When he appeared before Congress in April 2015, Abe could report that he had continued to do everything within his power to that end.

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THE ABE PATH The tension between the two poles of the San Francisco formula — subserv¬ ience to the US and the assertion of national purity and superiority — sharpened in the two and a half post-Cold War decades and especially in the time of Abe. The contradictory' nature of his commitment simultaneously to confirm and intensify military cooperation with the US, restore the ‘proud’ emperor-centred, heavily state-centred polity of the early twentieth century, promote ‘correct’, denialist history centred on the country’s proud and pure traditions, justify the wars of the 193f)s and 1940s as directed at the ‘liberation’ of Asia, and deny or belittle Japan’s wartime crimes and atrocities, neoliberalize the economy, and pursue a central role in a twentyfirst century East Asia seemed not to phase Abe. Nominally ‘conservative’, he has proved the most radical of all post-1945 Japanese prime ministers, intent upon revising all three of the country’s basic charters: Ampo (the 1951 security treaty with the United States, revised m 1960), the Constitution (1946) and the Fundamental Law ofEducation (1947). With the end of the Cold War the United States urged Japan to make the US-Japan relationship ‘mature’, meaning to increase its share of the burden of hegemony.'-'* In part, this meant ‘reorganization of US forces in Japan’ {Beiguii saihen). First as chief cabinet secretary in 2005 and then as pnme

minister, Abe’s efforts to expand Japan’s military contribution to the US naturally weighed heavily in his favour in Washington, but at the same time the fact that he and most of his cabinet belonged to organizations that looked back to wartime Japan for inspiration was hard for the US to tolerate. These included the Liberal View of History Study Group (founded 1995), the Committee to Produce New History Textbooks or Tsuktirukai (founded 1997), the Diet Members’ Associations ‘for the Passing on of a Correct History

(founded 1995), for ‘Reflection on Japan’s Future and History

Education’ (founded 1997) and for a ‘Bnght Japan’ (founded 2013). His cabinet was made up almost entirely of members of two organizations, Nihon Kaigi (literally: Japan Conference) and the Shinto Politics League. Nihon Kaigi is committed to the notion of Japan as (in the words of former

Prime Minister Mori)

country of the gods centring on the emperor’. It

rejects the judgement of the Tokyo Tribunal (the International Military Tribunal for the Far East or IMTFE), denies the ‘Nanjing massacre’ and the existence of the wartime sex-slave system of‘comfort women’, calls for moral and correct education, and insists on the ‘beautiful’ Japan that was the subject of Abe’s 2006 book.'^ The Shinto Politics League (founded in 1969 but assuming added importance under Abe as a core member and from 2013 president) shared many of these views and placed special stress on the

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centrality ot the imperial institution. As ot 2015, sixteen members of the nineteen-member Cabinet belonged to Nihon Kaiiii, and eighteen, together with the cabinet secretar)% two assistant cabinet secretaries, and all three special assistants to the prime minister, were members of the Shinto Politics League.'^ When Abe defined his agenda as to ‘shrug otb the husk of the postwar state’ and ‘recover Japan’s independence’, he could only mean replacing USimposed structures with ‘Japanese’ (meaning pre-1945 fascist and emperorworshippmg) ones.'^ His commitment to rewriting Japanese history, and his equivocations and refusal to acknowledge responsibility for Japan’s wartime comfort women system of sexual slavery, vexed Japan’s relations with the outside world, from Beijing and Seoul to Washington. During his first term m office, the parliaments of Canada and the European Union, followed by the US House of Representatives, adopted resolutions rebuking Japan, i.e. Abe’s Japan, for the perceived failure to acknowledge and compensate victims ot that system. The ‘Shintoism’ of Abe and his colleagues is not the common folk religion associated with local shrines and seasonal festivals, but what had been known m prewar and wartime Japan as ‘state Shinto’, predicated on the view of Japan and its people as unique, superior and emperor-centred, precisely the view held by those who led Japan to the disastrous wars of the 1930s and 1940s. These are the sorts of organization that in a European context would be proscribed and membership itself treated as a crime. Philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya asks ruefully: ‘How can one not be sick at heart at the thought that, 70 years after the war, nearly 300 members of the National Diet, including the prime minister and [most members of] the Cabinet, belong to such organizations [as the Shinto Politics Teague]?’'^ Abe’s efforts to secure a US guarantee to defend Japan under the 1960 security treaty m the event of any clash with China over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands alanned the US government because it carried the potential of embroiling the United States in a conflict with China over ownership of uninhabited East China Sea rocks. Abe’s consistent priority was to treat differences with China over this issue not as a territorial dispute to be negotiated but as the subject of a cast-iron security guarantee from the US that in effect allowed him to brandish the threat of full-scale American war should China not submit and thus absolved him from any need to negotiate with China.'*^Joseph Nye, doyen of‘Japan handlers’, was moved to adopt an unusually severe tone: ‘Just to sit there and say there is no dispute is ndiculous’.’'^ Despite the fact that Abe staunchly defended and promoted the US-Japan

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relationship and US interests, on his visit to Washington in February 2013 he was given a cold reception, treated merely to lunch, given no congressional speech opportunity, and denied the customary press conference with the president. The subsequent communique made no reference to Abe’s Chinafocused security agenda but instead simply committed him to Obama’s trade and investment policies.^" That same year, despite strong and explicit US pressure including a personal plea from Vice-President Biden, Abe proceeded to fulfill his pledge to worship at Yasukuni Shrine, the Tokyo institution dedicated to worship of those who had fought and died for the imperial cause, including the Class A-convicted war criminals.^’ His Washington stocks sank even lower. The US embassy in Tokyo declared that ‘the United States is disappointed that Japan’s leadership has taken an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan’s neighbors’." Washington applied heavy pressure to have Abe agree not to repeat his offence, urging him to ‘take steps to address decades-old disagreements over forced prostitution at Japanese military brothels in World War IF and to ‘consider reaffirming Tokyo’s previous formal apologies over World War II in a bid to erase tensions in East Asia’.“ One the one hand, he was reluctant to accommodate US pressures over identity and history or to concede that there is anything to negotiate with neighbouring countries over territonal disputes. The Library of Congress Research Service referred to what it called a ‘widely held view’ that ‘Abe embraces a revisionist view ofjapanese history that rejects the notion of imperial Japanese aggression and victimization of other Asians’.-"* Less than a year later it noted that Abe ‘was known for his strong nationalist views’ and restated the ‘concern that Tokyo could upset regional relations in ways that hurt US interests’.-^ Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel spoke of the ‘significant challenge’ the United States faced in ‘helping Japan to deal with historical issues that create tensions, anci even estrangement sometimes, with its neighbors Throughout his political career, Abe has campaigned vigorously to recreate what in 2006 he described as ‘beautiful’Japan and in 2012 as ‘new’ Japan. Such a Japan had no room for ‘shameful’ references to comfort women or wartime atrocities. Instead, he called for cultivation of moral and patriotic education - specifically, respect for Japan’s national symbols and for its ‘unique’ culture and history. He and other ‘conservatives’ had long objected to the idealistic and universalist tone of the 1947 Education Fundamental Law, some, including Nakasone Yasuhiro (prime minster 1982-87), complaining that such education had ‘destroyed the nation’ through ‘its emphasis on nghts’ and that the words of the Fundamental Law

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were so much ‘distilled water’, lacking the national spirit ot imperial Japan once declared in the Rescript on Education ot 1890.-^ Then, service to the emperor had been the highest ideal, and death in his cause the ultimate glorv'. In that vein, Abe in 2006 succeeded in accomplishing fundamental revision ot the law so that, alongside the ‘distilled water’ global humanist clauses ot the law, he inserted inculcation of‘love of country and homeland’ as an educational goal. Education was required by law to inculcate patriotism.The ‘New History Textbooks’ Abe and his colleagues promoted were designed to cultivate love ot country and to turn back the tide of what they called ‘masochistic’ history' — history that blames Japan for war and its atrocities. References to atrocities by the anned torces of imperial Japan were to be watered down and passive tormulations — tor example, women being abducted and turned into sex slaves — preferred to active formulations in which the Imperial Japanese Army was responsible for the abducting and enslaving. The word ‘massacre’ was to be avoided in discussions of the infamous Nanjing events of late 1937. Such an educational refomr agenda naturally profoundly affects relations with neighbour countries. At the end of 2013, Abe made four appointments to the board of the national broadcaster, NHK. The newly appointed head declared that the wartime comfort women system was part of an institution that existed in ‘every' country’ and that it was only considered wrong based on ‘today’s morality’.^^ He later abandoned the institutional claim to neutrality by declaring in January 2014, ‘If the government says right, who are we to say left?’ Another NHK director claimed that the Nanjing massacre of 1937 never occurred and that Americans had ‘fabricated war crimes against Japanese leaders in order to cover up American atrocities’.Yet another, harking back to the constitution of pre-1945 Japan, praised the leader of a nghtist group who had committed ritual suicide in 1993 and saw his death as a confirmation that Emperor Akihito had been a ‘living god’.^' Various members of the Abe government drew positive allusions for Japan from fascist Germany. Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro (on 29 July 2013), for example, made subtle reference to the people of Germany simply waking one day to find their constitution no longer meant what they had thought it did.^^ Others have been featured in photographs hobnobbing with leaders of the explicitly Nazi ‘National Socialist Workers Party’ and the Japanese chauvinist and violently anti-foreign

Zaitokukai

(Citizens’

Association

Opposed to Privileges for Korean-in-Japan Residents).Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Chief Ishiba Shigeru wrote in his blog (on 29 November 2013) that after all there was little difference in substance between vociferous

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demonstrators and terrorists. In the Diet on 16 March 2015 LDP upper house member Mihara Junko quoted with approval the wartime slogan ‘All the world under one roof {hakko ichiu), with more or less the connotation ot the Gemian expression ‘Deutschland uber alles'. A close adviser and friend, the mass circulation writer Sono Ayako, opined that Japan needed to import labour, but that it was better that the races be confined to separate living spaces in accord with South Africa’s apartheid model of race relations. Such statements emanated from figures close to the prime minister and were generally understood as a reflection of his own views. As for Yasukuni, Abe kept his distance following the plain warnings issued from Washington after his December 2013 visit. But his close colleagues continued to worship there,^^ and Abe chose another institution intimately connected with the imperial institution, Ise, for a 2015 New Year visit. The consolidation of consensus at the centre is matched by the virulence ot the rejection of dissent and dissenters, and even of those who dare to seem different. More than under any previous government, the mood of intolerance, chauvinism and hostility to dissent spreads. In an atmosphere of ken-kan zo-chu (hatred of Korea and of China), waves of xenophobic abuse are directed at dissenters, who are hounded as hikoktunin, kokuzoku or baikokudo (all roughly translatable as traitor): Zainichi resident Koreans are directly targeted by ‘hate speech’;^^ the Asahi Shimhun, sometime bastion of liberalism, reels under massive, orchestrated assault, joined and encouraged by Abe himself;^*^ and a palpable unease spreads, fed by speculation about the possibility of war.^^ The socioeconomic transformations of neoliberal downsizing, outsourcing, automation and ‘flexible’ employment practices also feed frustration and insecurity. All this helps consolidate Abe’s support base and justify further militarization. MILITARISM AND FREE TRADE: FROM ‘POSITIVE PACIEISM’ TO THE TPP Article 9 of its constitution declares that Japan ‘renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes , and that it will never maintain ‘lanci, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential’. Washington regretted this clause almost from the moment the ink dried on the document. Vice-President Richard Nixon m 1953 referred to it as a US ‘mistake’.^" In Japan, the LDP from its inception in 1955 included m its party platform a pledge to ‘revise’ It.'*'

The US has long pressed Japan to cast off its constitutional ‘pacifist’ shackles and play the full-fledged imlitary role of an ally. ‘Land, sea, and air

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forces were gradually built up during the Cold War under the sobriquet of ‘Selt-Detense Forces’ (SDF), and from the end of the Cold War the SDF were dispatched on ‘humanitarian’ or ‘peacekeeping’ missions to Cambodia, Mozambique, the Ciolan Heights, Haiti, and to Iraq and the Indian CJcean — Article 9 serving as a constraint on their pertbrming any combat role. In September 2013, however. Prime Minister Abe, speaking in Japanese, told the United Nations General Assembly that he planned to turn Japan into a ‘positive pacifist’ {sckkyoktiteki keiwashng{) country, to be ‘even more actively engaged in collective security measures, including peacekeeping operations’.'*’ In July 2014, his cabinet adopted a reinterpretation of Article 9 so that the right ot ‘collective sell-detence’, hitherto understood by all governments to forbid any combat role alongside its US ‘ally’, would constrain it no longer. Virtually at a stroke, he thus scrapped the long¬ standing view ot the constitution and freed Japan’s ‘Self-Defense Forces’ for global missions alongside US forces. Abe and his government render this core concept of ‘positive pacifism’ not by the literal English equivalent — because the word ‘pacifist’ might seem incongruous to refer to an alliance with the greatest military power in history and because US governments and policy intellectuals in Washington had long made clear that they do not want a Japan that is ‘positively’ (or any other kind of) pacifist — but by the subtly difFerent ‘proactive contribution to peace’. In the post-Cold War era, they demanded it set aside ‘anachronistic restraints’ (referring to Japan’s abhorrence for ‘the threat or use of force’ and its pledge to the international community to pacifism under Article 9 of its constitution) and clear the way to the merger of Japanese and US forces and shared imssions to the Persian Gulf or the Indian or Pacific oceans, and commitment to construct, and pay for, US base facilities in Okinawa, Guam and the Northern Manana Islands. In 2012, the ‘Japan handler’ group in Washington issued a specific challenge to Japan, asking if it was ready to assume the responsibilities, especially military, of a tier-one status state, or if it wished to lapse into becoming ‘a tier-two country’.'*'* On his February 2013 visit to the US, Abe made clear his response: ‘Japan is not, and will never be, a tier-two country’.*^ Apart from this long awaited reinterpretation of the constitution, Abe’s government made other efforts to please Washington; setting up a ‘National Security Council’ on US lines, centralizing and removing the exercise of war powers from parliamentary scrutiny;**’ adopting a Secrets Protection Law with draconian punishment for those who would attempt to look too deeply into what their government was doing; stepping up military spending; beginning the construction of new Self-Defense Force bases in

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the southwestern Islands facing China and of the new Marine Corps base on C^kinawa; subsidizing the Pentagon to the tune of $3 billon towards its construction ol Marine Corps facilities in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas; and another $2 billion for US troops m Japan under the general head of ‘host nation support’ (once known as the ‘sympathy budget’). As the Asalii shimhun put it, ‘Abe seems to be using the tenn “pacifism” only as a means to win public support for his attempt to allow Japan to exercise its right to collective self-defence by changing the government’s interpretation ot the Constitution concerning this issue’.The words ‘proactive contribution to peace’ hinted at the bold spirit that could be expected of real ‘tier-one’ countries. Within days of Abe’s Washington performances, Senator John McCain, chair of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, was anticipating dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces to Korea, the Middle East and the South China Sea."**^ ‘Positive pacifism’ thus supplants constitutional pacifism. At the same time, the imposition of neoliberalism via international economic treaties with constitutional effects has reached a new stage with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Commonly described as a trade agreement, the TPP is actually a comprehensive charter of global corporate governance, transferring much authority from states and representative institutions to corporations and so presumably maximizing growth. Currently, twelve countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam), accounting between them tor 40 per cent of global GDP or one-third ot world trade, are engaged in final negotiations that began in 2005. The Obama administration treated TPP as a high policy priority, estimating that the US would tnple its economic gains it Japan became part of it. Apart from agriculture, US capital was especially interested in gaming access to Japan’s medical, pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. For his part. Prime Minister Abe took Japan into negotiations in earnest early in 2014 following heavy US pressure, and in Washington in April 2015 he talked this project up for its potential to create a seedbed for peace , with ‘awesome’ long-term strategic value. It was as if TPP were the next, and higher, stage of democracy. Four features of the TPP warrant attention: its secret and undemocratic character (while corporate leaders, lawyers and bureaucrats engage in discussions, citizens and NGOs are excluded); its transfer of power from elected governments to corporations (who would gam the right to demand eiiforcenient against member governments); its comprehensiveness (states are to be required to contorm their laws, regulations and administrative

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procedures to 29 chapters ot comprehensive rules, of which only two relate to trade)and its exclusion ot China, despite China being the major trading partner ot most ot the member o')!' projected member states. Secretary of Detense Ashton Carter remarked that the TPP was ‘as important to me as a new aircraft carrier’.The project may best be seen as an American design to counter China’s growing global intluence, to ‘bring back jobs from China’ (as Obama put it in his 2015 State ot the Union address), and a reassertion of the US-centred world of San Francisco. In particular, the TPP spells severe shock for Japan’s food and agriculture. The government’s own estimate was that the gains predicted for the countrs^’s industrial sector would only slightly outweigh the losses (calculated, however, m purely economic temis and without regard to the social and environmental consequences) that would affect its primary industry sector,®' especially prefectures heavily dependent on agriculture, forestry and fisheries such as Hokkaido and Okinawa.®- Japan sought exemptions to protect its rice, milk products, wheat, beef, pork, sugar, as well as fish and marine products, but the large primary producing countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico and New Zealand looked askance at such a prospect should the project go ahead. Japan’s food self-sufficiency ratio would be expected to decline from an already lowest-in-the-OECD ot 39 per cent (2011) to 27 per cent on a calorie basis.®® Japan would thus be staking the lives and welfare of its people on the avoidance of global famine or catastrophe and continuance of a benign food trading system. SQUARING THE CIRCLE? FROM IMPERIAL TO DOMESTIC CONTRADICTIONS For his efforts to square the circle of the contradictions of the San Francisco system, reinforcing and rendering permanent Japan’s military incorporation in the American twenty-first century Pax Americana project while pressing Japan along a neoliberal path towards closer American embrace, Abe in Apnl 2015 earned the fulsome gratitude of the Obama administration. The coldness of the previous two years had vanished. Abe as state guest addressed ajoint session of Congress, paid his respects at the Lincoln Memorial, enjoyed dinner and a press conference with the president, and was widely acclaimed for his bold and positive words designed to cany the bilateral relationship first articulated at San Francisco forward to a new level, an ‘alliance ot hope’. In a finely crafted speech, he referred to the ‘shared values’ of democracy, the rule of law and human rights, expressed his ‘remorse’ tor the pain and suffering, and his ‘eternal condolences to the souls ot all American people’ lost in the war. He announced that he would honour the statements of war

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apology issued by his predecessors in 1993 and 1995 (which he had spent so much political capital over twenty years either doubting or attacking), promised to ‘fortify the US-Japan alliance’ and to support the TPP project, and pledged Japan’s ‘proactive contribution to peace based on the principle ot international cooperation’.^"* Although he made no explicit statement about it, it was also taken as understood that he would make no further visit to Yasukuni and would strive for accommodation with neighbour countries, China and South Korea. No speech, however finely crafted and however warmly acclaimed by Congress and the American metiia, could resolve the contradictions of the position, essentially an upgrading and updating of the subordinate relationship initiated by the San Francisco Treaty more than sixty years earlier. The speech was so worded as to express sadness (‘remorse’) while avoiding any admission of legal responsibility for war, atrocities or comfort women (the subject of explicit congressional rebuke just eight years earlier). Much hung on that single word ‘remorse’ and no doubt it was very carefully chosen, rendered in Japanese by the obscure term, ‘kaigo\ Both were calculated to convey a quasi-religious sense of sadness for pain caused, but neither was open to the possibility of redress. By referring to the statements issued by previous prime ministers, notably Murayama Tomiichi, he endorsed those sentiments while avoiding key words such as ‘aggression’ and ‘apology’ or the direct role of the Japanese military in recruiting and managing the comfort women system. During his joint news conference with President Obama (repeating the formula he had used in interview two days earlier with the Washington Post), Abe said; ‘1 am deeply pained to think about the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering as a result of victimization due to human trafficking’.^" He thus avoided both the term ‘sex slave’ and any reference to the role of the Imperial Japanese Army in organizing and controlling the victimization. Having played a key role for twenty years in the campaign to cast doubt on the temis of the Murayama and Kono apologies, his ‘remorse’ now stopped short of the comfort women. As for positive pacifism’, a keynote in many presentations by the Abe government since 2014, the connotation is distinctly Orwellian. For Abe, ‘peace’ means war. And yet the rightward trajectoiy of the Abe government should not be taken as indicative of the sentiments of Japanese society as a whole. The process under way is distinctly ‘elite driven’, one that can be described as an ‘electoral dictatorship’.5*’ The ‘left’ (communist and socialist) vote that had held to about 30 per cent throughout the Cold War collapsed after it to around 3 per cent,^^ and the electoral reforms of the early 1990s had the

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effect ot entrenching the LDP to the point where the support of around 16 to 18 per cent ot the electorate in the small seat constituencies (as in December 2014) earns it a landslide parliamentary majority.'’^ From such a narrow electoral base, Abe has moved to concentrate an unprecedented measure ot control over the levers ot the state, nominating his cronies to special policy advisory committees and to heaci the Cabinet Legislative Bureau, the National Security Council, the Bank of Japan, the Nuclear Regulatory' Commission and the national broadcaster, NFJK. His agenda of neoliberal economic policies, military build-up and alliance reinforcement, secrecy laws, constitutional retorm and nuclear energy generation lacks majority support and the package becomes increasingly incoherent. While ‘Abenoniics’ floods Japan with yen, driving down the exchange rate, boosting exports and ratcheting up the stock exchange (doubling it in less than two years), disposable househoki income shrinks, the indirect (consumption) tax is raised (initiated at 3 per cent m 1989 and to be raised to 10 per cent in 2015), and regular jobs are replaced by part-time, temporary or non-regular ones (now accounting for 20 million people or 38 per cent of the labour force).Salaries are reduced and the once model health and welfare systems deteriorate; 1.6 million households subsist on welfare.^*’ While the nominal unemployment rate remains low (3.4 per cent), the ranks of the full-time employed who are paid the paltry rate of less than two million yen (roughly $16,000) per year have risen to 1.2 million (24 per cent as against 17.5 per cent in 1999) with a further 33 per cent of the workforce employed on an irregular basis (low-paid, part-time, insecure, earning an estimated 1.45 million yen ($12,000) for 1,880 hours worked).^' As the precanat in Japan steadily assumes the centrality once enjoyed by the middle class, Abe promises to make Japan ‘the easiest country in the world for enterprises to do business’.This can only mean elimination of unions and penalty rates and preference for short-term and part-time labour over ‘regular’ full-time employment. In such a world, virtually anyone in the middle class is at risk of falling into poverty.'’^ Levels of support for the Abe government and its agenda have in tact been slowly sliding (46 or 43.5 per cent by different polls in May 2015). But exercising overwhelming control of the Diet, Abe reckons to have a good chance of retaining power until 2018 and therefore of accomplishing much of his radical agenda. The national media has sunk into a kind of uncntical torpor reminiscent of wartime ‘imperial rule assistance’ {yoktisati

taisef) unanimity, in part succumbing to assiduous cultivation on the prime minister’s part.

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SOCIALIST RECISTER 2016 OKINAWA - PREFECTURE IN RESISTANCE

In Okinawa, however, Abe has faced serious opposition/’"* The Okinawa problem of today is rooted in the decisions of 1951 and 1972. The first occurred in the San Francisco Treaty severing Okinawa from Japan and fonning it as the war state to complement mainland Japan’s peace state; and the second, ‘reverting’ it to Japan in such a way as to maintain de facto priority lor military matters. The consequence today is that, 64 years after the San Francisco Treaty and more than two decades after conclusion of the Cold War, US forces still occupy 20 per cent of the land of Okinawa Island, concentrating three-quarters of all US military presence in the country, and base authorities retain a sovereign (extraterritorial) authority little diminished from the time when the island was under direct US military rule. Since 1996, the governments of Japan and the United States have cooperated m the project to add to this uniquely military-first structure a huge new base, one that would be nominally a ‘replacement’ for Futenma marine base that sits now in the middle of the township of Ginowan. But it is plainly designed to confront and contain China. This so-called Futenma Replacement Facility would be a land-sea-air base with its own deep-water port. It would entail reclamation of 160 hectares of sea fronting Henoko Bay to the east and Oura Bay to the west, imposing on it a mass of concrete towering ten metres above the sea and featuring two 1,800 metre runways and a deep-sea 272 meter-long dock. The site chosen for this project happens to be one of the most bio-diverse and spectacularly beautiful coastal zones in all Japan, one that its Ministry' of the Environment wants to promote as a UNESCO World Hentage Site. It hosts a cornucopia of life forms from blue — and many other species of - coral through crustaceans, sea cucumbers and seaweeds and hundreds of species of shrimp, snail, fish, tortoise, snake and mammal, many rare or endangered, and strictly protected, not least the dugong. If built, this would likely remain through the twenty-first century the largest concentration of military power in East Asia, a key element of the Obama ‘pivot’. The second Abe government, from December 2012, attached high priority to this project. After one year of intense pressure it succeeded in having then Governor Nakaima Hirokazu reverse his long-standing opposition, without explanation, and grant the license tor reclamation ot the designated Oura Bay site. That decision was so overwhelmingly unpopular that in the gubernatorial election that followed m November 2014, Nakaima was defeated (by 100,000 votes) by a candidate who explicitly promised to ‘do everything in my power’ to stop the Henoko project. As ofmid-2015. Governor Onaga awaits the recommendation of a ‘Third-

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245

Experts Commission that he set up to investigate the procedures

leading to the decision taken by his predecessor. If that Commission acivises, as

IS

widely expected, that the process was flawed and the decision should

be nullihed, he is then likely to cancel the legal warrant for the project. The national government, very conscious ot this, therefore hastens the prelimmaix' \vorks, steps up the violence used to crush the on-site civil protests at Henoko, and issues contracts for reclamation and construction. As the governor and the democratic Chkmawan resistance thus challenge the two superpower states, the scene is set for frontal clash between national and regional governments of a kind without precedent in modern history. As the Okinawa newspaper Ryukyu sliinipo reported:

As far as we know, the government has never unleashed such reckless disregard ot the will of the people, as we have seen at Henoko_ We wonder it there has ever been a case like this, where the government has trampled on the will of the overwhelming majority of people in the pretecture elsewhere in Japan. This action by the government evokes memories of the crackdown against peasants during the Edo period.... This

IS

barbanc behaviour by the government, and it is shameful if the

international community just stands by.^^

When Abe and Obama met in Washington m April 2015 to celebrate the bilateral ‘alliance’, declaring shared commitment to ‘basic values, such as freedom, democracy, and basic human rights, and the rule of law’, Okinawans pointed out they were colluding in denial of all ot these. Furthemiore, opinion poll evidence suggested that despite every public relations effort by the Abe government, national opinion was moving to support the Okinawan cause. Five of six major national news media polls showed a majority strongly disapproving (55 to 25 per cent in the Asahi) the government’s handling of the Okinawa problem. Just one showed an equal number (41 per cent) for and against it.^’^ Since polls to late 2013 had shown general support for the government, the conlrontation at Henoko — and the bitter exchanges between central and local government - appeared to be generating support for the Okinawan cause.Modern Japan has never witnessed such confrontation between the national government and a local self-governing body. CONCLUSION The paradoxical Japanese state, founded and structured seventy years ago by US forces as a dependency, chose in the late twentieth/early twenty-lirst

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century to deepen that relationship into the ‘client state’ or zokkoku, and since then seeks to further reinforce military and strategic integration with the US on an anti-China axis while widening and deepening economic and financial submission. However improbably, Abe strives simultaneously to restore the lundamentals of the ‘beautiful Japan’ (of militarism and fascism) he associates with his grandfather. The final grand touch is to be a revised or rewritten constitution, consolidating and extending the de facto ‘revision by interpretation’ that he adopted m July 2014. Although no postwar leader has done more than Abe Shinzo to please the United States, his Japan is both solipsistic, intent on vindicating its troubled past at the cost of alienating its neighbours, and obedient but also resentful towards the United States. It was only after prolonged and intense pressure that he submitted to the US, abandoned his personal commitment to Yasukuni and for the first time expressed ‘remorse’ over the war. Whether he has really undergone a change of heart will only be known when, or if, he confronts and attempts to persuade his right-wing national support base to follow him. However, if he does indeed follow up domestically and regionally on his 2015 Washington commitments, it will expose more sharply the basic contradiction on which the state rests: the greater the Japanese efforts to meet US demands and follow the ‘servile’ path, the more it becomes necessary to insist on ‘nationalism’ - compulsory flag and anthem rituals, a proud and ‘correct’ view of Japanese history, and the elevation of Shinto shrine rituals into a central role in national identity formation. Such a ‘nationalism’ — distorted, denied, and channelled into a ‘correct history’ movement, ‘beautiful Japan’ campaigns, and antagonism to China and Korea - is fragile and febrile. The ‘postwar regime’ that Abe is intent upon liquidating is none other than the democratic, citizen-based, anti-mihtarist Japan. Instead, he strives to fuse the Shintoist, the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘new’. His government widens state prerogatives, circumscribes citizen rights, reinforces national security and strives to build a Japan whose citizens would be expected - or required - to love it (and m the future to die for it). The anxieties of a collapsing middle class and of widespread youth un- and under-employment create a fertile field for the messages of Abe and Japan’s political elites, and rumblings of violence and chauvinism shake the society.

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247

NOTES

1

For further background discussion see iiiy Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, London: Verso. 201)7; as well as Japan’s “Positive Pacifism”: Issues of Historical Memory' in Contemporary Foreign Policy’, Brown Journal of H 'orld Affairs, 2(2), 2014; and also my essays at the web journal The Asia-Pacific Journal — Japan Focus, available at http;//japanfocus.org.

2

Terasbima Jitsuro, ‘Noryokti no ressun, 157, “Uchimukti to ukeika no shinso kozo — 21 seuiki Nhon de shinko shite iru mono’”, Sekai, May 2015, pp. 202-5.

3

1990 and 2030 figures from Mitsuni Obe, 'Focus —Japan to Refocus on US-led Trade Pact Amid Troubles with China', Wall Street Journal Online; OECD 2060 estimates from Jiji, 'OECD Forecasts Japan’s Share of Global GDP will Halve by 2060’, Japan Times, 11 November 2012.

4

This 'China problem’ is tar from new. In long historical tenus, Japan has preserved a wary distance from China tor well over a millennium. Ever since the 'Battle of Baekgang’ in the year 663, when the combined forces of Tang-Silla — states then dominating China and the Korean peninsula — defeated the combined forces of Baekje and Yamato Japan) on the Korean pemnsula, Japan has nurtured its distance and independence from any Sinic world order, alternating betw'een fear of being invaded — as China’s Mongol conquerors threatened in the twelfth century — and failed attempts to supplant the Sinic order with one under its own hegemony, as took place under Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century and under the Imperial Japanese military in the twentieth century. In regional terms, the long Pax Sinica era gave way alter 1895 to the troubled Pax Sipponica, culminating in the disaster of war between 1931 and 1945, and from 1945 in Pax Americana.

5

Nakano Koichi, “Neoribe jidai no ea nashonarizumu’ saraba dokusaisha, kensho, boso sum Abe seiken’, Shukan kinyohi, rinji zokan, 17 April 2014.

6

Magosaki Ukem, 'Dorei konjo mamdashi no Abe shusho’, ('Prime Minister Abe, the

7

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, New York: Doubleday, 2007, p.

epitome of slave mentality’), Twitter post, 24 February 2013, 1:21 p.m. 116. 8

Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, pp. 116-21.

9

See the 1995 'East Asia Strategic Report’ (officially known as the ‘United States Security Strategy for the East Asia Pacific Region’ and more commonly as the ‘Nye Report’ after Joseph S. Nye, Jr., fomrer assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs), and in 2000, 2007, and 2012 the three reports from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), entitled, respectively: ‘The U.S. and Japan: Advancing towards a Mature Partnership’; ‘The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Getting Asia Right through 2020’; and ‘The U.S.-Japan Alliance; Anchonng Stability in Asia’.

10

Murata Ryohei, Doko e iku no ka, kono knni wa (Wiere is this conntr)' headed?), Kyoto:

11

Quoted in Sunohara Takeshi, Domei henho — Nichibei ittaika no hikari to kage, Nihon

12

Keizai Shimbunsha, 20f)7, p. 64. Abe Shinzo, ‘Japan is Back’, policy speech at the Center for Strategic and International

Minerva, 2010, p. 161.

Studies, Washington, DC, 22 Febniary 2013. 13

The United States and Japan: Advancing Toward a Mature Partnership, Special Report ot the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 1 I C^ctober 2000.

14

Abe Shinzo, Utsukushii kuni e, Tokyo: Bungeishunjusha, 2006.

15

Tawara Yoshifumi, (Kodomo to kyokasho zenkoku netto 21), 'Dai sanji Abe Shinzo naikaku no cho takaha (kyokuu) no daijintachi’, (Abe naikaku o shihai sum Nihon kaigi no menrnen, Kusanone hoshu shiindo), 14 February 2015.

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16

For recurrent Abe themes see ‘Abe Shinzo’, available at http://www.shinzo-abe.or.jp.

17

Takahashi Tetsuya, ‘Kyokuu ka sum seiji’, SVL'rti, January 2015, p. 151.

18

Abe Shinzo, ‘Atarashii kuni e’, Buin’ci shunju, ja-nu^ry 2013, p. 130.

19

Ayako Mie, ‘Japan’s Image Hurt by Japan’s Militarist Facade: Nyc’, Japan Times, 4 April 2014.

20

‘Joint Statement by the United States and Japan’, 22 February 2013, Washington, DC, Wliite House, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov.

21

Agence France-Presse, ‘Biden Warned Japan’s Abe About Visiting Yasukuni Shrine’,

22

‘Statement on Prime Minister Abe’s December 26 Visit to Yasukuni’, press release by

23

Kyodo News, ‘New NHK Chief: “Comfort Women” Only Wrong per “Today’s

South China Morning Post, 29January 2014. US embassy in Tokyo, Japan. Morality”; Programming Must Push Japan’s Territorial Stances’, Japan Times, 25 January 2014. 24

Emma Chanlett-Avei^, et ah, ‘Japan-U.S. Relations: Issues for Congress’, Congressional Research Serv'ice, 1 May 2013.

25

Emma Chanlett-Avery, et ah, ‘Japan-U.S. Relations: Issues for Congress’, Congressional

26

Yuka Hayashi, ‘US Seeks Abe Assurance He Won’t Visit War Shrine’, Wall Street

Research Service, 20 Febmary 2014. Journal, 23 January 2014. 27

Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan: A State Strategy for the 2P' Century, New York: Routledge

28

McComiack, Client State, pp. 142-3.

Curzon, 2002, p. 218. 29

Kyodo News, ‘New NHK Chief.

30

For a statement from Hyakuta Naoki, said to be a ‘close friend’ of Prime Minister Abe, see Kirk Spitzer, ‘Japanese Broadcast OtFicial: We Didn’t Commit War Crimes, the US Just Made That Up’, Time, 7 February 2014.

31 32

Spitzer, ‘Japanese Broadcast Official’. Japan Should Follow Nazi Route on Revising Constitution, Minister Says’, The Guardian, 2 August 2013.

33

Justin McCurry, ‘Neo-Nazi Photos Pose Headache for Shinzo Abe’, The Guardian, 9 September 2014.

34

On Sono Ayako, see Tomohiro Osaki, ‘Outrage Grows Over Sono “Apartheid”

35

‘Three Cabinet Members Visit Yasukuni Shrine After Abe Meets Xi', Japan Times, 23 April 2015.

36

“‘Ajia ya sekai in koken”, Abe shusho, sengo 70 nen danwa ni’, Asahi shimlmn, 6 June 2015.

Column’, Japiii; Times, 20 Febmaiy 2015.

J^umi Sakamoto,

Koreans, Go Home!

Internet Nationalism in Contemporary Japan

as a Digitally Mediated Subculture’, The Asia-Pacific Journal -Japan Focus, 1 March 2011. 38

The assaults were orchestrated against the Asahi Shimbun for the belatedness in acknowledging publication of some fabricated ‘comfort women’ stories in the early 1990s.

39

Abe told the Davos meeting in January 2014 that relations between Japan and China were akin to those between Germany and Great Britain in the summer of 1914. Bobby Ghosh, ‘Will Japan and China Go to War?’ Time, 22 January 2014.

40

Watanabe Osamu, Kenipo wa do ihite kita ka [Hotn did the constitution come into being?), Tokyo: Iwaiiami Bukkuretto, 85, 1987, p. 15.

41

For an earlier discussion, see McCormack, ‘Japan’s “Positive Pacifism’”.

42

Son Kantei (Pnnie Minister’s Department), ‘Speeches and Statements by the Pnme Minister’, available at http://japan.kantei.go.jp.

CHAUVINIST NATIONALISM IN JAPAN’S SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE 43

249

Article 51 ot the UN Charter confers on states a tcniporai7 (pending authorization by the Security Council) ‘inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if subject to armed attack’. Abe has been keen to use this as loophole to allow the dispatch of SelfHetense Forces (currently restricted to territorial defense of Japan) to the aid of the US in future ‘Vietnam’, ‘Afghanistan’ or ‘Iraq’ cases.

44

Richard Arnutage and Joseph S. Nye, ‘The US-Japan Alliance: Anchoring Stability in

45

Abe, ‘Japan is Back’.

Asia’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2012. 46

Taoka Shunji, ‘Nihon ban NSC sosetsu no gu’, Shtikaii kinyohi, 24 May 2013, p. 41.

47

Editorial, ‘Abe’s “proactive” Pacifism Should Not be Used to Promote Collective SelfIdefense’, Asahi shii)ilnni, 28 September 2013, available at http://ajw.asahi.coni.

48

Kyodo News, ‘McCain: SHE Should Expect to See Action in Korea, Deploy to

49

Edward Herman refers to the 30,000 word chapter on intellectual property rights which

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