The Utopian Constellation: Future-Oriented Social And Political Thought Today 3030325156, 9783030325152, 9783030325169

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
1 Introduction......Page 8
References......Page 11
Introductory Comments......Page 13
Origins......Page 14
Ideology, Science, Utopia......Page 17
Bloch and Contemporary Utopian Studies......Page 20
Seven Theses on Utopia as Optic......Page 23
1789–1871: French Revolution to the Paris Commune......Page 24
1871–1914: Age of Empire, First Crisis of Modernity......Page 28
1914–1968: The Organization of Modernity......Page 32
Entering Modernity’s Second Crisis, 1968–1999......Page 37
Concluding Comments......Page 40
References......Page 42
Introductory Comments......Page 50
Classical to Social Liberalism—Emancipation and Dis-Emancipation......Page 53
Neo-Liberalism and Its Discontents......Page 55
Contingent, Punitive Neo-Liberalism......Page 62
Neo-Keynesianism......Page 66
A Liberalism of Fear......Page 70
Concluding Comments......Page 75
References......Page 78
Introduction......Page 85
Visualizing Post-fascism......Page 87
Post-fascism and Utopianism......Page 91
Continuities and Discrepancies......Page 97
The Future in the Past—Bloch and Post-fascism......Page 101
Concluding Comments......Page 110
References......Page 113
Introductory Comments......Page 119
New Cognitive Maps......Page 123
Subjects......Page 130
On the Content of Socialism......Page 135
Forms—Aesthetics, Affect, Spirit......Page 139
Concluding Comments......Page 143
References......Page 144
6 Concluding Comments: Beyond Left Melancholia......Page 151
References......Page 154
Index......Page 155

Citation preview

The Utopian Constellation Future-Oriented Social and Political Thought Today

Chamsy el-Ojeili

The Utopian Constellation

Chamsy el-Ojeili

The Utopian Constellation Future-Oriented Social and Political Thought Today

Chamsy el-Ojeili School of Social and Cultural Studies Victoria University of Wellington Wellington, New Zealand

ISBN 978-3-030-32515-2 ISBN 978-3-030-32516-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32516-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my parents—Margaret Cummins and Hicham el-Ojeili.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sage Publications for their permission to reproduce copyrighted material, for el-Ojeili, C. (2018). “Reflecting on Postfascism: Utopia and Fear”, in Critical Sociology, parts of which appear in Chapter 4.

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Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Horizons and Formations 7 3 Centers: Liberalism 45 4 Margins I: Post-fascism 81 5 Margins II: The New Communism 115 6 Concluding Comments: Beyond Left Melancholia 147 Index 151

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract In this chapter, el-Ojeili sets out the focus of the book—the examination of social and political thought in the contemporary period through a utopian optic. el-Ojeili argues that an exploration of this realm of intellectual production indicates significant transformations in the contemporary “utopian constellation”, a concept drawn from the work of Benjamin, Adorno, and Mannheim, which suggests a contradictory totality of future-oriented ideas, images, and practices. The book sets out to examine social and political intellectual production across three broad spaces within this contemporary constellation—the liberal center, and the far-Right and far-Left margins—in the chapters that follow. Keywords Marxism · Gramsci · Utopia · Utopian constellation · Intellectual formation · Human sciences

I have been interested in utopia for around three decades, and this interest has gone through three phases. At first, my utopian concerns were implicit, conditioned by my encounter with the Marxist critique of capitalism and by my consequent commitment to socialist politics. A second phase was shaped by reading Marxian thinkers who directly dealt with utopia—Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, and Ruth Levitas—but also by my growing realization of the gravity of Left defeat in the 1990s, the period of the end

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of history, when neoliberalism appeared to be “the most successful ideology in world history” (Anderson 2000, p. 13). My feeling, here, was—to quote Perry Anderson (2004, p. 71) again—that utopianism had gone into “general suspension”, bringing a “remorseless closure of space”. Over time, though, after the close of the 1990s, I increasingly had a sense that something within the field of future-oriented thinking was changing. This sense, hardly dazzling, inclined me to revisit those Marxian utopians and to view utopia as interpretative method, as omnipresent and multivalent, and as diagnostically important, despite its still rather marginal place within the human sciences. In what follows, I draw on the aforementioned thinkers in an effort to examine fragments of the present through a utopian optic. My data, here, is social- and politics-oriented intellectual production, intellectual understood in the deflationary Gramscian sense of those tied to social groups and involved in the production and circulation of knowledge. My next chapter is an orienting one, where I explore human scientific discussion of utopia, arriving at seven theses on utopia as investigative tool. In addition, within that chapter, I offer some broad suggestions about the periodization of modernist utopianism, as a backdrop to the three chapters that follow. In these chapters, I argue that, in the midst of today’s crisis of intellectual and moral leadership, we are witnessing important transformations of the utopian constellation. This concept, constellation, as I am using it, is found in the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Mannheim. Across these usages, there are some important commonalities. First, all three thinkers deploy the notion as a way of approaching the broad realm of cultural production. Second, the concept is used in a way that marks an effort at a complexified approach to human scientific understanding of this realm, against positivist approaches to knowledge, say, that posit a simple, reflection theory as an answer to questions of representation, in which object and subject are cleanly separated, and in which ideological phenomena are conceived of in a static, complete, and ahistorical manner. Third, in all three thinkers, we see the joining together of a more culturalist Marxism (emphasizing totality, dialectics, contradiction, history, and a sophisticated departure from the straightforward causality of an orthodox base-superstructure model) with Weberian elements (ideal types, the critique of reification, an elevated role for interpretation). More concretely, in Benjamin’s (2003) intriguing formulation from 1928, “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars” (p. 34). As framed

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by Sahraoui and Sauter (2018), in Benjamin, constellation refers to “a configuration of phenomena under specific spatial and temporal circumstances” (p. ix), or an “instantaneous, relational figure of epistemological, historico-political, and literary objects” (p. x). This figure, in both Benjamin and Adorno, is an attempt to deal with issues of representation and to grasp cultural-intellectual totalities in a way that avoids passive, linear, contemplative, “completed” ways of seeing, including those one-dimensional scientistic appeals issuing from certain Marxist quarters. The constellation is a totality constituted of elements configured together in a “momentary and provisional” system, apprehended in a “snapshot” (Jameson 1990, p. 51) fashion, in which past and present, as well as not-yet, anticipatory elements intersect (Cook 2014; Gilloch 2002; Sahraoui and Sautter 2018). Understood as a “contradictory and mobile whole” (as Benjamin described his own thought in a draft letter of May 1934), constellation suggests the discernment of crystallized cultural-intellectual patterns or formations in their specificity, while acknowledging what Adorno labeled the “unavoidable insufficiency” (in Stone 2014, p. 58) of thought. In Mannheim’s (1968 [1936]) work, the phrase “constantly shifting total constellation” (p. 187) is used with direct reference to utopia. Again, Mannheim shares with Benjamin and Adorno the influence of both Western Marxism (especially by way of Lukacs) and Weber (thinking utopian “structures of mentality” [p. 189] as ideal types). Mannheim, though, attributes the concept to Alfred Weber’s 1927 work on cultural sociology, where the latter speaks of the “total constellation” and of the “concrete, unique constellation of a historical moment”, using “physiognomy” and “life-aggregation” as alternatives (in Kettler et al. 2008, p. 18). Once more using “constellation” to speak of cultural-intellectual totalities, or of a particular “configurational unity”, free from dogmatic rationalism or Marxist economic determinism, as a “provisional determination of the phenomena which are symptomatic of the present situation” (Mannheim 1968, p. 227), Mannheim posits the existence of a number of historically specific utopian configurations, dominated by distinctive forms. These constellations conjoin what Williams (1977) conceived of as residual, dominant, and emergent phenomena, with each utopian conception (itself, a constellation of affinities, resonances, and coherences, in Weberian terms) also a “mutually antagonistic counter-utopia” (Mannheim 1968, p. 187). Here, Mannheim suggests the play, within any utopian constellation, of a host of utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian figures, in what Jameson (1981) describes as “a Homeric battlefield” (p. 13).

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My object, in the chapters ahead, is to shed light on the contemporary utopian constellation. This “shifting total constellation” (Mannheim 1968, p. 188), of course, contains multitudes, an array of particular, mobile constellations, which are characterized by processes of “mutual interpenetration” (Mannheim 1968, p. 223). This complexity has necessitated choices, and I do not focus on any number of important, world-shaping configurations of future-oriented thought—most notably, perhaps, the revival of feminist and democratic socialist thinking, environmental thought, or discourses around the impact and possibilities of new technology. Instead, I attend closely to three broad configurations within the larger totality. At the center of today’s utopian constellation is a liberalism that is increasingly splintered. I examine this fragmentation in Chapter 3, a fragmentation marked, variously, by post-hegemonic tendencies, by the significant wearing down of utopian significations, and by fear. On the far-Right margin, we are seeing the consolidation of a post-fascist intellectual formation. In Chapter 4, I explore this contradictory, synthetic body of thought and increasingly organized practice, which is both continuous with historic fascism and specific to the contemporary moment, drawing together a host of fears with utopic figures from the past, elements of the present, and imaginings of a novel future. At the opposed, but not symmetrical, Left margin, we see the composition of a new global Left, one part of which I treat in Chapter 5—what I am calling the new communism. This again variegated current exhibits a rapprochement between anarchism and Marxism, develops novel social cosmologies, suggests the appearance of new collective and individual subjects, and expresses, in experimental forms, a transformatory desire that I call insurrectionary immediatism. These configurations and their elements, I argue, tell us a great deal about where we are, but also indicate crucial lines of struggle for and into the future.

References Anderson, P. (2000, January–February). Renewals. New Left Review, 1, 5–24. Anderson, P. (2004). The river of time. New Left Review, 26, 67–77. Benjamin, W. (2003 [1928]). The origin of German tragic drama. London: Verso. Cook, D. (2014). Theodor W. Adorno: An introduction. In D. Cook (Ed.), Theodor Adorno: Key concepts (pp. 3–19). London: Routledge. Gilloch, G. (2002). Walter Benjamin: Critical constellations. Cambridge: Polity.

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Jameson, F. (1981). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jameson, F. (1990). Late Marxism: Adorno, or the persistence of the dialectic. London: Verso. Kettler, D., Loader, C., & Meja, V. (2008). Karl Mannheim and the legacy of Max Weber: Retrieving a research programme. London: Routledge. Mannheim, K. (1968 [1936]). Ideology and utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trubner. Sahraoui, N., & Sauter, C. (2018). Introduction. In N. Sahraoui & C. Sauter (Eds.), Thinking in constellations: Walter Benjamin in the humanities. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stone, A. (2014). Adorno and logic. In D. Cook (Ed.), Theodor Adorno: Key concepts. London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Horizons and Formations

Abstract In this chapter, el-Ojeili explores the scholarly treatment of utopia and utopianism. Examining key debates around the connections between utopia and science, ideology, reason, and emotion, el-Ojeili draws from the work of Mannheim, Bloch, and Levitas to set out seven theses on utopia as optic or method. These theses inform the chapters ahead. As a further backdrop to the studies that follow, el-Ojeili turns to specifically modern utopianism in social and political thought. Here, he suggests four important modern periods in which novel elements within successive utopian constellations emerged. In conclusion, el-Ojeili suggests that 1999 serves as a symbolic date, after which major transformations in the utopian constellation become visible. Certain dimensions of such contemporary transformations are the focus of the three chapters that follow. Keywords Cultural production · Conceptualisation · Ideology · Science · Modern utopianism · Neo-liberalism · Socialism

Introductory Comments Since the close of the 1990s, there has been a surge in commentary on, and usage of the term, utopia. In, New Zealand, where I live, for instance, a great variety of businesses incorporate “utopia” into their name—a web design firm, a home kill operation, a pilates studio, a motel, an ice cream © The Author(s) 2020 C. el-Ojeili, The Utopian Constellation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32516-9_2

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store, a bakery, to name just a handful. More widely, across the West, while explicit utopian production in popular culture often appears more targeted at younger children, utopian imaginings are heavily in play within cultural production centered, say, on travel, food, the makeover (image, body, real estate, etc.) genre, and the self-help industry. More visible, over the past decade or so, is the substantial output of dystopian fiction (The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner), movies (Chappie, Children of Men, The Giver, District 9), television (Westworld, Black Mirror, Jericho, Leftovers), and gaming (Bioshock, Fallout, Deus Ex). In political life, in the face of dynamics, events, and struggles, such as globalization, climate change, the global financial crisis, Occupy, LGBTQ+ activism, and Black Lives Matter, dystopian scenarios and utopian proposals are everywhere—“Make America Great Again!”, “Stop Islamization!”, “Another World is Possible!”, “Forza Italia!”, “Hungarian Values and Interests”, “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!”, “For Climate Justice!”, “Love is a Human Right!”. Turning to the academic realm, and confining our attention to English-language scholarship, we find 6279 scholarly articles on the subject of utopia (including, on average, a thesis every 17 days) in the period 1999–2017, compared to 1633 for the period 1980–1998, and 558 for the period 1960–1979. Utopia, then, has become an increasingly visible subfield of discussion across the human sciences, a rich, plural space, encompassing scholarly work on past and present utopian conceptions, reflection on utopianism’s connections to various disciplines, the varieties of utopianism in practice (intentional communities, social movements), utopian impulses across the arts and popular culture (particularly, literature), utopia and the built environment, utopianism and political belief (feminism, environmentalism), utopianism attached to sexuality, to science and technology, and to educational philosophy and practices, as well as the academic elaboration of utopian alternatives. In this chapter, I examine the fortunes of utopia within the realm of the human sciences, exploring key debates, and I suggest seven theses as a guide to utopia as optic or method. As an additional backdrop to my next three chapters on elements of our contemporary utopian constellation, I offer some broad interpretative contentions about four distinctive moments of modern utopianism, 1789–1999.

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Origins Associated in popular usage today with the impractical, the fanciful, the unrealistic, the irrational, and the unreasonable, “utopia” in Thomas More’s original 1516 coinage joins meanings of “no place” and “good place”. In line with these novelistic origins, some scholars insist on a restrictive conceptualization of utopia. In Kumar’s (1991, 2003) stringent view, for example, utopia is narrowly defined as a genre of fiction, and as a predominantly Western and modern phenomenon. On the other side, a good number of scholars in the field of utopian studies work with a rather wideranging conceptualization, closer to Levitas’s (1990, 2013) expansive designation of utopia as “the desire for a better way of being”. This is the broad definition I will work with. This disagreement raises a first important point of discussion—the historical location of utopia. There are some good reasons to suggest that utopia and utopianism are distinctively modern imaginative forms, bound up with those transformations from the fifteenth century that Wallerstein sees as crucial in the making of the modern world-system. In what we might call the “modernist” reading of utopia, utopia and utopianism are fairly new, tied, above all, to a transformed “time orientation”: an attitude of critical reflection on, and critical distance from, the past; an imaginary that posits the future as shapeable and open (Harrington 2005; Wagner 2001a). The “modernist” argument, simply stated, is that it is only in the modern period that people come to believe that they can collectively transform social orders in a progressive way, and that those core elements of the vocabulary of utopia—“society”, “progress”, “social change”, “revolution”, “evolution”—have their origins in modern Europe. A compelling variant of this argument is put forward by the Greek thinker Cornelius Castoriadis. Although Castoriadis tends to use “utopia” in a pejorative sense, something very similar is implied by his notion of “autonomy”. We can detect two historical ruptures in which autonomy emerges, says Castoriadis—Greek Antiquity and Modernity. This autonomy means explicit self-institution, unending and lucid questioning of ourselves and our institutions, “a society that knows that its institutions, its laws, are its own work and product” (Castoriadis 2003, p. 16). Castoriadis sets these ruptures against the “heteronomy” that characterizes the bulk of human history, in which institutions appear as given to human collectivities from the outside (the Gods, the Ancestors, Great Men and Women, History). The first rupture, in Greek Antiquity, is connected to the emergence

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of politics, democracy, and philosophy; the second, in the modern age, to the reflowering of art and philosophy, the creation of the “European citizen”, and the contestations of the workers’ movement (Castoriadis 2003, 2005). There are, though, elements of Castoriadis’s thought that suggest a very different understanding of utopia and history, what we might call a more “primordialist” understanding. In this approach, utopian imagining beyond tends to be viewed as a part of the makeup of the human animal and, therefore, as omni-historical. On this score, Castoriadis (1997) charges that the imagination, both social and psychical, has been sorely neglected within the social sciences and philosophy; the radical distinctiveness of the imagination, the unique human capacity to posit and create truly new forms and figures, has been consistently overlooked. For Castoriadis, by contrast, we must think being and history, first and foremost, as creation. This creation has two central sources: first, the “radical imaginary” of the human psyche, the “capacity to posit as real that which is not real” (2003, p. 20), the “flux or incessant flow of representations, desires, and affects” which equals “continual emergence” (2005, p. 127); and, second, the social imaginary, the collective creation of “magmas of imaginary significations” and institutions embodying these significations, which account for the form, cohesion, and patterns of change of a social order. Drawing from this aspect of Castoriadis’s work, I suggest that utopianism is tied to the human imagination, and that the transformative, contestatory quality of the imagination is visible across human history—in, say, the work of Plato, within the Gospels of the New Testament , or as a dimension of slave and peasant revolts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it is important to note that utopia and utopianism take different shapes in different periods, and that the utopian figures of the modern period— shaped by disembedding (Taylor 2004), by new social co-ordinates, and by new currents of thought, such as Enlightenment, Romanticism, liberalism, and socialism (Rundell 2003)—are distinctive. It is on the terrain of such modern transformations that the human sciences emerge, and these are intimately bound up with and expressive of new forms of utopianism. The classical period of sociology, 1870–1920, is, for instance, also the high-water mark in the production of utopian fiction, the period of Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, Theodore Hertzka, William Morris, H. G. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is in this period that utopia becomes an explicit consideration in scholarly and political texts.

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Very crucial, here, is Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, first published in 1880, and the most widely read work of the Marxist tradition in Europe (Favilli 2016). In this work and in a section of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, the “utopian socialists” are commended for their achievements: “They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class” (Marx 1987, p. 244). On the other hand, Marx and Engels argue that utopian socialism is best viewed as an expression of the “undeveloped state of class struggle, as well as their own surroundings”, as pushing doomedto-fail experiments and indistinct practical measures (“castles in the air”), as spawning followers who have ended up as “reactionaries” in “violently opposing all political action on the part of the working class” (Marx 1987, pp. 244–245). The main charges, which have persisted among more orthodox Marxists, are that utopianism fails to produce acute critical accounts of the present, that it does not work from a “real” basis, that it provides a too detailed, rigid, complete, and fanciful picture of the future, and that it is bereft of a concrete transitional politics (Ollman 2005). Importantly, utopianism, in Marx and Engels, is deployed as a device that establishes the ground for the development of a contrasting Marxian “science” that places itself “upon a real basis” (Engels 1978, p. 694). This real basis, the structural dynamics and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and, a crucial part of this, the growth and central strategic location of the working class, is the realm of the science of historical materialism, against a utopianism that confines itself to ideas, hopes, ethical principles, to “phantoms” (Marx 1987, p. 159).

Ideology, Science, Utopia Marx and Engels’s rhetorical dualisms—science versus ideology, science versus utopianism, real-life processes versus the realm of ideas—must be rethought today. A 1909 essay by H. G. Wells provides a suggestive approach to such questions of ideology, science, and utopia. Here, Wells (1916 [1909]) criticizes the scientific pretensions of a still-young sociology, arguing that science read as positive and emphatic, based on experimentation—science, that is, as modeled on the natural sciences—is not something to which the discipline can or should aspire. Sociology, instead, must be “knowledge rendered imaginatively” (p. 202). Art, every bit as much as science, is important to sociology, and a crucial, in fact, inescapable dimension

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of this is utopianism: “There is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what is, without considering what is intended to be” (p. 204). Ultimately, “Sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia” (p. 205). In the future, Wells suggests, sociology should adopt two principle literary forms: first, historical description and explanation, and, second, an explicitly utopian form—the creation, analysis, and criticism of utopias. Wells’s essay illuminates Lepenies’ (1988) contention about the early tension and competition between sociology and literature in the period of the institutionalization of the new discipline, where sociological work oscillated between “cold reason and the culture of feeling” (p. 14), science and hermeneutics. Wells’s rare, more appreciative human scientific interest in utopia is found somewhat later in Karl Mannheim’s 1936 work Ideology and Utopia. Here, Mannheim conceives of ideology and utopia as opposites: ideology as either worldview or distorted consciousness; utopia as worldshattering and reality-transcending. Additionally, Mannheim proposes four ideal-typical utopic periods: “the orgiastic chiliasm of the Anabaptists”, characterized as embodying “ecstatic outbursts” (1968, p. 192) of the psyche, an “absolute presentness” of experience (p. 193); “the liberalhumanist idea” of steady, unilinear progress toward the rational; “the conservative idea”, which posits the “concrete” “here and now” (community, folk, nation, state) as “the embodiment of the highest values and meanings” (p. 209); and “the socialist-communist utopia”, where the “economic and social structure of society becomes the absolute reality” (p. 217) and the strategic basis of progress into the future. This historical succession of utopian forms, for Mannheim, indicated a growing approximation to reality or concreteness. Utopia, that is, was becoming less and less utopian, toward a possible “general subsidence of utopian intensity” (p. 223) and the generalization of a more “prosaic attitude” (p. 230). Though Mannheim is, at times, rather upbeat about this subsidence, at the next moment he laments the withering of the critical-diagnostic dimension of utopianism, speaking of a possible “decay of the human will”, a “static state of affairs”, a loss of both the energy to shape history and the ability to understand it (p. 236). Finally, Mannheim insists that we must always place particular utopian conceptions within a “constantly shifting total constellation”, as always “mutually antagonistic counter-utopias” (pp. 187–188).

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It is important to examine more closely some vital questions raised by Wells and Mannheim, beginning with Mannheim’s pairing, ideologyutopia, considered as opposites. The origins of ideology as a social scientific notion are found in the period of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment—Bacon’s “criticism of the idols”, the desire to overthrow “the edifice of mud” (the gloom, superstition, and ignorance of religious and customary beliefs) and replace it with “the edifice of truth” (Larrain 1979; Horowitz 1999, pp. 44–57). Coined in 1796 to designate a new master science centered on the genesis, combination, and consequences of ideas and sensations, the term was soon imbued with negative connotations, wherein “ideology” came to connote abstraction, illusion, error, and political impracticality (Freeden 2006; Thompson 1990). Formulating “ideology” in a number of different ways, Marx frequently loaded the concept with these derisory associations, and, as noted, utopianism was viewed by Marx and Engels as belonging within the space of the ideological. In such usage, both utopia and ideology are, as Terry Eagleton (1991) puts it, like bad breath—always something the other has. Similarly, both are frequently set in contrast to a superior way of knowing—science. And both ideology and utopia have regularly been declared dead, usually in ways that maintain that we are all better off for these passings. Crucial to the consolidation and disciplinization of the human sciences was an appeal to scientificity (Lepenies 1988), “a kind of scientificity patterned on an imaginary vision of the natural sciences” (Steinmetz 2007, p. 53). Today, by contrast, across much of the human sciences, postpositivity, reflexivity, and pluralism predominate (McLennan 2006). The older appeal to a strict separation of facts and values, the cognitive and rationalist focus, and the assumption that formal rationality might provide solid guarantees for knowledge and action (Wallerstein 1997) are no longer hegemonic. It is hardly controversial, then, to underscore the political, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of human scientific work (Lassman 1986). This need not imply that the human sciences must simply jettison scientific, observational, cumulative, and rational aspirations and guiding analytical values, in favor of deconstructionist, constructivist, and discursive approaches (McLennan 2006). Instead, it is to acknowledge the conditions of emergence of the human sciences, as attempts to deal with what Peter Wagner (2001a, b, c) describes as the “problematiques of Modernity”: “the search for certain knowledge and truth, the building of a viable and good political order, the issue of the continuity of the acting person, … the way of relating the lived present to time past and time future” (2001b, p. 8),

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and “organizing for the satisfaction of needs” (2001c, p. 25). In the case of sociology, Wagner (1994) points out that the new discipline’s quest to demonstrate “the intelligibility and the shapeability … of the social world” (p. 175) was simultaneously analytical and explanatory and a “political project” (Wagner 2001a, p. 8), bound up with social changes and problems and with political, normative, and utopian desires and aspirations (Arblaster and Lukes 1971; Strasser 1976). If we follow this line of argumentation, anti-utopianism is paradoxical, insofar as the denunciation of ideas, thinkers, and movements as “utopian” is always founded “by reference to rival conceptions of the good society” (Arblaster and Lukes 1971, p. 7), by an opposing set of “utopian references” (Alexander 2001). In the case of Marxism, “science” set against “utopia” was, in part, a utopic, political aspect of a war of position on behalf of communism. Similarly, the skeptical liberal connection between utopia and totalitarianism (see Chapter 3) is thoroughly utopian and ideological, the anti-utopian figure of totalitarianism bolstering a liberal utopia centered on free, property-owning individuality. Within this liberal critique, alongside charges of abstraction, impracticality, and idealism, utopianism is often castigated as irrational, emotional, and associative, these features frequently used to link utopia with violence (Jacoby 2005). Again, in the formative period of the human sciences, one predominant intellectual vector entailed a scientific commitment to excising the irrational and passionate from the field of scholarly analysis and from politics. On the other side, a number of European intellectuals—Nietzsche, Freud, Le Bon, Weber, Pareto, Sorel, Mosca, for example—underscored, in a variety of ways, the activating and perhaps ineradicable role of instincts, sentiments, images, feelings, fantasies, and passions in social life. Regarding this divide, I believe we must accept, with Wallerstein (1997, 1998), that there is an inevitable intertwining of intellectual, moral, and political dimensions within science, and that criticism, the capacity for imagination and hope, and the search for social improvement or progress, can never be formal and universal but merely instances of substantive rationality. Further, we might accept, following Castoriadis, that the radical imaginary dimension, in play within utopianism, can be wild and monstrous, but also hold that, as Richard Rorty (1999) contends, “The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record” (p. 277). And it seems reasonable to accept that the utopian function of the “education of desire” (Levitas 2013) is inevitably both rational and “musical” (Griffin 1991) or extra-rational.

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Bloch and Contemporary Utopian Studies The thinker who manages these dilemmas most ably, I believe, is Ernst Bloch (1885–1977). Part of Weber’s circle, Bloch is best known for his epic, sprawling masterpiece, the three-volume Principle of Hope, written between 1938 and 1947, and first published in 1953. This work is centered on the category of the “Not-Yet”, or “venturing beyond”. Bloch (1986) contends that “we all live in the future” (p. 4), and he views this future—decipherable in fairy tales, myth, religion, new technology, literature, quotidian daydreaming, political movements, trashy films and magazines, architecture, and beyond—as a material force in the world: “a basic determination within objective reality as a whole” (p. 7), a “directing act of a cognitive kind” (p. 12), a “component of reality itself” (p. 197)—“man [sic] is essentially determined by the future” (p. 5). Utopian “thinking beyond”, then, is a force that helps shapes the world, an immense source of creativity, dynamism, and progress in human affairs. Here, Bloch reverses the usual priority given to the material realities of what is viewed as a “closed world”, contending that “the working, creating human being … reshapes and overhauls the given facts” (pp. 1375–1376). Analytically speaking, too, a utopian way of seeing is philosophically and sociologically crucial: “we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness” (Bloch 1986, p. 12). For Bloch, utopianism, viewed as a “basic feature of human consciousness” (p. 7), must be apprehended in terms of function. On the one hand, the utopian function is sometimes one of “random and abstract escapism” (p. 14). More positively, when utopia is “concrete”, its function is that of building up and creating the real (pp. 12, 1370–1375). This concreteness is attached, by Bloch, above all, to Marxian politics. Bloch’s work remains tremendously important in a number of ways. His serious attention to an expansive range of human cultural activities prefigures cultural studies—focussing on the utopic dimensions of dance, music, collecting, sex, exercise and rebuilding the body, travel, the fight against aging, and more. In attending to these aspects of social life, Bloch refused the well-trodden Marxian path of analyzing such phenomena as merely ideological in the critical sense, insisting on the surpluses over and above simple distorted consciousness (Bloch 1986, p. 156; 1970, p. 95). Bloch’s (1986) emphasis on a “critical-militant optimism” (p. 446) provides, here, a positive hermeneutical analytic lens, which creates a generous

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vista on to the wealth of human experience, beyond the Marxist propensity to approach culture as class-motivated mystification. In addition, by suggesting a more subtle materialism, Bloch, as part of the Western Marxist tradition, goes beyond the highly problematic manner in which the base-superstructure metaphor was put to work within orthodox Marxism. Here, as noted, utopian venturing beyond, the Not-Yet, was viewed by Bloch as material, as doing work in the now—“The tomorrow in today is alive” (1986, p. 1374), the wish “confutes and judges the existent” (1970, p. 91). This analytical prism and value, though, as noted, is not undiscriminating, Bloch differentiating between “private wishful thinking” (1970, p. 89) and utopian expressions that are political and strategic. In line with this expanded materialism, Bloch also dealt with questions around science, ideology, and rationality in a manner that often feels surprisingly contemporary. Committed to a subtly understood science, Bloch is nevertheless clear that science cannot fully exclude ideological, utopian, and musical elements. Unsurprisingly, Western Marxism, and Bloch, in particular, are crucial resources within contemporary utopian studies. A number of scholars in this field have sought to retrieve, keep alive, and elaborate upon aspects of Bloch’s work, in an effort to connect utopia and the human sciences.1 In my view, the most important contemporary contributor to this field is Ruth Levitas. Drawing on Bloch, Levitas (1990) has defined utopia broadly as “the desire for a better way of being”, and she views utopianism, after Bloch, as a “fundamental … propensity in humans” (p. 1). Levitas (2005) has also noted the connectedness between utopia and her disciplinary home, sociology, suggesting that both are in the business of the “imaginary reconstitution of society”. Despite different inflections, both sociology and utopia are holistic, descriptive, explanatory, critical, normative, prescriptive, and present- and future-oriented. In her more recent work, Utopia as Method, Levitas (2013) defends utopia against post-modern inflected disavowals and prohibitive strictures and delineates three utopian modalities: utopia as archaeology, as ontology, and as architecture. Utopia as archaeology is about “piecing together the images of the good society that are embedded in political programmes and social and economic policies”, looking for the often “implicit images of the good society and views of how people are or should be” (pp. 153–154). In contrast, utopia as ontology centers on critical questions “about human nature and human flourishing” (p. 177) and is intimately bound up with a consideration of the connection between utopia and affect. Finally, utopia

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as architecture deals with “imagining a reconstructed world and describing its social institutions” (p. 197). The “terrain of utopian fiction” (p. 197), this mode is both critical and reconstitutive, but, above all, focusses on the latter in its dedication to questions of the imaginative, institutional, and existential building of alternatives.

Seven Theses on Utopia as Optic Drawing together elements of the foregoing discussion, I will suggest seven theses on utopia as optic, as a set of guidelines to my approach in the chapters ahead. First, after Levitas (1990, 2013), the most useful definition of utopia is “the desire for a better way of being”. This capacious definition allows for recognition of the wide-ranging place of utopianism in everyday life, business, politics, popular culture, and social movement activity. It also avoids specification of the moral and political content of such utopianism, thus getting beyond the assumption that utopian conceptions must be pleasant, or, conversely, that they must be unpleasantly totalitarian. Second, such a definition implies that utopianism is everywhere. Utopianism is not confined to fictional literature that depicts another, better world, or to programs of total social transformation, but exists at multiple levels, from individual daydreaming, to larger cultural currents, to social movements. Third, utopia is without a history. Utopia, that is, is not an exclusively modern or Western thing. It is closely bound to the human imagination and to human creativity, psychical and social. While recognizing utopia’s omnihistorical existence, utopianism takes different shapes in different times and places. Fourth, counter to a pervasive strand of commentary that suggests that utopia has gone into retreat since the 1970s, I will argue that utopia tends to shift form and sites rather than disappear (Alexander 2001). The declinist reading of utopia is to be found in both affirmative and critical variants. The affirmative version, articulated in end of history/end of ideology narratives, is typically a liberal storyline, which tends to connect utopianism with violent totalitarianism (see Chapter 3). The pessimistic variant, on the other hand, is usually expressed by those on the Left, connecting utopia’s demise to the defeat of critical thought and emancipatory movements (Anderson 2004; Bauman 2003, 2007a; Jacoby 2005).

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Fifth, utopia should not be seen, after Mannheim, as opposed to ideology, but as part of the ideological, widely understood. This contention informs the work of both Jameson (1981) and Levitas. Here, the ideological is apprehended in a wider, more neutral sense as worldview, or as “that aspect of the human condition under which human beings live their lives as conscious actors in a world that makes sense to them to varying degrees” (Therborn 1980, p. 2). While utopia, in this conception, is part of the ideological, it is a part that requires an analytically separate focus. Sixth, utopia should not be viewed as overwhelmingly extra-rational, but instead, like ideology, as variously rational, emotional, and bound up with feelings, images, symbols, narratives, practices, and institutions. We find elements of this position in the work of Georges Sorel, Bloch, and Benjamin, and, more recently, in the scholarship of Levitas (2013) and Jameson (2009). This focus seeks to grasp something akin to what Raymond Williams (1977, pp. 130–134) spoke of as “structures of feeling”, a kind of feeling and thinking that is social and material, but at the “edge of semantic availability”, and to what Griffin (1991) has characterized as the “musical” quality of ideology. Seventh, and finally, after Mannheim, utopias are patterned and exist within historically and spatially specific utopian configurations, which entwine particular utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian figures. That is to say, utopianism is always critical; as Kumar (1991) says, “Utopia opposes as it proposes” (p. 107). On the one hand, as Paul Ricoeur (1986) noted, utopia’s “leap outside”, provides an “empty place from which to look at ourselves”, putting the “system at a distance”. On the other hand, as Mannheim argued, any particular utopia is always an antagonistic counterutopia: That is, a utopian conception is built by way of a dystopian outside. In related fashion, many utopianisms are built upon or against an antiutopianism, the disavowal of utopia, which is viewed as necessarily leading in a dystopian direction.

Modern Utopianism---A Periodizing Sketch These broad contentions frame my approach to contemporary utopianism in the three chapters that follow. As a further backdrop to these chapters, and drawing on this framing, I will suggest below a broad periodization of the shifting historical constellations of modern utopianism.

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1789–1871: French Revolution to the Paris Commune I begin with the symbolic date of 1789, the French Revolution, as a way of drawing together a set of wide-ranging, world-making imaginative and institutional shifts that occur over a longer span of time: the notion of intentional, collective social transformation; the idea that the people should be sovereign; the advent of the language of the “social” and of “society”; the novel connotations—upward, forward movement, the opening to the new—attached to the word “revolution”; the unleashing of the three big modern ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, and socialism); the modern conception and civic religious quality of nationalism, and the appearance of a new subject, the national citizen (Heilbron 1995; Held 1999; Hobsbawm 1962, 1990; Jameson 2016; McGrew 2001; Therborn 2009; Wallerstein 1990, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2005b). The suggested re-framing of modernity as, above all, a new “time orientation” captures an important dimension of the above-mentioned changes: the future as open, reachable, constructable; the present as preparation for the future; the past as ruins to be left behind, or to be salvaged in building that future (Harrington 2005; Therborn 2003). Intellectual foundations for such new orientations can be found earlier, in, say, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, or the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Gordon 1991; Heilbron 1995), and these imaginative changes are profoundly intertwined with economic and political transformations. Notably, these include the making of the modern state from the fifteenth century, including the emerging international system of states, and the construction, in the same period, of the modern world economy—the expansion of commodity production, the restless search for profit, technological development, globalization, and proletarianization (Chase-Dunn 1998; Held 1999; Mann 1988; McGrew 2001; Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989). Challenges to worldly powers, found across human history, are to be seen, too, in the early-modern period, for instance, in the assault on Church authorities posed by the Munster Rebellion of the early 1530s, the Anabaptists arguing for radical equality and declaring a “New Jerusalem”. The moment of Enlightenment similarly contained profound challenges to the predominance of religious traditionalism and to the ancien regime, shaping a new framework for thinking about nature, society, and human beings, captured in phrases such as “Dare to know”, “the light of reason”, and “Everything must be examined” (Hamilton 1999, pp. 25–26; Porter 2001;

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Briggs and Clavin 2003, p. 8; Swingewood 2000). This new framework and those core Enlightenment values—science, reason, freedom, progress—are saturated in utopian content, set against the oppressive social bonds of the feudal order and the dead weight of customary and religious modes of knowledge that enchained individuals, portrayed as, in essence, free and reasoning (Bocock 1999; Hamilton 1999; Hobsbawm 1962; Israel 2006; May 1996; Ray 1999). With respect to what Levitas (2013) calls utopia as ontology, future-oriented imaginings around “human nature and human flourishing” (p. 177), the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are tied to the new figure of the citizen, a more active subject possessed of rights—including a share in popular sovereignty—and responsibilities given by territorial belonging, in contrast to the duty-bound and passive conception of subjecthood characteristic of the old order (Held 1999). In part, these newer utopic contentions can be linked to the rising power of the bourgeoisie—private property rights, expanded liberties, free competition, the pursuit of self-interest, betterment and progress, and “careers open to talent” (Heywood 2003; Hobsbawm 1962, 1995a). This increasingly powerful class is also the predominant carrier of the classical liberalism emerging in this period, articulated by Adam Smith. According to Smith, the new commercial phase of human history, promised “perfect liberty”, allowing individual pursuit of self-interest and generating productive competition, which, in turn, would expand the realm of the market, induce technological advance that might “abridge labour”, and, as an unintended consequence, create “general opulence” (Gordon 1991; Smith 1986). Classical liberalism rested upon notions such as free individuality, self-interest, prudence, property rights, merit, and progress, set against a pre-modern past depicted as war-like and wretched, and against contemporary threats represented by unreasonable restraints on the market and competition, government over-extension, corruption, and, significantly, the threats posed by the lower orders (Smith 1986). This last threat is registered within a long-running liberal concern over the potentially harmful consequences of democracy and expansive political participation. Within the utopian constellation of this period, we see, as well, the emergence of currents recoiling before aspects of the Revolution, Enlightenment thought, and modern social changes. “Romanticism” is one broad way of capturing elements of this reaction. A multivalent phenomenon, containing reactionary and radical, poetic and philosophical, and individualist and collectivist expressions, Romanticism variously encompasses the following kinds of emphases: human beings as poets rather than consumers, and

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human action as more than the merely empirically observable; a concern with cohesion and order, and, often, an emphasis on hierarchy, duty, the collective good, and strong social bonds; contentions around the complexity of life, and the necessity of seeing society as an organic whole; an orientation to the past as a living foundation of the present; an emphasis on the limits of reason; and gestures to faith, intuition, emotion, imagination, feeling, spirit, nature, and the organic, set against rationalist and mechanical modes of knowledge (Gordon 1991; Ritzer and Goodman 2004; Rundell 2003; Saiedi 1993; Smith 1997; Swingewood 2000). We find, within this diffuse current, strong dystopian readings of the modern present and possible future—disconnection, loss of community, selfishness, often in the face of the predominance of the “cash nexus” (Mazlish 1989), growing ugliness, impoverishment, the degradation of work, disenchantment. We also see the conjuring of utopian figures—nostalgic images of the simplicity and togetherness of traditional communities, appeals to the value of strong shared faith, craftsmanship, unspoilt nature, and privilege given to subjects such as the lone poet, the community, or the integral nation. A similarly diffuse and variegated radical or revolutionary current is another compelling presence within this constellation. Often reacting, like Romanticism, against modern ills, such as atomization, the loss of belief, and the preponderance of trade over other types of relations, radicalism underscores, above all, equality and fraternity. It is attached to a totalizing and predominantly forward-looking image of modernity as “radically transformative” (Rundell 2003, p. 18). Within the matrix of tendencies in play within the French Revolutionary period, for example, a more radical faction appears with the “Conspiracy of Equals”—the rejection of individual property in land, the call for an end to distinctions between rich and poor, rulers and ruled, the demand for a “community of goods” (Marechal 2004). Such radicalism branches in a number of distinctive directions, one of which involves a synthesis with elements of liberalism and Romanticism, found in the work of the so-called utopian socialists—Henri SaintSimon (1760–1825), Robert Owen (1771–1858), and Charles Fourier (1772–1837). These thinkers sought the construction of both new, complete social cosmologies or sciences of humankind and society, and novel platforms for a better social order, viewed, as Goodwin (1978, p. 2) frames it, as a “frictionless social machine”, designed to overcome conflict, crime, and misery. Another radical branch leads toward a socialism attached to

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working-class politics. This tendency reflects the rapid, dislocating transformations occurring in Europe in the period—proletarianization, a new system of factory production, rising industrial productivity, intensive urbanization (Briggs and Clavin 2003; Hobsbawm 1969, 1995b; Lilley 1972). Such massive social changes brought with them pressing social problems—overcrowding, poverty, slum housing, alcoholism, harsh working conditions (Arrighi and Silver 1999; Hobsbawm 1962, 1969). The period 1780–1850 was, unsurprisingly, then, one of constant upheaval, which took a number of forms—the bread riot, the destruction of machinery, the strike, the movement for universal male suffrage (Bradley 1999; Hobsbawm 1962, 1969). The eruption of uprisings across Western and Central Europe in 1848 provides a further, crucial symbolic date, signaling the genesis of what world-systems thinkers call the “anti-systemic movements”—social democracy, communism, national liberation—even if the leading and most active participants in these rebellions tended to be artisans expressing the popular ideal of a “democratic and social republic”, rather than the working classled specter of communism invoked by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto (Briggs and Clavin 2003; Hobsbawm 1962, 1969, 1995a). The defeat of these rebellions also spelled the decisive end to feudal relations in Europe and the beginnings of the global triumph of capitalism (Hobsbawm 1962, 1995a). The 1850s and 1860s are decades of liberalization and growth in Europe, with Britain, “the workshop of the world”, the leading power, economically, politically, and ideologically (Hobsbawm 1962, 1995a). The period of relative intra-European peace from 1815, which encouraged the deepening and widening of capitalist social relations, was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). The insurrection emerging from this conflict, the Paris Commune, was claimed by Marx as an exemplar of an impending “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and the Commune can be seen as symbolic closing moment to this first period. 1871–1914: Age of Empire, First Crisis of Modernity Drawing on Hobsbawm (1995b) and Wagner (2001a), I suggest that a novel utopian constellation takes form in what they call, respectively, the “age of empire” and the “first crisis of modernity”, 1871–1914. In this sequence, a further cycle of major modern transformations is taking shape, and these changes transform, too, the utopian landscape. For a start, we see shifts within capitalism: the Great Depression of 1873–1896; a new

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industrial shift toward steel, engineering, chemical, and electrical industries, which is bound up with an expansion in the size of firms and a fast-growing and increasingly organized industrial working-class; extensive globalization, as the European powers double the world surface area under their control, trade volumes rise steeply, migration increases, efforts at international organization thicken, and new communication and transportation technologies appear and spread (Anderson 2002; Chirot 1986; Flora et al. 1983; Held et al. 1999; Hobsbawm 1995b; Osterhammel and Petersson 2003). We also see, in this period, important political, cultural, and ideological shifts: massification—for instance, mass trade in basic goods, mass communication, and a surge, connected to proletarianization and working-class organization (trades unions, socialist and labor parties), of pressures toward expanded democratization and social re-organization; the emergence of the modernist avant-garde, with its challenges to bourgeois conventions and its radical questioning of extant forms of art and life; a Rightward turn in nationalism, as intra-European tensions, along with arms spending, increase—expressed in rising xenophobic sentiments, and a racist social Darwinism directed both inward, at the popular classes, and outwards, toward the non-European world (Anderson 2002; Chirot 1986; Flora et al. 1983; Held et al. 1999; Hobsbawm 1995b; Osterhammel and Petersson 2003). Within the camp of power, we see the consolidation of a liberal imperialism (Wallerstein 2011), equipped with the language of scientifically based racial hierarchies, societal evolution and progress, natural selection, and civilizing missions, in which it was deemed the European duty to exploit underutilized resources, civilize “savages” or “primitive” peoples, and open “living space” for European settlement and exploitation (Hobsbawm 1995a; Joll 1976; Traverso 2003). Proto-sociologist Herbert Spencer, for instance, depicts a social evolutionary movement from militant, predatory, primitive social orders to peaceable industrial society, the latter characterized by individualism, free trade, liberty, and voluntary cooperation, a progressive shift toward perfection and happiness (Ellwood 1969). Further, Spencer’s laissez-faire commitments and evolutionism were bound together with degenerationist arguments about the “lower human races” (in Gondermann 2007, p. 24), who, possessed of significantly smaller brains, were destined to wretched lives until a “stronger race” (p. 34) took possession of their territories. Such racialization was applied also to the lower ranks within Europe, Spencer arguing that the “stern discipline of nature” needed to be applied to the European poor, against relief that

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would entail the “artificial preservation of [society’s] … feeblest members” (in Gondermann 2007, p. 28). The “great power nationalism” (Anderson 2002) of this cycle, with its recourse to biological and sociocultural racism (Hobsbawm 1995a; Smith 1997), justified imperial domination of the non-European world and the status and power of extant elites. It also functioned to mobilize national populations for the “glorious … conquests of exotic territories and dusky races” (Hobsbawm 1995b, p. 70), in an effort to integrate, neutralize, enchant, and nationalize the increasingly visible popular classes (Anderson 1991, 2002; Balakrishnan 1995; Balibar 1991; Day and Thompson 2004; Finlayson 2001). The new nationalism and imperial liberalism soon turned inward on Europe, signaled by a spike in anti-Semitism from the 1880s, foreshadowing the outburst of intra-European xenophobia of World War I (Hobsbawm 1995b; Joll 1976; Traverso 2003). Here, intellectuals and political elites across Europe, multilaterally dehumanized their European enemies, declaring “that ‘we’ were the victims of aggression … [and] that ‘they’ represented a mortal threat to the values of freedom and civilization which ‘we’ embodied” (Hobsbawm 1995b, p. 163). Converse to the utopian hopes expressed in the liberal imperialism of this period are sentiments to be found within the so-called revolt against reason from the end of the nineteenth century, a mood of pessimism and skepticism infecting European elites, signaled in a reaction against positivism and the domination of scientific reason, in favor of emphases around will, the imagination, feelings, the spiritual, the ineffable, the submerged, the irrational, impulses, myth, the heroic, the esoteric, the body (Briggs and Clavin 2003; Hobsbawm 1995b; Joll 1976). Reference to topics such as the “psychology of the masses” and the “popular imagination” (Briggs and Clavin 2003) proliferated—visible in Le Bon’s study of crowds, Freud’s work on mass psychology, or Sorel’s emphasis on the force of myth. Such concerns are also visible in the emergence of elite theory, Vilfredo Pareto (1966), for instance, skeptical of the notion of progress, attacking state intervention and socialism as forms of spoliation, insisting on the primacy of the non-rational in social life, and asserting the ineradicable circulation of elites through history. Such figures of elite utopianism and dystopianism must be viewed as in antagonistic conversation with the utopic energies emerging from below— in particular, set against the growing power of socialism. In this period, we see the steep growth of the industrial working class, the expansion of unionization, and expanding socialist parties and votes (Flora et al. 1983;

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Hartwell 1972). If we can trace the anti-systemic movements to the rebellions of 1848 (Wallerstein 2002), the Paris Commune marks a ruptural moment for these movements, forcing their leading figures to face the profound difficulties in obtaining their goals, their political weaknesses, and the problem of repression (Balibar 2007). These difficulties raised the crucial question of “how to win?” (Badiou 2010). The predominant answer to this question across all three movements, in Wallerstein’s (2002) estimation, was a state-centered, two-step strategy—gain power within the state and then transform the social world. In this period, socialism was a “broadly polyvalent subversive ecosystem” (Favilli 2016, p. 3), with a plurality of anarchist, syndicalist, state socialist, and Christian-ethical variants in play, variously nationalist (even imperial) and internationalist, revolutionary and evolutionary, ethical and materialist, democratic and elitist. Nevertheless, within this sequence, we see what Balibar (2007) calls the inauguration of Marxism’s 100-year “cycle … as an organizational doctrine” (p. 2), symbolized by the 1891 Erfurt Programme of the powerful German Social Democratic Party. Espousing an accessible version of Marx’s ideas, the Programme calls for a series of immediate reforms and looks forward to “the transformation of the capitalist private property ownership of the means of production … into social property”, in order to bring for the exploited classes “the greatest welfare and universal, harmonious perfection”. As Sassoon (1997) notes, the unfolding conquest of socialism by Marxism was, in part, a victory of ideas centered around a compelling critical analysis of capitalism (a theory of exploitation), a theory of historical change and power (the materialist conception of history), and a theory of political transition, strategic and agential (the working class as a unified and compelled collective subject of socialist change). The rising power and visibility of socialist organization and its associated utopian imaginary, the threat from and fear of the popular classes—these were central components of what Wagner (2001a) frames as the “first crisis of modernity”. This framing expresses the decline, under the weight of the above-mentioned transformations, tensions, and struggles, of the hegemony of classical liberalism. In particular, Wagner (2001a) argues that, in this period, we see an escalating crisis of the doctrine of non-interference in the economy, widespread skepticism about the capacity of political institutions to deal with the deep-seated problems they faced, and an epistemological crisis expressed in pervasive doubt about the “intelligibility of human action and the social world” (p. 23). One important outgrowth of this first modern crisis was a mutation or reformulation that took place within

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liberalism. This reformulation is particularly apparent among a number of leading social scientific intellectuals who staged something of a conversation between liberalism and socialism—Weber in Germany, Durkheim in France, Leonard Hobhouse (1908) in Britain, and Lester Frank Ward (1896) and Albion Small (1895) in the United States. The search undertaken by these thinkers for a role that social knowledge might have in battling against incoherence, disorder, insecurity, and uncertainty (Wagner 1994) can be connected, too, to tendencies toward state-led, rational social reform from the late nineteenth century, with a number of states introducing welfare state-like interventions, in an effort to tame the social order through enlightened central planning (Lassman 1986; Wagner 2001a). These tendencies—again, political, scientific, and utopian—came to the fore in the period that followed. 1914–1968: The Organization of Modernity Wagner (2001a) characterizes the period 1914–1968 as the “organization of modernity”, arguing that we see here a broad shift from the classically liberal perspective of atomistic individuals to a new commonsense around the need for a “restriction of individual liberty” in the name of some “collective liberation” (p. 77). Utopic notions emergent in the previous period around the central role of planning, programs, state intervention, parties, class, nation, and rational social knowledge, came to the fore in this period (Wagner 1994, 2001a). One significant expression of this shift can be seen in the fortunes of the idea of the state-led plan as a force for social progress and betterment—for instance, the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan of 1928, Hitler’s 1933 four-year plan, the New Deal in America, inaugurated in the same year. This sequence opens symbolically with World War I. An expression of the boiling over of imperial tensions and the battle for hegemony in the world economy, the conflict meant an unprecedented coming together of state, economy, and civil society, as whole social orders were mobilized toward the national war effort, a novelty captured in the term “total war” (Arrighi and Silver 1999; Hobsbawm 1995b; McGrew 2001; Wagner 2001a, b; Wallerstein 2003a, b). Drawing all major powers into its devastating orbit, and leaving societal wreckage and trauma in its wake, the War was also a crucial laboratory in the making of communist revolution, fascist counterrevolution, and social-democratic power (Traverso 2003). Growing war weariness and disaffection reached a high-water mark in Russia, with the

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world’s first ostensibly communist revolution—a revolution that expanded the threat of revolution across Europe. The xenophobic, total mobilization of nations, mass conscription, political and economic dislocations, and fear of revolution issuing from the War, meanwhile, were vital in the genesis of fascism (Mann 2004). And the War significantly expanded the demand for and institutionalization of liberal democracy—full suffrage only extant in three counties in 1914 (Therborn 1977)—as well as social rights aspirations. We might frame this sequence as marked by the emergence of what Badiou (2007) calls the two great “we-subjects”, or major vehicles of collectivist utopianism, of the twentieth century—nation and class. We find four major variations in this period. The first three are modalities of the antisystemic movements—communism, national liberation, and social democracy. The War and the Bolshevik Revolution consolidated the victory within these movements of the state-centered, two-step strategy that emerged in the nineteenth century in response to defeat. The world Depression of the 1930s and World War II underlined the efficacy of this broad strategy in achieving progressive social change. In particular, these anti-systemic movements triumphed between 1945 and 1968 (Wallerstein 1989, 2002; Arrighi et al. 1989). That is, the post-War period sees the expansion of “really existing socialism”, so that, by 1970, the socialist bloc encompassed about a third of the world’s people. In the West, American post-War hegemony was accompanied by the social-democratic or Keynesian consensus—extensive state intervention, mixed economies, and redistribution in the interests of national growth, cohesion, and progress—as the “basic grammar” (Anderson 2007) of government. Meanwhile, in what became the “Third World”, a wave of assertive decolonizing movements shook off European rule in the name of self-determination—81 former colonies gaining independence between 1940 and 1980 (Chirot 1986)—and such successes were registered in the prominence of the notion of “development” on the global political agenda (Wallerstein 2005b). In the case of “really existing socialism”, the figures of utopian expression are continuous with the orthodox Marxism that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The indispensable role of the party, as repository of Science,2 as organizer and representative of the working people, and as legislator of socialism—these are ideas fundamental to both Kautsky (Kautsky 1994; Salvadori 1979) and Lenin (1965), and are laid out at length in Stalin’s 1939 work History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Bolsheviks ): Short Course. The essentially statist conception

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of socialism found, here, is intimately bound up with a state capitalist conception of the economic dimension of socialism, a state capitalism acknowledged by Lenin, evident throughout Stalin’s (1933) report on “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan”,3 and also clear in Trotsky’s (1972) efforts to delineate a degeneration of socialism within the Soviet Union, while still equating socialism with, “The nationalization of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade” (p. 248). This conception of socialism—nationalization of the means of production by the party-state, the disciplining of workers, the operation of value, the control by the party of organs said to embody working-class power—reigned supreme across the socialist bloc and was the target of what remained a marginal Left communist critique that insisted “really existing socialism” was, in fact, a new variant of capitalism (see, for instance, Buick and Crump 1986; Rubel and Crump 1987; el-Ojeili 2003). Social democracy or social liberalism, despite its diffuse variations, can be characterized as pivoting around the utopian ideal of a “social capitalism”, pursued through strategic nationalization and extensive state intervention,4 redistribution with the aim of reducing extensive inequalities, the extension of social rights, the cooperation between state, capital, and labor in the interests of stability and national harmony, full employment, economic growth, and technological progress. This variety of anti-systemic movement, again, has its genesis within the working class and socialist movements of the nineteenth century, visible in the statist socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle, but, particularly, in the decades after the Commune, in a move away from insurrection toward patient parliamentary work, gradualist reform, and pacific evolutionism. This social-democratic reformism was expressed across Europe in these decades by thinkers such as Paul Brousse in France, Eduard Bernstein in Germany, and Giacinto Menotti Serrati in Italy, with significant support within both socialist and trades union movements. These reformist, revisionist, and possibilist currents, as well as converging strands of social scientific social liberalism, gathered strength following the Great War, and, again, during the Depression of the 1930s. In the West after 1945, a social-democratic or Keynesian consensus emerged as the predominant logic of government, what Karl Polanyi (1944) imagined was a necessary and irreversible societal taming and embedding of capitalism, and what Daniel Bell (1962, p. 402) called a “rough consensus” around decentralized power, pluralism, the mixed economy, and the welfare state.

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A global social-democratic perspective was also visible, within new institutions and initiatives established after World War II, centered on the need for modernizing “development” within poorer nations. This turn can be viewed as a response to the power of the third variety of anti-systemic movement, national liberation, in the period running from 1945 to 1975. Drawing inspiration from 1917, national liberation movements were encouraged in the direction of state-led development, as well as by the discrediting of paths reliant on the world market and private enterprise in the face of the Depression and World War (Hobsbawm 1994), by the official anti-imperialism of the USSR, and by the division of the world into two spheres following 1945. The period of decolonization saw the appearance of a wealth of movements, encompassing both more moderate forces and a more ruptural anti-imperialism. These movements, as Hobsbawm (1994, p. 35) notes, “called for an end to agrarian backwardness by systematic industrialization, whether on the centrally-planned Soviet model or by import substitution”. Land reform was, similarly, a core part of the program of national liberation, as a means to shape greater levels of internal equalization, development, and national sovereignty. The moment of national liberation or “Third worldism” is frequently imagined by way of landmark events—the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the achievement of Algerian independence in 1962, the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America in 1966, the call for a New International Economic Order at the United Nations in the mid-1970s. Berger (2004) suggests the existence of a first- and secondgeneration of such “Third Worldism”. The first is symbolized by the gathering of leaders such as Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, and Zhou Enlai at Bandung in 1955 to condemn colonialism, call for increased support for human rights and “self-determination of peoples and nations”, for cooperation between newly independent nations, for the peaceful settlement of international disputes, and for a UN-operated development fund. This post-colonial socialism was succeeded by a second-generation in the 1960s and 1970s, which moved in “a more radical, more unambiguously socialist” (Berger, p. 19) direction. Equipped with a “more radical antiimperial agenda that located the participants firmly in the socialist camp” (Berger, p. 20), coinciding with the spread of dependency theory and the notion of “delinking”, this ruptural tendency was embodied in the enthusiasm around the figure of Che Guevara, in the Third World and in the West. Crucially, as Nash (2002, p. 96) notes, “The driving force behind

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Third Worldism was indeed the entry of millions of people from the former colonial world into a world-historical arena that had for centuries been dominated by a relatively small number of western capitalist societies”. The appearance of anti-colonial militancy among the poorest in the world, evident in the insurgency in Latin America in the 1960s and Africa in the 1970s (Berger 2004), was painted by one of the leading intellectuals of the time, Kwame Nkrumah (1965) as follows: “when all is said and done, it is the so-called little man, the bent-backed, exploited, malnourished, bloodcovered fighter for independence who decides. And he invariably decides for freedom” (Nkrumah 1965). And in what Nash (2002, p. 98) describes as “the manifesto of Third Worldism”, Franz Fanon’s (1963) Wretched of the Earth, a rousing utopianism, simultaneously world-creating and ontological, is clear: When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man and an avalanche of murders … Let us decide not to imitate Europe. Let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving. (p. 236)

The fourth variation, fascism, belongs outside of these anti-systemic movements, and, despite the appearance of proto-fascist ideas in the nineteenth century, was an ideological novelty to the twentieth century. Emerging properly in the Interwar years, fascism was an expression of imperialism, the brutality and dislocation of World War I, and the threat posed by socialist and working-class politics, a syncretic ideology, conveyed by a family of parties, and containing a variety of often contradictory impulses. Centered around the we-subject of a reborn nation (Griffin 1991), fascism drew plentifully from its competitor ideologies and utopianisms—socialism (solidarity, equality, planning), imperial liberalism (social Darwinism, national grandeur, eugenics), and conservatism (fear of dramatic transformation, nostalgia for past glories, rootedness, traditionalist hostility to universalism) (Traverso 2003). As articulated in Mussolini’s (1935) “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”, fascism was tied to “the need for action” and “Faith” (p. 587). Repudiating pacificism and worshiping combat, struggle, heroism, and conquest, fascism, says Mussolini, stands opposed to socialism (a “materialist conception of happiness” [p. 589]), democracy, and liberalism (a forerunner to anarchy). The twentieth century, Mussolini announces, will be “the century of collectivism, and hence the century of

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the State”, the State understood as “an absolute” or “ethical” State, “a spiritual and moral fact in itself”, “the custodian and transmitter of the spirit of the people” whose influence “reaches every aspect of the national life” (p. 591). It is important to pay attention, as well, to the predominant dystopian figures in play within this period. A master motif, taking different forms across the political spectrum, was the menace of disorder, insecurity, and instability. Social democrats, communists, and fascists all claimed to have found a statist-organizational solution to such threats. In the West, following 1917, “communism”, “socialism”, “Bolshevism”, and “Marxism” were emblems of fear, expressed in hysterical form in Churchill’s musings on the “cosmopolitan fanatics” behind the revolutionary barbarity in Russia (Traverso 2003). A similar fear is at the epicenter of fascist dystopianism, often expressed in the biological, racialized language of disease, contagion, and hygiene (Traverso 2003). Later, in the Cold War period, “totalitarianism” became an important device that energized fear about the dangers of communism. At another pole, the dystopian potential of unleashed capitalism—unemployment, excessive inequalities of wealth, destabilizing crisis (Keynes 1936)—figured prominently. Imperialism—or its progeny, “neo-colonialism”—was an aligned master figure operative within the antisystemic movements, as a denunciation of domination and dehumanization, and as a demand for the sovereignty of subaltern peoples. This decolonizing imagery reverberated across the West in the mobilization against ethnic oppression (most resonantly, within the American Civil Rights movement), which, together with early broadsides against the forms of domination exercised by men over women (for instance, Beauvoir [1949]) and denunciations of the deadening conformism of post-War life (Marcuse [1966], say), provided a prelude to dimensions of the “world revolution of ’68”. Entering Modernity’s Second Crisis, 1968–1999 This phrase, “the world revolution of ’68”, again, serves as symbolic shorthand for a whole series of major material and imaginative transformations, including utopian reconfiguration. Across the human sciences, we see a host of efforts at capturing major shifts in economy, polity, and culture post1968—a post-industrial age (Bell 1999), post-modernity (Lyotard 1984), disorganized capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987), risk society (Beck 1999), reflexive modernity (Giddens 1990), globalization, the network society

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(Castells 1997), liquid modernity (Bauman 2000). Once more, Wagner’s (2001a) encapsulation, the “second crisis of modernity”, seems a useful way of approaching this moment. For Wallerstein, the crucial content of the world revolution of’68 involved both a fundamental challenge to the American-led world economy, and also to the now powerful anti-systemic movements. Of the latter, the critical charges offered in the moment of’68 were that these movements had left certain groups out, that they had not transformed life as they had promised, and that they had become co-opted and corrupted and were themselves now agents of domination, oppression, and exploitation (Arrighi et al. 1989; Wallerstein 2002). In the subsequent decades, these movements unraveled, and we see a wearing down of the utopian significations attached to them. In the West, the social-democratic consensus gave way to a new neo-liberal consensus, which championed liberty over equality, the individual over the collective, the market over the state, deregulation over regulation, competition over cooperation, the private over the public. In the poorer nations, “Third Worldism” and “development” were vanquished, replaced by debt, dependency, structural adjustment, and the “Washington Consensus”. And the world of “really existing socialism” was increasingly beset by problems of performance and legitimacy, collapsing in the period 1989–1991, and bringing, in Fukuyama’s (1992) notorious formulation, an end to history—an end to alternative horizons beyond market capitalism and liberal democracy. At the same time, the emancipatory legacies of 1968 have indisputably reshaped the world. We could mention, here, the impacts on commonsense in the West of the youth revolt, the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, or the newer movements centered on the environment, anti-sexism, anti-racism, and anti-homophobia (Therborn 2011). These challenges have significantly transfigured the very operation of capitalism, which has incorporated emphases that emerged from that world revolution—freedom from domination, self-expression, creativity, plural lifestyles, irreverence, reflexivity, recognition of otherness, decentralization, participation, for instance (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Castells 1997; Fraser 1995; Giddens 1991; Therborn 2009). Such emphases have intersected with a turn against those imaginative and institutional elements undergirding the utopic constellation of organized modernity—notably, rational, scientific authority, bureaucracy, planning, states, program-led political parties. This turn has been underpinned by the eclipse of the post-War years of growth, mass production and consumption, employment, welfare, rising wages, and union power, with world

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economic downturn from the early 1970s (Maddison 1976; Held et al. 1999). Dramatic economic changes—captured, variously, in the language of globalization, the re-organization of the international division of labor, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, financialization, informationalization—that followed the downturn went hand in hand with the rising dominance of neo-liberalism in wealthy nations, symbolized in the electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. This neo-liberalism and transforming capitalism have entailed not only an assault on and weakening of the old modes of Left critique and utopianism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), but also the appearance of new utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian figures. Neo-liberalism’s antiutopianism is encapsulated in the Thatcherite contention that “there is no alternative”, and in Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) thesis about the West’s arrival at a final destination of “rational recognition” in the political realm and “rational desires” in the economic sphere. This narrative converged, in certain ways, with a swelling post-modernization of knowledge in the human sciences through the 1980s and 1990s, which detected and championed a move away from grand narratives, totalizing thought, sameness, reason, science, progress, determinism, closure, teleology, and essentialism, toward little stories, epistemological relativism, difference, plurality, contingency, constructionism, and openness (Harvey 1989; Jameson 1984; 1989; Lyotard 1984; McLennan 1996; Sim 2002; Smart 1992). Those criticized modern values—totality, perfection, sameness, and closure—are, vitally, those typically associated with the space of the utopian, post-modern thought, here, converging with a liberal emphasis on the strict intellectual and moral limits of human knowledge and action (Beilharz 1994). In the face of this post-modernization of knowledge and the advance of neo-liberalism, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of what might be called the decline of utopia narrative. In a scholarly version of this narrative, Bauman (2003) portrayed utopia as characteristic of an earlier, solid phase of modernity: “Utopia was to be the fortress of certainty and stability”; “Utopia was the product of the age of engagement and commitment” (p. 16). In the early twenty-first century, however, with the shift from solid to “liquid modernity”, utopia finds itself shaped on a different terrain, wherein social forms have only a short-term life expectancy, state power weakens, community dissolves, individualism and consumerism grow, the idea of progress falls into decadence (Balibar 2007), and long-term thinking collapses (Bauman 2007a). With such changes, Bauman (2003, 2007a, b) contends, we see the advance of deregulated, privatized, and individualized

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versions of the search for the good life; a move from collective improvement to individual survival; a shift of utopia, the better place, from the end of the road into the here and now, today rather than tomorrow; and a turn away from utopia as lending significant meaning to life, in favor of utopia as escape. In a somewhat aligned fashion, Jacoby (1999, p. 15) maintained that utopia was being eclipsed among intellectuals, and that the Left had become “practical, pragmatic and liberal”, subsequently (2005, p. xiii) suggesting that the generalized “impoverishment” of imagination (“the source of utopian speculation”) was the force behind the contemporary demise of utopia.5 For these Leftist thinkers, the demise of utopia narrative was one of loss. The more dominant register of this narrative was triumphal and progressivist, articulated in neo-liberalism and attached to utopian figures such as the unleashing of the free, competitive economy and the free individual, to accountability, efficiency, and transparency (Levitas 1986), and to an imagined future of increasing wealth, choice, cosmopolitan harmony, diversity, and meritocracy. Simultaneously, this neo-liberalism expounded a thoroughgoing anti-utopianism in the name of circumventing the dystopian possibility of totalitarianism (see Chapter 3).

Concluding Comments I am suggesting that this neo-liberal anti-utopianism, as well as the dystopian and utopian figures it is associated with, were increasingly beset by “reality problems” (Alexander 1995) through the decade of “happy globalization” (in Outhwaite and Ray 2005, p. 19), so that, by the end of the 1990s, the elements of a novel utopian constellation were emerging into view. Symbolically, I suggest we date this to 1999, when opposition to neo-liberal globalization in Seattle opened an increasingly visible set of condemnations of environmental destruction, inequality, Southern debt, militarism, and forms of oppression, guided by the sense that, in the subsequent language of the World Social Forum, “Another world is possible!” This contentious politics and utopianism have further crystallized in the wake of the global financial crisis. 1999 is also symbolic in the rise to prominence of Right nationalist forces, as alarmed commentary greeted the Austrian Freedom Party’s 27% share of the vote in national elections. These far-Right forces have also gained momentum on the heels of the events of 2007/2008, targeting globalization, immigration, multiculturalism, and the “cartelization” of the establishment parties of Left and Right (Bornschier 2010).

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These established centrist liberal parties, meanwhile, have found themselves ensnared by their submission to the dictates of an increasingly unpopular neo-liberalism, confronted by popular disaffection, falling membership, and growing electoral volatility (Mair 2006). It is to these dynamics that I turn in the next three chapters, focussing on three sites or spaces within the contemporary utopian constellation, which I take to be particularly important. In Chapter 3, I explore the fortunes of contemporary liberalism, which, I suggest, is marked today by significant fragmentation. This splintering entails post-hegemonic tendencies, as well as a striking diminishment of utopian significations, and the growth of a liberalism of fear. In Chapter 4, I examine post-fascism, a varied, diffuse culture, conjoining significant elements of fear around deteriorating power and life chances with hybrid visions of futures built, notably, from nostalgic, mythic, and vitalistic fragments. Finally, in Chapter 5, I turn to the new communism, another emergent atmosphere of concerns, values, images, and mapping exercises, opposing state and capital, oriented toward an “insurrectionary immediatism” to be enacted by new individual and collective subjects.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Jameson (2005), Moylan (2011), Sargent (2006, 2011), Sargisson (2012), Suvin (2016), Tamdgidi (2007), Tester and Jacobsen (2012). 2. See, here, Stalin (1972) on Marxism as rendering the world and its laws “fully knowable”, converting socialism “from a dream of a better future for humanity into a science” (p. 312). 3. Stalin, here, emphasizes the industrialization, development of the productive forces, growing productivity, and rising wages brought by the plan, and contends that these successes, including the eradication of crisis tendencies, have rendered capitalist nations pregnant with proletarian revolution. 4. “[E]nlargement of the functions of government”, in Keynes’s (1936) terms, as a means to avoid “the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety” (pp. 188–189). Or, as framed by The Beveridge Report of 1942, the State, in cooperation with the individual, should organize security in a “comprehensive policy of social progress”, to attack want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness (p. 6). 5. See also Anderson (2004) and Jameson (2016, p. 10).

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Lilley, S. (1972). Technical progress and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1914. In M. Cipolla (Ed.), The Fontana economic history of Europe: The twentieth century. London: Fontana. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maddison, A. (1976). Economic policy and performance in Europe 1913–1970. In C. M. Cipolla (Ed.), The Fontana economic history of Europe: The twentieth century 1. London: Fontana. Mair, P. (2006). Ruling the void? The hollowing of western democracy. New Left Review, 42, 25–51. Mann, M. (1988). States, war and capitalism: Studies in political sociology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mann, M. (2004). Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannheim, K. (1968 [1936]). Ideology and utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Marcuse, H. (1966). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon Press. Marechal, S. (2004) Manifesto of the equals. Retrieved January 23, 2019, from http://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/conspiracy-equals/ 1796/manifesto.htm. Marx, K. (1987). Karl Marx: Selected writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. May, T. (1996). Situating social theory. Bristol: Open University Press. Mazlish, B. (1989). A new science: The breakdown of connections and the birth of sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGrew, A. (2001). The state in advanced capitalist societies. In J. Allen, P. Braham, & P. Lewis (Eds.), Political and economic forms of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. McLennan, G. (1996, July–August). Post-Marxism and the ‘four sins’ of modernist theorizing. New Left Review, 1(218), 53–74. McLennan, G. (2006). Sociological cultural studies: Reflexivity and positivity in the human sciences. London: Palgrave. Moylan, T. (2011). Realizing better futures, strong thought for hard times. In T. Moylan & R. Baccolini (Eds.), Utopia as method vision: The use value of social dreaming. Oxford: Peter Lang. Mussolini, B. (1935). The political and social doctrine of fascism. Retrieved January 23, 2019, from https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/ hist151/MUSSOLINI.pdf. Nash, A. (2002). Third worldism. African Sociological Review, 7 (1), 94–116. Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism. Retrieved January 23, 2019, from https://politicalanthro.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/ nkrumah.pdf.

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Ollman, B. (2005). The utopian vision of the future (then and now): A Marxist critique. Monthly Review, 57 (3), 78–102. Osterhammel, J., & Petersson, N. P. (2003). Globalization: A short history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Outhwaite, W., & Ray, L. (2005). Social theory and postcommunism. Oxford: Blackwell. Pareto, V. (1966). Pareto: Sociological writings. London: Pall Mall Press. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Porter, R. (2001). The enlightenment (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave. Ray, L. (1999). Theorizing classical sociology. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1986). Lectures on ideology and utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Ritzer, G., & Goodman, D. J. (2004). Classical social theory (4th ed.). New York: McGrawHill. Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and social hope. London: Penguin. Rubel, M., & Crump, J. (Eds.). (1987). Non-market socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. London: Macmillan. Rundell, J. (2003). Modernity, Enlightenment, revolution and romanticism. In G. Ritzer & B. Smart (Eds.), Handbook of social theory. London: Sage. Saiedi, N. (1993). The birth of social theory: Social thought in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Lanham: University Press of America. Salvadori, M. (1979). Karl Kautsky and the socialist revolution, 1880–1938. London: New Left Books. Sargent, L. T. (2006). In defense of utopia. Diogenes, 209, 11–17. Sargent, L. T. (2011). Choosing utopia: Utopianism as an essential element in political thought and action. In T. Moylan & R. Baccolini (Eds.), Utopia as method vision: The use value of social dreaming. Oxford: Peter Lang. Sargisson, L. (2012). Fool’s gold? Utopianism in the 21st century. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sassoon, D. (1997). One hundred years of socialism: The west European left in the twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sim, S. (2002). Irony and crisis: A critical history of postmodern culture. Cambridge: Icon Books. Small, A. (1895). The era of sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 1(1), 1–15. Smart, B. (1992). Modern conditions, postmodern controversies. London: Routledge. Smith, A. (1986). The essential Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, R. (1997). The Fontana history of the human sciences. London: Fontana. Social Democratic Party of Germany. (1891). The Erfurt programme. Retrieved October 19, 2018, from https://www.marxists.org/history/international/ social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm.

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Stalin, J. (1933). The results of the first five-year plan. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from http://www.marxists.org/referemce/archive/stalin/works/ 193301/07.html. Stalin, J. (1939). History of the communist party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short course. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from http://www.marx2mao. com/Other/HCPSU39i.html. Stalin, J. (1972). The essential Stalin: Main theoretical writings, 1905–1952. New York: Anchor. Steinmetz, G. (2007). Transdisciplinarity as a nonimperial encounter: For an Open Sociology. Thesis Eleven, 91, 48–65. Strasser, H. (1976). The normative structure of sociology: Conservative and emancipatory themes in social thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Suvin, D. (2016). Metamorposes of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. Oxford: Peter Lang. Swingewood, A. (2000). A short history of sociological thought. London: Palgrave. Tamdgigi, M. H. (2007). Advancing utopistics: The three component parts and errors of Marxism. Boulder: Paradigm. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke. Tester, K., & Jacobsen, M. H. (Eds.). (2012). Utopia: Social theory and the future. London: Routledge. Therborn, G. (1977). The rule of capital and the rise of democracy. New Left Review, 1(103), 3–41. Therborn, G. (1980). The ideology of power and the power of ideology. London: Verso. Therborn, G. (2003). Entangled modernities. European Journal of Social Theory, 6(3), 293–305. Therborn, G. (2009). From Marxism to post-Marxism?. London: Verso. Therborn, G. (2011). The world: A beginner’s guide. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, J. (1990). Ideology and modern culture: Critical social theory in the era of mass communication. Cambridge: Polity. Traverso, E. (2003). The origins of Nazi violence. New York: New Press. Trotsky, L. (1972). The revolution betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and where is it going. New York: Pathfinder. Wagner, P. (1994). A sociology of modernity: Liberty and discipline. London: Routledge. Wagner, P. (2001a). A history and theory of the social sciences. London: Sage. Wagner, P. (2001b). Theorizing modernity. London: Sage. Wagner, P. (2001c). Modernity, capitalism and critique. Thesis Eleven, 66, 1–31. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. (1980). The modern world-system II: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press.

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CHAPTER 3

Centers: Liberalism

Abstract In this chapter, el-Ojeili explores the utopian dimension of contemporary liberalism. Surveying liberalism’s historical transformations, elOjeili examines the future-oriented contours of the neo-liberalism dominant within wealthy nations since the 1980s. In the wake of the global financial crisis, el-Ojeili argues, we see a splintering of liberalism into three important fragments. First, we see an increasingly contingent and punitive neo-liberalism of austerity, which retreats from leadership and seeks to preserve extant power relations. Second, we find a neo-Keynesian turn, which frequently combines the language of enterprise and competition with a drive toward careful, selective regulation, toward a more socially justified capitalism. Third, we see the advance of a “liberalism of fear”, which evokes a number of threatening dystopian figures—populism, protectionism, the 1930s, extremism, and, totalitarianism. Keywords Contemporary liberalism · Neo-liberalism · Neo-Keynesianism · Dystopian · Democracy

Introductory Comments The attack on, or assertion about a crisis of, liberalism is far from new. We find, for instance, intellectual insurgency following the French Revolution around elements of the emerging bourgeois order—fears about the © The Author(s) 2020 C. el-Ojeili, The Utopian Constellation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32516-9_3

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implications of the increasingly prominent “cash nexus”, about atomization, about the loss of communal, traditional sources of order and meaning, and the critique of mechanistic, rationalist ways of viewing the world (Gordon 1991; Mazlish 1989; Rundell 2003; Saiedi 1993). Similarly, from the late nineteenth century, we see significant criticism of the classical liberal doctrine of non-interference in the economy, as well as widespread pessimism about the capacity of political institutions to deal with the pressures of social transformation, which blossoms into a “post-liberal” (Wagner 2001) perspective, increasingly institutionalized during what Traverso (2016a) calls the European Civil War, 1914–1945, in the variegated forms of Russian communism, Italian and German fascism, and Western social democracy. For world-systems thinkers, another moment of anti-liberalism is inaugurated by “the world-revolution of ’68”, articulated, in the West, in challenges to the socially liberal “organization of modernity”—national progress and unity through growth, mass production and consumption, redistributive welfare, and bureaucratic regulation—a rebellion marked by expressive, irreverent, and youthful non-conformity, and by the criticism of established institutions, such as family, education, media, trade unions, and political parties (Arrighi et al. 1989; Therborn 2009; Wallerstein 1990, 2002). Today, we are arguably in the midst of a further major moment of anti-liberalism, expressed, variously, in a “post-liberal” recommencement of communitarian ideas and virtue ethics (see, for instance, Milibank and Pabst 2016), recalcitrant communism (see Chapter 5), post-fascism (see Chapter 4), and a post-secular intellectual turn (see McLennan 2010). In a thoughtful meditation on “Western liberalism … under siege” (p. 11), Financial Times commentator Edward Luce (2017) enumerates a number of crucial explanatory factors that have resulted in a shift from the “unshakeable self-confidence” (p. 71) of liberalism following the collapse of “really existing socialism” to today’s loss of “faith in the future” (p. 36). International factors, such as an Eastward power shift, have played a role, but the most important threats come from within—economic stagnation, the growth of precarity, the retreat of the state, “acute polarization” (p. 41), money’s “stranglehold on the legislative process” (p. 198). An address to fellow “liberal elites” (p. 204), Luce seeks a way of “saving liberalism from itself” (p. 14), to reinvigorate the idea of progress and the commitment to individual liberty, in the face of the anger of the losers of “deep globalization” (p. 73) who are turning to populism in a time of “radical uncertainty” (p. 174). A utopian dimension is crucial to Luce’s narrative—“When

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a culture stops looking to the future, it loses a vital force” (p. 199)— and he suggests a number of broad programmatic orientations that might prevent liberalism’s collapse: “genuine vocational skills” (p. 197) to deal with precarity and automation; protection of the most vulnerable from “arbitrary misfortune” (p. 198); a reworking of tax policy; electoral finance reform; and tentative endorsement of Lawrence Summers’s turn from neoliberalism to “responsible nationalism”. In this chapter, I suggest that the pessimism, caution, defensiveness, and the quite denuded reconstructive-programmatic qualities of Luce’s account are symptomatic of wider ideological displacements—both a splintering of and a pronounced wearing down of utopian significations within, contemporary liberalism. On the first, I contend that the attacks on and failures of neo-liberalism in the twenty-first century have had a fragmenting ideological effect, issuing in three predominant, intellectually distinct but often intertwining, moments or tendencies. First, after 2007/2008, in particular, we find an increasingly post-hegemonic, contingent, and punitive neo-liberalism of austerity, which seeks to conserve and reinforce existing power relations (Davies 2016, 2017). Second, we see a growing appeal to a neo-Keynesian liberalism, which frequently merges together a number of the impulses characteristic of neo-liberalism—enterprise, diversity, and competition—with calls for strategic, political re-regulation and reembedding, toward the goal of a more social and stable capitalism. Third, we see the thickening of a “liberalism of fear”, animated by the invocation of a set of dystopian figures—the 1930s, populism, protectionism, political shocks, extremism, and, in particular, totalitarianism. We are also seeing what Castoriadis described as the wearing down of liberal utopian significations, the withering of a once-confident future orientation. Writing on the crest of the wave of “the end of history”, Castoriadis (2003) argued that the modern project of autonomy was closing into a new heteronomy, in which “Society has discovered itself to be without any representation of its own future, and projectless as well” (p. 37). Ill-suited to the time in which it was written, Castoriadis’s language captures what I suggest is a generalized loss of utopian confidence within contemporary liberalism—a pervasive atmosphere of hesitation, defensiveness, and apprehension, and a residualization or imaginative scaling back of figures of a better future. I will begin by setting the scene—first, with a broad characterization of the shifts across historic liberalism, underscoring liberalism’s dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, second, in a treatment of neoliberalism as hegemonic project of a transformed capitalist world-system

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and as a distinctively post-democratic project. I then turn to examine those three twenty-first-century mutations in contemporary liberalism suggested above, visible across liberalism’s global institutions and within the work of contemporary liberal elites. Elucidating this splintering effect, I argue that we are presently seeing the demise of what Ranciere (2010) named the moment of “consensual times”, and, with this, what Badiou (2012) has referred to as “the re-birth of history”.

Classical to Social Liberalism---Emancipation and Dis-Emancipation Following Bidet (2018), I suggest that we understand “the invariant claim of liberalism” as the varying justifications by dominant elites of their practices and strategies, within the frame of the modern world-system. Liberalism is a complex analytical object, a differentiated and historically and spatially shifting formation of ideas and practices.1 Nevertheless, the class dimension of liberalism is key to comprehending both the continuities and discontinuities across liberalism’s life cycle, beyond a narrow focus on liberalism’s core ideological and utopian appeals to the free individual (rights, choice, merit), constraints on government power, and the commitment to rationality. Here, I draw on the work of Domenico Losurdo. Centrally, for Losurdo (2011), from the moment of its formation, within the three liberal revolutions—Holland, England, and America—liberalism is a tangle of both freedom and oppression, emancipation, and dis-emancipation, visible, say, in Holland’s pioneering role in both liberal doctrine and imperialism and the slave trade, and in liberal Britain’s reliance on slave-produced goods. Slavery, Losurdo notes, “in its most radical form triumphed in the golden age of liberalism and at the heart of the liberal world” (Losurdo 2011, p. 37). The same dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation is visible within an explicitly formulated liberalism that responds to the unleashing of the demand for popular sovereignty with the French Revolution (Wallerstein 2011). Rejecting, in the name of the free individual, the “illegitimate” privileges of the old order, articulating a “consciousness of being modern” (Wallerstein 2011, p. 5), and emphasizing a commitment to “conscious, continual, intelligent reformism” (p. 6), liberalism often figured popular sovereignty precisely as a sum of these free individuals, but the notion proved lastingly unruly and difficult. Liberalism was forced to break with slavery in the hereditary, racial sense following the American Civil War,

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but, Losurdo points out, semi-slavery at home and its liberal justification persisted—work and poor houses, child labor, and legalized violence against early subaltern attempts at organization, which were viewed by liberals as a despotic threat to individuality and freedom. The threat posed by popular sovereignty to the maintenance of power and accumulation of capital by the newly dominant classes was a key focus of liberalism in the period 1830–1875 (Wallerstein 2011), a period encompassing growing challenges from below, dynamic capitalist growth after 1848, and a surge of European expansion into the non-European world. In this sequence, we find liberals variously comparing the lower orders with working animals, with tools of labor “bipedal machines”, for instance (in Losurdo 2011, p. 103), and with “savages”. On the connections between liberalism, the working classes, and popular sovereignty, Losurdo argues that we find, in essence, a politics of a “master race democracy” of the “aristocratic community” of free, property-owning individuals. Thus, even progressive liberals of the period underscored the ignorance, selfishness, and brutality of the masses and suggested the need for unevenly weighted voting. From the 1870s, with the expansion of European conquest of the non-European world, we see the consolidation of a liberal-imperial state and a free-trade imperialism led by the hegemonic power in the worldsystem, Britain (Wallerstein 2011). In this period, the lower classes in Europe increasingly forced themselves onto the stage of politics (Hobsbawm 1962), pushing for a widening of the realm of politics to encompass what liberalism had portrayed as issues of Providence (labor relations and material conditions, that is, as entirely private matters) (Losurdo 2011). Here, liberal efforts at containment took both repressive and co-optative forms. The latter entailed, importantly, the “nationalization of the masses”—the expansion of suffrage, alongside imperial-civilizational rhetoric directed at conquest and domination of inferior, despotic peoples (Hobsbawm 1992; Losurdo 2011; Wallerstein 2011). Once more, liberalism’s dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation is visible: The widening of political rights and recognition of certain social rights for European subalterns, alongside an “ideology of war” that celebrated the civilization and liberty of a free, chosen race, destined to conquer, even eliminate savage peoples (Losurdo 2011).

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Initially visible from the late nineteenth century, a new social liberalism was to become dominant in the West in the period 1945–1968, converging significantly with a emphases found within reformist European socialism. In many respects, the predominant liberalism in this period appears more emancipatory than dis-emancipatory, particularly in the wide-ranging extension of welfare through redistribution, and other interventions that sought to tame and embed capitalism. Nevertheless, four important qualifying remarks are in order. First, the growing levels of equalization, the spread and deepening of social rights, and the escalation of workers’ power during this time must be seen, in large part, as concessions won against liberalism through the considerable power achieved by the anti-systemic movements. Second, the conditions underpinning the hegemony of this social liberalism, as well as the “social capitalism” that was constructed under its auspices, were peculiar—the unprecedented post-War boom and the legacy of empire, the favorable position achieved by core states at the expense of peripheral regions of the world. Third, we cannot ignore the dis-emancipatory features of the liberalism of this moment—very notably, the institutionalized sexism and racism that conditioned and justified the inferior life-chances of women and of non-European workers. Fourth, we should note the unwavering elitism of this social liberalism, in its representation of the popular classes, and in its character, after Keynes, as an “elite civilizing project” (Mann 2017, p. 69). Duly, this social liberalism came apart in the face of unrest and economic downturn, to be succeeded by a neo-liberalism in which, as Losurdo (2016) notes, dis-emancipatory emphases—the deletion of economic and social rights, the rehabilitation of imperialism—figure prominently.

Neo-Liberalism and Its Discontents Across both the human sciences and Left political commentary, neoliberalism is frequently viewed as the dominant ideology of the last four decades. The term seems to be everywhere, with a nine-fold increase in usage between 1990 and 2007, and over 400,000 academic publications referring to neo-liberalism (Flew 2014). This ubiquitous neo-liberalism has often been understood and criticized as powered by utopian urges, following Karl Polanyi’s 1944 exploration of the rise and fall of classical liberalism’s “stark utopia” of the “self-adjusting market” (p. 3).2 Equally, neo-liberalism is viewed as the prime suspect behind an alleged demise of the utopian imagination: The hold exerted by the Thatcherite slogan “there

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is no alternative”, the effectivity of the triumphal end of history narrative, responsible for a sense that, today, as Jameson (2016) famously put it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Fisher 2009; Jacoby 1999; Levitas 2013). It seems, then, important to know with some precision what neoliberalism is, and what shape its utopianism takes. Here, however, there is now significant debate, with a section of intellectual commentary recommending that we jettison the concept. Venugopal (2015), for instance, contends that “Neoliberalism is everywhere, but at the same time, nowhere” (p. 165), that it is an “incoherent and crisis-ridden term” (p. 166), a concept that is “over-stretched and ill-defined” (p. 171). Setting forth a number of crucial, contradictory poles of interpretation in the literature, Venugopal 2015 and Flew (2014) note the variety of discrepant objects referred to by the term, and Venugopal points out that virtually no one self describes as a neo-liberal. Rather than seeking to extract a useable object of investigation, Dunn (2017) suggests we ask, instead, why and for whom the term “neo-liberalism” is used. His and Flew’s (2014) conclusion is that “neo-liberalism”, in both Marxian and Foucauldian variants, is a theory of Left elites. Neo-liberalism is, these critics argue, a conspiracist, reifying explanation for everything the user dislikes, flawed by functionalism and instrumentalism, exaggerating both the novelty and the liberalism of what is referred to, and doing remarkably little work in informing social practice. Further, Dunn (2017) contends that the Leftist use of the concept posits a “simple state/market-good/bad binary”, which can “degenerate into a romantic vision of the previous period, in which the benign hand of the state overcame the invidious hand of the market” (p. 450). A number of important points are made in this critical literature—for example, around the reification of the concept, or the tendency to capitalcentrism in discussions of neo-liberalism, which might be viewed as both demobilizing and connected to a problematic aristocratic radicalism. Nevertheless, the concept remains, I believe, unavoidable. The absence of selfdescribed neo-liberals is notable; yet global institutions, political parties, and prominent intellectuals continue to articulate a substantial number of the core elements of neo-liberal ideology. Perhaps the attack on the concept of neo-liberalism can be viewed as expressive of the in-roads made by post-modern-inflected challenges to modernist social theory, where appeals to “good” analytical values, such as difference, particularity, and contingency, are set against “bad” theoretical tendencies—totalization, essentialism, and universalism (McLennan 1996, 2006). At their outer edges, such challenges themselves frequently turn out to be incoherent, contradictory,

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and, in fact, corrosive of the theoretical enterprise as a whole (McLennan 1996). I would argue, then, that we stick with “neo-liberalism”, as a way of encapsulating the liberalism that emerges from the end of the 1970s, a hegemonic ideological-utopian formation of thought that accompanied a number of fundamental transformations in the capitalist world-economy and in the political realm. Among such changes, a crucial factor has been the reorganization of the international division of labor and a shift in world class structures, captured in the notion of “spatial fix” (Silver 2005), the attempt by Capital to restore profitability in the face of the power of organized labor and the challenges presented by global economic slowdown. This is intimately tied to the intensification of globalization—for instance, the expansion of global trade volumes, the thickening of worldwide financial traffic. Such globalization has been facilitated by state actors, as well as by international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and regional institutions, through a generalized movement toward the removal of certain regulations, through privatizations, and, importantly, through the attempted flexibilization of labor markets. Profoundly entwined with the above, from the 1980s, we have seen increasing appeals by governments, international organizations, and leading economics commentators to the central guiding role in social life of “international markets” (Streeck 2016), an argument paired with contentions, both optimistic and pessimistic, about the containment of state power or sovereignty that these powerful markets imply. A significant part of the commentary, here, centers on the financialization of contemporary capitalism. Such financialization, closely connected to more general deregulatory tendencies, to frenetic financial innovation from the 1980s, to the explosion of public debt in the 1980s, then private debt in the 1990s (Streeck 2016), means, for a number of thinkers, a significant shift of weight toward financial profit making, vis-à-vis that of productive capital (Blackburn 2011; Harvey 2005), a shift of weight to, or overaccumulation of, fictitious capital that is inherently destablilizing (because of self-amplification tendencies), parasitic, and dispossessive (Durand 2017). Within the critical literature on the new capitalism, changes in the international division of labor, globalization, deregulation, privatization, and financialization are central explanatory factors in a widely observed expansion of inequality across the world. The steep rise of income and wealth inequalities, and the manner in which states have consistently leant toward

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investors and corporates, as well as the privatization and underfunding of public institutions, has, in tandem with labor market restructuring, shifted wealth toward the top bracket income earners. We see a rising share of total income going to the top ten percent of earners, and, especially, to the top one percent, and we see a growing polarization, too, in terms of shares of overall wealth, particularly after 1980, across the developed world (Piketty 2015). With respect to the utopian dimension of such changes, the new capitalism has been represented in a number of contrasting ways. On the one hand, contemporary capitalism is figured as an increasingly “flat world” of global equalization (Friedman 2005), as an emerging cosmopolitan global village of multi-cultural exchange and understanding, and—with the retraction of oppressive, inefficient, and distorting state engineering—as expanding individual freedom and choice, transparency, and wealth (Legrain 2002). On the other side of this, the new capitalism has figured dystopically, as a system dedicated to the interests of large corporations and rich investors, as a new form of neo-colonial domination of nations of the South, and as generating both cultural homogenization and a set of reactive “defensive identities” (Castells 2000; Barber 1996)—a system, in short, inimical to equality, democracy, the environment, human well-being, and peace. A fascinating sub-stream of the critical literature deals with the relationship between the new capitalism and representation, suggesting that a significant imaginative consequence of the globalization, financialization, and reconfiguration of class structures over the past decades has been to render the contemporary world ever more difficult to map, and, accompanying this, ever more beyond the imagined reach of human control and direction (Bauman 1999a; Jameson 2000). These material and imaginative dimensions of the new capitalism are intimately bound up with neo-liberalism, which I understand as an ideological phenomenon, in the widest sense: a formation of thought encompassing ideas and ideal practices, platforms and policies, moral commitments and technical solutions, and representations of past, present, and future. In terms of the broad ideological lines of neo-liberalism, Harvey’s (2005) much-cited definition holds that: Neoliberalism is … a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The

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role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist … then they must be created, by state action if necessary. (p. 2)

In its sweeping outlines, this is fairly unobjectionable. For Harvey, the driving force of neo-liberalism is an attempt “to bring all human action into the domain of the market” (p. 3), that neo-liberalism is a project of the “restoration of class power” (p. 31)—though this restoration has entailed the reconfiguration of classes—and that neo-liberalism refashions state regulation (thus avoiding a simple dualism between state and market). Harvey’s work is designed, though, as a road-map and polemic, and other approaches provide more nuanced accounts, which seek to answer some of the criticisms of the concept, touched on above. Notably, Peck et al. (2012; see also Peck 2010a; Gill 2015) define neo-liberalism as a “crisis-induced, crisis-inducing form of market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring”, underscoring, against more monolithic conceptions, the uneven, hybrid, and unstable character of “neoliberalization processes ” (my emphasis, p. 269), which are historically and spatially specific, but nonetheless patterned. This patterned quality is expressed in marketization and commodification, which are always mediated modes of regulation through state interventions in various policy arenas, and driven, as a class project, by the utopian vision of a “free society” and a “free economy”, and by what Levitas (1986) underscores as central appeals to liberty, accountability, and efficiency. In a complementary body of work, Wendy Brown (2015) views neoliberalism as a form of reason that, while “disunified and nonidentical” (p. 21) in space and over time, entails the economization of all spheres of life, configuring human beings as exhaustively market actors. This depiction of the human being “as an ensemble of entrepreneurial and investment capital” (p. 36) is distinct, says Brown, from the figure of homo oeconomicus found in Adam Smith (the merchant or trader) or, later, in Jeremy Bentham (the cost-benefit calculator), as neo-liberalism represents all domains as markets and posits competition rather than exchange as the market’s root principle and basic good. On this latter, William Davies (2017) defines neo-liberalism as “the disenchantment of politics by economics” (p. xiv),

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emphasizing, in particular, the importance of the neo-liberal ethos of competition, “market-based principles and techniques of evaluation” (p. 6), as a mode of reorganizing society, an ethos and mode of organization that collapses, in the process, the separate spheres characteristic of earlier liberalisms. With respect to acknowledgment of neo-liberalism’s changing inflections, Davies (2016, 2017) also provides a compelling attempt at periodization. A first stage of “combative neo-liberalism” runs from 1979, the election of Margaret Thatcher, to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The character of neo-liberalism, in this period, is captured as the “self-conscious insurgency” of a “movement aimed at combatting and ideally destroying the enemies of liberal capitalism” (2016, p. 126). Attacking socialist and Keynesian ideas and policymaking, labor legislation, and trade unions, as well as pursuing an aggressive anti-inflationary drive, neo-liberalism, here, was oriented toward the demolition of “non-capitalist avenues of political hope” (p. 126), and “anchoring political hopes and identities in nonsocialist economic forms” (p. 127). A second period, from 1989 to 2008, is glossed by Davies as “normative neo-liberalism”. In this phase, with the narrowing of the horizon to “a single political-economic system” accomplished, the “neo-liberal telos became a constructivist one, of rendering market-based metrics and instruments the measure of all human worth, not only inside the market but, crucially, outside it as well” (p. 127). We see, in this moment, the attempted “remaking of subjectivity around the ideal of enterprise”,3 with the attendant notion of “human capital”, the extension of the ideal of “standards of competition”, the drive to delineate “winners” from “losers” as the basis of fairness, and the institutionalization of the language of “governance” (p. 127). Normative neo-liberalism brings the “expansion of neo-classical economics and auditing into all walks of social and political life … strip[ping] non-market domains of their autonomous logics. It achieved what I have described as neoliberalism’s disenchantment of politics by economics” (p. 128). Crucial in this period, in utopic terms, was the transformation of common sense around markets and states, the public and the private, freedom and equality, the individual and the community, competition, growth, and wealth. Finally, following the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we enter, Davies argues, a third phase—“punitive” (2016) or “contingent” (2017) neo-liberalism. Turning to the political sphere and elaborating on neo-liberalism’s “disenchantment of politics by economics”, a number of commentators have

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paired neo-liberalism with the emergence of post-democracy (or postpolitics). As Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014) note, the discussion of postdemocracy appears paradoxical, because liberal democracy has become more widespread since 1980 and arguably “hegemonic” (Dean 2014). Similarly, we have also seen growing politicization over the past few decades of a whole range of new issues and an accompanying widening of demands for popular participation in decision-making processes (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014). Yet, numerous thinkers have claimed that democracy, politics, or the political are withering in the contemporary period, in the face of a number of pressures and forces that are intimately bound up with neoliberalism (Castells 2000; Crouch 2004; Crouch 2016; Dean 2014; Mair 2006; Mouffe 2005; Ranciere 2010; Zolo 2001). The thesis of post-democracy entails a number of core claims and explanatory elements. Most crucial is neo-liberal globalization, where expanding, deregulatory world connectedness undermines state power or sovereignty, reducing the scope of state decision-making and action, in a shift of power from states to markets (Bauman 1999c; Castells 2000; Crouch 2004). This disembedding of the economy shifts power decidedly from the political to the economic realm, marketizes politics and the public sphere, elevating individualized consumption and customership above citizenship (Streeck 2016)—wherein, as Dean (2009) argues, commercial choices become paradigmatic of choosing more generally. The posthistorical formula of the contemporary absence of alternatives, meanwhile, is widely viewed as expressed in a fundamental convergence between established parties of Left and Right, around variants of the neo-liberal program, with political rivalries becoming more and more “bland and vapid” (Crouch 2004, p. 21). Parties, it is said, have tended to move away from distinctive programs on behalf of particular social constituencies and have instead been more and more orientated toward free markets, by way of an increasingly image-driven media politics (Castells 2000; Debray 2007; Mair 2006; Streeck 2016; Zolo 2001), directed at the capture of the “middle ground” (Crouch 2004). On this score, Peter Mair (2006) has spoken of the “hollowing” of democracy in Western nations: rising anti-political sentiments; declining voter turnout, “partisan consistency” (p. 32), and involvement in campaigns and parties; increasing electoral volatility; and the retreat of parties into institutions and their evolution in the direction of “governance”, which combines “stakeholder participation” with “problem-solving efficiency” (p. 32).

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For Swyngedouw (2010), the new modality of politics in richer nations is “structured around dialogical forms of consensus formation, technocratic management and problem-focussed governance, sustained by populist discursive regimes” (p. 215). At the center of this lies a predominance of a managerial logic and the reduction of the political to administration, where decision-making is considered to be a question of expert knowledge and not of political position and where “governance” fosters “consensual understandings of political action and the particularization of political demands” (p. 225)—all of this producing “a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary” (p. 219). This post-democratic condition is well expressed by former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan’s comment just years before the global financial crisis, “We are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces” (in Szalai 2018).

The Splintering of Contemporary Liberalism To this point, I have emphasized the dis-emancipatory and class significance of historic liberalism, features that are very much to the fore within neo-liberalism, the hegemonic form of liberalism since the close of the 1970s. Neo-liberalism, as an ideological-utopian formation of thought, is part of a historic bloc that entails, too, a new phase of capitalism and a postdemocratic reshaping of the political realm. The argument that I pursue in this section is that a growing number of “reality problems” (Alexander 1995) since the close of the 1990s, and particularly the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, have critically undermined the hegemony of neoliberalism. This erosion of moral and intellectual leadership is manifested in what I characterize as a splintering of liberalism into three distinctive but often co-mingling tendencies or moments, visible within global institutions and in the thought of liberal intellectuals. Each of these fragments, I maintain, expresses a significant scaling back, wearing down, and residualization of utopian reference, across contemporary liberalism. Contingent, Punitive Neo-Liberalism Davies (2016, 2017), as noted, contends that the crisis of 2007/2008 has ushered in a new phase of what he calls “contingent” or “punitive neoliberalism”. The key causal factor in this shift, for Davies, is the discrediting of neo-liberal nostrums, given, say, the central role played by states in the

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aftermath of the crisis—states and central banks spending the equivalent of around 50% of world GDP 2008–2009, in order to support the financial sector (Durand 2017). The disconfirmation of assumptions around the autonomous, self-correcting, and widely beneficial qualities of deregulated markets was joined by an austerity-centered turn by governments, which sought to off-load the costs of the crisis onto national citizenries. Here, Davies (2016) notes that neo-liberalism now “operates with an ethos of heavily moralized … punishment”, where “economic dependency and moral failure become entangled in the form of debt … a … condition in which governments and societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations” (p. 130), particularly the most vulnerable. In the place of argumentation, reasoning, and justification, or visions of a better tomorrow, contemporary neo-liberalism operates “without any principle of equivalence, with no appeal to common humanity, but purely via contingent acts of preservation of the status quo” (Davies 2017, p. 156). This is, then, a post-hegemonic neo-liberalism: “impervious to evidence” (2016, p. 121); operating “outside of the norms of judgement” (p. 122); offering only “empty affirmation”; evincing no “aspiration to represent reality” but, rather, merely reinforcing power; and circumventing the public sphere (p. 132). Neo-liberalism is now, for Davies (2017), literally “unjustified”, and instead “constantly propped up, bailed out, nudged, monitored, adjusted, data-mined, and altered”—“performative, repetitive and potentially violent” (p. 189). In a similar register, Peck (2010b) characterizes the austerity-directed response to 2007/2008 as “zombie neoliberalism”, marked by “new forms of active-and-punitive statecraft”, which seek to manage “economic insecurity and social marginality” (p. 105). This “authoritarian fix” (Bruff 2014, p. 125)—entailing a new round of workfarism, the dismantling of social safety nets, and the moralization of the global crisis (in an equation of state budget deficits with citizens’ credit card debt [p. 121])—is, crucially, a further step in the direction of de-democratization (Brown 2015; Bruff 2014; Gill 2015; Peck 2010b). It is important to underscore, here, the substantial shift represented by this post-hegemonic neo-liberal pathway, vis-a-vis the representations characteristic of the phase of normative neo-liberalism, the discourse Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) describe as the “new spirit of capitalism”, which centered around positiveutopic appeals to freedom and authenticity, autonomy, spontaneity, conviviality, self-definition and self-fulfillment, openness to others and to novelty, creativity, mobility, adaptability, innovation, anti-hierarchy, and the like (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Chiapello and Fairclough 2002).

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Exemplars of this post-hegemonic, punitive, and contingent neoliberalism can be found both sprinkled across the thought of liberal intellectuals and within global institutions—for instance, in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Risks report of 2012. An organization that brings together liberal elites, the WEF’s 2012 survey of key stakeholders is dedicated to preventing a “dystopian future”, one core instance of which is articulated as “Resistance to further increased cross-border mobility of labour, goods and capital” (p. 43). Particular “centres of gravity”, for respondents, include “chronic fiscal imbalances” (i.e., “Failure to redress excessive government debt obligations” [p. 37]) and dependency on “already heavily indebted governments” (p. 10). Explanatory factors for the crisis tend in a punitive direction, placing blame on ordinary citizens—for instance, inflated expectations, lack of savings for retirement, insufficient discipline with respect to debt, and educational deficits, especially among the young who are “not equipped with the skills to adapt to new realities” (p. 19). Encouraging educational upgrading, along with fostering entrepreneurship, is seen as crucial in preventing “the seeds of dystopia from taking root” (p. 19). In a somewhat similar vein, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf (2015) insists on the “wonderful results” (p. 319) of market liberalism, but maintains that today, amidst crisis, populations in the West “must look forward to a long period of retrenchment” (p. 353). The Economist ’s Bill Emmott (2017), meanwhile, is even more enthusiastic about the “huge success, all over the world” (p. 210) of globalizing neo-liberalism, and he is far less bowed in the face of crisis about the need for a fundamental recasting of economic orientation, arguing that attacking such a capitalism is rather like attacking “life” (p. 61). A “neo-neoliberalism” (p. 211), then, is the order of the day, with some curbs on financial movements, inheritance, and wealth taxes to create truly neo-liberal meritocracy, raising of the retirement age, and encouragement of greater discipline among the citizenry with respect to expectations. Again, in these accounts, educational shortcomings are crucial both in explaining and in solving the current crisis, a theme dear also to the WTO (2017). An overriding concern with sovereign debt and with the restoration of market confidence and the faith of investors (“business and financial market sentiment” [IMF 2019]), along with an untrammeled belief in the powers of global free markets, even when austerity alone is deemed insufficient, is a key theme across post-Crisis publications from the IMF (2011, 2012a,

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2013, 2017, 2018a). The intensification of post-democratic dynamics associated with such concerns is particularly stark in the European response to 2007/2008, where Durand and Keucheyan (2015) speak of the emergence of “bureaucratic Caesarism”, to capture the bypassing of a wider public, in favor of an exclusive focus on technical issues among government officials, the European Commission, and bank insiders. The foregrounding of non-democratic institutions such as the European Central Bank and the insulation of decision-making from popular pressures can be seen in the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance or “Fiscal Compact” of March 2012. Part of a raft of responses to the European fallout of the global financial crisis—including the Euro Plus Pact, which sought to foster competition, employment, sustainable public finances, and tax policy coordination, reduce labor and healthcare costs, and adopt “debt brakes”—the Fiscal Compact is an attempt to institutionalize many of these aspirations. In the name of the EU’s weakly utopic objectives of “sustainable growth, employment, competitiveness and social cohesion” (2012, p. 9), the Fiscal Compact centers on the need “for governments to maintain sound and sustainable public finances and to prevent general government deficit becoming excessive” (p. 1). The Compact sets in place rules regarding the size of government budgets and structural deficits as a percentage of GDP, along with measures to strengthen economic surveillance (by “independent bodies” [p. 34]) of member states, empowering the Court of Justice of the EU to impose binding penalties on states that fail to comply, and compelling governments to take “corrective action”, i.e., “structural reforms” (p. 14) to reduce excessive deficits.4 The Fiscal Compact, the adoption by numerous states of debt brake legislation, and, at the outer limit, the brutal monitoring and bullying of crisis-stricken Greece suggest a qualitative shift in what Marx (1887) called capitalism’s “dull compulsion of economic relations” (p. 689). The centrality in the period of austerity given to “fiscal rectitude” through “technomanagerial planning, expert management and administration” (Swyngedouw 2010, p. 225) signals a significantly coercive escalation in neo-liberal policymaking and implementation, coercion not merely understood as brute force, but as the “attempt to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent” (Bruff 2014, p. 115), in the name of economic necessity (Durand and Keucheyan 2015; Streeck 2016). Again, for Bruff (2014) and Durand and Keucheyan (2015), this situation of governance without consent, post-hegemony, or “passive revolution” implies the rule of finance capital, protected and insulated from

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democratic interference (Streeck 2016), bereft of efforts to integrate subaltern popular classes. This decoupling of democracy and political economy, and the transformation of economic into political power has, for Streeck (2016), reached a zenith in the effective suspension of democracy in a number of European nations—Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. With the rise of what he names the European “consolidation state”, where a state’s obligations to creditors are placed above all else, we see a sea change from the assumptions of embedded liberalism or the older tax- or social-state: A shift away from justificatory appeals to the national, citizenship, civil rights, voters, elections, public opinion, loyalty, and the public, and toward, instead, investors, contractual claims, creditors, auctions, interest rates, “confidence”, and debt service. States, here, become less like sovereigns and more like firms whose brief is to be responsive to markets rather than overriding them (p. 134). This is the moment of Angela Merkel’s Hayekian “market-conforming democracies” (in Streeck, p. 184)—or, as framed by former WTO Director General Mike Moore (2009), “Global consumer democracy” (p. xix), “the democracy of the market” (p. 190)—in short, a “technocratic-authoritarian market dictatorship” (Streeck, p. 187). Neo-Keynesianism Sometimes in opposition to, sometimes intertwining with this posthegemonic, punitive neo-liberalism is a second fragment or strand of contemporary liberalism, neo-Keynesianism—Keynes declared by the Wall Street Journal in 2009, “The New Old Big Thing in Economics” (in Mann 2017, p. 4). As Mann (2017) observes, something of an eternal Keynesianism is part of the history of capitalism, and so today’s Keynesian turn must be approached with circumspection. Nevertheless, sharing with the other two liberal strands an elite, patrician vantage point and mode of address, and often sharing core neo-liberal articles of faith in “free” and “open” markets, competition, and creative entrepreneurship, a break from the hegemony of normative neo-liberalism is visible within today’s reinvigorated Keynesianism. Explicitly emphasizing and seeking to raise the profile of the political, as well as offer counter-futures to neo-liberalism, this neo-Keynesianism converges in certain ways with the more trenchant reformist socialist energies found within existing labor and social-democratic parties and within newer organizations, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. It is hardly surprising to find explicit, positive reference to Keynes in long-established social liberals, such as Paul Krugman (2012) or James

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K. Galbraith (2014). Keynes’s name, though, is also invoked by one-time neo-liberal true believers, such as Wolf (2015), who argues that Keynes’s concerns have again become ours. Very often, however, this Keynesian turn is implicit. Its core impulses can be summarized in five broad points: (1) Today, contemporary capitalism must once again be saved from itself; (2) to accomplish this, a more active role for governments in the economic realm is required; (3) this active government role is oriented toward justice and stability, and core interventions toward this are required in the arenas of inequality, finance, environment, and electoral politics; (4) we find, aligned to these positions, a presiding sense of caution, signaled in a defensive language of risk, uncertainty, vulnerability, and resilience; and (5) the mode of address characteristic of neo-Keynesianism is narrowly, and often consciously, one directed to fellow liberal elites, who are the privileged agents of neo-Keynesian change.5 Regarding this last impulse, Luce (2017), for instance, appeals to “liberal elites” (p. 204) who must comprehend “the enormity of what they face” (p. 199)—the reality that Western liberalism “is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe” (p. 184). A core element in this is economic stagnation, Luce lending economic growth a central role in liberalism’s overall fortunes. The faltering of growth is, unsurprisingly, at the center of the accounts of former US Secretary of Labour Robert Reich—whose book (2016) and book-based Netflix documentary are tellingly titled Saving Capitalism—of former Chief Economist at the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz (2012), and of Krugman (2012). It is also key for Jeffrey Sachs (2017), who declares that we are now in a period of “secular stagnation” (p. 2),6 connecting growth to progress and social stability, for Emmott (2017, p. 220), and within institutions such as the WEF (2018), the WTO (2017), and the IMF (2017, 2018a, b), which all associate the lack or faltering of growth with “risks”, “uncertainty”, and “vulnerabilities”. Another keyword across these global institutions is “resilience”, a positive quality, though with strong deflationary, defensive connotations, often pegged to the right kind of active government intervention, or, in the more unreconstructed neo-liberal language frequently found in these documents, “good” or “anticipatory governance” (IMF 2018a; WEF 2012, 2018). Typically, though, we see a shift away from the assumptions of governance characteristic of neo-liberalism, toward a greater emphasis on the role of the more conventionally political—captured in Stiglitz’s (2012) phrase, “It’s the politics, stupid!” (p. xxiv). In canonical Keynesian fashion, Stiglitz (2012), Krugman (2012), and Reich (2016) underscore problems

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of unemployment and growing inequality, emphasizing the need to break from neo-liberal “deficit fetishism” and austerity (Stiglitz 2012, p. 237), and to stimulate growth and end recession through government spending. More equality through active state redistribution, increased and universalized social insurance and provision (especially in the realms of education and health), would address the destabilizing loss of social trust, linked to the rising power and wealth of corporations and financial elites, expanding a middle class with real purchasing power that might rescue and temper the excesses of capitalism (Stiglitz, p. 267). Frequently, these neo-Keynesian emphases still contain or sit alongside elements of the previously reigning neo-liberal consensus, visible in Reich’s acceptance of the overall benefits of open, expanded trade, and in Stiglitz’s insistence that we need to make markets work like markets (i.e., be truly competitive). Such hybridity is similarly to the fore in the accounts of Sachs and Luce. For both, unemployment, poor-quality employment, and expanded inequality demand a break from neo-liberal orthodoxy. Thus, Sachs (2017) emphasizes the need for “major change” (p. 2), toward a “prosperous, fair, and environmentally sustainable” (p. 113) capitalism. Supportive of expanded trade, Sachs seeks to rescue the notion of “planning” from the disrepute into which it has fallen over the past decades, calling on the US government to beef up investment in education, healthcare, research and development, smart energy, and infrastructure, to raise more taxes, and to cut defense spending and imperial pretensions. In Luce, “acute polarization” (p. 41) and precarious employment necessitate a retraction from “deep globalization” (p. 73), major government intervention in education, universal healthcare, and a progressive overhaul of taxation policy. Even within the discussions of more resolutely neo-liberal thinkers and institutions, we find components of this neo-Keynesian shift. For instance, the WEF (2012, 2018) voice major concerns about unemployment, inequality, education shortfalls, and environmental degradation. Wolf (2015), meanwhile, admits to a change of mind—the “failure” (p. 191) of the economic orthodoxy—arguing for a combination of free markets with socially provided public goods, such as medical care, education, environmental protection, greater taxation of corporations, and more robust safety nets. In his largely unapologetic neo-liberal narration of the post-crisis situation, Emmott (2017), nonetheless, acknowledges the growth of inequality, “insider rights” (p. 18), and the distorting concentration of wealth and power, suggesting both greater investment in education and inheritance and wealth taxes, side-by-side with the need to finally, fully

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unshackle ourselves from “the corpse of socialism” (p. 211). And similarly committed neo-liberals and former WTO officials, Moore (2009) and Legrain (2010) admit of the continuing, important role for governments (in, say, social mobility or the remodeling of taxation), although the solutions, here, remain more on the side of the market than the state.7 Direct address of the neo-liberal disenchantment of politics by economics is another common feature of this strand of contemporary liberalism, which often insists on the need for reform of the democratic systems of wealthy nations. For instance, both Luce and Sachs note the distorting effect of money on the realm of politics, calling for changes to campaign financing. Reich and Stiglitz make similar comments, Reich arguing the need to re-bolster “countervailing powers”, to transform a politics now gamed by companies, banks, and wealthy individuals. Such political reform, for these thinkers, might address the demise of social trust. A final, notable commonality across this neo-Keynesian turn toward expanded government activity concerns the realm of finance. The IMF (2012a, b), for example, emphasizes the need for reform of the financial sector—toward greater safety, more transparency, less complexity, and away from a situation in which these institutions are deemed “too big to fail”. Emmott, in particular, derides the delusion, self-interest, corruption, and complacency of the sector, as the cause of the “calamity” (p. 5) of 2007/2008, criticizing the weakness of state responses and calling for more radical controls on capital movements. Stiglitz and Galbraith, too, argue for immediate, extensive reform of the financial system. Calling, in like fashion, for urgent and resolute measures from governments in the financial arena, Legrain (2010) and Wolf (2015), nevertheless, refuse to see the problems in the sector as problems of the market or of capitalism; quite the reverse! For Wolf, the real issue is that finance is dangerously dependent on the state (a government-backed racket, for Legrain), banks and states joined like Siamese twins (p. 256). Making important breaks from the undiluted neo-liberal orthodoxy that is still found, say, within the WTO (2008, 2017), where global free trade is blithely tied to all manner of utopic promises—technological progress, economic growth, human welfare, increasing wages, employment opportunities, skills, efficiency, consumer choice, and equalization8 —today’s neoKeynesian liberalism emphasizes politics and political will. This represents a decided break from neo-liberalism’s staggering economic determinism, which instead insists on the malleability of markets and on their necessary reshaping by active government, in the interests of a better, more just,

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more stable future. Nevertheless, while we see, here, a significant shift from the period of neo-liberal hegemony, a number of critical observations are in order. First, this neo-Keynesianism is often arbitrarily grafted together with contrasting emphases on the leading role of free markets, competition, and entrepreneurship, characteristic of neo-liberalism. Second, within the more resolutely neo-Keynesian accounts, specifics regarding the mechanisms of change and the contours of an alternative future social order are surprisingly absent or are thin and gestural. Third, the hesitancy, in utopian terms, is revealingly evident in a language of caution and warning, found, say, within IMF publications—“increasing risks”, “vulnerabilities”, “fragility”, “volatility”, “stabilization”, “uncertainties”, “clouds”, “dangers”, and “resilience” (IMF 2009, 2011, 2012a, b, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018a). A Liberalism of Fear These emphases and this tone connect us to the third dimension of the contemporary fragmentation of liberalism, a liberalism of fear (Schiller 2016).9 The pivot and axis of this third moment or strand are a set of dystopian warnings. As noted, this is spelled out explicitly in the WEF’s 2012 report, which focusses on the “seeds of dystopia”. In particular, the authors note that, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, popular discontent is becoming a “violent, destabilizing force” (p. 19). This discontent is expressed in a popular “retreat from global connectedness” (p. 19), understood as “Resistance to further increased cross-border mobility of labour, goods and capital” (p. 43; see also WEF 2018). In a similar vein, the WTO (2008) and IMF raise warnings about the threat of protectionism, “short-sighted pressures” (WTO 2013, p. 43), which would prove “hugely damaging to all” (IMF 2009, p. xvii). Protectionism is represented congruently by Wolf (2015), Emmott (2017), Legrain (2010), and Moore (2009), frequently connected with populism but also with the widely raised specter of the 1930s (IMF 2009, 2018a; Legrain, p. 11; Moore, p. xxxi). In these accounts, an atmosphere of looming danger is constituted, Moore (2009), for example, connecting post-2007/2008 discontent with the “twin tyrannies” (p. xx) of the 1930s, communism and fascism, the “enemies of reason” (p. xvi), “blind and dangerous” “utopian idealism” (p. 227). Similarly, Wolf (2015) charges that a new 1930s looms before us, with the growing influence of “utopians and fanatics of both the left and the right” (p. xx) who “muster the inchoate anger of the disenchanted and the enraged” (p. 383). Alarm about the future is further conjured, in these narrations,

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by references to “populism” (Luce 2017; Moore 2009; WEF 2018; Wolf 2015), authoritarian rule (Emmott 2017; Luce 2017; Moore 2009; Wolf 2015), extremism (Moore 2009; Wolf 2015), and the notion of “political shocks” (IMF 2018b). Of this last, in this focus on “political uncertainties” and “political shocks” (IMF 2018a), we find a hardly concealed fear of the political itself. We see, then, a move counter to the re-emphasis on the political in neo-Keynesianism, frequently alongside appeals of a neo-Keynesian variety. These fear-filled, dystopian representations are very often joined with a hectoring and dismissive tone and imagery with respect to the general populace—educational shortcomings (Luce 2017; WEF 2012, 2017; WTO 2017), inflated expectations (Emmott 2017), lack of discipline with respect to debt and savings (WEF 2018), failures of enlightenment and reason (Moore 2009; Wolf 2015), undirected anger (Luce 2017; Wolf 2015), tribalism (Emmott 2017), and backlash (Luce 2017). In short, we find a pervasive elite-liberal dismay about the threat posed by the popular, by those outside of the aristocratic community of free individuals. Dystopian figuration is, of course, a component part of any ideological formation, and it runs through historic liberalism: the denunciation of the “fanaticism” of anti-slavery campaigners, the racialization of subaltern resistance, psychopathological diagnoses of revolution as “disease”, “contagion”, “madness” (Losurdo 2011; Toscano 2010). What is of significant interest, in dystopian signification within contemporary liberalism, is, first, the extraordinary weight given to such fear, relative to the paucity of positive, reconstructive utopian representation. A second point of interest lies in the particular content of this dystopian signification. On this score, as noted, a number of crucial dystopian figures recur—protectionism, populism, the 1930s, extremism, fanaticism, and radicalism. My contention is that all of these are cognates of a master dystopian figure operative within contemporary liberalism—totalitarianism. The fortunes of this concept are fascinating and complex.10 The exceptional revival of “totalitarianism” in France in the 1960s (Elliott 2006) was, to a degree, metabolized in the subsequent post-modern intellectual moment of the 1980s and 1990s, across the Global North. Much of this post-modern thought, while possessed of a wealth of progressive elements and impulses, is marked by a liberal insistence on the limits of human knowledge and action (Beilharz 1994), as well as by a liberal commitment to difference and plurality, a concern with coercion and the drive to sameness, and a critique of the modern utopian quest for order, non-ambiguity, finality,

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and perfection (Bauman 1989, 1991, 1999b, 2003, 2007). In these ways, we can detect a certain convergence of emphases between post-modern thought and culture, strands of the artistic critique of the 1960s and 1970s, and neo-liberalism. At its outer edge, this convergence entails two implicit equations characteristic of the most recent resurgence of totalitarianism talk, captured by Levitas (2013) as follows: “Utopia equals totalitarianism equals communism equals Marxism equals socialism” and “communism equals totalitarianism equals fascism” (p. 7). These equations have been core components of neo-liberal ideology, from its first “combative” phase (Davies 2016). More recently, this dystopic figure has been aggressively deployed in the battle for memory characteristic of the rise of revisionist historical scholarship, which has entailed a sustained assault on the revolutionary tradition, 1789–1917, but also on the anti-fascist legacy, the meaning of decolonization, and even the social-democratic taming of capitalism (Losurdo 2015; Traverso 2017a).11 Two contemporary illustrations of this liberal critique of totalitarianism, or its cognates, illustrate the tenor and functions of this figure today. A 2015 Australian government publication, Preventing Violent Extremism and Radicalization in Australia, defines its objects—radicalization and extremism—as “attitudes [that] differ significantly from how most members of society view social issues and participate politically” (p. 4). The authors posit, then, the existence of a majoritarian ideological consensus on social and political order. At the same time, acknowledgment is made of the historical variability of what is labeled “extremist”—for instance, women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century. This historicization, though, is immediately retracted in the claim that radical ideas become problematic “if they advocate the use of violence or other unlawful activity to promote particular beliefs” (p. 6)—the suggestion being that this was not the case with the struggle for women’s suffrage. The principle suggested, here, can be glossed as difference and tolerance, insofar as it does not infringe upon the lawful order of things, that it does not imply “a drastic change in society” (p. 4). In a series of brief case studies of radicalization and recovery, the authors tie radicalization to factors such as depression, substance abuse, isolation, and alternative music, and associate recovery with new interests and hobbies, mainstream political participation, and academic and employment success. Exemplifying a number of patterns of contemporary liberal dystopianism, such as consensual post-politics, psychologizing individualism, and the pathologization of dissent, the authors explain that

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“incomplete knowledge may make … [certain people] vulnerable to adopting negative ideas and violent extremism” (p. 23). A second exemplar, from the scholarly realm, is provided by a pair of texts by Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University—The Reckless Mind (2001) and The Shipwrecked Mind (2016). In the first, Lilla focusses on “philotyrannical intellectuals” who were “possessed” (p. 215) by communism, fascism, Marxism, nationalism, and Third Worldism. Naturally, says Lilla, “we” will be “disgusted” by the choices made by the likes of Schmitt, Benjamin, Kojeve, Foucault, and Derrida, and, of course, “we” will struggle to comprehend their actions (pp. 198, 215). Of the latter, Lilla rejects the influential but opposed liberal explications of Berlin (too much rationalism) and Cohn (too much irrationalism), and, instead, maintains that recklessness—the contrary of the moderation and skepticism of certain liberal heroes—is to blame: These committed intellectuals “lack … humility and pedagogic care … exciting passions, not channelling them” (p. 211). In Lilla’s (2016) follow-up work, the focus is turned to political reaction, the apocalyptic fears and “extravagant hopes” for redemption, propelled by nostalgia, “fantasies of the world we have lost”. Found among intellectuals of both Left and Right—but also among militants of deep ecology, anti-globalization, anti-growth politics, and radical Islamism—who feel “stranded in the present”, a failure of thought is, again, to blame: “Epochal thinking is magical thinking”. What is most absent, here, is irony—“the armour of the lucid.” Lilla’s “aleatory reading” across both works demonstrates, again, clamorous contemporary liberal fears, consensual assumptions—his appalled and indignant “we”, presumably expanding well beyond the professoriate of Ivy League universities—pathologization and psychologizing, and consolidatory emphases on limits, against the dangers of totalization. As Traverso (2017b, 2019) notes, “totalitarianism”—and, I would contend, its cognates, populism, closedness, protectionism, extremism, utopianism, fanaticism—is, above all, a “fighting word”, a term defined largely in the negative as “anti-liberalism”. Three critical remarks about this concept are in order. First, the equation of fascism and communism is wholly arbitrary and illegitimate, and a better case could be made in remarking upon the continuities between fascism and the liberal imperialism of the period 1870–1914 (Losurdo 2015; Traverso 2003, 2017b, 2019; Zizek 2002). The model, second, is static, formal, and superficial (Traverso 2017b, 2019) when placed against the actuality of what is named totalitarianism—for instance, vastly overstating the degree of control in such social orders, which

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were much more chaotic and fragile than depicted (Tormey 1995). Third, and most crucially, the concept functions as a defense of the “free world”, an effort to criminalize emancipatory thought, and a shield that deflects interrogation of actually existing liberalism (Zizek 2002). This fanatically anti-utopian liberalism (Levitas 2013)—often undergirded by what Toscano (2010) describes as a “folk Enlightenment” premised upon finitude, limitation, caution, toleration, and antitotalization—can be visualized in a number of contemporary tendencies toward neo-liberal dis-emancipation. One important instance of this is found in today’s liberal imperial humanitarianism (Losurdo 2015), where a thin utopianism of human rights, combined with state-private sector partnerships in dispossessive accumulation, represents populations of nonEuropean “failed states” as suffering animals, in need of the military delivery of human rights and democracy by Western powers (Badiou 2001; Ross 2002). This wing of cosmopolitan liberalism, on display in interventions in Iraq and Libya, for instance, reconceptualizes sovereignty as a “partial and conditional licence, granted by the ‘international community’, which can be withdrawn if it contravenes standards of liberal governance” (Gowan 2001, p. 80; Anderson 2002; Losurdo 2015). Domestically, the crucial core of today’s anti-totalitarian liberalism of fear is a resurgent anxiety, post-2007/2008, about the masses (McManus 2017; Balakrishnan 2002), expressed particularly in the discourse around “populism”. Populism, across liberal media and academia, centrist political parties, and global institutions, is predominantly viewed as virulent, aggressive, irrational (the realm of moods and emotions, rather than thought), anti-pluralist, anti-civil society, and mob-based—that is, as the complete obverse of liberalism (D’Eramo 2013, 2017; Muller 2016). The term, as D’Eramo (2013, 2017) has pointed out, has been used in fast-accelerating frequency since the fall of “really existing socialism” and is intimately connected to the concept of totalitarianism, especially in its thesis of far-Left and far-Right convergence,12 as contrast to a reasonable, consensual liberal center. Resonant with the fear of the masses and anxiety about democracy found in the age of empire among liberal thinkers, such as Le Bon, Nietzsche, and the German-Italian elite theorists, this contemporary commentary frequently evinces a veritable class hatred (Jones 2016), in its assumption about the popular masses’ propensity to despotism and their proclivity for irrational arousal—in short, the threat to civilization posed by the “rabble” (Mann 2017). Such fear is healthily on display in the WEF 2017 Global Risks Report, where democracy is viewed as in crisis, in the face

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of irrational populist post-truth politics, characterized by distrust, antagonism, and misinformation. It is acutely present, in the very mode of address to fellow liberal elites, in Wolf, Luce, Lilla, and Emmott, and in the aforementioned tone and imagery deployed when representing the citizenries of rich nations, in accounts consciously written for an elite, patrician liberal audience. Once more, we are reminded of Losurdo’s trenchant critique of liberalism, its changing dis-emancipatory features, and its shifting profane spaces, which designate lesser types of personhood (Losurdo 2011; Melamed 2006)—“manual labourer, serf, peasant, woman, Indian, black, coolie, Chinese, rogue-state, Arab … cheap immigrant-workforce” (Azzara 2011, p. 105)—against which stands, once more, an aristocratic class of free property owners-consumers.

Concluding Comments In their editorial introduction to a collection published just prior to the global financial crisis, Davis and Monk (2007, p. x) contended that “resurgent late capitalism … has succeeded, where all the great world religions have failed in finally unifying all of humanity in a single imaginary body: the global marketplace”. The volume’s depiction of a variegated “utopian frenzy” of wealth, power, and pleasure, found across gated communities, zoned consumption, oligarchic enclaves, and reality televisual aspirations (Davis and Monk 2007; Milibank and Pabst 2016), has both its conditions of existence and obverse in an increasingly “plutonomic capitalism” (Streeck 2016, p. 73), characterized by a “securitarian obsession” (D’Eramo 2017, p. 173), the staggering growth of inequality, the decoupling of economics from democracy, the dis-emancipatory deletion of economic and social rights (Losurdo 2016), the rehabilitation of liberal imperialism, framed in cosmopolitan terms, and a technocratic Caesarism legitimated by the “speech acts” of market forces (Durand and Keucheyan 2015; Jones 2013). In this chapter, I have argued that the world-ideological unification suggested by Davis and Monk has unraveled significantly, and that we have seen, since the close of the 1990s, and particularly since 2007/2008, the splintering of contemporary liberalism into three dominant and often intertwining strands. First, we see a decidedly post-hegemonic neo-liberalism emerging after 2007/2008. The deepening of post-democratic politics under the logic of austerity intimates both elements of continuity with the “capitalist realism” Fisher (2009) saw as bound up with neo-liberalism,

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and, as maintained above, a certain discontinuity from a hegemonic neoliberal project that sought, in the period 1979–2008, to install a “business ontology” (p. 17) compatible with the new capitalism. Balakrishnan (2009) conceptualizes this situation in terms of a “long-term drift towards ‘the stationary state’ of civilization” (p. 6). Here, in the face of crisis, “the ruling ideas of the period have suddenly gone bankrupt” (p. 20), leaving “delegitimized and insolvent political orders” (p. 26), with protracted slow-growth stabilization ahead. Punctured since the 1990s, and discredited by the latest crisis, neo-liberalism in its austerity guise becomes more and more contingent, punitive, and bereft of the drive for intellectual or moral leadership. At the same time, a second liberal strand is clearly visible, a neoKeynesian turn that appeals to a reinvigorated politics that might save capitalism from its destructive dynamics—polarization, unemployment, financial instability, environmental ruin, de-politicization, and atomization. Consonant with a number of features of a revived democratic socialism, this strand of liberalism is, however, marked by a remarkably thin and residual utopianism, when set against the representations of the socially desirable and economically efficient good future promised by free market capitalism characteristic of the period of normative neo-liberalism. This weak utopianism is visible, in particular, in a hesitant, cautious language that underscores risk, vulnerabilities, uncertainty, and resilience, and in the institutionally thin and strategically underdeveloped qualities of these accounts. Frequently, in this hesitancy and foregrounding of risk, a tangible fear is in play within neo-Keynesianism, and this comes to the fore in a third major tendency or moment in the fragmentation I have spoken of, a liberalism of fear. This liberal strand draws its energies predominantly from the invocation of a number of central dystopian figures—populism, protectionism, and extremism, for instance—and I have argued that these figures are cognates for a master signification, totalitarianism, which warns and threatens of the catastrophic consequences of substantial social change. Again, just short of the cataclysm of 2007/2008, Jacques Ranciere (2010) summarized the neo-liberal present as “consensual times”. This consensus—a “machine of power”, a “machine of vision and interpretation”, a “map of war operations, a topography of the visible, the thinkable and the possible” (p. viii)—left “no room in which to dispute its presence, to scenarios of the past in which one confines the recalcitrant – the lame of modernity or survivors ill-cured of utopia – and of the future which commands the total deployment of energies” (p. ix). It is my contention that

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the contemporary wearing down of liberal utopian significations and the splintering into fragments of liberal discourse indicates that this moment of consensual liberalism is now closing, and that the consequences for liberalism’s capacity for moral leadership are, indeed, as Luce (2017) worries, devastating. Further, this wearing down can be understood as what Badiou (2012) calls the “rebirth of history”, a re-opening signaled, in contrasting ways, by the subject matter of the two chapters to follow, post-fascism and a new communism.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Freedan (2008). 2. See, for instance, Gray (2007), Harvey (2005), Levitas (1986), and Streeck (2016). 3. See, here, a literature that suggests the formation of a new neo-liberal subject—for instance, Bauman (1998), Brown (2007), Fisher (2009), Gauchet (2000), Streeck (2016), and Traverso (2016b). 4. For a similar thrust, see the G20 Toronto Summit Declaration, June 27, 2010 (G20 2010). 5. Again, see Mann’s (2017) brilliant analysis of the illiberal, elitist heart of the Keynesian project. 6. See also Galbraith (2014), for a more pessimistic neo-Keynesianism. 7. Moore, for instance, continuing to emphasize the benefits of competition, to lament welfare dependency, and to think of social questions overridingly as questions of “human capital”. 8. Former WTO Secretary General Mike Moore (2009) deeming the benefits of free trade “breathtaking in its magnitude and scope” (p. xvi). 9. Once more, as Mann (2017) argues, this fear was a crucial foundational impulse in Keynes’s project, the fear around the possible collapse of modern civilization. 10. See, for instance, Tormey (1995). 11. For a discussion, see Losurdo (2015) and Traverso (2017b, 2019). 12. See, once more, Moore (2009, p. xxxi) on the “savage advances of fascism and Marxism” as a warning against contemporary protectionism, or, in a very similar vein, Wolf (2015, p. xx).

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Wolf, M. (2015). The shifts and the shocks: What we have learned—And have still to learn—From the financial crisis. London: Penguin. World Economic Forum. (2012). Global risks 2012 (7th ed.). Retrieved July 24, 2018, from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_ 2012.pdf. World Economic Forum. (2017). The global risks report 2017 (12th ed.). Retrieved July 24, 2018, from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GRR17_Report_web. pdf. World Economic Forum. (2018). The global risks report 2018 (13th ed.). Retrieved July 24, 2018, from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GRR18_Report. pdf. World Trade Organization. (2008). World trade report. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/wtr08_ e.htm. World Trade Organization. (2013). World trade report. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/wtr13_ e.htm. World Trade Organization. (2017). World trade report. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/wtr17_ e.htm. Zizek, S. (2002). Did somebody say totalitarianism? Five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion. London: Verso. Zolo, D. (2001). The ‘Singapore model’: Democracy, communication, and globalization. In K. Nash & A. Scott (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to political sociology. Cambridge: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 4

Margins I: Post-fascism

Abstract In this chapter, el-Ojeili focusses on the far-Right margin of the contemporary utopian constellation, examining post-fascism. A fivefeatured ideal type of fascism is developed, each element of which is loaded with utopian significance. el-Ojeili demonstrates that versions of each of these ideal typical features can be located across the contemporary farRight. Drawing on Bloch’s engagement with fascist utopianism, el-Ojeili examines the utopian and dystopian figuration visible within today’s farRight, the combination of “the future in the past”, elements of the postmodern present, and appeals to a novel future. Such post-fascist utopianism, el-Ojeili argues, has been neglected in the critical literature, which has instead emphasized the important, very visible fears found within this ideological ensemble. Keywords Post-fascism · Nationalism · Conspiracism · Militarism · Culture and politics

Introduction As Sheri Berman (2017, p. 1) notes, an analogy is haunting Western nations—“the analogy of fascism”. Scholars of fascism have long been weary of the tendency to cry wolf here, Griffin (1991, p. 1) noting the “inflated” quality of the term and Paxton (2016) emphasizing how often © The Author(s) 2020 C. el-Ojeili, The Utopian Constellation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32516-9_4

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“fascist” is deployed as a discrediting charge, a charge, moreover, that is probably second only in severity to “child molester”. Used in this inflated, discrediting manner, “fascism” has periodically resurfaced and extruded— most recently, in the aftermath of the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States. Such inflation, relentlessly pejorative connotations, and emptying of the concept, is, in a certain sense, something to be celebrated by progressive social scientists—an expression both of the power of anti-systemic movements in the period 1945–1968 and of the lasting cultural-political gains of the world revolution of 1968, in discrediting explicit racism and sexism and encouraging irreverence toward all forms of authority and domination (Therborn 2009, 2011; Wallerstein 1990, 2002). On the other side of this, though, from the 1990s, a number of scholars have sought to reconsider fascism as a more precise and serious object of human scientific investigation. This specificity and scrupulousness have tended to issue in the conclusion that fascism effectively died in 1945, with the defeat of the Axis powers, the Nuremburg trials, the hegemony of the victor’s liberal democratic values, and the emergence of the Holocaust as Western “cultural trauma” or “civic religion” (Alexander 2002; Traverso 2016b): “As an active factor in the transformation of history … fascism is a spent force” (Griffin 1991, p. 45); “European fascism is defeated, dead and buried” (Mann 2004, p. 370). Of particular importance, democratization is frequently viewed as the “coffin of revolutionaries” (Goodin in Foran 2003, p. 2), including the fascist revolutionaries. Nevertheless, it is clear that the aftermath of the global financial crisis and, especially, the Trump election and its consequences have significantly unsettled this more sober scholarly consensus. In 2017, for instance, both Samir Amin and Henry Giroux spoke of the return of something like fascism; a scholarly symposium on the Verso Books (2017) blog site largely answered in the affirmative to the question, “Is fascism making a comeback?”; and three important books on the so-called alt-Right, bridging the scholarly radical journalism divide—by Neiwert, Hawley, and Nagle—similarly leant in this interpretative direction. Here, Dylan Riley (2018) has remarked upon “an explosion of historical analogising, with the experience of the 1930s looming large” (p. 5). This shift in register, I will argue, is well founded. It is my contention that, today, we are witnessing the consolidation of what Enzo Traverso (2017, 2019) calls “post-fascism”, a historic-ideological formation that embraces, among other forces, the Right nationalist parties,1 white

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nationalism, and the alt-Right. I will begin by suggesting a five-featured ideal type in approaching fascism. Each of these features or dimensions is loaded with utopian significance, and I argue that variations on each are to be found within post-fascism, despite the internal variegation of this intellectual formation. I will then shift register, approaching post-fascism’s utopian dimension by drawing from the work of Ernst Bloch. This dimension has been largely neglected in the literature dealing with today’s far-Right. In the above-mentioned works on the alt-Right (Hawley 2017; Nagle 2017; Neiwert 2017),2 for instance, we have an exceptional composite portrait of this analytical object. However, these works are also symptomatic of three major shortcomings across the literature on “post-fascism”. First, this literature segregates and treats independently facets of what I maintain is an integral socio-historical formation, in Raymond Williams’s (1977) sense of the term. That is, such work tends to insist on the separation of, say, Right nationalist parties from the alt-Right, and the alt-Right from white nationalism, despite the clear ideological resonances, the interactions, multiple memberships and affiliations, and the overlapping social media networks and personal bonds in play (Copsey 2017). Second, this literature tends to abjure explicit and sustained theoretical framing and periodization. Third, it has rather little to say about the positive, reconstructive, and utopian elements of its investigative objects. Thus, in the aforementioned books on the alt-Right, we hear rather a lot about the negations at work within this thought-world—political correctness, feminism, ethnic minorities, Islam, cultural Marxism, globalism—but we find little beyond blank mention of the elements of an “opposing landscape”, such as the “white ethno-state”, heritage, constitutionalism, neo-confederatism, freedom, “red-pilling”, transgression, and the “manosphere”. This is the sphere of utopia and utopianism. In approaching post-fascism’s utopian dimension, I will argue for two apparently opposed theses: first, that postfascism is loaded with utopian content, often along the lines of what Bloch called “the future in the past”, but also entailing novel elements; second, that, nevertheless, this utopian figuration is more than matched by a vast reservoir of variably expressed fears within post-fascism. Both theses, though, suggest the urgent need to be wary of scholarly or political complacency and to move beyond the contemporary predominance of psychologistic approaches, elitist condemnations, and moral indignation, toward an emancipatory social science that engages in both critique and the analysis and refitting of post-fascism’s subversive, surplus utopian elements (Bloch 1986, 1991).

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Visualizing Post-fascism As noted, I am borrowing the term “post-fascism” from Enzo Traverso to capture a contradictory configuration, possessed of a “fascist matrix”, but “still in mutation” (2017), a “phenomenon in transition, a movement that is still in transformation and has not yet crystallized” (2019, p. 6). The “post”, then, not only denotes a form of thought that follows the defeat of the twentieth-century fascist regimes, but also emphasizes “continuity and transformation” (Traverso 2019, p. 4), instability, and an inmovement quality. The “post” rather than “neo” prefix also resonates with periodizing connections to late capitalism and its cultural dominant, postmodernism (Jameson 1984). Here, post-fascism is marked by atomized and non-movement qualities, by hyper-textuality and irony, by “a particular regime of historicity” (Traverso 2019, p. 7), and by ultra-contemporary features of the social mediascape. I am using this designation to encompass the Right-wing nationalist parties, the alt-Right, and white nationalism.3 Two immediate objections suggest themselves: First, this notion, “postfascism”, lumps together an implausibly diverse array of parties, groups, sites, and thinkers—for instance, the French National Front (FN), Lega or CasaPound in Italy, Alternative for Germany (AfD), Jobbik in Hungary, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Golden Dawn in Greece, The Right Stuff, Alt-Right.com, Stormfront, the Council of Conservative Citizens, Alain de Benoit, Jared Taylor, Milo Yiannopoulos, Aleksandr Dugin; second, and related, “fascism” is surely not the appropriate conceptual term for all, perhaps any, of those listed above. I will explore the first question in the next section. With respect to the second objection, we clearly require an ideal type of fascism in order to move forward. Unfortunately, this is a rather difficult requirement, given the number of persuasive but discrepant theoretical accounts in the literature, including important studies by Eatwell (1992, 1996, 2006), Griffin (1991, 2012), Mann (2004), Paxton (2004), Riley (2010), and Traverso (2003, 2008), among many others. Drawing on these accounts, and on work by other scholars of Right-wing thought, such as Wodak (2015), Berlet and Lyons (2000), Robin (2011), and Camus and Lebourg (2017), I suggest, here, a “fascism” ideal type with five core features: 1. Organic, transcendent, palingenetic nationalism; 2. Conspiracy theorizing and cleansing; 3. Charismatic authority;

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4. Counter-revolution/backlash politics; 5. Militaristic masculinity. Fascism, first, sets forth a politics centered on the figure of an organic, integral, and pure nation or ethnic group. This entails hostility toward outsiders, explicitly or implicitly, which is articulated principally as racism. This racism has often been of a biological kind, loaded with the language of evolution and innate, insuperable racial hierarchies, but it can also be expressed in cultural terms, and is sometimes framed in ethno-pluralist ways. This appeal to an organic and pure identity politics is viewed as the means of transcending conflict, disharmony, and decay. In particular, this politics is invoked as the vehicle of what Griffin (1991) calls “palingenesis”, the redemption through rebirth of the nation, overcoming, in the process, decadence, betrayal, humiliation, and victimhood. This narrative of past, present, and future is often articulated in selfconsciously mythic terms and narrated by way of conspiracist understandings of the present and revisionist understandings of the past. Rather than being viewed as a series of negations—anti-liberalism, anti-communism, anti-democracy, anti-Semitism, anti-Enlightenment (Traverso 2008)—fascism should be viewed as anti-systemic and revolutionary, espousing an “alternate modernity” (a “rooted modernity”, in Griffin’s [1991] framing).4 This anti-systemic element is articulated in conspiracy theorizing, and the uncovered conspiracy necessitates cleansing the nation of certain ethnic, religious, sexual, or political elements. Conspiracy theorizing is a form of “cognitive mapping” (Jameson 1988), a parsimonious, totalizing political optic that posits that powerful, hidden, evil forces, outside of the true community, control human destinies, a type of theorizing often bound up with apocalyptic and/or millennial beliefs (Barkun 2013; Berlet and Lyons 2000; Moore 2016). Frequently, such conspiracism draws on core tropes of historic anti-Semitism, even when anti-Semitism is formally renounced: opposition to immigration, cosmopolitanism, and elites in the economic, political, media, and academic spheres; valorization of true producers and of commonsense and ordinary wisdom against unrooted abstraction and universalism (Berlet and Lyons 2000; Traverso 2003). Ideologically, culturally, or biologically foreign elements within the nation demand a vigilance expressed in the obsession with security, safety, and border politics (Wodak 2015). This conspiracism, and its attendant border politics, is, on the side of solutions, bound up with charismatic modes of authority. The spread of

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fascism in Europe from the 1920s to 1940s is widely linked to an accompanying retreat of liberal democracy. However, fascism tends to combine a certain number of democratic appeals—the people, the nation, participation, community, the nationalized masses—with a species of aristocratic elitism (at times, even putschism), condensed in the decisive heroism of what within the proto-fascist French far-Right was described as the “magic king”, a figure both of and above the people (Copsey 2017; Eatwell 1996, 2006; Eco 1995; Griffin 1991; Landa 2014; Suvin 2017; Traverso 2008; Wodak 2015). Griffin (1991) characterizes this configuration as populism in intent, elitism in practice; Inglehart and Norris (2016) frame it as a combination of the will of the people with charismatic authoritarianism; and Umberto Eco (1995) summarizes it as “popular elitism”. Perhaps this is best framed by Riley (2010) as “authoritarian democracy”, Riley rejecting the equation of fascism with undemocratic totalitarianism, as the fascists presented themselves as the true representatives of civil society,5 against a corrupt and ineffective political class and in the face of the failings of liberal democracy. As suggested above, fascism should not be seen in purely negative terms as a reactionary and incoherent set of rejections and oppositions, or as a mere simulacrum of revolution. Nevertheless, fascism cannot be understood in the absence of attention to its counter-revolutionary or backlash politics (Paxton 2004; Poulantzas 1974; Riley 2010, 2018; Suvin 2017; Traverso 2003, 2008, 2019). Fascism has both drawn from and fervently, obsessively reacted against Left political and cultural forms and figures— sometimes, say, appropriating dimensions of socialism while fiercely attacking communist and working class organizations, as well as the claims of egalitarianism (Suvin 2017). Riley (2016) expresses this well in noting the crucial role played by the reaction against the threat of the Left in fascism’s “ideological and organizational energy”. Finally, both military and gendered-bodily dimensions have been crucial to fascism, which I have sought to capture as “militaristic masculinity”. Traverso (2003, 2008) has, for instance, underscored the indispensable activating role of modern European-organized violence—imperialism, factory discipline, the prison system, the Great War—in fascism. Of particular note was the role of total war in introducing violence into everyday life and brutalizing European societies, with fascism growing out of this trauma (Traverso 2019). Mann (2004), meanwhile, emphasizes that fascism is inseparable from marching, uniforms, danger, guns, fighting, distinctively “encaging” young men in paramilitary organizations that proved

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vital for fascism’s successes, both in terms of discipline and solidarity and in the intimidation of opponents and the general populace. This paramilitary aspect was, of course, profoundly gendered, and a deep-lying value dimension of fascism is the appeal to what we would now describe as “toxic masculinity”: the exaltation of battle and martial values—life viewed, says Eco (1995), as “permanent warfare”—strength, power, loyalty, speed, courage, youth, virility, action, decision (Suvin 2017; Traverso 2003), and a disdain for women (Eco 1995). I have suggested these five elements as a way of binding fascism into a useable concept, in acknowledgment that fascism was a deeply variegated phenomenon, or as Eatwell (1992) frames it, “a spectral-syncretic ideology … a set of syntheses” (p. 189): for instance, between a conservative view of man constrained by nature and the more left-wing view of the possibilities of creating a “new man”; between a commitment to science, especially in terms of understanding human nature, and a more anti-rationalist, vitalist interest in the possibilities of will…; between faith and service of Christianity and the heroism of Classical thought; between private property relations more typical of the right and a form of welfarism more typical of the left.

More widely, across fascism 1920s–1940s, we see extraordinary variety— Christian and pagan, racist and more tolerantly if fervently patriotic, nationalist and internationalist, leaning in Romantic and in Enlightenment directions, statist and more market-oriented, conservative and Bohemian (Camus and Lebourg 2017; Eatwell 1992, 2006; Traverso 2003, 2008). Like Marxism and anarchism on the other side of the political spectrum, this intellectual formation must be seen in its forms, as a “panorama of discrepancies”, a “highly unstable, non-homogenous composite” (Favilli 2016, pp. 13, vii).

Post-fascism and Utopianism Each of these five dimensions is loaded with utopian significance. In the remainder of the chapter, I will approach the utopian implications of postfascism in a number of ways—by reference to those five ideal typical dimensions, in conversation with Bloch’s work on fascism, and by means of attention to the contrasting utopian and dystopian figures constructed by postfascism. With respect to the ideal type outlined above, I am suggesting, first,

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that what I am calling post-fascism clearly coincides with these five dimensions of fascism, but that, second, new syntheses and distinctive elements are to be found across the contemporary far-Right. Regarding the first ideal typical dimension—organic, transcendent, palingenetic nationalism—we see in today’s post-fascism the call for a “return” to a strong politics of the purified, integral nation. This often takes a recognizably nation-state form within the Right nationalist parties: a “sovereign Germany” (AfD); “it is our house” (FN); “Take back control”, “We want our country back” (Brexit slogans) (Brown 2018; Caiani and Kroll 2017). Thus, AfD (2016) underscore German “self-determination”, “sovereignty”, “strength”, the need to “remain German at heart”, and a threatened, unique national “identity” that keeps people “grounded and connected”. Similarly, UKIP (2018) emphasize the retention and strengthening of “English identity”, which is being “airbrushed out of national life”. Jobbik (2003), meanwhile, champion a “renewed Hungarian nation”, “common roots”, and “natural human communities”, against ultra-liberal globalism’s “fatal mutilation of our national sovereignty”, while CasaPound (2018) call for a State “that is once more a spiritual and moral entity”, “ethical, organic”, to be rebuilt against the contemporary demise of state independence. Sometimes, though, this nationalism takes a more supra-national, pan-European, or pan-Western direction. In much alt-Right and white supremacist discourse, for example, the white race as a whole or the West are designated the collective, integral subject—the Proud Boys (n.d.), say, positing theirs as a project of “Western chauvinism”: “The West is the Best!” In Dugin’s (2018) influential “fourth political theory”, the preservation and development of “organic national, ethnical and religious cultural traditions” require a “multi-polar world” of “supra-state formations of regional kind (‘great spaces’)”. In an again other variant, for the French New Right, a more communitarian and federated good society is posited as a solution to the modern crisis—the “revitalization of local communities … [the] renaissance of popular traditions”, built upon “sociohistorical representations”, “roots”, “meaning” (de Benoit and Champetier 1999). This revivified identitarianism or ethnicization is expressed in what Camus and Lebourg (2017) call “sovereignism”,6 a desire and drive toward a new politics of strength, power, decision, and autonomy. Such identitarianism and sovereignism are set against narratives of present and future cataclysmic decline: “white genocide” or “the great replacement” among the alt-Right; a “collapsing” nation, according to the AfD (2016); the

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“betrayed, humiliated, and sold” people of Italy, for CasaPound (Caiani and Kroll 2017); a “tragic demographic situation” and a “mutilated” sovereignty, in Jobbik (2003); convergence and homogenization, in Dugin (2018); the “destruction of the lifeworld”, “impoverishment of the spirit”, an “empty civilization”, according to de Benoit and Champetier (1999). This decline is blamed on forces such as the EU, globalism, the Zionist Occupation Government, Islamism, immigration, political correctness, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, and feminism. In such discourses, then, we find clear utopian significations concerning the shape of the good society—a strong, independent, unified, organic, pure nation—which is posited at a variety of “levels”, from communitarian to supra-national-civilizational. The destructive forces noted above are connected to dystopian significations, the oppositional corollary to these utopian propositions. These forces are understood in conspiratorial terms, from the “new world order”, to 9/11 conspiracies, to “birther” memes, and into the beyond of Alex Jones’s InfoWars,7 the correlate of which is a politics of security, safety, and cleansing. Right nationalist denunciations of “the establishment”, the altRight on “cultural Marxism”, or white nationalism’s (the site Stormfront , for example8 ) fervent paranoia about the “new world order” and often rabid anti-Semitism produce totalizing maps of the world, what Fredric Jameson (1988) once described as a “poor person’s cognitive mapping in the post-modern age”. In the widely used conspiracist notion of “cultural Marxism”, for instance, we find resonances with the Nazi phrase “cultural Bolshevism”. Used since the mid-1990s, “cultural Marxism” is a catch-all conspiracy, traced to the ideas of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, and attached, variously, to social justice ideals, feminism, gay and trans rights, immigration, gun control, redistribution, affirmative action, multiculturalism, Hollywood, and political correctness. It is frequently linked to an insidious cosmopolitan Leftist-elite politics that seeks to displace and disempower white or European people, especially men. Used across white nationalist and alt-Right discourse, the term is deployed, too, by more “respectable” figures such as Ron Paul and Jordan Peterson (Mirrlees 2018), and by UKIP (2018), the latter linking the term to an “anti-English” elite in government, politics, the public sector, the media, corporate capitalism, and academia, to a “PC thought-police”, to “social engineering”, and to the freedom-diminishing notion of “hate speech”. This conspiracism, as noted, is interlaced with cleansing—for instance, cleansing the nation of elite distortions—“big government”, “big media”,

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“big Hollywood”, in Breitbart’s terms, for example—or of privileged, “invading” ethnic minorities. This cleansing can take a number of forms. Post-fascists often call for the purging of institutions, such as academia, to free them from cultural Marxist, feminist, and social justice infections. The creation of alternative institutions is another common strategy, especially alternative media, set against a globalist “media monopoly” (Jobbik 2003). The expulsion of foreign elements is also frequently key—stronger borders, tighter citizenship criteria, deportation of outsiders. Here, Islamophobia often plays a central role, Traverso (2019) suggesting that anti-Islamism today functions as a replacement for anti-Semitism. On this score, AfD (2016) declare that “Islam does not belong to Germany”: Islamic practice is destructive of liberal democracy, Roman law, and “the Judeo-Christian and humanist foundations of our culture”. Frequently, immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, as well as marginalized ethnic groups are blamed for crime, disorder, and insecurity—“Foreigner” and “immigrant crime” (AfD 2016; Fekete 2018; UKIP 2018), “rapefugees” (Wendling 2018)— and such groups must be exposed and de-protected (AfD 2016; UKIP 2018). This cleansing impulse is profoundly connected to a separatism that ranges from the re-elevation of “Christian-Occidental values”, in a number of Right nationalist parties (Caiani and Kroll 2017), to the creation of a white ethno-state, as in much alt-Right and white nationalist discourse. Naturally, post-fascism operates on a different terrain from that of the 1920s–1940s, a question I will discuss further below. One arguable novelty today is the global extension of liberal democracy and the almost universally high esteem in which democracy is held—although, as noted, Riley contests the image of twentieth-century fascism as straightforwardly anti-democratic. Ostensible democracy is, then, a consistent component of post-fascism, especially a new media democracy, embracing supposedly free and direct communication, outside of established communication channels and established parties deemed “distant from the people” (Caiani and Kroll 2017). This democratic politics is, as Wodak (2015) notes, typically attached to scandal politics, celebrity, obscene scapegoating, and denial, and appeals to strong, decisive leadership. On the one hand, something akin to the French New Right’s9 notion of “organic democracy” often plays an important role, with appeals to more direct democracy, referenda (AfD and PEGIDA, for instance), and social media immediacy, which are deemed by the far-Right to be more representative of the general will of an authentic citizenry than the established parties, who are distant, technocratic, and globalist in orientation. Jobbik (2003), for instance, insist on the

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establishment of “real democracy”, against the “political” or “elite class”, “unfulfilled promises, turncoats, lies and corruption”. CasaPound (2018), similarly, speak of “organic and qualitative”, participative, or “town hall” democracy. This, emphasis, though, comingles with an elite theory politics of decision, action, heroic masculinity, and saviors, condensed, for example, in the peculiar alt-Right figure of “God Emperor Trump” (Lamerichs et al. 2018), or in what Mosley (2017) calls “revolution from above”. Again, this ideal typical dimension is full of utopian significance, especially in connection with the notion of the will of the true community and in representations of transformative agency, both popular and elite, that would enable movement from a corrupted and fallen here to the utopian there. Classical fascism both plagiarized and fervently opposed the Left. Postfascism, too, on the one hand, borrows certain Leftist elements. Particularly important is the New Left appeal to the recognition and valorization of the identitarian “right to difference” (Copsey 2017), often, as Gray (2018) points out, with arguments about white or European superiority left secondary or implicit. This, of course, is often not the case, with white nationalists and alt-Righters often emphasizing Western or white superiority: “A race that can fly into space is certainly worth more in the cosmic sense than a race that drums in the bush and hops half-naked through the woods” (Hoffmeister 2018). Nevertheless, even in such instances, racial and cultural differences are often viewed as acceptable, provided spatial separation is established. On the other hand, both Dugin (2018) and the French New Right argue on behalf of human plurality and against racism—the “primacy of difference” a future “pluriverse” (de Benoit and Champetier 1999). We also find Leftist resonances in the contemporary far-Right’s irreverence and appeal to transgression, say, the alt-Right’s imaginings of itself as “a new counter-culture” (Mosley 2017), a “new punk”, or in the far-Right obsession with the right to free speech, against the prohibitive strictures of PC culture, SJWs (social justice warriors) “cry-bullies”, and the like (Brown 2018; Nagle 2017; Pollard 2018; Wendling 2018). Additionally, many post-fascists appeal to anti-capitalist significations: Jobbik (2003) reject the sale of national assets and an ultra-liberalism in which “egoism sets the course for the world”; Dugin (2018) and CasaPound (2018) criticize the oligarchic, disembedded character of today’s economy, as well as the rampant pursuit of self-interest; post-fascists frequently represent themselves as the champions of the popular classes against a ruling class—“the elite class” (Jobbik 2003) “political elites” (AfD 2016). And

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the notion of a transformed, revolutionary Right consciousness—the altRight’s notion of “red-pilling”—is clearly indebted to Leftist notions of ideology and consciousness-raising. On the other hand, a politics of backlash or restoration is constitutive, as well. We have, as noted, the crucial role played by the opposition to “cultural Marxism” and “SJWs” within alt-Right and white nationalist circles, in an online culture dedicated to “destroying”, “devastating”, “vanquishing”, “owning” Leftists and their contentions. Here, Bornschier (2010) suggests that we interpret Right nationalism as something of a delayed reaction to the slowly unfolding results of the world revolution of 1968, the discrediting of explicit sexism, racism, and homophobia in a third of the nations in the world (Therborn 2011). This backlash—against anti-racism, multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism—is, in essence, a hostility to all forms of egalitarianism and has, more recently, taken the form of violent street encounters with anti-fascist demonstrators. In post-fascism’s borrowings from and backlash against the Left, utopian and dystopian impulses coincide—elements of a projected good social order, as well as critical portraits of power and of the enemies that block the path to a better way of being. The last ideal typical element is militaristic masculinity. Paramilitary elements are found only sprinkled across post-fascism—attached, say, to Jobbik in Hungary, the American militia revival (the Three Percenters, for instance), or Golden Dawn in Greece. However, a militaristic masculinity is visible across post-fascism, expressed, as it was within mid-twentiethcentury fascism, in a contradictory mixture of both marginalization, protection, and idealization of, and suspicion, hatred, and sexual aggression towards, women. Post-fascists often appeal to traditional gender roles, women, first and foremost, as mothers and housewives (AfD 2016), and the traditional family depicted as the bedrock of a good social order (AfD 2016; CasaPound 2018; Jobbik 2003). On the alt-Right, the Proud Boys (n.d.), a “MEN ONLY” group, reject what they call “apology culture”, arguing that “nobody wants men to be men more than the women who depend on them”, and the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, has praised the virtues of traditional marriage and recommended abstinence from pornography (Nagle 2017; Wendling 2018; Wodak 2015). The protection of women is also prioritized in the white and Right nationalist focus on sexual crimes by African American or refugee men. We find, too, various post-fascist efforts to re-regulate women’s bodies—in strictures against abortion in religiousoriented post-fascism (Jobbik or the AfD, say), and in arguments against

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Islamic dress codes for women (the AfD or the FN, for instance). In such patriarchal discourse, so-called sex realism often plays an important role: the “largely evident biological and psychological differences between men and women (which pre-disposes them to different roles within society”) (Mosley 2017); a longing “for the days when ‘girls were girls and men were men’” (Proud Boys, n.d.); the clear “existence of a feminine and masculine nature” (de Benoit and Champetier 1999). This “sex realism” is typically shoulder-to-shoulder with a thoroughgoing hostility to feminism: Yiannopoulos’s declaration that “feminism is cancer”; the designation of feminism as universalist and abstract, unrooted and decontextualized (de Benoit and Champetier 1999); the AfD’s (2016) contention that “Gender research does not meet the claim of reputable research”, and its rejection of gender-neutral language changes and of gender-based positive discrimination. A more aggressive, misogynist version of such strictures is particularly to the fore within alt-Right and white nationalist circles. From the content of the 4 and 8Chan forums, to “gamergate”, to pickup artistry (say, in the figure of Roosh V), to the resentments of incels, to an unleashed violent, pornographic trolling practice of rape and death threats … in all of this, we glimpse an emergent online cultural atmosphere, the so-called manosphere (Nagle 2017; Wendling 2018). Opposing the feminizing and “gaying” of national cultures, condensed in the disdainful deployment of the term “snowflake”, this manosphere evinces what Eco (1995) calls the Ur-Fascist will to power around sex—violent and racist pornography,10 rape and death threats, virtual gaming imaginaries of battle, and the “passion for the real” (Badiou 2007). This increasingly inescapable, vulgar, and depressing culture is read by Kelly (2017) as haunted, both repulsed and awed, by post-September 11 images of rugged-living, bearded Islamists, armed with machine guns and machetes.11 Such an atmosphere is brimming with resonances with the ideal of the new man of classical fascism— that is, a utopian anthropology.12

Continuities and Discrepancies If we can arguably find multiple connections linking the fascism of the 1920s–1940s and post-fascism, what of some of the potential discrepancies? Traverso (2019, p. 25), for instance, comparing twentieth-century fascism to Trump, notes a host of differences:

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… [fascism] was born in the era of Fordist capitalism, of assembly-line production and mass culture. Trump has emerged in the age of neoliberalism, in the age of financialised capitalism, of competitive individualism and endemic precarity. He does not mobilise the masses but attracts a mass of atomised individuals, of impoverished and isolated consumers. He has not invented a new political style; he does not want to look like a solider and does not wear a uniform. He shows off a luxurious, terribly kitsch lifestyle that resembles the backdrop of a Hollywood TV series. He embodies a neoliberal anthropological model. It is difficult to imagine Mussolini or Hitler as real estate promoters.

Similarly, Riley (2016, 2018) points to a number of profound discrepancies. On the one hand, the interwar fascist regimes were a product of inter-imperial warfare and capitalist crisis, combined with a revolutionary threat from the Left. They emerged within late-coming, second-rank powers that had been excluded from the imperialist game, where civil societies were characterized by a high degree of political mobilization, with a nationalist bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie pitted against an internationalist working class, and offered an imperialist-revisionist solution to the crisis. (Riley 2018, pp. 16–17)

By contrast, says Riley, in the case of Trump, we find the absence, today, of total war, of an autonomous mass party organization and of a mobilized civil society, of a significant threat from the Left, of a corresponding vision of the state, of a mass of impoverished small agrarian producers, and of unemployed workers. Today, too, the popular classes are individualized and atomized; a partly mobilized nationalist working class faces a pro-globalist elite; and Trumpism expresses no coherent ideological alternative. It is important to explore some of the sociological contentions raised here at greater length. First, some commentators would undoubtedly argue that the constituencies drawn to historical fascism are very different from those drawn to, say, contemporary Right nationalism. Thus, Mann (2004) maintains that those close to the state, the historic nation, and outside of the front line of capital-labor class struggle formed the core of the twentiethcentury fascist movement. Today, by contrast, Right nationalist support is typically drawn from outside of the major urban centers, among older, less educated white men, as well as from petty bourgeois elements (Inglehart and Norris 2016). In the case of the alt-Right, it is perhaps too early to

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tell, but it has been suggested that many participants are under 35, welleducated, tech-savvy or tech professionals, and living in larger urban centers (Hawley 2017). This objection is, in many respects, too complex, because of the unevenness or unavailability of the data, and perhaps, in any case, beside the point, as different groups, in different places, at different times have been drawn toward fascism (Riley 2004). Second, a number of critics have noted that, in contrast to the situation obtaining in the 1920s and 1930s, a hard-Right today can no longer plausibly be seen as reacting to a powerful Left, except perhaps in Greece and Spain (where far-Right influence, until recently, has been negligible). It is certainly true that we would be hard-pressed to characterize our situation, as Gramsci did in explaining the rise of fascism, as one of catastrophic equilibrium between the forces of ruling and subaltern classes (Poulantzas 1974). Nevertheless, as noted, it is possible to view post-fascism as a slowmoving backlash against the long-running institutionalization of the New Left’s cultural and political gains, crystallized, in particular, after the crisis of 2007/2008. It is plausible, too, to read post-fascist mobilization as at least partially drawing energy from the emergence of what Santos (2006) has called the new global Left, since 1999, a Left visible in both alternativeglobalization and Occupy movements. On this score, the often violent rhetoric post-fascists reserve for communists, socialists, radicals, Marxists, and feminists—captured by the romance, for some on the far-Right around, say, Pinochet or Latin American death squads (Cabezas 2018)—is a signal that, after a period of defeat for the far-Left, “There are also signs that something else is on the rise … that a change is afoot” (Traverso 2019, pp. 185, 187). Third, an important question, definitional of fascism for some, centers on questions of statism and totalitarianism. According to Mann (2004), for example, the fascists of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s worshipped the state, and statism is one of the five component features of his fascist ideal type. In a different vein, the “totalitarian school” of political scientific thought has tended to view fascism as seeking a dictatorial-statist regime, converging, in this way, with communism (Eatwell 1992). The reality of this within classical fascism is complex, however, with fascists in practice pragmatic, above all, with respect to questions of both economics and politics (Eatwell 1992; Paxton 2004; Traverso 2008).13 Similarly, across post-fascism, we find considerable variety on the state-market polarity. Jobbik in Hungary, Bulgarian Attack, and the Greek Golden Dawn all lean in the direction of chauvinist welfarism and the critique of unrestrained capitalism. For instance, Jobbik

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(2003) are highly critical of the growth of inequalities, privatization, and consumerism, created by ultra-liberal globalization; UKIP (2018) argue the need for a “strong”, “supportive”, “robust” welfare safety net, arguing against depressed wages, unemployment, and the rising cost of housing; and Dugin (2018), de Benoit and Champetier (1999), and CasaPound (2018) react strongly against unregulated capitalism—financialization, deregulation, speculation, commodification, over-expansion, materialism. On the other hand, the Swiss People’s Party, the New Flemish Alliance, and the Austrian Freedom Party take more free market positions, while often Euroskeptic in bearing. In the United States, meanwhile, certain limited- or anti-government neo-libertarian and localist positions often obtain among white nationalist and alt-Right thinkers and groups. Such questions raise tremendously difficult problems of the environmental differences between post-fascism and classical fascism. It can certainly be argued that the current sociopolitical juncture is at some remove from that of the interwar period, where what Wagner (2001a, b) has called the “first crisis of modernity” issued in a range of solutions toward the “organization of modernity”, in which state, party, and program emerged as the central pillars of societal reorganization across fascism, social democracy, and “really existing socialism”. Such statist, planning-centered visions have been in abeyance for decades within the rich nations, where neo-liberal hegemony, equipped with a decidedly individualist notion of the good life, surely provides a sharp contrast to the collectivism characteristic of the organization of modernity. On the other hand, Landa (2014) emphasizes the combination of collectivist mass politics with individualist elitism within fascism, pointing to the unsettling continuities, in this respect, between liberalism and fascism. In a congruent way, we see variability in today’s post-fascism, with both aggressively individualist elements and collectivist appeals—the white “race-soul” (Hoffmeister 2018), communitarianism (de Benoit and Champetier 1999), the organic nation, the need to sacrifice “the cult of individualism” (Mosley 2017). Similarly, the ground on which fascism grew—total war, major economic crisis, massive unemployment, political turmoil and disaffection, social mobilization, socialist insurgency—can be seen as disparate to contemporary experience in the wealthier parts of the globe. However, there are arguably many congruences, too—a signal crisis, the dislocation of the hegemonic ideology and a significant crisis of representation for the major parties, long-running experiences of spiralling inequality and precarity, new anti-systemic tendencies, and a certain atmosphere of cultural

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pessimism, analogous to that holding in the period in which fascism germinated (Traverso 2019). The post-fascist response to such dislocation has appealed to a new politics of strength, power, decision, and sovereignty, or “sovereignism” (Camus and Lebourg 2017). This is not, certainly, a simple return to the imperialism and interventionist state Poulantzas (1974) viewed as critical to fascism, but it is a substantial shift from neo-liberalism’s “disenchantment of politics by economics” (Davies 2017, p. xiv). My contention, here, is not that post-fascism is a simple return of the fascism of the 1920s–1940s. Rather, versions of those ideal typical fascist elements I have suggested are to be found within post-fascism, and there are some important symmetries between the activating sociopolitical environments in question. Post-fascism is composed of distinctive emphases and is multistranded, but is also characterized by continuities with and iterative variations upon classical fascism.

The Future in the Past---Bloch and Post-fascism I have suggested, then, that we can visualize variants of each of fascism’s ideal typical elements within post-fascism, and that each of these dimensions is brimming with utopian significance, as propositions about the good society, as oppositions to a fallen present and a threatening future, as suggestions as to the modes of transformation toward a better way of being, and as imaginings of the creation of new types of subjects. As noted, such consideration of post-fascist utopianism is almost entirely neglected in the literature. This neglect is, in my estimation, a barrier to emancipatory social scientific understanding and contestation of post-fascism today. A crucial resource in approaching this post-fascism-utopianism bond, in addition to the ideal type used above, is The Heritage of Our Times, composed by Ernst Bloch through the 1920s and early 1930s, and first published in 1935. Centrally, Bloch is directly exploring fascism’s utopian significance, depicting fascism as a “powerful cultural synthesis” (in Rabinbach 1977, p. 5), a “heterogeneous surprise” (Bloch 1977 [1935], p. 27), and offering stern challenges to Marxian orthodoxy. On the latter, Bloch is unsparing with a certain Marxist response to fascism, rejecting “pedagogical intellectualism”, the notion that “truth makes its own way in the world” (in Rabinbach 1977, p. 19), and the mere denunciation of fascist ideology as false, irrational, nihilistic, confused, or as simply a tool of big business. Such Marxists, says Bloch (1977 [1935]), have surrendered the ground of both heaven and hell. The fascists speak deceitfully but to

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people, while the Marxists speak truly but only of things (Bloch 1991, p. 138). Fascism, Bloch argues, can be viewed as a “swindle of fulfilment” (in Rabinbach 1977, p. 8), certainly, but it is not just “dogs and false magicians” (Bloch 1991, p. 2), not just morbid symptoms, and it requires close analysis, theoretical recalibration (the development of a multi-spatial and multi-temporal dialectics), and the development of an alternate theology, a “religion without lies” (p. 144). Crucially, here, Bloch uses the concept of non-contemporaneity, expressing the notion that “Not all people exist in the same Now” (Bloch 1977, p. 22). His argument is that fascism draws from “the future in the past” (in Rabinbach 1977, p. 7), calling up “earlier forces, from quite a different Below” (Bloch 1977, p. 22), responding to modern disenchantment, joining a romantic anti-capitalism—roots, soil, homeland—among rural strata with fears of decline and genuine immiseration among middling urban strata and a youth out of step with “the barren Now” (Bloch 1977, p. 23). Fascism expresses, then, an authentic longing for something different. It successfully steals elements from the Left—the color red, the street, and the language of revolutionary change (Bloch 1991, p. 64). And it creates “new figures” (Bloch 1991, p. 3), synthesizing various elements into “hybrid structures” (Bloch 1977, p. 32), using “hooks” from elsewhere— fairytales, myth, kitsch, Romanticism, occultism and magic, “masculine qualities” (strength, openness, decency, purity), a primitive-atavistic “participation mystique”, as well as components from vitalist philosophy (will, life, creation, archaic surging, instinctive knowledge) (Bloch 1977, 1991). In these ways, Bloch took decisive leave from the mandated response of the Communist International, which after the “social fascism” interlude concluded that fascism represented the “terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital” (quoted in Griffin 1991, p. 3). Bloch, similarly, goes beyond various far-Left formulations that held that fascism and democracy were but two forms of the dictatorship of capital.14 His efforts can be seen as joining with a range of more attentive and empathetic listeners within the Western Marxist tradition, who sought to understand the powers of attraction, the “magic” of the fascist mutation, such as Wilhelm Reich, Benjamin, and Adorno. For Toscano (2017), Bloch’s analysis falls short in the contemporary period. Toscano contends that late fascism—and he does not accept that it is fascism at all—is, first, bereft of non-contemporaneity. His argument is that, today, capitalism is total, “intensively shape[ing] and homogenise[ing]

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desires and forms of life”. There is, that is to say, no past to salvage. Second, Toscano suggests that late fascism evinces a utopianism without transcendence, without the “fanatic-religious” element of fascism’s earlier iterations. Further, he charges that that drive for political autonomy within historic fascism is unavailable today, and that contemporary “fascist” variations are intensely superstructural—that is, are overwhelmingly psychoanalytic rather than political or sociological phenomena. Additionally, late fascism, Toscano argues, is not a mass movement, there is no semblance of a class character to it, and today’s far-Right no longer articulate an antisystemic position. Instead, Toscano recommends Adorno’s work, particularly emphasizing mass psychology and narcissism, the phoniness and lack of conviction—charging that neither leaders nor adherents truly believe, and instead desperately perform their own enthusiasm—and the obscene character, in the “twilight zone between the respectable and the forbidden”, of late fascism’s mode of operation. In a somewhat similar vein, Foucauldian scholar Wendy Brown (2018) highlights psychoanalytic phenomena in reading today’s far-Right. For Brown, the conditioning factors in contemporary white backlash are to be found in neo-liberal reason—in particular, its equation of freedom with the “personal, protected sphere” (p. 66), set against, and in hostile relation to, the political and the social. As part of the neo-liberal moment, we have seen, too, a downward trajectory for both nation-state sovereignty and white male supremacy, a definitive loss of entitlement. We need, however, to add to these conditioning factors psychoanalytic-philosophical meditations on nihilism and the death instinct, as “rancour, grudges, barely concealed victimization … are the affective heartbeat of internet trolling, tweets, and speeches at right-wing rallies” (p. 70). Freedom, within this culture, is, in Anker’s words an “ugly freedom” (p. 71), an “ethical destitution” (p. 71), the production of a subject that is “pleasure-mongering, aggressive, and perversely attached to the destructiveness and domination of its milieu” (p. 75).15 Toscano and Brown are surely correct in pointing to the psychoanalytic factors in play within post-fascism, and elements of each of the nine variables purportedly measured by the F-scale are healthily on display in various ways, across the parties, sites, and figures of this intellectual formation: conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and sex (Adorno et al. 1966). Nevertheless, Bloch’s utopian optic provides a much needed supplement

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in approaching post-fascism, especially as psychological-cultural portraits abound in the literature.16 One issue with this literature is its thoroughgoing pessimism, Brown (2018) contending that no appeal to facts, reason, or argument will work, and that this subject “does not want to know” and “cannot be wooed by a viable alternative future” (p. 75), so pervasive is its nihilism, so tight is the grip of the death instinct. At times, furthermore, such portraits, as they are sometimes framed in liberal-progressive media, have their own obscene underside—class hatred toward poor, uneducated white “deplorables”, “white trash”, in short, who rally to the far-Right. Taking up Toscano’s initial query, we might perhaps agree with analyses, such as Wallerstein’s (2005) and Jameson’s (1988), of ours as a more total, encompassing capitalism, while acknowledging the still uneven quality of social relations, alongside the continuing imaginative power of older dreams operative within culture and politics—nostalgia within contemporary popular culture for the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s providing one example. This nostalgia for bygone ages is voluminously present within the culture of post-fascism, in imagery, text, and speech, which bolsters the case for Bloch. Within alt-Right and white nationalist discourse, for instance, we see ample conjuring of Antiquity—Sparta and the Roman Empire, in particular. Describing the future sought by the alt-Right in an interview, Richard Spencer, for instance, describes an ideal future “global empire … that is a homeland for all white people, whether you’re German or Celtic or Slavic or English … It would be one big Roman Empire” (in Wendling 2018, pp. 24–25). In a congruent way, we find white nationalists frequently appealing to Ancient Greece—Stormfront displaying images of the Parthenon, and Steve Bannon, Golden Dawn, and marchers at Charlottesville referencing Sparta (especially the Battle of Thermopylae)—or Rome, the white nationalist use of SPQR and Roman military eagle symbolism. And, as well as appeals to the legacy of humanism, Enlightenment, and Christianity, the AfD (2016) root authentic German identity in Antiquity and Roman law. Crusader-like images and rhetoric are also common—the use of the Cross of Saint George and the appeal to the Knights Templar. For instance, at the altright.com site, in the banner above an article entitled “White Flight Nationalism is a Dead End: Retreat is Not an Option”, a painting depicts a crusader knight, holding aloft a flag and riding a white horse, breaking through a horde of chained, spearwielding, cowering African warriors.17 We find, too, nostalgic appeals for the homogeneity, prosperity, and certainties of the 1950s, in, say, diversion of 1950s-style advertising and iconography,18 to herald, say, the coming

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of the manosphere. And we see the mobilization of a desire for a supposedly more certain period of white masculinity in the 1980s, captured in the recycling of images from action films or in the use of neon-lit video-game iconography from the period, the latter especially associated with fashwave music (Kelly 2017). For a flavor of this musical genre, both sound and imagery, see, for instance, a YouTube Mix,19 which includes track titles such as “Dying Society”, “Revolt Against the Modern”, “Right Wing Death Squad”, “Panzer”, “Rhodesia”, “Identity is Unstoppable”, and “Fight for Western Civilization”. At the heart of post-fascism, then, are variegated appeals to a “return” of some sort, sometimes, as in de Benoit and Champetier (1999), in a decidedly anti-Modernity register—set against massification, standardization, individualism, disenchantment, rationalization, the autonomous logic of technological development, progressivism, and the like—sometimes, toward an earlier modern moment. Further, the constituencies Right nationalist forces attempt to hail, in Western rust-belts and smaller de-industrialized towns, provide some signal of the continuing relevance of Bloch’s ideas, where a class element intertwines with ethnic, gender, and generational factors. Here, we often find post-fascist appeals to the regeneration of industry and to the remaking of a now-diminished working-class mode of existence. The FN, for instance, underscore “manufacturing” and “re-industrialization”, selective protectionism, and French-focussed welfare entitlements, and the Trump campaign repeatedly appealed to coal, miners, expanded manufacturing employment, and the protection of local industry. In similar fashion, Jobbik (2003) and UKIP (2018) call for expanded employment opportunities, improved working conditions, and a robust welfare state—UKIP prioritizing a “twenty-year programme of manufacturing expansion”. CasaPound (2018), likewise, seek the “revival of national product”, control of financial markets, strategic nationalization, and, strikingly, the “Cultural re-evaluation of manual work”. Another class element, here, is that constituency often pinpointed in Marxian analyses of fascism—the petty bourgeoisie,20 threatened with downward mobility, post-2007, as argued by Ingelhart and Norris (2016) and by other commentators on the altRight (Hawley 2017). We see this class element in frequent post-fascist calls for the bolstering of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), often set against oligarchic corporate capitalism: “safeguarding of SMEs”, smaller, local credit banks (CasaPound 2018); promotion of SMEs, by cutting bureaucratization and over-regulation (AfD 2016); SMEs as the “lifeblood and backbone of the British economy” (UKIP 2018); tax breaks to SMEs,

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in the FN. Appeals to the protection of farming and of the open, green spaces of homeland also have petty bourgeois affinities, as do a number of post-fascist invocations of creativity and diversity, against giganticism and massification. In approaching the cultural surpluses, the conjuring of earlier forces, and the “hybrid structures” composited by post-fascism, a master figure is gathered in the appeal to something like a surer period of homogeneous, organized, ordered capitalism that enshrined white male privilege. In a contribution to the alt-Right Counter-Currents site, Johnson (2018) depicts this “Whitopia” as a return to a pre-1965 situation, “high-wage manufacturing jobs”, “tradition-hallowed sex roles”, “racial idealism”, whose goal would be “Aspen, or Chappaqua, or Martha’s Vineyard for everyone”. Layered onto such appeals are representations close in content to some of those deployed in classical fascism, with occult, magical, and pagan elements, and intoxicating imagery from Antiquity. The new man connections with classical fascism are, at times, direct, with militaristic, heroic, fraternal fascinations. Sometimes, these new man representations are much more contemporary, with widespread associations made between post-fascist ideas and the violent world of mixed martial arts or ultra-contemporary ascetic gym culture.21 These are tied, as well, to what might be characterized as a new vitalism of creative destruction, will—human history, in Benoit and Champetier (1999) as a “result of will and action”—decision, idealism, and surging life—all of these, as in Bloch’s (1977, p. 26) reading, as “signs of flight from relativism and nihilism”. This cannot, however, be viewed as a straightforward return or as a pure traditionalism. Surprisingly, given the influence Benjamin exercises on his thought, in his very adroit analysis of post-fascism, Traverso (2019) denies the existence of a utopian dimension, seeing it, above all, as a surrogate for utopias that have disappeared, and as an expression of a “world [that] has retreated into the present and does not seem able to project itself into the future” (p. 184), an impotent, impoverished longing for a mythical past. In contrast, I believe that not only do we find the conjoining of very different figures from the past within post-fascism, but also the gathering of a variety of new figurations. For example, Dugin (2018) calls for a novel social configuration, supra-state formations—“great spaces” or “geo-economic belts”—an “original and authentic world” set in contrast to the current globalist-Atlantist vision, and to the older modern ideologies, liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism, which combines “faith in the past” with an “open attitude toward the future” and “blossoming complexity”. Similarly,

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Spencer argues for a new European homeland, beyond nation-states, created through “peaceful ethnic cleansing”, and taking benevolent-imperial form (Spencer 2017; Wendling 2018, p. 22). The Proud Boys (n.d.) organization describe their project as “Western chauvinism”, a position available to a variety of religious, ethnic, and sexual identities, though underpinned by the belief that the “West is best”. At times, as noted, post-fascism takes the side of difference and plurality—Johnson (2018) calling for religious pluralism, and de Benoit and Champetier (1999) speaking of multipolarity, a “pluriverse”, “Differentialist anti-racism”, a combination of the ancient and the new. In addition to these newer significations, we find a proliferation of sci-fi and fantasy images and references (Dune or BioShock Infinite, for instance). In line with this, futuristic imaginings take us beyond mere repetition and nostalgia. For instance, CasaPound (2018) imagine a future order of “Total computerization”, the AfD (2016) argue for more genetic research and development, and the FN argue for the pioneering use of nuclear power. In a fanciful piece from altright.com, Hoffmeister (2018) speaks of archeofuturism, the revitalization of the white race “through a combination of archaic traditions and futuristic visions”. A combination of “archaic values” and the “Faustian spirit” would build a “Galactic Empire”, joining a “community of destiny” with “human-machine symbiosis”, to be led by a new anthropological type, “Cybernetic knights of the high-tech morning… equipped with yesterday’s ideological armour”. In fascism’s heroic period, this syncretic quality is captured, in part, by Goebbels’ phrase “steel romanticism”; today, we find something similar in Richard Spencer’s remark that, “If the alt-right were in power, we would all have arrived here via magnetic levitation trains… We would have passed by great forests and beautiful images of blond women in a wheat field with their hands, running them through the wheat” (sic, quoted in Levy 2016). Within such synthetic utopian imaginings and representations, a plural number of utopian and dystopian figures populate the post-fascist landscape. I have attempted to capture this below by schematically modifying Traverso’s (2003) tabulation of the oppositions in play within fascism (Table 4.1). My disagreements with Toscano’s and other accounts that emphasize the disparities between the contemporary radical Right and twentieth-century fascism are clearly, to a degree, a matter of warring gods, but I strongly believe that we can, in fact, detect elements that Toscano views as absent from post-fascism. We find, for example, transcendent elements. These are visible in post-fascist opposition to the rancor and disorder of contentious

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Table 4.1 Utopian and dystopian significations in post-fascism

Utopian

Dystopian

Spirit, concreteness, wisdom, experience, tradition, decision Nation, belonging

Abstract reason, universalism

Honour Myth, feeling Community Creation Hero Loyalty Hierarchy Legitimacy Nature Authority Organic integrity, oneness Realism—race and sex Masculinity Action Regeneration, rebirth Combat Body, will, soul Leader Charisma The ethnic people Purity

Rootlessness, cosmpolitanism Utilitarianism Rationalism, science, expertise Individuality Standardisation Elites—financial, political, bureaucratic, academic Contract Equality Law Humanity Democracy Pluralism Political correctness, cultural Marxism Feminization, the ‘gaying’ of culture Passivity Degeneration, decadence Pacifism Mind Citizen Rational-legal authority Establishment, abstract humanity Hybridity, engineered mixing

Source Adapted from Traverso (2003, pp. 135–136, 142–143)

emancipatory movements, such as the opposition to Black Lives Matters in American post-fascism. We also see religious/spiritual significations— say, in the regressive Christianity of Bulgarian Attack, AfD, Jobbik, or the Council for Conservative Citizens in the United States, or, in very different register, in Richard Spencer’s neo-paganism, drawn ultimately from the French New Right and from Nietzschean suspicions about the egalitarian and emancipatory potentials contained within Judaism and Christianity.

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In addition, anti-systemic representations play an important role within post-fascism, which frequently imagines itself the “only real opposition” (UKIP 2018). The system, here, is frequently depicted as controlled by a distant, oligarchic, self-serving “establishment”, contentions that, at times, resound with anti-Semitic undertones. Often, formal anti-Semitism is discarded and replaced by the specter of Islamization—for instance, in AfD’s (2016) notion of minarets as a “symbol of Islamic supremacy”. At other times, in, say, the Stormfront web forum,22 a virulent, unmodified antiSemitism is on display, while it is modified and post-modernized in the more ironic space of the alt-Right, with triple parentheses used to indicate the Jewish belonging of opponents. Anti-systemic imaginings can be directed at global capitalism, say, in Jobbik, Golden Dawn, Dugin, the French New Right, and CasaPound; or they can be found in a Right Gramscian battle against the alleged hegemony and institutionalization of feminism, cultural Marxism, or social justice-driven thinking. All of this said, though, it is hard not to be drawn toward two apparently opposed preliminary theses. First, it seems clear that, indeed, we can detect non-contemporaneous elements within post-fascism, though different in content and ultimate synthetic form from those identified by Bloch. Particularly important, here, as noted, are regenerative appeals to an older period of homogeneous organized capitalism, high-wage full-employment, and white male privilege. Arranged around this figuration is a heterogeneous collection of other elements called up from below—Antiquity, medieval courtly virtues, the grandeur of the age of empire, the heroic period of fascist militarism, the consensual and prosperous 1950s, 1980s masculinity, for instance. These are joined, too, by novel, futuristic utopian significations and images, and by elements of contemporary popular media culture, such as hyper-intertextuality, hyper-irony, and the proliferation of memes.23 On the other side of this, a second, quite different, though not necessarily contradictory, reading suggests itself: That contemporary post-fascism displays rather weak and residual utopian materials, and that it is institutionally brittle, and contains little of a substantial or concrete Not-Yet. This, in a sense, is Wodak’s (2015) reading of Right nationalism, whose meaning, above all, is understood as a congealment of fears—around unemployment, strangers, national autonomy, older traditions and values, climate change, inequality, crime. In this vein, Traverso’s (2016a) analysis of fear and fascism focusses on the shattering impact of the Great War (for instance, shell-shock) and the way fear came to be associated with outsiders—Jews, homosexuals, women. One far-Right response was to posit such fear as antipodal to the figure of

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the soldier, as romanticized by Ernst J˝ unger, bleeding into the figure of the new man of fascism. In the aftermath of the War and the Bolshevik Revolution, fear came to suffuse the collective unconscious, and, for Traverso, we see precisely this fear, rather than the desired image of unshakeable strength and aggression, in the famous Hoffman photos of Hitler’s rehearsals of his speeches, Hitler returning to crowds their own images and feelings of fear. Something analogous is suggested by the notorious photograph of Peter Cvjetanovic at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, May 2017.24 Wide-eyed and mid-shout, the 20-year-old student’s expression is deeply ambiguous, suggesting extreme distress and horror as easily as rage and hatred. On a personal, methodological note, here, I have been profoundly struck and dejected by the post-fascist material I, and students of mine studying today’s far-Right, have encountered, in terms of the sheer quantity of hatred, the shameful joy in the denigration of others, and the masculine selfpity and pornographic violence of rhetoric and imagery. While writing this chapter, a massacre by a far-Right activist at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, left 51 people dead. The shooter’s “manifesto” encompassed all of the above-mentioned tropes and figures, was laced with post-modern irony, and espoused an absolute paucity of hope, compared with its inarticulate, nihilistic despair, anomie, and rage. More widely, the hate-filled, denigrating, obscenely violent qualities of today’s far-Right are perhaps vastly exaggerated by the atomized, anonymous, “bubble” quality of the sources I have accessed. Undoubtedly, as well, this impression is buoyed by an online culture characterized by dark humor, transgression, and irony. On this last, Nagle (2017, p. 12) has very perceptively asked, “Do those involved … any longer know what motivated them and if they themselves are being ironic or not?” Framing this material in a world-systemic register, we might, after Wallerstein (2002) and Jameson (2004), link the predominance of anger, refusal, and indignation and the brittleness of reconstructive thinking about alternative institutions and social practices, to the ideological disarray accompanying our age of transition or “systemic chaos”—a transitional moment, then, which has generated the “transitional phenomenon” (Traverso 2019, p. 187) that is post-fascism.

Concluding Comments My contention throughout this book is that we should seek to develop and bring a utopian methodology or optic close to the heart of the critical

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human sciences. A crucial testing ground for such an optic is its capacity to shed a different light on even the most immediately unpleasant of contemporary ideologies. Today, in the face of faltering neo-liberal globalization, a post-political mutation in Western nations, and a nascent global Left, a post-fascist ideological formation is consolidating, and the specter of the 1930s haunts critical theory. Responses from the broad Left have tended to take three forms: first, a consensual liberalism that seeks to mock, discredit, pathologize, and dehumanize post-fascists; second, a patient educationism that focusses on rational refutation of post-fascist contentions, missing the “magical” qualities (Suvin 2017) operative within this ideological ensemble; and third, a more confrontational anti-fascism, which sees no other option than to fight fire with fire. Humor, ideology critique, and meditation on the question of violence, I am suggesting, should be supplemented by an alternate course—the attempt to extract and illuminate post-fascism’s dream elements and cultural surpluses, in the spirit of what Bloch (1986, p. 446) called “critical-militant optimism”, as a first step toward the redrawing and re-purposing of these by an emancipatory social science.

Notes 1. I will use the term rather than the more widely used Right-populism to label these parties, because of the critical issues with the term populism, detailed in Chapter 3. 2. See also, more recently, Wendling (2018). 3. The term could equally encompass certain religion-centered variants. On the connection between Hindu communalism and fascism, see, for instance, Vanaik (2017). For the linkages between certain strands of Christianity and fascism, see, for example, Berlet and Lyons (2000), Cooter (2011), Suvin (2017), and Neiwert (2017). On the resonances between certain strands of Islamism and fascism, see Al-Azmeh (1993, 1997), Suvin (2017), and Dematagoda (2017). See, though, Traverso’s (2019) critique of the notion of “Islamic fascism”. 4. The question of fascism’s revolutionary and anti-systemic character is highly contentious. I am leaning, here, toward Griffin’s (1991) and Mann’s (2004) interpretations (though underscoring the central role of counterrevolutionary elements), and away from the readings of scholars who view fascism as ideologically incoherent, merely reactive, and, above all, pragmatic or bereft of any positive programme or alternative vision. Nevertheless, Traverso (2019) crucially points to the shortcomings of fascism scholarship that reduces fascism to its self-representation, thereby underestimating

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

the militaristic dimension, the centrality of anti-communism, and the compromises, in practice, with the older economic, bureaucratic, military, and political elites. Here, too, Riley (2010) has brilliantly contested the Tocquevillian thesis of the elective affinity between civil society and liberal democracy, demonstrating that fascism arose within social orders characterized by a highly developed civil society, signaling the “dark side of social capital” (p. 10). An apt term, given Steve Bannon’s imagined “sovereignist international”. See https://www.infowars.com/. See https://www.stormfront.org/forum/index.php. The French New Right are, arguably, a crucial pivot between the older fascism and today’s post-fascism. See, for instance, Bar-On (2001) and de Benoit and Champetier (1999). See, for instance, the alt-Right use of “cuck” and “cuckservative”, drawn from the world of pornography to designate beta men who enjoy watching their partners having sex with another (often black) man (Kelly 2017; Wendling 2018). Even though Traverso (2019) points out that spectacular Islamist violence itself “unsparingly reproduces the whole gamut of Orientalism” in “an imagination of violence that belongs to the West” (p. 88). All of this is not to say, however, that women are absent from the culture of post-fascism. See, for instance, Blee and Deutsch (2012), Darby (2017), and Miller (2017). Similarly, increasing doubt has been cast over the reality of an achieved fascist totalitarianism in power (Mann 2004; Paxton 2004; Riley 2010), and, with respect to nation-statism, twentieth-century fascism was, in fact, characterized by multiple supra-national tendencies—for instance, Mussolini’s declaration in 1932 that fascism was a project for all of Europe, the Third Reich’s more Europeanist turn after 1942, the fact that, by 1944, around half of the Waffen-SS were non-German (Bar-On 2008; Camus and Lebourg 2017; Eatwell 1992). For this Left communist interpretation, see, for instance, Bordiga (1946–1948) and Barrot (1992). This said, Landa (2014), Losurdo (2011), and Traverso (2003, 2019) rigorously dismantle the predominant and often too easily erected opposition between liberalism and fascism, indicating the links, in particular, between fascism and liberal imperialism. “Behold the aggrieved, reactive creature fashioned by neoliberal reason and its effects, who embraces freedom without the social contract, authority without democratic legitimacy, and vengeance without values or futurity … Having nothing to lose, its nihilism does not simply negate but is festive and even apocalyptic, willing to take Britain over a cliff, deny climate change, support manifestly undemocratic powers, or put an unstable know-nothing

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

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in the most powerful position on earth, because it has nothing to lose” (Brown 2018, p. 75). See, for instance, Neiwert (2017). See https://altright.com/2017/07/06/white-flight-nationalism-is-adead-end/. See, for instance, https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2019/02/18/stateof-hate-2019-manosphere-explained/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMF7Bc-vjJE&list=RDQMN4DkbBDr9k&index=4&bpctr=1548122490. See, on this, Poulantzas (1974), and also Riley (2010), who builds on Poulantzas in a number of ways. For a contrasting view, see Mann (2004), for instance. Here, Traverso (2019, pp. 12–13) suggests that post-fascism “is not haunted by Jungerian figures of militiamen with metallic bodies sculpted in the trenches. It knows only bodybuilders trained in ordinary gyms”. See https://www.stormfront.org/forum/index.php. See, on this, Lamerichs et al. (2018). See https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/scenes-from-charlottesvillesviolent-unite-the-right-rally.html.

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CHAPTER 5

Margins II: The New Communism

Abstract In this chapter, el-Ojeili turns to the far-Left. Increasingly, since the end of the 1990s, a new global Left has consolidated, a Left that includes a configuration el-Ojeili labels the “new communism”. Within this configuration, a number of novel utopian dimensions are visible. Evincing a convergence between anarchism and Marxism, this new communism produces novel totalizing maps of power. It also develops new positions on resistance and on the subjects, both individual and collective, of emancipatory transformation, espousing what is labeled an “insurrectionary immediatism”. While discussion of the institutional and strategic dimensions of this new communism is underdeveloped, today’s far-Left, in emphases on poetry, post-secularism, and affect, chart a contemporary variant of the Left’s artistic critique. Keywords Post-Marxism · Globalization · Communism · Anarchism · Power

Introductory Comments Surveying the overall fortunes of Marxism in the period 1983–2000, Eric Hobsbawm’s (2011) summary judgment is “recession”—a “rapid retreat both politically and intellectually” (p. 385). The eminent historian cites a

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number of explanatory factors in this spectacular diminishment: the collapse of “really existing socialism”; neo-liberal intellectual and policy hegemony; a rising tide of post-modern relativism in the academy; the longrunning impact of certain dynamics flowing from the cultural radicalism of the 1960s; the growing attention given to ecological crisis; the return of religion; and the prohibitive role played by the dystopian figure of totalitarianism. Hobsbawm’s broad assessment, a diagnosis of defeat, is a generally acknowledged position—a feature of contemporary “Left melancholia” (Traverso 2016)—across today’s intellectual Left. In Therborn’s (2009, p. 67) estimation, for instance, the “Marxist triangle”—an historical social science, a philosophy of contradictions, a socialist, working class politics—has been decisively and irretrievably broken. It has come apart under the impact of what Alexander (1995) calls “reality problems”—economic changes, political defeats, the post-modernization of knowledge, say. In a similar vein, Keucheyan (2013), building on Anderson’s (1976) analysis of Western Marxism, speaks of the “defeat of critical thinking (1977–1993)”, features of which include Marxism’s loss of hegemony in the realm of critical thought, a recoding of the world in terms of identities, theoretical pluralism and eclecticism, a “flight into abstraction” (p. 12), and the resurgence of spiritual concerns. Finally, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) contend that the brief convergence of the artistic and social critiques of the Left in 1968—concern with oppression, uniformity, commodification, valorization of liberation, individual autonomy, uniqueness, and authenticity, on the one hand; concerns with inequality, poverty, exploitation, commitments to solidarity and egalitarianism, on the other—have given way to the disarming and paralysis of Left critical contestation. On the one side, following the 1970s, we see the exhaustion and withering of the social critique, signaled in the decline of macro-sociology, the disappearance of the language of class, and a decisive shift away from political commitment to “equality of outcome”. On the other side, the artistic critique succeeds only too well, becoming a major part of the ethos of the new capitalism—freedom, spontaneity, conviviality, openness to others and novelty, authenticity, unbridled self-fulfillment, hostility to rigid tradition, authority, hierarchy. Bereft of critical resources, the Left is rendered helpless—“raw indignation, humanitarian work, suffering turned into spectacle, and … action focussed on specific issues” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, p. xlii). In a more narrowly intellectual register, we might frame the 1980s and 1990s as the moment of post-Marxism. Tormey and Townhend (2006)

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approach this moment as marked by six major problems posed to Marx and Marxism. These problems are history (teleology, determinism), revolutionary subjectivity (prioritization of the working class, essentialism), ethics (an “ethical deficit” [Lukes in Wilde 2001]), positivism (a questioning of science, truth, and rationality), vanguardism (the role of leaders and the party, “really existing socialism”), and democracy (socialism and dictatorship, socialism and the state). Post-Marxism both raises such questions and responds, variously, by emphasizing contingency, constructedness, plural emancipations, difference, and a re-staged conversation between socialism, liberalism, and democracy (see Bauman 1987; Laclau 1990, 1996, 2005; Lefort 1988; Lyotard 1993). A field of encounter between critical theory and a matrix of post-modern concerns and emphases within the human sciences, post-Marxism evinces major shifts around two poles of thinking—cognitive mapping (Jameson 1989) or social cosmology (Therborn 2000) and utopianism. I suggest that the post-Marxist moment cohered, first, around rather negative co-ordinates of unity as a theoretical-explanatory field, and second, that this post-Marxism expresses a certain residualization of utopianism. With respect to social cosmology, we find a predominantly deconstructive, selfscrutinizing approach, concerned with detecting and rooting out a number of “sins” of modernist thinking—universalism, essentialism, determinism (McLennan 1996, 2003). This resolutely negative and prohibitive disposition tended to issue in the abandonment of the terrain of accounting for the constitution, reproduction, and transformation of social orders (Mouzelis 1988), to displace capitalism as analytic object in favor of a multi-stranded “modernity” (Alexander 1995; Jameson 2002; Wagner 2001), to engage in a relentless “war against totality” (Jameson 1989, p. 35), and to end up, theoretically speaking, with something of an “institutional vacuum” (Mouzelis 1988, p. 116). With reference to utopianism, meanwhile, we see a residualization effect across post-Marxism, away from substantive specification of the institutional or agential content of societal alternatives or other ways of being, from commitment to “total revolution” (Boltanski 2002), from strategic-organizational specification, and toward emphases on citizenship, the extensions of rights, the completion of logics contained within modernity—in short, a cautious, negative (“lack”, “limits”), restrictive, and institutionally-thin and ethically-led set of reflections around questions of possible better futures. It is my contention that the post-Marxist moment came to an end around the symbolic date of November–December 1999, during “the battle for

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Seattle”, the disruption of the World Trade Organization’s Third Ministerial Conference, a date signaling the “coming out” of the “alternative globalization movement”. Further momentum to this shift beyond postMarxism and post-socialism was gathered in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, particularly around another symbolic date—2011, the year of the “Arab Spring” and of “Occupy”. In brief, my thesis is that “reality problems” have not only deflated the neo-liberal, end of history narrative, but also unraveled the fabric of post-Marxist and post-socialist political-theoretical assumptions that exerted significant intellectual force through the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1999, as Santos (2006) suggests, we have been seeing the crystallization of a “new global Left”. This turn has entailed major mutations at those two levels mentioned, social cosmology and utopic expression, which are visible in a number of realms. First, we have undoubtedly seen the return of larger, more militant emancipatory social movements—the alternative globalization movement, Occupy, Black Lives Matters, #MeToo. Shaped by this more voluminous and militant social movement activity, we have seen a renewal of social democratic thought and activity, both in the formation of further-Left political movements (most notably, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece) and in the drift of existing social democratic parties in a more combative direction (Corbyn, Sanders, and Melenchon, in the UK, United States, and France, respectively), in an attempt to leave behind the neo-liberal compromises characteristic of the period of the “Third Way”. At the same time, though in a more minor key, we have seen the return of a vigorous, trenchant neo-Leninism (expressed, say, in the extraordinary appeal of Slavoj Žižek, but also in the vigor of scholarly journals such as Historical Materialism), as well as a surge of intellectual feminist, LGBTQI+, and emancipatory anti-racist assertion. These intellectual shifts are signaled in the heightened visibility of Left publishing and podcast activity—N + 1, Salvage, Zero Books, Verso, Jacobin, Semiotext(e), Chapo Trap House, Democracy Now, Delete Your Account, Pod Save the People, The Dig, Majority Report, Street Fight, to mention just a handful of projects in the Anglosphere. It is to these mutations within one part of this emergent global Left that I turn in this chapter. Here, my focus is on what I am calling the new communism, which might also be described as ultra-Leftism, libertarian socialism, or Left communism. Within this current, we see attempts to reinvigorate the name communism, to depart decisively from the older precepts of social

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democracy and Leninism, and we witness an often-unacknowledged drawing together of two broad traditions of emancipatory thought. On the one hand, we find novel reanimations of Left-Marxism, historically attached to tendencies such as council communism, Bordigism, situationism, and autonomism. On the other hand, we have seen over the past decade and a half a significant return of interest in anarchism—“an anarchist moment”, in Newman’s (2011, p. 314) reading. These two traditions converge in important ways today, and, in this chapter, I will elucidate a number of crucial themes apparent in this convergence. First, I will survey the diagnostic social mapping exercises to be found within these currents, where attempts are made to re-theorize the particularity of our moment in totalizing fashion, the forces in play, and the challenges before us. I move, next, to consider the subjects of revolutionary change, both collective and anthropological. Third, I address the organizational, strategic, institutional, or architectural moments of this new communism. And, finally, I discuss the predominant forms such work takes, particularly with respect to contemporary emphases on aesthetics and affect. These co-ordinates of unity, despite internal diversity and dispute, dilemmas and silences, provide a positive contrast to a splintering, defensive liberalism and to a noxious, fear-filled post-fascism. The new communism, in my estimation, is the most exciting, promising part of our utopian constellation.

New Cognitive Maps A crucial task for any politics—or, as sometimes, in the present case, any anti-politics—is the production of cognitive maps, descriptive, classificatory, and explanatory theorizations of the social world and, particularly, of power. A central feature of post-modern-inflected critical theory is its reluctance around such mapping exercises, exemplified within the language of Laclau and Mouffe (1985; Laclau 1990)—“suturing”, “contingency”, “horizons”, “plurality”, “irreducible antagonism”. On this score, Jameson (1989, 2002) has underscored the post-modern retreat from totalizing thought, a retreat, at the same time, from the language of capitalism and a shift toward the language of modernity, often understood in terms of a number of contingently intertwining dynamics. The post-modern opposition to totalizing, essentializing, universalizing social and political theory

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is built, above all, against the Marxist theoretical edifice, which is characterized as always constructed upon capitalism-, class-, and economyreductive explanations, and as guided by a teleology that subordinates plural dynamics and forms of domination and struggle to historical necessity. This accusatory narrative intertwined with a widespread intellectual shift from the 1980s with respect to the understanding of power, in line with the pioneering work of Michel Foucault’s capillary or micro-conception of power. A first observation, with respect to the new communism, is to remark upon an apparent “new positivity” (McLennan 2000) in breaking from these post-modern tendencies, with a notable return of attention to capitalism, totalization, and periodization. We see, here, multiple efforts to name today’s capitalism, a naming that posits capitalism as social totality, but also as a particular temporal form, which necessitates the rethinking of resistance, contestation, revolution. Contemporary capitalism is, here, named in a variety of ways: “Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009, 2017; Tiqqun 2010); “dreamless capitalism” (Troploin 2007); “real subsumption” (Endnotes 2008a); “capitalo-parliamentarianism” (Badiou 2010); “Civilization” (Zerzan 2015); “financial capitalism” (Marazzi 2011; Graeber 2011); the “global machine”, “semio-capitalism”, “techno-financial authoritarianism” (Beradi 2012); “neo-liberalism” (Beradi 2012; Hardt and Negri 2017; Invisible Committee 2017; Lazzarato 2011); “cognitive capitalism”, “communicative capitalism” (Hardt and Negri 2017); the “desert” (Invisible Committee 2004); “globalized capitalism” (Badiou 2012); “post-liberal and biopolitical security states” (Newman 2010); the “net-economy” (Beradi 2009a); the “global machine”, “necro-capitalism” (Beradi 2017). This new capitalism is typically understood as evincing both continuities with and variations from previous modern societal configurations. In terms of the continuities, polarization of wealth and power, exploitation, accumulation, dispossession, and alienation are frequently underscored. At one end of this spectrum, Badiou (2008a, 2012) views today’s “globalised capitalism” as entailing the “unlimited power of a financial and imperial oligarchy” (p. 5), rejecting arguments about a creative or post-modern capitalism, and remaining close to Marx—describing our moment as a return to the spirit of the capitalism of the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, for Badiou, something new is demanded of those seeking to pioneer a novel iteration of the “communist hypothesis” today. In a somewhat similar vein, a number of contributors to the literature on “communization” continue

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to underscore the accumulation of capital, productive labor, and class in an apparently rather orthodox Marxian form (Endnotes 2012; Theorie Communiste 2012; Troploin 2007). Still, these thinkers will typically contend that shifts from the 1970s have transformed capitalism and the terrain of struggle. Thus, Dauvé and Nesic (2002, 2007) and Troploin (2007) speak of the contemporary blurring of industrial, banking, trade, and insurance, the predominance today of financial over productive capital, and the decomposition of the working class and an accompanying fragmentation and containment of struggle. In the case of the Endnotes (2012) and Theorie Communiste (2012) organizations, the 1970s mark a break into a new phase of “real subsumption” (Noys 2012). This latter emphasis, framed as something like the contemporary “despotism of capital” (Camatte 1995; Noys 2012), is a common trope within this literature, with both bleak—ours as a time of total commodification and containment of dissent (Toscano 2012, p. 98)—and more sanguine iterations, where an encompassing capitalism also provides the conditions of possibility for what the Situationists would have called a “reversal of perspective”. On the capital-pessimistic side, Tiqqun (2012), for instance, speak of our age as one in which the commodity is everywhere, a moment of “total alienation”, of spectacle and biopower, in which there is “no visible outside anymore” (2010). In a similar vein, Beradi (2012) talks of the “techno-linguistic automatisms” of the “interconnected global machine” (p. 7), of “bio-economic totalitarianism” (p. 9), of universal and total abstraction, social and psychic breakdown, “derealisation”, and widening impotence (Beradi 2017). Meanwhile, Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2017) “Empire” appears to have fully absorbed the commons and society, leaving nothing outside, taking hold of—in the words of The Invisible Committee (2017)—“every detail and every dimension of existence” (p. 49). Hardt and Negri’s body of work since 2000 is the most widely known of these theorizations, with multiple points of connection to other thinkers treated here. Fluently drawing together themes from Italian autonomism, certain post-modern ideas, and elements from literatures around postindustrialization and globalization, “Empire” is characterized by Hardt and Negri as a new logic and structure of rule, emerging through the 1990s, signaling the demise of state-centered capitalism in favor of a single, global, decentered variety of rule. The object of this rule, too, has changed, as classical industrialization and modernization are displaced by the exercise of power over social life as a whole (“biopower”). Crucially,

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this capitalism entails the hegemony of immaterial or biopolitical labor and production, centered on ideas, information, images, knowledges, codes, language, affect, and social relationships (Hardt 2010; Hardt and Negri 2017). The immaterial and social character of production today involves a new composition of labor power, the “dematerialization of property” (Hardt and Negri 2017, p. 196), the rise of finance, and neo-liberal, globalized forms of governance. Vitally, in Hardt and Negri, the aforementioned capital-pessimism is reversed by their continued affirmation of a foundational claim of Italian autonomism: That resistance is prior to and causative of the transformations to capital. Examining some of these core elements at greater length, a first, resonant suggestion in the new communism pertains to contemporary capitalism’s fictitious or financial character. In Hardt and Negri (2017), this financialization is, once more, viewed as originating in resistance, which provoked escalating spending and, in turn, fiscal crises. Financialization, as a new capitalist form of abstraction, and a dematerialization of property, also exists as a new form of extraction through debt. Hardt and Negri draw here from the work of Marazzi (2011) who sees contemporary financialization as an essential component of capital accumulation today and as a tendency parallel to the newly social and cognitive production of value. In a different interpretative line emerging out of Italian autonomism, Lazzarato (2011) views financialization as entailing a shift in class modality, away from immateriality and the conflictual dialectic of production/management, toward a new mode of struggle between debtor and financier, where indebtedness becomes a primary social relation.1 Drawing on Lazzarato, Beradi (2012) ties financial capitalism to contemporary forms of exploitation, arguing in more pessimistic fashion about the human consequences of the extreme abstraction and virtualization this modality of capitalism brings. On this score, Jameson (2003) has noted the troublesome implications for mapping posed by financial expansion, the sheer opacity of much of the world of finance and its byzantine and proliferating instruments, its disorienting effects in terms of the apprehension of temporality, as against the experience of classical industrial exploitation of productive labor. For Beradi (2012), the separation of money from goods is congruent with today’s separation of words from their references, the subsumption of language by semiocapitalism, the “derealisation and acceleration” of experience (p. 106), and the virtualization of social relations. This is fundamentally, for Beradi, a

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class question, as both capital and labor have been “pulverized” and “deterritorialized”, the bourgeoisie and its morality replaced by a financial class that is fragmented, dispersed, placeless, and impersonal. In emphasizing ours as a moment of finance capitalism, we see today’s new communism attempting to re-draw maps of domination, appropriation, exploitation, and of class. Similarly important are reflections on contemporary globality, informationalism, and post-industrialization—signaled in what The Invisible Committee (2017) call the reign of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). Of globality, congruent claims to those around financialization can be made about the implications for representation—what Jameson (1989) brilliantly framed as the paradoxical, parallel escalation of both capitalism’s systematicity and the sense of its complex, dispersed, uncontrollable, agentless, and non-system-like qualities. Relatedly, the immaterial, informational, or communicative dimensions of contemporary capitalism seemingly render the conflictual dyad labor-capital incapable of bearing the explanatory and moral load it once carried. Here, as we will see, novel formulations about the recomposition of class or around the new subjects of rebellion are crucial—the multitude or immaterial labor in Hardt and Negri, forms-of-life in Tiqqun, affinity groups in Alfredo Bonanno or David Graeber, destituent power in postanarchism and The Invisible Committee, the General Intellect or the “rebellious cognitariat” in Beradi, “the inexistent of the world” in Badiou, the “common”. If there is a certain elusiveness or opacity associated with contemporary capitalism’s financial, informational, global, and post-industrial features, a number of other traits are bolded as more much immediate, experiential, visible, or somatic—in particular, violence, a new imperialism, precarity, new forms of alienation, and ecological devastation. Declaring that there is no Rome to this Empire, Hardt and Negri’s (2000) work, nevertheless, belongs to the family of theories of imperialism, even if this is an imperialism of a now truly global capital. Redolent with concerns about the unequal relationship between North and South found across the alternative globalization movement, Empire is said to emerge bookended by two imperial events—the First Gulf War and the NATO war in Kosovo. Globalized neo-liberalism is widely read on the Left as a “spatial fix” to problems of accumulation since the 1970s—super-exploitation of labor in poorer nations, dispossessive structural adjustment programmes, imperialhumanitarian wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Such an interpretation

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is perhaps most clearly found in Badiou’s work, shaped by his Maoist background. Here, and elsewhere, emphasis is placed on the increasing violence, both visible and invisible, of the new capitalism. Thus, Hardt and Negri (2004) contend that war is “becoming a permanent social relation” (p. 12), with neo-liberal governance connected to rising fear and the obsession with security, and with police becoming “kinds of militias that hunt the poor, people of color, the miserable, and the exploited” (2017, p. xvii). The contemporary escalation of violence is similarly underlined by Dauvé and Nesic (2002), by Newman (2010), by Beradi (2012) who speaks of capitalism’s “totalitarian”, “fascist” character, by Graeber (2011) on the inextricable connections between markets, states, and warfare, and by The Invisible Committee (2004) in their language of a contemporary “global civil war”. In Newman’s (2010) post-anarchism and in the work of Tiqqun (2010), Foucault and Agamben are important sources in emphasizing biopolitical systems of control, security, and an increasingly everyday state of exception. In an important recent work, Lazzarato and Alliez (2018) claim that contemporary financialization is at the forefront of today’s “interconnected civil wars: class wars, neo-colonialist wars on ‘minorities’, wars on women, wars of subjectivity. The matrix of these civil wars is the colonial war … in essence, a war in and against the population” (p. 27). Both overt and systemic violence are strong themes in new communist discussions of the spread of precarity today. Connected to the post-1970s re- or de-composition of the working class and the spread of casual, parttime, contract, and other forms of unprotected and insecure work (Graeber 2018), precarity often signifies a wider condition in the work under examination. Insecure work, flexibilization, impoverishment, indebtedness, and general disconnection, dispersal, and atomization are elements of today’s precarious condition or life (Beradi 2012; Hardt and Negri 2017). Here, The Invisible Committee (2017), for instance, speak of the “fragmentation” of the world in every domain. The human consequences of this systemic violence, fragmentation, and precarity are widely expressed in this literature as generating new forms of alienation. The new communism voices a morally charged condemnation of the personhood implied by contemporary capitalism, against which the possibilities of a new communist subject are constructed: variously … mere “animality”, the “service of wealth”, corruption, opinion, nihilism, “circulation and adolescent pleasure seeking” (Badiou 2008b, c, 2009, 2010); an internalization of the state (Bonanno 1998; Newman 2010); depression, fear, loneliness, anxiety, domestication, disembodiment

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(Zerzan 1995, 2005, 2015); competition, the invasion of desire by the market, “ethical insensibility”, desolidarization and disempathy, mental illness, mass cynicism, growing impotence (Beradi 2012, 2017); a pervasive fear and obsession with security, expressed in the neo-fascistic demand for racialized property (Hardt and Negri 2017); spectatorship, the demise of criticism and satire, the diminishment of language, misery and isolation, and the creation of “Needy Opportunists” (Invisible Committee 2017). A final very urgent, tangible consequence of today’s capitalism, provoking indignation, and connected to contemporary violence, precarity, and alienation, is ecological devastation. Once more, the resonance of this theme is conditioned by the prominent role environmental-focussed critique played within the alternative globalization movement, and Keucheyan (2013) emphasizes environmental questions as core to the future of critical theory.2 In some respects, the more recent “cottage industry” (Franks 2007, p. 127) of reinvigorated anarchism is a more likely site than Marxism for the production of new conceptualizations and political strategies around such questions, given historical anarchism’s affinities with nature, the local, the small-scale, diversity, and multi-pronged, wide-ranging opposition to domination. Nevertheless, more Marxian thinkers, too, have sought to incorporate environmental concerns as central to their social cosmologies, Dauvé and Martin (2015), for instance, criticizing Marxism as “hampered by capitalist pictures of the future” (p. 2) in its attachments to economic growth and the development of the productive forces. Likewise, Hardt and Negri (2017) connect the violence of Empire with environmental damage, “ecological violence” (p. 260). Above all, though, it is within a marginal sub-tradition of the farLeft, anarcho-primitvism, that an environmentally centered cartography has been developed in its most radical, “extremist” form. Most visible in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s in the Anglo-American world, thinkers such as Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, John Moore, and David Watson, and publications, such as Fifth Estate, Green Anarchy, Species Traitor, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and Green Anarchist, erected a multi-stranded critique of hierarchical, domination-ridden civilization. In these accounts, contemporary humanity is viewed as having fallen from the grace of huntergatherer existence. This fall is dated to the agricultural revolution, which inaugurates private property, state, and patriarchy. This moment is also key in an epistemological transformation in terms of the apprehension of the now other natural world—separation, instrumentalism, abstraction. Bound

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up with this claim are questions of science and the development of technique, which are viewed as far from neutral and as tending to become autonomous and enchaining of human beings, tied in turn to a fragmenting division of labor and disempowerment. This moment is also connected to militarism, conquest, and genocide, as well as to homogenization and mass conformity. This civilization, megamachine, or Leviathan is viewed as increasingly regressive, leaving damaged, controlled, spiritless, and aggressive human material in its wake and an increasingly uninhabitable planet. The alternative is some form of future primitive social order—reconnection with the natural world, decentralization, self-sufficiency, a simpler, less technologically mediated form of life, a re-enchantment aligned with the natural world—in short, a veritable tiger’s leap away from the “interlocking armoured juggernaut – capital, technology, state” (Bradford 1989, p. 50; Davidson 2009; Gordon 2007; Millett 2004; Moore, n.d.; Perlman 1983; Smith 2010; Watson 1997 [1981–1985]; Williams 2007; Zerzan 1995, 2005). Some figures active in this older anarcho-primitivist tradition have continued to produce work—most notably Zerzan (see for instance Zerzan 2005, 2015). We find some congruent themes in Beradi’s (2009b, 2012) consideration of the acceleration of climate change or the precarity of global food supply, and his critique of the ubiquity of pharmaceutic antidepressants and tranquilizers, and in Scott’s (2017) critique of the destructive qualities of agriculture, urbanism, and the rise of the state, and in his linkage between the domestication of nature and the domestication of humanity. The more recent work of Derrick Jensen (2006a, b, 2012) and Timothy Morton (2010, 2017) also contain similar themes—the critique of civilization, the need for an ontological shift, the turn toward “primitive”, connected imaginaries for utopic inspiration.3

Subjects Surveying the cognitive mapping undertaken in the new communism, I have remarked upon the return of more confident totalization, and on a number of crucial periodizing devices, such as financialization, precarity, and ecological devastation. A fundamental component of such emancipatory cartography entails reflection on the subjects, both individual and collective, implied by such total social configurations—say, neo-liberal subjectivities, capitalist imaginaries, or theories of class re-composition.

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Equally, though, attention to the subjects of capitalism within emancipatory thought has been accompanied, historically, by utopic questions of revolutionary agency, subjecthood, and transformation. This is, put simply, to pose the question of who is the subject of today’s communist critique and hopes, both in individual and collective terms? It is also a question of revolutionary anthropology—the possibilities for the creation of other types of subjects. Turning first to the singular subject, visualization of the new communist person or mode of being takes shape through opposition to the experiential features of today’s capitalism—commodification, spectacle, opinion, family, state, the corporation, work, biopower, sexual poverty, herd mentality, nihilism, corruption, destruction of community, mediation of social relations, alienation from nature, loneliness, depression, and anxiety (Badiou 2008a, 2012, 2013a; Beradi 2012; Bonanno, n.d.; Graeber 2011, 2013; Hardt and Negri 2009, 2017; Holloway 2002; Invisible Committee 2004, 2009, 2017; Newman 2017; Rassmussen 2012; Tiqqun 2010, 2012). Set against this, the new communism posits something like an insurrectionary immediatism, consonant both with anarchism’s emphasis on “living the revolution” and Situationism’s “revolution of everyday life”, and expressive of Boltanski’s (2002) claims about the contemporary Left’s move away from the imaginary of total revolution. The intellectual foundations of this revolutionary immediatism can be traced to earlier emancipatory thought— for instance, Gustav Landauer’s contention that the state is a social relation—but, both implicitly and explicitly, today’s communism is frequently deeply informed, as well, by Foucault’s notions of micro-power and biopolitics. This immediatism is captured by The Invisible Committee’s (2004) declaration that “communism is possible at every moment”. Communism, here, is thought as a process and a collection of acts, rather than a destination (Endnotes 2012; Invisible Committee 2004; Noys 2012; Toscano 2012). This immediatism, in addition, has a decidedly insurrectionary cast to it, expressed in frequently deployed terms, such as flight, deterritorialization, the creation of non-alienated experiences, evasion, runaways, blockades, refusal, exodus, event, encounter, sabotage, secession, desertion, attack, human strike, rupture, riot, the gift, a politics of the act, and the wild (Badiou 2012; Beradi 2012; Bonanno 1998; Critchley 2011; Clover 2017; Day 2011; Grubacic and Graeber 2004; Graeber 2013; Hardt and Negri 2009; Holloway 2002; Invisible Committee 2009, 2015; Murray 2010; Noys 2011; Robinson and Tormey 2009; Tiqqun 2012; Troploin 2011).

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Crucially, insurrectionary immediatism represents a refusal of, a withdrawal or “outsideness” from, extant social forms, institutions, and conventions (Badiou 2008a, 2012, 2013a; Bonanno, n.d.; Graeber 2011, 2013; Holloway 2002; Invisible Committee 2004, 2009, 2017; Newman 2017; Tiqqun 2010; Smith 2010; Merrifield 2010). The politics at work within this communism, then, can be broadly characterized as extra-institutional, non-citizen, post-sovereign, and non-hegemonic (Newman 2017; Smith 2010), a point of discussion to be taken up below. It is a politics, or antipolitics, of rebellion, which posits the possibility of a set of transformational shifts in our senses of space, time, and value (Badiou 2008a; Beradi 2012; Bonanno 1998; Holloway 2002; Invisible Committee 2004, 2009, 2017). We find such a politics in Badiou’s (2010, 2008b) notion of the Truth Event, which takes us beyond mere animality, or sheer self-interest, and in his insistence that “communists …declare that their time is not Capital’s time” (2013b, p. 10). A related conception is found in Hardt and Negri’s (2009) notion of the encounter, of an imagined communist transformation centered on creation, joy, love, and happiness, and in hopes for new machinic assemblages (2017). Something akin is evident in Beradi’s (2012) call for new, creative acts that might reconstitute the social and erotic body, inaugurating “becoming other” (2017, p. 1). And The Invisible Committee (2017) invest hopes in what they call the “organized riot”, the authentic encounter, the creation of “lively and irreversible bonds” (p. 9), a “presence”, a new way of “apprehending things and beings from the inside” (emphasis in original, p. 80). An outsideness or otherness with respect to capitalist modes of knowing and being is crucial, then, in the new communism. Who is it that refuses and what meaning, subjectively, does this refusal or rebellion hold? In Badiou (2008a, 2010), we have a post-foundationalist subjectivation in the face of the event, a break from the habitual animality to which we are condemned. Within post-modern-inflected anarchism, any vestige of essentialism is abandoned in favor of a conception of the subject as indeterminate, radical potentiality, and promising the suspension of all orders through refusal. Newman (2010, 2017), for instance, rejects any notion of a predefined subjective telos or purpose, emphasizing instead desertion, unbinding from power, and singularity, which might create autonomous communal spaces and modes of interaction. Similarly, Hardt and Negri call for autonomy in the continuous production of subjectivity, “a new humanity”, the ruptural production of singularity against identity (Hardt 2010,

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p. 144), in which “your self has to be sacrificed”, breaching “the anthropological fabric of society” (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 339). Core, here, is the creation of the new within the shell of the old, a production of subjectivity autonomous of Empire, through radical refusal (Hardt and Negri 2009, 2017). In the post-Situationist stylings of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, meanwhile, communism is possible at every moment, through secession, “a complete presence to oneself and to the world, a vital contact with the real” (Invisible Committee 2017, p. 8; 2004). Such secession or destitution4 entails a “profusion of forms” (Invisible Committee 2017, p. 26), the recognition of the possibility and conscious making of new assemblages, beyond the liberal fiction of the individual. Vehemently criticizing liberal individualism, singularity is frequently a major key played across these communist meditations on revolutionary subjecthood. Singularity is underscored in Badiou’s ontology of multiplicity, for instance, and in his understanding of the subjectivation implied by the authentic Truth Event. It is a core feature, too, of Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004) conception of the multitude, as a “radical diversity of social subjectivities” (2017, p. 69). In similar fashion, singularities, forms-of-life, declare The Invisible Committee (2017, p. 14), are becoming “wild”; and Tiqqun (2010, p. 67) contend that, “An agent of the Imaginary Party is someone who, wherever he is, from his own position, triggers or pursues the process of ethical polarization, the differential assumption of forms of life”. Likewise, Beradi (2009a) calls on us to “proliferate singularities” and “new infinities” (2012, p. 157). A utopic figure connected to such singularity is that of autonomy, connoting transformation and abundance, set in contrast to liberal individualization, but also against identity and identity politics, which are linked with fixity, limits, orders, or “spooks” (in Max Stirner’s language) (Badiou 2008a; Bonanno, n.d.; Hardt and Negri 2009, 2017; Holloway 2002; Murray 2010; Newman 2017; Noys 2011; Rasmussen 2012; Robinson and Tormey 2009; Smith 2010; Tiqqun 2010). An important observation regarding such figuration—immediacy, insurrection, singularity, autonomy—is the crucial role of a neo-vitalist appeal to “true life” beyond the operation of power today (Endnotes 2012; Graeber 2013; Invisible Committee 2004; Noys 2011; Robinson and Tormey 2009). This vitalism frequently has a Deleuzian valence, positing existence as amorphous, diverse, abundant, and excessive, and underscoring flow, movement, change. It is becoming over being—exceeding fixity and limits (Robinson and Tormey 2009). This is apparent in the widespread refusal of separation and the rejection of current delineations and categories of

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existence, reminiscent of the refusal, found within the historic artistic critique, of the separation between art and life (Rasmussen 2012). In Beradi (2017), for instance, “becoming other” is connected to “vibration, selection, recombination, recomposition”, to “potency” (p. 1), to the possibilities of excess still residing in “voice”, to a “real” threatened by “virtualization”, to instinct, and to a reactivation of the body (2012). Neoprimitivism contains congruent emphases, in its struggle against domestication and its call for epistemological revolution (Zerzan 2015). We find cognate language in Hardt and Negri (2017)—“swarm”, “plenitude”, and “assemblage”—and in The Invisible Committee (2017), “vital contact”, “presence”, “profusion”, “real encounters”, “what is in tune, vibration, adequate, present, sensible, luminous, and familiar” (p. 39). Here, as Noys (2011) notes, The anti-strategic immediacy of violent opposition, the stress on intermittent and unrepresentable forms of struggle, the unyielding hostility to all existent political forms, the voluntarism of combat, the reliance on processes of contagion and “resonance” of attacks, are all premised on the refusal of representational compromises and an unyielding binarism of life versus power. (p. 13)

We will return to this neo-vitalism, but it is crucial to note that such impulses are typically separated from modernist conceptions of essence, announcing something like a post-foundational decisionism, a “subjectivism without a subject” (Anderson 1983, p. 54). Contrariwise, the engine room of hopes and expectations for such neo-vitalist subjectification is frequently, above all, desire. We find, within the new communism, recurrent emphases on play, unbounded sexuality, joy, pleasure, happiness, self-expression, and love (Badiou 2008b; Beradi 2009a; Bonanno, n.d.; el-Ojeili 2015; Graeber 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2009, 2017; Invisible Committee 2015, 2017; Jensen 2012; Tiqqun 2010, 2012). Again, this theme resonates with the older artistic critique of capitalism, found, say, in Emma Goldman, Landauer, the Freudo-Marxists, and the Situationists, but also in the “expressive politics” (Epstein 2001) visible within alternative globalization mobilizations (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006; el-Ojeili 2015; Tancons 2014; Taylor 2017). This insurrectionary subjectivization, centered on desire, is, as noted, positioned as beyond individualism (Badiou 2007, p. 98; Dean 2016; Invisible Committee 2009; Tiqqun 2012). On this score, we also find a

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new collectivism in play across this communism. Such collectivism is found in recurrent language around the commons, sharing, affinity, the coming community, participation, communization, communes, swarm intelligence, mutual aid, the General Intellect, the imaginary party, and a new universality (Badiou 2007; Beradi 2012; Graeber 2013; Hardt 2010; Hardt and Negri 2004, 2009, 2017; Invisible Committee 2004, 2009, 2017; Merrifield 2010; Newman 2017; Smith 2010; Tiqqun 2010; Toscano 2012). At times, this collectivism appears to sit somewhat uncomfortably alongside the emphases on singularity and subjectivization. That is, multiplicity, singularity, and the diverse are often considered crucial experiential components of contemporary life and of forms of struggle, while, at the same time, communism surely requires solidarity, togetherness, commonality, and universalism; and any new collectivism might be seen as demanding a different framework of desire than that championed by the older artistic critique, captured as this has been by today’s desiring capitalism. Questions of commonality inevitably touch, as well, the issue of class, and are bound tightly to the debate around the contemporary “We-subject” (Badiou 2008a) of emancipatory change. Attempting to move beyond orthodox Marxism’s orientation to this question, Hardt and Negri draw on Italian autonomism’s attention to the shifting class compositions of capitalism with their notion of the “Multitude”, which remains an explicitly class figure, encompassing both plurality and unity. Similarly in dialogue with this tradition, Beradi’s (2017) “neuro-workers”, “General Intellect” (2012), and “rebellious cognitariat” (2009c), and Lazzarato’s (2011) antagonistic dyad, debtor/financier, do congruent work. A recognizably Marxian thrust is found, too, in Badiou’s (2012) “inexistent of the world”, and in Endnotes’ (2008b, 2012), Troploin’s (2011), and Theorie Communiste’s (2012) prioritization of class, widened beyond the focus on productive labor. In all of these cases, the post-Marxist rejoinder would be the charge of a barely reconstructed and strategically and experientially void classical Marxism. Two brief comments are in order, here. First, the task of accounting for class composition, decomposition, and recomposition remains a crucial part of any macro-sociology concerned with power in the social world. Second, these thinkers do represent an important break from at least one aspect of the class problematic of orthodox Marxism— workerism. That is, in Hardt and Negri (2009), Endnotes (2008a), and Dauvé and Martin (2015), communism is crucially about the move beyond worker identity, as well as beyond the older utopic figure of workers’ selfmanagement.

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On the Content of Socialism In characterizing the “new Global Left”, Santos (2006) suggests the important themes of growing singularity or “depolarized pluralities” (p. 166), increasing horizontal and prefigurative emphases, and the move beyond older polarities such as reform versus revolution and Marxism versus anarchism. On this last question, numerous commentators have contended that the far-Left today is characterized by some sort of reconciliation between elements of the two traditions.5 Across what I have called the new communism, though, this polarity, at the rhetorical level, often remains in place. Thus, Badiou (2009, for instance) continues to make hostile observations on anarchism, and, within the new anarchist literature, we continue to see familiar swipes at Marxism—class determinism, productionism, statism, vanguardism, ethical indifference (Purkis and Bowen 2004; Critchley 2007; Newman 2010). The polemics on both sides are deeply unhelpful, as well as often wildly inaccurate: on the one side, Marxism versus anarchism as a story of authoritarianism, vanguardism, and statism, against liberty, spontaneity, and autonomy; on the other, a story of organization, intellectual clarity, and persistence, against shambolic, capricious, and individualistic politics. Beyond such durable sectarianism, a more interesting case can be made for convergence, both historical—visible, say, in tendencies represented by Marxian currents associated with names such as Pannekoek, Bordiga, and Luxemburg—and contemporary. The antagonism between these two emancipatory traditions is often traced to Marx’s encounters with Stirner, Proudhon, and Bakunin, while the split between anarchism and Marxism was formalized at the London Congress of the Second International in 1896, around the question of political participation, narrowly conceived. This scission was further sedimented in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, as numerous anarchist thinkers became increasingly alienated from the realities of postRevolutionary Russia. And yet, a number of Marxian thinkers expressed similar doubts to the anarchists, about the role of the party in both Leninism and social democracy, about the state in any transitional period, and about the organizational shape of a post-revolutionary order. Within historical currents of both anarchism and Marxian, we frequently find a resolute commitment to popular self-emancipation and equally firm rejections of state and capital. The self-emancipation demanded in these accounts was frequently given shape by the creation of new institutions that would play the predominant role in emancipatory contestation, social

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transformation, and post-revolutionary organization. These institutions— for instance, revolutionary unions, workers’ councils, communes, or culturalist forms, such as alternative educational institutions—then had a prefigurative character. In addition, these revolutionary institutions were either elevated above, or deemed replacements for organizations of militants, revolutionary parties often viewed as dangerous—substituting for the mass of people, embodying a nascent new class, acting as director of a new statecapitalism. Widely considered a “movement of movements”, the alternative globalization movement contained clear echoes of these emphases, as did earlier lines of struggle in Latin America. Frequently, such tendencies within alternative globalization have been read as indicators of a “new anarchism” (Purkis and Bowen 2004; Epstein 2001). Certainly, Gordon’s (2007) enumeration of the predominant idea clusters in anarchism’s stable core indicates the affinities in play: the concept of domination and the critique of hierarchy; decentralization; direct action, affinity, and prefigurative politics; consensus-seeking; commitment to diversity, spontaneity, perpetual experimentation. The prevailing emphases of alternative globalization, then, encourage the notion that anarchism is the contemporary spirit of anticapitalism (el-Ojeili 2015; Epstein 2001; Gordon 2007; Grubacic and Graeber 2004). One mode of capturing such tendencies is the opposition erected between vertical and horizontal organizational tendencies (Tormey 2004). On the one side, within alternative globalization, certain currents leant in the direction of rupture, direct democracy, participation, and the street; on the other side were more conventional factions that placed emphasis on established parties, NGOs, reform, “movement-building”, and representation (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006). In the new communist literature, weight is placed with the first tendency, a tendency exemplified in, and given further impetus by, the Occupy movement and other struggles that have followed upon the global financial crisis. Spontaneism, anti-vanguardism, and horizontalism predominate, then, within this communism, even if certain hesitancies or modifications are voiced. This is particularly visible in Hardt and Negri (2004), where the immediate production of the common by and resistance of the Multitude are prior to the capturing, extractive operations of power. While, in their most recent work, Hardt and Negri (2017) seek to critically address the fetish of horizontality and spontaneity, positing new forms of leadership, and championing organization and discipline, opposition to hierarchy and centralization pervade the work; and,

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at its core, their vaunted alternative to pure, spontaneous horizontalism, “political entrepreneurship”, is, in fact, equivalent to the self-organization and self-governance of the entirety of the Multitude. Deriding anarchistic gestures to spontaneity and the fetishization of democracy, meanwhile, Badiou still insists that the time of parties is over, and he articulates a politics akin, in its essentials, to the anarchist notion of organized action by affinity groups (2001, 2008b, c, 2009, 2013b), which turns out to be essentially equivalent to a politics of radical or direct democracy, or true popular sovereignty. Similar contentions are to be found in the work of Critchley (2007), Ranciere (2008), and Graeber (2013), and within communization currents (Endnotes 2008a; Noys 2013), in the opposition to “programmatism”, as well as in notions such as “the imaginary party” or the “coming community”, in Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. A second major point of discussion around the new communism and the content of societal alternatives centers on the problem of institutions. Here, we find a prevailingly fragile and nebulous quality to the discussion. Exhortation and gestures to non-vanguardist forms, immediatism, and spontaneity stand in the place of sustained reflection on institutional alternatives. “Swarm intelligence”, the “General Intellect”, the “Multitude”, “the “commons”, “the coming community”, the “imaginary party”, “communes”, “affinity”, “event”, “sharing”, autonomous spaces or zones, “autonomy”, “mutual aid”, “organized riot”, “assembly” (Badiou 2007; Beradi 2009a, 2012; Graeber 2011, 2013; Hardt 2010; Hardt and Negri 2009, 2017; Invisible Committee 2004, 2009, 2017; Merrifield 2010; Newman 2010; Tiqqun 2010, 2012)—these concepts or slogans are asked to do a volume of work that they are simply not built for. Again, in Hardt and Negri (2017), the stated intention of discussing contestatory institutional forms—gestures to historic and present examples, such as militarized Kurdish resistance to Islamic State, aside—is never staged. In a very different register, The Invisible Committee (2017) explicitly reject the notion of new institutions, in favor of “forms”, or mobile configurations that hold together, which “live” (p. 87), italicizing exit and the neutralization of extant institutions over construction. An ungenerous interpretation of the foregoing is that this new communism is indeed “extra-institutional” (Newman 2017) and “posthegemonic” (Day 2005, 2011), but not in the positive sense implied by these designations. The frequent appeal to the ordinary, implicit, or basic extant communism of everyday life—as Colin Ward (2004) once phrased it, anarchism as always already there, like seeds beneath the snow—has, I think,

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plenty of rhetorical-argumentative force. Yet, the accompanying paucity of institutional thinking across the new communism cannot but give one pause. In this vein, more recognizably Marxian thinkers within this current, such as Endnotes (2012), for instance, charge that the authors of The Coming Insurrection end up with “abstract, voluntarist self-affirmation” (p. 37), and Toscano (2012) criticizes the absence of strategic and properly political reflection within the communization current as a whole. For all of its dispersal, the alternative globalization movement of movements contained a rich and diverse array of institutional suggestions— proposals for decommodification, alternative development schemes, relocalization, movements for ethical consumption, the organization of marginal workers and other excluded groups, and efforts toward a new labor internationalism. Nothing within today’s new communist literature comes close to this, or to the achievements of those Left communist historical antecedents that these thinkers and groups most resemble. In this respect, Badiou’s (2008a) periodization of our moment as closer to 1848 than to 1917 seems entirely appropriate.

Forms---Aesthetics, Affect, Spirit A final important consideration on today’s new communism involves the question of the predominant forms of expression found across the thinkers and groups discussed. A number of observations are in order, but, above all, we see the formulation of a contemporary variant of the Left’s artistic critique that pivots around figures such as love, poetry, violence, affect, and spirit. This new artistic critique takes shape by way of those emphases already discussed around refusal, outsideness, desertion, the wild, set against alienation, separation, conformism, boredom, disenchantment, and the like—an appeal to “true life” against the operation of power (Noys 2011; Robinson and Tormey 2009). Very often, underlying these attachments is the notion of insurrection as excess beyond present fixities and limits (Robinson and Tormey 2009). These qualities have affinities with elements of both existential thought and classical bohemia, in the appeal to a new subject, beyond the limits of self and identity. Again, recurrent emphases on desire, play, unbounded sexuality, pleasure, happiness, self-expression, and love and on “expressive” or “ecstatic” politics (Tiqqun 2012, p. 143) resonate with the historic Left’s artistic critique.

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In this register, poetry often plays a pivotal role in the new communism, as both a means of struggle and a modality of expression that is at some distance from the pedagogical seriousness of purpose and directness of much classical anarchism and from the scientific appeals predominant within much of the Marxist tradition. In this respect, we can trace lines of descent between this contemporary communism and the bohemiaanarchism connection of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western Marxism, as it culminated in Situationism, and the irreverence of the cultural politics of 1968 (Sonn 1992, 2010; Wollen 1989). The poetic tone is clear, say, in Hardt and Negri—“the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist ” (2000, p. 413)—or in Tiqqun’s and The Invisible Committee’s post-Situationist prose. Meanwhile, Badiou, a playwright and novelist as well as a philosopher, deploys a startling, crisp writing style that embodies his call for a new affirmationist art—coherent, surprising, elevated—“unified like a demonstration, surprising like a night raid, elevated like a star” (2013a, pp. 86–87). Very directly, Beradi (2012) sets poetry against contemporary finance capitalism, seeking to respond to the colonization of communication and imagination by “semio-capital” with the possibility of “the poetic revitalization of language” (p. 8). Despite our current “bio-economic totalitarianism” (p. 9), words can escape exchangeability, language contains an excess that might reactivate the social body and solidarity, reinstating an affective relation to the world against “derealisation”. The old techniques of contestatory politics—organized, conscious action and government—are gone, claims Beradi (2012), but “Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity” (p. 147), able to escape capture and usher in new common understandings, by way of the “singular vibration of the voice” (p. 147).6 If this artistic modality is attached most tightly to themes of art, play, desire, freedom, irreverence, singularity, then a more austere tone, with connections to the serious, meditative dimensions of existentialism, is also audible. We find such austerity, say, in Badiou’s (2008a, b) championing of a new “discipline”, but also in emphases on the rejection of corruption, the renunciation of the pleasures of commodity and spectacle, the embrace of poverty (“a state of wealth and plenitude that threatens every sovereign and transcendent power” [Hardt and Negri 2017, p. 61]), simplicity (less possessions, more connections [Invisible Committee 2009]), innocence, anonymity, invisibility, and opacity (Badiou 2008c; Critchley 2009, 2011; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2009, 2017; Invisible Committee 2009, 2017; Jensen 2012; Merrifield 2010; Power 2009; Tiqqun 2010).

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This more austere line has ties to a return to ethics, found sprinkled across the new communism. This is most apparent, perhaps, within the new anarchism. Critchley (2009), for instance, summarizes anarchism as, above all, a “set of ethical concerns with practice” (p. 8), a “moral conviction, an ethical disposition”, set against “the macho mannerism and fake virility of contemporary neo-Leninism” (Critchley 2013, p. 4). For Critchley, Day (2005), and Newman (2010), the work of Emmanuel Levinas is vital in developing a contemporary anarchist ethics. The attraction of Levinas resides, in part, in its offer of an alternative to a too-libertarian anarchist conception of the subject and of freedom, in favor of a “relational and communal” (Newman 2010, p. 55) understanding. In addition, the prerogative given by Levinas to ethics appears to offer a brake that might prevent the dangerous inflation of politics to everything. Critchley’s (2007) account is the most developed, seeking to prioritize responsibility over the old imaginary of unlimited freedom, a responsibility based on our encounter with the other, an encounter that “dividuates” us from ourselves, showing us our limited self-mastery, inauthenticity, and ridiculous failures. The ethics of commitment that this Levinasian anarchism promises, Critchley (2007, p. 7) hopes, might allow us to “face and face down the drift of the present”. Hardt and Negri (2009), from a very different direction, nonetheless posit theirs as “an ethical project” of democratic action within and against Empire (2009, p. vii). And The Invisible Committee (2017) underscore the ethical dimension of their emphasis on the “nearby” (p. 39). Even in Badiou—a thinker who gives an excoriating account of the “ethical turn” as inoperative, and merely a maudlin liberal capitulation to the stultifying notion of human finitude and human rights moralism (2001)—even here, a resoundingly ethical impulse is at the heart of his entire corpus. The highly moralized pitch of this work, as impassioned indignation with the state of the world, and as forceful call to insurrectionary action, can be visualized around two particularly fascinating questions—the issue of violence and post-secularism. First, today’s new communism explicitly wrestles with the problem of violence, returning to consider violence beyond the pacific liberal consensus. Once more, the practical conditions of existence of this reconsideration can be seen as shaped by and expressive of the actions of the notorious Black Bloc, by the very name of the Occupy movement, and by contemporary antifa street action. A core intellectual condition of this reconsideration, meanwhile, is the unearthing (after its heyday in the 1970s) of the older notion of structural or systemic violence. This conceptualization points to the always already extant violence of the system, visible

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in exclusion, poverty, domination, inequality, and exploitation, and is built upon an explicitly utopian conception of the difference between human potential and actuality (Schinkel 2010). This is perhaps best captured by Lazzarato and Alliez’s (2018) Wars and Capital, where the authors speak of our times as characterized by the “subjectivation of civil wars” (p. 11), of plural, neo-colonial wars, “in and against populations” (p. 27), taking diverse form—surveillance, austerity and debt, racialized justice, military humanism.7 Here, the violence already in play makes admissible a violent response, captured in already discussed notions of insurrection, riot, civil war, sabotage, attack, destitution, and in Lazzarato and Alliez’s “collective war machine”. It should be noted that, here, these communists tend to take a subtle, nuanced approach, cognizant both of the various limitations and failures of historic Leftist violence—propaganda by the deed and insurrectionism in the period 1870–1921, the pitiful experience of the armed Leftist guerrilla groups of the 1970s, for instance—and of the transformed terrain of state power and privatized violence today. In this reconsideration of violence, we can trace paths of connection to thinkers such as Sorel, Benjamin, and, more recently, Agamben, all of who attempted to incorporate into emancipatory thought questions touching on the realm of spirit. On this score, we frequently find evidence of important post-secular tendencies within the new communism. Connected to the contemporary interest in the realms of poetry, the non-rational, and affect, this can be viewed as part of a wider theological turn across critical theory today (McLennan 2010; Therborn 2009). As Keucheyan (2013) notes, we might think of this turn by the Left as strategic, as a response to the contemporary unsecularization of the world, as an effort to capitalize on the force of spiritual meaning-making amidst widespread anomie and dislocation, and as connected to the problem of belief today—how are we to keep believing and hoping in the possibility of progressive social change amidst pervasive disenchantment? Badiou’s (2003, 2010) use of St Paul, his notion of the body-of-truth as a “glorious body” (see also Žižek 2003), or the rather miraculous quality of the Event (Bensaid 2007)8 are examples of such a tendency. Similarly, Hardt and Negri’s radical Catholic affinities are relevant,9 as is their meditation on the figure of Job (Hardt 2010), their emphasis on “exodus” as political strategy—“fleeing from subordination and servitude” (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 195)—or their positive commentary on St Francis. Drawing on the New Testament , the category of “love” is paramount, for these thinkers—“Love is the battlefield for the struggle against evil” (2009, p. 198). We might, in line with this,

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reflect, too, on the potentially radical implications of “metanoia” in the New Testament, usually rendered as “repentance”, but also translatable as thinking beyond the self that is. Similarly, the radical millenarian figure of Thomas Müntzer—previously resurrected by Engels, later by the Situationists around 1968—has been most recently re-rescued by the radical Italian artistic/activist collective Wu Ming “in a political short circuit with Zapatismo and the alter-globalization movement” (Toscano 2010, p. xii). Messianic overtones are also visible in notions such as the coming community, the Multitude, or the imaginary party. In some respects, the wider theological turn can be viewed as an outgrowth of the post-modern critique of one-dimensional emphases on science, reason, and progress, and of the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism, and it retrieves, at the same time, as mentioned, elements from earlier unorthodox Marxian thinkers— Sorel, Benjamin, Bloch, say—who attempted to widen consideration of the different dimensions of the “webs of belief” (McLennan 2010). Spirit, love, violence, ethics, poetry—these themes importantly shape the forms of new communist expression. We see, here, hybridizations (Keucheyan 2013) in search of the new, as forms of uncovering or discovering ways to leave what is viewed as a saturated, contaminated world. These forms are political and strategic as well as expressive, tracing the outlines of a new modality of the Left’s artistic critique.

Concluding Comments In this chapter, I have sought to illuminate a number of crucial themes characteristic of new communist utopianism, a fragment of a wider Left. Taking leave of the old polarities that separated Marxism and anarchism, this communism evinces a quite distinct, but still in formation, synthesis of concerns and figures, cognitive maps, specifications about the subjects of emancipation, arguments about transformational organization, and modes of expression. This vigorous current, in spite of its many hesitations, blockages, and shortcomings, inspires me in a way, clearly, that a diminished, splintering liberal centrism and a thwarted and hate-filled post-fascism do not. The emphases found, here, despite their often experimental, nascent quality (Badiou 2008a), will, I believe, be taken up and developed further in what will perhaps become a world-shaping culture of the new global Left.

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Notes 1. See also Graeber (2011). 2. For an analysis of the utopian significance of Green politics, see Garforth (2017). 3. I am indebted, in this discussion, to Dylan Taylor. 4. Destitution understood as abandoning, putting aside, knocking down, deceiving, escaping, “desertion and attack, creation and wrecking” (Invisible Committee 2017, p. 51). 5. See, for instance, Armaline and Shannon (2010), Choat (2016), Franks (2012), Garland (2010), Kinna and Prichard (2012), Lynd and Grubacic (2008), and Pinta and Berry (2012). 6. See also Morton (2010) who emphasizes the role of poetry and art more generally in what he calls “the ecological thought”. 7. See also Jensen (2012) for a trenchant defence of emancipatory violence: “Those in power rule by force … Love does not imply pacifism” (p. 176). 8. Which is not a possibility that resides in the situation (Badiou 2010). 9. See also Critchley (2009).

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CHAPTER 6

Concluding Comments: Beyond Left Melancholia

Abstract In this chapter, el-Ojeili summarises the evolution of various strands of socio-political intellectual production, and the shaping of a distinct contemporary utopian constellation. Throughout the book, el-Ojeili has made the case for what the utopian optic can offer the human sciences, and in this concluding chapter, explores how it might be used to rejuvenate political strategies. Keywords Liberalism · Ideology · History · Left melancholy · Political rejuvenation

Throughout this book, I have explored dimensions of what I suggest are important transformations in the realm of social- and politics-oriented intellectual production, which have shaped a distinctive contemporary utopian constellation. In Chapter 2, I noted the expanding scholarly attention given to utopia, and I argued for the centrality of a utopian optic for the human sciences. Drawing on a number of key thinkers from the field of utopian studies, I contended that we approach utopia as the desire for a better way of being (Levitas 1990), as everywhere, as existing at different levels, as a basic feature of the imagination and of ideology, as both rational and “musical”, and as taking diverse form according to time and place. This last contention is connected to the concept of constellations, conjunctural configurations of utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian figures. To illuminate © The Author(s) 2020 C. el-Ojeili, The Utopian Constellation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32516-9_6

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this notion, and as backdrop and contrast to the treatment of elements of contemporary future-oriented thought, in the second part of the chapter, I focussed on a number of figures important in the utopian constellations of four modern periods: for instance—the “perfect liberty” and “general opulence” classical liberals foresaw in the unfettered expansion of modern markets; the evolutionary, civilizing, and progressivist-scientific hopes and promises characteristic of the period of liberal imperialism; or the desires for development, self-determination, and the creation of a new post-colonial human being found in the heroic period of anti-colonial militancy. I have maintained that, since the close of the twentieth century, and increasingly since the global financial crisis, elements of a transformed utopian configuration have emerged into view, three particular spaces of which I examined in Chapters 3–5. First, I turned to utopic shifts occurring within liberalism, which suggest a break from the period of hegemonic or normative neo-liberalism. Here, I argued that, under the pressure of a variety of forces, a splintering effect was visible: variously—a newly posthegemonic neo-liberalism that seeks, above all, to affirm and protect extant power relations; a hybrid neo-Keynesian stance that attempts to reinvest future hopes in political re-regulation and will; a liberalism of fear, which issues warnings of dystopian scenarios ahead; and a more general residualization of utopian reference, signaled in a cautious, defensive language around risk, resilience, vulnerability, and stability. This fragmentation of liberalism has been accompanied and exacerbated by the gathering of significant new utopian energies, which have appeared at both ends of the political spectrum. On the far-Right, we have seen the consolidation of a post-fascist ideological formation. Overflowing with fear and resentment, this post-fascism must also be visualized, after Bloch, in terms of its utopian dimensions. Here, appeals to “the future in the past”—to a selective embrace of elements of Antiquity, the crusades, or to a reanimated Fordist “sovereignism” that would once more protect white male privilege—are joined by elements of the post-modern present (hyper-textuality and -irony, say), and images of a novel future (for instance, supra-state formations, a “pluriverse”, human-machine symbiosis, total computerization). By contrast, at a non-symmetrical Left pole, a new communism— one part of the new global Left—has been increasingly visible. Moving beyond the older Left divisions, this new communism has engaged in

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the construction of new maps of power (for instance, “Empire”, “semiocapitalism”, “financial capitalism”), but, equally, has espoused new modalities of transformative resistance, on both subjective and collective levels— flight, event, riot, desertion, encounter, communization, commons, the imaginary party—which I have tried to capture in the notion of “insurrectionary immediatism”. Within this new communism, too, we find particular emphasis placed on love, poetry, violence, affect, and spirit, themes that suggest a contemporary re-formulation of the historic Leftist artistic critique. As noted in the previous chapter, I have not claimed to be (and I see little value in) taking a position of detached scientific neutrality with respect to the material I have covered, even if I believe that the human sciences must remain attached to a nuanced version of scientific realism. I am, in post-fascist parlance, a cultural Marxist and a social justice warrior, or, in liberal terms, a utopian and an extremist. I remain inspired by and committed to the unorthodox Left communist critique of capitalism and to the kinds of utopian alternatives emerging from these traditions, which emphasized, against twentieth-century social democracy and Leninism, self-emancipation, direct democracy, and radical equality. Despite my clear affinities with the material treated in Chapter 5, however, I haven’t got the stomach for the maximalist sectarianism sometimes found among these more marginal currents, where any other positions on the wider Left are denounced as mere bourgeois reformism, corrupted vanguardism, or narrow identity politics. Across the new global Left as a whole, we are in a period of enormous critical and utopic productivity and creativity, which issues from a wealth of traditions—democratic socialist, Leninist, environmentalist, feminist, for instance. These diverse energies, all of which feed contemporary Left rejuvenation, have been left largely unconsidered here, for reasons of space and expertise. What seems crucial today and in thinking ahead, for the entirety of this new global Left, is, I believe, a critical but thoughtful relationship with what has been called “Left melancholy”. In Enzo Traverso’s (2016) book-length treatment of this, the focus of Left melancholy has been upon the vanquished, and, historically, this melancholy was strung between two poles, memory and utopia, a dialectic between past and future, where memory was mobilized toward a better future, where defeats, which were “only lost battles” (p. 36), nourished militancy. For Traverso, this dialectic has collapsed since the late 1980s: “When communism fell apart, the utopia that

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for almost two centuries had supported it as a Promethean impetus or consolatory justification was no longer available; it had become an exhausted spiritual resource” (p. 52). In the West, from the late 1980s, this Left melancholy frequently provoked a certain conservatism, bereft of the desire to discover a new “critical and visionary spirit” (Wendy Brown in Traverso, p. 45). This is exemplified in the thought of one of the figures of Left communism most dear to me, Cornelius Castoriadis. An adventurous, unorthodox figure, who tirelessly championed a radical self-emancipatory vision of an autonomous society and who put human creativity at the center of both being and history, Castoriadis’s (2003, 2005) thought became, from the 1980s, especially, increasingly overwhelmed by a thoroughgoing pessimism about the present—the complete wearing down of imaginary significations, generalized corruption and conformism, the death of art and critique, the disappearance of politics and judgment, a gigantic movement of privatized withdrawal—all of these leading in the direction of a closing into societal and psychic heteronomy. This, for me, is the least interesting part of Castoriadis’s corpus, where social criticism slides toward generational lament. How do we remain inspired and informed by our historic traditions, concepts, programs, thinkers, battles, and organizational forms, while acknowledging that the Left’s future answers are really quite unimaginable? Here, a utopian optic and Bloch’s (1986) espousal of a “critical-militant optimism” (p. 446) seem more pressing than Gramsci’s celebrated formula, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. The contemporary heartbeat of utopia, I’ve argued, is really not that faint at all; we just need to listen more carefully.

References Bloch, E. (1986). The principle of hope (Vol. 1). Cambridge: MIT Press. Castoriadis, C. (2003). The rising tide of insignificancy. Retrieved January 23, 2019, from http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf. Castoriadis, C. (2005). Figures of the thinkable. Retrieved January 23, 2019, from http://www.notbored.org/FTPK.pdf. Levitas, R. (1990). The concept of utopia. Hertfordshire: Syracuse University Press. Traverso, E. (2016). Left-wing melancholia: Marxism, history, and memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Index

0–9 1789, 19 1848, 22, 25, 49, 135 1917, 29, 31, 135 1930s, 27, 28, 47, 65, 66, 82, 95, 97, 107 1950s, 100, 105 1960s, 29, 30, 66, 67, 100, 116 1968, 31, 32, 46, 52, 66, 82, 92, 116, 136, 139 1970s, 17, 29, 30, 33, 52, 57, 100, 116, 121, 123, 124, 137, 138 1980s, 33, 52, 66, 100, 101, 105, 116, 118, 120, 125, 149, 150 1990s, 1, 2, 7, 33, 34, 70, 82, 100, 116, 118, 125 9/11, 89 A Adorno, Theodor, 2, 3, 98, 99 Africa, 29, 30 Agamben, Giorgio, 124, 138 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 14, 17, 34, 57, 82, 116, 117

Alliez, Eric, 124, 138 Alt-right.com, 84 Alternative for Germany (AFD), 84, 88, 90–93, 100, 101, 103–105 Alternative Globalization, 118, 123, 125, 130, 133, 135 America, 26, 48 American Civil War, 48 American Revolution, 32 Amin, Samir, 82 Anabaptists, 19 Anarchism, 4, 87, 119, 125, 127, 128, 132–134, 136, 137, 139 Anarcho-Primitivism, 126 Anderson, Perry, 2, 17, 23, 24, 27, 35, 69, 116, 130 Anker, Elisabeth, 99 Anti-imperialism, 29 Antiquity, 9, 10, 100, 102, 105, 148 Anti-semitism, 24, 85, 89, 90, 105 Anti-systemic movements, 22, 25, 27–32, 50, 82 Arab Spring, 118 Arrighi, Giovanni, 22, 26, 27, 32, 46

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 C. el-Ojeili, The Utopian Constellation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32516-9

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INDEX

Art, 8, 10, 11, 23, 130, 136, 150 Artistic critique, 67, 116, 130, 131, 135, 139, 149 Austerity, 47, 59, 60, 63, 70, 71, 136, 138 Australian Government, 67 Austrian Freedom Party, 34, 96 Authoritarianism, 86, 132 Autonomism, 119, 121, 122, 131 Autonomy, 9, 47, 58, 88, 99, 105, 116, 128, 129, 132, 134

B Bacon, Francis, 13 Badiou, Alain, 25, 27, 48, 69, 72, 93, 120, 123, 124, 127–132, 134–140 Bakunin, Mikhail, 132 Balakrishnan, Gopal, 24, 69, 71 Balibar, Etienne, 24, 25, 33 Bandung Conference, 29 Barrot, Jean (aka Gilles Dauve), 108 Bauman, Zygmunt, 17, 32, 33, 53, 56, 67, 72, 117 Beck, Ulrich, 31 Beilharz, Peter, 33, 66 Bellamy, Edward, 10 Bell, Daniel, 28, 31 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 3, 18, 68, 98, 102, 138, 139 Bentham, Jeremy, 54 Beradi, Franco, 120–131, 134, 136 Berger, Mark T., 29, 30 Berlet, Chip, 84, 85, 107 Berlin, Isaiah, 68 Berlin Wall, 55 Berman, Sheri, 81 Bernstein, Eduard, 28 Beveridge Report , 35 Bidet, Jacques, 48 Biopower, 121, 127

Black Bloc, 137 Black Lives Matter, 8, 104, 118 Bloch, Ernst, 1, 15, 16, 18, 83, 87, 97–102, 105, 107, 139, 148, 150 Bohemia, 135 Bolsheviks, 27 Bolshevism, 31 Boltanski, Luc, 32, 33, 58, 116, 117, 127 Bonanno, Alfredo, 123, 124, 127–130 Bordiga, Amadeo, 108, 132 Bornschier, Simon, 34, 92 Bowen, James, 132, 133 Brexit, 88 Britain, 22, 26, 48, 49, 108 Brousse, Paul, 28 Brown, Wendy, 54, 58, 72, 88, 91, 99, 100, 109, 150 Bruff, Ian, 58, 60 Bulgarian Attack, 95, 104 Bureaucratization, 101 Butler, Samuel, 10

C Caesarism, 70 Camatte, Jacques, 121 Camus, Jean-Yves, 84, 87, 88, 97, 108 Capitalism, 1, 22, 25, 28, 31–33, 47, 50–53, 55, 57, 59–64, 67, 70, 71, 84, 89, 94–96, 98, 100–102, 105, 116, 117, 119–125, 127, 130, 131, 136, 149 CasaPound, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 101, 103, 105 Castells, Manuel, 32, 53, 56 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 9, 10, 14, 47, 150 Champetier, Charles, 88, 89, 91, 93, 96, 101–103, 108 Charlottesville, 100, 106 Chiapello, Eve, 32, 33, 58, 116

INDEX

Christchurch Mosque Attacks, 106 Christianity, 87, 100, 104, 107 Churchill, Winston, 31 Civilization, 24, 49, 69, 72, 120, 125, 126 Civil Rights Movement, 31 Civil Society, 26, 86, 94, 108 Class, 11, 16, 20, 23–27, 48–50, 52–54, 57, 61, 63, 69, 70, 86, 91, 94, 95, 99–101, 116, 120–124, 126, 131–133 Classical liberalism, 20, 25, 50 Cohn, Norman, 68 Cold War, 31 Collectivism, 30, 96, 131 Commodification, 54, 96, 116, 121, 127, 135 Commons, 121, 131, 134, 149 Communism, 4, 14, 22, 27, 31, 35, 46, 65, 67, 68, 72, 85, 95, 118–120, 122–124, 126–139, 148, 149 Communist Manifesto, 11, 22 Communitarianism, 96 Community, 12, 21, 33, 55, 66, 85, 86, 91, 104, 127, 131, 139 Conservatism, 19, 30, 150 Conspiracy of Equals, 21 Conspiracy theory, 84, 85 Constellation, 2–4, 8, 12, 18, 20–22, 32, 34, 35, 119, 147, 148 Consumerism, 33, 96 Copsey, Nigel, 83, 86, 91 Corbyn, Jeremy, 118 Cosmopolitanism, 85 Council Communism, 119 Council for Conservative Citizens, 104 Counter-Culture, 32, 91 Counter-Currents, 102 Crisis global financial, 8, 34, 57, 60, 65, 70, 82, 118, 133, 148 hegemonic, 57, 71, 96, 148

153

modern, 22, 25, 88 organic, 88, 96 Critchley, Simon, 127, 132, 134, 136, 137, 140 Crouch, Colin, 56 Crusades, 148 Cultural Marxism, 83, 89, 92, 104, 105 Cvjetanovic, Peter, 106

D Darwinism, 23, 30 Dauvé, Gilles, 124, 125, 131 and Martin, Francois, 125, 131 and Nesic, Karl, 121, 124 Davies, William, 47, 54, 55, 57, 58, 67, 97 Davis, Mike, 70 Dean, Jodi, 56, 130 de Benoit, Alain, 84, 89, 91, 93, 96, 101–103, 108 Debt, 32, 34, 52, 58–61, 66, 122, 138 Decolonization, 29, 67 Deconstruction, 13 De-industrialization, 101 Democracy, 10, 20, 27, 30, 32, 53, 56, 61, 69, 70, 85, 86, 90, 91, 98, 104, 117, 118, 134 direct, 90, 133, 134, 149 liberal, 20, 27, 32, 56, 69, 86, 90 Democratization, 23, 82 Depression, Great, 22, 29 D’Eramo, Marco, 69, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 68 Determinism, 3, 33, 64, 117, 132 Dictatorship, 61, 98, 117 Difference, 33, 51, 66, 67, 103, 117, 138 Direct action, 133 Direct democracy, 90, 133, 134, 149 Disorganized capitalism, 31

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INDEX

Dugin, Aleksandr, 84, 88, 89, 91, 96, 102, 105 Dunn, Bill, 51 Durand, Cedric, 52, 58, 60, 70 and Keucheyan, Razmig, 60, 70 Durkheim, Emile, 26 E Eagleton, Terry, 13 Eatwell, Roger, 84, 86, 87, 95, 108 Eco, Umberto, 86, 87, 93 Egalitarianism, 86, 92, 116 Elites, 24, 48, 51, 63, 85, 104 Elite theory, 24, 91 Elitism, 50, 86, 96 Emmott, Bill, 59, 62–66, 70 Emotions, 21, 69 Empire, 50, 69, 100, 105, 120, 121, 123, 125, 129, 137, 149 Endnotes, 120, 121, 127, 129, 131, 134, 135 Engels, Friedrich, 11, 13, 22, 139 Enlightenment, 10, 11, 13, 19, 20, 66, 85, 87, 100 Environment, 8, 32, 53, 62, 97 Environmentalism, 8 Epstein, Barbara, 130, 133 Equality, 19, 21, 30, 32, 53, 55, 63, 104, 149 Erfurt Programme, 25 Essentialism, 33, 51, 117, 128 Ethics, 46, 117, 137, 139 Eurocentrism, 139 European Central Bank, 60 European Commission, 60 European Union (EU), 60, 89 Evolution, 9, 23, 56, 85 Extremism, 47, 66–68, 71 F Family, 30, 46, 92, 123, 127

Fanaticism, 66, 68 Fanon, Franz, 30 Fascism, 4, 27, 30, 46, 65, 67, 68, 81–88, 90–99, 101–103, 105–108 Fashwave, 101 Feminism, 8, 83, 89, 92, 93, 105 Fifth Estate, 125 Finance, 47, 60, 62, 64, 98, 122, 123, 136 Financialization, 33, 52, 53, 96, 122–124, 126 Fiscal Compact, 60 Fisher, Mark, 51, 70, 72 Flew, Terry, 50, 51 Flexibilization, 52, 124 Fordism, 33 Foucault, Michel, 68, 120, 124, 127 Fourier, Charles, 21 Franco-Prussian War, 22 Frankfurt School, 89 Franks, Benjamin, 125, 140 Freedom, 20, 24, 32, 48, 49, 53, 55, 58, 83, 99, 108, 116, 136, 137 French National Front (FN), 84, 88, 92, 101–103 French New Right, 88, 90, 91, 104, 105, 108 French Revolution, 19, 20, 45, 48 Freudo-Marxism, 130 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 24 Friedman, Thomas, 53 Fukuyama, Francis, 32, 33

G G20, 72 Galbraith, James K., 62, 64, 72 Gauchet, Marcel, 72 General Intellect, 123, 131, 134 German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 25 Giddens, Anthony, 31, 32

INDEX

Giroux, Henry, 82 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), 8, 34, 57, 60, 65, 70, 82, 118, 133, 148 Globalism, 83, 89 Globalization, 8, 19, 23, 31, 33, 34, 52, 53, 56, 57, 96, 107, 121 Global Left, 4, 95, 107, 118, 139, 148, 149 Goebbels, Joseph, 103 Golden Dawn, 84, 92, 95, 100, 105 Goldman, Emma, 130 Goodwin, Barbara, 21 Gordon, Uri, 19–21, 46, 126, 133 Graeber, David, 120, 123, 124, 127–131, 133, 134, 140 and Grubacic, Andrej, 127, 133 Gramsci, Antonio, 89, 95, 150 Gray, Phillip, 91 Great Depression, 22 Greece, 60, 61, 84, 92, 95, 100, 118 Greenspan, Alan, 57 Griffin, Roger, 14, 18, 30, 81, 82, 84–86, 98 Grubacic, Andrej, 127, 133, 140 Guevara, Che, 29 Gulf War, 123

H Hardt, Michael, 120–125, 127–131, 133, 134, 136–138 and Negri, Antonio, 120–125, 127–131, 133, 134, 136–138 Harvey, David, 33, 52–54, 72 Hawley, George, 82, 83, 95, 101 Hegemony, 25–27, 50, 57, 61, 65, 82, 96, 105, 116, 122 Held, David, 19, 20, 23, 33 Hertzka, Theodore, 10 Heteronomy, 9, 47, 150 Historical Materialism, 11, 118

155

Hitler, Adolf, 26, 94, 106 Hobhouse, Leonard, 26 Hobsbawm, Eric, 19, 20, 22–24, 26, 29, 49, 115, 116 Hoffman, Heinrich, 106 Hoffmeister, Constantin Von, 91, 96, 103 Holland, 48 Hollywood, 89, 94 Holocaust, 82 Humanism, 100, 138 Human sciences, 2, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 31, 33, 50, 107, 117, 147, 149 Hungary, 84, 92, 95

I Ideal type, 2, 83, 84, 87, 95, 97 Identity, 85, 88, 128, 129, 131, 135, 149 Ideology, 11–13, 16–18, 30, 50, 51, 67, 87, 92, 96, 97, 107, 147 Immaterial labour, 123 Immigration, 34, 85, 89 Imperialism, 23, 24, 30, 31, 48–50, 68, 70, 86, 97, 108, 123, 148 Individualism, 23, 33, 67, 94, 101, 129, 130 Industrialization, 29, 35, 121 Inequality, 34, 52, 62, 63, 70, 96, 105, 116, 138 Ingelhart, Ronald, 101 Intellectuals, 14, 24, 26, 30, 34, 51, 57, 59, 68 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 52, 59, 62, 64–66 Invisible Committee, 120, 121, 123–125, 127–131, 134, 136, 137 Islam, 83 Islamic State, 134

156

INDEX

Islamophobia, 90 Italy, 28, 84, 89

J J˝ unger, Ernst, 106 Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, 35 Jacoby, Russell, 14, 17, 34, 51 Jameson, Fredric, 1, 3, 18, 19, 33, 35, 51, 53, 84, 85, 89, 100, 106, 117, 119, 122, 123 Jensen, Derrick, 126, 130, 136, 140 Jobbik, 84, 88–92, 95, 101, 104, 105 Johnson, Greg, 102, 103 Jones, Alex, 89 Judaism, 104

K Kautsky, Karl, 27 Keucheyan, Razmig, 60, 70, 116, 125, 138, 139 and Durand, Cedric, 60, 70 Keynesianism, 61 Keynes, John Maynard, 31, 35, 50, 61, 62, 72 Kojeve, Alexandre, 68 Kosovo, 123 Krugman, Paul, 61, 62 Kumar, Krishnan, 9, 18

L Laclau, Ernesto, 117, 119 and Mouffe, Chantal, 119 Landa, Ishay, 86, 96, 108 Landauer, Gustav, 127, 130 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 28 Latin America, 29, 30, 133 Lazzarato, Mauricio, 120, 122, 124, 131, 138 and Alliez, Eric, 124, 138

Le Bon, Gustav, 14, 24, 69 Lebourg, Nicolas, 84, 87, 88, 97, 108 Left Communism, 118, 150 Legrain, Phillipe, 53, 64, 65 Leninism, 119, 132, 149 Lenin, Vladimir Illich, 27, 28 Lepenies, Wolf, 12, 13 Levinas, Emmanuel, 137 Levitas, Ruth, 1, 9, 14, 16–18, 20, 34, 51, 54, 67, 69, 147 Liberal democracy, 108 Liberalism, 4, 10, 19, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 35, 45–52, 55, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64–66, 69–72, 85, 91, 96, 102, 107, 117, 119, 148 classical, 20, 25, 50 social, 28, 50 Libertarianism, 118 Life World, 89 Lilla, Mark, 68, 70 Liquid modernity, 32, 33 Losurdo, Domenico, 48–50, 66–70, 72, 108 Luce, Edward, 46, 47, 62–64, 66, 70, 72 Luxemburg, Rosa, 132 Lyons, Matthew, 84, 85

M Mair, Peter, 35, 56 Mann, Geoffrey, 50, 61, 69, 72 Mannheim, Karl, 2–4, 12, 13, 18 Mann, Michael, 27, 82, 84, 86, 94, 95, 107–109 Manosphere, 83, 93, 100 Maoism, 124 Marazzi, Christian, 120, 122 Marcuse, Herbert, 31 Market, 20, 29, 32, 53–55, 59, 64, 70, 71, 96, 125

INDEX

Martin, Francois, 125, 131 Marxism, 2, 4, 14, 25, 31, 35, 67, 68, 87, 102, 115–117, 125, 131, 132, 139 cultural, 2, 15, 83, 89, 92, 104, 105 orthodox, 2, 11, 16, 27, 131 Western, 3, 16, 116, 136 Marx, Karl, 11, 13, 22, 25, 60, 117, 120, 132 Masculinity, 91, 92, 101, 104, 105 Materialist Conception of History, 25 McInnes, Gavin, 92 McLennan, Gregor, 13, 33, 46, 51, 52, 117, 120, 138, 139 Melenchon, Jean-Luc, 118 Merkel, Angela, 61 Merrifield, Andy, 128, 131, 134, 136 #MeToo, 118 Middle Ages, 10 Middle East, 123 Militarism, 34, 105, 126 Modernity, 9, 19, 21, 32, 33, 71, 96, 117, 119 Monk, Daniel Bertrand, 70 Moore, John, 125 Moore, Mike, 61, 64–66, 72 More, Thomas, 9 Morris, William, 10 Morton, Timothy, 126, 140 Mosca, Geatano, 14 Mosley, Martel, 91, 93, 96 Mouffe, Chantal, 56, 119 and Laclau, Ernesto, 119 Moylan, Tom, 35 Multiculturalism, 89, 92 Multitude, 4, 123, 129, 131, 133, 134, 139 Munster Rebellion, 19 Mussolini, Benito, 30, 94, 108 N Nagle, Angela, 82, 83, 91–93, 106

157

Nash, Kate, 29, 30 Nasser, Gamel Abdul, 29 Nationalism, 19, 23, 24, 68, 83, 84, 88, 89, 102, 105 National liberation, 22, 27, 29 Nationalization, 28, 101 NATO, 123 Nature, 19, 21, 87, 104, 125–127 Negri, Antonio, 120–125, 127–131, 133, 134, 136–138 and Hardt, Michael, 120–125, 127–131, 133, 134, 136–138 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 29 Neiwert, David, 82, 83, 107 Neo-liberalism, 33–35, 47, 50–59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 97, 120, 123, 148 Nesic, Karl, 121, 124 Network society, 31 New Deal, 26 New Flemish Alliance, 96 New Left, 91, 95 Newman, Saul, 119, 120, 124, 127–129, 131, 132, 134, 137 New Testament , 10, 138, 139 New Zealand, 7, 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 69 Nineteenth Century, 120 Nkrumah, Kwame, 29, 30 Norris, Pippa, 86, 94, 101 Noys, Benjamin, 121, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135 Nuremburg trials, 82

O Occupy movement, 95, 133, 137 Ollman, Bertell, 11 Orientalism, 108 Orthodox Marxism, 16, 27, 131 Owen, Robert, 21

158

INDEX

P Pannekoek, Anton, 132 Pareto, Vilfredo, 14, 24 Paris Commune, 22, 25 Parties, 23, 24, 26, 30, 32, 34, 35, 46, 51, 56, 61, 69, 82–84, 88, 90, 96, 99, 107, 118, 133, 134 Paul, Ron, 89 Paxton, Robert, 81, 84, 86, 95, 108 Peck, Jamie, 54, 58 and Theodore, Nik, and Brenner, Neil, 54 PEGIDA, 90 Perkins, Charlotte, 10 Perlman, Fredy, 125, 126 Peterson, Jordan, 89 Petty Bourgeoisie, 94, 101 Pinochet, Augusto, 95 Planning, 26, 30, 32, 60, 63, 96 Plato, 10 Pluralism, 13, 28, 103, 104, 116 Podemos, 61, 118 Poetry, 135, 136, 138–140, 149 Polanyi, Karl, 28, 50 Political Correctness (PC), 83, 89, 91, 104 Popular culture, 8, 17, 100 Popular sovereignty, 20, 48, 49, 134 Populism, 46, 47, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 86, 107 Pornography, 92, 93, 108 Positivism, 24, 117 Post-anarchism, 123, 124 Post-democracy, 56 Post-Fordism, 33 Post-industrialism, 31, 121, 123 Post-Marxism, 116–118 Post-modernism, 84 Post-politics, 56, 67 Post-secularism, 137 Poulantzas, Nicos, 86, 95, 97, 109

Power, 19, 20, 22–26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 46–50, 52, 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 69, 70, 82, 87, 88, 92–94, 97–100, 103, 108, 119–123, 128–131, 133, 135, 138, 148, 149 Precarity, 46, 47, 94, 96, 123–126 Primitivism, 130 Privatization, 52, 53, 96 Progress, 9, 12, 14, 15, 20, 23, 24, 26–28, 33, 46, 62, 64, 139 Proletarianization, 19, 22, 23 Protectionism, 47, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 101 Protestant Reformation, 19 Proud Boys, 88, 92, 93, 103 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 132 Purkis, Jonathan, 132, 133

R Racism, 24, 32, 50, 82, 85, 91, 92 Radicalism, 21, 51, 66, 116 Ranciere, Jacques, 48, 56, 71, 134 Rationality, 13, 14, 16, 48, 117 Reagan, Ronald, 33 Really existing socialism, 27, 28, 32, 46, 69, 96, 116, 117 Reflexive modernity, 31 Reich, Robert, 62–64 Reich, Wilhelm, 98 Religion, 15, 70, 107, 116 Restructuring, 53 Revolution American, 32 French, 19–21, 45, 48 Russian, 27, 31, 132 Scientific, 13, 19 World, 27, 31, 32, 82, 92 Ricoeur, Paul, 18 Right Nationalism, 34, 83, 90, 92

INDEX

Right Stuff, 84 Riley, Dylan, 82, 84, 86, 90, 94, 95, 108, 109 Risk society, 31 Robin, Corey, 84 Romanticism, 10, 20, 21, 98 Rome, 100, 123 Rorty, Richard, 14 Rundell, John, 10, 21, 46 Russia, 31, 132 Russian Revolution, 26, 31, 132

S Sachs, Jeffrey, 62–64 Saint-Simon, Henri, 21 Sanders, Bernie, 118 Santos, Bonaventura de Sousa, 95, 118, 132 Sargent, Lyman Tower, 35 Sargisson, Lucy, 35 Sassoon, Donald, 25 Schmitt, Carl, 68 Science, 8, 11–14, 16, 20, 21, 27, 33, 87, 104, 117, 126, 139 Scientific Revolution, 13, 19 Seattle 1999, 34, 118 Second International, 132 Second World War, 27, 29 Serrati, Giacinto Menotti, 28 Sexism, 50, 82, 92 Sex Realism, 93 Silver, Beverly, 22, 26, 52 Situationism, 119, 121, 127, 129, 130, 136, 139 Small, Albion, 26 Smith, Adam, 20, 21, 24, 54, 126, 128, 129, 131 Social critique, 116 Social democracy, 22, 27, 28, 46, 96, 119, 132, 149 Social democratic consensus, 32

159

Socialism, 10, 19, 21, 24–31, 35, 50, 71, 86, 117, 118 Social justice, 89–91, 149 Social liberalism, 48 Social movements, 8, 17, 118 Social sciences, 10, 83, 107, 116 Sociology, 3, 10–12, 14, 16 Sorel, Georges, 14, 18, 24, 138, 139 Sovereignty, 29, 31, 52, 56, 69, 88, 89, 97, 99 Soviet Union, 26, 28 Spain, 61, 95, 118 Sparta, 100 Spectacle, 116, 121, 127, 136 Spencer, Herbert, 23 Spencer, Richard, 100, 103, 104 Stalin, Joseph, 27, 28, 35 State capitalism, 28 Stiglitz, Joseph, 62–64 Stirner, Max, 129, 132 Stormfront, 84, 89, 100, 105 St. Paul, 138 Streeck, Wolfgang, 52, 56, 60, 61, 70, 72 Structural adjustment, 32, 123 Subject, 2, 4, 8, 19–21, 25, 30, 35, 72, 88, 97, 99, 100, 119, 123, 124, 126–128, 135, 137, 139 Subjectivity, 117, 124, 128, 129 Sukarno, 29 Summers, Lawrence, 47 Suvin, Darko, 35, 86, 87, 107 Swiss People’s Party, 96 Swyngedouw, Erik, 56, 57, 60 and Wilson, Japhy, 56 Syndicalism, 25 Syriza, 61, 118

T Tamdgidi, Mohammad H., 35 Taylor, Jared, 10, 84

160

INDEX

Technology, 4, 8, 15 Tester, Keith, 35 Thatcher, Margaret, 33, 55 Theorie Communiste, 121, 131 Theory, 2, 25, 29, 51, 53, 107, 117, 119, 125, 138 Therborn, Goran, 18, 19, 27, 32, 46, 82, 92, 116, 117, 138 Third Way, 118 Third World, 27, 29 Third Worldism, 29, 30, 32, 68 Three Percenters, 92 Tiqqun, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127–131, 134–136 Tormey, Simon, 69, 72, 116, 127, 129, 133, 135 Toscano, Alberto, 66, 69, 98–100, 103, 121, 127, 131, 135, 139 Totalitarianism, 14, 17, 31, 34, 47, 66–69, 71, 86, 95, 108, 116 Totality, 2–4, 33, 120 Traverso, Enzo, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 46, 67, 68, 72, 82, 84–87, 90, 93, 95, 97, 102–109, 116, 149, 150 Troploin, 120, 121, 127, 131 Trotsky, Leon, 28 Trump, Donald, 82, 93, 94, 101 Twentieth Century, 27, 30

U Unemployment, 31, 63, 71, 96, 105 Unions, 23, 46, 55, 133 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 84, 88–90, 96, 101, 105 Unite the Right Rally, 106 Universalism, 30, 51, 85, 104, 117, 131 Urbanization, 22 Utopian Socialism, 11

V Vanguardism, 117, 132, 149 Venugopal, Rajesh, 51 Verso Books, 82 Violence, 14, 49, 58, 67, 86, 106–108, 123–125, 135, 137–140, 149 Vitalism, 102, 129 Voluntarism, 130

W Wagner, Peter, 9, 13, 14, 22, 25, 26, 32, 46, 96, 117 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 9, 13, 14, 19, 23, 25–27, 32, 46, 48, 49, 82, 100, 106 War Cold War, 31 First World War, 26 Franco-Prussian, 22 Second World War, 27, 29 total, 26, 86, 94, 96 Ward, Lester Frank, 26 Washington Consensus, 32 Watson, David, 125, 126 Weber, Alfred, 3 Weber, Max, 3, 14, 15, 26 Welfare State, 28, 101 Wells, H.G., 10–13 West, the, 8, 27–29, 31–33, 46, 50, 59, 88, 108, 150 Western Marxism, 3, 16, 116, 136 Williams, Raymond, 3 Wilson, Japhy, 56 Wodak, Ruth, 84–86, 90, 92, 105 Wolf, Martin, 59, 62–66, 70 Workerism, 131 Workers’ councils, 133 Workers’ movement, 10 Working class, 11, 22–25, 28, 30, 49, 86, 94, 101, 116, 117, 121, 124 World Bank, 62

INDEX

World Economic Forum (WEF), 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69 World-Revolution, 32, 82, 92 World Social Forum (WSF), 34 World Trade Organization (WTO), 52, 59, 61, 62, 64–66, 72, 118 World War I, 24, 30 Wu Ming, 139

Y Yiannopoulos, Milo, 84, 93

Z Zerzan, John, 120, 125, 126, 130 Zhou Enlai, 29 Zizek, Slavoj, 68, 69, 118, 138

161