Progress and its Permutations: Theory and Practice

A version of this essay originally appeared at prague Revue.

What do we mean when we say "progressive"? The UK Liberal Democrats, currently in coalition with history's most successful and adaptable Conservative Party, have unblushingly described themselves as "progressive". Everyone from Paul Krugman to the Pew Research Center is sure that, despite the drone strikes and increasing power of a financial plutocracy, the Obama administration is a "progressive" one. The Economist, meanwhile, insists that Obama take advice from Republicans if he's to be a "true progressive". Reflecting the transatlantic trade in political jargon, the term has loosed itself from geographical and ideological moorings, becoming universally accepted shorthand for dispassionate, even-handed public policy. In ideological practice, what such semiotic flexibility implies is an ever more capacious "centre" and a juxtaposed "radical" fringe (from right-wing nationalists to social-democratic Greens). 

   In its country of origin, the United States, "progressive" has long been a liberal substitute for what "social-democrat" meant in Europe: thus the adjective (formerly applied in a technical sense to "progressive" income tax regimes, in which those at the top pay proportionately more than those at the bottom) became a proper noun: in hushed tones, "She's a progressive." Closely aligned with Civil Rights struggles throughout the 20th Century (a social coalition whose legislative highpoint came with the 1964 Civil Rights Act), the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party was a proxy electoral representative of the often disenfranchised black working class. In terms of elections, however, the progressive social power base was overwhelmingly the unionised, industrial working class of the north.

Shifting the Balance of Class Forces 

   Geographical distribution—of industry and of working classes—has been crucial in determining the fate of American progressives at the ballot box. The main electoral strongholds of the progressives lay in the traditional northern home of urban industry, with its militant, unionized working class. As the Marxist economist Robert Brenner, writing in the New Left Review, has convincingly shown, the long-term breakdown of the social alliance between the Democratic Party and the Civil Rights movements coincided with the first of several grand geographical shifts in the concentration of US capitalist accumulative capacity. In sum, the declining industrial north, with its high-cost unions, was beaten down by a more muscular, low-cost, ideologically anti-union south. The white working class didn't, as is commonly assumed, ditch the Democrats over black civil rights; in fact, the unions remained loyal while capital relocated to the south. There the Republican Party waged a largely successful battle to win over a 'layer' (in Lenin's terms) of southern workers to a new ideology of free markets, thus sustaining low union density and stunting the growth of social movements against the free rein of capital.

   Any threat posed by progressives—either those of the Democratic Party or the working class and social movements aligned with them (not only for black civil rights but also, importantly, for women's rights, immigrants' rights and the rights of many other marginalised groups)—to the successful accumulation of capital has long since been neutralised. Indeed, with its domestic defeat at the hands of a globalising capitalist class, the situation was ripe for the globalisation of the term itself. Thus the pyrrhic victory: as the class content of the term "progressive" has been eviscerated, so has its international acceptability increased. In the Britain of today it is far less thorny to describe oneself as a "progressive" than to be saddled with the cumbersome sounding "socialist".

   David Miliband, recent loser of a UK Labour Party leadership election and favourite son of the Party's Blairite right, recently toasted Barack Obama's wrestling with the contradictions of progressive rule in straitened times. Although Obama has been forced to make welfare reductions that pain his liberal instincts, Miliband argues, his underlying progressive sensibilities have helped him understand their long-term unavoidability. All principle not aligned with the market is consequently deemed "dogmatism." In ideological terms, progressivism has identified itself with the market as the embodiment of progress. To attempt countervailing action, therefore, is to tempt the condemnation of history. The goals appear to be nothing more than making jobs (however short-term and disposable) and sustaining finance-based growth to the benefit of nobody but the imperious sounding "markets."

Playing Defence: The Obama Presidency

   For many, Obama has failed to define the field of play over the course of his presidency. For those sympathetic to him, the reasons for this are simple enough: despite the major legislative achievement (an extension of private healthcare), Obama's has been a largely "defensive" presidency. "Both Bill Clinton and Obama have spent as much time defending progressive advances—from Social Security and Medicare to voting rights and abortion rights—as they have trying to extend them," saidDavid Remnick recently in the New Yorker. Due to an intransigent right, Obama has had to narrow his horizons.   

   What specific set of achievements is Obama the perceived defender of? Little of the financial-regulatory architecture of the New Deal era remains intact, Glass-Steagall itself having been repealed by, of all people, a Democratic president. The welfare programs of Johnson's Great Society have become subject to a far higher degree of conditionality than its designers anticipated. Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and quiet support of gay marriage attest less to a clear legislative program than a series of public statements designed to evoke an attitude of pragmatic progressivism. Dodd-Frank, a damp squib of a regulatory effort, did exactly as it was designed to: that is, allow the president to look presidential while further guaranteeing Federal Reserve power over the practicalities of regulatory enforcement. This was "regulatory capture" not as unintended consequence of naive policy but as the guiding light of public ideals. It doesn't take an economist to realize that a central bank composed entirely of pro-market financialists with growing autonomy from any properly public oversight is at risk of making deeply partial choices. 

Obama has found the path to progressivism fraught with peril...

   Politicians like to talk about "winning coalitions": disparate groups of people rallying together around a hope-inspiring candidate. Viewed at a distance from the sterile politics of lobbyists and opinion polls, election victories look rather different. By Obama's 2008 victory, the organised, militant unionists of the 1960s and 1970s had been replaced with the modern era's lower middle class homeowners. This was, in essence, a 'layer' of the working class which had been initiated into patterns of high consumption and property ownership. The Democratic Party has consistently positioned itself as the champion and protector of these "middle class" interests. Take this as euphemism for a heavily-mortgaged, often debt-burdened lower middle class worried by federal and state-level insolvency and what that might mean for jobs. Thus the Democrats' defensive role looks more natural; its unwillingness (or inability) to expand social programs is a clue to its real interests. Certainly, worried homeowners came flooding back to the Democrats in the wake of the disastrous Bush presidency.

   Just as importantly, Obama has also benefited from the overwhelming support of newer immigrant voters, many of whom work in low paying, highly insecure jobs. Though these voters do not, for the moment, carry anything like the collective power of the established lower middle class, their numbers tip the balance of electoral forces in the Democrats' favour. Yet without organisation of poor and immigrant voters—along the lines of classical trade unions or more flexible social movements—Democratic policy will continue to bend itself towards the vulnerable lower middle class.

   Much as the earlier geographical relocation of industries and the revolution in technologies—from Detroit and the mid-west to Texas and Silicon Valley—all ultimately served to build a Republican voting bloc, so the recent economic crisis has personified another turning point in class alignments. The decline of domestic American industry through a combination of technological improvement, international competition and off-shoring of plants, has led to a permanent decline in long-term, stable jobs (the kind that historically leant themselves to unionisation). At the same time, a vast service industry has arisen, providing increasingly precarious work to a growing section of the population. Class in America has moved away from the traditional factory workplace, perhaps permanently. Yet the majority of the US population remains concentrated in the cities, the populations of which, though disempowered relative to their mid-century working class equivalents, are very likely to vote Democrat. This does not, however, guarantee progressive legislation. In fact, with the fractured, isolated character of the American working class being what it is, electoral politics is unlikely to properly represent class interests. A long-term stalemate is likely to ensue, with the Democratic Party easily able to get elected but unable to implement redistributive or classically progressive policies (perhaps even incapable of articulating them).

A Legislative Stalemate? 

   One of the great ironies of demographic changes in the western world—with ageing societies rubbing up against new, resourceful immigrant communities—has been the strange sclerosis of the once-mighty parliamentary and legislative systems that underwrote western democracy. As societies themselves have become more fluid and more contradictory, politics has become simultaneously more inflexible and more myopically fixated on outdated electoral maths and the management of the jobs market. As has been widely noted, this sclerosis of the centre has allowed extremism to flourish on the margins.

   Increasingly alienated, unrepresented voters are turning away from the staid, technocratic language of mainstream politics, with its utter dread of "populism" and all energy not easily contained by central policy-makers, yet those voters find few institutions ready to bear their anxieties. The answer usually proffered by the social democratic or progressive mainstream is a reincorporation of former voters by an appeal to their "extreme" instincts. 

   The real answer is rather to move away from parliamentary and congressional centralism with its outdated obsession with the workplace and management of the jobs market. In fact, given the decline of the portion of the American workforce in stable jobs, perhaps the answer lies in developing novel, informal associations and political organisations not dependent on the old trade union and party systems. A reorientation of progressive politics away from the traditional prioritisation of the jobs market—to focus on, say, the provision of decommodified public goods (healthcare, social housing, utilities); the democratisation of finance; the development of civil society institutions and community initiatives independent of the discredited parties—might serve to reintroduce some energy and interest into the old ways of doing progressive politics. Otherwise, progressivism will continue to narrowly locate its voters' interests in cheap consumerism, the jobs market, homeownership, and credit expansion to support it all. Framed in those bleak terms, what conservative wouldn't want to see a little more progress, after all?           

Image via wikimedia

Greece: Some Short Notes on Backing Down

I won't waste time going over the immediate background to Greece's capitulation. By now anyone reading this will surely know the negotiations' essentials. In the aftermath, much of the financial press is relishing a possible reaction by unsettled "über-Keynesians" and "neo-Marxists" in Syriza's ranks. By this they presumably mean anyone not intellectually shackled to neoclassical economic assumptions and angry at a looming return to austerity as supervised by the troika. From the look of the deal Varoufakis has made, a reaction of some force is deserved.

The deal betrays not only Syriza's commitment to democracy, but also the coherent economic critique developed by Syriza intellectuals like Costas Lapavitsas and Varoufakis himself. This critique, which gave Syriza real intellectual novelty, focused on the structure of the eurozone and the role of German surpluses in creating vast peripheral debt. The short of it is that Germany has tended to keep wage growth below productivity, undercutting ECB inflation targets and sustaining its export competitiveness to the detriment of importers like Greece. Huge German profits from exports were then recycled into finance, which was then leant back to households in the peripheral economies. The likes of Greece could not compete with German exports, couldn't help but get in debt to Germany, and because of the shared currency couldn't devalue to reanimate their export sectors. When banks inevitably went under after the US mortgage crisis in 2007-08,  liquidity seized up,  leaving households mired in unpayable debt. Banks were bailed out and in turn started speculating against the sovereign debt of those peripheral states which had recently paid for their bailouts. Thus the sovereign debt crisis broke out because of the structure of the EMU, the role of Germany in the eurozone, and the volatility of financialised economies.

What were the policies that logically followed from this critique of the euro crisis? In short, the critique suggested  that peripheral economies like Greece should: reinvigorate domestic demand; encourage investment on the basis of this demand; aim for productivity increases on the basis of this targeted investment in key sustainable industries; then increase wages  on the basis of rising productivity, thus contributing to demand and further growth. This could be a classic virtuous Keynesian circle of demand management, deficit be damned. The problem was always that, in order for such a strategy to work in the periphery, Germany would have to sustain competitive losses. It too would have to let unit labour costs increase in line with productivity. It would have to get over its terror of inflation. It would have to accept that its enormous trade and current accounts surpluses were not necessary for future European development. The suggestion that Greek politicians could impose this reversal of ends in the German "discursive formation" is deeply misguided.

What then did Varoufakis want and why is his retreat so devastating for the democratic hopes of Greece? Put succinctly, Varoufakis believes in the progressive potential of the euro. He believes in a hegemonic Germany in Europe, a smart currency union equipped to tackle fiscal imbalances, and a future where European prosperity is vouched for by the ECB. Although plausible, in practice, Greek political pursuit of this  pro-euro outcome takes an increasingly pro-German form. Pursued safely within the confines of EMU precedent, any future form of fiscal integration will accord with German power. De facto Varoufakis is willing to trade off all Greek democratic aims in order to keep open the long-term goal of EMU reform from within. But he cannot win by fighting the battle on the terms of German power. His limitations are analogous to the structural subordination of Greece in the union. The export orientation of Germany is presently being universalised as a simple, self-evident moral good by a very strong Germany "moral economy." Austerity as an impetus to thriftiness has become an absolute - regardless of austerity's damaging effect on demand. In negotiations Varoufakis appears to have accepted all the moral assumptions of German power, despite a long academic career of challenging them. The reality of German surpluses is peripheral deficits. This much is obvious. Varoufakis can no longer publicly state this - along with the need for cuts to Greek debt and serious reversals to austerity in Greece - because he is wedded to the euro.

The reasons for the Greek retreat are not simply a matter of weakness. Varoufakis really believes that European leaders can be made to believe in a Keynesian plan for growth. However, Germany will not risk its trade surpluses because of the extraordinary role played by thriftiness in its moral make up.  Add to this any risk to the euro's world currency chances and the rejection becomes total. Without any kind of concession of this kind possible in Germany (short of a sudden, utterly remarkable landslide for Die Linke), no Greek government can really tackle systemic Greek weakness. The same is true of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. Yet their alliance alone could not permit the defeat of German capital.

What then could defeat German power as embodied in EMU? The answer is obvious: default, exit, devaluation and a new round of public investment. Committed to increasingly distant and conservative reform of the euro from within, Varoufakis has refused to countenance this. To the detriment of Greece and Europe, Syriza has lost a vital bargaining tool as a result. Welcome back, then, austerity.

On Belief

There are two generic types of statement of belief, a fact which leads quite naturally to the idea that there must be two types of thing called belief; two things that just happen to share the same name. Here are two examples:

a. "I really believed that the Saddam regime had weapons capacity that posed an immediate threat to the west and to Saddam's own people."

b. "I have an abiding belief in the Christian God."

In both cases the speaker is the same: former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Like many of us he is quite able to make both kinds of statement of belief - often in the same conversation - without feeling there to be any kind of conflict at all between them. Statement (a), whether true or in fact a lie, is logically quite plausible: it is possible for someone to believe that a certain fact can be derived from a certain state of affairs. Inductive reason, this statement suggests, had led him to conclude that Saddam must be in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Statement (b) is quite different. It is quite absurd to think that it is based on any process of reasoning from observation, that the speaker has amassed appropriate cosmological evidence and derived from it the theory that God indeed exists. In fact, it is only fanatics who collapse these statements into the same thing, such as the very earnest young men in London's Brick Lane who once informed me that the Second Law of Thermodynamics proved Allah's existence. They had full-colour books with diagrams to demonstrate as much.

Since the two are so different, why not dispense altogether with this semantic space-sharing, freeing the two concepts once and for all from their awkward joint tenancy to pursue their separate housing destinies alone? After all, it would have been quite possible for Tony Blair to say, "I really trusted the evidence that..." or "I reasoned upwards from the evidence before my eyes that..." or "Making what conclusions I could from the meticulously assembled and arranged dossiers of my perhaps over-zealous advisors I decided that..." These would have done much the same job - their truth value, as I said, being a quite separate matter from their internal logic. After all, isn't this fusion of concepts we now quite happily distinguish between just a formal-linguistic hangover from a more barbarous age when speakers lacked the finesse of separating reason from belief?

Well, calling statements like statement (a) something different, and no doubt less catchy, does nothing to explain the status of statements like statement (b). Transhistorically, I'd wager, belief in God has always meant something different to the belief that the tiger will eat me if it gets a chance or the belief that the frayed, sagging rope bridge will collapse into the abyss below if I try to run across it. In fact, the more you think about it the less statement (a) seems all that loftier than the likes of statement (b) after all. Yet, it is of some kind of different order of statement. But there is no reason to assume it inhabits some statelier realm of thought.

The transparent obviousness of their difference is further muddied when we think about the many different instances of statement type (a). Indeed we may want to introduce a subdivision between those (call them a1) where we must directly complete an act of induction and (a2) where the induction has already been done for us. An example of (a2) might be when we, say, go to the toilet and trust that gravity will draw our bodily expulsions downwards instead of upwards. Then again, has anyone (outside of space) ever doubted this result and had to puzzle out whether or not to risk going for a wee? Does that make (a2) type statements closer in fact to type (b) statements? Do they operate on blind faith and casual assumption, on the individual surrendering her or his probing, rational intellect to a dulled collective incuriosity? The rejection of such acts of faith would put us in an absurd position, like that of Sartre's protagonist Roquentin in his novel Nausea, who rejects the complacency of the citizens of Bouville on the grounds that they have not clearly established for themselves - that is, assumed the full weight of their responsibility to know - how a chair may not become a tongue or a chestnut tree a giant phallus.

One can question altogether the notion that type (a) statements are inductive statements in the complete sense. Do they lead necessarily to a general theory or are they always, at a certain point, preliminary if not abortive? We did not arrive at a general theory of gravity from understanding that rivers flowed from mountain source towards the sea. And in fact, at most points, the observation would have halted at precisely the point of particularity: this river flows from its source to the sea... or somewhere unknown. The thought of generalising to all rivers would have come later, with the concept 'all rivers' and the concept 'world'. What's more, stopping short of such generality may be a strength rather than a weakness of practical thought.

How, then, to grasp the similarity between statement types (a) and (b) as more than merely circumstantial? For an empiricist the answer might be that, since all beliefs are reasoned from experience, God-belief and gravity-belief statements are of the same kind. It is simply that gravity-belief statements can be shown to be well-founded because they are based on observations that come from within the realms of human experience. But then aren't we guilty of doing the exact same thing as the earnest young men in Brick Lane who believe that they can prove God's existence with reference to physical laws? We turn the validity of statements of religious belief into a matter of evidence. Fine, you might think, let's relegate all belief to this status and simply dispose of religious belief - no great loss. Until you consider that neither observation nor custom are fit to evidence the universality of human rights or the rational principles of equality. Actually, Hume's analysis is a good deal more sophisticated than this, since he argues that the question of God's existence is simply debarred by human experience. It is unanswerable - but also essentially uninteresting.

Yet when somebody tells me that they believe in God or the Rights of Man I don't understand the statement the way I would if they told me they believed that the evidence in the Oscar  Pistorius case was convincing enough to convict him of murder. What's interesting here is that only the latter really requires a leap of faith - since, of the two, it is the only one that makes a claim on any evidence. For quite bald statements of facts - like the hair colour of the person in front of us; or our own names when we are compos mentis - it would be odd to say, "I believe that your hair is blonde" or "I believe that my name is Hillary." The power of inductive reasoning is that its provisional conclusions rely on attaining a degree of abstraction that cannot be derived directly from the starting point. This is, of course, the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. The statement about religion makes neither type of claim. Indeed, rather than a leap of faith, statements of belief in God are performative. They do what they say. These statements enact belief, reconfirming it in a similar if less painful way to self-flagellation.

To really get to grips with statements of religious belief we have to at least know that they come embedded in a context. In a syntactical sense, of course, there is no qualitative difference between saying "I believe in the omnipotence of the Christian God" and "I dance in the transparency of the beige Ether." What makes the former meaningful for us (as opposed to simply grammatically correct) is not some process of inductive reasoning but the symbolic order that it articulates and that we recognise through it. This is not down to grammatical structure or to inductive reasoning but to the way language constructs the social order in which our actions attain their meaning. This is what Jacques Lacan called the order of the symbolic: a language-mediated world of shared culture which we enter into when we construct meaningful sentences. What belief in God and belief in the findings of some ethnographical research have in common is neither the sharing of a particular conception of belief, nor simply a syntactical coincidence, but participation in a social process whereby meaning is established through convention. The name given in Lacanian psychoanalysis to the product of this process of establishing meaning through negative differentiation (i.e. the "logic of the signifier") is the symbolic order. Therefore, where both types of belief-statement coincide is in their shared articulation of different kinds of subjective commitment to something beyond onself.

Sartre, caught as he was between phenomenology and Marxism, is not very fashionable today. Yet it may be worth returning to his view of subjectivity in order to throw some light on the status of belief statements like "I believe in the omnipotence of the Christian God." Sartre took human consciousness as a starting point from which he developed a dialectical theory of subjectivity. It was not that he believed that language, the social world, and the "whole human adventure" didn't precede the individual; it was simply that an understanding of the "practical relations" between "men" was only possible from the position of the individual (a pan-social "perspective" was ruled out by the very fact that the individual observer was mediated by that society). Now, because Sartre felt that when new knowledge entered the universe of the subject the subject itself was transformed, he argued that "non-knowledge" itself played a key role in constituting subjectivity. The partial-sightedness of the subjective position was not simply a flaw, a limitation of vision, but was the characteristic which allowed that subjectivity to make sense of the world. Thus, the limits of the subject appear as barriers in the real world. Sartre gives the example of how partially-deprived eyesight is simply compensated for by the extra work of the eye, with the field of reality re-constituted through the eye's renewed efforts. The absence of full vision is integrated by the subject as a new, different totality, recognised as complete in-itself.

We need to ask ourselves, when assessing statements of belief, how new knowledge is integrated into a subjective position, and what happens to the subjectivity through this process. This is the question that should be posed to those who believe religious belief is "irrational": How do they propose to "enlighten" the world? By simply shining the light of reason upon it! What this ignores is one's own complex, subjective entanglement with the world. It is rare indeed that religious believers intend their professions of belief to contradict scientific discovery; rather these kinds of belief-statement are living attempts to resist the subjective integration of some new mode of control. "I simply believe..." is a form of resistance, a means of deploying the accumulated "practico-inert" - the old power of the symbolic - against some new challenge. One might go further than the atheist Sartre: the stakes in such arguments are not those between "reason" and "unreason", but those of ideological warfare. Not irrational leaps of faith, but reactionary deployment of a power that at least discursively precedes the world of capitalist modernity. As such "I believe..." has a profound oppositional force. In fact, professions of belief in the values represented by the American constitution or flag are no different really than professions of belief in the truth of the Bible or the Koran. We should question what it is about the contemporary conjuncture that not only summons forth such discursive resistances but conjugates them with altogether more tormenting exactions on the perceived enemy. 

Syriza is not the story

Syriza, the party of the radical left in Greece, is not the whole story - nor even the bulk of it. Syriza has been around for a while: leftover Eurocommunists and Trotskyists dissatisfied with both Third Way Pasok and the Stalinist KKE, until very recently they troubled few polls. But their organisational dynamism and openness to the social movements - and most importantly the social innovations happening on the streets of Athens - made them the perfect electoral vessel for new radicalism.

The successes of any radical politics are driven by shifts in emphasis between the Party and popular mobilisations. Syriza was the beneficiary of Athens' Syntagma movement. Yet as that mobilisation abated along with the constant rounds of strikes and near-insurrectionary protests, the movement settled into more long-termist social and cooperative projects. Provision of basic healthcare and foodstuffs - as I've mentioned before on this blog - form the organisational backbone of the social movements. Syriza feeds off of these largely urban, youth-led projects. It is from them that it must draw strength following the elections, especially as they enter the no doubt harrowing debt negotiations with the ECB that await them.

No one should doubt the Syriza leadership's economic brains however. Yannis Varoufakis is one of Europe's best heterodox economists - and a leading voice in Syriza. His account of the 2008 crisis The Global Minotaur is among the best- and truly global in scope. They will enter negotiations with this vision in mind - especially Varoufakis's proposal for a Europe-wide "surplus recycling mechanism" capable of publicly controlling the combustible flows of finance. But they as an isolated leadership of an isolated political party cannot achieve the debt reductions Greece needs alone. New mobilisations throughout Greece will be necessary. Militancy and strikes in Greece's weary organised labour movements are essential. As are the newer, non-production based social movements. The pendulum must swing back from organisation to mobilisation.

Greece will also need European anti-austerity solidarity. Syriza will no longer be engaged in national politics. The dialectical movement between Party and civil society will expand to cover all of Europe. Their capitulation will also be our failure. Yet European elites can be forced to compromise if the pressure is there. Syriza's victory in future negotiations, if it happens, will belong not only to the people of Greece but to all of Europe.

Top 10 of 2014

In 2014 the world finally spun off its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet consolation was always available in the form of culture, which continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.

 

3. Havel by Michael Zantovsky

This star-studded - and to some extent star struck - biography of the late Czech president and national playwright Vaclav Havel befits its author's CV: Michael Zantovsky is a former Ambassador to the United States and now Ambassador to the UK. In diplomacy more than other political dark arts, the face-to-face manoeuvres of the individual outweigh the grand symbolic gesture. To paraphrase Clausewitz, in the sodden turf of political warfare diplomacy is the clash of foot soldiers: charm works here like gunpowder. Zantovsky is most at home in the dazzling world of official state visits. However his subject clearly was not; hence, perhaps, Havel's need to keep people like Zantovsky close to him.

In one encounter with a surly, post-Berlin Wall Gorbachev, the naif Havel hands the General Secretary a short, plain-spoken note demanding equality between the superpower and the smaller nation, much against the advice of Zantovsky and others. Later Havel offers Gorbachev a "peace pipe" (though not of the jazz variety). Gorbachev is startled by both gestures; though, however idiosyncratically, they work. Havel, Zantovsky tells us on presumably intimate grounds, liked Gorbachev much more than Yeltsin, despite or perhaps because of Yeltsin's ebullience and fondness for a good Czech dinner. If there is a political - as opposed to purely personal - element to this we might assume it is that Gorbachev was closer to Havel in the global scope of his vision. Yeltsin exuded too much of the dirty odour of daily democratic doings; of the schemes and conspiracies that were, as the dissidents of Eastern Europe now realised, hardly the sole preserve of the ex-Soviet bloc. Zantovsky does little to explore the political dimensions of these preferences - again he is more comfortable psychologising than politicising his subject (he is a trained psychologist). He may also take Havel too much at his own "post-democratic" word. Havel's stated disinterest in politics - and his often metaphysical public ponderings - hardly mean his thought was apolitical. He was a president, after all.

Zantovsky's weaknesses are few: the prose is mostly eloquent and his satire of Communist officialdom effective, if familiar (Timothy Garton Ash would nod in approval). Still, his near perfect grasp of Anglo-American style is only slightly upset by niggling convention. The occasional definite article crops up where it shouldn't (not much of a failing for one whose first language does not use grammatical articles but perhaps some closer proofing could have been done for such a high-profile publication?) 

The problem for this reader is in his strengths. With over two hundred pages devoted to Havel's post-revolutionary years, the flashy diplomacy tends to dominate the nitty-gritty. The fundamental limits of democratisation in the context of deep economic liberalisation and the creation of extraordinary social inequalities, are not addressed by the book or the cadre of globetrotters who are its subject. For the real, unacknowledged subject of the book is in fact a political ideology which emerged as a kind of dissident orthodoxy to compliment the vanquished Communist one: "liberal-conservatism", which took power in all the new Central European democracies, though exceedingly narrow in its intellectual horizons, was the privileged partner of US power-play throughout the 1990s. 

In most cases the liberal-conservatives formed a kind of fringe within the broader, reformist and dissident movements. Most had begun life as scions of disinherited bourgeois dynasties (Havel himself was heir to the Lucerna and Barandov fortunes of his father) or more rarely as "papist"  devotees (as with Lech Walesa in Poland). Zantovsky, integral to the movement, is dismissive of the suppressed Trotskyists and reform Communists within Eastern Europe, as well as left social democrats and Eurocommunists beyond it. The real energy, he claims, came from the small band of conspiratorial liberals hustled together in the Balustrade Theatre, just off Smetanov Embankment in Prague's Old Town. Never mind that Havel started out as something of a left social democrat himself, the practical limitations of dissidence, which meant Marxism-Leninism could only be publicly opposed from within, pass Zantovsky by.

Whether they knew it or not, Zantovsky believes, the dissidents of 1968 - of so-called "socialism with a human face" - were liberals in nuce. This is not only revisionism; it is selective distortion of the real patterns of oppositional thought and its ideological weaponry. It risks reducing the long evolution of anti-Communist movements - both within and outside of the Soviet bloc - to a kind of "pre-history" of liberalism, which led in a deterministic fashion to the type of society born in the post-1989 world. This is a shame, as an opportunity is missed to write - from the perspective of Havel's own intellectual development - a history of dissidence true to its real manifestations. Despite his insistence on "living in truth" Havel's own truth was hardly static. It developed in the midst of a changing concrete situation, embracing the extreme social scepticism which inspired Central and Eastern European free-market fundamentalism only ever incompletely.

The backbone of Havel's thought was pristinely assembled during his decades of enforced inaction during "normalisation". Reference to Vladimir Lenin - about as significant in building the world Havel opposed as Havel was in breaking it up - is revealing: whereas Lenin's philosophy is in every sense one of action (indeed, the culmination of a legacy of thought-as-action inherited in part from Machiavelli and in part from Hegel), Havel's philosophy reflected his own material circumstances: physical inaction coupled with a profound commitment to the morality of the intellect. This was, to put it bluntly, a weakness. Havel's transcendental ontology - a "great chain of Being" in which all our actions are "inscribed" - knits all thought and action into a single, neat bundle through which each can be categorically judged irrespective of time and place. A sense of the "infinite judgement of being" hangs over his tortured self-recriminations following his arrest and the concessions extracted from him by the secret police in the 1970s. Havel realized at this time the non-correspondence of "the moral significance of an act and its practical consequences." (191) Although his friends saw no wrong in what he had done, Havel continued to reflect on the betrayal he had committed throughout his life. "Living in truth" was thus not a series of reconciliations made with the ontic, historical world as one found it; but rather morality was guaranteed by reference to the transcendentally ontological.

For Havel political morality was an immediate extension into the practical realm of this transcendental ontology. It is true, as Zantovsky argues, that the method and outlook of Havel's politics bore little relation to the workmanlike conservatism of Vaclav Klaus and his party the ODS (Obcanska democraticka strana or Civic Democratic Party). Due to ructions within the dissident elite it was not long after Havel's invitation to Klaus to join Civic Forum in 1989 that Klaus quit and formed ODS. Klaus's bullish style as prime minister inevitably jarred with Havel's aloof unworldliness. Yet on fundamental "democratising" processes - including membership of NATO, the European Union, and economic liberalisation - they would fall into line, even if for Klaus these were phrased pragmatically and for Havel as deep commitments.

It had not always been thus. In the first years of Czechoslovak democracy Havel, following his Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier, had toyed with the notion of a "universalist, collective security concept" (437) which would displace both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, tackling the geopolitical asymmetries in the European state system, and developing transparent channels of diplomatic and economic collaboration between East and West. Instead, by 1993, Havel became the world's most determined lobbyist for Central European membership of NATO and the European Union, both of which would isolate Russia and render non-members like Ukraine and Belarus deeply vulnerable to any shift in the balance of regional power. The Soviet bloc's foremost "peacenik" was soon keenly supporting US interventions in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. These were not, as Zantovsky rightly argues, simply manifestations of political expedience. As Havel put it, it was only a small step from the recognition of one's responsibility to "live in truth" to entering an international struggle in which others would be made to live in truth too: "We [Czechs] must accept our share of responsibility for peace and freedom in Europe." (434)

At root Havel's transcendental guarantee of morality was blind to its own presuppositions. The abstraction "civic democracy" became a powerful and enduring justification for liberalisation, privatisation and inequality once re-contextualised by historical forces. In this the rigour of Havel's moral thought - standing in such sharp contrast to the free market conventionality of his peers - merely gave deeper, albeit eccentric, thrust to Czech capitalist development. In his reconstruction of the "aura" of existentialism - or what Theodor Adorno called the "jargon of authenticity" - Havel was very close to a kind of philosophical common sense of the age. Although he critiqued the "divesting" of people "of their innermost identities" by the domination of cynical thought systems, he failed to account for that identity's formation in historical time. He reified the subject as the spiritual monad of resistance to the domination of the objective world. By the hypothetical designation "post-democracy" Havel meant an age of spiritually empowered individuals which would supersede the crass sectional interests characteristic of both the Soviet bloc and liberal democracy. Yet this fantasy of freely self-empowering individuals ignores the part played by the structures of power in constituting those very individuals.

Havel is ultimately a tribute to the naivety and idealism of the first postcommunist governments and their "pre-history" in the twilight years of the one-party state. For all the achievements - artistic, intellectual, and political - of that generation, not even a mind as supple and probing as Havel's could prevent the atrophy of that movement under the pressure of strict alignment with the United States and the verve with which the marketisation of daily life was to be pursued.   

Top 10 of 2014

In 2014 the world finally spun off its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet consolation was always available in the form of culture, which continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.

4. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

Read the article I wrote for New Left Project on Piketty, Stiglitz and liberal reformism here

Thomas Piketty, a Parisian economist, was plucked from data-churning obscurity last year in the wake of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is not difficult to see why: here Piketty combined a lifetime's devotion to data analysis with generalising, sweeping insight. There is both elegance and statistical weight to his much-cited formula that, where the average annual rate of return to capital (in the form of profits, dividends, interest, rents, and more) exceeds the level of growth in an economy for a long time, a "force of divergence" will concentrate wealth in fewer hands. Written in the form r>g (where r is the rate of return and g is growth of output), Piketty thus has a formula which demonstrates what is happening to wealth in especially, but not exclusively, the advanced capitalist economies. Piketty explains the divergence as a result of slowing growth, itself caused by dwindling population growth. He explains that, in conditions where returns to capital are high relative to growth rates, the owners of capital "need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole." (25) Wealth for the very rich will therefore increase very quickly while income to labour will stagnate with growth. Inherited wealth will come to dominate wealth earned "meritocratically" through hard work and achievement.

As I recently explored in an article for New Left Project, this analysis has put fire in the bellies of reforming, though ideologically quite "bourgeois", liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. Together they are turning their collective ire on inherited as opposed to earned wealth in a perceived showdown between meritocracy and plutocracy. Piketty himself, in his penchant for rationalism and the "cadastral survey", has clear sympathies for the ideals of the bourgeois republic. Good data, he claims, will save us all from the woes of bad distribution. 

His fatal flaw, however, is in the failure to deeply contextualise the historical data which he so ably surveys: Where, after all, did the great leaps forward of nineteenth and twentieth century growth rates come from? What happens to the capital that the wealthy do invest - why is it not generating growth? Or why, in the advanced capitalist west of the twentieth-first century, might growth be tailing off? As I suggest - following Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review - western capital may be confronting insuperable barriers to its future expansion. Without the high growth rates which funded the distributive losses to capital of the era of democratic suffrage, can capitalism in the west continue to afford democracy? Or, put in Marxist terms, with declining growth rates since the 1960s, and with the developmental fruits of increasingly competitive markets being captured by emerging economies as opposed to the old western industrial juggernauts, capital in the west must find a way of increasing its "rate of exploitation" (s/v, the ratio of surplus value to variable capital) through intensification of labour or it must find newly monopolisable commodities (hence the scramble to commodify, through patents and branding and intellectual property, ideas as opposed to physical goods as such).

Rates of return - including interest, dividends, and other financial wealth indicators - may, as Piketty argues, be stable; but profit rates for US manufacturing firms have experienced no steady increase since the 1960s (with the brief exception of the post-Plaza, post-recessionary Clinton boom in the US). Uneven development of the global economy and competition from rising regions have sapped the life out of the "base" of a growing number of western economies (as argued by Robert Brenner in his book The Economics of Global Turbulence, the data from which I rely on here). Though manufacturing is far from the be-all-and-end-all of economic vitality, advanced western economies - and the US in particular - have been forced to bear the brunt of manufacturing decline. Since the 1970s the US in particular has attempted to secure its hegemony, often by trying to maintain a strong dollar; expand financial dominance; intensify domestic consumption without increasing wages, and ultimately by disastrously committing to the "asset price Keynesianism" that led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. In the face of the failure of all projects undertaken so far, the advanced western economies must invent yet another new means to assert their global dominance and to coordinate hegemony.

Not, then, a generalised or generic "crisis of capitalism" (one of the great theoretical myths developed from the closed, abstract model of capitalism used by Marx); rather a crisis of western led capitalist development manifesting itself as a breakdown of US hegemony.

The pattern of US manufacturing decline will result in ever deeper financialisation of the "real" economy and the further concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. With western industry fundamentally uncompetitive, yet with torrents of investment still pouring in from exporting countries, the US in particular is forced to develop ever deeper credit markets to fund consumption in the midst of declining overall compensation to labour. "Neoliberalism" remains the catch-all given to precisely the kind of project that seeks to guarantee western power through financial hegemony; the only problem is that - despite the hearts it has won among policy makers and intellectual elites; despite the unprecedented string of victories it has won against organised labour; despite its command over global financial markets - it keeps failing to secure long-term stability in the declining west. By the standards needed to rejuvenate and secure western hegemony against growing international competition, neoliberalism has not been radical enough. The harsh reality is that any rise in the federal funds rate - and a consequent increase in the real rate of interest - will curb domestic consumption. Not only this but such a move will increase US reliance on imports, increase the strength of the dollar in a glut of foreign investment, and ultimately further undermine US industrial competitiveness. Although the US economy grew by five per cent in the last quarter of 2014, even the Economist accepts this is the product largely of a drop in oil prices and "faint" signs of wage increases. A 1.2 per cent growth in median income last year does not bring any relief to families who suffered a loss of income of eight per cent between 2008 and 2011. This is hardly a convincing uptick in overall compensation to labour. No doubt, in such conditions, finance will fill the gaps that wages cannot. The model has not changed, even if the number of jobs is increasing.  

The overriding question for western elites is: can the west lead through financial hegemony and low domestic growth alone or can it finally unburden itself of the immense amounts of over capacity in its economies and by what draconian, anti-democratic measures?  

Top 10 0f 2014

In 2014 the world finally spun off its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet consolation was always available in the form of culture, which continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.

9. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (dir. Katie Mitchell) at the Young Vic, London

See here for my post.

8. La Boheme by Giacomo Pucini at Prague State Opera

Mercifully bawdy, this opera by Pucini was amiable and exciting in all the right ways. Sort of like highbrow panto. Fuelled by cheap sekt (at least for us), we took our seats on upper balcony of the faded neo-rococo auditorium. Helpful subtitles kept us informed of the goings on far below. The building is the real star, however: much-loved and in need of a paint job, it nevertheless emanates a special charm, part glamour, part dysfunction. Originally opened at the end of the nineteenth century to cater for Prague's German minority, it feels a lot like something out of a Stefan Zweig piece or Grand Budapest Hotel for that matter.. Unsurprising, then, that the first performance here was of Wagner's The Master-Singers of Nuremburg. Things couldn't get more Dual Monarchy if they tried. Surrounded by the biggest road in central Prague as well as the central train station, its exterior balcony is also a fantastic place to watch the seething city pulse by. Prague in a nutshell then: glamour on the cheap with echoes of a vanquished past and a little hint of danger.

7. Ivan Lutterer, Photography Retrospective at Prague Museum of the Decorative Arts

Lutterer's photography examined the abandoned and forgotten. Action is suggested, incipient, but never actually present. There is a feeling that a quiet world is about to disappear for good, that a disturbance will soon wake the world up. But in capturing the moment before the change he prompts a longing for the disappeared world of the past. A quietly devastating collection.

6. Slav Epic, Alfonz Mucha, at Veletrzni Palace, Prague

The strangest but perhaps most ambitious single cycle of work I saw this year was Mucha's Slav Epic. It had to make the list for sheer ambition. In March I wrote:

"Though the ideas at work in Slav Epic - mostly self-conscious paeans to banished medieval wisdom - are very different to the earlier Paris work, the system of techniques remains the same. Thus the Slav spirit was to be articulated with more or less the same skill-set as his commercial period. Ecclesiastical interiors are rendered with the same lilting intricacy as the floral backgrounds of his Parisian street adverts. The adjustments of scope and scale, of symbolic and theatrical tropes, can hardly conceal the continuities. This is especially true of his recurring fetish for highly stylized, very white human bodies. Slav Epic, for all Mucha's attempts to juxtapose Slavdom with Germanic culture, unfolds in just as racially exclusive a world as anything more deliberately "Aryan". Not only is there no variety of skin colour (except in the case of the typically marauding Turks at Sziget), there's also little noticeable variation in the body-shape of the dramatis personae. Indeed the thing is composed entirely of easily transferrable and identifiable types - from steely youths to wizened kings, it all feels a bit Tolkien. Given that it ranges over hundreds of years, Slav Epic's cast is suspiciously homogenous."

5. Kazimir Malevich retrospective at Tate Modern

A reminder not only of Malevich's Suprematist shocker Black Square but also his painterly and experimental prowess. Also, brilliant contextualisation by Tate. Barmy in the best sense. In September I wrote:

"Malevich's defining work, The Black Square on White Background, is frequently described in punctuational metaphors: that is, as either exclamation mark or full stop. In this sense Malevich's key work of visual abstraction is quite often grasped in representational terms. More accurate than the punctuational image in this case, however, is the aforementioned syntactical one: that is, the injunction of the avant-garde. Black Square amounts to a kind of visual correlative to Mayakovsky's "Throw them overboard." (The pair collaborated in 1914 on, of all things, some cartoon satires of the German army). So imposing is the legacy of Black Square that the Tate has chosen to offset it by screening an off-kilter American staging of the opera which inspired it, Victory over the Sun (the stage backgrounds designed by Malevich). Thus "The Icon" (a pointed title for the room; one Malevich would probably approve of) is relatively marginalised in an exhibition which builds teleologically towards it. In the midst of such distraction (fuzzy Californian accents from on screen Futurist antics puncturing any air of reverence), Black Square can paradoxically be approached with fresh attentiveness. Its world historical importance is not foisted on the spectator by the gallery but rather left to hang dangerously in the suitably cacophonous air."