Since May, Tirana’s central boulevard had been the scene of the peaceful, and joyful “Flamingo Revolution” protests, named after the animals supposedly threatened by the Kushner-led coastal development project in the southern village of Zvërnec. But if the “Flamingo Boulevard” of the summer was a protest movement that styled itself as a revolution, what is happening now is an attempted revolution that styles itself as a student movement. The demonstrators are attempting to overthrow Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, elected for a fourth consecutive term only last year, with the aim of installing a caretaker technocratic government before new elections. On Saturday, it looked for a dramatic few hours like they might succeed. Thousands of protesters had filled Tirana’s main boulevard, pressing right up to the Prime Minister’s Office, Albania’s seat of government. Masked and black-clad youths kept pushing forward with howls of joy and rage against the water cannon and shield walls of riot police, cheers going up as petrol bombs exploded in flames against the armored trucks, forcing them to retreat. If the underlying causes — an end to political corruption, greater social spending, an entirely new political system — are the same as before, the mood among the protesters has become newly fierce. Gone is the summer’s disaffection with Edi Rama, replaced by a burning, visceral hatred.

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Whenever the rioters wavered, chants of “Down with the dictator, Down with the communists” rang out, motivating them to push forward once again into the thick clouds of tear gas, hurling back the CS canisters, and aiming fireworks at the police ranks. Hijacking a parked car, the protesters rolled it towards the police lines and set it aflame, forcing the police to retreat. Young women in gym wear and Covid masks, and young men in black tracksuits and ski masks ran as close to the police as they could to hurl their missiles, jeering and cursing at them, the men often thrusting their groins at their opponents to indicate, in a manner it does not take a fluent command of Albanian to understand, what they wished to do to the officers. Dozens of times that Saturday night, I had to escape from the choking tear gas; every time, within seconds, a volunteer ran up to squirt distilled water in my eyes, an indication of the impressive and seemingly organic level of student organization behind the protests. Tea, a 21 year old math student, asked me where I was from as she squirted water into my eyes. England, I spluttered. “Then you don’t know us Albanians, we are crazy as fuck,” she laughed. “He is going, and we are going to make him go, as quickly we can.”

At a pavement cafe near the protests, I met Genc Pollo, a prominent conservative intellectual and politician, and a strong critic of Rama’s government. An urbane figure, it was a surprise to see him with swimming goggles perched on top of his head, an attempt to keep out the tear gas from the protests he now observes nightly. If the Flamingo protests had been listened to by the government, he told me, all this violence could have been avoided. “But the answer from the government was mostly derision, mockery, calling them foreign spies, calling them algorithmic manipulators, and the usual stuff.” Instead of concessions, “immediately, with the police, replying with tear gas and batons, and now rubber bullets, it turned into a violent confrontation. That is “a very logical evolution of the situation. Should the frustration, and the discontent, and the legitimate grievances have been really dealt with, not with decoys, not with propaganda, and on the top of that, derision for the protesters, it could have been channeled into peaceful ways, peaceful solutions, and arrangements.” Was there a solution that ends with Rama still in power? “I don’t think that’s possible,” Pollo told me. “Since it has become tense and also violent, I don’t think it will last as long as the Flamingos. By the nature of it, I mean if it’s either way, it will be decided in a shorter time frame.”

Back on the boulevard, beneath the din of the tear-gas grenades, I asked Jurgen, a  20-year-old law student, why he was here. “Because of the corrupt government and everything that has been happening in the past 13 years,” he told me “The PM will resign, hopefully this weekend, because of the mass protests, he should reflect on that. We gave him 140 days of just asking nicely, he didn’t listen, so now things took a turn. This is the result of not listening to the people of Albania. I cannot name a single thing he’s done that has benefited me as a student or as an Albanian.” Behind him, a group of older women, one in a hijab, were busy tearing up the cobbled pavement and filling a wheeled shopping trolley with rocks to be trundled towards the young men at the front. Indeed, for a Gen-Z protest, there were a surprising number of men with gray hair at the forefront of the clashes, hurling rocks and metal poles at the police lines.

While the violence is led by students and schoolchildren, the polite middle-class protestors of the summer have been joined by older toughs, with indications that ultras from Tirana’s football firms have set aside their rivalries to unseat their embattled Prime Minister. To the chants of “Rama resign” and “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail” from the peaceful summer protests have been added a new one: the slogan of the Balli Kombëtar, the Right-wing Second World War resistance movement: “Albania for Albanians, Death to Traitors.”

For many protesters, however, it is contemporary geopolitics that most concerns them. “Rama will go,” one man in his 30s told me, “but he will only go when other nations, America and Europe force him to go, because he has a bad personality, he is difficult, and also because he is implicated with criminal gangs, and with Israel.” If the Kushner-led Zvërnec project was the spark for the summer Flamingo protests, a broader sense that the Rama government is too close to Israel has led to widespread conspiracy theories that Tel Aviv has sent reinforcements and crowd control equipment to the Albanian police, and that Rama has sold the country out to Israeli interests. Among the many demands for revolution scrawled along the walls of the boulevard was the terse spray-painted message: “Fuck the Jew Rama.” In a country that is fiercely nationalistic even by Balkan standards, multiple shades of political opinion, both Left and Right, have now converged on a joint struggle to overthrow the government. I asked Eldison, a 20-year-old software engineering student, if the Flamingo protests had become a revolution. “It was always a revolution, because we are fighting for our future, our rights, our country,” he said. “Rama won’t resign, but he will kill himself.” Why, I asked. “It’s kind of Jewish stuff,” he shrugged.

The Albanian government did not grant a request for an interview, instead offering to respond to a set of written questions. When I sent a detailed list, it didn’t answer them, instead forwarding me a transcript of Edi Rama’s television address in which he blamed antifa, “neo-Communists”, “neo-Ballists”, the political opposition and Iran for the disturbances. At a café in a shopping mall, I met a prominent Socialist Party insider who granted me an interview on the condition of anonymity. “What is new now is that there was this very sudden explosion in terms of attacking public institutions, destroying public offices,” the insider told me. “But I guess there’s also the element of the police doctrine linked to it, in the sense that there was an effort in the very early days, at least, to sort of let them let steam off.” The explosive rhetoric, meanwhile, which the insider blamed on “bots,” was also apparently new. “What do the bots say? You have sold this country to Israel. You are all thieves, that’s the second element. And we are gonna kill you and burn you. So these are the three overarching themes.”

The rhetoric was becoming increasingly dark, my interviewee told me. “The last time Albanians have called other Albanians traitors, it was in 1943, 1945, 1944. And it’s so out of context now, but again, this is a generation that does not understand the specificity of that word in Albanian history. And for me, it’s very dangerous.” Indeed, “there are three things I fear in terms of keeping me up at night,” the insider told me. The first was rising inflation of essential goods, carried over from Albania’s main trading partners Italy and Greece. The second was that the heightened rhetoric might cause a death, after which things could spiral out of control. The third, they said, was an unwillingness to explore constitutional means of resolving the impasse, in favor of absolute victory. “That’s why I’m a bit bemused by them saying, like, ‘We need a political answer to this crisis’, I mean, if you go to the government and say, ‘Look, before we talk, you should step down’, it’s a diktat. It’s not a political solution, right? It can be a political outcome, but it’s not a political beginning of the sentence.” Will Rama step down? “No, but there are discussions in terms of what’s the method forward.” The interview over, our smalltalk was abruptly ended by their driver coming up to warn them that protestors had reached the area, and that they should leave. This protest, like almost all the protestors’ gatherings now, was quickly dispersed by the police’s liberal deployment of tear gas and water cannon.

At the headquarters of Albania’s conservative opposition Democratic Party, I met Belind Këlliçi, the party’s young and American-educated vice-chairman. In his office, with signed photographs of Donald Trump and JD Vance framed on the wall behind him, a jumble of gas masks and plastic body armor sat on the floor. The night before, police had fired volleys of tear gas into the compound, in what Këlliçi told me was part of a plot to have agents provocateurs burn it down and blame it on rioters. I asked Këlliçi what he meant by his tweet the day earlier, which said that: “This monster who demands blood at any cost deserves the fate of every dictator who has been dragged away by his own people.” “[Rama] is a dictator, and he’s the head of the first narco-state in Europe,” he answered. “I say that the Socialist Party is not my enemy. It’s my political opponent, but for what Edi Rama has done to the Socialist Party, and if you can check the records in the last decade, you have dozens of ministers, mayors, members of parliament, and high-ranking officials that are in jail for either corruption, drug dealing, stealing money, money laundering, and other affairs.”

I asked Këlliçi what will happen next for Rama’s government. “I cannot tell you within this month or within this calendar year, but I’m very positive that within a very short period of time, in the next few weeks or months, it will be forced to leave,” he said. “There is no way that people can go on with this. There is no way that we will go in parliament and pretend it’s business as usual. We will not do it. We will stand by the students. We will stand by the protesters. We will do everything in our capabilities to support and protect them.” In terms of the coming days, Këlliçi claimed, “We have received a tip from his closest team within the Prime Minister’s office that he’s trying to have a fatality in the protest. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the students or from the police forces. He’s trying to use it as a justification to stop immediately the protest and to find a way to come to an agreement with the students and to say that this is enough, you cannot take it anymore, one fatality is enough, and we have to find a political solution.” But, Këlliçi added, “I don’t see the students stopping. I don’t see the civilians, the people of Tirana and other cities stopping.”

Certainly, the street violence, which now comes in waves of lulls and escalations, has not ended, and neither have the mass rallies, which have now been joined by striking university lecturers and teachers. On Friday, I’d joined the protesters outside the Ministry of Education on Durrës Street, which has become the hub for morning protests, before a far larger crowd gathers later in the day along the government boulevard. The police assumed a defensive posture, huddled around a water cannon whose nozzle twitched and dripped in anticipation of the violence to come. A line of schoolgirls linked arms and pushed to the forefront, daring the police to blast them away, which, after male protesters ran from behind them and began to throw stones, they did, first with blasts from the water cannon, and then with volleys of tear gas. I asked one of the girls for an interview. “My parents would not be happy,” she said, lowering her Covid mask. It would be anonymous, I said. “Oh, OK,” she replied, “We are here to bring down the dictator Edi Rama,” smiling happily before running away at the next round of gas.

Women were as prominent at the forefront of the fighting as men, one woman in her 30s wearing pink angel wings running right up to the police to hurl a rock into their faces, another young hijabi in modest clothes smashing a cobblestone against the curb then throwing it at the police, skittering away laughing. Later that evening, as the crowd of protesters outside government buildings on the boulevard morphed into a riot, I watched as a few hundred protesters began ripping up the cobbled pavements and hurling the stones at police. Some climbed onto the parliament building and smashed the windows with steel bicycle racks, trying to batter down its thick wooden doors before being dispersed with volley after volley of tear gas in fighting that went on through the night. In the first days of the riots, the government tried to project an air of normality, sending in overnight teams to clear away the wreckage and paint over the slogans on the walls, no doubt hoping that the protests would fizzle out naturally. Yet at the very least, large crowds smashing the windows and doors of parliament and the Prime Minister’s palace to burn them down is surely a distraction from normal parliamentary procedure. For over a week, Parliament was suspended as the riots overtook the capital’s daily life.

Each side, government and protesters, blames each other for the violence. On Friday and Saturday, it appeared from the scene that the police used force only defensively, after coming under sustained assault, or in an attempt to prevent the storming or destruction of government buildings. But in an attempt to prevent an Albanian Maidan in the capital’s seat of power, the police have evolved new tactics of dispersing attempted concentrations of protesters with water cannon and baton charges, rubber buckshot fired from shotguns, and constant volleys of tear gas, which hangs around the city center like a thick Dickensian fog. Potential rioters are pre-emptively arrested by police snatch squads, sometimes seemingly at random. At night, operators from the elite police special forces unit RENEA surround the Prime Minister’s office, where they make their disinclination to be photographed assertively clear. But if the police’s new tactics have eased the threat to government buildings, the result, so far, has been to push the violence into surrounding streets, as knots of rioters fight evening running battles in the main shopping boulevards and narrow alleyways in between, smashing up banks and CCTV cameras and erecting impromptu barricades of burning bins and street furniture to slow down the police vans chasing them, and throwing firecrackers and pyrotechnics into government buildings along the way in an attempt to burn them down.

The protests, and riots, have swiftly evolved from a shock event into part of the fabric of Tirana’s daily life, a new normality for Albanians to navigate, with all its inconveniences and strange advantages. The kiosk where I was accustomed to buying my preferred local cigarettes has been burned down, like many others in the city center. On the other hand, crossing the road, a hazardous enterprise in ordinary times, has been made easier by the destruction of all the center’s traffic lights, forcing drivers to begrudgingly stop for pedestrians. The television news channels are now devoted to rolling coverage of street battles, filmed by gas-mask wearing cameramen perched atop vans. Pavement diners in restaurants and cafés watch the disorder like football fans, restaurant owners hand out bottles of water to passing rioters to shouts of “bravo”, and confused tourists choke at the tear gas as they leave their hotels, trying to make their way between the clashing lines of demonstrators and police.

Along Mine Peza Street, one of Tirana’s main thoroughfares, almost all the shops are shut, with A4 signs proclaiming “We are with you! Please don’t destroy our business!” taped to the metal shutters. At the landmark Taiwan cafe, in a park beside the main boulevard, I watched burly security guards order away riot policemen attempting to enter to arrest protesters. When the police gave up and trooped away, the park erupted in cheers and clapping. With both sides digging in for the long haul, the battle to come is for the patience and goodwill of Tirana’s wider population. In one busy shopping street, I saw passersby remonstrating with rioters attempting to burn down a bank, gesturing angrily at the occupied apartments above. “I’m disgusted at this,” a café owner told me, “Burn down all the ministries, sure, good, but leave private property and small businesses alone. Rama will never leave. I’m 40 years old, and I know Albania will never change.”

Outside the Ministry of Education, I met the 25-year old MP Marjana Koçeku, elected to parliament for Rama’s Socialist Party only last year, and who resigned when the Flamingo protests began. As we spoke, over the loud explosions of tear gas grenades, our conversation was twice interrupted by older women coming up to kiss her, thanking her for her support. “Being part of this group [the Socialist Party] I understood that just by being part and having my vote on their support, I am contributing to the destruction of my country,” she told me. “I think it’s very important to have a deep reformation of the system of the political elite that we have right now, because they are strongly rooted in a mentality of corruption, in a systematic violence of making politics and [its approach] to the citizens. So if this is a safe and healthy solution for our country, I fully support it.” Indeed, she added, “I believe that this protest will not end soon,” she told me. “I expect it to last for some time, and I definitely believe in good and positive results of this protest, and of this movement. The only and the most necessary reflection into political actions that should be coming now from the government part, is the resigning of the Prime Minister, from his government, and from politics at all, because he had enough time to witness what our nation is really looking for, and enough time to understand that he cannot be the right image of leading Albania toward the European Union, especially with all the scandals that have popped up.” I asked Koçeku if the Flamingo Protests had now become a revolution. “Revolutions are beautiful,” she smiled, “I’m looking forward to seeing one in my country.”

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In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protesters to gather or hold their ground. The protesters’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy. With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.

Whether or not the protesters evolve new and more effective tactics, as the government has, remains to be seen. The country’s religious leaders — Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic, —have made joint appeals for calm and dialog, hinting at a political transition. But even if the government wished to negotiate with the protesters, it is unclear who they could negotiate with. Over lunch, an exasperated Western diplomat, who had attempted to reach out to the demonstrators, told me that they still don’t know who is leading the movement, or indeed if anyone actually is. The government’s hope, then, must now be that the attempted revolution turns back into a protest movement, with which it can choose to negotiate or else continue to ignore. Winter rains will soon be coming, perhaps diminishing the will of protesters to gather in large numbers, but also limiting the effectiveness of tear gas, upon which Rama’s authority increasingly rests. Another possibility is that the protests will evolve into an electoral movement beyond the control of either main party, as in Serbia, where the two-year student-protest movement looks this weekend to be on the cusp of power. The one thing that could tip the balance, almost everyone I spoke to told me, would be a death resulting from the riots, at which point, I was told over and over again, “anything could happen.”

But for now, two immovable objects, Edi Rama and the protesters, are locked in a battle of wills with no plausible means of de-escalation other than the total defeat of their foe. On Monday, on the boulevard, eerily quiet after the police’s overwhelming use of force the day earlier, I bumped into Bora again. “I don’t like it,” she said, gesturing at the small knot of placard-holders outside the Prime Minister’s office. “If this protest turns back to peaceful, we’ve lost.” She need not have worried: the clashes have since resumed. Overshadowed by turmoil elsewhere in Europe, Albania’s most serious political crisis in years still has a long way yet to go. Perhaps, rather than appealing to EU institutions for mediation, the greater impact will be a disenchantment with a European core not so very different in its essence to Albania after all.

It began in mid-September in Créteil, in the suburbs of Paris, with lycée students marching in solidarity with their striking teachers. Three weeks later, hundreds of schools are closed, the Place de la Bastille has filled again, and the protests have spread to Belgium, Italy and now Greece. The demands are embarrassingly modest: enough teachers; classrooms that are not overcrowded; buildings that are not falling apart. The state’s response has not been modest at all. Almost 7,000 arrests, 86% of them minors. A 15-year-old lost his left hand to a stun grenade. A 16-year-old was partly blinded by a rubber bullet. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister lectures them against “violence” and lambasts politicians who “use this anger to conduct their electoral battles”.

I keep watching the videos. Many of the students could put our parliamentarians to shame with their free-flowing speeches. Others cannot string two sentences together. And, to be fair, some indulge in ugly violence. As I watch them, my mind races back to my own student days in England. To our rage at Margaret Thatcher’s determination to slash and burn our universities’ budgets. And to my friend Fiona — whom I wrote about in my last book as well as in my last piece. As student activists, Fiona and I shared one political defeat after the other, from the Miners’ Strike to the Wapping Dispute. One day, exhausted, I asked Fiona if it was time to surrender, to give up. Her answer has stayed with me for 40 years: when you join a good struggle, she said, you learn to live in near proximity to giving up without ever actually doing so.

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That’s the political passion that can beat in young chests. It is not always articulate, it is rarely disciplined and, as I learned in Thatcher’s England, it is usually on the losing side. Fiona’s one regret was that we were fighting splendidly to defend communities that deserved defending, but for causes that screamed anachronism. “Why can’t we bring the country to its knees to demand clean energy and a free press?”, she asked, as we fought in solidarity with coal miners and printers whose labor resulted in abominable rags like The News of the World and The Sun.

The French lycéens have no such problem. Their cause is anything but anachronistic. They are demanding the one thing that every social economy needs, and which ours have refused to fund since at least 2008, well before that in Britain and my native Greece: investment in the future, beginning with the people who will live in it.

Here is the cruel irony. For 15 years, centrist politicians have been telling French families that there is no money: for teachers, for classrooms, for anything that does not yield a quick rent. Yet after 2008, that same center found unlimited sums for the bankers and, today, finds gargantuan sums for armaments. Even Renault is at it, pivoting from quirky cars to killer drones. For almost two decades, austerity for the masses and “socialism” for bankers and corporations choked investment.

There is no puzzle here. Why would big business invest the rivers of money the central bank was providing them for free: when the masses were too impecunious to purchase high-end goods? Naturally, big business took the funds and bought back their own shares. As these shares skyrocketed in price, so did the managers’ bonuses, house prices in Paris’ leafier neighborhoods, and the price of everything — from crypto to art — that the rich buy when they have money to burn. And here’s the rub. In the midst of all this money-making, productive investment collapsed. Why invest productively when you can make more by buying houses, paintings and Bitcoin?

This is why German industry is withering, why France’s schools are crumbling, and why so many young people wonder what life will look like in a decade, especially now that AI is pulverizing entry-level jobs hitherto reserved for the “good” kids who did their homework and followed the proscribed bourgeois path. It is bizarre for the grown-ups to dismiss the students blocking their lycées as rebels without a cause. They are the first generation to receive the sky-high bill for the combination of austerity for the many and socialism for the very few that their parents bequeathed them.

As I watch them, a darker thought creeps in. The incredible youth uprising of May 1968, when students urged us to demand the impossible, ended up reinforcing conservatism. Will today’s uprising end up feeding the extreme Right that loathes them, the very forces that thrive on their despair? Six months before the presidential election, Marine Le Pen leads in the polls. We have already seen how her side will play this.

The demonstrators from the banlieues of Créteil and Seine-Saint-Denis are being painted as black and Arab hooligans, foreign bodies burning the Republic. As for the furious white bourgeois kids of central Paris, they are portrayed as spoilt brats, too clever by half, privileged products of elite lycées who understand nothing of what it means to work to put food on the table, to be real victims of mind-numbing inequality. The far Right’s strategy is tried and tested: divide the youth along the lines of race and class; set the frightened middle classes against both; then walk into the Élysée promising order. It seems the young cannot win. Or can they?

Seeking hope, I turned to an article by novelist Arundhati Roy, describing another youth uprising half a world away. In India, the Chief Justice contemptuously dismissed unemployed young Indians as “cockroaches”. A student, Abhijeet Dipke, replied on Instagram with a single question: “What if all cockroaches come together?” Millions answered. The Cockroach Janta Party was born, first demanding the resignation of an education minister whose ministry had allowed exam papers to leak, devastating the lives of millions. On 20 July, tens of thousands of young “cockroaches” descended on Delhi and marched towards parliament, through tear gas, batons and the barrels of assault rifles. Months on, they are still out on the streets.

The parallels with France are striking. In Delhi, as in Paris, it began with education: with the state’s contempt for the young people it was meant to prepare for the future. In Delhi, as in Paris, the demand that sparked the fire quickly became, in Roy’s words, “small change”. The real target was the rot across the entire system of governance. And in Delhi, the police reportedly prepared trucks of stones and pre-damaged vehicles so that the young would look violent and the state would look as if it were acting in self-defense. Remember that the next time a French minister speaks about “violence”.

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But the most important lesson from the cockroaches is what they got right. Instead of lecturing, Roy writes, they showed Indians what their country could look like: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, people of every caste and class protecting each other as they faced down the police. Dipke, a Dalit, dared say out loud what cautious opposition politicians would not: that if his name had been Khalid, he would already be in jail. In short, the cockroaches refused to be split along the fault lines that the Modi government has spent a decade deepening. They did what my friend Fiona always demanded of us: they stopped explaining oppression and started practicing solidarity.

By looking to India, I feel I now have an answer about France. The Republic’s youth can win if the kid from Créteil and the kid from the Lycée Henri-IV refuse the roles that the far Right and the extreme center have written for them. If they see that the crumbling classrooms of the banlieue and the overcrowded ones in central Paris have the same author. If they understand that their dignity is indivisible, that, as Solomon Burke once sang, “none of us are free if one of us is chained”.

But Roy also issues a warning, one that we, the adults, must heed. Spontaneous rage dissipates, she writes, unless accompanied by real political work. “States have the power to wait. People don’t.” The French government is already waiting, promising a “plan” by the end of October and hoping the students will be back in class, exhausted, by Christmas. Here I find myself closer to my mother, a second-generation feminist, than my friend Fiona. Whereas Fiona distrusted every organization, as a finishing school for future bureaucrats, my mother, who for years faced down organized misogyny alone, knew that without organization, life is dreary and struggles are short.

The young have lit the fire. It is now the duty of trades unions, teachers, parents and, yes, the parties of the Left to stop jockeying for position and to turn this moment into a program: money for schools; an end to the austerity that starves them; and a public-investment drive in the sectors of the future, funded by the means some of us have been proposing for years.

If the Left fails them, the far Right will harvest their anger, just as it harvested the anger of the gilets jaunes. Yet get it right, and France’s young cockroaches will achieve more than what their predecessors did in 1789, 1871 and 1968: not merely warning Europe, like a thermostat, that a boiling point has come, but helping us turn away from fascism, racism and mindless conflict. The canary is singing again. This time, let us not wait until it falls silent.

There’s every chance, here, that Burnham was familiar with Trotsky’s quip long before he entered No. 10. Like many Labour statesmen — Tony Blair and Keir Starmer among them — he enjoyed a youthful flirtation with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas. That’s three out of the last four Labour PMs confessing to intellectual dalliances with the founder of the Red Army. Blair and Starmer, alas, achieved high office only to strengthen Britain’s nightmare political economy of bloated arms-length regulatory regimes, rampant rentierism, privatized national assets, and tragicomic levels of state incapacity, leaving us doubly vulnerable to today’s global shocks.

Labour’s latest prime minister claims to be different, promising a rupture in this peculiarly British mode of governance. But these kinds of epochal shifts, revolutionary premierships on the level of Gladstone or Attlee, are rare indeed. Burnham’s own Trotskyist fling was experienced via the contemporary protestations of the Eighties political celebrity Derek “Degsy” Hatton — a sharp-suited Scouse firebrand (and fellow Evertonian) with a predilection for gold watches, expensive tailors, personalized number plates and “vulgar Marxism”. Hatton was the larger-than-life de facto leader of Liverpool City Council when it thrust itself daringly into the national spotlight, setting illegal budgets and implementing mass housebuilding initiatives even as its Whitehall grant was slashed. Hatton offered a New Deal-style, localized and limited Keynesian stimulus effort dressed in revolutionary garb.

Yet that garb was important, as Degsy basked in a kind of belligerent, workerist anti-intellectualism, poking fun at the academic, London-based New Left scene. The Scouse Trot was quick to differentiate the kind of Liverpool socialism he was enacting with what he himself called the “Loony Left” — “more concerned,” Hatton said, “about black mayors and gay rights than… about building new homes.”

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A teenaged Andy, fresh-faced and idealistic, would have seen Hatton on TV every night, fighting his birth city’s corner against Thatcherism. And it’s hard not to compare it to Burnham’s own stint as a righteously indignant mayor of Greater Manchester, railing against Covid lockdowns. But where Burnham’s anti-London combativity earned him the moniker “King in the North”, his former hero Degsy eventually became known as “King Rat”. After Hatton and his posse almost bankrupted Liverpool, expelled from Labour, and removed from office, he used his newfound infamy to launch a career in low-rent TV appearances and Christmas pantomimes. Now 78, he’s a successful property developer, albeit one awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit bribery and intimidate witnesses. There’s another instructive lesson for the prime minister: revolutions do have consequences, and often they are not especially positive.

Perhaps that history explains the caution Burnham has shown towards governing so far. To be sure, “resilience” has become the center-left’s economic watchword, overtaking the “efficiency” of the high neoliberal era. And why not? As the economist Wolfgang Streeck has noted, that hyper-global age entailed a “dictatorship of the lowest marginal cost” — all just-in-time supply chains, outsourced production, and highly mobile capital in search of the cheapest possible inputs. Yet if Burnham has imbibed the critique, and talks about a return to public control, reindustrialization, and economic security, his fine words have yet to translate into action. Yes, Burnham seems to have learned from Degsy, be a rebel — but not too much. Yes, embrace socialism — but not yet.

The problem, here, is that Burnham’s party doesn’t necessarily have time for moderation. The era demands a radical rupture because the old order has so palpably failed. As one MP tells  me, the prime minister represents Labour’s “last roll of the dice”, to see if there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s a sentiment you can hear elsewhere too. A thoughtful essay by one of Starmer’s former speechwriters recently pondered whether the party would “go gently into the sociological night”, abandon a diminished working class, and lean into its minoritarian status as an institution for progressive public sector workers and professional urban graduates. The nadir of British social democracy experienced under Starmer required a forceful internal response. Yet if MPs acted to remove one serially unpopular leader and install the man that polls and focus groups deemed most acceptable, it’s unclear, as Burnham prepares to take the podium in an airless glass-and-steel convention center, whether that’ll be enough.

There are reasons to think it won’t be, not least given the looming geopolitical storm clouds. “We’ve all become accustomed to shit economic news over the past 18 years,” says one backbencher. “It’s baked in at this point.” Still, there’s an aching dissonance emerging between the inchoate Burnhamite message of hope and change, and the slow realization that the light at the end of the tunnel may turn out to be an oncoming train. Certainly, most of the public have not registered the implications of Iranian-backed insurgents holding the global economy hostage. The number of people who think they will be worse off next year has decreased from 40% to 33% since April, with 20% now thinking they’ll be doing better. Yet Britain is more exposed than most, especially since successive prime ministers — Hayekian free-marketeers and former Trotskyists alike — have created a service-based, import-dependent economy, one reliant on foreign capital inflows and buoyant international trade.

The irony, of course, is that Burnham always wanted to be a domestic leader, with cost-of-living salves held up as the great unifying totem of his new regime. But as Trotsky also learned — when, for instance, his plans for world revolution were stymied by the Poles in 1920 — exogenous events have a way of intruding on even the best-laid plans. With the Bab al-Mandab blocked, inflation expectations are likely to be adjusted upwards. From there, gilt yields will spike accordingly. John Healey’s first Budget anyway seems unlikely to be cheerful.

Perhaps the best Burnham can hope for in the short term is to borrow from Starmer’s book and act the statesman on the world stage. And, to be sure, sanctioning West Bank settlement goods will play well with sections of Labour’s base, just as action on AI safety does to wavering Lib Dems. But that hardly equals a revised settlement on Britain’s place in the new multipolar order. Nor does it solve the problem of our impotence in the face of a Washington hegemon seemingly intent on causing chaos. Burnham is no Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron, progressive leaders with their own grand projets on “strategic autonomy” and the future of “middle powers”.

More than any particular policy, though, Burnham should probably take a more general lesson from Degsy and his Trotskyist forebears: if you’re backed into a corner, then fight. Thatcher may have beaten Degsy in the end, but the struggle was just and necessary. As Leon said, revolutions have a way of calcifying, recommending as an antidote a “permanent revolution” more than the settled “socialism in one country” backed by Stalin.

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And there are plenty of candidates that a radicalized Burnham could choose to take on: the OBR and Treasury, which together treat investment as a liability rather than an asset; the Bank of England, which raises the cost of government borrowing by engaging in successive rounds of quantitative tightening; the ECHR, which would launch legal challenges against any moves to bring utilities back into public ownership without eye-watering sums being paid to foreign hedge-fund shareholders. “I think he’s doing well,” as one prominent backbencher puts it, but he “needs to grow in confidence… and generally speak and act with more clout and urgency.”

So rather than backing down against the legalistic instincts of the civil service, the orthodoxies of the Treasury, or the apoplexy of the business pages, perhaps Burnham should return to his roots, embody the tribune-of-the-people persona that served him well in the North West, and declare war against Britain’s established interests. An icepick to the head killed Trotsky’s revolution. Thatcher’s revolution killed Degsy’s in Liverpool. A ballot-box verdict, delivered with rather less drama, is what finishes leaders whose revolutions never even start.

No other theme in popular culture combines such enduring popularity with so unbroken a record of failure. Of course, cataclysmic events do happen from time to time — as I type these words, the people of Venezuela are struggling with the aftermath of a major earthquake. But there’s a crucial difference between real events of this kind and the gaudy dreams of universal destruction that cluster around apocalyptic claims, like so many wasps round a jam jar.

In Venezuela, after all, the survivors are picking up the pieces of their lives and preparing for a slow return to business as usual. The core premise of the apocalyptic faith, by contrast, is that business as usual will never return. An apocalypse places a full stop at the end of everything familiar, and if anyone survives to witness the aftermath, they will inhabit a world wholly unlike the one that was destroyed. The mere fact that destructions so total don’t happen in the real world does nothing to dent the devout faith that some time soon it will happen to us all.

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The predictive power of dreams

By John Michael Greer

A contribution from the odder end of postmodern philosophy may be useful here. You will rarely catch me quoting Jacques Derrida, but just this once he has something useful to contribute: hauntology. The word is a portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology” (or in Derrida’s own language, of their exact French cognates “hant” and “ontologie”). The concept is the recognition that something which has never existed, does not exist, and will never exist, can still affect human culture and thought in much the same way as something that possesses a less phantasmal mode of being.

Derrida coined the word during a famous discussion of Marxism. That was wholly appropriate, of course. The entire apparatus of Marxist historical mythology — all the way from primitive communism through the arrival of the Workers’ Paradise, for all the world like the New Jerusalem descending from the clouds — is a 19th-century construct pieced together from scraps of inaccurate anthropology and random pieces of Christian apocalypticism with the serial numbers filed off. Such oddly assorted raw materials are common enough in the backstories of popular movements.

Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were quite correct when they claimed, in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, that the specter of Communism was haunting Europe. While the ghost in question was chased out of its familiar European haunts by the events of 1989, it still hovers unbanished in Russia, where the Communist Party is the second-largest political party in the country, and in the United States, where a resurgent socialist faction is battling the mainstream Democrats for control of the party. Given the massive unpopularity of socialist ideas in the US, outside a handful of huge and very liberal cities, that struggle may yet succeed in handing the midterm elections to Donald Trump: a reminder, if one were needed, that when idealists go charging into the political sphere, the outcome of their actions may not be what they hope.

The specter of apocalypse has less immediate political impact than that of the ghost just studied, since believers in imminent cataclysm are much less likely than their Marxist peers to join political movements and try to overthrow governments. Even so, belief in the impending end of the world can have considerable indirect impacts on politics, economics, and society. Consider the prepper movement in the United States — a complex phenomenon poorly understood by most of its critics. On one end, you have people who have reasonably decided, after watching the remarkably inept responses to recent natural disasters by state and federal agencies, that having food and other necessities stashed in safe places might just be a good idea. On the other, you have believers in full-blown apocalyptic ideologies insisting that this time for sure the Antichrist or some other figure of dread will show up and give red-blooded Americans the long-awaited chance to blaze away with automatic weapons. There are, of course, many other options between these two extremes.

While the prepper scene in any of its variations inspires and supports a certain skepticism toward government, it has little direct impact on politics. Yet its indirect impact is considerable. Prepper networks routinely become informal conduits for political ideas, as well as rules for storing powdered milk and recipes using dried beans. Since the networks exist outside the accepted channels of information flow in American society, and make a point of not being too conspicuous in the mainstream culture, pundits and politicians alike can end up blindsided when large numbers of their constituents take up ideas that the talking heads of the establishment media never thought to push on them. It was thus by way of prepper networks, among other channels, that the ideas that paved the way for Trump’s victories — notably the rejection of the bipartisan consensus on immigration and economic globalization — found their way well in advance to a considerable share of the US electorate.

Paying attention to upsurges in apocalyptic belief is, therefore, one way to gauge when such conduits for alternative ideas may be forming, and perhaps yield clues about which ideas are likely to flow. Apocalyptic beliefs are important in another way, however, which they share with other beliefs at odds with the consensus reality of their society. Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous book on the subject, form a sensitive indicator of social stress. Notice where, when, and among whom strange beliefs find a substantial foothold, and you have some chance of guessing where stresses are rising toward crisis.

This was why imperial China had an entire government department dedicated to keeping track of omens, and required local mandarins to send in reports of any strange events from local people. That gave the central government a back-channel view into the collective thoughts and passions of people even in the most remote provinces. The power of strange beliefs and rumor panics to flag unrest before it breaks out has not diminished in modern times. It’s hardly an accident, for example, that the same regions of the rural United States that were seized by the cattle mutilation rumor panic in the Seventies became hotbeds of anti-government sentiment a decade or two later.

The cattle-mutilation panic evolved into the centerpiece of a flurry of competing conspiracy theories: was it government agents who were mysteriously slaughtering cattle in the rural West, or was it Satanists doing those evil deeds, or were aliens in flying saucers responsible? The lack of a single focus didn’t make the signal less important. When conspiracy theories flourish, whether or not they reach consensus on the plot’s supposed nature, that tells the attentive watcher that large numbers of people have lost faith in the government that rules them. By the time conspiracy theories arise, it’s too late to resolve the situation with propaganda or the suppression of free speech — the government needs to change its policies in response to public pressure, and the punishment of a few high-ranking scapegoats is usually needed as well.

Apocalyptic beliefs have a different message to communicate, though one no less explosive. People place their faith in an imminent end of the world when society as it exists refuses to meet their needs, and gives them no hope of better times ahead. Think for a moment of the state of mind that would make you regard the prospect of huddling in a burnt-out basement, eating rats if you’re lucky enough to catch them, as a less daunting option than waking up tomorrow morning and going on with the life you lived today. Plenty of people have reached that state. While it’s certainly true that few of them genuinely grasp what life would be like if they got the collapse that anchors their dreams, the prevalence of such fantasies shows how little faith they place in the future toward which their societies appear to be heading.

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Nor will that disaffection remain safely locked away in the realm of fringe beliefs. It bears reminding how short a time passed between the first great wave of apocalyptic frenzy in the American colonies, the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the outbreak of the American Revolution — or how an even shorter interval passed between the second such wave, the one that culminated in the so-called “Great Disappointment of 1844”, when tens of thousands of Americans waited vainly on hilltops for Jesus to appear, and the outbreak of the American Civil War. British readers may draw a comparable lesson from the way that Puritan apocalyptic beliefs in the first half of the 17th century helped drive the rising spiral of political and religious passions that sent the New Model Army marching across the British landscape and brought Charles I to the headsman’s block.

It’s possible and, I suggest, useful, to generalize from these examples. The strange popular beliefs and rumor panics of a society are its collective dreams, and they can be interpreted in much the same symbolic manner as the dreams of individuals. In a very real sense, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic beliefs, and other forms of popular rejected knowledge are the ways ordinary people say the unsayable, and communicate in veiled form those realities of their lives that can’t be mentioned in public.

I’ve mentioned above some examples of where these trends can lead. In the United States and Britain alike, we may be closer to a repetition of such scenes than the respectable thinkers of our time are willing to recognize. For this reason, if no other, close observation of the specters haunting the collective imagination of our time is an urgent necessity.

In other words, the movie is perfectly timed for people who want to latch on to the revolutionary politics it portrays for their own reasons. Along with being an excellent movie, then, it’s a sort of Rorschach test, a psychic prompt at which agitated people can cast their political feelings. Some of these feelings have been pretty raw, directly connected to thoughts of real political power. For example, David Marcus of Fox News let on that the movie made him “angry” at leftists in a way that reminded him gratefully of the “cracking down” the Trump administration is doing against Antifa, and his anger at those Antifa radicals allowed him imagine how One Battle After Another would be “a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail”. I liked the movie a lot, but even I didn’t find it that evocative.

The film is a sort of love triangle: between revolutionary comrades Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and the main antagonist Federal Immigration honcho Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) who gets hotter for Perfidia than even Bob is. But, since the film is (loosely) based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it’s a Pynchonian love triangle — wild, improbable, so pervy it’s virtually supernatural. One Battle After Another is delirious fun, one of the most delightful movies I’ve seen in years. It touches daringly but not heedlessly on themes of political violence. Finally, though, and despite the shrill warnings of its conservatives detractors, and despite the dreamy swooning of its progressive admirers, it’s not politics. It’s just a movie, and thank God for that.

Anderson’s greatness has always consisted in his ability to make coherent art out of close and often lurid and somehow also epic psychological studies that are punctuated by juddering action and intimate violence. Thanks to these heavy counterpoints, an Anderson film can often leave you feeling kind of battered and wrung out when it’s done. One Battle After Another reverses this balance, in a way that makes it both more fun and less draining than, say, There Will Be Blood or Magnolia. That is, it has a setup of chaotic adventure on a large scale and settles only occasionally into close observation of the crazed G-Men and vain utopians who make up its cast. Indeed, despite its apparent political commitments, it’s one of Anderson’s least serious movies. The only Anderson film more larkish, finally, than One Battle After Another is Inherent Vice, which also draws from a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The Pynchon connection is key. Anderson’s Inherent Vice is closer to its Pynchonian sourcematerial than is One Battle After Another. But the new film is more Pynchonian in tone and spirit.  As the movie goes on, jumping 15 years when we meet lovely Willa (Chase Infiniti) as the adolescent daughter of fugitive Bob, its story grows more larkish, indeed slightly magical. Events transpire not according to some cold causal logic but from a sort of cosmic horniness familiar to Pynchon readers, the Fates really wanting in their loins for things to come together in a certain way, which makes the playing out of the assorted mortal destinies basically comic, basically funny. This places all the radical political action in an almost mocking light that makes both the progressive swooning and the conservative frothing about One Battle After Another seem like different forms of wish-projection.

This is not to say that the politics are insincere. Pynchon surely hates Nixon and Reagan and other buzz-killing Republican finks he sneers at in passing. But he’s too much of a postmodern jokester to make such dour hating a tonal feature of his fiction. Even the political bad guys get taken up into the machinery of Pynchonian play, and become funny. And Anderson surely hates the apparatus of immigration detention he portrays in One Battle After Another. But he’s too “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon not to show the avatars of this apparatus as clownish functionaries rather than slavering demons. The film’s enforcer supreme, made into an unforgettable grotesque by Sean Penn, has that great Pynchonian name, Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw, and he is consistently hilarious, literally never for a single instant a figure of seriousness. There’s an evil secret society in the film that seems to function as a shadow government, or some kind of white-supremacist Avengers, which conservatives are railing against as a slanderous outrage against the honor of America’s virtuous regime. Its name is the Christmas Adventurers Club. Its slogan or secret password is “All hail St. Nick”. How a pundit, even a Right-wing pundit, can mistake the planet where all this happens as our Earth rather than Near Pynchonia is a mystery. But then debilitating literalness is a job hazard, or perhaps a job requirement, of the Constantly Angry Commentator.

In other words, One Battle After Another is sincere about its politics, but it is not, as an aesthetic matter, serious about them. And this unseriousness is a good and saving feature of the film, because its politics really are pretty silly. The first time I saw it I thought to myself as the credits came up, “Wow. I have never loved a movie so much that had such dumb politics.” It’s the violent methods of the film’s revolutionaries that conservative critics and progressive admirers have found terrifying and inspiring, respectively, but more telling are the political ends that animate these radicals. The film seems to be about a bunch of Leftists planning revolutionary change for fascist America, but the revolution they’re trying to stage is on behalf of the utterly conventional moral quibbles and lifestyle priorities of bourgeois liberals. (I’m not saying these humdrum ends are dumb in themselves, necessarily. I’m saying that, if you’re pursuing these things that we most already have through the dramatic methods of armed revolution, the mismatch, the overkill, is very dumb indeed.)

The eye-catching opening sequence, and the extended action set-piece in which Bob joins up with his daughter’s relaxed and resourceful karate teacher (Benicio del Toro, being excellent), involve frightened migrants and the immigration forces trying to detain and deport them. As such, these scenes express the humane and totally understandable desire of liberals to distance themselves from the cruel realities of immigration enforcement. I struggle with this stuff myself, but maximizing the free movement of families across the US-Mexican border so that American businesses can have a larger supply of low-paid labor is not exactly a traditional goal of the radical Left or the working class. It is, rather, a policy fixation of educated progressives who, queasy about the human reality of immigration enforcement, also derive substantial lifestyle benefits from having all those migrants around to pick their vegetables and process their industrial meats and take care of their kids and make them tasty burritos.

Indeed the film says nothing about economic class. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and I have no memory of any character mentioning poor people. Affluent viewers anxious that a real-life French 75 would appropriate their things for communist redistribution can rest easy. The militants in One Battle After Another aren’t thinking about your property. The word “capitalism” is said once that I recall, but the person who says it is speaking vaguely, and he seems to be working in an anti-tech vein, inveighing against “surveillance capitalism”. In other words, he’s saying something any old centrist grumpy about the internet might say. Instead of poverty or class, the movie’s militants are militating for “freedom”, and this freedom seems much more “negative” and Lockean than “positive” and Marxist. When Colonel Lockjaw asks her what she and her movement are after, Perfidia, the film’s most outwardly radical character, snarls something about “free lives” and “free bodies” and “free borders”. When she brags about bombing a senator’s house, she says it’s because he supported “that anti-abortion bill”. With the possible exception of the internet stuff, then, and with the obvious exception of their chosen methods, the revolutionaries in One Battle After Another have no evident policy disagreements with the editorial team at Reason magazine.

Conservative critics might counter that this proves their point, that Paul Thomas Anderson really is encouraging progressives to take up revolutionary violence simply to pursue their current agenda of open borders and perpetual sexual liberation. That would be a fair point, if One Battle After Another actually encouraged anyone to take up revolutionary violence. The film portrays violent methods in a few scenes, and it presents them as part of a thrilling adventure in the moment, and it shows the supposed radicals committing and enjoying these militant acts to be nice people with good intentions, for the most part. But it also shows the whole enterprise to be kind of a mess, kind of a disaster. Even on the film’s terms the ends don’t justify the means, because the means, being haphazardly deployed by semi-competent people with their own particular agendas, don’t bring the world an inch closer to those ends.

The film is actually profound on this point, how projects of supposedly universal justice or general legitimacy require regular idiosyncratic people to carry them out, and so these general projects are readily hijacked by the specific quirks of these all-too-human humans. In embodying this dilemma, Perfidia represents the folly of revolution itself. She is the most charismatic member of French 75, but this owes in part to the very particular fire that burns inside her, which is one-part preternatural anger and about seven parts feral sexuality. In very Pynchonian fashion, then, her revolution is a matter of desire, of libido. Her specific chemical mix makes her an eager player of dangerous revolutionary games, but it also makes her unreliable as a revolutionary comrade and completely ludicrous, indeed terrifying, as a self-appointed agent of universal justice.

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More provocatively, for wary conservative viewers especially, the film applies this model to every urge to rule, within nominally elected governments and ostensibly revolutionary cadres alike. As Perfidia represents the mercurial and fairly stupid eros that revolutions end up taking their bearings from, Colonel Lockjaw embodies the priapic, libidinal essence of official violence. Revolutionaries pursue revolution in part because it’s fun and arousing, and some men sign up to be government enforcers, the tip of the sovereign spear, because they have a powerful desire to stab something. The thought of being the final thrust of the sovereign body is the sort of turn-on a man like Lockjaw can make a career out of. Lockjaw himself draws this link between official enforcement and erotic desire almost explicitly when, in a scene of deep comical strangeness, he refers to his erect penis as his “power”.

If Perfidia represents the arbitrary human desire that lurks in revolutionary plans for universal justice, DiCaprio’s Bob represents the steep human costs that the heady plunge into revolutionary action imposes on a life over the long run. Ben Shapiro really got himself going on this point during a recent podcast. A core “suggestion” of the film, Shapiro said, is that it’s “better…  to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen”. Shapiro gets the sequence wrong here, which is kind of important for what the film’s actual “suggestion” is regarding what kind of person it’s “better” to be. Bob doesn’t become a loser and then bomb things randomly so some Mexicans could get all willy-nilly. He bombs things and then he becomes a loser. He becomes and lives as a loser because he bombed things 15 years earlier.

In other words, thanks to his revolutionary hijinks, Bob’s been in hiding for those 15 years, living as a paranoid hermit with his frustrated daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He’s a stoned and lonely bachelor who rarely washes his hair and is always wearing an old bathrobe. I imagine there are one or two viewers out there who will receive the “suggestion” that it’s better to live like Bob than to be a productive citizen, but they’re probably starting out as even bigger losers than Ben Shapiro accurately says Bob is. But it’s hard to imagine this is a lesson the film itself wishes to suggest, especially as the revolution, which sputters along without him, is achieving precisely nothing that would make Bob’s existential bargain seem a wise one.

That’s Bob’s existential bargain — and the deep sacrifice he’s imposed on poor Willa — are either probably or obviously not worth it, depending on how much of a loser you already are, is something Pynchon himself says in Vineland. After his long years of hiding out with his daughter Prairie (Vineland’s inspiration for Willa), the old legal jeopardy has once again found Zoyd (Vineland’s inspiration for Bob), which leaves Zoyd regretting the whole damn thing. “Damn fool Zoyd,” Pynchon writes. “Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he’d forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.” Maybe I’m naive, gullibly inclined to interpret films I really enjoyed as bearing reasonable rather than idiotic ideas, but I thought that sound sentiment was the suggestion I was supposed to get from smelly Bob. But this aside by Pynchon also shows that progressive critics are getting carried away in their giddy claims that One Battle After Another is — to quote the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis — “dead serious”, at least about revolution. A cadre of young people “sent… gaga” by their “mythical days of high drama” does not sound even coma serious, let alone dead serious. To put it another way, if you’re identifying with these violent dilettantes, you’re not serious either.

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I want to point out for special recognition a fretful review of One Battle After Another in the conservative outlet The Blaze. According to the writer Peter Gietl, the film’s “celebration of vitriol and murder is clarifying” — that is, it reveals the lethal intent of Paul Thomas Anderson. “When the perpetually sweaty DiCaprio shouts ‘¡Viva la revolución!’ while detonating bombs, you’re meant to cheer. And if you’re not cheering, well, those bombs are meant for you.”

Couple things. First, the film’s take on murder is far from celebratory. The one murder it shows, black Perfidia killing a black security guard during a bank robbery, comes out of nowhere, from no operational logic or shared political motives, but merely from Perfidia’s uncontainable impulses, and so it appalls the other revolutionaries and ends up being their fall from grace, the end of their revolutionary innocence, the moment when all the fun comes apart and everyone is sent on the run, or to prison, or worse.

Second, Bob actually says “¡Viva la revolución!” twice, and neither time is the audience supposed to cheer. The first time he says it you’re supposed to chuckle, because it’s said as an afterthought, the blurting of a revolutionary cliché, and because it’s Bob, and Bob just isn’t a serious person. The second time he says it there’s more of a setup, more comic timing built behind it, and 15 years of hiding and getting high have made Bob even less serious than he was the first time he said it, and so you’re supposed to laugh. And that’s what the audience did both times I saw it — in Oakland, California, perhaps the most politically radical city in America. They didn’t cheer — it would have been dopey as hell if they did. They laughed, because it was funny, because it was Bob.

Finally, the melodramatic kicker in Gietl’s hysterical riff — “and if you’re not cheering, those bombs are meant for you” — is far more politically inflammatory than anything in One Battle After Another. Its interpretation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s motives is so flagrantly wrong, so totally unsupported by the text of his fun new film, that the reader would be justified in making a sort of Pynchonian turn as he seeks its actual meaning. This turn might take the reader into his memories of Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero has a cosmic erotic connection with the rockets of war. These memories might inspire our reader to wonder what kind of cosmic wanting lurks in that ostensible worry about Paul Thomas Anderson’s bombs, and, perhaps, what is the hidden connection in this wanting to the explosive power of the vengeful sovereign.

As the architect of New Labour’s campaigning focus on Tory sleaze, warned his readers: the British voter’s faith in politics is squandered “when those who are elected to serve the public interest see nothing wrong in helping themselves to their own share of the consequent commercial rewards in directorships and consultancies. The idea that there is nothing objectionable about a public figure pursuing a dubious private commercial interest as long as it is declared is one of the most corrupting principles in public life today. As far as the electorate is concerned, many think we have a government that consists of business back-scratchers and a Parliament made up of politicians on the make.”

That two years later Mandelson was forced to resign for an undeclared loan from a parliamentary colleague, whose entanglement with the late press baron Robert Maxwell’s estate it was Mandelson’s remit, as trade and industry minister, to investigate, is more than just a piquant historical irony. After all, to have been once forced from office for perceived corruption and undue coziness with the interests of the super-rich may just be bad luck. By the third instance, the blame surely falls to the employer: the character of the person involved is all too well-known, and the pattern long-entrenched. As Le Monde, freed from English niceties, characterizes New Labour’s Third Man, he is “the evil genius of the British Labour Party”, a “tactician fascinated by fame and money” who “showed contempt for morality and common social rules.” The scorpion stings because that is its nature; the blinking protestations of the frog, clinging to the wreckage of his premiership, that such an outcome could not be anticipated are too absurd to be entertained.

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Instead, the greatest, most ironic contrast that strikes today’s reader is not that between the younger Mandelson’s reformist, moralizing tone and the well-established tenor of his political career, but rather the yawning gulf between his domestic reputation and the raw facts of wealth and power unveiled by the ongoing Epstein revelations. The notorious “Prince of Darkness”, the fearsome and powerful intriguer at the heart of British governance, stands revealed in his email correspondence as more Widmerpool than Machiavelli. Westminster’s ruthless operator, the terror of lobby journalism, comes across as a needy, social climbing arriviste, a grasping provincial striver dazzled by the opulent consumption of his rich friends and desperate to grab a slice for himself. So desperate, indeed, that his mentor Epstein even once rebukes him for his constant demands for favors. His New Labour memoir, The Third Man, sent to Epstein for writing advice, is, the two friends discuss, merely a CV for a role at Deutsche Bank. Epstein dangles other glittering prizes before his friend. Would Mandelson like to sell an Israeli oil field for Ehud Barak, Epstein enquires. Why not? Would Mandelson like to involve himself in post-Tahrir Square Egypt, Epstein wonders? Why not? The affairs of nations, once the engine of history, had at the End of History become mere business opportunities: it must have seemed, back in the 2000s, as if the party would never end.

The glittering, amoral world of Epstein and his associates, of the Russian oligarchs and Arab potentates and financiers who flit across the correspondence, is simply the end product of the world of globalization, and of America’s unipolar imperial moment, without which the New Labour project is incomprehensible. When we read Epstein and Ehud Barak venomously gossiping over the extravagant income Tony Blair has amassed as the consigliere of Central Asian dictators, we are granted a glimpse of the true architecture of the world New Labour sold us as unstoppable progress. “We live in the new global economy, and that there is no alternative to that,” the Mandelson of 1996 advised his readers, and this is the result. Just like Blair, whose planned post-premiership career of resolving the Palestine conflict while accumulating wealth was rather more successful at the latter than the former, it was fortunate for him that this brave new world would transpire to be so personally rewarding. Epstein was nothing more or less than a vampiric aristocrat of American empire, extracting whatever he desired from its outer reaches. Mandelson his eager courtier, risen from that same empire’s provincial backwaters. How meager and parochial British politics must seem from this exalted vantage point: it must have been hard to remember that the needs and desires of British voters ever mattered at all.

The age when a former prime minister could retire to obscurity in a quiet cathedral close ended with New Labour. Today, their second acts revolve around the imperial center. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in How Will Capitalism End?, corruption, broadly defined, is simply a symptom of financialized capitalism in a globalized world, and the decaying social fabric of its host countries the result of a world in which “the rich may rightly consider their fate and that of their families to have become independent from the fates of the societies from which they extract their wealth.” If British industry did not notably prosper from Mandelson’s time overseeing it, smoothing its wholesale transfer into the portfolios of the globalized oligarchy, so be it. If the MP for Hartlepool more rapidly and dramatically prospered from New Labour’s time in office than did the people of Hartlepool, that is the nature of things. For all that Mandelson can proclaim that the business dealings with Epstein, for which the police are currently investigating him, were in “the national interest”, the governance of Britain does not figure in this worldview as anything other than a career first act, the highest offices of the British state merely a provincial dry run for advancement in the higher world, among the richer people, who actually matter. When even the former Prince Andrew inserts himself in Epstein’s court, seeking rest and relaxation from the onerous privileges of his sinecure, we see, if not the secret harmonies of the world, then its true architecture, beneath the Westminster state’s ornately crumbling facade.

As for the little people, the truculent and aggrieved British voters whose anger was to be assuaged by the scraps from the big table, redistributed as a consolation prize for the loss of their industries and the wholesale recomposition of their cozily insular society, if their time has not yet come, Mandelson’s third downfall is the harbinger of when it will. It is ironic to recall, now that the near-revolutionary tumult of British politics is waved away by the Government’s dwindling band of supporters as a false consciousness imparted by hostile Right-wing agitators, that the younger Mandelson once spun visions of Britain’s near future as dark as anything now found on Twitter.

Imagining the future world of 2005, in which the public had failed to vote a reforming Labour government into office, Mandelson in The Blair Revolution conjured dark prophecies of the forthcoming “millennium riots”, in which “the army had been brought in” and his fictional upwardly mobile family had witnessed “their neighbors running screaming along the road”, their Georgian townhouses set ablaze. As a result, “there had been a middle-class exodus from London to the Home Counties, into hastily built private estates with perimeter fences and private security.” In the real world of 1996, the “breakdown of society in Britain”, typified by “a crime wave [that] was dismissed as exaggerated tabloid scare-mongering”, derived from the simple fact that “the nation has been in relative decline for a century”, and was baldly “a declining, post-imperial, economically second-rank nation, which is also increasingly divided and unequal”.

In his introduction to the 2004 reissue of The Blair Revolution, Mandelson lamented Britain’s “bleak ghettos depressing the spirits of all who live in them, dominated by the fear of crime and racial tension, too often becoming centers of danger and desperation”, language now anathema to his ideological heirs. The British public had begun to despise its political class, he warned: “New Labour’s task now is to ensure that public opinion does not slip back into this sullen mood — or, at least, not permanently — and that a deeper, lasting connection is made between government and governed.” Does Mandelson feel New Labour achieved this, we wonder? Does he believe his wavering place at globalization’s most-luxurious table is justified by the transformations his faction wrought? Mandelson termed his mission a “permanent revolution,” creating “a long-term transformation of Britain” in which New Labour’s ideology “embeds itself in the fabric and social architecture” so that “our changes can be entrenched”. Indeed, he notes, “We want to create institutions across British society that people can point to in twenty and thirty years’ time and recognize as distinctly New Labour landmarks.”

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Indeed we can: New Labour’s monuments are all around us. The tragedy of modern Britain is that Mandelson and his clique succeeded. The wreckage of our society is a testament to the success of their project, a series of time bombs buried within Britain’s social and economic architecture. The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism. The current prime minister’s project of governing Britain as if it were still 1997, taking off where his ideological forebears were so rudely interrupted by the British voter, was doomed from the start, because Starmer is fated to rule the volatile and rebellious country that New Labour created. The least popular prime minister since polling began is now condemned to eke out his mandate without power, at the helm of a fractious and moribund party that despises him, lurching from crisis to crisis, until the electorate’s final sentence of execution rescues him from his purgatorial reign.

A badly run country has become an ungovernable one, ill at ease with itself and looking inward for enemies. Lord Mandelson’s one, unintentional gift to Britain is in hastening the collapse of the rotten and crumbling superstructure of the politics he helped construct. The reams of internal correspondence soon to be released will provide Reform, the de facto party of opposition, with ammunition in its mission to undo the Blair Revolution Mandelson once flaunted. As the director of Labour Growth, Mark McVitie, rightly observes, the scandal is “the latest and most grotesque signifier of a political culture that cannot carry on in its current form”, and “what is undoubtedly worth saving in the liberal democratic settlement will not be saved by the people who have presided over its decay”. But the domestic tragedy of British dysfunction is inseparable from the country’s willed transformation into the fawning servitor of a corrupt transnational order. That it takes an American scandal to demolish the Government’s last lingering traces of legitimacy, our peripheral backwater administration haunted by the nefarious pleasures of its metropole, is only fitting. In his career’s final act Mandelson has become, just as Le Carré perceived, the squalid archetype for the British state itself.

Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered.

Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase.

The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.

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The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.

The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.

Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.

But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favor with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.

The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.

It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.

Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.

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“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.

Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.

Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favors a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.

As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.

A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonored by its leaders, goes to work on itself.

There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.

She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling savior, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumors fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.

If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learned singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.

Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.

The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of color and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energized by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.

The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. Yet it has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.

So today, the revolutionaries include young women of color, energized by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organizer for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.

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She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalize water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.

The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This all sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.

Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to them, understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind, knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”

These voters, she says, are “blaming the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”.  But how will she stop them? As ever with the hard Left, I think the talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity.  No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”

The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.

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The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are just told to be grateful.” Another party member, a young woman, is grateful: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be messy.

Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.

Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.

Out in the real world, the way to combat the paralysing effects of normalcy bias is through training and preparation. If people do their fire drills before a fire breaks out, they are much more likely to be able to spring into action; the brain can simply act on what it already knows. Similarly, learning from history is a sure-fire way to prevent normalcy bias. The only problem is that few recognise this: most people believe history has nothing to teach us about the modern day.

Still, with America’s great divisions only getting greater, let’s assume it does for a second. If we tried to compare the position of the United States today with that of France on the eve of the great revolution of 1789, how would the former hold up? Is it in a more stable position than the France that collapsed into revolution, or is it actually worse?

Let’s start with the domestic and political situation. France in the late-18th century was bitterly inegalitarian. Economic inequality coexisted with social inequality — the old feudal caste system was starting to chafe against the realities of the early modern economy — and the political system itself had basically stopped functioning. Everyone knew reform was badly needed, but passing actual legislation was impossible. Special interests had the ability to veto every change, no matter how necessary, and as 1789 approached, total political gridlock became the order of the day. The French Revolution happened not because it was inevitable, but because the political system proved completely incapable of curing its deficiencies.

Does this seem a bit familiar? It should, because that is precisely the situation in the United States right now. An unequal political system has essentially seized up and stopped functioning, and is now stumbling towards election between the most unpopular president in modern history and the next-most unpopular president in modern history. One of those men is clearly fading rapidly, prone to slurring his speech or forgetting where he is; the other just became the first president to be convicted of a felony. Just as in France in the 1780s, violence, protests and disenchantment seem the likeliest conclusion.

But how is the economy doing? France in 1789 was famously bankrupt; in fact, the bankruptcy of the French Crown was the proximate cause of the entire revolution. It borrowed heavily to fund foreign wars and domestic spending, and before long, it had to keep borrowing even more money to pay off the interest on its old debt, only to borrow even more to pay for those loans, and so on. Finally, France could borrow no more, and the crisis began in earnest.

And yet, when it comes to fiscal impropriety, 18th-century France simply can’t compete with modern America. The US is by far the most indebted nation in the world today in absolute terms, gorging as it does on some $1 trillion in additional debt every three months. And unlike in revolutionary France, when public pensions and social welfare simply didn’t exist, America has a supplementary “shadow debt” of around $175 trillion, representing its commitments for future welfare.

On top of this already miserable situation, the US has to contend with another problem not faced by early modern France: deindustrialisation. On the eve of revolution, France was remarkably self-sufficient, which is why it could so easily go from a political and economic basket-case in 1789 to dominating most of Europe in 1812. By contrast, America in 2024 is not self-sufficient; the old industries that allowed it to dominate following the Second World War have now been sold off for scrap, and the US today is dependent on exporting dollars and importing physical goods in return. If demand for dollars drops, those physical goods cannot be quickly replaced. A much more painful period of economic readjustment will have to be undertaken in the US, while France in 1789 essentially only had to rationalise the resources it already possessed to become powerful again.

So, the social and political situation in contemporary America is at least comparable to that in France in 1789, while the economic situation is actually a fair bit worse. What about the military situation?

Well, in 1789, things didn’t look particularly good. France faced at least two big problems: first, its military was suffering from low morale and high levels of dissatisfaction. This partly had to do with the intractable divide between commoners and nobles, and partly with a series of disciplinarian reforms that were very unpopular. The second had to do with foreign policy. In 1787, Prussia invaded the Netherlands, which was supposed to be part of France’s rightful sphere of influence. Many French people wanted their leaders to defend the country’s honour against the Prussians, but Louis XVI declined — for the simple reason that France was too broke to afford a war. This failure to act like a great power didn’t just have domestic consequences; it convinced other great powers that France was becoming the sick man of Europe.

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While these weaknesses shouldn’t be underestimated, they are in an order of magnitude less serious than those faced by the current United States. If you wanted to draw a comparison, the French Army’s disciplinarian reforms probably caused about as much discontent as the US military’s Covid-vaccine policy; not exactly a good spot to be in, but not life-threatening either. The US military, however, has significantly more pressing problems: the recruitment crisis is now so bad that it is undermining the combat readiness of entire formations. “Ghost units” — that is, units that should technically exist but practically don’t because they have no men — are now slowly proliferating across the US Army. Meanwhile, the Navy has a massive problem with chronic sleep deprivation, because there simply aren’t enough sailors to crew the ships to their full compliments. On top of these problems, the US military is increasingly unable to source ammunition for its weapons, and the Navy cannot build enough ships to keep itself from shrinking, nor can it now really perform scheduled repairs on the ships it has.

In other words, the French military had a crisis of internal culture, while the American military has a crisis of internal culture and a massive recruitment crisis and a massive logistics and sustainment crisis. On top of this, the US military is tasked with several orders of magnitude more work than the French: it has almost 1,000 bases across the world. The French failed to show up in the Netherlands in 1787 because they didn’t have enough money to pay for it; America, by contrast, has tried and failed to wage proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, and tried and failed to stop the Houthis from blockading the Suez Canal. In April, the US Army built an aid pier in Gaza as a sort of show of force, an illustration that the US military — whatever else one might say about the rest of America — was still up to the task. On Tuesday, the pier fell apart and was washed away.

Taken together, then, it seems that the position of the US in 2024 is much worse than that of France in 1789. Does this mean a revolution will happen?

It’s always easy to come up with a reason for why things will continue like they always have. That is simply how our brains work: if you’ve done your fire exercises over and over again and you suddenly smell smoke, your brain’s first reaction is likely to be “A-ha! Fire! Time to head for the fire exit!”. If you don’t know where that exit is, if you’ve never really thought about the possibility of a fire, your brain is very likely to respond to the sight and smell of smoke with an “ah, well, it can’t be that bad, right?”.

And perhaps, you might say, that is indeed the correct attitude to have today. Perhaps things really aren’t “that bad”. To which I would respond: but things are worse than were in France in 1789. All that remains to be seen is whether that simple, incontrovertible fact about our current moment leads to something or not.

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) announced themselves to the world on 1 January 1994, when they overthrew and temporarily occupied various Mexican centres for political power. The timing was symbolic, corresponding with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. Outraged at the treaty’s effective removal of Article 27 from the Mexican constitution, which guaranteed indigenous peoples their rights to collective lands, they became the first organisation to declare war on an internationally recognised treaty. Their campaign came to resemble a war from February onwards, as Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo launched an offensive to capture or destroy them.

In 2006, I was part of a delegation accompanying the Zapatistas as they returned to the streets of San Cristobal in what they called the “Other Campaign”, a broad movement of protest and civic resistance. Our vehicle followed directly behind their leader, the Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos. He led the rebellious cavalcade out of the canyon on a motorcycle, inevitably recalling the spirit of Che Guevara. For many activists of the Nineties, Marcos had filled a similar space to Che: the exotic radical who combined the roles of intellectual and man-of-action. And like Che’s movement, the Zapatistas’ idealism eventually shattered when it collided with the raw realities of power.

Often described as the “poorest of the poor”, the Zapatistas connected their fight to a broader history of persecution. “We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” their First Declaration proclaimed. Theirs was a fight for dignity, which was inseparable from their demands for autonomy and the constitutional right to self-govern according to indigenous laws, customs and practices. And their name bound their struggle to the nation’s revolutionary past, invoking Emiliano Zapata, who led the Mexican revolution of 1910.

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But though the Zapatistas wove themselves into a tapestry of Mexican history, many observers felt what they represented was radically new. My guide in 2006, the late journalist and Beatnik poet John Ross, told me: “If the Zapatistas hadn’t appeared, we would have needed to invent them. There would not have been such a thing as the anti-globalisation movement without them. They were the catalyst.” The Zapatistas immediately became icons of a global Left, largely thanks to the non-indigenous Marcos, who positioned himself as a bridge between the two worlds. Like all revolutionaries, Marcos projected a romantic allure with his trademark military cap, smoking pipe and balaclava. He became a new kind of pin-up for a globally sensitised radical generation. Indeed, perhaps part of his appeal was precisely that he was faceless, the balaclava he wore acting as a kind of leveller, which allowed men at least to dream of the romance of being a revolutionary without the impossible handsomeness of El Che.

Beyond his mystical appeal, Marcos’s greatest accomplishment was the originality of his writings. The Zapatistas insisted that words were their most formidable weapon, and Marcos became their most recognised author. Not only did he display an astute reading of global political affairs, but his adaptation of myths and tales with human spirits and fictitious animal characters showed the true power of fabulation. If there were to be a genuine revolution, he insisted, it would need to be written in a different style. Marcos quipped he was a Marxist who, intent on converting the indigenous to his doctrine, found himself being converted to an indigenous way of seeing the world.

But his movement was soon to be lost in translation. The Zapatistas arrived at the dawn of the internet age; some commentators even claimed they were the first internet revolution. Leading security think tanks, such as the Rand corporation, called their struggle “network centric warfare”. And Manuel Castells, among the most prominent social gurus for what he called the “information age”, even fronted one of his books on “The Network Society” with Zapatista artwork. It was hard to read any study of the Zapatistas in which the new language of the digital age — networks, non-hierarchy, connectivity — wasn’t applied. Yet during my visit to la Garrucha, which was widely promoted as the first rebel stronghold to have internet, it was clear that the technology simply didn’t work. The projection of digital language onto the Zapatistas was designed purely to appeal to bourgeois radicals in the West.

What actually set the Zapatistas apart was their ability to surprise, to go into hiding, and the unpredictable and untimely responses they offered that didn’t follow obvious paths. By 1998, they were already writing about the importance of slowing things down and embracing silence. This couldn’t be further from the performativity of a certain kind of radical politics they were made into emblems of. The Zapatistas never asked to become global icons, even if they undoubtedly welcomed the solidarity. Their demands were actually rather straightforward: land, liberty and autonomy for the indigenous of Mexico. Yet at the dawn of the digital age, it was external forces that wanted to momentarily parade them to the world as part of a new revolutionary vanguard — despite the fact they resisted those very terms.

By the turn of the millennium, it was becoming apparent that radicalism in the West was taking a different path. While the Zapatistas had fully embraced non-violence as a political strategy — a position that was most evident during their march upon Mexico City in March 2001 — the previous year’s protests in Seattle at the WTO convention, and in Prague against the IMF and World Bank showed how some Western anti-globalists were willing to engage in violent confrontation. And after 9/11, the attention of Western activists turned to the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, which gradually pushed the conceptualisation of war back into a more familiar statist direction. This seemed to be at odds with Marcos’s insistence that war was a global state of affairs in which the nation state merely played a militarising and policing role.

In the two decades after 2006, the Zapatistas saw a notable decline in international attention. This was due in part to their own political moves, which included a rather disastrous foray into electoral politics in 2018 that seemed to contradict their previous critique of the state. But something else happened in 2006 that would end up transforming Chiapas, Mexico and the Americas in ways that diverted attention away from the indigenous campesinos.

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In December 2006, President Felipe Calderón won Mexico’s election — though many analysts believe the vote count was rigged, and the then-contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador never accepted the result. Ten days into his presidency, Calderón announced an outright assault on the narco-trafficking cartels. The expansive and violent battle that ensued drew international interest away from the conflict in Chiapas, leading to hundreds of thousands of murders and disappearances. In the process, the narco wars pushed the drugs trade into Chiapas. During one of my trips there in 2006, human rights representatives said that Chiapas didn’t have a major drugs problem. That is no longer the case today. In January, more than 700 villagers permanently fled their homes in the communities of Chicomuselo and La Concordia due to cartel violence.

This violence has escalated since smuggling groups moved in to control and exploit the flow of migrants heading north. And the electoral victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019 has further exacerbated the problem. His militarisation of the region hasn’t deterred the cartels: on the contrary, with the links between organised crime, the military and the police, promises of greater profits in this new economic corridor has resulted in open warfare. In response to this instability, a Zapatista communique stated in November they were closing their autonomous municipalities to the outside world.

After this retreat, what legacy do the Zapatistas have today? By emphasising the Zapatistas’ race and identity over their desperate poverty, Western radicals were as complicit as liberals in setting aside the importance of poverty as the defining marker shaping political consciousness. What’s more, their attempt to frame the Zapatista movement to fit the language of digitalisation anticipated the parading of social justice solidarity we continue to see on social media, and speaks less to the indigenous of Mexico than to virtually connected intelligentsia of today. Given the self-serving performativity of it all, is it any wonder the Zapatistas became a kind of fetishised object, openly embraced by techno-optimists to convey an image of “good indigenous” radicals until they too could be neatly set aside?

Ever since the dawn of the 20th century, the lands and people of Mexico have been stereotyped. In their heyday, the Zapatistas fulfilled a Western radical fantasy. And now their country is over-filtered in that familiar cinematic shade of Mexican yellow: dangerous and unforgiving, lawless and ruled by crazed bandits who kill without remorse. This is not the Mexico I know. And the remedy is a better appreciation of the complexities of history, while moving beyond fetishised portrayals of identities that are loaded with prejudice, including the prejudices of radicalism.

Its father was William Dugdale, who had been a rising star during the political ferment in the hard years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, which E.P. Thompson called “the heroic age of popular radicalism”. Dugdale gave his first public speech to a mass rally in 1818, calling for armed insurrection against the state. He was 18 at the time. He was also mixed up in the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the cabinet, and as a publisher he brought out the first edition of Robert Wedderburn’s abolitionist pamphlet, The Horrors of Slavery (1824).

But the radical moment passed, the market for revolutionary tracts collapsed, and Dugdale turned instead to publishing obscene literature to make a living. By the 1840s, he had established himself in Holywell Street as importer and distributor, as well as publisher and retailer, with a thriving mail-order business on the side. An 1851 raid on one of his seven shops saw the seizure of goods worth, allowing for inflation, £350,000 at today’s prices. This was new. The trade in obscenity had previously been centred on market stalls and itinerant salesmen; there had never been anything on this industrial scale before. Mostly, Dugdale’s trade was in prints, etchings and books — with titles such as Confessions of a Voluptuous Young Lady, The Quintessence of Birch Discipline, The Curious and Diverting History and Adventures of a Bedstead. But he also published The Exquisite, the first recognisably modern pornographic magazine. Others followed him and by the 1850s, Holywell Street had become a byword for filth.

Inevitably, all this brought Dugdale into conflict with the law. He was repeatedly sentenced on obscenity charges, normally getting two years’ hard labour each time, though it is uncertain how long he actually served. He had some influential men among his customers, and a tendency to get out of jail on technicalities.

Anyway, he saw the prosecutions as proof that he was still an irritant to all the right people: the religious and secular authorities. Their condemnation of pornographic literature was rooted in a concern that it would fall into the hands of the working class, at a time when literacy was spreading rapidly. Time and again, judges thundered that this celebration of lust, at the expense of family and parenthood, was “subversive of the foundations of civil society itself”. And since Dugdale was subversive, he saw pornography as a continuation of the political struggle by other means.

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His enemies were also crusaders, part of the great evangelical revival that came to define Victorian Britain. Most of the prosecutions were initiated by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, co-founded by William Wilberforce in 1802 to combat all manner of immorality. By the middle of the century, though, the SSV was in decline, its membership dwindling, its funds exhausted. Nonetheless, its secretary, Henry Prichard, engaged in a decades-long war with Dugdale, as the two men brought cases and counter-cases against each other. Prichard, Dugdale claimed, allowed himself to be bribed by his rival shopkeepers in their attempts to avoid prosecution; he was also reputed to re-sell onto the market the material seized in raids. There was sufficient suspicion to prompt the passing of the first-ever Obscene Publications Act in 1857, which was specifically aimed at suppressing Dugdale, while also clipping the wings of the SSV: new powers of seizure were given to the police, assumed to be less susceptible to corruption.

Dugdale carried on trading, and carried on being prosecuted, right up to his death, in 1868, while serving yet another jail term. This time the charge sheet had included obscene photographs for the first time; even as an old man, he was still moving with the times. Dugdale has never been seen as a political hero. Even at the time, few of his radical comrades approved of his business. But the state saw him as a genuine threat, and it saw pornography as dangerous. One of the exhibits at Dugdale’s last trial was John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill, published a century earlier and still banned a century later; the works of, say, Karl Marx faced no such suppression.

A century later, at the dawn of what became known as the Golden Age of Porn, much of the story was repeated. Dugdale’s belief that he was fighting the good fight was again evident in the political counterculture of the Sixties, especially in America. “Pornography was seen to be a vehicle of liberation,” remembered Andrea Dworkin. “Anything they tried to stop us from doing, we did.” The reality turned out to be grubbier than the idealism. Dworkin and other early feminists were horrified when former comrades, with whom they had marched side-by-side on anti-Vietnam War demos, embraced the money to be made from porn. “Suddenly they weren’t so anti-capitalist anymore.” The sense of betrayal fuelled much of the feminist anti-porn campaign that followed.

Meanwhile in Britain, Suck magazine — arty, radical, pro-feminist — was launched in 1969 by figures from the alternative press. It only lasted eight issues, closing after Germaine Greer lambasted her comrades on the editorial staff as “pseudo-revolutionary”. But Suck had been strictly underground anyway, published in Amsterdam, since it was far too explicit to be legal in Britain. That was the key difference: America had a First Amendment guarantee of free speech, which by the Seventies was being successfully invoked to defend porn; Britain did not.

The second Obscene Publications Act, of 1959, did largely free the written word, but visual imagery — as various trials established — was far more restricted. In America, the film Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, was a massive box-office hit with its explicit sex scenes. It was banned outright in Britain, which had to settle for the home-grown Come Play with Me, a comedy that went a little further than Carry On Camping, but not much further.

It wasn’t always clear what was permitted, but the fear of prosecution meant that the trade self-censored to be on the safe side. Depictions of an erect penis, for example, were avoided, guaranteed to get a conviction. Accordingly, an eye was always kept on “the angle of the dangle”. Indeed, there operated a semi-joking Mull of Kintyre Test: anything steeper than a map of the Scottish peninsular was deemed to be too erect. In this semi-legalised world, the imagery was less explicit than it had been in Dugdale’s day, when everything was banned and one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. The result was that the permitted material reflected the dominant values of a still sexist society: unable to show intercourse, it opted for willing and waiting women. In such circumstances, it was hard to see pornography as “a vehicle for liberation”.

Instead, the rapidly growing porn industry was concentrated in the hands of the criminal fringe, who had been running strip-clubs in Soho since the turn of the Sixties, and now added sex shops, magazines and movies to their property portfolios. Following Dugdale’s model of multiple outlets in a tightly defined area, they made Soho synonymous with porn, just as Holywell Street — less than a mile to the east — had once been.

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As society became more liberal in sexual matters, the magazines that were sold over the counter in Soho gradually migrated to licensed sex-shops elsewhere in the country and, more significantly, to the top shelves of newsagents, where their presence became hard to ignore. Softcore porn became normalised to the extent that it could be joked about on mainstream television. In a 1977 episode of sitcom George and Mildred, she inadvertently donates his stash of magazines — including copies of Nudge, Wink and Titter — to the vicar’s jumble sale, leaving him to fret over their loss: “Be hard to replace some of them. Especially the Swedish ones.”

That reference to Scandinavian titles suggested something far more serious: the hardcore magazines and films that were smuggled in from the Continent. (A mark of quality was said to be if it smelt of bacon, since that meant it had been imported on a container ship from Denmark.) This stuff was illegal, of course, but it continued to arrive, partly because the profit margins were astronomically big, and partly because there were surprisingly few prosecutions. And that was because, in another echo of the 1850s, those who were supposed to be policing the industry were actively supporting it. Between 1975 and 1976, 15 members of the Obscene Publications Squad of Metropolitan Police were jailed for taking bribes and effectively running a protection racket. The legal definition of obscenity is material likely to deprave and corrupt; that has always been a difficult concept to pin down, but what is certain is that porn has repeatedly corrupted the guardians of society.

William Dugdale had seen pornography as a way of attacking the power structures of society; now Andrea Dworkin was arguing that it was actually an expression of those power structures. Porn, she said, was “the nerve centre, the Pentagon” of the war against women, the place “where strategies of sexual abuse were both planned and communicated”. Previously, the church, social norms, a shared morality — these had been enough to enforce male power, but they had been weakened by the rise of the women’s movement, and heavier weaponry was required. The modern proliferation of porn was a reaction to feminism, an attempt to intimidate women into subservience.

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Further, it was inherently totalitarian and genocidal. “Dachau brought into the bedroom,” was Dworkin’s assessment of pornography, an image that was adopted by others. In the Nineties, former editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg was shown the material being broadcast on European satellite TV station Red Hot Dutch; he was horrified: “It reminds me of films about concentration camps.”

For others, pornography defied rather than represented repressive regimes. Porn may have become an established part of life in America and Britain, but it was still being ruthlessly suppressed in the communist Soviet Union and in apartheid South Africa. When those systems fell in the Nineties, there was an explosion of porn comparable to that in the West a couple of decades earlier. The development felt like a manifestation of freedom.

Today, North Korea and Iran are not noticeably tolerant of pornography. It is still seen as subversive, a threat to religious and political control. In the liberal, individualistic world of post-Christian Britain, on the other hand, criticism has increasingly centred on the impact on the consumer. With the unprecedented availability of porn on the internet, are children acquiring a distorted, corrupted vision of sex? Is the instant hit of digital porn inherently addictive? Again, these concerns are not entirely new. Some 220 years ago, prosecuting counsel William Garrow, acting for the SSV, cautioned that obscene books and pictures were a very real danger to “young persons of both sexes, particularly of the female sex, addicting themselves to such publications”.

So, how subversive is porn? Historian Donald Thomas argued that it should be seen as akin to satire, attacking those things that are considered sacred to society. In William Dugdale’s day, incest was a favourite theme, a way of making light of 19th-century family values. It also meant that women were depicted as actively enjoying sex, something that was not spoken of in polite society.

The tone now is far more aggressive than it was then, or in the Seventies. Not all pornography is anti-women, but there is more overt misogyny in material aimed at men than there used to be — a response to the rise of women in employment and society. Lesser trends illustrate the same point: the continuing growth of cuckold porn, for example, or even the appearance, following #BlackLivesMatter, of fantasies centred on slave-owner Edward Colston.

The subversion, in other words, is negative and reactionary. Porn delights in poking at conventional morality — not in pursuit of revolution, but illicit thrill. The primary aim is arousal, the secondary to ridicule human aspirations to virtue. It is also remarkably ineffective in its subversion. Generations of those addicts that William Garrow warned about have been and gone. Holywell Street rose and fell, Soho rose and fell, and through it all, civilisation survived. Society has changed in the process, but porn, despite all the fears, has reflected, not initiated, those changes.

This week, he spoke to Mary Harrington at the UnHerd Club about populism, Tucker Carlson, and how to swerve the next big catastrophe. Below is an edited transcript.

Mary Harrington: Peter, tell us the thesis behind your fascinating new book.

Peter Turchin: Ever since the ancient Greek historian Polybius wrote about how the Roman Empire was able to grow quite so relentlessly, people have also tried to explain why societies collapse.

There are many different theories, but the only way to adjudicate is with mathematical modelling. First of all, you translate those theories into mathematical language, so that the predictions follow inevitably from their premises. Then you bring on lots of data to work out which theory best fits the reality.

My colleagues and I are currently working on building a large historical database — our “Crisis DB” — in which we log incidents when past societies got into a state of crisis. What we have found is that all complex societies in the past 5,000 years have experienced an integrative phase, when peace and order reigned — and then an inevitable descent into an “end times”.

I hope that, with all this information, eventually we will make it possible for society to escape this cycle. But why do these end times happen at all? One common theme that we see over and over again, in all of the different routes to crisis, is a condition that we call “elite overproduction”.

Let me explain what I mean by that. First of all, who are the elites? Put simply, they are neither good people or bad people, they are simply a small proportion of the population who concentrate social power in their hands — whether that’s in the military, economic, political, or ideological sphere. In medieval times, the elites were the military nobility of England or France, for example; or in Imperial China, they were the class of mandarins. In the United States, where I live, simply put, it’s the proverbial 1%.

Of course, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. Complex human societies are organised as pyramids, and so there are different levels of elites; the 0.1% rule within the one-percenters, and so on. There are no sharp boundaries necessarily, unless you live in a society like medieval France, where legally you were either nobility or a peasant.

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The next big question is how are elites produced and reproduced? They’re reproduced by ambitious young people, or, to use the technical term, “elite aspirants”, who want to gain positions of power. Elite overproduction occurs when, during some historical periods, we get too many elite aspirants for the slowly changing number of power positions. That creates intense competition, and while some competition is very helpful and good, excessive competition is harmful as it corrodes the social norms and institutions of the society.

When you have huge numbers of losers in this game, a proportion of frustrated elites will decide to break the rules. We saw that very clearly in the 2016 US presidential election. At that point, the number of candidates in the Republican primaries was the largest in history.

Disgruntled elite-wannabes are far more threatening to societal stability than disgruntled workers. In England during the Middle Ages, there was a huge peasant uprising led by Wat Tyler. And what happened? A small group of armoured knights on horseback destroyed them without raising so much as a sweat, because non-elites are not organised. As long as the state is strong and the elites are unified, they can keep a lid on popular discontent.

MH: In the book, you use the arresting phrase “the iron law of oligarchy” to describe why we end up producing too many elites. Once you have a bunch of people in charge of the levers of power and money, they will start funnelling resources towards themselves because they can.

PT: Exactly. What we see in the historical record is that all complex societies go through periods of good times, maybe a century or so long on average, and then periods of disintegration. During the good times, after a couple of generations, the elites get used to the fact that life is good and stable, and that’s when the iron law of oligarchy kicks in. The elites are very strongly tempted to convert their power into goodies for themselves — and if there’s nothing stopping them, that’s what they do. They basically reconfigure the economy in a way that depresses the wages of workers and creates a “wealth pump” that funnels riches directly to the owners and managers of corporations.

MH: You’ve described this happening under Thatcher and Reagan, after several decades of the post-war consensus.

PT: Precisely. Those elites in the US and the UK had 30 glorious years. But by the late Seventies, they started getting selfish. That’s when we began to see the separation between worker productivity and worker compensation. And immediately — within another 30 years — the numbers of uber-rich people exploded in the United States. The number of decamillionaires, those with $10 million or more, increased tenfold from the Eighties to 2010.

That’s the wealth pump at work. And that’s what drives one part of elite overproduction in the US, which is the overproduction of wealthy people who try to become candidates for political office. That’s one of the reasons why the cost of campaigning for political office has completely exploded.

MH: You say in End Times that “America is in a revolutionary situation”. In your view, is it too late to avert the predicted crisis?

PT: We are in crisis, but it’s not too late to avert the worst outcomes. I’m not a collapsologist. The possibility of a social revolution in the US seems to me outlandish. But the Ancien Régime nobility in France could not imagine that in 1789 they would be put under the guillotine, just as antebellum Americans could not imagine a bloody war that would leave 600,000 dead. It is typical that we cannot fully see the possible nastiness of a situation before it unfurls.

We have close to 200 cases of societal crisis right now, and the majority are fairly severe — some leading to outright collapse. But there are also maybe 10-15% of cases where the elites pull together and, cooperating with the rest of the population, they find the right mix of reforms and avoid the worst outcomes. For example, in the mid-19th century, the British Empire was the only large European state that was not affected by a revolution. Of course, there were bad moments, like the Peterloo massacre, but there was no civil war. That’s partly because a group of social elites got together and convinced the rest of their number of the need to reform.

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MH: What about elite dissidents today? In your book, you give a fictionalised example of a young, far-Left, woke, upper-middle class revolutionary who wants to smash the system from within. She joins Antifa, the autonomous anti-fascist movement, and wants to abolish the police — even if that makes life worse for the working class. But is she really a revolutionary at all if none of her opinions have any resonance with the working class?

PT: She is a failed revolutionary, clearly, because she cannot harness popular discontent. In fact, it’s the populists on both the Left and the Right who resonate far more with the working class in the United States.

Antifa is really quite ineffectual, except at beating up Right-wing extremists and smashing things. That’s why Jane, this character in my book, grows disenchanted after some years in the Antifa movement because it’s not going anywhere. She then realises that the way to get ahead in the US, if you want to have a revolution, is through the legal channels because the state is very strong. I am Russian, and I can tell you that nothing like a Bolshevik Party is possible in the US. We don’t want a violent revolution, really. Instead, people on both the Left and Right work their way through the structures of power.

MH: Do you think the elites who want to abolish the police are genuine believers?

PT: Yes. Antifa is fairly secretive, and for good reason, because they don’t want to be penetrated by the FBI. So let’s look back 50 years, at the Marxist militant group the Weatherman Underground, because many of those people have now written memoirs, and we have a pretty good idea of what motivated them. They were clearly fighting against what they saw as an unjust American society, where the poor went hungry and where minorities and women were oppressed. They had a genuine cause — but they were completely unrealistic about their ability to start a revolution. And so they started blowing up monuments, killing people, all because they wanted to trigger the outpouring of popular anger against the elites.

But there was no popular anger at that time. This was before the wealth pump got turned on: American workers were doing very well, and every new generation was doing better than the previous one, so they were completely turned off by these wannabe revolutionaries. Just because somebody is a revolutionary doesn’t mean that they are going to be a successful revolutionary.

MH: You say in your book that the Republicans are on their way to becoming a revolutionary party. And, as we saw with Brexit and long before that — with the repeal of the Corn Laws — that alliances between political elites and a disaffected working class are often somewhat cynical. Is revolution more likely to come from the Right? 

PT: We have to remember that there’s not just one counter-elite party; they’re all splintered. It is a constant struggle between the different radical groups. That’s why, in the US, we have Left-wing populists and Right-wing populists who cannot work together, even though Bernie Sanders sometimes says things that are identical to Republican Senator J.D. Vance.

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MH: In your book, you note that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator, represents a kind of lightning rod for some of these dissident forces on the conservative side, and that he actually has quite a coherent ideology. You also say that Rupert Murdoch appears to care more about his bottom line than about the interests of his class. So why did he fire Carlson?

PT: Well, I’m not a Freudian psychologist, but let me reconstruct what I think happened. Rupert Murdoch, who really does care about his bottom line, is embedded in a network of like-minded, wealthy people, and he must have been growing tired of them carping on for years about Tucker Carlson and how he is undermining their interests. Finally, Murdoch broke and fired him. It’s not a matter of money — they’re still paying his salary — they just wanted to shut him up.

MH: In cases where the elite view is in conflict with the popular view, do the elites always win?

PT: The great political scientist Martin Gilens conducted some fascinating research into the legislation passed through Congress. He found that 90% of the American population had zero effect on the actual legislation that passed — zilch, nada. Their technique was not fine enough to distinguish between the final 10 percentiles, but they suspect that it’s really the 1% who drives everything. This is why I argue in my book that the US is not a democracy anymore, it’s a plutocracy.

MH: Did those liberal democratic norms ever do anything in the first place? What’s the point of democracy at all?

PT: Democracy works — just look at the quality of life in Denmark and other socially democratic Nordic countries. Of course, it’s all comparative: autocracies are even more dysfunctional than democracies. But even the US plutocracy has, in the past, been capable of pro-social action. During the progressive era, reformist American elites persuaded and browbeat their cohort into passing the New Deal reforms, which essentially shut down the wealth pump for three glorious decades.

MH: Can you envision a coalition in the present day with the capacity to hold the elites to account — and perhaps even frighten them into shutting off the wealth pump?

PT: Let me first say that I am completely non-partisan, and regularly criticise both the Republicans and Democrats. I think that the populist factions, both on the Left and the Right, often talk a good talk, but they have not yet delivered.

There was an American populist party in the 1890s, which never won elections but did put pressure on the establishment at a time of political tension. Riots and insurrections were becoming more frequent. By the early Twenties, it seemed to many that America had reached a revolutionary moment, especially with the Soviet Union presenting an alternative model to the US system. The first Red Scare broke out in 1921, when a segment of American elites were convinced that a Bolshevik Revolution was imminent.

It was this combination of internal and external pressures that propelled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms. He must have realised, like the Russian tsar Alexander II before him, that you either make reforms from above or you end up having revolution from below.

MH: The entire thesis of your book is that we have always had elites — and, in fact, the important thing is not to get rid of them, but to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they’re behaving. But it’s my observation that the current reigning elite is overtly anti-hierarchical, and that we must get rid of hierarchies, wherever there are, wherever they exist. Where do you stand on the sacred values of anti-hierarchicalism?

PT: For 95% of our evolutionary history, we humans lived in small-scale societies, which were very egalitarian — unusually egalitarian — when you compare us to the great apes, for example. The first elites appeared about 7,500 years ago, in chiefdoms. My argument is that a large-scale society can only function in a reasonable way if we have hierarchies of managers and administrators, because we are not ants. We cannot deal without elites. Elites are necessary because, without them, we wouldn’t be able to cooperate and coordinate in large numbers.

But let’s separate their managerial needs from huge differences in wealth. In principle — and, in fact, in history — many elites who start at the beginning of those integrative eras, they’re fairly unselfish. They live quite modestly. Just think about Republican Rome and the senator class: they were just farmers that were somewhat a little bit wealthier than the citizens. The economic differences were quite minimal.

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In principle, it is possible to have elites and have them act in procedural manners. But it is like riding a bicycle: you have to balance all the time. So in order to keep elites from acting in selfish ways, there have to be constraints on them. Democratic institutions provide a set of such constraints, but they have to be supplemented — by other things that we have not yet evolved. Because, inevitably, even democratic society gets into a situation where inequalities start to grow.

My main point is that we can separate the managerial parts of the elites from their accumulating huge wealth and unfettered power.

MH: But what do you make of this societal insistence that we must abolish all hierarchy?

PT: Okay, you want to abolish hierarchies? First, pay yourself the same salary as the median worker in your 500 Fortune company. Put your money where your mouth is.

All this was due to Nicholas, who came to the throne in 1825 with the potential of turning into an enlightened ruler, supposedly being opposed to the serfdom of the Russian peasant. As Adam Ulam notes in his magisterial book The Bolsheviks, however, the aristocratic Decembrist revolt that welcomed Nicholas’s accession forever stamped a suspicious mindset on the autocrat.

For the next 30 years, until his death in 1855, Nicholas created the prototype of the modern police state. The infamous Third Section, the forerunner of secret police throughout the modern world, penetrated all levels of society. Nearly a quarter-century after the Decembrist revolt, Nicholas’s police crushed the reformist Petrashevsky Circle, comprised of lower officials and small landowners, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, cruelly waiting until the very last minute to commute the decreed death sentences to Siberian exile.

On the surface, Nicholas’s domination of Russian society seemed complete. Yet his iron grip had two fatal results. First, in the words of Ulam, “the stability and the power of the regime were bought at the price of neglecting the needed reforms and of leaving the Russian Empire incomparably farther behind Western Europe” at Nicholas’s death in 1825. As tragically demonstrated in the 1854-56 Crimean War, and then more devastatingly in the Great War that erupted in 1914, Russia could no longer match the national power of the Western capitalist-industrialist nations.

Second, Ulam concludes that Nicholas’s complete control over Russian society taught its intellectuals and elites the “dangerous lesson that everything in the last resort is dependent on politics”. Unwittingly, the autocracy itself prepared the ground for professional revolutionary parties and the socialism that ultimately overthrew the Romanovs.

Much like Russia nearly two centuries ago, the People’s Republic of China today seems impervious to reform or liberalism, riding waves of global upheaval such as the 2008 financial crisis and even Covid with little long-term threat to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, over the past decade, hesitant reforms have been reversed and political oppression has increased, thanks to the increasingly personalised rule of Xi Jinping.

Could Xi become a modern-day Nicholas I? Since rising to the position of general secretary of the CCP in 2013, Xi has exerted increasing control over Chinese society while buttressing his own power. Most notably, he has ended the tradition of Chinese leaders stepping down after two terms and has successfully named his own allies to the latest line-up of the CCP Politburo’s Standing Committee. He has dominated the CCP through anti-corruption campaigns, revitalised Marxist-Leninist ideological indoctrination, and inserted Party cells into every group in the economy and civil society. Many, such as former Central Party School professor Cai Xia, argue that Xi has fostered a cult of personality second only to Mao’s.

On the face of it, Xi’s policy has been successful. China appears stable, its society politically docile. Xi’s campaign against liberal values has steadily permeated the country, accompanied by exhortations to recover the virtues of Confucianism and its social hierarchy. Various economic sectors have been reined in as reform plans have petered out, and Xi’s campaigns against powerful tech executives such as Jack Ma or high-flying lenders have registered nary a peep of protest from their targets.

As riots and unrest sweep through America, France, the Netherlands, and other countries, China sits seemingly serene. Beijing continues to suppress Xinjiang and Tibet, and crush Hong Kong democracy, but little domestic outrage has resulted. There was indeed significant protest against Xi’s draconian “Zero Covid” policies, but there were no further outbursts once Xi relaxed the most onerous restrictions, and certainly little that seemed to threaten his personal control and that of the CCP. If anything, Xi’s triumphant coronation at last autumn’s 20th Party Congress seemed to show his complete mastery over China.

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Here, perhaps, is where Xi, the Party, and the world should be wary. Nicholas I, too, seemed invulnerable, having swiftly disposed of potential threats and built barricades against the viruses of liberalism and reform. Xi is by all accounts increasingly living in an echo chamber, surrounded by toadies, and unhampered by any need to share either decision-making or power. So far, he has avoided making any catastrophic errors, such as Nicholas’s attempts to defeat the Ottoman Empire, which led to the disastrous Crimean War against Britain and France. Yet fears of a conflict over Taiwan have reached unprecedented heights.

Unlike Nicholas, of course, Xi has focused on building up national power, especially military might and advanced technology. One might think, then, that China will avoid the first fatal flaw of Nicholas’s repressive policy — the material weakening of the country. Despite increasing trade with the US even after Covid, however, China’s macroeconomic picture continues to darken, and it is unclear just how much growth is actually occurring. Similarly, despite years of investing billions in semiconductor development, to take one example, China remains at least a half-decade behind America, a gap that seems remarkably stable. Similar questions dog other aspects of China’s technological growth, despite the hype of Chinese research into machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The once-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative, which supposedly invested $1 trillion in infrastructure and trade around Eurasia, has been plagued by corruption, shoddy construction, and wasted investment. By some measures, Chinese personal wealth is decreasing, and the elites remain desperate to offshore both their money and children. As for the Chinese military, until it is tested in combat, there simply is no way to know if all the shiny hardware and advanced weapons will either work or be operated by a well-trained, disciplined, and capable human force. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that we have already seen China peak, and that in another decade or two, its relative strength will seem much less than today. Thus, a major mistake, such as a move on Taiwan, could turn out to be Xi’s equivalent of Nicholas’s Ottoman war: the beginning of an unravelling of the very system he is trying to maintain.

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That then leaves Nicholas’s second fatal flaw: the politicisation of all aspects of life and the inadvertent sowing of the seeds of destruction of tsarist autocracy. In the PRC, of course, almost everything has been political since 1949, and Xi is simply further enhancing the state’s power and reasserting control over areas of consumerism and civil society that emerged in the Nineties and 2000s. Yet in doing so he is running against the imperfect spheres of freedom that middle-class and elite Chinese appear to have taken for granted over the past generation. What we can tell from online discussion indicates widespread dissatisfaction with the Party’s reassertion of control; combined with the exposure of endemic corruption among Party nobility such as former premier Wen Jibao, public anger at the hypocrisy and unfair advantages of the Chinese elite roils beneath the surface. Xi’s attempts to smother such anger risks driving it deeper underground but not extinguishing it. While China’s democratic dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng are safely out of the country, the long-term effects of Xi’s repression could possibly engender a new generation of reformists or those opposed to Party control.

The question, of course, is what would replace a Party overthrown in response to Xi’s repressive excesses and weakening of China. In the case of Russia, tsarist autocracy was eventually replaced by the far worse evil of communist totalitarianism. It is hard to see anything worse replacing the system perfected by Stalin and Mao, but few could have predicted the ravaged 20th century. What prevents such an outcome is the current lack of ideological alternative to autocracy (whether socialist or not) and democratic liberalism. There is no nascent movement or ideology on the horizon comparable to the socialism of the mid-19th century that entranced intellectuals and workers.

So, there is at least the chance that a post-Xi, post-Party China would not become more repressive and totalitarian, but less so. Democracy has been having a hard run of it lately around the globe and is far from attracting new acolytes, but in the condition of complete political and even social breakdown, the pull of self-determination would be a powerful one. By attempting to crush all heterodox thought, Xi Jinping may in fact help to ensure its survival. At least, we in the West can so hope.

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Another possibility is an internal political oscillation from repression to comparative moderation, as happened when Khrushchev succeeded Stalin and Deng Xiaoping followed Mao. Xi could be succeeded by someone who relaxes some of his restrictions without in any way loosening the CCP’s grip. But there are risks in such an approach as well. In Russia, the autocrat Nicholas I was succeeded by the “Tsar Liberator” Alexander II, who freed the serfs only to fall victim to the terrorists of the “People’s Will” socialist revolutionary group. This in turn led to the reassertion of autocratic control under Alexander III and Nicholas II, and the final confrontation with revolutionary movements.

However, for now, there seems little threat to the CCP. Despite its corruption and inefficiencies, the Party continues to rule largely unopposed — watchful and often vengeful, but not fearing for its immediate future. Such was the tsarist system of Nicholas I. His success in staving off change helped ensure cataclysmic transformation just over a half-century after his death. The lessons for Xi Jinping could not be clearer.

But the great Victorian year of protest actually feels more recent than it has for decades. In its chaos and its power, it resembles our own historical moment, buffeted by populist uprisings and social turmoil, climate rebellion and violent insurrection. “We can take that place,” one man said confidently as he pointed to the Capitol on January 6. “And then do what?” responded his partner in crime. “Heads on pikes!” the first replied without really having the slightest idea of what to do next. As in 1848, radical and even violent protests are now expected, sometimes even desired, but without any clear programme or manifesto. Revolution doesn’t seem unlikely anymore, but at the same time, it’s hard to concretely envision a post-capitalist world.

Whether it’s the bolsonaristas invading the Brazilian National Congress, the gilets jaunes assembling spontaneously in the streets of France, or the “square movements” following the 2008 crash, the more traditional repertoires of contention that characterised the past century seem to be changing both on the Left and the Right. But far from being on the verge of a carefully planned coup d’état or a new social order, contemporary revolts instead resemble that tumultuous mid-century upheaval: “poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions” as Christopher Clark notes in his gripping new history, Revolutionary Spring. “The people of 1848,” he adds, “could see themselves in us.”

While the inter-war period and the rise of fascism has often been raised as a comparison for our present, Clark offers us a different and more accurate analogue. Far from being a failed revolution as Karl Marx had thought, 1848 successfully transformed Palermo, Paris and Vienna, and reverberated in Chile and Martinique. The year progressed not as chain or domino effect, but more like our own “populist revolts”: nearly simultaneous, interconnected and rooted in common socio-economical changes, but without being directly caused by one another. It was the “particle collision chamber at the centre of the European nineteenth century”. “People, groups and ideas,” Clark says, “flew into it, crashed together, fused or fragmented, and emerged in showers of new entities” with “profound consequences for the modern history of Europe”. The world, as Bismarck recalled in his memoirs, would never be the same after. Of course, at the time, the hopes of radicals were crushed. Many fled into exile in the United States or London, like the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, or Marx himself. For them, the disillusion was intense and the prospects of an immediate socialist transformation had rapidly vanished. But in the years to come, 1848 transformed how liberals, conservatives and socialists alike would relate to politics.

In response to the revolts, which were largely defeated, significant constitutional changes were passed, that slowly defined our modern representative politics and shaped for good the nature of the state and government. These new political constellations were more open to reform and to the aspirations of the moderate elements of society, but the state apparatus was significantly expanded, with the establishment of armed police forces trained to combat insurrections. The armed civic state is taken for granted now, but it was a marked novelty after the period spanning from the Vienna congress of 1815 to 1848. Most regimes had obviously been repressive, illiberal and change averse, but were also, as the historian Paul W. Schroeder has noted, inefficient and quite reluctant to use brute force against their own citizens. This allowed for a proliferation of conspiracies and popular revolts.

For a long time, ordinary people did not demonstrate, rally or strike, but would rather parade in mocking routines, seize grain, invade fields, attack tax collectors, destruct tollgates or sack machines. Conflicts unfolded generally at a local level, with a narrow focus and without coherent political aims. And revolutions themselves were rather the preserve of austere figures such as the Italian Robespierrist Philippe Buonarroti, who favoured revolutionary dictatorship over mass movements, convinced of the difficulty of involving the multitudes. Despite censorship, it was, in fact, Schroeder observed, “relatively easy and safe to promote revolution”. As a result, in 1848, the authorities of Europe weren’t ready to respond properly to the insurrections, used instead to small and carefully-planned uprisings.

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In that year, something quite different emerged for the first time. As Clark writes, the uprisings were “inchoate, multifocal, socially deep” rather than anchored in the “seditious conspiracy” characteristics of the 1830s. The revolutionary ideas “reverberated in cafés and political clubs, circulating in communicative networks that were incomparably denser, socially deeper and more sophisticated than their late-eighteenth-century predecessors”. Even if there weren’t yet “political parties capable of disciplining their members or binding them to commonly agreed positions” or “doctrinally authoritative ‘ideologies’”, it marked the beginning of the end of a certain form of protest. From here on, not only the middle classes and liberals renounced revolution for good, but the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades.

As the sociologist Charles Tilly later argued in the case of France, 1848 therefore stands in the middle of two crucial intertwined changes that would transform the repertoire of collective action for the following century. The first involved the centralisation of the state into a more complex apparatus, internally coordinated and with enhanced means of coercion. This was coupled with an unprecedented expansion of capital, producing a large and modern working class which populated large units of production. And within this new nexus of capital and state, social movements as we know them began to take hold within an emerging civil society. Change couldn’t be the product of a few heroes dedicated to the revolution, but had to come from organised and ideologically-driven masses. If class struggle was the steam of History, it would now require strong and sophisticated engines to move forwards and channel collective struggles into specific directions. The “social”, as Clark notes, could now “be grasped as an autonomous category, irreducible to politics”.

This transition wasn’t just a concern for revolutionaries. Even conservatives, as Eric Hobsbawm noted, “would have to defend themselves in new ways” and “to learn the politics of the people”. “Public opinion” — a distinctively liberal notion — could not be ignored any more. Defeating insurrections or censoring the press was not enough, and influencing and controlling the masses would become increasingly important over the next decades, shaping a new form of statecraft and political activity. It marked, Hobsbawm argued, “the end…of the politics of tradition”. As the rate of literacy increased, all political forces had to develop their own ideological apparatuses to shape the mentality of large groups, through political newspapers, youth movements or rallies. Politics was slowly embedded in a “thick” civil society, with a large range of deeply networked organisations and institutions that served as intermediaries between citizens and the state. Parties became not just machines to conquer power, but mediators between institutions and citizens, embodying the interests of mobilised and conscious social groups.

This kind of politics, that culminated with the total mobilisations of the first half of the 20th century, would shape the whole political spectrum. From socialists and communists creating their own counter-society within capitalism, to fascists who, while they crushed unions and labour organisations, still tried to fully integrate a broad range of voluntary associations and organisations within the fascist state. In that sense, everything was political, from the sport club to the local newspapers. This held for much of the 20th century, where even during the post-war period, politics remained transactional, and programmes and reforms generally reflecting pre-electoral deals with specific constituencies. It’s only with the more individualised ethos following the century’s own year of global protest, 1968, that this settlement began to unravel, opening the space for the more speculative and public relations-driven public sphere of the Eighties.

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And with the demise of social democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, collective engines to define human needs and collective endeavours slowly disappeared in favour of a more atomised civil society. That is why, as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe recently argued, “our political world…retained its external appearance, but if you crack open the shell, there’s nothing inside”. The formal institutions of democracy are still there, but are “divested of popular energies and innovation”. The populist explosions of the 2010s marked therefore what we could call the final disintermediation of politics, an exit from the associative structures that shaped politics for a century: parties, unions, mass organisations. And while the era of apathetic citizens characteristic of the Nineties has come to an end, the renewal of social turmoil and ideological battles hasn’t brought back such engines. People assemble and demonstrate not on the orders of parties and unions leaders but through the spread of messages and call for action posted on social media. We have been plunged back into the spontaneous, disorganised and unpredictable world that shaped 1848.

In the newly digitalised public sphere, political figures combine a strong and charismatic authority with a less mediated relation with their base. They speak to them through Facebook, Twitter, or even their own social media platform, rather than the outmoded bureaucratic structures of the mass parties. Within such a shift, in a sense ending the dynamic that began in 1848, even ideologies are not stable but rather, like in the era of Tocqueville, “an archipelago of texts and personalities across which [are] plotted quite idiosyncratic courses”. Large and influential newspapers have been replaced by a proliferation of media platforms, shaping the ideas of evanescent crowds on specific issues rather than precise political projects. Even the decorporation that went along the proletarisation of labour echoes this. Rather than a labour movement built upon a formalised labour market, we have witnessed a proliferation of the “working poor” and the “Uberisation” of workers. Social conflict has itself deserted the workplace, where the “great resignation” replaced coordinated strikes and mass labour militancy.

Whether it be the syncretic nature of their ideas, the irruption of spirituality into politics, the resurgence of violence, the tension between representation and direct forms of democracy, or even the rise of influential feminist figures and writers, our past decade has allowed the rebirth of the radicalism that ended with the mid-century revolutions. A world that would probably appear more familiar to Blanqui than Jaurès. Politics is now everywhere, but in a very different and more elusive sense than during the mass mobilisations of the 20th century.

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But among all these similarities, there is a difference. If 1848 led to an ascendency of the centre and the idea of superseding politics through technocracy and scientific government, our time appears to be heading the other way. Technocracy has been shattered, and the ability of the state to effectively govern is at its lowest since the late Sixties. Even if the idea of revolution has made a comeback, we still lack of engines to actually allow collective forms of decision making and to politicise human needs. Despite the development of new forms of digital engagement, the participation of citizens remains narrow and unable to sustain enduring political participation. There isn’t a week without headlines mentioning a riot or spontaneous assemblies or demonstrations. But the question still remains: what’s next?

But as Tocqueville had himself experienced, the end of an era is always an unpredictable process. “I cannot say and have no idea when this long journey will end,” he wrote in his Souvenirs, “and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever”. If the agony of the old can be a long and a painful thing it also, as the story of 1848 demonstrates, opens history to unexpected turns and innovations.

But by the end, it was the book’s swirling, ambiguous politics which struck me the most: its class tensions, militant worker rebellion, and aborted revolutions. It spoke to the emotional, often interpersonal motivations behind political actions, the pitfalls of mob anger, and the futility of uprisings against larger, overseeing forces that go much deeper than we could ever see.

Written between April 1884 and February 1885, and published serially starting in December of 1884, Germinal tells the story of a young man, Etienne, who shows up to a mining village one night looking for work. He’s been sleeping out, is broke and hungry. Despite initially getting denied, he’s given a job by Maheu, the leader of the workers. He’s offered lodging under Maheu’s roof, sleeping alongside Catherine, Maheu’s daughter, who also works in the mines, and becomes Etienne’s love interest. But they are prevented from consummating their love due to an almost incestuous, taboo-like proximity caused by their living arrangement, and because Catherine gets taken by another man, Chaval, Etienne’s rival. As the novel progresses, we see Etienne gradually get accustomed to the job. We see what life for these workers looks like, their festivals, how they turn up, how they bathe — each household member taking turns in a single big tub.

But before long, Etienne starts wanting more. He starts reading about revolutionary ideas. He starts asking his fellow workers if they are content with the life they’re living. Some, like Souvarine, an anarchist extremist who was part of an uprising back in Russia, are all about it. Others, like Maheu’s wife, who has a household of children to consider, are more apprehensive to get riled up about a life they could be living. They talk it out at the pub, at Maheu’s before going to bed each night. Etienne starts giving speeches to increasingly receptive crowds of workers. Then the Company docks their pay, and they decide to strike.

What we see next is the gradual frenzy of the mob. Of how ugly things can turn when a single employer monopolises an area’s available work. The striking workers first mob to Hennebeau’s, the local bourgeoisie manager’s house, presenting their demands. When they’re rejected, they mob, on foot, from mine to mine in the area, attempting to prevent other workers from returning to work. They surround and try to break into Hennebeau’s house. When that fails, they turn on the local shopkeeper, Maigrat, attempting to raid his store. Maigrat climbs onto the roof, attempting to protect his goods with projectiles from above, only he slips and falls, bashes his head open. His corpse gets mutilated by the mob in a stomach-turning scene and even Etienne looks on with horror.

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It has long been debated whether Germinal is a revolutionary or a reactionary work. On the one hand, how Zola describes the bleak conditions of these workers aligns him squarely on their “side”. Under constant risk of getting crushed underground by rock falls, or asphyxiated by firedamp, and coughing up huge hunks of phlegm their whole lives, they’re given just enough bread to survive, have no horizon of hope, and “life’s only pleasures [are] getting drunk and giving your wife a baby”. But Zola, interestingly, also shows the other side. After the striking workers surround the bourgeoisie manager Hennebeau’s house, Zola switches to Hennebeau’s point of view, giving the reader a contemporaneous rundown of his day.

We learn that a) Hennebeau doesn’t even have the power to meet their demands — he’s only answering to the higher-up stockholders in Paris, and b) he’s not even thinking about the workers, he’s just discovered that his wife, who hasn’t slept with him for years, has been sleeping with his nephew. Hennebeau spends the day, when workers are rioting and throwing rocks at his windows, feeling silently cucked and in fact deeply envious of the shameless, visceral way these workers live, rioting and drinking and fucking at will. Even Etienne, as soon as he starts getting some power as the leader of the uprising, starts buying new clothes and dreaming of becoming a political leader in Paris. He, too, is looking out for himself.

Are Zola’s visions of what happens once a crowd becomes a mob, what happens when the leader of an uprising gets some power, assertions, or simply true reflections of the world that he’s merely reporting? That is up to the reader to decide. The difficulty the reader has deciding this, in fact, is what makes Zola’s storytelling so strong. What jolts the reader out of empty political theorising.

In the end, the strike does, for a time, seem to work, if backhandedly. The conflict culminates in a clash when the Company brings in foreign scabs and troops, and the local workers surround the mine, throwing rocks at the armed gendarmes. Shots are fired — as, we’re told in a footnote, happened at a mine near where the novel is set, in 1869. It’s only at this point, when news gets out to the rest of the country that troops are shooting workers, that the stockholders do something. Attempting to save face, they abandon their plan to implement foreign scabs and invite the local workers back, promising, in cold corporate speak, that all is forgiven. Most of the workers, beaten down, demoralised, and starving, return to work.

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Only, the night before the miners return, Souvarine, the extremist anarchist, commits a destructive, terroristic act against the Company, sneaking into the mine and rupturing its already compromised main vein. The mine explodes, water bursting through the barriers, swallowing all the mining equipment underground, and trapping Etienne and a few dozen workers down there. Etienne eventually gets rescued — by Hennebeau’s nephew, Negrel, the engineer, who, in a rare subversion of the worker-bourgeoisie binary, risks his life to do so — and ends the book bathed in sun one morning, recovered from his injuries, seeing off his coworkers, who are back working at the mine with pre-strike wages. He’s off to Paris to take an entry-level political job. A type of class mobility, for the few seeds able to make it through winter, is possible. But otherwise: people fight, people die, and those who don’t die, according to cycles beyond our control, endure, continuing their endless striving upwards, out of the earth, into the sun and clean air.

That’s the political conclusion. A sense of futility in the face of larger natural forces. The mine explodes when it wants to, things calibrate once spring comes, everything returns eternally according to its own timetable.

The emotional climax, however, comes during the armed standoff, when it appears that Catherine has been shot. The engine of the book — what pushed me, in any case, to finish it — are the interpersonal threads. The erotic desires, or internal biological forces, driving characters to act. Early on, Etienne accidentally witnesses Chaval taking Catherine behind a shed, despite her not being a woman yet. “You know I’m too young,” Catherine pleads. “Wait till later on, at least till I’m grown up.” Chaval ignores this, continues onto her, and she lets him. Witnessing this fills Etienne with “a kind of jealous excitement”, “together with a furious desire to get his revenge”.

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When Etienne is first getting ideas about striking, he sees the way Catherine looks at him in that position of leadership. When he speaks to crowds, he keeps an eye out for if Catherine is there. These internal, libidinal energies, like the larger, external cyclical forces, drive and orient his political actions. And that intersection between internal, biological forces and external, political ones culminates when, during the armed standoff, Catherine appears to be one of the casualties, passed out on the muddy field out front of the mine, her stomach soaked in blood. Only she hasn’t been shot; she’s finally become a woman. Her mother, discovering this, scoffs at the cosmic irony of starting menstruation the minute the world has gotten too fucked to bring children into. But it seems significant that Catherine, once the Company invites the workers back, is the first to go. She tells Etienne she can’t sit around doing nothing. She’s got to do what she can for the future.

This seems like a more optimistic acceptance of the cyclicality of the world: it’s not just that we’re deterministically led along paths we can’t see or control, according to larger natural rhythms. But each of us are driven by interpersonal motivations within ourselves, to impress a prospective lover, to protect a family, or even, like Souvarine, who lost his wife to public execution back in Russia during a revolt he himself led, to find nihilistic expression for heartbreak. This insight doesn’t resolve any political conflicts we might have, nor justifies terroristic political acts, but could open the door to having compassion for where political differences might stem from — might emotionally, interpersonally, in unseen, cyclical ways, be driven by.

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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By Aris Roussinos

Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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By Dorian Lynskey

If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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Your Fitbit has stolen your soul

By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

It began with sit-ins and protests of small, far-Left groups at Nanterre University on the outskirts of Paris. Their actions only interested a small minority of students. Everything changed on 3 May, when these groups met in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. Hearing a rumour that an extreme Right-wing militia was coming to attack them, they prepared to fight. The dean called the police, resulting in the arrest of several activists, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The brutality of the clashes took everyone by surprise. Simultaneously, a series of strikes occurred in factories. As the situation escalated, the government started to panic.

At the end of May, it tried to reach an agreement with the striking workers, but to no avail. President de Gaulle disappeared from the country for 24 hours. The government hung in the balance, but the General returned and dissolved parliament, calling elections for the end of June. Gaullists won in landslide, strikes and student protests lost popular support. They died out.

In June, Michel Foucault watching France from a perch in Tunisia, wrote to one of his correspondents: “From here it looks like a great mystery.” More than half a century later, there is no consensus either on the causes or on the meaning of those events. Were the students motivated by economic anxieties? Or was this a cultural revolution? The question boils down to whether the underlying cause of the youth revolt was precarity or abundance.

The baby boom meant that there had never been as many students in French universities as there were in 1968: 508,000 in the academic year 1967-68 — the equivalent number in 1950-51 was only 135,000. The worries of students in the humanities, who made up the majority of the protesters, was supposedly linked to the scarcity of teaching jobs available to them.

Louis Gruel, a Maoist who took part in the May riots, rubbished this explanation in his La Rébellion de 68: Une relecture sociologique. Not a single demand or pamphlet published in 1968, Gruel notes, raised the issue of the future of students on the labour market. The devaluation of diplomas came much later. When Gruel conducted a survey among former activists, none recalled that concern for the future propelled them to protest.

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America has captured France

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

France was not exactly on its knees economically in the late-Sixties. It was the second half of Les trentes glorieuses, a three-decade stretch of uninterrupted GDP growth, expanding by an average of 5% a year throughout the period. Full employment prevailed; the working class had seen its purchasing power increase; younger generations had every reason to believe that they would be better off than their parents.

In reality, only a small fraction of the young demanded a revolutionary abolition of consumer society and “putting power in the hands of the imagination”, as one May slogan went. In September 1968, the IFOP asked students what was most important to them: the revolutionary transformation of society, reform of the university or passing the exams. Only 12% of students prioritised the downfall of capitalism.

The pretence of a spiritual revolution against capitalism, however, deceived many Catholics. The intellectual wing of French Catholicism, from Maurice Clavel to Jacques Maritain, fell hard for the revolution. Students, claimed Maritain, were fighting on the streets because they were “systematically deprived of reasons to live”.

Revolutionary zeal erupted with even greater force among priests than among Catholic intellectuals. Around 1,500 priests abandoned their vocation in 1968. Monastery councils re-organised themselves; decisions would now be taken collectively. In one of them an old Dominican, a translator of Aristotle, asked permission to purchase the philosopher’s works. The council concluded: “authorisation denied, Aristotle is out of date”.

The philosopher Raymond Aron measured his own bewilderment in May ‘68, by wondering what would emerge from the chaos. He recognised the student’s criticisms of French society, but was alarmed by their failure to articulate a counter-ideal. Like the protests following the death of George Floyd, chaos became a goal in itself. As Martin Gurri described America’s violent summer of 2020, the protests of French students in 1968 were “an exercise in pure negation, in the repudiation of the status quo without an alternative in sight. At this point, the question of nihilism becomes impossible to avoid.”

Hollow philosophy followed hollow political action. There was an extraordinary outpouring of major philosophical works in France at this time. Foucault’s Words and Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology (1967). There was Jacques Lacan’s Écrits in 1966; Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), and Logic of Sense (1969).

In La Pensée 68, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut take a critical look at the thought that accompanied the May revolt. What strikes them is that “philosophies of difference”, as they were called, ossify after the rebellion into a new conventionality. They break with the style of French thought, rejecting its clarity and replacing it with a cult of paradoxes, while constantly striving for unreasonable “complexity”. The ideas of Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze by no means represent the fruit of French intellectual life. They borrow heavily from Freud, Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger. French philosophy becomes nothing but a radicalised outgrowth of German thought.

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Macron is the leader France deserves

By Dominic Sandbrook

The Leftist movements that arose in May 1968 did not disappear. But instead of carrying out a revolution, they squabbled among themselves. Above all, feminism, which flourished as never before, came into conflict with Maoism. Feminists from the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes (MLF) rejected the dogmas of revolutionary struggle as understood by Maoists. They founded their cause not on theories but on experience, supposedly more truthful than the concepts championed by men.

“The activists spend their time fighting for others, for workers or for immigrants,” says one feminist quoted by the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff. “Let us talk about ourselves, and let the workers talk about themselves.” MLF-style feminism represented the culmination of the spirit of May ’68. It carried the demand to abolish the barrier separating what is private from what is public, to its ultimate conclusion. While revolutionaries assumed that the personal was irrelevant to the cause of the liberation of the proletariat, for French feminists politics begins with feelings. For many it ended there.

Decades later, we can begin to see the events of May as a larger turning point within Left-wing politics. The nature of revolution changed. It ceased to be a collective project based on economic considerations, pursued to change society. Revolution became privatised, reduced to the domain of inner lives. For the Left, this utter futility was compensated, in the words of the philosopher Régis Debray, by the “intensity of imaginary struggles”.

The ‘68 generation moved from Maoism to marketing. Guy Hocquenghem, 22 at the time of the revolts and a participant in them, observed that his former comrades swapped joints for cocaine, and scooters for sports cars. They created a “mafia” occupying the most important positions in French society.

“The eternally young,” he wrote, “‘the class of 68′, blocks with great determination the path for everything born after them”. They have turned contestation into a consensus that is neither Left nor Right, but gathers the worst elements of both. It is no surprise that in France, baby boomers and soixante-huitards have become Emmanuel Macron’s most reliable supporters.

Contrast Macron with Charles de Gaulle. The old general never defined Gaullism, but in his memoirs he described it as “an instrument of struggle and renewal”. The riots of ‘68 convinced him that France needed to reinvent itself. As Arnaud Teyssier has argued, de Gaulle’s response to the botched revolution on the streets was a revolution of his own.

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The Left should not vote for Macron

By Thomas Fazi

He ordered a referendum in 1969 which proposed major changes to France’s institutions. De Gaulle wanted to give the new, broad middle-classes the chance to participate more fully in the Fifth Republic. More authority to the regions; a new second chamber to replace the elitist Senate.

When the French rejected his project, the General resigned. He believed France had chosen stagnation. He sensed that without completing his proposed revolution, France would once again be ruled by an oligarchy of unrepresentative political parties. Only in the last five years has that oligarchy dissolved in the acid bath of its own contradictions.

By the end of the Sixties, the French, having flirted with revolution, abandoned the idea altogether. They did not want a revolution from the Left, nor did they want de Gaulle’s revolution from above. The young were as reluctant to change the world as to rebuild France’s institutions. They were focused on the present, and indifferent to both the past, and what lay ahead of them. France chose stagnation. The curve of decline, as Marguerite Yourcenar wrote, is complicated.

One by one all the vast palaces of the aristocracy were “expropriated” — a favourite word of the revolution — and systematically vandalised and looted. Their lavish interiors were trashed, paintings slashed, priceless Aubusson carpets ruined, antique furniture broken up for firewood and famous wine cellars pillaged in an orgy of drinking and violence. Even Lenin was seen driving around the city in one of Nicholas II’s prized Delaunay-Belleville limousines.

What a contrast this was to the last gilded, heady days of the Belle Epoque, when the old tsarist oligarchs had indulged themselves in the food, fine wines, casinos and high-class courtesans of Paris. Before the war, couples such as the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and his wife Olga had a swanky home in the Bois de Boulogne, where they entertained the glitterati of Marcel Proust’s Paris. At Madame Yturbe’s Hungarian costume ball in 1912, Olga arrived dripping in luxury — in a dress by Worth encrusted with rows of pearls and a Cartier tiara of pear-shaped diamonds.

The legendary wealth of the Russian elite was perhaps epitomised by the fabulous jewellery they purchased in St Petersburg from the leading imperial jeweller and master goldsmith, Carl Fabergé. The high point of Romanov extravagance was manifested in the fabulous, ornately jewelled Easter eggs that Fabergé produced for the Imperial Family between 1886 and 1916 — some 54 eggs in all, of which 44 survive today.

Fifteen of those eggs form the centrepiece of the current exhibition “Fabergé: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Of the 233 charming works of art in the show, 13 are on loan from Russian institutions, causing some to question whether they will now be caught up in the new “cultural Cold War”. Will they be returned to Russia while hostilities continue? Already, the UK government has sanctioned the billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, whose foundation loaned the golden “Hen egg” for the exhibition.

Coming as it does during this dramatic conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and an accompanying outburst of virulent Russophobia in the West, the Fabergé exhibition cannot help but provide a mournful and telling parallel of what happens to wealth and privilege when they are dispossessed and routed.

In 1917, along with many other private businesses, Carl Fabergé’s was seized and taken over by a workers’ collective. He found it hard to adjust and a year later fled Russia when the Bolsheviks nationalised his company. With German assistance he got out of Petrograd under diplomatic protection and made his way to Lausanne in Switzerland where he died in 1920, heartbroken that the glittering life he had once known “is no more”.

Meanwhile many of his patrons left during the 1919–20 mass exodus south out of Russia — through today’s war-torn Ukraine — to Odessa and Novorossisk when General Wrangel’s White Army took its last stand against the Red Army. At that time, a million Russians fled into Europe — but that figure is today dwarfed by the number of refugees escaping Ukraine.

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Kyiv will rise again

By Dominic Sandbrook

Today’s Russian oligarchs — the new post-Soviet aristocracy — now find the screws being tightened on them, just as they were on the Romanovs. More and more demands are being made for their property to be sanctioned as punishment for Putin’s war against Ukraine. For after many years of rumbling criticism, the war has finally drawn the world’s attention to the obscene wealth that this elite group of expatriates have enjoyed for far too long. Given their links to Putin, the seizure of their property, in the eyes of many, is a necessary — if not righteous — penalty for their leader’s sins.

Recently, Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove suggested that perhaps the mansions of today’s Russian oligarchs should be seized and filled with Ukrainian refugees — as “the ultimate payback for Putin’s cronies”. No sooner said than billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska’s lavish mansion in Belgravia was occupied, albeit briefly, by anarchist protesters.

One cannot help but be reminded of a moving scene in David Lean’s film Dr Zhivago, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, where revolutionaries turn up at the large apartment of the comfortably off Gromyko family of Zhivago’s wife Tonya and announce that their home is forfeit. It is now to become a communal dwelling that the Gromykos will have to share with several workers’ families.

While today’s Russian oligarchs are long practised in every possible tax scam and evasion to hide their wealth from possible confiscation, back in 1917, there was no way that the old aristocracy could evade the cudgel of revolutionary retribution. All they could do was grab a few of their most precious and easily portable possessions, travelling into exile with little more than the clothes they stood in, with their few remaining jewels sewn into their garments.

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For Russian refugees, these family heirlooms would be the currency of exile, the only tradable possessions they had left with which to sustain themselves in their future severely reduced lives. Or so they thought. The trouble was that their jewellery had greatly depreciated in value. This was due to a flood of such goods on the European market at the end of the war. For the Russians were not the only aristocracy to have seen their monarchy crash and be forced into selling off their jewels — the German and Austro-Hungarian thrones had gone the same way too.

Only one aristocrat of note, Grand Duchess Vladimir, saw her jewels safely smuggled out of her grand palace in St Petersburg – to London, by a British art dealer and unofficial spy named Bertie Stopford. But her fabulous collection, that had once been the envy of all Paris, was sold off after her death in 1920 to sustain her children in exile. Her magnificent diamond and emerald tiara by court jeweller Carl Edvard Bolin was bought by Queen Mary in 1922 and is a favourite piece worn by our own Queen Elizabeth.

As the Russian old guard fled their homeland they settled into communities of exiles in Berlin, Paris, London and elsewhere. Reduced to poverty, made worse by a lack of skills or any kind of training that would find them jobs, they discovered that the jewels they thought would last them for many years soon ran out. One émigré, Grand Duke Alexander, noted with despair how the proceeds from the sale of his wife Xenia’s great strings of Romanov pearls had lasted just three years. In London, Russian exiles sold their Fabergé treasures for a song at antiques dealers such as Wartski’s in Old Bond Street.

But at least these communities of exiles had each other and could share in the experience of dispossession and poverty. Where will today’s despised Russian oligarchs end up if they continue to support Putin’s pariah regime? Already, many have fled to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a financial haven where their wealth can ensure some kind of dismal but comfortable purdah. Their other option, of course, is to leave all their foreign assets behind, and return to Russia — retreating behind the new ‘iron curtain’ that is rapidly descending on their homeland.

This stance won him few friends among his fellow postcolonial writers. The Caribbean historian C.L.R. James spoke for many when he dismissed Naipaul as a colonial stooge who simply published “what the whites want to say, but dare not”. But while it may have been true that Naipaul provided comfort to Westerners licking their wounds over the end of European empire, he also offered something to those he critiqued: a challenge. Naipaul wrote about the pathologies of the downtrodden with an intimacy that could neither be faked nor ignored. Today, at a time when the American empire has entered its twilight, Europe is somnolent, and the long-marginalised are slowly attaining power commensurate with their numbers, Naipaul’s challenge feels worth reflecting upon.

“He had been fed by so many civilisations; so much had gone into making him what he was, but now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he [had] cut himself off,” he wrote in his travelogue Among the Believers about a Leftist Iranian friend whose life he used to critique the culturally defensive trajectory of Iran after its revolution. The Iranians had wanted the amenities of modernity — fighter jets, medical technology, television. But the headlong cultural Westernisation of the Shah had unnerved them. Their passionate, unforeseen revolution had tried to turn back to the past while holding onto modernity’s material benefits, only to find that such a thing was impossible. The new regime they now lived with was ruthlessly modern in its style of oppression while still corrosive to the old values. In place of the Shah, they had not received the warm certainties of the past, but a gaping spiritual void.

It was these types of half-modernised peoples whose psychology Naipaul picked apart in his travel writings, from the Middle East to India, to Argentina. Even as he skewered the hypocrisy and brutality of empire, which he did with quiet effectiveness, Naipaul knew the pathologies of those on the other side. The child of an impoverished Caribbean society deeply shaped by the slave trade and colonialism, Naipaul, when he turned his sights onto his own people and those like them, knew how to press where it hurt.

Naipaul’s fiction, for which he won the Booker Prize fifty years ago this month, poked holes in the confidence of the newly liberated masses. In his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, Naipaul depicted a fictional African country spiralling into the abyss after winning its freedom. At a time when cathartic violence was very popular on the postcolonial Left, he wasted no time pointing out where those furies would lead. “They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late.” These chilling words remind one of the apocalyptic visions of Isis. But they could describe any number of countries that have plunged into limitless violence after winning independence.

“Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” Naipaul once wrote, pessimistically. Too often this has turned out to be wise advice. Naipaul painted with a broad brush. He got his share of things wrong. Later in his life, he even succumbed to the same fanaticism and hypocrisy for which he chastised others. Even so, his writings — about the squalor of India, the prideful stagnation of most Muslim countries, and the dangerous fantasies of the recently liberated across Africa and Latin America — could not be brushed off as simple ignorance. They had the sting of truth.

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I started reading Naipaul a few years ago on the recommendation of friends. These recommendations typically came with a murmured warning that his politics were questionable, but that his books were worth it for the prose alone. I found that they were even better than that. Discovering Naipaul was like finding a curmudgeonly uncle who could point to one’s neuroses because he, too, had suffered from them.

Any reader who identifies with what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ will find in Naipaul’s writing a heavy dose of introspection. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, was so pitiless about the country’s backwardness that its publication there was banned for several years after its initial release in 1964. His words seemed to open something up in people who were willing to listen. The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said that the experience of discovering Naipaul as a young man left him “shocked and bewildered”. “I didn’t know that you could write a book like that about India,” he added. “I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived.”

Naipaul could be ungenerous to his subjects, most of whom were just emerging towards political independence after the long trauma of colonisation. But by shining a harsh spotlight on their failures, he also offered them a more comprehensive kind of freedom. Naipaul returned to those he wrote about moral responsibility for their own condition. This was the burden of independence, and accepting it, Naipaul suggested, was the only way that the formerly colonised would ever truly be liberated.

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By Tomiwa Owolade

There’s a lesson in Naipaul’s life story as well. As the son of a lower middle-class Indo-Trinidadian family, he had one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history. At a time when the Western publishing world was considered the racial patrimony of those who controlled it, Naipaul triumphed so thoroughly that his personal background became immaterial. By the time Naipaul finished A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he had established himself as perhaps the finest writer of the English language to be published in decades.

Naipaul achieved this in the face of an atmosphere that was not just unwelcoming but actively hostile. He did not retreat into a defensive cocoon but instead conquered the English literary world on his own terms. Like James Baldwin, whose writings on race dwarf most of what is published on the subject today in eloquence and coherence, Naipaul’s writings were put up against the Darwinian test of an unsympathetic audience. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” he wrote to his father in an anguished letter while at Oxford. And he did.

The “bootstrap” mantra of modern American conservatism is correctly criticised for serving as a defence of unjust economic or social arrangements, often by those who fail to live up to the high standards they prescribe for others. But there is also something to be said for persevering in the face of a world that never has been and never will be fair. “The world is what it is,” as Naipaul put it in the immortal opening lines of A Bend in the River, and those who begin at a disadvantage must strive to be their best selves regardless. This, at least, was the world that he inhabited. “You couldn’t be a victim in the 1950s,” Naipaul observed drily. “There wasn’t the market.”

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By Matthew B Crawford

If there was no market for victimhood in Naipaul’s time, even for a brown-skinned, lilting-accented son of Caribbean poverty, now it seems there is no market for anything else. These days I sometimes find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the mention of terms like “race” and “empire,” even though, objectively speaking, they remain important subjects. The deference that comes when these sacred terms are invoked feels too easy. No one has the courage to push back, to demand from the victims rigour and consistency. Without worthy adversaries to overcome, their writing devolves into cliché.

Like C.L.R. James and Edward Said, I likely would have been a political opponent of Naipaul had I lived in his time. But one does not need to endorse all of his views to recognise that he was a worthy critic of many who would conceive of themselves as members of an underclass — and that we, like everyone else, need such critics. I never met him. Yet reading his books decades after they were published, I’ve often had the feeling that that Naipaul was challenging me personally. His entire career was an argument against taking up the mantle of sainted victimhood.  To a reader of a particular background, he offers bitter medicine through self-reflection rather than the sugar rush of moral self-righteousness.

Fifty years after winning the Booker Prize and a few years after his own death, it turns out that this descendant of indentured labourers cast off by the British Empire still has something important to say.

But though there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, all lasting cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they worship or communicate with in some form.

We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. In her book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French philosopher and reluctant mystic Simone Weil puts the case like this:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.”

Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the Left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the human need for roots in favour of some universalist flavour of “global justice.” She saw that notion for what it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that was leading the USSR to roll out a tyranny that matched that of fascism, right down to the barbed wire that surrounded the camps designated for those who did not fit into the model.

Weil saw beyond: when she looked at Hitler and Stalin, she saw two tyrants leading nations that had already been uprooted — by the industrial revolution, by Bolshevism, by the Great War, by the depression, by the wider process of modernity. Both men promised a return to, or a forward march towards, security, power and meaning through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology which they claimed would speak for the masses. Both delivered hell instead.

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Weil’s book was commissioned by the Free French in London, led by Charles de Gaulle. It was intended to be a manifesto for the renewal of France, and Europe, after the scourge of Nazism. Her prescription was radical. Europeans, she said, had been uprooted by industry, by the state and by an aggressive form of pseudo-Christianity (Weil was a sometimes reluctant Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases aligned themselves with “the interests of those who exploit the people.”)

Both state nationalism and state socialism were con tricks, according to Weil: exploiters of the people posing as their liberators. The “totalitarian idol” of grand world-saving ideologies such as communism and fascism was the scourge of the twentieth century. The whole game had to be junked, the terms redefined: “The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example,” she wrote, “is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it.”

“A transformation of the meaning attached to greatness”: perhaps this has always been the task, and perhaps it has always been urgent. But it certainly is now. Our idols today are economic conquest, unending “growth” built on turning all life into “resources” for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward-motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility. Charles de Gaulle, when he returned to France victorious, was an effective competitor in this game. He never read the book that Weil aimed at him.

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The West has lost its virtue

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What did Weil mean by this “transformation”? Perhaps the answer explains why she is not as widely read as she should be. Her attachment was to the eternal things, and she could never be boxed in. She wrote in praise of God, tradition, roots, peoples and culture; but also of justice, freedom of speech and thought, honour and equality. She could be equally scathing about fascism, communism, established religion, liberal elites, capitalism and mass education.

One minute she is incinerating the “uprooted intellectuals obsessed with progress” who dominated the cultural elite of her time (and who have entirely conquered ours), assailing the Left for its contempt of the peasantry or asserting that “of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital … than love of the past.” But just when you think you’re dealing with a conservative Defender of the West, you read something like this:

“For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.“

Weil wasn’t wrong. We in the West invented this thing called modernity, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once we called this process the White Man’s Burden, and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it development, and export it via World Bank loans and the War on Terror.

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But — and here is the point so often missed, especially by the “progressives” currently leading the charge in the culture wars — before we could eat the world, we first had to eat ourselves. Our states and economic elites had to dispossess their own people before they could venture out to dispossess others. The ordinary folk of the “developed” West were the prototype; the guinea pigs in a giant global experiment. Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other.

Furthermore, this process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

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For the past several centuries, this intersection of financial power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies has constituted an ongoing war against roots and against limits. The momentum of the “global economy” is always forward: it demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes, and it will not stop until the world has been entirely remade. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes — or, worse, no shapes at all — with all the consequent turmoil and conflict. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer.

Plenty of people, of course, are quite happy with all of this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like me when we lament it. Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the internet, lamenting, so perhaps the last laugh is on us. But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return. And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: toxic imitations of our lost roots. Identity politics, newly rigid racial categories, extreme nationalisms, intolerant strains of religion, endlessly multiplying genders and “identities” constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far Right or the diversity identitarianism of the far Left: take your pick according to your predilections and fears. But these fake roots can never replace the real thing and the result is an orgy of anger, iconoclasm and rising bile. Meanwhile, the machine of techno-modernity pushes on, relentless.

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In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures — rooted in time, place and spirit — whether in the west of Ireland or West Papua, I’ve generally been struck by two things. One is that rooted people are harder to control. The industrial revolution could not have happened without the enclosure of land, and the destruction of the peasantry and the artisan class. People with their feet on the ground are less easily swayed by the currents of politics, or by the fashions of urban ideologues or academic theorists.

The second observation is that people don’t tend to talk much about their “identity” — or even think about it — unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, it seems, the more you have probably lost. The range of freewheeling, self-curated “identities” thrown up by the current “culture war” shows that we are already a long way down the road that leads away from genuine culture.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural — and spiritual — crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying — it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences. Some day soon, we are going to have to look up and begin searching for what we have lost. I have a feeling that this process has already begun.

A longer version of this essay originally appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

When Bitcoin, the first ever cryptocurrency, was launched in 2008, it was hoped its “Blockchain” technology — which records transactions and cannot be hacked — would spark a digital revolution. If a transaction could be carried out securely without the need for an established bank, it would, we were promised, mark the end of corporate capitalism — and the dawn of a new era of decentralisation.

Just over a decade later, however, Blockchain has become the centre of the financial elite’s new-age banking system. Indeed, behind the scenes, they’re going all in on crypto.

Using its very own cryptocurrency, the world’s largest bank JPMorgan has completed its first “interbank crypto trade” with fellow Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. They carried out the transaction of JPMCoin, JPMorgan’s version of a digital dollar, using its new blockchain system. And with more than a dozen institutions now signed up to it, exchanging more than $1 billion daily, a digital financial revolution is in the making.

Ordinary citizens, however, won’t be part of it. When it was first conceived, crypto’s leading advocates insisted that we had entered a new era of financial autonomy: all you needed to defeat crony capitalism was a Bitcoin wallet and an internet connection.

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But in reality, the crypto rebellion has failed to liberate us, or achieve anything else its founder Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. Rather than producing a more open, more liberating, more financially free society, the crypto movement has empowered not just another cabal of corrupt financiers, but a hidden cartel of criminals, Wall Street rejects, and what U.S Senator Liz Warren has described as “shadowy super-coders”.

Its prominent members continue to run rampant around the globe, circumventing laws, regulations and ethics to accumulate multi-billion dollar fortunes. Not a single country appears to want to host crypto-billionaire “CZ” and his company Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world. Meanwhile, Brock Pierce, the billionaire co-creator of cryptocurrency Tether, is currently using his wealth to engage in “crypto colonialism” in Puerto Rico, where dozens of “entrepreneurs” hope to build a new city that only uses virtual money.

Sensing this rising elite is getting a free pass, the world’s financial power structures have responded with a regulatory hailstorm. And as it has intensified, the more “controversial” outlets have tried to meet regulators’ demands.

Binance has tried to appear more credible by “looking at the potential IPO route” and appealing to regulators, while BlockFi, a cryptocurrency lender that matches all the Securities and Exchange Commission’s criteria for a Ponzi scheme, has had to obey securities laws to continue operating in the US, with five states  —  New Jersey, Alabama, Texas, Vermont and Kentucky  —  striking the fintech company with either cease and desists (requests to stop alleged illegal activity) or show-cause notices (proof that they are not a scam).

As for the bosses of ill-famed Tether, they recently appeared on CNBC, trying to convince everyone that their currency has a one-to-one backing — for each Tether in circulation, they claim to have $1 in their reserves backing it up (though still won’t perform an audit of their reserves).

Since the US Government has come down hard on any entity not playing ball, some of the crypto elite have started to question whether true decentralisation is a delusion. Indeed, they are starting to realise that it is a lot easier to build a fortune  —  and keep it  —  when they participate in the “official” system and follow the rules.

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It’s the same realisation Peter Thiel had in 1999. Back then, his original vision for PayPal was to create a truly anonymous money-transfer system, free from state influence and control. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means,” he declared, before quickly backtracking and rising through the ranks of Silicon Valley.

Fast forward to today, and the crypto elite have mimicked Thiel’s change of direction. Rather than simply throwing in the towel and admitting the game is up, they have abandoned their cyber-libertarian roots and merged with their enemy: the financial behemoths of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and Silicon Valley.

It’s easy to see why this would seem appealing; a number of crypto elites are already reaping the rewards of cosying up to the establishment. Jeremy Allaire’s Circle — the company behind the huge, unaudited cryptocurrency USDC — has partnered with Silicon Valley payment giants, Mastercard and Visa. Meanwhile, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, revealed in a tweet in May that he’d held meetings in D.C with high-ranking state officials, including Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell.

All of which raises a peculiar question: Why is the Federal Reserve’s head honcho, Bitcoin’s supposed arch-enemy, collaborating in undisclosed meetings with the CEO of crypto’s main cashier? In Bitcoin Gospel, that’s heresy.

The answer lies in what I suspect are the crypto elite’s real intentions: namely, that they were never really in it for the freedoms Bitcoin could offer, but more for the untold riches it promised. Now they’ve succeeded, it’s all about wealth preservation, and in the age of bailout capitalism, becoming “too big to fail” is the ultimate protection. That is why getting in the good books of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve seems to be the top priority for crypto billionaires. If a crisis emerges, and they threaten to bring down the existing power structure’s financial order, guess what? They’re first in line for a taxpayer-funded bailout.

Right now, it seems inconceivable that the financial elites would bail out the crypto market. But as the bubble gets bigger and becomes tied to Wall Street through its investments, the likelihood increases.

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Take Tether, for example. On top of its $63 billion market cap, half of its reserves are now backed by real-world debt securities issued by Wall Street companies. Given it is a modern wildcat bank, one that issues its own currency, and has failed to provide any proof its assets exist, it is unlikely we will ever know how much debt Tether owns. But if it’s revealed that Tether’s value is, in fact, a swindle, Wall Street could eventually face losses amounting to more than a slight haircut.

In which case, don’t be surprised when the Federal Reserve comes to its rescue. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street can’t be distinguished from the Federal Reserve; the financial elites know that if something goes wrong, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, will be there to step in and bail them out at whatever cost.

And if the next crypto crash does threaten to bring down their system, if wildcat banks like Tether become too big to fail, our current financial power structures will do everything they can to ensure that the status quo is maintained. Two classes of elites will become one, with the “less desirable” parts of the crypto world  —  and likely the taxpayer’s purse  —  becoming collateral damage.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. But with the likes of Goldman Sachs combining forces with such unsavoury characters in the crypto elite, it is not impossible to imagine them wreaking havoc around the globe: charging clients obscene crypto fees and betting against their own Bitcoin products to make even more money. The rest of us, meanwhile, will watch on from afar, knowing that we’re powerless to stop or escape yet another era of financial repression.

On the very first page of Black Skin, White Masks — which has just been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, using Richard Philcox’s translation — Fanon states: “I’m not the bearer of absolute truths”. Which doesn’t sound very saintly. He was trying to emphasise his humanity instead of being seen solely for his race. The book is an investigation into neurosis and alienation; the crisis of a man who thought he was just a man, but discovers instead he is a nègre. “Look Mummy, a nègre,” a little child says and points to Fanon.

The text is often dense: Fanon mixes literary analysis of obscure novels with the jargon of phenomenology. He can be horny, sad, angry, introspective and playful — all on the same page. The sections that seem to be influenced by Hegel are particularly tough work. It is not entirely surprising that the book was a damp squib on publication. No major French newspaper or journal reviewed it; by the time Fanon died from leukaemia, at the age of 36 in a hospital in America, it had been out of print for many years.

Fanon did have aspirations to be a playwright. And the drama involved in the text is positively theatrical. He didn’t type the manuscript himself, but rather dictated it to his inamorata, Josie; this explains the sudden shifts in register and tone. This is not a contained book; it bursts with the energy of a young man.

Fanon was 27 when it was published, a Jacques the Lad who loved football, and as a teenager stole marbles and snuck illegally into cinemas with his friends. In a letter he sent to a friend about the book, which is quoted in Macey’s biography, he affirms: “I am trying to touch my reader affectively, or in other words irrationally, almost sensually. For me, words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark.”

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Another reason why Fanon can be called a saint was his strident moral universalism; but this universalism can be explained, at least partly, by his background as a black man from the French West Indies. As he puts it in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks: “As those of Antillean, our observations and conclusions are valid only for the French Antilles”. The rest of the book is, indeed, very French.

Fanon was born to a middle-class family in the French West Indian colony of Martinique. His father was a civil servant and his mother a successful shop owner. The family were so well-off they could afford servants. They even owned a second house in the outer suburbs of Fort-de-France, the capital city. Martinique was an old colony: many of its institutions, such as its schools and courts, were modelled on metropolitan France. Fanon attended a fee-paying lycée, a privilege that poor West Indian blacks couldn’t afford — neither could poor whites in France.

One might think, on knowing that a white population lived in Martinique, that they were the emissaries of mainland France. They would be wrong. The Békés — as the Martinique-born white population was called — were opposed to Martinique being integrated as a French territory in 1946, and they supported the Vichy regime during the second world war,

They were a clannish, endogamous minority composed of landowning families. Interracial marriage here, unlike in metropolitan France, was completely taboo. In a documentary by Stuart Hall on the nations of the Caribbean, an elder Béké man, with a grin on his face, compared them to the mafia. They lived in a hill just above Fort-de-France: there was a rivalry between the landowning Békés and the rising urban black and mixed-race middle-class families in the capital city.

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Fanon’s life was in many ways not just an embrace of republican France, but a rejection of the lifestyle and beliefs of Békés. He fought for de Gaulle’s Free France, and was decorated with a Croix de Guerre. He married a white woman. And, at a deeper level, his commitment to republican French universalism — which, of course, wasn’t fully practised in France, as he later found out when he moved there to study medicine — was in stark contrast to the American-style racial obsessions of the Békés in Martinique.

Fanon, in his book, is trying to affirm the universal brotherhood of man. In one passage, he states: “we must recall our aim is to enable better relations between Blacks and Whites”. It is no surprise, then, he is sensitive about anti-Semitism: “Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick,” he writes. “They are denying me the right to be a man. I cannot dissociate myself from the fate reserved for my brother.”

He rejects being viewed as black person. He wants to be seen simply as a person: “The black man, however sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the Compass.” Later he lyrically adds: “It is not the black world that governs my behaviour. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. The starry sky that left Kant in awe has long revealed its secrets to me.”

Unlike many self-described anti-racists today, who engage in performative demands for white guilt, Fanon states: “I have not the right as a man of colour to wish for a guilt complex to crystallise in the white man regarding the past of my race”. What he wants, instead, is respect and dignity: “I, a man of colour, want but one thing. May man never be instrumentalised. May the subjugation of man by man — that is to say, me by another — cease. May I be able to discover and desire man wherever he may be”.

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Yet Fanon is also often linked with the Négritude movement, a group of black Francophone intellectuals who wanted to cultivate a distinctively black consciousness. This is partly because the most famous Négritude intellectual was the poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who was not only a fellow Martiniquan, but also taught Fanon at the Lycée Schoelcher.  However, Fanon was largely ambivalent to the Négritude movement, and in Black Skin, White Masks he expresses views that run contrary to their ethos: “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilisation unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past”. And he later states: “No, I have not the right to be black. It is not my duty to be this or that”.

What animates Fanon most was a deep curiosity. In the book’s conclusion, he asks: “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Indeed, the final sentence is: “My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions.” And so explicitly linking Fanon to his French colonial background has its pitfalls; it potentially blunts his wish to be free from his past, and to be, as he put it, “constantly creating myself”.

But while his background didn’t determine his views and attitude, it did, to a considerable extent, influence it. What can be more French — apart from the obvious things — than turning the act of asking questions into something sacred? On the front cover of the new edition of Black Skin, White Masks is a photograph of Fanon. He looks both proud and sceptical, embodying the most captivating features of French culture.

If Fanon was an icon of anything, it wouldn’t be Third World revolution, but rather republican France. But he was not an icon; he was simply a man. And his humanity was all the more transparent in the tragic gap between his universalist ideals and the reality of being seen as just a nègre.

This photograph is one of several from the Iranian Hostage Crisis that has lodged in the collective consciousness of the modern Middle East. It was a truly historic event – one that would come to sour US-Iran relations far more than the Iranian Revolution that precipitated it. It began on 4 November 1979 when a group of students calling themselves the “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line” stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took the 52 embassy staff inside hostage. They would keep them captive for 444 days, releasing them, finally, on 20 January 1981 – 40 years ago to the day.

Fast forward four decades and today Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. When he enters the White House, he will find a world cowering from a pandemic and a country strafed by civil unrest. But perhaps his biggest problem will only come into focus when he turns to face the east: Iran.

As Biden knows, the Islamic Republic of Iran poses a problem that has remained unsolved for 40 years. Even today, the Hostage Crisis remains at the heart of the US’s relationship with Iran – or perhaps more correctly, its lack of one. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the so-called Nuclear Deal between Iran and the UN Security Council Powers plus Germany — lies moribund after Donald Trump unilaterally abrogated it in 2018. In the years since, Iranian proxies have wreaked havoc in Syria and Iraq, while the regime has busied itself killing dissenters. Biden’s options are few. He can’t even speak directly to Tehran. The two countries are implacably opposed. Both carry scars that remain livid on both sides — and they were formed in that embassy all those years ago.

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The hostage crisis occurred amid the turmoil of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when a combination of nationalists, leftists and Islamists overthrew Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, then Shah of Iran, forcing him to flee the country. They then set about fighting over who would take power: a battle the Islamists quickly and comprehensively won. A 76-year-old cleric from the provinces, Ayatollah Khomeini, became Supreme Leader, and brought with him a new system of government, the Velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurist), which mandated overarching rule by the religious jurists, or Mullahs, like him.

If 1979 marked a rupture in internal Iranian politics, then the hostage crisis was the Islamic Republic’s march on to the international stage. Despite the Shah’s fall, Washington wanted to salvage its friendship with its foremost Gulf ally and a number of meetings were held with Iran’s interim Prime Minister. Things looked hopeful. But then US President Jimmy Carter allowed the cancer-ridden Shah into the USA for medical treatment. Iranians were enraged. The anti-US protests and chanting that had swelled throughout the year suddenly erupted with the storming of the embassy.

How much did Khomeini know about the attack? He wasn’t forewarned, but undoubtedly then gave the hostage-taking his approval. There is no way that the diplomats could sit there for over a year without his say so. The truth is that it benefited him. Enraging the United States meant weakening moderates in Iran while strengthening his Islamist base, which rejected all ties with the “Great Satan”. It wasn’t just that the US had, along with Britain, organised the overthrowal the Iranian president in 1953, or that the Shah was seen as an American lapdog. It was something even more primeval: the US was the chief source of Gharbzadegi — literally “west-struckness” or westoxification — by which Western ideas and culture had seduced and corrupted Iranians. And there was something else, too: payback. “You have no right to complain,” a hostage-taker told a furious American captive, “you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”

Things got worse. On 24 April 1980, seeing that negotiation was going nowhere, President Jimmy Carter approved Operation Eagle Claw, a Delta force mission to rescue the hostages. It was a disaster. A combination of poor weather conditions and logistical problems meant the mission was aborted, though not before one of the helicopters crashed into the ground.

Back home, the US media railed against Carter. His 1980 election defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan was largely down to his failure to get them out. Iran had brought down an American president. But before he left office, Carter struck back. He froze billions of dollars of Iranian assets abroad, imposed sanctions and isolated it diplomatically. He threw American weight behind Iranian opposition groups and repositioned US foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counteract the hostile Islamic republic. Both US politics and the geopolitical constellation of the Middle East had been reordered. And it was the hostage crisis, not the revolution, that did it.

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Forty years later, the legacy of the hostage crisis still dominates Middle Eastern politics: the US and Iran have never officially resumed diplomatic relations. Years ago, in the course of researching my book, I interviewed former US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Nick Burns, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Burns, under the leadership of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the presidency of George W. Bush, who first tried to heal relations with the Iranians in 2005. It didn’t work that time, but it paved the way for Obama’s success.

Burns explained to me how, as a diplomat, he felt that the US’s relationship with Iran was the oddest it had with any country, and you couldn’t simply chalk it up to bad blood. Washington had a liaison office in Havana and throughout the Cold War had maintained embassies in Moscow and Beijing. American diplomats had even talked on key occasions to the North Koreans. But with Iran? Nothing.

He was hinting at the almost uniquely dysfunctional relationship between Iran and the US since the Hostage Crisis: at heart, it was so bad because they needed each other. For the Islamic Republic, the need to defend Iran from the United States is its ideological lodestone — it can never permit relations to become too warm. Even when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in desperate need of sanctions relief because of Iran’s chronic financial woes, allowed President Hassan Rouhani to speak to Barack Obama (thus ending almost 40 years of silence at the official level) and eventually conclude the Iran Deal, he made it clear that their cooperation would stop there. There would be no détente.

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On the other side, for a certain strand of American politician keen to burnish their hawkish credentials and grab some attention, being tough on Iran is a guaranteed political, and often fund-raising, winner. This is not to draw equivalence between the two sides, but to observe that for four decades Iranian-US relations have been characterised by a unique dialectic that has played an increasingly central role in organising each side’s understanding of the other.

Like unlucky lovers, timing hasn’t been on their side. In 1988, after eight years of horrific war with Iraq, Iran’s leaders were less keen for the country to export its Islamic revolution than to rebuild bombed-out schools. Around a decade later, the reformist President Mohammed Khatami even went on CNN to talk about a “Dialogue among Civilisations”, but found US administrations reluctant to talk. Later, it was Barack Obama who, in his first formal TV interview after taking office declared that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” Unfortunately, squatting in Tehran was the malign and absurd Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It wasn’t to be.

This relationship, which is far more than a collapsed deal centring on nuclear centrifuges and enriched uranium, is what Joe Biden must now address. And fixing it is what he must do for any deal to last. Iran is a 5,000-year-old civilisation with a well-educated population of over 80 million and huge oil and gas reserves. It dominates the Persian Gulf and controls the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes. You cannot adequately deal with the Middle East without it; and you absolutely cannot lock it out of the international order forever.

Yet Trump looked the other way and Obama confined negotiations to the nuclear issues; the Iranians insisted on it. But now that Iran’s need for sanctions relief is even more desperate, Biden must tackle the country’s human rights violations, its regional belligerence, its support for terror and funding of proxies that undermine Iraq and Lebanon. But if Iran moves, he must, too. He must ease sanctions and help to rebuild its shattered economy. Ever since the Hostage Crisis, America and Iran have been waltzing together, locked in each other’s arms, but always out of step. Forty years after the event that changed the history of the Middle East, we must hope that a new President can succeed where every other one before him has failed.

SG Maclean is a historian who lives on the Black Isle in Scotland, which isn’t actually an island. She writes very good crime fiction set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, which isn’t just about Cromwell’s England. She wins prizes for her novels, and deserves more fame to go with them. Especially among people in politics.

On the face of it, Maclean’s Seeker novels are about Damian Seeker, a Yorkshire soldier for Cromwell who becomes the leading enforcer for the Protectorate’s domestic intelligence operation. Slowly and subtly over several books, Maclean explores the essential tension here: how can a fundamentally decent man serve a regime he increasingly recognises as falling short of his own high moral standards?

Seeker’s answers are instructive: because he fought for them once, and against another lot who were worse. But that is not enough to sustain — or deserve — lasting loyalty.

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It is the theme of loyalty that makes the Seeker novels good reading for politicians, who always need to understand why people support causes — and why they stop.

In the end of the series — so far, at least, for there is hope she will write more — Maclean shows Seeker’s break with the collapsing Cromwell regime not as a grand gesture or an exercise in psychodrama but rather the way real people make big decisions — with a resigned shrug.

Cromwell’s story deserves more attention in the Britain that voted for Brexit. It’s a reminder that, no matter what we tell ourselves about our phlegmatic stability, Britain does indeed do revolutions. Cromwell, of course, was no radical from outside the system. A son of the gentry who sat in Parliament, he led a cause that united disgruntled notables and true grassroots revolutionaries — for instance, the Levellers, who were to be marginalised and bitterly disappointed by Cromwell in power.

Maclean’s hero is part of that non-conformist tradition, a Seeker by faith as well as name, he was part of a small, obscure sect before shifting his faith to Cromwell’s cause and its defence against scheming royalists plotting to restore the dissolute Stuart monarchy.

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Such royalists are still a major presence in the England Maclean guides her readers through. Because no revolutionary regime can make its opponents simply disappear — accommodations must be made. The Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell makes regular appearances as an agent of Seeker’s intelligence operation. Marvell’s precise loyalties were and are unclear: he lionised leading Royalists, but then worked for Thomas Fairfax, the great parliamentary general.

We also meet a young Samuel Pepys, another parliamentarian who converted to Royalism when Cromwell died in 1658.

When that death comes, Seeker is in Bruges tracking the royalist cells that made that city their base while supporting the young Charles Stuart in his designs on the throne amid the shifting backdrop of European politics. This is the setting for the fifth and most recent Seeker novel, The House of Lamentations. It’s a nice way to illustrate the international dimensions of turmoil in British government, as well as a reminder that British leadership worrying about European plots is not a new thing.

The Seeker novels’ lessons for today’s rulers are numerous.  Perhaps the biggest is that taking power is easy enough — just win some big battles — but keeping it is much harder. In the end, the stars of the series are the ordinary folk who lent their support to Cromwell and his cause, but then, tired and resigned, welcome back the Stuart monarchy, albeit briefly. It’s a reminder that while elites take politics and government very seriously, the public on whom those things ultimately depend generally don’t pay too much attention, instead just getting on with their lives. Revolutions are easy to declare but hard to sustain.

This is perhaps most obvious in the area of foreign policy. To be on the socialist Left in the twenty-first century is to be staunchly opposed to ‘regime change’ of any sort, especially when the regime in question is hostile to the United States. This is defined not merely by hostility toward western military intervention – perhaps understandable considering the recent history of botched American invasions – but opposition to revolution tout court.

This can be seen in the response to Venezuela. The economic incompetence of the Venezuelan government has prompted the largest refugee crisis in the history of Latin America. A brutal regime that imprisons, tortures and occasionally murders its political opponents is assailed by mass protests involving all sections of society.

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The demands of the protesters are modest: free elections and the replacement of the dictator Nicolas Maduro by the elected head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido. The United States has directed veiled threats at the Maduro government and tightened economic sanctions. But no one seriously expects the US to launch a military invasion of Venezuela any time soon.

Yet the Western socialist Left – bar a few exceptions – has reacted to events in Venezuela by throwing its weight behind the discredited dictatorship. The Labour Party has set itself in opposition to almost all European and Latin American governments by failing to recognise Guaido as the legitimate representative of Venezuela. The Left’s activist media outlets have come down firmly on the side of the dictatorship. Others who in the past acted as mouthpieces for the Chavez/Maduro regimes have, for the most part, fallen into an embarrassed silence.

This indifference toward the aspirations of the Venezuelan people is of a piece with the socialist Left’s hostility toward the Syrian revolution. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly equivocated when pressed about the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Following the poison gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, Corbyn refused to be drawn on whether Assad was responsible and remained silent when a UN investigation confirmed what the British, French and US governments had been saying all along – that Damascus was responsible for the attack. Corbyn’s favourite newspaper, The Morning Star, has thrown its full weight behind the dictatorship, describing Assad’s bloody bombardment of Aleppo as a “liberation”.

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The socialist Left adopted a similarly hostile stance toward protests against the Ayatollahs in Iran. As the ‘Green Revolution’ in 2009 saw Iranians pour onto the streets to demand freedom, Labour’s director of communication, Seumas Milne, dismissed the protests in a column for the Guardian as “an attempted coup”, and the protesters as “gilded youth”.

Milne went on to heap praise on the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who has denied the Holocaust – as a politician who “is seen to stand up for the country’s independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority”.

And you can look further back at the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and find, once more, much of the socialist Left firmly on the side of discredited dictatorship.

This Leftist hostility toward ‘regime change’ goes well beyond fear of American military intervention. Indeed, the unlikely spectre of an American invasion is frequently summoned as an excuse for withholding solidarity from oppressed people. Last month Labour MPs including John McDonnell and Diane Abbott co-signed a letter together with Guardian columnist Owen Jones which claimed there was “no justification for backing the US attempt at regime change under way [in Venezuela]”.

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As in Iran and Syria previously, no attempt was made to draw out the amorphous nature of the crowds protesting against a brutal dictatorship. Instead, Venezuelans were stripped of individual agency and dismissed as pawns of American power.

This betrays a conservative disposition on the Left that has become dominant in recent years. To understand it, you must delve into some of the internecine squabbles of the mid-twentieth century, when debates raged on the Left over whether despotic regimes deserved conditional support because their economies were run on the basis of nationalised property.

The faction of the Left that argued in the affirmative won out, solidifying the notion that, as the critical Marxist theorist Sean Matgamna has written, “no crime by totalitarian rulers could destroy their credentials as a residually progressive locum… no crime, that is, except the dismantling of the nationalised economy”.[1. The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Vol 1, edited by Sean Matgamna]

Thus regimes such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Maoist China, Stalinist North Korea – and even despotic governments that resembled fascism more than socialism, such as Ba’athist-regimes in countries like Iraq and Syria – received and continue to receive backing from sections of the Western socialist Left simply because economic life was ordered on a model that was distinct from Western capitalism. Never mind the restriction of trade union activity, the murder, disappearance and torture of dissidents, and the grey-wasteland of state-sponsored cultural life – the rejection of capitalism was seen to trump everything else.

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In truth, the socialist Left – as opposed to the social democratic Left – no longer has a credible economic programme to fall back on. State economic planning has left a sorry record of inefficiency and failure wherever it has been tried. Even where it has produced rapid economic growth, such as in China, it has been combined with a strain of capitalism as virulent and cruel as anything documented during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

The social democratic Left grasps this and seeks to use the market economy to fashion a society that people actually wish to live in. The hard-Left doubles down, adopting an oppositional posture in which any movement that pertains to oppose American capitalism – however backwards or autocratic – receives support or acquiescence.

Look at any Left-wing news website to see this played out. Economic chaos in Venezuela is blamed on US sanctions and a drop in the oil price – despite sanctions not applying to the Venezuelan oil industry and no similar economic catastrophe occurring in any other oil-reliant nation.

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Poverty in Cuba is blamed entirely on the embargo, while chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government are attributed to the opposition. Russian annexation of chunks of Eastern Europe are said to be the fault of NATO and the European Union. And mass uprisings that yearn for democracy rather than Marxist utopia, as in Venezuela, are ruthlessly attacked and smeared.

“A conservative is a fellow who stands athwart history yelling stop,” the American author and commentator William Buckley Jr once said. Today this applies just as well to the socialist Left – for wherever you look, the more an individual styles themselves as a revolutionary, the more terrified they are when a genuine democratic revolution comes along.