Drones command the skies

The US is planning a future in which pilotless drones do the killing, remotely controlled. It looks and plays like an Xbox game, but it’s for real. It may not defeat its intended enemies, though

by Laurent Checola and Edouard Pflimlin

Two Hellfire missiles from a US drone hit Laddah, a village in a remote part of South Waziristan in Pakistan very early in the morning of 5 August this year. The targeted house belonged to a religious leader and Taliban supporter, Maulana Ikram-ud-Din. Baitullah Mehsud, the charismatic leader of the Pakistani Taliban and Pakistan’s public enemy number one, was among the 12 victims.

The US authorities announced in July that one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, Saad, had been killed in a drone attack, though this remains unconfirmed. On 1 January they had announced the death of Osama al-Kini, head of al-Qaida’s external operations, sought for his involvement in the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. “Drones are having a major impact on al-Qaida, eliminating key figures, pushing its members out of the tribal areas and compromising their operational capabilities,” concluded Christine Fair, a regional specialist with the Rand Corporation think tank.

There have been more attacks by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Pakistan’s tribal areas recently. Drones can wage permanent war at reduced cost against insurgents of all kinds: al-Qaida militants, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The elimination of Mehsud is only the most salient example of a strategy that has taken out several high-value targets.

The relative success of these targeted attacks, which began in Pakistan in 2004, must be set against their collateral damage. There has been one drone attack per week this year and by 
30 September they had caused 432 deaths, including civilians. In the bloodiest period, June and July, 155 people were killed. (In the whole of 2008, 36 attacks caused 317 deaths.) Principal target is the mountainous region of South Waziristan in western Pakistan, dominated by Mullah Nazir Mehsud and the Haqqani network (named after a former Afghan leader).

Menacing insects

With their long, thin fuselages and bulbous heads housing their satellite systems, their narrow wings and sharply angled tail fins, drones look like menacing insects. Their pilots are several thousand kilometres away at the CIA’s Creech Base in Nevada, in a room full of computer screens with keyboards and joysticks, just like a video game. It’s a clinical environment with no risks for the pilots. But long-distance warfare has its own problems. “It radically alters the final act of combat” – killing. “Warfare with drones becomes a banal office activity or even a video game. That’s why, to avoid the risk of creating irresponsible behaviour, the Pentagon regularly sends its pilots to the combat zone for four to six weeks” (1).

But the risk of irresponsible behaviour is less important than economic reality: it costs $2.6m to train a US fighter pilot and just $135,000 to train a drone pilot (2). “In summer 2008 the Bush administration took the decision to turn the CIA into a counter-insurrection air force working in support of the Pakistani government,” said Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The CIA attacks are secret, which rules out a public debate on their effectiveness.” It seems that the US private security company formerly known as Blackwater and now rebranded as Xe, implicated in several scandals in Iraq, has carried out drone work covertly and illegally (3).

The advantage of drones is their autonomy. Most widely used are General Atomics’ MALE (medium altitude, long-endurance) Predator drones. An MQ-1 Predator A can stay in the air for more than 24 hours, far longer than a fighter aircraft, and track the enemy’s movements. It is progressively being replaced by its successor, the MQ-9 Reaper, twice as large, four times as heavy (4.7 tonnes) and with a weapons-carrying capacity 10 times greater. At $8m a drone it is much cheaper than a fighter plane. The latest is the Predator C Avenger, whose jet engines have a top speed of 740 km/h, significantly faster than the Reaper’s 400km/h.

Between 2002 and 2008 the US military drone fleet has grown from 67 to more than 6,000 aircraft. Even though many are light reconnaissance drones, the number of UAVs carrying missiles has also increased: in 2008 there were 109 Predators compared with 22 in 2002. Since then, 26 Reapers have been added. According to a report, the number of flying hours by all the drones reached 400,000 in 2008, more than double the 2007 figure. The US is spending more and more of its military budget on drones. For the fiscal year 2010, the Obama administration has allotted $3.8bn for the purchase and development of drones, notably 24 Reapers for the US Air Force and five Global Hawks. This is part of a steep increase in military spending overall, which grew by 74% between 2002 and 2008 to reach $515bn. The sum for military robotics has almost doubled year on year since 2001, creating a major new sector of the economy (see “US secures drones market”).

‘No longer opposed’

US Predators are deployed on the enormous military base in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. The US is also suspected of operating out of Pakistani military bases, following a secret agreement between George W Bush and Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan. “With the death of Mehsud, the Taliban are more discredited and there is cooperation between the US and Pakistan,” said Imtiaz Gul of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. Christine Fair said: “The Pakistani army has requested drones and the ability to pull the trigger. The Pakistanis are no longer opposed to attack by drones as they were in the past.”

President Obama ordered attacks in the tribal regions of Pakistan (4) on 23 January 2009, just three days after his investiture. Eight people died in the first raid in North Waziristan and seven more in the south. On 30 September there were 39 attacks by drones in Pakistan, compared with 36 in the whole of 2008. The defence specialist Joseph Henrotin said: “Bush was careful when it came to Pakistan. For Obama and his team the problem is more global. There’s been a sort of radicalisation in terms of firepower. They’ve done search and destroy and are seeking a sort of right of pursuit” (5).

Since last year, the US has justified its widespread use of drones by citing the impossibility of direct intervention on Pakistani soil. Exasperated by the Pakistani authorities’ unwillingness or inability to control the tribal areas, President Bush authorised the intervention of special forces there. In September 2008 a team of US Navy Seals based in Afghanistan crossed the border and killed around 20 people, including women and children. The attack was condemned by Pakistan’s leaders, who made it clear it should not happen again.

Visions of the future

So the drone has a critical role in the US military’s future plans. It is, as Henrotin puts it, an auxiliary to the soldier if not yet a substitute. According to a US Air Force report, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047”, published in May 2009: “The vision is for a USAF positioned to harness increasingly automated, modular, and sustainable UAS, resulting in leaner, more adaptable and tailorable forces that maximise the effectiveness of 21st century airpower.” The report states that drones are “considered viable alternatives to a range of traditionally manned missions” (6).

X-47A Unmanned Longrange Bomber

The report is clear that drones will “reshape the battlefield of tomorrow”. Fighter pilots may even find themselves being phased out. The consequences go far beyond the Afghan conflict; drones could even deliver nuclear warheads (7). Several other countries have launched their own combat drone programmes to conduct ground strikes, bombing raids or aerial combat. Here too the US is in the lead with its X-47 B bomber project from Northrop Grumman.

The prospect of extending the use of drones to the anti-drug war or the pursuit of illegal immigrants is also being taken very seriously. In France, drones have already been used for surveillance, for example during the official visit of Pope Benedict XVI in September 2008. More recently a small Elsa drone flew over Strasbourg during the Nato summit. There is the prospect of civil drones (8).

Meanwhile, the verdict on these planes is worth reflecting on from the operational as well as the strategic point of view. Are the targeted attacks really effective? Among the insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they strengthen pride at being up against an enemy unwilling to send in living soldiers. After the death of Mehsud, the terrorist infrastructure and the socio-economic conditions that lead to radicalisation are still there across the 27,000 km2 of tribal regions (9).

The drones worsen the resentment of Pakistan’s people: public opinion, which already views its government as corrupt, sees drones as an attack on the legitimacy of national power. While most of the world gives more credit to Obama than to his predecessor, his ratings in Pakistan are little higher than those of George Bush. “Drones are just an expedient,” said Micah Zenko. “They don’t address the deeper causes. Those take time to sort out.”

Laurent Checola and Edouard Pflimlin are journalists

(1) Martin Crag, “Drones: le nouveau jeu de la guerre”, (Drones: the new war game), Science & Vie, special issue on aviation, Paris, 2009.

(2) Frédéric Lert, “Drones recherchent pilotes”, ibid.

(3) “CIA said to use outsiders to put bombs on drones”, New York Times, 20 August 2009.

(4) Tim Reid, “President Obama orders Pakistan drone attacks”, The Times, London, 23 January 2009.

(5) Joseph Henrotin, La technologie militaire en question : Le cas américain, Economica, Paris, 2009.

(6) «United States Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047» (PDF).

(7) Nathan Hodge, “Unleash the nuclear-armed robo-bombers”, Wired, 3 June 2009.

(8) “Dans l’attente des drones civils”, Air & Cosmos, Paris, no 2187, 25 September 2009.

(9) See Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, “Pakistan creates its own enemy”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, November 2009.

See also

• US secures drone market
• by Edouard Pflimlin

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US secures drones market

by Edouard Pflimlin

Global Hawk

The global market for drones was worth around £4.4bn in 2009, the lion’s share of which (70%) went to US companies such as Northrop Grumman and General Atomics. Northrop Grumman is the manufacturer of the Global Hawk, a long-endurance drone capable of 36-hour surveillance flights. General Atomics makes the Predator.

European companies in this market, such as Thales, EADS, Dassault, Finmeccanica, Sagem and BAE Systems, are tiny by comparison: together they account for only 4%. Israeli firms make up a further 2%, though in reality they are bigger players than this suggests as they collaborate closely with the Europeans. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), for example, produced the Hunter (of which France has bought four) and the Heron (and its derivative the Eagle) as part of the SIDM Harfang programme used by the French air force. The other Israeli company, Elbit Systems, manufactures Hermes drones, used by the British.

The remaining 24% of the market is shared between other companies in Russia, India, Iran and China, which together account for less than 5%, leaving almost 20% in the form of contracts which remain secret for reasons of military security.

The US is very well placed to profit from the exponential growth in the market for drones, the most dynamic sector of the world aerospace industry, which, it is estimated, will total $62bn over the next 10 years. According to a study by aerospace consultants, the Teal Group, the market for drones will go from $4.4bn per annum to $8.7bn in the next decade, bringing an additional 25,000 drone aircraft of all types into service. In 2010, according to analysts, one-third of the $4-5bn total expenditure will be spent outside the US (1).

The US entirely dominates the market for very large HALE (high-altitude, long-endurance) drones with the Global Hawk, which will in the future also be used by Nato. It’s not a market the Europeans can hope to penetrate. But the future battle in the MALE (medium-altitude, long-endurance) market is going to be fierce – here there are two main contenders: EADS with the advanced UAV and Dassault aviation-Thales and Indra in Spain with the SDM. There’s a budget of $4.2bn to play for: $1.5bn for development and $2.7bn to provide 15 systems, each with three aircraft.

And then there are the UCAVs – Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles or combat drones. But the Dassault-led Neuron project suffers from the absence of two key players, the British and the Germans.

(1) «La guerre des drones aura bien lieu», armees.com, 29 June 2009.

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Noam Chomsky: 'Obama's campaign rhetoric was completely vacuous'

Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN general assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for tickets to attend his lectures, followed live on the internet across the globe, as the 80-year-old American linguist fielded questions from as far away as besieged Gaza.

Part 1

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This month the UN will publish the findings of its inquiry into Israel’s possible war crimes in Gaza in 2008-9. These are unlikely to lead to legal proceedings, so there are calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions to force Israel to comply with international law.

BDS Movement

The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel (1) has gained momentum after four years of near silence. It was launched on 9 July 2005 by a group of Palestinian organisations, a year after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled, in an advisory opinion, that the wall built in the occupied Palestinian territories was illegal (2). It is a protest against Israel’s failure to honour its international obligations.

The Israeli army’s latest operation in the Gaza Strip (27 December 2008-18 January 2009), which aimed to annihilate the military potential of the Islamist movement Hamas and end the firing of rockets at Israeli civilian targets, was important to this resurgence. Media images created the impression that this war was meant to annihilate an entire people. Palestinian solidarity organisations, and many others around the world, immediately felt a moral obligation to take action and make up for the failings of the international community. A huge civil movement grew up around the Palestinian cause. Its weapon was the boycott, which had helped to dismantle the structures of racial discrimination in South Africa (3). Political figures and opinion leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter have compared the plight of the Palestinian people to that of black South Africans under apartheid.

On 30 March 2008 the BDS movement organised a global day of action, a move decided a few weeks earlier at the World Social Forum in Belém, Brazil. Calls to support this day of action were heard from Jewish communities everywhere and even from within Israel.

The boycott, within this non-violent resistance strategy, calls on consumers not to buy products made in Israel (whether by local or foreign companies) or in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Lists of goods (fruit, vegetables, fruit juice, cut flowers, tinned fruit, biscuits, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics) and their barcodes have been published, especially in Europe. Other tactics include publicity campaigns, petitioning of store managers to withdraw blacklisted products, awareness campaigns directed at central purchasing agencies, and disruption operations in supermarkets.

Right side of the law

There are also campaigns by organisations (4) for the suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement, on the grounds that Israel has failed to observe article 2, which requires “respect for human rights and democratic principles”. This agreement, which was signed in 1995 and came into force in 2000, exempts Israeli goods from EU customs duties. There is a traceability problem: many goods declared by Israel as Israeli are produced in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

A survey reveals that 21% of Israeli exporters have had to cut their prices as a result of the boycott, after a significant loss of market share, especially in Jordan, the UK and Scandinavia (5).

Although a boycott is based on individual freedom of choice, it may fall foul of the law if it becomes a call to collective action. In France, article 225, paragraph 2, of the criminal code provides that any act of discrimination “obstructing the normal exercise of any given economic activity” is punishable by three years’ imprisonment and a fine of €45,000 ($64,350). So, while consumers are free to choose and to advertise their choice as a personal position, a call for a boycott might fall foul of this legislation.

The rulings of the highest levels of the French judiciary, the Conseil d’Etat (the highest administrative court) and the Cour de Cassation (the highest civil and criminal court), have condemned such acts, notably in regard to trade relations with Israel (6). This is also the position taken by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in its judgment of 16 July 2009 in the case of Willem v France. Jean-Claude Willem, mayor of Seclin, near Lille in northern France, had been accused of inciting a boycott, first at a meeting of the town council on 3 October 2002, where he announced that he had asked the municipal catering services not to use Israeli products, and later via the municipal website. He was acquitted by the Lille criminal court, but sentenced on appeal on 11 September 2003 and fined €1,000 ($1,430). The ECHR, to which Willem then applied in the name of freedom of expression, judged that the call for a boycott was “a discriminatory act, and therefore punishable”.

These judgments set out the legal limits on the use of boycotts: they can be implemented by government authorities, either in execution of a decision of the UN Security Council or, on their own initiative, as part of coercive measures.

The boycott of Israeli goods is the aspect of the BDS campaign that has received most coverage, but other attempts have been made to isolate and bring pressure to bear on Israel. There have also been cultural (7), academic, diplomatic and sporting boycotts. And an Israeli tourism fair in Paris in January was cancelled; Israeli tourism posters were removed from the London underground in May; Hertz, the car rental market leader, declined to have its name associated with a promotional offer by El Al; and Sweden refused to join international air manoeuvres because Israel would be taking part.

‘Get out of Israel’

The divestment element of the campaign, aimed at companies doing business in the Middle East, is beginning to take effect. A campaign to force the Franco-Belgian bank Dexia to withdraw from Israel, with the slogans “Dexia, get out of Israel!” and “Israel Colonises, Dexia Finances”, led 14 Belgian municipalities to leave the bank, which was financing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories through its Israeli subsidiary.

The French power and transport group Alstom has also been targeted and was excluded from Sweden’s AP7 national pension fund portfolio in early 2009. The fund’s decision followed the example of the Dutch financial institution ASN Bank, which took action against another French firm, Veolia Transport, in 2006. Participating in the construction of a tramway in Jerusalem has deprived these multinationals of a number of contracts: in France, the Greater Bordeaux urban community cancelled Veolia’s contract for waste management, worth $53.3m; in the UK, Sandwell borough council excluded Veolia from the bidding for a waste collection and recycling contract worth $1bn; and in Sweden, Stockholm council cancelled its contract for operating the city’s metro system, worth $2.5bn.

Some companies have not wasted time in conforming to the demands of “socially responsible” investment. The Dutch firm Heineken’s subsidiary Tempo Drinks has relocated part of its operations from the West Bank to inside Israeli territory; the Swedish electromechanical security systems firm Assa Abloy has resolved to move one of its factories out of the West Bank.

What of sanctions against the Israeli state? Bogged down in arguments, the UN has difficulty in acting as a guarantor of the international rule of law. Although many other states are subject to sanctions, and though they proved their worth during the struggle against apartheid, sanctions have yet to be applied to Israel.

The desire for justice must be satisfied via other (notably judicial) channels. An example is the suit that the Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), supported by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), has been pursuing in the French courts, since 2007, against Alstom, Alstom Transport and Veolia Transport. In 2004 CityPass Limited, a consortium governed by Israeli law in which Veolia Transport and Alstom Transport had minority interests of 5% and 20% respectively, signed a concession contract with the Israeli government for the construction and operation of the tramway that would serve Jerusalem and part of the West Bank, as mentioned above. The court case aims to prove that the contract is illegal.

The companies contested the subpoena, arguing that the Nanterre high court, before which the case had been brought, was materially and territorially incompetent; and that the petitions were not admissible since the AFPS and PLO were not qualified to act as complainants, and their interests were not affected by the contract. The court still ruled on 15 April that the AFPS could bring a valid action against the three French companies, since the execution of the contract would harm the collective interests that it defends. The court also dismissed the argument that Israel fell outside its jurisdiction. Israel is not a party to the court proceedings but is considered as an occupying power in the area of the West Bank where the disputed tramway is being built and will be operated. Alstom decided to appeal, Veolia decided not to.

Israel faces the threat of other judicial sanctions following petitions to national and international courts. But, in view of the instrumentalisation of criminal justice by the great powers and the way that individual states are retreating on universal jurisdiction, it is doubtful that these proceedings will ever be successful (see Israel’s culture of impunity).

A counter-attack, based on persistent lobbying, has been launched against the BDS movement: a number of organisations (8) have joined the fray in a bid to prevent Israeli products from disappearing or being pushed to the back of the shelf. The BDS campaign and the counter-attack it has provoked are the results of the failure of conventional mechanisms for the resolution of international differences.

(1) See Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement website.

(2) See Willy Jackson, “Israel: verdict on the wall”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, November 2004.

(3) See Omar Barghouti, “Israeli Apartheid: Time for the South African Treatment”, 26 January 2006, ; Virginia Tilley, “The Case for Boycotting Israel: Boycott Now!”, CounterPunch, 5/6 August 2006; Uri Avnery, “The Bed of Sodom”, 21 April 2007. See also Alain Gresh, “Palestine: the view from South Africa”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2009.

(4) For example, the Peace Cycle petition.

(5) Ma’an News Agency, 31 March 2009.

(6) Although it did not envisage a full arms embargo, the UK decided to limit exports of military equipment to mark its disapproval of Israel’s disproportionate use of force during its attack on Gaza; see Washington Post, 14 July 2009.

(7) Among who have joined the embargo are the musician Roger Waters (who refused to play in Tel Aviv), the writers Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, and the film directors Ken Loach and Jean-Luc Godard.

(8) See www.crif.org/.

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India is modernising fast to face the perceived threat of China, not just on its northeastern borders but across the Indian Ocean. And within the army, Nehru-inspired traditions of non-aligned ‘moral diplomacy’ are giving way to pragmatic realism.

India

India has joined the ranks of world powers. What its huge population and semi-official status as a nuclear power since 1998 (1) didn’t quite guarantee, economic growth has finally achieved. The shipwreck of the US economic model has helped show what it is by right: one of the five or six axes of world power alongside the United States, China, Russia, Europe, Japan and, perhaps, Brazil.

India, now a giant in full flight, means to banish the label of “regional actor” attached to a “moral diplomacy” (2) inherited from the Nehru years, now under harsh scrutiny. The world must be made aware that it is acceding to what the writer Sunil Khilnani calls with gentle irony the “perpetual soirée of great powers” (3). It seems a long time since pre-9/11 2001, when US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his personal antennae still locked into the cold war and the strong nuclear supply links between Moscow and New Delhi, was incautious enough to call India “a menace to other peoples, including the US, Western Europe and the countries of Western Asia” (4). Since then, no US official has risked displaying this kind of bad taste.

Courted by all the great powers except China, India has the relative luxury of being able to choose its allies. With its sights set firmly on a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, India is impatient to assess the intentions of the Obama administration – perceived as likely to be less pro-Indian than that of George W Bush, in particular on the continuing dispute between New Delhi and Islamabad over Kashmir. For Christophe Jaffrelot, senior research fellow at the CNRS, Paris, there is a deep cultural change: “From its former heavily ethical positions India is now becoming a herald of realism in international relations”. Harsh V Pant, a specialist in Indian affairs at King’s College, London, emphasises “India’s renewed confidence in its international stature”.

To consolidate this status, India has three main planks. It has to make sure that the world economic crisis does not derail its development ambitions. It must capitalise on the extraordinary diplomatic achievement of the 2005 civil nuclear pact negotiated in Washington between Bush and Manmohan Singh, ratified in 2008 by the US Congress; this pact broke the sacrosanct rules of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and recast India (with 750 atomic warheads) as a “responsible” military nuclear power (5).

The third plank concerns the armed forces. Conventional military power represents an objective just as strong as the others in a fast-rearming Asia. This is the area on which Indian strategists focus their main energies and discussion.

Changed security model

New Delhi seems to have a fixed position on the use of nuclear weapons. True, in February 2008 India made its first test of K-15 strategic ballistic missiles from a nuclear submarine, effectively becoming a nuclear power with second-strike capacity. But the posture of minimal credible force and non-first-use of the nuclear deterrent remains unchanged in Indian strategy.

For conventional forces, the field is much more open. In the face of western armies and China, which is taking giant steps to modernise its armed forces and its tactical ability right through to projects in space, India is searching for its own route to credibility. Still dependent on an operational model from the cold war with mainly Russian suppliers (around 80% of arms imports), India is impatient to speed up its own evolution. The technological revolution in control and communications systems, the challenges of terrorist warfare, the move towards the “arming” of space, the arrival of Homeland Security programmes and the frantic rush to secure sea bases have all transformed the realities of power.

India’s civilian and military elites formulate their theories around a changed security model. By diversifying overseas suppliers (6) and gambling on progressive cultural change in their ranks they aim to revolutionise a military practice still bound by Indian Army traditions. The wherewithal to do so will follow. In the country’s 2009-10 budget, the amount allocated to military spend saw its greatest ever annual hike (+23.7%) to a total of over $29bn (7).

With more than 1.3 million men and women in uniform, India has the world’s third-largest standing army after China and the US. The army itself enjoys the lion’s share (see India’s armed forces). But while India’s special forces are famous, the overall condition of equipment is worrying: old weaponry, obsolete vehicles, maintenance problems and the poor state of supply depots all feed a sense of frustration in the army – less favoured when it comes to research and development and acquisition budgets than the air force or navy.

The Indian Navy has one of the world’s most important fleets. As symbols of its status, two new aircraft carriers have been ordered – one bought from Russia to be refitted, the other built by Indian shipyards. The Indian-designed Advanced Technology Vessel nuclear submarine, which absorbs a large part of the naval budget, passed a key stage in July with the official launching of INS Arihant, the first in a series of five, which won’t however be operational until 2012.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) is the most prestigious arm of the services. Created by the British in 1933, who prudently confined it to tactical missions, it took off after independence, seeking to buy American F-104s. The US’ closeness to Pakistan put an end to that, throwing New Delhi into the arms of the Russian aerospace industry. India bought the most defensive option available, the Mig-21. Nowadays, seeking a more strategic “attack in depth” capability, the IAF is looking for systems similar to those deployed by western powers. Such is the pressure on Moscow that India has become the only client to whom Russia will sell systems more modern than the ones its own air force uses, as well as entering into joint-partnerships to develop fifth-generation programmes (8).

Technology transfer

That’s not all. Israel (very strongly), France and even the US are in the frame, despite India’s anti-American traditions. For example, the IAF has 26 equipment programmes out to tender, of which the most important is the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA). The Indian specification is for 126 fourth-generation fighter jets, costing almost $12bn. This “contract of the century” has Dassault, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Saab, EADS and the Russian Mig-35 in the bidding. Even so, the trauma of what Air Marshal VK Verma calls “technology apartheid” from the cold war years has left Indians calling for an autonomous aerospace industry. They don’t intend to swap the links with a Russia they know only too well for dependency on fickle western suppliers. Whoever wins the MMCRA contract must agree to rigid technology transfer rules: the first 18 aircraft will be delivered before 2012 but the 108 others will be built in India by Hindustan Aeronautical Ltd. At the same time, the chosen supplier must reinvest half the contract’s value, at least $6bn, in the Indian economy.

This ambition to reequip and reform is far from jugaad, the old system proudly practised by the Indian military. It reflects New Delhi’s intention to widen options. Writing in 1999 in Defending India (Palgrave Macmillan, London), Jaswant Singh, the then foreign minister, was already a proponent. But this penchant for wide-open strategic spaces and high tech flew in the face of dogged traditionalists and seemed a little artificial at the time. This was not just because of Indian culture (the kalapaani or “black holes” of the ocean were long held to be taboo and harmful) but principally because of immense social challenges on dry land.

South and Southeast Asia, heavily armed with nuclear strike capability, have many regional issues of global importance – from Taiwan to Kashmir by way of the Spratly Islands. Whatever its ambitions as an “exporter of security” (on the US model, or anti-model), India cannot neglect border quarrels with Pakistan and China, whose own alliance is itself a horror for New Delhi. Strategists now paint Pakistan as a minor issue compared to China, giving the lie to a still-virulent national obsession with the old enemy, but follow step by step China’s technological and strategic progress, which they tend to overanalyse. “Asian geopolitics make a ‘brotherly relationship’ difficult, if not impossible, between the two countries of the future. If India and China carry on arming in the coming years, competition over security issues will be inevitable,” warns Pant.

Points of friction

The recent decision to exclude China from the second Indian Ocean Naval Symposium underlines this growing atmosphere of mistrust. For New Delhi it is simply not acceptable that Beijing interferes in this forum, created in February 2008 under its patronage, which brings together the naval chiefs of staff of countries bordering the Indian Ocean. Chinese protests have been loud, with government journals jeering at the notion of “India’s ocean” and drawing a parallel with New Delhi’s refusal, despite invitations from smaller countries (mainly Sri Lanka), to allow Beijing observer status at the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (9).

India’s obsession with the “pearl necklace” of Chinese naval bases under construction from the South China sea to the African coast via the Indian Ocean is the main reason for its insistence on keeping Beijing away from a territory clearly claimed by New Delhi (10). However, heavy international maritime traffic in the area, as well as the more welcoming stance of other neighbouring countries (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and, until recently, the Maldives) all help the growing presence of the Chinese navy in what is no longer – if it ever was – India’s ocean. The race between to the two navies to fight piracy off Somalia neatly illustrates this growing rivalry.

Added to sea power competition are the land friction points. Indian forces are readier than ever to confront the various frontier issues. Kashmir remains the principal abscess in the northwest where there is also the “frozen” struggle between China and India for control of Aksai Chin (part of which was given to the Chinese in 1963 by Islamabad). India’s most substantial army force, the Northern Command, guards that frontier.

In the northeast, India’s conflict with China over Arunachal Pradesh remains unresolved. The region’s eight states, joined to the main Indian landmass by the 21km wide Siliguri corridor, form a continual headache for India’s chiefs of staff. Part of the area has been off limits to foreigners for almost 40 years. Numerous separatist rebellions are hatched there, given the distance between the main Indian population centres and those who inhabit the peninsula. The Unified Front for the Liberation of Assam still contests India’s authority, and the Chinese are suspected of offering a helping hand.

To the south, Bangladesh, the Muslim enclave on the Brahmaputra delta, faces difficult population and economic issues. It is a source of substantial migration into India, which deploys 50,000 of its armed forces to oppose the flood. In the face of international protest, it is constructing a 4,000km barbed-wire wall to separate the two countries and prevent massive population flows. Today, surveillance is boosted by observation drones. Despite the huge aid offered by India to Bangladesh during the separation process from (“West”) Pakistan in 1971, there has never been any love lost between the two countries. Chittagong, Bangladesh’s principal port, is a haven for the Chinese navy; Beijing helped reinstate the port’s military facilities.

These territorial issues, together with the wider oceanic debate, form the overall framework around which Indian defence thinking rotates. Opinions are strong. Policy review bodies and defence think tanks have swollen over the past 10years, from the IAF’s Centre for Air Power Studies to the Strategic Foresight Group or the South Asia Analysis Group run by Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of Indian counter-terrorism and considered an extreme hardliner on both external and internal matters. It’s a lively and often polemical debate, which comprises, as in all countries, ongoing arguments between the proponents of land, sea, air and space options.

To bolster their different points of view, experts analyse detailed reports of earlier operations. Strategies in conventional warfare during the Kashmir campaign of 1947-8, the Indo-Chinese war of 1962 and the Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971 are studied, along with small-scale campaigns like the 1961-2 UN operation in the Congo, the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka in 1987 and Operation Cactus in the Maldives, 1988, and mixed operations like the 1999 Kargil war in Kashmir.

In the throes of change

Culturally as well as technologically, history and frontier reality still favour the heavy battalions, but the Indian Army is in the throes of change both in technology and tactics. The IAF, faced by the Naxalite rebellion (11) in Central India and separatist movements in the northeast, studies lessons to be drawn from the 2008 air war in Sri Lanka, looking for ways of applying them to counter insurrection (air-land coordination, use of drones). The army’s Hind Shakti exercises in the Punjab during May 2009 simulated a raid on Pakistan, trying out a looser form of Russian-school armoured blitzkrieg.

New resources in space have proved a revelation: in April 2009 India launched into continuous orbit an Israeli-built RISAT-2 observation satellite to patrol the Pakistani frontier. Indian generals are demanding a stand-alone military channel like the Chinese geo-positioned satellite system Beidou as New Delhi seeks to build on its own advances to draw the greatest strategic advantage from the growing militarisation of space. Its objective is not to fall behind China.

According to military sources, this strategy means investing in space weaponry because “in a possible limited conflict scenario, China would not hesitate to blind or dazzle observation satellites selectively to degrade India’s capabilities, denying India the much-needed battlespace awareness,” warns Wing Commander Kaza Lalitrenda of the IAF (12). By presenting such internal discussion in the form of low- or high-density combat, from mountain war to domination of space – not forgetting the ideal shape of Indian special forces – the two major debates on the geopolitical ambitions of the new India have finally been combined.

The first is the dilemma already discussed between a defensive model based on border priorities and another more ambitious view of world power play, whose protagonists – perturbed by Chinese advances, particularly the so-called pearl necklace – are winning more and more ground at staff HQ. This dichotomy is very apparent in the navy – one side, influenced by the Soviet school, seeing the fleet as a simple adjunct to the regional nuclear balance; the other side, American academy graduates, seeking to prevent Chinese expansion by a more aggressive anti-warship strategy.

The second debate centres on persuading the government of multicultural India’s fragility in regard to terrorism. Using as ammunition the 26 November 2008 Islamist attacks on Mumbai in which 174 people died, the protagonists of this debate call for better cooperation between defence and security (the model is a militarised Homeland Security). The finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, who on 7 July 2009 presented the new national budget, commented: “The Mumbai terror attacks have given an entirely new dimension to cross-border terrorism. A threshold has been crossed. Our security environment has deteriorated considerably.”

This view constitutes today’s dominant faction, committing the country in the coming three years to invest in more than $10bn of equipment for securing frontiers – surveillance drones, light interceptor vessels, biometric passports, transport helicopters, urban combat weaponry (13). The Indian Special Forces would grow considerably in number, operating between the interior ministry and military units, with emphasis on the latter. Their objective: anti-terrorism capacity and effective urban control. The Indian Army, subject of all such strategic and cultural debate, is no longer a lumbering elephant, despite increasingly serious technological challenges.

Could economic realities undermine India’s defence ambitions? Not according to official statements. For Pradeep Kumar, who was in charge of military procurement before becoming defence minister in July 2009, “the global meltdown won’t affect the modernisation of the Indian armed forces or other defence programmes, as these will go ahead as planned and required” (14). The “moral” non-aligned force of the Nehru years is living its last moments in the minds of India’s decision-makers.

(1) In May 1998, India tested its nuclear deterrent, followed several days later by Pakistan.

(2) The “moral diplomacy” that represented Indian foreign policy during the decades following independence is built on principles of peaceful coexistence and non-alignment, expressing Nehru’s desire to differentiate himself from the realpolitik of the two blocs, which he claimed were aggressive predators.

(3) Martine Bulard, “India’s boundless ambitions”,Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, January 2007.

(4) Siddharth Varadarajan, “Stop supply of N-fuel to India, US tells Russia”, Sunday Times, London, 18 February 2001.

(5) Nuclear strategists are still looking for a satisfactory definition of this kind of value judgment. What is a responsible nuclear power: whoever will not risk using the bomb? In which case, some say, the United States represents a problematic sub-category.

(6) In 2007 and 2008 Israel became India’s most important arms supplier in cost terms, dethroning Russia after more than 4O years. This reflects the high value-added technology of Israeli products (anti-missile defence systems, electronics, communications systems, drones, satellites).

(7) In 2008-9 defence spending increased by 10%. India devotes 2% of GDP to defence compared with China’s 7% and Pakistan’s 5%.

(8) The supersonic cruise missile Brahmos (Brahmapoutre-Moskowa) and, more theoretically, the strike fighter Sukhoi/HAL T-50 FGA, designed to replicate the American F-35 and F-22.

(9) Formed in 1985, SAARC includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It has been joined by Afghanistan, with which India has warm relations.

(10) Olivier Zajec, “China’s naval ambitions”, Le Monde diplomatique English edition, September 2008.

(11) The Naxalites are a revolutionary group operating in 15 Indian states, seeking to provoke agrarian reform by force. See Cedric Gouverneur, “India’s undeclared war”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, December 2007.

(12) Kaza Lalitendra, “Dragon in Space: implications for India”, Air Power Journal, Vol 3 n°3.

(13) Vivek Raghuvanshi, “India plans Homeland Security, Buys worth $10bn”, Defence News, Springfield, Virginia. 31 December 2008.

(14) Statement made on 2 February 2009 at the Aero India show.

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IRAN

Few countries have remained so opaque to objective scrutiny, so resistant to coherent analysis, as Iran. Recurrently characterized as the most hostile of all Middle Eastern regimes to the West, the Islamic Republic has connived at the American invasion of Iraq and occupation of Afghanistan, helping to prop up puppet regimes of the us in Baghdad and Kabul. Regularly represented as little more than a clerical dictatorship, it has—uniquely in the regional Umma—held genuinely contested elections, and maintained a parliament where debate is not a façade and votes are unpredictable; yet prison—or much worse—awaits principled dissent. Widely held to be an obscurantist theocracy, it has transformed popular literacy and given more women higher education than any regime in the neighbourhood. Famous for its poetry in the past, since 1979 the country has produced one of the richest cinemas in the world, even while millions have been driven out of it by cultural repression. Today Iran is moving towards centre stage on the international scene, as the us prepares to tighten the economic noose around it, to preserve Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region; and the regime in Tehran, more domestically isolated and divided than in the past, confronts a mass opposition enraged by electoral fraud and eager for more comprehensive accommodation to the West. The conjunction of these two crises has unleashed a torrent of clichés and homilies in the Euro- American mediasphere. In this issue, we publish the first of a series of pieces on Iran, aiming at more informed and critical coverage of the country. In a strikingly original essay, James Buchan sets the current impasse of the regime in a cultural-historical perspective going back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. Many further questions remain open. Among those consistently glossed over or ignored in standard treatments of Iranian politics are the comparative economic and political records, in practice, of the Rafsanjani/Khatami and Ahmadinejad governments; the class composition of the Green bloc of 2009; the social basis of regime loyalism; the exact roles, respectively, of the Armed Forces and the Revolutionary Guards in the power structure of the country; the intellectual, regional or other grounds of factional divisions within the clergy; not to speak, of course, of the strategies and activities of the Western regimes bent on bringing Iran to heel as one more domesticated pawn of the ‘international community’.

Iran

Hegel says in his lectures that history must repeat itself to be intelligible. [1] Yes, rejoined Marx, in his most elegant piece of journalism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), first as tragedy, and then as farce. [2] Marx saw the coup d’état of Prince Napoleon in 1851 as a comic re-enactment of Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power on the 18th Brumaire, Year viii of the French revolutionary calendar (1799), mere historical play-acting in altered circumstances. What would Hegel and Marx have made of the June days in Iran? The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the tenth election for the Iranian Presidency on 22 Khordad, or June 12, was for his supporters an instance of divine grace and for his rivals a vulgar fraud. For the student of Iranian history, June 12 falls into a pattern in which popular revolutions (1906 and 1979) are disrupted by a coup d’état and then another and then another. In place of Muhammed Ali Shah Qajar, we have Ali Khamenei, for the Cossack commander Liakhov there is Interior Minister Mahsouli, and for Reza there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Persian Bonaparte in a car coat.

For Iranians of a religious cast of mind, the history of their country is the repeated disruption of God’s will by conspirators, mercenaries, foreign capital, liberals and the bbc Persian Service. For those of a secular bent, the sure passage of the country towards enlightenment is broken up by unpredictable periods of darkness, like a train journey in mountainous country. In either case, the consequence is frustration in which the Guarded Realms of Iran are granted neither prosperity nor justice, nor the fame they deserve in the eye of God and the judgement of humanity.

Within this perplexing pattern, there is a fundamental conflict which, as you might expect in the land that gave the world Manichaeism, takes different shapes at different historical epochs. Despotism fights Constitutionalism, Monarchy Parliament, Right Left, God the Devil, hard-liner reformer. The twelfth of June opens a new chapter. The long stalemate since the death in 1989 of the revolutionary pioneer Ruhollah Khomeini, in which the reformers could not reform and the hard-liners could not hard-line, is broken. Iranian Republicanism, or jomhuriat, is wounded and the clergy at daggers drawn. We enter a period of confusion, confrontation with the Western powers and messianic enthusiasm. Somewhere in the great salt deserts of Iran, there will soon be a nuclear explosion.

Crowns and constitutions

In 1905, Iran was an out-of-the-way place where European modernity was represented by a few horse-drawn kaleshkis, five miles of pilgrim railway which some rode in their shrouds, a bankrupt sugar factory, a polytechnic, a brigade of Cossacks and thirty million roubles in national debt to fund the Shah’s household and his water-cures in France. A protest at the bastinadoing of two sugar merchants and objections to the construction of a Russian bank were transformed into a revolt against the Qajar autocracy, famine prices and the sale of concessions to shady European capital. The progressive clergy, shopkeepers, craftsmen and a few liberals and social democrats called for a ‘house of justice’ and then a majlis (parliament), qanun (rule of law), and even mashruteh (constitution). Tormented by gout and kidney stones, Shah Muzaffaruddin Qajar agreed to grant a constitution on August 5, 1906 and the Majlis convened two months later. In a land where surnames were still a few years in the future, the deputies advertised themselves by their crafts: Messrs Bookseller, Tailor’s Foreman, Silkmercer, Wholesaler, Fletcher, Crystalseller, Grocer, Ricecooker, Middleman, Watchmaker. [3]

Muzaffaruddin died that winter and his son, Mohammed Ali, objected to any limitation on the ancient prerogatives of the monarchy. On July 24, 1908, the commander of the Cossack Brigade, Vladimir Platonovich Liakhov, turned his cannon on the Majlis building in Tehran. By then, many of the clergy had come to distrust democratic government and the wild talk of liberty and equality. Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, the most learned and influential of the Tehran clergy, concluded that, until the Lord of Time—the twelfth Imam in direct descent from the Prophet through his daughter, Fatemeh—should emerge from his incognito and usher in the age of justice and the end of the world, an absolutist government that applied Islamic law was the least of all evils. For the anti-clerical historian Ahmad Kasravi, the Constitutional Revolution was premature. ‘The mass of people’, he wrote in the 1920s,

were wholly ignorant of what a Constitution is and what it entailed and took part in the insurrection merely to follow their leaders. In that case, there should have been at the outset of the movement people to guide and educate and teach everybody about popular government and national life, and progress as it is understood in Europe. [4]

The ‘little despotism’, as it was called, lasted just a year. A force of Constitutionalist tribesmen from the Bakhtiari gathered in Isfahan, defeated the royal army and reconvened the Majlis. Sheikh Fazlollah was hanged on June 30, 1909. But Constitutionalism gradually disintegrated and much of the clergy returned to the seminary or doffed their turbans. In 1921, a Cossack officer named Reza seized power, ejected the Qajars four years later and instituted a modernizing despotism. Foreigners responded according to national type: English ladies attended Reza’s coronation in 1926 and designed the court uniforms from patterns at Kensington Palace; a German professor dug up an ancient Persian word, Pahlavi, to consecrate the parvenu dynasty; the Soviet orientalists at Novy Vostok labelled Reza a bourgeois revolutionist, anti-feudal and anti-imperial, who would create an industrial society ripe for proletarian revolution.

Reza duly introduced surnames, a uniform dress code, factories, a national bank and university, an insurance company and military conscription. He paid off the foreign debt and forced government officials to appear in public with their wives. He smashed the corporate character of Iranian society, murdered his associates or drove them to suicide, and alienated every class of men and women. Hemmed in by Soviet commercial policies, and hating British control of the oil industry in the south of the country, Reza was attracted to Weimar and then National Socialist Germany. He built a railway from north to south, paid for by a tax on his people’s only luxuries, tea and sugar, and that was his undoing.

In 1941, needing the Trans-Iranian Railway to ship American bombers and trucks to the Red Army, the British and Soviets invaded Iran and sent Reza into exile. His son Mohammed Reza took his place but, before he could find his feet, there was a brief flowering of parliamentary government. Under the wing of the Red Army in northern Iran a popular front party, the Tudeh (or ‘mass’) gained in power and influence. In 1953, after a valetudinarian nobleman named Mussadiq as-Saltaneh nationalized the British-owned oil industry amid great popular excitement, bazaar thugs and the anti-communist clergy (liberally bribed by the British and Americans) staged a third coup d’état. Restored to his throne, Mohammed Reza dismantled representative government, suppressed the secular opposition and attempted to demolish the clergy as a political force by ordering the troublesome Khomeini into exile in 1964.

When the revolution came, in the bitter winter of 1978–79, the old constitutional slogans of independence and the rule of law merged with the mourning ceremonies of the Shia for the martyrs of the Prophet’s family. The public listened spellbound to Khomeini on television, discoursing for five nights on the first six words of the Koran. [5] Meanwhile student radicals occupied the us Embassy and the Islamic Republican Party, whose newspaper was edited and managed by a certain Mir Hossein Mousavi, proceeded to make fools of the liberals. In the new constitution drawn up by the theoreticians of the irp, the representative government of 1906 was revived but hemmed in by appointed institutions, such as the Council of Guardians, designed to preserve clerical hegemony. The new constitution, approved by referendum on October 24, 1979, placed at the head of affairs (first of Iran, and then the world), as Regent until that joyous moment when the Lord of Time unveils himself to view, a seminary-trained jurist. This arrangement, so rich in possibilities for political and doctrinal conflict, nonetheless remained intact through thirty years of presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections. That changed on June 12, 2009.

An electoral coup

Even in Iran, where alone of the Muslim lands miracles not only occur but are on the increase, the results of the tenth presidential election are a prodigy. Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saw in the ballot evidence of ‘the special favour of the Lord of Time to the Iranian people and the System of the Islamic Republic’. [6] In contrast, Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, an old revolutionary living in retirement near Isfahan, said here were ‘results no healthy reasoning faculty could possibly accept’. [7] To have turned out 85 per cent of the electorate is one thing, but for almost all of the increased turn-out to vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another. In one province, East Azarbaijan, which also happens to be the home province of Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main challenger, Ahmadinejad increased ten-fold his vote of 2005. In two provinces, Yazd and Mazanderan, more people voted than were on the electoral register, and in four other provinces the participation rate was 95 per cent. Iranians in possession of an identity card can vote where they like and Yazd is a fine town, with an interesting Zoroastrian community, a tradition of resist-died silk-weaving etc., but it takes several days to reach. Where, for example, the Majlis election of 1943 took six months to count, this presidential election had a satisfactory result in an hour.

In politics, what matters is what people think. Millions of Iranians believe that the Interior Ministry, under Sadeq Mahsouli, and the clerical leadership have disenfranchized them. It is as if the Iranian public were no more than torpid rayots (‘livestock’) of the Middle Ages, not a nation that pioneered representative government in Asia in 1906, overturned a well-armed despotism in 1979 and advanced in bounds in literacy and college education over the last generation. This is not the society of 1906 or even 1979, but an educated population, dwelling in immense cities, and steeped in its own history. The public knows that representative government is a force in Iran. It was the Majlis that prevented Lord Curzon establishing a personal protectorate in 1919, stood up to the Soviets in 1946, ousted the stingy Scottish managers of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 and reformed the one-sided divorce law in 1967.

A rigged election in Iran is scarcely a new phenomenon. The ninth presidential election of 2005, which brought Ahmadinejad, then Mayor of Tehran, to his first term, inspired no sort of confidence in Iranian mathematics. The questions this time are why the revolutionary establishment in Iran, known in Persian as the nezam or System, found it advisable to stage this slapdash little coup d’état in this particular year 1388 of the Persian solar calendar; and what are its consequences for the life and prosperity of the Islamic Republic?

Contenders

Of the four hundred and seventy-five men and women who presented themselves as candidates for President, all but four were rejected by the Council of Guardians. Those were the incumbent, Ahmadinejad; a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards corps, Mohsen Rezai; an elderly cleric and former speaker of the Majlis, Mehdi Karrubi; and a former prime minister living in retirement, Mir Hossein Mousavi. Of the challengers, only Mousavi was given much of a chance. A cousin of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, Mousavi descends from the same branch of the Prophet’s family as Khomeini himself. He was bred up an architect and town planner. A disciple (with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard) of the Fanonist philosopher Ali Shariati, Mousavi came to power in that evil summer of 1981 when the first generation of Khomeini’s associates were wiped out in bombings and assassinations by the ultra-leftist Mujahedin. There followed a nightmare of Terror in which not only the Mujahedin but the secular Left and Kurdish separatists were wiped out or driven into exile. Evin Prison became for a while a concentration camp, and as many as three thousand young people went to the gallows.

As prime minister during the Terror and the eight-year war with Baathist Iraq, Mousavi is remembered for a fair system of rationing food and petrol, and for his bad relations with Khamenei, then President. Soon after the ceasefire with the Baath in 1988, Mousavi resigned. Khomeini’s death a little later robbed him of his principal support and established Khamenei as Leader or Regent. The prime minister’s post was abolished, the Islamic Republican Party dissolved and Mousavi retired into private life. When, in the course of reconstruction after the war, the scattered remnants of the Islamic left joined with a frustrated younger generation to become the ‘reformists’ (aslahtalaban), Mousavi resisted pressure to stand for the Presidency in favour of a popular clergyman of the second rank, Mohammed Khatami.

‘An insignificant child of the Revolution’, as he describes himself, Mousavi’s pious scowl and long-winded manner seemed no particular threat to the System or to its ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. He has said, for example to Time magazine the day before the election, that the use of Iranian nuclear energy for the making of weapons was ‘negotiable’. [8] Yet the Iranian project to enrich uranium is not under the control of the Iranian president. A penitent Terrorist may not be the best choice for the many young Iranians longing to end their isolation and for the exiles hoping to return. Anyway, forms of government in Iran that look antiquated tend to be long-lived. The Safavids lasted a century after they had succumbed to drink and harem politics, the Qajars long outlasted their vigour and their revenue and even the Pahlavis, hated as they were, occupied the Peacock Throne for fifty-four years. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic, with its mixture of parliamentary democracy and clerical dictatorship, has survived since 1979 with only small alterations, of which the most important was the abolition of the prime minister’s office and the return of Mousavi to his architect’s table and painter’s easel.

In the ten days of campaigning, the reform-minded Mousavi and Karrubi concentrated less on their own policies than on the conduct of Ahmadinejad. Here was a man of doubtful truthfulness, superstitious, chaotic in his administrative work, and bucolic, even clownish, in his appearances on the diplomatic stage. Ahmadinejad countered with his twinkle, his workman’s manners, his open-handedness with the state’s money, his intimacy with the Lord of Time, his fund of folksy Molla Nasreddin stories, his Jew-baiting, and his humiliation of the Royal Navy in the Shatt al-Arab. In a series of television debates—a novelty for Iran—Ahmadinejad cast aspersions on his opponents’ financial probity and insulted Zahra Rahnavard.

As the Mousavi campaign gathered strength, it adopted as its symbol the colour green. That was both wise and rash. It was wise, because green is the colour of the Prophet’s family, and also rather becoming. It was rash because the command of the Revolutionary Guards corps has come to fear a revolution from below. Mousavist green evoked Georgian rose, Ukrainian orange and Kirghiz tulip. Since those were movements to throw off the desiccated remnants of Soviet rule, they did not appear to have much connexion with Iran which, to everybody’s surprise including its own, had managed to eject the Red Army in 1946. On June 10, Yadollah Javani, the political director of the Guards, warned that a velvet revolution would not be tolerated. ‘There are many indications that some extremist groups have in mind a “colour revolution”’, he said. ‘Any attempt at a velvet revolution will be nipped in the bud.’ [9]

A Democrat president in Washington often unsettles an authoritarian regime in Iran. John F. Kennedy in 1962 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 insisted on democratic reforms that were ultimately disastrous for Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. As Tocqueville said, a bad government is never more vulnerable than at the moment when it begins to reform itself. [10] Revolutionary Iran relies for its public support on external threat, both political and doctrinal. Barack Obama, in offering his hand, slackened one of the three mainstays that keep the country in perpetual tension—the other two being the threat of attack from Israel and sectarian Sunnism, whether Saudi, Binladenite or Deobandi.

Presidential elections in the Islamic Republic take place in two rounds, a French practice that Khomeini and his advisers brought back in their hand luggage from Paris in 1979 like a box of nougat. Unless a single candidate polls 50 per cent and one vote in the first round, after a two-week interval there is a run-off between the two leaders. It does appear that the 62 per cent given Ahmadinejad with such suspicious haste on the morning of June 13 was arrived at precisely to prevent that eventuality. A second round, in which the muj-e sabz or ‘green wave’ might have turned into a tide and swept Ahmadinejad away, was best avoided. As so often, what appears to be a consequence is, in reality, a cause. Whatever the truth of the matter, Ahmadinejad is so fond of talking that we will soon all know.

The week that followed saw the revival in Iran of the crowd, a force not seen in Iranian politics since Khomeini’s funeral in 1989. At least 34 young people are known to have been killed by the security forces. Many were killed in a pre-emptive attack on the dormitory quarter of Tehran University in the small hours of June 15 and later that day, when a crowd running into millions came under fire from a base of the armed component of the militia or basij, beneath Mohammed Reza’s memorial to the monarchy at Azadi Square.

In approved Marxian fashion, the Mousavists adorned themselves with the symbols of the 1979 Revolution. As in the January days of that year, each night a howl of ‘God is great’ resounded from the rooftops and bounced off the mountains to the north. As in 1979, they cried ‘Death to the Dictator!’ (or ‘Death to Dictatorship!’) though this time the dictator was Khamenei, and the dictatorship the Leadership or Clerical Regency (velayat-e faqih). If the Mousavists’ heads were full of 1979, 1953 and 1908, the System also succumbed to nostalgia. Ahmadinejad saw the unseen hand of Downing Street and tweaked the tail of the sleepy British Lion at his white brick-and-wisteria lair on Ferdowsi Avenue. What was new was the style of repression. The old chomaqdaran or club-wielders, who used to break up leftist or women’s demonstrations at the turn of the 1980s, are now flanked by militiamen equipped with handsome motorbikes and automatic weapons. Several hundred oppositionists were arrested and on August 1, a large group was put on public trial. At the trial, Mohammed Ali Abtahi, an adviser to Karrubi, in prison pyjamas and stripped of his turban, confessed to having been mistaken in claiming that the election result was a fraud. He said that Khatami, Mousavi and the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had conspired beforehand to stage a velvet revolution. Nobody in Iran credits such prison confessions, which have been a feature of Iranian life since the Pahlavis, or responds with anything but sympathy. Abtahi’s distressing performance was merely a warning to the named gentlemen that they, too, could soon be resident in Evin.

The crowds lacked leadership. Mousavi, his wife and his friends were not willing to expose their young supporters to bloodshed. They lacked a programme, only a constitutionalist question: rai-e man ku—where is my vote? They lacked organization, except as a coalition of small parties known only to connoisseurs of Persian politics, such as the Union of Campaigning Clergy and the Participation Front of Islamic Iran. Just as the 1905–6 Revolution discovered newspapers and telegrams, so the Mousavists had new-fangled electronic communications. Distributed denial-of-service attacks on the websites of Khamenei and the Guards were all very well, but they were no substitute for the direct action of 1905–6: the closing of the bazaar, mass asylum in the British legation, and a general migration of the constitutionalist clergy to Qom. Nor was there, as after the royal coup d’état of 1908, a reserve of constitutionalist forces in the tribes as when the Bakhtiari marched on Tehran and defeated the royal army. The Pahlavis smashed the tribes, as they smashed up everything in old Iran; and what Reza started the Revolutionary Guards completed when Khosrow Khan, chief of the nomadic Qashqai, was hanged in the market square of Firuzabad in October 1982.

Above all, the Mousavists failed to win over the traditional economy or bazaar. Though the bazaar is frustrated at Iran’s economic mediocrity, and by Ahmadinejad’s inflationist practices, it stayed open through June. There was none of that creeping industrial paralysis that was a feature not only of 1906 but of the autumn of 1978, when the Pahlavi regime could not collect its customs receipts or supply its mechanized brigades with motor spirit. Even an economy as chaotic and mismanaged as Iran’s generates a revenue which, distributed to the Revolutionary Guards, regular forces, police, militia, nationalized industries, veterans of the Iraq war, servants of state, a large clerical establishment of mortmain endowments and seminaries, and subsidized food and gasoline, creates an army of Iranians with a material stake in things as they are. The excess of spending over revenue is financed by inflation, always the simplest way to tax working people, for it is a tax they cannot avoid paying. Standards of living, when expressed in per capita income, have not risen since the days of Mohammed Reza, but inequalities of wealth are much less in the eye than under the Pahlavis and there are powerful sumptuary codes. As long as the regime keeps out foreign competition, and enforces modest dress and conduct for men and women (hijab), it can count on the bazaar. The rank and file of the Guards, which may be no firmer than the Shah’s army, was not tested on the boulevards.

The Twittering of the exiles became, by the third week of June, just the squeaking of little birds on a wire. At Friday prayers at Tehran University on June 19, Khamenei spoke ex cathedra, evoked the trials of the Shia patriarch, Imam Ali, and said that a fraud of one million votes was possible but not one of eleven million votes. He declared the matter closed and threatened punishment if protest continued. On June 29, the Council of Guardians ruled the election valid. On August 5, Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president.

After-effects

So what are the consequences? Mohammed Reza used to say that those who did not like his Great Civilization could go away. Since 1979, the chief remedy of the Islamic Republic for dealing with unruly subjects has been not so much repression as banishment. Each tremor in the regime has produced its wave of emigration. The monarchists, military families, savakis, Jews and Baha’is left in 1979. The liberals and left quit after the Terror of 1981. In the 1990s, when oil could be had for $10 a barrel, the economy stagnated and the currency collapsed, hundreds of thousands of young men drifted abroad as once to the oilfields of Baku and the coal mines of Krivoy Rog. The Mousavists will no doubt make a fourth wave of emigration.

Such a purification through exile has two hygienic effects. The first preserves an image of unity (vahdat) which is the pretension of Muslim politics as it is the principle of Muslim theology: the people are as indivisible as the Godhead. The second is to restrict the ambitions of the Iranian middle class, and preserve its small-bourgeois, religious and traditional character. A side effect has been to create an army of a million or more Iranian exiles in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany and Sweden, all but a few of them prospering, and all but a few homesick to death. It is as if in Bel Air and South Kensington, they have lost the metaphysical privilege of Iranianness. Their numbers at home have been made up by refugees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet what happened happened. The System’s unexpected loss of nerve in the June days has undermined its prestige. Despite the array of unelected bodies surrounding the Majlis and the Presidency, the regime still could not secure its wishes without giving a strong impression of fraud and shooting several young women. An order which once dreamed of imposing Islamic government on Iraq (or at least on the Najaf seminary that Khomeini had so hated in his Iraqi exile in the 1960s and 70s) finds itself shaken to its core by a drab architect and unarmed crowds. A Revolution that promised to give law to the world and return Jerusalem to the Muslims has reverted to a pessimistic Shiism-in-one-country, barricaded behind walls of belief and social conduct which are constantly being breached.

In the case of Ayatollah Mohammed-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a philosopher and mystic in Qom to whom both Ahmadinejad and his political circle, the Abadgaran, are much attached, this pessimism shades into defeatism. For Mesbah-Yazdi, Iran is under perpetual assault and not only in the military arena. ‘In the economic sphere,’ he once said,

this war takes the form of international conspiracies to prevent economic and scientific progress in the Muslim world. In politics, it is revealed in the actions of local mercenaries and traitors to sow political chaos and dissension between Muslims. But the most important theatre of war is culture where for years the colonialists and bullies have played multifarious tricks on the Muslims. Alas, we see signs of their victory in our country and even in our households.

In a speech in Mashad on July 19, he said those who wanted to declare the elections void were denying the very principle of clerical guidance. [11]

The Constitution of the Islamic Republic functioned. Its representative character gave the Iranian public a sense that it had a share in government, which provided a cloak of popular legitimacy for Iran’s power politics. In retrospect, it was the refusal of the Pahlavis to tolerate representative government that left them unable to deal with dissent. Reza abused and beat parliamentarians as he did his associates, and his exile after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 was welcomed principally because it permitted a revival of parliamentary government. In time his son, Mohammed Reza, who turned from the frightened young man of the war years to a sort of Montreux edition of his father, had nowhere to turn in 1976 except a discredited and unpopular single party, the Rastakhiz (‘renaissance’). It is now impossible to imagine the elections for the eleventh presidential period generating any enthusiasm. As Khamenei looked down, during Friday prayers on June 19, at Ahmadinejad in the front row, smiling like a prize pupil, he must have wondered: How am I going to get rid of this lad in four years’ time? Elections may well degenerate into a bayat or oath of allegiance of the kind Sheikh Fazlollah had in mind.

As well as its tragic view of history, and its promise of redemption, the Shia has been since the time of the Safavids the principal means of seizing and preserving state power in the Guarded Realms. Confronted with the dilemma of all scripture, which is written down in time but must legislate for eternity, the Iranian Shia allows those men that can master the gruelling seminary curriculum great latitude in making law. It is this latitude which allowed the Shia to import so many of the mental goods of the European nineteenth century, such as constitutionalism and freemasonry; the Third Worldism of the 1960s; and now the internet. Yet never in all Muslim history was there such an innovation as Khomeini’s theories for seizing and holding power in the world. Looking back at Khomeini’s lectures in Najaf in January and February 1970, now known as Islamic Government: The Regency of the Jurist, one is struck by how the argument proceeds not by authority (as in classical Muslim thought) but by assertion. It is as if Khomeini, in his long journeys through the outer reaches of Persian theosophy in the 1920s and the 1930s, had mastered those lost gnostic secrets that allowed him to speak with the voice of God.

These fantastic Persian theories have never had much appeal outside Iran. They are unthinkable as heresy in the lands of the Sunna, and all but unknown in the strongholds of the Shia in southern Iraq, southern Lebanon and India. When Khomeini was exiled by Mohammed Reza in 1964 and made his way to the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, he found himself ostracized by the senior Shia clergy. [12] The most venerated of the Najaf divines of our times, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an Iranian from the generation after Khomeini, is himself a constitutionalist of early twentieth-century character. His singular contribution to rescuing Iraq from civil war was his ruling in 2005 that the Shia vote in the parliamentary elections.

Even in Iran, the unity of the Khomeinist clergy has broken. Divines of great authority have been silenced or driven into retirement. The heroes of Khomeini’s movement, who endured exile and Pahlavi prisons and the assassin’s bullet in their pulpits, see themselves displaced by power-seekers and mountebanks. Montazeri, whom Khomeini once called ‘the fruit of my life’, has been confined to his house in Najafabad since 1997. In 2002, Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, the leader of congregational prayers in Isfahan, withdrew from an intolerably corrupt public life, in words that breathe the true spirit of 1906: ‘When I recall the promises and pledges of the early days of the revolution, I tremble like a willow over my faith. I see the sun of my life on its last rays, my flour sifted and my sieve hung back in its place. I am drenched in the sweat of shame.’ [13] In early July, he issued a statement condemning the manipulation of the election. Thus, pious Iranians disgusted with the violence and compromises of Islamic government have ample alternative authority, or ‘source of emulation’ (marja’) as it is known.

Like the French Constitution of 1848, ‘so cleverly made inviolable’, as Marx put it, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic can ‘like Achilles, be wounded at one point. Not in the heel, but in the head.’ [14] The role of Leader or Regent, created in 1979 for the hero Khomeini, is oversized for ordinary successors. The clerical kingmaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, who in 1989 manipulated the Council of Experts to elect Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor, has long had second thoughts. At Friday prayers at Tehran University on July 17, Rafsanjani presented the events of June 12 as a betrayal of Khomeini’s legacy. ‘You are listening’, he said, ‘to a man who has lived each second of the revolution, from the very beginning of the struggle about sixty years ago until this day. I know what the Imam wanted and am thoroughly familiar with the Imam’s thinking.’ [15] Were Khamenei retired by the Council of Experts, which Hashemi leads, the entire constitutional edifice of the Islamic Republic would be rattled to pieces.

Portents

Few ideologies last much beyond the generation that brought them to birth. The young people who were permitted to vote for the first time on June 12 were barely conscious of the Khatami government of 1997, let alone the death of Khomeini, the Sacred Defence against Iraq of the 1980s, the Revolution or the whisky years of Mohammed Reza. The lurid symbols of those periods evoke little response in their imaginations. The endless sermonizing about traitors and mercenaries and British conspiracies strike no echo. They never expected that freedom from foreign interference would mean isolation from the main stream of world affairs, and unemployment in a country starved of capital and brain. They do not fear a restoration of monarchy, or have a very clear idea what monarchy is. They want liberty, not in the sense of libertinism, but as what we would call privacy.

What they will get, as we all do, is diversion. In his Natural History of Religion, Hume provocatively divided religious sentiments into the fanatical and the superstitious. Khomeini, who appeared at times to be so absent from this transitory world as to be indifferent to phenomena, had no superstition about him and no tolerance of it. Those Iranians who swore blind they saw his face in the full moon of January 16, 1979 received short shrift. Ahmadinejad, a self-conscious man of the people, has a taste for Persian popular superstition; Shah Abbas himself kept the best horses in his stable saddled and bridled for the use of the Twelfth Imam. Ahmadinejad has fostered the cult of the well at Jamkaran, outside Qom, where, according to tradition, the Lord of Time appeared for an instant and where he is expected to return. In the eschatological ferment of these days, the System may well find in some greasy truck stop in Sistan or Fars that it has an old-fashioned Iranian prophet on its hands. It will have only itself to blame. If Khomeini and Reza had nothing else in common, they did have this: There will be no prophets in Iran while I am breathing.

The other diversion is a nuclear weapon. There is a fantastic belief across Iran that a nuclear bomb will entrench rule by the turban for ever. It matters not at all that the capacity to detonate a nuclear bomb did nothing to preserve apartheid South Africa or the military government in Pakistan. The enrichment of uranium towards an eventual bomb explosive proceeds. If that frightens the Europeans or provokes an attack by Israel, so much the better, for only thus will the unity of the people be guaranteed and skirt lengths stay on the ground. If the future is confrontation with the West, messianism, social conformity and a nuclear seminary, is it any wonder that so many Iranians in June marched from Enqelab to Azadi? Until then they can watch Ahmadinejad perform like Louis Napoleon in the closing paragraph of the Eighteenth Brumaire:

Driven on by the contradictory demands of his situation, he has to keep the eyes of the public fixed on himself by means of constant surprises, that is to say by performing a coup d’état in miniature every day. He thereby brings the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable in the Revolution, strips the halo from the state machine and makes the state both disgusting and ridiculous. [16]

[2] Surveys from Exile, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 146.

[3] Habl ul-matin (Calcutta), 1907, quoted in Ahmad Kasravi, Tarikh-e mashruteyeh Iran, Tehran 1384, p. 181.

[4] Kasravi, Tarikh, p. 273.

[5] Ruhollah Khomeini, Tafsir-e sureye hamd, Qom 1363.

[6] ‘Khutbeh-haye namaz-e jome’e tehran’, 29 Khordad 1388, available at khamenei.ir.

[7] ‘Payyam-e ayatollah montazeri piramun-e nataej-e entekhabat’, 26 Khordad 1388, available at www.amontazeri.com.

[8] Joe Klein and Nahid Siamdoust, ‘The Man Who Could Beat Ahmadinejad’, Time, 12 June 2009.

[9] Sobh-e sadeq, 18 Khordad 1388.

[10] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Book iii, Ch. 4.

[11] ‘Dar musir-e defa’e hameh janebeh az islam’, Ramadan 1425, available at www.mesbahyazdi.org; Mashad speech available at www.parlemannews.ir.

[12] Hamid Rouhani, Nehzat-e emam Khomeini, Tehran 1381, vol. 2, p. 219 ff.

[13] Nowruz, 18 Tir 1381, available in English from bbc Monitoring, 10 July 2002.

[14] Surveys from Exile, p. 160.

[15] bbc Monitoring, 19 July 2009.

[16] Surveys from Exile, p. 248.

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Asia

The mass of recent literature on the ‘rise of Asia’ largely focuses on the implications of this development for the West. [1] It rarely stops to consider the impact on inter-relations between the Asian states themselves. In Rivals, ex-Economist editor Bill Emmott attempts to correct this by examining the cases of China, India and Japan, and argues that the interaction between the three will decisively influence the shape of the coming world order. As he points out, their triple coexistence as major powers represents a historical novelty. In 1820, when China and India between them accounted for almost half of world output, Japan remained a relative backwater, its modernizing drive of the Meiji period lying decades in the future; by the 1930s, when Japan had become a full-fledged industrial and military power, China was impoverished and riven by warlordism, while India groaned under the British yoke. The headlong economic development of the prc and steady growth in India over the past decades suggest that the two Asian giants will join Japan among the top five national economies in the world.

Yet this very process is creating ‘disruptive transformations’ that will profoundly alter the economies, societies and polities of the states in question, Emmott argues, potentially raising new tensions between the three. Rising prosperity has brought commensurate expansion of Chinese and Indian global ambitions. The coming years will see intensifying competition over resources and markets, not least in the battle for Burmese oil and gas fields. In addition, Emmott sees an incipient arms race developing, in a region littered with potential flashpoints. As well as territorial disputes—over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh in the case of China and India, and over the Senkaku and other islands in the case of China and Japan—there are further sources of tension in Tibet, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, Pakistan and Kashmir, which the deteriorating world economic outlook will likely only heighten. Emmott proposes a ‘plausible pessimistic’ scenario: China’s bubble-prone economy enters a deep recession, accompanied by rising social protests; the ccp tightens its grip with increased recourse to nationalism, amplifying regional tensions through displays of truculence. With Japan too bolstering its military, Taiwan might become the cause of a ‘short, exploratory exchange of fire’ that could also draw in the us.

Emmott is no stranger to prognostication: in 2003 he published 20:21 Vision, offering ‘Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-First Century’. His verdict then was that liberal capitalism under us hegemony would endure, despite the challenges to it that might arise. In Rivals, written as the world entered an economic downturn, he has changed tack somewhat: ‘the future does belong to Asia’, he nods at the outset. ‘Asia’ itself is a geographical rather than a political expression, of course. But Emmott suggests a ‘new Asia’ is now being created through the widening and deepening of trade and investment linkages. Japan’s post-2002 recovery has been based on exports to China, not the us. In a few years China, not the us, will be India’s main trading partner. Around half of all Asian merchandise exports go to other Asian countries, a level of integration comparable to that of the nafta economies. Today’s ‘Asian drama’ is ‘generating new wealth, ideas and confidence’—‘knitting Asia together into a single, vibrant market for goods, services and capital, one that stretches all the way from Tokyo to Tehran’. (More specifically, Emmott’s investment tips are for Indian infrastructure and manufacturing, Chinese consumer goods and Japanese services.)

Nevertheless it is ‘premature’, in his view, to see Asia as ‘a genuine region’. What divides it, especially politically, is at present more important than what unites it. The three great powers are ‘not naturally compatible’, and each will be manoeuvring to strengthen its position and further its long-term interests. ‘Asia is piled high with historical bitterness’ and flashpoints that ‘could readily ignite during the next decade’. The history of Europe teaches that the most dangerous moments in balance-of-power politics come at times of change. Fortunately, Emmott writes, the barriers to war are higher today—thanks, above all, to the United States’ ‘stabilizing role as a global military power’: ‘In Asia, where the United States is an outside power but with extensive military deployments inside the region, that role as an intervener of last resort is especially important.’

The subtitle of Rivals turns out to be misleading. Emmott’s real subject-matter is not how India, China and Japan will shape the next decade, but how the us should be shaping them. His recommendations are predictable. Getting India and Japan to balance with America against China has been established us policy since at least 1998, when Clinton’s five-star presidential visit set the American seal of approval on India’s nuclear tests. Emmott is full of praise for the 2005 Bush–Singh agreement—in which Delhi’s foreign and defence policy has been subordinated to Washington’s in exchange for nuclear sweeteners—as the consummation of this process, likening it to Nixon’s trip to China as a coup for us diplomacy. He welcomes signs of Indo-Japanese rapprochement, too. In October 2008 Tokyo and Delhi inked a declaration for a ‘Strategic and Global Partnership’, only the third such agreement that Japan has signed (the us and Australia being the other two). Washington should by all means encourage closer economic integration between Asian countries, Emmott argues, and should drop its insistence that ‘America must always be at the table when topics such as trade are discussed’. But defence and security are another matter—there, ‘it would make no sense for America to leave the room’. Just as ‘America plays no part in the European Union but is a pivotal element in nato’, so a similar division of labour is required in Asia.

The central chapters on the three powers, seeking to assess the sources of economic strength and political stability in each, cover territory that will be familiar to any reader of the mainstream press. China: the key driver of growth has been record levels of investment, at 40 to 45 per cent of gdp; but this is now creating asset-price bubbles and investment over-supply, building up pressures for a possibly painful adjustment. Will the growing Chinese ‘middle class’ become a democratizing force? Unlikely, in Emmott’s opinion. Barring a serious and protracted downturn, ccp rule will remain stable, strengthened by the institutionalization of inter-generational leadership change. But Deng’s motto, ‘Keep a cool head and maintain a low profile’, will be increasingly difficult to maintain. China’s presence on the Korean peninsula as well as in Southeast Asia, the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Pakistan—building a deep-water port at Gwadar, upgrading the Karakorum Highway—is said to be jangling nerves in Tokyo and Delhi. Japan: economically things have looked up after the 1990s’ lost decade, thanks to the massive casualization of labour and deregulation of telecommunications, transport, energy, financial activities, etc. Despite the problem of an ageing population, Emmott remains optimistic since the long stagnation of the 90s has had the beneficial effect of reducing the prestige of functionaries at the Ministry of Finance and miti. India: economically there is more to be done to demolish the ‘permit raj’, and inequality will have to rise more before India’s situation ‘improves’. But Emmott notes approvingly the broad stability in policy whether the bjp or Congress is in office, with the result that ‘for all the muddle, India has built up quite a momentum’. Above all he warmly endorses the Indo-us nuclear deal because of the strategic pay-off.

India is clearly the country Emmott knows least, and his chapter on it is distinctly unimpressive. He completely ignores the vast literature that has sought to give an in-depth, long-term analysis of India’s growth, not least of its geography and periodization. His intellectual diet is apparent from the acknowledgements page, a roll-call of corporate honchos, official government spokespersons, senior editors and think-tank intellectuals, all of whom in varying degrees are supporters of neoliberalism and the pro-us Indian turn. Here, as for China and Japan, there is simply no social map of the country, nor any real sense of the contradictory dynamics that have driven their development over the past twenty years. ‘The main problem in Asia is fear and suspicion of China’, Emmott declares. This is patent nonsense. The China Question may pose the biggest conundrums for us strategy, but principal problems in most of Asia are health, illiteracy, hunger and mass unemployment. Whatever the internal social and political tribulations of advanced capitalist countries, they are of a qualitatively lower order to those facing China and India as a result of the ‘uneven and combined’ character of their development.

Ruling elites in the two countries have a better awareness of future social dangers than Emmott demonstrates. In China, vast inequalities have opened up between classes and regions, as well as the urban-rural divide. Some 200 million migrants have emptied the countryside of educated youth; the low-paid make up a rising proportion of the total workforce; there is a growing pressure for the capitalization of land to create larger, more competitive farms through the displacement of small peasants; this will have a disastrous social impact, eliminating land possession as the key safety net for the Chinese poor. The government has talked of building a ‘harmonious society’, but Chinese capitalism with a human face will not alter the dynamics that are causing these problems. China’s highly bureaucratized form of capitalism creates an interlocking of private capital and business interests with the Party administration and higher-level officials. These strata of the rich and super-rich—plus a new middle-class layer, some 150-million strong, comprised of cadres, business people and professionals—provide the strongest support for the current capitalist direction and for maintaining one-party rule as the way to ensure longer-term stability (albeit with internal disagreements about how best to carry out a ‘controlled democratization’).

The ratio of inequality in India, though rising, is nowhere near that of China. But the depth and character of poverty is much worse: 77 per cent of the population earns less than 20 rupees a day, creating problems on a scale that India’s rulers cannot ignore. A rural-employment guarantee scheme, though all too often inadequately implemented, was seen by Congress leaders as a key factor in their 2009 re-election—a form of ‘compensatory neoliberalism’. India’s ruling-class coalition differs from China’s: it has a much weaker bureaucratic component and is more in thrall to private capital, domestic and foreign. It also has an agrarian bourgeoisie which, though losing ground to big capital in the industrial and service sectors, continues to exercise strong influence on state governments, not least through its electoral-mobilizing capacities in the countryside. The existence of an institutionalized parliamentary system means that the country’s numerous social upheavals do at times result in policy adjustments at the central and provincial levels. But the extraordinarily variegated character of Indian society also means that the targets of popular resistance are many; the electoral system acts as a safety valve, and the coordination and unification of such a diverse array of struggles remains an unrealized goal. The more centralized and authoritarian character of ccp rule in China means that social upheavals are less varied in their origin and more easily repressed. But perhaps the very fact that such protests have the potential to be more focused and centralized makes their implications more worrying for the Party leadership, as it struggles to cope with the global economic downturn and an uncertain future.

The Economist has not had a good crisis. Its bullet-point ‘Hayek for dummies’ mindset has proved incapable of any deeper re-assessment of the problems currently facing the capitalist order, and it continues to trot out the neoliberal nostrums of yesteryear. Emmott’s claim that globalized free-market capitalism will ‘lift billions’ out of their centuries-long squalor is empirically and theoretically untenable. The macro-economic programmes of the past twenty years have accentuated the crisis for hundreds of millions of ‘Asians’ in the countryside and in the continent’s ever-growing slums. The prosperity of the advanced countries remains out of reach. It makes more sense to anticipate a much higher degree of social instability in both countries than Emmott allows for.

At the geopolitical level, Rivals suffers from a major flaw in restricting its considerations to Japan, China and India, and avoiding any reckoning of Russia as a major Asian player. Yet Russia’s relations with India and China, as well as with Iran and the Central Asian republics, will crucially shape the Asia of the future. Since 2006 China has been Russia’s number one economic partner, and both recognize that the us’s Ballistic Missile Defense project is aimed at them. Emmott consistently euphemizes America’s use of force in the region. In addition to the 300,000 us troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ‘advisers’ overseeing bombardments in Pakistan, the Pentagon has several hundred military bases in Asia, including 124 installations in Japan and 87 in South Korea. us security pacts with Japan, Taiwan and South Korea continue to circumscribe North Korean and Chinese behaviour. America’s massive geostrategic dominance is to be further reinforced through the Indo-us strategic alliance, aimed at China, and the beginnings of an ‘Asian nato’—the principal pillars of which are the us, India, Japan and Australia, with supplementary roles offered to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

In its theoretical underpinnings, Rivals is essentially a straightforward marriage of neoliberal economic thinking with a Realist interpretation of international politics that justifies the role of the us as ‘hegemonic stabilizer’. But Washington does not intervene merely to re-adjust power balances for the good of all, as Emmott implies, but strives to tilt the scales in its own favour. Maintaining ‘hub-and-spokes’ relations with the powers in the region, and preventing the emergence of any autonomous Russia–China–India bloc, has long been a central aspect of American strategy. But Emmott offers no evidence as to why this should be good for Asia. The ‘rivals’ have proved perfectly capable of conducting their own diplomacy regarding border disputes and competition for resources. It would seem eminently sensible for China and India to pursue access to Iranian oilfields, for example, independently of us–Israeli dictates. In fact, if there are mounting difficulties in West and Central Asia arising from more effective resistances to us ambitions in respect of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Palestine, then this would create both the space and the incentive for a stronger triadic relationship to emerge between Russia, China and India. This obviously is not the kind of ‘Asian resurgence’ Emmott has in mind.

In 2005 a Pan-Asian Energy Grid was mooted by the then Indian Energy Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar. Emmott makes no mention of this proposal, which aimed to bring together the continent’s principal oil and gas producers—Iran, Russia, the central Asian republics—and consumers—India, China, Japan, South Korea—to undertake a massive infrastuctural programme. The proposed pipelines would run east from Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and south from Siberia, to the Subcontinent, China and eastern Pacific. The key to its implementation lies in the willingness of four countries in particular, Russia, China, Iran and India, to push it through. All four have recognized its potential benefits—and its profound geopolitical implications: the Pan-Asian Energy Grid would seriously undercut America’s hold over energy reserves in West Asia. Emmott would be relieved that, for the time being, all four have left it on the backboiler. (Indeed in January 2006, not that long after the Bush–Singh agreement, of which Aiyar was known to be critical, there was a cabinet reshuffle in which he was demoted to head the Sports Ministry.)

The hegemonic stability thesis, mainstay of the Atlanticist realist tradition in international relations, justifies the existence of a dominant world power on the grounds of its providing an ‘international public good’. Emmott’s book exemplifies this line of thought. In practice, the provision of international public goods such as the Grid are subordinated to the particular interests of the American imperium. Noam Chomsky once remarked that one reads magazines like The Economist and Business Week not so much to get a balanced and accurate understanding of what is going on and of what needs to be done, but to understand how dominant classes and their acolytes and servitors think, and what they want. The same can be said of Rivals.

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Picasso's Guernica

There is surely no doubt that Fredric Jameson is not only an eminent critic but a great one, fit to assume his place in a roll-call of illustrious names stretching from Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, F. R. Leavis and Northrop Frye to I. A. Richards, William Empson and Paul de Man. Even this is to limit the judgement to Anglophone colleagues only, whereas the true field of comparison ranges much more widely. No literary scholar today can match Jameson’s versatility, encyclopaedic erudition, imaginative brio or prodigious intellectual energy. In an age when literary criticism, like so much else, has suffered something of a downturn, with forlornly few outstanding figures in the field, Jameson looms like a holdover from a grander cultural epoch altogether, a refugee from the era of Shklovsky and Auerbach, Jakobson and Barthes, who is nonetheless absolutely contemporary.

To mention the name of Barthes, however, is to indicate one way in which Jameson has the edge over almost all of his confrères. For he is surely one of the most superb critical stylists in a largely styleless age. As Perry Anderson has put it, he is quite simply ‘a great writer’. Consider, for example, this breathtaking patch of prose from an essay entitled ‘Towards a Libidinal Economy of Three Modern Painters’, to be found in the author’s recently published collection, The Modernist Papers. Jameson is examining what he calls the ‘flat’ in the paintings of De Kooning, by which he means ‘stretches of painted colour across which the eye skids without so much as raising a ripple’:

You have to imagine, I think, a process of effraction that seizes on the line itself, tangling it, as in the charcoal sketches, making it shiver and vibrate, shattering it rhythmically into pencil shadings, like so many overtones. Here some inner compulsion of line, some originary nervousness, makes it want to burst its two-dimensional limits and produce, out of its own inner substance, smears that co-opt and preempt its primal adversary, the brush-stroke itself . . . In De Kooning, line transforms itself, it splays out, fanning into distinct yet parallel ridges and streams of paint, refracting the original substance into strands that have different densities, some mountainous and bristling, others trickling down the canvas in tears that no longer seem the marks and traces of maladresse. Line is now brush-stroke and colour; its new structural opposite, the flat, is something that happens to the latter, rather than a place of freedom and of private, personal expression in its own right.

Some readers might find this overblown: too flamboyantly ‘writerly’ to have its eye genuinely on the visual object. My own sense is that, as with all Jameson’s finest writing, these lines stay just this side of too portentous an awareness of their own brilliance, unfurling with all the mounting drama and excitement of the great Proustian period yet with something of its tact and finesse as well, if not exactly its air of naturalness or civilized lucidity. One feels, as one does not with Proust, that there is a turbulent linguistic energy at work here which might breed some disturbingly frenetic effects were it to let rip, rather as the De Kooning brush-stroke threatens to burst at the seams and spill its contents all about it. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere that part of Jameson’s perverse fascination with Wyndham Lewis—‘the brutal and boring Wyndham Lewis’, as Leavis aptly called him—may be that he detects in Lewis’s flailing, agitated prose a kind of savage caricature or nightmarish version of what his own literary style might look like if it were to throw off all decorum. In the passage I have just quoted, however, his prose is in sufficiently fine fettle to risk the odd touch of rhetorical inflation without fear of losing either its shapeliness or its momentum. If there is any inflation at work here, it is in the way language strives to project these smears and trickles of paint on to some broader screen of structural meaning, without detriment to their sensuous specificity. Deciphering the relations between daubs of paint is at one with interpreting the relations between certain conflicting forces and ideas.

We shall see later how this stylistic achievement, in which the sensible and intelligible constantly play into one another, is also in Jameson’s view a solution to what he takes to be the central dilemma of modernism. Meanwhile, we can note that this is also a solution of sorts to the conflict between the postmodern culture Jameson feels we have at least to live with, and the high modernist art where a precious part of him is still at home. Modernism, he comments here, is still all about language, whereas postmodernism by and large displaces the sensory focus from the verbal to the visual. By writing in such unabashed high-modernist style about the painterly, then, the author of Marxism and Form and the dazzling film and architectural critic who was to emerge later are shown to be secretly at one.

Materiality and meaning

Yet if Jameson’s style is resplendently unique and original, this must also mean on his own reckoning that it sails perilously close to a form of reification—for this is just how he regards the modernist cult of the individual style, of which he is himself a late inheritor. But whereas style in modernist writing can become a kind of fetish in its sealed-offness and false immediacy, as well as in the way it sucks the energies of the world into itself to become a kind of pseudo-animate thing in its own right, this is precisely not the case with Jameson’s writing, which seeks in its dialectical way to bring sensory immediacy and conceptual reflection into intimate contact.

There is an extraordinary drama at work in the passage I have quoted above, as the De Kooning canvas is brought alive as a great war of antagonistic forces; and this drama is acted out in other terms in the sentences themselves, which as often with Jameson roll remorselessly on until, just at the moment when you feel they must surely have run out of breath and find themselves incapable of throwing off a single further sub-clause, they draw a last gasp and triumphantly snatch a few more pregnant utterances from their apparently inexhaustible depths. The passage also presents us with a literal version of the way that in Jameson himself ideas become materialized, as De Kooning’s concepts thicken into streaks of paint and the tug and tension of ideas can be felt in the fingertips. This interweaving of materiality and meaning is something that interests Jameson the cultural materialist a good deal, as well as being something that his own writing actually accomplishes. His style, poetic in texture but discursive in structure, thus becomes allegorical of its own preoccupations.

Jameson, then, reveals another unexpected affinity with Proust in his remarkable gift for endowing ideas with a sensuous body, translating conceptual matters into visual, dramatic or corporeal terms. He is not very interested in rigorous logical analysis—it works on both too abstract and too humdrum a scale for his epic turn of mind. There is an addictive quality about the Jamesonian style, as his sentences no sooner use up one clause than they reach restlessly for another. It is part of the perverse allure of his writing that it has trouble in knowing where to stop. One suspects that part of the appeal of Marxism for him, psychologically speaking, is that totality—standing in, among other things, for what he sees as the lost absolute of modernism—is a limit at which even his gargantuan hunger for every species of experience must finally come to rest, a desire which in its Faustian way will be satisfied with nothing less. If the semantic density, rhetorical inflections and magisterial pitch of Jameson’s prose are in general ‘European’, the heteroclite contents of the writing, its excited openness to almost any kind of material, are more stereotypically American.

It is part of the reader’s pleasure in Jameson’s writing that his syntax seems always to maintain its poise, perpetually at risk though it is of collapsing under the hectic productivity of ideas it has to cope with. Form, in other words, retains its edge over content, though it is part of our relish of these great roller-coasters of sentences that it only just manages to do so. The reader, so to speak, hangs on to her hat as she is pulled up the slope of a lengthy sub-clause, then teeters precariously on its cusp for a second before plunging vertiginously down another bumpy piece of syntax, enjoying with a certain frisson of alarm the prospect that she might be derailed altogether, yet secure in the knowledge that she will be delivered to her destination in one piece. Jameson himself regards this effort to subdue an unwieldy mass of materials to coherent shape as a feature of modernism itself, writing as he does of its ‘attempt to reabsorb and recontain contingency’—‘in spite of itself, it always seeks to transform that scandalous and irreducible content back into some thing like meaning’. In this sense, too, his style is allegorical of the dilemmas with which it deals, and furnishes something like an implicit solution to them.

It would be hard to imagine Jameson writing an extended piece of straight political or economic analysis. What fascinates him, as a kind of phenomenologist of the mind, is the business of imaginatively reinventing ideas, as his prose lingers over their flavour and texture. Ideas in his writing come saturated in sensibility, and the sensibility in question is as distinctive as that of an outstanding poet or novelist. He is not, like George Steiner, a hedonist of the intellect: the truth value and practical force of ideas are by no means a matter of indifference to him. His strength, however, is less that he coins new concepts, though he has of course done so, than that he provides us with imaginative objective correlatives for our knowledge. In Shelley’s fine phrase about the task of the poet, he enables us to ‘imagine what we know’. An example of this can be found in the final chapter of Marxism and Form, where he describes dialectical thought as

thought to the second power: an intensification of the normal thought processes such that a renewal of light washes over the object of their exasperation, as though in the midst of its immediate perplexities the mind had attempted by will-power, by fiat, to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps . . . This is indeed the most sensitive moment in the dialectical process: that in which an entire complex of thought is hoisted through a kind of inner leverage one floor higher, in which the mind, in a kind of shifting of gears, now finds itself willing to take what had been a question for an answer, standing outside its previous exertions in such a way that it reckons itself into the problem.

Style as solution

One of the central motifs of The Modernist Papers is the rift between being and meaning, existence and signification, which the book rightly sees as characterizing modernism as a whole. Once upon a time, meanings were inherent in things like seeds in a pod; now, like Joyce’s Ulysses, the world seems split between purely contingent pieces of matter and abstract but empty schemas. The Kantian synthesis, in short, has ceased to do its work. That usual suspect, the commodity, at once a fetishized bit of material and a purely immaterial form of exchange, can be discovered lurking at the root of this great schism. Though the book does not quite put it this way, it is as though capitalist society is a botched work of art, being ‘bad’ universality and ‘bad’ particularity together. The market is composed of both appetite and abstraction—of that which cannot rise above the brutally sensual and specific, and that which can tolerate no particle of matter in its make-up. One might claim that what allows Marx to reject this duality is the fact that he is both a Romantic humanist with a passion for the sensuous particular, and a child of the universalist Enlightenment.

In Jameson’s view, the absolute which modernism can only ever glimpse out of the corner of its eye is precisely this vanished unity of form and content; though it might be just as plausible to claim that some modernist art seeks no such unity, but rather pure form. The Romantic symbol Jameson rightly regards as a discredited solution to this problem. As for literary realism, which in its Hegelian or Lukácsian version was also capable of discerning the intelligible within the sensible, grasping the typical in the individual, this particular fusion of the two domains Jameson sees with rare insight as being historically scuppered by (among other things) imperialism, as the life of the metropolitan nation is increasingly determined by forces which lie outside its cognitive sway, and which can thus no longer be totalized in classical realist style.

Jameson’s own translation of concepts into material images is yet another way of reuniting the sensible and intelligible. Writing at its most supple, as Adorno also knew, rescues contingency for meaning without thereby crushing the life out of it. If it recruits the particular for the general, it does so in a way which allows it to put up some resistance. Moreover, it offers this return from alienation not just as image or epiphany but as practice and process, in the material toil and pleasure of writing itself. Writing here is an image of non-alienated labour; but it can also provide a foretaste of emancipation in so far as it is ‘a figure for sheer activity and for production as such’. It is, so to speak, an image of the release of the productive forces, as Jameson’s own style becomes allegorical of a future material abundance in its well-nigh inexhaustible profusion.

Embodiments

As such, style itself becomes political utopia. In the older, collective register of rhetoric, the body is already a signifier: physical sensation, Jameson argues, ‘is secretly transparent, and always means something else’. He might have added that what the modern age knows as aesthetics arises as a last-ditch attempt to codify sensation in this way, in order to render it intelligible. As a kind of logic of the senses, it seeks for some rational order in sensory existence. Modernism then emerges from the ruins of this semiotic system, as perception ceases to signify according to certain shared conventions, and the body becomes accordingly opaque. The birth of ‘style’ is thus also the emergence of the privatized body, and both are in different ways reifications. One might then complete this narrative by proposing that writing, at least of the poetic, Jamesonian variety, is both sign and body together, and can thus figure as a transcendence of what Jameson sees as modernism’s various false solutions to their divorce.

Roland Barthes remarks in Writing Degree Zero that literary style is a corporeal affair, plunging straight to the body’s visceral depths; and Jameson also associates style with the body. Indeed, in an extraordinary vampiric metaphor, he speaks in some (frustratingly obscure) pages on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, with its portrayal of the diseased body, of the way in which reading ‘can drink the blood of the body as it were . . . and borrow the latter’s concreteness in order to endow itself with density’. This, however, belongs with what Jameson sees as the monadic, narcissistic, self-absorbed body of the modern reader, withdrawn from the world like the modernist work of art to a certain private, contemplative distance. Yet just as style is public language as well as personal idiom, so Jameson prefers to regard the body less as some kind of sealed interior than as a metaphor for the spatial. He is therefore able to link it to other spatial systems such as geopolitical ones, which given their abstract status are intelligible rather than sensible. In The Modernist Papers, he does this above all in the case of Rimbaud, drawing a daring analogy between the ‘fermentation’ of a whole geopolitical system and that of the adolescent body. The body thus ceases to be one of the two poles of a divided world—the material, private or individual part, as opposed to the general and conceptual—and becomes instead a means of bridging that gap. As such, it resists what Jameson sees as the somatic reductiveness of modernism, with its ineffable fragments of sensation from which meaning has been expelled. Modernism presents a problem to which both body and style are solutions.

In the work of Michel Foucault, the body and its pleasures come to stand in for the category of the subject, to which Foucault has a particular aversion. Such a displacement is not quite the case with Jameson, who does not regard the subject as a form of self-incarceration; but his distaste for ‘inwardness’ is sometimes not far from Foucault’s own. He, too, betrays a curious hostility to ‘deep’ subjectivity, even though he displays a fair amount of it himself. With a moral intensity untypical of this scourge of morality, not to speak of a dim echo of the Soviet aesthetics of the 1930s, he dismisses as ‘pernicious’ the whole modernist project of sealing off subjectivity ‘from a now dead and inert objectivity: generating a whole new field in which a whole new literature of inwardness and introspection can flourish’. Elsewhere in The Modernist Papers, Jameson goes so far as to brand the whole problematic of subject and object as purely ideological, an odd position for one whose work so often invokes the concept of reification. The idea of the expressive subject, he considers, is already archaic by the time of Baudelaire.

Yet modernism is as much a flight from the subject as a wallowing in its depths, and there is a sense in which this, too, is acted out in Jameson’s literary style. What is striking about his writing in this respect is the way it combines an intense dramatic and affective life with a curious kind of impersonality, even anonymity, in which these rhetorical turns and emotive gestures seem to belong to the writing itself rather than to any expressive subject standing behind it. That subject is as dead for Jameson as it is for Baudelaire, which may be part of what attracts him to a subject-free postmodernism. Yet he is not, like some postmodernism, ready to give up on ‘affect’, which gets separated from the subject and transferred instead to the language itself. One recalls T. S. Eliot’s distinction between ‘emotion’—the raw stuff at the root of the poem—and ‘feeling’: the purely textual qualities into which it is distilled. One is also reminded of Eliot’s Bradleyan vision of a world swarming with sensations which do not, however, belong to anybody’s consciousness in particular. There is, in other words, a kind of subjectless affectivity at work here, which allows the author to conduct a vicarious dramatic and emotional existence in his writing while remaining, in personal and psychological terms, largely concealed from view. One might claim that he is a modernist in so far as he deploys a high, uniquely individuating style, but that this style is among other things a mode of self-masking; and that he is a postmodernist because he is allured by the idea of being freed from the tyranny of deep subjectivity. What both commitments have in common is the prospect of an escape from the subject—either by camouflaging it or abolishing it.

Anonymous subjects

Jameson finds something of Eliot’s idea of impersonality in Baudelaire, observing that ‘as the putative “feeling” or “emotion” becomes slowly laid out in words and phrases, in verses and stanzas, it is transformed beyond all recognition, becomes lost to the older psychological lexicon’; ‘as it becomes transmuted into a verbal text, it ceases to be psychological or affective in any sense of the word, and now exists as something else.’ One might detect a touch of both relief and unseemly haste in the sentence with which Jameson follows this remark: ‘So with this mention we will now leave psychology behind us’. One suspects that it is not to be consigned to the ash can of history quite as summarily as that.

The problem is to reach beyond the fetishized style or art sentence of modernism without toppling over into some blank, postmodern anonymity. To put it in other terms (though not ones used by Jameson himself): the vivid sensory fragment or highly wrought style of modernism are resistances to reification—to a world of impersonal, determining forces—but they are also reifications in their own right. It is just this that Jameson registers so magnificently in his account of Conrad’s fiction in The Political Unconscious—the fact that the subjective impressionism of the author’s style is simply the other face of a kind of positivism, for which reality is fixed and inert. The role of the former is to provide a degree of utopian compensation for the degradations of the latter, coating a realm of dead, meaningless objects with a wash of surface glitter. This, then, is a false solution to a dilemma to which Jameson’s style provides a true one, seeking as it does to be both affective and impersonal. Rarely has a form of critical writing been at once so obtrusive and inexpressive—so full of theatrical and emotive flourishes, yet giving so little of the subject away. It might be objected that this reticence belongs simply to the protocols of academic writing, with no more significance than that. What is different from the usual run of such writing, however, is the sense of a strongly subjective passion displaced into language itself. It is also the case, as we shall see later, that the writing subject rarely reveals itself in the form of personal judgements. There is little sense in Jameson’s work, as there is in, say, Edward Said’s, of a voice arguing a passionately felt personal case.

A fetishism of style must clearly be avoided; but so also must its opposite, a kind of automated writing which seems to have been cut entirely adrift from any subject and simply spins itself out in a void. This is how Jameson sees the language of Ulysses—as words which nobody is speaking or thinking, but which in a kind of ‘autistic textualization’ exist simply as printed units on a page. It is no accident that Joyce’s great novel is full of gossip and rumour, which are also utterances without a source. But there is also the kind of anonymous collective voice Jameson finds in Kafka’s mouse people, witnesses who are ‘objective without any lack of sympathy’, who thus combine impersonality with affect, and whose anonymity is a communal affair rather than a depersonalized one.

There is, however, something of the ‘bad’ species of anonymity in Jameson himself, when his writing is at its least impressive. At its best, Jameson’s style has the nimbleness of a heavyweight boxer who can carry his considerable bulk remarkably well. At its worst, there is a striking contrast between the sensitivity of the individual perceptions and the implacable, elephantine motion of the sentences themselves. There is a sense in which Jameson is imprisoned within his style as well as incarnate in it, incapable of breaking out of this stately but sometimes rather ponderous rhetorical posture to pen a snappy sentence, crack a joke, switch registers or strike a colloquial tone. His style lacks manoeuverability. He would make an excellent novelist but a dreadful dramatist. If his writing is inexpressive in a positive sense, spurning the myth of giving voice to unmediated personal experience, it can be inexpressive in a more pejorative sense as well, as much a rhetorical straitjacket as a sinuous medium. We shall see later that, as a form of psychical defence, it may also be armature and carapace.

Amorality?

At one point in The Modernist Papers, Jameson records his belief that the categories in which he has been dealing (subjective and objective, psychoanalytic and social, and so on) are in any case artificial. This is rather like claiming that territorial wars have only a minor degree of reality since the planet itself acknowledges no frontiers. Even if such distinctions are theoretically idle, they are real enough. But they are not in fact theoretically idle, and cannot be conflated as blandly as Jameson imagines. Indeed, the claim itself can be read as a defensive gesture, part of his distaste for the whole phenomenon of subjectivity. The subject is not simply the other face of the object. As we have learnt from the work of Slavoj Žižek, it is rather that which disrupts the objective disposition of things, that which is lacking, askew, obtrusive, out of joint. It is the denial of this duality which is ideological, not the assertion of it.

Jameson’s suspicion of the ‘deep’ individual subject of modernism goes hand in hand with his animus against morality. There is an unexpected reference to Vice in The Modernist Papers, but it turns out to be a misprint for Vico. Subjectivity, morality, the personal or interpersonal life: these in Jameson are neuralgic points, places where the emotional temperature of the prose is momentarily raised, and as such, one suspects, symptomatic of something at all costs to be avoided. No doubt this is one reason for his affection for some of the more impersonal products of postmodernism, despite his belief that such culture represents the late flowering of a political system he opposes. Since I have taken issue elsewhere with Jameson’s aversion to the moral, I do not intend to rehearse that argument here. I want rather to suggest the relevance of this allergy to ethics to questions of form and style in his work. The point at stake is a question of critical practice, not of philosophical outlook. It can be claimed that form operates in Jameson’s work among other things as a kind of psychical defence against the ethical, in the sense of emotional, psychological and behavioural content.

But the issue is not just whether Jameson should give the ethical more credence; it is rather that his refusal to do so results in an undue dismissal of the empirical or phenomenal appearance of the literary work. In quasi-structuralist fashion, the empirical presence of the work is too quickly bracketed. Reading the essays on Thomas Mann in The Modernist Papers, with their wonderfully innovative investigations of irony, allegory, mimesis, polyphony, genre, narrative structure and the like, one is struck by the realization that Jameson says very little about what the common reader, even the common leftist reader, will surely carry away from The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. What has happened to the explicit content of these novels—to the motifs of sickness, suffering, love, evil, unreason, humanism, Eros, mortality, barbarism, sacrifice? Why does Jameson appear so loth to tackle these common-or-garden thematics head-on, telling us what he thinks about such momentous questions, where he stands, what judgements he himself would pass on the various pressing subjects that come up? Throughout The Modernist Papers, as well as elsewhere in his work, he has something of a cavalier way with such matters, referring somewhat disdainfully to the standard interpretations of Kafka’s fiction (roughly, Oedipality, bureaucracy and religion), and inclining as early as The Political Unconscious to write off with chin-leading provocation such notions as character, event, plot and narrative meaning as so many ‘false problems’.

Historicism’s limits

Jameson’s way around such phenomena is two-fold: it is to formalize on the one hand and historicize on the other. These two operations can then ideally be brought together in what Jameson, following the linguistician Louis Hjelmslev, calls the ‘content of the form’. If form itself can be revealed as secreting historical or ideological content—and to show how this comes about is perhaps Jameson’s greatest achievement—then a passage can be opened from form or structure to history or politics which does not have to travel through ‘content’ understood in its moral, empirical or psychological sense. At its least commendable, this method results in something like the paradox which Jameson himself discerns in the poetry of Wallace Stevens: ‘an astonishing linguistic richness on the one hand and an impoverishment or hollowness of content on the other’. It can also result less in historicizing content than in historicizing it away. It can involve a displacement or suppression of empirical content rather than a rewriting of it—a rewriting which would involve granting it more credence than Jameson is generally prepared to do. Like most Marxist historicists, he imagines that to return permanent features of the human condition, such as illness or mortality, to their historical contexts is always and everywhere the most illuminating move to make. But why should this be so? Would the legendary visitor from Alpha Centauri not be more struck by the fact that all human beings without exception must die, than by the fact that death for the ancient Romans is not what it is for modern-day Californians? Jameson has a characteristic coyness about whatever cannot be readily cast in structural, schematic, historical or impersonal terms. It is, perhaps, the left equivalent of the stout burgher’s fear of personal feeling. Yet it is one of the few benefits of an era of political defeat for the left that the limits of the political, as well as its continuing vital relevance, can be more candidly acknowledged.

It would take too long to demonstrate in any detail that what Jameson calls his ‘absolute historicism’ is misconceived. A few brief headings will have to suffice. For one thing, any historicism must include at least one precept—‘always historicize!’—which is axiomatic, and as such exempt from its own historicizing injunction. No historicism can therefore be absolute. In any case, if a supposedly absolute historicism is one which covers everything, does this include the laws of geometry? For another thing, historicism is by no means an inherently radical activity, as Jameson seems to suppose; from Burke to Oakeshott, much historicism has been politically on the right. It is the left-wing adversaries of these ideologues who have typically appealed to universal values against historically evolved ones. Not all those who place works of art in their historical context are radicals; not all antiradicals are formalists. The fundamental argument is not between those who historically contextualize and those who do not, but between mutually antagonistic readings of history itself—between, say, history as a narrative of unfolding enlightenment and history as a tale of struggle and scarcity.

There are many precious continuities in human history, along with many noxious transformations. Judging by the record to date, human beings seem to find being miserably exploited a somewhat objectionable state of affairs, a continuity that leftists should value rather than dismantle. Historicism is generally more alert to difference than to repetition, and so fails to make enough of such facts. Moreover, there are plenty of aspects of our material make-up or species-being which are relatively unchanging, and it belongs to any authentic materialism to acknowledge this fact. Historical materialists do not play gullibly into the hands of conservatives by accepting the fact that though, say, grief over another’s death indeed takes a variety of historical forms, there are a great many factors which a mourning modern has in common with a lamenting ancient. The notion that there is something politically perilous in such a recognition—that it lets in by the back door the spectre of an invariable human nature—is simply a historicist bugbear or culturalist bogeyman.

Jameson’s work is too quick to substitute historical explanation for both moral and political judgement, as though the two were mutually exclusive. Throughout Ideologies of Theory, for example, he is notably nervous of the truth claims involved in such judgements, and at one point even suggests that the categories of theoretical correctnesss and incorrectness should be abandoned for a concern with the pragmatic force and ideological function of an intellectual position. Would he really want to argue this of racism or fascism? He is, in short, historicist in all the ways Althusser abhorred, while anti-humanist in all the senses he admired. Writing in the same volume of competing versions of Gramsci’s work, he dismisses as ‘frivolous’ the attempt to determine which interpretation is true, and even drapes the word ‘true’ in scare quotes in the manner of some cultural studies tyro. Elsewhere in the book, he suggests that there is no ‘pregiven human body’, as such, but rather a ‘whole historical range of social experiences of the body’. But by what criteria do we decide that these are all experiences of a phenomenon called the body, rather than of something else?

Jameson’s other habit is to formalize moral content out of existence, as he does in several of the chapters in The Modernist Papers. He does so, too, in his great essay on Conrad’s Lord Jim in The Political Unconscious, in which he plucks a whole history of capitalist reification and rationalization from the novel’s impressionistic style. Modernist artworks, which are sometimes rather poor in content, are thus peculiarly hospitable to his method, however negative he may feel about their ideological bearings. Indeed, they can become allegories of his own critical procedure, as when he writes of a tale by Kafka that it is ‘not really to be grasped as an interpersonal drama’ but as ‘itself only a projection of the logical system’.

Eloquent absences

This attention to the ‘content of the form’, as I have suggested already, is probably Jameson’s signal contribution to criticism. The title of the book which first brought him to general attention, Marxism and Form, seems deliberately provocative and programmatic in this respect—a calculated semi-oxymoron, along the lines of, say, Logical Positivism and Angst, in the context of a Marxist criticism scarcely accustomed to treating artistic form with any great sensitivity. The notion of the content of the form is yet another way in which he can bring together meaning and materiality, as (for example) in the essay on three modern painters, in which he treats Cézanne’s use of ochre as a kind of ideology in its own right. Form—the sensuous organization of the work, the play of its signifiers or splay of its brush-strokes—has an abstract or conceptual lining known as historical content; and the two are as indissociable as sense and sensibility in Jameson’s own literary style.

Yet rather as Jameson discerns a form of repression at the heart of a Cézanne canvas, so his own astonishingly adventurous re-writings of works of art in terms of form, structure and history, in which such works are estranged almost to the point of being unrecognizable, would seem based on a repression of the subjective, empirical and psychological, all of which needs to be rigorously, almost contemptuously banished by this otherwise most generous, inclusive of thinkers. There is, for example, very little about sexuality in the œuvre. Jameson’s criticism thus produces an object bracingly discontinuous with the familiar texts of liberal humanism; yet in doing so, this devout Hegelian risks abandoning his own characteristic injunction, which is not just to cancel or negate, but to preserve and negate at the same time. Modernism in particular brings out in Jameson a vehement strain of anti-humanism, and this from a devotee of Lukács who was never much affected by the Althusserians. Its hermetic, overheated human interiors are rejected with a symptomal intensity of affect, in a prose style which seems otherwise constructed to distance any too personal feeling.

It is largely because of Jameson’s reticence about ethical or subjective existence that wisdom is not a term we would readily associate with him, as we would with Bloch, Benjamin and Adorno. It must be remembered, however, that repression is what allows us to speak—that blindness is often enough productive of insight. It is, among other things, Jameson’s silences, blindspots and elisions which have allowed him to produce the most distinguished and original body of cultural analysis of our age. For us readers, at least, this is a small price to pay.

Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers, London and New York 2007, pp. 256 and 257. Henceforth mp.

Eagleton, Against the Grain, London and New York 1986, p. 67.

mp, p. 229.

Marxism and Form, Princeton 1971, pp. 307, 308.

mp, p. 186.

mp, p. 229.

See Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford 1990, Chapter 1.

mp, p. 62.

mp, p. 241.

mp, p. 225.

mp, pp. 111–2.

See Eagleton, After Theory, London 2003, p. 143n.

Jameson, The Political Unconscious, London and New York 1981, p. 242.

mp, p. 208.

mp, p. xiii.

Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, pp. 652, 358, 344.

mp, pp. 103–4.

Though see the essay ‘On the Sexual Production of Western Subjectivity’ in Ideologies of Theory.

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A crisis occurs sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves and that despite this the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them within certain limits and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts (since no social formation will concede that it has been superseded) form the terrain of the conjunctural, and it is upon this terrain that the opposition organizes.

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

What is the historical significance of the implosion of neo-liberalism, coming less than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? A disconcerting thought experiment suggests itself. The ussr, it might be recalled, had reached the summit of its power in the 70s, shortly before stumbling downward into a spiral of retrenchment, drift and collapse. Could a comparable reversal of fortune now be in store for the superpower of the West, one of those old-fashioned ‘ironies of history’? After all, a certain unity of opposites can be traced between an unbridled late capitalism and the centrally planned rust belts of the former Comecon—and precisely in the economic sphere, where they were diametrically counterposed. During the heyday of Reaganism, official Western opinion had rallied to the view that the bureaucratic administration of things was doomed to stagnation and decline because it lacked the ratio of market forces, coordinating transactions through the discipline of competition. Yet it was not too long after the final years of what was once called socialism that an increasingly debt- and speculation-driven capitalism began to go down the path of accounting and allocating wealth in reckless disregard of any notionally objective measure of value. The balance sheets of the world’s greatest banks are an imposing testimony to the breakdown of standards by which the wealth of nations was once judged.

In their own ways, both bureaucratic socialism and its vastly more affluent neo-liberal conqueror concealed their failures with increasingly arbitrary tableaux économiques. By the 80s the gdr’s reported national income was revealed to be a statistical artifact that grossly inflated its cramped standards of living. But in the same decade, an emerging circuit of global imbalances was beginning to generate considerable problems for the measurement of capitalist wealth. The coming depression may reveal that the national economic statistics of the period of bubble economics were fictions, not wholly unlike those operative in the old Soviet system.

Of course, the recurring crises of capitalism are supposed to be different from the terminal stages of non-capitalist civilizations and modes of production. Such social orders seem to have lacked capitalism’s distinctive capacity for creative destruction, for periodic renewal through downturns that liquidate inefficient conditions of production and life forms, opening up frontiers for the next round of expansion. In accordance with this pattern, nearly all commentators on today’s economic meltdown have assumed that this Schumpeterian tale of crisis and renovation will repeat itself in one form or another. But is it, in fact, inevitable that new phases of accumulation will emerge from the aftermath of what now promises to be an enormous and protracted shake-out? I would like to propose that this scenario of capitalist renewal is distinctly less likely than a long-term drift towards what the classical political economists used to call ‘the stationary state’ of civilization.

Growthlessness

From Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, early theorists of the wealth of nations were pessimistic about their societies’ long-term prospects for growth, and assumed that the productivity gains from specialization and the division of labour would be thwarted after a certain point by the exhaustion of the soil and population increase. The historian E. A. Wrigley writes:

For reasons cogently argued by Smith and his successors, the momentum of growth was expected to peter out after a time, arrested by changes endogenous to the growth process itself, and giving rise in due course to the supervention of the stationary state. Moreover, the classical economists were unambiguous in doubting whether even the then prevailing level of real wages could be sustained indefinitely. Future falls were more probable than future rises. A steady and substantial improvement in real wages for the mass of the population was a utopian pipe-dream, not a possibility that a rational and well-informed man could plausibly entertain, however much he might wish to see it occur. [1]

The passage suggests why Adam Smith and his contemporaries might have thought that a stagnant 18th-century China was in some sense ahead of contemporary Western Europe. Having exhausted the sources of further productivity growth, China had entered, inevitably, onto the path of secular involution: de te fabula narratur. Of course, this pessimistic verdict on civilization’s longue durée was overturned by subsequent great waves of capitalist expansion. Marx’s later critique of political economy was, in part, an attempt to reconceptualize this tradition’s classical, pre-industrial pessimism regarding the external, natural limits to economic growth, transforming it into an account of an ever more difficult to surmount socio-economic impasse of accumulation. [2]

For more than half a century, such attempts to theorize the ultimate limits of capital were relegated to the political and intellectual margins. In the 1920s and 30s contemporaries of varying political persuasions had concluded that capitalism was coming to an end, and were surprised by its stupendous post-wwii recovery. This great come-back discouraged the more prudent from thereafter contemplating a capitalist crisis deep and long enough to put a question mark over the future of the system. Today, so soon after its late 20th-century triumphs, it might seem incredible that anyone would seriously call into question capitalism’s historical viability. The matter was supposedly resolved circa 1989. Departing from this consensus, I propose that the coming era of socio-economic shake-out and contraction—the harvest of unresolved economic problems going back to the 1970s—is being compounded by a drift in the economically most advanced regions towards a stationary condition. The coming period will be shaped by the convergence of a conjunctural crisis of accumulation with ongoing epochal shifts in world capitalism—in its technological bases, demographic patterns and international division of labour—that have diminished its capacities for sustainable growth. In what follows, I will highlight some of the main dimensions of this dual crisis, and consider the forms of politics that may take shape within the contours of structural decline and transformation. What lies beyond the horizon of the current defensive nationalizations and bailouts of a faltering status quo?

Periodizing the present

Historians have long been preoccupied with the problem of decline and fall of communities, of the ways in which modes of life come to an end through structural change, extinction, or their involution into semblances of what they once were. Whoever considers the problem of qualitative historical changes today can draw upon various traditions of thinking about the moment, or whole period, during which some order of human things ceases to exist. There are punctuated collapses—the conquest of Pre-Columbian civilizations, the overthrow of the French Old Regime, the self-liquidation of the Soviet bloc—as well as those drawn-out transitions of which no contemporary was cognizant, like the decline of ancient slavery and the passages to feudalism. How then might the ends of capitalism unfold, over what time span, and along what dimensions?

The defining, expansionary drive of capitalism (M–C–M’) depends upon a vast array of supporting and partly autonomous infrastructures and dynamics. Seen in this light, the current predicament of capitalist civilization is not simply a matter of a cumulative logic of economic stagnation. I will argue that an emergent trend line of secular deceleration has been exacerbated—‘overdetermined’—by mounting problems of demographic disproportion, ecological deterioration, politico-ideological de-legitimation and geo-political maladaptation. Nature, culture, war: the expansionary socio-economic drive that partially totalized these different historical dimensions into a world-system may now be faltering, leaving disparate elements and tendencies of the old regime to persist, with indefinite life-spans. Perhaps it would not take many generations for a non-dynamic capitalist order to evolve into an inegalitarian, drifting post-capitalism. In any event, it is safe to assume that the ends of capitalism will be as unprecedented as everything else about it has been.

If the collapse of the world market during the Great Depression initially appeared to confirm one or another ‘orthodox’ interpretation of Marx, in point of fact, no general theory of capitalist crisis has ever proven adequate to explain it. The causes of the depth and longevity of the Great Depression are still not well understood, at least for the us, which, unlike Germany, was far less dependent on an unbalanced inter-war world economy for its growth. Although all capitalist crises stem from anarchic, self-undermining processes of expansion, this self-undermining has failed to adhere to a general pattern, and assumes novel forms in every conjuncture. Exit from a global economic deadlock took one course after 1873—a gradual shake-out, without a precipitous collapse of output or living standards, eventually releasing the upturn of the 1890s; and another after 1929—a cathartic purge of the system by a severe depression, resolved only with the outbreak of war. Each major crisis of capitalism has unfolded in a new socio-historical world that modulated the ebbs and flows of valorization. As a result there are no generally applicable diagnoses and remedies.

While policy flounders, a number of broadly Marxist accounts of the economics of the period have come into their own. The works of Giovanni Arrighi, Robert Brenner and David Harvey are but the peaks of a wider literature on the current age of capital and the state. Compared to previous episodes of capitalist crisis, the long lead-up to today’s downturn has been more profoundly theorized. In the 1930s and 1970s, even those who did not believe that capitalism had overcome its propensity to slumps and crashes failed adequately to explain the causes of a sudden, worldwide systemic distress. What accounts for the difference? Perhaps neo-liberalism swept away many of the regulatory institutions and non-capitalist social formations that had previously impeded and modulated the logic of capital. Perhaps the unprecedented global economic imbalances that led to the current crisis were always harder to ignore, even as markets soared to new heights. For whatever reason, in the age of its universal triumphs, various limits of capital have come into view. And yet despite this cognizance of growing risk, even the harshest critics of neo-liberalism generally assumed that this volatility expressed the dynamism and rude health of the system.

The long 1970s

The last three decades of neo-liberal capitalism can be characterized as a prolonged, unsuccessful attempt to transcend the world economic crisis of the 1970s. Robert Brenner argues that the basic source of today’s crisis is the diminished vitality of the advanced economies over the entire subsequent period. [3] This deceleration is the result of a long-term decline in the rate of return on capital investment. Despite a subsequent reduction in the share of income going to wages and benefits in all the leading economies, Brenner shows that the rate of profit failed to recover after the 70s due to a persistent over-capacity in global manufacturing industries in excess of what would yield the previous return. A faltering rate of profit, occasionally reversed by spasmodic upswings, yielded smaller surpluses for reinvestment, leading to a slow-down in the growth of plant and equipment. In the leading advanced capitalist countries, this led to either wage stagnation or higher unemployment. Attempting to restore profitability, employers the world over held down wage and benefit levels, while governments reduced the growth of social expenditures. But the consequence of these cutbacks has been a protracted sluggishness in the growth of demand, reinforcing the stagnation stemming from overproduction. The cumulative problem of deceleration unequivocally manifested itself in a steady, system-wide expansion of government, firm and household debt. Although many have protested that this picture of the economic performance of the advanced capitalist world since the 70s is far too bleak, this across-the-board growth of debt should be taken as prima facie evidence that there was, in fact, a slow-down. For there is no other explanation for why it happened.

But in what sense has there been a worldwide growth of debt during this period? After all, at any given moment, investment—including purchases of interest-bearing debt—is supposed to be in equilibrium with savings. The problem has been that an increasingly large part of this world pool of savings has come to support a runaway growth of consumer debt and unsustainable speculation, in lieu of finding an outlet in the forms of investment that would generate sustainable income growth. Other countries’ exports generate reserves that purchase us debt at rates low enough to sustain its bonanzas. The true economic history of the period is not a morality play in which virtuous producers and savers were pitted against gamblers and big spenders. The manufacturing sectors of the world’s leading export economies—China, Japan and Germany—were just as dependent on the build-up of debt and speculation as the finance and real estate of the debtor countries. The reason is that as income from investment in plant and equipment sank, the level of aggregate demand became increasingly dependent on turning savings into interest-bearing debt, which under the right conditions can grow out of all proportion to the streams of income that ultimately support it. Debt is the taproot of the myriad forms of ultimately unsupported claims on wealth. ‘As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows unproductive money with the power of creation and thus turns it into capital, without forcing it to expose itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury.’ [4]

Eventually, of course, it is exposed to all the troubles and risks of its employment. In Brenner’s account the current crisis is the inexorable resurfacing of the pressure for a systemic shake-out that was never allowed to happen over the course of the last three decades, despite multiple rounds of downsizing and massive departures of capital from overcrowded manufacturing lines to cheaper locales and financial assets. The implosion of the American-centred financial and real-estate bubble is the end of the line for a whole period of gravity-defying account imbalances, asset bubbles and debt creation. Of course, the neo-liberal era has witnessed enormous bail-outs before: from the early 80s, such clean-up operations have been an essential enabling condition of getting the boom and bubble dynamic rolling again. But unlike previous local episodes of neo-liberal meltdown, this one is obviously taking place on a vastly larger scale, and no bailout can realistically keep the world economy from entering into either a new era of world depression or a protracted period of slow-growth stabilization, or perhaps some novel combination of the two.

Elasticity of capital

So far there has been no general fall in price levels, apart from housing markets, of the kind that marked the 1870s or the 1930s. This testifies to the formidable capacities of the post-war state to support demand, although this may soon hit its limits as the toll of unemployment continues to rise everywhere. The current form of stabilization and the market rallies it makes possible come at the cost of growing indebtedness, which cannot continue indefinitely. This does not mean that the bottom will eventually fall out of prices, as it did during the Great Depression. In fact, the deflationary consequences of a large-scale drop in consumption—the upshot of firms and households attempting to pay down their debts—will likely be intertwined with, and occasionally counteracted by, inflationary or even hyper-inflationary bubbles that will result from attempts to stimulate flagging economies with injections of ever more liquidity, that is, by the printing of money. Over the next several years, we are likely to witness the birth of a new and bewildering form of stagflation.

Instead of propping up aggregate demand through debt, one might ask whether it would have been possible after the 1970s to unleash a crisis on a scale sufficient to liquidate the vast quantities of marginal and inefficient capital holding down the rate of return, thereby restoring the necessary conditions for a more dynamic capital accumulation. The Carter–Volcker shock was a brief experiment in that direction. Of course, if the us had stuck to that strategy, Latin American scale structural adjustments might have been the order of the day throughout much of the oecd. Perhaps if these societies had been able to withstand a shake-out on this scale, rates of growth might eventually have returned to a level that could have sustained a less debt- and speculation-dependent, albeit more modest, rate of growth. But would this scenario have materialized? Austerity in this period has only led to growth through a realignment of the economy to exporting. If the us had stayed the Volcker course in the 80s, it may very well have plunged the whole world economy (and not just Latin America) into a depression, and then would have found no one to export to. In any event, few societies in the post-war affluent capitalist mould would have endured such a drastic restructuring and disentitlement, without the clear prospect of a return to rising levels of consumption.

High rates of growth sustained the social contract of post-war capitalism in the West. Even after its Golden Age, a buoyant consumerism remained as an unnegotiable legacy. Not only was a cathartic blast of thoroughgoing creative destruction out of the question after the beginning of the downturn in the 70s; the lower growth rates of consumption characteristic of earlier eras of capitalism were no longer socio-politically legitimate. Growing levels of debt were needed to make up for the potential fall-off in consumption. This happened despite the mass entry of women into the workforce, making double-income households the norm. The build-up of debt in this period, ultimately made possible by fiat money, expressed institutionalized expectations of rising affluence. While it is true that the growth rates of the last thirty years have not been low compared to more remote historic averages, they have been low in comparison to these historically shaped expectations which, as Marx said of the wage level, set the standard of what is high and low.

There are still intact socio-political barriers to the downward adjustment of living standards in the advanced capitalist countries, and probably in some of the more successful recently developing ones too. Neo-liberalism brought large-scale unemployment to Europe, long-term wage stagnation to America and increasing job and benefit insecurity everywhere. But except for the bottom fifth of the population, much of the social damage was cushioned by social provision, the increase of women’s earnings (allowing for growth in overall household income) and, in some countries, burgeoning credit-card debt and house-price inflation. Across the oecd, public provision actually rose throughout the neo-liberal period as a percentage of gdp, largely due to the steadily rising health-care costs of these ageing societies. As a particularly striking example of this trend, Medicare shot up during the administration of G. W. Bush. But in the absence of the cushion of debt and speculation, standards of living could begin to deteriorate in ways more reminiscent of the 30s than the 80s. Of course, several countries experienced Depression-like collapses in the 80s and early 90s, or in the run of crises from 1997 t0 2001; but outside of Africa these had the cold comforts of export-based growth to fall back on, after they were racked by structural adjustment. There are no comparable ‘higher powers’ to impose structural adjustment on the largest advanced capitalist societies, but there is also now no immediate austerity/export path of adjustment. All the current Herculean efforts of bailing out and stimulation demonstrate that the leaders of the advanced capitalist world already know that what was supposedly good for the Third World goose is out of the question for the First World gander.

Technological revolution

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed.

Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

The contemporary crisis exhibits a number of unfamiliar characteristics stemming from the inability of advanced capitalist societies to bear the costs of a new socio-technical infrastructure, to supersede the existing fixed-capital grid. The latter currently entrenches a 60-year-old complex of productive forces at the core of the world economy. The structural impasse that this has created has not been fully grasped, leading to difficulties in historicizing the last quarter-century of capitalism. Fredric Jameson’s conception of postmodernism as the cultural logic of the period is arguably the great benchmark of contemporary epochalism. [5] In the early 80s, Jameson originally conceived of this new order of things as a prefiguration of groundbreaking new technologies and energy sources of capitalism. In order to understand the subsequent trajectory of capitalist society, it is important to recognize that this great leap forward, what Ernest Mandel called the Third Technological Revolution, never really materialized. Even a more modestly conceived ‘post-Fordism’ failed to release a productivity revolution that would reduce costs and free up income for an all-round expansion.

Instead, the latest phase of capitalism got an ersatz form of growth primarily through credit-card consumerism and asset bubbles. Jameson’s explanation for contemporary society’s inability to experience and represent the totality of the world system initially attributed it to some immeasurable disproportion between human agency and newly unleashed nuclear and cybernetic productive forces. [6] But in later accounts, the locus of the problem silently shifted to mapping an opaque, pseudo-dynamic world of financial markets. Initial anticipations of an exhilarating new cultural condition gave way to totalizations of a more closed and derivative situation. Capitalism’s culture became an organized semblance of world-historic dynamism concealing and counteracting a secular deceleration in ‘the real economy’.

But what about information technology and containerization—the two signature technological breakthroughs of the period? These have undoubtedly powered a huge increase in world trade, over and above the growth of the world economy itself. Computerization and ‘just in time’ modes of organizing supply chains made it easier than ever before to bring manufactured goods to the world market, and relocate production. These cost-reducing technological and organizational changes countered the potentially inflationary consequences of the growing supply of various forms of money. Alongside American deficits, these trade-promoting changes were responsible for accelerating East Asian and especially Chinese growth. But unlike a ‘nuclear-cybernetic industrial revolution’, or the shift to some alternative energy source, technological change in this form has, by and large, brought vast quantities of goods from countries with lower labour costs into world markets already weighed down by overproduction of their higher-cost equivalents, instead of fuelling growth through the creation of whole new lines of production.

In the 90s it seemed plausible that containerization, post-Fordist production and supply chains and information technology in the new office place were the driving forces of a transition to a New Economy, one more productive, and in different ways, than anything that had come before it. But this great transformation somehow failed to show up statistically and, in due course, the stock-market crash of 2001 brought an end to the decade of cyber-hype. Altogether less plausible was the subsequent expectation that technologically retrograde real-estate bubbles, providing markets for exporters of consumer durables and raw materials, could be a sustainable basis for economic growth. Rather than leading to any ‘New Economy’ in the productive base, the innovations of this period of capitalism have powered transformations in the Lebenswelt of diversion and sociability, an expansion of discount and luxury shopping, but above all a heroic age of what was until recently called ‘financial technology’. Internet and mobile phones, Walmart and Prada, Black–Scholes and subprime—such are the technological landmarks of the period.

Looking east

Alongside this myth of a technological new age, the other grand narrative of capitalism in this period has been the de-centring of the Euro-American core of capitalist civilization by the rise of Asia, by which was meant first Japan, and then China. Postmodern globalization has been an epic of the self-transcendence of the West towards an Oriental horizon. (Both geographically and world historically it makes sense that, in such accounts of the future of capitalism, Asia should appear as the new West, an America for the next millennium.) For more than half a century us hegemony had helped make this development possible, by opening up its vast market to selected clients and providing them with free military protection from Communism. In its late, post-Cold War phase, us demand galvanized the rapid growth of Asia’s export powerhouses, which produced already existing manufactured goods but more cheaply. Instead of unleashing new productive forces more broadly or intensively, the latter’s accumulated surpluses eventually came to fuel the inflation of asset bubbles around the world.

The process of this relocation of technologically less-advanced industrial production to low-wage regions has unfolded differently to that of the classically expansionary phases of the capitalist system. Although China has grown very rapidly along these lines, the world economy as a whole has grown too slowly and disproportionately for even this to be sustainable. While the us, and the West more generally, will come to accept a larger role for China in some emerging, unsteady crisis-management regime, this is not the beginning of a new, China-centred phase of accumulation. For the latter to be conceivable, Chinese growth would have to come to depend on new and more advanced productive forces—not simply the broader dissemination of existing ones that are not even at the most advanced level, like the us techniques that spread to Europe and Japan after the war. The quarter-century story of countries with a half or a fifth of us per capita gdp catching up and indeed surpassing it, cannot be repeated today by others that have scarcely a fourteenth.

Lower-tech manufacturing could conceivably keep China growing at an impressive rate but it cannot be the basis for a new global phase of accumulation. Moreover, China’s rate of growth will soon be checked as export markets dry up. It is not clear whether China can now shift to domestically driven accumulation without a significant slow-down in growth. Only after a long, socio-politically transformative process of building up a compensatory domestic demand will some of the bases of sustained growth be secured for its population of a billion and a quarter. The prc’s current infrastructural investment stimulus is unlikely to counteract the massive shake-out of its export sector, because it is probably too small and too capital-intensive to begin shifting the economy towards domestic demand.

If the world was moving towards a new phase of vigorous, capitalist accumulation, China would be one of its main epicentres. But are there any reasons for thinking that, as the downturn simultaneously intensifies in Japan, the us and much of Europe, China will not only be able to avoid being dragged down with them, but will be able to grow so fast as to open up opportunities for their export-based recovery? Even by the largest estimates of its size, and even assuming that its increasingly export-dependent high rate of growth will not now decline precipitously, China’s economy is too small to carry the weight. The West will continue to decline without giving rise to an ascendancy of the Far East, let alone of Brazil, Russia or India.

These conjectures are attempts to situate where we are in the longue durée of capitalism—somewhere in mid-stream or, alternatively, closer to an end; whether this mode of production is old or new, reaching its outer limits or poised for further waves of expansion. The dramatic geo-economic expansion of the system over the last two decades, the ongoing formal subsumption of the last great peasant populations of Asia, as well as the incorporation of the ex-Comecon industrial world, seemed to demonstrate the long-term growth prospects, inner and outer vistas of colonization, of an Empire in statu nascendi. But secular stagnation and chronically sputtering economies in much of Latin America, Africa and the former Soviet Union stand as sobering testimony to the failures of neo-liberal ‘primitive accumulation’ when compared to the classic enclosures that fuelled capital’s genesis and episodes of expansion. Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums is a disturbing exposé of the expulsion of an ever-growing mass of obsolete humanity from the world market, as either producers or consumers. [7]

Parallel processes of obsolescence have unfolded in the advanced capitalist sector. Despite periodic bursts of frenzied speculation from the mid-1980s, accompanied by fanfare announcing the advent of an era of unprecedented capitalist dynamism, the results have only been brief, unsustainable bouts of new technological investment. Marx seems to have anticipated that capitalism would begin to slow down in the mature lines of its old homelands, as the explosive productivity growth of machines making ever more productive machines resulted in the employment of ever fewer workers. Over the long term, the further growth of industrial productivity would be thwarted by its tendency to reduce employment in this sector, and thus also to reduce the aggregate demand that would purchase the expansion of output. This was the form in which a contradiction between the forces and relations of production would unfold.

Grey society

Whatever the merits of this account, it is questionable whether the story of sustainable productivity growth through industrial revolutions will continue in the era of the service sector. Marx implied that the ‘internal’ cost of capital borne by firms would go up, bringing down the profit rate. What is being suggested here is that certain external social costs rise over the long term that cannot be counteracted by productivity gains elsewhere in the economy. Advanced capitalism would get a new lease on life if it found a way to decrease significantly the costs of health, education and age care without drastically reducing the level and quality of provision. But the productivity revolutions that reduced the agricultural population to single digits, and are now doing the same to industrial workforces—of course, counteracted by outsourcing to cheaper labour zones—are unlikely to be repeated for large parts of what is called the service economy. This is the main reason why capitalist economies eventually head towards the stationary state.

The reason why manufacturing is ‘technologically progressive’ has to do with its intrinsic attributes—production in this sector can be readily standardized, and consequently, the information required for production can be formalized in a set of instructions which can then be easily replicated. In the case of services, there are large differences between various activities in their amenability to productivity growth. Some services which are impersonal, as in telecommunications, have attributes similar to manufacturing and hence, can be ‘technologically progressive’. However, personal services, such as certain types of medical care, cannot be easily standardized and subject to the same mass production methods used in manufacturing. These types of services, therefore, will be ‘technologically stagnant’. In general, if there are two activities, one of which is ‘technologically progressive’, and the other ‘technologically stagnant’, then in the long term the average rate of growth will be determined by the activity in which productivity growth is slowest. [8]

It is not clear how ‘post-industrial’ capitalism will be able to reduce the costs of social reproduction, given the long-term problems of technological stagnation in services like health care. This economic transition overlaps in turn with a demographic one, in which ageing populations come to be supported by diminishing numbers of productive workers: by 2050, 22 per cent of the world’s population will be over 60; for Asia, the figure will be 24 per cent. The core of the post-1970s conjunctural crisis is an unresolved problem of overproduction and declining returns, leading to a slow-down of growth both relieved and exacerbated by the compensatory build-up of debt. The inherently slow growth of service-sector productivity further exacerbates the problem of demand, reinforcing other tendencies in this direction. The conjunctural crisis of neo-liberalism has become intertwined with an epochal-structural one brought on by a transition to a slow-growth, post-industrial service sector economy—the ageing, grey capitalism that Robin Blackburn has analysed. [9]

Blackburn’s studies explore the ways in which pension-fund expansion has generated the potentials for a socialization of the financial sphere, even as this development remains trapped and thwarted by short-term, speculative logics. Intrinsic to this is the insight that modern economies have come to rely upon ever-greater state support of the infrastructural environments that sustain the value form. Both the viability of capitalism and the form of whatever lies beyond its horizon depend upon whether a politics emerges that will move this process of the socialization of infrastructure building and maintenance onto a rational and planned track, as opposed to it unfolding as an ever larger public subsidy to the flagging powers of private capital. It is hard to imagine a socially acceptable, cost-effective solution to many of these ‘bio-political’ problems within the framework of capitalism. Its historical vitality and expansiveness has depended upon a demographic youthfulness that is unsustainable over the long term.

After neo-liberalism

What are the prospects today for reforming capitalism in the aftermath of neo-liberalism? Some change is inevitable, as the ruling ideas of the period have suddenly gone bankrupt, even as they, like the great banks they promoted, get propped up for a while, or gently whisked off stage. But in this dilapidated state, neo-liberalism’s former pretensions to intellectual superiority and realism will no longer be sufferable. One of its more scrupulous apostles recently made the following announcement: ‘Another ideological god has failed. The assumptions that ruled policy and politics over three decades suddenly look as outdated as revolutionary socialism.’ [10] But popular subscription to these policies has arguably always been shallow, depending upon the perception that there was no alternative way for an economy to move forward. Although the reflexes of most political systems make a clean break with the status quo inconceivable, one would expect these governments to react pragmatically as economies start contracting, by ditching further experiments in deregulation and privatization, while trying to prop up market values through vast public interventions, in the few instances where such options are available.

It might be thought that the discrediting of neo-liberalism would send us back to an earlier Keynesianism, but this is unlikely to happen. Neo-liberalism was not just a ‘reverse course’ departure from the thirty years of post-war managed capitalism, but also a continuation of it by other means. This implies that what might be coming to an end is the whole post-1945 period of capitalism, in which governments claimed the capacity to smooth out business cycles and recessions through demand creation. If the last thirty years of neo-liberalism have witnessed a massive expansion of overall levels of private and public debt, compensating for persistent slow growth in the real economy, can governments realistically stimulate economies now by taking on more debt through public expenditure? The Keynesianism of the 30s was a remedy for economies that had already bottomed out, not a means for preventing debt-laden economies from deleveraging. More American debt just prolongs the cumulative problem of massive global misallocation and imbalances, even if the alternative of letting the problem unravel in a chaotic free-for-all would make things considerably worse.

The hope that the present crisis might facilitate a transition to green capitalism may be equally unfounded. While stagnation itself could possibly slow down an ongoing, headlong deterioration of natural environments, a shift to alternative energy and green technology would almost certainly be undermined by the reduction in the price of fossil fuels that would result from a protracted slump. Overcoming these disincentives, the public commitments of leading states could of course be shifted to alternative fuels or green technology by a politics rationally oriented towards the long term. But at present it seems unlikely that such a politics could also be harnessed to a narrow project of capitalist restoration. The scale of public support for sufficiently remedial measures would overstep these bounds, and therefore be resisted very strenuously, unless precipitous deterioration exposed socially relevant populations to emergency conditions. However determined these efforts in conservation and sustainability eventually become, the ecological impasse of capitalism is likely to be the most absolute of all.

These problems are always perceived and treated by whole peoples as field problems, i.e. they are regarded as being soluble (and amenable to analysis) only in the capitalist field . . . At the helm is this or that class, this or that regime, this or that solution is being pressed, this or that particular direction has been taken etc, and until the real and imaginary possibilities of the field have been framed, tried, exhausted and discredited, no other field arises. Though the field itself may not satisfy reason (imagination may locate other fields, experience suggests yet others), in the currently functioning field of practice there is still enough reason operating for the purposes of the entire people and for the purposes of justifying what is happening.

Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955, entry for 14 June 1940

With its enormous bailouts, the Obama Administration has sought to salvage whatever might be saved from the neo-liberal status quo, including, of course, American seigniorage. This effort, even if it moves beyond the passivity of existing measures, will likely fail on its own terms. The level of expenditure and state indebtedness required to stimulate unsustainable stock-market rallies and ward off deflation will eventually compel foreign holders of dollar reserves to abandon further purchases of dollar-denominated debt, thus driving up its cost. Until now, East Asian governments have been happy to fund us external and government deficits, in order to sustain us consumption and their own exports. But with the crisis overtaking even China, these governments may lose the capacity to finance us deficits, especially as they grow to unprecedented size, yielding diminishing returns.

For the time being, the world’s leading export economies continue to accumulate dollar reserves, for fear that if they were to stop, a stampede to dump dollars might begin, resulting in a punishing devaluation of their reserves. Besides, in the absence of any other suitably big and liquid store of value, us Treasuries have preserved a now improbable aura of safety. But the tipping point is perhaps not so far away; a run on the dollar might break out despite the best efforts to prevent it; or, pre-emptively, the us could attempt to liquidate its debt load to foreigners with money printed on a scale that would unleash an explosive bout of hyperinflation, undermining the foundations of the world market for a long time to come. This impossible either/or situation has led to an impasse: debt levels cannot be brought down through vast devaluations because the worldwide socio-political fallout would be overwhelming; but propping up existing levels with more debt is economically unsustainable, even under the best-case scenarios of coordination. In their timidity, present efforts to shore up a tottering status quo with vast stimulus packages may wind up sharing the fate of efforts by early Depression-era governments to do the same through austerity measures. The ‘solution’ to the conjunctural problem of financial implosion might be a prolonged, difficult-to-sustain holding pattern, converging with an epochal shift to a stationary state. The former process may already have started; the latter could be the work of a generation.

Political forms

Which oecd societies could withstand prolonged bouts of structural adjustment of the kind that immiserated populations from Lagos to Vladivostok—especially now, when there are no longer export outlets to counteract the implosion of the home market? It is difficult to see what measures could be taken by political establishments to ensure that depression-stricken societies stick to the course during this long march. It is probably safe to assume that elected parliaments, sheikhdoms and oligarchies will all cleave to the dilapidated hull of American statecraft for as long as they can, after a prolonged period in which such rulers have stopped contemplating the alternatives. But the de-linking that will now unfold in the form of collapsing exports or withdrawn credit in any number of these countries might escalate to a different stage if power were to slip from their hands.

What politico-ideological forms will resistance to restructuring take, when the latter can no longer be implemented in accordance with the dictates of money markets, and now has to be imposed through more directly political—and therefore more controversial—processes of determining winners and losers? The erosion of older traditions of collective response makes prediction hazardous. The initially localized opposition to these processes will be ‘class-like’ to radically varying degrees, conditioning the shape of the social structures that will emerge out of the contemporary retrenchment of capitalism. The outcome of these struggles may depend upon the degree to which state powers can fortify the essentials of property and privilege as they could in an older age of class conflict. In many parts of the world, the coercive core of the state apparatus has undergone a long-term process of neutralization. Elsewhere, this is a more recent and reversible development. In the coming period, how will different political systems respond to creeping and direct threats to the rule of capital and its core constituencies, when the emergency resort to force may no longer be available to any decisive effect? During the 30s most of Europe outside of Scandinavia lurched to the Right, with brief Popular Front interludes in Spain and France. The us, and much of Latin America went Left. It might be interesting to try to anticipate similar variations today across all the zones of the world-system.

With a few worthy exceptions, there are currently no large-scale left-wing parties and movements implementing or even demanding radical reforms. But despite their abundant reserves of inertia and passivity, advanced capitalist societies are probably incapable of enduring the scale of hardship that a true depression would inflict on them, in the way that these same societies managed to get by in the 30s, and other poorer ones have done in our period. If there are no immediate left-wing Keynesian solutions, and society cannot be allowed to take the plunge into a full-scale shake-out, are there then any viable right-wing ‘statist’, i.e. non-market-based, solutions to the current contradictions of capitalism? Comparisons to the 1930s inevitably raise the question of whether it is possible for advanced capitalist societies to move in the direction of a politics analogous to fascism. There is little chance that the electoralism that swept the earth after 89 will be menaced from this direction, although various weak states of emergency will no doubt abound. It is unlikely that older, right-wing forms of authority and discipline could be imposed on a demos of service workers and consumers, inured to more indirect forms of power, but allergic to traditional authority.

Since the conclusion of the Second World War and the advent of the atomic age, there have been no head-to-head confrontations between the world’s most powerful states. This long peace in the Eurasian core has led to lower levels of manpower mobilization, promoting a less authoritarian but thoroughly depoliticized cultural atmosphere. The consequences of this pacification for relations between the sexes have been momentous, forming a powerful progressive trend from an earlier era that continues through this one. Fourier claimed that the level of emancipation in any society could be measured by the position of women within it, a metric that qualifies any overly pessimistic conception of this historical period. This is an age in which statist authoritarianism lives on only in vestiges and backwaters. Of course, reactionary campaigns tailored to the sensitivities of these more democratic populations need not be militaristic. Immigration, and in America ‘race’, are still potentially toxic wedge issues. In some cases, one can expect that the blame for collapsing employment and social provision will be pinned on ethno-racial minorities, but it is hard to see how the resulting exclusionary measures could even put a dent in the problem.

The radical right politics of the inter-war era depended upon the mobilizing atmospherics of great-power rivalry, drastically sharpened by the perception of a Red menace. Moreover, in the midst of a collapsing world market, a new international order based on a mutant form of autarchic capitalism seemed entirely plausible. (How viable it would have been over the longer term is another matter.) Even if we are moving from a neo-liberalism to new forms of public ownership, tomorrow’s stagnant and pacified state capitalisms are unlikely to exhibit the political directiveness of their antecedents from a bygone industrial era of welfare and warfare. Mid-century state capitalisms were briefly dynamic because their production targets were set by total war and popular mobilization, neither of which are on the horizon today.

Classical inter-imperialist conflicts, violently expediting the renewal of the system along new frontiers of expansion, are no longer compatible with the preservation of the system. Moving in the opposite direction, the scale of the fiscal crisis that all states will be confronting, whether presently debtors or not, may eventually compel them to cut back on military budgets, perhaps on a large scale. Of course, this is not even on the agenda yet in the us, but if insolvency and public-sector shutdowns loom, it is hard to see how this could be deferred indefinitely. As a result, for the time being it is very unlikely that the us will venture forth in new risky, costly expeditions, although it will no doubt do its best to maintain its present commitments. ‘Terrorism’ is another matter, and can be dealt with more cheaply. But its brief moment of geo-political significance is already passing, even as the West soldiers forth in the Hindu Kush.

Another end of history?

We are now at the end of an Indian summer of reflated American imperial power. What power(s) will be able to uphold and constitute the interests of the world capitalist system as a whole in the coming period? These general interests can only ever have approximate embodiments in the hegemonic centres that stand in for this absent universal dimension. Very few incumbent powers are willing to concede that their particular interests might have to be sacrificed to the universal interests of the larger field of accumulation. If no inter-imperialist struggle to determine a new hegemon is possible, can there be a coordinated multilateral devaluation of debts and inflated assets? It is not clear what kind of system will emerge if neither this nor any functional surrogate to this process occurs.

Giovanni Arrighi’s three geo-political projections, laid out in TheLong Twentieth Century, were that the flight forward into financialized neo-liberalism would only bring a brief prolongation of American hegemony and would have to yield eventually to either a West-run global empire, an East-inflected world market-society, or long-term systemic chaos. [11] A full-fledged version of the first possibility can probably be ruled out. But following the logic of Arrighi’s historical narrative, the emergence of a new hegemonic centre seems equally improbable. After all, each of the successive hegemons in his account was a larger and more advanced capitalist economy than the one that preceded it. By that standard, there is obviously no power in the world that could supersede the us, neither China—at present a considerably smaller and more backward economy—nor ‘Europe’, which is not even a state, and will soon perhaps begin to abort its historically anomalous quasi-statehood. Japan, once thought to be the nation most likely to succeed, has long since been eliminated from consideration. The most likely development is a combination of possibilities one and three: a concert of powers to stave off financial meltdowns, but incapable of orchestrating a transition to a new phase of sustainable capitalist development.

We are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders. The end of history could be thought to begin when no project of global scope is left standing, and a new kind of ‘worldlessness’ and drift begins. This would conform to Hegel’s suspicion that at this spiritual terminus, the past would be known, but that a singular future might cease to be a relevant category. In the absence of organized political projects to build new forms of autonomous life, the ongoing crisis will be stalked by ecological fatalities that will not be evaded by faltering growth. An observation from Fredric Jameson at the onset of this age of capitalism still frames the present:

Confusion about the future of capitalism—compounded by a confidence in technological progress beclouded by intermittent certainties of catastrophe and disaster—is at least as old as the late nineteenth century; but few periods have proved as incapable of framing immediate alternatives for themselves, let alone of imagining those great Utopias that have occasionally broken on the status quo like a sunburst. [12]

[1] Edward Anthony Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, Cambridge 1990, p. 3. Pessimism was perhaps the wrong word for Mill, who wrote in 1848: ‘I cannot, therefore, regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.’ Principles of Political Economy, Part ii, Chapter vi, § 2.

[2] Marx’s speculations on a supposed tendency for the rate of profit to decline are notoriously unclear, but underlying them, perhaps, was the older Malthusian intuition: ‘The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.’ Capital Vol. 1, London 1976, p. 638.

[3] Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, London and New York 2002.

[4] Capital Vol. 1, p. 919.

[5] David Harvey’s alternative theorization of postmodern capitalism is more directly focused on the problem of the rise and fall of socio-spatial infrastructures. See Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge 1990.

[6] Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, London and New York 2008, p. 496; ‘Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, nlri/146, July–Aug 1984.

[7] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006.

[8] Robert Rowthorn and Ramana Ramaswamy, ‘Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications’, imf Working Paper 97/42, April 1997.

[9] Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death, London and New York 2003; and Age Shock, London and New York 2007.

[10] Martin Wolf, ‘Seeds of its own destruction’, Financial Times, 8 March 2009.

[11] Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, London and New York, pp. 355–6.

[12] Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, p. 644.

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