En marzo de 2021, el equipo de Terra Ignota, un proyecto iniciado por el artista chileno Nicolás Spencer que explora la memoria de la Patagonia y Antártica Chilena, descubrió un sitio arqueológico con material lítico no local a unos 10 kilómetros de Bahía Blanca en el Parque Nacional Yendegaia, en la Región de Magallanes.
El hallazgo fue la prueba para corroborar la existencia de un “paso de indios” en esa zona, es decir, un punto de contacto entre tres etnias ancestrales que solían transitar por ese sector: las comunidades selk’nam, kawésqar y yagán.
Este sector podría representar también una antigua “zona de contacto intercultural» entre las etnias. Es por esto que, con el propósito de seguir recopilando información sobre este lugar, el próximo 3 de marzo comenzará una nueva expedición del equipo guiada por Nicolás Spencer, el curador alemán Carsten Stabenow y el arqueólogo de la Universidad de Magallanes Alfredo Prieto.
Área de contacto intercultural
Esta exploración interdisciplinaria del territorio es la primera etapa del proyecto Terra Ignota Forum (TIF), un laboratorio de investigación que busca construir e implementar un archivo contemporáneo sobre esta llamada “zona de contacto intercultural» que, a través de metodologías colaborativas, recogerá y pondrá en valor información geológica, arqueológica, ecológica e histórica sobre un lugar de encuentro cultural en incipiente estudio, que en 2024 ubicará los resultados y hallazgos en las dependencias de la Universidad de Magallanes.
“Nuestra motivación para este viaje va más allá de estudiar los vestigios culturales hallados el año pasado y comprobar una posible zona de contacto intercultural”, explica Spencer.
“Lo importante de este estudio es buscar nuevas formas de generación de conocimiento y, a partir de una mirada lo más heterogénea posible, tratar de comprender la naturaleza, la cultura y sus formas de representación”.
En una misma línea, Stabenow manifiesta: “Este es ante todo un proyecto de cooperación que surgió lentamente de intereses mutuos y amistad. Es un encuentro de personas y profesionales con diversas experiencias y conocimientos. Algunos se conocen desde hace mucho tiempo, otros se encontrarán por primera vez. Lo que intentamos es crear una situación social, un diálogo en un lugar que solo puede entenderse a través de la propia idea de intercambio”.
Investigación interdisciplinaria
La travesía contará con la participación de un grupo de científicos, artistas, curadores y descendientes de los primeros caminantes.
Incluyen a Kerstin Ergenzinger (Alemania), Raviv Ganchrow (Estados Unidos), Gerd Sielfeld (Nueva Zelanda), Víctor Manzon (España), Florencia Curci (Argentina), Robert Carracedo (España), Claudia Augustat (Austria), las chilenas y los chilenos Iván Flores, Cristian Espinoza, Ivette Martínez, Juan Carlos Solari, Fernanda Fábrega, Paula Urdangarin, Sandra Ulloa, Paola Grendi, Julio Contreras, Rodrigo Munzenmayer, Claudia González de la comunidad Yagán, y dos mujeres de la etnia selk’nam, Hema’ny Molina y Fernanda Olivares.
“Como mujer selk’nam, indígena, hay algunos aspectos culturales que son muy privados y que generalmente se comparten solo en la intimidad de la propia comunidad. El conocer a parte del equipo, sus intenciones y ambiciones, me dieron la confianza y entusiasmo para integrarme. Conocer con ellas y ellos parte de las tierras por las que caminaron mis ancestros, seguir sus huellas es un privilegio, y hacerlo acompañada de profesionales excelentes, y mejores humanos aún, me llena de alegría”, señala Olivares.
Cabe mencionar que los participantes también realizarán otros proyectos individuales de investigación en el territorio relacionados con diferentes aspectos de la exploración arqueológica, las condiciones ambientales, sus implicaciones etnoculturales y la búsqueda de nuevas formas de representación del conocimiento local, científico, artístico y museográfico.
El proyecto es posible gracias al Fondo de Ciencia Pública del Ministerio de Ciencia de Chile y al Fondo de Coproducción Internacional del Goethe-Institut y cuenta con el apoyo de CAB, INACH (Instituto Chileno Antártico), Museo Regional de Magallanes, Conaf (Corporación Nacional Forestal), Dirección de Patrimonio, Universidad de Magallanes, Universidad Austral, WCS (World Conservation Society) y Weltmuseum Viena.
Al respecto, la encargada de programación cultural del Goethe-Institut, Fernanda Fábrega, expresa:
“Como institución conocemos el proyecto desde inicios del año pasado y hemos apoyado ya dos instancias: la exhibición de Terra-Ignota en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo y el viaje a Chile de Carsten Stabenow para presentar su visión con motivo de esta muestra en Santiago y Punta Arenas. Nos parecen de gran relevancia los temas que este proyecto toca y sus metodologías, involucrando tanto dimensiones del conocimiento como sensibilidades culturales y estéticas, prioridades de nuestra institución”.
Para saber más de lo que está pasando en el mundo de la ciencia y la cultura, súmate a nuestra comunidad Cultívate, el Newsletter de El Mostrador sobre estos temas. Inscríbete gratisAQUÍ
The Globe and Mail’s new revelations about socialist poet Pablo Neruda’s death after the 1973 coup in Chile carefully omitted any reference to Ottawa’s complicity in the repression. But in Chile and around the world, Canada has long helped undermine democracy.
Members of the Pablo Neruda Foundation hang a picture of the poet (L) with former Chilean president Salvador Allende during a ceremony in Isla Negra, west of Santiago, Chile, April 26, 2016.
(Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images)
When it covers right-wing, US-backed coups in Latin America, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s paper of record, omits Ottawa’s role. From Chile in 1973 to Peru today, the paper erases Canada’s role in undermining democracy.
“Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died with toxic bacteria in his body, say forensic scientists,” read the front page of a recent edition. In the story about the Nobel laureate killed after Chile’s elected government was toppled in 1973, the Globe ignored Ottawa’s complicity in the repression that felled the famed poet.
From economic asphyxiation to diplomatic isolation, Ottawa’s policy toward elected Marxist president Salvador Allende was clear. Canada recognized Augusto Pinochet’s military junta within three weeks of the September 11, 1973, coup. Immediately after Allende was overthrown, Canada’s ambassador to Chile cabled the Department of External Affairs (now Global Affairs) to state that Pinochet “has assumed the probably thankless task of sobering Chile up” from “the riffraff of the Latin American Left to whom Allende gave asylum.” Neruda’s murder was apparently merely part of the process of “sobering Chile up.”
The Globe’s whitewash of Canada’s role in Chile was part of pattern that continues today. Three weeks ago the paper published an op-ed from a University of British Columbia academic criticizing the violence in Peru since elected president Pedro Castillo was ousted on December 7. But it ignored Ottawa’s commitment to consolidating a coup that sparked a furious popular backlash.
Canadian Diplomacy
Ottawa has supported Dina Boluarte’s replacement government in Peru — the selfsame government that has suspended civil liberties and deployed troops to the streets. Security forces have killed sixty and shot hundreds of mostly indigenous protesters. Global Affairs and Canada’s ambassador to Peru, Louis Marcotte, have worked hard to shore up support for Boluarte. Since Castillo’s ouster, Marcotte has met President Boluarte, the foreign minister, foreign commerce minister, environment minister, vulnerable populations minister, production minister, and mining minister.
It is rare for a Canadian ambassador to have so much contact with top officials of any government. The flurry of diplomatic activity reflects Ottawa’s commitment to consolidating the shaky coup government, which has been rejected by many regional governments and had multiple ministers resign. The diplomatic encounters are also an indirect endorsement of Boluarte’s repression.
Amidst large protests a week after Castillo’s ouster, Marcotte met new foreign minister Ana Cecilia Gervasi, tweeting a photo with a message that read: “Today with Minister Gervasi, reiterated support for the transition government of President Boluarte to create consensus leading to transparent and fair elections that will bring social peace.” Three days later, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly bolstered Canada’s support for Boluarte, tweeting, “Spoke with Peru’s Foreign Minister, Ana Cecilia Gervasi, to reiterate our support for the transitional government of President Boluarte.”
Joly’s and Marcotte’s moves followed similar moves by the US secretary of state. Antony Blinken spoke with Boluarte over the phone, and US ambassador to Peru Lisa Kenna met with her at about the same time. On December 23, ambassador Marcotte tweeted, “I met today with President Boluarte to reiterate Canada’s commitment to continue strengthening the relation and to support Human Rights and transparent and fair elections.”
Most of the hemisphere has taken a different tack. Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, Barbuda, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Colombia all expressed some opposition to Castillo’s ouster. In general, consensus for blame has landed on the Peruvian opposition for not allowing Castillo to govern. His opponent in the second round of the presidential election, Keiko Fujimori, refused to even recognize Castillo’s election victory while the media and business elite attacked Castillo viciously. The country’s leading business group, the National Society of Industries vowed to “throw out communism” by making the country ungovernable. Congress has repeatedly sought to impeach Castillo.
All the Exculpatory News That’s Fit to Print
The Globe has also ignored the Canadian ambassador promoting mining interests with Peru’s repressive, unelected, government. After meeting Boluarte’s mining minister, Marcotte tweeted,
with Minister Oscar Vera Gargurevich, we talked about modern mining investments that benefit communities and all of Peru. Ready to support the Peru delegation at PDAC [Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada] 2023, the most important mining exploration convention in the world, March 5-8 in Canada.
Alongside Peruvian diplomats, Canada’s ambassador will open PDAC’s Peru Day next month. Marcotte recently told a Peruvian business outlet that “Peru has an excellent opportunity to be a leader” in energy transition due to its reserves of copper, lithium, zinc, and rare earths. Seventy-one Canadian mining firms have $9.9 billion in assets in Peru. Castillo criticized foreign mining companies, promising stronger environmental regulations and profit sharing for communities in mining regions. But his largely dysfunctional government failed to adopt any major reform.
The Globe ignored Justin Trudeau’s government’s passive support for the 2016 “soft coup” impeachment of Brazilian Workers’ Party president Dilma Rousseff. Ditto for Ottawa actively backing the economic elites, Christian extremists, and security forces who overthrew Bolivian president Evo Morales in November 2019.
A search of the Globe database for coverage of Canada’s role in overthrowing the majority indigenous nation’s first indigenous president will turn up almost nothing. Then foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland released a celebratory statement hours after the military command forced Morales to resign and Ottawa provided significant support for the Organization of American States’ effort to discredit Bolivia’s 2019 vote. This fueled opposition protests and justified the coup. At the time, the Globe deemed none of this newsworthy, publishing only one sentence on the subject. Two and half years later, commentary on the topic included two scant paragraphs critical of Canada’s role in ousting Morales.
Shedding Darkness on Canadian Collusion
Ottawa passively supported the ouster of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, Dominican Republic leader Juan Bosch in 1963, Brazilian president João Goulart in 1964, and Paraguayan leader Fernando Lugo in 2012. Additionally, Canada offered quiet support to military interventions that impeded a progressive leader in Colombia in 1953 and a coup by the president against their parliament in Peru in 1992. In a more substantial contribution to undermining electoral democracy, Ottawa backed the Honduran military’s removal of elected president Manuel Zelaya in 2009.
In its most aggressive-ever subversion of a progressive elected government in the hemisphere, Ottawa helped overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide and thousands of other elected officials in 2004. In a rare bit of critical coverage, the December 17 Globe front page read: “The Last Thing Haitians Need is Foreign Intervention.” Most of the opinion section was covered with a photo of Haitians protesting with a coffin draped with the flags of the United States, France, and Canada. But the long article ignored Canada’s role in the 2004 foreign invasion that ousted the elected government.
According to a search of the Globe database, the paper has never reported on the 2003 “Ottawa initiative on Haiti” meeting. Thirteen months before Aristide was ousted the Canadian government brought top US, French, and Organization of American States officials together for a private gathering where they reportedly discussed ousting the elected president and putting the country under UN trusteeship. Prominent journalist Michel Vastel brought the gathering to public attention in the March 15, 2003, issue of l’Actualité, Quebec’s leading corporate news magazine.
Even though the matters reportedly discussed at the Ottawa Initiative played out in Haiti a year later, it wasn’t until seventeen years after the meeting that a major media outlet saw it fit to investigate the stunning coincidence. As part of covering the 10th anniversary of the terrible 2010 earthquake, Radio-Canada’s flagship news program Enquêteinterviewed Denis Paradis, the Liberal minister responsible for organizing the meeting, who admitted no Haitian officials were invited to discuss their own country’s future during the get together.
Canada has consistently sided with Washington and corporate interests against democracy in the southern hemisphere. But you wouldn’t know it if you only read Canada’s paper of record.
In his new book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau argues that to understand and end capitalism, we need to analyze how it not only subordinates the poor to the rich but in fact exerts economic power over everyone — including capitalists themselves.
Søren Mau (Daniel Hjorth)
Even amid the current outpouring of scholarship on Marx, leftist philosopher Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital stands as a significant contribution. First published in German and Danish in 2021 and published in English by Verso earlier this year, the book meticulously develops a theory of what Mau calls “economic power,” a form of capitalist domination that is not strictly bound to notions of class and, unlike the forces of violence or ideology, that acts upon subjects indirectly.
Building on a diverse body of Marxist thought, Mau details how economic power shapes the terrain of social reproduction, influencing subjects by determining material conditions. In this rendering, subjects of economic domination are not directly restrained or blinkered by false consciousness, as they are often understood in the context of post-Marxism. Rather, they are subjugated by the oblique logics of capital. Forced to conform to capital’s demands, people are dominated insofar as, per Mau, “the worker wants to live.”
Both an insightful introduction to many of Marx’s core concepts and an original theoretical intervention, the book promises to substantively inform current conversations on capitalism, power, and resistance.
Mau recently sat down with Jacobin contributor James Rushing Daniel to discuss the book and the role of theory in the struggle against capitalism.
James Rushing Daniel
I’d first like to ask about the origins of Mute Compulsion. As you note in the book, the title comes from a passage in Volume I of Marx’s Capital: “the mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.” How did your reading of Marx, and of this passage specifically, lead to the theorization of what you call “economic power”?
Søren Mau
I got the idea for the book not from that passage in particular but from reading works by scholars from the German “New Marx-Reading” or Neue Marx-Lektüre (NML) tradition, especially Michael Heinrich, as well as from reading political Marxists, especially Ellen Meiksins Wood. The idea that one of the characteristic things about capitalism is that it’s reproduced by means of an impersonal and abstract form of power is not new. Lots of Marxists have written about this before me; I just thought that this idea deserved more attention and that there was more to be said about how this form of power works.
So that was my idea with the book: to take this argument about power in capitalism that I had from others and expand on it. And then I just found that particular passage in Capital very useful for summarizing this entire analysis. Marx only uses the expression “mute compulsion” in that specific passage, and in other places he talks, for example, of “invisible threads,” which I also briefly considered as a title for the book.
But eventually I settled on “mute compulsion,” even though the passage in Capital isn’t perfect since it only highlights class domination: “the mute compulsion seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.” One of the central arguments in my book, however, is that the power of capital cannot be reduced to class domination, since it also includes mechanisms of domination that everyone is subjected to, although in very different ways. But despite this I still found the expression “mute compulsion” useful as a way to sum up the idea.
James Rushing Daniel
One of the crucial interventions of the text is this distinguishing of what you call economic power from other forms of power such as violence or ideology, which have been dominant in leftist political theory for decades. Can you explain what sets economic power apart?
Søren Mau
There has been a tendency to think about power as something that has two fundamental forms, namely violence and ideology.
In my book, I argue that economic power is a form of power that can neither be reduced to violence nor ideology. In contrast to violence and ideology, economic power doesn’t directly address the subjugated part in a relationship of domination. Instead, it addresses the environment of the subject, which means that it functions by shaping the material and social environment in a way that forces people to act in a certain way.
This is distinct from violence, which addresses the subject directly as a body, as well as from ideology, which addresses the subject by shaping the way in which it thinks or perceives itself and its surroundings.
James Rushing Daniel
A number of anti-capitalist theorists in recent years have centered the notion of class. Vivek Chibber and Erik Olin Wright are two prominent examples. Class domination is certainly part of your critique — yet, as you say, economic power transcends class.
Søren Mau
Class domination is an extremely important part of the power of capital and an indispensable condition of capitalism, but it’s also important to see how capitalism is reproduced by forms of power that transcend class in the sense that everyone is subjected to them. I think what some of the theories that I rely on have demonstrated very powerfully is that Marx’s value theory and his analysis of competition illustrate how capitalist society or the capitalist economy generates mechanisms that help to reproduce capitalism that capitalists are also subjected to.
We need to understand not only how proletarians are dominated by capitalists but also how everyone is dominated by capital as such.
That does not mean that capitalists and workers are subjected to them in the same way. My point is obviously not to say that we should also feel sorry for the capitalists or something like that. They are not dominated in the same way as workers, but I just think if we want to understand why capitalism is so difficult to abolish, why it’s been so successful, and why it still exists, we need to understand not only how proletarians are dominated by capitalists but also how everyone is dominated by capital as such.
James Rushing Daniel
Michel Foucault has been undergoing a reevaluation in recent years. He was long seen as an indispensable lens for conceptualizing power under late capitalism, but today books like The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora are very critical of his alleged endorsement of neoliberalism.
In Mute Compulsion, you are certainly critical of Foucault for resting his critique in the “microphysics of power” and bracketing the microphysics of power from the broader social currents of capitalism. But you nevertheless see value in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, the idea that power operates at the level of the organism. I’m wondering how you see the utility of Foucault in this kind of critique.
Søren Mau
I don’t really have any strong opinions about the whole debate about neoliberalism and Foucault. I think that his general concept of power has some advantages — it avoids most of the pitfalls of mainstream theories of power. But his refusal to take class and property relations into consideration also made him blind to certain fundamental aspects of power relations in modern society.
But there are many aspects of his general concept of power that fit quite well with what Marx is doing in his critique of political economy. I think it’s certainly possible and fruitful to combine Foucault and Marx, even though it’s not an important project for me.
Regarding his notion of biopolitics, I think he highlights some important aspects of how the state began to relate to the population in the modern era, which can be fruitfully combined with Marx’s analysis of the rise of capitalism.
I’m not the first to suggest such a perspective. Silvia Federici, for example, has also written about it. I think that what Foucault does is to highlight some interesting historical tendencies and facts, but without being able to explain them because of his resistance to considering classically Marxist topics such as class and property relations. So, I think that we can actually provide a better analysis of what he calls biopolitics by combining his analysis with Marx’s analysis of how the capitalist mode of production presupposes proletarianization, that is, the radical separation of life from its conditions.
James Rushing Daniel
Your book also addresses the concept of value in Marx. You argue that, for Marx, the labor theory of value is not a matter of reading the true price of labor but, instead, about illuminating the very essence of valuation as an expression of domination.
Søren Mau
Here I follow what can broadly be termed value-form theory, an approach that interprets Marx’s theory of value not as a theory that attempts to explain prices but a theory about the social form of labor in capitalism or, in other words, a theory about how social labor is organized.
One of the unique things about capitalism is that production is organized by private and independent producers who exchange their products on the market. This is what the theory of value explains and tries to analyze, and with regards to power, the crucial thing is that such a system generates certain standards that everyone must live up to in order to survive. It does so by means of abstract and impersonal market pressures. So the theory of value is basically a theory of how the market is not an apolitical transmitter of information but a mechanism of domination that generates impersonal commands.
Value is a concept that highlights the horizontal relationships between units of production rather than the vertical class relations, even though the latter are presupposed by the former. The theory of value is a theory of how social labor is organized by means of real abstractions such as money, which subjects everyone in capitalist society to the demands of capital.
James Rushing Daniel
Competition, in your theory of economic power, is also vital to this kind of domination. This emphasis notably places you in the company of economist Anwar Shaikh, who centers competition in his assessment of capitalism’s core function. I’m wondering just how you see competition as functioning in the context of contemporary capitalism.
Søren Mau
Competition is the mechanism that “executes the laws of capital,” as Marx puts it. That means that, on the one hand, we cannot explain the dynamics of capitalism only on the basis of competition but, on the other hand, it also means that we can’t explain the dynamics of capitalism without reference to the competitive pressures capitalists expose each other to.
Competition is an extremely important mechanism in capitalism and, basically, it’s another word for the horizontal relationship between units of production or between capitals. It describes the same relations that the concept of value is intended to analyze but on another level of abstraction. Competition is a relationship between sellers, regardless of what they’re selling. It’s also a relationship between proletarians, who compete against each other on the labor market. Competition is a universalizing mechanism that generates the standards that everyone must live up to in order to survive in a capitalist system.
One of the paradoxical things about competition is that it’s a mechanism that unifies by means of separating.
One of the paradoxical things about competition is that it’s a mechanism that unifies by means of separating. It is the very split between individual capitals — the fact that production is organized by independent producers who face each other as competitors on the market — that transforms the power of capital into something more than an aggregation of the power of the individual capitalists into a social logic that no one is in control of and that imposes itself on the social totality.
I think that the centrality of competition in capitalism was overlooked for a long time partly because of the popularity of the idea that capitalism had entered a monopoly stage.
This idea was very popular from the early twentieth century until the 1970s, and one of its consequences was that competition was regarded as unimportant. The intensification of competitive pressures on all levels of the global economy in the neoliberal era has, however, made the theory of monopoly capital seem much less plausible and has led to a renewed interest in the crucial role of competition in capitalism.
James Rushing Daniel
Can you talk about why it’s important that we embrace a theory of economic power today?
Søren Mau
As a Marxist, I obviously don’t think that writing books is what is going to initiate the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism — especially not writing a book as abstract and theoretical as Mute Compulsion. On the other hand, it would be meaningless to write a book about capitalism if I didn’t believe that it could, at least potentially, be useful for combating the world of capital.
I think we should be careful not to derive political tactics and strategies from the kind of abstract theory that I develop in Mute Compulsion, so in my view, the political utility of the book lies rather in the fact that it offers a conceptual framework that can hopefully be put to use in strategically relevant analyses of concrete situations. But although it is by no means necessary to understand the capitalist system in order to destroy it, I think that a certain understanding of the enemy can be useful when fighting that enemy.
If there are any strategic perspectives to draw from my analysis of the economic power of capital, it would probably be to underline the importance of building new, communist forms of collective reproduction at the same time as we’re dismantling capitalism. The concept of mute compulsion highlights how capitalism reproduces itself through economic processes that we’re all dependent upon and participate in on a daily level. In order to break the power of capital, we need to dissolve it at its roots.
We spoke to director Santiago Mitre about his Oscar-nominated film Argentina, 1985, which depicts the struggle to bring the leaders of Argentina’s murderous military junta to justice.
A scene inside the courtroom in Argentina, 1985. (Amazon Studios, 2022)
Director Santiago Mitre’s much-lauded, fact-based Argentina, 1985dramatizes the South American country’s return to democracy after suffering seven years under a military junta. The new civilian government is determined to hold the leading officers accountable for carrying out the barbaric “Dirty War” of torture, liquidation, and disappearing about thirty thousand people. Mitre’s script, cowritten with Argentines Mariano Llinás and Martín Mauregui, deeply humanizes the struggle to try the generals in the biggest war crimes case since the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
Argentina, 1985 has very deservedly racked up accolades, winning the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film; three prizes, including a nomination for the Golden Lion for best picture, at the Venice Film Festival; and many other awards and nominations, most prominently being Oscar-nominated for Best International Feature Film.
Mitre’s gripping two-hour, twenty-minute masterpiece is arguably the best political feature since Costa-Gavras’s 1969 Z, which was rather uniquely nominated for the Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film, winning in the latter category. This classic film about the assassination of Greece’s peace candidate and the Greek colonels’ overthrow of the government before they could stand trial had a major impact on Mitre.
The director reveals that fact, how he cinematically constructed his recreation of the court case that rocked the world, and much more in this candid conversation. Mitre was born in 1980 in Buenos Aires and was interviewed while in New York this year by Jacobin.
Ed Rampell
What was the role of Henry Kissinger and the CIA in Argentina’s 1976 coup and in the “Dirty War”?
Santiago Mitre
The CIA supported many of the military dictatorships that put down democratic and progressive governments that were present in the region, as in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina.
Ed Rampell
Who are your cinematic influences for this film?
Santiago Mitre
I was thinking a lot about All the President’s Men, with Dustin Hoffman; this is a film I love, because it’s about an important issue with great characters and great tension. There were other films whose influence you cannot track directly, but more importantly for me is The Conversation, by Francis Ford Coppola. Because of the way he used paranoia and the camera movements, it was a great film.
I loved Costa-Gavras and those political thrillers from the 1970s — Z, and many others.
But I also watched a lot of classic Hollywood films. I was thinking a lot about Frank Capra and John Ford and the way they used cinema as a tool to tell history. It was a mix of everything. Also some Argentinian films on the subject of the dictatorship were important for me as a filmmaker, like Luis Puenzo’s 1985 La Historia Oficial.
Ed Rampell
There’s a sequence in Z when the judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, charges each of the Greek colonels. Your film almost seems like what would have happened in Greece if the military junta had not overthrown the government and had stood trial.
Santiago Mitre
That’s one of the examples that the judges and prosecutors used in Argentina to build a case — because there were not many antecedents in history of civil courts judging military dictators. So, they needed to build it all and try to be new.
In my case, I had the real trial [in Argentina] that happened that was so important and influential for me — to read the files and watch the tapings of the trial, to speak to everyone. But there is also a tradition in cinema that also was influential. Because it was like this magnificent event, plus cinema is what brings this story and event back to life, so people in many places can appreciate it and can discuss the subjects the film is proposing.
Ed Rampell
During the trial sequences in Argentina, 1985, did you cut in some actual historic footage from the actual trials with your actors? Did you intercut news clips?
Santiago Mitre
Yes. For me it was like working in this recreation of the trial. There was something I wanted, to have a very nonfiction style; I used many procedures. Like all of the words that are said by the witnesses are verbatim, exact transcripts of what the witnesses said. All of the public things I showed during the trial are exact from what happened. At the same time, it was important for me to shoot in the real courtroom. We were lucky we were allowed to shoot there because it’s a historic building nowadays. To be seated there, in that place, with the [actors playing the] witnesses dressed up exactly as the witnesses were dressed up at that moment in ’85, was a very intense image for me. I had been watching the tapings of the original trial for months and months.
Because you know, the taping of the original trial had one characteristic, which was that the witnesses were only shown by their backs. We could only see their necks, with the judges watching them. It was a way of protecting their identities . . . and integrity. . . . Most of the people who had kidnapped or tortured them were free. . . . It was a great and brave thing to go and be a witness in that trial.
It was a great and brave thing to go and be a witness in that trial.
For me, when I decided how to shoot the film, how to shoot the recreation, it was clear I needed to show the faces — the faces that we could not see for forty years, so we could imagine the pain and the anger, and how difficult it was for the witnesses to sit there and talk to society in Argentina for the first time. But at the same time I had these tapings of the trial in my head all the time, so I told my director of photography, Javier Juliá, that we should also bring a U-matic camera, which was the same [type of video] camera that was used for the broadcasting of the trial. So, while we were doing our scenes, we were building U-matic shots in the exact same angle where the cameras in the original trial were put. We were making a sort of fake archive. We could do our shot and then cut to one U-matic camera, and from the U-matic camera we went to fragments of the original trial. So, during the trial we were doing that all the time, going from our shot to a U-matic shot to an archival shot.
For me, it was very important, because I wanted to be so precise in the reconstruction of the trial. You can see that we are going from ’85 to our reenactment of this trial, and it goes very fluidly. Because to talk about this trial is not to talk only about this trial. I wanted to talk about this moment of the world and the society in Argentina, also. It was a way of going back and forward in time, the way we designed with my editor [Andrés Pepe Estrada].
Ed Rampell
Prosecutor Julio César Strassera’s closing argument at the end of Argentina, 1985 is the best anti-fascist speech I’ve seen in the cinema since Charlie Chaplin’s grand finale in 1940’s The Great Dictator.
Santiago Mitre
Those were his exact words. We had to tighten it up because it was a lot longer, of course. All the fragments that Ricardo Darín [the actor playing Strassera] is saying are exactly the words that Strassera used. Somebody on the internet edited both [speeches] together. You go from Strassera to Ricardo, and it’s amazing.
Ricardo was very clever in his decision; he never wanted to copy Strassera. He wanted to understand what Strassera was going through — Strassera’s fears, courage, and responsibility — through his [Ricardo’s] own sensitivity and try to live the things as if they were his own moments to bring this back to life. He didn’t want to watch too many tapes of Strassera, so as not to copy him. But at some point, when we watched this thing somebody did on the internet, editing one with the other, our picture of Strassera and the real Strassera — they’re exactly the same. It was one of these magical things that sometimes happens in cinema that are incredible.
Ed Rampell
What role did young people play in the prosecution?
Santiago Mitre
For me, it was the key to the whole thing. When I was doing the research and I was working on the ideas of the film, I came to that. Luis Moreno Ocampo [portrayed by Peter Lanzani], the real one, explained to me the context of the people who were working in justice at the moment, who were not wanting to participate in the trial, because they were afraid another coup d’état would happen, because they were part of the dictatorship, or because they were named [appointed] under the dictatorship, so they were sort of supporters.
So, [the prosecution] didn’t have time, they needed to go quick, so he came to the idea of bringing the lower ranks, who were almost twenty-year-old lawyers, or not even lawyers — they were working in the justice [department] to help. And for me it was my turning point where I realized that this is a film that is going to be a strong political intervention on these days, because you see so many young people embracing undemocratic speeches or seeming to disbelieve in democracy because they have been living in democracy all of their lives and forget how hard it was for Argentina and many countries to go back to democracy. It’s painful to see twenty-year-old or eighteen-year-old people, teenagers, with right-wing speeches.
I realized that this is a film that is going to be a strong political intervention on these days.
So, I wanted, with this film, to talk directly to younger generations who are forgetting how difficult it was to come back from the dictatorship and how important it is to defend democracy. It’s something so relevant these days, because we are seeing it everywhere: so many attempts to prevent democracy from happening.
Ed Rampell
What role did journalists play during the trial?
Santiago Mitre
That’s a very good question. It was something very interesting. Because of course, during the dictatorship the media was controlled by the dictators. So, the journalists, those who knew what was going on, did not talk a lot because they could be killed or disappeared. So, it was difficult how to spread the news. They did it through other countries, mainly, the ones who did it.
The biggest part of society did not know much until we went back to democracy. Then the trial, which lasted six months, was every day in the newspapers, on the news radio, on the TV, so it was like an awakening for a society that did not want to see the awfulness of the dictatorship during its rule. The trial was an awakening for a society to understand how awful what happened in Argentina was. It built what continues this democratic tradition we’re having now since ’83.
Ed Rampell
What’s next for you?
Santiago Mitre
Well, I’ve been on a rollercoaster. We showed the film for the first time in August at the Venice Film Festival. I’m doing lots of presentations in many places in the world, which have been so interesting. Now it’s like our last part of this experience with this film — the Oscars. So, I will enjoy this and then after that I will start to think on what to do next and what to start to write again. I’m a writer, so I enjoy my solitude a lot, and I want to go back to it. But also, this is a great experience and I want to enjoy it. It will not last a lot longer.
Ed Rampell
Good luck at the Oscars.
Santiago Mitre
Thank you very much.
Argentina, 1985 is available worldwide on Amazon Prime.
PUTRAJAYA, Feb 23 — The Aboriginal Peoples Act 1954 (Act 134) will be amended by improving legal aspects involving land ownership as well as the registration of marriages and the birth of Orang Asli children, said Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.
Ahmad Zahid, who is also the Rural and Regional Development Minister, there was a need to amend the act, which will be tabled in the Dewan Rakyat soon.
“This amendment is needed because there are some constraints, especially in terms of land ownership among the Orang Asli and they need to be given legal rights to village areas and permanent land ownership.
“There are also constraints from the National Land Code and legislation that are ‘related to’ matters on land affairs involving state governments. With this amendment, cooperation between the federal government and state government will be established,” he told a media conference after visiting the Department of Orang Asli Development (Jakoa), here, today.
He said the element of marriage registration is also included in the amendment since most Orang Asli are faced with the problem of marriage documentation due to customary marriage, which results in their children not having a valid citizenship certificate.
“The Orang Asli community needs to be given equal opportunities to protect their interests and, for that, the government is very committed to implementing any development for them,” he said.
As for educational opportunities, Ahmad Zahid said it should be provided until the highest educational level, with 300 Orang Asli children targeted to enter university this year.
“To achieve this goal, motivational programmes and extra classes will be implemented because if they are given tertiary education, they can at least bring changes to their own families,” he said.
He said that the Orang Asli Economic Development Secretariat was formed today, with Deputy Speaker of the Dewan Rakyat Datuk Ramli Mohd Nor, who is also an Orang Asli, appointed as chairman and Jakoa as the secretariat.
He said that smart partnerships will also be carried out with any company or private party to implement corporate social responsibility programmes in the Orang Asli villages.
Currently, there are 209,000 Orang Asli communities nationwide. — Bernama
This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems, and appears here with permission. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
This is the end of the world: el fin del mundo, as the tourist brochures dub it; Tierra del Fuego, as it is known more universally; and home, as the Indigenous Yaghan people have called it for much of the past 8,000 years and probably longer.
The southernmost tip of South America is a jagged splay of islands, as if a careless god dropped a dinner plate. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet here and the match is pitilessly stormy. The weather is mercurial—rain, hail, snow, and sun can beat the land within the span of an hour—but, on this summer’s day in February, it is sunny, warm, and windless. Kelp gulls natter, waves lap against a rocky islet, and a coppery tang—a blend of marine snails and algae—wafts across the reef where I’m helping gather limpets, scraping them off rough stones along the Beagle Channel.
Bucket full, I head off in José German González Calderón’s rowboat, in search of his crab pots. I am on the starboard oar, photographer Kat Pyne is on the port, and González Calderón watches our flailing from his seat at the stern with an expression that flits between willed neutrality and bemusement. Feofeo, his fluffy white dog, sits in the prow. Feofeo, Spanish for uglyugly, is cutecute and staring at us.
González Calderón, 58, solidly built, with a full head of gray-dusted hair, teases us: “Feofeo is bored; we are going too slowly.”
Everyone’s a critic.
González Calderón was, until recently, not supposed to exist—because he is Yaghan. Like the Palawa in Tasmania, the Sinixt in Canada, and the Karankawa in the United States, the Yaghan have the dubious distinction of coming back from the dead, their extinction declared by outsiders—Europeans and their descendants—for over a century.
Despite thousands and thousands of years of history, the story of the Yaghan, and other Indigenous cultures, has often emphasized one moment: the disastrous meeting with Europeans. And that’s what drives me here, an irritation that across the Americas, popular culture has focused relentlessly on that one point in time, and though significant, it’s like writing a badly abridged version of a multilayered story. A deeper truth lies buried, rich with a diversity of characters spanning time and place.
For the past few decades, archaeologists have been digging past the narrative told by European adventurers and chroniclers, those who killed some Yaghan, stole some, converted some to Christianity, and declared them all gone. They are searching the landscape more broadly than previous excavators, reinterpreting decades’ worth of data, and opening their minds to the evidence before them. They are unearthing in greater and greater detail a counter-narrative centered on the longevity and tenacity of the Yaghan—on how they went about making Tierra del Fuego, now split between Argentina and Chile, their home as the millennia spooled past. Joined with the oral histories of a proud and increasingly assertive Yaghan community, the archaeology aids in a people’s resurrection.
The story lies in the present, too. González Calderón has invited us to spend a couple of days with him on Navarino Island, a part of Yaghan territory, which once stretched across parts of Tierra del Fuego, practically to the tip of South America. The island, part of Chile today, has been Yaghan territory for thousands of years and it’s where most of the Indigenous community still lives.
Still high in the sky, the sun shimmers off the water as we land the rowboat at Bahía de Mejillones, Bay of Mussels. The bay looms large in Yaghan history. Shell middens—heaps of mostly mussel and limpet shells—dot the beach, extending meters deep. Standing vigil is the home of the bay’s last full-time Yaghan inhabitant, Benito Sarmiento, who, in the 1960s, resisted when the Chilean government moved the community and others of the archipelago to the outskirts of the island’s only sizable town: Puerto Williams, population 2,000, an hour’s drive east. Today, a few Yaghan keep cabins in Bahía de Mejillones, but they only visit. Sarmiento lived alone in the cove until his death in the 1970s. Sarmiento’s home, they say, serves as a reminder that the people will return.
González Calderón’s one-room yellow cabin perches on a hill above the road. The Argentine city of Ushuaia, across the Beagle Channel—called Onashaga by the Yaghan—seems like an easy canoe ride away, and we joke about paddling to the Irish pub there for a beer. The only drama comes from the mainland mountains in the distance, the jagged tail of the Andes, high enough to mistake for the ramparts of heaven. A light that evokes something divine reflects off ice saddled between the ridgeline’s stony spires.
We chat and gaze across the channel. González Calderón scrapes the limpets from their shells, chops seaweed, and adds some vegetables packed for the trip into a pot to make soup. It has a lovely saltiness that only the ocean can impart, and every once in a spoonful, a little smiley face, a limpet, peers up in seeming disbelief through strands of seaweed.
González Calderón’s mother, Úrsula Ercira Calderón Harban, was born in Bahía de Mejillones in 1923, and he spent his early years on nearby Mascart, a small island across from a bay where the Yaghan massacred missionaries in the 19th century. Úrsula died in 2003. Her sister Cristina Calderón Harban remained as the matriarch of the community on Navarino Island until she died, age 93, this past February. She lived surrounded by family in Villa Ukika, the Yaghan village skirting Puerto Williams. Cristina wove baskets, told stories, and kept the Yaghan language alive.
As we sit and sip soup, a friend of González Calderón’s, Jaime Ojeda, a Chilean marine ecologist, tells me that Cristina was sick of journalists. Ojeda has known the Calderón family since 2008, when he lived on Navarino Island, researching seaweed and mollusks for his master’s thesis. He arranged this trip to Bahía de Mejillones. Cristina, Ojeda says, had to endure endless requests for interviews and ersatz stories of her fashioned by outsiders: the last speaker of a language, the last to remember a dead way of life, the last of the “true” Yaghan. This broken “last of” narrative sticks like gum to a shoe, embedded in the sole. Even tourists sought out Cristina, hoping for a last-chance-to-see moment they could post on social media.
The Yaghan past is present everywhere on Navarino Island, in the shell middens, in the bounty of the ocean, in the animals and mountains that feature in stories, in a carefully curated museum, and in the people themselves. But in today’s currency of words and pictures, the tourists seemed to want to capture Cristina as the embodiment of an ancient people. They wanted her to validate the stories that Eurocentric voyeurs spun of exaggeration, assumption, insularity, and willful ignorance. It’s a faulty narrative that began in 1519.
Ferdinand Magellan sails from Spain in that year, across the Atlantic and through a strait at the tip of South America into the Pacific, the first European to do so. When he reaches the southern tip of South America, smoke blankets the shoreline. Magellan names it the Land of Smoke, Tierra del Humo. He sails on. The king of Spain, however, declares that where there is smoke there is fire, and renames the land the catchier Tierra del Fuego. The name—encapsulating a brief moment, a scene misunderstood and little contemplated—sticks.
Almost 60 years later, after weeks bashing around the Southern Ocean, storm-tossed sailors of the Golden Hind, captained by English privateer Francis Drake, spot a bay. People materialize out of the bush. A priest onboard scribbles notes about canoes filled with men and women paddling from island to island, children wrapped in skins hanging on their mothers’ backs. The canoes are marvelous, he writes.
And so begins the journaling or, in anthropology-speak, the ethnography. Written mostly by white male Europeans in English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Spanish, the number of words spilled on the Yaghan is astounding. The Europeans are by turns admiring and dismissive, but mostly they’re obtuse.
The Dutch arrive as early as 1616. In February 1624, eager to engage in battle against the Spanish Armada in Peru—apparently a necessary step toward world domination—they park their fleet in various bays of islands south of Navarino Island. In one, where five ships anchor, sailors row to shore in search of water and firewood. After they fail to return, their compatriots find five corpses and two survivors on the beach. Another 12 sailors are missing. The Yaghan have dispatched them with spears and bows and arrows. The Europeans label the Yaghan cannibals, a calumny that will dog them for 250 years.
The Europeans label the Yaghan cannibals, a calumny that will dog them for 250 years.
The decades tick by, with visits from Englishman Captain James Cook in 1769 and 1774. He calls the region’s people “a little, ugly, half-starved beardless Race,” sprinkles their territory with the name Desolation—as in Cape and Island—yet gushes about the rich marine life, particularly whales and seals. Soon after, the first whaling boat sails around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean and sperm whale territory. Legendary tangles with that species—perhaps the most difficult whale to capture—become the inspiration for Moby-Dick. Whale oil fuels the Industrial Revolution. Exploration fuels exploitation.
The Europeans steal people, bring them back to Europe, display them or try to civilize them, then return them home. On his first voyage to Tierra del Fuego in the late 1820s, Captain Robert FitzRoy penetrates Onashaga, the channel at the heart of Yaghan territory, in his brig-sloop, the Beagle: the Beagle Channel will thereafter carry that naval vessel’s name. FitzRoy absconds with four people—Fuegians, he called them—and brings them to England. One dies.
On his second voyage, in 1831, FitzRoy returns with the three surviving Fuegians and a young Charles Darwin, who approves of the manners the trio have gained living as the English do—in boarding schools. Their English names are Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and York Minster. Their names are Orundellico, Yokcushlu, and Elleparu. The Yaghan Darwin meets on Navarino Island, in contrast, revolt him. The man whose keen observations and open mind launch a scientific revolution writes, “They are such thieves & so bold Cannibals that one naturally prefers separate quarters.” Darwin is not fine hobnobbing with his Fuegian shipmates’ relatives. He thinks they eat their grandmothers.
Europeans are Energizer bunnies, nothing deters them: not months spent on cramped wooden sailing ships, not treacherous seas, not bad weather, bad food, or risk of death. They keep coming. As in zombie movies, the plot never changes, only the actors. European explorers come and go—the way dream monsters do—and their impermanence makes them manageable. Next up? Missionaries in search of heathens. Cue the low note of doom, an ominous hint that life, for the Yaghan, will now change dramatically. God can throw anyone’s universe into chaos.
Until now, the Yaghan are masters of their fate. Fires keep them warm—on land and in their bark canoes—and so probably does the sea mammal fat smeared on their skin. They paint their bodies with red ocher, black charcoal, and white clay. Clothes—seal-skin capes, loincloths—are minimal. The land gifts them tall, straight trees, southern beech that they strip of bark to craft canoes. The ocean offers endless bounty: sea urchins, mussels, limpets, cormorants, penguins, fur seals, sea lions. Sometimes the sea bestows more than any one tribe can wish for—a whale beaches itself, an opportunity broadcast through smoke signals to neighbors. Kindness and generosity are virtues. Uplifting oral histories guide the living with takeaways like “courage conquers all” and “the impossible is made possible.” Spirituality embraces the nonhuman world: to mock animals and water spirits is dangerous. And as we all might be, the Yaghan are suspicious of hairy men living without women.
But by the mid-19th century, a Christian organization in England, having heard the Yaghan are docile and untarnished by popish priests, raises funds to send a mission to convert them. Saving souls is a competitive Christian practice. An early mission, composed of seven men, starves to death, though not before killing a few Yaghan. Later, on Navarino Island, the Yaghan massacre an all-male mission. Subsequent efforts to convert the people succeed, especially when the missionary Thomas Bridges, who became fluent in the language, takes over and brings his wife to Yaghan territory on what will become the Argentinian side of the Beagle Channel.
With the mission comes the Argentine navy, a declaration of Argentine sovereignty, and the measles. In 1888, the Bridges family witnesses an epidemic that nearly wipes out the Yaghan. In a memoir, Uttermost Part of the Earth, Thomas’s son Lucas writes: “They were a dying race, who seemed to know it.”
Once ringing, there’s no stopping the death knell.
Martin Gusinde, an Austrian priest and ethnologist, visits four times between 1918 and 1924. He establishes relationships with the people, particularly Nelly Calderón Lawrence, an ancestor of González Calderón, and dives into the culture—the Yaghan museum on Navarino Island bears his name—describing rituals and mythology in danger of being extinguished along with the language. Gusinde estimates a population of roughly 70 and he, too, falls into the notion that the people will soon cease to be.
In 1934, a former US ambassador to Chile announces the Yaghan “all but vanished.” In 1977, in a bestselling book, In Patagonia, English writer Bruce Chatwin declares he has met the last Yaghan, Grandpa Felipe. In 1986, a Chilean journalist publishes a book about a Yaghan elder, Rosa Yagan: The Last Link.
The written record, centuries deep, becomes the narrative, limited and blinkered by the lens of a vastly different culture. There is a different story. Or, more precisely, stories.
In Argentina, across the Beagle Channel from Navarino Island, within an hour of my arrival at an archaeology dig a couple of weeks before my visit with Gonzáles Calderón, the weather alternates between rain, sun, and hail. Less sheltered than the bay on Navarino Island, wind is a constant companion here.
A white tent covers a large rectangular hole a bit bigger than two average-sized parking spaces, a four-meter-by-eight-meter archaeology excavation. A grid made from string overlays the dig and divides the site into 32 square meters. Archaeologists crouch before the squares, using trowels to scrape away a thin layer of dirt, depositing the soil into buckets. I grab a full bucket and empty it on a screen laid across sawhorses outside the tent. Next, I scoop water from an algae-ringed pond and splash it on the screen, sieving out the dirt until only rocks remain, some of them artifacts. A practiced eye can tell the difference.
This is gumboots, rain pants, and slicker work: one bucket of water thrown on a screen with one bucket of dirt equals one mud pie. The smell, however, is sophisticated: peaty Scotch with a hint of manure.
While the roughly 100 Yaghan alive today continue to assert their place in the here and now, archaeologists are in pursuit of a deeper and broader story of their ancestors who made the land and sea their home since possibly as far back as the end of the last ice age. Atilio Francisco Zangrando and Angélica Tivoli from the Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CADIC) in Ushuaia, the Argentinian capital of Tierra del Fuego, lead the archaeology team. They also hope to dig past the oldest date recorded for the Yaghan in the Beagle Channel—almost 8,000 years before present.
Francisco Zangrando and Tivoli met at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1999 and have worked together as colleagues since 2010 at CADIC. Physically, they are a study in contrasts. Francisco Zangrando is tall and broad, gray speckles his curly black hair, glasses frame his eyes; Tivoli is petite, with fine features and blond hair. But they both wanted to be archaeologists from the time they were kids in the 1980s and read a newspaper feature about the “canoe people” and the archaeologists who were beginning to unearth their story.
The story that captured the imaginations of Tivoli and Francisco Zangrando was of an ancient people so well adapted to their environment that they thrived for 6,000 years, until the arrival of Europeans, relying on a simple toolkit and a stable seafood diet. They fashioned harpoons and spears to hunt sea lions, fur seals, and fish. They danced their canoes across the Beagle Channel, gathering mussels and limpets, creating jewelry from shells and bones. They buried their dead.
The article explained that the story was being revealed, since 1975, by archaeologists Luis Abel Orquera and Ernesto Luis Piana. Anywhere along the Beagle Channel that a canoe can land, the archaeologists found heaps and heaps of shell middens. They excavated many, finding well-preserved animal bones, blades, harpoons, and jewelry. In scores of papers in English and Spanish, the archaeologists rewrote the centuries-old Eurocentric narrative of the Yaghan, whom the researchers dubbed the canoe people.
Tivoli tucked away the story. Francisco Zangrando, age 11, had other ideas. At dinner one night—and it’s night, not evening: Argentinians dine at 10:00 p.m. or later—Francisco Zangrando tells the team at base camp the story about his introduction to archaeology. Base camp—where the team sleeps, eats, and banters—is a disintegrating ranch house, maybe 100 meters from the excavation. The ranch was once home to the Lawrences, a missionary family that arrived in Tierra del Fuego in the late 1800s, along with the Bridges. Serving the beef he just cooked over a wood fire on a brick grill—traditional Argentine asado—Francisco Zangrando explains that his 11-year-old self simply found Luis Abel Orquera’s name and address in the phone book and cold-called him.
Orquera invited the boy to visit the university. He went, with his father, and told the archaeologist he wanted to participate in an excavation. Orquera suggested he wait, but keep in touch. They met again during Francisco Zangrando’s first year at university. The day he turned 21, in 1998, Francisco Zangrando realized his boyhood dream, excavating a shell midden along the Beagle Channel.
Tivoli deadpans: “I was a normal child.”
As PhD candidates in the early 2000s, Francisco Zangrando and Tivoli dug deeper into their dream work and began to wonder if archaeology had a vision problem. In the 1970s, when Orquera and Piana had first launched into uncovering the Yaghan’s ancient past, colonial culture was starting to crumble, yielding to an era of relative inclusiveness. The Yaghan excavations, from the start, were about laying aside old European narratives, looking for material clues, and interpreting the past based on hard evidence. But the evidence came only from shell middens concentrated along the sheltered central part of the Beagle Channel’s shoreline.
For Tivoli and Francisco Zangrando, that lens has become too small, the framing too focused. The portrait of a place and its people, though vigorously reimagined through 50 years of archaeology, has largely remained static, like those old black-and-white photographs snapped in colonies around the world of grim-faced Indigenous people posing in traditional dress or settlers displaying their Sunday-best clothes. It’s tempting to ascribe people traits based on a few moments frozen in time, to build a narrative from the documentation in hand and forget that life is a messy enterprise and parts of it elude our shovels and trowels.
The Yaghan’s past as well-adapted canoe people is celebrated thanks to archaeology, but the arc of the story is still slightly off. Not wrong, it’s just that we are reading one chapter in a series of books with many missing volumes. And this is one reason for the dig here by the Lawrences’ former house—a ranch called Estancia Moat (pronounced “moe-aught”). It’s different from all the other sites along the protected Beagle Channel: it’s not a shell midden atop a hummock, but rather a muddy flat on the coastline edging eastward into the stormy Atlantic Ocean.
Finding the site at Estancia Moat in the first place took a fresh perspective, a new set of eyes. In 2014, Hein Bjartmann Bjerck, a Norwegian archaeologist working with Francisco Zangrando and Tivoli’s team, excavating shell middens near the ranch, went for a stroll. The day was mostly sunny and, as usual, windy. Bjerck climbed a drumlin, one of the hills that look like giant, half-buried eggs. Drumlins, formed below retreating glaciers in a warming world, speckle the landscape all along the Beagle Channel. Bjerck, however, was looking beyond the shell middens; he was thinking like a Norwegian.
In Norway, shell middens are rare—early people probably relied on fish, not shellfish—so archaeologists look for other clues to potential dig sites. Their gaze goes deep, seeking what is hidden. Bjerck scanned the ocean, the ranch house, and another little house closer to the water, where gauchos live and work. Both houses sit on a plain. Before the glaciers melted and the land—relieved of the icy weight—rebounded, sea levels were higher: Bjerck reasoned that water would have lapped over the plain, creating a shallow bay and beach, a reliable harbor sheltered by the drumlin.
At the base of the drumlin, gauchos had dug holes for fence posts. Bjerck walked down and ran his fingers through the piles of dirt and found some flakes from the manufacture of stone tools. He dug his own hole, then a test pit, and found a lot more flakes. The archaeologists eventually dated the pit’s charcoal layers—probably an ancient hearth—to reveal people on the landscape over 5,000 years ago. Not earlier than 8,000 years ago—Tivoli and Francisco Zangrando’s holy grail—but it was intriguing precisely because it came from a site that was not embedded in a shell midden. Perhaps it would tell a different story? The alkaline nature of shells is fantastic for preservation of organic matter, but focusing on shell middens skews the data: it’s like describing modern lives based on what’s found in the kitchen, missing the piano in the living room, the books on the shelves, or the bicycles in the basement. Bjerck’s pit marked a fresh start.
The archaeologists eventually dated the pit’s charcoal layers to reveal people on the landscape over 5,000 years ago.
“As soon as we started to work with Hein [Bjerck],” Tivoli says, “we started to develop this different way of looking at the landscape and searching.”
On this project, it meant looking beyond middens and into the muck of Estancia Moat.
A few of us take a break to climb the drumlin that rises from the muck. We dig a test pit at the top, in a shell midden. People congregated on drumlins: think of it as building a community hall at the top of a hill—the view is excellent and water drains away. Drumlins were also good lookouts, Tivoli says, and Indigenous communities would light fires at the top to send smoke signals to each other. A stranded whale was an event to be shared with neighbors. So too, probably, was the appearance of an enormous wooden boat.
A warm north wind picks up, and we peel off jackets and sweaters. The archaeologists set up a one-by-one-meter square, then cut away its mat of vegetation, setting it aside. Next come trowels. Within 30 seconds, limpet shells pop out. Soon after, we uncover cormorant bones, a penguin wing bone, a marine mammal backbone, a mother lode of bones from guanacos (wild camelids), and stone flakes.
“A penguin bone, that is so great,” Iain McKechnie, a visiting archaeologist from coastal British Columbia, says in wonderment. His BC sites release stone flakes, hearths, and tiny fish bones. Yet he scoffs at the midden-ites who fail to move their archaeology beyond the shell heaps. Over lunch and dinner, McKechnie has been exclaiming, “Sites before shell middens!” A mantra perhaps, or a watchword embodying a guiding principle for archaeologists: get out of the shell midden and get dirty. Nicole Smith, a Canadian archaeologist married to McKechnie, laughs, and in the kindest way, rolls her eyes.
Excavating shell middens, as satisfying as it may be, has another vexing issue: the bottom is not necessarily the bottom.
Smith understands a shell midden’s limitations; she has spent years excavating them on Haida Gwaii, off Canada’s northwest coast, where the Haida people have lived since at least the end of the last ice age. “There are layers below middens in Haida Gwaii where it looks as if the carbonate dissolved,” Smith says. Earth eats shell: groundwater is so acidic that over hundreds or thousands of years, shells decompose. On Canada’s west coast, there are thousands of shell middens, she acknowledges, but the oldest sites are not found within them. “That’s the problem of these old dates below shell middens, with no shells around,” she says. “The shells dissolved perhaps, but why is there shell midden above? Does a certain amount of accumulation need to happen before it’s preserved? Or is it a time factor? Eventually, will the whole midden disappear, too?”
The two oldest dates along the Beagle Channel—and the second- and third-oldest dates for Tierra del Fuego as a whole—come from the bottom of shell middens excavated during that 1998 dig, and by Orquera and Francisco Zangrando between 2010 and 2013. Dated to around 8,000 and 7,000 years before present, these bottom layers have yielded few artifacts but include tools found nowhere else in Tierra del Fuego: beveled and polished basalt chisels and unusually shaped projectile points. The archaeologists found some poorly preserved bones, too, which may belong to sea lion and guanaco. The people who left these artifacts appear to have been landlubbers, without the harpoons or spear points canoe people relied on to hunt fur seals and sea lions or fish from boats. Above those finds, the shell midden begins, revealing the rich narrative of the canoe people and the blades, harpoons, and jewelry that flesh out the picture of prosperous seafaring communities, so well adapted that they changed little over 6,000 years. Those two older dates are mystifying, though—where do they fit into the story? What are the archaeologists missing?
Archaeologists contemplate evidence while keeping in mind that they have no idea what they have not found. The absence of evidence, they know, is not evidence. Take, for example, dog bones. Never have archaeologists excavated a dog bone in Tierra del Fuego, Francisco Zangrando says. But the Yaghan had dogs. They appear in Yaghan stories. Anthropologists reported dogs, too, and considering that it takes time to domesticate a canid species, the Yaghan could have started doing so long before the 16th century. One stuffed specimen in a regional museum has yielded DNA suggesting that a native fox species gave rise to Yaghan dogs.
Climbing out of a shell midden, where a scientist is almost guaranteed to find artifacts and animal remains, and descending into a pit that could muddy the research—like those earliest dates that bestow no answers, just more questions—takes some coaxing. “Our team has been doing archaeology for the last 45 years but focused too much on shell midden formation,” Francisco Zangrando says. Shell middens have yielded a bias, he believes, that overweights practices of the past few millennia, restrains the research geographically, and possibly ignores the beginnings of human activity in Tierra del Fuego. When did people adapt to a maritime lifestyle? What lured them into the sea?
So the muddy flat at Moat is welcome for the information it may yield about a past more distant than shell middens tend to reveal. But Moat’s geography is another reason the team is excited about it: this is the oldest date and non-midden site found so far in a sort of no man’s land of excavation, between the sheltered central Beagle Channel and Peninsula Mitre, which juts like the turned-up toe of an elfin boot into the Atlantic. A cloud, one that obscures a clear view of the past, still lurks over the peninsula, as it does over a lot of sites in Tierra del Fuego: the written historical record has an almost insurmountable lead over the archaeology record. European chroniclers arrived in the 16th century, archaeologists not until the late 20th century.
Peninsula Mitre is the kind of place that most people visit by browsing Google Earth or by watching a surfing video. A boundary peculiar to our time—a reliance on specific tools, such as electricity, combustion engines, even lighter fluid—keeps people away. Not a lot of archaeologists have visited the peninsula. An anthropologist, Anne Chapman, hiked through in the 1960s and early 1970s, collecting artifacts from shell middens along the shoreline. In the 1980s, a few archaeologists dug into a few beaches. But mostly the story, until recently, has rested on historical accounts. From the writings of Gusinde—the Austrian ethnologist—and Chapman, we know something about the people who lived there: the Selk’nam, a land-based society, and the Haush, who tuned into land and sea.
Flavia Morello is an archaeologist at the University of Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile. She’s excavated shell middens on Navarino Island and along the Strait of Magellan, over 200 kilometers north of the Beagle Channel. She is of the same cohort as Francisco Zangrando and Tivoli; she, too, has been questioning the orthodoxy of earlier studies of the Yaghan and other Fuegians. The tyranny of ethnography has a lot to do with narrowing researchers’ vision, she believes.
“In Tierra del Fuego, the first thing they teach you as a student: if you have a shell midden, they are marine hunter-gatherers, and if you have mainly guanaco, you have terrestrial hunter-gatherers,” she says. “But there are so many instances of mixing.” Like the Haush.
On Peninsula Mitre, the Haush were both terrestrial and maritime, and they never fit tidily into anybody’s model, Morello says. Looking at the land- and seascape, why would they? The Atlantic Ocean pounds against the shoreline; it’s windier and less sheltered than the Beagle Channel. Geographically, it would make sense to shuttle from shoreline to the protection of the forests. The Haush hugged the peninsula coastline, hunting guanaco at the inland reaches of their territory and catching seal and sea lion along the rocky shore, no boat necessary. The Selk’nam were spread from the Strait of Magellan to Haush territory, living mostly inland, mostly hunting guanaco.
In the past couple of decades, archaeologists have been readjusting their perspectives on the tidy boundaries of who lived where and when. By pushing the geographic scope to Estancia Moat and the peninsula, Francisco Zangrando and his colleagues are zooming out, from a close-up of neighborhoods to a panoramic view of a whole region, and watching how people lived and interacted over time. About 10 years ago, they found traces of the Yaghan on the peninsula and beyond.
“We have a movement of the [canoe] people to the peninsula 2,700 years [ago],” Francisco Zangrando says. And more recently the team has found Yaghan harpoon points from the peninsula’s south coast dated to 5,000 years ago. “That is dynamic. It is something new. You don’t have one kind of hunter-gather here and another there.” The movement of the Yaghan was a big leap across the landscape that archaeologists had missed.
Once established on the peninsula, the Yaghan shove off from there, as well. They soon paddle to an island 30 kilometers across rough waters, presumably to reach the same animals they hunt and harvest on the peninsula and in the Beagle Channel: colonies of sea lions, fur seals, penguins, cormorants, albatrosses, and mussels. Why make the dangerous crossing, then? A warmer, drier climate may have weakened the prevailing westerly winds and made them more predictable.
On the peninsula, new archaeological digs and a re-examination of the evidence show people mixing it up. Information gets passed around the communities of the Beagle Channel and the peninsula. The people borrow ideas. They share knowledge. You can see it in their daily activities. Some 6,000 years ago, the people of the peninsula are decorating bone harpoon points with cruciform bases and beads with curved, rhythmic incisions. Over in classic canoe people territory, in the central Beagle Channel, the people are doing the same, decorating their harpoon points and beads. “It’s very nice decoration, very nice art, and it takes a lot of time,” Francisco Zangrando explains. “And then that kind of decoration disappears.” By 3,000 years ago, both on the peninsula and in the Beagle Channel, they’re done with art on harpoon points, and they drop the cross. They’re fashioning harpoon points with simple shoulder bases, a design they’re still using when Europeans arrive. Another technological change: they’re knapping stone—metamorphic rocks—instead of bone, into spear points.
Food preferences change, too. Across the region, people are mad about seals and sea lions some 6,000 years ago. Then 5,000 years ago, they’re still eating sea mammals but go big on guanacos and seabirds, and in the last 1,000 years, they’re more into fish. There’s no hint that, during that time, they depleted a resource and moved to the next. It seems a matter of preference: food fads. The people were anything but living a static existence for thousands of years—they created and adapted and shared information across time and space.
For millennia, interaction and information flow freely across the region between terrestrial people and marine people. They trade obsidian from hundreds of kilometers away on mainland Patagonia to the Beagle Channel, for a while, then there’s a gap, and obsidian reappears as a trade item in the north. When people trade, they talk. Remember that seemingly random Yaghan slaughter of 17 Dutch sailors back in 1624? Word had probably traveled from the Magellan Strait, over 200 kilometers away, to the Beagle Channel, about a massacre 25 years earlier: foreign sailors had killed as many as 40 people from the Selk’nam tribe. The Yaghan, in 1624, may have been warned to strike first or, as Captain FitzRoy surmised, they were taking revenge on behalf of their neighbors.
“We see the changes, but how you interpret those changes … none of us has the correct answer,” Morello says. “It’s just going to keep evolving forever.” It would be nice, she muses, if you could pick up the record and read archaeology as a book, from cover to cover. But if archaeology were a book, it would be one that had been dropped in a bathtub full of water: the pages would be fused together, and prying them open would destroy what you’re hoping to read. Archaeologists have to coax open their fragile book.
Mucky Estancia Moat is especially clumpy; the mud reveals so little, but it’s worth the effort. It’s a hinge point. Compared with the central parts of the Beagle Channel, the region is more exposed and more boisterous weather-wise, the mountains are lower, and the marine influence is stronger. But there is a trade-off. Before 5,000 years ago, Moat was mostly grassland, then as the climate changed, peat bogs and patches of evergreen forests colonized the land, resulting in a more guanaco-friendly landscape than the deciduous southern beeches used for canoe making. Moat River runs 50 kilometers from an interior valley to the coast, a path easily followed by all sorts of animals, including humans. That route made it “easier to interact between the coast and inland,” Francisco Zangrando says. Estancia Moat is on the shoreline, but the frequent hunting in the forests is evident from the guanaco bones littering the middens on top of the drumlins that surround the site, with dates ranging from 1,000 to 600 years ago.
There is a lot of hope riding on Estancia Moat. Will it reveal something new, something the shell middens cannot?
During a sunny moment on a summer day, an undergraduate student on his first dig unearths a palm-sized doughnut-shaped stone ring. More digging unearths three more doughnuts, one broken, within two square meters. Smith, McKechnie, and a visiting Norwegian archaeologist immediately identify that the stone doughnuts are probably weights for fishing nets, a technology ubiquitous around the world.
Finding them along the Beagle Channel is a first.
“The interesting thing is, it is not just one [stone ring],” Francisco Zangrando says. He’s leaning over, carefully brushing dirt from one of the doughnuts. “We have at least three or maybe four. So, wow. That gives you some kind of context for discussion.” Francisco Zangrando and Tivoli are unperturbed, even though it’s unusual to find a clutch of tools together as if they were just laid aside for a moment.
But the rings are also unusual for how they stand out from all the other stone artifacts unearthed here. If artifacts could vamp, these stone doughnuts, three still partly encased in their muddy tomb, are strutting—more glamorous than stone flakes, cracked hearth stones, and the charcoal from spent fires. “Look at us,” they might say.
But Francisco Zangrando won’t even say that the carved stones are definitively net weights, he’s all about data and hard evidence. “They could be some kind of net weight, yeah, why not? But we have to find a way to support that.”
Tivoli is circumspect, like Francisco Zangrando, as she picks one up for inspection. “The object was left behind for whatever reason, and it was on a beach, you can say that [about it].”
Yet imagination is part of the process, too, and I have no problem surmising: almost 5,000 years ago, someone held the stones—carved doughnuts—in his or her hands. The person’s family arrived in a canoe, perhaps, shouting for help as they pulled a heavy, dead fur seal out of the boat. The person set the stones down, hurried up the beach, and forgot about them.
As exciting as the stone doughnuts are, it is a discovery later—on the last day of the season’s excavation—that fills the team with hope: below the 5,000-year mark, at an older layer, they find a hearth, charcoal bits, and bone fragments, datable material. The ancient moment they’re searching for—a site older than the 8,000-year mark—just got closer.
The days on Navarino Island, across the channel, are sunnier and warmer than at the dig at Estancia Moat, with its influence from the Atlantic Ocean.
With González Calderón, we string a net across a natural fish trap on the beach and catch two robalo, the Patagonian blennie or rock cod. Sometimes, González Calderón says, he snags a salmon that strays from a fish farm hundreds of kilometers north, a reminder that boundaries are often imaginary and cultural. We’re fools to believe otherwise.
Ojeda, the marine ecologist, goes snorkeling for sea urchin, while the rest of us sit on the beach. We collect mint for tea and wood for a fire. We sit late around the fire, looking at the stars, eating dinner, chatting. In the middle of the night, awake in my tent, I hear voices, Ojeda and González Calderón, still talking.
But now it’s time to go. We drive to Puerto Williams, passing the Chilean naval base fronting the shoreline and crossing a bridge over the Ukika River into Villa Ukika, where candy-colored houses are sprinkled like confetti across an area smaller than a city block.
Most of the people who identify as Yaghan, including González Calderón, live there. They are Chilean citizens with jobs, families, and hopes for the future. Some are also basket weavers, foragers of traditional plants and seafoods—urchins, limpets, fish. They practice the Yaghan language. And they are activists. They protect their waters—Onashaga, the Beagle Channel. Most recently, they mounted a spirited opposition to the salmon farming industry’s bid to install net pens in the channel.
At a presentation at the Yaghan museum in Puerto Williams the next day, González Calderón, a former president of the Yaghan association on Navarino, and two other Indigenous leaders, a Yaghan from Ushuaia and a Selk’nam from Rio Grande on Peninsula Mitre, present on a number of issues touching on cross-cultural relations. About 30 people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, cram the room, some holding smartphones aloft. A camera crew records it all.
The leaders talk about their visit to Bayonne, France, for a cultural festival about Indigenous peoples, not an entirely successful trip. The re-creation of a sacred initiation ceremony by a couple of artists was insensitive. They couldn’t view the bones of their people, kept in a Nantes museum, during the trip, nor listen to recordings of an Indigenous elder they had hoped to hear. The three also talked about the marketing of their culture in Chile and Argentina—a beer named Yaghan, fridge magnets based on their art, street signs with images of an initiation ceremony—and how the border between the two countries, slicing through the Beagle Channel, has made it difficult to maintain relationships with each other.
For thousands of years, borders were more fluid. The Yaghan danced across the waves from bay to bay. They hunted, they fished, they traded with their landlubber neighbors, taxiing them across the channel when necessary. The European explorers wrote of seeing over 100 canoes. Today, traffic on the channel includes navy boats, cruise ships, private sailboats, and scientific expeditions, but no canoes: it’s easier to fly to Navarino Island from Punta Arenas, Chile, than to board an expensive ferry that caters to tourists from Ushuaia, Argentina.
As archaeologists begin to see the past more holistically—piecing together a story of highly mobile people living together, sharing knowledge across an archipelago stretching closer to Antarctica than any other landmass—they throw into relief the constraints that today’s artificial boundary imposes on the Yaghan and their neighbors. The political border restricts their way of being in the world—rooted but not fixed—and it must chafe. The point is: this is a dynamic place and a dynamic people. Once, they roamed far and wide. We put them in various boxes narratively, and governments put them in boxes geographically.
The Yaghan, though few in number today, never doubted their identity or their own existence. Their stories say this place has been home since before the glaciers melted some 9,000 years ago. But their metaphorical resurrection may be the story outsiders need the most. Perhaps the visitors who pestered Cristina did so in desperate hopefulness that she would reveal what belonging means and how to become anchored in a world of mass movement. The visitors can go anywhere, but do they belong anywhere? And if you don’t belong anywhere, how can you possibly feel an obligation to place or to your neighbors, human and nonhuman?
To truly belong, the Yaghan remind us, is to know your place on this Earth. Their creation stories tell them, over and over, nothing is free on the land and sea, they have to work hard to live in balance with the sacred world around them, and their reward is not an afterlife, it’s the unquantifiable, almost infinite generations of life.
While many radicals of the 1968 generation shifted to the right, French philosopher Alain Badiou maintained fidelity to the revolutionary communist project.
Alain Badiou speaking on May 5, 2016. (Wassilios Aswestopoulos / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
For leftists today, it’s common to regard the idea of communism with skepticism, or to view events like the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Paris Commune as failures. For French philosopher Alain Badiou, however, the fact that these moments of revolutionary upheaval did not absolutely overturn the status quo is no reason to discard them — or, for that matter, the idea of communism.
Badiou likens the communist project to a theory that mathematician Pierre de Fermat first proposed in the seventeenth century. In 1994, after three hundred years of failed attempts, English mathematician Andrew Wiles finally substantiated Fermat’s “Last Theorem.” For Badiou, the example is instructive: the communist hypothesis is true, even if it remains to be proved. “Failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis,” he writes, “provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.”
It’s this lifelong commitment to radical philosophy that marks Badiou out among intellectuals of his generation. In his youth, he interviewed philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jean Hyppolite, and Georges Canguilhem for a TV show L’Enseignement philosophique. Today, at eighty-five years of age, Badiou continues to interrogate the relationship between politics and philosophy with his monthly seminar series, which begun in 2021, titled “How to live and think in a time of absolute disorientation?”
Nevertheless, the Anglophone left has been slow to engage with Badiou’s thought, perhaps due to the demands he places on readers. But this is to overlook a philosopher who insists on reviving the idea of communism against the many who have “cheapened” it or who would rather communism be “sentenced to death.” Indeed, Badiou offers an example of what it is to live one’s politics in the most radical sense. He thinks and writes in the spirit of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong, and his chief contribution is a philosophy that defends the core tenets of revolutionary Marxism with unrivaled rigor.
Who Is Alain Badiou?
Badiou grew up in Morocco under French colonial occupation, a childhood that left him keenly aware of class inequality. In the 2018 documentary “Badiou,” he recalls noticing that white colonial women occupied the upper rooms of his family’s house, while the Arabic women who largely raised him lived below and worked in the kitchen.
A gifted student, when Badiou was nineteen, he enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure where he was taught by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. At the time, Althusser criticized Badiou’s approach to philosophy for what he called “Pythagorism,” that is, an overindulgence in mathematics. Readers of Badiou, however, will agree that this is a warning he didn’t heed. As Badiou later reflected, “as so often happens to the Master’s injunctions when the disciple is stubborn, I simply went on to make things worse for myself.”
After graduating, Badiou first became a high school teacher and later a lecturer in Reims, where he took part in the student and worker uprising of May 1968. Reflecting on this period, Badiou explains that it “breaks my life in two parts,” forming the impetus behind much of his later work.
When Badiou’s university in Reims joined the 1968 general strike, he marched alongside his students to the gates of the Chausson automotive factory, the largest local workplace to down tools. However, neither Badiou nor his students had a clear idea of what they would do when they arrived. Later, he reflected on the initial uncertainty that characterized the meeting between radical students and factory workers:
We approached the barricaded factory, which was decked with red flags, with a line of trade unionists standing outside the gates, which had been welded shut. They looked at us with mingled hostility and suspicion. A few young workers came up to us, and then more and more of them. Informal discussions got under way. A sort of local fusion was taking place. We agreed to get together to organize joint meetings in town.
Prior to this uprising, there had been little dialogue in France between working-class people and students because union representatives generally served as mediators between the two. The protests, however, created a newfound possibility for communication and collective action. Indeed, as Badiou recounted, factory-gate discussions like the one he and his students had initiated “would have been completely improbable, even unimaginable, a week earlier.”
Like the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution, this moment of resistance ultimately died down. Yet, Badiou insists that we must not consider it a failure. The lesson of 1968 is that there is a common politics that can unite student and working-class radicals and actualize the potential of joint resistance. As he would put it, we are “still contemporaries” of 1968, and indeed, the event had such an impact on Badiou that for the subsequent decade, he entered into a period of “no philosophy,” and instead dedicated himself to political action.
Rather than distance himself from the academic world, Badiou sought to bring political militancy to bear on it. So, he took a teaching position at Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis, which was founded in response to May 1968 and counted a number of radicals among its staff, such as philosopher Gilles Deleuze. While at the university, Badiou led several unorthodox protests aimed at countering ideas he regarded as conservative or elitist.
“I myself once led a ‘brigade,’” Badiou recounts, “to intervene in his [Deleuze’s] seminar.” This was not lost on Deleuze’s students, one of whom later recalled Badiou’s pupils “turning up with copies of Nietzsche and asking trick questions to try and catch [Deleuze] out.” Alternately, Badiou invoked the “people’s rule,” calling on students to leave Deleuze’s class in favor of a political protest or meeting. On these occasions, Deleuze would signal his resignation by raising his hat — a white flag of surrender — and placing it back on his head.
As Badiou explains in his monograph Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, he was concerned with the political import of Deleuze’s philosophy. Today, his methods of intervention have changed and he reflects on these youthful protests humorously. However, Badiou’s sentiment remains unchanged: one must be vigilant in thinking through the political implications of any given philosophical system taken to its limits.
In the Name of Truth
Badiou is a prolific writer, and in addition to many philosophical treatises, he has published plays, novels, and translations. He has also remained engaged with live political debates, publishing commentaries on the election of Donald Trump and the Yellow Vests movement, for example. However, the centerpiece of Badiou’s oeuvre is the Being and Event trilogy in which he pursues the main goal of his philosophy: to develop a theory of truths.
As Badiou notes, this project clashes with contemporary academic fashion, which frequently considers it gauche to speak earnestly of “truth.” Against this, Badiou argues that there are such things as truths — and they run contrary to the two dominant characterizations common to our times.
On the one hand, it is conventional to think of truths as relative, that is, as only being true within particular contexts and for certain communities, but not others. On the other, we might favor a notion of truth as singular or legislative. This approach upholds the idea that there is only one truth to which everyone must submit. The former, relative approach to truth, is common coin in undergraduate social or cultural studies programs, and is often associated with the liberal left. The latter, by contrast, is more commonly favored by those working in the hard sciences, or by certain religious or political movements that propose one spiritual truth or one national identity.
Both understandings of truth present problems. If truths are relative, we sacrifice any idea of universal truth, and are therefore forced to deny that we are united by shared ideas. Consequently, we have nothing but our differences. Conversely, if truths are universal, the challenge is to give an account for how they can be true for radically different peoples and contexts. And we must do this without inadvertently legitimating structures of oppression — like colonialism — that historically have used the language of universal truth to justify their violence.
By arguing that philosophy should be determined by politics, Badiou attempts to maintain the potential for political thought as such.
Badiou’s theory of truths attempts to resolve this tension by establishing truths as both universally applicable and particular to the local situation. Truths emerge in historically determinate events while also ringing true in times, geographical locations, and cultures outside the place of their emergence.
Importantly, truths shape and constitute the possibility of philosophy itself. Badiou insists that philosophy does not itself produce truths but must think through truths as they appear in art, science, love, and politics, which he terms the four “conditions.” Here we encounter one particularly valuable feature of Badiou’s schema vis-à-vis politics. By insisting that philosophy does not produce political truths, he ensures that philosophy doesn’t attempt to determine politics. Instead, by arguing that philosophy should be determined by politics, he attempts to maintain the potential for political thought as such.
What’s crucial for Badiou is that we learn to think in ways that do not follow from the existing situation of capitalist oppression. The fact that there is no clear example of a perfectly realized emancipatory politics makes this harder — but it doesn’t mean that the task Badiou sets us is impossible. However, the politics that we begin to construct cannot be based on pure conjecture, otherwise we are bound to fall into abstraction or tend toward fascism.
This is where philosophy can help us develop political alternatives, but only provided we maintain fidelity to a revolutionary sequence — such as 1968 — set in motion by real political events. In short, Badiou suggests that we avoid the twin dangers of relativism and abstraction by insisting that philosophy must follow from politics, as thought in action.
The Mathematics of Resistance
If Althusser was taken aback by Badiou’s emphasis on mathematics, what are we to make of it? Historically, it’s not uncommon for philosophers and theologians to attempt to think through mathematical problems like the nature of the infinite. However, the connection between mathematics and Marxist political action might seem obscure.
While Badiou does offer a philosophical argument that reconciles mathematics and politics, he’s clear that it’s not just a scholarly question. He points out that historically, many mathematicians have upheld fervent political convictions, and that their discipline has drawn them toward political life, not away from it. As an example, he points toward his father Raymond Badiou, a mathematician and enthusiastic member of the resistance against the Nazi occupation of France.
Badiou also writes about the more widely known mathematicians Albert Lautman and Jean Cavaillès, who were both killed for their anti-Nazi activism. For example, in 1942, disguised in nothing more than a boiler suit, Cavaillès broke into a German submarine base in Lorient. Although French police arrested and interned him, Cavaillès escaped later that year. In 1944, German counterintelligence arrested him again before he was eventually shot and buried in a grave marked “Unknown Man No. 5.”
Both Cavaillès and Badiou’s father explained that their choice to resist oppression was a necessary consequence of the mathematical logic to which they were committed. Indeed, it is worth noting that Cavaillès worked in the field of pure mathematics. He advocated for a methodology that divorced mathematical reflection from any notion of the subject and emphasized the potential internal to mathematics itself.
This is important for Badiou who, following Plato, argues that mathematics is the first point where logic demands that we break with opinion. He writes, “the essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists.”
The Event
This is to say, political truths cut through the proliferation of political debates and identities, offering an alternative to the prevailing social structure. Ruptures like these, in Badiou’s theoretical schema, are understood as “events.” An event is inherently challenging because it produces a new truth that goes beyond the geographic and historic conditions that gave rise to it.
Consequently, the task for radical philosophy is to discern between what is genuinely new and what recapitulates a version of the existing state of affairs under the guise of novelty. For instance, contrast the uprising of 1968 against the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The former created new forms of political action, broadening our horizon of possibility. The latter was a symptom and, ultimately, a repetition of the status quo.
Badiou’s point is that mathematics can provide us with resources for thinking through an event as it ruptures the dominant political order. Reduced to its simplest form, the question of politics is: How can we imagine and actualize a different situation to the one we are currently in? And from this, a further question flows: How can moments of resistance to oppression come to restructure society, beyond the often brief and chaotic moment of revolt?
For Badiou, these inquiries help us address all contemporary social and economic threats that result from capitalism by positing a higher, communist truth.
Because mathematics provides a mode of thinking according to axioms, philosophy informed by mathematics allows us to think at the point of what cannot be determined. This helps us answer the question: What do certain decisions allow? And how, by a series of inquiries into the unknown, might we begin to actualize an alternative to oppressive political realities?
For Badiou, these inquiries help us address all contemporary social and economic threats that result from capitalism by positing a higher, communist truth. Rather than “participate in the festivities of capital or roam aimlessly,” he calls on those with a commitment to philosophy to think the political truth of communism through to its consequences.
The result will be thought in action and the proof of a communist hypothesis that will have been true since its birth.
Cada amanecer, durante mi caminata cotidiana hacia los faldeos de los Andes, paso por el Aeródromo Tobalaba, un recinto que atiende a una amplia variedad de aviones privados. Para la mayoría de los vecinos de La Reina, el barrio de Santiago donde mi esposa y yo tenemos una casa, este es un espacio abierto, atractivo y benigno, en una ciudad congestionada, una garantía de que ningún rascacielos ha de borrar el horizonte. Para mí, en un año que marca el 50 aniversario del golpe contra el gobierno democráticamente elegido de Salvador Allende, ese aeropuerto despierta sentimientos menos afables.
Fue desde allí, pocas semanas después de la asonada militar del 11 de septiembre de 1973, que despegó un enorme helicóptero Puma, atiborrado de oficiales del ejército chileno en una misión que les encomendó el general Augusto Pinochet: asegurarse de que los partidarios de Allende que ya habían sido condenados a penas leves por tribunales militares locales en el sur y el norte del país fueran ejecutados sumariamente. Entre los 97 presos políticos ultimados por lo que se llegó a llamar la Caravana de la Muerte, se encontraba un amigo mío, un joven comunista llamado Carlos Berger.
Carlos y yo habíamos sido colegas en la Editorial del Estado, Quimantú, encargada de publicar revistas populares y millones de libros a precios muy bajos. Lo recuerdo guapo y serio y a veces travieso, pero sobre todo recuerdo su intenso compromiso con la revolución pacífica que Allende había inaugurado al ganar la presidencia en 1970. La última vez que nos vimos, Carlos me comunicó, con una emoción desbordante, que su esposa, Carmen Hertz, había dado a luz a un hijo, Germán, que crecería, agregó, en un país sin explotación, sin injusticia. El propio Carlos dejaba Santiago para dirigir una estación de radio en Calama, conocida como la Capital Minera de Chile. No podía saber que este traslado al Norte del país, significaría, a los treinta años de edad, su sentencia de muerte.
Pese a no haber ofrecido resistencia violenta al golpe, se le condenó a 70 días de reclusión, una sentencia que había sido conmutada por una multa. Estaba, entonces, a punto de ser liberado cuando llegó la Caravana de la Muerte en aquel helicóptero Puma, con un resultado letal: el 19 de octubre, a Carlos y a otros 25 presos políticos se los subió, encapuchados, a un camión que se perdió en los páramos del desierto de Atacama, donde les evisceraron las tripas con corvos antes de que los fusilaran a quemarropa. Los cadáveres mutilados fueron enterrados bajo las arenas anónimas de ese paraje, el más árido del mundo.
Años más tarde, esta tragedia cobraría nuevas víctimas. Los padres de Carlos, Julio y Dora, terminaron suicidándose. En cuanto a los restos de Carlos, su viuda Carmen tuvo que esperar hasta el 2014 para que se celebrara un simulacro de funeral, cuando científicos forenses identificaron algunos pequeños fragmentos humanos encontrados en una duna como pertenecientes al esposo desaparecido.
El año pasado, Carmen, una conocida activista de derechos humanos y ahora miembro del Congreso, copatrocinó una ley que financia la construcción frente a la entrada del Aeródromo de un Memorial que recuerda a los derechos humanos vulnerados en ese lugar. Porque no sólo fue el sitio desde donde partió la Caravana de la Muerte. Otros helicópteros Pumas fueron usados posteriormente para deshacerse de presos políticos que habían muerto en la tortura, echándolos al mar. Los militares les ataron vías de ferrocarril a los muertos, para que se hundieran en el Océano Pacífico y no pudieran sus cuerpos destrozados acusar a los asesinos. Una manera cruel y eficaz de que permanecieran eternamente “desparecidos”. Y por eso el monumento, austero e imponente, va a exhibir frente al Aeródromo una hilera de ramales alzados, clamando hacia el cielo contra los vuelos de muerte. Se espera que la ley, ya aprobada en la Cámara Baja (88 a favor, 49 en contra, 15 abstenciones – notemos estos números), sea ratificada pronto por el Senado.
Una manera más de recordar lo que sucedió y nunca más debe suceder.
No todos, sin embargo, están contentos con el Memorial. Un grupo de habitantes de La Reina ha iniciado una campaña para impedir que se levante el monumento. Están llenos de miedo, dicen, de que el sitio se transforme en punto de conflictos y disturbios. Las redes sociales advierten que fomentará la violencia, que turbas vendrán a pintar graffitis en las paredes, a construir barricadas, a saquear tiendas. Aunque no hay un solo caso de que semejante violencia se haya producido frente a los múltiples memoriales de derechos humanos diseminados lo largo del país, eso no ha disuadido a quienes sugieren que sería mejor trasladar el monumento a otra parte de la ciudad. ¿Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente?
Ni siquiera valdría la pena mencionar tales protestas en un solitario barrio chileno si no fuera representativo de algo más grave. Este intento de soliviantar a los ciudadanos contra un memorial para las víctimas de los derechos humanos es una escaramuza más en una batalla nacional más grande y prolongada por la memoria que se ha ido intensificando a medida que se acerca el 50 aniversario del golpe. La pregunta que los chilenos tendrán, inevitablemente, que responder a lo largo de este año es ¿cómo queremos recordar ese día de septiembre de 1973 cuando el Palacio Presidencial fue bombardeado y Salvador Allende murió junto con la democracia que defendía?
Hay dos respuestas principales a esa pregunta.
El gobierno del Presidente Gabriel Boric, un carismático ex líder estudiantil de treinta y siete años y ardiente admirador de Allende, está organizando una serie de actividades y conmemoraciones que culminarán el 11 de septiembre. El énfasis estará en la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos como una forma de garantizar un futuro donde una dictadura sea inconcebible, especialmente para las nuevas generaciones que no vivieron la interminable pesadilla de terror que sufrieron sus mayores. Lo fundamental, por lo tanto, es educar a jóvenes cada vez más escépticos de que la democracia pueda responder a sus frustraciones y ansias.
Hay mucho que está en juego.
Como tantos países del mundo, Chile se encuentra en crisis. El crimen desenfrenado, las oleadas de inmigrantes, la inseguridad económica, la sequía y los incendios forestales, la polarización política, el odio casi ambiental, son terreno fértil para el surgimiento del populismo autoritario, nutrido por una nostalgia de los días en que un hombre fuerte gobernaba Chile y había orden en las calles. Para vacunar contra nuevas formas de tiranía, no basta con recordar las atrocidades del pasado, las vías del ferrocarril que nos agobian, sino que es igualmente necesario alentar de nuevo la creencia popular de que un Chile diferente y mejor es posible, el tipo de sueño que alimentó la revolución pacífica y democrática de Allende. También es una forma de que Boric, cuyo gobierno todavía no se recupera de la rotunda derrota de una Constitución progresista el año pasado, cambie la narrativa y retome la iniciativa, recordando a la gente cuántos políticos y empresarios excesivamente ricos que se llaman democráticos se beneficiaron de los diecisiete años de dictadura de Pinochet, cuántos fueron y siguen siendo sus cómplices.
Acordarse de esa raíz –diríase, ese pecado original– Pinochetista, no le conviene a la derecha que se opone con saña al izquierdista Boric. Sus líderes prefieren que el 50 aniversario sea una ocasión para dejar atrás el pasado – una actitud negacionista cuya persistencia y obcecación lo prueba ese 42% de los representantes del Congreso que optaron por no aprobar el memorial del Aeródromo. Si hay que recordar el pasado, dicen, lo que se debe tener presente es el trauma suyo, los errores y el desorden de los años de Allende, cómo el deseo de una sociedad socialista llevó a divisiones insuperables que obligaron a las Fuerzas Armadas a actuar. Los «excesos» (¿el asesinato de Carlos Berger?) deben ser deplorados, pero Chile necesita aprender una vez más la lección básica del golpe: Si persistimos en exigir demasiados cambios, el resultado será desastroso. Y virulento. Boric debe tener cuidado de no tratar de impulsar reformas desmedidamente radicales.
Estas dos visiones se enfrentarán a lo largo de este año, como lo han hecho durante las últimas cinco décadas.
En Chile, como en el resto del mundo, la forma en que una nación entiende su pasado más traumático está determinando constantemente su identidad más profunda, el tipo de futuro que imagina para sus hijos.
No puedo predecir cómo mi país saldrá de esta búsqueda de una unidad difícil de alcanzar, un consenso sobre quiénes somos realmente.
Espero que, en ese proceso, no estén ausentes los muertos.
Ojalá los chilenos puedan escuchar la voz de Carlos Berger que exige, desde la oscura noche que habita, que lo recordemos y, con ese recuerdo gentil y feroz, vayamos creando entre todos un mundo donde ningún niño como Germán crezca sin un padre, ningún padre como Julio y ninguna madre como Dora mueran de dolor y desesperación, ninguna viuda como Carmen tenga que recordarlo a través de un monumento. Sería el mejor reconocimiento y legado de Carlos y de tantos otros hermanos y hermanas cuyas vidas fueron cercenadas después del golpe: que su memoria sea un acicate para unirnos y no para separarnos, que seamos capaces, como nación, de derrotar el miedo, el odio y la ceguera que nos impiden hacer justicia a los vivos y a los muertos.
The great labor historian Michael Denning reflects on what Antonio Gramsci’s work has to tell us today.
A mural of Antonio Gramsci in Rome, 2015. (Nicholas Gemini / Wikimedia Commons)
Italian communist leader and theorist Antonio Gramsci is perhaps more referenced than actually read. But his work is worth wrestling with. As an organizer, Gramsci developed a method for doing politics as a communist militant leader and intellectual, and then as a prisoner under Benito Mussolini, where he wrote what became his famous Prison Notebooks over the last decade of his life.
Gramsci provides us not with historically determinist, iron laws of capitalist life and development, but rather with tools to analyze our moment and to think through what sort of politics, ideology, and organization might be required for the working class to overcome it and rule.
For the Jacobin podcast the Dig, Daniel Denvir spoke about Gramsci to historian Michael Denning, a professor in the American Studies Program at Yale. You can listen to the conversation here. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Origins
Daniel Denvir
Who was Antonio Gramsci, and how did he, imprisoned for eleven years under Italy’s fascist government, end up filling three thousand notebook pages with such remarkable analysis and theorization around the sorts of politics that communism required in the twentieth century?
Michael Denning
Gramsci is one of the major political thinkers of the twentieth century. Gramsci would think that’s an unreasonable and inaccurate reason to look at him. But that’s not really the interesting way to talk about him. In fact, the way of thinking about intellectual history as a series of great thinkers is one of the points that Gramsci wants to challenge throughout all of this.
One of the most intriguing moments in the Prison Notebooks is when he writes a whole set of notes on how one might think about Marx. Both very detailed things in saying, yes, we should pay very close attention to the biography. We should figure out which things Marx was writing that were meant for a public audience and which were correspondence, because one might say things in correspondence that one wouldn’t say in a public audience. What are the things that are then put together by the inheritors later? And on the other hand, wanting to say, what’s the relation between Marx and those that are his inheritors of Gramsci’s own generation, like Lenin? So the question of how one thinks about such a figure is one of the key questions for Gramsci.
But the first question to be asked is, where do our conceptions of the world and where do our norms of conduct come from? And how do they change? One of his powerful arguments is to say that the philosophy of praxis, Marxism, is a historic change in our conception of the world, not unlike the Renaissance or the Protestant Reformation. For him, Marx is not unlike Martin Luther, a figure who is not just a great thinker, but is an emblem of a major transition in intellectual, philosophical, and political action.
Gramsci says that a modern Reformation will probably take centuries, as indeed the Renaissance and the Reformation did.
That’s the way that Gramsci reads Marx and wants to understand how the philosophy of praxis is the Renaissance and the Reformation combined for the modern world, and why he will return to a Renaissance text, Machiavelli’s The Prince, in trying to write his own book (never finished), The Modern Prince. Gramsci himself says that a modern Reformation will probably take centuries, as indeed the Renaissance and the Reformation did.
He is of that remarkable generation of artists, intellectuals, writers, and thinkers that we refer to as “modernists.” Most of them, including Gramsci, came of age in the late 1910s at the time of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. From 1914 to 1945, World War I to World War II, with the Great Depression in between them — that was the moment of Gramsci’s life.
He was born in 1891 in Sardinia, a Mediterranean island off the Italian coast, part of that newly united Italy — a nation only since the 1860s, thirty years before his birth. He was the child of a petty bureaucrat. In fact, the family’s fortunes went downhill when his father was imprisoned, either rightly or wrongly, for embezzlement. He was not a peasant as he grew up, but he was living in an overwhelmingly peasant society.
Antonio Gramsci in 1922. (Wikimedia Commons)
Gramsci was speaking a dialect. Across Italy, many people speak many different versions of Italian. There is no national language. Many of his comments about dialect and national language are actually accounts of his own experience.
When he went to northern Italy, to Turin, in 1911, Turin was kind of the Detroit of Italy. It was the center of the new auto industry. Fiat is based there. So he moved from a very rural, agricultural island on the periphery of Italy to the most modern, Fordist part of the Italian peninsula to study at university there. It was an industrial metalworking center of the new technologies of the day, which were fashioned around the automobile: steel and oil and rubber and the assembly line, all being brought together. That was the world he came into.
Gramsci was studying language and philology. One of his linguistics professors was always asking him, “How do they say these things in Sardinia?” He was the native informant from the provinces who came to Turin and very strongly felt his outsiderness, as a Sardinian in northern Italy.
This would not be there later, but the young Gramsci even had his first political experience as a kind of Sardinian nationalist, interested in autonomy and the independence of Sardinia. But he became an activist in the Socialist Party. He was in his twenties, a Socialist Party activist and theater critic, and he never got his doctoral degree or anything. He was revealing a precarious life with letters home — always “send more money,” which they didn’t have very much of. At the same time, he was involved in organizing, going to the theater, writing reviews in the newspapers, editing little newspapers of his own with his friends.
Then the war had a tremendous impact. Many of the military metaphors you find in Gramsci’s notebooks come out of living through or battling over World War I and Italy’s involvement. But the events that most structured Gramsci’s life would be after the war, when Italian workers occupied the factories. Gramsci was involved in it. He was visiting those factories, he was organizing in them. He was editing a journal called The New Order.
That moment right after World War I was a remarkable moment of political and social and labor upsurgence, and Gramsci was a key part. That really shaped him.
He and the workers were also receiving news of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets or councils from Russia in 1917 and on. There was a number of postwar — in 1919 — attempts to create councils, to create factory occupations and general strikes. There was one in Seattle. That moment right after the war was a remarkable moment of political and social and labor upsurgence, and Gramsci was a key part. That really shaped him.
That was the great moment — indeed, a great tragic moment, as there was a split in the socialist movement between those which remained the main socialist parties in most places on the one hand, and on the other, the emergence of new communist parties allied in one way or another with the hopes of the new Bolshevik Revolution. Gramsci was part of that split in the Italian party and became one of the founders of Italy’s Communist Party; he was elected to parliament in the early 1920s. He also went to Moscow and was for a number of years the representative of the Italian party to the Communist International, in those early years of debate and controversy before Lenin’s death in 1923 — before Stalin’s takeover of the party apparatus and the purging, isolation, and eventual killing of figures like Bukharin and Trotsky.
The Italian trajectory went slightly differently, because at that moment there was an explosion of new labor movements, new socialist movements, new syndicalist movements, new communist movements on the Left. It was also the seedbed of a new fascism. One sees that in the early fascist organizations of Hitler in Germany and, in this case, Mussolini’s March on Rome and coming to power. Early on, Gramsci became one of the key figures in the opposition to fascism.
In 1926, he was only thirty-five years old. He was arrested, and at his trial, a prosecutor said, “we must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years,” because Gramsci had become such an important leader of the Italian left at that point. So from 1926 to 1937, he was in prison. At the very end, he ended up in prison hospitals and was eventually released. But by then, his health had deteriorated so much that he died in 1937. It was about those ten years when most of the notebooks were written. It was a long, hard process. The physical notebooks were protected and saved from destruction by the fascists and were then published after World War II.
I think the most interesting thing to finish on with this is that Gramsci’s writings before 1925, when he was a young activist, are quite interesting, but mainly to scholars and historians of that particular period, because these works were always written for the moment. They are newspaper articles about this particular issue, this particular strike, this particular debate in parliament or whatever. One of the things that happened when he got into prison — and after a year or more of actually fighting to have paper and pen to be able to write, and then later to actually have some books and newspapers — was that he decided that he wanted to write for eternity. He could no longer be engaged in day-to-day politics.
All of a sudden, his writing changed. He was actually asking questions. Why did things go wrong? Why did the factory occupations not win out? Why did those organizations not take root? Why did fascism win? What were the roots of Mussolini’s popularity? How do we see this in the roots of contemporary politics in the long history of Italy and Italian politics? How do we understand how we get our conceptions of the world, how we get our norms of conduct, and how do those change?
The Prison Notebooks continue to fascinate. They go back to first questions.
And as a result, the notebooks that he wrote in — literally in those black school notebooks that schoolchildren had, thirty-three of them — ended up being the thousands of pages later published, edited, and understood. In some sense, they were written for us, for posterity, in the way that the journalistic articles of 1917 or 1922 were not. Thus they continue to fascinate. They go back to first questions. They’re interesting, often more for the questions that they ask than for the answers that they provide.
Daniel Denvir
How did the conditions of prison writing make for a very particular style rife with euphemism and code words, at times somewhat enigmatic?
Michael Denning
Everything was written with the prison censor in mind. So that leads to a long debate in Gramscian interpretation. I’ll give you two sides of it. One is that we should read all of the things as just code words. He couldn’t say “Marxism,” so he says, “the philosophy of praxis.”
On the other hand, it’s also arguable that the philosophy of praxis has a whole set of meanings and connotations for Gramsci that go beyond what would be done by just reducing it to Marxism. So there’s always a kind of double sense of whether one is reading a new concept as a disguise for an older concept. He’s so scathing about the dogmas of his own side, of his own party. One can see these as new concepts and ideas.
In the early 1980s on television, they weren’t allowed to swear. So there were characters who invented these extraordinary fake swears, fake curse words that actually were in their own ways a richer and more imaginative vocabulary than if they had actually used the words that were banned on television. One might think about Gramsci like that: since he couldn’t say the standard curse words, he had to invent new curse words. Some of them are just codes, but others are really new and imaginative ways of understanding — new metaphors for what we thought we already knew.
Hegemony, “Common Sense,” and “Good Sense”
Daniel Denvir
The concept we should probably begin with is hegemony, which, for Gramsci, described the totality of forms of coercion and consent that a ruling group uses to govern a society. What does Gramsci mean by hegemony? And what is important about his insight that hegemony is secured and maintained through this combination of consent and coercion?
Michael Denning
Let me challenge that. So I take what I like to think of as the Jeopardy! approach to social theory, which is to say: rather than try to define a term, give a term, and the question to which that term is the answer. In many ways, one of the difficulties in the US appropriation of Gramsci has been to try to figure out a half a dozen key concepts — hegemony, subaltern, organic intellectual or whatever — and get definitions of them, which are more or less accurate, and then use them in other kinds of places.
Yet one of the more interesting ways to go at this would be to consider, what is the question that Gramsci is asking, to which hegemony is some kind of an answer? Because one of Gramsci’s fundamental arguments is that new words don’t change things — “hegemony” itself can’t be an answer. An answer to a particular situation is a new situation, is a new politics. So the question really becomes: What are the sources of a new collective will? Where does a new political formation (or, we might call it, if we translate into American, the new social movement) come from?
One of Gramsci’s fundamental arguments is that new words don’t change things — ‘hegemony’ itself can’t be an answer.
What you’ll end up arguing is that in some cases, a social group that emerges to take leadership in a society has to have more than just economic and political power; otherwise it couldn’t have that leadership. But that’s fundamental. The group actually has to begin to conform the society to its ideas to win consent.
Remember, Gramsci’s time was before there was high school education for working people, when working people may have had only the rudiments of literacy and numeracy. If you wanted to build a popular party of working people, the party had to be an educational institution. So there were party schools. Gramsci was very interested in what the curriculum of those party schools would be. He says you should begin with the common sense of ordinary people — the spontaneous philosophy that people have gotten from their schools, but also from their work and churches. How does that add up to a conception of the world?
In fact, a philosophical education is an education that is a critique of that common sense. That common sense is also, he says, embedded in the people’s language — the words we speak carry with them a whole set of concepts that we don’t know. So one of his intriguing things will be to try to say, let’s take the words that we use, the language that we use, to shape that common sense.
Daniel Denvir
This argument has implications for what has often been called “false consciousness”: the question of what to make of people holding beliefs that are contrary to their material interests or even their lived reality. Gramsci writes, “the contrast between thought and action, i.e. the coexistence of two conceptions of the world, one affirmed in words and the other displayed in effective action, is not simply a product of self-deception. It is, rather, an expression of profound contrasts of a social order.”
What’s this distinction drawn between holding that people are simply being duped, versus Gramsci’s notion that there are contradictions at play that are much deeper, expressing themselves on the level of what Gramsci calls “common sense”?
Michael Denning
Let’s say instead the question of where we get our conceptions of the world from and how they change, because he’s actually quite skeptical of the sense that you could rationally persuade people to another position just because the facts are on your side. For the ordinary person, you can make a good argument to them and they’ll say, “oh yeah, I remember someone else who made the opposite argument, and I couldn’t answer it right now, but it was convincing to me at that point. And so I’ll remain on that side.”
Our common sense is built in part out of our faith in the other people in our social group who we have heard put things better than we did at various points. And those figures can range, as he said, from the parish priest, to businesspeople on the Chamber of Commerce, to a certain politician. Gramsci includes both, at one point, Stone Age traces of old folk beliefs and proverbs on the one hand, and on the other, knowing the most up-to-date science. Common sense is a kind of mix of both.
So common sense is this weird combination, and the figures who help us shape our conception of the world are in the largest sense of the word “intellectuals.” They are the organizers of ideas in a society. For Gramsci, local schoolteachers and local priests are organic intellectuals of daily life — very fundamental ones in passing on certain folklore, certain knowledge.
One should also mention the division that he maintains between “common sense” and “good sense.” Common sense is basically that set of beliefs that you have that you think is what you believe and/or what your opinions are. Good sense, though, encompasses the practices and knowledge that come out of the work that you do. As far as I can tell by my colleagues, as professors, when they talk about politics, they have the same common sense as anybody else around. Some of them have a little bit better than the others, but it’s the same mix of received ideas that one gets out of the newspapers and all the other media or whatever. But if you ask them, “oh, how do you put together a syllabus? How do you teach this class?”, then they have a remarkable good sense that comes out of years of teaching students.
Part of Gramsci’s faith in ordinary people is that we are not simply prisoners of our common sense.
I had a cousin once who was a great conspiracy theorist about all kinds of weird stuff, and lots of people in the family wouldn’t even talk to him because he would go on to his conspiracies. But he was a dairy farmer. If you got talking to him about dairy farming, he was a fountain of good sense.
Part of Gramsci’s faith in ordinary people is that we are not simply prisoners of our common sense. Actually, all of us have the good sense that comes out of labor and the elaboration of that labor. “Elaboration” is one of his favorite words — the sort of working through of ideas, a labor of ideas. He wants to recognize and break down the division between mental and manual labor. So he basically says that there is no manual labor that doesn’t have a mental aspect. There is no mental labor that doesn’t have a manual aspect. He talks about the physical toll that it takes to learn how to sit and read for eight hours a day, how to take notes physically, and how there are ways in which the actual physical conditions of prison made him extraordinarily aware of how difficult even reading and thinking and writing are as manual, exhausting activities.
He is very dedicated to the study of classical languages, particularly Latin, in the sense that this is a kind of mental exercise that is necessary to develop the mind. His educational philosophy often seems very conservative in our terms, because he has this sense of the kind of necessity for forming activity of the body and mind.
Rooting Ideology in the Experiences of Everyday Life
Daniel Denvir
Gramsci writes that a successful ideological movement can only come about “when in the process of elaborating a form of thought superior to common sense and coherent on a scientific plain, it never forgets to remain in contact with the simple. And indeed finds in this contact the source of the problem it sets out to study and resolve.” He continues, “it must be a criticism of common sense basing itself initially, however, on common sense.”
What is Gramsci arguing here? About rooting ideologies — not just rooting ideologies, but rooting the practical elaboration of ideologies that aspire to hegemony — in people’s everyday lives. And as you were just discussing, rooting them in the good sense that people have because of their practical activity in the world. And also, even seeding the growth of these insurgent ideologies amid the imminent contradictions of reigning ideologies.
Michael Denning
The example that he sees as doing this most powerfully is the Catholic Church — the Jesuits are his example. Catholicism is, for him, a very powerful conception of the world, which he says always maintained a connection between the intellectuals, the theologians, and the ordinary people: you could never let the theologians get too far from the parish priests. Thus one actually had to have a conception of the world that could be translated back and forth between the top and the bottom.
For him, the challenge for the philosophy of praxis, for Marxism, for his Communist Party, is to create a conception of the world that is accessible both to the young militants, still barely literate, barely numerate, who are coming in because of the oppression of their daily life and daily work, and also the intellectuals who are contesting and battling. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, he’s got this double sense. We have two tasks: popular education and the combating of dominant ideologies at the highest level.
For Gramsci, the challenge for the philosophy of praxis, for Marxism, is to create a conception of the world that is accessible both to young militants and also to intellectuals.
It’s very hard to bring those two together. It’s arguable whether or not anyone has actually pulled that off in the socialist tradition. You can see moments, but that’s really the hope that Gramsci is trying to establish. Can one see the other side doing it? One could argue that if neoliberalism has become hegemonic over the last forty years, it is by the moving of notions of capital, of human capital, of entrepreneurship, of risk — of all of the images of the market — into the rest of our world.
Daniel Denvir
More than many of his contemporaries, Gramsci seems attentive to the complex, diverse composition of the nonruling classes. It’s not just the capitalists and the proletariat. Beyond that Manichean divide, he seems to identify a more complex idea of social organization and therefore of how strategic politics might relate to that reality.
He writes, “although every party is the expression of a social group, and one social group only, nevertheless in certain given conditions, certain parties represent a single social group precisely insofar as they exercise a balancing and arbitrating function between the interests of their group and those of other groups, and succeed in securing the development of the group which they represent with the consent and assistance of the allied groups, if not out and out with that of the groups which are definitely hostile.”
What is Gramsci saying here about the inevitably coalitional nature of politics? And what role, then, does the political party play in that?
Michael Denning
One of the real battles throughout is, who leads the labor movement? Who leads the opposition? Is the movement led by trade unions or by political parties? At that time, at the turn of the century, one tradition had basically said, let’s stay out of politics. Not even getting involved in electoral campaigns — abstaining from campaigns. Remember, there was no universal suffrage at this point. Politics looked like a battle of different elites. You were not going to win. The parliament was often what Gramsci called a “talking shop,” where people took positions but nothing actually happened. So workplace struggles were at the focus.
On the other side were those who said, hold on a second, no, it should be the party that rules. Particularly in the more democratic, parliamentary systems — we should be electing mayors. We have elected mayors in Bridgeport, in Milwaukee, in other cities around the United States. We should be running candidates for president.
Those two positions are not necessarily opposed, but that’s kind of what Gramsci was worrying about in what he called “economism” — as did Lenin, and those people on the side of the unions who basically said it’s all the economy. Whereas the other version was a kind of parliamentarism.
Both of those sides were in crisis under fascism. The factory occupations did not lead to the overthrow of that society. And the Socialist Party itself splintered. So in some sense, Gramsci was asking: How do we rethink this relation between the economic and the political — between imagining that everything is economic interests, and imagining that everything is political coalitions? Gramsci wanted to avoid either one of those. How does one build a vision of a national popular group, of a people, that is actually beyond economic interests?
Daniel Denvir
Why, more generally speaking, is economism such a tempting perversion of Marxism, both then and throughout all history through the present? And what is it about Gramsci’s insight into the relationship between structures and superstructures that undermines this sort of economistic vision?
Michael Denning
He says that it is a kind of wisdom that comes cheap, if basically one says, “Oh, well, this war is about oil” — well, yes, it is about oil in one sense or another. But does that really give you any new knowledge that actually allows you to organize, to change people’s minds? That reduction doesn’t really gain any new knowledge. He will then say, “hold on a second, though. People are not crazy to believe this.” So we have to understand why people do believe this. He is not anti-economist in that sense. There are other traditions in Marxism that basically say, we know that those kinds of things are wrong. But Gramsci never says that.
Daniel Denvir
He says, “when you don’t have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself becomes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion and of patient and obstinate perseverance.”
Michael Denning
Exactly. When you’re losing and a social movement is weak, it is often drawn to more deterministic, more mechanical versions, like in that famous Fidel Castro speech, “History Will Absolve Me” — that sense that somehow, in the long run, we will win, even though it looks really bad right now. Gramsci uses examples from the history of religion: those Calvinists who most believed in predestination had a kind of mechanical determinism. They were the ones who were the most activist, because they felt like they could go out and act on the grounds of that.
You can’t leave people at that position of pure faith. A party that actually wants to turn people into self-determining rulers of their own society has to actually criticize that common sense.
But he says that’s not enough. You can’t leave people at that position of pure faith. A party that actually wants to turn people into self-determining rulers of their own society has to actually criticize that common sense, raise people in it, raise oneself out of that rarefied common sense, those Stone Age traces, and instead understand in the good sense: out of one’s experience of work, out of one’s experience of politics, out of one’s experience of one’s own household life and neighborhood life.
Daniel Denvir
One upshot of economism, Gramsci argues, is that it can reduce politics to “a moralistic accusation of duplicity and bad faith, or in the case of the movement’s followers of naivete and stupidity.” What’s the relationship Gramsci is drawing between economism and a moralistic account of politics? And what then, is the danger of a moralistic account of politics? Because it’s something that I continue to see all around me constantly today.
Michael Denning
It’s hard not to fall into either economism or a moralistic version of it. One place to see it is in Gramsci’s analysis of the Boulangist movement in 1880s and 1890s France. His thinking about this right-wing populist movement is a disguised way of his thinking about Mussolini, and it becomes a disguised way of us thinking about Trump. Basically, how does one understand a social movement of the Right?
The Boulanger types subscribed to ideas about a certain militarism, a certain populism, a certain nationalism. Gramsci says straightforwardly, there are very powerful capitalist forces who are backing this guy, and you could go and find who those backers are. Just as you could find the dark money behind Mussolini, and just as in, say, journalist Jane Mayer’s great work, you can see the dark money behind today’s far right. Gramsci never thinks that that is not important work to be done. But he says that’s not sufficient to understand why that movement actually begins to take power.
Gramsci both tries to understand the Left from the point of view of the Right and the Right from the point of view of the Left.
And the second half is to say, “all these people are duped. If they only knew it was Koch brothers money behind them, they wouldn’t do it.” This is equally wrong. He both tries to understand the Left from the point of view of the Right and the Right from the point of view of the Left, which is to say, “look at this social movement as if one was looking at our own social movement. What are the forms of identity, the forms of appeal that make this powerful?” Because then he also is saying to his own generation of communists: “Not only should we look at Mussolini’s followers for why they are fascists and what their actual beliefs are, in both their contradictions and consistencies. But then when we imagine building our own movement, we should actually be thinking in that same kind of expanded, hegemonic way of thinking rather than thinking in the strict economic way. If we add our own left-wing money, then we could do the same things that they do. If the money is all that is needed, then it would be just about finding those kinds of resources.”
It’s not quite as simple as what I just laid out, because in his political theory, he also does say that a movement that is based on people who have to work for a living every day can’t use the same strategies as the movement that has its own professional militias, its own professional politicians, its own money. There are moments when he actually wants to parallel movements to the Left and movements to the Right in understanding how they are reshaping conceptions of the world — how they are reshaping norms of conduct — but we can’t use the same strategies and tactics because we actually have a very different population that we are trying to mobilize.
No Ironclad Rules
Daniel Denvir
There is, again, a certain acceptance of the inevitability and everyday practicality of, in this case, a moralistic account of the world, but also a recognition of its dangers. And today, I think we see moralism operating across the entire spectrum. We have certain moralistic forms of popular anti-elitism that became Trumpism when hijacked by reactionary currents, which blame a small cabal for capitalism’s depredations. And on the other side you see efforts to portray Trumpism as a simple story of rubes getting swindled by a snake-oil salesman and Koch brothers money, conveniently redirecting any sort of explanation for Trumpism away from the entire history of the mainstream political economic order that these accusers are deeply complicit in. On the Left, we see a very powerful movement among rank-and-file Bernie diehards, especially those not connected to socialist organization in this period of desperation and defeat, turning to extremely moralistic accounts of the Democratic Party establishment.
Michael Denning
How does one square Gramsci’s resistance to a moralistic politics in the sense of a moralistic rhetoric and his quite passionate, positive sense that what a new politics requires is a moral reformation?
Gramsci again and again goes back and says, you can’t understand this in an abstract or mechanical way. You cannot reduce this to a set of sociological rules. You can’t turn it into a kind of Newtonian world where there are classes and class fractions that move around, like the planets in mathematical orbits. The densest sections for Americans of the Prison Notebooks are the notes on Italian history, which are his attempt to figure out in this way: What were the attempts to create an Italian national people and Italian national culture? Why did they succeed? Why did they not succeed? Why the paradoxes?
The densest sections for Americans of the Prison Notebooks are the notes on Italian history, which are Gramsci’s attempt to figure out: What were the attempts to create an Italian national people and Italian national culture?
I think we have still yet to approach American history that way. Is there actually a real history of the Democratic Party that tells us how the party of slaveholders from Jefferson and Jackson became the party of Roosevelt, let alone the party of Biden? Those kinds of reversals, what they mean, their relation to fundamental economic forces? After all, the slave plantation’s economy is a fundamental economic force. The rise of the railroads, of the great corporations in the late nineteenth century, right up until the rise of the Apples and the Microsofts and the platform industries of our own day — those are the kinds of questions that Gramsci again and again tells his readers, you have to ask that question.
Daniel Denvir
Gramsci does argue that economism was behind “all forms of electoral obstructionism,” which was related to a “rigid aversion on principle to what are termed compromises.” Gramsci criticizes the idea of explicitly disavowing electoral politics, like not participating, but even also effectively disavowing electoral politics by using them exclusively for the purposes of propaganda.
We can’t look to Gramsci for a set of ironclad rules. What sort of questions, then, does his method insist that we ask when we think about things like reform and compromise?
Michael Denning
One of the hardest things to understand about Gramsci is: What’s the relation between the state and civil society, and what makes up the state? Is the state the legislature? Is it the executive branch? Is it Biden? Is it the Pentagon, the military? How many school boards are there and school systems in the United States? What about the state employees (one of the biggest unions in the country is that of state, county, and municipal employees)? Those are all state apparatuses in a certain kind of way. So all the different levels of what the state is, where we even think of electoral politics, are up for grabs.
In Gramsci’s time, there were many fewer state employees, and most of them were on the far right. Because they were military employees or state bureaucrats, they were often associated with forms of fascism. We’re now in a situation where a large part of the population working for the state in various forms are public employees. And one of the major divides in the labor movement is between public employees and private employees: the different kinds of union access they have, the different kinds of access people have to pensions, the struggles that have taken place as actually pitting one part of the working population against another. Those private employees who don’t have union rights, who do not have guaranteed pensions, feel like they are being cheated, having to pay taxes for that — all of those kinds of issues are fundamental to the class politics of the present United States.
Even among the state public employees, public employee unions still remain relatively liberal. On the other hand, you have prison guards and police officers who have a very different kind of politics — let alone a whole set of employees that appear to be private, but are working for defense contractors of one sort or another and so are actually working outsourced from the state.
I remember, from the early days of the antiwar movement, not paying your taxes in protest. Was that a form of left resistance to a military state, or was that a kind of anarchist indulgence to not actually pay your taxes to a welfare state? The line between the welfare and warfare state is a tricky one in thinking these things through.
Daniel Denvir
I would say that today, maybe the most fundamentally unhelpful divide on the Left is that pitting electoralism against mutual aid, or people who say only electoral and legislative struggle against those who say only mass organization. Reading Gramsci makes me feel confident that the answer has to be that we do all of the above, but that only a close study of the present moment can tell us what sort of combination of efforts would be most strategic, and that none is inherently the most valuable or strategic front.
Michael Denning
On the Left, we could all have more compassion for each other following one’s own gifts and abilities, rather than guilting people into doing things that they don’t necessarily have gifts for.
I think that Gramsci does lead one to not think that one position is guaranteed to be the central position. People should fight in struggles where they feel they can be most effective and most powerful and where their own talents are, as opposed to a certain tradition — and I remember it from my own youth — of people of my generation thinking they would go off into the factory in order to organize factory workers, even though they had never worked in a factory a day in their life. For some of them, that was a crazy decision. Others actually ended up becoming factory workers, finding a life, doing what was part of a kind of new labor movement. So it wasn’t like that was right or wrong, but it does seem to me that on the Left, we could all have more compassion for each other following one’s own gifts and abilities, rather than guilting people into doing things that they don’t necessarily have gifts for.
On the other hand, I think it is always worth it, even when one feels like Gramsci is endorsing or helping support one’s own position, to remember that his own positions came out of particular historical moments. His own resistance to economism and to syndicalism and to that electoral abstentionism was partly because he had been so deeply involved in the factory occupation movement and was then worried about why it had failed.
His bending of the stick to the party was in part feeling like, well, maybe we didn’t put enough attention on the party, we didn’t attend to things outside the workshop. And he says most of the people in Turin didn’t work in factories. They were in individual households, they were working on the street, they were informal workers, they were in tiny workshops. We had these huge occupations of the giant factories, but we didn’t touch most of those people. The second thing he says is that most of the people on the Italian peninsula don’t live in Turin, and until we figure out how to reach the people in the south, the people in Sardinia that Gramsci had grown up with, we’re not going to make any progress.
So there was always Gramsci’s sense of his own excitement, of the electricity of those moments which he thought were greater than strikes. After all, he says that at one moment in a strike, all one is asking of people is: endurance, loyalty, passivity, stay out, don’t work, suffer, go without a salary. But in contrast, with the factory occupation, he says it’s like: take over, continue producing, continue to work, continue to contribute to society. Run it yourself. We don’t need the bosses. He said he couldn’t believe how old workers, worn down by years of struggle, were actually taking a new leadership position, were involved in factory theatricals, in games after work.
So how do we do justice to both of those senses? On the one side the Gramsci who was present at moments of extraordinary political struggle and was electrified by that, and on the other the Gramsci who says, “Wow, there were a lot of places that weren’t Seattle 1919, there were a lot of places that weren’t Paris 1968. Those struggles are meaningful too.” That is one of the things that makes just reading and engaging with Gramsci and with that tradition so important.
Los orígenes de la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica
El golpe de Estado de 1973 no es sólo una ruptura democrática del país, también es un cambio drástico de la orientación de la política económica. Hasta ese año, la política económica de Chile, y de la mayor parte de los países latinoamericanos, puede considerarse desarrollista, sustituidora de importaciones y orientada a las relaciones económicas de bloques homogéneos.
Derivado de las hipótesis de la CEPAL sobre el “empeoramiento secular de los términos de intercambio”, los países seguían políticas promotoras de la industrialización para elaborar productos cuyo destino era el mercado nacional y países con acuerdos de colaboración económica (ALALC, Pacto Andino y otros).
En Arica, se habían concentrado incentivos importantes a la industria manufacturera. Se habían instalado empresas armadoras de vehículos, electrodomésticos, insumos industriales.
La dictadura asume políticas diferentes: de corte monetario para el control de los precios, de mercado para la asignación de recursos y de apertura total y unilateral al comercio internacional. Las autoridades económicas de la época entendían que ese tipo de políticas supondrían costos para las empresas industriales; que difícilmente sobrevivirían. Las importaciones, que no encontraron barreras arancelarias significativas, y se encontraron con un país cuya moneda estaba sobrevalorada, simplemente barrieron con los productos elaborados dentro del país. Esto afectó severamente a Arica por su concentración industrial.
Los intereses de los empresarios locales tuvieron cierto eco en las autoridades de la dictadura y es así como en 1977 se dicta el Decreto Con Fuerza De Ley Nº 341 de Hacienda, Sobre Zonas Francas. En síntesis, este decreto autoriza la operación de Zona Francas en Iquique y Punta Arenas. La Zona Franca se entiende como “El área…perfectamente deslindada…amparada por presunción de extraterritorialidad aduanera. En estos lugares las mercancías pueden ser depositadas, transformadas, terminadas o comercializadas, sin restricción alguna.
Esta Ley le otorga a Arica, un estatus especial. En su título VII, promueve “Normas Especiales para Arica” y establece que “El régimen preferencial establecido por el decreto ley 1.055, de 1975, y sus modificaciones, para la Zona Franca de Iquique será aplicable, en los mismos términos, a las empresas industriales manufactureras instaladas o que se instalen en Arica… Se entenderá por empresas industriales a aquellas que desarrollan un conjunto de actividades en fábricas, plantas o talleres, destinadas a la obtención de mercancías que tengan una individualidad diferente de las materias primas, partes o piezas extranjeras, utilizadas en su elaboración.
Igualmente, dicho régimen preferencial será aplicable a las empresas que en su proceso productivo provoquen una transformación irreversible en las materias primas, partes o piezas extranjeras utilizadas para su elaboración.”
Estas “normas especiales” otorgan ventajas de costos a las empresas industriales de Arica. Es claramente, una compensación por la aplicación de las nuevas políticas económicas. De hecho, fueron numerosas las empresas que intentaron competir en el mercado local con productos apenas maquilados en la Zona Franca Industrial.
Simultáneamente, numerosos problemas de administración y gestión de la Zona Franca de Iquique, en manos de una Junta de Administración y Vigilancia, provocaron que en 1989 se disolviera dicha Junta y se creara una Sociedad Anónima, mediante la Ley número 18.846, que “Autoriza La Actividad Empresarial del Estado en Materia De Administración y Explotación de la Zona Franca de Iquique.” Nace Sofri S.A.
Esta ley, sin embargo, ignora por completo la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica, la que no era administrada ni gestionada por ninguna autoridad administrativa. A principios de los 90s, el deterioro socio económico de Arica era evidente y se había convertido en un problema político a resolver para la recuperada democracia.
Las autoridades de la época deciden entonces encargar la administración del Sistema de Zona Franca Industrial a la recientemente creada Zofri S.A., a través del Decreto 672 de 1990, que “Aprueba Contrato de Concesión de la Administración y Explotación de La Zona Franca de Iquique, Celebrado Entre el Estado de Chile y la Sociedad «Zona Franca De Iquique S.A.»
Este decreto formaliza la relación entre Zofri S.A. y el Estado, pero, además incorpora en su artículo 2°, la gestión de los beneficios otorgados a las empresas instaladas en Arica bajo el régimen de Zona Franca Industrial, de la ley antes citada.
El contrato otorga plenos poderes de gestión a Zofri S.A. Esto incluye la elaboración de un Reglamento Interno de Operación (RIO), que (solamente) debe ser “puesto en conocimiento” del Ministerio de Hacienda.
Además, Zofri S.A. se encarga de la supervisión y control del cumplimiento de las normas de Zona Franca. El contrato de concesión tiene un plazo de 40 años, en los que el Estado “se compromete a mantener con la sociedad anónima administradora y con los usuarios que con ella contraten, a mantener en forma permanente la inmutabilidad de los privilegios indicados”. Debe notarse que el plazo del contrato se encuentra a 7 años de vencer; el 2030.
Análisis económico general
Arica es una zona que sufre con mayor fuerza los cambios de política económica que impulsa la dictadura. La historia económica de Arica de los últimos años del siglo XX, son de una lenta decadencia. La industria local no logra competir con los productos importados que ingresan sin aranceles, y en el contexto de una lucha antiinflacionaria que encarece la moneda local desde mediados de los 70s, hasta mediados de los 80s.
Así la industria local empieza a colapsar y a comienzos de los 90s, habían desaparecido las empresas productoras de electrodomésticos y la mayor parte de las automotrices. Sólo quedaba General Motors entre las automotrices y un pequeño conjunto de empresas proveedoras de la Minería.
El escenario económico se transforma en crisis social hacia 1993, con la protesta de diversos sectores ciudadanos, que, encabezados por dirigentes gremiales, protestan con banderas negras en la ciudad.
El Gobierno de la época era consciente del decaimiento de Arica. Por esos años se aplican diversos programas de apoyo a la instalación de empresas productivas en Arica. El plan Cocharcas, se inaugura el Parque Industrial Chacalluta (propiedad de Zofri S.A.), se promulgan dos “leyes Arica”, se traslada la matriz de Corfo y de la Seremi de Agricultura de la entonces Región de Tarapacá a Arica, se crea la CORDAP y muchas otras iniciativas, se extienden desde comienzos de los 90s hasta principios del Siglo XXI.
Pero Arica no logra aumentar su ritmo de actividad económica y, de hecho, la crisis económica comienza a impactar el crecimiento demográfico de la Provincia. A comienzos del Siglo XXI, el desempleo en Arica se situaba sistemáticamente en dos dígitos, duplicando durante muchos años al desempleo nacional (1). La pobreza y la pobreza extrema, duplica los promedios nacionales y el repertorio de políticas económicas parece agotarse.
Por esos años comienza a gestarse la idea de crear una nueva Región en vista que las autoridades situadas en la capital regional, Iquique, no lograban tampoco, siquiera, explicar la situación de Arica. La creación de una nueva Región, sin embargo, requería una reforma constitucional, que se realizó durante el Gobierno de Ricardo Lagos. Casi inmediatamente se crean las regiones de Arica y Parinacota y de Los Ríos, las que entran en funcionamiento a mediados de 2007.
La crisis “subprime” que comienza a fines de 2008 y se extiendo por todo el año 2009, en su fase más crítica, no resulta un escenario económico propicio para la expansión económica de la nueva región. La planta General Motors que funcionaba en Arica, anuncia en 2007 su cierre, que se materializa en julio de 2008 dejando más de 400 trabajadores, directos, altamente calificados, además de otros 150 trabajadores indirectos que trabajaban para proveedores y contratistas, desempleados y produciendo un impacto notorio en el PIB de la Región (posteriormente en 2009, la matriz GM de USA, quebraría debido a las pérdidas que acumulaba). Otras empresas importantes sufren el impacto de la crisis también.
Sin embargo, en términos relativos, la Región reduce su distancia económica respecto del resto del país. El desempleo promedia el 8%, mientras en el resto del país superaba los dos dígitos en promedio. Las mediciones de pobreza regional muestran una reducción relativa importante, acercándose a los promedios nacionales y, de hecho, la CASEN del 2011 (con datos del 2010) (2) muestra que la única región en Chile en que disminuyó la pobreza, fue en Arica y Parinacota.
Desde el comienzo de la administración de la nueva Región de Arica y Parinacota, se producen problemas en la relación de las autoridades regionales con Zofri S. A.
El comportamiento de Zofri S.A.: problema de incentivos
La Zofri S.A. quedó con la misión de gestionar dos sistemas “francos” muy diferentes. Por una parte, la Zona Franca de Iquique, que es un recinto cerrado y delimitado, cuyas propiedades no pueden enajenarse y la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica, que no tiene restricciones físicas. El procedimiento para que una empresa se acoja al Régimen de Zona Franca Industrial de Arica consiste en:
Calificación de la Dirección Regional de Aduanas. Evalúa, en base a un proyecto empresarial que cumpla los requisitos productivos para acogerse al régimen. Originalmente; transformación irreversible o cambio de partida arancelaria. Con posterioridad a la promulgación de la Ley Nº 19.420, conocida como “Ley Arica” (I), que estableció incentivos para el desarrollo económico de las Provincias de Arica y Parinacota, se permitió la instalación de empresas que realicen “otros procesos que incorporen valor agregado nacional, tales como armaduría, ensamblado, montaje, terminado, integración, manufacturación o transformación industrial”. Esta tarea pasa de la Dirección Regional de Tarapacá a la de Arica y Parinacota.
Delimitación y autorización del lugar donde operará la empresa. Tarea que debe realizar el Gobierno Regional de Tarapacá hasta el año 2007 y, con posterioridad al Gobierno Regional de la nueva Región de Arica y Parinacota.
Inscripción usuario de Zona Franca. Este proceso permite el control de mercancías ingresadas (SRF) o salidas (ZETA) y control de inventarios. Esto se hace con documentos diseñados al efecto y administrados por Zofri S.A. Este proceso es el que norma el Reglamento Interno de Operación (RIO).
El problema de diseño de este mecanismo es que Zofri S.A. obtiene más del 80% de sus ingresos del arriendo de galpones y locales localizados en Iquique. Otro 10% de la gestión de documentos SRFs y ZETAs y el resto de las prestaciones de servicios y otras fuentes de ingresos.
En el caso de la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica, no existe la posibilidad de captar arriendos por propiedades acogidas a Zona Franca, pues las empresas industriales pueden instalarse, en terrenos de su propiedad, en cualquier lugar que autorice el Gobierno Regional. La conducta de Zofri S.A. es consistente con dicho problema de incentivos, como se explica a continuación:
Un Comité Interministerial y las autoridades electas de los años 90, culminaría con la promulgación de la Ley Nº 19.420 conocida como “Ley Arica” (I), que estableció incentivos para el desarrollo económico de las Provincias de Arica y Parinacota, promulgada en Octubre de 1995 por el Presidente Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. Esta es la ley que agrega otro tipo de empresas que pueden acogerse al régimen de Zona Franca Industrial de Arica como se mencionó antes.
Esta nueva definición produce una reacción adversa por parte de Zofri S.A. que demanda al Estado por vulnerar los derechos que sostenía tener en virtud del Contrato de Concesión, fijado en decreto 672. El fundamento era que este nuevo tipo de empresas (que agregan valor a la producción), se convertían en una amenaza para la Zona Franca Comercial debido a la cercanía de las exigencias como usuario. No deja de ser paradójico que una empresa demande a su accionista mayoritario por efecto de una ley.
Zofri S.A. perdió esta demanda y, de hecho, comenzó a autorizar a algunas empresas de servicios para operar bajo el régimen de Zona Franca Industrial en Arica, las que fueron hostigadas de diversas maneras. Un ejemplo es el caso de Comercial Santa Nené, que envasaba productos alimentarios que importaba a granel y que, a juicio de Zofri, era una empresa comercial disfrazada de industrial.
Además, como se mencionó antes, no surte los efectos deseados y se hace necesaria una nueva Ley que perfeccione algunos aspectos de la Ley Arica I.
El 20 de abril del 2000 se promulga la Ley 19.669 (Ley Arica II). Esta norma establece nuevas derogaciones arancelarias a los productos manufacturados en Arica. Adicionalmente, en la ley, a petición de Zofri S.A., se crea una nueva Zona Franca Industrial en Alto Hospicio (provincia de Iquique) pero en un recinto cerrado sujeto a la jurisdicción de Zofri S.A.
Este recinto cerrado en Alto Hospicio es una herramienta de competencia para las empresas industriales que requieran instalarse en el extremo norte de Chile. De hecho, Zofri S.A. invierte cuantiosos recursos en este nuevo centro, lo que no ocurre en el Parque Industrial Chacalluta, que también es propiedad de Zofri S.A., donde podrían operar empresas en las mismas condiciones que en Alto Hospicio, pero que no tiene la exclusividad respecto al resto de la región.
Nuevamente los resultados de desarrollo para Arica, no son los esperados. Como se mencionó, ya se había comenzado el proceso de creación de una nueva Región. De esa manera, en marzo de 2007, en el gobierno de la presidenta Bachelet, se promulga la Ley 20.175 que crea la Región de Arica y Parinacota que comenzaría su funcionamiento seis meses después.
Sin embargo, la Ley 20.175 no cambia un aspecto crucial de la gestión del Régimen Especial de Zona Franca Industrial de Arica, pues no altera las funciones (atribuidas o legales) de Zofri S.A. para la nueva Región. De acuerdo con la Ley de Zonas Francas y a la que crea la Región, se establece que quién informa y autoriza la instalación de empresas en ese régimen en Arica son las autoridades de la nueva región. Pero el sistema de supervisión y control permanece en Zofri S.A. Dicha anomalía pronto revelaría su importancia, pues devela el papel que había tenido Zofri S.A. en los años 90. La puesta en marcha de la nueva región y el ejercicio de las nuevas autoridades comienza a producir problemas cuando se captan nuevos inversionistas interesados en dicho régimen especial.
Un caso resulta paradigmático, el de H.A. Motors, una empresa de capitales paquistaníes, que en agosto de 2008 comenzó su tramitación para acogerse al régimen de Zona Franca Industrial en Arica.
Obtenidas las autorizaciones de Aduanas y del Gobierno Regional para instalarse y luego de invertir US$ 21 millones en vehículos, terrenos e instalaciones, Zofri S.A. no autorizó el contrato de usuario. Recurre de protección contra el director regional de Aduanas y el Intendente Regional de Arica y Parinacota. La corte de Apelaciones de Arica, falla en contra de Zofri S.A. y apela a la Corte Suprema, sin extender el contrato de usuario a la empresa.
La 3ª Sala de la Corte Suprema falla en abril de 2009 (3), nuevamente en contra de Zofri S.A., estableciendo que esta empresa no puede estar siendo perjudicada por acciones ocurridas “fuera de la esfera del contrato de concesión de la recurrente”. En efecto, el Contrato de Concesión comprende el recinto amurallado ubicado en Iquique.
En los medios se anuncia que podrían ser 120 las empresas interesadas en instalarse en Arica luego del anuncio de instalación de H.A. Motors, sin embargo, Zofri S.A. detiene varios proyectos análogos y la totalidad de esas empresas, termina desistiendo.
El conflicto entre los intereses de Zofri S.A. y los objetivos de desarrollo de la Región de Arica y Parinacota se hace evidente y público.
En los primeros meses de 2011, las autoridades políticas mencionan un “conflicto” potencial entre Zofri S.A. y las autoridades regionales, que aspiran a prevenir mediante un “protocolo” de resolución de conflictos, para dirimir diferencias entre el concesionario y las autoridades encargadas de evaluar y autorizar empresas en el régimen de Zona Franca Industrial. Consiste en designar como árbitro, en caso de discrepancia, al Director Nacional de Aduanas y eso lleva al plano político las solicitudes de los usuarios. En Arica, se le considera un subterfugio, ilegal e innecesario, que sólo se explica por el interés de cambiar la Ley Arica I.
Finalmente, el protocolo no se implementa y lo que se resuelve es un cambio “administrativo”, en el que se altera el orden de las presentaciones de los potenciales usuarios de la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica. Desde ese año, las empresas que deseen hacerse usuarias de Zona Franca Industrial, deben comenzar su trámite en las oficinas de Zofri S.A en Arica. Con ello se le otorga un control previo a Zofri S.A. de los proyectos industriales y, de hecho, detiene la presentación de proyectos acogidos al sistema.
A petición de Zofri S.A. desde marzo de 2021 (mensaje 025-369) se discutió un proyecto de Ley que “tiene por objeto prorrogar la vigencia del régimen de Zona Franca para la ciudad de Iquique y perfeccionar el régimen de administración de la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica, y de las demás Zonas Francas del país”.
Como se comentó, la concesión de Zofri S.A. expira el 2030 y el plazo remanente se considera insuficiente para proyectos comerciales potencialmente interesados en operar en Zona Franca. Es decir, el proyecto de ley soluciona un problema comercial de Zofri S.A.
En este proyecto, a iniciativa del Gobierno y debido a los sistemas de modernización de Aduanas iniciados el 2015, se termina el sistema de administración de usuarios de Zofri S.A. y todo el proceso de autorización, evaluación y control del sistema queda en manos de Aduanas. Con ello se autonomiza la administración de la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica y, nuevamente, Zofri S.A. se opuso. No sólo sus directivos concurrieron a la cámara de diputados, también, se manifestaron públicamente, con organizaciones sociales, sindicatos y autoridades políticas de Iquique.
Los últimos acontecimientos
Como se ha comentado, Zofri S.A. no acepta la pérdida de control sobre la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica. El proyecto de Ley en el Congreso concede lo solicitado por la empresa, es decir la extensión de la concesión. La única objeción es la pérdida de control sobre la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica.
A partir del año 2021, Zofri S.A. contrata asesorías para desarrollar una estrategia que les permita extender el plazo de concesión, sin tener que pasar por una ley (4). El camino elegido es la solicitud anticipada de extensión del contrato dirigida a la autoridad administrativa, el Ministerio de Hacienda. Esto significa renovar el mismo contrato y condiciones (con tuición sobre la Zona Franca Industrial de Arica y sin modernización del sistema de control). Dicho “trámite” fue iniciado el mismo año.
En noviembre de 2022, el Gobierno procede a retirar de la Cámara de Diputados el proyecto de ley (5) y deja abierto el camino administrativo para la extensión de concesión en los términos referidos. Las consecuencias son fáciles de prever, nuevamente se priva a Arica de una herramienta fundamental para su desarrollo, atendida su vocación productiva.
Ello es inaceptable y, en estas condiciones, queremos recoger la iniciativa del Gobierno del Presidente Boric, respecto a la Zona Franca de Punta Arenas. Recientemente (6) el Gobierno entregó al Gobierno Regional de Magallanes la administración de la Zona Franca de Punta Arenas y creemos que de manera análoga, ello debe hacerse en la Región de Arica y Parinacota, como una manera de fortalecer el proceso de regionalización en marcha.
1.Para detalles, ver Ríos W, Salgado L. et. al, (2007). El trabajo de Cabrales F. (2013) sintetiza esta transición.
2.Cabrales F. (2013) op. Cit.
3.Corte Suprema (2009).
4.Memoria Institucional Zofri S.A. 2021 pp. 34.
5.Oficio 186-370 de 21 de noviembre de 2022.
6.Comunicado de Prensa, Ministerio de Hacienda, 14 de enero de 2023.
A 58-year-old woman was sentenced to 10 months in jail today for abusing two domestic workers in her Paradise Island home in Sentosa Cove.
According to testimony from the victims, Tan Lee Hoon kicked one of them while she was putting her socks on for her because Tan was angry she had done so incorrectly. She also pinched the other worker.
Tan used to work as a director and secretary at Novena Medical Centre and had claimed trial to eight assault charges involving Joan Lozares Lizardo and Jenefer Vegafria Arangote.
Assault started in 2015
Tan was found to have assaulted Arangote on five occasions in September 2018, pinching her on the abdomen, chest and limbs.
During the trial, Lizardo said that Tan hit her many times between October 2015 and October 2018.
She was not able to recall the exact details of these incidents except for an incident in October 2018 when Tan was wearing a ring on her finger and hit Lizardo hard on her head.
Her accounts were also corroborated by two other domestic workers, Gaborone Clayrimae Balasa and Zin Mar Phyo, who had also worked for Tan.
The Deputy Public Prosecutors (DPPs) said, “She felt pain when the accused hit her. She was almost bending down to put on the accused’s socks when the accused hit her head. She explained that the accused was very angry and had been screaming for her socks.”
In another similar incident, Lizardo was on the front porch of the Paradise Island house when Tan kicked her in the chest because Lizardo was putting on her socks wrongly.
The DPPs said that the kick was painful and Lizardo could still feel the pain after five days.
In a medical examination after the incident, the doctor confirmed that she had tenderness over her sternum, consistent with the injury inflicted by a kick to the chest.
All work and no rest
During the trial, District Judge Salina Ishak also brought up examples where Tan had imposed long working hours on her domestic workers and even docked their salaries with she was not happy with their work.
She agreed with the prosecution that the working conditions for both victims were “oppressive and exploitative”.
It was also mentioned that she did not give the victims enough time to eat.
Unknown who lodged the report
Police officers went to Tan’s home after the incidents and statements were taken.
It is unknown who alerted the police in the first place.
The DPPs said, “We highlight that neither Jenefer nor Joan actually reported the abuse to the police, that Joan informed (a policewoman) that she did not know why the police officers were at the house, and that Jenefer had no idea the police were coming.”
The prosecution also said that both Arangote and Lizardo were credible and candid witnesses and their evidence should be given full weight.
Husband and wife team
Both Lizardo and Arangote were employed by Tan and her husband Sim Guan Huat as domestic workers.
In May 2021, her husband pleaded guilty to three charges under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act.
He also admitted to conspiring with a friend to illegally employing a domestic worker.
Sim and his family had been debarred from applying for work permits for domestic workers (though it is unclear why) so he conspired with his friend Tan Chong Choon to get a work permit for Lizardo.
Denies all charges
Tan was ordered by Judge Salina to pay S$2,500 (US$ 1,900) to Lizardo and S$5,100 to Arangote as compensation.
Despite statements from different sources, Tan denied all the charges and even claimed to be shocked when prosecuted for the crimes.
She denies ever causing hurt to any of her workers or abusing them.
Apparently, she had even provided the contact details of her other domestic workers to the police officers, hoping their statements would clear her name.
Tan’s defence lawyers argued that she had no criminal record, had treated her domestic helpers well and was of good character.
They also included in their submissions character references by Tan’s friends, former domestic workers and other witnesses who have seen her interactions with her maids.
“However, it is jarring that the clear and consistent evidence from her previous domestic helpers was that she had been abusive towards Joan on many occasions,” the DPPs said.
Her defence lawyer said that she intends to appeal against her conviction and sentence. Her bail has been set at S$15,000.
“Compensation for their pain and suffering”
Judge Salina said before the sentencing, “All maids should be treated with dignity and respect… The victims ought to be compensated for their pain and suffering.”
She also said that the protection of domestic workers from abuse “is always a matter of public interest”.
She acknowledged that the two victims suffered physical and psychological harm.
On top of that, the victims were afraid to report the abuse to the authorities for fear that they might be sent back home to the Philippines or blacklisted from working in Singapore.
The Singapore Hamster Society recently shared a video they had received of a family of rats at the Singapore Zoo that looked like they were clamouring for air in their…
Synthpop icon Molly Nilsson speaks about the future of creative pursuits in a neoliberal world, her hatred of pessimism, and her admiration for revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg.
Swedish Singer Molly Nilsson performs live in in Berlin, Germany, 2015. (Frank Hoensch / Redferns via Getty Images)
On her days off from working at the cloakroom at Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, Molly Nilsson began recording lo-fi pop gems. Armed with a knack for creating gloomy ballads that sparkle with mordant observations on life, loneliness, and the city, it didn’t take long for the Stockholm-born, Berlin-based artist to etch her name in the hearts of audiences from Manchester to Tokyo, now enjoying significant cult status across the world.
Together with her Spartan stage setup, her first songs captured her essence in the eyes of thousands: miniature, realist, personally driven odes to a certain type of young life, revolving around late night bars, the feeling of loneliness in crowded places, and nagging reminders that not even the tiniest moments of beauty afforded to people by a city can ever last.
However, while her more recent records are brighter, so too are they more political. More often than not, Nilsson uses her platform as a way to address social issues, including gun violence, the male gaze, late capitalism, and “neoliberal bullshit,” as she neatly put it in the 2015 anthem “Lovers are Losers.”
This is true for her tenth and newest album, Extreme. A remarkable work which combines her signature aching melodies with unalloyed socialist conviction, Extreme is a left-wing record that is wryer and, in some ways, deeper than Billy Bragg’s activist earnestness and Gang of Four’s theory-driven art school formalism.
Songs like “They Will Pay” take aggressive aim at tech billionaires, who are named and shamed for their exorbitant wealth and attacked for not recognizing unions formed by workers at corporations like Amazon. For the historically minded bedroom dancer, “Obnoxiously Talented” offers a propulsive elegy to Rosa Luxemburg, the communist leader murdered a century ago on the orders of the German state.
With socialist pop music in lamentably short supply, Tribune’s Alexander Brown caught up with Nilsson to discuss music after COVID-19, the future of creative pursuits in a neoliberal world, her hatred of pessimism, and her admiration for revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg.
Alexander Brown
How did it feel to play your first shows since the pandemic? Were you rusty or was it like getting back on a bike?
Molly Nilsson
It was. I mean, the first show was really weird, and I would say maybe not the best. But not because of the audience! Everyone was great! It was just that…
Alexander Brown
Just blame it on the audience: “They weren’t ready for me.”
Molly Nilsson
[Laughter] Exactly. They weren’t ready! No, I was definitely not ready. It was surreal because I just went on stage and was like, what am I doing here? What are they expecting me to do? I was not even nervous. I just felt so disconnected from it. Afterward, I was like: that was weird, is this what the whole tour is going to be like? But that was really just the first night because the second night was in Manchester and I was so nervous. I realized you have to be nervous. If you’re not nervous going on stage, there’s something wrong.
But in general, it was so fun because everyone has been starved for shows. Everyone is so nice. You can just tell that it’s not about whatever the show is. It’s just to be able to see people and to see them seeing their friends and flirting and chatting. Hopefully we won’t have that moment again, but it almost felt like a postwar situation.
Alexander Brown
Many of your songs revolve around the city and its nightlife. What makes the city a subject you always return to?
Molly Nilsson
Maybe it’s because there’s so much to say about city life — and maybe I just don’t like nature! I was in nature last weekend and I got, like, twenty mosquito bites — I was like, this doesn’t happen in the city! But I really like how people get together and want to live as close to each other as possible. It’s so fun to live in a city where you live so close to strangers. It’s so endearing how humans are like that. We could just spread out and live alone, but we want to be together. Even if we have to pay a lot of money for rent, we really want to be together, you know?
Alexander Brown
Did the isolation of the pandemic and the absence of nightlife change how you approached writing songs?
Molly Nilsson
I don’t know if it changed during the pandemic, or if maybe I felt like I’ve sung so much about being in a bar that I’m not allowed to sing about that anymore. It’s like, Molly, you’re not allowed to sing about that. I guess I’m trying to avoid that scenery. But if you’re writing a song, the song is about something, but you also need a stage for it to happen. I guess I would pick a bar because it seems like the best place for any kind of drama to happen. You have people, intrigue, dreams, and excitement rather than, I don’t know, a supermarket or something.
Yeah, I made a mental note there. But I think on Extreme I have very little real scenery. It takes place a lot inside my head.
You can leave the pessimism to conservatives. You have to believe in things. If you don’t believe in things, then it’s all useless.
Alexander Brown
One noticeable aspect of Extreme — and your last few records — are their more political aspects, but also that despite the fact you’re tackling themes far more depressing than heartbreak, they are also on the whole happier records. Has your disposition changed?
Molly Nilsson
I think it’s changed because of ageing. When I started writing songs, I was in my early twenties. When you’re in your early twenties, you’re at peak pessimism because… I mean, it’s kind of a tough time in life. You feel like you have to figure out what you want to do, but you don’t have so much going for you. You’re going to have the worst jobs, live in the worst places. It’s not a great time. I think I definitely became more optimistic because my life has just gotten a lot better.
I also think optimism is a skill, just a muscle you have to train. If you believe in things — if you’re a Marxist, for example — you don’t have the right to be a pessimist. Because who’s going to do all the work? You can leave the pessimism to conservatives. You have to believe in things. If you don’t believe in things, then it’s all useless. So I try to exercise my optimism muscle in every situation. There are so many forces in the world trying to limit our vision for the future — I just don’t want to be part of it.
Alexander Brown
Berlin once enjoyed a reputation for cheap living and a vibrant cultural scene. Sadly, the last five years have seen rents increase faster than in any other European city. How do you see this affecting the city’s social and cultural life?
Molly Nilsson
If I was a young person today, I don’t think I would’ve moved here because I wouldn’t be able to afford it. That in itself is obviously turning away a lot of people who don’t have lots of money. I mean, it’s not even about Berlin at this point. It’s like, where will people go? Where will people live, and how?
If everything in the cities is just about moneymaking, then cities are just going to be dead. That’s a bit what Stockholm is like. The inner city is dead at night, it’s just shopping malls. But it’s not over yet. Berlin is not a utopia, but it’s definitely trying to be at the forefront of showing all cities don’t have to be like London. They don’t have to be unlivable.
Alexander Brown
You mentioned Stockholm, a city that you left just before the Moderate Party set out to kill off the remainders of the social democracy Sweden was famed for, including generous public funding for the arts. Maybe the best-known example abroad is the 45,000 SEK ($4,400) the Swedish Arts Council gave to the Knife to create their 2001 debut album. Do you think the legacy of social democracy played any role in helping you to pursue music as a vocation?
Molly Nilsson
Music in Sweden is interesting because everybody in school learns an instrument. I mean, you can, you don’t have to — actually, I guess you kind of have to. I wasn’t so interested at the time; I did learn piano for a bit, but I didn’t actually learn anything because I wasn’t interested in playing music. But I think you get some confidence just automatically because you’re sort of expected to take part in music.
There was this cool thing where if you had a band, you could get paid for rehearsing. So I did have a band — a punk band with some friends — but we just wanted the money. You got like, I don’t know, maybe five bucks an hour while you rehearse. So we would just pretend to rehearse. And we just hung out and chatted in the rehearsal space. And we played a little bit.
That was a cool thing in itself. If you actually wanted to play music, you could. I think all that stuff is gone now: sadly, like everything in Sweden, music has just become this huge monster. Music is now the biggest export — except for weapons.
Alexander Brown
“Obnoxiously Talented” is dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg, and a lot of your writing in recent years certainly has a more socially committed, political edge. What brought you to socialist politics? And what is it about Luxemburg you admire in particular?
Molly Nilsson
I’ve always had that from my family. My parents were communists. When I was in my twenties, I didn’t think so much about Marxism, I was sort of more interested in anarchy. I guess it’s been a bit of a loop coming back to that.
But apart from her work and legacy, I’ve really developed a relationship with Rosa Luxemburg on a human level. It’s great to find people in history who can give you an example of what’s possible, or how you can live your life, or what you should strive for. When I was younger, I wanted to find examples of what you can do with your ambition that isn’t just, I don’t know, making money, and having examples who really lived and died for what they believed in is so inspiring.
Today, the class struggle is so much more important than having female CEOs. I don’t want any CEOs.
I mean, almost on a “What Would Rosa Do?” level in everyday life. I like to lean back on her whenever I’m getting depressed. I’m like, she wouldn’t get depressed. She would be in prison and still find the flowers and the birds outside her little window giving her hope enough to continue. I think also as a woman at that time, having everything sort of against her, even being physically impaired from birth, she kept going.
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time thinking about feminism and about women in the world. And I still think about that. But if you’re living in a world where someone like Ivanka Trump calls herself a feminist, I feel like maybe I’m not a feminist, you know? Or, maybe I don’t think that’s the most important thing anymore.
Today, the class struggle is so much more important than having female CEOs. Because I don’t want any CEOs. I don’t want more female billionaires. I want no billionaires. I think it’s something that people try to do, you know, to get Rosa into the feminist field. Because, you know, she was a woman and she did things.
Alexander Brown
I feel that the enemy is certainly aware of her power, too. In Zamość, the city of Luxemburg’s birth, the local council recently removed her commemorative plaque. All across Europe, socialists are being erased from history, their statues torn down, their graves desecrated. Do you think artists can play a role in preserving and extending the legacies and political hopes of radical thinkers?
Molly Nilsson
Definitely. I mean, when I was touring Extreme, I was talking about Rosa every night. In some cities people are like, “Yay!” And in others, people are like, “What, who?” I’m hoping that inspires people to find out about her if they don’t already know.
I’m hoping that someone is in the audience at one point, and maybe they go on to do something really great. That’s kind of my dream scenario. I definitely don’t think I’ll inspire anyone to do anything bad.
I feel that the whole point of art or culture is building on these traditions, the ideas of people before us, and remembering that we’re all a part of this long chain of political ideas. I definitely think my work is not as important as maybe what I am doing to inspire someone else’s. Or that’s always the way I’ve always thought about it.
The Philippines on Tuesday denounced the killing of a Filipina maid in Kuwait, whose body was reportedly burnt and found dumped in the desert at the weekend.
Manila has periodically imposed bans on the deployment of its migrant labor force to Kuwait after the gruesome deaths of several Filipino domestic workers in the Persian Gulf country that hosts more than 200,000 of them.
The body of Jullebee Ranara, the 35-year-old victim, was found Sunday, days after her family in the Philippines said they had lost contact with her. Autopsy findings showed that the Filipina was pregnant, according to information cited by Philippine senators and received from Manila’s embassy in Kuwait.
“[We] urge the Kuwaiti government to work on the early resolution of the case and its perpetrators brought to justice,” Department of Migrant Workers Secretary Susan Ople said during an interview on the dzBB radio station on Tuesday.
“According to the mother, Jullebee has been complaining about her employer’s son, who was abusive. In fact, there was a time that he threatened her.”
She added that she visited Ranara’s family on Monday and assured them that the department would provide all the necessary support, including death and burial assistance, and scholarships for Ranara’s four children.
Ople said the employer’s 17-year-old son appeared to be the “primary suspect.” He “is now under the custody of the Kuwaiti police,” Ople said.
Separately, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, citing reports that he had received, said the victim had been “beaten, ran over by the perpetrator’s car twice and … burnt and left for dead in the desert.” The details, he said, were based on an autopsy report.
Ople said it might be time to ensure more stringent safeguards for Philippine workers.
“We will reach out to the Kuwaiti government. Maybe it’s time to review the 2018 bilateral labor agreement so it would be similar to the bilateral agreement with Saudi Arabia which has more safeguards for our workers,” Ople said.
Manila had earlier banned the deployment of workers to Kuwait owing to a sharp rise in Filipino deaths there. Then-President Rodrigo Duterte made the decision after the body of 29-year-old Joanna Demafelis, who also worked as a domestic helper, was found stuffed in a freezer.
The ban was lifted in 2018 after Duterte signed an agreement with the Kuwaiti government to ensure better treatment of Filipino workers.
The agreement guaranteed Filipinos’ right to use their phones and keep their passports, which are usually confiscated by Arab employers. The agreement also said that workers or Philippine authorities had to approve transfers to another employer.
Despite the agreement, Filipino domestic workers continued to die under abusive conditions.
In May 2019, Constancia Lago Dayag, 47, was killed by her employer after being physically and sexually assaulted.
The killing of another Filipino domestic worker, Jeanelyn Padernal Villavende, 26, prompted Manila to again halt deployment to Kuwait in January 2020. Deployment resumed the following month after charges were filed against her employers.
Ranara’s killing, though, may not lead to a deployment ban, Ople said, noting that the Kuwaiti government had been quick to arrest the suspect, the teenage son of the victim’s employer.
Migrante Philippines, an alliance of local migrants group, called for an outright end to the government’s labor export program.
“Despite the sufferings of our countrymen, the DMW still wants to continue the deployment of Filipino workers to Kuwait and similar countries,” the group said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Instead of selling Filipino workers abroad, the government must find a sustainable reintegration program for overseas Filipino workers,” it added.
Sen. Rita Hontiveros echoed the sentiment.
“True justice can only be achieved if we ensure the protection of our fellow citizens who work far from the motherland,” she said.
“The most important thing we can possibly do for our OFW (overseas Filipino workers) is to make sure to better our economy so that no one has to leave the country to provide for their families.”
Basilio Sepe in Manila contributed to this report.
A cocktail of elite arrogance and naivete across the Anglophone world, combined with the support of billionaires like Sam Bankman-Fried, produced effective altruism. The result has been reactionary, often racist intellectual defenses of inequality.
According to Karl Marx, a combination of arrogance and ignorance incubated in elite institutions was to blame for the worst excesses of British moral philosophy. The same holds true for effective altruism.(RDImages / Epics / Getty Images)
Academics are fond of giving lofty names to their research institutions. But the Future of Humanity Institute, a research body based at Oxford University, is grandiose even by the standards of an elite institution that takes it for granted that many of its graduates will go on to walk the halls of power.
The combination of a forward-looking outlook and a universalist perspective would suggest that the institute would at the very least be home to cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideas. For this reason, it came as a surprise to some when a racist email written by Nick Bostrom, a professor at the institute, resurfaced. In the email, sent in 1996 to a transhumanist mailing list of which Bostrom was a member, the future Oxford don writes that “blacks are more stupid than whites” and then later doubles down enthusiastically on this statement by telling the forum’s members, “I like that sentence and think it’s true.”
In the email, Bostrom cites as evidence for his assertions “scientific” views about IQ differences between racial groups. Predictably, he suggests that fear of being accused of bigotry prevents honest talk about these important issues: “For most people, however, the sentence seems to be synonymous with: ‘I hate those bloody n——!!!,’” he wrote.
Given this concern, he concludes there’s a need for caution in communicating the “facts” about relative mental inferiority in ways that don’t invite accusations of racism and therefore result in “personal damage.” He is adamant that he’s not racist, and he seems to sincerely believe this claim.
We might think that, given the incident took place decades ago, it is hardly relevant. This may have been the case were it not for the fact that, in an apology circulated by Bostrom earlier this month, he did little to challenge the central claims of his previous racist rant. “I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago,” Bostrom writes:
It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
The main problem, according to Bostrom, was the use of a racial slur and not, his statement suggests, his commitment to pseudoscientific ideas about racial difference.
Bostrom is an advocate of longtermism, a once-niche concept now in vogue thanks to a bestselling 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill, a pioneer of the effective altruism (EA) movement. The gist of longtermism is that future people, however distant, have equal moral value to people alive today. Though seemingly innocuous, this view has drawn support from reactionary conservatives and tech gurus who flood Bostrom and MacAskill with millions in research grants.
What is it about effective altruism and offshoots like longtermism that make them so appealing to tech billionaires who flood MacAskill and his pals with grants, book endorsements, and invitations to California retreats?
The short answer is that effective altruism, for all the hype about being a novel, game-changing approach, is at heart a conservative movement, which attempts to present billionaires as a solution to global poverty rather than its cause. The effective altruism movement has parasitically latched onto the back of the billionaire class, providing the ultrarich with a moral justification of their position.
In a 2015 conference hosted by Google, organizers enthused that “effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.” A deeply implausible statement, of course, but one that has managed somehow to serve as a rallying cry for the idealistic rich.
Rooted in a worldview that stretches from philosopher Peter Singer to the grandaddy of consequentialism, Jeremy Bentham (“Bentham’s bulldog” is the title of one effective altruism fan’s Substack), proponents of effective altruism champion the belief that measurable effects in terms of lives saved is the only rational way to make decisions about philanthropic expenditures.
In many ways, their interest in measurement is not particularly objectionable, nor new. Gilded Age robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller drew upon Taylorist management principles to insist that their giving was more scientific than earlier philanthropists. In every age, we see apologetics for extreme, concentrated wealth, and while the charitable causes shift, the rationales tend to be pretty much the same: my extreme wealth is good — no matter how concentrated and disproportionate — because others will inevitably benefit from it — if not today, then certainly tomorrow.
“Earn to give” is the most recent instantiation of the supposedly rational justification of inequality. It’s the idea that people are morally beholden to maximize wealth however possible so they have more to give, leading in its most extreme interpretation to the insistence there may be no moral “good” after all in trying to save poor lives, because rich people are more “innovative” and thus more worthy.
Many of the effective altruism proponents I met spoke about ending global poverty but had never heard of the WTO or the IMF. This ignorance seemed not to perturb but to embolden them to make grand claims about the ‘facts’ of the global economy.
“It now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal,” wrote Nick Beckstead in his 2013 Rutgers PhD, which he completed before joining the Future of Humanity Institute as a research fellow and then going on to work as CEO of the FTX Foundation before leaving in the wake of Sam Bankman-Fried’s recent disgrace.
Certainly, not everyone in the effective altruism movement agrees with Beckstead’s claim that saving rich lives is worthier than saving poor ones. It is, however, those like him with the most extremist, pro-rich takes on trickle-down policies who seem to get the plum jobs at effective altruism research centers. On EA forums, meanwhile, hoi polloi frustration is mounting. There is growing realization that a hierarchical movement spearheaded by a handful of mediagenic men and the billionaires they worship might not be the world’s saviors after all.
Many onetime enthusiasts who read books like MacAskill’s first one, Doing Good Better, and were inspired to “give what we can” are frustrated. They earnestly wanted to help poorer groups and feel cheated. They are right to feel that way. Given their sincerity, it feels almost cruel to break the news: no, you’re not the last social movement humanity will ever need. Indeed, many seem to have little knowledge of previous ones, a problem I encountered when I worked as a research fellow in Oxford and met EA leaders in the early days of the movement.
At first, I thought we shared a common cause. Before reaching Oxford, I’d been a journalist and activist, reporting on movements calling for reform to global trade policies that hindered poor nations from acquiring pharmaceuticals, domestic tax revenue, and the policy freedom they deserved. Many of the effective altruism proponents I met, meanwhile, spoke about ending global poverty but had never heard of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This ignorance seemed not to perturb but to embolden them to make grand claims about the “facts” of the global economy.
“The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods,” a chapter in MacAskill’s first book, hails sweatshop labor as an unalloyed advantage, even a beneficent gift, to poor nations: “Among economists on both the left and the right, there is no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor nations.” The authorities he cites are Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs. His main empirical material appears to be drawn from Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns. “I’d love to get a job in a factory,” one Cambodian woman says to Kristof.
To be sure, you can find some economists across the spectrum to defend sweatshops. But you can also find reams of Global South scholarship on tax drain and the bullying of nations to accept draconian IMF loan conditions. MacAskill’s book entirely ignores any viewpoint that does not affirm his own conservative priors — perhaps because confronting alternative views might force a rethinking of his philosophical stance, which is predicated on exhorting the world’s 1 percent to engage in as much economic predation of poor groups as possible as long it generates private wealth to then disburse.
MacAskill’s strategic ignorance is not unusual; it is in fact hardwired into the history of the branch of Anglophone philosophy out of which effective altruism emerged. James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, published a history of India in 1817 that helped him to be upheld as a key global authority on the nation, later taking up senior positions in the East India Company. Incredibly, he purposely chose not to visit India while writing his three-volume history because he didn’t want to be biased by local norms. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen put it, “Mill seemed to think that this non-visit made his history more objective.”
This sort of insipid, purposeful blindness tended to enrage later anti-utilitarian thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx. It’s probably why Marx voiced sharp criticism of Bentham, who he called that “arch-philistine . . . that soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle of the ‘common sense’ of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.”
“Bentham is a purely English phenomenon,” Marx declares in Capital, Volume 1: “In no time and no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way.” According to Marx, a combination of arrogance and ignorance incubated in elite institutions was to blame for the worst excesses of British moral philosophy — the same holds true for effective altruism.
Unscientific Racism
When Bostrom made his false, anti-scientific comments about IQ testing, I wasn’t surprised because I’d seen him and his pals up close. When Anders Sandberg, a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute, offered a defense of his colleague shortly after the public became aware of the racist email, he made sure to leave Bostrom’s core claims untouched.
Sandberg instead implied there was nothing wrong with the original email, but rather that because of “newfound” historical awareness of the problem of racism, out of politeness Bostrom should avoid racial slurs. “The email has become significantly more offensive in the current cultural context: levels of offensiveness change as cultural attitudes change,” Sandberg tweeted on January 11. “This causes problems when old writings are interpreted by current standards.”
It is odd to imagine that Sandberg does not realize that racial slurs were offensive in 1996 too. Even if we grant this absurd claim, the main problem with Bostrom’s email is not his writing style but the worldview underlying it. This is a worldview that draws spurious connections between IQ and intelligence to back up racist assumptions about the world.
In 1996, the first “drafts” of the human genome were a few years away from being sequenced and published. In 2003, a global consortium made a thrilling announcement. As the Guardian reported, “Fifty years after the discovery of the structure of DNA [scientists] have sequenced the entire genetic code of a human being, to an accuracy of 99.999%.”
This sequencing was — and remains — bad news for racists everywhere. It found, as one recent research paper summarizes, that “humans populating the earth today are on average 99.9% identical at the DNA level, there is no genetic basis for race, and there is more genetic variation within a race than between them.”
The finding has settled a centuries-long debate over how biologically meaningful today’s racial categorizations are. The answer was clear: they aren’t, not at the level of genetic difference. And certainly not at the level of cognitive difference, something much more elusive and impossible to study precisely than genetic makeup.
Let’s get back to Bostrom: “Blacks are more stupid than whites.” To speak in this sweeping, grossly generalizing way was morally and scientifically suspect in 1996, but it’s especially shameful and debunkable now, when we know so much more about how useless it is to categorize people writ large into separate biological “races” in the ways that Bostrom does. I am not a racist, he insists; then don’t make racist claims.
Of course, Bostrom’s errors are not his alone. Similar pseudoscientific views are incentivized by a cluster of commercial, educational, and political factors that militate toward keeping early imperial racial classifications alive and well in the twenty-first century, even long after their biological basis, which never existed to begin with, has lost all credence.
Ancestry tests are a big culprit, emboldening white supremacists today to claim various levels of “purity” genetically based on their heritage and the regions ancestors hailed from. Early race science was rooted in categories developed in the eighteenth century, when the German natural scientist Johann Blumenbach and others suggested there are five races — Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Malayan (brown), Ethiopian (black), and American (red). Today’s ancestry tests don’t exactly replicate these categories, but in some ways, they’re almost as problematic when it comes to maintaining a mirage of racial separateness that belies constant migrations and intermingling throughout history.
As the academic Vivian Chou writes, “Ancestry test kits are the new ‘it’ item.” Proving relatedness to distant populations is a way for various groups to insist on their superiority even though we know, as Chou writes, that there is “so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other.”
The finding of 99.9 percent shared DNA hasn’t halted white supremacists. Instead, they pounce on the 0.1 percent variation, cherry-picking “ideas that align with their preconceived notions of racial hierarchies,” Chou writes, while “ignoring the broader context of the field of human genetics.”
The latest trend is to insist that Neanderthal inheritance — the fact that many Europeans and their descendant have inherited some DNA from Neanderthals, while most African descendants did not — has conferred a sort of exceptional intelligence on white groups. As Chou puts it, “Some within the alt-right have claimed that Europeans and Asians have superior intelligence because they have inherited larger brains from their Neanderthal ancestors.”
Of course, it’s impossible to prove that this Neanderthal inheritance has any causal influence on personal intelligence today. The white supremacists base it on skull size, claiming the bigger brains of Neanderthals means they must have been cognitively superior to other groups. Right.
Perhaps it’s to be expected that alt-right supremacists have an interest in such cherry-picking. What’s Bostrom’s excuse?
He based his 1996 claim of racial cognitive difference on IQ testing, and today he appears to be standing by this, insisting the “science” of IQ is robust enough to claim unequivocally that there is some objective basis to his claim that “blacks are more stupid.”
IQ testing is, of course, as much a social construction as Blumenbach’s effort to sort humanity into five discrete races, and its objective flaws and misuse has tempered most scholars from making generalizations based on deeply subjective, uncertain science.
IQ scores are affected by a host of factors, including social-economic status, financial opportunities, learning resources, and psychosomatic anxieties. Test outcomes tend to shift dramatically at the group level over time as living standards rise. For example, a 1998 Brookings Institute report on black-white achievement gaps found that overall,
82 percent of those who took the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 scored above the 1932 average for individuals of the same age. The average black did about as well on the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 as the average white did in 1932.
If we leave aside basic questions such as whether it makes sense to compare the cognitive ability of people living in vastly different social worlds that required vastly different sets of skills, this finding and findings like it would seem to back up Bostrom’s assertion. Although some scholars cherry-pick data like this to defend Bostrom’s view, others reach the opposite conclusion, pointing out that shifts in IQ over time underscore just how environmentally shaped and malleable any cognitive tests really are.
When it comes to national-level IQ rankings, the United States tends to rank lower than Mongolia, to name just one country. So, are Americans stupider than Mongolians? Presumably, Bostrom must think so, given his propensity for making gross generalizations based on flawed IQ measures. And yet, oddly enough, that’s not the point he made — perhaps because maligning American intelligence writ large might piss off his white philanthropic donors. But “blacks,” on the other hand, he’s fine with disparaging.
In the 1990s, introducing the notion of “stereotype threat,” a study by psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson found that, when asked to record their race before taking a test, and when told the test was a measure of mental ability, black undergraduates at Stanford did measurably worse than their white counterparts. When the same test was presented in a different way, as a nondiagnostic test of ability, the same undergraduates performed equivalently to their white classmates.
Twenty years on, such stereotype threat effects have been registered in a host of studies, across multiple groups. For example, as one recent study summarizes:
Research indicates that Caucasian men, a group that have a relatively positive social status, underperform when they believe that their mathematical performance will be compared to that of Asian men. White men also appear to perform worse than black men when motor tasks are related to “natural athletic ability.”
The conclusions of such research? Stereotypes have self-fulfilling consequences, shaping “the behavior of individuals in a way that endangers their performance and further reinforces the stereotype.”
Bostrom’s blanket claim about the intellectual inferiority of black people is therefore damaging and dangerous. We know this from studies of the empirical effects that stereotypical claims can have on lowered performances. What’s more, Bostrom knows this, or at least he should know it.
There is currently an investigation at Oxford into Bostrom’s conduct. “The University and Faculty of Philosophy is currently investigating the matter but condemns in the strongest terms possible the views this particular academic expressed in his communications,” the university told the Daily Beast in a statement.
Bostrom claimed in his 1996 email to esteem “uncompromisingly objective” ways of thinking. But to actively avoid scientific challenges to nineteenth-century racism involves doing the opposite. The “objectivity” he claims to idealize and embody might be a quaint mirage that gives him and his rich funders comfort, but it certainly isn’t the truth.
This sparked a conversation between Coconuts KL and Coconuts Singapore on how little non-Malaysians know when it comes to ordering a Ramly burger considering its tons of variations depending on one’s likes and dislikes.
For those who don’t know, Ramly burgers are an all-time Malaysian favourite and their patties have been consumed by almost all the country’s residents – young and old, rich and poor.
The Ramly brand and burgers are well-known among Malaysians and have been proudly accepted as one of the nation’s top street food offerings.
Ramly patties and products are commonly used by burger vendors in the country.
We concluded this topic by putting out a question to Malaysians on Twitter and how they would usually order theirs, let’s just say the responses we received was *chef’s kiss*.
Good morning Malaysia! We have a very important, life-or-death question for you.
How do you order or like your burger Ramly? We like a Benjo special.
We have decided to share their responses with you in this article as a guide if you’re travelling to this beautiful country and want to try out its most famous street food, the Ramly burger.
Below are their responses which you may use as a reference when ordering your own Ramly burger!
The classic
Photo credit: Qniti Bazaar
There’s a reason why it’s a timeless burger. A standard Ramly burger is a combination of a meat patty of choice (there’s fish, chicken, beef and lamb), a sloppy fried egg, cheese and a medley of sauces (mayo and barbecue sauce) and cut veggies. And that’s how most people enjoy the national burger.
A popular one is the chicken special which is basically a burger with a chicken patty that is wrapped with an egg and a slice of cheese is added to make it more delicious.
Vegetarian? No problem.
Photo credit: Sham Suriyadi
Though the juicy meat patties are the pièce de résistance, there are also meatless ways to enjoy the Ramly without compromising its enjoyment.
Those who do not wish to consume meat can opt for the Benjo, which is similar to the standard burger, but with a cylinder-shaped fried egg as its patty instead of meat.
This burger benjo has no meat patties but only uses egg and cabbage with onions as its vegetable and is always drizzled with a generous amount of chili and mayo sauce.
The ‘Kawin’
Photo credit: Resipi Che Nom blog
‘Kawin’ means marriage, and we all know the word always refers to joy and bliss.
When you order the ‘kawin’, you’ll get both beef and chicken patties in one burger, doubling the fun!
If you’re feeling bold, you can pamper yourself with an order of kawin spesyel (special), where the patties will be wrapped by a thin blanket of fried egg. You can also make your standard burger “spesyel” if you prefer the fried egg wrap over your patty.
There you go, that’s all the combinations of how you can enjoy the burger. Do you have another unique way to enjoy this iconic burger? Let us know!
You can also check out other responses to the question here.
Nicos Poulantzas developed a highly original interpretation of fascism, seeing it as a potential that lurked within all capitalist states under conditions of crisis. His work can help us understand the danger posed by right-wing authoritarianism today.
Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán shake hands during a news conference on February 17, 2022, in Budapest, Hungary. (Janos Kummer / Getty Images)
The Greek political thinker Nicos Poulantzas was one of those Marxists who attempted to think about fascism as a challenge that was both theoretical and strategic. His writings on fascism were not motivated simply by theoretical considerations but also by urgent political exigencies. He sought not only to describe what led to fascism but also to distinguish fascism from other forms of “exceptional state.”
Poulantzas rejected the liberal approach that presented fascism as an anomaly in the history of capitalism that told us nothing about the system in general. Yet he also challenged the economic determinism of those Marxists who depicted fascist regimes as a necessary function of capitalist development during the interwar period. According to Poulantzas, the potential for fascism existed within capitalist states, but the realization of that potential depended on the outcome of class struggles.
With the rise of far-right political movements in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, the question of whether those movements will repeat the experience of interwar fascism, in whole or in part, is being widely debated. Poulantzas can be an important reference point for such debates. His warning that capitalist democracies were shifting toward a kind of “authoritarian statism” that would preserve the forms of liberal-democratic rule while trampling upon civil liberties now seems especially prescient in the light of contemporary trends.
The Coup in Greece
The experience of the 1967–1974 military dictatorship in Greece was especially important for Poulantzas’s turn toward the question of fascism. The dictatorship was a watershed moment for the Greek political system and the Greek left — in particular the communist movement. It represented the limits of the anti-communist state that took shape after the monarchist victory in the Greek Civil War of the late 1940s.
The experience of the 1967–1974 military dictatorship in Greece was especially important for Poulantzas’s turn toward the question of fascism.
That state combined some formal elements of parliamentarism with the criminal penalization of communist political activity and the existence of a “parallel constitution” of authoritarian measures and power centers inside the state, such as the army and the monarchy. After a period of intense social struggles and political crises, the army took over as the “party of the state” after a coup that had backing from at least some elements of the US state and its agencies.
At the same time, the dictatorship was a moment of strategic crisis for the Left. The left parties were not really prepared for it — something that led to mass arrests — and it brought the conflicts inside the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to a head, acting as the catalyst for a split in the party in 1968. But there were other considerations for Poulantzas as well.
In certain segments of the post-1968 revolutionary left in France, such as the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne, there was a tendency to depict Gaullism as a form of fascism, something with which Poulantzas disagreed. Poulantzas wished to distinguish his position from those who extended the “fascist” characterization to forms of authoritarian rule that were in truth different from fascism.
At the same time, he wanted to examine how fascist and more generally “exceptional” state forms could emerge in conjunctures of political crisis or even a crisis of the state. This stood in contrast to the tendency, obvious in many mainstream readings of fascism, to view it simply as a kind of political “pathology” or “anomaly,” instead of treating it as something that is a latent possibility in capitalist social formations.
In a text that appeared in Greek in 1967, in the journal of the Union of Greek Students in Paris, Poulantzas insisted that the 1967 coup was not fascist, since one could not identify the “popular base” that was associated with classical fascism. Nor was it “Bonapartist,” since one could not see in the Greece of the late 1960s the catastrophic equilibrium that might lead to Bonapartism, following the analysis of nineteenth-century French politics developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Rather, it was for Poulantzas a coup that corresponded to the international strategy of US imperialism. This was in a conjuncture marked by a serious escalation of popular struggles — which did not reach a point of equilibrium with the bourgeoisie — but also by divisions inside the dominant classes. The fact that parts of the state such as the Greek army had gained a relative autonomy was another symptom of this.
Poulantzas concluded that, since the army takeover in 1967 was not a fascist coup and lacked a popular base, the Left should boycott any attempt by the new regime to create mass organizations:
According to [Georgi] Dimitrov’s report, for instance, such organizations must be used — as was the case in Germany and Italy — for a revolutionary should be wherever the masses are. And Dimitrov pours endless ridicule on the “revolutionaries” who pose the question at the level of individual “honesty.” On the other hand, if, as I believe is the case, we are not dealing with a fascist coup, and certainly not with a stabilized one, then the line must be the absolute boycotting of the organizations that the regime might create to attract the masses, so that its isolation be maintained.
This was in contrast with Francoist Spain, where the underground left parties infiltrated the official state trade union that the regime had set up.
Fascism and Dictatorship
Poulantzas’s main theoretical confrontation with these issues was the book Fascism and Dictatorship, which first appeared in French in 1970, two years after his celebrated work Political Power and Social Classes. It continued the attempt to develop a coherent theorization of fascism and distinguish it from other forms of exceptional state while also returning to questions of revolutionary strategy in the aftermath of May 1968.
For Poulantzas, fascism was ‘one of the possible conjunctures’ of the imperialist stage of capitalism.
For Poulantzas, fascism was “one of the possible conjunctures” of the imperialist stage of capitalism. He theorized imperialism as a “stage in capitalist development as a whole” that was “not simply or solely an economic phenomenon; in other words, it is not determined by events in the economic domain alone, nor can it be located within it.” Poulantzas opposed this perspective to the economism of the Third International.
One feature of this stage in particular, apart from its economic modifications, was that it assigned a new role to the capitalist state, “giving it new functions and an extended field of intervention, and also a new level of effectiveness.” Poulantzas connected this to an accumulation of contradictions within the imperialist chain during the interwar period: “Although the revolution was made in the weakest link in the chain (Russia), fascism arose in the next two links, i.e., those which were, relatively speaking, the weakest in Europe at the time.”
Poulantzas insisted that fascism could only be explained “by reference to the concrete situation of the class struggle, as it cannot be reduced to any inevitable need of the ‘economic’ development of capitalism.” He rejected what he called the “economist catastrophism” of the Third International and believed that this faulty paradigm could explain many of the European communist movement’s strategic failings regarding fascism.
Poulantzas argued that it was both analytically and politically disastrous to portray fascism as a phenomenon that would bring revolution closer since it was an expression of capitalism’s catastrophic economic crisis. In Fascism and Dictatorship, he attempted to develop a theory that would treat fascism as “a form of State and of regime at the extreme ‘limit’ of the capitalist State.” This meant that it was neither a “pathology” of the bourgeois state nor an inevitable development of it but depended upon particular conjunctures that were determined by the outcome of class struggles.
Poulantzas stressed the importance of the analyses of fascism developed by communist thinkers such as August Thalheimer, Antonio Gramsci, and Leon Trotsky. At the same time, however, he criticized some of their arguments. For example, he thought that the notion of catastrophic equilibrium that Thalheimer and Gramsci had used, drawing upon Marx’s interpretation of Bonapartism, was not applicable in cases where the working class had already been defeated. He also believed that Trotsky had been wrong to perceive an imminent fascist danger in France during the 1930s.
Elements of Fascism
According to Poulantzas, the key elements for the emergence of fascism were as follows. First of all, there was a process of “deepening and sharpening of the internal contradictions between the dominant classes and class fractions.” Second, there was a crisis of hegemony, in the sense that “no dominant class or class fraction seems able to impose its ‘leadership’ on the other classes and fractions of the power bloc, whether by its own methods of political organization or through the ‘parliamentary democratic’ State.”
In this context, one could observe the “hegemony of a new class fraction within the power bloc: that of finance capital, or big monopoly capital,” as well as a crisis of party representation and of the dominant ideology. An “offensive strategy on the part of the bourgeoisie” coincided with a “defensive step by the working class.”
Poulantzas was very critical of certain aspects of the analysis of fascism developed by the Third International.
While setting out these elements, Poulantzas wanted to avoid any narrowly “instrumentalist” conception of fascism. He insisted that during and after their rise to power, fascist parties and states typically possessed a “relative autonomy” from both the wider power bloc and the specific fractions of big monopoly capital whose hegemony they had established.
Poulantzas was very critical of certain aspects of the analysis of fascism developed by the Third International. This included the formulations put forward by the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, where he described fascism as the dictatorship of “the most reactionary, chauvinist and imperialist elements of finance capital.”
For Poulantzas, this was an unduly narrow summary of the economic interests that the fascist state represented. It also opened the way for a strategy of alliances that might include all fractions of capital with the exception of those Dimitrov had identified. Although fascism represented a new relationship of forces within the dominant classes, he believed, this did not mean that it exclusively represented the interests of finance capital.
In contrast to the rhetoric of the Third International, Poulantzas insisted that important defeats of the working classes and an ideological crisis of the working-class movement and its organizations were important aspects to the rise of fascism. He also stressed the inadequacy of the concept of “social fascism,” which presented social democracy and fascism as twin, potentially cooperative forces and underestimated the fact that fascist parties had developed a social basis of their own.
In addition, he addressed the particular attachment of petty-bourgeois strata to fascist parties. Poulantzas argued that in a period of economic and political crisis, certain elements of the ideology of fascist parties offered an outlet to these strata, such as “statolatry,” nationalism, elitism, racism, and militarism.
Poulantzas offered a very detailed analysis of fascism in power as an interventionist “exceptional state” that helped overcome an ideological crisis and expanded the scope of state intervention beyond the limits set by law. While the single-party system did not eliminate the contradictions between different fractions of the dominant classes, he insisted, it did offer
forms of “direct representation” typical of situations where the power bloc is politically disorganized, where political parties are cut out by the direct “organizer” role of the other State apparatuses, and where the masses are characteristically subject to the dominant ideology.
The suspension of competitive, multiparty elections did not mean the suspension of legitimacy as such, Poulantzas believed. Fascist parties in power constantly invoked some form of “popular sovereignty” and engaged in regular mobilization of the masses.
Organic Crises
Fascism and Dictatorship was an important contribution to the debate. It certainly had its shortcomings, such as the author’s tendency to think that strategies articulated within state apparatuses were determined mainly by the relationship of forces within and between the dominant class fractions. This ran against his own insistence on the relative autonomy of the state. Poulantzas also underestimated the extent to which fascism was based on a form of mass politics.
Poulantzas underlined the potential for fascism to emerge while showing that not every form of state authoritarianism was fascist.
Nonetheless, his analysis managed to strike an important balance. On the one hand, it treated fascism as an “organic” aspect of certain historical periods, linked to the transformation of accumulation regimes and state apparatuses alike. On the other hand, it stressed its contingent features, reflecting the conjunctural dynamics of class struggle in one country or another. In this way, Poulantzas underlined the potential for fascism to emerge while showing that not every form of state authoritarianism was fascist.
The same desire to avoid presenting all “exceptional states” as fascist was obvious in 1975’s The Crisis of the Dictatorships. This was a more “interventionist” book than his other works, written in an attempt to analyze the demise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Greece, Portugal, and Spain during the mid-1970s. It included some very interesting observations about the role of US imperialism.
Poulantzas identified a “plurality of American tactics” in dealing with the regimes of Southern Europe that was “related to the contradictions of American capital itself” — contradictions that found expression within the US state:
The peculiarity of the American state is that its “external fascism,” i.e. a foreign policy that generally does not hesitate to have recourse to the worst types of genocide, is embodied by institutions which, while far from representing an ideal case of bourgeois democracy (one need only recall the situation of social and national minorities in the USA), still permit an organic representation of the various fractions of capital within the state apparatuses and the branches of the repressive apparatus. A regime of this kind, even though based on a real union sacrée of the great majority of the nation on major political objectives (and a lot could be said about this), is necessarily accompanied by constant and open contradictions within the state apparatuses.
At any given time, Poulantzas argued, Washington’s attitude could encompass “a number of possible solutions” that ranged from “various degrees of support to the more or less passive acceptance of solutions that it considers the lesser evil — up to the point of a certain break.” The different state apparatuses involved in US foreign policy could even work at cross-purposes to an extent:
The CIA, the Pentagon and military apparatus, and the State Department often adopt different tactics, as do the Administration and executive branch as a whole as opposed to Congress; this is quite apparent in the cases of Greece, Portugal, and Spain. What is more, these tactics are often pursued in parallel, giving rise to parallel networks that take no notice of each other and even combat one another.
Authoritarian Statism
In the 1970s, Poulantzas continued working on questions about the state, taking his studies in two important directions. On the one hand, Poulantzas developed a highly original, relational definition of the state, according to which the state was not an “entity” that possessed its own “intrinsic instrumental essence . . . it is itself a relation, more precisely the condensation of a class relation.”
On the other hand, he put forward a more elaborate theorization of state crisis:
This series of contradictions expresses itself at the very heart of the state (the state is a relation) and is a factor in determining the characteristics of the state crisis: accrued internal contradictions between branches and apparatuses of the state, complex displacement of dominance between apparatuses, permutations of function, accentuations of the ideological role of a given apparatus accompanying the reinforcement in the use of state violence, and so forth. These all bear witness to efforts of the state to restore a toppling class hegemony.
For Poulantzas, this was leading to an authoritarian turn “that could signify simply that a certain form of ‘democratic politics’ has come to an end in capitalism.”
Poulantzas identified a series of transformations of which this new “strong state” authoritarianism was comprised:
Prodigious concentration of power in the executive at the expense of not only “popular” parliamentary representation but also a series of networks founded on popular suffrage . . . organic confusion of three powers (executive, legislative, and judicial) and the constant encroachment on the fields of action and competence of the apparatuses or branches that correspond to them . . . accelerated pace of the state’s arbitrary policies that restrict citizens’ political liberties . . . precipitous decline of the role of bourgeois political parties and the displacement of their political-organizational functions (both from the perspective of the power bloc and from that of the dominated classes) in favour of the administration and bureaucracy of the state . . . accentuation of the use of state violence (both in the sense of physical violence and in that of “symbolic violence”) . . . creation of a vast network of new circuits of “social control” (extended police surveillance, psychological-psychoanalytic divisions, social welfare controls).
In his final work, State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas described these transformations of capitalist states as the emergence of “authoritarian statism”:
For want of a better term, I shall refer to this state form as authoritarian statism. This will perhaps indicate the general direction of change: namely, intensified state control over every sphere of socioeconomic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called “formal” liberties, whose reality is being discovered now that they are going overboard.
Poulantzas was careful to distinguish this authoritarian statism from totalitarianism or fascism. This was not because he underestimated the extent of these transformations or their authoritarian character. Rather, it was because we were dealing not with some form of “exceptional state” but rather with the authoritarian mutation of the “democratic” capitalist states themselves:
The emergence of authoritarian statism cannot be identified either with a new fascist order or with a tendency toward fascism. The present-day State is neither the new form of a genuine exceptional State nor, in itself, a transitional form on the road to such a State: it rather represents the new “democratic” form of the bourgeois republic in the current phase of capitalism. . . . For the first time in the history of democratic States, the present form not only contains scattered elements of totalitarianism, but crystallizes their organic disposition in a permanent structure running parallel to the official State.
Poulantzas was concerned during this period with the authoritarian transformation of capitalist states as well as with the authoritarian or “totalitarian” character of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. In a certain sense, the conception of a democratic road to socialism that he articulated in State, Power, Socialism was his way of dealing with both challenges.
Poulantzas believed that, thanks to the existence of strong social movements, it might be possible to impose profound changes within the state.
Poulantzas believed that, thanks to the existence of strong social movements, it might be possible to impose profound changes within the state that condense the social relationship of forces. Through a strategy that combined the conquest of governmental power with autonomous social mobilization, one could open the way for socialist transformation. This idea of democratic socialism that would combine representative and direct forms of democracy was also his answer to the impasse of Soviet-style “actually existing socialism.”
Reading Poulantzas Today
Poulantzas has been strongly criticized for excessive optimism about the possibility of radical-democratic state transformation and for underestimating how the material dynamics inscribed in the state — precisely what he described as “authoritarian statism” — would impose their logic upon any attempt at left-wing governmentalism (as the experience of countries like France and Greece in the 1980s would show). His suicide in 1979 brought a premature end to his theoretical trajectory, leaving many open questions about the directions that his thinking might have subsequently followed.
However, Poulantzas did leave us with some invaluable insights into the transformation of capitalist states. Of particular importance was his identification of authoritarian tendencies and shifts that would become much more evident in the years to come. The authoritarian-disciplinary aspects of neoliberal states are now all too familiar to us, including the use of “anti-terrorist” legislation as a cover for repressive practices and surveillance mechanisms.
Poulantzas was also right to anticipate that the neoliberal agenda of privatization and pro-market deregulation would not involve the rolling back of the state. Instead, it would require the expansion of administrative interventions and machinery, most of which would be insulated against any form of democratic control or input from popular movements.
The proliferation of supposedly independent (and unelected) authorities and the increased power of central banks are typical examples of this. In the European context, the imposition of neoliberal policies under the auspices of European integration has meant expanding the authority of unelected European Union institutions and giving priority to European regulation over democratic decision-making processes at the national level.
The work of Poulantzas can help us to better understand the current wave of far-right political movements.
The work of Poulantzas can help us to better understand the current wave of far-right political movements, which is linked not only to situations of political crisis — including the crisis of the Left in its various forms — but also to the authoritarian transformation of states, with new forms of state racism directed against migrants and refugees. In addition, and perhaps above all, his work drives home the point that we cannot separate resistance to fascism and state authoritarianism from broader anti-capitalist struggles.
Such resistance can only be effective if it is based on a bloc of the working classes with the other subaltern classes, rather than minimalist alliances limited to the simple defense of liberal democracy. After all, it is mainly the parties of the so-called constitutional arc that have orchestrated the current “postdemocratic” mutations of advanced capitalist states. Most far-right political movements have no problem declaring their full compliance with the current institutional framework of liberal democracy, including its transnational embodiments such as the EU.
This points to another important lesson that we can draw from Poulantzas. While his vision of a democratic road to socialism has been justly criticized for possible reformist readings, his assertion that “socialism can only be democratic” was not simply a question of distancing himself from the experience of the USSR and its allies. It also carries the implication that “democracy can only be socialist,” in the sense that there is no “organic” association between capitalism and democracy. The only way to achieve democracy as self-government of the subaltern is through a struggle to move beyond capitalism.
Political movements are not just driven by theories or even material interests but also their myths. Italian historian Furio Jesi was a socialist who examined the power of mythology — and its centrality to the Right’s cultural influence.
The Vampire (Love and Pain) by Edvard Munch. Private Collection. (Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images)
A wrestling match, a vampire story, a set of slogans meant to indoctrinate a troop of young fascists, a popular tearjerker penned by a reactionary author who knows her audience’s base instincts all too well. In all these things there’s a grain of mythology — the use of certain familiar archetypes, of majestic “big ideas,” of narrative forms that are presented as naturally meaningful but, if prodded more carefully, prove emptier and more outdated than they might appear.
The French philosopher Roland Barthes was one of the first left-wing theorists to grapple with the theme of myth and mythology in a way that was transparent and openly accessible to a wider audience. In his 1957 book, Mythologies (which collects several analyses of contemporary French cultural and pop-culture phenomena), he explains he resented how journalists attributed a patina of “naturalness” to things that were “undoubtedly determined by history.” “Myth is a language,” he asserts — and as such, we must learn its rules and inner workings to reveal what is hidden behind the code.
One of the most insightful explorers of the theory of myth and mythology on the Left was the Italian writer and scholar Furio Jesi (1941–1980). Much like Barthes, he believed myth to be a language hiding historical and political phenomena behind a patina of “naturalness” that grants them a false idea of universal validity. And like Barthes, Jesi believed that myth needs to be studied in all of its representations, disregarding any value judgements that might lead the historian or the literary scholar to shrug off populist culture as meaningless and too crass, the unworthy lumpenproletariat of the cultural realm.
But Jesi was exploring dangerous territory — one that, with a few exceptions (like Barthes), left-wing theorists had mostly steered clear of up until then. Myth had mainly been the playground of thinkers who were either unabashedly reactionary (Mircea Eliade, Julius Evola) or politically dubious at best (Oswald Spengler, Georges Sorel, Károly Kerényi). Jesi’s intellectual and political contemporaries in the Italian left weren’t always thrilled — Enrico Manera, who worked with him on several projects, later told an interviewer that many feared Jesi studied these things because “in the end he just gets off on it”; “he’ll go off the deep end and get infected”.
Morbid fascinations aside, Jesi was in many ways a contrarian: affiliated to the academic world but never really a part of it (until material necessities compelled him, that is), an outspoken socialist activist but never a card-carrying Communist. He was open and relaxed on topics that — in the 1960s and ’70s — still caused some dillydallying among many of his quite chauvinistic comrades, like feminism or homosexuality; he was as opinionated as he was generous spirited.
Early Beginnings
Jesi’s intellectual journey began astonishingly early. He published his first book as a precocious and inquisitive teenager, writing about the not-very-adolescent topic of Egyptian ceramics. But from then on, his career only got more unusual. His trajectory tells us something about a time in which eclectic outsiders and polymaths could penetrate the world of culture and academia through roundabout ways. Though Jesi hailed from a fairly well-off bourgeois family (his father a cavalry officer, his mother a historian and author of children’s books), he proved a rather wayward son, leaving school early without a diploma and never setting foot in the lecture halls of a university as a student. Nevertheless, he was smart enough to attract the attention of somebody like Hungarian philologist Kerényi — his formative years were marked by feverish research and exchange with intellectual models who were often three times his age. In Jesi, an undeniable talent was matched with a great gift for self-promotion — his success in the publishing world as an editor, translator, and curator as well as his landing a lecturing job in the universities of Palermo and Genoa (though obstinately degree-less and PhD-less) would otherwise be hard to explain.
He also had a keen eye for the importance of topics his peers would have considered frivolous. In the classes he taught at the German studies department at Palermo in the late 1970s, Jesi focused on themes that were not kosher with the literary establishment either. He famously gave a course on “vampires and automata in German literature from the eighteenth up to the twentieth century,” in which he invited his students to analyze this classic figure of horror fiction as (among other things) a spectral return of aristocratic values in bourgeois times, with the mercantile classes vying to dethrone nobility and take their place as the ruling class while at the same time inheriting their value system as a source of legitimacy. As in any revenant story, what is summoned back from the dead can only produce rather ghastly results, much like a transplanted organ rejected by the body. This is a fundamental takeaway from Jesi’s analysis of the so-called “mythological machine,” a theoretical model he devised to analyze all kinds of cultural and political phenomena, from the rituals of festivity in European and non-European societies to eighteenth-century German literature, from right-wing ideology to outraged readers’ letters in Italian magazines.
Jesi’s reflections on myth are highly complex and nuanced; he built upon them for his entire legacy, and he did so with varying degrees of accessibility or obscurity. As intentionally asystematic as he was, his thought did have a solid foundation of ideas and definitions he always stretched and expanded as he went along.
Not Quite Dead
To understand his idea of myth, we could use another example in which, as he had done with vampires during his university lectures, Jesi spoke of things that are “not quite alive and not quite dead.” And to do so, we’ll have to make a detour to the kitchen.
One of Jesi’s most informative and wittiest essays from the 1970s has the appealing title of “Mythological Gastronomy” (“Gastronomia mitologica”). Jesi begins with a warning — to the reader but maybe to himself too, as if he had taken seriously his comrade’s suspicions mentioned above. When sitting down to study the objects that make up the science of myth, Jesi writes, one must proceed with caution:
To configure these objects means to relate them to one another and to the observer, with a gnoseological intent. But in the context of myths and mythology, whoever devises a model always runs the risk of composing or putting together mythological materials: of becoming himself a maker of myths (mitografo) instead of a scholar of myth (mitologo).
This is tantamount to an ethical conundrum: in analyzing these “mythological materials,” the scholar might herself be contaminated by the logic of myth and reproduce its assumptions and tropes even as she attempts to dismantle them. Myth is insidious because it is catchy and easy, an intellectual earworm that moves the listener to hum along and repels any challenge to its workings. Not just catchy but also, Jesi suggests, pleasing to the palate.
For his gastronomy of myth, Jesi tears a handful of pages from a rather archaic French cookbook, detailing the preparation and cooking of shrimps. The cook is not unlike the manipulator of myth, Jesi suggests. Both set out to handle something that, in its raw and dead state, isn’t really appetizing at all — it has the ashen, gray color of death, and it is enclosed in a thorny carapace that must be removed if any cooking or eating is to happen at all. Such is the uncooked shrimp, such is the myth in its unadulterated state — after all, there is little attractive about, say, the death wish–infused violence of cults, religions, or extremist ideologies or the sometimes-fatal cruelty of an initiation rite. But like our unlucky batch of shrimps, myth can entice us and stimulate our hunger once it has been washed, cooked, and seasoned rightly — after it has been turned from an uncanny gray to a seductive red:
This red is the color of that which is dead and, in dying, has taken on the color of that which is alive, ripe, and pleasantly edible. The goal of the modern science of myth or mythology, the goal of modern mythographers, is precisely this: to serve on our tables something really appetizing, which we would deem alive with little hesitation but is pretty much dead and — even when it was alive — never had such a pleasant color to begin with. The color of life is often not the prerogative of the living. The living are often not very edible for us, and to our eyes the color of life is the color of the things we eat with satisfaction.
The vibrant pastel tones certain foods take on once a chef (or industrial chemist) has had his way with them have little to do with the color of biological life (as in animals’ complexion when alive and breathing). Likewise, the presumption of the everlasting relevance and applicability of myths does not hold up against reality and historical change. Like the shrimps in Jesi’s anecdote, myths generally would gross us out in their “live” form (in their sheer violence, that is) and have to be “cooked” and “processed” to appease modern tastes and seem, if not alive, at least fresh and consumable. (Pure colonialism is not fashionable anymore? Let’s call it “exporting democracy.” We can’t be directly classist or misogynist because it would tarnish our image as liberals? Fine, we’ll just make fun of “Karens.”)
The presumption of the everlasting relevance and applicability of myths does not hold up against reality and historical change.
What Jesi had in mind when he wrote of myth was defined in less mouthwatering terms at many points of his career. If the shrimp essay has the receiver (or “victim”) of myth cast as a consumer who — fancying himself a gourmet — is in fact devouring an unappetizing carcass, other writings by Jesi break down the processes allowing myth to function as such. In his outline to a book on “contemporary myths” that sadly never came to fruition, Jesi defines myth as a foundational narrative about the basic realities of human life and society that is taken to be true and — even in the face of momentous historical change — proves remarkably adaptable while never changing its original message or explanation.
Even if the modern individual cannot believe in “heroes” like somebody from the Hellenistic period, she can still be made to believe that a heroism of sorts persists — after all, the myth of the underdog and her triumph (or defeat) against incredible odds still holds sway today. The Greeks had their Achilles and their Medeas; we have our Steve Jobs and our Elon Musks. All our contemporary myths have roots in ancient ones, Jesi suggests; for our ancestors, there was little difference between these explanations of reality and reality itself (the latter emerged from and was a continuous rerun of the former) — for us, they hold value as escapist fantasies or ideological tools.
Right-Wing Culture
This allows us to understand the deep political implications of Jesi’s work, which he carried through all his books but most explicitly tackled in his 1979 outing, Cultura di destra (Right-Wing Culture). When invited to discuss this book with the Italian weekly L’Espresso, Jesi explained his descriptions of the “culture of the right”:
It is a culture in which the past is a sort of homogenized pap that can be modeled and kept in form in the most useful way. A culture in which a religion of death prevails, or simply a religion of the illustrious dead. A culture that declares the existence of indisputable values, indicated by capitalized words — Tradition and Culture first of all, but also Justice, Freedom, Revolution. In short: a culture of authority, of mythological security about the rules of knowledge, of teaching, of issuing and obeying command.
Aside from Jesi’s apparent attachment to culinary images (though a “homogenized pap” sounds less inviting than a serving of crunchy shrimps), this passage gives us the gist of Jesi’s model to describe right-wing ideology: it is a culture of empty signifiers that only pose as ideas (they are “ideas without words,” to use another definition of his) but are fundamentally unquestionable, unchangeable, and — herein lies their strength — reassuring, inasmuch as they simplify the complexities of reality; they glamorize the history of nations, communities, political movements; they identify allies and enemies, and they allocate the roles that each believer has to play in order for change (not) to happen.
Right-wing culture is not the prerogative of a restricted and clearly defined political current or of a handful of fanatic fringe groups.
In each of the essays that make up Cultura di destra, Jesi manages to apply this model of description of myth to a variety of case studies which are in part anthropological and in part literary in nature. In two of them, he examines the “cult of death” and self-sacrifice typical of fascist militias, where the grunts are kept at bay by reminding them of the symbolic significance of their apparently arbitrary tasks (from venturing on borderline suicide missions against a clearly advantaged opponent to engaging in aimless forms of activism that do not serve any real long-term purpose); these lower-level individuals are on an exoteric, need-to-know-basis and are the beneficiaries of the most mystical, abstract forms of ideological propaganda (the part that mostly smacks of religious zeal, allowing them to feel like the foot soldiers of a millenarian movement that is bigger than them), while the higher-ups have access to the real-world truths of their political operation, have read more of into the philosophical and mystical system behind it all, and manipulate these “mythological materials” with esoteric (restricted) knowledge and awareness.
Yet right-wing culture is not the prerogative of a restricted and clearly defined political current or of a handful of fanatic fringe groups. In another interview with L’Espresso reprinted in a recent edition of Cultura di destra, Jesi asserts that the main tenets of this culture — the strategic banalization of the past, the magical allure of “big ideas with capital letters,” whose meaning is taken for granted but never clearly defined — have become so hegemonic that even those who understand themselves in opposition to it are likely to think and operate in accordance with its principles.
That conclusion has not lost any of its relevance: we need only think of how the proponents of identity politics (with various degrees of cynicism) think of categories like “Race” or “Queerness” as if they were essential realities that need no further critical prodding. (They are instead like abracadabras in a magical incantation that simulates criticality and protest as a palliative for the lack of actual political action.) Or we might look at the way that the term “Working Class” is easily expanded or restricted by certain leftists according to their critical or political agenda. Often, this is done with little historical or sociological insight into its possible meaning in different contexts and eras, with a remarkable ease to identify “pariahs” to justify classist contempt. (“This person is working class, but she voted Brexit, therefore a traitor; this person is working class, but she’s white, therefore privileged. . . .”)
The enduring importance of mythological manipulations shows us how Jesi’s critical project, largely glossed over in most accounts of leftist thought, is worth reconsidering and expanding upon today. Phenomena like the alt-right, conspiracy theories, or even meme culture (again: ideas without words) would surely have piqued his interest as an intellectual with such a keen eye for all forms of myth — from its high-minded (or highfalutin) instances up to its pop-culture manifestations. Jesi’s contemporaries, who contemplated the encyclopedic scope of his project with a sometime sneering attitude (too much erudition or too much frivolity), now stand corrected: his holistic gaze at how right-wing ideology can aptly seep through many layers of culture and politics like an ever-growing blob is more relevant than ever.
English-speaking readers can now access some of Jesi’s work thanks to the effort of a group of Italian scholars translating and publishing his essays for the American imprint Seagull Books (a revival concomitant with an equally recent surge of reeditions and critical interest in Jesi in his native Italy). The more accessible Right-Wing Culture is still untranslated, as of this writing, but the brilliant pieces in Time and Festivity can already offer a first, pleasurable glimpse of Jesi’s breadth of analysis.
All translations from the Italian are by the author. The lines from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies are cited from Annette Lavers’s translation.
In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history.
History’s first recorded author was a woman named Enheduanna. Born sometime in the latter half of the 23rd century BC, Enheduanna was the high priestess of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. It was a political role as well as a religious one; as the daughter of a powerful king, Enheduanna was no stranger to affairs of the state. In her writing, she wielded her pen for peace, working to unite a fractured kingdom.
Today, more than 4,000 years after her death, her words continue to echo down to us. A new exhibit at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C., highlights Enheduanna and the importance of other Mesopotamian women. Atlas Obscura spoke with one of the scholars on the exhibition team, Majdolene Dajani, about Enheduanna, what her life might’ve looked like, and why her story deserves to be told. The exhibit runs until February 19, 2023.
What was Enheduanna’s background?
Her father was King Sargon, ruler of the Akkadians. He conquered an area in southern Iraq, Sumer, and she was put into power as a priestess of the moon god, Nanna. In her writings, she took a Sumerian goddess, Inanna, and fused her with an Akkadian goddess, Ishtar. She tried to unite these two different cultures, these two different people under her father's reign. So she was a key political entity.
What do we know about her life as a priestess, from her daily routines to the power she wielded?
Sometimes we have these people where we know them by name and we know what their position was. But then there's this other aspect of what was their everyday normal life, and it's hard to grasp.
We have a representation of her on a disk where she is facilitating a ritual where a libation is being poured for the god. There's a set of temple hymns that she wrote. And so her role has something to do with ritual and libations honoring the gods and facilitating that.
There's something called the King's List. It's a list of all the kings that ruled and beside them is the list of the priestesses who were in power during their reigns. So I think that tells us a lot about the importance of the priestesses' role within society, but also within the political atmosphere of the times.
Tell us about the Mesopotamian goddesses, Inanna and Ishtar, who feature in Enheduanna's writings.
Inanna is a Sumerian goddess. She's often associated with reproduction and fertility, sexuality. For example, we see her in materials where there's abundance, like natural landscapes where there are animals or where food is being brought to a temple.
And then, Ishtar is a goddess of war. When she is combined with the Sumerian goddess Inanna, she also takes on the reproductive aspect. But really she is a goddess that crosses boundaries. In some of the poems about her, it talks not only about how she can destroy a landscape or make it fertile and abundant with life, but she also can, for example, make people or animals change genders. She's very powerful, and also the associations with fertility, reproduction, and sexuality could have been there before she was combined with Inanna. But the warrior aspect really comes through with the Akkadian Ishtar.
Ishtar/Inanna stays popular throughout Mesopotamia, throughout the time periods, but that's not the case for any of the other gods. They go and come in popularity. But she really stays, throughout time. She was very popular. The Exaltation of Inanna, which Enheduanna composed, I believe the first line says something to the effect of, “Inanna, Queen of the Heavens.” So she's clearly a major goddess.
What does Ishtar/Inanna’s popularity tell us about gender roles in Mesopotamian society?
It's very hard to assess this...She’s a goddess. She's not a mortal woman, and because she's not a mortal woman, she gets to do things and be a symbol in a way that mortal women are not going to be. But I think what we can say, when you couple that with this King's List, is that power wasn't just a male quality or something that men aspired to or controlled. I think it’s very important to see women in these political structures and dynasties.
Why has the role of women in Mesopotamia, and Enheduanna specifically, not been well understood?
When some of Enheduanna’s materials were discovered, modern archeologists and scholars dismissed this evidence. It wasn't taken seriously. Because she was a woman, I think, she was dismissed and her role and her impact were also dismissed.
I’ll give you an example. There is a Mesopotamian statue of a woman with a tablet on her lap. Presumably, she's going to write something. When it was found and commented on by early scholars and archeologists, they said something to the effect of “woman with tablet on her lap meaning unknown,” just to give you the sense of the dismissiveness of modern scholars. And that dismissiveness has kind of hung over us because what you do in scholarship is you read everything that someone has written on a certain subject. So it influences, the way later scholars were writing and thinking as well.
Mesopotamians clearly knew Enheduanna’s impact and her legacy. But in modern society, I think it hasn't always been that way.
As you were researching Enheduanna, did anything surprise you?
Sometimes, you're reading about these people in a textbook or in an article, and you don't get a first-person narrative, right? These texts are extracted and then put together by a scholar.
But in the process of doing this research and reading The Exaltation, Enheduanna refers to herself in the first person. It's her story. There's a strength in her words, in her conviction. You can see her passion.
It was a nice reminder that she was a person and had feelings and motives and emotions and passion. It's a powerful and eerie feeling because you're hearing the voice of someone long gone.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is hardly a feminist. But battles over gender are key to her rise, in a far-right agenda that fuses motherhood, nationalism, and the demonization of Muslims.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni during the party for the tenth anniversary of Fratelli d'Italia in Rome on December 17, 2022. (Riccardo Fabi / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In the late Middle Ages, it was believed that the king possessed two distinct bodies: the first was the natural and mortal body, subject to time and human frailty; the second was the political body, with a perpetual character, which by passing from one individual to another escaped the limits of human nature and death. The idea of the dual body of the ruler expressed in metaphorical terms the emergence of political sovereignty and the state, which transcended the contingent individual who found himself at the head of the latter.
Historically, the natural body of the king has been predominantly male. But it has also been female. Ancient Egypt, Nubia, Japan from the late 500s to the late 1700s, Spain, and, most famously, the United Kingdom, have had female leaders. And even in the Italian states before unification in the 1860s there was no shortage of women in leadership, such as Joan II of Naples, or Eleonora D’Arborea in Sardinia in the fifteenth century.
All these queens found themselves holding the reins of power in contexts extremely hostile to women. Femininity was mostly associated with dispositions considered detrimental to the art of government, such as irrationality and weakness. The female body, in other words, was not conceived of as a political body.
Yet Elizabeth I of England bent the old notion of the dual body of the ruler in her favor. It was useful to her power strategies because it implied that the “natural defects” of the biological body (which, after all, men possessed too) did not contaminate the political body, which was considered immortal. She famously referred to this idea in her 1588 Tilbury speech to galvanize the English troops readying to defend the island from the Spanish Armada: “I know I possess the weak and frail body of a woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Elizabeth I was also one of the first to theorize that a ruler should possess both masculine and feminine qualities — strength as well as compassion, courage as well as caring and love. In fact, she proclaimed herself, and was in turn called by her subjects, either King, Prince, or Queen.
If premodern history counts so many female rulers, it is not because things were better for women then. Rather, it is because many lineages preferred to entrust leadership to female daughters in direct descent rather than risk losing power to male sons belonging to other lineages, or to family members who were hated by the ruler of the day. Women therefore became queens by accident of birth, but they were expected to rule as kings. None of them espoused the cause of “women’s rights,” in whatever form it took in their time, not even after the first feminist movements arose (as in the case of Britain’s Queen Victoria, who opposed both the right of women to vote and their entry into universities).
It was then the bourgeois revolutions that kept women out of the halls of power by establishing liberal democracies that denied them — as well as the working classes — the right to vote. We will have to wait until the first half of the twentieth century, following the suffragettes’ struggles, for women to be able to vote and be voted for. It would take until 1979, with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom — after two decades of feminist mobilizations for gender equality in all spheres of social and political life — for a woman in Europe to become prime minister.
From Thatcher onward, female heads of governments became ever more numerous. A few months after Thatcher, it was Portugal’s turn, with the premiership of Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, followed by Iceland in 1980 with the election of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as president, Norway in 1981 with the election of Gro Harlem Brundtland, and then Yugoslavia, Poland, Ireland, and so on. There are a few European countries to date that have not yet had a female premier at least once. Until the election on September 25, 2022, Italy was one of these few. Now, it is not.
Anti-Feminist
This historical background is useful to contextualize Giorgia Meloni’s victory and her election as the first woman to head a government in Italy as a phenomenon in continuity, rather than in rupture, with a more general European trend. The reality is that over the past forty years women have occupied progressively more positions of power. And if there are ever more women in key positions, including the highest state and government posts, it is also due to the feminist struggles that preceded and accompanied them. As Italian journalist Ida Dominijanni put it in a recent article, Meloni ultimately reaps the fruits of a history of feminism that does not belong to her, but of which she makes use.
And yet, as feminists, we do not rejoice in the slightest at Meloni’s victory. Not only because for the most part women’s access to the highest ranks of power hierarchies is consummated within a framework that leaves those hierarchies, their rituals, and their patriarchal symbolics unchanged. But also because Meloni represents a political formation with an explicitly misogynistic culture, which has systematically fought against fundamental feminist demands for reproductive rights and sexual freedoms.
The question, therefore, is not whether Italy’s first female prime minister represents an achievement for women, but why she has come from an openly anti-feminist political force.
Like other formations of the radical nationalist right in Europe — with or without roots in historical fascism —Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia has for years been undergoing a process of repainting itself as a democratic force, and winking at the center to enhance its credibility as a candidate to govern the country. Meloni’s female leadership in a masculinist and far-right party, as also in the case of Marine Le Pen in France, or Alice Weidel in Germany, is functional to showing an innovative and feminized facade that serves both to intercept more votes, including female votes, and to “soften and make palatable their more backward programmatic content,” as Dominijanni writes.
The fundamental ideological matrix underlying Meloni’s political program is nationalism, of which racism is an essential component. The instrumentalization of feminist issues by nationalism is what I have termed femonationalism. On closer inspection, this instrumentalization always takes place in the context of anti-immigration and anti-Islam campaigns. It is the femonationalist ideology, therefore, that allows us to understand why Meloni waves the banner of women’s rights only when it comes to demonizing immigrant men (as she did during this election campaign by posting a video of an asylum seeker raping a woman), or proposing family-work balance policies that would allow Italian women to have more children, so as to counter the supposedly excessive fertility of Muslim women who threaten to Islamize Europe, as Meloni has been saying for years.
For nationalist movements, in fact, women are central only as “mothers,” that is, as the biological and cultural reproducers of the nation. As such, women for nationalists must be protected from the sexual (as well as economic, cultural, and political) threat that would be posed by the foreign male. Think of nationalist iconography in its early days, when the nation was depicted with female features to naturalize the chauvinist political project. Although the nation is a historical and social product, naturalizing it allows and reinforces its legitimacy because its supposed naturalness implies its necessity and immutability, as well as the duty of loyalty.
The identification of the nation with the mother (motherland) and the family nest (homeland) allows the nation to be represented as a source of identity, an object that requires dutiful commitment. Fratelli d’Italia reproduces to the letter the femonationalist familistic iconography in which the call of the family and the female body serves to evoke the idea of “genesis,” “birth,” and “lineage.” It does so from the choice of the party name — in English “Brothers of Italy,” an explicit reference to the national anthem — which invokes a communion only between men (brothers), but is then represented by a female body (Meloni’s face plastered all over the party’s posters), to the constant invocation of Italian patriotism as an object of identification, devotion, and gratitude.
Meloni’s entire imagery and political agenda, including her opportunistic gestures toward women’s rights, are functional to mobilizing the national-racist identity against foreigners. Not surprisingly, Meloni has come out strongly against the proposed ius soli bill, which would allow the daughters and sons of immigrants born in Italy to obtain citizenship by right.
Even the battle waged by Fratelli d’Italia against the benefit known as “citizenship income” could be read according to an anti-immigration key. When Meloni takes away a minimal source of survival like the citizenship income benefit from the unemployed, who have little prospect of finding a decent job, she knows full well that she is putting them in the position of being forced to accept precarious and poorly paid jobs, i.e., those jobs to which immigrants have always resigned themselves for lack of alternatives.
Although branded as a measure aimed at valuing work as a source of human self-fulfillment, the elimination of the citizenship income benefit then would seem geared both to nationalize as much as possible the demographic profile of the blackmailable workforce, and also to reinforce the idea of work as a social duty (which was characteristic of fascism), without any discussion about the undignified conditions to which workers are subjected in the current context.
But there is more. Although Meloni talks about introducing pro-birth measures, the elimination of the citizenship income benefit would also mean a further reduction in birth rates, given that the poor women who receive the benefit — according to recent studies — are more likely to have children. Fratelli d’Italia’s national-racist (and post-fascist) obsession here thus risks penalizing the very women whom Meloni claims to want to help.
Instrumental
That the invocation of women’s centrality is, after all, purely instrumental in a fundamentally racist and anti-immigrant framework was well understood the very moment Meloni set foot in parliament as head of government. As soon as she entered the halls of power, she surrounded herself with men in key ministries, calling upon only a very few women to lead ministries considered secondary. In her inaugural speech, she mentioned the first names of the women who she said built the ladder that had enabled her to break the glass ceiling, but without mentioning their last names; meanwhile, the only MP in the chamber whom she addressed in an informal manner was the Italian-Ivorian trade unionist Aboubakar Soumahoro.
In both instances — in that of the women-precursors, called only by their first name, and in that of the only black deputy, whom she did not deign to address formally — Meloni displayed the paternalism and contempt (ill-concealed as familiarity) that patriarchs and bosses have always shown toward women, working-class people, and immigrants. In the coming months, we will need to be reminded constantly that Meloni’s most retrograde legislative initiatives are likely to be consummated in the intertwining of gender, immigration, and labor policies.
Finally, to reiterate the idea that power, after all, is still a male enterprise, Meloni wasted no time in insisting that she be called il presidente, with the masculine and not feminine article, as if to reassure the party’s entourage and base that her gender poses no threat, but rather reinforces the patriarchal symbols of leadership.
Somewhat like Elizabeth I over four hundred years ago, nearly half a millennium later Meloni thus emphasizes that while her biological body is female, her political body is firmly male (and white). We will have to be on guard that her policies do not set women’s achievements back by as many years.
If any good comes from tens of millions of people watching two incredibly boring rich people complain about how hard it is to be royalty in Netflix’s new documentary Harry & Meghan, maybe some will start to question whether the monarchy should even exist.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry attend the 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Gala on December 6, 2022, in New York City. (Mike Coppola / Getty Images for 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Gala)
Harry & Meghan, the new documentary from Netflix that chronicles the love story, marriage, and eventual departure from the royal family of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in their own words, has a lot of grand ambitions. It wants viewers to see Harry and Meghan as two normal people who just happened to fall in love — a “modern fairy tale,” says Meghan. It wants to convince us that being part of the British royal family is a terrible burden rather than an immense and unjust privilege. It wants to drive home a message of social justice about representation and diversity in the twenty-first century. And it wants to indict the vicious and profit-oriented media that intrudes on celebrities’ privacy. Unfortunately, it’s only really successful at the last one.
The nearly six-hour-long limited series becomes extremely tedious and boring by its second half, as it becomes clear that the two will make no direct criticisms of anyone or anything other than the British media. As far as they are concerned, the world is running pretty smoothly, except for the vulturous paparazzi who are always trying to get in their business, preventing them from doing the good philanthropic work on behalf of the British monarchy that they “could have spent the rest of their lives doing.”
A Modern Fairy Tale
The series begins with an overview of how Harry and Meghan met and fell in love, which is intended to be relatable while not being relatable to very many people at all. (Another totally relatable thing they do is refer to each other by their first initials, “H” and “M,” instead of their names. This makes them sound more like harried coworkers dashing off a quick email rather than two people planning to spend the rest of their lives together.)
Harry reached out to Meghan after she appeared in an acquaintance’s video on social media, they went on two dates in London, and then they video chatted for a month after Meghan returned to Toronto to continue filming Suits, the TV show she starred in at the time. After that, Meghan flew to Botswana, where she and Harry spent an idyllic week together on safari. The two then embarked on a secret love affair of biweekly transatlantic flights. Throughout the series, their mutual love of Africa is offered up as evidence of their good moral fiber and lack of pretense, as individuals and as a couple. (“For me, [Africa has] always been quite special,” Harry tells us. “So it was absolutely critical to share it with Meg.”)
The time devoted to sketching their childhoods and family backgrounds does a lot of heavy lifting in this regard as well. Harry is presented as a boy who never quite fit into the posh surroundings of boarding school and the royal family. Amid a flood of negative media coverage of his bad teenage behavior, Harry retreats to Lesotho during his gap year, where he can be a normal guy who builds fences and does charity work with Prince Seeiso, apparently. “Lesotho gave me the space and the freedom to breathe, to live, and to grow,” he says.
Later, he uses the military as an escape hatch from the pressures of young adulthood. Harry’s main personality trait is liking to be barefoot, which is mentioned multiple times during the documentary and proven with constant footage of him walking around outdoors without shoes. What a relaxed man of the people!
To counteract the racist dog-whistling of the right-wing tabloid media that was part of the deep dive into Meghan’s background that accompanied her rise to fame as Harry’s girlfriend, the film expends a lot of effort to demonstrate that Meghan had a mostly white, middle-class upbringing in Los Angeles. Countless group photos from childhood flash across the screen, showing Meghan as the only person of color. The documentary seems to say, over and over, “Meghan definitely didn’t grow up in Compton, like some people said. Not that there would be anything wrong with that!”
Meghan Markle in Harry & Meghan. (Netflix)
In fact, it kind of seems like Meghan is a little bit of a nepo baby herself. Her dad was a cinematographer and lighting director, and she attended the Hollywood Little Red Schoolhouse, a private primary school where the annual tuition is upward of $20,000, later graduating from Northwestern University before becoming an actor.
Harry and Meghan’s whirlwind romance is presented as being driven by their mutual passion for social justice and philanthropic causes. Harry’s choice of Meghan as a partner is characterized as him following his heart over his head, choosing an unorthodox outsider to bring into a pedigreed institution for which people are born and bred.
More than anything, the documentary shows that Harry and Meghan wish they could just be normal rich people.
It’s never addressed that Meghan was, in many ways, an extremely practical choice for a royal partner: a Hollywood celebrity who was already accustomed to public speaking, press appearances, and living a life in the public eye. Meghan retires from acting after they marry — she never really cared about being an actress, the show tells us, she just wanted her voice to be heard! What a perfect fit for becoming a full-time hand-shaker, speech-giver, and money-raiser.
But, oops. It seems like being part of the royal family is way worse than being a regular celebrity. In fact, it kind of sucks. The scrutiny is unbearable, and the expectation to be perfectly gracious at all times without showing any real emotion is deeply inhuman. More than anything, the documentary shows that Harry and Meghan wish they could just be normal rich people.
A Missed Opportunity
The series is at its worst when it makes ham-fisted attempts to draw links between the never-ending narrative of Harry and Meghan’s suffering and broader social themes. The racist online trolling that Meghan experienced is attributed to “misinformation” and “bot accounts” — which are described, incredibly, as a “humanitarian crisis,” as though harassment of celebrities on social media is a problem with the same stakes as fear of vaccines or doubts about the legitimacy of democratic elections. Meghan sharing that she wasn’t doing well in the months after giving birth and struggled with her mental health is presented as a brave act that “resonated for so many people.”
Harry and Meghan clearly see themselves as cutting-edge changemakers whose very existence in an interracial marriage is radical. When things start to unravel and Meghan becomes the target of negative attacks by the tabloid media, they speculate that it might have been because she was too popular and successful, too much of a threat to the institution of the royal family. “If you can destroy people who are symbols of social justice, then it’s a message to other people to stand down,” explains Meghan in one of the many painfully self-aggrandizing moments of the documentary. “If you speak truth to power, that’s how they respond.”
Harry and Meghan in Harry & Meghan. (Netflix)
Meghan’s departure is described by Harry as the royal family having “missed an enormous opportunity” to reflect the diversity of the Commonwealth, which is made up of “2.5 billion mostly black and brown people” — as though colonialism is a problem that can be solved by representation. Queen Elizabeth II, who is only ever mentioned in the film in the most glowing and admiring of tones, is praised for having “fought to keep the Commonwealth together,” a political association of fifty-six countries that are mostly former colonial territories of the British empire. Several interludes in the documentary give the briefest of overviews of Britain’s colonial crimes, but these are always narrated by talking heads, like broadcaster Afua Hirsch and historian David Olusoga, and never commented on by Harry or Meghan themselves.
It’s even implied that Barbados might not have declared independence from the monarchy in 2020 if Meghan had still been an active member of the royal family. The film recalls the disaster that was William and Kate’s visit to Jamaica on the Platinum Jubilee Royal Tour of the Caribbean in early 2022, during which they were met by significant republican resistance, while consequently reflecting on Meghan’s widespread success and popularity in diplomatic visits to former colonies on behalf of the queen. Harry and Meghan seem wistful as they reflect on the good work they could have done for the royal family (and, while they don’t mention it explicitly, the British empire), strengthening ties with former colonies and prolonging the influence of the monarchy worldwide.
Happily Ever After
Much of the documentary is devoted to indicting the press and discussing how awful it is to spend your life under the magnifying glass of tabloid media. Harry discusses watching his mother, Princess Diana, suffer the same thing when he was a child, and Meghan talks about feeling suicidal at the point of greatest negative media coverage. These are serious downsides to what might appear as an otherwise charmed existence.
It’s interesting, then, that the two have chosen to put themselves in the limelight over and over, beginning with their March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey and reaching a peak with the debut of Harry & Meghan, Netflix’s most watched documentary ever in its premiere week, with 81.55 million hours viewed by more than 28 million households. The series is peppered with iPhone videos the two have recorded of themselves and their reactions to important moments going back several years, suggesting that they’ve been planning to go public with their story for quite a while.
Harry and Meghan in conversation with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.
Presumably, they’re doing it for the money. They reportedly made a deal with Netflix to earn $100 million from the film, which will certainly help make them financially independent from the royal family while preserving the lifestyle they’re accustomed to. They’re aghast when Harry’s family cuts off their security detail in March 2020. In one shot from November 2021, Meghan complains about how long her lawsuit against the Mail on Sunday over their publication of a private letter she wrote to her father has dragged on, while one person curls her hair and another massages her left hand. Recent film clips of the two riding their bicycles in Santa Barbara, California, show them arriving home to a private entry yard where nannies and assistants with blurred-out faces wait to receive them. “I can do things with my kids now that I would never be able to do in the UK,” says Harry.
Viewers are supposed to celebrate Harry and Meghan’s escape from the cold, unforgiving pressures of membership in the British royal family. But Harry and Meghan see no problem with the monarchy as it currently functions, except for its symbiotic relationship with the tabloid media and its lack of diversity. The documentary fails to draw this point out, but in a way, Meghan and Harry’s experience is an indictment of the liberal politics of inclusion. They thought they could transform the institution of the monarchy (whatever that means) by diversifying it, but even they realize that they failed.
If any good comes from tens of millions of people watching these two incredibly boring rich people complain about how hard it is to be royalty, maybe some of them will start to question whether the monarchy should even exist. As Ben Burgis explains, “The idea that any human being would deserve to have a role within a state institution purely because of their bloodline is offensive for the same reason it’s offensive that we live in a world where some people are born into wealth and others into poverty.”
So, sure, the British royal family seems mean and unwelcoming, and I don’t blame Harry and Meghan for wanting to “step back” from a family that was making them unhappy. But the very existence of the monarchy is a paean to hierarchy and inequality, and it can and should simply be abolished. The only downside would be that all the members of the royal family would have to start earning their living through podcasts and Netflix documentaries, and we’d probably hear more from them instead of less.
Western nations rightly accused World Cup host Qatar of worker exploitation and authoritarianism. The postcolonial world responded with well-founded accusations of Western hypocrisy. In the meantime, transnational capital has been let off the hook.
A view of Al Bayt Stadium and a FIFA World Cup ahead of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. (Mohammed Dabbous / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Much has been written on the perverse power of sports-washing surrounding the 2022 World Cup, and rightly so. Western commentators have justifiably criticized the host country Qatar’s political authoritarianism and draconian labor conditions leading up to the tournament. In response, commentators in the postcolonial world have raised reasonable points about the West’s hypocrisy. After all, colonial superpowers laid the groundwork for the debacle that took place in Qatar.
While each side raises fair points, the resulting conversation has not been entirely productive. The political discourse around Qatar 2022 has shown that “clash of civilizations” narratives continue to dominate global political imaginations, despite the modern reality that transnational capital — Eastern and Western — reigns supreme, and has the power to bring governments to heel. While we’re busy pointing fingers, international corporations are making off with the loot.
The World Cup Scandal
Since securing this year’s World Cup bid in 2010 under blatantly corrupt circumstances, the oil-rich yet small nation of Qatar, which had little to no sporting infrastructure at the outset, kickstarted a $220 billion megaproject to host the world’s most watched televised event.
While Qatar’s economy has long relied on migrant workers in all industries, their numbers have grown by more than 40 percent since securing the bid. Today, only 11.6 percent of the country’s 2.7 million inhabitants are Qatari nationals. There has been a massive increase in precarious migrants, predominantly from Southeast Asia, hired to carry out the manual labor needed to construct the virtually nonexistent infrastructure ahead of 2022.
Despite the hundreds of billions invested, working conditions for these manual laborers have been blatantly exploitative. Qatar’s migrant workers have dealt with life-threatening work environments, unsafe living conditions, delayed and paltry payments, withheld passports, and threats of violence, all while carrying out manual labor in the blistering heat of the Gulf sun. There have been 6,751 migrant worker deaths since Qatar secured the World Cup bid.
While human rights groups and journalists have been documenting the rampant exploitation of migrant laborers in Qatar for a decade leading up to the 2022 World Cup, mainstream Western media only began to highlight these injustices in the month leading up to the tournament — with tickets secured, hotels fully booked, and all the infrastructure completed. The most outspoken Western outlet has been the BBC, which refused to air the tournament’s opening ceremony, instead opting to broadcast a roundtable condemnation of Qatar’s human rights record.
The BBC’s criticisms of Qatar are entirely valid. At the same time, they fail to acknowledge the role of the United Kingdom’s colonial legacy in establishing the exploitative labor conditions that existed in Qatar long before the World Cup. Britain intervened in a material, codified manner that continues to benefit both the Qatari monarchy and the global free market dominated by transnational (but chiefly Western) capital.
The British Legacy
At the heart of the systemic exploitation of Southeast Asian workers in Qatar and the broader Middle East is the kafala (sponsorship) system, which exempts employers sponsoring migrant worker visas from the labor laws protecting Qatari nationals. Migrant workers lack the right to seek new employment, unionize, and even travel.
The modern kafala system can be traced back to a relatively unknown colonial bureaucrat named Charles Belgrave. Modern-day Qatar and the wider Arab Gulf fell under British colonial dominion following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Belgrave, an English veteran of the war, was appointed in 1926 as an advisor to the tribal monarchy of what would become modern-day Bahrain in a bid to help create a modern nation-state with a functioning governmental bureaucracy.
The British’s intent in administering the post-Ottoman Middle East, made up of “protectorates” or “mandates” rather than colonies, was to secure long-term British interests in the region. Foreseeing the eventual unsustainability of direct colonial rule in the aftermath of the war, the aim was to create viable structures for Western-friendly, free market–aligned state governments to take over.
Long before the discovery of oil, Bahrain and the surrounding region were coastal, nomadic societies revolving around fishing and pearling. The advent of colonially drawn borders created impediments to this regional industry, which relied on free-flowing trade and labor across the sea, now restricted by new concepts like passports and visas.
To address this, Belgrave codified the first iteration of the modern kafala system, which soon spread to other newly forming governments in the region. Eventually this allowed Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and other Gulf states to facilitate the immigration and exploitation of laborers from Southeast Asia.
The kafala system was widely unpopular in Bahrain, where protests eventually saw Belgrave resign from his post in 1957. But the system persisted well after Belgrave’s leave and the abdication of British rule across the Gulf in the 1960s and ’70s. It’s that British-designed system that led to the deaths of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar leading up to the World Cup. As that origin story demonstrates, the problem is much bigger than the behavior of one barbaric Eastern nation, and the West’s hands are hardly clean.
The Real Winners
The kafala system is only one of many modern exploitative labor systems in the so-called “third world” that trace back to Western colonial rule. Broadly speaking, the consumer lifestyle enjoyed by many in the West is made possible by outsourcing extreme economic exploitation to socially repressive and politically authoritarian post-colonial countries.
The West’s ahistorical finger-wagging at Qatar has thus been understandably derided as hypocritical by many in the postcolonial world, with a number of commentators quick to point out Western governments’ shortcomings in tackling their own labor conditions, not to mention the racism, misogyny, and homophobia (other legitimate grievances against the Qatari government) in their own countries.
These critics have legitimate points, just as critics of Qatar itself do. But the conversation is ultimately doomed to go nowhere, with the West chiding the East for backwardness and the East chiding the West for hypocrisy in perpetuity. This discourse relies on a reductive East/West divide, and fails to capture the shared interests of Western and Eastern governments and corporations in upholding regimes of exploitation and social repression.
Qatar, a stone’s throw away from Iran, houses the largest US military base in the Middle East. It is no coincidence that the Biden administration greenlit a $1 billion arms sale to Qatar during halftime of the high-stakes match between Iran and the United States. This behavior is predictable: the United States is no stranger to turning a blind eye to the despotism of its oil-rich allies in the Gulf, while criticizing its authoritarian enemies for engaging in the same behavior.
European governments and corporations also engage in profitable relations with Qatar. In fact, four members of the EU parliament were charged on December 11 with bribery from Qatari officials looking to influence policy decisions. Yet the West’s enabling of and benefitting from Qatari and broader Gulf despotism haven’t factored into the criticism Qatar has faced in recent weeks. Nor has it been highlighted by those who leaped to deflect that criticism.
Very little has been said from both critics and deflectors regarding Western sponsors, athletic wear companies, sports broadcasters, and other transnational corporate entities who raked in massive profits off the back of the laborers who toiled and died preparing this tournament. The only Western organization complicit in the Qatar 2022 controversy receiving justifiable criticism is FIFA, a noncorporate or governmental entity. Like Western governments, Western corporations have largely been let off the hook.
The “clash of civilizations” narrative informing the discourse surrounding Qatar 2022 distracts from the biggest problem plaguing both the Middle East and exploited migrant workers worldwide, which is global neoliberal capitalism. The real winner of the World Cup is transnational capital, be it Western or Qatari, and the real losers are the exploited migrant laborers and the politically repressed citizens of Qatar and the postcolonial Middle East.
Each side’s respective focus on imagined barbaric Eastern nations or hypocritical Western ones fails to account for the financialized and transnational character of twenty-first-century capitalism, and how it has altered the global political landscape — often uniting East and West in a shared project of profiting off the backs of the exploited global poor.
On a more optimistic note, the 2022 World Cup also saw expressions of a pan-Arab, postcolonial solidarity that goes beyond these colonially drawn borders, a form of political consciousness that has had anti-capitalist, left-wing tendencies in decades past. The continuous presence of the Palestinian flag and the massive support Morocco had from Arabs and Africans alike suggests the possible return of a postcolonial political discourse that breaks with these nation-state bound, unproductive “clash of civilizations” narratives.
Since Indonesia annexed West Papua, its people have faced brutal military repression while the US helps whitewash the occupation. But the country’s freedom movement is pressing ahead with a unique liberation project based on ecological principles.
Free Papua activists hold placards during a protest in Jakarta, Indonesia, on December 1, 2021. (Jepayona Delita / Jefta Images / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
West Papua has the world’s third-largest rainforest and is one of its most biodiverse areas, with an equally rich array of indigenous tribes and languages. It is also the site of a long but little-known struggle for self-determination. In the 1960s, West Papua exchanged one colonial occupier, the Netherlands, for another, Indonesia. Its people have been struggling against Indonesian rule ever since.
Amnesty International estimates that the Indonesian military has killed at least one hundred thousand West Papuans in that time; other estimates are even higher. West Papuans have suffered systematic racial discrimination and land theft. The global mining, palm oil, and logging corporations operating in their lands are wiping out irreplaceable natural habits. But a media blackout has kept the experience of West Papua largely concealed from the outside world.
As a child, Benny Wenda lived in a remote village among the Lani people who rebelled against Indonesian control in the 1970s, and he witnessed the brutal repression that followed, including sexual violence against his female relatives. While at university, Wenda began to learn about the suppressed history of his country and its culture and organized West Papua study groups. He became a leader of the West Papuan independence movement.
After being arrested on trumped-up charges in 2002, Wenda was tortured and held in solitary confinement. Facing a twenty-five-year prison sentence, he soon escaped and eventually received political asylum in the UK. Wenda is the leader of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), established in 2014 to bring together the three main political organizations campaigning for West Papuan independence.
In 2017, the ULMWP presented a petition to the UN with 1.8 million West Papuan signatures — 70 percent of the population — calling for self-determination. In 2020, the movement announced it was establishing a provisional government for West Papua, with Wenda as the interim president.
Last year, the ULMWP launched its “Green State Vision” at the COP26 summit in Glasgow. It aspires for West Papua “to be the world’s first Green state” by making ecocide a criminal offence and “serving notice” on all extraction companies operating in West Papua.
Ben Wray
Why did Dutch colonial rule not end for West Papua at the same time that it ended for Indonesia in 1949? How did West Papua come to be under Indonesian occupation by 1963?
Benny Wenda
Indonesia and West Papua were both Dutch colonies. After Indonesia became independent, the Dutch argued that West Papua was separate, that its people were different from those of Indonesia — culturally, linguistically, geographically. The Dutch held on to West Papua for over a decade after Indonesian independence. Then, in 1960, they prepared to give us independence. They formed the Dutch–New Guinea Council, and the West Papua flag was recognized.
Indonesia said: “No, the rest of the Dutch colony, including West Papua, is ours.” But the Dutch kept saying that West Papua was separate. Then Indonesia’s leaders used another strategy. This was the time of the Cold War, and they saw this as a chance to convince the Americans, the British, and other European countries.
Indonesia successfully played the Cold War game to get Washington’s backing for its claim over West Papua.
They said: “If you don’t give West Papua to us, we will join the other side in the Cold War,” because communists had emerged as a major political force in Indonesia, so the big Western powers saw this as a threat. Indonesia successfully played this Cold War game to get Washington’s backing for its claim over West Papua.
On August 15, 1962, in what is known as the New York Agreement, there was a secret deal between the United States, Indonesia, and the UN. Without any West Papuans being involved, they decided our future. The deal was to transfer sovereignty to Indonesia and then hold a referendum on West Papua’s future status by 1969, which was to be on the basis of one person, one vote.
However, what actually happened in 1969 was that Indonesia handpicked 1,022 people, put them in a room, and forced them to vote. Indonesia called it the “Act of Free Choice,” but we call it the “Act of No Choice.” Even a representative from the UN said that it was a whitewash. The UN never recognized the result, and it still doesn’t today: in fact, the UN has said that it regrets being involved in the process.
That’s why the legal argument to reclaim our territory is very strong. We were basically crucified for the sake of the interests of the global powers.
Ben Wray
In the 1970s and after, there was fierce West Papuan resistance to Indonesian control. Can you talk us through those years of resistance and Indonesian repression under Suharto’s dictatorship?
Benny Wenda
It was like a nightmare. You couldn’t say the words “West Papua” or even “Papua” — you just had to say “Irian Jaya,” the term favored by the Indonesian authorities. In the Suharto era, we were totally isolated from the rest of the world. The media was totally banned from West Papua.
In the Suharto era, we were totally isolated from the rest of the world. The media was totally banned from West Papua.
The legacy of the Suharto era still carries on to the present. Under Suharto, it was terrible, but honestly it is still terrible today, because Indonesia sees us as its colony and treats us that way.
Ben Wray
Suharto’s dictatorship ended in 1998, and East Timor won independence from Indonesian rule in 1999. What prevented West Papua from following East Timor’s example?
Benny Wenda
When Suharto resigned, East Timor became independent, and we too, in 2000, fought for our independence. It was called the Papuan Spring. Our flag, the Morning Star, was raised almost everywhere, and we appointed a leader called Theys Eluay: we had a congress to vote for him, and he was like our president in a way.
Every leader that emerged in West Papua was always killed.
But Theys Eluay was killed in 2001. The Indonesian authorities arrested me in 2002, because I was the leader of the tribal assembly at the time. They wanted to kill me, so I escaped.
Every leader that emerged in West Papua was always killed. The Indonesian government offered us what it called “special autonomy” in 2001, and we were forced to accept it at gunpoint. But West Papuans still want independence.
Ben Wray
What is the reality on the ground today? Has the regime changed at all since you were imprisoned and tortured in 2002?
Benny Wenda
Between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people have been displaced from their homes. Since the occupation began, almost 450,000 West Papuans have been killed in total, mainly women and children. Just the other day, three West Papuan students were arrested just for holding the Morning Star flag. Many West Papuans are held in Indonesian prisons. I think the situation has gotten worse and worse.
Ben Wray
The Indonesian government of Joko Widodo, in office since 2014, recently made headlines after introducing a law that banned sex outside marriage. Has the occupation of West Papua changed under Widodo’s rule?
Benny Wenda
For us, every new Indonesian president brings no change. It’s the same with Widodo. He has visited West Papua fifteen or twenty times, but nothing has changed. In fact, he has sent twenty-five thousand troops to the West Papua militarized zone.
The Indonesian government knows that West Papua is illegally occupied, but it won’t let go because Indonesia is economically dependent on West Papuan resources.
The Indonesian government knows that West Papua is illegally occupied, but it won’t let go because Indonesia is economically dependent on West Papuan resources. That’s a key reason it holds West Papua by military force.
Ben Wray
The United States has maintained close relations with Indonesia since 1949, seemingly regardless of who was in power in Jakarta. Is US imperialism a block on West Papua’s struggle for independence?
Benny Wenda
Yes, because the United States wanted to keep Indonesia on its side, because it was worried about the Cold War. Today, the emergence of China as a US competitor influences Washington’s policy toward Indonesia and West Papua. The United States also wants to be on good terms with the Indonesian government to extract resources, because it benefits the American economy.
The emergence of China as a US competitor influences Washington’s policy toward Indonesia and West Papua.
In addition, no one really knows about what is happening in West Papua. However, as people find out about it, the big powers will change their view. If you look at the Vietnam War or the South African struggle against apartheid, when ordinary people put pressure on their governments, they can change this situation.
Ben Wray
In the last few years, we have seen an increase in resistance to Indonesian rule within West Papua.
Benny Wenda
The West Papuan people, inside and outside West Papua, have been very strong in the last five years. They have been protesting and resisting peacefully. But the Indonesian authorities have responded with a crackdown through military force. When people are protesting on the streets, they use tear gas or kill them.
The Indonesian military even shoots children, but because of the media ban, it can act with impunity.
However, nobody reports on what is happening because of the media ban, so it’s very difficult to bring it to the world’s attention. Everyday there are protests on the streets. Religious pastors are being killed and churches are being burned down. The Indonesian military even shoots children, but because of the media ban, it can act with impunity. That is the biggest problem we are facing.
Ben Wray
West Papua’s rainforest makes it very important for the whole world in preventing climate breakdown. At the recent COP27 summit, the governments of Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Brazil announced that they want to establish an “OPEC for rainforests”. What did you think of that announcement?
Benny Wenda
It’s a cover-up. Indonesia is directly destroying the rainforests. The idea of “OPEC for rainforests” is good PR for the country to be a global player. Even if it signs global agreements, for us, it’s just a question of pretending to be doing something, because we know what is really happening to the environment in West Papua. I think this is an attempt at propaganda to counter our Green State Vision for West Papua.
Ben Wray
What sort of economy and society are you aspiring to create in West Papua with the Green State Vision?
Benny Wenda
What we want is a democratic society, just like any other country. But we believe in a form of democratic governance in the context of our beliefs, our customs, and our norms. This is a balance between Western-style democracy and our own beliefs and traditions. Key to this is a belief in peace and harmony with nature.
Nature — our rivers, our forests, our mountains — is connected to us, and we want to respect it.
For us, everything is based on what we need. For example, if you want to build a house and a garden, everyone comes together to discuss “who does this land belong to?” etc. We discuss on the basis of our values and then we agree to build a garden to share. This already existed before Western-style democracy came to our world.
Nature — our rivers, our forests, our mountains — is connected to us, and we want to respect it. The people and businesses that come to our world need to respect our customs and laws. Before a company invests, they need to follow our Vision. We are not against them investing, but they need to respect our laws and the meaning of the Green State Vision.
Ben Wray
Six decades of Indonesian occupation have obviously changed West Papua. Almost half of the population of West Papua is now Indonesian. Are you concerned that over time, these changes will undermine the basis for a West Papuan state?
Benny Wenda
Absolutely, this is a threat. The Indonesian government has used resettlement programs to bring Indonesians to West Papua and grab the land. They want West Papuans to eventually become a minority that will be easy to control. That is why we are fighting hard now, through the protests, the campaigns, and the lobbying, and by winning the support of ordinary Indonesians, listening to us and supporting our struggle.
Luego del –lamentable y vergonzoso– espectáculo que hemos observado en el último tiempo en el Parlamento, especialmente en la Cámara de Diputadas y Diputados, diversos actores plantearon, durante la semana pasada, la necesidad de incluir una evaluación psicológica para quienes están a cargo de elaborar las leyes que rigen al país. Lo cierto es que la gota que rebalsó el vaso fue el momento de descontrol que sufrió el diputado Gaspar Rivas (PDG), quien procedió a insultar duramente a otros parlamentarios… de su propio partido. Pero no es la primera vez que el ex RN muestra conductas, a lo menos, inquietantes, considerando el cargo que ocupa. Rivas ha grabado videos llorando y se ha disfrazado de sheriff, entre otras curiosidades.
Pero no es el único. Alinco se descontroló a tal nivel durante un debate, que llegó a amenazar a la directiva de la Cámara. ¿El problema? Sus propios colegas denunciaron que el diputado –que tiene un largo historial de eventos muy poco decorosos– estaba algo pasado de copas. Claro, a las dos de la tarde. Gonzalo de la Carrera, por su parte, ha protagonizado desde golpizas hasta insultos varios a otros parlamentarios, pasando por burlas hacia la condición sexual de quienes comparten el hemiciclo con él. Una doctora-parlamentaria suele hacer diagnósticos psiquiátricos en público. Una periodista que ha intentado volar con una capa lila presentó, por enésima vez, el mismo proyecto –curiosamente con Alinco y Rivas– y las emprende ahora contra el Presidente Boric. Y un diputado ultraconservador intenta explicar por qué su señora usa sus vales de bencina.
Un grupo de diputados de oposición patrocina un proyecto para censurar a 13 presidentes de comisiones, liderados por… De La Carrera. Una simple triquiñuela técnica para quitarles el poder a los(as) otros(as). Kaiser renuncia al Partido Republicano después de usar lenguaje degradante hacia las mujeres. De la Carrera es separado también del partido, pero ambos aparecen después como voceros de la colectividad en todos los puntos de prensa. Tres diputados del PDG son sancionados por cumplir con la palabra empeñada y reciben un duro juicio ético por parte del líder de dicha tienda, quien vive en Estados Unidos y que no puede entrar a Chile por una demanda por pensión de alimentos.
Y no es todo. Una senadora viaja por dos meses a terminar sus estudios a España, dejando botado su trabajo. Tres senadores oficialistas se ausentan el día de una votación clave para designar al Fiscal Nacional y le propinan una dura derrota a Boric. Cruz-Coke le arrienda a su exsocio una oficina de lujo por 2 millones al mes para que sea su “oficina parlamentaria” –en el sector alto de la capital– y, cuando una periodista lo arrincona, dice que debe ser un error del conserje. Los miembros de Demócratas, Walker y Rincón, rinden más de 4 millones c/u al mes por concepto de “traslación”. El senador Chahuán llega a un encuentro, en que se busca acuerdos en torno a la seguridad, con una guitarra para burlarse de sus anfitriones. Unos días después, el mismo parlamentario sale mencionado en una investigación de Ciper –por suerte existen medios investigativos– por mal uso de la tarjeta de bencina (beneficio utilizado por su señora) durante la campaña del Rechazo.
Un grupo de parlamentarios negocia durante largos 84 días para encontrar un acuerdo que permita dar continuidad al proceso constituyente. Sin embargo, terminan informando a la ciudadanía que fueron incapaces de acercar posiciones y optaron por presentar cuatro proyectos distintos –uno por cada actor participante de las negociaciones–, y que esperan que un “comité técnico” o un “cónclave” decida por ellos. Por cierto, no dicen quiénes integrarían esas instancias, ni cómo funcionarían, ni menos cómo tomarían la salomónica decisión. Y, por supuesto, el “cónclave” no se realiza y pasa otra semana sin acuerdo.
¿Y cuál es, entonces, la diferencia entre los que se burlaban de la tía Pikachu o las excentricidades de los convencionales y lo que estamos viendo hoy en el Congreso? Muy poca. Rojas Vade mintió respecto de su condición de salud, pero, arrendar una oficina a un amigo y justificarlo como sede parlamentaria o usar vales de bencina para otros fines, ¿no es un engaño a la fe pública también? Por supuesto que votar desde la ducha es vergonzoso, pero ¿no lo es tratar a garabato limpio o golpear a otros parlamentarios?
Si algunos(as) pensaron que el 62% del Rechazo fue un triunfo de los partidos y la política tradicional, están no solo equivocados sino que cometen también un error de cálculo que se pagará después. Cuando en 2020 se eligió una Convención con mayoría de independientes, fue un voto de castigo a los partidos. Los mismos partidos que luego de tres meses no fueron capaces de encontrar un acuerdo, y los mismos partidos que hoy están dando un espectáculo gracias a varios de sus representantes. ¿Qué pensarán los(as) ciudadanos(as) de ellos? ¿Exámenes psicológicos o test de sentido común? ¿Volante o maleta?
Sean Turnell, an Australian citizen who served as an economic advisor during the National League for Democracy-led government in Myanmar prior to last year’s military coup, was released from prison by the junta in a general amnesty on Nov. 17 after more than 650 days behind bars. Sentenced to a three-year jail term for violating the Myanmar Government Secrets Act despite being officially appointed by the NLD-led government, Turnell described his imprisonment and amnesty as “circus stuff” used by the junta in a bid to extract concessions from the international community and confer legitimacy on its rule.
In an interview with RFA Burmese, Turnell recounts the difficult conditions he endured during his incarceration and provides his views on the state of Myanmar’s political crisis since the military takeover.
RFA: How are you?
Turnell: Very good, since being released. Not so good while I was not. So I’m feeling good, you know, I’m very happy that I am released. But very, very mindful that a lot of people are not, including many, many of my Burmese friends who remain imprisoned. And of course the whole country remains imprisoned [under junta rule]. So I’m very concerned about that.
RFA: What do you think was the reason for your release from prison?
Turnell: Good question, and I think it’s not entirely clear. I think partly it’s all pressure on … the regime, from people around the world including, of course, the United States, Australia … As you and all of the people listening to this know, the situation in Myanmar is absolutely terrible. The economy has also been completely destroyed and so I would imagine the regime is feeling under pressure and this is part of a gesture to try and get some of the pressure lifted off of them. So I think this is all a part of a political guise. But, you know, the real change – the important change – still hasn’t happened. This is all just circus stuff.
RFA: Could you please share some of your experiences in prison?
Turnell: Yeah, well, it was pretty bad. And again, I’m sure many people who are listening to this have experienced and fully understand what Myanmar prisons are like. They’re pretty dreadful. At a personal level, I thought I might have been treated very gently. And I suppose to some extent … I was treated slightly better than the average Burmese person was in Myanmar prisons. But it was still pretty rough. The conditions are pretty terrible. The food was bad, and it was very easy to catch diseases, so I got COVID five times while I was there.
Having said that, though, I was with a lot of Myanmar political prisoners, of course. And they remained in very good spirits. Very much supporting each other. There was a broad feeling of solidarity and compassion and certainly … my Myanmar colleagues who were political prisoners were very good to me. They helped me survive. There was really just a good spirit in the air.
[Deposed and jailed] State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi … was in great spirits. Very, very strong, very serene … the person we’ve always known her to be. She remains that. She probably spent more of her time keeping the spirits of everyone up around her rather than worrying about herself. So, amongst political prisoners, a great feeling that ultimately, in the long run, the people of Burma would win and some sort of peace will return at some point. And real strength and passion amongst the people.
Australian Sean Turnell is shown seated during a ceremony inside the Insein prison in Yangon, Myanmar, Nov. 17, 2022. Credit: MRTV
Subjected to ‘psychological torture’
RFA: Did you experience anything like torture?
Turnell: I was treated quite badly and also I witnessed and heard torture taking place all around me. But I wasn’t tortured myself, except psychologically. I was held in solitary confinement for months on end and not given anything to read, or things like that. I would call it psychological torture but my Myanmar friends who were caught were actually tortured, physically … They had electrodes attached to them and were electrocuted. People were beaten. There were bruises and scars that people had from beatings.
It’s not a good place and the regime doesn’t worry at all about any human rights … They don’t even care about their own laws. For instance, in the end, I was convicted under a law that legally doesn’t apply to me. But they didn’t really care … Sometimes they don’t even pretend to be doing things properly. The trial I was at where Daw Suu was accused and myself and so many other ministers, everyone knew it was a total sham. And [the regime] never really disguised that.
RFA: Did they take you to an interrogation room before prison?
Turnell: Yes. [For two months] I was just locked inside something that I call a box. It was almost like a small shipping container. It had no windows. It had nothing but a concrete floor and steel chair. It was bolted to the floor and there were chains and ankle cuffs … And I was held there for two months without any contact with the Australian Embassy … They used to just come inside the room at any time – middle of the day, middle of the night, no telling. They didn’t even identify themselves. So I was never quite sure, was I talking to a special branch, was it military intelligence? I think in the end, it was a mix of both.
That was the worst time. And as I mentioned before, completely outside of the law. At no time did they justify anything, at no time did they have warrants or anything or tell me in any way what I was being charged with or given any due process. Again, personally, not physical torture, but psychological torture, definitely. So I was told … that I would never see my wife and family again.
RFA: You got COVID in prison, right? Did you get proper medication?
Turnell: They were usually pretty good about that for me because I think they were only worried that if anything happened to me, the international community would really rise up. So they were willing to be careful about that. They didn’t care if I was comfortable or not. Or whether I got diseases … I think they were a bit worried I might die … So I usually got medical attention if it was serious.
RFA: How about the food they provided in prison?
Turnell: It was awful, it was terrible. It was just out of a bucket. Everyday you got something – bean soup, boiled rice. The rice was always horrible, with stones in it so you had to be careful not to break your teeth. Sometimes, I had this sort of meat thing … The best bits of it were sold off [by the authorities] on the black market and all that was left [for us] was bone and gristle and oily residue.
RFA: What do you think about the charges against you?
Turnell: Completely ridiculous. It was official secrets that they said that I breached, but all we were doing was economical work … And of course, all of this was done by a regime that itself is completely illegal and has no legitimacy. So the legal aspect was a complete sham, and the regime knows that. Sometimes they don’t even pretend that they’re acting in an illegal way.
Sean Turnell receives a COVID-19 vaccination in Insein Prison in Yangon, in this handout photo taken on July 28, 2021 and received on July 29 from the state-run Myanmar News Agency (MNA). Credit: Handout/Myanmar News Agency
‘We’re back to the Myanmar of 20 years ago’
RFA: How do you see the situation in Myanmar now?
Turnell: Terrible. The economy has been basically destroyed. The proportion of Myanmar’s population that dies of poverty has more than doubled. The exchange rate has collapsed … The foreign investment and all the nice [development] programs that get set up are all just ruined and all get pushed aside. We’re back to the Myanmar of 20 years ago. The country has made a great leap backwards. And while the people of Myanmar suffer, the military has made sure to look after themselves. It’s not too far to say they have destroyed the country.
RFA: Will you help Myanmar again if you have the chance?
Turnell: I sure will. One of the last things said to me as I was being deported a week ago was by a senior official who urged me to “please don’t hate Myanmar.” And I said, “I could never hate Myanmar. I love the people of Myanmar. I hate the regime … but I love the people. They were brave and strong and very good to me all throughout” … I have nothing but love and respect for the people of Myanmar. And I will continue to do all that I can to help.
RFA: What do you want to say about the junta to the international community?
Turnell: We need to do everything we can to get rid of them, frankly. Convince them to just get out of the way and to leave the people of Myanmar alone. There’s been such great progress over the years leading to this, they’ve knocked everything back. They’re a regime with no vision … But it’s a regime that is not very clever. They have no idea, no understanding, of economics at all.
RFA: What do you want to say to the people of Myanmar?
Turnell: Well, I love and respect you. I will always be here for you. So at a personal level, I would like to get that across. I don’t blame the people of Myanmar in any way. In fact, I see them as heroes, and people who were incredibly compassionate to me. Sometimes in the prison, the people who were the most vulnerable and had the least resources were the people who helped me the most.
Secondly, I suppose even though with Ukraine and all that, some of the attention has moved off Myanmar, we need to get some of the attention back. The international community will stand up for them. And hopefully, I guess the task is to keep that up and to reinvigorate that and make sure that Myanmar comes to the attention of everyone as well.
Let me kick this reflection off by getting something out of the way: You ungrateful pieces of shit.
You just couldn’t let me have one, huh? Bono’s not allowed to make mistakes, I guess.
It’s funny—no, really, it is—you can sing, “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief / All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief,” a thousand times, and nobody bats an eye.
But the second you sing, “Uno, dos, tres, catorce”? Forget it. You’re the catorce guy.
I’ve got a question for all you snarky little shits.
What do you think the Spanish-language offerings in Dublin, circa 1971, were like? Do you reckon they were robust? Well. They weren’t. And Y Tu Mamá También didn’t exist yet. So don’t pull that card.
Want to hear my theory?
You people wouldn’t know a good thing if it ran you over with a truck. After 9/11, what was playing on every radio station in the country to help you tune out the news cycle? To help you feel something resembling hope? Yep. It was “Beautiful Day.” If 9/11 was your sensitivity to light, “Beautiful Day” was your pair of Armani prescription sunglasses. It shielded you from all that you could not bear to face. You put it in your graduation montages and your Fourth of July fireworks shows. You got a lot of mileage out of “Beautiful Day.”
Fast forward. It’s a few years later. New album. New lead single.
I don’t know what I was expecting. A hero’s welcome? Maybe! Maybe I did.
And that’s on me. That’s on ol’ Bonbon. Mea culpa. Whatever. Next song.
Chapter 32: Ordinary Love
In case you’re wondering, though, I don’t do it anymore. When we play “Vertigo” live, I mean. I don’t say “catorce.”
I don’t replace it with “cuatro,” either.
I could. I know how to. But I refuse.
It would make you feel so big if I changed the lyric to “cuatro,” wouldn’t it? It would make you feel like you had some kind of sick power over me. Like your sad little life means anything next to the high that I experience every night as I stride into an entirely sold-out stadium with thousands of people chanting my name (which I made up), singing along to words I wrote (but not “catorce,” not anymore), with my best friend, who also got to make up his name, by my side.
But in time, I’ve come to realize something. I don’t have to sing “cuatro” just because you made me feel small. Roslyn (my therapist’s name is Roslyn) says I don’t owe you anything.
Anyway. Next one. For real this time.
Chapter 33: City of Blinding Lights
Big tune. Fun song where you can just crank the volume and belt it. This one never fails to get the crowd going. It’s bright, anthemic, and absolutely free of blunders in a foreign language.
Because, apparently, that’s what matters.
It doesn’t matter if the biggest band in the world, who honestly could’ve sold out a long time ago, put their heart and soul into a record.
One wrong word. That’s what you choose to remember. And honestly, I pity you.
Look. I know “catorce” means fourteen. And not just now. l knew it on the day we recorded. I got a little swept up and made a mistake. It can happen to anyone. Literally anyone. You’re not exempt just because you haven’t been to Davos or met the Dalai Lama. On every pedestal of life, high or low, you rest on a brittle column of “catorce.” I pray that when yours falls out from under you, you handle it half as well as I did.
I’m doing fine now, though.
That’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject. This is my last word on the song “Vertigo” and its count-off, which I guess failed to be the Rosetta Stone of pop music or whatever the fuck you guys were expecting.
Bono out.
Chapter 34: Get Out of Your Own Way
The Dalai Lama loves “Vertigo.” He says the count-off is refreshing and more about a feeling than any strict meaning. It’s a rock song. He gets it.
¿Qué nos configura como seres humanos? ¿Somos dueños de la creación de nuestra persona, nuestra subjetividad? ¿O acaso somos solamente entes que la sociedad maneja a su gusto?
Muchas veces resulta difícil diferenciar hasta qué punto las decisiones y pensamientos que tenemos son producto de nuestra propia individualidad, especialmente en un sistema tan abarcador y dominador como es el sistema mundial moderno.
Claramente (y para anticipar un poco la respuesta a las preguntas) no somos amebas a las cuales nos manejan, sí realizamos decisiones y sí tenemos pensamientos que dependen de nosotros mismos. Sin embargo (y acá está el truco), nuestras decisiones y pensamientos parten de un marco preconcebido, donde la estructura de pensar y de actuar está constreñida por el modelo ideológico dominante, el modelo occidental global o modelo eurocéntrico.
Es importante recalcar que esto no es una teoría conspirativa sobre la sociedad actual, no estoy escribiendo una descripción de cómo los malvados jefes que dominan el mundo nos controlan. No, muy alejado de la realidad. Lo que sí es real, es que, si miramos la historia a nivel global, podemos ver que el mundo desde la colonización empieza a configurarse de cierta manera, existiendo dos lados, los colonizados y los colonizadores.
Los colonizadores (el mundo occidental europeo), lleva su modelo de Estado nación a los diferentes países de América Latina, lo cual incluye no solamente a las instituciones coloniales, sino también el modelo de pensamiento racional occidental de la época. El problema de esto no es solamente un quiebre de una sociedad ya instalada, sino cómo se fue perpetuando este modelo, ya que cuando los países latinoamericanos se independizaron mantuvieron la mayoría de las instituciones y prácticas coloniales antiguas, ignorando muchas veces la diferencia de contexto entre América Latina y Europa.
Esto trajo diversos problemas obviamente, pero, debido al poco espacio que tengo, me abocaré al dilema que nos compete, la imposición y continuidad de un modelo occidental, o como el sociólogo Aníbal Quijano lo llama: la colonialidad del poder. Esta colonialidad opera de formas diferentes, pero principalmente lo que genera es una matriz de poder colonial, la cual genera jerarquías sobre pensamientos y acciones, clasificándolas en aquellas que resultan más adecuadas o menos adecuadas para la sociedad, tomando al hombre blanco europeo como modelo a seguir.
La imposición de este modelo sigue hasta nuestro días, no solamente fue un cambio inicial que afectó gravemente a los indígenas de la zona (los cuales eran obligados a hablar español, vestir de cierta manera, etcétera) sino que también mantuvo en el tiempo el estándar occidental en diversos aspectos; una lengua heredada de la época colonial; clasificaciones de género más estrictas; modelos tradicionales de familia; incluso la forma en que uno debe desarrollarse como persona, siendo el modelo de persona racional y no el de persona emocional el que uno debe alcanzar.
Por tanto (y ahora sí respondiendo las preguntas del principio), la colonialidad del poder está presente en todos nosotros y en diversos ámbitos, esto involucra el machismo, el racismo, el clasismo, todas estas ideologías dominantes operan en nuestros cuerpos y subjetividades a través de esta herida colonial que supuso el seguir manteniendo el modelo colonial, negando y reprimiendo otras subjetividades ajenas al sistema occidental.
En los últimos años se han ido cuestionando las ideologías dominantes que se desprenden de la colonialidad del poder, diversos aspectos sí han cambiado y hay aquellos que logran cuestionarla y enfrentarla. Sin embargo, es innegable (al menos en cierta medida) que la estructura de poder occidental nos afecta en nuestro desarrollo como personas, muchas veces redireccionando nuestro camino a tomar. Esto sucede también porque la opinión pública, los medios de comunicación y la tradición sociocultural del país están también sesgados a favor de este modelo, bombardeandonos con información que afecta la forma en que vemos el mundo (y, por tanto, al sistema occidental imperante), tanto al remarcar qué es mejor consumir, como al marcar la pauta sobre lo que es criticable o no.
En conclusión, el modelo occidental sí está presente en todos nosotros, influyendo en las cosas que valoramos más y en las que valoramos menos, sin embargo, la clave justamente está en comprender que este modelo colonial sigue existiendo en nosotros (al igual que saberse hijos del machismos nos permite ver las acciones que siguen perpetuando ese sistema, por ejemplo), y al aceptarlo, también podemos actuar para evitar reproducir estas acciones, deconstruyendo nuestras subjetividades, algo difícil pero clave para el desarrollo de nuestro ser, donde tenemos una individualidad que busca salir y luchar contra este sistema dominante, por lo que hay que darle terreno y así cada vez ser más dueños de la creación de nuestra persona.
Aceptar que existe una herida colonial es comprender y abrazar nuestro pasado, pieza clave para construir nuestro presente y nuestro futuro.
Diecisiete puntos incluye la Agenda de Naciones Unidas 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible. Diecisiete puntos o ejes que, en su mayoría, llaman a implementar políticas orientadas a poner fin a la pobreza, promover la sustentabilidad ambiental, consagrar el respeto a los derechos humanos de las personas que emigran por diversas razones, a fortalecer los derechos sexuales y reproductivos de las mujeres así como la igualdad de género, la promoción del trabajo decente, educación y salud de calidad…
En apariencia, el programa de la ONU parece hacerse cargo de los grandes temas que ocuparán a la humanidad en esta década, pero para un grupo creciente de personas conservadoras esconde algo diferente, algo que bien vale ser combatido. Según estos se trataría de un siniestro plan diseñado por una élite global tendiente a destruir la soberanía de las naciones, minar las bases de la familia tradicional e impulsar el arrinconamiento (sino la aniquilación) de la etnia caucásica.
Esta es una de las últimas obsesiones del mundo que hoy sigue en redes a Francisco Muñoz, alias Pancho Malo, cuya conversión confirma la severidad de la crisis institucional y de representación democrática que vive el país. Según un sondeo del Observatorio Interpreta, el exlíder de la Garra Blanca es un potente movilizador en Twitter de los difusores locales de esta conjura global digitada desde las sombras por los sospechosos de siempre, entre ellos George Soros y la familia Rotschild, quienes, actuando de consuno con Naciones Unidas -en su calidad de “protogobierno global”-, estarían empujando esta Agenda 2030 orientada a establecer -presuntamente, claro- un “nuevo orden mundial” con características distópicas.
Presidente Boric en Asamblea General de la ONU
El integrante del Observatorio del Ascenso de la Extrema Derecha en Chile, Alejandro Lagos, quien es investigador de la Universidad de Chile, sostiene que la Agenda 2030 de Naciones Unidas “se enfoca en la reducción de la pobreza y el hambre, igualmente busca instalar la igualdad de derechos entre hombres y mujeres y combatir el cambio climático. Esta propuesta de alcance internacional es a todas luces un plan con lineamientos estratégicos progresistas en varias áreas, y es desde ahí que los sectores de extrema derecha lo repelen por varios factores”, sostiene, sin ocultar su inquietud por una interpretación que bien podría arrancar sonrisas toda vez que se antoja no ya sólo excesiva, sino que derechamente afiebrada, y ello porque refleja un estado de ánimo cada vez más divorciado de la racionalidad.
“En el área de los derechos, los sectores religiosos fundamentalistas rechazan los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres y el reconocimiento de las disidencias, igualmente el reconocimiento de la diversidad sexual, que es algo que los sectores conservadores rechazan con especial ahínco desde la tesis de la destrucción de la familia tradicional; esto es, hombre, mujer e hijos. En el área de la inclusión y el multiculturalismo, los grupos del racismo histórico, como neonazis y supremacistas blancos, vinculan a los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sustentable (ODS) de la Agenda 2030 con la tesis conspirativa del ‘Gran Reemplazo’”, agrega el investigador.
¿Y qué es el “Gran Reemplazo”? Lagos explica esta teoría -esbozada por primera vez por el escritor francés Renaud Camus- entregando luces respecto de los temores inconfesados que suelen embargar a personas como Pancho Malo, quien a menudo es blanco de mofas en redes sociales por experimentar un progresivo blanqueamiento de su apariencia, lo que quedaría de manifiesto en una cabellera que luce un aspecto cada vez más “nórdico”. Dice Alejandro Lagos: “El ‘Gran Reemplazo’ consiste en que el libre flujo migracional de las personas en búsqueda de oportunidades es en realidad la búsqueda de una élite judía por debilitar a la raza blanca a través del mestizaje. Todos estos relatos se anclan en las transformaciones que están ocurriendo en el marco de la soberanía de los estados-naciones en el siglo XXI, y que vienen ocurriendo gradualmente desde los acuerdos de Yalta después de la II Guerra Mundial”. Obviamente que Pancho Malo y su grupo, nucleados en la cuenta de Team Patriota, también suscribe la existencia del complot.
Hoy protestamos contra la Agenda 2030 que la casta política intenta imponer al país. La cocina política ya nos estafó el 2019.
Rechazamos el “Comunicado” de la @Camara_cl, es ajenos a la realidad e incitan al odio al denostar a Francisco Muñoz. @tere_marinovic@carreragonzalopic.twitter.com/qJh00UEygO
El mismo Francisco Muñoz y su grupúsculo Team Patriota se han sumado a la lucha contra esta perversa maquinación de la élite mundial. El tópico comunista no podía quedar fuera de esta teoría, aun cuando cuesta establecer un vínculo claro entre los banqueros de origen judío y una sensibilidad de izquierda que se encuentra en las antípodas en la tirante relación capital-trabajo, aunque cabe la posibilidad de que en la categoría “comunista” -y es muy probable que así sea- ingrese todo aquel que se ubique en el arco político más allá de la derecha. La exconvencional Teresa Marinovic es otra de las figuras del sector que suscribe la existencia de este plan.
“Las tesis ‘anticomunistas’ y en clave conspiracionistas son en rechazo a la filosofía de la economía circular, la que busca combatir el cambio climático revirtiendo la cultura del consumo. Sin embargo, para los grupos de extrema derecha la economía circular es una forma en la que la élite judía quiere instalar el ‘comunismo’ desde arriba, a través de la máxima ‘en 2030 no tendrás nada y será feliz’, lo que no fue otra cosa que un eslógan anticonsumista planteado por el Foro Económico Mundial y que acá en Chile, el diputado republicano Johaness Kaiser ha utilizado en clave conspiracionista para denostar al gobierno de Gabriel Boric”, agrega Lagos. La Agenda 2030 tendría así la gran singularidad de aunar prácticamente todas las principales teorías conspirativas de la ultraderecha, que van desde la instauración del marxismo (especialmente el «marxismo cultural», que es como define este sector a las cuestiones sexogenéricas) a la «geoingeniería», consistente esta última en la alteración global del clima a gran escala.
Tenemos que preguntar siempre a todo político ,representantes, alcaldes etc Qué posición tiene sobre la #Agenda2030; La ONU,OMS ,sobre coacción de pinchazos experimentales, geoingeniería etc.Porque sabemos que ningún periodista/medios sometidos globalistas..Nunca preguntaran !! pic.twitter.com/pU7gjtOTQ7
“Eso deja al descubierto que existe una coordinación entre la extrema derecha y las teorías de la conspiración, las que son utilizadas a voluntad para la exaltación populista y una cierta retórica de la ‘defensa de la libertad’, que no es otra cosa que una defensa de la propiedad privada”, agrega Lagos.
El diputado republicano Johannes Kaiser sostiene, sin embargo, que el plan de la ONU efectivamente “compromete a las generaciones futuras con una agenda que es política, no técnica, pues ahí vemos una serie de iniciativas de control central de la economía en nombre de la ecología. Es básicamente socialismo global. O bien el tema del aborto”, señala el parlamentario, quien acusa a los sectores más tradicionales del establishment chileno de adherir a esta agenda.
“Hay una convergencia que no se condice con los principios que los distintos sectores políticos dicen representar y defender. ¿Desde cuándo la derecha defiende una economía centralmente planificada y controlada? ¿Desde cuándo la derecha promueve el aborto o la ideología de género que nos dice que un hombre puede ser mujer y una mujer puede ser hombre en un abrir y cerrar de ojos? Digámoslo con claridad: el estado-nación como entidad de organización humana es un problema para los que quieren una gobernanza global, creando para ello regiones globales como la Unión Europea. La integración política a nivel global tiene de dulce y de agraz, pero deben transparentarlo, pues uno de esos costos es la pérdida de soberanía. Si quieren eso, mejor convirtámonos en una gobernación global y así nos ahorramos el Congreso”, señala enseguida Kaiser, quien avisa que la agenda se encuentra en pleno desarrollo, incluso en Chile. “Vaya al sitio web del Ministerio de Educación y verá ahí ‘Agenda 2030’. Es una página oficial del Gobierno”, señala.
Un cuadro desolador
Asimismo, “Pancho Malo” arrastra en Twitter a sus seguidores (un 72% son hombres y un 28%, mujeres) comprometidos en la defensa de Carabineros (#Regla7MetrosAHORA) y la preservación del actual orden constitucional (#RechazoNuevoProceso), en la demanda de un sexto retiro de los fondos de pensiones (#SextoRetiro), y también en apoyo al diputado Gonzalo de la Carrera, con quien se fundió en un conmovedor abrazo pocos días atrás en las afueras del Congreso Nacional. Por cierto: el polémico diputado es uno de los más mencionados por el “exgarrero” (alrededor de 230 menciones), a los que se suman Sergio Melnick (460), Teresa Marinovic (140) y el ultraderechista argentino Agustín Laje (160), además de otras cuentas como @girealaderecha (380) y @conectados921, cuenta que corresponde al programa de Checho Hirane en radio Agricultura (300). Los conceptos que más reitera Francisco Muñoz son “casta política”, “operadores políticos”, “violar la democracia”, “dejen de robar la democracia”, “constitución actual” y “plebiscito ratificatorio”.
Pancho Malo y el diputado Alejandro de la Carrera en el Congreso
Como sea, este activista que no tiene oficio conocido -quien abrió su propia cuenta en julio de 2022- se las ingenia para estar en boca de todos: desde el 1 de noviembre de 2021 hasta el 14 de octubre de 2022, se registraron 83.120menciones provenientes de 27.899 autores únicos. Entre el 1 de noviembre de 2021 hasta el 29 de junio de 2022, se registraron tres incrementos inusuales de menciones: el 9 de diciembre de 2021, cuando El Mostrador informó que lideraría una convocatoria en apoyo al por entonces candidato José Antonio Kast; el 4 de abril, fecha en la que lideró junto a Johannes Kaiser una manifestación del Rechazo en Providencia; y finalmente la semana del 6 de junio, cuando fue recibido por el presidente del Servel, Andrés Tagle. Tamviñen tuvo otros «momentos de gloria», todos ellos marcados por los “aprietes” a la senadora Fabiola Campillay, Luciano Cruz Coke y Javier Macaya.
Curiosamente, y pese a los ideólogos originales de esta teoría apuntan a una élite conformada por potentados judíos, la derecha que sigue en redes de Pancho Malo dan cuenta de otro rasgo de este fenómeno: la contradicción. No en balde, en la nube de emojis destaca la bandera de Israel, nación a la que los seguidores del exbarrista apoyaron con fervor a raíz del entrevero diplomático que protagonizó el Presidente Boric con el recientemente nombrado embajador Gil Artzyeli. Ahora, si de contradicciones se trata, criticar la pérdida de soberanía al tiempo que se celebra la suscripción de tratados de libre comercio también es una muestra de que la emoción es la gran generadora de prácticas y discursos.
Los principales hashtags usados por Pancho Malo en cuenta de Twitter
Para algunos, la teoría sobre la Agenda 2030 puede parecer absurda, una anécdota desopilante al pie de página de un país de que ha de interesarse por situaciones ciertamente más acuciantes, como la seguridad pública, las listas de espera en salud y las paupérrimas pensiones. Mal que mal, teorías conspirativas han existido siempre. Para otros, en cambio, el fenómeno actual -en un marco decreciente digitalización de las relaciones humanas- no tiene nada de irrelevante, pues las teorías conspirativas, aun cuando puedan sonar disparatadas (el epítome de la locura es QAnon, en Estados Unidos), son un síntoma claro de una democracia liberal que enfermó en la medida que sus “consensos” posteriores a la Guerra Fría pasaron por eliminar las posiciones alternativas que dan sentido a la política, según sostiene el doctor en Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades de la Universidad de Chile y coordinador del Magíster en Comunicación Política del Instituto de la Comunicación e Imagen de la Universidad de Chile, Claudio Salinas.
Tópicos preferentes del mundo que sigue a Pancho Malo en redes
“A veces debemos preguntarnos por qué las fake news y estas teorías prosperan en las democracias. La respuesta, creo yo, está en que la democracia liberal perdió su proyecto político al anular los antagonismos que son inherentes a su naturaleza, y eso consiste en exponer proyectos alternativos que hicieran ruido. En Europa y Estados Unidos, por ejemplo, el progresismo en vez de responder de manera progresista a los ciudadanos opta por reafirmar el estado de cosas con tal de mostrarse responsable, y por eso (Donald) Trump aparece como más revolucionario pues se sienten con la libertad de ir a cualquier lado con su discurso basado en eso que llama ‘el sentido común’. Los progresistas al final no responden como progresistas, y ahí tenemos también a Gabriel Boric, que acusa esta contradicción de denunciar el status quo pero al mismo tiempo se le ve defendiendo el sistema porque está consciente de su debilidad”, sostiene. “¿Quién gana en este cuadro? Pues la ultraderecha, que maneja mucho mejor el manual de la desinformación”, añade.
Si a lo anterior sumamos que durante décadas la izquierda ha hecho propias algunas miradas filosóficas que renuncian expresamente a los valores de la Ilustración a efectos de incluir miradas marginalizadas o “invisibilizadas” (lo que ha debilitado al extremo el estatuto de la “verdad objetiva”), lo que vemos hoy en día no debería sorprender a nadie: todo el mundo, incluyendo los ultraderechistas, se sienten con el derecho de legitimar cualquier creencia o relato “alternativo” en la medida que cumpla con sostener su propia realidad. En ese sentido, la ultraderecha ha sabido sacar partido como nadie de este imperio de la subjetividad en que entramos allá por los años ‘70.
El diputado Johannes Kaiser suscribe la existencia del plan global
Para el cientista político Rodrigo Espinoza, el problema es que las teorías conspirativas son un combustible poderoso para estos grupos, pero también es extremadamente peligroso para la propia derecha tradicional, esa que termina siendo fagocitada por estos sectores extremos. Sin ir más lejos, Pancho Malo no sólo ha realizado funas a quienes participan en la conversación para un nuevo proceso constituyente, sino que además se ha comprometido a sabotear las opciones de Chile Vamos en la próxima elección municipal. De hecho, hashtags como #cancelamosachilevamos y #abandonenchilevamos predominan en sus tuiteos, así como todos aquellos que defienden la Constitución vigente: #rechazoplanc, #marchaporelrechazo y #rechazoporchile.
“En Polonia y Hungría son gobierno, también en Italia, en Suecia… En Brasil, (Jair) Bolsonaro ganó una elección y casi ganó la siguiente”, recuerda el analista. “La derecha tradicional, en este caso RN y la UDI, tiene dos alternativas: o aplica un cordón sanitario o derechamente incorpora a estos grupos como un matrimonio por conveniencia y da el giro, y lo que ha pasado generalmente es esto último. La literatura comparada dice que hay que acostumbrarse a que la derecha más radical va a estar siempre en la mesa de negociación”, sostiene Espinoza.
“Los republicanos se están reagrupando y se articulan con Pancho Malo, y tienen además una creciente base social. El contexto los ayuda: problemas de seguridad, inmigración descontrolada, recesión y crisis de representación son el caldo de cultivo para que dejen de ser grupos marginales”, agrega Espinoza, quien menciona otra terrible contradicción que embarga a este mundo que hace de la nación una tribu de valores pétreos e inmutables: “Los grandes problemas como la crisis climática, que seguramente incrementará la migración, sólo puede ser resuelta en la medida que nuestro país se articule con otros países. Estos problemas no pueden encararse si no es de manera coordinada”.
PATRIOTA (@Equipo_Patriota) 
