Strongmen

INTRODUCTION The Return of the Monster ^{Vijay Prashad}

THE MONSTERS have returned. They are led by strongmen—by Trump, by Modi, by Erdoğan, by Duterte, and by others. But these are not really strong men. These are men who pretend to be strong, who hide behind ugly rhetoric that befuddles the masses, but who are nothing other than cowardly when it comes to social reality. Rather than confront the difficult problems that face us—problems of unemployment and starvation, humiliation and inequality—they take refuge in an easy rhetoric of hate. It is so much easier to hate than to spend the time necessary to build the ramparts of a future world, one where the catastrophic social problems of today no longer define human existence. But the monsters of today—the morbid symptoms of this period of transition—do not care to tackle the problems of society. They blink at them, nod at them, and then move on to harsher prescriptions.

At first glance, these monsters appear to be like the fascists of the last century—Germany’s Adolph Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Spain’s Francisco Franco, and Japan’s Hideki Tojo as well as Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar, Romania’s Ion Antonescu, and South Africa’s D.F. Malan. These men and their regimes are defined by the ugliness of their political agendas as well as their rhetoric—bilious against social groups that they abhor. Violence is both their strategy and their tactic. The current monsters even resemble the monsters of the 1960s and the 1970s, the men who led the neo-fascist states through the military juntas (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Greece, Indonesia, and Thailand); these were weak states that used force to extract resources at low prices for export and to produce markets for high value imported goods—all at the behest of multinational corporations and imperial centers.

But the current monsters are a shadow of the older fraternity. They do not advertise themselves as fascists, neither wearing the same emblems nor using the same rhetoric. Some of their followers carry swastikas on their signs, but most of them are more careful. They do not wear the uniform of the military, nor indeed call the military out of the barracks to lend them a hand. Their fascism is couched in modern rhetoric—in the terms of development or trade, in the terms of jobs and social welfare for their nationals, in the language of threats from migrants and drug gangs. But the older language of the older monsters cannot stay away. It makes its appearance when the new monsters speak of migrants and of the vulnerable, of the social and political dissidents. They are treated as vermin that need to be exterminated. The military comes to the border or goes into the slums, bullets flying. Dislocation of society is their goal. Older, decadent language can be heard, the language of death and disorder.

Why have the monsters returned? They made their appearance in the West in the 1920s and 1930 when the workers’ movement had asserted itself and when capitalism went into a tailspin. At that time, the monsters came to suffocate the workers’ movement and to steady the capitalist ship. They broke up the parties of the Left and absorbed a section of the workers into their outfits. They attacked society, attacked its institutions and its confidence—leaving the militant workers of the Left vulnerable. The monsters, “swollen with rhetoric” as Gramsci put it, chastised society for its desire for a better world. Intimidation was the order of things, the fulcrum upon which the monsters were able to balance their own will to power with the desire to produce a social order to advantage big business. But even the capitalist had to appear to face their wrath. They took the capitalists into a room and scolded them for being insufficiently patriotic to capitalism. The class of capitalists had to protect capitalism against their individual capitalist interests. The monsters arrived to save capitalism from the militancy of the workers and the cupidity of the capitalists.

The monsters told people to fear their minions, the men who marched in ironed uniforms and with polished jackboots. If anyone strayed from the norm, the men in boots would descend on them. These fascists were the detritus of a decadent capitalism. Their ambitions were destroyed in the fires of war, their project compromised by their disgusting violence against humanity.

That was then; this is now. Why have these monsters returned?

These days, the workers’ movement is weak, debilitated by ideology and technology—by the lure of commodities and by the productivity of computers. Left parties are few, and if they exist, they are weakened by the difficulties of organizing the workers, the peasants, and the unemployed—the key classes who spend so much more time on social reproduction, on finding work, and on travelling to work than they ever did. Individual advancement as an ideological platform is an overwhelming barrier to collective projects of the Left. There is no immediate danger to capitalism in that direction. Bourgeois democracy is fully capable of draining the reservoirs of the Left. The capitalist class does not need fascism for this purpose. If fascists appear, it is not because the Left is a threat to the capitalists.

But capitalism itself is in disarray. Inequality rates are astounding. It is as if the very rich, of whom there are fewer and fewer, are of a different breed than the very poor—of whom there are more and more. A thick and high wall has divided humanity. The poor imagine that they could become rich if luck struck them, but they know that the chances of this are minuscule. The rich, in turn, know that they will never be poor again. They have accumulated generations of wealth by taking advantage of the gibberish of the world of finance, the New Science, the new vocabulary of the alchemists of money: BISTRO, CDS, CDO, CDOs of ABSs, CDOs of CDOs, CDOs of CDOs of CDOs, RAROC, SCDOs, SIVs, SPOs, and VAR. Money makes money, financial instruments insure that the wealthy remain wealthy and that pension funds and middle-class investors feed the system to the advantage of the rich. The house always wins say those who run casinos. Financial exchanges, oxygenated by petrodollars and derivatives, always favor the wealthy. The rich have withdrawn their wealth—to the tune of trillions of dollars—from either investment or from taxation, although they plow it into financial instruments that do little productive good for the economy. The rich are hoarding the wealth produced by the workers. They have weakened the economic system: its arteries are dry, its heart ready to seize. A small heart attack of the financial system in 2007-08 took place when the US housing market failed, and it set off convulsions across the system. Doctors have panicked. Other organs are in danger of failure. Next time, the heart of capitalism might fail altogether.

The monsters have returned because the masters of the New Science have not been able to manage the economy, the free-fall of inequality and humiliation. It is not that the workers and the unemployed workers are now stronger. They are weaker and more disorganized. But they are also angry. And anger can lead in many directions. It can tear society apart, drawing the bile of the torn social structure into family life and into inter-personal relations. It can create anti-social feelings that erupt in violence of all kinds, disassociations from community, hatred of class enemies. The atmosphere of rebellion can always exist without any real possibility of rebellion. Trade unions have been gutted, rural workers have been disinherited from their small plots of land, debt stalks ordinary people from one end of the world to the other, and Left parties are on the back foot. But anger remains. It festers. It could turn into aggression. It could threaten the lives of the rich—their homes on fire, their businesses smashed.

Johann Rupert, the boss of Cartier, told the Financial Times Business of Luxury Summit in Monaco in 2015, “How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and social warfare? We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.” Nick Hanauer, who made billions of dollars when he sold aQuantive to Microsoft in 2007, wrote to his “fellow Zillionaires” a few years ago. His warning is stark: “No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchfork didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising.” These are not radicals. These are the people who exist in the realm of the .01 percent of the wealthy. They can see that economic ruin and social humiliation might produce the strongman, but his appearance does not settle the deep sense of resentment and anger amongst the people produced by social conditions generated by a policy that benefits the rich.

Who will keep the workers and the unemployed workers in line and capitalism humming? The monsters. That is why they have returned. Not to attack the workers’ movement, because it is weak and is not an immediate threat, but to remove the gloves and crack down on collapsed society. Security states grow, the police are in charge, and militia groups emerge to intimidate society into silence. Lynchings of Dalits and Muslims in India are linked to the murder of supposed drug dealers in the Philippines, who are further linked to the shooting of black men and women by police officers in the United States. The monsters take their cue from normal, boring bourgeois democracy. The institutions of bourgeois democracy are also saturated with the apparatus of repression. You don’t need the monsters for police brutality to become normal or for wars to distract you from your own problems. But the monsters offer something more. They are not just bourgeois democrats who hide behind the police and the military. They are out on the streets, telling the hemorrhaging middle-class and the unemployed workers that it is neither the rich nor the state apparatus that are to blame for social failure. Nor is the way ahead for the despondent white-collar and blue-collar worker the path of the entrepreneur. The way ahead is to disparage the marginal, the vulnerable. It is those people who are at fault.

The monsters return not to tell the capitalists to pay more tax, but certainly to tell them to invest more. The monsters grab the economy by the throat and force it to cough out jobs. Yes, they are able to discipline the workers and the unemployed workers. But they cannot force the rich to produce jobs. That will not happen. Millions of people are no longer going to find employment. They have been made into zombies—the living dead. They exist so that they will soon not exist; they are born, but purpose has been taken from their lives. But what to do with their anger?

It is to be displaced, to be reoriented. Why should the workers and the unemployed workers worry about the rich? After all, say the monsters, the rich have earned their wealth. It is by ingenuity and hard work that the rich have climbed to the summit and built a gated community around their house. They have dug a moat around their community and erected guard towers with drones in flight between them. Anger at the rich will only get you killed, say the monsters. Don’t target the rich, they say. Turn your guns against the socially marginal.

The old monsters had a clever idea. They turned the workers and the unemployed workers as well as the middle-class against the Reds—who helped the workers remain strong—but also against the homosexuals and the Jews. It was easy to target the homosexuals, for there had been centuries of animosity bred inside religious traditions for anything that did not conform to the most conservative definition of human relations. It was even easier to target the Jews. Modern capitalism is bewildering, modern finance capitalism even more so. In the old days, the angry peasants would attack the home of the landlord or the overseers or the moneylender. They would run across the fields, pitchforks raised and torches lit. They knew who oppressed them. Matters were reasonably easy in the early days of industrial capitalism, when the factory was the target of the workers’ anger.

But with finance the game is difficult. Who is there to attack, which field to cross, which house to set on fire? Finance capital dominates through the structure, anonymously, a stealth form of oppression. The workers and the unemployed workers know that they are oppressed and exploited and made disposable. They know all this. But what they don’t easily know is who is responsible for their situation. They cannot burn down the bank, because the bank is not one building—there are too many branches, too many ATMs. They cannot burn down the corporate office, because they know that there are many of these as well, in many countries. The old monsters pointed their fingers at the Jews—there is your financier they said, using the deeply rooted language of anti-Semitism. The pogroms against the Jews morphed into the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The new monsters borrow the old monster’s idea. Workers and unemployed workers, the disposable part of humanity, also look at capitalism and wonder at who is firing them, who has ruined their lives. Once in a while, a disgruntled worker takes a gun to his former workplace and shoots his former boss. This happens. But not as often as you’d imagine. The guns are mostly turned against strangers, the rage phantasmagorical. The new monsters point their fingers elsewhere, away from the rich and the powerful and towards the vulnerable and the weak. It is the migrant that gets the brunt of the blame, for it is said—against all the facts—that it is the migrant who is taking away jobs from the workers and the unemployed workers. The migrants come from places of great desperation, where they have seen their own fields torn apart by capitalist farming and their jobs as landless workers vanished by mechanization. They have travelled across the deserts and waters at great peril, risking life and limb to get to places where they think they will find better work. There are few options for them in the new lands, where they find themselves doing the butt-end jobs and being treated with contempt by the armies raised by the new monsters. It is the migrant who must suffer for the plight of the workers and the unemployed workers. The migrants are the sacrifice for capitalism’s failure.

If it is not the migrant who is to blame, then it is some other social figure—the drug dealer or the terrorist. Citizenship is denied to them, the protections of basic human rights are withdrawn. Martial law arrives. Emergency powers are enacted. The strongman must be allowed latitude to protect the real citizens from those who have violated the framework of citizenship. There is no gap between the terrorist or the drug dealer and the migrant—even as the liberal might plead that the migrant is a victim of circumstance and not of choice. These liberal distinctions vanish at the heel of the state’s boot.

It is this hatred of the migrant, the terrorist, and the drug dealer—all seen equally as sociopaths—that evokes an acerbic form of nationalism, a nationalism that is not rooted in love of one’s fellows but in hatred of the outsider. Hatred masquerades as patriotism. The size of the national flag grows, the enthusiasm for the national anthem increases by decibels. Patriotism is reduced to hatred of the migrant, the terrorist, and the drug dealer. It smells acrid—of anger and bitterness, of violence and frustration. The eyes of the workers and the unemployed workers as well as sections of the middle class are turned away from their own problems, from the low wages and the near starvation in their homes, from lack of educational opportunities and provisions for health care, to other problems, problems that are false, that are invented by the new monsters to turn them away from their real problems. It is one thing to be patriotic about flags and anthems. But it is another thing to be patriotic against starvation and hopelessness. The new monsters have taken the second kind of patriotism and thrown it into the fire. Human beings ache to be decent. But that ache is smothered by desperation and resentment, by the diabolical new monsters.

This small book is a collection of fables.

Five brilliant artists and writers confront five of our monsters. Eve Ensler, the American playwright who wrote the play The Vagina Monologues, goes beneath the skin—or should I say orange hair—of US President Donald Trump. Danish Husain, the Indian storyteller and actor, finds himself telling us the story not only of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi but also of the ascension of the extremism of the Sangh Parivar. Burhan Sönmez, the Turkish novelist, ferrets about amidst the bewildering career of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Ninotchka Rosca, the Filipina feminist novelist, unravels the macho world of Rodrigo Duterte. And Lara Vapnyar, Russian-American novelist and essayist, lays bare the sinister sexiness of Vladimir Putin.

There are many other monsters that could have made it into these pages. This is not a comprehensive list, just a suggestive one. We encourage people to write their own essays. In fact, please write them and send them to me (vijay@leftword.com). We will post them on our Left Word Books blog, http://mayday.leftword.com/blog/.

But, for now, settle in and read these five superb essays by these sparkling writers. Their essays do not presume to be neutral. They are partisan thinkers, magical writers, people who see not only the monsters but also a future beyond the ghouls. A future that is necessary. The present is too painful.