Hysterics do not help
This article is part of the 3/2020 Eurozine review. Click here to subscribe to our reviews, and you also can subscribe to our newsletter and get the bi-weekly updates about latest publications and news on partner journals.
Soundings defines a very English populism; Razpotja talks a lot of rubbish; New Humanist thinks rationally about climate crisis; il Mulino sees populism as consequence not cause; and NAQD discusses threats to public media in Algeria.
Soundings
73 (2020)
(United Kingdom)
Soundings defines a very English populism
In Soundings, historian Bill Schwarz argues that the Johnson government marks the end of the ‘good chaps’ Tory party and the beginning of a peculiarly English form of authoritarian populism:
‘It’s as if Edmund Burke had crossed the river of fire and chosen to agitate with the sans-culotte rabble, all of a sudden dazzled by the “will of the people”, and, turning himself inside-out, embracing in the process a self-righteous Jacobin purity … Yet, against all the odds, this oligarchic Jacobinism seems to be finding resonance with the wider electorate, a meeting of opposites in which class hatreds reverberate with class deference. For many, Johnson really is championing the will of the people.’
Writing before the December 2019 election, developments since confirm Schwarz’s point. The Johnson government has revealed plans for ‘constitutional reform’, which could see restrictions on judicial independence, as well as for far-reaching changes to the civil service and the BBC. Read the article in Soundings here.
Other Europe: Brexit is one instance of the retreat behind national borders that is spreading across Europe. How might the transnational left in Europe respond? Antje Scharenberg introduces a new Soundings series entitled ‘Other Europe’, featuring actors who are ‘re-inventing Europe from the bottom up, inside and outside of local, national and European political institutions’. The first contributor is Rasha Shaaban, a campaigner, feminist, DJ and storyteller based in Sweden. She talks about what Europe looks like from the perspective of newcomers and the role of intercultural dialogue in making ‘other Europes’ visible:
‘Living in Europe is almost like a utopia, like living in a luxurious, gated community, while everywhere around you, you have people dying, LGBTQ people being persecuted, poverty, climate change, hate speech, everything! And then all of these shootings in mosques and synagogues, and the persecution of Roma people. It somehow feels fake, like a fake democracy. I go to Egypt three times a year to see my family. And sometimes I just sit, especially on the plane on the way back, and I’m thinking: my goodness! the gap is so huge!’
Also: Giorgos Charalambous on the chances of the radical left in the EU; Lawrence Grossberg on the US right’s ‘weaponization’ of political heterogeneity; Graham Music on what social critique can learn from neurobiology; Campaign Choirs Writing Collective on the political possibilities of song; and Hongwei Bao on ‘queer comrades’ in China.
More articles from Soundings in Eurozine; Sounding’s website
Razpotja
4/2019
(Slovenia)
Razpotja talks a lot of rubbish
Razpotja’s tenth anniversary issue focuses on rubbish. What is rubbish and when does something become it? In one sense, rubbish can be seen a human achievement, albeit of dubious worth: ‘It took us a long time before we were able to dissect nature to such an extent that our products would no longer simply return to it’, comments editor Martin Hergouth.
Nature: In his book Humankind (2017), Timothy Morton writes that ‘One’s garbage doesn’t go “away” — it just goes somewhere else.’ Katja Huš picks up on Morton’s concept of nature as integral rather than extraneous to human life. ‘While the plastic bag has become a symbol for throwaway consumer culture and environmental destruction,’ she argues, ‘nuclear waste and carbon emissions still seem to be too far from sight to trigger wider public concern and reaction.’
Economy: In consumer society, nothing is truly consumed, argues Miha Kosovel. ‘Rubbish is perceived as a by-product when it is actually the direct product of a product, so the real costs of the product should also include the cost of having to get rid of that rubbish’. These costs are much higher for plastic than, for example, glass; yet plastic packaging remains cheaper, because ‘plastic disappears from market calculations in the same way that it disappears from sight, reappearing somewhere in the third world.’
Maidan: With her book The Ukrainian night: An Intimate History of Revolution, Marci Shore says she wanted ‘to capture historical experience as something intimate’. Fascinated by questions of generation, she explains the extraordinariness of the Maidan protest, where instead of pulling their children off the streets, their parents joined them: ‘I wanted to tell these stories: what does it mean to join the revolution and risk your life with your child or a parent.’
More articles from Razpotja in Eurozine; Razpotja’s website
New Humanist
2/2020
(United Kingdom)
New Humanist thinks rationally about climate crisisNew Humanist focuses on the climate crisis, exploring ‘more rational, more nuanced ways of thinking and talking about environmental disaster’, writes editor Samira Shackle.
Climate pragmatism: Although we are finally witnessing a mainstream climate movement, there is still a ‘lack of serious discussion about what measures are needed’, writes climate activist Will McCallum. Climate change policy, he argues, ‘has become part of the culture wars, where truth and reason bear little to no relevance to the discussion’. Polarization stifles progress: rather than exacerbating ideological divisions, urgency demands constructive cooperation. ‘Hysterics do not help at a time of crisis.’
Green New Deal: Interviewed by J. P. O’Malley, political economist Ann Pettifor makes the case for the Green New Deal, arguing that protection of the ecosystem requires control of the economy, which in turn means public authority over the monetary system: ‘To manage emissions we must manage the flow of credit’. Pettifor criticizes the ‘dollarization’ of the global economy and the resultant imbalances. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, rather than guarantors of prosperity, have become ‘agents for global capital markets’ and ‘enforcers’ for the world’s creditors.
Racism: Tasked with preparing an ‘American Negro Exhibit’ at the 1900 Paris Exposition, African-American sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois compiled 63 brightly-coloured diagrams. He hoped, writes Lola Okolosie, that ‘data visualization could swim against strong currents of racist thinking, which had been empowered by pseudo-science’. However, not completely immune to the zeitgeist, Du Bois ended up limiting ‘the majority of black people within the confines he intended to escape’, by showing that they were ‘valuable not in and of themselves’, but for their economic worth to the nation. Nevertheless, Du Bois pioneered ‘the radical potential of infographics to tell the stories of lesser heard voices’, and the power of his work still resonates.
God pop: ‘Do we want faith mixed up with our funk, God in our grime, Jesus in our jazz?’ Writing on the resurgence of religious sentiment in British pop, Caspar Melville concludes that it does not matter: ‘When the music is sublime and the crowd and players work in sync to produce a sense of rapture, questions of the facticity of revelation seem vulgar and beside the point.’
More articles from New Humanist in Eurozine; New Humanist’s website
il Mulino
6/2019
(Italy)
il Mulino sees populism as consequence not cause
Il Mulino looks back at the legacy of 1989 and at the consequences of the neoliberal hegemony that has reigned since. The liberal triumph, write the editors, made us overlook that admired intellectuals such as Solzhenitsyn, Patočka and Havel ‘criticized the materialism of capitalist societies just as much as that of the Soviet system’.
Liberalism: Since the ’80s, neoliberalism has progressively unlinked capitalism and democracy — hence the crisis of western liberalism, write Emanuele Felice and Giuseppe Provenzano. The growth of inequalities and the erosion of the welfare state in the West accompany the rise, on the world stage, of countries that are fully capitalist and yet autocratic. How to reverse the neoliberal trend? By realizing that liberalism finds its most authentic expression ‘in its encounter with democratic, socialist and environmentalist thought’.
Populism: Nadia Urbinati looks at populism not as the cause, but as the most visible consequence of the decline of multi-party representative democracy. Populism’s communication experts — its intellectuals — wage a permanent electoral campaign, using the internet to construct a ‘theological identity’ of the leader and the people. There is no going back, argues Urbinati: instead, the challenge is to build new forms of political association to contain populism.
Catholicism: What does Pope Francis mean when he speaks of ‘the people’? It is neither a populist discourse nor a legacy of his Latin American origins or Peronism, writes historian Guido Formigoni. In the Pope’s discourse, there is no such thing as a ‘massified sum of human beings under the guidance of some leader’. Instead, the ‘people’ is a mythical category projected into the future, composed of ‘vital subjects and plural wills’.
More articles from il Mulino in Eurozine; il Mulino’s website
NAQD
37 (2020)
(Algeria)
NAQD discusses threats to public media in Algeria
Despite the democratization process underway in Algeria since 1990, public-sector journalism is still closely controlled in the country — a fact made clear by Radio algerienne’s avoidance of discussion of the Hirak movement in 2019. In NAQD, Hakim Hamzaoui explores the reasons for the government’s aversion towards a free press.
Control is manifested in excessive coverage of mundane events designed to minimize the possibility of writing defamatory political pieces, he writes. There is also self-censorship (58 per cent of journalists said that they practise this regularly, knowing that their careers depend on it) and close surveillance of the kinds of information published (approximately half of all journalists have had their work heavily edited in order to conform politically). The manipulation of information and the use of propaganda ‘is making [the media] a key player in the perpetuation of the current political system and a status quo in terms of freedom of expression’. This is responsible for ‘the stunted development of the country’s sociopolitical consciousness’.
Media financing: Nor El Houda Bouzegaou discusses the financing of Algerian public television through advertising, focusing on the public television company EPTV. Advertising is ‘susceptible to being destabilized, as it is dependent on the development of the market’, she argues; by relying on advertising, public television has come up against a number of economic challenges. Tracing the history of Algerian television, Bouzegaou shows how advertising can only develop fruitfully and fairly if it is carefully regulated.
Authoritarian reform: Aldjia Bouchaala and Aissa Merah analyse the evolution of public media, particularly the print sector. ‘Thirty years after the application of a constitution on media pluralism and its reinforcement through a series of legal and institutional reforms, the media landscape remains unchanged’. Absence of oversight over legislation has been a major contributing factor. Bouchaala and Merah describe Algerian media as authoritarian and closed — ‘a natural extension of the country’s political regime’ — and argue that the rise in demagogy and populism in both private and public media has only aggravated this.
