Subaltern resistance and the (‘bad’) politics of culture: A response to John Beverley

Abstract

In his reply to my critique of the Latin American subaltern studies project, John Beverley insists there can be no normative model of modernity. Because of this, resistance by (undifferentiated) peasants in defence of individual proprietorship, indigenous culture and agrarian tradition is now a legitimate part of the struggle against capitalism, a result being that rural movements are no longer about class but identity politics and thus the national question. Against this it is argued that the recuperation by the subaltern studies project both of an essentialist peasant culture/economy and of indigenous nationalist agency stems from the idealized concept of popular culture held by the new left in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only does the subaltern framework leave intact the existing class structure, and reproduce the populist mobilizing discourse of the 1930s political right, but it also (and therefore) undermines international working class solidarity. It is, in short, a conservative form of anti-capitalism. As such, it corresponds to a discourse which more accurately merits the label ‘bad politics’ that Beverley wishes to affix to Marxist criticism of the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies project.

Notes

1 The last three epigraphs – by Warshow, Malraux and Mrinal Sen – are included in order to make the point that not all those formulating or analysing popular culture have succumbed to idealism, and viewed it as a-historical or as unproblematically emancipatory/progressive/empowering.

2 The reply by Beverley 2004 is to a critique by me [Brass, 2002a; 2002b of his earlier work [Beverley, 1999.

3 For this argument about my being ‘anti-peasant’ see Beverley 2004: 266]. As rural capitalists, rich peasants continue to exploit and oppress both poor peasants and agricultural labourers, a process to which I am sure Beverley would object and oppose politically as much as do I.

4 For his accusation that I lack a sense of humour, see Beverley 2004: 261–2].

5 Appearing at the gates of heaven, the French philosopher is asked by St Peter why, since he abandoned Catholicism, should he now attempt to seek entry – let alone be accepted – into God's kingdom. St Peter asked Althusser to provide him with three good reasons as to why he – Althusser – should be allowed into heaven, to which the reply was as follows. First, the French philosopher insisted that he had never abandoned his religious faith, merely relabelled it ‘a-historical poststructuralism’. Second, Althusser pointed out that he had thereby restored to God the agency stolen from him by humanity at the Enlightenment. And third, the French philosopher outlined how he had then persuaded atheistic Marxists the world over to accept this theory in place of historical materialism. Without an additional word, St Peter stepped aside and allowed Althusser to pass inside.

6 The main arguments of this critique were developed initially in Brass 1991, and elaborated in numerous texts subsequently.

7 For the agrarian myth, and its connection to the ‘new’ populist postmodernism, see Brass 2000. Each variant of the agrarian myth – the landlord/aristocratic no less than the peasant/plebeian – valorizes and recognizes the hierarchical immanence of the other. In short, both agree that the structure of which they are a part is ‘natural’, and thus unchanging. One of the most intellectually rigorous defenders of peasant economy as a viable concept in the study of development is Shanin 1972; 1990, a pre-postmodern exponent of agrarian populism and the founder of this journal. His oeuvre is important and has remained consistent over the years, a result being that respect for his empirical and theoretical work on the peasantry is not confined to those who agree with him.

8 In addition to the subaltern studies project, the components of the ‘new’ populist discourse include ecofeminism, the new social movements framework, ‘everyday forms of resistance’ theory, ‘post-colonialism’, ‘post-Marxism’, ‘post-development’, and ‘post-capitalism’.

9 Confirmation that the wheel has now turned full circle, and the critique of postmodernism has itself become something of an orthodoxy, is when longstanding arguments against postmodernism are finally recycled by popular journalism. Sure enough, this is what is happening, as recent books by Eagleton 2003 and Wheen 2004 attest. The attribution by the latter [Wheen, 2004: 86] to the former [Eagleton, 1995 of the ‘bracing left-wing critique of postmodernism’ overlooks earlier left-wing critiques (among them Petras 1990 and Brass 1991), not only just as ‘bracing’ but – more importantly – made long before such left-wing critiques became common. Wheen in particular parades what are now well-established criticisms – that the space previously occupied by history, progress and Enlightenment reason has been colonized by the combined forces of religion and postmodernism, based as these are on relativistic epistemologies which are anti-intellectual and anti-scientific. To his conclusion [Wheen, 2004: 7] that ‘the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason [by] many of the new irrationalists [who] hark back to some imagined or even pre-agrarian Golden age’ one can only amend the comment déjà vu.

10 This argument about populism, postmodernism and capitalism has been influential, and is found, albeit unacknowledged, in a number of more recent texts written by those who previously espoused the very views they now criticize [e.g., Corbridge and Harriss, 2000; Corbridge, 2001; Harriss, 2002; Bernstein, 2001, 2004. Where Corbridge and Harriss are concerned, the extent of this volte face between their pre-1995 endorsement of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism and their post-1995 critique of this same approach has been outlined in a review published in this journal (JPS, Vol.29, No.1, October 2001, pp. 182–91). That Bernstein also initially adhered to the same populist discourse he now condemns is evident from Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985.

11 Accepting that ‘“in the long run” capitalism will do away with the peasantry in Latin America and elsewhere’, Beverley 2004: 268] nevertheless counters this by stating – rightly – that those on the left should prevent capitalism from having a ‘long run’, and – wrongly – that in the system that follows there will be a place for private property owned by peasants. The latter is one of the many positions he shares with Otto Baüer (see below).

12 Elsewhere Beverley observes that ‘maybe its time for a return to Althusser’[Beverley and Sanders, 1997: 239]. It is not always clear precisely what meaning Beverley attaches to Althusserian ‘historicism’. At times what Beverley seems to object to is ‘necessitarianism’, or history as having a predictable – as distinct from a desirable – outcome. Few Marxists subscribe to this concept of ‘predictability’; indeed, how is it possible to do so, given the innumerable reverses over the latter part of the twentieth century? But this is not the point, since what Marxism endorses is the view that – because socialism is a desirable (not a predictable) objective – the historical process is determined by struggle based on class, the object of which is to abolish capitalism and establish socialism. It is from this – that a particular historical outcome is both desirable and attainable – that postmodernists such as Beverley depart.

13 A result of the objection by Althusser to history conceptualized as a linear process of ‘becoming’ is that a particular class can no longer be said to have an equally specific ideology as embodied in a given discourse about political economy [Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 92ff.]. This is no different from the epistemology of neo-classical economic theory, for which capitalism is similarly an a-historical – and thus eternal – relation, and as such one not to be transcended.

14 Beverley is as a result open to the same objection as that levelled against the original subaltern studies framework. In ignoring both the fact and effect of the presence of class within the ranks of those opposed to colonialism, therefore, it overlooked also the degree to which anti-colonial discourse/mobilization was that of small capitalist producers and rich peasants as much as that of poor peasants and agricultural workers. This is the most damaging accusation made by Marxists against the postmodernism of the Subaltern Studies approach.

15 For this opposition to a normative concept of modernity, see Beverley 2004: 262–3, 270, 275], who includes under this rubric all ‘forms of “modern” rationality in which “traditional” identities and value systems now seen as anachronistic or reactionary should disappear or be sublimated in a new mix’. This is the crux of his antagonism both to ‘modernity’ and to ‘historicity’: that in effect there is no such thing as a non-modern phenomenon, since to pose issues in terms of a politically desirable transformation is to privilege a normative concept modernity. If no relational forms can be categorized as non-modern, then the future relevance of petty commodity production cannot be challenged, as to do so would immediately identify one as an exponent of a normative concept modernity.

16 According to Beverley 2004: 264], therefore, the peasant subaltern ‘interrupts’ the ‘narrative of [systemic] transition’, thereby confirming that for him the subaltern is indeed the eternal ‘other’ of systemic transformation.

17 This apparent contradiction, promoting capitalist development with a backwards-looking ideology, generates a certain amount of theoretical confusion, not least among those who interpret the presence of one as evidence for the absence of the other. For the adherents of the agrarian myth framework, by contrast, there is no such difficulty. This is because the agrarian myth is a mobilizing discourse targeting not capitalism per se (= modernity) but mainly – or only –‘foreign’ and/or finance capital. It does this by proclaiming the importance of tradition and rural hierarchy that is supportive of national identity and agency, neither of which is ostensibly incompatible with the continued reproduction of peasant economy and culture. Just such a combination featured in the rise of agrarian fascism in Italy, where [Cardoza, 1982: 38–9] despite ‘their difference on church–state relations and their factional fights, most members of Bologna's ruling elite shared similar economic interests and were united by a common world view that combined an enthusiasm for technical innovation and free-market liberalism with a sense of noblesse oblige and the glorification of the traditional rural hierarchy. Both before and after national unification, the speeches and discussions in the Agrarian Society testified eloquently to the agrarians' interest in the technical modernization of agriculture… . Their enthusiasm for agricultural modernization coexisted with a pronounced distrust of rapid industrialization and its accompanying social dislocations and depersonalized market relations’. In ruling class ideology, therefore, rather than being an obstacle to tradition and hierarchy, national modernization is perceived (and projected) much rather as a continuation, an expression and even a consolidation of these structures.

18 Subalternity is defined by Beverley 2004: 263] as ‘the overdetermination of class by forms of cultural subordination’. Why peasant cultural ‘otherness’ is central to the mobilizing discourse of the political right is explained more fully below.

19 To the objection that socialism, too, has its traditions, the obvious reply would always be that these are socialist ones. What is being defended by postmodernism generally and the subaltern studies project in particular, by contrast, are nationalist, conservative and – in some instances – reactionary versions of tradition. Although Beverley 2004: 271] concedes this point – particularly with respect to the way in which the existence of the apartheid regime in South Africa was justified by its defenders – his attempt to solve this difficulty is unpersuasive. To say, as he does, that those on the left must espouse nationalism (see below), and work with counter-revolutionary and conservative agrarian movements – with a constituency that is not merely non-socialist but anti-socialist – so as to induce them to work with the social forces represented by the left, whilst at the same time not subscribing to their reactionary/conservative political objectives, is to misrecognize the contradiction between what are antagonistic class positions. As many Marxists have pointed out, whereas rural workers benefit from higher wages, central planning and collective ownership of the means of production, peasants are invariably opposed to these policy objectives. This is because smallholders not only uphold the principle of private property, which they insist on cultivating without state direction or regulation (= ‘interference’), but the better-off amongst them are also frequently employers of labour-power.

20 See Beverley 2004: 264ff.], who invokes Trotsky in support of a general form of anti-modernism. This, however, is to misunderstand Trotsky, whose concept ‘combined and uneven development’ was an endorsement not of an anti-modern/a-historical position – as Beverley imagines – but much rather of the link between modernity/history on the one hand, and socialism on the other.

21 That I enjoy a variety of cultural forms does not mean that I regard this either as a defining aspect of my identity or as a substitute for discourse/agency about the political economy of class. For this reason I do not expect any concept of self-empowerment as applied to me – both by me personally and by others – to be restricted to my enjoyment of these varied cultural forms, anymore than I imagine does Beverley where the equivalent components of his identity are concerned. Since this is true of us both, why then is it not also true of those we study? (If, however, access to specific cultural forms – for example, art – is blocked by private ownership, or one cannot afford to enjoy particular kinds of culture – whatever these might be – then this is no longer a question simply of culture but rather one of class.)

22 See Beverley 2004: 268]. In my fieldwork area of La Convención, in the eastern lowlands of Peru, those who led the anti-landlord movement during the early 1960s were capitalist peasants who, as tenants engaged in accumulation, had most to lose economically from dispossession. Similarly, those who emphasized the irreducibility of peasant culture, and who used this undifferentiated identity (‘we are all peasants, we all work the land’, etc.) to distinguish producers from local bureaucrats, were themselves some of the richest peasants in the agrarian cooperative. Accordingly, failure to differentiate the peasantry in terms of class cannot but lead to a corresponding misrecognition of agrarian struggle. Hence exponents of the subaltern studies project overlook the fact that the political objective of many peasant movements led by small agrarian capitalists has been the defence of private property, and not – as Marxist theory argues – the collective ownership of means of production. For this reason, Marxists other than Baüer have tended to regard such mobilizations as in the main conservative, in that better-off peasants seek neither to overturn private property relations per se nor to achieve systemic transcendence.

23 These same antithetical processes – the trend to global economic sameness eliciting agency emphasizing national/regional/local cultural ‘otherness’– generated by the accumulation process were delineated nearly a century ago by Lenin 1964: 27]: ‘Developing capitalism knows two historical tendencies in the national question. The first is the awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against all national oppression, and the creation of nation states. The second is the development and growing frequency of international intercourse in every form, the break-down of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, of economic life in general.’ He went on to criticize the kind of micro-level indigenous nationalism advocated currently by postmodern subalternists.

24 Part of the problem is that Beverley 2004: 266] regards peasants as forming a class, an agrarian populist view long opposed by Marxism. Elsewhere he deploys the terms ‘popular strata’ and ‘popular sectors’, also conceptual emplacements of populism [Beverley and Sanders, 1997: 234, 235, 251, 256].

25 See Beverley 2004: 272ff.]. Pace Beverley, in Austria a consequence of Baüer's Popular Front reformist politics during the late 1920s and early 1930s was not to strengthen but to demobilize working class opposition to fascism, and thus in effect to make easier the taking of power by the far right [Kitchen, 1987.

26 See Lenin 1964: 35, original emphasis] and also Trotsky 1934: 908ff.]. Earlier, Marx warned that a working class divided along national and/or ethnic lines undermined the solidarity necessary for revolutionary agency. In the late 1860s and early 1870s he [Marx, 1973: 166–71] argued that in Britain ‘antagonism [between English and Irish industrial workers] is artificially sustained and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes’. Much the same point was made subsequently by Luxemburg 1976 with regard to peasants and agricultural workers in eastern Europe, and by Shachtman 2003 in the case of small farmers, tenants, and agricultural workers in the southern US.

27 At times it is unclear whether or not Beverley understands the centrality to the subaltern studies project of nationalism, albeit a ‘from below’ variety of this discourse. When discussing the influence on Latin American subalternism of its South Asian counterpart, it was to ‘the critique of the nation and nationalism’ that significance was attached [Beverley and Sanders, 1997: 237]. Like the original subaltern studies, therefore, Beverley seems unaware of the fact that he is simply replacing one form of nationalist politics (a ‘from above’ bourgeois version) with another (a ‘from below’ indigenous version).

28 In an attempt to imbue subaltern resistance linked to nationhood with a progressive veneer, Beverley 2004: 265] identifies this with the contemporary struggles conducted by the ‘multitude’ of Hardt and Negri 2000. The gap between a proletariat (= that which the subaltern will become) and ‘multitude’ (= that which the subaltern is) corresponds in his opinion to ‘a difference marked precisely by … “identity”’. This is how Beverley arrives at the view that national difference/identity is currently the main capitalist contradiction. What he has done, therefore, is to translate Negri's autonomist ‘refusal of work’ into ‘a wish to remain a peasant’, an argument that can be made only because Beverley has declared the process of depeasantization an ‘historicism’, and thus politically and epistemologically unacceptable. Consequently, for Beverley ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ are now reborn as a legitimate politics of a-historical stasis, of wishing-to-remain-peasants.

29 At roughly the same conjuncture, Israel Zangwill, an avowed non-marxist, arrived at a similar definition of national identity. According to him [Zangwill, 1917: 44] nationality ‘in its inner or concave aspect, being a form of feeling, can be explained only by psychology. It is – or should be – a section of “the psychology of crowds”[and] springs from the operation of what I propose to call the law of contiguous co-operation’. For both Zangwill and Baüer, therefore, nationalism is a non-transcendent identity that possesses mainly a non-material referent. It is for them simply the accumulated and ever-present product largely of consciousness (history, psychology), an eternal and thus continuous form of being. This suggests two things. First, that the more a definition of identity is structured by non-material aspects (such as language, ethnicity, culture), the more the resulting element of ‘community’ is likely to be one of nationalism. Conversely, the more such a ‘community’ is defined in specifically economic terms, the less likely is it that the resulting identity will be one confined within the boundaries of nationhood. And second, that there is nothing particularly Marxist about the definition of nationalism used by Baüer.

30 That the concepts ‘nation’ and ‘nationhood’ are essentialized by Baüer 1978a: 109] is evident from his observation that ‘for me, history no longer reflects the struggles of nations: instead the nation itself appears as the reflection of historical struggles’. Although he starts out with a premiss that is uncontentious –‘The development of the nation reflects the history of the mode of production and of property’– Baüer 1978a: 108] proceeds on the basis of this to elaborate a theory about nationalism that is problematic. Hence the view that: ‘Just as private ownership of the means of production and individual production develops out of the system of primitive communism, and from this, again, there develops co-operative production on the basis of social ownership, so the unitary nation divides into members of the nation and those who are excluded and become fragmented into small local circles; but with the development of social production these circles are again drawn together and will eventually be absorbed into the unitary socialist nation of the future’.

31 According to Baüer 1978a: 109], ‘the nation of the era of private property and individual production, which is divided into members and non-members, and into numerous circumscribed local groups, is the product of the disintegration of the communist nation of the past and the material for the socialist nation of the future’.

32 In the context of primitive communism and nomadism, ‘nation’ signified a community based on descent. The sedentarization of agriculture, however, marked a disintegration of that old nationhood, as smallholding peasants became regional/local in terms of culture, while ruling classes maintained a culture that was distinct to them. As capitalism developed, peasants and workers were still excluded, and according to Baüer 1978a: 108] it was only ‘when society divests social production of its capitalist integument’, under socialism, in other words, that ‘the unitary nation as a community of education, work and culture emerges again’. His assumption [Baüer, 1978b: 110] is that ‘only socialism will give the whole people a share in the national culture’.

33 This equation of pre-colonial Andean peasant economy not just with Inca socialism but also with an innate and eternal national identity is a staple of indigenista discourse. During the early 1950s, this was an argument made in Bolivia by Fausto Reinaga 1953, one of the major theoretical influences on current indigenous/subaltern mobilization. Among the sources he himself acknowledged endorsingly [Reinaga, 1953: 19] was Mariátegui. Even those on the political right in 1930s Spain – such as de Maeztu 1937: 203]– evinced a concern for the wellbeing of the indigenous Latin American ‘other’. Hence the justification of Spanish colonial rule [de Maeztu, 1941: 82] as benign, in terms of it having both respected the beliefs and protected the material interests of the indigenous rural population in the Indies (‘Y es verdad que los abusos fueron muchos y grandes; pero ninguna legislación colonial extranjera es comparable a nuestras leyes de Indias. Por ellas se prohibió la esclavitud, se proclamó la libertad de los indios, se les prohibió hacerse la guerra, se les brindó la amistad de los españoles, se reglamentó el régimen de Encomienda para castigar los abusos de los encomenderos, se estatuyó la instrucción y adoctrinamiento de los indios como principal fin e intento de los Reyes de España, se prescribió que las conversiones se hiciesen voluntariamente y se transformó la conquista de América en difusión del espíritu cristiano’.).

34 For the details of this view, and why the ‘socialism’ of Mariátegui was no different from the populist multi-class alliance advocated at that same conjuncture by Haya de la Torre, see Brass 2000: 27ff.]. The way in which the attempt by Baüer to revise the meaning of socialism, in the process converting it into a discourse about ethics and subjectivity – as did the ‘cultural turn’ of postmodernism subsequently – was accurately pinpointed during that era (1919–22) by Georg Lukács. In the words of the latter [Lukács, 1971: 38]: ‘Economic fatalism and the reformation of socialism through ethics are intimately connected. It is no accident that they reappear in similar form in [Eduard] Bernstein, Tugan-Baranovsky and Otto Baüer. This is not merely the result of the need to seek and find a subjective substitute for the objective path to revolution that they themselves have blocked … The “ethical” reformation of socialism is the subjective side of the missing category of totality which alone can provide an overall view’.

35 The same kind of indigenismo discourse is encountered now in Mexico, where in Chiapas peasant smallholders supporting the Zapatistas are reasserting what they claim is an ‘authentic’ cultural otherness at the rural grassroots, a selfhood threatened by global capitalism [Brass, 2005.

36 See Baüer [c. 1919: 78–88] and also Pollock 1984: 163ff.]. According to the latter source, in his 1925 Austrian Social Democratic agrarian programme Baüer ‘takes over the doctrine of the “eternal peasant,” previously rejected bluntly by [Marxist] theory’. Of this Pollock 1984: 168] asks the following two pertinent questions: ‘How can one possibly incorporate an explicitly anti-collectivist stratum of the population, which is attached to private property, into a classless society? Is not [the] conception of the small peasantry as an important stratum of the classless socialist society itself a contradiction?’

37 Because the ‘socialist’ programme of Baüer was based only on the taxation of existing wealth, and not on the confiscation of property belonging to industrialists and landowners, it was dismissed by Lenin 1965: 361] in the following terms: ‘he [Baüer] grew frightened and began to pour the oil of reformist phrase-mongering on the troubled waters of the revolution’ (original emphasis). For the same kind of criticisms levelled at Austrian social democrats, see Trotsky 1934: 910ff.]. Significantly, the unwillingness of Baüer to confront the economic power of capital was condemned not just by the Bolsheviks but also by other Austro-Marxists. Thus, for example, even Fischer 1974: 92, 168–9] questioned the willingness of Baüer to compromise with representatives of the political right, the ultra-reactionary Heimwehr.

38 According to Baüer, therefore, ‘the peasant was there before feudal society. He lived through feudal society as well. And in the framework of socialist society too, peasants will live on their own patch of land as a free proprietor’ (cited in Pollock 1984: 165]). It was precisely for this reason that he approved of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, described by him as ‘a capitulation to capitalism’, an endorsement that was condemned by Trotsky 1953: 250]. By contrast, Baüer's support for peasant economy was commended by populist writers such as Mitrany 1951: 156–7], according to whom it ‘was the most realistic and constructive approach to the peasant problem made by an Socialist in that period’, and for whom the views of Baüer ‘almost echoed [those of] the Peasant writers [= populists]’.

39 The extent to which the peasantry not just of Austria and Hungary but also in other national contexts throughout Europe was differentiated socio-economically at this conjuncture emerges with clarity from a number of sources, not least the findings of the United States Senate Commission 1913 appointed by President Wilson, the object of which was to provide potential investors with an overview of rural life in European countries.

40 Nowhere is this view made more explicit than in the reasons advanced for the recuperation of peasant cultural ‘otherness’ in the Austro-Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century [Haberlandt, 1911: 30]: ‘For a long time peasant art was everywhere ignored. With certain honourable exceptions the eighteenth century looked down with scorn and disdain upon the peasant and his affairs, and so, too, in the nineteenth century with the growing pride of the urban proletariat the peasant was made to look small and ridiculous. Today, however, he and his work are taken seriously, alike from a scientific and from an artistic point of view … From a scientific point of view, let us repeat, because here our ancient civilization may be studied from its still extant survivals, and from an artistic point of view because here one may win back truths and ideas which amid the complex developments of a higher artistic practice have to a great extent been lost sight of.’

41 According to Kriesch-Körösföi 1911: 36, 46], therefore, ‘every one of us who travels through the country with open eyes feels convinced that there is a Hungarian national style, however much it may be furrowed and intersected by influences derived from other sources … this elemental living spirit we discern everywhere in the peasant art of Hungary at the present day … [it is impossible to overestimate the importance of] the great harmony, the vital congruity, everywhere seen to exist between the land – that is, Nature – and the peasant art which has sprung from it – and this indeed is the great mystery of all art. It is not merely that peasant art has made use, first of all, of those natural products which the land itself has furnished and thereby elaborated a distinctive local style – that is natural enough. No, it is the character, the soul, as it were, of the landscape itself that has wrought the most potent influence. And it is just this never-ceasing, ever-potent interaction that constitutes the vital essence of art.’

42 Hence the observation [Kriesch-Körösföi, 1911: 31] not only that ‘the mountains of Transylvania keep watch over many a craft in which the genuine artistic impulse of a healthy, simple people can be seen at work, and which has nothing in common with the wholesale production of the modern factory system’, but also [Levetus, 1911: 49] that ‘in Saxon-Transylvania, we feel that, although the towns are striving for modernism, still the peasants are holding fast to the old order of things’.

43 With unintended irony, Baüer 1978b: 110–11] celebrates the meeting between the peasantry and nationalism in the following manner: ‘The peasant masses are completely bound by tradition; the household possessions of their ancestors are dear to them, while everything new is hateful. Their love for the values of the past also has political consequences; it is the root of their attachment to the church, their local patriotism, their dynastic loyalty. We have seen the significance of this fact in our investigation of the forces which assure Austria's stability; the peasants who cannot free themselves from the chains of centuries-old tradition are one of the supports of this state. If on the one hand the socialist mode of production integrates the masses for the first time into the national cultural community and thereby strengthens their national consciousness, so on the other hand it destroys their attachment to the ideologies of past centuries which is an obstacle to the full realization of the nationality principle.’ Whilst accurate as a description of a process, his concluding observation –‘It not only increases the driving force of the nationality principle, but also clears away the obstacles from its course’– is profoundly wrong in terms of its political direction.

44 If nothing else, the ominous juxtaposition in Baüer's analysis of the words ‘national’ and ‘socialism’ ought to have alerted Beverley to the presence of a political difficulty. An identical conflation, with similar political consequences, was made by Sombart 1937.

45 For the ‘new wind’ blowing through the study of the South Asian rural grassroots, see in particular the contributions by Vidyarthi and Malik to the collection edited by David 1977. Initial and uncritical admirers of populist/nationalist discourse about South Asian ‘otherness’ included exponents of the self-styled ‘impasse’ framework, such as Corbridge and Harriss (on which see Brass 1995).

46 Hence the approval by Beverley 2004: 267] of the fact that in the early 1970s the Guatemalan abandoned class and replaced this with ethnicity as a mobilizing discourse. The result, he then notes, was that ‘it was able to mobilize indigenous groups on a mass basis’. This is precisely the problem: wherever/whenever the left has substituted the identity politics of cultural ‘otherness’ for those of class and socialism, it has made headway, but at the expense of a socialist programme/project.

47 An example of a discourse shared by those on the European and Latin American political right is Ramiro de Maeztu 1919; 1941, for whom the loss by Spain in 1898 of its empire in Latin America generated a retreat into anti-rationalism and nationalism. He blamed the materialism and internationalism of socialists and communists for undermining Spanish national spirit, and thus indirectly for the loss of the Spanish American empire. A political reactionary who was executed by Spanish Republicans at the start of the Civil War, de Maeztu argued for a cultural rebirth of Spain based on the reaffirmation of Roman Catholicism, authority and tradition. Insisting that no Spaniard had contributed to liberal or socialist theory, de Maeztu 1937: 202] claimed that this was ‘because, in other countries, Liberalism and Revolution have arisen either as a remedy for mistakes or as punishment for sins. In Spain these were not necessary. What we needed to do was to unfold, adapt and apply the moral principles of our theologians to the requirements of the time. The root of the revolution in Spain – back in the beginnings of the eighteenth century – is to be found only in our admiration for foreign countries. It did not germinate in our being, but in our non-being. And that, without wishing to offend anyone, we can call the antithesis of our country; which has no being except in our country, as the Anti-Christ has its being in Christ’. His ideas about the eternal and innate character of national identity –hispanidad– were influenced by Hulme 1936 and in turn influenced those on the political right in Latin America. As outlined in Hernández 1999: 172, 194, 249, 490ff.], de Maeztu's project of hispanidad was an important ideological component of the Sinarquista movement, an agrarian fascist mobilization led by dispossessed landlords and supported by smallholding peasants which emerged in rural Mexico during the mid-1930s. Rejecting modernity, lamenting the process of cultural erosion, espousing tradition, and advocating a return to Roman Catholicism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Sinarquista movement was vehemently nationalistic and anti-socialist. Central to its politics was the ideal of peasant economy; that is, an individual family farm owned by a peasant proprietor and worked by his family members [Hernández, 1999: 415, 488]. Hence the slogans ‘To the communist cry of “All proletarians”, we say “All owners”’, and ‘Long live reaction! We are reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries’[Hernández, 1999: 256, 397].

48 I myself encountered this kind of enforced ritual cultural display, a demonstration of ‘otherness’ carried out by ‘those below’ at the behest of an employer, in Peru during the mid-1970s. It took the form of a rich peasant on an agrarian cooperative insisting that his workers – seasonal migrants from a neighbouring province – demonstrate their local dances for my benefit. Much the same happened in India a decade later, when one large landowner in Punjab interrupted the rest period of tribal workers he employed in harvesting and instructed them to perform a dance for the visiting researcher. Despite the fact that they were clearly exhausted, the workers nevertheless complied with his instruction.

49 In the case of North America, for example, this kind of episode is well described by James Agee and Walker Evans 1988: 24ff.] in their account of 1930s Alabama. They were taken by a local landowner to visit houses occupied by his black tenants, and there compelled to witness an enforced display by the latter of their songs. ‘We had caused an interruption that filled me with regret’, Agee and Evans 1988: 27–8] confess, as the ‘landlord objected that there was too much howling and too much religion … and how about something with some life to it … [the tenants] knew what he meant, but it was very hard for them to give it just now. They stiffened in their bodies and hesitated, and looked at each other with eyes ruffled with worry; then the bass [singer] nodded, as abruptly as a blow, and with blank faces they struck into a fast, sassy, pelvic tune whose words were loaded almost beyond translation with comic sexual metaphor; a refrain song that ran like a rapid wheel, with couplets to be invented, progressing the story; they sang it through four of the probably three dozen turns they knew, then bit it off sharp and sharply, and for the first time, relaxed out of line, as if they knew they had earned the right, with it, to leave. Meanwhile, and during all this singing, I had been sick in the knowledge that they felt they were here at our demand, mine and Walker's, and that I could communicate nothing otherwise.’ It is perhaps this very episode that Mel Brooks had in mind when directing what amounts to a brilliant parody of it in the film Blazing Saddles (1974). An early scene in the latter [Yacowar, 1982: 130–31] involves an overseer instructing black workers on the railroad gang to sing a ‘good ole nigger worksong’, to which they reply out of character by singing a Cole Porter song. Furious, the overseer shouts ‘Hold it! Hold it! What the hell is that shit’, demands that they sing instead ‘De Camptown Races’, and demonstrates to them how they should do this in the idiom of black-and-white minstrels. The black workers look on, bemused at this attempt to impose on them a cultural stereotype.

50 Hence the observation by Wyndham Lewis 1927: 52], a fellow traveller of the political right, about the failure to recognize the long political lineage of discourses proclaimed to be ‘new’: ‘But there is nothing so “new” as so startling as the Past, for most people. All the supreme novelties come from the most distant epochs; the more remote the more novel, of course … So what we generally name “the new” is the very old, or the fairly old. It is as well to point this out, and even to stress it, since it is an impressive fact not sufficiently recognized. But where the “new” is dug up, pieced together, and given a new lease of life, it is customary to announce it as an absolutely novel creation. That is the rule to-day. And it is this bad rule or habit that it seems to me it would be a good thing if we could break. Let us call a spade a spade; let us call what the spade digs up old, very old; not new, very new.’

51 As a number of sources have pointed out [Harrison, 1966; Hamilton, 1971; Carey, 1992, throughout Europe during the early twentieth century the political views held by most prominent (= ‘public’) bourgeois intellectuals generally, and in particular writers, were in many important respects no different from those of fascism. To regard the latter as in some sense a wholly anomalous ideological formation where the reproduction of bourgeois literary discourse is concerned is thus incorrect.

52 That such a discourse is claimed by the political right as its own is evident from, for example, the following observation [Hitler, 1977: 349]: ‘Not until the international world view – politically led by organized Marxism – is confronted by a folkish world view, organized and led with equal unity, will success, supposing the fighting energy to be equal on both sides, fall to the side of eternal truth [= the political right]’. When deployed by the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in Lower Saxony during the 1920s [Noakes, 1971: 105–27], this völkish discourse generated increasing electoral support for the ultra-right from peasant farmers caught up in the capitalist crisis (declining prices for agricultural commodities, increasing imports and land repossessions) of that decade. Arguing for the protection of peasant economy and local culture from ‘foreigners’, urban capitalist development, and commercialization/industrialization, the success of the mobilizing discourse employed by social movements like the Landbund stemmed ‘from the growing belief that the [political] front was no longer Junker versus small farmer, but agriculture and rural society as a whole versus industry and the urban interest’. This success on the part of the Landbund‘in projecting itself as the representative of all types of farming and all sizes of holding’, notes the same source [Noakes, 1971: 116–17], ‘may have been an important aspect of and influence on the move to the extreme Right by the agricultural population in Lower Saxony after the [1914–18] war’. Throughout that decade the NSDAP made this discourse its own, and as a result made continuing electoral gains among smallholding peasants, which ‘suggested the vulnerability of some of the rural population to völkish propaganda at the time of crisis’. The targets were ‘foreigners’ (= ‘Jews’), who were identified as responsible both for the economic plight of the local peasantry and – through this – for the ‘collapse of a flourishing Kulturvolk’. By the time of the 1930 election, the NSDAP programme incorporated many classic elements of an agrarian populist mobilizing discourse: anti-semitism, volksgemeinschaft, and a call for the return to old cultural values and a society no longer disrupted by modernization [Noakes, 1971: 125]. The conclusion is salutary [Noakes, 1971: 123–4]: ‘As the disillusionment of the rural population with their traditional political representatives increased, and their economic and social position became more and more precarious, the radical, largely irrational appeal of the NSDAP became increasingly attractive’.

53 That appeals to authentic and ancient cultural tradition emanate from the political right is a matter of record. Just as postmodernists claim that their view of the rural grassroots in Latin America and/or South Asia is based on a more authentic and ancient identity, so during the 1920s and 1930s Italian fascists (and their non-Italian supporters/admirers) evoked Ancient Rome and Catholicism as their cultural model. Hence the following view advanced at that time by one fellow traveller [Barnes, 1928: 62–3] of the political right: ‘[Italian] fascism is no improvisation. It has immediate historical antecedents in three movements: the revival of Catholic life, Syndicalism and Corradini's Nationalism … it has gathered these three movements together and harmonised them … [Fascism] stands at the crossroads looking backward to the two Romes, Imperial and Catholic, that made her civilization.’ Writing at that same conjuncture, Wyndham Lewis 1927: 51–2, original emphases], another right-winger, made roughly the same point: ‘The Fascist Revolution … is an imitation of antiquity. The fasces are the axes of the lictors; the Roman salute is revived; and the Roman Empire is to be resuscitated, Mussolini continually announces … All the most influential revolutions of sentiment or of ideologic formula to-day, in the world of science, sociology, psychology, are directed to some sort of return to the Past. The cult of the savage (and indirectly that of the Child) is a pointing backward to our human origins, either as individuals (when it takes the form of the child-cult) or as a race (when it takes the form of “the primitive’).”

54 Historically, and currently, the political right has presented itself to the greatest ideological effect as the defender of indigenous plebeian interests against what it argued was the destructive impact of foreign capital. The challenge to liberalism from those on the political right is usually thought to originate in their social authoritarianism. Hence the connection between the latter and the objections of conservatives to a variety of social emancipations (gender, ethnic, sexual, etc.). However, this is only part of the reason. Far stronger than their opposition to social liberalism, with its emphasis on individual liberty/choice, is the objection by those on the political right to the systemic effects of economic liberalism. In short, the main objection is to the deleterious effect of laissez faire economic policies on what the political right has regarded as otherwise stable national or rural communities and their socio-economic relationships – between master and servant, landlord and tenant, rich and poor. Economically undermining the ‘natural’ social order, at the apex of which they were positioned, was what those on the right found least forgivable in free market capitalism.

55 In the words of Hitler (cited in Mitrany 1951: 252–3, note 3]) uttered during 1933: ‘We wish to build up this people, first of all with the German peasant as its foundation. He is the central pillar on which all political life must rest. Since I fight for the future of Germany I must fight for the German soil and the German peasant … he has been through the millennia the eternal source of our strength, and he must continue to be supported.’ These words were echoed in Italy at that conjuncture by Mussolini, who stated that [Barnes, 1937: 26]‘the hope and future of civilization lay with those countries whose actions and reactions sprang from a deeply-rooted attachment to the soil’.

56 It is perhaps significant that the most negative interpretation of popular culture, and one that highlights its disempowering rôle, was formulated by those [Horkheimer and Adorno, 1973 who saw the way in which it was deployed ideologically in 1930s Germany by the mass media on behalf of National Socialist political objectives.

57 In the early section of Mein Kampf Hitler 1977: 23ff.] describes at length the disillusioning journey at the beginning of the twentieth century of the Austrian peasant from the countryside to the city, and the process of alienation it entails. It was this which struck a chord with recent migrants from the countryside, not least since he drew a sympathetic portrait of their wretched and impoverished existence once they were part of the urban workforce. Hence his condemnation of their plight, one he claims to know about and to have shared [Hitler, 1977: 25]: ‘The more I witnessed it, the greater grew my revulsion for the big city [= Vienna] which first avidly sucked in men and then cruelly crushed them. When they arrived, they belonged to their people [= rural Germans]; after remaining for a few years, they were lost to it. I, too, had been tossed around by life in the metropolis.' In contrast to Marxists, however, who in their pamphlets not only outlined the socio-economic plight of migrants in a similarly sympathetic fashion but blamed it on capitalism, Hitler made a different series of connections. These erstwhile culturally ‘authentic’ migrants who were first and foremost Germans, he argued, had lost their national pride in the course of being absorbed into the urban workforce, where they were now exploited by two categories of ethnic ‘other’. When these workers asserted their ‘German-ness’ in order to protest at their degrading economic circumstances, he went on, they were laughed at by the urban rich and misled by Marxists, because – unlike the former, who were ‘authentic Germans’– those in each of the latter categories were ethnic ‘others’ (= ‘Jews’). Instead of workers exploited by capitalists, therefore, migrants were recast in this classically populist discourse as Germans exploited by non-German ‘foreigners’.

58 Hence the view advanced by the pro-Fascist/pro-Nazi author Francis Yeats-Brown 1934: 15]: ‘Fascism thinks first of the land, and tries to shield the peasant from being overshadowed by the urban population, whereas communism would make all the world a factory. Fascism has grown out of its native earth. Communism was excogitated in libraries.’

59 This was the argument put forward by Adolf Hitler at the time of the 1923 putsch (cited in Ringer 1969: 174]): ‘Salvation must come from below! From above we can expect nothing. The people must redeem themselves, when the others fail.’ For accounts of the way in which Italian nationalism was reinvented during the early years of the twentieth century as an ideology with a specifically plebeian component, and how this transformation in turn licensed the emergence of fascism, see DeGrand 1978 and Roberts 1979. Central to this political shift was the conceptual recasting in 1910 by Corradini of the term ‘proletarian’, the meaning of which he decoupled from class and attached to the nation. Italy was henceforth a ‘proletarian nation’, a poor nation that stood in the same relation to better-off ones as workers did to employers. In this discourse it was Italy (not its workforce) that was exploited by other, better-off nations (not capitalists as a class), and with which as a result it would of necessity have to struggle. The importance of this transformation is outlined by Saladino 1965: 237] thus: ‘Corradini reasoned that Italy was materially and morally a have-not or “proletarian nation,” and that the role of Nationalists was to do for all of Italy what the Socialists had done for the proletariat. He asserted that what he preached was a “national socialism” in contrast to proletarian socialism –“our teacher and our adversary”– that told the workers that their solidarity should be not with the Italian nation but with the workers of the world. He explained: “It is necessary to nail into the brain of the workers the fact that it is to their greater interest to be in solidarity with their employers and above all with their nation, and to the devil with solidarity with their comrades in Paraguay and Cochin-China.” Corradini thus expressed clearly and openly his developing concept of a “national egoism” that transcended the egoism of a class and would alter the internal struggle of classes into an international struggle between proletarian and affluent nations’ (original emphases). Quite how the ‘proletarian nation’ at the centre of this discourse differs from the concept ‘subaltern’ that now dominates much writing about ‘peasant nations’ in the so-called Third World, is difficult to see.

60 Hence the observation by Schneider 1928: 153] that ‘for the socialist formula of “international solidarity and class struggle” fascism substitutes “inter-class solidarity and national struggle”’.

61 The folly of going down this path is evident from a previous epoch, when the same tactic was recommended. In the 1930s, therefore, some of those who regarded themselves as socialists – Henri de Man, Serge Tchakhotine and Ernst Bloch – advocated just such a process of ‘borrowing’ ideas from the far right in order to persuade its supporters ‘to switch from Nazism to the Left’[Ayçoberry, 1981: 77–8, 82]. Having noted – correctly – that in times of capitalist crisis elements of the rural petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes longed for a return to a previous ‘safer’ historical period, a desire manipulated by the political right the ideology of which deployed all the symbols and myths of past glory (‘peasants lived virtually as they had in the past, and let themselves be enticed by the anachronistic vocabulary of reaction’), Bloch argued that this discourse was progressive and should be adopted by the left. The disastrous political conclusion that Bloch drew from the existence of what he termed historical asynchronism is set out clearly in Ayçoberry 1981: 82–3]: ‘The objective, current, synchronous (gleichzeitig) contradictions that set the proletariat against capitalism intersected with the objective, asynchronous (ungleichzeitig) contradiction between those who longed for the past and the two truly contemporary classes. The latter contradiction was purposely exploited by capital, which availed itself of archaic anti-capitalism in order to combat the real anti-capitalism of the revolutionary proletariat. The conclusion was that the proletariat should keep its hegemonic position by means of a triple alliance with the peasants and the impoverished middle class, but this could only be done by “incorporating [their] anachronistic contradictions into its own tendency.” The task was not hopeless, Bloch affirmed in the Spring of 1932: the disillusioned SA [Sturm Abteilung or Brownshirts] and the youngest petits bourgeois were ripe for a communism that would assume responsibility for their affective needs “in such a way as to rationalize the irrational currents and behaviours.” This was the appeal, heard so often since Klara Zetkin, for a Marxism freed from its economistic rigidity.’ In other words, Bloch suggested that the left should abandon class struggle and instead take a leaf out of the book of fascism, welcoming the petty bourgeois by adopting its mobilizing discourse (= a backwards-looking national myth and nostalgia). Needless to say, neither the Brownshirts nor peasants abandoned the Nazis for the communists, for the very good reason that fascism was perceived by them as representing their economic interests. That is, supportive of private property generally, against both international capital and labour, each of which was ethnicized as the non-national ‘other’ (= ‘cosmopolitan Jewry’) threatening a specifically German bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie.

62 It should be emphasized most strongly that, rather obviously, no exponent of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism mentioned here – not just Beverley but also others belonging to the new left – espouses such political discourses.

63 See Deutscher 1963: 128ff.] for these critiques, and how accurately Trotsky 1975: 33–4, 53–77] was to warn that the beneficiaries of any attempt by those on the left to abandon socialist arguments in favour of the ideology/discourse/symbols of the far right would be the latter and not the former. Two passages, which have particular relevance to discourse currently deployed by exponents of the ‘new’ postmodern populism, merit quoting in full. The first one is as follows [Deutscher, 1963: 152, emphasis added]: ‘A fatal and deeply demoralizing ambiguity now appeared in communist policy, which was to persist until Hitler's seizure of power and even thereafter. Not infrequently the same slogans appeared on communist and Nazi banners. The Nazis, seeking to win socially discontented and radical elements, promised that their “People's Revolution” would settle accounts with finance capital. The Communist party, wary of calling for a proletarian socialist revolution, spoke, instead, of the “People's Revolution” which would achieve Germany's “social and national liberation” and break the shackles of Versailles. The spirit of nationalism insinuated itself more and more strongly into its propaganda just at a time when nothing was more urgent in Germany than the need to stem the mounting tide of racial and chauvinist fanaticism.’ And second [Deutscher, 1963: 153], although Trotsky ‘did not doubt the good intentions of the Communist party [he argued that]“unfortunately, the Stalinist bureaucracy is trying … to act against fascism by using the weapons of the latter. It borrows colours from the political palette of Nazism and tries to outdo Nazism at an auction of patriotism. These are not methods of a principled class struggle, but tricks of a petty market competition … a betrayal of Marxism”. Those who talked about the “People's Revolution” and about freeing Germany from the chains of Versailles had forgotten Karl Leibknecht's maxim that for the working class “the main enemy stands in their own country”. The insinuation of nationalism into communist thinking had begun with Stalin's “socialism in one country” and it now produced Thaelmann's “national communism”.’

64 See ‘Vote Nick Griffin? Flying the Flag’, The Observer Magazine (London), 1 September 2002. A similar case of harking back to ancient tradition is the ultra-reactionary Conservative Member of Parliament, Alan Clark 2000: 96, 112], who not only evinced the same kind of nostalgia (‘my roots are here in this glorious piece of English medieval history’) but also regarded the National Front – the forerunner of the BNP – as ‘good’ and ‘brave’, because it ‘still keep[s] alive the tribal essence [of Englishness]’.

65 The explicit espousal by those on the political right of postmodern arguments about the innateness of cultural ‘otherness’ is now finally being recognized. Hence the following observation: ‘In common with other European far-right parties, the [English] BNP presents itself as a party of postmodern nationalism which denies [universality] while celebrating difference. Jean-Marie Le Pen sounded like a good student of the philosophies of Derrida or Lyotard when he said: “I love north Africans but their place is in north Africa.” Griffin, too, has insisted that all he is saying is that different cultures can't live together. A lot of the journalists who have worked on the BNP have revealed that fascism lurks behind cultural relativism, as it does behind a surprising number of the ideas of postmodern philosophy.’ See ‘All mouth, no trousers’, The Observer (London), 6 June 2004. That wealthy landowners in Britain deploy postmodern arguments about the relativism of identity, insisting that to be rich and wealthy is simply another form of ‘otherness’ (as I argued would happen [Brass, 2000: 322]), is evident from the following observation [Clark, 2000: 265] by one such: ‘Why should it be legitimate to “discriminate” against the rich and well-educated, when heavy penalties are attached to do so against the black, the fat, the homosexual, the handicapped, the female, etc., etc.[?]’.

66 Thus, for example, Griffiths 1978– a conservative academic in Britain writing before the rise of Le Pen or Thatcher – contrasted the historical position of the Action Français on the French political right outside the bourgeois democratic system with the parliamentary road followed by British conservatism. He nevertheless accepted that [Griffiths, 1978: 136]‘if their solutions differ, some of their fundamental preoccupations are surprisingly similar’. Whereas in the 1930s those on the European right opposed democracy and espoused the corporate state (= fascism), now conservatives and the right in Europe are confident enough to press their case within democracy (hence their enthusiasm for ‘redemocratization’). This they do in the full knowledge that – unlike the 1930s – those on the left who have been their most doughty opponents historically are either too unpopular or too weak to oppose them, or  –mirabile dictu– now subscribe epistemologically to a discourse about the agrarian myth that is indistinguishable from their own.

67 See, for example, Hall and Whannel 1964. The irony here is that the theory which emerged from this particular necessitarian epistemology was postmodernism, or the very conceptual apparatus which Beverley himself now espouses. If Beverley is seeking to apportion blame for a necessitarian view of history (= ‘historicism’), then it is on the discourse of the populist new left – to which he himself originally adhered (see Beverley and Sanders 1997: 249]) – about the progressive nature of popular culture that his critical gaze should fall. For a detailed and amusing critique of new left politics in Britain, see Widgery 1976.

68 The text in question was edited by Cowling 1978a, and included a contribution by Scruton 1978: 102] challenging the view ‘that there is any one kind of social order that is associated with the existence of high culture, or any one kind of social order that is served by its continuance’. It was precisely this view – privileging a depoliticized culture, which licensed the remythologization of ‘popular culture’– that informed postmodern theory.

69 Thus, for example, one influential British socialist historian [Rustin, 1980: 75]– usually critical of much new left theory – advocated just such an approach right at the outset of the Thatcher era, arguing that ‘the political failures of the past twenty years, with their now very ominous consequences, are one strong argument for sympathetically reconsidering the implicitly populist assumptions and styles of the early new left’.

70 And not just ‘popular culture’, it should be noted. There were additionally misguided attempts on the part of left-wing scholarship to recuperate forms of ‘high culture’ (art, music), and to find in them a political discourse friendly towards not just to a variety of emancipations (gender, sexuality) but also to socialism itself. Thus, for example, Arblaster 1992: 147ff.] draws a distinction between what might be termed ‘early’ and ‘late’ Wagner operas. In the former category is found Das Rheingold, characterized [Arblaster, 1992: 159] as ‘the most politically explicit and, from a radical point of view, perhaps the most exciting of all Wagner's works’, in which the evil power of the gold ring is interpreted as a progressive attack on industrial capitalism. Only the later operas, and especially Parsifal, project the composer's notorious anti-semitism. Such a view, however, overlooks both the element of continuity and the reason for this: the gold ring symbolizes not capital per se but rather finance capital, which in the discourse of the political right is synonymous with the ethnic ‘other’ (= ‘the Jew’). Those in the latter category are blamed for the erosion of an authentic German culture, a sub-text that forms a thematic continuity in his nationalist ideology. In other words, Wagner's anti-capitalism was a critique emanating not from the left but rather from the right. For this reason, any attempt to recuperate Wagnerian discourse by dividing his works into early/progressive and late/reactionary is problematic, since it is based on a misrecognition of the politically consistent ideology spanning both early and late operas. The same kind of difficulty faces those who have attempted to recast Sir Edward Elgar as a politically progressive English composer, and his music as non- (or even an anti-) imperialist in intent; as Richards 2001: 44ff.] shows, the Elgar revival of the 1960s reinterpreted the patriotic sentiment of musical pieces such as Land of Hope and Glory and Caractacus as irony (= not merely ‘not meant’, but subversions of national and/or imperial glorification), statements to the contrary by the composer himself notwithstanding. Most worryingly, this kind of approach – wrongly identifying the presence of a progressive ideology in the discourses of ‘high culture’– also plays directly into the hands of those conservatives who incorrectly equate postmodernism with socialism. Hence the palpably nonsensical attempt by a postmodern art historian to find a non-existent homosexual theme in a Rubens painting enables commentators on the political right [Kramer, 1997: 177ff.] not just (and correctly) to chastise poor scholarship but also – and incorrectly – to identify this as a consequence of espousing leftist views. In other words, the ‘discovery’ of emancipatory discourses/themes that are in reality absent simultaneously discredits socialist political analysis and empowers conservative interpretations.

71 Anticipating the electoral success of Thatcher, Cowling 1978b: 2, 7] issued a warning: ‘If there is class war – and there is, it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill’, adding that ‘unfortunately, it is seldom possible to insulate economic judgements from political ones, or to expect complicated economic truths to be accepted “on their merits”’ (original emphasis). His view [Cowling, 1978b: 11] was that ‘most of what is needed can be secured by rhetoric rather than by force and that the function of the Conservative party in these circumstances is twofold – to press the existing elite and its replacements to think and act in a conservative manner, and to give public expression on their behalf to opinions that will help to create a public sentiment of national solidarity with them’. Contrasting the conservatism of the late 1970s with that of the two previous decades, he concluded [Cowling, 1978c: 194] by labelling the former as populist, and observed that ‘“New Conservatism” is perhaps a misnomer; probably it would be better to see it as “traditional Conservatism” brought up to date’.

72 In the vanguard of the subsequent headlong rush by some of the new left in Britain into the welcoming embrace of capitalism were those [Hall and Jacques, 1989 associated with the revisionist Marxism Today (or, as some more accurately called it, Marxism Toady), whose ‘Marxism’ consisted of abandoning socialism in favour of right-wing Thatcherite populism. A key aspect of this 1980s shift – from opposition to the endorsement of market individualism, privatization, and capitalism itself – was the ludicrous notion that, in order to defeat Thatcherism, it was necessary for those on the left to become more like her politically. This capitulation was embodied in what amounted to a document of political surrender [Hall, 1988: 271ff.], fittingly entitled ‘Learning from Thatcherism’. Although ostensibly the lesson was – unproblematically – about the importance of political commitment, actually – and most problematically – it concerned the desirability of taking over the same political agenda. Hence the tenor of the following recommendations [Hall, 1988: 276, 278, 279]: ‘We [on the left] may have to acknowledge that there is often a rational core to Thatcherism's critique … Contestation, however, is not enough, because by itself it is too negative … To develop a more positive perspective means thematizing [the fiscal crisis of the state] around the “politics of choice” or the question of the market versus the state. The popular theme of “choice” has no “necessary belongingness” to Thatcherism … [it] is as much part of popular radicalism as it is of the populist radical right … The so-called “rediscovery of the market” is not a phenomenon exclusively of the right’, etc., etc. Arguing for ‘the left “appropriation” of the market’, Hall in effect advocates a complete about-turn, ending up on the same political ground as the Adam Smith Institute. Significantly, this view, which manifested itself in the New Labour project of Blair, was based on the mistaken perception of popular culture under neo-liberalism as chosen by ‘those below’, and thus for them a form of empowerment. It comes as no surprise that many of the most enthusiastic contributions to Hall's festschrift [Gilroy, Grossberg and McRobbie, 2000 were written not by Marxists but by ‘new’ postmodern populists (James Clifford, Néstor García Canclini, Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).

73 Nowhere was this more evident than in the way ‘popular culture’ was projected through film. During the 1960s, for example, the ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ of Sergio Leone set out consciously to remythologize this genre by recuperating all those elements that US directors had cast aside. Shot cheaply in south European and north African locations, these commercially successful depictions of the American foundation myth –‘the destruction by the railroad of his utopian dream’ according to Frayling 2005: 34]– resulted in Leone being categorized by Baudrillard as the first postmodern film director. Significantly, Leone wanted to depoliticize the Western, in the process making it into a ‘fairy tale for grown ups’[Frayling, 2005: 38, 77]. This process of ‘infantilization’, a regression involving the rediscovery and celebration of childhood, also informed the subsequent Hollywood films of Spielberg and Lucas, whose comic-book heroes similarly emanate from childhood. One of the film critics to object to this populist trend – without identifying it as such – was Raymond Durgnat. Nearly four decades on, his observations [Durgnat, 1967: 74–5, note 1] still carry force: ‘There were a few ventures into criticism in which philosophical terms were used freely, and sometimes incoherently, in an effort to sound as profound as Bazin was thought to be … There was a notable change in attitude to “pulp” movies … It's hard to believe that people of these critics’ culture and intelligence could really be so impressed by such “innovations” (which aren't), if they weren't forcing themselves to “be jolly”. Yet the whole point of appreciating a good film which happens to be couched in the idiom of a pulp thriller is that you don't lower your normal standards an inch, you're no more indulgent to Bond than you would have been to Liberace or Rin-Tin-Tin. The partial volte face from critical “superiority” to uncritical acquiescence is … an example to the general aesthetic upsets generated by the current confluence of “high culture” and popular art.’

74 For this view see Hall and Whannel 1964: 30ff., 38–9]. Another who subscribed to same view, that the spread/endorsement by the mass media of popular culture necessarily entailed the political radicalization of youth, was the then-Trotskyist Tariq Ali. His argument [Ali, 1972: 221] was that ‘there has been a marked levelling of cultural barriers between working class youth and the student movement, largely through the influence of pop music and such groups as the Beatles (and now more specifically John Lennon), the Rolling Stones, The Who, etc’. This over-optimistic view – equating popular culture unproblematically with a socialist revolutionary impetus – can be read now by those who still remain Trotskyists only with a certain amount of embarrassment. As is clear from materials in the anthology published by Widgery 1976: 360–61], not everyone at that conjuncture was taken in by this highly idealized view about the left-wing rôle of music and popular culture. The enormous wealth and impeccable establishment credentials of many pop musicians from that era (Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Mick Jagger) negate any lingering doubts about the radical nature of their politics.

75 Some non-Marxists spotted this early on. One such was Colin MacInnes, who in the late 1950s not only took a less idealized view of ‘popular culture’ but also saw that its dissemination via capitalism would be politically deradicalizing, not to say potentially reactionary. His views [MacInnes, 1958; 123, 128, 130, 132] about this merit repeating: ‘Once, the jeunesse dorée were a minute minority; now all the young have gold. Earning good wages, and living for a little. … the kids have more “spending money” than any other age-group in the population. … . Indeed, the great social revolution of the past fifteen years may not be the one which redivided wealth among the adults in the Welfare state, but the one that's given teen-agers economic power. [Teen-agers] are not so much hostile to, as blithely indifferent to, the Establishment … it would be equally possible to see, in the teen-age neutralism and indifference to politics, and self-sufficiency, and instinct for enjoyment – in short, in their kind of happy mindlessness – the raw material for crypto-fascism of the worst kind.’ Much the same kind of conclusion was drawn a couple of decades later by Régis Debray, then still a Marxist. Rather than being a challenge to the capitalist social order, he argued [Debray, 1979, the events of May 1968 gave it a new lease of life, and thus paved the way for its reproduction by getting rid of institutional forms that were obstacles to ‘Californian’ capitalist patterns of consumption.

76 An example of this approach was Hobsbawm 1971, notwithstanding the recent absurd claim (for the details of which see Brass 2002b: 367 note 5]) that the arguments made by him at that conjuncture anticipated criticisms now aimed at the ‘new’ postmodern populist theory. He attributed the then blossoming interest in social history to the fact that struggles in colonial/semi-colonial countries fell outside the purview of orthodox historiography. Outlining how social history had emerged in the period 1955–70, and the way it might develop in the future, Hobsbawm identified its object as the ‘history of the movements of the poor’, and its focus as being cultural history with particular reference to the way in which non-economic phenomena ‘determine economic growth’. This is precisely the agenda followed a decade later by the ‘new’ populists, among whom were to be found participants in the subaltern studies project.

77 This teleology structured the way in which ‘people's history’ advocated by the new left slipped imperceptibly into a discourse about popular consent, and consequently also into one about plebeian empowerment. These were epistemological shifts that in turn facilitated a ‘new way of looking’ at reactionary regimes – hitherto beyond the pale – that enjoyed grassroots political support. It is precisely this kind of logic that informed what amounted to an interesting but nevertheless sympathetic re-examination of Italian history during the period from the 1920s to the mid-1940s by Forgacs 1986a. The rejection by the latter of ‘class reductionism’ and the notion of false consciousness, plus the claim that Italian state policy towards culture (cinema, literature) throughout this era was not dirigiste, culminated inevitably in the epistemological deprivileging of capitalist class/state coercion and a corresponding privileging of popular consent, and thus grassroots empowerment. The result was that Italian fascism ceased to be regarded as a disempowering political and economic system, one that was a wholly negative experience for members of the urban and rural working class, notwithstanding both a recognition and a refusal [Forgacs, 1986b: 1] of this outcome (‘“rethinking” does not mean rehabilitation’). Despite the fact that members of the new left – such as Forgacs – were emphatically not seeking to rehabilitate fascist politics, but merely to probe further the nature of plebeian consent/empowerment in such regimes, their approach cannot but result in the conceptual erosion of political distance between fascist and non-facist states. Having abolished or downplayed the significance of class and – more importantly – false consciousness, the meaning of a grassroots nationalist/populist ideology undergoes an inevitable metamorphosis. Rather than being conceptualized as a form of disempowerment – a deflection from class (for-itself) – such an ideology is doubly recast: as the authentic expression of plebeian consent, and thus also as an authentic form of plebeian empowerment. An analogous problem was faced by those conducting similar kinds of research elsewhere. Hence the same relay in statement – the fact that slave culture was not obliterated but flourished on the cotton plantation system in the antebellum south – underwrote the cliometric approach to unfree labour on the part of neo-classical economic historiography [see, e.g., Fogel, 1989.

78 Typical of this kind of view is the observation about plantation workers [Munro, 1993: 32] to the effect that ‘it is surprising perhaps that so much resistance actually occurred [and] even when resistance failed, it was nevertheless admirable in that an attempt had been made to beat the odds’.

79 A critique of ‘people's history’, it should be emphasized, is neither anti-people nor anti-culture. What it is against is the attempt by ‘new’ populists – under the rubric of postmodernism or social history – to depoliticize all plebeian culture and then to categorize it as necessarily emancipating/progressive/empowering. The ease with which the conceptualization of ‘otherness’ generally has been permitted to pass – virtually uninterrogated – into the discourse of development studies over the last two decades merely underlines the scale of depoliticization inflicted on its epistemology by postmodern theory. One has only to look at the way in which Gobineau 1915 sought to locate ethnic difference in a wholly separate evolutionary lineage (= ‘not-at-all-like-us’) to understand where unchallenged forms of ‘otherness’ can eventually lead.

80 On this point, see Carey 1992. An argument could be made to the effect that the real political battle waged by the bourgeoisie has always been to prevent ‘those below’– especially poor peasants and agricultural workers – from ceasing to be ‘other’, by availing themselves of hitherto exclusive bourgeois cultural attributes and resources. Historically this has been one of the achievements of class struggle, a process whereby plebeian elements gained access to the citadels of the bourgeois cultural domain, through state education, subsidized arts, and literacy programmes. It is precisely these kinds of modest gains that have been attacked by neo-liberalism, under the rubric of ‘we can have only what we are prepared to pay for’. What the bourgeoisie fear, therefore, is not the cultural ‘otherness’ of their workers so much as acquisition by the latter (and thus the erosion) of bourgeois cultural distinctiveness. In other words, what ‘those above’ really feel menaced by is the sameness not the difference of ‘those below’. Rather than threatening bourgeois ‘hegemony’, as Beverley maintains, the subalternist demand for the recognition of existing plebeian cultural ‘otherness’ is perfectly consistent with this bourgeois fear, in that it allocates to ‘those below’ a (cultural) space appropriate to their station. Put less charitably, but more realistically, it has as a subtext an old but familiar conservative political objective: namely, that poor peasants and workers should know their place.

81 Evidence from Central American contexts at different conjuctures [La Farge, 1947; Smith, 1977 suggests that, where indigenous peasants have become culturally ‘non-traditional’, they return to ‘traditional’ cultural forms/patterns only when compelled to do so by declining economic conditions, which deprive them of the income necessary to continue being ‘non-traditional’. In these circumstances, cultural ‘otherness’ is not an innate but a contingent identity, and is associated by indigenous peasants themselves with a lowering of their living standards. In other words, they see it not as the culturally empowering transformation claimed by adherents of the subaltern studies framework but rather as an economically disempowering one.

82 This is argued not just in Brass 2002b but also earlier, both in Brass 2000 and in the articles on which the latter was based.

83 When criticisms about his supposed ‘anti-peasant’ bias were levelled at Trotsky by Stalin, they were dismissed by him [Trotsky, 1930: 440–41] in the following unambiguous manner: ‘From what does this accusation of Trotsky's wishing “to rob the peasant” derive – that formula which the reactionary agrarians, the Christian socialists, and the Fascists always direct against socialists and against communists in particular? Whence this bitter baiting of the Marxist idea of permanent revolution, this national bragging which promises to build its own socialism? What sections of the people make demands for such reactionary vulgarity? And lastly, how and why this lowering of the theoretical level, retrogression to political stupidity? Lying in bed, I went over my old articles, and my eyes fell on these lines written in 1909, at the peak of the reactionary regime under Stolypin: “When the curve of historical development rises, public thinking becomes more penetrating, braver and more ingenious. It grasps facts on the wing, and on the wing links them with the thread of generalization … But when the political curve indicates a drop, public thinking succumbs to stupidity. The priceless gift of political generalization vanishes somewhere without leaving even a trace. Stupidity grows in insolence, and, baring its teeth, heaps insulting mockery on every attempt at a serious generalization.” … I say to myself that we are passing through a period of reaction. A political shifting of the classes is going on, as well as a change in class-consciousness.’

84 For the classification of Trotskyism as ‘bad politics’, see Beverley 2004: 267].

85 Noting that Trotsky ‘published in 1924 a most remarkable little study called Literature and Revolution’, the North American literary critic Edmund Wilson 1952: 191–2] praised his analysis, commenting as follows: ‘In a position to observe from his Marxist point of view the effects on national literature of the dispossession of a dominant class, he was able to see the unexpected ways in which the presentments of life of the novelists, the feelings and images of the poets, the standards themselves of the critics, were turning out to be determined by their attitudes toward the social-economic crises'. The sentence that comes next, however, is the most instructive: ‘But he did not believe in a proletarian culture that [under capitalism] would displace the bourgeois one’.

86 Arguments about nationalism and the nationalities question in Soviet Russia, many of them aimed at the interpretation of Stalin, are found in Trotsky 1934: 889–913]. With unintended irony, having criticized Stalin's view of nationalism, Beverley 2004: 271–2] then reinstates this very theory when arguing that ‘the form of left politics today must be that of a Popular Front’. This is not so surprising, given that, on the national question, Trotsky 1934: 912] saw distinct parallels between the views of Stalin and those of Otto Baüer: ‘This vulgar and pedantic separation of national form from social content in the revolutionary process, as though they constituted two independent historic stages – we see here how closely Otto Baüer approaches Stalin! – had an extreme utilitarian destination. Its purpose was to justify the collaboration of [Austrian] social democracy with the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the danger of social revolution.’ The Popular Front was the Stalinist policy of Comintern during the ‘third period’ (1928–34), and involved the subordination of working class politics to bourgeois nationalist objectives. The assumption that no difference existed between Stalinist and Trotskyist views about nationalism [Beverley, 2004: 272] is therefore incorrect. In contrast to Stalin's reformist policy of a yet-to-be-realised capitalist economic transition and thus a nationalist politics (= Popular Front), Trotsky advocated permanent revolution, or an immediate transition to socialism on the basis of an internationalist politics. To the suggestion [Beverley, 2001: 57; 2004: 271] that the Workers' Party of Lula in Brazil offers an appropriate model of contemporary Popular Front politics, one can only recommend that Beverley look at the devastating critique by Petras and Veltmeyer 2003 of Lula's neo-liberal regime.

87 This point was recognized even by someone as hostile to Trotskyism as Keynes 1933: 90], who conceded: ‘Granted his assumptions, much of Trotsky's argument is, I think, unanswerable. Nothing can be sillier than to play at revolution – if that is what he means’ (original emphasis).

88 For the elaboration of this view, see George Monbiot, ‘The flight to India’, The Guardian (London), 21 October 2003, p. 25. Significantly, perhaps, the same kind of argument can now be heard from journalists giving voice to the interests of the capitalist class. When opposing suggestions for raising trade barriers against cheap textile imports, therefore, spokespersons for European capitalists invoke the plight of impoverished peasants in China, arguing that it is they who will suffer most from protectionist measures. See Will Hutton, ‘China's poorest will suffer’, The Observer (London), 28 August 2005, p. 24 (also – and more generally – Brittain 2005: 73]). Such crocodile tears shed by capital on behalf of the rural poor demonstrate the degree to which behind an ostensible ‘concern’ for the Third World rural ‘other’ lurks the desire of employers to justify restructuring using ever cheaper sources/forms of labour-power. This, too, has a long history, as an anarchist [Rocker, 1937: 261] writing seven decades ago reminds us: ‘The love of his own nation has never yet prevented the entrepreneur from using foreign labour if it was cheaper and made more profit for him. Whether his own people are thereby injured does not concern him in the least; the personal profit is the deciding factor in such a case, and so-called national interests are only considered when they are not in conflict with personal ones. When there is such a conflict all patriotic enthusiasm vanishes.’

89 Both the reasons for and the dynamic of what in the 1980s became known as the new international division of labour were to some degree anticipated by Trotsky 1934: 906] in the following words: ‘The backward country does not follow in the tracks of the advanced, keeping the same distance. In an epoch of world-wide economy the backward nations, becoming involved under pressure from the advanced in the general chain of development, skip over a whole series of intermediate stages. Moreover, the absence of firmly established social forms and traditions makes the backward country – at least within certain limits – extremely hospitable to the last word in international technique.’ Although written about Russia, this description could just as well apply to the rise of the Asian ‘Tiger’ economies in the so-called Third World over the last two decades of the twentieth century. As is well documented, the dynamic informing this was restructuring of the capitalist labour process, with the object of shifting production from contexts where workers were unionized and well-paid to one where labour was non-unionized and cheap. This workforce decomposition/recomposition amounted to segmentation, an object achieved by means of decentralization/relocation.

90 There ought to be no mystery about this, as the following analysis makes clear: ‘National economics are not, or at any rate were not until recently, water-tight compartments. The wages of any one country influence wages in any other country, and so do all other conditions of work. … In order to be effective, the competition between labour groups with different standards of living need not take place in one country only. Labour at a low rate of wages is dangerous to well-paid labour not only when the lower paid workers are immigrants. It is just as dangerous when those labourers are set to work abroad, and give their employers an advantage in their competition with industries burdened with a higher wage rate … From this realization the transition is easy to the conclusion: it is in the interest of labour that wages should rise and working conditions improve everywhere. The strongest labour movements, and labour in the countries with the highest standard of living, must help the more backward sections of labour to rise.’ This argument was advanced not by someone writing about the new international division of labour in the 1980s, but rather 40 years earlier, by the socialist Franz Borkenau 1942: 11–12]. His point was that, even then – he was writing during World War II about the struggle between national and socialist politics – capital was engaged in a global search for cheaper forms of labour-power. Unless worker solidarity was international and based on class, he maintained, plebeian agency designed to protect existing living standards when capital eventually found these less costly forms elsewhere would of necessity be nationalist and/or ethnically based.

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Tom Brass

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, UK. Dedicated to the memory of my father, Denis Brass (1913–2006), who – as Music Officer of the British Council – gave the first concert performance in Spain in June 1947 of Piano Concerto No. 1 by Alan Rawsthorne, and translated into English the poetry and short stories of the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga 1950.