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A Leap in the Dark: Italian elections before the hot winter.

The right wing looks set to easily win the coming Italian elections. The Left must regain its lost credibility


24/09/2022

The results of sunday’s elections are already written. The coalition led by the radical right leader Giorgia Meloni is going to obtain a large majority that may even allow for constitutional changes. The traditional centre-left has completed its transformation into an establishment party and was unable to propose a viable alternative. Conversely, the Five Star Movement completed its left turn and is now competing for the left political space. A reactionary turn in civil rights and an economic policy geared towards the protection of the declining Italian petit bourgeoisie is to be expected in the next years. Most worryingly, an authoritarian turn in the management of conflict and protests is a real danger in the upcoming months.

On the 25th of September, Italy is yet again called to an electoral round, this time with the July fall of the Draghi government. The swiftness gave little space for emerging political parties, especially on the left, to organize. Therefore we will see mostly a change in the balance of power between already established political parties.

Italy experienced one year of technocratic government under the leadership of Mario Draghi, former Italian and European central banker, and one of the main advocates of the regressive economic policies implemented in Italy since the 1990s. This government enjoyed vast support from the media, which started celebrating him even before he could take any real measure. For reasons related to power and ownership, Italian media have traditionally been expression of the will of a narrow circle of powerful business families and have managed to carry a remarkable influence in the way the population has made sense of crisis situations. This time, the media managed to frame Draghi as the almighty “saviour of the Motherland”, a figure that is very typical in Italian politics since the beginning of the 1990s, when the country’s political party system got dismantled. Criticizing Draghi was in itself a matter of stigma, and we may go as far as to say that Italians lived, for one year, in a handbook case of “cult of personality”.

In July, Italians discovered that political support for this semi-god was like the house of straw in the “Three Little Pigs” fairy tale. Conte decided that the Five Star Movement (M5S) would take a more critical stance vis-à-vis the government. Draghi decided to resign, although having the numbers to continue governing without the M5S. Draghi policy making style was extremely authoritative, and every dissent was silenced with a “take it or I leave” attitude. Draghi felt either he would govern with all or with nobody. In the speech before the vote of confidence, he vehemently criticized the right-wing coalition partners, without any apparent reason. Eager to capitalize, the right-wing Lega and Forza Italia parties removed their support to the Draghi government. Thus elections in September.

I will describe the general political situation before the elections and what we may expect in the future.

A black wall: the right-wing coalition.

The general prediction is an inevitable victory of the right-wing coalition. Surveys assess the coalition (Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), Lega and Forza Italia) with 43% to 49% of the vote. With the center-left coalition (in all possible configurations) less than 40% at best. The gap between the two coalitions is maybe as big as 19 percentage points. 

These elections signal an impending victory of a coalition led by a right party with roots in the post-Fascist party “Movimento Sociale Italiano” (MSI). Namely  Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), with around 22-24% of estimated votes in surveys. Their leader Giorgia Meloni has worked hard to create an image as a “reliable” moderate politician. But FdI is at the radical right, with many overtly neo-fascist members. For migration and civil rights she espouses rhetoric “against the LGBT lobby”, against more generous citizenship admission criteria, and migration. Economically, the party switches between neo-liberal proposals of a flat rate tax and more “social” proposals reflecting the radical right.  Meloni’s party is compared to Hungarian Fidesz or Polish PiS. But it is unclear if this is true, since those parties were in government, and sometimes took the “social” vocations of the radical right. For instance, Orbán introduced price caps on some goods and compelled international banks to convert the catastrophic mortgage debt of the private sector into Hungarian Florint (instead of international currencies). PiS also introduced social benefits for the poor that previous governments were not able or not willing to provide. It is difficult to predict whether Fratelli d’Italia will be more inclined to a “social right-wing” or a “neo-liberal right wing” agenda.

There are hints that the next government’s economic policy will mostly skew to the advantage of the petit bourgeoisie,  in Italy a numerically substantial electoral group. Why?

First, FdI will be in coalition with the Lega and Forza Italia. Both favour a flat income tax-rate, benefiting mostly the higher-middle class. Such a regressive measure, will hit the public budget harshly. 

Second, a July survey highlighted that, the voting intent for FdI is highest among the self-employed and entrepreneurs. The national average of 20.3% of votes,  increases to 22.5% and 24.8% among the entrepreneurs and self-employed. The FdI also holds strong among the lowest-income voters,  at 21.5%. In general, this cross-class party is skewed towards the petit bourgeoisie. This is relevant, since the Lega, (historically also a party of the petit bourgeoise), saw its consensus among these voters dropping, presumably to the FdI. This suggests FdI is the petit bourgeois party of the coalition, a position consistent a more “social” right.

Lega voter composition is also telling. Its’ national average of 15.3%, the Lega reaches 23.1% among workers in industry, and its consensus decreases with social class, with 19% among voters in the low-income class. This may be partially explained by Lega’s attempt to capitalize on leveraging the anti-migrant sentiment of part of the Italian population. Despite this socio-demographic shift, the Lega still promotes itself as the party of the small-medium sized enterprises, vocally pushing the flat-tax rate. The Lega competes for the base of FdI and Forza Italia. 

Overall, the right-wing coalition of Lega, FdI and Forza Italia accounts for 51.2% of the low-income voters in this survey, against a national average of 45.5%. By contrast, the centre-left coalition only accounts for 13.5% of the voters surveyed in this income class.

A centre left for the elites: the PD as the natural continuation of Draghi.

Since its creation in 2008, the centre-left Partito Democratico has always had an ambiguous political agenda. It periodically switches from very mild social democratic stances, to markedly right wing neo-liberal economic policy when in government. The technocratic neo-liberal governments that Italy experienced since the financial crisis found marked support from the PD. The Renzi government was markedly right-wing.

A the current time, the Partito Democratico is clearly positioned at the center or right-of-the-center of the political spectrum. It is similar to the Macron “En Marche” movement: a party of progressive views in civil rights, but highly reactionary in labour and economic policies. Nonetheless, the party tries to make ritual electoral cosmetic adjustments to persuade some left-leaning voters. The official programme and recent statements by politicians, sometimes raise topics like minimum wage, labour de-precarization and taxes on extra profits. Despite the mild to overt hostility that PD politicians have always had towards these topics. This party had promoted the flexibilization of the labour market as a way to “modernize” it, and it promoted stagnation or decline of healthcare expenditure during the Monti and Renzi governments. Hence paper political programmes rarely interpret the political stance of the party. Even the programme of the centre-right coalition includes more inclusive social security, higher minimum retirement benefits, environmental protection and funding for public housing. If even they can  pay lip service to social welfare, there is no reason the PD should not be doing so.

The real political paradigm of the PD was overtly for the “Draghi agenda”, and it tries to appear as the natural continuation of that government. This was confirmed by the alliances made immediately after the government fall. These were with the “Azione” and “+ Europa” parties, both economically centre-right and ordo-liberal. The initial agreement anticipated this would give them 30% of contended seats of the coalition, despite their joint political weight being estimated at 5-6% only. By contrast, the alliance with the social democrats of Sinistra Italiana and the Greens, with a comparable but slightly inferior political weight, only gave them 20% of contended seats. Ironically, the alliance with “Azione” was broken only by the will of the “Azione” leader. He suddenly decided that he did not want to ally with the social democrats and greens. Conversely, “+ Europa” remained as the ordo-liberal partner of the PD. To remove doubts, the PD also included in its lists the popular neo-liberal economist Carlo Cottarelli, IMF official and strenuous supporter of budget balance and pension reform.

The coalition with the ordo-liberals is fully consistent with the economic paradigm of the PD. It follows the “external constraint” imposed by the European institutions as a religious dogma. Keynesianism and deficit spending in times of crisis are taboos, what matters is that Italy does “its homework” silently and sticks to European guidelines. This neo-liberal dogma has basically destroyed democratic policy making in Italy in the last decade and has contributed to the stagnation. Italian ordo-liberals see European integration as a guarantee that national politics will be deprived of capacity to shape the economy, in favour of a supra-national market-enforcing and budget-disciplining leviathan. This paradigm is fully consistent with Hayek, but also with Italian neo-liberals such as Carli or Maione. The PD leader Enrico Letta is an integral part of this establishment, and was formerly in the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and subsequently on the centrist faction in the PD.

Even on migration, supposedly a civil-right issue, some members of the Partito Democratico often competed with the radical right. They advertised the “success” of an agreement of their former Minister of Interior Minniti, to reduce the number of migrant departures from Libya. But at the price of detaining thousands of migrants in horrific quasi-concentration camps run by Libyan authorities. It is not uncommon to hear PD politicians arguing that they “did better than Salvini” in this field.

The PD electoral campaign is mostly a campaign “in defence of the constitution” and “against the right”. But this defence does not include the most progressive parts of the constitution. Rather, it is interested to avoid a shift to a presidential system, and to ensure that Italian law remains constitutionally subordinated to European law.

The social composition of PD’s voters shows a consistent picture. Data from the previously mentioned survey (IPSOS, 2022), shows that the electoral base of the PD largely overlaps sectors with ordo-liberal thinking. First,  among the high-income voters, the PD holds for 31.4% against 20.9% of national average. The preferences for the PD shrinks together with the income class, obtaining only 10% of the voting preferences among the low-income voters (against 21.5% of the right-wing FdI). Other core-constituencies are entrepreneurs and self-employed (24.2%), teachers and white-collar workers (25.4%) and pensioners (29.2%). Conversely, only around 13% of factory workers and the unemployed expressed a preference for the PD. This largely confirms a previous data from the post-2013 election surveys (ITANES, 2013). Namely it is a party that gradually loses voters from the most disadvantaged social strata in favour of the wealthier ones. 

The left turn of the Five Star Movement.

After the end of the second Conte government, Giuseppe Conte, former Italian Prime Minister, decided to continue as the political leader of the Five Star Movement, replacing Luigi di Maio. The Five Star Movement’s leadership was now divided between Di Maio, for the moderate “pro-government” area of the Movement, and Conte, for the critics of the new Draghi government. This did not prevent Conte from giving Draghi a blank cheque for the whole first year of mandate, even in regards to the Russian-Ukrainian war. The Five Star Movement was fundamentally  a disciplined device to support the government and “rebel” parliamentarians who refused to vote for the Draghi government, like Pino Cabras, were expelled.

This changed in June this year, when Conte decided that the Movement should have been more critical vis-à-vis the government, especially on social policy and on weapons to Ukraine. This escalated  tensions within the Five Star Movement between pro-government and anti-government factions. It led eventually to Luigi Di Maio and his circle leaving the Five Star Movement to set up “Impegno Civico”, which placed itself as a “puppet list” of the Partito Democratico.

This final showdown enabled the Five Star Movement to quit the game and refusing to be part of the Draghi government. Nonetheless, Conte initially offered his “external support” to single measures, rather than the whole set of policies. However, Draghi was not eager to accept this and the government fell.

The reasons leading Conte to quit the government are still unclear. The main motivation given was the neglect of the Five Star Movement’s proposals for redistributive policies and social aid in the government coalition. A more critical,  realistic view – argues that this was an electoral strategy. With likely social unrest  this autumn due to gas shortages and inflation, The Five Star Movement did not want to lose its narrow political consensus by backing a government that, would become unpopular. As Conte put it: “at the election day, it is not journalists or tv commentators the only ones who vote”.

Most likely, both reasons hold truth. The Five Star Movement has steadily declined, dropping from 32% of voters’ preferences in 2018 to 10% this year.  Political survival demanded cutting its  subordination to the Partito Democratico and launching a “social agenda” occupying the left political space. This is framed as the Five of the Five Star Movement coming “closer to its roots” to capitalize on the social welfare and labour legislative achievements of the first two Conte governments. The genuineness of this left turn is questionable, since previously Conte himself did not seem concerned when the government watered down his “achievements”.

The social background of Five Star Movement’s voters reflects this “social” orientation. The Movement is over-represented among the unemployed, students, and the young age groups, although the loss of consensus compared to 2018 is still remarkable even in these groups.

Conte placed the Five Star Movement as the main left alternative to the coalition led by the Democratic Party and, so far, the strategy seems pay off. The last surveys place the Five Star Movement between 13 and 15% of preferences, a considerable gain from the 10-12% of reported voters’ preferences in July. This places the Five Star Movement as the only “left” alternative among the big competitors in the electoral arena.

The left and Unione Popolare

The big absence  is the Italian left, showing little sign of recovery from its two decades-long decline.

Leading up to the 2018 elections, Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party), together with other movements, contributed to the movement “Potere al Popolo”. The electoral result was poor, at 1.13% of total votes. The defeat and  internal conflicts led to Rifondazione Comunista quitting Potere al Popolo.

At the beginning of 2022, the wide consensus enjoyed by Draghi seemed consistent with 2023 elections. The fragmented left was thus caught by surprise when, the government fell and elections called for September. A rush to create a project began centring on some keywords.

After the ground-breaking result of NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale) in France, Rifondazione Comunista, Potere al Popolo and other minor organizations did “march united” to an “Italian NUPES” – “Unione Popolare”. “Their” Mélenchon was the former Napoli Mayor De Magistris, popular for his victory in metropolitan Naples leading a coalition opposed to centre-left and centre-right.

However, De Magistris is far from Mélenchon. Both with respect to political experience and to his radicality. The UP leader surely can communicate with the spirit of times (i.e. in a populist manner), but he is highly ambiguous on the contents of his proposals.

Above all, on European treaties limiting deficit spending he is ambiguous at best. The programme reads that UP wants to “re-discuss” the Maastricht Treaty and the deficit parameters. However, nothing has been written regarding their intentions if this noble attempt is blocked by Europe, as previously. All governments have tried to re-discuss flexibility with Europe, with little success. We risk the trap, reminiscent of Greece, of a left that promises changes at the European level that will almost surely be denied. In that case, telling electors that you can obtain what you want by applying the treaties as they are is simple electoral fraud, and is not credible. By trying not to hurt the Italian mainstream on the European treaties, they want to challenge the mainstream on deficit spending, without realizing that the two are indissolubly connected.

Beyond this, the UP has an ineffective communication strategy. The “on paper” programme of Unione Popolare is highly ambitious and clearly left in orientation, including the extension of social security to the most vulnerable strata, taxation of the wealthiest, and even nationalizations of strategic sectors. However, people reading programmes on the webpages of parties are a very narrow minority.

In the general debate, Unione Popolare fails to distinguish itself with its’ proposals. In the economic sphere, the keywords were a cap on electricity and gas prices and introduction of a statutory minimum wage. However, both these proposals were also adopted by the Five Star Movement, and the centre-left coalition. Acknowledging this, the only argument for UP is that “the others are less credible”, but this is a poor strategy. Perhaps the most distinctive position of Unione Popolare, was favouring a more independent Italian stance on the war in Ukraine and pushing for a “diplomatic solution”. However, these arguments have not resonated in the Italian public. That is understandably more concerned with the gas bills, rather than with the international situation per se.

Overall, the average voter would struggle to vote Unione Popolare instead of the Five Star Movement, especially when the Five Star Movement is increasingly seen as the most credible opponent to the Democratic Party. The real challenge facing the left now is to take the little it may build in this pre-electoral period and develop it further at the grassroots after elections. Realistically, a mass left movement is not expected probably in the next ten years. The left should thus primarily get rid of its “electoralist bias” leading to these periodical rushes into “unitarian” projects that end up spending the energies of activists for a miserable 1% at the polls.

As capitalist analysts might say, the left must behave like a “long-term investor”; focusing on building ties at local level and achieving recognition by being present in the struggles of Italian workers, and synthesise their needs in a single nation-wide programme. Thereby working “at a loss” for a period, to keep motivation high for a later pay out

Conclusion: What comes next, what to expect.

The electoral game is clear. The right-wing coalition will win, with a strong  post-Fascist Fratelli d’Italia Party. What comes next is difficult to forecast, since the situation is unprecedented. But cautious guesses are possible.

Italy’s international position with respect to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Despite the Democratic Party tries to equate the right-wing coalition and Putin, this is barely credible. Although Berlusconi and Salvini have historical ties to Putin and the United Russia party, they stuck to the Atlantic alliance once the war started, although Salvini was more cautious. It is highly unlikely that the right-wing government will be endangered by the war per-se.

The main conflicts are likely to rise in the economic field.

The self-employed workers cannot be ignored. These make up between 21 and 23% of the overall workforce and are right-leaning, and the main target of the right-wing coalition. The whole electoral competition between right-wing parties rotates on fiscal policy, on the flat tax rate. Originally an idea of the Lega, which took it from Orbán, Putin and Trump. It proved popular among the self-employed, hence the other two coalition parties, Fratelli d’Italia and Forza Italia, rushed to adopt a flat rate tax “of their own”. As a result, reducing taxes for the self-employed is a common electoral goal.

However, this flat taxation rate is more to the inclination of Fratelli d’Italia, which may require deploying  financial resources, while the flat-tax would cost itself billions of euros. Especially considering that the coalition wants to extend support to families hit by catastrophic energy costs, some compromise is to be done. It is highly likely that Salvini will use his strategy of not taking any responsibility and try to shift the blame of unfulfilled promises on Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Similarly, Meloni will try to take a more assertive stance vis-à-vis Brussels on deficit rules, which may contrast with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, – the “moderate” side of the coalition.

We can expect the next government to be stable as an effect of the large parliamentary support and, economically, to focus on the protection of the declining Italian petit bourgeoisie by subsidization.

On civil rights, the regressive stance of the government is clear to the public. It is however unclear which civil rights will be hit. The most likely scenario is a government blocking any new advance in civil rights, without fundamentally changing anything. It is very unlikely they will enforce a reactionary turn, since this is unlikely to pay electorally.

The danger is the authoritarian turn in managing dissenting voices and protests. When Salvini was Minister of the Interior in 2018, the perspectives already were bleak tending towards authoritarianism. The situation is not going to be any better from October onwards. Protests risk being harshly crushed, especially with the upcoming winter and huge social upheavals due to the energy crisis.

Italian unions usually remain silent under centre-left governments, so we may expect them to be more active in organizing mobilization under the right-wing. Equally, we may expect anti-union activity by government to increase, to weaken the bargaining power of unions, consistently with an idea of economic growth based on “internal devaluation”.

A left that wants to be effective in addressing its own social base has thus to start building credibility among people. In Italy no redistributive mechanisms are yet announced to avoid poor households ending up paying 900 euros or more for 2 months of electricity. Equally, taxation on extra profits of the national electricity companies are only on paper. Only 1 of the 11 billion Euros expected was collected by the State. These are the pressing issues the left is called to act upon, to develop a left movement in the upcoming years.

Photo Gallery – Climate Strike Demo, 23rd September 2022, Berlin

Photos: Phil Butland, Dave Gilchrist. Rosemarie Nünning


Farewell Jean-Luc Godard

The film maker, who died this week, was a product of his time, including the May 1968 movement


22/09/2022

Jean-Luc Godard’s death on September 13th had impact not only to cinephiles all over the world, but also to left-wingers, as his name is connected with both, radical cinema and political activism. So profound is the imprint he left, that after the emergence of his debut feature film “À bout de souffle (Breathless)” (1960), film theorists and historians have been talking about “cinema before” and “after” Godard.

Not everyone appreciates his cinematic work. While social network timelines have been flooded with photos of Godard films and praises over the “founder of modern cinema”, the “pope of Nouvelle Vague” or the last “iconoclast”, at the same time objectors describe films of boredom, elitism, insolence, incoherence, the latter being in a way implied by his own words: “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”.

This text stands basically in defense of Godard, the theorist, the filmmaker and the political being.

French New Wave

Godard was a pioneer, who walked upon challenging the course and the substance of cinema up to his time and sought to revolutionize it. He radicalized the visual and aesthetic of the film, turning cinematic rules upside down, inventing new notions and transforming tools: The “jump cut” – which until Godard’s innovations in “Breathless” was considered plainly an amateurish mistake – in his hands became a technique of deliberately eliminating segments of particular shots instead of removing the entire shot. Direct address to the camera, an element he introduced from Berthold Brecht’s epic theater, along with so called non-diegetic inserts (scenes coming from outside the made-up world of the film to be placed into the film). Breaking the fluid narrative that characterizes conventional cinema forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connect the pieces by themselves, become participants in what is happening on the screen and, in distance from the protagonist’s struggle, get in the position to judge without sentimentality. Together with Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 blows” and Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima mon amour” Godard initiated the French New Wave in cinema.

Nothing seemed to be the same anymore in the way of seeing and digesting a film. “Breathless” was the burst of this concept, but it continued throughout Godard’s so called first period, until 1968, with provocative and often controversial films, such as “The Little Soldier”, which was banned for years by the French authorities for addressing the Algerian War, “Masculine Feminine”, “Contempt”, “Pierrot le fou”, “Alphaville”, culminating with the “Weekend”, a virulent satire of the bourgeoisie, which premiered just before the events of May ’68 and actually introduced a new period, shaped by the rising of mass struggles in France (and worldwide). These films were diverse and radical, denouncing bourgeois values and authorities, the imperialist war in Vietnam, the consumer society (the children of Coca Cola) and their effect on human conscience.

Many critics argue that Godard simply ignored cinematic rules, because he was dogmatic and biased against Hollywood, or because he had not been trained in a proper film school. This is not the case.

Godard’s generation did not come out of the blue. Having worked on film theory around the magazine “Cahiers du cinema”, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer, but also a circle including Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker and others moved into directing as the “Nouvelle Vague” of cinema and engaged themselves into transforming art to a vehicle for change.

Far from being dismissive of American mainstream cinema, the group of Cahiers were film aficionados, who, before turning to directing had “devoured” hundreds of Hollywood movies and reflected and discussed the contribution of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and others to the making of cinema. Their transition to directing followed getting to know how cinema had worked before.

They challenged the notion of the cinema industry and the cinema moguls’ grip on the entire film production and juxtaposed the “auteur” theory, which emphasized the importance of the individual director, and the semi-mysterious concept of “mise-en-scène” (putting the scenes in order), essentially an attempt to analyze visual style. Of course, one would rightly argue that film-making is a collective process. But the criticism of the group of Cahiers referred to the big producers and to the market. At the end of the day, many of their films did, bear influence from the great Hollywood filmmakers and reference to genres.

Godard in May ‘68

Most of these people were actively involved in the May uprising, not just as filmmakers but also as activists of the revolutionary Left that emerged out of that period. The mood had already been heated by the dismissal of the founder of Cinémathèque française, Henri Langlois by the Minister of Culture Andre Malreaux three months earlier, and a defense committee had been created to support Langlois. These mobilizations were to be transferred to the Cannes film festival, which set off on May 10, 1968.

As demonstrations and strikes burst in Paris, Godard along with Truffaut and Claud Berri played a decisive role in delivering to the festival the calling of the general assembly of the people of cinema for the Cannes festival to be stopped, as a gesture of solidarity with the Parisian insurgents. Harsh political debate took place. In his famous address at the Cannes assembly Godard said “We are talking of solidarity with students and workers and you are talking dolly shots and close-ups!” It worked though. The jury and the artists were divided, and under the advance of the struggle in the rest of France, the festival was finally cancelled.

A few days later, a general assembly (États général) met in Paris and came up with a political manifesto for “cinema at the service of society and the revolution”. That was a formidable declaration, although its realization had to face practical and political obstacles. Soon, the assembly split into 19 different groups, each with its own concept of how to carry on the scope. Nevertheless, these initiatives were an original experiment for a cinema that would be determined not by dominant ideas and market laws, but by the creativity of its people and the needs of the movement. The main reason for this was of course the end of the mobilization and the return of France to “normality”, following an agreement between the trade union leadership and the political establishment.

Tziga-Vertov Group

Godard named the collective he created with Jean Pierre Gorin the “Tziga-Vertov Group” (DVG), a tribute to the Russian Revolution of 1917. He disavowed everything he had made up to that point as “capitalist” and declared that the collective “sought not just to make “political films” but to make films politically”. He was at the time identified as a devoted Maoist, which may seem grotesque today, however at that time Maoism was a dominant political current in the movement and stood critical to the French Communist Party which had capitulated to General De Gaulle’s maneuvers to end the revolt.

The films made by DVG are the most neglected of Godards, regarded strict and dogmatic by many, however they are challenging and, from a historic point of view a valuable documentation of the mood inside the working class and the movement during and in the aftermath of May ’68. For example, “A Film Like Any Other” is a non-narrative assemblage of filmed discussions between Renault workers and student activists intercut with footage filmed in the streets of France during the heated weeks of May 1968. “British Sounds” comments on the alienation of labour by involving quotes from The Communist Manifesto with striking car workers from Ford Dagenham and elsewhere. There is also a section on the then emerging women’s liberation movement. In the same spirit “Wind from The East” and “Struggle in Italy” attempt to speak on the politics bourgeois representation and the role of the left. “Vladimir and Rosa” is a parody of the Chicago 8 trial of the anti Vietnam War activists who were charged following protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. This was a clear attack on the criminalization of dissent and trial by media and the state. Godard would come back to these issues later.

This circle actually closed with fiction film “Tout va bien” (1972), where well-known actors Yves Montand and Jane Fonda were engaged to play a pair of middle-class intellectuals encountering a strike at a sausage factory. “Letter to Jane” was the epilogue to this film and the entire effort of the group, which dissolved soon after.

…and after

Godard went through a personal crisis, both physically (following a motor-cycle accident) and intellectually, and re-oriented himself and his activity. First in Grenoble, where he established his own studio and then to Switzerland. He took time to reflect on the retreat of the movement and the Left and came back with new stuff, dealing not overtly with class struggle, but with everyday life, relations, and sexuality, always retaining his political point of view. In the 1980s he produced films in a more refined artistical way, for which he received criticism from some of his earlier fans. More known are the melancholic “Prenom Carmen” (1983) and “Hail Mary”, which was condemned by the Catholic church as blasphemous. He declared once more his interest in cinema history with his 4.5-hour video project named “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (1988–1998), denying the widespread notion of the 1990s that cinema was dead. On the contrary, his career would continue in the 21st century.

A supporter of Palestine

Godard remained during all his life committed to the Palestinian cause, defying the cost of being accused for anti-semitism. In the early days of the Tziga-Vertov Group, he and Gorin visited Jordan and spoke with Palestinian militants in order to prepare a documentary to be called “Till victory”. Tragically, most of those fighters were massacred by the Jordanian regime during the “Black September” of 1970 and the project was aborted, only temporarily, as Godard used the footage a few years later in his “Ici et ailleurs (Here and elsewhere)” film. In “Film Socialisme” (2010), he chose Palestine as one of his six “homelands” to visit in the last section of the film named “our humanities”.

In 2010, after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced plans to award Godard an honorary Oscar, pro-Israel groups revolted, calling on the Academy to rescind the Oscar. Godard rejected the allegations by insisting that he was an “anti-Zionist”, not an anti-Semite, a fact that could easily be proved by the way he has depicted the holocaust in his documentaries. He did not hesitate to endorse cultural boycotts of Israel.

Legacy

“All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun” Godard once wrote, and proved it with “Breathless”. What he did not know is that with a girl and a gun he would change cinema. He transformed the way we see a film, what we expect from a film, and for that cinephiles owe him.

Godard followed with commitment the path of questioning and renewing his means of expression. The camera was for him a tool for artistic and political intervention. A Marxist and deeply politicized, he did not miss the opportunity, both with his films and with his life standing and his statements, to “disturb” all sorts of establishments in the artistic field and in society. Unapologetic, disobedient, stubborn, committed to the cause of socialism and communism, he never stopped seeing the world from the “left bank”.

Grab your pen, buddy, German socialist culture needs you!

A visit to the Beeskow Art Archive


19/09/2022

In late August I visited the Beeskow Art Archive as part of a €9 day trip organised by Left Berlin. The Beeskow Art Archive preserves an extraordinary range of artistic production from the GDR; from huge mural-like panel paintings, bronze busts, still lives, to student projects, photography and ceramics. Both the collection, and how the archive was created gives us an insight into the role and conception of the culture and art of GDR, as well as bringing up the question of public ownership of material that was produced under a state system of patronage that no longer exists.

So what did cultural policy look like in the GDR? A look back at the Bitterfelder Weg conference of 1959 which introduced a new program of the socialist cultural policy in the GDR, can help reveal the origins of prevalence of public art as well as the role of art in Alltagskultur (everyday life culture). The conference was organised to look at how working people could be given access to art and culture, overcoming the “existing separation of art and life” through getting the working class more involved in the cultural project of socialism. Walter Ulbricht, the head of the SED party, initiated the slogan “Greif zur Feder, Kumpel, die sozialistische deutsche Nationalkultur braucht dich!” or, “Grab your pen, buddy, German socialist culture needs you!” This program attempted to place artists and writers in factories and other sites of mass production, to support workers in artist activity.

This in some ways mirrors the Worker Photography Movement which went against a representative mode of photographing working class movements, instead locating artistic production as part of or in aid of struggle. In the 1970s revival of Worker Photographer in London by photographer Terry Dennett, where he poses the distinction between, ‘workers’ photography, those movements in which Socialists and ordinary people have played an active and formative role, and the various bourgeois controlled practices which we have termed photography for the workers.

However, the Bittefelder Weg was soon abandoned, and in April 1964, cultures were instead given the task of promoting political education in socialist consciousness and key figures in socialism. Much of this was funded by the GDR Kulturfonds, a fund founded by FDGB, the Kulturbund, and the Department of Public Education, which acted as the commissioning body for most of the works that are housed in Beeskow Art Archive. A month before reunification, Herbert Schrimer, the final minister of Culture of the GDR and Walter Patig, the last director of DDR Kulturfonds formed a new foundation whose aim was to continue the public access to works funded by the Kulturfonds.

At this time the artworks were dispersed all over the GDR in the institution that they were commissioned for. After reunification those institutions would no longer exist, so a separate organisation that would continue after reunification was needed. Florentiner Nadolny, the director of the Archive, reminded us that there is no public art collection in West Germany that houses artists from the GDR. This ambivalence of GDR cultural heritage since reunification is only starting to change after a generational gap.

Up until the last five years or so, GDR cultural production was seen as socialist kitsch rather than serious artist work. Two current exhibitions that are helping shift this change in perspective are Kunstraum in Berlin, current exhibition Worin unsere Stärke besteht: Fünfzig Künstlerinnen aus der GDR, showcases the work of fifty women artists from GDR, and Künstlerinnen. Fotografien von Sibylle Fendt, which is housed within the Beeskow Art Archive.

As part of the visit we were given an excellent tour around the collection by Florentiner Nadolny ( which you can book here). Many of the brief insights in this article were inspired by Florentiner’s deep knowledge of the collection and I highly recommend it. I want to highlight a number of pieces from the tour which showed the breadth of aesthetics in GDR commissioned art despite a very much regulated system of state patronage, as well as how art permeated much of public and everyday life in the GDR. We were unable to take pictures in the Archive, so I have managed to source some pictures to give you a glimpse of the works.

There was so much interesting work to write about but I could not include them all, other artists that were of particular note on the tour were: Norbert Wagenbrett, Sibylle Fendt, Kostas Sissis, and Sabina Grzimek.

The fee for the commission was for around twenty-five thousand East German Marks which was the equivalent to around a year’s wages for an artist in the GDR… Although application to the professional organisation was highly controlled, once a member they ensured that cultural workers were properly paid and the art that became part of the state and mass institutions.

Top right panel of Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! (Workers of the World, Unite!)

When entering the archive in Beeskow the room is full of grey metal plan chests full of drawings, prints and photographs. Above them hangs a huge painting, Aus dem Leben Ernst Thälmann (From the life of Ernst Thälmann) by Christian Heinze, which was commissioned in the early 1980s to be hung in the mensa of Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB). A communal table in the centre of the canvas shows people from the GDR living a common life, above them a crowd of people and at the centre Ernst Thälmann, former leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), with his fist raised high. Around the edges of the painting we see the Red Army defeating fascism, the destruction of Berlin and the building of industry in the GDR.

Due to the fact that most works in the Beeskow Art Archive were owned by the Free German Trade Union Confederation (FDGB) and other mass institutions, during the GDR they remained in the public sphere (as opposed to private collections). Art was not just confined to the gallery or museums, but seen as integral to building socialism, so sharing lunch with Ersnt Thälmann in mensa was very much part of the fabric and material culture of life.

The fee for the commission was for around twenty-five thousand East German Marks which was the equivalent to around a year’s wages for an artist in the GDR. These kinds of commissions were only available to artists who were members of the Verband Bildung (Artist’s Union) and were paid for by the GDR Kulturfonds. Although application to the professional organisation was highly controlled, once a member they ensured that cultural workers were properly paid and the art that became part of the state and mass institutions.

Am Strand (On the Beach) by Walter Womacka was painted in 1962… The painting was reproduced more than three million times as an art print, postcard and art calendar, as well as a stamp in 1968 had a circulation of twelve million.

Stamp of Am Strand by Walter Womacka

Hanging on the wall, right next to Aus dem Leben Ernst Thälmanns, were various versions of probably the most famous painting in the GDR. Far from portraits of Thälmann, bronzes of Lenin and or numerous tributes or Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, this intimate everyday picture struck a chord with the population. Am Strand (On the Beach) by Walter Womacka was painted in 1962 and was presented to Walter Ulbricht by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED on his 70th birthday. The picture shows two young people, perhaps not yet a couple, sitting on the beach, their middle fingers touching in an uncertain gesture of adolescent love.

Very much in a Socialist Realist style which elevated everyday life under socialism into a “revolutionary romanticism”, the painting through its circulation became a key to the people in GDR’s image of themselves. The painting was reproduced more than three million times as an art print, postcard and art calendar, as well as a stamp in 1968 had a circulation of twelve million. Indeed, one of our tour group remembered the painting from her parent’s sitting room.

Womacka was very much a ‘state artist’ and a member of the SED who was commissioned to do many commission in prominent GDR buildings, such as Unser Leben (Our Life) for the teacher’s house on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and panel painting Wenn Kommunisten träumen (When Communists Dream) was hung in the Palace of the Republic. The latter was also reproduced as a stamp in 1981 (see below). The dramatic shift in style between Am Strand and Wenn Kommunisten träumen shows that even for ‘party artists’, art was neither uniform or simple functional within socialism.

A Stamp of Wenn Kommunisten träumen (When Communists Dream) by Walter Womacka in the GDR Palast der Republik

One of the most spectacular, and mildly grotesque pieces of the archive was a huge multi-canvas piece by renowned GDR artist Willi Sitte, entitled ‘“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!’ or ‘ Workers of the World, Unite! Each section, mounted on sliding archival storage, was revealed individually due to the size of the piece. First came Marx; a lightning bolt grasped in one hand and the other lifted high as a fist radiating rainbow colours, below a small refracted side portrait of Lenin.

The next panel brings a sharp contrast between the austere sepia portraits of the figures of communism in Germany (Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Ernst Thälmann) adorn the top of the picture, under this a baroque mass of bodies, muscles and guts. The people are tearing themselves down from the cross and heralding a new dawn with golden trumpets. Sitte, who deserted the Wehrmacht in 1944 and briefly went and fought for the Italian Partisans, and this style evidently resembles Italian Baroque.

Printout from the tour of all the panels of Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! together.

The final panel we were shown continued this lineage of communist figures with a young Marx and Engels in the left hand corner all the way through to Kautsky, under the canvas is grey with lumpen naked figures shrouded in cloth, newspapers emerge and fall from the grey background. They both form a revolutionary base, reminiscent of Willi Neubert’s Die Presse als Organisator (The Press as Organiser) mural on the Presse Cafe, in which the communist press takes on an activity and integral part of the revolutionary project.

Pieced together almost triptych-like murals portray the progression of revolutionary consciousness and mass politics from the beginning of the communist movement to what is assumed to imply state- socialism of the GDR. But far from the perhaps drab social realism that one might associate with ‘socialist’ art, the end panel shows a psychedelic mass of colour, power of collective action and the strength of people rising. Interestingly though this was not deemed a fitting piece to be displayed in the Parteihochschule in Köllnischer Platz by SED officials. Due to the prevalence of naked people in the painting the piece was hung at the top of the main staircase in the school and covered by a curtain. Florentiner Nadolny, the director of the Art Archive in Beeskow, said that this was suspected to be due to GDR relations with the Soviet Union. Sitte objected to it being covered up and attempted to buy the painting back through a public campaign, after much conflict the piece was permanently displayed.

This example of the top down sanctioning of even their most prominent artists (from 1974 to 1988 Sitte was President of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR), showed the rhetoric of the Bitterfelder Weg had become highly institutionalised. However, like many of the contradictions that come out of the GDR, the conditions in which art was produced there can not simply be dismissed. The art in the Beeskow Art Archive emerges, not just as a top down expression of social values, but a site of struggle and negotiation around what it means to create socialist culture. The collections in Beeskow are testament to the huge variety and vibrancy of art that came out of GDR, and their work is key to reasserting it’s artistic and cultural heritage back into public view.

Notre Dame, Eco-colonialism, and The Wretched of Pakistan

The muted altruistic response to Pakistan’s calamitous flooding reveals the persistence of colonial priorities of the Global North.


15/09/2022

I emigrated from Pakistan with my family at the age of 17 in 2010 and I have never returned. I never really felt an emotional connection to the country, the language, or the history. I was always eager to come to the West and assimilate there and my wish was fulfilled. Only after I read Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of The Earth” did I begin to feel a sense of patriotism towards the motherland. My sense of righteous anger at the legacy of colonialism-at-large found an expression towards colonialism as it shaped the lives of myself and those whom I perceive as my people.

The Notre Dame Cathedral fire occurred on 15th April, 2019. Within a week, nearly 1 billion Euros were pledged for its restoration. Not a single person died, nobody was displaced from their home. In humanitarian terms, this was a non-event. For a country that can never stop beating its chest about its secular humanism, the eagerness to restore a church to its former glory contrasts starkly with the indifferent response of the, comically named, international community. Laïcité seems like a cruel, taunting insult to the wretched of Pakistan.

The list of donors is worth highlighting. The French energy giant Total pledged 100 m, the chair of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) pledged another 100, Francois-Henri Pinault pledged 100, the heirs to L’Oreal pledged 200 more, the city of Paris pledged 50. Half a billion Euros pledged on a whim in a grotesque auction for public self-aggrandisement. Why is it that any entity in the world has the power to allocate such sums to satisfy their own vanity? But perhaps more immediately, how were (and still are) these fortunes generated in the first place? How much did their generation contribute towards the destruction wrought on the biosphere which precipitated the catastrophe in Pakistan?

Even though the lands of Pakistan were colonised by the British, today, in the age of the “Rules Based International Order”, the people and the land can be exploited by capital of any nationality. It is in short, an economic and environmental gang rape facilitated by institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Greenhouse gas emissions have no nationality. To reiterate, Pakistan is ranked within the top 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change, despite ranking around 158th in the world for emissions. In light of this frightening divergence, I feel comfortable highlighting the French response to the Notre Dame fire and the French state’s barbaric response to the floods. A web search for stories on money or support pledged by the French state or actors yields nothing in terms of money and little in terms of aid that is commensurate with the scale of the crisis.

But if France, with its hypocrisy and wealth built on colonialism, both new and old, is a chief accomplice of this catastrophe and its perpetuation, then the UK and the USA are the primary conspirators.

“Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country’s industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Fanon is speaking through the map at the top of this article. Almost the entirety of Balochistan has been affected, even in areas far flung from the Indus River, the primary conduit for flooding. Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, until 2010 referred to by its colonial name: North West Frontier Province, is similarly affected. The river Indus merges with the flows of the other four rivers of Punjab (Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum) at the border between Sindh and Punjab. Roughly a third of Sindh comprises the Thar desert and is therefore extremely vulnerable to flooding. A catastrophic increase in river volumes would make Sindh difficult to defend as the river swells up downstream. But the damage caused upstream and across in Balochistan are, at least partially, the consequence of the wounds of imperial neglect.

The British government has offered a miserly package of £15 million, or 46p per person displaced. The United States is providing $30 million, 91c per person displaced. Contrast this with the estimates of value extracted from the Indian sub-continent (in the order of trillions in present value) or the money offered to successive Pakistani governments to help prosecute, first the Soviet-Afghan War, and then the War on Terror. The US Congressional Research Service estimates US aid to Pakistan’s military since 2001 to be over $10 billion. The US military is estimated to have emitted 23.4 MTe CO2,eq in 2017. The entirety of Pakistan’s emissions in 2017 were approximately 221 MTe CO2,eq. The confluence of historic economic plunder and present-day environmental vandalism has turned Pakistan into perhaps the first victim of eco-colonialism. The effects of such widespread destruction of homes, crops, and livestock in conjunction with country-scale displacement through a single climate change induced event is without precedent. Countries in the Global South may see what has happened to Pakistan and ask themselves: “Are we next?”.

In light of these facts, the moral outrage of such preventable devastation is already unfathomable to the mind, but it would be remiss not to address one final element to its causality; the role of the IMF and debt. Governments across the Global South are familiar with the dreaded structural adjustment programs that condition any transfer of financial aid from the IMF. In practice, the IMF acts like a loan shark preying on the desperation of the very countries that emerged in the period of decolonisation after the second world war. In Pakistan’s case, this is illustrated by the fact that in 2022-2023 it is expected that 56.4% of tax revenues will service debts.

The demands of the IMF, as a rule, entrench indebtedness and make it impossible for these countries to progress beyond emerging market status. They become centres of unequal value exchange, providing raw materials and cheap labour to perpetuate the wealth and power of the Global North. Work by Jason Hickel and co-authors estimated that in the period 1960-2018, the Global North extracted $62 trillion dollars from the Global South through what they term “unequal exchange” i.e. paying less for something from abroad than what it would cost within the Global North.

Coupled with the entrenchment of economic relations mimicking the period of imperialism, the indebtedness imposed on Global South countries makes it impossible for them to adequately mitigate the impacts of climate change as a last resort. It leaves countries like Pakistan stripped of autonomy, forcing governments to beg at international gatherings like the COP Summit to provide for the harm they have been perpetrating for centuries, and then diligently obstructed through conduits like the IMF. The genealogical links between imperialism, neo-colonialism, and eco-colonialism are thus reified.

Contemporary Pakistani politics is similarly plagued by these legacies. Punjabi elites, the most populous and economically dominant province, coupled with their Sindhi counterparts (home to the largest city in the country) have monopolised political power since its inception. Bangladesh seceded after a brutal war of subjugation led by West Pakistan failed, geography and the intervention of India facilitating Bangladeshi independence. However, efforts to gain autonomy or independence within Balochistan have been brutally suppressed to the present day, with abductions a routine facet of political activism.

Khyber Pakthunkhwa has, owing to the War on Terror, been a similarly militarised region in the country, driven into the grip of religious fundamentalism on account of a war it had little say in participating in. Therefore the scale of devastation caused by these floods and the woefully inadequate response, at home and abroad, is the result of a synergistic function of colonial socio-political legacies, neo-colonial domination, and ecological collapse. The entirety of the Global South must unify to negate these synergies, casting off all old rivalries and apprehensions so that they do not suffer the same fate as Pakistan, one after the other.

You can find some sites where you can donate to Pakistan flood victims here. On Saturday, 17th September there will be a Solidarity Fundraiser for flood victims in Café Karanfil in Berlin Neukölln.