Subterranean hyperpolitics blues

Ruari L reviews the debut work of theory by Anton Jäger, agreeing with his diagnoses but questioning whether he really has the cure for our blues

The Wolfgang Tillmans photograph – Love (Hands in Hair) – that covers Belgian historian Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences represents an inflection point between past and present. It’s a vision of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in which the world was finally released from the weight of history, united in the embrace of liberal norms, institutions and human rights. Unfortunately for them and us the high came with an inevitable comedown and in the space that politics evacuated a whole host of morbid symptoms took hold. Anton Jäger names our condition today, ‘hyperpolitics’.

Conceptually, ‘hyperpolitics’ aims to capture the conjuncture, summarised by the subtitle of the book: ‘extreme politicisation without political consequences.’ It is slippery, less a definite structure than a ‘general atmosphere… a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage.’ It is marked by periods of intense, frenzied activity – both digitally and on the streets – that disappear almost as quickly as they emerge. Highly emotive appeals are a core component of hyperpolitical action, and these engage both personal and public spheres. Hyperpolitics grasps us in the supermarket choosing which brand to buy as much as it pulls us into a city square demonstration, giving both a fraught urgency. As a description of the atmosphere of modern life, something in this rings true. It does feel as if we are in a constantly heightened state of emergency that demands action right now, and yet nothing seems to change no matter how many times we try to pull the emergency brake. 

But how did we get here? Jäger uses a novel scheme to track forms of political expression on two axes, politicisation and institutionalisation. The former measures degrees of mobilisation, the latter the density of civic association. Jäger starts with mass politics, defined by high politicisation and institutionalisation, in both ‘wild’ form during the revolutionary interwar period, and ‘integrated’ form from the postwar era up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The highly organised and rich lifeworlds of mass parties and their auxiliary associations – cycling clubs, reading groups, paramilitary organisations, rabbit breeding clubs and so on – can feel from the perspective of the irradiated social landscape of the present as if they took place on another planet. Seemingly almost any activity that could be done with others was done within an organised structure, often formally linked with a political party, be it socialist, fascist, conservative or Christian democratic. 

But it wasn’t to last. After the crises of the 1970s layers of civic association dissolved ‘in the acid of deindustrialization and triumphant market logic.’ The result was ‘postpolitics’, a period of both low politicisation and institutionalisation, exemplified by the subjects of Tillmans’ photography. Political parties across the spectrum hemorrhaged membership and there was a broader retreat into the private sphere of individualised consumption as a substitute for political expression. With the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, the politicisation of society returned with a vengeance but it remained at best only partially institutionalised. This was the decade of antipolitics, with populist movements across Europe castigating the technocratic elite who had spent the postpolitical 80s and 90s securing market forces from democratic contestation. Populist movements made some headway in this period but, as Jäger outlines, antipolitics is more hostile terrain for the left than the right who can make better use of digital methods of coordination and communication to rile up their base in place of durable organisation. The left, for both political and strategic purposes, needs the sustained participation of broad layers of society. 

In the Britain and the US, left populist movements and parties achieved a degree of ‘semi-institutionalisation’ and partially reversed membership decline in established parties, but were unable to breach the fortified walls of the state. Jäger wades into a somewhat tedious scholastic debate over whether Trump and the Tea Party movement can be characterised as fascist firmly in the negative. Some argue that MAGA makes use of the forms of associational life available to the right and capital that have been able to survive amidst the left’s post-political desert, and therefore their movement retains features of the fascist movements that sank roots into densely organised societies. Against this, Jäger argues, along with Dylan Riley, that the contemporary moment is missing a key component of fascist organisation – a rising revolutionary left to counterpose itself to. In addition, Jäger rightly points out the forms of associational life matter, as he dryly puts it, ‘a golf club is not the NSDAP’. Quite. So, from left to right, hyperpolitics reigns. While it retains the low institutionalisation and high politicisation of the antipolitical decade, hyperpolitics is a result of the failures of the 2010s cycles of struggle and the ejection of the left from its first tentative steps back to formalisation. Where the right were able to ride the wave of the antipolitical decade the left were pulled under.

In under 100 pages Jäger covers an impressive range. As a historian, he is at his best when surveying the fullness of the 20th Century and is a worthy inheritor to the New Left Review house-style, making sweeping generalisations of world-spanning cultural, historical and sociological dynamics from Olympian heights. His aim in relitigating the century of mass politics is to give some historical heft and Marxist rigour to Robert Putnam’s intuitive thesis in his 2000 book Bowling Alone on the collapse of American civic society, that more people than ever go bowling, but they do so as individuals rather than in organised associations. Putnam argued that this has produced a variety of deep political and social problems for the US, and the story is familiar to Europe. The contrast between the social worlds of mass and postpolitical societies is clear, although Jäger does take a circumspect view of the former. Workers made a bargain in building their parties as agents of collective will formation. Doing so ‘required a transfer of agency but guaranteed in return a modicum of collective power.’ Mass parties were able to foster a total world for their members where one could live their entire life under its auspices. Workers would socialise, learn, organise and educate themselves through party and trade union institutions, but this came with a degree of authoritarianism. To secure the collective will, mass parties cultivated and imposed a perspective that enabled them to mediate between their followers and the state. This also enabled leaderships to educate and impose discipline upon the party faithful. The picture drawn is so totalising Jäger even raises whether calling any of this ‘voluntary’ association is strictly accurate. The all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave worlds of mass politics are compared with the easy entry and exit that characterise political organisation today. Jäger’s vision is not totally rose-tinted but his judgment is clear, that politics in post-, anti- and hyper- forms are severely denuded successors in their ability to challenge the power of capital. 

One of the primary institutions of association the left is missing today according to Jäger is the labour movement. His case for a ‘materialist’ left-Putnamism relies upon the role labour played in the mass political decade and the circumstances in which it was defeated. The woes facing labour since the 1980s are well-documented: cratered trade union density unable to keep pace with the growth of the workforce, hostile legislation, empowered employers and the growth of ‘passive alternatives’ to collective organisation. It’s difficult to imagine a trade union today with its own theatre, as documented in a Rhenish hamlet in the 1930s. Economically, Jäger rightly argues that 20th Century inflationary pressure was a key indicator of the intensity of class struggle. Elites recognised this and when the post-war boom seized up and distributional struggle became more zero-sum, neoliberals seized the moment to launch an assault on labour. The defeat of the miners in the Britain and air-traffic controllers in the US were signal events in swinging the class struggle back in capital’s favour, triggering mass unemployment through interest rate spikes and accelerating deindustrialisation. The fact that this caused significant collateral damage to conservative civic institutions was a price worth paying. Where labour once had a greater ability to set the pace, workers’ bargaining power is now more individualised and dependent on broader labour market factors, not to mention the whims of central bankers. The labour movement for Jäger was the backbone of mass politics and with its defeat mass parties that had by then become cartelised and integrated into the state no longer mediated working class demands but accepted their subordination to the market. As Jäger describes, ‘instead of mobilising thousands of supporters and party members at meetings and congresses where they could exert pressure on politicians, it was easier to treat the electorate like a black box from which one hopes to extract insight after a plane crash.’   

Historians making bold and provocative arguments for a wide public audience are to be welcomed. Hyperpolitics is best thought of as a book to argue with and about. In its diagnosis, Jäger has clearly struck a chord with the Anglophone left who are looking for a way forward after the failures of left populist experiments and the inability of social movements to make a lasting impact at the level of the state. Jäger is at pains to argue that the purpose of the book is neither the empirical detail of an academic study, nor is it an organising manual. But despite his protestations to the contrary, the book is first and foremost a strategic intervention. Jäger tells us that the only way out of the hyperpolitical impasse is ‘drawing individuals back into parties and unions’, but he puts a curious dampener on his own conclusion. Perhaps a ‘reckoning with the historic decomposition of voluntary association’ includes the possibility that voluntary association at scale was determined by social conditions that no longer exist. Maybe what was broken cannot be put back together again. Maybe a critical mass of people required for robust associational life will never be persuaded to spend a night organising with their neighbours rather than clubbing, or more likely in our hyperpolitical era, posting online. This bleak conclusion is consistent with the declinist history Jäger articulates, but it also highlights a sociological determinism. In focusing single-mindedly on voluntary association and the conditions that enabled it, Jäger draws a straight line from deindustrialisation to social atomisation to the left’s political impasse. Jäger sees an absence where we might better see restructuring and recomposition.

Given Jäger’s reliance on the role of the labour movement, and indeed the role of work more broadly in his left-Putnamism, it is curious how little attention he pays to the actually existing labour movement beyond its diminished size. Nobody would argue that the labour movement today is comparable in strength or depth of social roots to the mid-20th Century, but reading this book it would be easy to forget that it exists at all. Jäger’s conflation of industrial work with the labour movement as a whole is a theoretical misstep. Indeed, his sense of loss is so great he falls back on the likes of novelist Michel Houellebecq and Christopher Caldwell as his primary weapon for criticising the resultant liberal hegemony. Jäger fills in the gap where labour once stood with culturalist anti-liberalism in order to bemoan the hedonism of postpolitical Europe. He neatly sidesteps the substance of their analysis, that Europe’s malaise is closer to a cultural and political suicide in the face of mass immigration. One should take arguments on their own terms but Jäger doesn’t do himself any favours in coyly identifying Caldwell as an ‘American critic’ as opposed to an unapologetic reactionary fearmongering about Muslim hordes conquering Europe. This isn’t to judge guilt by association, and Houllebecq at least was an astute critic of French politics, but it’s a curious turn from waxing nostalgic about the Modern Princes of interwar mass politics to lining up alongside hack commentators. Jäger reprimands those arguing that Trump is a fascist on the basis that their implicit political impact is to prop up an equally corrupt and captured Democratic Party. Perhaps there is something to this, but it begs the question of what, then, is the implicit political import of Jäger’s declinism? In essence it is a prop for so-called ‘reindustrialisation’. His deterministic theoretical positions drive him into the arms of anti-liberal miserablism, which politically amounts to a rather half-hearted call for reheated mid-century industrial policy as a cure for social atomisation.

Jäger’s analytical blinkers cause him to miss an equally significant recomposition of capital that went alongside the ‘epochal decomposition’ of civil society organised around industrial labour. Jäger argues for the primacy of the workplace as a site of power on the basis that ‘the world of work remains the site where surplus value is produced and economic interests directly clash’. No socialist worth the name would disagree. But what is work and surplus value? He argues those who see social reproduction as a potential site of renewed working class power should not write off ‘the spheres of production and distribution’, but in both the US and British deindustrialisation entailed huge shifts in employment from manufacturing to health and social care which, even in the British, is highly commodified.¹ It’s unclear then how social reproductive organising is in conflict with organising in the spheres of production and distribution. 

Jäger seems unable to recognise social reproduction as either a site of massified labour or capital accumulation, leading to a confused argument against it as terrain for organisation. When he states that ‘many no longer interact with coworkers in person on a daily basis’ but that ‘one still has to drop their children at day care, attend parent teacher meetings, or visit their own parents in retirement homes’, Jäger is misidentifying the agent of organisation as the consumer rather than producer of social reproductive services. Jäger makes the claim that those interacting with social reproduction ‘can only appeal to the fiscal state’, but do the nursery workers, teachers and carers not have exploitation, injustices and, importantly, employers in common? Jäger’s socialist subject has transformed from the industrial worker as producer to the salaried professional as consumer. In a similarly dismissive vein, Jäger comments ‘the average Western European is more likely to interact with geriatric nurses than workplace union reps.’ The possibility that the geriatric nurse could be or have a union rep eludes him. The labour movement today may lack the Promethean romance of auto or steel manufacturing but the potential power to disrupt capital remains. Social reproductive labour does not reproduce the neutral terrain of ‘society’ but ensures the continued reproduction of the class relation. When teachers strike, it disrupts not just pupils but those workers who are required to care for them in the absence of school². 

The only explicitly programmatic intervention Jäger makes is opposition to police defunding. He makes an awkward pivot from arguing that abolitionist demands emerging from the US Black Lives Matter movement didn’t work (which is obviously true – police departments are more well endowed and just as deadly) to saying that the demand itself was undesirable. He argues that in the political-economic context of a weakly organised working class, alongside high levels of crime due to the lack of a US welfare state, ‘demands to resolve systemic problems simply by defunding the police will appear painfully limited.’ People can make a case either way, what is less debatable is the simple fact that the demand for a restrained carceral state is one of the clearest positive articulations of working class politics that have emerged from a mass movement since the 2008 crash. When considered alongside his dismissiveness of contemporary organised labour, one is left with the impression that Jäger’s half-nostalgic relationship to the era of mass politics comes as much from an aesthetic distaste for the excesses and failures of the actually existing working class than a considered engagement with it.

Jäger’s chain of reasoning is clear enough: European Social Democracy was the highpoint of the working class’ ability to pose as a counter-power to capital. This counter-power was exemplified by mass parties and trade unions, which in turn grew from the fertile soil of thick social ties enabled by voluntary association. Without those close social bonds, the working class has been unable to act for itself and produce institutions through which its political objectives can be mediated. In the absence of those mediating institutions, atomised proletarians, left like Marx’s peasants in their potato sack, have articulated hollow and thoughtless radicalism rather than mature political demands. Jäger is wrestling with a real dilemma and it is admirable that he resists the temptation to pose reconstruction of this world as an easy solution, but ultimately it is his solution. He is left trying to tie together two isolated strategic answers to the condition of hyperpolitics that weren’t necessarily separable in the first place: the pre-political task of building civic association, and the reproduction of an idealised, mature European Social Democracy for the US. But in making an analytical retreat to a pre-political terrain of civic association, Jäger prefers to dissolve the people and elect a new one than take the world as it is, with all its fragmentation, failures and exuberances. Is hyperpolitics really worse than no politics at all, and is there no way through the hyperpolitical impasse other than turning our backs on it? 

Looking to the past for solutions to the present isn’t unwarranted, but we should approach institutionalisation as a good in itself with caution. Jäger’s schema posits institutionalisation and politicisation as quasi-independent variables when, as Mike Davis summed it up, ‘whether emphasis is placed on the repression of the labor left or simply the operation of a Michelsian ‘iron law of oligarchy’, the triumph of bureaucratism has usually been seen as the determinant event in the dissipation of activism at the base.’³ The relationship between politicisation and institutionalisation is more complicated than Jäger suggests. Integration into the state is hardly the most pressing problem for the socialist left, but a renewed process of institutionalisation would perhaps present as many problems as it solves. Class recomposition poses significant challenges for organising a working class fragmented along several lines. Work is more precarious, higher turnover and collective action is subject to significant legal restraints. These are challenges requiring significant thought to overcome, but they raise different strategic dilemmas than the ones Jäger centres. 

None of this criticism should be taken as a hollow ‘optimism of the will’, or an argument that weakened working class sociality isn’t a problem. Jäger is right to resist voluntarism, but a question for socialists confronting deindustrialisation and the fragmentation of the organised working class is whether solidarity, the foundational political factor in the labour movements’ ability to challenge the state and capital beyond sectional interests, emerged fully-formed from the end of an assembly line or from determined and sustained activity in hostile conditions. Combatting working class disorganisation will certainly require patience and persistence of a kind that is foreign to many of us. The only thing that will require more patience is waiting for pipe dreams of reindustrialisation to reproduce a labour movement comparable to its heights in the mass society. Jäger is not stupid and must know that promises of reinvigorated European and American manufacturing, even if they were to materialise and these firms were able to compete on international markets, will not automatically reproduce the labour movement of the 20th Century. In Stuart Hall’s words, a history of the present asks ‘what is the condition in which we now find ourselves, how did we get there, and what forces are creating it, in order that we might understand how to do something about it?’⁴ Jäger’s intervention balks at Hall’s final question, searching high and low for any movement of the working class to bring the left out of the wilderness except the one in front of him. He disdains hyperpolitical forms for their ‘low commitment, low cost, and all too often, low value’ character. To that, our geriatric nurse might respond: physician, heal thyself.

References

1. Gabriel Winant documents the latter case in his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt America ↩︎
2. Jackson Potter, What Other Unions Can Learn from the Historic Gains We Won in the Chicago Teachers Strike, ↩︎
3.  Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream ↩︎
4.  Stuart Hall, Studying the Conjuncture ↩︎