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Global Society needs Global History
Barry Buzan’s Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras is a big and an ambitious book. In this volume he tells us the story of 50,000 years of humankind by constructing a “world history” (p. xi) with the social structure of humankind as its object of study. In doing so, Buzan has undertaken two main tasks. First, he adopts an approach rooted in the global society perspective based on the English School to tell this story. More specifically, by social structure he means what the English School refers to as the primary institutions. Buzan divides the past fifty millennia into three eras – of the hunter-gatherer bands (HGBs), of the conglomerate agrarian/pastoralist empires (CAPE), and of modernity – and provides a magnificent grand theory by explaining the changes in material conditions, in the social structure, and in environmental/ecological factors across time.
Buzan’s ambition is to replace the traditional English School triad of key concepts – international system, international society, and world society – with his idea of three domains: interpolity, transnational, and interhuman domains. For Buzan, the social structure of humankind operates along these three domains. The social structure of humankind is “normally located across, and embedded within, not just one, but two or three [of these] domains” (p. 11). Indeed, he traces the rise and fall, and the transformation and replacement of the social structure across the three eras along these three domains to explain how an integrated world society gave way to our global society in the era of modernity. He specifically notes that “Global society means planetary in scale” (p. 33). In the final page of his magisterial book, he also calls for the English School to drop its “parochial-sounding and misleading label” and proposes that we call it the Global Society Approach (p. 426).
Second, and relatedly, Buzan’s quest is a larger one still, for he sees the Global Society Approach as an “invitation” to International Relations (IR) “to become Global IR” (p. 422). It is well-known that alongside Amitav Acharya, Buzan is one of the main scholars who have criticized the Eurocentric nature of IR theory while calling for a truly global discipline. In fact, Buzan also sees his Global Society Approach as linking IR with the related fields of Global Historical Sociology (GHS) and Global/World History (p. xiii). Not only does he incorporate the insights from the literature on International Political Economy (IPE) to his Global Society Approach given that the English School has generally tended to ignore IPE, but he also argues that the Global Society Approach is an “invitation” to build bridges with both GHS and Global History for they are engaged in complementary ways of thinking about the world (p. 421). Given his social and historical approach, Buzan is of the opinion that IR should aim towards the “macro-end of all the social sciences and History” (p. 426). In fact, he even argues that the ultimate goal should be “the making of an Earth System Social Science” (p. 426).
There is little doubt that this is a wonderful and thought-provoking book. Notably, Buzan’s hope is that the book has the potential to “open up a substantial research agenda” (p. 425) along the lines specified above. In line with these thoughts, I raise three points that call for the Global Society Approach to engage with Global History to widen its research agenda. Some of my points have to do with the larger themes of the book mentioned above, while others are relatively smaller issues in the sense that they are related to Buzan’s assertions and interpretations on specific issues/themes.
In the spirit of these sentiments, and as a scholar who has learned much from Buzan’s work, my first point is that the contours of the “world(s)” that existed during the CAPE era of Buzan’s integrated world societies (p. 149) are not really clear. For example, he notes that not until the end of the CAPE era “did the scale of these networks and connections become global, so this was a world with several ‘worlds’ that were either thinly and loosely connected (China and Europe), or not connected in any direct and sustained way at all (both China and Europe in relation to the Americas and Australia)” (p. 74). He also makes passing references to “the Silk Roads” and “the Indian Ocean trading system,” (for example, on p. 103), thereby seemingly implying that some of the “worlds” were perhaps larger than China and Europe. However, elsewhere he notes that his approach “does not aim at comparative civilizations within eras, but at comparative eras in their own right” (p. 42). This seems to imply that the “world(s)” and “societies” that Buzan is referring to are indeed broadly defined “civilizations” such as China and Europe (p. 71).
However, this is problematic at two levels, one conceptual and the other empirical. At the conceptual level, this creates difficulties for a full conversation with Global History. In Global History, the global is not planetary in scale as defined by Buzan and noted above. According to Drayton and Motadel, Global History is a conceptual approach to the study of the past that can be pursued through the comparative approach that “seeks to understand events in one place through examining their similarities with and differences from how things happened elsewhere,” or through the connective approach “that elucidates how history is made through the interactions of geographically (or temporally) separate communities.” In other words, connections and comparisons across different parts of the world are a part and parcel of the enterprise of Global History even if the scale is not truly planetary. By contrast, Buzan emphasizes cross-temporal comparisons as his goal is to show the emergence of the truly planetary global.
This focus on civilizations as the ‘world’ or ‘society’ under analysis also creates a significant empirical issue: it essentializes entire societies. For example, Buzan argues that the “caste system of Hinduism” rendered “the state somewhat marginal”, and consequently, India had “a rather ephemeral system of states, which became, like war, mainly the sport of kings” (p. 129) during the CAPE era. (For Buzan, “Much the same was true of Islam” too (p. 129)). There are too many generalizations and essentializations in these statements such as the equation of India with Hinduism, and that of Hinduism with caste. More problematically, “India” or the subcontinent is seen as a timeless region for the emergence (or not) of a “system of states”. But as argued by Subrahmanyam, the Global Historian (and historian of connections), India is best conceived of as a “crossroads”.
Elsewhere, I have argued that “South Asia” or “India” emerged as a “region” under the Mughal Empire (~1500—1750), for pre-Mughal Indian sub-regions were oriented towards different parts of Eurasia and the Indian Ocean for a millennium. In fact, a regional society re-emerged in South Asia after a millennium under the Mughals, and that Mughal South Asia was just one region of the Islamicate international system. (This is also important because Buzan (p. 367) is of the opinion that there were no “regions” in the CAPE era). Prior to that, in the ‘classical’ Hindu-Buddhist period (~600 BCE—300 CE), a dynamic and decentered Indian states system existed for centuries that was held together by ideas related to the management of power asymmetry in a culturally plural subcontinent. This classical India was itself a part of the South-West Eurasian international system that was deeply connected with the Iranian, Hellenistic, and Central Asian worlds. In the intermediate period between the classical and Mughal eras, there were states in the subcontinent that lasted for centuries and were consequently, hardly ephemeral. To put it crudely, while Buzan is interested in the connections and transformations across his three domains noted above, history is also full of connections across the taken-for-granted timeless worlds/societies (or civilizations) of his analysis. For what was “Indian” in these different time periods was emergent from such interactions. The same is also true for other world civilizations. Similarly, war cannot be simply dismissed as a “sport” in classical or Mughal India. The norms of classical India required the victor to reinstate the monarch of the vanquished as a subordinate ruler instead of territorially or institutionally incorporating the subordinate state. Similarly, the aim of Mughal warfare was not the destruction of the enemy, but their incorporation through “endless rounds of negotiations.”
The study and theorization of connections is an important subject matter of much of Global History. Furthermore, such connections were (trans)formative for many societies which leads me to my second point. For Buzan, unevenness is one of the main characteristics of the post-CAPE period of the transition to modernity (p. 300). Although not explicitly discussed or explained, Buzan himself implies that unevenness was also a characteristic of the CAPE era. Buzan notes that “Europe was a latecomer to the top table of Eurasian civilizations” (p. 225, emphasis added). Later, he refers to Europe as “a latecomer to development” (p. 265) again, and as a society that was “in many political, economic, and social respects, a backwater that was becoming more like the rest of the CAPE world” (p. 417, emphasis added). For Buzan, what enabled Europe to overcome its backwardness was its connections with other parts of the world, especially “the CAPE era trading and financing traditions and practices [picked up] from the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world” (p. 265).
In other words, there is an implicit comparison between different parts of the world even before the onset of global modernity in Buzan’s analysis that is not limited only to cross-era comparisons. While this obviously calls for more engagement with Global History, the larger point is that unevenness was also a feature of the CAPE era. How the ‘backward’ CAPE era societies like Europe overcame this unevenness may yet have a lot to teach us, especially if this unevenness is a “more durable” and “even permanent” condition of modernity (p. 301). What does the contemporary rise of Asia vis-à-vis the West mean for “the Rest” that are not rising due to this unevenness?
It should be noted that unevenness was also a feature of other times and of other places during the CAPE era. For example, state-like structures emerged in most of classical Southeast Asia through interactions with India across the Indian Ocean. Similarly, state-like structures emerged in Korea and Japan centuries after the emergence of such polities in China, and that they emerged through interactions with China. The different strategies and motives for overcoming unevenness may lead to the formation of different types of “societies” or orders across these connected spaces. This feature of history deserves more attention as it may provide us with insights to understand the causes and consequences of ‘the Rest’ catching-up (or not) with Asia and ‘the West’ as the core-periphery global society of the early phase of modernity transitions into deep pluralism.
My third and final point also has to do with issues of interpretation when the Global History perspective is not taken into consideration. For example, Buzan treats science as a primary institution or as a part of the social structure. Buzan argues that “the efflorescence” associated with this mode of knowledge “began to emerge in Europe” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 278), and that science was “carried worldwide by Western imperialism” (p. 280). However, according to Raj, who has called for a Global Historical approach to the history of science, “Europe’s unique role in the emergence of modern science” in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries is “a Cold War invention.” Instead of science being “carried” from Europe to elsewhere, science itself emerged in the relational context of “trade, diplomacy, wars and conquests, especially in the early modern world of increasing global interaction.”
The general thrust of my three points mentioned above do not undermine any of the core findings of Buzan’s work let alone his ambitions of building bridges with other fields. This is a marvelous book of breathtaking scope that will certainly attract other scholars to build upon Buzan’s insights. I also find myself in agreement with Buzan’s larger point that the world is moving towards “a more decentered international order” (p. 399). Furthermore, I am persuaded by Buzan’s claim that modernity will not be durable enough until it is ecologically stable (pp. 418-419). My basic argument is simply that the Global Society Approach needs Global History to fulfill its promise and potential.
The post Global Society needs Global History appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
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Settler Space: a spatial history of nineteenth-century Sydney
The critique of settler space is a pressing task in the context of movements for Indigenous justice in settler-colonial societies across the world. My recently awarded PhD thesis contributes to this critique by investigating the historical production of settler space, on the premise that thinking through this project of settler spatial history may help shed light on the contradictions and contours of settler spaces today. It is available to download from the University of Sydney Library here.
What I sought to understand through studying nineteenth-century Sydney was how Indigenous dispossession organises the production of space and how the production of space re-organises ongoing dispossession. For example, the early decades after invasion witnessed serial colonial violence in what Stephen Gapps calls The Sydney Wars, including state-organised massacres, which were the outcome of the colonial seizure of land and nature. Thus, this colonial violence was nested within relations of land, labour, and nature, and set the terms for the production of settler space. In turn, these relations were re-mobilised and transformed over the course of the century alongside mutating settler projects of dispossession.
The historical arc of my argument is bookended by the landing of settlers in 1788, and the colonial violence that ensued, and the centennial celebrations of 1888, which were accompanied by a spate of state activity in shaping urban space. My purpose was not to recapitulate the history of Sydney, as such, but to develop an account of the distinctive production of settler space through a spatial history of this period.
Towards this end, I proposed that we can usefully criticise the production of settler space through a critical reworking of Henri Lefebvre’s account of the production of space, in dialogue with contemporary settler-colonial theory. Lefebvre aimed at a critique of space on the grounds that it was through space that capitalist social relations are sustained. In his words:
Social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial.
He goes on to say that analysis of such social relations “must imply and explain a genesis and constitute a critique” of the processes which produce the space in question.
Likewise, a critique of settler space is required because it is through space that settler social relations are sustained. What Lefebvre provides to this task is a geographical and historical materialist account of the production of space: one which is sensitive to the complex layering of space, from the imperial and global to the everyday and local, all of which is piled on top of itself in the tumultuous accumulation of history.
This is borne out in Lefebvre’s project of spatial history, which I argue is fundamental to his critique of space, drawing also from others such as Stuart Elden. For those interested in the conceptual underpinnings of Lefebvre, my thesis sets out the links between his ‘rural sociology’ of the 1950s – where he developed the regressive–progressive method and explored Marx’s theory of ground-rent and landed property – and his later work in The Production of Space. These connections, especially around land and ground-rent, pose some fruitful lines of inquiry into the formation of settler landed property.
At the same time, however, I argue that we need to critically appraise the limits to Lefebvre. As Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena have argued, despite Lefebvre’s criticisms of colonisation, he does not go far enough because his account “does not adequately specify the distinction between different varieties of ‘colonisation’ and their particular forms of determination.” For the critique of settler space, the value of Lefebvre rests in his method and his commitment to an open and fragmented concept of totality, but the specifics of his critique of space need to be reworked in the context of settler-colonialism and the foundational role of dispossession. My thesis provides a critical reconstruction of Lefebvre’s project of spatial history, illuminating both his method and how his key concepts (including the concept of abstract space) are coordinated through a European spatial history.
One distinctive feature of (some, but not all) settler spaces today is the separation of their histories of dispossession from the production of space. On the surface, there is very little that marks out settler spaces as settler or dispossessed Indigenous lands. This separation can be seen in how signifiers of Indigenous history and sovereignty – like some place-names, or signs along walking tracks – almost appear to be on a different spatial plane, so to speak, separated from the circulations of labour and capital, or the markets for land and housing, or the sundry humdrum activities of life. These are part of a liberal politics of recognition that, as Glen Sean Coulthard argues, aims to “reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.”
Elaborating how this came about, and its continuity today, requires drawing together the historic moments from which this separation originated, as well as their mutation over time. I explore a crucial originating moment for this separation through a study of the public works and architecture of the Macquarie period (1810–1821). These interventions in the built and natural environment express what I term the logic of devisualisation, evident also in the set image to this blog post by Frederick Garling Jr. of Sydney Cove, or Warrane (1839). Here I refer to the erasure of Aboriginal presence, life, and sovereignty, in the face of their ongoing presence, survival, and resistance. This was predicated on the attempt to consolidate a peculiar moral order of space: one which linked the moral reformation of the convict with relations of land, labour, and nature, and buttressed by colonial violence.
This logic is taken up and reformulated in successive periods of the production of settler space, coordinated through shifting relations of landed property. By turning to a Marxist account of landed property, and drawing on the theory of ground-rent, the thesis offers a set of insights into the materialist dialectics of settler property formation, and how this underpins the mutating production of settler space.
On this point, the thesis advances on critiques of the spatial abstractions of settler societies which address specific state spatial technologies (e.g. surveying) and forms of property title (e.g. Torrens title). Drawing on Lefebvre’s emphasis within the critique of space on underpinning social relations, I follow how the abstraction of landed property was achieved through its internalisation within imperial circuits of capital and, in parallel, with the rising capacity of the settler state to shape the production of space. It was these social relations which impelled the rapid pace of dispossession through the pastoral frontier, and which in turn reshaped the production of settler space within the Sydney Basin.
The upshot of this view is that it enables us to trace how the logic of devisualisation is reformulated through the emergence of settler abstract space. As an example, I explore the making by the settler state of some of Sydney’s oldest parks – Moore and Centennial Parks, amongst others – from their origins as peri-urban commons into emblems of a “civilised” and prosperous city. These projects required complex webs of finance, debt, and rent, and were nested within internal settler struggles over landed property. The outcome was the invocation of an urban aesthetics of nature, inspired by the imperial heartland, and which sought to forge a nativist settler society.
On the whole, the account provided by the thesis is one of settler space as a dynamic system of domination, articulated through specific interests and agents, that creatively reformulates its own conditions as part of its socio-spatial reproduction. By no means is this a unitary or static project or logic: rather, contradictions and tensions internal to settler society abound. The perspective provided by the spatial history developed in this thesis, then, might enable opportunities for the contemporary movement for Indigenous justice to exploit the fractures and interstices of settler spaces.
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Making of the song "So long"
A behind-the-scenes video, talking about the making of our song "So long".
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From a simple keyboard line to a melody recorded on a phone to avoid being forgotten. We talk about the early versions of the song and what we remember of the process as we wrote the song.
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On Southern Authoritarian Populism
During the 2010s, many states across the global South turned decisively to the right. Foreshadowed by the rise of Recep Erdogan in Turkey in the early 2000s, a wave of authoritarian populism swept political figures like Mahinda Rajapaksa, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, and Narendra Modi into power with very substantial popular mandates. More recently, Javier Milei secured victory in a face-off with centre-left candidate Sergio Massa in Argentina’s presidential election, and elsewhere, for example in South Africa and Indonesia, southern authoritarian populism constitutes a significant undercurrent that is shifting established political terrains in important ways.
However, whereas authoritarian populism is a political force to be reckoned with across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, it is Euro-America, as Gillian Hart has noted, that remains the focus of the vast bulk of writing on far-right politics in the current conjuncture. If we agree that it is an important task to address this bias and to conceptualize southern authoritarian populism in its own right, it is also necessary to ask ourselves how we should approach this task – in short, how should we study authoritarian populism in the global South?
In my current work, I attempt to do this by breaking away from one of the dominant trends in Euro-American scholarship, which is to focus on the performance of right-wing populism as a distinctive political style. Such approaches have yielded insights into the discursive logic of right-wing populism, but they have had relatively little to say about the political economy of authoritarian populism. In contrast, my ongoing research shifts the focus of attention back to the interplay between accumulation strategies, class formation, and forms of state. Most fundamentally, I ask how authoritarian populism works as a hegemonic project in a specific conjuncture of uneven development across the regions of the global South.
In addition to borrowing the key concept that I use in this work – authoritarian populism – from Stuart Hall, I also take my more general bearings from his notion of conjunctural analysis. I am more concerned with understanding what Hall referred to as strategic shifts in the political and ideological conjuncture than with the level of pure theoretical abstraction that Marxist scholarship is often excessively invested in. The reason for this is simple: our conjuncture is one in which the stakes are too high to waste time on the higher mysteries of abstract theory. If we instead clarify our understanding of the workings of southern authoritarian populism as a concrete political process, this might serve as a modest contribution to a wider debate about the kind of counterhegemonic collective action that is required to disrupt, effectively, such reactionary projects.
Uneven geographies of development
Where do we begin to build such an understanding? My suggestion is that we start with the changing coordinates of early twenty-first century development. Most countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America are today middle-income countries. This is a result of processes of economic growth which have challenged developmental cartographies that pivot on a simple counterpoint between a rich North and a poor South. Indeed, some scholars read these trends as pushing towards economic convergence across the North-South axis of the world-system.
It is undeniable that between-country inequality has decreased in recent decades. However, what some think of as a new geography of development is also a new geography of poverty. In fact, as Andy Sumner’s work has shown, more than 70% of the world’s poor live in Southern middle-income countries. This poverty, in turn, is intimately linked to deepening inequality rather than to an absolute dearth of material resources. In his most recent work, Sumner attributes this to the nature of economic growth in the global South after the end of the Cold War. Since the 1990s, he argues, Southern growth processes have hinged on integration into global value chains. While this has offered a pathway from low-income to middle-income status for many countries, it is ultimately a diminished form of industrialization characterized by falling labour shares of income, weak employment growth, and an expanding informal sector. The net result of this is a deepening of within-country inequality, and a situation where working classes across the global South hover somewhere between absolute poverty and security from future poverty. In this grey zone, various degrees of precarity are very much the norm.
We need to conceive of these dynamics in more complex terms than those offered by the notion of “middle-income traps” that countries can escape by applying technical policy tweaks. Instead, we must understand that we are confronting what Toby Carroll has referred to as the death of development. This is a result of how neoliberal accumulation strategies are centred on forms of low-level profit-oriented activity that cannot bring about the kind of structural transformation and material progress that is normally associated with the term development. And this also explains why, as Tania Murray Li has argued in a recent intervention, it is no longer possible to think of capitalist development in terms of transition narratives.
This scenario is profoundly turbulent. The 2010s, we do well to recall, was a mass protest decade across the global South, beginning with the Arab uprisings of 2011 and 2012, and culminating with mass revolts in countries like Chile and Lebanon in 2019. What this signifies is that the very same accumulation strategies that have propelled the so-called rise of the South have thrown up crises of legitimation for governing elites across Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These crises have the potential to destabilize and disrupt hegemonic configurations in very substantial ways. In this sense, the current conjuncture can well be thought of as an interregnum in Gramsci’s sense of the term – that is, as a long and drawn out period of organic crisis, in which the old is dying while the new cannot be born. And southern authoritarian populism is one of those “morbid symptoms” that tend to appear in such conjunctures.
Constructing consent for authoritarian populism
In essence, southern authoritarian populism is best understood as a hegemonic project that seeks to shore up subaltern consent for neoliberal orders that for most, if not all, intents and purposes are dead, but which still stubbornly refuse to lie down.
Across national and regional contexts in the global South, authoritarian populism propagates political vocabularies which draw a line between an authentic people (based on factors such as religion, race and ethnicity, sexuality, or moral qualities) and their enemies within, which are constituted as a composite of ominous Others (religious minorities, subaltern racial and ethnic groups, queer people, foreigners, or criminal underclasses) and corrupt elites. The coercive power of the state, these vocabularies assert, must be deployed to defend the people against their nemeses, while strongman leaders guide the nation on its path to prosperity. Significantly, these hegemonic projects have managed to gain cross-class support: across national cases, southern authoritarian populism is nourished by composite constituencies that tend to consist of old elites, new middle classes, and precarious working classes.
The Bolsonaro regime in Brazil, for example, came to power in 2018 based on a political vocabulary that pitted a virtuous, hardworking, law-abiding people against the criminal vagabond as their Other and promised to use the full force of the state to quell the threat posed by criminals and other deviants. Bolsonaro ultimately won 55% of the vote, and made significant gains among working classes who had experienced some social mobility and material improvement under the left-of-centre Workers’ Party. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency in 2016 with a very similar message. His authoritarian populist project won significant support among the working poor. And in India, Narendra Modi has secured two terms in power by dramatically expanding support for the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) among lower caste groups and poor people.
But how exactly is subaltern consent won for authoritarian populism? After all, these are conservative hegemonic projects that pursue neoliberal accumulation strategies which only deepen the inequality and precarity that has come to define growth processes in Southern middle-income countries. A central part of any answer to this question has to reckon with the fact that, across democracies in the global South, authoritarian populism has managed to harness complex structures of feeling that permeate precarious subaltern lifeworlds.
What I refer to here are those emotional cultures of precarity that Harry Pettit has identified in his work on unemployed young men in urban Egypt, in which attachments to aspirations of social mobility and affluence – aspirations that are unlikely to be realized – intertwine with anxieties about social decline and the disaffection that such anxieties engender. Such composite structures of feeling naturally prevail in contexts where many people inhabit “a fuzzy zone between absolute poverty and security from future poverty”. It is in this zone that authoritarian populism does crucial hegemonic work for governing elites and dominant groups across large parts of the global South in the early twenty-first century.
In the case of Brazil, ethnographic work by Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Scalco has shown that popular support for Bolsonaro was grounded in a form of conservative subjectivity that crystallized among subaltern voters in urban peripheries. While the Workers’ Party boosted consumption among the urban working poor, the economic crisis that hit the country during the mid-2010s eroded many of these gains. This combined with heightened levels of violent crime to spur anxiety and disillusionment among groups that had benefited from moderate social mobility since the early 2000s. Bolsonaro’s authoritarian populism was able to harness the conservative political subjectivity that emerged out of these processes by pitting the image of a virtuous, hardworking, law-abiding people against the figure of the criminal vagabond, and promising to use the full force of the state to quell the threat posed by the latter against the former.
Similarly, in the Philippines, Duterte tapped into the entanglement of anxiety and hope in poor communities – anxieties about the corrosive impact of violent crime and hopes for future material improvement. Appealing to a quintessentially neoliberal moral universe that counterposed good entrepreneurial citizens to their evil and immoral others, Duterte was able to elicit support from poor people without pursuing structural reforms in a deeply unequal society.
In these dynamics, we are witnessing how southern authoritarian populism works as a hegemonic project: it engages with what Hall referred to as genuine contradictions in society. Authoritarian populism, he argued, doesn’t dupe people. It addresses “real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions” that are acutely felt by subaltern groups. However, it does so in a way that aligns emergent structures of feeling with right-wing politics and, in the context of the global South today, perpetuates neoliberalization.
Of course, southern authoritarian populism does this with varying degrees of success. This is evident in the differential life span of the governing regimes that these projects spawn. Bolsonaro only lasted one term in Brazil, but his presidency clearly signalled that the far right is a force to be reckoned with on the country’s political stage. In the Philippines, Duterte exited the presidency in 2022, but power was passed to Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, son of the country’s erstwhile dictator. He quickly appointed Duterte’s daughter to a senior position in his government, which is likely to pursue an authoritarian agenda.
Other regimes are more durable, and it is worth looking at them in more detail to understand just how southern authoritarian populism works to garner subaltern consent. For example, in India, Modi’s BJP has won two consecutive landslide victories – first in 2014 and then again in 2019 – and the party looks set to repeat the achievement in the general election happening later this year. As I mentioned above, these victories are in large part a result of the fact that the BJP, which conventionally found its constituency among upper caste groups, the middle classes, and the rich, has managed to expand support among lower caste groups and poor Indians. This is happening in a context where the top 10% of the population earns 50% of national income and owns 65% of national wealth, while the poorest 50% of the Indian population earns 13% of all national income and owns 6% of national wealth. According to economist Jean Drèze, the real wages of agricultural labourers, construction workers, and non-agricultural workers was less than 1% per annum between 2014 and 2022. So how does Modi and the BJP manage to prevent this social crisis from morphing into a political crisis?
This question finds its answer, in no small part, in the psychological wages that Modi’s authoritarian populism offers to India’s subaltern citizens and working poor. Anchored in a foundational division between an authentic Indian people and their anti-national enemies within (dynastic political elites, dissenters, and, above all, the country’s Muslim minority) and the promise of making India a Hindu nation, this project also assures the people that prosperity will materialize as India completes its long overdue rise to economic and political power in the world-system. This neoliberal Hindu nationalism offers a double promise: on the one hand, a promise of development that appeals simultaneously to aspirations of social mobility and anxieties about social decline among people living just on the brink of abysmal poverty; on the other hand, a promise of dignity, predicated on a common Hinduness, that is often denied to those on the lower rungs of India’s caste system.
This double promise, and the psychological wages that it contains, is in turn the pivot of organizing and mobilizing by a reactionary social movement network that has worked patiently and persistently over a century-long period to change Indian society. Originating in the 1920s, this movement network is known as the Sangh Parivar – the Family of Organizations – and has burrowed its way through India’s civil society since then. This movement infrastructure has been crucial in enabling the electoral victories of 2014 and 2019, and in sustaining what appears to be a very durable hegemony for Modi’s authoritarian populism in a deeply unequal society.
Constructing social movements from below
Where does this leave us in terms of how we think of counterhegemonic collective action? The first thing to acknowledge is that despite the mass protests of the 2010s, the victories of progressive social movements from below have been fewer and further between than the wins registered by reactionary social movements from above. These wins are, most fundamentally, the outcome of the ability of right-wing forces to build the kind of cross-class historical blocs that I have outlined in this essay, and which are needed to animate the current zombie phase of neoliberalism. This, in short, is the adhesive of authoritarian populism.
It follows that progressive politics from below will have to revolve, to a very significant extent, around the work of disrupting and unravelling the vertical vectors of the historical blocs that southern authoritarian populism has constructed. This work must be carried out in the knowledge that hegemonic configurations are always unstable. Dominant groups and governing elites are compelled, as Raymond Williams put it, to continually renew, recreate, defend, and modify specific forms of hegemony in contentious negotiations with dominant groups.
These processes of hegemonic renewal are the point of entry for the counterhegemonic work of disruption, which must aim to fracture reactionary imaginaries of “the people” and subaltern attachments to these imaginaries. This also entails building new alliances between subaltern groups grounded in emancipatory political subjectivities and projects which address the “real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions” that uneven development gives rise to across the global South through radical structural reforms. If a new world is to be born at all, this is the work that will help deliver it.
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Welcoming Australia’s newest literary journal
South Australia is about to launch a new national literary journal!
Crucial Steps to API 570 Certification: Paving the Path for Piping Inspectors
The world of piping inspection holds a vital role in ensuring the integrity and safety of pipelines in various industries. Achieving API 570 certification is a significant milestone for professionals aiming to excel in piping inspection. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the crucial steps to API 570 certification, offering insights into the certification…
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Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation – Part I: Contesting Neoliberal Social Policy
Neoliberalism changed many things in Australia. Unions are weaker. Inequality is higher. But exactly what changed is often surprising. The state did not shrink. Social spending did not decrease, nor did it become less redistributive. Household wealth has increased rapidly, but largely due to changes in social policy rather than rising productivity.
The relationship between liberalisation and the welfare state is both more central and more complicated than we often imagine. In Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation I sought to move beyond a lament for declining egalitarianism, and to instead learn from the political strategies that have mitigated and even reduced inequality in hard times.
The book examines case studies from three forms of liberalisation – targeting benefits, marketizing services and financialising the life course. Through each I highlight different models of reform that are broadly consistent with liberalisation (means-testing benefits, facilitating private service providers or using asset-debt relations), yet have different political and distributional consequences.
Asymmetric budget rules
To unpack these differences, I use theories of state finance (which Gareth Bryant and I explore elsewhere) that explain the size and structure of the state’s economic role. Liberalisation both seeks to constrain and redefine state finance. Key to Australia’s expertise is a strong focus on the size of the state, as measured by the tax to GDP ratio (and social spending to GDP).
From the 1980s Labor has been committed to the so called ‘trilogy’, promising not to raise taxes, social spending or debt as a proportion of the economy. That commitment breaks a decades long post-War trend across high income countries for the welfare state and taxes to grow faster than incomes. This strong fiscal constraint rules out most traditional social democratic strategies for advancing equality.
Alongside fiscal constraint, liberalisation also remakes the state to resemble the market. Competition policy reorganises state finance. Each service is fiscally separated, allowing corporatisation and privatisation, and competition within social provision. Enforced competition underpins both marketisation and financialisation.
But the construction of the state in market terms doesn’t produce the ‘level playing field’ it promises. Market rules allow private providers to access uniquely ‘private’ advantages, but are applied to government in ways that prevent the state doing likewise. Corporations can borrow to invest more easily than states (even though they are riskier). State promises to pay for citizens’ pensions or healthcare are reimagined as liabilities, but the future taxes to fund them don’t count as assets.
These budgetary asymmetries reflect the challenges of applying accounting rules designed for the private sector (which focus on profitability and solvency) to the public sector (that doesn’t return profits and can’t go bankrupt). Those challenges are combined with a good dose of politics and self-interest to use budget rules to constrain state action.
Asymmetric budget rules help to break the older social democratic politics of the post-War era. They make it harder to use politics to simply take some parts of life out of the market – to decommodify welfare through public finance. Instead, they push governments towards quasi-market solutions.
The dual welfare state
Traditionally social policy has expanded by asserting different criteria for social spending than for market activity. However, many of the strategies that advanced equality did the opposite – they attempted to treat taxation and spending in the same way to show how market advocates were not so much winding back the state as they were creating a ‘hidden’ or ‘dual’ welfare state. Market advocates had worked out how to structure public spending as tax cuts and structure tax increases in spending cuts.
The history of the dual welfare state pre-dates liberalisation. Mid-century public budget rules were constructed to aid macro economic management by tracing how much demand the state was adding or subtracting from the economy. Thus, budgets focused on cash flows in real time. Macro economically, a tax cut is pretty much the same as a spending increase. Politically, though, the fiscal constraints of liberalisation made them worlds apart. A tax cut fit Labor’s trilogy rules, a spending increase broke them.
The hidden welfare state works by disguising fiscal support for the better off as tax cuts – such as the tax concessions once enjoyed for having a stay-at-home wife and still enjoyed on capital gains – and constructing bigger fiscal claims on low-income folks as tighter means-tests. It is not just that tax concessions work like spending, but are not budgeted like spending, or means-tests have almost identical effects to marginal income tax rates, it’s that the politics reverses. Citizens resist spending on the rich and tax claims on the poor, but tolerate tax concessions and means-testing.
Where more egalitarian social policy did advance, it often did so by revealing these asymmetries and finding ways to reframe state finance. Australia decreased child poverty more rapidly than almost any other high-income country in the 1980s and 90s, but if you count tax concessions as expenditure, the total amount spent barely moved. Feminists successfully resisted the tight targeting of new family spending – although they failed to make it entirely universal. Almost all the new money needed for Medibank (the first version of Medicare) came from closing tax concessions for private health.
The strategies used to expand social spending applied market logics to manage the limits of state finance more consistently. The two accounting techniques that support these strategies – tax expenditure statements and effective marginal tax rates – apply orthodox economic and tax principles, rather than asserting an alternative ‘social’ logic. A similar extension of economic principles pushed in the other direction, not to clarify the boundaries of the state, but to facilitate the state taking on ‘market’ roles.
Hybrid policy tools
Where the hidden welfare state presents the state as more egalitarian than it really is, the financialisation of the state often suggests it is more privatised than it is. Budgetary changes designed to facilitate the corporatisation of state functions created unexpected opportunities for the state to act like a private firm. Of course, the state did shift functions from public to private, but it also extended its reach to invest, insure, lend and underwrite in hybrid forms that combine public and private logics, marketizing social life while also socialising risk.
We often forget just how marketized Medicare is. Its power comes not through traditional nationalisation, but as a public competitor to existing private (hospital, health insurance, health services) markets. Because Australia lacks a strong tradition of virtually any form of socialised care, marketisation enabled the state to enter the market as a competitor, rather than undermining an existing public monopoly. Medicare’s structure promised to lower medical inflation (and thus costs to government) through competition, while avoiding constitutional barriers to overt nationalisation.
Similarly, student loans are clearly market-like compared to ordinary tax and spend policies, but they are not market contracts. The debts are issued and collected by the state, and their conditions reflect social principles around ability to pay. Likewise, the newly established Housing Affordability Future Fund is invested entirely in market products, but because it is a public fund, its proceeds follow social principles.
These hybrid policies are not a public finance. They remain marketized, and thus more limited instruments of egalitarian social policy. But nor are they private finance, even though the expansion of hybrid models seems to defy the fiscal constraints of liberalisation. Our tools for understanding hybridity are underdeveloped, making it hard to evaluate policy alternatives and challenge inequalities. In many cases, what appear as technical changes (like how super funds operate), are the most consequential for determining just how public or private a hybrid model is.
Contests around dual and hybrid welfare continue to dominate welfare politics. The most promising campaigns to expand state finance continue to emphasis tax concessions. Linking the concessions in our housing and superannuation systems to addressing the increasingly generational inequalities they produce has the potential to mobilise a powerful new politics. Likewise, despite its extreme fiscal caution on social issues (not submarines) Labor’s HAFF appears to have simply created money out of nothing. There is no new tax or conventional fiscal claim at all, yet there is new spending.
Understanding the policy tools at stake in liberalised welfare is only half the story. Converting tax concessions into spending, highlighting the disincentives of means-testing and mobilising the state as an insurer or lender all aid egalitarian strategies, helping to navigate the fiscal constraints applied by liberalisation. But none of these changes advanced through clever design alone. All were hard fought through contentious politics. Importantly connecting policy design to political mobilisation involved a very similar hybrid logic, where liberalisation’s attempt to turn everything into a market was met by a feminist counter-movement to contest the social as the economic – which I explore in Part 2 of this post.
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Revolutionizing Healthcare: The Potential Future Paths of Digital Surgery and MedTech
Embarking on a journey into the future of healthcare, delve into the transformative world of digital surgery and MedTech. Uncover a landscape where cutting-edge technology intertwines with compassionate care, reshaping how medical interventions unfold. This exploration is not just about the future; it’s about addressing a concern you might share. It’s the accessibility and efficacy…
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