socialism – The Duke Reader

Love With Chinese Characteristics

26 Jun 202214 Mar 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China, Charlie Yi Zhang, Duke University Press, 2022.**

In Dreadful Desires, Charlie Yi Zhang advocates “a new approach” and “a different perspective” on love and neoliberalism in contemporary China. As he describes it, “My study integrates the discursive with the ethnographic and combines grave scrutiny of political economies and empirical data with upbeat examinations of popular cultures.” His grave and upbeat essay documents how a neoliberal market logic permeates expressions of love and aspirations for a good life, and how a fiercely competitive conjugal market, polarized gender relationships, and residency-differenciated precarities in turn produce willful subjects who are ready to sacrifice their well-being to maximize the interests of the state and capital. Its content and writing style also reflect his personal background and professional training. Having left China in his late twenties to pursue an academic career in the US, Zhang returned to his homeland for a few months of fieldwork in 2012 in order to complete his PhD in gender studies at Arizona State University. He was subsequently hired by the University of South Dakota to teach global studies to undergraduate students for two years, then landed a job as Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Kentucky University, where he completed his book manuscript. During his graduate studies, his sociology professor taught him “how to combine different methodologies into [his] unique voice.” He claims to have developed “a novel theoretical and methodological approach” that builds an “epistemic ground for fundamental change.” His ambition is no less than “to lay the foundation for better futures” and “to develop a different understanding of global neoliberalism and to transform the current system.” His book is published in the Thought in the Act series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, two Canadian theoreticians working at the intersection of philosophy and art critique.

Methodology and theory-building

Zhang’s methodology is far from unique in cultural studies and social science. He uses the standard anthropological method that relies upon informal conversations, focus group discussions, and direct observations collected in two Chinese cities, Hai’an and Wuxi, located in the Jiangsu province north of Shanghai. The first is a county-level city of one half-million inhabitants that encompasses rural areas and industrial zones on the south-western shores of the Yellow Sea; the second is a prefecture-level city of more than five million people in the southern delta of the Yangtze River with a rich history of silk weaving and artistic expression. During his four months of fieldwork, Zhang interviewed over a hundred rural migrants and local farmers or workers, men and women, asking questions about love, family life, and aspirations for the future. He “spent considerable time in the homes and dormitories of [his] informants” and at “various locations of production, such as construction sites, factories, small workshops, family mills, and farms.” He also participated in “nonproductive activities such as family dinners, birthday parties, weddings, festival celebrations, and mundane chores.” There are only two chapters, however, that are organized around his analysis of field data. The remaining three chapters, two of which were published in academic journals in earlier versions, offer a commentary on cultural productions and events, namely the sixtieth-anniversary ceremony of the regime’s founding in 1949, a popular TV reality show titled If You Are the One, and an analysis of middle-aged women’s passion for danmei fictions featuring same-sex relations between beautiful young men, based on a sample of sixteen fans. These chapters are written in the ethnographic tradition that combines factual description and abstract theorizing. Although he quotes data on China’s economic development and social transformation taken from the popular press and expert reports, Zhang does not use quantitative methods, structured questionnaires, or comparative case studies.

It is on the theoretical front that Zhang displays more originality and novelty. To quote from the introduction, he takes “a feminist intersectionnal approach to interrogate and untangle the mechanism that the Chinese state relies upon to define and redefine the affective parameters of desire and intimacy in binaristic terms of gender, class, sexuality, and ethno-race.” He also takes a “queer of color critique approach […] to foreground power relationships and engage the becoming aspects of the machinery to interrogate its speculative manipulation of affective ecologies.” He borrows from Judith Butler’s playbook the idea that “gender is intentional and performative” and that anatomical sex, gender identity, and embodied performance do not always align. He is attuned to the thinking of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Brian Massumi, who have developed new ways of articulating affective economies to neoliberalism. Ahmed allows him to present a “postorthodox Marxist perspective” in which affect is viewed as a different form of capital, which “does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation.” Berlant is another important source of inspiration: a dithyrambic endorsement on the book’s back cover advances that “Zhang offers to do for love in China what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, does for hope.” As for Massumi, also associated with the affective turn in cultural studies, Zhang borrows his model of affective temporality that conflates an anticipatory present, a promisory future and a virtualized past. All three authors allow him to address “the theoretical lacunae that leaves affect, emotions, and feelings fatally underdiscussed in scholarly examinations of neoliberal subject and world making.”

The borderless Loveland and the difference-making machinery

Zhang’s distinctive contribution to social theory is to build a bridge between emotional affect and calculative reason, between love and neoliberalism. He brings affect theory to bear on political economy reasoning and geopolitical considerations. Specifically, love and aspirations for the good life are used strategically by the state to obtain acquiescence and participation in a polarized market economy. Class disparities and gender differences are exploited by the authoritarian state to recreate competition from within and to serve capital’s productive ends. Zhang also proposes a vast array of idiosyncratic concepts and neologisms to make sense of the entaglement between reason and affect in neoliberal China. He situates his ethnography in “the borderless Loveland,” an “affectsphere” or “fantasmatic lovescape” that shapes people’s love and caring capacities in order to harness China’s national interest with the transnational interests of capital. The Loveland is to be understood as a topological notion, not a geographical concept, as the author draws “a speculative topography of the everyday sensibilities.” The Loveland extends its reach beyond mainland China; it is alternatively presented as “borderless” or within boundaries that are “indeterminate” or “expansive.” Zhang’s creative use of topology extends to the concepts of biopolitics and biopower borrowed from Michel Foucault. The first, assimilated with calculative reason and state power, follows a top-down, vertical axis; while the second, located on the immanent plane of affects, circulates horizontally. Feminist scholarship complicates this two-dimensional diagram by introducing a “multilayered and multifaceted architecture” where domination and resistance are “multidirectional and multidimensionnal.” These overlapping layers consist of gender, class, ethno-race, and sexuality. The assemblage of these orthogonal coordinates and multiple dimensions give shape to what the author calls the “difference-making machinery,” a polarizing mechanism that pits disenfranchized groups against another to allow for their compound exploitation by the nation-state and multinational corporations. This neoliberal machinery “integrates the borderless Loveland into the regulatory biopolitical system to drive and sustain China’s marketization and reintegration into the global economy.”

Dreadful Desires documents two different moves: the colonization of love and sentiments by the market and the state, and the way “lovable and love-able” subjects in turn uphold the functioning of the market and the expansion of the state’s interests. The encroachment of a neoliberal logic upon the emotional lifeworld of Chinese citizens is illustrated by the TV date game show If You Are the One, a copycat of a British TV reality show with added Chinese characteristics. The crass materialism of female participants is illustrated by the attitude of one young woman who, asked by a male suitor if she would “like to go out for a ride on my bicycle”, bluntly answers: “I would rather be crying in a BMW car!” In the show as in real life, it is standard for a Chinese woman to evaluate a potential male partner’s worth and accomplishments by asking him questions about his educational background, job, salary, amount of savings in the bank, ownership of property and cars, and so on. Indeed, having an appartment, a luxury car, a hefty savings account and a high-paying job has replaced the “four big items” (si dajian) that prospective grooms were supposed to possess under Maoist China: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a wristwatch, and a radio. A new kind of masculinity has emerged, which valorizes entrepreneurship, business acumen, and material possessions. As for women, the requisites placed upon them are no less stringent. The “three good girl” (sanhao nüsheng), a honorary title for meritous students under Maoism, used to designate girls with good morality, good learning, and good health. Now women have to respond to superlative standards of attractiveness, including breast size and leg length; hold glamorous jobs in the service sector; and be ready to carry out expanded family duties to support their husband, in-laws, and future children. These impossible requiements are exerting a heavy toll on Chinese masculinities and feminities. The amount of cash and gifts exchanged in a wedding ceremony can result in lifelong debt for the average family. Migrant workers working on construction sites or women in textile factories stand ready to sacrifice their health and well-being in the hope of a better future, if not for them, then at least for their children. But the dream of a good life is forever deferred: “the harder they try, the more they are alienated from their homes.”

Xi Jinping’s love and peace ideology

The Chinese state is complicit in the exploitation of labor by capital and the reproduction of oppositional differences out of the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality. It fuels the construction boom that sacrifices migrant workers on the altar of economic development and excludes them from the cities they have helped build. It pits categories of labor and gender roles against each other, while repressing nonnormative forms of intimity in the name of “homepatriarchy”—a portmanteau word that combines heteronormativity, male privilege, state authoritarianism, and home ownership. For Zhang, internal migrations and the hukou system of residence registration play the role that racial segregation occupies in racially-divided America or in South Africa under apartheid. Hukou registration gives access to education, medical care, basic life insurance, and other social services. It considerably enhances the value of a prospective bride or groom on the marriage market; bachelors lacking the urban residence permit must work harder and save more to improve their marriageability, or find a bride from a poorer area of China or a less-developed country such as Vietnam. To be sure, the socialist state run by the Chinese Communist Party cannot condone class hierarchies and labor exploitation. New regulation on TV dating shows now mandates diversity of participants and equality of treatment—even though the guy with the biggest property portfolio still gets the girl. Drawing upon Marxist-Leninist ideology, the party-state extolls the eradication of class differences and the liberation of China from exploitation and oppression; but in the choreographied extravaganza of the sixtieth anniversary ceremony, gender difference reemerges in the celebration of the post-reform era as a way “to conceal the new class structure and class differentiation.” The figure of Xi Jinping, construed as a benevolent father and a good husband to the nation, reinforces the patriarchal nature of the regime. The party-state offers love and harmony as a solution to internal developments and external challenges; but in the eyes of the author, “China’s love-gilded cosmopolitan dream proves no less pernicious than the hate-filled paranoia stoked by incendiary nationalists” such as Donald Trump in the United States.

Is Charlie Yi Zhang a Marxist? He shows little interest for the historical Marx, noting only his endorsement of normative heterosexualiy as the foundation for human and societal development. He prefers to borrow from Petrus Liu a “queer Marxist approach” that rejects “inclusion as a mode of social redress.” He retains from Marxism and radical thought the role of crisis and contradictions in fostering political upheaval and social change. The “difference-making machinery” is ripe with contradictions and fault lines, the first being the “contradictory needs of freewheeling capital and the border-making nation-state.” Zhang uses the concept of apparatus that he borrows from Marxist thought; but whereas for Louis Althusser apparatuses were an emanation of the state and reflected its repressive or ideological functions, Zhang refers to “a fantasmatic apparatus of desire and intimacy” that draws people to “work hard, dream big, and die slowly.” Like Marx, Zhang also believes that the role of critical theory is not just to interpret the world, but to change it. His declared goal is “to find a place where the subalterns can survive and to help lay a foundation for long-run transformation.” Exposing the dissonance between promise and fulfillment in the “borderles Loveland” is bound to send shockwaves to the system, shattering the “life-sustaining fantasy” on which it is built. His economy of affects places contradiction and change solely on the side of the reproduction of capital, neglecting entirely the relations of production and the reproduction of labor that form the bedrock of Marx’s thought. Indeed, borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s “economic model of emotions” where capital and affect are the sole factors of production and reproduction, he completely ignores labor as the primary scene of class antagonism and alienation. The only form of labor that is acknowledged in this affect-dominated economy is emotional labor. Indeed, this neglect of “hard labor” that characterizes postmodern political economy reflects the disengagement of the younger generation of Chinese men and women, who shun factory or construction work in favor of lower-paid jobs in the service sector.

The cultural unconscious

To simplify Zhang’s thesis, love in China is shaped by the market, and the market in turn is moved by love, while the party-state sustains this dynamics by accentuating polarization in society. Charlie Yi Zhang is not the first one to raise the issue of love and sentiments in post-Mao China. Yan Yunxiang wrote a splendid ethnography on Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, while Lisa Rofel used her extended fieldwork in a Chinese silk factory to write about Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. These two ethnographies are based on solid empirical ground, cross-generational historical depth, and a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity and social change during transition from socialism to the market. They have become classics in the anthropology literature, and allow us to understand the evolution of Chinese masculinities and feminities through experience-near concepts and thick descriptions. By comparison, Dreadful Desire is relying on more shallow observation and thinner engagement. The author attempts to compensate the limited time spent on the field with ambitious efforts at theorizing and conceptualizing, drawing from a broad range of authors and subdisciplines. But the experience-far concepts and philosophical metaphors like the “borderless Loveland” and the “difference-making mechanism” taught me more about the context of academic production on North American campuses than on the travails of migrant workers and urban citizens in Xi Jinping’s China. There is a cultural unconscious at work in the emphasis put on “the pursuit of happiness,” the possibility of a “new birth of freedom” that the author experiences while moving to the US, the protestant urge to publicly confess one’s personal background and life expectations, and the belief in the transition from a love-inpaired present to a “love-enabled future.” The proliferation of differences, gendered or otherwise, that the author attributes to a Chinese ideological state apparatus, better characterizes in my view the scissiparity reproduction of ever-increasing subfields of cultural studies and the multiplication of gendered, classed, sexualized, and ethno-racialized categories brought forth by identity politics on American campuses.

The Moral Economy of Management Consulting in China

20 Jun 202223 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China, Kimberly Chong, Duke University Press, 2018.**

Best Practice There was a time, not so long ago, when the “China Dream” was to make China more like the West. Foreign multinational companies were invested with a transformative mission: they would teach the Chinese how to do business the modern way. They would bring with them practices of good corporate governance, increased productivity, and organizational efficiency. Global consulting firms were at the vanguard of this transfer of management knowledge. They opened shop in China to ride the wave of globalization, and they applied to Chinese firms the tried-and-true management techniques that had made their fortune in the West. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China is a product of such times. As part of her PhD in anthropology, the author spent sixteen months of fieldwork during 2008-2009 in a global management consultancy operating from Dalian, Beijing, and Shanghai. The firm’s mission was to provide services to Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises, in order to help them achieve their digital transformation and become viable capitalist entities. The anthropologist’s conclusion is that Chinese state capitalism proves remarkably compatible with the logic of shareholder value maximization, which she describes as financialization. Consulting firms are in the business of making financial capitalism come true, and they do so by creating ethical subjects whose moral outlook and cultural norms are made commensurate with the cultural values of finance. I take a different perspective. I believe the original China Dream was a delusion, which led the West to sell the Chinese the rope with which they will try to hang us. The corporate practices and ethical values that financial capitalism promotes are incompatible with state capitalism as it operates in China. The recent wave of CEO arrests, company delistings from the New York Stock Exchange, governmental clampdown on tech firms, and negation of minority shareholders’ rights are just the first instantiations of a repressive trend that will make China less and less like the West.

Getting access

Multinational companies are notoriously difficult for anthropologists to observe and rarely grant authorization to do fieldwork. Kimberly Chong is proud of getting access and of studying up the corporate ladder. But did she? The consulting firm she boasts of cracking open let her enter through a side door, and allowed her only minimal access to its clients. She spent one year in Dalian teaching English and providing soft skills training to the employees of the shared service center where the firm was outsourcing its back-office operations worldwide. She succeeded in moving to the front office in Beijing as an unpaid external contractor, and she was able to interview consultants and to follow them to client sites where they were supervising the introduction of new IT systems in Chinese companies. She then spent a few weeks as a junior employee in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) division of the firm’s China practice. Considering her limited access and lack of prior experience, the amount of information she was able to gather on the internal workings of the consulting firm is no small feat. She compares her achievement to Karen Ho’s ethnography of a Wall Street investment bank, published in 2009 by Duke University Press. In Liquidated (which I reviewed here), Karen Ho was able to show how investment bankers tend to project their own experience onto the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid” or tradable, including jobs and people. In her own ethnography, Kimberly Chong shows how consultants embody the same values of “best practice” and high performance that they use to reshape corporate China in their own image. The ethos of outsourcing, cost-cutting, and business process engineering, which they apply to Chinese companies, also defines the inner workings of the consulting firm.

Best Practice can be read at two levels. On the one hand, it is an ethnography of a global consulting firm which applies uniform techniques in its own management and in the expertise it sells to its clients. On the other hand, Kimberly Chong shows how these best practices are adapted to the Chinese context and how they help to shape moral subjects in post-Mao China. The first aspect makes Best Practice a contribution to the booming field of critical management studies. The consulting industry has a bad image among anthropologists and ethnographers, and indeed in the eyes of large segments of society. Consultants are accused of peddling false dreams and empty recipes or, in the words of a popular critique, they “borrow your watch to tell you the time.” They are often at a loss of describing what they do and what constitutes their field of expertise. Some can be very cynical about it: “Management consultancy is a scam,” says one consultant. Others insist on the intangible value they create by standardizing business processes and promoting the diffusion of best practice. A seasoned consultant can often devote time and expertise to a project that staff employees would be unable to implement on their own. They can also help bring new life to organizations that are stuck, or shift resources to help companies grow or move in a different direction. Kimberley Chong describes her socialization into the profession: “I became proficient in their jargon of acronyms and buzzwords, and could quickly put together a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation.” But she kept her critical distance and did not adhere to the ideology of the profession. For her, “the power of management consultants, who continue to be hired in spite of their failure to deliver on their promises, derives from their capacity to naturalize the moral actions of restructuring and other forms of intervention as purely economic or technocratic.”

The culture of performance

But global consulting firms do not operate in a vacuum. Context matters, and the purportedly “global” managerial concepts of efficiency and productivity are interpreted and negotiated by Chinese employees in very distinctive ways. Chinese consultants who failed to adhere to the tenets of performance management were said to put the enterprise at risk for failing to inculcate the required mind-set among their Chinese clientele. Observations suggested that knowledge-based industries in China were afflicted by a problem of insufficient corporate professionalism, and that Chinese employees lacked the social norms and dispositions of global work. How else to explain the high turnover rate, the opportunistic behavior, the lack of personal accountability, the attempts to game the system of managing by numbers, and the inapplicability of performance management tools that plagued the consultancy’s inner workings in China? Many assumed the problem was with “Chinese culture” or with the inheritance of a socialist work ethos. As Kimberly Chong notes, “culture in this setting is a far cry from the conceptions of culture familiar to anthropologists. Here it is something that can be managed and controlled.” Culture is deployed as a tool for producing financial value and for shaping Chinese workers into good corporate subjects who will think and behave in accordance with global business norms. But Chinese employees’ conception of culture tended to differ from the one dictated by the management consultancy. Their stated ideal was the development of suzhi, a term often translated as “human quality” that describes a person’s moral characteristics and its capacity to contribute to the nation as a whole. Particularly in state-owned enterprises, consulting was sold as a means of increasing the quality of employees rather than reducing the number of staff on payroll—even if the unavowed goal was to downsize and lay off redundant staff.

IT-enabled outsourcing and downsizing was one of the ways in which consultants sought to improve organizational performance. By decomposing tasks, formalizing processes, and measuring results, consultants were able to measure each employee’s contribution to the firm’s financial results and to divest the activities that did not contribute sufficiently to the company’s bottom line. But the rules of management by results, financial metrics, and the integrated IT solutions that consultants brought to performance extended far beyond outsourcing and offshoring. Kimberley Chong was able to observe the use of management tools at several stages of the business process. Most of her observations relate to human resource management and the optimization of employees’ performance. The evaluation of each individual’s performance, and the setting of yearly goals and targets, consumed a lot of time and energy. But she also describes staff training in “crafting value propositions” (selling consultancy work to clients) and the deployment of CRM and ERP software—respectively, consumer relationship management tools and enterprise resource planning systems designed to monitor real-time productivity. In doing so, she notes three surprising facts. First, new measures and management systems were all tied to total shareholder return or TSR: the maximization of shareholder value (the company’s share price) was the overarching goal espoused by all consultants, and the single-minded focus of the consulting company was to improve financial performance. Second, the management tools on which the consulting firm relied were not proprietary: they were bought off-the-shelf from other consultancies or adapted from recent management fads, from the Balanced Scorecard to the Change Tracking Map or the Employee Engagement Dial. The use of acronyms tended to obfuscate the trivial notions on which these standard tools were based and that formed the bread-and-butter of consultancy work. Third, key notions or metrics were left undefined or were conspicuously absent from the firm’s official literature. All consultants knew their evaluation rested on their “billability,” or ability to generate cash-flow, but the notion, like the amount of the overall compensation package, was never publicly discussed. Despite all the talk over employee engagement and motivation, turnover figures or satisfaction rates were never disclosed.

Performative management

Performance is a key concept in Best Practice, and consultancy work was performative in at least three distinct meanings of the word. As in performance evaluation or the design of high-performance organizations, performance is used as a synonym of financial results and the creation of shareholder value. The focus on performance is exclusive of any other form of personal commitment or collective endeavor: even charity activities—under the label of corporate social responsibility—have as a stated goal the strengthening of commitment and engagement of employees, which is measured by their contribution to the firm’s financial results. Performance is also a show, a game that people play or a story that a group of actors tell on the stage. “Appearing more efficient” is the reason why SOEs undertook the considerable investment of installing ERP systems to signal to investors that they had the managerial equipment identified with a modern corporation. This embodied performance depends heavily on context: among private clients, consultants had to look always busy and motivated by profit, while in state-owned enterprises they could be more lax and take long naps or give each other neck and shoulder massage. The performance of consultants reflects not only profit maximization and global norms of efficiency, but also cultural values and a shared sense of morality. But the expertise of management consultants is performative in another meaning: it “has the power to make its theories and descriptions of the world come alive in new built form, new machines and new bodies.” Management concepts and tools don’t just reflect particular ways of thinking; they also create ways of thinking, and make the world imagined by management consultants come true. This is the thesis that Karen Ho developed in her book Liquidated: financial assets and people were made liquid and tradeable, which meant, in the end, dispensable or constantly running the risk of being liquidated. Kimberly Chong uses a related concept: management consulting develops cultures of conmensuration, through which new economic imperatives, forms of value, and power relations are legitimized and naturalized. The job of management consultants is to make corporate culture commensurate with profit maximization. Likewise, financial capitalism is made commensurate with existing logics of Chinese development and post-Mao modernity. Through commensuration, consultants create a structural relation between two different entities.

In the Chinese context, did management consulting succeed in making the world of financial capitalism come true? Yes and no. As with socialism, capitalism in China comes up with Chinese characteristics. As the author reminds us, “the state remains a dominant market actor and guiding force for capitalism in China.” Financial results and profitability are not seen as exclusive of state goals, but rather as a means of advancing the public good and of shaping “quality people” with high suzhi. Chinese consultants embody this mix between private corporate ethics and public nationalist values. Most of them are haigui or “sea turtles,” which designates people who go overseas for educational and professional purposes but then return to China as entrepreneurs or to work in waiqi, or foreign companies. They are fully westernized in terms of personal habits and work ethos, drinking coffee rather than tea and sending their kids to international schools, but are also motivated by strong sentiments of love and fidelity toward the Chinese nation. Even if they weren’t, the heavy hand of the state is never far away to remind them of their liminal position. Kimberly Chong notices a senior executive who conspicuously displays a poster with all the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his office. She does not seem to be aware that all companies, including waiqi, have to accommodate within themselves the functioning of a cell of the CCP. The state apparatus, controlled by the Party, has to decide on the contracting to a foreign consulting company the task of preparing state-owned enterprises for public listings on overseas stock exchange. As mentioned above, this task is largely performative: becoming a listed company requires not only a focus on profits and the share price, but also the appearance of transparency, accountability, and efficiency that will convince foreign investors to join the game. But the Party’s leadership can always put an end to the performance of foreign consultants, and change the rules by which the game has to be played.

Maximizing suzhi

Such change was slowly emerging when Kimberly Chong was doing her fieldwork, and is now fully apparent. The goal of the party-state is not to maximize profits or to create value for shareholders. An alternative goal would be to maximize suzhi or “human quality”–as defined by the state, and based on the instruments of social control and collective discipline. Other corporate goals might include assuming world leadership in key economic sectors, developing self-reliance and minimizing dependence on Western technologies, or achieving post-Mao visions of “building a paradise” and achieving socialist modernization. These state goals are only partly compatible with the maximization of shareholder value, and are particularly detrimental to minority shareholders’ rights—the metric by which the efficiency of a financial system is evaluated in the academic literature on law and finance. The Chinese state has proven its readiness to sacrifice economic efficiency when its core interests were at stake, and to destroy shareholder value on a grand scale in order to regain control of vast swathes of the economy. The time since Kimberly Chong completed her research has also seen a sharp increase in the use of data to develop new forms of state surveillance and social control. Foreign consulting companies were originally allowed to enter the Chinese market in order to spread the use of information technology systems and data management tools. The corporatization of state-owned enterprises required a radical overhaul of managerial practices, while new firms in the private sector benefited from the influx on best practices and cutting-edge technologies. As the author notes, ERP systems and human resource management tools are designed to standardize working practices and act as a system of surveillance, documenting where, when, and how long each employee spends on any one task. But the rise of artificial intelligence and data mining technologies have vastly increased the possibilities of managing by data. Due to the size of the population, the lack of protection of privacy rights, and the innovative spirit of a new breed of entrepreneurs, Chinese companies like Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi have become world leaders in information technologies, competing head-to-head with the American GAFA formed by Google, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), and Apple. Under the strong monitoring of the party-state, new forms of data management and surveillance capitalism with Chinese characteristics might play the role formerly devoted to foreign consultants and Western IT leaders.

Dispatches from a Controlled American Source in Quito

3 May 20215 May 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The CIA in Ecuador, Marc Becker, Duke University Press, 2021.**

CIA in Ecuador A large literature exists on United States intervention in Latin America. Much has been written about the CIA’s role in fomenting coups, influencing election results, and plotting to assassinate popular figures. Well-documented cases of abuse include the overthrow of the popularly elected president of Guatemala in 1954 and the attempts to assassinate Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Books about the CIA make for compelling stories and sensationalist titles: The Ghosts of Langley, The Devil’s Chessboard, Killing Hope, Legacy of Ashes, Deadly Deceits. They are usually written from the perspective of the agency’s headquarters—which moved to Langley, Virginia, only after 1961—, and they concentrate on the CIA leadership or on the wider foreign policy community in Washington—The Power Elite, The Wise Men, The Georgetown Set. Rarely do they reflect the perspective of agents in the field: the station chiefs, the case officers, the special agents charged with gathering intelligence and monitoring operations on the ground. Such narratives require a more fine-grained approach that is less spectacular than the journalistic accounts of grand spying schemes but more true to the everyday work of intelligence officers based in US diplomatic representations abroad. Fortunately, sources are available. There is a trove of declassified intelligence documents made available to the public through the online CREST database under the 25-year program of automatic declassification. In The CIA in Ecuador, Marc Becker exploits this archive to document the history of the Communist Party of Ecuador as seen from the surveillance and reporting activities of the CIA station in Quito during the first decade of the Cold War.

This is not a spy story

This book will be a disappointment for readers with a fascination for the dark arts of the spy trade and who expect crispy revelations about covert operations, clandestine schemes, and dirty espionage tricks. There were apparently no attempt to manipulate election results, no secret plots to eliminate or discredit opposition leaders, and no extraordinary renditions to undisclosed locations. Of the two missions of the CIA, the gathering of foreign intelligence and the conduct of covert action, archival evidence indicates that the Quito station strictly stuck to the first one during the period covered by the book, from 1947 to 1959. Nor are the names of confidential informants, domestic assets, or deep cover moles uncovered and exposed: intelligence reports or diplomatic dispatches usually don’t identify their sources by name and only mention their reliability (a “B2” classification thereby signifies that the source is “usually reliable” and that the content is “probably true.”) The farthest the author goes into revealing state secrets is by exposing the names of the successive station chiefs in Quito—for many decades, US authorities maintained that there was “no such things as a CIA station,” and diplomatic dispatches only referred to their intelligence as coming from a “controlled American source.” Using public records, Marc Becker was able to reconstruct their career path subsequent to their posting in Ecuador. They were not grandmaster spies destined for prestigious careers: throughout the 1950s, Quito was a small station for the CIA, and Ecuador was peripheral to Cold War interests. Their intelligence reports do not make for entertaining reading. They speak of bureaucratic work, administrative drudgery, and solitary boredom in a remote posting that rarely lasted more than three years.

To be true, despite the book’s title, the author is not interested in “the CIA in Ecuador.” He uses CIA documentation and State Department archives to write a detailed history of the left in Ecuador in the postwar period, focusing in particular on the Communist Party that was the object of intense surveillance from the CIA. The 1950s were a unusually quiet period in the turbulent political life of Ecuador. After a long period marked by political instability and infighting—twenty-one chief executives held office between 1931 and 1948, and no one managed to complete a term—, Ecuador entered a twelve-year “democratic parentheses” during which a series of three presidents were elected in what critics generally recognized as free and fair elections and were able to finish their terms in office and hand power to an elected successor from an opposing party. Despite persistent rumors of coups and insurrections, the army stayed in the barracks and public order was broadly maintained, with the occasional workers’ strike, student demonstration, or Indian mobilization, the latter facing the most violent repression. The Communist Party of Ecuador sought to coalesce these social forces into a political movement that would lay the basis for a more just and equal society. Rather than pressing for class struggle and a violent revolution, communist leaders advocated the pursuit of democratic means to achieve socialism in coalition with other progressive forces. But their attempts to form a broad anticonservative alliance with the liberals and the socialists repeatedly failed, and they drew minimal support during elections. Their emphasis on a peaceful and gradual path to power eventually led a radical wing to break from the party in the 1960s. After 1959, Ecuador returned to its status quo ante of political volatility and instability, and leftist politics became more fragmentary and confrontational.

Cold Warriors in Ecuador

Unlike Marc Becker, I am more interested in the CIA’s activities and style of reporting he indirectly describes than in the travails of the communist movement in Ecuador. Unsurprisingly, the authors of diplomatic dispatches and intelligence reports were Cold Warriors, and they shared the biases and proclivities of their colleagues and leaders in Washington. They considered world communism as the enemy, and drew the consequences of this antagonism for the conduct of foreign policy in Ecuador. They were convinced, and tried to convince their interlocutors, that the communists were dangerous subversives bent on death and destruction and that they plotted to disturb the smooth functioning of society. They were determined to implicate communists in coup attempts and they repeatedly pointed to external support for subversive movements. They saw the hand of Moscow, and Moscow’s gold, behind every move and decision of the PCE, and they closely monitored contacts with foreign communist parties and their fellow travelers, including by intercepting incoming mail and opening correspondence. Despite their weak number—estimate of party membership oscillates between 5000 and 1500 during the period—, communists were suspected of manipulating labor unions, student movements, and intellectual organizations, and of infiltrating the socialist party and progressive local governments. According to American officials, Ecuadorians did not take the communist threat seriously enough. United States representatives pressed the Ecuadorian government to implement strong anticommunist measures and applauded when it did so. The accusations of communists organizing riots and fomenting revolution fed an existing anticommunist paranoia rather than reflecting political realities. Evidence shows that the communists had no intentions of resorting to violence to achieve their political goals. But their claim for social justice and labor empowerment was perceived as posing a threat to the economic and political interests of the United States, and was fought accordingly.

In this respect, and contrary to its reputation as a rogue agency or a “state within the state,” there is no evidence that the CIA was running its own foreign policy in Ecuador. Its objectives were fully aligned with those of the State Department, and there was close cooperation between the CIA station chief and the rest of the embassy’s staff. Different branches of the government represented in Quito, including the military attaché, the cultural affairs officer, and the labor attaché, collaborated extensively around a shared anticommunist agenda. Indeed, Cold War objectives were also shared by other countries allied to the United States, and Becker quotes extensively from the correspondence of the British ambassador, who stood broadly on the same anticommunist positions but expressed them with more synthetic clarity and literary talent. To be sure, there were some petty infighting and administrative rivalry between services within the embassy. The CIA typically exaggerated communist threats, whereas State Department officials dedicated more attention to the much larger socialist party and to violent political organizations inspired by Italian fascism and the Spanish Falange. There were redundancies between official correspondence and covert reporting, and diplomats competed with CIA agents for the same sources and breaking news. Officials in Washington had “an insatiable demand for information” and were constantly fed by a flow of cables containing little valuable information and analysis. Occasionally, case officer would annex to their correspondence a tract or a manifesto that, considering the absence or destruction of party archives, provides the historian with an invaluable source of information.

Cognitive biases

In failing to give a realistic assessment of the political forces in Ecuador, CIA officials exhibited several cognitive biases and were prone to misjudgments and errors. They interpreted events through a Cold War lens that colored their understanding of the realities they observed. Their belief in the presence of an international conspiracy that sought to throw chaos across the region bordered on paranoia and made them neglect or distort important pieces of information. They failed to report that the communist party was opposed to involvement in military coups, and they overestimated the communists’ influence in the armed forces. They were blind to the threat posed by proto-fascist movements such as the falangist group ARNE and the populist CFP, suspecting the later of leftist leanings because its leader was a former communist even though he became violently opposed to his former comrades. They overreacted to some news such as the disruption of an anticommunist movie projection with stink bombs thrown by unidentified students or the spontaneous riots that followed the radio broadcasting of Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds, “a prank turned terribly awry.” They had mood swings that alternated between overconfidence and inflated fears, minimizing the strength of the party while overemphasizing its influence over the course of events. They exhibited an almost pathological urge to uncover external sources of funding for subversive activities, even though they knew that Ecuadorian communists had only minimal contacts with Moscow and that their party’s finances were always in dire straits. They were oversensitive to divisions within the party, providing the historian with valuable information about internal currents and debates, but failed to notice political organizing efforts among Indian communities that provided strong support to the party (in general, indigenous people were a blind spot in embassy’s reporting: “The Indians are apart and their values are unknown,” pondered the ambassador.) Like any bureaucracy, the CIA and the State Department fell victim of mission creep: as one officer observed, “There was a lot of information for information’s sake.”

Considering Marc Becker’s many criticisms of US interference and interpretive biases, one wonders what an alternative course of action might have been. The United States might have adhered to a strict policy of neutrality in the hemisphere and refrained from their vehement denunciation of communism by acknowledging that the Communist Party of Ecuador and its supporters were a legitimate political force in the local context. In other terms, they might have tried to disconnect Latin America from the broader geopolitical forces that were shaping their Cold War strategy, stating in effect that Ecuador was irrelevant to the pursuit of their global policy objectives. Considering not only their words but the limited means they allotted to CIA surveillance in Ecuador in the 1950s, this is more or less what American policymakers did: only with the turbulent sixties would the United States invest more means, including covert actions, to prevent the expansion of communism following the Cuban revolution and the rise in insurgency movements. Alternatively, at the individual level, officers might have tried to rid themselves of the cognitive biases and to paint a more realistic picture of the political situation, emphasizing not only the threat but also the opportunities raised by the development of the progressive left. This might have been the course pursued by more enlightened diplomats, but considering the political climate prevailing in Washington, where McCarthyism was in full swing and the State Department was decimated by red purges, this would have meant political suicide and instant demotion for the officers involved. Better, in their perspective, to bide their time and adhere to a more conformist line of analysis, serving to their political leaders the discourse that they wanted to hear.

A revisionist history

The historian is not without his own bias. Marc Becker is a revisionist historian bent on setting the record straight: during the 1950s, the Ecuadorian Communist party was a progressive force preaching reformism and European-style social welfare programs within the parliamentary system. To demonstrate his case, he sticks to the archival record and provides much more detail for the period from 1949 to 1954, for which sources are abundant and detailed, than for the years after 1955, for which the CREST database contains much fewer documents. Like his sources, he tends to overemphasize the geopolitical importance of Ecuador and Latin America in postwar global history. His concluding chapter on the year 1959 states that “the triumph of revolutionary forces in Cuba is arguably one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century.” He sees all activities of US diplomats in Ecuador with suspicion, and tracks in every detail the heavy hand of American interventionism where in fact diplomatic missions were only doing their job of representation, advocacy, and reporting. He detects a running contradiction between the official policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries and the reality of Americans trying to shape opinions and influence outcomes. In doing so, he doesn’t clearly distinguish between adherence to the principle of non-interference, the pursuit of influence through public diplomacy, and the defense of the national interest. The fact that diplomatic dispatches conclude that a presidential candidate or a policy measure may be more favorable to American interests abroad is not synonymous with meddling into internal affairs: it is the bread-and-butter of diplomatic activity, even though what constitutes the national interest may be open to democratic debate. In the case of Ecuador during the 1950s, it was in America’s interest to monitor the activities of a communist party that was vehemently opposed to “Yankee imperialist capitalism,” however small and inconsistent its threat to the neoliberal international order. The fact that diplomatic representatives and intelligence officers pursued this mission with dedication and rigor may be put to their credit, and our understanding of the past is made richer for the documentary record they left behind.

One Thousand and One Arab Springs

27 Feb 20217 Mar 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, Fadi A. Bardawil, Duke University Press, 2020.**

Revolution and Disenchantment Ten years have passed since the wave of protests that swept across North Africa and the Middle East. Time has not been kind to the hopes, dreams, and aspirations for change that were invested in these Arab uprisings. A whole generation is now looking back at its youthful idealism with nostalgia, disillusion, and bitterness. Revolutionary hope is always followed by political disenchantment: this has been the case for all revolutions that succeeded and for all attempts that failed. Fadi Bardawil even sees here the expression of a more general law: “For as long as I can remember, I have witnessed intellectuals and critical theorists slide from critique to loss and melancholia after having witnessed a political defeat or experienced a regression in the state of affairs of the world.” These cycles of hope and disillusion are particularly acute in the Arab world, where each decade seems to bring its own political sequence of rising tide and lowering ebb. Revolution and Disenchantment tells the story of a fringe political movement, Socialist Lebanon (1964-70), through the figures of three Marxist intellectuals who went through a cycle of revolutionary fervor, disenchantment, despair, and adjustment. Waddah Charara (1942–), Fawwaz Traboulsi (1941–), and Ahmad Beydoun (1942–) are completely unknown for most publics outside Lebanon, and their reputation in their country may not even have crossed the limits of narrow intellectual circles. They have now retired from an academic career in the humanities and social sciences, and few people remember their youthful engagement at the vanguard of the revolutionary Left. But their political itinerary has a lot to tell about the role of intellectuals, the relationship between theory and practice, and the waves of enthusiasm and disillusion that turn emancipatory enterprises into disenchanted projects.

The ebbs and flows of revolution

Fadi Bardawil proposes to his readers a tidal model of intellectual history. There were four consecutive tides that affected the lives of the three intellectuals under consideration—as well as, less directly, his own: Arab nationalism, Leftist politics, the Palestinian question, and political Islam. Each tide followed its ebb and flow of enthusiasm and disenchantment, leaving behind empty shells and debris that have drifted onshore for the scholar to pick. The generation to which the three intellectuals belong was formed during the high tides of anticolonial Pan-Arabism, founded the New Left, and adhered to the Palestinian revolution before ending up as detached, disenchanted critics of sectarian violence and communal divisions. Collectively, they point to a different chronology and geography of the reception of revolutionary ideas in the Middle East. The conventional periodization and list of landmark events identified by historians do not fully apply: for instance, the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War is often overemphasized as a turning point, while the collapse of the union between Egypt and Syria in September 1961 is now largely forgotten. But the Palestinian question predates 1967, while the 1961 breakdown of Arab unity ushered in the first immanent critique of the regimes in power. Similarly, the traditional East/West and North/South binaries cannot account for the complexities and internal divisions of Middle East societies. Beirut was closer to Paris and to French intellectual life than to other regional metropoles, including Cairo where the Nasser regime silenced all oppositional voices. The site of the “main contradiction” was not always the West, as Marxist scholars assumed; very often the contradictions were integral to the fabric of Arab societies.

Like the rest of the Arab world, the Lebanon in which the three intellectuals grew up was tuned to the speeches of Gamal Abdel Nasser broadcast by Radio Cairo and by demonstrations of support to the Algerian national liberation struggle. Palestinian refugees who had fled Israel in the aftermath of 1948 were a familiar presence in Lebanon, and the Arab Catastrophe or Nakba—as the Palestinian exodus was designated—loomed large in the Arab nationalist agenda. As one of the interviewees recalls, “the ‘Arab Cause’ was more dominant in our lives than Lebanese concerns.” Lebanese intellectuals from Sunni, Shi’i and Druze backgrounds were attracted to Nasserist nationalism and Ba’thist ideology and politics, while a majority of the Christian population supported the pro-Western politics of President Camille Chamoun (1952—58). Chamoun’s decision not to severe diplomatic ties with France and Great Britain after the Suez crisis in 1956 resulted in a political crisis that drew heavier American involvement in the form of economic assistance and military presence. The summer of 1958 was an important milestone in the development of the generation that was now in high school: sectarian tensions and the political deadlock led to a short civil war in Beirut, while inter-Arab relations and Cold War politics provoked a shift in alliances. The union between Egypt and Syria came to an end in 1961, and authoritarian regimes settled under the guise of socialist and Ba’thist ideologies in Syria and Iraq. The tidal wave of Pan-Arabism and its promise of a united popular sovereignty on Arab lands after defeating colonialism was now at its low point. The budding young intellectuals became disillusioned with Arab nationalism and turned to Marxism to fuel their quest for social change and emancipation.

Translating Marx into Arabic

The intellectual generation that founded Socialist Lebanon in 1964, with Waddah Charara, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Ahmad Beydoun at the forefront, was also the product of an education system. Lebanon was created as an independent country in 1943 under a pact of double negation: neither integration into Syria (the Muslims’ Pan-Arabic demand) nor French protection (the Christians’ demand). Ties were not severed with France, however, as the Maronite elite used predominantly French and sent its children to French schools and universities, while international education was also buttressed by the presence of English language schools and the American University of Beirut. Charara was a southern Lebanon Shi’a who went to a francophone Beirut school and left for undergraduate studies in Lyon, completed later by a doctorate in Paris. Traboulsi was the son of a Greek Catholic Christian from the Bekka Valley who attended a Quaker-founded boarding school near Mount Lebanon and studied in Manchester as well as the American University of Beirut. Ahmad Beydoun went to a Lebanese school that pitted pro-Phalangist Maronites and pro-Ba’th nationalists against each other. Learning French and English in addition to their native Arabic, and studying abroad, opened new intellectual venues for these promising students. As Bardawil notes, “Foreign languages is a crucial matter that provides insight into the readings, influences, and literary sensibilities and imaginaries out of which an intellectual’s habitus is fashioned.”

The habitus of the generation that came of age at the turn of the 1960s was decidedly radical. Socialist Lebanon, the New Left movement that they founded in 1964, was in its beginnings more a study circle than a political party. The readings of these young intellectuals were extensive and not circumscribed by disciplinary boundaries: Marxist theory, French philosophy, psychology, sociology, art critique, economics… They published a bulletin that was printed underground using Roneo machines and distributed clandestinely. In order to avoid being taken for wacky intellectuals, they rarely made quotes from the French intellectuals they were imbibing (Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Castoriadis, Lefebvre…), and mostly referred to the cannon of the revolutionary tradition: Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, but also some Cuban references and, in the end, Mao. Through their translations and commentary, they also gave agency to other voices from the South: Fanon, Ben Barka, Giap, Cabral, Che Guevara, Eldrige Cleaver, Malcolm X and others. Books published by Editions Maspero in Paris, as well as articles from Le Monde Diplomatique, Les Temps Modernes, and the New Left Review, were pivotal in the readings discussed in Beirut at that time. So were the pamphlets of Leftist opponents of the Nasser regime in Egypt such as Anouar Abdel Malak, Mahmoud Hussein, and Hassan Riad (the pseudonym of Samir Amin): “What couldn’t be published in Cairo in Arabic was published in France and translated back into Arabic in Beirut with the hope that it would circulate in the Arab world.”

Left-wing groupuscules

In addition to reading, discussing, writing, and translating, the young revolutionaries engaged in clandestine political activities. Unlike their gauchistes equivalents in France, Germany or Italy, they ran the risk of arbitrary arrest, detainment, and execution: hence their practice of secrecy, with underground political cells and anonymity publishing. Their critiques targeted the Ba’th and Arab nationalist ideologies, the authoritarian regimes in power in the region, the national bourgeoisie, and last but not least the pro-Soviet communist parties. The Lebanese Communist Party was the target of their most ferocious attacks, but intra-leftist skirmishes also targeted other groupuscules. The Arab-Israeli war in June 1967, often considered as a watershed for the region and for the world, brought to the fore the Palestinian question. Bardawil argues that the date of 1967, referred to in Arabic as an-Naksah or “the setback”, was more a turning point for the intellectual diaspora than for local actors. Indeed, Edward Said recalls in his autobiography the shock and wake-up call that the defeat of the Arab armies caused in his personal identity: “I was no longer the same person after 1967,” he wrote. The 1967 setback was also used by nationalist military regimes to legitimize their own repressive politics in the name of anti-imperialism and the fight for the liberation of Palestine. But as we saw, the nationalist tide had already ebbed in 1961, and Socialist Lebanon had developed a radical critique of the gap separating the regimes’ progressive professions of faith and their authoritarian rule.

The Palestinian resistance post-1967 became a local player in Lebanese politics, putting on the table again the question of Lebanon’s national identity. It generated its own cycle of hope and disenchantment for the Left. For the cohort of intellectuals forming Socialist Lebanon, it was a time of fuite en avant. The group became increasingly cultist and sectarian, and turned to Maoism to articulate its militant fervor and revolutionary praxis. In 1970, Socialist Lebanon fused with the much larger Organization of Lebanese Socialists, establishing a united organization that became known as the Marxist-Leninist Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL). In true gauchiste fashion, OCAL would be plagued by splits and expulsions from the beginning. Note however that the call for action directe and a “people’s war” that Charara articulated in his Blue Pamphlet did not turn into political assassinations and terrorism. The reason was that Lebanese society was already plagued by violence: violent strikes and demonstrations were repressed in blood; armed Palestinian resistance gained force until Israel invaded in 1978 and pushed PLO and leftist militants away from the borders; and terrorist actions were indeed taken up by Palestinian groupuscules such as the PFLP-EO that committed the Lod Airport massacre in May 1972, with the participation of three members of the Japanese Red Army. The low ebb of the Palestinian tide came with the defeat of the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon in 1982. By then, Lebanon had already plunged into a sequence of civil wars (1975—1990) splitting the country along sectarian lines; the Iranian revolution (1979) had ushered a new cycle of militant fervor centered on political Islam; and the Lebanese intellectuals had retired from political militancy to join secure positions in academia.

From Nakba to Naksa and to Nahda

This summary of the historical plot line of Revolution and Disenchantment doesn’t do justice to the theoretical depth and breadth of the book. Trained as an anthropologist and as a historian, Fadi Bardawil attempts to do “fieldwork in theory” as a method to locate “not only how theory helps us understand the world but also what kind of work it does in it: how it seduces intellectuals, contributes to the cultivation of their ethos and sensibilities, and authorizes political practices for militants.” He treats the written and oral archives of the Lebanese New Left as a material to ponder the possibility of a global emancipatory politics of the present that would not be predicated on the assumption that theory always comes from the West to be applied in empirical terrains in the South. He takes issue with the current focus on Islamist ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb and Ali Shariati that are used by Western scholars for “thinking past terror,” while the indigenous tradition of Marxism and left-wing thinking is deemed too compromised with the West to offer an immanent critique of Arab politics. As Bardawil notes, quite a few of the 1960s leftists rediscovered the heritage of the earlier generation of Nahda (Renaissance) liberal thinkers such as Taha Husayn (1889–1973) and ‘Ali ‘Abd-al-Raziq (1886–1966) or, like the aging and sobered Charara, turned to Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) to understand the logics of communal violence that had engulfed Lebanon. Revolution and Disenchantment also reflects the coming-of-age story of the author who started his research project in the US in the wake of the September 11 attacks, still marked by the Left-wing melancholia of his school years in Lebanon, then matured into a more balanced approach that took its cues from the mass mobilizations known collectively as the Arab Spring.

Postscript: I read a book review of Revolution and Disenchantment written by a PhD student specializing in Middle East studies who regretted the fact that readership of this book will most likely be limited to a fringe audience of area specialists. If only this book could become a core text for an introduction to intellectual history or for a class on world Marxism!, she bemoaned. My answer to that is, you never know. Manuscripts have a strange and unpredictable afterlife once they get published, and neither the author nor the publisher can tell in advance which readership they will eventually reach. Remember the circuits of the French editions of revolutionary classics published by Editions Maspero in a historical conjuncture when theory itself was being generated not from Europe but from the Third World. Add to that the fact that Revolution and Disenchantment is available free of charge for downloads on the website of Duke University Press (with a trove of other scholarly books), and you may have in your hands the potential of an unlikely success. Besides, the political effects of a text, and the difference that it makes, cannot be measured by the number of clicks and readers but depend on the questions asked by the reading publics and the stakes animating their practical engagements. You never know in advance which texts will be included in future political archives and curricula, or who will read what and for what purposes. Reading today about the Lebanese New Left in Hanoi is not more uncanny than translating Mao and Giap into Arabic in Beirut during the sixties. New forms of critique and their transnational travels may produce unexpected political effects that go beyond the closed lecture circuit of jet-lagged academics. This is one reason why the Arab Springs were followed with passion in China, leading the Communist authorities to delete all references to the events on Chinese social media. Ten years after, a new cycle of democratic hope and enlightenment may begin.

The Old Mole

17 Feb 202117 Feb 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Gavin Walker, Duke University Press, 2016.**

Gavin Walker Why read Marx today? More to the point, why devote a book to how Marx was read in Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and in particular to the writings of a Marxist scholar named Uno Kōzō (1897-1977), Japan’s foremost Marxian economist and founder of what is usually referred to as the Uno School (Uno gakuha), Uno economics (Uno keizaigaku), or Uno-ist theory (Uno riron)? Books about this branch of Marxist theory now collect dust on the shelves of second-hand bookstores in the Kanda-Jinbōchō district in Tokyo. They remind us of Marxism’s surprising longevity in Japan’s academic circles: a Japanese publishing house, Kaizōsha, was the first editor in the world to publish the complete collected works of Marx and Engels (in thirty-two volumes), and Marxist theory was taught and studied with passion in the tumultuous years of campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The generation that imbibed Marx’s shihonron in its formative years is now past retirement, and the few remaining bastions of Marxism are only to be found in philosophy or literature departments, not in faculties of economics. But Gavin Walker considers that something important was at stake in these economic debates, something that can still speak to our present. In his opinion, we need to understand the “sublime perversion of capital” in order to situate and possibly overcome our contemporary theoretical impasses and debates: the surprising persistence of the nation, the postcolonial situation, the enclosure of the new “digital commons,” the endless cycles of crisis and debt. Indeed, Walker argues, “this moment of globalization calls for a fundamental (re)examination of the central questions of Marxist theory itself.” For, like Marx wrote to his German readers in the 1867 preface of Das Kapital, “De te fabula narratur!”—it is of you that the story is told.

De te fabula narratur

First, we must clear the ground from what the book is not. It is not a political essay à la Fukuyama that would try to apply Marxian or Hegelian lenses to a rereading of the present—Walker has only contempt for such literature, which he calls “supreme political cretinism.” Nor is it a rephrasing of Lire le Capital, an attempt to expose Marx’s theory along logical lines: indeed, this is how historiography remembers the main contribution of Uno Kōzō, who reformulated Marx’s Capital in conformity with an adequate order of exposition, with a necessary beginning, development, and end. But what concerns Walker the most is to think about what is at stake in the Japanese debates on Marxist theory for theoretical inquiry today. As he explains, “What I am interested in is to enter into the theoretical work in Marxist theory, historiography, and philosophy of this moment as theory.” He doesn’t study Japanese Marxism historically or in isolation, but plugs it to the scholarship of “world Marxism” in which the concerns of Japanese intellectuals echo, sometimes decades in advance, theoretical issues that were also picked up in the United States or in Europe. Just like Lenin identified “three sources and three component parts of Marxism” (German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism), Walter draws from three traditions of critical thinking: Japanese Marxism or “Uno Theory” which forms the main focus of the book, but also as minor voices or counterpoints French political philosophy (Althusser, Balibar, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou), and the Italian autonomia school of social critique (Paolo Virno, Sandro Mezzadra, Silvia Federici). His familiarity with texts written not only in English and Japanese, but also in French, Italian, Russian, and German is what commends Walker to the serious reader. And his rereading of Japanese Marxism provides an introduction to an important current of political thought that has seldom spilled over the national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries of academic communities.

Uno Kōzō and Japanese Marxism are unfamiliar to most readers, and some elements of contextualization are in order. However, Walker warns us that “this book does not privilege or even accept the biographical mode of analysis,” and that “it is hostile to the concept of ‘context’.” He provides only one paragraph on the life and work of Uno Kōzō, mentioning his studies in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, his arrest in 1938 on suspicion of political activism, his work as a statistician outside of academia until the end of the war, and his reappointment after 1945 in Tokyo University’s Department of Economics, where he was to develop his famous theory of the three levels of analysis, or sandankairon, and his formulation of the “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri). Walker provides more perspective on the debate on Japanese capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō) and the opposition between the two factions of Japanese Marxism, the Rōnō-ha (Labor-farmer faction) and the Kōza-ha (Lectures faction). Based on positions or “theses on Japan” adopted by the Comintern, and raising the issue whether the Japanese Communist Party should ally with other progressive forces in a popular front, this debate, predominantly held from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, deeply influenced political developments, not only in Japan, but also in the then-colonized Korean Peninsula, in China, in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. The Rōnō faction argued that the land reforms instituted in the 1868 Meiji Restauration had successfully effectuated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and that Japan was now ripe for a socialist revolution. The Kōza-ha, representing the mainstream of the JCP and of the Comintern, held the view that Japanese capitalism was permanently crippled by emerging from a feudal basis and that “remnants of feudalism” (hōkensei no zansonbutsu), especially in the countryside, made inevitable the turn to “military-feudal imperialism” (gunjiteki hōkenteki teikokushugi).

Difficult words and torturous grammar

The political debates of the times were loaded with difficult words and expressions that the Japanese language, with its kanji characters and grammatical structure, makes even more abstract and unfamiliar. Especially hard to fathom was the work of Marxist scholar Yamada Moritarō, whose Analysis of Japanese Capitalism, published in 1934, was “one of the most simultaneously celebrated, reviled, frustrating, controversial, and influential book in the history of Japanese Marxist theory and historiography.” Yamada wrote in a particularly recondite and idiosyncratic prose, filled with “riddles” and “codes,” as his writing style was modeled after the German language used in the most abstract philosophy with its inversion of typically Japanese grammar, sentence structure, and diction. But Gavin Walker’s own immersion in this literature testifies that getting fluency in this highly theoretical language is no more difficult for the true believer than mastering Buddhist scriptures: mantra-like formula such as “military semi-serf system of petty subsistence cultivation” are treated as blocks of characters that are stringed one after the other and recited like a psalmodic shibboleth. They create their own world of meaning that bears little resemblance with ordinary life, and convey to the insider the impression that he or she belongs to the select few. Besides, Japanese scholars were also fond of colloquialisms and didn’t hesitate to call each other names in a prosaic manner: rivals from the Rōnō faction called Yamada’s text a “farce,” and reacted to one of Uno Kōzō’s key lectures by saying that “Uno’s gone nuts” (Unokun wa kawatta.) The most intricate discussions often centered on simple words, such as the “semi-” (han) in semi-feudalism or the concept of “muri” used by Uno in his “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” theorem (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri.)

Gavin Walker devotes a whole chapter to Uno’s notion of “muri,” which he alternatively translates as “logical (im)possibility,” “rational impasse,” or “the nihil of reason.” But, as any child or Japanese language beginner will tell you, muri can also mean, at a colloquial level, “don’t think about it,” “out of the question,” or “no.” Disentangling the colloquialism from the conceptual is no easy task. The most abstract discussions in Japanese philosophy often focus on everyday notions, such as mu (not, without), ma (empty space), ba (place), or iki (lively). These concepts have their roots in Japanese Buddhism and especially in the Zen tradition, and were often picked up by nationalist ideologues and twentieth century philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō to emphasize the distance between Japanese thought and the Western canon. To attempt to translate them in a foreign language, or to discuss their meaning for a Western audience, raises a difficult challenge. On the one hand, foreign commentators need to convey the radical otherness of these notions rooted in a culture that gives them meaning and depth, and they can only do so by making elaborate discussions on the intricate lifeworlds that these words summon. On the other hand, they risk to lose their simplicity and childlike quality that makes their meaning commonsensical and straightforward. This contradiction is apparent in Walker’s treatment of muri. In Uno’s logic, the commodification of labor is the foundational basis of capitalism, and yet this commodification is made impossible by the nature of labor power as defined by Marx. Another way to express it is that although the commodification of labor power should be impossible, in capitalist society “the impossibility is constantly passing through” (sono muri ga tōtte iru). Again, the expression “passing through,” that Walker submits to a long exegesis, cannot convey the simplicity of the Japanese verb tōru.

Childishly simple

Another way to complicate simple notions is to resort to vocabulary borrowed from the hard sciences or to mathematics. To convey the notion of the impossibility of labor power’s commodification, Walker alternatively refers to mathematical figures such as the Moebius’ strip, the Klein bottle, the Borromean knot, the torus, or topology notions of torsion, inversion, loop, and fold. These topological notions were all the rage in the theoretically loaded context of the sixties and seventies, when Marx was often discussed in conjunction with Freud and Lacan—the French psychoanalyst who became enamored with algebraic topology. Walker also suggests that Uno’s use of muri may be borrowed from the concept of “irrational number” (murisū), although the evidence he gives to back his claim is rather moot. The mathematical formulae he introduces in his text—variations on the M—C—M’ equation in Marx’s Capital—, are at the level of a elementary logic and only contribute to his prose’s dryness. On the other hand, Walker is also capable of flights into hyperbole and metaphoric statements. The title of his book illustrates his use of colorful rhetorics and literary excess. Why is capital perverse, and what is sublime about the perversion of capital? As I understand it, capital is perverse in the sense that it thrives on our most basic instincts in a capitalist society: commodity fetishism and the elision the social relations between people as relationships among things, the forgetting of labor’s true contribution to value and profit, alienation from one’s true self and other workers through the act of production. The sublime is the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations: this is the feeling that grips the true believer upon the revelation of absolute truth and true science that Marx’s doctrine was supposed to incarnate.

Gavin Walker’s text is even more obscure when he discusses Japanese Marxism in conjunction with contemporary authors: French philosophers, Italian social critics, or modern Japanese thinkers reclaiming Marx’s heritage. The result is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. As if reading a commentary of Japanese scholars commenting on Marx wasn’t hard enough, Walker double-downs the challenge by bringing in other hard-to-read authors and by offering his own commentary of Marx’s original concepts such as primitive accumulation or the origin of labor power. Chapter 3 in the book moves from Carl Schmitt to Sandro Mezzadra and to Karatani Kōjin but loses sight of the author’s original intention to address “Marxist theory and the politics of history in modern Japan.” I understand his argument: he doesn’t want to be categorized in the “Japan slot” with other area study specialists, and he prefers to associate himself with high theory and Marxian scholarship. He sees a division of labor at work between his own production and the books of intellectual history that have mapped Marxism’s development in prewar Japan. I myself am not adverse to philosophical arguments and French Theory: I don’t mind introducing a few codes of Foucault, a dual use of quandary from Deleuze and Guattari, or a dash of devilish derring-do from Derrida. But I am also genuinely interested in Japan’s intellectual history and would have liked to read more about the Japanese context and less about Gavin Walker’s own thoughts on Marxist theory.

The Japanese management system

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a debate that dominated scholarly discussions in Japan for decades. This debate, interesting in its own right for the logical arguments and rhetorical skills that it mobilized, has long passed its expiry date. It never affected Marxist theory—what the author labels “world Marxism”—in a significant way, and attempts to revive it in the twenty-first century are faced with the same conundrums that Derrida experienced when he confronted himself with the specters of Marx. Trying to rekindle the flame by rehashing the old theories of a Marxist scholar unknown beyond Japan’s borders seems to me like the epitome of a lost cause. Historically, the debate on Japanese capitalism was soon replaced by the discussion on Japanese management—some scholars, Japanese or Western, adapted to the changing times and made the transition between the two. I see some parallels between the two lines of enquiry. First, Japanese management scholars were also concerned with the nature of capitalism in Japan and the way it differed from the Western version. They insisted on labor relations and workplace arrangements: lifetime employment (shūshin koyō), the seniority-wage system (nenkō joretsu), and the enterprise union (kigyōbetsu kumiai) formed the “three sacred regalia” (sanshu no jingi) of the Japanese employment system—to be sure, the crown has now lost its jewels. Like the Marxist mantras of Yamada and Uno, strings of Japanese characters were attached in long formulations and found their ways in Western texts, or were lost in translation. Management specialists pondered endlessly about the everyday notions of genba (workplace), kanban (signboard) or kaizen (improvement) that sound commonsensical to anyone familiar with Japan. We even hear echoes of the disputes between the Rōnō and the Kōza factions in the opposition between proponents of Japan’s distinctiveness and those who favored neoliberal solutions—the latter won the day.

TV-Glotzer

28 Nov 20202 Dec 2020 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of TV Socialism, Anikó Imre, Duke University Press, 2016.**

TV Socialism In her 1978 hit song “TV-Glotzer,” Nina Hagen sings from the perspective of an East German unable to leave her country, who escapes by watching West German television. She switches channels from East to West and stares at the tube where “everything is so colorful.” As she puts it, TV is her drug while literature makes her puke and she keeps eating chocolate that makes her fatter and fatter. The song was written when Nina Hagen was still living in East Berlin but made a hit in Western Europe, where “white punks on dope” could identify with the lyrics and share the spirit of “no future” rebellion. Anikó Imre’s TV Socialism gives a different perspective on television in socialist Europe. For her, television isn’t a drug but a matter of scholarly enquiry, and her book is a dense academic text that comes fully equipped with historical references, textual analysis, and footnotes. The book is a seminal contribution to the field of “socialist television studies” and challenges many ideas by which we assess Eastern Europe’s socialist past. But first, what does she mean by TV socialism? What links TV to socialism, and what makes socialist TV different from the television programs that were produced at the same time in Western Europe, in the United States, or in the developing world? How did television in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the GDR shape the imaginaries of viewers, and what remains from this socialization through small-screen images in a post-socialist world? Or to repeat Anikó Imre’s introduction title, “Why do we need to talk about socialism and TV?”

TV as a propaganda tool

According to conventional opinion, TV in socialist Europe was a propaganda tool. Its goal was to educate and enlighten all social classes, giving access to culture and information while also providing a light form of entertainment for the masses. Educational TV had to demonstrate social commitment to the cause of the State and the Party, show solidarity with the Soviet Union, acknowledge the superiority of European high culture, and contribute to the building of socialism. Teaching viewers how to be good socialist citizens was a central mission of national broadcasters. Lenin famously called on good socialists “to study, to study, and again to study,” and television was one of the mass media that could bring the study guide to the living room. Of course, socialist workers were not to be treated as students, for they embodied the knowledge and values that the sphere of culture only reflected. TV programs had to be relevant to the workers and understandable to them. TV was meant to be watched collectively in offices, factory clubs, and cultural centers. Instead of depicting life as it was, reality-based programs shifted the emphasis to teaching citizens how to behave in an ideal socialist society. But this consciousness-raising documentary realism was always articulated with the privates pleasures of television’s emotional realism. The doctrine of socialist realism also acknowledged the role of emotional expression to promote Soviet ideals. The same Lenin distinguished between propaganda, a way to convince through rational argumentation, and agitation, which mobilized emotion and affect. Like the theater according to Bertold Brecht, television was a tool of agit-prop and, as such, could lead to the creation of new forms of cultural expression, distinct from the dull productions of bourgeois culture.

This description above summarizes the standard view of socialist television, as held by critics and sycophants alike and as it was sometimes expressed by the rulers of socialist republics. But Anikó Imre shows that it was a far cry from reality. Really-existing socialist TV was not so much different from television as it existed at the time in Western Europe, and indeed there were many linkages and influences that crossed the iron curtain. To dismiss (or to hail) socialist TV as mere propaganda widely misses the mark. In her introduction, Anikó Imre articulates three surprising facts that help readers see TV and socialism from a different angle. The first surprise is that television in Eastern Europe was much more exciting and entertaining than its status as propaganda tool would make us believe. Authorities had to reckon with television’s power as a mass medium, and mostly left professionals in charge of its development. TV managers used this autonomy to operate under the radar screen of censorship, to play catch-up with Western broadcasting programs, and to formulate a light critique of the regime through irony and self-derision. The second surprise is that TV broadcasters cared about their audience, their viewer ratings and their domestic market share. They were commercially oriented, and operated in a competitive field where they had to fight for available human brain time. A large part of their revenue came from advertising. As a result, they provided the public with what people most enjoyed: quiz shows, pop music, comedy, and drama serials. It is these forms of popular entertainment, and not the live broadcast of classical music concerts or didactic science programs, that came to define what socialist TV was all about. As a third surprise, Anikó Imre shows that socialist TV was not bounded by state borders and national identities. It was transnational even before the word was invented, with border-crossing signals and program exchanges that allow the author to provide an integrated picture of Eastern European TV as opposed to a juxtaposition of country studies.

National leaders are watching TV

The way national leaders engaged with TV had a heavy influence on program content. János Kádár never watched TV as his taste drew him to high culture and concert halls. Leonid Brezhnev had his appointed head of Soviet television design programs especially for him and his wife, while his children and other relatives had the house equipped with another TV set and a Japanese VCR to watch shows and movies from the West. In the 1970s, Nicolae Ceaușescu opened his country screens to US series and German quiz shows in order to demonstrate his independence from the Soviet Union and to gain favor with the West, then in the 1980s he turned increasingly dictatorial and reduced television broadcasting to a few hours a week with programs lauding his every words and actions. Josip Broz Tito encouraged TV channels to draw on advertising income and even had a Slovenian station broadcast commercials in Italian to audiences across the border to get additional revenue. Erich Honecker redirected the course of East German TV when he famously diagnosed “a certain boredom” around television and urged its managers to create “good entertainment” at the Eighth Party Congress in 1971. What all these leaders had in common is that they tried to mold the new medium to their own purposes, but failed to dictate their taste and preferences to the public. Television’s lower cultural status allowed it to escape the strictures of official culture and to develop free forms of popular entertainment. Socialist TV shared with Western European broadcasters the same commitment to realism and the ethos of public service. Tight state control and censorship also characterized periods of Western European TV programming. De Gaulle famously gave orders and directives to TV channel managers that he himself appointed, and it was rumored that news anchors on French TV had an earplug that linked them directly to the ministry of information. As for the feeling of boredom that Erich Honecker perceived in the East German public, French téléspectateurs could feel it as well: “La France s’ennuie,” titled Le Monde in a famous editorial on the cusp of the May 1968 movement.

It may come as a surprise to a generation raised on Japanese anime and American TV series that TV programs from the East once had a not-so-insignificant market share in Western European markets. This was especially the case for children’s television. Growing up in the 1970s in the United Kingdom or in France meant watching a lot of imported East European children’s programmes. There was the Singing Ringing Tree with scary dwarves hailing from East German studio DEFA, Taupek the Mole which came from Czechoslovakia and used giggles or non-verbal exclamations instead of words to communicate, and something quite bizarre called Ludwig which was an animated series about a machine that played Beethoven to his animal chums. Some animation feature films were drawn from Continental Europe’s tales and legends, like The Snow Queen produced at the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow or The Pied Piper by Czech studio Kratky Film; other animations developed Slavic themes like Gallant Robber Rumsaïs or Tchessilco the Magician, which were broadcast in France by ORTF. Not only did people in the Soviet satellites love their children too: they watched along with them what was recognized at the time as the best TV animation in the world. These animated pictures’ influence over Western animation, and over Western audiences, cannot be overstated. Anikó Imre doesn’t cover children TV in her book, but its development is quite similar to the other genres she reviews. The socialist reality-based, educational TV programs she describes were a kind of prehistory to the much more excoriated and inflamed reality-TV shows that took European channels by storm in the 1990s. Aside from proper language and decency, a lot was lost in the move from socialist realism to reality TV.

Did women have better sex under socialism?

Women are said to have had it better under socialism: better labor market participation, better jobs, better maternity leave and child care, and even better sex. Whether this is true remains controversial. Anikó Imre paints a mixed picture of women’s reflection in the mirror of socialist TV. On the one hand, television addressed many topics conventionally considered as women’s issues: child rearing and education, cooking and housekeeping, romance and family issues, and even birth control and sex life. But on the other hand, the default national viewer addressed by socialist television was most often the white, male, abled and working heterosexual citizen. Women as a homogenized social group were identified with special needs and tasks such as reproduction, family care, and emotional labor, and with inferior skills for political participation and mastering of technology. The blond female host was often associated with the pretty face and decorative position of the program announcer, while men anchors were clearly in control. This gendered hierarchy was also reflected in the two-tier production structure: television remained a male-dominated industry, and women typically worked below the line as technicians, make-up teams, or secretaries. The occasional powerful woman in television often did everything to efface herself and masquerade as one of the boys. Over the years, socialist television turned more feminine, if one identifies feminity with melodrama and consumerism. The thaw period beginning in the late 1960s brought political and economic changes that required socialist parties to readjust their gender policies. Women were presented as key agents of the “socialist lifestyle” and featured prominently in the genre that Anikó Imre labels the “late socialism soap opera.” Unlike historical dramas from the previous period, which removed the narrative into the past and revolved around heroic male figures, these domestic serials took place in the present and evolved around key female characters who acted as problem solvers and natural caretakers. This idealist image of the socialist woman who is independent, desirable and capable, is reflected the stunning photo portraits of Júlia Kudlik and Irena Dziedzic, with their fashionable hairstyle and modish dress, eliciting from the reader the male gaze that the author’s feminist agenda precludes.

Anikó Imre’s description of socialist TV defies Cold War stereotypes of a gray, repressive, joyless and isolated Eastern Europe. Men and women beyond the Iron Curtain knew how to have fun: only they did it differently, infused with the traditions of Mitteleuropa and the contradictions raised by socialism. The ruling communist parties and the strictures of state socialism couldn’t be criticized upfront. But citizens could vote with their eyeballs by switching channels, turning to programs broadcasted from neighboring countries, or turning off TV altogether. The more elitist, austere, realistic, and educational television attempted to be, the more it was mocked and abandoned by viewers, who wanted fiction, humor, and entertainment. The public could also distance itself from really existing socialism through mockery and satire. The systemic deficiencies of socialism were treated with light humor: living conditions in housing blocks, queuing for acquiring consumer products, facing the maze of bureaucracy, and other absurdities of the era were addressed in a light and relaxing manner. Reality shows at once celebrated and poked gentle fun at socialist institutions and rituals. Some 1980s serials took subversion to surprising levels: as the author notes, humor “thrives on oppression and censorship, rather than being silenced by it.” Rather than a government-controlled soapbox that repelled humor, much of socialist TV programming was actually perceived by audiences as comic because socialism itself was absurdly comical. Television was an theater of the absurd: the distance between the utopian horizon of socialism and the existing conditions of life was too great to swallow without a heavy dose of humor. The comic absurdity of late socialism could also draw from older traditions of cabaret, farce and carnivalesque entertainment that echoed the “agit-hall” operetta from Weimar Germany or the monologues, dance numbers and songs from Viennese Kabarett. This tradition of political satire survived and in some contexts flourished in the late shows and New Year extravaganzas offered to TV viewers. Here again, as for reality TV, the author sees in this wave of derision a harbinger if not a direct influencer of the politically-charged entertainment programs that were later developed in Western Europe and the Unites States, from the Guignols de l’Info to The Daily Show.

The afterlife of TV Socialism

What remains of socialist TV in today’s Europe united by political integration and market consumerism? TV Socialism addresses the afterlife of socialist TV in three different guises: as postsocialist TV programming, as an archive steeped in nostalgia, and as an academic discipline. First, socialist TV continues to have an active social life in the countries that have made the transition from state socialism to market capitalism. There is much more continuity between late socialism and postsocialism than the narratives centered on Cold War and transition to market would make us believe. Many idiosyncratic genres, distribution patterns, and reception practices have perpetuated into the present day. Some shows and serials have continued into postsocialism; other contemporary programs have deliberately attempted to reproduce the mood and values of late socialist TV, giving it a nationalist twist; and there has also been some reruns of older TV shows, with specialized channels catering to a nostalgic public. New circulating formats, from DVD to on-demand catalogues and YouTube uploads, have brought a new lease of life to vintage programs that have acquired a cult-like status. Anikó Imre adopts a critical perspective on postsocialist nostalgia, known in Germany as Ostalgie, claiming that it is a naive and postimperial gaze on a mythified past. But her own attitude shows that there is pleasure and knowledge to be gained from delving into TV archives, and that the repertoire of antiquated shows and series should not be left to oblivion. Taking socialist TV seriously grants access to an image of life under socialism that stands in stark contrast to the clichés of Cold War stereotypes. Rather than scarcity, homogeneity, and brainwashing, TV Socialism conveys a mixture of familiarity and strangeness, which helps to defamiliarize some of the basic assumptions about Eastern Europe and socialism. As Anikó Imre notes, television has long been relegated to the status of a minor and inferior object for scholarly studies, both in the Slavic and Eastern European Studies departments of American universities and in the cultural studies programs that have burgeoned in Europe. By moving it centerstage, she deconstructs the opposition between high and low culture as well as the Cold War division between East and West and between socialism and postsocialism.