Between non-reformist reforms and attainable gains in living standards and equality, or ‘Walking the Tightrope’ International Workshop Summary – Counter-Strategies to Authoritarianism, 4 Oct 2024, University of Vienna.

Alexander Kurunczi

Day 1

The discussion on the first day envisioned a return to the state in a different form, while remaining acutely aware of the perilous nostalgia that besets progressive forces when reflecting on the state-form. At its core, it raised a question of conceptual language and its translation into political practice: What are the adequate terms for a reclamation of the wellbeing state? – especially in times in which there is palpable democratic backsliding in Europe, the US, and Latin America, as well as parts of the Global South such as India, South Africa, and Turkey. The three talks of the first day, and the ensuing discussions, responded to this political and theoretical challenge from different vantage points: the notion of property, the question of the state-form in the post-colony, and the perspective of hegemony.

 

Siddant Issar and property

Siddhant Issar’s remarks on Charles W. Mills’s notion of the racial contract intervened in a discourse of anti-racist proposals that remained wedded to racial capitalism and its social dynamics and economic assumptions. Advocating for fighting on all planes, including reforms, non-reformist reforms, and the essential maintenance of a radical edge, Issar interrogated the shortcomings of a racial liberalism that remained committed to the property form. From the get-go, this threw into sharp relief pivotal questions for the entire project of contouring a well-being state and refunctioning the state in a way that is conducive to collective flourishing. For one thing, it problematised the notion of the state in terms of its promise of scalability: Which state are we talking about when we refer to the well-being state – does it have to be a nation-state or do we have to think about it on alternative planes of organisation, such as an internationalist supra-state or the municipal level? The insistence on moving beyond capitalism – pivotal as it may be – also sparked productive debates on the character of the utopia that is being negotiated in the (floating?) signifier of the wellbeing state: where to draw the lines between a concrete and an abstract, a reformist or a proper revolutionary utopian sketch? Unsurprisingly, this sparked reflection on how to negotiate these two poles. While some participants suggested that an overly quick shift to an utopian proposal might actually add to the feeling that there is no alternative, there was also a persuasive case to be made that reformist, partial, and piecemeal suggestions are particularly susceptible to capture by the (capitalist) state. In other words: if, for instance, we think about nationalisation as a central strategy to bring about a different political and economic constellation, how do we decide what to nationalise first? While areas such as housing and railways sound like very plausible candidates for such a first push, the effect might be more ambivalent: what might arguably lead to a more classical model of the welfare state does not necessarily give way to the abundance of a well-being state.

Central tensions to the project

This highlighted a tension. On the one hand, the goal was clear – a repurposing of the state under a notion of the commonwealth and collective well-being. On the other – as, for instance, left accelerationist accounts on the British left have been testament to –, there is an undeniable peril to nostalgically harken back to the seemingly golden age of the welfare consensus under a form of fettered liberalism – conveniently ignoring that this consensus was, in reality, built upon racialised and gendered exclusions and a fossil-fuelled political economy, which created the abundance to be distributed in the first place.

 

Kelly Gillespie and spatiality

If this relation between welfare and wellbeing and its different articulations was part of a genealogical analysis of the state’s capacity to provide care and resources, spatiality featured centrally, too: How are we able to do the deep, preventative work necessary to affirm life – especially if the role of the state in the post-colony has remained a veritable predicament? This was the question raised by Kelly Gillespie’s talk on the alarming attachment some of the feminist movements in South Africa have shown to the police and its complicity with the state’s carcerality and the authoritarian tendencies embedded in the state. Interweaving years of ethnographic research in South Africa’s townships, Gillespie’s remarks zeroed in on the pitfalls that come with relying on the state form: its connection to the nation – and hence blood and ethnos – and to sovereignty – i.e., the power to put people to death ­– have proved central stumbling blocks for a political imagination and practice that does not repeat the historical violence of the state. The specific context of the post-colonial situation also reformulates this general predicament of the state. For if the postcolonial state is expected to take up the work of the liberation movement and the liberation party – those very actors that fought for a (more) democratic society and state in the first place –, it does not do so in isolation. Instead, any attempt takes place in a matrix of geopolitical power asymmetries. What might seem like a daunting task – and might, indeed, be one –, however, is also one that stresses the need for genuine internationalism.

 

Paula Biglieri and hegemony

From a perspective of hegemony, Paula Biglieri focussed on a different historically and nationally specific example outside the realm of Europe: Argentina and the Milei government. Tracing the hegemonic articulation of a project of freedom as an empty signifier for the far-right project, Biglieri analysed the ways in which – in the context of an anti-elitist push against the aftermath of the Pink Tide governments in Latin America more generally – any policy that related to collective welfare became deligitimised by association with communism. The far right’s project, then, can be conceived as a fundamentally anti-populist gesture. Biglieri’s analysis thus threw into sharp relief the structuring function of hate in how authoritarianism constructs its political expressions; referring to the specificity of the ‘national security doctrine’ in Latin America’s political landscape more generally, this also involved taking stock of how left forces are continuously conceived of as the ‘enemy from within’ (a trajectory of political abjection stretching from Thatcher to Milei). Taking the workshop’s guiding question of counter-strategies to heart, Biglieri also suggested potentially new articulations that might reinvigorate an emancipatory project. In drawing on the rich history of the signifier in the Argentinian context, Biglieri proposed a return to social justice as a genuinely new nodal point for a hegemonic project of emancipation. Highlighting the various pre-existing communities and contexts, in which the far-right recruited their supporters and which collaborated with in their project (such as, for example, the religious communities and discourses in the US and India), this also accentuated the need for more thorough analysis of the nationally and geographically specific ways in which the rise of authoritarianism has to be analysed.

 

Summing up – the necessity of walking the tightrope between non-reformist reforms and attainable gains with material impacts for living standards and equality

These tensions and debates, different diagnostic emphases and varying proposals are to be expected in a project that specifically (and commendably) confronts an occasional unwillingness of progressive and radical forces to more thoroughly reflect on the role the state plays for social and political transformation. In fact, they are integral for a pluralist account of the wellbeing state. To be sure, reflecting on the level of policy and the state does not always go down well with parts of the Left – and given what appears at times to be a thorough capture of the social democratic project by the neoliberal paradigm this scepticism is not totally unwarranted. However, as in particular the international contributors of the workshop all came to agree by the end of the second day, this cannot mean fully divorcing emancipation(s) from the state. Instead, walking the tightrope between non-reformist reforms and attainable gains that have material impacts for vulnerable and precarious groups remains the essential task – as a defence mechanism against a rampant authoritarianism as much as a utopian horizon for different social relations, collective practices, and social organisation.