tripleC 19 (1): 212-230, 2021 http://www.triple-c.at

Reclaiming Radicalism: Discursive Wars and the Left

Giorgos Charalambous

University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus, [email protected], https://www.unic.ac.cy/charalambous-giorgos/

Abstract: The aim of this article is to identify and discuss a number of labels that have been increasingly used to describe, categorise and study the contemporary radical left – the movements and parties of the socialist tradition and its contemporary derivatives – pointing to the deeply political implications of these trends. More specifically, ‘extremism’, ‘populism’ and ‘nationalism’ as signifiers of what left radicalism looks like are scrutinised in terms of both the political logic and the historical background behind their use, and the challenges they raise for emancipatory, progressive politics. A plea for recasting contemporary social and political struggles for equality and rights is subsequently articulated, the central conviction advanced being terminological: the left’s struggles today must rise above the verbal smoke of the predominant discourse about this political space. It is a key task to appropriately qualify those terms that taint contemporary radicals with colours which do not represent them or fall far short from defining them. Put simply, if the radical left is to succeed electorally and channel its vision into society effectively it needs to reclaim its chief identity trait in the public sphere: left radicalism itself. Reclaiming radicalism entails a number of strategic tasks. These are laid out in terms of imperative discursive articulations, which are, however, paralleled by particular political actions on the ground that can either confirm or undermine any terminological claims.

Keywords: radical left, discourse, populism, extremism, nationalism, political communication

Acknowledgement: The author would like to thank Gregoris Ioannou, the journal’s two reviewers and the editor for comments which have improved the article.

1. Introduction: The Politics of Terminology In the past twenty years a number of concepts and labels have been used and misused to describe radical left identities; specifically, ‘extremism’, ‘populism’ or an ‘illiberal’ heritage, and ‘nationalism’. These terms have become very common as descriptors of radical agency in journalistic and popular discourse; they are used by centrist and conservative politicians and they are also entrenched in academia. The reconstruction of the radical left’s identity by politicians, journalists and scholars away from its historical characteristics and into a realm of concepts that blur its uniqueness as an egalitarian and democratic movement certainly does not work in its favour. When exposed to analytical frames that treat the left as part of a much larger political group whose defining features are not those of the radical left in relation to all the rest, radical left forces draw polemic more easily and are less distinguishable in the public sphere, or stand out for the wrong reasons. The aim of this article is to identify and discuss a number of labels used increasingly to describe, categorise and study the contemporary radical left – the movements and parties of the socialist tradition. While pointing to the implications of these trends, a plea for recasting contemporary social and political struggles for

Date of Acceptance: 21 December 2020 Date of Publication: 23 December 2020 CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons License, 2021. tripleC 19 (1): 212-230, 2021 213

equality and rights is subsequently articulated. The central conviction advanced is terminological: the left’s struggles today must rise above the verbal smoke of the predominant discourse about this political space. It is a key task to appropriately qualify those terms that taint contemporary radicals with colours which do not represent them, or fall far short from defining them. Put simply, if the radical left is to succeed electorally and effectively channel its vision into society it needs to reclaim its chief identity trait in the public sphere: left radicalism itself. That is, opposite other social and political forces, left radicalism must pursue the signification and defence of its chief properties: equality and the call for major redistribution; roots and branch change; democracy and overcoming its liberal capitalist deficiencies; internationalism and the identification of a globality in structurally rooted oppression (see March and Mudde 2005). This article follows that there are material ramifications for radical movements to the systemic reconstruction of the left. Its portrayal exerts actual pressure which may weaken movements. This can happen through the alienation of potential or actual voters, and through the disorientation of left forces away from radical positions as a form of co-optation to entertain allegations. These two tendencies would also feed into each other. Through cues that misconstrue party identity, masses of voters with views that are ideologically incongruent to the left may alter its internal political dynamics. Given this, they can facilitate the mutation of the left’s role in society as a historical movement. Especially in today’s context, these ramifications must be accentuated, as there is already an existing penetration of the contemporary left by postmodern relativism, following the severe setbacks of Marxism as theory, certainty and a unifying pole for radicals. Dominant liberal perceptions have pushed the left away from its historical roots, because, among other things, they deny it a revolutionary subject and the feasibility of an alternative1. By implication the main distinctions of the left-right divide and the properties of the radical left today are already less rooted in class voting and between pro-and-anti-capitalism. Since around the 1960s, a two-dimensional space has structured political conflict in the West: an economic dimension cross-cutting the dimension of identity politics (tradition, authority, nationalism). In this complexion, lines of separation between distinct and even markedly different spaces can be blurred, specifically if positions on only one dimension of conflict are reported or given more attention, or the relationship between dimensions is turned and twisted by systemic discourse. The terminology applied to political movements constitutes a central concern for contemporary radical strategy. It affects citizen as well as militant perceptions about the aims and means of struggle by the socialist movement and its contemporary derivatives. In short, terminology is itself a politics because in every socio-economic system discursive wars about politics reflect conflict in interpretations, ideas and material interests. Terminology is especially important in the context of relatively new competitors for radical left parties today. The contemporary radical left, unlike most of its post-war predecessors, has been confronted by a resurgent far right, which has become a key competitor attracting part of the blue-collar working-class vote. Between the early 1980s and the late 2010s these parties have more than doubled

1 For the crisis of Marxism and the significance of the 1960s and 1970s, see Kouvelakis (2020) and Meiksins-Wood (1986). For the “dictatorship of no alternatives”, see Unger (2009). 214 Giorgos Charalambous

their vote share in Europe, while the broader phenomenon of rising right-wing extremism has taken up a global presence. The rise of the far right has been widely documented, so here it will suffice to note that it poses a challenge for the left largely in the context of very high electoral volatility, a decline in partisan identifications across the board and the significantly weaker status and capacity of trade unions. More particularly, the increasing importance of working-class constituencies among far right forces raises questions that are most relevant to the left’s identity and politics. A ‘proletarisation’ of far right party voters was reported for the 1990s across various European countries, leading to the eventual predominance of working-class votes among the far right social milieu.2 Without a strong government social policy, something virtually impossible under conditions of permanent austerity, welfare chauvinism as a sort of pseudo- socialism obtains electoral force. Welfare chauvinism targeting immigrants constitutes a feature and outcome of welfare retrenchment in the context of the broader neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state (see Keskinen, Norocel and Jørgensen 2016; Mondon 2014). Terminological claims are intermediated by concrete politics. For some decades now radical left parties have found themselves voting in parliament or advocating policy positions similar to those of the far right. In France, this was the case in 2005 at the occasion of the national referendum on the ratification of the European Constitution, where both the radical left and the extreme right mobilised against ratification, obviously for different reasons. In many countries the far left and the far right parties have both been anti-austerity actors; in Greece and Cyprus, ELAM (National Popular Front) and Golden Dawn took an anti-bailout stance and voiced anti-austerity discourse (Charalambous and Christoforou 2018). In Scandinavian countries, social democratic ideas are combined by parties such as the Sweden Democrats (SD) or the Danish People’s Party (DPP), which blend statism with a xenophobic nativist component, which in turn leads them to vote inside parliament like the left on various aspects of budgetary and welfare policy, although they view immigrants and other minorities as ‘scroungers’. At the same time, party systems have become increasingly fragmented, making it difficult to ingrain the left-right as a bi-polarity among citizens, especially in the context of postmodernism having undermined it for several decades now. Many militants and leaders of the extreme right as well as parties of other positions claim to operate beyond and above the left-right divide, arguing that it is obsolete, which is of course not the case3. Events that have shaped contemporary party competition and political conflict are driven by social realignments. New dividing lines were drawn into shape during neoliberal globalisation and its associated forms of regional economic integration, between the so called ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of these processes. Neoliberalism led to a ‘hollowing of democracy in the West’, which in turn spurned political disengagement at the same time as extra-institutional forms of protest (Mair 2013). With regard to the effect of conflating distinct spaces, radical left parties carry some of the blame. Their failures in office on various occasions since the 1990s disappointed voters, and more generally contributed to perceptions of the Left as a force of the status quo. This in turn can feed the growth of the extreme right, which

2 For empirical studies, see Oesch (2008) and Rydgren (2013). 3 For rigorous empirical investigations that validate the sustainability of the left-right divide, see Rosas and Ferreira (2013: Section V).

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can claim more easily a radical identity and sell the narrative of a sold-out Left, one ‘like all the rest’. The rest of this article engages with the discursive wars at play concerning the radical left and its politics during the past twenty years or so. It seeks to explain the chief instances of conceptual blurring and misnaming and how these translate into political challenges. Subsequently, it is argued that overcoming these challenges is a necessary justification of emancipatory identities and that this entails a number of strategic tasks. These are laid out in terms of imperative discursive articulations. Discursive strategies, however, are paralleled by particular on-the-ground political actions that either confirm or undermine any terminological claims. Before concluding, therefore, ontology, the very practice of radical left politics, is considered. Illuminating how political behaviour itself impinges on any attempt towards epistemological counter-hegemony, the article suggests the further production of theory for unveiling tensions and complementarities between the two.

2. The Radical Left in a Sea of Names

2.1. An Extreme Left? Above we were reminded that the far right poses a serious challenge for the left and class politics. But the problem is not only that the far right is today, unlike the earlier post-WWII period, one of the chief political competitors of radicals in elections and in the streets. Part of the challenge for radicals is the intellectual energy invested in popularising a ‘two extremes’ thesis, utilised to polemicise both the radical left and the radical right by equalising them as inimical to democracy, as irrational and populist, as extremists and opponents to the enlightening and necessary process of European integration and globalisation. The first problem of changing party systems is compounded by a second: while in competition, the radical left and the radical right are often treated as alike. Broadly speaking, a ‘two-extremes’ thesis has developed, formulating and testing assumptions about the commonalities and differences between radical left and radical right parties. For example, because welfare chauvinism also effectively opposes the neoliberal “lean state”, as a framework for social and welfare policy (Sears 1999, 1-5), many of these parties have claimed an anti-neoliberal stance; and many commentators have fallen for it. Research in political psychology has invested heavily on studying cognitive behavioural affinities between the supporters of non-centrist ideologies. Some studies go as far as suggesting psychological distress as a driver of espousing ‘extremist’ ideologies, both left-wing and right-wing, because personality disorders are assumed to stimulate the adoption of an extreme ideological outlook, which is in turn seen as expressing ‘simplistic, black-white perceptions of the social world’ (van Prooijen and Krouwel 2019, 159). The equalisation of the two poles in the political spectrum underlying most contemporary political analyses working with the ‘two extremes’, whether these point to more or fewer differences, is catalysed by the definitional approaches that have predominated in the study of neo-fascism and contemporary forms of right-wing extremism. In much of political science scholarship, and the study of party politics, the far right space is defined as ‘radical right parties’ and ‘populist radical right parties’, while ‘neo-fascist’ or ‘extremist’ parties are considered to be for the most part extra-parliamentary fringe groups4. Three claims are at play in this framing:

4 For an indicative summary of these trends, see Golder (2016). 216 Giorgos Charalambous

radicalism can be conservative, the radical right is not extreme and extremists are not typically inside parliament. All three of these underlying convictions that turn ideas into definitional vocabulary damage the left’s case; both the view that extremism and the mainstream right coalesce and are historically enmeshed (see Kallis 2015) and the argument that true radicalism can only be progressive, unlike the situation on the right where radicalism translates de facto into ultra-conservatism, authoritarianism and extremism. Unsurprisingly, Google’s search engine generates as a first result for ‘extremism’ the following Wikipedia lines: “Political agendas perceived as extremist often include those from the far-left politics or far-right politics as well as radicalism, reactionism, fundamentalism and fanaticism”. Obviously, under no circumstances is the contemporary radical left an extremist force; it is the exact opposite, an agent of progress and development, with all the essence of its internal deliberations, theory- building, strategic debates and cultural resonance. Yet in the context of these and related discussions, ‘left-wing extremism’ is not an uncommon term. This is so, certainly in political discourse by the left’s enemies which aim to discredit it, but also in academic studies (see March 2008; March and Mudde 2005; Backes and Moreau 2008). In a seminal definition of the radical left, Luke March and Cas Mudde distinguish between the radical and the extreme left, arguing that extremism is an “ideological and practical opposition to the values and practices of democracy, either as it exists in a particular system, or as a system, which may, but does not necessarily, involve a propensity to violence”. The net is cast as wide as possible, only to subsequently identify extremism as anti-democratic per se, not as simply anti-liberal democratic (March and Mudde 2005, 24-25). But it is also still insisted that “extreme left parties […] have far greater hostility to liberal democracy […and] define anti-capitalism much more strictly” than radical left parties (March 2008, 3). These reflections translate into categorising most communist and Trotskyist parties in Western Europe and unreformed communist successor parties in Eastern Europe as ‘extreme left’. In other words, the anti-capitalist left is the extreme left, whereas the reformist, anti- neoliberal left is radical. It seems that part of the equation in labelling anti-capitalism as extreme is to first identify free enterprise and profit-driven accumulation with democracy. All these narratives reflect the Aristotelian tradition, whereby

the centre is at the same time a point of balance between too much and too little. In it, traits that are fully expressed by the extremes come to the fore in a milder form. The centre, often the metaphor for equilibrium and scales, embodies the principle of moderation. In the doctrine of virtues, the centre stands for morally appropriate behaviour that neither exaggerates nor understates; it neither extends far beyond that which is imperative nor remains far behind. Virtuous behaviour is the condition for a telos which the individual is capable of reaching, both with and within the society of the state: a moderate and virtuous life allows for eudaimonia, the unfolding of human happiness (Backes 2010, 177).

The problem arises when modern transpositions of what constitutes virtue, and by extension virtuous politics or extremism, are taken to deny virtue to resistance and cast resistance as inappropriate for eudemonia. It is also problematic to equate extremism as ‘opposition to constitutional democracy and the rule of law’ with ‘extreme measures’ as transformative visions of change and uncivil forms of

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resistance. While the former definition describes the quality or state of being extreme, the latter refers to the advocating of radical views but not necessarily an anti- democratic outlook, which is engendered in the former definition. To relativise this idea of extremism one can cast it as something transcending the classical left-right continuum, or not to be found only on the poles of a political spectrum. One should not forget, after all, the analysis of fascism as the result of a base built on the extremism of the centre.5 More recently, Tariq Ali’s (2015) analysis of the “extreme centre” reveals a political space which, although nominally centrist, rests upon a politics of full compliance with neoliberal doctrine. Ali captures the consensus over which all major political parties of the Europe and the USA have converged: a dangerous politics tailored to the needs of the market and based on the material pursuit of self-enrichment by politicians (2015, 42-53): that is, the very opposite of politics for the public good, where given minimal political differences, ‘the symbiosis between power and money has almost everywhere reached unbelievable extremes’ (Ali 2015, 3). Indeed, the West’s extremities are not few in the sense of violating civil and political rights or inflicting direct or indirect harm on humans. They range from state repression and police brutality, to foreign military intervention resulting in the mass- scale loss of human lives, to crimes of war more generally, to the uprooting of indigenous populations in pursuit of new markets, to deeply entrenched corruption and patronage practices in several countries, to condoning slave-like working conditions for subaltern groups, to pushbacks of immigrants on national waters, including young children, to the mainstreaming of far right agendas; the list is long and painful. Given that these are features of a new neoliberal extremism permeating both the centre-left and the centre-right, and also condoned through hundreds of mainstream media outlets, then for several decades now these spaces in Europe have been much more extremist than the radical left. A plethora of historical and contemporary extremities have been committed by both the centre-left and the centre-right; hence, the ‘extreme centre’, nominally centrist but substantively extremist. If political families’ ideologies are measured through manifesto pledges, as commonly happens from a positional perspective, the ways in which pledges are fulfilled or not fulfilled in the making of everyday individual, political and government decisions cannot be captured, and this overlooks much of the extremism in mainstream spaces. Part of the accusation about extremism concerns mobilisation tactics and more specifically violent or uncivil acts. In the US, from Portland’s Antifa community to the Dakota Pipelines, radicals have been accused of aggressive and violent behaviour. Notably, Noam Chomsky criticised Antifa tactics in the US, such as physically preventing members of far right groups to express their views, as deeply counter- productive because, among other things, they may elicit an extremist response by the state through, for example, the initiation of ‘anti-terrorism’ programmes of political surveillance. As much as Chomsky is not against, but rather very much for Antifa groups, he was criticised for this view. One argument is that tactics are designed given a particular viewpoint. Many anti-fascists, and indeed the historical left, have seen fascism as a serious political opponent largely generated from capitalism, not

5 This point was famously shown by Lipset (1958). His argument was that, unlike the prevailing understandings of his time, “extremist ideologies and groups can be classified and analysed in the same terms as democratic groups, i.e. right, left, and centre” (347). 218 Giorgos Charalambous

merely a difference of opinion. Thus, as Michael Bray explains, anti-fascists understand their politics

as a struggle rather than something which can sit within a liberal rights framework. Some members of the movement say no free speech for fascists because historically fascism has invalidated its legitimacy in the public sphere – it has shown itself to be violent and genocidal (quoted in Oppenheim 2017).

Beyond Antifa and into the whole spectrum of violent and uncivil resistance, much intensified today, this should not be conceived (at least not always) as irrational, even if sometimes tactically flawed. On the contrary, “non-institutional collective actions are not irrational; instead their departure from the proper pathways of politics reflects the deficiency of systemic channels in connecting citizens to the state, and is, if anything, eminently rational” (Seferiades and Johnston 2016, 4). If conflict “involves the – more or less – institutionalised relationship between contentious claimants and the state (or, more broadly, the authorities)” (Wievorka 2009, quoted in Seferiades and Johnston 2016, 5), then violence is the means resorted to in the absence of meaningful space for institutionalised mobilisations: as Michel Wieviorka puts it, “violence is an expression of the exhaustion of conflict” (quoted in Seferiades and Johnston 2016, 5). Violence then defies institutionalised ‘conflict’ because grievances and claims cannot extract concessions by elites (see also Hobsbawm 2007, 234). This explains why terrorism and the revolutionary left first developed in states where protesters lacked access to legitimate politicalparticipation and clandestinity or insurrection was their only means of mobilisation and resistance (Seferiades and Johnston 2016, 5-7; Vössing 2011; Tarrow 1998, 95). Violence overall, including its relation with the radical left, cannot be separated from the context of global neoliberal system deficiencies. These generate more or less universal patterns of disruptive and unlawful behaviour. In the age of authoritarian neoliberalism, violence is politics in a system otherwise insulated from the political.6 What characterises the crashing majority of the radical left, Antifa groups only partly excepted, is not violence as the unthinking, fanatical, hot-headed violation of rights or physical harm to others. It is more a case of civil disobedience or, more specifically, uncivil resistance and the civil disobedience this entails; the duty to disobey authority if the latter is too coercive or unjust. Pursuing this through various activities, ranging from squatting, to Antifa street fighting, to peaceful refusal to be evicted, to solidarity-based unlawful action, has been a common procedure of mobilisation and resistance among activists, especially during periods of heightened working-class misery. In light of the civil disobedience argument that when authority is extremely oppressive extreme counter-measures are required and arise from a duty of resistance, the left’s ‘extremism’ is a consequence of its diagnosis that politics are oppressive and anti-democratic to the extent that an uncivil response is legitimate and strategically strong. Resort to ‘extremism’ is a conscious choice that derives from actors’ conviction that disobedience is necessary and that labelling it as extremist is a deeply political issue to begin with, entrenched in the battle over the current status quo. Certainly, such a conviction fluctuates in strength amidst changing circumstances, both within the left and in society at large. Today, at a time of huge inequalities across and within countries and the mainstreaming of the far right, this conviction is perhaps more ‘historically legitimated’ from the critical observer’s point of view than earlier.

6 For the main (new) features of authoritarian, neoliberal structures, see Bruff (2014).

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2.2. A Nationalist Left? Radicals utilised nationalism “as a key player in the politics of modernity”, “developed in association with ideas of popular sovereignty and mass democracy bound up with ideas of the self-determination of a given people, defined by shared history and common political rights” (Schwarzmantel 2012, 148). The left has thus often rallied on platforms embracing nationalism as a civic concept evoking democracy and self- determination whereby the nation is the framework for achieving social progress. This is not to say, however, that the alliances of Marxism and socialism with nationalism have not been problematic; indeed often socialism has taken “a ‘back seat’ in the coupling” (2012, 150). Concurrently, “the difficulty which Marxist or Marxist-inspired theories have had in grasping the complexities and enduring appeal of nationalism” (Schwarzmantel 2012, 145) have led to disagreements, which have always manifested themselves into diverging political positions: from Lenin’s disagreements with Rosa Luxemburg on Poland in the early 20th century to the Catalan question in Spain in 2018 and the balancing acts of Spanish politicians and parties on the left in regard to how the issue plays out in the institutionalised public realm. The European radical left has tended to deconstruct national identity or any form of ethnic claim as an ‘imagined community’, with nationalism engendering nations and “not the other way around”. In this vein, tradition and national sentiment has been invented by the profit-seeking drivers of capitalism and the formative processes of the nation-state (Anderson 2006; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). At the same time, while acknowledging nationalist claims as real political grievances manifesting out of imperialist oppression, the left is challenged by the claim that “ethnic myths, narratives, beliefs and symbols” which “often predate the modern advent of nationalism” cannot easily disappear (Conversi 2017; see Smith 1999; 1995). Moreover, this is the epoch of heightened nationalism due to the effects of neoliberal globalisation; the national element in various forms has been on the rise in backlash to the processes pushing economic integration forward. From a strategic point of view, many on the left acknowledge that simply dismissing and deconstructing nationalism could “consign the most powerful ideology in modern history” and today, thus a key political resource for mobilisation and resistance, to political enemies (Conversi 2017). It would also ignore that even in the era of globalisation, the reproduction of capital, income distribution and economic elite formation take place in the frame of the (national) state. The state also remains a relevant reference for progressive politics because the legal grounding of labour relations, welfare provisions, military practice and institutional democratic arrangements remain primarily nationally based. Moreover, if we accept that the EU after Maastricht has institutionalised a technocratic, neoliberal, non-transparent, unequally beneficial and fortress-like governance, then national sovereignty can at once and simultaneously constitute a fight against multiple enemies (that is, policy directions). The Scottish referendum and developments in Catalonia have re-revealed social movements and parties that are (and have historically been) both nationalist and left- wing. How are we to classify regionalist parties in Catalonia or Scotland, or Northern Ireland, or Galicia or Brittany, combining claims to self-determination with socialist principles? Sinn Fein’s ideological profile in the Republic of Ireland has divided academics and activists over its radicalism and its socialism. These peripheral nationalisms and the ways they shape the political agenda are a topic towards which the radical left in Europe again remains divided. Many on the Spanish and European 220 Giorgos Charalambous

left have voiced suspicion at the rise of Catalan separatism, seeing it as a chiefly nationalist phenomenon, which can be and is capitalised upon by the ruling classes to divide the economically oppressed (see Vilallonga 2015). Even though the radical left since Lenin is sympathetic to the right of self- determination, many activists distrust both the leadership of separatist forces and its regional coalition with centrist or right-wing nationalists, and the potential effects of secessionism on the national left and society more broadly (2015). Others remind us that the Catalan question and along with it the Kurdish, Corsican, Scottish and Palestinian movements must be framed not as national questions, ones which concern above all the sacredness of the nation state, but rather as questions of democracy, regarding above all the democratic right to self-defence of the minority: practically, its right to separation or secession. What remains of political essence across all cases is the civic component of nationalism, which can blend with socialism. The people of a nation-state are seen as such by the left not due to ethnic claims of identity but for being a political community. Simultaneously, there is an emphasis on the need for forms of international solidarity as resistance to global capitalism. It is not surprising then that many pro-independence Catalan activists are engaged in solidarity struggles with immigrants and political refugees or in the anti- house-eviction movements. Catalan claims to secession, Catalan culture and ethnicity among radical sections of the populace do not negate, but rather coexist with their internationalist sympathies. Given that discussions over Scotland or Catalonia take place in the very context of discursive slippage and political misnomers, a doctrinal stance on either case in favour of or against secession can be avoided as much as it can be excused. If radicals are divided over today’s political dilemmas posed by sub-national identities in Europe, and given that such divisions are historical, then at least these divisions have to be approached and if possible resolved, not as independent of egalitarian and socialist questions, but solely in connection to them. The conservative right and extreme right parties in the 20th century predominate in terms of identification with and use of nationalism, although it was on left-wing ground that nationalism and the advent of the nation state developed in the late 18th and the 19th century (Hobsbawm 1996, 38-47). The national issue cannot be neglected if the left is to semantically associate (or dissociate) itself with (from) nationalism in ways that are in its favour. Nationalism as a label and strategy surely works negatively in the sense of recalling the far right and enabling easier identifications of the left with populism, extremism, illiberalism or particularism and thus the effective contradiction of internationalism. Still, the left needs a case for nationalism because its struggles (and politics tout court) have always de facto included an evolving national question, because self-determination is a central part of world affairs and is likely to stay as such. Subsequently, the sovereignist left, or the argument of sovereignty, national and by extension popular, must be understood as embedded in the socialism- nationalism nexus, with politically determinate outcomes as to which side will predominate in the fusion. Indeed, how progressive nationalism can be is a question of context. Consider divided Cyprus, where Greek and Turkish nationalism have systematically been the breeding ground of militaristic, corrupt and religious politics, and more broadly the chief obstacle to bi-communal peace on the island. Contrast Cyprus with Scotland in a Britain ruled for a prolonged period of time by the Conservative party in a neoliberal direction. Contrast Cyprus also with the case of the Catalan secessionist left after the authoritarian and harsh response of the Spanish state to the dissenting Catalan

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politicians who upheld the 2017 referendum result. Progressive attitudes and national, regional, local, or indigenous identities mix especially where the latter arise in a context of ethnic and other conflicts, or disagreement over sub-national jurisdictional claims. But the national context itself is of utmost importance as to the potential of nationalism or ethnocentrism to contribute to social progress or translate into a radical political demand with potential for change not possible in the current state of affairs. Political labels and, even more so, academic concepts can still be damaging for the left if the link between ideas and the language they condition is not clarified. Such would be the case of the recent defence of sovereignty among many radical left parties in southern Europe, faced with austerity-driven bail-out programmes. The quintessence of the phenomenon of diminished sovereignty – especially in the Eurozone context – that the radical left identifies as a problem is the lack of accountability of those implementing economic policies. This translates into an inherently illegitimate governance. From this angle, national sovereignty on the radical left is popular sovereignty because only national governments can be accountable to the people, who in turn through them can exercise sovereign power. Therefore, if there is not a people bounded nationally through common territory, there is no popular sovereignty. Following this, repossessing the national state and the national border as economic devices is a defence mechanism against neoliberalism an edifice to counteract its negative consequences (see Kallis 2018, 301). Saying that the chief idea behind calls for ‘economic sovereignty’ is social justice may sound unnecessary, but it is not. If ‘economic sovereignty’ is not explained in correspondence to understandings of what constitutes the popular, as well as up-to- date theories of imperialism, its associated discourse can more easily be misinterpreted. It would then signal an ethnic or nativist, or isolationist, or vaguely ‘populist’ attachment in opposition to prevailing notions of globalisation and integration. As a pejorative, the same thing is framed as ‘economic nationalism’, a term utilised widely by liberal commentators and academics (see Pickel 2003). Nationalism is, like populism, located at the intersection of language and ideas, and has had its imprint on the left since the very beginning. As things are, nationalism is today on the rise, ruling the world across countries and continents. This twofold realisation should direct our interest onto how radical reflections are framed with a national perspective, rather than merely whether they should or not. In the public sphere of the information society, there is conflict over framings of the egalitarian opposite the national, and whether these can advance or constrain radical political struggles. In the final analysis, what should interest the global left is how to connect nationalism with socialism and claim a radical left position in struggles where the two are associated to begin with; as in secessionist and regionalist spaces or in opposition to Eurozone-rooted austerity. At the same time, and above all, disconnecting the left from nationalism as ethnocentrism is of absolute importance if its fundamental divergences from nationalism as overarching ideology, as for the conservative and far right, are to be defended. There is a need to explain that nationally-based claims in politics can be progressive; at least that they are not always conservative in nature, but not because national attachment (territorial or ethnic) is endogenously superior to globalism. Rather, because global, radical and humanistic values and strategies to mobilisation and resistance can sometimes be disseminated through nationally sovereign action in a world defined by imperialist dogmas and contradictions. Otherwise, if sovereign claims are not communicated with an internationalist outlook, they can be accused of 222 Giorgos Charalambous

particularism. In order to reconcile local, national and global claims to politics, a way forward would be to propagate a strategy of “shared sovereignties”, as in parts of the Catalan municipal and secessionist movements (Agustín 2020, 70). Through defending multilevel or ‘relative’ sovereignty, the region, the nation-state or the entire planet would not be approached as exclusive arenas of either struggle or legitimacy. Rather, their significance and coexistence would more clearly be conveyed as shifting and taking shape depending on issue, historical period and political setting.

2.3. A Populist Radical Left? At core, populism is the discursive schema between a people: the ordinary citizens opposite a corrupt elite or establishment. The people can either be exclusive or inclusive, emancipatory or reactionary, depending on how the frames of populism attach to core ideologies of the left or right (see Mudde 2004). Based largely on the work of Ernesto Laclau, various radical left parties have been inspired by a discursive strategy of constructing the people as a counter-hegemonic force – notably Podemos and France Insoumise. Post-crisis social movements, especially given the digital revolution on which they have capitalised, are also seen as embracing populism; and with it, citizenism, sovereignty, autonomy, inclusivity and horizontality (see Gerbaudo 2017; Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis 2019, xi-xii). Some authors call attention to left- wing populism as a force which disfigures democracy, with a personalistic appeal embodied by a charismatic and powerful leadership voicing demagogic discourse (see Mudde 2004). Many comparativists also treat the radical left parties as ‘anti- establishment’ actors who are critical towards liberal democracy or, in some cases, even contest the very idea of democracy, demanding an in-depth transformation of the entire democratic system (Abedi 2009; Backes and Moreau 2008; March and Mudde 2005; Schedler 1996). Populism for radical left parties is often seen as the product of their non-mainstream nature; they are seen as populist because they are anti-establishment, because they are illiberal, because they are nationalist. The first approach is constructive and friendly towards the populist strategy on the radical left, while the second is critical and often dismissive. They both contribute to conceptual confusion, but each in a different manner. For the critical views, much has already been said here: it should perhaps be repeated that anti-populism is fierce and predominant in liberal discourse. Yet a positive view of left populism can also play into misrepresenting radicals, inasmuch as it is taken to suggest full agreement over constructing counter-hegemony, novelty or uniqueness. First, if many of the features of today’s populist forces are novel, some of them at least come from the depths of the radical left’s history: most importantly, the search for a ‘people’, an in- group, a force of counter-hegemony, the inclusionary features of populism and the elitist framing of national capitalism.7 Second, even today, at the time left populism has acquired widespread use as a concept, the radical left is far from unanimous on the issue. Left populism has always been a contested way forward, often dividing socialists along ideological and strategic lines. Indeed, the ‘populist’ style of mobilisation as premised in all-inclusive formulas has been often accused of

7 One can cite multiple historical examples, but perhaps one of the closest to the typified populist frame comes from the French Communist Party (PCF), which in the early 1930s, in the spirit of the national frontist strategies across western Europe, had crafted the slogan ‘union of the French nation against the 200 families and their mercenaries’. See Escalona (2019).

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reformism or opportunism. As James Petras has already explained concerning the 1970s left-wing parties in southern Europe,

the indistinctness of the slogans, in terms of specifying which class interests would benefit or be adversely affected, was considered by many in the Left as a clever electoral tactic to secure lower-class support without alienating the middle class. In the aftermath of the elections, the vagueness of the promises allowed several of the Socialist leaders to state that they had not in fact promised any radical social reforms and therefore were following the same political-economic trajectory traced out before the elections. The point is, however, that the plebiscitary character of the campaigns – the mass excitement in crowded plazas, the focus on the personal leaders, the emphasis on general slogans – transmitted the feeling that ‘movements for change’ were under way, without creating any context for serious critical public examination of programmatic issues (Petras 1984, 146).

It is important to underline that not all left-wing populism is consolidated by serious critical examination of policy pledges, and certainly not all of the radical left aligned behind populism in the period after the 2008 financial crisis or more generally in the 2000s. While some Trotskyist and other extra-parliamentary currents, for example, denounce post-Marxism and populism as its derivative strategy for undermining the prominent role of class and the labour-capital dichotomy in the development of society and the design of socialist strategy, others have participated in broad parties such as Die Linke in Germany, the Left Front in France and Podemos in Spain. Certain radical feminist critiques of populism pose that the latter is an obstacle to feminising politics, reinforcing patriarchal systems (Roth and Shea Baird 2017). The orthodox communists, such as the Greek (KKE) and Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) do not deviate from a strict and absolute class-based understanding of contemporary struggles, and neither does any party in Europe with the label of the communist or workers’ party, no matter how small or large they are. Pointedly, some of the parties identified as representative examples of party populism, such as SYRIZA in Greece and Die Linke in Germany, themselves approach populism mostly as a smear from their enemies, as an ideological dispositif and not a positive self- description à la Podemos or France Insoumise. The term is so widely misused and so adamantly utilised to stigmatise the left and align it with the far right that parties like SYRIZA and Die Linke may de facto voice populist rhetoric but certainly do not defend a populist strategy, which in their national-cultural contexts is synonymous to cheap and superficial politics, the politics of very many promises and no actions, as well as a key feature of extremist competitors. On the one hand, populism is embraced by revolutionaries and reformists, communists and Keynesians, partisans and activists, cutting across older divides. On the other, it is also either rejected en masse as a theory-informed discursive practice, or as a label, or still debated and scrutinised as a broader political strategy, depending on the organisation in question and its internal balance of power. Conceptual confusion arises when the radical left is equated to the populist radical left, or when the latter implies the entire political space in question. Of course, this has political implications. If radical left forces are seen as coherently and above all else populist (which is why one would add the prefix ‘populist’ before mentioning them), then the problems facing the radical left may be reduced to those faced by the 224 Giorgos Charalambous

populist strategy writ large. Indicative of this verbal slippage, in a recent article for Jacobin, Anton Jäger titled his thoughts as follows: “We bet the house on left populism and lost it”. He writes that by 2019 “short-lived and cruel, Europe’s experiment in left populism had ground to a halt” (2019). Through this seemingly surprising observation, in his introduction the writer groups together the Greek moment of 2015, during the negotiations between SYRIZA and the EU concerning the bail-out, the ‘Oxi’ tweets, Paul Mason, Toni Negri, Stathis Kouvelakis, David Graeber, and the general feeling that an alternative might be coming. “Left populists want more than the whole cake”, the author writes, “Instead, they have sought to seize the bakery itself – a far-reaching overhaul of the Eurozone, a departure from austerity programs, and an ambitious expansion of social provision” (Jäger 2019). But left populism doesn’t explain or exclusively represent these positions. These are standard democratic socialist positions embraced by both left-wing populists and others who may be as different as staunch anti-populists. These positions united distinct ideological spaces within the left, carrying over from the classical socialist and social democratic tradition. They were there in the 1990s as well, put forward by parties such as the IU in Spain and Rifondazione Comunista in Greece. Given that ideology conditions discourse (Gerring 1999), the way these positions played out in political experience reflects mostly the challenges and limits of radical reformism in globalised and financialised neoliberal capitalism, and only then the discourse used to legitimise them. Further, SYRIZA’s capitulation to the demands of Greece’s creditors in 2015 was not a defeat of left-wing populism. In fact it had nothing to do with left-wing populism but rather with SYRIZA’s incapacity to offer an alternative and prepare for power, in conjunction with the Eurozone’s internal dynamics and the authority of capital (Kouvelakis 2016). Hence, if the failure of radical visions to translate into policies is the issue here, then it is the radical left strategy in its totality that has failed and not only its populist parts, moments or dimensions. And if this is the case, then any recent limitations, challenges and mistakes concern much more the left and capitalism than merely left-wing populism, especially in the conjuncture of the multiple crises during the 2010s and into 2020. Accordingly, the left needs to turn its attention to the structural questions of politics, to complement them and not replace them with queries of language and the psycho-social responses to it. The argument can also be reversed to consider populism as important for radical left victory. Positive approaches to left populism argue explicitly that it is a successful strategy. Venizelos and Stavrakakis (2020) synthesised a counter-critique to what they call left-wing anti-populism as follows:

In fact, without a populist mobilizing strategy, Syriza – and Podemos – would not have been in a place to either honor or betray its policy commitments, to start with; while Bernie Sanders would not have been able to popularize his social-democratic agenda in the United States either. Nobody would have heard about them, in the first place.

This is a bold statement. Yes, anti-establishment rhetoric is useful in the politics of opposition; yes, inclusiveness, sovereignty, popular appeals and images, common- sense arguments and so on also work, especially in today’s ideational universe. But can we really strip down the success of SYRIZA in Greece or the success of Podemos to the political performance of a rhetorical strategy? Don’t multiple questions arise that remain unaccounted for by convictions like that of the statement

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above? What about Greek neoliberalism in prompting SYRIZA to power? What about Podemos’ lack of populist far right competition? What about the electoral defeats of Eurocommunist-type populism in the 1980s in Italy, France and Spain? What about the defeats of Popular Front strategies in France and Spain? Insofar as the defence of left populism implies linguistic determinism it can neither offer a full explanation of radical left resurgence, success or failure, nor account for the differentiated trajectories of populism across time and space. More explicitly, a left populist strategy is not always (equally) useful and needs to be approached more as a ‘double-edged sword’, whereby “It is ultimately up to the contexts, the stakes and the agents” how it is utilised (Charalambous and Ioannou 2019, 265).

3. Reclaiming Radicalism A specific and unchanging number of things characterise the radical left and these are also the features which render other concepts used in polemic or analysis as either obsolete or epiphenomenal. Given that there is no universal accepted definition on radicalism, radical attitudes and the significations of root and branch change (Arzheimer 2011), radicalism has taken up meanings and associations which differ across countries and evolve through history (for a review, see Gordon and Kinna 2019, 4-6). Radicalism is both about positional distance (the far as opposed to the centre-left) and its interpretation. Or, as it has been alternatively phrased, “radicalism is equally about starting points, novelty and extremes” (2019, 4-6). In this sense the adjective ‘radical’ is to be understood not only as a relational signifier but also as a substantive one. After all, the centre, opposite which one is or is not a radical, can shift in substance, although not in name. To reconcile substantive and positional understandings of the radical left, the positional distance between a radical and a centre-left can be seen as a more radical or subversive espousal of equality and also liberty and fraternity; as far as this effectively translates into anti-capitalism, draws from a broadly Marxist and critical influence and seeks systemic alternatives, whether through reform or insurrection. A radical left is thus left of the centre at a distance approaching the extreme end of the spectrum rather than the centre, but it is also an anti-capitalist left or a left critical of capitalism, seeking to turn emancipatory visions into practice. The radical left is not only a left broadly inspired by the socialist ideal, but its very radicalism is fuelled by its socialist heritage. It also reaches far in organisational format and mobilisation repertoires (intellectuals, trade unions, social movements, parties, militant research collectives, solidarity movements, churches and more), and is substantively a plural left, both in terms of ideas and structures. It is about reforms and extra-institutional action, verticality and horizontality, internationalism, the rights of oppressed communities, private and public sector workers, blue collars and white collars, immigrants, intellectuals, students, feminists, environmentalists, queers, indigenous people, anarchists and statists. What reclaiming radicalism entails is reconstituting and capitalising on the centrality and importance of these defining features as opposed to the obsolete, divisive or epiphenomenal ones within the public sphere. This may appear as an explicitly rhetorical task, if not also a self-evident truth. In reality it entails a number of political imperatives:

 To deconstruct current understandings of, and reactions to, extremism, indicating the real extremisms (of the nominal centre) and uniting behind an understanding of them as such. Accordingly, it must be recalled that in many countries, the extreme 226 Giorgos Charalambous

right is a historical outgrowth, at some times a political breakaway and at others a collaborator of nominally centrist spaces. In this direction it is pertinent to maintain and defend positional distance and thus the advocacy of ‘extreme measures’ as today necessary for even the most basic aspects of the human condition; while fighting with full force extremism’s anti-humanist and anti-democratic strain.  To aim at disseminating radical framings of civil disobedience and attempt to strike a long-term equilibrium between social movements and politicians on this issue. This engenders the expectation, demand and promotion of social activism among radical left party politicians: that is to say, their solid and institutionalised fusion with the masses at every possible opportunity, as a way forward in dealing with personalistic and vertical political structures and bringing the militant left back into focus.  To formulate and propagate visions of a better world, endorsing the search for utopias: in essence, to reacquire teleology. Without as tangible a plan as possible as to what the world should look like, ontological lines of distinction from other spaces can more easily be blurred in political discourse. It is thus important to consolidate utopian thinking in the collective radical imaginary, to speak away from the terminology of laissez-faire and through the concepts of critical political economy – scarcity and abundance, leisure as freedom, full employment, socialism as process, worker councils, collectivised production (see Gindin 2018).  To draw clear lines of demarcation between anti-democracy on one side and emancipation through reconfiguring liberal democracy on the other side. This does not mean a total rejection of political liberalism but the root and branch change of liberal economic policies, which fuel the democratic deficits of politics.  To effectively communicate the lens of internationalism, explicitly rejecting ethnic, cultural or other demographic particularism, either in what concerns the forces of production or beyond them. This means distinguishing with the utmost clarity the universality ingrained across all different traditions of the radical left, away from the particularism that extreme right nationalism and ethno-populism evoke. To achieve this demarcation of sides, although nationalism must be accepted as a progressive force where it exists that way, it cannot be a tool for claiming political legitimacy. In this vein, civic understandings of nationalism on the radical left must always be traced down to their founding stones – egalitarianism, anti-imperialism and anti- capitalism.  To avoid elevating the features of populist strategies above their historicity. Their status as a space within a space should be maintained as a given. Also, their contribution to the domain and field of anti-capitalist and progressive struggle can only be partial rather than holistic. Opposition to capitalism is much wider and more complex than populist stratagems can provide for as a politics of resistance.  To constantly strive to claim a plural and inclusive people. For the radical left, this means above all to accept and effectively communicate the pluralism of its thought and practice, to turn it into a good thing rather than identify it as a vulnerability or lack of cohesion. Radicals should present such pluralism as a positive sign of multiple ongoing radical experimentations and evidence of democratic debate and deliberation across different ideological currents. Such diversity is also an indication that a socialist future can only be a pluralist one. Any divergences over teleology or strategy then must not a priori constitute lines of division. Rather the issue at hand is how to utilise political affinity; how distinct modes of mobilisation and ideological thinking can serve points of convergence on policy and political goals.

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Ontology and epistemology are interrelated, as established by the Kuhnian explanation of scientific revolutions. Reclaiming radicalism is inevitably a project that involves both discourse and action: it is a performance as much as it is a grounded practice. While radicals do best to engage with conceptual issues in the study and talk of the collective actors representing them, political behaviour will always feed back into terminology and the castigation of collective democratic and social struggles. In lieu of further elaboration between these two aspects of politics, let us summarise how: when electoral campaigns evoke national sovereignty simplistically and through sloganeering, nationalism resonates more easily as a defining feature of the left. When alliances occur with nationalist and right-wing forces, alleged affinities between the two parts of the alliance will gain face validity. Only if carefully balanced in electoral rhetoric and supported by radical programmatic positions and untarnished actions on the ground will socialism avoid taking ‘the back seat’ in questions of self- determination. For left populism, if the discursive strategy of constructing a counter- hegemonic, sovereign people is aligned with the politics of personalised organisations or sectarianism, it is cancelled out. This is both because of the negation of the people’s central role as a collective whole over individual identities and due to the fact that fragmentation is opposite of what left populism is about – mass unity of a relatively heterogeneous crowd. Similarly, when government participation (as in Italy and France during the late 1990s, or Greece in the 2010s) leads to endorsing welfare retrenchment or foreign imperialist wars or austerity packages, the far right can more effectively claim an anti- establishment profile, a ‘neo-socialist’ or ‘neither left nor right’ identity; and the radical social milieu often becomes alienated. Political compromise becomes an important concept and the lines separating it from co-optation, de-mobilisation and self- negation are thin. When radicals cease to be radical they face setbacks. And much of the aftertaste leads to divisions and sectarianism. This is in any case not an easy or temporary pathology to get rid of, given a broad, complex and rich ideological heritage. Moreover, to speak of socialism to promise a utopia and explicitly invoke transformative potential is perhaps the discursive tactic most in need of ontology. Without a solid, scientific, collective and rigorous background of policy elaboration and theoretical discussion, a discourse which brings teleology in from the cold without making the case for socialism’s plausibility is exposed to all the common accusations dealt with here. Any form of contradiction, disjuncture or incongruence within the radical left will eventually be discursively articulated into an offensive against it. This attack can either concern its false promises, oversimplifying pledges and thus demagogic style, or more generally its veritable continuity with other political forces, which engage in ‘politics as usual’.

4. Conclusion Reclaiming radicalism can be fuelled when collective efforts by popular and workers’ movements, politicians and intellectuals are made to alter the existing dialectic between discourse and action. For this act of resistance to be fruitful, collective agency and a certain degree of unity, a famille spirituelle, are necessary. Consistency is also important, but both of these potentialities are influenced and often obstructed by historical time and national specificities, as well as the contingencies of elections and parliamentary structures. Distorting signifiers of left radicalism have come into widespread circulation because of pre-existing structural 228 Giorgos Charalambous

factors. Yet agency can either be present, or not. Reclaiming radicalism is a complex and difficult task to achieve, especially in the age of fake news and given that the radical left political space as a whole is fragmented. Yet doing so is visibly pertinent in the battle of ideas and interest if radicals want to compete and struggle on their own terms and not those of others. Finally, inasmuch as the left needs to plan specific strategies to deal with systemic labelling and the discursive distortion of its identity, there is also a grave need to decipher strategic success and failure in doing so thus far. Further study in this direction will be most effective if it is both conceptual and empirical: that is, simultaneously identifying how discourse can be legitimised or delegitimised by action, and how this effect has operated in particular historical eras and instances.

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About the Author Giorgos Charalambous Giorgos Charalambous is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nicosia, working in the field of comparative European politics and political sociology and especially focusing on parties, ideas, attitudes and mobilisation processes. He is currently the co-convenor of the Left Radicalism Specialist Group (sg) of the Political Studies Association (PSA). His second monograph ‘The European Radical Left: Movements and Parties since the 1960s’ is forthcoming with Pluto Press.

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Mapping Connective Actions in the Global Alt-Right and Antifa Counterpublics

WEIAI WAYNE XU University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

The study examines how the Alt-Right and the Antifa counterpublics build counteridentities and influences through three connective actions: crowdsourced gatekeeping, hashtag- based framing, and political jamming. By studying social networks of Twitter-based information flows and semantic networks based on hashtag co-occurrence, coupled with bot-detection algorithms, the study presents how counterpublics build like-minded communities for information sharing and use Twitter mentions to seek rapport with fellow counterpublic members and challenge ideological opponents. Both counterpublics adopt counteractions to varying degrees in the form of oppositional framing, mockery, and trolls. Their hashtags suggest that the Alt-Right is a transnational alliance of populism and ethnonationalism capitalizing on U.S. President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, whereas Antifa’s identity is more decentralized and activist-oriented, defined by progressive causes, offline rallies, and cyber operations. The results of the study shed light on digitally mediated counterpublics and how connective actions support their goals.

Keywords: counterpublic, connective action, collective action, Alt-Right, Antifa, social media

Fringe political groups are on the rise globally. Representing two factions on opposing ends of the ideological spectrum are the Alt-Right and Antifa. The Alt-Right (alternative right) is a loosely connected group of people who are sympathetic to the cause of far-right populism and ethnonationalism (Lyons, 2017). Long eschewed by establishment conservatives, the Alt-Right has distinguished itself by its opposition to multiculturalism, globalization, and the elite (Lyons, 2017). It has gained political clout through the election of populist leaders in the United States and through the rise of far-right parties in Europe (Lyons, 2017). Antifa (short for antifascist) is a global, self-organized vigilante movement that physically confronts the rise of the Alt-Right and other neo-Nazi groups (Bray, 2017). The two rival groups frequently confront one another on streets, resulting in riots, damage, and even deaths.

Weiai Wayne Xu: [email protected] Date submitted: 2019–04–11

Copyright © 2020 (Weiai Wayne Xu). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1071

The emergence of the Alt-Right and Antifa presents a new case for studying counterpublics (Fraser, 1990) and their online networks of connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Counterpublics describe alternative public spheres in opposition to the dominant public (Fraser, 1990). Counterpublics relate to marginalized and discriminated groups (Clark, 2016; Duguay, 2016; Jackson & Welles, 2016) as well as to political minorities, such as the far-right in Europe (Toepfl & Piwoni, 2018) and climate change skeptics (Kaiser, 2017). Recent studies have investigated counterpublics’ use of digital technologies (Duguay, 2016; Eckert & Chadha, 2013; Jackson & Welles, 2015, 2016; Renninger, 2015; Toepfl & Piwoni, 2015; Vicari, 2017). Whereas a great deal of focus has been placed on their counternarratives and actions (Jackson & Welles, 2015; Toepfl & Piwoni, 2018), there is a lack of theorization as to how counterpublics leverage networked connective actions to build counteridentities and actions against a rival counterpublic that holds a competing ideology. Connective actions refer to a repertoire of digitally enabled, networked, personalized, and decentralized actions of mobilization that are distinct from the traditional collective actions characterized by the involvement of formal organizations and centralized resource mobilization (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Through network analyses of far-right and far-left hashtags (i.e., #bluehand, #whitegenocide, and #antifa), this study examines three connective actions: crowdsourced gatekeeping, framing through hashtags, and political jamming.

The Emergence of Fringe Political Groups: The Case of the Alt-Right and Antifa

The Alt-Right, or “alternative right,” is a global sociopolitical undercurrent of the broader far-right movement. The Alt-Right comes in many forms, from White supremacy to the more moderate antiestablishment and antiglobalization populism (Mudde, 2017). Although the term Alt-Right is loosely defined and even misappropriated (Mudde, 2017), its followers and sympathizers are alike in their embrace of White identity politics and nativism, as well as in their opposition to the elite, globalization, and multiculturalism (Lyons, 2017). The ideologies of the Alt-Right, although looming in some aspects of American politics, are largely rejected by traditional conservatism. Therefore, the Alt-Right is marked by its fringe status in its contempt for and alienation from the political mainstream (Lyons, 2017). It should be noted that the Alt-Right has been creeping into mainstream politics through far-right parties in Europe and the Tea Party populist movement in the United States (Mudde, 2017). The Alt-Right ecosystem consists of speakers, think tanks, and media outlets, as well as Internet communities. Its online communities exist as loosely connected groups across Internet platforms, such as anonymous forums (4chan, 8chan), Reddit, and private social network sites (e.g., Gab; Daniels, 2018; Thompson, 2018).

Antifa is a self-organized, vigilante group that rises to fight racism, xenophobia, and other forms of injustice across Western democracies (Bray, 2017). It seeks physical confrontations with neo-Nazis through militant tactics and doxxing (i.e., exposing the private information of neo-Nazi members on social media; Bray, 2017). Antifa’s radical approach stems from its followers’ distrust of institutions that they consider complicit in fascism and racism (Beinart, 2017; Bray, 2017). It joins forces with such fringe political ideologies as anarchism, socialism, and communism (Beinart, 2017). Antifa has an active presence in Europe, mobilizing antiright rallies and protecting Muslim refugees from neo-Nazis. In the United States, Antifa has become a household name after its violent clashes with neo-Nazis on the University of California– Berkeley campus and in Charlottesville, Virginia (Bray, 2017). The Alt-Right’s main object of hate is minority groups, including immigrants and refugees. Antifa’s claimed goal is fighting against the Alt-Right to protect vulnerable minorities (Bray, 2017). The rivalry between the two groups is on display in violent on-street protests (“America’s Extremist Battle,” 2017) and on social media (Klein, 2019). 1072 Weiai Wayne Xu International Journal of Communication 14(2020)

The Alt-Right and Antifa as Counterpublics

The concept of counterpublic (Fraser, 1990) derives from Habermas’s (1989) vision that media form a public sphere for debating and deliberating issues. A public sphere, however, does not function as a singularity, but fragments into multiple, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting publics (Bruns & Highfield, 2016). The mainstream public has dominant powers in producing knowledge and social consensus (Toepfl & Piwoni, 2018). Domination inevitably excludes certain groups from participating in public life. The marginalized groups then form counterpublics to challenge the dominant mainstream (Fraser, 1990). Asen (2000) associates counterpublics with oppressed identities, subversive media spaces, and underaddressed topics. Counterpublic studies commonly address African Americans, women, immigrants, and sexual minorities—those who are traditionally oppressed (see Eckert & Chadha, 2013; Jackson & Welles, 2015; Renninger, 2015). Counterpublics can be formed by those who perceive themselves as powerless, regardless of whether or not such a perception is accurate (Asen, 2000). Therefore, counterpublics are not necessarily associated with progressive causes (Kaiser & Puschmann, 2017) and can apply to the radical left and right (Downey & Fenton, 2003). Toepfl and Piwoni (2015, 2018), for example, contend that the European far- right formed a counterpublic because its voices were muted in the mainstream media. Similarly, Kaiser and Puschmann (2017) assigned the label to census-defying climate change skeptics.

The Alt-Right arguably is a counterpublic formed on the perceived oppression of White identity (Lyons, 2017). The group consists largely of White males, who are of the historically privileged class. Over the past decades, however, ethnic minorities in the United States have been gaining political voices and economic clout, whereas some working-class White males have suffered economic hardships (Hochschild, 2016). The society has moved to embrace diversity and multiculturalism, making the once culturally and economically dominant White males “strangers in their own land” (Hochschild, 2016). The perceived economic insecurity, cultural displacement, and fear of losing status drive right-wing and populist ideologies (Inglehart & Norris, 2016; Mutz, 2018). Fueling the perceived oppression is censorship by the mainstream society. Outspoken Alt-Right speakers Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos have been frequently banned from public appearances and on social media (Ohlheiser, 2016). Gab, a private social networking site frequented by the Alt-Right, was once deplatformed because of its offensive content (Hagey, Wells, & Frosch, 2018).

Antifa is a counterpublic formed because of the suppression of their unpopular political belief and tactics. Bray’s (2017) book chronicles how the Antifa movement suffers political alienation, media mistreatment, and repression from law enforcement and the moderate progressives in Europe and the United States. Whereas the censorship of Antifa is little reported, the mainstream media and political pundits often label Antifa as an “outside agitator” while criticizing its violence and fringe ideologies (Beinart, 2017; Bray, 2017).

Counterpublic Connective Actions on Social Media

Scholars have long recognized the centrality of media technology in counterpublics. Their early interests lay in media outlets owned by ethnic minorities and citizen-oriented media production (Asen, 2000). The more recent discussions involve digital media, which, according to Castells (2012), form “counterpower” in subversive communication networks to challenge institutional power. Digital technologies support counterpublics’ two essential goals. The first goal is forming, redefining, and articulating an International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1073

alternative identity (Asen, 2000). Counterpublics are observed to have developed scripted languages and safe communicative space to be secluded from the mainstream (Squires, 2002). Social media platforms, in particular, become the very first mediated places for some marginalized populations to find collective identities and voices (Leung & Lee, 2014). In this realm, Renninger (2015) demonstrated how the asexual community used the less-regulated social network site Tumblr for private, in-group contact and identity expression. Eckert and Chadha (2013) found that the Muslim minority in Germany used blogs to express intersectional identities to challenge mainstream misperception. The second goal is to engage a wider audience, either by challenging the dominant public or seeking support (Asen, 2000; Squires, 2002). The literature presents diverse counteractions such as counterframing (Toepfl & Piwoni, 2018) and hashtag hijacking (Jackson & Welles, 2015, 2016).

Despite ample examples of counterpublic members using social media for counteridentities and influence, there lacks a discussion of their actions under connective actions that have become the signature of online social movements (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). The notion of connective actions provides a useful framework to theorize counterpublics’ digital actions and impacts. Unlike traditional activism, which requires formal organizations to play the central role in mobilizing resources and public participation, the logic of connective actions is that Internet users join social movements through “digital networking mechanisms” without the intermediation of traditional organizations (Vicari, 2017). Such collective participation tends to be self-motivated, personalized, and organizationally flattened, as well as geographically distributed (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Such characteristics match those of counterpublics as being grassroots and nonhierarchical (Downey & Fenton, 2003). Next, I synthesize previously identified digital counterpublic actions into three connective actions: hashtag-based framing, crowdsourced gatekeeping, and political jamming.

Hashtag-based framing. A hashtag is a user-assigned label to annotate social media texts. Common hashtags weave like-minded individuals into a networked public in redefining and reframing contentious issues (Bruns, Moon, Paul, & Münch, 2016; Hopke, 2015). Pond and Lewis (2017) call hashtags “the representative symbols of personalized action frames” (p. 5) that could redefine dominant narratives. When used as sense-making tools and interpretative schemata, hashtags highlight certain aspects of identities and events (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013): For instance, the use of #Solidarityisforwhitewomen and #NotYourAsianSideKick reveals how feminist identities intersect with racial identities (Kuo, 2018). When used for performative expressions, studies reveal how marginalized groups tell personalized stories through common hashtags to challenge hegemonic discourses (Liao, 2019; Papacharissi, 2012). In a move that embodies “frame alignment” (Benford & Snow, 2000), users connect between otherwise disconnected issues by using multiple hashtags in the same context (Vicari, 2017). Because counterpublics reflect diverse interests and causes (Asen, 2000), the frame alignment is a strategic step to “link their interests and interpretive frames with those of prospective constituents and actual or prospective resource providers” (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 624). Through this lens, Tremayne (2014) shows how online groups/movements addressing different equality issues aligned with the #Occupy movement to project a unified voice. Jackson and Welles (2015) reveal how the Occupy movement and civil rights groups joined the Black counterpublics through shared hashtags.

Crowdsourced gatekeeping. Social media enable the sharing of user-created content to reach a mass audience. On Twitter, for example, users frequently retweet or share content via the @RT marker. Users can also mention other users (via the @ marker) for directed replies and commenting. Bennett and 1074 Weiai Wayne Xu International Journal of Communication 14(2020)

Segerberg (2012) call the personalized sharing “the linchpin of connective action” (p. 760). Meraz and Papacharissi (2013) further argue that the sharing embodies networked gatekeeping because users collectively filter the stream of user-generated content, finding the most relevant and important information. The most shared content and users become the prominent voice of a minority community (called crowdsourced elites) rising to challenge elite narratives (Jackson & Welles, 2015, 2016). Jackson and Welles (2015, 2016) observed that through everyday activism and citizen reporting, average members of African American neighborhoods could become opinion leaders to reset the news agenda. Driven by the goal of creating counternarratives, counterpublic members can leverage social media’s sharing features to create influencers.

Political jamming. Social media enable counterpublic members to co-opt existing communicative spaces of the dominant class through the subversion of original meanings, coupled with the use of humor, parody, and mockery (Cammaerts, 2007). Examples of political jamming include infiltrating established institutions’ social media pages, as in the case of the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong (Chan, 2018), hijacking official hashtags in African American activists’ jamming of #myNYPD to mock and criticize alleged law enforcement brutality (Jackson & Welles, 2015), and in Cambodian youths’ production of satirical memes to protest against their authoritarian regime (Lee, 2018). The use of social media bots and trolls—that is, manipulating platform algorithms to spam other users and amplify certain viewpoints—raises the possibility of a new form of political jamming. Trolls are used to mislead, agitate, and disrupt opponents’ communication spaces, sowing distrust and divisions (Woolley & Howard, 2019); they have been used to wage information warfare between nation-states (Al-Rawi, 2019). Bots are used to automate information diffusion, which embodies what Chan (2018) refers to as copy and paste jamming, in which counterpublics leverage the “structural affordances of networked publics” (p. 11) to record and amplify messages. Both trolls and bots can be conceived as political jamming because they introduce noise into the signal in a saturated media space characterized by information overload and attention deficiency (Al-Rawi, 2019).

This study examines connective actions used by the Alt-Right and Antifa counterpublics, emphasizing how connective actions reveal counteridentities and counteractions. I conduct this work in consideration of two gaps in the literature. The first gap is the lack of theorization of Antifa and the Alt-Right as mediated counterpublics. Recent works detail the genesis of Antifa (Bray, 2017) and the Alt-Right (Mudde, 2017). Communication scholars have also studied how the two groups use Internet platforms (Daniels, 2018; Eddington, 2018; Klein, 2019). However, no study, to my knowledge, has discussed the Alt-Right and Antifa through the lens of counterpublics, presenting a missed opportunity to update the old theoretical framework with recent cases. More important, the second gap is a lack of research on linking connective actions to counterpublics’ goals of identity articulation and building counteractions. This study thus expands the literature’s focus on rhetoric (Klein, 2019) to consider a broader repertoire of digital actions. Guided by the aforementioned three connective actions, I propose the following research questions:

RQ1: How do the Alt-Right and Antifa counterpublics use the crowdsourced gatekeeping process to develop counteridentities and counteractions?

RQ2: How do the Alt-Right and Antifa counterpublics use hashtag-based framing to develop their counteridentities and counteractions? International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1075

RQ3: How do the Alt-Right and Antifa’s counterpublics use political jamming for counteridentities and counteractions?

Method

The Alt-Right has popularized racially charged and conspiracy-sounding hashtags, such as #whitewomenaremagic, #whitegenocide, and #bluehand (Daniels, 2018; Morgan, 2016). According to the definition provided by the Urban Dictionary (Bluehand, n.d.),#bluehand is described as “an online movement against political correctness and Islamification of countries”; #whitegenocide is related to the White genocide conspiracy theory positing that immigration, racial integration, and other progressive policies have resulted in reverse discrimination against the Caucasian White. I selected the two hashtags because the hashtags represent the underlying core grievance expressed by the Alt-Right. The hashtags have also received mainstream media coverage (Morgan, 2016) and scholarly attention (Eddington, 2018; Graham, 2016) in studying the radical right. The Antifa counterpublic has a digital community center called It’s Going Down, designed as a hub for the anarchist, antifascist, autonomous anticapitalist, and anticolonial movements. It uses a group of hashtags (e.g., #antifa, #allout, and #prisonstrike) to organize protests countering neo-Nazis (It’s Going Down, 2017). The current study focuses on #antifa and its general use in everyday Antifa activities.

Data Collection

I used a customized Python script to grab all tweets available through the public Twitter Search API in the study period (between April 15, 2018, and August 15, 2018). The timeframe covers the one-year anniversary of the notorious Charlottesville car attack by an Alt-Right protester. The Python script (available on request) was set to run daily to ensure the thoroughness in data collection. However, given the black- box nature of Twitter API (Rafail, 2018), it is difficult to gauge the representativeness of this convenient tweet sample collected from the Search API. After removing duplicates, the data set includes 33,271 tweets from #bluehand, 58,917 from #whitegenocide, and 217,285 tweets from #antifa. To protect user privacy, the institutional review board at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst reviewed and approved the study protocol. Multiple steps were taken to minimize the exposure of personal information in data visualization. Following prior work (Jackson & Welles, 2015, 2016; Vicari, 2017), I used network analysis to reveal and quantify counterpublics’ connective actions. Network analysis can visualize and quantify connections between entities—whether they are Internet users, words, or hashtags.

Social Network Analysis for Crowdsourced Gatekeeping (RQ1)

I first applied social network analysis to study user-to-user relationships formed on retweeting and Twitter mentions. Betweenness centrality, a network indicator measuring how central (and consequently influential) a user is in a network, was calculated to identify crowdsourced elites (Jackson & Welles, 2015, 2016; Vicari, 2017): Crowdsourced elites are those who are ranked highest by betweenness centrality. I then used the Python package tsm (Freelon, 2014) to create two social networks based on retweets and mentions. The retweet network (based on the retweeting of any of the three hashtags) has 1,011,167 nodes (i.e., accounts) and 196,518 edges (i.e., connections). The mentions network has 27,059 nodes and 39,664 edges. Blondel, Guillaume, Lambiotte, and Lefebvre’s (2008) community detection algorithm was applied to compartmentalize Twitter accounts in a network into clusters (subgroups), revealing counterpublic groups distinguishable by ideologies and interests. The accounts in each identified cluster tend to have frequent 1076 Weiai Wayne Xu International Journal of Communication 14(2020)

interactions (via retweeting or mentions) with other accounts in the same cluster but limited contact with accounts outside the cluster. The five biggest clusters were analyzed for their crowdsourced elites. To contextualize findings, I manually read all identified crowdsourced elites’ tweets.

Semantic Network Analysis for Hashtag-Based Framing (RQ2)

Because hashtag co-occurrence indicates “frame alignment” (Vicari, 2017), I created semantic networks in which two hashtags are connected if they co-occur in the same text. Counterpublic identities are revealed through hashtag co-occurrence in the same Twitter user’s bio, and the same goes for counteractions through a co-occurrence in the same user’s tweets. To conserve computing resources, I limited the analyses to the 20,000 most frequently used hashtags in each network. The semantic networks were created using quanteda, an open-source R library for textual analysis (Benoit et al., 2017). Betweenness centrality was used to identify prominent hashtags. Blondel and colleagues’ (2008) community detection algorithm was used to cluster hashtags into distinct subgroups for later interpretations.

Bots and Troll Detection for Studying Political Jamming (RQ3)

I focused on political jamming through bots and trolls using the tweetbotornot R library (https://github.com/mkearney/tweetbotornot), which relies on machine learning algorithms to score each account’s bot probability. Accounts flagged as having above 99% probability of being bots were labeled bots in the study. Trolls were identified by checking with the API to see whether an account had been suspended by Twitter: Twitter routinely suspends users for spamming and posting abusive content.

Results

Crowdsourced Gatekeeping (RQ1)

Figure 1 presents the five largest user clusters in the retweet network identified by the community detection algorithm in network analysis. For simplicity, this figure visualizes only accounts that retweeted at least six other accounts in the same network. The largest cluster in pink (n = 11,348, encompassing 11.2% of the total accounts in the network) has its top-20 crowdsourced elites mostly tied to Antifa (hereafter labeled the Antifa cluster). They include city-specific Antifa groups (@EdinAntifa, @NYCAntifa, and @rosecityantifa), grassroots anarchist political organizations (@brrn_fed), local anarchist establishments (@pmpressorg), Antifa activists, and the official account of the Anonymous (@youranoncentral), which is a decentralized international hacktivist group. The crowdsourced elites also include Mark Bray, a historian researching and advocating for Antifa. The second-largest cluster in green (n = 10,038, encompassing 9.92% of the total network) features crowdsourced elites who are mostly conservative Christians and Trump supporters. Eleven of the top-20 accounts have keywords and hashtags on Twitter bios related to Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign (this cluster is labeled MAGA Cluster 1). The third-largest cluster in blue (n = 9,957, consisting of 9.84% of the total accounts) is dominated by grassroots and largely anonymous far-right accounts, such as accounts associated with the #bluehand movement (@bluehandarea and @bluearmyfaction), far-right media outlets, fellow #bluehand followers in the United Kingdom and United States, and self-identified Trump supporters (hereafter the cluster is labeled the #bluehand cluster). The fourth-largest cluster in gray (n = 7,504, encompassing 7.42% of the total accounts) is similar to the second-largest cluster in that its crowdsourced elites are exclusively pro-Trump conservative accounts (this cluster is labeled MAGA Cluster 2). The fifth-largest cluster in yellow International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1077

(n = 7,107, 7.03% of all accounts) is primarily formed of discussions about the so-called “White genocide.” Its crowdsourced elites consist of accounts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and Europe. Although geographically dispersed, accounts in the fifth-largest cluster share a common interest in preserving and protecting “White rights” (hereafter, the cluster is named the White rights activist cluster). In summary, the clustering of accounts shows how accounts form like-minded groups based on distinct identities and ideologies. The network also shows a clear chasm between the Antifa and Alt-Right clusters (note in Figure 1 the gap between the Antifa cluster and the rest), which means only a handful of accounts retweeted across the ideological lines (the bridges). The bridge accounts include an academic, a free speech advocate, a reporter from the New York Daily News, and a conservative account that claimed to “welcome moderate Democrat tweets on [their] page because the United States needs a two-party system” on its Twitter bio.

Figure 1. The retweet network.

Figure 2 presents the mentions network and its five largest clusters. Compared with passive retweeting, the Twitter mention is a more preemptive and direct way of user interaction. Counterpublics can build counterinfluence through directly tagging other users to draw their attention. The mention networks, which map out counteractions, reveal who counterpublic members seek to influence. Unlike the retweet network, which shows a clear ideological division line, the Alt-Right and conservative accounts seem to have a stronger presence in the mentions network. To contextualize findings, for each of the top-five clusters, I 1078 Weiai Wayne Xu International Journal of Communication 14(2020)

manually reviewed the bios of its top-10 accounts by in-degree (the most mentioned) and out-degree centrality (the most active accounts in mentioning others). I then read the tweets sent by the top-five most active accounts in each cluster.

Figure 2. The mentions network.

The largest cluster in pink (encompassing 6% of the entire mentions network) shows a group of Trump supporters actively targeting other like-minded conservative accounts and also mainstream media and journalists (@cnn, @msnbc, @washingtonpost). The qualitative analysis reveals tweets meant for criticizing the mainstream media, such as the following example directed at CNN’s Chris Cuomo: “I saw the video. Is it really ok to hit a bigot? I consider YOU a BIGOT Who are you to say it’s ok to break laws and hit people?” The analysis also identifies some tweets directed at specific Antifa accounts aimed at mocking the Antifa movement: “Hey Winchester, when’s your next violent democrat #Antifa rally?” International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1079

In the second-largest cluster in green (6% of the entire network), both Trump supporters and anti- Trump accounts were active in outreach. They targeted politicians (@realdonaldtrump, @potus, @maxinewaters), political parties (@gop), and government agencies (@thejusticedept, @fbi), as well as George Soros (@georgesoros), long accused by the political right for funding Antifa. The qualitative analysis shows that pro-Trump accounts’ pointed criticism at Antifa’s violence. Several of their tweets were directed at Donald Trump and law enforcement to call out Antifa as a domestic terrorist group: “@FBINewYork @WhiteHouse Is this #Legal? Endangering the Lives of #USA Government Employees? #Antifa Loves it!”

The anti-Trump accounts, presumably members of Antifa, sent threatening tweets to Trump and his conservative supporters as seen in the following tweet: “@FrankTunde64 @DontMessWMurphy @FL_lewoo @AuthenticAmUS @realDonaldTrump #antifa is now watching frank and his family very closely.”

In the third-largest cluster in blue, the most mentioned are conservative news outlets and hosts (e.g., @seanhannity, @v_of_europe), conservative speakers (@kthopkins), the #bluehand official account, and the Trump White House (@presssec). The most active accounts include the #bluehand official account along with the so-called “#bluehand family members.” The #bluehand followers used Twitter mentions to welcome new members and for in-group chats. An Antifa supporter was also identified, who used Twitter mentions challenging #bluehand followers. Within the fourth-largest cluster in gray, the most mentioned accounts are conservative news outlets and hosts (e.g., @foxnews), the founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA (@charliekirk11), and a congresswoman of the Democratic Party. The most active accounts’ tweets include those by conservative accounts mentioning other conservatives to attack Antifa. Some tweets also mention Antifa accounts directly to challenge its actions. In the fifth-largest cluster in orange, the most mentioned accounts include a fake Antifa account propped by the Alt-Right (@bevhillsantifa7), a suspended Proud Boy account (@proudboysusa), conservative figures, and the Canadian prime minister. Similar to other clusters, the most active accounts are conservative accounts that sent tweets attacking Antifa.

Hashtag-Based Framing (RQ2)

Concerning the semantic networks of hashtags in Twitter bios (see Figure 3), I inspected each cluster’s top-100 hashtags identified by betweenness centrality. Here, betweenness centrality serves as a proxy measure of prominence and salience. Next, I discuss several unique patterns that have emerged from the networks.

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Figure 3. Hashtag network based on co-occurrence in Twitter bios.

First, hashtags by accounts in the Alt-Right clusters reveal the importance of local far-right populist parties and ethnonationalism movements across North America (#MAGA, #KAG), United Kingdom (#Brexit), Europe (#PVV, #AfD), and South Africa (#SouthAfrica). Although a transnational community, the Alt-Right counterpublic seems to capitalize on a central figure: Donald Trump because the most central hashtag in all of the four Alt-Right clusters is #maga, coupled with Trump-inspired hashtags (e.g., #maga, #trump, #draintheswamp, ##trumptrain, and #kagr [Keep America Great]). Hashtags indicative of conservative causes are also dominant, including gun control (e.g., #NRA and #2a [Second Amendment]), antiabortion (#prolife), restrictive immigration (#buildthewall), free speech (#1a [First Amendment]), and America First, pro-Israel, and promilitary foreign policies (e.g., #patriot, #americafirst, #istandwithisrael, and #military). The #bluehand cluster, although centered around MAGA, extensively uses hashtags related to British politics, such as #brexit, along with #iamtommy and #freetommy, the latter two supporting jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Hashtags by the White rights activist cluster have an explicit mention of issues in South Africa (#southafrica, #farmmurders), signaling the grievance over the alleged targeting of South Africa’s White population by robberies and government land seizure (de Greef & Karasz, 2018), as well as hashtags related to far-right politics in Germany (#prodeutschland, which refers to a far-right, anti- Islamification movement). International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1081

Second, unlike the centralization of the Alt-Right clusters under the banner of Trump and MAGA, the Antifa identity, reflected by hashtag use in the Antifa cluster, is more decentralized and represented by the anti-Trump resistance movement (#resist and #resistance), the Anonymous (#anonymous), progressive social movements (#blacklivesmatter, #metoo), and progressive causes (#freepalestine, #BDS, #medicareforall, #climatechange). Unlike the MAGA-centered Alt-Right counterpublic, there appears to be no overriding political figure or party that leads the Antifa community.

Third, hashtag use reveals religious affirmation and hostility. The Antifa cluster is characteristically nonreligious (as reflected by the frequent use of #atheist on its Twitter bio), whereas the Alt-Right clusters use multiple hashtags indicating Christian faith (e.g., #christian, #god). The coalition between political and religious conservatism is present through the high centrality of #ccot (Christian conservatives on Twitter). The Alt-Right clusters also use a number of anti-Islam hashtags (#banislam, #stopislam, #noislam).

Lastly, hashtags related to conspiracy theories, such as #pizzagate and QAnon (#qanon and #q), including its German adaptation (#merkelmussweg), are also among the top hashtags. News media describe QAnon as a “complicated pro-Trump conspiracy theory” that has “jumped from fringe social media sites to mainstream attention” (“America’s Extremist Battle,” 2017).

Concerning the semantic networks of hashtags in tweets sent by accounts in respective clusters (see Figure 4), I applied the same procedure to analyze top hashtags in each cluster in the retweet network.

Antifa’s hashtag network points to a number of offline protests, such as Occupy ICE (e.g., #occupyicepdx, #occupy). It is a protest modeled on the Occupy movement that targets the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The hashtags also show community-based vigilante activities, such as efforts to protect the city of Portland, Oregon, from White nationalists (e.g., #DefendPDX). In addition, the hashtags reveal the online hacktivist group Anonymous’s cyberattacks at White supremacist institutions under the banner of OpDomesticTerrorism (#OpDomesticTerrorism, #anonymous).

Hashtags used in tweets from the Alt-Right clusters show traces of oppositional framing, aimed at labeling the Antifa movement as violent domestic terrorism (#domesticterrorists, #terrorist, #hate) and liberal users as immature (#snowflakes). The Alt-Right hashtags in tweets are geographically distributed, reflecting far-right issues and figures in the United Kingdom (#FreeTommy), South Africa (#southafrica), and the United States (#kag, #maga). The Alt-Right has also sought to co-opt the meaning of “the resistance movement” (originally an anti-Trump campaign) to reframe it as the resistance toward the political left and the establishment.

Both Antifa and the Alt-Right have used identity-affirming hashtags. For Antifa, its identity is presumably strengthened through joint activities in offline protests, as seen in the #solidarity hashtag. Based on the manual reading of tweets, I found crowdsourced elites in the Antifa cluster to have commonly invoked the theme of solidarity to call for participation in offline rallies and to help Antifa prisoners (e.g., writing letters to Antifa prisoners). For the Alt-Right, identity affirmation lies in asserting the virtue of being White (#itsoktobewhite), the grievance of reverse discrimination (#reverseapartheid), and its populist root (#wethepeople).

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Figure 4. Hashtag network based on co-occurrence in Twitter tweets.

The counterpublics’ hashtags indicate possible traces of their counteractions through the oppositional use of hashtags. The #antifa hashtag has been used extensively by accounts in the five Alt- Right clusters. Judging by the hashtags associated with #antifa in each network, and based on the manual reading of top Alt-Right accounts’ tweets, the #antifa hashtag was used in the context of mocking Antifa’s violence and immaturity. It is also interesting to note how hashtags used by the Antifa cluster collide with the set of hashtags related to #bluehand. Notably, #newbluehand is a hashtag popularized by Antifa seeking to infiltrate and co-opt the #bluehand. A review of such tweets also shows that Antifa accounts tweeted #bluehand to mock #bluehand accounts, as seen in the following example: “Proof that #Bluehand is nothing but an attempt by .@bluehandarea to massage his fragile ego. A dispute between members. . . .”

Political Jamming Through Bots and Trolls (RQ3)

Table 1 displays the summary statistics of bot and troll activities across the five clusters identified in the retweet network. The bot and troll activities are gauged on two levels: first, the proportion of accounts in a cluster that was deleted and suspended by Twitter (for trolls), and second, the proportion International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1083

of accounts tagged as bot-like by the bot-detection algorithm. The White rights activist cluster has a notably higher rate of suspended accounts, whereas the Antifa cluster has the highest ratio of bot-like accounts. The presence of bots in the crowdsourced elites (top 20 by betweenness centrality) is minimal. However, the #bluehand cluster and MAGA Cluster 2 have relatively higher numbers of suspended accounts of crowdsourced elites. From the manual reading of crowdsourced elites’ tweets, a number of high-profile fake Antifa accounts emerged. One example is @bostonbobantifa, which was the most active account in the entire mentioned network. Journalists and citizen bloggers suspected that @bostonbobantifa was a troll (presumably a Russian one) given the Fake Antifa campaign aimed at discrediting Antifa through hoaxes (Mufson, 2017).

Table 1. Bot/Troll Activities by Cluster.

Antifa #bluehand MAGA MAGA White rights Variable cluster cluster Cluster 1 Cluster 2 activists cluster

Bots in the top-50 crowdsourced elites (n) 0 0 1 2 0

Suspended accounts in the top-50 crowdsourced elites (n) 11 28 15 24 17

Suspended accounts (%) 18.20 25.00 13.00 20.50 37.40

Bot-like accounts (%) 4.70 3.50 3.30 3.00 3.60

Note. MAGA = Make America Great Again.

Discussion

This study presents the case of the Alt-Right and Antifa as two emergent rival counterpublics. I propose studying the counterpublics’ identities and counteractions based on Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) connective actions framework. In particular, I examine three connective actions that are enabled by social media’s networked and dialogic affordance, namely, crowdsourced gatekeeping, hashtag-based framing, and political jamming through bots and trolls. With interest in connective actions, the object of investigation is less on discourse per se (what is communicated) and more on the metadata of discourse (how something is communicated), that is, how information diffuses in the communities, how hashtags are organized to carry symbolic meanings, and how platform algorithms are manipulated to create noises. The study demonstrates the feasibility of using network analysis and the bot-detection algorithm to identify connective actions. It shows how simply algorithmically identified structural characteristics of social media messages, rather than the message content, can reveal critical dimensions of counterpublic identities and actions. The emphasis on algorithmic analyses of metadata is not to obviate in-depth qualitative readings of communication content. As will be discussed, it is necessary to parse out key social media messages to better contextualize connective actions. Nevertheless, the study’s methodological design provides a complementary framework for studying counterpublics and radical groups in general. I discuss four findings about the Alt-Right and Antifa’s identities and counteractions.

First, I found that counterpublic members use multiple hashtags in Twitter bios and tweets as an indication of their converging identities and interests. Counterpublics’ hashtag use gives a macro-level perspective on identity construction that would otherwise be missed by qualitative discourse analysis. The 1084 Weiai Wayne Xu International Journal of Communication 14(2020)

ecosystem of the Alt-Right hashtags shows a global convergence of populism and ethnonationalism invigorated by Trump’s election and policies. Antifa’s hashtags suggest a comparatively decentralized, activist-oriented identity, defined more by progressive causes, offline rallies, and combative cyber operations. The finding bears down on the significance of studying hashtag occurrence because it conveys rich symbolic meanings (Eddington, 2018; Vicari, 2017). Precisely, hashtag co-occurrence serves the expressive and alliance-building function. Consider first how, by coplacing hashtags, users negotiate and make sense of the overlapping and multilayered nature of counteridentities. As in Kuo’s (2018) work on hashtags reflecting intersectional feminism, we can also consider the Alt-Right counterpublic identity to be “intersectional” because its pride and grievance collide with racial, socioeconomic, or religious issues (Mutz, 2018). Next, consider how hashtag co-occurrence can be leveraged strategically to connect local issues to global movements. Among the most prominent hashtags, I observed the effort to link South Africa’s “White genocide” issue with Trump’s ethnonationalism movement. Also, in the post hoc qualitative analysis of hashtags, I found the #projectconnectsa hashtag: Its creator launched the hashtag putting #projectconnectsa alongside #brexit and #maga to draw global attention to the local issue presumably. In addition, a parallel case is the little-known RainMakersUnite movement: The movement account asked its followers to promote #RainMakersUnite alongside Trump’s Twitter handle to increase the group’s visibility. Both examples show how counterpublic members may strategically position hashtags for transnational alliance-building, which is commonly observed in online social movements (Tremayne, 2014).

Theorized more broadly, the hashtag-based coalition building embodies what Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford (1986) refer to as frame bridging, that is, linking “two or more ideologically congruent but structurally disconnected frames” to provide an organizational base for “unmobilized sentiment pools or public opinion preference clusters” (p. 467). Here, sentiment pools refer to aggregates of people who share common grievances but who previously lacked organizational resources to express discontent. Like the historical case of the “Fortress Europe” protest, in which Monforte (2014, p. 121) observed that activists constructed local and national issues at the EU level to achieve “crossnational solidarities,” common references, and perceptions, the current study shows the construction of local populist and nativist causes at the national and international level. Previous works on frame bridging also highlight the importance of media and social networks: Mailing lists consolidated the alliance between the Christian Right and the Republican Party, forming the political organization called the Moral Majority. In the present study, Twitter hashtags provide such a venue for frame bridging between local populism and Trump’s MAGA movement.

Second, similar to how hashtag occurrence reveals identities, it also shows the use of oppositional framing. By coplacing two hashtags, such as #whitegenocide and #masculinity, users make a conscious connection between two issues represented by the hashtags (Vicari, 2017), and in this particular example, a connection between White grievance and traditional masculinity. Based on the abundant use of #hate, #domesticterrorists, and #libertard, it appears that the Alt-Right seeks to portray the Antifa protesters as violent and senseless thugs. The Alt-Right’s framing tactic seems to be borrowed from news media’s old playbook of dealing with social justice protesters: Boykoff (2006) found that news media often use the frames of violence, disruption, and ignorance in covering protesters. Viewing hashtags as a framing tool has a methodological implication: Frames are often identified through coders’ subjective judgment in manual content analysis or computational approaches to cluster texts by common linguistic elements (Walter & Ophir, 2019). Hashtag-based framing is unique in that hashtag users, as opposed to researchers, define the meanings of frames. This is not to suggest that one can disregard the context and the message underlying International Journal of Communication 14(2020) Mapping Connective Actions 1085

a hashtag frame. Rivalry groups contest the exact meaning of hashtag frames. For instance, the Alt-Right and Antifa both use #resist and #resistance. Nevertheless, the common hashtags may suggest different targets of resistance and grievance.

Third, counterpublics build like-minded and close-knit communities for information sharing (via RT@) but use Twitter mentions to seek rapport with fellow counterpublic members and challenge ideological enemies. Hyperpartisan crowdsourced elites dominate each close-knit community (i.e., cluster). The crowdsourced elites identified in the present study are both similar to and different from those identified in prior works. To revisit, the platform architecture of Twitter, which enables selective following and interactions, gives rise to “opinion entrepreneurs”—quasipolitical groups as well as individual activists (Rojecki & Meraz, 2016). I concur with previous scholars on the statement that opinion entrepreneurs largely control the information flow within a counterpublic community. It speaks to the essence of “connective actions” in that individuals and amateurs, rather than established organizations, serve as opinion leaders (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). However, the Alt-Right is driven by its “spiritual leaders” (i.e., Donald Trump and European far-right parties). As the spiritual leaders gain institutional powers through elections, it becomes debatable as to whether the connective actions are genuinely grassroots and if the group is independent of organizational resource support. Another distinction is the role of news media. Previous studies have shown a notable role of news media (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013) and how crowdsourced elites’ power is unleashed by a changing media agenda (Jackson & Welles, 2015). In the current context, mainstream media play a peripheral role in retweet-enabled information sharing. Counterpublics are found to criticize mainstream media (via Twitter mentions and #msm). Due to their antielitist stance, the studied counterpublics may distrust mainstream media. Reciprocally, news media favor resourceful and established organizations over confrontational and volunteer-led groups (Andrews & Caren, 2010). It is also plausible that given that the Alt-Right has already gained a significant share of political power through electing populist and nationalist leaders, it is no longer dependent on national media to amplify its agenda.

Fourth, both counterpublics seek to challenge ideological opponents through oppositional framing, mockery via Twitter mentions, co-opting hashtags, and trolls. However, the Alt-Right and Antifa seem to have adopted different tactics. The Alt-Right is noted for its trolling (as reflected by its higher ratio of suspended accounts and prominent fake Antifa accounts), its extensive use of #antifa, and its dominance in the Twitter mention network to mock Antifa and attack mainstream media. Antifa’s counteractions appear to be more focused on offline rallies and cyberattacks against neo-Nazis (as suggested by its hashtags). This contrast may speak about Antifa’s priority in offline and direct tactics, such as its use of doxxing (Bray, 2017). The Antifa counterpublic may not appear as aggressive as the Alt-Right when it comes to online fights. The Antifa counterpublic also appears to lack structured leadership and powerful political actors. Barring the possibility that Antifa’s activities may have migrated to other hashtags and platforms, it is important to note the roles of counterpublic structure and norms in shaping respective connective actions.

In addition, the study identified two characteristics in the current counterpublics that could inform the discussion of radical politics. First, the Alt-Right has succeeded in forming ties with some marginal Christian groups despite the idea that such alliances are arguably unbiblical (Keller, 2018): It is Jesus’s teaching to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, ESV). Second, the Alt-Right is tied to a number of conspiracy theories (such as #Qaron and #pizzagate). This convergence of the two political undercurrents warrants future study. 1086 Weiai Wayne Xu International Journal of Communication 14(2020)

The investigation of the two counterpublics and connective actions is met with several challenges. First, precisely locating a counterpublic in the online space is a daunting task. My approach was using hashtags as the seeds to identify clusters in hashtag-based Twitter interactions. However, with the limited selection of hashtags, it is difficult to reach a generalizable conclusion about the counterpublics. Unlike high- profile social movements such as #MeToo and #OccupyWallStreet, which are united by a signature hashtag, the Alt-Right and Antifa use a variety of hashtag variants and the hashtag ecosystem is expected to vary over time. Particularly considering that the Alt-Right has appropriated the hashtag #antifa, some Antifa members may have moved to more privately used hashtags. Second, it should be noted that the two counterpublics operate on other platforms in addition to Twitter. As the two groups face increasing pressures of censorship, anonymous forums, private social networks (e.g., Gab), and even the dark Web may play a more pronounced role in mobilization. Third, the scope of qualitative textual analysis conducted is limited; only selected crowdsourced elites’ tweets were studied manually. The study, therefore, is not able to deliver the contextual subtlety that is critical to counterpublics’ identities and influence. Fourth, the boundary of counterpublics should be more clearly defined; due to the negative connotation associated with the two groups, Twitter users who use the studied hashtags and even those who identify with the far-right/far-left ideologies may not necessarily see themselves as members of the counterpublics. Readers are also reminded of the potential lack of representativeness of the collected study sample. This may be solved in future work that relies on the paid premium access to the Twitter API for more complete data sets.

Future studies should address the above problems and strive for new exciting directions: The release of electoral manipulation data by Twitter in 2018 makes it compelling to study the foreign influence of domestic counterpublics. The present data already show clear signs of trolling activities and possibly foreign intervention. As the current study shows the convergence and consolidation of more radical political counterpublics under the presumption that such radical counterpublics are largely alienated by more moderate political groups, future studies can explore connective actions by radical counterpublics to infiltrate the more moderate discourse and communities. This process will show the moderation and the mainstreaming of radical political claims.

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INTERVIEW

To Interpret the World and To Change It Interview with David McNally1

MURRAY COOKE York University. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Keywords David McNally; feminism; global justice movements; language; Marxism; radical political economy

Mots‐clés David McNally; économie politique radicale; féminisme; langage; marxisme; mouvements pour une justice globale

David McNally is a life‐long Marxist activist and scholar. He is the author of six books, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (1988), Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Market Critique (1993), Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation 2001), Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti‐ capitalism (2002, 2nd revised edition in 2006) and Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (2010). His forthcoming book is Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011). He is a frequent contributor to Studies in Political Economy and Historical Materialism and to progressive, left magazines, including Against the Current, Canadian Dimension, International Socialist Review and the New Socialist. David McNally undertook his undergraduate studies at the Evergreen State College in Washington and at York University and graduate work at York University in the Social and Political Thought programme, completing his PhD in 1983. Since that year, he has been Professor in the political science department at York University. His contributions to political economy, include analyses of classical and radical political economy and materialist theories of language and culture. He has written about Marxism, socialist feminism and anti‐racism and anti‐ capitalist struggles, as well as democratic theory. A frequently‐invited speaker, his most recent scholarly engagements include invitations to

1 Transcript and introduction by Elaine Coburn, CADIS‐Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.

Socialist Studies / Études socialistes: The Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies/Revue de la Société d'études socialistes www.socialiststudies.com ISSN 1918‐2821 Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

lecture at the Global Studies Association, the Canadian Political Science Association, the Historical Materialism conferences, and the Li Ka Sing Knowledge Centre at the University of Toronto. Alongside his academic work, David McNally has been an activist since he was a teenager, when he participated in anti‐Vietnam war protests and formed a campus chapter of the Committee to Free Angela Davis. A long‐time member of the International Socialists and later the New Socialist Group, he participates regularly in anti‐capitalist struggles and movements. In Toronto, he supports the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, No One is Illegal, Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid/Faculty for Palestine, and the Greater Toronto Workers Assembly, among others. He regularly blogs about current events and his most recent scholarly and activist work on his website (http://davidmcnally.org). This interview took place in March 30, 2011 at a downtown Toronto restaurant. The transcript has received only the very lightest editorial touches; David McNally speaks clearly and in full paragraphs.

Murray Cooke: Your website (http://davidmcnally.org) states that you’ve been active in progressive politics since high school, when you joined the movement against the Vietnam war. How did this politicization occur – did this come from 2 your family, did you grow up in a ‘left’ household, or did the politicization occur because of the times, since you were an adolescent during the turbulent 1960s?

David McNally: I think it was very much a product of the times. I came from a very typical family of Irish Catholic descent, which is to say people voted Liberal, because that’s what Irish Catholics did. And it was really more a product of being a young person growing up in the 1960s and being surrounded by music that was starting to express all kinds of social protest themes and being surrounded by the visual images of things like the civil rights and black power movements, the war in Vietnam and so on. And really starting to try to understand what it was about our society that could breed racism and war, for instance. And so I just found myself gravitating to protest politics. And I think the most dramatic moment for me personally was in the spring of 1970 when antiwar students were shot at both Kent State and Jackson State universities in the US (United States). And the idea of seeing these young people shot for protesting the war was enough to make me sit up and pay attention. And the calls went out for demonstrations and so on. So I went to what I didn’t know was the largest anti‐Vietnam demonstration (in To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

Canada). This was in May of 1970, in front of the US consulate on University Avenue in Toronto.

So you were in high school in Toronto…

I was north of Toronto, a small town north of Toronto. And I was sixteen and I went down to see and participate in my first mass demonstration of ten thousand. It was charged by police on horseback, there were over one hundred arrests and so on…So it was a very politicizing moment and experience. And I think it really just… In that sense, I was a product of a particular historical moment.

And so then did you take that new political awareness back to your high school?

Absolutely. I was involved with a group of Toronto area, really GTA (Greater Toronto Area) high school activists, in something called the League for Student Democracy. We were doing anti‐war agitation. But also organizing around student elections to demand greater student powers, trying to break some of the authoritarian codes that existed within the high schools and that sort of 3 thing. So we had a network of radical high school activists and some of them are still around on the left today.

Your website jumps to say that you formed a campus chapter of the Committee to Free Angela Davis. So that was after high school, when you went to university, York University?

No, that was at the Evergreen State College in Washington, Olympia Washington, where… I was somebody who had to get out of high school and we had mandatory grade thirteen to go to Canadian universities at the time. I found a brand new university in the US that didn’t have grades. And it was much more experimental and they looked at the application I wrote and admitted me. I was already at this point, as a high school student, reading Herbert Marcuse and this kind of radical literature. I was ready to do more intensive study and arrived there in Washington state, then in 1971, to start my undergrad studies. And this was really a period where the movement to free Angela Davis, who had been arrested under Ronald Reagan in California and charged with very, very serious crimes for which she was ultimately acquitted (began). But Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

we had no campus chapter of that movement. And Seattle being the closest large city, when I went into Seattle I would go to the radical bookstores and pick up literature and buy left‐wing newspapers and all that sort of thing and came across the literature of the Campaign and the Committee to Free Angela Davis. And so with one African‐American student, he and I started a campus chapter.

So then from there, how did you end up at York University?

Largely it was financial and family pressures. Which is to say that foreign student fees were going up at the time and I didn’t see how I could afford to continue to study in the US. And I had a parent who was ill at the time; I was the oldest child so I really felt family responsibilities also. So I came back to Toronto. And at that point it was so obvious to a sort‐of politicized undergraduate like myself that York university was the place where I could find faculty and courses where I could really study these sorts of topics and themes that were consistent with my own radicalizing political interests…

Was it particular faculty that you were attracted to? Although I know later it 4 wasn’t your sole focus, as an undergrad were you in the political science programme?

I actually…I had this kind of combined Social and Political Thought slash Political Science major ultimately. Although I was as much or more in philosophy courses in the beginning as anything else. But the attraction of York was multiple. On the one hand, some Canadian universities wouldn’t even look at me without my grade thirteen. And York was still unconventional, which is to say that I met a faculty member, discussed my interests with her. She sent me to see someone in the Registrar’s office with a message saying, “This kid’s bright enough to go into second year. He shouldn’t have to go back to first year. Read his work.” They shopped some things I had written in my first year out to faculty members who said, “Absolutely, put him in the second year.” And York was still unconventional and flexible enough at that point, in the early ‘70s, where the bureaucratic regimes which said, “He doesn’t have grade 13 therefore he starts in first year” didn’t apply. Partly it was that about the institution. And then there was no question that York was already developing its reputation as a place for critical theory, widely defined, and this was really across the social sciences. It was simply a less conservative, tradition‐bound To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

university. It was also at that point heavily committed to interdisciplinary approaches, and so my gravitation into Social and Political Thought, for instance, made a lot of sense in that context…

In terms of your political involvement at York, as an undergrad, you were involved in the Ontario Waffle after it was essentially expelled from the NDP (New Democratic Party). Soon after this initial split with the NDP, the debate over left nationalism caused the final split within the Waffle: the radical leftists, including yourself, rejected the nationalist line of the leadership. Ultimately, fairly quickly, this led to the formation of Independent Socialists, later the International Socialists, around ‘75-‘76 . How did you get involved in the Waffle initially and what was the process leading up to the split and the formation of IS? Not necessarily the details, the personalities, but the politics in the broader sense -- what political and theoretical influences were shaping you at that point?

Right. Keep in mind with this that the story of the Waffle is a more complicated one than I think most people appreciate. My involvement happens after the Waffle was expelled from the NDP, so I don’t have that prior 5 history. When the Waffle left the NDP, one of the things that it had to struggle with was what differentiated it from the NDP. And initially, many of the Waffle leaders decided that it was time to be more explicitly socialist, even Marxist, in character. The meeting at which I made the decision to join the Waffle, Jim Laxer, one of its key leaders, made the statement: “It is now time to bring Marx out of the closet.” And I already considered myself a Marxist. That was really important for me. I had reservations about the Waffle’s nationalist commitments, but the declaration that this was a Marxist organization trying to build a socialist movement, was really important for me. The other thing about the Waffle that is often forgotten is that it had a real base among trade unionists: that was what really distinguished it. When I looked at the left groups in this city at that time, most of them were overwhelmingly student based. But when you went to a Waffle event, there were steel workers, auto workers, health care workers, nurses and so on, many of them very well rooted trade union activists, in its midst. And moreover, the Waffle, in the early stages of its independent existence outside of the NDP, was distinguished by doing strike support work. For instance, the York Waffle group that I joined was doing a lot of week‐in week‐out strike Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

support work with a slightly famous strike, at the time, the Artistic Woodwork strike up in North York, the Downsview‐North York area. So several times a week we would join solidarity pickets and we would bring students from York. And we also brought strikers to campus forums. We had a forum of about two hundred students, for instance, in solidarity with the Artistic Woodwork strike. So my attraction to the Waffle was more towards those elements of more radical working class activism and the more explicitly socialist‐Marxist elements. I had big qualms about the left‐nationalism. But the tension between these different elements really came to the fore in the 1973 federal election when Waffle candidates ran. Three ran in Ontario and in Toronto, we were campaigning for one candidate and the election literature came out saying that, “A vote for our candidate was a vote for Canadian independence.” And a lot of us turned the literature over, upside down, to try to find references to socialism, which is what we thought we were out for. And we were shocked. And this was really the beginning of a debate. Now, arguably the tension was there from the beginning. But the Waffle was trying to navigate some balance between its socialist and left‐ nationalist commitments. And for whatever reason, sections of the leadership 6 at this point, in the middle of ‘73, decided to make a hard turn away from the socialist emphasis and towards the emphasis on Canadian independence. And that’s where the debate started..… And, ironically just because we were young activists reading a lot of left‐literature, the critics of the nationalist turn within the Waffle, of which I was one, encountered much more internationalist literature coming from the British International Socialist (IS) group. But the other thing that we quickly twigged into was that this was a far left group, the British IS, which actually had a very serious working class orientation. They had perhaps a couple of thousand trade union members at that point, very active in building rank and file movements in the unions throughout Britain. And so the same thing that attracted me to the Waffle, the seriousness about grassroots trade union working class organizing, also seemed to apply to the British current, the IS. Except that it didn’t seem to be compromised by the nationalism; they were very explicitly internationalist. So even though to some people it looks like a very idiosyncratic development, once you realize how strong the trade union orientation of the Waffle was in 1973‐74 then, in fact, the movement from the Waffle into arguably the most rooted, far‐left organization in terms of working class roots To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

in the English speaking world, isn’t quite as much of a jump as people might think.

Why the Waffle ultimately raised the ire of the leadership within the NDP, particularly Stephen Lewis, is often traced back to the Waffle involvement in the labour movement: to the sort of rank and file organizing that you are describing, and to the fact that the Waffle was critical of international unions and also of the conservatism, the bureaucratic nature of the labour union movement. Some of the history suggests that it was then the labour movement folks who pressured Lewis (to expel the Waffle)– and maybe it didn’t take a whole lot of pressure -- but they were the driving force that got Lewis to finally act…

I think there is a lot of truth to that. The NDP establishment may not have been happy about the presence of a left opposition within its midst, but it was when the Waffle began to do its own independent organizing within the labour moment that the heat really rose. And this was in particular around the Autopact and organizing with UAW (United Auto Worker) activists, particularly in Windsor. As the Waffle began to stake out its own particular position and was attracting auto workers activists around it and also, in some sense, 7 galvanizing their critical relationship to the leadership of the Auto Workers Union and others, a lot of pressure did built up, no question, in the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) leadership, to get rid of these guys: “They’re troublemakers, they are making our life difficult in the OFL.” And I think you’re right, Stephen Lewis more or less did the job.

And then the IS emerged from the York Waffle, so initially the IS was primarily undergrads from York.

There is no question that the core group that wrote the dissident, critical documents around the Waffle were based at York University, based around the York University Waffle group. But there was another layer of activists in Hamilton, Toronto and so on, that was labour‐based. So that when the disintegration, really, of the Waffle occurred and the Independent Socialists were initially formed, later to becomes the International Socialists, although the core group clearly came for York undergrads, there were health care workers, municipal workers, nurses and so on who were also part of the mix. And that tells us something about the problems that the Waffle was grappling with..… Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

Related to that, throughout your career, you have challenged the left-nationalist tendency within Canada. Your academic work in the 1980s, including your articles in Studies in Political Economy (see McNally 1981, 1986) criticized the Innis-based approach of the new Canadian political economy. And by the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s you were engaged in a critique of the left- nationalist discourse that imbued so much of the anti-free trade movement in Canada (see McNally 1990). Along with other authors, such as William Carroll (1986), you critiqued the dependency approach by pointing to the strength of the Canadian capitalist class. And you and some of your students, including Jerome Klassen (2009) and Todd Gordon (2010), have gone so far as to describe Canada’s role as imperialist. What do you think is at stake in these debates about Canada’s role in the world? Do you think that perception has been changing because Canada’s role itself has changed? Or is it that there is a new cohort of academics and activists looking at things in new ways?

Well, in terms of what’s at stake, I think that the debate in the Waffle threw up that question for us, since we saw an emphasis on a certain kind of Canadian nationalism as blunting the working class, socialist commitments of the 8 organization. And to develop a critique of that trend within the Waffle required re‐examining a lot of the theses upon which it had built its understanding of Canada and Canadian capitalism. And at the time, there was within the Waffle but far beyond its ranks really, a whole wave of literature and analyses which applied the dependency thesis to Canada. Which is to say, analyses that try to argue that Canada was either a direct colony of the US empire or a semi‐colony or a neo‐colony or a dependency. And different theorists used one or more of these categories to try to characterize it. But what happened in that analysis in all its forms is that the external relationship of the Canadian economy to the American became the key analytical lens through which we understand the Canadian economy. And what this tended to do was to blunt both the national and colonial oppressions internal to the development of Canadian capitalism, that is to say, in particular the internal colonialism with respect to Indigenous peoples but also the semi‐ colonial status of Quebec within the Canadian formation. And this also blunted class analysis of Canadian society because the key thing was understood to be the national problem and so one made nationalism or anti‐imperialism the forefront of everything according to that analysis. So that the political stakes looked quite real. To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

But, it also seemed to many of us that the analysis was faulty on multiple levels. To begin with, it just didn’t seem convincing that Canada should be analysed in terms of its place within the world system in the same terms as Zimbabwe or India. It just didn’t seem credible to us. People then improvised in an ad hoc way on the dependency theories, so we got theories of a ‘rich dependency’. But all of these seemed to be theoretically extremely weak and unconvincing and so it became an important theoretical problem to rethink the formation of Canadian capitalism. And there it became clear to me that most left‐nationalist or dependency‐school analyses had really tried to build off of the quite important and pioneering work of Harold Innis. And I was never interested in diminishing the significance of Innis’ research for a whole variety of reasons, but I wanted to probe its theoretical foundations and in particular to illuminate the ways in which a market‐ centered or Smithian project informed Innis’ work, all the way along, and how he tended to revert to a kind of commodity‐based determinism: that each staple product involved a certain ensemble of labour processes and technologies and these determined the pattern of economic and social development. Not only was it highly deterministic but the class formations at the heart of Canadian capitalism, including the internal colonialism, really gets 9 muted in that analysis. And so far all those reasons it seemed important to develop an analysis which could put both the class formation and internal colonialism problematics to the fore but also could account for the fact that Canada was among the developed economies in the world system and played, if you will, a junior role within the camp of empire, of the imperial powers. And so that’s really what I was trying to do in developing that analysis. But, I think that you are right, in terms of the last part of your question, that there has been a very significant shift in analysis and I would say that has to do with the empirical failures of the dependency thesis. I mean the claims that were made in the 1970s were that an independent Canadian economy was disappearing, that it was going to become nothing but a branch plant extension of the US economy. And during the 1980s we began to see a whole series of empirical trends that defied this: most importantly, the fact that for a whole historical period now, for a quarter century, Canadian foreign direct investment has exceeded foreign direct investment inside the Canadian economy. That is to say that Canadian capital has been buying up more foreign assets and expanding more on the global stage than its own assets have been bought up by foreign investors. This was something completely unanticipated. Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

It went right against the grain of the dependency arguments that were everywhere in the 1970s, so there was a real empirical problem there. Second, it seemed more and more transparent that the Canadian state was operating quite often to defend and promote Canadian‐based multinationals, particularly in mining, but more broadly, in parts of Africa, Central and Latin American and the Caribbean. And that it was doing so not as a mere reflex of American interests, but that in fact it was very much defending and promoting the interests of Canadian based capital. So some of the work that you’ve referred to, Jerome Klassen and Todd Gordon’s work in these areas, for instance, really was designed to theorize those developments of a much more globally present Canadian capital within the world system. And so I do think there is a shift. I would also say that a younger generation of activists and scholars has been increasingly attentive to the colonial and racialized patterns of Canadian social formation and as they have highlighted those, it has forced them to treat Canada as involving a colonial project itself from the start. And so rather than poor old Canada getting kicked around by the US, the Canadian state starts to look like a state complicit in racism and colonialism… And I think we’ve learned a lot from those analyses. 10

And that probably influences how we organize, how the left organizes around issues -- the rights of migrant workers, for example, or how we understand the Canadian state’s negotiation of investment treaties with countries in the developing world.

Yes, definitely. I think it’s one of the things we see today with the younger generation of left activists in Canada. They are much more responsive to Indigenous struggles and claims for Indigenous sovereignty, self‐determination. They are highly attentive to the behaviour of multinational corporations around the world, whether it’s groups like Mining Watch or those sorts of organizations. And there has been much greater concern with migrant justice and with recognizing the highly racialized patterns of the Canadian labour market that have been promoted by governments at all levels in Canada. So I think its true all of that has reframed a lot of these political discussions and frankly, been very influential in the development of my own thinking in recent years.

To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

Switching back to your own academic development, you completed your PhD in Social and Political Thought (SPT) at York University in 1983. Your dissertation was later published as Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (1988), a book that examined the classical political economists of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly Adam Smith, and their understanding of the rise of agrarian capitalism. How did the SPT programme influence your intellectual trajectory and what drew you to the debates on the origins of capitalism?

Well, in terms of Social and Political Thought, there is no question that I was drawn towards an interdisciplinary programme. My own interests really span political economy, philosophy, social history and the like. So a programme which allowed me to draw upon faculty from a variety of disciplines was incredibly appealing. My PhD supervisory committee had an economist, a political scientist and an historian on it, for instance, and that sort of configuration simply wasn’t available in most programmes. So SPT made a lot of sense for me in that regard. Then in terms of the problems that were posed, there was a raging discussion across the left in the 1970s and 1980s really about our understanding of capitalism in general and capitalism as a world system in 11 particular. And consistent with the dependency theory approach that I was critical of in the Canadian case, a variety of dependency and world system approaches really saw capitalism in terms of a set of market‐based relationships. That is to say, it was the spread of commerce and the spread of markets which became definitive of capitalism. But in contrast to that was another line of argument, perhaps most famously associated with several key articles in the 1970s by Robert Brenner (for instance, Brenner 1977), which argued for the class specificity of capitalism, insisted that ultimately it was the forms of surplus production and appropriation which were key to understanding how any mode of production operates, and that dependency and world system’s theories tend to displace those questions and focus simply on market transactions and the spread of markets. So that was really important for a lot of us, in terms of making sense of how we analyze and understand capitalism. But then I was also drawn through that to wanting to have a better analysis and understanding of the whole history of political economy, since the critique of political economy had been Marx’s project. But very few of us actually go back and read the people Marx read ‐‐ we take on board Marx’s readings. Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

I don’t know many Marxists who have written as much about Adam Smith as you do!

Yes, that’s probably true. That may be some odd obsession (laughs). One of things I discovered in looking at it was that actually Smith’s theories fit much more nicely with a lot of the then‐recent Marxist understandings of the rise of capitalism than people had appreciated. I came to see the degree to which Smith was focussed on the agrarian sector, for instance, and one of the things that a lot of us were really starting to appreciate was the key importance of what Marx in Capital calls primitive accumulation, that is to say, the dispossession of the direct producers from the land and how crucial that is to the formation of capitalism. Dispossession ‐‐ which of course now we often discuss in terms of David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession (see Harvey 2004)‐‐ that process was already becoming central to the way a lot of us thought about the emergence of capitalism. And I was struck by the degree to which Smith seemed to understand more of that than the market‐centered analyses suggested. So my own research was, at that time, moving on a couple of tracks: 12 one was the social history of capital itself and the other was the intellectual history of political economy. And I started to bring those two themes together in my analysis, in terms of my PhD thesis, and I think in many respects that work still remains foundational to the way that I think about capitalism today.

You did your undergraduate career at York, then completed your PhD here, and you’ve been teaching at York for a number of years. All of us this adds up to quite a long experience at York. How do you think York has changed over the years? I think of changing political fashions and the larger ideological climate, the different pressures on undergraduate students today compared to when you were an undergraduate, structural changes in postsecondary institutions related to the rise of neoliberalism and the attack on the public sector… In particular, how has political science but also SPT at York remained Marxist in a political and ideological climate that’s become clearly hostile to these ideas? And in that, what is the significance of labour struggles -- the famous or infamous YUFA (York University Faculty Association) strike of 1997, but also the two CUPE 3903 strikes (CUPE 3093 represents contract faculty, and graduate, research and teaching assistants) in 2000 and 2008-2009- - in terms of ongoing efforts to defend the university against corporate visions of postsecondary education? To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

That’s a huge question or set of questions. But, I’ll try to at least give you a few loose thoughts on them. I think the answer is that we have kept a core of critical thought at York. But not without a struggle. And I think we should never take it for granted. It would be very easy to lose the foothold for critical research and scholarship at York, or any university. But there is no question that the transformations have been massive. It is not simply the scale of the university, which has grown enormously‐‐ but that is part of the story. There is the increased bureaucratization of York as an institution. Somebody simply could not get into second year the way I did, for instance, with a Registrar saying, “Yes, this seems like a bright young student. Let’s get a couple of faculty to look at his work and decide what level he should be admitted to.” That just could not happen. Similarly, the interdisciplinary commitments have been under siege for quite some time. And that’s got to do with a lot of the moves towards branding universities in terms of their marketable skills or the production of their marketable skills. Interdisciplinarity doesn’t seem to sell in terms of the way that it has been perceived by neoliberals. I might argue that there, in fact, could be a distinctive market niche, quote unquote, for indisciplinarity. But 13 that has not been the direction taken at York. But most importantly, it’s the transformations in the political and economic climate. York came into its own during a period of mass social protest in North America. It wasn’t only in North America but that’s what mattered ultimately in terms of the formation of the university. And so the young scholars who came into its faculties had been shaped by both the global protest movements, particularly in terms of the Vietnam war, but also the civil rights struggle, the emergence of feminism, the upsurge of radical trade union struggles in the late 60s and early 1970s. As a result, these were young intellectuals who were formed in this context and the theoretical traditions upon which they drew tended to go beyond the mainstream stuff that had been taught for a long time at North American universities. So you have a new university, with a young faculty, and a student body coming in that wants to engage the questions of the moment. All of that really produced a very unique university environment, where critical knowledge, dissenting and dissident theoretical traditions could really flourish. And it’s not surprising that York became a site for a lot of the best critical scholarship on the left at that time.

Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

But the key problem for anybody working inside the university is that what you do is so highly dependent upon struggles outside the university. And as working class and left movements receded from the late ‘70s onwards, it became much more difficult to maintain a toehold in those struggles and to let them inform what we do inside the academy. And this produced a series of effects. On the one hand, some faculty abandoned many of their earlier radical commitments. They decided that they had been duped by youthful enthusiasms and that they would now move to more mainstream sorts of theoretical traditions or to some of the newer ones that seemed trendy. And the so‐called post‐structuralism and post‐modern turn often figured there: it ‐‐ too often ‐‐ provided an exit strategy for people who didn’t want to identify themselves with the old discredited traditions that they’d rejected earlier on, but didn’t want to maintain leftist and Marxist commitments anymore. It sounded radical, because we were criticizing governmentality and binaries…

…deconstructing…

..deconstructing… lots of stuff. So it sounded like it was critical even though many of the political commitments, particularly to emancipatory politics, were 14 receding at the time. So you’ve got that larger cultural, intellectual environment. And then you have the direct attempt by neoliberals to reshape higher education and to reshape the universities and in particular the assault that they launched on critical knowledge production. They were interested in labour market based education. Education that was not about critical knowledge but about the skills necessary for ‐‐ and then their slogans changed ‐‐ ‘the new knowledge economy’, whatever it might be. And so they wanted to re‐shape the university. As a result, you had both the sort of internal transformations induced by a change in the broader political climate and the huge external pressures applied by neoliberal governments who wanted to reshape the university as a labour market based institution. And there is no question that the strikes that have taken place at York since 1997 have to be seen in significant measure in that context. I don’t want to say that they are the only issues. We’ve also got the rise of precarious labour inside the universities as the key part of the story of neoliberal restructuring, for instance, and that plays itself out through all of these strikes, as well. But that wider neoliberal context is part of the story of those strikes. Which is to say, there is a particular agenda that university To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

administrators want to implement consistent with that coming from governments, which is to reorient higher education, to tier higher education. In other words, they want to create a subclass of pure and simple teachers and then an elite group of researchers within the university. And that tiering of faculty is insidious in terms of solidarities of the various groups of teachers within the university. That that tiering will ultimately destroy solidarity between unions and within bargaining unit groups. But it’s also a completely different vision of what the university is. And all of that has played itself out in the strikes you mentioned. Fortunately, none of the strikes were completely defeated. Arguably the YUFA strike of 1997 was sufficiently successful to beat back some of the worst aspects of neoliberalism, one of the most important being that we defeated any requirement that faculty members must move towards digitally‐ based on‐line delivery of course materials. Faculty had a choice in that regard. And we very quickly beat back the Berkeley‐style scenario, in which the university owns all of your course materials which can then be put on line and commodified. So you can see certain victories there. There is no question that the first of the CUPE strikes (in 2000‐2001) is 15 really significant also in terms of beating back parts of the neoliberal agenda. I think the most recent strike (from 2008‐2009) is a more mixed story. I think the university, the university administration, excuse me, was able to make bigger gains on its agenda. But it has to be said that feisty campus unions have managed to blunt the full implementation of the neoliberal agenda. Now, that then takes me back to York political science, because…We need to be balanced here. The department does have a certain kind of Marxist reputation, even though it’s very clear that Marxists are a distinct minority within the department. But one of the things that I think we have managed to do a better job of in recent years is to create a much more robust alliance among people teaching in a variety of critical traditions. And so I think for a period of time there were real tensions, for instance, between critical feminist scholarship within the department and people who would be more identified with Marxist research, people doing critical international political economy and people more identified with Marxist political economy. And I think that one of the things we have managed in recent years is to create a better understanding and sense of community across some of those critical, theoretical practices, where people recognize we need each other. We can Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

learn from each other in really quite interesting and challenging ways. And we need to work together to preserve critical spaces. What is interesting about the York department is that a lot of the critical scholarship is very widely recognized outside of the University. And so we are often seen as a more left department than we might be. The degree to which we are a leftist department might sometimes be overstated. But I think what is true is that critical, leftist research in a variety of forms, has a space in which to operate. And that does make York political science distinctive. And it has an identity based on that and it would not be impossible to root it out, but it would be difficult. Somebody in the university administration would have to go after many of the best internationally recognized scholars and the work they do. And frankly that’s sort of self‐defeating because in many ways the university, in a lot of ways that senior administration may not appreciate, actually gains from this unique sort of intellectual culture that we build from within the department.

So the administration should be marketing their radicals in the political science department!

16 That’s the irony, that’s the irony, isn’t it! There is a certain niche for critical left scholarship that the York department offers but it doesn’t fit with the overall messaging that the neoliberal university likes.

It certainly attracts wonderful international scholars as graduate students. Following some of those different trends in the political climate and relating them to your own work, in the early ‘90s, you returned to some of the classical questions and debates in political economy, including Adam Smith again, in Against the Market (1993). To some extent, I think this was your response to the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting crisis in confidence of some sections of the left, that led to renewed interests in markets and ideas of market socialism. It’s probably accurate to say that you held no particular illusions about the Soviet regime, but particularly with hindsight, some twenty years later, how did the collapse of these Soviet regimes have an impact on the left and in your own political practice and intellectual development? In particular, shortly after this, you split from the IS and took part in the formation of the New Socialist group. To what extent was this a response to the new political context and an increasing emphasis on anti-oppression politics, particularly feminism and anti-racist thought, too often overlooked by To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

Marxism? And how was this related to re-thinking political organization on the left, as well?

Let’s start with the larger context and the fall of the Soviet Union that you began with. It was a complex and contradictory moment for people like myself because on the one hand, we hadn’t had illusions about what we saw as the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe. We didn’t believe they represented a kind of socialism. So in the first instance it was easy to be on the side of popular democratic uprisings that were expanding the spheres of freedoms and democratic rights. But having said that, I think we underestimated the overall impact that this would have on the left and for two reasons. One was, the wider context in which it was happening, which is to say the rise of neoliberalism. In fact, the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, even if you had no illusions about what they represented, was largely seen as part of the political vindication of the radical turn to the market. And I think we underestimated the significance of that at that time, in part because we underestimated the strength and durability of the neoliberal project, which is something I will come back to in a moment. And so at first, I think a lot of us thought this would be an opening toward the more libertarian and emancipatory traditions of the left, now that bureaucratically organized so‐ 17 called socialism were gone. And we were naïve on that front too. In fact, it was hugely disillusioning for thousands upon thousands of people of the left who, for better or for worse, had taken some confidence in the fact that there were regimes in the world that they saw as anticapitalist. And in a period of defeats for working class movements, for social movements and for the left, it was experienced as yet another big defeat, another big setback. And so it, in fact, had an enormously demoralizing and depressing effect across the left, which I admit I did not see coming. Rather than opening up space for alternative left traditions, it just closed down space for all of us. And I think that that is related to the issues to which you’ve alluded, which is to say my own movement outside of the International Socialists, the formation of the New Socialist Group and a questioning of a lot of the inherited practices and analyses of the left. Because it started to become clear across the 1990s that we couldn’t just keep saying that, “Capitalism is in crisis, capitalism is in crisis! The big breakthroughs for the left are just around the corner… “But that was what was being said in the IS groupings. The leadership of the British group had declared that we were in the 1930s in slow motion. So Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

it was the Great Depression again, it was just all moving a little more slowly. And therefore, all the groups had to intensify their activism, become ever‐ more dedicated, vigilant and committed. And that now was not a time for intellectual debates ‐‐ these were a distraction from the task of trying to really develop greater, rooted socialist forces in a very short space of time because great crises like the 1930s were impending. Well, I was among those who were developing severe doubts about this analysis. You only really see the full fruits of my rethinking in my most recent book Global Slump (2010) where I offer a very new appraisal of the whole neoliberal period. But that was the beginning, in the 1990s, when I was just having serious doubts about these claims that we were in a prolonged crisis of capitalism and that therefore big working class upsurges were around the corner. Didn’t look that way. Didn’t feel that way. But also, the hothouse atmosphere of the small group was becoming more and more debilitating. When we first joined the IS in the 1970s, it was an incredibly intellectually open group. It was open to a wide variety of critical Marxist perspectives and approaches. It embraced socialist feminisms, it embraced anti‐racism and that was all shut down across the 80s and the 90s. 18 In fact, I got into more and more conflict inside the IS groups, because I wouldn’t accept the feminist bashing that was now the order of the day. That was also a growing point of friction. And all of this was coming to head then throughout the 1990s. And then a group of us we just felt that we couldn’t function inside a group that thought we were living in the 1930s, albeit in slow motion, that everybody had to raise their activism and commitment, that there was no time for debate and discussion ‐‐ this was just wasteful energies of intellectuals ‐‐ and that feminism and anti‐racism were essentially distractions from the real tasks. And so by the mid‐‘90s, a number of us had concluded that for whatever reason we couldn’t continue to function in that environment. But, we didn’t want to give up the idea of having collectives of people who work together, analyse together, share experiences, try to develop a kind of socialist politics that fits some of the key demands of our historical moment. And at the same time, we were clear that we really wanted to radically break from all of this self‐styled vanguardism that small left groups tend to fall into. Interestingly again, when we first got involved with the IS in the ‘70s it was the explicitly anti‐vanguardist. It said that the formation of real mass working class parties of the left was a very complex process and that no small group could To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

claim to be the centre of gravity of such a thing. You just had to hope to make a contribution to a wider process that would be very complex and that would bring together diverse strands of the left into new political formations. We sort of returned to that commitment in the New Socialist Group. But equally important I would say, we decided that it was time for the left or the Marxist left at least, to do more than pay lip service to socialist feminism, anti‐racism, queer liberation, eco‐socialism and so on. That there had to be a really serious and systematic re‐thinking of fundamental Marxist concepts so that that they would be reshaped and rethought in and through their encounters with feminism, queer liberation and so on. I am not saying that we’ve totally accomplished that but at least we set it as an agenda that needed to be done. And you’re right that this was part of what I would call a sort of radical re‐thinking of certain quote unquote certainties of the Marxist left. And I continue to believe that the 1990s posed fundamental problems for the left that we too often evaded with quick and easy slogans. And in fact, it required us to go back and re‐examine a lot of our inheritance in a much more critical and systematic way and the New Socialist Group was simply one expression of that.

On the one hand, in the 1990s, we’ve got the aftermath of the collapse of the 19 Soviet Bloc, the crisis of Communism. Not unrelated to that is the emergence of some different intellectual currents and new forms of critical thought. There is some connection between that and what became your next major work, Bodies of Meaning, which came out in 2001,which followed upon an earlier article in Monthly Review (1995) on the issues of language, the body and meaning. There you present a materialistic theory of language, in contrast to postmodern positions. So you’re dealing with the new intellectual currents. Among other accomplishments, you retrieved the workers of Walter Benjamin from the clutches of what might be called postmodern ‘mis’-interpretations. Is it fair to characterize this book as a significant departure from your previous work? I know that the review in Historical Materialism (Collins 2003) generated considerable debate, so not everyone was open to your new approach. In part, does this reflect the necessity, particularly in that time period, of defending but also actually advancing the historical materialist approach against the poststructuralist critique – and not just resorting to the old debates, the old language?

I think you are right to see Bodies of Meaning as a departure. But, of course, there are always interesting continuities as well in all of these things. As I Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

mentioned earlier, I had had an ongoing interests in philosophy as an undergraduate and had actually been very immersed in what we might sort of call the Hegelian Marxist or dialectical tradition. And much of my thinking on pretty much all of the questions we have been talking about had been very much informed by that tradition. And as a result, I think in some respects as I was entering into this sort of rethinking that I’m describing, one of the things that I became unhappy about was the way in which Marxists were responding to poststructural and postmodernist theories. Most of the time they were just saying, “That’s idealism. End of story.” And even if there was some truth to the fact that there was a certain kind of new idealism at work in poststructuralism and postmodernism, this seemed to me not to engage seriously with what it was that was attracting a lot of young intellectuals and young activists towards postmodernism. And that’s one of the things that I should say something about. I was quite active in the anti‐Gulf War movement, the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, and I was struck by the number of students who came to those demonstrations who clearly identified themselves with some form of postmodernism rather than Marxism. So it wasn’t true that they had no interest in changing the world, no interest in resistance. But their coordinates 20 were completely different than mine had been as a young person radicalizing in the 1970s. And as I began to think seriously about the problems that these young activists and scholars were grappling with it became pretty clear to me that the agenda of problems they were posing was not nonsense, contrary to the way some Marxists were reacting. In other words, they were trying to probe issues of culture, language and identity in ways that were important, even if I found the theoretical resources that they were bringing to bear on these problems inadequate, in all sorts of ways. But, it does seem to me that on the left we do have a tendency often to think in simply political and economic terms and to act as if issues of culture, identity and meaning are of no significance ‐‐ when clearly for all of us they are. And I was spurred as a result of this to take seriously the work that was being done, but to also want to offer up alternatives from within a sort of heterodox Marxism that I felt could offer much more promising directions for work in this area that didn’t give up its connections to, if you will, the historical materialist domain of issues of political economy and class and so on, without reducing culture and identity to some kind of crude materialist coordinates. And so I found in particular the work of the so‐called Bakhtin school and of Walter Benjamin, to be really quite significant. To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

So Bodies of Meaning was an attempt to engage people taken by the postmodern turn, to take seriously their agenda and their commitments but to challenge the kind of theoretical traditions to which they’d gravitated. And in particular, I was trying to push the argument that in detaching language from human bodies and the social, material, embodied practices of humans, they’d come up with a very impoverished account of what language and culture are. And that this kind of approach that I was trying to develop within the book could actually give them ways of engaging those problems without forfeiting the embodied, materialist commitments. And I should say that it was very useful to me that a variety of works, within what was then was being called materialist feminism, were moving on a parallel track. In particular, materialist feminism was a term coined I think initially by Rosemary Hennessey and I found that work very useful. And I think it continues to be very useful because people like Hennessey, most recently in her book Profit and Pleasure (2000,) were taking up a lot of the key issues of the postmodern turn, in Hennessey’s case, gender, sexuality, identity, but trying to relate them to the social, material transformations of late capitalism. So in many ways my book was both building off on and trying to contribute to that development as well. But I do, in retrospect, put it within a wider 21 framework of part of my own process of rethinking the agenda of concerns for the left and the need for the Marxist left to engage in a much more open and constructive way with some of the new intellectual and cultural trends, rather than just to be dismissive of them and to assume that we’ve sorted it all out and therefore we can just reiterate certain certainties from the past.

We don’t have a ready set of answers, that’s for sure.

Exactly. If we are going to really renew the left and renew a kind of critical Marxism, that capacity to re‐engage our own certainties critically has got to be central.

In what we have discussed thus far, it is clear that your own politicization is linked with broader periods of militancy. There is a labour upsurge from the late 1960s, but also the student movement and other social movements, that fizzled out by the late 1970s. Clearly through the 1980s and into the 1990s, there is a demobilization of progressive political forces. But then we do have renewed signs of hope and mobilization, by the late 1990s, with the rise of so- called antiglobalization movement, from Chiapas through to Seattle and on to Quebec City. At the same time, there are the mass mobilizations, including the Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

various Days of Action across the province against the Mike Harris regime, and here in Toronto, the militancy of groups like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. This upsurge of activism, this re-emergence of an anti-capitalist discourse, was reflected in your book, Another World is Possible (2000; second edition 2006). That book sought to explain the roots of globalization in the dynamics of a capitalist system that is organically linked with imperialist politics and racist and sexist policies that are not outside of, but integral to, capitalism. So we have the emergence of an exciting movement, a new mobilization. But ultimately, the antiglobalization movement was weakened by the events of 9/11 (with the attacks by Al-Qaeda on the United States World Trade Centre and Pentagon) and the climate that emerged afterwards. But also perhaps by the organizational challenges of the alterglobalization movement itself. What is significant about this upsurge in activism and what limits does it face?

That’s great. I’ll try and do some justice to a really complicated question, in part because we are still living through all of that and so we’re trying to do a kind of assessment on the fly. But there is no doubt in my mind that there was, across 22 the neoliberal period, a massive series of defeats for the left and the working class movement that really shifted the political climate. And that’s part of what my own rethinking across the ‘90s had to come to terms with. It wasn’t just that there was a sort of temporary lull in the fortunes of the left and the working class movement. There had been real defeats imposed and left movements generally were in retreat. As a result, the emergence of what I prefer to call the global justice movement, as opposed to the so‐called antiglobalization movement, was highly significant. And I see its symbolic emergence, at least, as being crystallized by the Zapatista rebellion in January of 1994, (timed to coincide with and protest) the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. And so you get, from the Zapatista rebellion on, the re‐emergence of movements, of mass‐ based, anti‐neoliberal resistance…But, something we’ll come back to, not driven by the forces of the traditional left. There is something new happening here. But they’re anti‐neoliberal and they are creating the space, as you’ve noted, for anti‐capitalist discourses and movements to develop. And so I was drawn to understanding those movements. I saw in them the first significant rupture in the neoliberal consensus. The posing of the very idea that “another world is possible”, for instance, To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

seemed to me to be a really dramatic advance over where we had been across most of the ‘80s and ‘90s. But as I say, these weren’t movements that were being galvanized by traditional labour movements or parties of the left. There was something new at work here. So I wanted to learn from these and engage with them, but also to suggest that there were certain critical resources that Marxist theory and practice could offer to these movements to inform their analysis, their strategic perspectives and so on. And so Another World is Possible is a reflection of my attempt to really try to engage with and learn from those movements, to become more appreciative of some of, not all, the new currents of anarchism that were part of those movements, and to develop a kind of dialogue from a kind of anti‐dogmatic Marxist perspective with them. At the same time, as you note, the political moment after 9/11 was one where throughout the global north, at least, the global justice movement was just rolled back. The space for dissent was shut down in the midst of a sort of patriotic, national security fervour. And groups, for instance, that I was working with in Toronto, like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, fell on much more difficult times, in terms of the work that they were doing. I don’t think it was the same pattern across a lot of the global south. For instance, if 23 you take a case like Bolivia, from 2000 to 2005 you get the great wave of upsurges. So 9/11 doesn’t really do much to dent it, for instance. And I would say the same for a number of other sites of struggle in the global south. But in the north, there is no question we were in retreat, again. And to jump ahead a little bit, my analysis now is that a new period of mass protest has been opened up by the global economic crisis of 2008. But one of things that left is going to have to do is to assess what the weaknesses of the global justice movement were, because we don’t want to repeat them. There is going to have to be also a very significant critical appraisal. Because we lost a lot of ground. And the loss of that ground after 9/11 does speak to some of the inherent limits. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, by and large, the global justice movement wasn’t able to build sustained and sustainable organizations in working class and oppressed communities that could continue to do on‐the‐ground activism even when some of the larger kind of mobilizations like Quebec city or Seattle were not going to be available for a period of time.

That brings us to the current economics crisis and your latest book, Global Slump (2010). In that book, you provide your own detailed analysis of the Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

crisis. Along the way, you analyze the general crisis tendencies of capitalism, the history of neoliberalism, the spatial reorganization of global capitalism in the neoliberal era. You go into great detail, but you try and pitch it at a level that will be accessible to activists. Why does an activist, who is not an academic, need to develop this understanding of the details of the crisis?

I think I would start by situating the book Global Slump, in that context, which is to say, in 2008 when the financial crisis hit, the Wall street banks start collapsing and so on. And there was a real opening up of the intellectual climate. People have talked about how all of sudden there was a rediscovery of Marx, for instance. And I found myself being invited to speak to community groups, trade union organizations, student groups and even in the mainstream media, much more than I had been before. All of a sudden a radical or leftist political economist was having his views solicited. So part of it was my own attempt to think about how to do popular non‐academic presentations of basic Marxist ideas in popular education and mass media settings. But the other side of it was that I had by 2008 developed an analysis that said this crisis was different from the recessions that had happened across the 80s and 90s. And this goes back to our earlier discussion about 24 neoliberalism. I had become convinced by this point that rather than our being in a forty year long crisis of capitalism, which a lot of very eminent radical political economists have argued, that the crisis of the 1970s never went away…

…The ‘long down-turn’ thesis…

…the ‘long down turn’ thesis… Rather than that being the case, I was convinced that since the early 1980s, there had been a twenty year long expansionary wave, which I’m calling the neoliberal expansion, which really did restore corporate profitability, which massively restructured labour processes, which squeezed workers, very dramatically increased their level of exploitation, and also kickstarted a huge geographic expansion of capitalism, particularly in China and East Asia. As a result, when the crisis started to kick‐in in 2008 I was, I think, already primed to see this as something different. If you have an analysis which says that we are in a forty year long downturn, then this is just the latest crisis of many. I was inclined to see it as something new, something quite unique, as signalling an end of a quarter century of expansion To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

and the opening up of a much more turbulent period. And as a result, I wanted to share that analysis, as well. And I was suggesting in the talks I was doing in 2008 and 2009, once they finish bailing out the banks ‐‐ which they did to the tune of about twenty or twenty one trillion dollars ‐‐ they are going to have to pay for the bailout. And this is going to mean an intensification of neoliberal tactics: the age of austerity and the war on the public sector and public sector workers. But it’s going to be neoliberalism on steroids, in that regard. But also without any of the ideological convictions that characterized the ‘80s and ‘90s where neoliberalism really did produce a massive economic expansion. You’re going to have a very sluggish, even stagnant kind of period of capitalism, with a war against public services. And so the legitimacy of neoliberalism is going to be much more difficult to sustain. And so I was suggesting that we’re going to see a lot of fight backs. And so activists are going to have to navigate themselves in ways where we’re thinking, not just about next week’s demonstration and next month’s rally, but, “What are we trying to accomplish across a decade or more?” And is it possible to imagine rebuilding much more substantial forces on an anti‐ capitalist left that both does the day to day work of resistance but also 25 popularizes an analysis of why this is happening to our society and to our economy? And so in many ways, I was trying to write Global Slump as a resource for activists to help provide some of the foundation stones of an analysis of what I think is a different period in the history of capitalism and of neoliberalism, so that we think in larger terms and in more strategic terms.

The crisis of 2008 produced a crisis of confidence for neoliberalism. This is when you have the return of Keynes and maybe even of Marx -- or Marxists such as yourself. But, after that initial, understandable panic from the “rulers of the universe”, they have switched to the strategy of denial. We’re told that we are coming out of the crisis. We are told this in Canada: ‘Through steady management, we’re emerging from the crisis’. Has neoliberalism managed to re-establish its dominance and how successful has it been in reasserting itself? We’re told the solution to the crisis is further cuts, as you’ve just described. Is that merely a reflection of the weakness of movements in the global north -- and has that space that opened up for anti-capitalist movements closed up that quickly on us again?

Yeah, you’re right about the severity of that crisis of confidence in 2008 ‐2009. I was struck at the time, that you have the editors of the Financial Times of Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

London making the statement, “The world of the last three decades is gone.” And then running a column for a number of weeks called, “The Future of Capitalism” where they’re basically saying, “Capitalism as we’ve known it is gone. What’s the next phase?” This stage is clearly gone, what’s going to replace the neoliberal capitalism that we’ve known? And I think that this registered something real, which is to say, along the lines of what I was arguing earlier, that the neoliberal expansion is over. That doesn’t mean, however, that neoliberal methods are done. And that makes it a very complex period. But I also think that the ruling class is always uncomfortable about opening up questions about the future of its system. And they felt compelled to, with banks collapsing around the world. They didn’t know what it would take to bail out the banks and to stabilize the financial system. And if you watch what they did across 2008‐ 2009, it was just one injection into the banking system followed by another, each one more massive than the one before, until they stopped the bank collapses. But it’s not true that they had a fully designed programme. They were in panic mode and they just kept throwing funds, throwing wealth into the system, hoping that it would stop the bleeding. And twenty one trillion dollars, which is about one and half times 26 everything the US economy produces in a year, did eventually stop the banking collapse. But the difficulty is, that once they’ve done that, they have to pay off their creditors. Because the central banks raise money by selling their own bonds and they sell them to financial investors. Now you’ve got the problem that those investors are looking at the governments and the amount of debt they took on to bail out the banking system and more or less doing a risk assessment, trying to figure out who is good for paying back their debts and who might not be. And part of their calculation is not purely economic. Part of that calculation is which governments can impose the hardship on their populations and get away with it. So when they get cold feet about Greece, it’s not just the size of Greek debt relative to gross domestic product. It’s also the strength of Greek trade unions, the strength of the left within the society, the capacity to mobilize. It’s all those calculations that they are making. But what that tells us then, is that they know that this austerity regime is not a quick fix. They are talking about years and years. I mean the International Monetary Fund initially said a decade. Now that’s shifted to decades, and I think that’s right: we’re looking at a long‐term process. And that’s where neoliberal methods are run amuck right now. They’re going to try To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

and do what they do across the ‘70s and 80s, which is privatize, cut back services, lay off large numbers of public employees, and as we’ve seen, particularly in the US, take away their collective bargaining right or massively curtail them and so on. But because I don’t believe they can produce any return ‐‐ or any quick return ‐‐ to robust, sustained economic growth, it’s going to be, as I say, a period where they can’t deliver on the basic promise of neoliberalism from the ‘70s and ‘80s, which is that, “Restoring markets, restores growth.” That was the ideology. That’s not going to happen. I think we are seeing as a result, big bursts of protest, which on the one hand, create opportunities to rebuild mass‐based social protests and resistance. Greece has had eight general strikes, now. There were over a million people in the streets of France in the fall. We’ve seen utterly unprecedented labour upsurge in Wisconsin. But none of those are capable of actually stopping the neoliberal agenda. And so I think we’re into a difficult, dangerous, challenging period where we are going to see lots of resistance, that’s a taken for granted. Across a lot of the neoliberal period it was like, “Show me some resistance, please!” Now the resistance is here and it’s back in a repeated way. And obviously that’s been most dramatically so in North Africa and the Middle East. And I think its really important not to lose sight of 27 the fact that the return of the global economic crisis also kick‐started much of the labour protests in the country of Tunisia, for instance, which then surged to the forefront in December of last year and through January. And all of this is connected to the global crisis and the ways the global crisis is driving up food prices, for instance. But the scale of what our rulers are dealing with is so big that one‐day general strikes won’t do it. And so, I think we are into a much more complicated period where the left wing has to think much more long term. If we are only thinking about how to build next week’s rally, rather than, “How are we going to rebuild at the grassroots level of neighbourhoods, communities, workplaces and schools, real organizations and movements?”, if we are not thinking about the next decade in those terms, than I worry that we will not be able to produce the scale of resistance that is necessary. And so part of what I’m trying to do in Global Slump is to say to people, what we’re dealing with has systematic causes. We will need to think systemically, or if you will anti‐systemically. And this is going to require that we get beyond just thinking about our short‐ term projects of resistance and start to think in longer‐term horizons. Otherwise, the juggernaut of neoliberal austerity is just going to keep cutting through us. Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

Related to the issue of building resistance, a few year ago, in the post 9/11 context but before the current resurgence of activism related to the crisis, you wrote a very sober analysis in New Socialist magazine (McNally 2008) that pointed out that, “the revolutionary socialist left is today more marginal, more disconnected from the day to day experiences of working class people than at any time in the last one hundred and fifty years.” A fairly harsh assessment -- not that I’m disputing it! Looking forward, you then ask, “How do we rebuild?” You then say that the major task for revolutionary socialists is, “the development of an imaginative socialist vision that captures some of the tendencies of the future and crystallizes them theoretically and practically for the next wave of political radicalization”. And this is what you just mentioned, the need to build a long- term movement and also vision. But in the previous period, we failed to do this long-term building on the radical left, especially in the global north. And so what we are dealing with is our previous failures on the left to create a movement with a long term vision and strategy. And this raises concrete, practical questions about organizing on the left, in a period of economic crisis and renewed resistance. Now, in addition to your participation in revolutionary socialist 28 organizations, you were involved in the “Re-building the Left” efforts, that started around 2000, trying to create what Sam Gindin was calling, “a structured movement against capitalism” (Gindin 2001). At present, you are involved in the Greater Toronto Workers Assembly. How does your own activist experience influence your own ideas about how the left should organize, especially given prior failures to organize over the longer term? And specifically, what are some of the main possibilities and challenges represented by the Greater Toronto Workers Assembly?

Let me start with the larger challenge and then come to the more specific, local ones. The conundrum as I would pose it, is this: I continue to believe there are intellectual, political historical resources within a critical Marxism that are indispensable to building an effective left. I think there’s an analysis of capitalism as a system, of the historical problems and challenges of the working class within capitalism as a system, and a legacy of organizational experience, if you will, a kind of practical knowledge, that any kind of new anti‐capitalist left is going to need. But at the same time, as you note, I am very conscious of how marginal Marxist politics are or Marxist groupings are, in terms of the everyday life experience of working class people. And so part of To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

the problem I’m trying to raise is to pose things in those terms to socialists on the left and to say: “We’ve got to think about why we’ve become detached”. Now, for a whole historical period, most of the problem was that the ideas of working class self emancipation are not going to get very far when workers are being beaten back, day in and day out, losing ground, getting fragmented and demoralized, and left projects generally being in retreat. Those are just huge social, historical circumstances that we can’t overcome. But now we need to think about how we make sure that that legacy of disconnection doesn’t become an obstacle to re‐connecting and renewing radical socialist politics in a period in which arguably they can become meaningful again and they could really contribute to rebuilding movements of the left. So that’s the challenge I want to lay out. I think one of things that you’ve probably picked up on across our conversation is that one aspect of that challenge is generational. That is to say, there was a generation like myself in the 1970s for whom as we radicalized, socialism and Marxism just become the obvious point of reference. And then there’s a younger generation of radicals today for whom that’s very often not the case. Quite often, they are being influenced, in terms of their reading, by people like Noam Chomsky, who identifies himself with very admirable 29 anarchist traditions or Naomi Klein, who definitely situates herself as a critic of the left, but not a Marxist critic, and so on. And this is where they’re picking up ideas. And then a lot of the practices have been developed particularly in North America and parts of Europe within certain new, anarchist traditions. And then you’ve got those working class people coming into activism, let’s say in a place like Wisconsin, who just have never had any connection with the left. And I think the marginality of the radical left over a whole historical period can pose huge problems. Either we can think, “Oh, it’s our time again,” and bring out all of the points of reference of an older generation and imagine that those are relevant to today’s struggles instantly– and I don’t think they are. Or we can simply charge in and try to be really good activists on the ground and hope that somehow, spontaneously people move towards radical socialist conclusions. And I just don’t think it’s that simple either. And what I see as the other alternative, is to really get into the more difficult long‐term work of trying to re‐activate and revitalize some key inheritances of the radical socialist movement in ways that can seem organically meaningful to the kinds of struggles that we find ourselves in today. Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

I’ll just give one example, in passing. In my own writing on developments in North Africa and particularly Egypt and Tunisia but also in conversation with activists in Wisconsin, I have found Rosa Luxemburg’s classic pamphlet, “The Mass Strike” to all of a sudden speak, in really lively ways, to movements which are dealing with actual mass strikes on the ground. And I think there are things that Luxemburg draws on in the early twentieth century that slightly more than a hundred years later can actually be reactivated as living resources for the movement. But we have to do that creatively. And we also have to come to terms with the fact that the working class today is not the working class that I encountered in the 1970s. The working class in a city like Toronto is dramatically different. The majority of workers are people of colour in this city. As a result, anti‐racist analysis and anti‐racist practices will just have to be utterly central to any renewed working class politics and activism in this period. And so I guess what I am saying is that I am acutely aware that this new period creates openings for a kind of a radical or revolutionary socialism to maybe become less marginal than it was across the whole neoliberal period. I’ve lived through periods where socialists actually did have a real presence in unions, did sometimes lead important working class movements, 30 and so on. So, I’ve seen that and I know it’s possible. But I also recognize that the context is very changed. The very make‐up of the working class is changed today. But I think we can find resources both historically and in the here and now that we can mobilize for those purposes. But I think the challenges are really huge for the left. And so I find myself in the position of saying that we do have important resources, but if we just think we’ve got timeless truths, we’re screwed. We’ve got to figure out how we can bring those resources into a living conversation with activists on an ongoing basis, so that something new, a new kind of radical synthesis emerges in which other traditions…Some of the best practices of some of the young anarchists have to be part of what the next left will look like. But also some of the new working class traditions of organizing, whether it’s workers’ centres, worker of colour organizations and so on, will also have to be part of that. But I continue to believe that radical left Marxist politics are indispensable as well, one of the elements.

And do you want to talk specifically about the Workers Assembly in all of that?

To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

The Workers Assembly, if I can put it in these terms, is the right project. And it’s the right project in the sense that it’s posed the need to create a broad‐ based anti‐capitalist working class movement in this city. That it recognizes that the movement will be multi‐racial. The opening statement of principles of the Workers’ Assembly talks about building a multi‐racial anti‐capitalist working class project. And I think that’s the right project. I think that once you’ve set it, a lot of difficult work has to begin. And for all us there is as much un‐learning as learning that has to be part of it. We’re talking about having to create really healthy, non‐sectarian, democratic and inclusive practices for the left that challenge our own social location. In other words, you know, if you go to Workers Assemble events, we’re still too old, too white and too male. And that’s not to criticize anyone who is old, white and male. Good lord, I’m getting there! (laughs). But it’s to recognize that that poses really significant challenges to the way we operate, the assumptions we make about who needs to be in the room, who we need to bring together before something like the Workers Assembly is a meaningful movement. And I think it raises the generational challenges of being able to listen respectfully and to learn from the younger activists, who are in a city like this doing anti‐poverty organizing, migrant justice work, mobilizing against 31 Israeli apartheid and so on…and who need to be part of all of that. So, yeah, I think the project of building a multi‐racial anti‐capitalist working class movement in this city is absolutely the correct one. And I think the next year or so will tell us whether the activists who have come together in the Workers Assembly are really ready and able to rise to the challenge.

Related to that but more directly, what is the relationship between your activism through the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Workers Assembly, No One is Illegal, and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, among other activities, and your intellectual or academic activities? How does your activism inform your academic work and vice-versa? And more generally, what is the role of the intellectual or academic in social and political struggle?

You know, I’m in a funny position on some of this. And one of the reasons is because my biography is such that I was an activist before I was an academic. I became an activist as a high school student. And in some ways, I’ve always thought of myself as an activist first. And that doesn’t mean that I’m not very aware of all of the very unique and privileged circumstances that being an academic entails. But just in terms of my own thinking, the activism has always been front and centre and really definitional in terms of who I am and the Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

projects I want to engage with. And I think what that meant is that, for better or for worse, my intellectual work has always been informed by thinking about what the challenges for an anti‐capitalist left are. I mean, even to take something which is, in many respects, a very theoretical work, Bodies of Meaning, you can see from our conversation it’s still informed by my encounters with activists in anti‐war organizing and my thinking about where they’re at and the problems which were provoking them. And I think it will always be the case for me that in many respects my intellectual agenda is shaped by my involvement in social movements and left activism. Having said that, when you’re located as I am, being an academic as well as an activist, it also produces its unique challenges. Activists are quite used to academics who think they know in advance what the activists ought to be doing, what the social movements ought to do and therefore want to come and tell them what to do. And that is deeply frustrating for a lot of activists. Also, I think academics often assume that activists don’t care about analysis and that’s just never been my experience. That’s not to say that activist settings always find the time and space to do the analysis that many of them will tell you they need. I think a lot of activists will honestly say, “We don’t do enough analysis. We need more opportunity to do it and to develop popular 32 education programmes,” and so on. But I’m also very conscious as somebody located in the academy, that when I’m engaged with fellow activists, they come with certain preconceptions of what an academic is, as well. And I think it is important, therefore, as an activist‐academic to make it really clear how genuine one’s commitment is to learning from the activists you work with. Because they are amazing repositories of huge amounts of practical and theoretical knowledge. They often don’t get the chance to develop it in a very systematic way. And so, one of the things I actually find is that, very often, my work, my written work, often gives some expressions to some of that practical knowledge that I’ve been picking up in the activist settings in which I move. And so while I recognize that there’s a tension between these roles, I have to say that I want it to be a productive tension. That is to say, I hope that some of the theoretical work I do feeds back into my activism and I certainly hope that what I am learning as an activist is also informing how I’m theorizing that whole business of the production of knowledge. And I think that one of things that you can see is that my life experience, my intellectual trajectory is one where there are shifts. And that some of those shifts come through the activist experience. I just was simply To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

forced to re‐engage with feminism and anti‐racism, in particular, across the ‘90s and 2000s, in really, for me, profoundly important ways. Anti‐racism goes back very, very early for me. My first year as an undergrad, forming the Committee to Free Angela Davis, for instance. But I would also say that I’ve had to deepen and renew and develop analyses in those areas. I think one of the things we want to do, as we build a real rooted left in the years ahead, is to create the spaces for the development of the two kinds of organic intellectuals that Gramsci talks about. Some people forget that Gramsci does talk about it in two ways, which is to say, the activists from the real movements of the day, the real resistance movements, who become theorists of and for the movement. That is to say, we create the spaces where their political self‐education becomes an ongoing priority. But also, where traditional intellectuals as Gramsci describes them, really move their centre of gravity from the traditional institutions of the intellectuals to the movements as the centre. And Gramsci, of course, himself was one of those intellectuals who had a university education and became an integral and enduring part of the working class left. That, of course, requires that we create a left where that’s actually possible. And at the moment the academy and activist work tend, too often, to 33 be miles and miles apart. But, if we can create a new radical anti‐capitalist left, then the development of new organic intellectuals has to be part of that project.

That can almost be our conclusion! But one more question about your forthcoming book. Another one in the pipe, it’s obviously been a productive sabbatical.

Actually, pre‐sabbatical! I did just print the galleys, so, yes, a productive sabbatical, too.

Your forthcoming book, Monsters of the Market (2011) seems -- from what I’ve seen because it’s not even out yet -- to mark a return to the questions of the body. It delves into cultural theory, tackles Mary Shelley, Shakespeare, along with Marx. Tell us a bit about that project and how you ended up writing about monsters, vampires and zombies. Are trying to get the orthodox Marxists mad at you again? Should we expect any discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the Twilight (television) series?

Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

Alas, some of my friends are disappointed that there is no Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the book. But it’s an interesting convergence of a variety of interests. It’s partly, as you say, a return to the body. Partly it’s an attempt to extend the engagement with culture that I think Marxists need to be serious about. And in other ways it comes out of my own political economy and social movement work. The book represents a coming together of certain kinds of observations that I had. I was really struck in doing all of my political economy around globalization, by the fact that there has been in sub‐Saharan Africa, the area most ravaged by neoliberalism, this spate of zombie and vampire tales. They’re found in film, folklore, all kinds of video, pulp fiction and so on, but they’re everywhere. And of course lots of mainstream social scientists just see them as superstitious. I was struck, though, in getting more acquainted with some of them, by the centrality of the figure of the zombie‐labourer. One story after another is about people being kidnapped or taken in their sleep, to work all night and then waking up exhausted in the mornings and going to their regular day jobs. In other words, I was really struck by the way that labour figures centrally. And labour where your body has been captured by alien forces and coerced. And it was pretty hard not to see the connection of those kinds of 34 images and metaphors to the actual circuits of global capitalism today. Then, I’ve been teaching Marx’s Capital in recent years. And there are key parts of that text where Marx turns to monster metaphors, in particular, the vampire but not only the vampire. And I began to think about those as not just literary embellishments but as attempts by Marx to express something that the language of political economy doesn’t really provide very good vehicles for expressing. Which is to try to get at the actual texture of experience in a capitalist society, where your life energies are actually being sucked dry, over and over again. And I think Marx struggles to convey that, in Capital. That when he is giving us technical formulas for the rate of exploitation and the rate of profit, he doesn’t want us to lose sight of the fact that actual human bodies are being exploited. They’re suffering, they’re feeling pain, they’re being exhausted, they’re being worn out. And there are whole chapters on the working day and modern industry where Marx just, in immense detail, goes through this. And so those kinds of considerations then dovetailed with some of my earliest work which is on the emergence of capitalism in England. And as I thought about that in terms of the problems of monstrosity, I was really struck by the way in which the British working class, particularly in London, regularly To Interpret the World and To Change It: Interview with David McNally

engaged in battles for working class bodies. And there are a few historians who’ve really written about this, although I don’t know if they’ve always appreciated what is at stake. But we all know, if you read that history, as I did, that when hangings would take place condemned criminals’ bodies were up for grabs. They could be given over to the anatomists to be dissected. This was part of the punishment in death. And quite often, the crowd that gathered at the gallows would enter into these huge battles, which would sometimes go on for hours, to get the bodies and give them a decent burial and prevent them being dissected, and carved up and chopped up by the anatomists. And they also hated the grave‐robbers who would go to the paupers’ graves, who would steal and then sell the corpses of the poor. And I started to think, “Why was this a site of such immense contestation?” And I began then to think about the ways in which, in fact, they were fighting after death about the indignities performed in life on working class bodies. And then I realized that this is an ongoing theme that most of us had missed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein is a grave‐robber and Shelley tells us this. And he then cobbles together this gigantic creature with human and animal body parts. And of course, some commentators have noticed that there are ways in which the creature is a metaphor for the 35 proletariat. And so I began to work all of that into the analysis. But what this did, is that it created ways of thinking about the experience of capitalism and how groups of people experienced this as a horrifying and monstrous kind of development, particularly during periods where labour is being rapidly commodified, as in parts of sub‐Saharan Africa today or as in 18th century England. The idea that you sell your energies to somebody, that they claim your body and have control over it for the period of that working day. And I think, too often, we don’t appreciate how traumatic that experience is and how much the popular imaginary within capitalist societies reproduces stories about that experience. And then I began to think about zombie and vampire stories much more in those terms. And I was really asking myself, “Why are the zombie and the vampire the two main monsters of capitalist society?” They are the ones who proliferate everywhere and what is the significance of that? So I am trying to develop a kind of Marxist account of monstrosity within capitalism. But also the story ends on the prospects for, if you will, the hopeful monster, which is ultimately Mary Shelley’s creature, which is to say, the proletariat as a motley conglomeration of living, embodied humans that might actually have the final Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 1‐36

say. So that’s kind of the hopeful, concluding note of what is, I hope, a kind of interesting analysis of some of the cultural forms of capitalism today.

References Brenner, Robert. 1977. “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”. New Left Review. 104 (July-August): 25-92. Carroll, William K. 1986. Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Collins, Chik. 2003. “Review Essay on David McNally, Bodies of Meaning: Studies of Language, Labor and Liberation”. Historical Materialism. 11 (2):228-238. Gindin, Sam. 2001. “Rebuilding the Left: Towards a Structured, Anticapitalist Movement”. 64 (Spring): 91-97. Gordon, Todd. 2010. Imperial Canada. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Harvey, David. 2004. “The ‘New Imperialism’: Accumulation by Dispossession”. Socialist Register. 40: 63-87. Hennessey, Rosemary. 2000. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge. Klassen, Jerome. 2009. “Canada and the New Imperialism: The Economics of a Secondary Power.” Studies in Political Economy. 83 (Spring): 163-190. 36 McNally, David. 1981. “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political Economy.” Studies in Political Economy, 6 (Autumn):35-63. McNally, David. 1986. “Technological Determinism and Canadian Political Economy”. Studies in Political Economy, 20 (Summer):161-169. McNally, David. 1988. Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. McNally, David. 1990. “Socialism or Protectionism?”. Studies in Political Economy, 31 (Spring): 159-168. McNally, David. 1993. Against the Market: Political Economy Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso Books. McNally, David. 1995. “Language, History and Class Struggle.” Monthly Review 47 (3):13-30. McNally, David. 2001. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation. New York: State University of New York Press. McNally, David. 2002; revised edition 2006. Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism. Winnipeg : Arbeiter Press. McNally, David. 2008. “Building Toward the Next New Left.” New Socialist, 63: 28-30. McNally, David. 2010. Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press. McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Boston : Brill Academic.