Back to the ‘30s?
Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy
1st ed. 2020
Title: sumptuous wreckage of the present (detail) Medium: acrylic on dura-lar Date: 2019 Dimensions: 29” x 44” Threadlike masses ascend and descend from an implied horizon line, while webs of varying movement layer over one another. Evocative of a landscape ending where it begins, the gradually shifting patterns crescendo and dissipate as they repeat again, an imperceptible order emerges. My process tangles and twists, unravels and knots, snarls and entraps- drifts, loops and drops. Contrasting action-spaces engender both deliberate and random actions and thoughts. The edges dissolve between land, water, atmosphere, and human activity.
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“All history is contemporary history. But very few historians self-consciously explicate what this might mean. Translating the dictum into concretely focused investigations is rarer still. Pressing beyond the facile analogies and over-hasty comparisons, this finely conceived volume demonstrates carefully and persuasively how exactly Europe’s interwar crises can help us to think effectively about the present.”
—Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan, USA
“Breaking with the schematic and formalistic approach that dominates much of social science, this volume applies the resources of critical theory to a wide range of case studies to generate new insights into the current moment. A must read for anyone interested in contemporary politics.”
—Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
“By juxtaposing the last decade of global politics with the decade that followed the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929, Back to the ‘30s? piles up parallels between fascism’s golden age and the most recent rise of authoritarianism. Masterfully compiled, this book offers a compelling socio-political thesis, an exceptional collection of analyses, and a keen sensitivity to history’s most important questions. Its strong emphasis on the Global South, Eastern Europe, East Asia, Australia, and the European periphery lends it a unique force and relevance. All readers interested in the rise of international right-wing populism and neo-fascism will want this on their shelf.”
—Nitzan Lebovic, Associate Professor of History, Lehigh University, USA
“Comparing the 1930s to the 2010s, through a multidisciplinary approach applied to a variety of cases, this very interesting collection helps to understand today’s Gramscian Interregnum by pointing to the interrelation of specific forms of capitalist accumulation and authoritarian political turns, as well as to counter-hegemonic practices.”
—Donatella Della Porta, Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy
“Amidst the maelstrom of financial emergencies, violent institutional readjustments, hegemonic crises and exploding counter-hegemonic alternatives, the first decades of the twenty-first century have invited direct comparisons with the ‘dark’ 1930s. Mapping critical insights from, while also underlining caveats that inhere in, historical analogies between the two moments offers a much-needed corrective to the extremes of historical uniqueness or the notion of a ‘back to the 1930s’ déjà vu. This uniquely wide-ranging and intellectually prolific volume provides so much more that a collection of diverse methodological and geographic perspectives on the merits and limits of historical parallelism. Collectively, the twenty contributions chart ways in which the experience of the 1930s can be productively summoned to inform both critiques and validations of a historically analogous perspective no matter how distinctive and different the current moment may be.”
—Aristotle Kallis, Professor of Modern & Contemporary History, Keele University
“Capitalism and liberal democracy are once again in crisis. What can we learn about our future and the possibilities for mass action from looking back at the 1930s? The authors of this volume provide insightful and penetrating answers by examining rightwing movements of the 1930s and today in a variety of countries and by exploring the role of ideas in shaping peoples’ understandings of their historical moments and in inspiring both action and resignation. This volume will spur new thinking and can help left activists gain a better understanding of where to focus their energies.”
—Richard Lachman, Professor of Sociology, University of Albany, State University of New York, USA
To the writers and workers of the 2130s
As Back to the ‘30s? goes to press, the world is facing another potentially transformative crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic , accompanied by the “worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” according to the IMF. Worse, that is, since the Great Recession, whose comparability to the Great Depression provided one major inspiration for the present volume. This crisis could be understood as a singular event brought on by a freak virus, or—as some of the contributors to this volume would argue—as an only partially-contingent outcome of a longer period of stagnation, “downswing,” “financial expansion,” or “systemic chaos,” with structural similarities to the interwar period. As we observe in the introduction to this volume, the world economy has been depressed for most of the period since 2008, while the coronavirus shock exposed the degree to which the “recovery” from that crisis depended on the accumulation of debt, including a huge overhang of junky corporate bonds and the proliferation of “zombie” firms that must borrow just to pay interest. Even more than in 2008, US and European central banks responded to the Great Lockdown with a massive credit expansion (less so China, which now faces new constraints). This injection of credit did not stop unemployment from expanding at a historically unprecedented rate, as even healthy businesses were shuttered to control the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether a chain of defaults will lead to an enduring depression.
There are other historical resonances in this moment, beyond the obvious comparisons to the pandemic of 1918. There were invocations of the Second World War : Trump took to calling himself a “wartime president,” at least for a time, Guterres, the UN Secretary General, spoke of the “greatest challenge since WW II,” etc. The political significance of this rhetoric, from solidarity to suppression of dissent, might merit its own dedicated study. Economically, however, the Great Lockdown looks very little like a war. Viruses do not require massive expenditures of material; on the contrary, the rate of destruction, and turnover, of things has decreased enormously. If we are in a period of stagnation with an overhang of debt, the manufacture of masks and respirators will not get us out of it, in the way the Second World War ended the Great Depression.
Politically, the signs are ambiguous. Some have predicted that coronavirus will spell the end of the right-wing authoritarian populist resurgence, or have looked forward to a new, more expansive solidarity grounded by a renewed welfare state, or even the supersession of capitalism. Others are wary. Giorgio Agamben seems sure that we are headed for a quasi-permanent reduction to “bare life”: if he was roundly and rightly critiqued for his callousness toward coronavirus deaths, and inability to appreciate the expansive bios of social distancing as solidarity, he may also be at least partially right about these long-term effects, as COVID-19 makes for still-unknown biopolitical potentials, perhaps including increased policing and surveillance. On the other hand, one of the most tangible results so far has been the rise of Black Lives Matter, both one of the largest social movements in US history, and a movement with global reach, challenging not only racist state violence but the very apparatus of policing itself. At the same time, while social democrats, liberals, and most of those who still believe in responsible public conduct and policy have pursued containment with a remarkable degree of unanimity, the “populist” right has produced a striking variety of reactions: some, such as Bolsonaro and Trump, have downplayed the risks or fomented protests against containment measures (with predictably disastrous results), while others, such as Orbán, have used the crisis as an excuse to effectively put an end to the remaining freedoms of liberal democracy. The 1930s produced a biopolitics—necropolitics—of genocide, most iconically (but not only) in the Nazi camps. What bio/necropolitics, and what political economy, might emerge from the conjuncture of pandemic, depression, and rising right-wing authoritarianism? We hope and expect that this volume will provide some modest insights with which to address this urgent question.
This collection was jumpstarted by a series of discussions between the editors, as we began to puzzle about the kinds of comparisons we saw being drawn between the contemporary moment and the first decades of the twentieth century. It started, that is, with an observation, but this book took shape through conversation. Its first form was as a conference panel at the 2017 meetings of American Anthropological Association organized by Jeremy Rayner and Taylor Nelms. We wanted to find a way to think across borders (geographic, disciplinary, linguistic, and temporal) about the echoes of history—and about how it is that people come to hear and to enact those echoes in particular ways. We were overwhelmed by the response. Our first thanks go to the initial participants on that panel (Nicholas Copeland, Chungse Jung, Bryan Moorefield, and Zoë West, who gave papers alongside Susan Falls and Jeremy Rayner). While not everyone on our panel developed a chapter for this book, the explorations we made together helped to forge our initial paths.
As a book manuscript, the project gathered momentum and took on a shape and expansiveness we could never have imagined, largely due to the inspired work of George Souvlis.
Many contributors developed ideas for this book during the Historical Materialism Athens Conference 2019 on panels such as “Back to the 30s? Crisis and Transition,” “Back to the 30s? Nationalism, Populism, and the Limits of Liberalism,” and “Crisis, Rupture and European Constitutional Imaginaries.” Others presented work on these chapters at the 2019 Historical Materialism Conference in London, at the 2019 American Anthropology Association Conference, the 2019 Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, or elsewhere. We are extremely grateful to all of the contributors who joined us in this project–each one of whom worked diligently to prepare highly specialized areas of research, literature, and theoretical concerns for a wide audience of readers.
We are especially thankful to Mary Al-Sayed and her assistant, Madison Allums at Palgrave Macmillan for their ongoing support, guidance, and patience. We thank the many colleagues who gave us feedback on materials at every stage, especially the anonymous reviewers of the proposal whose insightful comments sharpened the overall direction of our collection. Taken together, the chapters presented here, along with the art, activism, and scholarship that all of these chapters engage, suggest how a wide-eyed reading of history can help us to shape the strategies that will one day take us beyond the long shadow of the 1930s.
received his doctorate in 2014 from the University of New South Wales. His research covers a range of topics on Australian history, Commonwealth history, South Asian affairs, political violence, and international relations. Mark is currently a Historian for the Australian Department of Veteran’s Affairs in Canberra Australia, where he undertakes collaborative research and writing projects on Australian history, jointly funded by government and industry. He is also undertaking an oral history project for the department. Between September 2014 and April 2017, he was Senior Lecturer of International Relations, History, and Security Studies at Curtin University in Perth, where he coordinated and taught undergraduate and postgraduate units on these topics. Prior to this, he worked for Charles Sturt University and the University of Canberra, as well as the Commonwealth Government of Australia in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.
is a Rome-based historian and translator, and Europe editor of Jacobin Magazine. He is an expert in the history of Italian Left. In 2017, he completed his Ph.D. in International History at the London School of Economics with a thesis entitled “Bandiera Rossa: Communists in German-occupied Rome, 1943–1944.” He is the author of two books: First We Take Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy (Verso, London 2019) and Rosso è il Futuro (Laterza, Bari 2019).
is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, focusing on radical democracy and how the Kurdish experience reassembles the nation-state concept. She has been working as a Research Associate and Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn since graduating with an M.Sc. in International Politics from the SOAS University of London. Her recent article “One State, One Nation, One Flag—One Gender? HDP as a Challenger of the Turkish Nation State and Its Gendered Perspectives” was published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.
is Senior Assistant Professor in Political Sociology at the University of Calabria, Italy. He has carried out fieldwork and study internships in Spain, Mexico, the USA, Ecuador, India, South Africa, and Russia. His main research interests are: the transformation of the capitalist system, international relations and global governance, international migrations, political organizations, and new ICTs. He has published various books and articles on these subjects, both in Italy and abroad.
is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA, and is the author of various articles as well as Clarity, Cut and Culture: The Many Meanings of Diamonds (2014), White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing (2017), and Overshot: The Political Aesthetic of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond (with J. Smith, 2020).
is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at New York University. His research focuses on the history of Brazilian anti-corruption politics. He is a contributing editor for Jacobin magazine and the website Africa is a Country. He is currently based in São Paulo, Brazil.
is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Constellations, Logos, Kant Studien, Topia, The European Legacy, The European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, Radical Philosophy, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, as well as in other journals and edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012). He is co-editor (with Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) also with Johan Hartle. In 2017, he was the Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China. In 2019, he was Visiting Lecturer at Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas—FFLCH-USP (Universidade de São Paulo). He is currently editing a book entitled Spectres of Fascism (Pluto Press) that, in part, stems from an Institute Free School co-organized with Stephen Collis in 2017.
is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bogazici University's Department of Sociology, Istanbul. His research concerns the themes of law, historical capitalism, communism, nationalist populism, and revolutionary politics. His current work explores the problems of nationalist appropriation of transitional justice and postcolonial discourse in neoliberal Eastern Europe in reckoning with the communist past. He is particularly interested in the conversations between Marxian, decolonial, and postcolonial approaches to the questions of universality, difference, inequality, and unevenness. His writings and commentaries have appeared in journals and forums across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the USA. His most recent publications include Facing History: Sovereignty and the Spectacles of Justice and Violence in Poland’s Capitalist Democracy (Comparative Studies in Society and History, January 2019), (with Umut Türem) The Banality of Exception? Law and Politics in ‘Post-Coup’ Turkey (South Atlantic Quarterly, January 2019), and Neither Teleologies nor ‘Feeble Cries’: Revolutionary Politics and Neoliberalism in Time and Space (Dialectical Anthropology, March 2018). He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Through a Glass Darkly: Transitional Justice and Remaking the Public in Poland After State Communism.
is Research Associate in the Center for Korean Studies at Binghamton University and Ph.D. Candidate of Sociology at Binghamton University. His dissertation, “The Age of Protest: World-Historical Structure and Dynamics of Protest Waves in the Global South, 1875–2014,” explores the world-historical patterns of protest waves in the Global South over the long twentieth century as mapping out the world-historical pattern of protest events. This work is based on data gleaned from the historical newspaper database of The New York Times. His research interests include world-historical study of social movements, media analysis of counter-hegemonic struggles, structural inequality of the world-economy, and governance and resistance of neoliberal urbanization in East Asia. He was selected as a Fellow of the Laboratory for Ph.D. Students in Sociology in the International Sociological Association and published a book chapter, “Media and the New War on Drugs: Governing through Meth,” in the edited volume, After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment (W. Martin and J. Price, 2016).
a historical sociologist, teaches at the City University of New York, CUNY. She studied Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Athens, Greece (B.A.), History and Theory of Art at Binghamton University (M.A.), and Sociology at the New School for Social Research (M.A, Ph.D.). Her articles have been published in journals including Hesperia; Histoire@Politique; Politique, Culture, Société; Revue du Centre; Histoire de Sciences Po; The Journal of Historical Sociology; The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies; and various media such as Al Jazeera, Boston Occupier, New Politics Magazine, and Marginalia. She is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled Digging for Democracy in Greece: Intra-Civilizational Processes During the American Century.
is Associate Professor of Sociology at College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. Her research interests include the labor movement, popular culture and counterculture, and, more recently, the relationship between national liberation struggles and syndicalist labor movement strategies. Her first book, The American Surfer: Radical Culture and Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2011. Her essays appear in numerous edited collections, including Class: The Anthology, The Surf Studies Reader, Southern California Bohemias, and Living With Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture. She is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination; her most recent essays there include “Slackers, Sabotage, and Shorter Hours: Cultural Politics and the Labor Movement” and “The Mediterranean Imaginary: A Nationalism of the Sun, a Communism of the Sea.” Her work has also been published in Z Magazine, Ikaria Magazine (Greece), Italian American Review, and Urban Affairs Review. Her newest essay, “Labor’s Will to Power: Nietzsche, American Syndicalism, and the Politics of Liberation” will appear Nietzsche and Critical Theory (Brill, forthcoming). She is currently working on a new book, Shanty Irish: Slackers, Sabotage, and American Syndicalism.
is Professor of British and American Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He has written extensively on French and German philosophy and its non-Western reception, Asian art, popular culture, and politics. In a quest to discuss the continued importance of communist principles today with contributions from intellectuals across the world, and particularly Asia, he co-edited with Slavoj Žižek the book The Idea of Communism 3: The Seoul Conference (2016).
is the Managing Director of Research at the Filene Research Institute, a non-profit credit union and cooperative finance think tank. He is an anthropologist and ethnographer of money, technology, and alternative economies, and he has written on topics ranging from Ecuador’s solidarity economy to zombie banks, mobile money, and Bitcoin.
is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She teaches courses on European comparative social and gender history, gender and politics, women’s movements, qualitative methods, oral history, and the Holocaust. In 2005, she was awarded the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by the President of the Hungarian Republic and in 2006, the Bolyai Prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2018, Pető was awarded the 2018 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. Author of 5 monographs, as well as 261 articles and chapters in books published in seventeen languages, she is also editor of 31 volumes. Her articles have appeared in leading journals including East European Politics and Society, Feminist Theory, NORA, Journal of Women’s History, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Clio, Baltic Worlds, European Politics and Society, and International Women’s Studies Forum.
is an economist and a sociologist. He is currently the Head of the Institute of Economics at the University of Western Hungary. He had received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex. His research interests include the economics of European integration, international development, and international political economy.
(CUNY 2014) is currently Research Faculty in the Centro de Economía Pública at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (IAEN) in Quito, Ecuador. He has been a researcher and sub-director at the National Center for Strategy on the Right to Territory (CENEDET), also at the IAEN, and has held fellowships with the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on processes of state formation, practices of democracy, and institutions for public and common property in relation to changing regimes of accumulation. He has published in English and Spanish on the movement against the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Costa Rica, the promotion of Indigenous communes in Quito, the right to the city, and theories of value.
is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the cultural production (poetry, cinema, and music) of long 1960s left-wing movements in Turkey, Greece, and USA. Kenan is a founder and co-editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry and he has also written for the Verso Blog, Jacobin, and Al-Monitor. Kenan splits his time between Santa Cruz and Istanbul.
holds a Ph.D. in history from the European University Institute in Florence where he worked on the Greek Metaxas regime, its organic intellectuals, and the role of women within the “New State.” He writes for various progressive magazines including Salvage, Jacobin, ROAR, and Lefteast. He recently published a book, Voices on the Left, and is Teaching Fellow at the University of Ioannina and Postdoc Researcher at the University of Crete.
is an anthropologist, urbanist, and artist, and currently the Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on sites, techniques, and politics of civic cultivation, social movements, and governance; the ethics and aesthetics of nationalism and cultural differentiation; and people’s movements in interwar, socialist and post-socialist Hungary. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and she co-edited Co-revolutionary Praxis: Accompaniment as a Strategy for Working Together (Aukland: St. Paul St. Gallery, 2015). Her book Movement of the People: Populism, Folk Dance and Citizenship in Hungary will be published in 2020 (Indiana University Press). She has taught at Hunter College, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Parsons School of Design. She is on the editorial collective of LeftEast.
is a Rresearch and Teaching Assistant at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis deals with different types of government systems and their classification in a case study entitled “Presidentialism alla Turca.” He examines the governmental system of the Turkish Republic, focusing on its various constitutions from 1921 until today. He holds a Masters of Arts degree in Political Science and Sociology with minors in History and Public Law from the University of Bonn and Università degli Studi die Firenze.
is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Political Science of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and coordinator of the seminar Gender, Sexuality, Science and Power. She studied Political Science at the University of Athens, achieved her Master’s Degree in Balkan history at the University of London, and her doctorate in Modern History at the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s). She specializes in issues concerning biopower and the cultural aspects of science such as psychiatry, forensic medicine, criminology, sexology, and psychoanalysis demonstrating that sciences were vital parts of an ideology of gender throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (in particular during the interwar years). Her current research interests deal with establishing a timeline so that the cultural significance of scientific discourse as it pertains to gender and sexuality is better understood. She is the author of five books; see Women and Nationalism in the Making of Modern Greece, London (Palgrave, 2009), and Moral Insanity and Social Order (Palgrave, forthcoming).
is Associate Professor of Law at the LSE and has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Cornell, Paris II, and the National University of Singapore. In 2019, he was the Visiting Professor at the University of Keio, Japan. He teaches and researches in the areas of legal theory, constitutional theory, and European integration. His publications include (with M. Dowdle) Questioning the Foundations of Public Law (Hart, 2018) and Constitutionalism Beyond Liberalism (CUP, 2017); “Authoritarian Liberalism in the European Constitutional Imagination: Second Time as Farce” (2015) European Law Journal; “The Material Constitution” (2018) Modern Law Review (with M. Goldoni); “The Spectre of Authoritarian Liberalism: Reflections on the Constitutional Crisis of the European Union” (2013) German Law Journal; “Beyond the Post-Sovereign State: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Constitutional Pluralism” (2019, forthcoming) Cambridge Yearbook of European Law. He is currently working on a monograph on a constitutional history of European integration from the 1930s to the recent Euro-crisis, The Reconstitution of Europe: Lineages of Authoritarian Liberalism.