‘I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who promise it are incapable of enacting it?
It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still, I think Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I could interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a hyperpolitical age.
Jäger, 32, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts (“bohemian class?” I ask, and he says carefully that they are boho “adjacent”), educated at the University of Essex, then Cambridge, is now a lecturer in the history of political thought and theory at University College, Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a calm, almost self-effacing manner. His philosophical reference points are Deleuze and Guattari, Mouffe and Laclau, but asked to situate himself in the firmament of the European left, he says simply: “Even with all the baggage and connotations, I still think the easiest thing is to call myself a Marxist.”
His thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates, though some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away.
Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.
He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because “I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues”. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like.
These four eras – mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics and hyperpolitics – “are not just concepts,” Jäger says, “they have some empirical data behind them. ‘How institutionalised is society?’ is basically a question of, how does civil society look? How are membership organisations looking? What are the affiliations, what are the types of bonds that people have? That’s not very difficult to quantify. You can look at union membership, you can look at church attendance, you can look at less overtly political forms of belonging. The political axis is more difficult to measure, but not impossible – namely, how many people attend elections, how many people strike, how many people engage in political violence, how many people engage in political communication, write letters to editors or now post online?”
He argues that the height of mass politics was between the wars. To illustrate this in the book, he lists all the civic organisations during the Great Depression in the small Rhenish hamlet of Marienthal – they spanned all human activity, from work to thought to rabbit-breeding. I won’t list them all here but there were many. Considering the effect these organisations might have on the collective psyche, Jäger considers the history of his own family: “On the Flemish side, this meant that the Christian Democratic or the Catholic party was not just a party that said how you were to vote, or which union you joined, but also had a very strong say in what happened in the bedroom. It was a total doctrine, not something that purely applied to your political deportment.” There was little boundary between public and private, and no such thing as a political identity without a membership card. It was personally quite constraining, but it got shit done. (Sidebar, I’ve seen a nascent institutionalised-politics like this, in Manchester, in 2019; the local Momentum group was campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, but it also had a running club, a knitting group and a book group. I was overcome by the sense of seeing a trade union movement reborn. Needless to say, Corbyn did not win that election. Institution-building can’t be done on the fly.)
The destruction of political organisations was “not monocausal”, Jäger says, though in the book he puts it squarely on the shoulders of the union busting by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost faith in organisations because the crunchy bit of their leverage – the bit where you get what you want by withdrawing your labour, the bit before all-out war – was taken away. Unions were defanged and workers impoverished, and many ultimately saw their industries collapse in the process.
Jäger says there were also cultural and generational shifts over decades – people in the 60s and 70s seeking a different relationship with collective institutions, for example, and looking instead for emancipation and equality – so it takes a while for the picture to cohere, and Communist parties remained tenacious through the 1980s in Italy, for instance. “In 1989, suddenly it’s as if there’s a day and night difference,” he says. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war, he says: “Suddenly everyone deserves to party.”
It is a strange sensation to have the 90s narrated back to you by someone who was born in 1994, but it is mainly unsettling because it is so accurate. Tony Blair did describe globalisation as a process as inexorable as the weather, and that is also how neoliberals described the economy – a thing that happened to you. “This is the ambiguity of the post-politics of the 90s,” Jäger says. “Politics is no longer something that you see as effecting large-scale social change, and the forms of liberty that are available to you are now more private, more intimate, more individual. At the same time, the idea that you can collectively bundle together with other individuals and change society starts to appear very, very remote.”
There was also a lot of beauty to that time, which he describes through the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans and the novels of Annie Ernaux and Michel Houellebecq. We were obsessed with Houellebecq in the 90s, but we will have to talk about why, and the direction his novels took, and whether we will ever again live in a world whose best cultural artefact is the novel, another time. “The fact that Tillmans as a gay man is able to express and experience the rave culture of the 90s and 00s as a new form of collectivity that wasn’t available to him in the 70s and 80s, I don’t think we should deny the liberatory value of this. It very clearly is the case that there are individuals who did not feel at home in the families, or the communities or the neighbourhoods in which they grew up, in which they finally find a kind of new community that is much less demanding and is less exigent than what they had before. The ambiguity is, of course, that it also implies a profound disenchantment and cynicism around what politics can do.” That’s politics with a capital P – you might see a community animated about an issue, but with no faith in parliamentary channels.
There is a critical and rarely mentioned adjunct to the neoliberal destruction of institutions and the post and antipolitics that came afterwards, which is that it didn’t only come for the left. “Thatcher basically did a controlled demolition of popular Conservatism,” Jäger says, “and replaced much of this with PR spin, and also a lot of private funding, because the idea was: ‘We can get rid of our mass party because we’re in control of the media, we can win elections with that.’” The right today, he says, is just as inconsequential as the left, and for exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not formally organised. “The people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared before they entered the march. This is different even to the BNP, where marchers had a shared history in football hooliganism, and the National Front. That shared subculture is no longer there.”
He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.” To me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to the left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk of a trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete secession of that individual from what we could even call society. That is a variable in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right thrives and why hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more difficult to achieve tangible results.” They are not more organised or more ideologically coherent or more strategic; they are just better funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the overarching organising principle of global politics. Money might not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants.
The more immediately controversial proposition of the book, though, is that what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct threat of organised socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favours by considering its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re overestimating your strength. The contemporary far right is more a function of the crisis of liberalism than it is a function of the strength of the left.” What we’re looking at instead, with Trump, is “Bonapartism” says Jäger. He writes that Trump, and everyone else who has ever got ahead by championing the “left behind”, isn’t representing a strong mass movement or class, but, like Napoleon, relying on “the largely passive support of impoverished peasants … not a collective but ‘formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes’.” (That bit about potatoes is from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) We skirmish a little about the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a standing army that looks extremely fascist, until Jäger concludes: “The spectrum from fascism to Bonapartism can flip into something more radical. At the same time, I’m still more struck by the differences than the similarities with these 20th-century phenomena.”
Neal Lawson, guru of Manchesterism and an Anton Jäger fan, lays these arguments over the predicament of our new prime minister. “It isn’t just lack of money Burnham has to contend with but the absence of secure political footings. Temporary hyper-political swarms have taken the place of substantial and secure alliances. He must find a way to surf these volatile waves or be another victim of them.” But we, the volatile waves, also have to figure out how to re-engage with institutions and build new ones, and is that possible? Jäger pauses, dispiritingly, like a mechanic who is about to give you bad news about your fanbelt. “This is an interesting and scary question. We do live in a society in which the incentives for leaving rather than entering organisations are much higher. Recent experience, whether joining a party or joining a union, often militates against the idea that there’s any sense in collective action, and the rational response is helplessness. And yet, repoliticisation is good. Hyperpolitics has increased people’s consciousness of the fact that politics matters.”
