Albena Azmanova (AA): in your new book Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, you observe that victimhood has today become one of the most potent political vocabularies in our culture. But haven’t claims to suffered injustice been always a powerful strategy? What is new?

Lilie Chouliaraki (LC): Grievances of suffered injustice have been typically raised by leftist political actors, and the political right has reproached them for strategically ‘playing the victimhood card’. However, of recent, right-wing populists have turned the tables: they have adopted the claim of victimhood as a central strategy. This is the starting point of the book. Far-right populists that tend to castigate, ignore or even mock the suffering of marginalized groups or vulnerable social actors, while they use the rhetoric of the victimized people to win voters over and promote themselves as a charismatic saviour to gain popularity and win elections. Donald Trump is a textbook case of this phenomenon.

 

AA: The paradoxical development of far-right populism hijacking the language of the Left is just the entry point of your book. In order to show how and why this is the case, as well as to explore the consequences of this development, you offer a panoramic history of the idea of the victim in late modernity and an analysis of the present uses of victimhood in western societies. What is the differentia specifica in the way the far Right uses claims to victimhood? 

LC: For those parties and actors that advocate the protection of vulnerable communities and minoritized groups, it makes much sense to draw on these groups’ experiences of emotional pain or social marginalization or oppression and to speak out on their suffering as a cause for action. Social movements have been doing precisely this, from the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century to Black Lives Matter and MeToo in our century. But what we are seeing today (as we have also seen in the past with dire results) is that the far Right makes a masterful use of victimhood not to protect the vulnerable and marginalized in society but to benefit themselves: the leader, the party and the interests of the few. Just look at the number of billionaires rallying around Trump, Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and his policies of minimal tax for the rich and no welfare for the poor. Same with the economic elites that supported Brexit in the UK. 

The weaponization of victimhood: the instrumental appropriation of claims to pain by political actors who neither speak from positions of systemic vulnerability nor serve the vulnerable in society

This is what I call the weaponization of victimhood: the instrumental appropriation of claims to pain by political actors who neither speak from positions of systemic vulnerability nor serve the vulnerable in society with a view to stirring strong emotions and achieving recognition and domination for themselves. One recent example of the far-right weaponization of victimhood is Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. His keyword has been “denazification.” Ukrainians were cast as “nazis” who needed to be exterminated for threatening his country – thereby evoking complex histories of past victimhood while conveniently ignoring that contemporary Ukraine is a democratic state where the far Right has growing but limited power. The west as an ally of Ukraine also posed a threat to Russia, they were also perpetrators in Putin’s language. In this rhetoric, the Russian army was “on a peacekeeping mission”, fighting to keep their country safe –  just as they did in the ‘Great Patriotic War”. Putin here uses “denazification” to vilify Ukraine and evoke a glorious past of mass sacrifice for his nation, presenting today’s Russia as a noble victim that defends itself with the same defiance as its victorious predecessors. Putin, in other words, is weaponizing victimhood so as to justify his illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine and to legitimize his imperialist geopolitical agenda.

 

AA:  In contrast to quests for justice that engage the imagery of broader societal ideals of welfare, claims to victimhood have been the last resort of the weak. What allows nowadays those in positions of power — the powerful and the privileged — to claim victimhood?

LC: It is true that victimhood has historically been used as a last resort of the weak. Starting roughly in the mid to late 19th century, there is a long history to the birth of the contemporary vocabulary of victimhood, which developed precisely in order to speak about the suffering of the weak and the vulnerable. In this history, I trace down two main languages of pain:  trauma and human rights. Trauma spoke about those who are broken emotionally, and I speak in detail about how the horrific violence of 20th century wars contributed to a growing acceptance of psychological trauma as a pervasive condition of the modern self. And rights arose through this same history to protect those who are socially vulnerable, all those who are exposed to social forms of violence whether such violence is related to war, to extreme poverty and destitution, to misogyny, to racist aggression and discrimination, and more recently also to violence and discrimination because of sexual orientation or body shape and ability – this is a history associated not only with the major social movements of the 20th century, as I already said, but also with the gradual institutionalisation of human rights in global politics particularly in the post-WWII order.

This historical excursion notwithstanding, no vocabulary belongs to one social group alone, and communication has always been a site of contestation and struggle over whose voice is stronger and whose message is dominant. Victimhood is a particularly attractive weapon in these communication struggles because of the emotional value and the ethico-political impact that claiming to be a victim generates today – partly due to this history of institutionalized diffusion of the languages of pain (trauma and rights). It is because of this that today we see actors vying in public for who is the bigger victim and who deserves more outpouring of emotion or recognition for their suffering. In this struggle, those who have more power – meaning more economic, political, cultural capital – go further than others. They are the ones with the access to power, the broad visibility, the louder voice, the priming of algorithms and so their victimhood and their emotions tend to dominate in the public sphere. Claiming to be wronged on social media platforms, in particular, tends to generate some of the highest volumes of emotional engagement, typically anger and outrage from the far Right and this is because social media platforms push emotional content to monetize engagement. But, beyond virality, there is a series of other, longer-term societal developments, like the rise of therapy culture and emo-talk or the marketization and mediatization of politics, that have made political communication much more emotional today and made victimhood a central element in how political actors assert themselves and seek recognition and domination in public. And this why the pain of the underprivileged, which has little or no access to the public sphere, requires collective mobilization, co-ordinated action and sustained effort both online and offline in order to be heard and recognized in public – as the Black Lives Matter movement showed in 2020 (and throughout the past decade). 

 

AA: In the book you are talking about a “reversal of victimhood”, where the perpetrator tries to pose as a victim. What exactly is the mechanism here? 

A good way to challenge the reversal of victimhood that the far-Right so expertly uses is to ask the question who is absent? Who is not talked about? Who is silenced in this conversation? 

LC: Yes, the reversal of victimhood refers to the strategic inversion of the relations of victimhood between those who inflict pain and those who suffer that pain so that the perpetrators style themselves as victims for their own purposes. One example of reverse victimhood that I use in the book is the back-rolling of reproductive rights in the U.S. When in 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by Donald Trump, overturned Roe vs Wade, and essentially took away women’s right to abortion, the main argument was that the foetus is “innocent unborn life” that has the right to be defended – and in Europe, despite the EU’s renewed commitment to the right to abortion, many far-right parties also call for restrictions on abortion rights. Their argument? “Defend life, from its conception until its natural end.” 

There are two things I want to point out with respect to those arguments. Firstly, the rhetoric of “unborn life” as an actual “person” and a “person” who has “rights” (one of the two languages of pain) casts the foetus as a potential sufferer. A sufferer who has the right to be defended. Secondly, this same rhetoric turns those who decide to have an abortion into perpetrators. By depriving the foetus of their right to exist, women who seek abortion are simultaneously seen to commit violence – in fact, nothing less than murder. Note here that the foetus did not have “person” status in U.S. legislation until the recent Supreme Court decision to grant it one – an act that was instrumental in presenting abortion as a form of violence that needed to be stopped and women as perpetrators that needed to be punished.  How does this reversal in the relations of victimhood work? It basically turns the control of women’s bodies by Evangelical Christians and misogynists of the American far Right into an emotional cause that legitimizes as benefactors those who took back one of the most profound legal victories for women’s reproductive rights in the 20th century. 

A good way to challenge the reversal of victimhood that the far- Right so expertly uses is to ask the question who is absent? Who is not talked about? Who is silenced in this conversation? What is missing from the far-right use of victimhood is the claim that women themselves are the only victims of abortion bans. There is extensive and long-term scientific research that demonstrates in detail the health-related harms and social harms that women who have not had access to safe abortion options suffer – from gynaecological and emotional trauma to poverty, unemployment  and further marginalization – especially women from impoverished and marginalized backgrounds. 

But perhaps the bigger point about this example is that victimhood does not work as a single word but sets in motion a whole vocabulary of blame and praise that slots different actors into positions of “enemy” and ‘friend” and rallies people around these positions. What I mean is that, in announcing the victim, at the same time, we also attach responsibility to those actors who surround the victim: those who inflict pain on the victim, or the perpetrator and enemy, and those who alleviate the pain of the victim, or the benefactor and friend. Victimhood is, in this sense, a whole vocabulary of suffering that conjures up a choreography of actors and puts value onto them according to what role they play in the political narrative at hand. Who is the sufferer? Who is the evil-doer? Who is the benefactor? Who is responsible for the harm? Who helped the victim? All these are important questions to ask when we hear far-right politicians, or indeed any politician, play the victimhood card. It is just that the far Right is making expert use of the vocabulary of the victim in their politics around the world. 

 

AA: You note that the nefarious political work in the instrumentalization of victimhood is to grant validity to claims to suffering made by powerful voices while silencing the grievances of the less powerful speaking out about their suffering. How does victimhood hold such validating or legitimizing power over those who claim it for themselves?

Communicating pain is political

LC: One of the reasons why victimhood is such a key vocabulary in our politics and culture today is because victimhood speaks to something that we consider universal: pain. Everyone feels pain. And everyone feels for those who are in pain. This feeling for the victim and expressing empathy with the victim is inherent to our self-description as citizens of late modern democracies of the west since the Enlightenment, particularly its Scottish legacy on the centrality of moral sentiments in western public spheres. In this legacy, we have all gone through some form of pain/trauma or some form of injustice that we want to see corrected. We all recognize the emotions of anger for those who have done wrong or compassion for those who suffer and gratitude or solidarity with those who help the victims. And so we do not usually think that there is politics – an insidious agenda — in hearing about people’s pain, in expressing pain or in supporting other people’s pain. But we need to challenge the idea that victimhood is not political, and that because we all feel pain, pain cannot be used as a tool for gaining power. 

Communicating pain is political. And the fact that claims to victimhood somehow speak to our common experience of feeling pain, our shared humanity so to speak, hides the relations of power wherefrom those who speak of victimhood already occupy in society. In this sense, the question “who is silenced in this conversation?” can reveal quite a lot about the social struggles at play when specific claims to victimhood are made in the public sphere. Often we see that those political actors who speak loud and clear about victimhood are those who already possess some form of legitimacy or capital that enables them to be heard. The far Right across Europe and the world, as we already know, have a whole disinformation industry of malignant actors and professional trolls who spread hate speech, division and outrage online against every ‘enemy’ that stands in their way all the while claiming that they are victimized. A case in point is that of  the  Algerian boxing athlete, Imane Khelif, who won the women’s 66kg final in the 2024 Olympic Games, and who was accused of being “a man beating up women” and “had to be suspended from the games”. This threw into relief the strong grip that far-right voices of victimhood can have in global conversations when they set the agenda of who suffers and deserves empathy and who is a perpetrator and deserves punishment in our culture. 

On the other end of the spectrum, those systemically vulnerable, the migrants, the low-wage workers, the racial/ethnic minorities, people-in-need in the global South remain mostly silent, marginalized or doubted in their words; or spoken for or about by other more powerful actors.  That’s why for vulnerable groups, it takes a whole social movement to be heard, as I already mentioned, or, wherever possible, it takes serious legal representation – as in Khelif’s case who filed a criminal complaint over alleged “acts of cyber-harassment” at the end of the 2024 Olympic games.

As I have shown both in this and in my previous work, The Spectatorship of Suffering, which dealt with how news journalists portray distant suffering on our screens,  it is important to ask how reporters in crisis zones, whether in disaster or conflict, employ the vocabulary of victimhood, who is portrayed as a victim, who is a perpetrator and who the benefactor, who is overreported and who is underreported, whose voice is heard and whose silenced, whose lives matter and whose are dehumanized – I mean how reporting plays out its own politics of pain, can tell us something really important about the geopolitical and moral norms that inform the practices and narratives of news organisations in the first place. Personally, I believe that it is urgent that we continue asking questions like these because, every time someone is presented as a victim and someone else as perpetrator, a certain vision of social order is being affirmed and a certain hierarchy of human lives is legitimised. But equally every time a dominant narrative of victimhood is challenged, that social order is challenged as well, and that hierarchy of lives is also challenged.

 

AA: Shouldn’t we also worry that labelling someone as a victim is deeply disempowering – adding insult to injury, so to speak. Much as the label of a victim  attracts compassion and desire for help, it can also be denigrating. “Bestowing victimhood’ to certain groups can also be a strategy of self-empowerment for entrenched political elites. As I have argued in this symposium, in conditions of ubiquitous precarity, “various minorities are competing for victimhood, as this is the only apparent avenue to social protection, while ruling elites source their power from the patronage they bestow to select minorities.” How do you propose to solve this conundrum? 

LC: That’s right. In the book I emphasize the point that being a victim should not be taken as an objective, stable identity of a person or something that each person carries inside them, but it is an act of speech or something the person communicates about themselves. This distinction is not meant to deny anyone’s lived experience of being a victim. I do not mean to make judgments on how individual people actually feel. Nor do I encourage an attitude of denying any individual person their pain by saying “you are just saying you are a victim, but you are obviously not”. We can never know the depths of a person’s emotional pain nor preclude that they feel hurt by the circumstances of their lives. Any such attitude would have been immoral, and my own approach has nothing to do with that. 

The value of the distinction between victimhood as claim and vulnerability as a condition is not to produce a rigid schema where each one of us is boxed in depending on their salary scale or their gender identity

What I think is important, however, is that we start thinking more critically about victimhood and its relationship to vulnerability. The two are different. While victimhood is an act of speech, vulnerability is a condition of the self. Vulnerability, in other words, has to do with the personal and social circumstances through which someone experiences life and how such circumstances may expose persons to various forms of violence or shield them for such violence – their circumstances of economic safety or precarity (class), of gender or race dynamics that may constrain them through misogynist or racist prejudice, of their sexuality and how this might fit within dominant norms or marginalize them, or the range of abilities and wellbeing they enjoy and how far these support them or hold them back as human beings. 

The value of the distinction between victimhood as claim and vulnerability as a condition is not to produce a rigid schema where each one of us is boxed in depending on their salary scale or their gender identity. That would be a dogmatic way of approaching the question of pain and suffering that is distinct for each individual and includes various degrees and combinations of emotional and social harm. 

What the distinction does, however, is that it draws our attention to the politics that lie behind claims like “I am a victim, we are wronged” – what I earlier called “the politics of pain”. This is an emotional politics of communication that invites us to feel for the pain of the victim and, in focusing on the feeling for the pain, systematically obscures where exactly these claims come from, what position of vulnerability (or privilege) they may be spoken from. Instead of taking these claims at face value and responding emotionally because of our prior commitments, the wish to go viral or simply as an emotional reflex, it would be best if we pause for a minute and look at where exactly each of these claims are coming from. Look at the historical and structural context where people speak from and think about how far this context that they occupy exposes them to which forms of violence or shelters them from other forms of violence. And when I say violence, I mean both physical violence and social violence: harms that come because of who people are in terms of their gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, age – or any intersection of those. 

To use myself as a hypothetical example, as a white female middle-class professor with an invisible disability, I am relatively sheltered from, say, class or race-related violence even though I am open to certain forms of gender-related, ableist and perhaps also ageist discrimination. My lived vulnerability, however, becomes victimhood only at the moment that I decide to articulate in public speech the exclusions or discriminations that I might have suffered because, say, of being a woman. In my case, the two, my vulnerabilities and my speech on gender discrimination would overlap, in which case, I would have used my voice to announce my suffering and protest in public. As I have already said, this overlap between people announcing their vulnerability through specific claims to victimhood is something that historically oppressed and marginalised groups have always done – take the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter and others. They use victimhood to speak out on the systemic forms of suffering they embody or experience. But as we all know, the two – structural forms of vulnerability and claims to victimhood – do not always overlap. Let’s get back to Trump. From his rape trial to his fraud trial, to his impeachment on the January 6th insurrection, he has always claimed to be the victim, the one persecuted rather than the persecutor. His suffering here is not systemic but tactical – it is an identity that does not articulate vulnerability but is put forward for the purposes of political and personal gain. This unstable coupling of vulnerability  and victimhood  is at the heart of the politics of pain that is ubiquitous in our culture today. How exactly forms of vulnerability and claims to victimhood come together – and so who they present as a victim deserving recognition and who they do not – is one of the most important political questions of our time. 

 

AA: Are you saying that the powerful cannot suffer? In Capitalism on Edge, I claim that the affluent and the socially privileged can also be victims of precarity and of the ecological trauma – harms incurred by capitalism’s profit motive; in this sense they are also victims of systemic injustice. How do we adjudicate between valid and abusive grievances of suffered injustice, between what you call ‘tactical’ and ‘systemic’ suffering? What is our gauge? 

LC: I agree that it would be wrong to a priori deprive anyone of their use of victimhood for whichever purposes they may wish to use it. For instance, Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court judge who was accused of attempted rape by Christine Blaisey Ford back in 2018, has as much right to claim that he is a victim of a smearing campaign against his name as much as Blaisey Ford has to claim she has been the victim of sexual assault by him. 

What I think is important to do, however, is to stop engaging in emotional debates or angry contests about who is the “real” victim in this or in any case – in many cases, we cannot even decide on the “truth” of victimhood because indeed both sides can feel “real” in the pain. Instead, we could introduce critical judgment that pushes us to think beyond our pre-existing prejudices and attachments. This means asking questions not about real or fake victims but about the game of power that is played out in the case at hand, and who is actually harmed by which forms of violence. 

It is important to have a language that delinks claims to victimhood from structural vulnerability or oppression

The starting point for this kind of questioning is to remember that when we speak of victimhood, we do not necessarily talk about vulnerability – about systemic exposure to various forms of social violence – but we talk about the communicative power of speaking out and being heard. In other words, what matters is what kinds of power those who claim victimhood hold and how far that power grants them privileges in terms of institutional authority, moral legitimacy and believability. To go back to the Kavanaugh example, as a white cis man, Yale graduate and prominent Republican Judge, Kavanaugh was indeed believed by those who had the power to vote him onto the U.S. Supreme Court as an associate justice, despite Blaisey Ford’s testimony but also the testimonies of three more women – testimonies that the FBI “failed” to investigate further during the Trump administration. A few years later, as a member of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh was one of those who voted for the overturning of Roe vs Wade, depriving millions of women of their right to make decisions about their own bodies.

My point is that the stand-off of victimhood between Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford cannot be decided on the basis of fake or true victimhood. Both people can feel pain, both can claim they are victims. What I want to add in the conversation is that it would be more productive to approach their stand-off from the perspective of power. As an unequal struggle between claims to pain, where harm inflicted upon a woman systemically open to patriarchal violence (as a sixteen-year-old girl at a party and as a female academic and adult witness at the Senate stand) is conflated with the personal grievance (for having to face an accusation) of a man with superior social and political power and male entitlement (to sex as a young man and to Supreme Court candidacy, now membership, as a middle-aged man). 

The bigger point here is that, when we are confronted with claims to pain, instead of rushing to take sides and emotionally connect with this or that victim, it would be better if we paused for a minute and asked questions that bring the broader context into the picture: 

• Who holds systemic forms of power in this context? 
• Who has historically been exercising which forms of power over whom? 
• What kinds of identities and actions do claims to victimhood legitimize? Who lines up with whom? 
• Whose pain is recognized and acted upon by whom? 
• And whose pain is not? Whose pain remains silent? And why? 

I think politically, at a moment when the far-right and more broadly racist, misogynist, neocolonial forces and groups – almost everywhere in the world in the global North and the global South, are coming to power or are close to coming to power in the name of victims and of the oppressed – it is really important to have a language that delinks the two – claims to victimhood from structural vulnerability or oppression. And to see what they say for what it is: a politics of pain that aims at those already being privileged securing more privilege and those who are already vulnerable – poor, marginalised, vilified – not just remaining in their place but suffering even more. 

 

AA: How about the risk  of turning the heuristics of victimhood into a dogmatic schema of sociological categories, as for instance when the struggles against discrimination become institutionalised into programmes and policies? I have in mind the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion programmes that list a number of ‘protected identities’ while obscuring other forms of discrimination. 

LC: My argument is not that the critical questioning of victimhood should be a matter of ticking boxes off a sociological grid: class, gender, race etc. My aim is to question why, in our current emotional contests and divisions over who is a victim, we do not take into account the circumstances of vulnerability from which claims to pain are made? 

I also argue that taking into account the various intersecting forms of vulnerability and privilege that people inhabit as they speak out on being victims can produce richer and subtler accounts of victimhood. Such accounts can also help us challenge common-sense ideas, such as that there is a “pure victim” and a “pure perpetrator”; or the idea that victimhood is a zero-sum game, if I am a victim you are not.  And they highlight that victimhood is a continuum of positions from abject vulnerability (marginalised communities, people living in occupied territories, refugees) to relative shelter from most forms of violence (upper middle-and-upper white men largely in the west) – and claims to victimhood may fall at any point across that continuum. 

Far from being dogmatic, these accounts challenge yet another common-sense idea, namely that if you are a victim (if you make a claim to victimhood in public) you automatically deserve empathy and support. No, we need to look beyond the claim and the emotion and the immediate response. We need not take the concept at face value, “oh this is a victim.” Instead, we need to do some thinking to work out who speaks from which position and in which specific ways their position of relative privilege or vulnerability exposes them to which forms of violence and harm to and to which effects. Of course, understanding victimhood is not an exact science. It is an interpretative exercise. So, it is not going to help us find the perfect victim – that is not the point. But we can at least have a method to evaluate how relative privilege and relative vulnerability shape the circumstances and balances of power at work in each context where a politics of pain is at play. 

 

AA: What is the one shift that urgently needs to be made in the way our societies address injustice? 

In our culture – a culture of neoliberal capitalism and the dominance of platforms, claims to victimhood are usually individualised.

LC: One of the main themes that run throughout the book and are there implicit in everything I said earlier is that, in our culture – a culture of neoliberal capitalism and the dominance of platforms, claims to victimhood are usually individualised, that is people speak out about their own personal truth, their own experience of pain. And, even when this experience is added up to make an online movement like MeToo and pushes for institutional change, the whole culture behind this still promotes individualised and commercialised solutions to social problems: whether it is the empowerment of postfeminism – that is completely tied up with consumerist choice and the promotional culture of big brands (feminist logos on Chanel t-shirts, for instance) – or the self-care industry of mindfulness and healthy living among others – which is again another mega industry of profit-making of an emerging class of gurus of well-being. 

What is missing from all this is a focus not on online victims, popular victims in our politics and culture but on structural vulnerability – on the forms of violence that some individuals and groups endure because the various personal and social circumstances that they find themselves in do not protect them enough from those forms of violence.  We live in times of unprecedented inequalities: yes, there are institutional improvements, there has been progress in terms of recognition and inclusion, but this is not enough while questions of redistribution remain unresolved. Thomas Pikkety claims that, in terms of income inequalities, we are coming full circle to a moment in time, when global inequalities seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century. 

So, structural vulnerability is a matter not of victimhood but of injustice. And, in this sense, we need not individualised claims to pain that single out this or that issue but collective narratives that combine the appeal to emotion with explicit justifications about why and how, on the basis of the justification offered, we need to reform or transform the conditions of the structurally vulnerable who are implicated in the claims. A move from individualistic explanations of social suffering towards concerted action that can transform the conditions of suffering in the first place and collective struggles against organized systems of oppression, capitalism, patriarchy, and structural racism.

 

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Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Chouliaraki’s latest book is Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood.

On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol with the goal of suspending the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. Three years later, on March 26 of 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by the Dali Cargo Ship, carrying 4,700 containers and a 21-member crew from India and Sri Lanka. Five road construction workers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, who were repairing roads on the bridge, lost their lives as a result, while several crew members remained confined in the ship for almost three months after the incident. While these events appear unrelated, thinking of them together can illuminate connections between politics and capitalism that are central to contemporary discontent and the appeal of far-right politics to citizens in the wealthy world. 

The January 6 mob was incensed by the racialized rhetoric of the speech then-President Trump gave at the White House earlier that day. This speech, which inaugurated the still powerful “Stop the Steal” mantra, singled out Arizona and Georgia as sites of possible electoral fraud, hinting at the active Latino and Black organizing that secured these states for Biden. But this visible animosity coexists with the fact that these groups sustain—in a very material sense—the life of all Americans. This became clear in the Key bridge collapse on March 26, when vulnerable Latino and South Asian workers laboring in exploitative conditions tragically crossed paths. While the focus was on dock workers and the urgency to rebuild the bridge, an alternative reading brings into relief the central role of super-exploited¹ racialized labor in sustaining the infrastructure that delivers packages to our doorsteps and guarantees smooth commutes in the morning. The events of January 6 and March 26, together, demonstrate that racialized groups are targets for both political exclusion and super-exploitation. This is a “bash and reap” strategy that denigrates the very subjects that are conscripted to sustain us. More specifically, their working and living conditions in the Global North (as migrants) and in the Global South (as workers) is predicated on these twin factors: their disenfranchisement entangled with and necessary for their exploitation. These combined features sustain societies in the Global North. 

As I will argue below, it is no mere coincidence that the far-right’s anti-immigrant hysteria is thriving as precarity reaches the wealthy world and conflict and poverty pushes people from the post-colonial world. While formally over with the end of colonialism in the course of the 20th century, the postcolonial order preserved the exploitative domination of a ‘core’ composed of Global North’s liberal democracies over the ‘periphery’ of the Global South’s newly sovereign countries. These dynamics of racialized political subjugation, resource extraction, and labour exploitation have enabled the prosperity that sustained western democracies both under the colonial and post-colonial global orders. As the relative prosperity enjoyed by workers in the wealthy world is crumbling, social anxiety in western democracies is being directed not against those whose wealth has multiplied, but against the groups that were supposed to stay subjected according to the post-colonial deal. If a less unjust world is to emerge after the demise of neoliberalism, democracies need to rethink their struggle for justice as one that does not require the subjection of others as in the system that prevailed under the colonial and continues today, but contests the exploitation and dehumanization of racialized others at a global scale. 

 

The underbelly of 20th century western democracy

Democracy in the west took shape through the gradual enfranchisement of the white working class, which proceeded in the context of empire in the early- to mid-twentieth century. As I argue in my recent book Democracy and Empire, the white working class was enfranchised after abandoning radical anti-capitalist demands and acquiescing into an agreement to share the spoils of empire with capitalists. The process was mediated by states that unions pressured to commit to welfare regimes, which reached their golden age in the postwar era. The politics of organized labour during this period cannot be understood without the imperial context. Settler colonies, for one, provided an escape valve for the poor and the unemployed, prevented labor unrest in the metropole, and facilitated upward mobility for white workers escaping abject poverty in industrializing England. Workers emigrating to British colonies became settlers, requesting enfranchisement for themselves while demanding the fencing off of land and working opportunities for other non-white foreigners arriving to the same territories. Questions of labor, mobility, and migration were heavily debated during this period at the level of British imperial bureaucracy and—eventually—state-based immigration regimes emerged not to restrict foreigners from entering, but to absorb the imperial system of labor control. Despite its formal focus on the foreign, migration systems were not created to exclude foreigners but to establish a gradated system. Migration control did not exclude white foreigners, but incorporated them to the polity while implementing their claims to self-government as including the ability to restrict non-white Chinese and South Asian migration to Australia, South Africa, and Canada. Failing that, popular movements fought to legally relegate them to the most arduous jobs, conveniently setting them up for exploitation.² U.S. debates proceeded alongside similar paths. Chinese restriction gave way to reliance on Mexican labor, whose “advantages” purportedly included their bodily resistance to arduous work in the fields and the ease of their return or deportation to Mexico when no longer needed. This racially gradated migration regime served to control labor, allowing for the provision of cheap and exploitable work where it was needed, while preventing the political enfranchisement of most racialized migrants. 

The division of labor between white and non-white migrants in settler colonies had a counterpart in the global division of labor, with racialized workers overseas tasked with providing food and raw materials to feed citizens and machines in the industrialized world.³ This combined regime of migration and global racialized division of labor evolved but did not substantially change during the twentieth century for those groups singled out as racial others (in contrast with the more fluid access to whiteness by Southern and Eastern Europeans). It can still be seen in racialized migrants’ overrepresentation in care, gig, farm, and construction work in the west and in contemporary exploitative extractive economies and export-oriented growth based on the toil of badly paid workers for apparel or high tech factories. Historically, countries in the Global South fought anti-colonial wars and resisted the imposition of anti-democratic development models. These models were eventually imposed by western-backed authoritarian regimes and enacted by co-opted local elites committed to pacification and stabilization programs. These dynamics of oppression were later augmented by structural adjustment policies under the ‘Washington Consensus’ policy agenda and implemented by neoliberal or neodevelopmentalist democratic regimes. 

The history of western democracy is thus also the history of empire shaping the world to serve this island of prosperity, where the political and economic emancipation of the domestic working class entailed the appropriation and redistribution of resources garnered through force and oppression, which destroyed communities in the subjugated territories in the service of capitalist accumulation. The democratic citizens in these imperial projects were thus united by two factors: first, a possessive feeling that organized the rule of others despotically to extract resources, and second, reciprocal political relations among themselves. These two factors mandated the redistribution of the capitalist gains from exploiting the Global South, itself predicated on citizens in western democracies claiming the right to set the rules of interaction with the Global South. This imperial mode of democratic politics, which I call “self-and-other-determination,” elicited significant resistance abroad, and multiplied conflict through the waging of colonial wars like Vietnam, the arming of friendly militaries, and the sabotaging and support for coups of regimes pursuing socialist projects like Arbenz or Allende. This mode of engagement bred instability because it militarized social conflict, both generally by favoring repression of social protest and progressive demands to make countries “safe” for investment and, specifically, by tackling socio-economic questions like the consumption and trading of drugs as if they were security issues. 

 

The breakdown of the imperial deal as a breakdown of western democracies

Fast forward to the present, and factor in the dismantling of welfare states and what Albena Azmanova has described as ‘epidemic of precarity’, understood as “a condition of vulnerability — disempowerment rooted in social threats to lives … experienced as incapacity to cope due to a discrepancy between responsibilities and power.” The imperial deal is breaking down. Unsurprisingly—and as Marx anticipated in his writings on English and Irish labor—the deferral of the white working class to empire and capitalism only strengthened capitalism’s hand and backfired: capitalism struck back by reneging on the domestic ‘democratic’ pact. In parallel, we have witnessed the sensationalized construction of migration as a threat by the extreme right and, in many countries, the increasing transformation of the problem into one of security across the political spectrum. The migrants that make it to the Anglo-European world are a small proportion of a very real exodus of people escaping poverty, violent conflict, climate change, and facing possible death in militarized paths they traverse well before reaching European or U.S. borders. In other words, they are escaping capitalism’s ravages.

These ravages are the other side of the deal between capitalism and the white working class. The stable access to resources and exploited labor in the Global South entails significant force and co-optation of local military and civilian elites willing to govern their populations to facilitate the extraction of labor and natural resources, as noted earlier. Conflict, climate change, development models predicated on cheap labor pushed people toward migration, made easier by the proliferation of information and ease of mobility. It is well known that the great majority of displaced populations remain within their home countries or in neighboring countries. For those who venture toward the Anglo-European world there is no unproblematic access to dignified labor conditions upon arrival. Rather, the militarization of immigration control creates ideal conditions for vulnerability and exploitation of undocumented migrants or asylum seekers who successfully cross the militarized barriers. This connection between vulnerable status and exploitation was clearly at play in the spike in underage labor drawing from the pool of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. Southwest border in recent years.

Thus, the crisis of the two pillars of western imperial democracy (capital and labour sharing of imperial spoils and their cordoning off and “pacification” of populations conscripted for labor exploitation to ensure stable capitalist extraction) has thrown imperial democracy out of whack. This understandably creates anxiety and perhaps a sense of threat, as Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge makes clear, but my point here is that this anxiety is associated with the crumbling of the imperial bargain, and the demand is to restore it. That is, the boisterous and peevish publics in the west have reacted to precarity not by demanding a rethinking of capitalism or redirecting their attachments toward forms of life not predicated on the exploitation of others, but by blaming migrants and refugees for said publics’ misfortunes. . The modes of visibility and sensationalizing of migration suggest that immigrants are not staying in their place, i.e. racialized subjects are seen as being guilty of exceeding the modes of labor mobility dictated by empire such as explicitly sanctioned guest-worker programs or exploited labor overseas. But this is not entirely transgressive, because the contemporary model of surveilled populations with irregular status is merely an update of imperial indenture programs and postwar guest labor. It is an update in that it produces, through other means, exploitable populations (like the road repair crew in the Key Bridge without proper means of communication or a safety skiff) in line with the formations demanded by metropole and settler working classes. 

 

Shedding democracy’s imperialist addiction

This historicized account of imperial democracy shows that western politics and models of emancipation remain addicted to and entrapped by empire and capitalism. In so doing, it also challenges the ideological apparatus that frames migration as a matter of sovereign states’ prerogative to control borders. Instead, it presents contemporary institutions of migration control as functional equivalents of a global regime of racialized labor control, now administered by democratic nation-states. 

The proposed framing of democracy and migration control allows for a better assessment of both contemporary far-right politics and left responses in historical perspective, rather than continuing to rely on ahistorical contemporary commentary that takes migration to be something that “happens” to societies. For example, a recent piece reflecting on the European turn to the populist right notes that “[n]o country, including the United States, has ever dealt happily with the panic, no matter how unfounded, prompted by mass migration, legal or clandestine, and the Europeans are doing no better.” Among scholars, migration is posited as one more “flow” that comes with market-driven globalization and prompts an authoritarian or right-wing populist backlash. But this begs the question of why the backlash against globalisation takes the authoritarian, far-right hue that it does, which only the historical account of imperial democracy proposed here properly addresses. Shortly put, migration is central to the crisis because its growth is a symptom of the proliferation of conflict and crises in the Global South.⁴ These crises are themselves indicators of a destabilized system of capitalist extraction resulting from the excessive exploitation of communities and nature. This, alongside the growing egoism of capitalist elites, even vis-à-vis their compatriots, signals the crumbling of the imperial bargain between capital and labour within western democracies and fuels a nostalgic demand for a past of “orderly”, insulated (hence, racialized) welfare. Importantly, the racist reaction to non-white migration, now, as in the past, fuels ever more violent regimes of migration restriction and surveillance, thus turning racialized hostility and violence into means of labor control and capitalist accumulation. 

In other words, anti-immigrant restriction is imperial racial capitalism returning with a vengeance, relying on racial hostility to create opportunities for accumulation but this time (mostly) refusing western working classes a welfarist agenda. The proposed diagnosis, moreover, brings into relief the danger for left parties of a return to the imperial socialism of the early 20th century. Notably, before passing a measure granting parole to undocumented spouses, President Biden enacted an executive measure akin to the measures approved by Trump, which suspended asylum at the border after certain triggers.⁵ UK’s brand new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, on the other hand, has set “illegal immigration” as his government’s top priority and promised “no more immigration” through a strategy that would use “counter-terror style tactics” to “smash the gangs” that facilitate crossings at the English Channel.⁶ The New Popular Front in France presents a welcome contrast, with a legislative contract that proposes revising European and French asylum policies, the creation of a rescue agency, and the extension of rights to work and citizenship to asylum seekers. The authorization to work aside, the (welcome) humanitarianism measures are insufficient if they do not come accompanied with a more decisive anti-capitalist program that tackles global processes of accumulation rather than merely sheltering domestic publics from their harshest effects. Thus, the challenge for the western left at the current moment of crisis is to return to its anti-capitalist project and to globalize it, rather than limit itself to adjudicate an ever-shrinking slice of public funds domestically while, at best, standing by the violent global order and the destructiveness of capitalism. At worst, left governments in western states continue to enlist their political clout and military power to sustain and expand their corporations’ influence in a process that can only strengthen corporate actors.

An alternative left politics is one of commitment to universal labor justice, where gains for western citizens are not extracted at the cost of migrants and workers in the Global South but obtained by directly attacking the power of corporations and wealthy elites. Projects like the job guarantee, the $17 minimum wage and 4 day working week are excellent examples of projects that aim to guarantee the wellbeing of workers. But these proposals ought to be global, like the otherwise relatively modest proposal for a 2% tax on wealth. Grappling with migration fueled by conflict and lack of opportunities means grappling with the fact that the deficiency of opportunities in the Global South is by (capitalist) design. This is what dependency theorists argued, and what export-led growth-qua-cheap-and-unprotected-labor-led growth continues to show. Another lesson of dependency theorists and other critics is that capitalism is a global system.⁷ If this is the case, then a left anti-capitalist project that doesn’t challenge the global division of labor falls short of challenging capitalism. But domestic-centered left projects leave untouched (or fuel through international organizations and foreign policy) capitalism’s global reach only at their own peril. This is because a domestic-centered anti-capitalism is not merely neutral in two senses. First because it permits unfettered capitalist accumulation abroad and strengthens capitalist elites as a domestic actor, and, second, because it protects its own constituencies/workers only by allowing and reaping the benefits from the continued super-exploitation of racial others. Thus the real danger of the embrace of anti-immigration measures by left parties is not only that this sends them down the far-right’s path into projects of immigration restrictionism and militarization, but also that it fails to genuinely challenge capitalism. It may be cheaper to militarize borders and buy off transit countries to repress migration in the short term, but absent a significant improvement in the conditions of sending and receiving countries alike, migration will continue and capitalism as a global and domestic project will only gain strength. Recently, commentators have grappled with this reality, but instead of grounding the staggering global wage inequalities in the historical transfer of wealth from the periphery to core countries, they have suggested it “create[s] the largest arbitrage opportunity on the planet,” which could be realized through temporary guest worker programs administered through “secure digital identities” and punitive penalties on businesses that move temporary workers outside of this legal schema. Indeed, a violently enforced global division of labor that produces inequality in combination with militarized borders and racial hostility does create arbitrage opportunities! Offering low-wage labor opportunities through “time-limited labor mobility” to address the demographic crisis in the west while employing digital technology and punishment to make sure imperial gains remain protected is the definition of adding insult to injury. Moreover, far from constituting a new “solution,” it comprises the very structure of the current system of irregular, hyper-surveilled migrant labor.

In sum, the growing popularity of far-right movements in Europe and the US reveals citizens’ wish to vanish non-white subjects or relegate them to even further margins of society. This is the repetition of an old mistake: democratic peoples in wealthy countries turning a blind eye to capitalism’s the intensive exploitation of racialized workers while hoping to appropriate a larger portion of these imperial spoils. This impulse is not foreign to the left, whose emancipatory orientation has too often narrowly concerned domestic workers, whose grievances are presumed separate from the global ills that capitalism produces abroad. But this is misguided. There is no way forward for the left without recasting the challenges of capitalism as global ones. As we witness, at the time of writing, the advance of the far-right in Europe and the U.S., it is imperative to understand the Capitol uprising in January 6 alongside the Key Bridge collapse three years later as symptoms of the persisting imperialist orientation of western democracies. We must grapple with the capitalist and imperial dynamics that brought Latino road workers and South Asian crews into violent collision in Baltimore – a collision that revealed the subterranean ways in which racialized exploited labor sustains western democracies. The racist hatred toward racialized groups represented by the January 6 uprising tells us something important about the democratic polities we live in. This is because by elevating aggrieved white citizens supposedly threatened by racialized political advances, it continued a tradition of white citizens joining capitalist projects as minor partners while keeping racialized workers at home and worldwide vulnerable and set for exploitation for capitalist accumulation. The challenge as we face the contemporary resurgence of this hatred is to undo the overall structure, rather than refuel it.

Footnotes

1. In Dialectics of Dependency Ruy Mauro Marini defines super-exploitation as the mode of labor typical of dependent countries. This mode of labor entails an increased intensity of labor, longer working days, and below subsistence remuneration.

2. In addition to establishing poll taxes and banning property ownership by non-white migrants and residents, the United States and the Anglo-settler colonies restricted access to certain trades for non-whites either informally through Anglo settlement and displacement of Mexicanos from the best occupations after the Mexican American war, or by enacting explicit measures, like in Canada and South Africa.

3. Workers in the Global South were both native and foreign, like the millions of indentured Chinese and South Asian workers enlisted to build railways in Africa, extract nitrate in Perú, or replace slave labor in Caribbean plantations.

4. Migration was historically considered and has worked as a safety valve to poverty, instability, and the potential for societal unrest, as British political economist and politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield argued in his writings on emigration/colonization in A Letter from Sidney (1829).

5. Specifically, asylum would be suspended at the border whenever border arrests hit a daily average of twenty-five hundred arrests in a given week. This suspension wouldn’t be lifted unless the number of arrests dropped below 1,500 and stayed that way for the duration of two weeks. This measure was harsher than the failed Senate bill that was rejected in the House.

6. The specifics of his plan are yet to be released.

7. See Rosa Luxemburg, Oliver Cox and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others.

 

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Inés Valdez, political theorist, is associate professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Valdez’s most recent book Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism (Cambridge UP) theorizes the material underpinnings of western democracy and its embededness in empire.

We live in an age of radicalization. We see it everywhere – from the evening news to conversations at the corner shop. Life has become a series of risks, radicalized people being, quite simply, dangerous to others. What is happening and can anything be done about it? 

All significant movements of the Geist (as in “The Phenomenology of Spirit”) inevitably produce a radical fringe. A small fraction of the human mass searching for new answers to new problems loses patience with the pace of events and decides to force them along by sheer willpower. This radicalized fringe cannot be dismissed as an insignificant blip on the radar screen or as a passing fad. For every radicalized individual, there are thousands, who share the same grievance, anger, and frustration, but disagree with the extreme posture; as John le Carré shares in his memoirs, he sympathized with some of the arguments of the Red Army Faction, but not with its methods. 

To avoid the disturbances – indeed, disintegrations – that result from continued radicalization, one must address the problems that, ultimately, give rise to that particular grievance which produces a radical fringe. 

Grievances are, as a rule, ignited by dramatic changes that disturb the settled fabric of life. A previously dominant Idea, underpinning social reality, has run its course. A new Idea needs to be formulated, in order for society to regain its balance. “The body cannot live without the mind”, noted Morpheus in “The Matrix”; by the same token, society cannot live without an underpinning Idea. And so, the human spirit tries to understand and evaluate the changes leading to the decline of an Idea, to see to which new Idea they may be pointing and to ponder whether something drastic needs to be done about it. 

A great Idea emerged in the 18th century and gradually, over generations, shaped a new kind of society. We can call this Idea “Justice for All.” At its very foundations lies the rejection of privilege and the demand for equal and fair treatment.

It germinated in the striking request of the British barons, back in 1215, that certain basic rights be treated as universal and unconditional human entitlements rather than privileges reserved to some. By the 18th century, the idea became prevalent among ‘enlightened public opinion’ in Western Europe. Much as social reality remained infested with human suffering, the ideal of ‘justice for all’ was the dominant lens through which that suffering was judged and interpreted. It was by no means uncontested: Conservatism, as a political stance, emerged as a revolt against Enlightenment universalism. It is this revolt that first gave birth to identity politics in the glorification of parochial loyalties. However, as the concept of “justice for all” spread from Paris cafes and London clubs, it held out the promise of enfranchisement – of bringing in, out of the cold, the dispossessed, the downtrodden, the exploited, the discriminated against. The establishment and outward spread of political rights was followed by human and social rights.

A multitude of social groups, whole countries and regions were being brought in from the cold. Employment gradually became secure, racial segregation was discontinued, women and gay rights were recognized. Ongoing enfranchisement, seen as emancipation from the oppression of privilege, was assumed to be the Idea of any legitimate society. Even communist leaders found themselves bound to claim, unconvincingly, that they were in the enfranchisement business. 

Societies which diverged from this model were gradually brought into line. The last colonies became emancipated through the 1960s and 1970s. Military dictatorships fell throughout Europe and Latin America. The communist regimes in Europe, which in fact enshrined privilege to a truly feudal degree, disintegrated in 1989. The nations “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic” decided to model their societies on the “Justice for All” principle. This onward march seemed unstoppable – for now and for all times: the End of History, no less. 

Human history cannot ever end for the simple reason that every dominant idea inevitably produces a reaction, an opposing idea or concept; and thereupon a great debate ensues about life, the Universe and everything. Such ideas and concepts were already circulating in the wake of 1989 (i.e. during the supposed ending of history), although few people noticed. 

Human beings inevitably argue with each other. For a long time the arguments were, ultimately, over food and the distribution of scarce resources. By the early 1990s, the food question was seen as resolved in what used to be labelled the First and the Second Worlds: no longer would you eat “what was given”; you would eat what you wanted, because everything was permanently available and you also had the resources to have it. This happened for the first time in history and it changed everything. People stopped arguing about food and, after casting around for a bit, focused on a new issue: they began arguing about “identity.” The era of culture wars was upon us by the time those hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers. 

Arguably (at least Richard Rorty argued thus¹), while remaining focused on the emancipation of repressed and discriminated groups, “identity” was an integral part of the emancipation movement: you could not, the argument ran, be fully emancipated as an individual if you happened to be a member of a repressed or a discriminated group. Such a drift towards collective (rather than individual) rights can only be temporary and must be called off the moment the repressed group is no longer so. Otherwise, a collectivist mentality will become entrenched and liberal democracy weakened. 

While Rorty allowed for the existence of “identity” temporarily and for clearly defined purposes, the great historian Tony Judt saw the entire “identity business” as extremely dangerous.² It is indeed so, for at least three obvious reasons. The first: modern humans have too many identities. When people become focused on expressing just one of them, the outcome is a plethora of ever-smaller identities competing for attention. Their proponents, in order to be heard, have to become increasingly more vocal. And, when engaged in too much shouting, we all become more radical in both our expression and our ideas. Identity radicals spread through the known world, fighting increasingly obscure battles with increasing bitterness. 

The second reason why “identity” is a dangerous business is that it subsumes the human individual – and the entire liberal-democratic edifice arising out of the placing of the individual at the centre of society and politics – into a collective. Once this drift into collectives becomes a tide, then “identity” inevitably shifts to the arena of reactionary, primitive, pre-modern agendas – ethnic, racial, religious, nationalist, populist. Whereas, while residing on the Left, identities kept splintering and, although increasingly vocal, weakening, with the shift to the reactionary arena they became big and felt strong. Inevitably, they were taken over by authoritarians and, under their leadership, became aggressive towards other collectives: Donald Trump, Putin, Hamas, Orban, Modi… the list goes on and on. 

The Left bears responsibility for the reductionist approach to identity, which in turn has provided fodder for the reactionary identity politics of the right. 

Identities, when becoming aggressive, feed on a sense of rage (against the enemy, be it the “liberal establishment”, the “elites”, “migrants”, “foreigners” or “infidels”) and victimhood. Victimhood fuels the rage and the rage penetrates into the souls of more and more people. 

The third reason behind Judt’s judgment is that “identity” fuels radicalization, which in turn fuels various novel forms of tribalist populism. This is the point at which we are at the moment. 

History has not ended; it can never end, because people will always argue. It has splintered. 

The political result is de-emancipation, which in turns fuels more resentment, rage and radicalism. This is how it works. 

The movement away from the individual and towards conceptualizing humans as collectives has initiated a historic turn of the tide. The spread of emancipation depended on the idea that individuals should be freed of all unreasonable restrictions – i.e. restrictions that could not be defended with arguments from Kant or Mill. With the weakening of the individual, the idea of ever-spreading rights is inevitably eclipsed by the ancient (and reactionary) idea of ever-spreading privileges for collectives. 

Equality is only possible among individuals; among collectives there is a struggle for privileged positions. Privilege, being the sworn enemy of rights, leads to de-emancipation.

At the same time (here we again see the dialectic in action) the position of the privileged groups is being strengthened by their entry into client-patron relations with the groups claiming victimhood. As Albena Azmanova has noted³: “Various minorities are competing for victimhood, as this is the only apparent avenue to social protection, while ruling elites source their power from the patronage they bestow to select minorities.” In this way, she concludes, victimhood becomes instrumentalised, losing its ethos of solidarity. This, in turn, puts the clock back to the feudal model⁴ of societal organization, which has little room for individual rights and freedoms, structured as it is around group hierarchies and subordination, rather than around free and equal individual citizens. 

This new twist to the plot creates another source of rage and radicalization. Losing acquired rights always makes people angry. De-emancipation is seen, quite rightly, as unfair by the majority of those who, throughout the last 30 years, have remained individuals and managed to stay away from collective identities. In the West, jobs become precarious as employers, becoming class-conscious again, revert to exploitative methods. In the East, individuals are denied the individual right to choose their religion or, indeed, to live in peace and keep their lives. Everywhere ruling groups morph into self-serving oligarchies. 

De-emancipation cannot but lead to anger because it overturns the entire logic of Modernity. For the last (at least) 300 years we have been battling against privilege and trying to get to a level playing field, with equal chances for all. Lord Acton called this process the “gradual passage … from subordination to independence”⁵ and identified this passage as the very essence of Modernity. With de-emancipation comes the revival of privilege and with it – a movement back to subordination. 

And so it came to be, by a canny dialectical metamorphosis, that a movement to collective rights, designed to emancipate whole groups, turned into its opposite and de-emancipated the individual. The feeling spread that something very essential was being lost, taken away. 

The feeling of loss was, as Ivan Krastev has pointed out⁶, further intensified by the perceived collapse of the idea of meritocracy. Just as vast numbers of people were becoming members of the precariat⁷, while others were wondering why they were losing long-established rights, it began to seem that success was in fact preserved for an entrenched privileged elite, rather than open to everyone in equal and fair measure. The appearance of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, together with the “Panama papers” served to underline the general impression that privilege and oligarchy had returned and taken effective power. 

This is enough to make anyone’s blood boil. It is a question of fairness. In societies based on the individual and her rights and freedoms, justice is the only legitimate basis of politics and of the institutions of state. Consequently, the feeling of injustice leads to a de-legitimation of the whole edifice. 

Here is Adam Smith’s take. The following he wrote in his “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), wearing the hat of a great moral philosopher (rather than the more prosaic hat worn while writing “The Wealth of Nations”):

“…Justice (…) is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms (…) Every appearance of injustice, therefore, alarms man [sic] and he runs (…) to stop the progress of what (…) would quickly put an end to every thing that is dear to him. If he cannot restrain it by gentle and fair means, he must beat it down by force and by violence, and at any rate must put a stop to its further progress.”⁸ 

To paraphrase Master Yoda: “De-emancipation leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate, Hate leads to… Suffering.” In our case, suffering comes in the form of radicalization and loss of civility in society, and of authoritarian populism in politics and government.

Rage, victimhood and the desire for revenge, if not checked, will make civilized life impossible.

As Adam Smith noted: “Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.”⁹

And there you have it. The current convulsions of the Geist have produced a generalized frustration with the eclipse of fairness that, in turn, has brought into being a radical fringe that gives tongue to agendas of revenge, hurt, and injury. Countries that have gone down this road have found themselves in a twilight landscape of: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹⁰

The way out of this is obvious. We must take seriously all of those major thinkers – from Plato and St Augustine to Smith, Kant and Mill – who placed justice at the basis of government and politics. More specifically, we urgently need to reboot the whole agenda of emancipation rooted in that struggle against privilege and for fairness that produced not only Modernity, but also liberal democracy, human rights and the possibility to be (in Benjamin Franklin’s words) civil to all and enemy to none. 

 

Footnotes

1. Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Radical Philosophy 59 (1991), pp 3-14, at p. 8.

2. Tony Judt, ”Edge People,” The New York Review, March 25, 2010.

 3. Albena Azmanova, “Precarity for All,” Post-neoliberalism symposium, 29 November, 2023.

4. David Graeber noted, sometime ago, the revival of feudalism in big corporations: “It’s not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies.” In “Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism,” an interview with David Graeber, The Economist, 29 June, 2018.

5. Lord Acton. Lectures on Modern History. Macmillan 1963, p. 19.

6. Ivan Krastev. After Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 

7. See: Albena Azmanova. Capitalism on Edge. How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia, Columbia University Press, 2020.

8. Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, Oxford University Press 1976, p. 86, p. 88.

9. Ibid., p. 86.

10. Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan (1651). Baltimore: Penguin Books 1968. Pt. 1 Ch. 13.

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Evgenii Dainov is Professor of Politics at the New Bulgarian University, Founding Member of the Green Movement in Bulgaria and composer and guitarist with rock band Magistri. His latest books include Politik und Rock’n’Roll. Wie kamen wir won “Love Me Do” auf Donald Trump? (Edition Konturen), Russia: A Story of a Country Without History (in Bulgarian, New Bulgarian University Publishers), Bowie: An Elegy (In Bulgarian, Millenium Publishers).