On Monday outside 10 Downing Street, Andy Burnham said, “I’m very aware that I’m the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him admit that, because beneath all the cabinet gossip and speculation, there’s a real fear about what’s coming next—and about us, the voters. Is this who we are now? Wildly excited one moment, furious the next? As passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those promising it can’t deliver?
It’s no surprise that Labour watchers and left-wing thinkers are reading Anton Jäger’s new book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. As the New York Times put it, 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 moves fast for everyone in a hyperpolitical age.
Jäger, 32, grew up in Brussels with parents who work in the arts (“bohemian class?” I ask, and he carefully says they’re boho “adjacent”). He studied at the University of Essex and then Cambridge, and now teaches the history of political thought and theory at University College, Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a calm, almost modest manner. His philosophical influences are Deleuze and Guattari, Mouffe and Laclau, but when asked where he fits in the European left, he simply says: “Even with all the baggage and connotations, I still think the easiest thing is to call myself a Marxist.”
His thinking goes like this (don’t get too caught up on the dates, though some, like 1989, are fixed). From 1914 to 1989 was the age of mass politics, when both politicization and institutionalization were high—people engaged with politics through elections and protests. They joined things: political parties, unions, churches, working men’s clubs, reading groups. They took part in many overlapping institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggles led to real gains. Then, from 1989 to the 2008 financial crash (often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when institutionalization was low (we definitely didn’t join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicization was at rock bottom. It was a time when technocrats handled business while everyone else went to raves, and we said history was over. From the crash to about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most flexible) was the age of anti-politics—the rise of the Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement. Politicization came back with a vengeance, and even though institutionalization hasn’t recovered, these movements still had institutional goals. Protest movements in Spain and Greece gave rise to political parties like Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France, and the UK aimed to take over traditional parties that had long lost their revolutionary spirit.
Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicization, but with no institutional roots or 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 … Organizationally, however, these movements show a striking set of similarities: they are short-lived, have no membership lists, and struggle to enforce any real discipline on their followers.” As a result, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge forward suddenly but don’t take any ground. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative description.The phrase “bodies without organs.” Modern political movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism.” He found this pattern across the OECD, 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 about 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 you have to admit, that’s 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, what does civil society look like? How are membership organisations doing? 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 covered every 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 reflects on his own family history: “On the Flemish side, this meant that the Christian Democratic or the Catholic party was not just a party that told you how to vote or which union to join, 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 behaviour.” 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 things done. (Side note: I saw a nascent form of 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 struck by the sense of seeing a trade union movement reborn. Needless to say, Corbyn didn’t 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 squarely blames the union-busting of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost faith in organisations because the core of their leverage—the part where you get what you want by withdrawing your labour, the step before all-out war—was taken away. Unions were weakened, workers were 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 come together. Communist parties remained strong 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 and the end of the Cold War, he says: “Suddenly everyone deserves to party.”
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Crowds climb onto the Berlin Wall on the night of 9 November 1989. Photograph: Robert Wallis/Corbis/Getty Images
It is a strange sensation to have the 90s narrated back to you.This comes from someone born in 1994, but what makes it unsettling is how accurate it feels. Tony Blair described globalisation as something as unstoppable as the weather, and that’s exactly how neoliberals talked about the economy too – as something that just happens to you. “This is the ambiguity of the post-politics of the 90s,” Jäger says. “Politics is no longer seen as something that can bring about big social change. The freedoms you have are now more private, more personal, more individual. At the same time, the idea that you can join together with others and change society starts to feel very, very distant.”
There was also a lot of beauty in that era, which he captures 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’ll have to save the discussion of why, where his novels went, and whether we’ll ever again live in a world where the novel is our best cultural product, for another time. “The fact that Tillmans, as a gay man, can express and experience the rave culture of the 90s and 2000s as a new kind of community that wasn’t open to him in the 70s and 80s – I don’t think we should deny the liberating value of that. It’s clearly true that some people never felt at home in the families, communities, or neighbourhoods they grew up in, and they finally find a new kind of community that is less demanding and less strict than what they had before. The ambiguity, of course, is that it also implies a deep disappointment and cynicism about what politics can achieve.” That’s politics with a capital P – you might see a community passionate about an issue, but with no trust in parliamentary systems.
There’s a critical and often overlooked side effect of the neoliberal destruction of institutions and the post- and anti-politics that followed: it didn’t just affect the left. “Thatcher basically carried out a controlled demolition of popular Conservatism,” Jäger says, “and replaced much of it with PR spin and a lot of private funding. The idea was: ‘We can get rid of our mass party because we control the media, and we can win elections that way.’” Today, he argues, the right is just as powerless as the left, and for the same reason – it’s hyperactive but not formally organised. “People who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same Instagram pages, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t share an organisational history before they join the march. This is different even from the BNP, where marchers had a shared background in football hooliganism and the National Front. That shared subculture is gone.”
He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily dependent on its leader. The whole movement is at risk from this scandal involving the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. It’s just Nigel and a smartphone and a few private donors.” To me, this overlooks the fact that the right is different from the left: they have more money. “Maybe I downplayed the role of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk about a trillionaire like Elon Musk means that individual has completely broken away from what we could call society. That’s a factor in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right thrives, and why hyperpolitics on the left has found it much harder to achieve real results.” They aren’t more organised, more ideologically consistent, or more strategic – they’re just better funded. That puts a lot of weight on capital itself as the main organising force in global politics. Money might noIt shouldn’t be the only one talking, but it’s the only one getting what it wants.
[Image description: A photograph of Donald Trump, with the caption: ‘What we’re looking at, with Trump, is “Bonapartism.”’ Credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images]
The more immediately controversial idea in the book, however, is that what we’re seeing in Trump’s America isn’t fascism. According to the author, the far right only goes that far when faced with a direct threat from organized socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favors by calling its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re overestimating your own strength. The modern far right has more to do with the crisis of liberalism than with the strength of the left.” Instead, Jäger argues, what we’re seeing with Trump is “Bonapartism.” He writes that Trump—and anyone else who has risen by championing the “left behind”—doesn’t represent a strong mass movement or a particular class. Like Napoleon, he relies 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 potato analogy comes from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) We briefly debate whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement functions as a standing army that looks very fascist, until Jäger concludes: “The line between fascism and Bonapartism can shift into something more extreme. Still, I’m more struck by the differences than the similarities with these 20th-century movements.”
Neal Lawson, a leading voice of Manchesterism and a fan of Anton Jäger, applies these ideas to the challenges facing our new prime minister. “It’s not just a lack of money that Burnham has to deal with, but also the lack of stable political ground. Temporary, hyper-political swarms have replaced solid, lasting alliances. He has to find a way to ride these unpredictable waves—or become another victim of them.” But we, the volatile waves, also need to figure out how to reconnect with institutions and build new ones. Is that even possible? Jäger pauses, discouragingly, like a mechanic about to give you bad news about your fan belt. “This is an interesting and scary question. We live in a society where the incentives for leaving organizations are much higher than for joining them. Recent experience—whether joining a political party or a union—often works against the idea that collective action makes sense, and the rational response feels like helplessness. Still, repoliticization is a good thing. Hyperpolitics has made people more aware that politics matters.”
Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger (Verso Books, £11.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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