Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel. Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel. Prithi Khalique, antage of Baitul Awal. Acrylic painting and graphic artwork, 12 x 8 inches. Artist LOCATION AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 23 Oct 2010 rd · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION The Ahmadis of Petrópolis The Baitul Awal mosque is a surprise. Located in Petrópolis, Brazil, a mountain city of about 300,000 , a little more than 40 miles outside Rio de Janeiro, the mosque's expanse belies its unconventional setting. A handsome white structure that rises from a fringe of gardens, it sits halfway up a mountain slope with houses hanging off. A sign says that it belongs to the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. When you assume its vantage point, looking in the direction it faces, you see a shallow valley that blurs into the Serra dos Órgãos mountain range. Brazil may not be a country known for its Muslim population, but it is where enslaved Muslims from West Africa led one of the most important revolutions against slavery in the Americas in 1835. Roughly around the same year—sources vary—Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in Qadian, Punjab, then part of British India. In 1889, Ahmad established a new Islamic movement called the Ahmadiyya Jamaat and declared himself its first caliph. One year prior, slavery was finally abolished in Brazil. The fifth and present caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, has governed the Ahmadiyya community since 2003. Wasim Ahmad Zafar, an Ahmadi Muslim imam and missionary from Rabwah, Pakistan, organized the construction of the Petrópolis mosque. He has lived there with his family since 1993; before this, he was posted in Guatemala. Among Islam's heterogeneous adherents, Ahmadi Muslims distinguish themselves by explicitly subscribing to a missionary ethos, sending emissaries around the world to proselytize. Despite having outposts in virtually every country of the world, they make up only about 1% of Muslims. “The Ahmadiyya Jamaat isn’t another school of thought,” Zafar said in an interview. We spoke in Urdu after lunch at his home. “Our school of thought is Islam.” According to Ahmadi Muslims, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was sent to unify the Muslim community in response to its fragmentation during the late colonial period. They view him as the messiah and mahdi, a ruler prophesied to arrive in the end times to integrate a variegated global faith. Although they preach nonviolence, they have been subject to violent persecution from many other Muslims. Meanwhile, the community has also experienced a fracture, with the 1914 separation of Lahori Ahmadis. “In the whole world, there is only one Muslim community with a caliph,” Zafar said. “And to have a caliph, this assures us that Allah Ta’ala is with our community.” There is a disconnect between how a large number of Muslims perceive them—as foreign to Islam—and how they perceive themselves—as torchbearers of its essence. Ahmadi Muslims regard their centralization under a living caliph as evidence of divine sanction and yearn to bring others under the umbrella. The community even has a motto: "Love for All, Hatred for None." The Baitul Awal Mosque, located in Brazil's Petropolis. Courtesy of the author. This April, following Eid ul-Fitr, Zafar and his family hosted the 30th jalsa salana , or annual assembly, at the mosque. It was presented as an inter-faith exchange, with speakers including a Jewish woman leader, Black Buddhist monk, Umbanda priest, and representative of the civil police. His sons, Nadeem, Ijaz, and Takreem, alternately emceed, translated speeches into Portuguese, and sang Urdu ghazals, and the woman sitting in front of me teared up. Zafar presented a single red rose to every speaker. Afterwards, the women of the family served a meal in the garden that they had prepared. I spoke to Zafar's youngest daughter, Aila, a dentistry student who had invited her friend, an Indigenous biologist-in-training who talked about the jewelry she makes out of insect wings. For our interview a few months later, the women cooked another meal. Zafar's wife, Anila, and their daughters-in-law, Nida and Maria, brought chicken curry, chickpeas, pulao, parathas, salad, fruit, and gajar ka halwa to the table. They served it in their home, which is situated next to the mosque. Zafar pinched red chili powder from a bowl and sprinkled it over his plate. He had just returned from a jalsa tour of sorts: from Virginia, to Toronto, to the global Ahmadiyya headquarter s in the town of Islamabad in Surrey, England, where 43,000 guests had joined. In keeping with the Ahmadi motto, outsiders are encouraged to come as they are to the mosque. This stands in contrast to the majority of mosques, which police women's dress, yet can also feel geared towards conversion. “Some time ago, a women’s group came, with girls too. It’s obvious that non-Muslims will be without dupattas, with bare heads. I uploaded photos of them like that and some Muslims messaged me saying that I did something wrong allowing these women inside,” Zafar said. “So I responded to them with love, saying that if we don’t allow someone inside and don’t show them the beauty [of our faith], how will they realize it?” The first time I went to the mosque, the weekend before Ramadan, I was wearing a jumpsuit covered with red zebra stripes. No one seemed to mind. I was struck by the hedge in front landscaped to read “Paz,” or peace, and the second-floor library with copies of the Qur'an translated into 60 languages as widely ranging as Bhojpuri and Russian. Select copies of the Qur'an written in multiple different languages housed at the Baitul Awal Mosque. Courtesy of the author. Ijaz, Zafar's middle son and a civil engineer who aims to improve Petrópolis' resilience to landslides, led a tour of the mosque, showing the visitor apartments built into it. His youngest son, Takreem, brought freshly brewed chai and biscuits from the house. He said that he wanted to be a missionary like his father and perhaps go to Africa. For the Zafar grandchildren, the third generation here, the garden is a playground. Switching between Urdu and Portuguese, they run around looking for hummingbirds and butterflies. As of 2024, Zafar said that there are approximately 53 Ahmadi Muslims in Brazil. He claimed that the community used to be larger, but many professionals moved on to Canada or the US for work. His missionary activity in Brazil involves traveling — he has visited all 26 states — and using political platforms to increase awareness of Islam as a religion of peace. Several Brazilian converts appear to be married to members of his extended family who are based in the country. The community's small numbers in Brazil do not seem to deter Zafar. "Our work isn’t to bring people in, unless their hearts are in it,” he said. Since its beginning, the missionary tradition has been a fundamental aspect of Ahmadi Islam. The earliest overseas Ahmadiyya mission dates to 1913, in London. By 1920, missions had spread to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China, West Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, according to historian Nile Green . For many communities around the world, the Ahmadiyya community was their first introduction to Islam. I wondered if, and how, this family in Petrópolis thought about the damage evangelical missionaries have historically wrought in Brazil, from incursions into Indigenous territories to pro-Bolsonaro pentecostalists in favelas. Green notes how the multiplicity of religious organizations that emerged in South Asia at the turn of the twentieth century worked in a competitive religious marketplace, borrowing methods from Christian evangelicals and contributing to the “ market production of sectarianism. ” Ahmadi Muslims made a point of building mosques in their new territories and taking advantage of the technologies available to them, founding and distributing newspapers to disseminate their beliefs. Newspaper articles tend to follow Zafar's travels. After the interview, he pulled out a binder to show me Portuguese clippings he has collected about the community since the 1990s. "The media here is so good,” he said. "They write what we believe, even when it’s different from what they believe.” But he added, "In freedom, they [Brazilians] have gone very far. And they don’t want any prohibitions. With affection and love, we want to show them that freedom happens within a limit. If you go outside of the limit in the name of freedom, then it will not be freedom.” He drew a parallel with the need for traffic rules while driving. "This is a simple matter that we’re trying to teach them. It will take time, but with love, we’re guiding them.” This kind of paternalism is perhaps intrinsic to the missionary project, regardless of religious tradition. A clipping from a local newspaper covering the Ahmadi community in Brazil. Courtesy of the author. Zafar opened the mosque in 2016, having begun the process in 2005. It took a long time to get permission from the Petrópolis city council to build it, because the neighborhood it is in was zoned as residential. Designed by a Pakistani architect, its construction was funded by the Ahmadiyya community. "We do dua that Allah brings faithful people to our masjid and it fills up," Anila Zafar told me. Pakistan has the world’s largest population of Ahmadi Muslims. Here, the competitive marketplace of Islamic variants has hardened into institutionalized persecution of non-Sunnis. Declared non-Muslims by the constitution in 1974, Ahmadi Muslims are forbidden from basic Islamic practices, such as saying salam, playing the adhan from their mosques, or referring to their mosques as such . They have to identify themselves on their documents, which leads to discrimination at school and work, affecting livelihoods and economic mobility. In recent years, they have again lost the right to vote , as well as, Zafar chuckles at the absurdity of this, to carry out qurbani , or sacrifice animals for the hungry, on Eid ul-Adha. The latter contributes towards zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. Most gravely, they face a constant threat of arbitrary arrests and detention by the state and state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence, disappearances, and murder just by virtue of their interpretation of Islam. Zafar was born in Rabwah, Pakistan, in 1959, the city created post-Partition as a home for the Ahmadis . When he was a teenager, he began the seven-year-long process of missionary training, where he had a scriptural education in the Quran and hadiths, as well as in how to cultivate qualities important to a missionary such as patience and restraint. His family is originally from Qadian, the birthplace of Ahmadi Islam, and his grandfathers on both sides converted. While he acknowledges his pain at the mistreatment of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, this also shores up his faith: "We forget that any prophet meets disbelief and resistance from the people,” he said. His preferred method of arbitration lies in the spiritual realm, even though he engages with the political sphere in Brazil—a duality ingrained in the Ahmadi Muslim approach. When we first met, he had just returned from Brasilia, the capital, where he said he had been providing a Muslim perspective on Palestine. Although the Ahmadiyya caliph has released statements in support of Palestine , pointing to the Ahmadi Muslims who live and have suffered in Gaza, the community continues to maintain a mosque in Haifa, Israel . "I've heard of it, but I've never seen it," Anila Zafar said. "There is one in every country…We have a presence everywhere." There does not seem to be a point at which the community will boycott Israel, closing their center or reducing their missionary presence there. What does it mean to be a persecuted Muslim minority with a missionary presence in Israel, supportive of Palestine but also conveniently painted by Israel as the “ good Muslims ”? "If there is oppression in Palestine, if all this is happening in Pakistan, should I gather a group here, go on the road, bother people, what’s the use of that? If I break some car windows here, will that have any use? That’s why this isn’t what the Ahmadiyya community does. If we have certainty in our hearts, that there is God, and Allah Ta’ala loves us, then what else do we need?” Wasim Zafar asked. He referred to an incident in Pakistan in 2010 in which Ahmadi mosques were attacked and over 90 Ahmadis were massacred. Following that, he stated, there were no Ahmadis on the roads protesting because of their motto. They chose peace, he said. To him, the conflicts that have affected Muslim states are further proof of their dividedness. According to Zafar, the fate of places like Palestine and Iraq, and the reason for their experience of oppression, has been the lack of unity among Muslim states. The reason the Arab countries have not been able to handle Israel is also a result of their lack of unified leadership. This focus on division within the Muslim world echoes the position of the global Ahmadiyya leadership, departing from mainstream clerics in places like Pakistan and the United States who frequently point to empire's excesses to explain contemporary crises. The German immigrants who initially settled Petrópolis recreated an alpine community in the subtropical Serra dos Órgãos mountains. Similarly, the Zafars and the community they have built have rooted themselves here, bringing with them perceptions, leanings, and desires from their homeland. Anila Zafar leads the women's wing, which was meeting the afternoon I was there. "Women can understand what other women say better," she said. She closed her words with a Portuguese-Urdu-Arabic mashup: "Vamos fazer dua.” Let’s make dua. It may not be surprising after all that there is an Ahmadi Muslim mosque in Petrópolis. The city, named after the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, is associated with exiles. Probably the most famous is Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who overdosed on barbiturates along with his wife Elisabet, upon realizing that they could not leave behind the horrors of war in Europe, even when in the mountains of Brazil. Their house is now a memorial to exiles. Petrópolis is also synonymous with its many house museums. There is of course the Brazilian royal family's summer palace , comprising a dual escape: from Napoleon in Europe and from the heat in Rio. Then there is the Franco-Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont's house without a kitchen. Finally, just down the road from the mosque where the Zafars live, there is the House of Seven Errors, whose right and left sides are purposely incongruous—not unlike the curious intersection of a community persecuted at home, while willingly serving as missionaries abroad. Among this list of house-museums and exiles, settlement and flight, lies the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Time traveling from 1960s India to early modern Egypt with the acclaimed Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her story “Roshni ki Raftaar.” INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 4 · On Qurratulain Hyder's sci-fi story “Roshni ki Raftaar” Time traveling from 1960s India to early modern Egypt with the acclaimed Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her story “Roshni ki Raftaar.” Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. A reading and discussion of the late Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her short story “Roshni ki Raftaar” by editors Nur Nasreen Ibrahim and Zuneera Shah. Feat.: time travel, women in science, sci-fi traditions in Urdu compared to those in English, and much more. Must-watch: Nur and Zuneera's thoughts on the ending, speculations on whether Hyder intended for a sequel, what she might think of criticisms, how the tonal shift affects the story, and how humor functions in the story. More importantly: why do we expect or want character growth? Is there a fundamental difference with regard to character growth between the Anglophone literary tradition and the non-Anglophone one? Qurratulain Hyder is amongst the most acclaimed and influential Urdu writers of the 20th century, perhaps even the most popular alongside contemporaries like Ismat Chughtai (with whom she had a testy relationship). Best known for her magnum opus “Aag ka Durya” or “River of Fire,” Hyder was also a deeply expansive writer. Here, Nur and Zuneera discuss her use of fantasy and sci-fi framings, the manner of her world-building, and comparisons to contemporary films and TV shows in the most fun and audience-engaging SAAG Chats episode to date. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

The occupation of Afghanistan demonstrated that climate catastrophe is a crucial feature of imperialism, not a bug. THE VERTICAL Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan AUTHOR The occupation of Afghanistan demonstrated that climate catastrophe is a crucial feature of imperialism, not a bug. EVERY EMPIRE is unique but most empires share many discernible structural features and operational modes. Normative patterns of imperial conduct include transgressing geographic, cultural, political, legal, and other kinds of boundaries while generating new circulations of people, ideas, technologies, and practices. Historically, empires leverage inequalities and, in so doing, tend to commit crimes. In the modern era, Afghanistan has been arguably the primary victim of imperial war crimes. Since 2001, these crimes have been perpetrated by a large number of colluding and competing international actors and a wide assortment of local collaborators and proxies. It is historically rare for an empire to be held accountable for criminal conduct, and it is a bitter irony that empires present themselves as peace-loving and law-giving while imperial history can be read as repeating litanies of unprosecuted criminal conduct. Through information management predicated on censorship, propaganda, and manipulation of individual states and multinational institutions that may or may not constitute legal conduct, empires work hard to immunize themselves against their own criminality. The International Criminal Court indictment of the US and other actors for crimes against humanity in March 2020 was diluted in September 2021 after the Taliban returned to power to now make it practically impossible for the US to be investigated and held to account by the ICC. The ICC was the last and only internationally recognized authority willing to publicly pursue US imperial war crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. US imperial authority was horrifically predicated on perpetual jet bombing, wanton drone assassination, incessant helicopter night raids, routine abductions and extrajudicial killings, and systematic renditions to black sites in the country. All this occurred across a globally dispersed imperial regime of torture predicated on illegal human trafficking and conscious legal obfuscation, through chains of contractors and subcontractors working covertly across national boundaries. Rapidly emerging GIS-based technologies through which US imperial violence against the people of Afghanistan occurred—involving drones most notably—inherently challenged and transgressed established laws regarding war, military occupation, and universal human rights. U.S. Central Command movement across Kabul of a white Toyota Corolla on Aug. 29th, 2021. Mapping, central to U.S. defense companies and military, tracks an individual car. Today, former defense officials at companies like Janes and Quiet Professionals deploy the same data to ostensibly track and protect refugees. (CENTCOM/via Military Times) Here I highlight the environmental impact of the US-led international so-called “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and call for accountability and remedial action from the US and its allies for criminal negligence of the uniquely precious and life-sustaining natural resource base of the country. The US engagement of Afghanistan’s natural resources began during the Cold War in the context of the Helmand Valley Development Project involving large dams and related canals, roads, airports, and new bureaucracies and administrators organized to provide a perennial supply of water to new agricultural lands where nomads were to settle and produce cash crop exports such as cotton in the south of the country. The HVDP not only failed due to a lack of basic initial soil and groundwater surveys, but the over-salinated soil became usable for little else besides poppies that transformed Afghanistan into the world’s largest exporter of hashish, opium, and heroin in the 1980s. During this decade while the CIA was covertly funding and arming the Mujahideen, the US Drug Enforcement Agency facilitated the processing and global marketing of Afghanistan’s bountiful opiate harvests. One result of the extensive CIA financial and military provisioning of the Afghan mujahideen was the extensive landmining of mountain passes and valley pasturelands between market settings and strategic locations in eastern Afghanistan especially. The ICC was the last and only internationally recognized authority willing to publicly pursue US imperial war crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. Beginning in October 2001, a twenty-year monsoon rain of US bombs fell on Afghanistan. Older well-tested munitions such as daisy cutter bombs designed to destroy forests in Viet Nam were used to decimate gardens, orchards, and farms in Afghanistan, while innovative new bunker buster bombs devastated underground water channels, overland canals and dams, and mountainous habitats. This vengeful imperial desire to obliterate single individuals from Tora Bora in December 2001 to the “Mother of All Bombs” in April 2017, to the ‘final official’ drone bombing of an innocent family in August 2021, and the hundreds of thousands of US bombs throughout this imperial occupation, have done irreparable harm by depositing depleted uranium into the soil and groundwater to such an extent that Afghanistan now joins Fallujah, Iraq, the Marshall Islands, New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki as locations where US munitions have left radiation poisoning and high concentrations of eternally disturbing birth defects among humans and animals in their wake. Deadly chemicals have long blighted the waters and wider ecosystems surrounding many hundreds of military bases in the US. Similarly, the habitats surrounding what were hundreds of military bases in Afghanistan have been forever tainted by deadly toxins, but this environmental assault is amplified seemingly irremediably by the noxious burn pits used by these bases to incinerate everything from paper to human waste to military equipment including full vehicles. These bases were found throughout Afghanistan, from mountain hamlets in the north to the ever-expanding Shindand base in the southwest near the Iranian border to Bagram in the lushly watered northern third of the Kabul valley. During the American imperium, Bagram was a city of its own, defined by a perpetually flaming and smoldering football field-sized burn pit. The toxicity emanating from these burn pits circulated near and far from the bases, resulting in inescapable disease and infertility across the biological spectrum of organisms from insects to fish, crops, plants, trees, animals, birds, and humans. Afghanistan now joins Fallujah, Iraq, the Marshall Islands, New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as locations where US munitions have left radiation poisoning and high concentrations of eternally disturbing birth defects among humans and animals in their wake. The US military operates primarily on fossil fuels and, as a result, carries one of the largest carbon footprints in the world. Nowhere is the air pollution resulting from military aircraft and diesel-fueled wheeled vehicles more evident than in Kabul, which regressed during the US imperial presence in the country from near-pristine air quality in 2001 to having among the world’s worst air pollution during the US occupation. The hyper-urbanization of Kabul from a city of roughly half a million inhabitants in 2001 to more than five million today has occurred without a sanitation system, while unregulated private wells have depleted the city’s water supply and are also being undermined by climate change-induced deglaciation of the Hindu Kush. From lack of water to radiated water, from toxic air to poisoned soil, the fully unrestrained US imperial military conduct in Afghanistan has resulted in an environmental catastrophe that requires accountability and restitution from all international powers that have contributed to what is now genocidal famine and environmental ruin, much of which did not occur within the boundaries of international law and ethical conduct. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Aerial satellite map of the city of Kunduz, where a Kunduz Trauma Center operated by Médecins Sans Frontières hospital was bombed by a US Air Force gunship in October 2015. The former site of the MSF Trauma Center colored in yellow can today be seen in satellite images as a vacant plot filled with debris. Courtesy of Kamil Ahsan using ArcGIS. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

The co-founder of the women-led publication Karti Dharti discusses India's farmers' movement, the intersecting realities of gender, and Dalit labour, the motivation to create Karti Dharti, the fifth edition of which you can read in Gurmukhi. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement AUTHOR The co-founder of the women-led publication Karti Dharti discusses India's farmers' movement, the intersecting realities of gender, and Dalit labour, the motivation to create Karti Dharti, the fifth edition of which you can read in Gurmukhi. Karti Dharti is a women-led publication that highlights diverse voices from the farmers’ movement. Understanding how gender, the COVID crisis, and the farmers' movement in India intersect is of critical importance. In April 2021, Drama Editor Esthappen S. chatted with Karti Dharti's Founder-Editor, Sangeet Toor, on Instagram Live, about Karti Dharti's history, the state of the farmers' movement in India at the time. They mapped out the nature of the movement itself, especially as it pertains to gender, discuss the challenges it faced. Toor described how the magazine focuses on the intersection of gender and movement politics. Read the fifth edition of Karti Dharti here . ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Submit SUBSCRIBE Success! BOOKS & ARTS THE VERTICAL FICTION & POETRY COMMUNITY FEATURES INTERACTIVE Submissions are currently closed for FICTION & POETRY, INTERACTIVE, FEATURES, and COMMUNITY. BOOKS & ARTS We are currently only open in this category for pitches on dispatches of upcoming or recent literary festivals, zine festivals, biennales, art exhibitions etc. Please limit yourself to one pitch until you have heard back and limit your pitch to two short paragraphs. Make sure to send a link of the event as well as the dates. Send your pitch with the subject heading "Festival Pitch" to info@saaganthology.com . You do not need to have attended any event before the deadline, but you must be registered for it. THE VERTICAL We are accepting pitches year-round. As crises deepen both in and around South Asia, we extend our mission to encompass other parts of the world. Part of our mission is to forge new communities and build upon longrunning traditions of solidarity across oceans, languages, and nations. The Vertical is a column centering solidarity—an effort to include essential, specific stories from across the world, featuring voices that offer a deeper introduction to key issues impacting regions not limited to South Asia. * Our aim is to ensure that we are able to publish and create space to share the work being done by marginalized communities, their voices, their struggle across different contexts in South Asia against oppression, marginalisation, active genocide and growing fascism to enable solidarities and make the movements stronger and visible in whichever way possible. The Vertical is rooted in the belief that to fight the growing inequities and systemic oppression and injustice, the movements across South Asia and the world have to be connected, the voices amplified through solidarities. 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For longer works or laborious collaborations, please submit in another category. Algorithmically generated & AI art is not permitted. See here for a sample comic. Multimedia: For video, please pitch a short video about 0.5-2 minutes long. See here for an example of a short-form video. For all other genres, pitch the equivalent of the three examples provided here. Longer-form works may be better suited to our Features or Books & Arts sections. See here for an example of a long-form reported prose piece. If you envision a longer work and still believe it belongs in The Vertical, please let us know why. Please note that between pitch and publication, a great deal changes because editors at SAAG work intensively with creators to publish the best possible piece. * We deliberately do not construe "South Asia" specifically in terms of geography. This is because we recognize, as our archives indicate, that: 1. 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For the purposes of The Vertical in particular, however, we do not find identity or the delineations of "South Asia" pertinent to the purpose of the column. ** Remuneration for shorter or longer works by length or works that take significantly more or less labor than average may be adjusted for accordingly in exceptional circumstances.

India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. Thomash Changmai An indescribable journey of survival (2022) CGI (blender 3d) Artist LOCATION AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 23 Oct 2010 rd · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION X Marks The Ghost The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, India was reported on 11th March , 2020. Thirteen days later, a nationwide lockdown was announced – bringing India to a grinding halt. Except that is not what actually happened. Those who could afford it shielded themselves within their homes, rations packed to the rafters and N-95 masks stockpiled. For the over 600 million internal migrants in India –those whose homes are in villages but who work in informal labor markets in the city–the lockdown announcement triggered a mass exodus. Droves of people fled the cities they worked in to return to their rural communities, largely on foot. With their wages coming to an abrupt standstill, they left deeply fearful of what lay ahead. Much has been written about the lack of statistics regarding this exodus. Many lives were lost to hunger, fatigue, heatstroke and, of course, disease. Yet “ there are no numbers ,” Santosh Kumar Gangwar, then Indian Minister for Labour and Employment, stated the same year when asked to enumerate the tragedy’s scale at a national level. Migrant workers have already long been considered “fringe figures” within the Indian urban social network. With the rupture caused by the pandemic, their existences have only been further invisibilized. The initial guidance provided by India’s central government was to ensure that migrants did not leave the cities. However, given the sheer volume of panicked people desperate to rush back home, this guidance was impossible to actually implement. When the stay-where-you-are orders failed, the center tried creating quarantine camps at state borders .This, too, did not prove successful. Attempts to build a database of the departing migrants were also abandoned halfway. The pandemic was already seen as an arithmetic problem : a problem of numbers where a solution could purportedly be reached by just pinning down the right formula. This notion was only compounded upon by the use of terms such as “rate of infection” and “doubling time” in the media, which made the actual lack of data and data collection efforts regarding migrant workers result in a particular kind of disenfranchisement. Despite the magnitude of the exodus, India’s national mood was to dismiss the migrants’ long march as simply an aberration. Since the event was caused by the deep distrust that migrants displayed in the state’s ability to provide them with safety nets, any acknowledgment of the tragedy’s nuances would misalign with the government’s narrative of complete control over the crisis. A Vocabulary of Ghostliness In retrospect, the lack of numbers eventually became an object of interrogation. A particular trope came into play within the media discourse surrounding the migrant exodus: a vocabulary of ghostliness. Words used to describe the state of the migrants essentialized their identities to solely their forced absence from the labor market. News reports in publications like the BBC and God Save the Points , spoke of “ghost workers” and “ ghost towns .” In a Telegraph India essay written shortly after the first lockdown, academic Manas Ray describes the migrant workers trekking to their native villages as “ghost mutineers stalking the country in search of a home.” “These lives are, of course, not entitled to the city's culture and taste, to its intellect and leisure; these are gross lives,” Ray writes further. The word “gross,” a mathematical term for excess, is specifically used here to capture the unnumbered migrants’ lives. “What seems like a relatively stable social order is constantly being modified, added, subtracted, maintained, and cleaned by the invisible labor force mostly made of migrants,” Ray continues. While terming the migrants as ghosts evokes a certain poignancy, it also dehumanizes and homogenizes a diverse, marginalized group of people. Although the tragic scale of the exodus could not accurately be enumerated at the time, it is now possible to retrospectively analyze Indian media archives and give an approximate number to the verbiage that was in play. As an intervention into this archive of absence, I formulated a dataset containing newspaper (e-paper) stories that appeared when I ran a Google Search with the following phrases as keywords: Migrant Haunting Mumbai Migrant Ghost Mumbai Covid Haunting Mumbai Covid Ghost Mumbai I delimited the database both spatially and temporally. The city of Mumbai became a stand-in for the urban, chosen for being the country’s financial capital. Temporally, I limited the selected articles to those published between 15th March, 2020 and 10th August, 2021. I downloaded the text from these news articles from relevant pages of search results as raw TXT data and eliminated the duplicate results, making sure that each webpage was represented only once in the TXT data file. This data was subsequently input into a Word document where, using the “Find” feature, I located the words “haunt” and “ghost,” highlighting the sections they appeared in. I further transferred these sections to columns to see the frequency of the words and the contexts they were phrased within. Finally, I color-coded repeated phrases, numbering each occurrence. My goal through this exercise was to locate patterns within this particular media discourse which evoked a metaphoric vocabulary of ghostliness. The data I analyzed for these patterns encompassed roughly 106,000 words in total, including headlines, by-lines, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions over the four keyword searches. It is important for me to say that by no means did I conduct a perfect academic study which incorporated all the work that has been produced relating to the migrant exodus. The formulation of the data set was restricted by resources, paywalls, and availability of time so it is meant to be indicative rather than declarative. Therefore, this is not a quantitative analysis, but a qualitative exploration of the use of a specific vocabulary and its implications for understanding a certain media archive. Why is it necessary to think about the vocabulary used to describe this, or any, tragedy? First, without numbers, we have no other way to understand the scale of the lives lost and destroyed. Secondly, understanding language allows us to understand who is permitted to be forgotten or remembered, and who media discourse renders invisible. The absence of numbers of lives can then be understood by investigating who is made a ghost–who is seen to haunt rather than live as a full human being–and how. When we cannot account, we must articulate. There is a long tradition in the social sciences of using the vocabulary of ghostliness and hauntings to explain societal relations. In a 1919 essay titled The Uncanny , Sigmund Freud describes how any change in the way society functions bring with it a sense of deep unsettlement. Karl Marx takes this even further at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto , where he terms communism itself as a specter haunting Europe, invoking ghosts to signify societal churn. More recent scholarship in anthropology has built on tradition, hypothesizing how societies often tell ghost stories as a way of integrating uncomfortable memories into the cultural fabric. In scenarios with no actual historical record or archive, hauntings and ghosts become a means to combat “ institutional forgetfulness. ” With the COVID-19 pandemic and migrant crisis in India, we can see deliberate institutional forgetfulness in action. Here, the vocabulary of ghostliness becomes a tool to grasp public sentiment. Even three years removed from the worst of the pandemic, which disproportionately ravaged the Global South , understanding its impact on human lives is to grapple with ambiguity–intellectual, pragmatic, and experiential. It is to be faced with something that is not quite historical, not quite normal, and not quite visible. It is to engage with a ghost. Gloomy Sunday, 2023, courtesy of Thomash Changmai. In the depths of the night, a lonely soul weeps, Tangled in shadows, where despair seeps. A heart, heavy with the weight of solitude's sting, A melody of sorrow, a dirge I sing. (Inspired by the song Gloomy Sunday composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933.) Accounting, Articulating Within my data set, the word “haunt” in various conjugations (haunted, haunting, et cetera) occurred 29 times. The term was used most often to describe images of the migrant exodus and how the city folk were haunted by the visuals of it. To ascribe a numeric value: out of the 29 references, 11 referred either to “haunting images” or “haunting visuals.” As anthropologists Benjamin Smith and Richard Vokes write in their 2008 article “ Haunting Images ,” the photograph and the ghost “are never far apart.” The two can be interchangeable in their function, “standing in for relationships that cannot or can no longer be performed directly,” and share the similarity of embodying present absences . They further activate an “emotive force through their representation of absent objects, kin and places.” Images from the pandemic are rife with this emotive force as they represent moments of death and tangible devastation, evoking significant grief, and by extension of the vocabulary of haunting, horror. Through images, citizens of the city are forced to reckon with the structural collapse of urban labor networks. In my study, a second pattern emerged: the use of the word “haunting” to describe memory and recollection. There were four references to being “haunted by memories.” Comparing it to the previous pattern, where photographs produced ghosts, memory here is where the lost “normal life, or the remembrance of normality,” resides. During the pandemic, the phrase “new normal” was commonplace. In such an unprecedented time, recent memories felt historical, and indeed haunting given the sense of loss they invoked. The word “ghost” itself appeared in my study 28 times. 21 of these occurrences concerned a place, with 11 referring to “ghost towns,” nine to “ghost villages,” and one to the ghostly nature of abandoned roads. In media discourse during COVID19, the term ghost town was clearly used to describe the emptied urban centers, while ghost villages referred to the rural settings where the population had previously been sparse due to internal migration. During the pandemic, these became the sites of return for the working class who were seeking safety and familiarity. In five instances across the data set, “ghost” was an epithet transferred to the laborers themselves leaving the cityscape. Coupled with migrants already being othered and alienated, this deployment of the language of haunting only served to further exacerbate their marginalization and cement their erasure. A 2022 report from the World Health Organisation suggested that India’s real COVID toll may never be known. According to the report, more than 4.7 million people – a nearly ten times higher statistic than estimates by Indian officials – might have died from COVID-19 infection between 1st January, 2020 and 31st December, 2021. It is not a stretch to postulate that the missing numbers from India’s state statistics might be deaths that occurred in villages or at the homes of those who could not afford medical treatment. Data paucity within India is not a new phenomenon, and it is well-documented that the ones left out are often from marginalized communities . A poem written by Indian filmmaker Kireet Khurana during the lockdown turns attention to the migrant crisis with the following stanza: “Hum to pravasi hain, kya is desh ke vaasi hain? Agar nahi hain insaan to maar do abhi, de do farmaan” (We are migrants, are we (not) residents of this country? If we are not human, kill us now, Give the command) The stanza juxtaposes “ pravasi” (migrant/traveler) with “ desh ke vasi ” (residents of the country). The value of this wordplay comes from the etymology of the terms and their meanings. The root word for both pravasi and vasi is the same–“vas” meaning abode. Therefore, a vasi is one who is of the abode, so its negative suffix pra(vasi) implies one who is separate or othered from their place of abode. However, the term desh ke vasi (residents of the country) often signifies being a citizen. Citizenship and residency are therefore interchangeable in this context. The poem questions the disenfranchisement of migrants by declaring “if we are not human, kill us now,” criticizing the political leadership's unwillingness to provide migrant laborers with humane means of returning to their native communities. In his celebrated essay collection Politics of the Governed , historian Partha Chatterjee categorizes individuals afflicted by infrastructural disenfranchisement as occupying a fringe space. In this fringe or margin, they reside within the city but cannot rely on it for social safeguards. Thus, they are rendered beyond the comfort of being a vasi . This only became more explicit in India through the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite numerous assurances by the government that migrant workers would be safe within the cities , a precedent of haplessness and lost livelihoods led to large masses attempting to leave cities. For most migrant workers, the uncertainty of a treacherous journey back home was preferable to relying on the state for sustenance. The distrust created by constant erasure simply could not be erased by politicians’ promises and press broadcasts. Specters and those who witness David Torri , an anthropologist of shamanism, describes the ghost as first and foremost a story: it “needs listeners more than it needs witnesses.” As researchers charged institutionally with the creation of knowledge, the onus is upon us to bear witness to the lacunae within archives and acknowledge our failures in listening to those who fall through the chasms of documentation. India’s COVID-19 migrant exodus was a humanitarian crisis born out of rightful mistrust held by laborer populations towards urban administration. The ghosts resulting from this exodus, and further exacerbated through media discourse, are not new, but have always existed – the pandemic simply made visible the cracks within India’s neoliberal urban apparatus. Indian cities have continued to grapple with their failure to integrate migrant laborers into their social and cultural fabric in the three years since the pandemic. Despite the significant cost to human life, there has been no socio-political change aimed at remedying the gap between those seen as citizens of the city, and those essentialized as mere bodies for labor. “I felt betrayed twice: by society, because no one around me lent a hand – my landlord kicked me out – and by the state,” a construction worker from Kanpur, Ram Yadav, said in a 2022 documentary made by The Guardian . At the time of the lockdown, he vowed never to return to the city he’d left. A few months later, however, he had no choice but to head back to Delhi. By November 2020, large sections of migrant workers , much like Yadav, had returned to the cities they had left. There was no newfound love for the urban–just desperation in the face of limited job opportunities within rural communities. The disenfranchisement they continue to face is deeply institutionalized. Within most archives their experiences are secondary. The fact that there are no numbers is potent; the state does not account for the working class body, neither in life nor death. In life, they have no stability or voice in the functioning of the very urban centers that rely on their migrant labor; in death, they are merely erased. This erasure reaffirms migrant workers as Chatterjee’s term of fringe figures, or outsiders to the city’s social and cultural fabric. Devoid of agency, the migrant becomes the object of urban anxieties, rather than a subject experiencing them. The city is thus simultaneously run by migrants yet haunted by their absence, with the urban populace haunted in particular, albeit at a comfortable distance, by migrants’ trauma. In other words, the laborer is subject to the whims of the megacity and those who administer it. They become the “other,” pitied by middle-class citizenry, yet still not seen by them as human or equal. As Jacques Derrida puts it in his book Specters of Marx (1994), disjunctures in society, like pandemics, make apparent the anxieties of a place, and the “ghosts” that emerge here are testimonies to alienated labor. By reconciling these specters through scholarship, at the least, we can move forward towards marking the absences within existing records. It is an attempt to integrate significant institutional failure into cultural memory. The production of knowledge is never perfect, but the use of alternative vocabularies as interventions allows us to pinpoint deliberate erasures. Fully understanding the effect of a crisis, of course, does not encompass just metrics, even if imprecise, for its impact. Yet, it is an honest start. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Cambodia’s trade union leaders, alongside young environmentalists fighting to preserve the country’s environment, have been imprisoned and censored for demanding just ecological policies and labor conditions. As the Cambodian monarchy continues to harpoon advocates with falsified charges ranging from conspiracy to “disbelieving a court decision,” movement leaders continue to demonstrate, knowing the people’s struggle for personal and environmental dignity transcends the carceral means of the state. Sophie Neak, Hang On, no.18 (2015). C-print photograph. Artist LOCATION AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 23 Oct 2010 rd · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Paean to Mother Nature In Cambodia, activists are facing a crackdown on their fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. The state is particularly targeting those advocating for environmental and labor rights, and as civil society space continues to shrink and tolerance for dissent wanes, the government is increasingly resorting to arrests to silence perceived opposition. “We have fallen deeply in love with nature, and we don’t want it to be destroyed by corruption. People’s livelihoods depend on natural resources, and they don’t want to lose their land, their home, their culture. We understand them, we feel the pain, so we want to protect them. Our lives are inspired by nature, and that motivates us to take the risk of standing here.” These are the words of a young activist from Mother Nature Cambodia , a youth-led environmental rights organization that launched in 2012. He requested to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. Since the organization’s launch, its members have campaigned on a raft of environmental issues in Cambodia, leading to multiple arrests, members being jailed, and authorities attempting to silence their voices. In July 2024, 10 young Cambodians were sentenced to between six and eight years in prison, convicted on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king. Three of them, including Spanish co-founder Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson , who was deported for his environmental activism in 2015 and permanently banned from re-entering Cambodia, were sentenced to eight years in jail and fined USD2,500. The others were handed six-year terms. Five, including Gonzalez-Davidson, were sentenced in absentia. Ahead of the verdict at Phnom Penh Court of First Instance, 26-year-old Long Kunthea, who has already been imprisoned for her activism, told a group of supporters who had gathered around her that she would not be silenced, encouraging her peers to remain undeterred. “May you all not be hopeless but continue your work in protecting the environment, your rights, your land. Although we are in jail, we will be strong. They can only arrest our bodies, but they cannot arrest our will and conscience,” she said. The sentencing has been condemned by various international organizations, who are lobbying for the release of those imprisoned. “The verdict is devastating for the 10 activists, who face between six to eight years in prison for their efforts to protect Cambodia’s environment,” said Bryony Lau, the Deputy Director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, in a statement in 2024. “It also sends an appalling message to Cambodia’s youth that the government will side with special interests over the environment every chance it gets.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Research, Montse Ferrer, said in a statement that the convictions were “another crushing blow to Cambodia’s civil society,” adding, “Mother Nature Cambodia is a renowned activist group that has brought attention to environmental degradation fuelled by long-standing corruption in the country. “Instead of listening to young leaders at the forefront of the environmental movement, the Cambodian government has chosen to jail those that dare to speak out. The government has shown time and time again that it will not tolerate any dissent.” Attempts to silence the defenders Since 2012, Mother Nature Cambodia has lobbied on environmental issues from illegal sand dredging and lake-infilling to pollution and protesting against mega hydropower dam projects. The organization has successfully campaigned to halt the Chinese-led construction of a mass hydropower dam in Areng Valley in southwest Cambodia, that threatened the Indigenous community, as well as the delicate ecosystem of the area. Mother Nature Cambodia also played an instrumental role in ending illegal sand dredging operations in Koh Kong. Mother Nature’s philosophy has resonated strongly with Cambodian youth keen to protect the environment for future generations. The environmental defenders, however, have also repeatedly been targeted by authorities. “The main environmental issue is the corruption in the systems, and these diseases are getting harder to solve because environmental crimes are happening all over the country under development projects,” a member of Mother Nature anonymously told SAAG. However, the arrests and intimidation have failed to dampen spirits, instead fuelling members’ determination to continue their mission. “We must empower and mobilize youth in the country to speak up. They must speak up against repression as we continuously demand an end to devastating actions against nature. We stay focused, resilient and innovative,” he said. “People’s voices are needed to lobby the government to give our friends back their freedom. We won’t stay silent if our friends are still not free. We, Mother Nature Cambodia, are demanding power for the people, not the regime.” In September 2023, Mother Nature Cambodia became the first Cambodian organization to win Sweden’s Right Livelihood award for its “fearless and engaging activism to preserve Cambodia’s natural environment in the context of a highly restricted democratic space.” Fighting for the disappearing rights of workers It’s not only environmental activists whose voices are in danger of being silenced. Recent years have seen a targeting of Cambodia’s union leaders, who have been peacefully advocating for workers’ rights amid claims of human rights abuses, unfair dismissals and wages, and mass layoffs. On September 16, trade union leader Chhim Sithar, 37, was released after serving two years in Prey Sar, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Sithar is the head of the Labour Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU) and was charged with incitement to commit a felony. Sithar led a year-long series of peaceful protests that started in December 2021 against the mass layoff of 1,329 employees at NagaWorld—a casino giant in Phnom Penh—during the pandemic. Hundreds of workers took to the streets outside the casino in protest of the dismissals, with LRSU demanding 365 union members be reinstated and that all those who lost their jobs receive fair compensation from the Malaysian-owned casino. In May 2023, Sithar was sentenced to two years behind bars (having already served almost two years), for incitement to commit a felony, while eight other union members were handed lesser suspended sentences or monitoring orders. “They were convicted for simply exercising their rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, protected by both the Cambodian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by Cambodia in 1992,” UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said in a statement . “The rights to peaceful assembly and association include the right to hold meetings, sit-ins and strikes, and the right of individuals to interact and organize among themselves to collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend common interests.” Cambodian authorities have maintained that citizens have the right to exercise freedom of speech and hold peaceful gatherings, as stated in the law, and arrests are only made when laws are broken. Khleang Soben, LRSU Secretary General, joined 70 Cambodian civil society organizations and many international organizations, including Amnesty International, HRW, and the US Department of State, in lobbying for Sithar’s release while she was in prison. “Until now, I’m curious about why she was detained as this is a labor dispute between workers and the company,” she told me. “But they accuse worker representatives of inciting social chaos. For me, it’s too much and unexpected that they turn the victim into the perpetrator. It’s very unfair.” In April 2024, Sithar’s “fight for democracy and respect for human rights” earned her the Swedish government’s annual Per Anger Prize, which celebrates courage, capacity to act and engagement. “She is a vital source of support for Cambodian women who are forced to work under appalling conditions. They are demanding to have their voices heard and their rights respected at their places of work,” the judges said. Sithar’s case is one of a series of targeted attacks by authorities. Despite this, Soben remains determined to ensure Sithar’s voice is not silenced, and pledged to continue the fight for the rights of her members. “Recently, we’ve seen the arrest of many youth and union activists. Saying I’m not afraid isn’t completely true. But I won’t give up as it’s a valuable job that benefits many Cambodians,” she said. “Union work is undervalued and it is unsafe when we stand up for workers and refuse to undertake activities that exploit the labor force and workers' interests. We will continue our nonviolent demands until there is a solution. Even if I am scared, it won't stop me.” Yang Sophorn, President of the 16,000-member strong Cambodia Alliance of Trade Union (CATU), also came under fire during the NagaWorld protests. On 4 August 2022, authorities accused her of conducting illegal activities and threatened her with an unspecified punishment for supporting the ongoing strikes. “We know that when we work in this field, there are a lot of people who are not happy with us, but we still do it for the sake of our members and to fight for their rights. The reason we continue this work is because of love, passion and wanting to help people in need,” she said. “It’s an injustice” “I’ve had violence committed against me and been arrested many times, but I still take on the challenge because I work for the rights of people. I’m not involved with politics, only labor rights. I suffer and have a lot of pressure to stop, but I have no choice. I have to promote the rights of workers,” Ath Thorn told SAAG. The former president of the Cambodian Labour Confederation (CLC) , a role he served for 18 years until May, and president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union (CCAWDU) , Thorn has spent the majority of his working life fighting for the rights of garment factory workers. He launched CCAWDU in 1997 while working in a factory, in response to the unfair treatment he witnessed from his employer. “I saw and experienced a lot of labor abuse, violations and cheating on the ground. There was nobody to respond to these problems. So, I established the trade union to address the challenges and negotiate with the employer.” During his time serving as union leader, however, he has been the victim of multiple legal actions and arrests, violence, threats, and intimidation. “As an independent, democratic trade union, we work to promote workers’ interests and benefits, and the authorities and companies abuse us,” he said. “Some of us are arrested and charged, violated and discriminated against, beaten and dismissed without pay. So, there are a lot of cases against us, and a lot of pressure and challenges.” A 2022 HRW report, ‘ Only “Instant Noodle” Unions Survive: Union Busting in Cambodia’s Garment and Tourism Sectors , based on interviews conducted between March and June 2022, found “widespread violations of workers’ rights to register, form and join independent unions at garment factories, a casino and other places of business.” On May 7, Mam Rithy, Vice President of CLC, became one of the latest voices to be silenced when he was detained after Phnom Penh Municipal Court convicted him for “inciting to commit a crime” and “disbelieving a court decision”. The charge against the well-known advocate for the labor rights of Cambodian factory workers was in relation to a video he posted on Facebook on February 24, 2022 commenting on the arrest of a female union leader in Sihanoukville in relation to a Chinese casino. The 35-year-old was handed a 1.5 year prison sentence and a two million riel (USD480) fine. “Vuthy has now been in jail more than four months and did not expect to be detained for long. It’s really tough for him and an injustice,” Thorn said. While the threats to these activists remain real, it has only served to strengthen their fight. “The arrests only make people get mad at the violent injustice to innocent people without any sense,” a Mother Nature member stated. “We have to strengthen our mental health and capacity-building to keep inspiring more people to become defenders. The more they arrest our members, the more defenders rise up. We will always be here, fighting for environmental justice.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Author Chaitali Sen in conversation with Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. COMMUNITY Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy AUTHOR Author Chaitali Sen in conversation with Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. I fight for a world without borders, but they're borders wrenched in reaction to colonialism, and fortified against the spread of English. It's interesting how capitalism homogenizes while making people want to put up walls. RECOMMENDED: A New Race of Men from Heaven: Stories (Sarabande, 2023) by Chaitali Sen ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

“It's very easy for us to talk about being in solidarity with somebody or groups of people, but what do we mean by that? What is the history of that?” COMMUNITY What Does Solidarity Mean? AUTHOR “It's very easy for us to talk about being in solidarity with somebody or groups of people, but what do we mean by that? What is the history of that?” The first panel from our event on 30th March 2024, “ Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse, ” at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, which marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. Here, Kamil Ahsan, Azad Essa, Heba Gowayed, Tehila Sasson, and Suchitra Vijayan discuss what "solidarity" means as a concept, how it is used, and whether it is useful. It begins with some of the rhetoric that Kamil Ahsan discusses in his essay and editorial that closed Vol. 2 Issue 1 of SAAG, entitled Into the Disaster-Verse . What follows is a discussion of four books from the panelists, including: Azad Essa's Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press, November 2022), Heba Gowayed's Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (April 2022, Princeton University Press), Suchitra Vijayan's How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (co-authored with Francesca Recchia, Pluto Press, August 2023), and Tehila Sasson's forthcoming Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (May 2024, Princeton University Press). Photographs courtesy of Josh Steinbauer SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER VERSE Panel 2: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER VERSE Quintet Performance ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Panel 1 of the event "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse" held on 30th March 2024. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Explore our archive of longform prose fiction and poetry, now multilingual. Fiction & Poetry Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Guyanese poet Rajiv Mohabir takes a bricolage approach to historicity, with disciplined attention to the material. Even as they slip into Creole and Guyanese Hindi, his poems remain anchored in the texture of “Ghee Persad” or on the decks of a ship carrying his Indo-Caribbean ancestors in “In Ships [Honoring Mahadai Das' 'They Came in Ships.'” INTERACTIVE FLUX · Poetry Reading by Rajiv Mohabir with Marginalia AUTHOR Guyanese poet Rajiv Mohabir takes a bricolage approach to historicity, with disciplined attention to the material. Even as they slip into Creole and Guyanese Hindi, his poems remain anchored in the texture of “Ghee Persad” or on the decks of a ship carrying his Indo-Caribbean ancestors in “In Ships [Honoring Mahadai Das' 'They Came in Ships.'” FLUX: An Evening in Dissent A selection of readings by Rajiv Mohabir—some published by SAAG earlier this year—to help pause, unwind, and slow time in the act of close reading and listening. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the event in full on IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? BOOKS & ARTS Exhaustion & Emancipation AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 CONSIDER THE militant who wakes up exhausted. Every day and night in the streets, perhaps marching back and forth with painful restraint, perhaps building barricades in spontaneous moments of affinity with those whose rapid “learning processes” have demonstrated the rationality of slowing and obstructing the police. Sore muscles the next day arguing in meetings and studying the classics for guidance. Despair at the emptying of the streets, the guilty capitulation to apathy, and the devastating disintegration of the organization. Consider what intervenes between politics as event: the knocking of doors, the apocalyptically slow process of persuasion, the daily strain to survive one’s own declining fortunes, the sheer emotional intensity of attempting to maintain fidelity and hope in the empty and seemingly endless interval. We know such exhaustions. Alongside these exhaustions which punctuate the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to politics at an everyday, grassroots level, the residents of the United States as a whole seem to have entered a state of exhaustion. It is in no small part provoked by the series of drastic political shifts that are marked by the fluctuating fortunes of the parliamentary system and its parties, parallel to the ebb and flow of social movements outside state boundaries. This exhaustion seems to be a broad phenomenon—caused by an affective investment in the outcomes of elections and the trajectory of social movements. But in fact, we must think of exhaustion in a different, highly specific way if we are to understand its contemporary political centrality. Exhaustion, in fact, has something like the status of a historical condition, a status that is a consequence of the termination of emancipatory politics. In this sense, exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Contrary to the popular opinion which dictates that “everything is political,” politics is not always taking place—politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away. Exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Of course, to understand any of this, we have to specify what politics means in the first place. In embarking on this task for the present moment, I want to pay tribute to two comrades who left us last year: the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, and the Italian Communist Rossana Rossanda. Together they help think through the questions the militant faces in every moment of political action, even in what seem to be unremarkable and everyday practices: what is an emancipatory politics? What allows it to take place—and equally, what prevents it? The problem of emancipation animates the whole history of politics and political thought—but somehow, its place in our thinking and its relationship to social analysis often remains obscure. This slipperiness of emancipation presents a crisis for political thinking today. It is not difficult to see that a resurgence of authoritarian populism, the breakdown of the existing political system, and the approach of ecological apocalypse, all require concerted and creative theoretical efforts. But alongside the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence and disappearance of unexpected social movements—like those that recently peaked in the extraordinary mobilizations against racism and police violence. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes. We also cannot simply take contingent aspects of any particular social movement to represent the intrinsic characteristics of emancipation. Horizontalist forms of organization, for example, though there is certainly no reason to dismiss them out of hand, nevertheless do not automatically guarantee a movement’s emancipatory character. It is possible for such organizational practices to foster broad and egalitarian popular participation, in a way that appears to “prefigure” an emancipated society. But it is just as possible that they will devolve into proceduralism, endless meetings, debilitating indecision, and the reassertion of the same old hierarchies and stratifications that characterize existing society. In this sense, perhaps counterintuitively, instead of embracing specific forms of movement democracy as good in themselves—which, more often than not, brings us back to abstract and ahistorical norms—we have to situate them within political sequences. It is within these sequences, and only within these sequences, that they take on a political meaning. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. Such a vantage point of emancipation is different from any social analysis that serves as a guarantee for a particular political program. In my book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , I declined, much to the chagrin of certain critics, to explain the relation between the categories, now so frequently paired, of “race and class.” It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions—which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances—would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory social movements. I briefly alluded to the vast literature on the social and historical construction of race, and at the same time, in archival work on the history of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movements for Viewpoint Magazine , I attempted to describe the social and historical construction of class, by reviving the method of “class composition.” At the time, it seemed to me that the erasure of class in “identity politics” had neutralized the revolutionary character of movements against racial domination. Since then I have been reminded that struggles founded on class can also be neutralized, as the history of the workers’ movement makes clear. It seems to me now that emancipation is foreclosed by any foundation, whether “identitarian” or “materialist,” and that the axes of political struggle cannot be aligned by an empiricist social analysis, but only from the vantage point of emancipation. I have further been led to understand that my description of the depoliticized moment of the present requires further explanation. I do not mean neutralization as the search for an already neutral domain, or the evasion of conflict, as in the canonical account of Carl Schmitt. His diagnosis of “the age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” is grounded in a general theory of “the political,” while I am concerned with the singular events of “politics.” My theory ends up diametrically opposite to the jurist. What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of co-optation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object. Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of each element into a new compound. Neutralization is restricted, while depoliticization is expansive. Neutralization comes from the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious diversity of the system. Exhaustion, then, is part of a constellation that includes neutralization and depoliticization. In order to distinguish this theory from preceding accounts of neutralization and depoliticization, it will be at the center of our inquiry. Emancipation Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work is not widely known in the “West,” despite the important influence he had at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Senegal. His writings form part of an essential global dialogue on emancipatory politics. Wamba offers an indispensable statement on emancipation in his discussion of Lenin’s proposition that politics happens “under condition”: The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so. People may live differently than they live. Politics is not expressed through the spontaneous consciousness. It is an active prescriptive relationship with reality and not a reflection or representation in consciousness of invariant structures (economic structure or level of development or the state). Politics is a creative invention. Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude. And so Wamba beautifully condenses a number of points on which to elaborate. Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” Because emancipatory politics starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics. Not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” But even once we have affirmed that people think, we are forced to reckon with the fact that something is not always being done about the situation. In other words: is politics always happening? Wamba notes that the existence of a social movement does not automatically imply the existence of politics; the latter requires a “subjective break,” the development of an antagonism to the whole political order which “is revealed through militant forms of thought… and not through the movement of history.” Thus Wamba argues: Emancipative politics does not always exist; when it does, it exists under conditions. It is, thus, precarious, and sequential: it unfolds until its conditions of subjective break disappear. When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics. To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics. Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. When it does, it appears in sequences with a beginning and an end, and advances categories specific to its situation. But there are also modes of politics which are not emancipatory: the single-party, party-state model of state socialism, and the multi-party parliamentary mode. Let us put the term “democracy” in suspension for the moment, because the equation of democracy with multi-partyism and parliamentarianism naturally absorbs it into the state. “The multiparty system is a form of the state and not independent of or antagonistic to it,” Wamba writes. “Legal and constitutional dimensions, separation of powers, recognition of freedoms of association, expression, religion, etc., are structural traits of the state. They do not identify a mode of politics which has to be grasped through its subjective dimension.” Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. In other words, politics in parliamentarism is reduced to voting. But it is only from the viewpoint of mass organization, Wamba proposes, that it is possible to speak of movements for democracy in Africa. The imposition of Western models of liberal democracy continues a fundamentally colonial relation which does not reflect the capacity of African people to constitute their own politics. “What are the conditions in Africa,” Wamba asks, “for emancipatory politics to exist?” He adds: Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. To fail in this task would be to “abscond from politics, reducing politics to a state capacity.” This, then, is our basic framework for understanding depoliticization. In line with Wamba’s reasoning, Michael Neocosmos provides important developments in his aptly named Thinking Freedom in Africa . Depoliticization is “the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics” when “state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories.” This problem, Neocosmos elaborates, is tangled up with the rare and sequential character of politics. How do we understand a political sequence? Along these lines, Neocosmos proposes, the end of the national liberation sequence in Africa 1960-75 need not be understood in terms of the “failure of nationalism” but as “the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics.” Conventional wisdom on historical revolutionary sequences of the 20th century revolves around a fundamental, flawed dichotomy: either the beautiful soul which remains unsullied by their dark side, or the sensible pragmatist who understands that every attempt to change the world ends in disaster. But one can both reject the nihilistic conclusion that no politics ever took place in a completed political sequence, and understand the consequences of the end of the sequence in terms of the risk of depoliticization. This is a pervasive problem which we encounter with the exhaustion of the great political sequences of the 20th century, even of the great socialist revolutions. This is how exhaustion becomes a historical condition and results in what we described above as the seeming impossibility of politics. The sequence of revolution which stretched across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century proposed not only the overturning of the existing societies but also the transitional processes of socialist construction which would yield an entirely new kind of world beyond capitalism. But now we are in no such historical phase—and the affective experience of exhaustion is tied to this condition. Nowadays, everywhere, there are attempts to disavow histories of the attempts to construct societies beyond capitalism—often with the easy narrative of “totalitarianism.” Such views simply repeat a traditional kind of fear of the masses which sees every collective body as a threat of mob conformism. This worldview seeks to defend representative, but essentially oligarchic institutions in which the educated elite protects a formal democracy which conceals the real dictatorship of capital. Anti-democratic views of this kind are in fact at the center of the dominant “democratic” ideologies which accuse every attempt to change the world of being fundamentally “totalitarian.” Theories of the political mired in this oligarchic sensibility, even if they appear on the left—such as it exists today—ultimately rely on teleological conceptions of history. Unable to comprehend the novel political declarations and actions which gave rise to the historical revolutionary sequences, they also cannot allow for the rare and exceptional emergence of politics in the present. Exhaustion, in this sense, is understood through what Lazarus has called the “method of saturation”: affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. In particular, we have to grapple with the saturation of the long sequence of the 20th century revolutions which revolved around the revolutionary working-class party seizing the state. Exhaustion, in this sense, is... affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. These are the conditions of depoliticization. But one need not lay blame on the historical figures who frequently reached a scale of human achievement unimaginable to us, to simply recognize that emancipatory politics is precarious and sequential. Exhaustion How does the condition of exhaustion operate on the concrete level of movements and the state? Here we can follow our second departed comrade, Rossana Rossanda of il manifesto , the dissident group pushed out of the Italian Communist Party in 1969. In 1983, reflecting on the long, turbulent sequence of political upheaval in Italy of at least the preceding two decades Rossanda identified two fundamental political problems: the dissipation of social movements outside the state, and the consequences of left-wing parties attempting to enter the state. Of course, the situation in Italy, characterized by perpetual strikes and a mass Communist Party approaching the seat of power, is not the same as the ones we know in the United States. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the mass protests against police violence demonstrates the ongoing salience of Rossanda’s reflections. The Sanders campaign, of course, attempted to pursue a social-democratic program within the parameters of the bourgeois state— subsequently followed by the eruption of social movements outside the state. This dynamic, even if in a drastically different form and context, sheds light on the problem of the relationship between party and movement—or to put it another way, between the political (parliamentary) forms of the existing state and the social (extraparliamentary) basis of autonomous mobilization. For Rossanda, in the aftermath of the crest of the European workers’ movement the very form of the party, manifested in the Communist Parties, was in crisis. Already in 1968, from Paris to Beijing “the party-form was put into question” in no small part by the independent initiatives of workers. This occurred without the guidance of parties and unions, and alongside an unprecedented level of protest by youth and students which had an uneven but frequently fecund relationship with factory struggles. This crisis of the party-form was a critique of its fundamental political model; it was, Rossanda wrote, “the refusal of any delegation of power, whether it be a party or state, henceforth treated as ‘other’ in relation to the new subjectivity of these social agents.” During this particular crisis, the working class was engaged in the “refusal of work” rather than following the lead of unions in pursuing a minimal program of delegating the negotiation of new contracts to the labor bureaucracy. The student movements, meanwhile, helped realize the potential of the workers’ movement to pursue an independent path by advocating for autonomy and cultural transformation. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the political demands of its working-class political base. But while the “new social movements” outside the party provided a vitality to the independent movements of the workers, they also relied on the mass organization of the working class that was inextricable from the political party, even if the latter operated as a force of containment. This contradictory relationship, also witnessed in the May 1968 revolt in France, was exacerbated when the parties confronted the implications, throughout the 1970s, of actually entering into the capitalist state. What could they achieve within the very bourgeois form not only of the political party itself, but parliamentary politics as a whole? Rossanda pointed to the simple fact that in Western societies representative democracy is a structure within which parties must attempt to get votes. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the demands of its working-class political base. For this reason, whatever tactical potential there might have been in participating in elections, it was nevertheless the case that a very different kind of working-class political power would have to emerge in order to overturn class society. Within this structure, contemporary socialists have aspired to reproduce the history of the mass working-class political parties: garnering votes, aspiring to enter the state. In short, despite the fact that the very notion of a Communist Party entering the state seems unimaginable, when and if they succeed, contemporary socialists will eventually confront the problem of the form of political power that will be required for structural transformation. It wasn’t just the party that was in crisis. Extraparliamentary social movements had a prospect of overcoming bureaucratic ossification and reorienting the parties in a revolutionary direction. But movements were also in crisis. Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”; its “dramatic and destructive ebbs are as important as the sedimentations it creates.” Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”. There were, furthermore, important historical shifts at work as Rossanda was writing. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rossanda argued, movements “arose from sudden bursts from the margins of society” but were then “predisposed to become a party or merge with an existing party.” In this sense they provoked a transformation in the state which also generally represented their absorption into the existing institutions. Yet the new movements of the 1970s did not operate according to this logic. They “tended to express subjects and needs that the dominant social bloc, namely the parties and the state, could no longer absorb in a timely manner without abnegating itself.” The movements did not institutionalize themselves, either by building new institutions or by entering existing ones, either because they were not capable of achieving this or simply did not aspire to, and without articulating a project or alternative, they “withered,” and the existing power structures solidified in response. In Italy the parties were incorporated into the increasingly repressive state—the Italian Communist Party itself playing a leading role in repression of autonomous movements—and capital succeeded, by the late ‘70s, in breaking the power of labor. Even if the parties and unions had operated as a force of containment and absorption into bourgeois parliamentarianism, their mass membership also functioned as a political anchor, so their crisis was also the crisis of the movements. As they went on the retreat, movements fell prey to a general social anomie and atomization. Here I must beg your patience in referring to a dense and lengthy passage which provides the key formulation: A diffuse politicization remains, skeptical in regards to the left if not openly hostile, as does an intense depoliticization, a kind of active negation. The “movements” are no longer “movements” (which would suggest that they are only movements insofar as they retain the implicit hope for a way out or transfer to other “forms of politics,” or a certain trust in the permeability of the institutional network which has disappeared today). They are becoming fevers, “latencies,” partial cultures or subcultures, acting creatively but molecularly, contradictorily. Rossanda is pointing us here to the molecular level of depoliticization: not the macroscopic, historical scale that is the condition resulting from the end of a historical mode of politics, but the immediate, on-the-ground level of practical activity of the movement’s participants. What she calls the “diffuse politicization” of the movements is oppositional to the existing society. But in their fragmentation, the movements no longer move from the margins into the institutions. As Rossanda had argued of movements in the first half of the 20th century, this shift into the institutions had a dual character: the existing institutions neutralized these oppositional bursts from the margins, while at the same time also necessarily being transformed by them. While the autonomy of the emerging movements may have circumvented this neutralization, they also did not find a new way to compel the institutions to resolve the problems raised by their revolt, refusal, and demands. Now the movements came to exist as latencies alongside the sturdiness of the institutional order, and this order appeared to take on a despotic permanence. Rossanda’s insight into the complex relations between class and party, party and movement, remain crucial for socialists today who ask themselves: how should we organize? Endings & Beginnings In this essay, I have meant exhaustion in three senses. The first, at the level of the immediate practical activity of the militant, is the waning of the political capacity for commitment or the devolution into factionalism. The second, at the level of the political sequences within which militants act, is when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent. The third, at the level of history, is the condition which results from the seeming impossibility of political sequences of a scale and depth comparable to the 20th century revolutions. Does exhaustion constitute a period of history, an “age”? Periodization is tricky. All periodizations are schematic. It is extremely complicated to determine how the logical relationship between categories is aligned with a certain period of time, especially for events so tumultuous that they constantly defy interpretation. Though this may seem counterintuitive, periodization at its best does not exactly identify periods, within which every phenomenon expresses the totality in a particular stage of development. Rather, it provides specific and distinct descriptions of uneven and structurally interrelated processes, which have moments of rupture and discontinuity. There are thus interwoven threads throughout these periods, untimely divisions and amalgamations. Those of us living through a period between sequences which announce shared reference points for a global political subjectivity can choose between being faithful to the emancipatory project and the various forms of capitulation to exhaustion. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. With this we are all exhausted. What we are left with are simply various forms of pseudo-politics. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. There are three such pseudo-political sensibilities: adjustment, which claims to advocate for adjusting the existing reality, but actually enjoins us to adjust ourselves to it, on the basis of convenient normative principles (democracy, even socialism); personalization, the reduction of politics to individual behavior and identity, determined by a range of categories to which a person might be said to belong; and pragmatism, which dictates that since it will not get better, you must unencumber yourself of principles. In the interval the choice is not easy. Perhaps more dangerous than resignation in the face of exhaustion is to perform the rituals of depoliticization. Consider how these sensibilities are practiced. First, adjustment appears in the condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object. It generally means that an aspiring bureaucracy closes ranks and insists that all other political practices should be dropped every few years when, as Marx put it long ago, the people are permitted to decide which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. Experiments, necessary for any process of organizational invention, are ridiculed and dismissed in comparison to an ideal model which exists nowhere in reality, but which we are assured is the only practical solution. The stubborn repetition of norms, both political and social, guarantees the despotism of the model. Walter Benjamin recounted what he called a Hasidic saying (but which he actually heard from his friend Gershom Scholem), that when the messiah comes, the world will be just as it is now, “only a little bit different.” From the perspective of adjustment, it will not be even a little bit different. Second, personalization operates the reduction of politics to interpersonal relations, resulting in factionalism and conformism. Factionalism and conformism are not unusual in the history of politics, even emancipatory politics, but today they happen without the processes of total social upheaval that framed them historically. As a result, individuals and groups act like states without achieving any substantive change, enforcing unwritten laws with informal social punishments. In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust, insofar as our experiences and self-designations are seen as spontaneously political rather than themselves the construction of political procedures. Third, pragmatism is the most widespread sensibility among intellectuals, from the media to the academy, who adopt political language but drain it of any idea, and laugh at those who have the courage to believe that a truly political idea is worth defending. As Alain Badiou puts it, the imperative of capitalism, “get rich!,” today translates into: “Live without an Idea!” Even in the pages of our most traditional newspapers, no less than in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorms” of social media, we can read condemnations of oppression and privilege, we can see debates over the abolition of our society’s most violent institutions, we can rejoice at the toppling of the latest petty tyrant with the misfortune of being randomly exposed. Yet if we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” These sensibilities correspond in certain respects to different political tendencies, but they also fuse and intermingle in various ways. In social movements, forms of organization, whether they are bureaucratic or horizontalist, frequently revolve around the persons who lead or represent the movement. Competitions between factions, the decisions about which persons will occupy the positions of leadership, displace debates over strategy and program; activists are required to perform lengthy confessions of their privilege instead of recruiting new members (who are almost universally repelled, entirely justly, by such religious procedures); and purges and expulsions are performed to cleanse and redeem the community, instead of fostering environments which encourage free and open discussion. If we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” All depoliticization leads back to the state, and its rituals, no matter how molecular, only enforce its hegemony. In periods of the intensification of opinion, of the back and forth which is not genuinely political, the greatest temptation is withdrawal—to maintain the conviction that a genuinely emancipatory politics is necessary, to recognize that it has taken place in the past, but then to conclude that it will not take place again. It is difficult to dictate to others whether it is better to enter the fray of opinion or withdraw into the isolation of one’s bunker. And indeed, I have no political prescription to make. I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend. In the absence of events which inaugurate a thorough break with the existing order, I can only try to remain faithful, to the extent that my energies allow, to the emancipatory statements that Wamba articulated: that people think, that they may live differently than they do, and that politics is the creative invention which says: let us do something about the situation! And the questions which immediately follow these statements are: what are the conditions for emancipatory politics to exist? What are the militant forms of thought which make it possible for masses of people to make a subjective break from the existing state of things? What are the sites of politics which allow us to take a distance from the state, and how do we prevent politics from being reduced to the state when a political sequence comes to an end? The energies for fidelity, however, do not remain stable in our turbulent reality. A kind of ordinary steadiness, perhaps, can be drawn from Rossanda’s analysis of the organizational processes underlying these conditions. If depoliticization overwhelms us, it is not a matter of historical necessity, but of everyday relations, of the way we organize our relations to each other in the process of organizing politically. From the working class to the new social movements, from unions to assemblies, there is the patient work of building collectivities that last and the sober analysis of the exigencies of organization. And once again, many questions: what will fill the empty space left in history by the party? How can movements avoid neutralization while still compelling the transformation of existing institutions? What can prevent movements from being consigned to the margins, where they watch power solidify and harden? I remain convinced by these insights, but it would be a mistake to pretend that we have answers to the questions that follow. False certainties do not result in correct actions, and we gain little from arranging our ideas in such a way as to give ourselves the gift of optimism. Exhaustion, perhaps, is not eternal; we have no evidence to conclude that it is. But as capitalism, in its automatic and impersonal nihilism, accelerates its exhaustion of the planet, and the rituals of depoliticization foreclose the declaration of any political idea, there appears almost to be a nobility in withdrawal. And yet, this appearance is illusory, because one of the few truly meaningful questions in an otherwise meaningless and mediocre existence is this: what can we do about the situation? Answering that question means reckoning seriously, and disturbingly, with exhaustion. Time will tell—but not too much time—if we are up to the task. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up: