Splashes of pink and white flowers intersperse the palm trees and ferns. The marks of human presence are selective, paying homage to Bensley’s own synthesis of maximalist design with low-impact ecological harmony. A set of rattan chairs awaits guests and a David set in Balinese stone stares out from behind the leaves with a piercing gaze. Enter the house, and chandeliers illuminate the relics and artworks collected by Bill and his partner, the horticulturalist Jirachai Rengthong. When done working in his city studio or flying all over Asia to oversee the development of his hotels, this is where Bensley returns for his moments of peace.

The house pays homage to nearly 40 years of design and architecture. Bensley first came to Singapore in 1984, with a degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and an offer from his classmate, Lek Mathar Bunnag, to come learn landscape design. Enraptured by the region, he worked in Hong Kong and Bali, dedicated himself to learning Indonesian and Malay, and immersed himself in Balinese traditions of design. In 1989, he launched the first “BENSLEY” studio in Bangkok.

Bensley is best known for his work on hotels and has overseen numerous projects across Asia and the globe. From Shinta Mani in Cambodia, a minimal-impact ecological resort built around the forests, to The Siam’s art deco invocation of King Rama V’s Bangkok, Bensley displays a reverence for both the human and natural environments in which he does his work.

Avetis Muradyan, correspondent for Palladium Magazine in Southeast Asia, met with Bensley at his home to discuss his artistic process, his philosophy of design, and what he has learned from his years of work across Asia.

Learning the Craft in Asia

Is there someone in your career you would describe as a teacher or as a master?

Many, so many. Probably the most influential was my classmate at Harvard. His name is Lek Mathar Bunnag. He is a Thailand national treasure and a really great architect. He invited me to come to Asia on graduation day. I came out and we went to Singapore, where he was teaching, and we spent a couple of years in there. Then we both moved to Hong Kong, having different jobs, and then we also both moved to Bangkok at the same time. That’s when I opened my own business in 1989. We shared an office for several years.

Lek single-handedly taught me almost everything I know about architecture because he could speak plainly. And he broke things down into such bite-sized pieces. It’s just very basic stuff. But those are things that I teach. The essence of architecture that I teach now, and have taught for the last 35 years, is what he taught me. So he’s probably the most influential.

What was the learning process? Did you work collaboratively on certain projects? Or was it a space where you could exchange ideas?

Well, we worked on many projects, him being the architect and me being the gardener. The problem was that it came with a message to get in that box and stay in that box. That’s where I was going to be. Don’t even think about coming out of that box and pretending to be an architect. So that’s what eventually split us up. I wanted to grow, very much so. I wanted to do other things. And he was insistent. In my formative years, he was such an influence that he almost convinced me to stay in my box.

Would you describe that kind of collaboration as master-apprentice?

Lek is 10 years older or so. So yeah, I would say master-apprentice. I never thought of it quite in those terms before but yeah, why not? I think that’s a good way to describe that relationship. Very much so.

You said that there were limitations but you were also taken under his wing in some ways. I’m guessing it made your introduction to Asia much smoother.

Very much so. Not business-wise, because I tend to be the leader on that. But as far as understanding the cultural nuances of all the projects in all the various countries that we were working on in the 1990s, yes. You know, we probably worked collaboratively in between 15 and 20 countries within 10 years. And then it all began to make sense that everything is connected. Just think about the architecture and the cultures of Southeast Asia—even greater Asia and beyond. There’s so much connection. If you just look, you can see those relationships. I think that is the real essence of what he taught me. And number two, what he taught me precisely was scale—how important scale is. How many meters is it from my head to your head? Can you guess?

About three or four?

I put it at about 2.65. And I bet you I’m within 10 centimeters. We used to travel a lot together and in every single place that we went to, every single hotel, we would do measurements. That was the first thing we did. We would get the tape out and we would measure the tables, we would measure the distance between the wall and the bed, and so on. We’d measure the ceiling. We had books of this stuff at the end of four or five years. And it is so true today that if you don’t understand scale, it doesn’t matter how well you can draw on the computer or how well you can do something in Rhino. No matter how well you can press the buttons, you don’t understand scale—that, from me to you, it is not three or four meters.

So if you don’t do that work, you’ll never be good. That’s what’s lacking with the kids today—they don’t use their hands. They don’t use their hands to draw anymore. Everybody that came to this lecture that I gave last week, maybe 15 people, asked me for a job. And I said, can you show me one of your drawings? Nobody could. Well, if you can’t draw with your hands and if you can’t understand scale, no matter how good you are with the computer, you can get that license but you won’t be creative.

To extend that criticism of art without craft, it seems like there is a devaluing of technical ability. There is a move towards automation on the one hand and sublimation on the other. A lot of art forms have taken on this idea that art is simply an expression of the artist. And it’s all looking for interpretation. Technical ability, the raw ability to create, is not the focus.

Yeah, and I call bullshit on that, big time.

You built your career in Southeast Asia. Did you have any prior ties to Asia before coming here?

None. Lek told me on graduation day, “Come with me to Singapore!” And I said, “Where the hell is that?” I had no idea where I was going. And then the week that I got there, I was put on a plane and I went down to work on a resort in Bali. My eyes went wide. It was so wonderful. It was so beautiful. And being able to draw something and then have 600 guys carve it out of stone was amazing.

At that point, I could draw better than anyone else in the office. I was the youngest but I could draw better. These crazy things that I was drawing still exist down in Bali and Lombok. Giant sculptures, swimming pools, big fantasy things that I just loved. And I became a “Baliophile.” I read everything that I could get my hands on, stacks and stacks of books. And then I learned the Balinese and Indonesian languages and I loved it. It was the best job in the world.

I did that for about 10 years or so. At one point in Jakarta, there were eight new hotels going up. I was doing seven of them. And I could present my drawings in Indonesian. The owners were like, “Who is this guy? He’s good!” It was really fun. But then, you know, that put me in this box of being a Bali gardener and designer. I could see that I was never going to get a job doing anything at the Taj Mahal, say, or anything in India. I would only be getting work in Bali. So I put the brakes on that. This was in the 1980s and ’90s.

What was it like to transition from the U.S. to Southeast Asia?

I was a total freshman. I knew when I graduated from Harvard that I had the choice of either getting out or planting rhaphiolepis indica in McDonald’s parking lots for the rest of my life. I knew that I did not want to do that. I thought that California, or anywhere in the U.S. for that matter, was just not exotic enough. I felt that I had already absorbed it. There was nothing left there.

The way you describe Bali is almost like an empty canvas. You could actually do something, especially in your business, which deals with the physical world and manipulating or changing it. And the way that you describe the U.S. and your experiences there, you didn’t have that canvas. We kind of tend to think of the 1980s and ‘90s as an exceptionally creative period. And yet you felt that you had absolutely no future amid all that cultural energy.

Right, I had zero interest in doing anything there.

When did you decide to start learning Balinese, Indonesian, and Thai?

The same week I got there. I enrolled right away at the university night school. I’d go and work out and then go to night school. I did that for three or four years. I would carry this big stack of flashcards in my back pocket of English and Malay. That sort of thing.

In the 1980s, when I first arrived, it was not just some nice thing to do. You had to learn Indonesian to be able to work as a landscape architect because nobody spoke English. Today, it’s a completely different landscape. Everybody speaks English. I find it difficult to get my staff to speak Indonesian to me anymore because everyone wants to learn English. But not at that point. So even just a smattering of Indonesian within the first three or four months was really welcome. You’d get these giant roars of laughter—”Mr. Bill can speak Indonesian!” And that just encourages you.

Globalization was only just taking off. What was the energy like in Asia then? Was it roaring and booming, or a very quiet place?

It was a very quiet place. When I first got here, you landed on the pavement at the airport and you’d walk across the paving to two open hangars. There were a couple of desks there and some big fans. And that was the airport. It was really cool. It was an adventure because I would get to Bali and I would take my VW, which I still have, and drive up to Ubud [a town in Bali popular for its cultural and ecotourism]. It was a one-lane dirt road up to Ubud. I would get up there and maybe see three or four cars on the way up.

I knew it when it was such a beautiful place. And now it takes you three hours to get to Ubud from the airport. I just finished the Capella hotel over there. So I miss it. When I first came out here, the hotel industry was in its infancy. There was one company that dealt with landscape architecture. I worked for that company for five years and then started my own firm. A lot of what we did was educate our customers on what’s possible. For us, too, it was a big learning experience.

In a lot of industries, there was this gap of sophistication between Asia and the West back then. Was that a challenging aspect of your early work in Southeast Asia?

I never thought of it as a gap of sophistication that I had to fill. I never thought that much of myself. There was this job to do with infinite possibilities. But I knew right from the very start that the people that I surrounded myself with—the Indonesians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese—were people that could still use their hands to craft things. That was my real fascination and it still is today. That is what makes our work tick: the ability to interpret various cultures and bring those cultures forward into a hospitality situation in unique ways.

Your use of historical influences is quite fascinating. You bring a lot of forgotten elements forward in time.

I consider myself a designer of hospitality. I design hotels and I do architecture, interiors, landscapes, uniforms, signage, menus, table tops, flowers, music, whatever. Part of that responsibility to the owners is to make money. But we know that over the last 40 years, hotels have been like restaurants here in Bangkok. The trendy ones go in and out of style. One minute you’re in and one minute you’re out. So I have very much stayed away from anything at all trendy. I want my clients to make money. When they make money, they’ll come back to you.

By staying away from trendy projects and by understanding cultural references, I can do things like The Siam. You walk in there and people ask me, “How long did it take you to renovate this building, Bill?” But it’s brand new! It’s about understanding the context of that part of the neighborhood. When that neighborhood was going up, when it was in its heyday, it was the 1920s. It’s about what Thai people were building then and what materials they were building with.

So it’s not necessarily about renovating projects, but understanding context and understanding cultural references and trying to create—this is the most important thing—something that will stand the test of time. If a client has to totally renovate every five or ten years when things go in and out of style, then he’s also less likely to make money. It’s really simple.

It’s funny you say that because a lot of the opposition to building good architecture, probably more in the West than here, is something along the lines of it not being economical. But you’re telling me it is good business. As far as quality prioritizes correct integration, it’s good business.

Very much so.

If you were starting over, where would you go today?

I’d go to a developing country, like India, Bhutan, or Nepal. But you could also go to Vietnam, Indonesia, or to a developing country anywhere in Africa. We’re doing some wonderful work in the Congo which is all about conservation and hospitality.

The Principles of Design

What basic principles animate your process and style? Do you see yourself as having a worldview or philosophy? And if so, what?

Yes—the crazier, the better. The odder, the better. Why do people go to hotels?

To stay?

To stay, right! And why do they stay? The vast majority of leisure travel is based on the idea that people want to have something different than they have at home. So by building hotels that are odd and different, really what I’m saying is that it simply has to be better or different than what you have at home. Otherwise, why would you go, other than for business?

As a hotelier, we have your attention for one day, two days, maybe two weeks. I don’t want this to sound sacrilegious, but in a way, hotels are becoming more like the churches of the past. You’ve got someone’s attention. So having said that, I think that good hotels should teach something to the people whose attention we have. We should educate them in something, whether it’s about conservation or the problems of Cambodia. Or if you’re in New York and there’s an orphanage next door and the kids are drawing airplanes, teach that. Teach your guests something and don’t just put heads on beds. So that’s a big part of my design philosophy.

I just mentioned we opened that Capella hotel in Ubud. Do you know what I wanted to teach people? In the 1800s, there was a Dutch camp that was capturing slaves from Bali. You’d never hear that. We’ve never heard that the colonies were providing slaves to the Dutch. That was a fact. They were considered the best of all the slaves in Indonesia.

And nine out of ten people that come to that hotel don’t give a shit. You know, they want the margaritas. But the fact that I laid it out is the important thing. And in every single hotel that I’ve done for the last 10 or 15 years, there is something—often there are many things—that you can learn like that. So that’s my philosophy.

Would you do any other form of architecture?

Oh, sure: museums!

I was at The Siam yesterday, which feels like a museum in its own right with its decor. I figured the concept would be interesting.

Oh yeah! I would love to do an art museum. And I would love to curate it as well. That would be a ball. Yesterday, I spent all day in museums in Manila. Museums are the places where people really learn.

At The Siam, the impression I got was that it was integrated into its own history. But I felt like I had left Bangkok. I think that as soon as you step into the courtyard, you’re no longer in Bangkok. Even the sounds are kind of muted. It’s like a dream or looking out from a window, the city has stopped. The place brings in artifacts from history. But I don’t know what your relationship with the past is. You seem to have a reverence for it.

Very much so. I read a lot. During COVID, I read over 200 books. So I read a lot and I think that’s a big part of it.

Maximalism and Ecology in Synthesis

You’ve been described as a stylistic maximalist. Yet you also privilege low ecological impact.

It’s just another one of the boxes that I hop in and out of.

How do you think about the synthesis? How do you leave the box?

How do you leave it? You jump up and over. Honestly, it’s by learning something new. I think that my best projects, which are very much maximalist, are also utilizing thousands of unique items from a bygone era that people forget about. So that is very much part of environmentalism and of conservation.

Add a few cans of colorful paint and some gay pillows, and poof, you’re a maximalist. So I’m okay with that. Where am I going next? I want to take art and philanthropy to another level. That has so many possibilities: art, hospitality, and philanthropy. And to do good in all the places that can’t afford maximalism. Have you been to Shinta Mai? I was kicked in the stomach by how atrocious the Cambodians were treated by Pol Pot. The atrocities that happened there for years and that still happen! Shit’s still going down.

I was there three weeks ago, right before I went to Las Vegas. I learned from a doctor who was next to our property in Phnom Penh that the farmers there are still using DDT because the government allows it. They don’t give a shit. And that DDT has now gotten into the groundwater, and the groundwater is causing cancer in kids at a tremendous rate and in the population out there.

It’s like the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam but self-inflicted.

But self-inflicted, exactly. And there are huge problems with finances. So that’s one of the things we want to do: finance education, now that it’s become trendy amongst the farmers to have a credit card. They put up their tiny piece of land, their tiny farm, so they can get a credit card to buy a motorcycle. And they get credit, but they don’t understand that the interest is 19.5 percent. So, long story short, within a year that land goes back to the credit card company. It’s repossessed.

There’s a clash of old lifestyles with modern financial instruments and contracts.

Right. And they have problems with prostitution, like 13-year-olds being sold. It’s just ad infinitum. The average Cambodian makes about one-seventh of the average Thai person. So what we’ve been trying to do as best we can is to work on clean water and general access to water. To be able to get kids to school. So this year, all of these paintings are being sold now to buy 1000 bicycles. We’re buying something like 25 houses because now we’ve identified families that have no roof. Sometimes they have walls, but there’s no roof, it’s plastic and whatnot. So we’re getting that sorted out. We’re building schools. All that is through the sales of these paintings.

It seems that Western cities are comparatively risk-averse. They don’t really like distinctive or maximalist art or architecture or any urbanism. Would you say your work would be possible in the West?

Absolutely. We’re doing work in Connecticut and the reason that we’re there is because they know that we’re going to reinterpret a 250-year-old architectural history into something which is super-layered, probably maximalist. And then at the end of the day, it’ll look like it’s been there for 100 years. And it’ll be commercially viable.

You created your vision in Southeast Asia. Now you will be able to expand that in the West? It seems like various factors trap designers into the universal glass box style that dominates basically every city now.

The longer I do this, the easier it gets. And why? Because of my track record. So, the people come to me because they know pretty much what they’re gonna get. And they know pretty much to leave me alone during the process. Except for the Saudis.

[Laughs] I’ve heard stories.

The Saudis know best, you know—they’re the center of the universe.

But also, I have only got seven days a week like everybody else. I’m asked to do a new project every single day of the year. And so certainly, I could make it work in the West. But nine out of the ten projects that I’m offered to do are those boxes, which I don’t want to do. So the trick is to wait for the perfect client that has that really special project. Over the past 20 years or more, that’s been the key to our success. We don’t grab everything that’s thrown our way, we cherry-pick.

When I was doing landscape architecture, the company I was with kept fastidious American timesheets. What project did you work on? How many hours? And so on. They had it all in a system. And every time that I would get to a point in my projects where things were really going well, they would come in and say “You can’t work on this anymore! You’ve run out of hours!” I vowed when I opened my own office in 1989 that I would never even think about having timesheets. And that, I think, has been a great key to success. You always do the project to the best of your abilities, to the best use of all the time that you have, with all the budget that you have.

Do you think your clients in Southeast Asia have been more receptive to the kind of work that you do?

When we were talking about job selection, the places that I want to work, I’ll always pick the places that I’ve never been to before. And I look for two things: Number one, if those places have cultural interest. And most places do if you look. The second thing is that my clients should be on the same page in mindset. If we’re in a natural environment, we respect Mother Nature. We all have to be on the same page to go forward. I speak so much to that and write so much to that effect that the majority of people that come to me are already in that boat.

Is the convergence of world cities on the universal glass boxes inevitable? Is this just part of a globalized society?

No, it’s not. It’s all about planning. It’s all about urban design. Going back to Connecticut: clearly, the people of Connecticut don’t want that globalization. So it’s all about planning. And they decided to go with these beautiful little houses which all look like heritage houses that are 150 years old. As a whole, they’ll make this hotel. But it feels very much like the fabric of that place. So no, it’s not inevitable.

So, if you had a message for municipalities and planning departments across the world, how would you tell them to create that distinctiveness in cities?

The answer is not always looking backward. The answer certainly is not just what is the most commercially viable—which I think is 99 percent of what is built in the U.S.—as opposed to the most environmentally pleasing. That’s a tough one because the dollar, the baht, and the rupee rule. Do you have any idea?

Yeah. You need a philosopher-king running every town hall in America.

[Laughs] All right!

We don’t tend to think across time. Your work is pregnant with these long timeframes. You graph the past, but you also look ahead to longer periods. It seems like our cityscapes would be very different if we had people who understood the speed at which time passes. But most are unable to place themselves. That certainly applies to the people that we find in city halls.

That makes sense. And I don’t mean to belittle the people of the city hall, but those that do, do, and those that can’t, regulate. Or teach. That’s a big problem. Anyone who really wants to build something is not going to be in that position in the city hall.

So maybe the answer is to use a jury. We don’t do that here in Thailand, but in the U.S., you call for a jury to see whether somebody ran a red light or not. Maybe you call jury duty for, you know, the most prominent architects and most prominent designers for five days a year, instead of going to jury duty proper. Sit in on a number of planning boards, as Norman Foster [a prominent British modernist architect] does now. He goes in once a week and he looks at 40 projects during the day. Pass, no, do this, don’t do that.

You go around Bangkok and there are tons of “For rent” and “For sale” signs. There’s a lot of space to do stuff, for life to go on. In the West, people talk about a housing shortage. There are not enough houses for everyone, there’s not enough space for people to do stuff—to live in, essentially. But also for commercial activity, artistic activity, or communities. This question of creating enough spaces fast enough, building things, and getting stuff done is a huge pain point for culture.

When we talk about space, I read that we use something like four-fold of the space that the average American had in the 1940s. They had a minuscule amount of space compared to what we have now. But it’s never enough.

We had that in America from the Gilded Age to the 1920s. The Hanoi hotel that you built is in the Art Deco style. It was around that time that America had that style with lots of buildings. And they did it at scale.

In some sense, China is way ahead of the West in that they don’t allow single-family houses anymore. They don’t allow golf courses anymore. They don’t allow crazy uses of land. In that sense, communism has had its pluses.

It’s not ecologically viable. It’s not sustainable. You don’t have enough space. We could leave so much more space to nature. And even agriculture, right?

Right, so when I hear the stories about America not having enough people to work and all of these complaints about how horrible things are in the U.S., I think “Get a life!” Just look around you and see what the rest of the world lives like. When I went to give a talk at this university, right away the dean came up to me and started soaking me for money to get another fat ass on another big sofa that can teach more stuff. And they asked me to pay $40,000 for a hosted chair or something. Do you know how much I can do with $40,000 in Cambodia? I just thought…lady, stop.

Your projects are very cohesive, they reflect a harmonious style. How do you consider what material elements to include?

In thirteenth-century Vietnam, there was a man called Trần Nhân Tông. He was the king of part of what’s now Vietnam and he’s very famous. Today, five million Vietnamese regularly go to his grave site in a beautiful valley to the east of Hanoi, called the Yen Tu Valley. I worked on this project for about seven years.

One of the first things we did was to try to understand what the materials of the thirteenth century were, with a team of maybe 20 experts and college professors. What were they using to build? And we used that knowledge. We found out that it was a very limited palette, but we used that knowledge of what they built and how they built it to completely replan this valley, which is 10 kilometers long. We took out everything in there which had been built since the 1950s to accommodate these 5 million worshippers—built to get more money, more money, more money.

Trần Nhân Tông left his kingdom to become a monk. And so this whole valley is a series of places for pilgrims and also for monks to stay, a series of temples. I had to design a whole series of temples and understand their needs. And then I designed some hospitality as well.

Why I’m telling you this story is that this is the role of materiality. Does that answer your question?

It sounds like you double as an archaeologist. It’s about studying the material culture of places.

From the early 1980s when I learned the Balinese language and Indonesian language, I studied under a guy named Wayan Susila. He did his master’s degree in Bali, studying traditional Balinese architecture. Over a period of years of doing these gardens and houses, he taught me the essence of Balinese architecture and planning.

Like many cultures around the world, it’s all based on the parts of the human body. So you would have one siku—one elbow, and one hand, and so on. The measurements of everything are all about that. Like how in English, we have the foot. In Bali, it’s based on these measurements to an amazing degree of accuracy. Even though people’s hands are different sizes. I still find that really fascinating, how architecture is handed down from farmer to farmer, by way of the body parts. The top is the kepala—the head. Everything in Balinese Hinduism and animism is broken into three different parts: the holiest part, then the body itself, which is representative of the people, and then the dirty part that is closest to the devils.

That goes right through to city planning as well. So that each village has three different temples: first is the closest one to the mountain, the holiest place where you go to worship. Second is a place where we would marry people. It’s the middle place, the place where people are. And finally, the farthest one away, the one closest to the ocean. That’s where the tourists are. That’s called the Pura Dalem and it is also the place where all of the evil spirits hang out. So there’s always this balance between black and white.

It’s the vernacular language of the materials.

What I find so beautiful about that is that architecture is accessible to everybody, in that way of teaching. That’s what I admired so much about Lek. It was accessible, and it comes down to little pieces so this little brain can figure it out.

The Tools of Excellence

You also paint in your spare time. In fact, I visited the gallery at The Siam yesterday. You engage with other media and art forms. How do you evaluate them as someone who is primarily a designer and architect?

I’m working on a 72-story super-high-rise in Tel Aviv. I met this client 10 years ago and I’ve been traveling there. Fascinating place, but it is a really, really tough place to work and also to be in. Everybody hates everybody else. In fact, I just heard on the news that two more people were shot on the night that I got there, four months ago.

So how do I decide about the art? We called this hotel the Hotel de la Paix. The Hotel of Peace. In the entire 72 stories—this is one of the things that I want to do with philanthropy art—every single piece of artwork is going to be about peace and about harmony. How people should come together. Keep it as simple as that. But thousands of different images.

Yeah, people will keep on fighting each other. But you’ve got the attention span of about three days for most people coming to the place, so you can at least attempt to solve a problem. Not just cover it up.

Is hope in short supply?

To be honest, the society that I live in lives for today. The people that I relate with don’t think much beyond that. So we have very few philosophical discussions about hope. It’s about what is happening now and what’s for breakfast tomorrow. And how are we going to solve this problem of building this hotel? Can we get it done by four years from now? So I think that there’s a short supply of hope.

Where the world is going is very worrisome for me. As we talked about earlier, the little we can do is make ourselves feel better, I suppose. But, I have very little hope for this planet in the next 1000 years. It’s the Anthropocene.

What about the medium itself? What’s your approach to these different art forms?

I have really only been working at it for three or four years now. But what I’ve been trying to do is that every month I have a muse—for example, Picasso. And I will try to think, if I’m Picasso, how would I draw you? So I’d have you sit in front of me and I’ll try his techniques. Or Matisse’s techniques, or someone else. So I use artists as my muse and try to get into their heads. That’s one of the things I love reading: monographs and biographies and autobiographies of artists and how they think.

I think that brings us to this idea of intellectual empathy. You want to place yourself in their position and play their game. And empathize completely, artistically.

Right! One of the most interesting gardens we’ve ever done, a little while ago now, is the Ritz Carlton in Bali. And I asked my staff what might have been done by Isamu Noguchi, the famous Japanese-American sculptor who lived in Bali during the 1960s and ’70s. That’s what I do continuously. This is very much a way for me to think about how to make my art richer. Everything we do makes everything else richer. It’s an exercise.

For me, it’s a form of meditation. It’s a form of relaxation. It’s an expression. But it’s also trying to catch up. Over the last 30 years I’ve had in our studio, I employed fine artists. I think that’s certainly the key to our success: everyone in my office can do things better than I can. Everyone can do things better than me. So I want to catch up on that. I want to be able to do at least something as good as somebody in my office. It’s a technical challenge. A pride in the craft.

The shimmer was that of metal. The surrounded crowd in the center was on guard in the full paraphernalia of battle: breastplate, spear, sword, and unmistakable quiet terror escaping from furtive faces. A great cry rose from the feathered circumference. It was a call to the gods. Despair won among the metalled men. They turned inwards and they too, on their knees, spoke words to their gods.

Then among the paltry men of the center, six broke from the mass and dragged their horses forward. They began to trot and the cataphracts turned towards a single point in the great multitude surrounding them. Their hooves drummed the no man’s land. On collision, this arrowhead of flesh and blood cut through the innumerable mass and launched many feathered men off their feet, strewing them about. Bucklers began cracking skulls. Behind the charge, a group of swordsmen closed in and began slaying the feathered warriors.

This maneuver was repeated against various points of the circumference to deadly effect. At last, on the final attack, one of the horsemen seized a great plume standard and, dashing away, held it high for all to see. The encircling army that had forced their attack froze and then broke. Their king had been slain and their gods had abandoned them. The metalled men had snatched victory from the jaws of annihilation.

It was a battle of Homeric proportions. We even know the names of our cataphracts: Hernán Cortés, Gonzalo de Sandoval, Pedro de Alvarado, Cristóbal de Olid, Juan de Salamanca, and Alonso Dávila—the last heroes of the Iliad. Yet the Trojans and Achaeans in this skirmish were two and a half millennia late to the battle of Troy.

Until the discovery of the city’s ruins, the battle of Troy was thought by moderns to be nothing more than a fable of great men of the past. The events recalled are so fanciful, so impossible to men of reason and logic, that they were written off as fictitious. Yet no such charge could be laid on the battle of Otumba, where 800 tired, desperate Spaniards routed 20,000 Aztec warriors. It was an impossible outcome, the stuff of legends. Bernal Díaz del Castillo and many others bequeathed recollections of the conquest of Mexico in writing. Though no great bards, they left us with a singular word pebbled in our mouths: providential.

Hernán Cortés was a providential man. The Conquistadors and their misadventures are no less infused with impossibility than Homer’s Myrmidons. One can imagine Neptune whispering in Cortés’s ear as he sailed from Cuba on an illegal voyage toward lands where no man from the Old World had ever been. Hera might have glided over the Spaniards as Cortés ordered his ships destroyed and spoke these words: “We could look for no help or assistance, but that which came from God, for we no longer possessed ships in which to return to Cuba, but must rely on our own good swords and stout hearts.” And in his account, Bernal Diaz does report the apparition of saints at the height of certain battles.

It is no longer fashionable to qualify Cortés as providential. The vogue these days is Cortés as génocidaire. Those six horsemen were but horsemen of the apocalypse and Cortés was but the executioner of an end-times orgy of violence. There is credence to that qualification. An entire hemisphere of civilizations was depopulated in a spasm of diseases, exterminations, and enslavements. But the question remains unanswered: how could a few hundred men bring down an empire of millions? How could the Spaniards have triumphed at Otumba without providence?

Cortés knew who and what he was. Bernal Díaz recalled him making comparisons to antiquity as he carried out the burning of his ships. When some of his men later challenged that no great Roman general had ever thought it prudent to burn his own ships, he answered “You are, however, perfectly justified in saying that the most renowned generals of Rome even cannot boast of such military exploits as we can. Future historians will also have to relate, if God be willing, greater things of us than of them.”

As he defeated Guatemoc and laid Tenochtitlan to fire and sword, Cortés must have swirled about in his mouth the same Homeric lines as Scipio Africanus did at the destruction of Carthage: “The day shall be when holy Troy shall fall, and Priam, lord of spears, and Priam’s folk.” Cortés and his Myrmidons, the last men of antiquity, opened for us a great and globalized modernity. The Iliad ends at the conquest of Mexico.

Golden Ages Are Coeval

The conquest of the New World by the Spanish and Asia by the Portuguese began right at the end of the Reconquista. The Iberia of the fifteenth century was a place of unmatched vitality that emerged suddenly onto the world stage. The comparison to the Romans that Díaz recalls in passing is easy to view as some kind of rhetorical flourish. But the historic reality was that this last chapter of antiquity consistently rhymed with the earlier ones. The Iberians of the time were conscious that their own great achievements were on par with those recounted in the histories of the Romans and the Greeks. Portugal even birthed its own Virgil to write The Lusiads:

Let Fame with wonder name the Greek no more,
What lands he saw, what toils at sea he bore;
No more the Trojan’s wand’ring voyage boast,
What storms he brav’d on many a perilous coast:
No more let Rome exult in Trajan’s name,
Nor Eastern conquests Ammon’s pride proclaim;
A nobler hero’s deeds demand my lays
Than e’er adorn’d the song of ancient days,
Illustrious Gama, whom the waves obey’d,
And whose dread sword the fate of empire sway’d.

In the third stanza of the famous Portuguese epic, Luís de Camões places Vasco de Gama and the Portuguese right next to the Greek heroes, Aeneas, the Romans, and Emperor Trajan. The mandatory classicist education of the nineteenth century still makes us accustomed to seeing the use of these classical references as merely idealized images one can draw on when one has run out of things to say. Yet there is far more than that occurring in the poetry of Luís de Camões: Hernán Cortés and Vasco de Gama are credible contestants. An Iberia which has just thrown the Moors out of Europe and carved up the rest of the world among itself by meridians at the Treaty of Tordesillas is one where these references to the great feats of antiquity no longer feel distant. Why would that escape its poets?

That great age of exploration is not thought of as a golden age stricto sensu. Unlike Moorish Spain, there weren’t any great flourishing cities filled with philosophers, scientists, painters, and wealthy merchants selling gold-laced silks. The Iberia of the time was a highly militarized, rather poor, feudal society. Portugal was a society of fishermen with barely a million inhabitants. The only things Iberia produced in mass were soldiers and mariners.

Yet, they conquered the world. Events as incredible as the Battle of Otumba abounded all over the globe. In the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese were developing the grand strategic trade interdiction of an entire civilizational bloc. As incredible as it sounds, Afonso de Albuquerque, with the paltry number of men and ships he had, laid waste to the entire Indian Ocean from Mogadishu to Malacca. In 1507, a Portuguese detachment of 400 men captured the 4,000-strong fortress of Hormuz and choked commerce in the Persian Gulf. Those 400 men were enough to strangle the Islamic world. The kleos aphthiton per capita at the time was very high.

The meaning of these references was far from idealized or symbolic. Artists are the mirrors of their time and that very same third stanza records a historical reality. Camões puts Gama next to the Greeks and the Romans because he sees him and the period in general as coeval with the great periods of antiquity. Despite the many centuries separating them, Gama was of the same kind and character as these heroes. For Camões, Gama brought the heroic age back into the world. Likewise, the Iberian society of the period fragmented chronological time and its people claimed to be contemporaries of the greats of antiquity—not descendants, not future iterations, not merely inspired by them, but actual contemporaries and peers. Antiquity was no longer a set of distant forms to be imitated but a place filled with friends to converse with and rivals to outdo.

Surprisingly, this fragmentation of chronological times cuts in both directions. While the golden ages of antiquity become coeval with the Reconquista, scholars have named the contrary impulse: “denial of coevalness.” Sometimes, you want to disassociate with contemporaries you view as inferior. For the Iberians, the Americas, Africa, and Asia were stuck in a backward time, a savage state, despite technically existing as their contemporaries. As Camões writes in the very opening stanza of The Lusiads:

What kings, what heroes of my native land
Thunder’d on Asia’s and on Afric’s strand:
Illustrious shades, who levell’d in the dust
The idol-temples and the shrines of lust:
And where, erewhile, foul demons were rever’d,
To Holy Faith unnumber’d altars rear’d…

While the Spaniards and Portuguese were fully conversant with the other golden ages, they viewed the peoples and cultures that populated their same earth as remnants stuck in an illegible dark age.

This practice of the bifurcation of time does not seem to be limited to the Iberians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This thread runs down nearly all golden ages as they remain in conversation with each other. One of the most enduring stories of Caesar was that he wept at the statue of Alexander the Great because he had accomplished so little at the same age by which the Macedonian had conquered the world. The histories of the Gallic wars and later conquests are littered with such little humanizing stories of Julius Caesar.

But what is striking about this one is that Caesar considers himself a peer to Alexander. Why else would he weep in losing the contest? For Caesar, Alexander was not some high-minded ideal, nor a conjuration from the past, but a contemporary rival. It was as if the more than two centuries separating the two men had entirely collapsed in the instant when Caesar visited the famous statue. This thread continued throughout chronological time: Alexander himself was contemporary to Achilles. Augustus was literally contemporary to Caesar, then Charlemagne became contemporary to Augustus, and Napoleon to Charlemagne.

One can easily read this as simple inspiration, but the golden ages have strange relationships to time. Clovis I, who was the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, was also the first Frankish king to convert to Christianity. His wife was a Catholic and insisted throughout their married life on Clovis’s conversion. One story recalls Clovis’s religious instruction, during which he was told about the crucifixion of Christ by two monks. Clovis became visibly angry, jolted out of his seat, and exclaimed as he grabbed his ax: “If I had been there with my Franks, I would have revenged his wrongs!” It’s as if Clovis was of the same age as Christ. The level of empathy with this period is so significant that Clovis almost saw himself as an actor, a direct participant, in the midst of what was chronologically a long-gone period that had slipped into mythic time for the rest of the world.

Much later, Nietzsche also identified this characteristic of genius in Twilight of the Idols:

The relation of a genius to his age is that which exists between strength and weakness and between maturity and youth: the age is relatively always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less resolute and more childish.

The genius, the providential man—or the providential wit or artist—comes from an older, more mature time because he is inscribed within that very long thread and the existing age is not. The specific point in time in which he appears is inconsequential. What matters is his coevalness and continuity with all the other golden ages and their heroes.

Our age has its own ideas about providential men; it also has its own relationship with the past. For our age, the past is an Orient—an exotic other—where it can project all its fantasies, psychoses, and perversions. This manifests in two forms. The more obtuse minds of the age join in a Panglossian unison, claiming that they live in the best of all historical worlds, seeing the past as a wretched dark age. Meanwhile, the sharper wit feels the absence of greatness in his own time and, being of an intense sensibility, falls into a deep and paralyzing state of mourning.

Evidently, in our age, we have our Panglossian matra on full blast. The introduction of critical pedagogy in academia and the resulting near-dissolution of the humanities departments are just modern versions of this very old exercise. They are methods of confounding the past by conjuring monsters to scare away any inkling of continuity with past heroes. But within this exercise, the age creates an absence as it pronounces itself on the providential men of the past. If one studies the conquest of New Spain, now it is only to condemn Cortés as another génocidaire on par with Idi Amin. Admiration is a grave offense. Yet, no one even entertains the possibility of a competing peer. In the minds of our age, the possibility of a modern Hernán Cortés is nil.

The Methods of a Golden Age

There is a sense that all golden ages are subspecie aeternitatis. In all places and times, the leaders of societies in ascendance have been particularly prone to seeing themselves as on the same footing as the great periods of the past. To be able to empathize with the various high points of the past, you have to be animated by the same vital energy as those men and societies and see yourself as the same kind of person.

But mere scholarship isn’t the way to share in that mythic consciousness. Today, we collectively have more facts and precise knowledge about antiquity than at any point since the collapse of the Roman Empire. But for all that knowledge, we haven’t produced a Caesar or an Alexander. Their kind cannot be reinvented by manuals. The Iberians managed it because their circumstances produced the right kind of people. In the absence of such, the real consciousness of the golden ages of the past is illegible and impenetrable despite our intricate knowledge of the historical facts.

As Nietzsche stated, the appearance of providential men and the accompanying golden ages are really a matter of chance. Yet one cannot fail to notice that before Cortés, King Ferdinand, and Queen Isabella, there were six centuries of Reconquista—there was an Alfonso VI and an El Cid. Before Vasco de Gama and the Infante Henrique, there was Afonso I. Before Caesar, there was Gaius Martius.

Even in the darkest times, there are vital elements. One has to seek them out and assimilate to them. In the absence of genius and greatness, this process of purification of the vital elements needs to be started and iterated upon until the moment of reckoning when the providential men again make their appearance. This process of iterative purification can take centuries but is necessary. As the age purifies itself, it develops a greater empathy and understanding of the preceding ages. As the necessary biological, social, and spiritual elements are infused with vitality, the golden ages of the past become more legible and clearer, and then enter into conversation with the living.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was a wave of obsession with past ages and their grim reminders that time erases all. The most succinct treatment of this obsession can be found in Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay // Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare // The lone and level sands stretch far away.” What kicked off this mania was the publication of a now largely forgotten tract by a French aristocrat, the Count of Volney, titled The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empire. Translated into English by Thomas Jefferson, it became hugely influential among the founding fathers of the United States.

Volney was a Pangloss par excellence who took orientalizing the past to its final conclusion. He left Marseille in 1782 for Syria and Egypt in order to visit the sites described in the historical texts of the Greeks. For Volney, the past was an Orient in the sense that the past could literally be found in the Near East. He visited numerous historical sites including Palmyra. In the unmistakable fashion of the midwit, he fingered something fundamental but failed entirely in getting to the substance of what was in front of him. Volney conjured fantasies, projecting on the past fashionable clichés about an age in which “no one was the slave, none thought of being the master.”

Despite his flaws, Volney was at least erudite and courageous enough to take the leap. He represented most perfectly the spirit of the Age of Reason. The accounts he made of the Levant, as well as his classification and ethnologies, were the most accurate of the day. Yet in that erudition, he did not possess the vitality and the genius to pierce beyond a simple collection of facts.

However, fate would have it that Volney encountered someone who did. In 1794, while on an agricultural improvement venture in Corsica, he made the acquaintance of a certain disgraced artillery officer, who also happened to be an ardent Egyptophile. The officer, deprived of his rank and left to rot in Corsica, was thinking of entering the service of Russia or the Ottoman Empire. In the course of their discussions, Volney dissuaded him and convinced him to stay in the service of France. This act, along with the wealth of knowledge he shared about Egypt with the young disgraced officer, would be his only encounter with genius. Likewise, Volney’s advice was pivotal to the young officer and set him on the path to empire.

When Napoleon conquered Egypt, he did what Volney failed to do. Napoleon, the providential man of his time, was able to truly enter into conversation with the great ages of the past. He wasn’t a luminary concerned with filling manuscripts but the conqueror of the East who then turned and bent all of Europe to his will. Volney, the wit at the heel of tyrants, conjured an image of Napoleon in the Great Pyramid of Giza, sitting on a sarcophagus and entertaining muftis in Arabic about his projects in the conquest of the Orient. Volney understood that Napoleon had overcome time and space itself, as well as the centuries separating him from Caesar, Alexander, and Muhammad. In that, he was absolutely correct. Napoleon, like Clovis before him, left us with a reflection on Christ:

He alone conquered the love of men. And how? By a miracle that surpasses all miracles. He asks for the love of men, the thing in the world most difficult to obtain. […] He requires it in totality and succeeds immediately. I conclude his divinity. Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, and Louis XIV, in all their genius, have failed at it.

Napoleon articulated well that coevalness, that deep sense of empathy with genius, and the collapse of the centuries to the point that his reflections are held subspecie aeternitatis. Like for Clovis, Christ is a peer for Napoleon—one he simply cannot outdo.

It is from that perspective that the ruins Napoleon encountered in Egypt became the source of a new golden age. While the Volneys of his time saw mere distance and the inexorable march of time in these ruins, Napoleon found peers, friends, and competitors in them. The seizing of ancient artifacts, like the Rosetta stone that he dragged to Paris and displayed as a symbol and testament of his conquests, were acts of empathy and competition. For the right kinds of men, ruins can be the beginnings of golden ages. Nor do ruins need to be physical. For the sages of the Late Zhou, the literature and odes of China’s past were the instruments of a potential rebirth of their own golden age.

As the ruins of Egypt were a source of newfound understanding for Napoleon, the ruins of Tenochtitlan were the beginning of a new civilization for Cortés. These points of founding cross even civilizational lines. Napoleon invoked as peers not only the pharaohs but also the prophet of Islam, who fought against the successors of pharaonic idolatry.

Whatever the nature of the ruins, their existence and materiality are the basis for any conversation with the golden ages. Like all conversations, there needs to be some common understanding between the two parties. A sense of materiality provides that common understanding. If one is stuck in a storm on a sailboat and glances between labored breaths toward the menacing waves climbing taller than the vessel, one gains a small understanding of the great voyages of exploration. The crews who undertook them suffered through the same mechanical operations of frantically tightening and loosening sails as they braved the tempests of the tropics. This is the deep engagement with materiality, beyond the inordinate focus on symbols and ancient trinkets. Materiality means understanding the pain of ancient sailors in every sinew of your body as you stumble back onto the shoreline.

Napoleon was in conversation with Caesar because he was surrounded by the same landscapes and endured the same hardships as his peer. The campaign of Italy was materially nearly identical to Caesar’s governorship in Cisalpine Gaul and his campaigns in Transalpine Gaul. Despite all the accouterments of modernity that the Enlightenment offered to Napoleon, the materiality of the campaign made for a fertile forum for conversation. The destruction of Tenochtitlan provided a similar sense of materiality to Cortés as the destruction of Carthage did for Scipio Africanus. The Church and its rituals granted that materiality to both Clovis and Napoleon in their conversations with Christ. It was an item of faith that they encountered Christ himself in body and soul at the Catholic mass.

The ruins, similarly, give a dangerous concreteness to these conversations. The Volneys of the world merely talk at the ruins, reinterpret them, and project the unimaginative contents of their thoughts onto them. It is the Napoleons who find them fertile grounds for conversation, who are able to listen to them, and who can learn from, dialogue with, and challenge the ghosts of the past. For them, the past is not an Orient, a far-off fantasy, but an ever-present companion. The caveat to this exercise of easing the ruins into conversation is that it is limited by the conversor’s spiritual, physical, and biological qualities. The Rosetta stone was used in the battlements of an Ottoman fort. It only revealed itself when Napoleon set foot in Egypt. The stone would only speak to those of providential quality.

To develop this quality, as well as the materiality to put it into conversation with the best of the past, takes a whole-life cultivation. We have to step onto sailboats and into fighting cages, and venture through the marshes and on distant battlefields—metaphorical or otherwise—as if the greats of the past were accompanying us along the way. None of these activities will bring about a golden age on their own. Rather, they cultivate visceral shared experiences with the heroes of the past. They are study aids. We have to read the Iliad, the Aeneid, and The Lusiads not as fantastical epics but as intimate diaries of dear friends. We have to put ourselves in their shoes and hold ourselves to their standards. We must think like they thought and act as they acted. We have to become one of them.

Part of the difficulty is in even knowing the path. Fortunately, the ruins are there to comfort and guide us. They act as a heuristic: the closer you get to the required levels of strength, cohesion, and breeding for the coming of a providential man, the more legible the golden ages become through their ruins and the more concrete they become in their materiality. That is when the conversation may begin. At first, it will be a few muted words carried in the breeze. But then the words begin to flow, as kleos unties the tongues of the gathering specters. As long-lost friends, no warmth is lost and the friendship resumes as if you had never been separated. Pleasantries and rivalries flourish. “How was it that you lived?” they ask you—yes, you open yourself up to judgment. We should ask what the past thinks of us.

The passive intellectual or aesthetic recycling of the ruins is a task of fallen men. The heroic impulse, on the other hand, is active and sudden. As Nietzsche states in Twilight of the Idols, “Great men, like great ages, are explosive material.” The implication of this statement is that the appearance of providential men is merely there to release an accumulation of enormous potential energy. The endeavor of accumulating that energy is in itself a mythical labor that must be accomplished over centuries. The collective effort of many generations crafts the tip of a spear to be unleashed upon the world. This preparation is no less noble of a task.

Early in the following morning, Giáp was on a train to the Chinese border. Traveling with him was a sickly Phạm Văn Đồng, the man who would later become the prime minister of Vietnam. They spent their time trying to avoid interactions with the colonial police during regular searches on the railway. In a moment of respite, Giáp replayed the previous day’s events in his head. His close comrade, Hoang Van Thu, had told him that he could meet the legendary and elusive Nguyễn Ai Quoc—Nguyễn “The Patriot”—in China.

It was an irresistible chance. Giáp had been a committed revolutionary since his participation in a student protest at age 19. The shadow of Nguyễn had followed and fascinated him as he had continued his devoted service to the Vietnamese cause. In the preceding years, he often wrote for the Hanoi socialist paper Notre Voix. Sometimes the editors would receive articles from overseas, mysteriously signed “P. C. Lin.” Often, they started with the sentence: “If I were a Vietnamese revolutionary…” Sharing a few pages in the same magazine was the closest Giáp ever got to Nguyễn, yet his shadow hung heavily over Giáp’s every act.

Giáp also thought about the conversation he had at the park. He thought of his wife—Comrade Thai, as he liked to call her—and their child, Hong Anh. He remembered that they promised to meet again in the underground to continue their mission. What Giáp didn’t know at that moment was that he had seen them both for the last time. The following year, Comrade Thai would be captured by the police and court-martialled. His wife and child would die in prison.

Giáp and Đồng got off at Lao Cai station on the Chinese border. They had just entered their theater of operations: the Viet-Chinese border, with its remoteness and Chinese communist strongholds. It would become the cradle of Vietnamese independence. They commandeered a raft and crossed into Chinese territory at the Nam Ti river. There was no return from here. Giáp crossed his Rubicon.

What might have seemed like an escape was actually a baptism by fire. The situation in China in 1940 was significantly more dire than the relative stability of French Indochina, which then encompassed Vietnam and a number of neighboring regions. In Indochina, Giáp was a persecuted revolutionary under the watch of the French police. In China, he was assisting the Chinese communist war effort against the Japanese.

Although the Chinese communists were technically allied to the Kuomintang, both parties would take advantage of the chaos of the conflict to destroy each other. “Only the Soviet Red Army and the Chinese Red Army are fraternal to us,” Giáp was told by his superiors. He was forced to hide from Kuomintang troops throughout his sojourn in China in safe houses provided by Chinese communists. His work alongside his Chinese comrades and the conflict in China would deeply mark his understanding of politics, war, and popular determination.

The only way to survive under these circumstances was through the complex system of revolutionary networks. These were organized to be hard to enter. Membership was based on extreme vetting and personal trust. On a summer day in Kunming, Giáp met a mysterious comrade under the name of Vuong on the banks of a local river. Comrade Vuong was a middle-aged man in a suit and fur hat. Giáp describes him with remarkable clarity in his own words:

I immediately recognized the man as Nguyễn Ai Quoc… I still remember that, when I met him, I had no particular feeling as I had expected I would, except that I found in him that simplicity of manner, that lucidity of character, which later when I worked by his side, had the same impact on me. Right at that first meeting I found him very close to me as if we were old acquaintances. I thought that a great man like him was always simple, so simple that nothing particular could be found in him.

One day, Nguyễn Ai Quoc would become globally renowned under a different name: Hồ Chí Minh. When the two met, Giáp was a 29-year-old radical with limited experience of the wider world. Nguyễn was a professional revolutionary with a decades-long career that had brought him all across the world. He had helped found the French Communist Party, attended black liberation meetings in the United States, and taught revolutionary theory in Russia. He had learned at the feet of earlier generations of revolutionaries, including the Bolsheviks. He had arrived on the Vietnamese anti-colonial scene early and was personally responsible for developing the Vietnamese communists into a viable state-building movement.

A significant part of Nguyễn’s legitimacy as the face of Vietnamese liberation was that he was the handpicked Comintern leader for Vietnam. This granted him the benefits of official support from both the Soviet Union and the Chinese communist movement. But more importantly, he had undergone the necessary training as a professional revolutionary: an agent whose professional abilities were the foment and execution of socialist revolution.

Western histories tended to dismiss the figure of the professional revolutionary either as an agent of Moscow, sent abroad to further Soviet realpolitik, or a deluded idealist being taken for a ride. A close look at Hồ Chí Minh’s journey reveals that this prejudice is patently unwarranted. He was a lethal political agent who spoke several languages: Vietnamese, French, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Russian. He assisted in the supply of ammunition and weapons by the Soviet Union to the Chinese communist forces, assisted in the creation of the Comintern itself, and systematically learned from revolutionary movements across the world. 

By the time of his meeting with Giáp, Nguyễn had dealt with traitors within inner circles, intelligence and political recruitment, imprisonment, power games, party purges, and the secret police of almost every major European state and several Asian ones. He was in every sense a political rockstar.

The communists had created a replicable model for building disciplined political parties anchored in mass movements. The system was political dynamite in the 1920s. Giáp, the younger man, was the right protegé at the right time. When Nguyễn Ai Quoc and Giáp met, they were guests of the Chinese Communist Party, sharing exile in a wartorn country. But circumstances were about to turn in their favor. Though they couldn’t have known it, their focus on organizational development in dire circumstances was a bet that would pay off. The fraternity between them that was formed on that fateful summer day in Kunming would sweep not one, but two empires under the rug and change Vietnam forever.

From French Indochina to Japanese Occupation

In his writings, Giáp quoted one sentence from Nguyễn at that meeting: “It is a good thing that you have come; you are badly needed here.” Over the next few years, they would prepare a revolution right on the Chinese border. The province of Cao Bang, in the Vietnamese highlands, provided an easy refuge for those fleeing the law. Numerous revolutionaries found themselves in hiding and were subsequently integrated into the organization now known as Vietminh—short for Vietnamese Independence League—that Giáp and Nguyễn were building in secret. Operating as a front for the Communist Party, which itself went through several iterations, the Vietminh would become the vehicle for fighting the independence war.

Besides integrating fugitive revolutionaries, the bulk of their work was in the villages of the region, among the Nung people. They helped with carrying food and collecting firewood. They also taught socialism to the villagers, seeing themselves as the missionaries of the revolution. Living among them, close to the ground, was the secret behind the support networks Giáp and Nguyễn built.

If the logic of the mass movement was radical then, it is almost entirely extinguished in the current era. The printing press and the radio were the means by which the working, toiling masses could be assembled into politically useful structures. They allowed mass communication between organized groups with access to the infrastructure, but were closed off to individuals. This allowed for the enforcement of party lines. The system’s logic extended beyond communism: both fascism and wartime liberalism—a tradition embodied by men like FDR—were mass party movements.

Nguyễn’s training within the Comintern was in building exactly this kind of mass organization. All communist parties took for granted that the “consciousness of the masses” needed to be raised by the revolutionary vanguard. This meant that the revolutionaries living in the villages, among the people, had to prepare the peasants of Vietnam to be marshaled into a popular force. Before the revolutionaries could teach socialism at all, they had to teach the peasants to read.

In the Indochina of 1941, the options on the political table were the de facto French colonial rulers, concerned mostly with running the rubber plantations, the encroaching Japanese imperialists, interested in setting up a puppet regime in the image of their imperial system, and the Vietnamese nationalists, who were Kuomintang copy-cats and willing Japanese collaborators. The Vietminh built up popular support against these more powerful allies by sharing meals with local villagers, laboring alongside the peasants, and teaching entire villages how to read and defend themselves. It was a formula developed during the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and Nguyễn was a master practitioner.

Nguyễn, Giáp, and the other lieutenants were doubly concerned with their own education and that of the inner party. They spent a significant amount of time reading, writing, and discussing not just revolutionary texts but also history, geopolitics, and poetry. The historical tropes about internal party methods have mostly focused on the extreme excesses: self-criticism and struggle sessions used to enforce outlandish ideological positions. However, these were only some of the more chaotic manifestations of discipline in a highly potent Leninist structure.

The organizational discipline employed by the Vietnamese communists was based on keeping the party core informed, correcting the strategic course, and building a unified revolutionary inner culture in which to inculcate new cadres. The mass popular fronts could not survive without this hard core of revolutionaries. Nguyễn taught his lieutenants the intricacies of revolutionary theory even as they subsisted on what little husk rice they could get their hands on.

It might have seemed like a counter-intuitive use of time and effort by a group at risk of being wiped out by hunger. But the lifestyle allowed them to take full advantage of their close ties to the peasants. The Vietminh were obsessed with absorbing knowledge that would prove useful in accomplishing their goals and they dedicated an enormous amount of effort to that endeavor. Without this foundation in organizational culture and discipline, astonishing feats like the construction of the Hồ Chí Minh trail—which relied on detailed knowledge of jungle footpaths and village networks—would never have been possible.

In 1941, Nguyễn, Giáp, and the other lieutenants took on the tremendous task of building up the organizational structures capable of carrying out a revolution across Vietnam. They did this while hiding in the Cao Bang tribal regions at the remote edge of the country. The initial core of the Vietminh was to be formed by forty or so members of a local revolutionary organization who had escaped from the cities and the northern provinces after a bout of repression by the French colonial police. In order to assemble the disparate rebels into a cohesive group, Nguyễn, Giáp and the others organized a training course to discipline them into the structure and rally them firmly under Nguyễn’s leadership.

One of the first tasks of the early Vietminh organization was setting up spaces and locales where revolutionary work could be carried out. Often hiding in caves and safe houses, the different cells of the Vietminh would move around to avoid detection by the police. Using a stone, some paper, and some ink Nguyễn, Giáp, and the other lieutenants launched a magazine called Viet Lap which was smuggled out of the mountains and distributed throughout the country. The insistence was on simplicity and ease of readability. From that point onwards, the Vietminh’s voice could be heard throughout the entire country.

The cells formed by the original forty or so Vietminh comrades spread to the entirety of the northeastern border region. Henceforth, the goal was a local cell in every village. Nguyễns gamble on the original forty paid off; membership, assistance, and goodwill among the local population flourished. It was also during this time that the decision was made to create self-defense units in each locality. In addition to Viet Lap, they turned their printing press toward producing short guides on guerrilla warfare based on the experiences of the Chinese communist fighters. They distributed these to all the self-defense units across the region.

The self-defense units became a military necessity as the repression by French authorities took on a new dimension. The shelling of physical assets, summary executions of collaborators with the Vietminh in the villages, and anti-guerrilla operations against the local-self defense units became commonplace. Isolation no longer protected the movement.

Under such circumstances, trust was invaluable. The Vietminh cell structure already kept members connected only to a small number of collaborators. Nguyễn, Giáp, and the other lieutenants were the central node of this nervous system. The redundancy of the cell system allowed the Vietminh to beat the repression rained down by the Surêté, the French political police responsible for crushing anti-colonial movements in Indochina. A network of decentralized, self-contained units that the central node could spur into action was difficult to repress. Because the Vietminh cells were so locally ingrained, any action against them steeled the local population’s resolve even more, winning more goodwill and support for the Vietminh. It was a scalable, anti-fragile political structure.

Up to this point, Giáp’s work had been that of a leading party member and revolutionary operator. Nguyễn and Giáp worked extremely closely on matters of political organization as direct collaborators: leader and lieutenant. But the nature of Giáp’s work changed in 1944 when a Japanese defeat seemed increasingly likely in the Pacific theater of the war. Nguyễn personally approached and entrusted Giáp with the creation of a military and political organization called the Vietnam Liberation and Propaganda Unit (VLPU).

Military and political work were inextricably linked for the fledgling Vietminh. The political dimension of the military struggle was the most important component of how Nguyễn and Giáp understood armed revolution overall. The regular army units of the French and Japanese forces had the goal of achieving militarily relevant strategic and tactical objectives. In contrast, the purpose of the VLPU was to score political victories and expand the base of support of the Vietminh.

Nguyễn and Giáp’s agreement on this question was foundational to their political alliance. Nguyễn had constructed a potent ideology for the Vietnamese war. But it was only the political discipline that Giáp ultimately built into this fighting force that ensured the Vietminh did not simply get absorbed by more powerful actors, be they Chinese, European, or rival nationalists. That decreased risk of absorption made possible a strategy that would serve the Vietminh well: strategic alliances with more powerful actors.

The original VLPU group was formed out of 34 members of the Vietminh selected among members of the self-defense units in the villages and towns, as well as party cadres and select specialists. Giáp personally led it. Within a few days of formation, they launched an attack on two advanced posts in Phai Khat and Na Ngan. These were Giáp’s first victories as a military man. Though small, he used them for propaganda material to stir the local population against French authorities and to show that the anti-guerilla operations would be met with a response. The militarily insignificant victories became major political ones. Giáp’s team also seized new ammunition and weapons in those attacks and he set immediately on growing the number of fighters in the unit.

Initiating Meigō Sakusen

The situation in Saigon was very dire in 1944. The Indochinese authorities had remained nominally loyal to the Vichy regime in France from 1940 onwards but the supremacy of the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean made all practical maritime links impossible. The French Indochinese government, led by Admiral Decoux since 1940, was effectively isolated. Decoux was profoundly aware of the imbalance of power vis-à-vis Imperial Japan, China, Great Britain, and now the U.S. With no hope of military assistance from the French metropole, he opted for a strategy of stalling, taking on the impossible task of maintaining neutrality and independence in the midst of a global conflict reducing all of Asia to ashes. He opted for the only possible strategy given the geopolitical situation and the resources at hand: wait and see.

The Japanese saw things differently. As soon as 1940, the Japanese began diplomatic maneuvers to establish themselves in Indochina. The French leadership, fully aware of the situation but without the resources to push the Japanese out, proposed a defensive alliance with the Japanese to formalize their recognition of Indochinese sovereignty. Over the years, the Japanese took advantage of the formal alliance to send ever more troops into Indochina in the spirit of “mutual defense.” As the war went on, Tokyo hardened its position. Requiring full access to air bases, naval ports, roads, and resources without the friction of diplomatic niceties, the Japanese came to the conclusion that the Indochinese administration was more trouble than it was worth.

On March 9th, 1945, under the pretext of a discussion around the supply of Indochinese rice to the Japanese army, the Japanese ambassador Shunichi Matsumoto made his way to the governor-general’s palace. At 7 p.m., after concluding the routine discussions around rice supplies, the Japanese ambassadors handed a memorandum to Admiral Decoux. Citing the degradation of the military situation in the theater of operations, the Japanese ambassador requested “the close collaboration” of the Indochinese authorities: it was code for total French subordination to Japanese forces in Indochina. The Japanese requested a response by no later than 9 p.m. Decoux attempted to stall the discussions by suggesting a platform for bilateral negotiations on the subject at a later date. The Japanese took the response as a refusal and immediately launched Meigō Sakusen—Operation Moonlight.

All over the Indochinese peninsula, French forces were annihilated. Within three days, the Japanese had liquidated the entirety of the French colonial apparatus. Under the banner of “Asia for Asians,” the Japanese installed a puppet government headed by Emperor Bao Dai, who loyally declared independence on the waves of Radio Saigon. The European population of Indochina was interned in ghettos. This was the coup de grâce for European prestige in Indochina. The psychological effect of white French colons being rounded up into trains by “yellow faces” was profound and shattered any remaining legitimacy the French administration might have had.

These developments placed the Vietminh in a dangerous situation. The French colonial power was being rolled back by an even more aggressive empire. In order to parlay with the various powers trying to carve up Vietnam, Giáp and Nguyễn had to ensure that their own organization was loyal first and foremost to their own political vision—and to them personally. In pursuit of that goal, Nguyễn himself now took on the name of Hồ Chí Minh: the surname is a common Vietnamese one, while Chi Minh means “bright spirit,” an expression of willpower. It was the beginning of a personality cult that would endure through decades of propaganda, both during and after the wars.

Giáp began an aggressive propaganda campaign to enroll local youth in the Vietnam Liberation and Propaganda Unit, which now became called the Liberation Army. This was a military application of the “popular front” concept developed by the Comintern. The popular front was intended as an umbrella movement to unite different forces—including bourgeois and other non-communist ones—into a single organization to achieve a stated larger goal. The cadres of the organization would be communists, but the rank and file had no harsh ideological demands beyond commitment to the purpose of the front. The Vietminh was such an organization. So was the Liberation Army, which was designed with the singular purpose of snatching independence for Vietnam. In practice, the strength of the popular front guaranteed the power and influence of the local communist party at its core.

In the same way, the success of the Vietnamese Communist Party was now dependent on the success of the arms of the Liberation Army. The numbers grew from a few hundred to three thousand; suddenly, the fledgling group had grown into an important force in the border regions in the north. With the encouragement of Nguyễn, Giáp began the task of centralizing control over the various factions conducting armed uprisings against the Japanese. In the summer of 1945, Giáp received orders from the central committee to come down from the forests and the mountains and begin battle southwards. He led a successful attack against the Japanese at the city of Thai Ngyuen, which opened the road to Hanoi.

It was in this context that the revolution of August 1945 took place. The French administration had already been decapitated and the Empire of Japan ultimately surrendered to Allied forces on August 15th. The various Vietnamese nationalist parties who rallied to the Japanese puppet regime were now discredited among the general population. The only standing political player in Vietnam was the Vietminh. The U.S. had already foreseen this outcome earlier in the conflict and directed the OSS to assist Giáp and the Vietminh against the Japanese. The Vietminh had begun an earnest collaboration with the U.S. Combat Section’s Southern Command. In exchange, the Liberation Army built by Giáp received equipment and training.

The advisors sent to support the Liberation Army were extremely sympathetic to the Vietminh, in line with broader U.S. goals for rolling back European colonial power in Asia and Africa. Local OSS agents likely foresaw a similar collaboration to that of Mao’s Communists and the Kuomintang Nationalists that was occurring in China, which at the time had strong support from the U.S. But the promises made in informal discussions did not translate into wholesale support for the Vietminh from the Truman Administration in Washington.

Nor did the Vietminh expect such support. The Marxist education of the party core played an important role in shaping the relationship with the U.S. advisors. While happy to cooperate with the U.S. as it acted as an anti-colonialist power, the Vietminh held to their adage: “only the Soviet Red Army and the Chinese Red Army are fraternal to us.” Hồ Chí Minh had ingrained the principle in them during the war in China, basing it on the Marxist belief that fundamental class interests rendered all other alliances temporary. The U.S., like the Kuomintang, based its anti-colonial project on reactionary and capitalist foundations. Its loyalty could not be relied on beyond an alliance of convenience against Japanese imperialism.

This careful approach was the dividend paid by the educational and decision-making culture now ingrained within the Vietnamese Communist party at its highest levels. Ultimately, it paid off. The U.S. began propping up French forces in Indochina in the late 1940s as part of its containment strategy against the communists.

The apathy towards the Vietminh and the anti-colonial position of the U.S. at the time provided a window for Hồ Chí Minh to launch the August Revolution. Hồ called for a general insurrection on August 10th and the entire country was set aflame. By August 17th, Giáp and his Liberation Army came down from Thai Nguyễn and simply walked into Hanoi to an ecstatic crowd. Even at this late stage, the Vietminh had remained a pariah movement living in difficult conditions in the Vietnamese highlands. Its influence on major population centers had been limited. Now, it marched straight into the limelight of history waving a red banner with a yellow star.

The intense political effect, amplified by a massive propaganda campaign, was that the Vietminh positioned itself as the only political option in Vietnam’s power vacuum. By the end of August, the Vietminh eliminated all practical nationalist challengers. Its influence spread throughout Saigon and wider Cochinchina, the administrative zone in southern Vietnam which had been ruled directly by France.

The resounding success in which the entirety of Vietnam was captured within weeks was the result of the collaboration between Hồ Chí Minh and Giáp. Hồ Chí Minh, the competent visionary and strategist, bid his time for years in the mountains and carefully selected the moment of insurrection. Giáp, the effective lieutenant, operator, and planner, created the centralized military structure to carry it out and integrated new elements as the Vietminh took power. By the time of victory, Giáp managed to grow the Liberation Army to tens of thousands of fighters.

The Road to Hanoi

The Vietminh had effectively taken over the Indochinese peninsula. It declared independence as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with Hồ Chí Minh as head of state. But the French had every intention to reestablish control of their sovereign territory. It was easier said than done: the situation in which De Gaulle’s post-war government found itself was nearly hopeless. The Inter-ministerial Committee of Indochina noted: “Without the pejorative connotation of the term, the task which is in front of us can only be qualified as a reconquest.”

While the Vietminh revolution was sweeping through the country, a man named Jean Sainteny was flown into Hanoi on August 22nd to act as the representative of the De Gaulle government. Sainteny, who was the head of the French mission in Kunming, was able to establish a dialogue with Giáp, who was already commander-in-chief of the Liberation Army. During this period, Giáp, along with Hồ Chí Minh, sought a negotiated solution to Vietnamese independence and the intricacies of the Japanese surrender.

The Vietminh were the masters of the country. But the formal surrender document of the Japanese forces spelled out that the disarmament and repatriation of Japanese troops had to be done by British and Chinese forces. The British favored a return of French rule to Indochina; the Chinese wanted a Kuomintang-style nationalist government, but mainly took advantage of the surrender procedures to pillage the north of the country. But their hostility undermined the Vietminh’s ability to gain international recognition of their victories. Giáp had to return from his role as a military commander to that of a political operative. The Vietminh maintained their dialogue with Sainteny because the French still held international legitimacy, despite U.S. anti-colonialist positions.

On October 5th, 1945, General Leclerc at the head of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps—barely scratched together in time from wartime volunteers—landed in Tan Son Nhut and quickly reached Saigon. He immediately launched a reconquest operation in Cochinchina and pacified the region using the 2nd Armored Division (2° Division Blindé). While the Vietminh resisted the attack, the support and center of the Liberation Army were in North Vietnam. The new, untrained Vietminh troops in South Vietnam were simply no match for French armored troops, which achieved victory by January 1946. Vietnam was now effectively divided between north and south; the stage was set for negotiations.

Sainteny and General Salan, in North Vietnam, were partisans of a strategy of peaceful negotiations with the Vietminh. Back in Paris, post-war France was now under a partnership between the Gaullists and elements of the French Communist Party, which supported French sovereignty over its colonial holdings. Among their opponents, many were sympathetic to the Vietminh cause. The Vietminh itself played up French socialist, liberal, and nationalist influences in its outward-facing propaganda. The negotiations in North Vietnam led to the recognition of a “Vietnamese Republic” within a “French Union”—the details set to be worked out in a subsequent round of negotiations that would take place in Fontainebleau.

Hồ Chí Minh and Phạm Văn Đồng—Giáp’s train and raft companion—accompanied General Salan to Paris for negotiations. While Hồ was giving interviews to the French press and Đồng was leading an interparliamentary friendship delegation to the French National Assembly, Giáp was left behind as the de facto head-of-state. As such, he had to oversee the day-to-day operations of the stalled hostilities. It seems that Hồ Chí Minh trusted his lieutenant to such an extent that Giáp had free reign to deal with the rapidly evolving situation on the ground. The Vietminh leadership suspected that the negotiations were in bad faith and being used to purchase time for the organization of a reconquest operation. Thus, Giáp took measures to counteract and delay French preparations.

Giáp’s new role as an independent decision-maker and accurate reading of the field proved crucial for the survival of the Vietminh. With Hồ abroad, Giáp decided to maintain the pressure through a guerilla harassment campaign against French troops in Cochinchina.

Giáp, who was kept in the loop of the negotiations in France, perceived the growing abyss between the two sides as a precursor to open conflict and began preparations for the restart of hostilities. He assembled a formal regular army of 30,000 troops, supported by thousands of auxiliary militias called Tu Vé. As expected, the French command in Indochina attempted to enlarge their zone of movement in Tonkin, which had been restrained by the Sainteny-Hồ agreement that preceded the negotiations in Fontainebleau. On August 3rd, 1946, with negotiations in Fontainebleau still ongoing, Giáp launched a brutal ambush on a French convoy composed of 60 trucks to check French operations in northern Vietnam.

While Hồ Chí Minh signed a modus vivendi compromise agreement with the French on September 14th, Giáp was preparing a coup de force. Giáp baited the French General Valluy into opening hostilities which degenerated into the bombing of the Vietnamese quarter of Hải Phòng, the port city outside of Hanoi, on November 22nd.

In December, Giáp launched a general offensive against French forces in Hanoi to throw them out to the sea. Using auxiliaries to absorb casualties and preserve his regular troops, Giáp fired the first shot of the Indochinese war with the prospect of prolonged conflict in mind. It was a conflict he would personally conclude at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 when he baited, surrounded, and destroyed the bulk of French forces in northern Vietnam. Resupplying using bicycles, the artillery went on foot up to the hills surrounding the French forward operating base. There, they bled the French to the last man, overcoming a superior force through adaptability and determination.

Once diplomatic efforts failed, Giáp’s role as commander-in-chief of the Liberation Army propelled his importance. The armed struggle had to be won and Giáp was the man to do it. He was given free rein to conduct a conflict in which his troops were significantly outmatched by the enemy and to resort to unusual and creative methods for attaining victory. These strategies relied on the enormous political capital that the Vietminh had built as the basis of their national project. Even with regular forces now assembled, Giáp fought the war according to the principle that political objectives far outweigh tactical success. That principle had guided the Vietnam Liberation and Propaganda Unit when it was only 34 men strong and it would be responsible for the success of the Liberation Army too. Giáp relied on the assistance and willpower of the local population as tools to overcome the enemy’s technical superiority.

By the time of the operations in Hanoi, Giáp had become an independent player in Vietnamese politics. Commanding the loyalty of Vietminh soldiers and the Communist Party, he was no longer merely the lieutenant of Hồ Chí Minh. Giáp had become a trusted equal in the campaign for independence. While Hồ Chí Minh was the spiritual father of the country, Giáp became the most important man in the Vietnamese war camp. The success at Dien Bien Phu was the ultimate proof that Giáp’s conception of a “People’s War” was a winning formula. The same philosophy would inform the coming conflict against American and rival Vietnamese forces for the reconquest of the south.

Giáp had become a power broker in his own right by virtue of creating the Liberation Army. But his political fortunes within the party were still tied to those of Hồ Chí Minh, who had favored him as successor. In the end, Giáp was ultimately passed on as First Secretary in favor of Lê Duẩn, due in part to the blame he took for losses during the Tet Offensive. Instead, his enormous skills as an operator were put to good use as defense minister, where he built the PAVN, North Vietnam’s regular army, into a modern military force on the Eastern Bloc model. By the time of the siege of Saigon in 1975, Giáp’s PAVN was itself under the command of one of his own lieutenants, Văn Tiến Dũng. Saigon’s fall concluded Giáp’s long service as a commander and political operator.

By the end of the war, the Vietminh had long since given way to a unified Communist Party that now ruled the entire territory of Vietnam. Hồ and Giáp’s skill in building mass political movements had been instrumental in their establishment. The structure of a Leninist party had proved surprisingly adaptive to the peasant villages of colonial Vietnam. Once established, its purpose was to provide discipline and structure that could outlast the founding generation. By the time Vietnam was reunited, a new generation had risen to maturity. It was time for Giáp’s own protégés to take the reins of power.

On it, there’ll be written LATAM 3333 to Rio de Janeiro. It’s one-way.

Rio de Janeiro is a city of early risers. Ipanema roars to life at exactly 5:45 a.m. Some stragglers, drunk on cheap beer and mirth, catch cabs at the closing of the bars while the ice boys whizz down the sidewalk by the beach, shouting “Gelo! Gelo!” past the sellers at their stalls. Barraca de Denise 63…Barraca 62…61…

Near Arpoador, on the border between Ipanema and Copacabana, a block from the beach, you’d find me drinking bad coffee at a little cafe, humming “Romaria.” Then the honking would interrupt the voice of Elis Regina in my head. As the convoy would get closer, the gurgling of the engines and honking would grow menacingly louder. Then, you’d catch a poorly made sign on the back window of some rundown Brazilian Lada: “Fora Bolsonaro!” Point made, peace disturbed.

This is my heaven. A normal day in Rio.

Such scenes were common scene in the lead-up to the election. Opposition to President Bolsonaro was loud in Rio, but isolated. First, it was a few activists here and there, but things took a turn for the unexpected during the election week of October 2022. Like a kettle at boiling point, Brazil roiled as the fire underneath kept crackling.

And by crackling, I don’t mean some embers here and there. One of the first signs of how bad things would get was a bus carrying voters burning down on the road in Rio de Janeiro state. Later, as the Brazilian army occupied the bridge to Niterói, constables of the Polícia Militar and elected representatives in Bahia confronted each other. Elsewhere, buses were thrown off schedule and transit boarding was refused to civilians sporting the red colors of the opposition Lula campaign. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (SET) sped up the process by which it could censor online news, controversially targeting opponents of Lula. Rampant censorship took over, as did rumors of lost and stuffed ballots. The list goes on. This is democracy in the Brazilian style.

Democracy With Brazilian Characteristics

In its national mythos, Brazil takes democracy very seriously. More than two decades of dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 imprinted respect for human rights and the right of Brazilians to vote as hard-won privileges in the collective mind of the nation. Many paid in life, limb, and shattered dreams to gain them—at least, in theory. In practice, a surprising number of Brazilians over the age of 45 will sing praises to the dictatorship after a few drinks. Bolsonaro himself is a major defender, crediting it with saving Brazil from communism. When voting to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, he dedicated his vote to Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra, whose dictatorship-era Doi-Codi unit had tortured Rousseff after she was arrested for Marxist guerrilla activities.

Today, though, voting is mandatory in Brazil. Failure to vote in elections can result in the suspension of benefits and government services, alongside fines. It’s a real stick for poorer people to vote. Fortunately, enterprising politicos can capitalize on this by trading votes for food, cash, clothes, and even water. They can also make it easier to vote by bussing voters to the stations directly. The letter of the Brazilian election laws renders both these enterprises illegal. Its byzantine enforcement, however, means that they remain widespread practices.

The 2022 election was particularly unique because all three parties—the pro-Lula “Petists” of the Workers’ Party (PT), the Bolsonarists, and the SET—agreed to rely on the Brazilian armed forces to act as a guarantor of the election. This was an unexpected step in a country so marked by its two decades of military rule. There was enormous, understandable reluctance on behalf of the PT due to the widely known Bolsonarist sympathies of the armed forces. There were even rumors of a supposed coup in the making. Eventually, the Brazilian army shouldered security and a portion of the logistics required to bring a country of 225 million citizens out to vote.

Whatever the sympathies of the Brazilian army, they didn’t get in the way of the role it played in the elections. Being under permanent scrutiny by the civil authorities means that the armed forces try to act beyond reproach. Mighty as they are, the military does not risk the fury of a higher power: the Brazilian supreme court.

Instead, the serious contestation that occurred against mobilizing PT officials on election day was mainly carried out by the Brazilian highway police, the Polícia Rodoviária Federal (PRF), assisted by the myriad of Polícia Militar units all across the country. The PRF closed down routes where the PT would bus in voters, including many bought-off ones, in PT-heavy electoral districts. Because the private bussing of votes is illegal, the PRF could argue that they were applying the letter of the electoral law. But such high-minded legal goals were probably far from the minds of many officers: the PRF, like most law enforcement in Brazil, has heavy Bolsonarist sympathies in the ranks. Blockades were their own way of “balancing” the perceived violations of electoral law by Lula’s campaign.

The move caused outrage in the upper echelons. Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the SET, threatened the arrest of PRF Director-General Silveni Vasques unless he immediately stopped all operations. After a few hours of stand-off, Vasques gave in and ceased all roadblocks, although various units of the Policia Militar continued to conduct stalling operations under the guise of enforcing security during the elections. The non-enforcement of the illegal voter bussing clause under electoral law was perceived by the Bolsonarists as another interference by the SET, all in favor of Lula and the PT. For them, it was a sign of things to come under Lula’s comeback—a return to the days of endemic collusion against their interests.

For many years, the right-wing in Brazil has levied the accusation of “juridicismo” against the country’s political class. It is something akin to judicial activism in Anglo-Saxon legal systems but in a much more blatant fashion. In the context of Brazil’s byzantine electoral laws, juridicismo refers to actions of a sort that would seem completely comical to any foreigner. In practice, it means that certain laws are enforced and others are not, as seen in the case of the PRF and the bussing of voters. It means that minor electoral violations are investigated and major ones are not, depending on who commits them. But even with all its systematic vote-buying and corruption problems, Brazil stringently enforces rules about online content and how many days in advance of elections politicians can advertise.

The Brazilian right skirts this disparate enforcement through creative and comedic means of distributing political propaganda. For example, car dealerships might disseminate pamphlets advertising “22% off merchandise,” and those receiving them will recognize 22 as Bolsonaro’s number; this lets them tiptoe around regulations on electoral ads. Another tactic is the use of the Brazilian national flag on billboards; this baits censorship of the national flag itself by Brazilian courts, something they have so far denied, because of its association with Bolsonaro. It’s Jeitinho Brasileiro—bending the rules, Brazilian-style—in its most glorious colors.

Crosshairs on the Policia Militar

The tug-of-war between the PRF, the Polícia Militar, and the PT in the election is seen by many as a return to the battlegrounds of prior years. Many members of law enforcement in Brazil feel that the work of the last half a decade in fighting crime and insecurity in the streets could be easily undone with a return of the PT.

For Brazilian police, juridicismo takes on a personal dimension. Laws prohibiting “excessive force” have been applied to exclude the targeting of the body, particularly of the head, in a shootout situation. Speaking with a former member of the presidential security detail, I learned that Brazilian policemen train to counterintuitively shoot at limbs in situations of extreme danger. Any stray bullet that lands in the skull of a criminal warrants an immediate investigation by the Brazilian judiciary into a possible “extrajudicial execution.” Although such laws continued under the Bolsonaro presidency, the government was willing to cut some slack. It’s not hard to see why there is enormous animosity towards the PT by those who see them as constraining an effective response against violent criminals.

Expanded gun ownership was another plank of the Bolsonaro program. Acquisition of firearms for personal defense became fairly easy and many took advantage of it: since 2018, the number of firearms in private circulation has more than doubled. Alongside an unshackled Polícia Militar, gun ownership allowed Brazil’s security situation to improve considerably. Brazil is extremely dangerous in a way that very few can imagine without having been there. Brazilians’ ability to defend themselves when subjected to the arbitrary violence of organized crime changed the game for many ordinary citizens.

Under this expansion, many ordinary Brazilians finally felt that they were no longer personally powerless and that the Polícia Militar was now sufficiently effective to discourage crime. That sentiment drives much of the support for Bolsonaro in Brazil’s violent cities.

Whether the Polícia Militar, the PRF, or even the military are acting in good faith in their electoral policing is beside the point of what their actions tell us about Brazilian democracy. When the PRF conducted its stalling operations, Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of the PT, called for the immediate arrest of Silveni Vasques and called on PT parliamentarians to head to the Polícia Militar headquarters of their respective states and hand out arrest warrants in person. For the PT, it was the only possible response—the correct political impulse. The police and the army, as bastions of Bolsonarist support, are hostile institutions from the PT’s perspective. Unlikely to be captured by the PT, the only other option is to gut them.

The reason for the Polícia Militar’s escape from political capture is simple. It is the very nature of the fight against Brazil’s brutal criminal gangs and the country’s widespread street-level violence that radicalizes policemen. A few dead colleagues, a few threats to your loved ones, and there is simply no coming back. It doesn’t matter what the entire judicial apparatus of the Brazilian federation has to say: you’re not going to put your life or the lives of your colleagues on the line for some appearance of ideological conformity. Instead, there is an open confrontation between the Policia Militar—along with the PRF and local forces—and the judiciary. It’s a battle that undergirds all of Brazilian politics, and it’s one that PT and its judicial allies were well aware of as the elections unfolded.

As a result of this situation, one of the policy proposals of the Lula campaign is the liquidation of the Polícia Militar in some form or another, with familiar talking points used as a justification: the claim that over-militarization of the police leads to more violence in underprivileged communities, that the Polícia Militar is a right-wing death squad used to kill poor Brazilians, and so on. The idea is to transfer the competencies of the Polícia Militar to the equivalent Polícia Civil, which can be politically captured and carries far less institutional weight.

For many Brazilians, any talk of the abolition of the Polícia Militar means a return to the bad old days of PT rule. In the 1990s and the 2000s, chronic insecurity and corruption were the order of the day.  It’s hard to explain what this kind of rhetoric does to the average Brazilian who immediately grasps the exact meaning of “demilitarization of the police.” Many would-be Lula supporters understand that it unshackles the criminal hand that will pull the trigger on them.

Bolsonarismo in Crisis

Like many of the populists of the 2010s, including Trump, Bolsonaro wasn’t elected to bring a certain platform to government and engage in the minutiae of public policy. He was elected to torch the whole thing down. The dysfunction and internal conflict in governments with populist leaders was not a side effect of a societal ideological conflict, but the express desire of the voters who brought these figures to power. They wanted to throw the wrench into the machinery of the state. Juridicismo and public violence were supposed to be on notice.

In practice, Bolsonaro’s classically liberal stance sparked resentment among his own supporters, shackling a would-be activist government. The enthusiasm among his supporters had dampened in the years since his election, but the threat and then reality of Lula’s victory brought it back with a vengeance.

Despite the unbearable figure that Bolsonaro was for much of the social class behind juridicismo, he went on to lose the 2022 election by little more than one percent. Regardless of what image the media painted of Bolsonaro—usually as a dangerous nostalgic of the military dictatorship, or as a fascist threatening Brazilian democracy and the sanctity of the judiciary—a good half of Brazilian voters remain strongly behind him. This gives him a personal legitimacy that will outlast his administration, as evidenced by the prolonged protests gripping cities all over Brazil. Massive crowds gathered in front of Brazilian army installations chanting “Forcas Armadas, salva o Brasil” (“Armed Forces, save Brazil”). A return of Lula is so odious to half of the country that the suspension of democracy and direct military rule are seen as salutary alternatives.

This contradicts the image that the Western press built of Lula’s image in Brazil as a universally-heralded savior of democracy, the Amazon, and the country’s racial and sexual minorities. Bolsonaro’s assimilation to Trump blinded the entire western media and the State Department to the realities on the ground. As it is not uncommon for the Western press to map its own ideological conflicts onto the rest of the world, it went ahead and lionized Lula into such a figure, erasing his past as a man of the old socialist left.

In the coalition of progressive movements that backed Lula against Bolsonaro, the urban bourgeois youth are only one minor component; groups like workers’ unions, indigenous coalitions, and segments of the Catholic Church friendly to liberation theology carry far more weight. The only reason this image of Lula as a great social progressive took precedence over his other social commitments was that bourgeois-bohemian youth is the only class the Western media is able to interface with internationally.

While the Western press and foreign ministries depict Lula as the local anti-Trump, an equivalent fantasy plays out in capitals hostile to the U.S. Here, Lula is seen as a great figure of the Third World by those geopolitical powers pursuing multipolarity and a decrease in U.S. hegemony. Lula was a founding member of BRICS and his return is welcomed by Moscow and Beijing.

The guiding principle of the anti-Western, multipolar world order is trade and the valorization of economic development over political conflicts. Lula’s Brazil will likely pursue further economic integration of the entire South American continent, now filled with friendly, left-leaning capitals. The flagship project for the continent is building up a single currency bloc, led by Brazil, for all of South America. This would be a far more decisive statement of continental autarky than Mercosur, the Southern Common Market already in existence. Lula’s plan is to capitalize on the red wave which has gripped Latin America from Obrador in Mexico to Fernández in Argentina, which is now pursuing membership in BRICS. The stars couldn’t be more aligned for the development of South America as an important pole in a multipolar world.

Will Lula and the PT conduct a progressive, liberalizing social policy? Yes, most likely. Will this be the cornerstone of Lula’s social program? Absolutely not. Will Lula pursue a left-wing geopolitical strategy to unite South America under a red banner? Yes, most likely. Will Lula turn Brazil into Venezuela? Absolutely not. Casting Lula as either a western-style progressive or a third-worldist overlooks significant dimensions of the PTs power base and its party machine.

While Bolsonarists decry Lula as a candidate pushed on Brazil by the Puebla Group—a forum that brings together the Latin American left—the reality is that there is significant genuine support for Lula in PT’s home base in the Northeast. While the motivations of the Bolsonarist right are easily graspable, the PT’s success in building a lasting power base on its home turf is much more elusive.

The Lessons of Nordeste

For Western scholars, the usual reading of the Northeast-Southeast divide in Brazil is through the lens of critical race theory. The explanation is as follows: the Northeast is more black, and therefore historically a victim of oppression—therefore Lula represents the voice of blacker, marginalized communities in the Northeast. Conversely, the Southeast is white, and whiteness represents a supremacist inheritance from the colonial era—therefore Bolsonaro is a fascist, defending a white Brazil now on the defensive. As simplistic as this sounds in two sentences, this is considered a respectable scholarly position.

The reality is that the Northeast of Brazil is not majority black. Bahia is the only black plurality state in Brazil, with 16 percent of the population being black. For the region as a whole, it’s somewhere around 10 percent. With that in mind, there is the additional issue of the sociology of race. Race works very differently in Brazil. Fragmented identities such as “African-Brazilian” or “Japanese-Brazilian” would seem completely bizarre. Regional and class identities are much stronger. For example, the Candomblé religion and the martial art of Capoeira Angola are strongly rooted in Bahianese culture without explicitly being markers of an “African-Brazilian” identity, though their African origins are known and celebrated.

Another simplistic tendency in explaining the Northeast and Southeast divide is in crude Marxist wealth terms. At face value, this reveals a fundamental divide: the Northeast has a GDP per capita of just over $3000 USD, while the Southeast has a GDP per capita of about $7800 USD. The reasoning goes, the Northeast is poorer and more exploited—once again, Lula therefore emerges as the voice of the marginalized communities of the Northeast. But this ignores the position of poorer communities on a primary issue that is on the minds of many Brazilians right now: gang violence and insecurity, which low-income neighborhoods and favelas are the most subjected to. In the poorest neighborhoods of major cities in the Southeast, this translated into support for Bolsonaro during the 2018 election—a lead he lost in the 2022 election.

In order to avoid these analytic traps, a better starting point is the material nature of the regional divide. Brazil is a big country, but also an old one with five centuries of colonial history. Each of its regions had very distinct arcs of historical development.

The historical capital of colonial Brazil was Salvador. It was a prized possession of the Portuguese crown at a time when sugar was a cash crop. Bahia was a major sugarcane-producing region and Salvador was its port of exportation. African chattel slavery was a founding institution of the region, leading to a highly hierarchical, highly stratified, feudal, and agricultural society. Coupled with the discovery of gold, the region became one of the most developed in the Americas in the seventeenth century, with very high rates of urbanization. Meanwhile, the rest of the hemisphere was still undergoing its period of initial settlement. Pelourinho, the historical center of Salvador da Bahia is a living testament to this period, with its churches gilded in gold and a heavy Jesuit presence.

In contrast, the historical trajectory of the Southeast was very different and came later. Slavery was also a founding institution, but for most of its history this had to do with the subjection of local Amerindian tribes, which led to heavy intermarriages with the founding Portuguese Bandeirantes. It wasn’t until the Portuguese crown moved the capital to Rio de Janeiro, and most particularly when the Portuguese court exiled itself there in 1807, that the region saw major developments.

While the Crown favored the import of African slaves to exploit the interior of the Southeast, they also brought with them liberal economic ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The new valorization of trade infrastructure led to huge investments in the port of Rio de Janeiro and its surrounding areas, as well as the encouragement of early manufacturing.

In the nineteenth century, this industrial maritime infrastructure drew huge numbers of European immigrants, catapulting the development of the region and leading to the establishment of a powerful bourgeois elite and bourgeois institutions. Rio de Janeiro’s Centro neighborhood is filled with the beautiful buildings of the imperial era, with a good number of them built by trade and manufacturing groups. In contrast, the Northeast, with its agricultural economy and its inability to draw European immigrants, stagnated for decades.

This brings us to the crux of the divide. One useful way to categorize these developments is to say that Northeastern Brazil is a feudal fragment: its history, culture, and economic development are marked by its initial founding. Meanwhile, Southeastern Brazil is a bourgeois fragment, with its historical trajectory determined by the introduction of liberal institutions at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The American political theorist Louis Hartz analyzed these divergent developments across colonial societies in his work The Founding of New Societies. He postulated the idea that the ideological frame of colonial societies remained locked from the exact moment of their founding. This stood in contrast to European societies, where changing class power structures caused updates in the ruling ideology. He thus categorized three major ideological frames: feudal, whig (bourgeois), and radical. Examples of feudal colonial fragments include French Canada and most of Latin America, while examples of whig fragments include the U.S. and Dutch South Africa. Applying this to Brazil, we see that these different regions of Brazil in fact attribute their social structures and political elites to very different founding moments in the country’s history. Thus, the nature of politics in these regions differs as well.

In The Founding of New Societies, Hartz writes:

Feudalism, of course, goes into the socialist brew and in the case of the feudal fragment, which smothers the Enlightenment from the beginning, there is a powerful type of appeal which the Marxist can make when the comparative impact ultimately hits […] He can promise a single leap across the whole of the modern experience that has been suppressed, a combined development into the last stage of industrialism and democracy […] To be sure, especially after the First World War, various types of socialism penetrate the Latin-American labor movement. But they do not transform the culture, and above all, they do not touch the great hacienda tradition on the land, one of the great sources of the later Marxian threat.

Lula’s lasting appeal in the Northeast stems from exactly the fact he represents this “promise [of] a single leap across the whole of the modern experience.” Lula’s familial roots are in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, and his early political career began when he worked as metallurgist and trade unionist in the metalworks factories of São Paulo—a figure of opposition to the bourgeois powers of the Southeast. Politically, he serves as the embodiment of the Northeast’s search for an alternative model of development.

In his seminal work, Raízes do Brasil, the Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda developed the concept of the “homem cordial.” He writes:

It is difficult for holders of positions of public responsibility, formed in such an environment, to understand the distinction between private and public domains. This is what separates the “patrimonial” civil servant from Max Weber’s pure bureaucrat. For the “patrimonial” functionary, the management of the political presents itself as a matter of his own particular interests; the functions, jobs, and benefits that are earned are the result of his personal rights and not from objective interests [of the bureaucratic state]. The choice of the men who exercise public functions is done according to matters of personal trust, that the candidate earns, rather than the result of his own abilities. […] And one of the decisive effects of the uncontested supremacy of the nuclear family […] is that relations formed in the domestic sphere of life serve as mandatory models for any social composition between [Brazilians].

Although Buarque de Holanda is talking about Brazil as a whole, this phenomenon is significantly more pronounced in the Northeast, where feudal influence makes the line separating the public and private very thin indeed. The rule of the “personable” through familial and personal relationships is ubiquitous, suffocating any attempt at creating a genuinely public sphere. Thus, the endemic corruption of the PT—as demonstrated in the Lava Jato trials—is a feature of good socialization and conformity to the social expectations of the Northeast. Cordiality is the basis of political life and is why PT has a lasting appeal in the region. The PT’s clientelism, including vote-buying, is a kind of patrimonial socialism. Lula’s own lasting charisma and image as a fatherly figure to the Brazilian left is a manifestation of this phenomenon of the patrimonial public figure.

Cordiality is also good politics. The PT’s ability to build a wide coalition with a variety of churches, community centers, labor organizations, social movements, and intellectual currents stems from this very fact. Its ability to navigate the juridicismo of Brasilia’s ruling class and deftly nudge it to one side is the result of this deeply Brazilian instinct. Bolsonaro’s classical liberalism and the reduction of clientelism by scaling back the state runs counter to the social expectations of the Northeast.

Because cordiality is a more pronounced feature of feudal societies, patrimonial socialism informs the PT’s model of state-driven development for the Northeast. There have been a number of successes of this model in recent years, which even led to it being adopted by the centrist politicians who dethroned the PT in their own strongholds.

One notable example is the Salvador subway, launched by the state-owned CCR Metrô Bahia in 2014. It completely revitalized the city. It has 370,000 passengers a day. The bike lanes which run alongside the tracks are also heavily used. This was a project by the state government of Bahia, which has been under PT control since 2003.

Another example is the revitalization project for Salvador’s historical center, championed by former prefect Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto, an “homem cordial” par excellence. The project cleaned up and secured a large coastal section of the city and restored a number of old decrepit buildings. Neto is from one of the most powerful political dynasties in Brazil and his influence runs so deep in Bahia that governance is basically a family affair. The cleanup of Salvador was a matter of maintenance and improvement of the familial patrimony.

These are both examples of the Northeast’s development model succeeding on its own terms. In this model, the politics of cordiality deliver results beneficial to the whole of the polity, inclusive of all the classes that constitute Northeastern society. These are also the politics that PT champions at the federal level. Its policies forward the expansion of the state. Their clientelism reaches the Northeast’s educated middle classes in the form of government jobs in public institutions and infrastructure spending. The expansion of subsidies and favoritism in contracts embody clientelism for select cordial businessmen. Since the early 2000s, these policies have earned the PT much loyalty and a lasting base of support, which in turn yielded victory in the 2022 election. The addition of the socially progressive elements of the Southeast ensures their inclusion in the system of guarantees, but also their subjugation to the PT’s regime of cordiality.

Support for PT is driven by two factors: ideological and sociological. The ideological factors are what rally the cultural elites of Brazil to the PT’s program: academics, the press, and even iconic funk and música popular Brasileira artists. This subset is attracted to the vision that the PT articulates for the country. It’s a progressive vision that plays on Brazil’s egalitarian impulses in the face of a rigid class society, and extends a version of familial solidarity to the whole of the community, the region, the nation, and the environment. The sociological factors, on the other hand, cement the PT’s base in the Northeast and allow the party to consistently articulate and execute a seductive, independent vision for Brazil and Latin America.

This shows exactly what is missing from the Bolsonaro camp. Being the candidate for popular anger and revolt is insufficient. As soon as you enter the corridors of power, you have to articulate a positive, energizing vision for the whole of the polity which gives the legitimacy you need to last for more than a term. A classically liberal proposition simply doesn’t cut it anymore. The 1980s were forty years ago and it doesn’t have the radical edge it once did. Latin America has moved on, and so has the world. Under those circumstances, the Brazilian right lacks several factors that it would need to triumph over an entrenched, byzantine system. The Southeast tends to lionize the military because they view it as one of the few truly meritocratic institutions. But military coups are not enough to overcome generations of cordiality and corruption.

Joaquim Nabuco, the great Nordestino statesman and abolitionist, once said: “In our society, it is the orphans, the abandoned, who win the struggle, rise, and govern.” This is insightful in terms of how things may play out. The Brazilian Southeastern upper classes rallied behind Bolsonaro. But they were raised in the confines of a domestic, warm, feminine society, and will retreat into the comfort of their wealthy compounds as the PT returns to power.

While the PT’s regime of corruption is one in which competence is an afterthought, its buildup of a mass movement will likely prove effective in the short term. It is the middle class and the poor that will bear the consequences of the PT’s policies—whether they pan out well or descend into chaos and violence. Some will learn to navigate the fallout, and it is from here that Nabuco’s orphans may come.

The following essay originally appeared in print in Palladium 04. To receive original content in future print editions, subscribe here.

She ran her hand up my thigh. I almost spilled my drink. There have been many times in my life where the absurdity of the moment stood out to me and this was one of them. She whispered something in my ear that I had a hard time making out. My Chinese isn’t exactly stellar, but I could tell her Thai accent wasn’t going to make things easy. This was truly the place for edifying intercultural exchange—another laowai, another Thai prostitute ready to greet him. Rituals are important.

Judy’s is one of the coolest places in Shanghai. It’s a relic from a time when Shanghai used to be even cooler. The decor was down to a tee. It hadn’t changed since the 1990s: tacky bright purple and pink flashing lights which used to be ubiquitous in all the go-go bars of Asia at the time, alongside besparkled girls performing cute little choreographies to kitschy 1990s Chinese pop songs.

But this was now a different Shanghai from those days. You could tell by the crowd. Judy’s was now frequented by foreign tech workers and businessmen, mid-level party officials, and serious salarymen. They were all regulars here—Ali Baba’s forty thieves. The location was perfect in Jing’An district, where Shanghai’s bustling tech scene was picking up and luxurious offices and the chicest brands were going up all around Nanjing road, a few hundred meters away. Judy’s was around the block from my office and became a regular watering hole for the colleagues in my building. Tongren Road, where Judy’s was located, was bustling with all sorts of nightlife. I had recently gotten into an altercation with the sons of a PLA general at a hip-hop club down the road. As I said, full of life.

To my greatest disappointment, I had never met this mysterious Judy in all the times that I had been there. This madame was one of the most infamous figures in Shanghai. She had been in the trade since the early 1990s, like many at the time, but she had managed to survive the clearing out of Shanghai’s notorious red-light district. In a city where even the most reputable and ritziest clubs were constantly raided by the police, her business was thriving. She had changed with the times. A bit past the intersection of Tongren road, she also owned another club, Manhattan, where she procured Vietnamese girls. Thai and Vietnamese girls are the most sought-after in East Asia because of their beauty. And Madame Judy’s was the most sought-after den in Shanghai. Madame Judy was in the business of only the best.

Why was she allowed to operate an illicit establishment in the middle of a total surveillance state? Did she have a tacit understanding with the Shanghai police chief? What was she providing to stay afloat? Bribes? Undoubtedly, but perhaps also intelligence. China is a country of rumors and there were many surrounding Madame Judy. She might have been trafficking in them as well. Where better to fish for rumors than a brothel?

There is a governance lesson in the way that Shanghai’s police manage the city’s underground: the underground is useful. Consequently, there is an ideal level of crime in a society and it is not zero. Competent governance requires making room for a criminal underground. The competent ruler can leverage it to cement his hold on power or to take power against a flailing state. Additionally, the underground is a great place for rising political elites to learn the more fundamental realities of power. This becomes particularly useful when you’re looking to take on hyper-sanitized, ultra-meritocratic, mandarinate elites.

Shanghai, one of the safest cities in the world, is proof of concept. You can walk anywhere at any hour with absolute peace of mind. Young professional women, especially, love that about the city. But China is a place with a lot of grey. There is more going on under the surface. There was clearly a very active criminal underground operating in the city. Judy’s brothels were only the surface; prostitutes drugged gullible men and stole their belongings—or sometimes, their organs. There was a very active drug trafficking scene, despite this crime carrying the death penalty. People disappeared all the time and the stench of human trafficking was everywhere. China is not for beginners.

China is also where Western liberal prejudices go to die. You can’t have prosperity under communist rule, except if you can. You can’t have functional markets without the rule of law, except if you can. You can’t have a criminal underground under a total surveillance state, except if you can.

There was more going on here than simply the Shanghai police being unable to quash the underworld. The Shanghai government had understood the value and the services that the underground provides. They understood that it functioned as a pressure valve. You didn’t have any political freedoms, but your supply of bootleg booze, cheap cigarettes, and women (or organs, as the case may be) would never be tampered with. This modus operandi is present in many countries under authoritarian rule and the criminal underground is always party to the arrangement.

Schmitt offers one model for conceptualizing what’s going on: suspension of de jure processes by de facto power. Although Schmitt was concerned with the suspension of constitutional order, we can also extend this line of thinking to the co-existence of the rule of law alongside criminal structures which it may or may not be able to uproot. When the Shanghai police refuse to enforce the law against certain actors within the city’s underground, they are effectively making an exception. The government and the police suspend the due course of the state’s judicial mechanism in an ultimate act of sovereignty where the interests of the state are placed above its own regular functioning.

It’s a good model, but not a perfect one. The liberal state with a corporate political identity is modern, but the coexistence of law and criminality is not. There are other, older conceptions to draw on.

Another conception is that of the extension of privileges. When the monarchies of 17th- and 18th-century Europe allocated letters of marque for disrupting shipping, they were codifying a de facto exemption from the legal means of suppressing international piracy. They withdrew their legal prerogative in order to grant a distinct power to a subordinate. A personal-level “state of exception” transformed into a legal privilege, once again for the superior interest of the state. These mechanisms of suspension are necessary to the regular exercise of political power. The recruitment of rogue elements for reasons of state has historically been an integral part of these suspensions.

But what exactly are these underground or rogue elements and what relationship do they have to state power?

First, a little structural analysis is necessary. What exactly is the underground “under” and the state “over?” That middle is where the proper functioning of society occurs, where people dwell, work, marry, reproduce, and die according to the norms of what society considers worthwhile and respectable. This is the domain of “normal” society: the working man, the middle classes, the local gentry, the trades and major professions, and most of the bourgeoisie. It includes neither society’s commanding heights, nor its deviants, outcasts, and criminals. This is society’s core, not its outliers. Its members do not generate new sets of norms much, but their role in upholding and socially reproducing norms means that a real society-wide transformation isn’t complete until it wins over this social majority. Once this happens, formerly radical or deviant sets of norms themselves become the socially enforced and largely unquestioned markers of basic respectability.

This middle section of society is also where the immense majority of production happens, and thus where the logic of production regulates life. Nearly all societies can be divided between “productive” and “non-productive” sections. Even hunter-gatherers have these distinctions, with the production done by the hunters and the gatherers and the “lower” and “upper” elements represented in the figures of the outcast on one hand and the shaman on the other. The former is outside of the reproductive system by virtue of his exclusion and the latter is outside of it by his proximity to the higher spiritual forms.

Just as production has a logic of its own, so do the things which are excluded from it. This is true regardless of whether they are “lower” or “higher” in relation to production. The key distinction, in this case, is between productive and non-productive, regardless of whether the latter groups are rejected by productive society as filth or as transcendence.

Armed with this expansive distinction, it becomes evident that the underground isn’t simply the variety of criminal organizations that may operate under or outside the auspices of productive and respectable society. It also encompasses all elements which respectable society rejects as unclean, improper, or deviant. The same goes with “higher” elements which are rejected as superior, elusive values—praiseworthy, but not accessible to most people. The logic of production has no use for warriors, criminals, poets, or aristocrats because it sees these elements ultimately as either parasitic or disruptive to the processes of production. Yet it encounters a major problem: the logic of production requires the functioning of a coercive and administrative state.

The administrative state is the productive state. It is where paperwork is processed, where driver’s licenses are granted, roads are paved, and where all the functional, algorithmic and mechanical processes of the state are hard at work. The coercive state is where the higher transcendental processes which are concerned with state violence and the mythos of legitimacy take place. It includes monarchs and the traditions of monarchies, the armed forces, the secret and not-so-secret police forces, esoteric aristocratic and technocratic rituals, the charisma and magnetism of authoritarian leaders, the mandates of heaven and the divine rights of kings, and the mystical and elusive “People” in republics.

If these transcendental values do not exist, then the state does not exist, and state violence withers away by virtue of being unable to motivate itself. Paved roads, driver’s licenses, and paperwork are great, but no one is going to die or kill for them. The state, in its intrinsic capacity to coerce, requires these higher elements to even exist. All states are a mixture of both, but the nature of the regime in place determines the balance of these two parts.

It is at the level of transcendental authority and of the mystical and coercive elements of the state that the link between the underground and the state becomes clear. The warrior and the thug are reflections of each other. So are the liege lord and the crime lord, protection rackets and feudal dues, highwaymen and nomadic hordes, the courtesan and the prostitute, gangs and armies. Both the ruler and the kingpin have to operate based on personal codes proving their word, their authority, and their power—the former because he creates and enforces laws and the latter because he operates outside them. Neither simply follows them like a normal, productive citizen. Each of these binaries demonstrates upper and lower manifestations of the same phenomena. 

This implies that law and criminality are not just intertwined conceptually, but structurally and socially as well. Are criminals so very distant from aristocrats? Can criminals, in fact, be aristocrats? Beyond being useful to the state, the underground has an intimate relationship with state power by virtue of its inability to be assimilated into productive society. The underground is made of the same raw material as the coercive, transcendent state.

Of Emperors and Thugs

On the 20th of September, 1979, three men assassinated Pierre Goldman in broad daylight in the middle of the Abbé-Georges-Hénocque plaza in Paris. Later that night, the assassins claimed their kill to the French press on a phone call: “Pierre Goldman has paid for his crimes. The justice of the state having once again shown its weakness and indulgence, we did as our duty demanded. We claim this act in the name of the ‘Honour of the Police’ militant group.” Pierre Goldman had styled himself a French Che Guevara and was preparing to lead an armed insurgency. After spending a year with Venezuelan Marxist paramilitaries, Goldman returned to France where he turned to robberies to fund his revolution. In one incident, two pharmacists were murdered and Goldman was pursued by the law.

When finally arrested, the entirety of the French left, including the likes of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Mitterand, clamored for his release. He was absolved of murder on a technicality and received a reduction on his other charges. Goldman was released in 1975, or five years after his arrest. Following his assassination, 15,000 supporters showed up at his funeral, including the luminaries of the French intelligentsia. 40 years later, his murder remains officially unsolved.

Goldman’s killing came hot on the heels of yet another political assassination. The previous year, on the 4th of May, 1978, a hit squad of two men entered the lobby of Henri Curiel’s building and gunned him down as he was leaving for his yoga class. Earlier the year prior, Henri Curiel was placed under house arrest under suspicion of being the head of a KGB network in France, but the French state had been unable to prosecute him and he was let go. The Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) officially claimed the hit. It does not come as a surprise that the OAS might have wanted Curiel’s head considering his long and illustrious career as an anti-colonial militant. Born to a francophone Jewish banking family in Egypt, Curiel reneged on his bourgeois roots in his university years and became a hardline revolutionary for the rest of his days. From the early 1940s onwards, Curiel actively participated in the organization and funding of a variety of anti-colonial struggles including the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale and the African National Congress in South Africa. He is also credited with recruiting George Blake, his cousin, who became the most famous Soviet mole inside the M16. Curiel’s murder also remains unsolved.

The murders of Goldman and Curiel are studies in how the state uses underground or rogue elements to advance its goals and score tactical points when the official organs are paralyzed. The context of these murders is the France of the 1960s and 1970s, when the stability of the country became very precarious, starting with the 1961 putsch attempt of several French generals in Algiers and the militarily unnecessary handover of Algeria to FLN. Then came a number of general strikes throughout the decade, the enormous power of a left-wing intelligentsia bent on toppling the French fifth republic, the numerous assassination attempts against De Gaulle, the widespread protests May of 1968, the years of lead, and all this in the middle of the Cold War.

The official French state apparatus was threatened by adversaries abroad, hostile elements at home, and rogue actors within. Yet, it managed to use the underworld and men from the “lower” sections of society to achieve goals it could not accomplish by its official “upper” organs. It could not put away Curiel and Goldman using the course of official justice and so decided to disappear them using unofficial means—yet in both cases, it could cite the stability and continuity of the republic as the source of legitimacy for its actions.

In January 2018, the French judiciary reopened the case of the assassination of Henri Curiel following the posthumous publication of the confessions of a certain René l’Élégant who revealed himself as the assassin of both Goldman and Curiel, whom he had murdered at the request of French intelligence. Not unlike the men he killed, René the Elegant had all the right credentials of the outlaw militant. He had joined the French royalist movement at the age 14 and he served in the 6e régiment de parachutistes d’infanterie de marine. With his professional military experience, he joined the Lebanese Falangists during the civil war. He then assisted the famous Bob Denard (dubbed the “Corsair of the Republic”) in a 1977 coup attempt in Bénin. Bob and René’s adventures played a similar political role to those of the assassinations: France could not officially intervene with its armed forces but had to maintain its interests in its former colonies. It is here again that we see the state can recruit sections of the underworld it normally persecutes as vehicles for projecting its own power, particularly when it wants to enforce order in times of crisis.

Mercenary, assassin for hire, committed royalist, but also a thug, René the Elegant was well known among French criminal circles. Himself of Italian origin, he was at ease with both small-time Corsican gangsters and le milieu de Marseille, the infamous Marseille mafia which was initially blamed for the murder of Goldman. The nickname wasn’t ironic. René wore bespoke shoes, the fold of his trousers was always impeccable, and he was flanked by a tiny little dog called Rocky. He was refined and came from a cultured background, his mother being a respected lyric singer. His family home was on the Champs-Elysées, where the iconic French actor, Jean Marais, was a regular guest. His refinement extended to all the arts. He was an avid cinephile and seamlessly combined argot (French street slang) with opportune quotations from the most famous volumes of French literature. All in all, he was the kind of character that only the intersection of French high culture and the French criminal underground could produce.

Beyond the immediate lesson in statecraft, we have in the person of René the Elegant the combination of society’s disreputable elements and its transcendental ones. These two extremes of social order have a close relationship to one another, one that raises eyebrows and even elicits condemnation from the broad and respectable middle—and should, since normal lawful conduct is the middle’s function. But it is, in fact, also necessary for social functioning. This is why we cannot differentiate so starkly between the upper classes and the downtrodden ones, between aristocrats and brigands, or between those who make the laws and those who exist beyond their reach. These categories can suddenly shift, with today’s criminal becoming tomorrow’s statesman or philanthropist—a pattern which played out many times among American elites through the generations, from the pirate-descended Vanderbilts to the bootlegging Kennedys.

Many modern nations have, at their source, ethnic criminal gangs. This is true of the raiding Northmen who became the dukes of Normandy and laid the foundations of modern England, as well as of the Frankish armed bands who lie at the origin of Charlemagne’s empire and of the French and German nations. In periods of decline, peripheral classes like criminals or barbarians often become a source of order, later translating into renewed authority. Since they survive by doing what the state and respectable, law-abiding institutions cannot do, they find themselves in a useful position when these the administrative organs of overstretched states go into sepsis. The governors of Roman Gaul integrated the Frankish bands into the security apparatus of the state, but these rogue elements outlasted the collapse of the administrative Roman state. Similarly, French kings bestowed titles on Northmen leaders and recruited them for defence against other roving gangs. This unity of the upper and lower is at the source of the emergence of adaptable state structures in times of decline.

Since the coercive part of the state follows the same logic as the roving gang by virtue of their niche outside of productive society, as soon as the lower elements acquire productive societal structures, especially the core economic ones, they are very easily able to embody the superior values of the state. This was the exact process of transcendence that was behind the emergence of the legitimate states of the early middle ages.

We also have modern examples of the process where the lower and upper unify into one to abruptly stop a period of decline and restore order—albeit, resulting in a political order far more distant and alienated from the productive base than its predecessor. One such case deals with the French liberal democratic coercive state as it atrophied under even limited bourgeois rule. During a chaotic period lasting from 1830 until 1851, France careened from the constitutional and evidently bourgeois July Monarchy to the short-lived Second Republic, and ended with the restoration of a new order with a more alienating, coercive, and transcendental imperative under Napoleon III. The Second Empire, which resulted from this settlement, oversaw two decades of order and development in the country. Despite its greater alienation from productive society, the Second Empire seemed able to rule it with greater authority. It had a transcendental imperative that its immediate predecessors lacked.

A century before the murders of Goldman and Curiel, the criminal underworld played a pivotal role in the creation of this new, authoritative regime and in the restoration of a new legitimate state order. In his “18th Brumaire” essay, Marx described the rise of Napoleon III:

This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.

Reading this passage, we see the emergence of this unique historical figure which embodies the unity of the upper and the lower: the figure of l’empereur-voyou, the Thug-Emperor.

In his multiple attempts at upending the order which had forced him into lifelong exile, Napoleon III spent prolonged periods in prison. While his conditions were comfortable and he used his six-year imprisonment at the Fortress of Ham to read, write and cultivate himself, it was nonetheless an experience that marked him and put him in proximity to the lumpenproletariat, the French underclass, psychologically and experientially. He later managed to escape his prison. Simultaneously acting as Bonapartist prince and seasoned convict, he used the collapse of the July Monarchy to elect himself to the National Assembly. Finally elected president of the Second Republic, he forced a confrontation with the National Assembly which he had every intention to win. Marx points to the secret ingredient to his victory over the bourgeois order:

This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème…

One might naturally doubt how auspicious these beginnings for a new order could possibly be. Yet that would be a mistake. The reign of Napoleon III is notably marked by the complete rebuilding of Paris on the Haussmanian model, which required the clearing out of the slums and an end to the pauperism which led to the emergence of this massive underclass in the first place. The Thug Emperor had his ear to the ground. He energetically pursued strong social policies coupled with a commitment to free trade and state-led industrialization. His reign saw the emergence of France as a true industrial power broker on the continent. Despite his defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, it is the remnants of his state that are today the backbone of French technical and industrial power and of the French social and cultural apparatus which preserves France’s status as a true great power for the foreseeable future.

Napoleon III’s ability to keep his ear to the ground let him outmaneuver far better-placed enemies. You cannot rule from behind excel sheets. Only an infusion of this transcendental imperative can achieve the goals of a truly great state. The tragedy of the modern discourse on power is that it completely ignores this element. This ignorance misleads us into unproductive intellectual territory. It may come as a shock to some, but codifying your laws into the blockchain is not going to resolve the crisis of competence that we find ourselves in. In fact, it might be time to look in the other direction.

Not only the underworld, but also many other unpatrolled sections of society present interesting possibilities in terms of the emergence of new elites that can take on the mantle. As we have seen in the previous cases, a functioning and cohesive political order needs to be fundamentally alienating towards the productive orders of society because in defining, motivating, and defending that productive order, it necessarily acts outside of it on a more fundamental reality. When these elements atrophy, they need to be renewed from other sources. A Thug-Emperor to upend the American constitutional order and re-found a new industrial state may or may not be in the cards, but there are other lessons to be drawn.

Some time after I finished my work in Shanghai, I ended up in Macau, an island that has become my spiritual home. It has been a den of adventurers, poets, sailors, and pirates for five centuries and I find myself walking in the footsteps of these giants. There is a memorial in the Jardim de Luís de Camões to the great Portuguese poet who wrote his epic on the island. Behind the grotto where he wrote “Os Lusíadas” there is a half-erased inscription in French on a small plaque in homage to the writer. It is signed as follows:

To the Great Luis de Camoens, Portuguese of Castilian origin, soldier, clergyman, traveler and exiled poet, from the humble Louis de Rienzi, French of Roman origin, traveler, clergyman, soldier and expatriate poet.

 

March 30th, 1827

These were men cast out from the productive middle—men of the imperative. Before concerning ourselves with the right kinds of regimes, we must become the right kinds of people. With the South China Sea beckoning, I resolved to take the road trod by these travelers and adventurers centuries before me.

Brazil Is Not For Beginners

A local friend had invited my friend and fellow traveler Siavash and me a few days before to an evening at a crime lord’s mansion amid the slums, at the top of the hill that overlooks Ipanema beach. Unfortunately, there was a firefight in the afternoon and the evening was canceled. These things happened in Rocinha.

That friend was a Swedish woman who had been living in Rocinha for some years and had essentially been adopted by a family there. She had endeared herself to the hardened traficantes of her new home and had grown to love life in Rocinha. It was with local pride that she invited us to a “cultural evening” in the favela. It may come as a surprise to many, but even that life was sweet. She found it easily preferable to the middle-class mundanity of her native Sweden. It was one thing to go on an official tour of the favela—not too far into the thick of it—but it was another to be invited into the life of the neighborhood. As with many places in Brazil, but especially in Rocinha, anything could happen.

We were on our way to São Conrado station. This was the farthest the cab would go. I had learned a few days earlier in Babilônia, another favela, that there was no Uber or cab service in the slums and only a few taxi drivers known to the traficantes could even pick up and drop off inside them. Babilônia, like Rocinha, was on a hill. There was one soldier from the Policia Militar, armed with an AR-15, guarding the entrance to the favela. As soon as you traversed the steep road up the hill, you had left Brazil—at least the Federal Republic. If you walked far enough, you found other armed men who were not in uniform. Other princes ruled there and you were a stranger in an even stranger country. You were fair game.

Our Brazilian friends were astounded that we had decided to go to the favelas. Many had spent their entire lives in Rio and avoided even walking the streets at night. One had been robbed at gunpoint fifteen times in the last two years. None of them had been to the favelas. Non-residents of the slums routinely found themselves held hostage, tortured, and mutilated for so much as the wrong glance. We were gringos asking for trouble. But Siavash and I had tasted the sweet promise of Brazil. “Brasil! A ultima patria da liberdade!” we often said to each other. We weren’t about to lose our newfound Brazilian version of freedom. Who was to tell us where we couldn’t go? Besides, we couldn’t refuse a polite invitation to what was to be a wonderful evening. After all, we were raised with proper values. Refusing a friendly hand wasn’t one of them.

The taxi took on Avenida Vieira Souto, which stretches the length of Ipanema beach, on the way to São Conrado station. The sun was setting behind Rochinha and I was basking in the last golden rays of the day.

By the time we arrived, the sun had already set and the crowd was making their way out of the station and up the hill. These were the workers who powered the chic restaurants and venues of the famous Zona Sul. The muscle behind Ipanema and Leblon was Rocinha. The foot of the hill had a series of shops and markets which were closing as we made our way up. The night was young and the people of Rocinha were flooding the restaurants and bars at the base of the neighborhood to rest after a hard day of work. We had to find our way through a series of small alleys to get to the rendezvous point. It was a pool bar. As soon as we walked in, everyone turned to stare us down. We were unfamiliar faces. “What are they doing here?” they seemed to think. We were clearly out of our element and everyone knew it, but so far so good.

We went to the bar: “Uma botelha da Antartica, por favor,” I ordered.

Beer in Brazil comes very cold, naturally.

The guys at the pool stopped their game and turned towards us. Siavash and I decided that downing our beer looking as much at ease as possible was the best course of action. Eventually, the stares tired of us and rejoined their lively conversations. The pool game resumed.

Our contact made his way into the bar. He addressed us in English:

“You’re friends of …”

“Yeah.”

Rodrigo was a sympathetic, scrawny young man, with a permanent blunt in his hand and always dressed in the yellow and green jersey of the Brazilian national soccer team. He was a small-time trafficker and the lover of our mysterious Swedish friend.

The road up the hill was very steep. There was sewage water flowing down the road. Convoys of reckless motorcyclists raced down the hill at breakneck speed. Sometimes we had to dodge them. By the time we climbed up the hill, we were masters of the best view of Rio and we understood something that had escaped so many: Rocinha wasn’t a ghetto, it was a fortress—a place forte. One truly cannot know this city without having known its favelas.

The Roda Cultural da Rocinha was neutral ground. It was a skate park turned music venue and tonight it was teeming with life. Carioca funk and rap, so characteristic of Rio, were the main cultural export of the favelas and they had taken Brazil’s youth by storm. Even the most bourgeois parties in São Paulo now danced to it and young bankers, lawyers, and marketing professionals from the most respectable and wealthiest families all across the country twerked to the rhythms of Rocinha. João, a greying man in his forties with impressive dreads and the adoptive brother of our Swedish friend, organized these evenings. Like many men in Rocinha of his age, he had had his run-ins with the world of crime and had paid for it. He worked with the youth of his neighborhood and used Carioca funk and rap to keep them out of the drug trade.

The Roda Cultural was a small plaza flanked by a couple of bars and food stands. We ordered our Antarcticas as the rap battle got on its way. The crowd erupted in rapture. Eventually, high schoolers with their backpacks began to join in as they were coming home from school. Two younger girls who lived in Rodrigo’s neighborhood joined our table and continued to review their courses amid all the commotion. They were prepping for the vestíbular, the entrance exam for Brazilian universities, and used every opportunity to study. It is a difficult task and places are very limited, but many hope that education will be the key to a different life. They asked Siavash and me for help on some math questions as Rodrigo mentioned that Siavash was an economist and I was a computer scientist by training. We tried our best despite our mediocre Portuguese.

Rocinha was surprisingly lively, even by Rio standards. After the year of lockdowns that had killed social life in North America, we welcomed it dearly. Even without the pandemic, there is virtually nowhere in North America with the spirit of the neighborhood that dwelled here. Everyone knew each other and helped each other. There was a very specific way of being that was in place and we understood why our Swedish friend had decided to live among the people of Rocinha.

Rocinha was at an equilibrium. Many things existed side by side. Brazil has some of the highest homicide rates in the world. It is self-evidently an extremely dangerous country and the streets of Brazil—filled with gunmen armed with assault rifles and flanking armored cars—gave the impression of a warzone. And so it is. Brazil is a warzone in the middle of tropical paradise and thus has all the sweetness of paradise and all the tragedy of war.

But amidst all of this, life went on and an equilibrium was established. What the sovereign couldn’t control, the underworld took on. While dangerous, there is little petty crime in the favelas. They are dangerous to outsiders, but it’s in the interest of the crime lords to provide some sense of order to the locals. Broadly speaking, the residents do not steal from each other, they don’t hurt each other, and they don’t cheat each other—and those who do can fear their victims’ recourse to the local bosses. The princes who ruled from these bastions had imposed a semblance of order. They operated their own borders, ran their own economies, and raised their own armies. They often went to war with each other and they went to war with the state. This is where the dangerous reputation comes from. These narco-princes even took on the more mundane duties of the state. They ensured that banks and social services functioned on their territories; they ensured that students could go to school; they sponsored rappers, helped produce unknown Carioca artists, and promoted them to national renown.

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in Zona Sul, they imposed a mask mandate and a lockdown, something the state government of Rio de Janeiro was unable to do, with even policemen refusing to wear masks. They distributed medicine to the neighborhood and made sure the elderly had adequate food. They also acted quickly to reopen when they saw that the pandemic wasn’t as deadly as they feared. After all, Brazil is a place where people die very easily. A fraction of a percentage of deaths due to some foreign flu simply doesn’t register.

But like many places with fragile equilibria, it isn’t all roses. Many of the residents of the favelas yearn for the return of the formal state. They too are tired of the shootings between traffickers and police, of the drug trade, and of the unjust treatments they can receive from the traficantes. The most egregious is the right that gang members claim to all the women on their turf. They also blame the gangs for painting a target on their backs. The state of Rio de Janeiro deploys the infamous Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (Special Police Operations Battalion) in the favelas. They mostly mobilize in response to kidnappings of police officers, to the more extreme acts of cruelty and mutilation that gangs sometimes carry out against rivals, and sometimes just in punitive expeditions to retaliate for the murder of Rio policemen. BOPE is the kind of unit that would feel more at home in the Battle of Baghdad than in a routine patrol in the neighborhood. Brazil is not Hollywood. When BOPE goes on an operation, they leave an unmistakable, indiscriminate trail of blood. They often conduct extrajudicial killings, engage in torture and there were even rumors that they were planning on assassinating the governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro for excessive corruption. Like China, Brazil is not for beginners.

To travel in Rocinha was to see an underworld with one foot tentatively planted in the upper realms of legitimacy. After all, Comando Vermelho, Amigos dos Amigos, and others who owned and controlled the favelas had mutated into quasi-states and tackled governance issues—a high crime rate, health and sanitation, food security, and artistic patronage—that the Brazilian state could not solve with all the resources of the eighth-largest economy in the world. If the Brazilian state ever does reconquer its own cities and internal territories—if it ever gains something like a real monopoly on violence within its borders—it will almost certainly occur with high levels of defection from the underworld, not simple suppression.

In the meantime, the favelas are part of the Brazilian social ecology. There is a lineage of alienation from productive society here, just as there was among the Shanghai nightlife and the Parisian lumpenproles. Where else should we expect to find the travelers, clergymen, soldiers, poets, contrabandists, and others who can shoulder the mantle of re-founding and bring vitality to a society’s atrophied structures? Cramming our brightest into computer science, economics, and law classes from which they emerge with serious moral and intellectual handicaps is not the right way to build the future. There is more to elite education than what the mandarinate classes can offer. Young promising elites with the right disposition would do better to leave the world in which assimilation into those structures is the only way forward and take their own journeys through the underworld, among the peripheries and the alien frontiers. They might just emerge on the other side with the skills necessary to direct state and para-state structures—to found something new.

There has been a marked homogenization of society since the industrial revolution, but especially in the last few decades with globalization and digitization. But programmers will not inherit the earth and the digital is not a substitute for the real. The familiar pathways of Silicon Valley optimists will not suffice. Emergent elites who are ready to upend the established order must be comfortable breaking its rules.

This search for unowned spaces has been a longstanding project of both Siavash and myself in the last several years. This is the journey that brought me to China, Brazil, and other strange locales. I’ve met many others there on the same journey. We aren’t looking for a startup city or any variation of a city on a hill, but real places where one is forced to confront the human condition headfirst. By doing so, we can open the gates to a fundamental renewal of our civilization and beyond. We can accomplish the re-emergence of competence, human tact and ingenuity, the regression of the most oppressive aspects of technocratic rule, and the renaissance of the arts and literature. There’s little use in decrying the dystopia we live in. Any coherent and inspiring vision of the future will come from spaces outside the boundaries that decrepit respectability sets for us. We just have to find it.

This, my friends, is what is to be done.

T——— and I usually meet in Vancouver’s West End, by English Bay. Quaint towers from the sixties, a beach, palm trees, cyclists, container ships drifting into the sunset, children playing—but only sometimes. You might spot an aging gay couple having wandered off from rainbow-flagged faux-seedy clubs. Those clubs are now mostly frequented by tired, yet glimmering retirees in denial about their age, or by loud young women trying to enjoy their girls’ night out. The West End captures much of the appeal of Vancouver: laid-back, beautiful, open, inclusive, safe. T——— has been living in this part of town for quite some time, after having spent his childhood in the suburbs. I always had the impression that he never quite enjoyed the entirety of it, although I suspect it’s because of the song in his voice that makes it seem like he is constantly caught unaware by the things around him. His every statement is a question. Although years in the making, even the suffocation of his professional ambitions seemed to have caught him by surprise.

T——— represents the best of the Canadian immigration model. A child of post-Iran–Iraq war immigration, he shares the honest intelligence, soft-spokenness, largesse in manners, and innate liberality so often found among Iranians in the West. The latter seems a product of intergenerational distaste for theocracy. Maybe that’s where the inquisitiveness stems from as well: an antidote to the steadfastness of the clerics.

This birthright inquisitiveness has found new use in a new context. A few years ago, T——— blazed through a degree in economics at one of Canada’s best schools, as well as through the city’s barren political underground. He knew the Who’s Who of Vancouver politics and business—an experience which left him with a pure and unmitigated disdain. His curiosity had brought him to acquaint himself with large and disparate circles of the city.

He often jokes about being in the shadow of his father. It’s a feeling common among sons with shrewd fathers and comfortable upbringings. The jokes, however, hinted at something more profound, which sometimes burst into honest family conversations: was it worth it? His father had left Iran with the hopes of sparing his sons the hardships and difficulties of living in a region disrupted by conscription, embargoes, and regime change. But what was a self-evident calculus had turned into quite a surprise. While his father had done well and built an enviable life for himself and his sons in Canada, there was a bitter realization that those who stayed behind in Iran had reaped the greatest rewards.

In those twenty years, Tehran had transformed into a world class capital, and the little clerks and drivers who had worked for T———’s father and could barely afford to rent a basement had since become ten times wealthier than hw was. Now, they have villas on the Caspian Sea, and servants of their own. The question of whether it was worth it is, of course, already meaningless for T———. But many of the young Iranians who immigrated in the last few years have settled it the other way. None have planned to stay for long—just enough time to get their Canadian papers (a marker of affluence at home) and jet back to Iran where life can really be lived. What happened in those twenty years?

We habitually end our evenings sweeping down Granville, Vancouver’s neon-lit party district—well-known as one of the least entertaining night scenes in North America. There’s a constant, eclectic mix of jumpy students getting their first taste of sweaty, deafening dance floors and overpriced vodka cranberry tonics, homeless men in their 20s shooting up heroin in every nook and cranny, washed up from Alberta’s struggling oil towns, and glitzy Chinese women draped in Louis Vuitton and Prada, strutting out of Nordstrom and into white BMWs.

“It’s surprisingly empty for a summer weekend night,” says T———. This is also a recurring theme in Vancouver conversations, especially among Millennials: the cataloguing of friends who have left to try their luck elsewhere is a constant theme. He’s right. The seasonal influx of rowdy Irish students and Australian bohemians seems to have gotten lighter with the years and is now unnoticeable downtown. Vancouver was always placed for being a city without a soul. It seems it has completely bled out, as well. “Now Hiring” signs are on every store front. Some have been there for months. T——— picks up on this.

“This is not what an economy with unemployment at 3% looks like,” he says. “For Canada, anything under 5% is structural unemployment,” he continues, “but there’s something that doesn’t make sense. Salaries haven’t budged. If unemployment were really at 3%, firms would be killing each other over workers.”

I reflect on this a moment. Many startups and tech companies I know are having a hard time hiring developers, especially with Amazon moving in. Their salaries are way too low. On a few occasions, I’ve gotten to ask if they’d consider raising compensation, but I get the same reply every time: “This is how much a developer should make. We’re not paying a penny more.” It’s a very strange dynamic; a combination of low available capital for investing in anything higher tech than real estate, and cultural barriers to high compensation, has them shooting themselves in the foot. They lose out on top talent that ends up going to the States.

When I relay all this to T———, he laughs. “Firms used to have training and recruitment programs. I don’t see that anymore. The most effort they put in is getting headhunters to harass people with bullshit PowerPoint jobs that pay nothing.” He pauses a moment. “What happened? How can corporate leadership be so lacking in thumos?”

He then launches into one of his favorite stories about his lunches with the top guys at the Canadian Pacific Railway, one of Canada’s economic jewels and the primary engine behind the settlement of the western frontier during the 19th century. A naive and younger T——— had tried engaging his sexagenarian audience with things like “western economic development,” “resource transportation infrastructure to meet Asian demand,” and “provincially supported railway extensions.” It went over their heads. Within minutes, the conversation had switched to golfing and vacationing at their lake houses. This was the pinnacle of Canadian corporate ambitions. “That’s all they talked about,” says T———, “They don’t even vacation in interesting or exotic places. Just dumb golfing vacations.” And every subsequent lunch went the same way. That was T———’s main frustration with these apparatchiks: mediocre at best and woefully incompetent at worst.

Canadian Brezhnevites

Canada is a holdout of Brezhnevism. T———’s apparatchiks aren’t very different from their Soviet predecessors: frail old men in buffoonishly baggy suits from the 1990s, complete with black (Volga-like) sedans and dachas in the countryside. When they aren’t vacationing in said dachas, their main occupation is making sure that things are as stable as possible, which realistically means making sure nothing new ever happens.

Americans with left-leaning sympathies point to Canada as a model to emulate for a progressive and fair society. But Canada is, and has always been, an oligarchy where the ruling families—the Saputos, Demarais, Reichmans, etc.—have relied on their own Brezhnevites to preserve their wealth by shielding them not just from competition, but from any kind of change.

The key to acquiring wealth in this country is creating bottlenecks by saturating public and private institutions with members of this class. Thanks to their valiant efforts, the Canadian economic model is a madhouse where apparent opposites are simultaneously true. Anyone who’s worked in developing economies knows that the right sort of corruption is a blessing, at least in the short-term: for a few greenbacks more, you can shrink processes that take months down to a few days. In Canada, the same process seems to exist to slow down development. Both governmental and private sector projects are always severely over-budget and late by ridiculous timeframes. Internationally promoted as an open and transparent economy, anyone in the thick of it encounters a culture of eerily systematic structural barriers. Spend enough time in it, and your mind begins to wander off to very different comparisons.

There was a period in the Soviet Union between the energetic reformer, Khrushchev, and the not-so-energetic reformer, Gorbachev, when the centrally planned economies of the Eastern Bloc started going off the rails—all while the veneer of normalcy was ever more brutally enforced. Stalin had built a giant of industry from a mass of illiterate peasants that out-produced Germany, and equipped and propelled some 400 Soviet divisions across the Danube and onto Berlin. Khrushchev had straddled this giant and used it to dramatically increase living standards across the country. The post-war reconstruction was completed, the stars were reached, Soviet agriculture was reformed, and personal cars and televisions made their way into the lives of average Soviet citizens for the first time. Initially a supporter of Khrushchev, Brezhnev came to power by shrewd bureaucratic manipulation and clamped down on the excesses of his patron.

During the two decades of the Brezhnev period, the dynamism of the Soviet economy died. Stagnation set in at all stages of life. Many Soviet dissidents and red émigrés of the late ’70s point to the general ideological disillusionment with the Soviet system experienced by the people as the cause for this stagnation. But the central planners were already aware, from the early ’60s onward, that they had reached the limits of the command aspect of the economy. The attempts at jump-starting the Soviet economy piled on, while the people grew more disillusioned with each passing year. It had become clear that the extraordinary transformations the country had experienced, and the optimism that comes with bloody and hard-earned progress, were behind them. There was no communism coming, the stars were getting ever more distant (Brezhnevites axed the real Soviet space program), the barbed-wire more apparent. The choices offered were emigration or “comfortable socialism.”

Productivity plummeted, alcoholism became chronic, gangsterism returned and shortages became more severe, while careerism ate its way through the Party. The hardline believers in the faith of communism and human progress made way to middle managers trying to exploit their positions to marginally improve their own living standards. This mindset of exploitation of the commons then infected the population with disastrous consequences. Soviet car-factory workers stole leather seats to redo their wardrobes with cool ’70s jackets, restaurant workers became fabulously wealthy by stockpiling state food distribution and reselling on the black market, Soviet pipelines leaked thousands of tons of oil through the most guarded border in the world and into neighboring markets.

The social hierarchy had shifted as well, with those best-placed for using state resources for their own enrichment climbing on top. Something strange happened in the Brezhnev years. Engineers and scientists, who were respected and capable figures under Stalin as pillars of socialist progress, and who had become cultural superstars under Khrushchev, suddenly morphed into naive losers who now occupied the bottom of the Soviet social hierarchy. The labor situation had also officially shifted, as alcoholism, absenteeism, and policies against unemployment meant that wages for unskilled laborers were fixed at a higher rate than those of white collar workers, which incentivized those who did not want to work.

The Soviet leadership was well aware of these endemic problems, and attempts at reform soon gave way to cheap fixes. The oil crisis and the détente allowed the Soviet Union to sell to the international market in exchange for the hard currency they could use to keep the whole thing afloat. It started with purchasing wheat to make up for the failures of Soviet agriculture, then it turned to Pepsi and Levis jeans to sprinkle over an increasingly uncooperative and unproductive population. By the early 1980s, oil exports weren’t enough to mask ongoing failures. Credit obtained on international markets substituted for economic growth. Debt spiraled out of control and by 1989, the Soviet Union traded 17 submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer for Pepsi bottles, making Pepsi the 6th-largest navy for a brief period of time.

There are many lessons to be learned for Canada from this surreal but unfortunate episode in history, as productivity gains flatten, cost of living rockets, and household and public debt inch ever out of control.

Most of our economic and social woes arise, as was the case in the Soviet Union, with Brezhnevites of all sizes carving out bureaucratic fiefdoms for themselves. This infectious mindset eats into the heart of what was once one of the most advanced and forward-looking countries. As rot sets in, optimism and belief in improvement die out, and are replaced by a race to the bottom among those fiefdoms. Brezhnevism and the pessimism that inevitably follows have reached critical levels and have taken comical and not-so-comical turns.

Vancouver is a wonderful case study. Architects line up at 6 a.m. with lawn chairs or placemarkers in front of Vancouver city hall, hoping to get a hearing for their projects in the afternoon. The effort is often in vain. By-laws are conjured nearly from thin air, or creatively reinterpreted, to send them back to the drawing boards. This comes as many city councils are eager for much-needed relief from the housing crisis. In this case, these Brezhnevites continue to sustain the interests of wealthy landowners who oppose any infrastructure, commercial, and housing development.

It’s not just housing and construction which suffer from this institutional rot. The MRI shortage in British Columbia is a particularly acute example. To appreciate the seriousness of the shortage, it’s important to note that the U.S. has 38 MRI scanners per million people, while Japan has 35. In Canada, that number is a critical 10 machines per million people.

As of the writing of this article, the wait times for a screening have been reduced to a commendable average of 48 days, half of the previous average of 96 days. How were these wonderful results achieved? By running the MRI machines 24/7 and scheduling appointments at 3 or 4 a.m. for those in critical need. You might be dumbfounded by this story. Couldn’t the number of machines simply be increased? A few physicians attempted to procure the MRI machines themselves and charge very low rates for screening. They were immediately ordered to cease and desist operations by health authorities. You see, determining the need for MRI machines is a core competency of a specific health commission in the British Columbia health care system, and at the time, the commission had not yet determined that there was a need for more machines. The issue required further investigative work by said commission.

The private sector is not safe from Brezhnevism, either. The phenomenon is set into elite structures which transcend such boundaries.

The supply management example is interesting because the lines between inefficiency, well-paying union jobs, private fortunes, and lobbying are blurred. Under this system, foodstuffs like dairy, eggs, and poultry are regulated to maintain prices. While some of the country’s largest fortunes are behind it, it’s not hard to see why so many Canadians see merits to it, especially in light of the disastrous effects of trade liberalization on nearly every other Canadian industry. The civil servants and politicians who pushed for the liberalization and privatization of Canada’s crown corporations suddenly found themselves sitting on the boards of the very same companies they sliced up—who still rely on protectionist measures to maintain their quasi-monopolies.

Rent-seeking, Or How To Destroy The Wealth Of Nations

It was a meeting I had while working in mainland China that hammered home events in Canada. G——— had become a venture capitalist through pure grit. Like many foreign entrepreneurs in China, he had that weathered look about him and made it a matter of principle never to mince words. In middle age, he looked more like a rockstar than an investor—sporting a man-bun, a deep tan, and ripped jeans. He was always flanked by pretty assistants. You would never catch him in a suit, even at more formal events, among Chinese salarymen and party officials. “Welcome to Shanghai!” he exclaimed. “You made it to the center of the fucking universe, and if you want to survive here, you have to learn quickly and see the big picture.”

His advice for foreign entrepreneurs wasn’t some canned platitude about never giving up or how hard work paid off, but rather to read a specific book. “You want to understand what’s happening here? Go pick up Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.” The down-to-earth entrepreneurs think it’s a waste of time to read a tract three centuries past due, and the university-educated economist scoffs at reading quaint theory over the econometrics papers pumped out daily. But reading Smith to understand the crazy world of Chinese growth wasn’t about economic theory or its applications. It was about intuition.

That’s what innovators do. When the world around them goes crazy, they step back and look. When empty lots sell in the several millions of dollars, when shoddy rentals begin taking above 50% of the incomes of ordinary citizens, when 36,000 homes sit empty while offshore fortunes are laundered through them, it’s time to rely on intuition.

Smith, revered by deregulation proponents, understood that rent-seeking was a hindrance and imposition on productive activity. In his attempt to intuit the relationship between farmers and landowners in his 18th century Scotland, he devised the following relationship:

The rent of the land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.

Smith uncovered the dynamic rent-seeking imposes on productive activity. Although many think of landlords as providing a service at a price determined by market forces, the reality is that they are barely providing a service at all, but merely extracting the largest possible share of tenant income by exploiting a geographic bottleneck. This is missed by the rhetoric surrounding the housing crisis. Landlordism in cities is (correctly) blamed for a worsening of income inequality. What’s ignored is the effect rent-seeking has on productive economic activity, and that the causes of income inequality lie in the crushing of productivity gains by such activity. Rent-seeking isn’t just a transfer of wealth from Millennial renters to Boomer landlords, but also a transfer of wealth from the productive segment of society to the unproductive.

There is a very simple way of looking at this transfer: wealth creation is making things.

When innovative companies begin making decent profits, landlords raise the rents to adjust for the new ability to pay. As a result, these additional wages are neither reinvested, nor reflected in the disposable income of employees. This is the dynamic behind the mystery of stagnant wages. When workers in a particularly well-paid sector begin pouring into a city, landlords likewise raise the rent to absorb these incomes. It isn’t gentrification, but absorption through monopoly power.

With this framework, we can begin to understand the effects that Canada’s out-of-control housing market has on innovation and productivity. Using data from StatsCanada and the CMHC, I’ve overlayed historical rents in Vancouver to average weekly earnings (pre-tax) of workers in British Columbia in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector, which gives us something like this:

Rent is rising with income, even slightly faster, absorbing much of the gains, as landlords are extracting an increasingly significant percentage of wealth generated by workers. As this trend drags into the new decade, it means being a productive worker pays increasingly less than speculating on the real estate market. It means that more and more people are pushing out of the productive sectors of the economy and into the unproductive, with the rentiers leveraging their assets and historically low interest rates to acquire even more rent-seeking opportunities. As the price of real estate inches ever upward, more and more people are left in the dust and at the mercy of the landlords.

It also means that real wealth creation is endangered. The sectors of the economy where goods and services are made and know-how is created shrink relative to our productive capacity as more capital, human and otherwise, becomes tied up in this real estate inflation. The rationale behind this asset inflation is the oft-repeated claim that the Canadian economy is undergoing profound technological change and that the influx of jobs in the transition will sustain demand for real estate in the decades to come. With the backing of major U.S. tech companies and urban transformation projects such as Sidewalk Toronto mushrooming in Canada’s top cities—-Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Waterloo—the word in everyone’s mouth is Silicon Valley North.

But a quick glance at sector data from StatsCanada dispels the idea of a Silicon Valley North:

From 2009 to 2019, this supposedly prodigal sector has gone from occupying about 4.3% of production to about 4.6%. Hardly the much-touted silver bullet to Canada’s economic woes. The Canadian economy remains solidly stuck in a resource trap; the only sector actually delivering tangible growth is the one driven by asset inflation. To illustrate the point of Canadian real estate compared to Canadian innovation, the following chart is instructive:

How did real estate, the most low-tech asset class in existence, become more sought after than shares in the most bleeding-edge tech companies? Which came first? Did Canadian innovation fail because all the capital became tied up in real estate, or more uncomfortably, did real estate absorb all the capital because Canadian innovation could no longer deliver on its promises? Whatever the answer may be, it’s clear that Canadian innovation needs a new start as the threat of Brezhnevite failure looms on the horizon. A country that has a housing shortage when it is a net exporter of construction material, has nearly unlimited land, and has an oversupply of human capital, is stuck in the same rut as a country that has a shortage of toilet paper, just as it exports massive quantities of processed timber.

The Canadian Space Age

The future will only belong to Canada if Canada, the people of Canada, have faith in the destiny of Canada and work like blazes to make that destiny come true.

— Sir Roy Dobson, 10th anniversary of Avro Canada

It’s always arresting to be confronted with the optimism and anxieties of a bygone era. At the Chief of Staff committee meeting in February 1957, at the height of the Cold War, there was a general feeling of unease as reports were piling up of U.S. and Canadian patrols making contact with the Soviet Type 37 Bison, a long range strategic bomber designed for the delivery of nuclear payloads to North American targets. The committee came to an agreement to speed up the Arrow program, the program to build and equip the Royal Canadian Air Force and U.S. Air Force with an aircraft capable of intercepting Soviet bombers flying up to 36,000 ft over the polar circle.

The timeline, the appearance of ICBMs, and the requirements presented considerable challenges to the engineers at Avro Canada. Although the costs of the program were expected to be significant, the government pressed on with development. It’s a little hard for us to imagine what the Canadian government was willing and able to do when we were a small country of 15 million people. The great defense scandal of our age is the failure of consecutive governments to modernize the antiquated CF-18s. This is purely a procurement failure. It would be unthinkable today for Canada to produce a 5th generation jet on its own. Funds would simply not be found, and nearly everyone would agree that the know-how to build such a jet is non-existent. After all, the F-35 program was a collaboration between several NATO allies, and its development was beset by problem after problem. How could Canada ever hope to build anything on its own?

In 1957, we still knew how to build things. We had the young, motivated engineers to push forward. Thousands of eager minds, newly minted from Canada’s top engineering schools, were marched into Avro Canada’s laboratories. It was an exciting time. Talented engineers, many of whom were veterans of the British aerospace industry that had won the battle of Britain, poured in from the UK, along with their families, to close any gap left by the youngsters.

The results were tangible and spectacular. The requirements for the Arrow program were issued in 1953. By 1958, the delta-winged apparition was already in the air—a mere five years. In 1959, the CF-105 Arrow hit Mach 1.52 at 50,000 ft. For a brief moment, a future Canada as aeronautical titan was within grasp. The Arrow program generated significant know-how. Engineers achieved many aerospace ‘firsts.’

The program was gradually shut down by the new Diefenbaker government, which was determined to rein in “rampant liberal spending” and shift to a new missile-centric defense posture. This amounted to buying missiles from the United States.

When the program was shut down, it permanently shut the door on large-scale Canadian technological ambitions. The demoralizing effect on the army of innovators that Avro Canada had assembled was devastating. The ending to the Arrow epic is one familiar to today’s young Canadian engineers. Superstars such as Jim Chamberlin and his inner circle, with decades of experience in the production of British aircraft models and the CF-100 under their belts, left for NASA and served as pillars of the Apollo program. The vast majority of the young men and the British family men who were given the opportunity of a lifetime, only to see it bitterly yanked away, never worked in aerospace again. The lucky ones ended up as small-time civil servants and construction consultants.

In 2019, many of the 6,000 yearly engineering graduates relive this story in a loop. The software engineers, in high demand at U.S. companies, migrate south. Others leave the profession for safer, better-paying careers. The human capital spoilage is astounding. Young people who are trained in moving mountains, in catapulting to space, in foraging the seas are then put on conveyor belts to cubicles to pump out PowerPoints. Canada spends enormous resources to train these people, only to deny them the opportunity to practice their profession.

Farewell, Misha!

I share with the faceless millions who have grown up in the shadow of North American factories a strange color blindness. We are unable to see the color gray—or, rather more accurately, it has the hue of a calm, comforting green. The earliest and fondest memories of our fathers are at the factory. Everything seems larger than life when you are a boy. I spent most of my early summers and many winters at the telecom factory where my father and grandfather both worked.

The ritual was perfect. Never once was it a bore. My father would come pick me up from school in the afternoon on his lunch break and drive me to the factory. I loved the drive there as the suburb melted along the highway and warehouses. Trains and industrial equipment took its place. There was one particular stretch of the highway where I would unbuckle and jump to the right backseat window, and invariably my father would point to it: the Bombardier warehouse storing large airliners, the tails popping over the fence. If I was lucky, they would be unsheathed from their black protective covers, revealed in the full glory of their metallic, glimmering white.

I loved the stuffiness of the offices where my father worked with the other engineers. It was a post-communist refuge, and there was an obvious sense of solidarity among the Hungarian exiles from Ceausescu’s regime, Estonian Jews and, of course, the unavoidable Russian engineer with his impeccably mismatched patterns. Everyone was gray, this jolly gray I was talking about, and there was a lightness about. The hypermodern offices of the most cutting-edge companies will never match that gray lightness. In my professional life, I have seen very few workplaces where people were more at ease.

I spent most of my time drawing on the back of discarded drafts, with no real purpose in mind, exercising a precocious imagination as many boys do at that age. Sometimes, I would reproduce the drafts themselves, at other times it would be scenes of boyish fantasy. Ludmila, a rather plump middle-aged redhead, loved the latter the most. She pinned my most extravagant drawings on the wall behind her desk, as if they were some sort of prophecy. My father thought she was silly for it. When I got bored of drawing, I would go and bother my grandfather manning an assembly line, bent double, polishing with sandpaper the various waveguides, filters, and terminations perfectly aligned on his work table like tin soldiers. Sometimes, we would go take a break and walk around on the train tracks running between the nearby factories. My main thrill was finding the carcasses of dead snakes lying around the tracks. When 6 p.m. came, all three generations fit into the car and headed home.

These memories are not particularly different from those who grew up away from the first-tier cities (to borrow Chinese terminology). Even those as young as I remember workplaces as communities full of solidarity, creativity, purpose—before the North American interior became a desert of opioids and unemployment and the coastal cities became mirages for cut-throat gigsters.

It was only later in life that I understood where the energy animating my father’s colleagues came from: the gutted carcasses of the Tondi Elektroonika Plant, or the Yaroslavl Radio Plant, or any of the other Soviet electronic titans, each with its tens of thousands of workers. They had broken free from their Brezhnevnite superiors, and had easily found a new home at Quebec’s national champions (and not-such-champions): Bombardier, Bell, Nortel, etc., where they were appreciated, nurtured, and accordingly compensated. The easy-going French Canadian managers and engineers welcomed their new Soviet colleagues with open arms and for a time, this new synthesis bore fruits.

Until our factories, in turn, were gutted.

Misha was my father’s best friend at the company. When the owners sold the factory for scraps and relocated production to Vietnam (very forward-looking for the early 2000s), Misha and my father did not look for new jobs like the other engineers. They decided to go into business together (or “bizinyis” as Misha would say) and start their own shop from Misha’s brutalist Montreal apartment. Misha was ahead of everyone and had never gotten comfortable when his colleagues were settling into McMansions. His apartment was bare, a very functional table with a trail of Heineken bottles filled to the brim with cigarette butts, mattress on the floor, two desktop computers with the massive TV-like monitors, and a sports bicycle—a token from a previous life.

Misha was a special person in a very Russian sense of the term. He was a horrendously ugly bald man, with enormous warts on his nose and large, bare forehead, always drawing your attention away from his eyes. He had been a ‘master sporta’ of the USSR in both cycling and fencing. Russians tend to be polymaths. He incessantly invented new components and perfected existing ones. Some of the stuff he built 20 years ago is still considered cutting-edge today. His resourcefulness had no end. When he needed rare German radioengineering software, he put his FSB friends back home on the case, and voilà, he had the bootleg copy he needed to complete his work. Misha was great in the way that all engineers are great: not because of his degrees or accreditations or blue chip employers, but simply because he solved problems no one else could.

My father and Misha had big dreams, and they were going to build the future together—they were ahead of everyone in the game by decades. But Misha’s Achilles’ heel was booze. On one of his many trips to Russia, he drank himself to death. Misha’s death was the first that I remember. There is no future without crazy, gun-slinging engineers like Misha: my father spent the next 20 years trying to do what they had set out to do, but it turned out to be a fool’s errand without him.

And I myself wouldn’t set foot in an electronics factory again, not until many years later in Hangzhou, when I visited Xiaomi’s plant. I found the future elsewhere.

That was something that linked T———’s father and mine. T———’s father had put all of his savings in Nortel where my father had worked. It was a time when everyone had unbounded optimism about Canadian technology. We were the best at what we did, and we knew it. When Nortel was gutted, he lost his savings, and my father lost his livelihood. It was a bitter lesson to learn for optimists, and their numbers have dwindled year after year for two decades. Canadian optimists are now in critically short supply.

A New Model 

How do you do capitalism without capital? Answering this question has been the fundamental economic struggle for the vast majority of countries since the 18th century. When the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, the country had large amounts of private capital, acquired through its trading empire, that it could invest in buying and building the infrastructure necessary to support its new industries. The history of industrial development in the U.S. followed a similar pattern. The northeastern U.S. had enormous amounts of capital in the hands of its leading merchant families that were quickly put to use in developing the country. The rail network that linked the country from coast to coast was built and funded by the robber barons of the age. Even when the U.S. government undertook ‘internal improvements’ specifically under the auspices of the Clay’s American system, there was sufficient capital in the country to fund the works quite easily.

However, many later industrial powerhouses such as France, Germany, and very recently China, began with little capital, as these countries had always been agricultural societies with limited access to international trade. The key to their economic development was that the state, with its ability to borrow on international markets, became the primary capitalist funding the projects necessary to develop a modern economy. Their trajectories were decidedly different from the U.S. and the UK. All three are mixed economies, with France and China still running a dirigiste economic model. You can’t do laissez-faire capitalism with peasants barely producing what they themselves consume.

Although somewhere between the U.S. and the UK, Canada never possessed the internal capital it needed to assert itself as a dominant economic force on the world stage. The country was built on a railroad to its western territories, funded by state capital. We have to be mindful of this reality when discussing development in Canada, especially innovation. There are many earnest voices in this country who are calling for the end of Brezhnevites. They call for an end to the tyranny of cliquey professional associations, of corrupt labor union officials, of incompetent bureaucrats, and of spendthrift politicians. They call for an all-encompassing liberalization, including a significant reduction in taxes.

But it’s crucial to look at the issues facing the country straight on. Shaving 5% off the income tax won’t build the 150,000 dwellings a year needed to house the 350,000 immigrants arriving every year, it won’t build the deep-water ports needed in the Arctic circle to facilitate polar shipping routes, it won’t build the refineries and pipelines needed to export energy to allies, it won’t build the nuclear power plants and charging stations necessary for a green energy transition. This would mean strategizing, shrewd decision-making, hard work, and—most importantly—experimentation. It’s not going to be done by investors who can barely scratch together enough capital to run a corner coffee shop without getting cold feet. But the future isn’t going to wait.

Many of these experiments would fail. That’s how innovation works. Failure is only a problem in the absence of improvement and backup plans. There is no such thing as perfect execution, or absence of risk. Calculated risks undertaken by competent and eager builders is a natural part of managing and creating growth. Shunning risks or avoiding planning is the surest way to rent-seeking and stagnation, as you cannibalize the successes of previous generations of innovators.

But risky experimentation requires optimism and confidence in the future. This is one of the greatest assets any country can have. An investment of any kind—time, money, effort, emotional commitment—is about belief in an upside. The larger the potential upside, the larger the acceptable risk. Optimism is the belief in upsides.

It’s become fashionable in some circles to ask how people can be made optimistic again, and speak of optimism directly as a variable influenced by culture and propaganda. It’s true that beliefs like optimism can be socially influenced. It’s clearly an important input to progress, so why not try to influence it? But beliefs also reflect reality, and cannot deviate too blatantly, except to the detriment of sanity.

Optimism isn’t just about what people believe is possible; it’s about what actually is possible. If some bright-eyed, young engineer graduates from his training, full of optimism and big ideas, and sets out to find the opportunities, what does he actually find? Does he find and solve real world problems, build confidence in his skills, and learn how he can do amazing things? Does he strike the jackpot of opportunity and then put his less optimistic classmates to shame? Or do his more conservative classmates who followed the tracks and took no risks put him to shame? Like T———, are his dreams progressively crushed down further year after year as he finds no willing comrades in adventure, and no dynamism or potential in the system? This is what decides whether the culture is permeated by an ambient optimism and dynamism, or the stagnation of Brezhnevism.

To some extent, if only others were also optimistic, our imagined young engineer might have found some comrades or willing capital. But the simple collective action problem is only part of the story. The problem of possibility isn’t just in everyone being optimistic. It’s in complex social organization. Networks need to be organized around finding, discussing, and taking advantage of ideas. Capital investors need expertise in evaluating risky opportunities. Material capabilities in hardware, space, and logistics need to be easily available to new projects. Young engineers need expert mentors to help them distinguish the real potential opportunities from wastes of time and resources. A workforce of experienced engineers needs to be available. Barriers to entry need to be low and key bureaucratic bottlenecks kept open. Without these fundamentals, any episode of mass optimism will soon be crushed by the inevitable failure of the future to materialize.

With economic pessimism, we’re dealing with a much larger collective-action problem than just belief in the future—-the kind of problem that has only ever been solved by a bold, coordinated, development-oriented elite. But where to get one of those is a whole different problem.

T——— isn’t the only one asking the question: if you can’t build anything else for lack of real leadership, then how do you build real leadership? I run into an increasing number of young, would-be innovators like T———, surprised and frustrated by the lack of possibility in Western economies, who are turning their attention towards this challenge.

I checked out a couple of books that day, but two authors stood out and followed me for the years to come: Éric Zemmour and Jacques Attali. Zemmour wouldn’t have been possible anywhere in the Anglosphere, where a risk-averse intellectual culture has suffocated any semblance of public debate. Instead of being shut down by mobs and shunned by most of the establishment, the controversial firebrand Zemmour is invited to host a weekly show on national television. He is France’s loudest voice.

He also happens to be an astute journalist and a great student of history. Most of his books are dedicated to the recent and not-so-recent history of his beloved country, and they sell surprisingly well. People need to know and relish their origins and Zemmour has the right set of talents to give the French public what they want.

His books taught me to read and understand the past and gain some footing in the present world. Attali, fortunately, was the right man to pick it up from there. If Zemmour taught me the past, Attali taught me the future.

Attali is the anti-Zemmour. He is universally detested by the French public and by the French readership. He is a Socialist (big S, as in Parti Socialiste) and a man of the establishment. He was there at the side of François Mitterand and once more at the side of Nicolas Sarkozy, as France limped from one humiliation to another. He was the éminence grise who marionetted Emmanuel Macron into politics, only for his marionette to recently burst into flames. Macron was Attali’s last resort for avoiding an insolvent political situation and descending into civil war and chaos. Unfortunately, Macron’s office has been rocked with scandals, his popularity has plummeted, and yellow-vested mobs have taken to the streets, calling for his head.  For all his talents, Attali is divorced entirely from the history and reality of France. Unfortunately for his critics, he has a good reason to be—he is entirely absorbed by the future.

Attali attended the École Polytechnique, France’s top engineering institution, in the early 1960s. He came of age in a world where France was still a colonial power, where the the Soviet Union had cloistered half of Europe behind barbed wire, where Chubby Checker’s “Twist” was taking America by storm. What did a relic of a never-to-return era have to reveal? Nothing but what continues to unfold, day after day. Attali detailed these insights during a 2014 speech at the École Polytechnique:

In thirty years, there will be more Frenchmen than Germans. In forty years, there will be more Turks than Russians. At the end of the century, if demographic tendencies maintain, there will be fewer Chinese than Nigerians (trans.)

Attali decidedly believes in demographics.

There are today 200 million people who reside in a country other than the one they were born in. If you think about it that’s very little spread over 7 billion people…In 25 years, the conservative prediction tend towards 1.2 billion, and not only [will there be migration] from the south to the north, but from the south to the south (trans.)

He then finished his train of thought by adding:

And if we consider climate migrations, which is to say, migration having climate change as its direct cause, numbers begin to vary greatly depending on one’s interest. However, it is estimated that the number is between 1-2 billion added to account for ecological migration (trans.)

Attali’s future is one marked by demographics, migration, and climate change on a scales several order of magnitudes greater than what we have experienced.

It is common practice when making predictions to draw up hypothetical scenarios. In terms of future patterns of global migration, the major patterns depend on the dynamic between the West and Asia. A standard example is the methodology used by Nikola Sander, Guy Abel, and Fernando Riosmena in World Population and Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Their approach resorts to two possible scenarios to forecast migration until 2060:

The ‘rise of the east’ (referred to as RE scenario) scenario assumes economic stagnation in Europe and North America, resulting in restrictive migration policies. South and South East Asia become increasingly attractive destinations, resulting in a shift in global migration patterns. The ‘intensifying global competition’ scenario (referred to as IGC scenario) assumes dynamic economic growth and social development, resulting in growing competition among governments and the private sector for (skilled) labour and natural resources, as well as between the traditional activities of agriculture and mining and industry, residential development and recreational activities. Economic growth in the developing world contributes towards rising levels of global mobility, which is paralleled by liberal immigration policies in the more developed world.

Forecasts by Thu Hien Dao, Frédéric Docquier, Mathilde Maurel, and Pierre Schaus chart migration patterns where the percentage of people under transit to world population in 2100 is 4% in the RE scenario and 6% in the IGC scenario.

That is the silhouette of the world of tomorrow. Despite the scale of the challenges that may prove to be too much, we must not forget we are dealing with the consequences of success. Yes, economic liberalization and modernization has succeeded. Critics can quibble over causality, but the results are not up for discussion—one billion fellow human beings dragged out of poverty in just 20 years.

I live in a city which had donkey drawn carriages on the streets 20 years ago. I now regularly take line 2 of the Shanghai subway (perhaps the best-run subway in the world) at rush hour without breaking a sweat. I’ve personally seen, from up close, the consequences of this success. I’ve had the privilege of working with young people from a peripheral Pakistan, which was subject to relentless bombings until a few years ago, and from various African nations which were counted among the poorest in the world. They are tireless, they are motivated, and they are absolutely richer than they could have imagined. The percentage of the world population that lives under extreme poverty has decreased to 10.7% from 17.8% in 20 years; it’s easy to dismiss as a just a number, but these are very real people we’re talking about—people who grew up in a world of want and insecurity and who are now patronizing the most chic restaurants of Shanghai. That’s success.

The demographic unrest that is slowly building, and sometimes not so slowly, is nothing more than the consequence of success. In 1990, Europe and Africa had the same population; today the latter stands at 1 billion. This is the result of increasing food security, access to modern medicine, and falling infant mortality, urbanization, and all the good things that came with economic liberalization and modernization in Africa. This phenomenon has also occurred in Pakistan, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam, which are the Asian counterparts of the African population boom.

Attali also understands the consequences of success:

The coupling of markets/democracy is virtuous. We observe that the market requires democracy and that markets presuppose innovation, the right to create, the right to change your mind…The first contradiction is that the market is, by its very nature, without borders…While democracy is, by its very nature, local. It presupposes a territory and borders and so we find ourselves in contradiction between a market which is global and a rule of law, democratic where possible but if not,  at least national…Globalization is Somalization [the erasure of the rule of law] at a planetary scale…Both democracy and the market are founded upon a single value, which is individual liberty. What is individual liberty?…Individual liberty is the right to change your mind, which in turn creates a precarity in relations and a precarity in contracts. We can even say that the apologia of individual liberty is the apologia of disloyalty…We are in the process of witnessing our societies became nothing more than aggregations of disloyal mercenaries – no society can durably be a society of disloyal mercenaries (trans.)

Chronopolitics and Khorapolitics

Attali lays bare the inherent contradictions of the globalist project. He gives a chilling warning particularly to his own camp, which holds to chronopolitics, that is, the belief that the present is a period of transition. When political parties focus on mobilizing newly-settled populations against their historic bases because the demographic wind is with them, or abandon the social mores of previous generations because they claim technology has made them obsolete, they are engaging in chronopolitics.

A pervasive view exists in liberalism that time is on its side, that movement is on its side, that openness is on its side. The ethos of social liberalism rests on the double pillars of the free movement of capital and the free movement of people, which are indeed the very basis of the European federal experiment. But Attali’s warning is a stern reminder that a society cannot be sustained by “disloyal mercenaries.” Populations which are the product of movement and whose loyalty belongs to the highest bidder (the bid being the provision of highest living standard) do not have any binding loyalties to the actors or institutions guaranteeing that freedom of movement. The social results of chronopolitics undermine the very mechanisms which make it possible.

Attali, however, does not propose an alternative to the problems posed by chronopolitics. He merely suggests that we can manage the externalities of markets and democracies. For Attali, time is an accelerating process whose momentum increases exponentially—more people, more resources, faster technology and faster movement—in a potentially dangerous trajectory that needs to be adjusted in the present moment.

However, the crises we have discussed are not purely temporal. The Cold War era was in many ways a chronopolitical one. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were operating under ideologies that saw themselves as stages in the development of mankind. This isn’t to deny that the battle was also geopolitical. But we should distinguish between geopolitics—competition between states—and what precisely those states are battling for in terms of their ideological motivations and values. Ultimately, neither liberal democratic capitalism, nor Soviet communism could permit the other to last indefinitely. There was an ideological battle being fought alongside inter-state competition, and this was a battle for the future.

But the Cold War is over. Increasingly, the crises faced by states are not about how to monopolize the future of humanity, but how to secure and optimize the spaces under their control. The massive population movements discussed earlier will not be resolved by imposing some given end-state across populations. In fact, such an approach has been the direct cause of the most immediate manifestations of this crisis. Libya and Syria were once spaces where populations and resources were governed and development was occurring. What they lacked was a liberal democratic system approved by the Western order. Now they have neither. Similarly, the impacts of a changing climate will both be faced and resolved on a spatial level. The reordering of supply chains in energy and agriculture, as well as mapping of and adaptation toward new and sometimes extreme weather patterns, are only possible through coordination across great spaces: regions, continents, hemispheres.

In other words, political competition is likely to become increasingly spatial. The question is whether geopolitical players will adapt their governing worldviews to this reality.

Chronopolitics has anything but a monopoly on political thought. In a previous article, I discussed how the spatial dimensions of politics underpinned previous civilizations, and established the historical basis in land exploitation for the development of the bourgeois state. If the politics of space has proven itself to be a mighty force in the past, then it might well again become an alternative to the politics of time.

This might be dubbed khorapolitics. Chronopolitics and khorapolitics begin in the same place—that technological development, though itself often a consequence of politics, generates the social conditions to which politics responds. However, the modern Western approach has generally been to consider technological development as a form of historical progress. This is by no means a given across societies. The optimal exploitation of spatial resources is to khorapolitics what economies of scale, material, political, or otherwise, are to chronopolitics. In a global environment where competition is increasingly related to control and use of space, explicitly spatial categories of political thought seem likely to arise.

The Chinese have begun to do this already. For example, besides its central and explicit focus on trade routes and spaces, Belt and Road’s ideological sheen focuses on the “community of common destiny” idea and increasing cooperation in the use of resources. In Africa, China’s priority has been investment in strategically vital cities such as Addis Ababa and Lagos, rather than promoting universal arcs of political development. But China is by no means alone in this pattern. Russian geopolitics on its frontiers, European efforts to secure the Mediterranean, and even the Trump administration’s focus on supply chains and trade deficits have all privileged strategies of spatial dominance over ideological supremacy. There is no reason to think this trend will reverse itself.

The method of chronopolitics is to note the heterogeneity of techne (methods and expertise) over time and the scale of interaction which techne facilitates—no conscript armies without food production at scale, no democracy without conscript armies, no rights without democracy, no progressive movement without rights. The progression through time is clear. Political legitimacy under chronopolitics is grounded in being on the right side of progress, which locks in a cycle of constant dépassement of a previous material reality: slavery is immoral because wage labor is the necessary input for industrial output. Legal equality between the sexes is moral because domestic duties have now been automated and capital requires a larger workforce. Marriage strictly defined for the purpose of procreation and child rearing can be deprioritized because the service economy no longer requires large functional families. Chronopolitics uses technical possibility as justification for its moral developments. This is the politics of disloyalty Attali was commenting on.

Moreover, chronopolitics sees it as not just possible but also necessary to sever all ties with its earlier incarnations. The progressives of a previous age pioneered Canada’s residential school system, declaring that they would “make the savage like us through education.” The progressives of our age decry the same system. The same can be said of French colonialism, whose pioneers were inspired by the humanist ideas of extending technical progress to all races of man, thus elevating and equalizing them. Progressives of our age now decry it as the greatest injustice. Chronopolitics is the ephemeral politics of the now.

Just as previous eras of human history were shaped by the management of land, new spatial technologies have become increasingly politically relevant, opening up the possibility for a 21st century revival of khorapolitical thought on a global scale. As with all major technological developments, the incentive is for political elites to use new technology to maintain their own power and out-compete rivals. However, as we have seen, current political battles seem to be favoring a move away from chronopolitical norms precisely because these battles are spatial in nature. Spatial technologies require political actors to strategize and take on parameters for victory which are inherently khorapolitical.

Those of us involved in the development of space management technologies are beginning to pierce the shape of these new technological horizons. AR and VR technologies, coupled with locally sourced and sustainable pre-fab edifices, will allow for faster iterations when optimizing economic activity of a space or when implementing relocation of people and resources. The latter will be vital when responding to dangerous changes in climate patterns. Increasing urbanization and the data generated by individuals and industries will allow competent authorities to more accurately predict population growth patterns in urban areas. This will allow for the design of transit around optimal patterns to minimize commute times.

Such capabilities will not only empower traditional urban authorities, but also allow companies to meet emission targets by spreading their teams across nodes in the city. The scattering of the workforce across the city implies a kind of urban development which is divergent in its effects from the kind experienced by greatest global cities. The current type of urban development is characterized by the effects of the flight of the working class to smaller townships, of the concentration of wealth and employment in specific neighborhoods in the city, and of the concentration of spending power and entertainment in certain centers. This creates cultural deserts in the periphery and unsustainable increases in the cost of housing in certain parts of the city.

Another use of novel technologies is the prediction of desertification and reforestation patterns, enabling a shift to sustainable economic activities in the primary sector of the economy. The Great Green Wall initiative to stop the desertification of the Gobi desert through mass reforestation launched by the Chinese government is a current example. Here, the key application of prediction technologies is in managing ecological pressures to the primary sector and to populations engaged in the sector, and thus under increasing ecological strain, namely in sub-Saharan Africa. These are also the populations most susceptible to becoming climate migrants. Advanced prediction methods will be used to identify optimal placement for breaker forests, and use of drone technology will allow far more precise and far more aerial seeding efforts. The ability to inexpensively adapt crops to changes in soil will completely change the direction of primary sector industries and reduce the cost of the externalities that have to be managed in the global south.

Finally, predicting disruptions in key national industries will allow active governments to diversify and decentralize centers of economic activity, linking workers together or retraining them via more robust communication technologies. This can reduce the need for international or sub-national skilled immigration, and consequently the associated financial and human costs, in markets and regions where certain skills are sparse. Likewise, space management technologies at the legal and financial level will let competent authorities track the movement of capital and squash flows of capital generated by illegal and criminal activities, which are laundered through the acquisition of prime housing stock in the developed world and the acquisition of farmland in the global south, thus ensuring transparency and accountability, and also securing trust from the rooted sections of the populace in the developments of their own cities, townships, and villages.

All of these technological developments allow societies to optimize space in ways conducive to sustainable cultural life. However, they can only be successfully used by actors rooted in their own spatial jurisdiction. Whether through technologically-assisted mass reforestation or the relocation of millions of climate migrants into livable pre-fab housing, it is impossible to imagine any of the necessary technical milestones being reached by Atalli’s “disloyal mercenaries,” permanently jumping around from one chic liberal metropolis to another. The future cannot be outsourced.

These aren’t short, six-month projects. In fact, these projects are time-independent, as their success or failure will get imprinted into the very rocks. The use of these technologies demands that everyone involved, from the khorapolitical “responsibles” down to the individual economic actors, have skin in the game. These technical solutions maximize for a healthy indigeneity across space.

But they also create new forms of competition, and this is the mechanism which drives political actors toward khorapolitical forms of thought. Great powers are already beginning to use these technologies. Since these technological trends are only progressing, Chinese greening efforts and U.S. concerns about the directions of supply lines are only the start of this political battle. Due to the spatial nature of these technologies, the ability to think in terms of a spatial politics is an advantage. Combine this with the fact that a spatial politics, independent of techne, is already part of the tradition of numerous great powers—Russia and China being the most prominent—and it becomes probable that khorapolitics increasingly underpins both the means and the ends of victory.

As a new paradigm of political decision-making, khorapolitical thought can harness new spatial technologies to deal with the effects of mass global migration, demographic shifts, and climate change. The continued application and development of spatial technologies will grant significant political opportunities for those capable of exploiting these technologies. However, this requires a fundamental shift in how those with power think and operate, particularly in the Western world, given deep commitments to chronopolitics. If this shift does not occur at the top, it seems unlikely that ambitious elements will fail to learn the lessons and act on them. In this scenario, new technological realities invite a new spatially-oriented elite to seize the reins of power from their chronopolitical predecessors.

Unlike chronopolitics, the khorapolitical methodology is no longer focused on the heterogeneity of techne across time frames. Instead, it observes the heterogeneity of techne across space. In khorapolitics, legitimacy stems from the right and purposeful management of space. It is a politics of constancy, as topography is close to eternal. The rocks are millions of years old, and the water that erodes them was present at the planet’s formation. The removal of the element of time as the decisive factor removes the justification for arbitrary changes of mind—space is correctly and optimally used, or it isn’t. If resources are wasted, valuable land is misused, or territories fall outside of control, these may be permanently sunk costs. This places a limitation on both the individual liberty underpinning democratic institutions and the individual liberty presupposed in market mechanisms. Decisions are indeed binding across the generations, as the generations are the product of space and not of time.

Heterogeneity of techne is a natural reality—the countryside is exploited in a spatial manner, while the burgh is exploited and organized according to its spatial principles (especially thinking back to the medieval European town which was built around the marketplace and the cathedral in accordance with the dominant khorapolitics of the millennium). Khorapolitics is much more than the freezing of time; it is the adaption of techne to spatiality on the level of political thought and as a tool of political actors. I will preempt the critics by returning to the example of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Babylonians and the Assyrians are no longer around, and a new ethnogenesis has given birth to the Iraqis and Kurds—yet the economic exploitation of the space is organized around the flooding of the rivers. In fact, in many ways the villages of Iraq today bear an unmistakable resemblance to those of the ancient Near East, and even certain technologies such as quffa, a round straw canoe, are still around.

What about a horizon of 2030, or 2060, or 2100? The rise of legitimate and competent khorapolitical elites requires an understanding of the significance of techne to land organization and management. This understanding is essential if we are to resolve the aforementioned crises faced by both the liberal international order and its rivals: demographic shift in the global south, mass migration, and climate change. Moreover, such an elite has the opportunity to surpass the logic and constraints of chronopolitics on the ideological level. The linking of political legitimacy to appropriate levels of “progress” or development is inherently chronopolitical. The optimal use of spatiality invites the users to become something more and invites the possibility of creating what the Greeks termed an oikos: a dwelling, a home, a true place of belonging.

Thus, khorapolitics allows for the transcendence of a solely economic and utilitarian status, a status which underpins the liberal international order’s conception of human societies. Instead, it allows for these societies to ascend to the state of dwellers. In doing so, it resolves the ever-present destructive chronopolitical tenet which is the inconstancy of loyalties. What liberalism has required of its elites so far is to forcibly remove obstacles to the movement of capital, goods, and people. This has been a spectacular success.

Yet the same intensity of thought and degree of organization are insufficient when it comes to solving the problems they themselves have created. Dealing with the consequences of success demands that we go beyond mere guarantees of functioning markets and the minimal political demands this requires. The unique material circumstances which make khorapolitics possible also demand that our elites act as commanders of market power, as creators and stewards of the oikos.

The Portuguese language has a word which is untranslatable: saudade. Saudade is both a memory and a hope. It’s timeless in that way. It’s somewhere between melancholy, nostalgia, and anticipation. Macau fills me with saudade. I make a pilgrimage to the Capela de São Francisco Xavier every time I arrive in Coloane and usually grab a seat at the Macanese cafe. Through the stuccoed columns of the old Portuguese building, I watch all the mainland Chinese tourists snap selfies at the entrance of the chapel.

All the mainlanders I’ve come across have little or no understanding of Catholicism. For them, the cartoonishly yellow chapel must have been like a trip to Disneyland. Amusing ruins at best—traces of a bygone, strange people. For me, it was very much a living thing, or at least a living memory. Maybe something more like saudade.

I always liked walking in the footsteps of giants. On a previous trip, I had bought a book called Camões in Asia at the bookstore near Senado square. It has always struck me as being quite strange that the greatest literary work in the Portuguese language was written on this very island. Imagine if Shakespeare’s Hamlet was set and written in colonial Virginia. It says something about the allure Macau has held across the centuries and the kinds of people it has attracted.

I see announcements lining the road on my way towards the city: Exposição de Produtos e Serviços dos Países de Língua Portuguesa 2018. A business exhibition putting the Portuguese-speaking world on display.

Maybe I’m not five centuries late, after all. My saudade is playing tricks on me. ‘I didn’t get here on a caravel but I’m here all the same,’ I think to myself, ‘and much for the same reasons as Luis de Camões back in the day.’

It was held at the bloody Macau Venetian.

Winning the Non-Zero-Sum Game

China’s defense strategy remains a focus in discussions about re-calibrating Western commitments in the Pacific. China hawks in the Pentagon and foreign policy establishment have been pushing for the rearmament of Japan and a beefing up of Vietnam, while championing the Quad defense pact. This pact would see the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India tied into a strategy of containing what they see as de facto expansionism on China’s behalf. The U.S. State Department had previously pushed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership as part of a larger strategy to economically isolate China. However, the political patrons of the initiative, largely in the Democratic party, were defeated in their ambitions of garnering popular support for the TPP. Going forward, how can we put a workable strategy on China in place? My time as an entrepreneur on the ground in China, with a good view of the economic situation in the PRC, has led me to believe that we need a far more sophisticated and workable approach than containment.

The problem in coming up with a China strategy is that no one knows the inner workings of the Chinese politburo. We have to stoop down to antics not unlike those of the Cold War, when we were analyzing the order in which the members of the Soviet politburo appeared atop Lenin’s mausoleum during the Victory day parade to try and insinuate their level of favor within the system. China’s leadership is a black box from which nothing ever leaks–and they like to keep it that way by whatever means necessary. During the October 2017 CCP congress, which saw the crystallization of President’s Xi’s place in the Chinese political system, the Chinese government throttled the internet speed to a near zero all over the country to “avoid a hack.” This ground the service sector of the economy to a halt for the duration of the congress. The authorities stringently enforced immigration regulations, deporting many illegal workers, and halted all arrivals and departures from airports, except at specially authorized crossings. Beijing, with its 30 million residents, went into lockdown. All this suggests that the Chinese leadership takes security very seriously, and sees its opaqueness as an advantage. Playing against China turns out to be less a game of chess than a game of poker. So how do we play the hand we’ve been dealt without knowing what our counterpart is thinking?

Stephen Kotkin, the great Russologist, offers a some insight into the mentality we need to adopt in a 2017 lecture:

So the answer with something like China, is how do you get away from zero-sum. […] We have a deeper relationship at the societal level than at the military level, which is a dangerous place to be. The military guys will the first ones to tell you. So you thicken the relationship, you thicken the conversation, you thicken the interaction at the decision-making level and then you focus on issues which are not zero-sum. If you can get somewhere on the not-zero-sum issues, it gives you a little bit more goodwill on issues which are zero-sum. The Russia stuff is easy, the China stuff is much harder. The China stuff is harder because they have a lot more leverage. The China problem is displacement of American power, where America is the dominant power but being pushed out. The issue is managing the relative rise of China and relative decline of the U.S. while the U.S. is still dominant. That means that China will not become dominant but China’s power vis-a-vis the U.S. is going to grow.

What counts as zero-sum? The Chinese have openly declared the South China Sea (SCS) to be a core interest, which puts it on the same level as Taiwan and Hong Kong. For comparison, the Chinese government seeks reunification of Taiwan by 2049, even if military force is necessary. The Chinese state takes its place in the SCS seriously, and is threatened by U.S. and allied attempts to thwart its territorial claims. This is the zero-sum situation that Kotkin told us about. An air campaign analysis between China and the U.S. over Taiwan by the RAND corp. has produced the following results:

The effects of China’s missile barrage are dramatically apparent: On  the first day, the PLAAF generates about 3.7 times as many sorties as do the United States and Taiwan combined. Without any analysis beyond this, we can conclude that China’s ability to suppress Blue airbases redefines that nature of the air war and puts the defenders at a severe disadvantage from the outset of the conflict. (p. 67)

 

However, our analysis on the whole suggests that a credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue air force has even fired a shot. Threats to Blue air bases and a more evenly matched qualitative balance combine to paint a very troubling picture. (p. 89)

 

With each passing year, meanwhile, China increases its capabilities for striking air bases and fixed air defenses merely by continuing to add to its stocks of advanced missiles, munitions, and aircraft. This race between China’s extant capabilities and Blue’s hypothetical ones is both unequal and highly unfavorable to Taiwan’s defenders. (p.90)

What this tells us is that a military engagement with China will be disastrous. Churchill once called politics “the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And…the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.” Let’s think about this scenario: what happens when a U.S. carrier strike group is sunk in a skirmish in the SCS, or off Taiwan? How are you going to explain that away? How do you retaliate? A nuclear exchange? The political shockwaves from such a skirmish would be immense, not to mention the loss of life. It would entirely undermine the network of alliances the U.S. has built up overnight, as it would show that the U.S. military can’t be trusted to make good on its commitments. As Kotkin said, China’s power vis-a-vis the U.S. has increased dramatically, which is reflected in its ability to enforce territorial claims in Taiwan and the SCS. If we can’t sanction them, and we can’t bomb them, we need to talk to them. And this is where winning the not-zero-sum game becomes crucial.

How do you get the goodwill to come to agreements on the harder matters? One way would be to tie them into a mutually beneficial international system. We’ve already done that with trade liberalization. But we can go even further. First, we need to think about the challenges that the Chinese face: rapid desertification, aging population, concerns around energy security, concerns around food security. If we can tie them up institutionally into our solutions, we get the leverage we need to establish a new equilibrium. And here’s where Macau comes in: although it’s been under the radar, the Lusophone world could provide an opportunity to do just that at a relatively low cost and little political capital.

China and the Lusophone world

Western observers have often ignored that China’s relationship with the Lusophone world runs deep. China sponsored Marxist post-colonial liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique, sending money, weapons, and training to these insurgencies in order to push out the Portuguese in the 1970s. Chinese power, even in its crippled economic state, played a role in the independence of these nations. The BRICS association, which includes both China and Brazil, has been widely discussed, despite a distancing between the two in more recent years. Nevertheless, China is still Brazil’s most important trade partner, accounting for 21.8% of all exports.

I’ve created the following charts to show the depth of the trade ties between China and its Lusophone partners. Data is from UN Comtrade.

What trends are easily noticeable from this trade data? First, the gargantuan increase in trade volume from 2003 onwards. This is a clue. While Chinese power took the form of military aid in the 1970s, Chinese soft power now comes down to one thing: trade. China does not control the financial markets, nor does it have the technological edge that Western nations have. It also lacks the economic and military weight shared by the Western alliance in its entirety, which would include North America and some of South America, the European Union, Australia, and Japan. There is simply no competition in those domains. However, where China can contest the Western economies is in growing demand and new trade routes. Becoming a trading partner of the PRC can mean the road to prosperity for many developing nations and requires fewer invasive ideological commitments than any of the Western initiatives. It’s a great way for China to expand its sphere of influence without causing too much friction, especially when it comes to countries weary of Western interference. While the U.S. builds military bases, China builds ports and railways. It is a low-friction and quick-reward strategy.

Second, we see a dip in the trade balance after 2013. This reveals something interesting about the limitations of Chinese soft power; it is dependent on basic indicators, such as the price of oil (which took a nosedive around that time), and any volatility can have significant impact. To account for such fluctuations, the PRC has deployed a large credit strategy to ease the adverse effects of market volatility. This could prove to be ruinous, as some, if not most, of the regimes that the PRC is dealing with are notorious for being bad debtors. The result is once more a limitation on Chinese soft power.

In light of that context, it’s time to move to the Portuguese-speaking world. The cases of Mozambique and Angola address two core Chinese concerns: energy security and food security. These countries are particularly interesting because they are very close to what could become Chinese poles of power in the post-liberal international order. Mozambique is incredibly close to the PRC military, and the trade ports in Djibouti and Angola are among the most open to China in Sub-Saharan Africa. The trade routes taken by goods leaving ports in these countries map directly into the Chinese port network under the Belt and Road Initiative, across the Indian Ocean. China is planning for these routes to ultimately avoid the strait of Malacca, which is an easy choke point for a naval blockade of China, instead taking overland routes from the Indian Ocean.

Mozambique

Mozambique is a failed state. On top of that, it is a failed neoliberal state. Mozambique is a favorite of international aid donors and has implemented all International Monetary Fund structural reforms to the letter. Yet, despite these great efforts, the situation has not improved. Poverty levels are the same, and any GDP growth can be accounted for by resource extraction by foreign corporations. Benedito Cunguara and Joseph Hanlon, writing in the journal Development and Change in 2009, summarized the situation at the time as follows:

Mozambique has been one of the poorest countries in the world for more than two decades. Its population is predominantly rural with 80 per cent engaged in agriculture; however, agriculture contributes only 20 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), suggesting that labour productivity in this sector is significantly lower than in the non-agricultural sector. It also suggests that growth in agricultural productivity is critical for poverty reduction. Nevertheless, as will be shown, agricultural productivity declined in the last decade, contributing to stagnant poverty levels. […] Worsening rural poverty is puzzling both because national accounts show an outstanding economic performance since the end of the war in 1992, and because Mozambique became a donor darling and aid has been rising steadily for the past decade. With GDP rank 169 and HDI rank 172, Mozambique receives significantly more aid than neighbours at a similar level.

In that same year, Brazil, Japan, and Mozambique launched the ProSavana initiative to bring Mozambican agriculture into the 21st century. The initiative entailed heavy investment into the northern regions of the country around the Corridor de Nacala (known in English as the Nacala Logistics Corridor) and a turn towards soybean production. The backlash the initiative faced resulted in the situation becoming a basket case. An opportunity to utilize both Lusophone potential and Asian demand was undone thanks to the overarching effects of liberal ideology as exercised through NGO power.

The Nacala Logistics Corridor is a good place to start from. This railway is owned and operated by Vale, a Brazilian mining giant, to shuffle ore from its mines in neighboring Malawi. It received $1.1 billion USD in investment in 2012 and today operates 85 locomotives over 912 kilometers, linking Malawi to the port of Nacala in the north eastern coast of Mozambique. Why is this significant to ProSavana, an agricultural initiative? The answer is that the agriculture production, turned mainly towards soybean production, could be easily exported to Asian markets—and to China in particular—through this same railway. To give some perspective, the following simple linear regression forecasts Chinese imports of soybean used to feed Chinese pigs (half the pigs in the world):

It’s huge, and it’s going to get worse. One of the main points of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy is that it has been able to raise the living standard through development efforts, lifting half a billion people out of poverty. An important part of that increase in living standards is a more diverse diet, with more meat and especially pork (a very important cultural staple—the Chinese character for home, 家, is a pig under a building). Food security and pork consumption are important to the interests of the Chinese elite. However, there is an ecological cost-benefit analysis. Shifting production from other crops, notably rice, to soybeans will exacerbate desertification and affect food security. Despite the size of the country, China’s arable land is quite limited. Given this obstacle, Chinese leadership has vested interest in importing huge quantities of soybean. With the recent U.S. trade spats, China’s next obvious source of soybeans is Brazil. But Brazil alone may not be able to fill Chinese appetite, as can be seen in this forecast of Brazilian soybean production over the next 7 years:

Outsourcing soybean production is a good deal for the Chinese leadership, but it needs to find a reliable source. This brings us back to Mozambique. ProSavana’s purpose was to plug into the Chinese trade network being developed in the Indian Ocean. Brazil is already in the Chinese trade network and has developed the expertise and new strands of resistant soybean which could produce good yields in the land around the Nacala Corridor.

So, why was the project halted? Simply put: Western NGOs. GRAIN, a non-profit, is one among those. Its mission statement is to “support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems,” engaging in activism and documenting initiatives such as ProSavana all over the world. GRAIN’s ideological associations are not opaque at all. They compare the ProSavana project to Portuguese settlement in Mozambique—that is, a process of disenfranchisement of the local farmers. Yet, there is something particularly odd about their assessments of the state of agriculture in Mozambique: GRAIN glances over the period of collectivization which occurred after independence, and resulted in utter failure. Not only does their assessment fail to discuss the damage done by collectivization, it also praises the spirit of collective ownership of land during Mozambique’s central planning era. Its funder’s list includes the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (which made $105 million USD worth of contributions on the global stage in 2017) and a plethora of U.S. and European aid organizations. GRAIN, along with similar Western-funded NGOs, mobilized local farmers against ProSavana. It claimed that the program was a process akin to recolonization and that their lands were being seized with the Mozambican government’s seal of approval. What are the reasons for such massive mobilizations against the project? What exactly is this ‘process of recolonization’?

Go Suzui summarizes some of the reasons for opposition:

First, they are concerned about a risk of land grabbing. Other Japanese agencies, (such as multinational companies), have entered the project area seeking business opportunities. This may result in land grabbing of local community land by these non-local agencies using contracts with the central government without agreement of a local community, for example of a large-scale plantation. Local farmers think that non-local agencies rob local farmers of their local lands. Land grabbing has happened in many places in response to the food crisis in 2007 in other countries. Second, ProSAVANA neglects and ignores the production efforts of local community farmers around the Nacala Corridor. The local farmers subsist on their own produce, and sell their surplus products to others through local markets. They worry that if this system is destroyed, it will create tension within their communities. […] Fourth, ProSAVANA is interested in growing Mozambique’s economy by exporting more food. However, the local population is concerned that such export-oriented agriculture will threaten food security, not only in Nacala Corridors, but also in other areas of Mozambique. For these four reasons, the local population fears that the implementation of ProSAVANA will violate the sovereignty of the people of Mozambique.

These are sensible, or at least familiar, reasons for opposition. Rhetoric about neocolonialism under the guise of ‘development’, and the sovereign interests of indigenous communities, is common in Western discourse. Benedito Cunguara and Joseph Hanlon, however, paint a very different picture:

One reason for the very high levels of chronic malnutrition in Mozambique is that on average farmers produce enough food to feed their families adequately for less than eight months of the year, and this is not changing. The poorest families only produce enough to provide adequate food for half the year. Thus most smallholder farmers are deficit producers of food, selling some quantities soon after the harvest, and buying more food later in the agricultural season at prices significantly higher. These households rely either on food aid or on cash income for their subsistence. Participation in non-farm income activities is used as a coping strategy, and the poor usually engage in activities of low return.

A bit of a divergence from Suzui, isn’t it? The people who mobilized the local population against the ProSavana project are also the same people in charge of distributing food aid. They pioneered ‘alternative’ methods of empowering local farmers, but in the end no results came from it. This isn’t to claim that land-grabbing does not occur. Quite the contrary; a lot of international illegal funds are laundered through shady land acquisition in rural Africa. However, the ProSavana project had many actors, some of whom even tried to work directly with the farmers themselves through microloans and the provision of seeds and fertilizer under agreement that they produce soybean. To compress a project of such scale down to a land grab ignores key advantages.

A project like ProSavana, if done responsibly with expertise from Brazil and Portugal, as well as funds from the West and China, could potentially inject cash into those local economies. This would force specialization in agriculture, while expanding Chinese trade power in Mozambique. The result could tie African development, Chinese food security, and Western expertise into one big project. Chinese-Western cooperation in Mozambique could prove to African partners, especially the regimes that feel insecure about growing Chinese influence, that responsible and stable development is good for everyone, especially on the security front. More money, higher yields, agro-industrial human capital, and more infrastructure eliminate food riots (as occurred during the 2008 food crisis)—a necessary task for stable states, whether democratic or otherwise. But to achieve that and open up Brazil-Portugal-Africa in projects, in general, the ideologies and roles of NGOs and foreign aid organisations would need to be revisited. This is fortunately an easier problem to solve than rethinking a Western grand strategy for Africa and Asia, or trying to sell the TPP to the American worker.

Angola

The Angolan problem can be summarized in these two graphs:

Chinese demand for crude oil is growing steadily, while Angolan production is hampered by depletion, and inability to retool due to endemic corruption. The crash in oil prices has made the problem worse for Angola, as it has to increase production to meet payments to Chinese creditors. It currently is unable to meet that production quota. As Inge Amundsen writes in his 2014 article on the Angolan resource curse:

The Angolan example illustrates well the analytically important distinction between the ‘institutions of extraction’ and the ‘institutions of redistribution.’ The Angolan institutions of extraction are vital for the regime. The presidency, the national petroleum company Sonangol, the coercive apparatus, and the ruling party are the main institutions that turned “grabber friendly” by the necessities of the war and later developed into strong institutions.

Angola is a reversed China. It’s a single party dictatorship which is notoriously bad at ruling Angolan society. It is highly competent at extracting cash for its elite, but unable to do much else beyond that. And this is going to be a significant problem for the PRC in its dealings with the Angolan elite, as China keeps propping the regime up with loans which hover at around 60 billion (USD) in total. This remains an area of potential collaboration between the Lusophone countries and China. Brazilian oil giants (which have the expertise for efficient oil production and management of reserve depletion) could enter the Angola oil markets and help meet China’s growing demand for oil. Angolan relations with the West, but especially the U.S., Portugal, and Brazil, are also quite warm. The technology and expertise coming out of those countries, coupled with Chinese funds, could help secure higher production of crude for Chinese markets, as these countries possess the expertise.

The advantage of such a scheme is that it makes use of sophisticated ‘institutions of extraction’ such as Sonangol, which Amundsen describes as a “haven of competency.” Amundsen also notes that most foreign interactions with the state-owned producer have been relatively easy. Furthermore, it is completely in alignment with the interests of the Angolan elite, which needs to pump out more crude to pay for its security apparatus—engaged in counter-insurgency operations against separatists in Cabinda.

Caravela Pastelaria, 7 Patio do Comandante Mata e Oliveira

Back to Macau. Angolan officials trying to interact with Chinese bakery clerks is something to behold. This place is a 20 sq. km slice of Portugal, Brazil, China, and Africa all blended together and it is quite aware of its role in the Lusophone. With the University of Macau and the ever increasing initiatives between China and the Lusophone world that the autonomous Macanese government is happy to platform, the significance of those 20 sq. km is increasing. After living through a decade of gambling boom, the Macanese administration is seeking to diversify and sees the enormous opportunities in connecting the Chinese world to the Lusophone world. If Macau successfully becomes a platform for business, it would cement the place of those 20 sq. km in the world at large.

In the center of that slice is the oasis of Caravela Pastelaria. There’s TV streaming from Lisbon, and vinho do porto is served. It’s a staple of the Portuguese community which permanently occupies one of the few smoking patios of Macau on an around-the-clock basis. There are some strange characters who frequent it, the kinds of which only several long years in Asia can produce. A punk-looking Portuguese gentleman is there all the time. He seems at ease in Cantonese when he talks to all the passersby. Occasionally, he will strike up a conversation in Portuguese with some of the cafe’s older clientele. I wonder what kinds of stories they have to tell.

Macau must be the densest Portuguese village in the world.

The Nile Delta, and the the fertile crescent at large, has been continuously farmed for 11,000 years. It is hard to find a better example of a sustainable, immemorial economic activity. While cruise ships often ply the waters of the Nile, they have to thread alongside the feluccas, a single masted vessel used by the inhabitants of the villages along the river. Life in those villages has not been significantly altered by the passage of time; the rhythm of life is dictated by the floodings of the Nile. Eleven millennia of sameness, a thought which upon reflection is incapable of being grasped by the modern mind.

As my flight was landing at the Macau International airport, I could spy sections of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge through the window, which stretches 34 kilometers and links the two banks of the Pearl River Delta. Another laurel of the PRC’s Promethean infrastructure development efforts, the bridge is a symbol of the unimaginable change this ancient region has experienced. Inhabited since the 5th millennium BC, the Pearl River Delta has been permanently altered in the past 30 years. An acquaintance of mine in the real estate industry once told me about his first trip to Shenzhen in the early days of the SEZ: “It was a tiny, backwater fishing village. It was hard to even catch a taxi. I thought it was insane for anyone to try and set up a factory there.”

In 1980, Shenzhen had 30,000 souls. Today, it is home to 12 million people. The fishermen and villagers of the region have become Armani clad businessmen and professionals blabbering in singsong Cantonese into their iPhones. All this within our lifetime.

Thirty years was enough to completely uproot 7,000 years of continuity.

The Pearl River is one of the most polluted rivers in China; its water quality is worse than the lowest national water quality standard and is entirely undrinkable. Industrial and household discharge have turned it into a light brown podge more like mud than water. Its dirtiness has become an inescapable fixture. Sitting down at a café at the quaint Portuguese waterfront village of Coloane in the south west of Macau, the distinct stench coming from the water has made a permanent mark on my memory. A visit to the Pearl River Delta region drives home the point argued by some geologists that we have entered the Anthropocene, a geological epoch marked by the alterations made by man upon what was once thought as the unalterable elements of nature. It is no wonder that the apparatchiks manning the ship of the Chinese state count degradation of the natural habitats and geological features as a primary threat to the political stability of the PRC.

The effects of the establishment of the SEZ in the 1980s by the previous generation of Chinese statesmen have been passed down to the new and highly competent technocrats of the Chinese Communist Party. Through this generational transfer of political responsibility, a deep knowledge of the value and purpose of land has also been communicated. In a country rocked by agrarian land reforms and the establishments of SEZs, there is deep-seated appreciation of the importance of land.

It’s something that is not as emphasized in the West. As we drive forward clamoring the advent of the post-industrial and digital age, we have relegated the ownership and management of land to the list of secondary concerns, far more preoccupied by healthcare, education, equity, and immigration.

But historically, the administration and ownership of land, the spatial dimension of politics, is key to political power and stability.

I will not attempt to write a full history of land, even less a brief one, but I can drive home the far-reaching ordering effect of land allocation and ownership on society. The condition of society is deeply affected by the management of the land it sits upon.

Let’s examine several historical examples across different cultures to clarify just how critical land management is to the organization of society and how technology changes the dictates of land:

Achaemenid Persia

As one of the most innovative empires in human history, the Achaemenid Empire can be credited for the creation and dissemination of what we traditionally associate with state power, including but not limited to bimetallic coinage and a relevant taxation system to exploit it, postal service, governorship, and extensive record keeping. Stretching from India to the Balkans, the empire was a well-oiled machine for most of its two centuries of existence, finally succumbing to Alexander the Great in 330 BC.

As a large and multi-ethnic empire, the Achaemenids developed a peculiar system of land ownership. They had three kinds of land ownership: royal land, land owned by temples and religious institutions, and private land. As Muhammad A. Dandamayev from the Oriental Institute of St. Petersburg writes in his Iranians in Achaemenid Babylonia:

[A]rchaeological evidence shows that in most areas of Mesopotamia, the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods mark the beginning of ‘a long phase of general growth, the resettlement and cultivation: of long-abandoned territory’. In the fifth century B.C, there was much cheap land, but water was costly. Oppenheim has shown that in Achaemenid Babylonia there appeared ‘new installations, new techniques, better utilization of the available water’. […] The land was divided into allotments and given to Persian nobles, to collectives of soldiers, and to officials who were not farmers themselves and therefore turned their land over to the other persons to cultivate. […] The king also owned many large canals, which his managers leased out for high prices. In the neighborhood of Nippur, the royal canals were rented by the Murasu house who, in their turn, leased them to groups of small landowners.

This passage is particularly revealing of what would account as state ownership of land and its administration. The state investment into the construction of canals and irrigation systems shows how central technological development was to a more fruitful and sustainable exploitation of land in a region where water is still, to this day, scarce. The mention of the distribution of royal land to soldiers is another interesting aspect of the Achaemenid system of land exploitation, since we know that the army was composed of various ethnicities from all over the empire, effectively tying the interests of the elements of society capable of perpetrating violence to that of the royal house. The foresight of the state administrators who understood that imperial power rested on the diligent management of public land, and sought to invest in technologies to improve its output, enabled the establishment and expansion of the Achaemenid Empire.

There are numerous aspects of land ownership in the Achaemenid Empire which significantly resemble our own, namely the commercial bonds between sublessor and sublessee. We know from the historical record that the most of the royal treasury funds did not derive from the direct exploitation of royal lands, but from taxation of economic output from all lands, whether royal, religious, or private. This arrangement of land ownership meant that the state required an effective way of collecting taxes, leading to the creation of bimetallic coinage. Satraps, regional governors, were in charge of collecting taxes and applied taxation according to potential economic output. The governors of Egypt mostly levied taxes in kind, as the region functioned as a granary of the empire, whereas regions where significant trade took place necessitated a larger share of the taxes to be levied in coin. A feature of the rapid expansion of cultivable land was the necessity of vaster amounts of laborers to till the land.

The Achaemenids were able to solve this problem by taking advantage of the large multi-ethnic nature of the empire, whereas workers were brought from neighboring regions and given wages, in addition to food and board being covered by employers. The necessity to direct labor and goods across enormous distances led the construction of the “Royal Highway” and the establishment of the postal service.

Gracchi Land Reforms

The previous example of the Achaemenid Empire shows how an entire society can be organized in a stable manner by diligent administration of land. Rome of the 2nd century BC can provide an example of the opposite. Scullard gives a good summary of the situation in his work From Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome 133 BC to AD 68:

Thoughtful Romans began to realize the need to attempt some alleviation of the economic situation, if only because it affected Rome’s military strength. The Roman army was a citizen militia: it consisted of men enrolled in five property classes, but if these men lost their farms and became urban paupers they would sink below the minimum property qualification and would be classed as capitecensi or proletarii who were not subject to conscription. The evidence suggests that the needs of recruitment had in fact led to some relaxation of the necessary requirement and that some such men had been enrolled in the armies which fought in Africa and Greece. This would produce further difficulty, because on demobilization men previously had a farm to which to return, whereas now some men might be left resourceless apart from any war-booty that they had won. If the strength of the army was to be kept up under the traditional system of recruitment, the peasant farmers of Italy must be restored to their old prosperity. This concern for the needs of the army might combine with distrust of recent developments in the countryside to induce some Romans to attempt some reform.

Scullard describes the misallocation of land and the insidious, quasi-illegal, acquisition of public land, the ager publicus, by wealthy landowners through various schemes, such as the use of puppet tenant (reminiscent of property flipping in major cities today with over-inflated property markets such London, Sydney, Vancouver, and Toronto). The effects of this degentrification of the Roman people led to a security crisis. It was common knowledge in the pre-modern age that you needed land to support soldiers, and a scarcity of the latter would cause a recruitment shortfall. For a state entity in full expansion, engaged in prolonged conflicts with major adversaries such as Carthage, as was the case with Rome in the 2nd century BC, the effects could be catastrophic. Tiberius Gracchus was the man to try to tackle the issue, which carried undertones of civil war. Scullard writes of Tiberius’ motivations:

It is difficult to be sure which were the dominant motives that turned him into a reformer. Knowledge of Greek political thought and practice, the effect of the Spanish episode, the contemporary slave-rising in Sicily, concern at the changing economic conditions with their impact on peasant husbandry and army recruiting, the consequent growth of unemployment at Rome, all these factors may have combined to urge a generous-hearted man to risk his own political future in an attempt to re-establish the peasants on small-holdings once again.

The issue would remain contentious for the remaining days of the Republic. Julius Caesar would capitalize on the sentiment of alienation from land monopolization to propel himself against the senatorial elites. We have in this history of the Republic examples of how land mismanagement and monopolization stifled economic growth, generating unemployment (as large landowners had access to mass slave labor) and pauperization, which eventually led to civil strife then civil war and culminated in the abolition of the Republic.

Feudalism, the Nation-State, and Democracy

The collapse of the Roman Empire and the degradation of the security situation in Western Europe led to the abandonment of a large amount of cultivated land. The feudal system of vassalage was able to reestablish sufficient security to allow for organised agriculture (a dépassment of sustenance agriculture) to progressively return to the European countryside. The equation for serfdom was essentially protection and land for labor. In order to keep crops growing, the lord had to guarantee the protection provision of vassalage, which required maintaining troops.

As the lords were not sufficiently wealthy to maintain large standing armies, and since the fields required manpower to be plowed, they relied on a small core of professional soldiers drawn from wealthier classes as armor, weapons, and training were expensive. Knights were given lands, which were exploited by their own vassals, while men-at-arms and archers were drawn from the landed gentry, yeomen, and craftsmen. Mercenaries were also profusely employed. The requirements of land and labor thus essentially dictated the political ordering of Medieval Western Europe, resting largely on military professionalism.

Although feudal relations, notably that of serf and lord, would decay from the Renaissance onward, particularly because of the shortage of workers induced by the Black Plague, the security infrastructure of Europe would not change notably until the end of the 18th century. Even through major conflicts such as the Wars of Religion and the Seven Years’ War, the growing authority of the monarch still relied on wealthy aristocrats to raise and maintain professional regiments at their own expense, with mercenaries playing a significant role in bolstering military forces. As noted in our previous examples, the disproportionate role that land and its exploitation plays in the ordering of society would be a factor in the disordering of feudal Europe in the late 18th century.

Agriculture experienced a revolution in the mid 18th century in Western Europe, primarily in Great Britain, which forever destroyed the established order. The agricultural revolution was entirely technological in nature, set into motion by the development of the four crop rotation system, the first forays into the use of mineral fertilizers, advances in metallurgy and, consequently, plough design, further investment into food transportation infrastructure, and canal construction. As a significant quantity of capital was dedicated to the development of the agricultural section in Britain, the legal system caught on and adapted to this new manner of organizing land exploitation.

By passing the Inclosure Acts, the British parliament mandated the enclosure of private property, effectively reversing acts of customary law established in the Middle Ages, which set aside portions of the manorial lands for common use. No longer able to access common lands, the small peasants were unable to feed themselves and were forced to sell their small lots, as they could not shoulder the costs of enclosing their properties. The wealthier landowners, however, consolidated their smaller lots and significantly increased the size of these estates (not unlike the previously reviewed Gracchi period). The peasants who had become landless were hired as farm hands for wages on these estates. In combination with the aforementioned technical advances, these changes can be considered as the first instance of industrial farming and the initial reordering of the economic system along capitalist lines.

Agriculture was the primary use of land up until the 18th century, but innovations in agricultural production upended that order and led to a new system.

What happened to the peasants driven off from the countryside? They went to the cities in search of employment for wages, which marks the beginning of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie. The landowners, by exploiting technical and legal advances in agriculture, provided the bourgeoisie with the labor necessary for the rapid expansion of their economic power. Although liberal mythology usually pins the changes of the 18th century on the reassuring and lofty ideas of the Enlightenment, it is no coincidence that liberal ideas took hold immediately in the aftermath of the agricultural revolution. Even the darling cause of historical progressives and reformers (who at the time were the early capitalists), the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, was passed at a time when the principal source of labor in the driving sectors of the economy (manufacturing and mining) were wage laborers and not slaves. It was easy for the new bourgeois elite to abolish something it had no use for.

It is also no coincidence that the first nation-state was established in France in 1789, or that the French republic declared war on the monarchies of Europe in 1792, or that the French republican army invaded the Rhine region, the industrial and commercial heartland of Europe. Why is it that the French bourgeois elite established the nation-state and used it to invade the wealthiest region in the world? Why indeed.

For the analysis of the nation-state and the rise of democracy, Lenin’s seminal work, State and Revolution, is instructive. Let’s review the definition of state that Engels gives in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:

It is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.

In the stated example of the Agricultural Revolution, the enclosure of land and the pauperization of the countryside led to civil unrest—food riots being particularly common. Another major source of antagonism in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century was the conflicting economic interests of the established landowners and the upstart bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie sought access to markets abroad and favored free trade, while the landowners were supporters of mercantilism. The Corn Laws, which prohibited the importation of grain, were examples of this dynamic. The bourgeoisie and their new-found laborers agitated for more political representation to overturn the policies set by the landowning classes (the village of Grampound and the city of Manchester had the same number of MPs, two, despite being of vastly different sizes). In order to manage the conflicting interests of these economic classes, the state sought to impose order, thus avoiding a repeat of incidents such as the Peterloo massacre.

Engels notes here in this passage something crucially ignored by the current left, which views the bourgeois state as directly implementing the interests of the bourgeoisie. Engels, and by extension Lenin, understood that in order for the state to exercise its powers, it must be above and alienated from society, which means the bourgeois state must and does resort to measures which allow its perpetuation, even if those measures directly hinder the interests of the bourgeoisie at large.

In the case of the French revolutionary republic and later the French Empire, the state of total war required the adoption of measures detrimental to the interest of the bourgeoisie in the immediate course of the war, while the general impetus of state policy, in the long-term, was towards the achievement of goals strengthening the power of the bourgeoisie. The access to the ports and manufactories of the Low Countries in the wars of the Coalitions (1792-1815) and later, during the Second Republic, the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the access to mineral resources in the same Rhine region (containing the majority of iron ore and coal in Europe) were exactly aligned with the interests of the French national bourgeoisie.

Yet in order to accomplish its objectives, the bourgeois state must create a national state militarily capable of competing with the state apparatuses of other hostile national bourgeoisies. Lenin described the aforementioned mechanisms of the bourgeois state as follows:

Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell […], it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.

Why is the democratic republic the very best shell for capitalism? Because of its ability to mobilize large numbers of men into the service of its ends. In 1792, the French legislature voted into force the Jourdan-Delbrel law. Here are extracts from the principles of the law:

“Tout Français est soldat et se doit à la défense de la patrie.” (article 1)

“All Frenchmen are soldiers and must rally to the defense of the country”

“Hors le cas du danger de la patrie, l’armée de terre se forme par enrôlement volontaire et par la voie de la conscription militaire.” (article 3)

“At the exception of immediate dangers to the country, the land forces will be constituted by voluntary enrollment and by way of military conscription”

This is the first and final blow to the centuries-long established tradition of the European professional army. This would be apparent during the first engagements between the French and Prussian armies. The Prussian army was considered, by far, the best-drilled, most disciplined, and most professional army in Europe, and a quick Prussian victory over the “French mob” was anticipated. That victory would never take place, and the Prussian defeat would be all the more humiliating. This very “French mob” would go on to conquer the vast majority of Europe, laying to rest any doubt as to the advantages of conscript armies. The old monarchies of Europe soon learned that the age of the bourgeoisie was one where numbers mattered. They also learned that democratic republics were able to field more and more troops.

Why would conscripts fight if not for funds? They had a vote; that was their compensation. The bourgeoisie was willing to grant universal suffrage, thus forging a kingdom of disparate ethnicities (Bretons, Provençals, Normands) into a nation of French citizen-soldiers, which they would weaponize for the eventual and final victory over their class enemies, the hereditary landowners and monarchs of Europe. The nation-state is the security apparatus of the national bourgeoisie, and the stronger it is, the better served are its interests. What began as mere technical advances in land exploitation led to the end of an order established for a millennium.

Land and the techniques for its exploitation are crucial for the ordering or disordering of society. We would do well to pay attention to changing land use and its downstream effects as a major factor in the future development of society.