Beyond Molotovs

To mark PPE@10 this feature continues a series of posts to celebrate ten years of Progress in Political Economy (PPE) as a blog that has addressed the worldliness of critical political economy issues since 2014. 

“We are aesthetically superior” and “The fucking lefties are losing the cultural battle” are two phrases repeated by the Argentinean leader Javier Milei. Through them, he seeks to allude to the supposed creative inferiority of the lefts committed to building alternative options in the face of the global polycrisis. They have confrontational purposes that denigrate otherness and exalt xenophobia and the growing expressions of neoconservative political action. What to do in this situation? How to subvert authoritarian discourses and reactionary communication strategies? How to counteract the appropriation of the language of resistance by neoconservatism?

With the financial crisis in 2008, it became clear that traditional measures could not contain its effects and discontent. More “democratic” responses began to be left behind, and new forms of authoritarianism emerged. In the last decade, we began to speak of the resurgence of global authoritarianism as we witnessed the parade of right-wing governments, the strengthening and expansion of extreme right-wing parties, punitive and repressive policies, hate speeches, and nationalist, reactionary, racist, neo-fascist and anti-feminist ideologies.

At the same time, the grand narratives and revolutionary gestures ended, and with them, our utopian fantasies. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, referring to the fact that there was no alternative to liberal capitalism. Our hopes were reduced to electoral political participation, and representative democracy was positioned as the only possible political horizon. In this way, our creativity to organize social relations in other ways and to build non-capitalist futures has been curbed. This situation has led to a form of capitalist realism where, as Mark Fisher warns, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

In mass media and social networks, in advertising and propaganda, we continually consume images and sounds that feed our minds with reactionary discourses and aesthetics; authoritarianism shapes mentalities and mobilizes people on deep psychological and emotional levels. Therefore, counter-strategies not only have to be versatile, but they also need to use the sensory and emotional aspects to communicate emancipatory alternatives effectively. We need other languages, using different images, sonorities, experiences and sensibilities to galvanize people to confront these global authoritarian tendencies and demonstrate that the left is far from a crisis of political imagination.

In this spirit, the book Beyond Molotovs. A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies is a collection of 50 first-hand accounts from activists, collectives, movements, artists and scholars from around the world, showing us the creativity to subvert authoritarian ideologies. In the form of images, songs, memes, poems, occupation of spaces, symbols, graffiti, murals, and stickers, people create aesthetics of resistance that travel the world. These strategies serve not only to confront authoritarian tendencies but also frustration, hopelessness, and fatalism and to give hope to humanity. “Other worlds are possible,” as the Zapatista communities, who have historically used poetics and the arts as part of their political praxis, say and do.

Coordinated by the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter Strategies and kollektiv orangotango, the book gathers imaginative experiences of struggle, allowing readers to travel the planet looking at how people carry out coordinated but also spontaneous actions in diverse geographies. These aesthetics of resistance reflect protests, such as those that took place in Hong Kong over the extradition law that threatened its autonomy from China, where powerful multi-coloured images distributed through the streets demanded its cancellation. Similar actions took place in Poland, where people advocated for reproductive rights and the right to have control over our bodies through interventions in public spaces. In rejection of militarism, the mural “Who gave the order?” which had been removed and censored by the military, went viral in Colombia and beyond.

HK Protest Art, Kwai Fong Lennon wall by Studio Incendo, 2019.

Often, the arts performed allude to emotions of joy, happiness and celebration in the face of the fear, hatred and order that authoritarianism transpires. For example, in Turkey, resistance in Boğaziçi against oppressive government policies took the form of art festivals. Likewise, festive marches with music and dance make their presence against repression and racism and for the defence of the land and Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) in Ecuador. However, struggles know that not everything is happiness due to the hard shocks they receive. Pain and memory are also part of their resistance strategies. Poems and photos serve as testimonies of the arduous journey of migrants in the Balkans and drawing functions as an act of conscience against the repression of the Kurdish people.

In diverse forms and languages, these other aesthetics convey similar intentions, as seen in the anti-patriarchal struggle. In Russia, a feminist group decided to sabotage a “pro-life” event of an ultra-conservative Orthodox group by impersonating them and carrying banners with ironic phrases such as “Masturbation is genocide” and “Ban abortions! Bring back mass shootings! Fill the gulags!”. Meanwhile, in Tanzania, an artist uses painting to denounce the patriarchal violence that took her mother’s life; in India, muralism and poetry are mixed to combat sexism and decolonize desire; and in Argentina, women have positioned the green bandana as a symbol of their struggle for legal abortion. These examples illuminate and inspire women’s struggles from the local to the global to create futures far from patriarchal authoritarian forms.

Feminist boat-trip by Dave Frenkel, 2017.

According to Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony refers to the ideological and cultural domination that one social group exercises over others, seeking to make its values, beliefs and norms be perceived as universal and natural instead of being seen as social constructs. It implies that the dominant classes control not only the state and economic apparatuses but also the cultural and educational institutions that shape the world’s perception. The cultural battle is, thus, the process by which different social groups compete to influence the construction and dissemination of their ideas, to make them hegemonic. As Javier Molina warns, this struggle is not limited to the political or economic sphere; it is also waged in the sphere of ideas, values, and cultural representations. It is not surprising, therefore, that reactionary neoconservative tendencies consider that culture is currently an essential field of dispute.

Emancipatory leftist projects, meanwhile, continue to create imaginative proposals as a form of resistance. For example, did you know that a beer was created in Brazil to support social movements and their causes? Do you know the Two-Tailed Dog party that used humour to talk about social problems and subvert government propaganda in Hungary? Have you wondered about the impact of the chants in the Arab Spring? Did you hear that in Valparaíso (Chile) and Bishan (China), communes were created trying to build their utopias? Can you imagine what an anti-authoritarian board game would be like? Do you know the history of the watermelon flag as a symbol of solidarity with Palestine? These experiences show the subversion against the usurpation of emancipatory languages by the right. Even when rulers like Milei maintain the contrary, they are collective testimonies that the left and its resistances are far from losing the cultural battle and are constantly reinventing their strategies.

Cases in which creativity is installed as an anti-authoritarian strategy and Beyond Molotovs condenses can also be found from Syria to the Philippines, Cameroon to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cuba to Myanmar. Whether due to media control or language differences, sometimes these experiences, struggles, symbols, sounds, and aesthetics do not reach all corners of the planet. Beyond Molotovs is an attempt to break those fences and liberate our utopian imaginations so that they can circulate and nurture each other. We believe that in this way, the plurality of creativities will be able to confront the planetary crisis and its growing authoritarian tendencies.

Download it for free here.