Critics

Critics – whether of the film, theatre, art, book (or indeed wine!) sort – are not exactly the most admired profession. For most people they hardly exist but they loom very large in the worlds of artists, authors and actors. A cutting review of a book or play can arouse murderous feelings in creative people. And reviewing can be a powerful weapon for those critics who fancy their own creativity. Just think of Clive James’ waspish pyrotechnics about films – still going strong stylistically  if now physically weaker.

I’m now back in Sofia and immediately visit my local (second-hand) English bookshop. I am trying to divest myself of books since I have, in a couple of weeks, to close down the nice old flat I’ve had in the centre of Sofia for the past 16 months. But I can’t resist a bulky collection of film and literary reviews called Nobody’s Perfect from one, Anthony Lane, who has apparently been film critic at the New Yorker since 1993 and also one of the best, at least according to John Banville

Nobody's Perfect shimmers with positively Nabokovian elegance, wit and delicacy of expression; it is hard to recall when one was made to laugh out loud like this and at the same time shiver with aesthetic bliss, unless it was the last time one re-read Lolita.Two examples must suffice, picked at random: Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare "took a rockbound Bavarian fortress with the calmness that comes only to those who have previously stormed Elizabeth Taylor"; Jeanne Moreau seemed "the spirit of Cannes incarnate, with a voice that made you feel you were being seduced by a coffee grinder".

This review of the book is also useful – not least for its link to some fellow film critics of whom the most interesting, for me, seems to be Jonathan Rosenbaum 

The processes, of course, involved in creating a book or painting are, of course, so very different from those involved in a film or play. In one case solitary and ascetic – in the other multi-discplinary and commercial. Films attract the most viewers – and paintings the least.  So art critics, not surprisingly, are the most inaccessible not least in their jargon –despite the best efforts of writers such as John Updike and, above all, John Berger whose Selected Essays I bought recently from the fantastic Frost English bookshop in Bucharest. The Essays were reviewed at length in LRB but behind a paywall 

I still have a subscription so let me share some of the comment  -

Berger recognised that photography presented a new challenge to the tradition of painting. Not only was it intrinsically realist: it had largely escaped the reach of the art market. Photographs could be commodified – and were – but, for the most part, they circulated outside the market. They were kept in a drawer or an album rather than displayed.

By now Berger had become acclimatised not only to France but also to the peasant culture of the Alpine village where he had lived since 1974. More and more, the peasantry became his central focus. The continuity of their history and traditions was unbroken, to a degree closed off from the urban culture which increasingly dominated the world, with its project of perpetual change and renewal. England had long ago discarded the last traces of peasant culture: there were farmers, but farming had itself become an industry, fully mechanised and intimately linked to massive food companies. In his 1979 novel, Pig Earth, he took on the role of one of those traditional village storytellers who, in his own words, were an ‘organic part of the life of the village’. The villagers enjoy the tales they are told by ‘the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions’.Not surprisingly, the artists who now occupied his attention included Millet and Van Gogh, painters about whom he had first written in 1956.

Eventually, in 1972, Berger attacked conventional art history head on in Ways of Seeing, a series made for BBC2 in collaboration with Mike Dibb and others, and intended as a riposte to Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation. This is a summary of the book
 In many ways the BBC series was directly inspired by Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, particularly in its emphasis on photography as the upstart young rival of painting, the product of an industrial, technological and commercial age. Berger made a number of important points in the course of the series.

That seeing is dependent on looking, which is itself an act of choice. That the objects of our looking are not simply things but the relationships that exist between things, and between things and ourselves. That every look establishes a particular relationship between ourselves and the world we inhabit, and that it is at the same time highly personal, reflecting the concerns of the viewer, the bearer of the look. 

My own feeling is that critics are wrongly disparaged. After all, they bring an incredible knowledge to the table. The pity is that they so often feel it neccessary to use that knowledge (of previous work) as a weapon in a struggle for superiority instead of as a means of instruction........

Beautiful Books

Neagu Djuvara is a Romanian intellectual with a striking history (he's 97 years old) and has just produced a Brief Illustrated History of Romanians which immediately goes into my short list of “beautiful books”.

To qualify for this honour, a book has to fit standards none too easy to specify – such as paper type (thickish and rough), format, balance of text and illustrations, typeface, graphics and textual content. 
Book cover design, however, for me is an overrated art.

In principle, art and cookery books should be beautiful – but their glossiness is usually offputting – Beaneaters and Bread Soup and Food from Plenty are exceptions. And travel books should be attractive eg the Pallas Athene books on Czechoslovakia (out of print) and Romania.

John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (Penguin 1969) is probably top of my list of beautiful books. Its perhaps significant that its pictures are in black and white – as, naturally, is Andre Kertesz’s On Reading (see also here)

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel is also a treat - both for content and visual impact.

As someone who can spend a few hundred euros on a single painting, I should probably be willing to pay more then 20 euros for a book - and be more demanding in my requirements of books. Indeed, having (self-)published several little books, it is probably time again to venture down that path - this time perhaps producing a "beautiful book"!  

It was only a few years back that I realised that I had become a collector – initially of various small objects which appealed to me in the various countries I visited. Painted boxes; wooden spoons; ceramics; figurines and sculptures....Curiously, some of my favourite objects are (empty) notebooks – products of those countries which craft superb specimens of such wood/paper products eg Italy, Latvia and Bulgaria. I succumbed only yesterday to such a notebook – Chinese, I have to confess, this time and for 2 euros only! One of them is shown in the 20 November post.

Winter was curiously dry in this part of the world. Little rain – let alone snow – apart from a few days in January - with Bucharest having a metre of the stuff for a couple of weeks. I drove up to Bucharest on 1 March – spring’s official opening which has been marked since then by continuous rain. At least the farmers will be happy!

Toward the End

Faithful readers will know that, at the start of the new millennium, I started to express my own personal anxieties about the direction globalisation was taking us all – and to muse about where a guy with my age and experience should be putting his energy and resources (not least time)

The global crisis of the past 6 years confirmed my worst fears – but I still haven’t found an answer to my simple question. In the meantime I’ve continued to try to identify the people who are writing seriously about the various issues involved……

Several years ago I was very impressed with the work of people such as Richard Douthwaite and, in the past couple of years, with the (rather more apocalpytic) books and blogs of JM Greer and Dmitry Orlov - see also here.

The latters’ recent blogspost have been reassessing the scale of the global crisis (in its various forms - fuel, economic and environmental) here – and here, suggesting that things have now gone beyond the point of no return.

Before I give you a flavour of these posts, let me share with you the eloquent final thoughts of a seasoned campaigner which were found on his laptop after his death

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behoves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together — whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

 Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices — of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

 Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things — impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

 We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport. 

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

 If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value. 

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it.

We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative. We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability.

When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together. It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything.

A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book. Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details.

We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class.

But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences — which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear. The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

The first sketch at the top is one I found in several drawerfuls of Ilia Petrov rough sketches. I suppose its from the 1944 period here.....The aquarelle is one of several (from the 1970s) I have from Vassil Vulev (when I met him a couple of years ago) who's still going at 79/80

French letters

The writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) have always given me pleasure – not so much her novels as the various parts of her autobiography (particularly the travelogues which give such an amazing sense of immediate post-war Europe in all its dereliction and ideological struggles)

Apart from her continuing loyalty to Sartre, I knew of her liaisons with Nelson Algren and Claude Lantzman (the latter still alive) but had not heard of her letters from 1947-64 to Algren  - Beloved Chicago Man (published only in the 1990s). Algren was a tough realist writer in Chicago she had gone to meet while on a USA tour in 1947 with Sartre who at that moment was dallying with an actress in New York. 

I picked up an original hardback version last week in Sofia’s second-hand English bookshop and was pretty quickly hooked on its almost 600 pages.

It is a quite stunning collection of letters (but one-sided) which compares in its powerful portrayal of love only (in my humble opinion) with Oriana Fallaci’s A Man (see also here). And they're written in her English - which, although quite excellent, contain delightful French constructs from time to time which only deepen the delight. Beloved Chicago Man  -

is a revelation. Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren are, from beginning to end, among the most beautiful sustained pieces of writing that I have read. They begin with the long, frequent, ecstatic communications of 1947 to 1951, chronicle the terrible coming apart and then the lasting attachment of the Fifties, and wind down with the occasional warm messages of the early Sixties. Her (famous) novel The Mandarins - published in 1954 - deals clumsily with the emotions so stunningly expressed in the letters.

This is a 2006 article on the relationship which, in its own cinematic American way, gives a terrific sense of what was actually going on. de Beauvoir was in what became the famous open relationship with Sartre (who was a lecherous little dwarf) and found herself "de trop" for the moment in New York - and therefore in the mood for some distraction in Chicago. She had not, however, bargained for falling in love - but still cut her visit short when Sartre indicated he needed her in Paris. When, however, she got back to France, it was to discover that the actress was with Sartre. She immediately sent a wire to Algren offering to return to him!  It was only some years later that Algren found out all about this - and was not a happy man!

If they hadn’t been such profound writers, capturing so brilliantly the truth of their lives and times, the names of Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir would already be buried like their love. Like the loves of so many Indians and intellectuals, pickpockets and philosophers who danced along the shore of the secondhand sea (a reference to the beach where Algren had a summer shack). And the story we like to tell—the hustler’s heart hustled by the very best, a woman who said she couldn’t, wouldn’t, tell a lie—would be long drowned in the sand.

Partly, Beauvoir and Algren were victims of the myth in which they collaborated. By not talking, by not pointing out her lies, Algren remained a gentleman for a long time. His books, which told the truth as far as he could see, remain rooted in their time. Hers describe parts of the life of a “modern” woman, the parts that backed up Sartre’s ideas about freedom and responsibility, about morality without a God. Algren had to understand that she was “flying blind,” that the only net beneath her trapeze act was being held up by Sartre, that her stories were part of the future and his were part of the past.

So who had the last laugh in our Dunes love story? Simone de Beauvoir is buried next to Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, wearing Nelson Algren’s ring, connected forever to the smartest men she knew.

Nelson Algren would most likely laugh at the irony of millions of people buying her books, stacking them like tourist memorabilia on their shelves, finding almost all of them impossible to read (I don't agree with this judgement!!). Sartre would have thought of all the people he knew existentially—they had no reason for being but themselves. It was up to every individual to do what he or she perceived needed to be done. They all did the best they could.

If, for even a tiny moment, any one of them believed in God, it would be hard not to see a Divine Sense of Humor at work. When sand slides into a house, it seeks no comfort or revenge, has no contempt or jealousy, satisfaction or guilt. The Dunes bury everything: beach houses, roads, forests, Hepburn, Mitchum, Tracy, dolls and books, everything.

To get a sense of how well de Beauvoir could write, read this extended excerpt from her notes on her travels around the USA called - America Day by Day

Let's talk about Scotland

It was 21 years ago that Czechia and Slovakia split from one another – to each’s great surprise. I was there in 1992/93– and can vividly remember the political impasse in Prague and then the celebratory noises in Bratislava. Most of my friends were Slovak – and they all seemed to regret the split despite the feelings about Czech arrogance. 

For the past few years, it is the Slovaks who have had the most to celebrate – with both their economy and politics. It was all so quickly done – deals by the senior politicians - with no opportunity given to ordinary people to express an opinion.

In this sense it is not at all like the Scottish situation whose referendum in September this year has been scheduled for more than 2 years.

I’ve just had the thought to drive to Scotland – via Slovakia – and chat to my friends along the route (including those in Belgium) about the situation.

The relationships are, of course, a bit different – both in scale and history. Scotland has less than 8% of the UK population (compared with Slovakia’s 33% share of the CS citizenry) – and Scotland has been a significant player  for 300 years in the story that is British capital and Empire (whereas Cz and Slo were linked as a nation for only 70 years).

I left Scotland and the UK in 1990 – but did participate (somewhat ambivalently) in the 1979 referendum – which was slated to give Scotland the devolution the country obtained only in 1999. My inclination this past year has been to vote yes - like the vast majority of Scots, I simply feel the political class in London is a different ideological race. And the tactics these past few weeks of the Westminster (and Brussels) "so-gennanten" leaders certainly make me feel a bit “stroppy”. The suggestions of cretins such as the EC President (Barroso) and the UK Finance Minister that there could be no currency link ; or easy negotiation to EU membership  is pure shock tactics…..and so counterproductive. 

These idiots don’t know my countrymen – who will simply come off the fence – and vote yes.

The only reason the “No” vote (which a few months ago was so strong) is collapsing is because the UK is now ruled by neo-liberal feudalists who, for Scots, are aliens at 2 removes. 

The PM (who is not so desperate as his Labour counterpart) has now invited English people to write to their Scottish relatives to convince them to stay in “the Union”. Here is one interesting effort. 

And also a lovely tongue-in-cheek list of 76 things for the English to apologise to the Scots about

Here is one take on the developing situation 2 weeks ago 

We now appear to be entering the third of four phases of the referendum campaign before the actual hustings in August. Each phase has been dictated by the Nationalists. In the first phase, their task was simply to get people to accept that a two-year campaign was not too much and that the running of the country would not be neglected. Labour leader Johann Lamont's justified criticism of this simply failed to resonate.This was followed by the elaborate countdown to the white paper, which seemed to confer Arc of the Covenant status on this mystical document. It weighed in at more than 600 pages and the No campaign attempted to smear it as being overly heavy and grandiose.

Yet there was a sense that voters, even those who might never get round to tackling it, were impressed that their intellects were being taken seriously at a time when the No campaign seemed not to be taking them seriously enough in trying to persuade us that Scotland would resemble 1970s Albania if it voted for independence.

Following publication of the white paper, the numbers began slowly to shift. The third phase has seen the Westminster political and coffee-house set begin to sit up straight and pay attention. This has been accompanied in Scotland by the long-awaited engagement at street level with the referendum issues. Here again, the Yes campaign has got its act together far more effectively. It ought to be acknowledged, though, that the No campaign faces several social and cultural handicaps here that it is powerless to overcome. Its leaders know, as do the rest of us, that organising rallies and public meetings in the shadow of the union jack risks them being hijacked by the scarecrow element of Ulster loyalism and the British far right.

Two weeks ago, I visited the Yes campaign website searching for an open event that I could attend, preferably off the beaten track. Between the end of January and 1 March, there were more than 200 happenings, a mass engagement that touched every nook and cranny of the kingdom. Seeking a similar event to attend on the No campaign website, I could find only a handful.I informed a friend of mine who is close to some senior members of the No team that, if this pattern were to prevail until 18 September, it would be the difference between victory and defeat for his people.
Within a few days, a glut of fresh activity appeared on the No horizon, but I was not convinced. Yes are engaging with the common people of Scotland in pubs, fairgrounds and town centres all over the country. In some of those places, the No response, in the absence of organising their own event, has been to try to have them ejected under spurious anti-politicisation laws.

Here is one Guardian writer (Jonathan Freedland) also trying to support the No campaign.

But the place to find the real argument is the pages of the great Scottish Review – here and here.

I have a feeling that there will be many others like me who worry about the sheer uncertainties involved in blithely voting "yes" to separation, with all the risks the subsequent negotiations with the UK rump and the EU would hold..... 
I have already confessed that I was an active campaigner during the 1979 referendum for a devolved Parliament - in the "No" camp - and then, in the privacy of the voting chamber, actually voted "yes"!
Devolution has been a success

Ilia Petrov

Had a great privilege yesterday – to visit the house and studio of llia Petrov (1903-1975) - one of the great Bulgarian artists. According to the text I have, he -

worked in the style of the artists of the 17th century , combining silvery tones of Velazquez, cold pink flesh of Rubens and created powerful female portraits and nudes – with sophisticated shades of greenish and bluish, working with sophisticated techniques so that even today , 50 years after their creation, his paintings look as if they are still not dry. His paintings are almost impossible to reproduce.

He was born in Razgrad; and studied at Sofia Art Academy 1921-26 – latterly under Prof. Nikola Marinov. He went on to specialize in Munich and gave an exhibition there in 1928. On his way back to Bulgaria he did an extended tour of German cities, France, Austria and Italy to become acquainted with European traditions. In the late 1930s, disturbed by fascism, he did a series of paintings on The War in Spain. 1941-1967 he was Professor at Sofia Art Academy. 1961 visited India

Art teacher (1928 - 1940) From 1940 lecturer , from 1957 to 1968 - professor of painting at the Art Academy, Sofia , Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts (1957-1962) and Rector (1965- 1968. The Art School in Sofia bears his name.

After the communist takeover in September 1944, he took an active part in the management of the Union of Bulgarian Artists and was its Secretary-General (1949-1951 and 1957-1959) and participated in the work of "Monument to the Soviet Army" in Sofia.

He also did quite a few works of historical revolutionary themes : “Guerrillas in action”, “Before the shooting ", " Partisan Song", " The Messenger " but his true virtuosity seen in naked bodies , where he remains one of Bulgaria’s greatest artists. A young student did  this copy of a famous self-portrait he did which hangs in the National Gallery here ….Shades of Lucian Freud!

Left a tremendous amount of paintings - portrait sketches, animals - some of which, as I can testify, are still to be displayed in public.

It was, in fact, the sketches that most interested me – and I emerged from the meeting with his nephew, with about 10 of them as well as the painting!

What is Populism?

The obvious question after yesterday’s post is - What is “populism”?

One academic, in a useful overview is quoted as claiming there were essential aspects.

• First, the ‘people’ is of paramount importance. Here, a feeling of community is stressed, and horizontal cleavages (such as left-right) are played down while vertical ones are played up for the purpose of excluding particular groups, e.g. elites and immigrants.

• Second, populists claim that the ‘people’ has been betrayed by the elites through their abuse of power, corruption etc.

• Third, populists demand that the “primacy of the people” (p. 13) has to be restored. In short: the current elites would have to be replaced and in their place the new leaders (the populists) would act for the good of the ‘people’.

 This, for me is where things get interesting. My blog has referred several time to Robert Michels whose Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy reminded us 100 years ago of the verity of Lord Acton’s words – “power corrupts – but absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The power of Michels’s words still comes back to me from my first reading of him as part of my University degree all of 50 years ago! (The entire book can be downloaded here - and a useful assessment is available here) 

Later in my course, however, I came across Schumpeter whose Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy persuaded me that democracy was actually - and not unreasonably - “a competitive circulation of the elites”. A few years later the global mood in 1968 took a more critical turn and encouraged a more active and participative role for citizens. Coincidentally that was the year I was first elected – hardly surprisingly I encouraged what was called “neighbourhood mobilisation” which was indeed institutionalised in a strategy which owed a lot to the American War on Poverty (and its milder UK equivalent).

Of course active citizens are no more representative than politicians – but they should, we innocently thought, at least keep politicians on their toes. That may have been true at a local level (although in too many countries, municipal systems have been denuded of power) – nationally the media were supposed to keep a bright torch shining on the misdeeds of those in authority – but, in the past couple of decades, have been almost totally bought out.

So where does that leave us? Disillusioned – and powerless? 
Not quite – rather talking of replacing the political elites – and random selection of citizens for limited terms in office.

But two questions -

• why should those in power be willing to surrender that power by, for example, amending the electoral laws to allow that to happen – let alone to cut off their political funding?
• And what have we learned from other efforts (eg the German Greens) to ensure that leaders (and other strange animals) do not emerge and corrupt the “general will”?

Future posts will try to explore some of the more anarchistic (perhaps better "fatalistic") ideas which have surfaced since the “Occupy” movement first started

In the meantime I couldn’t resist inserting this flier for an academic association specialising in ./…the study of elites

Bulgarian populism and the protests

Globalism has failed. Monetarism has failed. The liberal politics of “less government, the market has the final say” has failed. The worldwide financial crisis, caused by the US, is a clear sign of this. Market fundamentalism, transformed into a religion by the financial and political establishment of the US, has suffered an abysmal defeat…. We say no to the world’s speculative capital, no to supranational corporations, which destroy market economies, no to Wall Street, and we say yes to more common sense, balance, and equity

What could be more sensible than that? And yet the words are taken from the right-wing Bulgarian Аtaka party’s 2013 manifesto. I found them a few days ago in an excellent overview of Bulgarian populism on Anna Krasteva’s blog. The article, written, in English, by a Bulgarian academic who lives in Sofia, continues

The populist rage is targeted mostly at international capital, which “drains” the national wealth: Ataka have estimated that 28 billion 257 million levs have been diverted from the pockets of Bulgarian tax payers into the treasuries of foreign companies selling food, clothes, electricity, banking services etc.“All institutions, all ministries, the fields of culture, healthcare, and education altogether receive 10 billion levs less than the foreign colonizers!“  (Аtaka 2013, 8).Anti-Europeanism is the other topic which attracts the critical pathos of populist negation. It strikes out in three directions.

• The first one concerns the accusations of neo-colonialism: the EU “is becoming a new Soviet Union, functioning by force and against the constitution” (Аtaka 2013). The full version of the program bears the arrogant title Siderov’s Plan against the Colonial Yoke; the text begins with the story of “how we were enslaved after the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

• The second criticism is institutional and is leveled at Europe’s institutional structure: “the fake figure of EU president has been imposed, which contradicts both national and international law”; this claim also targets the consequences of Bulgaria’s political strategy: “The Euro Pact invalidates the Parliament and the government, the elections, and democracy at large.”

• The third direction has to do with Europeanization as a form of globalization: “The Euro Pact reinforces the power of the supranational and corporate oligarchy“. All of these criticisms converge in a cluster whose core conveys the message, “the EU is a threat to the national identity, sovereignty, and dignity”: “Bulgaria is threatened with a loss of identity and with extinction”; “Bulgaria is losing its sovereignty“.

Of course, the Ataka style is highly aggressive and intolerant – but I see no reason to fault this sort of the discourse which you will find in all current European “populist” parties. The romantic pull of the village and its traditions does seem stronger in Bulgaria than (say) in Romania - and the Romanian peasantry (unlike the Bulgarian) does seem to retain its loyalty to socialist/communist elements of political organisation......

In a long post just a couple of weeks ago, the same author has a rare and useful analysis of the protests which have now lasted here in Bulgaria for one year now.

I would identify three waves and three types of protests:

• the anti-monopoly protests of winter/spring 2013;

• the anti-oligarchy protests of summer 2013;

• the anti-government student protests of autumn 2013.

The political geography of the winter protests was decentralized. Sofia did not win first place, but neither did it vie for it. I have called those protests ‘Varna Spring’ because the protesters in Varna outnumbered those in Sofia, as well as because their outrage was well-targeted – against the mayor and a business group. Not against business in general, but against criminal groups suffocating business; not against the elite in general, but against a mayor who had brought the city to its knees before behind-the-scenes interests; not against government in general, but against that which was devouring Varna’s Sea Garden and stifling the vitality and enterprising spirit of Bulgaria’s seaside capital (Krasteva 2013c). 

Just days after the winter protests, the government of Boyko Borisov resigned although the protesters had not demanded – nor even thought of demanding – its resignation. After six months of protests against the Oresharski government, protesters were still demanding its resignation but the government, Parliament, and even the opposition were now saying that the incumbents were likely to remain in power for some time to come. The political effect of the winter and the post-winter protests was opposite, but they were similar in that, paradoxically, both led to the opposite of the desired results.In terms of duration, the protest year 2013 is unprecedented in Bulgarian democratic history.

We remember from history how a trivial occasion – an African American woman’s refusal to surrender her seat to a white man – led to the abolition of racial segregation and a profound transformation of American society. The Bulgarian protests also started from a concrete occasion – the exorbitant electricity bills and the appointment of Delyan Peevski, a controversial media mogul, as chief of the State Agency for National Security (DANS) – but the protest wave outlived the occasion (Peevski did not remain in office for more than a day), rightly interpreting it not as an exception but as an inevitable consequence of the whole political system which became the target of its outrage.

This is a most useful update of a rather more general 2008 article on Bulgarian populism entitled Radical Demophilia by Conservative MEP Svetoslav Malinov  and should be put in the wider context of the collection of articles I referred to a few days ago on European populism, the general tone of the articles being (typically) elitist and disapproving. 
What, I have to wonder, is wrong with being in tune with popular opinion these days - let alone picking out the corporate and political elite for denigration?????

The painting is one of the favourite Socialist Realist ones I have in my collection. Of partisans, it gives a sense of the village against the enemy.......