Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

[allan siegel via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

hello Brian,
Thanks for this spot-on appraisal and for mentioning Alberto Toscano who deserves more attention.
cheers
allan

On Sat, Aug 1, 2026, at 20:54, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> Hello all -
> 
> I too noticed that Guardian article, and because of this discussion I just
> read the short book in a single sitting. I can see why it is being devoured
> by the young British left, because it recounts generational (or really,
> decadal) political experiences that are probably almost impossible to
> reconstruct for people in their twenties today. If you lived through all
> that, however, it makes for a queasy couple hours...
> 
> There is no new theory here, unfortunately, in a book whose most important
> reference is Putnam's Bowling Alone. It is a sober and detailed examination
> of political disaffiliation on both left and right, paralleled by the rise
> of purely electoral parties that raise money from the corporate/financial
> sector to produce simulacral majorities - so if you never understood that,
> read it. It does contain the important observation that the conservative
> right, in the US at least, has been able to partially revive some of the
> old civic forms. But it was published too recently to offer any insight
> into the nascent resocialization, particularly of neighborhood life, that
> the left has started carrying out in resistance to ICE. And it has nothing
> at all to say about the strategies and organizational forms of oligarchical
> capital, especially but not only coming out of Silicon Valley, which are
> the most astonishing and threatening developments of the last decade.
> 
> If you want to go further with the understanding of contemporary fascism,
> Alberto Toscano has a better theory, which does basically confirm Jaeger's
> undeveloped notion of Bonapartism (see
> https://communispress.com/vectors-of-fascism). Toscano finds a relative
> absence, today, of the mass adherence to the productivist and
> redistributive policies that characterized Italian fascism as a national
> hegemonic project (I mean, one that convinces large numbers of people with
> a relatively coherent ideology). Instead he sees the current repressive
> violence in the US as directly generated by the state, raising the specter
> of "domination without hegemony." Well, that's not even a specter anymore,
> it's a plan. What's fortunately not happening is ideological consolidation
> and a willingness of half the country to go out and do what, for a while,
> it looked like they might. Namely, go out and shoot at the left in the
> streets. That would be real adherence to the extremist ideology that is
> being overtly promulgated by the state (NSPM-7 etc). It could still happen
> after the next elections, but it looks decreasingly likely.
> 
> Toscano speaks about a preemptive counter-revolution, giving a lot more
> emphasis to the threat to capital that was posed by the 2010's "decade of
> protest." That's more realistic and more pertinent than Jaeger's
> Baudrilardean portrait of febrile political excitement undergirded by
> nothing at all. It's obvious now that there are three solid legs to
> Trumpian Bonapartism: old school extractivist militarism, the bid for AI
> dominance and the cryptocurrency exit from national economies. All these
> things have cost Trump the wobbly fourth leg of populist conservatism,
> which is kinda reassuring - except that the whole point of Bonapartism is
> to use the populist media and the electoral process as a stepping-stone to
> the authoritarian takeover of the state. That's clearly the plan in the US
> now.
> 
> Jaeger is totally right about the disaffiliation. He's also right that
> political parties dependent on oligarchical funds for the "big tent"
> simulacra of electoral campaigns are too hypocritical to chart any course
> for the future. Yet it's strange that he doesn't look into that future -
> really not at all. Democratic societies are presently confronted with
> enormous threats: domestic polarization, global war, climate change,
> frantic movements of distressed populations, the list goes on. Until
> recently, these were conveniently solved by denialism. But in the US today,
> war and genocide, murderous militias generated directly by the state and
> the staggering corporate attempt to ram AI down our throats as the ultimate
> tool of subjective fragmentation and perfected mind control have finally
> given very concrete present-day features to the broader historical critique
> of racialized class society that marked the 2010s and culminated in the
> George Floyd uprising. There is both subjective desire and material need to
> overcome the Putnam-Baudrillard quandary of hyperindividual withdrawal
> agitated by networked passions. Multiple and expanding crises - from
> droughts and wildfires to wars and coming food shortages - offer political
> opportunities. The only way forward is to use these crisis situations to
> break the paralyzing hypocrisy of pseudo mass parties piloted by oligarchs.
> Otherwise it's state of emergency and authoritarianism forever.
> 
> Jaeger's book is not a bad one. It's kind of a primer in recent political
> sociology, bravo for that. But it has no analysis of future crossroads, no
> vision and therefore no capacity to help generate the new organizational
> forms that we desperately need. In short, it's an explainer. And being so
> short itself - well, it's another fascinating easy read. Give it two hours
> and see what you think.
> 
> best, Brian
> 
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 2:07 PM allan siegel via nettime-l <
> nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > What if Trump is 2/3 Bonaparte and 1/3 fascism, then what? The article has
> > motivated me to get a hold of the book to see what Mr. Jäger really has to
> > say. Based on the article he seems to make some rather ahistorical
> > assumptions; doesn't collective memory have at least some minimal weight in
> > political consciousness? and, some remarks are painted in broad
> > self-contained chronological strokes as if forms of agency don't carry over
> > from one generation to the next? and what about geographical bias? Which is
> > why I would like to see the actual book.
> > best
> > allan
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 31, 2026, at 13:09, Felix Stalder via nettime-l wrote:
> > >
> > > I haven't read the book, but from the article here, I think two things
> > > are useful. One is that Trump doesn't represent fascism, but
> > > Bonapartism, ie. not a collective mass movement, but a mass of people
> > > joined individually to a singular leader.
> > >
> > > The other is this:
> > >
> > > "They [the far right] are not more organized or more ideologically
> > > coherent or more strategic [than the left]; they are just better funded
> > > – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the
> > > overarching organizing principle of global politics. Money might not be
> > > the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants."
> > >
> > > In other words, somebody is still doing the boring but necessary
> > > organizational, institutional work. It's capital.
> > >
> > > Also, there is a great line on Reform UK: "There is just Nigel and a
> > > smartphone and then a couple of private donors." (I think this doesn't
> > > apply to the far-right in France or Germany.)
> > >
> > >
> > > all the best. Felix
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left
> > > Zoe Williams
> > >
> > > 23.07.2026
> > >
> > >
> > https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/23/anton-jager-groundbreaking-book-being-devoured-by-left
> > >
> > > “I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on
> > > Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this
> > > street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet
> > > gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the
> > > immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who
> > > we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as
> > > passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who
> > > promise it are incapable of enacting it?
> > >
> > > It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book,
> > > Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is
> > > being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York
> > > Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the
> > > political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still, I think
> > > Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I could
> > > interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a
> > > hyperpolitical age.
> > >
> > > Jäger, 32, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts (“bohemian
> > > class?” I ask, and he says carefully that they are boho “adjacent”),
> > > educated at the University of Essex, then Cambridge, is now a lecturer
> > > in the history of political thought and theory at University College,
> > > Oxford. He has an intense, angular face and a calm, almost self-effacing
> > > manner. His philosophical reference points are Deleuze and Guattari,
> > > Mouffe and Laclau, but asked to situate himself in the firmament of the
> > > European left, he says simply: “Even with all the baggage and
> > > connotations, I still think the easiest thing is to call myself a
> > Marxist.”
> > >
> > > His thinking runs as follows (don’t get hung up on the dates, though
> > > some, like 1989, are non-negotiable). The years 1914 to 1989 mark the
> > > age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and
> > > institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics
> > > electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political
> > > parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups;
> > > they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by
> > > coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in
> > > concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years
> > > often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when
> > > institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then,
> > > we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a
> > > time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to
> > > a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about
> > > 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of
> > > anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and
> > > anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy
> > > movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and
> > > even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still
> > > have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore
> > > political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US,
> > > France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from
> > > which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away.
> > > protester in a mask that says ‘I can’t breathe’
> > > A Black Lives Matter protest in London on 6 June 2020 after the killing
> > > of George Floyd. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
> > >
> > > Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither
> > > institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the
> > > Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the
> > > mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds
> > > apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking
> > > set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership
> > > rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As
> > > a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge
> > > suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political
> > > theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation of the evocative
> > > phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes,
> > > are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.
> > >
> > > He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
> > > and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because “I don’t
> > > have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story
> > > globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers
> > > and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad animated by brief,
> > > potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital
> > > demagogues”. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like.
> > >
> > > These four eras – mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics and
> > > hyperpolitics – “are not just concepts,” Jäger says, “they have some
> > > empirical data behind them. ‘How institutionalised is society?’ is
> > > basically a question of, how does civil society look? How are membership
> > > organisations looking? What are the affiliations, what are the types of
> > > bonds that people have? That’s not very difficult to quantify. You can
> > > look at union membership, you can look at church attendance, you can
> > > look at less overtly political forms of belonging. The political axis is
> > > more difficult to measure, but not impossible – namely, how many people
> > > attend elections, how many people strike, how many people engage in
> > > political violence, how many people engage in political communication,
> > > write letters to editors or now post online?”
> > >
> > > He argues that the height of mass politics was between the wars. To
> > > illustrate this in the book, he lists all the civic organisations during
> > > the Great Depression in the small Austrian hamlet of Marienthal – they
> > > spanned all human activity, from work to thought to rabbit-breeding. I
> > > won’t list them all here but there were many. Considering the effect
> > > these organisations might have on the collective psyche, Jäger considers
> > > the history of his own family: “On the Flemish side, this meant that the
> > > Christian Democratic or the Catholic party was not just a party that
> > > said how you were to vote, or which union you joined, but also had a
> > > very strong say in what happened in the bedroom. It was a total
> > > doctrine, not something that purely applied to your political
> > > deportment.” There was little boundary between public and private, and
> > > no such thing as a political identity without a membership card. It was
> > > personally quite constraining, but it got shit done. (Sidebar, I’ve seen
> > > a nascent institutionalised-politics like this, in Manchester, in 2019;
> > > the local Momentum group was campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn, but it also
> > > had a running club, a knitting group and a book group. I was overcome by
> > > the sense of seeing a trade union movement reborn. Needless to say,
> > > Corbyn did not win that election. Institution-building can’t be done on
> > > the fly.)
> > >
> > > The destruction of political organisations was “not monocausal”, Jäger
> > > says, though in the book he puts it squarely on the shoulders of the
> > > union busting by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost faith
> > > in organisations because the crunchy bit of their leverage – the bit
> > > where you get what you want by withdrawing your labour, the bit before
> > > all-out war – was taken away. Unions were defanged and workers
> > > impoverished, and many ultimately saw their industries collapse in the
> > > process.
> > >
> > > Jäger says there were also cultural and generational shifts over decades
> > > – people in the 60s and 70s seeking a different relationship with
> > > collective institutions, for example, and looking instead for
> > > emancipation and equality – so it takes a while for the picture to
> > > cohere, and Communist parties remained tenacious through the 1980s in
> > > Italy, for instance. “In 1989, suddenly it’s as if there’s a day and
> > > night difference,” he says. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of
> > > the cold war, he says: “Suddenly everyone deserves to party.”
> > > Large crowd climb onto the Berlin Wall
> > >
> > >
> > > It is a strange sensation to have the 90s narrated back to you by
> > > someone who was born in 1994, but it is mainly unsettling because it is
> > > so accurate. Tony Blair did describe globalisation as a process as
> > > inexorable as the weather, and that is also how neoliberals described
> > > the economy – a thing that happened to you. “This is the ambiguity of
> > > the post-politics of the 90s,” Jäger says. “Politics is no longer
> > > something that you see as effecting large-scale social change, and the
> > > forms of liberty that are available to you are now more private, more
> > > intimate, more individual. At the same time, the idea that you can
> > > collectively bundle together with other individuals and change society
> > > starts to appear very, very remote.”
> > >
> > > There was also a lot of beauty to that time, which he describes through
> > > the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans and the novels of Annie Ernaux and
> > > Michel Houellebecq. We were obsessed with Houellebecq in the 90s, but we
> > > will have to talk about why, and the direction his novels took, and
> > > whether we will ever again live in a world whose best cultural artefact
> > > is the novel, another time. “The fact that Tillmans as a gay man is able
> > > to express and experience the rave culture of the 90s and 00s as a new
> > > form of collectivity that wasn’t available to him in the 70s and 80s, I
> > > don’t think we should deny the liberatory value of this. It very clearly
> > > is the case that there are individuals who did not feel at home in the
> > > families, or the communities or the neighbourhoods in which they grew
> > > up, in which they finally find a kind of new community that is much less
> > > demanding and is less exigent than what they had before. The ambiguity
> > > is, of course, that it also implies a profound disenchantment and
> > > cynicism around what politics can do.” That’s politics with a capital P
> > > – you might see a community animated about an issue, but with no faith
> > > in parliamentary channels.
> > >
> > >
> > > There is a critical and rarely mentioned adjunct to the neoliberal
> > > destruction of institutions and the post and antipolitics that came
> > > afterwards, which is that it didn’t only come for the left. “Thatcher
> > > basically did a controlled demolition of popular Conservatism,” Jäger
> > > says, “and replaced much of this with PR spin, and also a lot of private
> > > funding, because the idea was: ‘We can get rid of our mass party because
> > > we’re in control of the media, we can win elections with that.’” The
> > > right today, he says, is just as inconsequential as the left, and for
> > > exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not formally organised.
> > > “The people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might
> > > follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram
> > > channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared
> > > before they entered the march. This is different even to the BNP, where
> > > marchers had a shared history in football hooliganism, and the National
> > > Front. That shared subculture is no longer there.”
> > >
> > > He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily
> > > leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of
> > > the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There
> > > is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.” To
> > > me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to the
> > > left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability of
> > > private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk of a
> > > trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete secession of
> > > that individual from what we could even call society. That is a variable
> > > in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right thrives and why
> > > hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more difficult to achieve
> > > tangible results.” They are not more organised or more ideologically
> > > coherent or more strategic; they are just better funded – which puts
> > > quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the overarching
> > > organising principle of global politics. Money might not be the only
> > > thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants.
> > >
> > >
> > > The more immediately controversial proposition of the book, though, is
> > > that what we are watching in Trump’s US is not fascism, because the
> > > right only travels to that extreme in the face of a direct threat of
> > > organised socialism. “The left is doing itself too many favours by
> > > considering its opponents fascists,” he says. “You’re overestimating
> > > your strength. The contemporary far right is more a function of the
> > > crisis of liberalism than it is a function of the strength of the left.”
> > > What we’re looking at instead, with Trump, is “Bonapartism” says Jäger.
> > > He writes that Trump, and everyone else who has ever got ahead by
> > > championing the “left behind”, isn’t representing a strong mass movement
> > > or class, but, like Napoleon, relying on “the largely passive support of
> > > impoverished peasants … not a collective but ‘formed by the simple
> > > addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a
> > > sack of potatoes’.” (That bit about potatoes is from Karl Marx’s The
> > > Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) We skirmish a little about the
> > > US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a standing army that looks
> > > extremely fascist, until Jäger concludes: “The spectrum from fascism to
> > > Bonapartism can flip into something more radical. At the same time, I’m
> > > still more struck by the differences than the similarities with these
> > > 20th-century phenomena.”
> > >
> > > Neal Lawson, guru of Manchesterism and an Anton Jäger fan, lays these
> > > arguments over the predicament of our new prime minister. “It isn’t just
> > > lack of money Burnham has to contend with but the absence of secure
> > > political footings. Temporary hyper-political swarms have taken the
> > > place of substantial and secure alliances. He must find a way to surf
> > > these volatile waves or be another victim of them.” But we, the volatile
> > > waves, also have to figure out how to re-engage with institutions and
> > > build new ones, and is that possible? Jäger pauses, dispiritingly, like
> > > a mechanic who is about to give you bad news about your fanbelt. “This
> > > is an interesting and scary question. We do live in a society in which
> > > the incentives for leaving rather than entering organisations are much
> > > higher. Recent experience, whether joining a party or joining a union,
> > > often militates against the idea that there’s any sense in collective
> > > action, and the rational response is helplessness. And yet,
> > > repoliticisation is good. Hyperpolitics has increased people’s
> > > consciousness of the fact that politics matters.”
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
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