Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics (Pic: versobooks on Instagram)
Politics is everywhere—in our consumer choices, online echo chambers and culture wars. But it can also feel like politics is nowhere—at least nowhere solid and tangible.
A new book by Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics—Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, seeks to understand this phenomenon.
Hyperpolitics captures this political culture and its frenetic cycles of outrage and burnout that change nothing. Jäger describes how politics has become unmoored from political organisation.
But acute though Jäger’s account is, his response to this hyperpolitics is to advocate a return to the failed political institutions of the past.
Jäger sees the past 100 years or so as divided into four periods. The first is the “mass politics” of the short 20th century from 1914-89. During these years, politicisation was high and people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They joined political parties, unions, church congregations and working men’s clubs.
Jäger says that it is no coincidence that this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains.
But there are several problems with this description.
Mass politics did not begin in 1914. The end of the 19th century saw European socialist parties win millions of members and create a range of cultural and social institutions—cycle clubs, choirs, Sunday schools.
And labelling events as disparate as the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust, as “mass politics” obscures rather than illuminates.
The next of Jäger’s periods is the “post-politics” of the years from the collapse of Stalinism to the financial crash in 2008. In the 1990s mainstream political parties were abandoned by the elites and experienced a “mass desertion from below”.
Neoliberalism was a response to the end of the post-war boom, one that hollowed out the institutions of formal democracy and prompted a crisis within social democracy.
The technocrats took care of business while the rich got richer and everyone else “danced away industry, politics, history itself”, Jäger writes.
But Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis, which argued that liberal capitalism had finally triumphed, was soon challenged by events.
There were huge strikes, and riots—think Los Angeles and Rodney King, or the Poll Tax and the end of Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Britain.
And imperialism re-entered the scene with the Iraq War, which sparked the global anti-war movement of the early 2000s. This movement was not “post-political”—it was both an attempt to influence international policy and an intensely political movement.
Formal membership of mainstream political parties has declined since the highpoint of the 1950s and 1960s. This “weakening of mass party capillary structures” means political leaders are less able to mobilise support or develop coherent strategies, as Jäger points out.
But it wasn’t the institutions themselves that won reforms. The stable, two-party system was itself a product of a system that was expanding and able and willing to reform public services and, when forced by working class militancy, to concede pay rises. That era is over.
Jäger’s third period is the “anti-political” decade that began in 2008 when economic crisis ended the neoliberal consensus.
It was a decade of mass movements as diverse as the Tea Party in the US, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. During these years, politicisation returned with a vengeance. Politicisation of the people against the elites saw the rise of new populist parties.
Jäger cites the political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who argued that radical populism depended on creating cross-class alliances rather than relying on the working class. It was the right, Marine Le Pen, Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who capitalised on this new politicisation.
Jäger is rightly scathing about the role of the Democratic Party in absorbing and destroying progressive movements in the US.
But Jäger is wrong to dismiss the working class in favour of radical populism. Organisations based on the idea of radical populism such as Podemos in the Spanish state have all too often collapsed into mainstream politics or been extinguished by the economic and political institutions they failed to defy.
Revolutionaries offer a different vision of organisation.
Over the past decade or so we have experienced hyperpolitics, Jäger’s fourth period. This idea has captured the zeitgeist of the left with descriptions of an intense politicisation with few institutional ambitions, in which everything explodes and nothing changes.
Jäger says the “life-worlds of the online environment” encourage deinstitutionalised, impermanent engagement and offer “repertoires of social expression that require little or no long-term obligation”.
His descriptions of hyperpolitics will resonate with many who are bewildered by hashtag activism and online outrage that leads nowhere.
To highlight the originality of hyperpolitics, however, Jäger downplays the multiple ways in which people are resisting the system as they always have done, by striking, by demonstrating, by taking to the streets.
He is dismissive of social movements that do not fit his periodisation, such as Black Lives Matter. Those who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963 wore union badges, he writes, while those protesting over the death of George Floyd had no visible political affiliations.
But it is deeply misleading to compare insurgent mass movements against police violence, which have occurred for decades, with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Yes, the BLM movement became incorporated and commodified, but not before it changed ideas on a mass scale.
Jäger’s book was first published in German before the Palestine movement erupted in October 2023. But that movement, which saw millions demonstrate, fundraise and join organisations, is certainly a challenge to the whole idea of hyperpolitics.
Jäger is a self-avowed Marxist but his periodisation remains at the level of description. His four periods are marked by great historical and cultural events—the First World War, the collapse of Stalinism, the economic crash of 2008—but nowhere are these events explained.
Jäger’s four political eras exist above economic developments, intensifying imperialism, revolutions and mass strikes.
He argues that, to be effective, political movements must ally themselves with institutional structures. The mainstream parties are in long-term decline because they failed to deliver what people wanted.
But millions vote when it matters. Jäger acknowledges that in 2020 Joe Biden was elected with a record turnout of 81 million.
Tens of thousands joined the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and may well have joined Your Party given the chance. The Democratic Socialists of America is now the biggest socialist organisation in US history.
Nostalgia for the old two-party system is both futile and misplaced.
Jäger appears complacent about the threat of fascism. He says that it is a response to the threat of a revolutionary breakthrough. So the conditions for fascism to emerge do not exist.
Instead, he suggests that Donald Trump may be a kind of “Bonapartist”. In the mid-nineteenth century Louis Napoleon Bonaparte relied on the passive support of the French peasantry. Trump relies not on a mass base but on constitutional provisions that give weight to sparsely populated states and allow life-time appointments to the Supreme Court.
Jäger seems to have little sense of how far right leaders can radicalise to the right and create mass movements out of institutions such as Ice.
His conclusion is that we need to “reinstitutionalise political engagement” or remain impotent. This “drawing of atomised individuals back into parties and unions may seem nostalgic, authoritarian or simply unrealistic,” he acknowledges. While this project could be based in the world of work where workers still have power, workers are not joining unions, and no longer share the common interests of the past, Jäger warns.
But the left must offer more than attempts at rebuilding the failed parties of the centre. People should get organised, but in ways that further their demands, not thwart and disappoint them.
The current debate between those looking to Zack Polanski’s Greens and Andy Burnham’s Labour must include a third component—a revolutionary alternative based not only on parliamentary politics but on social movements and working class self-activity.
Hyperpolitics, Jäger writes, is indispensable for understanding the contemporary political scene. And it has clearly struck a chord with some on the left.
But it is Marxism that is indispensable to understanding the polarisation and volatility of the age of polycrisis and the forces capable of forging collective movements from the hyped-up hyper world Jäger describes.
