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Luca Szücs: Populism in retreat? Lessons from Orbán’s downfall

Image 1: Supporters of the Tisza Party follow the election results at the party’s election-night event held at Batthyány Square, Budapest. Photo by Julianna Ugrin

On the night of 12 April, in the wake of the landslide victory of the Tisza Party, Hungary erupted into collective euphoria. Images from election night quickly spread across global media, capturing an outpouring of emotion as people took to the streets not only in Budapest, but across the country. Many who experienced that night, including myself, felt they were witnessing a historic moment. This was not simply a parliamentary election producing a new government, it was a vote for full regime and elite change. Once again, Hungarians expressed a strong sense of belonging to their European allies and the illiberal and autocratic regime of Viktor Orbán, along with its left-liberal “progressive” opposition, was replaced.

This collective catharsis also reflected a deeper sentiment: for the first time in decades, Hungarians could truly claim the outcome as their own. Unlike earlier transformation shaped by global forces – such as the collapse of the Soviet Union – this result was driven by domestic political agency. In that sense, it felt like a belated regime change of 1990, when many Hungarians felt more anxious than relieved – rightly so – and did not perceive themselves as active participants in a transformation largely driven by external forces. It is telling that voter turnout in the first free elections of 1990 was only 65 per cent, while in other parts of the former Soviet bloc it exceeded 90 per cent.

This time, turnout approached 80 per cent. The Tisza Party secured a parliamentary supermajority with 53 per cent of the vote, while Fidesz received only 38 per cent. With this result, Péter Magyar (Prime Minister of Hungary) and his government received unprecedented legitimacy, which, of course, comes with enormous responsibility. There is immense social pressure to begin with a clean slate. It is therefore no surprise that the newly appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Office announced that one of the first measures would be the opening of socialist-era agent files, along with the establishment of an Asset Recovery Office to reclaim stolen assets and public funds misused by the Orbán regime.

What happened to the old opposition?

Since the crushing defeat of the Orbán regime, a number of essays, op-eds, and articles have already appeared, and deeper analyses and academic studies will certainly follow, seeking to draw lessons from the Hungarian case on how to defeat illiberal autocratic regimes (see also Pulay 2026). While the European Union and much of the world shared in Hungarian euphoria with a sense of relief, international and domestic commentators have expressed concern (Scheiring 2026) over the disappearance of left-liberal and progressive forces from the new Hungarian parliament, fearing that these perspectives would not be genuinely represented by Tisza. Many felt, understandably, that only various shades of the Right would now remain in parliament. Others saw Tisza’s victory as final proof of the country’s deeply conservative nature (Szakolczai and Eilenberger 2026).

However, by 2026, the left-liberal opposition’s work had become completely hollowed out. Opposition parties were reduced to a largely reactive identity-political force that, willingly or unwillingly, sustained Orbán’s Fidesz system while having long lost their social base, including the working class. It is revealing that, with the exception of the mass protests triggered by the so-called “slave law” (Overtime Act) (Szombati 2018) at the end of 2018, this opposition never meaningfully engaged with topics such as workers’ rights. Nor did they confront the underlying material and cultural forces of “double devaluation” (Kalb 2023) that had produced the class base of Orbán’s illiberalism in the first place.

At the same time, Orbán had meticulously created a system in which room was allowed for dwarf opposition parties focused on identity politics, thus maintaining at least the appearance of a functioning liberal democracy. The dynamic resembled a predictable political choreography between Fidesz and its opposition. The 2025 ban on Pride by Orbán, followed by the decision to organize the event with the support of left-liberal opposition politicians, was a case in point. Rather than joining the Pride march, Magyar and Tisza party continued to focus on its campaign centered primarily on economic and social issues. Their strategy aimed to address the concerns of a broader segment of society in order to unify the opposition. Magyar also understood that the persistence of these cultural wars at the center of political debate, cultivated for more than a decade by both Orbán and his opponents, had made regime change impossible.

Although the election swept away the left-liberal parties and their political elite alongside Fidesz, voters and politicians committed to leftist values did not disappear. Instead, they joined Tisza and its broader grassroots movement.

The rise of a counterhegemonic force from within

In recent years, Orbán’s illiberal hegemony had already begun to erode. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the drying up of European Union funds for Hungary, and a long series of poor governmental decisions, the economy has been in a bad shape for some time, causing significant material stagnation. Orbánism recorded the highest cumulative inflation in the EU since 2020, with prices rising by 57 per cent. The stark contrast between the material reality of average Hungarians and the unhinged corruption and extreme wealth of Orbán and his cronies became increasingly difficult to conceal. His hegemony was collapsing and the raw domination that had increasingly underpinned it was in plain sight (Éber 2025).

Amid the economic and moral exhaustion of the regime, the counter force emerged from within: Péter Magyar was an insider and for many years a loyal cadre of the Orbán regime. The landslide victory of Magyar’s Tisza Party – and its ability to bring about regime change – was preceded by two years of intensive work centered on a sustained nationwide tour and engagement with local communities. During this period, Magyar established dialogue with the rural majority, moving from village to village and from town to town. This experience distilled the core themes of his campaign.

Out of these encounters, local communities – civil society in its original sense – began organizing themselves into one of the largest grassroots movements of recent decades: the so-called “Tisza szigetek” (Tisza islands), which became the social backbone of the Tisza Party. Crucially, these were not formally part of the party, nor were they created by it. Rather, they were catalyzed by the emergence of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party, evolving into a parallel social formation alongside it (Borbáth 2026).

Importantly, the main concerns of this social base centered on material issues: the dire poverty of workers, wage conditions, entrenched clientelism, working conditions, systemic corruption, and the erosion of public institutions essential to social reproduction such as health and education. These concerns formed the unifying core of Tisza’s campaign and produced a potentially counter hegemonic focus on everyday material concerns away from Orbán’s increasingly fictitious identity politics.

Nevertheless, these issues were in fact far from new. As a social anthropologist focusing on small business owners and conducting fieldwork in the countryside between 2015 and 2016 – at the height of the so-called migration crisis – I observed that the main concerns of my interlocutors revolved around much the same issues – even as people lived amid Fidesz’s hate propaganda and xenophobic hostility toward migrants, and the country was saturated with government posters conveying anti-Brussels hate messages.

Even during the relatively favourable global conjuncture between 2010 and 2019, when foreign capital and EU funds were flowing in, the structural problems of the economy and the labour market had persisted, particularly the extremely low taxation of capital, reaching as low as 3 per cent (Scheiring 2020) and the relatively high taxation of labour, despite the new flat tax (Scharle and Szikra 2015), which contributed to low incomes, a high level of undeclared employment and impeded formal job creation in small and medium-sized businesses. As a result, my interlocutors, small business owners, were often confronted with labour related issues, while self-employed workers were constantly hustling, working multiple shifts and combining various jobs simply to make ends meet. People managed to get by largely at the cost of self-exploitation. Meanwhile, formal labour became more flexibilized than ever, giving way to informal paternalistic mechanisms of labour control and surveillance (Szücs 2021). Fidesz’s ideology promoted a “work-based society” while curtailing workers’ interests. The so-called progressive side, meanwhile, had long abandoned the working class as well.

Contrary to the claim that the decline of left-liberal parties reflects an inherently conservative Hungarian society, value-mapping surveys indicate that majority of Hungarians lean economically left, with egalitarian and redistribution-supporting values remaining dominant, while only a small minority holds strong market-liberal views (Bíró-Nagy et al. 2022). This was clearly reflected in Tisza’s campaign and became the source of its success. To frame social and economic concerns, Tisza drew on national symbols and shared cultural references – Hungarian flags were everywhere. The reappropriation and rearticulation of the nation against an Orbánism that had turned it de facto against the demos proved a powerful mobilising any unifying tool, though it was often misinterpreted as evidence of an inherently conservative orientation.

The use of national symbols, including the Hungarian flag, may appear banal, but in a country where from the late 1990s the first Orbán government instrumentalised them for division, their reappropriation for democratic purposes carried a deeply liberating meaning for many Hungarians. It signified not ethno-national exclusion or national security vis a vis foreign forces, but rather a sense of popular democratic revival.

The new Tisza government was just inaugurated, so any full assessment of its policies remains premature. However, its general direction is already clear: strengthening ties with the European Union and reintegrating into its institutions; playing a more active role in Central European politics – Poland and Austria were the first to be visited after Brussels; diversifying energy sources in order to reduce dependence on Russia; rebuilding the rule of law and institutional frameworks, including going after misspent public money; restoring checks and balances; revitalizing the economy; strengthening public sectors such as education and healthcare; and reducing social inequalities.

Preliminary lessons learned

Liberal-left parties became embedded within Orbán’s illiberal system and failed, over sixteen years, to establish an effective counterhegemonic force, in fact replicating Orbán’s identity politics from the other side. Their focus on identity politics – largely shaped by Western liberal frameworks – proved politically powerless in the Hungarian context. The rediscovery of the material concerns of the broader population was crucial in Tisza’s victory.

A relentless presence on the ground, combined with the catalysis of a bottom-up grassroots movement, helped to counterbalance the omnipresent, increasingly AI-driven, fear-based propaganda of Fidesz. At the same time, the election was smartly framed as a choice between East and West, to which the Hungarian majority, always already pro-European, responded strongly. The Hungarian case demonstrates that what counts as “progressive” is context-specific, shaped by history, socio-political structure, and culture. Rather than relying on a priori assumptions of what progressive politics is and how progressive forces should respond to far-right and authoritarian challenges, it shows that credible political alternatives must be locally anchored and socially meaningful in order to succeed.

Luca Szücs is an anthropologist with a PhD from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. After working at the International Labour Organization (ILO) headquarters in Geneva, she now works as an independent consultant on labour-related topics. Her research and writing explore the changing world of work, as well as the politics, society, and culture of Eastern Europe through historical and ethnographic perspectives.

References:

Éber, Márk Áron. 2025. “Viktor Orbán’s politics of knowledge, intellectuals, and institutions in the light of Gramsci’s ideas.” In Laboratorio dell’ISPF 22. http://www.ispf-lab.cnr.it/system/files/ispf_lab/documenti/2025_BRM.pdf

Bíró-Nagy, András et al. 2022. Magyarország értéktérképe 2022. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung – Policy Solutions. https://real.mtak.hu/155579/1/Policy%20Solutions_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g%20%C3%89rt%C3%A9kt%C3%A9rk%C3%A9pe%202022.pdf

Borbáth, Endre. 2026. “Explaining Tisza’s Hungarian breakthrough” The Loop, April 12. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/explaining-tiszas-hungarian-breakthrough/

Kalb, Don. 2023. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(1), 204–219.

Pulay, Gergely. 2026. “Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary” FocaalBlog, May 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/06/gergely-pulay-post-feudalism-and-post-fascism-at-the-end-of-the-orban-regime-in-hungary/

Scharle, Ágota and Dorottya Szikra. 2015. “Recent Changes Moving Hungary Away from the European Social Model” in The European Social Model in Crisis: Is Europe Losing Its Soul?, edited by Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Scheiring, Gábor. 2020. The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and The Accumulative State in Hungary. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Scheiring, Gábor. 2026. “Democracy After Orbánism?” Jacobin, May 5. https://jacobin.com/2026/05/hungary-magyar-democracy-orbanism-technocrat

Szakolczay, Árpád and Wolfram Eilenberger: “What does Péter Magyar’s election mean for Hungary and Europe?” University of St. Gallen Newsroom April 16. https://www.unisg.ch/en/newsroom/what-does-peter-magyars-election-mean-for-hungary-and-europe/

Szombati, Kristóf. 2018. “Protesting the “slave law” in Hungary: The erosion of illiberal hegemony?” Focaalblog, December 28. https://www.focaalblog.com/2018/12/28/kristof-szombati-protesting-the-slave-law-in-hungary-the-erosion-of-illiberal-hegemony/

Szücs, Luca. 2021. “Moral Economy and Mutuality at Work: Labour Practices in Tobacco Shops”. Pp. 57 – 75 in Moral Economy at Work, Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia, edited by Lale Yalçın-Heckmann. Berghahn: New York – Oxford.

Cite as: Szücs, L. 2026. “Populism in retreat? Lessons from Orbán’s downfall” Focaalblog, May 13. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/13/luca-szucs-populism-in-retreat-lessons-from-orbans-downfall/

Blog

Gergely Pulay: Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary

Image 1: István Bibó (on the left) and Ferenc Erdei (second from the right) in the company of sociologist-psychologist Viola Tomori and Erdei’s father in 1940. Photo source: Wikipedia.

With the global rise of illiberalism in the twenty-first century, the reputation of Viktor Orbán’s regime has far exceeded Hungary’s actual geopolitical and economic weight. During late-socialism and around 1989, high profile international discourse on Hungary was shaped by the relationship of Hungarian dissident intellectuals and their Western friends (Harms 2025). Under Orbán, Hungary’s friends became autocratic leaders and far right politicians, and the exchange of ideas took place within transnational networks of knowledge production as a backdrop for an emerging illiberal international in Europe and beyond (Végh 2025). Now that Orbán’s regime is suddenly over as a result of this spring’s electoral revolt, Hungary’s local-global history as political laboratory seems to be entering a new phase, defined by the prospects of overthrowing illiberal regimes. A multitude of commentators are seeking to answer the question of how Orbán was defeated, hoping that the answer may have implications for the struggle against similar leaders in other countries.

The conferral of the political laboratory status often occurs alongside a near-complete disregard for social and intellectual history. Dominated largely by political science and commentary, studies of illiberalism tend toward analytic presentism and theorization in the negative, construing their object of scrutiny as a recent challenge, a style of leadership that does not fully correspond to the normative ideals of liberal democratic conduct. Illiberals reject the universalist criticism directed at them over corruption or the abuse of power, claiming that such critique is just an expression of liberals’ disrespect towards local custom and culture.

In my recent work, I trace a genealogy of two key words, or emic intellectual concepts—post-feudalism and post-fascism—to provide a historically and socially embedded account of the fatal symbiosis we today call illiberalism. These two concepts are rooted in the work of two towering figures of Hungarian social thought, István Bibó and Ferenc Erdei, who developed their main ideas as critics of admiral Horthy’s interwar authoritarian regime and then in the immediate aftermath of World War II (Bibó 2015, Erdei 1988), After the communist takeover, Bibó was marginalized, while Erdei became a high-ranking politician, but in 1956, they both became members of Hungary’s revolutionary government. As I return to it below, at the end of Fidesz’s first term in power in 2002, philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás described Orbán’s rule as an autocracy based on personal dependence, in other words a fatal symbiosis of post-feudalism and post-fascism.

Post-feudalism

Hungarian interwar populist progressives criticized the system of large landownership, monopolies and the redistribution of the national wealth by oligarchs who belonged to a political clientele. In their footsteps, generations of social critics engaged with forms of contingent closure, relying simultaneously on the categories of class and estate rather than reducing one to the other (Böröcz 1997). The concept of post-feudalism (utórendiség) was developed by Ferenc Erdei and his intellectual followers.In post-feudalism, the economic sphere has been thoroughly reshaped by capitalism (hence the ‘post’), yet the dominant logic of inequality remains a rank-based hierarchy of privilege and allegiance, entrenched in a political and administrative system in which the supremacy of the nobility—the ruling estate—persists behind the façade of parliamentary arrangements.

The practical side of post-feudalism is clientelist domination, based on the exchange of loyalty and support for guarantees of security and well-being—or simply the right to exist—between partners in unequal positions of power. In the period between the commodification of land in the mid-nineteenth century and the state-socialist collectivisation of agriculture, patron-client relations functioned as an institution that mitigated the consequences of polarization among different strata of the peasantry—such as landed farmers, smallholders, and landless day labourers within the same village community (Fél & Hofer 1973). As a system of domination and dependence, such networks of kinship and friendship regulated the flow of labour, services, and material goods, as well as the distribution of political loyalty. In clientelist transactions, participants placed strong emphasis on the idea of horizontal camaraderie or the ethics of mutual aid, even while remaining acutely aware of the inequalities between their positions. The wealthy benefited at the expense of the poor, who nonetheless took part in maintaining the relation for reasons of prestige (membership) and the expectation of return service. While clients could criticize their patrons in informal settings, open dissent—particularly in elections—was effectively prohibited.

Depending on the concentration of wealth and power, post-feudal arrangements may involve divergent forms of patronage, brokerage or atomized advocacy. Especially in the initial Stalinist version, the state-socialist regime managed to incorporate clientelism by the organization of the party-bureaucracy or nomenklatura, based on the principle of top-down appointment. In exchange for assistance in advancing their careers, clients carried out their patrons’ policies. (Szelényi & Mihályi 2020: 43) From the 1990s, local entrepreneurs in rural Hungary competed for monopolistic privileges to get access to profit flows by retaining some leverage (i.e. power over the distribution of advantages and disadvantages) and safeguards in relation to the state as well as business partners, banks and customers. Hierarchical forms of mutual obligation provided durable ways to bind the labour force to entrepreneurs as much as local constituencies to their political leaders. Amid the relative absence or decline of universal services, everyday problem-solving became increasingly synonymous with the pursuit of preferential treatment, entitlements, or various micro- and macro-privileges. At the same time, in the post-socialist political field, different factions established durable alliances with party-affiliated companies and economic elites that received competitive advantages and orders from governments in exchange for party and campaign financing (Stark & Vedres 2010). Post-socialist policies of austerity gave rise to a multitude of lobbies and strategies of informal and personalized bargaining to gain exemptions, concessions and favours. With Orbán’s rise to power in 2010, post-feudal arrangements took on an ever more centralized and systematic form. Relations of clientelism and brokerage were increasingly facilitated by the central state—as in case of workfare, the governance of poverty by discretionary power delegated to local mayors (Kovai, Pulay & Szombati 2022)—while minor corruption such as in hospitals was increasingly policed. With parliamentary super-majority, funding from the EU and some economic growth after the recovery from the financial crisis of the late-2000s, Orbán’s ruling estate was profiting from semi-peripheral capitalist integration through monopolizing the resources available through the state, without being held accountable for their misdemeanours. Still, these arrangements were not based on total consent. The introduction of new bills (including the one curtailing labour rights, or the amendments of the constitution) drew large crowds to the streets, but protests had virtually no effect on the ruling party’s decisions. By the early 2020s, popular criticism had become a common feature of everyday talk among ordinary Hungarians who were yearning for normal lives and ‘barking at politicians’ (Jansen 2015) mostly in restricted, confidential and friendly settings, without any necessary implication for their formal political participation or electoral behaviour. Post-feudal forms of domination continued to persist through the gift-like exchange of obligations and channels of atomized advocacy, accompanied by parallel publics and rampant forms of doublespeak. In Orbán’s Hungary, such apparent imperfections of hegemony were to be resolved by the more explicit forms of illiberal propaganda.

Post-fascism

If post-feudalism is a form of hierarchical organization, post-fascism is rather a vision or ideology of hierarchy. In a predominantly rural country like Hungary, twentieth-century fascism responded to economic crisis and a widespread sense of cultural decline by promoting the (re-)invention of supposedly archaic traditions, and the idea of collective rebirth after the elimination of the nation’s ‘others’. Conceiving hierarchy as natural, fascism subdued class-based differences to the principle of the racialized community (Kékesi 2023).

Post-fascism became a core concept in the work of Gáspár Miklós Tamás, following his profound disillusionment with post-socialist liberalization (Tamás 2000, 2002). The concept was inspired by the work of István Bibó, particularly his notion of ‘political hysteria’ from the 1940s, which GM Tamás sought to reframe for the conditions of the twenty-first century. Post-fascism describes a movement within global capitalism that reverses the Enlightenment tendency to equate citizenship with the human condition. In continuity with twentieth-century fascisms, it represents hierarchy as natural and seeks to reinforce the division between sub-political humanity and the privileges or elevated status of ‘proper’ citizens. Post-fascism denies the possibility of reconciliation between groups defined by gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ or religion. Inter-group relations are instead construed as a domain of existential struggle, in which one side’s gain necessarily entails the other’s loss. This denial of reconciliation produces a vision of the social world in which the common good becomes unintelligible beyond the loyalties of the hierarchical in-group.

In Hungary, amid severe economic and social crises following the fall of state-socialism in 1989-1990, the demand for legitimation increased in a weakened state. Citizens harboured illusions about the protective capacities of state dependency in an attempt to find rescue from the terrifying outcomes of capitalism. The politics of refeudalization eroded and bypassed the entire system of impersonal administration, the rule of law, and bureaucracy by dismissing them as non-national institutions. Thus, understanding its manifestations merely as corruption misses the system’s core dynamics. Refeudalized power binds individuals and groups by concessions, exemptions, waivers, posts, titles, ranks, informal access to goods and services granted outside the statutory scheme (see also: Szalai 2017). Politicians of the new right salvaged what they could from crumbling nation-states, acting as operators of wealth and institutions extracted from the state on territory left behind by global capital. Two main pillars of Orbán’s ideology can be identified: the idea of permanent war against internal and external ’aliens,’ and an understanding of politics as structured by the existential fear for the community. Orbán’s anti-liberalism promised protection from the very minorities that liberals sought to protect against the ‘normal’ (hardworking, heterosexual and obedient) majority. Amid growing economic and social insecurity, majoritarian neo-nationalisms appropriate the language and modes of claim-making originally developed for the recognition struggles of minorities or the truly disadvantaged (Gille 2010). The inversion of human rights liberalism is central to the project, as exemplified by the construction of the white Christian majority as a vulnerable category in need of privileged protection against the threat of becoming a minority in its own homeland. This parasitic dependence on liberal discourse reflected the symbolic dimension of the Orbán-regime’s material dependence on EU-funding—at least while such funding remained available.

What comes next?

Orbán’s downfall resulted from a rare convergence of geopolitical, economic and moral crises. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party and movement emerged as a specialized task force aimed at confronting Orbán’s regime through a broad populist coalition that seeks to liberate suppressed creative energies and defend life itself from a parasitic elite (cf. Rajković 2023). Magyar’s credibility was reinforced by his former insider status within the Orbánist ruling estate, providing him with in-depth knowledge of the regime’s inner workings, akin to the role of former mafia members in anti-mafia struggles (cf. Rakopoulos 2017). Magyar relates to Orbán similarly to the way reform-socialists once related to Stalinists whose crimes they have rejected.

The post-Orbán moment is marked by ambivalence: euphoria, relief and hope coexist with a sense of loss and sacrifice. In states of collective effervescence, we tend to experience heightened clarity regarding temporal divisions between the old and new, as well as social divisions between the victims and perpetrators. Later, however, these distinctions appear more complex, as the experience of shared suffering becomes intertwined with recognition of shared complicity. The new Hungarian parliament is comprised of different conservative, right-wing parties and that should give an impetus for new political movements and platforms that we do not yet see. Fidesz has become a mid-sized party representing predominantly rural, less-educated, elderly, and poorer voters, which should serve as a warning sign for anyone concerned about social inequalities and another backlash.

One of the corrosive effects of illiberal hegemony has been the erosion of critical imagination. In this context, I propose to revisit theoretical ideas from the past in order to reclaim their critical potential in the present, to envisage alternatives for the future. Post-feudal or clientelist social arrangements are often criticized in the name of meritocracy or the autonomous, rights-bearing individual. However, they can be even more powerfully criticized for the way in which—behind the façade of mutual aid—they undermine horizontal forms of association, class-based solidarity and shared claim-making in the name of the commons. Together with anti-fascism, and alongside the more familiar de-colonial agenda, the project of de-clientization should go beyond the critique of specific elites in order to challenge the broader patriarchal mode of social reproduction. For the time being, it is worth recognizing that a huge majority of Hungarian voters expressed their readiness to accept change as a forward-looking condition—even as something desirable—rather than associating it with threat and danger, as Orbán’s propaganda has done for sixteen years.

Gergely Pulay is a sociologist and social anthropologist, Research Fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. His research interests include urban marginality, value and livelihood and intellectual history in Hungary and Romania.

References

Bibó, István. 2015. The Art of Peacemaking: Political Essays by István Bibó. Yale University Press.

Böröcz, József. 1997. ‘Stand Reconstructed: Contingent Closure and Institutional Change.’ Sociological Theory 15(3): 215-248.

Erdei, Ferenc. 1988. Selected writings. Akadémiai.

Fél, Edit and Tamás Hofer. 1973. ‘Tanyakert-s, Patron-Client Relations, and Political Factions in Átány.’ American Anthropologist 75(3): 787-801.

Gille, Zsuzsa. 2010. ‘Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition?’ Global Society 24(1): 9-30.

Harms, Victoria. 2025. The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and Its Western Friends, 1973-1998. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime. ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Berghahn Books.

Kékesi, Zoltán. 2023. Memory in Hungarian Fascism. A Cultural History. Routledge.

Kovai, Cecília, Gergely Pulay and Kristóf Szombati. 2022. ‘Building the ‘work-based society’: State-enabled grassroots clientelism and the re-establishment of order in present-day Hungary’ Paper presented at EASA2022 Belfast: Transformation, Hope and the Commons.

Rajković, Ivan. 2023. ‘Whose death, whose eco-revival? Filling in while emptying out the depopulated Balkan Mountains’ Focaal 96: 71-87.

Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2017. From Clans to Co-ops. Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily. Berghahn Books.

Stark, David and Balázs Vedres 2010. ‘Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups’ American Journal of Sociology 115(4): 1150-1190.

Szalai, Erzsébet. 2017. ‘Refeudalization.’ Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 8(2): 3-24.

Szelényi, Iván and Péter Mihályi. 2020. Varieties of Post-communist Capitalism. A comparative analysis of Russia, Eastern Europe and China. Brill.

Tamás, Gáspár Miklós 2000. ‘On Post-Fascism’. Boston Review. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/g-m-tamas-post-fascism/

Tamás, Gáspár Miklós 2002. A helyzet. (‘The situation.’) Irodalom Kft.

Végh, Zsuzsanna 2025. ‘Rewriting the European Project? The balance and implications of Fidesz’s illiberal alliance-building in Europe.’ Wrocław: College of Eastern Europe. https://www.kew.org.pl/en/2025/05/05/rewriting-the-european-project-the-balance-and-implications-of-fideszs-illiberal-alliance-building-in-europe/

Cite as: Pulay, G. 2026. “Post-feudalism and post-fascism at the end of the Orbán-regime in Hungary” Focaalblog, May 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/06/gergely-pulay-post-feudalism-and-post-fascism-at-the-end-of-the-orban-regime-in-hungary/

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Don Kalb: Anthropological Use Value for an Anticapitalist Left

Image 1: Don Kalb and Marion Berghahn at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

What a joy to be hugged, celebrated, and criticized by stellar colleagues who intimately know the stakes of invoking Marx in more than a fleeting way in anthropology; stakes that may be higher here than in other social disciplines. Theoretically and methodologically, anthropology is deeply imbricated in liberal and less liberal idealisms, with a stark belief in cultural contingency, and rather wild about the idiography of cultural difference, alterity, and autonomy. If the discipline moves Left, it naturally inclines towards anarchism, mutualism, ethics, radical versions of rights and humanitarianisms or posthumanitarianisms beyond the regular liberal offer, rather than to Marxism and political economy with all their system thinking. The anthropological desire is definitely for a human self that is autonomously thriving on ‘the outside to capital’.

This is largely how the discipline has fared during the worldwide political contestations of the 2000s. Hence the importance of a public anthropologist like David Graeber, who had the genius to catch the Left spirit of the time in the 2000s, before that time itself was fully aware of it. The soon to be coming counter revolution, however, was less noticed by David, or by our discipline at large, though the right wing backlash was smoldering already during the Left wing years. Anthropology only caught up with it, in shock, when the radical Right was already comfortably seated on the plush of Western governmental power, increasingly determining not just ‘policy’ but a full-fledged program of defensive-aggressive Western civilizational supremacy. Unpleasantly surprised, and aware of their own vulnerability, anthropologists at once realized they had long preferred to study ‘people like us’ (nice Left-wanting people) and had ignored questions about labor, class, right wing political anger, and fascism. The inside to capital was blowing back as a boomerang. Ten years later, this still describes our deeply worrying situation.

Admittedly, those of us who were located in, and working on postsocialist Eastern Europe (CEE) were somewhat better prepared than the Western and Southern liberal mainstream. We had seen the counter revolution of the illiberal Right taking shape in the late 1990s and early 2000s already. CEE, it turned out, possibly to our own surprise, was not the liberal laggard of Western imagination, but an illiberal avantgarde that would soon be followed by the West and many places of the South.

The political sociologist David Ost and myself were among the first to notice the deep class dynamics behind the process, dynamics that I later sought to succinctly capture with the concept of ‘double devaluation’, for which Jaume Franquesa salutes me. I love Jaume’s sudden observation that actually none of the concepts that are central to ‘Value and Worthlessness’ (Kalb 2025) are new, that the book is just an unapologetic argument for anthropological Marxism consistently worked out: class, labor, capital, dispossession, social reproduction…imperialism. These days I lay more emphasis than I used to on devaluation and on value, value regimes, and an anthropologically informed dialectical take on the law of value, what Voicu rightly calls my ‘huffing and puffing’. These concepts were less common in the anthropological structural marxisms of the 1970s (though I owe Jonathan Friedman, a survivor of structural Marxism 1970s style, for having pushed me along this path without him being much aware of it, I guess), but Jaume is so right: nothing new, really, just an update of an existing Marxist toolkit and a modest anthropological rethinking under new circumstances and with new problems at hand, within and against a drastically transformed capitalist totality of social relations as compared to the one that produced the 1970s Marxist upsurge. My categories and approach are tuned into that new reality and coined in order to help explain the radical right wing political backlash in CEE and anywhere, in anthropological ways, that is.

I want to emphasize that I have never felt much for the overt structuralisms of those days. At every turn I try to dip my approach to value (“value and values, value regimes”) in what I call relational realism: relations that can be studied, ‘life in and as action’ on worldwide, as well as regional, national, and intimate levels; levels that are dialectically imbued with each other as in multi-scalar relationships; relations with others on which we depend and that shape who we are and who we can and want to be. Hence the ‘structured totality’. Hence also Trotsky, not just for his combined and uneven development, which, as Stefan Voicu rightly notes, is essential, but also his early gesture towards multiscalar analysis as expressed in the distinctions he made between ‘algebraic, arithmetic, and molecular’ scales of analysis, a vision Eric Wolf would later set to work in his ‘faces of power’ (without ever citing Trotsky). There is a big and urgent anthropological project in bringing this multiscalar dialectical edifice of value, including the ‘systemic production of worthlessness’, to work ‘close on the skin’ in the biographies, actions and experiences of our key fieldwork interlocutors; helping to bring their hidden histories into view in ways that under normal circumstances are not usually revealed to them.

‘Intimate Marxism’, Sharryn Kasmir calls the result and she likes it; a profound observation plus a seductive name. Thank you, Sharryn. ‘Intimate Marxism’, almost an oxymoron given popular and anthropological prejudices against a Marxism believed to be preternaturally given to obscurantist or even violent abstractions. Marxist anthropology might want to embrace ‘Marxist intimacy’ as a key element of our mission as compared to other Marxisms, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in relation to liberal anthropologies, as Sharryn suggests. We are seeing avowedly ‘liberal’ anthropological approaches to fascism these days that thrive on and all but seem to fetishize what I am tempted to characterize as mere ‘spoken words’, utterances derived from interviews and social media content, without much of an effort to create a compelling understanding of the speaker’s whole, lived, emplaced social life as it unfolds in time and space, with all its contradictions, desires, fears, angers, disappointments, suffering, private victories. Intimate Marxism searches for the full human claim to a worthy and meaningful life beyond inevitably rather random moments of utterance, life with others, and within and against the ‘inside to capital’. This is an ambition that comes with a strong recommendation here, and with a sense of both urgency and patience, to get behind and beyond the facile fascist (etc.) surface. Words are so easily spoken and scribbled up these days, a massive social media – that is, digital capitalist – driven overproduction; a flow of half-digested fuzzy signifiers for people to just show they keep up with the socially necessary speed of circulation (and with their neighbors). But what the hell do they really mean when spoken?

Image 2: Don Kalb and Marion Berghahn at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

This brings me to the point where I must engage with Ida Susser’s critique that in Value and Worthlessness I am weak on Gramsci, commoning, counter hegemony, ‘Left wing culture’. First, I am puzzled that I have apparently failed to show that my key informant Zadrozny – a person around whom a much broader story is told in my work on Poland – was precisely that type of an outspoken and important organic intellectual that she wants me to look for and that she strangely thinks is missing in my approach. As far as I know that problematic is right there in the middle; it’s what the whole story is about. Zadrozny was a lifelong key actor and organizer within a broad and powerful commoning movement for worker self-management, comprising at various points tens to hundreds of thousands of people, first against the ‘really existing socialist’ state, then against the neoliberal state, both of which would dispossess local workers of their self-managed factory commons (which included much more than those factories: credit, family benefits, kindergartens, health clinics, holiday camps, media!!). All of this is described though perhaps not really studied, it is more a starting point for another type of study, one that helps explain the puzzle of why this all lands on the radical Right side of the political spectrum. I am puzzled that Ida thinks I am neglecting Gramsci, hegemony, counter hegemony, commoning, and organic intellectuals. Maybe it is this: Many of my Western and in particular American friends have always found it hard to understand that the East European illiberal right was not an authoritarian imposition by the state or capital but an actual mass organic counter movement Polanyi style, as well as a counter hegemonic movement Gramsci style, against respectively authoritarian socialist and neoliberal state impositions. It is true that I do not study Left wing culture in Poland in the 2000s, that is because Right wing culture was the big issue and for us Western as well as Eastern analysts the big puzzle.

In Poland worker-led Solidarnosc ended up on the radical Right, just like the mass protests against the privatizations of health and pensions in Hungary in the early 2000s ended up with Orban’s Civic Circles and, in the Northeast of the country, now with a racist twist, with Jobbik. Western Gramscians often find it difficult to understand that there is no automatic affinity between commoning and the Left. The Left is a possibility, not more than that. But what if a self-nominated so called Left in power is your enemy? Regional histories, national public legacies, and relations of power produce crucial differentiations here. In France, the Yellow Vests could have moved rightwards too but in the end, partly as a consequence of street-commoning, as Ida’s (2026) new book shows, they ended up in a Left coalition. That Left coalition may not be strong enough though to keep the radical Right out of power in France: kindred processes of double devaluation as the ones I have observed in CEE are playing themselves out in that nation too, as elsewhere. Populist Lefts and Rights and their organic intellectuals and commoning practices are trying to capture and articulate that popular experience of double devaluation, both attacking the liberal center. As in CEE, in France the Right often dominates in the provinces and the rural areas, in particular those that have long stagnated and have seen big out-migrations. In CEE whole states as such have seen massive outmigrations and have indeed generated dominant, even hegemonic, right wing illiberal regimes in power. In France, the Left can compete in the big cities and sometimes in the provincial centers, such as in the recent electoral victory in Roubaix. More broadly, we should not ignore the fact that Gramsci is entirely embraced by the illiberal international nationalist Right and alt-right.

Being located in and working on CEE, I had to confront the objective of explaining the rise of the radical Right from the deeper popular experiences from which it was assembled. That included the commoning practices, but my curiosity went beyond the overt political organizing, which was established long before I arrived in the late 1990s: what happened to these well-organized manufacturing workers who went from Trotskyism against ‘neoliberal-Stalinism’ in the early 80s to radical illiberal nationalism against neoliberalism in fifteen years’ time? What was the popular experience, the hidden history, that helped to explain this political journey? That is what my approach in the ethnographic chapters helps do. Though I firmly believe that political outcomes are in the end somewhat contingent, they do happen by definition in regionally inflected and embedded ways – as part of the regional insertion into global capital accumulation and class formation; that is, they happen in relation to identifiable and describable value regimes. In the CEE postsocialist peripheries, where a neoliberal Left was hegemonic in the 1990s and 2000s, it meant that they overwhelmingly ended up on the radical right, as part of a counter hegemonic illiberal nationalist alternative. In France, in the core of the EU, with one of the most extensive welfare states in the region, the Yellow Vests in the end moved Left, but whole working class areas in the North and the East of the country moved right too, as they have been doing elsewhere in Europe and much of the world. CEE turned out to be an illiberal avant-garde. But we now also know, with the recent developments in Hungary, that such illiberal regimes too can succumb under their own contradictions, as seems to be happening with Trump and MAGA already.

Local commoning and its outcomes are not determined locally. Nor are what Ida Susser calls ‘political cultures’. Capitalism is a fast moving multiscalar edifice, no outside to that, even though any location has its fundamental specificities as part of its spatiotemporal insertion in the whole, which includes the socio-political histories and ‘political cultures’ of that insertion. That was also true for the South African anti-apartheid fight that Ida invokes; an invocation that is much to the point here. Would Southern Africa have seen the end of the Apartheid state in 1994 without the Polish 1989? Without the Soviet Union having gone bust? With the Apartheid regime still being seen among the Western ruling class as the last bulwark against a violently spreading African communism supported by the Soviet Union (Angola, Mozambique…South Africa)? We cannot be sure but quite possibly not. With communism and the Soviet Union all but gone, de Klerk was encouraged by domestic and international capital and the West at large to negotiate with the ANC. And Poland had delivered the example of the Roundtable. Thus, Poland and South Africa were again linked at the hip as two of the most ideologically and geopolitically significant ‘peaceful democratic transitions’ within an ever more neoliberal US led globalizing capitalism; both of them officially declared successes, but both also failing as inclusive democratic capitalisms for the many; both, as a consequence, ultimately giving rise to strong illiberal populist counter formations, in South Africa the Zuma faction within the ANC, in Poland, populist Solidarnosc against its former dissident anti-communist intellectuals, now the political elite. That new neoliberal Polish state elite and its wider hegemonic public culture and civil society was hellbent on telling the working class that they were just ‘worthless Poles’ who deserved the whip of capital pure and simple. These workers didn’t willingly agree and the Law and Justice regime was the biting result; an illiberal nationalist Right that was very unfriendly against leading liberals but that did reduce poverty and did push up the whole national economy by setting up a natalist/familialist welfare state against the loud protestations of the so called Left that this could only be economic suicide.

The fight, here and there, preferably combined, continues. But for now, the Left, too liberal, too neoliberal, too bienpensant, and in its more radical versions too much tempted towards the outside of capital, has lost. Is this overdetermined, I hear my friend Ida Susser ask? I hesitate and would love to say no. I actually whisper it, but then I see myself jump up and hear me exclaim loudly that there are no voluntarist escapes. Just pulling ourselves up on our belts and start organizing and commoning? No. My hope for counter hegemony does not start by confirming the importance of existing Left wing cultures because that is, as far as it goes, self-evident. It starts with listening very carefully to our ‘lost’ interlocutors in the field and with getting to grips with why ‘we’ ended up beaten by a popular force that ‘we’ used to associate with outright darkness and that we had imagined to have died out well before this 21st century had even started. And here we are. And this while capital and empire are going completely off the leash. Our deeply troubled predicament requires us to move the new global populist Left well beyond the limits of the liberal, limits that are so powerfully inscribed into the system and that will certainly not be overthrown by the illiberals, that is the power of property as capital, a power that is beyond the reach of any constitutional national democracy, and at the same time reject the utopian escape towards the outside to capital. That is why we need a full out rethinking of capitalism and its liberal and illiberal guardians, preferably in anthropologically informed ways. The well-trodden paths of the Left are exhausted. Call what we need revolution please. Some of that is tried in my book. Much more is needed.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog. His latest books are Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism (Berghahn Books, 2025), and, co-edited with Walden Bello, Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right (Pluto Press, 2026).

References

Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Susser, Ida. 2026. The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.

Cite as: Kalb, D. 2026. “Anthropological Use Value for an Anticapitalist Left” Focaalblog May 5. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/05/05/don-kalb-anthropological-use-value-for-an-anticapitalist-left/

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Ida Susser: The Value of a Left Culture in Combating Worthlessness

Image 1: (from left to right) Don Kalb, Marion Berghahn, Ida Susser, Sharryn Kasmir and Jaume Franquesa at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

Let me first say that I have been waiting for Don Kalb’s new book for a long time! Kalb has been a leading theorist of the growth of the Right in Eastern Europe and elsewhere for many years. Many of us have heard him speak with an overarching and comprehensive vision of the conjunctures and historical dynamics which have led to the current era. He has several key articles which outline the shifting politics of Europe over the past decades and connect them to the interactions of financial capitalism with state and global processes. Here, finally, Kalb has brought these interventions together in a vibrant synthesis.

Through the concepts of value and worthlessness, Kalb illuminates the theoretical links between his early work in the Philips factory under the regime of industrial capitalism in the Netherlands with his ethnographic perspective on post-socialist Poland and his latest work on the rise of the right in relation to the regime of financial capital. Discarded by capital as they are no longer needed, or forced to work in dismal and demeaning circumstances, people come to perceive themselves as worthless while capital extracts its own value.

I cannot possibly summarize the arguments and insights contained in every chapter of this book. I am only grateful that Don has brought these together for us to think about as an assembly of exciting ideas. Here I will focus on a few central themes he addresses and the ways in which his approaches reshape anthropology.

Class

Kalb’s early work in the Philips factory generates a holistic view of class which is fundamental to political economy. My own work (Susser [1982] 2012), based on a similar stress on family, work and social reproduction focused on the key importance of women’s contributions to community and class struggle in neighborhood movements. I remember well how difficult it was, within the social sciences, including anthropology, to find ways to talk about the gendered division of labor, class and agency. Theorists such as Eric Wolf and others maintained an analysis of class, relying on the point of production. Marxist feminists from the 1970s demanded that we conceptualize class in terms of the family in interaction with gendered inequality in spheres beyond the point of production, such as the home and urban space, and also began to stress race and intersectionality as elaborated by abolitionists.

Kalb’s analysis of Philips combines these underlying themes into a classic extended case analysis of social reproduction at a particular conjuncture of capital. He convincingly makes the case for what he calls “flexible familism” which shows the way in which patriarchy was directly implicated in the strategies corporations enforced to extract surplus labor from working class daughters. Through an in-depth analysis of an emotionally wrenching interview, he discusses the controlling and sometimes abusive relations between fathers and daughters. He complicates Gramsci’s discussion of Fordism based on the reinforcement of the patriarchal nuclear family by showing the ways in which industry may invoke different family relations under specific conditions. In the light of this research, he calls for an “expanded” view of class which comprehends the significance of domestic divisions within a broader vision of the processes of capital.

The rise of the Right

In his work on the changing hegemony of the world order, Kalb not only offers an exhilarating analysis of the rise of the global financial regime but he translates its consequences for working class members of Solidarity in post-socialist Poland. Through the analysis of a detailed series of interviews outlining the life history of Krysztof Zadrozny, once a leading activist in Solidarity, Kalb shows how Zadrozny and other activists found themselves “worthless” in post-socialist Poland in the face of corporate investment and the degradation of the nation-state to competitive states within global capital. He explains “the losers of socialism” in much more penetrating terms than simply the fall of the Soviet Union and the imposition of neoliberalism by the West. National unions and workers no longer wielded much power as millions of workers worldwide were sucked into industrial capital at fractions of the wages of earlier workers in the centers of capital. As a consequence, Zadrozny, failed by communism and as he sees it, betrayed by the social democrats, turns to the right.

I agree strongly with Kalb that the turn to the right in Eastern Europe and elsewhere has little to do with immigration or the hatred of the Roma. Such themes may be the content of the right wing populist agenda and the “whispers” of populist autocrats from the Right, they draw their influence from the rage generated in structural processes of class and capital. Nevertheless, I would explain the turn to the right, not only in terms of the repressive history of the Soviet Union and the selling out by the socialists, but as much by the loss of community among the leading activists and the working population. Kalb’s situational analysis of enlightening interviews in both The Netherlands and Poland captures the life and perspectives of the individual within a hidden network of class and worker mobilizations. I argue that to explain whether workers in a particular historical situation move to the left or the right, one might investigate further the neighborhood and community scale: the rituals, social gatherings, party networks and human interactions which give meaning to collective solidarity

My book,The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy (Susser 2026), follows an enigmatic and massive uprising in France in 2018, when hundreds of thousands of people who had never mobilized before, rushed into the streets of Paris initially protesting a new gas tax. I show that this movement could have gone to the Left or the Right. It was the social environment and in fact, the intense engagement of activists and local organizations at the grassroots level that inspired a unified humanistic and inclusive vision which helped to counteract the overwhelming individualistic pressures of neoliberalism.

Following Kalb’s research on the disappointments which contributed to the growth of the Right, we need further analysis of the processes which lead to counter-hegemonic movements along along with a strategic focus on the formation of organic intellectuals as a collective endeavor. The aim of my book on the Yellow Vests was to follow the possible generation of an historic bloc inspired by organic intellectuals as a foundation for a war of position.

Wars of position

In his overall analysis, Kalb takes no prisoners. He is clearly critical of the theorists who banish political economy from the anthropological terrain and insist on the purely symbolic cultural perspective, but he also wants to clarify his objections to ideas of the commons and the formation of common institutions within capitalism. This concern derives from his evaluation of the deceit and betrayals evident in the formation of workers cooperatives in post-socialism. The cooperatives in which workers expressed such hope were sold out by some of their own previous leaders who adopted the neoliberal phantasm of shock, later repudiated even by its initial promoter Jeffrey Sachs, as the means to a successful transition.

In spite of the experiences outlined by Kalb which clearly generated despair, my research suggests that, in his rejection of the commons, he may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Yellow Vests participated in street protests and occupations as a consequence of a deep sense of desperation similar to the “losers of socialism” and also of rage. Nevertheless, many experienced fundamental changes in their sense of hope and collective possibilities as they fought for a commons or took part in commoning, living in common, sharing in common and generating visions of the common for the transformation of civil society. Although the immediate collective excitement was temporary, I argue that many people changed in their subjective understandings of identity and collective engagement and participated in a cascade of later movements led by different fragments of subaltern groups and leaning towards social justice. Without such processes I see no way for transformation to occur from capitalism towards a more socially just and democratic state or system.

Kalb offers few mechanisms for such a transition in this book, although he has always been concerned with social movements as captured in the introduction to the prescient volume Worldwide Mobilizations he co-edited with Massimiliano Mollona (Kalb and Mollona 2018). He attributes change to class struggle, but how people are mobilized collectively and how that class struggle comes about, or then continues, is not discussed in the latest book. Certainly, no violent class struggle in highly industrialized capitalist societies, even less industrialized countries such as Iran, assures any form of democratic transition. For example, in South Africa, where I conducted fieldwork intermittently over a period of twenty years (Susser 2009), although the ANC and the Communist Party engaged in armed struggle for nearly thirty years, the turning points for the end of apartheid and liberation, are worth recalling: a massive series of strikes in the mines, a church opposed to apartheid, and even children in protest against a watered down curriculum, running out of their classrooms to be fired at by cannons in the streets, combined with international sanctions on both the South African government, corporations which traded with South Africa and participation in international events such as the Olympics . We shouldn’t underestimate the costs of the armed struggle, not only in regard to the number of deaths, but also of the young men who lost years of education and faced a grueling route back into civil society. Throughout southern Africa, veterans of the wars of Independence faltered at the margins of society and many failed to achieve stable jobs and a future in the newly created nations.

During those thirty years, perhaps inspired by the armed struggle, the institutions of civil society generated a counter-hegemonic discourse powerful enough to unseat the white supremacist government. Let us not forget the majority of social scientists, Marxists such as Harold Wolpe and Michael Burawoy included, who understood capitalist profits in South Africa to be dependent upon an apartheid regime, and specifically the migrant workers who were consigned to segregated homelands and formed the fundamental cheap workforce for the gold, platinum and other mines. Liberation in South Africa did not fully confront global or even national capitalist investment, and the gap between rich and poor has been enforced in other ways. However, it destroyed the fascist rule of apartheid, upending the racist policy of “homelands” and the colonial control of mineworkers, which had included chain gangs.

Thus, I would strongly argue that Gramsci’s point about a war of position and the creation of a counter-hegemonic discourse and practice are key to any transformation of capitalism. This realization puts questions of culture back front and center within any analysis of capitalism and the conjuncture of political economy with the historical moment. For these reasons, I would argue that Kalb’s clairvoyance and sharply focused analysis would benefit from further incorporation of the cultural and historical interplay of ideas with political economy which he clearly acknowledges.

Prefigurative politics

Taking the idea of prefigurative experiences and the emergence of a unified vision, or concrete utopia for Gramsci, fully into account in any broad analysis is difficult. Kalb has long criticized the anarchism and lack of political economy in the writing of David Graeber, who based his book on Debt firmly in the writing of Marcel Mauss. In this major work, Graeber makes the argument, based on Mauss’s ideas of the gift and reciprocity, that we need to reformulate the idea of debt to recognize that it is a cultural tool of power that can be redefined through political change. Graeber’s claims rely largely on people changing their minds and seeing things differently, no matter the historical moment or the political structures.

In the final chapters of the book Kalb goes straight to the horse’s mouth with his critique of Mauss. He questions his reputation as an ethnographer, as Mauss never in fact did ethnography, or as a theorist. Kalb is eminently convincing that Mauss can in no way be presented as a progressive or informed analyst of his era, and certainly not of the context in which the Russian Revolution took place. Kalb shows that by attempting to reframe Mauss as a source for a radical anthropological theory, Graeber’s work fails to account for the complexities of global capitalism. However, I would suggest that Kalb also needs to recognize more explicitly the power of cultural hegemony and the continuing importance of Graeber’s work in generating a counter-hegemonic vision within a prefigurative community context.

Value and worthlessness

I have only scratched the surface of the multiple challenging and exciting theoretical contributions and original formulations represented by this book. Overall, Kalb addresses culture through his rethinking of value within capitalism and the links he makes between his concepts of value and worthlessness. Through his insightful analyses of his informants’ experiences, he delineates a nuanced and convincing interpretation of the interplay of culture and political economy in their views of the world. There is no question this book is an absolute requirement for understanding the world today – and it shows brilliantly what anthropology combined with political economy and a comprehensive grasp of the global, the state and the local can provide for us all.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published on popular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in the United States, Europe, and Southern Africa.

References

Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don, and Massimiliano Mollona, eds. 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Susser, Ida. 2009. AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Susser, Ida. 2026. The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. Taking to the Streets of Paris in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.

Susser, Ida. [1982] 2012. Norman Street. Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighbourhood. Oxford University Press.

Cite as: Susser, I. 2026. “The Value of a Left Culture in Combating Worthlessness” Focaalblog, April 23.

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Sharryn Kasmir: Marxian Intimacy

Image 1: (from left to right) Don Kalb, Marion Berghahn, Ida Susser, Sharryn Kasmir and Jaume Franquesa at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

Don Kalb first sent me Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism in manuscript form. I had read most of the chapters in their original publications and welcomed the chance to revisit familiar arguments and scenes. What I did not anticipate was the emotional force of the collection, particularly chapters two through four. I was struck by the intimacy of the life story of Polish worker-activist Krysztof Zadrozny, who suffered the defeat of his and his Solidarnosc comrades’ aspirations for shopfloor democracy in their white goods factory. I was also affected by the refrain of Maria van de Velde’s self-description— “I have always been dumb”—which poignantly punctuates her account of exploitation and abuse in industrial Eindhoven, Netherlands in the mid twentieth century. Don uses the evocative phrase “close to the skin” to describe his close accounts of people rendered “worthless” through relations of capital accumulation (Kalb 2025, p. 127) but I think something more significant is at stake in the kind of empathy on display. A more capacious concept may be in order, both to identify a consequential feature of his writing and to make a broader claim for Marxist anthropology. I suggest the notion of “Marxian intimacy” to name this intellectual terrain.

To advance the concept, I begin with an excerpt from Zadrozny’s conversation with Don and his colleagues in 1998. Zadrozny reflected on the closing of political horizons during Poland’s post-socialist transition and remembered,

People were willing. There was zest. We could have been building a new society. And I think that this is what the Poles expected to happen. […] There was this rebuilding atmosphere and people had the will to switch to another system and to other habits too. But I guess it didn’t work out too well. Wild capitalism emerged […] it was not the human relations that we craved (Kalb 2025, p. 90)

His sorrow is neither nostalgic nor self-pitying; it is a reckoning with the forces that cut off political possibility. Zadrozny understands the historical conditions under which the project of building a post-socialist society slipped beyond the reach of Polish workers, and worth was stripped from their labor, their communities, and their democratic aspirations. He remembers with painful acuity how worthlessness was produced through the violent reordering of value under emergent market relations. With “Marxian intimacy,” I seek to characterize a text that inhabits the emotional currents of a life lived amidst capitalist crises and that points to the causes of the upheavals. It lays bare the “hidden histories of devaluation, and the hidden injuries of dispossession” (Kalb 2025, p. 65) as deeply felt individual and common experiences. Beyond humanitarian feeling, or the empathy of ethnographic encounter with which our discipline of anthropology is replete, this form of intimacy gives us to know how a life course emerges through layered relations of value and class. Don recounts Zadrozny’s experience not to render legible the moral world of an illiberal cultural “other”—that would be merely an extension of the liberal anthropological cannon and its emic perspective—but as part of his comparative project whose purpose is to explain the rise of the populist right in Poland and elsewhere.

Don conducted his dissertation research in the manufacturing city of Eindhoven, under the shadow of the Philips conglomerate. There, Philips worker Maria van de Velde declared to him, “This is my own history, but it is worthless!” Her exclamation arose from the combination of gendered kinship relations, labor regimes, corporate paternalism, and the arc of patriarchal capitalism speaking through an individual biography. Read alongside the story of the Polish worker-activist, these become diagnostic accounts of worthlessness as a historically produced relation, shaped by deindustrialization, dispossession, financialization, and segmentation of labor markets. Attending to these biographies requires the methodological ambition to identify the mechanisms through which lives are devalued and to articulate those “hidden histories” (Kalb 2025, p. xii).

Don takes the phrase “articulating hidden histories” from the title of an edited volume on the intellectual legacy of anthropologist Eric Wolf (Schneider and Rapp 1995). He shares Wolf’s imperative for anthropology to become a discipline whose meta project is to grasp the totality of capitalist social relations, to apprehend capitalism as a more than 500-year, globe-spanning system within which its objects of study—i.e. cultures—are produced in fields of power. As a child among textile workers in central Europe in the 1930s, Wolf witnessed firsthand how capitalist crisis upended everyday life (Wolf 1982, p. 402.) That experience “formed the central question of his anthropology: how to account for the emergence and persistence of a system whose dynamically unfolding relations can catapult […] everyday life into an abyss of uncertainty as if by an act of nature like an earthquake” (Schneider 1995, p. 16; see Kasmir forthcoming.) Don’s informants lived through similar world-shaking events.

Wolf also sought to explain the rise of extreme ideologies, including National Socialism in Germany, and the intersections of power and the differentiation and deployment of social labor that breathed life into them (Wolf 1999.) Don’s orientation is likewise toward the political “other” rather than anthropology’s well-trod cultural “other” (Kalb 2025, p. xii.) Illiberal mobilizations and right-wing populism, he argues, take shape among populations who are undergoing devaluation, both in their material lives and in discursive fields that mark them as unworthy. His ethnographic sights are set on the dialectic between everyday life and global political economy and between meaning-making and the see-saw of capital expansion and abandonment. Marxian intimacy reconstructs those intersections, exposing their effects, including the resentment and racism that are “part of a cauldron of vindictive feelings about hierarchy, value, and worthlessness, […] amid austerity and a drive for national competitiveness” (Kalb 2025, p. 165). For Zadrozny, a decisive moment was the betrayal of Solidarnosc worker-activists by technocratic elites and the installation of a neoliberal value regime that thwarted the “human relations that we craved,” yet a longer trajectory of dispossession, rather than any single event, had set the course.

Maria van de Velde’s devaluation was produced by exploitation at work and mistreatment within her family. Don recounts her daily routine in detail to draw us close to the drudgery it imposed,

She got up at 5.30 in the morning. Set the table for everyone. Took a bus at 6.30. Started work at 7.30. Worked well above the norm and arrived home again at 5.30 p.m. Tidied up the house, which was often a mess, and started peeling potatoes for dinner. She cleaned up the dishes afterward and went to bed totally exhausted (Kalb 2025, p. 101)

Maria repeatedly reaches for an explanation for her misery. And she turns from the knowable causes of her mistreatment at the hands of her employers and those of her sister, mother and father, and she offers instead that she was “dumb.” This pivot is abrupt, and it interrupts her search for answers:

But I have always been really dumb[…] They used to say I was just dumb. […] My father was often drunk and aggressive. Nellie, my second-oldest sister, was in fact running the household. […] I had to do everything (Kalb 2025, p. 101)

It was work, work, and work again. Maybe it is true that I have always been dumb, like they used to say (Kalb 2025, p. 103)

She lists the record of neglect and mistreatment and then wipes it away with self-deprecation, “I have always been dumb.” Reconstructing the social relations that produced her suffering therefore requires concerted attention. Don parses her individual biography and the structural causes that shape it. “Maria’s subjection was more multiple and her relationships with her parents more difficult than was probably the case with most other working-class girls. It made her feel she was ‘dumb.’” (Kalb 2025, p. 105)

In a dense narration of common events and circumstances of proletarian life in the region, Maria’s story is deeply moving above all for the intense tension it evokes between hostility and intimacy, fear and respect, trust and distrust, which all social relations seem to have been imbued with (Kalb 2025, p. 103)

Maria’s story is deeply moving because it conveys the experience of female proletarian life in the region, formed by class and gender, and because it is embedded in the structural pain that accompanies those collective conditions.

Intimacy is not a word we often hear associated with Marxist theory, yet the ethnographic chapters in this volume show that a deep emotional register may be one of its unremarked strengths. Don writes against culturalist empathy because it emphasizes morals and emic perspectives, while failing to explain the dynamics of value and devaluation. We feel profoundly for Maria and Zadrozny. The urgency that confronts us as we read their life stories goes beyond personal compassion to give rise to the imperative to remake the conditions that determine value and worth.

Sharryn Kasmir is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University. She has done fieldwork in the Basque region of Spain and in the southern United States. Her research and writing focuses on capitalism and working class lives and politics.

References

Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kasmir, Sharryn. Forthcoming 2026. “The New Laborers: Revisiting the Last Chapter of Europe and the People Without History Fifty Years Hence” In Don Kalb and Luisa Steur, Eds. In the Tracks of Marxist Anthropology: Fifty years of Eric Wolf’s ”Europe and the People Without History”. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Schneider, Jane. 1995. “Introduction: The Analytical Strategies of Eric Wolf”, In Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, Eds. Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric Wolf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3-31.

Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, Eds. 1995. Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric Wolf. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Eric, 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Kasmir, S. 2026. “Marxian Intimacy” Focaalblog, April 22.

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Jaume Franquesa: For an anthropology of capitalism

Image 1: (from left to right) Don Kalb, Marion Berghahn, Ida Susser and Sharryn Kasmir at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by Stefan Voicu

Having the opportunity to say a few words about the work of an esteemed colleague and an intellectual reference like Don Kalb is a rare privilege. Value and worthlessness: The rise of the populist right and other disruptions in the anthropology of capitalism is a fantastic book, worthy of discussion and celebration. It compiles some of the greatest hits that this public intellectual committed to his time has written in the last two decades or so (and the best of his work is just very, very good!) and ultimately stands as an energizing, unapologetic, and much-needed call and manifesto for an anthropology of capitalism.

I would like to say a bit more about what is meant by that (“an anthropology of capitalism”), but first I should describe the main contents of the book, which give a good sense of the author’s range of interests and the systematic character of his intellectual pursuits. The articles in the book could, in my mind, be divided into three groups. First, the ethnographic pieces, which masterfully disclose the interweaving of intimate and distant processes in the lives lived within the society of capital in Europe: from the uncovering of the hidden histories of flexible familism in the Eindhoven of the Phillips corporation to those underpinning the shift to the right of the Polish industrial proletariat, subsequently integrated in a comparative analysis of the “world-systemic production of worthlessness” in what is one my favorite chapters of the book; and from there to the ethnographic examination (with Oana Mateescu) of the webs of life of the urban youth at the center of the IT boom in Central and Eastern Europe, exploring the postsocialist dispossession, neoliberal policies and urban class inequality that loom behind that boom.

Next to those, we have a series of chapters that theorize the epochal transformations of capitalism in the twenty-first century. We can find in this group, inter alia, a salutary dissection and tearing apart of the concept of “global middle class”, a must-read discussion on the value theory of labor and an insightful piece where Kalb proposes the concept of double devaluations – which identifies the combination of economic and social-political-discursive devaluation of particular places, activities and peoples – to understand the rise of the populist right.

The third and final group is composed by a series of polemical, utterly enjoyable diatribes, where Kalb reminds us that the kind of materialist anthropology that this book and journals like Focaal cultivate and cherish occupies a subaltern position within the discipline and that it needs to be defended – and that one must do so with “no apologies”. These chapters are high-caliber critical engagements with and against generally well-chosen enemies, ranging from those with whom we need have no business – from the culture concept and its webs of meaning to the hyperpoliticization of identities, and from ontological theory to the anthropology of morality – to those we need to dialogue with because of their intellectual stature and a certain affinity of purpose (I especially recommend the pages where Kalb discusses the work of Marcel Mauss and David Graeber) in seeking anti-systemic alternatives to capitalism.

This array of greatest hits is framed by a preface and two masterful chapters where Kalb gives us all the necessary tools for the practice of a careful but uninhibited Marxist anthropology. In speaking about his seminal historical ethnographic work in the Netherlands, he describes the motivation to find the hidden history of Eindhoven thus: “That was precisely the attraction. Finding out things that people somehow know or sense, but cannot easily talk about for lack of a public vocabulary. That lack was in turn caused by the failure of an organic intelligentsia to notice local silences and give meaning to them” (Kalb 2025, p. xvii). Like them, the materialist anthropologists to whom this book is addressed all too often tend to lack a vocabulary. Kalb knows that, and this book goes a long way in furnishing it. “Class”, “labor” and “capital” pepper the text, as they should, but the list of terms goes deeper: “hidden histories”, “webs of life”, “structured contingency”, etc., as well as the many insightful concepts that come out of his sustained discussion of value, such as “double devaluations”, “worthlessness” and “dialectical value regimes”. Some will perhaps argue that many of these terms are not new. To that, I would answer that this may actually be the point. For this book shows to us that we already have the terms, that they come from a robust and deep tradition of Marxist and Marxist-inspired anthropology and broader social thought. All that is needed is to use that treasure chest imaginatively and to systematically deploy our terms to “reveal the hidden connections among different aspects of life” (Kalb 2025, p. 15) under capitalism to ultimately contribute to its transformation. Kalb calls it “an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present” (Kalb 2025, p. 3). Indeed.

In fact, this book’s contribution to this “anthropology of the present” is not limited to the furnishing of vocabulary, far from it. In the introduction, it offers a history of anthropology in the twenty-first century, connecting it to the key moments in the capitalist transformations of the last quarter century that should be compulsory reading in any course of anthropological theory. Among the many merits of this historical-theoretical tour de force, my favorite one is Kalb’s dispelling of the worn, nefarious myth that Marxist anthropologists are economic reductionists. As he argues, it’s rather the opposite. Take the example of “class”: yes, class is key to understand webs of life under capitalism, of course, but only on the condition that it is not reduced to a “singularly economic category” and is instead approached as a “complex social relationship”: “Class … refers to the relational … fields of force that put pressure on, and set limits to, the forms and practices by which we reproduce our lives” (Kalb 2025, p. 23). This approach to class is linked to an understanding of capitalism as a totality: “a set of social relations, a social form, and a type of society. This is a society that is organized, legally, institutionally, and relationally, to feed and sustain a capitalist economy that is fetishistically imagined as separate from it” (Kalb 2025, p. 17). Those that reduce capitalism to “an economy” contribute to that fetishization. To do an anthropology of the present, thus, one must necessarily be ready to do an anthropology of capitalism, for it is not possible to understand the common lives in which we are interested without having a grasp of the immanent tendencies of that totality that we call capitalism. In short, an anthropology of the (historical) present is an anthropology of capitalism, and vice versa.

Throughout this book, Don Kalb gives us vocabulary, theory and a clear sense of purpose together with precious examples of how to put them at the service of the analysis of the concrete. Yet, I would say that this book does something even more important than all that. Ida Susser’s dedication in the book’s back cover puts it eloquently: “Value and Worthelessness”, she writes, “synthesizes the original, courageous, and exhilarating work of Don Kalb. A vital Marxist anthropology for the present”. Indeed, vital and courageous are the right words. For I would say that vitalistic courage is the main gift that we get from this book. It gives us courage against the tendency to be risk-averse and the temptation to come up with a few fancy derivative terms that may garner us citations but do little else. It gives us courage to call ourselves Marxist anthropologists and to speak about and for the present. With no apologies. For this, we salute you, comrade Kalb.

Jaume Franquesa is Professor of Anthropology at University at Buffalo, SUNY. His research focuses on political economy, energy, and environmental transformations. He studies how renewable energy developments and infrastructure expansion reshape landscapes, livelihoods, and power relations, particularly in Southern Europe.

References

Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Cite as: Franquesa, J. 2026. “For an anthropology of capitalism” Focaalblog April 21.

Blog, Features, Notes on 'Value and Worthlessness'

Stefan Voicu: Huffing and Puffing with a Marxist Anthropologist

mage 1: Value and Worthlessness cover and review blurbs from Sian Lazar and Michael Burawoy
Image 1: Value and Worthlessness cover and review blurbs from Sian Lazar and Michael Burawoy

This text is not about the huffing and puffing you would expect. Although Don Kalb is Dutch, his new book, Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism is about a different kind of huffing and puffing. Kalb borrows this expression from E.P. Thompson to foreground the messy realities on which the hegemony of the capitalist law of value rests. Let me quote him at length on this:

Rather than being the assured outcome of successive market equilibria, this immanent historical tendency [the law of value] was always also the contingent outcome of ongoing class struggles at all levels in the system, and throughout all its various, evolving and interlocking institutional domains; and this against a turbulent background of recurrent economic crisis and violent ruptures (Kalb 2025, p. 54)

In Value and Worthlessness, Kalb has set out to do something that nobody has attempted to do since the 1970s. He develops a programmatic line of Marxist research in anthropology and outlines a conceptual toolbox that binds together political economy, social history, and ethnography. Kalb began his career in the late 1980s, during the last flickers of a once popular Marxist anthropology, but remained unapologetically Marxist, centering his work on an expanded notion of class to understand the globalization of capital at a time when the discipline was rapidly spiraling out of control into the language-games of culture. Now, bringing together his fieldwork with workers from the Philips factory in the company town of Eindhoven, with post-socialist Solidarność workers from the Polar factory in Wroclaw, and, accompanied by Oana Mateescu, with cognitive workers from Cluj’s booming IT industry, he develops an anthropological theory of capitalism and the methodological guidelines to pursue it.

Kalb does a lot of huffing and puffing himself in the book, describing social processes that unfold in and across capitalist times and spaces. I invited Jaume Franquesa, Sharryn Kasmir and Ida Susser, three leading US-based Marxist anthropologists, to write down the reflections on the book they shared during the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the 2025 AAA annual meeting. In the texts gathered in this feature, each of them celebrates the book while extending it in a distinct direction. Kasmir theorizes Kalb’s ethnographic method as “Marxian intimacy,” Susser presses him to take counter-hegemonic culture and processes of commoning more seriously, and Franquesa salutes the book as a courageous manifesto that equips Marxist anthropologists with vocabulary and purpose.

Image 2: (from left to right) Marion Berghahn, Don Kalb, Ida Susser and Sharryn Kasmir at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by author
Image 2: (from left to right) Marion Berghahn, Don Kalb, Ida Susser and Sharryn Kasmir at the launch of Value and Worthlessness at the AAA annual meeting on November 21, 2025. Photo by author

On top of their brilliant interventions, I want to outline three other important contributions this book makes.

First, Kalb proposes to view capitalism as an unevenly structured totality, a system that produces internal differences on which it feeds. Those readers of the book knowledgeable in post-Marxist theory, as well as the “less marxists” anthropologists Kalb takes aim at, will likely huff and puff at this idea. For half a century, Marxist theory has been constructed around the idea that capitalism is incomplete, that there is something external to it and the thrust of capitalism’s law of value is sucking in these outside spaces brimming with counter-hegemonic possibilities. Kalb instead starts from the common sense observation that contemporary capitalism has commodified everything. Directly or indirectly, the majority of the world’s population is now exploited by a minority that accumulates capital. Capital is insidious, as Kalb (2024) argues in the introduction to the edited volume that could be read as a companion to Value and Worthlessness, and the new frontiers of value are manufactured mainly through spectacular accumulations followed by violent processes of devaluation. There is no way out of capitalism except through it. Marx’s argument that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers never rang more true than today and between the lines of Kalb’s book one can read a repositioning of the redefined working class at the center of the struggle for a better world.

Second, Kalb wants to extricate Graeber’s radical anthropology from Mauss’ influence. He argues that because of this influence Graeber’s work on value is unable to account for class struggle and the multi-scalar structure of capitalism, misleading him into a somewhat voluntaristic political position. Kalb argues radical anthropologists should replace Mauss with Trotsky. According to Kalb, not only is the latter’s History of the Russian Revolution more ethnographic than anything Mauss wrote, but Trotsky, as opposed to the academically embedded ‘nepo baby’ Mauss, is probably a better model of politically engaged thinker. Moreover, neither Mauss in the 1920s-1930s, nor Graeber in the 2010s-2020s anticipated the rise of the fascist right. Both Trotsky and Kalb sounded the alarm on these worrisome developments early on (see Kalb 2009, Kalb and Halmai 2011, Trotsky 1971). Not coincidentally the structured unevenness defining Kalb’s capitalist totality is drawn from Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development and it is sharply opposed to Mauss’ expressive totality. However, it’s undeniable that Graeber was a model of a politically engaged anthropologist, highly influential, and quite the opposite of a ‘nepo baby’. The anarcho-socialist politics he promoted, coupled with the enduring, although questionable, image Trotsky carries as responsible for crushing Kronstadt, will probably require more huffing and puffing to replace Mauss and the kind of activist politics anthropologists are willing to engage in.

Third, in his engagement with Graeber and his theory of value, Kalb brings David Harvey’s political economy down into the muddled realities of “emplaced anthropological huffing and puffing” (Kalb 2025, p. 54) and proposes a new anthropological theory of capitalist value. Graeber’s value theory aimed to collapse the distinction between value, as in economic value, and values, as in social and cultural values. In his Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber 2001) he develops the theoretical framework for this project, but only in Debt (Graeber 2011) he fully explores the implications of the argument. Debt, Graeber shows, is not only an economic value, but permeates and frames all social relations. Graeber shows how one can find debt defining the relation between God and humans in the oldest religious text, as well as between friends in everyday life. Kalb rejects both the value/values distinction, as well as the reduction of both to one single value that Graeber advances. Instead, he proposes to look at value and values as being in a “dynamic relational totality” he calls “value regime” or “dialectical value regime”. Analysing the vernacular narratives of worth and worthlessness in The Netherlands and Poland, Kalb shows how workers’ values emerge alongside or in opposition to the accumulation imperatives of a specific industry, in a specific time and space, and always in conjunction with the abstract forces of capitalism’s law of value. Through this engagement with intimate experiences of capitalism, “Marxian intimacy” as Kasmir beautifully puts it, Kalb builds a theoretical foundation for the understanding of the rise of the populist Right in Europe and develops the concept of double devaluations, of both value and values, whose importance Franquesa highlights in his text.

Whether readers will huff and puff or nod in agreement while reading Kalb’s take on totality, Trotsky versus Mauss, regimes of value, or the critical junctions that led to the rise of the populist Right, matters less than the importance this book should have in any attempt to research contemporary capitalism. Like all great books, this is one critical anthropologists must reckon with, debate, criticize and use to advance our understanding of the current conjuncture.

The photos I took at the book launch got a bit damaged when I developed the film I shot them on. Coincidence? Maybe…They look a bit haunted, which kind of fits the 2025 AAA annual meeting theme of Ghosts. In these photos Don Kalb, Jaume Franquesa, Sharryn Kasmir, and Ida Susser seem to be those specters of marxism haunting a conference where sessions on Marxism and communism, conjured nowadays by right-wing leaders as if it was still the Cold War, were strangely missing.

Stefan Voicu is a social anthropologist researching transformations of property and class relations under financialized capitalism. He is one of the FocaalBlog editors.

References

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Kalb, Don. 2009. ‘Conversations with a Polish populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond).’ American Ethnologist 36(2), 207-223.

Kalb, Don. 2024. Insidious Capital. Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle. Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don. 2025. Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism. Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don and Gábor Halmai. Eds. 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Berghahn Books.

Trotsky, Leon. 1971. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Pathfinder Books.

Cite as: Voicu, S. 2026. “Huffing and Puffing with a Marxist Anthropologist” Focaalblog April 20. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/20/stefan-voicu-huffing-and-puffing-with-a-marxist-anthropologist/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Zoha Waseem: Creeping Digital Authoritarianism and (In)Security in Pakistan

Image 1: Deployment of Safe City infrastructure in Karachi, 2025. Photos by author

Over the past decade, Pakistan has been steadily expanding its digital security, policing, and surveillance architecture, which is sensorially and materially altering how security is experienced and enacted. The expansion has occurred through an assemblage of securitising narratives, non-transparent deployment of internationally procured smart policing technology used for urban surveillance, and state lawfare targeting digital behaviour through Pakistan’s primary cybercrime law, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA).

This online and offline blend indicates what I refer to as creeping digital authoritarianism in Pakistan. I approach digital authoritarianism as a transdisciplinary concept (explored in detail by Polyakova and Meserole 2019, Roberts and Oosterom 2024), as a strategy of governance that allows regimes, both democratic and authoritarian, to digitally and technologically control, manipulate, censor, surveil, and repress regime opponents and critics, domestic and abroad, for the consolidation of power. As a strategy, digital authoritarianism facilitates and enables the hyper-introduction of mass surveillance technologies, a pattern observed globally, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

In this text, I attempt to explore the impact of such creeping digital authoritarianism in Pakistan. I specifically focus on the recent developments of smart policing technology (known locally as ‘Safe City’ projects) and the simultaneous weaponisation of legal frameworks designed for policing and punishing online political activity (PECA). These technologies, although seemingly disconnected, have a collective chilling effect on citizen behaviour, which is leading to patterns of self-censorship and self-discipline. I approach the notion of “chilling effect” through Stevens et al. (2023) definition, as an explanation of how the fear, or possibility, of “being watched affects an individual’s conduct, impacting behaviours such as what they saw, what websites they visit, what materials they post, what comments they make, who they interact with, and if, or how, they engage in political opposition.” Although this effect is more evident in PECA-related cases, there is an observable impact on how people experience the world around them, notably in efforts to assemble, mobilise, and resist in the presence of surveillance technology deployed and used in ad hoc ways, with limited public engagement or transparency.

In a rapidly proliferating global era of digital authoritarianism, this human-technology relationship between digital policing (including the arbitrary use of technology alongside legal tools and frameworks) and political participation has wide-ranging consequences, not limited to the undermining of political freedoms. Everyday, routine behaviours—such as posting on digital messaging and social media platforms—are being gradually affected.

Infrastructures of Control

In 2016, the government of Pakistan passed its first and primary cyber and electronic crimes legislation, PECA. Over the past few years, this law has witnessed several amendments, and hundreds of journalists, activists, and critics have faced charges under PECA, under the allegation of “spreading false narratives against state institutions” or “anti-state activities”. Between January and July 2025, an additional 99 cases were reportedly filed under PECA for “anti-state activities”, according to a report drafted by the Ministry of Interior. Some of these 2025 cases were directed at journalists and private citizens accused of making defamatory statements against the Chief Minister of Punjab, Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of a former prime minister and the niece of current prime minister.

In early 2025, Pakistan hastily amended PECA, criminalising the dissemination of “fake and false information”, yet what constitutes “fake and false information” remains undefined. As such, this has significantly increased state control over online and digital activity and created avenues for potential abuse of discretion by law enforcement agents seeking to protect “national interest”. Then, in September 2025, PECA empowered Pakistani telecommunication providers to censor online content deemed to be against “the interest of the glory of Islam” (or blasphemous content) or against the “integrity, security or defence of Pakistan”. It further authorised a federal policing body, the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA), to investigate and arrest those accused of posting or publishing content or opinions reportedly against the interest of the state and key state institutions, chiefly the military and the judiciary.

Last year, Amnesty International published an extensive report detailing the “notable abuses” that internationally procured and sourced technologies are enabling in Pakistan, including mass surveillance and unlawful internet censorship. Part of this surveillance involves the monitoring of digital and social media platforms, weaponised through PECA.

The “Digital Dehshatgard”

Pakistan’s ascent towards digital authoritarianism has been carefully shaped by securitising narratives, with surveillance infrastructure and institutions gaining public legitimacy through the state-constructed risk of the so-called “digital dehshatgard (terrorist)”. The state’s introduction of the “digital terrorist” came in 2024, a label assigned to political opponents and activists reliant upon digital and social media platforms to generate critique against the armed forces and other state institutions. This narrative-construction helped set the stage for coordinated repression of opponents, and efforts towards “developing a strong national narrative” that would accompany media strategies, target disinformation, propaganda, and misinformation, while “positively influencing the younger generation” (The Express Tribune 2025).

Meanwhile, the procurement and development of digital surveillance infrastructure have been intricately connected to national growth and prosperity. Such technology is deemed vital for Pakistan’s “Digital Pakistan” vision, a strategy that seeks to create a digital ecosystem with information and communication technologies deployed across sectors. The introduction of surveillance technology across sectors is inevitable in today’s tech-dependent world, but risks fuelling digital authoritarianism. Pakistan’s attempts to control the internet, digital platforms, and information and communications systems, have escalated in the aftermath of a political fall-out between former prime minister Imran Khan’s political party (the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf) and the military, since 2023. These attempts gained traction in May 2025, following armed conflict with India, which saw widespread disinformation, including the use of AI-generated deepfakes, on both sides of the border.

Over time, securitised narrative-construction has carefully sought to legitimise the state’s encroachment into the digital realm, compromising the rights of social media users and undermining the security of activists, both online and offline.

The Legal Grind

In addition to the periodic censorship of social media platforms (including X and YouTube), banning the use of VPNs, or temporary shutdowns that throttle the internet, the state controls and monitors digital and online behaviour through PECA, which criminalizes free speech and uses broad language to equate online criticism with “cyber terrorism”. The law is frequently applied alongside the Anti-Terrorism Act, Pakistan’s primary counterterrorism legislation. This ensures that those who are charged under PECA and the ATA collectively can be tried in anti-terrorism courts, special courts that are created to avoid following due process and fair trial procedures. Such frameworks authorise state institutions such as the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the NCCIA, to survey and investigate online speech, censor content, and punish critical thought.

These institutions are further bolstered by their surveillance capacity, consisting of local social media cells that monitor online accounts and digital behaviours. This surveillance enables law enforcement agents to “build cases”, for which agencies may rely upon “crowd-sourced surveillance” (social media users who may be rewarded for registering police complaints against other users for posting “offensive” material online) or in-house complainants.

A recent infamous conviction of two lawyers, Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chatha in January 2026, reveals the practice of relying upon in-house complainants. In this case, two human rights lawyers, Imaan and Hadi, were charged under PECA for tweets condemning the practice of enforced disappearances in Pakistan. The case was filed by an officer of the NCCIA itself. This has a direct bearing on how targets of this law experience insecurity because of such digital surveillance and the legal grind that follows.

As journalist Farieha Aziz (2025) writes, empowered by PECA, these agencies use technology for surveillance, monitoring, and subsequently punishing, subjecting their targets to “bail hearings, repeated court appearances, the stigma of being labelled ‘’anti-state’, and the constant threat of a lingering case—often without trial”. Through lengthy ordeals within and outside of the courtroom, state critics experience the violence of unregulated and unchecked technological and digital surveillance material.

The high-profile case and subsequent conviction of Imaan and Hadi—who have been sentenced for a total of 17 years in prison for their posts on X—shows how technology and law can work in tandem to realise digital authoritarianism in the absence of adequate safeguards and regulatory mechanisms. In other words, material technologies can be harnessed to filter and flag content that can later be criminalised under a state’s legal architecture. This combination of the material and the legal, if designed to prioritize regime interests over individual rights and liberties, paves the way for repression through hybrid online and offline monitoring.

“Leave Your Phone Outside”

The combination of PECA and various internet governance strategies has resulted in what activists on the ground call “process as punishment” (Aziz 2025). In the words of one activist who spoke to me in confidence, PECA (and accompanying laws) are usually applied by state agencies after a suspect (usually, an opponent or a critic) has been illegally detained by unknown agents of the state with their whereabouts not disclosed, typically based on social media content. The “disappearance” follows the formal registration of a police complaint, which may be dictated to the police “on the phone” by other agents of the state or by unknown complainants that may be patronised by state institutions. The registration of the complaint allows the suspect to be formally charged and for the investigation to begin. The whereabouts of the suspect are then disclosed, after the complaint has been registered. During this time, the suspect’s devices may be taken from them and unlocked through coercion. No warrants are obtained for such a search.

Reports of digital surveillance processes have become common over the past few years, resulting in journalists and activists critical of the state to self-censor and self-discipline. The most obvious example of this is the increasingly widespread use of the “disappearing messages” function on WhatsApp, a practice notably adopted by journalists, activists, and lawyers, to limit the information and communication that can be used by authorities as evidence to incriminate “suspects” under PECA, should their devices be searched, as they frequently are once an individual is taken into custody.

Even beyond users likely to be criminalized under PECA, civilians have told me in private conversations that they are less likely to forward messages received through WhatsApp since the law was introduced. Lawyer Rida Hosain (2025) has similarly explained that “Even clicking ‘repost’ on content that the state finds objectionable can subject an individual to criminal persecution.”

Beyond these platforms and messaging apps, insecurity is also felt by critics in their routine usage of electronic devices, such as their phones. It is common knowledge that after reports of state surveillance through the Lawful Intercept Management System (Amnesty International 2025), state critics and opponents are increasingly wary of their digital messaging platforms coming under state scrutiny. Not only are dissidents applying the “disappearing messages” function to their messaging platforms, but extra efforts are also made to physically distance themselves from such gadgets during meetings and conversations considered to be of “sensitive” nature.

During my fieldwork in Pakistan, respondents told me that it was common practice in some official spaces for civilians to leave their phones outside of meeting rooms or be requested to do so. In at least one interview with a politician, the gentleman himself tucked his phones deep inside his sofa cushions to potentially avoid our conversation being audio-recorded through his devices, demonstrating the chilling effect of creeping digital authoritarianism.

Other respondents have similarly revealed switching their WhatsApp over to international numbers, when they are able to, as correspondence from local numbers may be easy to track by the state through the telecommunications authority.

Eyes on the Road

While PECA serves to criminalise dissent online and through information and communication technologies, the Peaceful Assembly and Public Order (PAPO) Act has criminalised protest and peaceful assembly in the capital city of Islamabad. Upon being hastily passed in September 2024, PAPO has been used to charge political opponents and supporters of the PTI (Imran Khan’s party). Enabling such legal repression of urban resistance and the right to protest are expansive and expensive technological projects, known as “Safe City” projects.

Safe City projects are essentially digital surveillance and security infrastructure that seek to enhance policing and law enforcement in Pakistan through technological advancements, and the collection of vast quantities of data (Hong 2022). Pakistani authorities refer to implementation of “safe city” infrastructure as necessary for “effectively combating terrorism,” in response to an “emergent situation”. In other words, technological advancements are justified as a response to a range of “internal threats”, from domestic terrorism to civil unrest and political protest, depending upon how governments choose to label anti-state agitation. In this way, technology and politics are co-produced in the field of security governance.

Even though the procurement and deployment of such technology imply urgency, risk, and threat to the nation, governments overseeing these projects have been largely secretive and guarded about details and documentation about this infrastructure. However, it is generally understood that the procurement of such smart policing technology has included material equipped with artificial intelligence, webcams, bodycams, facial recognition technology, voice recognition technology, and more.

By framing the procurement of such technology as relevant for countering terrorism and “emergent situations”, securitising narratives are used to justify lucrative and expensive architecture, avoiding debates around the global supply chains and partnerships that enable this process and aid digital authoritarianism. This way, any debate on harms that may be associated with or produced by this new surveillance technology, is avoided, as technological advancement, including the incorporation of AI in policing and surveillance, becomes integral to national stability and progress.

What is also avoided is a critical consideration of how smart policing technology may be deployed through colonial frames, tropes, and logics, that are ingrained into postcolonial policing and pacification programmes. As is already known, population control and monitoring were crucial for imperial interests and the protection of the colonial regime in British India (before independence in 1947). The Safe City infrastructure in Pakistan is similarly seen as critical for population control.

In an interview with this author, an official overseeing one such project boasted that Safe City officers were “custodians of people’s data”, an alarming admission for a country still lacks data protection laws and allows internationally-procured technology to collect vast amounts of data on civilians, hoping to use this data as “inputs for safe city solutions” (Hong 2022).

While there exists a draft of a Personal Data Protection Bill since 2023, it has yet to be passed, which means there are no legal safeguards in place to determine how personal data collected through safe city technology will be stored, for how long, under what conditions, and to whom it will be accessible. Similarly, little protection is available to “suspects” in terms of how their data is extracted by law enforcement authorities, should they be charged under the PECA law.

Thus, digital control practices and the lack of legal safeguards have a chilling effect, with observable behavioural changes, especially in the work of journalists, lawyers, activists, and dissidents.

For example, public order policing, protests, and collective mobilization have been controlled and punished using both PECA as well as surveillance footage collected through Safe City cameras. During protests led by opponents critical of the military establishment’s removal of the former prime minister Imran Khan in May 2023, for instance, Safe City surveillance cameras were used by the police to identify protestors and political leaders.

As interviewees informed me after these protests, the military – a key player in Pakistan’s politics and law enforcement–had direct access to such surveillance data, raising concerns about the political weaponisation of such expansive technology. As per the police’s own admission, most of the arrests that were carried out in the aftermath of these protests were of individuals identified through CCTV cameras of the Safe City Authority in Punjab, aided by geotagging.

These arrests—which have included high profile political figures (including women and the former prime minister, Khan)—have deterred large-scale political demonstrations over the past two years, showing the impact of technologically enabled surveillance practices on political opposition, a chilling effect.

Separately, however, the use of technology for repression is also condemned by certain law enforcement officials. In the aftermath of the arrests of PTI workers and activists, when the police were asked by their military counterparts to “pick up” civilians identified through geo-tagging and Safe City cameras, in private conversations some police officials expressed feeling “uneasy” by the demands being placed on them.

It is thus worth considering what pressures such techno-authoritarianism places upon state agents themselves, who may not always be united in their perceptions or their discretion.

Buy First, Justify Later?

Pakistan is becoming a prominent consumer in the global marketplace of surveillance and censorship technology, but details of how this technology is procured, delivered, and deployed emerge only gradually, if at all. The logic is simple: “if it is available and can be bought, it should be bought.” Such technological advancement is presented as essential for Pakistan’s growth, security, and associated with the nation’s progress, thus it has seemingly acquired substantial public legitimacy.

While the state’s use of digital surveillance technology for policing protests and public assemblies has created a deterrence in street mobilisation in Pakistan, the extent to which it impacts civilians sensorially is hard to quantify as this technology is still being developed and deployed. The onset of digital authoritarianism in the country, however, is undeniable. It is grounded in human and non-human assemblages of policing institutions, legal frameworks, tools and technologies, and security-centric narratives, all of which are having a chilling effect on citizen’s behaviour.

In the absence of adequate legal safeguards or independent oversight mechanisms, technological advancements risk digital infrastructural harm, not limited to the undermining of personal freedoms.

Zoha Waseem is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Warwick. She is interested in policing, law enforcement, digitalization, and urban (in)security with a focus on South Asia.

References

Ahmed, Z., Yilmaz, I., Akbarzadeh, S., and Bashirov, D. 2025. Contestations of Internet Governance and Digital Authoritarianism in Pakistan. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 38, 499-526.

Amnesty International. 2025. Shadows of Control: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa33/0206/2025/en/.

Aziz, F. 2026. Imaan-Hadi Conviction Marks the Death of Fair Trial in Pakistan. Dissent Today. Available at: https://dissenttoday.net/opinion/how-imaan-hadi-conviction-marks-the-death-of-fair-trial-in-pakistan.

Express Tribune, 2025. PM Leads high-level meeting to strengthen national narrative against terrorism. The Express Tribune. Available at: https://tribune.com.pk/story/2536922/pm-leads-high-level-meeting-to-strengthen-national-narrative-against-terrorism.

Hong, C. 2022. “Safe Cities” in Pakistan: Knowledge Infrastructures, Urban Planning, and the Security State. Antipode, 54(5), 1476-1496.

Hosain, R. 2026. Imaan-Hadi Arrest and a State at War with Dissent. Dawn. Available at: https://www.dawn.com/news/1968787/imaan-hadi-arrest-and-a-state-at-war-with-dissent.

Polyakova, A. and Meserole, C. 2019. Exporting digital authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese Models. Policy Brief, Democracy and Disorder Series, 1-22. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FP_20190827_digital_authoritarianism_polyakova_meserole.pdf.

Roberts, T. and Oosterom, M. 2024. Digital Authoritarianism: A Systematic Literature Review. Information Technology for Development, 4, 860-884.

Stevens, A., Fussey, P., Murray, D., Hove, K., and Saki, O. 2023. ‘I Started Seeing Shadows Everywhere’: The Diverse Chilling Effects of Surveillance in Zimbabwe. Big Data and Society. DOI: 10.1177/20539517231158631.

Cite as: Wasseem, Z. 2026. “Creeping Digital Authoritarianism and (In)Security in Pakistan” Focaalblog April 14. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/14/zoha-waseem-creeping-digital-authoritarianism-and-insecurity-in-pakistan/

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Katharina Lange: Uses of the Past by Representatives of Syria’s tribal groups (asha’ir) – the Wulda example

On December 8, 2025, a brief video video was disseminated on You Tube, X and other social media to mark the first anniversary of the overthrow of the Asad regime. For just over three minutes, it showed a speech delivered by an older man wearing a black headband (‘agal) with a red-checkered headcloth and a long robe (gallabiya) with a suit jacket. Identified as Sheikh Hamed al-Faraj al-Salama in the video’s title, the speaker is framed by two large flags of the Syrian revolution and the new Syria, green-white-black with three red stars in the white field. They were held up by a silent and unmoving group of sixteen young men, some dressed in camouflage, others in black. In front, to Sheikh Hamed’s right hand (or more precisely, his right knee), we see two little boys in civilian clothing.

Image 1: A still from a video uploaded on Youtube, and X (among other platforms) on December 8, 2025 (still by the author).

The speaker begins his speech by marking the occasion that prompts the publication of the video:

“Today we celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the defunct Ba’athist regime in Syria. We congratulate our people and everyone on this occasion, from […] the guesthouse (madafa) of the Wulda – the very guest house [he gestures to the house behind the group] where my father and my younger brother were killed by shelling from the Tabqa airport artillery […] we have stood with the Revolution since its beginning […] we fought in all the battles against the defunct [Baathist] regime […] We are patriots. My grandfather was exiled to Kamaran Island for three years for the sake of this people’s livelihood, and we are ready to make every sacrifice for our people.”

These first seconds of the video thus allow for a political as well as social positioning – the speaker politically aligns not only himself, but a “we” that includes “al-Wulda”, one of Syria’s tribal groups (asha’ir / Sing. ashira), with the victorious Syrian revolution. Terms such as “madafat al-Wulda” i.e. the guesthouse or reception hall of the Wulda, and the clothes worn by Sheikh Hamed, point to this tribal identity, while the educated accent in which the speech is delivered, as well as the dark suit jacket worn over the gallabiya, add a layer of Syrian urbanity.

This entry interrogates how the past has been referenced to underline present-day political claims among some of Syria’s tribal communities (asha’ir or qaba’il) in the Euphrates valley upstream of Raqqa. As an example, I focus on the Wulda ashira, in which I have been interested for a long time. This post is based on fieldwork I conducted in Syria between 2001 and 2011, and a short visit in May 2025.

The Wulda are one of numerous tribal or descent-based social groups which have long served as a fundamental structuring factor for social belonging in Syria’s eastern and southern parts. People who identify as belonging to one of these tribal groups are tied into long genealogies through the male line (although, as I have argued elsewhere, female perspectives are an essential if invisibilized component of this history). Reflecting segmentary models of social order, the Wulda specifically are made up of a number of smaller descent groups (confusingly, also referred to as asha’ir) among them the Nasser (from whom Sheikh Hamed himself has descended), the Ghanim, the Bu M’sarra, the Turn, ‘Ili, etc. Each of them, again, consists of distinct clans and families. In turn, the larger unit of the Wulda itself (like neighbouring groups such as the Afadla or the Sabkha) forms part of the Bu Sha’ban who in turn trace descent from the Zubaid and eventually, the Qahtanite Arabs whose roots lie in Yemen.

The ability to trace one’s genealogy to these ancient roots is particularly important given the collective classification of the Wulda (and other tribes) as “shawaya”, a classificatory term that has historically been distinct both from “sedentaries” (hadar) and also from the Bedouin who can claim Arab authenticity, strong genealogies, and nobility. The term itself is most often explained as a derivative of “shat”, sheep, indicating that “shawaya” were originally herders of small livestock. The term has also been used pejoratively, as an insult to designate the tribal inhabitants of Syria’s Eastern regions who are sometimes feared, but also looked down upon as backward, less civilized, wild and potentially violent.

For a critical intellectual readership, talk of tribes, asha’ir or qaba’il, and descent-based models of social belonging may seem outdated – or even, particularly among (some) anthropologists, suspicious of a dangerously exoticising and Orientalising view of at least part of the Syrian population. Yet for those who identify as a descendant of this milieu, genealogies and narratives about particular groups and ancestors are often a source of fierce pride. Moreover, in times where state structures are weak or even absent, the social networks created by tribal belonging and genealogy serve as a real and vital resource for social solidarity and mutual support.

Genealogies, anecdotes and icons of the tribal past, are a matter of great interest and debate in this region, as well as Syria’s tribal milieu more generally. Thus, to a local audience, Sheikh Hamed’s videotaped reference to his grandfather and his enforced exile immediately evoked a familiar discourse. This reference draws from a well-known narrative that has been told and retold to cement the status of the Wulda as a “patriotic” (watani) tribe. Its roots go back to the colonial era in Syria, the period of the French mandate (1920-1946).

Image 2 and 3: Older photos show Sheikh Muhammad al-Faraj (in 1972, right; in 1981, left) who was an important representative of the Wulda tribe during the French mandate era and Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan. His portrait has become an iconic image of tribal masculinity circulating on social media (images provided by the author).

Sheikh Hamed’s grandfather, Muhammad al-Faraj al-Salama (d. 1972) was one of the two paramount sheikhs representing the Wulda tribe during this era, alongside his equally famous cousin, Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan (d. 1981), whose portrait, featuring a memorable, pointed mustache, has become popular as an iconic image of tribal masculinity on social media, proudly referred to especially by people identifying with the Wulda. The “exile” which is mentioned in the video refers to an event from the 1940s. In July 1941, the administration of Syria had been taken over by the British and the Free French. Before the background of the Second World War, they imposed strict regulations on Syrian cultivators regarding the production and marketing of wheat, which was considered a strategic resource. In 1943, Sheikh Muhammad, who was one of the regions large landowners, was found guilty of “grain hoarding” – i.e., hiding part of the wheat harvest from the authorities. Together with other notables, among them the Shammar sheikh, Daham al-Hadi, he was sent into exile on Qamaran Island in the Red Sea, from where he returned in 1945.

This event has retrospectively been celebrated by members of the Wulda tribe as an example of anti-colonial resistance by the Sheikh and, by extension, the Wulda, underlining their self-ascribed credentials as a “patriotic” tribe. Besides conflicts and battles involving other members of the Wulda, notably the other famous Wulda sheikh of the mandate era, Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan, Sheikh Muhammad’s exile was one of the moments of Wulda history that was mentioned repeatedly during my fieldwork.

During the 2000s, a number of books authored by writers who for the most part originated from Syria’s tribal milieu themselves amplified such historical perspectives, which had hitherto been transmitted mainly orally. While the books had limited circulation (editions were typically printed by local publishing houses with 1000 or 2000 copies), after 2011, these (and other) iconic references to particularist, tribal histories were made more widely accessible through social media, which during the revolution became a forum for debates, controversies, and political (self)positionings hitherto unheard of for Syria. Beyond textual and discursive sources, images serve as references to Arab tribal values. Among them, visual indications of generosity and hospitality (videos of receptions in tribal guest houses, images of coffee pots, large metal trays or rows of big cooking pots come to mind).

The video from December 2025, cited at the beginning of this text, is an example of such a political self-positioning. In his statement, Sheikh Hamed makes more or less explicit reference to his controversial position as a vocal supporter of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and its Syrian Democratic Forces. To counter accusations of “treason”, Sheikh Hamed gestures to descent and tribal history, emphasizing that his understanding of patriotism encompasses the wellbeing of all components of Syrian society (in other words: Kurds as well as Arabs).

The position of the Wulda with regard to Arab-Kurdish politics in the Syrian Jazira (the land between Euphrates and Tigris; i.e., for Syria, the territory east of the Euphrates) has a long and complex history that is directly related to their geography. Historically, for the past two hundred years at least the Wulda have settled on both banks of the Euphrates river upstream of Tabqa. Until the mid-twentieth century, most households derived their income from a combination of seasonally mobile raising of small livestock (mostly sheep), as well as seasonal farming near the river. This gradually was replaced by a sedentary lifestyle and year-round agriculture. The construction of the Euphrates Dam at Ṭabqa, officially inaugurated in 1973, and the ensuing flooding of this part of the Euphrates valley marked a decisive rupture. The emerging reservoir submerged up to three hundred villages, displacing an estimated number of at least 60 000 to 70 000 individuals. A significant part of these so-called “submerged Arabs” (“Arab al-Ghamr” or “Maghmurin”), the majority of whom identified with different branches of the Wulda, were resettled in the Syrian Jazira on lands that had previously been farmed by ethnic Kurds. As Arabization measure and “Syria’s greatest social engineering project” of the Baathist era, a chain of thirty-nine new villages now formed the so-called “Arab belt”.

While the Arab belt villages have been governed by the Kurdish-led AANES since 2012, most Wulda villages on the Euphrates between 2013 and 2017 were ruled by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as part of its “Caliphate” centered in Raqqa. Since its demise, the area around Raqqa and the Jazira more generally became part of the AANES governed territories – a situation that is changing dramatically just as this blog post is being written.

For the Autonomous Administration, the co-optation of the Arab tribes of the Jazira was an important political goal; and not least, more than half of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were estimated to be Arab tribal fighters. Among other measures, tribal representatives were included in local councils. In 2017 Sheikh Mahmoud Shawakh al-Bursan of the Wulda, distant cousin of Sheikh Hamed and son of above-mentioned anti-colonial hero, Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan, was appointed to co-chair (together with a female Kurdish civil engineer, Leila Mustafa) the Raqqa Civilian Council (RCC).

Sheikh Mahmud’s and Sheikh Hamed’s public support for the AANES and the SDF can be seen as a pragmatic position, echoing earlier accommodations of Baathist structures. However, in light of the political polarization between Arab and Kurdish sides in the Syrian conflict, and wide-spread anti-Kurdish sentiment, Sheikh Hamed’s support for the AANES has also been explicitly criticized as “betrayal” of the Arab cause. Thus, Sheikh Hamed’s speech of December 2025 can also be understood as a way to counter this criticism by balancing support for the AANES with equal support for the new leaders of Syria.

While a more detailed account of the different positions taken by men who claim to speak in the name of the Wulda, or the Bu Sha’ban, cannot be given here, it is important to note that the above-mentioned Wulda notables’ declarations of support for AANES are countered by others who have lent support to political and paramilitary forces on other sides of the conflict in Syria. Thus, in a familiar historical pattern, representatives of the Wulda and related groups have politically aligned with different, even opposing sides. Tribal fighters who identify as members of “the Bu Shaaban” or other descent groups related to the Wulda have also inscribed themselves into formalised structures of the Syrian revolution, including the HTS.

Among the tribal notables who have vocally opposed the AANES is Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Bursan, another descendant of famous anti-colonial hero, Sheikh Shawakh. Using social media, Sheikh Abd al-Qadir has repeatedly called on the tribal fighters of the Euphrates valley to rise up in arms against the SDF – most recently in the January 2026 war between the two sides. To support his political agenda, he, too, draws on the anti-colonial history of the Wulda, and especially the role played by above-mentioned, famous Shawakh al-Bursan, who is remembered locally for his armed opposition to French mandate forces. In the case of Sheikh Abd al-Qadir, this past is invoked mainly through visual means. Besides clothes that are typically worn by tribesmen of a certain social status, Sheikh Abd al-Qadir cultivates a mustache that closely resembles that of Sheikh Shawakh, creating immediate visual associations between the two men.

Image 4: A still from a video uploaded to social media shows Sheikh Abd Al-Qadir wearing clothes typically worn by tribesmen of a certain status and sporting a moustache resembling that of Sheikh Shawakh al-Bursan brewing coffee (still by the author).

A final point that must be noted but cannot be explored here in detail is the gendered nature of this digital universe: the images and iconic references to tribal history described here project a distinctly male image of history as well as politics in the Syrian Jazira. From this vantage point, a particular image of tribal masculinity is an integral part of these references (strongly contrasting with otherwise gendered images of female activists and fighters, for instance – but not exclusively – characteristic of Kurdish representations).

The Syrian uprising against the Asad regime, which has transformed Syrian society in so many ways, has also impacted the role of Syria’s tribal groups. Men who position themselves as members of Syria’s tribal milieu legitimize and mobilize support for different, even opposed political positions in (post)revolutionary Syria by referencing well-known tropes and images of tribal history – expressing values such as “patriotism”, hospitality, masculinity, courage – that are well familiar from earlier decades. But the persistence of these symbols and tropes despite the considerable changes that this region has seen over the past fifteen years should not be taken as an indication that Arab tribal identity is unchanging or even timeless. Rather, the value attributed to certain symbols of social belonging based on descent and genealogy can be seen as a response to unstable and changeable political orders on the ground.

Katharina Lange is a senior research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin with fieldwork experience in Syria and Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, among others. Her current research focuses on oral and gendered histories, rural and agrarian lives, and the impact of war and violence on livelihoods in northern Syria.

Cite as: Lange, K. 2026. “Uses of the Past by Representatives of Syria’s tribal groups (asha’ir) – the Wulda example” Focaalblog, April 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/06/katharina-lange-uses-of-the-past-by-representatives-of-syrias-tribal-groups-ashair-the-wulda-example/

Blog

Iqra Anugrah and Rachma Lutfiny Putri: A Revolt that never was? On the aftermath of the 2025 Indonesian protests

Image 1: 2025 Indonesian student protests in Central Jakarta. Photo by David Wadie Fisher-Freberg

Political upheavals can feel like riding a roller coaster – exhilarating at the beginning, full of adrenaline rush, until it suddenly stops. This is what happened to the biggest protests against Prabowo administration and its erratic policies in late August-early September last year (Anugrah and Putri 2025). Mass arrests of protesters (including dissenting netizens), declining momentum of the protest demands, and deadly floods in Sumatra due to extractivist deforestation (Syaifullah and Adawiah 2026) virtually put major demonstration activities on halt. Compounding these structural hurdles was the lackluster move of liberal influencers and public figures whose naive political steps – such as overreliance on fanbase mobilization and engagement in an appeasement dialogue with a few members of parliament (MPs) – effectively contributed to the moderation of an otherwise brewing struggle.

As the basic reformist demands of the protests – cancellation of proposed raise of allowances for the MPS, end to police violence, and people’s welfare and labor rights – remain unmet, people continue to struggle for their livelihood. Repression made post-protest mobilization riskier, but certainly the mute compulsion of capital (Mau 2023) was another major factor that kept people away from the streets. When the brief possibility of political shake-ups subsided, it made sense to focus on one’s livelihood amid growing socio-economic precariousness (Subianto 2025).

What happened then in these “morning after” moments? During our field observations we noticed that: 1) post-August mobilization and activism exist, albeit in more moderate forms and intensity, 2) the prevalence of liberal activism and its vacuous impacts reveals its limits, and 3) the movement’s losing momentum suggests the need to be aware of the material conditions of activists and the broader public as a prerequisite for future mobilization.

Post-August activism: resilient, yet defensive

A major reason behind the decline of the movement was the mass arrests and criminalization of the protestors by the state. Comprehensive data on arrests across Indonesian cities was difficult to access, but in one key case six people, including three activists and two ordinary citizens, were arrested and charged for “inciting riots” by uploading images and narratives from the protests on their social media. In fact, they were simply expressing their opinions and frustration – in other words, their constitutional rights – concerning corrupt practices by political elites and state institutions. Initially, the six individuals were denied access to legal assistance or contact with their lawyers; some of them were even arrested violently by the police.

A joint report by three human rights/legal aid organizations showed that this repression was the biggest crackdown on youth activism since the downfall of the New Order dictatorship in 1998, with thousands arrested (later mostly released) and more than 700 arrestees unjustly brought to the court (KontraS, YLBHI, LBH 2026)

However, many others who were arrested by the police did not receive significant public attention. Several factors may have contributed to this lack of visibility, including difficulty in reporting the case, their lack of “shiny” credentials compared to more established activists, or the fact that they reside in smaller cities or regions distant from major cities.

Amid this criminalization of dissent, other activists, CSOs, legal aid lawyers, and scholar-activists have focused on online public campaigning, organizing small-scale protests demanding the release of detained activists and protestors and showing moral support through prison visits. Notably, legal aid lawyers have worked hard to provide legal assistance to release the detained activists. Legal scholar Eryanto Nugroho (2025) describes these initiatives as a sign of resilience by progressive civil society groups and activists in the face of state crackdown. While we agree with certain parts of his analysis, the idea of resilient activism should be contextualized and qualified.

Drawing insights from geographers Danny McKinnon and Kate Driscoll Derickson (2012), we conceptualize resilient activism as the potential and capacity of the collective to anticipate and recover from challenging situations. In the aftermath of protests, it is important not to glorify this resilience. Then, take a step back and investigate resourcefulness, that is, the possibilities of communal actions with an attention to uneven distribution of resources within the movement. To this, we would also add that Indonesian social movements and activists should (re)start the discussion on building collective self-defense under growing state surveillance and repression.

What else can we and other people do in this time of intensified repression and precarity? How could we act within (and hopefully beyond) our means? As the political momentum declined, we noticed that most of our activist comrades focused on other tasks, such as organizing public discussions and taking the role of trainers in popular education activities. Moreover, in response to the government’s denial of responsibility and lack of response to Sumatra’s socio-ecological catastrophe, environmental movements and activists have underlined the political nature of the disaster that is rooted in state-sponsored and corporate-led extractivism and campaigned for structural policy changes (see also Syaifullah and Adawiah 2026).

This situation shows that resilient activism is essentially a survival mechanism during times of limited options, an ongoing struggle amid the repression, precarity, and uncertainty. It is both a sign of potential longevity and desperation.

Liberal Activism: A Stumbling Block

The decline of the movement requires us to look at the political economy of activism during and after the protests. One analysis correctly points out differences in material conditions and cultural capital among protesting groups: while student groups and civil society organizations (CSOs) – not to mention unions and other grassroots movements – did the heavy lifting of “street fighting” and actual organizing, it was the influencers who reached the broader audience, gained oppositional credentials, and had the privilege to meet the MPs (Damayana 2025).

Some activist and organizer friends whom we talked with lamented this fact, especially when the national parliament preferred to engage with the influencers rather than labor unions and representatives.

This means those who worked the hardest and sacrificed the most during the protests – and arguably had the most effective street mobilizational power – were sidelined by the most media-savvy, celebrity-like figures. This also means the more radical challenge to the existing power structure was effectively eclipsed by much more moderate demands.

The curious rise of influencers as liberal commentariat is emblematic of development processes in peripheral capitalist countries such as Indonesia, where the neoliberalization of universities, research institutes, and the civil society sector has intensified class differentiation among cognitive workers (Anugrah 2025). In this context, liberal influencers, who hoarded – in other words, accumulated – knowledge and cultural capital became successful members of the professional managerial class (PMC) (Liu 2021) who labor in online content creation as “critical” commentators.

Amid fragmentation of social movements, cooptation of student activists by bourgeois political elites, low union density, and yet simultaneously rising political consciousness among the broader student population (Aminuddin and Ramadlan 2022), it is unsurprising that liberal influencers found a captive audience. In the marketplace of ideas and influence, they rule and win followers though they remain “fleeting,” divorced from concrete social forces and bases and lack any strategic materialist analysis, let alone political tactics.

A closer look at their profile and politics confirms such observation. For example, Malaka Project, a media platform of liberal influencers, is a business project with links to corporate sponsors. Other liberal influencers have their own vehicles such as consultancy firm Think Policy and English-based media channel What Is Up Indonesia (WIUI), two platforms with neoliberal economists and policy consultants among their board.

Politically, they zigzag between approaching the government when it was deemed as “reformist” particularly during the Joko Widodo (Jokowi) presidency and supporting anti-government protests when they were dissatisfied with it. As of now, their attention seems to have shifted to launching their publishing initiative at a Jakarta-based shopping mall, winning “40 under 40” award from the Indonesian branch of Fortune Magazine, and commenting on current affairs.

Of course, this can be seen as a public relations strategy to make activism palatable for the (petit)-bourgeois polite society, presumably from a place of good heart. But it is also reasonable to ask whether such strategies will a) broaden the pro-democratic coalition against hazardous government policies or b) force the elites to give some concessions to the public – the answers to which, in our view, are highly questionable.

To be fair, the Indonesian CSO sector is also donor-dependent and sometimes complicit in the moderation of movement agenda, such as in the context of anti-corruption advocacy during the Jokowi Presidency (Mudhoffir 2023). However, it is still deeply connected with grassroots social movements and bases and altogether they operate in the same social milieus. Unfortunately, this is not the case with liberal influencers.

In this context, the call for broad civil society unity should be qualified. Campaigners, including influencers, have a role in raising political awareness or even fundraising for disaster relief, but as we have argued previously (Anugrah and Putri 2025) the command for collective actions should remain in the hands of grassroots and working-class movements and actors for a meaningful change – redistributive concessions and restoration of basic democratic rights – to happen. Influencers are neither organic thinkers nor vanguard activists – it is social movements and the working people who should control them and not the other way around.

Image 2: 2025 Local farmers’ protest in front of West Java provincial parliament in Badung. Photo by Iqra Anugrah

Wither Political Momentum?

What remains of the August protests? Is it now the time to conduct a “post-mortem” analysis of the movements? Much of the massive protest activities had indeed ended and the public attention had shifted to other pressing issues, especially post-disaster recovery in Sumatra and Indonesia’s controversial participation in the Trumpist Board of Peace. However, this is not the end of it.

This current protest cycle might end, but this will not be the last one. Seen from a longer perspective, it is the last iteration of recent mass movements since the 2019 protests. Though organizers and the working people are currently on retreat, it is not far-fetched to speculate that another movement might erupt in the (near) future. Ongoing structural impoverishment of average Indonesians and erratic policies of the ruling class will keep triggering mass demonstrations.

Here we reiterate the need to be cognizant of the material basis of activism. Liberal activism has its own limits and, dare we say, cul-de-sac. We also have to admit that this tendency sadly is also embraced by the more progressive sections of civil society. Celebrity culture, which can be self-serving, remains practiced by chronically-online activists and self-styled progressive influencers. Another liberal tendency for unnecessary moderation can be seen in the decision of a senior cultural activist-turned-bureaucrat to take the helm of the directorship of Megawati Institute, a think-tank named after Megawati, the matriarch-for-life of the Indonesian Democratic Party and, as political scientist Jeffrey Winters (2013) puts it, a hidden oligarch. It is difficult to see how exactly such a decision will help the advancement of democratic class struggle.

Therefore, any conversation on “strategic alliance” between broad civil society elements should start from recognizing the fact that in the current context, most grassroots activists and mass bases are precarious in terms of their livelihood and socio-cultural/political capital. Further, there should be a serious discussion on curbing (petit-bourgeois) celebrity tendencies in the so-called “progressive” circles.

For now, major protest activities are indeed on decline, but other activist initiatives continue. This includes not only advocacy for the unjustly arrested, but also a whole range of activist works – movement meetings and gatherings, smaller-scale protests, public discussions on today’s pressing issues and progressive/radical literature, and popular education initiatives.

These activities have their own limitations. For example, a local farmers’ protest in front of the West Java provincial government and parliament that one of us (Iqra) observed on 9 December 2025 remained centered on local land rights issues. While this was clearly important, it missed the opportunity to link local issues with broader, more expansive national-level demands.

Nevertheless, this type of work helps social movements to keep going and build up their momentum. In one instance, we participated in a critical agrarian studies training as facilitators and found it to be an engaging forum connecting young activists and researchers across regions to reflect on their advocacy and research experience. Such initiatives can serve as seeds for further mobilization.

Recent policy blunders of the populist Prabowo administration and elite repression of popular activism might intensify the growth of such seeds. Hundreds of protesters representing student groups, social movements, and CSOs protested Indonesia’s participation in the Board of Peace and called for international solidarity for the Palestinians and against imperialism. The horrific acid attack against the young human rights advocate Andrie Yunus toward the end of Ramadhan (Hermawan and Hamid 2026) also prompted a number of national and international solidarity campaigns and protests for Yunus and democratic rights in Indonesia. At the very least, these realities convinced the public that they are right to be skeptical of the false promises of the state and the ruling class.

As we had witnessed directly, the longevity of protest movements depends on the hidden labor of ordinary citizens, precarious activists, and the most exploited and marginalized strata of society. They will, once again, launch and hopefully lead future struggles.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the Agrarian Resource Center (ARC) which hosted us during our recent fieldwork in Indonesia and our comrades at Forum Islam Progresif (FIP) for their insights.

Iqra Anugrah is a Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin. He holds affiliate positions at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden and the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES) in Jakarta. An interdisciplinary political theorist, his current project on multi-strand conservatism in Indonesia is funded by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.

Rachma Lutfiny Putri is a Wenner-Gren Wadsworth International Fellow and a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. She is also a Visiting Fellow at Populi Center. Her dissertation project examines the question of value in the waste recycle chain in Bandung, Indonesia.

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Cite as: Anugrah, I. and Lutfiny Putri, R. 2026. “A Revolt that never was? On the aftermath of the 2025 Indonesian protests” Focaalblog April 2. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/04/02/iqra-anugrah-and-rachma-lutfiny-putri-a-revolt-that-never-was-on-the-aftermath-of-the-2025-indonesian-protests/