As high summer wears itself out, the outdoor world is becoming more accessible. However, as of yet I've not been able to take full advantage of it, I'm still pretty much-desk focussed – reading, writing, and looking at paintings on the wall, about which I'll be writing an upcoming blogpost.
As for reading, I've been working my way through the oeuvre of the French academician, Jean-Christophe Ruffin. He writes both long, well-researched novels in a historical vein, and also novels that take contemporary geopolitical realities for their subject-matter. He also writes what Graham Greene would have called 'entertainments', a series of short novels on the (mis)adventures of a foreign-born, French, middle-aged, junior diplomat: Les énigmes d'Aurel le Consul. I owe the author a debt of gratitude. Aurel kept me going when I was recently confined to a hospital bed in Marseille for a fortnight.
I've also enjoyed reading Ruffin's more "serious" novels, especially Rouge Brésil, (Brazil Red) which recounts France's attempt to wheedle its way into a continent that the papacy had already divided between Spain and Portugal. It's the story of a doomed sixteenth-century colony on the coast of Brazil that would later be known as Rio de Janeiro. It was a good read, and as with all of Ruffin's books there are his political reflection to appreciate and geo-historical facts to be mulled over. 
I've just finished his book Le grand Coeur  based on the true story of Jacques Coeur, a fifteenth-century merchant, and treasurer and courtier of Charles VII of France. Ruffin grew up in the shadow of a palatial castle in the central French city of Bourges of which they were both natives. The palace, a folly, was Jacques Coeur's construction, and reveals the influence of voyages to "the Orient" and the great Italian trading cities. 
As Ruffin tells us in his postface, he feels enormously grateful to Jacques Coeur for having fuelled a childhood imaginary that helped him survive the years spent in the provincial town. That debt compelled the author to consecrate a book to his memory. The book is much more of a monument than it is straightforward ,biographical a novel. It is, as always with Ruffin, exquisitely written in a French that is both stylish and accessible. However, what emerges most strongly from the novel is the sense of confinement that all the court actors were bound by, as if France, and even the lands beyond it, were a prison from which it was impossible to escape. Coeur's fate is presaged from the outset, so the long, sometimes seemingly circular, story is really more about Jacques Coeur's search for inner liberation as he progresses towards his physical end. My sentiment is that Ruffin was too close to the hero of the story and thus, and this is a disagreeable thing to say, he doesn't see his own self-indulgence in penning what is an extremely long and winding narrative. However, if you are passionate about the fifteenth century, don't be put off, you'll find the book rewarding in many ways.
Another recent, and much shorter, piece of reading concerns the reality of teaching and writing about China in Europe; a subject close to my heart. Christelle Nguyen 
has written a very interesting and well-informed article about speaking truth to Chinese state power in Europe: "The Limits of Talking About China in Europe" (August 20, 2026). In classrooms and courtrooms, and on campuses across Europe, scholars are engaged in a quiet struggle to speak freely about a country whose impact can be felt everywhere. It's odd, but also somehow gratifying, to read in print the names of former students who are now among those standing up to bullying by the Chinese state.

When I was an undergraduate at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), I read a great deal, unfortunately, my teachers might have said, this activity along with student politics distracted me from the main focus of a degree in classical and modern Chinese which was to master the language. As any student of Chinese would tell you that endeavour entails hour upon hour of rote learning of Chinese characters, while the reading of set texts required one’s nose to be permanently inserted between the pages of a dictionary. I’d gone to university wanting to become more clever, and more knowledgeable, and yet in the first year, I felt like I was back in primary school learning the alphabet. In reaction, I did a good deal of extra-curricular reading. And when I read, I’d read voraciously, bulimically even. The past few days I’ve been trying to recall the books, aside from books about China, that I read.
I can’t at this stage put my reading into any chronological order, but I was very interested in politics and that drew me to a literature that was eclectic but intensely interesting, and often enjoyable. Although like most of my contemporaries I was interested in the politics of China – I'd often heard my grandfather in conversation with his friends talk of Mou Chak Tung (Mao Tse-tung 毛澤東) and Cheung Kai Shek (Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石). But, I was no Maoist. What attracted me to the study of China and Chinese was my family's story and the translations of "classical" poetry I'd read as a schoolboy. In fact, my immediate interest in politics stemmed especially from the Chilean refugee community I'd come to know between high school and university. They were refugees from Pinochet's Chile who arrived in the UK in 1974. I threw myself into trying to understand the politics of Chile and its fragmented left-wing landscape. I'd already done a lot of reading about Latin America – having done Spanish to a fairly high level (A and S level if those arcane UK qualifications say anything to you) – and had been reading all the major contemporary Latin American novelists and poets. I was passionate about Pablo Neruda well before I met my Chilean friends. Amongst the poets I read were also Nicolás Guillén and José María Heredia. Amongst the novelists, apart from García Márquez whose novels and short stories opened a whole new imaginary for me, I remember being struck by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his Tres tristes tigres (three sad tigers). It was a fictional wonder world, but to understand the context, you really needed to get a grip on the politics.

Latin American contemporary literature was a far cry from the contemporary scene in China at that time. When I started learning Chinese at university, the Cultural Revolution was still ongoing, the official literature little more than crude propaganda. It would be several years before we learnt there was an underground literary scene that was waiting to be "discovered". Fortunately, as I pursued my studies, poetry in particular, I was able to maintain the link to Spanish- and particularly French-language poetry through the 1930s Chinese poets who'd taken them as models to emulate in their construction of a new vernacular modern Chinese poetry. 

Meanwhile, I continued to read modern European fiction. I also have a vivid memory reading Sartre well into the night – I often stayed up reading until 4am. It was a winter's evening and I recall it vividly because it was snowing. Pig-headedly, I insisted on reading his trilogy L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) in the original, so it took some time. I wasn't convinced by the philosophy but the historical context fascinated me. I'd read L'Étranger/The Outsider when doing French at school, and continued to read Camus. I also read all of Beckett's plays in French - they were quite accessible. And, of course, because of the China connection, I read the fabulator André Malraux's La condition humaine/Man's Estate for what it was worth.

The only English-language novelist I read extensively while an undergraduate was George Orwell; an eclectic basket of English novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, Kingsley Amis, Laurie Lee, Aldous Huxley and others had been left behind in Liverpool. Orwell's 1984 spoke strongly to someone studying the language and culture of the totalitarian state that was China. And, of course, Homage to Catalonia for its account of the politics of the Spanish civil war. But, I also read everything of his I could find. And on the recommendation of a Malaysian fellow student – in fact he was an aspiring barrister at the Inns of Court – I read all five Penguin volumes of The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell.

In terms of political texts, even before university I'd read the Communist Manifesto and rudimentary introductions to Marxism, in particular David McClellan's Marx that had just been published by Fontana Press (1975). It would be years later before I discovered the real gems that were Henri Lefebvre's Le Marxisme, (1948) and Pour connaître la pensée de Marx (1948). SOAS had a very politicized student body. When I arrived in the autumn of 1975, I was struck by a bright red slogan scrawled over the wall of the student bar: Victory to the Viet Cong; Saigon had fallen at the end of April. Student politics were dominated on the one hand by the Communist Party of Great Britain and its Labour student allies, and on the other by the International Socialists, a Trotskyist party (later to become the Socialist Workers Party); I was attracted to Trotsky's writings and to the political figure in exile in Mexico, but not to the contemporary British manifestations of Trotskyism. Maoism was even more of a turn-off, and unlike in France and Germany, it failed to attract the younger generation in search of a radical alternative. And then, of course, Eurocommunism oblige there was Antonio Gramsci. I read his Prison Notebooks and was enthralled. At that time I hadn't yet realised his key place in the landscape of cultural studies, and even Raymond Williams I knew mainly for his work on drama, especially his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. The Liverpool Everyman theatre put on some magnificent productions of both playwrights in the early 1970s when Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy were part of the company. I recall a wonderfully ludic production of The Good Woman of Szechwan. When at university I bought Williams's George Orwell: a collection of critical essays and his Fontana Modern Masters Orwell; later Williams would turn against Orwell berating what he perceived as Orwell's rejection of Marxism and his chauvinism. Alongside Williams stood the historian E.P. Thompson whose The Making of the English Working Class awoke in me an understanding that there were alternative ways of perceiving and writing history. Similarly eye-opening was Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy who like Williams paved the way to cultural studies as a philosophy and a discipline. 

Midway through my undergraduate years, I specialised in "Chinese" poetry which comprised both pre-modern and modern poetry, and it was the modern poets' interest in Russian and Soviet poets that led me to Mayakovsky and Esenin. But the great revelation was nothing to do with the poetry course, rather it was my discovery of Victor Serge. Serge, a dissident Belgian-born Russian revolutionary unmasked in his writing the reality behind Stalin's Soviet Union. I read Serge's novel S'il est minuit dans le siècle/Midnight in the Century, and then anything else of his I could find. His novels helped me to understand what the lived reality of communism in China must be like. There was an extensive correspondence between Serge and Trotsky. And although there was much initial sympathy between them, they disagreed over the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) which Serge supported, as did Orwell, during the Spanish Civil War. Serge also contested the timeliness of the founding of the Fourth International, and insisted on a transparent reappraisal of the Kronstadt mutiny. These points of dissension eventually led to an acrimonious rupture between them. Serge like Trotsky ended his days in Mexico. Trotsky died with a Stalinist ice pick in his head, while Serge ostensibly died of a heart attack while hailing a taxi, although it later transpired that Soviet security ran a cell of liquidators within the cab-driving fraternity.

At the same time, I didn't neglect books about Chinese studies. I read whatever I could find. In my first year, I was even engrossed in everything written about Chinese legal history. Later, when I spent a summer semester in Taiwan, I took advantage of pirated editions of works on Chinese law literature and society sold by the celebrated Cave's bookstore and bought all the books I couldn't afford back home. Taiwan was not a party to international copyright conventions and the pirated editions were cheap. I bought Needham's Science and Civilisation in China and dozens of the standard translations of pre-modern poetry. However, modern works of literature were severely censored and modern 1920s-1940s works by writers who'd stayed on mainland China were banned by Chiang Ching-kuo who remained loyal to his recently deceased father, Chiang Kai-shek's strict anti-communist stance. My last day in Taiwan was also the day I received a rare treasure. I'd met and became friendly with a young man who declared his politics to be anti-imperialist. He made a living out of exporting basic stationary essentials such as pencils and pens. Our first encounter had been at an open-air hillside restaurant not far from the National Palace Museum. It was the first time I'd seen and eaten Black Chicken. I'd just gone through Taipei airport customs and was about to board the plane for Hong Kong when I was tapped on the shoulder by a security guard who handed me a large, heavy brown envelope and pointed back along the corridor to my acquaintance who was waving from behind the barrier. Opening the package on the plane, I found a copy of an early wood-block edition of the Jinpingmei 金瓶梅, a sixteenth-century fictional work celebrated in part known for its risqué content. And thus were Taiwan customs circumvented.

In the fourth and final year of my degree, I was studying modern poetry in earnest. Given the affection the Francophile and Hispanophile Chinese poets showed for modern French and Spanish poetry, I was able to indulge my own interest in French poetry by simply following up on theirs. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Mallarmé were all known and frequently translated by the early twentieth-century poets. García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, and Azorín were all translated from the Spanish into Chinese by the poet Dai Wangshu 戴望舒 about whose life and work I would later write my PhD thesis. However, as an undergraduate I was chiefly attracted to the poetry of Ai Qing 艾青. After the 1949 Communist victory, many established writers of the pre-1949 era chose to retreat into translation or the study of pre modern literature or even oracle bones - anything that was not immediately politically sensitive. Ai Qing  – the father of the now celebrated artist  Ai Weiwei 艾未未 – was one of the few poets to carry on plying his craft. Now, he simply chose to avoid sensitive subjects by writing uniquely about experiences inspired by his trips abroad. One such trip was to Latin America, during which he visited Pablo Neruda on Isla Negra where the Chilean poet was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He dedicated a long poem to Neruda describing his Isla Negra home. It was called "On a Chilean Promontory" 在智利的海岬上. I came across the poem in the magazine Renmin wenxue 人民文學 (People's Literature) in the SOAS library one day, it was one of the last poems Ai Qing published before being exiled for his political crimes. It was during my final year that Ai Qing after over a decade of exile, literally, in the desert that Ai Qing resurfaced. He'd been assumed dead. In fact, he'd been comparatively lucky, many of his contemporaries had fallen foul of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976); but Ai Qing had in large part been punished for standing up to Mao's anti-writer policies back in the 1940s and was banished well before the Cultural Revolution. It was a couple of years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when Ai Qing was finally "rehabilitated". His friend Neruda was no more. He had seemingly succumbed to cancer a few days after Allende was toppled by a CIA-backed coup d'état on 11 September 1973; sixty years later it would be found that Neruda had in fact been assassinated by poisoning. The poem was not part of my undergraduate modern poetry syllabus, which was not meant to extend beyond the Republican era (1912-1949); poems written in the 1950s somehow fell off the spectrum. I, nevertheless, translated the poem into English and then with my Chilean friend Hernán Rosenkranz into Spanish. We sent it off to a literary review called Araucaria but heard no more about it. China at that time was an ally of the USA with which it stood in the final phase of the Cold War against the Soviet bloc. In such a geopolitical context, it was unsurprising that a poem written by a Chinese communist poet would not be received gladly. But, for years I still thought the poem ought to be published, all the more so after Hernán himself had died. Finally, some 45 years after it was translated, with the intercession of Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco, the poem was finally published in the Mexican review Nexos; you can find it here: Ai Qing: Un poema para Neruda. For some twenty-five years, I'd taught the "Chilean" poems of Ai Qing – there were several – and thus in a sense this particular circle was closed – the extra-curricular had become curricular.

After my undergraduate degree I obtained a scholarship to study for two years at Peking University. But in order to get there there was one further Chilean link I had to use. I'd understood that UK students studying literature were automatically sent to the north-eastern university of Shenyang. Having heard reports from students who'd already studied there I had no desire to follow them, I wanted to be at the heart of things. I found out that in order to study at Peking University the only course open to me would be Political Economy - a Marxist discipline which masked the study of economics that was only just being reinstated in the university. I turned to Benny Pollack, a friend of Hernán Rosenkranz and a professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool. Benny and Hernán would later write together the definitive work Revolutionary Social Democracy: The Chilean Socialist Party (1986). I explained my predicament to Benny Pollack who very graciously wrote me a letter of recommendation setting out my competence in politics and economics. I then spent the summer before I left for China mugging up on Marxist economic theory so as to give some semblance of truth to the legend. Years later, after the fall of Pinochet's regime, Benny would be appointed Chilean ambassador to China.

My years in China were less about reading and more about lived experience: Listening and talking to Chinese people who'd lived through the 1950s to 1970s, travelling and recording what I saw through my camera lens; photography has long been a passion and it was put to constant use in China. But, the reading I'd done over the previous four years prove to be an indispensable asset for understanding the political and social system I encountered. It would also form the foundation of doctoral work back in London. But that is another story.

A few weeks ago, I promised to return to the work of André Gorz, and it was while re-reading the re-edition of Gorz's book L'immatériel, that I came across a reference to the work of Moshe Postone. Gorz was writing in 2004 by which time Postone had become quite an academic celebrity in the world of critical theory. I'd rubbed shoulders with Moshe while at the University of Chicago, and so Gorz's reference brought back some memories.
We'd met at faculty cocktail parties and get-togethers in Hyde Park, - almost everyone lived around the campus in this small academic enclave in the middle of South Side Chicago.  We had the same circle of colleagues/friends.  We also both had carrels – small offices where you could hide away – in the University of Chicago's Regenstein library a magnificent institution to which, along side the Seminary Co-op bookstore, I owe a huge part of my education. We had coffee a couple of times in the minuscule, subterranean, refreshment room in the basement of the library.
Moshe was a kind man and tolerated me, a junior academic, talking to him about my work, while I struggled to comprehend the labyrinthine complexities of his. Postone's magnum opus Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, (1993) was about to come out, while I was working on a chapter of my Troubadours book manuscript. The chapter dealt with contestatory rock music in 1980s China, in particular that of the musician Cui Jian, and I was looking at the phenomenon both in terms of cultural resistance and of hybridity in Homi Bhabha's sense. My time at Chicago (1990-1994) fell just after the Tiananmen débâcle and during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Radical academics - while not dyed in the wool Marxist-Leninists – were uncomfortable with the demise of "actually existing socialism", as the Soviet system was known. That I should apply the kind of critical approach to post-Mao China as they did to capitalist societies made me something of an oddity. But not so much with Postone. He did seem a little dubious about my take on the political impact and function of rock music in post-Mao China – he was after all close to Adorno's ideas and the German critic's views on the validity of studying popular music and had a nefarious effect on popular music studies for decades. Nevertheless, he was open to my critical approach to contemporary China since his reinterpretation of Marxist theory made it legitimate to critique "state capitalist" societies alongside post-war capitalist societies in the West, since "traditional Marxism struggle[d] to account for capitalism as it enters its Keynesian-Fordist phase and cannot adequately formulate a critique of the Soviet Union (since in both societies, the state has some form of control over the distribution of goods...)".* And, what went for the Soviet Union could naturally be mapped onto Marxist-Leninist China, especially after the return to power of Deng Xiaoping.
Postone, although already an oustanding intellectual force, had been mistreated by the university and survived on positions that were very much beneath his stature. While Chicago had a reputation for taking in and nurturing European Jewish liberal intellectuals, such empathy did not extend to the unorthodox Postone. Just after I left the university he was refused a tenured position in sociology. It was hardly surprising, this was the same university that had refused Homi Bhabha's appointment while pointing to his "rebarbative prose". Both decisions were challenged and both overturned. Postone was ultimately given a position in the History department. I found the University of Chicago an establishment that wanted people to crawl while jumping through hoops, if you didn't like crawling then you could walk away. Moshe did neither, stood his ground and was supported by his colleagues. I walked; I left in 1994 when I took up a position at Hong Kong University. Moshe was recognised for the great intellect he was in his later years as he bravely struggled with cancer. I'm glad to have known him.
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*Anke Devyver, "Freedom and Dialectics: On the Critical Theory of Moishe Postone and Theodor Adorno", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 21 (1), 2025, p. 52.
Moshe Postone,Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory,Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Moshe Postone, Temps, travail et domination sociale : Une réinterprétation de la théorie critique de Marx, Mille et une Nuits, 2009.
See also:THE MOISHE POSTONE LEGACY PROJECT https://thects.org/moishe-postone

“People don’t flood, and people don’t flow. People migrate, they move, they arrive, they pass through, they travel”.†

Listening this morning to the radio reports of the tens of thousands of Moroccans crossing the border into the North African Spanish "possession", aka "enclave", of Ceuta – which in reality is a left-over colony – I was impelled to write this blogpost. It's something I have written about before, but it bears repeating. As I always say to my students, it's not because you've made a breakthrough or think you've said the last word about an ideological shibboleth that you can sit back assuming the job is done. In interventionist academic work, the intervention needs to be continuous.
For some thirty years, I have been studying the discourse on racism and metaphors relating to water. My first text on the "Inundation metaphor" was in Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers (Duke UP, 1996): Chapter 7  "Fear of Drowing: Pure nations, hybrid bodies, excluded cultures".* Here's an extract:
"Unwanted immigrants of colour everywhere have frequently been described as "pouring in," "swamping," "flooding in," as coming in "tides" and "waves." In the [September 29, 1854] New York Tribune editorial, the phobia of death by drowning in an alien and unclean fluid is invoked. The metaphor alludes to an allied and recurrent image typical of this racist discourse, that of the fear of contamination, the terror of being made unclean by the filthy and sick. In Klaus Theweleit's 1987 study of the construction of the fascist, racist narrative which would be concretized in Germany's Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, in which the flood is the red flood of bolshevism, "a kind of ocean that surges on in waves, inundating and engulfing," he isolates the power of the inundation metaphor in a discourse of hate which was, of course, quintessentially racist."
Anti-immigrant, racist discourse is present in multifarious texts. I recall when I was a child in the 1960s seeing an elaborate racist, anti-black ditty which someone had written down. It intimated that black people were coming to England to scrounge on the white people's welfare state. I can recall one line clearly: "They come here and wash in Tide." There was a play on the word "tide" since "Tide" was, and still is, a popular brand of laundry detergent. There was the implication not only that the Other was entering the country illicitly at the country's seaboard, and thus uncontrolled and in great numbers, but also that s/he was  unused to washing and ignorant as to the difference between toilet soap and clothes washing detergent. This made the immigrant not only an object of derision, but someone ultimately unassimilable.
In my academic work, I have focused in particular on the press, from late nineteenth-century California to present-day Europe. Today the targets are Moroccans, and following the recent crossing of tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco to Ceuta, the media have once again trotted out their repertoire of clichés, associating human beings seeking a chance to live – rather than merely to survive – with dangerous waters that threaten to overwhelm Europe. This comparison between the movement of people and that of waves and ‘human tides’ has been going on for several centuries. Journalists, even so-called 'serious journalists' repeat this suite of metaphors without giving it a second thought. Is this a shortcut born of laziness, or an unconscious adherence to a dominant racist narrative? On the positive side, for the past ten years or so, I've been gratified to see that not only academic authors but also American public radio stations have taken note of my comments on this subject; at least, it's a start.
In whichever language and on whichever continent you get your news, I'm sure that journalists are using a variation on the inundation metaphor to describe current migration stories. It's easy to let these things go, but we should all call out these instances of easy recourse to racist metaphors whether employed consciously or not. That's what I did this morning when I wrote to the Mediator of Radio France to point out that journalists were employing the term marée humaine (human tide) to describe the recent passage to the other side of the border of thousands of individual Moroccans (you can see that message here).
So, don't let it go by. Do react.

* Troubadours is also available at archive.org : archive.org/details/troubadourstrump0000leeg
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

We are inhabited by abyssal forces that poetry alone has the power to fathom. Raoul Vaneigem

I don't go in for heroes, but I have throughout my life and career been drawn to a clutch of thinkers and their writings to which I turn again and again. Prominent amongst them has been the unorthodox French theorist who never set foot in a university and who was the leading light of the Situationist movement, Guy Debord (1931-1994). For some time the Situationists were shunned by the global academic community in favour of the more respectable pantheon of French theorists Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, the perpetuators of Heideggerism in France. Where the Situationists were the first radical thinkers to perceptively critique Maoist China* for what it was – a concentrated, totalitarian spectacle, the Left-Bank fashionable theorists continued well into the 1980s to construct the Maoist revolution as the Orientalist utopian paradise they wished it to be. It is perhaps no coincidence that those French intellectuals who remain apologists for Mao and Pol Pot similarly continue to carry the flame for Heidegger.†

Alongside Debord stands the Belgian writer, activist and theorist Raoul Vaneigem (1834-2026), whose  1967 Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations is credited with having underpinned the 1968 movement in France. The work is translated into English as The Revolution of Everyday Life, an appropriate title given the Situationists were  – along with Henri Lefebvre with whom Debord had a brief but meaningful intellectual honeymoon –  advanced theorists of the notion of daily life. Vaneigem throughout his long life would actively engage in thinking about ecology and the environment and continually critiqued the société marchande, or society of consumption, the veritable target of Debord's Society of the spectacle, or  "show" society.

In my previous blogpost I wrote about André Gorz's position on work. Since I did so Raoul Vaneigem has died. Together with Guy Debord, Vaneigem was an acerbic critic of the ideology of work, and continued to be so throughout his life. The praise of work and its redemptive, character-building qualities – what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger – form part of the ideological discourse of work, a discourse firmly challenged by Vaneigem. “The celebration of work, which according to Marx, transforms the world while exploiting Nature, and the Nietzschean propension to exalt the superior mind have each served as the Te Deum and De profundis for fascist and bolshevik states and corrupt democracies alike,” wrote Vaneigem (De la destinée, p. 11). However, Vaneigem pushes this back further than the era of industrial capitalism and its discontents, further back even than Christianity, in a reflection that would project the Anthropocene back several thousand years before the “modern” era: “ten thousand years of beliefs and thoughts…have founded, on the dogma of life reduced to survival, truths reputed to be eternal. Whereas, as contradictory as they may be, what they all have in common is the celebration of having over being” (De la destinée, p. 23).

Concern with the environment in Vaneigem’s thinking obliges us to think back beyond the conventional critiques of capitalism and colonialism to a stage in humanity’s domination of the non-human extending back eight to ten thousand years, to the “emergence of an economic and social system which giving free rein to the pillage of vital resources, distorted humankind” (De la destinée,p. 27). Work was and remains central to such domination:

“The appropriation and exploitation of the earth imposes work as a dominant activity. The ability to create, the true specificity of humankind, is left devalued and marginalized. Creativity is incompatible with work, since, implying self-enjoyment and the enjoyment of the world, it invalidates appropriation…. Creativity is to humankind what work is to the alienated human being” (De la destinée, p. 31).

Work, does indeed transform the world, but it reduces humankind to the status of a miserable beast obliged to yield to circumstances it itself fabricates while turning the world into a commodity (De la Destinée, pp. 31-32). And, it is the emergence of commodity-centred society that has provoked a veritable regression of human kind. If we look at the current climatic crisis and its effects, if we look at the millions of migrants seeking just mere survival, it can all be put down to an economic system which century after century has led us against our own interests to the current impasse and assigned us to a “programmed death”.

Much of what Vaneigem has written over the past six decades has proven to be uncannily prescient. For instance, a passage that Vaneigem wrote in 1986, before the declaration of the now already jaded New World Order, reads like a gloss on current far right populist ideology and its grip on so much of humanity. Addressing people's fear in the face of the crumbling economic order, rather than the joy that might be expected at the prospect of beneficial change, Vaneigem writes of “consumers reduced to a basic state of frailty and decrepitude” begging for “strong-armed protection as they rush through the well-lit, clearly displayed aisles of consumable hedonism.” “To what can one attribute this terror,” asks Vaneigem. To which he replies, to “the panic of having to create their own lives” (Movement of the Free Spirit, pp 2021). As I have written before, this reflection always reminds me of the bluesman B. B. King’s inimitable refrain “I've got a good mind to give up living, and go shopping instead.”

Ultimately, it is the old Situationist, libertarian distinction between life (vie) and mere survival (survie) – “surviving thus far has prevented us from living” (Traité) – in which we may discern a horizon of hope, for it is “the passion to live that joyfully reiterates itself. Death is just a tedious repetition" (De la destinée p. 235).

Modified 2.08.2026
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For free access to a comprehensive library of Debord's, Vaneigem's and other Situationist texts go to Situationist International Archive https://situationist.org/ 

† Witness the ever fashionable Alain Badiou,"Mao thinks in an almost infinite way"; Badiou's fidelity to Heidegger is amply documented.

* Guy Debord, “Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine”, Internationale Situationniste, no 11, octobre 1967, pp. 499-508. https://classiques.uqam.ca/contemporains/debord_guy/point_explosion_ideologie_chine/explosion_ideologie_chine_texte.html

Raoul Vaneigem,Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations, 1967.
Raoul Vaneigem, Mouvement du Libre-Esprit, Paris, Ramsay, 1986; Movement of the Free Spirit, New York, NY, Zone Books, 1994.
Raoul Vaneigem, De la destinée, Paris, Le Cherche midi, 2015.