Month: May 2022

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Same As It Ever Was?

Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ in the latest NLR takes aim at the growing list of thinkers who have seen homologies between feudalism and current tendencies in the capitalist system – prolonged stagnation, upward redistribution by political means, a digital sector in which a few ‘barons’ benefit from a mass of users ‘tied’ to their algorithmic domains, and the growth of a service sector or sector of servants. Among those accused of ‘feudal-speak’ are Yanis Varoufakis, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Kuttner, Michael Hudson and myself. Morozov dismisses feudal analogies as meme-hungry intellectual attention-seeking, a failure to understand digital capitalism, rather than insights into the possibility that it might be turning into something no longer aptly described as capitalist. Is he right?

In defining what makes capitalism capitalism, Morozov contrasts the conceptualizations of Marxists like Robert Brenner with those of world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. As he notes, Marxists generally conceive the process of surplus extraction under feudalism as ‘expropriation’, driven by extra-economic coercive or political means: lords expropriate produce from peasants over whom they exercise sovereign political and juridical power. Capitalism, by contrast, relies on ‘exploitation’ – surplus extraction by purely economic means: deprived of the means of subsistence, nominally free workers are obliged to sell their labour power for a wage in order to survive in a cash economy. For Wallerstein, by contrast, capitalism also centrally involves processes of expropriation from the periphery by the core. Morozov pinpoints this continuing role of ‘extra-economic coercion’ as the key difference between the two.

Morozov takes Wallerstein’s side, arguing that ‘dispossession and expropriation have been constitutive of accumulation throughout history’. But this dissolution of the difference between feudalism and capitalism, in favour of eternal expropriation, fails to attend to changes in the forms of exploitation. It naturalizes capitalism – in a way effectively criticized by Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origin of Capitalism (2017) – and abandons any effort to recognize and specify systemic change. Besides, as Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg all emphasized, extra-economic coercion isn’t simply replaced by exploitation, but accompanies it; capital comes to overlay, incorporate and rely on previous social forms. Marx understood that the compulsion of labour is not unique to capitalism. Pre-capitalist economic formations also compelled labour to produce a surplus, expropriated by the master or the lord. But capitalism changes the form of this compulsion: what was a direct and personal form of domination becomes impersonal, mediated by market forces – the economic separated from the political.

In the Grundrisse, Marx posits an originary unity: in the ancient communal form, the producers are a community of proprietors, who take for granted that the earth is there for them to labour on in order to live. They reproduce themselves and their community through processes that are both productive and destructive. Increases in population mean wilderness needs to be cleared and land cultivated. The need for land propels conquest and colonization. The rise of towns, of artisanal labour and property in the instruments of labour bring about a loosening, a separation, in the community. The community starts to appear not as a naturally and spontaneously given relation to labour, but as itself a product of labour.

Capitalism presupposes that the whole has dissolved into parts. The proprietor of the land no longer works it, and those who work the land no longer own it. Craftworkers likewise stop owning the instruments of labour. The tools employ them instead. Everything that was present in the originary unity is still there, but in a different form. Under this new order, the separated conditions of production come together through the mediation of the market. Contrary to Morozov’s presumption of a continuous linear history, the Grundrisse illuminates the processes by which continuous reproduction can generate fundamental change.

Is there evidence of such a change in the elements that constitute contemporary capitalism? An examination of Uber – the ride-sharing app and the company – helps to bring the problem into focus. First, the labour relation. Are Uber’s drivers independent contractors or employees? On the one hand, the company describes its service as providing a tool for people to access ‘flexible earning opportunities’, getting extra cash by driving in their spare time. The drivers are ‘earners’, independent contractors who use the Uber app to gain access to ride-seekers. Uber connects them to the market and collects a fee for the service. On the other hand, court rulings and workers’ organizations argue that Uber drivers are employees. In February 2021, a London employment court rejected Uber’s claim that its drivers were independent contractors, observing that Uber controlled their working conditions and remuneration. Drivers have no say in negotiating their contracts. Uber controls the information they receive and monitors their passenger rates, penalizing them if they don’t conform to its standards.

For some commentators, Uber exemplifies ‘algorithmic management’, a digitally turbocharged Taylorism. For others, it is ‘a modern version of the company town’, or an ‘on-demand’ servant provider, funded by billions in venture capital. In After the Gig (2020), the economic sociologist Juliet Schor describes the new online labour platforms as recreating a servant economy. At first glance, these interpretations seem to contradict each other: are platforms like Uber manifestations of unbridled capitalism or of a new feudal servitude? For proponents of ‘employee’ status, it is better for drivers to be workers, with legally regulated conditions of employment won by decades of working-class struggle. Defenders of the ‘independent contractor’ designation – including many drivers – don’t see employee status as particularly liberating. Gig workers often say they value their freedom to set their own schedules, even if they loathe the way the platforms manipulate the apps. Likewise, from Uber’s side, the ostensible capitalist doesn’t want to invest in means of production and purchase labour power.

The Grundrisse’s account of the separation that capitalism presupposes provides a way to resolve this inverted binary of servitude and ‘freedom’. Marx describes the mass of living labour thrown onto the market as ‘free in a double sense, free from the old relations of clientship, bondage, and servitude, and secondly free of all belongings and possessions, and of every objective, material form of being, free of all property’. From this perspective, it makes sense to think of Uber drivers as ‘free’ contractors – not because of what they gain in flexibility, but because of what they lose: they are ‘freed’ from workers’ rights to guaranteed hours, paid leave, healthcare benefits and so forth.

They are also ‘freed’, in a sense, from their property. In his discussion of transport in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx notes that ‘the relation between buyer and seller of this service has nothing to do with the relation of the productive labourer to capital’. The buyer of the ride service is not employing the driver in order to accumulate capital by putting them to work. The instrument of labour, the car, ostensibly belongs to the driver – just as the pre-capitalist craftsman owned his tools.

And yet something in the driver’s relationship to their car changes: from being an item of consumption – something purchased out of their own ‘consumption fund’, wages they had received for their labour – the car becomes a means for capital accumulation by another, Uber. Instead of Uber paying for and maintaining a fleet of cars, the company puts the drivers’ cars to use, in effect getting cars to employ their owners. Because they are rated by riders, many drivers feel pressured to keep their cars extra clean and pleasant smelling. The car’s purpose now is less personal enjoyment than generation of income. It stands apart from its owner, as an independent value. The car becomes capital.

The debt many Uber drivers accrue in order to acquire a car signals this change in form. Traditional cab drivers could shift to other jobs if they were unhappy, but Uber’s drivers are often locked into vehicle financial obligations that make it much harder to leave. Debt tethers them to the platform. At the same time, the burden of car maintenance is turned into a cost of production, which drivers have to assume. Drivers have to drive in order to pay for repairs and to keep up their car payments – which means earning for Uber as well as themselves. Drivers’ double freedom – from employee status, from leisured car ownership – ushers in a double dependence: dependence on the market and on Uber, for access to it. Uber inserts itself between driver and rider: they cannot meet without it.

Uber’s insertion of itself as an intermediary between buyer and seller superficially resembles Marx’s discussion of how the intervention of merchants transforms independent spinners and weavers into dependent workers. But Uber differs from the merchant: Uber isn’t buying labour power. Riders are.   

*

Morozov’s critique of techno-feudalism insists that our digital overlords are not ‘lazy rentiers’. With Google as his primary example, he sees them as innovators pouring money into research and development, engaging in the production of new commodities such as search results. But the drive to maximize profits can prevent the reinvestment of surpluses in production, directing them towards destruction instead. Capitalism’s own laws can undermine capitalism and generate something worse. Thus, for example, Uber undercuts and disrupts the urban-transport sector, driving down pay and making it impossible for cab drivers to earn a living wage. Airbnb has similarly led to declines in hotel revenue and employee layoffs. DoorDash is undercutting the restaurant sector through its unlicensed, uninspected kitchens which reproduce the menus of actual restaurants for delivery. 

Platform work carries out this sort of destruction wherever it takes hold. As Alexis Madrigal writes, companies like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, Doordash, and Instacart have ‘wired those in local industries – handymen, house cleaners, dog walkers, dry cleaners – into the tech- and capital-rich global economy. These people are now submitting to a new middleman, who they know controls the customer relationship and will eventually have to take a big cut.’ Whereas before these workers’ earnings were their own, now an intermediary extracts a fee, a rent based on control over access to the market.

The process of separation that fragmented the pre-capitalist originary unity continues as middlemen, platforms, intermediaries insert themselves into exchange relations, disrupt markets and destroy sectors. Insertion, the creation of new dependencies based on monopoly power, doesn’t come cheap. Market domination costs billions, raised through venture capital and private equity, accumulations of wealth that multiply through destructive rather than productive investment. Uber’s strategy – deploying enormous amounts of capital to incentivize drivers and subsidize riders until the company has established itself in a city and can start upping fees – is not unique. Tactics of ‘blitzscaling’ or ‘lightning growth’ are practically gospel in Silicon Valley. According to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and author of Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (2018), the process involves ‘purposefully and intentionally doing things that don’t make sense according to traditional business thinking.’

WeWork is another example of blitzscaling, this time in the office-rental sector. Armed with billions of investment capital from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, WeWork attempted to dominate markets by using hoards of cash to destroy or purchase competitors, paying out huge incentives to early renters, and so on. What makes blitzscaling appear feasible is the enormous amount of venture capital seeking outsized gains, especially the kind that can accrue from a successful IPO. Billions are funneled into a company that can destroy all potential competitors, rather than having to compete with them directly through efficiency improvements. Once competitors are eliminated, and regulations circumvented, the victor can increase the squeeze on workers and customers alike. The laws of motion here are not capital’s imperatives of market competition and profit maximization. Capital becomes a weapon of conquest and destruction.

Neoliberalism turns into neofeudalism because it effects a change in social-property relations by destroying state ‘fetters’ or constraints on markets – employee safety nets, corporate taxation, social-welfare provisions. The enormous stores of wealth that accumulate in the hands of the few exert a political and economic power that protects the holders of capital while intensifying the immiseration of almost everyone else. Wealth-holders seeking high returns rely on hedge funds, private equity, venture-capital funds and the like to sniff out high-risk, high-reward pursuits of the kind favoured by Silicon Valley – destructive platforms that insert themselves into exchange relations, rather than production. Manufacturing these days isn’t likely to generate super-profits; platforms that can make themselves indispensable to market access and extract fees in novel ways are more promising.

The increases in precarity and anxiety under neoliberalism, as well as broader patterns associated with privatization, austerity and the decline of the organized working class, have created a base of consumers grateful for price breaks and a supply of labour looking for work. Dependent on the market for access to our means of subsistence, we become dependent on the platform for access to the market. If we are to work, the platform gets its cut. If we are to consume, the platform gets its cut as well.

As it produces new social-property relations, new intermediaries and new laws of motion, the ongoing process of separation is not a ‘going back’ to historical feudalism, as Morozov would have it, but a reflexization, such that capitalist processes long directed outward – through colonialism and imperialism – turn in upon themselves. With advances in production seemingly at a dead end, capital is hoarded and wielded as weapon of destruction – its wielders new lords, the rest of us dependent, proletarianized servants and serfs. If feudalism was characterized by relations of personal dependence, then neofeudalism is characterized by abstract, algorithmic dependence on the platforms that mediate our lives.

What of the role of the state, which Morozov describes as weak to non-existent under the ‘parcellized sovereignty’ of the European feudal era, but ‘constitutive’ for Silicon Valley? Logically, of course, state involvement in the consolidation of an economic sector tells us nothing about its strength or weakness; it could just as well be the tool of special interests. But Morozov misrepresents the discussion of parcellized sovereignty in contemporary debates about feudalism and neofeudalization.

The key processes here are fragmentation and extra-economic expropriation. Just as feudal lords both exploited peasants and held juridical authority over them, so today economic actors exercise political power on the basis of the terms and conditions they set. Private commercial interests are displacing public law through confidentiality agreements, non-compete rules, compulsory arbitration and the dismantling of public-regulatory agencies, creating a fragmented form of ‘legally sanctioned private jurisprudence’. With the privatized parcellation of sovereignty, political authority and economic power blend together. Law doesn’t apply to billionaires powerful enough to evade it. Corporations like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet are treated by governments like sovereign states. Immensely concentrated wealth has its own constituent power, determining the rules it will follow – or not.

The counter-revolution of neoliberalism has been a process of privatization, fragmentation and separation, in the name of a hyper-individualized freedom that resembles the ‘dot-like isolation’ of the Grundrisse’s ‘free’ worker. Today’s proletarians are caught up in a new kind of serfdom, dependent on networks and practices through which rents are extracted at every turn. When production is insufficiently profitable for accumulation, holders of capital seek returns elsewhere. In the process, they further the dynamic of separation and induce new dependencies, which require a new name. Neofeudalism speaks to that.

Read on: Evgeny Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, NLR 133/134.

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Guns Without Butter

Ottawa political circles must have heaved secret sighs of relief when Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh announced their confidence and supply agreement on 21 March. In return for advancing some social spending priorities, the NDP will keep the minority government in power until 2025. No party wants an election anytime soon. Decades of neoliberal predation have diminished their vote-pulling capacities, as the national ballot in September 2021 testified. Voter turnout fell, the NDP gained a single seat, the Conservatives lost two and, most importantly, the Liberals once again failed to win a majority. In the aftermath of the vote, 55% of Canadians said that Trudeau should step down, and he is now reportedly tempted to leave harried public life for lucrative retirement. That would mean giving way to heir apparent Chrystia Freeland, the so-called ‘Minister of Everything’: Deputy PM, finance minister and lead on the Ukraine crisis. With politics this unreliable, backroom deals are needed to shore up Canada’s ruling bloc.

The Liberal–NDP deal has been discussed in the usual terms by media commentators. Will it last? Probably, unless Singh unexpectedly grows a backbone or the Liberal leader improbably spots an opportunity for a majority. Will the NDP benefit? Only by a miracle. Does it undermine Canadian democracy? Another nail in its coffin. Will it be good for the Conservative Party? Certainly for all those pushing it to embrace the hard-right white-supremacist politics of the ‘Freedom Convoy’, which immobilized Ottawa in January and February 2022. To these talking-points, provincial politicians added criticisms of the federal overreach built into the deal’s spending pledges (bringing to mind an old Canadian joke: Asked to write an essay on elephants, the Englishman titles his, ‘How to Shoot an Elephant’, the Frenchman, ‘How Elephants Make Love’, and the Canadian, ‘Elephants: A Federal or Provincial Responsibility?’).

Few, however, have asked why the deal was negotiated now, given that the very same arrangement was considered and dismissed after the September election. The text of the agreement gives two reasons: that ‘increasing polarization and parliamentary dysfunction’ was preventing the government from implementing its agenda, and that it is more urgent than ever to provide stability, since Canadians ‘face a world made less secure because of Russia’s criminal war in Ukraine’. Yet these seemingly innocuous explanations conceal powerful undertows pulling the country rightwards.

Military spending is not mentioned in the agreement, but it is written all over its timing. On 22 March, as Trudeau left Canada for G7 and NATO meetings in Europe, The Globe and Mail front page headline announced that the NDP were willing to ‘back military spending in exchange for social programmes’. Yet if Singh believes he can secure a 21st-century combination of imperialism and social reform – or ‘guns and butter’ – he will have to think again. The deal’s social policies are slim: some means-tested dental care, a Canada Pharmacare Act by 2023, a droplet of additional healthcare funding, a Safe Long-Term Care Act, some more affordable housing, tepid climate actions, ten days of paid sick leave for federally regulated workers and legislation to prohibit scabbing. Meanwhile, both parties look set to increase weapons expenditure drastically. Singh has reversed his earlier opposition to lethal aid to Ukraine and committed to expanding Canada’s arsenal, while the Liberals have opened negotiations with Lockheed Martin to buy 88 F-35 fighter jets, in an estimated $19 billion upgrade to the Canadian war machine.   

And this is only the beginning. As the Ukraine crisis ignited, the defence establishment whipped out its shopping lists, while ‘security experts’ warned that Putin’s imperial designs may threaten Canada itself. After all, Russia is a rapidly melting Arctic away. A well-orchestrated effort is underway to ensure plenty of guns but scant butter. The string section of defence contractors and foreign policy hawks conjures up new threats and sets higher military spending goals, while from the woodwinds – orthodox economists and media pundits – waft dire warnings about the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility amid inflation, economic uncertainty and pandemic-doubled public debt. Their fugue of iron necessity will ensure that social expenditure stays well below the Liberals’ manifesto commitments, let alone the NDP’s. The policies that survive will invariably generate handsome profits for the private sector (the involvement of private insurance in Pharmacare is already being discussed).

If this is what really lies behind Canada’s new ‘insecurity’, what about the ‘increasing polarization and parliamentary dysfunction’, given as the other justification for the deal? Here, even the Liberal-leaning Globe and Mail does not buy the government’s rhetoric, accusing Trudeau and Singh of trying to ‘neuter parliament’ and its committees. Given his 72% ‘success rate’ for proposed legislation while governing with a minority (a figure just 10% below that of his majority government), Trudeau’s accusations about Conservative obstructionism in parliament, the Globe argues, are baseless. Moreover, throughout his tenure, Trudeau has been able to harness the many methods devised by recent Canadian governments to bypass the legislature: tucking controversial laws into sprawling omnibus bills, shortening parliamentary sessions or announcing major initiatives in press briefings. This has outsourced government scrutiny to an array of parliamentary committees. In the absence of substantive policy debates, they have come to focus on rooting out ‘corruption’. Because of the mismatch between its progressive rhetoric and elite connections, the Liberal party has proved particularly scandal-prone – and Trudeau has faced nightmarish committee questioning on a number of occasions.

Early in his tenure, the Trudeau family’s vacation at the Aga Khan’s private Bahamas residence was found to have contravened conflict of interest rules. Three years later, in 2019, the revelation that Trudeau pressured his attorney general to go easy on his corporate cronies made front-page news for months. Though he pleaded that he was merely protecting ‘Canadian jobs’, the public didn’t buy it: he lost two ministers and his majority in elections that year. From there, things only got worse. The WE Charity scandal – a $912 million contract to run the Canada Student Summer Grant given to an organization that had paid members of Trudeau’s family to appear at its events – blighted 2020, with Trudeau’s proroguing parliament only escalating the crisis. In 2021, the Liberal government provoked outrage by teaming up with the Bloc Québécois to stall a probe into sexual assault in Canada’s military. Topping it all, 2022 is set to be dominated by the inquiry into whether the government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act to end the Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa. There will be much sound and fury as the Liberals lean into a law-and-order position while the Conservatives style themselves the party of rights, freedom and parliamentary rectitude. Among other things, this is sure to drown out any discussion of the real dangers that the Convoy revealed.   

They are rooted in the erosion of the Liberals’ legendary hold over Canadian politics (the party has ruled for 52 of the 77 years since 1945). Today, the Liberals are not only neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, with a third of the popular vote each; the former has nothing to match the latter’s overwhelming support in Western regions, with majorities of up to 70% in many constituencies. This process began with Preston Manning’s Reform Party rising in the West in the 1980s. It set off a slow political earthquake that rumbled through the Canadian party system, first reducing the Progressive Conservatives, the established party of the right, to two MPs in 1993, and then setting off the rocky process of right-wing recomposition that culminated in Stephen Harper’s Conservative governments of 2006-2015. These developments expressed underlying shifts in the structure of Canadian capital. A largely extractivist Western Canadian capitalist class emerged in the 1970s as the Canadian state sought to reduce foreign ownership and encourage oil and gas investment. Driven by resentment at the dominance of eastern finance and manufacturing, such interests were already taking Western provincial capitals when Reform gathered them into a national force, becoming the official opposition in 1997. By 2003, the ‘Unite the Right’ project had succeeded, merging the PC rump with Reform to form the Conservative Party.  

Handed Ottawa on a plate for a decade and a half by these realignments on the right, the Liberals responded to the same social shifts by becoming card-carrying neoliberals, prompting the long electoral downturn that saw their support dip below 20% in 2011. Desperate times required desperate measures, so in 2015 the Liberal establishment installed Justin what’s-not-in-a-name Trudeau as leader and donned some fetching policies – higher deficit spending, and a referendum on proportional representation. That managed to extract a majority from an electorate tired of Harper’s dogmatic market reforms and personal unattractiveness. In office, however, the Liberals’ appeal faded fast. With social spending still limited by ‘modest short-term deficits of less than $10 billion’, which would keep the deficit as a share of GDP declining, Canadians were invited to marvel instead at Trudeau’s gender-balanced and ethnically-diverse cabinet: ‘a cabinet that looks like Canada’. Aside from reversing some of Harper’s most unpopular measures – such as the raising of the retirement age – the Liberals delivered little, and their vote share resumed its slide in 2019 and 2021.

The Freedom Convoy’s bizarre antics – at once carnivalesque and menacing – unfolded against this backdrop. When the overwhelmingly white lumpen petit-bourgeois Convoy, with generous sprinklings of white supremacy, Christian fundamentalism and Islamophobia (plus considerable funding from US donors), occupied Ottawa and other cities, it styled itself both as a protest against vaccine mandates and an insurrection to bring down the duly elected government. The Trudeau Liberals were paralysed like a deer in the headlights. Their electoral insecurity did not permit them to alienate either the Convoy’s supporters or its opponents. While few Canadians supported the Convoy’s tactics, enough of the suburban white middle class – as essential to Liberal victory as they were fickle – were sufficiently inconvenienced by the governments’ handling of Covid to sympathise with the protesters. Though strong majorities supported decisive action, exactly how they would react to forceful policing of an overwhelmingly white group was unclear. Trudeau finally invoked the Emergencies Act almost three weeks into the occupation of Ottawa, only to revoke it within a week.

As Convoy sympathisers decried Trudeau’s authoritarianism and detractors his indecisiveness, fewer people paused to consider that the Emergencies Act was simply unnecessary. Canadian authorities already wielded the requisite powers to stop the Convoy at any time in its long and well-advertised journey. Only the political will was lacking. Throughout those tense weeks, policing remained light, even friendly, and cosiness between the protesters and police was reported. Notwithstanding the invocation of the Act, the Convoy dispersed largely amicably, the use of special powers being confined to some freezing of accounts. Conservative provincial governments, moreover, simply refused to use it.

The Freedom Convoy has already scored a victory: the moderate Erin O’Toole was ousted as Conservative leader for being insufficiently sympathetic to the Convoy. Distinguishing herself as its defender, interim leader Candice Bergen (not to be confused with the American film star) rails against high social spending and the alleged impending destruction of the oil and gas sector and denounces ‘socialists’ in government. Meanwhile, the suave pro-Convoy Pierre Poilievre pulls crowds whose sheer size anoint him leader pending only the rubber stamp of the leadership election in September. Given that Singh’s NDP is unlikely to survive its guns but no butter deal, the transformation of Canadian politics into a US-style entrenched confrontation between an ostentatiously ‘woke’ neoliberal establishment and an enragée hard right can only accelerate.

Read on: Ho-fung Hung, ‘Canadianization’, NLR 88.

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Return of the King

If there ever was a question of who is boss in Europe, NATO or the European Union, the war in Ukraine has settled it, at least for the foreseeable future. Once upon a time, Henry Kissinger complained that there was no single phone number on which to call Europe, far too many calls to make to get something done, a far too inconvenient chain of command in need of simplification. Then, after the end of Franco and Salazar, came the southern extension of the EU, with Spain joining NATO in 1982 (Portugal had been a member since 1949), reassuring Kissinger and the United States against both Eurocommunism and a military takeover other than by NATO. Later, in the emerging New World Order after 1990, it was for the EU to absorb most of the member states of the defunct Warsaw Pact, as they were fast-tracked for NATO membership. Stabilizing the new kids on the capitalist block economically and politically, and guiding their nation-building and state-formation, the task of the EU, more or less eagerly accepted, would be to enable them to become part of ‘the West’, as led by the United States in a now unipolar world.

In subsequent years the number of East European countries waiting to be admitted to the EU increased, with the United States lobbying for their admission. With time Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia achieved official candidate status, while Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Moldova are still kept waiting further down the line. Meanwhile enthusiasm among EU member states for enlargement declined, especially in France which preferred and prefers ‘deepening’ over ‘widening’. This was in line with the peculiar French finalité of the ‘ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’: a politically and socially relatively homogeneous compound of states capable collectively of playing an independent, self-determined, ‘sovereign’, above all French-led role in world politics (‘a more independent France in a stronger Europe’, as the just reelected French president likes to put it).

The economic costs of bringing new member states up to European standards, and the required amount of institution-building from the outside, had to be kept manageable, given that the EU was already struggling with persistent economic disparities between its Mediterranean and Northwestern member countries, not to mention the deep attachment of some of the new members in the East to the United States. So, France blocked the entry into the EU of Turkey, a long-standing NATO member (which it will remain even though it has just sent the activist Osman Kavala to prison, for a lifetime in solitary confinement with no possibility of parole). The same holds for several states on the West Balkans, like Albania and North Macedonia, having failed to prevent the accession, in the first wave of Osterweiterung in 2004, of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary. Four years later, Sarkozy and Merkel barred (for the time being) the United States under George Bush the Younger from admitting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, anticipating that this would have to be followed by their inclusion in the European Union.

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine the game changed. Zelensky’s televised address to the assembled heads of EU governments caused a kind of excitement that is much desired but rarely experienced in Brussels, and his demand for full EU membership, tutto e subito, drew unending applause. Overzealous as usual, von der Leyen traveled to Kyiv to hand Zelensky the long questionnaire required to start admission procedures. While normally it takes national governments months if not years to assemble the complex details the questionnaire asks for, Zelensky, Kyiv’s state of siege notwithstanding, promised to finish the job in a matter of weeks, and so he did. It is not yet known what the answers are on questions like the treatment of ethnic and linguistic minorities, above all Russian, or the extent of corruption and the state of democracy, for example the role of the national oligarchs in political parties and in parliament.

If Ukraine is admitted as swiftly as promised, and as its government and that of the United States expect, there will be no longer be any reason to refuse membership not just to the states of the West Balkans but also to Georgia and Moldova, which applied together with Ukraine. In any case, they will all add strength to the anti-Russian-cum-pro-American wing inside the EU, today led by Poland, at the time like Ukraine an eager participant in the ‘coalition of the willing’ assembled by the United States for the purpose of active nation-building in Iraq. As to the EU generally, Ukrainian accession will turn it into even more of a prep school or a holding pen for future NATO members. This is true even if, as part of a potential war settlement, Ukraine may have to be officially declared neutral, preventing it from joining NATO directly. (In fact, since 2014 the Ukrainian army has been rebuilt from scratch under American direction, to the point where in 2021 it effectively achieved what is called ‘interoperability’ in NATO jargon).

In addition to domesticating neophyte members, another job that has come with the EU’s new status as a civil auxiliary of NATO is to devise economic sanctions that hurt the Russian enemy while sparing friends and allies, as much as necessary. NATO controlling the guns, the EU is charged with controlling the ports. Von der Leyen, enthusiastic as always, had let the world know by the end of February that sanctions made in EU would be the most effective ever and would ‘bit by bit, wipe out Russia’s industrial base’ (Stück für Stück die industrielle Basis Russlands abtragen). Perhaps as a German, she had in mind something like a Morgenthau Plan, as proposed by advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt, in order to reduce defeated Germany to an agricultural society forever. That project was soon dropped, at the latest when the United States realized that they might need (West) Germany for its Cold War ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union.

It is not clear who told von der Leyen not to overdo it, but the abtragen metaphor was not heard again, perhaps because what it implied might have amounted to active participation in the war. In any case, it soon turned out that the Commission, its claims to technocratic fame notwithstanding, failed as badly in planning sanctions as it had in planning macro-economic convergence. In remarkably Eurocentric fashion, the Commission seemed to have forgotten that there are parts of the world that see no reason to join a Western-imposed boycott of Russia; for them, military interventions are nothing unusual, including interventions by the West for the West. Moreover, internally, as push came to shove, the EU found it hard to order its member states what not to buy or sell; calls for Germany and Italy to immediately stop importing Russian gas were ignored, with both governments insisting that national jobs and national prosperity be taken into consideration. Miscalculations abounded even in the financial sphere where, in spite of ever-so-sophisticated sanctions against Russian banks, including Moscow’s central bank, the ruble has recently even risen, by roughly 30 percent between April 6 and April 30.

When kings return, they initiate a purge, to rectify the anomalies that have accumulated during their absence. Old bills are presented anew and collected, lack of loyalty revealed during the King’s absence is punished, disobedient ideas and improper memories are extirpated, and the nooks and crannies of the body politic are cleansed of the political deviants that have in the meantime populated them. Symbolic action of the McCarthy type is helpful as it spreads fear among potential dissenters. Throughout the West today, players of piano or tennis or relativity theory who happen to be from Russia and want to continue playing whatever they play are pressed to make public statements that would make their lives and those of their families back home difficult at best. Investigative journalists discover an abyss of philanthropic donations by Russian oligarchs to music and other festivals, donations that have been welcome in the past but are now found to subvert artistic freedom, unlike of course the philanthropic donations of their Western fellow-oligarchs. Etc.

Against the background of proliferating loyalty oaths, public discourse is reduced to spreading the King’s truth, and nothing but. Putin verstehen – trying to find out about motives and reasons, searching for a clue as to how one might, perhaps, negotiate an end to the bloodshed – is equated with Putin verzeihen, or forgiving; it ‘relativizes’, as the Germans put it, the atrocities of the Russian army by trying to end them with other than military means. According to newly received wisdom, there is only one way of dealing with a madman; thinking about other ways advances his interests and therefore amounts to treason. (I remember teachers in the 1950s who let it be known to the young generation that ‘the only language the Russian understands is the language of the fist’.) Memory management is central: never mention the Minsk Accords (2014 and 2015) between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany, don’t ask what became of them and why, never mind the platform of negotiated conflict settlement on which Zelensky was elected in 2019 by almost three quarters of Ukrainian voters, and forget the American response by megaphone diplomacy to Russian proposals as late as 2022 for a joint European security system. Above all, never bring up the various American ‘special operations’ of the recent past, like for example in Iraq, and in Fallujah inside Iraq (800 civilian casualties alone in a few days); doing so commits the crime of ‘whataboutism’, which in view of ‘the pictures from Bucha and Mariupol’ is morally out of bounds.

Throughout the West, the politics of imperial reconstruction is targeting anything and anybody found to deviate, or to have deviated in the past, from the American position on Russia and the Soviet Union and on Europe as a whole. It is here that the line is drawn today between Western society and its enemies, between good and evil, a line along which not just the present but also the past needs to be purged. Particular attention is being paid to Germany, the country that has been under American (Kissingerian) suspicion since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and the German recognition of the postwar Western border of Poland. Since then, Germany has been suspect in American eyes of wanting to have a voice on national and European security, for the time being within NATO and the European Community, but in the future possibly on its own.

That three decades later Schröder, like Blair, Obama and so many others, monetized his political past after leaving office was as such never a problem. This was different with Schröder’s historical refusal, together with Chirac, to join the American-led posse invading Iraq and, in the act, breach exactly the same international law that is now being breached by Putin. (That Merkel as opposition leader at the time told the world, speaking from Washington DC a few days before the invasion, that Schröder did not represent the true will of the German people may be one of the reasons why she has up to now been spared American attacks for what is claimed to be a major cause of the Ukrainian war, her energy policy having made Germany dependent on Russian natural gas.)

Today, in any case, it is not really Schröder, all-too-obviously inebriated by the millions with which the Russian oligarchs are filling him up, who is the main target of the German purge. Instead it is the SPD as a party – which, according to BILD and the new CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, a businessman with excellent American connections, has always had a Russlandproblem. The role of Grand Inquisitor is robustly performed by the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, one Andrij Melnyk, self-appointed nemesis in particular of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now president of the Federal Republic, who is singled out to personify the SPD’s ‘Russian connection’. Steinmeier was from 1999 to 2005 Schröder’s Chief of Staff at the Chancellor’s Office, served two times (2005-2009 and 2013-2017) as Foreign Minister under Merkel, and was for four years (2009-2013) Bundestag opposition leader.

According to Melnyk, an indefatigable twitterer and interview-giver, Steinmeier ‘has for years woven a spider web of contacts with Russia’, one in which ‘many people are entangled who are now calling the shots in the German government’. For Steinmeier, according to Melnyk, ‘the relationship to Russia was and is something fundamental, something sacred, regardless of what happens. Even Russia’s war of aggression doesn’t matter much to him.’ Thus informed, the Ukrainian government declared Steinmeier persona non grata at the last minute, just as he was about to board a train from Warsaw to Kyiv, in the company of the Polish foreign minister and the heads of government of the Baltic states. While the others were allowed to enter Ukraine, Steinmeier had to inform the accompanying journalists that he was not welcome, and return to Germany.

The case of Steinmeier is interesting as it shows how the targets of the purge are being selected. At first glance Steinmeier’s neoliberal-cum-Atlanticist credentials would seem impeccable. Author of Agenda 2010, as head of the Chancellery and coordinator of the German secret services, he allowed the United States to use their German military bases to collect and interrogate prisoners taken from all over the world during the ‘war on terror’ – one can assume in compensation for Schröder’s refusal to join the American adventure in Iraq. He also didn’t make much of a fuss, indeed no fuss at all, when the United States held German citizens of Lebanese and Turkish descent prisoner in Guantanamo, each of whom was arrested, abducted and tortured after being mistaken for somebody else. Accusations that he failed to provide assistance, as he should have done under German law, have followed him to this day.

What is true is that Steinmeier helped make Germany dependent on Russian energy, although not quite as charged. It was he who, in 1999, negotiated the German exit from nuclear energy, on behalf of the Red-Green government under Schröder and as demanded, not by the SPD, but by the Greens. Later, as opposition leader, he went along when, after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Merkel, having reversed nuclear exit I, now reversed again to push through nuclear exit II, ever so cunningly hoping that this would open the door to a coalition with the Greens. A few years later, when she for the same reason ended coal, in particular soft coal, to become effective at about the time of the shutdown of the last remaining nuclear reactors, Steinmeier went along as well. Still, it is he, not Merkel, who is being blamed for German energy dependence on and collaboration with Russia, perhaps out of lasting American gratitude for Merkel’s assistance in the Syrian refugee crisis following the botched American (half-)intervention in Syria. Meanwhile the Greens, the driving force behind German energy policy since Schröder, like the CDU manage to escape American wrath by pivoting to attack the SPD and Scholz for hesitating to deliver ‘heavy weapons’ to Ukraine.

And Nord Stream 2? Here too, Merkel was always in the driver’s seat, not least because the German end of the pipeline was to be in her home state, even her constituency. Note that the pipeline never went into operation, a good deal of the Russian gas that goes to Germany being pumped through a pipeline system that runs in part through Ukraine. What made Nord Stream 2 necessary, in Merkel’s eyes, was the chaotic legal and political situation in Ukraine after 2014, raising the question of how to secure a reliable transit of gas for Germany and Western Europe – a question that Nord Stream 2 would elegantly solve. One doesn’t have to be an Ukraineversteher to understand that this must have annoyed the Ukrainians. It is interesting to note that after more than two months of war Russian gas is still being delivered through Ukrainian pipelines. While the Ukrainian government could shut these down any moment, it does not do so, probably to enable itself and associated oligarchs to continue collecting transit fees. This does not keep Ukraine from demanding that Germany and other countries end their use of Russian gas immediately, in order to no longer finance ‘Putin’s war’.

Again, why Steinmeier and the SPD, rather than Merkel and the CDU, or the Greens? The most important reason may be that in Ukraine, especially on the radical right of the political spectrum, the name Steinmeier is known and hated above all in connection with the so-called ‘Steinmeier formula’ – essentially a sort of roadmap, or to-do-list, for the implementation of the Minsk Accords drawn up by Steinmeier as Foreign Minister under Merkel. While Nord Stream 2 was unforgiveable from a Ukrainian perspective, Minsk was a mortal sin in the eyes not just of the Ukrainian right (among other things, it would have granted autonomy to the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine) but also of the United States, which had been bypassed by it just as Ukraine was to be bypassed by Nord Stream 2. If the latter was an unfriendly act among business partners, the former was an act of high treason against a temporarily absent king, now back to clean up and take revenge.

As much as the EU has become a subsidiary of NATO, its officials can be assumed to know as little as anybody else about the ultimate war aims of the United States. With the recent visit of the US secretaries of state and defense to Kyiv, it seems that the Americans have moved the goalposts forward, from defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion to permanently weakening the Russian military. To what extent the US have now taken control was forcefully demonstrated when on their trip back to the United States the two secretaries stopped over at the American airbase in Ramstein, Germany, the same that the US used for the war on terror and similar operations. There they met with the defense ministers of no less than forty countries, whom they had ordered to show up to pledge their support for Ukraine and, of course, the United States. Significantly the meeting was not called at NATO headquarters in Brussels, a multinational venue at least formally, but on a military facility which the United States claims to be under its and only its sovereignty, to the muted occasional disagreement of the German government. It was here, the United States presiding under two huge flags, American and Ukrainian, that the Scholz government finally agreed to deliver the long-demanded ‘heavy arms’ to Ukraine, without apparently being allowed a say on the exact purpose for which its tanks and howitzers would be used. (The forty nations agreed to reconvene once every month to figure out what further military equipment Ukraine requires.) One cannot but recall in this context the observation of a retired American diplomat at an early stage of the war that the US was going to fight the Russians ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

As is well-known, the attention span not just of the American public but also of the American foreign-policy establishment is short. Dramatic events inside or outside the United States may critically diminish national interest in a far-away place like Ukraine – not to mention the upcoming midterm elections and the impending campaign of Donald Trump to regain the presidency in 2024. From an American perspective this is not much of a problem because the risks associated with US foreign adventures almost exclusively accrue to the locals; see Afghanistan. All the more important, one would think, for European countries to know what exactly the war aims are of the United States in Ukraine, and how they will be updated as the war continues.

After the Ramstein meeting, the talk was not just of a ‘permanent weakening’ of Russian military power, never mind a peace settlement, but of an outright victory for Ukraine and its allies. This will test the Cold War wisdom that a conventional war against a nuclear power cannot be won. For Europeans the result will be a matter of life and death – which might explain why the German government hesitated for a few weeks to supply Ukraine with arms that could be used, for example, to move onto Russian territory, first perhaps to hit Russian supply lines, later for more. (When the writer of these lines read about the new American aspiration for a ‘victory’ he was for a brief but unforgettable moment hit by a deep feeling of fear.) If Germany had the courage to ask for a say on the American-Ukrainian strategy, nothing like this appears to have been on offer: the German tanks, it seems, will be handed over carte blanche. Rumours have it that the numerous wargames commissioned in recent years from military thinktanks by the American government involving Ukraine, NATO and Russia have one way or other all ended in nuclear Armageddon, at least in Europe.

Certainly, a nuclear ending is not what is being publicly advertised. Instead one hears that the United States assumes that defeating Russia will take many years, with a protracted stand-off, a long-smoldering stalemate in the mud of a land war, neither party being able to move: the Russians because the Ukrainians will unendingly be fed more money and more material, if not manpower, by a newly Americanized ‘West’, the Ukrainians because they are too weak to enter Russia and threaten its capital. For the United States this might appear quite comfortable: a proxy war, with its balance of forces adjusted and re-adjusted by them in line with their changing strategic needs. In fact, when Biden requested in the last days of April another 33 billion dollars of aid to Ukraine for 2022 alone, he suggested that this will be only the beginning of a long-term commitment, as expensive as Afghanistan, but, he said, worth it. Unless, of course, the Russians start firing more of their miracle missiles, unpack their chemical arms and, ultimately, put to use their nuclear arsenal, small battle-field warheads first.

Is there, in spite of all this, a prospect for peace after war, or less ambitious: for a regional security architecture, perhaps after the Americans have lost interest, or Russia feels that it cannot or need not continue the war? A Eurasian settlement, if we want to call it so, will probably presuppose some kind of regime change in Moscow. After what happened, it is hard to imagine Western European leaders publicly expressing confidence in Putin, or a Putinesque successor. At the same time, there are no reasons to believe that the economic sanctions imposed by the United West on Russia will cause a public uprising toppling the Putin regime. In fact, going by the experience of the Allies in the Second World War with the carpet bombing of German cities, sanctions might well have the opposite effect, making people close ranks behind their government.

De-industrializing Russia, à la von der Leyen, will not be possible anyway as China will ultimately not allow it: not least because it needs a functioning Russian state for its New Silk Road project. Popular demands in the West for Putin and his camarilla to stand trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague will, for these reasons alone, remain unfulfilled. Note in any case that Russia, like the United States, has not signed the treaty establishing the court, thereby securing for its citizens immunity from prosecution. Like Kissinger and Bush Jr., and others in the US, Putin will therefore remain at large until the end of his days, whatever that end will be like. Those European countries that are historically not exactly inclined toward Russophilia, like the Baltic countries and Poland, and certainly also Ukraine, stand a good chance of convincing the public in places like Germany or Scandinavia that trusting Russia can be dangerous to your national health.

A regime change may, however, also be needed in Ukraine. In recent years the ultra-nationalist end of Ukrainian politics, with deep roots in the fascist and indeed pro-Nazi Ukrainian past, seems to have gained strength in a new alliance with ultra-interventionist forces in the United States. One consequence, among others, was the disappearance of Minsk from the Ukrainian political agenda. A prominent exponent of the Ukrainian ultra-right is the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, mentioned above, who let it be known in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine that for him, someone like Navalny was exactly the same as Putin when it comes to Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign nation-state. Asked what he would say to his Russian friends, he denied having any, indeed having had any at any time in his life, as Russians are by nature out to extinguish the Ukrainian people.

Melnyk’s political family goes back to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the interwar years and under the German occupation, with which its leaders collaborated until they discovered that the Nazis really didn’t distinguish between Russians and Ukrainians when it came to killing and enslaving people. The OUN was led by two men, one Andrij Melnyk (same name as the ambassador) and one Stepan Bandera, the latter to the extent possible somewhat to the right of the former. Both are reported to have committed war crimes under German license, Bandera as police chief, appointed by the Nazis, in Lviv (Lemberg). Later Bandera was pushed aside by the Germans and put under house arrest, like other local fascists elsewhere. (The Nazis didn’t believe in federalism.) After the war, the Soviet Union restored, Bandera moved to Munich, the postwar capital of a host of Eastern European collaborators, among them the Croatian Ustasha. There he was in 1959 assassinated by a Soviet agent, having been sentenced to death by a Soviet court. Melnyk also ended up in Germany and died in the 1970s in a hospital in Cologne.

Today’s Melnyk calls Bandera his ‘hero’. In 2015, shortly after being appointed ambassador, he visited his grave in Munich where he laid down flowers, reporting on the visit on Twitter. This drew a formal reproach from the German foreign ministry, headed at the time by none other than Steinmeier. Melnyk also came out publicly in support of the so-called Azov Battalion, an armed paramilitary group in Ukraine, founded in 2014, which is generally considered the military branch of the country’s several neofascist movements. It is not quite clear to the non-specialist how much influence Melnyk’s political current has in the government of Ukraine today. There certainly are also other currents in the governing coalition; whether their influence will further decline or, to the contrary, increase as the war drags on appears hard to predict at this point. Nationalist movements sometimes dream of a nation rising out of the death on the battlefield of the best of its sons, a new or resurrected nation welded together by heroic sacrifice. To the extent that Ukraine is governed by political forces of this kind, supported from the outside by a United States eager to let the Ukrainian war last, it is hard to see how and when the bloodshed should end, other than by the enemy either capitulating or reaching for his nuclear gun.

Ukrainian politics apart, an American proxy war for Ukraine may force Russia into a close relationship of dependence on Beijing, securing China a captive Eurasian ally and giving it assured access to Russian resources, at bargain prices as the West would no longer compete for them. Russia, in turn, could benefit from Chinese technology, to the extent that it would be made available. At first glance, an alliance like this might appear to be contrary to the geostrategic interests of the United States. It would, however, come with an equally close, and equally asymmetrical, American-dominated alliance between the United States and Western Europe, one that would keep Germany under control and suppress French aspirations for ‘European sovereignty’. Very likely, what Europe can deliver to the United States would exceed what Russia can deliver to China, so that a loss of Russia to China would be more than compensated by the gains from a tightening of American hegemony over Western Europe. A proxy war in Ukraine could thus be attractive to a United States seeking to build a global alliance for its imminent battle with China over the next New World Order, monopolar or bipolar in old or new ways, to be fought out in coming years, after the end of the end of history.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Matrix of War’, NLR 133/134.