West Germany’s Migrant Wildcat Strikes

Fifty years ago, diverse groups of workers began to connect anti-racism and class struggle


AUTHOR
Efsun Kızılay
Striking Turkish workers at the Ford factory in Cologne-Niehl, 29 August 1973. The wildcat strike was triggered by the firing of 300 workers who returned home from vacation behind schedule, but in reality, it was about a lot more than that.

Photo: picture alliance / UPI

Germany has seen a number of scandals and debates over the working conditions facing migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in recent years. Hundreds of thousands travel to Germany each year to harvest vegetables, drive lorries, or work in factories. They generally are not represented by trade unions and earn less than their German colleagues. And frequently, they fight back, like the group of Georgian and Uzbek lorry drivers who, in early summer of this year, went on a wildcat strike after their employer refused to hand over their hard-earned wages.

Efsun Kızılay works on migration at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Yet poor working conditions for migrant workers in Germany is not a new phenomenon. These conditions have a long history — as do the struggles against them. Workers began protesting against unfair and inhumane conditions early on, demanding better working and living conditions as well as fair wages. They took labour disputes into their own hands, often carrying out wildcat strikes, independent of works councils, and in conjunction with struggles against racism and social marginalization.

These struggles first came to a head about 50 years ago, in the summer of 1973, when migrant workers in West Germany took a stand against over-exploitation and discrimination. To this day, their example continues to offer lessons on how anti-racism and class struggle can linked together.

West Germany’s Labour Agreements

West Germany’s expanding post-war economy faced a labour shortage that the federal government decided to combat through labour agreements with other countries. These were concluded in 1955 with Italy, in 1960 with Spain and Greece, in 1961 with Turkey, in 1963 with Morocco, in 1964 with Portugal, in 1965 with Tunisia, and in 1967 with Yugoslavia. These agreements, undertaken as the most cost-effective solution, did not anticipate the permanent presence in Germany of the workers they recruited; for this reason, they were labelled “guest workers”.

These guest workers were assigned primarily to “low-skill” jobs, often as contract workers on assembly lines, in construction, or in coal mines. The increasing affluence throughout all levels of West German society in the wake of World War II, known as the Fahrstuhleffekt (“elevator effect”), led to migrant workers’ being employed at the lower end of the hierarchy while Germans were able to ascend to higher-level occupations. The discrepancy between the two groups of workers was also apparent in their wages, which often diverged wildly.

The struggle over limitations on residence permits was successfully connected to the struggle over better housing conditions and industrial struggles and strikes, and a new anti-racist moment was born.

Resistance to poor and unfair working conditions began to grow among migrant workers. They began to unionize and take part in workplace demonstrations. Out of roughly 2 million migrant workers at the beginning of the 1970s, about one quarter were unionized. Many of these workers possessed a strong political consciousness. They came mostly from countries that were experiencing radical political upheavals. Greece, Portugal, and Spain had dictatorships until the mid-1970s, Turkey in the 1970s had a strong labour movement with countless strikes, and some of the workers arriving in Germany came from socialist Yugoslavia.

Workers from Greece organized resistance to the military junta from Germany, while workers from Turkey, where unions suffered state repression, started unions in Germany. From Italy, where the Communist Party was the second-largest party in parliament, workers brought extensive strike experience with them to Germany. In this way, migrant workers attempted to channel experiences from their countries of origin into labour struggles through union activity.

The Role of Unions and Autonomous Resistance

The existing trade unions initially perceived the recruited guest workers primarily as a new source of competition. This explains their reticence when it came to questions of being committed to and representing migrant workers. Since many migrant workers did not feel represented by the unions, between 1950 and 1970 they organized countless autonomous wildcat strikes independent of the unions. These wildcat strikes resulted both in schisms between German and migrant workers and successful solidarity-building between the groups.

Germans frequently met migrant workers with mistrust and scepticism. Many of the predominantly German works councils and trade unions refused to support migrants in labour disputes — their advancement within their companies was, after all, predicated on the fact that migrant workers would fill the lower ranks of company hierarchies. While German workers and unions were more interested in preserving company structures and so lent them their support, migrants frequently fought for changes to these structures and against their own exclusion. They criticized both racist conditions within the companies and poor housing conditions.

Their dissatisfaction eventually culminated in the waves of strikes that occurred in 1973. According to the editorial collective express, at least 275,000 workers at approximately 335 companies went on strike that year, spontaneously and independent of the unions. Spanish and Portuguese workers at the auto body manufacturer Karmann in Osnabrück, many of them women, stopped work to demand flexible working hours. Striking workers at John Deere in Mannheim were verbally berated and forced to protect themselves from physical attacks.

Although workers appealed to their employers primarily with demands for higher wages, they grew increasingly critical of the capitalistic structure of work as well. Workers at Valvo, a valve manufacturer in Aachen, and at the Hella automotive plant in Lippstadt, for example, demonstrated for a cost-of-living bonus and against wage discrepancies between German and migrant workers. The Lippstadt works council had previously won a cost-of-living bonus, but exclusively for German workers. Despite the fact that migrants included German workers in their demands, Germans rarely showed solidarity in migrant labour disputes. The Lippstadt Multinational Committee, which formed after the strike, openly opposed the company’s racist structures:

We are Greeks, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians; but regardless of our nationalities, we are all workers and we all face the same problems — or does the conveyor belt move faster for the Greek than for the German? We will not give management the satisfaction of seeing us divided because of the different colour of our hair and eyes.

The cost-of-living bonus was won for all, although in the end it was less than workers had demanded.

Resentment against poor working conditions was growing in many factories, erupting into various forms of resistance and protest. Disappointment spread regarding the restrained behaviour of the unions, and workers eventually refused to let them represent their demands. Two strikes in 1973 were particularly prominent: the women’s strike at automotive supplier Pierburg in Neuss, and the Ford strike in Cologne.

The Strike at Pierburg

The labour dispute at Pierburg took place in August 1973. It was one of the first successful strikes in West Germany against worker classification and compensation practices that discriminated against women.

One crucial element of the strike, and one of the factors that led to its success, was solidarity among the workers. Only a few days into the strike, German women technicians joined in solidarity with striking migrant women to oppose employers’ attempts at intimidation. With the demand of “One More Deutschmark”, 1,800 migrant and 400 German women workers staged an indefinite, spontaneous walkout.

Employers, the media, and even politicians attempted to criminalize the strike. It all began when Greek workers distributed leaflets in various languages calling for a strike. In response, police moved in to arrest the activists. During a scuffle, one police officer threatened them with a drawn pistol and hurled racist insults. As word of the violent, racist dimension of the police’s assault made its way around the factory, a wave of solidarity with the migrant workers immobilized the entire plant.

Fundamentally, labour disputes are always about more than labour disputes.

Despite racist company structures and a repressive management supported by both the press and the police, migrant workers were able to successfully call for solidarity and forge alliances. In doing so, they specifically sought out contact with German workers, for example by going to pubs they often frequented and recounting the racism they had suffered.

The strike was successful: the discriminatory Lohngruppe 2 was abolished, the lowest pay grade to which migrant women workers were assigned, with wages raised by 65 pfennigs per hour. Importantly, there were no lay-offs following the labour dispute.

It is important to mention that Pierburg already had a very active left-wing workers’ association before the strike. Many migrants already belonged to this association, which was in opposition to the works council of the time. In 1972, after years of work, it succeeded in winning more votes in factory-wide elections than the works council.

Members of the association accelerated the pace of their organizing work, regularly distributing information sheets in all the languages spoken in the factory. Multilingual representatives guaranteed the flow of information among workers, and even the workers’ assemblies were multilingual. All these developments and activities contributed to the strike’s success.

The Ford Strike

The best-known strike of 1973 was also carried out in August, at the Ford factory in Cologne’s Niehl district, where, about 11,000 workers from Turkey were employed between 1961 and 1973. They represented the largest “society of [Turkish-born] industrial workers outside of Turkey” and were given almost exclusively “unskilled” jobs. A sharp division therefore developed between these workers and the German workforce, who were mostly employed in better positions. The employment structure was based on a hybrid system in which migrant workers had to perform worse jobs, received worse pay, and could even be fired more easily than their German colleagues.

The catalyst for the strike was the firing of 300 workers who had returned late from vacation. But it was really about much more: prior to the firings, migrant workers had compiled lists of signatures petitioning the representatives of IG Metall, Germany’s largest metalworkers’ union, to campaign for a pay rise — yet the list was completely ignored in the next meeting of the workers’ association.

In the end, IG Metall reduced the migrant workers’ demands to a single one: cancelling their collective bargaining agreement. As Serhat Karakayalı writes, “As workers on a conveyor belt, most Turks earned an hourly wage between 7.15 and 8.24 marks, while Germans, as skilled labourers, earned between 8.98 and 10.59 marks.”

One week before the strike, a workers’ assembly took place at which the Turkish workers showed solidarity with those who had been laid off, while the majority of their German colleagues greeted the lay-offs and disciplinary actions with applause. When, in addition, the extra work resulting from the lay-offs was to be passed on to the remaining workers, their growing discontent was given voice through a train of protestors marching through the entire factory on 24 August 1973.

The subsequent strike lasted for seven days. More than half of the 33,000 employees took part, primarily Turks, although some German and Italian workers also supported the strike. The strikers’ demands were as follows: “decrease in conveyor belt speeds, reduction of the pace of work, better working conditions, six weeks of vacation, one more Deutschmark for all, the reinstatement of all those fired, and payment for striking hours”.

In the meantime, the works council was in unsuccessful talks with company management. When it then announced, “referencing industrial relations law and the ban on industrial action specified in the collective agreement”, that it would not support the strike, the works council forfeited any legitimacy it had in representing the interests of migrant workers. The union subsequently pursued a policy of division, which it shored up with demonstrations of its own. As a result, many German workers broke off and sided with the union. An alliance of trade union representatives, company management, press, city government, and police agitated against the striking migrant workers.


Migrant workers took their struggles into their own hands and, as political subjects, resisted the working and living conditions imposed upon them.

One week after the strike began, company management decided to use all available means to end it. During a counter-demonstration by German workers, management called in the police, who cracked down violently on the strikers and arrested their supposed ringleader. Baha Targün, spokesperson for the strike committee, was deported to Turkey. Management laid off 100 Turkish workers without notice, putting pressure on a further 600 to “convert [their] termination without notice to ‘voluntary’ termination”.

The works council did not object to any of these lay-offs. According to historian Jörg Huwer, “In the suppression of the strike, German workers’ anger erupted over the fact that Turkish migrants had, for a short time, been able to take control of their workplace.” Günter Piening explains:


At Ford, it was about “one more Deutschmark” … but at the same time, any halfway serious analysis shows that the great strike of August 1973 addressed all the conditions of life — including living quarters, the health problems caused by the work, and how you can keep in touch with family and friends when you have rotating shifts and just a few weeks of vacation. Fundamentally, labour disputes are always about more than labour disputes.

Beyond the Strike

Unfair, discriminatory structures were denounced outside of factories as well. Countless “multinational centres”, where migrants organized into work and cultural associations, formed across West Germany in those years. Migrants demanded the right to vote and protested police brutality and media attacks. As migration scholar Manuela Bojadžijev argues:

Migrants’ self-organized struggles against racist working and living conditions in Germany should therefore not be seen as single-issue movements. They connected the legal, political, and economic aspects of oppression and exploitation. They expanded narrow perspectives on labour struggles to encompass the entirety of the migrants’ experience, everyday life, language and culture, and no less importantly to housing conditions, which constituted the crucial focal point of migrant struggle alongside the factory.

The phenomenon of migrant workers’ strikes was of interest not only to the public, but also to the majority of those in the “old” and “new” Left. Huwer argues that their agitation and organization began to focus increasingly on migrant workers, “in [whose] life circumstances a new level of capitalist exploitation was to be seen, and at the same time the seeds of active resistance. In the eyes of the press, they filled the gap left by the unions, which had not yet succeeded in incorporating foreign workers into West Germany’s social partnership system of industrial relations.”

Structures of solidarity could therefore also be built with left-wing organizations. The Proletarische Front (Proletarian Front) in Hamburg and Bremen, the Arbeiterkampf (Workers’ Struggle) in Cologne, the Revolutionärer Kampf(Revolutionary Struggle) in the Frankfurt Rhein-Main area, and the Arbeitersache (Workers’ Cause) in Munich developed ideas for “multinational company work”. They had connections to the migrant organizations within companies as well as to autonomous migrant organizations, and migrant and student milieus drew closer to each other.

Migrant workers at steel manufacturer VDM in Frankfurt and at auto manufacturer Opel in Rüsselsheim stormed the German-dominated works council meeting with the slogan (developed by the Revolutionärer Kampf) “One Deutschmark for all!”. During housing struggles in Frankfurt, in which residents — a majority of them migrants — protested displacement and poor housing conditions, banners were also hung addressing poor working conditions. Karakayalı explains: “With the slogan ‘Fiat-Opel-Autobianchi die padroni siamo stanchi!’ (We’re tired of those tossers, the Fiat-Opel-Autobianchi bosses!), they also took on the capitalist instrumentalizing of migration.” The struggle over limitations on residence permits was successfully connected to the struggle over better housing conditions and industrial struggles and strikes, and a new anti-racist moment was born.

In this way, migrant workers took their struggles into their own hands and, as political subjects, resisted the working and living conditions imposed upon them.

Translated by Anna Dinwoodie and Marty Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.

Rosa Luxemburg Was the Great Theorist of Democratic Revolution

The latest volume of her Complete Works provides a unique perspective on her political thought

AUTHOR
Peter Hudis



Generations of socialist thinkers and activists have grappled with the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet there are many surprises still in store for those interested in her legacy, as seen in the recent publication of Volume Four of the English-language Complete Works. Along with the previously published Volume Three, the new collection brings together her writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution, one of the most important social upheavals of modern times.

Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and the General Editor of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

This article first appeared in Jacobin.

Luxemburg’s analysis of 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions is already well-known (and appears in Volume Four in a new translation). However, more than four-fifths of the material in the new volume, covering the period from 1906 to 1909, is appearing in English for the first time. Most of her writings that were originally composed in Polish — about half of the volume’s 550 pages — have never appeared in any other language.

Learning to Speak Russian

Luxemburg, like most Marxists of her generation (as well as Karl Marx himself) held that a democratic republic with universal suffrage was the formation best suited for waging the class struggle to a successful conclusion. Like many of her contemporaries in the Second International, she saw no contradiction between fighting for democratic reforms within capitalism while reaching for a revolutionary transformation that would abolish capitalism — even as she relentlessly battled those who separated the two.

In doing so, Luxemburg distinguished between forms of struggle employed in “peaceful” as against those used in revolutionary periods. The aim in both scenarios was to enhance the consciousness and power of the working class. However, “in peacetime, this struggle takes place within the framework of the rule of the bourgeoisie”, which required that the movement operate “within the bounds of the existing laws governing elections, assemblies, the press”, trade unions, etc.

Luxemburg referred to this as “a sort of iron cage in which the class struggle of the proletariat must take place”. Hence, mass struggles in such periods “only very seldom attain positive results”. A revolutionary phase was very different, she argued:

Times of revolution rend the cage of “legality” open like pent-up steam splitting its kettle, letting class struggle break out into the open, naked and unencumbered ... the consciousness and political power [of the proletariat] emerge during revolution without having been warped by, tied down to, and overpowered by the “laws” of bourgeois society.

For Luxemburg, the activity and reason of the masses during the 1905 Revolution, in which millions engaged in mass strikes aimed at bringing down the tsarist regime, was a clear example of such a moment. As she wrote in early 1906: “With the Russian Revolution, the almost-sixty-year period of quiet parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie comes to a close.” The time had come for the socialist movement in Western Europe to begin to “speak Russian” by incorporating the mass strike into its political and organizational perspectives:

Social Democratic tactics, as employed by the working class in Germany today and to which we owe our victories up until now, is oriented primarily toward parliamentary struggle, it is designed for the context of bourgeois parliamentarianism. Russian Social Democracy is the first to whom the hard but honourable lot has fallen of using the foundations of Marx’s teaching, not in a time of the correct, calm parliamentary course of state life, but in a tumultuous revolutionary period.
Immediate Tasks

In the years since Luxemburg penned these words, numerous commentators have praised her efforts to push the rather staid social democratic parties in a more revolutionary direction, while others have criticized Luxemburg’s perspective on the grounds that it downplays the stark differences between the absolutist regime in Russia and Western liberal democracies. There are several points worth noting in this context.

Firstly, Luxemburg held that the mass strike “is and will remain a powerful weapon of workers’ struggle”, but went on to stress that it was “only that, a weapon, whose use and effectiveness always depend on the environment, the given conditions, and the moment of struggle”. Secondly, she held that the Russian proletariat was “not setting itself utopian or unreachable goals, like the immediate realization of socialism: the only possible and historically necessary goal is to establish a democratic republic and an eight-hour workday”.

In Luxemburg’s view, socialism could not be on the immediate agenda in Russia for two main reasons: the working class at the time constituted only a small minority of the populace of the Russian Empire (less than 15 percent), and it was impossible for socialism to exist in a single country:

The socialist revolution can only be a result of international revolution, and the results that the proletariat in Russia will be able to achieve in the current revolution will depend, to say nothing of the level of social development in Russia, on the level and form of development that class relations and proletarian operations in other capitalist countries will have achieved by that time.

In a lengthy essay addressed to the Polish workers’ movement, she further developed this point:

In its current state, the working class is not yet ready to accomplish the great tasks that await it. The working class of all capitalist countries must first internalize the aspiration to socialism; an enormous number of people have yet to arrive at an awareness of their class interests ... When Social Democracy has a majority of the working people behind it in all the largest capitalist countries, the final hour of capitalism will have struck.

A Workers’ Revolution

However, this did not mean that the Russian Revolution would be confined to a liberal or bourgeois framework. Much like Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik current — and in direct opposition to their Menshevik rivals — Luxemburg held that the immediate task facing revolutionaries in the Russian Empire was the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class. Since the liberal bourgeoise was too weak and compromised to lead the revolution, “the proletariat had to become the only fighter and defender of the democratic forms of a bourgeois state”.

She stressed that conditions in Russia today were not like those existing in nineteenth-century France:

The Russian proletariat fights first for bourgeois freedom, for universal suffrage, the republic, the law of associations, freedom of the press, etc., but it does not fight with the illusions that filled the [French] proletariat of 1848. It fights for [such] liberties in order to instrumentalize them as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.

She further expanded on this point elsewhere:

The bourgeois revolution in Russia and Poland is not the work of the bourgeoisie, as in Germany and France in days gone by, but the working class, and a class already highly conscious of its labour interests at that — a working class that seeks political freedoms not so that the bourgeoisie may benefit, but just the opposite, so that the working class may resolve its class struggle with the bourgeoisie and thereby hasten the victory of socialism. That is why the current revolution is simultaneously a workers’ revolution. That is also why, in this revolution, the battle against absolutism goes hand in hand — must go hand in hand — with the battle against capital, with exploitation. And why economic strikes are in fact quite nearly inseparable in this revolution from political strikes.

Luxemburg consistently upheld the need for majority support from the exploited masses in achieving any transition to socialism, including those pertaining to freedom struggles in the technologically developed capitalist lands. As she later wrote in December 1918, on behalf of the group she led during the German Revolution: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League.”

One Step Forward

Luxemburg’s perspective on the 1905 Russian Revolution raises a host of questions, which relate to the problems faced by revolutionary regimes in the non-Western world in the decades following her death. How can the working class maintain power in a democratic republic after the overthrow of the old regime if it represents only a minority of the populace? How can it do so if, as she claims, “Social Democracy finds only the autonomous class politics of the proletariat to be reliable” — since the hunger of the peasants for landed private property presumably puts them at odds with it? And how is it possible for such a democratic republic under the control of the proletariat to be sustained if revolutions do not occur in other countries that can come to its aid?

Luxemburg addressed these questions in a remarkable essay written in Polish in 1908, “Lessons of the Three Dumas,” which has never previously appeared in English. By 1908, the situation in Russia had radically changed since the revolution was by then defeated. She surveyed the course of its development, encouraging Marxists to “redouble their commitment to subjecting every detail of their tactics to rigorous self-criticism.” She did so by evaluating the history of the three Dumas — the parliamentary bodies established in the Russian Empire from 1906 as a concession to the revolution, with a restricted franchise that became progressively more biased in favour of the upper classes:

The Third Duma has shown — and from this flow its enormous political significance — that a parliamentary system that has not first overthrown the government, that has not achieved political power through revolution, not only cannot defeat the old power (a belief the First Duma vainly held), not only cannot hold its own against that power as an instrument of opposition (as the Second Duma tried to do), but can and must become, on the contrary, an instrument of the counterrevolution.

She proceeded to look ahead in thinking about the possible fate of a future revolution that, unlike the one in 1905, did succeed in overthrowing the old regime:

If the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were to gain political power, however temporarily, that would provide enormous encouragement to the international class struggle. That is why the working class in Poland and in Russia can and must strive to seize power with full consciousness. Because once workers have power, they can not only carry out the tasks of the current revolution directly — realizing political freedom across the Russian state — but also establish the eight-hour workday, upend agrarian relations, and in a word, materialize every aspect of their program, delivering the heaviest blows they can to bourgeois rule and in this way hastening its international overthrow.

Revolutionary Realism

Yet the question remained: How could the workers maintain themselves in power in a democratic republic over the long haul if they constituted a minority of the populace? Luxemburg’s answer was that they could not — and yet the effort would still be worth it:

The revolution’s bourgeois character finds expression in the inability of the proletariat to stay in power, in the inevitable removal of the proletariat from power by a counterrevolutionary operation of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners, the petty bourgeoisie, and the greater part of the peasantry. It may be that in the end, after the proletariat is overthrown, the republic will disappear and be followed by the long rule of a highly restrained constitutional monarchy. It may very well be. But the relations of classes in Russia are now such that the path to even a moderate monarchical constitution leads through revolutionary action and the dictatorship of a republican proletariat.

Shortly before writing this, in an address to a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, she made the following remarks:

I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag. To the contrary, not only do I not mean to promise the Russian proletariat a sequence of certain victories; I think, rather, that if the working class, being faithful to its historical duty, continues to grow and execute its tactics of struggle consistent with the unfolding contradictions and the ever-broader horizons of the revolution, then it could wind up in quite complicated and difficult circumstances ... But I think that the Russian proletariat must have the courage and resolve to face everything prepared for it by historical developments, that it should, if it has to, even at the cost of sacrifices, play the role of the vanguard in this revolution in relation to the global army of the proletariat, the vanguard that discloses new contradictions, new tasks, and new paths for class struggle, as the French proletariat did in the nineteenth century.

She did not shy away from acknowledging the implications of this argument:

Revolution in this conception would bring the proletariat losses as well as victories. Yet by no other road can the entire international proletariat march to its final victory. We must propose the socialist revolution not as a sudden leap, finished in twenty-four hours, but as a historical period, perhaps long, of turbulent class struggle, with breaks both brief and extended.

This was a remarkable expression of revolutionary realism. Luxemburg was fully aware that even a democratic republic under the control of the working class — which is how she as well as Marx understood “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — was bound to be forced from power in the absence of an international revolution, especially in a country where the working class constituted a minority. And yet, even though the revolution would therefore have “failed” from at least one point of view, it would have produced important social transformations, providing the intellectual sediment from which a future uprooting of capitalism could arise.

In short, Luxemburg did not think that it made sense to sacrifice democracy for the sake of staying in power, since the political form required to achieve the transition to socialism was “thoroughgoing democracy”. If a nondemocratic regime stayed in power, the transition to socialism would become impossible, since the working class would be left without the means and training to exercise power on its own behalf. Yet on the other hand, if a proletarian democracy existed even for a brief period of time, it could help inspire a later transition to socialism.

Self-Examination

This argument speaks to what would unfold a decade later, when tsarism was finally overthrown in the February 1917 Revolution, followed in short order by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of the same year. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fully aware at the time that the material conditions did not permit the immediate creation of a socialist society, even as they proclaimed the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was why Lenin worked so hard to foster proletarian revolutions in Western Europe.

However, two fundamental issues separated Lenin’s approach from that of Luxemburg. Firstly, his regime did not take the form of a democratic republic, as seen in its suppression of political liberties — a development that Luxemburg sharply opposed in her 1918 critique of the Russian Revolution. Secondly, Lenin held that once the Bolsheviks seized power, they intended to keep it — permanently. This was very different from Luxemburg’s statement that “the inability of the proletariat to stay in power” would not be the worst outcome, so long as the vision of liberation projected to the world through its creation of a democratic society based on the rule of the working class inspired others to take up the fight against capitalism.

Luxemburg’s position is especially striking because she was fully aware that the bourgeoisie would always resort to violent suppression in the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Indeed, she lost her own life following the defeat of the January 1919 Spartacus League uprising in Berlin, which she initially opposed on the grounds that it lacked sufficient mass support. However, Luxemburg was equally aware that any effort to forge a transition to socialism through nondemocratic means was doomed to fail. In this sense, she anticipated the tragic outcome of many revolutions in the decades following her death.

Whatever one makes of Luxemburg’s reflection on these issues, one thing is clear: she developed a distinctive, though rarely discussed, conception of the transition to socialism (especially for developing societies, which is what the Russian Empire was at the time) that has received far too little attention. The publication of these writings in English will hopefully remedy that neglect.

Although many of Luxemburg’s ideas speak to issues that democratic socialists, anti-imperialists, and feminists are grappling with today, on at least one critical issue, her perspective has not stood the test of time. It is to be found in her oft-repeated insistence: “When the sale of workers’ labour to private exploiters is abolished, the source of all today’s social inequalities will disappear.”

Luxemburg’s contention that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production would provide the basis for ending “every inequality in human society” was not hers alone. Virtually every tendency and theorist of revolutionary social democracy in the Second International shared it, including Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and many others. Yet it is hardly possible to maintain this view today.

Neither the social-democratic welfare states, which sought to limit private property rights, nor the regimes in the USSR, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, which abolished them through the nationalization of property, succeeded in developing a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. A much deeper social transformation that targets not alone private property and “free” markets but most of all the alienated form of human relations that define capitalist modernity is clearly needed.

That is a task for our generation, which can be much aided by returning with new eyes to the humanist implications of Marx’s critique of the logic of capital. This entails a critical re-evaluation of the meaning of socialism that may not have been on the agenda in Luxemburg’s time, but which the overall spirit of her work surely encourages. As she wrote in 1906:

Self-examination — that is, making oneself aware at every step of the direction, logic, and basis for the class movement itself — is that store from which the working mass draws its strength, again and again, to struggle anew, and by which it understands its own hesitation and defeats as so many proofs of its strength and inevitable future victory.

Can a Few Sparks Light a Fire?

In Hungary, a fledging New Left is rebuilding amidst the ruins of Orbánism


AUTHOR
Áron Rossman-Kiss
Members of the left-wing group Szikra demonstrate against the Orbán government’s plan to bring Chinese Fudan University to Budapest, 5 June 2021

.Photo: IMAGO / EST&OST


On a warm morning in June this year, a small group made its way through the streets of Tatabánya, a midsize post-industrial town an hour northwest of Budapest. They were in a hurry — the eviction was scheduled for 11:00.

Áron Rossman-Kiss is a Budapest-based researcher, artist, and activist in Szikra, a left-ecological political movement in Hungary.

They reached the flat, two scruffy rooms on the second floor with enough time to talk things through with the tenant, Erzsébet, put their backpacks in a corner, post a handmade slogan on the door that read “A HOME FOR EVERYONE”, and form two short rows in front of the entrance. Then, they waited for the police to show up who would probably, inevitably, remove them one by one, seal the door, and leave Erzsébet on the streets. A middle-aged woman, she had lived in the flat since the 1990s and fallen into arrears in the past years. These days, she worked as a cleaner.

“There’s little chance we’ll succeed — five percent, tops”, the activist in charge of the action explained. The municipality would simply not budge, despite attempts to find a solution by advocacy groups, politicians, and charities in the previous days.

The group formed two rows in front of the entrance. Shortly after 11:00, a man walked up the stairs with an assistant carrying a drill. Bailiffs? The group jeered and took photos. Policemen walked halfway up the stairs a few times, waited downstairs, and fined a driver who had illegally parked. A woman carrying a document stopped in the hallway. Intermittently, a member of the group livestreamed the scene. They made calls. Hours passed.

Soon after, the news came through back-channels, first tentative, and still hesitant when it became official: the human chain had worked. The eviction was deferred.
A Snapshot of Modern Hungary

The group that stopped the eviction on that day was formed of members of Budapest-based housing rights group The City is For All (AVM), activists affiliated with Párbeszéd (“Dialogue”), the Green Party, and Szikra (“Spark”), a left-green movement. The livestreaming activist was MP András Jámbor, a Szikra candidate elected to parliament against all odds in April 2022. Successfully halting an eviction remains a rare feat in Orbán’s Hungary, and particularly so outside of Budapest. But besides the outcome, that morning’s circumstances give a clear snapshot of Hungary’s present.

Just like in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, the once state-owned housing stock in Hungary was almost completely privatized following the 1989 regime change. In the absence of political strategy or will — Hungary has not had a housing ministry or unified housing agency in the past 30 years — every crisis immediately ripples through already precarious housing arrangements.

This is particularly true in places like Tatabánya. Although the long downturn of the 1990s hit other regions harder, it still saw the closure of its heavy industry and mining, leaving its inhabitants with much reduced prospects. Much of the middle class that formed in the upturn of the 2010s moved to nearby suburbia. State-funded houses of culture, once central to community life, have closed, educational access stymied, and the population finds itself in steady decline.

As social services have been hollowed-out, falling into debt the way Erzsébet did often becomes an inevitable trap, even more so for those relying on irregular, informal jobs. Living in one of the remaining social housing units should have offered her a layer of protection, particularly in a city that elected an oppositional mayor in 2019. But as in similar municipalities, most of the mayor’s term has been marked by infighting within local opposition ranks, the absence of a social vision, and the incapacity and unwillingness to build a political movement in the face of the unrelenting hostility of the Orbán regime. No wonder a semi-privatized system for debt collection geared towards profit — and intertwined with the highest state authorities — thrives in such a context.

A welfare system catering to the needs of the middle and upper classes, growing inequality, a private-public nexus of greed and cruelty, indebtedness, and emigration all characterize Hungary midway through the fifth Orbán government — together with a largely disoriented and toothless opposition. Stopping the eviction of a single woman might appear like a minor change in such circumstances, but it shows that a handful of resolute activists can make a difference in people’s lives. It is upon such small victories that the Left must build to both inspire and mobilize towards a genuine alternative.
The True Face of Orbánism

Erzsébet’s situation is hardly an anomaly in contemporary Hungary. As we approach the middle of Orbán’s fourth mandate since his return to power (he also served as prime minister between 1998 and 2002), inflation in Hungary is by the far the highest in the EU, nearly double that of the second-highest country. Food prices have risen by over 30 percent. Real wages have been in decline for almost a year, while many companies rack up exceptional profits.

Isolated internationally and in increasingly dire economic straits, Orbán unleashed a stringent pack of austerity measures, raising taxes while slashing most of the meagre social support and subsidies established over the last decade. In the last weeks alone, the government scrapped price caps for designated food products, enacted additional taxes on pharmaceutical goods, massively reduced the capacity of the postal service, and shut down train lines. Moreover, despite a prolonged social movement among teachers throughout the country (a starting teacher’s salary is less than 700 euro), the government’s supermajority voted to end their status as public servants, further pushing the educational sector into precarity. A few weeks after the vote, the government’s spokesperson blamed the country’s poor results in reading comprehension on Roma children.

After 13 years, the Orbán regime reigns less through mobilization than through apathy, arbitrary and centralized decision-making, and the unceasing churning of a media machine controlled by the ruling party. But just as state and party have become inextricably intertwined, state capacity has also been profoundly hollowed out in key sectors such as education, health, and basic infrastructure. Little wonder that the level of COVID-related excess mortality was shocking even in global comparison.


There’s no denying the system’s blatant cronyism and corruption, but no regime can survive on coercion and brainwashing alone. Neither does propaganda produce docile subjects out of thin air.

Indeed, this is the true nature of a regime that has seemingly delighted in the confusion its hybrid nature breeds among commentators, academics, and politicians — friend and foe alike. It is true that the regime’s own propaganda has created a kind of political force field of its own, buoyed by the sycophantic embrace of a far-right international that sees Budapest as a bastion of the West, whiteness, family, and tradition. Moreover, it is also true that a superficial glance at some of its measures — such as the re-nationalization of energy providers and the pension system — could lead to see potential signs of a redistributive or developmentalist agenda. But if Orbán pointedly attending Thatcher’s funeral wasn’t evidence enough, perhaps Hungary’s flat tax system, the hollowing-out of social services, and its draconian anti-labour laws offer some indication of the true political economy of the Orbán regime.

And yet, just as most Hungarians never voted for the sweeping marketization that took place after 1989, opinion surveys consistently confirm that most of the population favours higher state investment in the kinds of social welfare and redistributive policies that are anathema to the government. By now, even an issue such as gay marriage — ardently demonized by the government and its propagandists — is supported by a majority of the population. Despite this, mobilization against Orbán’s Fidesz party has only been sporadic. Many protest movements were unable to catalyse widespread anger and support, or simply reverted to liberal platitudes once their momentum had.

How to explain such a seeming contradiction? Much blame can be attributed to the opposition’s echo chambers. It also is impossible to underestimate the role of censorship and fake news spewed by the government-controlled public media system. Complicit transnational firms and a shift in global industrial policies have been decisive.

Similarly, the EU’s complacency is painfully clear: the European Commission and Council have knowingly postponed the decision to freeze financial transfers until recently, despite the fact that the systematic funnelling of these funds to Orbán’s cronies has been amply documented over the past 14 years. Finally, the first years of the regime also saw a reorganization of the economy that brought material benefits — however precarious and uneven — to a segment of the population that went well beyond a small coterie of insiders.
The Golden Years

Orbán’s first years in office remain crucial to his power. To this day, much of the regime’s legitimacy is built on the memory of the late 2000s (a trauma repeatedly invoked by pro-government media). Hungary’s openness to global flows of capital — once heralded by local elites and international institutions as proof of its development — also meant that the country was extremely vulnerable by the time the 2008 financial crisis came crashing down.

As a nominally Socialist-led government under Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány followed by an unelected “technocrat” enacted harsh austerity measures and wide-scale privatization, hundreds of thousands of citizens lost their jobs, savings, and future prospects. Many defaulted on foreign currency-denominated mortgages and found themselves trapped between squalor and casual jobs, joining the flexible labour market in the EU’s Western core, where an expendable workforce from the East proved essential in maintaining a semblance of normalcy amidst the neoliberal dismantling of state structures.

In the face of the Socialists’ tone-deafness and pressure and deception on the side of international institutions such as the EU and the IMF, social dislocation ensued, exemplified by countless evictions, murders of Roma citizens, and the rise of far-right militias. Fidesz’s “Hungary First” discourse proved unsurprisingly popular in such a context. But this was not merely a question of finding the right narrative: during its years in opposition, the party had effectively built a nationwide movement capable of mobilizing a wide cross-section of a society largely disenchanted with the broken promises of 1989.

For all of Orbán’s political acumen, his party’s rise would not have been possible without a political reorientation among a large section of the Hungarian economic elites. In Poland, a disgruntled comprador class allied with a resurgent nationalist Right in the guise of the Kaczyński brothers’ Law and Justice Party (PiS). In Hungary, Fidesz managed to broker a deal with a national bourgeoisie that felt pushed aside by transnational firms’ dominance over domestic markets, while simultaneously creating a haven for international investors in strategic sectors.

This has led to a two-pronged economy: on the one hand, special economic zones and tax breaks have facilitated a reindustrialization via foreign-owned, export-oriented, low-value added (largely automotive, most often German) industry. While German companies with Hungarian subsidiaries may sometimes pay lip service to liberal democratic norms (for instance, berating the Hungarian government for its homophobic propaganda), German industrial interests are firmly aligned with — and catered to by — the Orbán government. On the other hand, state intervention has facilitated accumulation for the Hungarian bourgeoisie in sectors such as construction, tourism, and banking. In this process, rather than marginalizing the state, increased financialization has led to steeper power verticals, reorienting the state’s overlap with the market.
The Foundations of Fidesz’s Power

After more than a decade in power, Orbán has carved himself an outsized persona in global politics, often removed from the actually existing Hungary his system has created. As such, what happens in the country has reverberations far beyond Hungary itself. This is not only the case for ideological battles — even as the regime’s economic structure unravels, it will certainly remain a key battleground for the future of Europe.

As the EU’s green industrial policy has in effect been largely outsourced to private companies, Hungary has become a key site for the production of electric batteries in recent years. Established through governmental decrees and shrouded in secrecy, they have also been the site of worker abuse and lack of democratic consultation with affected communities. As such, they represent a dire harbinger of what a for-profit “green politics” stripped of accountability, redistributive elements, or wider consideration for ecosystems might bring — and one to which the Left must provide clear and progressive alternatives.


Despite widespread dissatisfaction and the destruction of basic social services, we cannot take the Orbán regime’s demise for granted. In these circumstances, Szikra and the broader Hungarian Left have to offer both concrete forms of resistance and support as well as a long-term political horizon to which they can aspire.

While often justifiably indignant, many critics still dismiss the regime as an authoritarian contraption under which all (bar a closed circle of insiders) are condemned to suffering and silence. Indeed, there’s no denying the system’s blatant cronyism and corruption — the sheer number of childhood and university friends, family members, and grifters of all kinds suddenly elevated to positions of power is staggering, but no regime can survive on coercion and brainwashing alone. Neither does propaganda produce docile subjects out of thin air.

Orbán’s tenure coincided with the release of an extended EU Cohesion Fund and slight but steady growth throughout the bloc. Industry brought jobs. Under the guise of a pro-natalist programme, the government engineered a construction boom (tailored for the middle and upper classes.) The much-vaunted public works system reinforced existing inequalities and offered neither avenues towards education nor integration into the labour market. But in regions entirely abandoned by previous governments and blighted by long-term unemployment, it was often seen as more than nothing. A cap on utility bills proved immensely popular — even if investment in retrofitting or renewable energy communities would have provided similar savings in the long run (and could not have been terminated from one day to the next with the stroke of a pen).

As the EU’s financial transfers and indolence facilitated the regime’s entrenchment, these political successes were endlessly trumpeted in an increasingly centralized public media system. The dissonance between official propaganda and everyday reality was often adeptly highlighted by the far right, all the while the government curtailed the right to strike and demonized even the mildest social measures. Crucially, this status quo was never subjected to a serious challenge from the Left.
Sparks of Hope on the Left

Under Orbán, the once-dominant Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), which facilitated widespread marketization and deindustrialization throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, has seen its base wiped out as it ambles aimlessly to the rhythm of defections and ideological disarray. The two fratricidal green-liberal parties, Hungary’s Green Party (LMP) and Párbeszéd, never formulated coherent political platforms, and years of infighting have left them both in tatters. The strongest opposition party today thus remains none other than former PM Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition (DK). After losing four general elections in a row, he has seemingly settled with attempting to rule over the opposition instead.

In a cruel twist, the electoral system devised by Fidesz has de facto forced all these parties — including the arch-liberal Momentum and reformed (but not repentant) far-right party Jobbik — to collaborate in order to have any chance of challenging the ruling party. Confusion was inevitable: during the spring 2022 general elections, the united opposition’s programme did contain a few socially minded proposals, but it was headed by a conservative candidate who all but disavowed them, professed admiration for Orbán’s flat tax, and singled out corruption as the only reason for Hungary’s woes. The electoral results were, perhaps predictably, abysmal.

If, a few exceptions aside, the Left has made only little electoral inroads in Hungary during the past decade, a lively left-wing scene has nevertheless emerged. Still small, Budapest-centric, and inevitably beset by fierce disagreement, it has nevertheless contributed to broadening the terms and possibilities of political imagination.

Mérce, an online news portal, offers invaluable reporting and commentary from a variety of critical and left-wing perspectives. The openly left-wing YouTube channel Partizán has emerged as one of the most important media organs in the country. Institutions and initiatives such as the Solidarity Economy Centre (SZGK), Periféria Központ, Helyzet Műhely (Working Group for Public Sociology) or Közélet Iskolája (School for Public Life) do tireless work, organizing, and research. Gólya Cooperative and Auróra are two community centres that offer precious space and opportunities for a variety of progressive initiatives. AVM has effectively empowered homeless people alongside allied activists as part of the struggle for just housing. And while trade unions are historically weak and hopelessly divided, strong individual voices have emerged from the labour movement in recent years as well.

Szikra emerged from this milieu, but in contrast to the wholesale rejection of institutional politics professed by many on the Hungarian Left, its members have always seen it as a necessary terrain of engagement — however fraught, hostile, and hollowed-out. Its forerunner, Szabad Budapest, supported left-of-centre candidates in municipal elections in 2019, including the current Mayor of Budapest Gergely Karácsony. The movement was officially formed as Szikra in 2020.

During a lull in COVID lockdowns, it organized one of the most significant demonstrations of the past few years, a protest against the planned building of a local branch of the Chinese state-run Fudan University. But whereas much of the mainstream opposition’s criticism resorted to hackneyed racism and orientalist clichés, Szikra instead used the case to place the question of housing at the centre of a public debate, as the campus was to be built on the location of long-planned and acutely needed student dorms. The construction of the campus has since been indefinitely put on hold.
The Long March through the Institutions

In the opposition primaries of autumn 2021, Szikra nominated András Jámbor, the founder and former editor-in-chief of Mérce, as its candidate in Budapest’s XIII–IV district, the poorest and most unequal part of the inner city. Raised by a social worker single mother, Jámbor built a campaign focused on solutions to local inequalities, the housing crisis, and tensions caused by creeping gentrification. Running on an openly left-wing platform, he roundly defeated his opponents in the primary.

In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the government poured an extraordinary amount of resources into the district, which had been a stronghold of Fidesz potentate Máté Kocsis, amplifying its disinformation campaign, routinely harassing volunteers, and tearing down Jámbor’s electoral placards. And yet, the campaign managed to mobilize the largest number of volunteers in a single district in all of the country. On the very night when Orbán raked in his fourth supermajority in a row, Jámbor flipped the district by a decisive margin, showing that the Left could still resonate, mobilize, and inspire in Hungary today.


In the face of mounting pressure, Szikra has not backed down.

Being an MP in a regime that has effectively hollowed out parliamentary deliberation brings with it a series of conundrums. In this context, Jámbor has used the visibility offered by his position to tirelessly raise issues related to the cost of living crisis, social injustice, and labour struggles, quickly becoming one of the most recognizable faces of the opposition. But his work has also gone beyond such interventions, whether in decisively vouching for the inclusion of pre-paid utility meters (used predominantly in social housing) into the new utility cost regulations, or in implementing a household energy assistance programme in his district.

Because participation in institutional politics allows access to visibility and funds otherwise inaccessible, Szikra will also field candidates for the 2024 municipal elections both in Budapest and smaller cities. But gaining electoral representation cannot be an end in itself. In a country where the alienation wrought by politics has been essential to Fidesz’s grip on power, Szikra has sought to build a political community that can offer support and socializing opportunities for its members alongside concrete forms of action.

Structured around a strong mentorship programme, the several-hundred-member-strong movement organizes a host of educational activities and events both internal and open to all. In parallel to street actions that highlight social injustices, it also seeks to collaborate with other social movements, trade unions, and civic initiatives. This spring, it co-organized a day-long May Day programme together with SZEF, one of the independent trade union federations. Since then, it organized a campaign denouncing the racketeering system of debt collection. Municipal campaigns are gradually gathering strength.
Rebuilding a Shared Sense of Hope

As the contemporary examples of Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey show, autocratic regimes can continue well after the social contracts that constituted their foundation collapse. Indeed, against the backdrop of unprecedented climate breakdown and the unravelling of liberal democracies, perhaps such death spirals are becoming the norm.

Despite widespread dissatisfaction and the destruction of basic social services, we cannot take the Orbán regime’s demise for granted. In these circumstances, Szikra and the broader Hungarian Left have to offer both concrete forms of resistance and support as well as a long-term political horizon to which they can aspire. Going forward, the challenge for the movement will be one shared by left-wing movements worldwide: mobilizing a largely non-union labour force, meaningfully repoliticizing a hollowed-out public sphere, offering concrete solutions and networks of solidarity that go beyond reactive acts of resistance, and creating institutions capable of pushing for an inclusive green transition built around and for communities. It’s a difficult but necessary task. One that necessitates day-to-day, often tedious work, the rebuilding of trust and of a shared sense of hope.

Meanwhile, faced with multiple crises (many of its own making), an increasingly erratic and vindictive Orbán regime is increasingly clamping down on any form of dissent. In early August, two weeks before Szikra’s annual summer camp, the venue caved into political pressure and cancelled the event. A few months earlier, a 42-year-old woman active in the movement was imprisoned on bogus charges for two weeks in the aftermath of incidents surrounding a tacitly approved neo-Nazi march.

The march marked the escalation of a coordinated campaign against the movement and András Jámbor, which has relied on the full force of state-controlled media to smear the organization as violent, foreign-backed, and even paedophilic. These are no idle threats coming from a government whose use of the Pegasus software against journalists and opposition has been amply documented, that directly controls courts and has a proven record in whipping up hateful hysteria. The direct line between open threats professed in parliament and a death threat received shortly thereafter should be clear to all.

And yet, in the face of mounting pressure, Szikra has not backed down. As it was being ceaselessly maligned through the regime’s loudspeakers, its activists made their way to Tatabánya on a June morning. They stopped an eviction. In the next weeks, the movement’s campaign gathered enough money to pay off a substantial amount of Erzsébet’s debts. It looks like she’ll be able to keep her home, as we all should be able to.

Meta’s Tussle with Canada Isn’t Over Principle, or Even Profit: It’s About Control

International attention is clearly part of the plan: the company wants to make an example of Canada.

Blayne Haggart
September 6, 2023

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves federal court after attending the Facebook parent company’s defence of its acquisition of virtual reality app developer Within Inc., December 20, 2022. 

(Laure Andrillon/REUTERS)


Meta’s ongoing (as of this writing) blocking of news media on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, in response to the federal government’s passage of the Online News Act, has garnered international attention. Many other countries are considering passing a version of the act, itself modelled on an Australian law, that would, like Canada’s, require large social media and search engines that are “digital news intermediaries” to negotiate payments to these news companies. And Meta’s consistent refusal to lift its blockade to help Canadians deal with the worst forest fires in our history has only supercharged international attention.

For Meta, international attention is part of the plan. The company clearly wants to make an example of Canada to the rest of the world: this is what happens when a democratic country that isn’t a global or economic superpower tries to regulate it in ways it doesn’t like. The lesson: We can hurt you. Regulate us and we will.

But that’s not the only — or even the most important — lesson to be drawn from this attempted coercion. Recognizing those other lessons requires understanding what is actually happening, and why.

The what is straightforward: Meta (and Google, waiting in the wings) has spent the past two decades deliberately and successfully establishing itself as essential information infrastructure, a macrointermediary (a more precise term than “platform”) between its users and suppliers, on which Canadians are now dependent. Meta’s news blockade is the private sector equivalent of an authoritarian state internet shutdown, if somewhat (but not completely) more targeted: a blackout of vital communication infrastructure in order to crush dissent. The latter, in this case, stems from the democratically elected representatives of the Canadian people in the form of the Online News Act, which treats Meta and Google as essential infrastructure, and regulates accordingly.

Once one understands this, the why also becomes clear. It’s not about a principle, or even money. Meta is calling the question of whether democratic governments are able to control these transnational companies and subject them to the rule of law in the public interest, or whether they are a law unto themselves. This action has implications not only for the funding of news media, but for any law the company deems not in its interest.

Lesson One: Close the Loopholes, Get Ready for a Fight

Technically, Meta is exploiting what it sees as a loophole in the Online News Act, which regulates “digital news intermediaries.” The reasoning, as University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, the foremost exponent of this approach, highlights in his many posts on the topic, goes as follows: If Meta kicks all news off its services, it’s no longer a news intermediary and not subject to the law.

This strategy is likely a big reason why the company has refused pleas to allow Canadians affected by the forest fires in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia to access news sources via their network — something Geist has also defended as consistent with the law.

Putting aside the obvious immorality of refusing to help — in fact, withdrawing help from — people in need, the fact that Canadians are begging Meta to restore news access shows how the company’s pretense that it is not a news intermediary, and therefore not subject to this law, is risible. Facebook has spent the past two decades marketing itself as the everything app. Its Free Basics plan is designed to persuade people in developing countries to see Facebook and its “walled garden” partners as equivalent to the internet. In 2019, the company attempted to launch its own currency, again, to bring ever more of the world under its umbrella.

The story is no different in news. Some 45 percent of Canadians cite social media as their “go-to place for news.” On the supply side, for the past decade Meta has positioned itself explicitly as a medium (i.e., an intermediary) for “ideas and news,” and had made a big show of supporting “a healthy news ecosystem,” funding “dozens of news publishers,” although it has since cancelled a program funding local reporters to protest the law and indicated its other programs “could be at risk.”

Online search engines are even more important to how we find and access information. In Canada, Google remains the only game in town, accounting for 92 percent of searches.

Of course these are digital news intermediaries. If it walks like a news intermediary and quacks like a news intermediary, it’s a news intermediary. They've assumed the power; now, they rebel against the related responsibilities.

The good news is, loopholes can be closed. Communications scholar Dwayne Winseck suggests the answer may be in the legislation itself. Section 51 of the act forbids digital news intermediaries from “unjustly discriminat[ing] against an eligible news business” or providing “undue or unreasonable preference to any individual or entity, including itself.” Meanwhile, the Competition Bureau is investigating Meta’s actions as potentially anti-competitive.

No matter the outcome, the ideal policy response is obvious: close the loophole or sue for compliance. The lesson for other countries is that if you want to regulate these transnational corporations, make your legislation airtight and be ready to defend it.

While the spectre of taxing links raises fears of censorship and chilled speech, the act’s actual funding structure seems designed to address such concerns.

Lesson Two: This Is about Power

No grand principles are at stake here. Unlike previous large-scale digital protests undertaken to oppose proposed laws that could stifle free speech, Meta’s news blackout is not a principled stand for freedom of expression.

Indeed, Bill C-18 in no way impinges on freedom of expression. Contrary to some misleading claims, it doesn’t impose a “link tax.” While the spectre of taxing links raises fears of censorship and chilled speech, the act’s actual funding structure seems designed to address such concerns. Rather than designate the government as the decider, the law leaves it to the companies involved to negotiate agreements among themselves, subject to final-instance arbitration if needed. Such arbitration, as it happens, somewhat restricts Google’s and Meta’s power to exact overly favourable concessions from the companies that depend on their services. That is likely one reason why both oppose the bill so strongly.

Regardless, we already have empirical proof that freedom-of-expression fears over the act are overblown. Australia’s similar law, enacted in 2021, has not broken the internet or reduced access to information. On the contrary, the Australian Treasury reports that it’s been a resounding success in creating much-needed jobs for journalists.

Years of intense debates over hate speech, misinformation and disinformation have demonstrated the naïveté of the early-2000s utopian assumption that simply connecting people is enough to deliver freedom. Quality matters as much as quantity, and quality is expensive.

It is in no way unreasonable to require companies that form part of the information ecosystem to help support the news outlets that make their businesses socially worthwhile — especially when neither Facebook nor Google has thus far been a particularly responsible steward of this ecosystem. Google’s search algorithms have come under fire for bias and racism. Facebook’s network has facilitated hate speech (according to the United Nations, Amnesty International and Facebook itself) to the point of genocide, against the Rohingya in Myanmar in 2017.

If Meta’s news blackout is not about a principle, it’s also not about money. These are fantastically wealthy companies who, in Australia, Canada and elsewhere, have demonstrated they have no moral objection to funding news under other circumstances.

It is, rather, about power.

In Australia, Meta ended its news blackout in 2021 when the government agreed to allow it and Google to avoid designation under the law, if they reached funding arrangements with Australian news media companies. As the Treasury report notes, the resulting law allows the companies to choose with whom they will and won’t negotiate, the resulting agreements being kept secret.

In contrast, the Canadian law mandates negotiations, a degree of transparency, and mandatory arbitration if an agreement cannot be reached: democratically, it’s a superior option.

The contrast highlights the stakes for which Meta and Google are playing. These companies refuse to abide the loss of their power over others, to set the terms by which others operate.

International political economy scholar Susan Strange called the ability to set rules and norms “structural power.” That power is these companies’ line in the sand: a refusal to allow democratic countries to tell them what to do.

That companies, and not just countries, can exert structural power can be hard to understand. It can be difficult to recognize the direct equivalence between a government shutting down the internet to deal with protests and a company cutting off access to an entire country’s media.

But the effects are the same. The offending government can argue (correctly) that people can still talk to one another by other means, just as Meta argues that the 45 percent of Canadians who get their news from social media can simply go to the original source. In both cases, the injustice is obvious: people have become accustomed to using the internet, and Facebook, to communicate. It is fundamentally unjust to capriciously shut down these sources of information. It doesn’t matter if it’s the government or the company turning off the taps: the effect on people’s lives and livelihoods is identical.

The Meta news blockade is giving Canadians and governments around the world a lesson in private, unaccountable, capricious corporate structural power. It’s a lesson that will be very familiar to marginalized groups: capricious private power leaves you at the whims of the macrointermediary’s rules, which it can change at any time, for any reason.

If you depend on a company to direct subscribers and readers your way, as Halifax Examiner editor Tim Bousquet indicated his outlet does, in an interview with CBC Halifax, then that company has structural power over you.

If your visibility as an artist or influencer on a platform changes when the company adjusts its algorithm, that company has structural power over you.

If users can no longer access news as they’ve done for a decade because of a corporate decision, that company has structural power over them.

And if a country’s news media is thrown into an existential crisis when a company decides to block its work, that company has structural power over the industry, and the country.

Democracies were and are designed to make structural power accountable to citizens. Corporations, which can also exert structural power, are not so designed. Unaccountable structural power is ripe for abuse, as Meta is showing with its decision to block news during a natural disaster.

The company’s power grab is designed to thwart the stated purposes of the Online News Act, which is to both foster a healthy information ecosystem and promote stability and accountability, two things that Meta’s capricious corporate structural power eschews.

This is a fight that Canada — or indeed any country interested in effective regulation — was always going to face, the moment public and corporate interests diverged.

The Battle We Were Always Going to Have

There’s little room for compromise if one party refuses to accept the legitimacy of the other.

One way or another, this situation will be resolved, and its outcome will tell us where the balance of structural power lies between small-country democracies and these global, US-based, macrointermediaries.

The Canadian government’s proposed regulations for the Online News Act, released September 1, shed some light on this question. While the regulator, the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), would still retain oversight over any agreements, it cedes some structural power to the macrointermediaries. The regulations would provide a limit on their liability, and significant flexibility over which media companies they bargain with, allowing them to ignore “any group of 10 independent news businesses operating local news outlets.” Perhaps most significantly, the proposed rules would allow non-monetary services, such as training, to count as “compensation” to news providers. This raises the potential for the tech giants to extend their influence into newsrooms: there’s no such thing as neutral, unbiased training.

To place this in context, consider what some alternative outcomes would reveal about the exercise of structural power. Canada could back down further and withdraw the act, effectively showing that macrointermediaries can impose their will on democratic governments. Or the government could up the ante by suing Meta, or by closing the loophole, or by requiring that all social media not discriminate against legitimate news services. It could increase the pressure to the point where Meta is forced to choose between abandoning a trillion-dollar Group of Seven market and itself backing down.

Which brings us to the final lesson: This is a fight that Canada — or indeed any country interested in effective regulation — was always going to face, the moment public and corporate interests diverged. It could just as easily have been over online harms, competition policy, or something else.

This conflict is only part of a longer contest between global macrointermediaries and democracies seeking to subject them to greater democratic oversight. Meta’s news blockade should convince policy makers that these macrointermediaries are, first and foremost, competitors for power, not partners or service providers. This truth extends beyond communication, to health, smart cities and — with the arrival of commercial generative artificial intelligence — education. There’s not a policy area into which these corporations will not seek to insert themselves. The goal will always be the same: the pursuit of corporate structural power at the expense of domestic democratic governance.

Meta’s actions confirm that national governments must be very cautious about allowing companies to establish themselves as intermediaries — say, in artificial intelligence — and need to examine sectors, such as retail and transportation, in which corporations have already gained a toehold. If there’s any lesson from the Meta news blackout, it’s that these companies must be subject to more and stronger regulation, not less, in order to ensure stability, transparency and democratic accountability, in the public interest.

The opinions expressed in this article/multimedia are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIGI or its Board of Directors.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blayne Haggart

Blayne Haggart is a CIGI senior fellow and associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. His latest book, with Natasha Tusikov, is The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power.

Canada Is Right to Push Back Against Digital Platforms’ Power

Requirements for social media companies to distribute ad revenue are not novel.

Natasha Tusikov
August 30, 2023

Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/REUTERS.

Unprecedented wildfires in the Northwest Territories and the Okanagan area of southern British Columbia are again highlighting the vital role that social media companies play in enabling people to access and share information during a natural disaster.

Many people have become accustomed to receiving news stories through Facebook and Instagram — about 30 percent and 10 percent of Canadians, respectively — but with Meta now blocking all Canadian news on its platforms, those fleeing wildfires have another thing to think about. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on August 21, “Facebook is putting corporate profits ahead of our democracy and our well-being.”

Meta’s actions constitute a “chokepoint” — a tactic that only works when companies command significant market share and provide critical services. Worse, this news ban is political, intended to pressure the Canadian government into amending or repealing Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which will require fair revenue sharing between companies designated as “digital news intermediaries” such as Google and Meta and news outlets.

Requirements for social media companies to distribute ad revenue are not novel. In February 2021, Facebook reportedly used news blockades to bully the Australian government, which had introduced the News Media Bargaining Code, requiring Facebook and Google to establish commercial agreements with media companies in Australia for the remuneration of news content, or face legal consequences. The blockades resulted in the Australian government amending the bill, and Facebook lifting its news ban after eight days.

Meta’s Canadian news ban during a state of emergency starkly highlights the capriciousness and cruelty of corporate power. But it also provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on how we can regulate tech companies’ power, and why Meta’s decision is so consequential for news media organizations and for its users.

Meta, alongside Google, dominates the digital advertising industry. As digital advertisers, these companies courted the news industry and inserted themselves into the ecosystem. This relationship became interdependent: news organizations now rely on Google and Facebook for advertising revenue and traffic to their sites, while the social media companies benefit from users’ engagement with news stories, driving advertising. This relationship, however, is distinctly asymmetrical: social media companies control the advertising revenue flows by setting rates, and control user engagement through secret algorithms, allowing them to set rules that privilege their commercial interests over those of news organizations or the public.

Facebook and Instagram can also create chokepoints because they are designed to function not just as social media companies, but also as interfaces through which people would access other sites and services on the web. Facebook has long desired to be an “everything” or “mega” app that combines messaging, social media, payments and marketplace services in the same way that Tencent’s WeChat app has done in the Chinese market. This ambition has raised concerns of anti-competitive behaviour in the United States and elsewhere. While accessing news directly through a media organization’s app or its website is possible, this goes against Meta’s carefully constructed social media empire.

Recognizing how social media companies wield market power — including by instituting chokepoints that deprive other actors of revenue sources or audiences — better equips us for designing effective regulation. Canada’s efforts to implement the Online News Act can learn from Australia’s experience where, for example, researchers have found that a lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine which news outlets receives what amount of funds from social media companies. As a researcher from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne notes, under the code, social media companies may act to serve their “business priorities, rather than in the interest of the code’s stated aim of supporting public-interest journalism.”

The fight over the Online News Act is also a preview of the battles yet to come. The federal government has plans to introduce the right to repair for software-connected goods in 2024 and revive consultations on its long-stalled online harms legislation. These two initiatives will generate significant opposition from big tech, as has been evident in the United States, where high-powered lobby groups have pushed back against right-to-repair legislation. We need to plan how to regulate the wider digital economy and digital society, while addressing the problem of monopolies operated by incredibly powerful technology companies.

Meta’s extortive tactics during a wildfire-induced state of emergency are a dare for the Canadian government to back down. Instead, Canada needs to push back against unchecked corporate power.

This article first appeared in The Globe and Mail.

The opinions expressed in this article/multimedia are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIGI or its Board of Directors.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natasha Tusikov

Natasha Tusikov is an associate professor of criminology in the Department of Social Science at York University and a visiting fellow with the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University.