Sunday, March 10, 2024

Putin’s crackdown casts a wide net, ensnaring the LGBTQ+ community, lawyers and many others

Prominent rights groups in Russia have been outlawed or classified as agents of foreigners.

March 7, 2024
By Dasha Litvinova

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — It’s not just opposition politicians who are targeted in the crackdown by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government in recent years. Also falling victim are independent voices as well as those who don’t conform to what the state sees as the country’s “traditional values.”

Russia’s once-thriving free press after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been largely reduced to either state-controlled media or independent journalists operating from abroad, with few critical outlets still working in the country. Prominent rights groups have been outlawed or classified as agents of foreigners. Lawyers who represented dissidents have been prosecuted. LGBTQ+ activists have been labeled “extremists.”

A look at those who have come under attack during Putin’s 24-year rule that is likely to be extended by six more years in this month’s presidential election:

Independent news sites largely have been blocked in Russia since the first weeks of the war in Ukraine. Many have moved their newsrooms abroad and continue to operate, accessible in Russia via virtual private networks, or VPNs. Reporting inside Russia or earning money off Russian advertisers has been difficult.

Russian authorities since 2021 also have labeled dozens of outlets and individual journalists as ”foreign agents” – a designation implying additional government scrutiny and carrying strong pejorative connotations aimed at discrediting the recipient. Some have also been outlawed as “undesirable organizations” under a 2015 law that makes involvement with such organizations a criminal offense.

Journalists have been arrested and imprisoned on a variety of charges.

“The Russian authorities decided to destroy civil society institutions and independent journalism completely after Feb. 24, 2022,” said Ivan Kolpakov, chief editor of Russia’s most popular independent news site Meduza, referring to the date of the invasion. Meduza was declared “undesirable” in January 2023.

More restrictions appear to be coming. Parliament passed a law banning advertisers from doing business with “foreign agents,” likely affecting not just news sites but also blogs on YouTube that need advertising and are a popular source of news and analysis.

Journalist Katerina Gordeyeva initially said she was suspending her YouTube channel with 1.6 million subscribers due to the new law but changed her mind after an outpouring of support. “Giving up now would be too simple and too easy a decision,” she said. “We will try to hang in there.”

RIGHTS GROUPS

Dozens of rights groups, charities and other nongovernmental organizations have been labeled “foreign agents” and outlawed as “undesirable” in recent years. Many had to shut down.

In December 2021, a court in Moscow ordered the closure of Memorial, one of Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organizations. It drew international acclaim for its studies of repression in the Soviet Union; several months after the ruling, it won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. In yet another crippling blow, its 70-year-old co-chair, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced last month to 2½ years in prison over criticism of the war.

Another prominent rights group leader behind bars is Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Golos, which monitored Russian elections since 2000. He is in pre-trial detention on charges widely seen as an attempt to pressure the group ahead of this month’s vote.

His arrest last year wasn’t a surprise, said the group’s other leader, Stanislav Andreychuk, in an interview with The Associated Press, because Golos has been under pressure since it detailed widespread violations in the 2011 parliamentary election that led to mass protests.

Pressure against Golos came in waves, however, and at times, the group was able to work constructively with election authorities. It even won two presidential grants.

“We are like a town on a high river bank,” Andriychuk said. “The river eats away at the bank, and the bank recedes slowly. … At some point, we found ourselves on the cliffside.”

LAWYERS

Lawyers who represent Kremlin critics and work on politically motivated cases also have faced growing pressure. Some prominent ones have left Russia, fearing prosecution.

Human rights and legal aid group Agora was labeled “undesirable” in 2023, making its operations and any dealings with it illegal.

Three lawyers who represented Alexei Navalny are jailed on charges of involvement with an extremist organization. Associates of the late opposition leader said it was a way to isolate him while in prison.

Prominent human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov told AP the pressure has scared some attorneys away from political cases. Pavlov left Russia in 2021 while defending former journalist Ivan Safronov on treason charges. After Pavlov spoke out about the case, authorities opened a criminal investigation against him and barred him from using the phone and the internet. “They simply paralyzed my work,” he said.

Dmitry Talantov, another lawyer for Safronov, was arrested in 2022 for criticizing the war and is on trial. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

The crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights has gone on for more than a decade and often was accompanied by Putin’s criticism of Western nations trying to impose their values on Russia. In 2022, authorities adopted a law banning propaganda of “nontraditional sexual relations” among adults, effectively outlawing any public endorsement of LGBTQ+ rights.

Another law enacted in 2023 prohibited gender transitioning procedures and gender- affirming care, as well as changing a person’s gender in official documents and public records.

In November, the Supreme Court banned what the government called the LGBTQ+ “movement” in Russia, labeling it as an extremist organization. That effectively outlawed any LGBTQ+ activism. Shortly afterward, authorities started imposing fines for displaying rainbow-colored items.

Igor Kochetkov, human rights advocate and founder of the Russian LGBT Network, told AP the Supreme Court ruling was more about ideology than anything else.

“So far we haven’t seen attempts to ban gay relations” and criminalize them, as the Soviet Union did, Kochetkov said. Rather, it’s an attempt to suppress “any independent opinion that doesn’t fit with the official state ideology … and any organized civic activity that the government can’t control,” he added.

RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS

In perhaps a similar vein, the government, closely allied with the Russian Orthodox Church, has cracked down on smaller religious denominations and groups, banning some. Authorities went further with Jehovah’s Witnesses, prosecuting hundreds of believers across the country, often simply for gathering to pray.

The Supreme Court in 2017 declared Jehovah’s Witnesses to be an extremist organization, exposing those involved with it to potential criminal charges.

Jehovah’s Witnesses spokesman Jarrod Lopes said over 400 believers have been jailed since then, and 131 men and women are in prison. Nearly 800 Jehovah’s Witnesses have faced charges, and over 500 were added to Russia’s register of extremists and terrorists.

“It’s absurd to us, because … part of our belief system is to obey the authorities. We want to be good citizens. We want to help our community,” he told AP. “We’re also not anti-government, we are neutral. We’re not going to stage a protest.”

In 2018, Putin himself said “Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christians, too, I don’t quite understand why clamp down on them,” and he promised to look into it. But the number of arrests and raids targeting them only grew.

Putin has distanced himself from the law enforcement and security structures that carry out the crackdowns, says Tatyana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“They have a certain domain, and they have a mandate in this domain, and they act in accordance with it,” Stanovaya says. “Putin knows it and agrees with it. … It’s convenient for him.”

9 Jehovah’s Witnesses convicted of extremism for practicing faith in Russia

The men received sentences of up to seven years in a penal colony for practicing their faith.

Video of defendants in the Irkutsk case in a Russian courtroom for an April 2023 hearing. (Photo courtesy of Jehovah’s Witnesses)

March 7, 2024
By Kathryn Post

(RNS) — Nine Jehovah’s Witnesses were convicted of extremism by a Russian court on Tuesday (March 5), receiving sentences of up to seven years in a penal colony for practicing their faith. Of those convicted, eight had already served more than two years in pretrial detention, often in solitary confinement, according to a spokesperson for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They plan to appeal the decision.

“Either I am one of Jehovah’s Witnesses or I am an extremist. It is impossible to be both at the same time,” Aleksey Solnechny said in Russian at court on Jan. 24, where he received a seven-year sentence. “And I declare: I am one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I am not an extremist!”

In the fall of 2021, Russian officers raided more than a dozen Jehovah’s Witnesses’ homes in Irkutsk and the Irkutsk region, subjecting two families — Anatoly and Greta Razdobarov and Nikolay and Liliya Merinov — to beatings and torture. The two men were later called to be witnesses in the cases against their Jehovah’s Witness peers.

The officers suspected the Jehovah’s Witnesses of violating the Russian Federation’s ban on organizing the activities of an extremist group. In 2017, the Russian Federation’s Supreme Court banned the Witnesses’ activities and liquidated their legal entities. Since then, almost 800 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been criminally charged, according to the spokesperson, Jarrod Lopes.

The men charged in the case include Yaroslav Kalin, Sergey Kosteyev, Nikolay Martynov, Mikhail Moysh, Igor Popov, Denis Sarazhakov, Aleksey Solnechny, Andrey Tolmachev and Sergey Vasiliyev. They have reported receiving hundreds of letters of support while in detainment, during which, several said, they experienced cold temperatures, isolation, dim lighting and smells from dead rodents. The conditions have contributed to their poor health, they said.

Top row, from left: Nikolay Martynov, Sergey Kosteyev, Yaroslav Kalin and Mikhail Moysh. Bottom row, from left: Igor Popov, Denis Sarazhakov, Aleksey Solnechny, Andrey Tolmachev and Sergey Vasiliyev. (Photos courtesy of Jehovah’s Witnesses)

RELATED: Putin’s crackdown casts a wide net, ensnaring the LGBTQ+ community, lawyers and many others

At the trial at the Oktyabrsky District Court of Irkutsk between December 2022 and March 2024, the state prosecutor showed books said to be confiscated during the raids as well as secret recordings of worship services. Those charged contended that they did not violate any laws and denied they had promoted extremism. Their religious beliefs, they claimed, are separate from Jehovah’s Witnesses’ legal entities, which were shut down in 2017.

“The charges were largely based on secret audio recordings of worship services, where the men were praying, singing Christian songs and reading from the Bible. Ironically, one of the passages read was Psalm 34:14: ‘Seek peace and pursue it,’” said Lopes, referring to the Bible’s Book of Psalms.

“What does it say about a legal system that convicts people of extremist activity for reading a Bible verse that promotes peace? … We implore Russian officials to reconsider its misconceptions about Jehovah’s Witnesses and allow these peace-loving men and women to worship freely in their beloved homeland as Witnesses do in some 240 other lands.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses go to trial against Norway after state registration is revoked

‘It’s certainly the most important trial about a religious freedom issue in Norway in decades,’ said Willy Fautré, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers.

Oslo District Court in Norway is home to an ongoing trial after Norway deregistered the Jehovah’s Witnesses last year.

Courtesy of Jehovah's Witnesses

January 16, 2024
By Kathryn Post

(RNS) — With its recognition of more than 700 registered faith communities, Norway is often admired as a bastion of religious freedom. But after Norway deregistered the Jehovah’s Witnesses last year, some human rights experts say that reputation could be in question. Now, the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Norway are suing the state for revoking their national registration and withholding state funds. According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are the first religious group to lose their national registration in Norway.

The trial, which began Jan. 8, will determine whether some practices of the Jehovah’s Witnesses violate Norway’s Religious Communities Act or whether withdrawing the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ registration violates their right to freedom of religion and freedom of association, as guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights.

“It’s certainly the most important trial about a religious freedom issue in Norway in decades,” Willy Fautré, director of the Brussels-based organization Human Rights Without Frontiers, told Religion News Service.

In January 2022, Valgerd Svarstad Haugland, the county governor of Oslo and Viken, in Norway, denied Jehovah’s Witnesses state grants for the year 2021 in response to concerns about what she perceived as exclusionary practices. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had received the grants, which currently amount to around $1.5 million annually, for three decades. These funds are typically used for international disaster relief work and supporting religious activity in Norway, including translating literature and building kingdom halls, according to Jørgen Pedersen, spokesperson for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Norway.

In an announcement originally written in Norwegian, the county governor of Oslo and Viken claimed that Jehovah’s Witnesses are forbidden to contact disfellowshipped members, as well as people who voluntarily dissociate, which can hinder a person’s ability to freely withdraw from the group. She also argued that Jehovah’s Witnesses may disfellowship children who have chosen to be baptized if they break the religious community’s rules, a practice she said constituted “negative social control” and violated children’s rights. These practices, the county governor argued, defy Norway’s Religious Communities Act. “We have assessed the offenses as systematic and intentional, and have therefore chosen to refuse grants,” the press release said.

In an email to RNS, Jehovah’s Witnesses spokesperson Jarrod Lopes said Witnesses only disfellowship an unrepentant member who “makes a practice” of serious violations of “the Bible’s moral code.” Even then, Lopes added, Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t force members to limit or cease association with former congregants, whether they’ve been disfellowshipped or withdrawn voluntarily — that’s up to individuals. “Congregation elders do not police the personal lives of congregants, nor do they exercise control over the faith of individual Jehovah’s Witnesses,” wrote Lopes.

Pedersen added that the serious sins that might lead to disfellowship include manslaughter, adultery and drug use. He said a congregation will always try to help an individual restore their relationship with God, but if the problem persists, Jehovah’s Witnesses feel compelled to respect the entire Bible, including instructions to not associate with unrepentant sinners, such as 1 Corinthians 5:11.

Though the Witnesses appealed the county governor’s decision, in September 2022 the Ministry for Children and Families upheld the ruling. In October that same year, the county governor said in a press release that unless Jehovah’s Witnesses would “rectify the conditions that led to the refusal of state subsidies,” they would lose registration, which they did a few months later, in December. Without its national registration, Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot perform marriages, and they lose entitlement to government grants.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses of Norway filed two lawsuits against the state in December 2022: one challenging the denial of state grants and another challenging their loss of registration. Those lawsuits have since been combined. Though the Oslo District Court initially granted the Jehovah’s Witnesses an injunction that suspended their deregistration until that case was argued, the Ministry challenged the injunction, and in April 2023, the court removed it.

As the trial plays out at the District Court of Oslo, Jason Wise, an attorney who is acting as a consultant on the case for the legal team representing the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Norway, said part of the Witnesses’ argument is that there is no evidence of harm and that it’s not the place of the state to interpret religious texts. The state continues to contend that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practices are in conflict with the Religious Communities Act, particularly, they claim, by exposing children to psychological violence.

RELATED: Timekeepers no more, rank-and-file Jehovah’s Witnesses say goodbye to tracking proselytizing hours

Since 2022, Jehovah’s Witnesses have reported an increase in vandalism, harassment and physical assaults in Norway. In September 2022, two Jehovah’s Witnesses in Harstad, Norway, reported that a man screamed at them and repeatedly attempted to hit one of them. That same month, a man in Kristiansand, Norway, reportedly set a Jehovah’s Witnesses mobile display car on fire, and a month later, someone attempted to set fire to a Jehovah’s Witnesses meeting place in Fauske, Norway.

“What we see now is that the state of Norway is taking a look at my beliefs, saying, we don’t like that, we don’t like that,” said Pedersen. Asking Jehovah’s Witnesses to change their beliefs, he said, is a “violation of my integrity as a person, as a religious person, as a person with a conscience. That’s the core issue of this case.”

Norway isn’t the only place where Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practices have been under scrutiny. In December, the Belgian Court of Cassation — the highest court in the Belgian judiciary — rejected an appeal of a lower court’s decision, ruling in favor of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ right to avoid contact with former members.

“Norway is just the tip of another phenomenon. That is a source of concern, because we see that there are more and more attempts in Europe by state institutions to interfere and intrude into the teachings and practices of religious groups, which is forbidden by the European Convention,” said Fautré. “The risk is they would open the door to more court cases against other religious groups.”

War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine

By Norman Solomon, Jeffrey Sachs March 7, 2024

Source: SDG Academy

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political and media analyst Norman Solomon as they discuss Solomon’s important new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.

Listen in as Solomon and Sachs explore the intricate interplay between the mainstream media and powerful political forces that promote America’s disastrous “wars of choice” – including the US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and currently the US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine and the US backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Solomon’s book explores how American foreign policy has become one of perpetual war, and how the media systematically hide the tragic human and political consequences of these wars, thereby enabling the US Government to perpetuate these conflicts.

Footnotes:

The Far Right Has Found Its Place In Europe’s Institutions

By David Broder

March 8, 2024

Source: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

With ex-Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri running for the Rassemblement National in the EU elections, boundaries between mainstream institutional politics and the far right seem ever more blurred.

Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) has long claimed an anti-establishment identity, irreducible to Left or Right. But its march to power also relies on winning institutional figures to its camp. One was Thierry Mariani, a minister under Nicolas Sarkozy who is today an RN member of the European Parliament (MEP). Yet on 17 February, a greater institutional heavyweight announced plans to join Le Pen’s group: Fabrice Leggeri, executive director of EU border agency Frontex from 2015 to 2022.

Leggeri is a product of France’s typical son-of-civil-servant-to-civil-servant pipeline, studying at the École Normale Supérieure and École Nationale de l’Administration, before taking up various Interior Ministry roles. He has also never been elected to public office. Nevertheless, he is all but guaranteed to enter the EU parliament, as third-placed candidate for an RN list polling 30 percent.

His embrace of the RN illustrates a grim reality. Throughout recent decades, mainstream politicians have rallied voters by warning that far-right leaders like Le Pen would destroy the European project. Now, it seems that the supposed looming threat was already in the corridors of power — and that it is not organizing the much-feared “Frexit” but changing the EU from within.

From Frontex to the Right-Wing Fringe?

Announcing his candidacy, Leggeri did not exactly boast of his establishment credentials. He told Le Journal du Dimanche — long a pro-government paper, but recently bought out by hard-right media baron Vincent Bolloré —that the RN is “determined to fight being flooded by migrants, which the Commission and the Eurocrats don’t see as a problem, but a project”. This condemnation of the “Eurocrats” was odd coming from Leggeri’s mouth: after all, he headed a major EU agency for seven years, in which time its budget ballooned from 143 million to 754 million euro.

Leggeri’s attack on “Eurocrats” referred to those who blocked his way within the corridors of power. His spell at Frontex — what JDD labelled “turning it from a small humanitarian body into an EU border police” — surely was marked by conflict, thanks to both his own apparent political radicalization as well as the critical scrutiny coming from the Left, liberal media, and various human rights watchdogs. A 2020–2021 investigation headed by Le Monde and Der Spiegel, among others, found extensive evidence that in this period Greek border guards carried out thousands of illegal “pushbacks”, abandoning migrants at sea and forcing them back across the EU’s borders to prevent them from applying for asylum. This same research reported the complicity of Frontex and German police in these pushbacks, and accused the EU border agency of attempting to suppress evidence of illegal behaviour.

In Der Spiegel’s account, it was the PR fallout of Leggeri’s conduct, if not Frontex’s policies as such, that ultimately led to his downfall in May 2022. He had overly aligned Frontex with the Greek government’s approach of turning pushbacks — illegal under international law — into standard practice. Still, the nature of this conflict questions the idea of rule-bound EU institutions that self-police when things go wrong. Frontex’s approach seemingly did not change after Leggeri’s removal, and those who do seek to hold the agency accountable are fighting against unfavourable political headwinds. This was well illustrated on Wednesday as EU ombudsman Emily O’Reilly took to the Guardian to denounce Frontex’s ongoing refusal to save lives at sea, after an investigation into the June 2023 Adriana disaster, which killed 600 people trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Why “unfavourable political headwinds”? At the EU level, the period since 2016 has seen an increased commitment to stemming migrant numbers by stopping people ever reaching European soil, also by outsourcing border policing to non-EU third countries. This is not, or no longer, just a far-right policy, but a line coming from the heights of power.

Last summer, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen joined Italian premier Giorgia Meloni in a taskforce to meet Tunisian leader Kais Saied over a development-aid and border–policing deal — a mission across the Mediterranean which Von der Leyen termed “Team Europe”. The aim was to enlist Tunisia in stopping migrants ever making the sea crossing, as a kind of preventative border-gendarme. Far from a pariah in Europe, far-right leader Meloni spearheaded the plan — though the deal with Tunis later ran aground.

The much-vaunted opposition between “Europeanists” and irresponsible ‘populists’ seems ever less obvious. So, which is it? Are voters rebelling against the “Eurocrats”? Or is Europe laying out the red carpet for the far right? Perhaps we can better understand by looking at the conditions that are being set for integrating far-right forces into the institutional mainstream.

Outsourcing Migration

Instructive in this sense is the contrast between Le Pen’s party and the more “advanced” example of the Italian far right. The first Italian government including post-fascist ministers back in 1994 prompted scandal in Brussels — today, on the other hand, their presence is normalized.

Indeed, many in the mainstream European centre-right give the impression that Le Pen is a pariah whereas Meloni is not. Yet the cited reasons for the distinction suggest that the dividing lines are malleable. Take businessman Alain Minc, formerly a Sarkozy advisor and erstwhile mentor to Emmanuel Macron. In December, he told France Culture that Meloni is “fascinating”: she has “fallen in line” and entered “the circle of reason”, even if she made some distasteful “symbolic measures on social issues”. The question was whether Le Pen, too, can “say like Mrs. Meloni: the Atlantic alliance is fundamental, the European project is fundamental, and budget policy must remain reasonable”. For Le Monde diplomatique’s Benoît Bréville, responding to another Minc intervention: “what it takes to earn the European badge of respectability … [are] the two cardinal values of austerity and Atlanticism”.

Still, defending EU borders is itself a condition for joining the “circle of reason”. Five days after Leggeri announced his EU election bid, Albania’s parliament voted to take what was presented as a step towards the country’s “European future”. On 22 February, legislators ratified an agreement between Prime Minister Edi Rama and Meloni, whereby Albania agrees to Italy building two detention centres on its soil, in order to “process” 36,000 migrants a year. The deal was backed by the Commission president as well as the two governments, but criticized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, citing concerns at another case of EU “outsourcing” the detention of migrants. They fear that, while the centres are under Italian jurisdiction, asylum seekers will be denied rights they would nominally have had upon EU soil.

Hailed by Rama as an example of European cooperation, the Italy–Albania deal is not quite the same as past (real or attempted) agreements between the EU and third countries like Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia on policing the Mediterranean, or even projected deals with further countries in sub-Saharan Africa. For one thing, Albania is called on to detain people not so much because it is a source of migration to the EU or a transit country for migrants, but rather because its government is willing to detain migrants on any number of routes who happen to be picked up in Italian territorial waters. As Richard Braude and I recently wrote for Jacobin, Meloni’s scheme also bears comparison with the right-wing British government’s agreement with Rwanda to detain rejected asylum seekers arriving from all over the world.

While Britain has left the EU, Albania’s nominally centre-left government hailed the migration agreement with Meloni as a step toward joining the bloc. Last Thursday, its prime minister Rama commented that “Albania is standing together with Italy by choosing to act like an EU member state”, adding, “No country can solve such a challenge alone. Only a stronger, braver and more sovereign Europe loyal to itself can.”

In the 1980s, post-dictatorship Spain, Greece and Portugal saw the European Economic Community (EEC) as a path to democratic modernity — an optimistic narrative later echoed in ex-Eastern Bloc states. Today, Albania hopes to join the EU fold by becoming its outsourced border gendarme. While Europe was never a universalist project, it seems that filtering out African and Arab newcomers is becoming an increasingly prominent European value.

Right-Wing Pact

This turn on migration does not necessarily mean that Le Pen’s party is about to join the concert of institutional power in the European Union, or that it can easily follow Meloni’s path. There are considerable hurdles to this taking place, and it remains unlikely to be realized in the wake of the 2024 European elections. Still, there clearly is a game of convergences on the centre-to-far right of European politics, taking steps toward what some French commentators call the union des droites — the alliance of the various forces of the political right.

Hailed by CNN as a “new Merkel” taking the lead in Europe, Meloni today bridges divides between “traditional” Christian Democrats, as embodied in the European People’s Party (EPP), and more radical elements of the Right. Just as Italy has a longstanding coalition between the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the Northern-regionalist Lega and Meloni’s party (called the “centre-right” pact in Italian media), there has been much speculation on a “union of the Rights” forming at the European level.

Today reflected in the governments of Italy, Finland, and Sweden, and in some Spanish regions, this slogan is taken up by French anti-immigrant leaders Éric Zemmour and Marion Maréchal, whose Reconquête party has a smaller and more bourgeois electorate than the Rassemblement National. As well as being inspired by Meloni’s strategy, last month Reconquête joined Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR) in Brussels.

Not all these forces are easily allied. As I wrote for WOZ, EPP leader Manfred Weber has pursued a strategy of nurturing ties with parts of the far right, building close relations with Meloni while rejecting alliance with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Rassemblement National. He told France 24 last May that EPP allies “must be pro-European. They must be pro-Ukraine. And they must be pro-rule of law.”

While polls for June’s EU elections suggest a strong right-wing shift, this will not likely produce a right-wing majority able to fulfil Weber’s conditions, or at least the meaning he attributes to these words. The EPP (or indeed the liberal-centrist Renew) are not on the brink of an EU-level embrace with Le Pen’s party, or still less the AfD. Yet, the RN may be malleable, and today, its lead European candidate Jordan Bardella seems intent on pulling this party toward a more straightforwardly pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine stance.

The red lines set by Weber are also open to creative reinterpretation. As we saw already with the Commission’s on-off conflict with Poland’s Law and Justice government following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, pariahs need not remain so forever. Recently, 10 billion euro in EU funds to Hungary were held up by the Commission due to concerns over the “rule of law and corruption” under Viktor Orbán. The Commission’s announcement, in December, that Orbán had “guaranteed” the independence of the judiciary, and thus that the cash could flow, appeared entirely motivated by trying to win him over to another round of EU aid to Kyiv. Orbán’s eventual assent to this was widely cast as a victory for Meloni’s statecraft, after a late-night summit between the two. Media close to the Budapest government now suggest Orbán’s Fidesz party could join ECR, although this faces opposition within Meloni’s group.

For Italian journalist Francesca De Benedetti, Meloni is playing a “two-faced” game, forging alliances with the EPP but also using her political capital to bring Orbán into the fold — while at the same time fending off potential rivalry from the Identity and Democracy group. Still, as the Frontex case shows, we ought not look for attacks on the rule of law only from apparent “outsiders”. While Greece’s New Democracy government enjoys the backing of the financial press as well as the European Central Bank, its wiretapping of opposition leaders, the unresolved murder of journalist Giorgos Karaivaz, and its role in migrant pushbacks, have also raised alarm. At the Left’s urging, on 7 February, the European Parliament voted to censure the Greek government, whose ruling party is part of EPP.

New Right-Wing Alliances

When the RN’s lead European candidate Bardella visited Florence in December for a rally alongside the Lega’s Matteo Salvini (Meloni’s deputy prime minister, but a leader of the rival Identity and Democracy group), there was much discussion of new alliances at the EU level. Salvini again raised the idea of “a centre-right united in Brussels”, “in the lead” in Europe. By this, he meant an alliance of right-wing forces akin to the present Italian government. The call for such a pact is transparently designed to mobilize right-wing dissatisfaction with Meloni, and to criticize conservative forces’ “dealings” with the centre-left in Brussels. We remain unlikely to see a formal political alliance uniting everyone from Macron to Zemmour and former Frontex chief Leggeri as a result of the 2024 elections.

Still, a party like Le Pen’s can exert considerable influence even outside the dominant coalition in Brussels. In France itself, only last month Macron’s government passed border-tightening legislation that could not have succeeded without the decisive support of Le Pen, and which her party in fact only backed after it had been significantly rewritten. We should probably dispense with the idea of anathemas and cordons sanitaires against the far right, which do not exist in reality. There is a strong chance that Von der Leyen will be re-elected Commission president with at least some votes from parties in Meloni’s ECR group — parties considered beyond the pale just a few years ago. Votes on everything from green policy to migration have allowed ad hoc alliances to develop, gradually “mainstreaming” such forces.

This might be read as a story of institutional forces defanging right-wing radicals by setting the kind of red lines proposed by Weber. This is not only about the mantra of “Atlanticism and austerity” — after all, even Le Pen no longer speaks of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Le Pen and RN colleague Bardella have also used the war in Gaza to cast themselves as opponents of antisemitism, and thus burnish their credentials part of the republican mainstream.

Yet it would be one-sided to see “mainstreaming” and “moderation” as the same thing, as if there were a static European centre of gravity to which all else must converge. To again focus on migration, the mainstream has itself radicalized: a once-disputed agenda centred on militarizing Fortress Europe, outsourcing border policing, and letting individual member states decide which countries are “safe” to deport people to, is today hegemonic.

What about the opposition? The picture is not good, either in pushing back against right-wing hegemony or in mobilising an alternative base of support in society. The pious wish that Europeanist values could provide an antidote to “sovereigntists” — a common ideological illusion over the 2010s — looks out of step with the real balance of forces. Right-wing parties with institutional power in the EU can ally deadly border policing with the influx of a low-cost, undocumented — and for that all the more easily blackmailed and disciplined — migrant labour force.

Moreover, it is not as if the record of the centre-left is so great either. Even the most promising government experience in Europe, in Spain — with a creditable record on some cost-of-living measures, and its strong rhetoric (if not action) against Israel’s war on Gaza — has turned a blind eye to the killings of migrants on its Mediterranean border.

On the further Left, there is a deeper question. The Left’s Manon Aubry argued in a recent Euractiv interview that we are today seeing a convergence between the political centre, the Right, and even far-right forces — but that the left-wing camp remains divided. Aubry draws on the understanding that Macron risks preparing a Le Pen victory in 2027 through the unpopularity of this government’s reforms and its laundering of RN talking points.

Around Europe, the call to form a third force apart from the centre and far right has sporadically allowed new left-wing forces to make electoral headway — in some cases recomposing alliances between the young and precarious, service workers, and fragments of social democracy’s historic base. However, this has rarely been able to shift the overall centre of political gravity or arrest the process by which politics becomes a contest between various media-driven campaigns, committed to the values of individualism and enterprise and allied to greater or lesser degrees of nationalist identity politics.

In this sense, our problem is not just that the Left is failing to expose the false “social” promises of Meloni or Le Pen or the AfD. In fact, we often do so. But these latter’s specific solutions (cutting employee tax contributions, curtailing green legislation on businesses, the demonization of migrants) conform with the expectations of large parts of the working-class population, who themselves cast a sceptical eye on solidaristic social policy and collective action.

Telling was the line that Le Pen’s party took on the rise in the French pension age: opposing Macron’s reform, but not supporting the movement that tried to stop it. The massive opposition to the reform showed that the far right is hardly the only dynamic force in French politics. Yet the ultimate defeat of that movement played into Le Pen’s hands: Macron imposed the reform regardless of the popular will, the Left and trade union movement did not claim the hoped-for victory, and the RN maintained its dissenting posture.

The career civil servant Leggeri now rallies against “Eurocrats” under the banner of this same far-right party. Even from a left-wing perspective, the grotesque complicity between mainstream forces and the far right could easily give rise to cynicism. It looks ever less plausible to call for a last-minute mobilization to defend Europe from “dangerous right-wing populists” when the existing status quo was already well able to integrate figures like the Frontex chief.

Rather, the difficult task for the Left is to build a counter-force of its own, able to resist both the current EU mainstream and those who would pull it even harder to the right. This means breaking through defeatism, building its own bases of support in society — and showing tens of millions of people that collective action can produce concrete change.

Germany’s Far Right Is Laying Down Roots, Despite Protests

Leaks from a secret meeting on “remigration” have prompted a wave of protests against the Alternative für Deutschland. But as Germany’s debate on immigration harshens, this far-right party is becoming a powerful electoral threat.

Supporter of AfD at the state party conference in Saxony-Anhalt, Magdeburg, March 3, 2024. (Photo by Peter Gercke / picture alliance via Getty Images)

BYMARC MARTORELL JUNYENT

JACOBIN
03.07.2024

When Martin Sellner visited Chemnitz, eastern Germany, on February 23, around three hundred demonstrators summoned by the Nazi-Free Chemnitz group ensured the Austrian agitator knew he was unwelcome. Sellner, former spokesperson of the radical-right Identitarian Movement Austria, has become infamous in Germany in recent weeks.

In January, independent investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his racist theses during a secret meeting organized by two businessmen in Potsdam. In attendance were members of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The CDU attendees were low-ranking figures, and the party is working on their expulsion. But the AfD participants included Roland Hartwig — at that time a personal aide to party coleader Alice Weidel, until the Correctiv revelations forced them to part ways — and Ulrich Siegmund, who is the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt state.

Sellner’s presentation in Potsdam revolved around the concept of “remigration.” The term is not new but became ominously specific in the Potsdam meeting. According to the Austrian anti-immigration campaigner, a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens. The Correctiv revelations have led to massive demonstrations in Germany against the far right. In the protest against Sellner in Chemnitz, one chant specifically countered his plan: “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here.”

According to polling conducted soon after the Correctiv revelations, the AfD slipped from 22 percent of the vote to 19 percent in a month. This still placed it in a comfortable second place nationally, trailing the CDU alone — and above all three parties in the current federal government. The ruling coalition, made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the neoliberal hawks of the Free Democrats, is deeply unpopular.

I spoke to Dr Johannes Kiess, a sociologist and deputy director of the Else-Frenkel-Brunswik-Institute at the University of Leipzig, which researches antidemocratic movements. He noted that parts of German civil society needed a moment such as the Correctiv revelations to further mobilize against the far right. The sociologist added that the news about the Potsdam meeting represents a good starting point for a campaign against the AfD. A different question is whether such a campaign should include a call for a ban on the AfD by the German constitutional court. This topic has been hotly debated in recent weeks, with positions for and against a ban cutting across party lines. According to Kiess, one argument in favor of proscribing the AfD is that it would send a strong message to the CDU that reaching any agreement with the far-right party is unacceptable.

State Power

Such a message would be particularly important in the current context. As concerning as polls for the next German federal elections are, they won’t be held until late 2025. The more immediate danger is this September’s elections in the states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg. In the three eastern Länder, the AfD is polling in first place, at around or above 30 percent support. The CDU’s official position is that it will not enter any coalition government with either the AfD or the left-wing Die Linke. Although this could be possible in Saxony and Brandenburg with the repetition of the current “Kenya” coalitions (named after the respective party colors of the CDU, Social Democrats, and the Greens), things are different in Thuringia.

There, Die Linke is stronger — it has held the presidency of the region almost uninterruptedly since 2014, with Bodo Ramelow at the helm. Although Die Linke is now polling third-placed in Thuringia, absent a major change before September the CDU will be faced with the dilemma of aligning itself with either the AfD or Die Linke. There are strong reasons to doubt that the CDU will choose the left-wing option. In the Thuringian parliament, the CDU has already voted together with the AfD, and the same applies to many subregional parliaments in the Eastern Länder.Although the AfD bears a major responsibility for the portrayal of migrants and asylum seekers as threats, the problem runs deeper.

The AfD in Thuringia is particularly extreme. Its leader, Björn Höcke, has openly used Nazi terms such as “racial suicide,” “Lebensraum” (living space), and “cultural Bolshevism.” He has, moreover, been a key factor in the general radicalization of this party at various tipping points, such as the party congresses of 2015 and 2017 and the election of candidates for the regional elections in eastern Germany in 2019. Höcke achieved this through Der Flügel (The Wing), a grouping within the AfD that formally dissolved in 2020 but which is in truth increasingly powerful. Höcke and his allies, like the former AfD member and party leader in Brandenburg state Andreas Kalbitz, have managed to move the AfD even further to the Right while rising in the polls.

It was also Höcke’s Flügel, explains journalist Eva Kienholz in her book Ihr Kampf (Their Struggle), that cemented close contacts with the Identitarian Movement Germany, i.e., this country’s branch of Sellner’s organization in Austria. In 2017, members of the German Identitarians, together with other right-wing extremists from France and Italy, hired a ship to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from helping boats in distress. After running into technical problems, the racist agitators had to be helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO they had previously demonized.

Instruments of Discrimination

Although the AfD bears a major responsibility for the portrayal of migrants and asylum seekers as threats, the problem runs deeper. In a late 2023 poll for the public broadcaster, Germans were asked to name the two most important problems their country is facing. An astonishing 44 percent mentioned migration — as much as climate change, social inequality, or the economy added together. Germany has recently experienced a considerable increase in the number of migrants and asylum seekers arriving, and the number of asylum applications reached 334,000 in 2023. Although the absolute numbers are high, per capita applications are far lower than in countries like Cyprus or Greece, and only a bit higher than in Spain. None of these countries is nearly as wealthy as Germany.

Regional and local governments in Germany have expressed reasonable concerns about their difficulties in managing the new arrivals, and the federal government has gone some way into addressing the issue. The zeitgeist at the different levels of governance, however, is not one of improving the conditions for people reaching Germany. In January, the German government approved measures to facilitate the incorporation of new arrivals into the workforce — but it will also accelerate the deportation of unsuccessful asylum seekers. The police will be allowed to carry out searches in the residences of migrants or deport them without prior notice.

The current trend is toward making Germany less attractive for noncitizens, in the rather questionable belief that this will reduce numbers arriving. This is the motivation behind the introduction of a paying card for asylum seekers, who will soon receive only a fraction of their monthly allowance in cash. The rest will have to be spent in the shops near their place of residence, where payment with a card will be allowed. In Germany, especially in rural areas, payment via credit card is often not possible. The independent organization Pro Asyl describes the payment card as an “instrument of discrimination” that will only complicate asylum seekers’ lives.Under new measures the police will be allowed to carry out searches in the residences of migrants or deport them without prior notice.

Furthermore, the CDU is advocating for a so-called Rwanda Plan to prevent migrants from reaching Germany in the first place. The idea, modeled after the British project to fly irregular migrants to Rwanda right after their arrival and process asylum requests in the African country, contradicts the most basic human rights legislation. The UK Supreme Court also saw things this way when it felled the proposal made by Rishi Sunak’s government. Austria and Denmark have also been toying with the idea.

In Germany, the possibility of processing asylum requests in African countries is not only an idea among the right-wing opposition; indeed, the Interior Ministry is reportedly studying similar options. As in many European countries, in Germany there is a widespread call for controlled migration flows, often focused on the need for migrants to fill jobs as the German population ages. This can be seen in many business leaders’ support for the anti-AfD demonstrations, as well as in the citizenship law recently approved in parliament.

The new legislation speeds up the citizenship process for people with a migration background, provided that they do not rely on social welfare. Yet, the process is now more complicated for those who do need state support and for those who cannot work full-time because they have disabilities or are raising children by themselves. There are theoretical provisions for hardship cases, but it’s not clear how they would work in practice.

Hostile Climate

When I spoke with two members of Nazi-Free Chemnitz, which organized the protest against Martin Sellner, they told me about the increasingly hostile climate for migrants and asylum seekers in Germany. They explained that the current migration debate is utterly at odds with reality — describing how new arrivals are often accused of not being willing to work, when it is actually legal hurdles that prevent them from doing so. As for the complicated path to German citizenship for people reliant on social welfare, the activists note that “people should not have to earn their right to be treated as human beings.”

The Nazi-Free Chemnitz group’s activism against the far right is no easy task in a city where the AfD captured 21.6 percent of the votes already in the last federal elections in fall 2021 — twice the party’s national average, at the time. But the situation, they explain, is even more complicated in rural areas, where activism for human rights and democracy meets with serious threats. In the electoral district that includes the towns surrounding Chemnitz, the AfD received more than a quarter of all votes in 2021.

As if the presence of the AfD and the Identitarian Movement in Chemnitz was not enough, the region also features two other far-right movements, Free Saxony and Pro Chemnitz. The latter organized the protests, also joined by AfD members, that led in August 2018 to massive attacks against people with a migration background in Chemnitz. The scenes of violence followed the death of a Cuban German in a fight with two migrants in the city center. Faced with the passivity of police, who are generally more concerned to investigate nonviolent left-wing groups than right-wing extremists, attacks against people perceived as foreigners went on for two days.

In eastern Germany, the AfD and other radical-right movements have a stronger presence than in other parts of the country, and this is most likely to be reflected in the regional elections next September. This notwithstanding, eastern Germany also has a civil society that has long known about the dangers of letting right-wing radicalism grow, and which takes to the streets in the same towns where the stakes are highest. Even faced with difficult odds, this seems more urgent than ever.

Marc Martorell Junyent is an author and researcher based in Munich.

How To ‘Decouple’ Emissions From Economic Growth? These Economists Say You Can’t.

At least, not fast enough to reach international climate targets.

By Akielly Hu, Joseph Winters

March 8, 2024
Source: Grist

Thomas Mountain wildfire in the San Jacinto Mountains.

Original public domain image from Flickr

For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.

This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.

Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries.

“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.

It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.”

The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’”

The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.

Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050.

That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population.

“The prospects for reversing inequality in all countries will be far greater when the overall economy is growing,” writes Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The good news is that at least some decoupling has been happening on a global scale for decades. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, but not quite as fast as gross domestic product, or GDP — the value of all goods and services produced in a given area. This type of decoupling is described as “relative” or “weak.” As the IEA has noted, the tight link between climate pollution and economic activity “has loosened” in every region of the world except for parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

But the kind of decoupling needed to achieve international climate targets is called “absolute” decoupling, when economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions veer in opposite directions: GDP up, emissions down. More recent research has documented this in a number of high-income countries. The U.S., for example, saw a 32 percent increase in GDP between 2005 and 2021, while its overall CO2 emissions fell by about 17 percent.

Something similar appears to have happened in other developed economies like France, Sweden, and Germany — even when you account for so-called “consumption-based” emissions, which include emissions from the production of goods that are imported or exported. In other words, these countries seem to really be reducing climate pollution and not just offshoring it to the developing world. Since 2016, reports from the World Resources Institute, the Breakthrough Institute, and independent researchers have shown more and more countries achieving periods of absolute decoupling, including their consumption-based emissions. Perhaps the splashiest analysis came in 2022, when a Financial Times data columnist reported that 70 countries — one in three worldwide — had experienced at least five consecutive years of absolute decoupling between 1990 and 2020.

“Green growth is already here,” the columnist wrote.

Some experts have raised questions about the data used to make these claims — GDP, for instance, can be measured in different ways that affect decoupling calculations, and country-level emissions data typically excludes major pollution sources like aviation and methane leaks from uncapped oil wells. Research led by Haberl — the largest literature review to date on the empirical evidence for absolute decoupling — suggests that only countries experiencing an economic crisis have successfully reduced their emissions, and that evidence for an inverse relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions is “seldom found.” But there’s a general consensus among economists that at least some amount of absolute decoupling has occurred in a handful of countries. In a study published last year in The Lancet Planetary Health, even green growth skeptics found evidence of absolute decoupling in 11 of the world’s highest-income countries.

“Everyone should be cheering about this,” Kate Raworth, a heterodox economist and professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, told Grist.

This leads to more nuanced questions, not about whether decoupling is possible — at least for individual countries — but whether currently observed trends can be extrapolated out to create a climate-safe future for the entire planet. In other words, can decoupling happen fast enough to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement?

One simple way to look at it is to take the rate of emissions reductions achieved in countries that have successfully decoupled, and see how long it would take for them to fully decarbonize. That’s essentially what Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel — researchers at the University of Leeds and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, respectively — did in the Lancet Planetary Health study. They found that, if 11 high-income countries continued their achieved rates of emissions reduction, it would take them more than 220 years to cut emissions by 95 percent — far longer than the net-zero-by-2050 timeline called for by climate experts.

“The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green,” the authors wrote. In an interview with Grist, Vogel likened optimism around gradual decoupling to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re slowing down,” while the Titanic races toward an iceberg.

Some economists argue that just because decoupling at the scale and speed necessary hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t. With enough investment in renewable energy and efficient clean technologies, they argue, economic growth can continue without the rise in emissions that has historically accompanied it. As noted by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, carbon-intensive sectors like electricity generation actually contribute relatively little to the world economy, compared to high-value but lower-emitting sectors like IT, real estate, and social work.

According to Pollin, the University of Massachusetts economics professor, faster decoupling is simply a matter of money and political will. If policymakers invest 2.5 percent of global GDP each year, he said — about $4.5 trillion — then the world economy can completely decarbonize within 40 to 50 years, all while boosting GDP through the creation of tens of millions of new jobs in the clean energy industry.

This plan would likely involve new policies to address renewable energy permitting challenges, boost energy efficiency for appliances and housing, and rein in global methane emissions — not to mention the urgent need to curtail the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry. Economic growth will be a natural byproduct of huge new investments in clean energy infrastructure, according to Pollin, and it will also be essential for creating new jobs for displaced fossil fuel workers and improving living conditions in developing countries. “There is simply no alternative,” he said.

Economists like Vogel and Hickel, however, draw a different conclusion. As long as countries pursue economic growth, they don’t believe world leaders will be able to zero out emissions fast enough to comply with international climate goals and principles of climate justice. According to their research, doing so would require, on average, a 10-fold increase in currently observed decoupling rates, which they consider to be “empirically out of reach.” They note that their conclusions are conservative because their data does not take into account emissions from agriculture, forestry, other land use, aviation, and shipping, and their projections assume that countries began adequate climate mitigation in 2023, which does not appear to have happened.

Other researchers have found that, even under aggressive climate mitigation policies, emissions relative to constant GDP growth can only decrease at a maximum rate of 3 percent per year. That’s only about a third of the decoupling rates that some experts say would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees C (2.7 or 3.6 degrees F).

“Absolute decoupling is not sufficient to avoid consuming the remaining CO2 emission budget under the global warming limit of 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C and to avoid climate breakdown,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent assessment.

Instead of making growth greener, some economists call for a whole new economic paradigm to address converging social and ecological crises. They call it “post-growth,” referring to a reorientation away from GDP growth and toward other metrics, like human well-being and ecological sustainability. Essentially, they want to prioritize people and the planet and not care so much what the stock market is doing. This would more or less free countries from the decoupling dilemma, since it eliminates the growth imperative altogether.

Raworth, the professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, calls her version of the post-growth agenda “doughnut economics.” In this visual model, the inner ring of the doughnut represents the minimum amount of economic activity needed to satisfy basic needs like access to food, water, and shelter. The outer ring signifies the upper limits of natural resource use that the Earth can sustain. The goal, she argues, is for economies to exist between the inner and outer rings of the doughnut, maintaining adequate living standards without surpassing planetary limits.

“Our economies need to bring us into the doughnut,” Raworth told Grist. “Whether GDP grows needs to be a secondary concern.”

Vogel and Hickel go a little further. They call for a planned, deliberate reduction of carbon- or energy-intensive production and consumption in high-income countries, a concept known as “degrowth.” The rationale is that much of the energy and resources used in high-income countries goes toward carbon-intensive products that don’t contribute to human welfare, like industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets. Tamping down this “less necessary” consumption could slash greenhouse gas emissions, while lower energy demand could make it more feasible to build and maintain enough energy infrastructure. Some research suggests that reducing energy demand could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C without relying on unproven technologies to draw carbon out of the atmosphere.

Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit.

“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.

Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.

Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality.

“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”

They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt.

Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”

Degrowth and the Professional Managerial Class

By Emma River-Roberts
March 8, 2024
Source: Class and Degrowth

It may have taken the degrowth movement the best part of fifty years and a vocal alignment with ecosocialism to actually start talking about class politics, but we’re here now at least. This novel interest has brought with it a barrage of questions pertaining to how working class consciousness and power can be rebuilt from the ground-up – elements that are necessary preconditions to our mass mobilisation and emancipation. However, helping to achieve this will forever remain out of the movement’s capabilities unless they begin to critically reflect upon the social dynamics of the movement itself. That is, that it’s mostly comprised of individuals belonging to the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), and the specific challenges that this creates in regards to the working class and movement building.

In Bridging the Class Divide, Linda Stout observes that organisations and movements often fall apart because they fail to organise across class lines. She stresses that organising across class lines doesn’t just entail bringing in a greater diversity of people, but actively working to create the conditions that enable these diverse groups to work together. In other words, consideration must be explicitly given to not only the classed-differences that arise in matters such as disparate preferences for communication styles, but also to the existing state of relations between different groups. In cases where these existing state of relations are contentious to any degree, steps must be taken to ascertain what the root cause of these issues are and how this can be remediated. Otherwise, collaboration across groups will most likely be transient and subsequently ineffective at best, non-existent at worst.

The existing state of relations between the working class and PMC are, broadly speaking, ambivalent at best. As highlighted by Catherine Liu in Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, the working-classes continue to be treated with nothing but contempt:

“The professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes… They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimisers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people”, but the use of that word objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that they people have no access to power without them.”

Of course, this doesn’t apply to the entire demographic. However enough of them have – and continue to behave in this way, that it’s become a quintessential form of working class struggle: We continue to be stereotyped in the media, documentaries, social media, by academics, environmental activists, those in professions they deem to be ‘superior’ to ours. Our dialects and languages continue to be penalised and stigmatised, our sense of humour is flagged as inappropriate, our appearance is seen as something to be laughed at, even our homes are labelled as grossly inferior and inhabited by society’s worse. We’re excluded from actively participating in civil society organisations, and we know that unless we make ourselves ‘palatable’ in PMC spaces – that is, downplaying our working-classness and trying to present ourselves as middle class, we’ll probably be treated like second-rate citizens.[1] In the eyes of others, our differences mean that we’re unworthy of respect in all its forms, legitimising our systematic and social exclusion from participation in mainstream society, and ruthlessly tearing every single component of our cultures, values and practices to shreds in the process.

These examples aren’t anecdotal: I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never met another working class person – from both the global North and South, who doesn’t have handfuls of personal experiences such as these. The PMC have self-internalised and reproduced the oppressive nature of successive states, alienating us for the conditions of our existence that we never chose but were born into – it’s irrefutable that they played a monumental part in the ruthless decimation of working class consciousness and power, pulling it right down to the ground where it continues to lay in tatters to this day.[2] If the reader is dubious about what I’m saying here, instead of perpetually theorising the nature of our existence from a physical and philosophical distance, go and find a working class person, ask if any of the aforementioned applies to them and how they have been personally affected by it.

Being cognizant of this side of our struggle is therefore vital. Not just to understand our history and who we are as people, but also because this longstanding marginalisation has impacted how many of the working class view and interact with the PMC themselves – including those of the PMC who belong to environmental movements. There are countless working class people with the means to mobilise who actively shy away from PMC-led spaces for many reasons, making their retreat a form of self-preservation against the very people who purport to be standing in alliance with them. For obvious reasons, this has ramifications when it comes to movement building strategies in all their forms.

Frustratingly, the movement remains largely reluctant to address this issue – and more often than not, it’s not mentioned at all. But rather avoiding it entirely, or downplaying the problem by stipulating that Marx and Engels were white middle class individuals from the global North, and suggesting that perhaps all the degrowth movement needs is time to connect with others, we need to be confronting this head-on. All of the empirical evidence, lived-experiences and personal testimonies points to this being an issue in need of remediation, to varying degrees across the global North and South, so we need to stop pretending like it isn’t something worthy of critical conversation. I can assure the reader that this won’t go away on its own no matter how cataclysmic our conditions may become in the future. The left is losing the climate class war, and sitting around waiting for time to heal all wounds or ignoring this issue entirely will only incur us further losses.

Emphasising the problems between the working class and PMC doesn’t create an ‘us and them’ mentality, so long as the reader is able to adopt a truly objective stance and be willing to engage in a continuous process of critical self-reflection – even if it may apply to them, and even if it’s an uncomfortable truth. We can’t afford to be anything but bluntly pragmatic. Or, to quote Marx:

“Everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no idea what the future ought to be… It is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the world through criticism of the old one…. If constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”

If people are truly serious about the emancipation of the working class then they must take the time to learn about our sources of de-emancipation – we can’t ‘build the struggle’ unless we fully comprehend and acknowledge the multifarious forms that it takes in the lives of the working class. We can’t expect to bring anyone on board otherwise, and it’s vacuously naïve to believe that a global struggle against the bourgeoise is enough by itself to unite people across class factions – it isn’t. If it was, it would’ve worked by now.

If the reader still needs convincing allow me to put this another way – it’s taken half a century to bring class politics to the top of degrowth’s agenda. After half a century, people are still grappling with the question of attracting working class people to the movement. Now of course it’s grown in size and popularity since then – exponentially so, but it remains predominantly comprised of white PMC individuals from the global North. Degrowth has effectively sat on the shelf for long enough that it’s become the stale ham sandwich of movements, devoid of a demographic representation that reflects the heterogeneity of society, deprived of the voices and perspectives that a heterogenous demographic brings with it, and subsequently incapable of becoming a serious contender for mass politics. Maybe – just maybe, it’s time to start thinking about how the social dynamics of the movement have inadvertently contributed to this, and how this can be redressed. These issues can be remediated, but only if the movement is willing to be pragmatic and open to critical self-reflection on their limitations in this light.

Adopting ecosocialist principles and practices is a monumental step in the right direction. However socialist theory isn’t a panacea for the working class, and even with this shift in approach this still doesn’t alter a given individual’s demographic. It doesn’t matter what people’s intentions are – it doesn’t matter that some PMC activists would never dream to treat others in this way, what matters is how they are perceived by the very people that they are trying to reach.

PMC-dominated spaces/movements are unattractive to much of the working class for many reasons to the extent that they avoid them entirely (I will unpack this further in Part II, including the challenges of PMC spaces/movements that are inherently academic in nature). Most of these issues have their roots in the historic systematic and social marginalisation abetted by the PMC – they are issues so entrenched that it has culminated in the working class struggle becoming a socially dyadic one: It exists as a struggle against the bourgeoise and the PMC. Understanding this forms part of the crucial foundational knowledge that anyone must have in their repertoire if they are to successfully engage with the working class.

TBC

[1] At the grand old age of 32 I’ve decided that I’m fed up with trying to make myself a ‘palatable’ working class person and I won’t be doing this anymore. The only occasions where I will ever tone down my dialect is in front of audiences/people whose first language isn’t English, because I’ve found that they find it difficult to understand what I’m trying to say at times – and I’ll never have a problem with toning it down for that.

[2] For further reading see: David Graeber’s ‘Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class’

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Sunday, March 10, 2024

War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine

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