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A new report confirms that insecure and precarious work is widespread across the economy. To respond meaningfully to the needs of workers, the labor movement must grapple with the harmful impacts of precarity.

Food delivery workers in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 7, 2023. (Creative Touch Imaging Ltd. / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In their new report, “But Is It a Good Job? Understanding Employment Precarity in BC [British Columbia],” for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Kendra Strauss and Iglika Ivanova survey the rise of the “gig economy.” The report finds that the harms of precarious work are widespread, with some groups bearing a greater share of the burden.

Coauthor Kendra Strauss recently spoke to David Moscrop for Jacobin and discussed the report, the state of labor, and what might be done to secure better jobs for all.

David Moscrop

I want to start by defining precarious work. One of the bits of the study I found interesting is that it complicates the idea of “precarious work.” What precisely defines a precarious job?

Kendra Strauss

One of the things we addressed in the study is the fact that there’s no single agreed-upon definition of precarious employment. We looked at two different ways that researchers have tended to approach and measure precarity. If we go back to the 1980s and the work of the International Labor Organization trying to understand changing trends in employment, mostly in higher income countries, that’s where we get the idea of standard versus nonstandard jobs. A standard job, in a kind of normative sense, was a continuing full-time job with a single employer, often with a family-supporting wage, access to benefits, and usually some access to collective representation, although that obviously varied country by country. But it’s really the characteristics of a job being full-time, continuing, with a single employer, and with access to benefits that we tend to think of as the standard.

The problem with that definition is that even historically, in the post–World War II era, it was largely normative in the sense that it applied to a significant number of workers, but there were nonetheless groups of workers who never really had access to this standard. We can think about women; we can think about racialized workers.

More recently, researchers have been looking at additional indicators of precarious employment that address both aspects of job quality and job security. We are less and less starting with the idea of “standard jobs” and then defining precarity as the opposite of that. Rather, we’re trying to actually define what precarious employment itself looks like. The main kind of indicators that tend to be part of that definition are temporary or contract-based employment, low and/or irregular income or pay, and a lack of access to employment-related benefits.

David Moscrop

The survey also found that there’s more than one type of precarious work. It’s more than just so-called gig work. Practically speaking, what sorts of precarious work did you find? What are people actually doing out there in the world that is defined as precarious?

Kendra Strauss

I think that one of the really important findings of this study in British Columbia is that precarious employment is not just gig work. What we really saw, although we didn’t gather detailed data on sector and industry, is that forms of less secure and precarious employment are found across the economy.

Almost all sectors had people working in precarious jobs. Obviously, we know that precarious employment is concentrated in certain sectors. The service sector, broadly speaking, sees relatively high levels of precarious employment. The private sector tends to see more precarious employment than the public sector. But that’s partly because in British Columbia, as in other parts of Canada, the public sector is more highly unionized. But we also see precarious employment in the public sector as well. The idea that a government job is a stable, full-time permanent job is just not true anymore, especially for young workers.

I think one of the key findings of the report is that precarious employment is found across our economy, but it’s not equally distributed among different groups of workers. That’s where we really need to be concerned about the way that precarious employment interacts with other forms of systemic inequalities.

“Precarity Is as Old as Capitalism”

David Moscrop

Why was it necessary for you to carry out this work in the first place? Why does Statistics Canada [the country’s national statistical agency], for instance, not collect data on precarious work?

Kendra Strauss

That’s one of the things we’ve been asking ourselves for some time. And I think the answer to that is, in some senses, that the normative idea of a standard job still exercises a lot of sway. I think Statistics Canada has really just taken a long time to catch up with the realities of the changing labor market.

In the same way that labor exploitation is inherent in capitalism, so is precarity. Precarity benefits employers.

Let’s be clear: precarity is as old as capitalism. This is not new. In the same way that labor exploitation is inherent in capitalism, so is precarity. Precarity benefits employers. But I think that in Canada, the perception that most people work in permanent, full-time continuing jobs has been one that was really only disrupted by the pandemic, because the pandemic actually spurred Statistics Canada to add some additional questions that get at some of the indicators that we looked at in our study.

The study was inspired by the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario research project, which ran for a number of years and was one of the first studies to really look at precarious employment in the greater Toronto area using survey-based research. We were frustrated by the gaps in the data that Statistics Canada generate and gather through, for example, the labor-force survey, but also through the census as well. There was very limited data on access to benefits, on multiple job-holding, on training, and many of these indicators of job quality and job security that are important to understanding precarious employment.

David Moscrop

You mentioned that not everyone is affected equally by precarious work. That’s one of the findings in your report. Which sorts of people are affected by this type of labor?

Kendra Strauss

Well, unsurprisingly, given settler colonialism and racial capitalism, indigenous workers — in particular indigenous men — were the single largest group to be in precarious jobs. For recent immigrants, people who’ve immigrated within the last ten years, the likelihood of being in precarious employment is very high. And interestingly, that mirrors some of the findings of a government report.

The government released its “what we heard” on its consultation with app-based food delivery and ride-hailing workers in British Columbia just a day or two before we released our report. And one of the things that it found was that certain groups of workers are highly reliant on app-based gig work as the main source of their income. It’s not just a little bit of extra cash. What we see is that recent immigrants, who are also likely to be racialized, are not able to access what we might think of as core- or primary-sector jobs. They’re more likely to be in precarious jobs.

Racialized workers broadly, and women, are also more likely to be precarious. And young workers. So, we really see kind of intersecting or interlocking forms of inequality being related to the likelihood or propensity of being in precarious employment. What should really concern us all is that precarious employment both reflects but also exacerbates those existing systemic inequalities that I talked about.

Balancing Flexibility and Security

David Moscrop

Building off that, we know that precarious work is a lousy deal for individuals that makes it harder for them to afford the things they need to get through the day, much less flourish. But are there broader social, political, and economic effects that a market full of precarious work produces?

Kendra Strauss

We know that there has been increasing polarization in the labor market. We know that there’s been increasing polarization in income and wealth in Canada. I think what we’re seeing is the way in which precarious employment is part of that picture. We don’t yet have an analysis with which to identify causal relationships. But I think we can say with some confidence that the spread of precarious employment and its unequal distribution is part of that picture.

But there are broader social implications as well. When people don’t have access to employer-provided benefits in a country like Canada, where we have at least primary health care that’s free at the point of delivery, we bear the costs of the unequal distribution of extended health care benefits as a society. Although I don’t particularly like the argument that we should be concerned just because of the cost in taxpayer’s money, I do think that there are social costs that we need to be aware of.

Precarious employment is a barrier to equal participation of families and workers in their communities.

We also see broader social costs in relation to the ability of precarious workers and their families to participate in society and in their communities, to participate equally in the lives of their children. We see that precarious workers have less time and ability to help their children with homework and to participate in school trips or to afford school supplies and the basic things that any parent wants to be able to do with their kids and their family. Precarious employment is a barrier to equal participation of families and workers in their communities. And that’s a problem. That’s something we should all be worried about.

David Moscrop

The report is called, “But Is It a Good Job?” What is a good job and how does it contrast with a bad, precarious job? What does better look like?

Kendra Strauss

That’s a great question, because I think one of the things we need to be aware of is that discourses of flexibility have been very successfully mobilized, including by big tech companies. It’s politically naive to deny — particularly for those of us who are interested in organizing with workers while taking into account the political implications of precarity — that workers do want and need some flexibility. And not everybody wants a full-time, permanent kind of desk-based or industrial job that we used to think of as the gold standard. We can say that decent jobs are characterized by security and permanence. But we also need to think about flexibility and security and how they can be traded off against one another.

So, for example, some workers might prefer contract-based employment — particularly highly paid and highly skilled workers — because it actually gives them flexibility, and they have pretty good bargaining power. But other workers might prefer a continuing job, but not necessarily a full-time job. We need to think carefully about why workers need flexibility. If, for example, it’s because they need to provide childcare and don’t have access to childcare that’s affordable and good quality, then we need to look at both the organization of employment and the organization of collective supports — our social services and our social safety net.

We need to think about what workers need to have to ensure adequate security to be able to live day to day and thrive and plan for the future. But the ways in which we as a society provide the supports that workers in their communities need is a significant part of that puzzle.

A really good example of this is the introduction of five paid sick days in British Columbia. That policy was not in place when we did our survey. And a very high proportion of workers had no access to any paid sick days. We could say that five sick days might be inadequate — I would’ve liked to see ten — but, either way, that’s a policy that makes a significant difference to workers in terms of their ability to stay home when they’re not well. And that benefits them, but it also benefits our society in terms of public health.

That’s not a simple or straightforward answer, but what I’m saying is that we need to be looking at both job quality and the aspects of security that workers need to be able to plan and thrive day to day. At the same time, we also need to be looking at our social safety net and our social programs. Many of our employment supports and employment-related programs are still very much premised on a model of full-time continuing employment.

Employment insurance, for example, has covered fewer and fewer workers with each subsequent reform. And it is really, really inadequate to the realities of precarious employment. And that’s why we needed the Canada Emergency Response Benefit during the pandemic. Those programs also need to be looked at if we as a society want to have a social safety net that actually covers all workers.

Securing Better Jobs for Workers

David Moscrop

At a practical political level, do you have any advice for how advocates, activists, and even governments might bring about better jobs for workers? How does that happen at the level of the streets and at the level of the policy boardrooms?

Kendra Strauss

I think we’re already seeing organizing, particularly more grassroots organizing, that is a direct response to precarity: Fight for Fifteen movements, organizing movements around and among fast-food and gig-economy workers, or some of the efforts to try and organize with companies like Amazon. The big unions, I think, are playing catch-up.

I think traditional organized labor is waking up to the fact that precarious employment is a problem both for nonunionized and for many unionized workers — a broad-based labor movement that responds directly to the needs of most workers is one that needs to grapple directly with the realities of precarious employment. I think that’s something that the labor movement needs to wake up to. And grassroots labor organizing is already there, and that’s where we’ve seen some of the successes. Granted, those have been fragmented, and there are huge challenges in actually getting a first contract and sustaining certification in sectors like fast food.

I think traditional organized labor is waking up to the fact that precarious employment is a problem both for nonunionized and for many unionized workers.

Think about Starbucks, for example. I live in Victoria, British Columbia, and we had one of the first Starbucks to certify. And the challenges that they face in terms of actually getting their first collective agreement are massive. But we need to have a kind of critical theory of the state that understands that governments will only be held to account and bring in worker-supporting policies when workers demand it. This is not something that governments will do on their own out of the goodness of their hearts. In British Columbia, we have a government that is nominally kind of on the Left and has brought in some policies to make unionization easier. But increasing workers’ voice and the ability of workers to unionize is one of the only ways that we’re going to put pressure on employers to improve the quality of jobs, because employers are not going to do it on their own.

That said, I mean, we’re at an interesting moment where employers are talking a lot about labor shortages. And of course, their first argument is that this means that we should increase immigration, and in particular, temporary migration. They want to see the expansion of the temporary foreign worker program. But I think we need to be countering that with the argument that if you want to attract workers, you need to offer decent jobs. And in a labor market where workers have any kind of choice, they are going to be choosing jobs that meet their needs, that are more stable and less precarious. Employers need to be offering those kinds of jobs if they want to recruit and retain workers.

I think there are lessons in our report for employers and for government. And in our conclusion, we propose several policy suggestions. But we know from history that work only becomes less precarious when workers mobilize, organize, and demand less precarious employment. Our report and project aimed to shed light on the prevalence of precarious employment across various sectors of the economy. That was one of our primary motivations. We want people to understand that precarity impacts everyone, and that we need to be organizing across the economy and forming coalitions to improve employment for all workers.

For decades, Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia is on the path to extinction. His war has killed untold numbers of people — but it’s also an attempt to force millions of people into Russian citizenship.

Russian recruits gather outside a military processing center as drafted men said goodbye to their families before departing from their town in Moscow, Russia on October 6, 2022. (Sefa Karacan / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“The demographic doom loop has not, it appears, diminished Mr Putin’s craving for conquest. But it is rapidly making Russia a smaller, worse-educated and poorer country, from which young people flee and where men die in their 60s.” So concludes a recent Economist article about the demographic situation in Russia, a year into its invasion of Ukraine. However, what the British weekly isn’t counting — unlike the Russian government — are the approximately two million Crimeans who received Russian citizenship after the annexation in 2014. It also fails to mention the over 2.8 million Ukrainians who had to move to Russia since the beginning of the invasion, the more than one million people from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions who had to move to Russia over the last eight years of war, as well as those who have stayed in the occupied territories, and are currently lining up to receive Russian citizenship.

But these people matter — and including them in an analysis of the invasion and its consequences is crucial. As I will show here, managing the demographic crisis — part of a broader crisis of the reproduction of Russian society itself — can be understood as one of the key reasons behind the invasion. Before February 24, 2022, Ukrainians constituted the key ethnic group among those acquiring Russian citizenship and coming to the country as labor migrants. Now, the Kremlin uses forcefully displaced Ukrainians to refill the population pool with educated, predominantly Slavic, Russian-speaking new citizens. It is no coincidence that Putin repeats that Ukrainians do not exist as a separate nation — they, according to him, should be integrated into Russian citizenship but in a specially designed category as “second-class” citizens. Now, Putin’s changes to Russian citizenship law have introduced a new category of citizens with acquired citizenship.

Surely, such demographic engineering offers a scary vision of the future envisaged by Putin. But as my analysis shows, it can also help us better conceptualize a biopolitical imperialism, i.e. one “in which death is figuratively exported and life imported back.” That is, we can understand this imperialism in its connection with social reproduction — the replenishment of the Russian population itself.

“Traditional Values,” a Magical Solution

Since the early 2010s, as Dmitrii Dorogov argues, the Russian government has been vocal about what it calls “gender freedoms,” a series of scapegoats that includes feminism, women without children, and “LGBTQ propaganda.” The latter is already completely prohibited in public space in Russia, and a ban on “child-free propaganda” is being discussed. Several feminist activists and organizations promoting gender equality have already been stigmatized with “foreign agent” status. These attacks are often reduced to the superficial confrontation of an emancipatory feminist agenda and the autocratic patriarchal Putin: so the argument goes, “gender rights are explicitly democratic, so they threaten authoritarian regimes like Russia’s that rely on traditional, unequal gender roles, heteronormativity and, especially, the cult of masculinity.”

The medal of the ‘Mother Heroine,’ accompanied by a onetime payment of one million rubles, calls for a life-threatening ten offspring per woman.

Clearly, the gender hierarchy implied in “traditional values” contributes to many other social hierarchies, which can be naturalized through gendered metaphors. If it is agreed that the “masculine” should be superior, it may be easier to accept the priority of military spending over health care, the priority of the security of borders over the protection of life, etc. Spheres coded as feminine can be underfunded and underrepresented, all in the name of the “natural, traditional” order. The conservative Russian government hates any emancipatory projects, whether Bolshevik or queer-feminist. But the question of gender has the more fundamental political-economic connection with social reproduction, which is doubtless one of the Kremlin’s key anxieties.

“Traditional values,” as Putin’s ideologues present things, provide a secure basis for the nation’s procreation. In this conservative worldview, a woman is often seen as incomplete until she gives birth. Everyone who has ever visited a gynecologist in Russia will know this attitude — according to women’s consultation personnel, all our problems will wither away as soon as we give birth. Women should, preferably, give birth to three children — or so Putin explained to us in his 2012 address to the Federation Council. However, in 2022, this accounting of female bodies’ reproductive capacities has bumped up the numbers; it now calls for a life-threatening ten offspring per woman, by introducing the medal of the “Mother Heroine,” which is accompanied by a onetime payment of one million rubles. This attempt to strengthen control over reproduction is also expressed in the prohibition on foreign citizens from using Russian women as surrogates, and in discussions about removing abortions from the state health-insurance system.

In stark contrast to this rhetoric is a recent national strategy for women’s interests, which focuses on women’s involvement in paid labor and political decision-making. It even calls for a fight against “gender stereotypes,” female poverty, and domestic violence. Overall, the strategy remarkably echoes the structure, language, and priorities of the old Soviet trade-union organizations, except for one distinction: the national strategy also cites “traditional values” to encourage women to fulfill their natural roles as mothers while also being workers. Without any material foundation, “traditional values” here loom as a magic spell to solve the demographic crisis.

As Mona Claro argues, in post-Soviet Russia “postponing motherhood was becoming a new way of ‘doing class’ in a context of growing social inequalities.” In other words, in Russia people stay childless because they simply cannot afford to have children. Thus, there is no solution to the demographic crisis without a radical restructuring of the economy in favor of reproduction — and the national strategy reveals the fact that “traditional values” are an unachievable goal for the government and probably an undesirable one for the population. Russian data shows that having three or more children in almost 50 percent of cases means life below the poverty line. In this sense, the talk of a return to “traditional values” is just a symptom of the Russian government’s helplessness in influencing women’s demographic choices.

But anxiety about social reproduction is broader than just fear of a demographic crisis — it reflects the threat that the new generation will not comply with the system. This is evident in Russian authorities’ obsession with children and teenagers protesting, highlighted by the “criminal” files on journal DOXA. Ever-more initiatives in Russia are addressing the need for a “patriotic upbringing,” like “Important Conversations” classes or the “Movement of the First,” a pseudo-imitation of the Soviet-era Young Pioneers. This is combined with severe criminal prosecution of kids like Masha Moskaleva — sent to an orphanage for an antiwar painting — or a schoolgirl in Kazan under house arrest for an alleged attempt to set a conscription office on fire. We are seeing the tightening of control over the transformation of young individuals into “proper” political subjects who will recognize themselves ideologically as “Russians.”

‘Traditional values’ are just a symptom of the Russian government’s helplessness in influencing women’s demographic choices.

Over the last decade, the Kremlin spoke ever louder about its reproduction crisis, both in the physical form of procreation and in the political form of ensuring itself a mass of compliant citizens. The fight for “traditional values” is an attempt to find a metaphysical solution for the actual material problems of poverty and inequality that are among the causes of population decline.

Demographic Situation: An Existential Threat

Much is written in the media about the drastic demographic situation in Russia — a state that, despite all the efforts made, has a falling population. Ultimately, corrupt capitalism mixed with an authoritarian government may not provide comfortable conditions for happy family life. True, the demographic crisis is hardly unique to Russia. Still, it is worth examining how in public discourse, these demographic challenges are framed as a threat to national security or even to Russia’s very existence.

In his first address to the Federation Council in 2000, Putin framed demographic problems as a threat to national security:

And, if you believe the forecasts and the estimates are based on actual work, the real work of people who understand this, who have devoted their whole lives to this, in 15 years, there may be 22 million fewer Russians. I ask you to think about this figure: a seventh of the country’s population. If the current trend continues, the nation’s survival will be in jeopardy [emphasis added].

According to researchers Ekaterina Vasilieva, Tamara Rostovskaya, and Ebulfez Süleymanlý, the 1990s were the first time demographic issues were framed, in public policy, as a part of national security. This trend is one of the most obvious and persistent in Putin’s rhetoric over the decades of his rule. Based on a discourse analysis of Russian laws, they argue, “since 2000, a new stage in the formation of meanings begins — the popularization of demographic threats to the national security of the Russian Federation.”

In 2006, Putin declared the need to address population decline as “the highest national priority,” and the Maternity Capital program was launched the following year. It offers a significant onetime benefit (known as a certificate) to parents who give birth to or adopt a second or third child. The funds are designated for specific purposes such as housing, children’s education, contribution to the mother’s pension fund, or rehabilitation services for a child with a disability. However, all these measures have not substantially increased fertility rates — they have only changed the timing of giving birth. Neither has an influx of migrants been enough to make up for population decrease.

Thus as the years have passed, the gloomy forecast in Putin’s 2000 address is ever more the reality. In 2013 — the year before the annexation of Crimea, which brought Russia two million new citizens — major daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article with the alarming headline “Russia is facing a colossal deficit of the working-age population.” The introduction claimed that “Russia has only five years left to get out of the ‘demographic hole.’” Not only economic consequences were discussed, but also threats to the Russian army, given that the demographic crisis “will jeopardize the country’s defense capability (by 2020, the number of men of military age will be reduced by more than a third, and by 2050, by more than 40 percent) [emphasis added].”

This situation didn’t improve over the last decade. An accelerating natural population decrease occurred in 2020–21 due to the government’s failure to implement anti-COVID measures, which migration did not make up for: “The natural population decrease in Russia in 2021 amounted to 1.042 million people, compared to 688,700 people in 2020 and 317,200 people in 2019.” This data has plenty to say about the looming collapse of the “Russian nation.” If something should have been a “reasonable security concern,” it was not as much NATO expansion per se as the lack of human bodies to protect Russian borders.

Thus, the Ukrainians forcefully and violently displaced by the Russian invasion represent one of the Kremlin’s main gains in this war. In this sense, the story of kidnapped Ukrainian children is not just one of many horrifying Russian war crimes, but represents the core of this military aggression.

New Citizens

All this ought to sound counterintuitive. War is always seen as a source of demographic crisis: people refrain from giving birth, flee the country, and get killed. According to different data, up to half a million people emigrated from Russia (the most generous calculation, but also some of them are coming back), at least 16,774 people have been killed (as established by the independent media), and the number of wounded people is unknown. These statistics are horrifying, especially since the raw numbers hide the reality of disrupted human life. Yet, the picture gets even more sinister if we look into the numbers of displaced Ukrainians in Russia and the new laws about asylum and citizenship. Indeed, war is a crisis, but capital accumulation needs a crisis that is “orchestrated, managed, and controlled to rationalize the system.”

There is nearly zero state support or protection for displaced Ukrainians in Russia.

According to UN data from the beginning of the invasion, more than 2.8 million Ukrainians had to cross the Russian border, lacking almost any possibility of leaving the occupied territories to the Ukrainian side. But the Russian authorities proudly announced numbers almost twice as high at 5.3 million, among them 738,000 children, thus showing their pride in the forced displacement of millions of Ukrainians and simultaneously articulating their hidden desire: millions of new potential citizens. Unfortunately, we do not know precisely how many people are trying to survive in the occupied territories.

There is almost zero state support or protection for displaced Ukrainians in Russia. Only twenty-eight Ukrainians have a “refugee” status as of December 31, 2022; 65,374 Ukrainians have temporary protection status. The rest must either work — which includes the requirement of obtaining an expensive patent for labor migrants — or have to acquire Russian citizenship. In July 2022, Putin signed a decree that guarantees an easier procedure of acquiring Russian citizenship to all Ukrainian citizens (since 2019, it only covered people from uncontrolled territories).

Although 303,786 Ukrainians acquired Russian citizenship in 2022, this number is lower than the previous year (375,989). The change may point to Ukrainians’ resistance to taking up Russian citizenship but may also be related to the slow pace of bureaucracy or exclusion of people from the occupied territories from the database. We cannot know. But we do know that this low number — opposite to what was expected, given claims that there are some five million forcefully displaced Ukrainians — has saddened Putin. He recently expressed his disappointment in the only form available to him: as an order to the authorities to speed up the process, finishing his public address to the responsible bodies with “Get it right. I’m serious.”

Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced, the survivors of the devastation of their hometowns. These Ukrainians — predominantly Slavic, primarily Christian, Russian speaking, and ground through filtration camps — can guarantee Putin the increase in population that he failed to achieve during his rule, with minimal state investment. By September 2022, Russia spent less than 0.1 percent of its GDP on support programs for Ukrainians, considerably lower than most Eastern European countries that have welcomed Ukrainian refugees. Some of this money is also stolen by contractors.

Instead of support for “refugees” per se, we are today seeing increasing support for motherhood: a substantial increase in social benefits for mothers and children in the new Russian budget, a new system of social benefits starting January 1, 2023, and Putin’s promise to pay Maternity Capital to all women from the occupied territories who gave birth or adopted children after 2007 (on condition, we may assume, of them taking up Russian citizenship). These benefits will make Russian citizenship much more attractive to women with children whose cities — along with their houses, workplaces, childcare, and health-care infrastructure — were destroyed by the Russian invasion. This again points to how Russia has bought new citizens for relatively small sums (the benefits for children do not exceed one living wage per child, if the parent’s income is below this level).

Instead of support for ‘refugees,’ we can see increasing support for motherhood: a substantial increase in social benefits for mothers and children in the new Russian budget.

So, how are Ukrainians in Russia living and surviving? According to official data, there are ninety-five thousand places in temporary housing facilities for Ukrainians in Russia. However, as Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the Civic Assistance Committee, told Feminist Antiwar Resistance, only thirty-eight thousand of them are now receiving accommodation in these facilities. Thus, Russian social media has been filled with ads like, “I will rent half of my bed to a Ukrainian woman.” According to Gannushkina, many Ukrainians have to move in with their relatives or friends, and agree to whatever job is available due to their precarious and vulnerable status. In addition, they must pay for health insurance during the application process for either citizenship or temporary protection.

In the last year, Russian imperialism has uprooted millions of Ukrainians: it took away their houses, ways of life, and community — a “devaluation and destruction of previously viable livelihoods” — to transform Ukrainians from the occupied territories into an even more precarious workforce. As a result, the Kremlin accumulates cheap labor power, appropriating Ukrainian state investment in the birth, care, and education of its former citizens; their reproductive labor; and even their personal relations that allow them to survive in Russia without state support. This — together with the appropriation of companies and the devastation of territories now to be redeveloped — is a typical process of imperialist accumulation by dispossession. However, it is essential to emphasize that the new citizens themselves become the main asset in question, albeit one tremendously devalued through the war with its litany of daily shellings, murders, death, and injuries. Indeed, human life is never as cheap as during wartime.

Changed Citizenship

But, some may ask — what is so bad about Russian citizenship? Indeed, it is true that the Russian state does not only govern through repression and coercion. An invitation to take up citizenship, rather than an exhausting refugee status, might seem to some pro-Russian people from occupied territories as a brotherly and caring gesture. At the same time, Russian foreign policy has extensively used Russian citizenship as a means of soft power, destabilizing the sovereignty of neighboring countries. However, Ukrainians entering Russia must pass through humiliating filtration camps and sign a paper that they have no claims against this state.

Changes have also been made to Russian citizenship itself. The amendments were initially proposed by Putin in December 2021 and approved by the State Duma in the first reading in April 2022. However, after that first approval, the process stalled. This is very unusual for presidential proposals, which are typically adopted nearly immediately. The amendments to the law about citizenship were announced again last fall and included a wide range of reasons for deprivation of the acquired citizenship. They include political motives like spreading fake news about or “discrediting” the Russian Armed Forces; calls for separatism; participation in the activities of an undesirable organization; desecration of the flag and coat of arms of Russia; encroachment on the life of a statesman; and calls for extremism and the evasion of military service. Besides these are crimes like drug dealing, hooliganism, vandalism, corruption, etc. The State Duma Committee finally approved the amendments earlier this month. Simultaneously, we can see legislative initiatives introduced in Russia to prevent Ukrainians from keeping their Ukrainian citizenship or to simplify the procedure of canceling the Ukrainian citizenship of minors without their consent.

Those of us born in the USSR but outside the territory of the contemporary Russian Federation thus risk falling, overnight, into the condition of second-class citizens — people who, because of their disobedience, risk not only imprisonment but the deprivation of the only citizenship they hold. These new amendments thus challenge even the remnants of popular sovereignty in Russia, with dissent restricted not only by the threat of imprisonment but by the deprivation of all citizenship rights. The amendments thus postulate a new type of contract between the Russian state and its new citizens, who are obliged to be loyal in order to be citizens at all.

This happens at a time when citizens are increasingly dependent on the state, even for income. For example, the income of the poorest part of the population actually increased during 2022 due to the benefits connected with the war, whereas the middle class lost out, except for those groups that receive a salary from the state (army, police, teachers, public servants, etc.). Intensifying this dependency, the amendments destroy our barely existing freedom of political expression, including those of us who are abroad.

Along with their repressive aspect, the amendments to citizenship law also have another element designed to balance discontent: they simplify the process of acquiring citizenship for twenty categories of people, including those in useful professions, such as drone operators. Last fall, Putin signed a decree that grants simplified acquisition of Russian citizenship to foreign citizens after a year of military-contract service.

Those of us born in the USSR but outside the territory of the contemporary Russian Federation may fall, overnight, into the condition of second-class citizens.

This war has thus become a testing ground for the Kremlin in creating new tools of population management. It is developing a new type of biopolitical imperialism to manage the crisis in social reproduction. In granting and depriving citizenship, it is possible to expand Russia’s borders and its political influence, while also cleansing the internal population in the interest of creating an obedient and silent army of workers, soldiers, and future mothers. A new law about digital notices for the military draft and severe restrictions on evaders from the army (including a ban on monetary transactions, restriction of movement, etc.) is another side of this transformation of citizenship permitted by the war.

It is vital to note that these amendments to citizenship law came from Putin’s own initiative, upon the eve of the invasion. This helps us understand how he sees the “saved” Ukrainian population — as a silent and obedient workforce requiring zero support and investment. In this sense, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children is only the tip of the iceberg of the demographic politics of this war. It is crucial that any conversation about postwar justice makes visible and heard these millions of Ukrainians who have been displaced to Russia and forced into Russian citizenship.

Troublingly, the new manipulations of Russian citizenship reach far beyond Ukrainians alone. The amendments to the citizenship law also allow Putin to expand the categories of people eligible for simplified acquisition of citizenship, including “citizens of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Ukraine.” The inclusion of these many other countries marks out the horizons of the Kremlin’s imperialist ambitions.

A toddler managed to make it past security at the White House Tuesday. The Secret Service was on the case, and they returned the boy to his parents.

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A hallmark of Israel’s official state ceremony at the start of Independence Day are the drills performed by soldiers and flag bearers.

The post WATCH: Behind the scenes of Israel’s ‘Operation Independence’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Bernie Sanders is calling for a reduction in the workweek to 32 hours, at full-time pay. He’s absolutely right. Gains in productivity should serve the working class.

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a nomination hearing for labor secretary nominee Julie Su in Washington, DC, US, on April 20, 2023. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders renewed his long-standing call to reduce the workweek to thirty-two hours. He pointed out that there have been “huge advances in technology and productivity” in the eight decades and change since the Fair Labor Standards Act capped the workweek at forty hours.

In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours – with no loss in pay. Workers must benefit from advanced technology, not just the 1%.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 13, 2023

Critics argue that it’s fine if technological advances deliver the shorter workweek without government intervention, but that “top-down” interference in the free market is a bad idea. This idea doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If the reduction in hours was going to happen without being mandated, it would have happened long ago.

Bernie is right. If we want increased productivity to benefit the working class, we need to take political action to make that happen.

Top-Down or Bottom-Up, Someone Better Mandate It

The idea is slowly gaining traction. Last year, a state-level version was proposed in California, and this March, there was an attempt in Congress to institute a thirty-two-hour workweek by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Right now, these efforts face an uphill battle to say the least. The California bill stalled out in 2022, though it could be amended and reintroduced this year. The federal attempt is going to be strangled in the crib as a matter of course. It was introduced in the House Education and Workforce Committee, whose chair, Republican representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, has said that “blanket federal regulations often cause more harm than good” because they don’t account for the “unique needs” of various groups, and that “Main Street America” doesn’t need “more top-down federal mandates.”

When the California version was proposed last year, Reason magazine’s Scott Shackford made similar complaints:

If modernization inevitably leads to people getting as much (or more) work done in fewer hours than they did in the past, then shorter workweeks are an awesome byproduct. We’re certainly not going to complain about people having to work less. . . . However, it’s not something that can be ordered top down via fiat by government officials who don’t have to deal with the consequences.

All this talk of “top-down” mandates makes me wonder what Foxx or Shackford would think about “bottom-up” mandates imposed by strong labor unions. I suspect neither of them would support the PRO Act or similar efforts to create a more favorable legal environment for organizing unions.

In fact, Shackford treats as insidious the provision in the California proposal that would exempt companies that have collective-bargaining agreements with their unions. He equates this with extortion to accept unionization. “It would be a shame if something happened to your company’s business model.”

Personally, I find it difficult to sympathize with the plight of employers “extorted” to stop their union-busting efforts. And a choice between accepting blanket rules mandating shorter hours or negotiating directly with your employees about what hours and other conditions they’re willing to accept seems reasonable enough on its face. But the real point here is that all this talk of “top-down” regulations misses the point. What the critics object to isn’t really that the proposed mandate comes from the “top,” but the fact that it’s a mandate.

Shackford’s claim that he’d be fine with a shorter workweek if it resulted “inevitably” from technological advances willfully misses the point. We know perfectly well that it won’t happen that way. There was a 299 percent increase in labor productivity from 1950 to 2020. As Senator Sanders rightly suggests, the benefits of that increase largely went to the top of society. It certainly didn’t automatically generate a shorter workweek.

The nature of capitalist property relations make such “natural” decreases deeply unlikely. If workers collectively owned and democratically ran their own workplaces, they would have the option of responding to laborsaving technological advances by simply voting themselves reduced hours with no reduction in income. But with labor and ownership separated, owners have little incentive to make that decision.

The “Modest Magna Carta” for the Working Class

In nineteenth-century Britain, even the struggle for a sixty-hour week — ten hours a day, Monday through Saturday — was waged in the face of ferocious resistance by employers. Chapter Ten of Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital is devoted to analyzing this struggle.

Much of the chapter is spent chronicling horrors like deaths from overwork and children deprived of time to play through endless hours in factories, workshops, or bakeries. He mentions a town that held a public meeting to petition for working hours to be reduced to eighteen hours a day. But Marx’s overall focus is analytical. He spends a lot of time taking apart the rationalizations offered up by apologists for the capitalist class, like the Oxford political economist Nassau Senior, who absurdly argued that the “last hour” of the workday was so essential to profits that the economy would collapse if hours were reduced at all.

At the end of the chapter, Marx celebrates the eventual passage of the Ten Hours Act:

For “protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.”

If the Ten Hours Act in Britain — or the Fair Labor Standards Act in the United States — was the equivalent of the Magna Carta for the relations between labor and capital, that analogy is worth unpacking a bit. When King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, recognizing certain rights he couldn’t infringe, this was the first major limitation on royal power. But Britain wouldn’t be anything like the advanced democracy it is today if the struggle to roll back royal power had ended in the thirteenth century.

Technology and productivity have advanced to an astonishing degree since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the limitation on how many hours workers can be made to spend on the job if they want to be able to make a living has stayed in place. They don’t get one more lousy hour a week to spend with their loved ones or spend pursuing their own interests that their grandparents didn’t get in the 1940s.

Bernie is right. We’re long past the time for that to change.

The new paradigm is intended to send a clear message to Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran that Jerusalem will not stand idly by when it is attacked.

By JNS

Israel will respond with greater force to Palestinian terrorism emanating from Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told members of the Security Cabinet recently.

Netanyahu instructed the relevant security authorities to prepare for the policy shift beginning after Israel marks its 75th Independence Day on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The premier told officials not to comment on the prospective counterterrorism measures, which are intended to send a clear message to Hamas, Hezbollah and their patron Iran that Jerusalem will not stand idly by when it is attacked, and to restore deterrence against the country’s enemies.

Last week, the Israel Defense Forces struck assets belonging to Hezbollah, firing artillery at targets in Quneitra in the Syrian-held part of the Golan Heights.  Earlier this month, the military hit targets in Syria in response to six rockets fired towards the Jewish state. Among the targets were a military compound of the Fourth Division of the Syrian Armed Forces, military radar systems and artillery posts.

The IDF regularly conducts airstrikes in Syria with a view to preventing Iran and its terror proxies, foremost among them the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, from developing permanent military infrastructure with which to open a front against the Jewish state.

Early this month, terrorists in the Gaza Strip fired 44 projectiles at Israel, prompting the IDF to strike more than 10 Hamas targets in the Palestinian enclave, including weapons manufacturing sites and attack tunnels. The military also struck Hamas assets in southern Lebanon after Hamas fired 34 rockets from the Hezbollah-controlled country towards northern Israel.

Palestinian and Arab Israeli terrorists have also perpetrated several deadly attacks since the beginning of this year.

The post Israel to hit back harder against terrorist aggression, Netanyahu vows appeared first on World Israel News.

Ten years since its creation, the Alternative für Deutschland has established itself as a constant presence in Germany’s parliament. Now, it’s challenging the Christian Democrats — and seeking to tear down the historic barriers to the far right.

Leaders of the AfD attend the party’s tenth anniversary celebration on February 6, 2023 in Koenigstein, Germany. (Thomas Lohnes / Getty Images)

When Friedrich Merz first threw his hat into the ring to succeed Angela Merkel as chair of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in November 2018, he set himself an ambitious goal. Merz told the German tabloid Bild that he wanted to “halve” the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), meaning to say he sought to win back half of its voters for the CDU. Back then, the AfD was hovering at around 15 percent in the polls. In fact, over the last five years its numbers have largely stayed the same — but the party now leads the polls in several states, successfully uniting wide swathes of the Right behind it.

This was hardly a foregone conclusion. Back in April 2013, more than one thousand people squeezed into a packed hotel conference room to attend the AfD’s founding congress. They cheered on an economics professor named Bernd Lucke who, his sights firmly trained on the CDU, spoke dismissively of the “old parties” and argued that Germany should step back from the EU, leave managing the economy to the market, and take a more conservative approach to social policy. Alongside Lucke, a chemist named Frauke Petry and a former journalist named Konrad Adam were also elected to the leadership of the AfD. All three have since left the party.

Ten years after its founding, the face of the AfD has changed dramatically: whereas conservative Euroscepticism represented the dominant theme in its early days, the AfD today is largely a far-right party. Nevertheless, one constant runs between the original and the current AfD: from the beginning, it sought to unite the political spectrum to the right of the CDU and its traditional coalition partner, the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP).

Initially, the party represented an alliance between an ordoliberal current around a few dozen economics professors and a national-conservative network of aristocrats, Christian fundamentalists, and anti-feminists. A short time after its founding, however, a third current entered the stage: a völkisch, or ethnonationalist wing closely linked to the self-proclaimed “New Right” that first emerged in France and West Germany in the 1960s and harkens back to more traditional far-right ideas. Its core ideology is an ethnonationalism that understands the Volk, German for “the people,” to denote an ethnically homogeneous community. It sees its primary task as changing reality to fit this ideal.

Despite all the internal wrangling, splits, and power struggles, these three currents continue to set the tone in the AfD. The constellation necessarily entails certain internal contradictions, given the substantial differences between ordoliberals, national conservatives, and ethnonationalists.

Ten years after its foundation, the face of the Alternative für Deutschland has changed dramatically: whereas conservative Euroscepticism represented the dominant theme in its early days, today it’s largely a far-right party.

For example, the party contains highly divergent positions on economic and social policy as well as geopolitics. Another point of contention, around which most of the AfD’s internal struggles have revolved since its founding, is of a strategic nature: while a majority of the key figures in both the national-conservative and ordoliberal currents prefer tactical moderation and a parliamentary approach, a large part of the ethnonationalist wing favors a movement-oriented strategy based on fundamental opposition to the political system as such.

Nevertheless, despite these deep differences, the AfD has consistently managed to prevent the kind of split that would threaten its existence, staying true to the party’s project character and maintaining a focus on the points of unity that hold it together: the ideology of inequality.

Old Wine in New Bottles

After years of at times quite vicious struggles for power and control, the ethnonationalist wing in the AfD has now taken the lead. The party is thus effectively the parliamentary arm of German far-right radicalism — albeit in a modernized form.

This modernization is firstly of a substantive nature. It remains focused on the homogeneity of the Volk, but it no longer defines that homogeneity on the basis of genetics, being well aware that pseudo-biological concepts of race fell into disrepute with the defeat of Nazism. There are some modest attempts to rehabilitate the category of “race” in the German public sphere, but they are flanked by a parallel, much cleverer concept: “ethnopluralism.” Ethnopluralism takes into account the critique of genetically understood racism, but arrives at similar conclusions with the help of anthropological, ethnological, and psychological arguments: different peoples are allowed to live side by side, but they should not mix and rather remain “pure.”

The concept of ethnopluralism dates back to the 1970s. At that time, Henning Eichberg, a mastermind of radical nationalism in West Germany, developed the concept of ethnically homogeneous societies, with this rejecting the Left’s universalism and reformulating racist ideas in a manner that appears more harmless than the Nazis’ aggressive ethnocentrism. Ethnopluralism continues to shape the radical right across Europe today. It is fundamental for intellectuals of the New Right as well as for fascist and far-right currents in France, Italy, and Spain.

Ethnopluralism is popular in Germany not only among the so-called Identitarian movement (a neofascist protest group active throughout Western Europe), but also among AfD politicians. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a member of the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, mentioned the term positively in a contribution to the party’s programmatic debate in September 2018, stating that ethnopluralism represented the “leitmotif of the AfD program.” The party, he argued, ought to be “committed to preserving the ethnocultural unit that calls itself the German people in all areas.”

The ideology’s influence could also be seen when AfD honorary chairman Alexander Gauland, referring to soccer players from immigrant backgrounds, said that the German national team was no longer German “in the classical sense,” or when AfD speakers distinguish between “passport Germans” and “real Germans.” In terms of both its rhetoric as well as its policy platform, the ethnonationalist wing of the AfD ultimately stands for a kind of ethnically segregated apartheid state in which social and democratic rights are tied to national origin.

In addition to this ideological modernization, we can also observe a strategic modernization within the German far right over the AfD’s ten-year history. The AfD has long since ceased to function as a mere party, but forms one element among many in a far-right political project that also includes right-wing citizens’ initiatives, media, student fraternities, think tanks, and subcultures. The strategists of the ethnonationalist wing in particular not only seek to win votes, but fight over language and for control of the streets.

The concept of ethnically homogeneous societies rejects the Left’s universalism and reformulates racist ideas in a manner that appears more harmless than the Nazis’ aggressive ethnocentrism.

The AfD has clearly won the electoral contest within Germany’s right-wing camp, making gains in almost all classes and social milieus. Meanwhile its previous competitor, the more explicitly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), and other far-right parties have largely faded into insignificance or dissolved entirely. That said, the ethnonationalist wing of the AfD in particular has a very low opinion of parliamentarism.

According to Björn Höcke, the undisputed leader of the ethnonationalists, the job of the AfD is to serve as the “voice of the movement” in parliament, which is seen above all as a stage on which to promote party positions. This is about more than just parliamentary work — speaking about his wing’s strategic orientation in a taped interview, Höcke explained: “A few corrections and minor reforms will not be enough. But German unconditionality will be the guarantee that we will tackle the matter thoroughly and fundamentally. Once the turning point has been reached, we Germans will not do things by halves.”

The struggle over language is one of cultural hegemony, or “metapolitics.” The concept of metapolitics was in many ways inspired by the strategy of the post-1968 New Left in France. It stipulates that the focus of right-wing politics should no longer be on elections and parties as such, but on the “pre-political space,” i.e. the battle over interpretations and ways of thinking. Götz Kubitschek, one of the founders of the Institute for State Policy (IfS), a far-right think tank and a cadre of the New Right, identifies three discursive strategies for the far right’s culture war:

First, the Right must expand the boundaries of what can be said through targeted provocations. To this end, it is necessary to “provocatively push forward along the fringes of what is sayable and doable.” The AfD has used this strategy of calculated taboo-breaking since its founding, enabling it to dominate political debates, especially in its early years.

Secondly, the Right should pursue a strategy of “interlocking” with the aim of “preventing the enemy’s artillery from firing.” The Right should interlock its own troops with those of the enemy, so that the latter never knows for sure “whether he will not hit his own people when he fires.” In practical terms, this means agreeing with conservative politicians when they condemn so-called left-wing extremism or the German government’s refugee policy.

Thirdly, Kubitschek recommends a strategy known as Selbstverharmlosung, roughly translated as “self-trivialization.” The Right must seek to “ward off the opponent’s accusations by displaying our own harmlessness and emphasizing that none of our demands fall short of the standards of civil society.” In reality, so this posture goes, the Right is not so bad; it opposes violence and supports the constitution and democracy. However, he cautions, the Right should be careful not to overdo it with self-trivialization.

The AfD has clearly won the electoral contest within Germany’s right-wing camp, making gains in almost all classes and social milieus.

In addition to the battle for votes and the battle for minds, the New Right is also pursuing a battle for the streets. Here, the AfD repeatedly succeeds in building bridges to right-wing street mobilizations such as Pegida, an Islamophobic extra-parliamentary movement. The preliminary high point of the strategy to establish the AfD as the leading force of the far-right movement was a demonstration in Chemnitz on September 1, 2018, at which top AfD personnel marched shoulder to shoulder with the figureheads of Pegida, Identitarians, and neo-Nazi thugs. The demonstration marked the first time that the AfD openly presented itself as the leading force of a right-wing united front linking the fight for the streets with parliamentary activity.

The Right-Wing Mosaic Under Pressure

The ethnonationalist wing of the AfD and the party as a whole experienced difficult years in 2020 and 2021. The party stagnated at around 10 percent in the polls, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution officially began monitoring its activities, and the opponents of the ethnonationalist wing gained ground in party infighting. All of this was cause for anxiety, and some far-right figures began to turn their backs on the party. To them, it appeared as if the “iron law of oligarchy” — coined by the Social Democrat-turned-fascist Robert Michels, according to which parties have a tendency to develop bureaucracies and power elites and thereby lose momentum over time — was playing out before their eyes.

At times, the AfD almost lost control over the battle for the streets. During the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protests that emerged around the COVID pandemic, the party lost its status as the avant-garde of the right-wing movement in some parts of eastern Germany to a group known as Free Saxony. Right-wing critics complained that the AfD had invested too little in consolidating its periphery and devoted insufficient attention to the movement.

In the meantime, far-right strategists are paying more attention to the interplay between the party and movement actors, developing the term “Mosaic Right,” coined by IfS intellectual Benedikt Kaiser in reference to German trade unionist Hans-Jürgen Urban’s concept of the “Mosaic Left.” The basic idea behind the term is that all right-wing forces should work on a common political project, but leave enough space for themselves in their respective spheres: the party, a magazine, a youth group, women artists, student fraternities, and right-wing hooligan groups. In a diverse modern society like Germany, the political right needs to be diverse as well.

An important base for the AfD and its ethnonationalist wing are the eastern German states, where the party has polled between 20 and 25 percent for several years. Here, the AfD scores points with antiestablishment rhetoric. East Germans’ lower level of trust in the institutions of the state is due in part to the fact that in the course of the eastern states’ accession to the Federal Republic, many things changed for the worse for East Germans within a short period of time: virtually overnight, the former industrial proletariat was confronted with forced structural transformation, targeted deindustrialization, and, as a result, mass unemployment.

What had taken decades in West Germany’s industrial regions such as the Ruhr — triggering upheavals in the social fabric despite the state’s attempts to soften the blow — took place within weeks in the early 1990s in the territory of former East Germany. Instead of the promised “blooming landscapes” promised by West German politicians, they were left with industrial ruins. Instead of hope came disillusionment.

The population’s ties to the ideologies and institutions of the old Federal Republic thus did not have to weaken over time in East Germany — they were never particularly strong to begin with. Unlike in western Germany, large parts of the former East have been caught in a permanent crisis of hegemony for thirty years, in which political and economic elites are unable to reach the masses and fail to establish a social consensus. Electoral turnout is significantly lower in the East than in the West, as are the numbers of citizens active in volunteer associations or nonprofit organizations.

This situation has enabled the AfD and its supporters to fill the vacuum, especially in rural areas, partly because the Right has succeeded in presenting itself as looking after the interests of eastern Germans. In doing so, the party consciously ties in with the experience of 1989–90: “Complete the Wende,” the term used to describe the uprising during that period, is a slogan frequently used by the AfD in eastern Germany. The message is clear: back then, the people rose up against the ruling party bigwigs; today, they do so against the political establishment of the Federal Republic.

The Parliamentary Arm of Street Violence

As a parliamentary representation of modernized far-right radicalism, the AfD tries to distance itself from violence as part of its aforementioned self-trivialization strategy. Yet despite all of its attempts to formally distance itself from that violence, links to potentially violent groups persist.

The Right has succeeded in presenting itself as looking after the interests of eastern Germans.

One example: the twenty-five people arrested in the so-called Reichsbürger raid in December 2022, when federal police arrested a network of suspected far-right militias, included a Berlin judge who sat in the German parliament for the AfD until 2021. The association, which called itself the “Patriotic Union,” had allegedly planned to storm parliament by force of arms and install a self-appointed government.

A second example: in June 2019, right-wing extremist Stephan Ernst shot and killed CDU politician Walter Lübcke, the head of the public administration of Kassel. Ernst had previously been an AfD supporter, attending its events and donating money to the party, and in 2018 helped with its state election campaign in Hesse by hanging posters and working campaign tables.

A third example: in October 2020, an AfD member drove an SUV into an anti-fascist demonstration on the fringes of a party event in Henstedt-Ulzburg in Schleswig-Holstein. Some of the victims were seriously injured. The public prosecutor’s office accuses the driver of hitting the protesters “with intent to kill.”

These are the most obvious instances of connections between the AfD and right-wing violence. There are many other cases that are difficult to prove directly, but where far-right propaganda incited the perpetrators of violence to put into practice the supposed will of the people as formulated by the AfD. Nevertheless, neither these connections nor the party’s ongoing far-right drift and its observation by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution have substantially harmed the AfD.

Ten years after its founding, the party has established itself as a durable political presence. It sits in almost all state parliaments, and has hundreds of deputies and even more staff. Hopes that the AfD would be torn apart by its internal contradictions have not been realized — and are unlikely to be realized in the future.

Unlike Die Linke, which is currently on the verge of a damaging split, the AfD manages to work through its fundamental internal differences of opinion, and in some cases even puts them to productive use. Disputes now take place relatively quietly behind the scenes.

The AfD also succeeds in papering over internal differences concerning the war in Ukraine. Similar to the Left, a wide range of opinions can be found in the right-wing camp when it comes to the role of Russia and NATO. The (mostly western German) voices that support NATO are likely in the minority within the party compared with those that express some “understanding” for the Russian invasion, partly because they see Putin’s Russia as a role model for their own political approach. Nevertheless, a degree of internal pluralism is allowed to exist on this issue.

Unlike Die Linke, which is currently on the verge of a damaging split, the AfD manages to work through its fundamental internal differences of opinion.

Following the last federal party congress in Riesa in June 2022, the balance of power has been clarified for the time being: the ethnonationalist wing is here to stay. The German Left must now prepare itself for at least ten more years of the AfD.

Nevertheless, the AfD faces a strategic dilemma: in all likelihood, the other parties will not form a coalition with it in the foreseeable future. Even in eastern Germany, where the AfD is particularly strong and the CDU is more reluctant to distance itself from the right-populists, no coalition is likely to be considered in the medium term. Right-wing forces in the CDU seeking to initiate such a move have so far been harshly rebuked for doing so. After talks between CDU and AfD members of the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament on tolerating a CDU minority government presumably took place at the end of 2020, Holger Stahlknecht, the CDU minister of the interior who was apparently open to such a proposition, was forced to vacate his post.

The fact that a coalition is very unlikely at this point suits the leaders of the ethnonationalist wing, as they do not aspire to cooperate with the CDU at all. Their model is Italy, where the extreme right has succeeded in putting so much pressure on the established conservative parties that they have largely eroded. That is the long-term perspective of the ethnonationalists: the destruction of the CDU. In the best-case scenario, a purified, heavily depleted CDU shifting significantly to the right will be willing to join an AfD government as a junior partner.

The AfD knows that this will not happen anytime soon. But its leaders think in larger dimensions and in the long term. If it’s up to the ethnonationalists, the AfD’s first ten years will only be the first step.

Herzi Halevi urges Israelis not to bring judicial reform debate to military cemeteries during upcoming Memorial Day.

By TPS

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi called on the Israeli public to respect the sanctity of the country’s national Memorial Day and to not politicize the day’s ceremonies with protests, especially at military ceremonies.

His call comes at a time when the nation is badly divided over the government’s controversial judicial reform plan which has seen massive protests against it held all over Israel for months.

“We must all respect the cemeteries and not turn them into an arena of debate; Communion with our fallen loved ones cannot exist under the noise of debate.”

The Chief of Staff’s words echo those made by many politicians from both sides of the political spectrum in Israel.

In Israel, Memorial Day for fallen soldiers is a day of national mourning in which places of entertainment are closed at night, people gather to pay their respects at military cemeteries across the country and television and radio stations broadcast only somber music and programs dedicated to the IDF such as documentaries about Israel’s wars and history.

The day will begin Monday night at 8 PM local time with a one-minute-long siren blast during which people will stand for a minute of silence in memory of the fallen. A second two minutes of silence will be observed Tuesday morning at 11 AM. The day will end at 8 PM Tuesday night with the start of Israel’s Independence Day celebrations.

The post IDF Chief of Staff calls to keep politics out of Memorial Day gatherings appeared first on World Israel News.

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