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Plans for EU-wide regulation of digital platforms could finally enshrine labor rights for workers for firms like Uber. Neoliberals from Emmanuel Macron to the far right are resisting the move.

A protest by delivery riders for employment protections in the gig economy, Rome, Italy, March 26, 2021. (Marco Ravagli / Future Publishing via Getty Images)

On June 2, the CEOs of Deliveroo, Uber, Delivery Hero, Wolt, and Bolt joined forces in a show of unity among gig-economy bosses. Their aim: to sabotage European Union attempts at regulating platform work.

In an open letter in the Financial Times, the CEOs sought to defend business as usual. Naturally, they prioritized not the recognition of workers’ labor rights, but what they called “protecting the flexibility of genuine self-employment while encouraging measures that improve working conditions in a manner that is compatible with on-demand work.” They argued that in “focus[ing] almost exclusively on who is an employee and who is not,” the planned EU directive on the issue “does little to improve the rights of the self-employed.”

The dispute took a fresh step forward little over a week later, as the Council of the European Union approved its negotiating position on the directive, in view of its so-called trialogue with the European Parliament and the European Commission. Sadly, the result is a downward compromise that represents a brake on platform workers’ ambitions for proper labor rights. Yet, even with this complication, this struggle is far from over — and will have far-reaching consequences for precarious workers around Europe.

What’s Happened So Far?

Last December, French left-wing member of the European Parliament Leila Chaibi was interviewed for Jacobin about her role in supporting EU-wide regulation over such firms. These moves to create a directive, proceeding through different EU institutions, came against the backdrop of both struggles by platform workers and sentences passed by labor courts in individual member states, which have often upheld workers’ claims.

In December 2021, the European Commission published its proposals to improve working conditions within the gig economy. After over a year, the European Parliament approved its position for the negotiations, significantly improving the initial text from the European Commission.

The commission had indicated five criteria for what counts as employment. To trigger the presumption of employment (thus handing the digital platform the responsibility to prove that the worker is not a real employee, rather than vice versa) two of five criteria would need to be met. These were: a) the employer effectively setting upper limits for remuneration; b) requirements for the worker to respect specific binding rules (e.g. appearance, conduct toward clients, work performance); c) supervision of the work performance by electronic means; d) the effective restriction of freedom in work organization, absences, and choice of shifts, e.g. by imposing sanctions; and e) the effective restriction on the worker’s possibility of building their own client base. According to a test by the European Trade Union Institute, workers at all the main platforms would have fulfilled most of these criteria: those at food delivery firms Glovo and Deliveroo would have met all of them.

Nevertheless, the European Parliament chose another route, making recognition of workers’ employment status easier. As the EU-wide trade unions had proposed, it set a general and less rigid presumption of employment, more effectively curbing bogus self-employment. Moreover, it amended an important passage of the European Commission’s proposal: the freedom to refuse tasks, choose one’s own working hours or absence periods, and use subcontractors or substitutes, although characteristic of self-employment, does not prove that one is not an employee, per se. This thus meant strengthening the initial text in the direction of greater recognition for workers. This also happened thanks to a split within the largest EU-level party (the center-right European People’s Party), divided into a more market-oriented wing and more socially embedded positions (as in the case of Dennis Radtke, a member of the German Christian-Democrats and an ex–trade unionist).

The major digital platforms fiercely attacked the European Parliament’s position, focusing on lobbying the Council of the EU (the other institution involved in the legislative process), as highlighted by the abovementioned letter in the Financial Times.

Yet, there is also a divergence among national governments, including those that take over the EU’s presidency, which rotates between member states each six months. During the Czech presidency of the EU in the second half of 2022, an attempt to water down the directive was rejected. Among member states, there has generally been a group of countries supporting a prolabor position, led by Spain, and a front pushing in the other direction, led by French president Emmanuel Macron. Progressive forces within the European institutions thus looked forward to Spain taking over the EU presidency, this July 1. Spain’s broad-left government has, after all, already approved a national bill based on the presumption of employment, thanks to the reforming impetus of its labor minister, Yolanda Díaz. However, one recent development radically changed this picture.

Hopes Riding on Spain

Spain is due to take over the EU presidency from Sweden later this week. Yet the Spanish political situation was shaken by the results of the local elections held on May 28. Center-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez took note of the defeat and called for early general elections, which will be held on July 23. The specter of a right-wing victory represents a serious threat. Although not a foregone conclusion, there is a very concrete possibility of a coalition between the conservative Partido Popular and the far-right Vox.

What consequences would this change of government have for issues related to platform work? Sadly they are not hard to imagine. The Partido Popular and Vox opposed the national bill (known as the “Ley Rider,” or “Rider Law”) that recognized the employment status of food delivery platforms’ couriers. Both parties have even evoked the alleged unconstitutionality of this law. The Partido Popular would like to cancel all labor-related reforms of Sánchez’s government, including both the “Rider Law” and the “Labor Reform” that placed constraints on temporary contracts, limited precariousness, and strengthened the centralized collective bargaining system. Is a new climate of deregulation approaching? Moreover, Vox is directly connected to the yellow union Solidaridad, which openly opposed the “Rider Law,” and defended bogus self-employment within the food delivery sector.

This electoral uncertainty makes it difficult to know which government will in fact lead Spain’s presidency of the EU. There is the risk that Spain will go from being the most favorable country for the presumption of employment for platform workers to the least favorable. This would drastically change the balance of power within the EU institutions. As argued by one local commentator, the Spanish left — starting with Sumar (the coalition led by Díaz herself) — must defend the achievements in the field of labor rights that have been made during this government. The difficult pathway of the EU Platform Work Directive illustrates how this is not only a national issue, but a European struggle. Consciously or not, Spanish citizens are also voting on the rights of all European platform workers.

The Council Decision

The weakness of the Spanish coalition after Sánchez’s call for fresh elections was immediately felt within the Council of the EU. With the last act of the Swedish presidency, the council approved its position on the directive. The text undermines the position of the European Parliament and the starting proposal from the European Commission. In particular, the European trade unions complain about two mechanisms: a) the criteria that need to be met for the presumption of the employment have gone up to three out of seven, making the recognition of workers’ rights more difficult; and b) the national derogations requested by member states, offering a possible loophole for the digital platforms.

The Left and Green parliamentary groups labeled this new text ineffective for defending platform workers. Yet, some governments that had obstructed the previous attempts at watering down the directive within the European Council did approve the new document, especially out of fear of what might happen after Spain’s elections. The existing Spanish government itself abstained. However, member states with a prolabor orientation on this question (Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Malta, Spain, and Portugal) wrote a joint statement. They insisted that

establishing a rebuttable presumption of employment is an important step for the protection of platform workers. Nevertheless, in its current design the rebuttable legal presumption of the employment relationship in today’s General Approach is less ambitious and effective than the one proposed by the Commission. The rebuttable legal presumption should be activated under clear and transparent norms and mechanisms. . . . Moreover, it is necessary to establish a legal presumption without restrictions or derogations.

These governments’ position thus remains critical in defending the substance of the directive. On the other side, the French government approved the position of the European Council, albeit with reservations: Macron’s neoliberal extremism wanted an even weaker position.

The game is now shifting to three-way negotiations. Will the European Parliament be able to defend its ambitious proposal? Which Spanish government will manage the negotiations? Will corporate or union lobbying be more prominent? These questions remain to be answered.

Workplace Pressures

While the complicated European legislative process rolls on, the situation within platform workplaces themselves continues to be problematic. This is happening, it must be said, also within the digital platforms that have already recognized their couriers as employees, given the race to the bottom fueled by the absence of a guaranteed framework of labor rights. In Germany, unlike in Italy, Takeaway’s subsidiary is refusing to sign a collective agreement with the Food, Beverages and Catering Union (NGG), despite widespread strikes and struggles. Where the self-employment model is continuing to rule, things are obviously even worse. UberEats announced that it will leave the Italian food delivery market as of July 15. In September 2020, the company signed a collective agreement with a right-wing yellow union in order to keep bogus self-employment and a piece-wage system. Had Uber recognized its workers as employees, this industrial crisis could have been managed through social dialogue and state-supported social shock absorbers, as also stressed by the Italian General Confederation of Labor, the country’s biggest union.

The gig economy model shows all its limits in terms of social protection precisely when it becomes apparent that all the corporate risks are offloaded onto the bogus independent contractors. Strengthened labor laws are increasingly necessary even to recognize workers as full employees and guarantee rights they were meant to have already. Unions, workers’ collectives, social movements, civil society organizations, and progressive political forces must not lose sight of the need for the EU Platform Work Directive — and pressure European institutions accordingly.

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The Right’s recent attacks on birthright citizenship are a further step in their slide toward “postfascism.”

Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on April 27, 2023, in Manchester, New Hampshire. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

In his book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, historian Eric Foner contends that “we are still trying to work out the consequences of the abolition of American slavery. In that sense, Reconstruction never ended.” Neither has the backlash against Reconstruction, which has flared up recurrently with greater or lesser degrees of intensity since the 1860s. As the contours of the 2024 presidential election come into focus, it’s likely that one of the main legacies of Reconstruction — the guarantee of birthright citizenship contained in the Fourteenth Amendment — will become a major issue in the campaign.

Last month, Donald Trump vowed that he would scrap birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants if he wins the election. This week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis joined him in this pledge. According to DeSantis:

Dangling the prize of citizenship to the future offspring of illegal immigrants is a major driver of illegal immigration. It is inconsistent with the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, and we will force the courts and Congress to finally address this failed policy.

It goes without saying that DeSantis is completely wrong that birthright citizenship drives undocumented immigration. All of the available evidence suggests that migrants come to the US in search of work or to escape violence and persecution, not to give birth to “anchor babies” and collect public assistance as in the average Fox viewer’s fever dreams.

Actually repealing birthright citizenship would require either a constitutional amendment or an act of Congress. The former is unlikely because of the extreme difficulty of amending the Constitution, the latter because it probably couldn’t pass both the House and Senate. Still, the fact that this is even being proposed at all by leading contenders for the presidency is deeply alarming. It is yet more evidence of the Republican Party’s commitment to rolling back the democratic conquests of the last 150 years. It is also further confirmation of its headlong lurch from “normal” conservatism to the politics of postfascism.

“Postfascism” isn’t simply an epithet for politics one doesn’t like. It has a specific habitus and a practical agenda organized around a particular conception of citizenship. The late Hungarian Marxist philosopher G. M. Tamás articulated this idea over two decades ago in a seminal Boston Review essay, “On Post-Fascism.” For Tamás, the sort of politics that was germinating in Central Europe then and that finds expression in the United States now bears continuities with the classical variety of fascism, while departing from it in important ways. According to Tamás,

Post-fascism finds its niche easily in the new world of global capitalism without upsetting the dominant political forms of electoral democracy and representative government. It does what I consider to be central to all varieties of fascism, including the post-totalitarian version. Sans Führer, sans one-party rule, sans SA or SS, post-fascism reverses the Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the human condition.

The politics of Jörg Haider, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis are fascistic, in this framework, because they aim at “cutting the civic and human community in two” through a fundamental rejection of universal citizenship. For Tamás, such hostility is “the main characteristic of fascism.”

This iteration is worthy of the modifier “post” because it “does not need stormtroopers and dictators. It is perfectly compatible with an anti-Enlightenment liberal democracy that rehabilitates citizenship as a grant from the sovereign instead of a universal human right.” Figures like Trump want the freedom to arbitrarily decide who is worthy of inclusion in the political community of the nation. One imagines him haughtily dispensing citizenship rights the way he tossed rolls of paper towels at desperate Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria. The attack on birthright citizenship reflects a reversion to ethnic, racial, and normatively sexual conceptions of citizenship in place of the civic egalitarianism that has defined the United States at its best moments.

The proposition that Trump, DeSantis, and the contemporary GOP represent a postfascist threat is still controversial on the US left. Corey Robin, for example, has argued that modern Republican politics is “almost the complete opposite of fascism” because of its synergy with the US constitutional order. He contends that “what fascism is about, above all else, is the politics of strength and will. That’s why fascists traditionally loathe the constitutional order: because they think it constrains the assertion of political will.”

But it seems odd to imply that Trumpism is not a politics of strength and will. From Trump’s pronunciamento that “I alone” can fix what ails America, to his followers’ fantasies of him as a muscle-bound, machine-gun-toting reincarnation of Rambo, to the prominent place of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in the Trumpist coalition, the politics of strength and will — grounded in a reassertion of traditional, heterosexual masculinity — permeates today’s GOP. You can’t make sense of the Right’s transphobic panic without reference to it.

And successful fascists have always been willing to play by, and take advantage of, the rules of the constitutional game on the road to power. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton notes that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini “shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out . . . to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations.”

Neither Hitler nor Mussolini came to power through a coup, but through bargaining with traditional conservatives amid an atmosphere of crisis their extraparliamentary actions helped to create. “Both Mussolini and Hitler,” Paxton reminds us,

were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg.

One can easily imagine Trump or one of his epigones taking advantage of certain aspects of the existing constitutional order — say, our convoluted presidential election system — to win power in defiance of the popular will and to use the machinery of state to punish those who stand against them. In fact, you don’t even have to imagine it — we all saw them try to do it less than three years ago.

No political tradition remains static over time if it has any vitality at all. Historian David Broder, the author of two valuable books on Italy’s radical right, points this out in the context of the accession to power of Fratelli d’Italia, a direct descendant of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. As Broder describes it,

Postfascism is a movement rooted in historical fascism, but which simultaneously claims to have transcended it to have become a normal, national-conservative party. However, the fact that this tradition has persisted for 70 years does not mean it stayed the same. . . . Postfascism shares important characteristics with historical fascism: the same political culture, focus on the past, the use of history as a theme of identity. . . . But its political platform is not the same as in the era of revolution, social violence, mass mobilization and grand utopianism. It is a harsh identity politics and an ethnic conception of nationhood, but which it pursues within a liberal constitutional order and a (somewhat depleted) democratic framework. Even though there are also some more militant elements in its base that use political violence.

Broder is here describing the movement that produced prime minister Giorgia Meloni, but the description could, with minor modifications, just as easily be applied to today’s Republican Party. For that matter, a similar appellation, postsocialism, might be applied to the new left in the United States, which maintains many of the themes and cultural touchstones of earlier iterations of the socialist movement but lacks the mass character and utopian program of socialism’s classical era.

I used to think that analogies between Trump, the Republican Party, and fascism were wildly overblown. The Trump administration and everything it unleashed — topped off by its collusion with the violent attempt to overthrow the election on January 6 — disabused me of that notion. If anything, Trump’s open solicitation of right-wing paramilitaries and the “groyperfication” of GOP cadres raises the possibility that the “post” modifier may, at some point, end up being superfluous.

Birthright citizenship is one of this country’s most redeeming qualities, and it’s one of the enduring legacies of the Confederacy’s defeat. This is why the worst people in the country want to abolish it, and it’s why people of democratic conscience must unite to defeat them. The first step in doing so is to see what’s in front of our noses.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s coup attempt demonstrated the conflicts within Russia’s elite — but also the great political passivity of the general population. In today’s Russia, a fascist cult of violence has taken root in an atomized, demobilized society.

Russian Defense Ministry officers seen during a meeting with officers of Russian army and secret services who prevented invasion of Wagner Group into the Kremlin, June 27, 2023 in Moscow, Russia. (Getty Images)

Since Donald Trump and then Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept electoral defeat, even supporting mobs that occupied the symbolic sites of power, a growing commentary has associated these and similar far-right leaders with fascism.

This is hardly a consensus position. Against such claims, Anton Jäger has argued that the defining sociological transformations of recent decades — rising social atomization and declining associational life — although fundamentally detrimental to democracy and benefitting capital, do not provide the conditions for fascist governments to emerge.

In the examples of the last century, a fascist interclass alliance between capital and part of the people crushed a strong organized left on the verge of power. In today’s atomized “hyperpolitics,” Jäger instead identifies something like the final victory of neoliberalism. In this view, politics have been substantially emptied of their possibility to question who owns and controls what. So, an analysis of today’s political developments should free its historical reference points from the omnipresent trauma of early-twentieth-century Europe.

For Jäger, today’s political struggles rather more resemble those of the mid-nineteenth century. In such a context, while there is a polarization between opposed social groups, each lack strong organizational bodies to transform individual perceptions of justice into common interests grounded in political objectives — even if there are still possibilities for the destabilization of the social order. Now as in Karl Marx’s time, in reaction to social unrest, the atomized mass of individual debtors abandons its sovereignty to a patriarchal, Caesarist regime.

Yet it is also true that all insight into modernity from historical analogy is necessarily partial. Jäger rightly describes why references to the history of the confrontation between fascism and left-wing social forces fail to account for the current disarray in which both sides find themselves. For instance, today’s Italian government — dominated by a party with an overt fascist genealogy but embedded in European ordoliberalism — differs but slightly from Emmanuel Macron’s ostensibly liberal government in France. Yet Jäger’s reference to nineteenth-century history fails to see the potential for fascism to rise out of and adapt to modern-day atomized societies.

Hence, historical analogies can be complemented with comparative ones. We can get more insight into today’s political and social transformations, and their possible future, by looking at countries with more advanced conditions of modernity — which, paradoxically, can be found in today’s Russia.

Russia embodies a highly atomized and depoliticized society and does not resemble the fascist regimes of the interwar period. Yet, its political order has come to reproduce the main ideological elements of those regimes.

The failed coup in Russia this Saturday was billed, true to historical analogy, as a “March on Moscow” — a display of paramilitary strength that would force a change in the capital. Yet, also striking in these events was the lack of any kind of popular mobilization, whether for or against the Wagner Group leadership. In this sense, the weekend’s events exemplified the depoliticization of Russian society, compared to the active role the popular masses played in the coups of 1991 and 1993. Moreover, the swift rise of Wagner as a quasi-legal mercenary group — which was itself a creation of the Russian state, unlike the Blackshirts in Italy or the Sturmabteilung in Germany — illustrates the government’s embrace of violence committed by nonstate forces, even to the point that these paramilitaries threaten the state bureaucracy itself.

Russia surely embodies a highly atomized and depoliticized society and does not resemble the fascist regimes of the interwar period. Yet, its political order has come to reproduce the main ideological elements of the historical fascist regimes, including virilism, the justification of violence as the expression of social hierarchies, and the role of war in rejuvenating man and nation.

Advanced Modernity in Russia

The decline in associational life in Russia does not resemble that of liberal-corporatist Atlantic nations; rather, it is the result of the evolution of a previous Brezhnevite order in which organized social life was heavily bureaucratized while individualist and consumerist attitudes were criminalized as antisocial. The subsequent cooptation or destruction of such institutions under Russia’s liberal-criminal (1991–2002), neoliberal-consumerist (2002–2012), and ultranationalist-fascist (2012–) regimes has allowed some of them to continue in weaker form, while not allowing for new forms of associational life to emerge.

For an example of the modern reproduction of the bureaucratized Soviet-era institutions, we need only look to the trade unions. Unlike Poland, where Solidarność did, at some point, represent a genuine mass movement external to statist discipline and party rule, the combined forces of independent trade unionism in Russia — though officially permitted since the transition to capitalism — have never amounted to even 5 percent of the workforce.

Meanwhile the FNPR, the Russian trade union federation and formal successor to the Soviet All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (ACCTU), today claims thirty-one million members, down from fifty-five million in 1990, and has lost most of its significance. Labor strikes had a crucial impact in the final years of the Soviet Union, but the FNPR leadership was replaced after the 1993 crisis, when Boris Yeltsin militarily suppressed the Russian congress’s opposition to his economic reforms.

In subsequent years, rather than opposing the government’s destruction of workers’ rights and establishment of an oligarchic regime through shock therapy, the FNPR bureaucracy preserved its enormous privileges (inherited from the Soviet ACCTU’s considerable empire of welfare provision for workers) by enabling the government to ward off any significant contestation at the national level.

In general, the political transition in Russia can be described as having relied on mass contestation against the Gorbachev-era Soviet order, without mass support for what has replaced it.

For example, when the Russian government defaulted and stopped paying wages in August 1998, twenty-five million protesters gathered across the country. The FNPR then issued statements against “the perturbation of the government’s activity.” Similarly, party membership has declined steeply: in 1989, the Soviet Communist Party claimed twenty million members (around 10 percent of the adult population). A plethora of political parties have emerged in Russia since but none replaced the social structure of the former Communist Party with its para-state structures.

United Russia, the “big-tent” party today in power claims two million members, less than 2 percent of the adult population. Even though many parties claim significant numbers of members, somewhere in the tens of thousands, this is only an artifact of compliance with legal limitations that, until 2021, required parties to provide fifty thousand (lowered to forty thousand in 2011) signatures to register electoral lists. Since 2021, parties with elected members in Russian parliaments are exempted from this obligation — but others must provide a massive two hundred thousand signatures to register.

In general, the political transition in Russia can be described as having relied on mass contestation against the Gorbachev-era Soviet order, without mass support for what has replaced it. Rather than expressing support for the government, the high level of popularity of leaders in Russia, or even higher level of support for the invasion of Ukraine, indicate the profound political alienation and social atomization of Russian citizens. Certainly, pockets of high politicization exist, famously illustrated by the Telegram information channels amongst the Yabloko and liberal supporters of Alexei Navalny as well as between ultranationalists. Yet their influence over the masses remains marginal.

This atomization is clear from the latest statistics: almost a quarter of the population regularly feels lonely. Depoliticization can be seen in the fact that almost 80 percent of adults claim they are surrounded by like-minded people who share their views on events in the country and the world. Far from implying a division of society into sectarian groups without contact between them, this statistic illustrates the level of popular detachment from politics and world events.

Atomization and depoliticization can interact in reinforcing the social appeal of conformity. One example is the popularity of the Russian Orthodox Church. While the proportion of people attending church has remained marginal (6 percent of Orthodox adults), the proportion of adult Russians identifying with the Orthodox Church has more than doubled since 1991 (from 31 percent to 71 percent). Even such processes of disaffiliation can allow for highly moralized political approaches, including heightened anti-solidaristic perceptions of individual responsibility and higher tolerance for the social and economic oppression of nonconforming social groups.

Russia, much like wealthier Western countries, exemplifies the absence of mass political forces, both on the Left and on the Right.

Atomized masses (“bags of potatoes” in Marx’s terms) nevertheless can gather to vocalize opposition to the government’s electoral manipulations (for example, the protests against the fraudulent mayoral elections in Moscow in late 2011), planned pension cuts, or even, more locally, against anti-poor land and housing policies. But even without invoking the comparison to the size of the Russian population, the size of these protests is meager (between eighty thousand and one hundred fifty thousand protesters on Bolotnaya Square in 2011).

Rather, as for the French gilets jaunes or the early Maidan protesters in 2013 in Ukraine, the only — usually not so significant — political strength such protests can hope for depends on the sympathy they gather amongst the general atomized public, which lacks any other mechanism to express its will than spontaneous rebellion with the hope of a political collapse of the government (as in 1848 in France and in 2014 in Ukraine, unlike in 1848 in Vienna and in 2021 in Belarus).

Russian Fascism

Russia, much like wealthier Western countries, exemplifies the absence of mass political forces, both on the Left and on the Right. There’s nothing of the scale of “squadrismo,” the paramilitary force of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party, in either the United States, Brazil, Italy, or Hungary. But both in Western countries as in Russia, the lack of organic resemblance between today’s political struggles and those of a hundred years ago does not imply the impossibility of a fascist regime emerging. Social atomization has made our politics similar to that which preceded the era of mass organizations, but — as in the 1920s and unlike in the mid-nineteenth century — liberalism, having suppressed its means of social democratic self-regulation, now reigns supreme, and thus once again stands on the brink of self-destruction.

Russia — the epitome of an atomized polity — illustrates the possibility of a modern fascism. Certainly, organically, the Russian government does not resemble that of Mussolini’s Italy, either in its rise to power, nor in the political structures that define it today.

Politically, however, it has come to reproduce core attributes of it: the current system has emerged out of a liberal-consumerist one, without any apparent political rupture. It has come to reject liberalism since 2012, accusing it of having allowed for the destruction of the “natural social order.” Ideologically, it also aims to resurrect this “natural order” in morality and geopolitics.

The current government has reproduced, if not strengthened, the most repressive aspects of Soviet morality, for example the persecution of homosexuality — although what was originally attacked as “antisocial” is now directly addressed as a perversion of morality and social order. The decriminalization of male domestic violence signals acceptance of violence, committed not only by the state but also by individuals, as the expression of the “natural order” and social hierarchy.

Russia — the epitome of an atomized polity — illustrates the possibility of a modern fascism.

Virtually unreported in Western media, Vladimir Putin recently signed a new strategic orientation framing Russia’s ideological stance in relation to the outside world. Russia is called a “unique country-civilization” and a “civilizational community” that is endowed with a “historically unique mission aimed at maintaining the global balance of power” (deriving its philosophy from ultranationalist philosophers Aleksandr Dugin and Ivan Ilyin, whom Putin frequently cites). It maintains “spiritual and moral values,” which require proactive, preventive actions against the “external ideology and its destructive psychological impact.”

The “collective West” has morphed into a Schmittian enemy with conflicts being imagined within the realm of existential identity. The enemy always threatens the safety and integrity of the state and cannot be reasoned with because of its inherent Russophobia: it uses measures “aimed at weakening Russia in every possible way, including at undermining its constructive civilizational role.”

The enemy is never a single nation, but a shapeless, geographically amorphous ideological entity (a new law specifies an ever-growing list of “unfriendly” countries), manifested both in entire nations, their rulers, the bankers on Wall Street who preserve the economic hegemony of the United States, or the “Ukronazis” in the heart of the former Soviet Union. The enemy is defined less by its politics, but by the threat it provides to Russia’s position in the world hierarchy of nations. Thus, the attack on Ukraine is described in terms of the “protection of the [Russian] vital interests in the Ukrainian direction.”

The ideological link between the Great Patriotic War and the invasion of Ukraine is invoked frequently, from the stated objective of the “denazification of Ukraine,” to the ideological symbolism of the day of the invasion — the day after the national holiday of the “Defender of the Fatherland.” Russia once saved the world’s moral values, and now, they are under threat again, from the collective West. Yet, according to Putin’s speeches, the guilt for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lies not in NATO expansion but in Russia’s Communist past. Misunderstood in the West as pro-Communist nostalgia, Putin’s regrets over the end of the USSR are a condemnation of Soviet-era nationalities policy, which formally recognized Ukraine’s statehood and thereby undermined the natural “great Russian” order.

The decriminalization of male domestic violence signals acceptance of violence, committed not only by the state but also by individuals, as the expression of the ‘natural order’ and social hierarchy.

The army itself has become a sacred masculine subject (last year Russia introduced a law that can send to penal colony, up to fifteen years, anyone who “discredits” it). The army and the police, the main instruments of violence of the fascist state (even though “spontaneous formations of street violence” had constituted the way to power for fascists in Italy and Germany, both regimes soon came to eradicate them in the case of the German SA or integrate them into bureaucratized state formations in the case of the Italian squadristi), are aestheticized and are ideologically linked to reproduced elements of the “glorious past.” The violence enacted by this sacred instrument incarnates the nation’s regained virility: bringing back the golden age of glory, exemplified by the enormous popularity of the phrase “we can do it again,” referring to marching to Berlin and the victory in the war.

While such discourse should not be taken too literally, it represents the possible crystallization of social atomization and highly moralized environments into a fascist ideology centered around the idea of violence. Surely, social atomization is not necessarily followed by a fascist ideology of violence. However, since the breakdown of associationalism left few avenues for individuals to regain a sense of connection and purpose, the idea of rejuvenated social order can endow individuals with such pseudo-senses of belonging and meaning.

The appeal of the cult of redemptive violence does not require actual embeddedness in a community; the justification of violence as the expression of national rejuvenation is also an expression of the virility and moral integrity of the individual man himself. Such ideological conditions allow for a pseudo-return of embeddedness (as in the case of belonging to the Orthodox Church) while leaving the conditions of atomization as they were.

Atomized Fascism, in Russia and Beyond

Classical fascism is linked to the structural features of the political system to which it gives rise: mass mobilization, powerful party structure, control of industry, a dictatorial/authoritarian power that tames organized labor’s capacity to threaten the domination of capital. There needs to be a mass-based party with militant ideology that violently pursues internal purity and external expansion for the government to be considered as fascist. Since Russia lacks these structural elements, it is said, it can hardly be described as fascist.

However, fascism is characterized not only by structural but also ideological features: the key feature of fascism is the ideological centrality of the ideas of violence and rejuvenation. The difference between Caesarism and fascism is that the former only contains the belief in the centralization of power against trouble. Fascism, however, emerges from and against liberalism as a violent reaction to what is conceived as liberalism’s self-destructive weakness: its tolerance of some forms of societal contestation, which enables socialists, trade unionists, feminists, and other “unworthy oppositions” (Ukrainian nationalists, independentists) to accumulate influence and threaten the supposedly “natural” social order.

What characterizes a fascist regime is its positive embrace of violence, not only as an instrument, but as an expression of virility, manifesting national rejuvenation through glorification/aestheticization of violence for its own sake. The legitimation of violence as an end in itself requires making it an integral part of how we read the world: existential enemies threaten each other, the enemy’s agent within the social body must be denounced, and distaste for violence is considered a weakness, causing chaos, unrest, and further violence.

Evidently, this does not mean that other ideological orders such as liberalism or socialism reject violence: they can embrace it — potentially up till enormous levels (colonialism, slavery, imperialism, patriarchy, etc.) as means to an end (primitive and profit accumulation). Additionally, because of naturalized inegalitarian practices, they can neglect even the reality of some forms of violence. Unlike fascists, however, they do not embrace violence as the welcome expression of such an order.

Jäger assumes that whereas fascist governments are built on mobilization, ensuring a deep ideological concordance between the public and the ruling power, amidst today’s social atomization there are no mass movements and few channels of political mobilization. Thus, the crucial features of fascism are said to be missing.

However, those phenomena have characterized Russian societal evolutions since the fall of the Soviet Union and an atomized fascism has nevertheless emerged as a political regime. Hence, fascism — understood here as an ideological order promoting violence as the expression of virility against social liberalism — can arise out of and adapt to the conditions of social atomization and depoliticization. Nor is it guaranteed that this will remain limited to Russia.

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Israeli security officials say pair of rocket attacks from PA city in northern Samaria were carried out by lone wolf.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

Israeli security officials downplayed a pair of rocket attacks from the Palestinian Authority-administered city of Jenin, dismissing the launches as a stunt intended to draw attention on social media outlets like TikTok.

On Monday, two makeshift rockets launched from Jenin towards Israeli territory, marking the first time in 18 years that terrorists in Judea and Samaria fired rockets as part of an attack on the Jewish state.

Both rockets fell far short of their targets, travelling some 80 meters (265 feet) and landing in PA-controlled territory.

“The rockets did not pose a threat to communities in the area,” the Israeli military said, adding that the projectiles “were makeshift rockets, with very limited capabilities.”

IDF officials said Tuesday that the two rockets were launched by a lone wolf terrorist, identified as a resident of a small town outside of Jenin. The man does not have any ties to any known terrorist organization, officials said, according to The Jerusalem Post, despite claims by Hamas that it was responsible for the launches.

Army officials cited by Israel National News and the Post said the launches appeared to be little more than a publicity stunt aimed at producing footage of rocket fire for social media outlets.

“The video on Tiktok succeeds in sowing fear, but according to sources in the army, there is no real threat in the field yet; the serious threat is the shooting squads. The IDF is following the attempt to develop this field [of launching rockets at Israel from Judea and Samaria] and deals with it all the time,” a source cited by INN said.

Last month, the Shin Bet internal security agency discovered a rocket in an Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. One suspect, Abd al-Hakim Buatana, a resident of the Palestinian Authority-controlled town of Ajul in Samaria, was arrested.

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When Russian warlord Evgeny Prigozhin started a ‘march on Moscow’ with his Wagner forces, the world – and Russia – was shocked. Was this a coup? A rebellion?Now Prigozhin is supposedly in Belarus and the Kremlin is trying to retake control of the narrative – all while Ukraine’s counter-offensive grinds on. But how should we understand the weekend’s drama? And what is really going on now? Join our experts to find out how they’re making sense of the rebellion-that-wasn’t.

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The Israeli president also condemned extremist violence against Palestinians.

By JNS

Israeli President Isaac Herzog called Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday to wish him a happy Eid al-Adha on the eve of the Muslim holiday.

“The president of the country wished him, his family, his people and all the peoples of the region a happy holiday,” according to an official readout of the phone conversation.

Herzog “emphasized the importance of the decisive and vigorous fight against terrorism, incitement and hatred, and emphasized the terrible price and pain that terrorism exacts from the bereaved families and from Israeli society as a whole.

“The president insisted on the need to act strongly to thwart terrorism, which harms people, families and communities as well as the chance of good neighborliness in the region and the Middle East. The president also emphasized that he strongly condemns the harm to innocent Palestinians by extremists that has been carried out in recent days,” the statement said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant spoke by telephone with Hussein al-Sheikh, head of the General Palestinian Authority’s Authority of Civil Affairs.

The two men discussed recent terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria and the need to restore calm and stability for both Jewish and Palestinian residents there, according to a Defense Ministry statement.

“Minister Gallant stressed that Israel’s security forces will operate against terrorism wherever this may be required, and conveyed a message to the Palestinian Authority regarding the need for immediate and decisive action against terrorism.

“Minister Gallant also noted that the defense establishment views the recent violence against Palestinian civilians with great concern and emphasized that the State of Israel will take action to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Gallant also congratulated al-Sheikh upon the occasion of Eid al-Adha. Also known as the Feast of Sacrifice, the holiday runs from Tuesday evening until Saturday.

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