openDemocracy: Hungary’s regime is proof that capitalism can be deeply authoritarian

The fierce anti-migrant hate campaign was the most visible sign of the length to which Orbán was prepared to go to ensure his majority. Since 2010 Orbán has been using the momentum created by popular anger at the failures of liberal policies to build up his own system: authoritarian capitalism. A system that is deeply illiberal but capitalist: private property and the profit logic still dominate, but the state bureaucracy and its institutions are subdued to the enrichment of the preferred national economic elite. [...]

Hungary has also been characterised by painfully low wage levels that lagged behind Central and Eastern European wages throughout the last thirty years. Low wages, lost jobs, and high indebtedness made the Hungarian working middle class extremely fragile. As a result, social tensions grew and the approval rates for post-socialist liberal capitalism dropped dramatically in the first twenty years. These tensions and disillusionment swept the working middle class to the Right. [...]

Between 2014 and 2018, real incomes and the employment rate have risen somewhat, but the bottom forty per cent has remained on the losing side of Orbán’s economic policies. To prevent a backlash from those who have lost out, Orbán uses the authoritarian state as a disciplining tool. He controls the economically vulnerable population from above, by using their fears of losing access to public works and other public services and benefits.

Another way the authoritarian state secures the consent of the economically vulnerable is redirecting distributional conflicts along cultural lines. He attacks the unworthy, undeserving poor and immigrants with hate campaigns to pose as the saviour of the nation. Targeting George Soros in the most recent parliamentary election was a strategic move to connect the enemy images of the reckless global investor and the fearful migrant, portraying both as threats to the vulnerable working class. Orbán’s authoritarianism cannot be separated from the model of capitalism he builds.

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Social Europe: Macron Takes Aim At European Politics

Macron’s “La Grande Marche pour l’Europe” will mimic the programme that toppled France’s dominant political parties and transformed his La République En Marche! movement into a political force in 2017. Over the course of six weeks, he will dispatch ten ministers and 200 parliamentarians to survey the French people’s views on Europe and European issues. The results will then be considered in developing a platform that can beat populist and Euroskeptic parties in the 2019 European Parliament election.

Macron has persuaded all other EU member states (with the exception of Hungary and the United Kingdom) to conduct similar public consultations, which he hopes will lay the groundwork for the EU-level reforms he proposed in major speeches in Athens and at the Sorbonne last year. [...]

Similarly, Macron’s vision for Europe seems to reconcile the irreconcilable: his plan is both to preserve member states’ sovereignty and deepen EU integration. Institutionally, this means supporting supranational bodies while also allowing for more flexibility in areas where national governments, rather than Brussels, are better positioned to solve problems. [...]

On migration, Macron wants both to secure Europe’s external borders and ensure that the burden of taking in refugees is shared across the EU. In the short term, he is pushing for an agreement among member states on refugee quotas. But, in the long run, he supports greater harmonization of asylum systems, or even the creation of a central EU asylum agency. [...]

The second Ricoeurian concept underpinning Macron’s worldview is the idea of a European “refoundation.” Whereas the first wave of European integration was largely limited to economics, Macron now wants to focus on politics and culture, starting with the European Parliament election next year.

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Social Europe: There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth, Horatio, Than Populism

The concept of populism is a theoretical kaleidoscope which has been used indiscriminately for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Marine Le Pen, Alexis Tsipras and Viktor Orbán, even for Barack Obama, or for Margaret Thatcher in the past. It really offers a reassuring view of the world: in today’s confused times, where all that is solid melts into air (political traditions, identities, narratives), people are being led astray by demagogues thunderously ventilating their fears of the unknown. But populism is merely a political style that invests political programs and strategies. It is not an ideology or a worldview in itself. Let us not take the appearance for the essence, the symptom for the cause. [...]

It is precisely with the outsiders and losers that social democracy lost contact after its social-liberal adaptation to late capitalism – and now finds itself bitterly defeated in Italy, trapped in a standstill coalition with the preachers of Ordoliberalismus in Germany, suffering from the “Pasokification” effect all across Europe. A victim of its own triumph, it became too much of a mainstream and consensual political force. With its last moment of hegemony (Blair’s “Third Way” and Schroeder’s “Neue Mitte”), social democracy effected a full adaptation to post-Fordist capitalism but at the same time lost its chance to change the path of European integration. Instead it made its opponent’s agenda its own: never before had social democrats believed so implicitly in market self-regulation. When the crisis broke social democracy was unable to formulate a Euro-Keynesian solution, to escape from austerity or remedy the inequalities of trickle-down economics. But material security is the touchstone for progressive reformism, next to identity politics. For social democracy it is after all not so difficult to win the support of “globalised” liberal white-collar voters. What has been lost is the support of the world of labour, the young precarious workers, the people stuck in rusting ports and former industrial cities. [...]

The Left should therefore defend its fundamentals instead of deploring the supposedly irrational populist surge. And this is first and foremost the primacy of politics over economy, a core tenet of social-democratic tradition as Sheri Berman has eloquently indicated: political intervention and not a passive acceptance of the “global market forces”, a new social-democratic compromise between capital and labour without great sacrifices on the part of economic stability but in return for more protection for the outsiders. An updated combination of prosperity and equity is the key to reassert the progressive values against the “cultural backlash”. After all, material security is a prerequisite for both individual emancipation and an open and self-confident national identity, only this time beyond nation-state (which was the case in the Glorious Thirty) as reformism is possible only at a supranational, European and rather federalist level.

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Financial Times: Shifting dynamics of a low-carbon future

As climate change forces a shift away from oil and gas, and electric vehicles become more popular, several commodities industry leaders explain how decarbonisation affects demand for resources.

Haaretz: Israel Still Hasn't Learnt the Most Important Lesson of the Holocaust

Preparing for a not far-off age when we will not have living testimony of the Holocaust means also thinking about it in new ways. For those of us descended from survivors, and for Israelis and Jews who feel the Holocaust is somehow "ours," it inevitably means part of our personal and national connection to it will be lost in the universalization of the Holocaust as a historical symbol of dehumanization.  [...]

Not only against the callousness of his remark, and the implications for the policy of the IDF in the coming clashes on the border. But because Lieberman feels he can say that about the 1.8 million people living in Gaza because they are being denied any rights, not just by Israel and Egypt who maintain the blockade, but by Hamas as well. He wouldn’t have said that about Palestinians living in the West Bank, living under the Palestinian Authority, or the citizens of a neighboring country. [...]

Just as we have a duty to point out the fact that the government’s (hopefully) failed forcible deportation plan, was only aimed at refugees from war-torn Sudan and ultra-repressive Eritrea - countries which have long ago stopped treating its citizens as such. Not against more than double the number of migrants from functioning countries currently living illegally in Israel. Because it is much easier to treat people as unwanted packages and ship them off to a "third country" when they have already been denied the protection of their homelands. [...]

It is our duty, as descendants and heirs of all those generations of Jews who were denied their basic rights to live. A duty not just of Israelis, but of all Jews in whose name Israel was founded and who can and should bring their influence, experience and knowledge to bear in this project. Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which brought Zionism to its successful end 70 years ago, still needs to be fulfilled.  

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Jacobin Magazine: The Kurdish Dilemma

Unsurprisingly, not everyone in elite circles agrees that the US military should be allying with the Kurdish revolutionaries. When the partnership first began to take shape, the Wall Street Journal warned about “America’s Marxist Allies Against ISIS.”  [...]

In Washington, a big concern is that the Kurdish revolutionaries are carving out an anticapitalist space that firmly rejects the basic premises of the US-led global order. Another major reservation is that the Kurdish revolutionaries have historic ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the US government has classified as a terrorist organization. While US military officials repeatedly deny any ongoing connection between the Kurdish-led forces and the PKK, it’s widely presumed in Washington that the YPG is a PKK affiliate. [...]

When the Syrian Kurds took a major step in March 2016, announcing the formation of a new autonomous region inside Syria, US officials declared their opposition. “We don’t support self-rule, semi-autonomous zones inside Syria,” State Department spokesperson John Kirby said. “We just don’t.” [...]

The defeat of ISIS has left the US-led coalition well-positioned to play a more direct role in the war. As then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pointed out earlier this year, “The United States and the coalition forces that are working with us to defeat ISIS today control 30 percent of the Syrian territory, and control a large amount of population, and control a large amount of Syria’s oil fields.” [...]

As tensions mounted between the US and Turkish governments, the Trump administration then faced another major challenge. In February, pro-regime Syrian forces backed by Russian operatives launched an attack on Kurdish-led forces in eastern Syria. US officials, who were aware of potential Russian involvement, decided to respond with airstrikes, killing hundreds of people, including dozens of Russians.

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Quartz: How government policies in India and China are widening income inequality

Many developing nations have targeted poverty alleviation and improved living standards as ultimate policy goals. While China has achieved poverty alleviation on a historic scale, policy obstacles remain. These include bureaucratic inefficiency and failed policy implementation. India has likewise made progress in alleviating poverty, though it lags significantly behind China. [...]

Between 1978 and 2015, the report shows, the urban share of national income increased from 30% to 80%. Today urban households earn 3.5 times more than rural households. Two Chinas are emerging. One is urban, educated, and mobile. The other is isolated, immobile, and tethered to outdated livelihoods and social assistance. [...]

By World Bank estimates, 270 million Indians—that’s nearly 20% of the population—were considered poor as of 2012. India also saw the fastest rise in inequality of all major world regions between 1980 and 2016, and 55% of the country’s income share is in the hands of the wealthiest 10%. [...]

In China, expectations of urban-led economic growth are driving programmes to shift 100 million rural residents into urban environments. That includes third-tier cities which lack the advanced education and health services typically supporting growth. This comes on top of neighbourhood redevelopment programmes that are displacing low-income residents, particularly in Beijing.

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Politico: Netanyahu is picking the wrong friends in Europe

Here’s something for Benjamin Netanyahu to consider: The Israeli prime minister should spend less time in Europe praising nationalists like Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and more time listening to people in Brussels, like European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans.

Look at the recent Hungarian election. During his campaign, Orbán blamed his country’s problems on a Jewish financier, George Soros — and won, big time. After his victory, Orbán spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, said the attacks on Soros “could not possibly be anti-Semitic, since they were echoed by Netanyahu.” [...]

The Commission has also taken a series of important concrete actions to support these words. Timmermans has named the first-ever European coordinator against anti-Semitism. He has pressed internet companies to combat online anti-Semitism. He calls out countries for trying to rehabilitate Holocaust war criminals and minimize their own guilt. And he has unlocked millions of euros in grants to fight anti-Semitism and finance interfaith initiatives. [...]

The European Parliament also deserves praise for its new support for European Judaism. In June 2017, the Parliament adopted its first-ever resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Among other conditions, it requires EU members to appoint national coordinators to combat anti-Semitism, to publicly condemn anti-Semitic statements and to promote education about the Holocaust. [...]

Although European institutions want to avoid intra-Jewish politics, they should ensure that all strains of Judaism are treated equally. Most European countries continue to recognize followers of Orthodox Judaism as the only representatives of the Jewish people. Orthodox communities alone receive government support. State support should also go to progressive, non-Orthodox Jewish movements.

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