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The Marshall Plan envisioned the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. President Harry Trumans administration launched the initiative, which provided $13 billion for economic and technical assistance. It boosted European morale and promoted political and economic stability, which lowered the influence of domestic communist parties and strengthened the American position. The plan was implemented after negotiations between the United States and 16 participating European countries in July 1947. The Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites, however, did not participate. Joseph Stalin saw the plan as a threat to communism and a manifestation of American imperialism. After the completion of the Marshall Plan, all participating countries economies, except Germany, surpassed their pre-war levels. The subsequent two decades saw unprecedented economic growth in Western Europe.

World War II caused the deaths of 60 million military and civilians. It marked the first international conflict in which civilian casualties outnumbered military casualties, and the world saw the tragedy of one of the first organized genocides in modern history, the Holocaust. Additionally, heavy artillery and aerial bombing across Europe brutally destroyed cities, towns, and villages, including the industrial and cultural centers. The horrors of World War II and its aftermath caused the displacement of at least 40 million people from their home countries, with about 11 million coming from Allied-occupied Germany.

The United States, being less damaged by the war than other Allied forcesGreat Britain, the Soviet Union, and Francesupplied aid to millions of people living in refugee camps through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as well as other organizations. However, it was not enough.

World War II disrupted the supply and production of food and other agricultural products in Europe. In addition, airstrikes and artillery attacks severely damaged the regions transportation infrastructure, including railroads, power plants, port infrastructure, roadways, bridges, and airports. The naval forces and shipping fleets of key European countries had been destroyed. All of these contributed to the disruption of the regions trade flows and economic isolation from the rest of the world.

The economies of most European states were recovering slowly. Industrial production was 88% of 1938 levels, exports 59%, and agricultural production 83%. The only exceptions were the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. In these countries, production had already been brought back to pre-war levels by 1947. In 1948, Belgium and Italy also reached the pre-war production level. From 1946 to 1948, food production was two-thirds of what it had been before the war. A drought and a harsh winter destroyed most of the wheat crop. Severe socio-economic conditions were only contributing to the rising popularity of communist parties. The economic issues could not be fixed promptly, as most countries at war had drained their resources. The Truman administration saw the need to adopt a definite position on the world scene or fear losing credibility.

To avoid the economic deterioration of post-war Europe, the expansion of communism, and the stagnation of world trade, the Marshall Plan sought to stimulate European production, promote the adoption of policies leading to stable economies, and take measures to increase trade among European countries and the rest of the world. The government of the United States was concerned that the hardships, unemployment, and instability of the post-World War II era would increase the attractiveness of communist parties to voters in western Europe and further contribute to the Soviet Unions expansionist policies.

The idea of providing economic assistance to Europe as part of the United States early strategies in the Cold War was first introduced on May 8, 1947, by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson. In Cleveland, Mississippi, he gave a speech at the annual meeting of the Delta Council, where different social, economic, and financial issues had been discussed since 1935.

During his speech, Acheson outlined the urgent need to provide international aid to post-war European countries. For Acheson, the plan was not just about rebuilding Europe but also for:

With this speech, he hoped to attain wider public support, including that of the local farmers and businesses of the Mississippi Delta, as the growing dollar deficit in Europe was negatively affecting the American economy: unable to pay for the imported goods, European states would be eventually prohibited from trading with the United States, creating financial difficulties for farmers and businesses locally.

In his historic speech at Harvards graduation ceremony, the idea of a European self-help initiative that the United States would finance was advanced by Secretary of State George C. Marshall on June 5, 1947. In his speech, Marshall outlined the need for an economic aid strategy to assist the devastated European countries in recovering from the effects of World War II. The Secretary of State outlined that,

Events unfolding in Greece and Turkey proved the necessity of such a program. Greece was suffering from a civil war between the communist-backed National Liberation Front and the British-supported Greek monarchy, and Britain was losing its position. Supporting anti-communist forces while trying to rebuild after the war seemed challenging. The same scenario prevailed in Turkey, where the Soviet Union pressured the Turkish government to grant the Union special privileges for using the Turkish Straits. If accomplished, it would strengthen the Soviet Unions influence in Europe and threaten American economic and political interests on the already polarized European continent.

As a result, the Truman Administration and Congress formulated the European Recovery Program, otherwise known as the Marshall Plan. It comprised of providing roughly $13.3 billion (worth $174 billion in 2023) of assistance to 16 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Western Germany. The assistance equaled 5 % of the United States gross domestic product at the time.

Representatives from 16 European countries gathered in Paris on July 12, 1947, to discuss the economic issues they were facing as well as potential remedies. This discussion was mandatory under the proposed Plan to receive aid. Before the Plans approval, participating European countries committed to taking steps toward solving their economic problems rather than simply receiving financial aid for recovery. The Committee of European Economic Cooperation (CEEC), a cooperative organization, was formed and consisted of participating members. Marshall did not restrict any state, including the Soviet Union, from joining the meeting. However, the USSR and its satellites refused to participate, as the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin, believed that it would restrict their economic sovereignty and increase American influence.

As a result of these discussions, the design of the Marshall Plan was finally crafted. It would last for four fiscal years and provide aid to the recipients per capita, with larger amounts given to major industrial powers such as West Germany, France, and Great Britain. This was done under the assumption believed by Marshall and his advisors that the revival of these key countries was essential to Europes recovery.

According to the Marshall Plan, it would assist European countries in:

However, the Marshall Plan had conditionality recipient states had to consent to the following:

In April 1948, twoagencies were createdto implement the Marshall Plan: from the side of the United States, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), and on Europes side, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). The latter assisted in ensuring that members met their shared obligations to adopt trade- and production-enhancing measures. The ECA helped Europe buy goods like food, fuel, and machinery with monetary assistance and leveraged money for specialized projects, particularly those that developed and repaired infrastructure. Additionally, it authorized the use of local currency matching funds, granted guarantees to stimulate private investment in the United States, and provided technical support to boost productivity.

The $13 billion project began with the delivery of food and supplies to French and Dutch ports throughout Europe. Soon after, tractors, turbines, lathes, and other industrial machinery were provided, along with the fuel needed to run them.

Money from the Marshall Plan was distributed to local governments and jointly managed by ECA. In each participating country, a special ECA envoy, usually a well-known American businessman, was appointed to provide guidance and expertise during implementation. To assess the economy in each participating state and determine where assistance was required, panels of government, corporate, and labor leaders were assembled to gather and analyze the economic developments.

As a result of these developments, the fastest phase of growth in European history occurred between 1948 and 1952. The level of industrial production in Western Europe had increased by 40% by the time the Marshall Plan was completed in 1951. Moreover, trade and exports significantly outpaced what they were before World War II. Increased production created more working places, and thus the living standards of Europeans improved.

Perhaps even more significant than the economic implications of the Marshall Plan were the political ones. Aid from the Marshall Plan enabled Western European countries to ease rationing and spending restrictions, which decreased dissatisfaction within Western European populations and brought political stability. Communist parties lost political influence. Economic self-sufficiency in all participating European countries had been achieved, and as Secretary of State George C. Marshall thought, the cooperation of all European nations led to greater unity. Communism in Western Europe was successfully contained. Aside from Czechoslovakias fall to communism on February 25, 1948, no other Western European nation shared the same fate.

A sort of United States of Europe was what the Truman administration envisioned for the future of the European continent. Indeed, the promotion of economic and political cooperation among European countries through the Marshall Plan influenced the idea of forming the European Union.

It promoted economic integration, which led six countries Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands to establish the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950. Eight years later, the same six created a more cohesive European Economic Community, eventually transforming into the European Union in 1993. The frameworks that were implemented by the European Economic Community were tested and developed in the OEEC as part of the Marshall Plan.

Additionally, the Brussels Treaty on Mutual Defense, ratified in 1948 by the 16 participating European countries, served as the precursor for the creation of the collective security organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in 1949.

Scholars often suggest that the Marshall Plan only further intensified tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and contributed to the intensification of the Cold War. It signaled a new era of global responsibility for the United States. Turning away from its traditional policy of isolationism, the Marshall Plan helped the United States to position itself as a new leader in a new emerging post-war order, threatening the dominance of the Soviet Union.

The Marshall Plan is regarded as one of Americas most efficient foreign aid initiatives and one of its more successful foreign assistance programs. As economic historians J. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen outlined, the Marshall Plan can be regarded as historys most successful structural adjustment program.

Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for proposing and supervising the plan for the economic recovery of Europe. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rightfully called Marshalls decision to rebuild Europe the highest level of statesmanship.

Continued here:
What Was the Marshall Plan? - The Collector

This essay examines the antinomy of class struggle, as formulated by Paul Mattick and elaborated by Thorie Communiste. The antinomy can be formulated as follows: while capital accumulates by exploiting wage labor, the reproduction of wage labor reproduces the conditions of exploitation that propel the accumulation of capital. Thus, in reproducing itself, wage labor reproduces the conditions of its own exploitation, which is to say, capital. This means that labors gains against capitalbetter wages and working conditionsare won at labors own expense: increasing wages imply an increasing rate of exploitation. Only the abolition of the capitalist class relation can abolish this vicious cycle. The question is whether this abolition requires labors seizure of the means of production, or whether these means have become so bound up with capital accumulation that abolishing capital entails relinquishing these means and abolishing production as we know it. Thorie Communiste insists on the latter. Since social production has become inextricable from capital accumulation and the affirmation of labor inseparable from the affirmation of capital, communism as the abolition of capital requires the self-abolition of the proletariat. Class struggle unfolds in the rift between two impossibilities: the impossibility of affirming the proletariat without affirming capital and the impossibility of negating capital without negating the proletariat. Is the possibility of communism inextricable from this rift between impossible affirmation and impossible negation? Or does it require a politics of the rift capable of pinpointing the faultline between these impossibilities?

The Antinomy of Class Struggle

In one of his late texts, Reform or Revolution, Paul Mattick succinctly encapsulates the antinomy of class struggle:

Higher wages and better working conditions presuppose increased exploitation, or the reduction of the value of labor power, thus assuring the continuous reproduction of the class struggle within the accumulation process. It is the objective possibility of the latter which nullifies the workers economic struggle as a medium for the development of revolutionary class consciousness.

Capital will only increase the share of social wealth it yields to labor by increasing the amount of surplus value it extracts from labor. Capital increases through labors struggle to increase its share in capital: the more wealth labor obtains from capital, the more labor is exploited by capital. Labors victories consolidate capitals monopolization of social wealth: the strengthening of its influence upon capital is also the weakening of its challenge to capital. Since labors ultimate interest is the abolition of capital, winning better wages and working conditions is a short-term gain that diminishes the prospect of long-term victory.

But labor can no more abstain from the struggle for wages than it can relinquish the struggle for overcoming capital. It is caught in a double bind: if it gives up its struggle for wages, it will be immiserated; if it does not, it perpetuates its own exploitation. In orthodox Marxist theory, the intensification of labor struggles generated class consciousness and hence consciousness of the need to abolish the class relation separating producers from the means of production. Class struggle culminates in the abolition of class. Reformist consciousness becomes revolutionary when it perceives the need to abolish its own social being (social being generates the consciousness capable of transforming it). But in historical practice, the consciousness resulting from the increased power of organized labor seeks only to consolidate the social being that generated it. Organized labor becomes the adjutant of the bourgeoisie. Instead of negating its social being, working class consciousness reinforces it. What explains this blockage? The subjectivity of labor is trapped between aspiring to the dominant status of the bourgeoisie and affirming its objective status in the social order. It aspires because it is subordinated and it is subordinated because it aspires. This deadlock converts the consciousness of social being into its affirmation, preventing consciousness of class from issuing into the imperative negation of class.

But this neutralization was only possible so long as capital was assured of an increasing rate of exploitation. With the end of capitals postwar boom (lasting roughly from 1950 to 1973), class war enters into a new phase. Capitalist class consciousness is reenergized by the self-conscious power of organized labor; it launches a new offensive against it. Privatization and marketization intensify. As the bourgeoisie rolls back the social gains of the working class, labors diminishing power and influence corrodes the material buffers that prevented class consciousness from recognizing the need to destroy class. Now maximizing exploitation entails growing immiseration, whose consequences are compounded by murderous imperial wars and catastrophic climate change. In waging war against the working class, bourgeois consciousness dismembers social being, its own as well as that of its opponent. Capitals war on the global proletariat ramifies into the destruction of humanitys inorganic body, the earth. This is where we find ourselves. The question then is whether the class consciousness rekindled by labors nascent reorganization will be satisfied to regain what it has lost since 1973, or whether recognizing the destruction of its social being will spur it to pursue the definitive abolition of both capital and class.

Revolutionary Possibility

This sketch omits all the details one would expect from a credible analysis or explanation. But it serves to highlight an underappreciated facet of historical materialism (one that is also stressed by Mattick). Social being determines consciousness and is redetermined by it in return. But the temporal hiatus separating determination from redetermination marks the noncoincidence of subject and object, or the gap between social being in-itself and social being for-itself. This gap is crucial for the interplay between the subjective and objective dimension of historical materialism. The latter is not about the one-way determination of consciousness by social being, but about the two-way determination between the unconscious objectivation of subjective practice (what we do everyday without knowing we are doing it) and the conscious subjectivation of objective structure (what we are compelled to do, having consciously interpreted our social being). It is the transition from one moment to the other, and especially the redetermination of social being by class consciousness, that decides whether the bourgeoisie will maintain its social being as well as that of the working class, or whether the proletariat will practically negate its own social being together with that of the bourgeoisie. The practical shift from affirmation to negation marks the transition from reformist to revolutionary class politics. Effecting this transition requires grasping this hiatus as the interval within which history is made. This entails consciously apprehending and intervening into the gap separating the subjective and objective dimensions of social being and thus knowing when to act at the limits of knowing.

Revolutionary possibility emerges in the interval between the objective consequences of subjective activity and their subjective redetermination. It is a truism to say that revolution takes time. But this truism has both a reformist and a revolutionary sense. According to the former, the revolutionary transition from one mode of production to another remains a social process: the transformation of social reproduction requires its maintenance. The revolutionary sense insists that revolution is not a transition but a hiatus interrupting regular social processes and even the imperative of social reproduction itself. The revolutionary imperative consists in actively suspending the imperative of social reproduction in order to secure its future, because to continue to affirm it is to jeopardize this future. We might add that in the current conjuncture, it is precisely the blind affirmation of the need to continue that negates the possibility of continuing. Refusal gathers the past, present, and future of social reproduction into the interval that suspends them and attempts to recreate their future possibility. The transition from capitalism to communism is forged by risking the continuity of transition.

But the question is whether suspending existing conditions of continuity (i.e., existing conditions of social reproduction) forges a new, radically different continuity, or whether the discontinuity generated by negating these conditions merits the name communism. This is the difference between communism as sublation and communism as abolition. The issue concerns more than the logic of negation. Asking whether labor might resume its ascendancy vis--vis capital assumes that the dynamic of class struggle is akin to the movement of a pendulum in a neutral medium, each pole ascending in alternation. But history is not a neutral medium. Its irreversibility inflects this dynamism and irrevocably alters its composition of forces.

Thorie Communiste on the Disconnection of Valorization and Social Reproduction

The restructuring of the labor-capital relation initiated in the 1970s and extended through the 1980s and 1990s (sometimes described as neoliberalism, a term I will avoid because of its imprecision) changes the conditions of class struggle. For some, it alters them in a way that renders a certain conception of revolution, i.e., the proletariats seizure and control of production, historically obsolete. This is the basic proposition of Thorie Communiste (TC), a group of theorists and activists born of the cycle of struggles that flared from 1968 to 1977, whose work is dedicated to thinking through the consequences of this restructuring. It has three basic components: deindustrialization and off-shoring; privatization and austerity; financialization and credit. Their combined consequence is the dual disconnection of the reproduction of labor power from valorization and of wage income from consumption. The first disconnection entails the geographical zoning of valorization, which involves

capitalist hypercenters grouping together the higher functions in the hierarchy of business organization (finance, high technology, research centers, etc.); secondary zones with activities requiring intermediate technologies, encompassing logistics and commercial distribution, ill-defined zones with peripheral areas devoted to assembly activities, often outsourced; last, crisis zones and social dustbins in which a whole informal economy involving legal or illegal products prospers.

While zoning unifies the valorization of value, it divides the reproduction of labor power:

Reproduction occurs in different ways in each of these zones. In the first world: high-wage strata where social risks are privatized intermeshed with fractions of the labor force where certain aspects of Fordism have been preserved and others, increasingly numerous, subjected to a new compromise. In the second world: regulation through low wages, imposed by strong internal migratory pressure and precarious employment, islands of more or less stable international subcontracting, little or no guarantee for social risks and labor migrations. In the third world: humanitarian aid, all kinds of illicit trade, agricultural survival, regulation by various mafias and wars on a more or less restricted scale, but also by the revival of local and ethnic solidarities.

The result is a total disjunction between the global valorization of capital and the reproduction of labor power adequate for that valorization. The reciprocity between mass production and the reproduction of labor power, characteristic of Fordism, disappears. There is a separation between the reproduction and circulation of capital and that of labor power. Moreover, the zoning of social reproduction enforces the segmentation of the proletariat, its division through processes of racialization and gendering compounded by the subdivisions of ethnicity and culture. Proletarianization is no longer the socially homogenizing force that promised to unify the proletariat against capital: The unity of segmentation is all that exists for it [the proletariat]. The second disconnection couples increasing consumption with decreasing wages. Mounting debt allows household expenditure to outstrip income. Macroeconomic risk is displaced onto households, whose debt becomes the prime source of demand. Thus the starting point for the subprime crisis of 2008 is not capital investments but household debts. The savings instrumentalized by financial markets, savings whose repayment is endless, are those of wage laborers: The wage is no longer an element of regulation of the whole of capitalism.

Given how much will turn out depend upon it, it is worth pausing to consider critical rejoinders to the disconnection thesis. On a charitable reading, the zoning of valorization can be understood to obtain at different geographic scales and even within single nation-states: Brazil might plausibly encompass all three. But the dual disconnection thesis has been subjected to particularly trenchant criticism by Bruno Astarian. Astarians critique can be boiled down to three main points:

1) The unification of value exists only as an assemblage of multiple capitals differentiated by their organic composition (ratio of constant to variable capital and of labor power to means of production). This differentiation is hierarchical and rules out any global equalization of the rate of profit. The totality of available surplus value is not equally distributed as a single rate of profit across all capitals.

2) If the unification of global capital is relative, then the reproduction of labor power is both locally and internationally differentiated, and as such more or less adequate to the differentiated unity of value.

3) With regard to household debt, there is a difference between consumer credit and real estate credit. While the first allows an increase in household expenditure, it represents only a minor partroughly 30 percentof total household debt. Consumer credit is mainly practiced in five countries: the USA, Canada, the UK, Japan, and Germany. Sixty-five percent of the mass of consumer debt is concentrated in these countries. As one might expect, the majority of the global proletariat does not have recourse to consumer credit. Even in the US, the resort to credit among proletarians is relatively infrequent and the sums concerned comparatively modest. According to Federal Reserve figures, between 1998 and 2007, while debt was present at all levels of income and was on the rise even at the lower end of the income bracket, it was the middle-classes who sustained the majority of consumer credit, and they did so both in greater numbers and for larger sums. This does not rule out the prevalence of overindebtedness among the poorest, but it does imply that wages have fallen relative to what is considered a normal standard of living in the US and that the restructuring invoked by TC is at least not in full effect. As for real estate credit, it only increases household demand for new housing. Thus, transactions concerning old housing should be deducted from this total credit mass. In 2007, the number of real estate transactions for old housing was $5.7 million, as opposed to $0.7 million for new housing. Consequently, while household debt does play a role in stimulating overall demand in the US and Europe, the preponderant mass of debt driving this demand come from the middle-classes rather than the proletariat. Middle-class income comprises a larger portion of surplus value, whether in the form of higher salaries, bonuses, or more directly through capital revenues (interest, dividends) and small or personal business profits. Generally speaking, the propensity for household debt is directly proportional to income, which determines the capacity for repayment. Thus, the rich invariably incur greater debt than the poor. The marked decrease in interest rates incited households to incur debts at the upper limits of their capacity and, in the case of subprime mortgages, often beyond it. But the subprime mortgage crisis is more indicative of the way in which the capacity for repayment imposes limits upon household debt than of a drift towards debt in proletarian consumption. Consequently, while it is true to say that the proletariat in the US and Europe is indebted and that the 2008 financial crisis was initiated by payment defaults among the poorest, it is false to claim that proletarian consumption has become disconnected from the wage, whether singly or doubly.

Astarians critique plunges us into questions of political economy that I am not qualified to adjudicate. Interestingly however, it undermines the disconnection thesis while reasserting the correlation between wages and surplus value. The consequence that TC derives from the disconnection thesisthat the wage relation is no longer a regulative element vis--vis capitalism as a wholemust be relinquished to the extent that the wage remains determining for the majority of the proletariat. But the disconnection thesis has a significant corollary that merits consideration even if one rejects the thesis itself. This is the claim that the contemporary wage relation is the element which renders visible the contradictoriness in proletarian being as such. It indexes the overlap between proletarian belongingthe internal relation between wage labor and proletarianizationand belonging to capitalthe external relation between living labor and valorization. While the first is a relation of internal necessity, the second is a relation of external contingency. Being proletarian belongs to capital. There is nothing left to affirm in the possession of labor power but the external compulsion of capital: it brands labor with the destitution of belonging to capital.

The wage demand becomes structurally illegitimate vis--vis capital, and not just antagonistic vis--vis the maximization of surplus value. The wage relation is now the site of labors struggle for existence, and no longer of the demand for its management. The disjunction between valorization and the reproduction of labor power recenters the contradiction between capital and proletariat. But now the proletariat is riven by this contradiction in its very existence. Its identity as a class is imposed externally upon it by capital: The necessity of its reproduction is something it finds facing it, something represented by capital, for which it is constantly necessary yet always superfluous. Capital is no longer compelled to negotiate the ratio of surplus to necessary labor; it can impose it by force. The illegitimacy of the demand for higher wages renders the disciplining of labor power integral to the capitalist agenda. Coercive managerialism complements police violence. This crisis in the wage relation concentrates the current phase of the contradiction between labor and capital. The proletariat is nothing outside of the contradiction of the wage relation. It cannot reproduce itself independently of this relation, but by reproducing itself it reproduces the relation that nullifies its independence. This is the rationale for TCs notorious insistence that there is nothing left to affirm in proletarian being, no positive characteristic to defend, no independent capacity to preserve: The proletariat is nothing in itself, but a nothing full of social relations, such that, against capital, disappearance is its only option. To be a proletarian is no longer to be the nothing capable of being everything; it is to be the nothingness through which everything (the totality of social relations) is not only preserved but expanded in its homogeneous fullness.

Critique of Programmatism and Theory of the Rift

During the period of the ascendancy of labor power, its rising power within the capitalist mode of production was accompanied by its identification with a specific predicate: being a worker. It is precisely this identification that is disqualified by the growing rift between the accumulation of value and the reproduction of labor. The disconnection between valorization and the reproduction of labor, and between wages and consumption, renders obsolete the definition of communism as the dis-alienation of labor, the expropriation of expropriators through seizure of the means of production. This is the programmatist schema, whereby communism is understood as the proletariats transition from being a class in-itself to a class for-itself, the self-organization and self-affirmation of labor, which, interestingly, TC views as common to both Leninists and council communists, Stalinists and anarcho-syndicalists:

Generally speaking, programmatism may be defined as a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organisation which become a programme to be realised. In the class struggle between the proletariat and capital, the proletariat is the positive element that takes the contradiction to the point of explosion. The revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers councils, the liberation of work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalised self-management, or a society of associated producers. One of the terms of the contradiction is considered its solution.

This critique is historical, not metaphysical. The claim is not that programmatism is an illusion which we can now see through but that while it was once historically legitimate, it is no longer. The social conditions that made it viable no longer obtain. On the basis of this diagnosis of the historical obsolescence of programmatism, TC proposes communization not as the hitherto occluded truth or essence of communism but as its only current, historically viable form. It is the abolition of state, class, and of the division of labor, but also of commodification and exchangean abolition no longer consequent upon the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose result is no longer envisageable in terms of the free association of producers. It is an abolition in process, but an abolition no longer subordinated to the reconstitution of relations of production. At their most provocative, TC suggests that communism is not the reconfiguration of forces and relations of production but the abolition of the social objectivation that generates and is regenerated by those forces and relations. We will examine this aspect of their thinking more critically below. For now, what needs to be stressed is that what TC calls communization follows from grasping the contradictoriness of proletarian being in its dependence upon the force that expands by nullifying it.

Although it renders communism unrealizable as an affirmative program (the liberation of living labor), this contradiction yields a rift (cart) in social being that makes communism possible as revolutionary negation. This is the rift between two historical impossibilities: the impossibility of affirming the proletariat without affirming capital and the impossibility of negating capital without negating the proletariat. The second negation was also endorsed by programmatism, but only as a consequence of the revolutionary self-affirmation through which the proletariat seized the means of production. Self-negation followed self-affirmation, but they were rigidly segregated. Communization decouples negation from affirmation (in which regard it is profoundly anti-Nietzschean). It overthrows negations subordination to the positive. The rift is at once what compels proletarian action against capital, and what limits it. It is the rift between the proletariat as constitutive of capital and the proletariat as negation of capitalthe rift between the limit that blocks struggle (the fact that the proletariat can act only as a class) and the dynamic that propels struggle (the fact that the proletariat seeks to abolish what constitutes it as a class, i.e. capital). Class struggle is at once the product and the presupposition of this rift. The separation of the producers from the means of production, without which capital cannot function, is not a punctual origin relating two distinct substances, labor and capital, but a rift in which ceaseless self-expansion, capital, feeds off ceaseless self-depletion, labor. The rift conjoins capital as self-relation, reflexively positing its own presuppositions, and the alienage (extranisation) of labor, split between labor power, posited through the valorization of capital, and living labor, whose compulsory reproduction through the wage relation is the real presupposition, at once solicited and repressed, for the movement of valorization. The split between living and dead labor, or labor and labor power, through which value valorizes itself, is also what cannot be wholly integrated within self-relating value, the effective (wirklich), not posited, presupposition that prevents it from achieving closure. But this is not because living labor is an autonomous power. On the contrary, it cannot be substantialized and separated from the dead labor upon which its life depends. The alienage of labor does not follow from the estrangement of an antecedent propriety (or authenticity). It designates a condition of voidedness, or lack of substance, that does not presuppose an originary plenitude. The separation of producers from production is not an originary alienation that communism would undo by reuniting what has been separated but the perpetual alienage of the rift, the contradiction inherent in the commodity labor power, which renders communism historically immanent in the daily course of class struggle.

Contradiction is polarization, pitting the reproduction of ever-dwindling labor power against the accumulation of ever-expanding capital. As an activity of the proletariat manifesting this contradiction, class struggle is necessarily limited, yet this limit begins to founder when, in the course of a struggle initiated by a demand (revendication) (for higher wages or a shorter working day), the determination of class (being a bearer of labor power) begins to be recognized as an external constraint to be abolished, rather than as an internal impulse (a productive capacity) requiring liberation. It is this encounter with their own limit that pushes struggles initiated by demands, and hence conditioned by the capital relation, beyond those demands and thus beyond this relation:

The conditions for overcoming struggles for demands are put in place on the basis of struggles for demands themselves Putting unemployment and precarity at the heart of the wage relation; defining clandestinity as the general situation of labor power; posing the social immediacy of the individual as the foundation to produce the basis of opposition to capital, as in the Action Directe movement; engaging in suicidal struggles such as that at Cellatex and others in the spring and summer of 2000 (Metaleuropwith some caveatsAdelshoffen, Socit Franaise Industrielle de Contrle et dEquipement, Bertrand Faure, Mossley, Bata, Moulinex, Daewoo-Orion, ACT-ex Bull [these examples are important because they point to the interweaving of the concrete and the abstract in TCs work]); reducing class unity to an objectivity constituted in capital and in the multiplicity of collectives and waves of temporary workers strikes (France 2003, British postal workers)all of the above define the content of each of these specific struggles as constitutive of the dynamic of the cycle inside and during these struggles.

The wage demand of the employed is limited by the revolt of the unemployed, but the two are no longer pitted against one another in competition for a share of surplus value accrued through the increasing exploitation of the one and the intensifying domination of the other. The limit of the demand for necessary labor binds it to the revolt against immiseration expressed by those consigned to the scrapheap of surplus labor: The worker can no longer break the chain in the liberation of labor, the chain which links together the terms of contradictory reciprocal implication between surplus and necessary labor. The illegitimacy of the wage demand conjoins employed and unemployed. Because it indexes the limit between valuable and valueless labor power, value-producing labor retains a central revolutionary role despite the decentralization of value production (its spatiotemporal dispersion). Social reproduction fuels value production; they cannot be decoupled without abolishing production as a social relation. While the latter may be communizations ultimate goal, it cannot be reached without being routed through labor struggles. Thus it is an error to accuse communizers of diminishing the revolutionary significance of labor struggles, and, concomitantly, of inflating the revolutionary import of insurrections by the unwaged (an error I have made in the past). The point is to acknowledge the interdependence between wage demands and unwaged revolts, against programmatisms tendency to decouple them. If the latter constitutes the limit of the former, then by the same token, unwaged revolt encounters its limit in the wage demand. Insurrection cannot be decoupled from struggle at the sites of production:

If class struggle remains a movement at the level of reproduction, it will not integrate its own raison-dtre, which is production. The currently recurring limit of all riots and insurrections is what defines them as minority struggles. Revolution will have to go into the domain of production to abolish it as a specific moment of the relation between people and to abolish, in the same moment, labor in the abolition of wage labor. That is the key role of productive labor and of those who at a specific moment are the direct bearers of the contradiction because they experience it as necessary and superfluous at the same time in their existence for capital.

It is this stress on the way in which the limit of wage struggles necessarily couples them with the struggles of the unwaged, and vice versa, such that surplus labor is merely the obverse of necessary labor, that distinguishes the politics of value-abolition conceived as communization, from the politics of value-critique (Wertkritik). Where value-critique decouples the logic of valorization from the class relation, thereby relegating class struggle to the status of a fetish (e.g., Robert Kurz), communization stresses their interdependence while distinguishing class struggle from the affirmation of labor. Where value-critique reduces labor to an avatar of value and identifies capital with its abstract domination, downplaying the exploitation of labor, communization stresses the indissociability of abstract and concrete domination, and the entwinement of exploitation and oppression, wage struggles and unwaged revolt. Most significantly, the critique of programmatism upholds the ineluctability of class struggle while ridding it of its subordination to the teleology of production.

Auto- and Alloproduction

The contradiction between the proletariats necessity and its contingency for capital (which is the contradiction between necessary and surplus labor) is the condition of its own resolution. The alienage of class belonging is not just a conceptual form deployed in theory but the content of revolutionary practice. Communism can only emerge by suspending the existing conditions of social reproduction. The proletariat is not the class endowed with the power to dissolve existing conditions; it is this dissolution embodied as a class. If communism begins with the proletariat putting its own existence into question, it culminates with the proletariat destroying the social forms that perpetuate it: companies, factories, production, exchange. Thus it is not only commodification, class, state, and the division of labor that are indices of transcendence, but social relations of production as such, insofar as they are indissociable from the logic of exchange (the abstract equivalence of value). In abolishing the latter, communization also puts an end to the former. Communization is the autoproduction of humanity no longer positing any social relation as a presupposition to be reproduced; it is autoproduction as lack, passion, constant destruction and creation, ceaselessly positing becoming as its premise.

Yet at the same time, endorsing Marxs critique of Hegelian idealism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, TC insists that humanity is an objective being, completing itself with external objects that it causes to become for it. Can humanity produce itself without reproducing preexisting social relations? There is a tension between the claim that humanity is an objective being, bound to complete itself by causing external objects to become for it (note the avoidance of the term production), and the insistence that it can do so without this causation turning into a mode of production, objectifying a set of social relations. The key distinction lies between the objective immanence of autoproduction and the transcendence of objectivation, or alloproduction. Capital is the extremity of humanitys alloproduction; its transcendence is merely the most acute variant of the objectivation of production. Consequently, the overcoming of capital terminates the social objectivation of production that has conditioned all previous human history:

The overcoming of existing conditions is the overcoming of the objectivation of production. In this regard communism is the overcoming of all previous history. It is not a new mode of production and there can be no issue about its management. It constitutes a total break with the concepts of economy, of productive forces, of objectivated measures of production. Humanity is an objective being, completing itself with external objects that it causes to become for it. Throughout its history, the noncoincidence between individual activity and social activity, which is constitutive of its history and which does not need to be proven or abstractly produced, took the form, for this objective being, of its separation (objectivation) from the productive act and from production, becoming the social character of its individual production. Separation, alienation, objectivation, in the course of the history of the separation of activity from its conditions, turned the latter into an economy, into relations of production, into a mode of production. As the dissolution of the capitalist mode of productions existing conditions, the proletariat as a class, in its contradiction with capital, is the presupposition for the overcoming of this entire history, without assuming that attaining this situation is the goal of all previous history.

For TC, the history of production is a consequence of this noncoincidence. They dismiss as idealism the suggestion that history itself results from the externalization and estrangement of production and the development of productive forces. But if the history of this development is simply the history of the contradiction between labor and capital, then the task is not to explain why alienation has existed but why it cannot go on existing. The end of alienation is the end of the disjunction between individual and social activity. If the origin of alienation requires no explanation from a materialist standpoint, neither does the disjunction between individual and social activity.

Yet at this point, another tension emerges between TCs commitment to the historical immanence of real subsumption and its conception of history as noncoincidence of individual and social activity. For a historical materialist, individual and social are historical categories, as are universal and particular. Can the noncoincidence of individual and social activity be abstracted from our own historically specific society and retrojected as the origin of human history? This is precisely the move TC objects to when it is made with regard to labor in general as a supposed invariant of human history. Labor in general is merely the historical retrojection of historically specific abstract labor. It is hard to see how positing the noncoincidence of individual and social activity as the matrix of history is any less mystifying than the account of history as the alienation of production.

This is compounded by the repeated suggestion that human singularity preexists relations of production, as when TC declares that communization abolishes society as autonomized substance of the relations among individuals, who then relate to each other in their singularity. This is to assume that human singularity subsists beneath capitalist social relations, just waiting to be released. But what distinguishes human singularity from the natural singularity of sand grains and snowflakes is precisely the fact that it is constituted in and through social relations. It is as though the precautions against the autonomization of living labor served merely to preserve the transcendence of human singularity. This is another symptom of the tension between the commitment to historical immanence and the insistence that objectivation is transcendence. It was precisely the premium on historical immanence that motivated the rejection of the autonomy of living labor and the claim that the proletariat only exists in and through the transcendence of capital. But while class determination is entirely beholden to capital, the determinations of subjectivity, singularity, and individuality are curiously absolved of this dependence. Thus, apparently disregarding their own strictures against attributing autonomous agency to labor as self-organization, TC appeals to the self-transformation of the class subject to release human singularity from its transcendent objectivation in social relations. The self-abolition of the proletariat is supposed to yield what they call the social immediacy of the individual:

The social immediacy of the individual is the end of the separation between individual activity and social activity, which constituted, for humanity, the fact of its being an objective being on the basis of the relation between its individuality and its sociality, and defined its activity as labor. It is not, for humanity, the fact of being an objective being in itself which is in question but the separation between individual activity and social activity, which turns this objectivity into an economy and economy into what mediates the two.

But how can this social immediacy of the individual be postulated as the result of historical mediation if the separation of individual and social activity is the immediate (non-produced) condition of historical mediation? Historical materialism stresses not only humanitys dependence upon nature, its inorganic body, but each humans dependence upon other humans to produce its material conditions of existence. The sociality of human being is as much part of its objective being as its organic aspects. But it is precisely by rooting sociality in relations of production operating behind the back of consciousness that Marx breaks with the Feuerbachian premium on the interpersonal relation as the absolute relation grounding sociality. Marx replaces sociality conceived as an absolute relation with the dynamic ensemble of social relations of material production. The objective sociality of human being is grounded in this ensemble of social relations. It is implausible to drive a wedge between human sociality, which is inseparable from the objective, material character of human being, and the objectivation of this sociality in relations of production, through the insistence that one is immanent and the other transcendent. The materialist premium on immanence is sound, but not the insistence that immanence be uncontaminated with transcendenceobjective sociality with social objectivation. It is precisely the separation of immanence and transcendence, their segregation as pure subjectivity and pure objectivity, which is idealist, while the recognition of the need to root transcendence in immanence, objectivation in subjectivation, is the hallmark of Marxian materialism. And it is precisely the dynamic of externalization and estrangementproductive appropriation and consumptive expropriationthat articulates them. Here TC (perhaps following Althusser) simply assumes that externalization presupposes interiority while estrangement presupposes authenticity. But externalization need not presuppose antecedent interiority, just as estrangement need not imply prior authenticity. Interiority is retrospectively constituted as a consequence of the transcendent estrangement of externalization. Objectivation is the estrangement of a process of productive appropriation without origin or end. The separation of activity from its conditions is not the premise of alienation and objectivation; it is a consequence of the alienation of objectivation, as is the noncoincidence of individual and social activity. Making them coincide is the task of appropriating production. Only then can autoproductionthe production of productionbe conceived as an externalization of estrangement that does not retrospectively mythologize their immediate coincidence.

Perhaps it is now easier to see the fundamental difficulty that vitiates the plausibility of proletarian self-abolition understood as the abolition of objectivation. By decoupling class struggle from the appropriation of production, the theory and practice of the rift decouples class struggle from politics conceived as strategic orientation around desires that are more than mere concatenations of needs. The problem becomes one of tactical discrimination in destroying existing conditions of production. But in destroying the means for the production of capital, class struggle destroys the existing means for the reproduction of the proletariat. The point at which the pursuit of communization threatens to compound capitalist immiseration is the point at which the politics of the rift replaces the management of production with the palliative management of needs. Tactical discrimination alone cannot resolve the strategic selection required to distinguish between those means which can and those which cannot be suspended in order to decouple social reproduction from the reproduction of the capital relation.

This essay was inspired by conversations with Nathan Brown, who impressed upon me the philosophical significance of Thorie Communistes work. For Browns own engagement with TC, see his Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique, chap. 9 and 10 (Fordham University Press, 2021).

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Politics of the Rift: On Thorie Communiste - Notes - E-Flux

Strange as it sounds, the European Unions most successful policy ever has been deeply unpopular in Brussels for the past decade. But now, the view from the blocs political and governing institutions is changing. EU enlargement is back on the agenda, and it will remain there.

The EUs enlargement and evolution have radically changed Europe. The bloc has grown from six members to the current 27. While it was originally meant to facilitate Franco-German reconciliation in the mid-20th century, it soon became a vehicle for securing democracy in southern Europe after the fall of the dictatorships in Greece, Portugal and Spain. And then, after the fall of communism, EU enlargement fundamentally transformed much of Central and Eastern Europe.

The EU owes its prosperity to its vast internal market, where people, goods, ideas and capital can move freely, and where many old borders and barriers have gradually disappeared. European enlargement and integration have not always been easy, nor is the process complete. Yet it has been a monumental success, overall.

But enlargement has rarely been popular. Within the political bubbles of the European Commission and the European Parliament, there has always been murmuring about the attendant institutional challenges, budgetary problems and disruptions to the status quo.

Such complaintswhich are echoed by some key member stateshelp to explain why the EU enlargement process stalled around a decade ago. The last new member to be admitted was Croatia, in 2013. Meanwhile, the rest of the Western Balkans have been left out, despite the official invitation they received two decades ago (admittedly, some of them havent been particularly helpful in advancing their own accession).

Russias war against Ukraine has changed the situation. Ukraine applied for EU membership just days after the invasion started, and the EU recognised its status as a candidate in record time. What had previously been unthinkable suddenly became a strategic necessity. Following the elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, the next European Commission will be expected to make enlargement one of its top priorities.

True, this change comes with risks. Ukraines accession process could end up stalled, like the Western Balkan countries process did after the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Yet there is good reason to think that this time is different. After all, failing to bring Ukraine into the fold would jeopardise European security and amount to a strategic disaster for the EU.

But EU accession is not a simple affair. It entails lengthy, detailed talks that are best understood as a negotiated surrender to all the rules and regulations encompassed in the 35 chapters of the acquis communautaire (the body of EU law). The process is tedious, complicated and unavoidable. There are no shortcuts. The countries that joined after the original six members negotiated for an average of four years. While Finland and Sweden closed all chapters in a record-setting two years, Portugal and Spain each took around six years, owing to complications concerning their agricultural policies.

The European Commission is now assessing what the next step should be, with a report expected in October. If it recommends moving ahead with accession negotiations, and if the European Council agrees to do so when it meets in December, talks with both Ukraine and Moldova could start sometime in 2024. And if that happens, theres a chance that the negotiations could be concluded within the next commissions five-year term.

But hurdles abound. Ukraine must sustain its reform momentum, and the EU will need to manage the various institutional issues and budgetary challenges that come with enlargement. With preparation, these should be surmountable. Spains accession in 1986, and Polands in 2004, required lengthy transition periods and careful management of sensitive issues, but both ultimately succeeded.

For its part, Ukraine is geographically large, but its small in many other ways. In terms of population, it is significantly smaller than the (recently departed) United Kingdom, but close to Poland and Spain. Its economy, however, is significantly weaker. Even prior to the war, its per capita GDP was less than one-third the EU average. Since the invasion, it has lost roughly a third more. Incorporating Ukraine into the EU thus would represent a significant budgetary burden, underscoring the need for sufficient preparation and political will.

Looking ahead, launching accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova may also lead to calls for renewed talks with the Western Balkan countries. If that impasse is broken, the EU could suddenly be on track to include 35 member states within a decade.

Its worth remembering that previous waves of enlargement have always been accompanied by fears of weakening the EU. Yet, in each case, the bloc has grown stronger. As the EU has expanded, it has become more relevant and important on the world stage. Theres no reason to think that adding new members today would yield a different result. But the process must be managed carefully to uphold European principles and standards. How the next phase of EU enlargement is handled will determine Europes fate for decades to come.

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The return of EU enlargement | The Strategist - The Strategist

July 20, 2023

As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhins name, he said that the leaders of the rebellion had betrayed their country, their people. Amid his invective of treachery and treason, Putin levelled another charge: apostasy.

Theres no more defining act of the latter years of Putins reign than the invasion of Ukraine, where the Russian leaders justification for the war has been as moral as it is material. In Putins address to the nation on the eve of the invasion last year, he spoke of needing to protect Russia from dangerous Western influences which were seeking to destroy our traditional values, and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people, from within. As with his charge against Prigozhin, it was a pointed signal to people both inside and outside of Russia that, to him, this was an issue far greater than mere borders. And this invocation of cosmic transgressions speaks to a deeper change happening within Russia, a tightening of the bond between the political and the spiritual.

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In spiritual terms, the merger of Orthodox Church and Russian state began long before Prigozhin launched his ill-fated mission. Its a process that was memorialised in 2020, when the Cathedral of the Armed Forces of Russia opened in Moscow to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. The stained-glass mosaics on the imposing building fuse saints and military heroism, while its floors are made of melted-down trophies seized from the Nazis; every time a Russian walks on them, he is symbolically delivering a blow to the fascist enemy. The proportions of the church are deliberately encrypted with numerology: the height of 14.18 metres, for instance, corresponds to the 1,418 days of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. It is, as Aris Roussinos described it, a statement of Russias neo-traditionalist state ideology for the next century.

A wartime leader calling on higher powers to fortify a nation is hardly new, but Putins regime appears to be increasingly leaning into the mystical as a source of its legitimacy. Last autumn, the bones of legendary commander Grigory Potemkin Catherine the Greats consort were returned to Russia from the fiercely contested Ukrainian city of Kherson. The remains of Prince Alexander Nevsky, the great warrior-saint of medieval Rus, have also been handed over from the St Petersburgs Hermitage Museum to the Orthodox Church. Then, in May this year, the icon of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, a widely venerated 18th-century hermit and confessor, was flown over parts of Russia susceptible to Ukrainian advances, in an apparent bid to ward off potential drone attacks. Putins message to the nation would seem to be that its traditions are its strength.

This is a country that is not yet fully mobilised, but firmly on a war footing, and one where people have been told that they must endure and suffer for the good of the motherland. The message is increasingly clear: Russia is not simply engaged in a physical battle, but a celestial one.

It was around 10 years ago that Putin began drawing heavily on Russias religious heritage for geopolitical reasons. This is, perhaps not coincidentally, around the time that Putin started tinkering with his borders in Crimea. He was trying to position Russia as this geopolitical democracy thats different from Europe and the West because [of its] religious values, explains Telly Papanikolaou, professor of theology.

The Russian Orthodox Church has backed itself into becoming nothing more than a department of the foreign ministry, he says, adding that the church is being used as a soft-power tool of the regime. And Putin has squarely aimed his rhetoric at those in the West who believe that traditional values are under threat from abortion, gay marriage and womens rights. But in labelling the mutiny as apostasy, Papanikolaou believes that Putin is looking inside rather than beyond his borders, attempting to weaponise religious heritage to eradicate dissenters.

When it comes to using the Russian Orthodox faith as a political tool, the state has a deeply fraught history. The church was central to Russian life before the Bolshevik revolution, before the Soviet state attempted to completely decouple Christianity from Russian identity. But it was impossible to unwind such a rich history. Earlier this year, declassified Swiss documents revealed that Patriarch Kirill, who has headed the Orthodox Church since 2009, worked for the KGB in the Seventies, suggesting a closer bond between church and state than is generally recognised in histories of the Cold War. And as the collapse of communism saw chaos reign, many Russians returned to religion.

During those years, however, the Orthodox Church faced serious competition for the first time. Western missionaries labelled by the then-Patriarch as spiritual colonisers had long been obsessed with reaching the godless communists. As a result, some groups, such as Jehovahs Witnesses, were persecuted by the state before being banned entirely.

The spiritual remit of the Putin era favoured the Orthodox faith, but was careful not to alienate the broad collection of religions in the Russian Federation, co-opting the Islam of the Caucasus as well as Judaism and Buddhism. Religious leaders all got the same message: domesticate your boys and be a part of the state apparatus, and youll be fine. Crack down on the gays and western decadence, and you, too, can be a patriotic Russian. Today, that extends to the war effort, which is a highly national project.

In fact, according to a paper published by Kristina Stoeckl last year, the concept of spiritual security has become Kremlin doctrine. It all began in the year 2000 shortly after Putin came to power around the same time that the European Unions Charter of Fundamental Human Rights enshrined right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Spiritual security became a rival to the security offered by Nato and the EU, and in time, Stoeckl says, has become the justification for Russias war on Ukraine and, in an enlarged perspective, with the West. The amendment of the Russian constitution in 2020, Stoeckl notes, saw it launch a Declaration of Values, in which spiritual ideals were emphasised, in speeches by academics as well as religious figures. In the 2021 update to the document, the word spiritual was mentioned 24 times. Stoeckl believes that this is all part of giving the FSB, successor to the KGB, a moral mission.

The marriage of church and secret service was consummated in 2002, when an Orthodox Church was consecrated within the infamous Lubankya headquarters of the FSB by none other than Nikolai Patrushev, Putins attack dog who still heads the Russian Security Council and is reportedly positioning his son as a potential future leader of the country. At this point, Stoeckl says, church leadership and the government agreed that, among the tasks of the FSB, police and law enforcement, was the safeguarding of Russian identity and culture against undesirable influences. Spiritual values are discussed in terms of friends and enemies, with Russia defined always in relation to a West and a West that Putin feels is forever closing in.

At the same time, Russia is pushing issues that appeal to religious conservatives in the West most successfully with its emphasis on what are euphemistically known as traditional family values. That Russia remains the world leader in abortions per capita by some distance is an inconvenient truth. The Levada Center, considered Russias most reliable pollsters even in repressive times, recently found thatthe number of Russians who do not support homosexual relationships has grown significantly, from 60% in 2013 to 69% in 2021. Meanwhile, next year, Russian state hospitals will open clinics for LGBT conversion therapy a deeply held belief of the Putin regime.

The mirror image of this is playing out in Ukraine. Not exactly the natural home of LGBT allyship, Kyiv last month drafted a new civil union law that would give same-sex partnerships legal status for the first time. That Ukraine is increasingly becoming more accepting might be a political move to curry favour with the West, since those Ukrainians who might be most opposed to it are, in large part, currently occupied on the frontlines. For the Russian Orthodox Church, it is further confirmation since the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decided to break away in 2019 of the spiritual cleavage between the two nations.

There are now two distinct battlefronts: the horrific conflict raging beyond the Dnipro, and a culture war that has Russians making gains far beyond Bakhmut. Its a new East-West divide, Telly Papanikolaou says, a fight that has replaced the Cold War dichotomy of communism versus democracy. To the Russian state, and the Russian church, it is a question of supporting religion and traditional values against a godless, liberal, aggressively atheist West.

It would be simple to conclude that, in bringing back faith-based politics, Putin is dictating his peoples values. But the truth is not so straightforward. Because, as in the chaotic years after the end of the Cold War, Russians do seem to be turning to God of their own volition. A few years ago, a report from the Russian Academy of Sciences found there are around 800,000 faith healers in the country compared to 640,000 medical doctors. Two-thirds of women, and one-quarter of men, said that they had sought help from a psychic or a sorcerer at some point in their life.

Turning to God when the state fails is something that can be seen in Russias fellow BRIC economies, Brazil and South Africa. Emerging from similarly repressive regimes, a military dictatorship and apartheid respectively, their people rapidly took up Pentecostal Christianity, similarly doubling down on family values. For the millions who feel let down by the false promises of the new state, faith seems the only alternative. In Brazil, one study found that a downturn in the GDP had a direct correlation to increased church attendance.

Its difficult to know the true thoughts of the Russian people, but there is strong evidence that Russians are losing faith in the states narrative and, equally, that the Putin regime is increasingly courting religion for its legitimacy. One survey found that, in the six months following the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russians watching state television fell from 86% to 65%. Russians appear to be losing faith in the special military operation, too.

Putin had a front row seat for the collapse of communism in East Germany; he knows all too well that when people stop believing in the system, it can be catastrophic. He also seems aware that Russians are looking to religion rather than nationalism for their moral nourishment. For now, it appears that the regime is robust enough to meet the Russian people where they are, spiritually. As Kremlin rhetoric increasingly turns to asking for suffering and sacrifice for the greater good deeply religious notions, as much as they are national ones those daring to challenge it will either be seen as saintly figures, or very stupid ones.

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Putin's holy war on Ukraine - UnHerd

Campaign slogans are subject to pillory and parody - but a good one can lift the hopes of the politicians pushing them. Who comes up with them? And how?

Photo: Supplied /Labour Party

It's got to have "zizz, zazz, zing, zook" and a "wow".

"It's a little bit like poetry," ad man Mike "Hutch" Hutcheson tells The Detail, as he describes a slogan.

"It should be a short verse or a short statement that captures the zeitgeist of something or someone or a time.

"Good slogans are founded in truth ... something fatuous that doesn't ring true to people just makes them laugh it's an eye roll. What you want is something that moves the hearts of men."

The Detail also talks to Sir Bob Harveysurfer, former Waitkere mayor and top ad-man, and the self-proclaimed political slogan king of New Zealand.

He was part of the group who brought slogans into the political game in New Zealand during Labour Party campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

He got the idea from briefly working at an advertising agency in New York, which was pitching to advertise Richard Nixon's campaign in 1968.

"They were emphasising how audiences could be inspired by music, slogans slogans were forbidden, of course, in New Zealand then," Harvey says.

"Nothing was happening in New Zealand all the political ads said "vote Labour, vote Social Credit, vote communism"which was very much a viable alternative! They had obviously a big photograph of one of the candidates pretty bloody dull and boring stuff."

When Norman Kirk arrived on the scene, Bob Harvey got the job of promoting the Labour Party.

He was the mastermind behind the 1969 slogan "Make Things Happen"and the 1972 slogan "It's Time".

He came up with the "Make Things Happen" slogan on a run but it didn't win Kirk the job of prime minister. However, the 1972 campaign tagline did.

"It came from a meeting I was at, with a guy called Arthur Faulkner ... and he was giving a talk, I think somewhere in Mt Roskill, and I was sitting here and he said "it's really time, it's time for a change.

"I thought, 'that's a good line', so I wrote down on a piece of paper 'it's time for change'. Then I did some bumper stickers and showed Norman."

Harvey says Kirk thought 'it's time for change'was too "extreme", so the phrase was snipped down to "It's Time".

Harvey has worked on winning campaigns for the likes of Tim Shadbolt in Waitemat and Mike Moore in Mt Eden. But when he ran for mayor himself, he couldn't come up with a tagline.

"I found it really difficult to come up with a slogan for myself ...I just simply went with 'Harvey for Waitkere'."

To test out the slogans beforehand, he would work with Auckland University lecturers and students and "you'd get a reaction very quickly" to figure out if it was good.

But is a slogan really all that important?

"There [have been] some great slogans over the years but you don't have to have one, you're better to have a really good story and a story that tells the truth. I think we're far too preoccupied with the witty, pithy statement," Hutcheson says.

He talks about Len Brown,the first mayor of the Auckland Super Citya campaign he worked on.

"We did the research and found that the real problem facing Aucklanders was transport. So we said to Len, 'you've really got to get on television and talk about transport ... I can't even remember what the slogan was because that wasn't the story.The story was he talked about transport and solving Auckland's transport woes."

Listen to the full episode for Sir Bob Harvey's tales of success and failure as the 'slogan' is born in New Zealand.

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The zing zazz factor in a slogan - RNZ