The inherent limitation of a rules-based international order is that there is no sovereign. Without a supreme authority that has the capacity to enforce the law, all norms remain inapplicable and are effectively non-binding. Any sufficiently capable regime can brazenly disregard them, violate the national sovereignty of other states, and grab any resources it deems worthwhile. The sole deterrent is the military might of its adversaries. By extension, rules are enforced when the balance of forces permits as much.

The United Nations architecture gives the impression that there is ironclad supranational law that guides all humanity. While this is the stated aim, any UN-led initiative that gets to be applied is so because it is aligned with the interests of great powers.

The Palestinian catastrophe demonstrates that the so-called “international community” is a figment of the imagination at worst, or a happy coincidence at best. The law is not designed to protect the weak no matter the circumstances. It all depends on power dynamics, where expedience is the deciding factor.

Israel has been gradually yet steadily assuming the same privilege of unaccountability in its ambition to become the region’s uncontested despot. There is no reason to believe that toppling the Iranian government will make the Israeli military any less assertive. If anything, a potential win in the war against Iran will galvanise those who aspire for a greater Israel that dominates the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Those on the sidelines have gotten the memo. Strategists in Turkiye, for instance, must be analysing events in light of the clear potential for a time of reckoning in the decades ahead.

The gist is that justice only exists among equals. For as long as the mighty do not think of themselves as being on the same footing as the rest they will exploit their advantageous position. This is true in the relations between states. It also is in effect at the interpersonal level: you only deter a bully by making the cost of bullying prohibitive, not by appealing to their sense of morality. Calls to justice are, in this regard, an admission of weakness.

Is this a pretty world? No, it is ugly and dangerous. Though it is sobering to recognise how things work. For only then can you cut through the platitudes and prepare for action.

Europeans, in particular, have long lived with a boutique view of politics, in which soft power can be decoupled from hard power. Hence their belief in the vaunted “European values”. In truth, soft power is effective when it has hard power as its backstop: they exist on a continuum. Europeans had that in the form of their vassalage to the USA. They might eventually develop their own capacity in the decades to come, if the European integration process continues apace towards military union, while the Americans get progressively weaker by all the wars they inevitably involve themselves in. At any rate, such an outcome will only contribute to peace by balancing out competing interests, not by holding some imaginary moral high ground.

There are no benevolent actors in such matters. Those who desire freedom must be ready to fight for it. Global justice is not attainable. What we can hope for is a viable balance of forces.

As for the ongoing war, the Iranian regime has blood on its hands, as do its counterparts in Israel and America.

Policy-makers and investors have gotten the memo: a theme park is good business, your country is a brand, ergo it is to be unscrupulously exploited. The country’s image towards visitors is to be packaged a certain way to appeal to those with a mere superficial interest in the local culture. In turn, the culture is to be moulded into a caricature of itself. The parts of it that are typical of the locality shall be exaggerated and offered in spades. Those who are participating in—and contributing to the continuous making of—the living culture will be pushed to the margins, forced away from the hotspots of tourist attraction, and blamed for breaking the immersion. Their land shall be appropriated by rapacious “foreign direct investment” as they themselves will become alienated from a world that no longer represents them.

Such is the reality of my part of the planet. The first time I got a hint of the demand for a theme park version of historical reality was a few years back when a British woman of Cypriot descent was asking to buy some handkerchief that was typical of marriages held over a century ago. I explained how Cypriots do not marry this way anymore. To no avail… For her, this item is the irreducible factor of a Cypriot marriage: that which adds the unmistakable Cypriotness to the event. What the contemporary people do is apparently not genuine. In truth, hers was but a kitsch, a misunderstanding of culture as gimmickry rather than a lived experience and a life form unto itself that changes with the times. I could still understand her though, as her ancestors took a snapshot of their local culture with them when they left for Great Britain. Yet the idea of some product encapsulating the quintessential local identity is exactly how the theme park is set up, as the simulacrum of what once was or the depiction of what should ever be.

There is a small village close to where I live that is undergoing large-scale renovations. The plan is to make the place more attractive to visitors. The central government has thus taken the initiative to draw the schematics and enforce its “quality standards”. This means that the built-up area is being turned into yet another gentrified milieu that is indistinguishable from other such “authentically Cypriot” places. The original character, which took form organically through the ages, is gone. At the local taverns, visitors are treated to ostensibly local dishes, only those are gourmet renditions of recipes that no real person here ever makes at home. To further insult our intelligence, servings consist of tiny portions presented in disproportionately large plates. Again, nobody actually eats this way outside the controlled environment. It does not matter. The theme park is all about reinforcing a belief in the verisimilitude of a product. The trick is to maintain a shadow play of consumerist cosmopolitanism in which there appears to be a unifying global culture that simply has its own cute little particularities from one locale to another.

This is the result of homogeneisation, of mass production, and of streamlined marketing. The true culture is threatened with extinction because its people are impoverished and pressured to move out of the way. There are no locals serving guests at those taverns, for example. Not one! The waiters have been imported for pennies from some unidentifiable place far away. The remaining residents who are still related to the old stock are already competing for shelter with more affluent “digital nomads” and those bent on finding a more favourable tax jurisdiction for their liquid assets. The time for the remaining locals to be priced out of the market beckons.

At some point, the authorities will approve of new zoning regulations to set up apartments for everyone. Not for locals, mind you. Accommodation shall be optimised to host short-term tourists at exorbitant rates. This is the twisted logic of profiteering: sell a cheap imitation of the local culture while actively undermining the longer-term wellness of the real thing.

The homeland thus becomes nothing but a glorified fiefdom with fancy flags, vacuous anthems, absurd military parades, and all the pompous paraphernalia of nation-statism; a fiefdom to which we pay ever-more taxes and get scorn in return. The authorities do not actually care about us, the preservation of our spaces, and the continuation of our ways of life. No! All they understand is easy money, much of which will circulate under the table and find its way to shadowy coffers.

Some apparatchiks in the capital are deciding for us in our absence how our communities should be refashioned based on some grand agenda to placate the investors and to woo travellers with the disposable income to realise their whimsy. What we get is contempt and smugness each time we happen to walk through our streets with our dogs at an inopportune time. Our new masters expect us to disappear, to slither in the dark so as not to ruin their curated experience. We present an inconvenience because we break the theme.

Too bad I have no manners and shall not apologise to anyone who thinks they own the place just because they organised some “authentically Cypriot wedding”.

Fuck you and your fairytales!

Israel is winning the battle of impressions with its subterfuge and sabotage tactics combined with its friendly media machinery across the West, yet it needs America (and other Western allies) to prevail in a total war against Iran. The Israeli government’s gambit, if not well informed expectation, is that its fait accompli will pull the Americans into the conflict, despite President Trump’s personal branding as an anti-war president. The goal is to topple the Iranian regime and replace it with a puppet of their choosing. All in the name of liberating people, of course.

Prem’s article helps us discern some of the influences Donald Trump is subject to. The base of the Republican party may have temporarily shifted away from the neoconservatism of the George Bush Jr. era in favour of the isolationist nationalism of the Make America Great Again movement, yet the elites have neither changed their tune nor lost their influence in the centres of power. Why would they, after all, given the post-WWII path dependencies of the USA? American forces are present across the globe and their domestic military-industrial-financial-tech complex is as dominant as ever.

In a vacuum, isolationism is a reasonable idea: do not get involved with the problems of other countries, stick to your own affairs, and let trade define your relationships with the rest of the world. Yet politics does not happen in the absence of historical realities. Given what has transpired, America cannot simply withdraw, say, from Europe and the Pacific and expect that the rest of the world will remain as-is. Other forces will fill in the void, creating a new balance of power in the process and with it a new order on how things are to be done.

Isolationism with its underlying classical liberal or libertarian ethos is naive in this regard. International trade does not unfold absent the control of critical resources and trade routes. Whomever manages those has the power to set the terms of commerce and benefit accordingly. The more this is the case, the greater the potential but also the higher the need to maintain that arrangement through coercion, i.e. the capacity for military presence, for others will have a powerful incentive to challenge the status quo in the hope of turning the balance in their favour.

Put differently, America cannot have it both ways of (i) being the top economy, of many of its citizens enjoying a life of opulence and unbridled consumerism, and of issuing the world’s reserve currency, all while (ii) not being involved politically and potentially militarily anywhere. The luxuries at home are the flip-side of the ceaseless interventions abroad. To put an end to the latter is to accept a more modest lifestyle. But no politician is prepared to make such an admission, with Trump chief among them. His rhetoric was that the USA would somehow decouple from all the conflicts while simultaneously being a leader in international affairs.

The reality of America’s historical trajectory is now showing its true face. The USA is at the cusp of committing to another open-ended campaign, acting as the de facto client state of Israel in the process. The country’s opinion-makers have not been honest about the trade-offs they are facing, while the apparatchiks in Washington DC have never had a genuine desire to steward the transition to a multi-polar world order. The latter is what Russia and China want, for example, but we in the West have learnt only to demonise those countries as rapacious tyrannies that are incompatible with our so-called “free world.”

What the romantics will hopefully learn from all this is that privilege is maintained through brute force and that anyone who is indeed eager to be fair towards others has to give up what they thought was their exclusive right.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the world’s most ruthless terrorist, has once again managed to delay his political downfall using the only method he knows: war.

Except now his private war — masked as self-defence against the Evil Empire of the ayatollahs who dare to want nuclear weapons like Israel has — now risks dragging his allies into a third world war. If it were up to him, it would have already started. In twenty months, he has opened seven fronts in other people’s countries as if they were his own: Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Yet none of his allies, beyond the usual pious words and condemnations, have done anything to distance themselves from him.

I will get to the role of the European Union in all of this, but first a brief comment on the salient point here. Depending on which date you pick, you can come up with the sequence of events that best fits your narrative. History is complex. Framing it along the lines of good versus bad guys is neither descriptive nor constructive. Many truths can exist at the same time, such as Netanyahu indeed having self-serving ends and Israel being part defendant part aggressor in these multifaceted international relations. The specifics are beside the point. Our world is a messy place. What we always get is some morally grey arrangement out of the prevailing conditions.

What is pertinent is whether a stable state can be established, so that the cycle of violence does not continue unabated. This is not merely a matter of desire though, but of the ability to support one’s position of principle and fight for it if they must. Words have to be backed by deeds; fancy proclamations need to be buttressed by raw power. Legality comes down to something basic: force. It is about wielding power in pursuit of a lofty target. Strongly worded letters and peace-loving vibes do not deter a determined foe. Without the requisite capacity for exercising brute force, a polity cannot render material any legal provision. This is what sovereignty has always been about: supreme authority, which ultimately rests in the hands of the superior agent of potential violence.

Absent the capacity for coercion, a political order can only react to the initiatives of another. The European Union is a case in point. It has no means of making events take the direction that favour it. Instead, it remains in a state of weakness characterised by indecision, always responding to phenomena and always failing to come up with a decisive set of measures for reversing the trend. All due to its power deficit, not lack of want.

The Israelis got this memo a long time ago and is why they have taken their fate in their own hands. Is it pretty? No. But what makes anyone think the world is meant to be all sunshine and rainbows? Moreover, what are the detractors going to do about the problem they are commenting on? Appeals to the international community are effectively an admission of powerlessness. There is no such entity. The United Nations are impotent. What we have are powerful actors, each with their own agenda, operating within a global architecture of rules absent a sovereign; rules that are, in other words, unenforceable or enforceable whenever some superpower needs them as justification for its policies. If you wish to make your political opponents do things differently, then you need to come up with a compelling plan.

We Europeans have gotten used to (i) having America take care of much of the work for us, primarily on military spending, and (ii) on the matters we control, do too little too late. The best example of the latter is the response to the post-2008 financial crisis. We basically needed to outfit the European Monetary Union with a fiscal union, such that there would be a treasury as a counterparty institution to the European Central Bank. Instead of fully addressing the systemic flaws in the Euro architecture, namely the asymmetry between a Europe-wide monetary policy and national fiscal policies, our political leaders went from one European Council to another, treating each instance of the crisis as an isolated case. We got grinding austerity for the masses and oodles of effectively free money for the banks and mega corporations in the form of monetary easing.

The Euro Area was not fundamentally redesigned. The problems persist only now we have spent over a decade of under- and mal- investments. The latest initiative for concerted action on defence spending under the rubric of ProtectEU is something I agree with, in principle, though am concerned that we are not seeing enough in terms of commensurate political reforms. What we might get, assuming things go as intended, is a more streamlined procedure for coordinated spending coupled with better procurement. This is a net positive, though it is not sufficient to make the EU a protagonist in global affairs. A fully fledged defence union is more than ten years away—and that is a charitable estimate.

Concretely, the EU does not have the means to enforce its will under the prevailing conditions. What it can do, though, is use whatever economic levers are available to campaign for its priorities. Diplomacy is available and has to be used to full effect. The review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement is one such example. Though I am afraid no assertive course of action will come out of it, based on my reading of the situation. On the 4th of June 2025, Carmen-Cristina Cirlig published a review of the state of affairs in the EU-Israel Association Agreement on behalf of the European Parliament’s Research Service, which includes this:

Article 79 [of the EU-Israel Association Agreement] outlines a gradual procedure whereby the alleged breach must first be discussed within the Association Council, in order to find an acceptable solution (i.e. consultations). If a solution is not found, then the aggrieved party may take appropriate measures – for the EU, these would be reflected in a Council decision. Moreover, preference should be given to those measures that would least disturb the functioning of the agreement, thus making suspension a measure of last resort. Nevertheless, Article 79 provides that, in cases of special urgency, appropriate measures may be adopted immediately without prior submission of the matter to the Association Council.

All this legalese is a long way of saying “it ain’t happening bro!” Not the author’s fault, obviously: they are merely informing us about what is happening. The gist is that decision-makers will continue to dither and Eurocrats will keep publishing walls of well articulated text. Unless we witness a qualitative shift unlike anything that has transpired in the history of the European integration process, the Union shall remain a second tier actor in all of the major international affairs that directly influence its wider region.

As concerned citizens we will, of course, blithely tell ourselves how none of this is done in our name, as if that changes anything. What we need is to start talking about whether the EU apparatus is actually serving the longer-term interests of our respective countries. The EU’s democratic legitimacy is still lacking. The economic upside of being in the Union is of dubious value or has proven to be outright calamitous. And we are not even benefiting from membership in some military powerhouse (we could still be part of NATO without the EU, if that is the issue). Meanwhile, Israel is showing us that a fairly small country can do a lot when it is determined enough. Whereas we have internalised the defeatist narrative that we are powerless without Brussels and Frankfurt bossing us around.

Given such results and the difficulties of finding a biological cause, Sonuga-Barke proposes that we view ADHD not as a medical problem, but one of “misalignment” between what he tactfully calls “a child’s biological makeup” — but could also easily be called a child’s personality and situation in life — and “the environment in which they are trying to function.”

I do not know how it feels to be a girl, so I will limit this article to boyhood and to my experience in particular. There is a noticeable number of boys who, like younger me, are naturally energetic (I still am). We are boisterous and seemingly in perpetual motion. We play-fight at every opportunity and will even kick each other with great force while competing, such as in sport. Our violence is not evil though. We merely seek an outlet for our natural propensities to be aggressive. At a more subtle level, we socialise with other boys by better understanding their limits and by testing that their claims are true (more on this below).

This makes sense biologically, as males have the capacity to be violent and predatory. These are not necessary evils, though pretentious social norms want them to appear that way. Violence is problematic only when it is used frivolously. It is a force for good when it is employed in the service of safeguarding values and protecting the weakest members of society. Same for being predatory: it is what drives us to hunt, i.e. provide highly nutritious food including to those who cannot hunt for themselves (babies and the elderly, for instance), but also to explore and to face challenges head on. Violence and the sense of adventure can be pro-social behaviours and it is a dangerous mistake to brand them as undesirable a priori. A society that is on the whole reluctant to push the boundaries is superseded by those that continuously improve.

I remember when I was promoted to train with the adults at my local football club. I was fourteen at the time. The difference in strength between a young teenager and a fully grown man is massive. We did the drills and were about to have an 11-a-side match. A tough guy who was five years my senior told me “you should not be here kid; I will cut you down.” I was playing in central midfield and he was the defensive midfielder on the opposing team, meaning that we would be challenging each other for the entire match. Upon receiving the first pass, I see him coming at me with a flying tackle that I barely skipped. I realised he meant what he said. Instead of backing off, I told him to not question my resolve (well, I actually said something less polite). When he got the ball at the next passage of play, I came in with a crunching tackle that flattened him to the ground. He complained about foul play, to which I responded with “go cry to your mummy, bitch.” After the match, we hugged each other and became close friends. He took good care of me and would always buy me a drink whenever we would meet downtown. Sounds crazy, I know. This is what some boys do all the time. I understand that girls in particular cannot relate to this experience, which is fine: just do not demonise it. Same for bureaucrats and decision-makers who either never had this in their life or forgot how it feels. It is how some of us develop respect for each other, while also making ourselves more resilient in the process. If you are weak but talk big, you will quickly learn to only say what you can actually do, which is a valuable lesson for life.

Where Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is typically made manifest is at school. The institution of public schooling is not designed in accordance with biological needs. It is a one-size-fits-all model that is optimised for the lowest common denominator. Boys who need action and who thrive in the sort of physically competitive environment I outlined above will definitely find 8+ hours of sitting at a desk extremely uncomfortable. They will rebel to the forced confinement and seek ways to make their frustration clear. This is no different to how a dog chews on your shoes and your furniture when you do not provide it with enough physical exercise. These boys need hours of daily exercise just to come down to whatever baseline of passivity the school assumes as normal (“normal” in the sense of “normative” but also “baseline”).

Public schooling is not designed to tend to the needs of children and teenagers, but to meet the demands of the workplace. It takes students away from their home to (i) indoctrinate them more effectively in state dogma and (ii) keep the parents free from parenting duties so they can work for longer. Paraeducation, of the form of after-school schooling, has the same effect.

Then there is the way classes are taught. The one-size-fits-all model reduces learning to an exercise in parroting. Students are discouraged from thinking for themselves and are instead trained to perform at standardised exams. Sure, teachers and policymakers extol the virtues of critical thinking, but will fiercely repress it when they encounter it. I was at the receiving end of such oppressive arbitrariness on many occasions. In one case at a language course, I used a perfectly valid, albeit archaic, form of a common word. The ever pedantic teacher marked my text with a bad grade because I had not learnt the lesson of proper modern Greek grammar. I protested the disproportionate treatment on the grounds that my language was unambiguous, perfectly intelligible to a Greek speaker, and correct in its formulation. But when the development of so-called “critical thinking skills” is but a fig leaf to distract from the mindlessness of parroting, there is no recourse to reason. For boys who are naturally inclined to build respect by testing each other’s qualities (like me and my friend kicking each other), the appeal to authority is nothing but flagrant abuse.

A boy who shows signs of frustration in the face of eight or more hours of incredibly dull lecturing and forced stillness is neither maladjusted nor necessarily defective: its behaviour may simply be a healthy response to an inconsiderate institution. Instead of reforming education, we have an establishment bent on pathologising the behaviour of people willy-nilly. This not only preserves the status quo but also provides a lucrative business opportunity to big pharma and its enablers, of hooking otherwise healthy folk to a lifetime of dependency on drugs. Everybody seems to have a “condition” nowadays because of the perverse incentives built into the industry and its concomitant politics. The prescription is invariably the same: the policies are fine, so take yet more drugs in response to the pernicious side effects you are developing and continue down the vicious cycle towards madness.

I learn everything I set my mind to, while my high levels of energy have empowered me to do the difficult jobs I have taken on, including the construction of my own house. Simply accept that some people are different and they will not fit into whatever mould your bureaucratic hubris has envisaged for them.

I do not have children. If I ever do, I will raise them with four values:

1. Be honest and safeguard your honour above all else.
2. Remain unapologetic about who you are.
3. Use your qualities, strength, talents also in the service of others.
4. Show the middle finger to authority, if you must.

And if an educator takes offence, they will have to deal with me.

For some European countries, historical guilt over the Holocaust has arguably been transformed into a “reason of state” that justifies unconditional support for Israel, risking engaging the EU in complicity with crimes against humanity. One horror cannot justify another. Unless the values the EU claims to uphold are to lose all credibility, the bloc cannot continue to passively observe the unfolding horror in Gaza and the “Gazaification” of the West Bank.

The fact of the matter is that the Union’s vaunted values only hold true when they align with power politics. Otherwise they are a perk for privileged locals. Those who believe that European elites actually care about democracy and fundamental rights for everyone have simply not been paying attention.

In European politics there is no courage to push forward with bold ideas. It is a bureaucratic apparatus that has lots of competent administrators but few, if any, visionaries. Most policy-makers are conditioned into cowardice and fake modesty. They mince their words to the point of not saying anything, just how Josep Borell is doing here despite wanting to say something more than he does.

How many countries, dear Josep Borell, is the “some European countries” you are referring to? Why is it so difficult to speak in plain terms about what you did and who exactly turned it down?

European decision-makers are used to operating behind closed doors. It is why we do not have public discussions about EU affairs, outside whatever issue touches on some national sensitivity. This modus operandi is undemocratic. Forget about the institutions and the letter of the law. We do not need to rewrite the Treaties to change how we do politics. Josep Borell and every other person in that position has the liberty to speak his mind and to thus provide that power impulse which generates discussions. My idea of a politician is simple: if you are holding a leadership role you lead with honour and are loud about it so that we can better check on you.

Until that happens, until the spirit of democratic conduct permeates the everyday practice of Union politics, we will continue to bear witness to the machinations of a massive bureaucracy and deal with such blatant double standards as the one outlined by the former commissioner.

The supranational level where the European Commission, and thus someone like Josep Borell, operates at, is driven by the intergovernmental power dynamics at the European Council. If the Commission’s policies are implemented, it is because they flesh out the guidelines stipulated by the European Council. And, by the same token, if, say, Josep Borell’s actions do not lead to anything concrete it is because those do not align with the European Council’s agenda.

Knowing about who “some European countries” are thus takes us to the heart of the issue. It is at the intergovernmental level where those countries exert their influence, always behind closed doors.

Against this backdrop, it is pointless to think of Europeans as a bloc that has a coherent foreign policy. It will all be power politics wrapped in a neat package of euphemisms and virtue signalling.

There is no “we” in this regard. I, as a person living in Cyprus, have no impact whatsoever on the outlook of “some European countries” because those countries are not subject to my right for democratic scrutiny: they do not answer to me as a citizen. This is exactly why we cannot have democracy in the EU in its current form. There is a mismatch between the powers of the Union, which apply to the entire architecture, and the accountability they are subject to which coagulates along national lines and has no sufficient supranational counterpart. I have, in the past, termed this phenomenon “sovereignty mismatch” on the premise that sovereignty in a democracy is reified in the virtuous cycle between state power and popular control. We now are subject to the power, but have no commensurate control.

As such, “we” care about the Ukrainians simply because Russia poses a threat to “our” immediate interests. For the countries in the vicinity of Russia, this threat involves territorial claims as well and the understandable fear that what happened to Crimea and more recently in Eastern Ukraine can happen in the Baltics as well. By contrast, “we” have no immediate geopolitical interest in standing up to the human rights of the Palestinians so “we” pretend to not have seen or heard anything.

The idea that a critique of the Israeli government’s actions can be construed as antisemitism is specious. No government should be immune to criticism. If it is, then this is the hallmark of tyranny. When I write against the EU, as I am doing right now in unequivocal terms, I am not being anti-European: I care for the wellness of this continent and these people and want the norms which underpin our institutions to be upheld.

The Israelis have a right to self-determination which emanates from international law. They also have obligations stemming from the same corpus of legality. The same goes for every country. Yet international law is not featuring a sovereign, meaning that it is enforceable only when the international community acts in concert. Otherwise, international law is just a bunch of papers that powerful rulers blithely ignore.

In this regard, it is a mistake to think that the Israeli government is acting unilaterally. None of this could have happened without the support and acquiescence of global powers such as the United States and the European Union (and the long history of Western colonial powers meddling in the Middle East among other places).

What we Europeans are experiencing is the outward expression of an inner malaise. We do not have democracy in places where we need it, which empowers unaccountable elites to apply their double standards with impunity. It is a disgrace.

War is odious yet part of our potential. A country that wants to preserve its way of living is a country that is combat ready. The same is true for individuals: those who do not want to be victims of some bully do what they must to make themselves a hard target. And those who are always mistreated are so because they are easy targets. Is this nice? No. Are the aggressors justified? No. The point is not one of aesthetics or of moralising against the phenomena. What matters is how the world works. There is no lasting security, personal or collective, that is sustained absent strong checks on innate ambitions of control, dominance, or even the sheer thrill of conquest and adventure.

The story of the European integration process is one of peace among the Member States, in juxtaposition to the cruelty of two World Wars, yet it happened against the backdrop of the Cold War and, more recently, of ongoing tensions in the wider region. Europeans uniting under a single legal-institutional framework is, in practical terms, an alliance. Even from a purely economic standpoint, it makes sense for trading partners to have a vested interest in their common safety: it helps business continue. And with that come all the practicalities of the free movement of workers, their right to establishment, and so on. In other words, what starts out as a purely financial calculus inevitably spills over to all facets of the quotidian experience.

The EU is a highly flawed architecture which cannot be a federal republic in its current form. It is a union of states or a confederation, else, a layer of bureaucracy on top of nation states, which has some competences (“sovereignty”) but which nevertheless lacks democratic accountability commensurate with that generally found at the Member State level. There still are degrees though, which critics of the Union need be mindful of in order not to lose their sense of perspective. Despite its shortcomings, the EU is a largely progressive place in terms of the rule of law and the respect for fundamental freedoms. One need only take a look at the immediate periphery of the EU to appreciate those nuances and understanding how nothing can be taken as a given.

A European Defence Union provides a credible deterrent to aspiring overlords that seek to exploit Europeans. It cannot be purely good though, as it admittedly comes with the latent risk of turning into a repressive regime in its own right. Such is the trade-off every hitherto society faces: who guards us from the guardians? There is no ultimate guarantee and it is pointless to think of politics in terms of the untenable binary of good versus evil. It will always be an arrangement that is prone to abuse while having the merit of enabling a certain lifestyle. It is why political conduct rests on faith, else the acquiescence of individuals to the prevailing norms and their commitment to operate in good faith accordingly. Put differently for our immediate case, democracies are maintained by democratic citizens and cease to be democratic when the people no longer are vigilant in enforcing the values they purport to uphold.

Accelerated rearmament is a pragmatic response to the evolving international trends. Anything else is complacency bordering on recklessness. My hope is that on the balance, we avoid the worse by showing the requisite readiness, without getting sucked into the black hole of militarism. The key, then, looking forward is to be responsible in the language we use and the deeds we carry out. We will all be on the losing side if in the process of fighting the bullies we become bullies ourselves.

Western power is as strong as ever. What has changed is that the combination of socialism for financiers, collapsing prospects for the bottom 50%, and the surrender of our minds to Big Tech has given rise to overweening Western elites with little use for the last century’s value system.

The gist of Yanis’ position is that the power elite benefited from the liberalism of the previous century. They saw it as the means to the end of perpetuating Western hegemony. As the times are changing, so is this unscrupulous establishment adapting to a new order in which those very values are no longer considered expedient, let alone sacrosanct. The narrative is plausible, especially once we account for the obvious imperialistic initiatives of Western powers over the previous decades as well as the ones currently unfolding on the ever-shifting battlefronts. Still, I think Yanis follows a line of reasoning that undermines his own vision for a better world.

If all the values that find currency in any given social order are but the polite facade of a potentially brutal regime, then must we not also question the leftist worldview Yanis represents? Why would those precepts be any different? Could we not formulate the same narrative of ruling elites pulling the strings about, say, Russian imperialism and how it transmogrified from Tsarism, to Sovietism, to Putinism? Where is this pristine leftist milieu where all people believe exactly in what they preach and do not deviate from it one iota? There is no such place and no such agents of action, because we are always dealing with human beings who labour under imperfect circumstances. Sometimes we fight for our principles, while at others we circumvent them due to how inconvenient they are under the prevailing conditions. This does not mean that nobody believes in anything but their parochial agenda, but only that the institution of any one set of laudable goals as the basis of our politics remains a work-in-progress.

We know from history that societies go through ups and downs. A golden age leaves a dark age in its wake, only for something new to rise again. It keeps happening and will continue to happen for as long as imperfect humans make their own rules. This does not prevent us from trying to work with what we have and to pursue loftier goals.

Being Greek, Yanis is familiar with the age-old adage of our people ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού (“no bad not intermixed with good”), which loosely translates as “there is no pure evil in the world, as anything bad is mixed together with some good”. The inverse is true as well. This is what politics is. In our times, there are those among us who are genuine democrats and others who only care about setting up their own dominion, as well as many other persuasions. What we experience as quotidian political affairs is the process of reconciling such competing tendencies within the heteroclite whole that is modern society. Instead of an elite pulling the strings, we have multiple actors operating at different levels with whatever is available at their disposal.

The inchoate point in the article of Yanis is that the West thinks as a singular entity. We know this cannot be the case by a mere cursory view of the main ideas that dominate public discourse. In any given issue, there are multiple perspectives. On the demographic front, our societies are increasingly ethnically and racially diverse. Only a few years ago Americans were upbeat about the totemic issues of LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter, among others. This time around there is a completely different focus. Is it because the underlying issues are resolved one way or another? Or maybe they remain unresolved and there is still much more to witness on these and other fronts? Put differently, we cannot assume that Trumpism is the new normal for the rest of time or that the recrudescent far-right extremism is inexorable.

Let us turn our attention to the European Union, the supranational polity encompassing Yanis and myself. It is in many ways a clumsy attempt at Europe-wide federalism, riddled with inefficient policy-making and supported by incomplete legal-institutional arrangements. Furthermore, it is a project that hardcodes neoliberalism in key areas of economic governance. Still, the EU represents something valuable, as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.

This is the principle: the set of beliefs we aspire towards. Does this mean that everybody in the EU is a bona fide tolerant progressive? Of course not! Does it also suggest that there are no imperialistic powers in our midst? We know they exist and are as influential as ever. Yet, the issue is not whether we can establish a blissful angelic world. Let angels deal with that project. The human reality shall remain messy. As such, the pragmatic consideration is whether we already have something which, on the balance, is worth fighting for. It is not pure and it cannot be pure according to the wisdom of the aforementioned Greek adage. What we have in Europe must give us hope. It serves as a guide for action; for the possibility of enacting thoroughgoing reform along the lines it foreshadows.

Consider the popular pro-EU protests in our neighbourhood. Some of those involved may be foreign agents bent on controlling the situation. Though we cannot dismiss every person as a mere pawn in a contest of competing imperialisms. There are many who genuinely believe that the European Union represents something more benign that its alternatives, all things considered. Should we not acknowledge this possibility, we will fail to chart a course of programmatic action. Instead, we will resort to an admittedly clever albeit self-defeating nihilism where, basically, everything remotely idealistic is but the pretext for a rising authoritarianism.

I do not share the outlook of Yanis Varoufakis because, at heart, I remain optimistic about our collective prospects. Though my optimism is of the pragmatic sort, as encapsulated in the saying of my ancestors. We will continue to suffer and to fail miserably when all we expect is purity of outcome. Learn to appreciate what you have and ready yourself to work for its betterment.

So, I think that this snap-election campaign [in Germany following the collapse of the ruling coalition], which will be short and hard-fought, will be all about defending Europe, defending Germany, and security policy, discussed in military terms. That’s frightening. When the political center invokes a “sovereign Europe,” they only mean it in Emmanuel Macron’s sense of building up a European army. This summer, during the EU election campaign, we said, yes, we need a sovereign Europe and European Union, but in a sense of social and economic policies, in the sense of not being dependent on either the United States or China.

I agree with the sentiment of focusing on socio-economic matters, but think the notion of sovereignty is intrinsically linked to military might. This is not a matter of ideology but a consequence of sovereignist governance. If a polity wants to be sovereign, else independent, on, say, the economic front, it has to impose protectionist policies. This means that trade partners on the receiving end will be forced to find new markets for their exports and, generally, devise ways to cope with the economic headwinds. Among such reactions will be their closer collaboration with states that antagonise the country that implemented the protectionist policies. In the case of the EU versus China, for example, China is incentivised to collaborate with Russia and Iran, among others. Those international actors will seek ever closer ties which will inevitably include military affairs as there will be a global race for the control of valuable resources. What then starts out as seemingly innocuous economic protectionism in the name of “the people” will have to transmogrify into a more aggressive mode of governance that involves assertive foreign policy, with the necessary side-effect of reinforcing the domestic industrial-military-financial complex.

We need not look far back in our history to understand how trade, with the interdependence it establishes, is a powerful guarantee for peace. The history of the European integration process is, in essence, the history of dismantling trade barriers between the member states of the European Communities (European Coal and Steel Community, European Economic Community, European Union). There has not been war or the chance of one between member states, despite the long history of conflict on the continent. For example, Germany and France were enemies in two World Wars, as well as similarly disstrous conflicts in previous centuries, but now the Franco-German tandem is an integral part of European politics. The idea of European integration, despite flaws in specific implementation details, is wonderful because it understands the link between economic liberty and peace and, conversely, the connection between economic hostility and warfare.

Countries with close economic ties are less likely to go to war with each other because of the immediate consequences of the ensuing economic downfall. Trade will collapse overnight and with it there will be cascading effects that harm the livelihood of civilians, notwithstanding the horrors of war. A government that declares war on a close trade partner is thus consigning its citizens to radical uncertainty and impoverishment. By contrast, the sovereignist outlook potentially benefits from conflict because it is already operating along the lines of a zero-sum game where the winner takes the spoils and the loser suffers permanent losses.

The Left’s commitment to internationalism was an expression of this notion that collaboration brings peace while sovereignism begets conflict. We understand this dynamic in interpersonal affairs as well. People who are exposed to groups outside of their own, and who are made to rely on others, are more likely to be tolerant towards them, while those who live in their little bubble express intolerance towards anyone alien to them (and this can happen even in the name of cultural progress, where self-styled “social justice warriors” will say how bad are the men, the white people, or whichever bugaboo is in vogue).

Instead of the age-old “beggar thy neighbour” mistakes that plunged Europe in perpetual conflict, we need to review our history, recent and ancient, and think in terms of the general good. We have to recognise that we are not alone in this world, be it as countries or individuals. We give something and get something back. In the process, we have peace through openness and get the chance to broaden our horizons.

Seeing though how virtually everybody in Europe is obsessing about their own flavour of sovereignty, I am afraid that we will continue to go down the path of paranoia that only sees enemies beyond our borders. We already hear strong voices in the public opinion that are, for example, outright Sinophobic. I expect this to remain the norm exactly because Europe’s foreign policy outlook vis-à-vis much of the world is increasingly hostile (same for the Americans, by the way).

Finally, there is another point of concern for people on the broader political left. If you are peddling what effectively is sovereignism lite, then why would voters opt for you en masse when they can instead go for the real deal in the form of the far-right?

I encourage you all to breath, to speak with loved ones, to meet your neighbours, to engage as fruitfully and charitably as you can, to do favours for people, to ask for favours from people; put the social back into socialism and stop worrying about the politics for the moment.

What Douglas describes is the workings of a community. I have long now been convinced that this is the way forward for a more peaceful society. What the average person experiences now is alienation, disenfranchisement, and loneliness. They spend most of their day in closed spaces, within an urban setting, lacking a strong social network around them, deprived of sufficient sunlight, and perennially stressed.

I spent years living in large cities where I did not know my neighbours at a human level. The few times I tried to be friendly, I was met with a cautious “hello” and a polite, albeit distant, “goodbye”. After a while, I stopped greeting people on the street, despite my friendly demeanour. It was soul-crashing to not say anything when I would rather wish somebody a good morning and, should they need, help them with whatever I could.

This is the norm in cities: to not trust those around you and to try to rely on your own devices or those of a select few individuals you know. You cannot trust those around you because they come and go. Your neighbour today will not be there long-term for a number of reasons. They have no roots in the given milieu. You do not know who their parents are, what their grandparents are doing, and who they are friends with. As such, social relations are limited to a smaller circle of like-minded individuals which, in turn, creates a real-world filter bubble that is then turbo-charged by social media into levels of extremism and paranoia.

I made the difficult choice to abandon the comforts of the megalopolis in pursuit of a more humane—a communitarian—way of living. Here in the mountains I greet and am greeted by virtually everybody. For example, I have a safety vest that I got as a gift from a person who had noticed me walking the dog during twilight. The man called me to his garage, where we got to know each other, and gifted me this vest. I did not even know his name (or he mine) before that encounter, yet we were aware we were living in this remote place where cooperation is a prerequisite to harmonious social experiences. In return, I helped him over the years with lots of chores.

There are many such stories, including those that involve the hut I built. I will not forget the day when a local from the nearby village drove by when I was doing a video call, reached to my room’s window, and told me he had brought that some materials I could use to improve my building. I never asked for anything and did not know this person before but, again, we develop mutual trust through our deeds. At the time, I wrote Anonymity and community, which is a commentary on the fact that too much privacy is not conducive to a communitarian life: you need to put yourself out there, to be available for others, to come to terms with the fact that others will talk about you, and to recognise that people trust what they can measure. From that article I posted:

Eponymity engenders a sense of trust as the person is a known quantity and their actions are traceable. Each member’s identity is common knowledge. It thus forms part of the community’s shared narratives and collective notion of selfhood. Narratives are about who is who, who does what, what happens where, and so on. They concern the people in the place, drawing linkages between the two magnitudes of community and locality.

This is all against the backdrop of my experience in institutionalised politics par excellence. When I was working at the European Parliament, I felt that I was operating at a level of abstraction that was decoupled from the quotidian life of those people in communities. Citizens are almost understood as mere numbers, disembodied agents of aggregate patterns. I would spend my energy analysing what the European Commission is doing, how the European Central Bank is conducting its policies, what the various political groups are concerned with and, generally, how an impersonal apparatus of power, the legal-institutional order of the European Union and its Member States, was concerned with its own survival and proliferation.

As I understood the disconnect between the world of politics and that of everyday affairs, I also realised that the thinking, philosophical or otherwise, that appealed to me the most was the one that applied to day-to-day issues. I dismissed grand theories of social reform, from Platon’s utopia to the fantasy world of Marxists, all the way to the imaginary collective of the nation as a secular deity that embodies statehood. In 2019 (five years ago!?) I wrote Against the secularised theology of statecraft, but did not revisit this essay to see how I have evolved intellectually.

The point is that I remain of the view that what we need is to not neglect personal qualities. Virtue matters today as much as it mattered in the small colonies and city-states of the ancient Greeks. To be honest, to conduct yourself with kindness, to have honour in how you treat others and yourself, to be close to nature such that you understand your place as part of a cosmos that does not revolve around you. This is the world where people are not divided along partisan lines; where matters of identity, of claiming to be someone or doing something, are secondary as deeds speak for themselves.

There is still a need for politics at a level of authority above that of the local communities. What matters though, is to remain committed to a bottom-up understanding of social organisation where the individual, their family, their neighbour, and clan at-large (“clan” literally or figuratively) assume responsibility for their actions, contribute to the preservation of their shared spaces, and act in solidarity towards those whom they can trust all around them. We do not need to remake the world for this to happen. What is of import is that we each do our part and not render ourselves helpless by hoping that some state actor will perform our duties in our stead.

Between the global hex of inflation, the slow creep of dealignment, and the Biden fiasco, the prospects for a Republican victory in 2024 were always large. Trump himself seemed to recognize this better than the pundit class, running a cavalier campaign that junked much of his rhetorical “populism” for an embrace of billionaire budget cutters like Elon Musk.

Jacobin has long maintained a clear position about the shortcomings of the Democrat party, which we can summarise as not appealing to the average person and working-class people. The Democrats are not leftists per se, though they do have such forces among their ranks. Still, their leadership has been committed to the neoliberal consensus, while their most obvious form of progressivism is perhaps the least substantive one: the tandem of identity politics and virtue signalling.

Harris ran on a platform of negation and empty words. Instead of talking about policies, her campaign was a mixture of tokenistic inclusiveness (basically, “vote for me because of how I look”) and name-calling of Trump. This cannot be a winning strategy. Telling voters how morally dubious the other person is does not convince them that you are necessarily better, let alone competent. There needs to be a decisive positive message that engenders hope in the hearts of people; a narrative that also highlights the skills of the candidate and not whether they check all the boxes on the political correctness list.

I watched lots of Harris’ clips and never heard anything remotely decisive from her. Every piece of footage was of her covering safe talking points, with no strong commitments, and no vision on a reform agenda. She presented herself as the bland, pro-establishment, Biden 2.0 candidate.

Trump has obvious authoritarian traits, which nobody should dismiss as a mere expression of his flamboyant persona, though he does get one thing right: he speaks to the average person and has a no-nonsense attitude that engenders trust. It is not about the content of his speech, but the manner in which he is communicating.

The class dealignment mentioned in Matt Karp’s article is no mere coincidence. This election, recent history, as well as what was evident in the 20th century, tell us that the far-right can and does appeal to the working class. This is because of how clear and relatable its messaging is compared to the typically smug intellectualism we find on the political left: it addresses everyday issues and has a message of hope. Sure, we can discuss the substantive parts, but the populist characteristics (“populist” in the sense of “pro-people”, broad-based talk as opposed to “elitist”, technocratic palaver) are always present.

Countering the juggernaut of fascism is not easy because it involves self-criticism from everyone among the opposition parties. I am concerned that the Democrats will not be introspective in this regard and will put the blame for their own failures on whatever the equivalent of “class unconscious” is to them.

What is of immediate interest to me is what is happening in Europe. The rise of the far-right is a secular trend, powered by demographic and economic pressures. It will not go away anytime soon. Financial crises do transmogrify into crises of core values and fundamental rights. We have been on this trajectory post 2008. I am afraid that left-of-centre parties have lost touch with their traditional electoral bases and that their contemporary headline issue of positive discrimination in the name of inclusiveness is not a sustainable position long-term due to the fact that it is inherently discriminatory.

The European Union is not a single country, so we will not have the same dynamics we witness in the United States of America. The intricate nature of the EU’s legal-institutional arrangements make it hard—nay, virtually impossible—for any government to unilaterally upset the status quo (e.g. a “Frexit”, else a French exit from the euro area, would lead to an immediate economic calamity for France due to the self-fulfilling cycle of currency devaluation), though we have to prepare for the inevitable rightward concerted action at the intergovernmental level.

Given how the new European Commission is so keen on Europeanising defence policy, we might end up in a scenario where we are called to defend a Europe of autocracy, not of basic liberties. It thus is of paramount importance to not be complacent and to have a healthy dose of self-criticism. Hopefully, the politicians involved will learn from the failures of the Democrats to not adopt a rhetoric of negation but to instead formulate a compelling agenda of thoroughgoing reforms that are of immediate interest to the average person.

Unfortunately, most of these promises and pledges have been broken repeatedly, even by seemingly responsible democratic leaders. This is because politicians cannot ignore the electoral arithmetic. When faced with difficult choices, those who have votes prevail. This is how democracy works; it gives the majority of the day what they want – and those are likely not-so-young people.

The salient point is that in an increasingly ageing population, there are fewer young people to stand up for their own interests. Combined with the workings of democratic decision-making, the argument goes, young people are basically marginalised and end up being exploited by the older folk.

I think such framing is problematic because it assumes that these vaunted new generations are somehow not related to the older ones. To me, it is a bizarre premise. I have never met a parent or grandparent who votes to ruin the future of their descendants. Those seemingly age-based interests must be more nuanced than what they seem.

Furthermore, we have to entertain the inverse scenario of a predominantly young population. Would those people not be interested in the wellness of their parents and grandparents? Again, I find it hard to believe they would not.

The notion that democracy is ill suited to cope with challenges that require longer-term commitments is also suspect. A totalitarian system would still have to consider the costs and benefits of every decision on the time axis because failure could spell the end of its reign. There are economic crises, natural disasters, and foreign countries eager to exploit any obvious weakness in an attempt to create a fait accompli on the international stage. Without tending to immediate issues, the authorities will no longer enjoy the support or acquiescence of the people and will ultimately be ousted. Hence the age-old mode of governance for “bread and circuses”, which is necessarily done for those present.

Intergenerational justice is a laudable end. Though it is hard to express in terms of tangible policy proposals and even harder to assess the effectiveness thereof. How can we know that any given programme will guarantee a decent life for the people who will be born in 2050, for example? And what does a “decent life” even entail? Most Europeans nowadays would find it extremely difficult to live without a smartphone and the occasional flight/vacation abroad. But are those necessary components of a decent life? I doubt it.

The more I think about this, I can only conclude that politicians who bring up the ageist problématique are either naive or are actively distracting people from more fundamental issues that plague our countries. Let us talk about how democracy is rapidly degenerating into plutocracy. When environmental protection laws are weakened, for example, we have to wonder how much of that is due to an ageing population and how much is because of vested corporate interests lobbying policy-makers to do their bidding. In this light, media ownership has to be brought under scrutiny, both the traditional outlets (TV, newspapers, radio, …) and social media. When a handful of economic elites or deranged billionaires exerts control over most communication channels, we cannot pretend that citizens are voting freely and that their age group is the predominant factor in their putative short-term thinking.

Those granted, I know from personal experience that there is a path to sustainability and it can happen now without revolutionary reforms. It requires personal courage to live with less and to endure some discomfort. If the people of today and tomorrow care so much about their future, then maybe they should stop waiting for a magical grand bargain to come out of government bureaus or be formulated in the ivory towers of academia. Instead, individuals or small groups of like-minded people can abandon the megacities, move to the countryside, and work with what is available there, pooling resources and expertise as the needs arise.

This is not a turn to the Stone Age, as one can still benefit from technological advances, such as the Internet for remote work. It is a new power impulse of decisiveness; a turn to a lifestyle of initiative and localised solidarity. The youth, or anyone else for that matter, are not hopeless: they have developed tunnel vision and are thus conditioned to expect everything from their rulers. We can theorise about the evils of global capitalism, the constraints in the existing legal-institutional arrangements of the world, or whatnot, but the gist of the matter is that we can act virtuously despite those magnitudes.

We could be on the brink of World War III. Israel assassinated a Hezbollah leader, Iran bombed Israel, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, and the United States deployed more troops and fighter jets to the Middle East. Israel won’t back down on Lebanon or Gaza, and both Israel and Iran have nuclear weapons.

It’s scary — and a bipartisan chorus of nerds who probably couldn’t win a bar fight is eager to make it even scarier.

The final sentence is the key issue here. Forget about geopolitics and ideological battle lines for a moment. War is simply not costly for many of its proponents. They are part of an elite that is insulated from the suffering and will in one way or another benefit from the situation. They are shameless and unscrupulous in making a political career out of jingoism while helping their corporate cronies earn a profit from all the destruction they cause. The ones who will be tasked to do the fighting typically are physically fit, working class males.

The USA’s decades-long policy of continuous warfare must be understood as part of the symbiotic relationship between the state apparatus, the military industry, and the financial establishment. War generates debt, which entails a need for borrowing money that is done via the issuance of yet more debt (government bonds), which is then marked as a triple-A rated asset that works as collateral for other financial derivatives. It is a lucrative business for those at the top and a bottomless source of discomfort, pain, PTSD, or death for the rest.

In this light, the elites have a perverse incentive to always discover a bugaboo somewhere that supposedly poses an existential threat to Americans and their allies. Such is the twisted conduct of imperialism: to continuously interfere in the affairs of countries around the world and, when they unsurprisingly retaliate, to play the victim and call for more war against such “terror”.

The establishment will rump up the patriotic rhetoric to brainwash the average lad into thinking that he has to fight for his country. Men are hardwired or conditioned to protect those they love (whether this is nature or nurture is beside the point) and the regime seeks to exploit that disposition by turning it into a duty to forward the agenda of imperialism.

When demagoguery fails, the authorities will resort to enlisting people by force. Those who have the luxury to relocate to another jurisdiction will flee, while the poorer folk will stay behind to be integrated into the war machine. This is yet another expression of the class divide that frames these phenomena.

The way of the gun is not the solution. Mental gymnastics such as “deescalation through escalation” will simply engender more distaste for the perpetrators, which will, in turn, all but guarantee future armed conflicts.

Unless those loud warmongers are willing to lead by example in fighting from the front lines, they cannot be trusted to have the general good in mind.

Although Europe desperately needs a new strategic outlook, it remains obsessed with a politics of consensus, and thus is stuck with a stultifying orthodoxy propagated by official circles in Berlin and Paris. That means its future may depend on Britain, Italy, and Poland creating a new political center of gravity.

The thurst of the professor’s argument is that the Franco-German tandem that has been driving the European integration process hitherto is ill suited to meet the challenges of our times. The United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland are instead presented as likely partners that can provide leadership for the continent.

In the article much talk is about democracy, yet the professor does not pause to question how exactly would some new coalition of states be representative of the wider interests of Europeans. It is not that the Franco-Germans are no longer good enough for “our” purposes: they were never suitable for a Europe-wide democracy to begin with.

The central problem of the European Union is its intergovernmentalist design. There is no Union-wide administration with fully fledged fiscal and military competences, for example. The governance of the EU is driven by the European Council, which brings together the heads of state or government of the member states. The member states remain sovereign in their own right, making the EU a dubious federation at best with glaring gaps in its democratic legitimation.

It is not that France and Germany do not have a European outlook in their policies, but rather that the role of their respective governments is to first promote their national interests and only then tend to the needs of the EU as a whole. This is what has always been the case and why no crisis can ever be addressed in the optimal way from the interest of the Union as such.

Shifting from one group of national governments to another will only refashion the points of contention while preserving the underlying constraints of intergovernmentalism. Because there will be no European government, we will continue to rely on inter-state bargaining for all key issues. As such, we can expect acrimonious negotiations unfolding behind closed doors whenever the stakes are high, like what is happening ever so often at the European Council.

European leaders failed to seize the chances presented by previous crises, such as during the 2008+ financial meltdown, to introduce new institutions that would eventually legitimise the EU as a federal republic. We could have had a European treasury, for example, to provide a counterpart to the European Central Bank. This would, in turn, engender the need for a ministry of financial affairs and, down the line, a government with the familiar executive functions and processes for its election/formation. Instead, we got more intergovernmentalism, as in the form of the European Semester for economic governance. The Union thus remains a coalition of nation-states, each of which promotes its parochial agenda.

Against this backdrop, consensus building is not the legacy of old elites who are out of touch with reality. It is the necessary condition for the preservation of the EU as we know it. With things as they are, if a small group of countries can decide for the rest what the policies will be, then tensions will naturally rise as the underrepresented voices will rightly point out that their national interests are ignored. The principle of consensus is a shrewd compromise with the realities of European affairs and must therefore be understood as one of the Union’s redeeming qualities, however awkward it may be in practice.

This is all without even considering the specifics of such a new coalition. Georgia Meloni was a neofascist until recently and is now superficially Europeanist perhaps because the EU is itself more aggressive on the migration front. The UK went through the whole “Brexit means Brexit” shadow play and has its own share of massive internal problems. As for Poland, it had an anti-EU government until recently… That these countries have some supposed “strong traditions of debate”, as Harold James puts it, is a dangerously complacent narrative for policy-making. We cannot rely on “traditions” as substitutes for strong democratic institutions. The EU has had enough of the former and it is high time it develops the latter.

Fundamentally, the notion that we need new Franco-Germans to take the baton from the old ones does nothing to undo the violation of the principle of “no taxation without representation”. We will be dragged into wars because, say, the Brits and the Poles are eager to fight the Russians, and we will not have the means to participate meaningfully in those decisions. Sure, we may no longer have to deal with Germany’s insistence on austerity, but we will be introducing a whole new range of similar problems. Whatever supposed gains are of dubious quality.

The European Union will continue to go from one crisis to the next and to develop policies on an ad-hoc basis. This has been its modus operandi and there is no sign it will change course. What remains to be determined is whether such a method is suitable for the challenges ahead. I think that in critical moments European leaders will be focused enough to adopt bold decisions. Though I am not sure those will be in the longer-term interest of democracy at the EU level.

The question then for us citizens is whether we care about European democracy or not. If we do, then we have to campaign for thoroughgoing institutional reforms with the end goal of replacing intergovernmentalism with participatory EU procedures. If we do not care though, then we might as well go ahead with whatever coalition of states works best in the present moment. But let us at least do so with honesty and not pontificate about our lofty “traditions of debate” because, apparently, we do not care about them in practice.

There are three ways that such dissimilar economies [France and Germany] can remain within a single market. The first is through a proper federation built on a fiscal union – the path that Macron invited the Germans to take, to no avail. The second option is a gradual currency devaluation for France – a path that Macron and the rest of the political center have sworn not to take. That leaves the third option: permanent austerity, which is the root cause of today’s political impasse.

For over a decade now, we have known all too well that Europe’s de facto economic policy is austerity. There is no politically viable alternative within the confines of Europe’s economic governance, exactly because there is no Union-wide administration with the legitimacy to tend to the needs of the whole. The government of each member state is accountable only to its own citizens and, as it ought to, cares what its electorate wants (i.e. it promotes its national interest). Hence, the mismatch between policies with an EU-wide reach and democracies that form along national lines: a phenomenon I describe as “sovereignty mismatch”.

A fully fledged European federation cannot happen under normal circumstances. National governments that pursue their parochial agendas will not give up their sovereignty. The only way this can be done—and has been the modus operandi hitherto—is through a process of gradualism, of creating faites accomplis at the supranational level, waiting for a crisis to force the hand of politicians, and then consolidating those holdings in the form of a new treaty. Rinse and repeat. This is, in short, the history of the European integration process, which is how we have monetary union with no fiscal union; a central bank with no counterparty treasury; economic governance, but no European government.

What Yanis Varoufakis correctly points out is a fixture of European affairs, not some transient arrangement of factors that will change over the short-term. Leaders of all ideological persuasions have to deal with this reality. And, yes, this includes a potential Le Pen as president of France. She too will be in the same predicament:

• An EU federation is political anathema to nationalists (and not only);
• Euro-exit and devaluation of the currency amid radical market uncertainty is a calamity waiting to happen;
• Austerity is the only viable option.

Shrewd decision-makers know that they cannot wait for the world to change before they make their move. They will work with what is available, meaning that they will implement austerity where they have no other choice and push against it whenever that is expedient. For there to be a major upset to the status quo, there will need to be coalitions of governments willing to either cooperate outside the EU framework or force some kind of new exception to the economic governance of the Union. At any rate, one government cannot unilaterally change things.

A Le Pen presidency may not be a major problem for Europe per se, though it is dangerous in terms of the precedent it sets. A global power and core EU country will be making a decisive turn to the extreme right, departing from the liberal orthodoxy of the past decades. This will only embolden others to do the same at which point the EU will be in trouble.

The hard dilemma then for those on the left who are not unconditionally pro-EU is whether they run on a federalist platform for Europe or become more open about the repatriation of sovereign competences. This is not an easy choice prima facie because it runs the risk of injecting nationalistic palaver in many a discourse. Though it can be done right, by rooting it in a civic understanding of the nation as the only space where democracy is practised in the EU right now.

It is a mistake to equate everything national with the far-right: the nation does not belong to them. It is also strategically suspect to identify with the EU, given that thoroughgoing reforms to its policies are practically impossible. Even a potential European fiscal capacity of some sort is no guarantee that the perma-austerity will be dismantled. It might actually remain the default course of action and be supported by mechanisms that further limit what elected governments can do.

The experience of the Euro shows us that a one-size-fits-all approach is not equally viable for all member states. The needs of some countries cannot be met within those confines. We also know that incomplete legal-institutional arrangements, such as monetary union without a commensurate fiscal union, greatly limit what elected governments can do. Against this backdrop, the known magnitude of national democracy is more attainable than some theoretical European federation which may well continue to be too rigid for each country’s particular needs.

Who chooses wars for us? What does it mean that somewhere is peace and somewhere is war? Is this still peace? What kind of peace? Whose peace? Is there really peace until there are wars? So what if wars no longer exist? How can we reach worlds without wars? Can we get there? We have to. Once upon a time there was a world of wars. There was.

While I agree with the pacifist sentiment, I struggle to see how we move from the status quo to a conflictless utopia of egalitarian bliss. Part of the problem is with the entire narrative of the more intellectual leftist cycles: it is too academic, too involved in its esoteric language, too far withdrawn from the everyday needs of people, and thus not prepared to engage in governance.

A language of guilt and shame

The notion that unless we are all free nobody is, is a strange one. Not only because its absolutist premise is untenable—nobody has ever been “truly” free, happy, safe, etc.—, but due to the emphasis it places on the collective culpability of even the most impoverished parts of society. How can “we” be happy in the here-and-now where we feel happiness, when some people are miserable in another part of the planet? How can “we” enjoy what we are doing everyday when some economic/political elites among us continue with imperialistic campaigns abroad? Exploitation then becomes a meaningless term: “everybody” is doing it and there is no way to avoid it unless the world is perfected, which it cannot because there are exploiters all around…

It is counter-intuitive to argue that what one feels in the moment is not real. The appeal to consider phenomena far withdrawn from our experience may be well-meaning, but ultimately requires a leap of faith. It asks people to suspend belief about what occurs in their midst and imagine how it feels to be in another setting altogether. The discussion about what is “real” peace, or happiness, or whatnot, turns into a pedantic exercise in pointlessness where, again, words lose their significance.

Bundling up together the vast majority of people with their domestic elites is also suspect. It rests on the assumption that the many have direct control over the few and, therefore, they are acquiescing to whatever bad is happening. In truth, most people are drained of their energy by working all day, struggle to make ends meet or are in a situation where they would be in trouble if they went out of business, and have few resources to influence even the politics of their own neighbourhood. The idea that “we” are guilty because some deranged plutocrat carries out horrible deeds abroad is simply unfair.

The language of guilt and shame leads to a dead-end. It does not give people a vision. There is no hope down that path, as we are pressed to parrot how we are all perpetrators of misdeeds and how this newfound secular original sin of ours makes us equally responsible for the suffering in the world. It is a commentary on politics that is paradoxically divorced from any concrete programmatic action. All it has is a series of virtue signalling gimmicks.

Disconnected from everyday affairs

Parts of the broader left are out of touch with the practicalities of day-to-day politics. They are single-minded about their ideological purity, oblivious to the fact that ideology is useful only to the extent it frames day-to-day decision-making on the political front. Having an impeccable track record on one’s ideological commitments is a selfish obsession that does not yield the desired outcome for society at-large: it only holds together a nucleus of ideologists while other, more practically minded agents, continue to govern and to create further complications for the leftist causes. Unflinching devotion to the letter of one’s ideology is not politics, but a lifestyle few can afford.

I think part of the reason we are witnessing a steady rise of extreme right wing beliefs is because they are putting forth a pro-social agenda that is easy to understand. There are practical ideas therein, such as to assume monetary sovereignty by exiting the Euro, impose protectionist economic measures to relieve local businesses from the chilling effects of globalisation, control borders to instil once again in people a sense of security in their neighbourhood, and the like. Us leftists will, of course, call out the fascist elements where we spot them, though “fascism” as a term no longer is the post-WWII bugaboo it used to be: people will just dismiss the accusation and move on.

There is an inescapable trade-off between security and freedom. A structureless collective nominally grants its members maximum space to express their individuality. Yet therein lies the danger of unencumbered conflicting expressions that can quickly turn nasty. A sense of order, of shared values and agreed upon constraints, of rewards and punishments, is beneficial to the prosperity of a people: it reduces uncertainty, else boosts the sense of safety. Even an anarchic society will need to enact rules on everyday matters such as if one is allowed to play loud music in the early morning hours or, if not, what kind of counter-measures are available and acceptable. There are no human relations without rules, which limit some facets of personal initiative to enable forms of collective experience.

Even in our most libertarian fantasies, we must remember the human animal’s need for safety. It is a visceral feeling that has to be satisfied, no matter the era. People cannot operate with the lingering thought that their immediate surroundings pose a grave danger to them. They will seek to alleviate the uneasiness at all costs. Promoting freedom recklessly is bound to lead to a backlash as fears set in. The balance between security and freedom had better not be neglected. This dynamic extends to the consideration about the needs of the person and their community. Too much individualism weakens social bonds, which in turn increase the risks to society’s safety. Again, a balanced approach is in order.

Understand, not judge

We have to formulate policies not only with pragmatism but also compassion for our fellow citizens. Name-calling the average person for their deplorable (or “deplorable”, depending on what the subject is) beliefs does nothing to address the underlying natural propensities of our kind. If people are unsafe in their milieu, they will seek safety and, once that is a given, will consider whatever secondary ideological sensitivities.

The pace of news outlets and the functioning of social media make it easier to pass judgement on to people without due process. This spills over to the political discourse, which is toxic, absolutist, and akin to the whims of a petulant child. It is hard to suspend judgement, though it is a prerequisite to reach out to people and to meet them where they are.

This appearances-first-everybody-is-unenlightened kind of presumption is part of the reason why the leftist intellectuals are practically apolitical. The guilt and shame characteristic of their outlook is not a winning strategy towards what ought to be the goal: governance. It does nothing to empower people into action. All it achieves is make them feel uncomfortable with themselves as perpetrators of deeds they did not actually have any direct involvement in. At best, this engenders indifference: “what do you expect me to do between the two jobs I have to work at?” citizens will respond. The intellectual who is thus keen to point out whatever frailties in our individual and collective character has the responsibility to also propound a realisable programme for undoing the putative injustice. Otherwise, it is idle talk.

Moralising over collective guilt and blaming everybody for their apparent choices is especially disempowering for people when it has a money dimension to it, because it ignores the financial constraints of those involved. It is easy, for example, to tell someone to eat those opulent “ethical” meals three times a day, but it is harder to understand that the minimum wage does not cover for such a lifestyle. You have to be there to know how it is to struggle with rising costs of living, precarious living conditions, and the absence of a stable job and shelter. Again, these are all matters of safety, broadly understood. The person who has to make tough choices operates on the basis of what is available, not whatever finds currency among trendy thinkers.

Understand what is happening

I am thus interested in understanding the “why” behind people’s actions rather than blaming them for how supposedly horrible their choices are. There is more than meets the eye. Why, for example, is it such a popular topic to close Europe’s borders to unregulated migration? Is it that the voters are just evil and heartless? How come everybody is so bad and only the leftist cultural elites are paragons of virtue? Or maybe there is something there in people’s expressed views which is worth considering? If the opinion-makers cannot sincerely tell the average megacity-dwelling family that it is fine for their young daughter to walk out alone at night, then they are not doing anything to address those people’s concerns. They can label the beliefs of those parents as backward or whatever, though the concerns are there for a reason even though they brushed aside with contempt.

Parts of the intellectual left are inadvertently weaving a narrative of self-inflicted powerlessness masquerading as moral enlightenment. They will point out all those lamentable events that are happening across the globe, but will fail to devise a plausible plan for concerted action. Any vision that does not give us hope and the impetus to fight an even remotely winning battle is ultimately tyrannical. Common folk do find ways to not be trapped in incessant theorising. They are results oriented and expect concrete measures. None of them are concerned about how perfect the policies are, because they understand those unfold in imperfect circumstances, not the optimal conditions of some thought experiment.

There have been wars and there will be wars. We cannot disentangle all the issues at once, but must necessarily focus on something given the limited resources at our disposal. While an internationalist ethos is helpful to appreciate the shared struggles of people and the interconnectedness of our suffering, policies unfold within the existing structures of nation-states and international cooperation. Each country has its own particularities and sensitivities. If we are talking about diversity among people, we have to acknowledge the diversity of cultures as well. Introducing a one-size-fits-all set of talking points imported from America is not a sign of practical policy-making, let alone tolerance.

Accept this imperfect world

Societies cannot afford to wait for the perfect world to be made manifest. Unlike those who are selfish and comfortable enough to obsess about their individual “moral high score”, most people are forced by the circumstances to make compromises. There is no pure world. Some have to put in the work to improve things and get dirty by proceeding through trial and error. The best time to be active is now and the best way to do it is by focusing on everyday affairs.

Europe’s war machine is intertwined with other powerful economic interests that none of us common folk are involved in. To change policies on the military front, we necessarily have to introduce social reforms and concomitant economic measures. Though this requires that we rise to power, hence the need to fight on a platform of actionable measures. Commenting from the sidelines is just that: commenting, not governing. The “no to war” slogan is useful insofar as it hints at a set of initiatives to redistribute the national product and roll back the privileges of the corporate elite.

Returning to the article that inspired me to write this essay, Nora Ugron remarks:

I keep thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin, who said that it seemed impossible for us to end capitalism, but so did the reign of kings… Then I think of Ursula K. Le Guin and her novel The Word for World is Forest. Once upon a time there was a lush green world with many trees. There they called the world forest. And at some point, at the point where we meet the characters in the novel, another world arrives, with machines and science and weapons, to colonize the forest-world. To cut down the trees of the forest-world and enslave the forest people. To kill the forest people. There was no such thing as murder in the forest-world before.[ix] No one killed anyone, there were no wars. Once upon a time there was a world without killing, because from the moment the colonizers arrived with machinery, guns, science and death, there was no such world without killing. And for the forest-world itself to continue to exist, the colonizers must disappear. Thus the people of the forest-world kill the colonizers. It’s hard for them, it’s totally unfamiliar, but something they learn in order to survive. That pretty much ends the story. So far this speculative fiction is actually history. Let’s say our own – but it’s always with the question mark, who is that us….

As someone who is still clearing their land in the mountains of overgrown vegetation to have a safe place to live in, I can assure you that those imaginary forests are not peaceful. Like all other forms of life, plants compete over scarce resources: soil, water, exposure to air and sunshine. But you would never know that if you were not forced to make tough choices…

At any rate, these colourful stories hint at how withdrawn from politics some sections of the political (!?) left are. I have reached a point where I, a leftist at heart, question whether I belong to this broader movement. Sure, the anti-war sentiment is there as are other ideas I did not comment on, though I recognise that it is not intentions that change the world, but actions.

For the purposes of this publication, I am editing my original message by adding links to other writings I have published.

Wondering about the future, (post)modernity, liberalism, and where we’re heading…

I’d like to spend more time reading, but I’m not even sure where to start. I feel I should be reading more from the people who seem to see the world in the opposite way I see it for one.

For instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Political_Theory

In general, your intent to study counterpoints to your views is a fruitful approach because it prevents you from developing tunnel vision. I think intellectual curiosity (open-mindedness) is better than ideological purity or consistency with one’s own views. We ultimately want to understand how things stand, not vindicate ourselves in our little bubble.

To the salient point of the link: I have not read the book though am aware of its themes. I also just read this entry to refresh my memory: http://www.4pt.su/en/content/liberalism-20.

I think there are interesting points there and some valid criticism against the status quo. (More about the “status quo” below).

My main concern with Dugin’s world-view is that we are not really moving in the direction of truly community-based social structures and organic societies. We still have the mega-structures of the nation-state, the [ecumenical and in principle globalist] Church, big armies, big business, … In short, gigantism.

What Dugin refers to as “liberalism 2.0” is indeed totalitarian in spirit and thus not liberal at all (I agree that it is anti-Hayek, yet liberalism is self-contradicting [Read: On the contradiction of non-interventionism]). Though I think it still has elements which are worth salvaging, such as the reality of many genders. I mean, even from a science perspective, there are cases where the man/woman distinction is not clear. Furthermore, is the man/woman a purely biological construct without concern for subjectivity and thus psychology? I believe not: we need a holistic view. More so once we factor in cultural associations on gender and concomitant roles.

It is not bad per se to preserve culture and social integrity. Pretending that the “modern way” is necessarily superior to “tradition” is nothing but self-righteous prejudice, rooted in the baseless belief in an inexorable “progress” towards some tacit moral enlightenment [Read: Notes on Science and Scientism]. Tradition has the benefit of aeons of experimentation, where societies have learnt through trial and error what works and what doesn’t. Dismissing it all on a whimsy is irresponsible as it will most likely discard valuable insights and/or practices.

There is, however, a fine line between “preserving” or “respecting” tradition and “deifying” it. We don’t want to exalt “the society” or “the culture” to the status of an ostensibly omnipotent judge that always knows better what people are and how they feel. Such a judge cannot exist and this sort of exaltation is but an opinion that hides behind the superficial objectivity of a presumed authority: the deified tradition.

Culture does not give us an authoritative source of wisdom. People still made mistakes back then and values passed on to us may well be flawed. Though filtering them is no mean task. It must be done carefully with an open mind. This all-or-nothing tendency we witness nowadays is the same sort of dogmatism that brought all sorts of misery to this worlds.

There needs to be a balance.

As for the dichotomy between individualism and collectivism, I think it is false. These are two scopes of a singular reality. We have the micro scale of the single person and the macro scale of the person in relation to other persons, the structures those create, and the impersonal magnitudes they establish. Think of language, for example. One who has dogmatic faith in individualism cannot understand language as an, at first, interpersonal phenomenon, and then as an intersubjective one. “Intersubjective” is more general, in that the “subject” is not an individual or an actual living entity, such as in intergenerational matters. Language is like a living organism that continuously changes: it is intergenerational and interpersonal (i.e. the macro scale).

The micro and macro scopes are analytical constructs, not separate standalone realities.

Finally, a few words about the “status quo”. I think there is too much emphasis on ideologies, such as “liberalism 2.0”, and not enough talk about the practical problems of the concentration of power in few hands [Read: On platformarchs, the demi-state, and deplatforming]. In every country (and on a global scale) we have, for example, all TV channels, radios, newspapers, being owned by a handful of economic elites. Same for social media and tech in general. And the same for every other industry. These elites are the “platformarchs”, as I call them: the rulers of the platforms upon which all economic activity is established and unfolds.

The platformarchs don’t need a specific ideology to rationalise and consolidate their holdings. There were platformarchs in other regimes, such as the East India Company: a prime example of capitalism (i.e. state intervention in favour of capital owners, here in the form of exclusive privileges that established a symbiotic relationship between private interests and the then imperialist state apparatus). Platformarchs will use “liberalism 2.0” for as long as it serves their agenda, but they will have no problem to switch to something else, if need be.

I feel that the emphasis on ideologies obscures these phenomena, as it abstracts practical matters of power politics into all-inclusive ideological stereotypes that seem to have a life of their own (e.g. how Dugin uses “feminism” in the linked article as some actually meaningless bugaboo, for it misrepresents a diverse set of views as a homogeneous corpus of thought). Combined with the latent gigantism I alluded to, I wonder if in Dugin’s ideological order we are actually setting up an antipode to the status quo or merely refashioning it. I sense it is the latter though, again, I have not read the book.

10. The European Council recognises the European perspective of Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Georgia. The future of these countries and their citizens lies within the European Union.

11. The European Council has decided to grant the status of candidate country to Ukraine and to the Republic of Moldova.

12. The Commission is invited to report to the Council on the fulfilment of the conditions specified in the Commission’s opinions on the respective membership applications as part of its regular enlargement package. The Council will decide on further steps once all these conditions are fully met.

13. The European Council is ready to grant the status of candidate country to Georgia once the priorities specified in the Commission’s opinion on Georgia’s membership application have been addressed.

14. The progress of each country towards the European Union will depend on its own merit in meeting the Copenhagen criteria, taking into consideration the EU’s capacity to absorb new members.

While promises and commitments should not be given more weight than they deserve, the statement of intent is clear while its timing is no coincidence. This is part of a concerted effort to challenge Russia on all fronts.

The European Union has been acting as the informal political arm of NATO in the region since the first days of the Ukraine affair and, generally, through its eastward enlargement into former USSR countries, which overlaps with NATO’s own expansion in the area. While Ukrainians rightly see the ongoing conflict as a matter of self-defence and have every right to oppose an aggressor, imperialist forces within NATO and Russia know this is the current phase in a prolonged proxy war between the two superpowers; a war that both sides are eager to escalate further, on the Ukrainian front and beyond.

Russia’s immediate geopolitical ambition is to create buffers at its western borders, strengthen its presence in the Black Sea, and gradually draw linkages between its holdings/alliances in Armenia, Syria, Libya to expand its control southward and into the Mediterranean Sea. NATO, on the other hand, wants to push the Western sphere of influence further into the European hinterland and towards the Caucasus to consolidate its hegemony over the wider region.

Against this backdrop, the EU is pursuing its foreign policy with an eye to achieve integration in breadth without having first finalised integration in depth. Adding new members to a Union that has yet to achieve homogeneity over a heteroclite collection of nation-states will only amplify the existing tensions and divides.

The EU is a multi-tier construction at least since the Treaty of Maastricht, where a union within a union was introduced: the monetary union, else the Euro. The contradictions of this “variable geometry”, as it is known, have not been reconciled to date. There still is a formal separation between Euro and non-Euro members, but also informal ones such as the division of Euro Area countries into “core” and “periphery” with the latter’s participation in the single currency being dependent on continuous intervention from the European Central Bank. There also exists the tandem of France and Germany, which is the de facto driving force of European affairs and blithely appropriates Europe in pursuit of its agenda.

Picking up a fight with Russia only guarantees that the much-needed work to bring democracy to all levels of the EU architecture will be postponed further. The Union remains an incomplete edifice. What happens at the supranational level suffers from what I term a “mismatch of sovereignty”: we have rules (authority) for the system as a whole, but lack the requisite fully fledged mechanisms of popular participation and the overall accountability of decision-makers.

When, for example, the European Council adopts its decisions, there is no singular entity which can be held accountable. As citizens of individual Member States, we can, in theory, voice our complaints against our respective government, but European citizens cannot challenge the European Council as such. What the European Council decides is a function of the balance of power between the Member States—an intergovernmental affair—which inevitably results in backstage horse trading that can be blamed on no-one in particular.

Asking the question of “who governs?” gives us unsatisfactory answers. Is it the European Commission? No. And if it was, it remains an unelected institution. Is it the European Parliament? Its competences are broader than ever, but it cannot initiate legislation and must co-decide with the Council of the EU (also not elected as a body). Is it the European Council? No, not really because it does not exist as a single entity. Put concretely, you cannot vote the European Council out of office as a whole.

The complexity and incompleteness of the EU contributes to an emergent phenomenon where a collection of democracies (in principle) is not a democracy unto itself. It is not by accident or sheer coincidence that the European Central Bank is the self-appointed protector of the Euro, with no body of citizens capable of scrutinising it. The locus of power is found in technocratic arrangements and intergovernmental coalitions, starting with the Franco-German tandem.

Minds are now concentrated on power politics, while bellicose rhetoric prepares the stage for the inevitable formation of a European military capacity; an army without a Europe-wide democracy bestowing upon it the necessary legitimacy and accountability.

Europeans are quick to condemn Russia’s weaponisation of food supply chains, yet happily ignore how EU membership is instrumentalised in the service of Western imperialism. Enlargement should be preceded by the deepening of integration between existing Member States in the interest of instituting a European Democracy. Instead, membership is used as a means to promote foreign policy stratagems that serve NATO rather than be conducive to the full realisation of European values within the EU.

A multi-tier EU makes it impossible to have a Union-wide demos. The system is so complex that only experts can make sense of it, while the political realities of diverse countries necessitate that each case has its own particularities and requires special treatment. Such a state of affairs favours a bifaceted approach to European affairs that fundamentally caters to the interests of Kerneuropa (core Europe):

1. Creating and/or strengthening technocratic institutions or mechanisms that enforce rules across the Union;

2. Keeping power away from citizens by diffusing the locus of authority between bureaucratic arrangements and intergovernmental structures.

While EU cheerleaders will pat themselves on the back for how righteous the Union is for safeguarding “democracy”, the fact of the matter is that more work needs to be done at home before we can pontificate about lofty ideals (and even then we do not have the right to hold the moral high ground, but I digress). For the time being, the crusade to bring “European values” to other countries is misguided. More so when it provides grist to the mill of imperialism.

In my view, the referred decisions taken by the ECB derive from a sort of shadow mandate underlying its action. Indeed, fearing that the rise of certain Member States’ debt interest rates could inevitably lead to a return to previous national currencies and, potentially, a eurozone break-up, the ECB is informally assuming a dual primary mandate: ensuring price stability and eurozone survival.

Crucially, the described course of action illustrates the paradox of EMU integration in its current form. I am not referring to the well-known division of competence mismatch between the Union and Member States, but to the fact that the legal values enshrined in the Treaties no longer adequately and accurately reflect societal needs. It is by now clearer that, in the current institutional setup, some Member States need the ECB to survive in the monetary union: after the announced policy on June 9th, it took only one day to bring back sovereign debt crisis fears.

I agree with the salient point: without the ECB’s quantitative easing the Eurozone would have collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and shortcomings. As things currently stand, Member States have conferred control over both macroeconomic policy levers to the supranational level: (i) fiscal policy is formulated within the confines of the European Semester (aka “Economic Governance”) in accordance with strict rules on debts, deficits, and pursuant to the singleness of the Single Market, and (ii) monetary policy is trusted with the ECB. Governments thus lack the means to respond to economic shocks in a manner that is beneficial to their domestic economy (given the heterogeneity of national economies, such shocks are asymmetric).

Put concretely, a country cannot devalue its currency in an attempt to ease its way out of a recession. Similarly, the government cannot boost the competitiveness of local businesses by shielding them from competition as the rules of the single market strictly prohibit as much. All things combined, the rigidity of the European Economic and Monetary Union makes austerity a one-way street: the story of European affairs since ~2010 in a nutshell.

The reason countries like Greece need the ECB’s intervention in the secondary bond markets is because it is impossible to exit a crisis by austerity alone, as it deepens and prolongs the economic downturn. If you cut people’s disposable income amid a recession, the government earns fewer taxes, which does not help with its deficits, the national product shrinks, which increases the debt to GDP ratio, investors see the negative indicators which puts upward pressure on bond yields, thus reinforcing the vicious cycle.

It can be said that foregoing sovereignty over both macroeconomic levers is worth it as European integration provides other benefits. At least such was the thinking when the EMU was originally designed. In the 2000s, these beliefs were plausible because no crisis was in sight. The fair weather construction of the Euro seemed to stand just fine. Though ever since the 2008+ financial calamity, things have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. We are dealing with crisis after crisis. To claim that some vague promise of an integrated Europe will address our woes is more wishful thinking than practical guidance.

Europe is caught in the interregnum between the awkward intergovernmentalism of the Maastricht Treaty (single currency but decentralised governance) and a fully fledged European-level government that is yet to be enacted. The prospect of the latter is not in sight, which implies that the legally and politically questionable policies of the ECB will remain the norm for years to come.

On the legal front, it can be argued that the ECB’s implicit duty to preserve the integrity of the Euro Area springs from the singleness of its mandate for price stability. The precedent of the Outright Monetary Transactions suggests as much. It then remains to be determined whether citizens will be satisfied which such a broadened interpretation of the Treaties. I remain of the view that OMT undermines the European value of democracy, as the ECB—a technocratic body—was offering a quid pro quo to elected governments in exchange for “strict conditionality” which is code language for enhanced austerity under the auspices of another technocratic institution: the European Stability Mechanism.

One must then ask the all-too-important questions about the Economic and Monetary Union: “who governs?” and “where is the locus of power?”. The short version of the answers is that the European level is not democratic. The fact that we are discussing the ECB’s self appointment as protector of the Euro is sign that there is a power vacuum and the concomitant absence of legitimacy/accountability. Whether it is the ECB or the institutions involved in the European Semester, Europe does not have a proper government, a European treasury as a genuine counter-party to the ECB, and all the legal arrangements an order of this sort requires.

As such, and seen from the perspective of citizens in countries that are dependant on the ECB’s whims, the proposition of European integration, manifesting in the current poorly designed architecture, is unappealing (to say the least). The choice is between austerity at home or migration to some other country, such as to Germany. And while the EU makes the movement of people possible, this alone cannot be examined without reference to the wider context: when you have to migrate in order to survive, you are a refugee, legal technicalities notwithstanding. Besides, mass migration does not rectify the errors in the institutional makeup of the Union: it compounds the existing problems by adding the pernicious effects of brain drain on top of them.

Fundamentally, the EU is dealing with an inescapable dilemma. Its response is to dither and let the underlying malignancies fester. There will be a reckoning. Does the EU want to be a union of largely sovereign nation-states? Then it needs to roll back the framework of Economic Governance, abolish the Euro, and the like. Alternatively, does the EU aspire to be a fully fledged federal democracy? Then it needs to complement existing institutions with new ones so that the integrity of the Union becomes a matter of democratic deliberation, not be subject to the kind of bureaucratic calculus that happens behind closed doors. The untenable intermediate state we are in harms peoples but also damages the otherwise laudable ambition of a united Europe.

The ~15 minute video talks about what could be considered relevant factors of biological differentiation and social behavioural patterns that produce uneven outcomes over a given period of time. There are mentions of elite athletes and how they outdo their peers. Then there is a reference to the personality trait that is associated with creativity and how, basically, successful entrepreneurs share that trait. What the video does not bring attention to is the set of legal-institutional arrangements that turn a cyclical natural phenomenon in to a structural political reality.

First off, why “cyclical”? Consider the case of an elite athlete. They will outperform other athletes for a few years. In that time span they will earn more income, other things being equal. But they cannot continue earning more income from their sheer talent and athletic ability over the long-term. Their performance will eventually deteriorate until it no longer is at that elite level. Consequently, their income will diminish until it matches their present output and eventually fade away (again, ceteris paribus).

What can turn the cyclical in to a structural phenomenon? Let’s continue with our example. For an athlete of this sort to perpetually profit, they must benefit from a favourable legal order that allows them to extract rent. This can be in the form of image rights, for instance. The very notion of owning your image is codified in law and has no meaning and binding effect outside of it. These image rights, this intangible property that the lawmaker has enacted into being, can be transferred, traded, inherited, and generally be treated as an asset. In other words, it no longer is about the athletic performance per se but the marketing—the narrative—surrounding it.

Sport in general is not a good analogy of what happens in the world and why half the wealth is in the hands of a tiny minority (and of that half, how much is at the very top, i.e. the 1% of the 1%?). Outside the confines of sport, we have to account for a non-exhaustive list of factors that includes (i) intellectual property at a much greater scale as it permeates and penetrates every aspect of economic activity, (ii) de facto oligopolistic markets or even shadow monopolies underpinned—and enabled—by legal barriers to entry, (iii) a global order of tax havens or otherwise favourable jurisdictions for the uber-rich to siphon their profits to in order to avoid taxation and erode their tax base (taxable material/wealth), (iv) so-called “incentives” and tax breaks provided by the state which typically favour a small minority of beneficiaries, (v) the favourable institutionalised position of certain corporations, such as mega-banks which are close to the source of practically free new money in the form of the central bank’s quantitative easing policies, (vi) the flip-side of oligopolistic or monopolistic status or institutionalised significance which manifests as implicit or explicit guarantees provided by the state to a handful of corporations which are deemed “too big to fail” for a variety of reasons.

When, say, a mega-bank benefits from the central bank’s QE and when it is blithely bailed out by the state with taxpayer money while people live under grinding austerity, it is not because some genius entrepreneur with peerless business acumen and a unique creative talent is working tirelessly to add value to society. The parallel with the elite athlete is misleading, because it obfuscates the systemic nature of the phenomenon where an individual or relatively small group thereof benefits from a system that is designed for them and, once we factor in lobbying, sponsorships, media ownership, and manipulation of politicians, scientists, journalists, by them.

This brings us back to the distinction between cyclical and structural magnitudes. Yes, it is possible for an especially talented person to win all the awards, enjoy all the accolades, earn more money, and gain whatever else their sheer ability renders feasible. What is not realistic is for that to happen in perpetuity and to always benefit the same class of people. In our world, we cannot afford to treat such issues by reducing them to biology. There is a political reality in place which adds a systemic dimension to the matter at hand. If we insist on ignoring the system, we limit ourselves to the examination of a case whose constitution in our mind does not correspond with its actuality.

The structural nature of inequality has implications on the notion of “equality of opportunity”. We are made to believe that we are all made equal and all have the same chances in life. This would be true if, for example, the central bank’s QE would be distributed evenly among us, the state would bail us all out indiscriminately or not bail out any business whatsoever, tax havens would not exist and everyone paid the same taxes and was at all times subject to the same laws, and so on. If we had what the ancient Greeks called isonomia (isonomy), meaning equality of law or institution, then we would indeed enjoy equal opportunities. Our world does not have isonomy. Some are benefiting from the established order a priori, regardless of biological traits, while others endure a life of agonising precarity and are then brainwashed to think of themselves as simply more stupid and lazy. Instead of isonomy, we as peoples are defined by our heteronomy (the opposite of autonomy; rule by another): those who benefit from the system which they themselves manipulate, rule in our name over a political order that is democratic in name only.

This is not to say that we should disregard biology and psychology. To understand phenomena at a deeper level we need interdisciplinary methods. My concern here focuses on what the emphasis is, for it feels like some are taking certain things for granted, are searching for data points that vindicate the categories they already assume as constant, and are thus inadvertently peddling deep-seated ideological prejudices as impartial, morally neutral insights.

Finally, we have not even mentioned the international aspect of inequality and its colonialist or imperialist expression. Not only do we have egregious inequality within countries, but also between countries as the richest economies—or, rather, a handful of corporate actors—continuously drain the poorer ones of their natural resources as well as their human potential (“brain-drain”, as it is called). At any rate, I think my point is clear: the problem is systemic and cannot be explained solely by the distribution of talents among the population.

Such is the case with the war in Ukraine, where we are compelled to pick sides in an ostensible conflict of the forces of justice against the rapacious hordes of tyranny. Any other point of view, any proposition that stresses the fact that the world of politics is messy, with shades of grey defining the proverbial picture, is derided as an ally of the designated enemy and risks being persecuted as such.

We are expected to (i) agree with the inane notion that this is a case of black-and-white and (ii) are pressured to provide unconditional support to the powers that be on the premise of them supposedly being on the side of righteousness. Such simplistic conception of evolving circumstances can only engender invidious results. Every dark age starts with the belief that there may only ever be one answer to life which, in this case, is supposed to be a pro-NATO, pro-EU, and anti-Russia position.

The fact, however, is that reality is complex. This war does not occur in a political, economic, historical, cultural vacuum. There are factors at play which prompt us to consider the intersection between seemingly unrelated magnitudes. The gist is that we are dealing with yet another phase in the conflict between opposing imperialisms. The expansionary policies of NATO and the European Union collide with the tsarism of the Putin regime. Ukraine is caught in the middle and people suffer as a result.

There are multiple aspects to this basic condition that we cannot afford to disregard. The war is a disaster for humans and the environment at-large. That much is clear. What is lost amid the noise is the insight that those who are pulling the strings in Russia and the West are not the respective side’s good guys.

On geopolitical affairs, NATO powers have a track record of regime change and of leaving power vacuums in their wake. What is touted as a defensive organisation has waged wars of aggression under various pretexts on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the EU has blithely operated as the de facto political arm of the Atlantic alliance due to the overlap between its eastward enlargement and that of NATO, culminating in the political tensions in Ukraine over the past decade which foreshadowed this war. Couched in those terms, the EU has not adequately distanced itself from the USA establishment’s trigger-happy foreign policy and thus cannot pretend to be morally neutral, let alone righteous.

In terms of politico-economic organisation, both Russia and Western states are capitalist, despite secondary points of differentiation, that exhibit the same overall structure of a two-tier order in which a tiny minority of what I call “platformarchs” is in control of the entry points to any given industry. Western media does a decent job at describing Russian plutocrats for what they truly are: “oligarchs”, i.e. part of an oligarchy. Alas, it fails miserably in its description of the equivalent phenomenon when it comes to Western regimes. “Our” plutocrats are instead lauded as ingenious and tireless entrepreneurs. They typically have an aura of mystique surrounding their persona or are the centrepiece of some cult of personality. There is no mainstream critique of the unscrupulous methods employed in pursuit of their extractive business practices, no reform agenda to outright dismantle the nexus of legal arrangements that enable large-scale tax avoidance and tax base erosion, nor are platformarchs described for what they actually are: part of an oligarchy that hides in plain sight, which encompasses political and economic elites. Both in the West and in Russia (and elsewhere) we witness the symbiosis of plutocrats with the state apparatus, resulting in a third category I describe as the “demi-state”: an amalgam of corporatist and étatist interests.

[ Read: Crises, transnationalism, and the demi-state (2020-05-01) ]

[ Read: On platformarchs, the demi-state, and deplatforming (2021-01-26) ]

[ Read: On the nation-state, democracy, and transnationalism (2021-05-29) ]

The prevailing economic order extends to the ownership of traditional mass media and so-called “social” media. What appears as pluralism is but a facade, as the ownership of most, if not all, outlets is consolidated in vast portfolios that are held by a tiny minority. Platformarchs do not simply mind their affairs and allow some romanticised, perfectly objective journalism to do its job without any kind of interference. No! Platformarchs own the very media of communication and dictate what will find currency “on air”. Yet another indication of the prevailing oligarchy which masquerades as “democracy”, of monologue that is peddled as “public dialogue”, of indoctrination that is valorised as “the popular will”.

As for the EU in particular, the overall complexity of the Economic and Monetary Union obscures its illiberal disposition when it comes to matters of fiscal and monetary policy. The euro is part of an architecture that practically limits the right of peoples to self-determination, both individually in their expression as member-states of the EU, and collectively as an ad-hoc, emergent European demos. The EMU practically enforces persistent impoverishment under the guise of quasi-permanent rules on debts, deficits, banking regulation, and so on, that are wrapped in jargon such as “economic governance”, “European Semester”, “monetary dialogue”, “micro- and macro- prudential policy”, et cetera. The European Central Bank is an unaccountable institution that has been actively engaging in policies that redistribute wealth upward. Inequality is on the rise while inflation has been on an irresistible upward trend prior to the obvious supply-side shocks caused by the war in Ukraine. All while a fully fledged pro-megacorporation disposition has been at full force in the form of what is euphemistically known as “quantitative easing”, which is essentially free money for those close to the source of the stimulus.

[ Read: On the appropriation of Europe (2020-09-28) ]

[ Read: On the political telos of the euro (2022-01-22) ]

Against this backdrop, it is irresponsible to ignore the egregious injustices that take place at home and abroad. We cannot afford to offer support to the view that Western elites are “the good guys” in an otherwise terrible tragedy. They are just as abhorrent as the oligarchs who oppress and exploit the Russian peoples and who now have their eyes set on Ukraine.

Time and again the establishment has resorted to fear-mongering, which is reducible to the common tactic of inducing a sense that “there is no alternative” (the infamous “TINA”). In the face of the fabricated narrative that the EU-NATO tandem represents the only viable option, we must counter with a principled and necessarily nuanced set of arguments for reform at home. Imperialism is deplorable in all of its forms. Whether it manifests as jingoism, corporate-driven post-colonialism, or recrudescent feudalism. The principled position is to oppose both Putin and co. and their Western counterparts. We should insist on the thoroughgoing reform of the European Union to make it truly abide by the principle of subsidiarity (distribution of authority close to the citizens) and to tear down the euro edifice which greatly favours the interests of a core business lobby at the detriment of all the rest. Internally, we must campaign for pro-social policies and seize every opportunity at undermining the power of incumbent forces. To that end, we ought to resist the urge to channel scarce resources to the coffers of industrialists and their banker friends in view of engineering some misguided large-scale re-militarisation.

The answer to war is not more war. We must sabotage all such stratagems, each of us with whatever means available. Do not give the oligarchs on either side of this conflict fodder for their cannons.

[About institutional reforms to prop up the euro] These are undoubtedly large changes. But they constitute the minimum that was needed to keep the euro afloat without changing its character. By implementing them, the EU confirmed its readiness to change everything in order to keep everything the same – or, more precisely, to avoid the one change that matters: the creation of a proper fiscal and political union, which is the prerequisite for managing macroeconomic shocks and eliminating regional imbalances.

What we need to consider here is how the European integration process works. There has never been a case of thoroughgoing reforms that refashioned the EU (and its predecessors). Change happens gradually with each crisis being treated as an opportunity to address some of the apparent shortcomings in the institutional setup of the project.

Consider, for instance, the most obvious flaw in the design of the euro: the lack of a counter-party treasury to the European Central Bank. The euro was conceived as a stateless currency that had no system-wide fiscal mechanisms to complement the nascent monetary union. The only Europe-wide provisions on fiscal affairs were limited to essentially arbitrary targets for the budget deficit and public debt (I say “arbitrary” because they are not hard science). Those have eventually developed into the European Semester that underpins the economic governance of the Union. This “economic governance” is a concerted effort to approximate the fiscal positions of all Member States, though it still lacks the tools and concomitant legitimacy to, say, redistribute wealth between regions.

While we can think of this state of affairs as a major problem, there is a sense in which it is a feature of the overall conduct of European affairs: that of letting things reach a tipping point before introducing controversial reforms under the pretence that they are absolutely necessary technical measures to prevent impending doom. The European Semester and all its underlying regulations are a product of this method, as they were introduced at the height of the post 2008 financial calamity. Same for the infamous Troika regimes that enforced austerity in hard-hit countries.

The euro occupies an unsustainable spot between the statelessness of its original conception in the Treaty of Maastricht and the eventuality of a fully fledged EU-wide statism. Which is why even folks who are constructively critical or sceptical of the EU’s merits call for the creation of the necessary legal-institutional arrangements at the supranational level to ensure the viability of the euro, namely, the creation of an EU fiscal capacity that can have its own debt and issue the corresponding financial instruments (let’s call them “eurobonds”), eventually culminating in a European government.

There are no accidents here. No careless omissions and mysterious structural shortcomings. Fundamentally, the euro has always been a long-term project to concentrate sovereignty at the supranational political centre and to do so as a matter of technical necessity, not bottom-up initiative. The euro epitomises the elitism that has always kept the European integration process away from citizens. People were fed lies about how the single currency would bring paradise on earth, which helped the apparatchiks circumvent the messy politics of having to gain popular support for a European superstate.

It is not trivial to unite Europeans and have them support a single [federal] government. Their cultural diversity renders the task virtually impossible, especially if it is supposed to be implemented outright. EU policy-makers are well aware of the difficulties with such an endeavour and thus adopt their incrementalist, top-bottom method to integration. Side effects of this process are (i) the predominantly technocratic and intergovernmental nature of EU affairs, (ii) the overall indifference of citizens to what is happening in “Brussels”, where Brussels represents the political centre of the Union and not necessarily the Belgian capital.

Against this backdrop, the normative questions surrounding the very existence of the euro are set aside or relegated to matters of secondary importance. The debate revolves around how to iterate on what Maastricht set in motion with regard to monetary union. In other words, we are not presented with real options, with genuine alternatives. There is the awkwardness of the status quo and the prospect of ever-closer Union, which means more power for the supranational level.

As we have seen with the European Semester or with the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, “more Europe” does not simply rectify errors in the institutional architecture of the EU. It rather reinforces the established economic-political order, granting it the means to impose its ideocentric will while masquerading it as political pragmatism. Instead of talking about a class-conscious set of measures that favours business cronies, we are regaled with seemingly neutral terms like “economic governance”. Instead of the impoverishment and marginalisation of the lower parts of the income distribution, the lack of state intervention for those in need combined with the presence of interventionism when it comes to supporting corporate interests, we deal with “fiscal targets” as part of some “semester” of ordinary bureaucratic dialogue.

The euro then symbolises—and accelerates—the further depoliticisation of the narrative of European integration. A Eurostate is discussed in terms of filling in the gaps of the existing design, though not on its own merits of whether it would do us good to actually have such a polity. This aspect is totally absent from the debate or, if it is recognised, it is dismissed in advance as populism, europhobia, and the like.

Then we have other normative considerations that are cast to the margins, pertaining to the presence of a European fiscal capacity. Has there ever been a sovereign that did not ultimately develop its own security forces and army or failed trying? Not only do we have to consider how new fiscal powers are to be [mis-]used, we must also look at the prospect of perpetually addressing the ostensible design flaws of the status quo because it will always be lacking some important feature of a state until it becomes one.

Put differently, the idea that we must create a fiscal union to make the euro viable comes with the latent risk of then having to expand the fiscal union with a police union, a military union, and so on. There is nothing in the nature of things that will halt that momentum and instead give us free eurobonds without any of the downsides of an omnipotent supranational authority.

It still is not clear that the euro needs to be saved. Perhaps it is better to organise its orderly disintegration and keep the future EU limited to what it once was: a free trade area comprised of otherwise independent states. At least that will save us from the interdependence we currently find ourselves in where we are powerless to deal with one asymmetric shock after another or are forced to cope with it in an inefficient way.

Consider then the political telos of the euro, its role in the bigger picture of European affairs, and stop worrying about some lacunae in its institutional makeup.

We live in a time of growing intolerance and increasing nationalism. Europe’s social fabric is fraying at the edges. To restore a sense of unity, of trust and direction, and to reconnect minorities and majorities we need to imagine and deliver a common European future. Only if we harness the power of culture can we do so.

Notwithstanding the professor’s lofty language, I feel that culture cannot be reduced to a finite quantity that must be managed between the national and European levels. The EU has the propensity to think of every case as a matter of distributing competences, because that is how it historically accumulates power at its political centre. The formula is simple: a problem is identified where the only viable solution is the generic and all-too-predictable appeal to “more Europe”, for the realisation of “ever-closer Union” in the form of increased competences at the supranational level.

Culture is an area of policy that is hitherto underdeveloped at the European level due to how the Treaties classify it as a matter where the Union has residual functions or else a so-called “supportive competence” (Article 6 TFEU). However, the letter of the law does provide the basis for greater EU involvement, as “The Union shall have competence to carry out actions to support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States”. The issue then is not a matter of ability, but of political calculus: how would the EU benefit from such an initiative and what are the compelling reasons to launch one at present time.

What we learn from the European integration process is that decision-makers adopt a gradualist approach to EU affairs: they wait for things to reach a dead-end, for a crisis to be made manifest, before they interfere with arguments on the necessary involvement of the Union.

As such, integration has always been framed in economistic (not economic) terms of economies of scale. The rationale is of pooling resources, sharing know-how, and harmonising positions across Member States. While plausible, this approach inevitably devolves into an exercise in accounting, where the EU is shown to be the more profitable or business-savvy option regardless of moral considerations.

Unlike the corporate world which is dominated by the hierarchical model of organisation where few are expected and encouraged to make decisions on behalf of many, politics in Europe are in principle underpinned by normative qualities of broad-based participation. There is an expectation to not only conform with democratic etiquette, but to actually make citizens feel like they own the policies which affect their quotidian life.

The EU fails to deliver on this front despite its vaunted “European values” including the surface-level commitment to the connatural principles of subsidiarity, proportionality, and conferral. The reason is the very makeup of its institutional order which forces national governments to engage in intergovernmental bargaining where the balance of power between them defines both the parameters and the substantive features of the given agenda item.

The Union acts in a technocratic fashion with the logic of a business executive because that is all it can do and has ever done. It is a cliché to invoke the bugaboo of nationalism or populism, depending on the specifics, as if it is nationalists/populists who are in charge and are driving the EU forward. Where are these mighty foes in Europe’s centres of power? The European Commission? The European Council or Council of the EU? The Eurogroup? The European Central Bank? The Paris-Berlin tandem? The ineffectual European Parliament? Just where are they hiding?

The inference then is that the source of trouble is not the elite of the Union but its popular base. Which in turn implies that the appeal to instrumentalise yet another area of policy in pursuit of “ever-closer Union” is a thinly disguised attempt by the apparatchiks of the Brussels establishment and their intellectual vanguard to further reinforce their position.

It is frivolous to blame Europe’s woes on political forces that are not determining EU politics. This has been the lazy argument of a complacent broader Left that is slowly but surely forgetting about politics as a distribution of power and control among different classes of people; a Left that is adopting its own brand of banal nationalism, understood as supranationalism. In a misguided attempt to fend off exaggerated threats, it is becoming the apologist of a status quo whose policies have devastated working peoples and have ravaged small businesses in an uneven playing field that favours large multinationals and those who have the resources as well as lack of scruples to engage in cross-border tax avoidance or unethical fiscal engineering.

Meanwhile, disposable incomes are being eroded by galloping inflation (including core inflation). The European Central Bank has been happily pumping oodles of liquidity in the system through a policy that favours those who are closer to the origin of the new money; a policy that contributes to greater inequality and higher concentration of wealth in fewer hands. What is the ECB expecting when it is engendering or reinforcing inflationary pressures on a monumental scale? Liquidity does not simply evaporate. After it creates bubbles in markets that are not tracked by the nominal inflation target (e.g. fine art), it inevitably finds its way to the real economy. We thus suffer the chilling effects of a programme with far-reaching fiscal ramifications that did not spring from a position of widespread popular consensus but was instead devised in the upper echelons of a technocratic power structure.

To the point of leveraging “culture”, we are again presented with the potential praxis of consolidating resources at the supranational level. We are thus blithely ignoring the possibility that what Europe needs to realise its democratic aspirations is devolution of competences or else a redistribution of authority away from its political centre. What good are the much-touted “European values” if they do not inform a daily reality and if they are only used as a pretext to peddle the narrative of the EU apparatus’ built-in benevolence or enlightenment?

Culture, or rather a simulacrum that can fit into the stratagems of political expedience, is being weaponised in an effort to appropriate it from its particular milieu. There is no singular European culture, nor is it desirable to homogenise the cultures of this continent in pursuit of dubious short-term ends. Homogenisation of this sort entails the cultivation of a tenuous meta-narrative of Europeanness, accompanied by the commensurate concentration of competences, which the EU can then assiduously exploit to forward its ambitions.

What makes the broader Left think that granting the Union more means to combat the nationalists/populists will be a net positive for its own priorities? The enemy of my enemy is not always a friend. Only those who did not learn the lessons of history think otherwise. An omnipotent EU is one that can, for example, enforce grinding austerity with greater ease; an EU whose business-centric modus operandi will make it turn culture into yet another market infested with Europe-wide corporate parasites in the fields of cinema, music, and the like.

The Union’s problems are complex and multifaceted. There is a systemic aspect to them in that the very design of the EU creates and amplifies inequalities between and within countries. For as long as we are misdiagnosing the root cause of Europe’s malignancies, we will remain stuck in false dilemmas where we are called to choose between the Eurocratic power fantasy of “more Europe” or some equally unappealing throwback to an imaginary golden age of yesteryear that fills us with “pride and dignity”.

Culture can inspire us to see things from a different perspective: to appreciate diversity in vivo, in its proper context as an expression of locality, not a mere token of tolerance that lives and dies in some legal document. What the broader Left needs is to disinvest from defending the EU as a necessary good. Those kind of idealisations do not benefit anyone but the powers that be. There is a pressing need to recognise that sometimes Europe is part of the problem and that “more Europe” can be detrimental to our everyday social-economic affairs and, indeed, our cultural outlook.

• Urbanisation has increased the density of human populations, while simultaneously downgrading the quality of their everyday environment. Cities are centres of pollution, meaning that one does not breath benign air. Cities combined with international trade make people oblivious to the realities of seasonal agricultural production, to the effect that they have no natural check on what they eat and when: for example, grapes grow towards the end of the summer and so a natural life cycle will prevent you from overdoing it by consuming them all year round. Furthermore, cities in a capitalist world that is single-minded about incessant growth impose rhythms that are detrimental to one’s overall stability, by sustaining pressure and engendering or amplifying anxiety.

• Food is a complete disaster and the single most important cause in a vast number of chronic diseases. Just walk into a grocery store and take note of everything that is outright unhealthy: all processed foods, everything that contains preservatives or artificial flavours and colours, sweets, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, chips, industrial loaf which is made with numerous dubious ingredients that contribute to its taste and texture… The list goes on. Then we have practices which lead to a degradation in the quality of otherwise genuine food, such as adding sugar in the preparation of meals, overcooking vegetables, using sauces which ultimately contain sugar/salt and questionable additives, frying the ingredients, overdoing it with substances that should only be taken in small doses such as by eating lots of fruits, and so on. One’s diet is essential to how they feel and how healthy they are inclined to be overall.

• Lack of exercise is a more tricky case because you will find people who go the gym to work out. The key here is to think of training as a quotidian condition that happens continuously, not just one hour per some fixed schedule. Some gym-goers may be doing it properly, though a lot of people will indulge in bad habits, such as eating junk food and then going to the gym to entertain the illusion that they are burning off what they have just consumed. Exercise is about one’s longer-term condition. It is at its best when it contributes to stability, instead of the erratic heights and lows that the gym-going-junk-food-consumer endures.

• Confinement to closed spaces results in poor air quality. Such spaces further compound the inherent problem cities have with what people breath. Whether it is office work, the gym, or a car with closed windows and air conditioning turned on, the recycling of one’s breath is always harmful, let alone the potential damage coming from the sudden changes in temperature when moving between indoors and outdoors.

Those are intertwined though we treat them separately to make sense of phenomena. They are all part of a wider system that encompasses production, consumption, and ownership:

1. Production involves all techniques and methods that go into making the good. In the case of food, production is typically inimical to the presence and sustainability of ecosystems. It abuses animals to get their by-products such as milk or eggs, and it mistreats those which are intended to be slaughtered. It also endangers or exterminates bees, rodents, snakes, birds of all kinds, etc. Agricultural practices involve monoculture and the use of chemicals which ultimately contribute to the deterioration of the soil’s quality, which then reinforces the need for yet more chemicals to undo the damage of the previous ones, so the vicious cycle invigorates itself.

2. Consumption covers everything from packaging, distribution, advertising, handling of waste. Most products on a supermarket’s shelf are wrapped in plastic. It is supposedly cheap to produce because its accounting does not factor in the damages to the planet. Advertising typically is downright unethical, for it is an exercise in misleading potential customers. Think, for instance, of a certain soft drink that purports to contain “zero sugar” yet remains as invidious as ever for everything else it has and does. Or consider how a major junk food defiler provider is incentivising kids to buy its garbage by packaging it with a toy. Or even take the seemingly innocuous claims about certain “superfoods”, which can easily lead one to believe that they can counter-balance their poor habits simply by eating those, while keeping everything else constant.

3. Ownership pertains to the system of values that underpins this order. At its core is the distribution of control in a hierarchical structure that favours those at the higher strata. Layered on top of that is the sanctification of property rights for those in power, though not for property in general as that remains an easy pray for the state. The maximisation of profit follows therefrom as the meta-narrative that rationalises gathering increasingly more wealth and control at the top. Such is the conventional wisdom that profitability alone is considered a virtue in itself, expressed in the shared deceit on the desirability of year-on-year fiscal growth. The concentration of wealth in fewer hands is what enables so-called “economies of scale” and “horizontally integrated” management, which in turn feed into production and consumption patterns.

Couched in those terms, we have a political system and concomitant business incentives that have a direct effect on all aspects of personal well-being and on public health at-large. The establishment prioritises profits without considering the actual costs on people and the planet in general.

Duty towards others

Decision-makers are employing all means possible to focus minds on the ongoing vaccination programmes to limit the spread of COVID. One rhetorical device they use is that of putting the brunt of the blame on those who have not taken the jab and who, perhaps, have no intention of doing so. Vaccination is described as a moral imperative to safeguard the health of others, which rests on the kernel of truth that some vulnerable groups are in need of protection.

What is not being discussed is the underlying reality of people’s overall condition and the structural magnitudes contributing to it. The authorities have had no trouble imposing restrictive measures of all sorts. Those have, among others, resulted in mass impoverishment and bankruptcies, as well as the further erosion of labour rights for the lower parts of the income distribution, yet are combined with record profits for major corporate actors. All this is forgiven as the necessary cost of tackling the pandemic, or so the apologists claim. Yet the authorities, who are apparently committed to the valiant promotion of public health, have done nothing whatsoever to contain the distribution and availability of all the rubbish that masquerades as food nowadays.

Those who work all day and have no energy left to go for a proper walk, those who are forced into tight schedules and eat junk as a necessity in order to stay on time, those who are misled by advertisers into making choices that are detrimental to them, overweight and obese people, as well as those with relevant chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, are all victims of an immoral system of the joint magnitudes of production-consumption-ownership; a system that has a vested interest in poor personal health and in squeezing the life out of every person, every animal, every natural resource it controls.

While a vaccine can help protect against a given virus, it does not address the underlying systemic causes, nor does it bring about a paradigm shift in how we think of food, the unity between the mental and physical states, and public health in their wider context as inherently political phenomena.

The rhetoric of social responsibility is insincere, for it does not consider its own implications and puts the blame wholly on private persons for faults that are not entirely their own. If you claim that all people have a duty towards others, then that means they possess the agency to fully carry on such a task in pursuit of the betterment of their own condition. And if that is so, then you must be prepared to deal with the consequences, such as those who are healthy openly opposing, say, overweight and obese persons on the premise that the latter group—those who also have the aforementioned moral agency—do not assume responsibility for their own health and so nor should the former. The argument applies equally to cases where such a fully capable agent realises that they do not need the government in order to realise their potential for taking care of their health and, a fortiori, are not obliged to follow the exhortations of some bureaucrat, public intellectual, or whatnot. In other words, the social responsibility bandwagon is a distraction from the persistent, system-wide problems. It risks turning groups of people against each other, while those at the top continue unencumbered with business as usual.

If you want to insist on the morality theme, there exists personal duty of a different sort: that of recognising the truth of the case and helping move things towards a different direction altogether that is respectful of humanity as a whole and all other life forms in a spirit of sustainability.

We all have the means to resist being mistreated by a status quo that has made fiscal growth its sole guiding principle. To take care of yourself is to make a minor revolution. Every little bit counts. It all starts from small beginnings, though commitment to it will have a cumulative effect. Be prepared to enact change. Stop eating sweets. Zero! No more soft drinks. Dispose of all junk food. Walk and be active. Strive for a balanced lifestyle that is consistent with natural cycles. You get the idea. Resist advertisers who want you to spend all your disposable income on stuff you do not need. Hold on to your possessions for as long as they last. In short, say “no” to those who profiteer from your bad habits and seek out knowledge on how to improve the quality of what you buy. Establish networks to promote your goals and support each other.

Once you assume responsibility and adopt a purposeful stance towards life, you will soon realise how everything is connected and that you cannot decouple health from politics, politics for economics, economics from social organisation. You will also understand on your own what else needs to be done to break the mould you currently find yourself in. Let the prevailing conditions serve as a reminder that we were in trouble long before the pandemic broke out and that the real solution, the one which guarantees that we have learnt from past mistakes and are thus prepared to act decisively, requires thoroughgoing reforms across the board.

The political machinations in both countries are as well-trodden as they are clear. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, want to create internal enemies to distract from their own failures and thereby maintain power. The internal enemy they have largely created is LGBTI people, and now they are instrumentalising the same minority to turn their populations against the European values everyone in the ‘forward thinking’ part of Europe is defending. In using the rainbow flag as an instrument to castigate whole countries, we might thus unwittingly contribute to isolating LGBTI people in countries such as Poland and Hungary, rather than bringing people along in support of equality.

Evelyne Paradis makes a fine point about not penalising entire countries as that risks alienating potential allies to the cause of diversity and equality. Turning this issue into yet another power struggle between the supranational and the national levels would only undermine the position of those minorities who are already under pressure. It seems, however, that the European Union is keen on pursuing its divisive rhetoric as it serves its own agenda of ultimately concentrating more power at the top.

The creation of an enemy that functions as a distraction or catalyst for sweeping reforms is a well-known tactic that incumbent forces use. It is neither a modern invention, nor peculiar to Hungary’s and/or Poland’s political realities. The EU does that too, including in this case. The goal of its leadership and spin doctors is to portray the Union as a victim, with its vaunted values being under attack, cultivate a sense of emergency and present itself as the solution to the impending crisis.

In plotting a collision course with the governments of Hungary and Poland, the Western countries that are de facto leading the EU seek to issue a call for unconditional unity behind their platform. The invocation of the threat to so-called “European values”, which are presumed as unambiguous and touted as non-negotiable, sets the stage for an all-or-nothing conflict. While the pretext is the rainbow flag and its connotations, the overarching theme is one of picking sides in a polarised debate: being with or against either of the parties involved. Such is a means of indirectly silencing all other voices as well as deprioritising or disinvesting from policies that are perhaps inexpedient under the prevailing conditions.

When the complexity of politics is reduced to simplistic notions of in- and out- groups at odds with each other, we witness the cultivation of monolithic identities and their subsequent clash. Those ad-hoc allegiances engender—and operate along the lines of—pernicious binary reasoning, such as if you do not wish to wave the rainbow flag you are diagnosed, in splendid pseudo-scientific fashion, with some latent phobia, whereas if you are bearing the flag you automatically qualify as an uncompromising thinker extraordinaire, again without any sense of nuance whatsoever. More importantly, the topic at hand is formulated as a question that is supposed to be answerable and answered with a generic yes-or-no, with one choice being strongly favoured. A plain “yes” thus provides the authorities with open-ended consent to operate as they see fit.

Nuance matters greatly in societies that want to uphold genuine diversity. This starts at the level of ideas. If one is not allowed to hold views that are altogether different from the accept ones, or which are permutations between the established extremes of “pro X versus against X”, then we cannot expect plurality of form to be made manifest and be allowed to flourish. The subtleties of discourse and critical thinking are lost when we are forced to treat a spectrum of many possible combinations or variations as a field with only two options where only one is welcome.

While the cases of Hungary and Poland are known (and of many other countries in the EU, such as with illiberal conservatism in Greece), the progressive forces cannot claim the moral high ground of enlightenment while they employ the same tactics as those of their opponents. If pluralism is still lost in the cacophony of virtue signalling, then it does not matter how exactly we end up in a state of affairs characterised by intolerance of the dissenting opinions. For instance, does it mean that if we support the salient point of diversity in gender self-determination and sexual orientation that we must necessarily endorse every policy that the most fervent LGBT+ activists will put forward? Does a more eclectic approach that remains in favour of the overall cause but questions the efficacy, adequacy, propriety of individual initiatives or policy programmes qualify as “with us” or “against us” in this inane, age-old classification of the world as good versus evil? There is no logical or material necessity of the sort: one can support the principle but still be opposed to—or remain sceptical of—individual implementations of it. Yet binary thinking forces us to assume such a case as an impossibility or, worse, to treat it as a troublesome deviation from the norm, an undesirable aberration, that should be eliminated with extreme prejudice.

Value tokenism creates its own superficial normativity along the lines of the desirable against the deplorable. It is a role-playing game where one must appear to be on the right side of the divide, carrying all the appropriate paraphernalia and behaving in accordance with the demands of their role as a moral agent.

This expectation of performative conformance is clearly discernible in the shrewd advertising of otherwise for-profit, non-morality-driven corporations, such as Volkswagen, which present their logo against a rainbow-styled background. “Oh look! VW wears our colours. Let’s forget about its dubious track record on everything else and join forces.” It is easy to fall into the trap of short-term opportunism. When an unscrupulous car manufacturing conglomerate, or any mega-corporation for that matter, appropriates your symbolism, you know there is some ulterior motive involved or that something is amiss: perhaps they do it to get good press and to whitewash their past, which ultimately helps boost sales, or maybe your cause is not as revolutionary as you are led to believe. There is much to consider.

It is no longer about the substantive matter, which in our case is what happens to the daily life of LGBT+ people. The focus is on maintaining the facade that the EU has set up to gather still more competences at the supranational level and, ultimately, extend the reach of the handful of Western countries that are de facto running Europe.

[ Read: On the appropriation of Europe (2020-09-28) ]

We are forced to revolve around a single item on the agenda and are pressured to assume either of the extreme positions. Whether by inventing an internal threat or by shifting focus towards some perceived alterity, the intent is to set aside the complexity of actual political affairs, which can only be resolved through thoroughgoing deliberations, and turn it into a power struggle that is formulated as a clash of homogeneous opposites. Those who do not want to get dragged into the squabble, those who may prefer dialogue or who think that there are other issues that should not get lost in the noise, are silenced or outright stigmatised/targeted as some sort of heathens or heretics.

Which brings us to the EU’s claims on its righteousness. One cannot help but point at its worrying design flaws. How can we expect the supranational level to be a bastion of democracy and fundamental values when its own policy-making is not democratic to begin with? The Commission, which is the EU’s effective government, has a leadership which consists of appointed members. The European Council, which practically decides on the broad themes of EU policy, is an inter-governmental institution where the power balance between member-states tilts decisions in favour of the powerful countries, typically the Franco-German tandem. While each country has an elected government, there is no electoral process for the system as such, to the effect that there is a sovereignty mismatch between the actual power of the European Council and its legitimacy. The European Central Bank is unaccountable as no body in the entire EU architecture can challenge its interpretation of price stability and, thus, cannot impose conditions on the particularities of its policy.

[ Watch: On the nation-state, democracy, and transnationalism (2021-05-29) ]

[ Read: ECB independence: concept, scope, and implications (2017-04-02) ]

Value tokenism obfuscates the political calculus of expediency that drives decision-making. In the EU’s recent history, it was expedient to do whatever it takes to save the euro (e.g. grinding austerity, unaccountable quantitative easing, …) because that set of institutional arrangements, older and newer, guarantees a structural imbalance of power in favour of the supranational level. It now is expedient to use the rainbow flag as a catch-all for the simplistic “we against them” that Western Europe, else the tacit Kerneuropa (core Europe), implies when it assumes the role of the knight in shining armour who toils against the forces of mischief.

The EU’s greater objective is to concentrate ever more power in the hands of operators in the Brussels-Paris-Berlin nexus. It wants us to take its claims at face value and just hope it will always be a benevolent force, a driver for progress or whatnot, which will consistently exercise its omnipotence with responsibility and moderation. Not mentioning the EU’s inherent flaws while getting dragged into its value tokenism to uncritically pick sides is irresponsible. Granting it all the power it wants to be the guardian of whatever cause is in vogue, without fundamentally refashioning its architecture in the interest of greater legitimacy and accountability, is dangerous.

Hi Prot. Thanks for this video. I share your concerns with the current trends in governance. If I’m allowed to make one suggestion, then I would ask to please make these briefer if possible, otherwise the point is lost in the details.

Thank you! Yes, I will try to keep them short going forward. 1-hour long presentations are a bit tiring (and I record them in one go as with all my videos, which makes them difficult for me as well).

Before we proceed: may I publish this exchange on my website? I will simply quote what is available here and just link to the video’s post. A brief introductory note will describe the context. If you want, I can write your name as it appears here, or you can give me the expanded version. Here is an example of a recent case where the author wanted to be identified: https://protesilaos.com/politics/2021-04-26-comment-autonomy/. And here is another where they preferred to remain anonymous: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2020-12-28-comment-unix-vs-emacs/.

(1) You are assuming that all civilians care and have opinions about every aspect of society. Unfortunately, this is not true as there is no time to study (and acquire detailed information about) everything [1]. In fact, some issues are so complex, with competing interests, that is impossible to have a compromise. Therefore, if a decision needs to be made, some members of the society will lose out, and many people don’t want to be in the position where they are forced to make a decision. Therefore, for practical reasons, civilians delegate the task of decision-making to a small number of individuals.

I think it is important we disaggregate the issues here. One is the problématique of people’s interest in the commons. The other is basically a division of labour.

With regard to the former, we need to account for the scale of operations. If you ask a Cypriot farmer in the mountains what is their opinion on the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, they will likely have none whatsoever, or none that is informed and useful. An observer of this phenomenon could attribute this to indifference, where the farmer simply does not care about politics and just blithely accepts policy programmes that have a profound effect on their daily life qua farmer without questioning them. The same observer could alternatively surmise that the apparent indifference is nothing but the result—the epiphenomenon—of powerlessness, as the Common Agricultural Policy is a grand bargain between EU Member States (within the context of the Multi-annual Financial Framework) where not even all Cypriot farmers united on a single platform will ever have any meaningful effect on.

As for the division of labour, there are indeed lots of complex issues where specialisation is required. Complexity is not only because of the issues themselves. At least a part of it is due to structural constraints. Think, for example, about the EU architecture and how much knowledge it takes to figure out who does what, for which cases, and to what extent. Then extend that to the complexity inside individual countries (and Cyprus, despite the multifaceted challenges of the Cypriot dispute, the Treaty of Guarantee and Treaty of Alliance, is a “fairly straightforward” unitary state as of this writing). An observer could argue that this highly stratified system of decision-making is a necessary outcome of the magnitude of phenomena we are confronted with. While another interpretation could be that the complexity of some events is compounded by the intricate hierarchical structures that concentrate power in some centres, depending on the scope of the policy in question.

What I am suggesting is that there is room for interpretation and the established order conditions our way of thinking about it and the world at-large.

Coming back to the joint themes of indifference and complexity, let us take them at face value. Let us posit that, by and large, people do not care and that, in general, people cannot make an impact anyway because of how difficult those issues are. If we accept those points, then why should our world insist that it is democratic or, rather, insist on the pretence that it is democratic, as I argue in the video? If people are indifferent and/or ignorant, then what are the representatives actually representing? And here we should clarify that representation is across the board, not particular to one policy (e.g. all farmers having a common voice in the form of a delegate). To the effect that such representation is exposed both to indifference and complexity. Again, if those are inescapable or immanent, what is being represented? “Nothing meaningful”, I would add.

Hence my claim that the legitimation function that is performed with the existing means is inadequate, to say the least.

(2) Governments are not elected because of their specific policies, but on broader ideology. This guides our decision in evolving circumstances.

Sometimes this is true. Other times it is a matter of the personality that assumes the leadership role. What is the ideology of the grand coalitions of Germany? What is the ideology of Mario Draghi in Italy who is supposed to be there in a ‘technical’ capacity?

Regardless, we still have the fundamental problem of representation. If the means by which the present order is legitimised are not sufficient (per the previous point), then we cannot be certain that a clearly delineated ideology is being prioritised or preferred.

Now consider the point of governments being elected on matters of ideology rather than policy. Why does every party make programmatic commitments, promising all sorts of legislative initiatives? Suppose though that those are irrelevant and the substantive aspect of policy does not matter in the formation of governments. Is that not another indication that we have a non-representative group of delegates in charge of affairs? To continue with the example of the farmers, if their specific demands for sustenance on their land are not met by the government they voted for, then that government does not represent them for those particular issues. Which links to complexity or, more specifically, to the invocation of the general will of the people, national interest, etc. Basically, it is said that the government represents the people at-large, which is a dubious claim (not to repeat what I cover in the video).

(3) People are inherently biased and selfish. (I don’t know if the latter is a consequence or a cause of our political system.) What this means is that it is impossible to design a subjective system where well-run corporations succeed and badly-run fail. Unfortunately, relationships matter.

Biased yes. To be impartial is very hard. More so in political affairs (and I do not purport to be unopinionated here). Which is why we should be careful with those who appeal to impartiality (e.g. Mario Draghi).

For selfishness, it depends on what we are talking about. Don’t families (at least some of them) have solidarity between their members? Do they not help each other out? Have you ever given money to a friend without asking it back, or have known of such cases? Have you ever done work without asking for remuneration, such as to help paint the neighbour’s house or train their dog?

Selfishness is part of human nature. Though it is ameliorated by social relations where the altruistic spirit is made manifest. Perhaps then, what really matters is the structure of incentives that apply to each case and how that conditions people into behaving individualistically or collectively. Here, too, we have a case where the established order may be conditioning our thinking about it and the world in general.

To the point about success or failure in the market, I think we already have those mechanisms in place for small-scale businesses (as noted in the video). Where things stop being about a level-playing field is as we move upwards in the hierarchy, where we find variations of the excuse that certain entities are “too big to fail” (or are pillars of the national economy, integral to the national interest, etc.). Bail-out programmes shift taxpayer money into the coffers of privately-held entities, to the effect that they socialise private loses. In Cyprus, “we the people” paid for the mismanagement of Marfin Laiki Bank and for the incompetence of the Central Bank that channelled billions of Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) into an insolvent corporation. The people were not asked about how their tax money should be used (again, non-representation) and they never got a share of the spoils, so to speak. When public money is used to pamper or rescue private gains, there is something fundamentally wrong.

Speaking of the ELA, this relates to what central banks are currently doing (and have been doing). No citizen ever elected a central banker or ever approved of any of those policies. Not even if we take the present means of legitimation as sufficient for the task (e.g. in the EU (and elsewhere) parliaments do not vote on the specifics of central bank policy, due to the institutional independence of the latter).

(4) You say “[Technocrats are] supposedly apolitical experts [who] are ideologues in their own right, [except that] their appeal to science is largely detached from the rigours of genuine science”. There is no denying that some technocrats are appointed by politicians because of their political beliefs to provide legitimacy to political decisions. However, the recent pandemic showed that, when faced with a genuine challenge, the appointment of true scientists is necessary.

Yes, the pandemic has shown that we need experts. We need specialists for practically everything in life. Though it is important we disambiguate expertise from technocracy in the literal sense of “rule by the experts”.

Let us put the pandemic aside as it is an ongoing issue which might still change how we think about it, and consider the previous crisis where governments appealed to expertise to fix the economy (or so the claim was). Those experts, economists in their training, were in agreement about reforms that would benefit creditors, such as in the form of bail-outs and then on the handling of non-performing loans.

The government which appointed those economists, was not impartial to begin with: governments being ideological, as you suggested, but also in practical terms because it had already picked sides by bailing out those “too big to fail” creditors (practically “too big to jail”), thus putting them in a strong negotiating position vis-à-vis those smaller entities who had taken on loans. Then the experts effectively confirmed what was a fait accompli: to continue to favour the creditors.

For the pandemic, I think we need to wait and see. One obvious constraint in terms of the management of the phenomena is that the years of austerity leading up to present day had rendered health services ineffective, underfunded, understaffed, and severely lacking in equipment.

This experience reminds us of the structural and/or intergenerational aspect of politics, where previous decisions determine the boundaries of the present horizon of possibilities. Those previous decisions were, in the immediate sense, about the 2008+ economic crisis, in which experts were not objective, strictly speaking (then we can ask how we were led to an economic order where exposure to financial risk was not properly accounted for, and so on).

In short, expertise is good to have and we should always take it into account, but we still have a lot of things to consider. The excuse that leads down the slippery slope of technocracy is that the experts are impartial and that their decisions should remain uncontested.

(5) One the point about the media’s role, I will offer one anecdote. The inquisitive journalist John Humphrys of BBC was interviewing someone from the English-speaking, Russia-backed, TV station Russia Today (RT) on the broadcasting of Russian propaganda by the station. Humphrys argued that because RT is owned by the government or Russia, it is biased. The response of the RT representative was that BBC is also government-owned, at which point Humphrys jubilantly stated that BBC is owned by the public who is paying the BBC licence fee.

It puts things in perspective.

[1] A trivial example for us Cypriots is the referendum on the Annan plan for Cyprus.

This relates to your first point about indifference and complexity. I left it last because that is how it appeared in your comment, but also because I want to tackle it on its own.

First off, I am not in favour of referenda over issues that cannot be answered with a simple Yes or No. The Annan Plan was such a case. The reason is that you are presented with a block vote, a choice of all or nothing. Does the “No” vote mean that citizens were against (i) a resolution per se, (ii) a resolution in the form of a federal system in general, (iii) a resolution in the form of the particular federal system, (iv) individual provisions of the plan, (v) other considerations and what would those be? We do not know from the result of the referendum itself. The vote is not reflective of opinions and, thus, non-representative.

Just to bring up the Brexit vote for a moment, Theresa May famously stated that “Brexit means Brexit”. That kind of meaningless statement shows us exactly how obscure the result of a referendum can be.

The internal complexity of the Annan Plan is not a justification for making the process of both its formation and eventual approval non-representative. For example, and without asking to reform the entire decision-making edifice, we could expect a new plan to be presented to parliamentarians with each provision being open to amendments/deliberation. Those drafts would then be brought together and reconsidered in light of the resulting consolidated text, and then taken back to parliamentarians for approval. Only afterwards would they put the proposal to a popular vote. The original draft and all the amendments would be available online, while the whole procedure would be live streamed and recorded for on-demand access by anyone. This is a more involved process for sure, but that is what popular participation entails. If we (not me and you, the general “we”) do not want all this seemingly inefficient back-and-forth, then why do we insist on having democracy or, as I noted earlier, why do we cling on to the appearance of democratic legitimacy?

[Prot note: This is a follow up to my reply]

As I said in my original reply, I agree with your overall thesis.

Regarding (1) I have a minor point, which doesn’t invalidate your conclusion. I agree with you that powerlessness leads to indifference (no power –> indifference). But this does not mean that we can fix indifference by giving people power (power -/> care).

Agreed! I cannot claim with confidence that giving people power or greater responsibility would necessarily make them care more, become competent, and the like. There would probably need to be complementary measures that would have to be adopted to essentially re-train people as citizens, but trying to enumerate them here or fathom their modalities is beside the point. We cannot know for sure unless we try or start thinking about trying. And even once we have had committed to a new course of action, our experience would not be immediately reproducible in other historical-cultural contexts. Life is messy and we tend to learn through trial and error, including when we try to be prescient and reasonable.

What follows is the text of the presentation:

#+TITLE: On the nation-state, democracy, and transnationalism
#+AUTHOR: Protesilaos Stavrou (https://protesilaos.com)

Hello everyone!  My name in Protesilaos, also known as Prot.  In this
video I will talk to you about the tension between democracy as a system
of collective decision-making and the nation-state as a form of
legal-institutional arrangements that depend on---and promote---a
modicum of homogeneity among the subjects of government.

I will elaborate on concepts such as the spurious theology that
underpins the concept of national sovereignty, the presence and
functioning of the demistate, transnationalism and its impact on
technocratic forms of governance, and more.

The notes of the presentation will be available on my website.  If you
are watching this on the video hosting platform, I will provide a direct
link to them in the description:
<https://protesilaos.com/politics/2021-05-29-nation-state-democracy-transnationalism/>

* Basics of the nation-state

The nation-state is an institutional order that combines three otherwise
distinct magnitudes: a culturally defined people, the territory of that
people, and the institutions that hold force in that area and which bind
those people together.

Unlike other forms of state, say, a city-state or an empire, the
nation-state is predicated on the notion that there exists a common
thread running through the aforementioned magnitudes, which can be
conceived and reified as the will or the character of a singular entity:
the nation.

This entity is supposed to have an inter-generational reach.  It is not
merely the totality of people who are alive in the given country.  And
this pertains to the cultural dimension of the people, which itself
developed organically through an extended period of time.  This
intertemporality between generations applies to everyday political
affairs to the point where it is considered a given.  For example,
treaties that were ratified by previous generations continue to be
legally binding, while legislation that could have been promulgated
centuries ago remains the law of the land.

We further understand the substantiation of this entity in terms like
the "national interest", which is supposed to derive from this common
thread that unites the three magnitudes (people, territory, state): it
is reasoned as the discernible constant, the /simile in multis/ that is
claimed to be indicative of the nation as such.

The nation-state is, therefore, the identification of a state apparatus,
else a mechanism for the exercise of legitimate force, with this
supra-personal and effectively eternal entity that is called "the
nation".  And so, when we refer to the national will, or the national
interest, we are, in effect, thinking in terms of those policies or
stratagems that are put forward by the state /qua/ legally personified
nation, the state as an agent of political initiative whose temporal
reach is itself intergenerational.

* Nation-statism and sovereignty

Sovereignty is the term we use to describe supreme political authority:
the power that overrides all others within a given institutional order.
It can also be explained as the quality or set of connatural qualities
we identify by seeking answers to two intimately linked questions:

+ Who governs in this legal-institutional order?
+ Where is the locus of power therein?

Sovereignty can, in principle, exist independently of the nation-state
though in the modern world it is largely identified with it.  We will
discuss some exceptions later.

Who governs and where the power resides within the confines of the
nation-state is almost always with the central government and thus with
a small group of people.  Think, for example, how the central government
of the United Kingdom used a marginal majority in an open-ended question
put to the referendum to push forward with leaving the European Union
even though some parts of the country were predominantly in favour of
remaining in the EU.  This is a case of knowing in practice "who
governs" and "where is the locus of power".  Same principle for all
matters, such as gaining accession to the EU or agreeing to the creation
of a European-level entity in the first place.  And so on for every
aspect of life.

For the nation-state, its claims on sovereignty spring from a normative
proposition on its legitimation: it is the only entity that can express
the will of the three magnitudes it combines and identifies with,
namely, the people, their homeland, and their institutions, and so its
very presence endows it with legitimacy.

"Legitimacy" here means the perception of justifiability in the use of
force, which practically translates as the acts of the state being
justified by the mere fact that it exists.

And by "use of force" we mean compulsion, not outright violence, though
the state does have that option as well.
* National sovereignty as secular theology

We have already covered the fact that the nation is reified as a
supra-personal entity with an inter-generational reach.  Now what
exactly that means remains a mystery or, rather, open to interpretation
by those whom we identify as being in a position to exercise governance.

This obscurity is by design as it provides the ruling class with the
means to adapt to evolving circumstances, interpreting both the nation
and figments such as the national will in whatever way is expedient.  It
is like a spurious theology where everything goes, only in this case it
concerns everyday affairs not something that happens in some other
domain of existence.

This decisively secular theology of nation-statism is expressed at least
since the French Revolution in Article 3 of the Declaration of the
Rights of Human and Citizen of 1789 (translation is mine from the
original in French):

#+begin_quote
The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.  No
body, no individual, can exercise authority that does not emanate
expressly from it. [EN]

Le principe de toute souveraineté reside essentiellement dans la nation,
nul corps, nul individu, ne peut exercer d'autorité qui n'en émane
expressement. [FR]
#+end_quote

This could be interpreted as saying that supreme political authority may
only be exercised when it comes directly from the people, though we know
from history and experience this not to be true and then we have the
problem of specifying the term "people".  All of them?  Some of them?
All the time?  On special occasions?  And is not the "people" the same
kind of abstraction that purports to express the common in the multitude
among individuals and, perhaps, across generations (e.g. the
constitution of the USA)?

A closer reading shows that the reference is to "the nation", not the
people.  Which leads us back to the supra-personal, eternal entity that
we already discussed.

We may therefore read the intent of Article 3 as a self-justification on
the exercise of supreme political authority.  The nation-state, which
already identifies with the nation, holds that all legitimate authority
must spring from it.  In that sense, it invokes the idea that the nation
is God-like for all intents and purposes.  It is its own cause, its own
telos.

* Representative democracy and national sovereignty

To avoid the obvious problems with the secular theology of national
sovereignty, the modern nation-state is supposed to operate as a
democracy or, more specifically, a representative democracy.  The idea
is that the national will can be expressed as some kind of average or
rough approximation through the voters or, rather, that the process of
periodic elections justifies a /fait accompli/ with regard to "who
governs" and "where is the locus of power".

Representative democracy offers the impression of a more immediate
source of legitimation than the kind of mumbo jumbo stipulated in
Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Human and Citizen of 1789.

Still, the notion of "representative democracy" is at best a euphemism,
at worst a contradiction in terms.  The /demos/ is the body of citizens,
meaning that a subset of the totality of the citizenry is not the demos
and the system is, /a fortiori/, not the rule of the demos (democracy) but
of a smaller group (oligarchy).  Only in a perfectly homogeneous set can
a subset be fully representative of the whole.

On the matter of homogeneity, think, for instance, that the European
Parliament has 705 members that decide on behalf of ~450 million people.
This breaks down on a per-country basis, though the ratios are still
dubious, such as 91 Members of the European Parliament representing more
than 80 million Germans, or Malta with 6 MEPs for half a million people.
How representative is that tiny sample?  And how representative is it
across the full range of policies over an extended period of time?

Furthermore, representation of any sizeable and diverse group of people
is highly unlikely to capture some uniform common will.  Imagine putting
100 strangers in the same room, who have not been indoctrinated to
express a singular will or who do not come from a special interest
group.  Have them deliberate on every aspect of politics.  Let them do
so substantively, from agriculture, to tourism, the arts, technology,
industry, foreign affairs...  Everything.  The chances of finding a
common will, which can then be passed on to a single representative of
this small group are, dare I say, fairly slim.

Now add to that the dimension of time.  A representative typically gets
to serve for a term of four to five years.  Not only do those random
strangers need to agree on everything today, they are also supposed to
remain in agreement for the duration of the representative's term,
despite evolving circumstances that can affect each of them differently.
Moreover, they must commit to such a deal ahead of time.  The problem
grows exponentially the further away power is from quotidian life.
Representation does not scale well.

However you go about it, representative democracy in terms of a
nation-state is an oligarchy: relatively few people in power.

* Representative democracy and individual policies

Not only are citizens supposed to express an immutable collective will,
they are also assumed to have provided their consent to decisions that
do not accept their input at all or in any meaningful sense.  For
example, the operations of the monetary function of the state, performed
by an institutionally independent central bank.

Central banks manipulate the macroeconomics of their area of authority
by influencing the nominal growth rate in GDP, which relates to the
inflation rate.  They do so in accordance with their mandate or within
their remit.  That of the European Central Bank is enshrined in the
European Treaties and pertains to "price stability": a nebulous concept
that can mean just about anything and which is further complicated by
the ECB's own definition of an inflation in the common basket of goods
that is "below, but close" to 2% over the medium-term.  Below, but how
close exactly?  And how many days, months, years stand for the
medium-term?  In other words, what is the objective criterion?

Was the demos asked explicitly about this open-ended power?  No.  Is the
demos being consulted on what the effective interpretation is?  No.  The
specific measures?  No.

Over the last few years, all major central banks have been conducting
what is known as "quantitative easing".  This basically involves the
expansion of their balance sheet.  They create new money with which they
buy assets from the private sector, i.e. mega-corporations such as banks
and major industrial entities.  Central banks are channeling oodles of
cash into the coffers of those corporate actors, shielding them from
loses on their investments.  This added security further amplifies the
concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people, as the corporation
which has been saved from likely losses amidst an uncertain economic
environment can use its newfound money to reinforce its oligopolistic
hold in the sector it operates in.

The bonanza continues because wage repression for the average person
means that their diminishing spending power cannot push prices higher to
expose the inflationary expansion.  Also, investors use the fresh funds
they got from the central bank to buy luxury goods or items which do not
count towards the nominal inflation target of the central bank.

Was the demos involved in this apparent upward distribution of wealth?
No.

The infamous apologia is that central banks enjoy so-called "output
legitimacy": they are justified by fulfilling their mandate based on how
they interpret it.  Which is the same kind of circular reasoning of the
secular theology of the nation-state.

* Sovereignty and the demistate

We have already clarified that "representative democracy" is neither
representative nor a democracy.  It is an oligarchy.  Yet this oligarchy
is not limited to the legal-institutional order, as it encompasses
certain private actors who exist in symbiotic relationship with the
nation-state.

Banks are again part of this, as we just explained with the cycle
between the central banks and the private sector and how the interplay
between the two reinforces both of them, each in pursuit of their own
ends.

The same is true in every other economic sector.  When you hear about
"national champions" in business, or calls to bail out some company
because of its critical role in the economy, you can expect that the
matter is not strictly about business: it concerns the interwoven
interests of state and private elites.

For example, the economic competition between America and China also
unfolded in the world of a mobile phone's Operating System, as Google
effectively blocked Huawei from using Android.  While this was aligned
with the foreign policy ambitions of the US administration, it also
served to hinder a major current or potential competitor from the
market.

What we thus notice is the presence of an intermediate stage between the
public and the private, which I name the "demistate" and which I define
thus:

#+begin_quote
The social class comprising private interests that are enabled,
supported, protected, or otherwise sustained by the state's acts of
sovereignty, which controls the entry points, critical infrastructure,
or other requisite factors of economic conduct, and which, inter alia,
provides state-like functions in domains or fields of endeavour outside
the narrow confines of profit-oriented production and consumption in
exchange for a legally sanctioned oligopolistic privilege in the markets
it operates in.
#+end_quote

Basically this means that some corporations are extensions of the state,
partners in statecraft, in a mutually beneficial relationship with it.
And all this is wrapped in the narrative of national sovereignty and its
claims on legitimacy.

* The demistate and elections

Let's return back to the point of representation and consider both
day-to-day politics and election cycles.  For a new political initiative
outside the establishment to gain popularity, it has to reach out to
people.  Within the boundaries of a nation-state that usually means that
it has to rely on telecommunication media.

The first problem is that a new political initiative that wants to enact
thoroughgoing reform has no funding.  It must start with volunteers.  So
it depends, among others, on the charisma of its founders and their
devotion to the cause.  To secure more funds, such as through donations,
it needs more members.  So it has to find a platform to reliably connect
with an audience.

Platforms like so-called "social media" are controlled by the world's
corporate elite in the tech sector.  Same for the infrastructure of
computing technology that underpins those media's activities.  So a new
political initiative is effectively exposed from day one to the whims,
the secretive algorithmic machinations, or generally the vicissitudes in
the maintenance of those proprietary walled gardens.

Then we have media such as TV and newspapers, whose ownership is
by-and-large in the hands of a handful of individuals in each and every
country.  Again we are talking about an oligopoly that is linked with
the state in a symbiotic relationship.  Think, for example, how much
power rests in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, the Axel Springer group,
Silvio Berlusconi, and so on.  A new political initiative must go "on
air" during elections to communicate its message.  If it says things
that run contrary to the vested interests then it will either see no
prime time, or will get a tiny fraction of it, while exposure will be
placed on those issues that are suiatable to the media proprietors'
agenda.

To top it off, the incumbent forces will use the results of the
elections to claim that "the people" were given the chance and decided
not to support this newfound movement.  The assumption is that of fair
competition, kind of like a Marathon run, even though the odds are
stacked in favour of incumbent forces, from the distribution of
resources to the reach they have through the media.

Elections are not a level-playing field.  The fact that they take place
does not, in and of itself, mean that we have democracy or that the
oligarchy that is in place is representative in any meaningful sense.
More so when we factor in electoral systems, such as district
representation as opposed to proportional representation, or how a
government can have an effective share of a tiny percentage of the
citizens, yet still form a majority.

Faces change, the structure remains constant.

* Platformarchs and the free market

The demistate reflects a key aspect of the globally predominant
organisation of society, which is the two-tier system of economic
relations along the divide of security and precarity.  We have the
privilaged forces who enjoy the direct or indirect support of the state,
which amounts to protection from competition, and then we have everybody
else who operates in accordance with principles that are closer to a
free market.

The protected class consists of what I call the "platformarchs".  This
is another way of describing the demistate, as those platform owners or
rulers are the ones who control key resources or infrastructure in each
of the sectors they operate in.  They face no real competition and are
state-like in their supreme authority over their business field as
enablers and de facto regulators of it.

Think, for example, how much power Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
and Apple wield over the Internet or over how people can experience the
Internet.  Same principle for car manufacturers, big pharma, the upper
echelons of the food industry, mass media, sports franchises, and so on.

This links back to the uneven distribution of power and resources in
society.  We already discussed how that takes the form of a glass
ceiling for new political initiatives with a reform agenda, and how it
translates into policies that are designed to further the interests of
the platformarchs, as in the case of quantitative easing policies.

Couched in those terms, the kernel of free market that we see at the
level of smaller scale businesses serves as a proxy for legitimation.
It is said that those with the money worked hard for it and earned it
rightfully.  What is not mentioned, is how they benefit from legal
arrangements they have unscrupulously helped design.  Think of how
multinationals can maintain an army of lawyers and accountants which
they use to siphon their profits through preferential tax jurisdictions,
i.e. tax havens, to erode their tax base or, in other words, to not pay
their fair share.  Same principle for platformarchs who benefit from
historically unfair privilages, such as contracts made with a corrupt
regime.

Let's simplify this.  In Western media you hear about the notorious
"Russian oligarchs" who hold most of the wealth in Russia.  Well, the
same is true for American oligarchs, German, French, British, Italian,
etc.  Don't let the pretenses on democracy make you think otherwise.
And don't generalise the elements of free market activity at the small
scale into how power arrangements are ossified at the top.

* The nation-state, transnationalism, and the framework-state

The nation-state has to be treated as a product of history, which was
made possible by a given state of technology that allowed economies of
scale.  In this day and age where it is easier for multinational
corporations to shift profits across the world's jurisdictions, and
which can easily gain access to new markets, we witness the trend for
evolving the nation-state into a component of transational state
arrangements.  A case in point is the European Union, which had started
off as a trade agreement and evolved into a single market before
becoming what it is today.

The EU is, in effect, a federal system whose members are nation-states,
yet which enjoys sovereignty or "competences" over key areas of policy,
such as the common European market and the monetary function performed
by the European Central Bank for all countries whose official currency
is the Euro.

From a business standpoint, what the EU is effectively providing is a
system of rules that allows mega-corporations in some countries to tap
into a wider market than that of their host country.  It further sets in
place a system of economic governance that depoliticises the national
level by removing any meaningful fiscal and monetary space for
differentiated policy actions.  It is a mechanism for imposing
uniformity and thus centralisation, wrapped up in a rhetoric of
diversity, lofty European values, and the like.

The point is that the scale of operations changes from the nation-state
to the continent-state or, more broadly, the framework-state.  The
/simile in multis/ is no longer defined in national terms, but as a
narrative of geography or sphere of influence within a politically
delineated space.

We are therefore at a point where the nation-state no longer holds
primacy as it once did.  It will remain relevant, though it becomes part
of a multi-faceted distribution of competences.  Regardless, we still
experience the exact same problems of legitimation as before, namely,
that "who governs" and "where is the locus of power" are answered in a
way that does not point to the demos.  The transnationalist drift means
that power moves further away from home in some other capital or to a
more dynamic and complex set of relations involving international
treaties and trade accords.

Regardless, there is no inherent conflict or incompatibility between the
nation-state and whatever framework-state it is integrated with because
the latter effectively piggybacks on the legitimacy that the former has
established for itself.

* Democracy and the mismatch of sovereignty

What the shift towards transnationalism reminds us of, is a fundamental
problem with the claims on sovereignty made by nation-states that
purport to be democratic.  And that is a mismatch between the two
magnitudes of sovereign authority, which I define as popular sovereignty
and state sovereignty.

In a democracy, we have the demos in charge of its own affairs.  This
necessarily means that the scale of operations is small, as in an
ancient city-state like Athens.  In such a case, we have the citizens
participating directly in quotidian affairs: the formation, enactment,
or refashioning of institutions comes from the citizens, it frames their
decisions, yet remains open to be redefined by them.  This is a case of
autonomy, else rule by self (here meaning the collective self of the
demos).

What we call "the state" is thus the instantiation of an agreement
between citizens that delimits scopes of authority and defines roles in
the running of daily affairs.  The citizens create institutions with
which they regulate their collective life.  Those institutions are, in
turn, open to revaluation by the citizens.  So there exists a virtuous
cycle of legitimation and accountability between the creation or reform
of institutions and their workings.  In a democracy, sovereignty is this
virtuous cycle.

When that cycle turns vicious, when either of the two analytical
constructs gains more power over the other, we notice a drift away from
democracy.  If popular sovereignty runs unchecked, we have the rule of
the mob, else ochlocracy.  If, on the other hand, state sovereignty
becomes practically unaccountable, the system turns into an oligarchy of
some sort or an outright tyranny.

Representative democracy in a nation-state is an oligarchy, because
state sovereignty is effectively self-justified, while participation
exists in name only.

Making the scale of operations ever larger, lets the tensions grow, to
the point where citizens are effectively alienated from the institutions
that determine their life.  A case of heteronomy, else rule by an other,
which compounds the actual unaccountability of the institutional order.

* Gigantism and democracy are irreconcilable

This brings us to the realisation that we cannot escape the realities of
locality.  The greater the scale of operations, the more distant it
becomes from life in human communities.  And thus, this propensity to
concentrate power at the centre, this highly structured model of
top-down governance, leads to the aggrandisement of inequalities and,
ultimately, the uneven distribution of power and control.

I call this phenomenon "gigantism", where a hierarchy develops a sense
of self and an instinct of self-preservation and proliferation.  We see
this unfolding at the state level, but also in the workplace.  Democracy
is considered the norm in the modern era, the flaws of existing systems
notwithstanding, yet a large part of one's adult life is likely to
involve some hierarchical form of rule at their work.

There is no democracy as an inter-subjective experience that occurs on a
daily basis.  Workers do not get to decide for their workplace.  Instead
they are abstracted away as "human resources" or as input that is
evaluated in terms of "human capital".  Those generalisations are akin
to how "the people" can express through some representative qua medium
"the national interest"; the set of policies that some bureaucracy aloof
from the fray spins a narrative about.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the current pandemic have made the case
for gigantism ever more unappealing.  The more it grows, the more
distant it gets from the demos or, rather, it makes the concept of a
demos irrelevant.  Instead, it engenders a type of oligarchy whose
claims on legitimacy are less about the will of the people or the nation
and more about the insight of the experts.

Technocracy is the new normal.  Except those supposedly apolotical
experts are ideologues in their own right and their appeal to science is
largely detached from the rigours of genuine science, which involves
remaining dubitative and inquisitive about one's own findings.  Imposing
one's supposedly objective expertise as an edict is contrary to the
scientific ethos of scepticism.  Do you think, for instance, that the
experts who conduct quantitative easing have figured out all that
science has to offer and all they could find was how to give more money
to the demistate?

Democracy is about alternatives, not the ideological excuse of "There Is
No Alternative", not this false determinism where impersonal forces
somehow justify the erosion of liberties and the rise of what
effectively is a technotheocracy.

* Concluding remarks

On that final point about technocracy, I have a publication about
Science and Scientism but I will not elaborate on this right now.  You
can find the text on my website:
<https://protesilaos.com/books/2021-04-28-notes-science-scientism/>.

The main takeaway from this presentation is that democracy and the
nation-state are mutually exclusive, hence the advent of representative
democracy, which we already dismissed as a non-representative oligarchy.

We are at a point in history where even the appeal to representation is
being discontinued by the powers that be.  And if those trends continue,
we will witness a further reduction or degredation in the elements of
democracy that we still enjoy; elements of democracy that previous
generations fought for and which need to be reclaimed and expanded upon.

The nation-state was never instrumentalised in the service of the demos.
Instead it appropriated the democratic discourse by identifying the
citizens, the country, and the culture with the state, making it kind of
a mortal sin to challenge the legitimacy of the institutional order as
that would be equivalent to doubting or outright attacking the existence
of the nation.

Transnationalism, understood as the framework-state that brings together
nation-states in pursuit of common objectives, is increasingly becoming
everyday normality and it blends in together with technocracy to
gradually change the narrative about its own legitimacy.  Again, this is
a disguised attempt to undermine the spirit of democracy and to
brainwash citizens into thinking that they cannot enact change in their
milieu due to the increasing complexity of the world that only some
enlightened experts with their nimbleness of thought may truly grasp.

The world can be made simple though.  It is all a matter of perspective
and mentality.  It starts small, by organising with actual people at the
local level, developing communities with them that are predicated on
genuine solidarity, and by campaigning for tangible reforms in their
life.

In a democracy, it would be unacceptable that amid a pandemic some of us
do not know whether we will have enough money for next week's groceries.
We are at a stage where the systemic failures are apparent and we
recognise how the current structures are designed to maintain a highly
stratified society where the vast majority live in precarious
conditions.

Things must be critically reconsidered and that starts at the level of
concepts and theories, for it is impossible to pursue alternatives you
have not fathomed.  It is pointless to attempt to change the world if
you do not first reprogram your mindset.

Great talk, Prot!

I do have a question. When you talked about “geeks vs normies”, you seemed to be talking more about emacs than autonomy in general.

But talking about the general case, do you think it is normal to give up autonomy? I believe that autonomy is the exception, precisely for its cost.

Although I am autonomous with my computer, I am not with a car: I have no proper idea of it’s inner workings and could not fix one without help. For another example, I am not autonomously when I eat, as I live in the shadows of who grows the food.

I have even read that democracy is about giving up autonomy, and even though I feel uncomfortable with this claim, I do not believe I have strong arguments to refute it.

Sure, I agree and understand your point about “it’s not binary”, and that small steps matter more. But when I contemplate all the manifestations of my heteronomy, I am forced to accept that they are the norm, and that I should choose wisely where to pay the cost for autonomy.

My reply is copied below. For a more abstract approach, consider my Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) as well as On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14):

Hello Nathan and thanks for taking the time to write this! I will pin your comment if you do not mind, so that others may read this as well.

With regard to “geeks vs normies” I was indeed referring to the narrower sense within the computer world. Perhaps I should have generalised it, though I felt it would have taken the talk in another tangent.

As for giving up autonomy or not having autonomy in particular cases, I think we need to go a bit further than what I discussed here, namely, to think of autonomy not just in terms of the individual person but of groups of people at-large. Furthermore, we need to disambiguate this collective freedom from private omniscience, in the sense that you are free only if you yourself have expertise in everything that affects your life.

If we generalise autonomy to the interpersonal level, which applies to free software as well, then we realise that it does not matter if each of us is an expert in everything (which is impossible), but whether someone within the community can be an expert in one thing and share that knowledge with the rest of us, and so on for each person to do their part. So we apply division of labour.

“Division of labour” should not be mistaken as the exclusivity of a specific economic ideology. It occurs naturally. Even a particular program like Emacs requires a group of people to bring together their particular domains of expertise to continue its development. One person cannot do it, so if we were to adopt a strictly individualistic conception of autonomy then no one would be free when using Emacs because no one could claim to be an absolute expert in every single part of it. Extend that to everything in life and you get the notion that autonomy would be outright impossible.

Whereas by working within a framework that incentivises or enables cooperation, such as copyleft free software licenses, we can benefit from each other’s contributions and together—jointly—partake in liberty.

Couched in those terms, what I discussed in this video about autonomy/heteronomy is only a very narrow aspect of those concepts to help us get started into thinking about them.

Now let’s consider the case of the car that you mention. Even as a community we are alienated from the internal workings of the car—we are rendered heteronomous—not because no one among us can understand how the thing works, but because the business interests that produce those items have an agenda in making it difficult or outright illegal to experiment with them and share our findings. This is the same with closed computer hardware (think about the calls for a “right to repair”), patented seeds, paywalled science, and so on. In those cases, the norm is heteronomy not because we cannot collectively exercise control over those means but because the institutional arrangements in place are designed to deny us our autonomy (again “autonomy” in the collective sense).

As for democracy, I would agree with the idea that democracy or indeed anything that has an intersubjective dimension is about giving up a part of one’s individuality. So if we think of individuality as individual autonomy then, yes, that would mean giving up some autonomy. Though once we factor in what I mentioned above, which basically is summarised as “individual freedom can be experienced consistently within an environment that facilitates and enables it”, then we have to think of this issue not as a loss of private autonomy but as a boost to it. And here we may re-use the notion of the division of labour and consider the simple case of the computer: if an individual does not want to give up any of their individuality, then the only way to use a computer is to produce it from scratch, which means to go around the world gathering all the raw materials, having the knowledge and machinery to develop each and every component and then to assemble them all together, develop an OS, and so on. That would not be possible. Plus, we could ask from where did such an individual gain all that knowledge and machinery from? They must have still benefited from a prior collective effort (prior science, for example). Thus we see that even for such a particular issue, giving up some aspect of self actually helps expand the horizons of what one can do on their own exactly because they are not absolutely “on their own”.

In conclusion, I wanted to present the notion of autonomy and relate it to some experiences which I think are familiar to a lot of people. To generalise those findings, we must go a step further and start thinking in terms of relations between people and then about the systemic or structural magnitudes within which those relations unfold (such as the institutional order).

Sorry if this is a long reply. I hope I have remained on topic.

By the way, can I publish this on my website? I can include your name and link to your personal page, or I can keep you anonymous. Whatever you prefer. I just think it would be nice to share this thread.

Thanks to Nathan for raising the question and agreeing to publish this piece!

Mises notes:

Under interventionist ideas, it is the duty of the government to support, to subsidize, to give privileges to special groups. The idea of the eighteenth-century statesmen was that the legislators had special ideas about the common good. But what we have today, what we see today in the reality of political life, practically without any exceptions, in all the countries of the world where there is not simply communist dictatorship, is a situation where there are no longer real political parties in the old classical sense, but merely pressure groups.

While the identification of political parties and, by extension, ideologies with pressure groups does seem plausible, the notion of “real political parties” hints at an idealised era in which such entities and their underlying values were neither governed by minority concerns nor catered to parochial interests. We are led to assume that those “real political parties” laboured to promote nothing more than the general good: a magnitude that is supposed to be both unambiguous and decisively different from the interest of any particular pressure group.

For reasons that remain obscure, those same entities that once strove for the wellness of the whole changed into their conceptual alterity: they lost sight of their original cause as stewards of the common good and became interventionist. Could it be that they always were that way? They always served special interests and, for whatever reason, had to make further concessions towards other groups in order to retain their grip on power?

Unless we can identify a clear cause that turns “real political parties” into mere “pressure groups”, we have no reason to stand by this romantic view of the world of yester year. We are also not compelled to provide credence to this narrative by virtue of the absence of evidence on there being such exalted political entities; parties “in the old classical sense” that partook in enlightened governance without ever being tempted into reaping the short-term gains of clientelism.

Rather than start from a hypothesis of a once perfect world that has since declined, let us acknowledge the imperfect nature of the human being. We have our character flaws as individuals: we are tricked by biases, we sometimes cannot help but let our passions take over rational thinking, we act in accordance with our instincts when the need arises without observing the ethical framework that informs the zeitgeist.

The individual’s imperfections spill over into the world of ideas in general and politics in particular. For the most part, humans operate under conditions of uncertainty. They are not sure about what the best course of action is, in no small part because they lack the means to interpret the interplay of contributing factors to emergent phenomena. They lack perfect insight, else omniscience. Scientists, philosophers, engineers, artists, all have opinions—justified and informed, yet opinions nonetheless—about their respective field of endeavour; opinions that they typically evaluate using methods that appear to be appropriate for sorting out falsehoods. Areas were complete certitude can be asserted are fairly few and narrow in scope.

[ Read: The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30) ]

The world of politics is replete with contradictory views. Those who live on the borderlands may have a greater interest in foreign policy vis-à-vis the neighbouring country than those who reside further in to the hinterland and who have no experience of life on the border or lack information about its day-to-day reality. Those who have been exposed to physical abuse, domestic violence, or bullying may be more sensitive to such issues than the ones who are ignorant about the matter. Individuals with the same background may still react differently to stimuli, meaning that people from the same locality or group may not necessarily occupy convergent lifeworlds. And the same for all other scenaria.

Differences of opinion also arise from the scale in which decision-making unfolds. If the affairs of some village are ultimately decided by bureaucrats in the capital, then there is a good chance that the bureaucrats are not accounting for the specifics that hold true in that milieu because their role, their mandate and institutional outlook, is to cater to some broader interest.

[ Read: Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) ]

This is about the principle of subsidiarity and the vertical separation of powers in which decisions should be adopted as close to the citizens as possible: so village affairs are to be determined by the villagers, regional issues by the region’s authorities, and so on.

Subsidiarity is an appealing proposition, yet it cannot be applied as elegantly in practice when the scale of the polity contains strata that are far removed from any particular locality. There will always be cases where some higher stratum’s policies have permanent effect on lower strata, such as a periphery’s plan to build a road network which in turn limits the possible courses of environmental action in a given community that is disproportionately affected by the new infrastructure.

Subsidiarity is, in essence, a principle that must be interpreted in light of values that underpin modern statehood: internal homogeneity, territorial and legal-institutional integrity. In ideal terms, nation-states safeguard their unity by balancing out the good of the place (some locality) with the good of the space (the nation at-large). This holds true for aspiring nations such as the European Union, whose idiosyncratic federal system is meant to at once promote a sense of “Europeanness” while respecting the diversity of Europe’s people and, in particular, while forming its rules through inter-governmental mechanisms.

[ Read: On the appropriation of Europe (2020-09-28) ]

Banal nationalism and the modest or tacit Europeanism of present day Europe rest on the belief that a people can (i) be conceptualised as an indivisible whole, (ii) that such an entity can have a singular aspiration that those in power may themselves discern and express, and (iii) policies in pursuit of this common interest do not undermine or otherwise frame in a negative way the well-being of those yet-to-be-expressed, as in the case of inter-generational affairs.

Perhaps with the exception of some communities and micro nations, all states in the world have populations that are characterised by varying degrees of diversity. Those differences may be cultural, educational, social, economic, ideological, situational. For there to be a “national interest” or common good, well-meaning authorities must exercise discretion by labouring under the assumption that some abstract simile in multis is present within the population and that such a pattern is what is genuinely representative of the citizenry as such.

While the conduct of accommodating competing agendas may be a prerequisite to governance, it nonetheless entails the probability of discriminating against certain niches in pursuit of some estimated average opinion. For our purposes of entertaining Mises’ assumption, let us grant that such discrimination is neither ideological nor premeditated and that it only follows from the very mechanics of treating a diverse group as if it were homogeneous. Even with such a brave hypothesis we cannot afford but acknowledge that those in power may well be enabling some pressure group’s stratagems, such as by preferring the interests of those who benefit from, say, the single market and common currency that the state imposes upon its subjects.

Even if the common mind is sometimes possible to be expressed, we have to account for the complexity of the world. Suppose that a unified defence policy is to the benefit of all groups that make up the body politic. Consider, further, that this policy requires the maintenance of a standing army. As an army’s morale is of paramount importance to its effectiveness, shrewd governors will seek to implement measures that are not strictly about defence, yet can be conceived as contributing to the overarching objective of operational military efficiency. Those can be the instruction of a common language, or the formulation of a titular narrative such as in the form of a single religion or secular doctrine that encapsulates the vaunted essence of the political whole’s unity. This top-down homogeneity may be instrumental to the realisation of the general interest in effective defence, yet it inevitably undermines or otherwise works against other issues like cultural diversity.

[ Read: Against the secularised theology of statecraft (2019-06-14) ]

However one goes about it, the conclusion is that the “real political parties” are a chimera. Mises’ prior truth is but an expedient story to provide credibility to the claim that civilisation is experiencing a decline which is caused by resurgent interventionism and which, in turn, is due to the transformation of the once-true political parties into associations of lobbyists.

The point is that there is no practical way in which a fairly large body politic is ever expressed uniformly, not just for one issue in a given moment, but for all matters that affect it over time. It thus follows that all policies necessarily involve a degree of arbitrariness and that even well-meaning officials will inadvertently disadvantage some constituency over others in any given domain of decision-making.

Democracy was never conceived as a system where an enlightened elite expresses the general good. It rather was predicated on the realisation that through continuous compromise in the Ecclesia (Athens) or Apella (Sparta), formalised as the political process, all citizens who enjoyed equal status could balance out their competing interests over the long term. An imperfect system that was deemed better than other yet more imperfect systems of the time.

Which brings us to the very notion of interventionism. Before we proceed, however, let us revisit Mises’ claims on the topic:

It was not the idea of the eighteenth-century founders of modern constitutional government that a legislator should represent, not the whole nation, but only the special interests of the district in which he was elected; that was one of the consequences of interventionism. The original idea was that every member of the legislature should represent the whole nation. He was elected in a special district only because there he was known and elected by people who had confidence in him.

We have already argued that representing the whole nation is both practically impossible and does not necessarily ameliorate the ostensible innate faults of interventionism. Those representatives may still have to discriminate against certain particular interests in their quest to pursue the often elusive or outright arbitrary common good.

Now suppose that none of the above holds true and that Mises is right that interventionism is the force that inwardly corrupted constitutional government. What is interventionism? And, conversely, what exactly does non-interventionism entail when couched in terms of such a constitutional political order?

Non-intervention would amount to the absence of regulation by the government. No government policy should determine any sphere of life.

• Should this principle apply universally? If yes, then the government has no reason to exist, because every single law is, in effect, a medium through which the rule-makers seek to form reality in accordance with their will rather than letting it develop organically.

• If some degree of interventionism is to be allowed, then we must necessarily create a classification of areas of policy where a few of them are presumed to be more important than others in that they merit government initiative to render them possible or desirable. Who decides what those policies are and why is this meant to be an objectively correct or politically neutral course of action?

Strictly speaking, non-interventionism either (1) leads to the kind of anarchy that annuls the sort of constitutional government Mises refers to, in which case the entire mythology of a golden age of “real political parties” becomes irrelevant, or (2) it introduces profoundly ideologically driven arbitrariness under the guise of vague concepts like the “national interest” in which special pressure groups stand at the receiving end of favourable policies under the pretext that they are pillars of that presumed national unity and wellness.

Anarchy would itself qualify as a kind of variagated interventionism in the sense that all political conduct involves purposeful concerted action to regulate inter-personal or inter-subjective affairs in accordance with certain principles or in pursuit of ends that would not have been observed or hypostatised in the absence of politics. Anarchy is political throughout, though our argument here is that Mises’ non-interventionism would annul 18th century constitutional government once implemented faithfully—so it does not support his thesis.

As for the tacit ideocentric disposition of non-interventionism that favours special interests, let us revisit the example of the common defence policy. Suppose that decision-makers have qualified defence as worthy of government intervention while they otherwise remain committed to a non-interventionist form of governance. Now the government wants to raise and maintain a standing army. Should it not, for matters of homeland safety, also support the industries that produce arms? And what about the protection of critical infrastructure, such as airports, roads, power plants? Those must be instrumentalised as well. Same for the control over key resources like oil or natural gas. Extend this to espionage and diplomacy, which inevitably influence international trade… Before you realise it, the government’s pursuit of the “national interest” in defence policy can only be implemented as a series of exemptions and favourable deals for particular pressure groups. All while rendering void and meaningless the claims on the overall non-interventionist outlook of policy.

The theorist who expounded on the merits of non-interventionism in vitro will never be able to criticise non-interventionism in vivo when catch-all concepts such as the general good or the national interest are part of the equation and actually guide political discourse. It simply is naive to grant one virtually limitless power as well as a blank check they can cash in at any moment and expect them not to abuse such privilege.

Mises’ tenuous propositions notwithstanding, there exists a more subtle problem with the arguments in favour of non-interventionism. They rest on the presumption that the status quo ex ante is a good starting point to roll back government interventions and that whatever injustices will be corrected organically. In other words, the structural aspects of the human world are altogether disregarded or not given sufficient consideration.

Think, if you will, of land ownership. And suppose that the government stops implementing all policies that contributed to the concentration of property in the hands of a few economic overlords. Consider then that the government also repeals all legislation that pertains to labour rights. All the government is left to do is treat property rights as sacrosanct. The landless will have to work for the land owners, while the latter will be in a position to impose odious working conditions, employ thugs that kill any attempt at unionisation at its birth, and, generally, behave ruthlessly in their exploitation of the workers. In a system where interventionism is possible, the oppressed can at least hope that they may influence the government to do something in order to ease their pains. In the absence of such an option all they are left with is the course of bloody revolution.

It may be argued that the landed gentry would have a rational interest not to exploit its workers and not push them over the edge. While interesting, there is no reason to believe in the likelihood of such a hypothesis especially in light of the history of economic relations, the current working conditions in the Global South, the overall precarity of living standards in so-called “advanced economies”, and the misconduct of mega-corporations both towards their employees but also with respect to the ecosystem.

In Politics and Ideas Mises fails to appreciate the peculiar brand of interventionism that defines capitalism: state intervention in favour of capital owners and, in particular, platformarchs. This is the kind of intervention that is conceptualised by apologists of the establishment as ideology-free despite the fact that it follows from the arbitrary classification of areas of policy into those that should be instituted through legislation and those that should remain “hands off”. The doctrine of laissez-faire economics and concomitant governance rests on this arbitrariness, such as in its argument for the rule of law in the preservation of private property parallel to its offensive against labour rights and other such “impediments” to “unfettered” business operations.

[ Read: On platformarchs, the demi-state, and deplatforming (2021-01-26) ]

Notions of “crony capitalism” or “corporatism” are often used to describe the modern world’s economic order. While they do denote some kind of corruption or decadence, they too hint at a mythicised golden age in which capitalism was not plagued by those evils; a capitalism where markets were free and everyone was happy… That paradise on earth never existed, unless we count the enrichment of colonists as “free market” when they appropriated the land of indigenous peoples all while engaging in slave trade. The same colonists who were subjects of vast empires that actively exploited large parts of the world.

This is not to suggest that Mises would have argued in favour of such historical events. It rather is an attempt to highlight once again the indifference of non-interventionist theorists on the status quo ex ante and how they wish to dissolve present injustices through means whose adequacy is questionable at the outset.

It is true that a government wielding its resources in the benefit of pressure groups is inevitably discriminating against other groups which can, inter alia, mean that it distorts what could have otherwise happened in the economy. It is also true that non-intervention may help calcify existing inequality and its accompanying unjust structural distribution of power.

In which case we have two broad options: (1) either we embrace anarchy and acknowledge that politics might potentially evolve without any obsession on economic efficiency as a brand of communitarianism and localism outside the confines of the eighteenth-century-style constitutional government (i.e. nation-statism) or (2) we accept interventionism as an epiphenomenon of politics and put our efforts into recalibrating our political order so that collective life results in an equilibrium between competing interest groups, which implies more interventionism, though this time decisively against platformarchs.

In concrete terms, one cannot be alienated from their right to free speech by the unilateral act of another person, for that would undermine the principle of equality between the two in the face of the law. Similarly, the state cannot apply double standards on who may enjoy a given liberty, because such intervention disturbs the balance between the affected groups, but also invalidates the distinction between public and private spheres ceteris paribus.

What limits the scope of a right—indeed any law—in such an order is the presence of other laws which are also promulgated in accordance with the aforementioned dichotomy of the public or private good. Rules with conflicting provisions that may apply to a given case are meant to balance out the well-being of the individual with that of some larger collective. In the case of free speech, for example, prohibitions on the incitement of violence are considered just grounds for the limitation of one’s right, exactly because the wellness of the whole needs to be accounted for when assessing the propriety of one’s act.

There is no boundless freedom nor unlimited authority in a rules-based order that safeguards fundamental rights. Too much individual liberty comes at the cost of potential injustice for categories of citizens, while disproportionate state power can quickly lead to abuses and, ultimately, authoritarianism.

Phenomena differ and such matters are subject to interpretation. No legal framework can foresee all possible permutations between the extremes that may be envisaged in statutes. It thus falls upon the judiciary to exercise discretion in its evaluation of the factors that constitute each case and, in doing so, redraw the context-specific delineations between public and private spheres. Judges are themselves bound by such instruments as procedural law, but also by rules of custom. Technicalities notwithstanding, their authority is neither absolute in scope nor immediate and uncontested in its application.

The demi-state poses a challenge to the rule of law

Against this backdrop, we may investigate the legal-political status of platformarchs. Those are private actors who own critical infrastructure, foundational physical and/or intellectual property, or any other resource that constitutes a prerequisite to either the entry of an enterprise in to a given industry or its continued operation as a competitive entity. Platformarchs are in control of the very foundation upon which the given market sector is based on and, consequently, they do not merely participate in those economic activities but outright enable them.

This position of strength and privilege means that platformarchs can pursue the continuation of state interests through private means, by virtue of providing ancillary or primary facilities to the instituted authorities. For example, private money in the form of cashless payments that have to go through the oligopoly of the banking system, grant the state access to superior tools for monitoring transactions which can, in principle, be used to profile individuals for policing purposes, but also tax them with greater precision, with other nefarious courses of action not ruled out of the domain of possibility.

The state, by deviating from the social contract of a rules-based system with fundamental rights, benefits by propping up platformarchs: it makes its reach wider and its machinations more effective, albeit increasingly sinister. In return, those presumed business people enjoy the unique benefit of living under the impervious shelter of implicit or occasionally explicit sovereign guarantees on their economic endeavours. Just as a “systemically significant” bank is deemed “too big to fail”— an admission of such guarantees entering into force—so are all platformarchs protected from the vicissitudes of the business cycle and, thus, from genuine competition.

There being platformarchs means that the much-vaunted notions of free markets do not have universal application. So called cut-throat competition does exist on top of the platforms, though not for the platforms themselves: they are always there, establishing the two-tier economy, the innate double standard, of the capitalist world.

Which leads to the realisation that the neat dichotomy between public and private spheres fails to account for the reality of what I consider the demi-state, formally defined thus:

The social class comprising private interests that are enabled, supported, protected, or otherwise sustained by the state’s acts of sovereignty, which controls the entry points, critical infrastructure, or other requisite factors of economic conduct, and which, inter alia, provides state-like functions in domains or fields of endeavour outside the narrow confines of profit-oriented production and consumption in exchange for a legally sanctioned oligopolistic privilege in the markets it operates in.

Deplatforming and fundamental rights

Even if we set aside the justifiable critique against the very presence of such a class, we cannot avoid the immediate problems it creates for any self-proclaimed rules-based polity. Platformarchs are private actors who, for all intents and purposes, have state-like powers without any of the concomitant checks on how those may be exercised. Subjects of taxation can, for instance, appeal to the principle of “no taxation without representation” which practically means that the citizenry must maintain the ability to choose its governors and partake in the decision-making processes that affect it. Nothing of the sort applies to omnipotent economic overlords who are neither voted in office, nor can they be forced out of it when their decisions run contrary to the general good.

The least that can be done is to push for a revaluation of platforms as subjects of the law. They cannot be placed in the same category as any other item of private property. Instead, they belong to a special class of goods that must be regulated in such a way as to guarantee the unencumbered application of fundamental rights and the overall functioning of the rules-based polity, including the provisions on “who governs” and “where is the locus of power”.

[ Read: Structured Text on Sovereignty, Nationhood, Statehood ]

Which brings us to the trending tendency of deplatforming, the act of banning a person, group, or set of ideas from a given platform, in this case an online network. The particularities of current affairs should not distract us from appreciating the forces at play and understanding the wider implications of sweeping changes that happen with what feels like the press of a button: the platformarch can unilaterally silence a target with no due process, without having to justify their decision to any body or agency, and without any recourse to remedies for those affected.

In essence, this injustice is possible because the demi-state is not recognised as such, but rather as a series of private actors. The reasoning is that which applies to individuals: a household owner can decide who to invite at their party, a restaurant can be eclectic about its clientele, and so on. The important detail, however, is that such acts do not ramify into the province of jurisprudence in the sense that they do not shape the very conditions in which fundamental rights may be upheld (notwithstanding the possibility of being illegal in other ways).

To insist on treating the demi-state as akin to the private sector at-large, as some typical family business, is to misrepresent reality and, by extension, to labour against the viability of the rule of law. In order to preserve the achievement of a rules-based polity it is necessary to recognise platformarchs as controllers of key resources and proceed to apply special provisions that prevent their activities from either substituting the law on a case-by-case basis or otherwise rendering it irrelevant.

Should some malevolent person be denied of their right to free speech? That may well be answered in the affirmative, provided that all checks have been respected and all other options have been exhausted. Else the decision is odious. It is why we have courts of law: to adjudicate over disputes on who maintains the right to do what in light of the prevailing circumstances and, consequently, to determine what may be considered just. Any limitation on fundamental rights must be deemed absolutely necessary, narrow in scope, and proportional in application.

[ Read: Notes on Rules ]

The power of deplatforming as a threat to the rule of law

It is easy for short-term party politics and temporary emotions to prevail over reason, just as it has been proven time and again that a democracy can descend into ochlocracy (mob rule) or some other form of tyranny whenever the values underpinning the polity are suspended.

The expedient lie that perhaps well-meaning persons will believe in is that the end of deplatforming some controversial and much-maligned person or group thereof justifies the means of letting platformarchs operate in legality’s stead. Such considerations cannot form a reliable basis for the longer-term well-being of the political whole, as there is nothing whatsoever that constrains the arbitrary and inherently disproportionate medium of deplatforming from applying to any target given the right circumstances.

Furthermore, there is no credible guarantee against covert forms of deplatforming in online networks, realised as variants of so-called “filter bubbles”, where algorithms purposefully demote or outright conceal certain items from ever entering the public mind while reinforcing biases in parallel. Coupled with the phenomenon of fake news and the money-making and oligopolistic incentives of platformarchs, such opaque instruments cannot be trusted to promote the general interest nor should they, given the complete absence of institutionalised checks on their ongoing operation.

Activism against “the wrong people”, which supports large-scale censorship and other draconian measures in the name of democracy is misguided. It essentially misunderstands the wise compromise that underlies the spirit of fundamental rights, namely, that when all factors are considered it is safer to grant freedoms indiscriminately at the outset than to offer liberty only to those who are deemed worthy of it ex post facto by some unaccountable hierarchy.

What ultimately is at stake here is whether a body politic will remain faithful to a rules-based system, with the proviso that it recalibrates it to account for the presence of the demi-state. Otherwise society will be forced down the treacherous path of trusting the demi-state to whimsically interpret the public good; a demi-state that is free from any constraints on the exercise of its newfound authority.

Today some online network is gagging your political opponents and you approve of it because you deplore those people. Tomorrow the banking system of a cashless economy will be able to render anyone monetarily homeless just by denying them services. Extend that to health insurance and pharmaceuticals and all other industries where platformarchs exist. And then try to answer with sincerity, who governs and wheres is the locus of power.

Allowing an economic elite to act as the arbiter of all legality and the judge of all morality is a recipe for disaster. It is the telltale sign of a polity that is on the cusp of tyranny.

The symbolism of the event offers us stimulus for contemplation. Lagarde, an elite Eurocrat at the helm of the most powerful technocratic institution in the EU, addresses a body that is the vivid realisation of the Franco-German tandem’s ambition to effectively co-opt Europe.

The Assembly does not have competences of its own just yet. Its role is to provide guidelines to the respective governments, though students of the history of the European integration process know all too well that such is a common pattern that contributes to what I consider the obfuscation of the agent of governance.

In Europe it is not immediately apparent “who governs”. There is complexity, layers of decision-making that can only be rendered clear by careful analysis. That is so by design, as it actively hampers efforts at setting up an antipode to the supranational establishment. Citizens cannot easily track the source of their problems and, thus, are unable to act in a coordinated fashion towards enacting genuine reform. Put differently, it dilutes, confuses, and disrupts opposition to policies that have a supranational dimension. A profoundly anti-democratic practice shrewdly wrapped up in democratic procedure and decorum.

The Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly is but one piece of the puzzle. It must be examined in the wider context of the relations between France and Germany and, in particular, how their governments operate within—as well as outside the narrow confines of—the EU architecture. The Treaty of Aachen on Franco-German Cooperation and Integration (EN, FR, DE), which entered into force in January of this year, is a clear statement of intent. The two countries have long coordinated their positions on European affairs, especially ever since the economic crisis that started at the end of the previous decade. Equipped with this new legal instrument, they are announcing to the rest of Europe their plan to press on with moulding Europe in their image by exploiting the reality of a multi-speed, multi-tier EU that advances through the practice of differentiated integration (a process of policy harmonisation also known as “variable geometry”, which is formalised in the Treaties as the principle of Enhanced Cooperation—think, for example, how the Euro area is a union within the union, with its own rules and particularities).

France and Germany are forming a united front on all matters of common interest. They can impose their will on the rest of Europe by picking and choosing the necessary allies to each policy. For that is what enhanced cooperation is all about: a core group leads the initiative, with others are told that they free to join at a later point, with the proviso that they will accept whatever faits accomplis.

It, nonetheless, is false to think of this peculiar alliance as a mere caucus of sorts within the decision-making platforms of the EU. Their cooperation can use European instruments when needed, though it can also be bilateral in nature. Many policies such as foreign policy and military matters fall outside the exclusive competences of the Union. The Franco-Germans can simply deepen their cooperation in those areas and, once they have made sufficient progress, campaign to transpose their established lines into European law, with the potential of creating new institutions and/or modalities of rule formation.

Differentiated integration provides for the inexorable shift of competences to the supranational level. Given the complexity of the overall edifice, this is not necessarily the EU proper. It may be a subset thereof, characterised by ad-hoc policies and emergent centres of authority (e.g. how the Eurogroup became the de facto body for the handling of the Eurocrisis). What matters is the obfuscation of the agent of governance, which allows the Franco-German tandem to assume the role of the continent’s hegemon without ever appearing to do so.

In this light, the EU is structured as a superficially federal system whose locus of effective sovereignty is inter-governmental. Within that core, we then have the balance of power between the parties involved, where France and Germany stand in a position of strength. The rest have conflicting agendas and, courtesy of differentiated integration, will sometimes side with the Franco-Germans against other countries in the ‘periphery’ of core European power. In one way or another, the overarching objective of the Treaty of Aachen, that of empowering its two signatories, is always met.

Returning to the speech of Christine Lagarde, let us think what “jointly” means in the context of shaping Europe’s tomorrow and couched in terms of the aforementioned. The European Central Bank is the technocratic institution par excellence. It is practically unaccountable and wields peerless power. In summary of what I analysed at length in, inter alia, ECB independence: concept, scope, and implications (2017-04-02):

• The ECB has a strong form of institutional independence, enshrined in Treaty law. No body can influence its decisions and it is virtually impossible to change this state of affairs.
• The ECB determines on its own what it means to conform with the Treaty provision for price stability. It quantifies that as an inflation target that is below, but close, to 2% over the medium term, with the rate being measured against the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP).
• The ECB does not clarify what “medium term” is, nor does it account for price inflation in luxury goods or the sheer expansion of the money supply, which are typically not included in the basket of goods that ordinary inflation is about. In practice, it does not consider price instability the expenses of Europe’s most affluent spenders, nor does it factor in the suppression of wages and concomitant reduction of demand to the bare necessities (i.e. austerity) as key factors that keep the average price level low. Put differently, it engages in class politics, revealing as naive the much-vaunted notion of money’s neutrality over the long term.
• The Monetary Dialogue is but a shadow play, a fig leaf that distracts us from the absence of true parliamentary oversight, as the European Parliament does not have authority to impose conditions on the ECB. It cannot establish an objective criterion or set thereof with which to gauge the performance of the ECB in accordance with its mandate (e.g. how many years does the “medium term” last, how close is “below, but close, to 2%”, and what happens if the conditions are not satisfied). Nor can it intervene in the decision-making processes of the ECB, perhaps to question the pro-wealthy assumptions that underpin these so-called “unconventional” monetary policies.
• Speaking of unconventional policies, neither the European Parliament, nor any other body for that matter, can determine what is conventional and what is not, nor can it instruct the ECB to pursue a certain course of action. Here “unconventional” just denotes the new normal or rather exploits a climate of crisis to usher in ever-more odious measures.
• Inflation targeting, including quantitative easing and whatever other “unconventional” recipe the ECB has concocted, can never be neutral because those who are closer to the monetary source (banks and other mega-corporations) have a temporal advantage to use their newfound liquidity or capital (little difference in practice) to invest in conditions that are in their longer term interest. The new money only reaches the real economy as a final step, once every other goal has been met, and always in the form of a bondage of interest. The beneficiaries in this inter-temporal flow, the banks and mega-corporations, stand in an effective position of security and symbiosis with the official institutions, while the rest of the economy operate under precarious conditions. The ECB sustains and amplifies the dichotomy between security and precarity, the privileged few and the unprivileged many.

Against this backdrop, we have Lagarde appearing before Europe’s aspiring hegemons to tell us how “we” are paving the way to a European future. The inattentive cheerleader or apologist of European integration will hail this as another step towards federalism or what is blithely referred to as “European Democracy” , while it is clear that (i) there exists no homogeneous European demos that could formulate a coherent programme for enacting change at the European level, and (ii) even if such a demos exists in some form, it is not the one that actively participates in the multi-faceted operations that determine the overall state of politics in Europe.

We are getting ersatz federalism and a democracy manqué, while we are being indoctrinated into thinking of some abstract European citizenry as the agent of reform in the grand scheme of things. In truth, we are left near-powerless to act, as we observe elites ostensibly deciding “for us”—a euphemism of forwarding their interests—always in our absence.

No central bank should ever be deciding for anything that is political in nature and because money is inherently political, no central bank should ever have the degree of independence the ECB enjoys. The fact that Christine Lagarde and her colleagues (and their predecessors) voice such opinions in their official capacity, is a clear sign of regression. The complexity of the European integration process has rendered us incapable of discerning the patterns. The engineered obscurity of the overall project forces us into submission where we no longer set ambitious targets pertaining to the very quality of democracy on the continent. It thus is to be expected that technocrats assume on their own terms the role of expressing some imaginary sovereign will of “the people”.

It is this very appropriation of Europe that should concern us. We are giving away the very notion of a continent, the abstraction of a culture, the symbol of Europa, to a power elite, as we are acculturated into becoming a homogeneous citizenry only terms of being subjected to the same class-conscious policies that repress our demands. The likes of Lagarde will tell you how righteous their pro-rich and undemocratic machinations have been. While the powers that be in France and Germany will continue to brand themselves as the avatars of European unity.

Make no mistake: it is not the everyday French and German citizen that is empowered by such appropriation. The main beneficiaries of every hitherto existing imperialism are the ruling classes. The average French and German person will continue to live in precarity and be controlled by policies they have had no meaningful part in shaping. Meanwhile, opportunists will exploit this state of affairs in an attempt to reignite gigantism within the confines of the nation-state, attempting to turn our angst against all the French and the Germans, while never pointing their finger at the local overlords who themselves have no problem forming pacts with their peers in France, Germany, or anywhere else for that matter.

Our fight against this drift towards imperialism has to assume the form of reclaiming Europe: the mythos, the symbol, the set of narratives. This demands from us to look both inward and outward. To reach out to our fellow neighbours in order to coordinate our actions at the local level, in pursuit of more egalitarian and ecosystem-friendly policies. And to draw linkages between the place and the space, our domestic struggles and those that unfold in our wider cultural milieu. We must organise ourselves on the principle of genuine solidarity and we must seek to establish networks of like-minded platforms across the region.

The response to the effective European Union, that which stands as-is, not the one fantasised by the people who operate in the Brussels bubble, has to be just as variegated as the challenges we are confronted with. Concerted yet locale-conscious action is necessary both at home, in our immediate surroundings and their geographic boundaries, and wherever our comrades are. For the time being, the ones who closely cooperate are those who appropriate Europe.

There has to be a day of reckoning. It starts with each of us assuming responsibility and escaping from the prison of egocentrism, to recognise that we are potent only when we stand together and that we must find the others.

A case in point are Hollywood’s superhero movies. The tropes and stereotypes they rely on and perpetuate are characteristic of the underlying value system that their corporate overlords consider appropriate for the preservation of their status qua overlords.

The abstract plot of a superhero story is that of the champion of all that is good against the rapacious forces of evil. While the hero’s backstory typically is a variant of two archetypes:

1. The benevolent billionaire.
2. The product of bio- or cyber- engineering.

Making economic injustice likeable

We are told in one of those movies that the Batman’s parents are the ones who built the public transport network that connects the city where the story unfolds. There was nothing before it and, apparently, the rest of the citizenry had no means to help themselves. Perhaps because some unjust political order preemptively deprived them of the resources to fund such projects; resources that were instead redirected to the coffers of some plutocrat?

That story hints at the philanthropic facade of real-world billionaires. Just browse the list of the world’s richest people to notice the incredible coincidence of supreme power going hand-in-hand with bleeding heart altruism. As with the movies, there is never any question as to whether this apparent philanthropy is genuine or some stratagem to extract yet more value and to further consolidate the billionaire’s position.

Do those plutocrats, be it in our life or in the stories, employ every trick in the books to erode their tax base, siphon their profits to some jurisdiction that facilitates so-called ‘foreign direct investment’ (i.e. tax avoidance), and ultimately not pay their fair share? What about their political status overall? Are they favoured by policies such as lowered taxation, ‘incentives for investment’ that provide legal loopholes to not make tax payments, a broadened interpretation of copyright and patents laws which further empower their oligopolistic grip in the industries they operate in, etc.? And are such policies funded by those same billionaires in the form of promoting their political candidate of choice, controlling or influencing the media, lobbying, and so on? Are those billionaires platformarchs exactly because of their symbiotic relationship with the state apparatus? Do they form part of the demistate?

There are no such concerns in the superhero movies, just as no-one is supposed to ever scrutinise the motives of a billionaire’s vaunted philanthropy and “corporate social responsibility” , nor examine the wider context in which it unfolds and is enabled by. The story just offers us a version of the world where the vast majority of humans have no part in shaping; a world where the nexus of legal, political, economic forces is presented as decisively external to those affected by it. It is a state of heteronomy where all that is instituted is touted as a constant and a necessary good and where the subjects of that order are conditioned into thinking of it as impossible to re-institute in a manner that would be beneficial to everyone (also read my Notes on Rules).

The superhero billionaire serves as a plausible fantasy of what the next step of philanthropy is. Is it not reasonable to expect whichever real-world billionaire-philanthropist who is currently in vogue to care for “the city and its people” by also buying or outright making those cool gadgets, weapons, power suits that grant supernatural powers? We see here how the superhero model serves as a proxy of what money can do when it is combined with noble feelings. And since it is claimed by the establishment that our world is replete with bleeding-heart moneymen, it follows that they too are stalwart guardians of all that is good. Ergo, do not question the status quo.

The ‘cool’ robotisation and weaponisation of the person

Same principle for the other category of superheroes: those whose powers are either in large part or completely the result of the regime’s or some powerful institution’s intervention in the human biological constitution. They are equipped with cybernetic enhancements or engineered mutations and they act as weapons in the hands of the establishment; an establishment that is not rendered clear, yet whose underlying values are never questioned either.

In several of those stories we are told that scientists conduct experiments on humans. Who is funding those scientists to begin with and what agenda does that programme serve? In our real world, the average scientist is either severely underfunded or has to receive grants in exchange for working in a particular area of research that ultimately benefits some mega-corporation or imperialistic end. Think, for example, of big pharma and big tech, or the military-industrial complex. In either case, the scientist no longer serves the principles of objective inquiry into the world, but is instead instrumentalised into forwarding the interests of their sponsors regardless of whether they like it or not, understand it or not.

When it comes to realising the goals of some corporate actor, there arises again the issue of where does that concentrated wealth come from? Which brings us to the previous points about the billionaires.

If, on the other hand, it is some government programme that uses those scientists to turn people into drones, we need to question its claims on its legitimacy. The regime always purports to serve its people, the nation, the will of some divine authority, and so on (also read Communitarianism and the self-institution of divinity). Its acts are supposed to be just and benevolent (see Against the secularised theology of statecraft) and its intent is to mass produce soldiers for its cause.

What if the state is not just? What happens when it operates as the iron fist of a power elite that exploits the rest of society to preserve its illegitimate status? What if its wars on the other side of the world are not just and that the real motive of such campaigns is to further reinforce tyranny at home and abroad?

The fact that ‘scientists’ do the dirty preparatory work does not mean that the end-product is necessarily good and desirable. Nor that it is value-free because some exaggerated objective method is in effect. Here we discern another pernicious meta-narrative of our era, that of scientism.

Scientism derives from interlocking misunderstandings about the work of science, all predicated on the assumption that the scientific enterprise delivers objective and final truths and has all the answers. Contrary to what happens in reality, scientism presents the “expert” as the indisputable authority in their field, whom none shall ever challenge. By extension, that field of research only delivers propositions about the world that are universally accepted.

In truth, science finds itself in a continuous process of research, inquiry, review, and disagreement. Scientists maintain distinct schools of thought within their area of expertise. Oftentimes one such school becomes the mainstream paradigm, with or without external interventions, or just because scientists are also human and remain subject to biases, obsessions, tribalist patterns of behaviour, logical fallacies, and so on. There is, in other words, an enforced orthodoxy that decisively marginalises heterodox positions; positions which are cast aside without sufficient consideration in a non-scientific fashion.

What we can learn from epistemology and philosophy in general is that science does not offer answers that are characterised by absolute certainty and that disagreements should remain at the epicentre, else science turns into yet another dogma.

Scientism remains limited to the phenomenality of science, stripping it of its underlying ethical values: those that instruct the student of the world to remain dubitative, inquisitive, dialectial, and plain-spoken (parrhesia). Instead it gives us ersatz science, a simulacrum that tries to impress the audience by citing decontextualised numbers, statistics, charts, and a bunch of awe-inspiring jargon, all of which scream of objectivity and deontologically sound research.

Couched in those terms, the regime employs scientism as an intellectual shield to fend off critics. Who are you to question, say, the central bank’s policies that outright favour the banking establishment? Do you hold a PhD in monetary economics with a specialisation in this particular subject? If not, then your opinion is irrelevant. If yes, yours is still a fringe position, because the central bank has an army of such PhDs who claim otherwise.

Linking this back to the superhero fantasy, we are indoctrinated into thinking of weaponised and/or robotised humans as ‘cool’ and ‘badass’. As with the case of the benevolent billionaire, we must accept the instituted world as-is. We are made to believe that the state is there to tend to our needs, and that the humanoid drones that ‘science’ unscrupulously engineers are just fancy forms of life that serve some higher cause of justice.

The citizen manqué

There is another logic to the whole superhero craze that the Hollywood establishment promotes: that of the passive subject of the polity. In those stories the people have no role in moulding their inter-subjective experience to suit their needs and aspirations. They are just there to serve as the backdrop of the story, cannon fodder, or the age-old pattern of some damsel in distress.

The superhero world is one of elitism. Only a select few have the means to exercise some degree of control, while a tiny minority pulls the strings. The rest lack the means to enact any kind of reform. Citizens appear to have no agency, no collective will to take matters into their own hands, form associations based on solidarity, establish parallel economies that circumvent the capitalist oppression, and ultimately self-organise in ways that abolish the control of human by human.

The superhero fantasy is the manifestation of the power elite’s ambition to impose slavishness from the top. To impress upon the average fellow’s mind a sense of powerlessness and desperation. It all comes down to turning the citizen into a citizen manqué who basically is little more than a compulsive consumer and the cash cow that the state and demistate exploit with impunity.

To change the world we must be prepared to challenge the prevailing narratives, to deface every idea that finds currency; ideas whose advocates maintain hidden agendas for or have clear incentives to impose some form of tyranny with.

Should we break with tradition or insist on the methods of earlier social movements? Is religion itself a convention that humanity can live without, or must there always be some form of religiosity in every society, no matter the particularities?

The old left has historically held an outright atheist view of the world in which religion per se is bundled up together with the establishment. To overthrow capitalism and intersecting forms of oppression has been equated to a struggle for dethroning god. Effective communism in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere thus enforced top-down atheism, replacing belief in the divine with slavish commitment to the omnipotent state’s edicts. As modern Russia shows, the communist reforms did not emanate from a cultural will. They instead coagulated as centralist technocratic despotism. Soviet godlessness failed to plant its roots in popular conscience. The implosion of the USSR was inevitably followed by a recrudescence of the religious views of pre-revolutionary times. Today the average Russian’s religiosity is undeniable.

Contemporary leftists, broadly understood as a spectrum, adopt an equivocal stance on the matter. Some cling on to atheism that occasionally manifests as de facto quotidian elitism against other citizens, while others prefer to emphasise their pro-science outlook. The latter is the more reasonable approach. However, it too can produce untenable propositions when it is not willing to entertain uncompromising or unconventional thinking.

The careless cheerleader of science does harm to genuine scientific inquiry by attributing to science a quality that is not inherent to it: that of yielding certain knowledge. Such are the workings of scientism, where “science” no longer represents the body of work that is permeated by the ethical qualities of dubitativeness, inquisitiveness, dialecticism, and parrhesia (honest plain-spokenness). It is instead treated as the equivalent of oracular wisdom that none shall question.

Scientism proceeds from the fundamental misunderstanding that if some programme looks like science, if it is couched in terms of statistics, charts, and jargon, it must doubtless speak the truth with precision. The falsehood is reinforced by the function of social stratification that higher education certificates perform, namely, that X number of PhDs support a given view, “therefore…”, the thinking goes, “who are you to question them?”. The notion of a conventional wisdom that embeds itself as self-evident orthodoxy is totally lost. As are the nuances that can be expressed in an honest scientific context about the propriety, adequacy, and scope of the given research methods.

It was once impossible to question the clergy, for their word was supposed to be that of the one true God. Again, “who are you to question the Lord?”. We are fast approaching the same type of normality, only this time the role of the authority is assumed by a simulacrum of science that exists in symbiotic relationship with the state apparatus and the platformarchs that control the economy. The alarming signs of such a regression are clear whenever scepticism is expressed against the initiatives of malevolent political and economic actors who present their stratagems as objective, i.e. inevitable, reality: sceptics are cast aside as uninformed, out of sync with the state-of-the-art, too paranoid, and so on.

Whether we are dealing with mainstream theism, Soviet-style atheism, or scientism, we are basically facing the same problem. Some power elite is in control of the narrative. A group of bureaucrats, career politicians, priests, conniving entrepreneurs, etc. are imposing their agenda in a top-down fashion. Their ostensible truth springs from a position of authority and privilege. This is the real problem.

A new left requires a more considerate approach. Rather than preemptively reject religiosity, let us think as true scientists:

• Why is it that all hitherto existing civilisations have had some sort of belief in divinity?
• What is the social or political utility of organised religion beyond the narrow confines of governance?

In political terms, can a religion-based sense of belonging reinforce centrifugal forces whose end goal is autonomy at the local community level? Put differently, can we use our own conception of the divine as a vehicle for enacting reform in our immediate milieu?

Localism and religious belonging

To escape from the meta-narratives of the status quo we must be willing to discern what is common in the multitude of phenomena that are germane to the ideology that pursues the ever-increasing concentration of power. This is what I call “gigantism”: the reinforcement and proliferation of the hierarchical model of organisation, which results in the accumulation of ultimate control at the top of the chain of command.

The old left experimented with its own brand of gigantism, only to confirm to us that the concentration of authority is pernicious in and of itself, regardless of its modalities. It is against this backdrop that a new left can introduce a genuine alternative: a programmatic agenda whose ambition is to re-organise society as a distributed system of largely autonomous local communities, in respect of their history and presence in their land. Let whatever forms of cooperation between them develop per the evolving needs, in a model that could be described as the “organic society”.

What kind of religion would be suitable to an organic society? Such is the problématique that must guide our thinking.

The pre-Christian, pre-Roman world of Europe was defined by its polytheism. It was also known for its diversity and locality-bound distribution of power. With polytheism, people of the same culture were loosely linked together by broad themes of theology, yet each community had its peculiar deities and cults, which were not strictly limited to gods. For instance, religion in parts of Greece was also expressed as faith in a hero of legend, like Hercules.

Roman imperialism refashioned this mosaic of plurality. It did so by gathering competences in a central locus of power and by enforcing its brand of the Pantheon ex cathedra. The Roman policy on religion appears, prima facie, as an expression of tolerance: let all gods exist. In fact it was one of appropriation, assimilation, and eventual homogenisation of the empire’s subjects, as it amounted to an attempt at depriving communities of an invaluable mechanism for their inter-subjective identification: the collective self-institution of divinity. They were told, for instance, that Minerva is just another name for Athena, with the tacit understanding that the narratives surrounding the former were now controlled by a state apparatus far from the place where Athena was once worshipped.

The Roman Empire always had a propensity to impose religious standards that were consistent with its imperialistic outlook; a drive that was later embodied in the Christianisation through fire and steel that Theodosius I and Justinian I brought upon the early Byzantine empire (both of whom are labelled as “the Great”, while both are considered saints in Eastern Orthodox Christianity).

An establishment’s incentive is to mould its subjects in an image that suits its end. It must manipulate culture, intercept and control all discourses that influence society at-large, and make its subjects think that their well-being derives from the continued presence of the highly stratified order that controls them (alas, such is a constant that defines our times as well).

I would speculate that polytheism is not the main factor that contributed to the actual diversity of the ancient Greek world and of other cultures in Europe (here “Greek” is just a proxy for “city-states in the part of the earth where the modern Greek nation-state and its neighbours exist”). Besides, Roman elites were themselves polytheist for several centuries, during which they fought against localism in pursuit of their imperialist ends.

Diversity of the sort here considered must rather be attributed to the fact that centres of influence such as Delphi did not have the requisite sovereignty to enforce a uniform religious world-view and that no counter-party political organisation, in the form of an empire, existed to impose conformity with a certain dogma of godhood.

The ancient polytheist of the pre-imperialist era thus had the freedom to think of divinity in terms that were aligned with their political actuality and lifeworld. They could develop a faith that reflected localism and communitarianism, by exalting the local mountains, rivers, forests, etc. as deities that protected the peculiar ecosystems and the humans in their midst.

The naive rationalist will deride those people as simpletons for truly believing that a “mere mountain” can ever be a god. Yet it is not the theological claims that are of interest here, but how such sets of beliefs can enable a modus vivendi that stands as a natural enemy to gigantism; a lifestyle that all empires have actively opposed, trying to replace it with some state-sponsored interpretation of the world, including the secularised theology of nation-statist statecraft.

The point is to move beyond the phenomenalities of religious conduct and think in practical terms about social organisation. Let the mountain be a god. Let it be revered as a life-giver in its particular ecosystem, if that is what we need to differentiate ourselves from those who seek to deny us our freedom. My thesis is that theology must follow the functions of the polity we wish to enact. We must institute the divine in a way that would be conducive to our politics.

It does not really matter whether we figure out some polytheism that derives from modern ecology or re-purpose one of the existing or historical religions. We could think, for the sake of the argument, of an interpretation of Christianity that departs from Byzantine theocracy and reinforces the original meaning of koinonia (κοινωνία) as “the commons” or “the common good”, and ecclesia (εκκλησία) as “the call [to partake in the commons]”. Such would doubtless be combatted as heresy, which is to be expected given the original role of this religion as an instrument in the hands of emperors.

Could a radically reinterpreted Christian creed be consistent with communitarian ends? In principle, we must answer affirmatively. How likely is it though, given the gigantist heritage and concomitant values of this religion? One cannot be optimistic. Whereas, say, ecology that assumes new forms of artistic expression and allows for creativity feels like a type of polytheism that is both plausible and possible. Though I must reiterate my outright political, indeed revolutionary, perspective on the matter.

Beyond theological controversies

We must not perpetuate the mistakes of the old left. Religion is a potent tool that has developed in the history of humankind as a means to facilitate various processes in the political organisation of society. There are cases where it has been used for good and others where it has been weaponised in the service of gigantism. Religiosity that unfolds as an expression of local autonomy should be seen as a net positive: it reinforces the everyday anti-gigantism of the community, while it offers some guarantee that the community will not disintegrate over the medium to long term, due its newfound sense of identity.

The anarchist may counter with examples of their communities that nurture solidarity without allusions to theology. Such is an interesting phenomenon which, however, is not reproducible in societies that are not characterised by selection bias. The average anarchist has thought about politics, economics, and the like, in ways the everyday non-anarchist has not. When a group of them create a small community, they are effectively putting together a club of like-minded people; people who most definitely are not you common type of person.

Societies that occur naturally are diverse in terms of the talents and attributes that are distributed among their members. We cannot expect everyone to be a theorist. Religion is the answer to the problem of finding an overarching narrative of ethics that can be simple enough for everyone to grasp. Religiosity can serve as a foundation for teaching everyone various important lessons in manners and inter-personal behaviour, in thinking about their community and nature, and so on.

In essence, we need to escape from the trap of simplistic, binary thinking about complex issues and look at the phenomenon of theism from a position of wisdom, not passion. People must learn to form patterns of behaviour that are consistent with benign outcomes. We define those outcomes in a way that suits our revolutionary ambitions. The rest can be discussed indefinitely.

A state that can tell you what your god is, is one that can stand almighty against you. We must reclaim the right to institute divinity within our community, just as we must gain sovereignty in all of its facets within the confines of our locality.

The following is my initial take on the subject. I am sharing it with the proviso that I do not consider it a comprehensive analysis and may still elaborate further in some future essay.

I think we need to frame dystopia that is powered by digital technology as yet another form of tyranny. This is not to trivialise it—if “trivialising” can ever apply to tyranny—, nor to downplay its potential for destruction or otherwise equate it ideologically with other totalitarian regimes. By understanding it as a tyranny, we provide ourselves with an already well-understood conceptual framework to reason about it.

Every tyranny consists in the control of the vast majority of people by a small group of individuals. It is always a minority that wields power within the confines of the given polity’s scope of sovereignty or reach.

For a minority to rule over the majority, it obviously requires access to critical resources but, more importantly, it must have a comparative advantage of coordination relative to the subjects of its will.

The minority has to act as a unit, while the majority remains divided and unorganised. The principle of “divide and conquer” is a constant in all hitherto existing statecraft. The state of technology or the prevailing conditions in general may only alter the specifics on the implementation front.

That principle captures the irreducible factor of the case, which constitutes the relative strength of the tyrants over the oppressed. Disorganised people are vulnerable, exploitable, and can more easily be forced into supporting the regime or otherwise acquiescing to its stratagems.

Couched in those terms, tyranny is both (i) an immediately recognisable architecture of supreme political authority, and (ii) a widespread mindset that is characterised by inertness, indifference, helplessness, and fatalism. To resist oppression one must not merely guard against the legal-institutional, economic, technological, or such readily discernible establishment. They must also overcome the centripetal forces generated by the people’s inability to act.

History tells us that a group which functions as a unit can exert greater power than that of its constituent elements in isolation. It acquires an emergent property, germane to the concerted action as such. Tyranny governs through the unity of its members, but also by mastering the reign of fear. Terror spreads like a virus, especially when those being terrorised remain exposed by virtue of their forced/induced turn towards short-term-focused egocentrism.

What else is contagious though is courage and the duty to express opposition to injustice. If the oppressors can gain an advantage by cooperating among themselves, then so can an opposing force that starts out as small in scale. It cuts both ways.

The resistance does not need to be carried out by a majority of people at once. Indeed it never is possible to arrive at that eventuality without going through intermediate phases. There must initially be a fairly tightly-controlled collective that is self-governed and guided by agreement of spirit and a clear sense of purpose. This agent of reform is enough to help spread courage, so that the majority may eventually agree to contribute towards enacting regime change.

The members of the resistance must stand united, in solidarity to each other. The starting point is to undermine that inter-personal comparative advantage of the oppressors by means of grassroots action. Remember that part of tyranny’s power is contingent on the inertness of the majority. This is where activism must focus its immediate attention: to show the alternatives in concrete terms, to build networks of exchange and genuine support.

While it is clear that one can contribute incrementally to global shifts by means of localised action, it also is the case that one may appreciate the universal truth by discerning an instance of it. As such, activism must promote cases of freedom-respecting and freedom-enhancing media or practices as tangible examples of modes of possible inter-subjective experience: they offer a hint as to what a freed world could look like.

At any rate, a critical mass is required. Coordination and cooperation will always be part of the solution to the problem. Everything else will follow from there. The technological means will vary, as will the figures and the ideocentric parameters or whatever other contributing factor to such a state of affairs.

To my mind, techno-digital dystopia can be reduced to “dystopia”, which in turn implies tyranny. By claiming as much, I wish to stress the importance of the human qua social animal side of things: how concerted action is essential to the cause.

It is crucial to understand that no amount of freedom-friendly technology is ever enough to render one immune to the vicissitudes of the establishment’s machinations. Nature and history tell us that there is safety in numbers. It is naive, indeed self-defeating, to believe that one can effectively fend off aggression while remaining strictly limited to their individuality.

To this end, all calls for apolitical escapism, those that present individualism as its own telos, must be interpreted as impediments to the possible creation of an antipode to the status quo. Such times call for collective efforts and an appreciation of the longer-term dimension of the pro-liberty struggle; liberty as experienced by each person (subjective) and as enabled by one’s milieu (inter-subjective).

Finally, I think we are not in a generalised dystopia right now, at least not in my part of the world. Regardless, we must always be wary of the establishment’s potential: it does have the means and the propensity to proceed down that path. To think that some constitution or court of law will single-handedly upset the repressive turn is to remain oblivious to the lessons of history, including those of the near past and, in parts of the world, of the present. No institutional arrangement can defend itself. It is always people who may safeguard the prevailing values that can otherwise be codified in statutes and other rules.

I have never voted. I am not against it per se. It just seems to me that elections cannot deliver auto-nomy (self-government), because the “constitutional subject”, the people, is nothing more than an abstraction.

Party politics are an integral part of representative democracy, which in turn is a facet of a system of centralisation of authority. When the nation-state started taking form, this centralisation meant that everything would be decided by a handful of people in the country’s capital: even in an ideal parliamentarian system we are still talking about a tiny minority who has disproportionate power over the rest of society. Now that telecommunications, travel, and other technologies remove logistical constraints that held true in previous eras, centralisation happens at the continental/supra-national level (EU in my case).

These are different kinds of gigantism. Elections offer a sense of participation, but the real power lies elsewhere. Think, if you will, of the virtual omnipotence of the European Central Bank. No-one voted for them. No parliamentarian who speaks for “the people” can scrutinise the ECB, and so on.

Also see my Crises, transnationalism, and the demi-state and make sure to follow all links from there.

And then there is the practical problem that elections are never fair. There are inequalities in funding and “air time” on the media. While I do not know whether this is true for your country, in Greece and Cyprus (and the UK and several other countries I know of) the media are platforms that are controlled by an economic elite. Again, a handful of people. Same with the main social networks, whose algorithms influence who sees what.

The core challenge is that power is at some centre. That makes it easier to be abused.

Elections are an excellent tool in a system where the members have equal opportunities to speak their mind; a system of true pluralism and genuine participation. And this can only happen by going to the smaller scale of the local community.

If you must vote, go for people with good ideas and honest intentions. At any rate, the act of sending a parliamentarian to a 4/5 year-term service in some far away place (literally and figuratively) will never grant any real auto-nomy to your quotidian life. Connect this to the aforementioned notion of intersubjective freedom.¹

While nation-states will remain indispensable in providing good governance and contributing to global efforts, the principle of nationalism will only exacerbate future systemic crises. The pandemic must be followed by a new age of international cooperation and a strengthening of multilateral institutions. This applies to Europe, in particular.

Now more than ever, we need to reclaim the spirit of 1945. We need the twenty-first century’s two superpowers, America and China, to set the example, by burying their rivalry and uniting all of humankind around a collective response to the current crisis, and to those that await us.

While I agree that nationalism, made manifest through the centuries as nation-statism (more on that later), is too limited in scope and cannot cope with the challenges of a global magnitude, I am not convinced that more centralisation of power at the international centre is the solution to our problems.

Fundamentally, the crises we are facing, be it the pandemic, climate change and ecological calamities, the Great Recession of the past decade and the coming Greater Depression, can be understood as epiphenomena of increased inter-connectedness, else inter-dependence. Rather than distributed systems that can remain robust to a range of shocks, the human world is becoming ever-more monolith-like and fragile as a result.

The fact that our hospitals did not have even the basics in sufficient stock is due to the neoliberal ideology that underpins the world’s legal-institutional order: the belief that global trade is sufficient to deliver production on demand and everything should be outsourced. So the hospital in country A becomes dependent on the supplier in country B and, therefore, is exposed to whatever shocks may emanate from the prevailing conditions in that country. A crisis in one area becomes generalised by means of the sheer mechanics of the system.

More inter-dependence will only exacerbate the systemic nature of the crises and will further amplify their invidious effects. This is an insight that us Europeans should have learnt from the peak of the eurocrisis: a single currency area connects local economies in such a way that a persistent downturn in one part is enough to pose an existential threat to the common currency itself through a cascading effect of widespread failures and bankruptcies, as well as self-fulfilling prophecies in market expectations for identifying the next weakest link in the chain.

In practical terms, Fischer’s thesis can only hold true as an immediate reaction to the challenges of the pandemic: the system cannot be refashioned in one stroke amid the crisis and, therefore, no country can reliably act unilaterally in the meantime. Over the longer-term though the genuine solution is to scrutinise and ultimately dismiss as pathogenic the dogma that centralisation is a necessary blessing.

Which brings us to the false dichotomy between nationalism and internationalism. None of the two is appropriate, while they do not stand in direct opposition to each other. Nationalism was the first step towards the rapid acceleration of inter-connectedness within and then across borders, hence the inter national world order.

The nation-state is the apparatus that consolidated power at the country’s capital, effectively establishing a technocracy with elements of democratic custom and majoritarian decision-making. It is the mechanism that pampered and reinforced the familiar two-tier system of the capitalist power edifice, where a rentier class of platform owners (I call them “platformarchs”) exists in symbiotic relationship with—or as a de facto extension of—state structures, while the rest of society copes with precarity and the vicissitudes of the business cycle (i.e. they are handed generous bail-outs and privileges, while we get grinding austerity and radical uncertainty).

In essence, nation-statism created a new class of corporate overlords that are best understood collectively as the demi-state. I define it thus: the social class comprising private interests that are enabled, supported, protected, or otherwise sustained by the state’s acts of sovereignty, which controls the entry points, critical infrastructure, or other requisite factors of economic conduct, and which, inter alia, provides state-like functions in domains or fields of endeavour outside the narrow confines of profit-oriented production and consumption in exchange for a legally-sanctioned oligopolistic privilege in the markets it operates in.

Think of how cashless transactions that involve private money in the form of inter-bank payment systems allow the government to track market activity by being integrated with the handful of bankers/operators in this particular area of specialisation. Or how tech giants are becoming increasingly intertwined with surveillance corps (“security agencies”) and partake in tacit foreign policy or even internal affairs through cyber means.

The demi-state is the pinnacle of the capitalist system and the most vicious monstrosity the nation-state ever established. This is why there needs to be a distinction, albeit analytical and academic in spirit, between nationalism and nation-statism. The former is a romantic/idealist notion that never developed into a form of governance. At its core, it is about being cognisant and supportive of one’s cultural identity. Whereas the nation-state expanded on that idea by interpreting three distinct magnitudes as consubstantial: the nation, the state, the homeland. For the nation-state, these three are the same thing to which we often read commentary along the lines of “America should do this” or “the Germans want that”: it conflates the citizens with the country, the land with the state, the government with the people, reifying the resulting aggregate as an exalted transhuman entity (also read my essay Against the secularised theology of statecraft).

Couched in those terms, national sovereignty is hypostatised as the supreme political authority of a power elite in the nation’s command centre. The lofty ideal of “we the people” is, in the nation-statist worldview, realised as “we the few pretending to serve the people” or even “us the chosen ones who embody the spirit of the nation”. It is this very disconnect, indeed absurdity, that has allowed the once disparate national demi-states to extend beyond their borders and draw linkages between them. Or, to put it differently, the oligarchies decided that inter-connectedness would forward their agenda and so they pressed ahead without concern for side-effects that are always felt the most by those who survive in precarious conditions.

As for the attitude of being pro-nation, nationalism properly so-called, this is always exploited by the nation-statists whenever they want to protect their interests. Sometimes as outright racism. Others as a moral imperative. Think of how it is a ‘national duty’ to bail out some mega corporation—‘our’ companies—or to send people’s children to die in a far away land in pursuit of the master’s imperialistic mania.

Again to bring an example that us European are well aware of: the creation of the euro. An elitist initiative which established the most undemocratic institution that could ever exist in an ostensibly democratic legal-institutional arrangement: the European Central Bank. As explained in my ~4000-word essay from 2017-04-02 on ECB independence: concept, scope, and implications, this entity is practically immune to scrutiny. No body, no institution, be it national or supranational, can place conditions on the ECB or hold it accountable for its shortcomings using objective criteria. Moreover, no authority has the power to redistribute resources upwardly across the euro area. None except the ECB, which is blithely channelling resources to the privileged few, guaranteeing virtually limitless demand for the assets of corporate elites, effectively shielding them from the forces of the market, creating an uneven playing field, and putting them in a position of strength from where they can plunder the forlorn with impunity.

To this end, the dichotomy between nationalism and internationalism must be re-framed in order to correspond to the actuality of things: it is a continuum that maps differences in degree. The internationalist mindset is the same as that of nation-statism without being limited to the borders of a single nation. Put differently, it is nation-statism freed from technical managerial constraints: faster travel, better telecommunications, and all the technological means of escaping physical limitations of yester year that kept logistics confined to a smaller scale.

The case of the EU notwithstanding, we can already get a glimpse of the technocratic features of such a superstructure by recalling the observation that disproportionately powerful institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Health Organisation are practically unaccountable. Or how the United Nations is but a glorified bureaucratic shadow play of rules-based global affairs that essentially obfuscates the fact that not all nation-states are made equal (a point that Joschka Fischer concedes). Or how the internationalist demi-state concentrates ever more power in its hands, while paying little-to-no taxes by leveraging a network of preferential jurisdictions that enable tax base erosion and fiscal engineering. And, lest we forget, how all this is expressed as an ever expanding chasm of inequality and an uneven distribution of resources between countries and among social classes.

“Transnationalism” is a term that attempts to bestow a sense of righteousness and enlightenment on the nation-statism and internationalism that brought the world to where it currently is. The transnationalist will complain about the evils of nationalism and will lament the rise of ‘populism’ while conveniently ignoring the fact that it is the “spirit of 1945”, as Fischer puts it, that established the first iteration of what later became the EU and that defined the international architecture we are all familiar with. No populist bugaboo ever contributed to the inter-dependence of the world. The notion that some malevolent nationalists are undermining all the good things that the international order offers is flatly incorrect (also see my essay on The shadow play of “populism”).

Alas, we have been indoctrinated into the belief that we must never challenge the dominant narrative, for we run the risk of being labelled a ‘nationalist’ or some of the other more sinister labels associated with that term. We are, in other words, brainwashed into seeing the world in binary terms, where you must either be a transnationalist or you are some nationalist scum. Good versus bad. No nuances. No possible permutations in between the extremes. This is a pernicious folly and the telltale sign of a humanity that has failed to internalise the scientific ethos, the attitude of questioning, the spirit of being tolerant by virtue of recognising one’s overall ignorance, the need for researching things and not accepting claims ex cathedra; the mark of a world that is moving full speed into a new Dark Age of false certainty and hubris.

The answer to the crises does have a philosophical facet, in that it requires us to think of complexity as such and to remain aporetic in the face of the establishment’s hypocrisy and conventional wisdom. More concretely though, what we need is to disinvest and decisively downsize our operations: not just average me and you, but the insatiable billionaires of this world—especially them!

Inter-dependence is unsustainable for humans and the rest of the planet. We need to become increasingly autarkic at the local community level. Learn to cultivate our own land while relying on polyculture and sustainable methods, produce our own sourdough bread away from the mild poison that is industrial loaf, stand in solidarity with our fellow people in our immediate surroundings, gain a sense of responsibility towards respecting and safeguarding the ecosystems we are immersed in.

In short, we must shift from the arrangements of global inter-dependence and personal irresponsibility to a network of largely independent micro-centres of local participatory government and personal empowerment. This presupposes a thoroughgoing review of the principles that underpin the current paradigm of production-consumption-ownership and a direct opposition to the uncivilised moneyman of the capitalist regime.

Joschka Fischer just echoes what many decision-makers and influencers like him have failed to realise or otherwise admit: that their vaunted beliefs are the root cause of the crises, not the much-touted panacea they envision.

Humans institute their polity in pursuit of a set of ends. The midpoint or common denominator of all rules within each given scope is the scenario, narrative, idea, phenomenon that compels, determines, or informs the process of polity-institution in its totality or in parts thereof.

This object of reference has to be interpreted as external to the process of institution. It has to be independent of the conventions that establish the polity. Otherwise it could simply be ruled out of existence.

Such an immanent external alterity can be typically understood as the need to live in peace and security, to afford a comfortable life, ensure the continuation of the species and the given culture, and so on. Rules do not exist in the absence of such a counter-force to human convention. The polity as a whole or in its parts is neither a-contextual nor decontextualisable. There is no such thing as a polity in abstract.

Couched in those terms, a crisis may be assessed as a challenge to the established guiding narrative and the secondary narratives derived therefrom. It calls for a grand review: to appreciate anew the way the polity is designed, be it in its general form or particular facets thereof. A crisis triggers a process of re-institution.

For statecraft—the art of governance and state-formation or state-institution—a crisis does not necessarily entail a net loss of some sort. It rather offers a turning point, a unique opportunity to re-imagine and re-draw rules that were theretofore perceived as sacrosanct.

A state apparatus can use a crisis as a pretext for concentrating power at the political centre, the top of the hierarchy. It can use it as a means or excuse to pass reforms that would otherwise seem disproportionate and tyrannical.

Evaluations on the qualitative features of rules are always contingent on their midpoint: how severe the object of reference—the external alterity—is thought to be and what must subsequently be done to cope with it.

A crisis forces one to think in terms of “whatever it takes”. For statecraft this can manifest as a sacrifice of a once cherished value to the altars of greed and ambition.

We saw how the 9/11 attacks forever refashioned politics in the USA and much of the world in an attempt to prepare against this ever-present terrorist alterity. How states found it expedient to introduce blanket surveillance as the new normal and how a growing industry of data-mining, with few oligopolistic interests at its top, emerged from that milieu.

In a similar fashion, we witnessed how central banks introduced so-called “unconventional” monetary policies, such as Quantitative Easing, and made them an integral part of their day-to-day operations. At the outset of the recent economic crisis, central banks had to struggle against several constraints before implementing such measures. Currently, in the face of the pandemic and with the world still recovering from the chilling effects of the last economic calamity, central banks expand their QE and related operations as a first reaction to the evolving phenomena. Contrary to what was the norm in the last decade, it is now expected of them to pursue such a course of action and, one might imagine, it will soon be asked of them to go even further.

A crisis redraws boundaries. Shrewd statecraft operators can take advantage of the newly-formed normality to consolidate their gains, moulding the polity in their image.

It would not be surprising to look back at the history of the pandemic, and the ensuing coronacrisis in the economy, as the point in time when monumental changes started taking place, ranging from global trade, the equilibrium of power between the world’s superpowers, to the very relationship between government and citizens in hitherto self-described “liberal democracies”.

While all of the aforementioned can be considered in mere technical terms, as yet another analysis of political phenomena at-large, there exists a more practical insight: in a world defined by its great injustices in income distribution, a world plagued by imperialism and the pernicious ideology of incessant year-to-year economic growth, is there anything to guarantee that the powers involved in statecraft will not abuse the present crisis?

[…] the ECB’s Governing Council announced on Wednesday a new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme with an envelope of €750 billion until the end of the year, in addition to the €120 billion we decided on 12 March. Together this amounts to 7.3% of euro area GDP.

[…]

We are making available up to €3 trillion in liquidity through our refinancing operations, including at the lowest interest rate we have ever offered, -0.75%. Offering funds below our deposit facility rate allows us to amplify the stimulus from negative rates and channel it directly to those who can benefit most. European banking supervisors have also freed up an estimated €120 billion of extra bank capital, which can support considerable lending capacity by euro area banks.

While the ECB’s response signals an eagerness to cope with the unique challenges the euro area faces, it suffers from a fundamental flaw in its approach to crisis management: it seeks to stem an insolvency crisis by means of expanded liquidity. This is the same misreading of the situation that (i) amplified the euro crisis during the previous ~10 years, and (ii) forced the ECB to engage in de facto fiscal policy that evidently fails in its stated end of boosting inflation to the desired levels.

To remind ourselves: QE is deemed necessary to fill in a void that is left behind by the concerted cuts in aggregate demand imposed by euro area Member States (simultaneous austerity). When spending collapses, the pressure on longer-term inflation rates is downward. Such a trend discourages investments, as persistent disinflation or outright deflation will entail losses while creating an environment of uncertainty and low expectations (i.e. more potential losses). Meanwhile, the ECB is mandated to preserve price stability, which the institution itself has quantified as a rate that is below but close to 2% over the medium-term. I have analysed this latter notion, and its concomitant issues, in my ~4000-word essay from 2017-04-02 on ECB independence: concept, scope, and implications.

The idea of QE is to provide sufficient capital to large corporations, typically financial institutions, in the hope that the money will trickle down to the real economy. Such a phenomenon should eventually be reflected in the inflation rate which, despite the trillions in asset purchases, remains persistently below the ECB’s medium-term target.

QE cannot guarantee an upward inflationary trend, ceteris paribus, because asset holders find it expedient to use their newfound resources to invest in luxury goods instead of directing funds to households and businesses. The new trillions never reach the real economy: they are used in speculative endeavours that are not tracked by the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), such as lucrative contracts for footballers (prices in the European football industry have been exorbitant in recent years), yachts, paintings of dubious aesthetic value that are auctioned for ridiculous sums, etc.

Put differently, QE offers nothing but the impression of a return to normality. It actually aggrandises debts and increases systemic risk, whose extent will only be fully revealed in the next financial crisis.

The fact of the matter is that the euro area never fully recovered from the previous crisis. The feeble positive signs where just a reflection of heightened ECB activism, rather than an indication of strong fundamentals. To use pertinent medical language, if you live off of supplements, you are dealing with an underlying health issue.

More QE means more of the same package of measures that has clearly failed to boost aggregate demand and put inflation rates in line with the ECB target. In an insolvency crisis no amount of liquidity will suffice to arrest the downfall and bring things back on track.

What is now needed is an altogether new mindset that will break free from the ideological constraints that have prevented European policy-makers from rational policy action. We need a genuinely unconventional response from the ECB and the Member States (coordinated via the Eurogroup, European Council, etc.). The core objective should be to monetise sovereign debts, allow governments to engage in large-scale expansionary fiscal policy that is commensurate with the debt monetisation scheme, and set price controls for practically all consumer goods.

The goal is to channel resources directly to the real economy at a time when economic activity has effectively stalled (the other option would be “helicopter money”). Households should witness a tangible difference in their purchasing power which, in turn, will send aggregate demand on an upward trajectory.

It is of paramount importance to tackle the coronacrisis at its root, otherwise the recession will transmogrify into an economic meltdown of colossal proportions.

A blueprint for such drastic measures has already been offered by Mario Draghi’s policy initiative following his famous “whatever it takes [to save the euro]”: the Outright Monetary Transactions. OMT was a debt monetisation plan linked to a programme of the European Stability Mechanism. In principle, Member States can use Enhanced Cooperation to employ EU institutions, such as the ECB, in the pursuit of policy initiatives that are outside the remit of the European Treaties though aligned with them. In effect, it is possible to circumvent any legal constraint on debt monetisation in order to save both the average European citizen and the EU/Euro architecture. This is with the proviso that policy-makers rise to the challenge of this unique historical occasion.

There is no such thing as a legal obstacle to survival. The challenge we Europeans have always been confronted with is to find ways of escaping from the shackles of pernicious ideology. It is ideological narrow-mindedness that guided policy-makers to blithely exacerbate the eurocrisis by imposing grinding austerity amid a general collapse in aggregate demand. It is ideology that keeps the ECB captive in this role-playing game of trying to help the real economy while actually sponsoring the speculative bonanza of unscrupulous investors.

Unlike the timing of the eurocrisis, the coronacrisis comes at a point where our economies and the welfare state have already been devastated by years of misguided austerity. Those in power must be immediately challenged to reconsider their mindset, emancipate themselves from the path-dependency of their past policy initiatives, and act in the longer-term interest of Europe at-large. Else I fear we will suffer much—MUCH—more than we already have.

1. Political organisation rests on trust. Without it we have no institutions, no law and order, no money, no morality, nothing.
2. Our lives on this planet are intrinsically inter-linked. Isolationism is an illusion, as you are never truly sheltered from externalities.

We know at least since the time of Thucydides (see the Milean Dialogue) or Plato (refer to Book II of the Republic on the Ring of Gyges, etc.) that the human animal is contained and rendered moral by an equilibrium of power. What we experience as peace and prosperity is a state where no person or group thereof is preponderant. Otherwise we default to the state of nature where everyone is left to fend for themselves and their immediate loved ones.

The state of nature, which results in the Hobbesian war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes), tells us something fundamental about the lack of trust: that humans are predatory towards their kind when their inter-subjective institutions implode (homo homini lupus est).

Institutions are at the risk of collapsing when a crisis hits. This can come in the form of a sustained economic recession, [civil] war, famine, a pandemic, and so on. What can arrest the downfall is either a remedy to the exogenous source of tension, where applicable, or a more just distribution of resources in an attempt to ease fears and appease the passions.

Our world has yet to recover from the financial calamity that struck at the end of the last decade. We have gone through years of grinding austerity that have put us all on the edge, while undermining the viability of critical infrastructure, including public health services.

We live in a world which, according to the 2019 Global Wealth Report of Credit Swiss, is defined by its staggering inequality metrics:

The bottom half of wealth holders collectively accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth in mid-2019, while the richest 10% own 82% of global wealth and the top 1% alone own 45%.

We cannot trust in the authorities to cater to our longer-term needs when the measures to cope with this pandemic are, as with the sovereign debt crisis and concomitant financial meltdown, not addressing the egregious injustice at the core of the global world order. People are told to live in isolation and remain under- or outright un- employed until further notice even though the precarious economic conditions of most of us do not permit for such a “luxury”.

There is no shortage of resources. The problem consists in their distribution. Yet we pretend as if we have suddenly depleted all of our stock and are on the verge of collapse. Ideological obsessions, such as conformity with neoliberal guidelines for “fiscal responsibility”, must be recognised as impediments to a genuine, lasting solution to the impending downfall. It would be a cardinal sin to have decision-makers report “positive numbers” on the fiscal front while leaving people to perish.

Pragmatism and a sense of urgency are in order. Our world must rectify its excesses, its underlying hubris. This eventually requires a rethink of the axiom that incessant, amoral growth is a necessary blessing and that the profiteers know better.

We must also scrutinise the growing isolationist tendencies across the planet. In a globalised system, where capital can flow virtually unencumbered from one nation to another, any serious action to improve the distribution of burdens must come in the form of a concerted effort between states. No country can do this on its own: the economic elite is shrewd enough to siphon its profits through some shady tax avoidance scheme—they are doing it anyway.

Our inter-connectedness is also of a natural sort. We share the same habitat. There is no “planet B”. Global phenomena such as climate change or this pandemic recognise no border controls or whatever feeble wall we may build for our selves to satisfy our delusions. Our shared humanity, our common presence as part of this planet’s ecosystem, forces us to think in terms of sustainability for the system at-large. It is a pernicious folly to pursue some isolationist agenda while thinking that the calamity will somehow spare us.

Though border checks may be a necessary measure to temporarily adapt to the realities of the virus, the longer-term objective must be to formulate policies with a cross-border scope. And such programmes must have a clear emphasis on their humanitarian or even ecological character. To save lives, to preserve life, to empower communities in the face of monumental transitions.

Capitalism has gone too far into toxic territory. It has reached a point where it generates—or greatly exacerbates—one crisis after another in quick succession. There is no reason to believe that things will magically solve themselves while the power elite continues to enjoy its massively privileged status.

Only fools will see the challenge of the present as a mere health issue. Policies are woven together. Our reality is a continuum that extends to every aspect of life. We cannot have effective health systems for all when our governments operate in servitude to some chimera called “austerity”, which is but a euphemism for promoting the interests of the oligopolies that control this world.

I believe that many of the problems in our economy or politics in general spring from the misinterpretation of intellectual property and its consequent weaponisation by oligopolistic interests. The logic of exclusivity and the concomitant practice of artificial scarcity force people towards becoming individualistic, which ultimately benefits the establishment that wants us weak and divided. Cooperation is discouraged so that corporations can further increase their profits, typically to the detriment of society and the planet.

With these in mind, I decided to sign the Public Domain Manifesto. It is a step in the right direction. I encourage you to study and support it.

The fundamental problem is the very notion of a capitalist critique of billionaires. I hold that, upon closer inspection, it leads us to the untenable position of a “capitalist critique of capitalism”, because it ignores the political dynamics at play.

The quintessential institution of capitalism—the conditio sine qua non of this system—is property rights. No rich person, no billionaire can ever exist without the legal framework that supports and protects claims on tangible or intangible goods. By “legal framework” we mean more than a mere corpus of legislation, as it implies the presence of a state apparatus with the capacity to both promulgate such laws and, most importantly, enforce them by means of supreme political authority (sovereignty). Enforcement encompasses the use of force, which spans everything from security forces, to courts, and prison systems.

This is why the notion of an unfettered free market is essentially impossible. Either you have an instituted free market, which includes at minimum the baseline of property rights and concomitant institutions, or you have the rule of the jungle. By the same token, I find the idea of “anarcho-capitalism” to not only be a contradictio in terminis, in that capitalism presupposes an archy, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of how property rights can be maintained over the long term without the use of force or the permanent threat thereof.

Once we couch capitalist economics in terms of their underlying politics, it no longer makes sense to argue along the lines of an idealised free market, as if that were an objective benchmark by which to compare degrees of capitalism. We can go straight to the moral point of whether we want some individuals to hold far more power than others. The argument thus switches from economic criteria to power relations between people.

The shift in focus is necessary to avoid the pitfalls of the capitalist thinking on such magnitudes as so-called “efficient markets”. How can you curtail a billionaire’s power without hindering their presence in the markets they partake in? How can the polity, for instance, break the billionaire status of Mark Zuckerberg while keeping Facebook in tact? The short answer is that this is not possible and that corporations will have to be radically refashioned as well. Which then means that we will have to tear apart the fabric of legal persons to the effect that one corporation cannot own others and, furthermore, that a real person’s ownership of corporations can only be limited in scope.

This line of reasoning means that we are no longer thinking in terms of efficient markets per se. Our goal is to contain the power of the economic elite, so that we can avoid injustices in our daily life but also the degredation of democracy into plutocracy. To that end, we would be willing to forgo some ‘efficiency’, though I disagree with such narrow economistic concepts for understanding the complexity of the real world, in favour of the greater good of preserving social peace and abolishing the control of human by human.

I repeat: why bother with the whole capitalist or free market mindset if your objective is to ultimately oppose it? Why try to be a false friend and in the process frame your thinking by categories you do not recognise or indeed approve of as the midpoint of any debate on the matter?

Moving on, I would suggest that capitalism presupposes inequality and indeed an economic elite because it has always been the system whereby all state interventions are aligned with the interests of capital owners (yes, capitalism is a form of interventionism, the litanies of naive neoliberals notwithstanding). In practice, “capital owners” are reduced to a select few that not only hold capital, but actually control the very access to the industry at hand. I call them “platformarchs”. They are in charge of the platforms on which all other economic activity can be based on. The platforms consist of critical infrastructure and/or key intellectual property. Platformarchs are not mere market actors but enablers of the markets they participate in. Think of how Facebook and Google are the platform controllers of the advertising business online.

Platformarchs exist in a symbiotic relationship with the state, both because their power is an extension of the legal-institutional architecture, but also due to the fact that the state finds it expedient to maintain only a handful of major actors in any given industry. A two-tier system of oligopolies framed by complementary market forces (i.e. the capitalist order), makes the exercise of governance much easier than having to wield power over a largely diverse, heteroclite, heterogeneous whole.

Against this backdrop, the phenomenon of an economic elite amassing the majority of the world’s wealth is not an irregularity but an expected outcome. It also explains why the right wing forces, broadly understood, have no trouble swinging from the political centre to the far right, given the right circumstances. The very design of the establishment rests on the uneven distribution of resources which, at scale, produces billionaires. It follows that a capitalist case against this concatenation of phenomena cannot actually be inherently capitalist.

Social democrats have always dreamt of managing capitalism in some supposedly humane way. And we have ample evidence to show that this task is futile, since social democracy shares the exact same gigantist principles as those of explicitly pro-capitalist forces, namely, that an omnipotent state will ultimately be in charge of people’s lives and that everything will be controlled at the political centre. I already formulated an argument along those lines in yesterday’s article on the shortcomings of technocratic communism, so please read that as well.

To press on the point of social democracy being gigantist, consider the typical scenario of “guaranteeing jobs”. The state will go to great lengths to ensure that a given capital owner, say, an industrialist keeps their business activities within the national borders. The government will come up with all sorts of so-called “incentives” to entice the industrialist, such as indirect payments, favourable treatment, and even implicit state guarantees that result in outright bail-outs in times of a major crisis. Just think about the spurious argument of “too big to fail” in light of “protecting jobs” and you already have a social democratic, ostensibly “broad-based” as the bureaucrats like to call it, recipe for preserving oligopolies.

The abolition of billionaires cannot be separated from the opposition to inequality at-large. It can never be formulated in terms of the constructs it seeks to undo, nor can it be predicated on values it does not share. It must rather be defined counter to them: a revolutionary power impulse that emanates from an outright anti-capitalist view of the world.

What Varoufakis outlines as an alternative to the established order is yet another form of gigantism. It requires a massive, omnipotent state apparatus that would need to have access to vast amounts of data in order to perform the function of ironing out inequalities between people. The notion of a central bank overseeing everyone’s income implies that there must be commensurate checks in place: a counter-party treasury, a government, a legislature… A super-state, much like the USA, Russia, China, and, increasingly, the EU.

What historical communism proved, what past and modern capitalism confirms, and what leftists in the mould of Varoufakis blithely ignore, is that the concentration of power is a source of mischief, abuse, corruption, no matter the initial motives for gathering all ultimate authority in a single locus.

Historical communism was enacted as yet another highly-stratified imperium rather than a distributed network of communes. It turned into a totalitarian regime exactly because the only way to control every aspect of life, in the name of the much-vaunted communal good, is to create a robust hierarchy, with supreme authority trusted at the top.

Whether it is party apparatchiks, professional central bankers, or ostensibly enlightened scientists in charge of managing everyone’s life, the underlying assumption is that gigantism is not bad per se. It just is a matter of changing the policies, not the state architecture. This is why today’s leftists offer no sustainable solution to the problems of our world. They see the epiphenomena while ignoring the underlying mechanics of institutionalised power. Should they get things their way, history will just repeat itself.

In the capitalist system we witness the symbiotic relationship between the state and the capital owners who control critical infrastructure; “platformarchs” as I call them. This type of plutocracy maintains a two-tier system that has nothing to do with the idealised free market of competing agents over a level-playing field that is taught in economics textbooks. Platformarchs hold disproportionate power, which they use to mould politics/law in their interests, to undermine their potential competition, and to consolidate their {oligo,mono}-polistic status. The “free market” only exists in the half spaces left unoccupied by platformarchs; the spaces where concentrated power is not [yet] focused in.

This is not a decadent form of some true capitalism, a far cry from some supposed golden age of free markets. No, this is a necessary result of the concentration of power: the intertwined agendas of economic and political interests, the control over resources and its weaponisation as an instrument for preserving the status quo. Those who have power seek to keep it and expand it. Not controlling some aspect of life can potentially lead to the undoing of the entire edifice. It is why a hierarchical system always has the tendency for absolutism (and why modern representative democracies are, in fact, oligarchies).

Gigantism cannot be turned into some kind of benevolent totalitarianism. That would require a technocratic elite that consists of purely altruistic beings who only care about the common good, assuming there is such a one-size-fits-all good to begin with. We cannot expect such an exalted, omniscient class to come to the fore—and to always be there in the long term—when it is highly unlikely to ever meet a single human who is perfectly non-egoistic. Put bluntly, it is naive to expect people in power to consistently behave unlike their nature and their role.

The other major problem of gigantism is that it can only be instituted in opposition to organic societies; “organic” in the sense of naturally exhibiting solidarity between their members. Organic societies are families and small communities. The opposite of what an empire is all about. Gigantism cannot be communitarian because it would then have to deny itself of the power over those communities.

When we think about alternatives we should always prefer the theory that makes the fewer assumptions about human nature. Do not base your ideas on the presence of the perfect moral agent. Your endeavour is bound to fail miserably. Instead work with the knowledge we have about the imperfect people we all are. Take it as a given that there will be competing forces, recognise that corruption and power go hand-in-hand, and do not expect the human kind to behave much differently than other pack animals (the idea that humans are higher beings is another hubris of ours, a form of anthropocentrism).

I hold that the opposition to capitalism must also assume the form of a radical departure from gigantism. That is the constant, the historical midpoint. Whereas capitalism is just its current emanation, with actualised communism being another one. We must turn our attention to organic societies, local communities that are allowed to be self-governed, without interference from some bureaucrat who purports to know better while operating aloof from the fray of local quotidian life.

Corruption at the community level is far smaller in scope than the abuse of power at the gigantist centre. It also is easier to spot and address in a timely manner, given that at the local scale people can practice genuine, participative democracy, while having full access to the information that concerns their public good.

We should not entertain a romantic view of humanity. Forget about the chimera of the selfless technocrats who take care of all of our needs while we blithely go on with our frivolous lifestyle. But also dismiss the equally baseless belief in “the people” as an integral whole that expresses a singular will; a will that the career reformist claims to grasp and express in its fullest, purest way. These magnitudes of people, nation, etc. are artificial constructs. Expedient abstractions, whose treatment as actual beings all too often facilitates gigantism’s quest for total control: to weaken people, to place them in precarious conditions, divide them and disempower them by means of displacement, solitude, and detachment from their natural and cultural milieu.

Let us remain realistic, cynical: expect the worst and plan accordingly. To go down the path of mainstream leftists is to throw to the wind everything that history and everyday experience teaches us.

In terms of appearances, James is the clear winner of the debate. He was more prepared, had references for all his arguments and, most importantly, found Chris to be downright wrong on a number of issues.

Chris’ own credibility started to fall apart when he admitted to not know a particular research method: how to read a “forest plot”. This made him look like a charlatan, which allowed James to attack him on a personal level throughout the show.

When it comes to finding the truth though, we are ultimately interested in the objective findings, not whether one side won over another in an argument. Did we get a definitive answer? Or are we still unaware of a host of things that call for further research?

Despite reigning supreme in the debate, James failed to prove the crux of his claim that meat is bad for you. There can be inferences made out of the available evidence, which may allow one to reach tentative conclusions. “Tentative” is the key word. In the face of uncertainty it is irresponsible to claim to know the truth with such unflinching confidence.

The fact that James presents cutting-edge research does not, in and of itself, mean that a definitive answer has been provided. It just proves that we are in a process of searching for the truth; a process that will continue for several years to come; a process that might need to be reviewed in the future just as all such research programmes hitherto have been subject to further evaluation.

The point is to stress the importance of remaining dubitative and inquisitive.

I am yet to be convinced that James’ argument against industry-funded research works in his favour. Yes, the establishment will do whatever it takes to forward its stratagems, making them appear as objective science. But why would this not also apply to the rising vegan industry? Are there no powerful interests there, who have a clear agenda?

It seems to me as a new small-scale, ecosystem-conscious farmer that uses no pesticides and chemicals, and who only employs polyculture and similar nature-aligned techniques, that there are oligopolistic interests on both sides of the argument. Whether we are talking about the omnivore industry or the vegan industry we are dealing with corporations that follow the exact same capitalist principles. Their telos is gigantism in that they all have incentives to maximise profit for shareholders and to dominate their industry in pursuit of that end. None of them has in mind the well-being of local communities or indeed the ecosystem at-large.

Speaking from my experience in the field of economics, specifically with regard to the economic crisis in the euro area, the numerous allusions to authority that James made do not amount to anything more than an appeal to the orthodoxy. Any heterodox view will of course not enjoy the prestige of being represented at head of an Ivy League institution, international organisations, etc. This does not mean that the mainstream is correct just because it has the appeal of being infallible. It just tells us which group is currently more influential for reasons that are external to the theses themselves (social status, exposure, etc.).

As a philosopher, I am concerned by the insistence on the micro scale of nutrients. I find it reductionist, potentially narrowing the scientist’s field of view, the scope of their inquiry. Is a fruit, a vegetable, a piece of meat just the sum of its nutrients? Or are there any emergent phenomena that can only be revealed by the interplay of those micro elements in their specific combinations? Has the relevant science ever considered the possibility that the human organism evolved over the millennia to understand different constitutions of nutrients in their given proportions as carrying a specific meaning which triggers certain chains of events in the body?

What I mean by this speculation is that there may be an emergent reality that goes unnoticed or understudied, due to the focus on the micro foundations. Emergent phenomena cannot be understood by looking at the elements in isolation: you need to check the system they comprise—to study it as such.

My speculation, a hypothesis for further research if you will, basically amounts to this: does the human organism understand meat as meat, vegetables as vegetables, fruits as fruits, etc. and react to them on a case-by-case basis? Furthermore, do such possible triggers adapt to combinations of these categories of food? Because if they do, then the emphasis on nutrients and the concomitant claims of taking supplements or whatever hyper-processed equivalent would seem to not be beneficial for our longer term health. Can we rule out the possibility that nutritionism, the reductionist emphasis on nutrients, favours the vested interests that produce supplements and, by extension, the vegan industry as a whole?

Take the case of fake meat for instance. I am referring to products that vegans consume that are made out of intensively processed soy beans yet are made to taste like meat. Has there been any conclusive research on the way the human organism reacts to the consumption of such products? When eating fake meat, does the body understand it as meat, as soy, or as an unknown? And what would possible misunderstandings or false positives mean for one’s overall health over the longer term? I do not think there can be any definite research on the matter, given the relatively short time span such products have been in circulation. Meaning that any claims on their much-touted benefits are based, at least in part, on nothing but faith.

I do not purport to be an expert. I am just pointing at the fact that James never offered any compelling evidence to support his main thesis that meat is bad for you. He won the debate based on Chris’ evident shortcomings and on the fact that he alluded to authority, conflating the orthodoxy with the objective truth.

What I take from all this is that with all said and done we remain uncertain. Meaning that we need to be calm and not draw far-reaching conclusions based on the imperfect information we currently have at our disposal.

If you want my personal opinion on meat consumption, I as a non-expert who claims no authority, think that it is bad for you for the mere fact that those animals are maltreated and malnourished. The same line of reasoning, however, applies to the vegetables you eat, which are filled with pesticides and chemicals, and which are produced in large monocrops that destroy the ecosystem (e.g. threatening the survival of bees, eroding the soil…). The same goes for the air you breath, especially in the big cities. And so on.

We have piles of evidence on the egregious abuses of capitalist interests in the food industry (capitalist interest in general). The vegan corporations have no plan to upset this order. Their ambition is to just place themselves in charge. Now I understand this is not the topic of the debate, but it is all too convenient to focus on the false narrative of “bad meat industry versus good vegans” while ignoring the social, political, economic factors that contribute to the destruction of nature.

The impression I got out of listening to this episode is that I have heard these same arguments a hundred times over. As such, the present essay will address the topic without being limited to the specifics of the given podcast. Here are some general remarks before I delve into the specifics:

• The term “populism” is inherently problematic. It is not properly defined. It does not refer to any one group. For an analysis to have credibility, both clarity of concept and precision of statement are required.
• Any social-political research programme that examines economics in a vacuum is fundamentally misguided. You need to look past economic indicators: start examining the distribution of power and control within the political whole in order to appreciate the interplay of economic factors beyond their phenomenality.
• On the economic front, mainstream economists repeat the same-old fallacy that plagues their profession: that of thinking of indicators as mere mechanics that are detached from actual human beings. A closely-related fallacy is the belief that their exhortations and appeals to scientific objectivity are freed from tacit moral assumptions.

There is no populism as such

Whenever someone groups together the likes of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Jeremy Corbin, Yanis Varoufakis, other leftists, etc., you know they are making broad generalisations that cannot withstand scrutiny.

The argument is that these politicians belong together because they all allude to “the people” as a means of forwarding their agenda. The populist, the thinking goes, is one who juxtaposes an idealised people with an oppressive elite or some other group that labours against the general good.

But this too is fundamentally flawed. For all the politics of modernity can be characterised, in one way or another, by its commitment to the wellness of the people. The very constitution of the United States of America is formulated by “the people” (“We the people”), implying that power springs from—and is ultimately exercised by—the totality of citizens. The French Revolution gave us Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which is, prima facie, about the citizenry being in charge of their polity (I analyse this in my essay Against the secularised theology of statecraft).

Every politician that runs for office must always demonstrate their commitment to the commons. No one ever got elected by outright claiming to oppose the interests of the many. Even authoritarian leaders claim to exercise their rule with the well-being of their subjects in mind, either explicitly or by alluding to a proxy such as “the homeland”.

Practically every country on the planet is instituted as a nation-state which rests on the idea that the nation—the people in its cultural-historical continuity—is identified with the state apparatus that operates within the confines of the homeland. Again, the tacit claim is that “the people” are in power and that the task of governance is to serve their interest.

International law, the very fabric of modern world affairs, is built on the principles of nation-statism. Practically every aspect of our politics is designed to offer the impression of catering to the masses.

Yet the self-righteous analyst who toils against ‘the populists’ will blithely insist on using the term “populism”, as if they have discovered something new; something that improves the instruments we have for describing phenomena. What happens instead is to create confusion, to counter ambiguity with greater ambiguity, blanket statements with more of the same, and to ultimately provide grist to the mill of those who thrive on misinformation.

Analysts of this sort will argue that populists share the defining feature of seeing the world in binary terms: the people against the elite, us against them, the virtuous majority facing the treacherous minority. The contradiction they fail to recognise is that this line of thinking follows the same pattern of contrasting absolutes: the populists versus the liberals, the cosmopolites versus the nativists, etc.

The truth is that political reality is far more complex. Rather than arguing for either of the extremes, we must appreciate the spectrum of possible combinations and permutations in between the various analytical constructs. And, most importantly, we must understand that there are several factors that need to be accounted for, in order to reach any tenable conclusion.

There is a place for generalisations: to understand broader trends, or the abstract structure of various epiphenomena of political organisation. But the general must not be conflated with the particular. When speaking about specific persons, groups, political parties, governments, etc. we must keep generalisations to a minimum, else make it clear that such claims would require further qualifications in order to properly describe the state of affairs.

The analyst who cavalierly propounds arguments against some fictitious group—against ‘the populists’—is an analyst in name only. But perhaps such a case is not as innocuous as someone being wrong, since those people tend to form part of the intelligentsia. They hold positions of authority. They are in contact with governments or powerful economic interests. They are given a platform to spread their falsehoods (e.g. a podcast on Project Syndicate). And so on.

The gigantist distribution of power

Every introductory course on economics or political science will, at some point, expound on the equality of the agents in the system. It comes down to the following:

• In a modern democracy all citizens are treated the same way, all have the same opportunities to achieve flourishing.
• The role of politics is to establish a level-playing field where equality is actualised and the forces of the market can deliver their blessings.
• Along those lines, capitalism is touted as an inherently fair construct. Since all members are subject to the same rules, every economic outcome, even if undesirable at first, is ultimately contributing to a net positive (it maximises utility) due to how rationality on the macro scale supposedly works out.

Any outright undesired effects of economic activity are described as a “market failure”, while any shortcomings in the political process are attributed to a number of factors with ‘the populists’ being the new bugaboo. At any rate, the fundamental assumption of fairness and equality as the core attributes of the legal-institutional architecture are never put into question.

The real world, however, does not conform with these idealised notions because it has a feature that is omitted from textbooks: the distribution of power and control.

Take, for example, the freedom of speech. You will notice how the platforms where someone can voice their opinion are controlled by a handful of people or corporations, such social media silos like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin (Microsoft), or by media proprietors like Rupert Murdoch and Axel Springer SE. Yet the naive politician will keep on touting “media pluralism”…

The same sort of concentration can be found in every sector of economic activity. A small group of software giants dominates the tech industry. The banking industry is an oligopoly with strong symbiotic ties with public institutions, by means of central banking, fractional reserves, implicit state guarantees, outright bail-outs, etc.

Capitalism is the ideology by which state intervention must be made in the interest of the capital-owners. In practice though, capitalism creates two types of capital owner: the platformarchs and the platformzens. The former are those who own critical infrastructure, essential intellectual property, the very access to the industry (the concentration mentioned above). The latter are the ones who can only operate on top of what the platformarchs render possible.

This binary, when combined with political reality, can be reduced to a distinction between security and precarity. The government will never allow a platformarch to go out of business because they are “too big to fail”. In a similar fashion, political elites find it expedient to favour the expansion of platformarch control, because it makes it easier to perform various tasks of governance. It is easier, for example, for police authorities to have a detailed profile of someone who was active on social media, since all data is already collected, collated, synthesised. Taxation becomes more straightforward when every transaction goes through the banking system. And so on.

In turn, platformarchs use their resources to promote politicians who will do their bidding. You think you have a right to run for office: modern democracy is all about equality and such. Well, good luck finding funds, getting media exposure, and so on, while still retaining an independent voice…

As such, political and economic elites feed off of each other. The state apparatus and the platformarchs have a symbiotic relationship that extends to every aspect of public life. This is the oligarchy of our times which, in truth, differs only in its surface aspects from the feudal order of yesteryear.

I term this phenomenon gigantism. A self-conscious hierarchy with the tendency to concentrate more authority at the top; a hierarchy whose purpose and destiny is to expand its reach and proliferate.

The cornerstone of this order is the sanctification of property and the treatment of intellectual property as of equal or superior status to its physical counterpart. The platformarchs hold the legal titles that allow them to extract rent, but also to assiduously and unscrupulously combat any form of competition. When that is not enough to secure their position they will simply buy out any rising challenger, such as how Facebook has acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, further consolidating its status as the de facto portal to the social web.

What the mainstream economist will consider as the ordinary operation of the free market is, in fact, the reinforcement of the two-tier economic order of capitalism (platformarchs and platformzens). The so-called “free market” is but a stratified one. Politics is no different, given how individuals of a certain background or with the right connections gain access to power.

Against this backdrop, it is pointless to talk about modern democracy and capitalism as essentially just and egalitarian. To do so would be to substitute reality with ideology. Our very experience tells us that not all of us are treated equally, not all businesses enjoy the same level of protection, not all voices are granted a megaphone with direct access to the wider public… Yet we are indoctrinated in lauding the establishment for its fairness and we are constantly bombarded with disinformation about how good things are and how any faults are primarily of our own doing.

It also is quite telling how the intelligentsia has found an expedient answer to any potential problem: ‘the populists’ are to be blamed. As such, the talk about populism functions as a meta-narrative: an ex ante rationalisation of theories about the underlying soundness of the present order, as well as a prior legitimation for any labelling technique against those who may question the status quo. Now every argument against the establishment is stigmatised as populist, therefore, as essentially equivalent to the governance of Putin, Erdogan, and co.

An example of this cheap trickery is the very excerpt of the aforementioned Project Syndicate podcast:

For the last several years, populist leaders have wreaked havoc on the institutions and norms that have underpinned the liberal world order. And their policies are increasingly placing the global economy at risk.

It conveniently ignores the fact that said liberal world order produced the economic crisis in the first place and did everything within its power to ensure that the losses where distributed to the many, while the profits stayed with the few. Unless, of course, the likes of Alan Greenspan and the chorus of economists/apologists who touted “efficient markets”, as well as the policy-makers that were in charge during the crisis, are all part of this illustrious group of populist leaders…

Enough with this nonsense!

Economistic ideology and moralism

It is common for economists to speak of economic indicators without recognising the underlying human aspects of them. Part of that is legitimate when doing specialised research. But it turns out to be highly problematic when directly converted into guidelines for policy initiatives without further interdisciplinary feedback.

A case in point, though far from the only one, is the concept of “human capital”. On the face of it, this is a technical term for describing a factor of production. Nothing untoward about it. However, the dehumanisation of individuals and their subsequent treatment as raw input has the following side-effects:

• Humans are treated as interchangeable, without any real downsides. Like cogs in a machine.
• Humans are extracted from their cultural-social background. They are decontextualised.

From these follows a core of tacit moral claims that disguise as scientific insight:

• A pro-migration stance that only sees individuals as easily relocatable resources. This encourages mass migration which, in turn, increases the competition for domestic jobs and, thus, the precarity of those with an occupation. The economist’s pro-migration stance is an implicit affirmation of the positives of precarity for the maximisation of business gains.
• The perpetuation of the myth of the “rugged individual”, the homo economicus who moulds its destiny by sheer force of will. This mythical being optimises its behaviour by thinking on the margin (in economic parlance) and by being prepared to migrate once the conditions demand as much. This means that the person is no longer attached to their locality, their community and, more importantly, their land.

The combined effect of the above is summarised thus:

1. A vicious cycle of uncertainty for the majority of people. It is why people are willing to tolerate such egregious conditions as unpaid internships, work without extra benefits during Sundays or holidays, long hours well beyond the purported 8-hour shift, etc. Reported unemployment indicators can be used to deceive the public, as they typically disregard such qualitative aspects of reality.
2. Precarity pushes wages downward, while capital gains continue to increase. This effectively translates into an irresistible drive for a more uneven distribution of resources and control. Combined with the expansion of platformarch power, this results in the further entrenchment of oligopolies in every sector of the economy. As such “capital gains”, typically refers to more benefits for the economic elite.
3. People are encouraged to become even more individualistic and to stop thinking about camaraderie. Emphasis is placed on their mobility and flexibility. They must remain detached from other people in their proximity, since they are all replaceable with relative ease. Meanwhile, platformarchs know all too well how to join forces when pushing for government reforms that suit their interests.
4. There is an ever-greater concentration of arable land—land in general—in the hands of new aspiring feudal lords (platformarchs getting into agriculture). This contributes to the erosion of local communities and thus to the collective disempowerment of the people involved. In turn, this sets the stage for a fully-fledged recrudescence of manorialism and feudalism. Whenever people realise that life in the city is unsustainable due to exorbitant living costs and return back to their village they will find out that their commune has become nothing but a large consolidated title held by the new local baron who serves yet greater interests.
5. Brain drain is never recognised for what it actually is: a form of colonialism. Instead “human capital” from underdeveloped countries is encouraged to move into developed countries in droves where their skills can add greater value to the economy. The pernicious effect of brain drain is a structural degradation of life in the country of origin, a form of impoverishment and critical resource depletion, that decisively diminishes its capacity for innovation and cultural fulfilment. Brain drain also lowers the defences of a country to the speculative attacks of vested economic interests from developed countries.

The notion that representative democracy has made us all equal is ludicrous. Just as there is no genuinely free market in a capitalist order that produces and favours platformarchs.

In short, the mainstream economist’s exhortations have ideological underpinnings and moral assumptions that favour a specific state of affairs. They are not objective, at least not to the degree proper science would demand. It is why they should be considered economistic rather than outright economic observations.

Still, the economist qua apologist of the status quo will pretend to be free of bias and will insist on us “listening to what economists have to say”; to listen to the economists that are promoted on the establishment’s media platforms to remind us how great things are…

The focus on populism is a distraction

The overarching theme here is that we should not get dragged into the fake dilemmas that the intelligentsia wants to impose on us. Just as we should not take their every word at face value. Furthermore, we must not entertain the beguiling fallacies and selective reasoning of economists who imply that because we do not live in absolutely brutish conditions, we should be eternally grateful to capitalism.

On the topic of populism, politicians such as Trump, Salvini, Orban, conform with my analysis that the extreme right is the new right. There is nothing new about them. Just a recurring theme among conservatives. While the likes of Putin and Erdogan need to be examined in the wider context of their respective country’s cultural-historical path dependencies, where it will be made clear that, yet again, the talk about “populism” is misplaced. A similarly inquisitive approach must apply to the various left-wing politicians that are described as populists.

Much of the public dialogue—which is not public given the centralised control of the media—focuses on the vaunted threat posed by populists. We are conditioned to worry about problems that do not really exist and to place disproportionate emphasis on minor details. All while the greater issues that define our times are altogether ignored or talked about as natural constants or benign by-products of an inherently virtuous political order.

This is the challenge we are facing: to cut through the misinformation and to recognise pseudo-science on the spot. In parallel, we must be prepared to mount an offensive against the forces that seek to control every aspect of our life. For that we need to cultivate the values of communitarianism and localism; to understand that the true answer to gigantism is the replacement of the status quo with a distributed system of largely autarkic and autonomous collectives.

Examined in abstract, euro-optimism looks like a sensible position. You do not take everything at face value, while still expressing your support for the potential benefits of “ever-closer union”. As such, you can dismiss everything that transpired during, say, the years of the economic crisis as a concatenation of otherwise momentary lapses in judgement. You can, in other words, claim that there are no path-dependencies to the formation and the making of policy, and that the large corpus of legislation that was passed and the political precedent framing it are but transient phenomena.

But what if the policies of the present are in large part determined by those of the past? What if decisions are not made in a legal-institutional vacuum? What if the state of affairs features a certain distribution of power that informs any course of action? I am not arguing for strong (i.e. “naive”) determinism in matters of statecraft. I am, however, pointing at the excessive good will one must show to truly remain a euro-optimist.

Too much optimism of this sort can make one an apologist of the establishment. You will have to go to great lengths to defend the EU, with your argument essentially being reducible to an empty promise: “we just need to change things later”. At which point the very term “optimist” is a misnomer, for it conceals the underlying ideology of Europeanism that takes precedence over every other issue.

Gigantism writ large

From the perspective of local communities, the EU is an amplifier of all that is bad with the nation-state: it accelerates the concentration of authority to the political centre, depriving communities of their capacity to govern their commons.

The one potentially redeeming feature of the nation-state, albeit a minor one in the grand scheme of things, is the affinity we likely have with those in power. We share the same cultural background. We are “close enough” to believe that we just might be able to have a say in matters of state. Both history and immediate experience suggest that this is wishful thinking for the most part: the power elite serves its own interests. Still, there is an argument to be made that under certain circumstances national unity can underpin a more fair form of governance.

The EU removes even that glimmer of hope. Now our rulers are people that we have very little in common with. Forget about the nihilism that “we are all Europeans” or “we are just humans”. Why should the Protestant dogmas about daily conduct be imposed on us in the form of technocratic edict? Why should we all align our lives with the aspirations of industrialists and bankers in Western Europe?

The EU is a union of power elites from the nation-states who band together against local communities throughout those countries. The gigantism that was once confined to the borders of the nation-state is now aggrandised on a continental scale. And as with yester years, its beneficiaries will be the oligarchy:

1. technocrats operating the state apparatus;
2. conniving entrepreneurs who stay close to the locus of power in order to hinder the free market;
3. their facilitators, such as political parties, esteemed universities, trade unions controlled by political parties, and the like.

To this end, capitalism in Europe will quickly expand its reach to create the familiar two-tier economic order that corresponds to the security-precarity binary:

• platformarchs (platform owners) who control the means of entry in the given industry, such as intellectual property rights, patents, state-sponsored protection from competition;
• platformzens (platform dwellers) who can only operate their business on top of the platform that is maintained by the above group.

The former group operates in a symbiotic relationship with the state apparatus, while the latter is effectively excluded from having a meaningful impact on policy.

Against this backdrop, the platformarchs need only maintain the established order by sponsoring politicians that will keep power structures in tact. Which in turn reduces elections to a contest between the assignees of plutocrats. Those with an independent voice will be cast aside, given limited “air time”, remain underfunded, etc.

But hey, there are elections underway, ergo “we have democracy”…

To this end, the only difference between a nation-statist and a Europeanist is the geographic scope of their incessant drive to concentrate power at the centre.

The Westernisation of the EU

The eurocrisis will go down in history as a turning point. It catalysed the irresistible shift of power to Germany, France and their closest allies—to what would qualify as Kerneuropa (core Europe). Throughout the crisis, the Franco-German tandem managed to impose its policies on the rest of Europe in the form of:

• crushing austerity,
• large bailouts for the mainly French and German banks,
• the economic governance of the Economic and Monetary Union.

I must stress the importance of “catalysed”: the eurocrisis greatly contributed to a series of factors that were already in play and which could be traced back to at least the Treaty of Maastricht and the subsequent introduction of the Euro.

In the years since the start of the crisis, it is clear that every major initiative will have to be tailored to the ambitions of the Franco-German elite, such as with the possibility of a Europe-wide military-industrial complex and a European army.

Couched in those terms, the distinction between the “core” and the “periphery” becomes more pronounced. The latter group can only add meaning to its contribution by facilitating the core’s stratagems. The periphery might coordinate its efforts in a desperate attempt to block every initiative, without however being in a position to impose its alternative. Put differently, the periphery has become irrelevant in the grand scheme of EU integration. They are still useful as Lebensraum though: debt colonies and markets to export the goods produced by the massive corporations that reside in the core countries. This in turn exacerbates “brain drain” (young, educated people forced to migrate) from the periphery to the core.

The very design of the EU produces a vicious cycle against countries that are far from the locus of power. In the past, the Franco-Germans used to be a bit more coy about their true intentions. The signs were still there, but only analysts would care to trace them. Now everything is clear as day. The nominations for the EU top jobs speak for themselves:

• A German aristocrat at the head of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen).
• The French darling of the financial establishment as the chief of the European Central Bank (Christine Lagarde).

What connection do such people have to the average European? You are telling me that a feudal lord will give us “European democracy”? Or that the banksters’ flunky will care about our precarity? They are there to put flesh to the bones of European gigantism.

“European democracy” is a false goal

The euro-optimist will continue to believe that the “United States of Europe” is getting closer and with it the ideal of a European democracy. If only that were the case: just look at the quality of “democratic” rule in the US—a detached technocracy in the service of vested interests and an omnipotent state apparatus that exists in symbiotic relationship with platformarchs.

There can be no European democracy just as there exists no centralist-and-centralising rule from the bottom. A hierarchical structure is always ruled from the top. This has been the case from antiquity. That is its very design.

There is an inherent trade-off between representation and scale. The bigger the institutional order, the less representative it is. This is due to the very logistics of power management within the structure and the need to preserve the hierarchy’s integrity, which ultimately manifests as the centralisation of power.

This is gigantism in a nutshell: the propensity of a hierarchy to expand its reach and proliferate. The EU validates this rule by always trying to bring more competences at the supranational level.

The phenomenon is not limited to politics though. It is, for instance, a defining feature of the corporate world. Do you think the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft are organised bottom-up? How about the car industry or the food industry, or big pharmaceuticals, or the banking sector—is not their structure, their mode of conduct, their telos, a gigantist one?

And this speaks at another widespread delusion of our era: that democracy exists because the letter of the law states as much or merely due to the shadow play of elections at regular intervals. How naive! Meanwhile, quotidian intersubjective experience unfolds within the confines of top-down absolutism at the workplace.

The EU is a lost cause

I am writing this as someone who used to believe that Europe could indeed strive for something better. I was an optimist myself. But a disposition towards the future can only go so far. There needs to be a reality check, at which point insistence on euro-optimism cannot be maintained rationally.

The EU is the vehicle of gigantism in this part of the world. It is the natural enemy of local communities, of people in their daily lives. Everything that comes out of Brussels, or Strasbourg, or Frankfurt, or the capitals of the Franco-German tandem is another measure against us.

Consider this a warning: not everything Europe does and will do is going to be purely bad. That is not how modern statecraft works. There will always be just enough “probably good” elements to cultivate in people a sense of hope for greater things to come.

They will continue to peddle the “European values” while distracting us from the fact that the EU is not in the service of its people. Ursula von der Leyen and Christine Lagarde will be presented to the general public with an opportunistic gender narrative of “women in power”. They will not be named for what they truly are: elites exercising authority in the service of the oligarchy.

Localism and communitarianism

Democracy is about community sovereignty. People in their locality who express their collective agency by deciding on the things they have in common. And democracy presupposes actualised equality:

• we have all secured the means of sustenance,
• we can voice our opinion at the assembly (ecclesia, apella) directly or through a close member of our family/group,
• we have abolished the control of human by human,
• no member has a permanent position of authority,
• no member concentrates all wealth and corresponding power in their hands.

The product of modernity known as “representative democracy” is, in fact, oligarchy whose gigantism was initially confined to the structure of the nation-state.

The EU is compounding the problems of gigantism at the national level by introducing cross-border hegemony. It ushers in the era of gigantism on a continental scale. There is no going back for this organisation. The European integration process will continue to reinforce the core at the expense of the periphery, the elites at the expense of the rest of us.

Those who believe in democracy, those who understand that liberty can only be experienced through the collective, must realise that they face a choice of remaining true to their ideals or becoming hopeless romantics who insist on euro-optimism.

The EU is our enemy.

• On Gigantism.
• After Capitalism.

The central ideology of statecraft and of international relations in general is nation-statism, i.e. the assignment of personhood to the construct of the nation-state. Nation-statism combines the three present entities of the nation, the state, the homeland into an imaginary being. The nation-state is thus perceived as the unit of international affairs, the bearer of sovereignty, the embodiment of popular will and the incarnation of the national interest.

The nation-state is thought as having a personality of its own, as expressed in quotidian language where “America demands”, “Germany intends”, etc. Against this backdrop, statecraft is largely concerned with specifying that which is “national” in accordance with the evolving demands of governance.

Such beliefs have been embedded in popular consciousness roughly since the Peace Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and later the French Revolution (1789). These encompass the values about political conduct that bridged the transition from the Medieval times to Modernity.

The statecraft of the Middle Ages had as its midpoint certain theological propositions that justified the superstructure of the vertical distribution of power. Royalty as a function of “God’s Will”. Campaigns in the name of “The Lord”. Crowns, fiefs, generalised serfdom grounded in some mystical “exogenous” legitimation of the political order.

Whereas the turn to nation-statism changed the surface aspects of statecraft. The agent of political will became the nation-state as such, while older institutions lost their significance, at least on the face of it or in purely symbolic terms. Structural injustices remained constant, nonetheless: the role of the feudal lord is now assumed by the platformarch, the capital owner who operates in symbiotic relationship with the state apparatus.

Despite the superficial similarities and differences between the now and then, I hold that modernism is essentially the reformulation of dogmas of yore. What the transition to the modern era achieved is the secularisation of the Medieval value system, in every aspect of political organisation, including matters of individuality.

The nation-state as an exalted being

Let us consider how Medieval theology about the legitimation of authority was secularised and how, through that process, the new order is but the continuation of the older through different means.

Here is Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Human and Citizen of 1789 (translation is mine from the original in French):

The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially with the nation. No body, no individual, can exercise authority that does not emanate expressly from it.

Le principe de toute souveraineté reside essentiellement dans la nation, nul corps, nul individu, ne peut exercer d’autorité qui n’en émane expressement.

On the face of it, this article appears revolutionary. It seems to put an end to the aristocracy’s claims on undisputed rule, while offering people the right to define their polity themselves. Perhaps the construct of the nation-state is an important step forward in human history.

Yet upon closer inspection it shall become evident that this provision does not necessitate any change whatsoever, insofar as the balance of power in society is concerned, as evidenced by 200+ years of nation-statism.

If we replace Article 3’s references to the “nation” with overtly theological propositions, we can draw some useful conclusions:

The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially with the nation God. No body, no individual, can exercise authority that does not emanate expressly from it Him.

We see that the legitimation of authority continues to be treated as exogenous to the governors and the governed. Meanwhile, the overall ambiguity of what exactly is the nation, is consistent with the theological notion of a prior truth; something that is necessary for every dogma. It does not really matter what character one may give to that which remains undefined, obscure, and impossible to verify objectively. What is of import here is the status of the proposition: it is treated as undeniable, as a given. And as with all such worldviews, it gives excessive power to those who are designated as its interpretors. In other words, the deification of the nation is a blank check in the hands of the establishment.

The nation remains undefined and, therefore, the ruling class gets to substantiate it as it sees fit. For example, the French government wages war in the middle of Africa supposedly in the name of the national interest, as if that is of any tangible benefit to the average French farmer. The ones who gain the most from jingoism, resource extraction, mass displacement of populations, are the large corporations that operate symbiotically with the state apparatus.

There no longer exists imperialism of the old style, where a metropolis has colonies across the world. Now everything is couched in terms of “national necessity” or “need” or “interest” that is all too often perfectly aligned with the plans of multinational companies (e.g. American oil companies being the natural extension of USA’s geopolitical stratagems).

Through the ever-evolving hermeneutics of nation-statism, the nation is identified with the power elite. The national interest is whatever profits the powers that be. National will is but the machinations of the establishment. Whatever historical change is limited to ceremonial aspects of life. What one was the domain of the kingdom, protectorate, colony now goes by the name of “national space”, while the subjects of the feudal master are now the subjects of the omnipotent nation-state. As for the old aristocracy, they become owners of mega-corporations and through their association with the state turn into platformarchs.

The role of the apologist of the status quo is no longer performed by the priests of the prevalent religion. A chorus of “secular” thinkers is enough: theologians without a god, typically maintaining the social status of doctor (philosophy doctor == PhD, though as a rule of thumb they are as far from philosophy as they can be). These are the intellectual vanguard of the establishment. Political scientists, economists, lawyers, poets that idealise conventional wisdom: the intelligentsia that accompanies the construct of gigantism. Of course, the power and influence of religions has remained in tact. In fact, they can now pretend that their role is purely moral, as if morality can ever be cleanly separated from the rest of intersubjective behaviour and experience; as if, that is, it does not inform the decisions of humans on a daily basis and in every aspect of their life.

The “analysts” that support gigantism are the ones who contrary to real science hold as objective truths a range of conventions that facilitate the powers that be, such as the sanctity of property, “natural” and “inalienable” rights, economic growth as a synonym for prosperity, etc. They are the ones who perpetuate myths such as that the nation expresses itself through the shadow play of partitocracy known as “elections” that are nothing more than a competition between corporate sponsors and lobbies. There can be no free and fair elections while there is an uneven distribution of resources and for as long as the media are controlled by the oligarchy (media pluralism is a myth).

The establishment’s proponents are also the ones who give credence to the belief that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the platformarchs and the concomitant consolidation of plutocracy is nothing but the ordinary operation of the “free market”. And they blithely dismiss any counterpoint by claiming that this is fair because we are ostensibly equal and can all achieve that status, provided we work hard enough. If you point to the nexus of interests that exist, who controls credit and money and all media of communication, and how only conniving entrepreneurs who have insider support get to do things, you are labelled all sorts of things. In true pseudoscientific fashion, any criticism, any expression of doubt, is rejected in advance.

And to add insult to injury, these pseudoscientists and the activists that have internalised their rhetoric will have the audacity to suggest that a referendum in the form of a binary choice to a complex, multifaceted issue is the pinnacle of democracy. This is plain wrong! Voicing an open-ended “yes” or “no” to a process that we had no say in and, most importantly, without being able to specify the meaning of the result, is but a charade. Referenda are a form of extortion, the litanies of the apologists notwithstanding.

Opposing the underlying values of gigantism

Rome (eastern and western) consolidated its global hegemony, its brand of gigantism, in large part thanks to Christianity. The Christian dogma took form by means of imperial interventions and ecumenical synods, while the new religion was imposed on the masses by state edict, fire and steel. In Roman theocracy, there is one supreme ruler—the emperor—who reigns over everything, just as there is one almighty deity (the pantokrator). Then there is a single hierarchy that expresses the true word of the deity: the church with an undisputed figurehead (vertical power structures with a religious character is from where “hier-archy” takes its name). The Roman model imposes top-down control in both “secular” and “mystical” aspects of life, with the locus of authority being the ruling elite. This was a form of totalitarianism that justified itself as the will of some exogenous force. The reign of the few over the many. The absolute asymmetry in the distribution of power.

The Westphalian worldview of the personalised state, which the French imagination converted into the nation-state, has not challenged the Roman framework. There has been a change in faces and methods, largely due to technological advances. For instance, the modern state purports to oppose totalitarianism, as it appropriates and twists democracy, while alluding to liberal values in order to forward its illiberal ambitions.

Similarly, the Enlightenment did not refute the prior given truths it purported to oppose. Humanity was never truly enlightened in the sense of being emancipated from the values of the Medieval era. Instead, the Enlightenment helped secularise them and essentially repackage them for use in the new age. As such, the Biblical individual becomes the decontextualised human of anthropocentrism, which is the cornerstone of contemporary morality. The prejudice of free will, i.e. of some mystical force or intrinsic property that is unique to humankind, was never placed under scrutiny. Consequently, the basis of conventional wisdom remains largely constant since the time of Augustine.

We must free ourselves from the fallacy of the decontextualised being that exercises free will irrespective of the global magnitudes within which it operates. Humanity has nothing special about it. It is just another part of the whole. A species of animal that bears lots of similarities with other forms of life, especially those that share common characteristics with it, like mammals. Whatever differences are of degree, not category. Human is determined or influenced by underlying biological and chemical factors that reveal dynamic spheres of probable outcomes that are always subject to natural constants.

Questioning the figments of anthropocentrism in all its variations is the starting point of a holistic ethics which, in practice, manifests as a life that is conducted in accordance with nature and with humility towards the rest of the ecosystem.

A people’s moral conscience, its set of unchallenged traditions and basic beliefs, always exerts centripetal power against any kind of root-and-branch re-institution of society. All hitherto revolutions failed to achieved the ultimate end of obliterating the old order, because the revolutionaries never truly internalised the importance of first displacing the prevailing morality which, in the case of Christianity, was imposed on them by Rome and its imitators.

In this light, it is no surprise that the French Revolution heralded a new wave of imperialism that holds true to this day despite its permutations. Or how the supposed communist regime of Russia evolved into a top-down tyranny of the technocrats and the party elites (with the qualitative difference being that the function of the prior truth was initially performed by the messianic-style determinism of the class struggle).

A successful revolution can only be one that emanates from a shift in conscience and is then expressed as a decisive change in institutions. Put simply, there is a choice to be made between remaining true to the overarching value system of the decontextualised human or being a revolutionary. The two are incompatible.

The turn to communitarianism

The struggle for communitarianism cannot be expended in pursuit of marginal reforms of the established order. The goal is not merely the decentralisation of power, but the generalised opposition to all forms of gigantism: in politics, the economy, agriculture, interpersonal affairs.

This implies the rejection of conventional beliefs about statecraft as well as a comprehensive review of traditional morality. None of the components or subsets or elements of the ruling elite must remain untouched. New institutions require new modes of thinking. Only in this way can we achieve the organic polity, centred on the principle of the citizen-owner-guardian.

It is clear that the turn to communitarianism also requires relentless criticism of our history. We must stop beautifying the conditions in which our ancestors lived, i.e. the legacy of Rome.

Communitarianism is not the transfer of power to the regional administrations. That would just create localised tyrannies. Communitarianism is the conscious struggle against the gigantism of our times. It is a fight for the contextualised human: the being that lives on its land, its natural habitat, in cultural affinity with its fellow people, while sharing biological ties with them.

Consequently, sovereignty does not emanate from some imaginary supreme entity, be it a deity or the nation. Supreme political authority is the sum of each person’s power within their community. It is the natural strength that is used to define interpersonal relations and to safeguard our commons.

While I appreciate Mr. Stiglitz’s observations about the state of affairs, I find the essence of “progressive capitalism” fundamentally flawed. It does not deviate from the core tenet of conventional statecraft: gigantism.

Progressives delude themselves into thinking that the problems in the current order rest with ideology or just the wrong people being in power. Their thinking is that, ceteris paribus, tweaks in mindset and a change in faces is all that is needed to nudge the juggernaut into doing the right thing. Thus they remain oblivious to the inherent tendency of hierarchies to persist and proliferate.

It is a mistake to believe that the concentration of wealth and concomitant power is a function of ideology, in this case neoliberalism. The problem is germane to the political organisation itself. The modern state is a monolith that seeks to bring everything under its control. And, as we can see in Europe, there is a growing propensity to insist on the aggrandisement of state structures, with the EU seeking to gain ever-more competences.

A large state apparatus can only ever give rise to an oligarchy. This is a systemic phenomenon. The further away the state is from the citizen, the less representative and more concentrative it necessarily becomes. Ideology is secondary to the mechanics of power distribution. It is why the symbiosis of political and economic elites is not peculiar to the neoliberal world order. It was made manifest in the USSR as well as empires of yore. It is readily apparent in China, Russia, and across all presumably non-neoliberal countries.

The gigantist state creates the economic elite out of sheer necessity to extend its control. Think of how a state may approach tax collection, for instance:

• One way is to allow everyone to use whatever fiduciary medium the free market allows and process payments in whichever manner the individuals decide.
• The other is to impose a state-sanctioned currency, controlled by a central authority, and to force everyone to run their transactions through a controlled environment that can be regulated with greater ease.

The latter is the model we have. State fiat gives us money and the banking system, with which we are to conduct out business. In turn, the state gets to monitor all activity and impose taxation at will. In this scenario, the bankers qua enablers emerge out of the desire of the authorities to make their tax-collecting mechanism more efficient. In turn, the economic establishment needs an omnipotent state to shield it from competition. The economic elite turns into the class of platformarchs thanks to the support of the authorities. It is a mutualist existence.

Those who genuinely believe that capitalism is the same as the free market are naive. Capitalism is the tandem of economic and political interests which produces the two-tier economic system we are familiar with: that of platformarchs and platformzens. There is no such thing as an even playing field. One set of rules applies to the economic elite—rules that allow them to be the elite—and another to the rest of us. They are the enablers, we are just renting out our life. Security for them, precarity for us. Just consider the oodles of free money that have been pumped into the financial sector under the euphemism of “quantitative easing”. The banksters are subsidised, while the rest of us are forced to brutishly survive on the precipice.

In a similar fashion, the gigantist state controls the people who will ever be allowed in power. It is sheer folly to believe that what we have today is democracy in its proper sense. Either because of electoral laws and vote counting (minimum threshold, district representation, etc.), the control of the media by a select few, the uneven distribution of sponsorship, those who are heard the most are the ones who are favoured to do so. Small parties are not given the same resources and time “on air” as the incumbent ones.

This is how the hierarchy expresses its survival instinct. It chooses the people who will perpetuate it. And because gigantism must control every aspect of life to be most effective, the hierarchies have a built-in drive to grow larger, more homogeneous, and self-aware.

Lord Acton’s observation that “all power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely” contains both a truth and a potential misunderstanding. Power begets power. Though this is not “corruption” in the ordinary sense of moral degradation—that implies the falsehood that some incorruptible leader can set things right (per the “progressive capitalist” rhetoric, for example). “Corruption” in this sense is the normal operation of concentrated power striving for its continuity.

To this end, neoliberalism is but an epiphenomenon: an ideology that masks the underlying propensities of the gigantist establishment. It is not the defining feature of our times, but its rationalisation.

What every progressive economist in the mould of Mr. Stiglitz fails to understand is that the emphasis on efficiency and growth, which translates into economies of scale, is the path to gigantism. To illustrate my point: I am a real bread baker. I prepare my own sourdough loaf at home and share it with my community. Actions such as this, once standardised, make the community more autarkic and resilient. We do not consume the junk peddled by the industry. And we are healthier as a result, meaning that we do not need the other kind of rubbish sold by big pharma. If my concern was solely about efficiency, then locally baked bread would be a bad idea: industrial loaf would be the way to go.

The same reasoning applies in agriculture. Doing things locally allows us to engage in what I call “ecosystemic agriculture”, which rests on the principles of polyculture, biodiversity, respect of the natural constraints, and appreciation of humans’ role as yet another part in the greater system (this is the contextualised human in contrast to the fantasies of the decontextualised human held by individualism and anthropocentrism).

Think about it: if we all work in our small piece of land and do not target maximum output of a single good in the name of “efficiency” (polyculture instead of monoculture), we remove the dependency on chemicals: the ecosystem delivers crops without pampers—effectively a form of “doping”—that have disastrous consequences. By eliminating that dependency, we have not only contributed to the sustainable rebalancing of the ecosystem, but have also taken power away from incumbent economic interests. In the process we have also denied the state apparatus its control over our farming. Bureaucrats think they know best—such hubris! Their solution always involves some sort of gigantism, with the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy being a case in point.

The gist is that “progressive capitalism” can only be yet another incarnation of the status quo. Our goal should not be the preservation or mere beautification of this political order, but its utter annihilation. We will make real progress when we no longer entertain notions of gigantism, switching instead to communitarianism and localism. We must go small, to the organic unit of society: the local community.

Communities already have everything a progressive ostensibly wants to impose from the top as an enlightened despot. They share strong bonds between them. They exhibit genuine solidarity among their members and impress upon them a sense of belonging. They distribute knowledge and resources. Communities are what makes people stronger.

Gigantism does not want organic social groups. It keeps us in precarious living conditions and promotes individualism. Together these are what turn us against each other. We fall back to our base instinct for survival, treating everyone out there as a potential threat and enemy. All due to our precarious predicament and the misguided commitment to archetypes of the individualist sort.

It is no surprise that the alternative to gigantism is gigantism of another kind. Mr. Stiglitz and others like him are, perhaps unbeknownst to them, are given exposure because they pose no threat to the system. Their solution is yet another calamity waiting to happen.

To begin with, the ultimate telos of conservatives is the preservation of the capitalist organisation of society. Capitalism is the political order that is designed to promote the interests of the capital owners; where “capital” is “critical capital”. All legislation and every major kind of state intervention conforms to this basic principle.

Capitalism is the system that serves the needs of the platformarchs, as per my analysis on gigantism. The platformarchs are not merely “capital owners”, or “the rich”. They are those who control vital resources, factors of production, intellectual property, that are prerequisites to every field of endeavour in the given industry. Think of how the common business or private actor has to use Google or Facebook to advertise themselves online. Those two mega-corporations are the platformarchs in this domain, to the point where they function as de facto gateways to much of the worldwide web.

Conservatives pursue their end using a number of methods within the spectrum that exists between liberalism and authoritarianism. Their approach is contingent on the secular trends in the economy. In times of perceived affluence, they move towards the political centre, using liberalism as their vehicle. But when things go awry, or when notions of limitlessness to economic growth cannot be entertained, they turn towards authoritarianism. Either way, the goal is to preserve the status quo.

The fiction of the “American dream” is a case of the conservative’s turn towards liberalism. This is a time when people believe in the cornucopia of capitalism: everyone can become rich, provided they put in the effort. All are invited into the United States to work hard and live the good life. Yet the same people who preach freedom have no problem whatsoever propping up dictators such as Augusto Pinochet. The pretext is to combat the bugaboo of communism, while the ex post facto rationalisation is that Pinochet introduces “market reforms”. Structural changes such as these are the basis upon which the new class of platformarchs is established.

Now consider some more recent examples. Take the EU, which touts itself as a bastion of democracy, fundamental rights, and the like. These are the much-vaunted “European values” which are enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. The European values meant nothing at all when it really mattered, as European policy-makers did not hesitate to force through austerity measures at all costs. They supported “technocratic” governments in Greece and Italy. They pushed through legislation under duress, such as when Greece had to adopt its third bail-out package. They stole bank deposits from Cypriot people in one night, using measures that even the likes of Pinochet would feel jealous about. Then they named this outright theft a “haircut” as if people’s hard earned money grows on the back of their head.

The EU’s metamorphosis at the height of the euro crisis should be all the historical evidence we need. Conservatives only care about capitalism. The rest are optional extras that are provided when the establishment does not feel threatened.

Overview of the prevailing conditions

With those granted, let us consider in outline form the prevailing conditions in mature capitalist societies, to appreciate why conservatives have to reveal their repressive nature.

• We witness an ever-greater concentration of wealth and concomitant power at the upper strata of the income distribution. This manifests as a starker distinction between platformarchs and platformzens (as per my analysis on gigantism). Oligopolies and de facto monopolies are the norm in virtually every field of work.
• The idea of a free market where all economic agents enjoy equal access to resources and opportunities is sheer fantasy. An expedient lie. Societies are inherently unequal. This is not just about income. There is a major divide between those relatively few who live in security and the many who survive in precarity, structural poverty, poor health and bad eating habits.
• Democracy gives way to plutocracy: the rule of concentrated wealth. There exists a symbiotic relationship between vested economic interests and the political establishment. As a rule of thumb, politicians who wield considerable power are those who are favoured by powerful interests. Democracy has already been usurped by an oligarchy that masks its machinations as “the will of the people” by using democratic customs such as elections.
• By and large, elections are a shadow play. They offer the illusion of participation in the commons and give the impression of choice: Brexit or no Brexit, the elites will be supported, Trump or Clinton, the cronies will win, Nea Demokratia or Syriza, austerity will persist.
• Small political actors aside, politicians do not have an independent voice. They and their parties are sponsored by the economic elite and have gained a life of their own, detached from any social base. They exist to serve their partisan, clientelist interests, i.e. to finance the fancy lifestyle of their administration and assignees.
• Meanwhile, automation and robotisation decrease the demand for cheap labour. Mass migration to bring down labour costs is no longer an absolute necessity. Similarly, the replacement of humans by machines and/or software algorithms, has eroded the power of trade unions, while granting ever more control to the capital owners. Hence the slow, but steady downfall of labour movements. Their electoral base does not exist any more or is too insignificant to make any kind of difference.
• Thus collapses the age-old norm of industries trying to prop up their local communities. There is nothing to be gained. They become purely extractive instead, siphoning their profits across tax havens, leaving mass unemployment and impoverishment in their midst.
• Their extractive nature and fiscal engineering methods contribute to localised bubbles, such as in the real estate market and relevant financial derivatives. Insiders gain from the boom, while the rest of society will ultimately suffer from the bust, in a variety of ways, such as through austerity measures, outright bail-outs to the banks and their friends, quantitative easing and other forms of unconventional monetary policy measures, aka free money, for banksters, etc.
• The support to insiders favours the rise of a new class of aspiring feudal lords, who capitalise on their gains by concentrating land under their ownership; land which is being eroded by the spread of gigantist thinking in farming, aggressive monoculture, and hubris towards the ecosystem and its natural constraints.

Tyranny is normalised

Against this backdrop, the conservative forces know that they have nothing to gain by clinging on to the tenets of classical liberalism. Myths such as the “American dream” can no longer be entertained. Only the few live in security. This is not about income: there still are small- and medium- sized businesses that earn a lot of money. The point is that in an economic downturn they will lose most of it, whereas those who are pampered by the state apparatus will come out unscathed.

What conservatives are now looking for is to reignite the politics of false identities, traditionalism at home and jingoism on the international stage. They are a means of keeping the oppressed precariat in awe: the best way to obfuscate the fact that the major problems of our times are germane to the political order they maintain.

The far right’s patriotic rhetoric is an invaluable asset to the architects of the new right. Whenever a problem arises, they can always appeal to the people’s sense of togetherness. Solidarity with “our” businesses. Every authoritarian regime to ever exist has resorted to this technique of externalising the problem in order to muster support for their domestic policies.

In parallel, private actors with vested interests perform the function of easing the transition from centre-right liberalism to far-right authoritarianism. Think of how mass surveillance has been normalised through the oligopoly of data capitalism and how, along with it, the private sphere continues to diminish. Violating people’s privacy used to be the hallmark of tyranny. Now it is popularised as a form of convenience of calling the overlords of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft to perform such mundane tasks as switching on your lights with their AI. No part of your life is yours any more. The work of tyrants could not have been made easier.

Against gigantism

Conservative forces operate in cycles and are growing aware of the need to move further to the right. Classical liberalism is but a convenient tool at their disposal. A quasi-religion. They follow its tenets when they do not feel threatened by liberal thinking, else they are ready to reveal their authoritarian side.

The shift rightward is part of conservatism’s life cycle. Under the prevailing conditions, it is inevitable. If there are any far-right movements that are distinct from the main conservative party, it mostly is to keep people trapped in false issues and dilemmas. Enough with this tale that “democracy” is under threat by extremists. The extremists par excellence are already in power. They assiduously use democratic symbolism to forward the agenda of preserving capitalism, while they allude to the spectre of “extremist forces” to rally support behind the establishment.

As for the solution, I believe it cannot be found within the confines of gigantist thinking. We need a change of paradigm. We must counter the juggernaut with continuous, decentralised action, localism, communitarianism, a return to the natural way of living. We must become one with our land. Build our new institutions and inter-personal relations of equality and genuine solidarity. Let us become owners, citizens, and guardians of our commons.

Please bear in mind that this is a mere “note” and that I plan to revisit the topic at greater length once I have enough time at my disposal.

The backlash to “Article 13” has revealed the pitfalls of propertarianism which, in this case, manifests as a drive to preserve and strengthen copyright at all costs. Intellectual property becomes the vehicle for the suppression of free, decentralised expression. It functions as the tool for the promotion of oligopolistic interests and the expansion of platformarch power.

Article 13 is not the problem per se. It is yet another chapter in the proliferation of copyright as an instrument for proprietary control over every aspect of daily life. Copyright laws keep expanding in scope. They are being used to satisfy the economic establishment and to normalise anti-consumer practices. For example, DRM (Digital Rights Management) has become a norm even though it is the most odious form of anti-user technology. Similarly ‘patent trolls’ attempt to kill any kind of competition by launching law suits against anything that might seem to infringe upon their intellectual property.

People who are against Article 13 should realise that there is an inherent link between copyright and capitalism (for the Nth time: “capitalism” is not the same as “free market”). Other things being equal, a strong commitment to intellectual property is a major boost to the capitalist organisation of society—a win for gigantism.

As a response to the proprietary juggernaut, we should oppose any piece of legislation that is in the spirit of “Article 13”. But we should not limit ourselves to that battle, in large part because the economic interests have enough money to convert corrupt politicians into their assignees. Instead, we must turn the force of copyright against it, a licensing technique known as copyleft.

In practice, copyleft can be expressed in ordinary language as follows: I, the copyright owner, choose to share my intellectual property with everyone, allowing them to make modifications, and use it as they see fit, provided they share their derivative work under the same terms as I. We call works that are governed by such licenses “free”, in reference to freedom, not cost. A common distinction along those lines is between libre and gratis. Copyleft concerns the former: you can still sell stuff under a libre license.

The most popular licenses that provide copyleft provisions are the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) and the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The former is used for writings, or forms of artistic expression, while the latter is typically applied to software code. As an aside, all my work on this website—protesilaos.com—is distributed under the terms of these two licenses.

I am a proponent of free/libre culture and software as a vehicle for user and consumer freedom. As we can tell from the “Article 13” fiasco, this is no longer about liberty in the narrow sense of sharing works of art or programs with our peers or with strangers. At stake is the very essence of democratic rule: the freedom of expression. It also is a matter of collective self-determination: we shift the balance of power in our favour by undermining the plutocrats’ stratagems.

This is the point about liberty: it is a collective experience. We must all emancipate our intellectual works from the restrictions of copyright, so that we might enjoy unencumbered cultural expression and computing experience.

I thus call on everyone out there who is a writer, artist, programmer— anyone who has something to share with the rest of the world—to license their work under the appropriate copyleft license. The larger the pool of free culture items, the greater our resilience to the machinations of the economic elite and their flunkies in office.

This is gigantism: the belief in the inherent value of aggrandising the scale of operations while concentrating control. Everything should ultimately be determined at a single locus of authority or, at least, as few as possible. Corporations operate along those lines, as do states and institutions therein.

The hierarchy as an end in itself

Gigantism defines every entity that handles its communication channels and decision-making processes in the form of a hierarchy. A vertical structure creates a built-in incentive—indeed drive—to diffuse uncertainty by means of imposing uniformity. Heterogeneity must give way to homogeneity. Plurality must be superseded by singularity. All shall be streamlined for the distribution mechanism of the vertical structure to function with as little friction as possible.

In a nutshell, gigantism is the ideology that underpins the hierarchical model of political, social, economic organisation. It is the set of rationalisations developed by the members of the hierarchy itself in pursuit of their model’s self-preservation, augmentation, and proliferation.

We can find gigantism as a fully realised ambition in the empires of yore as well as everywhere in our world. The Romans at the height of their reign, which can also be understood as the point in time when they fully realised and embraced the inherent propensities of imperialism, developed a system of absolutism that featured a single deity (the Christian God, the pantokrator or almighty), a single representative of said deity (the Church, headed by the Pope—a hierarchy par excellence), and a single sovereign or superordinate political office (the Emperor).

The reign of wealth as an expression of gigantism

First a definition: Platform: properly equipped basis for the development of new endeavours, applications. The set of prerequisites for a chain of functions.

The concentration of control as a necessary good also exists in the domain of economics, or rather in a subset of economistic thinking that exalts the corporation as the driver of all unmitigated blessings in the economy. Most industries in mature capitalist economies feature a two-tier system that is falsely considered the by-product of the unencumbered operations of the ‘free market’:

• The platformarchs (platform owners, else rentiers). Large, typically multi-national, corporations that own the very infrastructure or means of access or essential ‘intellectual property’ in the given industry. They become the industry leaders and enablers. This is the economic elite and manifests as an oligopoly or de facto monopoly with strong, symbiotic ties with the domestic political establishment.
• The platformzens (platform dwellers, else tenants). Smaller business entities that can only operate in the industry within the half-spaces left by the platform owners. They cannot compete with the platformarchs on equal terms due to their lack of ‘scale’. Platformzens typically perform ancillary functions to those of the {mono,oligo}-polistic interests. In cases where platformzens grow in size, they are outright bought by the platformarchs, essentially ending their autonomy and reinvigorating the two-tier system of capitalist business economics.

The reign of [concrentrated] wealth—plutocracy—is the political system that emerges from the fusion of the interests of the platform owners with those of the political elite. For that to be accomplished, the state apparatus must also be structured along the lines of gigantism, in order to be in a position to impose its corrupt will on the populace.

The political establishment promotes gigantism

Which brings us to the point of quotidian politics. Virtually every party across the political spectrum peddles a variant of gigantism. Their ideologies are imbued in imperialistic doctrine, litanies to the contrary notwithstanding.

The contradiction of “free market capitalism”

The neoliberal, else conservative, purports to support the free market, but is in fact in favour of state interventions in the interest of the economic establishment. They have no hesitation whatsoever to push through with draconian measures such as austerity for the masses coupled with excesses for the economic elite: “quantitative easing” which basically is free money for the banksters, bailing out banks or legislating in favour of oligopolies or de facto monopolies in the various sectors of the economy…

Here is the catch. There is a fundamental misconception that capitalism is all about forming an economic domain defined by the symmetry of power among its actors. Naive capitalists think that the terms “capitalism” and “free market” are interchangeable and practically the same. In fact, capitalism throughout its history is the gigantist ideology by which state interventions should be limited to the support of capital owners, which at scale is limited to the support of platformarchs.

I define it as a type of gigantism because the practice of pampering the economic elite presupposes a powerful state that can extract taxes from the masses, impose its will without much trouble, and implement measures in a uniform way. Consider for example, institutions such as that of an independent central bank that is practically immune to public scrutiny—like the European Central Bank or the Federal Reserve Bank of the USA. As such, the capitalist state shares close, nay, inseparable ties with powerful economic interests, forming a politico-economic oligarchy.

Furthermore, neoliberals or conservatives promote individualism, which is an ideology that greatly facilitates gigantism. You are but a decontextualised human. Your local community, your culture, mean nothing. You are just a factor of production that holds “human capital”—and all individuals are replaceable by each other.

Individualism creates precarious living conditions for everyone that is not part of the economic or political elite. Rootlessness makes us weak, keeps us divided and at odds with each other by forcing us to resort to our base instincts of surviving in the face of precarity.

And the capitalist suggests that this inherent asymmetry is just the level-playing field where the “invisible hand” (according to Adam Smith) of the market is allowed to work its magic. Madness! Or rather class consciousness that rationalises every hideous measure in the interest of the status quo’s preservation.

Ultra-conservatives are capitalists with a different rhetoric

For all intents and purposes, the ultra-conservatives are in the same camp as the neoliberals, at least insofar as gigantism of the capitalist sort is concerned. They just focus more on the promotion of traditional values: values that embed and embody the capitalist values of individualism and the deification of the amoral corporation.

They are explicit about wanting a paternalistic political order. The state as a cop and pimp. Their ideas of the homeland, public security, and the archetypical family are to be enforced by the all-mighty state apparatus—an assortment of bureaucrats that claims to know what is good for its subjects and has the means to impose its will: propaganda, security forces, mass surveillance… These initially keep the populace in submission and are eventually marshalled for the support of the domestic economic elite typically under the pretext of some patriotic cause of “protecting our own companies”.

Economic elites need only conform to the utlra-conservatives’ demands on the social policy front. A fairly trivial task, especially once social policy is reduced to a mere witch hunt against certain groups of immigrants. Otherwise, the balance of power and distribution of resources remain in tact.

The self-righteous professional central planner

Social democrats are slightly different than capitalists, or so they think. Their starting point is the aggrandisement of the state architecture. The power elite should be omnipotent and omniscient, so as to have the means of forwarding whatever agenda of social reform. The typical social democrat is an exponent of technocracy, albeit one that conforms to the ideals of progressivism, however defined in any given context.

Perhaps without realising it, the social democrat believes in the essentials of capitalism. A powerful state that can enforce its edicts with ease. A state that can, in other words, manipulate every aspect of public life. A bureaucracy that can engineer social reform with the help of large corporations that control the means of production—the platformarchs.

Now combine that with the quintessence of “progressivism”: the notion that social reform should take place in an incremental fashion, as opposed to abolitionism. Progressives are satisfied with keeping the core of the system in tact. It is what gives them nourishment.

Make no mistake: “progressive” in this case seldom is about going forward and being enlightened. It concerns the management of the capitalist nexus of interests in a more overt and involved way compared to the deluded advocates of ‘free market capitalism’.

The social democrat is typically the one who toils to preserve domestic big businesses by means of subsidies, so that these may in turn stick around to employ people. This is their notion of “creating jobs”: keep the platformarchs happy, support the plutocracy and enhance it, so that the rest of society may perpetuate its precarious living. In effect, social democrats are desperate to reinforce the multitude of symbiotic relationships between public entities and private interests.

Think of all the laws that are being passed which expect from banks to hold more capital or from a handful of software giants to police the Internet. All in the name of the “average citizen”, as if the progressivist technocracy has any first hand experience of precarity!

In every field of endeavour, the self-righteous professional central planner imposes bureaucratic constraints that harm small private entities while ultimately reinforcing the dominion of the economic elite.

Their understanding of social policy presupposes the presence of large corporations and of state-business symbiosis. Big state, big capital, big labour unions, with the bureaucrat as the glue—the nasty goo—that keeps everything together.

Meanwhile, they may claim to be against individualism, but their exhortations tend to have the same effect as those of the neoliberal. Open borders, the idea that we are all just “humans” or “people”, enforced multiculturalism, quotas in the interest of ‘positive discrimination’ and other items from the social justice warrior’s agenda…

All converge at a vision of the human person as a rootless individual that can be moved around with ease and, more importantly, manipulated by the almighty state.

Communism is neither about the community nor the commons

The communist wants a ubiquitous, all-knowing state, that directs intersubjective experience from a single command centre. Allusions to “the commons” are nothing but references to complete ownership of the means of production and governance by a state apparatus; a bureaucratic elite.

In practice, the communist is a louder social democrat. The differences between their beliefs are ones of degree, not category. Oh, they also have distinct circles of cronies. Same principle, new faces.

More importantly though, state ownership of all that can be owned produces a monopoly of power, which can then be distributed with ease among the technocrats that form the communist elite. The Soviet Union was such a kleptocratic dystopia, as is modern-day China.

No, such regimes do not constitute a deviation from the ideal communist polity. Rather, they are the natural outcome of the complete concentration of authority at a single locus of power.

The three scales of modern gigantism

The only noteworthy differences between gigantists qua gigantists concern the ceiling they place on the upward concentration of power.

• Nationalists (nation-statists) want to concentrate control at the national centre.
• Continentalists seek to do the same at the continental level (e.g. the EU).
• Globalists wish to take things to the international domain, where a global bureaucracy will take charge (e.g. the UN).

One can identify such tendencies across the political spectrum, depending on the subject matter. The common denominator is gigantism.

Gigantism detests autonomy and autarky

We may not live in a modern incarnation of the Roman Empire. Yet we still have to struggle against its greatest legacy. At every scale there is an oligarchy consisting of political and business elites.

For gigantists, politics is about the distribution of control and the management of interests that are detached from actual human communities. They loath distributed systems because they cannot manipulate them. And they dislike strong organic ties between people as these remain robust to the sense of rootlessness that gigantism preaches and thrives in.

The gigantist wants to think of abstractions as physical entities so as to reinforce their drive for the concentration of sovereignty. Hence the tendency to speak of states or nations as if they were individuals. “Europe needs”, “Germany wants”… Such language makes it easier to render things impersonal and to proceed to take power away from communities.

The faceless state and the impersonal corporation can work in tandem, while the ordinary fellow toils at the sweatshop in pursuit of some consumerist fantasy, else dies on the battlefield driven by patriotism. Either way, the promise of a better life post-death keeps them at awe—another expedient myth that formed part of the tenets of Roman totalitarianism.

• Consumerism is the equivalent of a treadmill whereby we must ceaselessly work to reproduce our precarious lifestyle, while precarity ensures we always suppress our demands. Bad eating habits, poor health in general, a deviation from the simple and natural life, constant bombardment of {mis-,dis-}information, means that the consumer cum guinea pig is always subject to the machinations of the oligarchy—to the bureaucrats that peddle peanuts as welfare subsidies and to the economic elite that exploits their psychology by inducing in them the false needs that are characteristic of the insatiable consumerist behaviour.
• The terra patria (homeland) is yet another abstraction else fiction that obscures the tyranny of the plutocracy by virtue of placing the exploiters and the exploited under a common denominator, ignoring social injustices altogether. The exploiter is depicted as “one of us”, conveniently disregarding the fact that their very conduct runs contrary to the conviviality and solidarity shared by organic communities (who truly identify in their fellows “one of them”). The tyrant’s cultural background, the language they speak, the religion they practice or worldview they hold, does not make their dominion any less odious.

Time for re-institution

There is no point in trying to fit into this system. We will always be struggling against its built-in propensity to engender elitism. We must enact reform at both the political and the personal level. To achieve that we must first combat rootlessness, which manifests as individualism, humanitarianism, racialism, and similar ideological constructs that decouple the human person from its natural and social habitat.

You are neither a decontextualised human nor a part of an imaginary homogenised whole. You have individuality but it is brought into being through your inter-subjective experience, which unfolds in your immediate community and locality. That is where you belong. That is what makes you, and your community as a whole, stronger. And that is where you may build your collective life in a spirit of genuine freedom; freedom from the control of gigantists.

The goal is to bring the locus of authority to the local level. We do not need some bureaucrat to decide for us, nor some politician in the capital city to forward the agenda of their corporate sponsor. The task must be to gain control of the means of production and governance within our milieu. We must own the land we live on. By owning our space, we must also take control of its politics. We literally have a stake in the community. We are a fraction of it.

Citizenship is not about a legal arrangement between the state and its subjects. It rather signifies the capacity of each of us as a member of the local community, as an owner and defender of its land, and as one among equals in terms of power within the political compact. This is the ideal of the citizen-homesteader-guardian.

A fully fledged revolution should not be ruled out. However, we must not let that be an obstacle to gradual-yet-inexorable change. Reform is also about “small, continuous victories” as I like to call them.

We start by changing our ways and leading by example. For instance, we boycott industrial loaf and switch to eating real bread that is produced locally. We organise events where we help our neighbours and friends install free/libre software on their computers. We want to liberate them from the shackles of corporations that spy on them and try to extract profit and ultimately power from their entire computing experience. In a similar fashion, we prepare group activities where we instruct our fellow citizens best practices for cultivating their land, preparing their food, raising their kids, etc. in a manner that is sustainable for the locality, the community, the surrounding ecosystem.

We must strengthen the intimate link between locality and community through such forms of activism. The objective is to put an end to urbanisation (and its concomitant rootlessness) by re-establishing the agrarian model with the help of technology and the latest scientific breakthroughs. In this regard, we must share knowledge about sustainable agriculture, ecosystem-friendly ways of water management, the importance of cultivating bacteria (benign microorganisms) for the purposes of gastronomy and land preservation, and the like.

Ecosystemic consciousness, a frugal and natural modus videndi, is not merely about being in peace with the rest of nature. It constitutes a direct opposition to the interests of gigantism that seek to control the food chain. We fight against chemicals, pesticides, patented crops—patents and artificial scarcity in general—, and the complex of corrupt politics and big business behind them.

At the level of ideas, we must cultivate the virtues of locality and community. Localism is about fighting for control within the very space we occupy. Communitarianism is about strengthening the ties between us at the inter-personal level. Our answer to gigantism is a distributed system built around local communities: an organic polity.

You as an individual control a fraction of the total power consumers can wield. So if you alone change your ways, nothing noticeable will happen. But if you can coordinate your efforts with your local community or people online, things will start moving.

This is another way of thinking about the re-institution of society. Not everything needs to be done by politicians at the national or supranational level. We too can enact reform in a bottom-up, gradual, sustained and more resilient way.

This is not just about bread

Allow me then to introduce you to the idea of real bread and why preferring it will have far-reaching implications on economic organisation. We want to fight against large corporations that seek to control food supplies. We also wish to strengthen our local lifeworld: give work to our neighbours, engender a sense of belonging to our immediate locality. And we wish to improve our health by eating food that has no preservatives, artificial flour conditioners, sugar. Gaining control over our health is a parallel struggle against the interests of large pharmaceuticals and their assignees.

The items you buy on the supermarket labelled as “bread” are anything but. These are bread-like flour products enhanced with a mixture of chemicals. The intention is to maximise efficiency for factory scale production at the expense of quality, both in terms of taste and health. These products include a series of dubious additives that no average consumer can identify and that no one ever keeps on their shelf: propionic acid, sodium lactate, calcium propionate, acetic acid esters of mono and diglycerides of fatty acids…

The industry has a number of incentives for using those:

• Accelerated leavening to speed up production.
• Rapid adjustments to the dough’s texture to ease the pressure on the machinery that does the ‘kneading’.
• Enduring soft touch, so that the loaf gives the false impression of freshness even days after baking.
• Addictive—yet still poor—flavour.

The immediate effect of the massive supply of fake bread is to alter the expectations of consumers. They are made to believe that this is the genuine food people would always eat. So they buy from the supermarket or suppliers who only care about short-term profits. The small bakery cannot compete at that level. It lacks access to the machinery and the additives, or can only get them at a premium. As such, there is a built-in tendency of the system to concentrate power at the top. It becomes oligopolistic, as with most other sectors in developed economies.

Small and confident steps forward

Industrial loaf favours big business, which means that their creditworthiness improves in the banker’s eye. With cheaper credit comes more R&D, more market manipulation, more lobbying, with the ultimate end of re-invigorating this cycle. All at the expense of our health, the erosion of our local communities and sense of belonging with our neighbours, and indeed our power as citizens and consumers.

Instead of lamenting the inertia of politicians, let us take the initiative. I suggest this three-fold course of action everyone can follow or support:

1. Bake your bread. Start by reading on how to make real bread at home. Search for the simplest recipe. You only need water, flour, and yeast. Perhaps add some salt. Nothing else is necessary. Try baking your own bread for a while. Get a hang of it to understand how the process unfolds. I have been doing so for more than a year—the results have always been vastly superior to fake bread, even on first attempt.
2. Inform your community. Offer your friends some of your produce. Tell them about the merits of real bread and why they should never buy industrial loaf. Also explain to them how didactic and therapeutic the experience of making bread can be. You learn to take things in, slow down, be patient, more deliberate. Basically the opposite of the busy and boisterous archetype that modern capitalism wants you to conform with.
3. Help establish a support network. While always talking about real bread, make sure you identify like-minded people. We need to build networks of support. To share information and enlighten the public. Also to point consumers to their closest real bread bakery or cooperative venture.

I am at stage two right now. Trying to convert people over to real bread. In the meantime, I am learning to make sourdough so that I may eliminate my dependency on dry yeast. My hope is to make an even better product, something that is more distinct, more genuine.

People first

This all translates into political action. I am making a stand against the powers that be on this front (just like I do on many others, e.g. boycott all sorts of food brands, partake in free/libre software, de-google my life, reject social media, etc.). I am actively choosing communitarianism and togetherness with my fellow people over individualism and rootlessness. And I am making a case of how to use knowledge for the greater good, instead of taking advantage of others.

If there is enough momentum behind this initiate we will see tangible results. Our health improves as our food gets better. We no longer take in all those dubious additives. With a more robust constitution, comes a decreased dependency on medicine, doctors, and the like. Let us make the big pharma complex at least a bit smaller. Meanwhile, we support our community, give job to people we know in person, to those who would never be able to compete against fake bread. By offering employment opportunities, we reduce brain drain—we should not be immigrants for all our life as per the interests of the plutocratic elite.

Real bread cannot be coerced: it is an art that takes skill and patience. The process of making it will always be involved. Not everyone needs to bake their own. What we do require though, is to cooperate. Changing our ways is the first step to upsetting the establishment. I firmly believe in the importance of incremental improvements to one’s life, whose cumulative effect is a reformative impulse on institutions. I call them “continuous, small victories”. We need lots of them—all of us together—to make an impact in our world.

Europe’s response to its sovereign debt crisis was to protect the interests of international lenders over those of public borrowers. Rather than cancel debt, the establishment preferred to force policies of impoverishment on the population.

False ethics, pernicious politics

Countries should pay their debt in full out of some misguided notion of necessary punishment. Such is the narrative concealing the promotion of oligopolistic interests. Punitive ethics and capitalist machinations are masked by long economistic commentaries about the pressing need to avoid ‘moral hazard’. This is the concept where doing something, including if it is for the general good, can create a bad precedent for others to exploit. It produces incentives that are not aligned with the current expectations regarding the settlement of debts.

Yet it is never noted that the ‘bad precedent’ is only detrimental to reckless creditors and greedy financiers. What about the upsides of avoiding the bondage of interest, of eliminating debt prisons, of not forcing the degradation of public services and, ultimately, of not undermining democratic institutions?

The euphemism is “austerity”, but what was/is actually being implemented is a pro-creditor agenda. An upward distribution of wealth and control. This has nothing to do with some dubious virtue of frugality and parsimony. Learning to live with less is a myth that is being fed to those who see the rich among them become ever-richer.

Whether there is some inherent good to a minimalist lifestyle is beyond the point. That is a matter of choice, not orders backed by threats by some “troika” of unaccountable technocrats.

Inequality is on the rise. What really is at stake though is a power equilibrium within society and across countries, with creditors at the epicentre. The owning class has the means to consolidate its control over all industries it operates in. Hence the emergence of mega-corporations with an international presence, who pay little to no tax, and who manipulate markets by buying up other companies, start-ups, former competitors.

This is not just a matter of degree of the poor becoming poorer and the rich richer. A new social order is in the making. The super-rich evolve into the modern equivalent of feudal lords. They own or have unencumbered access both to the relevant factors of production and the political power to mould society in accordance with their economic interests. The rest are forced to conform under the pressures of precarity and “emergency measures” imposed by complying rulers.

Sovereignty must take precedence

Against this backdrop, policy-makers have seldom paused to think about the overarching rules of the world order. They have failed to question the effects of the rising international plutocracy on the core principles of statehood and sovereignty. Instead, the public debate continues to focus on the misinformed morality of the sanctity of debt, with the corresponding duty to protect creditors from ‘hazard’.

There is a trade-off involved. Safeguarding the interests of creditors comes at the cost of diminishing the independence of nations. Any decision should not only consider the needs of the creditors but also those of the countries affected.

This is where the Westphalian conception of statehood reveals its limitations.¹ Our world differs profoundly from the one that existed one, two, three centuries ago. There was nothing akin to the international financialised system we have today. Corporations could not siphon their profits to tax havens and engineer complex legal schemes to erode their tax base, thus paying little to nothing. There were no bond markets for unscrupulous financiers to aggressively speculate against a country’s creditworthiness with the ulterior motive of forcing a government to apply a certain regime of measures.

The Westphalian world view is one of symmetry. It concerns relations between states. Whereas our time is characterised by asymmetry. Certain private actors are simply too powerful. They have the means to force sovereign nations into submission. They can escape taxation by moving their money abroad. They can put pressure on countries by speculating against them. They can employ an army of apologists, posing as experts and ostensibly morally-neutral technocrats, who will forward their public relations agenda by arguing for such misleading notions as “moral hazard”.

Underlying the policy-making inertia is a misunderstanding about countries as persons. The whole idea of applying inter-personal norms to nations is riddled with fallacies. It conflates micro- and macro- economic spheres. It assumes the homogeneity and uniformity of nations and of national economies. It reduces complex, multi-faceted issues to a simplistic binary of reward and punishment, where there are no collateral damages, longer-term implications, and inter-generational injustices.

As such, it is considered morally permissible to curtail the independence of nations in order to service their exorbitant debt burdens. This omits the crucial detail of the Westphalian order: the personhood of nations/states only makes sense in a symmetric system where nations/states are the units of all things related to politics and will-formation. In other words, personhood is not inherent to nation/states, but a heuristic with which we can make sense of international politics.

Whereas the modern era of the internationalised and financialised economy has blurred the lines between the commercial and the political. International lenders do have a political agenda which they forward through their seemingly business-only decisions. They know full well which set of policies is aligned with their money-making schemes and who are the politicians willing to do their bidding on the legislative and policy-making fronts. The idea that corporations only care about money is overly simplistic. Indeed, naive.

Overcoming such misconceptions means updating our understanding of international norms. We must move from the narrow conception of the symmetrical order between state actors to the current reality of the asymmetric world. Applying the principles of independence and self-determination thus requires us to look at the relationship between public and private actors.

A country that is forced to service its debts at the expense of its independence is, in fact, facing economic warfare. Its sovereignty is at risk, its institutions are deprived of their legitimacy to serve the public interest. Depending on the specifics of the case, the issue of international debt is not just about the relationship between a public actor and private lenders. Rather, it is between the indebted state and private interests that are intertwined with some other country’s stratagems.

Consider the overarching framework

To this end, I encourage politicians to think about the bigger picture. To avoid the pitfalls of punitive morality, to stop treating countries as individuals, and to let go of the misbegotten notion that debt is sacred.

We are at a historical crossroads. Either we take pause and think of our political, legal, economic, social structures anew, or we mindlessly march to a new Dark Age; a new world where the vast majority of us become serfs—even if seemingly middle class—to some corporate overlord, some financial enabler or platform provider, who operates in between the jurisdictions of states across the globe, reaping the rewards and avoiding the consequences of their egregiously harmful conduct.